95: Next.js, Vercel, and Subscription Models

Robbie Wagner: [00:09] What’s going on, everybody? Welcome to Whiskey Web and Whatnot, your favorite podcast about whiskey web and whatnot. With your hosts, RobbieTheWagner and Charles William Carpenter III. What, am I too loud for you?

Chuck Carpenter: [00:24] A little bit, there’s a little reverb. That’s how.

Robbie Wagner: [00:28] Alright, how is it now?

Chuck Carpenter: [00:28] Much you’re eating the mic right now. But folks were experimenting with some new technologies to see if we can further enhance your listening delight. And Robbie’s failing, so apologize for that.

Robbie Wagner: [00:41] Well, yeah, turns out it’s a really complex problem, and sound engineers have hard jobs that require specialized knowledge that we don’t have. And maybe we should just hire them to make our stuff not suck.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:56] Maybe we’ll depend on the software on the other side. That’s hard to say. So trying out, yeah, I mean, just for those curious on the technology side of things, typically we record in a software a SaaS product called Riverside. How does that relate to podcasts? I don’t know, but trying Zencastr so that we can get in a state of Zen with our voices.

Robbie Wagner: [01:21] Yeah, so it’s similar. It lacks some of the features. It’s like a new thing where they kind of do everything, which is kind of cool. So they have a built-in monetization thing, and they have automatic transcripts, and they do video. You can do like video RSS feeds and various stuff. So I’m excited to try it out. I hope it lives up to the hype. One of the cool things you can do is this. Tell me a joke real quick, Chuck.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:49] Robbie had a tan.

Robbie Wagner: [01:51] Did you hear that?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:53] Yeah, you can add effects. And that was a rim shot, which was about all that joke deserved.

Robbie Wagner: [02:00] Yeah, I put you on the spot. We weren’t ready. But, yeah, you can put in your own sounds. I haven’t changed the default ones yet, but I’m thinking one day we’ll put in the intro and outro music, and we could just do it all live. I mean, obviously, we can add it and then post-production, too, but it could be cool to just do it all and then hit ship, not have to wait two weeks for things to come out. Just be like, we’re done.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:23] Boom.

Robbie Wagner: [02:23] Listen to it.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:24] Push it when it happens.

Robbie Wagner: [02:25] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:26] Push it. I haven’t even been drinking yet, by the way, just so you all know.

Robbie Wagner: [02:30] Well, we should be. Let’s get on that.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:31] Let’s get on it. All right, so a continuation of the bottom shelf series, which we reserve for Robbie and myself to share. We wouldn’t do that to a guest. Today we’re having the basic Ancient Age Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. So this is the non-age stated, but we know from previous episodes that by law, if non-age stated must be a minimum of four years. I’m sure they pop it right out at four years and 2 hours. It’s proofed down to 80. It’s a Buffalo Trace product, so they don’t really give you the mash bill percentages, but it’s their mash bill number two, which has corn, rye, and barley, pretty much like all the other ones. Ancient Age has a few other expressions. There is the Ancient Ancient Age, which I believe is a ten-year and has some stars on it and some other fancier things, but harder to get. So that doesn’t apply to this particular series. Let’s just start at the baseline and see where we go from. Right. No fun pop on this one with a screw cap. At least the bottle is metal. We’ll give it that.

Robbie Wagner: [03:37] Glass, you mean?

Chuck Carpenter: [03:38] Yeah, the bottle is glass.

Robbie Wagner: [03:41] If it were metal, that would be pretty cool.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:43] There you go. That’s our whiskey company. All right. So I think I’ve poured enough of this.

Robbie Wagner: [03:49] I don’t know if you mentioned explicitly, but this is Buffalo Trace. Did you say that?

Chuck Carpenter: [03:54] I did. Mash bill number two from Buffalo Trace.

Robbie Wagner: [03:56] Yeah, because it’s confusing because it’s like, one of the ones that they don’t own the name or something. So there’s, like, another company that technically is bottling it even though they do nothing. It’s weird.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:08] Yeah. The way they have to label things because it’s distilled. It’s basically distilled by Buffalo Trace. And then I’m sure the trademark is owned, and so they’re, like, licensed to distill for them or something of that nature. But it’s in pretty it’s an old brand. I think it’s been around since, like, the 40s or something. But it was well-known in Kentucky when I lived there.

Robbie Wagner: [04:31] So it actually smells very metallic to me.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:35] I’ve ruined it. Yeah, it’s the metal bottle it’s in. Translucent metal bottle. It’s like some stuff Iron Man invented.

Robbie Wagner: [04:43] Smells like sour cherry to me.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:45] I was about to say kind of cherry cola. I get a light cherry cola, which is nice and, like, maybe a little mildewy, though. Like cherry cola and mildew.

Robbie Wagner: [04:57] Yeah. There’s something not good.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:01] Well.

Robbie Wagner: [05:01] Somewhere in there.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:02] Bottoms up, brah. Yeah. I get a little metallic taste of it. It’s almost like having, like, a flat RC Cola out of a metal can where you can taste the can a little because it got flat in there. Like warm flat and then, like, cold again.

Robbie Wagner: [05:21] Yeah. This brings me back to when everyone starts first having alcohol, and you don’t buy the good stuff, and you get, like, pop off vodka or, like yeah. Shit.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:30] But that stuff’s painful to drink. That stuff’s so bad that you follow it up with, like, Mountain Dew or, like, Hawaiian Punch or something. Like you have this strong sugary chaser.

Robbie Wagner: [05:43] Yeah, I guess I’m not that much disliking this. And the thing I always go back to is I remember that one. I think it was like, I don’t want to say the wrong name, but it was the square one.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:56] Offend.

Robbie Wagner: [05:57] I think it was, like, red, and it was from some warehouse or something. I don’t know. But we gave it, like, a one or a two, and I think that was, like, one of the worst ones. I wouldn’t want to take another sip of it. And this is not that bad.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:12] Yeah. Okay. So there we go. And given that it’s only 80-proof, it is pretty mild in terms of how long it hangs around. So yeah, my first taste had, like, that metallic more like flat cola to it. I’m going to give it a little more, though.

Robbie Wagner: [06:29] Yeah. To me, it kind of tastes like if you took Jack Daniels and added some whiskey flavor to it. It’s got some of the same bad qualities and kind of wateriness. That’s not my favorite, but you can feel that there’s a couple of good tastes trying to come through.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:47] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [006:47] They just don’t quite land.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:49] It’s just not a sipper, and it’s not, like, terrible in that, but it’s not one that you just want to have neat and sip on for a little bit. Yeah. As it sits, I almost feel like it has kind of, I don’t know, like a light floral flavor and a little bit like if you were just to take a piece of wheat and chew on that a little. Yeah, I’m getting a little of that, too, so it just isn’t really deep and diverse, but it’s not, like, bad, per se. I can see, though, in getting spirits of this quality why people would really get into cocktails. You’re like, this isn’t terrible, but it’s not great. What can I do with this? What are these flavors? What is it missing? And maybe I’m going to add some things here, some vermouth or some more herbaceous kind of spirits to it or something, or oh, it’s a little soury and a little sugar would do something. So I could see where something like this be fine to have around for experimenting with cocktails.

Robbie Wagner: [08:00] I think it’s like any other consumable. If you have filet mignon, you don’t have to do as much seasoning because it’s good. If you have intestines, you probably want to put a lot more flavors in that.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:14] Yeah, menudo. Right? You want to make Menudo out of the insides. You know what that is?

Robbie Wagner: [08:19] I don’t.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:20] It’s a Mexican soup made with tripe, which innards. So there you go. Anyway, chitlin’s also a Southern one. You may have heard of taking those things and flavoring them up. Well, so we had the Rittenhouse Rye, which was, I think, like $27. Right?

Robbie Wagner: [08:38] Did we have that? So.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:39] We bought it.

Robbie Wagner: [08:40] Sorry, we’re getting off track here, but I have one that’s unopened, I believe, unless there’s just a tiny bit out of it. No, I think it’s unopened.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:47] Well, then it might be.

Robbie Wagner: [08:48] Because I found it. Did we have it together, or did we?

Chuck Carpenter: [08:50] I don’t know.

Robbie Wagner: [08:51] We’ll have to look through our old episode.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:53] If you didn’t have it, I haven’t opened it. I don’t open, no. That would be risky on my part to continue to have it around. So then maybe we haven’t, but I know that we have a couple in this range that I feel will perform a little bit better. So I don’t want it to, oh, so far we’ve had a couple, and they’ve both been real crap, and you get what you pay for kind of thing. I don’t think that’s always the case. Well, I mean, even Buffalo Trace, right? That’s $25. And we rate it very well.

Robbie Wagner: [09:21] We rated that an eight.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:22] Yeah, this is probably around $20, give or take.

Robbie Wagner: [09:26] Yeah. Cheaper.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:27] I think, and a little under. But we did get a whole liter instead of a 750, so bonus. And this one feels more like a mixer to me. And like Buffalo Trace, I could actually sip. They’re both bourbons. They’re both low-cost. It’s a little night and day here. I’d give this like a three. It’s not horrible. I certainly would choose some other things for a few dollars more, but yeah, it’s just kind of too low-proof for me, too. So I would think, like, their higher-proof stuff might be worth a look. A three.

Robbie Wagner: [09:59] Yeah, I’m going to do the same. Like I mentioned before, I think a one or a two is kind of reserved, for I’m not going to drink it again. So I’m going to say it’s decent. I would like to try the older ones. They might be interesting. But yeah, three for me.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:13] Three and a quarter stars. No, that was a whole other show. So speaking of shows, we have one, and we have a loose format around these things. Let’s talk about some technical things.

Robbie Wagner: [10:25] All right.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:25] In particular, it feels as if, top of mind, yet again, Guillermo gets back at us again Next.js.

Robbie Wagner: [10:33] By having such damn good products, right.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:36] A good meta-framework that makes even React tolerable for Robbie. He won’t love it, but it’s tolerable.

Robbie Wagner: [10:44] Well, yeah. So I’ll give a quick rundown into what I’ve been doing. So we needed a new podcast site. We’re trying to take over some more of that. Stop using the out-of-the-box, like makemeapodcast.com websites, and be able to control some of our own analytics, look and feel, et cetera. So I used a Tailwind template just to get started. They have a very nice-looking one. And all of their stuff is in Next.js because they can’t write it in every JavaScript framework because that would be nuts. So it’s in next. It’s all pretty modern. I think it was like just a couple of minor versions behind on the latest Next or something. So it’s all the modern stuff. I think it’s kind of halfway in between the new, and you can correct me if I’m wrong on this, but there’s like the new app JS router or something versus the pages slash your page or something. Like, there’s something different there. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Chuck Carpenter: [11:46] Yeah, probably mostly just in reference. So the file router versus, like, the actual app router. You have some more choices to potentially make there. Yeah, there’s some path differences that you can do well in the 13 release anyway. They’ve been cranking out minor releases pretty quickly, doing more things, getting support for additional things. So it’s hard to say, like, something that maybe was built a month ago would easily be a few versions behind, given those things.

Robbie Wagner: [12:17] Yeah, I’m not sure exactly what I’m talking about there, but it’s not necessarily relevant.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:21] Not really.

Robbie Wagner: [12:22] But the things that are relevant are like things that haven’t changed where a lot of what it leverages is like getStaticProps. That’s what it’s called, right? I don’t use it much, so I don’t remember.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:34] Yeah, so it’s basically the flag for Next to tell you, oh, okay, we’re going to load data at build time and output static pages.

Robbie Wagner: [12:42] Yeah. So we leveraged a couple of Next.js features, which I think, and we’ll go more into this if you want to talk about OpenNext after this. But the things that Vercel excels at is like taking these specific things that Next does and giving you an easy way to use them and theoretically the most performant way. So things that we leveraged were the static props, and we did an API route to go ahead and grab all of the podcasts from the RSS feed, and then we paginate it from there so that you’re not because we were loading all 92 episodes or whatever at once and we were getting really bad performance scores. So we fixed that. We fixed a few things from what the Tailwind template had initially. It had, I don’t know, just not quite the right things you would want for everything. It used icons for the 1X, 2X, like speeding things up for when you’re listening to it. And I was like, well, what if I want 1.5 and 1.2 and different numbers? So I made it like a div with the numbers instead and added in different meta tags and trying to support things that aren’t really supported with meta tags yet, where if you post like a Spotify link in Slack, it’ll let you hit like, play on it sometimes. I thought we’d be able to do that with meta tags, but we can’t. Like, it’s not supported yet, but that should be a thing eventually, so we’re ready when that hits. Stuff like that. The thing that I think is weird about React I don’t know if this is how everyone does it, but the way this was structured is they have a whole bunch of JSX kind of in the same file, and instead of having, like, a component for each thing, they’re like, this page is like, export home page or whatever, and it’s like a giant, messy block of JSX for it. Whereas I would split that into a couple of different things and have more components. So it was messier than I had anticipated. But the whole deployment process was amazing. Vercel really shines. I guess we used it for swatch, for the download thing. We use it for that for our download page, but I had never used it for a website, really. And the fact that I can just be like, give me analytics, press go, and it’s like, it works, and then give me speed, insights, go, and it just works. And the dashboards look better than the dashboards I’m used to looking at. And it gives me even better statistics than third-party services would because it’s where it’s hosted. It knows everything about it. I was very pleased, and I didn’t think I was going to be as pleased. I was so pleased that I was like, just take some of our money and give us even more of these features because the free tier is very nice too. They have a lot baked in. But there were a couple of things that I wanted that we had to pay for.

Chuck Carpenter: [15:38] Yeah, and that’s the whole point of the business, though, right? At the core of it, it’s nothing but AWS. But the AWS console is such a terrible experience and so convoluted, right? Because it offers so much, and you really got to kind of know the levers and what’s going on. And they essentially part of their business model has to be like, we just get some money from just tricking and confusing people. So obviously, Vercel’s business model is about a providing a better interface over to that and then just really narrowing down on specific points, right? They don’t let you do anything necessarily, and they don’t deploy it any way you want. They say, we built this framework that works in this one very specific way, the best, and then at build time, create a thing that allows them to hook into and set up the infrastructure for in a very specific way. And that’s always been, like, kind of the secret sauce. Hey, they were able to raise a lot of money based on that sauce and based on feedback like yours right there, like a great experience. Fast. I want to see my stuff quickly. I think they were the first to do preview deployments. I don’t think Netlify was first, but maybe if they were sorry about that. I think it was my first. Well, I think when they were, what was it? Zeit or whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [17:05] Yeah, Zeit.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:06] That stuff was happening pretty early days, and then now with them expanding into, like, I mean, you got to think about it, right? If they’re giving you analytics and different, I mean, they’re just repurposing what’s under the hood. AWS is pushing those things up. Cloud formation stuff, logs, whatever they’re saying, all this is here. You don’t have a great interface to parse that. Let’s pull that all together for your thing. That’s one huge point around that, and the fact that they control the framework that goes into that means, like, start to finish, they’ve got you.

Robbie Wagner: [17:41] Yeah. And I think it kind of reinforces how I thought I would feel, having not really used React or Next much at all before that. Next, itself is really great. All the stuff it adds no problem with, other than, I guess, all of that is from React. Maybe there’s some custom hooks that it has or something, but I just don’t like hooks. Most of that’s in React. So the big thing that I think I don’t know if they’re working on this or if there’s like a lever to pull to make this work. I had mentioned to you I was like looking, trying to make their performance better. So it’s like, all right, what’s our bundle? And the biggest thing in there is React DOM, which I think you have to have, basically, if you’re going to use React. But for a mostly static site like ours, why can’t it do what Astro does and be like, okay, I see you’re using React, and actually, I haven’t used React and Astro, so I could be wrong about this, too. But we see you’re using React, we’re using getStaticProps, and all of this stuff is mostly static. Let’s just throw away React. We’re just going to generate you an HTML and CSS and JavaScript page and ship very little JavaScript because we don’t really need it. And that’s like what I’m missing. If they had a way to get rid of that extra stuff, because we don’t really need it to be reactive at all, except for maybe syncing the player up, needs some JavaScript for, like, if you play on the episode page and then go to the list, it knows which one is playing. So it’s like connected behind the scenes.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:13] That’s still kind of a state thing. So you mentioned getStaticProps. But getStaticProps is a next thing. That’s not a React thing, right? So if you’re on Astro using React to render your things, that’s fine. That’s one whole other thing. GetStaticProps is a Next thing because of its page-level routing and page level basically data decisions and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, there’s no, like, Astro Next.

Robbie Wagner: [19:40] Yeah, well, Astro is like that by default. So you write your JavaScript in the front, matter on top, and it goes away. So it’s your static server-side stuff because it just goes away. But maybe neither of them do this, but it would be cool if one of them was like, oh, I see you wrote your whole app in React, but we see that none of the stuff needs React. It can just be HTML. Get rid of the React. That would be cool.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:10] Yeah, you basically take all of your JSX rendered out and throw it all away or whatever because it’s all output at that point. You kind of wonder, though, because what you’re dynamically rendering DOM at build time when you get data. I mean, do you even need React to do that? You’re just saying I’m used to that syntax at that point. You’re just saying, well, I’m using the syntax and language helpers in dev.

Robbie Wagner: [20:39] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:40] I run it through. It does the thing at build time, and then I just throw it all away, and I just have a static site. Never does it all come back. So then it just makes you ask, in the first place, why did I ever reach for this tool?

Robbie Wagner: [20:53] Well, the reason I did is because it was built in that already.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:56] Exactly.

Robbie Wagner: [20:57] If I were starting from scratch, I would have done Astro with just vanilla HTML, CSS, or, I guess, Tailwind. I shouldn’t say CSS. That’ll get people confused. All I need is HTML and Tailwind for 99% of this site, but it would take me at least a few days to rebuild it in that manner, and I don’t have that time. So I’m like, I’ll just use what we’ve got.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:22] Yeah, but it does make you ask that question ultimately. I mean, I think there’s one Is, okay, what this site is, which is mostly static, and at build time, it’s getting new data for newer episodes. But then you’ve kind of said you might want to use headers and do an ISR tactic and regeneration. I don’t know. I just, for fun, wanted to use Cron jobs and other stuff just because they’re tools that were there. And I was like, oh, I want to look at that. But perhaps not the most efficient. But yeah, that’s at the end of the day. If you’re just really serving a static site that periodically rebuilds so that people get the new episodes, definitely is overkill to use Next, right? Unless you’re just like, I’m used to that, which you’re not. So you got a little taste of that flavor, but then at the end of the day, then it also comes back to all these other tools that are kind of attached to that. That, yeah, you like the interface. But is it reason enough to pay a little more for Vercel versus, like, a lot of talk now about SST and their release of OpenNext, which essentially has dug into the internals of the next build system and found out ways to leverage those bits to get it straight into AWS? In the same way, leveraging all the same edge functions and all that fun stuff that Vercel is kind of doing for you while those hooks are in the build. So, SST, which I don’t remember what that stands for, my experience with it.

Robbie Wagner: [23:01] Super Sexy Trees.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:04] I think we should get one of them on. I follow the folks who created that framework initially and that are working on that stuff. Dax is like one that’s like talking and streaming all the time. But I want to say it’s. Jay and Frank originally were the ones that I had interactions with because they created a company also called Seed.run, which basically takes serverless things, and now they do a whole bunch more. But they started out as get your serverless applications quickly on AWS with some sugar. It’s like very Vercel basically took care of the CI/CD part, and I was using it for that. But now they’ve expanded, and they’re doing all of these front-end applications too. So you can still do the serverless stuff. You can do front-end applications. OpenNext is their big open-source release, and it’s been around for a little bit, but now it’s like basically supposed to be as equal to Vercel in features of what it leverages in the framework. Now it’s not going to give you the visual analytics and dashboards and stuff that you get otherwise. But if you’re saying some of the comparisons I’ve seen is say you’re spending $100 a month on Vercel, you could spend $20 a month using OpenNext and these other things, but you might have more headaches. So I don’t know what that is worth in some context.

Robbie Wagner: [24:25] Yeah, I think for me, Vercel has a weird payment model where it’s like you get all this stuff kind of for free and then you add on ways to make your numbers even more exponential. Like, you get 25,000 analytics events or something. And then if you pay, you get 2 million or whatever, but you don’t pay for that or per website or anything. You pay for like a team, and then each member you add is like $20 a month or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:57] It’s the seats model a little bit.

Robbie Wagner: [24:5] Yeah, that’s probably good for really large organizations. Like if you have a dev team of 100 plus devs and you have 50 websites, you don’t want to pay for all 50 of them. You just want to pay for all your devs. That makes more sense. But for a smaller company like us hosting a quick website for our podcast or whatever, not that $40 a month for the two of us is like the worst ever. It just seems high for hosting a static website. So I feel like they should have a way to say like a la carte stuff. I don’t want pro everything necessarily. I just want this extra one or two things. I’d give them an extra couple of bucks and stay on the free plan. You know what I mean? That would be much more attractive to me.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:52] Right? Let’s, first of all, assume you’re not the target market. They’re not skewing their pricing plans in order to best leverage Robbie Wagner.

Robbie Wagner: [26:02] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:04] And like you said, it’s like if you are a big and you’re a team of 20 or 100 or whatever else, it’s probably relatively cheap for you to go to the seat model and let people spin up endless projects and sandboxes with all the same features and still feel like, yeah, we’re getting good value. So yeah, I don’t know, there’s an interesting balance there between how much you want to self-manage and also what you’re allowed to do. Because Vercel is probably attacking that enterprise market a little bit, but it organizations can be very strict about how many additional places you’re able to put code and use things and whatever else. And so if you’re AWS org and you’re like, no, you can’t do this extra thing on top of it. Figure out how to get your stuff here because everything’s here. Something like OpenNext would be pretty useful because Vercel doesn’t offer database connections, right? So you’re either on the path of finding your database provider as well or maybe you have to use databases in AWS or something else. And again, if you’re already in that ecosystem for some things, doing it for the rest might make sense too. I think it’s interesting, and I don’t want to take it to the sense of, oh, they’re challenging Vercel, but I do think that they’re trying to say you can get a lot of these things on your own. If you want to roll your own things to a degree, yeah, you get the nice sugar over there, but you can get some of these things. I mean, then there’s tons of providers, though, that offer Next.js support, right? They’ll help you deploy your server-side rendered app or whatever, static app and all of those things. I know Netlify does do incremental static regeneration. They do have the support for that other ones, though, which I know will support deployments of particularly the static stuff like fly.io’s thing is supposed to be about having more zones, right? So it’s super fast to everybody kind of thing. Cloudflare, they have the whole thing where you can push things into workers and whatever else. So, again, I think speed-wise, it would have some of the things, but it’s interesting how much focus on breaking down the internals of Next.js a lot of places have done, and just see what maybe we latch onto this thing too. I don’t know because that’s attached to one company who’s highly incentivized to change any internal API they need to to make it work for themselves. You could be like chasing that for a while.

Robbie Wagner: [28:42] Yeah, it’s like anything. I guess it’s all open source or whatever, but it’s like anything that’s built to make money is going to be optimized for the people making the money. They don’t want you to be able to do it as well as they can. They’re going to always be the experts because if you can, then they’re out of business. So, like, there’s got to be some level of, like, secrecy on what’s coming down the pipe, and like, you don’t want to. It’s not like, what’s a good example? Like like, when you put out a new iPhone, they tell everyone ahead of time of, like, this is what the size it’s going to be. So you can make cases. It’s not like that. It’s like the iPhone itself. They don’t tell you anything about the new software or internals of the hardware until it comes out because they don’t want people hacking the hardware or doing jailbreaking or doing any of that stuff. So it’s similar to that of, like, you protect your secret sauce, but you promote the generic part, I guess, and then everyone can still kind of benefit.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:47] Especially when you talk about greenfield projects, and they get you to seeing something in production as quick as possible, multiple environments available, like it’s ideal for startups. And then they want to scale with those folks. Right. So I’m sure a lot of these things that you liked around analytics and speed insights, I’m sure that their customers that have been with them for a bit have started to ask for these things, we want to scale up with you. And instead of paying four vendors, we could do more of it here, and then that makes it cost-effective for us. And now seats, where it’s two grand, ten grand a month, aren’t as a big deal because we’ve trimmed bills otherwise, too. And so, like infrastructure that you scale all the way up with.

Robbie Wagner: [30:35] Yeah, that’s true.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:36] And they’re having the potential for a full stack application because you have API routes, essentially serverless APIs, right there. You just ORM connect to your database if they do introduce a database aspect, given.

Robbie Wagner: [30:53] Well.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:54] They’re in AWS.

Robbie Wagner: [30:55] They do have databases.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:57] Okay, so they do have databases.

Robbie Wagner: [30:59] Yes, but I don’t know the scope. So I know they had.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:03] An announcement recently.

Robbie Wagner: [31:04] Called, like, Planet Scale, which is what the Syntax guys used for their thing, where they were giving away their shirts and skate decks and stuff because they had to create codes for everybody and then make sure that those codes were stored in a database and then stored whether it was active or not and if someone had used it or if it was locked to a person or not, that kind of stuff. And so they said you get 2 million reads and 1 million writes or something like that for free, like on the free tier.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:32] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [31:33] And they did that and used 1% of their total allotment or something. So they were basically saying you get a lot on the free tier. But what I don’t know. There was an announcement recently, I think, something about Postgres because everyone was joking of like, oh, it’s Heroku now because Heroku was big into deploy your Postgres and your front end and whatever. And so I think they have, they have a page that I see that’s Vercel Postgres, but it doesn’t to a layman here. I don’t know if this means for sure that they’re hosting it or how exactly you can connect to it. They do mention you need, like they recommend, an orm, yeah, so maybe there isn’t a lot baked in to make it nice. Like if you want a really user-friendly experience, maybe something like Supabase is still better, but I think they’re getting there. So they’re working on being full stop, like, everything you need for your app.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:29] Yeah, I did see the Vercel storage thing, and I think I got caught on the Redis stuff and didn’t really get into full the Vercel Postgres, like actual powered by Neon. Okay. Yeah, I know. They announced the storage stuff a couple of weeks or so ago.

Robbie Wagner: [32:47] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:48] And I think the whole KV Redis thing is where I got stuck. Yeah, serve files at the edge, powered by Cloudflare, and then a serverless SQL database built for the front end powered by Neon. So yeah, I mean, I can see where they’re again, trying to bring as much into their own infrastructure as possible. Okay. Vercel Postgres complex data, maybe. Well, that’s interesting. I don’t know much about Neon and kind of where that lives, but it does bring you in.

Robbie Wagner: [33:20] Well, it’s a noble gas. Okay, I’m not sure if it is, but I was trying to make a joke, but I’m done there.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:28] Yeah, that’s not your forte. Well, I mean, speaking of, I went to a barbecue this past weekend. A friend had smoked a pork butt for 20 hours and then let it rest for another few, and it was like this whole ordeal, and oh, this is a funny thing, and this is maybe more whatnot? But I’m still going to interject it right here. So there’s a thing called the Napa Bean Club. Have you heard of this?

Robbie Wagner: [33:52] Bean?

Chuck Carpenter: [33:52] Yeah, you know, like there’s wine clubs all over and whatever else. So there are these heirloom beans, and I guess, like forever ago, those farmers kind of got together, and they’re like, well, they do wine clubs, why can’t we do let’s do our beans. And our friends waited four years to get onto the Bean Club. Now they’re part of it. And you get like every quarter, like, six pounds of beans or something ridiculous. So speaking of gases.

Robbie Wagner: [034:23] Yeah, I can’t imagine that they would be like, I mean, I guess the draw is there were, like, varieties you couldn’t buy elsewhere or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:33] I guess so. Right. And they give you recipes with which to do different things with them, and again, was tasty, but I mean, obviously, within this recipe, it was like baked beans, but it had, like, coffee and molasses and other things in there and it was, like, very richly flavored. So I don’t know. They could have probably put crickets in there. And I’d have still been like, these beans are delicious because the sauce was good. But the fact that that exists and the exclusivity, I think, is a kitschy kind of part of the whole thing. It’s almost like tongue in cheek, but then they mean it because they shippy beans, and you pay them money.

Robbie Wagner: [35:10] I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a thing with everything. If you make it exclusive, people want it, which is hilarious. It doesn’t matter what the thing is. You’re just like, oh, we’ve only got three of these, though. And they’re like, oh, my God, take my money.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:23] Right. That’s how we ended up with some weird JPEGs. But again, that’s a thing for another day. Yeah. So, okay, [inaudible 00:35:34] everything in there, and as a growing early company, I can see where these things become more and more appealing over time. Yeah. Having disparate ecosystems to do different things because you can cloud all the things now. I think over time. You can get a little exhausted by that. I think you can end up spending crazy money and not really having a full grasp on your budget. So make it easy. They’re giving me everything.

Robbie Wagner: [36:04] I think that’s going to be the new age of products. And it’s a fine line because ClickUp kind of did this where they did everything where it was overwhelming. You came in, it’s like, oh, we connect to your blender, your toaster, your microwave, GitHub, Facebook, LinkedIn, anything you want, we will connect to. And we have all these integrations, and you have to learn all the commands for them and all this stuff. And then I was like, oh, my God, this is overwhelming. So there’s a lot of UX work there to make it not overwhelming, which I think Vercel is doing well, but I think we’re going to see a real emergence of everyone trying to do this, of like, okay, everyone’s paying $5 a month here, $10 a month here. If I can get rid of ten products for them where they’re doing that and charge them $50 a month, they will want that. And I agree. Zencastr, I think, is trying to do that for podcasting. We’re going to be able to do a lot of stuff here, but I think it’s very early still. So a lot of it doesn’t work, but they advertise a lot of it working, and we’ll give it a try.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:08] You know, that’s a comparable model to what has happened with subscription entertainment, right? Like, oh, cable bad. Cable bad. Cable keeps costing more and gives me 400 channels on a one and blah, blah, blah, blah. And now they have commercials. Okay, so now we’re getting more on-demand model, except for everybody thinks they can charge you, like, 10, 15, $20 a month for their slice of the pie. So it’s hard to put things together. Like, I chase, basically, soccer competitions, and it’s like I have to have four or five different subscriptions to get all the games that I want. This definitely isn’t better. So now you go into collusion with your friends and start exchanging logins and whatever else so that you can get around that system. But I think, yeah, the fallacy is that everybody thinks their product is worth so much too. And I think some of these subscription software services who maybe are just doing a very specific niche. There’s not always like the value per dollar in times of inflation, though I guess everything should be $100 a month.

Robbie Wagner: [38:11] Yeah, there’s like a lot of people online that are calling for cable to come back. Basically, they’re like, hey, I combined these 15 things. What should we call it? And everyone’s like, ha, yeah, it should be cable or whatever. Yeah, I really do think there will be some sort of, well, I mean, obviously, Disney has the power to do a lot there. Like they own a lot of the things which they’re going to do. They’re going to combine Disney Plus into Hulu and all of that. So I think at some point, Hulu maybe will be a more realistic option. I think some of the other ones. There’s always going to be blackouts of, like, they don’t get this because this company owns it or whatever. But I think there will start to be reaching across the aisle and collaborating and figuring out how do we all make money while getting people basically a cable experience. Let’s just talk directly to each other. We don’t have to deal with whatever cable company. We just deal directly with, like, oh, Disney wants to talk to Fox, and we want to both take a couple of each other’s shows or something and offer them on our platform. Cool. I think there’ll be more of that because why would you want to deal with the middleman who’s taking everyone’s money for no reason? You guys can already ship the shows right to my house. So just give each other money and make more money.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:29] Well, I think it was all about who was going to shoulder the burden of creating the infrastructure, right? Initially, cable was that shouldering the burden of digging lines and whatever, running things wherever you could, telephone lines, normal new cable lines, all of that. That became the burden of creating the infrastructure. And then came the power of that. We created the infrastructure. Now we sold up into whatever at AT&T or Cable Comcast all the cable companies. And then they were like the overarching negotiator, I guess, right? They get to tell HBO what their chunk is, and then they deliver it to the customer in a package. So yeah, I wonder if we started to get around that. So now they tried to do a direct delivery thing. Still kind of convoluted because if you’re smart, if you’re sitting back and you just want specific content that’s not so time-dependent, you can say, I want to watch the HBO show for a while. I pay them for a couple of months. Now I stop. Now I’m going to watch the Netflix thing for a little while. Now I stop. And you could just play the bounce-around game, really. Instead of having everything available all the time. Yeah, I fall victim to that mostly because who knows the whims of my children, and so they’ve just got a few things that would always be available to them, but otherwise, you can kind of but you could have your centralized negotiator and maybe the cuts aren’t so deep because the infrastructure is there. Everybody wants a piece of the Internet. So it doesn’t mean like Verizon or whomever else is going to own that because they own the fiber. I don’t know. I think Internet should be considered a utility at this point.

Robbie Wagner: [41:16] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:41:17.33] A regulated utility.

Robbie Wagner: [41:19] Two things there one, I think, well, let’s go with two. First, I already forgot what one is. My brain is really not working today. But two, this company that I worked for for a while, I’m blanking on their name now, and I’ll think of it in a second. But they basically were doing that of commoditizing making generic fiber. Right. So it was easy for you or I to be like, all right, I have Verizon tonight, and I’m pissed off at Verizon. I want like, I don’t know, another fiber provider, but I guess theoretically, any internet provider. So you could do Comcast or who else? Cox or whatever. And it was as easy as switching off.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:03] CenturyLink.

Robbie Wagner: [42:04] Yeah, switching off like HBO.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:06] Sponsored by CenturyLink.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:08] Yeah. So I think if you made it like that, where basically it was a generic fiber that connected everyone, and then internet companies were just doing the behind-the-scenes stuff, then it’s much easier to get like you’re not locked into. Oh, there’s only one provider in my area, and they can charge me whatever they want or all of that crap. And that makes it really easy. And I remember what my first point was now. I think the problem with figuring out I’m going to turn on and off stuff is we’re just tired, right? So HBO, okay, I have to remember to turn it off. I have to remember what shows are coming up and what do I want to watch, and I don’t know. And it’s just like decision fatigue and just like you almost need new services that cancel your old ones when you want them to. Just a big dashboard that’s like, here’s all the things that I pay for, and I don’t want to log into all of them. I just want to be like, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, start. That’s what we’re kind of at. And I would rather have pay a few more dollars a month and not think about that and have some service do that for me.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:18] You just created a startup for somebody, possibly. And if this, then that.

Robbie Wagner: [43:22] There we go.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:23] Managing your financial subscriptions. And you could just start it based on manage my entertainment subscriptions. And then it just some credentials and.

Robbie Wagner: [43:33] Some of that’s out there, but I think it’s more manual. It’s like they reach out to the company and tell them you want to cancel and stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:43] Yeah, I’ve seen those where.

Robbie Wagner: [43:45] I want this to hook into APIs.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:47] Yeah, automate it. Right? Not the whole like, oh, look at all the subscriptions I have and see what you can negotiate and or cancel. I tell you, if I want you to negotiate me a better one, because they also take account for your wireless bill, your cable bill, or whatever it was, and then they’ll try to negotiate on your behalf, and then they take a chunk of the savings, and that’s the fee. And I remember those. This is just manage them for me. Yeah, it’d be kind of nice, especially if you were like, oh, yeah, we’re going on vacation for a month, so just turn off everything for this month, for example, things like that. That would be kind of interesting. I don’t know if it exists but could be a good one. Could we do it with OpenNext?

Robbie Wagner: [44:29] Another one that I’ve always wished existed, which is top of mind since we’re about to be moving, is I’m moving? Just find everything that has the address I’m currently at and change it to my new address.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:42] That’s another nice one.

Robbie Wagner: [44:44] Because you will inevitably be like, oh, yeah, I got everything. I got it all. And then there’s like an automated subscription that you only get every eight months that comes and goes to the wrong address. Then it’s already delivered to the wrong address. What do I do? How do I get it back? It’s frustrating.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:59] And that’s if you notice the extra charge.

Robbie Wagner: [45:02] So, yeah, we are moving on Friday, and we are probably about halfway done packing. And I still have only packed like two boxes, which is similar to the last time we packed.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:17] Wait, so hold on, you’re halfway done packing, and you pack two? So Robbie only owns four boxes, and the rest is your wife and child?

Robbie Wagner: [45:25] No.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:26] You’re just not contributing.

Robbie Wagner: [45:28] Well, yeah, I’m working during the days, and I’m bad and slow at packing and stuff because I’m more and more convinced that I have ADHD and can’t focus on stuff. And as we had twice in this episode, my brain just stops working, and I see something shiny, and I’m like, oh, I forgot what I was doing.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:47] Squirrel.

Robbie Wagner: [45:48] So it’s hard for me to pack. Like, if I get a two-hour block to pack, I’ll pack one box, and Katelyn would have packed ten. So it’s like it’s just by default that I am not really in charge of that.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:01] I see. Well, there you go. That really gets to the heart and crux of it. It’s funny because my brother actually just sold his house. Well, he signed contracts, and whatever else, so he’ll be moving at the end of next month. So he’s in a similar situation. He’s moving to Boise, and it’s kind of trying to figure out the logistics of that and packing somewhere else. I suggested PODS. I like pods, especially if you don’t know where you’re going to land as much. They drop you off the pods. You pack up the pods. They eventually get your pods. They’ll store your pods. And then when you say, take my pods here, they bring them there, and then you have a few days to unpack, too. So it’s a little more like leisurely than renting a truck or having movers or whatever else.

Robbie Wagner: [46:46] Yeah, I don’t disagree with the concept, but we had movers that we really liked before, and they also do storage, so we’re just going to use them again. And they’re going to store all our stuff until we find a house because that just sounded easier.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:58] It’s a shame that you are going to be homeless with your baby, but.

Robbie Wagner: [47:02] Well.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:04] You’ve got a tent.

Robbie Wagner: [47:06] Yeah. I mean, if I had enough money to buy a house, I would.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:12] Timing is not great. Let’s just say that.

Robbie Wagner: [47:15] Yeah. Like, with the interest rates, you can afford a lot less than you could before, and we definitely couldn’t afford what we had before. So trying to get something less expensive so that we’re not as strapped for cash, and then also trying to be in a competitive market in Great Falls. And we offered on a house, and there were seven other offers, and we did not get it.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:40] That just goes to show you that the Fed did not necessarily fix inflation and definitely didn’t equalize the market. The only thing they did was screw the job market. They screwed the employment market, and then they gave a platform for retail pricing to gouge.

Robbie Wagner: [47:58] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:58] This feels like the only things.

Robbie Wagner: [48:00] Yeah. So we’re continuing the problem where the problem is that circling back to Target, that all corporations are making record profits every quarter. Record profit, record profit, record profit. And that’s the problem. If they didn’t make record profits and pay CEOs $250,000,000 each, then we could all afford to buy some bread and stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:23] Eggs are at all-time record profits.

Robbie Wagner[48:28] If someone would run for president, that actually would fix that. I don’t care if you do anything about anything else. Just take four years and actually tax corporations. Don’t give them all these loopholes and bullshit, and let them have record profits.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:44] All right, hold on, Robbie. This is not a political podcast because I feel like we can go down this route.

Robbie Wagner: [48:50] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:51] I mean, you can be middle of the aisle and definitely discuss some of these things in a way.

Robbie Wagner: [48:59] Yeah. I’m not going into the polarizing issues.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:01] I feel like right, Citizens United is the problem is that you can’t fairly tax the folks who are fueling politics, and Citizens United allowed corporations to be considered individuals and contribute directly to campaigns. Besides lobbying. I mean, lobbying aside, right? Like, all of that is a whole other thing. But the fact that a corporation has a much louder voice than you because they have more money, and that’s the reality.

Robbie Wagner: [49:33] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:33] So it won’t really matter.

Robbie Wagner: [49:35] Yeah. Well, nothing that we say matters.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:37] Well, let’s just find out what country we’re moving to next. Oh, my gosh. Polarizing issue. Never mind. So Robbie’s moving again. I feel like we’re not even 100 episodes in, and this is the second or third time you’re moving.

Robbie Wagner: [49:50] Yeah, this is the third house that I will have been have moved into during this podcast.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:57] Are you sick of that yet?

Robbie Wagner: [49:58] Oh, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:59] You want to live anywhere permanently?

Robbie Wagner: [50:02] Yeah, no, we want to. It’s just, well, we part of the problem is we never lived out here. We had visited. And I think a good thing for everyone to do if you want to move to a new area is maybe rent for a while. And I’m probably not going to heed my own advice because we’re pretty sure that Great Falls is going to be nice. But if there’s an area that you’re not 100% for sure on rent there or stay there for a week or something, at least figure out where’s your closest grocery store and, what are your restaurants, how far are you driving to XYZ. Because the day-to-day stuff matters a lot. And if you don’t think about that, you’re like, oh, this is a beautiful property, and the house is nice and whatever. You’re not thinking about, oh, it takes me an hour just to drive to and from Target. That’s not including the shopping there or whatever else. It’s just the driving there. And that’s annoying.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:00] Yeah, it’s definitely a lifestyle shift. More holistically and think about your regular conveniences. Those things get pretty challenging. Yeah. Well, best of luck on the next one. And no matter what, you’ve got a five-year contract there. You better stay. Doesn’t matter. It can’t be that bad if you move closer to town.

Robbie Wagner: [51:20] Yeah, well, Katelyn has said that even if she hates it, we’re going to live there. So we’re going to figure out a way to make it work because the schools will be good, and we want Finn to grow up in one house for a while.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:33] Yeah. There you go.

Robbie Wagner: [51:34] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:35] All right, well, best of luck around that. Yeah, thanks. Okay, we’re creeping into summer. You had any big summer plans aside from finding a home?

Robbie Wagner: [51:47] Well, we’re just going to be living at the lake for the whole summer. And it seems like stuff just keeps getting piled on. Like we have Render ATL. We have the new announced Tailwind conference. My dad has this thing he wants me to go to. Ember Conf is in July, et cetera, et cetera.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:07] Yeah, I was going to say, dear listener, we are working on taking this show on the road and experimenting with that a little bit. Render ATL will be there trying to record some mini pods and just see kind of what comes out of that. There’s just so many interesting speakers, and it’s a real kind of cultural to do within our industry. So I just think, like, going there and taking some of the experience and maybe recording some snippets, and I don’t know, we’ll see what kind of comes out of that. And then, of course, the big one is Ember Conf in July, where we’re going to do a live recording, which is, I know, kind of contradictory, but do a live recording.

Robbie Wagner: [52:49] We could stream it too.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:50] Yeah, it would be cool if people want to join. Yeah, that would be interesting. I can’t wait to see how you figure that out. But in general, we want to engage with an audience and kind of bring that into play.

Robbie Wagner: [52:59] We’re going to have four Evos, four laptops, four microphones. I don’t know who the other two people are going to be. They’re going to talk, but I was just making it sound obnoxious anyway.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:11] I was going to say, wow, good for you that you’ve thought that far ahead technologically. Because aside from having the RodeCaster board and four plugins, I was like, I don’t know what else we’re going to do, but maybe cameras, bi-directional kind of thing, who knows? That is part of our big summer plans, though. I will also be like roasting in the heat as I did this past weekend because, for some reason, I put off all of my outside chores until it’s 100 degrees and then.

Robbie Wagner: [53:40] That’s when you want to do them.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:41] Now is a great time to do some big landscaping. Yeah, it’s perfect. But then, when you need a little time to cool off, I suggest picking up the new Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, which I have done and has become a mini obsession of mine when I have snippets of time to dive into that world. Did you get the game yet?

Robbie Wagner: [54:01] Yeah, it’s been very sad because it’s been sitting on my coffee table, and I have not been able to put it in and play it because I have had infinite stuff to do with the move and selling the house and all that.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:12] And I believe I thought you were going to let Katelyn play it first, and then maybe you’d pick, oh, no, that’s another Rob who’s perhaps a better husband.

Robbie Wagner: [54:21] Yes, Kelsey is playing it. I’ve heard about her playing it a lot.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:26] Exactly. My wife’s not really into video games, so I’m kind of lucky in that respect that I got right on it. I did kind of steal it back from my son, who was playing Mario Brothers Odyssey. Yeah, I think it’s Odyssey as that whole, like, kind of big world thing. And I’m like, well, son, you’re going to play your iPad for a little while because Daddy needs.

Robbie Wagner: [54:48] Yeah, so I’m upset that I haven’t been able to play it, and I don’t foresee being able to play it for a while. And then Diablo Four comes out June 6, and I will be playing that nonstop. So I may not be able to start Zelda until, like, August or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:05] You’re really prioritizing it. Well, I mean, the good news is everybody will have figured out all the weird stuff by then, and so you can just be like, oh, I’m stuck somewhere, or, I saw this thing. Yeah, okay, where is it?

Robbie Wagner: [55:16] There might even be like DLC or patches or nice things before then.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:21] Both of those. And Nintendo is actually releasing an official guide too directly, which is something they hadn’t done for, I think, for a while, or at least I hadn’t seen. I remember as a kid, you could be like the new Super Mario Bros game or a Zelda game, and then they release the guide through the Nintendo magazine. You could pay extra $10, and you get the guide or whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [55:43] Oh, yeah. I used to get Nintendo Power. I am familiar.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:46] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [55:47] I actually won, like, my one and only contest through Nintendo Power. I applied to get a surfing Pikachu, which was a thing in Pokemon Yellow.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:57] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [55:58] And I did not send it in because you could just use a Game Shark and get one. I already had one at that point, and I was like, whatever. But I kind of wish I had done it because I bet there was, like, different art for it, and there was probably something special about it.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:15] Yeah, all that extra effort you missed out on. Yeah, that’s funny. I won something at a. I went to an Insight event with my brother last week, and Insight kind of is a company that provides a bunch of hardware and software enterprise sales and management solutions. I don’t know.

Robbie Wagner: [56:35] Yeah, we used them to buy our stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:37] Exactly. That’s why he was invited to the event. It was called device day. Went there, and I came later than him and ended up in the first ten minutes winning a laptop in their raffle.

Robbie Wagner: [56:49] Nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:50] An HP elite book. It’s like $2,000 laptop, so it’s very nice. Win. And they gave away a bunch of stuff. I’ve spent like 30 minutes on it, set it up initially, and then immediately started looking into how to run Linux on it.

Robbie Wagner: [57:04] Yeah. Run Linux on it. Play games on it. Because you can’t play games on Macs. Really?

Chuck Carpenter: [57:09] No, but it’s only an I5, and I started trying to just look at through the EA app. Can I run FIFA on this? And it wasn’t great in the boot-up experience. Maybe if I got an external, you can do like an external graphics processor, right?

Robbie Wagner: [57:25] Right, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:25] Haven’t messed with that. I think you have one, so maybe something with that.

Robbie Wagner: [57:29] Yeah, I tried it. I don’t know that I would. It’s not great. It’s not as good as having like an internal one that’s good because the idea is solid. I feel like people haven’t executed well. It disconnects a lot. And if it disconnects, like mid-game, especially if you’re playing online or something, you’re going to get lag and get killed or whatever it’s. Not ready for prime time. I think it’s a good idea. It’s just not executed well.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:57] Yeah. And to make a laptop more useful with that right. Essentially, you’d want to be like, oh. I have this laptop. It can take anywhere. It can do the things I want. But you’re still kind of tethered to a desktop experience in a way because there’s this whole big block thing.

Robbie Wagner: [58:11] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:12] That I need to do.

Robbie Wagner: [58:13] You’re not going to be able to have a mobile gaming experience with the highest quality graphics in a game like FIFA unless you have something else to plug into because even if it called up, like the laptops can handle it. Then they’ll just increase the graphics. It’ll be like 8k or whatever. You’re always chasing it, and you’re never going to make it.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:35] Yeah. This is the problem with things like Stadia not lasting because it was amazing. It was this take-anywhere experience, and they were taking the crux of the processing. But maybe someday.

Robbie Wagner: [58:50] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [58:50] Steam Deck looks appealing.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:52] And I know. I think AMD is releasing a Steam Deck alternative. So somebody trying to play in that space as well.

Robbie Wagner: [59:02] Yeah. I mean, I just don’t do that much computer gaming. Although you can’t play Diablo Four on Mac. You could play Three on Mac. So I’m going to have to figure out something because I can’t even boot camp on an M one. So I’m going to end up just taking my whole desktop to the lake so that I can play games, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [59:22] Yeah. I mean, ultimately, that’s kind of where you’re at if you want to be a little more mobile. Just kidding. You can’t. Yeah. So you don’t have, like, a serious monitor to take with you, too.

Robbie Wagner: [59:33] Well, yeah, so that’s another option. I guess I could take the iMac, the all-in-one. Like, I have an iMac that has an Intel processor, so that would work.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:42] But yeah, food for thought.

Robbie Wagner: [59:44] Yeah. Well, we are overtime here, so thanks, everyone, for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe, leave us some ratings and reviews, and we will catch you next time.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:53] Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and Whatnot. This podcast is brought to you by Ship Shape and produced by Podcast Royale. If you like this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or two and leave us a rating, maybe a review, as long as it’s good.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:19] 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.