85: You and I are Pilgrims of the Grid

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian and Jason. Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Let's get started. Hello Jason.

Hey Brian. Did you hit the button? I hit the button and we have our previous audio set up is now officially working again as opposed to the hobble together thing that we used last week. We forgot Geek 101. We did Power Cycle but we didn't delete all settings and recreate. Yep. That was the trick.

That seems to have solved the problem. So yeah. I wanted to announce some Grumpy Old Geeks rewards. We want to get some donations to keep the lights going on here and keep our equipment up and running. We have a bunch of my old band Among Us tracks that we've discovered and for a $10 donation they can all be yours if you'd like them.

Jason's Autoblow 2 is up for a donation as well. Just what I mean honestly just say you want it. You can give us a penny and we'll send that to you. And we've got we've got. It's not included. Shipping is not included. Shipping is not included. And we've got Tara's WeVibe for $1,000 because you're all dirty, dirty boys.

Okay. Well, I'm glad that you have the tracks up. That's a good thing because I still enjoy them. I still listen to them. So the rest of the Grumpy Old Geeks audience can join along. Well, thank you very much. And I figured out what they actually were. We didn't talk about this on the podcast yet, I don't believe. Those were actually very early versions of some of our songs that we put together for a show at the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo.

They were put onto the sound sticks so you walk around the museum and when you're in different exhibits or different rooms, there were different songs that we created to play in those environments. So that's what those are. And that's why they're fantastically early versions of some stuff with no vocals or anything like that. But thank you.

I'm glad you like it. It's very techie ambiance. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about the music industry. We've got the music industry heavyweight Irving Azov, who was the former chairman of Live Nation and has started a new venture called Global Music Rights, which I'm just going to read this here, aimed at extracting higher performance rights royalties for songwriters.

So he's trying to get money for musicians. He is threatening to yank basically almost the entire catalog of music off of YouTube. I don't entirely know why. I guess because YouTube is trying to position themselves and create a subscription service. He does not like the rates that they're going to provide for it.

So he's preemptively taking everything off that's up there absolutely for free right now. Well, they do get a royalty off of advertising, don't they? For official tracks that have been claimed, yes. Okay. Claiming 20,000 tracks would take a while, I'm guessing.

It's all automated. I mean, that's why if you take your GoPro out and you go shoot yourself falling down skateboarding or whatever, and then you put a copywritten track over it, you'll get the cease and desist or takedown notice. And we've got a new music streaming service coming online that looks like Tidal.

Is that it? Yeah. Yeah. I gave this one a shot this week because it came across my desk and I was asked to take a quick look at it. It's called Tidal. It is high-fidelity music streaming. Introducing the first music service that combines the best high-fidelity, sound quality, high-definition music videos and expertly curated editorial.

It looks better than Spotify. It sounds... It's not hard. It's not hard. It sounds better on my studio monitors and my high-end headphones. As soon as I go off my studio monitors and high-end headphones and listen to it on anything that the standard consumer would listen to it, it sounds exactly the same as Spotify.

Pricing is through the roof. It's $20 a month as opposed to Spotify, which is dropping prices left, right, and center and introducing family plans. So I don't see any way that they're going to compete. And I also would like to know, does the higher price reflect any bigger payout to artists?

Because I seriously doubt that. I think that they're just charging that because they're trying to position themselves as the streaming pono, I guess. Yeah. I was going to say Neil Young didn't have a whole lot of luck with the high-fidelity market, so... No. And I don't really think that anybody is going to have much luck with it because nobody really cares.

And the people that actually really do care about high-fidelity, they're still using their super-high-fidelity audio DVDs, and they're using physical stuff. They don't want streaming. So I don't see this going very well. And again, let me go back to my old bugaboo. How big are these damn files that are streaming, and you're just going to kill your bandwidth plans?

Well, I mean, right now we still have pretty much unlimited, so... It's going away. For the time being, they think it's going to work. Yes. So we'll see how it plays out. I'm going to skip it. I'm half-deaf from all the punk rock shows I went to, so it would be wasted upon me.

I think they have a free trial that's like a buck or two or something like that, which is an interesting model. If you're into music and you really like high-fidelity, I'd suggest go give it a shot for the month for next to nothing. Just do a little A-B and see if it really makes any difference to you.

I mean, honestly, if I'm sitting here at my studio, yeah, I'd rather listen to it. It sounds significantly better, but I also have $5,000 worth of audio equipment sitting here. Yeah. Yes, I have Apple earbuds. Yes. Not worth it.

So this week I was actually a guest on another podcast. I know. Cheating. So I went on the Show Me Your Mic podcast on the Good Stuff Network. It was pretty fun. I listened to it. You did a good job, man. Oh, thank you very much. We talked, you know, nerdy podcasty stuff.

So if you're into the nerdy podcasty thing, Show Me Your Mic is a good podcast for people who want to be podcasters because everybody just gets on there and talks about their gear and their process. And Chris is a really cool host. We had a good time. Yeah, I enjoyed it. It was good stuff. I'm definitely – I actually bookmarked his page.

I might go back and listen to some of the other ones, although I don't like to do too much podcasting inside baseball. Yeah, it's still fun just to see what the other people are doing who are making it up on the fly just like we are. Yep. So a little follow-up, Mr. Zane Lamprey is back on Kickstarter.

Shocking. Everybody's going back to the well, aren't they? And how is it going for him this time? Let's take a peek and see where he's at right now. This one I hope he gets funded because, oh, he's almost there, $40,000 out of $50,000 with 31 days to go. Okay. I think this might be a winner.

Well, what is it this time? Because last time it was his TV show that he ended up selling to National Geographic and none of us got any money back from that on. So this time it is the drinking jacket. Okay. So it's an actual physical product. Yeah. It's a product that looks pretty neat.

I put in – I pledged at the $100 level to get the jacket and a custom plastic flask that is metal detector resistant. And it looks neat. It looks like a cool jacket. Now, I am slightly worried because the quality of the T-shirts we got with the previous Kickstarter campaign were so terrible we both used them as cleaning rags.

Yep. Never even wore it once. Couldn't. It was crap. It was so thin and the ink was so crappy. But I'm hoping with this one since it is a higher-end product and it's the only product that he will do a good job with it. And a little bit more about Zane and the Kickstarter thing later in the show.

But I just wanted to bring up that he's back and I'm buying one hopefully. Right. And how was this done in the old days again? I mean the old days even just being like a year ago? Hmm. People made their product and then sold it. Now, you pay up front for him to make his product.

Hey, you know what? If that's what it takes to get me the jacket, then I'm fine with it. All right. It looks neat to me. All right. All right. I will not be joining you on this one. It's my – yeah. Whatever. No. This one's not for me. Well, no. I mean it's not your cup of tea.

And next time I see you, we don't want to be wearing the same jacket. That would look silly. That's true. That would be awkward. Although it could be the Grumpy Old Geeks uniform. I tell you what though. I did have one of his hoodies, the fleapliest hoodies that came out of the Three Sheets merch. And that thing lasted me for years.

It was the best constructed hoodie I've ever had. That's why I kind of have a bit of, you know, faith that he's going to pull it off. I just – they ran out of money on the Chug thing. I think I – they spent over I believe $170,000 just getting all the crap made from all the rewards.

That's why I think the rewards suck. Right. Just keep the rewards and make the show. Use the money on the show. I don't need a shitty t-shirt. And yeah, shipping alone he said was $60,000. All that stuff. Yeah. Which sucks. I mean he raised $500,000 and then, you know, like two-fifths of it is already gone for merch and stuff.

Well, that's called project management and budgets. Yeah. Small shop. Anyway, another bit of follow-up. Pizziz 3.0 is out for iOS and Android. Okay. As we know, Pizziz is my favorite app. And this time they've taken both apps, the nap app and the sleep app, and combined them into one.

And now it is free. Wow. Which has me worried. Yes. Free is – free is worrisome. Because there's no in-app purchases. It just works. They gave it away. I looked on their website to find out if there was, you know, a post about rationale on why they're making it free.

Couldn't find anything. So I'm curious about it. But hey, right now it's free. Go get it and enjoy it and use it. And, I mean, I'm a paid member of the other two and the $60 old Mac app. So I've got skin in the game with these guys. And I'm just happy that they put a new face on it and made it easier to use.

And it looks good. I'm a fan. Well, I mean, I'm definitely going to go try it out now that it's free. It's not something that I was ever massively interested in. But you love it. So it's free. I'll go check it out now. I'd love to see what the business model is going to be. Comment of the week.

Our comment of the week comes from Dave. Question. Hey, guys. Love the show. I'm getting into building my first website for a family member or a family member's business and was curious about who you recommend for both domain registration and hosting. I know you guys have been around the industry for a long time and I would value your opinion.

Thanks. Oh, boy. Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, do not, do not do. Well, why don't we answer his question first and then tell him the answer to the question he didn't ask? Yes. Okay. For me personally, I use Hover.com exclusively now.

They've been the best DNA or domain provider in history. I've used a bunch in the past. I don't like elephant killers. I don't like network solutions because they're the devil. Yeah, they're all just terrible. But Hover is easy. It's a little bit pricier by like a dollar or two.

Free security stuff, you know, so your name and address is obfuscated. And it's great. What do you recommend for domain registrations, Brian? I'm still using Dotster, which is something that you recommended to me years ago. Jason is much more mobile with this stuff.

He likes to switch things around all the time. I am far too lazy. Dotster is great service, decent price. Sure, I could get it a little bit cheaper, but it's not worth my time and effort to move things all the time, which Jason loves to do. To that, I was using Dotster.

I was there day one because that's when I registered my Naughty Word domains. They have since been sold like three or four times. And the service now for me is terrible. The thing with Hover is as soon as you sign up, you give them your Dotster account. They will go and move them all for you for free.

I know. I'm just lazy. Damn. Well, I mean, there's almost nothing to do that. You sign up and say, here, move my stuff. That's one step too much. Well, their DNS is a lot better. Dotster's DNS can take up to 24 hours to propagate. They got terrible. I stay away from them. Okay.

On the hosting side, I use Linode now for everything. I sometimes have to use EC2 or Rackspace. Amazon's EC2, which is part of AWS, and Rackspace, I prefer not to because just their interfaces are kind of wonky. And it takes a little more work.

And Linode has just been fantastic for me. Everything's SSD-based now. So it's super fast. Pricing is right. And you can upgrade things on the fly. Now, the trick is you have to learn how to manage your server, spin up the instance, and deal with the Linux side of things.

And I recommend that. If he's just getting into it, start now. Learn how to do this stuff now because it's a skill that is going to be valuable over the years. It's paid my bills for God knows how long since I set up my first free BSD server. The skill of setting up a server and managing it and maintaining it is something that is valuable still.

It is very valuable, and that's not going to go away. So, yeah, I agree with that. I'm not going to mention who I use as a host because I don't really care to promote them very much. See above comment. I've been too lazy to switch over things. I have checked out Linode and Linode. Is that how you pronounce it?

Linode? Linode? Linode? Whatever. I've checked them out. It looks pretty cool. I have some major changes in terms of my work environment that are ongoing and I will be talking about in future podcasts, which means that I will be shutting down some various things. And it will be easier for me to move, so I plan on moving the sites that I will be continuing to personally host over there.

So there you go. Cool. Now, let's get to the real issue with this comment. Yeah. Dave, as soon as I read the first sentence of your comment, I was screaming in the back of my mind, do not do this. Don't build your family members' businesses' websites.

Never, ever, ever do this. Friends and family are the worst clients you will ever have in your entire life. It will bite you in the ass. Your Thanksgiving dinners will become smaller. There will be less presents under the tree at Christmas. Your children will be weeping without shoes.

It is terrible. Do not do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. I know you want to learn and you want to get started on something. Go find somebody that you do not know. Go find a coffee shop. Go find anything. Go find a small local business. Build them their website for a small amount of money.

Do not work for friends and family. It never fucking works out. I have been on call. I made the personal mistake about three months ago to do a site for a friend and all of a sudden, you know, the budgets kept getting smaller and smaller because that's all they could afford and I'm like, whatever, fine.

It's friends and family. This is something I can shit out at night, you know, just sitting around watching TV. But then the projects started getting more and more involved. They weren't happy with the basics and I was like, that's all you get for that amount of money. I can't do much more. Well, why can't we have a store? Because stores cost money.

Why can't we have this? Because blah, blah, blah, and then actually getting content out of the guy because it's, you know, he'll get to it when he gets to it. Well, the whole idea of me doing it for a thousand dollars is you're supposed to get me everything. I sit down in one night. I knock this crap out. It's three months later. I've had 17 phone calls.

I still don't have any of the content. He's not happy. I'm not happy. That's what's going to happen every single time. It's without fail, without fail. And I would like to recommend to go listening to the Vapid podcast, episodes eight through 10, where I cover friends, family, and freeloaders in detail and never again.

Yeah. I listened to those particular episodes of Jason's solo podcast because we have very similar experiences and he's exactly right on. Go listen to that and do not do your friends and your family's websites. Well, thank you for the comment, Dave. I appreciate it. And there was David.

Oh, Dave. Just Dave. Just Dave. And go on to our iTunes and give us a five star rating and give us a comment there too, please. Thank you very much, everyone. Appreciate it.

In the news. It's been a rough week for Uber and I'm kind of happy about that personally. I figured you might be. Yeah. It's well known that I am not a big fan of Uber. I don't mind the concept.

I think it's quite nice, but I've been screaming since pretty much day one that I don't think that this company is a good company. I think they're evil. And well, seems to be. Yeah, you'd think so. So we start off the week by a protest in San Francisco by the cab drivers.

Who, you know, caused a bunch of gridlock at SFO to protest all of the ride sharing and, you know, Lyft and Uber and all that kind of crap. And we've been having, I mean, this is the first time I think it's happened here in the States, but this has happened in Europe quite a few times already. Germany, I remember London as well.

So there's been a lot of protesting of the ride sharing services. Yeah, I do believe France as well, but they protest at the drop of a hat. I'm sorry, drop of a baguette. And that was just the start. Yeah. So everybody's heard so far this week, I'm sure, about the Emil Michael kerfuffle where he suggested that they basically start a black ops team of researchers and journalists to investigate the journalists who are critical of Uber.

Well, not just investigate. He actually also basically espoused the idea of doxing them. Yeah. All sorts of stuff. Which is not nice. Yeah. I take his remark with a grain of salt because, you know, it was at a dinner and whatever, have some wine, talk about some shit and make up some stuff.

But still, the fact that he said it is a problem, obviously, for the company and their reputation, which is already in the shitter. And this was a big one, though. This is like people are actually boycotting Uber now publicly and a lot of even celebrities.

I think John Hodgman is basically came out and did a big statement that got a lot of traction saying he's deleting it from his phone. He's not going to use them anymore. This is not good. No, it's very bad. And the like the star of the problem here is Sarah Lacey, who is a journalist.

And from my personal history with her back at South by Southwest, I think in 2009, whenever I went, she interviewed Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. Which was the which was famously one of the worst interviews of all time. And my friends and I went back to our hotel room and had a little bit of mischief and came up with a website kicked off the Internet where we tried to literally get all of the power of South by Southwest to physically remove Sarah Lacey from the Internet because it was such a bad interview.

And we were kind of douchey about it. I do admit that. It was funny. And for my part, there was booze involved. But my cohort was a straight edge guy. So I can't really put that off on him. Anyway, it was fun. And that's my history with Sarah Lacey. Yeah, but you're allowed to have an opinion about her, but you're not allowed to threaten her.

And what you did didn't do that. You didn't threaten to basically expose all of her private information. I do have a question. Actually, this just occurred to me. Do you know the etymology of docs, where that came from, the terminology that basically says we're going to expose your private information so people can find you? Well, it's like hacker speak for documents.

Oh, there you go. Okay. That helped, I hope? Yeah. No, it actually did. Because I was sitting around at the bar last night with a friend of the show, Fergal. And we were wondering about that, because we both weren't entirely sure. So yeah, let's keep on with Uber's bad news.

Well, actually, first, really quickly. I do want to follow up on the kicked off the internet thing. Because a few weeks later, a friend of the show, Scott Beal, actually introduced me to Sarah at a party. And I thought she was awesome. And I immediately felt like, crap, she was really nice. We had great conversations that night.

And she turned out to be a sweetheart. She's just not a very good interviewer. Well, you know, everybody has their off day, too. I've read a number of her things since then. And I think that she's quite good. So yeah, you know, we have bad podcasts. She had a bad interview. What are you going to do? She's got an article on Recode, which we'll have in our show notes.

And it's actually, well, it's not her article. It's Nellie Bowles, who's did kind of an interview with her. So it's really good. She has some interesting things to say about the situation. I don't really think that every woman using Uber should be scared. I think that every woman journalist that's out there that says anything bad about Uber should be scared.

Yeah. Yeah, really. You poke the lion. You get bit sometimes. But this is the job of a journalist. A journalist is supposed to, you know, look into things. And a journalist, it doesn't have a responsibility to say nice things about your company. And you don't get to go attack the journalist when they don't do what you want them to do.

That's, this is life. Yeah. I mean, in the real world, you know, people do fight back and they do punch. And, you know, the big leagues, you get elbowed sometimes. It's, you know, sometimes it's to be expected. But it also shows the character of Uber, which is what is at question here.

And, you know, been the problem. Yes. And there's, there are a couple more articles that came out this week about the executives using the God view where they can see everybody's history and all their private info, where they've been, where they're going, track them in real time. That was a huge privacy kerfuffle for them.

They came out with their new privacy policy and basically said, oh, we only use it for certain things. But people in the company came out and said, no, we pretty much use it all over the place. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's bad. That is very bad. And the last one is the leaked internal Uber presentation that reads like an Onion article.

I was rolling on the floor laughing when I read this. Yes, apparently the qualities that you must, or your Uber competencies, or Uber incompetencies as it's been this week, vision, quality obsession, innovation, fierceness, what was this, RuPaul's Drag Race, execution, scale, communication, and super pumpness.

I don't even know what super pumpness is. I'm yet to pump you up. We'll see Arnold pimp an Uber pretty soon. Now, this thing reads like straight out of the Onion. It's extremely funny. Now, so all of this happened with Uber this week, right?

And I just want to do a kind of, I'm going to pull it back and go, this is why we can't have nice things. All of this happened with Uber. Friend of the show, Fergal, you know I love you, but you're an Uber apologist. We were sitting around last night. We were talking about all these stories. You admitted it's a huge problem.

You admitted that this does not look good. You admitted that they're not a nice company. How did you get to the bar? You Ubered. And how did you go home? You Ubered. So there you go. So yeah, it doesn't seem to matter that they're not good people and it doesn't seem to matter to most people that this is not, yeah, whatever.

I give up. Most people lack the courage of their convictions and convenience. So yeah, it is convenient. It is what it is, but continued bad news for Uber and I don't see it going away anytime soon. And they do need to fire that guy. I don't care that it was a dinner. I don't care that it was an off the record remark.

He needs to be fired. No, he's got to go. Yep. Straight out, got to go. I don't think they're going to do it though. Me either. I don't think so. So I ran across a thing this week about Facebook. Yes. And it's on their Facebook blog, the code blog. And it's a new data center, like system that they're using that gets rid of a lot of high end routers and speeds up their critical infrastructure.

And it was a fascinating read for somebody who doesn't, I really don't even understand a hell of a lot of it, what they're doing because it is so high end and it's really neat. But when I'm reading it, I'm just thinking, this is what it takes to build something to that scale that is just so incomprehensible to most people.

And you mean, like you and I, we build stuff. I mean, my biggest server farm was, I think I had 24 servers. Right. Yeah. That was my biggest. These guys are in the thousands, you know, and it's, it's amazing just the stuff that they've done and the stuff that they're sharing back with how they're doing it is pretty cool.

Yeah. I read through this article. I didn't understand half of it. My takeaway from this is they're so far ahead of the game now. They're just killing everyone. They are ahead of the game. And the interesting, yeah, there's a couple more articles about them that kind of are good. They're curtailing unpaid ads by brands.

So they're crapping on the people that got them a lot of their critical mass to begin with much like Twitter did with the API developers. And it's the way things go. The bad thing about this is if you are a brand, Facebook has just basically been made completely and utterly useless for you.

It's been utterly useless for a while though. Yeah. No, it really has. I've been watching the stats on all the, on all the properties that I work on and it's, it's next to no return for posts now. And we all knew that likes were a stupid metric. And as soon as they changed the, uh, the layout to get rid of the tabs, remember we used to have the blocks, your contests and stuff.

Yeah. As soon as they made that change, it became utterly irrelevant for brands. Go back to grumpy old geeks too, I think. Yeah. Yeah. The funny thing is again, much like the Uber conversation, we can have this conversation all we want and still the people I work with don't want to invest in their website and just want to invest in social media.

It's utterly ridiculous. We've been saying it for over a year now. If you're a brand, build your brand off these other systems because you're beholden to them every time they make a change and they want you to give them more money, it's always going to be in their favor and not yours.

Even if you're a coffee shop or just little Joe Schmoe with your little web dev startup, you know, it's all the same to them. You're a brand, which means you've got to pay. Yeah. You know, I mean, on the plus side, like for personal reasons, you'd think it would actually make it better because you think you're not seeing all these ads in your newsfeed anymore and you're able to connect with your friends and all that.

The problem I find is that many brands, basically, that's the only way I find out information. I went around and liked a bunch of bands because I knew that this would be the only way I would see news. And now I'm not even seeing it. Yeah, it's a mess. It's a total mess right now. So this morning, as I was at the DMV waiting to become an Illinois resident, which I finally am.

Woohoo! Congratulations. Oh, you have no idea how hard this has been. I was reading an article in The Atlantic called The Fall of Facebook. Again. It's a fascinating read because there are some things that came out of that that, you know, were very interesting where there very well may not be a, you know, a single contender to Facebook, but it may be more of a death by a thousand cuts type of type of situation because a lot of people are moving to, you know, distributed multiple social networks to do specific things.

I mean, yes, Facebook keeps gobbling them up, but new, new contenders keep popping up in the spaces to kind of fill it. And people aren't so, you know, stuck with just one, because when you think of your phone as the aggregation device now, it kind of changes everything. And when you think about it, it's like, yeah, the phone actually is the game changer here.

It's not the, not the network itself. So we don't even have to think about a new behemoth coming on the scene. It's all the little guys who all get together and your phone just acts as that, that cohesion unit. So that's what, that's what I took out of it. And I started to think about it some more until my number was called and then I had to go take the worst picture of my life.

It's a really good article. And I like the way that it was presented and I like the way that it could be going. You know, we've, again, go back to Grumpy Old Geeks episode one, I believe was, we covered an article saying that Facebook was dead and, and people are stopping to use it and it's going away.

The death of Facebook has been greatly exaggerated since we've been doing this podcast and probably since Facebook first launched. It's still here. It's still number one. It's still big. We just talked about how their infrastructure is light years ahead of everyone else. Now, what I do agree with, I agree with you. I don't think, I don't think Facebook is going anywhere anytime soon.

Probably never because they're, well, let's not say never. That's obviously stupid, but they're not going anywhere. I do think that their hope of having this, where you're going to come to Facebook and use it for everything. I think that needs to go away. That is the reality of the millennials. As we say, um, they're using 35 different apps and they're doing different things on different apps and different spaces.

They're still on Facebook. They will stay on Facebook. They are not leaving Facebook. Facebook is not going anywhere. It's just Facebook isn't the only place that they are. Um, I was actually in a meeting yesterday where all these stats were thrown up. There was some massive research study. I don't have any of this in front of me right now.

I'm just remembering from the meeting yesterday. Number one is still Facebook. Number three, Facebook messenger. And then there were a whole bunch of small ones that have small market share. So yeah, there's a lot of little cuts at Facebook, but it's not going anywhere. Yeah, I think it's got probably another 10 years in it.

Oh, at least. Yes. And I mean, it's only been around for 10, but another 10 out of it. And it's interesting because you talk about, you know, all the smaller apps, which is exactly what they've been doing. They've been splitting things off into its smaller segments. And I'm sure WhatsApp is going to be rolled into it pretty soon. It's got to be.

Yeah, it has to be. So I have to urge Messenger and WhatsApp at some point. But if you think about like the top apps being used, it is, it is, you know, it's Facebook, it's Facebook Messenger, it's Instagram, which Facebook owns, it's WhatsApp, which Facebook owns. It's, they're, they're, they are pivoting correctly to deal with this trend.

Absolutely. Absolutely. The thing, though, is, I mean, people still keep coming up with these apps and Facebook keeps buying them. So I think instead of trying to build the next Facebook, try to try to build the next thing that Facebook's going to buy. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah. I mean, that isn't that basically all of Silicon Valley anyways.

It's, it's no longer build something that's really good. That's sustainable. It's build something and hold on long enough for one of the big guys to buy you out. Yeah, built a flip, built a flip. Yep. Speaking of apps that have flipped, Waze flipped to Google. Yeah, well, Waze. They're back in the news.

Waze is in the news, at least here in my little neighborhood, here in Santa Monica. West siders here in Los Angeles, of which I am one of them, are reportedly joining forces to drive out shortcut loving Waze users. Getting around the 405 here in LA is one of the biggest pains in the asses in the world.

And Waze has, you know, done exactly what it claims to do in that case, in which, you know, Waze is sending people down all these side streets and down these, you know, cul-de-sacs and down these residential areas to find quicker ways to get past that 405 hump. And residents are pissed off about it and have joined together to start reporting their roads as being clogged up and blocked so nobody drives down them.

It's quite smart, really. Well, you said Waze sends you down cul-de-sacs. That would be a bad Waze. Well, Waze has done that to me in the past and the few times that I've used it. Or it's made me try to, like, get across about an 18-lane street with no light. Nice. So my favorite comment in this article is Voice of Reason 14 says, let's go toilet paper houses on those streets.

Also, if you don't like living near the 405, go back to Chicago. And I'm like, okay, get exactly that. Well, you know, you can't bite the hand that feeds you. One of the reasons Waze works is it takes public information. Anybody can put in anything.

So the residents are fighting back by just saying the street's clogged up. You gamify driving. That's part of the game. You got a big baddie blocking you now. Well, and, you know, I'm sure Waze has lots and lots of fraud prevention to make sure that you're just not putting your street in if you live on that street.

They'll figure it out. They will figure it out. It all gets figured out in the wash, but it's kind of fun to watch right now. Oh, it's a blast. It's a great article. Yeah. So in music news, again, I always kind of come back to this a little bit. There was another big, you know, Band-Aid-type single in the UK.

This one was, you know, for Ebola in South Africa and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Bob Geldof, who always kind of gets all these things together over there, and this is all he seems to do anymore, has called out Adele because Adele did not take part and I guess didn't even get back to him when he reached out to, say, come sing on this.

And then there is a great op-ed from The Telegraph that is linked in our show notes by, I have no idea how to say our first name, Bryony Gordon, that basically says, leave Adele alone. Adele actually put money in. How about these celebrities that have gazillions of dollars actually fucking pay some money instead of just go sing on a song?

Yeah, I'm with Adele for not showing up. You know, you don't just call me out and say, come show up and do something for free. It's like, you know, hey, Brian, I need a new roof and I need you to come over tomorrow and put tar on my roof, you know? Yeah, no, not going to happen.

Oh, man. That's what it is. I hate those damn songs, too. Well, you know, the social relevance of them has decreased so much. We don't have big media anymore where this stuff gets blasted at you. There's no strong campaign that's surrounding it that's, like, pulling everybody together.

It's a different time now. And, again, you know, what worked is stuff like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. That worked. A bunch of celebrities getting together to say, hey, here's a nice little pretty song. Send some money. I don't think this is effective use of their time anymore. And I really like this article.

Okay, so changing gears a little bit. Apparently, we're teaching prisoners in San Quentin how to write code. Oh, great. Not only do I have to worry about India, now it's the prisoners coming after my gig. I know. And these guys, when they get out, if you screw them over, will just come shank your ass.

You want to pay your bills to these guys. That's right. I was like, he could be my collection agency. That's an Arts Technica article. We'll link it in the show notes. I just thought it was a nice roll-in because apparently Barbie is not teaching you how to code. That's the big takeaway this week. Yep.

Barbie's programming book that basically, it's called I Can Be a Computer Engineer, tells her to go ask her friends, her boyfriends, to code for her because she's just the designer. How did this get approved? I have no idea. But the funny thing is, it reflects the current state of the world so well.

It really does. I mean, this is unbelievably stupid. It's stupid because, yes, they screwed up the message of the book completely and everybody's outraged at it. I just laugh at it because this is reality. This is the way it's been.

I know women are trying to get more into tech and all that stuff, but I know in my history three women that have coded and I know probably 300 that have asked me to code for them. Yeah, I mean, well, you know, it is what it is. I think that's starting to change.

I mean, even our guest just last week, Tara, God bless her, there are people like her that are out there that are getting into it, that are really interested in it. I've come across a number of young women in their 20s that are coders and enjoy it. But, yeah, I mean, it is the way it is and this does not help.

But it did make me laugh a lot. Oh, it's funny as hell. What are you going to do? Okay, back to the music industry. Oh, boy. Now, Steve Albini did this, you know, keynote in Australia and it was an hour long, but I read the transcript of it.

I thought it was the best read I've had all week and I thought it was the best description of why the traditional label industry was broken. Yeah. And I adored everything he said in this article and I agreed with it.

Right. There's a flattening out of the architecture of the business now. You know, you bemoan it because you were part of that label system and got the money from it to build the websites, even though it was never very much because they wanted to keep it for themselves. Yes. And have their nice expense accounts.

Because I lived with one of those people for a long time and I got to hear all the tales from the other side of the aisle. Yeah. They never cared about the artists and they took all the money and they, you know, now they're selling cars and houses. It's the way it works. It is. Yeah. It's the world.

It is business. He, you know, Steve Albini is a really smart guy. He's been around in the industry forever. I have a lot of respect for him. But he's always been a DIY guy. That's his thing. That's his aesthetic. That's what he's into. He did a great job of kind of laying out the industry and how it's changed in the last 20, 30 years.

And his approach and his solutions work for him and artists like him. They don't work. It depends on what kind of music industry that you want or what kind of music you even want. This works for small bands that are in specific styles and it doesn't work for everyone.

It's not a one size fit all solution. There are things that we got out of the music. We never would have had a Nirvana if the industry worked the way that he sees it working. Well, see, that's the thing. We did have a Nirvana before they got big and they were still selling records and touring. I think what I was mentioning was the flattening out where we're not going to have big stars anymore because the system is broken.

And you look at your Taylor Swifts and your U2s and I think like that time is going to be, you know, flattening out and going away. No, I 100% agree with that. And we're looking at unless things – unless we figure out some sort of change or difference, we are looking at basically the last major music superstar will be Taylor Swift.

That is it. We will never have anything like that again. I don't think that that's necessarily a good thing. And this may just be me being old, being a grumpy old geek and missing the shared cultural experience. I do think that there is a place in our media environment for all these really, really small things that people get really, really into.

But I miss the one thing that brings us all together. The larger experiences that we share as a culture, that's going away. And it's even – it's gotten bad already because right now it's only something like a Taylor Swift or a Beyonce. The Curious, the Depeche Mode, the environment that we had back there had these larger – larger underground artists that would break through and become part – become culturally relevant throughout all of society.

Even if you didn't like Depeche Mode, my mom knows who Depeche Mode is. She recognized some of the songs from that era. We don't have anything that supports that anymore, and I think we're missing that. I really do. I don't want a world where it's just a million small niches, and I have no idea what kind of music you listen to.

We have no touchstones anymore. We have no nothing. I unfortunately think that that's the way it's going to be. Oh, yeah. I think it is too. That is the end result of this whole thing, this whole dismantling of that industry and mass media altogether.

But yes, we're going to have YouTube stars and Vine stars. How about – God. That is the other – again, I'm going back to – I was in a meeting yesterday where I – a company came in that basically manages and puts on a touring environment for YouTube stars.

And we found out just the numbers alone of the kids that are in – these YouTube fans have more fans than 90 percent of the people that we recognize in popular culture. But if they walked into the room, I would not have known who any of them are. The world has changed.

I mean we have to get used to that. It's a sad state of affairs in some ways. And in other ways, it's kind of cool that these kids can come out of nowhere and get an audience, get a following just by doing what they do. I think that part is kind of cool. I wish we had that when we were growing up because now we're kind of old and jaded.

I see for – I just see a lot more opportunity out of this for people to get maybe not the gazillion fans but have a really significant following and make their art and have fun with it. You know, I'm very optimistic about how it's going to shake out.

Yes, it's been a terrible process in the middle and a lot of people have had to change jobs and lose their job. But I think all in all, I think the end result is going to be better. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. I mean I think you're right. We're still in the deconstruction of all this.

It's still falling apart. There's a lot of pivoting going on in people that have worked in industries that no longer really support it. I would love to see a hybrid system but maybe that's just me. I want to see this burgeoning, huge, small bands doing really well with just enough fans to kind of make them a decent living and keep going in a super vibrant industry in that sense.

But like I said, I do miss the cultural touchstones and I think that we're going to be sadder as a culture not having these things that are overarching things that kind of touch on to everyone. It's going to – you know, it's – I just think back to being a kid and I know, you know, this is just being old again. It's like music was so important to me.

It was such a part of my identity. Running into somebody wearing a T-shirt from a band I liked meant I could talk to this person. And when you get to the point where nobody – like I've never heard of any band that you like. I've never heard of any band that you love. And you've never heard of anything that I like and you've never heard of anything I love.

We lose something as a culture when that happens. Yeah, but what you're talking about there, those are opportunities to actually expand your culture and meet somebody that says – if they're your friend and they've got a shirt for a band that you've never heard of to experience that band and discover them. But that happened anyways.

Again, I'm talking about the – That still is going to happen and I think it's going to happen in a more broader sense. And if you go with that case, then people are going to be exposed to more music instead of the siloed. Well, we only have so much bandwidth. There's only so many bands you can be into. There's only so much music you can listen to.

And if every single one of your friends is bringing you 20 bands that they really love, it just doesn't work. Well, there's also only so many minutes in this podcast. So let's move on to Twitter. Yes. Now they've opened up their entire archive of every tweet ever sent that is now searchable.

So everything that you thought was gone is now available again. So get back and start scrubbing. Now, see, I just assumed that this was always there anyways. No. You can only go back about 3,000 tweets. Oh, OK. Well, who knew? I did. OK, let me rephrase that.

Who cares? Well, there's a lot of things that are coming out of this now. Somebody posted a tweet the other day that was a link to the first time fuck shit and piss were said on Twitter, which was fun. See, that's pretty awesome. Yeah. There's some neat stuff that's going to come out of it. But this goes back to my original gripe about Twitter being completely out of context after about 24 hours and why you should be able to kill them all.

So people are going to go back and they're going to find Twitter arguments when they're doing research on new hires and find arguments or rants that are completely out of context. And it's going to cause problems. Yes, I agree. Now, let's talk about some social media wins this week.

I found an article on, I'd say, called Dipli. It's called 16 Reasons Why Taco Bell Wins at Social Media. And I hate to bring a listicle into this, but they are really funny. I didn't think that Taco Bell was this funny. I love it when you see a company like this that has basically brought on a guy and said, go do it.

You can tell that this guy did not have to run his tweets by anybody. It didn't go through a committee approval process. It didn't do anything. He just went out in real time, or she, it could be a she, went out in real time. And when they got tagged on something, he would respond to it.

And it's funny. It's damn funny. They're doing a good job. Yeah. These, I mean, these, these are like, seriously, you will laugh out loud. Yeah. Not, not just type lol to your friends. Uh, I have a bit of drone news. We haven't, we haven't talked about drones in a little while, but apparently TGI Fridays is going to use drones to fly around mistletoe during the holiday seasons to boost.

So you'll have to kiss in your boost. What can go wrong? I can't imagine anything going wrong with this. Oh dear. Okay. Uh, let's see here. Kid jumps up, grabs a mistletoe, brings the drone down. The blades cut up 17 old women in a panicked frenzy.

Uh, anything could go wrong with this, but you know, it's interesting. It's cute. We'll see if it works. We'll see if it works. Mm-hmm. Now in other silly news, there's a couple of companies out there now that will heat your house with a data center. You can have a data center brought into your home and use it to heat your water and air from the, uh, waste heat.

Okay. Yeah. I, what could go wrong with that? What could go wrong with that? Uh, it's, they, they're self-contained units. They're locked. Uh, everything's encrypted apparently. So there's supposed to be no security, uh, tricks there, but, uh, yeah.

Uh, prime real estate for a man in the middle attack there. Uh, just place that ethernet going in and out. And then you have all the network traffic going to those servers and can do things like that. Or what if your house burns down or, you know, the guy down the street, you know, does smoke and crack in his bed, falls asleep.

Your data center burns down. Uh, yeah, there's a liability problem there. Oh, it's just a silly one. I saw it. I laughed. I lulled. It is funny. It's, and yes, there's a lot of legal issues there, but you know, middle class is going away. I don't want to pay for my heating. I can't afford to pay for my heating anymore.

So I might as well take one of a Facebook server clusters and put it in the corner of my house and I'll cluster around it and roast marshmallows. Yeah. Yeah. I need to do a little more research to find out who's paying for the juice on this thing, because that's a lot of juice. That's true. Your electricity bill will skyrocket. Oh, yes. Security.

Ha. This is going to be a quick security segment this week, since we waxed poetic about the death of the music industry and the rise of the Viners. Again. So, New York City is going to blanket the city and free public Wi-Fi with 10,000 hotspots.

That's good. It's going to take about 12 years, cost $500 million, will be paid for out of advertising from a company called LinkNYC. Now. Why is it going to take that long? I don't know. Yeah. There's no reason. It could be done in a week.

A week? Why not? Weekend. Weekend. Well, come on. There's 10,000 stations. Get your VPN on if you're going to use this thing. This is a, you know, I won't even go to Starbucks and use the semi-controlled Wi-Fi there. 10,000 Wi-Fi stations on a giant public network.

Get your VPN on. I agree. Yeah. But I want to see more cities do this. This is good. So, there's another article that came out this week by Kim Zetter, who also wrote the book Countdown to Zero Day, which we'll talk about in a few more minutes, called How Obama Endangered Us All with Stuxnet.

This is a very long article, talks about zero-day exploits and how the government hoarding them is a terrible idea. The biggest issue I have with this article is the fact that Bush is the one that started the ball rolling on Stuxnet. And she doesn't mention him in one place whatsoever.

Yeah. Obama's getting painted with this one. It's not his fault. He kept the ball rolling, but you got to look at who started the ball rolling. You know what I mean? Yeah. Obama said, keep going with it. He reauthorized the program. And it's from what I – I'll talk about it in a minute when we get to the book.

It also came out that the feds are using stingrays on planes. They fly them around on planes to find the bad people now. Oh, joy. Yeah. So, you know, look for that eye in the sky. And typewriters are apparently back in vogue with the Edward Snowden revelations.

Several governments are starting to buy up the old typewriters, use paper and pens, and stay off the internets. In other news, voice prints are being harvested by the millions. It is the new trend in banking, apparently.

And I just finished watching Sneakers for Does It Have Legs a few weeks ago, and they foiled it with a tape recorder. So let's see how this one rolls out. But it is a surprisingly large industry. They're going to bring in about $700 million this year.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, voice prints are in no way, shape, or secure, especially with all the audio editing processing we can do on our iPhones these days. You can capture somebody's voice print piece of cake. But, you know, whatever. And welcome to our brave new world.

We'll see how this voice and pen, voice and chip, who knows how it's going to play out. But the rich apparently love it because they just get to talk and say, give me my money. Our friends at Anonymous have started to go after the KKK. Good.

Because of the Ferguson issues. And Violet Blue has a nice write-up in ZDNet about the whole thing. So I recommend checking that out. All these links will be in our show notes at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 85. Can't believe we didn't have a hack this week. We might have, man.

It's been a busy week. That's true. I've been super busy, too. If anybody knows about any hacks out there, let us know. Just don't hack us. Yeah. Go ahead. What are you going to get? Some audio files? I've had an insane week, which has not led to me being able to sit down and actually read.

And I am desperately trying to work my way through the Doctorow Information Doesn't Want to Be Free Laws for the Internet Age book because it is so relevant to us and everything we talk about and me and my profession. And I, every night, have climbed into bed going, I am going to work my way through this.

But it's so slow and it's so dreary. If I were reading a fiction book, I probably would have gotten through a book this week, but because I'm trying to read this, I have not finished it yet. It is hard. It is a hard book to get through. I started with Vim and Vigor and got two-thirds of the way through, and the last mile I am finding is about as steep as Mount Everest.

And I lost a little bit of gumption for it because it is very boring. It is very good, but it is very boring. So when we get back around to it, we can both finish it, then we'll talk about it again. I just wanted to bring up one thing that we had talked about, about Corey always giving his books away for free, Creative Commons license.

You can download them on his website, and we thought that he had a turnaround in his change of heart with this book being released in hardcover only, and then you couldn't get it on his site. Well, it turns out we were completely wrong. I listened to one of his podcasts where he was interviewed, and somebody asked him that question, and he apparently has just been too busy because he's been on a book tour.

It will be going up for free at some point, so look for that book at craphound.com at some point. So we'll cover what that means later. We thought there was a turnaround in his policies, and after reading the book, I understand that, no, there's absolutely no turnaround in what he's trying to do.

That is unfortunate because I was hoping to have this new direction, and it does seem somewhat ironic to have a book called Information Doesn't Want to Be Free and then give it away for free. Yeah, it's a complicated issue. That's why I wanted us both to finish it so we can actually talk about it intelligently, which is something we generally don't do on this show.

I know, but – Let's give it a shot. What the hell? It's good to have goals. My next book this week is The Art of Asking, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help by Amanda fucking Palmer. Mm-hmm. Your favorite person in the world. Mm-hmm. Loved it.

Mm-hmm. Loved the whole thing. Uh-huh. You're never going to read it, are you? No fucking way. Yep. I think she explained her stance on everything in a very smart and compelling way and changed my mind about her. Okay.

And I also have to say that the music that she plays in between the chapters was really good, and I'm actually going to go snag some on Spotify when we're done. I've actually never had too much of a problem with her music. I think she is a talented musician. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You don't want to rebut?

No. Well, okay. First off, we have a book called Information Doesn't Want to Be Free that is being put out for free. And then we have an entire book about you should just ask your fans to give you whatever they want, which is not available for free or at any kind of donation level.

It is a straight-up hardcover at full price. I am going to put two links in the show notes. I'm not – I really do want to go on a massive rant about Amanda Palmer, but I'm not going to. I'm going to put two links in the show notes that are two articles about two different periods in her life that basically really illustrate the problems that I have with her.

I'm just going to – we didn't talk about it on the show notes, but there was that issue with the Q host in Canada, Gian Gomeshi, a couple weeks back. Not good. I'm not going to go too much into it. Amanda Palmer managed to put herself into that situation as she does because this is her thing.

She gets herself attached to any news story out there so her name gets out there, part of the problem I have with her. Amanda Palmer makes a decision about Gian Gomeshi in the most Amanda Palmer way possible is the title of one article. Another one just basically says Palmer has a history of courting fake controversy.

Here's a list of all of her bad ideas, and these are the problems that I have with Amanda Palmer. Again, like we talked about just a few minutes ago with – oh, crap. What's the producer's name? The keynote speech that we talked about a few minutes ago. Albini. Steve Albini, yes.

Just as we talked about Steve Albini earlier, Amanda Palmer has been very good at finding methods that work for her and then go around and tell everybody else that this is the way you should do it. It will not work for everyone else. It works for her. She comes up with methods, and she is dedicated in her life to basically promoting herself.

She is very good at it. She has no solutions that work for everyone. Okay. Put them in the notes. Will do. But I'm glad you enjoyed it. I mean I don't have a problem with her personally. I just have a problem with her running around and telling everybody that she's got all the solutions and the ideas.

See, she didn't come across that way in the book at all. That's the thing. I've read both sides of this argument, and I want to read these links because I do like reading both sides of the argument. Okay. So I'm more informed. Okay. Well, every side is going to have its own bent, so you have to try and find the middle ground and find where the truth kind of is.

So we're going to have to use the photo of her that she used from her Kickstarter after she successfully got all of her money that has her holding a sign that she wrote that says, we are the future of the music industry. Put whatever you want it. That's fine. That's got to do. Yeah.

I'm just telling you right now. This is the segment called At the Library. I read the book, and I really like the book, so throw it in there. I will. I'm not a fan of hers, and I just – I can't. I won't read it. Well, no. That's why I read it for you. All right. Well, I'm glad you liked it. Okay.

Let's get down to the brass tacks here. Countdown to Zero Day. Stuxnet and the launch of the world's first digital weapon by the lady that we just mentioned previously. I think Kim Zetter. Yes, Kim Zetter. This book, I blew through this book so fast because it was so good.

I mean if you can write a book about a computer virus and make it disengaging, man, oh, so good. It's just the entire story of how it was found, how it was discovered, the research that went into breaking it down, where it came from, and all the back story.

I know more about uranium centrifuges now than I ever wanted to know. It goes so in detail with it, and it's a quick read. And a lot of this comes down to our government has two groups that are fighting against each other, one that is trying to protect us and one that is trying to be the espionage branch where there's this battle with zero-day exploits.

One side is compiling tens of thousands of them for every app that you can possibly imagine, app and operating system, buying them up, gobbling them up, and the other side is trying to find them and report them and make our infrastructure safer. So there's a lot of that battle that goes on here.

And the funny part is this is the book that goes back and tells me about how Bush started it and gave me all the back story, which isn't in her other article, which kind of tweaked me a bit. Right. Okay. I got to say, I mean, if you're interested at all in computer security or just want a good read on just the behind-the-scenes on this, it was awesome.

It was really awesome. This is already in my library. I probably should have been reading it last night instead of trying to get through Doctorow's because it probably would have kept me up. Yeah, this is the one that got me to put Doctorow down. Yeah, it looks really good. I mean, you put in the show notes that it's actually making you go tinfoil hattie a bit and stockpiling things.

No, no, no. If you wondered why I was tinfoil hattie before, this book will explain a lot of it. Right. The funny side is after I read this book, I completely understood that there's nothing I can do. Absolutely nothing. And I sleep better at night knowing the fact that, A, that there are people out there that are really good at this and are fighting against it.

And, you know, are really, like, on the front lines with the security thing and are, I mean, smart people that I am nowhere near anywhere with and just can't do anything. So that's, I think that a lot of my, you know, optimism lately is after reading this book, I'm like, that's off my shoulders now.

I don't have to worry about it because there's nothing you can do. So use the internet for fun and connecting and having a good time. Oh, well, I'm very proud of you, Jason. And I actually put in my show notes to talk about my mom here because I saw your comments. And I was like, because I, you and I are about the same age.

We grew up about the same time. Nuclear war was a constant threat to us as kids. The movies, like, the day after came out, we were doing stop, drop, and roll drills in schools, all of that sort of stuff. And it was an unpleasant addition and note that was an undercurrent of our entire childhood, correct?

Oh, yeah. So it was a constant stress. Yeah, it was a constant stress. And I remember being really freaked out probably right after, like, the day after aired because that was, like, the tipping point for all of us. We saw this movie and we're just like, we're all going to die. Yeah, nightmares for months.

Nightmares for months. And my mom sat me down and said, look, there's nothing any of us can do about this. This is, you have no control whatsoever. I have no control whatsoever. And honestly, if it happens, be happy that we're living right by Los Angeles. We will not be here.

It will be over in a second. We won't even know what happened. Would you rather survive? So I've always had that kind of, like, this is not in our control. If things get that bad, fuck it and hope you die. Your mom's a very wise woman.

Yes. So I had that as a young age. So I'm glad that you've come around to this, Jason. And you can, you know, loosen up a little bit and enjoy your life. I am. I'm partying. Woo-hoo. Woo-hoo. Software apps and gadgets.

I thought this would be right up your alley, Jason. This came across my desk this week. There's a company called Print, spelled with a Y because it's Web 2.0. The Print case turns your smartphone into a Polaroid camera. It's basically an attachment to your iPhone or whatever that has the little Polaroid stuff in it.

And boop, pops out little actual physical photos. I think it's pretty cute. I think it's really cute, too. I like it. I've been hanging out with a lot of people that are doing the Polaroid thing. But they're usually just photographers who have all their old Polaroid gear. And just like to take them when people come over and put them on their fridge, you know?

Yeah. It's a fun retro way to just have pictures of your friends that aren't on your phone that you're never going to look at. Yeah. So it's a cute little case that does all that. And, you know, the Polaroid thing is definitely, like, big-time hipster right now. But it's not just hipsters who are loving this. It's a little quick article on The Guardian that we have linked in our show notes at GrumpyOldGeeks.com.

Why stars love Polaroid's retro trick. No risk of embarrassing uploads on the net. So they'll come back. And there's even a shot of, of course, Paris Hilton taking a photo of herself with a Polaroid. Have they never heard of just theft in scanners? Well, yes, there's that.

But I suppose it's just more, you know, you can't get hacked. Yeah, yeah. I do believe somebody should ask, what was it, Pamela Anderson, about technology like that that's not on the internet? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's cool that they're bringing, you know, Polaroid back, the celebrities.

And it's, you know, hopefully it'll revitalize that. But thinking it is a security measure is just woefully dumb. Yes. Just because it's not digital doesn't mean it's secure.

Media Candy. This week I've got a really cool episode of my friend Caleb Bacon's show Men's School. He had Zane Lamprion, who we talked about previously. Oh, really? That's probably going to be pretty good. It is pretty good. He's, of course, pimping Chug. Of course.

The interesting thing about it is he does talk about a lot of the numbers and how it kind of broke down and, like, how he runs his company and just kind of a lot of the process and stuff. And it's a really, really good listen that I recommend you check it out for sure. I really just like this episode a lot.

And Caleb's a great interviewer. And when I go out to L.A., Caleb owes me a pizza. So I'm going to hopefully run into Zane and ask him why his shirts were so shitty. That would be very funny. Please record that. I will do my best. Since we're all podcasters, all three of us, so we should have a microphone handy somewhere.

Yeah, definitely. I agree. Serial has reached a tipping point. Yes, it has. I have not listened to it yet. It is out there. It is saying this is going to bring on the renaissance and the big breakthrough into popular culture for podcasts. What do you think, Jason?

You have listened. Oh, Serial is a fantastic show. I actually talked about it a little bit yesterday on Vapid, how I think that they are at the point right now where it could go horribly wrong because they're coming to the end of the season. And, of course, yesterday they put out the call for, if you would like to see a season two of Serial, please donate.

Well, yeah. There's a lot of backlash and a lot of praise that's out there. Dig actually has a really good roundup of all of the stories that are out, so we'll put a link to that in the show notes. And your buddy Bob Lefschitz had actually a pretty interesting take on it, too.

That'll be in the show notes. But as far as this whole, like, renaissance in podcasting thing goes, it's just a news item. It's headline fodder. Podcasting has been growing since it started. This isn't going to change anything. I mean, if anything, there'll be a small pop in people coming to podcasting, and that's a good thing.

I'm all for that. Bring it on. Bring more people into listening. Yeah, me too, obviously. It's super good content. It's quality. And if anything else, it'll just help people like us up our game to provide better shows. But, yeah, these guys are professional radio people and storytellers.

They're good at it. This is why this stuff is so good and engaging. See, that's my only – having not listened to the show but read almost every article about it, it's – they aren't doing what we do or what most other podcasters do. They've just chosen the podcasting milieu to tell their story, which would – they could have written a book.

They could have done a radio show. They could have whatever. See, the funny thing, Jordan Cooper has been talking about this this week, and he basically – he hits the nail on the head. Most podcasts are glorified phone calls, and that's exactly what they are.

But it's about being in entertainment and being entertaining. So these guys are entertaining. It's a different type of show. But that's the thing. All podcasts are different. There's every type. It's just audio. So bring it on. I'm happy about it. All right. But you've got to listen to the show, man.

Okay, fine.

The Web's not dead. I found two links on The Web's that I really enjoyed this week. The first one is a Business Insider article that is not meant to be humorous or a joke, but I read as hilarious.

It's called, These Diagrams Reveal How to Negotiate with People Around the World. It's supposed to help you basically if you're doing international business, and this is the communication patterns around the world. It's pretty fascinating. And I looked at it and started just kind of – I am so German.

I am so German. Follow the agenda. Straight line. Argument. Counter argument. Proposal. The truth is the truth. Done. That was – I was thinking of you when I was looking at that graph. Yeah, that is how I basically communicate and negotiate, which is part of the problem.

But apparently if I moved to Germany, I'd be with my people. With your people. Yeah. So it was very funny. Yeah, I glanced at it this morning, and I was flipping through the diagrams. The diagrams are really smart too, how they put it together. And I was definitely laughing my ass off at some of them because they're true.

I mean he finds cultural norms and figures out how people argue and how people have discussions, and it's spot on. Yeah, it's very good. It's very funny. In addition to the German thing just being so me, it's ridiculous. There's some hilarious parts.

Like I would never want to negotiate with anybody that's Serbian. There's that whole weapons and beware area of the negotiation process. And then Korean, the whole bit in the middle, Korean elastic truth. I look at the Swedish one where there's just a big spiral that kind of goes out of control in the middle of it too.

I don't believe they had any Welsh in here because Welsh would just be a big middle finger that says, fuck you. Fuck you. Yeah. The second thing that I ran across is awesome. A friend of the show, Hannah, actually sent this to me. It's actually how we also created the title for this very episode.

This is the New Age Bullshit Generator. Do you want to sell a New Age product and or service? I actually think this works for anything. It doesn't have to be New Age. This works perfectly for, hey, you're up in Silicon Valley and you've got a new product. Use this to name it or come up with a quote.

When you hit the top, it says re-ionize electrons. Boom. Ecstasy requires exploration. The universe is aglow with morphic resonance. By maturing, we dream. Yeah. This guy just goes on and on. We dream, we vibrate, we are reborn.

The world is overflowing with transmissions, Jason, but potentiality is the driver of well-being. I could spend all day on this thing. I know. Okay, well, let's transition from bullshit to poop. Okay. I've made fun of San Francisco so many times about it's just filled with man poo.

Everywhere you go, if you step in poo, it is not dog. It is man. Man poo. And somebody had the bright idea to make a heat map or a poo map of the neighborhoods of San Francisco where you are most likely to step in it. Oh, it's not real time? Damn. Yeah.

We got poop detectors out there. It could be a ways for poop. But they did a really good job with the data visualization and the Google Maps implementation. Yeah, quite nice. Yeah. It's good. It's fun. Check it out. Boop. Boop. Closing shout-outs.

Huge shout-out to one of my favorite shoegazing bands from the 90s, you know, back when there was a structure that supported artists and let them practice their craft and perhaps be mid-level and still survive and make a decent living. Whatever. Anyways, the band Ride is getting back together.

They just announced it and they announced a world tour. They're one of my favorite bands of all time. I am so excited. They're unfortunately not coming to Los Angeles, so this is going to cost me a crap ton of money, but I'm going to go see at least one, if not two shows. And I put a link to the show note into one of my favorite albums by them.

They are absolutely fantastic, and I couldn't be more excited that they're actually going to come out and play, and hopefully they'll do a whole new album. That would be awesome. Awesome for you. I've never heard of them. They're great, man. They're great. I tend to know where my shoes are, so I don't gaze at them very often.

Ha-ha. All right, man. Well, I think this horse is truly and thoroughly dead, so we can stop beating it this week. And, yeah, I'll talk to you next week. Yeah, man. I'll talk to you next week. Hopefully, we'll both have a slightly easier week, and we can get more arguments next week.

Well, I'm optimistic, so I'm going to have a great week. Jesus Christ. We have, like, switched positions since this podcast started. We're growing as peoples. All right. I've become the grumpy one. What do you mean become? Well, I mean, I was always grumpy, but somehow I became more grumpy than you.

I don't know how the hell that happened. And you're all optimistic and cheerful today. Grumpy transference is the new morphic resonance. Oh, that's good. Music for the show is provided by Among Us.

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Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 85. Poopypants Bob is your uncle. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida.

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