48: Tech Rants, Supporting Open Source, and Great TV Shows

Robbie Wagner: [00:09] Hello, friends. Welcome to Whiskey Web and Whatnot with your hosts Robbie and Chuck. You may not have heard of them, but they're the same people that usually host.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:20] But better known, owned by our full names.

Robbie Wagner: [00:22] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:23] Not our common names.

Robbie Wagner: [00:24] Yes.

Robbie Wagner: [00:25] But we'll get more conversational for this one. There's a lot of stuff that I want to rant about and discuss, and we're just chilling.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:32] Oh, come on, Robbie, you're new to the show. Tell us a little about yourself.

Robbie Wagner: [00:36] Well, I've been doing React for 14 years and since before it came out. Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:43] I invented React. They have heard of me before.

Robbie Wagner: [00:47] Actually wrote Facebook. Zuckerberg stole it from me. But you'll have that.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:51] You wrote in JavaScript first and he rewrote it in PHP, so he's a faster typer.

Robbie Wagner: [00:56] Yeah, I wrote it in React before React existed and he just wrote it on PHP. And I also made it open to everyone and he was like, oh, no, it's only people like 18 and up and whatever in colleges or whatever those original requirements were.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:09] He was the original marketing genius. You came up with the platform and wasn't going anywhere, so he stole it and got some great marketing there.

Robbie Wagner: [01:16] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:17] You called yours the Book Book, too, which was a little weird. I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [01:22] Yeah. All right.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:23] We haven't been drinking yet, believe it or not.

Robbie Wagner: [01:25] We will be, though.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:26] Yes. So today we are having the Barrel Dovetail Whiskey finished in Rum, Port, and Dunn Vineyards Cabernet barrels, which sounds very interesting, super high proof. 122.54 is what mine says. You wrote down 124.7.

Robbie Wagner: [01:46] Wait, they're different proof?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:48] Yeah, different proofs because mine is bottle number 28,247.

Robbie Wagner: [01:54] Mine is 14,286.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:57] So who knows what happened there? But different barrels.

Robbie Wagner: [02:00] Yeah. So I don't think they water them down at all. So it's just whatever it came out of the barrel at.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:05] Yeah, they're cast strength. So that's why I'm like 10,000 plus barrels or bottles ahead of you. So definitely a few barrels different.

Robbie Wagner: [02:12] But it sounds like all they do, from what I can tell, is buy this whiskey from someone or a couple of people because it's distilled in Indiana and Tennessee. And then they get all these cool barrels. Maybe that's why their name is Barrel and they just put this existing whiskey that they had nothing to do with in some fancy barrels to make it different and sell it to you.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:34] Yeah, sourced, finished, and blended. So they do a little blending, I guess, at some point. So maybe wherever they're like. So Indiana tells you MGP, most likely. I don't know who they're sourcing from in Tennessee, but they're buying up some barrels there, too, doing a blend and then finishing that in whatever. We don't get any time of finishing. These Louisville places. They're clever.

Robbie Wagner: [02:57] Yeah. This is how I would do a whiskey. I don't want to do any of the work. I just want to put it in a barrel.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:05] Store it.

Robbie Wagner: [03:05] And then at some point later, take it out and make a fancy bottle and put it in there.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:10] You're a glorified warehouse, basically. Yeah. All right, let's see. Take a little smell.

Robbie Wagner: [03:19] A lot of cherry. Maybe some Dr. Pepper on the nose.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:22] Yo, that's it. Dr. Pepper. I was like, what is this? Like, what is it? Dr. Pepper is a blend of, like, 24 flavors or something.

Robbie Wagner: [03:30] 23?

Chuck Carpenter: [03:31] Yes, 23. That's it. The MJ of sodas. Yeah, definitely a cola-like smell to it. Okay. All right, I'm going to taste it. I'm going to first prime my palate. Yeah. Like a cherry Coke with some burn, though.

Robbie Wagner: [03:48] Yeah, there's a lot of cherry. I'm guessing that's the Port. Or no the cabernet, maybe.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:53] Yeah, it could be either.

Robbie Wagner: [03:55] Not the rum.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:56] No, rum. The hell with rum. What am I, a pilot? It's more on brand, though. Let's see.

Robbie Wagner: [04:02] That's true. We should change this to Rum and two other "r" things.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:07] Rum Rust and Rambling.

Robbie Wagner: [04:10] There we go.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:11] Yeah. "R" "R" "R".

Robbie Wagner: [04:12] Catch us next week on Rum, Rust, and Rambling.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:17] -Got a little bit of an earthiness in the finish, though. Man, is it hot? I'll tell you.

Robbie Wagner: [04:2] Oh, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:23] If I had some ice, I would consider utilizing a little ice with this.

Robbie Wagner: [04:26] It is tasty, though.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:28] I don't know what I was expecting, but it has a very tasty feel. Hopefully, I don't have two of these. If I do, as I often do during our podcasts, I'll be done for the day. Yeah. Which, hey, maybe that's not the worst thing. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [04:43] I mean, the flavors are really good. It's a little hard to taste them with all the burn.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:48] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [04:49] But I think that's as intended, so you can water it down as much as you may want.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:55] Yeah, I've got a dropper at home. I don't know why I don't bring it in. Or maybe just buy a second dropper with some distilled water, and then you just do a few drops and that'll kind of change it up a little. I should do that. Especially these hot ones.

Robbie Wagner: [05:08] Yeah, for sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:09] Not my favorite show. I mean, the hot whiskeys, the burning ones.

Robbie Wagner: [05:15] But I'm a big fan, though, especially for I'm guessing the whiskey they buy is unless they maybe it doesn't say. Maybe they have influenced the mash bill in some way. Maybe this is more scientific than we know, but I'm assuming they're just buying some of the cheapest stuff that MGP and whoever makes and then putting it in barrels and making it better.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:37] I don't know. It's hard to say. I mean, I would gather that they go and they're tasting the barrels they buy. Yeah. I think they're doing some taste or they just know from, like, okay, MGP, here's a mash bill that we like, we've bought before, so we want a similar profile, flavor profile, aged this amount, get that in Tennessee. I'm kind of wondering what they're buying. They're probably not buying Jack Daniels, but maybe something like Dickel or maybe a smaller place that has some barrels. I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [06:07] I think I've seen several Dickel collaborations on Fine Cask, so I'm guessing maybe them. I don't think Jack Daniels collaborates. They're just like, we're us. You buy it.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:17] Yeah, we're going to handle it. We don't have spares to sell. But I could see a place like Dickel doing maybe Green Brier. We were there in Nashville. They're up and coming, and they do a decent volume. This thing's got legs on it too. If you like, move it around and you can see, like yeah, it's got some serious legs on there. Yeah. I don't know. I'm a fan. I would love to try it with a few drops of water and then possibly with some ice. But I feel emboldened enough to give it a seven as is.

Robbie Wagner: [06:48] I was going to give it a seven. I would say with some potential ice or water or something. This could be an eight. Like, right now it's a little too burny for me to make that call. I can't really feel all the flavor. But yeah, at least a seven for sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:04] Yeah. I'm going to have to take this bottle home and try it in a couple of other iterations this evening or this weekend possibly. We'll talk about it later. But as you know, I will be taking a trip out to San Diego. We all know what that means. I think it literally means Saint Diego.

Robbie Wagner: [07:25] No.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:27] But should we talk anything serious before this burny stuff starts to.

Robbie Wagner: [07:32] Um, none of this is well, so it's serious, but I'm approaching these topics as, like I'm just upset at the way people do things and just want to talk about it and how things could be better in several areas of things.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:49] Of companies who do technology?

Robbie Wagner: [07:51] Yeah, I mean, people that code not really as much on the personal developer level, but also some on the developer level. We'll just jump in. So, like, the first thing that really bugs me about companies is like, they'll have an app and they've been working on it for, let's say, at least a few years. Like, newer apps don't have a problem with this as much over those few years. They're like, all right, we got all these features we want. Like, we've maybe planned them out with a bunch of tickets. We've got designs. We've got all this stuff that needs to get done. And we have nowhere in this planned for things like testing, refactoring, upgrading your dependencies, or staying up to date on your framework, or just experiments like time that isn't like, oh my God, ship the new feature right now. None of that is baked in. And this is a big big problem because well, a lot of companies try to fix it. Honestly, they hire us to come in, and they're like, we still don't want to change our ways. We're shipping that button. That button is going out. It's got to be red. I want to click it and hover it and whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:02] Yeah. Business value. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [09:04] And I want you to come in and fix all the stuff like upgrade all our dependencies and get us better test coverage and do all these things.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:12] Yeah. It's a detriment to technical teams, I think because their definition of done doesn't include a lot of those things. Their maintenance ideologies are almost nonexistent. Right. There's never like, hold on, let's stop shipping features, still ship an improved application and include improvements, all these things, right? Confidence and shipping because testing coverage, security improvements, maintaining your dependencies to be to the latest levels because a lot of times version bumps happen. If you're not updating your versions, you have security vulnerabilities over time, like exposed vulnerabilities. That's another thing. And yeah, just like having longevity and confidence in your application because you are quote-unquote maintaining it. There's no correlation to business value on that.

Robbie Wagner: [10:04] Yeah. And I think a lot of the problems, like everything I have in these notes, honestly comes down to higher-ups at companies or not even higher-ups. Whoever's planning and in charge of what are we going to do? Maybe doesn't have enough buy-in or input from developers or people who may know about some of these things. So they're kind of taking a stab in the dark and just being like, these are the things we think we want to implement. I haven't really run a software team before. I don't know about tech debt, I don't know about all these things, whatever. So we're just going to blindly take the thing that we think is going to make us a few thousand dollars and we're going to do that and then we're going to move on to the next thing that makes us a few thousand dollars or whatever. And it's just bad because I don't know, I feel like we've done all of this stuff to be like, let's get everyone Scrum certified, and let's do this whole process. And people are really bought into that and it does not help them. It's all arbitrary values that are just supposed to help your team plan a little bit about what you may or may not get done.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:06] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [11:06] But it's not supposed to be a road map of these things will be done in a year. See you then.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:13] Yeah. Yeah, you've touched on all kinds of different points there. So on the high level, you have your executives who have business objectives that they want to get to, and part of that is making money, right? And so they want to tie work to making money. Right. And some of that is in making new money. Some is that retaining and reducing churn and things like that. So you have one aspect where you're shipping new features. You have another aspect where you're iterating features because you have user feedback or you can correlate churn to a pattern in the application or a thing in the application. So you're like, well, I want to maintain my income stream. I want to grow my income stream. And then you have technical teams where they struggle to tie those things directly to. So you have executives, you have product organizations who are supposed to tie those two things together, but I don't think they really do a great job of that. Like they hear from technical teams, we need time to refactor this or we need time to update dependencies because of XYZ thing. But unless you have an IT department that does scans on your dependencies and then can say there's a critical vulnerability here, you do have to do it. It's oftentimes like, difficult to convince the other two heads of that beast. Really. And I've seen this in companies of all sizes, right? I've seen it in companies that have been around for hundreds of years. I've seen it in startups. You've seen it all over the place. It's interesting that we always and maybe this is just a side effect of just my career path, but I've been in all these different kinds of organizations of various sizes and age, but nobody really gets it right. You read the books, you see the blogs, you get experts to come in and train your teams and you're still kind of like struggling to get it right. But then we keep getting told there's a right way. Who is doing it right?

Robbie Wagner: [13:11] Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the problem is too many like the planning is disconnected from the people doing the work. And let's do a real-world example here. So imagine your car is broken, right? You take it to the shop and you're like, I don't know what's wrong. It's making this noise. The mechanic or the guy who's going to fix it is going to be the one who knows what the noise sounds like knows what's involved to fix it or whatever. Imagine the guy that's estimating the price and figuring out the steps to fix it is not the guy, not the mechanic. There's just another guy who's never touched a car who's like, oh yeah, this seems like it's going to be $10,000 and it's going to take four weeks. Like, okay, well, how do you know? I have no idea. I'm just planning. These are the steps I would take to diagnose it and whatever. You should always ask the person doing the thing if they come to you and say, no, I need this wrench that costs $10 and I need this part and it's $50 and it will take me 2 hours. Cool. That's where it should start. And if a developer comes to you and they're like, hey, our dependencies are really out of date, or like there's this code that's really gnarly, I would like to refactor it. You should never tell them no because they're wanting to help and make this better. And make their lives better and make everything better. And you're like, no, I want this button.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:40] Right. Yeah. It can be a disconnect. And I've definitely experienced product organizations that are like, oh gosh, they're making a big stink because they don't like how someone else did it and they think their way is better and what's the real value there? Of course, they want to refactor, but guess what? I'm testing it. It works for me. I have no user feedback that says it's bad, so what's the point in wasting some resources on that? It's interesting because you'll get that attitude of like, oh, yeah, no developer likes whatever the predecessor did. And so there's always that we should have done it different. There's all this tech debt they're just not really seeing. I just think you always have to prove your case, find ways to create metrics to prove your case or find some resource to help prove your case.

Robbie Wagner: [15:32] Yeah. I mean, that's a fair point that there are code-style things that people want to change, but usually if it's just I don't like the way they did this, I would like it to appear a little different. Like they use the for loop, I want to use a while loop or whatever. That stuff shouldn't take long. So if that's truly their only problem with it, is like, I want it to look a little different, I would change the flow. There's no harm in doing that because the things that are going to take you months to refactor probably need to be refactored.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:06] Yeah. Right. So I'm not saying, like, okay, Robbie comes into a team and it's full of functional components and hooks, and he's like, this is all bad.

Robbie Wagner: [16:14] Monorepos.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:15] Yeah. He's like, this is all bad. We have to change this because this doesn't make sense and people like me can't read it well, and I think you can do state a better way that's faster and I don't know, blah, blah, blah. Right. That's subjective.

Robbie Wagner: [16:29] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:30] Saying that you have out-of-date dependencies, you're many versions behind and likely subject to security vulnerabilities or something. That's actionable, that's real. You can show those things.

Robbie Wagner: [16:43] Everyone can agree on that. There is some give and take, and I understand how these things happen. I just wanted to rant about it in general.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:52] Yeah, you don't want it fixed, though, because it's definitely one of our business models, is that teams are going to get overwhelmed in feature work and they're going to get now multiple major versions behind, and they need an expert to basically work out of their work stream. Someone to come in that isn't part of the work stream, that can just boom heads down on that and not affect delivery. Right. Yeah. So there you go. Don't fix it. Hire us. That's the suggestion on this rant.

Robbie Wagner: [17:26] Yeah. Visit shipshape.io and fill in the contact form and give us money.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:31] Select the biggest number in the drop-down, and we will send you an invoice.

Robbie Wagner: [17:37] Also, please fill in the about what you want for your project at just, like, 18 paragraphs of Russian. That's my favorite. When we get that.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:46] That's your fault for not being fluent in Russian. I mean, it seems fine for me.

Robbie Wagner: [17:51] But yeah, at least we only get that once because if someone tries to spam it, we now have, like, the reCAPTCHA stuff behind the scenes. But we used to get that, like, hundreds of those, and I was like, cool, that's awesome. But anyway.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:05] I don't think that's what you did at all.

Robbie Wagner: [18:06] No, I digress.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:08] Tell me about supporting open source projects.

Robbie Wagner: [18:10] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:10] I feel like we've had multiple guests that talk about this subject too.

Robbie Wagner: [18:15] Yeah, I mean, this is similar, I think, to what I just ranted about a lot from the standpoint of the higher-ups are like, how can we make money? XYZ makes us x dollars. And supporting open source projects or doing any of that doesn't make us any money. Which I would like to say that is 100% false, because anyone using React or Ember or frameworks or libraries, even anything open source is likely making. Like, let's start at the developer level. Developers, even a junior developer is making pretty good money, depending on where you are, anywhere from probably wouldn't be lower than 60 or 70k to up to $100,000.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:02] In Europe, actually, they start their salaries much lower, but then again.

Robbie Wagner: [19:07] Well, right.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:07] Their benefits are different and all that kind of stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [19:09] Well, we're talking about the US.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:11] Okay. No one in Europe supports open source.

Robbie Wagner: [19:16] Well, no, they do. A lot of them do. Okay, that's a fair point. So those people aren't making as much money, and I get it. But in America, if you're a senior developer, then you're definitely making at least $100,000. You're probably making up to 150 or depending on, like, if you're in California or somewhere where huge companies pay tons of money, you could be making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. Right? So you're making all this money because someone took the time to write Next JS or Ember or whatever the tool is you're building on top of, and you give no time or money back to that project. You just take your money and go home. And I get it. I think especially a lot of people are not exposed even to the open source ecosystem. So they're like, I download this thing, I use it. But I don't really understand how GitHub works or PRs or how you would even start contributing to this project. But I think for those people if you're just grateful for a tool like, wow, I make hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe I should give $5 a month to this framework I like. GitHub sponsors is a thing, right? It's a small gesture to show, like, I appreciate the hundreds and hundreds of hours these people have put into this thing for free.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:40] That has been a software problem for quite some time though, right? Even languages, all languages created and open source, there's no economic incentive behind it, just solving a problem.

Robbie Wagner: [20:53] So the flip side is, like, companies like to think that they are supporting the project by hiring the core team members, right? And that to some extent is true. If you're hiring the core team members and giving them huge salaries, you've basically paid for all the work they did before you hired them at that point. But I think there's a lot of people that get left behind with that model. The casual contributors. In the case of Ember, which we always talk about Ember, but it's what I'm familiar with. Like Ember add-ons. Last time I looked, I have like 103 NPM packages that I maintain, and probably 90 of those at least are Ember addons. And I don't get any money from anyone except Mel, if Mel's listening, appreciate you because that was her philosophy, is like, you know, all these people doing all this work, I can at least buy them a coffee every month, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [21:48] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [21:49] So I think for the people who aren't employed by huge organizations for their open source contributions, do you know of those people? Especially if they have one sponsor or you feel like they're underappreciated I'm going to pronounce this wrong, like Sindre Sorhus or whatever, you know, I'm talking about who has thousands of NPM packages and maintains all of everything. He has hundreds and hundreds of sponsors. So you can sponsor him if you want. He would appreciate it. But I'm talking about the people that are like, feel really unappreciated. And we've talked to several people about how they feel about this. Like Chris Manson mentioned it. He's like, I have these couple sponsors and they're the reason that instead of playing a video game, I go open a PR or whatever, it really makes a difference and makes people not get burned out as much.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:39] Yeah, they're not trying to get rich on it, but they want people to show appreciation. Right. And obviously, it would be even better if companies showed appreciation, right?

Robbie Wagner: [22:47] Yeah. Companies can afford it.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:49] They can afford it and they're willing to spend. A company could be building a SaaS product and for their workers, they're willing to pay money for a CRM for their sales, and they're willing to pay money to Microsoft for Microsoft products or Google for G suite stuff and whatever else. And this is all software, right? And then they build their product on let's say they build their product on Next or whatever it is, right? Technically they don't have to, but they could make a small sponsorship donation. Now, obviously Next has a company behind it now, and I think this is probably why a lot of popular frameworks are moving to putting an actual company behind it to find more stable financial incentives because to a certain degree, people in their career can't continue to maintain open source stuff in perpetuity, especially big things that are used by lots of people. What was it? Even Jest, which is like one of the number one testing frameworks. It recently had come to light that there was one guy at Facebook trying to do some PRs, like, here and there, and it's used by a million people. Well, that's crazy. Nothing's happening with it, and he can't even keep up. But yet that's the model that people expect, and they're like, I don't know, that's the one I heard of. Not like, oh, I'm putting even more pressure on this one dude.

Robbie Wagner: [24:18] Yeah, I mean, that specific example, I think Vitest is probably just killing Jest, so they'll probably just sunset it at some point. But yeah, there's probably more projects like that than you know. I know Ember has been not the hottest framework recently, but even when it was pretty hot, there was this website I forget what it was. It was like, number of people that understand Ember meta .com or something like that. And I don't know how it calculated it. It must have been based on contributions on GitHub to some obscure parts of Ember or something, right? And it was like, you would load it up and it'd be like five. There's like five people that know how this thing works, and thousands and thousands of us use it every day and benefit from it. So I don't know how you fix that.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:08] But you don't put all those people on a plane. First of all, just never get on a plane together or a bus.

Robbie Wagner: [25:14] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:14] Don't come to the same city. You have to be distributed.

Robbie Wagner: [25:18] If you're all at the same conference, you have to be in different areas of the building in case it's attacked or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:25] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [25:26] But yeah, I think in a perfect world, what I would love to see happen is companies kind of take frameworks under their wing and be like, look, we realize how much work you're doing. We realize there's not that many people doing it here's. These two people we just hired, teach them the thing that no one knows so we can increase the buzz factor here and at the same time, instead of just telling you to teach them here's, like, $500,000, also, do whatever you think makes the framework better. And I think there's too many people that just kind of look the other way and take it for granted. And if we all did, like, Faker JS and we're just like, all right, cool, you're using all this stuff here's, all this malware, and if you want it, you better start paying me. If everyone did that, all web apps would be dead within a couple of days. Except for the ones that check in their node modules.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:23] Right. Which is like, no one. I mean, who actually does scans? What is it like? I forgot what it was. There is like a thing that will scan your dependencies.

Robbie Wagner: [26:34] We have that on Shepherd.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:36] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [26:36] It's like how good of an open source steward you are or something based on your security vulnerabilities and something, I don't know, a bunch of things.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:44] Right. So, yeah, his rage quit did kind of backfire. He was sort of like, all right, forget this. All these companies are using my thing. All these companies are very profitable, and all these companies essentially put pressure on me to keep this thing going and give them their features and whatever else. Like, well, enjoy the next version. Everything is broken. The problem why it backfired for him is that the open source community stepped in and agreed upon an official fork and moved forward with the features. So they basically satisfied the needs without too much pain really being felt to a degree. A few days of outage revert to a previous version and pin your stuff and NPM saved you until this other person gives you what you want.

Robbie Wagner: [27:35] The fallacy there was not remembering that Microsoft owns all of JavaScript. So they're like, hey, NPM and GitHub, get rid of that shit. Back to the old version, get rid of this guy's account. Ban him everywhere. It was a swift and decisive, like, you're not doing this and that's nice. They're looking out for us, at least on some level.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:57] Yeah, but I mean, he rage quit because he was feeling used and abused. So not to invalidate his feelings in there, perhaps he could have taken another outlet, I don't know, trying to break everything and destroy things. Now he's got to go all black ops underground.

Robbie Wagner: [28:13] Yeah, I don't know what he's doing. We should have him on the podcast.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:16] That would be very interesting. Yeah, he's somewhere in Europe, I think.

Robbie Wagner: [28:20] I'm not sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:21] He had some issues with, like, an apartment burning down and money and whatever else. So I think that's what drove him.

Robbie Wagner: [28:27] So he had some hard times and was like, I need.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:30] He had some hardships prior to okay, yeah. There was a whole Hacker News thread about it. And I might be unclear about a couple of things, but I know that he had some hardships and essentially was just like, fuck the world a little bit and that's kind of what drove them there. So hopefully doing better, actually, and I don't know. Yeah, just stabilized and better. Come on the podcast we'll have to find you.

Robbie Wagner: [28:55] As a side note about Hacker News. Can someone just make a thing that lets me see all of Hacker News, but it doesn't look terrible? Like, give me some CSS and.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:06] Yeah, a ton of people have done that. There's a ton of people that have latched onto the API and that are, like, giving you more features and stuff. Like the maintainers don't give a shit. And I think you can get access to the API. And I've seen tons of projects where people have done other things with it. Yes, you can.

Robbie Wagner: [29:25] Okay. Well, I mean, I haven't looked to see if that existed. I just have been to Hacker News Links and been like, I have to read this. The formatting is terrible.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:34] Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the Reddit problem too, right? Yeah, it's got engaging content, but it's not I don't know, it just lacks some features and some readability. That sucks. But that's what our good friend Eric was trying to do. A Sqwok, or is trying to do. It's not dead. It's still happening.

Robbie Wagner: [29:52] Still there.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:52] Yeah. Sqwok, which is S-Q-W-O-K.io. Go check it out. Yes. Like kind of a burgeoning community there.

Robbie Wagner: [30:03] Yeah, I haven't really checked it out a ton. I've been to it a couple of times but like.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:07] Same.

Robbie Wagner: [30:08] I don't internet. Really.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:10] Yeah. I don't have time to engage in things. I don't social media and things like that. So, yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [30:16] I'm too busy building the Internet.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:18] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [30:18] To care about the Internet.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:19] To enjoy the Internet. Exactly.

Robbie Wagner: [30:21] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:21] And then if I find myself with free time, I don't find myself going, hey, let's Internet some more on this computer screen that I've been looking at for 8 hours. I'm like, let's look at different screens.

Robbie Wagner: [30:32] Yeah, let me get a much bigger screen with some TV shows or something on it and that's much better.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:39] Yes.

Robbie Wagner: [30:39] But before we actually talk about TV shows, my last complaint about companies.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:44] Yeah, here we go.

Robbie Wagner: [30:45] Is this thing that everyone does where they're like, all right, the top of mind example, obviously is we've got this Ember app and like, React is what I've heard is cool, and everyone on my team is saying React is cool. And I've been trying to hire Ember developers and I just can't. So we're just going to refactor the whole thing to React. So we're going to take the next couple of years. Just port it all over. To that I'm like, well, I get that, I sympathize. But with any framework, shouldn't you be hiring people that know the basics like JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and then you can teach them the framework or give them time to learn or whatever? Because right now, this is the world we live in, where for the past several years, people have only been able to hire for React because so many places only teach React. So they're like, okay if we want to hire, we've got to make our app React. And now that Vue and Svelte and things have become more popular and things like Astro, where you don't even need any framework, you can if you want, there will come a day where like, React is not the number one framework. What do you do then? Are you going to rewrite the whole thing again because you want to hire or like.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:01] It's an interesting question.

Robbie Wagner: [32:02] You look like you have something you want to say.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:04] I do. I have some things, I have many things there because I've thought about this and experienced it a number of times in my career. So first of all, yeah, one of the problems that is continuing to push this issue is that everyone is getting trained in React. They're not getting trained in JavaScript, right? So they don't have a full understanding of what is native and what's there for me right in the browser without me having all these different functions, signatures, and sugar and all this whatever stuff. It's almost the jQuery problem. Because I had this I learned jQuery before I learned JavaScript, just like was the path of learning at that time. And so not just accelerators and trade schools and even like now colleges are teaching React and you have the HTML course and you have the React course and everybody's like, well, I don't know, all the jobs that pay a bunch of money are React, so I'm going to take the React course. I don't care about this other thing. And then that's what they come out of school knowing and then they're pursuing jobs around that because they don't confidence otherwise. Because to me, I think you're right. Anybody who knows JavaScript can basically pick up whatever framework is in play for the application. So you're not an expert, but you know how JavaScript works and you work your way through it, and then a few weeks later, you start to become a bit more proficient. A few months later now you start to be like more natural with it and then you just go and that is where there's a massive disconnect, I think, in the industry in general, because we're not teaching JavaScript, we're teaching frameworks and then we're finding people based on frameworks. So if we were teaching and testing and whatever else on JavaScript in general, we probably would just have a better talent pool. So that's the narrative. And then executives are trying to hire leaders, tech leads and managers and whatever else leaders in on the tech side, they're given a budget and they got to hire and if they don't use the budget, then they lose it kind of thing next year and blah, blah, blah. There's all these artificial pressures there too. So great, all I'm getting is React people and they don't know what to do in this other pool and I'm not willing to train or take a risk or whatever else. And then it just is this massive loop. So it makes me wonder to a degree, you're like, you know, other things went away, maybe React goes away too, but I wonder if like, is the tail wagging the dog or the other way around? Will the spec get influenced by React at some point and start to make some of those things more official? So then it's like it is the way of doing things that could be some crazy long-term thing.

Robbie Wagner: [34:48] Yeah, I think in some ways, yes. Like the specs for everything have been greatly influenced by packages come out to do a thing you can't do with the spec and people go, wow, that's cool. And then.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:03] Everybody uses it.

Robbie Wagner: [35:04] It gets built into the spec, but it's usually much different. Like for example, everyone used LESS and then Sass and whatever, and then CSS was like, okay, you want variables? Everything uses like dollar sign thing, colon value, let's do dash dash whatever variable syntax. And I'm sure there's reasons, but that kind of thing happens on all things.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:32] Righ.

Robbie Wagner: [35:33] It's unlikely that well, I guess some things got ported directly from like CoffeeScript to ES6.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:38] Yeah. TypeScript is influencing it now and the ability to optionally declare types is being talked about. So there's that.

Robbie Wagner: [35:47] Totally.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:48] Or like Lodash right, had a bunch of helper functions around like map and filter and things like that and those ended up in the spec.

Robbie Wagner: [35:57] Yeah, I think there's a lot of things that could be built in. One thing they mentioned on Syntax recently they had an episode where they just kind of complained about things. It was different than this, but they were like, why doesn't.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:10] Yeah, Chris's voice is nicer than ours.

Robbie Wagner: [36:13] Well, Chris is Shop Talk, not Syntax. Get your shows right.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:17] Yeah. Wes. Wes' voice is worse than mine for sure. You might be more popular than me, Wes, but my voice is made for podcasts.

Robbie Wagner: [36:28] Well, we just have sexy microphones.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:30] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [36:30] Because Scott on Syntax has the same microphone and he's got that same like what up I'm podcasting. Like kind of voice. It's just these are nice mics. Like anyone could talk into this and sound really good. And Wes has a different one like he has a good one but it's not this one.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:45] Yeah, we just dropped the mic on him. Get the good one. We have people who listen to this, but you have a lot of people who listen to that. Probably worth it, Wes.

Robbie Wagner: [36:55] Yeah. Get an Electro-Voice sponsorship. There you go.

Robbie Wagner: [36:59] Nice. Solid. So yeah, regressing back into they were complaining about some things.

Robbie Wagner: [37:04] Yeah, one of the things was like we have inputs, right? And every framework ever we set up, like depending on which framework are using and what year it is, you either have a two-way binding, like value equals this thing and it just updates or you have like on change mutate the value like data down, actions up kind of style. Either way, you're doing a thing that's like, I want to change this value. That's what the inputs are for. Right? Why doesn't the spec just do that? You could just be like value equals foo and wherever you define foo is just always going to update. It just does it for you because what else do you using it for? Unless you're doing an old-school form that's like literally posting to another PHP page or something.

Robbie Wagner: [37:47] Which exists and they do want backwards compatibility. So I'm guessing that's probably part of it, right? They don't want to break the Internet made before 2004 or something. I don't know, whatever arbitrary date.

Robbie Wagner: [37:59] Well, then make it a different field. Make it like bound value or like.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:04] Yeah, right. There you go.

Robbie Wagner: [38:06] It's such a common use case. That's something they should build.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:08] Put your money where your mouth is. I think you should make an RFP spec and see what happens. So that would be an interesting pivot.

Robbie Wagner: [38:17] I could try it.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:18] Yeah. I don't know. It's funny. A previous company that I worked at in Europe. I was the engineering manager for some teams, and we were doing a rewrite of an application and just like kind of changing the architecture for performance version reasons. But it was an Ember application. We're going to keep it as an Ember application. Side note, fun fact, it was kind of like the POC for what eventually became the Cardstack architecture, or at least an early version of it.

Robbie Wagner: [38:46] And everyone knows what Cardstack is.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:48] So what some people do, some people listen to this that are Ember people.

Robbie Wagner: [38:51] No, I mean the people that work there like, what's Cardstack? You're like, well, it's like these things and no one knows how to explain it except for Ed.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:59] I don't know how to explain it. We should have him on just to explain what it is. Yeah, I'm still pretty confused, but I still subscribe to his newsletter. So there's two aspects of this application. We basically were abstracting the admin bit of it. So it was just like instead of being like some tiny sidebar that you had to deal with, you could have a more robust admin. We're like, Great, we're splitting out this app. We're still going to go with Ember. We need some more resources for two apps, though. And then we had this whole super long discussion around spoiler alert, that admin app ended up being Angular. It was like angular seven or eight or whatever, which is way more modern hand TypeScript. And actually, Angular CLI is based on Ember CLI. So they had taken some good things. But basically, I want to do this thing, and I only have so many resources to complete said thing. And if you bring in additional people and they say, well, I've been writing Angular for eight years now, I would like to do an Angular. Right. At that point, you're sort of like, well, you're the here and now, and your opinion matters. I guess we're going to go down this path. Can we support it forever? Moving forward too? But yeah, it's so interesting how the people in the space can affect that.

Robbie Wagner: [40:12] Yeah, I mean, I think that circles back to the whole how do you choose the framework? Are you trying to hire for it all that, like, there becomes a point where it is just based on whether you hired them directly for their framework expertise or not. If you've got 20 developers and 18 of them really love React, but your app is an Ember, probably not going to be an Ember for very long.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:35] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [40:35] You don't want them to just be like, yeah, it's fine. I don't really love my job, but I can get work done. I know, Ember okay. You want them to be excited, like, use the thing that they really want. But I think there's just marketing problems with frameworks, in general, to get people excited for things that aren't the thing that is supposedly the hotness.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:54] Yeah. Well, it's funny because we talk about all these new things bubbling up in the world and we've been using Next a lot over the last few years and have been pleased with the problems that it solves. Aside from, like, there are functional components and hooks in there. I think even Robbie is like, well, I can understand what it's solving.

Robbie Wagner: [41:15] Well, you could use class components, right, if you wanted.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:19] Yeah, they're backwards compatible. And I'm sure you could have a different state model, too, if you wanted.

Robbie Wagner: [41:24] Yeah

Chuck Carpenter: [41:25] Yeah, you know. Whoever writes the most articles basically wins, I think, in terms of championed patterns.

Robbie Wagner: [41:30] Or whoever is named Kent C. Dodds.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:33] Yeah, you can evangelize that one. I mean, Remix is hot. We have Solid, we have Astro, we have redwood, we have so many different options. Yeah, it's lit and all things, but I feel like all these are coming out and the people that are interested are experienced professionals. So new people just want to make a thing. They don't really know about the new thing, and then we're probably a little scared to try to adopt the new thing. So I don't know, I kind of wonder if that's also going to stagnate because okay, over the last five years, demand in our industry has grown exponentially, like hundreds of percent. And so a lot of people are in the more junior to mid-level, let's say. A lot of people have one to three years experience. So Solid maybe not really landing with them. Remix maybe isn't landing with them. They're like, I don't know, I know React and maybe I know some Next, and this is how I'm productive, so why am I going to move on?

Robbie Wagner: [42:35] And the things that Solid and Remix and stuff solve are things that you might not even understand. So you're like, why do I care? Okay, Remix runs on the edge and uses all this server-side stuff. Like, what does it matter? I don't understand what that is.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:53] Yeah, right. You're like, I made a thing and I hand it off and other people get it into production. I don't understand the whole pipeline of things.

Robbie Wagner: [43:01] I don't care who renders it or what. All that stuff?

Chuck Carpenter: [43:04] Yeah, I ran it locally. Looks like it was good. I pushed it. Maybe I'm lucky and I get, like, a PR preview. Cool. Looks great. I move on.

Robbie Wagner: [43:13] Yeah, but that's plenty tech ranting for now, I think. Tell me about Old Man without too many spoilers. I haven't started it yet.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:21] Aside from myself? Okay. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [43:23] It's a story about Chuck, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [43:24] Yeah. This old man, he played. No? That's not what you wanted.

Robbie Wagner: [43:28] No.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:28] So there's a show on Hulu. He played tic tac on my thumb with a knick-knack paddy wag. Give a dog a bone. This old man came.

Robbie Wagner: [43:38] Came rolling home.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:39] Yeah, there you go. That's me after a podcast. I'm going to go rolling home. So, yes, it's a show on Hulu has Jeff Bridges. I've only watched the first episode, so I don't really have too much spoiler for you other than like, he's a retired fellow. He all of a sudden is being tracked down by the FBI. And we know he has some crazy history. Say the FBI wanted to bury over who he was and the things he's done, but apparently he's some incredible badass and he's like.

Robbie Wagner: [44:14] As Jeff Bridges is.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:15] Yeah, don't open this can. And they're like, well, we might have to open the can. And he's like, you don't know what you've done. And that's basically how it ended. And I'm like, okay, this is crazy. What is going on?

Robbie Wagner: [44:28] How many people does he kill in the first episode?

Chuck Carpenter: [44:30] A few. He kills a few? Yeah. And he does it in some very interesting ways. So he's like kind of slick, kind of agile, kind of strong for some 65-year-old man. And you're just like, okay.

Robbie Wagner: [44:41] Is he only 65?

Chuck Carpenter: [44:43] Oh, I have no idea. I don't know. I'm just making a guess. He could be older because I can remember this like one of the oldest movies I've seen that he was in definitely during the 70s. It was like a movie with him and Sally Field and Arnold Schwarzenegger and it's kind of about the bodybuilding world. And like, Jeff Bridges is in it, though. And this is in the 70s. This is when Arnie was still a bodybuilder.

Robbie Wagner: [45:02] Is he a bodybuilder?

Chuck Carpenter: [45:03] No, he wasn't, but he was like bodybuilder manager or something like that. So he's like, I'm going to make you guys rich and famous and let's do this thing. Yeah, and that was in the 70s for sure. So do some math. That's 50 years ago. So he's probably in the 70s.

Robbie Wagner: [45:19] Yeah, like The Big Lebowski is fairly old now and he had like.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:23] The 90s right?

Robbie Wagner: [45:24] Plenty of gray hair then. So I'm just thinking he's pretty old, but maybe he's not. I don't know. Google knows. Let's find out.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:31] Okay. Let's do a live Google. It's like Live. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [45:34] Who can get it 1st?

Chuck Carpenter: [45:38] 72.

Robbie Wagner: [45:38] Not me, because.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:39] 72 born in 1949. Wow.

Robbie Wagner: [45:42] There you go.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:44] Yeah. He's very agile for a 72-year-old man. It was interesting. I will definitely continue to watch and see what we find out about who this old man was or is.

Robbie Wagner: [45:58] I might have to start watching it tonight.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:00] Yeah. Suggested had been watching Severance before. That also. Very weird show, but interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [46:07] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:07] The mind of Adam Scott. How many shows is Adam Scott in, by the way? Like every Apple TV show for sure.

Robbie Wagner: [46:14] Well, I mean, that kind of spirals, I guess. Apple has to deal with certain actors, and they're just in lots of stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:21] Yeah. Back to, like, the old studio system. Like, were you signed with a studio? You didn't actually.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:27] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:28] Because he was in, like, Big Little Lies. Right. And something else. The Reese Witherspoon One.

Robbie Wagner: [46:34] I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:35] And then he's in Loot also with Maya Rudolph oh, yeah. Which is a comedy. It's kind of like loose spin on the Jeff Bezos divorce thing. Like Billionaire Wife.

Robbie Wagner: [46:47] Is that a show or a movie?

Chuck Carpenter: [46:49] It's a show.

Robbie Wagner: [46:50] For some reason, I thought it was a movie.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:52] No show. So he's the billionaire, and then he's cheating on her so they get divorced. And what is she going to do now with her fortune? Her half?

Robbie Wagner: [47:02] Yeah. You could just put all of that in, like, stock with good dividend and make, what, like, $50 million a month or something absurd.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:12] Sure. That's not good TV.

Robbie Wagner: [47:14] No, I know, but I mean, in real life, it's just crazy that well, I guess they probably do do some of that.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:21] But she donated a ton of it, though. Yeah, she dove right into philanthropy and gave, like, half of it away.

Robbie Wagner: [47:28] Oh I know.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:29] Right away.

Robbie Wagner:[47:29] But I would put it all in a few, like, safe investments, and then as I get that $50 million every month, like, you get $50 million, you get $50 million, and I keep my capital and just give away. You know what I mean?

Chuck Carpenter: [47:44] Right. I see. I don't know. As the proponent of open source and giving back on your millions, plus, I'm sure that we're not CPAs. I bet CPAs would probably advise you on how you do that best.

Robbie Wagner: [47:56] That's true.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:57] Avoid capital gains and whatever else. Who knows?

Robbie Wagner: [48:00] Yeah. Does that count as a gain if you get divorced and get all half the money? Because you were still kind of owning that before, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [48:07] Yeah. Hard to say.

Robbie Wagner: [48:09] It probably does, because you get taxed, like, 40 times on everything somehow.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:13] Yeah, exactly. Every time. You now become a self versus a joint, and now you get taxed on whatever you got out of that. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [48:23] Like, you buy a car, you pay tax. You sell the car, they pay tax. Doesn't make any sense.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:30] Every time you renew your plates, you pay tax. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I don't know if that's different there, but here we pay based on evaluation of the car, so it changes.

Robbie Wagner: [48:42] Yeah. Personal property tax.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:44] Yeah. I remember when I lived in Ohio, it was a flat rate. It didn't matter. Brand new car, 30-year-old car, 80 bucks. Doesn't matter.

Robbie Wagner: [48:51] Yeah. I think Ohio doesn't have personal property tax. Maybe or like. Because my dad lived there a while, and I think he either bought a car there or didn't buy a car there because cars are more expensive because they didn't have the tax or something and then registered it there because it was cheaper or vice versa. I forget which way it worked.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:12] Gotcha.

Robbie Wagner: [49:12] But something to game the system.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:14] I see your dad's a shyster.

Robbie Wagner: [49:16] I mean, yeah, he clips coupons and like.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:18] Oh, yeah, nice.

Robbie Wagner: [49:19] He's into saving money.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:21] I don't know what it was because I didn't really have much personal property when I lived in Ohio. It was like poor college student time, so.

Robbie Wagner: [49:29] Fair.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:30] The fact that I had a car at any point there was probably as good as it was going to get for a while.

Robbie Wagner: [49:36] Yeah. So tell us about your weekend plans or I guess starting tomorrow or no one knows what day the show is, whatever. What do you do in the next few days?

Chuck Carpenter: [49:48] Yeah, there you go. Tomorrowish I have some work, some driving. We are driving out to San Diego, going to a friend's graduation celebration. She's graduating with her masters or PhD, I don't know. And get older, I kind of assume. Must be more degrees in that. I'm not sure.

Robbie Wagner: [50:06] Yeah. Probably PhD.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:08] Probably PhD. I don't know. Yes, I know some people with those. Definitely not me. A little beach time. It's probably an unpopular thing, but it is my son's birthday weekend, so we feel obligated to take him to SeaWorld. It was Legoland or SeaWorld. And at Legoland, he's just going to complain about me not buying him whatever Legos he finds there constantly. It feels like a giant amusement park all around buying Legos.

Robbie Wagner: [50:32] Well, now you got to buy a dolphin.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:34] I know. Maybe I'll buy a dolphin. Maybe I'll sponsor a dolphin or whatever you can do there. Little charitable give back. I saw Blackfin. You guys don't have to say anything. I know it's not great, but he's going to be six. What can I do?

Robbie Wagner: [50:48] Yeah. I mean, everyone is offended by something and hates something, and I do not disagree that animal rights are a big problem, but they also do a lot of good. Right? I don't know all the details, but various zoos and maybe not as much in SeaWorld, but there are some zoos and stuff that are, like, saving species and doing good things. So it's not all bad.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:12] Right. I do think that that movie and some media backlash caused them to do a bit more good into the world and donate some and things like that. So it is what it is. It will, I'm sure, be interesting and exciting and all that. And then for me, I live in the desert, so a nice weather break is always appreciated. I'll take the sea or the ocean breeze on my face any time I can get that.

Robbie Wagner: [51:39] You don't want it to be 113?

Chuck Carpenter: [51:41] It's only been, like, 103 this week. It's actually been cold.

Robbie Wagner: [51:45] Throw a jacket on.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:46] I know we've got a lot of rainstorms though, so it's up the humidity. Not quite to Virginia levels, but definitely too uncomfortable for here levels. Like, I don't know, 40, 50%. Crazy.

Robbie Wagner: [51:57] Wow. Yeah. They actually did a study on the news here talking about how we are getting a ton more frequent rain and more rain per storm than I don't know, it's going up because of climate change and like, the ocean evaporates more, so it's probably happening everywhere. That's probably why you get more rain too.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:18] Yeah, we usually get rain throughout August. It's called monsoon season. And when I first moved to Arizona in 2000, the first time I remember laughing, they would go on about crazy monsoon season because there's not really drainage or anything here, and so things can flood a little bit, but really it just rains hard for ten minutes and then is dry 2 hours later. But that has extended recently. Now it might be a little more like legit, and we're not really prepared for it. So all I know is I don't want to live on a coast anywhere because to me, it seems like rising sea levels is a bad thing for a lot of places.

Robbie Wagner: [52:53] Well, what I want to do is, like, either you go to those coastal towns and you buy land like a mile or two inland that will soon be waterfront, or you go to Canada and buy stuff, like on their lakes and stuff. It's a little cold for swimming in it now, but in a few years when it's hot everywhere, people will be like, wow, where is it colder? Canada.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:18] That's true. That's possible. Yeah. Blame Canada. I blame them. That kind of triggers for me. I remember reading an article a few years ago, due to climate change, that France had been one of the most ideal climates to grow these fancy grapes, and they've been experiencing warming over recent seasons. And actually it looks like Ireland could be the next big boom in winemaking and vineyards.

Robbie Wagner: [53:46] We're going to buy Irish wine.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:48] Irish wine. Can you imagine that? Like, in ten years, 20 years? Irish wine is something.

Robbie Wagner: [53:53] I'm sure that exists some, right? Like, they have to have some wine, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:57] It's hard to say.

Robbie Wagner: [53:58] I've never seen an Irish wine. Like, it's probably a thing they have there for a couple of people, but they don't export it.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:05] I have an Irish friend, I could ask him. Yeah, he lives in Toronto, though, ironically. I was like, do you have any family property for vineyards?

Robbie Wagner: [54:15] I guess also, yeah. Chris Manson. When you listen to this, let us know if there's some Irish wine we don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:21] Yeah. Should we try it? Is it shite? There's a reason why we all drink the whiskey.

Robbie Wagner: [54:27] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:28] Well.

Robbie Wagner: [54:29] Well. In our last few seconds, do you want to tell me about your Korean fried chicken experience?

Chuck Carpenter: [54:35] Okay. I enjoy cooking, and I enjoy planning. Elaborate, detailed cooking. Well, it doesn't always mean fancy. I just want to know how to do things, like, really well, which is why I was obsessed with burger making for a while and got all the things to do. Smash burgers. Right? And I found a recipe for the original McDonald's French fries, which require, like, a day-long process, but that could be another podcast. So my latest endeavor was I love Korean fried chicken. And being from Kentucky, it is sacrilege, I guess because we're supposed to have the good stuff. And Southern is good. Grew up on Southern fried chicken. But as soon as you have Korean, you're like, no, they perfected it. This is great. It's well cooked. There's like this little air, juicy space in between. You have this crispy crust that's like, not too much. And it's a twice frying process. So I finally, like, dove into trying to do that this weekend, I think successfully. I mean, there's obviously better places. Bonchon just crushes it for me. I don't care if they're a chain. They're amazing.

Robbie Wagner: [55:39] Yeah, it is good.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:40] Did it at home. Did it not spicy, because spicy would completely turn away my family. But yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [55:49] Twice-fried is not into spicy either.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:51] No, she kind of likes it, but she's like, I'll have one or two pieces, and then I want the soy from there on. Yeah, and wanted the kids to have it too. So I did boneless for Sarah and the kids. I did some drumsticks for myself. And yeah, I would recommend I believe it was like twice fried at 360 degrees. Good mix between like flour, corn, starch, a little baking soda, and an egg in your coating. And I think the drumsticks were better than the chicken finger things. Chicken tenders.

Robbie Wagner: [56:28] So it takes like an hour, though, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [56:30] Oh yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [56:30] For the whole process.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:32] Yeah, it takes a while. Especially like you have one pot, right? So you're doing your batch. You have to sit it. Let it sit it over on a rack. Let it kind of cool off and sit for a bit. And then you got to bring your temperature back up and all that stuff. So if you're doing at home, it's a lengthy process, obviously. Restaurants have all that.

Robbie Wagner: [56:51] I know. Even at Bonchon, like, you go there and you're like, I want this. And they're like, well, you know it's going to take at least 30 minutes, right? And you're like, that's fine.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:58] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [56:59] Just do it. I want it.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:00] I'm here. Yeah, bring me some pickled radishes. I'm good.

Robbie Wagner: [57:04] Yeah, I haven't had Bonchon on it forever since I think the last time I had it, Katelynn still ate meat. So we could go there. And there's like, nothing she can eat there now. So yeah, I just have to, like, pick it up for myself one day.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:17] You really should. We got one here in Tempe. I'm like, oh, shit. They have one. Yes. Also still. Good. We have In-N-Out and Bonchon. Food-wise, I'm pretty happy in life, but you know temperature-wise.

Robbie Wagner: [57:31] And so healthy.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:32] No, not at all.

Robbie Wagner: [57:35] Well, you balance it out with only potato diets or yeah, things like that.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:40] Some weird stuff. Hey, we should put a pin in that for a future episode. And whatnot around my weird eating habits from time to time?

Robbie Wagner: [57:47] Yeah, we can get into more of that in that episode. But I've tried to do the chicken diet twice now. The first time our power went out for three days, so I said, fuck it, I'm going to go get fast food. Whatever. The next time was like a couple of weeks ago I got covid. I was like, no, I got covid. I'm not going to be eating healthy. I'm going to eat whatever I want.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:07] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [58:07] So sometime soon I will hopefully lose some weight.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:10] Well, you tell me when you want to do it. We'll do a partner's fat loss boost, whatever it is.

Robbie Wagner: [58:16] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:17] Yeah. Fair?

Robbie Wagner: [58:18] Yeah, I mean, I could do it like in the next week or two. I don't know when exactly, but sometime soon because I'm getting way too large.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:27] Not everybody sees the video, so they don't know you don't have to tell them that. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [58:31] Anyway, that's enough for now. Thanks everyone for listening. Sorry we didn't have a lot of super technical stuff and just kind of ranted, but hopefully, people enjoyed it still, if you liked it, please subscribe. Share this with some other folks, like to get some more listeners in here and we'll catch you next time.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:53] 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, maybe a review, as long as it's good.

Robbie Wagner: [59:08] 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.