204: Modern Web Dev Meets 2000s Flip Phone: What Could Go Wrong?

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Syntax. Welcome to a brand new episode of the Front End Happy Hour podcast. Welcome to this week’s JS Party. Live from Ship Shape Studios, this is Whiskey Web and Whatnot. With your hosts, Robbie the Wagner, and me, Charles William Carpenter III. That’s right Charles. We drink whiskey and talk about web development.

[00:00:27] Intro: I mean, it’s all in the name. It’s not that deep. This is Whiskey Web and Whatnot. Do not adjust your set.

[00:00:36] Robbie Wagner: Hey, what’s up everybody? This is RobbieTheWagner, with Charles William Carpenter III. As always,

[00:00:43] Chuck Carpenter: I

[00:00:44] Robbie Wagner: know what to do for these

[00:00:45] Robbie Wagner: anymore.

[00:00:46] Chuck Carpenter: I am an AI robot. I was sent by Charles, so he doesn’t have to do this anymore.

[00:00:53] Robbie Wagner: Well, AI has gotten pretty good, so we’ll see which one is, uh, more tame. The [00:01:00] real Chuck or the fake Chuck?

[00:01:03] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. TBD, right.

[00:01:05] Chuck Carpenter: Alright, well introduce our guest.

[00:01:07] Robbie Wagner: Yes, we have a special guest today who I did not ask how to pronounce his last name, but it’s, uh, Tom, I’m gonna say Barrasso. Is that correct?

[00:01:15] Tom Barrasso: You nailed it.

[00:01:17] Robbie Wagner: Nice. Hey, how’s it going? Do you want to tell the folks at home a little bit about who you are and what you do?

[00:01:22] Tom Barrasso: Yeah. So my name’s Tom Barrasso. I’m currently joining from Switzerland that I’ve been traveling around the world for, , almost a year at this point. And right now I’m currently a working in dev relations for a company called Cloud Mosa. They’ve been around for almost two decades, which I guess makes them pretty old in the software space.

[00:01:42] Tom Barrasso: But most recently they’re here bringing a remote browser, kind of like opera mini, but a lot more modern to flip phones so that you can bring web apps. So that’s why it, you know, it’s, it’s all relevant, not, uh, flip phones and, and the web are, , more linked today in 2025 than you would ever imagine.

[00:01:58] Robbie Wagner: interesting.

[00:01:59] Chuck Carpenter: [00:02:00] Can one buy a flip phone today or is this just

[00:02:03] Robbie Wagner: The local bodega.

[00:02:05] Chuck Carpenter: Or, or is it about keeping like old hardware current?

[00:02:08] Tom Barrasso: It’s about, you know, the local Amazon.

[00:02:10] Tom Barrasso: Um, no, it really does depend. So I actually was, um, about a month ago I was in India, and you joke about the local bodega, but, it’s actually the, the way that the retail model works, there’s through a lot of local vendors. So you’ve got these like mom and pop shops that sell everything from your.

[00:02:26] Tom Barrasso: You know, whatever, $70 Shami and, and red me phones to these flip phones. , And then some of which, the cheapest ones I was able to pick up were about 15 US dollars. so they’re being made, you know, brand new, couple hundred million units, uh, every, every year still selling.

[00:02:41] Chuck Carpenter: I think that’s pretty cool actually. I want, I want to go to there. I don’t wanna go to India, but I mean maybe someday, but

[00:02:47] Robbie Wagner: But you want to go to flip phone?

[00:02:49] Chuck Carpenter: I want a flip phone. I want less phone. There’s

[00:02:51] Robbie Wagner: I agree. Yes. We’ll get more into this.

[00:02:54] Robbie Wagner: We have to start with the whiskey.

[00:02:56] Chuck Carpenter: Whiskey.

[00:02:57] Chuck Carpenter: All right, so today folks, we are having [00:03:00] Johnny Walker Black Label. It is 100% malted barley, but it is a blended scotch.

[00:03:06] Chuck Carpenter: It is 80 proof and 12 years old. Uh, at least the barrel aging. Uh,

[00:03:12] Robbie Wagner: to that, that cork

[00:03:14] Robbie Wagner: pop.

[00:03:14] Chuck Carpenter: yeah, there you go. It’s hot. Well, I didn’t even bring the bottle in. I’m in a coworking space, so I just like bring this little sampler, and then, you know, pour it in there. It’s a nice little travel setup, actually. Uh, today’s

[00:03:29] Robbie Wagner: aged in or,

[00:03:30] Chuck Carpenter: exactly, it’s like this little case thing, and it’s got a thing for like two and a half ounces, uh, that much pour and then, you know, a decent glass with it.

[00:03:40] Chuck Carpenter: So

[00:03:40] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. And if they pay us, you’ll hear about that. If not, we’ll cut it out.

[00:03:44] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, that’s right. This is what we do is we insert ad reads and then we hold it for ransom. Contact people there and be like, do you want it, do you want literally hundreds of developers to hear about your product? Well, anyway. cool. Well, [00:04:00] let’s, uh, you’ve already poured yours, Tom, but we’re gonna start by, uh, taking some smells,

[00:04:04] Robbie Wagner: Hmm.

[00:04:05] Chuck Carpenter: The old

[00:04:07] Robbie Wagner: That smells like a, uh, a freshly charred log

[00:04:12] Chuck Carpenter: Hmm.

[00:04:12] Robbie Wagner: There. Campfire.

[00:04:15] Chuck Carpenter: Okay. It smells a little like a grape Jolly Rancher to me, like smelling a grape Jolly Rancher.

[00:04:20] Robbie Wagner: I think your Jolly Ranchers fell on the

[00:04:22] Robbie Wagner: fire.

[00:04:23] Chuck Carpenter: It might’ve, I’m not getting a strong, like fiery, but that’s, you know, there’s no wrong answers here. What about

[00:04:29] Tom Barrasso: I am also not getting a strong fiery one, but when your bottle is an extra 25 years old, I think some of that has, uh, evaporated.

[00:04:37] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Between that, I mean, yours might be stronger than 80 proof at this point, but you definitely have had plenty of time to get some oxygen in there and open it up some.

[00:04:45] Robbie Wagner: this, you know, it’s, it’s a scotchy scotch whenever you have a scotchy scotch, I feel like they smell and taste like a sharpie. . If you like that sort of thing, then okay. But, um, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it. Other, [00:05:00] like, if you think about a sharpie know you take the cap off and you just smell it.

[00:05:03] Robbie Wagner: You don’t think there’s notes of that?

[00:05:05] Chuck Carpenter: Well, that doesn’t smell, that doesn’t remind me of like Char and fire, though. Like a, a Sharpie.

[00:05:13] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. But it’s something about,

[00:05:15] Chuck Carpenter: own thing.

[00:05:16] Robbie Wagner: It’s something about that scotchy smoky smell tends to go towards Sharpie. I don’t know.

[00:05:23] Chuck Carpenter: Enough. on the tongue. I do get a little bit of smokiness in there, but it’s actually pretty light. Not bad.

[00:05:29] Chuck Carpenter: yeah, I’m not sure I get a little bit of smokiness there. I get a little bit of like, like a light lemongrass flavor and I don’t know what’s coming at the end there. I don’t know. anything coming to you, Tom?

[00:05:44] Tom Barrasso: I was gonna say a little bit like a, like a toned down dry sage brush.

[00:05:51] Chuck Carpenter: Ooh, yeah. Okay. I could

[00:05:54] Tom Barrasso: Not quite wood smoke, you know, not quite. Um, maybe, maybe mine’s mellowed out. So

[00:05:58] Chuck Carpenter: [00:06:00] Hmm.

[00:06:00] Chuck Carpenter: No, I think you might be onto something there, but definitely a light lemon in mine on the finish side,

[00:06:06] Robbie Wagner: I don’t know. I don’t, don’t have much to add. Should, should you, explain our very technical rating

[00:06:12] Robbie Wagner: system,

[00:06:13] Chuck Carpenter: Yes, it is highly technical. , It is from zero to eight tentacles, , zero being horrible. Spit this out. Put it down the drain. Four. Middle of the road. Not bad. Would have, again, not amazing of course. And eight is clear the shelves every time you see it. You, on the other hand, may have a challenge in clearing the shelves, given that you cleared the shelves of where you got that particular one in the first place. and Robbie will show you how this scale works in action.

[00:06:41] Robbie Wagner: Okay, so Scotch, I’m not a big Scotch fan. I’m particularly not a, this kind of Scotch fan. , But we are an equal opportunity whiskey drinking podcast. So we try many things. In terms of this style of scotch, I think it is a, like, I would say this is like the Jack Daniels of [00:07:00] Scotch.

[00:07:00] Robbie Wagner: It’s like, it’s fine. it’s a whiskey for sure. it’ll make you feel nice when you drink it, probably. But, um, not something that I would reach for very often. I’m gonna give it a three, I think.

[00:07:13] Chuck Carpenter: Fair enough. All right, Tom, do you seem, do you feel prepared to give it a rating?

[00:07:19] Tom Barrasso: I think, I think I can manage this one. I had a similar train of thought to Robbie, but I was gonna go on the other side of that rating scale. So, It reminds me of some of the very first whiskeys that I would drink, , which came in plastic bottles and then eventually upgraded to ones that came in glass.

[00:07:35] Tom Barrasso: Uh, like Jack Daniels that you mentioned. And thinking in college how Tennessee honey was like the pinnacle of, quality that you could achieve. You know, when you were looking to obtain alcohol at a reasonable price, but not regret your decision so much the minute you open the bottle. it seemed a little bit nicer than that, so I would go to a five.

[00:07:53] Tom Barrasso: . I certainly wouldn’t clear the shelf over this, but, , it’s very drinkable.

[00:07:57] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Where did you go to college?

[00:07:59] Tom Barrasso: UMass [00:08:00] Amherst.

[00:08:00] Chuck Carpenter: Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah, I was just wondering like, what would be the selection du jour, based on location and whatever else? I, I grew up in like northern Kentucky, Cincinnati area, so we had it all, but, well, we had it all in the bourbon, rye, you know, American whiskey side of things.

[00:08:19] Chuck Carpenter: I would say this was probably, uh, top tier scotch in the late nineties. So, anyway. Cool. Yeah, I, I think we’ll be following somewhat similar trends, at least in terms of our commentary on this one. So yeah, Johnny Walker Black is, is. I would say it’s an excellent mixer scotch if the recipe calls for scotch.

[00:08:44] Chuck Carpenter: And I’ve used it many times in uh, rusty nails. So that’s a kind of fun. Say you have a bottle of scotch, you’re not loving it and you want a way to kind of get through it and enjoy some cocktails with friends. I would say rusty nail, that’s a good [00:09:00] one. Uh, but

[00:09:00] Robbie Wagner: you’ve had your tetanus shot.

[00:09:02] Chuck Carpenter: Right, exactly. Uh, yeah. And make sure don’t walk around barefoot.

[00:09:07] Chuck Carpenter: Okay. That’s just what the lesson learned is. , So with this one, it’s a blended scotch. It’s pretty mellow. In the scotch world, if you really like scotch, you may not veer towards this one. If you really hate scotch, you probably won’t hate this one either. So it is a good, like most people can agree, this is fine.

[00:09:22] Chuck Carpenter: but it’s also lacks a, a lot of punch and panache. , But it’s not terrible. . I kind of feel like I’m in, in the range around Robbie. Like I don’t reach for scotch often, but if I do, I kind of want to know it’s scotch. like Macallan, that kind of thing. Oh, this is tasty. It brings its own things to it.

[00:09:42] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. So this is, yeah, mucky muck. , So yeah, I kind of feel like a three, two, like I don’t seek it out. It’s not terrible. , I’ll finish this. Poor No problem. , But, uh, nothing to write home about. Mom’s not gonna get a postcard about this one. Okay.

[00:09:57] Robbie Wagner: Well, I don’t write anything, so[00:10:00]

[00:10:00] Chuck Carpenter: Mm. that would

[00:10:02] Chuck Carpenter: Nice.

[00:10:02] Robbie Wagner: Anyway.

[00:10:03] Tom Barrasso: I’m still sending postcards, but I guess that’s ‘cause I’m doing a lot of traveling.

[00:10:06] Tom Barrasso: I think when I first connected with you guys, I was in New Zealand and I had some amazing stuff there. But, , unfortunately we ended up on Johnny Walker. ‘cause as I kept moving, it turned out it’s pretty difficult to find stuff cross borders nowadays.

[00:10:18] Tom Barrasso: and some of the really good stuff is some of the hardest to find.

[00:10:21] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Where in Switzerland are you?

[00:10:23] Tom Barrasso: Uh, right now I’m in a small town just outside of Baden.

[00:10:28] Chuck Carpenter: Ah, okay.

[00:10:29] Tom Barrasso: Have you been?

[00:10:30] Chuck Carpenter: Even harder, , I have not, but I am moving to Como and that’s in Italy, not Switzerland. I’m aware of that. But it is right next to Switzerland, and you can drive over to Switzerland in like 20 minutes. So

[00:10:43] Tom Barrasso: That’s true. Yeah. You

[00:10:44] Tom Barrasso: can, um,

[00:10:45] Tom Barrasso: you could do the reverse and drive to Switzerland to get lower taxes.

[00:10:50] Chuck Carpenter: Right. There we go. Oh yeah. Well, maybe that’ll be a little whatnot that we talk about. I don’t know if you have like tax arbitrage, advice, but, [00:11:00] uh, obviously having domicile in the us but then if you spend most of your time other places, but maybe you don’t spend any enough time to be burdened with residence tax or anything like that.

[00:11:11] Tom Barrasso: E Exactly. That’s part of my calculation and that’s the only calculation because I’m not at all someone of this world. I pay an accountant ‘cause I hate this stuff. So I wanna not hate my life at every April. And you know, I, I would swear up and down the block if I had to fill out those forms myself. So I pay someone to make it his problem.

[00:11:31] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:11:32] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, as do we.

[00:11:34] Chuck Carpenter: So you’re not a generalist in, uh, in things like accounting.

[00:11:38] Tom Barrasso: yeah, I like business, but accounting absolutely makes me want to blow my brains up.

[00:11:43] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. That’s fair. We want to, we wanna keep you around so you can bring us to the promised land of flip phones.

[00:11:50] Robbie Wagner: Yes. Okay. So, , I don’t really know what developing for flip flow flip phones even entails. so I don’t [00:12:00] know if all of our typical hot takes are relevant. I scope the list down anyway, but we, we will do a few hot

[00:12:06] Chuck Carpenter: We’ll give it a swing.

[00:12:07] Robbie Wagner: Tailwind or vanilla CSS.

[00:12:10] Tom Barrasso: I’m probably preempting some future questions. I go, I go vanilla. And when we get in the cloud phone, it, it’s, there’s a compelling reason why, but, , yeah, I, I don’t like bringing in a hundred kilobytes of someone else’s junk.

[00:12:21] Robbie Wagner: Fair. Yeah. I guess the, the bundle size matters more for you.

[00:12:26] Chuck Carpenter: Get merge or get rebase. I mean, that one might apply across the board.

[00:12:31] Robbie Wagner: Yeah,

[00:12:32] Tom Barrasso: I mostly work on stuff that’s in the last, the stuff that I do is mostly by myself, so I don’t, I mean, version control’s pretty straightforward for me. There’s not a lot of, there not a lot of merge conflicts here.

[00:12:44] Chuck Carpenter: Push to master or hey, maybe you just FFTP, your stuff up to a server. I don’t know.

[00:12:50] Robbie Wagner: Those

[00:12:51] Tom Barrasso: Uh, we’re not, we’re not quite there. I like my GitHub actions. I like having some automated tasks, but I don’t, uh, yeah, I think the, right now the biggest code base [00:13:00] I’m, I’m personally actively developing on is two people. So, we have more complex stuff at, at the company, but they don’t let me touch that.

[00:13:07] Tom Barrasso: Probably for good reason. I haven’t done c plus both in a long time. And, pointers scare me.

[00:13:11] Chuck Carpenter: okay. Fair enough.

[00:13:13] Robbie Wagner: Okay, so I don’t know if you’re a VS. Code user, are you?

[00:13:17] Tom Barrasso: Yeah, I

[00:13:19] Tom Barrasso: used it

[00:13:20] Robbie Wagner: sidebar on the left or the right?

[00:13:23] Tom Barrasso: Ooh, left

[00:13:25] Chuck Carpenter: yeah, defaults for the win.

[00:13:28] Tom Barrasso: Defaults for the way you

[00:13:29] Chuck Carpenter: customizing too much. Yeah, exactly.

[00:13:33] Chuck Carpenter: Okay, and how about this? Where smartphone’s a mistake?

[00:13:37] Tom Barrasso: Oh, man. I don’t think I could, no, I don’t think I could go that far. I mean, they’re a pretty incredible invention. there are obviously tons of flaws. , There are two compelling, right.

[00:13:47] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, right. Yeah. They’ve stolen the souls of society, but outside of that, like pretty amazing.

[00:13:52] Tom Barrasso: Yeah, like I’ll install the virtues of flip phones all the time, but as someone who’s been traveling for a while, it’s, it’s remarkably hard to do it with a flip [00:14:00] phone. , Nowadays there’s so many apps you need, like went to the UK two weeks ago and you have to download their app to do an ETA on electronic travel authorization, and you can’t do it.

[00:14:09] Tom Barrasso: There might be other ways with some of these things, but like, you know, it’s the difference sometimes between like, oh, do you want to use the app or do you wanna mail in a piece of paper and spend a bunch of money on an international post postage stamp and like, hope it gets there. And maybe in six weeks, we’ll, you’ll hear from us.

[00:14:25] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Right. But that’s how they keep the boomers out, I guess. Right. This is also a question of like, just because this is the work you do, it doesn’t mean it’s the life you live. So I was actually curious there. You could be like, oh no, hell no. I do smartphones all day long. That’s just the job, yo.

[00:14:41] Tom Barrasso: No, I did genuinely try So. My flip phone journey started five years ago when I built my podcast pod LP for it. , It originally started right at the start of the pandemic when, I talking with my girlfriend and was like, I really want to, , switch the flip phone. I keep hearing about people doing it, but I just don’t know how.

[00:14:59] Tom Barrasso: , And then [00:15:00] she’s like, oh, you’ll never do it. They don’t, they don’t have podcasts and you love listening to podcasts, so how would you ever switch to this? And I was like, okay, I’ll build it. Right. That can’t be that hard. So I like, you know, as the start of the pandemic, so many things I couldn’t do way more time at home and I was just like diving into what it means to make a podcast app.

[00:15:16] Tom Barrasso: And this was pre podcast index, so I was like, what is RSS? Where do I find all these feeds? Like, where do they exist in the world? How do I gather all that data? How do I, get it down to work on one of these phones? yeah, and I tried it out and it was, it’s fun. I would take it for like camping trips, but there were just too many hurdles, especially five years ago.

[00:15:36] Tom Barrasso: there were, there were two little services built for them, and especially during the pandemic when everything became digital, right? You started having QR codes for the menus. You started having, like, you needed special transit apps. You constantly need to be on the web to check, like, when you could go to someplace, because the times were all weird, like when you could show up versus, so yeah.

[00:15:56] Tom Barrasso: COVID, I feel like really pushed people into like, needing [00:16:00] smartphones, , to always be connected and always be ready for like, who knows what,

[00:16:04] Chuck Carpenter: So in the last five years, do you think it’s gotten better or worse? I mean, I guess that your current company is trying to make it better, but do you think, , just curious in general right now, if I went and got a smartphone, would it be harder or easier

[00:16:18] Chuck Carpenter: sorry. If I went and got a flip phone to leave smartphones.

[00:16:22] Tom Barrasso: I would say in the West it’s probably still pretty difficult. , The truth is that a lot of the stuff that you would want hasn’t been built ‘cause that’s not the major market. There’s a pretty sizable community of digital detoxers who are interested in these phones. , But the platform, so cloud phone is actually not available right now, uh, at least commercially at a, at an appreciable scale in the United States.

[00:16:43] Tom Barrasso: it’s just not that the, the target market, , the primary focus is, , devices that are incredibly cheap, incredibly affordable. And the truth is, most of these digital detoxers are actually buying like kind of nicer, higher end flip phones. Sometimes I see them on Reddit and they’re buying like importing ones from [00:17:00] Japan that are sometimes more expensive than smartphones.

[00:17:02] Robbie Wagner: Now I need to find out what this phone is.

[00:17:06] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, that’s, it’s interesting. Yeah, I was gonna say, I have seen some of that and you’ll see you know, with, uh, e ink screens, there’s certain ones like the minimal phone or it’s something like that, and they’re expensive, right? There’s like four to $600 for what is supposed to be less. and then they’ll still give you some, , app access and all of that.

[00:17:27] Chuck Carpenter: But I, I guess like step one is they think with, in it’ll, it’ll be less compelling to kind of stare at it for

[00:17:33] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.

[00:17:33] Chuck Carpenter: Periods of time.

[00:17:34] Robbie Wagner: Social media with E Inc. Yeah.

[00:17:36] Chuck Carpenter: Right. Exactly. But, uh, but they’re expensive. It’s kind of like too detox in that way. The opportunist cost is still like, well, you have money.

[00:17:45] Chuck Carpenter: You’re just choosing not to, to do this, rather than like the economic reasons that might drive people to just a flip phone.

[00:17:52] Tom Barrasso: Yeah, exactly. And I think there’s a big difference in knowing what you’re missing. Like if you’ve already had a smartphone, you’ve had a thousand apps before, you know, [00:18:00] like. You’ve had your bank app, you’ve had whatever digital wallet you use, you’ve got, you know, apps for social media. You’ve probably got like five different apps from messaging people.

[00:18:09] Tom Barrasso: you know, so you’ve, you’ve really been hooked into the ecosystem. But if you are brand new to the phone world, or maybe you’re finally upgrading from, you know, a Nokia series from 2005, and you’re forced to, because your telco shut down two G and 3G and you have to move to a 4G flip phone, then you’re probably just gonna pick the cheapest option you’ve got available.

[00:18:28] Tom Barrasso: , Which hopefully we won with a cloud phone, service. But yeah, at the end of the day, I mean, it, it’s very, you’re coming from very different, approaching the market very differently and thinking about the types of ways that you interact with technology very differently, or thinking about it just less, right?

[00:18:42] Tom Barrasso: Like your life is so much less digital. If, you’ve made it to 2025 and you haven’t found that you needed whatever, 150 apps.

[00:18:50] Chuck Carpenter: Right.

[00:18:51] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Right.

[00:18:52] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I think there’s a, like, for me it’s, it’s the little things that I don’t think I could do without, like iMessage and like [00:19:00] these headphones connecting to all of my devices and like things just being easy. But I do wish that like someone would make a non-smart phone that did all that. Like if you could do the nice things, like, I wanna listen to music still, but I don’t need like internet really.

[00:19:20] Robbie Wagner: Like I don’t want social media for sure. Like I know that Oh, you could just delete the apps. Yeah, I could, but like.

[00:19:26] Chuck Carpenter: You have no self-control. I

[00:19:29] Chuck Carpenter: mean, come on, look at him. Of course, he

[00:19:29] Chuck Carpenter: doesn’t

[00:19:29] Robbie Wagner: something to force me into doing it. , Like there’s a, yeah, there’s lots of high-end people trying to do this. , But it just hasn’t fully come full circle yet, I guess.

[00:19:39] Chuck Carpenter: Call it the camping phone or something like that, like, oh, can use in emergencies, but doesn’t access a bunch of services. I don’t know.

[00:19:46] Tom Barrasso: Yeah, you might be surprised with how advanced he’s gotten. So at the very bottom of the market now you’ve got some of these cloud phones that are like $15, but if you go even just a little bit up to about 20 US dollars, I’ve got one that’s got wifi, Bluetooth, it can connect to even [00:20:00] AirPods. It doesn’t have the same seamless experience that your, , iPhone does.

[00:20:03] Tom Barrasso: And by that I mean you, you put it in your ear. It doesn’t auto pair because it doesn’t have that software integration. But you can go to the Bluetooth settings, discover it, pair it, I think we’re, we’re inching there. I mean, we’ve got ones with NFC now that can do digital payments. , Every one of these in India comes with UPI.

[00:20:19] Tom Barrasso: So, , it’s pretty incredible. Like where, where they’ve come and I, I think where they’re, where they could go,

[00:20:25] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. What about, uh, like ride sharing stuff?

[00:20:29] Robbie Wagner: Is there an option for that?

[00:20:30] Chuck Carpenter: No.

[00:20:31] Tom Barrasso: there’s no, I mean, if anything, I think the market would demand the other, the other, the flip side of that, right? So if we were to, , work with a ride, and not to say we wouldn’t, of course, if, like, if Uber wanted to, , you know, be on this, this platform, we’d, we’d happily take them. But I think if anything, you’d have it the other way around.

[00:20:48] Tom Barrasso: You’d have the drivers who have flip phones in India on a, took, took, you know, with the Uber app on their flip phone. And then, you know, it would give them all the, the basics that they need to, be able to do [00:21:00] this. But right now there’s very few of them with GPSs, , and the ones that do. They’re not very good.

[00:21:06] Tom Barrasso: The GPSs they have are, pretty coarse.

[00:21:09] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. I mean, $20 is not gonna get you a GPS, I would say. You’re gonna have to elevate a little bit more above that.

[00:21:17] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. That’s not gonna get you a Chipotle burrito these days. Like,

[00:21:22] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Just about getting there. Let’s talk about the cost of fast food. What a, a beefy cheese burrito. A Taco Bell is almost $6 now. Six US dollars. You don’t have that problem in Switzerland. You they have actual food.

[00:21:38] Tom Barrasso: Oh yeah. But it’s much worse. I walked into a McDonald’s ‘cause I love seeing sometimes like, oh, what’s the McDonald’s in this country have? And they’ve got Relet, which is like their font, it’s like a type of cheese that

[00:21:47] Tom Barrasso: you melt.

[00:21:48] Tom Barrasso: Um, They have a Mick Relet burger, but it was 16 francs, which is probably about 20 US dollars.

[00:21:55] Chuck Carpenter: Wow.

[00:21:57] Chuck Carpenter: That’s

[00:21:57] Robbie Wagner: you try it?

[00:21:58] Tom Barrasso: I did not at that [00:22:00] price. I was like, oh my God, I’ll go

[00:22:01] Tom Barrasso: somewhere else.

[00:22:02] Chuck Carpenter: Curiosity didn’t, didn’t get the best of you there. You’re very, I would’ve gotten it, I’m gonna say, and they probably sold a beer

[00:22:07] Chuck Carpenter: with it too, and it would’ve been like, ah, this will make it feel better. Yeah. The, the McDonald’s quality, , elsewhere in other countries is better though, too.

[00:22:15] Chuck Carpenter: Like it’s just fresher

[00:22:16] Robbie Wagner: a lot of stuff is outlawed in most other countries.

[00:22:19] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah. Meat, like products are just actual meat. But anyway, I digress.

[00:22:25] CTA: This just in! Whiskey.fund is now open for all your merch needs. That’s right, Robbie. We’re hearing reports of hats, sweaters, and T-shirts, as well as a link to join our Discord server. What’s a Discord server? Just read the prompter, man. Hit subscribe. Leave us a review on your favorite podcast app and tell your friends about our broadcast. It really does help us reach more people and keeps the show growing. All right, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

[00:22:58] Chuck Carpenter: I would be curious [00:23:00] in, , and you, maybe we can find a way like, uh, offline later where you can share a few links to like some of these low-cost phones. you can’t guarantee anything’s available in the us but I’m just like curious, like what it shows for features and things like that.

[00:23:14] Tom Barrasso: Yeah, I mean, I can sort of walk through what one of these would look like and, and the lay of the land of the, the flip phone world, which I guess I hadn’t really given the outline here. , I’m sure ever like you guys, everyone here is familiar with like the old moto Ra razors and stuff. The old Nokia, you know, back when they were symbian before Microsoft bought them and, threw them in the gutter.

[00:23:32] Tom Barrasso: So, , those phones, they had some version of an app, right? They had, there was, I dunno if you remember, J two ME Java two mobile edition. It was like a, like a heavily watered down version of Java that was brutally fragmented across every phone. And you could write some apps. If you were lucky, you’d get it to compile and then you’d send it off to an OEM and they would stamp it with their digital signature and put it on, God knows how many different, you know, back then telcos used to run app stores.

[00:23:58] Tom Barrasso: It used to have like the Verizon App store or the [00:24:00] T-Mobile app store. and that was how it, it kind of worked. And then there was Brew, which was its own thing that was mostly in the US but also somewhere else. so they kind of marched along, but they were all doing their own thing. writing apps was pretty painful, but you could, and then you had opera mini for a browser.

[00:24:15] Tom Barrasso: and then, you know, I think the Symbian days really hit their peak in like twenty eleven, twenty twelve, just before Windows phone became Nokia’s focus. And then you started to have a little bit more, it was kind of like Blackberry. You were still writing in Java, you still had proprietary SDKs. but there’s just more of an ecosystem around it.

[00:24:32] Tom Barrasso: Apple kind of forced everybody into that world. And then, you know, Google quickly after with Android, And then it kind of died down for a while, right? ‘cause the companies that were making these things, they all wound down, or limped along, you know, getting taken over by, by Android and Apple. you had Firefox os actually, which was one attempt at a competitor to bring a web platform to this world.

[00:24:52] Tom Barrasso: Uh, kind of remember that.

[00:24:54] Tom Barrasso: yeah, it was, it was a cool project, but it didn’t really go very far commercially. They had a couple devices, but it never [00:25:00] really hit the shelves. , But the idea was, was there, right? It was like, we’re gonna bring web apps to smartphone so that it wasn’t PWA back then. It was like, it will be the native app.

[00:25:09] Tom Barrasso: That’s the platform. And then Firefox os the team ended up being reincarnated to become Chios, which became a flip phone platform. So you had all these flip phones running Firefox as their operating system, and then apps or web apps. , They launched in, I wanna say 2018, give or take. And they, they had some, some stuff before them, but they really hit their strides in 2018 with the Geophone, which.

[00:25:30] Tom Barrasso: I think from, from 2018 until now, like 135 million units, um, of all their various models in India. So it was a huge success in India and to a lesser extent outside of India. It’s still, still sold today, especially in the US actually, if you buy a flip phone, odds are it’s gonna have COOs. , And then two years ago is when we launched CloudOne.

[00:25:48] Tom Barrasso: it, it really came from seeing the trends in the flip phone space where Kios is kind of like smartphone light. They called it a smart feature phone. So the prices, they started inching up and up and up along with [00:26:00] smartphones, especially with the ship set shortage during COVID inflation. All that stuff really started to eat at the cost of these.

[00:26:06] Tom Barrasso: and so then, you know, CloudOne basically was like, well, if we do all the web rendering in a server somewhere, you don’t even need the hardware that these phones run on is as low as 16 megs of Ram, single core, one gigahertz, sometimes even less than that CPU. so there’s, there’s nothing on these phones.

[00:26:23] Tom Barrasso: I mean, in terms of hardware, like. I think of them as a glorified calculator by today’s standards.

[00:26:29] Chuck Carpenter: that’s really interesting. So the internet is obviously a really important part of providing the experiences.

[00:26:37] Tom Barrasso: Yeah. Well I think a lot of, a lot of platforms recognize that it’s pretty difficult to draw developers to niche platforms. And one way that you can is by lowering the barriers to entry. And so web is a great way to do that by saying, we’re gonna bring the web to your phone. And now everybody who’s been, you know, building PWAs for years can ship them finally somewhere and have a real app store, have an ecosystem, get downloads.

[00:26:59] Tom Barrasso: and Kiwis [00:27:00] did this, but they’ve always, I think one of the things they struggled with was that all of the apps, because they run on the phone, ‘cause they run on very outdated versions of Firefox, you know, it ends up being quite an ordeal to actually get your app to run on it effectively. I remember the very first versions of PO LP would crash because, um, podcast thumbnails are like 3000 by 3000 pixels.

[00:27:20] Tom Barrasso: And displaying that on the phone was, it ran outta memory. So I had to like build a thumbnail service that shrunk them.

[00:27:26] Robbie Wagner: I just did that too.

[00:27:28] Tom Barrasso: Oh yeah, isn’t that fun?

[00:27:30] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I mean, I, I did it all through Elle’s, like image optimization stuff, but, uh, yeah, it was our website for each image. For each episode we have a different image and they have to be 3000 by 3000. So it was like the slowest webpage ever to just load like our list of episodes. So now it’s not,

[00:27:49] Tom Barrasso: Yeah. And you know, in the modern world of smartphones, it doesn’t really matter, but like, you know, if you have your iPhone, your iPhone can download an RSS feed for Joe Rogan with God knows like 15 megabytes worth of [00:28:00] stuff. it can download your, actually if anything, apple really wants you to have the 3000 pixel images.

[00:28:04] Tom Barrasso: ‘cause they’ve got, I don’t even know, what are they calling the latest screen now? It was liquid retina, but now it’s something else where the pixels are, you know, quantum level.

[00:28:13] Robbie Wagner: I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah. More than you can see with your eye these days, like. Past the resolution that even matters, but it looks a little cleaner.

[00:28:23] Tom Barrasso: Yeah, I mean, and don’t get me wrong, those things are awesome. Like I’m on apple silicon. They, they make some pretty cool stuff, but, you know, it is kind of fun when you work in this environment where the smallest phones that we sell have Q-Q-V-G-A screens, which is one 20 by one 60. That’s a number of pixels you can count.

[00:28:42] Tom Barrasso: like, you know how like sometimes, you know, you’re building the website and you’re off by one pixel with a border or something, you’re like, ah, you know, it blends in, especially on today’s screens, on these phones. It’s like that one pixel could be the, you know, could bleed over and like, could alter your layout, could look really, you know, strange.

[00:28:58] Robbie Wagner: now that you mentioned that, [00:29:00] I don’t think I’ve ever developed a website that I checked past, like, I don’t know, 300 pixels was like the smallest width. so that means probably everything I’ve ever built is terrible on, on any of these devices.

[00:29:13] Robbie Wagner: Like, I wonder, uh, if you’ve had a lot of experience with that sort of thing, like, like it’s an education problem, I think to like developers building websites that they would even have users that might have a screen that small.

[00:29:26] Tom Barrasso: Yeah, the interaction patterns become very different at a scale like that. I’ll say right now, uh, you mentioned Tailwind at the very beginning. If you’re using Tailwind or Bootstrap or any of these big CSS, I dunno what they call them, frameworks, libraries, like what is it in the CSS world? if you’re importing one of these, the smallest break points that they set for extra small or small, I think is, ‘cause I just wrote this up for Smashing Magazine.

[00:29:48] Tom Barrasso: It was like 520 pixels. Give or take, that means that everything below five 20 is treated as the same. Right. So unless you are adding your own, so unless you’re putting in your own break [00:30:00] points, and yeah, the, I think the problem with that is that you end up just taking like a smartphone layout. Like you’re building something for the iPhone eight and you’re like, oh, let’s just squeeze it into one 20 by one 60.

[00:30:10] Tom Barrasso: And it’s like, no, that’s, that’s half of an Apple watch that is so small that you can’t just have the sticky nav at the top. You can’t have the cookie banner down there. ‘cause the whole screen’s gone. That’s it. Those two buttons and the sticky header and you’re done. There’s nothing left.

[00:30:24] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, it’s, it’s hard mode. You’ve gotta basically, like CSS change everything. Like if it’s this small, move it everywhere or hide all the things. so that’s, yeah.

[00:30:35] Chuck Carpenter: Uh, disable CSS at certain size,

[00:30:37] Robbie Wagner: Well, then it would have no style at

[00:30:40] Robbie Wagner: all.

[00:30:40] Chuck Carpenter: No style, whatever an HTML document in its rawest form as intended.

[00:30:46] Robbie Wagner: Oof. I

[00:30:47] Tom Barrasso: there are,

[00:30:48] Robbie Wagner: that.

[00:30:49] Tom Barrasso: I, I found a, a phone in India that was from 2018 that has a version of Opera Mini that’s text only. So you could do that, you could just take the website and render it like that. [00:31:00] But,

[00:31:01] Tom Barrasso: you know, everyone’s doing spas now. So now what? Now you get JavaScript and no CSS.

[00:31:05] Chuck Carpenter: That sounds like,

[00:31:07] Robbie Wagner: Do it without JavaScript too.

[00:31:09] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, that, how does it work without, I mean, it doesn’t, an SPA really wouldn’t, and so what does it fall back to, you know?

[00:31:17] Robbie Wagner: Well, essentially every website won’t work without JavaScript because, I mean, you can, but you can’t ever like click a button and be like, thanks for contacting us. you know, you would have to post it to the other page,

[00:31:32] Robbie Wagner: you can’t like reload the screen

[00:31:34] Chuck Carpenter: Hypermedia controls would still work, which is an anchor and a form. And so if those basic things would work, I, I just wouldn’t want to have to enter details on a form, you know, from, uh, what was, what was the T nine keyboards or whatever. And you’re like, people used to be really fast with those things and I never

[00:31:54] Robbie Wagner: yeah. T nine.

[00:31:55] Chuck Carpenter: The T nine keyboards?

[00:31:56] Chuck Carpenter: No, I like, as soon as, would they have like the sidekick or something like that, as soon as [00:32:00] they had like the full keyboard flip open side things, I was all over that because I was never good with a T nine. But could you imagine within like a web form trying to be like bing, you know? Anyway, I do like the, I, I, I think it’s interesting to start to like develop value on the web with constraints.

[00:32:19] Chuck Carpenter: That kind of sounds fun to me in a weird, like hate myself kind of way, but

[00:32:24] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, I think it sounds kind of cool actually.

[00:32:26] Robbie Wagner: I was gonna say at, at Amazon, I never actually worked for this team, but there was a, like, Kindle team and the Kindle team has to ship everything, in like ES three. Really old JavaScript ‘cause it’s like a bespoke browser or something that they have for Kindle that like only runs ES three.

[00:32:44] Robbie Wagner: , So it’s like, you know, another environment where it’s like you’re very constrained. You can’t use most of the stuff you’re used to using.

[00:32:50] Tom Barrasso: I was just thinking about the Kindle because I brought it out to our company. I was like, oh, why don’t they move to, why doesn’t Kindle move to a remote browser? and I think there’s probably two, two key reasons. One is the only reason [00:33:00] you use your web browser in a Kindle is to connect to a wifi network.

[00:33:04] Tom Barrasso: And sometimes if you’re on a public network, you’ve got a captive portal. Captive portals don’t work in remote browsers ‘cause they’re not running in your local network. They’re running in a server somewhere. So that’s one. And two is people just don’t need or want that. Right. The reason you bought a Kindle is ‘cause you want something and I’ve got one.

[00:33:19] Tom Barrasso: I love it. It’s got a ridiculous battery life. it’s the one thing I never have to charge when it gets low. It’s like a shock to me. I’m like, oh, what has it been like six months? yeah, but I’ve, I’ve used that browser and it’s, there’s, you can, you can basically, like you were saying, you can submit an HTML form.

[00:33:33] Tom Barrasso: That’s what it can do.

[00:33:34] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. So that’s something to be said there. Yeah. I wonder if on the Kindle platform too, like there’s some sort of DRM constraints, they just wanna reduce access in general.

[00:33:45] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I don’t know the why’s. I just know that, uh, the guy on the team reached out like, Hey, uh, would you have any interest in switching teams to work on this challenging thing? And I was like, no, no, thank you.

[00:33:58] Chuck Carpenter: There’s no ember [00:34:00] js on the Kindle, is my guess.

[00:34:02] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I don’t, I don’t think you would want to use that. Like, the frame. Well, these days the framework is like tree shaken and smaller and your bundle is like fine. But yeah, classic ember trying to load on anything would be like, I’m so big I can’t do it.

[00:34:15] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Nice try. This is an SPA,

[00:34:17] Chuck Carpenter: uh, so Robbie has a question on here about ai. I think this is a funny one, is, how does AI play into this world? Is it useful for developing feature phone apps?

[00:34:28] Tom Barrasso: AI in general, I, yeah, I could take this in so many ways for developing, I would say it’s mixed. the reason I would say it’s mixed is if you’re developing for kios, there’s so little material out there for it. , I know ‘cause I run one of the only blogs focused in Kios, so it’s a small world.

[00:34:43] Tom Barrasso: , It hallucinates a lot. It makes up a ton of crap about APIs that don’t exist, permissions that don’t work that way. So caution there. For cloud phone, I would say you can get 90% of the way if you’re using AI because it’s running currently Chrome 1 28. But we update the browser engine [00:35:00] periodically, so it’s a very recent version.

[00:35:02] Tom Barrasso: So if you just think about targeting Chrome for a really tiny screen, it actually can be quite helpful. , I had it do that. I had it. I’ve tried both building new apps and adapting apps. I’m skeptical in general on building new apps. Every time I go to AI for this, I feel like it invents complexity, like no one’s business.

[00:35:19] Tom Barrasso: I’m working on a currency converter app and I think my version is like currently and I’m doing it in TypeScript and I’m trying to do it clean and all this nice stuff, like maybe at like 600 lines of code and I’m gonna add a little bit more style for this. Maybe I’ll have a thousand. The one when I was trying Claude, it put out, God, it was like 500,000 lines.

[00:35:38] Tom Barrasso: It had a docker build with a server that it didn’t do anything. The server had an API URL that said to do, please update with a real URL. Where it was gonna fetch the data from. It’s like I just looked at this thing and it’s like, oh my God. Like what, where have I gotten? I’ve got like 30 components.

[00:35:56] Tom Barrasso: Like,

[00:35:57] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.

[00:35:58] Chuck Carpenter: I

[00:35:58] Robbie Wagner: think it has no idea what [00:36:00] it’s doing, and so it tries to add more and more code to get around the bugs, but then it just breaks eventually.

[00:36:06] Tom Barrasso: yeah. Or you’re like, Hey, the input’s not working. Like, it’s not formatting the currency this right way. It keeps focusing on the symbol, but I want it to start the, I want the cursor to start on the first character where the user types the number and then it’s like, okay, I just imported this library and this library imported four more libraries with it and then it actually doesn’t really know how to use the library.

[00:36:25] Tom Barrasso: And so it puts the component in somewhere. But actually it doesn’t realize it’s using an angular component, but it, it imported react and it’s just, it falls apart pretty quickly. So like you can get to a prototype fairly fast and it kind of works, but if you actually want to ship it in production. Like I, I, one of my first jobs was working in a, in a marketing agency, and that’s what they did, right?

[00:36:47] Tom Barrasso: They had me like, build these really, really quick POCs and then you have a client turn around and be like, great, let’s keep moving this. Let’s ship it to production. It’s like, no. no. There’s so many

[00:36:57] Chuck Carpenter: It was never intended for real life. [00:37:00]

[00:37:00] Chuck Carpenter: It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors here.

[00:37:02] Tom Barrasso: exactly. They’re like, oh, but this looks so good. And I was like, yeah, because, because I, I hard coded, or I like made it an image where the animation was supposed to happen so that you didn’t have to know what happened behind the scenes.

[00:37:15] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So I mean, I think that that echoes a lot of people’s experiences. yeah, starting from zero I’ve been pretty skeptical and very skeptical of no-code solutions. Especially if you have like, I want it in this technology using these constraints and this library only, and it’s like, cool, I’m gonna do that and react anyway, and I’m gonna bring in these 16 component libraries instead of writing any of it myself.

[00:37:43] Chuck Carpenter: And, uh, here you go, or Or they go through these cycles of like, it just won’t build, they’ll start adding features and adding features and then it breaks and it can never build. And it’s like you ran outta credits, upgrade your, upgrade your account. And I’m like, I’m not sold on that upgrade.

[00:37:59] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. [00:38:00] Or you run out of Tokens, like your, your chat window is just like full and it’s like, Hey, I can’t do anything else. And I’m like, wait, what? Why don’t you like, just let it go infinitely.

[00:38:11] Chuck Carpenter: yeah. This is Chuck E. Cheese, that’s why.

[00:38:13] Tom Barrasso: But what I will say about ai, though, not necessarily for development, but in the use of your app, it’s actually incredibly valuable. so we’ve got the ChatGPT app and Gemini that both run as web apps on Cloud Phone which is pretty incredible that you can take a $15 phone you know, point the camera at something and ask Gemini, what is this?

[00:38:31] Tom Barrasso: , Or have it translate something for you. and where I think it could be really huge is, , speech interfaces, again, on a device that you can’t type very well on. Or actually, let’s think about the users here who are in languages that maybe they can’t even type or typing is like way more of an ordeal than English, which has 26 characters.

[00:38:48] Tom Barrasso: But like, what are you gonna do when you’ve got hundreds, thousands? , You’ve got a, you know, an iconographic language or you’ve got ones that are so. There’s, you know, there’s like Whisper, which is a pretty common, , [00:39:00] speech to text model that you can use. There’s translation models and there’s even, , a lot of like Indian universities have been, building forks of models like Whisper for languages like Tamil and Telugu which is pretty incredible that you can now have people converse with your app in their native language on a phone that costs $15 and use your service.

[00:39:19] Tom Barrasso: , Yeah. And it’s a much more powerful way of navigating and understanding the world for someone who, this is probably their first phone and the first time they’re ever using the internet.

[00:39:28] Robbie Wagner: Now I’m very curious, did everyone have to text in English forever? I never thought about that. ‘cause like your one through nine, having all the letters on it, would not have all the characters in like Japanese or something. Like how did, did they just have to text in English? I don’t know. How did, how did that

[00:39:46] Robbie Wagner: work?

[00:39:47] Tom Barrasso: K kind of yes. And kind of no. I mean, it depends on the language. , Some languages have built out systems to map characters to various keyboard layouts, , including T nine and then other ones, I don’t know about Japanese [00:40:00] specifically, but like there’s a huge, huge, I mean, so English is a very popular language in India.

[00:40:04] Tom Barrasso: cause there’s so many different regional languages. but you end up with, uh, when people type Hindi now you often have like Aish language where it’s Hindi, but that’s ized as the way that you pronounce the word in English. So they’re using Hindi words, but writing them out in Latin character set.

[00:40:20] Tom Barrasso: , So you get a lot of that too in the world.

[00:40:22] Chuck Carpenter: Oh yeah, phonetics makes a lot of sense, I guess, rather than literal characters. I read a book once that was, uh, actually it was train spotting and it’s written out in phonetics for Scottish, you know, which obviously is also English, but Sounds real fucked up.

[00:40:38] Robbie Wagner: like.

[00:40:39] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, it sounds real fucked up and whatever. So I thought that was a fun one.

[00:40:41] Chuck Carpenter: It was like slow to start reading at first, but then you kind of get into the vibe and then you’re like, okay, I get it now. And you’re playing Scottish, you know, accents in your head. But, uh, anyway, un unrelated, tangent to a degree, but like, yeah, writing things out in phonetics is, that makes a lot of sense actually.

[00:40:59] Tom Barrasso: Oh, but Scottish is [00:41:00] amazing too. I love it. One of my favorite accents, ‘cause it’s sometimes they, they have some sayings that are just so absurd.

[00:41:04] Chuck Carpenter: Okay. Glasgow or Edinburgh though, very different.

[00:41:08] Tom Barrasso: Oh, Glasgow. ‘cause the Glaswegian accent is completely unintelligible. I was in New Zealand with somebody, I think they were from Germany or France, and they turned to me and they’re like, is this, do you understand this person? Are they speaking English? And I was like, I actually don’t know. And I’m, I claim to be a native English speaker.

[00:41:23] Tom Barrasso: So.

[00:41:23] Chuck Carpenter: Exactly. Ls, weg, Gian or Scouts. I’m not sure which one is, is more unintelligible, but like, equally like hard to follow, in my experience for me at least. Yeah, so that’s interesting. You like the more confusing, the better for you. I’m like, I’m picking Edinburgh ‘cause it is kind of like pretty sounding Scottish.

[00:41:42] Chuck Carpenter: and that’s a yeah. Both nice towns, but man, what are you saying? I have no idea. I’m just nodding and drinking. Have no idea. and then you gotta say, well if you like glaswegian better than so is it’s Celtic arrangers.

[00:41:53] Tom Barrasso: Well, I’m from Boston.

[00:41:55] Chuck Carpenter: so Celtic, I guess. Yeah, the Celtics and then all of that. Yeah,

[00:41:58] Chuck Carpenter: I know [00:42:00] in Glasgow it’s like a Christian or Protestant thing, but I don’t know which is which. So Well

[00:42:06] Robbie Wagner: Well,

[00:42:06] Tom Barrasso: gonna to start wars here.

[00:42:07] Robbie Wagner: they’re both, Christian. You probably mean Catholic or

[00:42:09] Robbie Wagner: Protestant.

[00:42:10] Chuck Carpenter: Say A Catholic or Protestant. Yes. Thank you for the correction there. I’m clearly

[00:42:15] Robbie Wagner: You’re theologian right here. Yeah.

[00:42:17] Chuck Carpenter: Exactly. Yeah. Robbie’s going to church right after this, so that Wednesday night mass, I’m gonna, I gotta get off here for dinner, but it’s a mass actually.

[00:42:30] Robbie Wagner: The mass is my stomach. Got ‘em.

[00:42:32] Chuck Carpenter: Gosh.

[00:42:34] Robbie Wagner: Okay, so you’ve been traveling around a lot. We kind of, I can’t remember if we talked about this after recording or beforehand or, or what about various things about where you’ve been. , But like what tips do you have around digital nomad life in general? you know, are there certain countries that are better than others?

[00:42:52] Robbie Wagner: you know, we talked about taxes a little bit, like tips to avoid accidentally having to pay taxes or get like extra visas or, I don’t [00:43:00] know, what do you got for us?

[00:43:01] Tom Barrasso: Ooh, I won’t delve the taxes. That sounds like a, a lawyer or accountant’s problem.

[00:43:06] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah. You don’t wanna get sued.

[00:43:07] Tom Barrasso: I don’t need to get sued. No tax advice here. it depends on what you’re looking for, what level of infrastructure you’re here for. Like, I had an amazing time. I spent most of my time in New Zealand, , almost six months.

[00:43:18] Tom Barrasso: I bought a van. , I had wifi in it. It was hooked up to 4G. I just plugged it into a cigarette outlet that was hooked up to a solar panel and it worked super well. I got wifi more than 90% of the time. Most of the campgrounds had it pretty much everywhere you go had it. But that said, nothing about New Zealand was built for digital nomads.

[00:43:36] Tom Barrasso: It’s just everything was, you know, easy and they speak English. It’s clean, everything’s safe. You don’t really have to worry about anything. So it’s just a lot easier to navigate than I’ve been a few other places. Vietnam, India, Thailand. , I think Thailand’s a popular one for people, for obvious reasons.

[00:43:52] Tom Barrasso: Good quality of life, , really good infrastructure. Also by the standards of Southeast Asia. Pretty clean, pretty safe. , [00:44:00] Vietnam. Yeah, inexpensive. Vietnam’s even cheaper. I love Vietnamese food. So it was amazing. yeah, that, worked really well for me. India’s quite difficult. , It could work, especially if you stay put a lot, but getting around can be a pain.

[00:44:12] Tom Barrasso: definitely some questionable roads there. and I think just you will get a lot of stares, especially if you’re like me and you’re, a shade of white that doesn’t tan very well, you know, you’re kind of like a glowing beacon to everybody who’s just like, oh my God.

[00:44:27] Chuck Carpenter: Robbie knows your pain.

[00:44:28] Robbie Wagner: Yes.

[00:44:29] Chuck Carpenter: Look at him.

[00:44:31] Tom Barrasso: yeah. But all amazing places to be, and I think you can make it work. It just depends on what you’re looking for, right? Do you wanna sit by the beach and drink, you know, water from a coconut out of a straw? Do you wanna, you know, live in an air conditioned tower because it’s 98 degrees and 98% humidity all day?

[00:44:48] Tom Barrasso: Do you wanna be out hiking and then like occasionally getting work done?

[00:44:52] Chuck Carpenter: Did you drive in India, Annie?

[00:44:54] Tom Barrasso: Oh no, that was the one place I wouldn’t get behind the wheel

[00:44:57] Chuck Carpenter: I was gonna say it sound, you’re like [00:45:00] getting around. I’m like, I wonder if he tried driving ‘cause I wouldn’t,

[00:45:02] Tom Barrasso: well ‘cause I got used to driving the left side from New Zealand, so I was like, I was thinking about, I was like, oh, maybe I could, and then when we got there it’s like, oh God. No. Absolutely not. Especially near a city. Don’t even think about it.

[00:45:13] Chuck Carpenter: poof. Yeah. Like walking is even kind of quasi dangerous.

[00:45:19] Tom Barrasso: Not even quasi.

[00:45:21] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, just real danger all

[00:45:23] Robbie Wagner: you just can’t move It’s just

[00:45:24] Chuck Carpenter: you have to understand the vibe and the flow of the crowd and all that kind of stuff. It’s really what it is. It’s kind of like, I think it, from what I’ve been told, I haven’t been to India, but I have been to Thailand and in Bangkok, you know how it is.

[00:45:36] Chuck Carpenter: It’s like these weird sort of like. Just constant flows of motion through multiple intersections and just like six people on a moped and the cars are just nose to nose and all this stuff, but it keeps moving and I’m like, hell no. I wouldn’t drive this. And I’ve heard that India can be like a hundred times worse.

[00:45:55] Tom Barrasso: at least a hundred, maybe a thousand. Vietnam was like, uh, like Thailand, [00:46:00] you’re describing it’s like a beautiful choreography where you see a thousand mopeds all descend on one intersection at the same time, and they all just know how to go around each other and people walk right through it, and it’s totally fine.

[00:46:11] Tom Barrasso: And in India it’s just constant beeping. It’s like tuk-tuks coming four ways with a truck in the middle of the road. And like someone’s trying to help someone reverse into an intersection and like everything’s just happening all at once and everyone’s angry and everyone’s honking and yeah, it’s definitely not choreography, it’s just chaos.

[00:46:27] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Okay. Well there you go. Some massive differences. Do you want chaos and very spicy food?

[00:46:35] Robbie Wagner: Yeah,

[00:46:36] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, I like Indian food, but I think I’m too weak for it.

[00:46:39] Tom Barrasso: Every

[00:46:40] Tom Barrasso: day.

[00:46:41] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Every day,

[00:46:42] Robbie Wagner: yeah.

[00:46:44] Chuck Carpenter: Every, there’s just, I just live on the toilet. Let’s just be honest. I, I’m in India. I live on the toilet.

[00:46:50] Tom Barrasso: You also would have a hard time finding whiskey, just to relate that back to, to us. Right. ‘cause um, depending on what state you were in, I was in Kerala and it’s all run by the government. Um, [00:47:00] and so most hotels, most restaurants, they don’t serve alcohol of any kind and definitely not hard liquor.

[00:47:06] Chuck Carpenter: Oh wow. Oh, that’s funny. We’ve had

[00:47:09] Robbie Wagner: No, not visiting there.

[00:47:11] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Tell me, I don’t want to go. I’m just going to, , England for good, , Indian food. we’ve had some whiskeys from India. em, root was one that I recall off hand. We’ve had a couple of their expressions and. Fucking terrible. I don’t know what it was.

[00:47:26] Chuck Carpenter: It was like, it looks fancy, it’s got nice packaging. They have all these like things, so you, you feel like maybe this is good, but it wasn’t. it was like cow’s butt hole.

[00:47:37] Tom Barrasso: Maybe they keep the good stuff to themselves or maybe they just don’t have enough of a market to get good at it.

[00:47:42] Robbie Wagner: If you have nothing else available, how would you know if the stuff that you make tastes good?

[00:47:48] Chuck Carpenter: Right? Yeah. I mean, they’re out in the global market though, and you’ll see it all over the place and it’s well marketed and the branding looks nice and it’s like, it’s got a lot of potential and then you try it and [00:48:00] I’m like, I would rather drink whiskey out of a plastic bottle than this. that was my experience.

[00:48:05] Chuck Carpenter: I don’t know. I want it to be

[00:48:06] Chuck Carpenter: better. Just hasn’t.

[00:48:08] Robbie Wagner: We did the, uh, the whiskey advent calendar, and I think there were two or three from India in there. without reading the description or where it was from and you tasted and it was terrible, you’d be like, yep, that’s probably from India. And it was, so maybe they’d pick the wrong ones.

[00:48:21] Robbie Wagner: I don’t know. Would be down to try more of them, of course. But, , yeah, haven’t, haven’t had good successes so far.

[00:48:27] Tom Barrasso: Well, sorry I couldn’t bring any with me, although, to be honest, I don’t know which ones I would pick because, uh, it’s probably overwhelming and, uh, I I wouldn’t know how to pick up from a shelf. Honestly. Even being here in Switzerland can be challenging. I have to like put Google translate to half the packages to figure out even like what I’m, what I’m looking at, what it has in it.

[00:48:46] Tom Barrasso: so I can’t imagine going to a liquor store and being like, which whiskey is good in India?

[00:48:50] Chuck Carpenter: You’re on the French side too, the Swiss French, not Swiss German, right? Yeah. Since you said Frank’s earlier,

[00:48:57] Chuck Carpenter: Frank,

[00:48:58] Tom Barrasso: look, oh, the currencies for [00:49:00] the, the Frank. But, I, I honestly have no idea where I, people I, in one single day, I in, in one town, I had someone speak Italian, someone speak, Germans would speak French and someone speak Spanish to me and I was just like, I don’t know what I’m gonna get. I don’t know what they’re gonna start speaking to me in,

[00:49:16] Robbie Wagner: They’re all similar enough.

[00:49:18] Chuck Carpenter: German. Yeah. Very similar to Italian. Yeah. There you go. What do you speak any of those languages, Tom?

[00:49:30] Tom Barrasso: Uh, not well. I speak very poor Spanish and Italian. I studied Italian and then I self-study Spanish and have been to Spanish speaking countries, but now I just confuse the two.

[00:49:42] Chuck Carpenter: Hmm? Yeah. They like overlap in your mind. I can see where that would be easy to do.

[00:49:45] Tom Barrasso: Yeah, but they’re close enough. French, I make no effort to, I’ve been to France and they don’t even like it when you try. So it’s not worth trying. At least the Germans will give you some applaud for attempting and you know, a little of encouragement like, oh look, baby’s first German. Where it’s, look [00:50:00] at ‘em

[00:50:00] Chuck Carpenter: Oh, right. Yeah. I was gonna say, they’re gonna be cynical. I mean like be nice I guess is like, they were like, oh, thank you for trying, you are very bad at this.

[00:50:08] Robbie Wagner: Yeah,

[00:50:09] Tom Barrasso: Exactly. And then they just speak English to you. ‘cause they speak English perfectly.

[00:50:13] Chuck Carpenter: Right. Yeah. So it’s easy

[00:50:15] Chuck Carpenter: enough.

[00:50:15] Chuck Carpenter: Okay. So you used to work in, uh, at a manina company. Some people call this fang or manang or whatever else we’ve decided to appropriate and make it menon now ‘cause there’s more letters.

[00:50:27] Chuck Carpenter: This is a fun throwback to the Muppets, so on and so forth. , So yes, you, you worked at Amazon and Facebook.

[00:50:35] Tom Barrasso: Yeah,

[00:50:36] Chuck Carpenter: Okay. Tell us about that. You worked there, you don’t work there anymore. End of

[00:50:41] Robbie Wagner: Huh, done. Good

[00:50:42] Tom Barrasso: those are, factual statements.

[00:50:45] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. I try to, you know, we do a lot of research at this show and we’ve got a team of literally zero people, um,

[00:50:53] Chuck Carpenter: working day and night.

[00:50:55] Chuck Carpenter: I guess

[00:50:55] Tom Barrasso: a lot better than those. Oh my God. Better than those account managers that are all [00:51:00] Just chat GBT now who send you 41 messages that are all slight variations of the same thing. Dear first name, please. Why have you not responded? We have an incredible opportunity for you.

[00:51:09] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, for sure.

[00:51:10] Chuck Carpenter: maybe you’re busy, but are you not busy? Feel free to click my Calendly or cow.com link and set up time with me. Oh, I don’t want to. Why do you have my name? No farming from LinkedIn. Let’s talk about how terrible LinkedIn is, just that it exists. it’s a platform of lies. You must be. Your non-authentic self and be on there and be like, that created great value. Anyway, sorry,

[00:51:37] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, that’s all you say on everything.

[00:51:40] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, yeah. I just wanna talk about, I was having dinner with my family the other day and was thinking about business.

[00:51:48] Tom Barrasso: Oh man, you joke, but I, I remember one of our senior engineers, so when I started out at Amazon, I was in a subsidiary at PillPack. , And we had a, a front end engineer who’s like that, who [00:52:00] spoke in a language that was like, you know, delivering, you know, business value through, uh, you know, in incremental improvements to blah, blah.

[00:52:07] Tom Barrasso: blah. You know,

[00:52:08] Tom Barrasso: driving, driving successful

[00:52:10] Robbie Wagner: in Amazon now.

[00:52:11] Chuck Carpenter: I was gonna say he’s probably done well because of it. You know, you just robot your language so disingenuous in

[00:52:17] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Yeah. I had a, uh, like my manager’s manager was like that. Like, he would just talk and you would be like, these are big words. you’re very smart. Yes. , And I could never do that. I, I mean, that’s part of why I never was promoted. I guess.

[00:52:31] Chuck Carpenter: There you go. You’re the flip phone of the engineering world.

[00:52:36] Robbie Wagner: So. You mean I’m the better option.

[00:52:39] Robbie Wagner: The

[00:52:39] Chuck Carpenter: it’s, it’s, It’s subjective, right? I, I don’t think it’s a bad option. It’s just depending, it’s just like being a nomad in the world. It depends on what you want, Robbie.

[00:52:48] Robbie Wagner: That’s true.

[00:52:50] Tom Barrasso: That’s some good manager speak. You know, it’s like you come to them and they’re like, it depends on what you want in the world. I’m like, yeah, but I wanted a promotion like, well, it depends.

[00:52:58] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. It depends on you not [00:53:00] sucking anymore. I’m gonna need you to do less sucking and more doing. How about that? Yeah. and your doing should also not suck.

[00:53:08] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. No, it was actually nothing about work at Amazon to get promoted. You’ve heard many times it’s just like, is your promo doc good enough? Did you do all of the Amazon things? Like it has nothing to do with how much work you ship. You could ship like one line of code and they’d be like, oh, yes, you can talk the talk you, you can be promoted.

[00:53:27] Tom Barrasso: Yeah, there was a book that I’d read and now I’m gonna forget the name of it. , But they had this concept, actually it was towards the end and they were describing, it was like return on, you know, the concept like return on capital invested, right? If you’re building a business, it’s like, if I give you a thousand bucks, can you give me 1,100 and how quickly, so how much am I gonna get back?

[00:53:45] Tom Barrasso: It was, theirs was like return on politics invested. And so it was basically trying to get at that thing that everybody knows where it’s like you’re at that three person startup. You know, what you can’t do is politics. ‘cause you know what you can see immediately when there’s three people sitting at the table together, is [00:54:00] someone bullshitting you?

[00:54:00] Tom Barrasso: You’re like, well, did it work or not? Did you ship it? Is it there? Can I use it? And then you’re at one of these big companies and it’s like, there’s a function of scale and the number of managers and the way that communication works, that, return on politics invested is massive. It’s ‘cause like, if you’re at the Amazons or the Facebooks or whatever, if you go from senior to staff, staff to principal, you go from like whatever, $150,000 a year to 1.5 million, you’ve like 10 x yourself.

[00:54:28] Tom Barrasso: When you make those big jumps, what are you gonna do at a startup? You’re gonna be like, can I get promoted? I’m the third engineer here promoted to what you’re, you’re already the third engineer. Like, what do you want to be? You know, so there’s no, there’s no return and there’s no need for politics.

[00:54:42] Tom Barrasso: So the value add is neg basically negative if you’re at a big company. And that’s all there is. It’s just your personal benefit is maximized by. Your ability to communicate and navigate the systems that they’ve built?

[00:54:58] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. And it’s very [00:55:00] hard to get promoted, and then everyone that does get promoted decides, you know, they’re at that level, should this person get promoted, they get to weigh in and it’s like they think it’s this big fancy thing, so they don’t want everyone to have it. So they like artificially like stamp everyone down and like, yeah, it’s, it’s a shit show and.

[00:55:20] Robbie Wagner: I’m not gonna keep talking about that.

[00:55:21] Robbie Wagner: I do have one more question for you. If you were not in tech, what other career would you choose?

[00:55:27] Robbie Wagner: And to clarify this could be you could just magically get a

[00:55:31] Robbie Wagner: skill, like

[00:55:31] Robbie Wagner: if it’s a thing you think

[00:55:32] Robbie Wagner: would be to be Yeah. If you’re like, I love basketball, I would’ve been a point guard. You know? I don’t know.

[00:55:38] Tom Barrasso: oh man, that would be pretty incredible. I mean, I have dabbled, and I thought about this. My degree was in chemistry. I. Have bounced back and forth within the software world. and outside of it, is in this world. I also get compensated enough that I’m happy. ‘cause I would go with like being like some master carpenter or something, you know, like I, I would just suddenly have amazing skills to [00:56:00] do.

[00:56:00] Tom Barrasso: Like, no, no screw joinery, you know, no nail joinery and just all the wood pieces beautifully fit together. Like you see in those Japanese, they’ve been doing it for like a thousand years. They, they know how to cut them to like a millimeter precision by hand. and then their furniture.

[00:56:14] Tom Barrasso: You come back a thousand years later and you’re like, wow, it’s still there, still standing. That IKEA desk, I put it outside for a day and it, you know, melted in the rain.

[00:56:21] Tom Barrasso: But this thing, like, it survived 15 earthquakes and, you know, three wildfires and 18 dynasties.

[00:56:27] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. I mean that’s a, that’s definitely a craft that lasts, so. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think in, at this day, if you have that level of skill, you certainly should have the ability to get the income for it, right? ‘cause

[00:56:42] Chuck Carpenter: the people who can pay for quality can pay big money. They’re like, yeah, I would like a heirloom piece for my family.

[00:56:51] Chuck Carpenter: You are gonna pay,

[00:56:52] Robbie Wagner: $45,000

[00:56:53] Robbie Wagner: bed.

[00:56:54] Chuck Carpenter: $45,000 bed. That’s an untapped market. You know, they’re $45,000

[00:56:59] Chuck Carpenter: frames. [00:57:00]

[00:57:00] Robbie Wagner: $45,000 beds.ai. That’s my

[00:57:02] Robbie Wagner: new startup. Uh,

[00:57:04] Chuck Carpenter: Exactly. Designed by AI and only purchased by PHP developers. So.

[00:57:10] Tom Barrasso: I think you’re describing the velvet rope economy. It’s like this, this new world that we live in where people make good money catering to the uber rich, and they can just do crazy, ridiculous things like make mega yachts. $45,000 bed frames. ‘cause there’s someone who’s crazy rich who’s just like, yeah, I want that.

[00:57:28] Chuck Carpenter: and there’s enough of them, there’s enough millionaires to really like get into that, that space. There’s the $20,000 phone that just looks like a, yeah, I saw this. A recent like unboxing of a $20,000 phone is it

[00:57:42] Chuck Carpenter: of looked No, no it wasn’t. it came in nice packaging, I guess. It had like leather on the back of it and in general kind of looked like

[00:57:50] Robbie Wagner: But it’s just an Android phone, I guess.

[00:57:52] Robbie Wagner: Then,

[00:57:53] Chuck Carpenter: probably it was called like vent two or I don’t know, something like that.

[00:57:56] Chuck Carpenter: You should look this up. $20,000 cell phone. So it’s quite the [00:58:00] opposite of a $15 flip phone. But I think the technology isn’t anything better. Than what we have now. Like I think technologically, it’s like, you know, the nicest Samsung or whatever, or iPhone. But it comes in really fancy packaging and you know, it has like a built-in leather cover or something.

[00:58:21] Tom Barrasso: And it comes pre-installed with the I Am Rich app.

[00:58:24] Chuck Carpenter: Yes. That’s all you need. It just people see it and they know, oh,

[00:58:27] Chuck Carpenter: okay. You know, yeah.

[00:58:29] Robbie Wagner: That’s all you want.

[00:58:31] Chuck Carpenter: There’s a market there. Someone should make the I Am Rich app for CloudOne. That’s a great idea. Um, except for the fact that we don’t actually have the ability to charge for apps and the users definitely don’t have enough money to pay for them. But, um, you could still make an app that is just a button that says I am rich so that people I am rich. And then when it opens, it just says in spirit, I’m rich in it just puts up a, a Bitcoin address and says, please pay us.

[00:58:56] Chuck Carpenter: Pay

[00:58:56] Chuck Carpenter: us

[00:58:56] Tom Barrasso: The donation wear, I am rich.

[00:58:58] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.

[00:58:59] Chuck Carpenter: I am [00:59:00] The sublime text of apps.

[00:59:04] Chuck Carpenter: Anyway. Yeah. All right. Well, Chuck already knows, but it is dinnertime for me. yeah. What do you wanna plug before we end, Tom?

[00:59:11] Tom Barrasso: Oh, what will I plug? Um, I mean, obviously cloud phone, make an app, make my day. it’s just there’s a world that you can bring over to flip phones or just try ‘em out, I think, or you forget that there’s a huge market of people in places like South Asia and Africa that, would love to be able to access a number of services, but the world isn’t designed for them.

[00:59:32] Tom Barrasso: , And if nothing else, you know, add, add a break point, blow everyone’s mind and throw in a one 60 or a three 20 pixel break point into your tailwind setup and see if you can, make your, your website scale down to that level. If you need a a reference, try an Apple watch and see if it works there.

[00:59:48] Tom Barrasso: Then figure out how to make it work without a touchscreen. And then now you’ve got. A feature phone app. yeah, so that’d be good. Uh, I’m also

[00:59:55] Chuck Carpenter: the, what’s the, URL for Cloud phone real

[00:59:58] Chuck Carpenter: quick.

[00:59:58] Tom Barrasso: Oh, of course. [01:00:00] cloud phone is, uh, CloudOne Tech, so you can learn more there. You’ve got linked to our developer website, documentation

[01:00:07] Robbie Wagner: ‘cause I went to cloud phone.com and it doesn’t load.

[01:00:11] Chuck Carpenter: See, this is why I asked these questions. Sorry. And you were saying you were reading.

[01:00:15] Tom Barrasso: I was just thinking, uh, a book that I started reading, I’d done a lot of reading on, on the Kindle of all places, not using the browser super often. mostly just going to Libby and sending, uh, books over, but got the Inevitable by Kevin Kelly. I’m not fully on board yet with the concept of in, of Inevitable ism.

[01:00:32] Tom Barrasso: This idea that like, ‘cause tech is so amazing. It had to happen and, you know, software had to eat the world. The smartphone had to consume all of our waking time. But, he certainly makes a lot of compelling predictions

[01:00:44] Robbie Wagner: said it sounds like Sam Altman wrote it. Just ‘cause he’s like, AI will take over everything.

[01:00:51] Tom Barrasso: maybe he donated.

[01:00:52] Robbie Wagner: I don’t know. Yeah. Sorry, I didn’t mean to derail you there.

[01:00:56] Tom Barrasso: No, no, I think it’s a, it is a fascinating ‘cause it was written in 2016 and [01:01:00] I think Kevin Kelly’s done a lot of interesting work. Uh, he was one of the original editors to co founding editors to wired back in the nineties. you know, when the internet was, uh, just becoming sort of a thing. It was, you know, like Chuck was describing, you had h TM L forms.

[01:01:15] Tom Barrasso: Actually, that may not have even been there yet. I think it was that, that h html one did that even have, that’s, that’s before my time.

[01:01:23] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.

[01:01:24] Robbie Wagner: I’ve had frames or no frames at some point. I know

[01:01:26] Robbie Wagner: that

[01:01:27] Chuck Carpenter: Right. Yeah. I don’t know. I think it might have had like, yeah, I think, uh, it definitely had anchors and

[01:01:34] Tom Barrasso: It had the blink tag, which was probably the best tag ever.

[01:01:38] Chuck Carpenter: Marquee or Blink, that should have been a hot take.

[01:01:41] Chuck Carpenter: yeah,

[01:01:43] Robbie Wagner: doesn’t marquee, hasn’t it been deprecated for like 20 years,

[01:01:46] Robbie Wagner: But it still works or something?

[01:01:47] Chuck Carpenter: yeah. Yes. Correct. All of those things. anyway, I don’t know without reference whether forms were there, but I think form element was there.

[01:01:56] Chuck Carpenter: So, and I think it would’ve just been input type button in it [01:02:00] though. He did not have a button element, for sure.

[01:02:02] Tom Barrasso: You would’ve needed it, wouldn’t you? A submit button

[01:02:04] Tom Barrasso: and

[01:02:04] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. It would’ve been input type submit or something like that, or input type. Yeah, that’s what it would’ve been. I think it was that instead of button. There definitely was a time where there wasn’t button yet. Anyway, I digress. Kevin Kelly read the book,

[01:02:19] Chuck Carpenter: get Interested about Less. I think that’s, uh, less being more kind of thing, not less, less.

[01:02:24] Tom Barrasso: Yeah, just know that there’s an entire world out there. The internet is connecting on a very different, a very different plane, , even in India. I thought this was fascinating, the number of websites that don’t work because they have so many mobile networks that are IPV six only.

[01:02:38] Chuck Carpenter: Hmm.

[01:02:38] Tom Barrasso: They don’t even put up NAS six four or d or um, so that you’ve got no backwards compatibility layer.

[01:02:44] Tom Barrasso: They just don’t bother. Why do it? You know, Google works, YouTube works, Facebook works, but you know, it doesn’t work. It’s like half the websites in the world.

[01:02:51] Chuck Carpenter: Wow. Interesting. Good to know.

[01:02:54] Robbie Wagner: All right. Well, yeah. Thanks everyone for listening. If you liked it, please [01:03:00] subscribe and we will catch you next time.

[01:03:05] Chuck Carpenter: Just kidding. We’ll play that in an actual outro.

[01:03:08] Outro: You’ve been watching Whiskey Web and Whatnot. Recorded in front of a live studio audience. What the fuck are you talking about, Chuck? Enjoyed the show? Subscribe. You know, people don’t pay attention to these, right? Head to whiskey.fund for merchant to join our Discord server. I’m serious, it’s like 2% of people who actually click these links. And don’t forget to leave us a five star review and tell your friends about the show. All right, dude, I’m outta here. Still got it.