30: Prioritizing Performance and the Future of the Terminal with Zach Lloyd

Robbie Wagner: [00:09] Hey everybody. Welcome to another Whiskey Web and Whatnot with myself, Robbie Wagner, and my co-host, as always, Charles William Carpenter III, and our guest today, Zach Lloyd. What’s going on, Zach?

Zach Lloyd: [00:23] Not too much. How are you guys doing?

Robbie Wagner: [00:24] Doing well.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:26] I’m actually recovering from a long LA trip, so I’ve been better.

Zach Lloyd: [00:30] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:30] But hopefully hair of the dog will help me.

Zach Lloyd: [00:34] What was going on in LA?

Chuck Carpenter: [00:36] So I was visiting some friends, and then I went to the Porsche Experience center.

Zach Lloyd: [00:39] Very cool.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:40] To learn how to drive those cars a little better.

Zach Lloyd: [00:43] That’s awesome.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:44] Yes. Don’t do it hungover, though. Not recommend.

Robbie Wagner: [00:49] Speaking of which, well, I guess before we get into the whiskey, we should give you a chance to introduce yourself and just say a little bit about who you are and what you do. If you don’t mind, Zach.

Zach Lloyd: [00:59] Sure. So, my name is Zach Lloyd. I am the founder of a company called Warp. Warp’s a company focused on elevating developer productivity. And what we’re doing, our first product that we’re building is a new version of the command line terminal. So one of the kind of oldest and most widely used developer tools, what we’re trying to do is basically build a version of it that sort of unlocks the power of the command line to a wider group of developers. And then the other thing that we’re trying to do is turn into sort of modern collaborative app. So it’s been like a local desktop-only view into your file system. And our goal is to make something that works more like Google Docs or Figma, but for the command line. So, yeah, that’s like my super quick. What am I working on?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:55] Nice. Cool.

Robbie Wagner: [01:57] Yeah. So before we dive deeper into some of those things, we should probably start with some whiskey. So you want to tell us about what we got today, Chuck?

Chuck Carpenter: [02:06] Sure. This celebratory bottle, since it’s your birthday, Zach, is Stellum Bourbon. So the mash bill, I don’t know, I was trying to dig into what exactly it was. So it’s a blend of three different whiskeys. Looks like they’re sourcing some of it from Indiana, some from Kentucky, and some from Tennessee. But the primary blended one is mostly corn. So 99% corn and 1% barley, which is interesting. And then I don’t know anything about the other two.

Robbie Wagner: [02:36] 1%.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:36] That’s a lot of corn. That’s a lot of corn. I mean, over 70 seems like going to be pretty sweet, but I don’t know, we’ll find out. No age statement, but I guess from what I can dig in a few other whiskey-specific review sites, they think that around five to six-year-old barrels, so pretty high proof. Hundred and almost 115. So, like 57 and a half ABBV. Yeah. Not messing around.

Zach Lloyd: [03:02] Oh, boy.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:03] Yeah. Get ready. All right. We’ll do a little pour-go with the regular tumbler. We’ve managed to eventually get whiskey-specific glasses into this. I don’t know.

Zach Lloyd: [03:20] Woah.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:20] Not sure if it helps so these are like those Glencairns that are, like, tulip shaped, but then it has an extra layer on the outside so you don’t warm it up with your fingers. I mean, we mean business.

Zach Lloyd: [03:31] I feel like, should I even be drinking it out of this?

Chuck Carpenter: [03:33] Why not?

Robbie Wagner: [03:34] Yeah, it’s all fine. There’s no wrong way.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:37] No. There’s no wrong way. I don’t shame.

Robbie Wagner: [03:39] I used to use a normal glass and tons of ice, and I’ve evolved a little bit to be a little more legit.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:48] Yeah.

Zach Lloyd: [03:50] Ice I don’t do. But I don’t have the special whiskey glass, especially. Like, right now I’m in New Mexico and I’m at an Airbnb. So it didn’t come equipped with good whiskey gear.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:02] Yeah. And I don’t think they travel well.

Robbie Wagner: [04:05] One star.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:06] Yeah, it’s out. Wait a minute. Well, that will have to be a requirement in the future. That’s right. You’re not far from me. I’m in Phoenix while Robert’s in Virginia. Yeah.

Zach Lloyd: [04:15] Cool.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:15] I think we’re on, you on mountain time?

Zach Lloyd: [04:17] I am on mountain time.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:19] Cool. I love New Mexico. I know. We’re going down, like, a different rabbit hole here. Are you in Santa Fe, or?

Zach Lloyd: [04:26] So I am in Taos, which is, like, the southern tip of the Rockies. So actually, if you were to look out my window right now, you’d see snow-covered mountains. I’m here with my fiance for the winter, and we go skiing at Taos Ski Valley every weekend. A lot of people I thought, I’m in New Mexico. They assume it’s desert, and it’s kind of high desert, but it’s cold and snowy.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:49] Yeah, it’s beautiful there.

Zach Lloyd: [04:51] It’s gorgeous.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:52] In the summer. They do a lot of fly fishing stuff there too.

Zach Lloyd: [04:54] Yeah, they do.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:56] Okay, I’ll regress. We’ll talk about whiskey again, I guess, for a second. It’s getting a little, like, allspice, maybe kind of I don’t know. On the smell for me. Definitely spicier. Definitely has a little burn to it.

Robbie Wagner: [05:08] Yeah.

Zach Lloyd: [05:08] It has a burn.

Robbie Wagner: [05:09] Feels like about 1% barley.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:16] Would you call it malted or unmalted barley? You know the difference?

Zach Lloyd: [05:20] Okay. How expert are you guys on whiskey? Pretty expert?

Robbie Wagner: [05:24] Chuck is.

Zach Lloyd: [05:26] Chuck is.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:26] It just means I have a drinking problem. Yeah, I know things, but I think the descriptors are all very arbitrary and subjective to the person, so I can say apricot or whatever else maybe that will influence what you start to taste. Because it’s just the way that I can describe what I’m deriving, and then if we can kind of meet where those things make sense, I don’t know.

Zach Lloyd: [05:50] Yeah, it’s strong. It burns.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:53] Yeah. So in Kentucky, we call that the hug. It gives you a little hug.

Zach Lloyd: [05:58] Slightly sweet. You guys think it’s sweet? What do you think?

Chuck Carpenter: [06:01] Yeah, I think it’s got sweet in the beginning, and I’m trying to figure out what that feels like to me. But then it gets kind of, like, spicy, like I said. Like, clove, allspice that kind of thing. And then it just burns.

Robbie Wagner: [06:15] I feel like I’m getting some bitterness at the end that’s like maybe like some orange peel or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:22] Oh, yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [06:24] I can’t really put my finger on it’s. A familiar flavor, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:28] Maybe like a grapefruit rind kind of thing or something.

Robbie Wagner: [06:30] Yeah, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:33] Yeah. See, you can elicit all kinds.

Zach Lloyd: [06:36] Of I get the spiciness, the surflow of allspice. I actually get the weird, like the apricot. I don’t know if you just planted that in my head, that’s now how it tastes to me. But yeah, I kind of taste a little bit of like dry apricot type.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:51] Yeah, we were able to influence what was it, bananas foster last time. The last recording we did and we were like, yeah, more like bananas foster. Like a little burnt banana peel. Oh, yes. I don’t know.

Zach Lloyd: [07:04] Have you ever seen that movie Song? You know what I’m talking about?

Chuck Carpenter: [07:08] Yes.

Zach Lloyd: [07:09] This reminds me a little.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:10] Yeah. It’s where. What does he say? Like, oh, tastes like a fresh open can of tennis balls or something. Yeah, he has some really arbitrary descriptors.

Zach Lloyd: [07:19] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:19] Between that and that one a few years ago that Maynard did. Maynard James Keenan. It was like blood into wine.

Zach Lloyd: [07:25] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:25] Like kind of how he invaded the wine scene. So he has some vineyards in Arizona and he’s been here for a while, I think since like, 97. So big line of wines and then yeah, he’s talking about that. The whole point system is bullshit. And the descriptors that people use, it’s kind of like how I described it. Like they’re all made-up terms. It doesn’t taste like dirt, but dirt is the closest thing you can come up with to describe that.

Zach Lloyd: [07:52] Yeah, maybe you’ve talked about this prior, but have you followed all the sort of issues with the counterfeiting of the high-end bourbons? Have you heard about that at all?

Chuck Carpenter: [08:02] I have, yeah. So there’s a big market where, like, people will resell empty, like Pappy bottles or whatever else. Essentially why I don’t buy any of those things, because I used to buy a lot of stuff in the secondary market when I lived in DC. Like there was a good connected group of people you could trust and whatever else. But now if you’re just, like, randomly trying to get stuff off Facebook, yeah, I can’t mess with that. There’s a lot of good whiskey out there. You don’t need to pay $1,000 for a bottle. It’s just no, I don’t know if you’ve ever had Pappy, but I have not. It’s good. It’s not going to be like, I’ve never tasted whiskey, anything like this in my whole life. Wow. Amazing. When it was available, it was great. When I got it in the lottery a couple of times, it was nice to pay $55. It was good for that.

Zach Lloyd: [08:47] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:47] But the prices now, it’s just like yeah, that’s like a big thing. Apparently, they do it. They’ll even overseas, there are places like China and stuff. You can get counterfeit bottles and they’ll just fill it with whatever Jim Bean or something.

Zach Lloyd: [09:01] Right. And this one you sent me, this is legit?

Chuck Carpenter: [09:04] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [09:05] No, we made this.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:08] This is actually all part of Robbie’s out in his barn. He’s been distilling. Do you like it? Yeah, I’ve seen this one a few times in, like, Total Wine or something. I’m like, oh, it seems kind of interesting. Did this come from SeelBach’s or somewhere else? I forget. I think we had to do a new place.

Robbie Wagner: [09:25] No, they’re dead to us.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:26] Yeah, because they don’t ship to Virginia anymore.

Robbie Wagner: [09:29] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:29] Yeah. There’s a couple of online retailers, too, that we trust.

Zach Lloyd: [09:32] Great.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:33] It just kind of depends on where you’re at. So then, ceremoniously, the next part of the whiskey tasting is so we have a scale. It’s a tentacle scale because an octopus-like creature is our logo. And so eight tentacles. One is the worst thing you’ve ever had. Eight is the most amazing thing you’ve ever had. And then, obviously, it kind of goes from there. It’s all very subjective. I mean, I will be tweeting about whatever you say, but.

Robbie Wagner: [09:58] To your 20 followers.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:00] Yes, to mine. Yes, exactly. Most people don’t know I’m back on Twitter, but that’s all.

Zach Lloyd: [10:04] I think this is like a 6.6. I like it. I think it’s tasty. It’s burny. I think it’s a solid 6.6.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:18] Yeah. I mean, I like ones that will give me a little punch in the throat, and maybe that’s a masochist, kind of. But yeah, if they’re a little too light and too easy, it just feels like I don’t know, I want to feel it. That’s sort of what whiskey is to me.

Zach Lloyd: [10:34] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:35] Yeah, I might go seven.

Zach Lloyd: [10:36] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:37] I might go seven. Which I’m kind of surprised about that because at first, I wasn’t really sure about this. But as I sip it a little bit more and more, like my tongue is coated and that doesn’t get burned and I’m getting more flavors out of it, I think I kind of like it.

Robbie Wagner: [10:49] Yeah, I think I’m going to go seven as well, because for such a high proof, it’s very drinkable and tasty, and for being 99% corn, it has more complexity than I would expect. So they did a good job. I’ll give it a seven.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:03] The secrets and whatever else they’re blending with it. Like, the Kentucky one, so it’s interesting. So anytime you see made in Indiana, that’s always sourced from this giant distillery called MGP, and they’ll have a bunch of stuff they already make, or you can feed them a mash bill and they’ll make that stuff for you as well. And a lot of newer companies are basically just sourcing and picking barrels from MGP. They’re obviously doing that to a degree, but they’re also getting stuff from other places. So in Kentucky, it could be a lot of places. Heaven Hill is known for selling barrels pretty regularly because they have a huge distillery, like multiple locations and rick houses and then Tennessee Dickle kind of does it. I mean, it’s not like people are buying Jack Daniels, but so I don’t know, it’s pretty interesting way that they’ve gone about selecting it. And it kind of reminds me of High West, which is in Utah and that was like a former chemist who then started by like sourcing barrels and then doing cool chemical blends between his stuff, and then they were making their own eventually. But I don’t know, it seems like it was very smartly put together and it kind of worked out. It could have gone in any way. And at only $55 a bottle, I’m actually pretty impressed. That’s the other thing because everybody wants to charge you $70 a bottle these days because whiskey is popular and then you’re like, well how can I try this? And then I feel like it was kind of ripped off.

Zach Lloyd: [12:24] Yeah, it’s good. I’ll be drinking this, to be clear.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:29] Excellent. I’m glad it’s not going to waste or you know.

Zach Lloyd: [12:33] I will be drinking this. In fact, I have my bachelor party is this weekend. I’m getting married in a few weeks. And so I’ll probably be.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:42] Yeah, congratulations across the board. Wow, that’s amazing.

Zach Lloyd: [12:46] Thank you.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:47] Is it going to be in Taos? Or are you traveling?

Zach Lloyd: [12:49] The wedding is in Taos and the bachelor party is in Breckenridge, Colorado. So renting a house up there with some buddies. I’ll bring this and I’ll see what their scores are. This will be drunk this weekend for sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:06] Wonderful. That’s perfect. That’s great. Yeah. The celebration begins today and continues on. Yeah, I’ll be very curious to your Monday state how productive you’re going to be.

Zach Lloyd: [13:16] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:18] -Be a little rough but yeah, that’s awesome. Wonderful.

Robbie Wagner: [13:20] Shipping a lot of features on Monday.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:22] Yeah, exactly. Got all my feature request for you as part of this podcast. Perfect. Alright, well, yeah, let’s talk, let’s talk a little tech. Let’s talk Warp. And it’s a very interesting space in that I’ve tried to read and digest a little more about like the specifics technically, but I guess the gist is that the current software out there is fairly antiquated. Some of the newer players were kind of going down the Electron path and you guys are like going to attack it in a different way and in what seems to be very popular way to do that, choosing Rust and then building up from there, so sounds cool. Developer tools in Rust are pretty hot. But what made you think I guess aside from like you’re like iTerm sucks. I don’t know. Why a terminal?

Zach Lloyd: [14:11] Yeah, it’s a great question. So partly it’s just like personal. I’ve been a developer for 20 years now and I’ve always been a terminal user. I’m not a power user. I’ve always found command line to be it’s like a thing you have to use as developer. You really can’t escape it. Because so many programs that you use, or text-based apps are the easiest apps to write. I’ve always used it. I’ve always felt kind of clumsy in it. It’s a very weird user interface. Like basic stuff doesn’t work, like the mouse doesn’t work the way you expect. And so I just always kind of accepted it. But I also always worked with developers who really were power users in the terminal. And what you notice is if you work with people who are really good in that tool, they can be more productive than others. It’s just like text-based interfaces can be super efficient because they’re scriptable, they’re composable, they’re like hands on keyboard, lets you do things really quickly. And so one of the kind of root product ideas behind Warp was, could you build a version of a text-based interface that brings that same power to a much larger group of developers so it makes that power much more accessible? That was like one of the things initially that got me excited. I was like, hey, there’s an opportunity here. I was also excited by the fact that it is a really widely used tool. I still think it’s true. If you walk by most developers’ desks, they’re going to have a terminal open. They’ll either have it open in addition to an IDE, or they’ll have it open and that’ll be all they have open. And because they’re doing their code editing in the terminal, I don’t use Vim remaps, but a kind of surprising number of people still do. So that was like one insight. And then the other thing. My background as an engineer is I used to run the engineering team on Google Sheets and I helped build a lot of that product. I then was a principal engineer on the Google Doc suite. And so my experience doing that really made me believe that there’s a lot of power. If you can take an app that is not collaborative and like that is tied to your desktop and it’s just old school, not cloud-native software and turn it into something that is cloud native and collaborative, that there’s always going to be productivity benefits from that and they might not even be obvious. Like I don’t know how often two people are going to want to be in the same terminal, but I can think sometimes they will be. But even just things like moving your history, like your terminal history to the cloud, or, like making it really easy to share a configuration amongst all the people on the team in the terminal. The more I thought about those ideas, the more I was just like, it basically works 100% of the time to make something cloud-native. And so I was like, let’s try and do that. Now the idea for doing it in Rust was it was primarily around performance. We knew we needed to build a native app, even though I would love for the terminal to be running in a browser. The reason not to start in the browser is just like most terminal usage today is still going to be against your local file system. For that, you’re either going to build a web app and put it in Electron to run against your local file system, which is, I think, a subpar user experience, or you might as well take advantage of the fact that you can run compiled code. And like, the best sort of modern stack for doing that, in my opinion, is Rust. You get the same kind of performance you would get from, like, C or C++, but you get a much safer, more ergonomic development experience. And so we started with that. A lot of us had to learn it, but it was actually pretty straightforward. It took a while. I don’t know if you guys have used Rust at all. It’s not nearly as easy as JavaScript, but you produce a better app and then we end up doing the whole thing where we’re actually drawing the pixels on the screen and interfacing with the GPU. So it’s like a GPU-accelerated terminal. That wasn’t, like, the core reason for doing the product. But when we thought about, hey, we want to make something that’s really great for developers, we thought that would be the best way to implement it, is by starting with the fastest possible platform.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:27] People love speed.

Zach Lloyd: [18:28] People love speed. If you’re using the terminal a lot, your patience for a slow experience is going to be really low. And so that’s why we did it. Just as, like a side note, Google Docs is not built in native tech. It’s all web tech. And it’s really hard to make a web application that has native performance. And, like, we spent I can’t even tell you how much time trying to tweak the performance of Google Sheets to get the performance good. And the performance is great for a web app, but it’s not great compared to, like, if you’re just running Excel natively on your computer, and we were really running up against the limits of the actual platform there. Like, for instance, you couldn’t control the layout in memory of a spreadsheet cell. And that’s a pretty fundamental thing to be able to control if you’re building a spreadsheet. I mean, this is getting a little bit nerdy and technical, but that kind of stuff matters a lot when we approach the terminal, which is a bunch of the same challenges technically around how do you render a ton of text really quickly. We just wanted to pick a platform that by default was fast.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:43] Right. So wait a minute. Is it your fault that Google Sheets will always ask me if I want to download the native app instead?

Zach Lloyd: [19:52] To my knowledge, it doesn’t have a native. Are you talking about the phone?

Chuck Carpenter: [19:56] Yeah. Will on the phone. Yeah.

Zach Lloyd: [19:58] Yeah, on the phone? Yes. We want people in the native app on the phone for sure, because the web plus mobile is just like, forget it. The performance is really bad.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:08] Yeah. Not that I’d attempt any spreadsheet-like usage or even reading on phone, but like, iPad does that.

Zach Lloyd: [20:15] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:15] Call iOS. Hey, go get this.

Zach Lloyd: [20:17] Well, you should get the data app. It’s much better.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:19] Yeah, I do actually, for most of those things.

Zach Lloyd: [20:21] Good.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:22] Yeah, I try to listen. I feel like that Google, Amazon, most of the time, they’re smarter than I am. I got a lot of people trying to figure this out and I was like, I should trust you. I should just go with that. That’s fine.

Robbie Wagner: [20:33] Yeah, I’ve been using Hyper for a few years now, and I think it’s all Electron based and if you open more than a few tabs, it starts to be really slow. So yeah, definitely a problem with trying to go web-based first on that.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:51] I can’t remember why I abandoned it. I remember trying Hyper for a minute and then I don’t know, I didn’t go back to iTerm because it was just familiar and I’ve been using it for, I don’t know, more than ten years. Long time. And I am using Warp now, so.

Zach Lloyd: [21:06] Oh, nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:07] You’re welcome. My only feedback is that I am old and my eyes are bad. And when you open the preference pane, it’s like really small text that I cannot get bigger. So then I have to make mess with that to like, mess with my preferences.

Zach Lloyd: [21:23] That’s great feedback just to kind of maybe explain why, like, we have some weird stuff like that. So we have our own UI framework, so we’re not rendering using like, Coco components or like, the things that come with the Mac UI toolkit, which from a user experience perspective can suck sometimes. And we get complaints about not having actually, like, native settings, which we may do at some point, but doing all the text layout and there’s a lot of rough edges like that, which is stuff that we’re trying to work through. The advantage from our perspective is that when we do go cross-platform, we get to use some of that same UI on other platforms. So.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:06] Okay.

Zach Lloyd: [22:06] It’ll be a familiar experience if you’re on the web or Linux and you’re still using Warp. So that’s the user advantage. But there is this user disadvantage where it’s like some stuff is just like, not as Mac, like, native as I would like it to be.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:22] Yeah.

Zach Lloyd: [22:22] You’re probably, you’re feeling that a little?

Chuck Carpenter: [22:23] Yeah, it’s just small text. And I was like, oh my gosh, I have a 32-inch monitor. But I’m like.

Zach Lloyd: [22:29] Well, I guess have you tried zooming it? Like that would be my first kind of question.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:33] Like this pinch zoom thing. I don’t know if I have let’s just do it right now live. Plus plus thing?

Zach Lloyd: [22:39] If you do command plus.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:40] Yeah, it doesn’t.

Zach Lloyd: [22:41] No, it doesn’t zoom. There’s a real bug there.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:44] Yeah, it only zooms the actual like.

Zach Lloyd: [22:47] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:47] Terminal, but it doesn’t zoom my settings.

Zach Lloyd: [22:50] This is amazing feedback.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:51] Well, there we go. See, this is useful for you. I’m glad. Not just whiskey. I mean, we usually buy people’s time with whiskey, but anything beyond that, it’s good. But yeah, otherwise it’s been pretty great for me. I do want to dive into probably doing a custom theme, but I played around with that a little bit. I know Robbie wanted to do some theming stuff. I don’t know that you’ve gone down that you tried it or no?

Robbie Wagner: [23:14] That was my only complaint, I guess, was like, I have a very specific theme that I just download. I don’t even know what it’s called, honestly, because it’s all auto-synced behind the scenes these days. But it’s like, probably one of the basic teams. And I was like, why can’t I just pull these in from a package or something?

Zach Lloyd: [23:33] So we should definitely have that. You can do it right now. We have a theme repo if you actually want to do like a couple of minutes of work, but I don’t blame you if you don’t. Where we do have all of the basic themes, and so it’s probably in there and you just need to put the theme that you want in a Warp directory.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:50] Got you.

Zach Lloyd: [23:51] That said, that’s not the user experience that we want. We want a user experience where it’s like your theme is there. You search for you. You don’t have to set up any directories. So also good feedback.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:03] Good to know, though. That’s cool.

Zach Lloyd: [24:04] You can do it, though. And you can also customize it if you want. It’s just a text file that specifies the structure.

Robbie Wagner: [24:10] Yeah, I think that brings me to another question, and I haven’t used it a ton, so I don’t know if this exists and I’m stupid for asking this question, but is it going to be a thing that has plugins and things that people can easily extend or add open source packages to bolt on to it, or what are you thinking around that?

Zach Lloyd: [24:30] 100% yes is the answer. We’re not quite there yet. The sort of like, extensibility plan for Warp is, so there’s a bunch of parts. So I think the natural extension points for terminal are like our themes completions tool-specific stuff. So it’s like, is there something that can make like, Docker or Kubernetes work better? We have a new feature that we’re about to launch, which is this thing called workflows, which is super cool, which basically you could think of it as like the evolution of aliases. And so imagine for a second that you have like a complicated command that you frequently run and other people on your team need to run it. What you can do is make a workflow. You can put in metadata around what that workflow does. You can put in parameters for it and then be able to sort of like share that search for it as you’re entering commands. And so workflows will be another extension point. We’re also going to ship with a bunch of workflows that are generally useful for people. So for instance, if you can’t remember how to undo your last git commit, which I can never actually remember, you’ll be able in the app to search for like undo it’ll, show you like git reset dash dash hard head tilde one or whatever the thing is. So that will be a natural extension point. We want to also do extensions around the rendering which I think would be pretty cool. So in Warp, we have this concept of blocks. So when you run a command, it’s kind of like in a notebook. What we do is we visually group the command and its output together. And so Warp knows what command produces, what result, whereas a normal terminal like iTerm or Hyper, it’s just one big stream of characters. And in Warp what we can do is take advantage of that knowledge to do things like, hey, if you just outputted like a JSON file we could detect that and give you a rendering that’s like a JSON object viewer. Or if you output a CSV we could give you an interactive table. And so there’s a bunch of things along dealing with outputs that we want to make pluggable and then eventually the goal is to have an experience that’s kind of like VS Code that are extensions. I don’t know if you guys use VS Code at all.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:51] No.

Zach Lloyd: [26:52] So they have a really nice thing where it’s like, hey, they detect that you’re working with a particular file type and they suggest like, hey, you’re working with Markdown, why don’t you install this Markdown viewer? This is a SQL file. Why don’t you install something that helps you work with SQL? And so the terminal has a lot of that same type of content type specific or tool specific things that you can do to make the experience better. And so we want like a discovery mechanism that’s kind of like the Vs code extension store for surfacing that extra functionality. Now we’re not there, it’s going to take a while to get to, but I think it’s cool.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:25] Yeah, it sounds like a great roadmap. And just readability from a readability standpoint, right? Like being able to go through stuff and like you said, the outputs JSON, I’m trying to dig through some response data or something and figure out what’s going on and I miss the shape or whatever else. For CSVs. Yeah, parsing that stuff that would be really useful.

Zach Lloyd: [27:48] Exactly.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:48] Get that. That’s nice.

Zach Lloyd: [27:49] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:50] Very cool. As long as I can read the settings to change that as need to be, we’ll be fine.

Zach Lloyd: [27:55] It’s a great bugger for it. Definitely. We’re going to be focusing on that. And the other piece of that is like if you look at the way people extend their shell functionality right now, they tend to do it. You like discover a GitHub repo and then you run like cURL into Bash and it changes some conflict files someplace and you hope that change doesn’t conflict with any other environment variables that you’ve said you might have three things setting your PS1 like the prompt is another place we want to add better extensibility and so having some sort of structure around that and discoverability and assurance that things are playing well together is another place I think we can really make it better to extend the terminal.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:42] Yeah, that sounds nice. I think I’m getting the plug in points that make a lot of sense and what’s appealing there beyond just a performance thing. Yeah, you didn’t just want to make another hot Rust app, I get it.

Zach Lloyd: [28:56] No.

Chuck Carpenter; [28:56] Yeah, I would say that’s probably coincidental to how much popularity in DX that Rust is getting right now and then, oh yeah, you’re also on that stack, but obviously it probably took you a pretty long time to scale up to where you’re at right now and what you’re going to do.

Zach Lloyd: [29:12] So as a company, we have existed for about a year and a half. We started building the app for real about a year ago. Like, we did some prototyping and sort of exploration of different text stacks and that type of thing. I am not the type of programmer who will pick a language because I think the language is cool. I think we have all these cool benefits from being part of the Rust community, which is awesome. I don’t have anything against web tech or anything like that, but it’s like my general philosophy for when you’re building something like this to try to pick the tool that’s going to get you to the best product experience. And so it’s always like working backwards from what user experience is going to be best and then how do you pick the tools in the stack and the technology to try to achieve that? I’ve written a bunch about this. I have a blog that has an article on this that has gotten pretty active commentary on Hacker News on both sides because I’m like, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:12] I might have read that now. I think I forgot when someone introduced me, gave me an invite to Warp. I think I did read some stuff on Hacker News about it so now.

Zach Lloyd: [30:20] Hacker News is amazing for the conversation it fosters, it’s like people have such strongly held opinions, which I really appreciate. And so, yeah, one of my blog posts is on this thing called Product First vs Code First Engineers. And in my experience, the best engineers who I’ve worked with and who I prefer to work with are people who are seeing the technology as a tool for achieving an end-user result or for solving some problem. And that could be like a user problem or it could be like a problem for the people who are using your API. Like at any level of the stack you’re going to have users. So my sort of philosophy on that, which some people just, I think don’t agree and they think it’s like a coded way of saying I don’t care about the underlying tech, which is not the point at all, is like, I just want to work with people who are trying to solve they use the problem and work backwards from that.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:14] Yeah, I think you said it best when you were narrowing in on whatever is the best tool for the job.

Zach Lloyd: [31:19] Exactly.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:20] Yeah. So prior to Ship Shape and for a while, I’ve been in engineering leadership and stuff too, and running teams and letting teams solve problems on their own, but they can dip their toe into things and experiment. But it also has to make sense for the end goals of the objectives, for the user, for the business, and all those things coming into play. Right?

Chuck Carpenter: [31:39] Completely agree.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:41] Not just because it’s hot or whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [31:43] Yeah. That’s been my big complaint about React since it came out. It’s like half the people use it, so like, oh my God, it’s hot. I like, React. They don’t know anything about any other frameworks. They’re just like, oh, I love it. It’s like, okay, why?

Chuck Carpenter: [31:59] Sometimes it’s like exposure to sort of like the thing that clicked for you early on and then you really get I don’t know, really just embedded in that. You have a very singular objective in that sense too.

Zach Lloyd: [32:11] Right. I mean, there’s also this big cost to learning other tools, and sometimes it’s just like you have to factor that in, I think, being pragmatic around all these decisions. Like if you had a team of like Java experts and you’re building a server and someone was like, no, we should do this in Go.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:30] I was going to say Go is.

Zach Lloyd: [32:32] Go is how you build service today, I would be sort of skeptical. We have server code Go. Go is a perfectly fine language. So is Java. And having everyone give up their domain knowledge to pick a tool unless there’s some fundamental benefit to the tool. I’m always going to be sort of skeptical of something like that.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:52] Yeah, you got to look at what the resources you have in front of you and what makes sense. Like you said, very being pragmatic about your decisions, it was an interesting thing. So I did look at ZBook and I know that wasn’t a blog that you referenced, but still, I like to know a little bit about who we’re talking to. You have dog blue.

Zach Lloyd: [33:09] I do.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:10] Yes. Who likes clues? Maybe, I don’t know.

Zach Lloyd: [33:14] He’s not aimed after Blues Clues.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:15] Jest as that okay, we’ll get back to that too. This will be a little more whatnot or whatever because Robbie loves to talk about dogs. So in your experience, like, we talked about some about how you’re at Google and what you’re working on there and then what’s going on now, but like bookended there is your interim CEO at Time. And I thought that was really interesting because I used to work for National Geographic, and so I know what media is like and the juxtaposition of those software heavy, software heavy. I know it’s like DX and different customers, but in the middle, it’s about massive, well-known, very respected media. And I don’t know how you got involved there. I don’t know how was that for you.

Zach Lloyd: [34:01] I’ll give you the behind-the-scenes. So the story behind me being CTO for a short period at Time is actually. So Time is owned by I don’t know if you guys are, by Mark Benioff, who is the Salesforce, CEO and founder, who also happens to be my second cousin. I don’t talk about it that much, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:24] Oh, woah. Okay.

Zach Lloyd: [34:25] So Mark has been super supportive of me in my tech career. We talk from time to time. And I was sort of coming out of another startup that I’d been the CTO and co-founder of, which was super different domain. And I was trying to figure out, what do I want to do next? Do I want to start another company? Do I want to go work in another big company? Do I want to go work at a startup? And I talked to Mark, and Mark sort of made the case of, like, going to help out at Time, which was an awesome brand, awesome content, but they’re going through. They were going through. And I think they still are going through a transition from being a sort of print-first, sort of older type media company to a media company that is like a digital-first. I don’t know anything about media. I’m totally unqualified to be like, a media company leader, but I do know a bunch about sort of software engineering and running engineering teams. And so my job there is to just help as much as I could as far as sort of like, fostering a digital transformation. I helped hire the next full-time CEO there. I just made my best effort to sort of, like, bring my experience from Google and doing other technology projects into Time. And I think Time is an awesome place and the digital transformation is going pretty well, I think.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:56] Yeah, excellent. Yeah, I mean, I just felt like, oh, yeah, I have some understanding of that being I was part of a big brand, National Geographic. It was a not-for-profit, basically. So the magazine still made money when I left, but it was like, one of the very few that in print still made some money and that was sharply declining. The channel always made money. It had been keeping kind of the brand afloat for quite some time. And then they had a lot of other ventures, and they’ve just been trying to figure out their digital space. So, like, we made a bunch of different products and we did a paywall, and we did, like, lots of sponsored things and whatever else all along the way. 21st Century Fox, who were the partners with the channel, they ended up buying all media assets and then creating a second company. And then the society broke off, became completely nonprofit. And then they were just doing like education and the missions stuff. But then they had 20% of the other venture. I don’t know. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy.

Zach Lloyd: [36:52] It’s really like the same things you’re talking about are definitely things that Time is talking about. We would talk about Natgeo actually. Like, Natgeo is super successful on social. Actually, I think Natgeo has a.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:04] Yeah.

Zach Lloyd: [37:04] Like a huge Instagram following because they have such sort of beautiful, awesome photo content. Time has some of that. So Time is also like I can’t speak for Time, I’m not associated with them.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:16] Right.

Zach Lloyd: [37:16] But they’re definitely interested in diversifying. So Time is now doing like a bunch of stuff in the conference and event space. Time has, I think, really successful now like studio. I just was watching the new Kanye documentary. I don’t know if you guys are watching that at all on Netflix.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:33] I have been. I watched the first two episodes. I mean, how can you not how can you not watch it’s? Like even if you’re not really a fan, although I am from back in the day, it’s still like you’re watching the train go and go at another train very quickly.

Zach Lloyd: [37:49] I don’t know if you guys want to talk about Kanye West or not. But like.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:52] I don’t care.

Zach Lloyd: [37:53] The music is insanely good in my opinion. Oh, yeah, the music is out of control good. The I don’t know if the third episode is out yet or if it comes out today.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:01] Maybe I haven’t I think it’s today. Yeah, it’s funny, I just looked at the date because I have no idea what day is what most times. Because it’s just how it is. I have two kids and this and whatever else. I don’t know. They’re all the same.

Robbie Wagner: [38:11] It’s Saturday right now, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [38:12] It could be. It’s hard to say. And if it was, you should be skiing and not talking to us. But yeah. So today’s the second and it does come out today. So I’ll be watching that tonight.

Zach Lloyd: [38:22] Yeah, I mean, random other things for my jobs that I’ve had kind of a diverse career, but there was a period where I dropped out of law school. I don’t know if you saw that on my.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:35] Yes, I think we had that in notes to kind of ask you about like what was up with that?

Zach Lloyd: [38:39] And then I was like, what the heck am I going to do? And I’m a musician, I play guitar and I love music. And so what I did was I sent emails. I was living in New York. I sent emails to like 30 music producers whose emails I found on just like websites for different studios and ended up getting an internship where I basically then became like a recording assistant for a music producer for like, nine months or a year in New York.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:09] That’s cool.

Zach Lloyd: [39:09] Which is so, so awesome. So when I see Kanye doing the production stuff and then doing the rapping, I’m just like the talent level. It’s like unbelievable.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:23] Yeah. The fact that he has all of that. And then some, he can do a lot of stuff.

Zach Lloyd: [39:28] He can do the full stack. And like, if I make it really nerdy, it’s like he can do full-stack music.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:33] I bet he can do some film stuff and some, like, crazy artsy things. I don’t know about those shoes. They’re ugly as shit.

Robbie Wagner: [39:39] Fashion is questionable.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:41] Yeah, well, I don’t mind the chunky dad’s shoes. And then some of the plainer baggy things are kind of fine, but like, those weird slippers, like future-looking slippers. It looks like Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy wrapped his fingers around your foot or something. That one’s not for me, but.

Zach Lloyd: [39:58] I mean you’re asking the wrong guy about the fashion.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:01] Okay.

Zach Lloyd: [40:02] I’m all sweats.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:03] You got a pretty sweet sweatshirt there. I don’t know what you mean.

Zach Lloyd: [40:05] This is my Warp sweatshirt.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:07] I know. Yeah. Nice swag. Very cool.

Zach Lloyd: [40:09] We’ll send you guys some swag after if you would like it.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:12] Sure, yeah, of course.

Robbie Wagner: [40:14] We love swag.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:15] We’ll send you addresses.

Zach Lloyd: [40:16] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:17] Totally. Yeah, I love swag. I wear all tech stuff. I’m a comfy guy.

Zach Lloyd: [40:21] Cool.

Robbie Wagner: [40:21] Yeah, I miss conferences because I used to get all of my wardrobe for that year from the conference.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:26] Yeah. Kind of a bummer, but what are you going to do? Okay, so, yes, let’s talk about Blue. Where does that come from?

Zach Lloyd: [40:34] Totally random. He’s named after the Blue Ridge Highway, which runs through, I think, North Carolina, maybe West Virginia. I don’t know. My fiance and I the first trip that we ever took together was down to Asheville to go leaf peeping. Do you guys know what that is?

Chuck Carpenter: [40:55] No idea.

Zach Lloyd: [40:56] It’s really nerdy. It’s like in the fall when the leaves change color from, like they become, like, red and yellow. There’s like, a lot of people who go to watch the leaves change, and they’re called leaf peepers. Maybe we should edit this part out.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:14] No no no. This is definitely on record. Leaf. I didn’t know it had a term. I know what you mean. Because we’ve gone we’ll go up north.

Zach Lloyd: [41:20] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:20] Because I’m in Arizona and yeah, people think it’s the desert, right? But two-thirds of the state is not that. There’s a whole bunch of stuff and skiing and everything else up north, so.

Zach Lloyd: [41:29] Right.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:29] Yes, I understand.

Zach Lloyd: [41:31] We drove along the Blue Ridge Highway and then three months later or something we adopted Blue and we were thinking, what’s a cool name? And we were like, oh, we should name it for the Blue Ridge Highway. We said we named him Blue, which we didn’t think about it long enough because Blue is actually a really popular dog name.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:51] Really?

Zach Lloyd: [41:52] The first thing people associate is Blue Clues, which is not at all what he’s named after, but that’s the story behind Blue.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:59] Okay, you got something. I’m buying it.

Robbie Wagner: [42:01] We had a dog in college named Blue for two days and he ran away in a snowstorm. We were fostering him and he was like really skittish and someone left the door open for a minute and he ran away. So then I had to chase after him. So I was driving around neighborhoods and stuff and we found him like two days later eating a deer down in a field.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:26] Huh.

Zach Lloyd: [42:26] Oh shit.

Robbie Wagner: [42:26] And like he was hardcore and I almost called him. I had the leash ready to just put around him like I was sneaking up behind him. And then a car drove by and he looked up and saw me and never caught him. But somebody caught him and they put him back in the foster program and he’s doing fine, I assume now, or maybe he’s dead at this point. I don’t know how old he would be.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:51] I was going to say your college times. I mean, I’m going to assume this is a while.

Robbie Wagner: [42:54] It’s been a while. Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:55] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [42:56] So, yeah, you might not be around, but he was doing better after that.

Zach Lloyd: [43:00] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:00] That’s a great story, Robbie. We should definitely tell that more in the future.

Robbie Wagner: [43:05] We had another dog named Onyx.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:08] Did you sing Slam to the dog?

Robbie Wagner: [43:10] No.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:11] You remember that band onyx I don’t do it, no. Wow. I make a lot of old references that Robbie doesn’t get. So there’s this age difference between us, and I don’t want to be ageist, but yeah, there was I want to say it was like maybe the late 90s there was a band called Onyx and they had a song, Slam. And I was thinking Kanye fan, maybe you would catch on to that. Have you seen Hip Hop evolution on Netflix?

Zach Lloyd: [43:36] I have not.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:37] Okay, cool. All that stuff. Yeah, very good. It’s a mix between being like, different decades but also different locales. So it’s like, oh, here’s how the east coast scene sort of started. Went to the West Coast. Here’s Atlanta, here’s, like, Detroit scene and all the different flavors of it. So that’s really cool. I think I got into that after the Wutang show on Hulu.

Zach Lloyd: [44:01] You watch a few streaming shows on hip hop?

Chuck Carpenter: [44:05] Yeah, I go down the rabbit hole. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [44:08] Sounds like you have a lot of free time.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:10] Oh, no, what happens is I just don’t sleep as much, so kids go to bed and spend some time with the wife. She goes to bed and then if I want to watch something, that’s when it happens, so I just sleep less.

Zach Lloyd: [44:21] I think I watched that one with Dr. Dre and Jimmy. What’s his name? Jimmy. Do you know the one I’m talking about?

Chuck Carpenter: [44:32] Yeah, that sounds right. Didn’t that come out like, right after Beats sold or something?

Zach Lloyd: [44:36] Yeah, I think it’s partly about that.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:38] Yeah. Where he became, like, the first rapper billionaire or something. Although, I don’t know. I think Jay-Z might argue with that.

Zach Lloyd: [44:47] Yeah. And I think Kanye is a billionaire now, too, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [44:50] It’s hard to say.

Robbie Wagner: [44:51] Yeah. Is Eminem not a billionaire?

Chuck Carpenter: [44:53] I don’t think so.

Robbie Wagner: [44:54] He owns a lot of stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:55] Sure.

Zach Lloyd: [44:57] Kanye is a billionaire from the fashion brand, is my understanding. Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:59] Oh, that put him over the edge. That could be. But I mean, as a producer, you end up getting a lot of ongoing residuals, too. So doing the producer thing helped a bunch.

Zach Lloyd: [45:08] Right.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:08] Versus as a direct artist, and then yeah. Diversifying from there, because I don’t think Eminem, like, found anyone other than 50cent. And then that was kind of it.

Zach Lloyd: [45:18] That sounds right.

Robbie Wagner: [45:19] He has a few Skylar Gray.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:22] Never heard him.

Robbie Wagner: [45:23] I forget who else, but he has his radio station Shade 45 as well.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:28] Oh, really? No idea. He’s got Mom’s Spaghetti.

Robbie Wagner: [45:31] He does have Mom Spaghetti. Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:33] I’m so curious. He opened a restaurant in Detroit. It’s like, basically like a carry-out window, and it’s Mom’s Spaghetti.

Zach Lloyd: [45:38] That’s hilarious. I love that.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:40] Yeah. I’m like, I want to go there just for that at this point.

Zach Lloyd: [45:43] That’s so funny.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:45] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [45:46] I don’t know a ton about him, honestly, but I just assumed, having a radio station and a few other things, that he was maybe a billionaire, but maybe not. He’s probably happy not working that much. I feel like he’s in a sweet spot.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:59] He only works when he has to do a rebuttal album for Machine Gun Kelly, from my understanding. So that and the Super Bowl show, which was cool.

Robbie Wagner: [46:09] Yeah, it was pretty good.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:10] I don’t watch egg ball game usually, but I do watch it for things like that Super Bowl halftime show and all the commercials. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [46:19] We were fast-forwarding through the game because we had paused it for a while and then just skip through the game, watch the commercials.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:28] So where I’m from is even, like, across the river from Cincinnati? I don’t know. I don’t live there anymore. I just kind of don’t follow it.

Zach Lloyd: [46:36] You’re not a Bengals fan?

Chuck Carpenter: [46:38] I’m fine with it. I don’t have a lot of time for sports because obviously, I’m watching all these hip-hop documentaries. I watch European soccer. That’s it. It’s really kind of like that’s my zone.

Zach Lloyd: [46:49] Got you.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:50] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [46:51] What if Joe Burrow was a rapper? Then would you watch Bengals?

Chuck Carpenter: [46:56] Who? What?

Robbie Wagner: [46:56] If Joe Burrow, the quarterback for the Bengals, was a rapper?

Chuck Carpenter: [47:00] Oh, that quarterback. He kind of looks like a rapper. He’s got a big gold chain with, like, his JB whatever on it. I saw that. I was like, it’s like a 80s guy with those Oakley-like blades.

Zach Lloyd: [47:11] Yeah. He’s making up that fashion statement.

Chuck Carpenter; [47:14] Yeah, for sure. It’s a very strong one. It’s not for everybody, but, hey, good for him. So, outside of, so you ski, you’re about to get married. Today’s your birthday. You don’t have to tell us the age, any other hobbies or interests that you have.

Zach Lloyd: [47:28] So I play guitar.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:29] Yes.

Zach Lloyd: [47:30] That’s like a thing that I love spending time doing.

Robbie Wagner: [47:33] Acoustic or electric or both.

Zach Lloyd: [47:35] I play both. I play both and I played in some bands. That’s super fun. One of the things about the pandemic I think that is kind of sucked the most is just like hard to get together and play music with people. I’m mostly playing on my own these days. It’s just kind of a bummer. But yeah, guitar is like one of my all-time, all-time favorite things too. And then other than that, I don’t know, hang out with my dog.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:01] Here you go.

Zach Lloyd: [48:02] I am a football fan.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:03] So who’s your team?

Zach Lloyd: [48:04] I like to do some sports betting also. I don’t really have a team at this point.

Robbie Wagner: [48:10] Whichever one will make you the most money that day.

Zach Lloyd: [48:12] Yeah. So my friend and I do this thing every year which is called a survivor pool. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with this, okay, but the way that it works is basically at the beginning of the year you pay an entry fee and there’s like you’re competing against like 500 or 1000 other sort of people who are in it. And every week what you have to do is you pick one team to win in one game. And the only rule is as the season goes on, once you’ve picked a team you can’t pick them again. And so you just have to win that game until like the first week. You know, you can pick like the Chiefs, like you could pick the biggest favorite every week but eventually, you’re going to run out of those favorites like you’re going to have already picked them. And so there’s some strategy involved in that and at the end of the season, whoever has lost the fewest of those games wins the whole pool. So my friend and I have won like, not like a tremendous amount of money but we’ve won a quite a bit of money doing this thing. And what’s really fun about it is that when you get towards the end there become all these different hedging strategies that you can do. So if you get towards the end and you have a pretty good record and let’s say we’ve gotten to the Super Bowl a couple of times as basically undefeated, and what you can do is you can be like, okay, I’m either going to make my pick for the Super Bowl, but then you can also place a bet on the other team, which is a hedge bet. And so you essentially are taking some of the winnings out. And so we’ve won doing the hedge betting a bunch of times. It’s like I love football season because I love the sort of strategy around the betting for it.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:00] That’s interesting because I know a guy who used to be an accountant that quit his job because he does fantasy, and he.

Zach Lloyd: [50:07] Oh yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:07] Does it, like, very seriously. Like, they travel for tournaments.

Zach Lloyd: [50:10] Woah.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:10] And all this stuff with, like, Draft Kings and all this other thing. Like, he gets paid or they’ll give him a free trip. Like, they were here a few months ago in Scottsdale and he got, like a free trip there to do this whole event thing. And he’s like one of their top five players. I don’t know. I don’t know that much about it, but I have other friends that do, and they were like, oh, you know, Squirrel Patrol.

Robbie Wagner: [50:32] What?

Chuck Carpenter: [50:33] And that’s his name, Squirrel Patrol. He’ll never hear this so I don’t really care. But yeah, I guess through my wife. Yes, I know him. But yeah, that’s like his career that’s.

Zach Lloyd: [50:44] Well, this is not my day job.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:46] Yeah, right.

Zach Lloyd: [50:47] Obviously.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:48] Yeah.

Zach Lloyd: [50:49] It’s fun, though.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:50] But it’s crazy that it can be, though, for sure. I mean, they built a new house, I don’t know, in Virginia. And so it’s all right.

Zach Lloyd: [50:57] I feel like you got to really know what you’re doing.

Robbie Wagner: [50:59] Or be very lucky.

Zach Lloyd: [51:01] Probably a lot of people out there.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:03] He spent years and years developing his models.

Zach Lloyd: [51:06] Wow.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:07] Yeah. So he does it with baseball and football, but mostly football, I think now. But he was doing a lot of baseball for a while, too. He just took forever. Like, oh, he’s an accountant. Built his models, figured out, and then started running stuff through there.

Zach Lloyd: [51:21] It makes sense. That skill set with transfer, I think a lot of people have software skills or data skills end up getting really into, like, how do you predict the outcome of these things?

Chuck Carpenter: [51:32] Yeah.

Zach Lloyd: [51:32] That makes sense. Cool.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:34] Yeah. That’s like a recommendation engine, in a way.

Zach Lloyd: [51:36] Exactly.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:37] I know it’s a very hard software problem, but people get smart. They do it. They work for Netflix. I don’t know.

Zach Lloyd: [51:43] Exactly.

Robbie Wagner: [51:43] Yeah, there was that guy that hacked Roulette back in the day. I don’t know if you guys subscribed to the Hustle, but they were talking about this guy. He was a professor of something, I think, and he just figured out, like, if you wait until, like, a certain moment when they drop the ball and see where the thing is spinning or something, he could predict it well enough that he made like, several million dollars. Just like.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:08] Wow.

Robbie Wagner: [52:09] Predicting where it would drop.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:10] That’s a physics thing, I think, right?

Robbie Wagner: [52:12] Yeah.

Zach Lloyd: [52:12] That’s awesome. It’s like, you’re not going to get it right every time, but on the average, all you need is that slight edge to make a smarter bet. It tips the odds away from the house. That’s pretty cool. Yeah, I’m into that.

Robbie Wagner: [52:24] Yeah, I’m not that smart. I just make random bets and hope for the best. Like, oh, 30 sounds like a good number.

Zach Lloyd: [52:31] Sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:32] I don’t think it’s working out for you. I’m willing to bet.

Robbie Wagner: [52:35] Yeah my wife does not like my betting strategies because they never pay off. She’s like, why don’t you just hold on to the money, and then you would have more money. I’m like, well, what if one wins?

Zach Lloyd: [52:46] That could win. That’s a crazy thing for your wife to say.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:49] It’s your fault. I have a bunch of Shiba Inu. Seriously.

Robbie Wagner: [52:52] Hey, it’s going to blow up. Wait for it.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:54] It’s not working out right now.

Robbie Wagner: [52:55] 2024 is the year for ship tokens.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:59] Ship tokens. Yeah. He’s like, talk me into that essentially. Crypto has never worked out for me.

Zach Lloyd: [53:05] That’s one thing I haven’t bought in enough to use a crypto. I’m a little crypto-skeptical.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:12] Yeah. I think the infrastructure offers a lot of opportunity. I think what’s being tested upon it is pretty risky.

Zach Lloyd: [53:20] I agree with that. I think it’s cool technology. I think most applications right now seem like just pure speculation to me. But the technology is super interesting, for sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:29] - Right. I don’t care about eight drawings that much, but that’s just me. Some other stuff could be cool. We’ll see. Play it by ear.

Robbie Wagner: [53:37] Yeah. I mean, it’s like anything, the first generation of anything is never usually good. Like, it’s got to figure itself out and it’ll get there.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:44] I’m just going to say, I’m still finding this to be a seven. So I think this is going to be a winner for your bachelor party.

Zach Lloyd: [53:49] Oh, I have no doubt this is going to be a winner for the bachelor party. Yeah, it’s going up a little too, the more I drink of it.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:55] Nice, nice. Yeah. I don’t know if, like, whiskey is your drink of choice typically, or what your preferences are.

Zach Lloyd: [54:02] It is, actually. Yeah. I’m not a whiskey connoisseur, but bourbon is my go to. I like cocktails, too. So cocktails. I like scotch also. So yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:14] Years ago on the bourbon trail, this Bubba who was leading our tour at Buffalo Trace usually like old retired guys, and he’s like somebody asked him something about Pappy because that’s made at Buffalo Trace. And he was like, well, that’s over here. He’s like, that’s great. That’s your favorite. But I always tell everyone the best whiskey is the one you like. And if that’s a $20 bottle of Weller, then great. And if that’s Pappy for 300, well, then great. And Weller is no longer $20 a bottle. But I think the sentiment remains. It’s sort of like tastes are so subjective anyway. And so if you’re enjoying something, is there anything wrong with that? Are you wrong? Like, no. Hell with you. That’s what I say. So if you want some cocktails, you want to put ice in it. Even though I razz Robbie over the years for the same thing, everyone else can put ice in it if they so choose. It’s not a trophy. It’s just like something to enjoy. Right? You know. It’s kind of like the chef brings you out an amazing thing and people freak out if you put a bunch of salt on there. But if you want salt on your stuff, then you have it.

Zach Lloyd: [55:16] I’m on your page with this. The point of it is to enjoy it, so make it. Do it the way you want to do it. I’m with you on that for sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:24] Yeah, totally. So hope you guys enjoy it this weekend, then.

Zach Lloyd: [55:28] Yeah, we will.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:29] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [55:30] All right, we’re at time here, so thanks, everybody, for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe and we’ll catch you next time.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:40]Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and Whatnot. This podcast is brought to you by Ship Shape and produced by Podcast Royale. If you liked 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: [55:55] 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.