90: HTML, Shadowbanning, and Open Source Buyouts

Robbie Wagner: [00:09] What's going on, everybody? Welcome to another Whiskey Web and Whatnot with myself, RobbieTheWagner, and my co-host Tre.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:17] Wrote a song about it. Want to hear it? Here it go. My blues name Tre.

Robbie Wagner: [00:22] Also known as Charles William Carpenter III.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:25] Yeah. I only let my friends call me Tre. So, Robbie, let's keep that out your mouth.

Robbie Wagner: [00:30] Okay. All right, let's jump right into some whiskey. Tell us about it.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:37] Yes. Okay, folks, today's contestants are, so we are having Sazerac Rye by Buffalo Trace. Most people consider this or the insider's nickname for it is the baby saz because there is a more aged antiques collection version of it. This is 90 proof. It's tried and true and very popular. We don't get to know the mash bill, but it used to be known as, like, the six-year. I obviously can't confirm that because it's not age stated on the bottle itself, but most people know it as, like, a six-year rye.

Robbie Wagner: [01:12] Yeah, it was really cheap, I think.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:16] So, it's usually around the $30 range. There was a little while where it was hard to find, and then, like, whiskey places started getting ridiculous and trying to push it more to 50, but I believe it's in the 30 to 35 as, like, retail.

Robbie Wagner: [01:30] I think I paid 25, maybe.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:33] Let's see.

Robbie Wagner: [01:34] I'm not sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:34] Yeah, Virginia doesn't allow those extra taxes on there, or who knows? Sometimes it's the plus of the ABC.

Robbie Wagner: [01:42] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:42] Which is as easy as one, two, three.

Robbie Wagner: [01:45] That is true.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:49] Maybe this is reflective of last episode.

Robbie Wagner: [01:51] Not getting a lot from it.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:52] I'm getting a little orange, but, like orange, like a liqueur. Like an orange liqueur. Kind of.

Robbie Wagner: [01:58] My nose just isn't working.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:00] I netted today, so hopefully, I cleared that out and got what I need. A little spicy.

Robbie Wagner: [02:10] I smell new Vuori shirt.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:15] Vuori. Without going too far. Si Vuori. No, I was listening to an episode of SmartLess today, and they were doing a Vuori commercial, and Jason Bateman is doing it in Eastern European slash Italian accent. Yeah. And so I was like, oh, I should take that. Will they sponsor us? I mean, we're OG.

Robbie Wagner: [02:42] Yeah, probably not.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:43] All right, let's get back to this whiskey first because this is a lot of whatnot. So, yeah, I'm still just getting, like, more of an orange liqueur to it. Maybe a slight pepper. I don't know. I'm going to taste it.

Robbie Wagner: [02:53] Grand Marnier, a little bit.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:54] Yeah, it's pretty mild. I'm still feeling a little of that orange liqueur to it. I'm getting a little pepper in the beginning, and then the finish has just kind of a woodiness to it. Not like spice spice, like a normal rye.

Robbie Wagner: [03:08] I'm getting notes of maybe it's like vanilla. I want to say, like, a white chocolate KitKat is, like, what it tastes like.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:16] Okay, that's very sweet.

Robbie Wagner: [03:17] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:18] White chocolate includes no actual chocolate. Fun fact, everyone.

Robbie Wagner: [03:22] Well, it's made from chocolate, but they take all of the, like, strip all the chocolatey bits out.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:28] I was always told it was just a straight sugar confection. And there is no chocolate in there.

Robbie Wagner: [03:33] No, because I've looked this up.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:34] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [03:36] It's like a chocolate alcohol or something. It comes out of the chocolate. But they take the same way that they make, like, white bread, and they take all the bread stuff out.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:44] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [03:44] They do the same with the chocolate.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:46] It's weird. I love Wonder Bread, but not so much white chocolate. Zero Bar is interesting, but I can't have too much of that. I don't change my opinions or distinctions on this. So typically, I actually like this as a pretty decent cocktail whiskey or a cocktail rye. If you're making an actual Sazerac with the spray of Absinthe or the essence of Absinthe and all of that, this is a good one for that. That's usually probably how I have it. I don't think I have it straight very much, so it's fine. It lacks a lot of diversity with each drink. I'm not really getting anything new out of it. In fact, it probably even softens more. The only thing that increases is the slight burn in my throat. But that's as you run alcohol over and over your throat. That can happen. So okay. I actually would think about it independently on its own as like a sipping whiskey. I'd probably give this a four. It's not bad, but it's not that interesting. And let's say it's $5 more than Rittenhouse or something. Maybe I wouldn't get it. I definitely wouldn't buy this over straight Buffalo Trace for a sipping whiskey.

Robbie Wagner: [04:52] Yeah, I'm going to go a step further and give it a three to me. Ones and twos are reserved for, like, I really wouldn't get it ever again kind of numbers. Three, I'm saying, is like, I'd drink it, but it's like I'm never going to seek it out. It doesn't interest me. It's a little bit too low-proof. It's a little bit not spicy because it's low rye. It's just all around not great for me. Maybe if you're not a big rye fan, you might like it.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:23] Yeah. If you're not really into rye and you're coming from the bourbon world, I can see this as an easy transition. But dear listener, just so you know, we shall be trying other bottom-shelf whiskeys, at least one of the rye that I know of. And so we'll have a little compare and contrast in that realm.

Robbie Wagner: [05:41] Yeah. We may even have to find some plastic bottle ones just to be extra bad.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:48] Now, when I crossed over my forties, I made a promise to myself for most reasons that I was just never going to have like life is too short. Somebody said to me recently life is too short to have bad booze.

Robbie Wagner: [06:01] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:03] Yeah. And I think that even if you're, like, you're on a low budget, you're not in plastic bottle budget.

Robbie Wagner: [06:09] No, you literally have to have zero money to your name to be like, let me scrape together $5 and get this little plastic bottle.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:18] Or a home, and that plastic bottle shall reside within a paper bag. Those would have to be the circumstances where I'm not sure I can go back there again. But time will tell, I guess.

Robbie Wagner: [06:33] All right, so today for our tech slash web slash, whatever we want to call it, we're going to talk a little bit about building custom things versus using what the browser gives you natively. So this was top of mind for me recently because I've been doing a lot with date time pickers in the app that I work on for work, and there's one that's, like, I get a little bit confused on how it's structured, honestly, because there's a lot of stuff going on there. But this time picker specifically, there's no dates to it. It's just like a drop-down of times. Right? And one, I'm curious, like, why is this different than just a drop-down in general? Right? Well, how is a time really that different than just any kind of select? So that's weird. And then it also does some stuff where it has an input, but then also like a drop-down. And then inside of that, there's like an unordered list with an ordered list or no list, and inside of those are buttons. So it's like a really weird, like, why are none of these selects or things I would expect? And then it goes a step further, and they try to make it both support, like typing what you want in the input and then selecting that in the list and clicking what you want. And so there's some weird stuff of, like, when you hover, one of them, it says, is hovering this one kind of behind the scenes. And I'm like, Why does it do that? Because there's a click handler on each one of them that, when you click it selects it.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:18] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [08:19] And there's also, like, normal HTML behavior of arrow or tab through it and hit enter, and that will call the click handler. So it's very confusing to me.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:30] Sounds over-engineered, but perhaps yeah. And or there was some crazy user requirement that came into play. But yeah, I think you boil it down at the end of the day. Well, see, now you brought it up. See, when you said, like, date pickers, I was like, yeah, native date pickers. Like, why would you not use the native one?

Robbie Wagner: [08:51] Yeah, I want to go into that as well, but I was just setting the stage of what I've been dealing with specifically.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:56] Yeah. Is there time? There's no native time thing, right?

Robbie Wagner: [09:02] I'm not sure there is. This is an in-between. Right? First, I would argue you should never write your own date picker full stop.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:11] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [09:11] Or time picker, because usually they're kind of both included in some of the vanilla libraries, like flat picker or whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:19] Right, okay, well, yeah, that's a different step. Right? Like reinventing the wheel. Because there's been a lot of people, solve it pretty well. Unless you have a personal challenge that you're trying to get through. Like, A I would advocate to do that in a non-production situation. Right. Because it's not battle tested. Ultimately, I think you're always originally looking at what does a browser provide me for free, and why isn't that good enough? Okay, it's not. For some reason, I know that there are nuances. Like, say there's a time, and they want an input there so that you can filter down or something. I don't know. Let's just say that you can filter down, and it's not there in the browser. Okay, maybe that's one thing, but if it's purely visual, then that's one big challenge. I think we have to create a custom thing to meet this design. I think that's a bad use case. Now we have to create this custom thing because we've determined a shortcoming in either the library or the native functionality, for whatever reason, for our users. Perhaps those are the use cases. But I'd even say, in that case, you probably still are never starting from zero. Right. You should just be leveraging what's on there and progressively enhance. Remember those, like progressive enhancement? What is the base thing? And then add to that. I'd say that, but most of the time when I've experienced this, it's usually based on visual requirements. Yeah, I think some of that and I think sometimes it's a like the person who wrote it doesn't understand the way native HTML works. So they didn't understand for that time picker that if you made it selects with options, it would just kind of be accessible, keyboard accessible. I don't have to write my own handle key down stuff that gets you most of the way there, in my opinion. And then, the glue would be like when you type in the input, and it's supposed to select one of those things. Then you could do the actual, like, I think there's some kind of method that's like, actually, select the thing. I don't often do it, so I forget what it is. But if you have a select and you use JavaScript on it to grab it, I think you can say, like, select this one.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:47] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [11:47] So that's what I would do. When someone types in and it's close to one, I'd be like, select this, or whatever. So it's weird that there's all that going on, and needing to also put buttons inside of a thing that should be like options is weird. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen. Like, I mentioned the worst one before where it was like because people didn't know if you wrapped a label around of input and you clicked the label, it would focus it. They wrote custom JavaScript to do that. And I was like, oh, my God. But yeah, I think the root causes are either a failure to fully understand HTML or a failure of product to design with HTML in mind. And they have specific things that they say you must do, and you're like, well, we could be 90% of the way to what you say it should look like if we use native stuff. Can we change it a little? I would say is what people should do. Like push back on that or back to what I was saying, is just don't write your own. The browser gives you a lot of good stuff, especially for if you need, like, the calendar-style date picker that's built into everything now right? I think Safari is maybe behind a flag or not quite there or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:08] Who uses that anyway? Safari is the new Internet Explorer.

Robbie Wagner: [13:12] It really is.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:13] It really has become that.

Robbie Wagner: [13:14] They come out of the gate with, like they'll implement something crazy that no one else has done yet. To be like, look, we did this first, but then they don't have basic support for basic stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:25] The priorities around that are interesting. So for whatever reason, but I definitely found that to be the case. And it's interesting if you're doing any mobile stuff when you're kind of trapped in mobile Safari world too, or just your site or your application on mobile too, can get a little like I really wish iPhone didn't make this the default all the time.

Robbie Wagner: [13:48] Yeah. Although mobile stuff does have really nice native date pickers and time pickers.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:54] It does? Yeah. Like out of the gate. They did that. Right. Which was nice. Which is why with progressive web app days of things, I think people still do that. I don't know. But you wanted to lean on more native things because in the phone, it was nice.

Robbie Wagner: [14:09] Yeah. Whenever you opt out of that stuff, you get really weird stuff. People go to pick a date, and you have this thing that looks like it should be on a desktop, and people are like, what is this? This doesn't feel right. Which, like, flat picker on mobile just disappears. It just uses the native stuff. But on desktop, it uses, like, okay, I know these look and perform like shit, so just like, let's do the nice ones.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:34] Right? I'm trying to make it consistent across browsers still in 2023, which is like, crazy that there are those bridges at this point. Those wars are over. Can we just.

Robbie Wagner: [14:45] Yeah. Chromium won, and now people are doing cool things on top of Chromium.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:50] Exactly.

Robbie Wagner: [14:50] Arc is really nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:52] Brave browser was cool with some of its privacy things and stuff, being really considerate in those ways. Yeah, I think a lot of these were doing interesting things. So I think, really, at the end of the day, what we're talking about is continually learn about and reference the information of the base tools that you have. I mean, I go to the MDN docs all the time, even sometimes when I know, like yeah, this is what I do, and this is what I know. I'm just going to kind of take a look real quick and see are there some new methods or some different examples, perhaps like some things I haven't seen yet. So let's dive into that. My whole example into this is a circumstance where you're given an accordion layout, and you're given an HTML doc with a bunch of divs and asked to create this accordion, and it's like, well, no, you don't really need that. There's a couple of different ways to look at this, and you've got the whole definition list because you mentioned like unordered list and ordered list and things like that for more semantic things. And then there's the details element which has a summary element within, and then everything after the summary is the information, and you can structure that however, you want. It's pretty nice, actually, and by default, it hides everything below the summary unless you can start it with an open property, and then the first one is open. This is all just HTML. You get all this magic. You get basically an accordion altogether like right out of the box. It's really nice and trying to force that because of some arbitrary design rules, or just maybe you're not familiar with it, and you're going down this other path. Well, HTML is not sedentary. It's still an actively developed standard, and look at some of those basics before you start going down this other path. Oh yeah, four years ago, I had to build an accordion, and I built accordions in jQuery, and then jQuery UI at some point, and then React components and everything else in the middle. But basically, all of those things aside, you can be completely agnostic to that, and every browser will do it this way and give you an accordion if you just write the HTML and content. So why aren't we doing that?

Robbie Wagner: [17:18] I don't know. I do think a lot of that one is probably design stuff, so I've actually not used that myself. Can you do animations? Like can you make it kind of like grow open, or does it just pop open?

Chuck Carpenter: [17:33] Yeah, it just pops natively now. I believe you can do transition animations with it because of that. Basically, when it's transitioning from open true and open false, you can attach to that and then do some animations there.

Robbie Wagner: [17:49] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:50] I haven't done that. I mean, that would be a little sugar on top for some niceness, but I'm pretty sure you can transition it.

Robbie Wagner: [17:56] Yeah, I would guess that someone has come up with a smart way to do that. Yeah, I think there's a lot of cool stuff happening that hopefully is going to get us to where we don't need a lot of this custom crap because the whole view is it view transitions. Is that what they landed on for when you go from one page to another in a not SPA, and you want to animate from a thing?

Chuck Carpenter: [18:22] Yeah, I think so. You want to control that transition from one document to a new document. Right. Or URL or whatever. Yeah, I believe that's what it is.

Robbie Wagner: [18:32] So if that's going to be possible, I would think everything else natively should be animatable. Is that a word? Animatable.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:41] Onomatopeia.

Robbie Wagner: [18:41] Should be able to be animated.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:43] Yes, I think that's probably a word Onomatopeia.

Robbie Wagner: [18:46] So I'm very optimistic for all the new things coming out and people kind of just realizing they can delete. I don't need to include all of Bootstrap just to use this accordion or just to have a nav bar that collapses when I have a smaller screen or whatever. It should be very easy to use minimal CSS and make that work with just normal HTML.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:13] Yeah. First of all, I can't believe you said that dirty word Bootstrap.

Robbie Wagner: [19:17] I don't know why it's similar to WordPress and that everyone in the JavaScript hip cool, let's use the latest JavaScript thing is like, oh, I hate that, that's so old and crappy and whatever. And if you use that, you suck. But 70% of the web runs on it or whatever. I think a lot of people still use all these things, and if it is working for you, why not? That makes a lot of sense.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:41] Yeah, I think when I started hating Bootstrap is when everything started to look like Bootstrap. Right. That's really the problem I had with it. Is it became so popular, and these default themes were basically everywhere because it did speed you up, it did quickly help you create features that people eventually agreed on that visually were appealing, and that was good at first. I was a user and advocate for it for a while, but then when I started just seeing it everywhere, I was like, I'm so tired of this. And Material suffers from the same thing because, eventually, everything looked like a Google product. Every startup was the same bullshit stuff, and the decisions they made were good, kind of at the time, but then eventually, you just got tired of always seeing it, and I do wonder if Tailwind will suffer a similar fate or issue. Right. They've created this pay-for-pre-done library of things where you can quickly do all this stuff, but again, people are going to take that ease and not necessarily add in their own creative license, and then what everything starts to look like, I mean, Tailwind. Could be the same. Who knows?

Robbie Wagner: [20:58] Yeah, I think it won't be as bad. So I used to use Bootstrap a good bit. I think as things started being like that, where like 90% of the sites looked the same, I moved slightly different to Foundation. I don't know if you ever used Foundation.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:16] Yeah, I don't know. I remember it kind of; I don't know if I did.

Robbie Wagner: [21:20] It was very similar, but it was like a little more square. Bootstrap really leaned into all the border-radius and all of that stuff. And Foundation was more like getting into the flat design phase and being kind of square. So it was just a little bit different. And I would use that, and it was like it used SASS before Bootstrap did, I think. And I really liked SCSS versus, like, I guess Bootstrap was plain CSS. I don't remember if they shipped some less stuff before they did SASS as well. But yeah, everybody uses SASS now.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:55] Do they? I don't know. Is that still a thing? I thought enough spec.

Robbie Wagner: [22:00] What SASS?

Chuck Carpenter: [22:00] Yeah, I thought enough spec was you can do nested stuff now. Well, I thought everything moved to, like, PostCSS, and I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [22:10] So a lot of stuff, if you're building apps, has gone to PostCSS. But if you're consuming Bootstrap, the way to override stuff easily is to use like SASS and SASS variables, and then you can use all of their partial SASS files and be like, I just want to include navbar, or I just want to include whatever, and I'm not going to include all of Bootstrap. Okay, so people use it for that. But to circle back to what you were saying about Tailwind, I think the problem is with those older things until they started piecemealing them like that, and then kind of they've also started doing some utilities and things like Tailwind has. But before, it was like navbar looks like a navbar, and it's got 500 lines of styles. And if you want to change it, you got to go in and check all of those lines and figure out what you want to get rid of and tweak a little bit and make sure you get all of them because there might be, like, five media queries that are like all of these things, and then you might miss one. And then, in certain screen sizes, the things you overrode weren't overridden, and it was a mess. So with Tailwind, it doesn't give you a bunch of black box styles. It gives you or Tailwind UI, to be specific. They give you Markup, and it has the classes and whatever. And so one, if you're not using React or Vue, which I'm frequently not, they don't include any of the JavaScript for it. So you have to figure out how you're going to add and remove these classes to animate and stuff. And so you're already building some of that custom. And while I'm doing that, I'm deleting some of the crap they have that I don't need or whatever. So it's like more of a starting point that I can customize easily versus this thing where in Bootstrap, you wouldn't even see most of the code. It was just coming from NPM or Bower, I guess, at the time.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:59] Right? Yes. Bower.

Robbie Wagner: [24:01] Yeah. So I think on the one hand, yes, a lot of people are using Tailwind UI and using it differently than I would, using like, they have the full website template of like, this is a marketing site, and people will copy the whole marketing site and just change the text. Whereas I use like, okay, I need a couple of these elements just because I don't want to build it all myself. And I'll just sprinkle it into whatever. So I think 20% of the sites using Tailwind probably are doing that copy-and-paste everything, which gives you a little of that. Like, sometimes you'll stumble upon a new startup and be like, oh, they're using Tailwind UI. It's clear. But I think a lot of sites are using Tailwind, and you wouldn't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:46] Interesting. Yeah, I've definitely seen some of the former, though. Like, some new releases. And three different sites are exactly the same with different texts, and you're like, okay, guys, come on. I know you paid your $300 or whatever Adam's charging these days, but.

Robbie Wagner: [25:02] It keeps going up and keeps being charging you more, because it's like, I don't know how it's changed, but we had the forever team license, and then something changed to where they were like, yeah, oh, yeah. But these new templates don't count, and it's somehow in a forever license aren't included. And I was like, okay, well, whatever your new thing is, here's another $200 so I can get all the rest of the stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:26] Yeah, I mean, I understand that they're creating more value, and they got you in for the initial things that you said I want to have for that value. And there it is in perpetuity. If you want more value, it's going to cost more because we worked more. They're not necessarily refactoring the original thing, so there's that to consider. There's nothing wrong with the hustle to a degree, for sure.

Robbie Wagner: [25:49] They do have a really nice podcast website that I don't think I've actually seen anyone use. I'm sure someone is using it. Right, of course.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:59] You want to be the first.

Robbie Wagner: [26:01] The ones that I listen to are not. And I am thinking about if I ever have more than a couple of minutes of time again in my life.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:09] No.

Robbie Wagner: [26:09] That I will build us a site that's very similar to that because it's nice and clean and just a little fresher than the kind of out-of-the-box can site we have now.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:20] Right? Yeah, no, and I can dig that. Oh, transmit. There you go. I'm going to look at it right now. So I was just curious. Yeah, this looks cool. It's Next.js, though. Of course. And.

Robbie Wagner: [26:32] That's fine as long as all I have to do is click, like, make me a site, and then I change like a couple of things I can do Next.js when the plumbing is there, and I'm changing HTML and then doing, like, one API call to get our podcast.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:46] No, it's not a problem.

Robbie Wagner: [26:47] I can handle React. It's fine.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:48] Yeah, but you've got to know Next.js specifically. So are you going to do it? So that thing you probably, I mean, you can make that one-page server-side render, and everything else is static generated. You could make it static and then create an old client thing and utilize the data fetch through an API route or something if you want, depending there's a lot of things we could do there. Actually. We could probably create a cron job that gets our podcasts runs every night, gets the latest podcasts, and then static generate it.

Robbie Wagner: [27:20] To avoid the API calls later.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:22] Yeah. And you can do crowns in Vercel, I believe. I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [27:26] Well, it only has to run every Thursday.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:29] Until Guillermo comes on this podcast and drinks that whiskey we sent him with us. I refuse to promote. So we'll see how we can do this on Netlify.

Robbie Wagner: [27:39] Yeah. Oh, I'm never going to use Vercel. You already know. But I don't dislike Next.js. I think that let me take a step back here. Guillermo has built a lot of cool shit, and I've used a lot of that cool shit, but there's a little bit of me now that's, like. Obviously, you're using all of this just to make money, and Vercel is very locked in, and I'm not into that. Netlify, I feel like, is the altruistic one of the two. They're paying all these people to do like Ryan, they're paying to do Solid, and everybody is just like, I think they're doing that with, like, four or five different frameworks or people that are big, and.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:24] They are, yeah, they're obviously seeing how it can be best leveraged on their platform, but not necessarily driving that. Okay, I am going to play devil's advocate a little bit here just because I think that's more fun, regardless. So who's to say that's not exactly what Vercel is doing with, like, Rich Harris, for example, right? He's getting to continue to work on Svelte and improve it independently of its integrations with Vercel. So, I mean, that's altruistic to a degree. They are also supporting open-source contributors by hiring them. All the ones that Netlify doesn't hire. And I want to give him a little grace in the sense that he is not beholden to us in any way. We are simply developers in the community that have used his products, and he has VCs that he's taken a bunch of money from.

Robbie Wagner: [29:17] Yeah, I just think it's more of a public attitude of, like, Vercel thinks they're this hot shit, like, we're basically Apple for frameworks.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:29] I get that.

Robbie Wagner: [29:29] We're the best, and Netlify is like, hey, we're just trying to give everybody nice sites, and we want to work with everything, and, yeah, of course, we want to make money because that's what everyone wants, but it just feels better to use Netlify.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:46] Yeah. And at the end of the day, Next is created to work best on Vercel, which is interesting when you think about it because Vercel essentially sugar and ease over top of AWS, and you've got things.

Robbie Wagner: [29:57] So, is Netlify right?

Chuck Carpenter: [29:59] It is. And then you've got though I was going to reference There's open Next. Have you heard of that package? Which essentially makes it easier to deploy Next.js directly into like serverless AWS Lambdas and stuff like that. And this is by the guys who do the SST library, and they're the SEED.run guys who created SST, which essentially is like it's a wrapper around AWS CDK, and I don't want to simplify it in that same way. We should get somebody on this to talk to us about it.

Robbie Wagner: [30:34] Yeah, for sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:35] Because I was OG with that and because it's like a wrapper there, but there's a bunch of extra sugar and extension to it as well. That makes setting up what you need for deployments like super easy and all in code and all of that kind of stuff. And we use it. Maybe you don't realize that we use it for our serverless API for Swatch. I use SST for that setup and deployments and all that stuff too. So they're saying Next is good and saying that there's some keys that are locked here for normal folks, and we want to give you within the deployment story the ability to unlock those keys and put it right on the place it's going anyway.

Robbie Wagner: [31:11] Yeah, I mean, I think Vercel is not necessarily going to stand in the way of anything like that. They're just saying, like, we have these custom adapters and whatever that make things potentially much faster, much better, whatever. And we're not going to tell you the secret sauce. So if you happen to figure out, it's like jailbreaking an iPhone.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:32] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [31:33] People can reverse engineer it and get it to work. And then in the next version, they patch all those holes where the people use to do stuff and then.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:41] You keep going.

Robbie Wagner: [31:42] You do the dance.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:43] Yeah. And maybe that's it. Here's the thing. Maybe that was how it all started, right? Creating a meta-framework for AWS. And Guillermo found some ways to make it work really well. Make it fast. Make it so cheap. And he's like. There's the key. I can do this and put a site out on here and make it so cheap. Why don't I just add margin to that and go ahead and create the interface to do it automatically for you, right? Like you can deploy a site super. I forget what it was called before. It was something before Vercel. I feel like it began with a Z. I remember having it.

Robbie Wagner: [32:21] Yeah, ZEIT.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:21] ZEIT. That was it. ZEIT invite. Maybe it was like too close and.

Robbie Wagner: [32:26] They had ZEIT dot now or something like that. I would deploy stuff to that because it was just a CLI command. All the stuff that Guillermo did before it was officially Vercel, and they had, like, a pile of investor money was really cool. I used all of it. I liked using Hyper. I feel like, at his core, he still likes to do all these little hackery things and just ship them out, and it's just less often now because, obviously, he has bigger priorities. But that side of him I love. I just feel like I feel a little hurt that he decided not to come on the podcast, to be honest.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:02] To just ghost us. Yeah, just ghost us completely is kind of rude. Especially we didn't spend a lot of money, but we spent some money and sent him whiskey. And it's sort of like, just say no, thank you, or just say, figure it out. At this point, just don't ghost.

Robbie Wagner: [33:19] Or give us a real reason. Don't just say, hey, I've decided not to. Maybe you had someone research it, and you listened to one of the episodes where I said, React is shit, and you went, no. Oh, our whole business is React. These guys are going to attack me, but that's not what we want. I like a lot of your stuff.

Chuck Carpenter:[33:36] Who knows? Yeah. So that's out in the ether now.

Robbie Wagner: [33:40] Yeah, I mean, we've danced around it a few times, so I just wanted to address it officially.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:45] Yeah, I think that's reasonable and still very technology based. I mean, if we were real devs, we'd be arguing on Twitter about it.

Robbie Wagner: [33:52] That's true. Or finding someone who already said something about it and then retweeting that but changing, like, one word. That's the real thing to do.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:01] You certainly haven't had any tweets that are at all like that.

Robbie Wagner: [34:04] There was one like Fred from Astro. He was like.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:08] The baseline.

Robbie Wagner: [34:09] Yeah, no JS is not the.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:14] Standard or not the goal.

Robbie Wagner: [34:16] Not the goal. It's the baseline.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:17] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [34:18] So then Theo is like, zero CSS is not the goal. It's the baseline. And I was like, well, okay, if you've written nothing, zero. HTML is not the goal. It's the baseline.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:31] How many responses you get to that? 10,000? 20,000?

Robbie Wagner: [34:34] I mean, none. I just felt like doing it. It's weird. I think my profile is a little bit not shadow banned but deprioritized, and stuff that I post never gets seen. But if I had posted that as a comment in the thread of hundreds of people would like that. So it's like.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:55] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner:[34:55] Okay, well, I know people are seeing my stuff occasionally. Then I just have to figure out where and how.

Chuck Carpenter :[35:00] But they're not seeing our subscribers maybe aren't even seeing it, so it's hard to say where that's coming from. I don't know. Yeah, I looked through the Twitter code with a lot of other people. First of all, I don't think it's reflective of what is happening today. It's a snapshot. Things are moving fast there. But then, conversely, I still don't really grock exactly what would put me in someone else's thread, even following you look at the following tab, and who knows? I also paid for Twitter Blue because I saw you're doing it. So I paid for that like two weeks ago. I still don't have a checkmark.

Robbie Wagner: [35:34] They come and go.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:36] I should be reaping the benefits.

Robbie Wagner: [35:37] It's weird. So I changed my handle to RobbieTheWagner. And I think it was like weeks after that when they gave me my check mark back. And I just changed the podcast picture, and I think some description stuff or something. And we lost our check mark there too. It's basically if you change anything, they think maybe, like, oh, someone could have hacked this or something and changed it to something weird.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:01] It's got to go into a queue.

Robbie Wagner: [36:03] Yeah. So there's some weird stuff there. But also, people have been doing tests of, like, oh, okay, I'm going to pay for Twitter Blue for a while and post a couple of things. Then I'm going to not, and I'm going to see what my engagement is like. And it doesn't really seem to make any difference. So the whole promise of your things are going to be prioritized because you paid is like.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:24] Well, they need the money first before they can afford to build it in.

Robbie Wagner: [36:28] Well, some of that was like the For You tab, which I think is even gone now.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:32] No, it's there. For me, it's there.

Robbie Wagner: [36:34] Let me look.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:35] Yeah, let's look at it. Now we have computers.

Robbie Wagner: [36:37] Well, I'm looking on my phone because that's where. Yeah, okay. There were three tabs before, though. There was like, For You, following and something else. I don't know, but it was like the whole promise. Oh, no, it was verified. There was for you, verified, and following. And the whole promise was like the one that was going to be featured most was like the verified so that you could only see people with Twitter Blue until you went to another tab.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:02] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [37:03] And that was like, okay, that's worth paying for. And then, yeah, that seems to be gone. Unless I'm, I feel like every time I open the app. It's different. So I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:13] Possible. I'm a little bummed that the Doge went away. I thought that was funny. Not that I own any Doge anymore.

Robbie Wagner: [37:20] But yeah, well, I don't know if you sold it, but I have a lot of Shiba Inu.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:25] Yeah, I have a lot because it's like, worth fucking nothing the last time I looked because you encouraged me to buy it. And then it's like hot garbage. And I might as well just keep all my garbage until it's worth something. At least what I paid.

Robbie Wagner: [37:39] Yeah, well, all of crypto is garbage right now.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:42] All of finance is garbage.

Robbie Wagner: [37:43] It used to have a lot of really big swings up, and now it's just like it's the same as the stock market. Like, 5% up, 5% down, 5% up, 5% down.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:53] Yeah, bitcoin has had a nice surge or whatever, and I thought about, like, what if I just bought one when it was like 15 grand? I was like, what if I just bought one and doubled my money? That's a good thing. I was like. I just know I can't because I don't.

Robbie Wagner: [38:07] Yeah, I mean, that's what I did with Shiba Inu is like, I got to pick one of them. It's probably not going to be the winner, but if I buy 600 million of these and they go up to one cent one day, hey, that's a lot of money. I never believed in Bitcoin. I was like, every time I used to use it, I would buy a few of them at a time when they were, like, $50 or something, and then it would go up to maybe 100 and then back down to 50 or wasn't, like, life-changing money. So I was like, let me just gamble all of these. I would do Bitcoin blackjack all the time and all of that stuff, and then yeah, if I had just not done anything with that and just kept a few, would have been nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:54] I think the concept inherently is good and well-meaning, but the problem is it takes trust and uptake outside of people just trying to make a buck. And there's so much of this make a buck out there. This is the problem is that these people are pumping it because they want to make a buck. They want you to get in, and they want all the money to get in so that they can drop out and continue to pay for their nomadic lifestyle in Dubai or whatever. I don't know. It's just like that's not the intent. You believe in this idea, but it's not because you have sold this non-security for 50 grand, 50 imaginary thousand dollars. That's not what it was for. It was like saying currency inherently is flawed and based on some trust that's been taken advantage of. And we're looking at how technology can fix that. That's like blockchain in general, right? Like putting things in and having stronger security and no longer let's take digitizing paper one more step.

Robbie Wagner: [40:06] Yeah, I mean, I think the technology at some point in our lives is going to have a real use and have a few coins that are probably, like, stable coins are usually pretty stable. However, when they're not, that's a good time to buy a lot of. I never really knew how they worked, but it's like a stable coin basically has usually a few different coins or whatever that back it, and they just mint more of those to make sure that they have enough in the bank to make sure USD coin is always one dollars.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:41] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [40:41] And so when that flips, and the other coins are tanking, it will make the stable coin drop to a couple of cents or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:52] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [40:53] If you buy a ton of it, then you know it's going to come back to a dollar later. Or if you buy a bunch of the things that back it up, usually they're very free. So I think that's the way to make money now is wait for one of those weird events.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:05] Probably.

Robbie Wagner: [41:06] Because I've tried buying a few coins here and there, and none of them move at all. It's crazy.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:13] Yeah, I've had Ethereum a couple of different times and definitely could have done significantly better.

Robbie Wagner: [41:21] Well, the nice thing with Ethereum is it is really the thing backing most coins because people just build on top of Ethereum. So if you buy Ethereum, you know, people are using it everywhere for these things, so it's not going anywhere. But yeah, I don't understand why it's not going up in value.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:39] I don't either. Yeah. Because, again, it's kind of like the stock market in a way. And I know that that has protections to it, but a lot of it is about customer sentiment, right? A lot of it is about trust and sentiment, and that's a very flawed system, too, to begin with. I don't know. Investments, in general, kind of throw me awry because there's a bunch of math involved. But at the end of the day, it's about how do people that you trust or don't trust, but other people trust, they're considered important. How do they feel?

Robbie Wagner: [42:14] Yeah, and it's all rigged. The thing that I always point to is like, you'll wait for earnings, right? And people will speculate, are earnings going to be good or bad and whatever, and the stock goes up or down. And then they'll be like, oh, Microsoft beat earnings by ten times. They made ten times the money they were supposed to. Stock will drop. I'm like, why? They made ten times the money they were supposed to. Are you fucking kidding me? But then the opposite will be true too, if they're like, oh, they lost a bunch of money stock up. It's really all just rigged. And the people that are on the floor of Wall Street know how to manipulate all that stuff to make sure they make money every day, whether it's going up or down. And so it never really does what it's supposed to. It just does what those people make it do.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:59] Right. And there's a good point there, is that the people who are in charge of your money make money no matter what happens to you. For the most part, aside from fiduciaries who have flat fees, they're not really incentivized for your success outside of the marketing of that. And honestly, most common investors aren't playing with enough money to really make a difference for them. They'll have some pocket people they really care about.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:24] Yeah. That's also the key. So I subscribe to Benzinga. I guess they're all options picks, and the types of things they'll do is sell a put of this one stock for, like, $50 and then buy a put for $52 or whatever. It's like a $3 differential. And they'll be like they'll net you, like, a $0.20 credit per share or something because it's like buying insurance, basically. And so if you had a billion dollars, you could turn that around and make a few million every time you do this weird insurance-buying thing. That's pretty safe because it's like, but me having a couple of thousand to invest, it's like, okay, you made, like, $100. Okay, well, if I do that, like, 400 billion times, I'll have some money. But this is kind of silly.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:17] Well, I wish you were a programmer so you could write some automated script that did that for you.

Robbie Wagner: [44:22] I'm too scared to do that.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:25] Yeah, because all of a sudden, like, one bug or mistake or it just doesn't work one time, and you're like, oh, shit, I just lost ten grand.

Robbie Wagner: [44:34] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:34] That matters.

Robbie Wagner: [44:36] Anyway. Okay, let's move into some more whatnot here. We've touched on some other whatnot. I guess this is all was whatnot? Because it was all finance stuff, but sold your Rivian. That's good. Did you sell it to someone on Twitter?

Chuck Carpenter: [44:49] Yeah, I just did it on Twitter. I was like, Tweet me a price, and you win, and I trust you. I'll just send you the car, and then just send me money when you have it or something.

Robbie Wagner: [45:00] So Elon tweeted you and said, I'll take one.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:03] Yes, exactly. I'm pretty sure he has privy to early models of anything he wants. Now, I utilize a site called carsandbids.com by Doug DeMuro, I believe is how you say his name. Right? You may have seen his videos before where he's, like, reviewing cars, and he's like, this is a 2023 Rivian R1S, and then geeks out about cars in general.

Robbie Wagner: [45:28] Did he do that for your car?

Chuck Carpenter: [45:30] So the listing always has, like, Doug's notes at the top, and he does this all caps into whatever. So you get the same thing in your mind.

Robbie Wagner: [45:41] Love it.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:41] Yeah, I sold it on there. Versus something like bring a trailer or whatever because that tends to have a lot more, like collector cars and stuff. And this tends to have just, like, I don't know, all over the place. I've seen, like, a 1981 Golf or Rabbit on there before. Just all kinds of weird things. There was one thing I shared with my brothers recently. It was, like, a smart car that had been super tuned for racing and stuff because they're real light, so you can do a bunch with it. Sold for, like, $3,700. You could have this cool nimble little racy thing. I don't know. It's a cool site.

Robbie Wagner: [46:15] Like a golf cart that you could crash and die.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:18] Yes, exactly. Now you know where I'm going. Yeah. So sold it on. That site actually has, like, a number of local people still want to come check it out and bid and whatever as well. So worked out, got the Rivian, wife doesn't like it. It's kind of a big trucky thing, and I get that. It definitely has that feel to it, and I think it's good. It's going to go to someone who camps more, already has a truck, loves it. So now spouse is going to have the same car. So yeah, good for them.

Robbie Wagner: [46:47] Yeah, whenever we get to move finally, which hopefully is sometime soon.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:52] No, never. You're the only one that has a Middleburg farm dream. That's the problem.

Robbie Wagner: [46:57] Okay, so no, that's not true because we've had like 20 or more showings and just no offers, and maybe we're asking too much and fine, whatever. But I'm always of the opinion of, like, whether we accept the offer or not. Why don't you just send an offer? It can be really low. How do you know what we actually might take unless you ask? So that's just frustrating to me.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:22] I'm going to submit a very low offer after this podcast. See what happens. Well, I'm willing to move for 400,000. I want ten acres, barns, and whatever crap you have. A bunch of yard.

Robbie Wagner: [47:39] Yeah, we would not accept that. It's frustrating. So we've also been like, there's someone that's supposedly offering, and so let me take you back to the beginning of this. This is a long saga. So they first looked at the house in January, and I don't know if they I can't remember if they said they were interested then or not or just kind of sat on it. And so then, I think it was February or March, they reached out, and they were like, hey, we want to do a second walk-through. Like, come look at the house again, whatever. I'm like, all right, that's fine. Must mean you're interested and probably want to make an offer. And they're like, yeah, after we come do the second walk-through, we're probably going to submit an offer if everything looks pretty good and you'll have an offer tomorrow, is basically what they said. So they come do the walkthrough, whatever. No offer comes through. We're like, okay, it's been a couple of days since you said we'd have an offer tomorrow. Like, what's going on? And they're like, oh, actually, we want to do some inspections, like pre-offer inspections. And I was like, Is that a thing? Aren't you supposed to just do an offer and then be like, it's contingent on these inspections or whatever, just so that we can because it seems dumb to me to do a pre-offer? Because if you want to offer way less or you want to have some weird condition in your offer that we don't like, and we just decline it, then you've wasted everyone's time by doing this inspection and holding it up. So I was like, whatever, you can do it. Like, we don't have any other offers right now, so let's do it. And so they did that, and they were like, all right, everything looked great on the inspection. Like, we're good. We're going to send you an offer tomorrow. Tomorrow comes, they go, just kidding, we want to do now a septic and well inspection. So I'm like, all right, do that. So they do that like a week later, and they're like, all right, everything looked great on that. We're going to send you an offer tomorrow. Spoiler alert, they did not send us an offer tomorrow. So they were like, oh, actually, so everything's good now. The realtor has written the offer, but we want to have an attorney review the offer. So their attorney is, like, looking at the offer. He had some court cases for a couple of days, couldn't look at it. They couldn't meet with him, blah, blah, blah. Still no offer. I'm like, what are you guys doing? Just send it over and make it contingent on whatever you're worried about. Stop doing this whole dance.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:02] Yeah. On top of that, are they going to lowball you like, oh, we've really?

Robbie Wagner: [50:08] I would assume.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:09] Yeah. You got to think those people are a pain in the ass. And I know that buying a home is a long, large life commitment and all of that kind of stuff, but anybody who pushes the boundaries, you're like, okay, this isn't going to go well.

Robbie Wagner: [50:25] But extra context. So it is not a long life decision for them. They're paying all cash, and they are keeping their home in McLean. They're very wealthy. So to me, I'm like, what is the point of any of this? Because okay, yes, I understand you don't want to get a house that sucks. Like, if it's going to fall down tomorrow or something, you should know that. But if you're super wealthy and there's, oh, this thing's damaged, it's going to cost $5,000, who cares? Just make us an offer. It's super frustrating.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:00] Robbie, that's not how they got rich, okay?

Robbie Wagner: [51:02] That's true. They've been clipping coupons every night and going and getting the manager specials at everything.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:09] Yeah, sometimes the things that count and matter can differ, but well. Hopefully, you get something at some point.

Robbie Wagner: [51:18] Yeah. Still waiting. We'll see. It's been a few days since the attorney's been supposedly reviewing it.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:24] Yeah, he needs time also. Yeah, you're like, can you just hint?

Robbie Wagner: [51:28] And we're almost at the weekend now, and he's just not going to work over the weekend, so it'll be another week, but we'll see.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:33] No, that's not what I understand the career of lawyers is about. Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [51:37] Yeah. It's about spending as much time as possible to charge you as many dollars as possible.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:43] Yeah. I reviewed this offer, which is usually like a one sheeter, for the most part, give or take. I think like one, two pages.

Robbie Wagner: [51:50] Yeah, a few pages maybe.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:52] But it's taking me 8 hours at 1000 an hour.

Robbie Wagner: [51:56] Yeah, I'm reading one letter per minute. It's going to take a while.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:00] But I'm going to nickel and dime you about your $5,000 repair, but otherwise, I paid this lawyer eight grand to look at this.

Robbie Wagner: [52:08] That is hilarious. Yeah. Paid this lawyer $15,000. All said and done. We're going to need you to give us $2,000 back.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:18] Okay. Yeah. Can I escape? You're trying to escape the country? Not like the country as in the United States, but like urban versus the country, like barns.

Robbie Wagner: [52:31] And just logistically. We have trips, we're trying to plan and stuff, and we're like, are we going to live here or not? Just tell us if you want to move in soon so that we can live our lives. This is infuriating.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:43] Yes. Well, good luck to you. I'm going to give you that. There's one other point here in the whatnot that I think we don't want to slightly touch on, and that is the whole our mentors are our guiding light, the Syntax podcast, the most popular podcast in tech.

Robbie Wagner:[53:00] The sages of JavaScript.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:01] The sages of podcasting about JavaScript.

Robbie Wagner: [53:04] That's true.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:05] And tech things. I just want to touch base on that. They're now employees of Sentry, I guess.

Robbie Wagner: [53:13] Yeah, I don't know how that works if they get salaried to podcast or if there was just a big buyout amount initially, and it's kind of like free.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:21] Why not both?

Robbie Wagner: [53:21] For them afterwards or maybe both?

Chuck Carpenter: [53:24] Yeah, I would think both. I would think there's like a flat. Like, you are perpetually sponsored by us, but also maybe you're paid by us, and you'll do things well, I don't know. We need to ask Scott and Wes again how that all works, the semantics of that and what they want to share, what we can talk about on here. But it is a very interesting thing as a tech podcaster. Theirs is way more serious than ours, but they have a permanent home with Sentry. Good for them, good product. Into that. We'll just see where is it going to go. Is it going to keep being great or the whole other thing, or I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [54:05] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:05] That's an interesting prospect, to my knowledge. I don't know of any other JavaScript podcasts or web development, if you want to generalize it, that have been bought.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:15] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [54:15] So it's a new thing that, I mean, none of the others are anywhere near as popular. I forget the exact numbers, but if you look at like, even we are more popular than the ones that are so-called popular. Like if you look based on reviews and numbers and whatever. Okay, but their reviews are like, let's say, ShopTalk, which I would have thought was like second or pretty high, maybe 50 reviews or whatever. And then Syntax has 700 5-star reviews or whatever, and it's like, right? It's orders of magnitude higher, but I'm not really sure how or why.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:57] And I would say it's probably, like, 2% of listeners actually review. Like, I would feel like very low percentage. Right.

Robbie Wagner: [55:04] I ask our listeners every episode to review, and they never do it. So if you're listening to this right now, you should review. Leave us. Even if it's a bad review, honestly, just get the like, don't make it too bad, but give us an honest review.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:19] Well, let me say this. If you're my friend, if you're actually my friend, I probably asked you to review.

Robbie Wagner: [55:25] And you probably didn't do it.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:27] And you might not have done it. So can you just do it now? That'd be great.

Robbie Wagner: [55:30]Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter:[55:31] Thanks. Bye. And it gives us your names whether you reviewed or not. So I know I'm cutting out of my Christmas card list.

Robbie Wagner: [55:39] Well, they're screen names.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:41] Yeah. I mean, some of them are obvious.

Robbie Wagner: [55:44] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:45] Porsche guy 83 911. Guess what? I know which one you are. Yeah. So that being, like, such a small chunk of, and it just goes to show, yeah, like, from a popularity standpoint. And you talk about ShopTalk specifically, right? Chris had CSS Tricks, and that was acquired. They didn't want the podcast, too.

Robbie Wagner: [56:06] Right?

Chuck Carpenter: [056:06] Maybe that was on the table, and you didn't take it. I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [56:09] Yeah, I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:09] Other interesting questions. So I think in our realm, this is a first where someone has actually had their marketing, media property acquired.

Robbie Wagner: [56:20] So I think the difference here, and not to shit on anyone, is we and ShopTalk, I feel like, are very similar in that we kind of just jump on and chat and, like, Syntax. I feel like Wes spends, like, a day planning out the episode, writing all the notes, like making it nice production.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:42] That can't be right.

Robbie Wagner: [56:43] Like a good podcast.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:44] No, that can't be right.

Robbie Wagner: [56:45] Maybe not a day, but more time than we spend.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:48] More work does not mean more success. That's not the American dream. This is bullshit.

Robbie Wagner: [56:53] No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that they already were very popular. So is Chris like? Chris Coyier? Very popular. But when you're very popular, and you also produce a world-class podcast that's very planned out and meticulous, it's going to be even more popular than just because the people like, Chris gets a lot of people to listen to him just because he's him and we're not popular. So we don't get many people from that. But when you're very popular, and you do, like, a super planned out, well edited, well written up podcast, it's going to do really well. So that's what I think the difference is not that ShopTalk isn't good. ShopTalk is great. I listen to it all the time. I will continue to listen to it. I'm just saying that I think that's the difference.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:41] I think Chris just unsubscribed right now. I can feel it in the ether.

Robbie Wagner: [57:45] He doesn't listen to this. Chris, if you listen to this ever. And happen to hear this one episode. I'm sorry. And I'm not saying bad things about you. I think you're a very interesting person.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:57] Well, he's going to Render. He's one of the speakers.

Robbie Wagner: [57:59] Oh, right. So we'll see him at the black-tie dinner.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:04] I am going to message him and say, are you doing this? I got to know.

Robbie Wagner: [58:09] I mean, all the speakers are invited to the VIP dinner, so I'm not sure if they're going, yeah. I want the response of, do I actually need a tuxedo? Or can it be a very nice black suit? Because they don't look that different at the end of the day. Unless you're going to enforce the like, I need a vest, maybe, or like.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:28] My tux doesn't have a vest.

Robbie Wagner: [58:29] Bow tie?

Chuck Carpenter: [58:30] Yeah. Bow tie, yes. Bow tie, yes. Maybe if you bow tie, that's plenty. I mean, so the description they link to says specifically, like, tux.

Robbie Wagner: [58:39] I know.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:39] Jacket and pants. So the pants are very distinct. And you can have tuxes with different lapels. Right. You don't have to have a shawl collar or whatever else. So black suit can kind of get away there. The pants, though, don't have the silk stripe down.

Robbie Wagner: [58:55] So this is my problem, though. It is.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:57] Are you going to have shiny shoes? Shiny shoes would help you.

Robbie Wagner: [59:00] It's going to be June, yeah. In Atlanta.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:03] In Atlanta.

Robbie Wagner: [59:04] So what I want to wear is, if it's a suit, I want a Ministry of Supply breathable Japanese fabric, nice suit, and if I can make that 90% look like a tux, do I count? Or are you really going to turn me away for being like I see that you don't have the shiny strip down the pants? You've got to get out of here.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:23] I have those things. I just don't fit in them. So I wonder if in, like, four weeks, I can.

Robbie Wagner: [59:29] Maybe.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:30] I'm afraid to try. Excuse me. That's part of it. I took a drink of Diet Coke. I'm not like an alcoholic. Well, I mean, I am, but I'm not like one of those that hiccups.

Robbie Wagner: [59:41] Not in that way.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:42] Yeah, that whole stereotypical, like, I'm drunk. Yeah. Just want to give that some context.

Robbie Wagner: [59:49] On that note, for time here. So thanks, everyone, for listening. If you liked it, please hit that follow button, subscribe, and listen to future episodes. Leave us ratings and reviews, and we will catch you next time.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:07] Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and Whatnot. This podcast is brought to you by Ship Shape and produced by Podcast Royale. If you like this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or two and leave us a rating, maybe a review, as long as it's good.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:22] You can subscribe to future episodes on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more info about Ship Shape and this show, check out our website at shipshape.io.