Rare PooPoos

[00:00:00] If you're a poor person who lives under a lot of stress, there's something wrong with you. If you want to survive too late, give up. Get 10 credit cards minimum and then gamble on athletes like a boss.

[00:00:12] A washer and dryer for my loser podcast co-host.

[00:01:17] Can we give Bryan money for a thing? Again? You seem to be doing that a lot. Are you sure he's doing... He's going through a lot of hardships. That's life, honey. Well, you know he's Irish. Grew up next to a Superfund site. I mean, thyroid cancer is going to get him sooner or later. Oh, geez. Oh, geez.

[00:01:45] Speaking of thyroid cancer, it's 40 minutes... No! No! 48 Minutes of Dylas CT scans. Jesus. Oh, this is why you can't sleep on your site anymore. That's Bryan. I'm Jason. We're both going to die eventually. I mean, geez, it's going to happen. It comes for us all. I know. The sweet embrace. Do what thou post be the whole extent of the blog. Amen.

[00:02:13] Oh, boy, oh boy. What a weird week, Bryan. Okay. Not the least of which because, according to the first story in our What's Hot Classic, Madonna is out here outing gay people. I mean, you get enough to go from the hero to the villain. It's true. Batman Begins. From Queerty Magazine. Okay. Yeah. Their subhead being free of an agenda except that gay one.

[00:02:40] The headline, people are seriously pissed that Grindr outed them with its latest Madonna advert. That's right. This, according to the David Hudson over there at Queerty. Anyone who uses Grindr will be aware that Madonna has been heavily promoting her new music on the platform. However, the latest marketing stunt prompted a wave of criticism over the weekend.

[00:03:03] An advert that appeared late last week featured Madonna inviting Grindr users to add a tag to their profile listing their favorite Madonna album. The problem is that when you open the app, the ad plays automatically and the sound is unmuted. If your phone volume is turned up and you're in a public place, others can hear it. The very first thing you hear is Madonna saying, Hi, Grindr. It's Mother. Here's a quote.

[00:03:31] This feels like a bit from The Office. Yeah. Well, here's the actual audio. Hi, Grindr. It's Mother. Now I know we all have a favorite. Don't pretend you don't. I want you to make your immaculate selection. Pick the album that says the most about you. Go on. Express yourself. It's Mother. Yeah, a lot of people are saying Grindr. Here's Tom Katsumi.

[00:04:00] Grindr playing a sound on ad that starts with Madonna saying, Hi, Grindr. When you open the app, even when sounds are turned off, is a safety issue. At Power Boar. Hey, just a quick FYI. Can we not have Madonna say, Hi, Grindr, when we open the app? I'm in a taxi and my driver heard her basically shout it from the rooftops and now he's looking at me weird. Thanks, at Grindr. At Trash Magic, which is spelled M-A-G-I-Q, by the way,

[00:04:28] clicked on Madonna's Grindr ad at the gym and everyone around me heard, Hi, Grindr, coming from my phone at max volume. Yeah, it's problematic. That's very bad. Even Redditors. There's the r slash askgaybros. A user there said, I just got outed by Grindr. My phone was on silent and I got outed to my entire homophobic family because it said, Hi, Grindr. They all shouted at me. I ran and I'm staying in a friend's place on his couch now. I don't even know what to say.

[00:04:57] I am literally shaking. Not great, Grindr folks. Yeah, it's terrible, you know, because, I mean, I guess I would also be really upset if I opened up my dang app of choice and it proclaimed something about my identity that maybe I guard, like, you know, hey, hi guy that likes to eat tomboy ass. They'd be like, oh, wow. Oh, oh, wow. I didn't know this was going to happen here at Platypus in the Grove.

[00:05:24] Wow, they thems are looking at me very judgmentally. Okay, see, now I think that actually might work in your favor at Platypus. But anyway, I think perhaps the gentleman is protesting too much. Grindr did reach out. They said, on Saturday, users reached out with concerns. We immediately removed the audio message that afternoon. We're sorry for the impact, yada, yada, yada. We appreciate your feedback. Yeah, but you fucked up. Seems bad. Seems really, really bad.

[00:05:51] And Madonna, being the queer icon that she is, despite not being gay herself. It's funny how women do that. It's almost like it's a trope. Hashtag not an ally. Yeah. To kind of break the tension of that weird one. I came across this wonderful Instagram reel by XAV Sandoval, filming with their Ray-Ban metaglasses. But, yeah, it's called, it's just titled Putting Beans on My Roof.

[00:06:19] Beans on my roof, dog. Beans on my roof, brother. You got some beans on top of your truck. Get a can of beans on top of your truck. Get a can of your truck. Top of your truck. There's a can on your truck. There's a can of beans on top of your truck. Hold on, hold on. Beans on top. A can of beans on the roof of your car. I don't put no beans on the roof. And so it starts exactly like that. They have a giant can of Bush's Bust. Oh, yeah, it's like a 32 ounce. The big boy. The Pinto beans, by the way. The Frijoles. The Frijoles.

[00:06:48] And then they're driving around with that on top of their truck. And people are just going ham telling these guys. They're in a parking lot of a grocery store or a Walmart. It's like a Costco parking lot. Yeah. People are just pointing. Was that Cesar Juan Carlos? So apparently this is not the first time he's done this. He's done putting food on his roof. Putting Red Bull on his roof. Putting green beans on his roof. Putting bananas. Yeah. Seven million. Yeah.

[00:07:17] Eight million views for putting beans on my roof. It's a hoot. Because people are genuinely concerned. But also just their reactions are pretty damn funny. Beans on your roof. Beans on your roof. You got some beans on your roof or something? Dan Olsen folding ideas telling him he's got beans on his roof. I was like, this guy has girlfriend in the car. And she's just like. She's on her phone. Very stoic. He hands the guy. Okay. So this guy comes up and says something about the bananas on the roof. He hands them the bananas. And then he hands them $5.

[00:07:48] And the guy hands them back money. I think as well. Like it's a totally weird. What? I think there was something going there on the down low. We don't have to scrutinize it. But man, beans on the car. Beans on the car, Brian. One of the few instances where I think like the meta Ray-Ban glass is like. Like, oh yeah, it's a bit. Some prank videos. Yeah. I think there's a lot of unexplored comedy. You know, we got to get Conor O'Malley wearing the meta Ray-Bans.

[00:08:14] We got to get, you know, some of the real prank stars out there wearing the meta Ray-Bans. Conor O'Malley wearing the meta Ray-Bans as he breaks into Hassan Piker's house. Yes. Oh, the can you have here! He does another smoking 500 cigarettes for 5G. He's like doing 500 Zins. Yeah, there it is. 500 Zins. He just starts slobbering all over Hassan's Zins. Yeah. Hey, you dog like this? Shock your dog for me. All right. Anyway.

[00:08:44] Can you imagine the bits? The bits that you could do with those? If you're just utterly insane and had no self-respect. Yeah. Yeah. Or you were Conor O'Malley. Oh, yeah. No. Don't Hossoss feed me. Now, come on. Hossoss. God damn it. I put in the hot sauce all over these. Where are my meta Ray-Bans to do the hot sauce feed? Recreating it in HD. It's like a hot sauce on my feet. It's like Melinda. It's like fancy bougie shit. You're spending a lot of money to get that hot sauce feed. I see.

[00:09:14] I had the fucking... I was out of Sriracha, and that was like the one thing they had at the store for some reason. That's not bad. Like, if I'm gonna get Sriracha, I mean, I'm kind of... I've evolved as a person where the rooster sauce is low class. You gotta get like the Himalayan shit that's yellow. Okay. You never had that? That's surreal. It doesn't ring a bell, but it doesn't mean I haven't had it. It just means that I don't know what you're doing. It's surreal. It's like the real shit. Like, the Melinda's Sriracha's pretty damn tasty, not gonna lie, but the yellow Himalayan Sriracha.

[00:09:44] That's my lock of the life. There's a yellow... There's a... I have it in my fucking fridge. I can't remember. There's a yellow Sriracha, and all of my fucking bougie-ass friends that think they know fucking ball always like, but Sriracha's supposed to be right. I'm like, no, it's... You've been lied to. Yeah, that's Hoi Fong. That's Hoi Fong. You gotta get the yellow Sriracha, and they go get the yellow Sriracha, and they're like, holy shit, my life is completely different now. I go, you are welcome, my child.

[00:10:10] One step closer to breaking from the chains of samsara and the inner-eaching enlightenment. Become a bohisattva. The first step of becoming a bohisattva is getting rid of that red fucking Sriracha sauce. But the Melinda's Sriracha's fine. It's, you know, it's... It's all right. It punches above its weight. Sure. I think, like, Melinda's in general's pretty good. I got you that fucking habanero. Yeah, that was a good one. My wife's really liking the truffle, the black truffle. Black truffle's really good. That's like a really... That's like a very... It's weird to think of it like a finishing hot sauce.

[00:10:40] You just put a little dab on there. Yeah, it's not something you cook with. It's a topper. Yeah, and you also don't need to use a lot of it. Nope. And that's what she likes about it. Well, speaking of a little dab will do ya. 404 Media brings us this article with the headline, Internet of Shit. AI poop analysis app offered to sell me database of its users' poops. Published this very morning by Jason Kobler.

[00:11:06] A few weeks ago, I came across a wild post on Reddit's r slash dh exchange, a subreddit for trading large data sets. Quote, I hoarded a large database of something valuable, just not what you'd expect. 150k stools images. The post, made by a user called iii underscore car underscore 7351, was advertising exactly what it sounds like.

[00:11:36] A database of poop images collected from an AI poop analyzing app that he had launched several years ago. Basically, 25,000 people had been taking images of their poop and uploading them to his app. He had been collecting, analyzing, and annotating these images and now wanted to sell access to them. Quote, I've got 150k plus labeled and classified images of poop emoji

[00:12:04] from roughly 25k different people. Jokes aside, I know there's a lot of value in it. Hard to obtain, useful for machine learning training, cancer studies, etc. But not sure on how to move it. Feels like I'm sitting on a pile of shiny coins, but I can't find who wants them. Can't figure out how to move it. Sir, you might be interested in doing a Poe-Briot combination for a month or two. Get your gut fauna back in order. Get your gut fauna.

[00:12:34] The poster added, the images are extremely rare. Yeah. Rare and based. Uh-huh. Little bee DMing you. Let me see. Let me see. Let me see. Let me see your poop pics. This is going to blow rare pepes out of the water. Rare poo-poos. The poop database comes from an app called Poop Check, an app made by a company called Soft All Things that purports to use AI to analyze images of one's stool in order to give you a, quote, daily gut health score. The advertisement for the app reads,

[00:13:03] our AI analyzes your poop using the Bristol Stool Scale and advanced pattern recognition. Get insights on consistency, color, shape, and what they mean for your digestive health. The Bristol School Scale, if you've never seen it. It's the seven types of poop, you know, separate hot clumps. Oh, yeah. It's kind of like a, why did these chocolate chip cookies come out? Bad. Yeah, exactly. Too much salt, not enough. Not enough baking soda. So apparently in this app there was like a leaderboard.

[00:13:30] Good move mark 521 was still the number one on the leaderboard, by the way. Who was number one? Number two was Frantic Flusher. Number three was Chef M. Kakin. Okay. All right. Number four, Poopticon the Poopacious. Okay. Number five was Stools R Us. And number six was Full of It. You can still install it. Yeah. Day of Safety here, it says, no day is shared with third parties. No day is collected.

[00:13:59] Data is encrypted in transit. Clearly not. If somebody has 150,000 images of your doodos. Elaine Chunga gives it five out of five stars. It says user friendly. Funny features and the leaderboard just nails it. Five stars worth it. Alexander Varga gave it one out of five. UI doesn't even let me upload pictures. Just prompts upload from gallery or take a picture.

[00:14:26] And neither option does anything even after giving perm to the app. The thing is, it's soft all things replies to pretty much every single review. Oh, God. I don't know. Maybe I should. Maybe I should be uploading my fecal birth chart. So Jason Kobler here messages this guy. I think I'm fucking joking. No, I don't. I don't. I'm installing right now. Poop check. They leaked my shit. They leaked my shit foes on the cloud, brother.

[00:14:56] Oh, Jesus. He asked, you know, how much? Here was an estimation of the pricing options. Jason says, for 10,000 unreviewed images, AI validated $3,000. For 5,000 fully human reviewed and annotated images, $4,000. 5,000 reviewed and 5,000 unreviewed for $5,000. The sample data set included 20 images of poop from four specific users.

[00:15:21] Each image was tied to a series of user reported data points as well as the AI analysis of each image. Jesus Christ. Each image had user reported information, which includes when did you have your last meal? Any discomfort? How long did it take? Did it smell coffee or alcohol in the last 12 hours? The data also included demographics, age ranges, sex, height, weight, sensitivities such as lactose intolerance or IBS.

[00:15:46] Yes, soft all things is not exactly quiet about the database that he created on the poop check website. It has a page called For Business, which advertises the database. It sells access to both the stool analysis API, which turns a stool photo into a structured health report, as well as the annotated data set of 140,000 plus images to train your own models. Yes. It's my LLBM. Yeah.

[00:16:17] The LLBM catalog. I like that. Yeah, the internet of shit. One last thing to leave you on. We always like to give you a game. I found a good game. It is about Donald Trump, though. So if you're allergic to winning epic lib owning, no, an epic taco. Fortnite chungus. Lib out stuff. You might want to avoid this one. It's called Operation Epic Furious Straight, as in straight to hell.

[00:16:47] So it is a 16-bit style game made in RPG Maker, by the way. Another big beautiful day is the best president ever. And there you are, it's Donald Trump behind the desk. As soon as you move, another one of your executive orders was halted by the courts. And your options are order a Diet Coke or invade Iran. Now, you can continue to order Diet Cokes, and it will pop up an achievement.

[00:17:11] But you're supposed to invade Iran, which then has Donald Trump truth posting. And then it's got, hegseth shows up. Ha! My delts are combat ready. Let's liberate some oil. Go outside and borrow Kid Rock's helicopter to get to the war zone. But of course, in true video game fashion, you can dick around and not do that. My favorite thing is, of course, there's a furnace in the White House in this version. And you can click on this box of Epstein files. Would you like to burn an Epstein file? Yes.

[00:17:41] And then you go, yes. And it says, there are 3,124,000 Epstein files remain. You can just sit there and click yes a bunch of times. Wow. And nothing happens. But then you go down. There's JD Vance. I love couch. Okay. There's Cash Patel. Yeah. Thank you for delivering the safest country on God's green earth. Do you like my cool new jacket? And your only dialogue option is, of course, the classic anime three dots. It stands for female body inspector. Yeah. You go to Melania here.

[00:18:11] I was never on the Epstein jet. Did you burn the files yet? You can answer, I'm working on it, or you can answer, come and hold hands. Can we hold hands? Can we hold hands is game over. It's that kind of humor. The game is really fun and silly. It eventually evolves into a thing where you have to actually go into Iran and get the oil, which they've renamed Lube for some reason. And P. Diddy's there. Yeah, it's fun. It's very silly. It's a browser-based RPG maker game. It's a good time.

[00:18:40] But don't take it too serious. It's just memes. We're just having fun. We're just having jokes. That did make me think of emo game and all those. I was just thinking of that. Yeah, anti-Bush games and stuff. And like, oh, we're back that far. We're back there. Instead of Osama and a blender, it's Adiatola. Yeah. Well, I guess that means it's Crypto Scam of the Week time. You're listening to 48 Minutes of Dogs Barking, the podcast.

[00:19:07] And now it's time for the Crypto Scam of the Week. Yes, it is. Oh, baby. Courtesy of Molly White at Web3 is going great. Transit Finance. Hacked for $1.88 million. So this according to Transit's very own Twitter account. Of course, they have to have the full, basically a blog post. A post morum, yeah. On Twitter. Transit announcement.

[00:19:34] Regarding a recent incident related to historical legacy risks, we would like to share the following update. This is written like an actual root cause analysis from like a tech standpoint, which is, I think, just doubly funny. Also, just a complete aside, the trending topic right now on Twitter is hashtag keep pounding. Which is also followed immediately by Mom Donnie. So it's like, what's happening? Mom Donnie. Mom Donnie, keep pounding Matty Segrist.

[00:20:04] I will, New York. All right. So number one, cause of the incident. Early version smart contract previously deployed on Tron. Oof. Duh. Although the legacy. We're wrong. Although this legacy contract has been deprecated since 2022. That's wrong. It's depreciated. I fucking, I hate that. Historical vulnerabilities within it were recently exploited, affecting a limited number of users. Upon discovery, our team immediately carried out investigation. Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Users don't need to take any action.

[00:20:32] Effective users will receive full compensation with details later. Please remain cautious of unsolicited messages or accounts claiming to represent transit finance. Never share your private key or seed phrase with anyone. Yeah. So very boilerplate. Historical vulnerabilities aside. Here's a Cryptopolitan. They commit to refunds as the 1.88 million hack adds to May losses. Peck Shield flagged them saying stolen funds are currently parked in a dollar die address, D-A-I.

[00:21:01] In an on-chain message sent by transit to the attacker's wallet, the attacker was informed they may get a certain percentage of reward as a bug bounty. Classic. 48-hour window to respond. So some guy did like some math shit. Yeah. Real dumb. Well... And of course they turned off comments, transit did, on their Twitter account because of course they did. Sucks suck. Let's see here. The quotes here. Blocksec Falcon with a PH.

[00:21:29] Since the affected contracts are not open source and Tron lacks strong public analysis tooling, our investigation suggests the incident involved abuse of standing unlimited approvals. Specifically, users had previously granted unlimited USDT allowance to its official approval contract. The attacker then abused the own execution chain, turning old standing approvals into direct victim-to-attacker USDT transfers. Holy shit. Sounds a little involved. Yeah.

[00:21:57] At TX desk, I've been building support infrastructure across chains and the absence of accessible tracing makes incident response there significantly slower. Here's a good way to not have any kind of operational security issues. Don't put your money in crypto. Yeah. It's financial advice, folks. Well, you know who else had good financial advice? That's right. A young Austrian artist back in the 19... No. What? Excuse me? I caught you. Gotcha. No.

[00:22:28] Matt Rutledge. Who is Matt Rutledge, you might ask? He kind of looks like... Brady Judd? Yeah. I was going to say if Alex Jones was an IT guy. I was thinking like... This is what's going on here. He's designing this. I've changed your port forwarding. This is why you're no longer able to communicate with your Zebra thermal printer. There is a local comedian here in St. Louis, Brandon Judd. He's got a fucking amazing forehead.

[00:22:52] You can fucking write your favorite fucking pasta recipe on that shit and have room left over for like your fucking... The family secret. Jesus. But yeah, Matt Rutledge does look an awful lot like him. Matt Rutledge, by the way. If you're not familiar with Matt Rutledge, you may know him as the former CEO of Daily Deal's site Woot. Woot.com. Yep. Short for we owned the other team originally, at least as far as I'm aware.

[00:23:22] Woot kind of took off. He grew up in Texas, came to St. Louis for a while, lived with his mother. But this is my favorite part. He moved to Texas to avoid paying $8,000 in parking tickets. That's goddamn, man. That's... I mean, I've known a few people that left St. Louis because of things like that. Either like they were so tired of getting fucking pulled over for like the dumbest shit. Yeah. Or like, yeah. Like, you know what?

[00:23:50] Yeah, there was a couple fines I needed to pay, but it was just cheaper to move out of state. No, exactly. Woot. None of it would have happened without the Apple II that his dad bought in 1979. Rutledge taught himself a little basic and wrote a quiz program for the periodic table. When his parents divorced, young Matt moved with dad from San Antonio to Farmer's Branch. Then Carrollton. Eventually, little brother Dave moved with mom to St. Louis. He didn't distinguish himself in high school.

[00:24:18] By the way, this never mentions where he went to high school. What the fuck? I do know that there was a guy, and this may be getting ahead of it. There was a band here in St. Louis. It was a bunch of alt-rock nerds, I guess you would call them, called Dice Grinder. It was all Dungeons & Dragons references, and the fucking singer left the band because he went to go work for Woot. Yeah. He moved back to Dallas and worked for a computer retailer called Resource Concepts.

[00:24:46] That's where he got the bug about good deals, basically. Boggins. In 1994, Rutledge started Synapse Micro. This is according to D Magazine, by the way. A wholesale hardware distributor that he would build into a $50 million business before the internet and CompUSA and fries destroyed the ecosystem of mom-and-pop computer shops. Before all that, he learned how to sell crap. His first Saturday swap meet started in 72 as a market for ham radio enthusiasts.

[00:25:15] By the time he returned to Dallas in the early 90s, first Saturday, which was a swap meet, had grown to include computer hardware. Benders set up Friday evening in a downtown Dallas parking lot. People arrived at midnight to shop in the darkness, hangling over motherboards and hard drives. As the sun rose on the first Saturday of every month, enter Matt Rutledge. On Friday night, I'd go to the bar, he says. Probably the Salute Club on Midway.

[00:25:40] When the bar closed, I'd get a buddy, pay him a couple hundred bucks, come back to the warehouse with me and load up the rider truck. All the other guys had already set up their tables wearing minor hats. This was grassroots stuff. But I was a closeout distributor with a bunch of returns already written off, so at 2 or 3 in the morning, everybody else is already set up, and we're these assholes with bloodshot eyes trying to figure out how to park our truck in our spot at the last minute. Amazing. You went to the bar, you were up late, and you made the best of it. I didn't plan it that way. It just happened.

[00:26:10] And people knew who we were. I was almost like a drug dealer to them. They'd follow us, gather around the back of the truck when we threw the door up. I got these motherboards. You're delirious. No warranty. Who wants it for 10 bucks? You're a jerk, but you're having fun, taking cash, stuffing it in this pocket, making change from that pocket. People would come just to watch, not even to buy anything. That was kind of cool. And this, again, according to D Magazine, First Saturday was essentially a live rehearsal for what would become Woot.

[00:26:40] Start selling at midnight. Clear out all the crap. Make it an event. So if you're not familiar with Woot, 2004. Oh, by the way, St. Louis Magazine did a piece on it. Who's the author on this? World of Woot. Tim Woodcock. In the recent weeks, one could have used Woot to find a bargain-priced electric guitar, $59.99, a children's playhouse, $49.99, or a pair of USB-powered flashing police lights, $4.99.

[00:27:06] Luke Duff, who oversees a team of programmers, says he sometimes has to remind employees, We're not a technology company. We sell crap on the internet. Lawnmowers and laptops, robots to clean, and toy monkeys that scream, and a friendly robot to add it all up. This fantastical procession of products ships from Carrollton, Texas, a suburb of Dallas that's home to 150 Woot workers.

[00:27:28] But most of the fun, creative stuff happens here in St. Louis at Woot Workshop, a subsidiary that employs 14 people. The company launched in 2004, and the St. Louis office followed a year later. At its helm is Dave Rutledge, brother of Woot founder Matt Rutledge. When he set up Woot Workshop, Dave recruited three high school friends to help. Five years later, those four remain at the company's core. However, Rutledge admits that being a dot-com outside of California has its disadvantages.

[00:27:58] Woot staff isn't, quote, going to the same bars as the people at Google and Yahoo. But it's pretty common to find someone who's a fan of Woot, says Rutledge, but is shocked that there's a local connection. But yes, the company's standout quality is its goofiness. So again, Woot was a website. They would put up one thing a day, sell it, and when it's sold out, it's sold out. The company's standout quality is its goofiness, its seeming inability to take anything seriously.

[00:28:27] The humor is part of the brand, of course. And brand loyalty underpins a multimillion-dollar business model. In 2008, the company generated $164 million, Brian. That's pretty impressive. A typical product description is more comedy skit than conventional sales literature. The descriptions have parodied scam letters from Nigeria, Edgar Allan Poe's ghost stories, and TV show The Office.

[00:28:53] Woot's formula is to give a utilitarian product a personality and bury the important information, text spec, size, color, at the end. Then stand back and watch word of mouth take care of the rest. Next, Jason Toon, who heads a team of five copywriters, says Woot embraces a kind of anti-copywriting that appeals to people who object to how products are traditionally sold. During a recent visit to Woot's local office, again, St. Louis, hometown, debate raged over how to market the wine diaper.

[00:29:23] Woot's employees were happy to sell the product designed to wrap around a wine bottle to protect it during travel, but the bizarre name nilled some debate. The word diaper described its function quite nicely, some said. Others felt the word brought bodily functions to mind. When the product was posted late April, the description leaned towards more cutesy satire than full-blooded ridicule. Quote, congratulations on your new bouncing baby bottle. Here are a few things new wine parents need to know about properly diapering your precious little one.

[00:29:53] If you're new to wine diapering, you may want to practice on a bottle of the cheap stuff first. All wine is precious, but not equally precious. Do not be alarmed if, on removing the wine diaper, you discover your wine is a reddish color. That is not a rash. It's perfectly normal unless your bottle contains white wine. In that case, something freaky is going on, and you should definitely be alarmed. A good nice example of some of the mid-period Woot stuff. There was a shadygoods.meh.com, by the way. We'll talk about meh.com, of course.

[00:30:23] That's Jason Toon continuing to write. This is a newsletter. Here's some other examples from Woot in the time period. Oh, I bought that fucking Zune. Microsoft Zune 30 gig. You know what, man? You know what, man? I'm going to say this right here. Do you still have it? The fucking three-pin fucking broke. Bummer. I'm going to say that Zune's still probably the best MP3 player I ever had. I'm still looking for one. If I find it, I'll let you. I'll bend some pins. I don't care. The fucking Zune was cool. I had a really cool UI. Zune. Yes, everyone made fucking fun of it.

[00:30:53] But man, like iPod Touch, I thought the... Gauche. They're gauche. iPod was just like a little bloated. Yeah. And the Zune also had a nice screen. People made fun of the brown. I had the brown. Yeah. The brown was fine. Yeah, even in this woo description. So wrong it's right. So good it's bad. So gross it's not gross. Brown is the new black. And you'll never get your MP3 player mixed with someone else's. Because who in their right mind owns a brown MP3 player? I mean, it's so fucking funny. I had that fucking Zune.

[00:31:20] I saw one when it first came out that had like a wood grain finish. Now, obviously it wasn't actually wood. It was like a vinyl sticker or something. Yeah. But I was like, that's classy as shit. That would be a thing that I would want to put somewhere in a place of prominence. But yeah, some of the other ones. World's Crappiest Projector. Those projector snobs at Gizmodo say this has the, quote, worst contrast ratio we've ever seen. And, quote, even smelled bad like mildew and made way more noise than we can bear. You know what I say? One please.

[00:31:49] So woot.com. Just a weird sense of humor about things. Now, one of my favorite things in the early days that they did was just, it was called bag of crap. Oh, yeah. You bought one bag and it was guaranteed to be filled with at least three crappy items. At least three. Sometimes more. So I got a little heavy handed stuff in the bag of crap. Oh, sometimes. Yeah. It was like eight bucks. Yeah. So this Jason Toon, again, writing for shoddygoods.med.com. In this pre-social media age, our forums blossomed into a raucous, smart, funny, creative community.

[00:32:18] Our fans were so rabid, we were able to throw together scraps in something called the bag of crap. And to sell them so fast, we had to add extra servers to handle the load. Wooters, as users of the site were called, developed a whole bunch of elaborate strategies for nabbing a bag of crap and still mostly missed out as there just wasn't enough crap to satisfy everybody. Here's that reference, by the way.

[00:32:45] Woot and the bag of crap, how I got one from hubpages.com. The two major methods are the furious F5, or continuously refreshing the page, and the bot method. So basically, you refresh the page a bunch of times. You sign in before the anticipated bag of crap goes live. Check in at midnight. You guesstimate when it will appear based on tips, and then open your browser and refresh until you see it. The bot method is you have to create this elaborate nonsense about...

[00:33:14] I use the Wootilizer bot. Like, there's a fucking... They made an app called the Wootilizer bot. Here's a bag of crap they got. It looks like an official PGA bag of some sort. A swag bag, a couple iPhone cases. A 2010 desktop calendar, which is Ben and Jerry's Would You Rather? It's like a couple of coasters and a little wooden thing. Bag of crap. They weren't kidding. There's your other... A second bag of crap. Here we go.

[00:33:44] Fuzzy purse. Some sort of ornament. A digital photo frame keychain. Some crap. Fuck it is. It's just crap. A lot of people responded to this, you know. I found a few useful items, given a few ways gifts, and the rest is sitting in my closet waiting for the right purpose. But yeah, they had a lot of fun with that sort of thing. Even their about page was a hoot. I only see one item. Do you sell anything else? No. We sell one item a day until it's sold out or until midnight central time when it's replaced.

[00:34:13] However, each item we sell is in stock and typically ships within two to three business days. What is the schedule? Short answer, we offer a new item every day. Like, they repeat themselves a bunch of times on this about page. I missed yesterday's item. Can I still get one? No. I want to talk to a live person. No. Will I receive customer support? No. If you buy something you don't end up liking or if you have what marketing people call buyer's remorse, sell it on eBay, they say. I mean, they weren't fucking around.

[00:34:42] There's no frills, right? They're not going to tell you how many units are available in a given sale. I see some orange flashing lights on the main page. What does that mean? No, you aren't seeing a side effect from your allergy medication. You have found a Woot Off. So this was another feature of the site. A Woot Off is a short-term frenzied mutation of our product posting procedure. In Woot Off mode, a new product is launched immediately after the sellout of the previous.

[00:35:08] There is a half Woot life of 12 hours maximum on any product within a Woot Off that does not sell out. When Woot Off mode is over, the orange lights disappear and our normal schedule will resume. Depending on its success, this may be a mode we would go into once or twice a month for a relatively short duration. Now, they did offer what a unique thing for people selling things on the internet, which was an RSS feed. Ooh. So you could set that up and just get notified as soon as the Woot Off or as soon as the deal was going live. I thought it was great.

[00:35:39] The only downside to some folks is they don't ship outside the 48 contiguous. So no Canada, no Mexico, no Alaska, no Hawaii. Like with every internet success story, there's a downside. Woot got bought by Amazon. 2010, Amazon decided to buy what was named in 2008 the number one fastest growing private retail company in America for $110 million.

[00:36:06] Now, Matt Rutledge remained as CEO. The headquarters stayed in Carrollton. But the creative team, which were originally based in St. Louis, got moved to Seattle because it's Amazon. Now, in the intervening years, to hear many people tell it, including Jason Toon. Well, yeah. In Jason Toon's own words, The promise was the same as every other acquisition. You guys are great, but now you'll have the resources to do your thing bigger and better.

[00:36:36] And at first, there was some truth to it. Some of us had to move to Seattle. We were indeed able to hire a bunch more people, including a brilliant team of comedy writers and community managers it was my privilege to work with. The team could be subject of a whole newsletter itself or a five-season streaming TV series. Not on network TV, though. Too much profanity. They even built us a sweet little video studio. But it soon became clear that Amazon thought that Woot's eccentricities were a flaw to be tamed,

[00:37:04] not an advantage to be nurtured. I spent more and more emotional energy on arguments over content that would have been uncontroversial in the pre-Amazon days. A few years after I left in 2013, that team of writers was eventually turfed out. Some of the superficial forms of the old Woot persists to this day, but hollowed out, defanged, normalized.

[00:37:29] Woot became the Amazon system's designated bargain bin slash dumping ground under the toothless tagline, deals and shenanigans. When Woot lost its weird, it also lost its superpower to buy and blast sell mass quantities of leftover junk, the main reason Amazon bought Woot in the first place. Sadly, most of the stuff that incredibly talented team made is gone or hard to find. I have noticed this was true.

[00:37:59] The Woot blog and YouTube channel were mostly wiped in recent years. If anybody out there got a stash of good old Woot video and audio, Jason Toon says, name your price. Happily, the core of the Woot Brain Trust regrouped at MEH. That's right, M-E-H. MEH.com. After Amazon bought them and transformed them into a hollow shell of their selves, they regrouped. We have MEH.com. What is MEH? According to the FAQ here,

[00:38:29] the Daily Deal is our signature flavor of online retail. MEH carries a single item, steeply discounted, until the clock strikes 12 a.m. Eastern Time. Used to be Central. Click the Buy It button for a great deal on something you didn't know you wanted, or the MEH button for an even more satisfying shopping experience. Abstention! Repeat as desired every day of your life. So they did put together a video about how they get the deals.

[00:38:58] This is an interesting piece. Every MEH deal begins with our buying team, deal fanatics with decades of experience building relationships with product vendors and manufacturers. But they're not calling those vendors to ask about their hot products or to find out what's selling great. They're asking about problems. Manufacturers want to move fast, clearing their old products out, moving on to their next big thing. But sometimes that plan doesn't quite work out. They guessed wrong on how many to make,

[00:39:27] or the product was marketed wrong, their branding changed, or they're getting out of that product category. There's a million reasons, but one need to clear out this problem. So yes, everything that was good about Woot.com now exists in MEH. The MEH-rathon, replacing the Woot off. The Instant Regret Kit, replacing the bag of crap. Although the prices jumped. A bag of crap was $8. Instant Regret Kit, 30 bones, my friend. Thanks, Obama. Yeah. Wow, this...

[00:39:57] Wow, I got a Pope John Paul Labubu. Yeah. A wine opener that's shaped like Porky Pig. Oh, and a charger for an LG Rumor. Yeah. On the Sprint Network. Oh boy. So right now, as of recording, it is a marathon right now. So it is the kind of blitz of deals. Right now, for the next 30 minutes, Chrono Max Bravo 3 smartwatch with 2.0 screen is the deal. For 20 bucks? 20 bucks. Isn't too bad. Not too shabby. And it's not a bad looking watch.

[00:40:27] Software might be a lot of debt. I wouldn't trust it with your biometrics, but... And then they have this section, our take. Here's what they can say about it. It's a smartwatch with a nice big screen, tracks time and activity, and then see the boring manufacturer specs on a separate page, by the way, that shakes when you click it. They definitely have this sense of, like, fun. And they also have six other online sites that are associated with mass. So you've got the Hamaker Schlemmer store. Yes, the Hamaker Schlemmer store. The home of the Heifleifer.

[00:40:57] I cringe so hard. Because if you go to woot.com nowadays... Soulless. It's not even a single deal. And it's not even good deals. It's random tech. $399 to $349.99. But here's the deal, folks. A Kodak PixPro AstroZoom digital camera. $349. Not a deal. Trackphone Moto Razr unlocked $329. You see what I'm saying? We're talking about very different deals.

[00:41:26] Very different types of deals here. Yeah, this isn't getting, like, a 30 gig Zune for $70 when they were still $250. Exactly. Oh, you can buy Big Dog t-shirts on woot.com. Wow! I can get a shirt that has Clifford the Big Red Dog on it. It says, Big Dog Energy. And then on the back, it has the Black Sun. The Clifford the Big Red Dog is... He's looking for Hyboria. Oh, Jesus.

[00:41:52] And Clifford the Big Red Dog looking for Hyboria while Heathcliff the Cat is looking for Agartha. Yeah. Agartha Field. Agartha Field! Instead of John Arbuckle, it's Yakub Arbuckle. Okay, sorry. Agartha Field. But yeah, this Back to D Magazine's article, because it's probably one of my favorites that I've read about this. On the creative side of Dave, again, the co-founder, the brother of Matt, says,

[00:42:21] The pressure to sell killed writing. He's talking about Amazon exerting pressure from the top, of course. If you have a day when something doesn't sell great, someone just says, What the hell happened? Well, it's the easiest thing in the world for a buyer or manager of buyers to point to the write-up. People were saying, Hey, I'm told I have to sell every single one of these things, and I really need you guys to write a more glowing write-up for this thing that you know is a piece of shit. And that is where the fundamental disagreement comes in. Meh deals, they understand they're not selling the best thing in the world, and they'll be up front and tell you about it.

[00:42:51] The writing here really sells this piece. Amazon's fundamental misunderstanding of what made Woot great can be seen today on the site. It sells many items simultaneously. It's a marketplace, not an event. The write-ups are cute, but not subversively funny. Woot is no longer a bug-eyed beast with eight tentacles. It's a pancake with two smaller pancakes for Mickey Mouse ears and a smile made of whipped cream.

[00:43:18] It did say that because of his early departure, by the way, they don't know how much it cost him, but apparently it was a pretty penny. But yeah, Meh does now have a mediocre corporation is now the organizing body behind all this stuff. Crapwithfriends.com. Oh, so it's like when you use the bathroom at CBGB. Oh no, it goes to a tube site. Oh no. It's a shame we don't do a shot.jpg anymore. I know.

[00:43:48] Disgusting. Awful. The inside baseball here is that there is a dive bar on Grand called CBGB. I believe it's the women's restroom. It's like two stalls facing each other. Yeah. And it's gotta be some great yapping has probably happened between two girls with Harry Potter, Deathly Hollow tattoos and too much eyeliner going, exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:44:18] Did you ever buy anything cool off Woot? I did. I got a bag of crap a while back and it was like one of the early versions of what you would think of like a tile. The little Bluetooth thing to keep your keys safe. It sucked. It didn't work all that well. It was good for the price. I got myself a Pebble, one of the little smart watches off of a Woot deal. And this was right around the time when they sold to Amazon. So that would have been 2012 maybe.

[00:44:47] So it was like after. There was a few things. They did the shirt site, Shirt Woot. They had some good stuff on Shirt Woot every once in a while. Yeah. I mean, it was fun. I really much prefer the new sites. I much prefer Side Deal. I got a couple of these. The Dual Socket Plobs. The Wild Clean Energy. The back shots. Oh no, wait. Energy shots. Energy shots. Very different shots. Looking back at it. Because I'm getting my antioxidants. That's right. Respectfully.

[00:45:15] Yeah, I got a few of these random mouse combos. Doesn't look terrible. Yeah, I mean, they find some stuff. Kind of upscale Teemu. I mean, it's like anything. You got to kind of look for what's good. There's some stuff in here. You're just like, dude, I just need a fan. Yeah. It isn't terrible. It isn't super expensive. But Ionic Hair Dryer? Probably not. For $30. For $30? Yeah. And again, that was a lot of the appeal of Woot in that time period. It was just like, well, it's not going to break your bank.

[00:45:44] And it's not the best thing in the world. But hey. Yeah. You're like, wow, I'm spending $20 for something that's going to do what I need to do. I'm probably not going to feel put out about it. Exactly. And it's probably better than what I could buy for $20. Right. Off Amazon. Anywhere else. Yeah, exactly. It's ridiculous. I just, I think that like Amazon fucked up. Truthfully. I mean, it's the same. It's a tale as old as time. You know, Google buying Blogger. Yeah. Private equity buying stuff. Equity.

[00:46:14] Nerd rope. Having less nerds on them. Nerd rope clusters. Just sucking ass. Excuse me. I'm sorry, man. It's like, oh, I took a chewed up piece of bubble gum and dip it in some nerds. I'm sorry, man. Sorry you feel that way. Anyways, you know, guys, I hate to tell you this is our last episode. Friendship over? Friendship over. I'm going to go start a podcast with one of the Proud Boy guys.

[00:46:43] The guy that had the belt buckle that said pecker or whatever. Oh, Jesus. Wept. Woot. Woot.com. Yeah, I bought like computer parts and stuff that like was super broke. It was the best thing to buy on there. Yeah. You can find a good deal. Shit. My idea. Internal hard drive kit that makes it an external hard drive, which was really great when like I don't really need like this hard drive in my build, but like I might need to pull something from it from time to time.

[00:47:13] Exactly. Yes. Two bitches in a cubicle. Exactly. Exactly. But no, you would always find just the good stuff. And now it's a shadow of its former self. Such is life, I suppose. Shadow of its former self. Well, speaking of shadows of their former selves, Brian, why don't you tell people where to find you on the internet? Oh, God. Oh, God. If you want to find me on the internet, if you want to stalk and hunt me for sport. Oh, first of all, it wouldn't be that hard because I am.

[00:47:43] I get tired. I was going to say. This is a gout. This is a gout from all the nerd ropes and. You got to stop eating that shit, man. You can find me on Twitter and Blue Sky at iShotGyDBord. I-H-H-O-T-G-U-I-D-B-O-R-D. You can find me over on Instagram at amusicphotographer. You want to check out my well curated portfolio of people with their mouths open. You can head on over to assholemusicphotographer.com.

[00:48:13] I have a well neglected, sweaty sub stack. Very sweaty. Amusicphotographer.substack.com. Really trying to figure out how to monetize this thing. I think I probably need to make content for it. I think maybe we could fold that into the Patreon. I don't know. I'm just like really thinking of like, I'm writing all these articles, Jason. I need my cut. Yeah. I need my cut, Jason. So you got. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay.

[00:48:40] So you got money for Final Fantasy on Switch. Never. I'm never. Well, I think that's all for me, Jason. Where can they find you on the old internet? Oh, Brian. They can find. I don't know. Anywhere there's video crime. Chances are that's me. That's going to be Twitter. Blue Sky. You can find me on, let's see, Letterboxd. Various other places. Chances are it's video crime. It's me. You can also find me as part of a podcast. It's not this one.

[00:49:08] It's called Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals. There I play a fictionalized version of horror icon Stephen King. And it's a hoot. It's a holler. There's two seasons to catch up on. You'd really enjoy it. Midnight-pals.simplecast.com or anywhere podcasts are sold. Just search up Midnight Pals. You can reach out to this show in a number of ways. My personal favorite is, of course, the telephone. 314-246-9766. Tell us what the best deal you ever got on Woot was.

[00:49:38] Leave a voicemail. We'll play it for you next episode. Or shoot us a text and we'll read it out loud in our beautiful golden voices. If you don't feel comfortable using the telephone for whatever reason, shoot us an email. Jason at the number 4, the number 8 minutes of dogs barking dot com. Brian with a Y at the number 4, the number 8 minutes of dogs barking dot com. That's right. If you're the Patreon guy who said he's going to feature my post, fucking let me know, dog. Holler. Yeah.

[00:50:05] Speaking of Patreon, though, patreon.com slash 4 8 minutes of dogs. Hey, that's where we have not just this show. You'll get episodes early. A couple hours earlier than everybody else. For free. But also, if you join Patreon at the $5 or the $10 level, you're going to get yourself the bonus episode every week. About an hour of content where we talk about pretty much everything else.

[00:50:30] And any cut bits that I felt were either, you know, too offensive or too long or too stupid for the main episode. That is patreon.com slash 4 8 minutes of dogs. We are also still in the process of compiling our shock.jpg best of. Volume 1 is out. Volume 2 is about halfway. I still have to, like, scrub through old episodes and cut all of it out and then drop it into a new file and, like, render it all. So it's taking a minute. That's coming soon.

[00:50:59] Every once in a while, we don't do a thanks I hate him. We just do something real weird. And we do, like, the podcast equivalent of a video essay. That's called the mind zone. You know, whatever it is. And we'll have it there for you. Patreon.com slash 4 8 minutes of dog. As we always say at this time, namaste. Good luck. Give mommy a good gut fucking 25th amendment now. Who ate all the pussy? And as we always say, I'll be on that kryptonite. Shout out to big boy. All right. See you later, guys.