55: Native Apps, Progressive Web Apps, and Media Monopolies

Robbie Wagner: [00:11] What’s going on, everybody? Welcome to Whiskey Web and Whatnot with myself, Robert William Wagner, and my cohost, as always. Charles William Carpenter III. How’s it going, Chuck?

Chuck Carpenter: [00:25] That’s my echo effect. It’s the only thing that could potentially make you sound even more important. Yeah, well, Robert, it’s going.

Robbie Wagner: [00:35] Yeah, I mean, my day started off super early because Caitlin had a glass of water on her nightstand, and when she tried to snooze, her alarm proceeded to spill it all over the room. So we were all up as soon as that happened, which was fun.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:52] Yeah, there you go. That’s the whole, like, little water wake you up kind of thing. Splashing the face with water, just instead splashed everything with water.

Robbie Wagner: [01:02] Yeah, I mean, it was certainly effective. Both our alarms went off, and we would usually snooze them and knock it up for, like, an hour, but we were up.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:09] Nice. Well, oddly enough, I think yesterday was my first day not really eating food, and I woke up right along the alarm at six. No snooze whatsoever, and I just got up and started things and didn’t feel groggy, so that was a plus.

Robbie Wagner: [01:27] Interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:27] 06:00 A.m. You just need to skip food.

Robbie Wagner: [01:31] So you’re saying not eating things that are bad for you is actually good for your body?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:37] There’s a rumor. I don’t know if there’s any science to back it, and we can talk more about that later. Whatnot things? But I am eating food. It’s just very limited in both caloric and diversity.

Robbie Wagner: [01:53] Got you. Yeah, I got bit by a mosquito on my forehead, so I’m scratching this a lot. If you’re wondering.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:01] It’s because it’s the only part you expose to the elements, like t-shirts, shorts yeah. Cover everything but my face.

Robbie Wagner: [02:12] It’s fall.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:13] Yeah, we should get those octopus face masks, and then you’ll be protected.

Robbie Wagner: [02:18] Yeah, we should. Anyway, let’s get some whiskey going.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:22] Okay, let’s move on to whiskey. This is very boring, so we need whiskey to make it interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [02:27] I thought you were saying the Four Roses is boring.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:30] No.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:31] The guy at the ABC store was like, I got a couple of others. And he’s like, oh, these are good choices. And then, like, the Four Roses, he was like, I don’t know about this one.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:39] Yeah, it’s not new and different enough. So I’m a fan of Four Roses across the board. They’re cheap, 80 proof on up. I think their cheap stuff is decent and great for cocktails, and I like a lot of their other things. It’s a beautiful distillery, so it’s certainly worth visiting in person too. I mean, I really like their barrel strength offerings. And then you can get the ones that have, like, a few different mash bills, but they’ve become pretty hard to get these days, so I remember I used to be able to get them all the time, $50 a pop, all six or eight variations. And then now it’s like, no, they’re all in bunkers, probably, or something.

**Robbie Wagner: **[03:16] It’s crazy how no one has money because, like, recession and whatever, and yet everything that you could possibly buy is way super expensive and sold out all the time. It doesn’t make sense.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:29] Luxury goods, I think people prioritize. I don’t know. Not sure.

Robbie Wagner: [03:32] True.

Chuck Carpenter:[03:32] And you have groups of people that are just clearing the shelves and have been for years, and so they got lucky.

Robbie Wagner: [03:39] That’s true.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:40] All right, that’s Four Roses, small batch select. It is a blend of two different mash bills. One of 75% corn, 20% rye, and 5% malted barley. The other changes the corn rye ratios to 60% corn, 35% rye. Still five malted barley, 104 proof, and anywhere from six to seven years old. Where you get the age statement, but good job. Our research department is really on it.

Robbie Wagner: [04:07] Well, so online, it said there wasn’t an age statement, but then in this little thing that’s attached to the bottle, it says a mingling of six and seven-year-old bourbons. So you just have to read the tag. People online.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:22] Yeah. Are you strange? V, K, and F. Oh, I selected three of our nice. Okay. Yeah, I knew that was like a Nashville yeast thing, so it seems interesting. Anyway, let’s smell it. Whoever smelt it and delt it.

Robbie Wagner: [04:40] It smells simultaneously very fresh and also very smoky. It’s like a weird combo.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:48] I get some floral, but.

Robbie Wagner: [04:50] It’s like if you took something like some fresh cut grass or like lemon juice and burned it. Like a fresh smell with some smoke.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:02] Sure you don’t have allergies or something?

Robbie Wagner: [05:04] Oh, I have lots of allergies, so.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:06] It could be different there.

Robbie Wagner: [05:07] Take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:09] Yeah. I get a little earthy, and I get a little floral, like a flower bed.

Robbie Wagner: [05:14] Okay. I can taste some, like, caramel. Maybe some toasted marshmallow.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:26] See, I’m feeling a little bananas, Foster, maybe.

Robbie Wagner: [05:29] Oh.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:30] Yeah. Let me revisit. Peppery finish. Little hug. Definitely got some of that rye in there.

Robbie Wagner: [05:40] I’m not getting the banana. I can see what you mean. Like something flambeed that’s sugary.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:45] Yeah. And maybe even, like, something more bitter than a banana. Like a banana peel. You smelled burned fruit, and I taste burned fruit. Flambeed with sugar.

Robbie Wagner: [05:56] That’s fair.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:57] Caramel.

Robbie Wagner: [05:58] Yeah. I think it has a good mix of, like, a little bit of burn, a little bit of rye for some little bit of spice there.

Chuck Carpenter:[06:04] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [06:04] Get a little bitter overall, not bad.

Chuck Carpenter:[06:07] Yeah, I would say that. I don’t feel like I’ve ever had a Four Roses where I’m like, this is terrible. Right? Yeah. Tasty enough. Wouldn’t have again. What do you think? How many tentacles?

Robbie Wagner: [06:21] I’m going to give it five and a half.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:23] Yeah, I’m using the five range myself, so I’m going to just stick with a flat five. Not a half. I’ll round down. Yeah, five it is. So would have some other things instead.

Robbie Wagner: [06:34] I didn’t dislike it, so I was like, I wanted to give it that extra half.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:37] But we’ll say five. Well, again, five is above average. Four average.

Robbie Wagner: [06:43] True.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:43] Five. So for bourbons non-wheated. I like it. Although I’m going to say I like their single barrels possibly better, which is interesting because I think that’s a lower price point. It’s not barrel-proof, but a single barrel, like 100-proof. Maybe they’re like $35. They’re, like, one of the best bangs for your buck in that range.

Robbie Wagner: [07:05] What’s the point of doing a single barrel if you’re going to water it down? That seems kind of silly.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:12] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [07:13] Like, we picked this because we like this one and then altered it.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:17] Yeah. Instead of doing it as barrel-proof and charge more money.

Robbie Wagner: [07:21] I don’t know. Yeah, that’s true. Be able to sell, like, 50 more or whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:25] Yeah. I’m not sure. I always end up getting them at Costco. Maybe that’s why they’re like $35, too. Oh, good deal. They’re tasty. It’s just like a win-win. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [07:33] Costco probably buys one barrel and then makes, like, thousands of bottles.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:39] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [07:39] That sounds like their jam.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:41] Yeah, they’re a volume game. Maybe that’s really what it’s all about. I feel pretty good about a five there. So, dear listeners, give it a shot. Not bad. I don’t remember the price point.

Robbie Wagner: [07:52] I just bought it today. I think it was 50 to 60, something like that.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:57] Yeah, it seems about right. Yeah. Definitely getting the more that I sip a little, I definitely get more pepper. Like peppercorn on the finish. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [08:06] I’m not mad at that.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:07] No, that’s your jam. Got some rye in there. Not a full-on rye. It is a Bourdon whiskey with an E.

Robbie Wagner: [08:15] I was looking at other whiskeys just because there were a bunch there, as there always are. There was a Whistle Pig bottled in barn. I thought that was a clever play on the play on Bottled in Bond. We’ll have to try that one.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:30] Yeah, that’s funny. Yeah, I think WhistlePig is pretty decent. It just tends to be overpriced for me. This is not bad. It’s pretty good. Yeah. Oh, it’s $160. Why?

Robbie Wagner: [08:41] Yeah, that’s why I’m a little bit scared to buy them because I’m just like, I haven’t heard anything amazing about these. So are they worth the price? I don’t know. The barrier to entry is definitely there.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:54] Yeah. I’ve tried probably a handful of their stuff, and I’m always like, yeah, not bad. I don’t understand, though, still. Why? It’s way more than Sagamore, whatever else. Yeah. And they were sourcing for a while, too. I believe they are distilling, selling their own distillate now. But they were another one that was sourcing stuff out. Let’s put this nice metal top on and tell you it’s from Vermont or whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [09:20] That’s my dream. Do no work, but make it look pretty. Right?

Chuck Carpenter: [09:25] That’s true. There you go. Anyone looking to hire someone who doesn’t want to do any work, but will make it look good.

Robbie Wagner: [09:32] Well, in terms of whiskey, like.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:34] Your whiskey dreams, right?

Robbie Wagner: [09:36] I feel like I’m not going to be any better than anyone else at picking a mash bill and distilling it. So just get an okay one and then play with the variables after that. Get some cool barrels, make your packaging nice. I think that’s where the interesting stuff lies. Like most unaged whiskey is not all that different. I would say. Like, it’s different if you have like a full rye versus a full corn, but anything that’s in the middle, I feel like, is all just all kind of the same.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:06] Interesting. Have you had White Dog before?

Robbie Wagner: [10:09] Yeah, but not like there aren’t a ton of different ones you can get. I feel like most people are going to age it right, so you can’t compare like 50 mash bills of that.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:20] That’s true. Yeah. It’s kind of hard to get, I believe. Like, I’ve had it on distillery tours. That’s a little easier. And then, as far as being able to buy retail, I know Buffalo Trace does it, but I don’t think it’s very much very well distributed outside of Kentucky as far as I can remember. So yeah, I guess it would be a challenge in that sense.

Robbie Wagner: [10:41] Yeah, I don’t think it’s very popular.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:45] For good reason. It’s not very good. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [10:49] The only thing that it’s sold as is like the fake moonshine type of stuff where you would like to have some fruit flavor or something in there. That’s a little better.

Chuck Carpenter:[10:57] Yeah. And since it’s like not aged at all, it’s like very corn. A lot of corn going on. Yeah. Anyway, we don’t have to keep talking about random whiskey that we’re not trying today.

Robbie Wagner: [11:10] Okay, that’s fair.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:11] What are we talking about today?

Robbie Wagner: [11:12] Yeah, we were just going to talk a little bit about some of the trade-offs between building a bunch of native apps like using Swift, and I don’t know what I know that Androids and Java. I don’t know if there’s a name for the framework.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:28] I feel like there kind of is there’s like a middle ground there? It’s Java-based, but it’s a thing I don’t remember because I never did it, but I remember seeing some things in there, like testing platform or whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [11:41] Yeah, I built some Android stuff forever ago, but I don’t remember how it worked.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:45] I have the whole Objective-C now. Swift see approachable, more so I don’t know, which does seem kind of interesting. And I know that Apple has some learning to code things that you eventually get into Swift, so I don’t know, maybe there’ll be swaths of young folks who want to build iPhone apps that go that path. Yeah. What about Flutter, though? Is Flutter still cool?

Robbie Wagner: [12:13] I thought I’ve heard bad things about Flutter now.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:16] I’m not sure. I heard bad things, and then I started to hear really good things for a bit, and then now I feel like there’s a slight regression on that. So I don’t want to say for sure, but it does seem like a fairly major player in the space. I can remember a couple of enterprise orgs and they would actually work on their native apps in Flutter. So Flutter is kind of like Google’s own language, and then it compiles out, right? Yeah. I don’t know, though, that it compiles out. Does it compile out to an iOS app too?

Robbie Wagner: [12:47] I would think it would have to. I think that it’s probably trying to replace something like React Native and give you all of the things, but I don’t know for sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:00] Right. It’s like React Native is that layer over top that gives you familiar ways of working in syntax. It doesn’t give you everything React gives you. Now that we dove into it a little bit, we’re discovering I’d heard great things about Expo for a few years and looked at it a couple of times. Didn’t have much of a need, as we know. We dove into Capacitor just to see what options we have there. Some limitations in terms of APIs connecting to basically some of the metal trying to get into audio and things like that were a problem, but Expo apparently does that better, or React native does that better, and then Expo gives you a developer experience on top of it is what I am understanding. But it’s not great. I don’t know. Yeah, it definitely doesn’t do for mobile what Next does for giving you good patterns and opinions for regular React on a normal SAS app. So I’m finding that so far, yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [14:02] I think for me, I’ve heard a lot of people debate this sort of thing before. I think most of them lean more towards doing some kind of web technologies that then ship compiled native things for each thing or maybe even kind of like Capacitor kind of skips some of that. It’s like there isn’t any weird React Native, different syntax, or special components you have to use necessarily. Like they have a few, I think, for doing some things. But it’s really just kind of build your web app in whatever you want and then install Capacitor on top, and it will basically wrap it. It’s kind of like Electron for desktop apps.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:51] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [14:51] So it’s like you get an iOS app and an Android app, and I think it actually gives you an Electron app, too if you want it. But I found it was easier to do that separately. So you can do all of that, and it just works. The caveat, of course, being I haven’t built anything that needs a lot of like bare metal type of APIs. Like, I’m not doing any Bluetooth low energy integrations, whereas a lot of people might be that kind of stuff lags behind like they support all of that stuff, but it’s not the official library. So if they don’t update when the spec changes or whatever, you’re going to be behind, it’s not going to work the same, and no one guarantees that anything will be implemented. So, like, next iOS comes out, you might be stuck and have to rewrite all your code. So that’s a big downside. Well, the plus side, of course, what we’ve kind of danced and mentioned around here is, like, you just have to write one code base. So I think that, for me, is the big problem with doing native things. Like people swear by doing, let’s have three or four separate apps for whatever devices we need. Or maybe it’s going to run on like a Samsung TV and iPhone. Like. I don’t know. Whatever devices, and they would write them all separate, and then it’s like. Okay. So yes. You’re sure that you’ve integrated with the API now. But what happens if your Android team wants to make a change to a button look and feel or something, and then your iOS team does it differently, or those interactions don’t get copied over the same way you’re like repeating yourself and hoping that everyone copies and pastes everything correctly. Which seems error-prone.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:34] Yeah, which could be. And as long as, I guess, the major patterns for accomplishing things stay the same, I guess there’s like an argument to say that it’s unlikely I as an Android user, which I’m not. I would never do that. But say I was and I’m using the app there, I’m not going to pick up like an iPad probably, and try and use the app next. That’s not going to be my next step. And when I get on a computer to do something potentially if I needed to, and it may not even be on the table, especially an app that tries to be like native first, I’m not really going to do that. So I’m not really going to experience any UX challenges, I don’t think, because I learned to do it on my platform, and I’m kind of married to that. I think most people at this point aren’t really making the lead back and forth. I’m sure there are some, but overall, if you have teams solving the same thing, then there’s some diversions there. The user is probably never going to know. I think the problem is the overhead on maintaining all of those things. Because if you think about it, like if you have your API and you release whatever a Roku app and mobile apps, and then you have a major API change, and then all three of those things have to change at the same time, you might have some issues there. Right. If your data is solid and your access is solid for the most part or at least obfuscated to consumers, and consumers being those development teams at this point, then, hey, who cares? Go down your path. Just make sure people can log in and get subscriptions, and whatever they’re doing, that’s okay. Yeah, but you also have to be able to afford three different development teams in that case, too, right? The cost structure there. So if you have one to rule them all, you can contain those things. But man, it’s not the easy leap that I thought it would be like, okay, writing React-based apps and NextJS cool, we’re going to go over here and drop in our classes and use some hooks to manage some state locally. And you’re like, well, no, you’re not doing that so much. Doing some of that. But then you also want to use their stuff, the React Native stuff, so that you get some of the nicety and not just a web app.

Robbie Wagner: [19:01] Right. So at that point, if you’re basically using separate React Native component type of things because you want that Chrome you’re used to in iOS, for example, I wanted to use the Swift version behind the scenes to look the way that Apple says things should look. If you’re having to do that and having to use a separate thing that you don’t really control anyway, the argument for it being like an easier leap, like, oh, we’ll just do it in web technologies, kind of goes away. It’s like, well, then I could just learn the separate things from Swift and just build it in that, you know, like, I don’t really see the huge benefit other than it’s kind of somewhat React flavored, which is like a little more approachable for React developers, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:48] Yeah, I mean, if you feel like you can write a negative app in JavaScript, essentially, and feel familiar and you know how to solve those problems, that I think is appealing. Just haven’t found the reality to be exactly the same because you’re still kind of learning their way of doing it. So now I’ve got to learn another thing. Who cares if I can use JSX-looking things and write some normal JavaScript functions? I’m not sure that it’s giving me the most bang for my buck, but I don’t know. It’s an interesting thing. I don’t foresee myself becoming an Expo or React Native developer from a day job on a regular basis.

Robbie Wagner: [20:31] Yeah, I know nothing about doing it in Swift. I’ve never done a native app. I’ve always done the easy because, usually, we don’t have a huge team either. So I’m just like, I just want to wrap it and whatever. But does Swift have any kind of thing that’s like, oh, I want to write some logic, but I want it to be in JavaScript? Would they let you write some JavaScript functions and then execute them somehow through their stuff? Or do you have to write everything in their language? Because I think maybe that’s the benefit is like, for the pieces that are logically complex. Doing it in the JavaScript you’re familiar with, I think, is maybe the thing that’s helpful.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:11] Sure. And there you go. The impetus for these tools is, no, you cannot. I actually haven’t touched any Swift, but I have, a long time ago, tried to dive down the Objective-C path, and it’s pretty complex and different, and there’s a lot of other things to think about from a hardware perspective. I think Swift was supposed to have fixed this, but the whole memory allocation, garbage collection, yadda yadda yadda, kind of yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [21:41] Stuff I don’t want to have to ever think about that.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:43] Right, and so Objective-C, not for you. And then you would pour in, like, a web view if you wanted to do weblike things. But again, the syntax wasn’t like, and now drop JavaScript in here.

Robbie Wagner: [21:55] Right, that makes sense.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:57] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [21:57] But yeah, I do think something that’s lacking for the web is, like, any version of this that has good standards. There’s no reason that there couldn’t be an equivalent document to, like, what Apple has for Swift that says, like, this is exactly how you would do a button in the web and like, whatever, and basically lay out all those standards to where then if you wrapped it in Capacitor or something, you would be on the same track as Swift. I think the reason they don’t focus on that is because they don’t have a way to make money off of you making a web app that would just be wherever you want it to be. Swift, you’re locked into their stuff, so I get why they haven’t spent the time, but that would be really cool to have.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:46] Plus, the App Store is full of a lot of things.

Robbie Wagner: [22:49] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:50] I’m not like, oh, man, we need to reach out for inventory here. Right? Demands are being met.

Robbie Wagner: [22:57] Yeah, that’s true.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:58] I suppose that’s one of the things around a progressive web app, which was supposed to be like the next step of even Google was really behind that. Yet you feel like businesses don’t feel like they have a presence unless they’re in the App Store.

Robbie Wagner: [23:14] Well, I think it depends on your use case. The progressive web app is essentially just letting you install the assets. So it’s like a similar concept of downloading a 50-megabyte app or whatever, and then you don’t have to do that download anymore. You’re just hitting APIs because you got all the images and whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:33] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [23:34] I think it’s useful, but it’s not familiar. Like when you download some progressive web app to your phone, or you can even do them on your computer. You can do it like they work everywhere, but they don’t have any kind of like this is an app type of Chrome to them. So unless you’ve built it to look more like a native app, it’s going to be, oh, this is a website in, like, a container. This is strange. I’m sure some people have done it right. But what was it? Is it Hulu? Maybe that prompts you to install it if you open it on desktop. Have you seen that?

Chuck Carpenter: [24:10] I haven’t, no. Can’t say I’ve watched any Hulu. I mean, I’m doing work on this computer. Robbie, there’s no Hulu opening here.

Robbie Wagner: [24:19] Yeah, I’m not sure, but it’s one of the streaming platforms, and they want you to install their progressive web app. I’m not sure why. I think maybe it allows you to download shows on desktop or something so that then you could not have to have internet. Like if you’re using a computer on a plane or something like that, maybe it lets you do that.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:40] Yeah, there you go. It does with their normal apps. It’s a parody.

Robbie Wagner: [24:45] The one thing that has been that I’ve used as a progressive web app that’s worked well is Google Photos. They want you to use that progressive web app for desktop. And so you just get like a normal icon in your dock, and it just opens the web page. But it feels nicer to me when I have an icon, and it’s like a separate thing. I don’t know why.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:05] Sure. Yeah, I get that. Like, click the thing versus type in Open Chrome, type in URL. Yeah, there’s a lot of extra steps there.

Robbie Wagner: [25:14] Yeah. I don’t know where things are going to go in terms of progressive web apps. I think that was a compelling story that has not come to fruition yet, and perhaps it will. Perhaps you kind of need Android, or well, Apple is never going to do it. They want their app store. They’ll support it. But you need one of them to be like. This is the format. Like, this is the default. We want you to build everything like this. And then, we will provide the Capacitor layer or whatever on top. Then everyone will be like, yes, okay, I don’t have to build this 1000 times in different technologies. It’s just going to kind of work. Everyone’s agreed it’s going to work. It’s similar to how the browser vendors get together and go, okay, we want to have, I don’t know what’s something that would make like, this is the way we’re going to render a CSS grid. We agree it should work like this. If you had that kind of standard for progressive web apps across different device vendors, then you could just build in web technologies, and it should just work.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:13] Right? I guess the path to certain hardware can be a challenge.

Robbie Wagner: [26:18] I don’t know.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:19] Like, I believe things have expanded in terms of media in general, right? Like access to the cameras and access to audio and things like that. So, I mean, right now, we’re in a web app recording this. This is all a web app taking our video, taking our audio, and using Smart APIs to do a few things.

Robbie Wagner: [26:42] Yeah, I know. When we were working on Wuf, you can either upload audio or video, and it’ll take the audio from that, or you can use your microphone, but it actually didn’t work when we wrapped it in Capacitor, there were like some special APIs that weren’t supported or something. The web audio API support and Capacitor was not good. But this was years ago. Yeah. I think that’s a good example of the walls you hit when you’re trying to use these wrappers because they’re not the official thing. Like, if you had built an iOS app, it would work, but then I would have had to build an iOS app.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:20] Right. You wanted to take a proof of concept basic web app, and then you want to see, and now I apply this to mobile to get the next step.

Robbie Wagner: [27:27] Yeah, so that’s the plan sometime in the future is to try Capacitor again, because I’m hoping they fix some of those things, and hopefully it will work well enough that we can, like, I don’t need it to be flawless or flashy necessarily. I just want it to be wrapped in an iOS app and an Android app and release them to the stores and be like, hey, this is out there, so we’ll see how that goes.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:50] What’s my dog saying? I don’t know.

Robbie Wagner: [27:52] Yeah. If your dog is saying one of three predefined things we look for, we can tell you we should probably add some more robust stuff. We would have to talk to a real animal behavior scientist or something and ask more about the different frequencies of the barks and all that.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:11] Well, if you want all that when it comes to you, download Woof and request it so that we can say, hey, there’s a market fit for this. Let’s go see if anybody wants to contribute.

Robbie Wagner: [28:22] Yeah, well, so it’s going to be open source, too. So if there’s anyone that’s like, wow, this is cool, but I wish it handled these cases. There’s plenty of time to play with web audio API and do some of that stuff. So it’s open source now. If anyone wants to check out this app, that kind of works for figuring out what your dog is saying, you can go to Wuf, which is W-U-F dot plus, I think, is the website right now because, like Wuf dot, everything else was taken.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:50] Hey, we’re going to rewrite it in Astro, right?

Robbie Wagner: [28:53] We could we’re going to be rewriting a lot of stuff in Astro. So I want to open source Swatch and then rewrite its homepage in Astro. It would be cool to rewrite Swatch itself in Astro, but we’re pretty ingrained in the Ember ecosystem there. Yeah, we may not do that, but it will be open-source. So someone can it would take a.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:12] Lot of work to move orbit over into, like, Solid or something else. I don’t know. Well, no, it has a reactivity layer, right?

Robbie Wagner: [29:21] That’s the beauty of it not being in the data. It’s JSON API-specific, but it’s not Ember specific.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:28] Well, that wouldn’t change anything as long as you probably have to write serializers versus having them magically already. There?

Robbie Wagner: [29:38] No, I think there’s still magic. There’s less magic now. So there was a package that was Ember-Orbit, right? And it was made to be like Ember data where you just kind of like save this thing, and it’s like magic. I saved it. Yeah, but now it’s more like the Orbit primitives are what you use. So you’re like, I’m doing an update, I want to update these things, I want to save it or not because it wants to explicitly know everything you’re updating so that it can undo that, or it’s very transactional and specific about everything. So all of that, I think, is like the low-level API now because it was hard to get that sugar on top of it and maintain all of that. So I think there wouldn’t be a ton of work to convert it. I think, honestly, the part that would be harder is like the app itself just converting all of the Ember code to, well, basically, vanilla JavaScript and HTML, which would be a really cool thing to do. I just don’t know that we have the time for that.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:36] Right when you get your magic job where you don’t do anything.

Robbie Wagner: [30:41] The one where someone makes whiskey for me, and I make a pretty bottle in like a day and then sell it and move on.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:49] It’s a pretty smart marketing. Yeah, I mean, I’m already starting to come across that we’re converting our website to Astro and trying to quickly copy pasta some things over and tweak things to more regular HTML and JSX syntax. And one of the things that slowed me down yesterday, which I’ll have to come back to, is essentially a tab component, and you think about, like, okay, yeah, it shouldn’t be too crazy. Well, there are some limitations there, right? And so essentially, ideally, you don’t want a framework for this, you want it pretty basic, and then you want some script to run on the page and just add and remove classes. That’s the best thing you probably can do is drop these things in, get a click and add remove classes. So I was like, oh wow, this is some different thinking. I’m going to have to do some basic, like get elements and have them capture a click event around an anchor and then look at its child ID or whatever we decide upon something like that and just swap those things out.

Robbie Wagner: [32:01] I mean, I think it’s cool to go back to the basics and do the real HTML JavaScript solution, but I also think if there is like an existing Solid JS one that’s like a tab thing that’s similar to what we have, just use that. That’s what I did on the contact form. Like when you hit what does the button even say? Contact, us, send? I don’t know, whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:29] It says a few different things where you’re coming from on the actual on the form. Yeah. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [32:34] So whenever you hit. I think it’s to send, and it’s like disabled if the form is invalid or whatever. But when you hit it, it either is going to be like, oh, no, I didn’t send like whatever, or like, thanks, we’ll get back with you. Like the message. So we had the flash messages is what it is, a number. And then there was a view. Flash messages, too. I don’t know how many people call them flash messages. Like, I feel like it’s not a super common term, but toast is what I think most people call it. So there was a Solid toast, and I was like, okay, just going to use that. I don’t want to build a new one. You can always come back and make it better or implemented in lower-level stuff if you want, but just use a package if it exists.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:20] Okay, well, that is good to know. I’m considered that. Solid toast.

Robbie Wagner: [33:25] There’s a lot of Solid libraries. Solid, Solid libraries, meaning the libraries are solidly implemented.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:33] They’re good, and they happen to use the Solid technology. So hey, win-win. All right, I’ll look into that. I was really trying to extra challenge myself, but since there’s so many styling changes to also make, which I haven’t done, just, making it work and seeing if content is there. And then, now, let’s circle back and finesse.

Robbie Wagner: [33:53] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:53] Good to know.

Robbie Wagner: [33:54] I’ve been doing some styling changes. I worked on the blog stuff yesterday.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:59] Okay, good. I’m happy to defer that.

Robbie Wagner: [34:03] Yeah, I feel like just doing some here and there is better than, like, I hate being like, okay, this whole page needs to be different. Well, I’m not going to do that. What I want to do is, like, okay, the hero block is different. All right. I’ll move these three elements and change their styles. Like, boom, we’ll push that out because this site isn’t even live anyway. So I’m doing it piecemeal because I just don’t have the attention span for like let me sit down for the next 5 hours and restyle this page.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:30] Yeah, no, I think one-off thing and whatnot is good and a little exposure to the thing, and then now I need to focus on the thing that is my primary duty today. But getting some things done. I don’t love big branches either, so I’m probably at the point where once I have the content covered, push the big branch and then come back and fix some stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [34:54] Yeah, I’ve somewhat reverted back to working after work on some of this stuff because for a while, I was not I was like Caitlin, and I have been watching a lot of shows and hanging out and love that. Once Finn’s in bed, we just like do whatever for two or 3 hours and then go to bed.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:14] What are you watching? That’s what I want to know.

Robbie Wagner: [35:17] Yeah, so recently, like the past week or two, we’ve been watching, I guess, the previous season of American Horror Story. Oh, like, it’s the Red Tide. Well, it’s like the double features. There’s a Red Tide, and then there’s like the next half is, like, alien-themed or something. We haven’t gotten to that half yet, but it’s been pretty good. I always have liked American Horror Story. There been a couple of seasons that were not great. This one, I think the story is pretty good. There’s a lot of holes in it for my taste. Do you watch American Horror Story at all?

Chuck Carpenter: [35:55] Have watched it, but it has been quite some time. I want to say, like, fourth or fifth season. We kind of dropped off. I’m trying to remember what jumped the shark for us. I don’t know if it was the witches’ one, maybe?

Robbie Wagner: [36:06] The witches one wasn’t great.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:07] Yeah. And that might have been like, I don’t know.

Robbie Wagner: [36:10] And the freak show one was, I think, not the best. The first two were really good.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:16] Oh, I did watch the freak show one.

Robbie Wagner: [36:18] But yeah. So this one, I won’t give away, like, spoilers in case you decide to watch it, but there’s just holes in the story where it’s like, well, this might be a spoiler, kind of I don’t know. I’m trying to think of how to someone commits a crime. Right. And there’s police around, and police would, these days, have body cameras, their cars would have cameras. All of these things where it’s like, and they don’t explain how they got away with the crime or how it’s not on video or things like that. That kind of bother me. It’s like, this doesn’t make sense. This would not work.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:55] Right? It’s not true crime, you know.

Robbie Wagner: [36:57] Yeah. If you like, go, okay? I don’t care about it being actually accurate. The story is kind of cool. It’s a good concept. So I would recommend.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:07] Okay, fair enough.

Robbie Wagner: [37:08] There’s a lot of blood, though. If you’re not into blood, don’t watch it.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:13] I don’t know. Well, we started the House of the Dragon, so Game of Thrones?

Robbie Wagner: [37:18] I have not started yet.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:19] So started it. But then we had also been watching another show, and we decided, like, let’s bank a few. I think we watched, like, I don’t know, the first three or something and then had just finished last night, The Great, which is a Hulu show about Catherine the Great, but its subtitle is a sometimes true story. So it has some humor and little gore, and I don’t know yet. It’s, like, very well-rounded. So it’s like historical fiction, essentially. A bit comedic, a bit, like, raw. That’s really entertaining. So that was the second season of it. We finally wrapped up. I’d recommend that. So I’ll be coming back to House of the Dragon, though.

Robbie Wagner:[37:57] Nice. Yeah. I need to start that. Before. We were watching. AHS, I watched Echoes. I don’t know if we’ve talked about that yet.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:06] I don’t think so.

Robbie Wagner: [38:07] Have you seen that? It’s a Netflix show. It’s good. It’s like a limited series. There’s only like maybe eight episodes, and it’s that you’re done. And it’s about some twins who keep switching places, basically, and mayhem ensues due to that, as you might. But it’s a cool concept. I always think things like that are cool. Like thinking about how that would work in real life.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:36] Somebody had to do it. Where the idea come from. Right. And if I was a twin, I would definitely have wanted to do that at different times. Be interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [38:45] Oh, yeah, I think low stakes, it would be fun. We’re going to switch for this party or whatever, but switching for real-life things, I think, would be very stressful.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:57] Yeah, I don’t know, I’m sick of my job. Let’s switch jobs for a little while or something like that. Or what do you say we switch wives? They just won’t know weird stuff like that.

Robbie Wagner: [39:08] Yeah, that stuff would get complicated.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:13] All right, well, bear that in mind. I have not heard or seen that, but I feel like I’ve been on the Hulu HBO Max train for a little while. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [39:23] The only reason I went over to Netflix is because I’ve watched most of what I wanted to watch on Hulu.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:28] Apparently not The Great. You should come back to it.

Robbie Wagner: [39:31] Yeah, no, I think Hulu has been cranking out content because.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:36] They get some Disney money.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:38] Right? Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [39:38] I don’t know if they had much less stuff before or if it was just they are better at surfacing that it exists now. Every time I open it, it’s like we have this new show. Have you watched it? And I’m like, I haven’t. Let me watch it.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:52] Yeah, I felt like they were very much an aggregator before. Now they’re more like they have a lot more original content. That’s interesting. I don’t know.

Robbie Wagner: [40:00] Yeah, well, Disney owns 80%, right? So that’s bound to happen.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:04] Yeah. And it used to be a bigger split between like NBC and Disney and some other things.

Robbie Wagner: [40:11] Yeah, I think Fox owns the other 20%, which is why you have a lot of, like Fox and FX content.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:16] Yeah, well, that’s true. I wonder, though, so when Disney came in and bought a bunch of 21st Century Fox assets, I wonder if they got FX or something like that. So Fox essentially sold off a lot of things other than like news and something else, but they really pared down.

Robbie Wagner: [40:38] Let’s see what Google says.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:40] I love the Internet.

Robbie Wagner: [40:43] Yes, Disney owns FX. I am upset.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:48] They got a lot.

Robbie Wagner: [40:49] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:50] So? Yeah. I don’t know. I know I mentioned, I think, before on the podcast, but I was at National Geographic when 21st Century Fox came in and basically purchased all media assets, created this new company that was a for-profit rather than a not-for-profit, which is different than a non-profit. Right. Which is what National Geographic was in that way that they could sort of have these powerful the channel basically fueled the Society for quite some time. And eventually, they were like, well, this is dwindling also, so what do we do? So the Society breaks off, sells off, like magazine, channel, all these other things. And 21st Century Fox just had a bunch of these assets, FX and sports stuff and whatever else. So when Disney came in to come get that, they basically took that company.

Robbie Wagner: [41:37] Got you.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:38] And they bought everything there. And Fox was, like, scaling back so they can stay into being an informative, non-biased news network. Yes.

Robbie Wagner: [41:51] No, I mean, I don’t have anything against Disney per se. I think they do a great job with a lot of stuff. I just think it’s just annoying when one company has everything. Like, how is that not a monopoly?

Chuck Carpenter: [42:04] Such a monopoly. Yeah, it feels like it at this point. It’s a monopoly of my childhood, though, in some ways. How do you have Star Wars and the Marvel Universe? It feels like so much to handle just right there. And yet they’re like. We also have, I don’t know, if we do another Sons of Anarchy spin-off, it’ll be Disney back. Yeah, it’s just weird.

Robbie Wagner: [42:26] Like, I don’t associate Disney with some of the content that FX would put out. Like, there’s got to be conflicts of interest there. There’s someone on some board somewhere who’s like. This doesn’t fit with our brand. Like, if we are to whatever in this show, it will be like people will realize Disney owns it and whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:45] Yeah, I don’t feel like they’re caring about that at this point. Yeah, it used to be sort of like, we want family-friendly things, but diving into even the Marvel and Star Wars worlds feels a little like, well, there’s some dark sides of those things. They’re like, yeah, cool. They don’t technically own Wolverine at this point, but they might at some point in the future. Yes. Like, Sony got in on that. They don’t own Spiderman, so no dead uncles or whatever. But there’s some other stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [43:18] Yeah, that reminds me. I didn’t see all of it. I was in passing on Twitter. But have you seen the trailer for the new Deadpool coming out?

Chuck Carpenter: [43:26] I haven’t.

Robbie Wagner: [43:27] It’s basically just like Ryan Reynolds. That’s who it is, right? Reynolds. I get all my Ryan’s confused.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:33] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [43:33] He’s walking around his house contemplating what to do for the next Deadpool movie. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t have ideas. He’s like, product placing himself, like pouring his Aviation Gin into a cup. Like, hey, Hugh, do you want to play Wolverine again? He’s like, yeah, sure. And then it pulls up the Deadpool logo, and then the three Wolverine claws slice through the Deadpool logo, and it gives you a date. So, like, guessing Wolverine is involved.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:03] That’s funny because I thought that Hugh Jackman was dead set on retiring of Wolverine after the last one. But good for him.

Robbie Wagner: [44:10] I don’t know if it’s real or if it was just for hype, but that would be cool. I know they’ve had a thing back and forth where he complains about Wolverine or whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:20] Right. Because they’re both vigilantes, and Deadpool is, like, originally an assassin, but then sort of hero assassin. So, like, basically being on the line very much like Wolverine. I don’t know. Ryan Reynolds brings top of mind. I guess the other show I’m watching is Welcome to Wrexham.

Robbie Wagner: [44:40] Oh, yeah, we talked about that, some, I think.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:42] Yeah, I think I might have mentioned that I wanted to, or maybe I started one, or whatever else. It’s okay. I think if you were not, like, really into soccer, you might find it boring. Although it’s funny because I think they’re trying to make it play to less soccer-centric people. There’s not a lot of soccer in the show, but it’s more about them coming into this town, and there’s so much love for this team. And it’s like the center of the town, almost like a college town, if you think about it. But instead, they have a professional football club, and it’s like the oldest continually operating stadium in the world for this. And things that these Hollywood guys are doing.

Robbie Wagner: [45:20] It’s really structurally sound.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:23] Yeah, there’s a part that’s completely shut down, but they have this weird situation that there’s like a third party that owns that. So even though they own the club, they don’t own the stadium. So being able to do renovations has been like another, yeah, I don’t know. I feel like he could just pour some Aviation Gin all over it, and it’d be fine.

Robbie Wagner: [45:41] Yeah, I think Ryan Reynolds has a shitload of money, so I don’t think that should be a problem.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:48] No, I think they have funds to put into it, and they are, to a degree, they’re trying to get out of this very bottom tier and get back into, like, a competitive potential.

Robbie Wagner:[46:00] Yeah, I think it’s interesting, and I think this is kind of like a phenomenon that they’ve talked about on some new show or something, where basically a lot of men like Ryan Reynolds idolize him, basically. And I think anything he’s in is really good. I don’t think I’ve seen anything where I’m like, wow, this sucks.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:21] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [46:21] So any time that it’s like, oh, Ryan Reynolds is going to be in this, I’m like, oh, cool, I’m going to watch that. Like, this is a good show. Whereas I have the total opposite thoughts about The Rock. And it’s not that he’s not a good actor and that the things he’s in aren’t good. I’m just not excited. It’s a different, and I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe because he’s so buff and has this wrestler persona, but I don’t know.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:46] Yeah, he’s like a superhero now. I’ve seen Ballers in the car. I don’t really watch his movies, per se, because I feel like he’s in a lot of corny stuff for me, and I don’t have a guilty pleasure of watching something mindless. But I did watch Ballers, and I liked that it was like that kind of was like Entourage, but for pro sports. It felt like to me. And he’s likable. But I do see what you mean. He’s like an action figure. Yeah, right. He doesn’t seem like reality, even though, like, Ryan Reynolds is technically actually an action figure. But he seems, like, kind of humble. He’s Canadian, right? So they’re like he’s polite and humble in ways I saw there was an interview with him on that Netflix show with David Letterman, And My Next Guest Is, and so they do one of those. And again, it’s kind of reinforced that feeling about him. Kind of a regular dude. I mean, you’ve got a lot of money, and you had a lot of successful endeavors and whatever to this path, but you don’t really, like, begrudge him that. And it’s interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [47:50] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:51] So maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s just the Canadian connection. I don’t know. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [47:54] I don’t know. I would love to talk to a psychologist about the phenomenon of why people like Ryan Reynolds because I agree. It feels like even if someone dumped, like, a pile of cash in his yard, that man worked for that. I don’t know. I just don’t dislike him. I don’t know why. It’s weird.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:14] To a degree, they’ve kind of done that. Right. So he invested in a spirit company, Aviation Gin. Right. I don’t know how much he was at the ground level in terms of developing this, but he certainly was in the throes of, like, marketing it and progressing it and funding it, and then it sold for a whole bunch of money. So essentially, somebody put a bunch of money in his yard.

Robbie Wagner: [48:42] Well, true.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:43] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [48:43] I did love the day after the Peloton commercial fiasco. He was like, hey, you want to be in the Aviation Gin commercials? And that was genius. I was just like, oh, hey, how’s it going? It’s been a rough day, or whatever they say, it’s a good one.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:03] Yeah, you got that. He’s in the Mint Mobile commercials because he’s an investor there. And then I don’t know if he’s an investor in TikTok, but TikTok is a sponsor of the football club, and they’re non-league, like, way out of clubs. So to get them involved means there’s going to be a lot of exposure. Aviation Gin also sponsor the club, so there’s obviously his connection. There the other guy, Rob, which I always forget his last name. It’s always sunny, guy. He’s done well. And isn’t it like the longest show?

Robbie Wagner: [49:40] Or one of the it’s been on forever.

Chuck Carpenter:[49:43] Yeah, but not longer than The Simpsons. So it’s not the longest, but it’s like up there. Let’s see one of the longest shows and continuous. So between that and syndication, I’m sure he’s all right.

Robbie Wagner: [49:55] Oh, wait, it’s only has 15 seasons.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:58] 15 years is a long time.

Robbie Wagner: [50:00] Yeah, but Law and Order SVU is on, like, season 23 or something.

Chuck Carpenter:[00:50:05] 30.

Robbie Wagner: [50:05] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:07] And The Simpsons is on pretty long too. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [50:10] The Simpsons, I think, is the oldest. I think it’s like actually 30 years. Like three decades.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:16] That would make sense. I can remember when it wasn’t even a show. It was like a snippet on the Tracy Alman Show in the something crazy.

Robbie Wagner: [50:25] Yeah, I don’t remember that.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:28] You weren’t a kid in the 80s with your parents had cable.

Robbie Wagner: [50:33] No, I was a kid in the we actually didn’t have cable, I don’t think. Which I thought was weird because, like, as a kid, you don’t really know, like, who’s watching what, but I think it was just like over the air, like networks for a long time. Well, my mom loved soap operas, and that’s kind of was her jam of just watching those during the day. And I don’t really remember us as a family watching stuff at night other than maybe stuff on like a VHS tape or something, but right.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:02] Definitely not Beta. Beta was gone before you, no.

Robbie Wagner: [51:06] Actually, we had laser discs on a few things. Oh yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:10] Okay. I never had laser discs, but I had friends who had laser discs, and it was kind of cool except for when it would stop, and then you’d have to flip it over to watch the other part of Star Wars or whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [51:23] Like a record. Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:25] Funny in that way.

Robbie Wagner: [51:26] Yeah, I think it was a cool idea. Like, I bet there’s very few of them now, and if you had them, they would be worth a lot of money, I feel like.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:35] Someone, I guess.

Robbie Wagner: [51:36] Well, yeah, I don’t know if there’s a big collector’s market.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:39] Or a player even anymore. That’s true. Obviously, you can get record players constantly, but records were around for like 100 years, so it’s a long time to sort of build up those collections before there was all of this audio innovation. So we’re creeping up on October definitely by the time this comes out. So what do you got for your Halloween plans?

Robbie Wagner: [52:02] Yeah, no, actually Caitlin was texting with her dad and step-mom earlier, and I think we’re going to take Finn up to their neighborhood and trick or treat and stuff, which I thought was weird cause it’s like do babies trick or treat? They can’t eat the candy.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:17] Right, right.

Robbie Wagner: [52:18] And then they were like, well, no, they still can. Like everyone takes their babies anyway. And then I guess we just eat the candy. I don’t know.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:25] Well, I mean, you do you but what we did was we put maybe even both, I can’t recall. But for Aiden, we definitely just put him in this, like, pumpkin suit. We sat off front hanging out with our friends, and people kids came to get candy. We just gave out candy. Yeah, it’s like he can’t go anywhere, so he’s not going to miss out.

Robbie Wagner: [52:48] It seems odd to me he could.

Chuck Carpenter:[52:49] Walk the first time he went trick or treating, but we only made it three houses, and we were dressed actually Star Wars. I was a Consolo. Sarah was Princess Leia, and he was Chewbacca. This, like, tiny Chewbacca costume. It was amazing. And made it to three houses. And the fact that he couldn’t just keep going to the same house. He threw one of those three-year-old no. I guess maybe it was just two, whatever terrible two fits just laid on the ground screaming until we just took him back and said, here, some candy.

Robbie Wagner: [53:19] Because there was too much process and going to multiple houses.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:21] Yeah. It was like, I can’t do this. Why can’t I just go back there? I like that.

Robbie Wagner: [53:25] Yeah, I liked this one. Yeah, I get that. I think as kids. You don’t realize how easy it would be to just go buy the big assorted candy. If I had known it’s like $10 for a thing of all the candy, I would want. And I don’t have to walk the houses for hours. I’d just do that.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:47] Very entrepreneurial of you. How can I solve this problem easier?

Robbie Wagner: [53:52] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:52] There we go.

Robbie Wagner: [53:53] But you never have candy on hand, so you don’t know that. Unless your family happens to have it all the time. Then you might know this is less of a rare commodity, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:06] Right. Well, I really want to make sure that Caitlin knows about the concept of family costumes because I’ve done that a few years, and I cannot wait for it to be over. But unfortunately, it’s not this year.

Robbie Wagner: [54:18] What are you doing this year?

Chuck Carpenter: [54:20] We’re simplifying it. So we’re doing some classic costumes. Like Aiden’s going to be a ghost, I’m going to be a skeleton, things like that. In the past, like last year, we did Peter Pan as the theme. Okay. Here. Before. It was like Toy Story with the Star Wars thing. I’m good. I’m an adult. I don’t even eat that candy. Why do I have to dress up?

Robbie Wagner: [54:40] It seems like you’re getting progressively easier.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:43] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [54:43] Like Star Wars. Sounds pretty complex. And then Toy Story could be complex, but then Peter Pan could be easy, depending on what you did for that. I don’t know.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:53] Except for I was stuck with being Captain Hooks. And then it was like a bigger pain. I was like, can we just not do this anymore? And it wasn’t like, well, we can’t not do it, but we could do something easier. Yeah. So I’ll take that.

Robbie Wagner: [55:08] Yeah, I think that’s fair. I mean, I think you’re getting to tradition standpoint where you can’t stop it because you got to do it every year.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:17] Yeah, but at a certain point, the kids are going to be like, well, we don’t want you doing this.

Robbie Wagner: [55:21] That’s true.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:23] We’re really just trying to get to the point where basically the kids are like, no, you’re not going to tell us what we’re wearing. We’re going to pick what we want, and it’s going to be different. And so it’s no longer a family theme. Right. I think we’re getting there with my son.

Robbie Wagner: [55:37] Soon, they care more about going with their friends to get candy and less about your opinion.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:42] Yeah. And they want to wear what they want to wear. I don’t know. I mean, it’s miles above what I did many times, especially at this age, which was essentially like you went to the store, and there was this crappy, hard-to-breathe plastic mask over just the front of your face with an elastic thing, and then a plastic suit that you would wear over your clothes that kind of had like the He-Man costume, but not really. It just is a print on plastic.

Robbie Wagner: [56:13] Yeah, I know. I think one of those for Ninja Turtles that was like a shell that didn’t connect from the back to the front. It was pretty crappy. And I was Zorro, I think, three years in a row, I kept reusing that costume.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:31] Zorro is all but gone, essentially. It wasn’t like kind of a crappy Antonio Banderas remake, but essentially before that, like some TV show.

Robbie Wagner: [56:40] Yeah, I don’t know. I’m not sure. I mean, I know. Yeah, I thought it was cool when I was whatever age that was. I haven’t heard of like there’s not a resurgence of a new Zorro or anything.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:53] We should pivot and do a new Zorro production.

Robbie Wagner: [57:00] We used to build web apps. Now we make the new Zorro.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:04] Somebody is Zorro. We’re going to have to cast someone. It’s not us. Robert William Wagner is Zorro.

Robbie Wagner: [57:16] I could believe that. I’m in pretty good shape.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:21] We’ll talk about my non-food next time.

Robbie Wagner: [57:24] Yeah, we’re out of time here. So thanks, everybody, for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe. Leave us some reviews and stuff. Check those little stars. Catch you next time.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:38] 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: [57:53] 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.