Unreliable Narrator

Aaron

Hello? Good morning, sir. How are we doing? Monday.

Ian

Ready to hit it hard this week. Oh, wow. That was

Aaron

a long pause. I don't know if that'll make it to post. I didn't know if it's it's Monday, ready to hit it hard, or it's Monday, and I'm ready to give up. I'm glad I'm glad we're ready to hit it hard.

Ian

Ready to hit it hard. Got no time to give up. Got stuff to do. All

Aaron

the work. Even being over 40, Ian?

Ian

I know. Could you believe it?

Aaron

Can you believe this? Founders over 40. Should we start there?

Ian

Sure.

Aaron

Let's do it. It?

Ian

I didn't read it. No. I I have no chance this weekend was very busy. So Yeah. You don't need to read something you already know about, I guess.

No. I'm here. You can ask me questions about it, I guess. I don't know. Well, give me the give me the two sentence.

I'll give

Aaron

you I'll give you the two sentence. I kind of read it. Justin Jackson wrote something about founders over 40, highlighted a bunch of people. But

Ian

it went viral or something.

Aaron

I know. It did. It made it to Hacker News. Mentioned a couple friends of the show. I think Brian Castle, Jordan Goll, Paul Jarvis, who just, you know, retired from Fathom.

Right. And basically was just talking about how seems like everything's changing for founders over 40. And I think a big crux of his argument was, like, he doesn't think that founders over 40 have the same, quote, unquote, raw horsepower that they used to, and they start optimizing for different things. Right. So I don't know.

So here's the thing. Here's the thing. I'm not buying it. I'm really not. Yeah.

Here's what I will here's what I will say. I think, yes, founders over 40 probably do optimize for different things. That just even even a a spry 35, I'm optimizing for different things than when I was 25.

Ian

Sure.

Aaron

So I was I was at a friend's birthday party this weekend, and where I was talking to a younger guy and he was like, so what are like he was like, what are you gonna do with your job? What are you optimizing for?

Ian

And I was

Aaron

like, well, what are you optimizing for? And he said, I wanna love my job. And I said, I wanna make money. I was like, that's what I'm optimizing for. So I totally get that.

But I don't know. It felt a little, it felt a little downer. It felt a little desal, you know? It felt a little like once you hit the wall, it's game over. There's no more there's no more hope for you, old man.

Ian

And I

Aaron

don't know. I just, you know, that is, that goes against what I like to believe. I don't I don't like it. So with that, very lossy summary of

Ian

There you go.

Aaron

Justin's article, give me give me your over 40 take.

Ian

I got yeah. I have a few counterpoints for you here. I don't think all hope's lost for you.

Aaron

First of all, I know first of all, I know all hope is not lost for me. It's the people that I'm worried about.

Ian

The people giving up. I'm not going

Aaron

gentle into that good night.

Ian

Well, I think there's an interesting stat you know, this is one of these stats that's around. I think it's fairly accurate, which is the the sort of average age of someone starting a business. Mhmm. This is not necessarily in tech. Right?

What text file different, but in general, any business, it's like 49 or something like that. Mhmm. So like people start businesses, you know, the average age of someone starting a business, it might be your corner store. It might be a auto shop. It might whatever.

It's, like, 49, 40 seven, something like that. So already, that's a little counterpoint. Right? Because it's, like, people are starting these businesses where supposedly in the over the hill Right. If we're thinking of, like, over forty years over the hill in terms of Mhmm.

Aaron

One foot in the grave. Yeah.

Ian

Right. I think where he's coming from, again, having, just seen, like, the top Having not read an article where he's coming from is. I did see the people he talked to and you just reiterate them. And like, so just from that vibe and himself and like myself and all those people on the list are people who've been doing it for a very long time already. Yes.

So we've all been doing it twenty years or fifteen years or whatever. And so that is a little bit different because not just that you're over 40, it's that you're over 40 and you've been doing this for twenty years.

Aaron

Twenty years. Yeah.

Ian

Your customers have been on your ass three hundred sixty five days a year. Right? Employees, whatever. Financial pressure, the market, like, all this stuff, you know, meaning your business market, not the stock market. So, like, you've been amped up at this level Right.

For twenty years

Aaron

already. Glass for twenty years.

Ian

And now you're 45 or you're 48, you're 43, and you're like, whew, that's better run. You know? So I think that's a little different than, like, even where you're coming from, let's say, where you're kinda just starting your pure founder. Like, you've been poking around on starting things, but you haven't been out on your own totally out there. Right?

It's just year one. Right? So I think that's a little different right there. But, yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I do think when your guys, you get a little bit older, there is, like, a little less energy generally. There are, like, different demands on your time.

So I think it's all true. And, like, even the kids, like, the kids when they're little, man, it's like, they're super hard in the some ways, but then there's, like, you put them somewhere and they stay there. And that is awesome. You know? And then, like, they get to where that's not true.

Or they're giving you attitude. Like, my daughter this weekend had, like, a balanced little attitude thing going on. Right. Cause she's 12 almost and all this stuff. So you're dealing with these other humans on a human level, like day in, day out.

It's like, these are other basically adults that I'm having to interact with all the time and have adult conversations with. And like, you just wanna sit down and play a video game or play chess, but no, like you've got, and then they wanna do stuff. Right. And that stuff isn't like, we'll sit on the floor and play for twenty minutes. It's go skiing, ride a horse, do a, go on a trip.

Like it's big stuff that takes energy from you. Right? Like, real energy, not just like, yeah. I can I can fake my way through this by bopping the little man around for, you know, half an hour, and we're playing, and that's fun? Or build a couch for it or, like, something cool.

So yeah. So I do think there are differences there, and there is something to all that. But I do think it's amalgamation also of, like, yeah, people who've already been at it a long time, and they're already burned out the way people get burned out on regular golf. And so that's a factor too.

Aaron

And I think there's another it always seems like there's another level to it where it's I feel like this somewhat dovetails into the calm company discussions Mhmm. Where it's like, oh, you should just run a really calm company and just, like, optimize for lifestyle. And I tend to be the people you know where I'm going with this. It tends to be the people that have made it that that a spouse

Ian

is beliefs.

Aaron

It's like, hey, man, my company's making several million dollars a year, and I've decided it is better to not work very hard. And you're like, I bet. That sounds awesome. I'm happy for you. And so that it it had that same, it had that same tint to me of, like, hey.

You don't don't worry about it. Once you made it, you made it. I'm like, I haven't made it yet, man.

Ian

Yeah. I'm not a calm company believer, really. I don't I don't really get it. I don't think I think there's, like, so few examples of the calm company. Like, from a start to finish Calm company.

It's like there's, like, literally, you could count them on one hand. So to me, it's not Yes. Like, a actual path to success. It's like a total exception to the rule. Mhmm.

But, yeah, I mean, there are, it's all the whole continuum. Like I've never been all the way to the, like, well, that's not really true. I sort of have been to the extreme, not, not in the maybe sense of like raising money and having a huge company that end of the extreme. But like in terms of hours, I've definitely been the extreme. And I feel like that's usually what people have.

Right? Like, you don't have the money. You have the hours. And so Right. That's what people put in is the hours.

There's not, like, really a great substitute, I don't think, generally speaking. So yeah. Yeah. Com company advice, very difficult. It is almost always from people who have made a lot of money already, and they're like, you know what?

I dialed it back, and it's all good.

Aaron

And I went and found myself, and I work, you know, twenty hours a week. And the rest of the time, I spend, you know, whatever, doing yoga or something. And I found out it's better this way.

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

You're like, nobody is surprised by that.

Ian

Of course,

Aaron

it's better.

Ian

I got a whole team, and they're taking care of everything. And, like Yeah. There's nothing to worry about, which is true. I mean, like, yeah, like, even my company, it's like, even if just a handful of employees makes a huge difference and lets you be much calmer than when you were by yourself or with just one employee or things like that. So those all make a huge difference.

But yeah, it's not really actionable advice. I feel like for most people, because it's like, well, this works. It's like, it's like, I hate more than anything. The four hour week guy, like that whole thing is such a load of crap. And it's just like, it's, obviously, the most annoying is how he's made, you know, who knows, a hundred million dollars on this Oh, easily.

Gimmick. Easily. Work at four hours a week. Well, maybe if your job is to sell people a four hour a week booking, you could do it. Maybe.

But, like, I don't know.

Aaron

Rising no one. I love Tim Ferris. You hate Tim Ferris.

Ian

Right. That's totally on brand.

Aaron

I think it's awesome. I think

Ian

he's great. Ferris, though. He's the exact antithesis of exactly what he's what you're talking about here. He's the guy who's like, just work two hours a week. If you have a virtual assistant, that's all you need, and you'll be rich instantly.

That's his whole game.

Aaron

That was the shtick. I don't think so I read the book when I was when I was much younger.

Ian

It was like,

Aaron

oh, yeah. This is awesome. This is cool. I'm totally gonna work four hours a week. I don't know that it was ever really besides the title, which is, of course, provocative.

I don't know if it was ever really the plan for anyone, especially him, to work four hours a week. It was all about, like, hacking things so you could do more with less, which, of course, I'm super on board with. That dude's probably worked sixty hours a week his entire life, you know, preaching this four hour work week thing. But, yeah, I I like him a lot. I've stopped listening to his podcast, you know, for the past several years because it got a little I don't know.

It just got a little too woo woo, a little too naval gaze, a little too Ayahuasca retreats, and I'm like, it doesn't do anything for me. Yeah. But, yeah, I think it's great. I I love it.

Ian

Yeah. Okay.

Aaron

This, so so I I Justin's article is not what I'm about to say. It's not this thing, but it has the it is, directionally in the same way as this thing that I'm about to say. But I just wanna be clear. Justin's article was not this bad.

Ian

Not about that.

Aaron

This is negative. This is not about this is not about you, Justin. But there seems to be a whole, there seems to be a whole, like, cultural vibe of when you're about to do something, everyone tells you how bad it's gonna be. Right. It's like, oh.

Ian

Yeah. Oh,

Aaron

you know, we're getting we're getting married the next year. Oh, first year of marriage. It's impossibly hard. Just hang on for dear life.

Ian

Why are

Aaron

you getting married? Oh, man. We're having kids. Well, kiss your life goodbye. You're about to have kids.

And I'm like, can we just, like, can we just talk about how those things are also good? Like, of course, having kids is hard. You don't need to tell me it's gonna be hard. Tell me I'm gonna make it. Tell me it's gonna be awesome.

Tell me it's gonna be fun. But this whole, oh, we're gonna have a kid, and everybody's like, oh, sorry. See you never.

Ian

Like, what

Aaron

are you doing, guys? This is

Ian

Boy, I feel attacked here because I'm the guy who tells you it's bad in a couple years.

Aaron

You you are the guy that that tells me everything everything on the way is bad. Yeah. That is actually true. Oh, that's true.

Ian

That's good too. That was a good point, though. There's so much good stuff, but it's like There is

Aaron

so much good stuff.

Ian

Yeah. You end up talking about these things in the context of, you know, your time or, like, obviously, things change and get harder in some ways, but then the trade off is, like, yes. Like, like, what we were just talking about. You have to interact with this other person who's a real human and basically an adult, and that can be incredibly difficult as dealing with adults is. But on the flip side, it's like, oh, wow.

Like, my kid's an adult, and they're cool, and they're a good person, and they have fun, and we have fun together. And, like, you can have a conversation that's interesting. My daughter just taught me something the other day about the history of numbers, blah blah blah. So you can learn stuff from them. Obviously, you can't learn anything from your little two year old or one year old or baby.

Like, you learn stuff about yourself, but you don't really learn from them. Boy, can't I. They're not they're not teaching you things directly. So, yeah, there's, like, all the all the upside there. Yeah.

That's true. I think our society is very, you know, pessimistic, inherently.

Aaron

Very pessimistic. Very pessimistic. Don't like that one bit.

Ian

No. No. I'm with you on that. How do you work around that? How do you get around that?

What's your strategies? You have strategies to put those things to not let those things get you down?

Aaron

It's not really. I mean, those things get me down if I'm being honest.

Ian

Mute list. Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. Giant mute list, logging off. I took Twitter off my phone, Twitter and Blue Sky off my phone, which has been it's been it's been weird, but it's been very nice.

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

I'll, like, you know, get up from my desk to walk to the bathroom, which is, like, 12 steps. I'm like, what am I gonna do on the way? I guess just gonna walk there like an idiot. So it's very strange. Yeah.

I don't know. I do have, you know, I have a lot of good close friends that are encouraging and optimistic as well. It does seem like there's just a lot of drive by commentary, from people that you don't really know. You know?

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

So, yeah, I don't know. Maybe try to I think I've tried recently, like, in the past year or so to, like, evaluate the source of the comments more. Like, if somebody is telling me something and turns out I don't want their life at all or I don't respect their opinions on other things at all. Right. And it's like, oh, I I don't really, like, I don't really need to listen to that comment.

Ian

You know,

Aaron

if I if I actually think Yeah. You're wrong about almost everything and then you tell me something, I'm like, wait. Why am I letting that affect me? I don't respect your opinion. So I've tried to, like, validate the source of things more rather than just let any, you know, little piece of snark into my life, and that's been helpful.

Ian

Yeah. Yeah. And so much advice is, like, it's so depend I mean, I was just the in business, the clearest cut example. It's like people who are successful. Like, what got them there is so rarely the thing that could get you there.

Just surely, like, the time is different. The timeline's different. Now is not what it was five years ago. Like, all these things, you know, obviously, with example, I always talk about is DHH, right? Like he's always like, just do the stuff we did.

Even the stuff they did first of all is not twenty years ago and completely insane as like a path, like just become famous. And then like, you can leverage that. And it's like, no, it's probably not gonna work. Even people become famous sometimes have a hard time leveraging it, like, the whole thing. So, yeah, you have to, like, always find it's like you could take these parts of these bits of advice, but then you can't always utilize the whole thing anyway even if it's from a trusted source.

So

Aaron

You do have to you do have to run it through, like, a processing function. Yeah. Like a like a debias function or, like, a rebias. Like, first, you have to debias from them and then rebias for your situation

Ian

For your own

Aaron

and see if anything's left over.

Ian

Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, I did try I actually last week went to this little phase of, like so I go on these long walks generally. And in winter now, I'm like, I got this pack on, and I got the straps, and it's like, I'd know the phone, like, I'm holding the phone because, like, I got nowhere to put it. Like, the straps are across where my pockets are and whatever.

And I was like, you know, I just wanted the phone. I'm tired of holding the phone. Like, forget even the stuff on the phone. Like, I'm tired of holding the phone. I'm tired of it weighing down my pants.

Like, I'm just tired of that, like, the physical object of the phone. Right? So I was like, let me try to just go to be the just watch guy. And I don't think I could, like, totally like, I don't think I could never have a phone. Like, I there's just times you need a phone.

I'm traveling, whatever.

Aaron

Fuck.

Ian

But, man, the watch is just it's just not there yet to actually replace the phone. Like, it doesn't this isn't even a big deal for me, but, like, on traveling, one one thing is, like, doesn't have Uber. Okay? So you can't have, like, Uber, which is would be nice. Okay.

Bring my phone traveling. Fuck. But even just other things, like, the way you sync audio books and stuff is wacky. Like the way you sync things is wacky. It's like it's got 64 gigs of memory, but I can't just say, like, there's not just like, hey, sync this.

Like in Audible, there's no button that says sync this. You have to, like, go in and, like, pick it on the watch or something, and then it's, like, stream and download. Well, is it downloading or is it streaming?

Aaron

How do

Ian

I know when it's done? Does it even tell you it's done? Like so there's all these little weird things. I'm like, I can't even believe it's been ten years, and, like, there's just a lot of oddities. And they portray it as something, like, it's cellular.

Like, you don't really necessarily need your phone all the time, but you really do. There was, like, every app that's, like, on the critical end had all these weird things. Slack doesn't have an app, which

Aaron

If you're slacking on your watch, you've already lost. I don't wanna know the way

Ian

on my watch, but there are times where I wanna be notified if somebody mentions me. So then I could, like, go to my laptop or whatever.

Aaron

Like Mhmm.

Ian

Like, I'm playing poker. I take a day off playing poker, but some there's some critical issue. I would love to get a notification. That's like, oh, like somebody asked you something important. I can always go up to the room, go to my laptop, handle the situation, whatever.

Aaron

That that's not calm, Ian. You gotta be more calm.

Ian

Exactly. Definitely not calm. But the phone it's like the phone's better than that. Right? Like, the phone, I just I just sit there and answer it on the phone.

Right? Like, so it's the same thing except that 99% of the time, I don't need to answer anything, and so it's fine. So I wouldn't need my phone.

Aaron

Here here's my here's my $80.20 on that. Just be watch guy only for walks. I mean, so you don't need slack. You don't need to answer. You don't

Ian

need any of that. You can you can

Aaron

bear the burden of syncing the audiobooks. But

Ian

I could absolutely do that.

Aaron

To be watch guy only in in real life, I think you have to you have to have a lot more money. You gotta have, like, somebody that follows you around. Did you ever see that video of Trump?

Ian

A watch guy with an assistant.

Aaron

With an assistant. Yeah.

Ian

He holds my watch. Round here. He holds my watch. Exactly. And that's what he does.

Okay.

Aaron

Yeah. What's my heart what what's my heart rate? So did you see that video of Trump dictating his tweets? He was, like, watching the Kamala speech. This was a few months ago.

Yeah. And he was, like, watching TV, drinking a Diet Coke, and there's, you know, some some person sitting

Ian

next to him with a with

Aaron

a laptop open with, like, Google Docs or Microsoft Word open to fonts, like, 200 font. And he's like he says something insane, of course. Like Okay. What, you know, what is she saying? She doesn't even know what she's saying.

And the person next to him is writing, what is Kamala saying? She doesn't even know what she's saying. It's like this you know, the tweet takes up a full scroll of the page, and he looks over and he says, yep. That's good. And she'll take it and copy and paste it and go over to whatever, you know, truth social or whatever and tweet it out and all caps

Ian

of writing. The country.

Aaron

Yeah. But

Ian

it's a vision. Technology law.

Aaron

Vision. I that was that was that was a vision for me of Yeah.

Ian

But you wouldn't wanna do it because you don't know how. There's a huge difference between

Aaron

No. Yeah.

Ian

Yeah. Incapable

Aaron

Outcome is the same.

Ian

And somebody does it for me out of convenience. Yes.

Aaron

Outcome is the same where I

Ian

I would love a flunky. Of course. Who would

Aaron

love a flunky? Am handed I'm handed pieces of paper that are emails, and I write on them with a Sharpie and hand it back. I I dictate my tweets. And, also, I'm president. That is great.

Ian

I could do that. I could absolutely do that. I wanna know. Do nothing job.

Aaron

Jennifer won't let me be president.

Ian

Really?

Aaron

No. She thinks that she she claims that the wife always gets kidnapped.

Ian

First lady. Oh, yeah.

Aaron

And I said, that only happens in movies.

Ian

I don't think it's everywhere in history. Happened. Never has it happened. The wife is fine.

Aaron

The wife is always fine.

Ian

Melania doesn't even live with Trump. Like, you she could Jennifer could just stay in Texas.

Aaron

She could yes. She could be a part time first lady. I know. Yeah. Now that I'm 35, the only thing that's holding me back from being president is Jennifer won't let me do it.

Ian

Damn. That's true. You are legit. We could've had president Francis this year. You could've solved all these problems.

You could've brought the nation together. Yep. You kinda let us down here, buddy. I'm not gonna lie. I know.

Let us down. You could've brought us together. You're from a big electoral

Aaron

college state. I know.

Ian

Man, I would totally vote for you.

Aaron

See? That's what I'm saying.

Ian

Vote already. It starts

Aaron

I know.

Ian

I'm the pebble that starts the landslide.

Aaron

So between you and Jennifer, I'm down to zero votes. So we need to get we need to get some more people to pile in on my side.

Ian

I can talk to Jennifer. I know just what to say to her. Don't even worry about that. We'll we'll get it all approved. It's gonna be fine.

Aaron

39. When I'm 39, I'll be president. God.

Ian

Can you imagine? I love this idea. The this is ready for a young president. Like,

Aaron

that's right. That much is true.

Ian

Right? Is there anything more true than that? True.

Aaron

Come on.

Ian

And I think the country obviously, like, hates experience and all that stuff. So you Whoops. What's the

Aaron

off the rails. We're getting off the rails. Let's go back to being young. Let's go back to being young.

Ian

You don't have experience in government? That's perfect.

Aaron

That is true. Yeah. So I'm very smart, boy.

Ian

Great fit. Well, you're very smart, but you haven't run a state or been a senator, which is great. Yeah. So now you're you're in tech. I love this.

See? We're gonna be a totally nonpolitical podcast where one of the hosts is running for president.

Aaron

Becomes president.

Ian

And we never talk about any issues on here. We don't talk about any any politics. We Oh, man. On the on the sideline, you're running for president. Yeah.

Aaron

Oh, man. Well, that's that would be one of our best bets ever. Truly.

Ian

A good bet. That would be a good bet. Ever wish your PHP stand analysis could be supercharged with AI powered code reviews? Meet CodeRabbit, the AI native code review platform that works alongside PHP STAN to revolutionize your PHP development workflow. Beyond static analysis, CodeRabbit analyzes pull requests to provide instant PR summaries, in-depth code walkthroughs with sequence diagrams, and one click suggestions to improve your code.

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Thanks again, the code rabbit. Alright. Can you tell me what the hell's up at the terminal? What does it turn? Can you tell me

Aaron

what the hell's up with? What the hell's up with?

Ian

Like, what's the problem? I why is the problem a word? I don't even like this Tui word. Isn't Tui a bad word? It's not a good term.

Tui.

Aaron

Tui is a silly word.

Ian

I agree. It's a silly word.

Aaron

It's silly. But so is gooey, to be fair.

Ian

I know what gooey's been around forever, and Tui, they just Tui's

Aaron

been around for a long time.

Ian

Ago. No. The the concept of TUI has been around for longer. The word TUI has not been around longer. Okay.

Aaron

So the the history the etymology aside, what's the problem with TUI's?

Ian

I mean, I just think everybody's trying to shove everything in there.

Aaron

What is everyone trying to shove in there? So I'm gonna I'm gonna dig in here. What is I don't know. Is

Ian

Why do I wanna do stuff in the terminal? I don't wanna do anything in

Aaron

the terminal. Have to.

Ian

Exactly. And I wish I could do less.

Aaron

Okay. What if you could do the stuff you have to do, but in a nicer way?

Ian

But it'll never be as nice as a GUI. It can't be

Aaron

That's you just changed you just changed the argument. So the argument

Ian

But that is the argument.

Aaron

No. No. The question is you have to do stuff in the terminal. That's true. K.

Why not, which was the statement, the question is, why not do the stuff you have to do in the terminal, but in a more pleasant way?

Ian

That's fine. I'm fine with all that.

Aaron

Great. Next segment. We're done. That's it. We did it.

That's that's the answer.

Ian

I don't know.

Aaron

Trying to shove what into the terminal?

Ian

I just feel like there's all this, like, people with the terminal apps, and it's like, it's gone from being, like, this is a fun little thing to make, like, these forums you have to build in the terminal nicer, which I'm all for. I think that's great. I think, like, prompt and all that stuff. Awesome. And then you had Joe doing, like, crazy, like, you we're building grass.

Aaron

Joe's having fun.

Ian

That's just insanity. Right? Which is fun and insanity. I'm down with fun and insanity. Right?

Mhmm. But I think people are trying to merge those things into, like, something, more. And I I don't think there's anything more there. I think there's nothing more there. I don't think people won't use it because people like to do things like it's like people use Vim.

Right? Because they

Aaron

People do use Vim.

Ian

They wanna use Vim. They wanna be different. They wanna be they wanna be all say they use Vim. Right? Like, geeks always act like they don't have these sort of, clicks.

But, like, right, it's like I use Vim. You can't even get out of Vim, which is true. I can't get out of him.

Aaron

Which I propose just as a side note, I propose we retire that joke. Can we can we retire that joke and centering a div? Can we just say that those jokes are done and we can find some new content? I'll find some new jokes in the

Ian

new year. A div has actually been solved. Getting out of VIM has not been solved.

Aaron

Don't so I don't use VIM.

Ian

Okay.

Aaron

Is don't you just hit escape and then Nobody knows?

Ian

No. Isn't it like isn't it like, exclamation q or something?

Aaron

Oh, yeah. Maybe q exclamation or w q or something. But I

Ian

Nobody knows.

Aaron

I feel like it's not that hard to get out of it. That's the thing I don't understand. I don't like it. I'm never gonna use it. If I accidentally end up in it, I know how to get out.

Ian

I don't know how to get out. And

Aaron

then you're

Ian

typing you're typing stuff in your document that you wanna be typing because you thought you're trying to get out.

Aaron

That part is wonky. Yeah.

Ian

Yeah. You're checking out.

Aaron

Here's

Ian

Now you're making errors. Yes.

Aaron

I don't I don't make errors. Here's the thing. Joe is doing Pong in the terminal because it's awesome. He's doing webcams in the terminal because it's amazing. Right?

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

Jess Jess is doing Laravel prompts because we must.

Ian

All that sounds great.

Aaron

Makes it makes it a lot nicer.

Ian

Love it.

Aaron

What is in the middle? What's one thing in

Ian

the middle? Don't you feel like there's all the stuff out there? People are like, we're gonna do all this stuff in the terminal. And I'm like, I don't wanna do stuff in the terminal.

Aaron

So I feel like all the stuff that's out there,

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

Save for, like, the fun experimental stuff

Ian

Mhmm.

Aaron

Is you're already on the terminal. Let's make this better. Here's something

Ian

that you want.

Aaron

Coffee. Ridiculous. Putting coffee on the term buying coffee through the terminal That's ridiculous. Ridiculous.

Ian

It's it's such a hard experience. Why do I want this hard? Now I forget that

Aaron

That shoehorning, I agree that that is shoehorning, but that's shoehorning for a shtick.

Ian

And you know

Aaron

I love a shtick.

Ian

I do love a shtick. And you love a shtick. I do. That one that one, I think, is even more sensical than a lot of these other things. Because it's like

Aaron

Okay. You

Ian

have to name one. Name one. Just out there. Right? Don't you feel like people are building these two apps?

Aaron

No? No. You're squirming.

Ian

Like, it's out there.

Aaron

What is give me one.

Ian

I don't know. I don't I feel like

Aaron

this will buy. Prompt's good. Joe fun, terminal shtick. We haven't found one yet.

Ian

I don't know. I haven't used any of

Aaron

them. Do you gotta okay. You gotta name one. Name just name even an example. I don't Even an example.

Ian

I don't think your thing is totally like what I'm talking about because it's more useful. Yeah. But I don't think your thing is totally like it. Although I do think your thing is, I I don't know if it needs to do all the stuff it's doing,

Aaron

but Story of my life.

Ian

But it's not like it's sort of stuff you do in the terminal anyway. Groot, I believe. I would use it. But, like It is.

Aaron

Is that is

Ian

that where it's going?

Aaron

Mhmm.

Ian

Yep. So that's fine. Here's the, you know, here's the interesting thing about it. Maybe it's the way I use the terminal in the sense of I almost exclusively at this point use the terminal in the IDE. So it's just a little bar at the bottom.

Like, I don't want a bunch of shit in there. There's no room. There's no room for chat.

Aaron

Run a command There's

Ian

no room for

Aaron

to move on.

Ian

Yeah. There's no room for user interface in my little terminal window. Yep. Like, I don't want any user interface. I just have text there and that's it.

It's one line. That great. And so all these things now require, like, before we use it, like, you have to open up the terminal. Like, it's a big gooey window. Right?

Because there's all kinds of stuff going on and there's form elements and whatever. And, like, I don't know. I don't wanna use the terminal that way. Maybe maybe I don't wanna use the keyboard. I'm not a keyboard guy.

Really? I mean, I'm, like, obviously, the key shortcuts everybody has, but, like, I'm not like, my hands never leave the keyboard guy. Are you are you are your hands never leave the keyboard guy?

Aaron

No. My my hands will be on the keyboard, but my hand will also be on the mouse.

Ian

Right. Well yeah. I don't know. Alright. What other two ears are you using?

If you're we're building, are you using any other two e's?

Aaron

I don't know anything about literature, but I think you're you're what we would call an unreliable narrator. Oh. You know? You're just saying you're just you're just saying two e's are bad, but you can't name one that's bad, and also you don't use them.

Ian

You know,

Aaron

it's an unreliable narrative.

Ian

I got it. I got it.

Aaron

I don't know what that means, but you are one.

Ian

As these things fly by me now, I will start to log a couple and maybe try one or two and see

Aaron

We need a follow-up segment.

Ian

Well, I think we need a follow-up segment because I it's just like I constantly see the Tui Tui Tui Tui. And, like, I'm just like I'm blocking out. It's like it's like you could say Trump and Biden in your world. Like, to me, the Tui is like as soon as

Aaron

you those words. I don't even know what you just said.

Ian

To it. But I I if I muted words, I would mute to it. So I will, I will attempt to try some to it and see. You don't

Aaron

you don't even have you don't even have to try. I don't use any other two apps.

Ian

Oh, well, that that's my point. So why is everybody building these things?

Aaron

I reject the premise. I don't think that everybody's trying I don't think that everybody's trying to shove something with the terminal.

Ian

Constantly seed chewy apples. Here's here's

Aaron

one that I saw. Here's one that I saw. Joe Tenenbaum Okay. Did blue sky, a blue sky client internally.

Ian

I didn't even see that one. Or maybe I didn't. It's one of the ones that phased over me. That's It's

Aaron

on it's on your favorite social network. You should've

Ian

seen it. That one doesn't exist. Why does that exist?

Aaron

That is fun. It's fun. It's wacky.

Ian

Is it?

Aaron

It's an experiment. Does he actually think people are gonna use it? I have no idea. I don't know. But it's cool.

Ian

I mean, I guess if everybody's just doing these things, it's like, hey. This is my side hacky project just to, like, see if I can do something. Let me I don't I don't care about that. I don't care. Everybody should do what they want.

Like, I don't care if people only live in the terminal. I'm not here saying you should do it my way. I'm just saying I don't think I get the idea that this would ever be better, objectively better. Like, you may like it because it's different and you wanna be different, but I don't think it's objectively better than, like, the blue sky phone app. Like, for example

Aaron

I don't know if there's anything objective about better. That I think that's that's part of it.

Ian

It might be Objectively better. That's a thing.

Aaron

There are things that are objectively better than other things, but this is very subjective. This is like saying PHP storm is objectively better than VIM, which is something that I would sign on to. But it's just, like, not true. I prefer PHP storm over VIM.

Ian

Well But it's

Aaron

not a it's not objectively better. There are just too many there are just too many dimensions to measure that on.

Ian

Hope I agree with you there.

Aaron

You think PHPStorm is objectively better than Vem? No.

Ian

No. No. So in I think the ID is different. I think the ID is primarily a textual thing. Alright?

But if we're taking, like, the blue sky app, I think when I see a photo, the photo is gonna be better in the mobile app than on the terminal.

Aaron

Yes. That I agree with.

Ian

Question. Right? It's not

Aaron

The photo will be better.

Ian

But this photo will be better, right, on the mobile app than in the terminal.

Aaron

Yes.

Ian

And so so right there, you have a huge part of a modern social network that is inferior just objectively to the terminal version.

Aaron

Well, no. The photo quality is objectively inferior.

Ian

Right. But the photos are

Aaron

still is still subjective.

Ian

Well, but not really because photos are a huge part of the experience of a modern social network. Well, to who who would say photos are not a huge part of the experience?

Aaron

I don't know. A lot of people probably.

Ian

I don't know. I don't know. But that's just one thing. What about, I don't know. What else would be different on the terminal?

I mean, you can only fit, you know, the the I guess, the orientation if you get if you make your terminal huge.

Aaron

Rendering speed is probably gonna be better in the

Ian

terminal. Maybe. So I I know that.

Aaron

My my only point is, that objective is I don't think I I don't think this is a measure of objectivity.

Ian

Objective is subjective. No. No. No. I don't

Aaron

know. Not everything.

Ian

Objectivity is subjective.

Aaron

I see that I see that the point that the photo would be objectively better, higher quality, more legible

Ian

on the web. A video.

Aaron

But I don't think that I don't video. I don't think that the experience of using a client is either objectively better

Ian

or worse. I wanna post a photo. How could it ever be better on the terminal than on the mobile client?

Aaron

I can't, but that's not what I'm arguing.

Ian

I'm arguing. I'm arguing that I'm arguing that make it objectively better. Uh-huh.

Aaron

Some some peep you're saying, you're saying that everyone values the same things that you do, and I'm saying that they don't. That's it.

Ian

I don't think everybody values the same things I do. I'm saying that objectively, a large part of a modern social network is sharing videos in some fashion, consuming videos in some fashion, consuming photos in some fashion, sharing photos in some fashion.

Aaron

On average, I agree.

Ian

And that so that alone is practically enough to say that the, mobile experience is objectively better. I think that alone is enough. And there's probably all these other trade offs. And the upsides are minimal. I don't know.

Aaron

I don't know. I don't think it's subjective. I think there are people that long to return to the text only interface. And for them, a terminal client would be better, which if there is one person who decides it's better over there, then it's not an objective fact that the other thing is better.

Ian

Oh, that's not true at all. There's a lot of people in the world who think the world is fat is flat, but that doesn't mean they're they're correct because one person believes that.

Aaron

That is that is a

Ian

matter Objectively false.

Aaron

That the world is not flat. A factual matter. Yes. That's correct. That's what yes.

I agree. That's a factual matter.

Ian

But I think a lot of these things are factual matters. A photo renders better

Aaron

Which I have seeded. The app. Yeah. Well, that's that's that's that's a fact.

Ian

But that's just a fact. It's just better. Right? So once you have a certain number of those things that are factually better, then the product is objectively better.

Aaron

I just I I Just because

Ian

one person likes this over here better doesn't mean objectively that that that doesn't mean it's entirely subjective because one person says, they like this one better.

Aaron

But I think the whole point is Yeah. That experiences are subjective. Yes. Right? People value different things.

Sure. People love and hate different things. Mhmm. And so if what we're talking about is an experience, and that is that is what we're talking about, the experience of, you know, exploring blue sky on the terminal or the experience of exploring blue sky on the web. If everyone values things differently let's let's take the picture example.

Mhmm. Some people might prefer that the pictures are low res. Some people might actually prefer that even though objectively Mhmm. The photo is more, accurate, higher resolution Right. Better quality, even though that's better on the web.

Mhmm. Some people might prefer that the pictures, be low res because they find they find themselves easily distracted by pictures and videos, and they just wanna see text updates with, like, maybe a hint of what the picture is, but not enough to be like, oh, I'm gonna spend the next four or five minutes on Reddit exploring this idea. Mhmm. So that's the point is, like, I think, objectively, matters of fact can be objective. The Earth is not flat.

Matters of subjective would be matters of experience. Like, you can't say, objectively, the weather is better in Florida than it is in, California. Like, it's it's objectively different. I agree. But you can't say that it's objectively better.

Ian

I guess I agree with that example, sort of. I think there is the idea that, like, people have a cons if you say in general, the concept of good weather, what does that mean? Yes. You'll find people who are like, I love the Arctic. The Arctic is my favorite.

Right? But, like, if we say in general, what does the term good weather mean to you? Most people are gonna say somewhere between seventy and eighty five degrees and sunny. Right? Like that's what most people are gonna say.

And so you know, in the context of most people, they might say that California has better weather than Russia. Right. Like just objectively generally in the common use of those terms. Now, again, you could get into all these edge cases, right, of like, well, yeah, I love the, the Arctic Circle. Okay.

Fine. Like that's yes. For you, you love the Arctic Circle. So it is on different levels. Any individual, of course, everything's subjective for any individual.

That's true. But then when you're talking about a broad spectrum, then I think there are just things that are better or worse, and that it's not subjective. You know what I'm saying?

Aaron

I kinda know what you're saying. Where do you wanna go next?

Ian

Alright. What should we do next? See, I knew that one was gonna be a little divisive there. But I was a good one prepared. That's on me.

That's on me. I wasn't fully prepared.

Aaron

See, that is on you. You're telling okay. That is. Yeah. You're telling me all these exists, and you're like, I can't name them.

Ian

I die. It's just like it's like the term. It's like every other Chewy. Is like Chewy. Chewy.

Mhmm. Alright. What's going on with Postgres? Your Postgres.

Aaron

Is it is it Yeah.

Ian

Just Postgres. Is it is it your course? Is it the platform? Postgres? Just the course.

Aaron

So last week, I think I did 17 sixteen, seventeen, 18 videos last week. How do

Ian

you do so many videos? That's crazy.

Aaron

Just struggle with existential despair till about 01:30 or two, and then You're still on. Videos before the first time to go home. Yeah.

Ian

Yeah. It's a

Aaron

great strategy. So I think, there's still there's still maybe five more that I need to do, but there are no more there are no more new modules that I need to do. So I knocked out this past week, I knocked out JSON and, PG vector and extensions.

Ian

JSON. That's a big one.

Aaron

Oh, I'm teasing. JSON and vectors are hot. They're good ones. They're very, very good. Very, very relevant.

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

So I knocked those out. Steve's editing them today. We'll probably, you know, release tomorrow or the next day, something. And that, I think, is gonna take us out of early access and basically finish the course. So we should get a nice big bump on on sales.

Yeah. That'll be so nice. And it's just a massive relief. It just feels so much better to have that off my plate. And so in addition to, you know, Postgres, there are a number of open items, across the rest of my life, and I've written them all down on Post it notes.

Oh. And the goal is to decrease the number of open loops, in my life. And so getting Postgres finished, merging some stuff into solo, getting that released, finishing the new aaronfrances.com, all of this stuff that's just kinda, like, hanging over my head Yeah. Trying to get all of these things, like, closed out before opening any new any new items, and, Postgres is is one of them. So we made it.

Ian

Nice. Congratulations. You should try putting yourself on a timer. I'm still liking the timer thing. Start a timer for

Aaron

yourself. Pomodoro?

Ian

Yeah. Pomodoro. I've been using toggle just, like, actually time tracking, like, as if I'm billing somebody Uh-huh. But I'm not. And start the timer.

I'm working on this thing. Work. Work. Work. Stop the timer.

And it's kinda like a nice little, like, feedbacky mechanism for yourself.

Aaron

I like that.

Ian

Door tower would be a similar thing. I'm probably door timer doesn't have, like, some of the other benefits of, like, being able to see the exact things you maybe spent time on or, you know, if you want some of that data. But, but it's even simpler, obviously, just doing door timer. So yeah. Alright.

There's a lot of open items. You still have a JavaScript library to build.

Aaron

I do. I do.

Ian

You've got a finish this two e thing you're building.

Aaron

Yep. Much to your dismay.

Ian

I don't know. Do you think it's what do you what are what's the feedback you're getting on this thing? Are people using it?

Aaron

Very good. Very good. Yeah. I think it's an objectively better experience. No.

People people seem to like it. Nice. Lots of, you know, lots of feature requests, obviously. Yeah. But the thing that I the thing that I need to merge in is, like, a fundamental kind of rewriting of the whole thing.

Ian

Oh, that sounds easy.

Aaron

And it opens it opens up just so many more use cases and ease of, like, extensibility.

Ian

Like, plug in architecture stuff?

Aaron

Kinda. I mean, it doesn't have a plug in architecture, but there is an underlying. So the thing the the hardest thing I've ever programmed, this is maybe true, at least top two or three, is what I'm about to merge in, and that's a screen it's a terminal screen emulator. And so I take all of the output of the underlying processes Okay. Processes, and run them through this PHP class that is a screen emulator.

Mhmm. And then I output from that screen emulator, then I output the output to the actual user's terminal. Right. And so, basically, I had to I had to reimplement a a a terminal in PHP.

Ian

Why? Exactly.

Aaron

So why? Yeah. Because,

Ian

alright.

Aaron

We'll take one specific code. So there there are these things called ANSI codes, that control, like, how stuff shows up on the terminal. Right? You pass in this wonky code, the text turns blue. Very weird, very old.

Doesn't matter. You pass in this other code, and you can move the cursor all around the screen. Right? So you can move it to the top. The code that we'll talk about is the code to clear the entire screen.

So there is a code, I think it's like two k or two j or something that, like, clears the entire screen. I'm not in control of these underlying processes. Right? They could use those codes at any point to build their own user interfaces. They could use those codes at any point that they want.

In fact, Laravel prompts does use codes like that. So when you're typing in the multisearch and Laravel prompts, it's like rendering the whole thing, jumping back five lines clearing, and then rendering again. That's that's its loop, is it just clears itself over and over and over, drawing frame by frame.

Ian

Yep.

Aaron

As I'm gathering out the output from these underlying processes, and then if I just simply pipe it through to the user's terminal, the prompts code, which is, like, clear the screen, is clearing all of my UI. Right. It's like clearing my Chrome. It doesn't it doesn't know that it's existing in this goofy little pane. It's like, you told me to clear the terminal.

I'm gonna goddamn clear the terminal. And I'm like, no. Not my stuff.

Ian

It's almost like the terminal wasn't designed to do this. It's almost like

Aaron

that. Except it was. So here's the thing.

Ian

Okay.

Aaron

Here's the thing. So now what I do is there's a buffer in between, the underlying process Right. And the user's terminal, and that is my screen class. And my screen class, emulates all of those ANSI codes, on an in memory buffer. So, like, I consume all of the output, and then I see a clear screen code, and I clear I clear in my in in memory buffer Right.

Just my thing.

Ian

Yep.

Aaron

And then when I output it to the terminal, the only thing that's left are, maybe some color NC codes and stuff, but there are no more there's no more stuff that can mess with my surrounding Chrome.

Ian

Right. Mhmm.

Aaron

And so I I've implemented, you know, cursor movements, screen clear, line clear, line up, line down.

Ian

ANSI code?

Aaron

Dude, there are a lot of ANSI codes.

Ian

Okay. Mhmm.

Aaron

And so that's the big that's the big, like, new piece of programming that I've done. I've, you know, I've written forums a thousand times. I've written, you know, background jobs a thousand times. I've never written a screen emulator. This is real programming.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm using bit masks and Right. All kinds of stuff.

Ian

On there. You're at the metal.

Aaron

I'm at the metal. It's so freaking fun. Okay. And so this allows like, this just opens up so many more use cases, including, like, interactive mode so you can, you know, interact with the underlying process and pass input to it, that kind of stuff. So Mhmm.

Once I get that merged, that'll be a huge, like, weight off of my shoulders to to close that open loop. So, yeah, a lot of fun. Wow. You can just do things, Ian.

Ian

You could sort of, but they have trade offs. They have trade offs. So that'd be a big thing to maintain. I'm just gonna say. I mean, do one that with that.

I mean, probably a million edge cases. What about here's an interesting thing. So you have Postgres and you're done. It's kinda interesting, like software versus something like that, you know, and like how being done like, you're a you're a guy who wants things to be done.

Aaron

Boy. I

Ian

think it's something interesting about I

Aaron

am. Yeah. I'm a completionist.

Ian

Yeah. You're a completionist. But software is never complete. That's the thing with software

Aaron

Mhmm.

Ian

Which is terrible. It's the worst part by far of software because that's never done. So I don't know. I think that's interesting. As you're in your whole, like, you know, when we're gonna do and the different projects and things, I feel like that's that's interesting.

It's like things that can get done and be done.

Aaron

Yes. Things that can be done.

Ian

Like, truly done. Not like I did the release. That's not done. That's just like the start of

Aaron

That is the thousand bugs

Ian

and everything else. Right? Like, but something that is done done. It's like, oh, this is done. I never have to go back to this again, potentially.

Aaron

Or if you like I do like video courses for that reason. Video courses

Ian

are so good. Yeah. That's the dream. That is the dream. With something.

Aaron

Can you imagine?

Ian

I haven't been done with anything in twenty years. Like, I might take something off my to do list, but just something else fills it in because that's the core project exists and is ongoing forever.

Aaron

That's why you're so tired over four years.

Ian

You haven't been tired.

Aaron

You haven't been done with anything in twenty years.

Ian

Get done.

Aaron

You do. You do.

Ian

I've accepted my faith. That's fine.

Aaron

I will never accept my faith. That is also one thing that is true about me is I will never accept my fate.

Ian

Oh, boy.

Aaron

I will change I will change my fate.

Ian

So do you think this, the thing you're building, could it be part of Laravel at some point? Is that a goal you have for it to be in the mothership? I think it's too much that it

Aaron

could be in

Ian

the mothership. Okay.

Aaron

It's too much. I was on the Laravel News creator spotlight a day or two ago. It hasn't it hasn't come out yet. But Eric asked me the same question. Mhmm.

So I'm gonna scoop him, but y'all go listen to his show anyway, but I'm gonna scoop him anyway. He asked me that, and my my thought is, I don't want to foist this upon Laravel. Right? Because if I do, then I'm like, yeah. As you all maintain it, good luck.

Ian

Then you're done. No. That's great. You're you're completed.

Aaron

But we burn we burn some goodwill if I foist it upon them and then say see you. Raven's project. Yeah. Have fun. That's not great.

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

There is a possibility that do you remember when, I think it was Fadaloper trusted proxy. I think that was the package.

Ian

Everything. Yeah.

Aaron

It was in everything. It was in everything. I could see a world where the, Laravel application starter repo, not like the framework framework, but I guess it's Laravel slash Laravel instead of Laravel slash framework. Not even the starter kits, but, like, the, when you do Laravel new

Ian

or whatever. Yeah.

Aaron

It, like, brings down, like, a application. I could see it being required in there. Mhmm. But still

Ian

what I mean. That's essentially the same thing.

Aaron

It's it's it's not, though. So if it in like, if you do Laravel new and then you open up composer.JSON and you see, Aaron Francis slash solo, I could totally see that. What I don't think will ever happen is it is somehow baked into, like, the Illuminate packages or even even, like, under the Laravel namespace like Laravel prompts is. Because the moment it becomes Laravel slash solo, I'm off the hook. And I just it's a huge thing to ask someone else to maintain that doesn't have the context.

You know?

Ian

Well, see, I think that the way they operate at this point, they would never put it in the way you're describing unless they control them. I don't think they would ever do what they do with Fadalupe. I think that's, like, in history.

Aaron

They're moving away

Ian

from that. Yeah.

Aaron

I would think because of Excel. Well I

Ian

just think they have the people. Like, they're not gonna wanna be dependent on if they're like, this is the way a new when you learn about new and the expectation is you're gonna get this tab command line, the thing with all this stuff. Cool. Like, if they want that, then I don't think they would ever do it and just be like, we don't control this in some ways. And Yeah.

That's true. User interface to

Aaron

They control yeah. They do control everything now. Well I mean,

Ian

you don't

Aaron

If they want it if they want it, they can have it. Also, as with as with all things, I am for sale. Sure. Yeah. I'm a % for sale.

So Tom Tom, COO Tom, give me a call. Yeah. Yeah. Drop a bad stack on

Ian

it, and you

Aaron

can have it. No. Tom's too busy. Tom's too important to do podcasts, especially with us

Ian

my god.

Aaron

Us jokers. You know?

Ian

Yeah. He's not he's not that kind of guy.

Aaron

He's locked in all day.

Ian

Yeah. I don't know. I just think he's yeah. I don't know what he's I don't know what he does all day, but I don't think he's listening to podcasts. Well, yeah, I had another question along their lines, and I can't think of it.

What about so now would you ever well, I guess no. I I guess you're not gonna do that. Alright. Let's move

Aaron

on. Wow. What what was the question?

Ian

If you would make this your Laracon e u talk, but I think you're going to stick with the jobs for flatbed.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Too late.

Ian

Well, you got you got a couple of months. Yep. It's gonna be busy. At least your courses are mostly It's

Aaron

all it's always busy. There's no other

Ian

way. Videos? What's the I know you have some screencasting stuff. But besides that, do you have of course, SQLite, is that totally wrapped up?

Aaron

Yeah. SQLite's wrapped up. The next so the next course like, the next proper course that we do is probably going to be, intro to SQL. So it's gonna be fundamentally different than SQLite or Postgres because those targeted those targeted intermediate. So that's not a I just graduated from boot camp.

Let me go learn about how b trees work under the hood. Like, that ain't gonna happen. So I think there's, this is this is one of those things where I'm having to observe the world and draw conclusions from it because I would not watch an introduction to SQL course.

Ian

Right.

Aaron

I would never watch that. I think Right. What's the point?

Ian

Right.

Aaron

But observing the world, those courses do great. Mhmm. And and being rational and using my powerful brain, there are more beginners than there are intermediates. Like, I can just I can just do that in my head.

Ian

Usually, people can't jump to pass beginner to intermediate.

Aaron

Inverted pyramid does not apply here. It's just a regular pyramid. And so thinking about, thinking about a few different a few different vectors, one being ease of production. This is going to be I could sit down today without an outline and probably have it finished by Friday. And that to me is a great delight.

Boy, that sounds that sounds I know.

Ian

Optimistic. You think you

Aaron

think that's Absolutely.

Ian

I guess details in the sequel syntax. You know, there's a lot of stuff.

Aaron

I'm very I I'm very confident. Yes. I'm What about, big believer in the old Aaron Francis?

Ian

Which flavor?

Aaron

Open question. I mean, I may I may highlight some nuances between, you know, the different engines and stuff. Yeah. But the the point is one vector is ease of production. Yeah.

That is, like, fundamentally different. I mean, I've still got

Ian

gonna be way easier than I

Aaron

still got, you know, piles of Postgres docs here because I haven't, you know, I haven't cleaned off my desk, and they're all just hanging around. And so it's like, boy, it is gonna be nice to do something where I don't literally have to print out a ream of paper and pour through the docs just to make sure that I'm teaching everything Yeah. Correctly. I know you think it's

Ian

just, like, straight select, update, delete

Aaron

Joins.

Ian

Join. Yeah.

Aaron

It's like Little bit little bit of indexes. Yeah.

Ian

Yeah. Okay. Not like triggers. Not getting to that level. Yeah.

Nope.

Aaron

Just the. Not getting to like not even getting to the underlying like what is a B tree? Like why would you use this for a primary key? It's like if you want that, I talk about that in other places. And so ease of production and size of size of potential audience.

And the thing is, this is not congruent with to my knowledge, this is not congruent with my existing audience because I feel like a lot of people that I'm friends with or follow me are primarily intermediates or or better. And that could be that could be availability bias. Like, that could be the people that I know that follow me or the people that respond. I know that, like, these people, they don't need an intro course. But there could be 90% of the people that never respond that are juniors that are like, man, I can't follow anything in this master Postgres course, but they never speak up.

And so, ease of production, size of market, and then there's an experiment there there's an experimental part of this where it's, what if we sold this course for $49 Right. Or 59.

Ian

The entry center, like,

Aaron

$1.99 or $2.99 or something.

Ian

Francis ecosystem. Yeah. Exactly. Loss leader.

Aaron

So, yeah, it'll be interesting, and it rounds it rounds out the offering quite a bit. You know, if you graduate from intro to SQL, you can move on to Postgres, SQLite, MySQL. Yeah.

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

And this will also be it'll be interesting because it'll be less of a, it'll be less of like a hype driven marketing strategy. Because, again, I think most of the people that follow me are not beginners, but it'll be interesting to see, like, can we pull off can we pull off, like, a successful profitable course without relying on, like, our friends to buy it? And I think the answer is yes. Like, I I the number of people that have bought Postgres is more friends than I have. So we're already proving that a little bit.

Ian

Do you think that, like, this seems to me, like, almost the kind of thing, though, that might even be better in, like, well, I think two different avenues come to mind. One is, like, build the course the way you're talking about, and, like, you try to partner with things like code schools and stuff like that. I'd be like, we'll give you some kind of whatever. There's bulk pricing, whatever. You can stream it as much as you want to people in your courses, whatever.

Aaron

Come up

Ian

with some deal for that. But the other side would be more like you put it yourself on you Dom Demi or one of these Mhmm. You know, these big platforms. Right? Mhmm.

That's like exposure for you to this audience that you don't have so much of currently. But then that gives you access to the audience to be like, okay. Now you've graduated this. I have these other courses over here.

Aaron

You definitely

Ian

let you do that. But there's I have other courses, that you can buy. So it, like, leads more of a yeah. Like, a marketing channel more than, like, directly profitable.

Aaron

Yeah. So the Udemy thing is tough. I have a few friends that have put courses on Udemy, and you're just not in control of you're not in control of pricing at all.

Ian

Right.

Aaron

You kind of are, but they're they strong-arm you pretty hard. Mhmm. You're competing you're competing with a lot of, what I would call low quality courses.

Ian

Right.

Aaron

That's good,

Ian

though, potentially.

Aaron

It's not necessarily good because, if you look up intro to SQL and mine that is, like, in my opinion, very good and very high quality is let's say on Udemy, we knock it down to $19, and there's another one that's $4.99, which is true. Right. They're just gonna be like, I don't I don't know that other guy. That's way too expensive at $19. Are you crazy?

I'm just gonna buy the cheap one. So that's a problem. But then also, from my conversations with these friends, getting people off the platform is incredibly difficult. Right. And so you have to bake in some things like go over here to sign up to get the source code or something like that.

Ian

Cheat sheet or

Aaron

like that whole stuff. Yeah. And Udemy, of course, doesn't want you to take the audience with you. So, yeah, I don't know. I, I I'm pretty,

Ian

I mean, to me, it would even be, I would, and I don't know if you, Udemy is the right platform for it, but it's more like, I, I think you would charge nothing. Like, I think ideally it's free. Like you just become the biggest sequel course, entry level sequel course, whatever that, or it's a dollar 9, whatever, whatever the best strategy is to becoming the biggest, forget making money on that. And then you're just trying to grow your audience because you're really trying to sell the more premium items now. Yes.

Like if that's, if they make it impossible, like I don't, who know? I don't even know. Maybe they have rules where you can't even mention things that are off platform.

Aaron

Right.

Ian

Who knows? Right. Like, I don't know. But that kind of idea where it's like, if you could build something in a week that opens up the opportunity for it to be a marketing thing more even than a direct profit making thing potentially, especially to, like, as, like, a way into an audience you don't already have.

Aaron

Yeah. That's an interesting idea. Possibly. I'd be curious if Udemy even allows fully free stuff because that doesn't help them out either. But that's an that is that is an interesting idea.

Yeah. I'm not gonna

Ian

do it. Sounds good.

Aaron

But that's an interesting idea.

Ian

Just kicking around ideas. You never know. You never know. Might come up. Alright.

What else is going on? Oh, I found my budgeting app.

Aaron

Yeah. You're not building it anymore?

Ian

No. Fuck. Come on. Who is that guy who even came on here and said he should build there? He's going to build.

He was thinking about building.

Aaron

That's that's I'm

Ian

not building.

Aaron

A move that's a move for a much younger man to build a budgeting man. Build a budgeting app. Are you kidding me? We're out we're out of firepower at this point.

Ian

Maybe somebody who's, like, 42 could do it, but I can't. Maybe. I'm too old. Too old.

Aaron

Alright. Tell us. I got this pain.

Ian

I got this wheelchair. I can't Got the wonky knee. Blood just drops. I got the bad knee. The whole thing.

I got the I got I don't even have a gallbladder. Okay? I got no gallbladder.

Aaron

That is true.

Ian

What am I supposed to do?

Aaron

So Not process fats. That's for

Ian

sure. That's for sure. Monarch. So

Aaron

Monarch.

Ian

Friend of the show, Tom Westrick. Thanks, Tom.

Aaron

Thanks, Tom.

Ian

Just when I had.

Aaron

What is it? Monarch budgeting.

Ian

And it's very good. I'm very happy with it. It's definitely better than all the other ones. But. Monarch.

Monarch. Margin. And, you know, let me just see what the

Aaron

So I'm gonna go ahead and

Ian

48. They say Monarch. Yeah. Yeah. Monarch money.

That's the one.

Aaron

Monarch money dot com. Alright. Yep. Accept cookies. Sure.

I love cookies. The modern way to manage money. K. It's making me nervous already. Modern way.

What does that mean? AI? Yeah.

Ian

There's no AI.

Aaron

Oh, good. This looks good.

Ian

Well, I don't know. They all have, like, this, you know, auto categorization and all

Aaron

Right. Right.

Ian

Bad for all of them. Theirs seems slightly better than some of the others, but still definitely gets a lot of things wrong. Although we will be using it for a couple weeks.

Aaron

I don't know. This looks pretty good. Tell me tell me what's, first impressions here.

Ian

It's very good. It's got everything we wanted. So it does, like, other assets. So you can have, like, investments or whatever. So it's like your whole financial picture, not just the budget.

But it's not a doing a job in the budget. The categories within the budget have the right amount of controls. Some of the rollover stuff has the right amount of controls. It's got this nice dashboard thing you can set up. It seems to work well.

It's fast. I was using this Copilot thing for a while, but it was so slow.

Aaron

It was

Ian

insanely slow. So

Aaron

this is Does it have a fast enough client? Can I use it for a

Ian

clean line? Figure you will build one. So if I can get you on it, then I'll be able to access it to the terminal, which would be very nice. It will be very nice. Mobile app.

Aaron

K.

Ian

It doesn't have a desktop app, which I'm fine with.

Aaron

I'm fine. I I love the browser. Browser's fine.

Ian

Browser's good. So, yeah, I don't know. It's been so far so good. You know, it's so annoying. The South

Aaron

is better than the

Ian

third one, and everyone you go through with the whole

Aaron

Oh, dude.

Ian

Connect all the things and whatever doesn't work on plaid, use this FX service or whatever. So you're going between the services. It's a total nightmare, but everything's connected. Everything seems to sync reviewing, categorizing transactions seems to work. It also has, which is, was the main reason I wanted to build my own budgeting app is it has and this is actually just launched in November.

So I just happened to be right on time, which is the ability to have a budget that is not like, to the penny. So it's not that you just set up everything to the penny and then,

Aaron

oh, you can do a Vibes budget.

Ian

It's a Vibes budget. So you have, like, non monthly things for, like, your taxes or things that happen, you

Aaron

know,

Ian

once a year, twice a year, insurance, whatever. Then you could have, like, your, if you're what they call it, but, like, utility like, the stuff that just happens, like, your mortgage, utilities, just stuff that happens every month kinda structured. So those two don't really have, like in this setup, if you use what they call the flexible budgeting, those are just kind of locked in whatever the costs are for the individual items. And then you have the flexible part of the budget, which is like everything else, which is where, like, I could spend more or less on clothes, on entertainment, on groceries even potentially. Like, these are areas where I can choose I dig.

To change or not change as I see fit. And so then you have just a budget that's like, hey. It's like x dollars for all these categories, which are all the categories that you actually control. Like everything else, you don't actually control your mortgage. Right?

Like you controlling that is a much bigger thing. Like, yes, I could control it by selling my house and buying cheap house for me. Expensive house. Yeah. But it's like, that's a bigger thing.

That's not like day in, day out. I have any control over that. So this way, it's like just a budget for the core things that you're like, I wanna try to spend less on superfluous crap. So you basically have, like, a superfluous crap area of the budget now. That's what the budget is.

And it's still tracking all the other stuff, so you still can see charts and data and whatever. But in terms of what you're trying to hit, the number you're trying to hit each month, that is just gonna be these things that are more variable. And

Aaron

Let let me ask you this. Can you do, I would have to imagine you can. Can you do tracking only? Can do you have to, like, create a budget? Because in, I feel like in YNAB, they're like, you gotta allocate.

Right. You gotta allocate every dollar. And I'm like, honestly, I just kinda wanna see where everything's going. I don't wanna, like, I don't wanna live by the budget. I just wanna die by the budget.

I just wanna Yeah. I just wanna see where everything's going, and then I'll make a decision based on vibes if we need to trim Which

Ian

is kinda how I think about it too. It's like we don't even track what we spend the money on now. So, like, step one isn't even, like, the budget.

Aaron

It's like

Ian

it's like gotta track. See where the money is even going, and then we can decide what the budget a little bit. So we do have a number in the budget, but this is like, it's just a number for the whole thing. So, yes, you can just import stuff and categorize it and not do any budget at all, and that's fine. And then you'll just have all that data about where the money's going.

Or you can do the a regular budget, which is, like, to the penny, it's all gonna line up, or you can do this flexible budget. That's what we're doing. And even the flexible budget has a couple a really interesting thing, which is that, okay, you say, okay, these 20 categories are the things that are variable and the things we're trying to like get our hands around really. So we're gonna say, okay, the budget for these 20 things is X that's the flexible budget, but you could still optionally have line item budgets for certain things. So let's say for groceries, we still just wanna say that is whatever it is, dollars 2,000 a month on groceries.

And so that can even still have a line item, even though the other ones don't have individual line items. And it's just an overarching budget that they're constrained within.

Aaron

So if

Ian

you are one on a few items. Yeah. It's like, okay, we've tracked this now. We know in these particular categories, it's like DoorDash and eating out or whatever. Like we wanna control that.

Let's like literally put an actual value on just that category so that we can try to stay in that category within a certain budget. And then the other things are still variable. Clothing might be zero in one month might be $300 next month, whatever it is. So, so yeah, so it's so far so good. I mean, we've only been using it.

Aaron

It looks great.

Ian

Whatever. So it's, it's very nice. Yeah. They just redid the UI actually, like in this week. So it's also a change.

I refreshed the screen and, like, the UI changed on me. I was like, oh, wow. Please do the update. Not totally different, just, like, more of a design update. But, yeah, so I would say check it out.

If you're in the market, very happy with it. Mobile app's solid. Desktop app's solid. Yeah.

Aaron

I look forward I look forward to next week, seeing if you're Yes. Still seeing if you're still using it or what problems you found.

Ian

Let me tell you. If this one doesn't work, I think we're just done. I don't I think we just go back to we don't have any idea what we spent on the week.

Aaron

We have no idea

Ian

how much money we have, how much we've spent. We're moving again. We've just been let go and let God. Yes. We've connected these accounts three times now.

Jamie's moved everything and reset things up three times now. I think we're all done with the moving and the setting up. So this doesn't work.

Aaron

Here here's a here's a litmus test. Does Monarch understand that when you pay off a credit card, you've paid off a credit card?

Ian

Or

Aaron

does it does it make all those entries that are like, oh, guys, come on. I didn't lose a bunch of money. I've just paid off

Ian

an Internal entry. I think it does correctly do that. Yes.

Aaron

That's good. I believe so. That's good. I

Ian

believe it does. It has that concept of, like, where it knows this went to this credit card. If you have it all set up on both sides of the transaction,

Aaron

I think.

Ian

Like, you have to have the bank account and the credit card all in there. I'm pretty sure that works. But, again, it's only in a week, so I haven't actually seen that happen. Gotten that far yet? Yeah.

But I'm pretty sure let's do that.

Aaron

Yeah. Alright. Let's get on. Got a

Ian

couple other ones here.

Aaron

Let's see what else I have here. We can end on, what time is

Ian

it? Okay.

Aaron

Yeah. Do we wanna do that? Let's just end on that. What time actually, let me actual question. What time is it?

We should be

Ian

talking about the sponsor too.

Aaron

Let's talk about the sponsors first. We're only at an hour eight. So we'll talk about sponsors and end with what time is it?

Ian

Alright. I think we talked about this already that the Thunk guys are building us a little ad platform.

Aaron

They yes. We did.

Ian

Advertising platform. So, Daniel says they're pretty much done. I think they have to do a little bit of work on the Stripe end of it. I think he's also moving right now.

Aaron

So I think so.

Ian

There's a little you know, that's slightly delayed. But, shortly here, we should have that. And then, like, we talked about, we'd be able to be able to self serve, to advertise on the show, to be able to get your brand name in front of our audience, which I think is gonna be really cool for a very modest rate. I'm very excited about that.

Aaron

I'm very excited about this. Of all of your handful of good ideas, this is definitely one of

Ian

them. Yeah. I know. It'll be interesting to see. I wonder if people are gonna do it, so that'll be fascinating to see if

Aaron

It will be. Mhmm.

Ian

But I hope they do. I think it's gonna be quite, an interesting opportunity. And for the amount we're charging, I feel like it's, like, so achievable that people could make that money back. You know? Like Yeah.

Aaron

And I I think

Ian

get customers.

Aaron

I I think we could sell out. I don't think it'll happen immediately, but I think I think we could sell out. I

Ian

think it's possible. I think it's possible. It'll be interesting to figure out the, like, how we wanna do the reads and where we wanna put them and, like, I think, you know, I think it's pretty straightforward, but there could end up being some nuance once we get in there and, actually do it if we have some some feelings on how we wanna how we wanna do that. But

Aaron

Yeah. I think, I think we should start by doing maybe four or five four or five slots Mhmm. And split them up.

Ian

Let's see how we can

Aaron

do that. Split them up. Maybe I don't know. Maybe, like, two at the beginning, two at the end, but the people at the end would kinda get hosed. But we could shuffle that because they're doing a month.

Right? Right.

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

So we could we could have a That's

Ian

a nice thing. Yeah. As they can they can rotate so you're not always in one slot.

Aaron

I also think it could be we're we're pretty good about doing segments. Like, we we Yeah. We don't just wander the whole time. So we could do them as interstitials between between segments. You know?

Ian

We could just have a segment that's to the we could just have it planned where this is our read after this thing or whatever. At some point, I don't think it's being built this way, but we could also even I mean, it would make sense in other podcasts to do this, which is there's a different charge of you're charged a different amount if you wanna be at the start of the show versus the middle or whatever. Yeah. I don't think for the beginning, we need to get that granular with it. But,

Aaron

No. I think as long as we shuffle,

Ian

it should be it should be Yeah.

Aaron

Fine.

Ian

Yep. And, yeah, I think maybe we start with, like, four or five slots or something and see how that goes. There should be, you know, quick reads, and I think people will it'll be content that people will consume if you hate that word. I think it will actually be useful to the listeners, which is great. Mhmm.

Aaron

I'm excited. I think even even as a listener, I think this is a great idea.

Ian

Well, also, because it'd be cool because I you don't really hear it on a lot of other podcasts. Like, everybody's just locked in because they're part of the bigger podcasts are all part of these bigger services. Part of these networks. Yeah. Yeah.

Networks and things where it's like, they're just going out and selling minute long spots because that's what the whole structure is. And, they're, you know, obviously, you have, like, auto ad injection now, dynamic ad injection, and all that stuff on bigger shows. So I think you don't hear a lot of different nobody's, like, pushing anything forward. Kinda it's like we they've all locked in on this, and they're just doing it, and that's what it is. So I think it's gonna be kinda interesting in that regard too to see if people like it, what the feedback is, if the sponsors like it.

Yeah. So that'll be interesting.

Aaron

It's gonna be great. I'm so excited.

Ian

I'm excited. I'm excited. Hopefully, the self-service part works. That'll be nice.

Aaron

It also it also has the opportunity it it has the opportunity to hit, a little bit wider media. Like, this this idea is just a spectacle unto itself that you can just come on and buy your own spot, and you don't ever have to talk to us, and you put in the 250 characters or whatever it is.

Ian

Yep.

Aaron

I think it has and we should try to leverage this. It has the opportunity to hit, news media, thought leaders, that sort of thing.

Ian

Let's get on. We need to be on Squawk Box where we talked about this or something like that.

Aaron

Yeah. I don't know what that is, but, yeah, I agree. That sounds awesome.

Ian

Hey, maybe someday. It's a platform. Platforms some way. We're rolling out.

Aaron

I know.

Ian

Complete the vision Adam Martin had eight years ago to do this

Aaron

That's right.

Ian

Same thing, but he never actually did it. Yeah. We'll see. That would be cool. I mean, definitely, I think it'd be cool if we have, other podcasts in our own circles that end up maybe wanting to use this this thing or something like that.

Possibility there as well once we work out some kinks to, do something like that too.

Aaron

So Mhmm.

Ian

That'd be cool. So, yeah, that's the update. Next week, I think so if you're if you're looking to sponsor the show, be ready. We'll probably be tweeting and posting and all that stuff once the

Aaron

platform is ready.

Ian

Get those credit cards out. Hopefully, by next, by next show. But we'll see if that doesn't happen, I'm sure, by the show after. So pretty soon here, you'll be able to do that, and I think that'll be pretty sweet.

Aaron

Yep. I agree. Alright. Have I told you about the what time is it game?

Ian

I don't think so.

Aaron

Well, it's kinda all in the name.

Ian

Showtime? Is it Showtime?

Aaron

No. No. No. No. It's just it's just a game.

It's not a game. It's it's just a game where if Jennifer and I are sitting around for a while, it's like we're, you know, on this case, we're leaving a friend's birthday party or, like, we've just finished watching an episode and eating dinner, she'll one of us, actually, we both do it. She'll say, don't look. What time do you think it is? And that's the whole game.

That's the whole game.

Ian

The game.

Aaron

Great game. Great game. So last night

Ian

Mhmm.

Aaron

I first of all, I encourage you to to all play this with

Ian

your friends.

Aaron

They're gonna think you're insane, but it's gonna catch on because they're gonna you're gonna say, don't look. What time do you think it is? And they're gonna say, 08:42. And you're gonna guess, and then you're gonna look in this 08:15. Everybody's gonna be like, wow.

That's crazy. So a corollary to what time is it is how old are they?

Ian

Oh, yeah.

Aaron

So we played how old are they last night. We're watching, we we watch SNL weekend update every week. Mhmm. That's the only part we watch, but just that part truly. But last night, Chris Rock was the or I guess Saturday night.

Chris Rock was the host. And I thought, I haven't seen Chris Rock in forever since, you know, I was a kid. And I don't I don't follow him, but I thought, I wonder what he's up to. And so we watched the opening monologue, and we played how old is he? And so how old do you do you know how old Chris Rock is?

Ian

I I don't I don't know exactly. No. Alright.

Aaron

We're gonna play. Yeah. We're gonna play. How old

Ian

Chris Rock.

Aaron

It's Chris Rock.

Ian

Time. I'm gonna say Chris Rock is, 63.

Aaron

50 nine.

Ian

Oh. 59. I thought it

Aaron

was I got it. I got it.

Ian

Did you really?

Aaron

Dead on. Wow.

Ian

I said

Aaron

'59. I think Jennifer said '61. But '59. So then we were fast forwarding as we do, and, Adam Sandler popped up in one of the sketches. Love that.

And we played again. How old?

Ian

Alright. Adam Sandler, I think, I think he's 60 or 62.

Aaron

You think he's 60?

Ian

Isn't he? Or is he 58?

Aaron

50 eight. Adam Sandler.

Ian

Okay.

Aaron

Adam Sandler is 58. Let me just verify.

Ian

I have

Aaron

four guesses. Account. Chris Rock is 59. Alright. Yep.

Got it. Crazy.

Ian

How can these guys be 60?

Aaron

I know. That's not great for us.

Ian

So crazy, man. I love Chris Rock. Chris Rock's the little run he went on, like, in, I guess was it probably, like, mid to late nineties and maybe early two thousands where he had those HBO specials? Mhmm. Those, like, two or three of the first HBO special he did are still probably the greatest comedy specials ever.

There's just, like, so many great lines. It's just, it's just magic. Perfect.

Aaron

I'm trying to remember what movies he was in when I was a kid.

Ian

I never loved him in the movies. Like, I can't say I like any Chris Rock movies, but the stand up is all all time classic stand up.

Aaron

There there's has

Ian

to have been one movies. It's gotta be one of the

Aaron

one that I'm thinking of that, like, I

Ian

remember in the hood. That was the first movie he was in way back early nineties. So then he went obviously in Moyer. All his stuff is kinda mostly weirdo comedy stuff. But it's all, like, kinda cheap.

I don't know. It's not my favorite.

Aaron

I IMDB is unusable. It's just unused

Ian

lunch. One I just want to see Wikipedia for that. Weekly because they usually have a pretty good

Aaron

Chris Rock filmography. Here we go.

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

Alright. So we would have been I probably would have been thinking mid nineties. Beverly Hills ninja. That's probably what I'm thinking of.

Ian

He was in Beverly Hills top two.

Aaron

Definitely. And lethal weapon four. Yeah. But he

Ian

wasn't in boy in the hood. He was in New Jack City. That's what he was in.

Aaron

Doctor Doolittle. These are these are, I think, specifically, Beverly Hills Ninja came out in '97, so I would have been eight years old and thought it was probably the funniest thing

Ian

in the world. I didn't even know that this was a a movie.

Aaron

I think it's Chris Farley too.

Ian

I've literally only heard of, like, half the movie he's ever been in. Yeah. Oh, he was in AI? Oh, no. That's a different thing.

No. It is AI. Steven Spielberg AI. I forgot. I guess he's just a he's a voice.

Aaron

He's in Paw Patrol. Dude's getting paid.

Ian

A gas guard. You know, like, man, my gas guard is fine.

Aaron

Anyway, what time is it, and how old are they? Great games. Great games. Highly encourage everyone to play. What time is it?

Ian

How old are they? He's in the Paw Patrol movie. Oh, man. He was on, he was in an episode of Miami Vice, 1987. Oh, yeah.

He had his own show there for a while. Oh, man. These Chris Rock specials. Yeah. Nineteen ninety nine.

I

Aaron

don't think I've ever seen Chris Rock special. Man, Chris seen Beverly Hills Ninja.

Ian

Oh my god. The the the you gotta see the comedy specials are, like, they're up there for me with, like, the Godfather in terms of, like, the absurd haven't

Aaron

seen them.

Ian

The amount of life advice that you can take out of a Chris Rock special to, like, improve yourself off the charts.

Aaron

Oh, now now now you're speaking my language. I could get behind that.

Ian

Yeah. You gotta check these out. Like, the the early ones, are so, so good. Yeah. Bigger and Blacker.

Bring the Pain. That, I think, is the first one. Bring the Pain is super good.

Aaron

Not a big comedy special guy. Oh, gosh. Just just a little just a little let's see. I've seen Seinfeld, Nate Bargazzi, Jim Gaffigan. I've watched all those specials.

Ellen DeGeneres' I think here and now, which is an older one, I think. I've never seen that. So funny. So so freaking funny. But those are the only ones I've really watched.

Ian

I've seen Seinfeld live two or three times. I've seen, Chris Rock live, but the HBO one

Aaron

Live. I've only seen Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan.

Ian

Okay. I do like a live comedy show. It's got a cool vibe. I wish I did it more. I should I should try to do more of those.

Seinfeld is good live, but he's not as good, I would say. He's not as good as the show to me. I agree. The show is funnier than him live. Yeah.

Aaron

I agree.

Ian

Yeah. Alright. We gotta wrap on

Aaron

we gotta we gotta wrap on one other thing. You're in the Northeast. Right?

Ian

Yes.

Aaron

I don't know much about geography, but you're in the Northeast. Mhmm. What's going on with the drones?

Ian

Man, the drones. My Jamie saw a drone. Last good thing.

Aaron

Bad guys? Funny guys? Silly guys?

Ian

Man. It's Our guys.

Aaron

Their guys.

Ian

I love how the government has no idea what's going on. They're like, oh, no.

Aaron

The thing.

Ian

That's the thing.

Aaron

We you.

Ian

How do you know it's not gonna hurt me? Because, like,

Aaron

you don't

Ian

know what it is.

Aaron

Part is the government is like, don't worry about it. But, also, like, I can't exactly tell you what it is.

Ian

Right.

Aaron

That's the part that's not great to me.

Ian

Yeah. But then, you know, what's so weird now too is it's like, who knows how much of it's just even BS in the sense of, like, I don't think it's made up that people are seeing it, but that once there's, like once it becomes a story and maybe it's just, like, more people flying a normal drone or whatever. Right. There's some whatever. Who knows what it was?

Right? But then it starts to take hold, and now you have every crackpot in the world who owns a drone just flying drones around all day.

Aaron

So now it's like Ken Wheeler. Do you follow him on Twitter?

Ian

On Twitter, I haven't I haven't seen him what he's up to because I haven't been on Twitter too much.

Aaron

You know, I asked what's the deal with the drones, and people replied, it's Ken Wheeler. And I was like, what what are you guys talking about? So I clicked through and went over to his Yeah. Page, and he lives in New Jersey.

Ian

Right.

Aaron

And he has a video of himself flying a drone, and it says There you go. Trolling in real life, LOL. And he's just flying a drone over people's

Ian

lives. I'm like,

Aaron

this sucks. Come on, man.

Ian

So is it even a thing? You know what I mean? And there's, like, a 90% chance it's nothing. And it's just like but the story got rolling because somebody saw a weird drone in a spot they didn't expect. And now every lunatic in New Jersey is flying their drone, and that's that's all.

Aaron

New Jersey is just lunatics. And so there's probably

Ian

a lot

Aaron

of drones out there. Yeah.

Ian

I mean, to be honest with you, that's that's pretty accurate. New Jersey is still lacking of a place. Not everybody there is totally normal. It's a little

Aaron

Not not anybody there. Objectively,

Ian

New Jersey is

Aaron

crazy. Oh, true. But the thing the thing that is confusing to me Yeah. Is, so I've I've seen a few videos on it looks like they're from TikTok, but they've been reposted to Reddit. And it looks like when a drone goes down, all the other drones swarm over to where the drone was.

And so I've seen one video of that and one video of one of the drones getting hit by, like, one of those high powered green lasers. And so somebody it's New Jersey. And so, you know, somebody's somebody's hitting it with a green laser.

Ian

Sure.

Aaron

And then, out of nowhere, like, 15 other drones, like, come out of the sky down to where that green laser drone was.

Ian

Seems like it's just gotta be made for TikTok, though. No. You think it's a real document of an actual event, or is this just Blair Witch

Aaron

on TV? Could have been just a, like, totally falsified video. That's that's very possible.

Ian

Not false, like, CGI, but just, like, yeah. I just

Aaron

Like, 16 friends got together and, like, let's do something hysterical.

Ian

Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. It's very Is

Ian

it just a regular Joan then? So it's just a regular looking drone because people seem to think they're very large. But people are very large. Spatial relations. You know what I mean?

Especially if it's at night. Like, who knows how big this thing is? Like, maybe it's just low. So you think it's bigger than it is, but it's hard to tell because it's nighttime or whatever.

Aaron

Right. I don't know.

Ian

I don't know. This is all ties into me. All this feels a lot like, a couple points in my life where you realize that, like, the world is, like, not what you thought it was. And, like, you know, like, the first time you know, it's like doctors aren't actually special people. They're just normal people.

That's terrible. Similar to this was, like, 09/11. I remember living through nine eleven and being like, great. There's, like, nothing that can shoot down a plane. Like, no.

There's, like, nothing over the whole United States. There's no combat aircraft that are patrolling that can shoot anything down. They're all unarmed, and there basically is nothing even in there at all. So it's like, you just assume that there's, like, radars and planes and missiles and things defending the country. There's nothing defending the country.

There's nothing up there. Like, now there is a little bit more since 09:11, but even then, I think it's mostly just, like, around Washington, DC and New York and stuff.

Aaron

Whatever that Malaysian airliner plane was that we lost. You're like, how is this possible? Right. How are we

Ian

losing airplanes? Satellites and things. Yeah. Like, where did that go? Like yeah.

Yeah. So it's like, yeah. There's drones. Nobody knows what they are. Nobody has any way to track them or figure out if they're real or not real or threat or not threats.

Just like, yeah. It's just stuff floating around maybe if it's even if that's even true or it's just people making TikTok videos. Who knows? But then people like people don't like you had the governor there is like, oh, look, it's really just the constellation Orion, but he thinks they're drones. Like.

Aaron

Well, here's the other thing is they're actually looking like for a period of time, they're shutting. They had to shut down some airports.

Ian

Right. So I'm like military bases.

Aaron

Yeah. The drones are real. We know that much.

Ian

Yes. They are.

Aaron

So we know that there are actually drones because you don't shut down an airport Right. Because of the constellation Orion.

Ian

That's probably true.

Aaron

So that that much we know. Now so that leaves open the question or the, possibility that it's just a bunch of it's just a bunch of New Jersey dorks that are like

Ian

Right. Ah, I

Aaron

was on Reddit or four Chan, and now there's a thing, and so I'm gonna, like, participate in the thing. That is that is possible. Maybe that is the most most likely. I think the second the least likely is nonhuman intelligence. I I think it's the least likely that it's aliens.

None of my deeply held beliefs preclude aliens, but I just don't think this this is not how they would show up in my opinion.

Ian

Yeah. Some of that's aliens. Jersey. Come on.

Aaron

They're not going to New Jersey. Come on. Yeah. You guys know everything, and you chose New Jersey. I hope none of our listeners live in New Jersey because they're catching a lot of stories.

I think besides being besides just being a bunch of rabble rousers, I think the second most likely explanation that I've seen on the Internet is, they're trying to detect some sort of radiation that is only visible at night or more more visible at night. And so these drones are somebody lost a nuke or there's a leak somewhere, and so they're looking for they're looking for something like that. That seems reasonable to me.

Ian

It's not reasonable. Because they have

Aaron

planes totally reasonable. Do that.

Ian

Why there's a plane. They have all kinds of planes to track, like, nukes and stuff like that. I think they have a bunch of drones.

Aaron

No. That seems reasonable to me.

Ian

Nah. That's not reasonable to me. I think more reasonable along those roughly same lines is something like it's just the Russians just fucking with us. And, like, it's like, you know, there's been all these attacks on, industrial facilities in Europe Mhmm. Where, like, you know, they're, you know, starting fires.

You know, miss mysterious fires at, like, arms plants all throughout Europe. And so is this just a, like, hey. Like, we could fly a bunch of drones in your airspace, and one of them could have a nuke on them, or one of them could have poison gas, one of them could have anything

Aaron

on it.

Ian

And we're just looking to do a little bit.

Aaron

Of provocation of a foreign country flying drones over our sovereign airspace. That is incredibly stupid and incredibly dangerous. If you're the Russians, you're like, yeah.

Ian

We're gonna I'm not there

Aaron

already, but That's crazy.

Ian

I don't know. But desperate people do desperate things. Right?

Aaron

Putin is crazy. That is that is

Ian

true. Yeah. I thought you're dealing with, like, a totally rational individual.

Aaron

That is true. He's not a reasonable actor.

Ian

He thought he was gonna drive into another country. He couldn't just drive in, and then he's, like, killed half a million of his own people trying to prove that he was right, and this should be his.

Aaron

He's not the sharpest tool.

Ian

Yeah. So, like, you know, I mean, he's a tool.

Aaron

I don't think he's

Ian

above such things. But,

Aaron

There's another argument that it's a show it's a show of, force from the United States government, but we're not claiming it. We're not showing, like, to the Chinese because they're always doing their big, drone displays as if they're parades of light, but, really, it's a military show of force. I don't think Like, we're not we're not taking credit for it.

Ian

Terrorizing your own people. Yeah.

Aaron

So teach them

Ian

Chinese something.

Aaron

That's what they say. This is ours. That's where instead, we're saying we actually don't know whose it is. Right. That doesn't intimidate anybody.

Ian

No. I don't think anybody's intimidated by it. Like, we can't even control our own airspace. We have no idea what's going on. Like, I don't think that's intimidating.

Yeah. I don't know. It's still most likely just random normal human or normal humans doing, like, for whatever their own either political reasons or just their own wacky reasons, making this, you know, they bought 10 of these huge drones. They're just flying them all around possible. I mean, there's lots of drones out there.

It's like just big industrial drones.

Aaron

Obviously, it's a

Ian

zillion little drones. So

Aaron

I don't know.

Ian

It'd be interesting. Maybe we'll never know. It's like DB Cooper. You know about DB Cooper? Love DB Cooper.

Love DB

Aaron

Cooper. DB Cooper.

Ian

So I love that kind of thing. People don't know. He's, like, this guy who hijacked a plane and stole some money, and they jumped out the plane with a parachute, and they never found him. So, obviously, everybody thinks they saw oh, I saw D. B.

Cooper in this gas station in Oregon or whatever. And, like, so now he probably just died in a tree, but nobody knows for sure. So he's just out there a lot.

Aaron

A few documentaries on DB Cooper.

Ian

Yep. So is it this gonna be that kind of thing? And in twenty years from now in the history channels, they'll be like, oh, the mass drones in New Jersey of 2024, and we don't know what that was, and that's it.

Aaron

I hope so.

Ian

Unfortunately, they make a documentary.

Aaron

I don't think it's aliens, unfortunately. I would love for it to be aliens.

Ian

Yeah. That'd be cool.

Aaron

But it seems

Ian

like people actually know their drones, so the aliens aren't using drones. You know?

Aaron

No. Probably not. Although, you know, what do I know about aliens? Not very much.

Ian

Maybe it is.

Aaron

Maybe it's

Ian

just the leading presence of their, like they send out the drones from the mother ship, and, that'd be something.

Aaron

Maybe maybe they traveled through interstellar space, got here, and they're like, woah. Drones. Those are cool. Let's do that.

Ian

We'll do that. Those. We'll adopt those.

Aaron

Show up with their their drones. Yeah.

Ian

That could be. That could be.

Aaron

Well, dear listener, if you know what the drones are

Ian

Yeah. Let us

Aaron

know because I'm very, very curious. It's

Ian

Give us your drone. Curiosity

Aaron

like l k 99. I wanna believe I wanna believe there's something interesting going on.

Ian

I have to say this has not peaked my interest as much as, like, that did or some of these other things. I I can't get into this because I feel like it's just, like, it's gonna be an unsatisfying conclusion.

Aaron

It's just gonna be hooligans.

Ian

Yeah. It's just gonna be something like whatever. Even if it's the Russians, like, whatever. It's the Russians

Aaron

are flying through. I think you're downplaying what a big deal it would be if it was the Russians.

Ian

All kinds of stuff in the past years. Nothing else has been a big deal. Is this a big deal? I don't know.

Aaron

I feel Yes.

Ian

Because this is Everything's not a big deal. Everything being not a since we've made none of these other provocations a big deal, they're obviously always just gonna keep pushing the boundaries. Right? Like, when will we ever hit something that is a big deal? Right?

Aaron

Flying drones over sovereign airspace is a big deal.

Ian

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. I don't know. China flew that balloon over. That was

Aaron

Did they, though?

Ian

Yeah. They flew and the air force shot it down. Remember that? It was, like, last year.

Aaron

Oh, I remember that. I didn't know we we knew definitively that it was China.

Ian

I think the pretty I think it's definitively Chinese. I don't know if it was definitively, like, is it a spy satellite or is it a Mhmm. Balloon or is it weather or whatever? You know? But it's a thing.

And even this is like, it's been a thing even more you know, they've known that they're flying them over, but they weren't bothering to shoot them down. And then the public found out, and then they were like, okay. We'll shoot it down because, like, whatever

Aaron

people are

Ian

freaking out. But, like, I don't it wasn't even, like, an unknown thing because that's, like, just a big thing you could see on radar for a pie. But

Aaron

Imagine being a fighter pilot that's just, like, chilling and you finally get scrambled to go shoot something out of the sky. How much fun would that be?

Ian

You're probably pretty excited about that.

Aaron

Yeah. That really Even if it is a little balloon, that's still that's pretty awesome. Target. Yeah.

Ian

That's real programming there. Making a missile, shoot down a balloon. That'd be

Aaron

three That would be high stakes stuff. How do you do that?

Ian

How do you do that reliably? What's your test suite like on that? Oh, you know?

Aaron

I don't know, but you're using technology from forty years ago. You are. Because you can't you can't be risking you can't be risking, you know, node modules getting too big or something. You're using tools

Ian

to testing. Like, is there testing frameworks for Fortran or whatever you use to write this stuff or just c? I don't know. I don't know. Don't know how any of that works.

Now there is a whole world where they're using terminal apps. Well, they're trying to get out of the terminal apps. Even there, you know, it's like all the modern airplanes have, like, the big iPad looking things now with, like, charts and graphs and stuff. But those old fighter planes had the more, like, just a green terminal looking screen.

Aaron

One other point I had on terminal apps is grocery store, interfaces are all terminal, like, the people at the cash registers and that kind of stuff.

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. Because they're so freaking fast. That's that's, like, that's one of the big pros of terminals is it's just incredibly fast. And so you ever, like, peek around to whoever's scanning your food and you see the big old goofy screen with just text, it's like

Ian

Yep.

Aaron

Yep. There's a reason.

Ian

It could be. I don't know if they're all terminals. Like, at Target, I think it's like a touch screen thing. But I know what you're saying.

Aaron

Yeah. I know

Ian

what you're saying. Yeah. There was a those terminal, like, interfaces. I mean, that's what I think I told the story on here, but, like, HelpSpot was born from, like, we had to use a help desk app that was only in the mainframe terminal. Yep.

And it couldn't accept email, and you couldn't paste into it. It's like, all these bad terminal things. That was, like, an actual terminal. Obviously, what we're talking about on a Mac is not a true a terminal in the true well, it sort of is when you're connected to a remote machine. I guess you mean you're welcome.

It's sort of a terminal. I don't know how you describe that. You could paste that.

Aaron

I don't know what a terminal is. I don't know what a shell is. I'm just I'm just here to hang. Yeah. It's true.

Ian

And some of this stuff has gotten a little fuzzier, I think, now that there's, like, with the modern state of computers. But, anyway, yeah, terminal app's bad. See that you're just making my point here. Terminal app's bad. But No.

I'm and I I

Aaron

was making the point terminal app's good. But thanks for listening. Y'all tune in next

Ian

next time. Alright. Thanks everybody. Follow us mostly technical.com at mostly tech pod on Twitter, mostly technical.com and blue sky, mostly technical podcast at g mail dot com, which I'm fully caught up on all the emails. So send me a fresh batch of emails that I can ignore for a month, and then I will get back to them all after that.

Aaron

Perfect.

Ian

Later.

Aaron

See you.