60: Framework Debates, Tech Layoffs, and Starlink

Robbie Wagner: [00:09] What's going on, everybody? Welcome to Whiskey Web and Whatnot your favorite show about Whiskey Web and Whatnot with your host Robert William Wagner and Charles William Carpenter III.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:21] This is by far the best show I've ever heard, called Whiskey Web and Whatnot. So, you know.

Robbie Wagner: [00:27] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:28] That's a fact.

Robbie Wagner: [00:28] If you like any of those things.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:30] No, no, it's just literally the one called Whiskey Web and Whatnot hosted by Chuck and Robbie. Like, this is the best one of those shows.

Robbie Wagner: [00:38] I would agree with that. I haven't heard any contenders, but yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:43] Right. So, Robbie, tell us a little bit about yourself and why you think wearing a summer shirt in the fall is still okay.

Robbie Wagner: [00:50] Yeah, so that's interesting because I haven't been I put them away in the drawer where I'm not going to wear them because it's fall. Right. And then it decided it's going to be like, 72. So I'm like, well, I'm going to get the shorts and summer shirts out again because.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04] Oh wow, shorts too.

Robbie Wagner: [01:06] Yeah, like, no jacket at all today.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:08] No jacket required. You are a Phil Collins fan, so that makes a lot of sense to me. It's funny, the context here for our listeners is that we did a swag run a little bit ago, and it's seasonal. So there is a summer, fall, winter, spring shirts, and they're themed with our adorable octopus-like creature. And now that we're early November, really close to the end of daylight savings time, he's like, I'm still going to wear this pink summer shirt. So that's the context behind this conversation.

Robbie Wagner: [01:40] Yeah. I mean, meanwhile, you're wearing the Christmas winter sweater, but you have it turned inside out, so no one knows.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:49] Is it? Yes. Oh, yeah, that's true.

Robbie Wagner: [01:51] So we're both in the wrong season.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:53] Yeah, but it's inside out, so no one knows.

Robbie Wagner: [01:55] Yeah, well, I can turn mine inside out.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:57] That's why I can wear this because it's just the stripe. So it's the Fiori sweatshirt that is you can go both ways with I love it. I respect its privacy, but I wear it.

Robbie Wagner: [02:09] Fiori is very progressive.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:10] Yeah, yeah that's good.

Robbie Wagner: [02:12] Going both ways.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:13] Right? All right, let's talk a little bit about whiskey before people decide to hell with this episode. Today we are doing the Barrell Seagrass. So I'm sure any regular listener knows that we've been a fan of some of the Barrell options recently, so now we're trying the seagrass.

Robbie Wagner: [02:32] Sorry to interrupt. I was just looking at this. Do you think it's Barrell with the two Ls?

Chuck Carpenter: [02:38] Right. But their logo looks like barrels overlapping. And then with the two things, so.

Robbie Wagner: [02:42] I'm not sure I need to do more research. But I've been calling a barrel as well because it's like what they do is get fancy barrels to finish the fence.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:50] I thought that's what it was, but, yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [02:52] I just noticed today that it has the two Ls.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:54] Yeah, right? And so you're like, is that a name or something else? I don't know. They are Barrell or Barrell Craft Spirits in Louisville. They just do the bottling and someone else does the distilling. Pretty much, it seems. Yeah. So this one is a blend of rye whiskey. Both American and Canadian. It's distilled in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, and Canada I blame them for everything. Then they are finished in three different kinds of barrels. One is rum Madeira barrels, which is kind of like port dessert wine, and then apricot brandy. That's interesting. It is a 119-three proof.

Robbie Wagner: [03:32] Mine's 148.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:34] Whoa. Okay. Well, different barrel, I guess. Anyway, I didn't get into it. Let's see what's going on here. There's no age statement, so we don't have any idea, but they're blending all kinds of at least two years.

Robbie Wagner: [03:47] It is kind of like smelling some pineapple on the nose.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:52] Oh, and you said that just as I was smelling it, so I definitely get some pineapple juice initially. Yeah. I wonder if that's the apricot going along there.

Robbie Wagner: [03:59] Maybe mango.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:00] I guess it could be the apricots. Like a tropical fruit. You know as a side note, I'm not a big dessert person, but mango sticky rice, so good.

Robbie Wagner: [04:10] Never had it?

Chuck Carpenter: [04:11] I don't remember you ever had that.

Robbie Wagner: [04:12] No, I had it.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:13] Fresh seed. I like some, like, fresh street food in Thailand, too. Mango sticky rice was so good. It's basically just sticky rice. Right. And then slices of mango over top. And then basically kind of like a little sugar syrup. It's almost like a condensed milk with syrupy over top.

Robbie Wagner: [04:33] Interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:33] Yeah. I'm going to try this. Oh, yeah. Definitely get that apricot, dried apricot in there a lot of that upfront. And then I'm getting a little, like almost like the top of a creme brulee. That little sweet, sugary, burnt flavor. A little of that. Then the rye starts to come in. Get a little spice, little burn on the way down. That's just the first taste, but that's very interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [04:58] Yeah. I'm discovering that I must have done something to the roof of my mouth, because all I can taste is when I take this, it's like, wow, that burns the crap out of the top of my mouth. Like I have a cut or something up there.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:10] To say, was it a cutter? Like when you actually just hot food burn your mouth, and then.

Robbie Wagner: [05:14] Oh, it might have been hot food.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:15] That's terrible.

Robbie Wagner: [05:16] I can't remember what happened.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:17] I had a sandwich today, so it wasn't very hot.

Robbie Wagner: [05:20] Yeah. I agree that this is very apricoty. I think it's similar to if you got one of those bags of dried apricots and just poured, like, a thing of whiskey in there.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:30] Just kind of like and let it sit.

Robbie Wagner: [05:32] What I'm getting, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:33] Get some kind of, like. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [05:34] Maybe flambe it, and then you get your little bit of creme brulee there.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:39] Yeah, you got to get a blowtorch. I don't really care again about dessert that much. But if that's the reason to get a blowtorch, that could be something.

Robbie Wagner: [05:46] Well, you don't have to flambe desserts. You can do whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:50] Yeah, it's true. To crust your own steaks instead of doing it on a cast.

Robbie Wagner:[05:55] Yeah, that's what I do, a steak au poivre and I put the cognac in there and light it on fire.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:04] Yeah, it might be interesting. So I've usually do just like a reverse sear of my steak. So like slow cooking the oven to almost temp and then sear it. So finishing that way would be interesting. But I have a few times done the sous vide steak. That's good. Especially if you get a fatty one and let it break down for a while. I'm getting a little seagrass or not lemongrass on the finish for me.

Robbie Wagner: [06:29] Well it's called Seagrass.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:31] Yeah, I subliminally had that in my mind, maybe.

Robbie Wagner: [06:36] I like it.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:37] I like it. This is heavily affected by the finish. I don't know. So is it a rye or am I putting it more in like a category of almost a flavored spirits in a way? But this is really good. I would definitely have this again, I would definitely encourage some friends to try it or share with friends, which I may do. I'm going to give it a seven. I like it. This is good.

Robbie Wagner: [07:03] Yeah. I'm going to say the same. I'm very impressed with all these Barrell or Barrell or whatever. They do a really good finishing job. I mean, I don't know. We don't really know a lot about the whiskey they're starting with, but whatever they do after they get it, it's pretty good.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:19] Yeah. I mean, if they're sourcing barrels from a few different places every time I see Indiana, I always think MGP. But I mean, that doesn't mean it has to be bad. People make their selections, and if you make good selections from there, as many places do, then great. And some places don't and that's fine. But they're in Louisville, so maybe they have some connections there. I don't know what they'd be getting in Tennessee. Usually, people will say like Dickle. They do some barrels out of Dickle. So they make a lot of stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [07:47] I mean, I guess it depends how big their operation is because you could be a craft distiller giving them some stuff, but why would you they wouldn't be able to make very much?

Chuck Carpenter: [07:57] Yeah, so like you've got like Greenbrier, right? And they have a few different things.

Robbie Wagner: [08:03] They're like medium size.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:04] Yeah. And they're basically going to sell all their stuff. Right. They're not going to be able to really afford to. What you'd think is that basically, they overproduced to such a degree that they can meet their own demands plus sell some off for any excess. I can see like Dickel going through something like that with some of their younger, cheaper stuff, being willing to sell off some barrels to someone, a small producer like this. It's an interesting business model, too. Basically, someone else makes the stuff. You pick it, you brand it, and you decide kind of how you make it your own, in a way, by getting used barrels from yet other places and then playing around with it.

Robbie Wagner: [08:48] Yeah. I think it sounds like the fun part of making whiskey because I feel like you could do a lot of things wrong with a mash bill or the actual distilling process, but once it's made, they're not all that different. Unless you've got, like, crazy mash bills. So then it's the fun part where you can get a lot of different flavors is the aging.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:08] Right. Yeah. You can continue to make it more complex and whatnot, but your ability to correct mistakes at that point, if you're starting with something that's decent, then you can continue to kind of play with that and, oh, no, this I aged over here. Wasn't that great? Let me add a little more rum barrel or something. And that'll kind of round it off. You think, like, if you do your own mash bill and then you wait a minimum of four years and start tasting it and you're like, this is hot garbage. Well, there's four years of my life I've got to throw away and start over. So you know. I guess there's that.

Robbie Wagner: [09:43] Yeah, no, that's the stuff you taste and you go, this is not good. I'm going to save it for 100 years. Someone's going to buy it just because it's 100 years old a long time from now.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:54] Yeah, I don't know. You're going to save it for 100 years and apparently, Robbie is going to be living a very long time to have a lucrative business in the future.

Robbie Wagner: [10:03] I wouldn't sell it. But all these distilleries, well not all. There's a few that will have, like, 100-year-old one because someone had the foresight to save some for that long.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:12] I have not I don't think I've had anything older than like 25 years in bourbon. Let's just say 23 years or so was 23, 25 is my oldest. And I did not like it. It was just so over-oaked and woody and just harsh and just smacked me in the face with a Steve. A barrel Steve. Not Steve, a person, because that's just rude.

Robbie Wagner: [10:38] A stave. You mean?

Chuck Carpenter: [10:39] Yeah. I don't know. A stave, a Steve. I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, is it stave or a. Yeah, I don't know. I think.

Robbie Wagner: [10:50] I don't know. It doesn't matter.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:51] I just had a sandwich. I don't know what to say. So on to the next segment. It's a broader topic today and it's kind of been bubbling up and then seems to really be top of mind in the Twitterverse. Yes. In case you didn't catch in any previous episodes, I'm back just at least in Twitter, not really any other social media. It's just a tech hotbed of discussions and also garbage. So there have been a number of heated discussions, not just in people talking about different JavaScript frameworks or overall like web application website generating frameworks. And the interesting part about it is that core people in the projects and founders and whatever else are at the heart of said arguments and discussions. So I think that's very interesting. What have you seen? What do you have to say about it?

Robbie Wagner: [11:50] I haven't really seen any of the arguments about it. I've seen a few things recently that make me extremely happy, where someone is like, I think it might be time to look at something other than React. And I'm like, yeah, it is. There's a lot of cool stuff out right now, but I haven't seen a direct back-and-forth argument with anyone. I don't follow anyone involved with Next.js. So if those are the people starting the arguments, I'm probably not seeing those.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:16] That's bad for you. Whether you agree or disagree with it, I think seeing the conversation is interesting regardless. You can't just follow Yehuda and then think that you're dialed into everything happening in development these days, Robbie.

Robbie Wagner: [12:30] Oh, I know. I follow a lot of the Astro people and that's mainly it these days I'm not really following. I still have the few Ember people, of course, and they chime in on some things and then.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:44] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [12:44] I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:46] Yeah, because I remember a while ago Yehuda had some discussion and debate with the Vue. The guy from Vue, I forget his name offhand.

Robbie Wagner: [12:55] Yeah, Evan You?

Chuck Carpenter: [12:56] There you makes sense. Just about inner workings and what's good for the web and whatnot, but it feels like it's been a little while. I think that was all around like The Vue 3 release. And then a few months ago there were some discussions between Next.js and the Remix group about some things happening there and best ways forward and that kind of stuff. Some call-outs around that. And then more recently so Next 13's massive event release. It felt like an Apple event for me. It was interesting, like the way they would go to these pre-recorded videos in a fancy office scenario. And I was like, when is Tim Cook coming up to tell us about the Next iPhone? I don't know. But it wasn't that. It was about Next 13 and it sounds interesting. And then there were a lot of claims being made, and then there were some disputes around those claims and it's sort of like, what is the next best way forward? And one of those things was like Guillermo had like a chart up and very loosely referenced other zero JS frameworks and what's actually faster. And then there was a rebuttal to that and then some lengthier discussions and it just seems like people chose their favorite sports team and then started tackling on to what it was. It was just really what it felt like. Now forget you the Greenbay Packers are the greatest football team ever and I don't know a reference of what would be the greatest football team ever. So I chose a sport that I don't know anything about.

Robbie Wagner: [14:30] They're not bad.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:31] I digress. Meaning like yeah, there was a lot of debate about what is the next best thing in web application development and it's interesting though too because we've talked about, I think a point of view on this show a few times around. Like it's really funny, it's kind of coming full circle and now multi-page apps are kind of a thing again, and because we're like, oh, we actually trust the servers we're paying money for to do some of the heavy lifting for us offloading to our clients. But there was more recent talk to the opposition saying maybe that's not great because it's at the expense of page transitions and a lot of your depending on cash a bunch too, and a lot of other very complicated things. And you know, it was the right thing to do to offload to the client because that's free computing power and right?

Robbie Wagner: [15:24] I don't know. There's a lot of arguments on both sides, and I've seen people posting various arguments about like, you have to consider your users' device and network speed, and some people you know, we have good Internet generally as developers in the United States. Not all the time, but we're usually not on like a 1-megabit, 3G, or less connection in the middle of some country that has that. I'm not sure who has that problem still, but I know that's a big thing where it's like how much is the server shipping to you? So that could be a thing. Also, if the server is shipping you all the JavaScript and then your device needs to parse it and you have a cheap phone with no service, it's probably likely it's not going to parse it and execute it as quick as maybe your server would too. So like there's arguments on both sides for that and I don't know that anyone knows the quote unquote right answer right now, but it's definitely a lot of arguments.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:30] Yeah, I bet the right answer is it depends because I bet it's like what is your app? You know, are you a news site that people worldwide are trying to consume, and perhaps then your users get to an article and they don't really care about the next thing because they're not acting, they're consuming? I don't know. I mean that's a guess possibly, but I think it depends potentially. But I don't know if you're in that context, do you care about pretty page transitions? I don't know, I thought page transitions.

Robbie Wagner: [17:05] That is a big thing.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:06] More like a nice to have, right? Yeah, but it's a progressive enhancement, not necessarily a feature loss for your users per se.

Robbie Wagner: [17:15] Yeah, a lot of it is nice browser things, transitions, animations, etc. But I think something that people kind of gloss over a bit is what exactly your server-side rendering is doing like is it a. Like Astro's build time is going to basically take all of your JavaScript out and build the most basic HTML it can. It's doing the loops in the build time, so it just spits out a ton of HTML mostly. Like, sometimes you have a little bit of JavaScript, but if you're doing that, I think that would be more performant than like an edge server needing to run like serverless functions to execute your things, you know what I mean? Like it's not necessarily build time, it's like request time. I'm going to quickly build the thing, but Astro, it's already built. By the time you deploy the site, I'm getting that thing back, you know what I mean?

Chuck Carpenter: [18:10] So I think that's the idea between like incremental static regeneration or whatever that is, like the next thing, which is saying like, how about some of both? Which is like some critical things are build time, some other things maybe are server-side less frequent, less important in that sense. And some of them become static eventually once they're requested, but so they'll be kind of slow the first time for X user and then they go to the edge and start to join the rest of everything else. I don't know, I mean, if you basically raise millions, billions of dollars or whatever around creating a hosting service and building technology specifically for that, you certainly have a sword to fall on, right? Like you're accountable to that. And so admitting that it's not the end all, be all, of course, would be detrimental to those things, I would guess. I don't know, I'm not in that position.

Robbie Wagner: [19:16] Yeah, that's weird. We don't have a multi-billion dollar server platform.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:20] Yeah, then you're incentivized to champion.

Robbie Wagner: [19:25] I didn't watch the presentations. I don't know if you watched them or just saw snippets on Twitter, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:29] Some of both.

Robbie Wagner: [19:30] I know they were like, Webpack is dead, we're using Turbopack. It's the successor, like.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:36] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [19:36] Just shitting on everything. And then they're also like, it's like, I don't know, whatever. The metric was ten times faster than Vite.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:43] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [19:43] And it's like, okay, but Vite compiles everything in .00009 seconds, so you do it in .00001 seconds. I can't perceive either of those. Chill the fuck out.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:55] Well, yeah, exactly. It's like the wrong metric. Yeah, I did see that on Twitter too, where it's like well, it's not a very positive metric when you say that we make each other better when you can say just as well it's three times faster than our last builds. And that's also still true and still feels pretty good. It's feel a little attacking in ways. And also Turbopack is Alpha software, right? So it actually isn't. They're announcing a thing that for many use cases isn't production ready.

Robbie Wagner: [20:26] And it just works for Next.js right now, right? I believe so.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:31] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [20:32] They're just self-serving entirely here.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:35] Of course, they are.

Robbie Wagner: [20:36] I don't know the history, but I think Vite was kind of done by Vue people-ish, or at least was adopted by the Vue community first.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:45] Yeah, that was his first proving ground.

Robbie Wagner: [20:46] But it also was built like agnostic to where everything can be built on it. It's just like Gulp or Webpack or Rollup or any insert thing here that you can use for everything. So I think anything proprietary built for just Next.js is kind of like, okay, well, you say we're a community and we're all helping each other out and we're the SDK for the web or whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:11] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [21:12] But like we're not going to help any other frameworks or whatever like that. And you're definitely going to have to use React.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:18] And then again raising lots of money to incentivize your for-profit business. Utilizing open source, you're leveraging open-source contributions. Now they've hired tons of people and they're paying people and all that stuff as well. So there's no shit talk around that. Well, they've hired prolific people in the space. Okay, let's say that. Like people work there.

Robbie Wagner: [21:42] Yeah, but then they've probably turned all of their projects to their will is what I assume. They don't let them continue to do what they want. I could be wrong, I could be wrong. I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:51] That was the argument though, made against Remix. Now that they are Shopify acquired is that, oh, now these things are going to get turned to benefit the company.

Robbie Wagner: [22:02] Well, that's fine. They're getting money.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:05] They're getting money. Why is that a bad thing?

Robbie Wagner: [22:07] How many other companies are using Remix?

Chuck Carpenter: [22:10] Yeah, I was going to say don't use Remix. I guess that's such a bad thing for you. Like, you know, when an open-source project gets corporate sponsorship, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not what we've talked about, like trying to make these contributions be meaningful to the people that put something into it in some way, and sometimes that's the way that happens. I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [22:29] Yes, I mean, let's just circle back to the Tea argument of like why doesn't every company just pay every open like drop however many millions in the we-appreciate-you-open-source bucket and it will trickle down to all of your things.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:48] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [22:48] Because that's the only way you can make sure everyone gets compensated. Like if you're using a little tool that you don't even realize, but it's like a dependency of 1000 of your packages, that person is probably like, oh shit, I'm not getting any money because everyone's sponsoring these packages. They use me. But they would all not work without my package. Like, where's my cut? You know.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:06] Yeah, because I'm the unknown, whatever. So there's a good kind of tree there, although it almost feels like multi-level marketing. But for open source, where do you get on the tree, and it all trickles down to you, and use my package so that they get consumed by everything anyway. I think it's a good model, at least a good model to attempt rather than say, we can't solve this. So regressing back a little bit. That's what I like about our friends at Astro is that it starts as like, let's scale back to the things that work well, let's build static sites, get it into our build tools, like work in ways that you're familiar with and then boom, let's make that fast. Okay. You need to add interactivity. Let's put that in there and give you options. Right. They haven't attached themselves to any particular option. So you can sprinkle that in with just JavaScript or add your framework du jour or whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [24:06] Yeah. Which is like way, way back when React and Vue kind of first came out. It's kind of what you could do. I'm not sure if you go with React. I know with Vue you can kind of just run it in the browser. I guess you can with React too. But it's like you could sprinkle that in, literally put like a script tag to include React in your site or whatever absolutely. And use a couple of components directly in line in your HTML and not have to do crazy builds and JSX and all the things.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:37] Yeah, basically the days where full-on software engineering came to the browser, right? All the processes and like, oh, I need to compile but remember you could just like on a page, you could add a tag to Jquery and then have this globally available and just write some scripts to do some things on the page and that was that. Just straightforward like that. Oh, the browser reads this just like this. You don't have all these abstractions and to be smart and how it imports modules and all of that, sure, that's fine, that's things we appreciate. But the reality is at the end of the day, your browser, it does those things.

Robbie Wagner: [25:20] It reads those things, which is honestly what we want. Like JavaScript is meant to be the polyfill until the browser implements things. So like, it got a little crazy because we realized how much we could do with it and we outpaced how quickly browsers can just implement things natively. But the more things you can use from native APIs, the quicker it'll just do it immediately instead of needing to parse all your JavaScript for three or 4 seconds or whatever it might take and then execute.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:51] So is there an argument then to say, okay, we're going to start trusting the browser more and having a build time or no time whatsoever? Like WebAssembly is the argument for just WebAssembly to actually be the deep web application language of choice. It should be like thinking about something else instead of wedging or other tools around this, possibly.

Robbie Wagner: [26:16] I haven't shipped a WASM site myself, so I don't know. I mean, I know the benefits are supposed to execute faster, but I don't know other than that. There's probably some downfalls, like things that don't work the same as I do in JavaScript or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:31] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [26:32] But I don't know, there are JavaScript to WASM compilers. So another interesting thing, if you want to use this language, familiar language, and then end up with those things, you can do that.

Robbie Wagner: [26:46] Yeah, I know that whenever WASM came out, it was kind of a big thing, like the ember counts. They had a WASM version of the, what do you call it, the schedule for the day. And so that was fun to play with. Oh, here's the WASM version. It didn't necessarily seem like crazy faster because the normal one was fast already.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:06] Yeah, but it was there, so there you go. Somebody just wanted to prove they could do it.

Robbie Wagner: [27:11] Yeah, it was hot then and they're like, let's show that we can do this.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:15] Hot. It's true. So you wonder what the uptake is going to be at that point and how necessary it is. I'm sure it has a use case, like many other things, and then at a certain point, maybe your site is brochure where and you don't really need that. Right? You just need to know how to write HTML. And then if you want to add tools on top of that, great.

Robbie Wagner: [27:35] Yeah, I would imagine it would be very useful for smaller utility type things to make it all these things that you're kind of building. The building blocks for your site could be extra fast and easier to execute or whatever, but then when you're tying the site together, you might need real JavaScript and be able to do different things.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:55] Food for thought, future episodes as we go down the rabbit hole of things.

Robbie Wagner: [28:01] Yeah, maybe we can find someone that uses it in some kind of production site and they can tell us what it's good for.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:07] Yeah, that would be good. So yeah, if you happen to listen and you have been through this scenario, let us know. Come on, let's talk about it. Let me send you some free booze.

Robbie Wagner: [28:18] Whiskey Web and WASM.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:19] WASM. See "W" applies to so many things. So yeah, the framework wars seem to be really sparking up. The frequency has increased and it's one of the many things people are talking about in the community. So it feels like we've kind of done this once before. And the SPA framework wars early on seems away, like React walked away with some kind of clear winners there and all its flavors. Prior to that, we had the browser wars. So it's interesting, for better or worse, where we're going to land with these things. Each of those wars, I feel like, made some progress for us in the landscape. So what are we gonna get here? I'm optimistic.

Robbie Wagner: [29:03] Yeah, I think there are things that I like and dislike from every iteration of whatever wars we have, but there ultimately are beneficial things that come out of all of them. Even if the main direction, like choosing React for 90% of sites is not something I agree with. A lot of things React did have been brought into other frameworks, like the concept of virtual DOM and diving, like just changing the part of the DOM that changed instead of doing all of it. Which now React doesn't do ironically, because you use a fact or whatever and it rerenders the whole thing.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:35] Yeah, you end up with like tons of rerenderers due to the hooks, which is not great.

Robbie Wagner: [29:40] But what it used to do, it was based on the Doom rerendering engines. What I had always heard where that was the concept they had in the game Doom, of only rerender the pixels that actually needed to change. So they got their idea off of that and then, you know, people went, wow, that's cool, that's a good idea. And then a lot of other frameworks, like basically every framework now only rerenders the thing that changed. So that was a big win for everyone.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:05] Yeah, they don't always do it in a virtual DOM, but.

Robbie Wagner: [30:08] Right.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:08] Some way they've come up with different clever ways to do that. So, yeah, that's true. Like the concepts get shared and then people implement differently and iterate and all of those things. So in that sense, I'm optimistic.

Robbie Wagner:[30:22] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:22] Yeah. So speaking of Twitter and many other places, the timeliness of this particular podcast is around our world. Our area of expertise is commercially burning down a bunch all around us. Twitter employees, I guess tons of them, were laid off today in the last few days and weeks to that. But it seems to be also accelerating. Lots of big companies laying off many of their tech staff and other staff using this, I don't know, recession thing and economic downturns, although spending stays high. And so recession isn't quite there.

Robbie Wagner: [31:01] That's what I don't get. Every company is laying off 15% or 20% of their people or whatever. Okay, first, maybe they had too many people they were hiring like crazy because they had infinite money. They didn't care. So there's a little bit of that correction. But then also, it's just like, okay, so these same companies are laying everyone off, are going to charge me another $10 a month for the service I use from them or whatever, like.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:26] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [31:26] Hulu, Netflix, hosting services, everything is like sending all these emails out, oh, it's tough times, we're going to charge you a bunch more money. Okay, well, everyone just got fired. Who's going to pay you the more money?

Chuck Carpenter: [31:38] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [31:39] You can't have both.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:41] Yeah, it's interesting, all kinds of decisions being made on that. Like prices being increased due to recession is what the companies try to say. But then their earnings postings seem to negate the need for these things. Right, but nobody cares. It kinda gets

Robbie Wagner: [31:57] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:58] You know away.

Robbie Wagner: [31:59] I think the hot take here is CEOs want to continue to make $50 million a year or whatever. And they're like, that's like, you know, 120 developers we need to fire so that I can keep my money.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:15] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [32:15] Or whatever and, you know, times the entire C level suite and VPs and all of that, it just trickles down. And then they raise their prices and make everyone work more to accommodate the work that everyone else was doing. And it's capitalism, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:30] Yeah. I was going to say they're incentivized to make those kinds of decisions so that they can make the most, which is based on their shareholders doing very well and continuing a constant upwards trend. Shareholders don't particularly like a reduction. They're not incentivized to give you a better price to just keep the status quo. They need their abundant bonuses, salaries, and whatever else.

Robbie Wagner: [32:58] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:58] And all of that is around that same incentive. What can you do?

Robbie Wagner: [33:02] Yeah, unless you're Twitter, of course, where you're owned by one guy and he wants to just ruin everything for everyone. I have been really enjoying his tweets, though, where it's like, I'm going to charge all of the people that are verified $8. And people are like, oh my God, $8 a month. There's no way. That's so crazy. Like, no one's going to pay that. We don't want that. And then other people are like, you know what really the problem is that all the people who are already verified and went through that process and think they're hot shit are like I don't want other people to be able to pay $8, and also get that thing I have.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:39] Yeah, there's the exclusivity.

Robbie Wagner: [33:41] That's the main problem.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:42] Yeah, I see that.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:44] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [33:44] I did see that he posted a funny meme where it was like, person looking at like an $8 Starbucks drink.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:50] Yeah, I saw.

Robbie Wagner: [33:50] And they're like, yay, and then $8 for the thing and they're like angry.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:55] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [33:55] I mean, it is ironic.

Robbie Wagner: [33:56] $8 Starbucks drink enjoyed for 30 minutes, very happy. $8 for a month of Twitter. Super angry.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:04] Yeah, and you don't have to pay it also.

Robbie Wagner: [34:07] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:08] I'm not going to pay it. I don't care.

Robbie Wagner: [34:10] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:10] I'm barely back on the platform.

Robbie Wagner: [34:12] I see it being a slippery slope because they're saying they're going to prioritize those people's comments and posts and stuff. So like, someone made an argument that it will allow state propaganda to prioritize their lives and post whatever they want and get more views, which could be a big problem. But I also think that I'm not sure if that will get put up with or not or if Elon would just shut that down immediately.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:40] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [34:41] I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:41] We don't know. We know what it was. That's just it, right? We know what we know currently and we don't know what perspective changes could mean. So at the end of the day, the business wasn't really viable on its own. So it's also his job to come in as a private owner to make it viable. Like it's not a state owned newspaper or media outlet. I mean, it is just a box people can yell in.

Robbie Wagner: [35:10] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [35:11] So I'm very, very curious because I feel like I never know what Elon's thinking. For him. This could just be he needed an incredibly huge loss for taxes or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:23] Maybe.

Robbie Wagner: [35:24] Like, I need to buy this thing and then run it into the ground because I need to, like, not pay as much tax this year or whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:33] I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [35:33] I have no idea. I do think regardless of whether his intentions are pure or not, with any of the things he does, he is a shrewd businessman who knows what he's doing.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:44] Proof's in the pudding, I suppose.

Robbie Wagner: [35:46] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:46] And you have a number of successful businesses. Can't really argue with that. You don't have to personally like the person.

Robbie Wagner: [35:52] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:53] I feel like there's lots of very rich people that aren't necessarily likable.

Robbie Wagner: [35:58] I think that's most of them yeah, right. Not that I hate them, but most of them not like, wow, you would be a cool person to be friends with.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:06] Yeah, I'd love to sit down and have a whiskey with you. Like, most of them, I would say probably not.

Robbie Wagner: [36:11] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:11] I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [36:12] Definitely not Jeff Bezos.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:14] No.

Robbie Wagner: [36:15] He's just mad that Elon beat him to rocket ships.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:18] Right, exactly. I'd be first, but won't be the most successful.

Robbie Wagner: [36:23] Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that is one problem. If Elon can get everyone to Mars, but Amazon won't ship stuff on their rockets to Mars, how do you get your stuff on Mars?

Chuck Carpenter: [36:32] Yeah, another disruption model there. You should have participated, Bezos. All of a sudden you're bankrupt.

Robbie Wagner: [36:38] He's not going to ever be bankrupt.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:40] Yeah, probably not because I keep ordering stuff because I'm lazy.

Robbie Wagner: [36:45] Like, the problem is we have probably only like two or three legitimate hosting solutions for all of everything that you can build apps and websites on. And there are a lot of choices, but most of them are built on top of Amazon services. So if you look at the ones that aren't like, even if the whole shipping stuff to my house every day went away, they would have the entire technology side that has an insane amount of people using it to power the entire Internet. Like, everything we have on our computers right now probably running through Amazon services.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:24] Right. And there's a flaw in that though, right? There's definitely a monopoly to it, to a degree. When AWS goes down, half the Internet goes down. Like, that's true. Very true. Did you see the DH article where he's like, what they're going back to on-prem stuff instead of renting someone else's computers? He's like, there's really diminishing gains there at a certain point, and the cost and support and all this stuff isn't great, so.

Robbie Wagner: [37:54] Which is interesting if you think about it. It's basically not sustainable. I think a lot of companies do it more sketchy than you would think. They have a few extra machines that they give a static IP and they host some internal stuff on there, like, probably nothing client-facing or customer-facing. I mean, they would probably put that on some real hosting. But that's the thing, is if you need to have all these edge nodes, right, like however many hundreds across the world.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:26] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [38:26] It's just prohibitively expensive to do it on your own. Like.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:31] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [38:31] If your customer base is, you know, you're a clothes washing service in Massachusetts and you want to host an app just for Massachusetts right? Like, that's a problem you could solve easily. But if you're even United States-wide, it becomes pretty expensive to have all that many servers.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:50] Yeah, well, obviously, I don't know the in-depth details of their infrastructure, but they basically use a company out of Chicago with on-prem hardware managed by that company. So to a degree, sort of, but they buy the hardware still. So, like, base camp owns the hardware, 37 signals, whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [39:13] They just don't own the building it's in.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:15] Right, yeah. So it's kind of like in a data center and you do pay some people to do the managed bit to it, but you design your setup and pay for the hardware and everything.

Robbie Wagner: [39:25] Isn't that what Rackspace was like?

Chuck Carpenter: [39:28] Yeah, I think that's basically what Rackspace was like, which I don't know if they're around anymore or not, but I remember.

Robbie Wagner: [39:34] I don't know, they had an office in Blacksburg.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:37] I was going to say when I was at Isogenics many years ago. We speak in MLMs, we use Rackspace for a lot of our stuff and a few things on-prem. But I think it was mostly like intranet versus, like you said, customer-facing stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [39:51] Yeah, I remember before it was the thing to just buy Amazon servers. I would look at huge Racks and you could buy those Mac server things to Rack in there and they would be, I don't know, 20 grand each or something. I was just like, I don't know what I would ever use this for, but I want this thing.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:10] Yeah, I know. That's. Like the next level of my home lab, I need to go from a little desktop Dell my brother gave me to an actual Rack server. That would be pretty fun.

Robbie Wagner: [40:23] Yeah, well, after setting up the office stuff with the firewall and switch and all the things in the Rack, I'd probably do that at my house one day, depending on where we end up and if I have enough ethernet wire.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:36] I would say if you ever stayed in one.

Robbie Wagner: [40:38] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:40] Yeah. I mean, running I saw an article recently about, like, running fiber through your house, which should be interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [40:47] That seems error-prone.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:49] Yeah, exactly.

Robbie Wagner: [40:51] Like it stops working because you crimped one little piece too much or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:55] Yeah, very directional and all that kind of stuff. So it's not as idiot-proof.

Robbie Wagner: [41:00] Yeah, because I tend to start running it through the wall and if it doesn't move, you just shove it really hard. That's not what you do with fiber.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:07] You know what, that's why I have one of those mesh WiFi networks. But I would love to move some stuff around. So I think I need to run yeah, I think I need to run ethernet through my house.

Robbie Wagner: [41:21] Yeah, I mean, Cat6 or I guess it's like eight now, is it? But six is very sufficient. Six is like up to four gigabits or something. Like speeds, you're not going to get from your service provider for a while.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:35] Yeah, seems like more than sufficient. Yeah. Plus like, maybe add some home value to have.

Robbie Wagner: [41:41] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:41] Ethernet ports in each room or whatever?

Robbie Wagner: [41:44] Well, even just for your mesh network, it makes a big difference if they're plugged directly together versus wirelessly talking.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:50] Yeah, exactly. So that would be another plus side doing that. And like I said, I don't like the location of where my Internet service provider put things. I wish they were somewhere else. So having some ports to move around and put things where I want them to be would be useful, I think.

Robbie Wagner: [42:08] Yeah, so we have, I think, like five or six Eeros like that's our mesh thing. And we had forget what it was called now, but we had the Internet that was line of sight beamed to us. So it was like ten Mbps and it was like $300 a month. It was awful, but it was our only choice. So we just got Starlink, which is awesome because it's maybe not as reliable just yet because I wasn't actually supposed to get it. I was just on the waiting list and it was like, you might get it by the end of 2022. And I wasn't getting it, wasn't getting it, and I was like, it's almost the end of 2022, what's going on? So I went in and just like, paid for a business one and was like, all right, I'm going to get the business one. I'm going to pay you a ton of money. That one still didn't ship or do anything, but within a day after I did that, I got an email about the personal one and it was like, we understand some people don't have any choice in Internet, even though we're not really available in your area do you want our best effort service type of deal? And I was like.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:16] Yes.

Robbie Wagner: [43:17] Yes, please.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:17] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [43:17] So they sent it to me and our max was like ten Mbps before and like the highest I've gotten so far with Starlink, like 83. So it's like not bad. Eight times faster, and I think it's $150 a month or something like half the price. And the only issue so far is they don't give you an ethernet port, so they give you like a router and you have to connect wirelessly to it. So I had to order an adapter that I have to plug in to then get an ethernet port and use my Eeroes. So we'll see what the real performance around the house is after I do all that.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:53] Very interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [43:53] So far it's promising.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:56] All right. Yeah. Line of sight technologies. Hot garbage. I worked for a start-up doing that in Phoenix 2002 or three or something like that. It was interesting because there was a decent amount of clients even, like, downtown because there wasn't good cable or anything else really run at that time. Plus to have that has changed. And then, of course, rural areas as well, as you know, that's a similar situation, but they essentially would, like, buy a T1 line somewhere, run it up as high as they can, put that antenna out, and then do specific directional antennas at the source to get the signals. And it broke all the time, and people were really mad all the time, and it was just, like, a mess. I just can't imagine how much better that would get.

Robbie Wagner: [44:49] I don't think it's much better now. It usually goes out at least a couple of times a day, and usually, by the time you actually get someone from support, it's come back. So it's like you just got to deal with it.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:02] Yeah. Most of the time I would log in remotely and reboot for people, and then it would work.

Robbie Wagner: [45:06] Yeah and I think it's even though we're supposed to get, like, ten Mbps, I think it's like, usually five or less. And it's just been crazy because I used to start up Disney Plus right? And I would have to wait for I didn't time it, but I'd say two or three minutes before all of the thumbnails would load, and now it's just, like, apps booted. So it's so much better.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:32] Yeah. So worth it for convenience. Life on a farm.

Robbie Wagner: [45:37] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:37] Very specific thing you chose.

Robbie Wagner: [45:39] Yeah. I mean, that was one of our biggest complaints. Some of the other things were, like, some of our bathrooms were outdated and stuff, but we just finished redoing those.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:48] You put them indoors, they were out houses, and you brought indoor plumbing into.

Robbie Wagner: [45:53] No, we thought they were original to the house. House was built in 1989, and I think they basically were. However, they did this thing that didn't know existed, where you can pour this stuff over your tile and it makes it like they had, like, red tile because it was like the 80s they thought that was cool, so they painted it white, basically.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:16] Yeah. I've seen that. You can kind of paint over the tile, but it's not just like, normal paint. It ends up being like.

Robbie Wagner: [46:21] It's thick and plastic layer.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:23] Yeah. Basically creates a hard candy shell.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:26] Yeah. So we had no idea. We thought it was just, like, a weird flooring that they had put down, but then they started jackhammering it up, and they're like, yeah, this is red tile. So that was interesting. But yeah. So we redid a couple of bathrooms. We're not doing one of them because we never use the upstairs. But Katelynn is now being like, oh, you know, we've done a lot of stuff in the house. We have better internet. Like, I'm not as unhappy out here anymore. She still doesn't like that we're really far from stuff, but we're enjoying it a little more now.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:58] Yeah, you can tolerate it. So I think you wanted to talk a little bit about speaking of down on the farm, you went down the explorative route of vintage four-wheel drive vehicles and found your experience to be okay.

Robbie Wagner: [47:15] Well, so the problem I bought a Scout because I think the Scouts are like, somewhat better looking than Broncos, even though Broncos are more popular. So I got that purely on looks like I know nothing about this truck. I think it looks cool. I'm going to buy it. Turns out when you buy a thing online that you know nothing about, it's likely that the person that owned it before did a lot of work to it in their garage and did all of it wrong. So I got it and everything was wrong. Like, they had flipped the axle to lift it without actually buying a lift kit, stuff like that, where you wouldn't want that. So we undid all of that janky stuff and redid most of that stuff. And it was probably 80% good. But getting someone to do all that work is expensive. So then I spent a decent chunk of money and then was still left with a truck that didn't all that great. It was probably par for the course for other people that own that truck that didn't put tons and tons of money into literally top to bottom redo's.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:19] Now you're going to buy another truck you didn't test drive, though.

Robbie Wagner: [48:22] Well, yes, but they do things like very meticulous. Like the flooring in the scalp, for example, was just metal, like the body of the truck. The new Bronco I'm getting is going to have four layers of like there's like a sound dampening layer, something else, like jute layer, and then carpet. Like little details like that are, like, done all the way around the truck. It has heated seats. It has a nice top. It has better suspension. All the stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:56] Yeah. What you want and what you didn't experience before. If you want, like, an old-looking truck, you want creature comforts, though.

Robbie Wagner: [49:05] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:05] Old cars aren't usually creature comforts. So restomod that is like.

Robbie Wagner: [49:07] Yeah, I want air conditioning. Yeah, all the things. So basically the company that's doing it for me does all of that stuff standard. It's like you can choose a couple of options. Like, I chose to do white wheels and bumpers, and the roll cage will be white.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:27] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [49:28] But other than that, it's like, basically like, oh, and you choose, obviously, the base color. It's going to be green.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:34] The classic bronco green.

Robbie Wagner: [49:35] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:36] Like the seafoam green color?

Robbie Wagner: [49:37] It's boxwood green.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:38] Yeah, those are cool.

Robbie Wagner: [49:39] Is what they call it.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:41] Whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [49:41] They had that in, like, the other classic colors. Brittany blue, which is kind of like a light blue.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:47] Not just your favorite pop star.

Robbie Wagner: [49:49] No, but yeah. So I'm hoping this will be a much better product. Obviously, it probably won't be amazing ride quality because it's not a new car, but it should be at least a lot quieter and a little bit better driving and hopefully a lot less. Just blowing gas out of the tailpipes like the Scout did.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:14] Literally. Just like, not even burning gas, it's just ripping gas out.

Robbie Wagner: [50:17] I would start it and there would be literal clouds of wet just all over the.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:24] So instead of having a key and ignition to start it, what you'd have to do with your previous truck is take a pile of money and then light it on fire. And then it would come to life. Right.

Robbie Wagner: [50:35] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:35] That's essentially what that experience was for you.

Robbie Wagner: [50:40] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:40] From start to finish.

Robbie Wagner: [50:42] Yeah. And then even once the key start worked, you would go to start it and it would just be turning over. Turning over. I mean, like a classic car would you have to, like, give it some gas, and eventually it'll start to go, and then it wouldn't ever like the idles would stay really high and you had to give it a ton of gas to get it to, like, realize, oh, it's, like, good and, like, cut back down and, like, there was a lot of timing issues and stuff, so.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:06] Right. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [51:08] But I sold it, so you.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:11] Sure did pass that on. You went to the marketplace where everybody overpays for vehicles, even like 1990 Celicas, and somehow lost money.

Robbie Wagner: [51:22] Yeah, but they bought it for basically the money I put into it. So they got a good deal, in my opinion.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:29] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [51:30] Even though it's got a lot of work left to go, I think they got a very good deal.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:34] I agree with that. And I really thought that you had a lot of positive comments within the thread, so I was like, somebody's going to step up here and really make a show but.

Robbie Wagner: [51:44] I think the problem was the timing because I talked to the guy who bought it, and he had been on, like, three or four other Scouts and lost most of them, or all of them, I guess, until this one.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:54] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [51:55] But one of them, he said, ended at like 6:30 on Friday. Like, people were off work, maybe had a drink or two, and were like, I'm a bid this way up, so mine ended at 1:30 or two or something in the middle of a Wednesday. People were working and not paying attention.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:13] That's true.

Robbie Wagner: [52:14] I think that makes a big difference.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:16] Yeah. Sometimes you get busy or in a meeting or whatever, you are doing and like, oh, crap. I couldn't get to that and then it's gone.

Robbie Wagner: [52:23] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:24] That was actually a deal.

Robbie Wagner: [52:26] Plus, all of the people that were just sitting around with piles of cash to buy these old cars lost their jobs.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:32] So turns out recently. Yeah, I don't know. I'm still waiting for a turn in that market. Like.

Robbie Wagner: [52:40] Yup.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:40] The classic car market prices shot up like crazy cars across the board, but. It was just like.

Robbie Wagner: [52:46] Yup.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:46] How is everything with a Porsche on the front? How are they all $70,000 no matter what? Like, this one got rust in the floor. 70 grand?

Robbie Wagner: [52:56] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:56] It's a real project car.

Robbie Wagner: [52:58] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [52:58] That was so funny. It would be like, Bring a Trailer, would have one. It would be like ten or 20 grand, and there'd be like four minutes left and it would go for 100,000. Who is bidding on this thing?

Chuck Carpenter: [53:12] What is happening here?

Robbie Wagner: [53:14] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:15] Pretty crazy. So I think you want to talk about some TV shows, none of which I have seen. I tried to start.

Robbie Wagner: [53:22] You haven't seen any of these?

Chuck Carpenter: [53:24] I haven't.

Robbie Wagner: [53:25] You've seen Peaky Blinders.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:26] Oh, sorry. Trying to finish Peaky Blinders. I haven't tried the new season yet, though so.

Robbie Wagner: [53:31] The last season. Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:33] I got to prime myself up to, like, get ready to understand what the hell he's saying. In most episodes.

Robbie Wagner: [53:38] I found that I can't turn it up loud enough to understand them.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:44] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [53:44] I just accept that I'm only going to understand every, like, two or three words and I get the gist.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:49] Yeah. It's more about the action anyway.

Robbie Wagner: [53:51] Yeah, it's more about him just, like, killing or maiming people as much as he can.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:56] Yeah. I mean, it's like turn of the 20th-century Irish mafia kind of thing.

Robbie Wagner: [54:04] It's pretty satisfying.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:05] And or I've started twice and fell asleep. And I love Star Wars, so I don't know why it would be a thing that keeps happening, but it definitely has, and that's disappointing. So what do you think? It's worth it?

Robbie Wagner: [54:18] I just watched the first episode so far because I watched the first episode and then remembered I hadn't finished Peaky Blinders, which is much more exciting. So I started watching that.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:28] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [54:28] But yeah, it was good. It's different in that there's no Star Wars stuff that you're used to I haven't seen any Stormtroopers or Jedi's or it's just about like a normal dude going about his we're not really sure what he's doing. He was looking for his sister or whatever in the first episode. It seems interesting. I think it's not as compelling because it doesn't have all the things you're comfortable with from the Star Wars universe. It's more just like a show that happens to have the same kind of blasters they have in Star Wars.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:00] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [55:00] So I think that's I don't know, I have to get a few more episodes in and see it's definitely not the Mandalorian, which is amazing.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:09] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [55:09] But it's not bad.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:11] I liked Obi-Wan, too. I don't know if you like Obi-Wan. I know people were split on that, but for me, it was delivered. I liked that. Yeah. I've been watching the latest season of Cobra Kai.

Robbie Wagner: [55:24] I haven't started any of those. I was never a Karate Kid person, so I don't know if I would enjoy it. I mean, does it hold up on its own or is it more fun for nostalgia type of stuff?

Chuck Carpenter: [55:36] It's more fun because so many characters come back and stuff. They basically revisited with everyone from that time. And the original protagonists are, like, John Kreese, and then later what's his name? Something silver. Sensei Silver. So, yeah, people later and different people he bought and were friends and all that kind of stuff. I don't know that it would stand on its own. I feel like it's campy and has nostalgia to it, and that's kind of the appeal. So if you weren't a child of the 80s during Karate Kid's heyday, you probably won't find a lot in it.

Robbie Wagner: [56:11] Okay, that's fair.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:13] Yeah. Let's skip it for you. Anyone else who finds a Gen Xer should definitely watch it.

Robbie Wagner: [56:19] Yeah, the thing's next on my list, I went through I mean, we're past Spooky season now, I guess. But I went through Netflix's shows and just, like, added a bunch of stuff to my list for stuff that was spooky. I forget what it's called now, but it's by the people that did The Haunting of Hill House. They have, like, a few shows in that universe, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:39] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [56:39] And it's like, about a priest that moves to a town and, like, miracles start happening or something. But I think the twist is that he's like a demon or something, you know? Like, it's not good miracles, but I don't know. I'm going to watch that at some point because I totally missed my window of spooky season so I'm going to watch it anyway.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:59] I see. Yeah. I don't know. I don't watch a lot of spooky. I do want to see Sandman, which is another.

Robbie Wagner: [57:06] It's underwhelming.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:07] Really?

Robbie Wagner: [57:08] For me.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:08] Yeah. Did you read the comics?

Robbie Wagner: [57:10] No.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:10] Are you a Neil Gaiman fan? Okay. I feel like because I like those things, I might be into it, but.

Robbie Wagner: [57:17] Yeah, no, it's not bad. It's just like when you have a buy Netflix, I forgot. Is it like Marvel Universe?

Chuck Carpenter: [57:26] It's a DC character, but there's no intertwining with the other characters. I think, so it's kind of its own thing.

Robbie Wagner: [57:32] Right. But, I mean, usually, when there's, like, DC or Marvel or something where it's like, this is this universe I'm like, it's usually pretty good.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:40] Right, right.

Robbie Wagner: [57:41] But I found it like the first couple of episodes are really good. Then there was, like, a lot of just kind of dragged on, and it wasn't great. I haven't finished it, so it might get better. But I didn't dislike it. I'll say that, but it's not like I'm. Going to finish everything else I'm watching first, and then I'll come back to it.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:57] Basically, when you need some filler, you'll kind of come back kind of thing. Yeah. Well, if you like superhero things, I just got an email, I think, yesterday about the new season of DC Titans. So titans on HBO. Max, I don't know if you ever followed, like, the Teen Titans was, like, the comic side of it, but it's definitely skewed more adults. And it's a whole, like, other superhero group with, like, were the sidekicks and teens of the main universe, and now they started their own. Like Robin. When he left Batman, he started the Titans.

Robbie Wagner: [58:29] Oh, yes, I saw that where it's like four people from like Batman-ish, but it's like, not Batman. Like, Batman has died or something. And that's the premise.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:39] No, he hasn't died.

Robbie Wagner: [58:40] I've seen something where it's like, what do you do when he's dead? Or whatever. And I think that's about what it is that the four other people.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:48] Well that's not what it's about.

Robbie Wagner: [58:49] Step up because he's dead. Or maybe he left and faked his death. I don't know. But it shows a funeral scene, and then it's like, here's these four other people.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:57] Right. That's not necessarily the context, though. The context is like, that Dick Grayson outgrows Batman. He has another philosophy, and they have a falling out. But then Batman is still sort of there as a mentor from time to time or someone he could check in with. But he's left Gotham and gone onto the West Coast and started his own superhero team versus, like, the Justice League kind of thing. A little more vigilante-like and all that kind of stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [59:29] Maybe that's it then, that he left. Maybe the funeral scene had nothing to do with the real premise. I was watching it in, like, an ad on Twitter, and I just saw, like, a funeral, and it was like, what do you do when the Bat is gone? Or something like that. So I thought he had died or whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:45] Right? Well, no, and then he has overlaps and interactions with the second Robin, Jason Todd, and how that goes awry and all kinds of stuff. And he becomes during the course of this, he becomes Nightwing, too, which is like, he's no longer like, Batman’s sidekick. He's not Robin anymore. There's a new Robin. He's Nightwing. There's all of that, too.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:10] Yeah, I'll have to check that out.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:11] I think it's good. I recommend it.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:13] I watched all of Gotham and really enjoyed it.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:17] You'll like this, then? It was very good. Cool.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:20] Yeah. We are overtime.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:22] We are overtime.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:23] So, everyone watch your favorite superhero shows. And also, while you're at it, go to your podcast player of choice and press five stars on this podcast, and we'll give you even more stuff you don't care that much about, like the next superhero show that comes out before the next one and we'll talk to you then.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:49] Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and Whatnot this podcast is brought to. You 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 and maybe a review. As long as it's good.

Robbie Wagner: [01:01:04] 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.