And welcome to another hotly anticipated edition of The Random Show.
I'm Tim Ferriss.
I'm Kevin Rose.
This is episode 14, we believe, although it could be 27 or 8.
We do not know.
But that's what's random about it.
Exactly.
So we're here at the Orbit Room in San Francisco, which is an awesome little cocktail lounge
on the corner of Market and Laguna, yeah, Laguna, and we've been invited in by Mark
here.
Mark, come over here for a second and tell us about these drinks, because you have some
awesome cocktails here that I always come, because I live right around the corner, so
I always come in here and enjoy this place.
It's funny, I walked in and he's like, you look familiar, he's like, are you on that
random show?
And I was like, yeah.
And he's like, when you shoot another episode, I'm like, in a couple days.
And so he said, come on in.
Here we are.
So thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us.
So what are you guys going on here?
So we have a couple cocktails here.
We've got our Brie Rose cocktail and our croquette.
Yeah.
That's this here.
This is the one with cucumbers and lavender syrup, vodka, lemon juice, and a little bit
of a little bit of cherry liqueur, and this is the Brie Rose over here and has some gin,
lemon juice as well, a cherry liqueur.
And like rose petals on top?
Rose petals.
Did you do this because my last name is Rose?
You know.
Awesome.
There's some pretty good bartenders over here.
I just do a pizza.
Your pizza is phenomenal.
I saw myself how to make a few drinks.
Yeah.
And what did I have, the burger with the pizza sauce on top of it?
Oh, the Bar Jules burger down the street.
The Bar Jules burger.
Yeah.
I was so highly recommended.
You guys try his pizzas.
I know.
We're going to do the pizzas.
We were just talking about that.
Yeah.
And then you have the standard issue.
Yeah.
It's my little Trimmer Pilsner beer.
And they have the awesome official Trimmer glasses, which are very cool.
Trimmer Tuesdays here.
And this is bourbon.
Trimmer Tuesdays.
This is bourbon.
These are all trimmings.
Nice.
This is bullet.
I love bullet bourbon.
It typically has very high ride content.
5% limited small batch bullet.
Rye mash, that is.
So where did you get this ice from?
Because the ice cube is awesome.
I love those big chunks of ice.
We started doing this a couple of months ago.
We kind of changed up our cocktail menu.
A couple of cocktails that we...
How do you make them like that?
We just have a little ice tray that makes the ice like that.
And we do a really nice cocktail, the Mint Hill Punch actually, where we use pomegranate
juice and do it with pomegranate ice cubes.
Awesome.
Cool.
Well, thanks for having us.
Yeah, thanks very much.
We're going to work on this Motley assortment of late AM.
And I will hand it off to some innocent bystanders here.
Fine.
Gorgeous lady who just happened to wander in to watch us.
That's right.
All right.
We have a lot to cover.
It's been a while.
It's been like what?
Four months?
Five months?
A few months.
You've launched a new book.
Have we talked since we launched your book?
Yeah.
When Toaster ate his cord.
I looked at them and they're kind of just like really utilitarian, very like just plain
and just, you know, not of the whole lot of style to them.
He's...
I hear audio is being...
Oh.
It's been by your dog.
Hey.
Was it affecting the audio?
Yeah, like I can't hear anything.
He bit through the cord.
Toaster.
And we're asking him.
Yeah, yeah.
So, and flashback, Wild Animal.
That was our Wild Kingdom edition.
So, the book continues to do well.
I'm happy about the New York Times stuff, but it's now the number one most highlighted
book on all of Amazon on the Kindle.
That's cool.
Which I'm very, very...
Did they tell you that?
Or does that show up somewhere?
It shows up.
There's a list.
And so, and you can also actually, for those of you who are interested, it's a great way
to get crib notes on books as you go to the most highlighted passages.
If you just search most highlighted passages on Kindle or on Amazon or most highlighted
books, you can actually read a lot of the really good material out of your favorite books
just by looking at the most highlighted passages.
And Wikipedia summaries.
So, if you're like, I really want to read Black Swan, but I'm never going to get to it.
Great book, by the way.
Read the Wikipedia entry and then you can look at the most highlighted passages on Amazon.
I really like how for people that don't have the Kindle, it will actually show you the
number of people that have highlighted it.
Yeah.
So, if you read the page and you see something, you're like, oh, it says like 37 people have
highlighted this little bit.
You're like, it's kind of cool.
It brings a social element to the books.
I like it.
Which I haven't been waiting for for a long time.
Mr. Milk.
Yes.
We haven't talked about Milk, have we?
We haven't.
We talked a little bit about it.
I was starting something while I was doing the whole thing inside.
A little something.
We haven't covered any detail, sir.
So, get us caught up.
I haven't caught any details.
Get us caught up with the broad strokes.
What is Milk for those people who may not?
So, Milk is my new start-up.
We just got done closing round of funding.
Thank you for investing.
Of course, sir.
So, we raised $1.5 million, which will give us about a little over two years worth of cash.
I was very happy to cut the 1.4.
That's the least I could do.
Yeah, right.
So, we did that because we just want basically to create an incubator on ideas.
So, you know, there's a bunch of different stuff that we have on the table to work on.
And we're going to pick one or two things, go after them, launch them.
Start off as iPhone apps and then eventually Android.
See if they have traction, iterate on top of that, and then decide whether or not we want to continue iterating or actually launch something else.
So, you know, we're going after a big idea.
We want to build something very big and awesome online, consumer internet stuff.
But I think for us, we didn't want to raise money under the...
We didn't want to come in and say, like, this is the idea.
It's oftentimes difficult for companies.
You know, I've had a lot of friends that have tried this in the past, like, for example...
Oh, there's been a bunch of them, but like, let's say, for example, Seismic.
Louis from Seismic.
He originally started as a video sharing service.
Later, had to go to his board of directors and say, hey, we're going to pivot.
We're going to do this, you know, Twitter thing and Twitter clients.
And then, you know, that's just a nightmare because you have to go to that board, get there buying,
and some of them are upset because I didn't invest for this.
I invested for the video sharing service.
So, we were very upfront with our investors from day one and said, hey,
you know, we're raising this capital.
We don't know what we're going to build.
You're kind of betting on the team here.
We've got an awesome team.
Daniel Burka, the old creative director, a dig back on the day and is joining me.
Great designer.
He's the guy that originally sketched out the first Firefox logo.
If you've ever used Firefox, you've seen some of his work, which is amazing.
But yeah, I mean, very excited.
So, we will launch something, I would say, probably our first big consumer app will be...
I don't know, probably about three months from now.
So, we want to do a combination of like a big idea and then something really fun and small.
So, Dave Marin that runs Path, he mentioned that it's kind of like doing full feature films and then shorts.
Like Pixar will do a big film and they'll also do a little tiny short.
We're kind of thinking about it the same way.
We want to do like a big full feature app and then just do some little tiny ones and then a big one.
So, it's going to be fun.
And if you want to get an idea of how frequent these pivots are and they often tell a lot of headache,
you could look at this article on Business Insider.
I think it's the 15 greatest tech pivots and it includes Groupon.
It includes Twitter.
It includes Facebook, also YouTube, which is originally a dating site.
A lot of people don't realize this.
On and on and on.
So, I think it's a smart approach.
A funny little story, a friend of mine was the original developer at Groupon.
And he was working with the two guys, two founders, and they were kind of trying to figure it out.
And so, he's like, I don't know. And he didn't have any money to pay him.
And so, he was like, you know what?
He's like, I can't do this anymore.
I have to leave.
And so, he left and then came to join Big.
And then like six months later, he's like, oh, they're doing pretty good now.
And then like a year later, he's like, what the fuck did I do?
Yeah, well, a lot of stories.
A lot of stories in the valley.
That's why you have to have confidence in your ability to generate more than one good idea or see more than one good opportunity.
So, you're going to let a couple of big ones go.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's actually a fund.
I think it's Excel Ventures, or Excel at least, that has their anti-portfolio.
Have you heard about this?
No.
It's all the companies.
And I'm not sure if it's Excel, but I think it is.
One of the most successful VC firms out there.
And they have the anti-portfolio.
And that is a list of the companies that they turned away that have since become very, very successful.
And so, when they say no to a company, they say to them on the exit,
well, we hope that one day you'll be in our anti-portfolio.
That's funny.
Which is cool.
Yeah, there's been a few that I should have acted on sooner, and I missed out on.
So, you have some other obsessions that people may not be familiar with.
Projects, we can call them.
Yes.
So, let's go down my list of stuff.
We always put together the list of things we haven't talked about.
One of the things that I'm working on now is home automation stuff.
This is a world that I've never been involved in.
I had no idea what was out there.
I'd always heard about that X10 stuff that you see online.
I don't know what X10 is.
It's like you control your lights and things like that with different little boxes that you plug into the wall.
So, I'm moving to a new house here in a few months,
but while I'm waiting to move into it, it's a long story,
but they basically sold the house to us bare bones, dry wall, kind of stuff.
So, the last 10% of the house, we actually have to finish off and do ourselves, which is kind of cool.
You get to do the last cool part of the house, like the kitchen and stuff like that.
So, I started thinking about, okay, well, what's the tech that I can include in my house?
They're going to have all the walls ripped open and they're doing things.
Like, why not run the right type of cat-wise, whatever it may be, right?
And so, I started researching the different stuff out there, and there's a company called Control 4.
And Control 4, at first, I was like, okay, I want to get something.
First, I don't want to spend a ton on home automation,
because I've seen some of these systems that are like $50,000,
and you're like, wow, that's freaking an awesome car.
Like, I don't need that kind of home automation.
So, I started researching it, and I looked at Control 4's iPhone and iPad apps,
and I was like, they had amazing reviews.
Like, 4 and 5-star reviews, like 500 people, and I'm like, okay.
Like, they must be doing something right.
So, I started researching more.
They're mesh network stuff.
Got ahold of a rep.
He invited me over to his house.
I was like, yeah, I want to show you what this thing can do.
And I was blown away.
Like, it is unbelievable the stuff you can do now versus what you used a few years ago.
So, I'll give you an example.
I'm going to give you like three examples of some of the cool stuff you can do.
So, first of all, as far as installation is concerned,
there's some things that you might need to run wires for if you're like controlling TVs and things like that.
But most of this stuff is all wireless.
So, when you want to replace like a switch in your house,
you pull out the old switch, you unwire it,
and you plug in the control 4 version of the switch.
And so, like, their switches have Wi-Fi built-in.
It's like a mesh network.
And it's like 150 bucks for like a new switch, right?
And so, you control, you know, how many of these you want to add to your house.
If your budget's a thousand bucks, you can start off with just a couple switches,
blah, blah, whatever it may be.
So, basically, there's a few demos that I was blown away by.
The first one I thought was really cool was the movie stuff.
So, he has all of his TVs like pipelined into this main controller,
and I think the controller's like 500 bucks.
And then he has a little media server, like a little server array next to it.
And you can rip all of your movies.
So, he goes and takes his Blu-rays, his DVDs, whatever it may be,
rips them all down, stores them to the actual media center.
And then at any time, if you're on your iPhone,
you're on your iPad or whatever else,
you can be like, I want Tron to play in the kitchen.
And boom, it just starts playing in the kitchen.
I want this movie to play in this bedroom.
Boom, it starts playing in that bedroom.
So, it just like pushes the video right to whatever screen it's supposed to be on.
Pretty cool.
Now, he also has everything set up from the door locks to the lighting,
to the temperature, to the speaker systems, to the TVs.
So, if someone rings the doorbell, it pauses the movie,
mutes the sound, brings down the sound,
and plays the doorbell sound throughout the entire house.
That's cool.
Pretty freaking cool, right?
Like, oh, I'm like, oh, that's pretty badass.
Like, that's awesome because you're going to get up and get the door.
You want everything to mute.
Other things you can do.
Let's say, for example, you get up every morning at 8 a.m.
So, you can set a wake-up thing for 8 a.m.
So, you can tell it that I like to wake up to 83 degrees.
I like to sleep a little bit colder,
but I like to wake up to 83 degrees.
So, 20 minutes prior to waking up,
it starts to bring the temperature to the house up.
The lights start from 0% to 40%.
So, they slow over the course of 15 minutes.
They slowly start to come up.
The lights slowly start to come up in the bathroom.
The shower turns on and starts to heat up your water.
It starts to play your favorite, like,
freaking Rhapsody station in the bathroom.
Like, and this, when you hear this...
I thought you were going to say your favorite rap song.
It could be your favorite rap song.
Look, I like hip-hop, but I want to wake up to it.
It could be your favorite rap song.
And so, I was like...
When you hear this, you're thinking, like,
okay, this has to cost a ton of money.
But it's really...
It's that one little central server, the light switches,
and, like, just setting it up one room at a time.
It's really not a ton.
So, I was like, wow, that's pretty awesome, right?
So, I was like, okay, damn, now you're really starting to sell me.
Then he's like, okay, door control.
First of all, you can open up your iPhone,
unlock any door anytime you want, right?
So, boom, unlock my front door.
I can assign a code.
Let's say I have a cleaners or I have a friend
that's coming over to pick something up.
I'm going to assign the code for Glenn, 5782.
5782, Glenn assigned, boom.
Goes out.
When he comes to my door now, he puts in 5782
and locks the front door.
It also triggers a text alert and an email.
So, I get a text that Glenn has just entered my house.
So, I know he's come in.
And then I can set that to automatically expire in eight hours.
So, the code will just go away and drop off.
What about security?
Do you have visual surveillance?
Do they have all that visual via, like,
you can watch the cameras via the phone or whatever?
Cool.
But two of the other cool things I thought were cool.
One, you can trigger anything to happen at any time.
So, if I open the door with my code,
it can play, like, the freaking Empire song on Star Wars.
Like, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
When I'm coming in, like, my own house.
The other thing that I thought was really rad
is you have complete control over all the switches of the house.
So, you can press a button for party mode in your house.
It brings down all the lights.
Puts on your party play mix throughout the house.
And now, you're not one of the most annoying things
when you go to a party.
Someone, like, leans up against a wall switch
and it turns the lights on.
Someone's, like, oh, man, you messed up the lights.
No more of that.
Now, but what happens is it turns...
It shocks them with a taser.
No, it shocks them with a taser.
No, it turns the light switches into a skip track button.
So, every light switch in your house,
if you push the button, it freaking skips to the next song.
Or you can control the volume with your light switches
in every room.
That's cool.
How crazy is that?
Dude, the other feature I really like about this, guys,
so check this out.
If you have a friend, right,
and you really want to harass him
and he walks into your house,
it requires that his iPhone,
let's say in this particular case,
is Wi-Fi enabled.
It'll set up a digital poltergeist
that'll follow him from room to room,
like, shouting scary shit at him.
It's pretty awesome.
I'm kidding.
I'm totally kidding.
I'm totally kidding.
That doesn't exist, but it'd be kind of fun.
That would be fun.
So, some of the higher-end installations,
one of the things that they told me
that that was pretty cool,
and I wouldn't do stuff like this,
but they do some crazy homes.
They had, like, all these paintings in the house
that are digital.
So, they have, like, the OLED paintings.
And when the guy enters his house,
he puts in a certain code.
It switches all the paintings,
like, what he wants.
So, it sets the mood
and switches all the paintings
to certain artwork,
depending on who's interested in the house.
That's cool.
So, like, you know how you have naked lady photos
or paintings in your house?
I do, not a sham.
You could just totally, like,
your mom's coming over.
She puts in mom code and, like, all those things.
They can do photos.
Exactly.
Or whatever she's into.
I think that would make my mom less comfortable
with all the things involved in my house.
Awesome.
Well, I think, can I jump into my gadget?
Yes.
My new gadget fixation.
So, I am fascinated,
have been fascinated by photography
for a very long time,
but had a lot of, I'll say,
insecurity related to getting a hand
and understanding of the technology involved.
Much like programming,
where people are like,
oh, my God, coding programming.
Then when you actually dive into something like Ruby,
if you have somebody who can relate it
to something you know,
like natural language or something else,
it's like, oh, it's created by a human brain.
Like, I could actually try to learn some of this.
Not that I would be any better than mediocre
if I went for it.
But, so this is a new toy that I have.
So right here, this is the Olympus Pen EPL2.
And this was recommended by a friend of mine, Chris Michael.
And if you Google Chris Michael,
or Christopher Michael,
M-I-C-H-E-L photography,
he has some amazing work.
And so you can see it looks very much like
any other digital camera.
It has a very small body
and then interchangeable lenses.
So I bought this.
It does come with another lens.
And then he recommended...
Did you consult Matt, by the way?
I have consulted Matt on multiple occasions.
This is Matt Mullenweg.
So ma.tt, photo Matt.
And I've played with his...
He's a big-time photographer.
I've played with his Canon before,
which is a beautiful camera.
And actually, one of the bio-photos
that he uses quite often
is one I took of him in Greece
when we were on our romantic getaway to word camp.
Romantic, amazing.
So this is a Panasonic Lumix G20 millimeter.
This is the F-Stop 1.7.
It's a beautiful, beautiful lens.
I like capturing images in low light conditions.
So this actually costs more than the camera.
I think this on Amazon is about $500,
and this is about $700.
But this is enough.
I'm done.
For now, I'm done.
This is what I'm going to use.
And what Chris recommended also,
he recommended one book.
And this is a guy who's amazing at photography,
among other things.
He also started a number of companies,
sold them for very, very successful exits,
was a fighter pilot as well.
And it's understanding exposure.
And it's a beautiful book.
And if you look at his photography,
you can see very clearly how he's really mastered,
I think, from my standpoint,
the variables that contribute to beautiful exposure
and lighting.
So is this just for digital SLRs,
or can it work for something like that?
Because some of the other compact cameras
don't have the exact fine grain control
that a DSLR would.
Right, right.
So this, to my understanding,
this you could apply to almost any type
of artistic composition, not just photography,
if it's related to lighting.
So whether that's panning,
or longer exposures, time-lapse, et cetera.
So I'm very excited to get into this.
And the point he made with me was,
you're going through a really exciting period of your life.
You're going to regret later if you don't capture it.
And you think you're going to remember it,
and you're not going to remember it.
I know that already, because I've had this experience.
I've traveled around the world for two years.
I'm like, oh, don't worry about it.
I'm going to have this burn into my memory forever.
Right, right.
And then lo and behold, I forget.
So I'm very excited to get into photography
if any of you have particular suggestions
for resources, tutorials online.
What have you?
Let me know.
I'm just really glad you didn't go
the crazy big camera route.
Because I've tried that in the past,
and I'm always like, I never take it.
I don't want to get overwhelmed.
I want it to be small enough to travel with.
And I view that camera, even though it's a very good camera,
as a positive constraint.
So much like people who buy, we talked about this.
We're going to get to this.
But people are like, oh, I'm going to buy my first motorcycle.
I'm going to buy a Hayabusa 1000cc monster.
I'm like, dude, you could buy something that was made 15 years ago.
It's still outstrip your driving ability by 10x.
Just take it one step at a time.
And I think that's true also with cameras.
I'll cover one more thing.
And then I'll jump into a few others after you go next.
So this is a book I've been reading.
You can see the binding here is Power.
This is a new book by Jeffrey Pfeffer, who is at Stanford.
And the subtitle is important here.
So I typically don't pay much attention to books about power.
This one is called Why Some People Have It and Others Don't.
Power.
And I've come to know Jeffrey over the last few months,
probably last year or so.
And what I love about this book is it goes through...
What was his last name?
Pfeffer.
P-F-E-F-F-E-R.
It looks at real examples, real world examples,
anecdotes from whether it's CEOs or other people
related to losing power, gaining power,
the commonalities dealing with blowback, controversy, media,
the pitfalls and prices of power.
So once you are powerful, whether that's measured in finance or exposure,
what are the downsides, how have people contended with that?
It's actually very, very practical as opposed to really
about 50,000 foot bird's eye view abstract.
No Kindle version of that?
There might be a Kindle version.
This was a personalized...
There's an inscription in here that is in the book sent to me.
So that's why I have a hard copy.
Just a quick side note on Kindle.
So I bought a Kindle, didn't touch it for a year and a half,
because I was hung up on various things related to print,
such as taking notes.
And now I can take all my notes on a Kindle and copy and paste them
or put them into a text file and share them.
Do you share on the Kindle.com site?
I'm not sharing it right now.
I started doing that.
It's pretty awesome.
It's very cool.
So I will go and I'll be exporting a lot of my notes
and sharing them with some other books I've been reading,
like Ben Franklin, which is written by Walter Isaacson.
Amazing biography.
So I'm reading that as well.
But you can share them with me.
Yeah, exactly.
I can follow you and I can see what I'm reading.
Exactly.
So I'm going to be doing that.
But now I've actually started donating books to libraries
or mailing my books to libraries to clean out space in my house.
And as I go through the books, simply buying Kindle versions
of the books that I think I'll want to refer to later.
Yeah, that's smart.
And I'm using my iPhone.
I do have an iPhone now.
This is relatively new.
My first smartphone ever.
And I used Evernote to take photographs.
It was pretty bad there for a while.
Honestly, he was pulling out things with no key,
like flip phone or whatever.
Clam phone, Flintstone phone.
So I will use the Evernote app on the iPhone
to take a photograph of my index that I've created for my print books.
And then I'll just close it up and I'll mail them all off.
What apps do you use on the iPhone?
I'm just curious as a new iPhone user.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a good question.
Hold on.
Angry Birds?
No, no Angry Birds.
Instagram?
No Instagram either.
I use a few things.
Let me take a look here.
Let's see what we have.
So I've tried not to install a ton of apps, to be honest.
But I'll tell you right now.
So I have the How to Cook app, which is by Mark Bitman.
Fantastic app.
If you want to see an adaptation of something like a cookbook into an app,
How to Cook is fantastic.
There's a Ben Franklin Virtues app.
So he kept track of, I think it was 13 Virtues.
Over time, worked on one a week.
I do have that.
Pandora, of course.
I use Pandora for hours.
I'll just listen to it on my iPhone as I walk around,
since I'm on Verizon and my data plan is unlimited,
so they can eat it for now.
Love you guys, Verizon.
Evernote, Uber.
So formerly known as UberCab, I use Uber all the time.
Now in New York also.
Oh, sweet.
I heard about that a lot.
100 cabs strong.
Cars.
Excuse me.
They're gorgeous.
Soundtracking is a really cool app.
That's funny.
So soundtracking can be used to share music,
whether I'm listening to it via iTunes,
or I hear it playing ambiently in any room.
Let's see.
A couple of others I'll mention.
G-Park.
So G-Park, I could also use Evernote for this.
G-Park, you take a photograph of where you've parked.
I always forget where I parked,
because quite frankly at the time,
it just doesn't seem that important.
Just take it with the camera app, though.
No, I know, but I take it with the camera app.
This will lead you back to it with the location tagging.
It's a free app.
Oh, that's funny.
So no big deal.
That's amazing.
Yeah, that's really about it, man.
That's it.
I don't use the apps.
I got a couple of recommendations for you
that I think you'll really like.
Okay.
I think you should go group me for group texting.
I think it's pretty awesome.
You need to try it.
Yeah, I did try it.
I did try it.
I ended up getting like 20 texts a day.
Instagram for public photos.
Path for private photos.
Yeah.
Hip Monk for booking travel.
Hip Monk is cool.
I like Hip Monk a lot.
Hotel Tonight.
So if you want a hotel right now,
like on the cheap,
like it's just like great for last minute hotel booking.
And then of course Tiny Wings.
Huge.
Tiny Wings.
It's Tiny Wings.
It's a game with a bird that you have to like
make sure he hits the right jumps.
Just trust.
Dude, you need some gaming in your life.
You don't have any of that.
How do you get your release?
Don't answer that question.
You're Tiny Wings.
It's fine.
Yeah.
I am a master by the way.
I watched Apocalypse.
Glenn Freaking Guy.
Talking about release.
I like movies.
I like getting off of my interwebs when I can.
But I do like games.
I do like try Tiny Wings.
And that's pretty much about it.
Oh, scanner pro.
Scanner pro.
Okay.
So if you open it up, you'll love this.
Okay.
You can take a photo of anything, like a document above it,
and it creates a PDF out of it.
And it looks just like you scanned it in.
Okay.
So if there's ever like you're sitting there like,
oh, I need to like email this five page document.
Yeah.
Like one page time.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Done.
Okay.
Cool.
So just two notes on that because documents are a headache.
There's another app that I've used for that called Jotknot Pro.
J-O-T-N-O-T Pro.
But then I realized that I could use Evernote for the same thing.
To create a note with multiple scanned images as one note.
So if it's from my personal reference, I'll send it to Evernote.
And then I can email directly from Evernote to, let's say,
an account or an attorney.
Yeah.
That's cool.
I'll use that too.
But from this app, you can fax as well.
Okay.
That's cool.
Which is really nice.
That's super cool.
I mean, every once in a year when you need to fax something,
it's nice to have that.
And also on the point of avoiding printing out,
signing, faxing, or re-scanning documents,
a PDF pen.
So a PDF pen is the application that I used to create mini PDFs.
I used that during my book launch when I wanted to take, like,
a single chapter and send it to someone.
And I could cut a big PDF down.
And you can move things around, drag and drop.
It's fantastic.
And so I'll use that to digitally sign stuff and then send it off.
Oh, I'll use that.
Yeah.
Is that a Mac app?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You just drop your signature into there, right?
Yeah.
It's a great app.
Super fast.
Cool.
All right.
So next thing I just wanted to talk about,
I know I just want something like to get around town,
kind of do something chill.
I actually had something to get around town or you have a scooter.
Yeah.
Like a little mini remote pad.
And it was kind of, it didn't have enough power.
And for full release in San Francisco.
Yeah.
So I actually won a motorcycle on eBay.
What?
Yeah.
No, you didn't.
Yeah, I did.
Yeah.
Because I went to the, so I want to get a Harley and don't,
don't make fun of me here.
No, no.
So you go like, like setting off car alarms, Harley.
Monkey hair.
Little tiny Harley called the Iron 883,
which is like a smaller version of a Harley.
Did you send a link to that to me?
Yeah, I think I did.
It's beautiful.
It's a gorgeous bike.
So I got one on eBay.
It's freaking awesome.
You won the one on eBay.
Yeah.
Oh, you won an auction.
Okay, I was going to say,
I didn't win.
You don't deserve.
You don't win things on eBay.
That's what I'm saying.
I was calling bullshit.
That sounded ridiculous.
Okay, I got it.
So yeah, I basically, you know,
you can find good deals on eBay.
I saw the Triumph outside of the milk offices,
and I thought that might be yours.
I like the Triumphs.
I like Triumph bikes also.
I like this one a little bit better.
There'll be a picture of it on the thing.
So that's, that's that.
Cool.
Let me move down to the next thing I want to talk about.
It was naming websites.
Yeah, we've talked about this once before.
Dude, this has been my hell for the last month and a half.
There's a reason I have bags underneath my eyes.
It's because probably I've been drinking a lot
because it's hard to come up with company names.
Not company names, but product names.
Great.
So what's funny is like, I have this one product that's coming out.
I've been trying to come up with a name for it.
I want, it's, it's a combination iPhone app slash destination site,
meaning that there will actually be a dot com destination for it as well.
I've seen the wireframes.
It's going to be fun.
So because of that, I need to have the dot com domain.
I want it to be like short, like four or five, six characters.
And it's just been a nightmare.
Like good names now, or a hundred K.
I'm not even kidding.
Like there are a hundred thousand freaking dollars.
And Fred Wilson just had a great post about what you should spend on a domain name.
He says that 50 K is kind of acceptable.
I know friends of mine that have spent 200, 300 K in a freaking domain name,
which is insane.
I'm trying to find something for around 20.
You know, I'm trying to go on the cheap.
Even though that that's crazy.
That's the cheap now is $20,000.
But I've been using all these different services and, you know,
I haven't found a good one yet, but I'll tell you a couple little hints.
I've spent a lot of time doing this.
So if you're looking for domain names, I'm glad to share.
So one that I use, cdo.com.
S-E-D-O.com is one of the biggest domain like marketplaces out there.
C-D-O.
Yeah.
S-E-D-O.com.
What I do is I say an advanced search.
I say dot com, five characters.
And then I search by not price, but bids.
And this isn't auction bids.
This is like bids that they haven't accepted.
And so, like, there's a good chance that, like, there's a lot of crap in there
that, like, domains that mean nothing, like X537.
And you're like, why would I ever want to buy that?
And so you don't want to sort through all that crap.
You want to get rid of all that out of the result set.
The best way to get rid of it is look at domains that have at least had one bid in the past.
That means somebody looked at it and said, oh, that's a value to me.
I'm going to put a bid on it.
That's smart.
And so that helps filter that out.
The other thing I do is I go and I get common extensions, like, of things that I want.
So, like, I know that there's great names that end in M-O, or that start in L-O,
or that end in B-E, or that end in L-Y, or the end in E-S.
And so I'll go through down.
I wrote out, like, all, one of the really good things to do is you go to, like,
there's this Web 2.0 directory online.
And you can go and look at all the old Web 2.0 company names.
And you go and look at all of them.
Some of them, a lot of them share very common, like, endings, like, like, EO,
like, Stodeo, or Opeon, or, or, or whatever it may be.
And you take those, and you go into, like, GoDaddy auctions.
And you say, ins with these three characters.com, this length, and then sort.
And then I'll sort by price.
I'm going to start going down from there.
So that's another way.
But, you know, it just takes a long time.
And you have to be, the thing that's really tricky now is once you find a name,
let's say I found, I found a couple names that I've really enjoyed.
Now you have to get them to agree on a price.
Now you have to do a trademark search to make sure that trademark's available.
Now you have to make sure that the actual iPhone app is available.
So, you know, oftentimes these things won't sync up.
You'll find a great domain.
You're like, okay, I want that.
The trademark's owned by somebody else.
You're like, okay, now I can't have it.
Find a great domain.
I want that.
Trademark is available.
And then you go and look, and there's already a pre-existing iPhone app.
You could do some really funky things like get the trademark and try and force them out,
but you don't want to be a dick, you know?
So it's like, it's just really hard.
So if someone, if someone has an amazing domain that they want to offer you,
how should they do that?
Send me an at reply on Twitter and just put the domain in the at reply.
It, you know, I'm right now.
Maybe a hashtag domain or something so they're not trying to send you a link.
If you do a hashtag KR, like Kevin Rose KR domain, I'll search that later.
I'd really appreciate it.
We are spending, you know, if you have something awesome and it's like,
you want 15, 20, 25 grand for it, happy to spend that
because that's kind of our budget for this project.
We want things that are, that are pronounceable in a bar.
So here's my test.
If it's a crowded bar and you say it to someone, they should be able to understand what you just said
and hopefully spell it back and, you know, know to go to that address later.
There shouldn't be like two or three or four different ways to spell the same thing.
What else?
That's pretty much about it.
Those are my, those are my big ones.
Another way I do, another little trick I do is I have friends like Glenn or somebody that hasn't seen me in a while
and I'll be like, I'll act like I'm playing on my cell phone.
And I'll be like, oh, dude, if you tried a verb, it's awesome.
They'll be like, oh, what's that?
They're like, what did you think it was?
Like you asked them and they're like, oh, I thought it would have been a cool app.
Oh, it sounded stupid.
And you can engage other people's response to how the name might sound.
Even though you don't own the name, you know, it's got a little trickery.
Trickery.
Tom Fullery.
Yes.
Kevin Fullery.
You know what I like is that word, charcuterie.
Charcuterie.
Charcuterie.
Charcuterie.
It's like a meat store.
This is very appropriate.
I want to show something.
This is related to Kevin's ability slash inability to pronounce that.
So this is another set of goodies that I've become quite interested in.
Studied linguistics at Princeton, among other things.
And I could never get my head around the international phonetic alphabet.
So that's the IPA.
And that is how you can indicate the pronunciation of any word in any language.
And I never found a remotely interesting way to learn how to do this.
Is this a pack for me?
Do I get to have a pack of this?
This is all one pack.
But so you can see, but you can see here, like that's hello friend.
And then if you flip over this, like you can see that like destiny break dance supersede
and it shows you exactly how to pronounce that.
So if you've ever looked in the dictionary and you see some weird looking non-English script
next to it, it's the international phonetic alphabet.
Nice.
And what this allows you to do, because I've invented my own phonetic script for her
when I learned like Greek or Turkish or whatever language.
And it's just this gobbledygook pigeon nonsense that I've created so that I can remember how things sound.
And so the IPA, once you learn this problem solved forever, you can indicate how something sounds
not only to yourself, but to speakers of any language as long as they're familiar with IPA.
Now, is this always attached to like what dictionaries does this appear in?
It should be in almost every dictionary you'll say.
Pretty much every major one.
Absolutely.
That's awesome.
So this is cool.
Something I've wanted to learn.
Yeah, you can go to IPAflashcards.com.
Oh, I was getting the field goal.
Hand signal.
I'm not going to try not to catch Glen in the head.
There we go.
But these are super cool.
IPAflashcards.com.
Awesome.
So I'm going to show one more thing.
Yeah, I don't really have anything other than just a movie recommendation.
Cool.
So this is a goodie that Andy Dunn sent me this.
So I know it's me and my knives.
Every freaking show he brings like a device to kill some love knives.
If you do set foot in my house and you don't, you're not supposed to be there.
I have no problem stabbing you.
So don't break into my house.
You won't shoot people.
I won't shoot people yet.
I can shoot.
Do you have a gun at all?
I'm pretty good at it.
No.
What was that?
I can throw knives.
You can throw knives.
You can hit that wall right now and stick it.
I would, but not with this knife.
Let me show you this knife.
Yeah, you need a throwing knife.
This one isn't balanced for throwing.
So this is a Norwegian, it's supposed to be hella probably, hella knife.
You can see how gorgeous this is.
It is a beautiful knife and it's actually very practical for if I wanted to do survivalist training.
This would be very good.
It's small.
What type of steel?
I don't know.
I don't know.
This is a very new knife.
It's a gorgeous, gorgeous knife.
Made in Norway.
It's lightweight too.
Yeah, super lightweight.
And so, as mentioned earlier, yeah, don't throw the knife.
Reading stuff like, you know, the survival template.
This is a self-published, tiny little book with tips for survival.
Oh dude, I've got a book for you.
Oh yeah?
Yeah, it's called the SWA Survival Handbook.
Southwest Airlines Survival Handbook.
It's amazing, dude.
It's basically like, when you were little, you know how you built traps and shit?
It's every possible trap you can build with twigs and shit and how to survive.
And it's all pictures.
Awesome.
So you look through it and it's nice.
If you don't have water, this is how you take a branch, put a plastic bag around it.
The condensation will come off of the leaves.
You'll collect four cups of water per day.
Cool.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
I'll put the link in the number.
A little below or 30.
Super cool, yeah.
So this is one of my favorite knives that I've ever seen.
So thank you, Andy.
You don't have anything else?
I've got one more.
I just have a movie that I think everyone should check out.
They haven't already.
Okay.
This is Tron.
Have you seen the new Tron?
I haven't.
Dude, I saw it for the first time.
And I was infatuated with Tron, or at least the...
First of all, I love Daft Punk, the band.
Yeah, yeah.
They do the entire soundtrack.
Cool.
And the visuals.
Like, forget the story.
I mean, it was a good story.
It was decent.
The visuals were amazing.
Yeah.
Like, it's just, it's really fun.
Anyway, I know it's old, but whatever.
It's old.
Old, meaning like 12 months old.
Meaning it's pronounced.
Have you checked out History of Us, yes?
No.
History of Us.
You can tell me if you check that out.
I'm going to write that down here.
History of Us, yeah.
What is it?
It's a history channel.
Put the camera on yourself.
12-part series.
And it's just amazing.
Like, it really puts everything in context as far as understanding kind of where we're
at today.
And it's done so well.
Like, I think students would love it because it's kind of like a Hollywood-style movie
with, you know, like, cool 3D graphics.
Three-dimensional graphics.
No, not 3D.
Last time.
But a good 3D modeling.
Yeah.
Cool.
So, History of Us meaning like US, like United States.
Yeah.
So, Obama was recommending this, right?
Like, yeah, he came out and said, like, everyone should watch this.
Like, he got some big endorsement.
He was just saying it was amazing.
I wonder if Wikipedia was doing well.
Yeah.
This is a smart guy, yeah.
Anyway, I've heard it's really good.
Can you get that on Netflix or no?
Only DVD.
Only DVD?
Yeah.
So, I'm going to give a teaser for maybe another time.
And then I'll give a movie recommendation and then we can adjourn as needed.
So, this is Lower Body Lactate Accumulation Workouts.
And I spent the afternoon.
Why do I have to sit here?
I spent the...
I spent the...
Lactate...
Accumulation...
It's not different from lactating.
I know that's what you're thinking about.
The...
If you start lactating here, I'm going to be pissed.
I'm aiming to lactate before I run my Ultra.
So, I spent the afternoon at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View on a new piece of
equipment called VASPR, V-A-S-P-E-R.
And they actually apply pressure cuffs to your upper arms and then the middle of your
thighs.
And you do a set workout that causes abnormal lactate accumulation in those limbs because
the circulation is prevented somewhat, not blood circulation, lactate clearance is prevented
from these cuffs.
And you wear an entire cooling outfit.
And what that does is dramatically multiplies the signal to your brain to then put out growth
hormone.
So, if you're looking for, let's say, a potential replacement for hormone replacement therapy
or...
Because you don't want acromegaly.
You don't want acromegaly.
Yeah, you don't want like...
Like your head to grow three sizes like Barry Bonds, not recommended.
Or if you're looking to sleep better, have better mental acuity, pretty interesting implications.
So, I've been...
I'm going to be experimenting with this stuff.
Then, so that's the teaser.
Maybe I have some video at some point of that.
It's pretty wild.
The movie that I was thinking of that everybody should check out, it's very controversial.
It's called Exit Through the Gift Shop.
And it involves people like Banksy.
If you haven't heard of Banksy, check it out, incredible street artists, graffiti artists.
And it's a movie that, at least as it's presented, involves Banksy turning the camera around
on this documentary filmmaker and making the documentary about the filmmaker himself.
It shows how you could potentially game the art world.
It's hysterical.
It's so good.
We...
Glenn and I know a little something about that.
Yeah, yeah.
I've not seen that.
It's so good.
Yeah.
You guys are nuts.
Oh, man.
It's such a fun movie.
So, exit through the gift shop.
Check it out.
Yeah, Glenn and I...
Are you sure that's what it's called?
Yeah.
Isn't that what it's called?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exit through the gift shop.
There may be another one that covers similar...
All right.
Or World's Fiascos.
I got a bunch of great stuff every time we do these things.
Yeah.
All right.
I think we're done.
I think that's it for now, ladies and gentlemen.
Let's show Mark's pizza off real quick.
Yeah, yeah.
Can we show it on the thing?
Oh, do we have a pie?
Oh, man.
Look at this thing.
This is cheat day, so...
If you want to check out this place, Orbit Room.
Yeah, yeah.
I want a piece of that.
That looks delicious.
All right.
Thanks, everybody.
We will see you in probably six to 12 months.
I'm just kidding.
Thanks, everybody.
