12: Boss Hog: Magellan's Atlantic, Recaptcha, GraphQL, NFTs, Crypto

Robbie Wagner: [00:25] What’s going on, everybody? Here’s another Whiskey Web and Whatnot. I think it’s episode twelve or something like that now. I’m here in person with Charles W. Carpenter III. As always, we’re usually apart virtually, but he is in Middleburg today, just hanging out.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:43] Where are you? Middleburg. Myrtle Beach. Myrtleberg my favorite town.

Robbie Wagner: [00:48] We’re in Myrtleberg.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:50] Listen, we’ve renamed it.

Robbie Wagner: [00:51] Yeah, it’s when you’re in Middleburg, but you feel like you’re at the beach.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:53] Myrtleberg.

Robbie Wagner: [00:54] Yeah, Myrtleberg.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:56] Well, it took Robbie a little while to afford my appearance pee.

Robbie Wagner: [01:04] We’re doing great here. This is good. I think you meant fee.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:12] I think I meant fee, but I didn’t want to talk about the details of my contract but could include both.

Robbie Wagner: [01:17] All right, we’ll see you guys next time. No, seriously, though, we’ll keep that. That was kind of fun. Today we have a special whiskey that we bought for Chuck’s two-year anniversary with Ship Shape. It is the WhistlePig Boss Hog, the 7th edition, which is Magellan’s Atlantic, which it’s a bunch of weird stuff that I’m not really sure of. It says it’s aged 17 years. It’s finished in Spanish oak and South American teakwood.

Chuck Carpenter:[01:50] Yeah, that’s kind of a different twist. Of course, it’s a rye, so it means lots of that. I don’t know what other mash bill it may include. I’m not sure if it’s 100% rye or not. Quickly trying to read that during our podcast seems like an ill-advised course of action, but yeah. So in celebration, we’re going to be trying this one today, and I assure you we’ve not had any yet. And I’m glad we chose that over the alternative. It seems that Robbie has. Here some Sheep Dog Peanut Butter Whiskey, and I think you only give that to people you don’t like, so I’m glad to be on the other end of it.

Robbie Wagner: [02:26] Well, it was free.

[00:02:27.790] - Chuck Carpenter

Sometimes free. Nothing’s free, really, especially peanut butter whiskey. Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [02:42] I forgot to pour near the microphone.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:46] Yes. I like the effects of that. That is a significant pour.

Robbie Wagner: [02:49] That’s all right.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:50] Mr. Wagner won’t be driving the rest of the day. Don’t worry. Police of Virginia.

Robbie Wagner: [02:57] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:58] Smell a slight cinnamon. A little bit of, like, I guess if I was smelling maple syrup, I don’t I don’t feel confident that this is going to taste like maple syrup.

Robbie Wagner: [03:10] You don’t smell South American teakwood?

Chuck Carpenter: [03:12] Does teakwood smell a little, like, maybe pipe tobacco or something?

Robbie Wagner: [03:19] It’s hard to describe, but actually, I don’t know if it’s power of suggestion, but I do kind of smell a little bit of teakwood now that I mentioned it.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:28] Well, there we go. Maybe that’s what smells like pipe tobacco to me.

Robbie Wagner: [03:43] Very spicy, which I like. Again, I don’t know if it’s power suggestion or not, but it isn’t that powerful American oak that you sometimes have, so it is different.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:57] I’m definitely getting, like, cinnamon gum kind of thing for me. So that’s the spice for me. It’s more like cinnamon spice.

Robbie Wagner: [04:05] I’m getting a heavy, like, almost smoky licorice on the finish. I don’t know. Can’t put my finger on it, but it’s a lot of smoke.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:17] I think we have a new gimmick, though. We got to smack our lips a lot in future episodes. Yeah. I’m trying to feel the licorice finish. I’m not sure.

Robbie Wagner: [04:30] It took a while, like, I was sitting for maybe, I don’t know, 20 seconds, but it’s yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:38] The power of suggestion is real because now I’m convinced that I’m getting it. But in the middle, yeah. I’m getting not necessarily, like, a sweet syrup, but like, a thickness to it. It is a 17-year rye, so that’s going to have a lot of wood, have a lot of kind of like yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [04:57] It’s like punching me in the mouth.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:00] It thickened a little or something over time.

Robbie Wagner: [05:02] Yeah. It’s almost viscous.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:04] Yeah. Would you put this in your car?

Robbie Wagner: [05:08] Would I put it in my car?

Chuck Carpenter: [05:09] Yeah. The viscosity of your whiskey may also be a good oil.

Robbie Wagner: [05:14] Oh, no, I don’t think it would do well for that. May explode.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:19] I’m not a scientist, but that’s probably a bad idea. Not that kind of engineer.

Robbie Wagner: [05:26] Yeah. So I guess I probably wouldn’t want to sip on this a lot. Honestly. It’s very punchy. It’s good, but yeah, it’s definitely not your middle-of-the-road, which you wouldn’t want when you’re spending this much on whiskey, so I understand that. I don’t know. I would give it certainly not my perfect taste, so I would give it maybe a seven. It’s pretty good. It’s certainly better than I forget what we rated the normal Boss Hog. I think that’s the one. Or not, Boss Hog. Whistle Pig. I think that’s the one we didn’t publish because there were, like, audio issues.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:03] Oh, got you. Yeah. And I think I was somewhere around the five on it. It’s a six-year rye. It’s pretty decent and drinkable, but on the higher price of things, not high, but I think it’s, like, $50, like that.

Robbie Wagner: [06:15] I think I could go down to a six on this. I could be persuaded. Six or seven. I’ll say seven. That’s pretty good.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:23] Yeah. It’s hard to say just for its own price point and uniqueness that you’re rating it against. So far, all whiskeys that we’ve currently reviewed, and a lot of things are middle of the road or true, say, the $60 to $80 price range. This is significantly more. So in that sense, I don’t know that I would buy it for myself. I would try this somewhere and be like, oh, different, and I could have it every once in a while. Would I buy this for myself? I’m not sure I would recommend that.

Robbie Wagner: [06:51] Yeah. I mean, I think it’s fun, and it’s something you could bring out and have people try, and it’s a good experience, but yeah, it’s not something you want to sip on all night. It’s very flavorful for that.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:02] Yeah, It’s like equate it to a very deep chocolate. You can have a little bit of and that’s okay. I like that. I don’t need anymore. It’s hanging around for a while.

Robbie Wagner: [07:12] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:14] I want to give credit where credit is due. It’s not my favorite. I wouldn’t seek it out necessarily, but it is unique and enjoyable for its small amount. So I think I’m going to go with the seven as well. Seven tentacles.

Robbie Wagner: [07:30] Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So this might be, have we given anything else a seven?

Chuck Carpenter: [07:37] I don’t think so. I try to be a little harsher critic on things.

Robbie Wagner: [07:40] And I think, really, this is only a seven because of the extreme uniqueness. Like, we’re not saying it’s the world’s best whiskey, but it’s definitely different.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:49] Yeah. I don’t think a lot of people who like whiskey are going to try this and be like, this is bad, right? They’re going to say. This is an interesting flavor. It hangs around for a while. It’s unique, feels special. I guess it does. It feels special. And in that sense, it’s delivering. So it gets a seven for delivering.

Robbie Wagner:[08:07] Yeah. Agreed. So, yeah, for our web portion today, we have just a couple of grab bag topics, kind of things Chuck and I have been working on. First off, everyone’s always probably familiar with having a form, and people abuse it, or you get bots that send a bunch of garbage into your forms, and you hate that. And we kind of dealt with that on our website for a while because we were like, it doesn’t really matter if we get the occasional spam, fine, we’ll just delete it. But I guess it was a few months ago now, a few days in a row, we got like hundreds of submissions, and then they all go to a Slack channel we have, and there’s no way to say, just delete all of these. So you have to go delete manually on hundreds of things. And that was enough to make us look at how can we stop this.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:06] I mean, I want to say it’s on the backs of on our backs for the popularity of this particular podcast. I mean, a few months ago, we probably got some serious traction. People who want to get our opinions on whiskey and their Internet technologies and then other random things, they want to be surprised. Like, that’s really started to gel with people and seeking us out.

Robbie Wagner: [09:33] Yeah. I mean, we should just make that our business model. We consult on these areas.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:38] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [09:39] Whiskey and whatever technical problem you have and basically anything with the whatnot some other stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:45] What are you interested in?

Robbie Wagner: [09:48] Yeah, no, I haven’t gotten a lot of inquiries about both building a website and suggesting a whiskey, but maybe someone will eventually.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:56] They’ll have done their research. They get a discount.

Robbie Wagner: [10:02] Yeah, but yeah, so we use Netlify. We’re not sponsored by them like many other podcasts. But Netlify, if you happen to listen, we wouldn’t mind being sponsored by Netlify.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:13] We like you.

Robbie Wagner: [10:15] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:15] We think you make good stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [10:16] Yeah, it’s a good service. It’s probably the best service other than Vercel is pretty comparable, but they kind of solve the same problems and have previews and collaboration, nice things. But anyway, they have things built in where you can say, here’s a bot field, and bots will probably fill this in, and then we won’t accept the form and all this kind of stuff, but I guess bots are getting smart enough to read that the ID is like, bots, fill this in, or something stupid. So now we just keep getting spam. And so we had to finally actually hook up reCAPTCHA and make things robust and actually not get that spam. So there are a couple of things you can do, and there are some out of the box packages. I think there’s like a Knoxd reCAPTCHA that we ended up using. Maybe I forget if I used that or hand-rolled it. But. There are several tiers. Like you have a kind of a personal reCAPTCHA, I guess, and then like a super enterprisey one. And the enterprisey one, I guess, is not limited. So you can have as many submissions as you want, whatever. But it also doesn’t work with a lot of the packages because the format is different. So I ended up using the non, like the less fancy personal one. But so far, I think it’s been working. We haven’t gotten we had, like, one spam submission, but maybe it would have been more, and it stopped, like, oh, this is suspicious. So it stopped letting them through. I’ve been pleased so far.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:54] Yeah. Sometimes the things you already know are good enough. Right? Like, you don’t always have to look to different solutions for the same problem.

Robbie Wagner: [12:03] Yeah, I mean, I always thought kind of I don’t like the look of having a little checkboxy thing or whatever, but we actually did the one where it doesn’t show anything, which I don’t know how that works. I guess if you’re behaving suspiciously, clicking on the site or something, or I don’t know, because there’s somewhere you click a checkbox, there’s somewhere you get a thing like which of these is a traffic light? But it doesn’t do any of that and still somehow knows what’s suspicious. I don’t know.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:33] Well, I mean, we utilize analytics, and so it probably has an idea of where the traffic has come from.

Robbie Wagner: [12:39] That’s true. Yeah, I think you do submit. It’s like a public-private key kind of thing, I think. Right. So, like, your form submit a certain key, and then the back end interprets that, and it somehow, from that request, knows if that request was suspicious. But someone smarter than me at Google made this. So they know what they’re doing, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:02] They work at Google. They probably do okay.

Robbie Wagner: [13:04] Yeah, that’s true. They don’t usually hire people that don’t know what they’re doing.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:09] Yeah, they’re known to have a semi-rigorous process, I think.

Robbie Wagner: [13:12] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:14] Speaking of not knowing what you’re doing. I mean, that’s essentially what I do from time to time, too, and bouncing around to various technologies. Although I’ll be coming back to one, I believe, that I have mentioned in the past, but mostly around doing Apollo caching with Redis keys or, which is pretty direct and had work to put together a proof of concept with a client and everybody’s happy. Nothing really went anywhere in terms of moving it through an environment and getting it to production. So it’s like six months later. Maybe it’s a little less than that, but here we go. Kind of doing it again. Except for we have upgraded the GraphQL server to Apollo 3 from Apollo 2, and many things have changed in terms of how you set it up. So kind of get a relearn and go down that path. Apollo does have its own in-memory cache too, which is kind of neat. If you do utilize Apollo Studio, you can see what’s cache it, what’s not. It is kind of smart enough within its own browser cache to know which are the same exact connections as long as you play the games right by including type name in your queries. Because if you don’t include type name, I believe there are some issues around. Oh, the shape of the return value is not exactly the same. I don’t know that it is this type name, this ID, blah, blah blah coming in. So my comeback is going to be a new hit through the resolvers. So started going down that path a little bit again, and cache is just hard every.

Robbie Wagner: [14:54] It’s what they say.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:55] Rules everything around me.

Robbie Wagner: [14:56] Yeah, it’s one of the two hard problems in computer science, naming and caching.

Chuck Carpenter: [15:01] Yes, so yes, in-memory cache and then being able to enhance that because I believe the in-memory cache when you are utilizing Kubernetes, and you could have multiple pods of your GraphQL server, each individual pod has its own in-memory cache. So if you have one application hitting that cache and it happens to hit pod one versus pod Three, they may not have the same cache. So you solve that problem by having a unified service like Redis that keeps key values, and so it tries its own cache and if that isn’t there, then it goes to your key-value store to see if you have the cache, pulls the response and then doesn’t hit your resolver or whatever that service could be. Especially when you’re working in an organization that has a lot of legacy applications. Some of those services can be a little bit slow. They’ve been around a long time, they’ve had minor upgrades along the way, and performance may not have been a consideration ten years ago when the amount of data they needed to query was much smaller than now.

Robbie Wagner: [16:12] Yeah, I mean, I’ve obviously seen lots of applications use Redis, but I never really thought about that as, like, we’re going to kind of have some disparate apps with some older stuff, and we want to have them have a nice fast one kind of store, just kind of pushing them all into there. That’s a great use of that.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:31] Yeah. And when you have common searches or something, the results of those searches are pretty much consistent. If your product categories don’t really change that often, maybe you have ingredients for something, or you’re selling light bulbs or whatnot. You can have one thing which is all the product information, and that one probably doesn’t change very much. And then maybe the pricing changes and that’s something that you get without caching. And the cool thing about some of the newer ways that you set cache times you can actually do it on entire models, or you can do it on individual fields. So you could have, like, all of this stuff is cache valued, and this is cache zero because it’s the price, and so I’m going to need to get that regardless. Or you can do it in a separate call. It kind of depends on how the application is designed, but you’ll have particular bits of information that you know are very consistent, so you keep those around and then other things that might be like, yeah, I need this.

Robbie Wagner: [17:32] So, do you configure that at the Apollo GraphQL level or as part of Redis,.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:38] You do it at the Apollo level. So Apollo makes all those decisions as to who it’s going to talk to and when. Redis will clear its own store based on the timing of when those keys are set. But Apollo will make some decisions, too, as to, like, do I need to go get this from the cash store? Or brand new, they could hit the cash store first and then move on. It’s a few different ways to kind of set it up. So you can do it within the schema, or you can do it within the resolvers. So you can do it like statically in the schema, so now everybody sees what that is there. Or you can do it dynamically on the fly with resolvers.

Robbie Wagner: [18:17] Kind of the same as the flexibility of just a normal request with GraphQL. Like, you can configure everything you want pretty much all the time across the board.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:25] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [18:26] Nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:26] So they say that’s the good and bad, though, because some of that are the reasons why caching is really hard within that paradigm.

Robbie Wagner: [18:33] Right, because you could choose different. Like one person doesn’t want this field. So how do you cache that request? Because it’s different request. Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I don’t know. This is why I don’t do back end.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:48] You’re like, can you just give me fast, fresh data? Great. See ya.

Robbie Wagner: [18:52] I’m going to be using Tailwind over here and making pretty interfaces. And just give me the data, please.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:59] And make it quick.

Robbie Wagner: [19:04] Yeah. So Chuck has been here in town for a couple of days. Started in DC somewhere, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [19:15] Well, technically, no. Flew into DC. DCA. I guess that’s in Arlington, though, isn’t it? Went to Balston. So an area in Arlington to see some friends, not quite DC.

Robbie Wagner: [19:26] Not quite DC, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:27] I guess that’s faking it till you make it. And now we’re in beautiful downtown historic Middleburg, and the next stop will be in DC proper. Shout out to my friends at Industrious, who will be hosting for a few days Ship Shape team.

Robbie Wagner: [19:49] Yeah. Who can also sponsor us if they want.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:51] Feel free. Yes.

Robbie Wagner: [19:52] Although we are opening our own co-working space, so maybe there’d be a conflict of interest.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:57] There could be, yeah. 1787.

Robbie Wagner: [20:01] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:02] You’ll hear about it?

Robbie Wagner: [20:03] Yeah. Not for a while, though, because contractors are ridiculous and hard to find. The whole supply chain, everything right now, is nuts.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:12] Yeah. Getting things done, in general, seem to be pretty challenging. I’ve been trying to get Raspberry Pi Compute Modules for, like, six months now still. That’s not working.

Robbie Wagner: [20:23] What are those for?

Chuck Carpenter: [20:24] Well, I got a Turing Pi. I ordered that quite some time ago, and then, later on, realized, oh, it doesn’t come with the Compute Modules. That’s fine. I’ll get some as soon as it gets here. So I didn’t buy in advance, and that came, and then now I don’t have the actual computers to put in it. So it’s like a big board that will handle multiple Compute Modules. Kind of let you set up. Well, for me, I just want to do Kubernetes experimentation and also deploy things like home Assistant in the cloud and some other stuff. Like, well, in my home cloud, like a home lab kind of a thing.

Robbie Wagner: [21:02] Okay. That’s fun.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:03] Could be, unless, but now it’s fun in a box doing nothing.

Robbie Wagner: [21:07] Yeah. I just don’t have, like, I used to do fun things like that and be like, oh, I have a computer. Let me put, like, Arch Linux on it. But, yeah, now I’m just like, no, I don’t have time for this. I’m going to buy a device that’s configured and works. Don’t do any of that.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:25] Yeah, I usually rubber band back to that. Like, I don’t have time. Just fine, I’m going to buy the thing that’s already there, and does it?

Robbie Wagner: [21:31] Yeah. I mean, I have too much other work going on. I was telling you earlier, I started painting for, like, two days, and then I was like, Why am I doing this? I don’t want to paint. Like, I’m going to hire someone to paint.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:42] No one wants to paint.

Robbie Wagner: [21:43] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:44] When we first moved into our house, we painted a couple of rooms ourselves, and it was exhausting, and that was the end of that. At that point. There were painters available, though. This was, like, three years ago.

Robbie Wagner: [21:56] Well, supposedly, the company that is going to come give us a quote has, like, seven teams of painters. So they’re pretty stacked on the painters.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:05] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [22:05] The problem is they only have one estimator. So if you want to get on the schedule, it takes a long time to get someone to come out and tell you how much it’s going to cost, and you agree to the paperwork and whatever. And then once you’ve done that, you’re on the schedule quick, and gets done. So I’m hopeful that’ll be quick and soon because that’s kind of the one well, I mean, we want to do some renovations, but if those don’t happen, painting is kind of the one prerequisite to putting furniture in, and doing all that stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:34] Yeah. Painting teams are very efficient, too. It’s really amazing because I think that, like, 70% of the effort goes around prep coming in and just doing all the prep. And it’s incredible how much time goes into that. Once they’re preps, they’re like. They can get it really done. And you’re like, oh, yeah, I didn’t want to do any of that prep. I’m glad that I paid. It’s one of those things you’re glad you paid for.

Robbie Wagner: [22:58] We’re also probably going to have lead paint in here because this building was built in 1800 for those that may have been. I don’t know if we mentioned that in other podcasts. I think we probably did.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:07] 1800 on the dot?

Robbie Wagner: [23:09] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:09] Oh, wow.

Robbie Wagner: [23:10] On the dot.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:10] There you go. Turn century building.

Robbie Wagner: [23:13] Yeah. So through those years, there was probably lead in the paint at some point. And yeah, I think that’s a professional should test that and deal with that, and I should not be sanding that.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:26] Or career pivot. It’s up to you. There’s clearly demand in the marketplace.

Robbie Wagner: [23:31] That’s true, but I think, well, I need to learn their secrets. Maybe I’ll watch them paint. Because it took me a whole day to paint one window, and you wouldn’t think it would, and I continued to think it wouldn’t. As I’m painting it, I’m like, it looks done, right? I’m going to touch up a couple of spots. But then you keep finding spots you miss, and you keep doing it and doing it and doing it, and then 4 hours go by, and you’re like, well, most of my day is gone.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:57] I think it’s a patience issue.

Robbie Wagner: [23:59] It is that. And then I did that one window and did it really slowly and carefully. Didn’t get it on the plastic bits and stuff. And then I go to take the tape off and rip the paint off the wall, and I was like, I’m done. Painters are coming in to do it.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:17] Yeah. It’s not valuable enough at that point.

Robbie Wagner: [24:21] No.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:21] Here, I’m going to have a second Boss Hog. See, what you guys can’t tell by not getting video is that Robbie, in order to get the sound of pouring, had to pour a lot.

Robbie Wagner: [24:31] Yeah, because I poured some first, and then.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:34] Forgot about it. Let’s see if I can do it. Oh, yeah. It’s very satisfying, though. This is not Sheep Dog. I won’t be having any peanut butter whiskey.

Robbie Wagner: [24:45] Yeah. For anyone that needs a sample of a whiskey pouring sound, feel free to rip this. This is open-source licensed, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:53] Yeah, we’re contributors to the open-source community. Free to do so. So yes. Now that I’m here in town, and I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned in previous podcasts but did used to live here? Worked for National Geographic startups. Well, there’s one startup, I guess, here, but I did some side work for a few startups here and there and eventually worked for Acquia not in town, but they get a small mention, I guess. Yeah. So back in town to work with Robbie some do some planning. Eat oysters, because that’s a thing I enjoy doing when I lived here and when I visit here. Most trips are about food. Let’s be honest.

Robbie Wagner: [25:35] Most everything is about food.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:37] You should come out and visit, and we can plan in person, and we’ll be more effective. But also we’ll eat some things.

Robbie Wagner: [25:44] Yeah. I mean, it’s one of the few universal pleasures in life is eating. Some people don’t drink or whatever, but everyone eats and usually enjoys food.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:59] Even if they have their preferences in that realm, they tend to like food. Yeah, it’d be difficult not to like food. What was that stuff at Soylent? I think that is the result of possibly not liking food. Sorry, is that still around?

Robbie Wagner: [26:15] Yeah. I love the idea of, like, you have all of your macronutrients and you don’t have to think about eating. You just drink this thing. But I don’t know about everyone in America. I feel like is really busy. That’s the one time you can take a minute and just enjoy eating. You’re not going to just be like, okay, down this gross thing. It’s not gross, but it’s kind of. I think most people, like, can tolerate it. Like it’s, it’s not like terrible tasting. It’s just kind of bland and like.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:50] Yeah, I think I had, like, other flavors. I recall reading that the initial flavor of it was not good.

Robbie Wagner: [26:58] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:59] I may have had like a chocolate or a coffee flavor or something like that. And it was like, this is tolerable, but this is not pleasurable.

Robbie Wagner: [27:07] Right. Yeah, I think when they started to package it in single-serve bottles and do flavors, it’s gotten better. But yeah, I think it was a Kickstarter, right? First, and it was like this big bag of just white powder, and it’s.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:20] Just like, wasn’t it like a Google engineer or something who came up with it in order to be more efficient with this time?

Robbie Wagner: [27:26] Yeah. Then you don’t have to stop to eat.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:29] Yeah, you don’t stop to eat.

Robbie Wagner: [27:30] Spoiler alert. Stopping working sometimes is helpful. You, at some point, just burn out and can’t do anything anymore.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:38] Yeah. Disconnecting gives you freedom of thought a little bit.

Robbie Wagner: [27:42] Yeah. I’ve seen this on. I think it was Netflix I saw most recently. They sent one of their engineers, like a diffuser, so they could relax. And the little card was like, everything works better, including your brain when you unplug it for a minute and plug it back in or whatever, something like that.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:02] Clever.

Robbie Wagner: [28:02] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:04] Netflix is getting a lot of kudos in terms of employee satisfaction.

Robbie Wagner: [28:10] Having contracted there and been in their offices. It’s nice. They’ve got heated toilet seats in all the bathrooms and bidets.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:21] It’s nice in my house.

Robbie Wagner: [28:23] Yeah, they have all that. They have fresh fruit out every morning, like six different brands of coffee, depending on which one you prefer. And it’s pretty nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:36] Yeah. I wonder how they’re transitioning that to the semi-remote workforce.

Robbie Wagner: [28:41] Well, them and Apple and some of the bigger ones that can kind of dictate what happens. Don’t want people to be remote. Right. Like, they’ve given a little bit into it because of the pandemic, and what can you do? Right. But whenever it’s possible, they’re going to force people to come back. So they’re not trying to make you comfy at home, I don’t think. I think they probably are a little during the pandemic. But they want you back. They don’t want you at home.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:08] Yeah. The appeal is to be there.

Robbie Wagner: [29:10] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:13] On the heels of that, I was reading some articles this morning that there is some unrest, though most people very happy to be there and work there, but there is a little unrest around having released Dave Chappelle’s latest stand up. Yeah, I think it’s called The Closer.

Robbie Wagner: [29:33] Haven’t see it.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:34] Yeah. Maybe I shouldn’t really give away too much, but he leans into some of his opinions and ideologies around what he perceives as a struggle between the trans community and the black community.

Robbie Wagner: [29:51] He’s known for being a controversial guy.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:53] Exactly. And I think that comedy is definitely a forum where you may be able to more. It’s not necessarily light-heartedly, but more without consequence. Kind of start to have that discussion. Sometimes counter, discussion.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:11] Yeah. People are more open to it. In a non confrontational forum. It’s not just like. I have these ideas. I’m going to push them on you. It’s like, can tie them into a little bit of humor. And it’s like it’s more approachable. But apparently some people at Netflix were very unhappy and some people have left or they stormed into meetings or something that they were uninvited to. And so there’s some disciplinary consequences around that.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:40] I don’t know. What is this, a First Amendment thing? Kind of he can say what he wants, and I guess they can decide as a private business whether they release it or not. They have particular guidelines, and they say he didn’t break their guidelines.

Robbie Wagner: [30:53] Yeah. And I mean, I’m not going to get too political or into it, but. I think we can all agree that everyone is offended about something these days, and you can’t win. It doesn’t matter what you say. Someone will take it the wrong way. So I don’t know anything about what the content was or if it was bad or not, but it’s tough to be the good guy anymore. You’ve got to worry about so many different groups, and obviously, you should. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. Just it’s hard.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:26] Yeah. I think you just got to be open to being wrong or just being from a different perspective or context.

Robbie Wagner: [31:31] Right.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:31] It’s hard to say I have everybody’s best interests in mind because I don’t know what is your best interest. I don’t pretend to know what is your best interest, but I’m open to hearing what you think is your best interest. And my experience and perspective has been ABC.

Robbie Wagner: [31:46] Right.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:46] There’s that as well.

Robbie Wagner: [31:47] Yeah, definitely. Haven’t they gotten in trouble for some things before, I feel like?

Chuck Carpenter: [31:54] I think they’ve been controversial before. Yeah, I don’t know about there’s been any sort of trouble. I don’t know what would mean anyway. Like, they’re kind of self-regulating in that way.

Robbie Wagner: [32:04] Right. Yeah, I don’t think there was, like, internal trouble like you’re describing, but, like, people thought some of their shows, I think, were pushing it too far. I forget what it was, honestly, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:14] It sounds right.

Robbie Wagner: [32:14] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:15] The Boss Hog is creeping up on you, isn’t it?

Robbie Wagner: [32:18] No. Well, I don’t know if we’ve talked about this on the podcast, but I just don’t like. A lot of people like to peruse Reddit or watch YouTube, or do things online. I do none of that. I code. I will occasionally watch something on Netflix, but I don’t keep up with the latest. Like, I haven’t watched Squid Game, which a lot of people have.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:39] I haven’t either.

Robbie Wagner: [32:41] If it’s a new hot thing, you can guarantee that I have not heard about it unless someone that I see in person tells me, hey, this thing is cool. You should check it out because I don’t peruse the internet to look for anything. And it’s odd because people are like, what, you’re a web developer, and you don’t look stuff up online? No, sorry, I just don’t.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:05] Yeah, I was like an early adopter, like 15 years ago, and I was like, oh, here of a new thing. Sign up for it. Always getting my early username and Twitter and all those things across the board, which I’m not on anymore. So I’m kind of similar to you, is that I depend on kind of the popularity of the crowd just to tell me about things. So, yeah, I usually hear, like, our brothers will peruse the Internet, all kinds of things. I’ll hear things from them, Reddit, other sort of things. I used to spend time in the morning looking at Apple News, and I found that current events are very anxiety driving, so I kind of do less of that, and I focus on the things that I enjoy. So a lot of that is around soccer news and some technology blogs which are helpful. And then I’ll look at, like, Hacker News and then, oh, it’s like, oh, our peer group seeing an importance in something, and maybe that bubbles up, and sometimes that’s like politics and current events and those kinds of things. But yeah, same thing. I’m definitely not first to it. I’ve never had a TikTok.

Robbie Wagner: [34:16] Yeah, you don’t need one.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:17] It’s kind of like NFTs where I think it’s sort of interesting technologically, but I don’t really understand it. And every time I take a financial risk, it doesn’t work out for me. I need to be the Warren Buffett. Just index fund the rest of my life and be done.

Robbie Wagner: [34:33] Yeah. On that note, way back in the day, let me think, it was probably 2013. I think I don’t know when Dogecoin started. I think it was probably maybe a year or two before that, something like, you know, a bunch of bitcoin was around for a little while, and like, altcoins started happening, but there wasn’t the huge explosion of altcoins until Ethereum happened and they made it really easy to make a coin.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:01] Right, right.

Robbie Wagner: [35:02] So Dogecoin was in that kind of transition period where it’s like, there weren’t a ton, but here’s this new one, and my friend and I thought, like, hey, this thing where it’s worth like two cents, that’s cool, let’s buy some. And we were kind of, like, exploring some investing and trying to move it to whichever coin we thought was going to make it. And obviously, even today, truthfully, Dogecoin, it’s a meme coin. It’s fake. It’s not, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:32] The founder did it as a joke.

Robbie Wagner: [35:34] Yeah. So we were like, we don’t believe in this, we’ll sell it. I think we maybe made a little bit of money on it or even maybe lost, like. We basically just broke even and got out of it and moved to a different coin or whatever. For anyone that’s paying attention, the $1,000 we had in it at that point, if we had kept it in it, we would be, like, multimillionaires today. Yeah. Don’t come to me for investment advice because I get out of everything way too early.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:03] Well, maybe the interest they should come to you for and then just don’t listen to when to exit from me.

Robbie Wagner: [36:09] Yes. No. Yes. I make great investment choices, but I get out at the wrong time. I also bought a lot of Bitcoin mining hardware. Like, what is it? Is it ASIC miners? Is that what they call them, where they’re, like, specific to mining that thing, and yeah, so I got those, and I could make, I think, like one bitcoin a week or something. It was like, whatever it was, was kind of slow. And Bitcoin was worth maybe like couple hundred then or something. And I was like, these miners are like $5,000 each. I’m never going to make my money back with my power costs and whatever. I should just sell these. If I had just mined until now, again, I would have multimillion. I think the same is kind of true for NFTs right now. No one knows which ones are valuable or which ones to buy. But if you get in it now and buy the right one, you are going to make a lot of money.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:04] Right. But I think the ideology is around utilizing the blockchain to protect fakes and copyright and licensing and things like that.

Robbie Wagner: [37:14] Right.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:15] But then when you have a Pepe meme generator that gives you 47 different variations every drop, and then every drop after that is it’s almost like a pyramid. Pyramid scheme? Oh, I think there’s a cat one that actually you can breed together and make, like, generations down. And that one does sound literally like a pyramid scheme because the Gen one, people are always at the top of the pyramid and do the best, and they got in early.

Robbie Wagner: [37:43] Are you talking about that game one?

Chuck Carpenter: [37:46] It’s some cat thing.

Robbie Wagner: [37:48] I forget what it’s called. But there’s a game one where it’s kind of like not like Pokemon exactly, kind of like a Tamagotchi, almost like it’s a pet, and it’s like kind of randomly generated. They’re all different. And I think it’s like Axie Infinity or something. Have you heard of that?

Chuck Carpenter: [38:04] No.

Robbie Wagner: [38:05] And to get in, you must buy a pet. So to start, you have to give them some f, right? Like that’s how you start. You’ve already given them money. But the hook is like the more you play, they give you whatever their coin is like in-game coins, but they’re Ethereum based and those coins themselves are becoming worth more. And then the real thing is if you breed your pets, right, and you get like a really rare one, those are worth like $50,000 for a pet or whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:36] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [38:37] So it’s kind of fun because you’re just playing a game and you might accidentally make a lot of money. So that’s kind of cool. But yeah, it is pyramid scheme. It’s like the people that started since you have to buy from them to get in, and then the new people have to buy from you because you made the new pets on and on and on.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:57] And so, is it art? It’s probably not art. It’s a game in this aspect where you’re just trying to generate pixels.

Robbie Wagner: [39:04] But I think. Sorry not to interrupt you. That’s all right. I think the land in there. I just remembered this. So my brain was like, the land is like NFTs, so you can be like, I want this plot of land. And then you’re the owner. Like, you have your deeded to that land because it’s like an NFT or whatever. And then you have to have land to, I think, make houses for your pets or whatever. I don’t know.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:27] Second Life. NFT Second Life or something.

Robbie Wagner: [39:30] It’s not as not as involved as that, but yeah, it’s crazy. And I think eventually those things will really take off.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:39] But which one? And what do you get? And you get lucky. And like you said, if you create one, you’re at the top of the mountain, and you’re getting people feeding into you, and if it does, well, great. You’re always getting paid whether they get a rare one or not.

Robbie Wagner: [39:54] Right. Yeah. I think the one game I was talking about was saying, like, in developing countries, it’s really popular because, say, somewhere where the exchange rate is terrible. Right. Like you barely have a cell phone or whatever, but you can play this game. So if you’re making .01F, which is, I don’t know, hundred bucks or whatever, and you played the game all day and you made that, that’s like, better than you could have made working. So people in those countries are really jumping on and playing the whole system and buying into it.

Robbie Wagner: [40:28] Right. Yeah. Because it’s just a viable way to get by, which is crazy. That is very interesting because you can think about the socioeconomic impact of that across the globe. It gets pretty crazy. Why would I go work to make I don’t want to stereotype, but why would I go make sweatshirts if I can just play this game and make way more?

Robbie Wagner: [40:53] Right. Yeah. I mean, maybe that’ll be people want a universal base income. Maybe you have to play this game all day for universal base income, and you prop up the blockchain, which powers all of the finance, and like, who knows?

Chuck Carpenter: [41:07] Yeah. Could go crazy places. Yeah. Sweatshirts are going to get really expensive.

Robbie Wagner: [41:12] Everything’s going to get really expensive.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:14] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [41:15] Yeah. We’re out of everything. You can’t get Halloween costumes. You can’t get furniture. You can’t get, I don’t know if the wood thing for building.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:24] Lumber industry is that kind of recovered? I’m not sure. I mean, I think some, but it is made a house, like houses that much more expensive.

Robbie Wagner: [41:31] Right. Yeah. Not a good time to buy anything right now.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:35] No. What are we doing? Why are we buying things?

Robbie Wagner: [41:41] Yeah. I don’t know. We kind of devolved into random stuff there, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:47] Seems very whatnoty.

Robbie Wagner: [41:49] Yeah. It’s been 40 ish minutes. I guess we could wrap it up here.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:55] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [41:55] We got to make it to a Middleburg town meeting, meet our fellow business members there, and go to dinner.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:02] I guess it just depends on how open they are to their Octopi residents now.

Robbie Wagner: [42:10] Yeah. Did I tell you what the guy at the meeting the other night when we were doing our sign was saying? Where he was like, what is this? What is this logo? Yeah. It’s like an octopus face kind of thing. Like kind of like Davy Jones. Okay. Whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:25] We can get by with that. We’re okay with it. It doesn’t have any other meanings, right? Okay, perfect.

Robbie Wagner: [42:31] All right. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Hopefully next time we were discussing doing some games and fun stuff, so I’m saying it in public here. We will do some kind of game next time. It’ll be fun. We have several guests planned in the future, so stay tuned. Please subscribe if you liked it, and catch you guys next time.