00:00SPEAKERBrad, something horrible happened this week.
00:02SPEAKERWait, hang on, hang on, look.
00:04SPEAKERThat might be a little broad, given the current hand wave.
00:07SPEAKERLet's take a step back here.
00:08SPEAKERI think maybe more than one something, but what do you have going on?
00:12SPEAKERI felt a deep personal loss this week.
00:14SPEAKEROkay, well, still with you there, but go on.
00:18SPEAKERLook, when we were in Canada, I brought back a bunch of Canadian mini eggs,
00:20SPEAKERand I've eaten them all now.
00:22SPEAKEROh no, what kind of eggs are we talking about?
00:24SPEAKERMini eggs.
00:25SPEAKERPrice of eggs, here we go, topical folks.
00:27SPEAKEROh no, look, the secret is you gotta be up at one o'clock in the morning,
00:31SPEAKERthen you order Amazon delivery groceries, and they have them pretty much every day.
00:35SPEAKERIs it getting worse?
00:36SPEAKERIt seems like it's a little bit better now, I don't know.
00:39SPEAKERI saw like a random blue sky post from somebody I don't know yesterday,
00:42SPEAKERsaying the Costco had no eggs when they went, which seems impossible.
00:46SPEAKERLike I was in the grocery store last night,
00:48SPEAKERand the egg situation at seven o'clock at night was thin.
00:51SPEAKEROkay.
00:53SPEAKERLike we got an 18 pack of eggs last time, like a week and a half ago,
00:56SPEAKERand we're still working on those.
00:58SPEAKERSo I don't know what today's egg situation is, but mini eggs.
01:04SPEAKERYes, Canadian candy eggs.
01:06SPEAKERCadbury's mini eggs.
01:08SPEAKERPlentiful.
01:09SPEAKERI didn't realize it.
01:10SPEAKERI mean, people have always said this.
01:12SPEAKEROur Canadian listeners have always said,
01:13SPEAKERwhenever I talk about how much I love mini eggs,
01:15SPEAKERwhich even the American version got to your holiday candy as far as I'm concerned,
01:20SPEAKERit's like a top three for me probably.
01:22SPEAKERWait, hang on, I've got multiple questions here.
01:24SPEAKERFirst of all, is Cadbury a Canadian company?
01:26SPEAKERNo, Cadbury is a British company probably, but they have different
01:33SPEAKERformulas in the Commonwealth that they give to us plebes.
01:37SPEAKERYeah, I was going to say it's of the Commonwealth at least.
01:41SPEAKERI'm sure that the Brits have a different standard
01:43SPEAKERfor how much cocoa has to go in the chocolate to call it chocolate.
01:46SPEAKERWhereas in America, it's like just put some mouse droppings
01:49SPEAKERand a little bit of sealing wax and then some artificial chocolate flavoring, right?
01:54SPEAKERIt's roach droppings, mouse hairs, mouse fur.
01:57SPEAKERSorry, sorry.
01:58SPEAKERYeah, the mouse hair is what gives it the flavor.
02:00SPEAKERThat's how you know it's real.
02:01SPEAKERYes, my other question was what kind of egg?
02:03SPEAKERWe're talking about the classic Cadbury cream egg?
02:06SPEAKERNo, fuck those.
02:06SPEAKERThose are terrible.
02:07SPEAKEROh, really?
02:08SPEAKERThose are a crime.
02:08SPEAKERYeah, those are gross.
02:10SPEAKERI'm kind of with you, but it really pains me to say that
02:13SPEAKERbecause they were a staple of my channel.
02:15SPEAKERLike I always got a couple of cream eggs every Easter as a kid.
02:18SPEAKERYeah, we always got them too.
02:19SPEAKERAnd then sometime between the Easter and like the first of May,
02:23SPEAKERmy mom would throw them out because nobody ever ate them because they're gross.
02:26SPEAKERI won't besmirch the name of the cream egg.
02:28SPEAKERI always ate them, but like maybe not my favorite.
02:30SPEAKERBut what kind of egg are we talking here?
02:33SPEAKERLook, the secret, the best way to eat the cream egg is to crack the top
02:35SPEAKERlike you would have soft-boiled and then just scoop all the gunk out and eat the chocolate.
02:39SPEAKERYeah, okay.
02:41SPEAKERHave you never had a mini egg?
02:42SPEAKERNot sure.
02:43SPEAKERA mini egg is like a malted chocolate ball with like a kind of malted-y shell.
02:50SPEAKERIt's really, it's Cadbury's chocolate ball with a malted candy shell on the outside.
02:56SPEAKEROh, it's a giant M&M.
02:57SPEAKERIt is not a giant M&M.
02:58SPEAKERThat's what it kind of sure looks like, a candy shell with chocolate inside.
03:02SPEAKERIf a hot dog is a taco, yes, it's a giant M&M.
03:05SPEAKERIf you're talking about candy, it is a completely different flavor than an M&M.
03:11SPEAKERWe are reaching levels of food taxonomy here that I don't think we're qualified to address.
03:15SPEAKERLook, you started this.
03:16SPEAKERI was just thinking about, I was looking here.
03:18SPEAKERI had ate a little pack of Smarties because we've gone through all of the Canadian candy.
03:23SPEAKERThis is Canadian M&M's.
03:25SPEAKERAnd they're way better than American M&M's.
03:27SPEAKEROh wait, Smarties are chocolate?
03:29SPEAKERThey're chocolate there.
03:30SPEAKERIt's not the little chalk and acid candies that we get here.
03:33SPEAKERAre those also Smarties?
03:35SPEAKERThose are also Smarties.
03:36SPEAKERThese are made by Nestle, the people who kill babies with bad formula.
03:39SPEAKERSo if you're choosing sides on the chocolate wars, it's Cadbury's all the way.
03:45SPEAKERI'm sure they've done some crimes too.
03:46SPEAKERMaybe don't, maybe this is a bold statement here.
03:49SPEAKERMaybe don't side with the baby killers.
03:51SPEAKERYeah, no, Nestle's, I got problems with Nestle.
03:53SPEAKERBut, but okay.
03:54SPEAKERSo the Canadian mini eggs though, like the American ones are pretty good size.
03:58SPEAKERThey're like, they're like bigger than M&M and M&M.
04:00SPEAKERThey're like maybe the size of a peanut or even an almond M&M.
04:03SPEAKERThey're pretty big.
04:04SPEAKERSince I have to put everything in M&M terms for you.
04:07SPEAKERIt's also really hard to say M&M over and over again.
04:10SPEAKERIt turns out the Canadian mini eggs are actually smaller than the US mini eggs.
04:15SPEAKERAnd it means that the ratio of the shell to chocolate is better.
04:18SPEAKERAnd also the chocolate is better.
04:20SPEAKERSo it was a, it's a transformative experience.
04:23SPEAKERLike a, like a US mini egg.
04:25SPEAKERYou put one in your mouth and you let it kind of melt there for a little bit.
04:27SPEAKERA Canadian mini egg, you can load it up like a chipmunk and just have like 15 in there.
04:32SPEAKERAnd then it's just like a malted explosion in your mouth.
04:34SPEAKERIt's like chocolate chaw.
04:36SPEAKERYeah, basically.
04:37SPEAKERYeah.
04:38SPEAKERIt's like, yeah.
04:40SPEAKERDid you know that they don't make big league two anymore?
04:42SPEAKERNo.
04:42SPEAKERWhat?
04:43SPEAKERYeah, it turns out, well, it turns out encouraging the children to use chewing
04:47SPEAKERtobacco through a gum product that looks like chewing tobacco is frowned upon in the modern
04:51SPEAKERcontext.
04:51SPEAKEROh, well, I mean, it used to be, but don't worry.
04:53SPEAKERI'm sure that'll get deregulated soon enough.
04:55SPEAKERWell, fair.
04:56SPEAKERLet's bring it back.
04:58SPEAKERIt's a specialty thing.
04:59SPEAKERNow you have to get it from, from like novelty candy places.
05:02SPEAKERNow they don't just sell it at the grocery store anymore.
05:04SPEAKERWell, as long as they don't take candy cigarettes from us.
05:07SPEAKERBut okay.
05:08SPEAKERThe TLDR though, I'm out of the mini eggs, the Canadian mini eggs.
05:12SPEAKERAll I have left is a Cadbury's bar that has some mini eggs embedded into it.
05:17SPEAKERYou're going to dig the mini eggs out so you can continue enjoying them in their proper
05:20SPEAKERformat?
05:21SPEAKERSo that's the question is I think I have to eat the chocolate in small enough pieces that
05:25SPEAKERI like let the chocolate melt and then I get the mini egg melting and then I get more chocolate
05:29SPEAKERmelting and it's like, you know, it's reaches Wonka like levels of, of delection.
05:34SPEAKERWould you be pleased to know?
05:36SPEAKERYes.
05:36SPEAKERLet me click through here.
05:37SPEAKEROh, it's not letting me load the oh no.
05:39SPEAKEROh no.
05:40SPEAKERWhat's wrong?
05:41SPEAKERI ended up on candy fun house.com.
05:43SPEAKERAh, the Canadian fun house of candy.
05:45SPEAKERYeah.
05:46SPEAKERWho sells who sells Cadbury mini eggs.
05:49SPEAKEROoh.
05:50SPEAKERBut every time I tried to load the Cadbury mini egg page on candy fun house.com it shunts
05:55SPEAKERme to the U S site.
05:56SPEAKERSo I was going to offer you, I was going to offer you a reprieve, but I don't think that
06:01SPEAKERI don't think this website is going to allow it.
06:02SPEAKERYou're just gonna have to smuggle them over the border.
06:04SPEAKERThat'll go well.
06:05SPEAKERI look, I just, I just Googled how to get Canadian Cadbury's mini eggs in the United
06:09SPEAKERStates and somebody pointed me to these things, a seasonal Cadbury's product available on
06:14SPEAKERHershey land.com called Cadbury's mini snowballs, which looked like mini eggs, but have a bunny
06:21SPEAKERand a Christmas sweater on the, on the cover instead of a bunny with a Easter sweater on
06:26SPEAKERthe cover.
06:26SPEAKERLook like kind of the same.
06:28SPEAKERWell, there you go.
06:28SPEAKERYeah.
06:29SPEAKERThere you go.
06:29SPEAKERMini snowballs.
06:30SPEAKERThat's what I got to get.
06:39SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod.
07:01SPEAKERI'm Will.
07:02SPEAKERI'm Brad.
07:03SPEAKERAnd now I want a mini egg.
07:04SPEAKERWe don't have any mini egg.
07:05SPEAKERIt's too early.
07:05SPEAKERIt's way too early.
07:06SPEAKERAnd this is, this is an illegal time to be eating candy.
07:09SPEAKERThis is like pre breakfast phase of the day.
07:12SPEAKEROh, I was going to say it's today's Valentine's day.
07:14SPEAKERSo we can't talk about Easter candy yet because it's Valentine's day when we're recording
07:17SPEAKERthis, but when it goes up totally fair game two days after probably target has mayday
07:23SPEAKERcelebration stuff up.
07:24SPEAKERNow they've just skipped Easter at this point.
07:26SPEAKERDo you feel like the early well, okay, but both of the late in the year and then the
07:31SPEAKERfall early in the subsequent year holidays have all kind of like blended together a little
07:34SPEAKERbit.
07:35SPEAKERLike there are still Christmas trees up in my neighborhood.
07:37SPEAKERHave we not talked about the Halloween to Easter death spiral?
07:40SPEAKERIt's like, it's like the unhealthy half of the year.
07:42SPEAKERYeah.
07:42SPEAKERWell, I mean, it's turning into like a six month thing now because now I'm hearing about
07:46SPEAKERpeople leaving their tree up and just redecorating it for Valentine's day and then Easter.
07:50SPEAKERSo my daughter, we did that in 2020.
07:52SPEAKERDid you do that?
07:53SPEAKER2021 when we were all really depressed.
07:55SPEAKERThat's probably what it was.
07:56SPEAKERWell, a lot of people were probably still feeling similar.
07:59SPEAKERSo that would explain the, the trees that I'm still seeing.
08:03SPEAKERWell, and, and like we usually leave the Christmas tree up until my daughter's birthday is in
08:06SPEAKERthe middle of January.
08:07SPEAKERSo we take the decorations down, write it for Christmas, and then it becomes a birthday
08:11SPEAKERtree because, you know, birthday trees are fun, right?
08:15SPEAKERYeah, true.
08:15SPEAKERI don't know.
08:16SPEAKERYeah.
08:18SPEAKERBut yeah, I do feel like it's all blending together.
08:20SPEAKERI feel like this is target.
08:21SPEAKERThis is like, this is the store's fault because I guarantee you, I guarantee you if I go to
08:26SPEAKERtarget tomorrow and I'm like, I want to get some St Patrick's day crap, they'll be like,
08:29SPEAKERoh man, St Patrick's day that was gone on January.
08:31SPEAKERThat was gone on MLK day.
08:33SPEAKERAnd, and like you just, yeah, I don't know.
08:36SPEAKERYeah, it's a problem, man.
08:38SPEAKERLess is more sometimes I think on things like that.
08:41SPEAKERYeah, less is more.
08:42SPEAKERSometimes less is better than having more.
08:44SPEAKERIt turns out like I, I think I zeroed in exactly the optimal amount of time to have the Christmas
08:49SPEAKERdecorations up this past year and it's six weeks.
08:52SPEAKERSo you started at Thanksgiving and went to like two weeks after Christmas?
08:55SPEAKERNo, it actually, part of this was the way the holiday laid this year on the calendar
09:00SPEAKERwith the way that like the day, the day we all, everybody went back to work was actually
09:04SPEAKERlike right after the 12 days of Christmas, actually like took the decorations down right
09:08SPEAKERat the end of that period.
09:09SPEAKERBut yes, it was roughly right before Thanksgiving to like January 5th ish, 6th, something like
09:16SPEAKERthat.
09:16SPEAKERAnd it felt, that felt right.
09:18SPEAKERSix weeks out of 52 felt like a good, a good percentage of the year, but not too much.
09:23SPEAKERYeah.
09:24SPEAKERYou can't have too much.
09:25SPEAKERSo I'm going to say like 2021, we did, we did some weird stuff.
09:29SPEAKERLike we, I don't know, I don't know how to show you this, but we, so my daughter's elementary
09:35SPEAKERschool, they did this oceans week thing every week, every, every fall, every spring where
09:39SPEAKERthey, like they did a, they did a deep school-wide curriculum on one biome in the ocean.
09:47SPEAKERSo it was like one year it was the coral reefs, one year it's the deep, deep ocean, one year
09:50SPEAKERit's like whales or whatever.
09:52SPEAKERAnd each year they would decorate the hallways of the school to look like that biome.
09:59SPEAKERSo the year that the year that we were stuck at home, it was like, it was like kelp forests
10:05SPEAKERand stuff like that.
10:06SPEAKERSo we just decorated the hallway of the house to look like there were, we hung jellyfish
10:09SPEAKERfrom the ceiling and had kelp dangling everywhere.
10:12SPEAKERAnd it was like, it was super cool.
10:14SPEAKERCause like you walk in, like there were like, there was mood lighting.
10:16SPEAKERThere were little lamps that turned on at night.
10:18SPEAKERAnd like when you came into the hallway, it was like, Oh, this is a special place.
10:22SPEAKERThis is nice.
10:23SPEAKERYeah.
10:23SPEAKERBut it can't be special all the time or it stops being special.
10:25SPEAKERThat's the problem.
10:26SPEAKERSo you have to, you have to moderate, that's the whole thing.
10:29SPEAKERYou're saying austerity is the, is the watch word going forward.
10:32SPEAKERYes, to sure.
10:33SPEAKERI think that's something everybody's going to have to get used to.
10:36SPEAKERYeah.
10:36SPEAKERWe, we got in the habit of leaving ourselves notes in the Christmas decorations.
10:39SPEAKERIt was mostly notes about like, this string has eight lights out or, you know, this is
10:43SPEAKERthe one that we bought in 2019.
10:46SPEAKERThis one goes on this lamp or whatever.
10:49SPEAKERBut at some point we started recording when the decorations were coming down every year.
10:52SPEAKERAnd I think it was two or maybe three years ago, we left them up until January 30th.
10:57SPEAKERWhich it was too much, man.
10:59SPEAKERWell, I love Christmas decorations more than anybody, but it was just too much.
11:03SPEAKERI was going to say the, the, the thing I hit there that I love is that you made notes to
11:09SPEAKERfuture you because we started doing that for Thanksgivings years ago.
11:12SPEAKERLike Gina started writing down like recipes that we used and timing and all that stuff.
11:18SPEAKERSo we know like each year when we get to, cause you make Thanksgiving once, maybe twice
11:22SPEAKERa year, if you do Christmas too.
11:24SPEAKERAnd by the time the next November rolls around, we've completely forgotten what we fucked
11:29SPEAKERup on the year before and having the book so we can go back and check and see like what
11:34SPEAKERtime the Turkey, how big the Turkey was, what time it went in and all that stuff means that
11:38SPEAKERit's a well-oiled machine by this point.
11:40SPEAKERYeah.
11:41SPEAKERAnd everybody knows that dealing with faulty Christmas lights or holiday lights is a
11:46SPEAKERwaking nightmare.
11:47SPEAKERYeah.
11:47SPEAKERSo just having, having some annotations for what's what and what not to waste your time
11:51SPEAKERon is crucial.
11:52SPEAKERWell, we, yeah, yeah, exactly.
11:55SPEAKERI mean, I, I love that.
11:56SPEAKERI love just taking notes about things.
11:58SPEAKERIt turns out really, really.
12:00SPEAKERYeah.
12:00SPEAKERWhat might you do with those notes once you've taken them?
12:03SPEAKERWell, okay.
12:05SPEAKERSo I'm going to describe a feeling that I've had and everybody I've described this to has
12:10SPEAKERnodded and said, Oh my God, I feel that too.
12:12SPEAKERSo no pressure, I guess, leading into that, but I have over the last, I don't know, five
12:18SPEAKERor 10 years, probably let's say five, maybe eight, I've developed a kind of deep set of
12:24SPEAKERdissatisfaction with the way computers and phones are working.
12:29SPEAKERI feel like there's less, I'm getting less value.
12:35SPEAKERLike I, I, I, my expectation from growing up in the nineties and, and coming online in
12:41SPEAKERthe early two thousands and 2010s is that if I put some time into learning how to use
12:47SPEAKERa computer, it's going to make my life better in some important way.
12:49SPEAKERAnd that could be something, something like, Oh, Hey, I have a tool that lets me search
12:54SPEAKERthe entirety of the world's knowledge, or it could be it could be I, you know, I can
13:02SPEAKERget books, I can buy books for less money than I used to pay to buy books or without
13:08SPEAKERhaving to drive to the library across town or whatever.
13:10SPEAKERThat was the dream.
13:12SPEAKERYeah.
13:12SPEAKEREarly on that, that was the dream of personal computing and the information superhighway.
13:16SPEAKERHey, it's going to improve society and not destroy it.
13:19SPEAKERI mean, and, and just to be clear, like right now I log into when I want to check out a
13:23SPEAKERbook from the library, I log into Libby.
13:25SPEAKERI searched for the book.
13:26SPEAKERI either hit it and it's in my Kindle in like two minutes or I place a hold on it.
13:30SPEAKERAnd like that part, that stuff's working really well.
13:32SPEAKERSome of that feels really good still.
13:34SPEAKERBut there's a larger kind of malaise creeping over a lot of the tech ecosystem where, and
13:43SPEAKERI think, I mean, Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron have talked about this a lot as, and shitification,
13:48SPEAKERbut I think it's a little different.
13:49SPEAKERIt's a little more insidious than that.
13:51SPEAKERCause it's the basic idea that you reach a point where user growth has slowed for a lot
13:58SPEAKERof these companies.
13:59SPEAKERAnd so they've been able to make, they take less from us because they're making money
14:04SPEAKERon each new user that they bring into the system.
14:06SPEAKERAnd as that user growth slows, they're like, oh shit, our shareholders want us to keep
14:10SPEAKERmaking more money every year.
14:12SPEAKERAnd so they have to do things with the people that are there more to squeeze more money
14:16SPEAKERfrom them.
14:16SPEAKERAnd the upshot is that that often ends up being time.
14:20SPEAKERSo they build systems that make everything take longer, or they just don't improve the
14:26SPEAKERstuff that takes a long time or things that aren't profitable.
14:29SPEAKERJust don't see any love at all.
14:31SPEAKERLike email.
14:32SPEAKERAnd we'll talk about email on that.
14:36SPEAKERSo I've been looking at this stuff for a while and it's bummed me out and it's made
14:39SPEAKERme feel bad about computers.
14:40SPEAKERAnd I don't like that.
14:41SPEAKERIt's probably come through in the podcast a little bit.
14:43SPEAKERBut then I started looking and I was like, oh, there's stuff we can do to make this
14:46SPEAKERbetter.
14:46SPEAKERAnd first off, some of it's like dark patterns, right?
14:49SPEAKERLike if you know about dark patterns and you're aware of dark patterns, then the mere
14:53SPEAKERknowledge of the existence that an endlessly scrolling feed makes your brain feel good
14:58SPEAKERand then also bad and then a little bit less good and then more bad and then a little
15:02SPEAKERbit less good than that, that knowledge helps break that cycle.
15:09SPEAKERHelps you helps your brain recognize that you're being fucked with by the computer.
15:13SPEAKERSure.
15:13SPEAKERAnd I'll jump in here real quick.
15:15SPEAKERWe did an episode about dark patterns ages ago.
15:18SPEAKERI'll see if I can dig that up and put it in the show notes.
15:21SPEAKERYeah.
15:22SPEAKERAnd we talked about mostly in the context of games and free to play stuff, but it's
15:26SPEAKERAnd social media.
15:27SPEAKEREven in the time since we did that episode, like a year and a half ago, maybe two years
15:32SPEAKERago, it's gotten worse still.
15:36SPEAKERSo the other thing is that there's a lot of stuff you can do right now on top of
15:40SPEAKERknowledge that you can do to make stuff better.
15:42SPEAKERLike, for example, my favorite example of this is somebody in Microsoft was told that
15:47SPEAKERthey had to get more traffic search traffic to Bing right years ago.
15:51SPEAKERAnd so their solution was what if instead of just when somebody types a search into
15:56SPEAKERthe start menu on Windows, instead of searching the computer for applications, which
16:03SPEAKERis what they've always used that search window for, what if they just searched Bing
16:09SPEAKERfirst and it generated a couple of search queries there every time somebody searches
16:12SPEAKERfor word on their computer?
16:14SPEAKERBecause I'm going to go and tell you when I press the Windows key and I type word, the
16:17SPEAKERthing I want to do is open up an internet, sorry, an edge window that has a first link
16:22SPEAKERto the Microsoft Word homepage on Microsoft's website.
16:25SPEAKERIt's definitely not that I want to open my fucking word processor.
16:28SPEAKERNot to derail this, but did you almost just say Internet Explorer?
16:30SPEAKERI did almost say Internet Explorer.
16:32SPEAKERI love that.
16:33SPEAKERWell, like edge is a perfect example.
16:35SPEAKERThey launched edge.
16:35SPEAKERIt was great for like a year and then they shitted it right up again.
16:39SPEAKERIt's just as bad as it ever was.
16:41SPEAKERI kind of was on the verge of I was I was moving toward maybe using edge as my main
16:46SPEAKERbrowser and then God, it's gotten intolerable since then.
16:50SPEAKERSo and it's all and then there's there's another layer of this.
16:53SPEAKERSo you can turn that off that Bing thing.
16:56SPEAKERThey don't put a button in the menu and they don't make it obvious how to do it.
16:58SPEAKERYou have to turn a registry key on.
17:00SPEAKERYeah.
17:00SPEAKERBut once you do that, it works just like the start menu did on Windows seven a hundred
17:04SPEAKERyears ago.
17:05SPEAKERAnd you type word and it just opens word and there's no shenanigans.
17:08SPEAKERSo there's ways you can fight this, like even living within Windows or Mac OS or whatever.
17:13SPEAKERAnd and it's it's a lot of it is you're constantly bombarded.
17:19SPEAKERUsed to be that when you bought a new laptop, the laptop vendor would put like a Norton
17:24SPEAKERoffer and a McAfee offer and a Kaspersky offer and a bunch of other crap that you probably
17:30SPEAKERdidn't need.
17:31SPEAKERAnd they were all designed to generate forty dollars a year for those companies and take
17:35SPEAKER10 percent of that for the laptop vendor so that they could sell their laptops for a little
17:39SPEAKERbit cheaper than everybody else.
17:40SPEAKERI'm noticing a theme here.
17:42SPEAKERYeah, we're being marketed to a real high level.
17:44SPEAKEREverybody's just trying to goose their numbers through whatever dubious means necessary,
17:48SPEAKERright?
17:48SPEAKERWell, last night I was setting up a laptop that I'm testing for PC World and I pay for
17:54SPEAKERoffice live three, whatever Microsoft calls their office subscription.
17:57SPEAKERNow, I think it's called Microsoft 365, right?
18:00SPEAKERI literally pay.
18:01SPEAKERI give them money for that every single year.
18:04SPEAKERAnd there's still a click through on this first run set up for Windows after it knows
18:09SPEAKERwho I am and knows that I'm logged in and knows that I have this access.
18:12SPEAKERIt's like, hey, have you considered paying for Microsoft 365?
18:16SPEAKEROh, you already do.
18:17SPEAKERWe notice that.
18:18SPEAKERThank you.
18:18SPEAKERYou just press next.
18:19SPEAKERYou don't like why show me that.
18:20SPEAKERWhy do I see that now?
18:22SPEAKERAnd everybody used to be that Apple didn't do this.
18:24SPEAKERAnd now Apple does it.
18:25SPEAKERGoogle does it.
18:26SPEAKEREverybody, everybody's doing trying to get more out of you.
18:31SPEAKERIt's exhausting and it's making computers worse.
18:35SPEAKERSo I'm doing a newsletter.
18:37SPEAKEROkay, now we come to it.
18:40SPEAKERYeah, this is the thing.
18:41SPEAKERI was like, what's the format to talk about this?
18:43SPEAKERBecause I don't want to do a full ass website because it's not, I don't have that kind of
18:46SPEAKERtime to devote to this.
18:48SPEAKERYeah.
18:48SPEAKERAnd nobody makes websites anymore.
18:50SPEAKERNobody makes websites anymore.
18:51SPEAKERInstead of having like, look, I put myself in a weird situation where instead of having
18:55SPEAKERone job that I do every day, like a normal human being, I have like five different jobs
19:00SPEAKERand I do them at different chunks of times all through the day.
19:02SPEAKERSo I need something I can do like in a day or two a week.
19:05SPEAKERRight.
19:08SPEAKERI think it's a really interesting topic because like a lot of people are talking about how
19:11SPEAKERbad this is, but not really.
19:12SPEAKERA lot of people are talking about how to actually address the problem.
19:16SPEAKERAnd I expect it to range from one of the posts that's up now is here's some, here's like
19:22SPEAKERa few easy things you can do in windows to make it much more tolerable.
19:25SPEAKERAnd it's stuff like turn off the fucking widgets on the lock screen because they don't add
19:30SPEAKERany value at all.
19:32SPEAKERThey're just there crapping up your computer.
19:34SPEAKERAnd it's just a way to trick you into clicking into something that drives you to MSN, which
19:38SPEAKERnobody should go to MSN ever.
19:40SPEAKERRight.
19:40SPEAKERLike, sorry, MSN.
19:41SPEAKERI know, I apologize if you work at MSN and it's putting food on your table, but if you're
19:47SPEAKERlistening to this podcast, don't go to MSN for God's sake.
19:50SPEAKERI'm not sure if I even realized MSN still exists.
19:52SPEAKERI kind of assumed it had all been subsumed into MSNBC at this point.
19:56SPEAKERLook, there's a whole nasty AOL still, the AOL homepage still has enormous amounts of
20:02SPEAKERtraffic in 2025.
20:03SPEAKERYeah, that makes sense.
20:04SPEAKERIt's like going back in time.
20:05SPEAKERNothing, nothing ever goes away when it's the size of MSN or the AOL homepage.
20:11SPEAKERThere's something, there's something kind of nostalgic about going to msn.com though.
20:14SPEAKERIt feels very, I don't know, let's say windows 98 era.
20:18SPEAKERMaybe, maybe.
20:20SPEAKERThat's when they started it.
20:21SPEAKERYeah, that seems right.
20:24SPEAKERBut, but yeah, so the three or four different kinds of posts early on for the, for the newsletter,
20:29SPEAKERone is like, Hey, here's, here's a problem that you should know about.
20:32SPEAKERAnd, and often just by knowing about it, like dark patterns, it'll, it'll help you solve
20:37SPEAKERyour problem.
20:38SPEAKERThe other one is here's some stuff that you can do right now.
20:40SPEAKERAnd then there's a bunch of people that are actually working on this and making thoughtful
20:43SPEAKERsolutions to these problems and that, that ranges from like people building better mail
20:49SPEAKERclients and better mail services.
20:51SPEAKERSo I asked about this on, on Blue Sky the other day and got a bunch of really interesting
20:57SPEAKERresponses.
20:58SPEAKERAnd a lot of people were recommending fast mail as a, as a, Hey, these people are doing
21:02SPEAKERthoughtful things to help you manage the email flood better, which I thought was cool.
21:07SPEAKERSo I'll do it.
21:08SPEAKERI'll do a newsletter about that.
21:09SPEAKERAnd then the last one is, is big, big, the big things, right?
21:13SPEAKERLike when I, when I pitched this to you, you were like, I hope to God, what did you say?
21:18SPEAKERI hope, I expect that there's going to be desktop Linux and desktop Linux episode in
21:22SPEAKERthe future.
21:22SPEAKERI expect a, I expect a post a post.
21:25SPEAKERI mean, we're here to talk about the newsletter, the amounts of the platform.
21:28SPEAKERWhat, what is, what is an individual newsletter?
21:30SPEAKERIs it still just a single unit of a news post?
21:34SPEAKERI'd call it a post.
21:35SPEAKERThat's nice.
21:35SPEAKERI feel like post is just becoming the term for everything, right?
21:38SPEAKERAll a newsletter is, is a blog with, with, I mean, cause there's, there, they're essentially
21:42SPEAKERblogs that send it, send the whole blog post out in an, in an email when you, when you
21:46SPEAKERhit the button, it's just, it's a blog with monetization and some better distribution
21:50SPEAKERthan going to a.com.
21:52SPEAKERYeah.
21:52SPEAKERI think that's a fair way to put it.
21:54SPEAKERSo so that's coming.
21:56SPEAKERIt'll be out.
21:57SPEAKERI hope by the time you listen to this, it's next.content.town.
22:01SPEAKERI'd call it if you all subscribe.
22:02SPEAKERIt's called what's next.
22:04SPEAKEROkay.
22:04SPEAKERCause it's a, I'm a deeply disaffected with the current state of computers.
22:08SPEAKERAnd we got to figure out what's next.
22:09SPEAKERThat also that's that there's a, there's a ring of nostalgic optimism to that term or
22:14SPEAKERthat, that title as well.
22:15SPEAKERWhat's next?
22:16SPEAKERKind of sounds like some late nineties again, information super highway, like, like the
22:21SPEAKERinternet's going to be a net positive for humanity.
22:25SPEAKERWhat was a Bill Gates's book was the road ahead.
22:27SPEAKERNevermind about, yes.
22:29SPEAKERI don't know.
22:29SPEAKERI don't know if Gates is somebody we want to prop up as a, as a vanguard of kind of utopian
22:36SPEAKERpositive social change.
22:37SPEAKERI mean, you know, a lot of the people that built this, the internet, as it is now, the
22:43SPEAKERearly days of it, we're fine up until a point, right?
22:47SPEAKERYeah.
22:47SPEAKERAnd, and I think that's the, that's the thing to remember.
22:50SPEAKERSo, so yeah, that's, it's next.content.town.
22:53SPEAKERWe'll put a link in the show notes.
22:54SPEAKERI appreciate it.
22:56SPEAKERIt's, it's all free right now.
22:57SPEAKERI'm not, I'm not, I haven't flipped on any of that monetization stuff.
23:00SPEAKERWe'll talk about why in a minute, but I want to see if there's, if people are interested
23:03SPEAKERin this kind of, cause I don't want to accidentally make another, another job for myself that
23:08SPEAKERdoesn't pay well.
23:09SPEAKERSure.
23:10SPEAKERYeah.
23:10SPEAKERYou know, that's, I mean, that's kind of what we're here to talk about, right.
23:12SPEAKERIs just kind of your launch strategy, like what the publishing options are and stuff
23:15SPEAKERlike that.
23:16SPEAKERBut I guess that's like, maybe the top line is like, how do you, how do you get this off
23:20SPEAKERthe ground and how much do you commit to it?
23:22SPEAKERI hadn't even considered that you wouldn't monetize it right out of the gate, but like
23:25SPEAKERyou probably do want to organically build an audience before you really commit yourself
23:30SPEAKERto this thing.
23:31SPEAKERYeah. Cause like the, the worst case scenario for this, now I've done this multiple times
23:36SPEAKERin the past and kind of this podcast is in the same boat.
23:38SPEAKERLike I, I do the, we do the podcast cause we like doing the podcast, but it's not, it
23:42SPEAKERmakes, it makes money to make it worth doing, but it's not like quit your job money, right?
23:47SPEAKERIt's it's, Oh, Hey, I can go on a nice vacation and have some savings at the end of the year
23:51SPEAKERmoney.
23:53SPEAKERThe, so I don't want to get in a situation where there's like, where it's making like
23:57SPEAKER$5,000 a month and taking three days a week. Cause then I would be bankrupt in like a month
24:04SPEAKERand that would be bad two months and it would be bad.
24:07SPEAKERThe the, so, so launching free, we'll flip on monetization shortly after and see, I'll
24:14SPEAKERflip on monetization, see what it is. I've been working on this for a couple of months,
24:17SPEAKERthree months at this point since like November, December, what was it? February? Four months,
24:21SPEAKERI guess.
24:22SPEAKERI think it's February.
24:25SPEAKERAnd I did a lot of, the first thing I did was look at it at how people make money on
24:29SPEAKERnewsletters. Like that was, that was where I began. I looked at a bunch of newsletters
24:32SPEAKERthat are both in this, in this kind of area in the tech space. And then I also looked
24:38SPEAKERat people who are doing more lifestyle-y and more like, like stuff that's written for
24:44SPEAKERnormies. I also looked at some business stuff. Cause I think, I think a chunk of this is
24:48SPEAKERprobably for business folks, but I don't, I don't know for sure. And I did a couple
24:54SPEAKERof, I did a couple of other newsletter concepts that I ended up ditching. Like one, the one
24:59SPEAKERthat I like, but I don't think there's enough people there to be worth doing was like, hey,
25:05SPEAKERif you're, if you work on a marketing team or a team that needs to produce a lot of video,
25:10SPEAKERhow can you use OBS and live mixing tools to do that? And yeah, people, people, people
25:17SPEAKERresponded really positively to that. But I think in order, I figured, I assumed that
25:21SPEAKERthe audience size was relatively small and I had to charge like 50 bucks a month for
25:25SPEAKERit to be worthwhile. Right. Cause that audience is constrained by the number of people doing
25:28SPEAKERthat kind of work, which necessarily is fairly small. And also it had to overlap with the
25:33SPEAKERtype of like OBS, like learning how to use OBS is great if you make video games or websites
25:39SPEAKERor things that you do on a computer. But if you're doing like makeup tutorials, then OBS
25:44SPEAKERis less valuable to you probably. Anyway. So I, I prototyped a bunch of different ideas
25:49SPEAKERand sent them around to people and got feedback from readers and, and all that stuff. And
25:54SPEAKERwhile I was doing that, I was also trying out different platforms. So sub stack is the,
26:00SPEAKERthe kind of the one everybody knows in this space, I think, because it's been around for
26:03SPEAKERa long time and they've realized that people would pay money for newsletters, like three,
26:08SPEAKERthree, five bucks a month for a newsletter subscription. They're post Patreon. So they've
26:14SPEAKERbeen around for a long time, but Patreon is older. Patreon's kind of the, the, the grandfather
26:19SPEAKERin this space, I guess. Probably 15 years old now, something like that.
26:23SPEAKERPatreon started just after Kickstarter. So probably, yeah, 14, 13, 14, 15 years old.
26:29SPEAKERThe problem with sub stack frankly, is that it's filled with Nazis and they don't seem
26:33SPEAKERto think that's a problem. Oh, you're talking, are you talking about that run the company
26:37SPEAKERor that publish on the platform? They publish on the platform and the people who run the
26:40SPEAKERcompany don't, don't view that as a, they feel that as a free speech issue, not an issue.
26:44SPEAKERI see.
26:45SPEAKERSo they're, you know, I'm, I don't like Nazis and I don't want to associate myself with
26:52SPEAKERNazis or white supremacist or they're assorted ilk and kin. So I didn't even really look
26:56SPEAKERat sub stack, but even if I did, and even if I didn't have a problem with Nazis, they
27:01SPEAKERtake a really enormous percentage of your revenue.
27:04SPEAKERThat was my assumption because they are the 800 pound gorilla space that they probably
27:09SPEAKERcommand a premium.
27:10SPEAKERAnd, and they also have a network effect. So the network effect in this case means like
27:17SPEAKERif you are a reader, if you, if you are a publisher on their platform, then they are
27:23SPEAKERgood at putting your newsletter in front of other people's newsletters that are similar,
27:27SPEAKERwhich is why they have a Nazi problem. Right. And, and that means, and they have a good,
27:33SPEAKERa fairly high percentage of uptick of users transitioning from subscribing to one newsletter
27:40SPEAKERto newsletters that are similar or adjacent to each other or something.
27:43SPEAKERYeah. That just seems like yet another example of a company like this prioritizing engagement
27:48SPEAKERabove all else or growth above all else, you know, cause it's the same thing on YouTube
27:51SPEAKERor Facebook or whatever, you know, like we, we know from social science very explicitly
27:56SPEAKERthat angry engagement is the most sort of sticky kind of engagement, you know, like
28:01SPEAKERincreasing friction and conflict and pissing people off is the best way to get them to
28:05SPEAKERkeep clicking around. So.
28:06SPEAKERGod, I hate this, Brad. You're such a, such a bad take.
28:09SPEAKERSounds like, sounds like they really just maximize that strategy. We should, there's
28:14SPEAKERsomething I want to dig into, but maybe we should wait until we get through all these
28:16SPEAKERother platforms you looked at, which is that's, or it's the extent to which the platform
28:22SPEAKERyou're on actually matters to the user or is visible to the user is actually the way
28:25SPEAKERI would put it like, but, but maybe we'll get through the rest of these services first,
28:29SPEAKERcause there are a lot of newsletters. I'm sure there are tiers of this where you can't
28:32SPEAKERreally actually tell what platform they're even distributing it on. If they, if they
28:37SPEAKERuse their own domain and there's no branding from whatever publishing system they're
28:39SPEAKERusing, like you can't actually even tell. So.
28:42SPEAKERSo, so that's very true. And, and I think it's safe to say that most users probably
28:50SPEAKERdon't know what platform their newsletters are on. The, the, the kind of like the, the
28:57SPEAKERdesign frame, the design style of sub stack has become the thing that everybody uses.
29:03SPEAKERSo all these other things that we're going to talk about and just to be clear, I picked
29:06SPEAKERfour or five of them. There's a bazillion of these at this point. I, I, I pulled down
29:12SPEAKERto the ones that I found the most likely to actually, that I would actually use and kind
29:18SPEAKERof drilled down into. I didn't look at the super small ones. So, so yeah, they for the
29:27SPEAKERmost part, you put your credit card number in and because Apple pay and Google pay are
29:32SPEAKERintegrated with your phones and it's really easy, you just, there's no, there's no,
29:37SPEAKERit's, it's not like the old days where when we started the whiskey media stuff, we were
29:40SPEAKERtrying to figure out ways we could, we could not have to have people put credit card numbers
29:44SPEAKERin. And that was before Amazon pay or Stripe or any of that stuff existed because getting
29:49SPEAKERsomebody to put a credit card number in was the hardest part of the transaction, right?
29:53SPEAKERLike most people, like when we were looking at bounce rates on the early whiskey media
29:57SPEAKERsub, people would click the subscribe button because they wanted to see what the offer
30:00SPEAKERwas. Then they'd click through the offer they wanted. And then when it got to the point
30:03SPEAKERthat you had to put in your address and your credit card number, like a double digit percentage
30:07SPEAKERof people would just bounce out. And that's, that was common at the time. We've, we've
30:11SPEAKERmoved past that, I think now. So yeah, okay. So Substack was out. I looked at Memberful,
30:17SPEAKERwhich is interesting because it's, it's a newsletter slash podcasting platform and they
30:21SPEAKERlet you do pay walled podcasts inside their ecosystem. They charge a flat 50 bucks a month,
30:28SPEAKERand then you have to set up a Stripe account or a payment processing account that hooks
30:32SPEAKERinto their service. And it's the, like, it was really neat. It's small. So like when
30:40SPEAKERI had a question and I posted something to the chat bot, I quickly realized it was an
30:43SPEAKERactual person, which was really nice. And I liked it, but I don't think I, the feeling
30:48SPEAKERI got from them is that there wasn't going to be a lot of network effect. Just because
30:52SPEAKERit's so small. I would believe that. I think Memberful, yeah, Memberful is owned by Patreon.
30:56SPEAKERI think that they get acquired by them. I think they got acquired. Yeah. So it's kind
31:00SPEAKERof the same vibe sort of. Kind of, but it's but because it's because it's a flat fee.
31:06SPEAKERSo Patreon, which we can talk about now, if you want, you can use Patreon to make this
31:10SPEAKERkind of newsletter. Like a lot of people did in the early days of Patreon. It is enormous
31:14SPEAKERoverkill in terms of what they offer and the integration. The one benefit is you do get
31:18SPEAKERa Discord integration if you care about that. But it's phenomenally expensive compared to
31:23SPEAKERthe people that are charging you 50 bucks a month plus credit card processing fees.
31:27SPEAKERBecause you're not going to use 80% of the features of Patreon just to publish some text.
31:32SPEAKERYeah. The cheap pricing for Patreon is that they take 8% of all revenue now. That does
31:39SPEAKERinclude the credit card processing fees, which are three or 4% generally. But that's a lot.
31:46SPEAKERIf you have 50 subs, it's no big deal. If you have 10,000 subs, it's too much money.
31:52SPEAKERIt's also kind of hard to move off of Patreon. You have to do a gradual... There's no way to
31:57SPEAKERexport your list and import it into another place and just keep charging them there. You have to run
32:03SPEAKERmultiple things at a time and just transition people over to the new thing gradually.
32:08SPEAKERPatreon's out. Memberful is interesting. I set up the OBS newsletter on Memberful and
32:15SPEAKERwrote a few issues of that and was interested in it. The next one is Ghost. We've talked about
32:24SPEAKERGhost on the site before. Ghost is the open source community tackling the Patreon problem.
32:33SPEAKERIt's a CMS that's designed for a mixture of paid and free sites, like Nextlander. Patrick and Rob
32:43SPEAKERuse that for Remap Radio. For their site. I think they paid somebody to do customizations to suit
32:51SPEAKERtheir specific content requirements. That's the problem with Ghost. If you want to pay somebody
32:56SPEAKERto host a Ghost blog for you and then set up your own payment processing, you can totally do that.
33:03SPEAKERIt's like 50 bucks a month for the base level hosting, which would be fine for the type site
33:06SPEAKERI'm doing. You'd have to deal with transaction fees and set up a Stripe account or whatever,
33:11SPEAKERwhich is fine. There's not a lot of extensibility on Ghost. This is why we haven't set up a Ghost
33:17SPEAKERfor this Patreon, honestly. The plugins all run through this service called Zapier, which sucks.
33:28SPEAKERIt's not good. We can't do a Discord integration. In order to do a Discord integration,
33:35SPEAKERwe'd have to manually export a Discord username list and then manually import it every few days
33:41SPEAKERor weeks or whatever so that people get added in batches instead of on demand with a bot.
33:47SPEAKERIt also doesn't integrate with other stuff particularly well, either.
33:51SPEAKERIn a perfect world for me, this is a thing that I'd write the post in the CMS and then I'd write
33:59SPEAKERthe Blue Sky post and the Instagram post and the Threads post and the Mastodon post and they'd all
34:04SPEAKERjust go out automatically from the CMS. Nobody really is quite there yet, but the one that's
34:11SPEAKERclosest over the stuff I tried is Beehive. Beehive is free for up to 2,500 unpaid subs.
34:20SPEAKERIf you want to start taking money from people, it's $40 a month. You have to set up your payment
34:25SPEAKERprocessor as well. They don't do that stuff for you. You can integrate other feeds, too.
34:32SPEAKERYou can publish your newsletter posts on your own. If you have another blog,
34:37SPEAKERyou can just import them to that other blog as an RSS feed and stuff like that, which makes it
34:43SPEAKERreally easy. It's the place that it seems like the most people left Substack to go. They've taken
34:50SPEAKERadvantage of that by building some stuff that takes advantage of network effects and things
34:54SPEAKERlike that. You can mark it on the platform, which was one of my criteria for this.
34:59SPEAKER- I'm sorry, did you spell out their name? - Beehive. B-H-I-I-V. It's a bad name.
35:07SPEAKER- I don't know how I feel about that. The two I's making a long I is a bit cheeky for me.
35:10SPEAKER- It's hard to name something in 2025 when every word is taken.
35:15SPEAKER- I feel like playing around with vowels in your startup name is a very early 2010s kind of thing.
35:22SPEAKER- Well, so the thing about Beehive is it's been around for a really long time.
35:25SPEAKER- Oh, okay. They came by it honestly then.
35:27SPEAKER- Yeah. It was one of those ones where people left Substack and somebody was like, "Hey,
35:32SPEAKERwhere are you going when you leave Substack?" Somebody else was like, "I'm going to this Beehive
35:35SPEAKERplace." They went from having a relatively small number of subs to having a whole shitload.
35:41SPEAKERTheir policy on Nazis is unequivocal. They're like, "Hey, we don't allow Nazis here,
35:46SPEAKERso fuck off Nazis." - Is that solved?
35:48SPEAKER- Yeah. I like that it's actually free while you're getting your legs under you.
35:56SPEAKERI can afford 40 bucks a month, but it's nice to be able to test the waters and see if people
36:01SPEAKERlike this and see if something people are engaged in. Also, once we hit 2,500 subs,
36:05SPEAKERyou won't be able to sub anymore until I give them my credit card number. So if you want to get in,
36:11SPEAKERnow's the time, I guess. - That's your chance. This is a bit
36:14SPEAKERof a sidebar because you're looking to monetize. This is not you, but if you did not want to
36:18SPEAKERmonetize individual users and you just pay these very modest flat hosting fees and just run a
36:24SPEAKERwebsite there. - Yeah. So the way that all of these work for the most part is you have a CMS
36:31SPEAKERthat you can choose to generate a website or not. I think you can set the website to be as much or
36:37SPEAKERas little as you want. So you can have a website with just a list of the old posts so that the
36:41SPEAKERarchive is still there for subscribers. You can have it be public posts so that once you post
36:45SPEAKERstuff, you can even set time delays on most of them so that it goes out to the newsletters and
36:49SPEAKERthen seven days later, it ends up on the website for non-logged in people. - Okay. But for something
36:55SPEAKERlike Ghost, if you're not going to, again, sign people up and have them give you money,
36:59SPEAKERit's just the 50 bucks a month hosting and you could just run your free website, or not free,
37:02SPEAKERbut free for your users, you can just run your basic website for 50 bucks a month there?
37:07SPEAKER- Yeah. And it just seems like- - Seems pretty reasonable.
37:09SPEAKER- WordPress, there's cheaper alternatives if you don't want to have the paid,
37:15SPEAKERnon-paid split, right? So like a WordPress, like maybe not wordpress.com because they
37:22SPEAKERlimit plugins weirdly, but if you could do a hosted WordPress install,
37:26SPEAKERthose are usually 10 or $15 for basic hosting. - Yeah. I haven't checked in on WordPress in
37:32SPEAKERthree or four months, but- - Matt's on a tear still.
37:37SPEAKER- Things were messy over there. Last time I saw the name WordPress come up.
37:41SPEAKER- Yeah. It's a scene drama. We don't need to get into that, but the upshot is the founder of
37:47SPEAKERWordPress has, he's decided to go after some people that may or may not have done something
37:53SPEAKERwrong, but it's unseemly. - The ecosystem and some of the
37:57SPEAKERmajor players in the ecosystem seem to be at odds at the moment.
38:01SPEAKER- Yeah. I mean, he's upset with one of the main hosting providers. There's a bunch of other
38:06SPEAKERhosting providers you could go to that are not at all affected by this. And just like WordPress is
38:14SPEAKERan open source project. That's like, you can grab source code and host it yourself if you want,
38:19SPEAKERwhich is what most of the hosting providers do. They build stuff on top of the core source.
38:23SPEAKER- Open source drama, man. - Open source drama.
38:26SPEAKER- Linux kernel drama this week that I probably shouldn't get into, but-
38:29SPEAKER- Oh, there's Linux kernel drama? - The founder, here we go. The founder
38:33SPEAKERof the Asahi Linux project, which is the sort of compatibility layer that gets Linux running on the
38:38SPEAKERARM MacBooks or Mac machines, generally Apple machines, step down over drama with one of the
38:46SPEAKERkernel maintainers not wanting to merge code. And there's drama around Rust being in the Linux
38:51SPEAKERkernel again. There's always something going on. - Linus is against Rust, right?
38:57SPEAKER- No, his stance has been kind of a hands-off, like, yeah, sure, that should probably happen.
39:02SPEAKERThis is me reading third-hand information. - You're not on the mailing list?
39:05SPEAKER- I spend a little bit of time on the LKML here and there, but I don't read a ton of direct stuff.
39:10SPEAKERBut my basic understanding is that he more or less said like, yeah, okay, yes, we should probably
39:14SPEAKERhave Rust in the kernel, but then has had a very soft hands-off approach since then and has not
39:19SPEAKERgone out of his way to facilitate it happening. And that's led to a lot of strife among other
39:24SPEAKERmaintainers and people who want to put Rust in there. And the sense I get is there are a lot of
39:28SPEAKERC zealots still in that scene. - I mean, it's all built on C.
39:34SPEAKER- Yes, the whole thing was written in C. - It's the thing they know.
39:36SPEAKER- Right, so anyway, it sounds like there's a lot of friction there around a new language
39:40SPEAKERcoming into the Linux kernel. And unfortunately, I hope that project continues. I mean,
39:44SPEAKERthere are other people working on it, like the- - The Sahih stuff.
39:46SPEAKER- The founder, yes, the founder is kind of taking steps to make sure it keeps going. But
39:52SPEAKERmy understanding is that was a ton of work getting Linux to work at all on those ARM Macs.
39:56SPEAKERSo I hope that stuff continues. - Interesting, okay. So yeah,
40:04SPEAKERscene drama on the WordPress front. But one of the things I like about Beehive is
40:08SPEAKERI can export my newsletters and just embed them in another blog if I don't want to have them hosted
40:13SPEAKERon Beehive. I think everybody who listens to this podcast knows how I feel about ads. I'm not going
40:19SPEAKERto put them on an ad jammed site. The main difference between a reader-supported newsletter
40:25SPEAKERsite and a typical blog-supported site is the newsletter sites don't have a bazillion ads on
40:32SPEAKERthem. If you go to a small indie blog, it's just ad city. It's a bunch of weird scammy ads. There's
40:41SPEAKERall sorts of stuff just to make a fraction of a cent per visit. - Yeah, when was the last time
40:45SPEAKERyou went to a blog spot site? - God, it's been a minute. Tumblr,
40:50SPEAKERnow Tumblr, I'm there all the time. Love Tumblr. So that's pretty much where I'm at. Like I said,
41:00SPEAKERI've been writing posts weekly since the start of, post CES basically. And right now I'm publishing
41:06SPEAKERon Thursdays or Fridays. And I'd love to know what people think about it. So please leave
41:11SPEAKERme feedback in the Discord. You can send me email at techpod@content.town and I'll get it there too.
41:17SPEAKEROr I think what's next at content.town works. I'm a little worried. One of the things I'm worried
41:22SPEAKERabout with this, because email has gotten complicated since I set up a mail server last time,
41:27SPEAKERis there's a bazillion anti-spam initiatives and signatures and all this stuff you have to do to
41:35SPEAKERget your domain set up for email now. So I'm just using the Beehive doc. The email address for the
41:42SPEAKERnewsletter is whatsnext@beehive.com because I was afraid to do email stuff on one of the domains
41:49SPEAKERthat we use for other stuff. - Yeah, that makes sense. I have consistently read, even as I've
41:53SPEAKERgotten into little self-hosting projects here and there, I've consistently always heard that nobody
41:59SPEAKERin their right mind would try to run their own mail server in this day and age. - Yeah, it's a
42:03SPEAKERfraud. - From a security perspective, from a spam collection, meaning your emails don't even make
42:09SPEAKERit to people because they're getting spam filtered left and right. It just sounds like an absolute
42:13SPEAKERnightmare. - Well, and from a CSAM perspective too, because if you get child exploitation spam,
42:22SPEAKERthere's reporting requirements and stuff like that. There's all sorts of legal requirements for
42:25SPEAKERemail servers. You don't want to host your own email at this point. - Oh, you mean they get sent
42:28SPEAKERto you on your show that just lives on? Oh God, I didn't even think about that. - Yeah, then you're
42:32SPEAKERhosting... Yeah, it's nasty. It's bad. - Yeah, I started to say there's not exactly the concept
42:38SPEAKERof a firewall for a mail server. Obviously there are all kinds of filtering options,
42:41SPEAKERbut it's never going to be as robust as a... - Well, it's still coming through your gateway,
42:45SPEAKERright? - Right, right. - Anyway, yeah, so that's where I'm at. The big thing I'm working on right
42:50SPEAKERnow is figuring out... Like I said, I'm launching everything free. If we get interest and people
42:54SPEAKERwant to subscribe, I'll figure out what the paid upgrade looks like. Or maybe there is no paid...
43:01SPEAKERA lot of people just do a free newsletter and everybody gets the newsletter, and then there's
43:05SPEAKERone or two newsletters a quarter that are subscriber only or something like that, so...
43:10SPEAKER- Oh, okay. So you don't actually... I had put monetization on the bullet list here to talk about,
43:15SPEAKERbut so you actually don't have that plan mapped out yet then? - There's a bazillion... In my early
43:21SPEAKERresearch phase, I looked at everybody from like... Casey Johnson is a good example who came on the
43:26SPEAKERshow, does the She's a Beast blog about weightlifting. - The internet's noted swole woman.
43:32SPEAKER- Yeah, she is a swole woman. And her monetization is that she gets access to the... She has a
43:39SPEAKERDiscord. I don't know if I want to run another Discord. That seems like a bit much. - Would that
43:44SPEAKERbe your third official one or something? - Yeah. There's a cap to the number of Discords I can
43:50SPEAKERmeaningfully participate in. But yeah, so I don't know what the monetization looks like. I think
43:58SPEAKERwe'll start with, "Hey, if you want to tip me and if you like this and you want it to keep going,
44:03SPEAKERchuck in five bucks and I'll keep posting them." But yeah, if it doesn't get in traction,
44:09SPEAKERthen I'll move on to something else. Justin McElroy said years ago when we were talking
44:14SPEAKERabout starting podcasts, well before we were even talking about doing this show,
44:17SPEAKERI was like, "Hey, how do you..." He was like, "We..." And he said this other places too. But
44:23SPEAKERthey killed a bazillion podcasts before they got to My Brother and My Brother and Me. They did a
44:27SPEAKERwhole bunch of crap that like 15 people heard and never had any traction at all. - I did not know
44:32SPEAKERthat. - Yeah. So you got to kill the stuff that doesn't work, it turns out. - Yep. Yep. - Yeah.
44:40SPEAKERAnd then, well, you had other questions, I think, too. - I mean, I had put on here that we should
44:46SPEAKERtalk about CMS, content management system, and these things kind of have robust or the
44:49SPEAKERpublishing tools, but I assume that's all... - They're all fine. - I assume everybody's
44:53SPEAKERa general parody on features at this point, like... Okay. I mean, maybe that's actually...
44:58SPEAKERSorry. Having worked with the Patreon publishing tools for the last four years, I can say there's
45:04SPEAKERprobably room for improvement in places, but the general point is we are a long way from 2008 when
45:09SPEAKERa WYSIWYG web editor was a big deal. Like everybody's got the basics now, right? - Yeah.
45:15SPEAKERI don't know that this is true, but the feeling I get from using multiples of these and kind of
45:19SPEAKERexperimenting with them is that there's some sort of WYSIWYG middleware framework open-source
45:26SPEAKERpackage that gives you the basic markdown, either markdown or WYSIWYG to newsletter/blog.
45:39SPEAKERAnd that seems pretty robust. The image uploads, the captions, the alt tags, all that stuff is all
45:45SPEAKERbuilt into all of these. And they're... I still don't write in the editor because I'm not a mad
45:54SPEAKERperson. But for people who don't know, in the old days, if you were working on a website and you
46:02SPEAKERwrote in the editor, it was a sure way to just piss away hours of your work because they often
46:06SPEAKERdidn't save drafts. These autosave as you go. Every time you do a new paragraph, it seems to
46:12SPEAKERsave on Beehive, which is nice. It has all the normal HTML markup stuff. So you do like
46:20SPEAKERstrikethroughs and superscripts and subscripts and paragraphs and headers and lists and all that
46:25SPEAKERkind of stuff. I think some of you can even do tables. I don't ever want to do a table in HTML
46:31SPEAKERagain because they suck. The weird thing is because they're designed for web, for email
46:37SPEAKERformatting, they often don't do things like write nested images that the text flows around because
46:44SPEAKERmost email clients don't handle that. So the simplification of this works for email actually
46:50SPEAKERends up making the layout and stuff of the pages much, much easier. That's actually something I
46:54SPEAKERmeant to ask you about earlier is do you have... I don't know if you have metrics on this, but just
46:58SPEAKERa general sense of how people consume newsletters, what the split is between people who just read
47:03SPEAKERthem in their inbox versus seeking them out on a website. So from what I can tell, there's not a
47:08SPEAKERlot of... I didn't find an industry standard blog that's like, "Here's our aggregation of 50 top blah,
47:14SPEAKERblah, blah," which maybe if this newsletter doesn't work, maybe that's what I'll do.
47:20SPEAKERSimon Carlos is a games journalist who does a really good
47:24SPEAKERgames newsletter that's about the business of selling games on Steam and Xbox and PlayStation
47:29SPEAKERand Switch. And he pulls in... He both pulls in aggregated data from places like SteamDB
47:36SPEAKERand Steam Store, Steam sales updates and stuff like that, the Valve releases. But he also reaches...
47:41SPEAKERHe's big enough now that people come to him and are like, "Hey, Simon, I'm going to give you my
47:45SPEAKERsales data in exchange for access to your backend stuff for a while." Oh my gosh. He is rebuilding
47:52SPEAKERGameSpot tracks. Yeah, he actually is, but it's an incredibly... If you make games, it's an
47:58SPEAKERincredibly valuable site. It's worth paying Simon money for. I've learned enough over the course of
48:04SPEAKERmy career to know that's where the real action is in the boring backend B2B space. That's where
48:10SPEAKERthe actual growth potential is. Well, and so you get enough... Because he gets actual data from
48:19SPEAKERpeople instead of just looking at the traffic on GameSpot for a particular story or a particular
48:24SPEAKERgame, you get a good idea of X number of wish lists on a game translates into X day one sales,
48:33SPEAKERa range of X to Y day one sales and stuff like that. It's also how you know that the review
48:41SPEAKERmultiplier, at most 10% of an audience is going to write reviews of your game unless you really,
48:49SPEAKERreally upset them a lot. So anyway, the business of making newsletters is the next idea. If this
48:57SPEAKERone doesn't go, I guess I just don't need to be steal that. I just came up with that right now.
49:00SPEAKERAll right. Fair enough. Is it worth... I don't know if you want to touch on this or not? Talk
49:05SPEAKERabout what your sense of the nine to five job market is right now, since you are still doing
49:10SPEAKERthis kind of piecemeal, you've got your hands and fingers in different pies. Is that the metaphor?
49:16SPEAKERYeah. So right now, I'm a hard person to hire. I'm a weird slot for a lot of organizations
49:25SPEAKERbecause I'm either the utility infielder or I can come in and help you fix your busted stuff. I've
49:32SPEAKERbeen doing a lot of contracting and stuff the last year and helping out at PC World and with a couple
49:37SPEAKERindie developers, helping them get their games out. The job market is kind of a nightmare.
49:49SPEAKERThere's a bunch of listings posted every day. A lot of them seem to never... I see the same
49:56SPEAKER50 or 100 listings posted every week. They're never filled. They're just always posting the
50:02SPEAKERlistings. Some of them I've applied to just to see what happens. I think that people are just... The
50:07SPEAKERpeople in hiring departments for places that aren't actually hiring are just posting job listings,
50:12SPEAKERso they have something to do. I don't understand exactly what's going on there.
50:15SPEAKERI saw a Blue Sky thread about that. I can't remember. Sometimes I feel like we should
50:20SPEAKERcite these sources of some of our social media threads that we reference, but this all red is
50:24SPEAKERplausible to me, whoever it was that was posting it. But they were talking about some of the recent
50:28SPEAKERchanges or developments in recruiting and hiring, remote work, and also automation of recruiting
50:35SPEAKERtools. Those two things have come together to... A, remote work increases the number of applicants
50:40SPEAKERexponentially because people from everywhere are now applying for open roles. And then, of course,
50:44SPEAKERalso the automation is also allowing more applications to come through. But those two
50:49SPEAKERthings together, and I'm sure there are other factors, are just increasing the number of
50:53SPEAKERapplicants, the range of the quality of the applications they're getting. And a lot of...
50:57SPEAKERI think you just alluded to a lot of candidates are maybe not even getting looked at at this point
51:02SPEAKERbecause there are so many. Well, the automated screening is a real thing. I've had, I don't know,
51:10SPEAKERa half dozen interviews, maybe probably one interview a month over the last year at different
51:14SPEAKERplaces. I'm only applying to jobs I'd want. I'm not applying to jobs that I would not find
51:24SPEAKERspiritually and emotionally fulfilling, or that wouldn't pay me a living wage in the Bay Area.
51:30SPEAKERAnd there's a lot of remote jobs posted that are like, "Hey, we'll pay you $60,000 a year
51:35SPEAKERto do this." I'm like, "Well, thanks. That's great. Go away." Just because the cost of living
51:43SPEAKERhere is still expensive. It's a lot. The challenge of the automated screening processes is that you
51:58SPEAKERhave to write a machine-readable resume, which means either you can A, try to do that, B,
52:05SPEAKERthere's services you can pay that you put your resume in and then you put the job description
52:11SPEAKERin. It's like, "Okay, we're going to help you match up keywords so that your keywords..."
52:17SPEAKERThis is another example of things becoming worse because we've added technology to them,
52:22SPEAKERjust to be clear, for everyone involved. The bad thing about this is if you're the perfect
52:28SPEAKERcandidate for a job and your resume doesn't pass the initial automated filter, you're never going
52:31SPEAKERto get that job. The company's not going to get you, and they're not going to get the benefit of
52:34SPEAKERyour labor. At the same time, it's not making the job easier for the recruiters because everybody's
52:40SPEAKERjust using these automated tools to make all their resumes look pretty good. I don't know how you
52:46SPEAKERstand out now, even to the point that with the remote jobs... I think I talked to a friend who
52:53SPEAKERworks in a recruiting department at a big tech company, not like a Google or a Facebook or
52:57SPEAKERwhatever, but a big one. She was saying that if they have a job posting that's up for a week,
53:04SPEAKERwhich is what they do, they get 700 resumes. Because everybody's connected to everybody else
53:14SPEAKERon LinkedIn, for senior level positions, they'll get 40 referrals. It's not even like getting the
53:20SPEAKERreferral from somebody who you know and have worked with and have a good relationship with
53:22SPEAKERis going to actually push you over the top like it would have in the past. It's very much knowing
53:31SPEAKERhow to use those tools and get past the automated screen and do all that. Or work at startups is the
53:36SPEAKERother thing. Startups still hire the old way. - Right. Weren't you seeing social media stories,
53:43SPEAKERespecially when AI started coming into the resume filtering scene of people pulling little tricks,
53:49SPEAKERputting instructions to the agents in white text on a white background, putting hidden text or
53:54SPEAKERtiny, tiny text, trying to use the model that was parsing all the resumes to tell it to prioritize
54:00SPEAKERtheir application or whatever? - There's a lot of smoke around that stuff. I don't know how much
54:04SPEAKERof it is real and I am hesitant to do any of that on a resume. I'm not going to try it.
54:10SPEAKER- I would never do that. I'm just saying that it's like the goosing the Bing search results by
54:15SPEAKERputting it into the star menu thing. It's coming close to revealing the farce of the whole setup,
54:21SPEAKERof the whole framework. All of this is everybody is just trying to make it work for them in whatever
54:28SPEAKERdubious way possible. - And just to be clear, there's also automated tools that will just,
54:33SPEAKERyou can say, "Hey, I want to apply to all the project manager jobs on LinkedIn."
54:38SPEAKERAnd to the point that when a Google product manager job gets posted, it'll be posted for
54:46SPEAKER15 minutes and there'll be a hundred applicants for it already. - I guess it goes both ways then,
54:51SPEAKERbecause from the recruiter's perspective, those are probably not very serious applicants if they
54:55SPEAKERare auto applying to jobs they haven't even looked at yet. - Yeah, that's exactly it. For lower level
55:01SPEAKERstuff, I think it's actually, it makes a little more sense. If I was 30 years old and I was
55:08SPEAKERlooking for a job right now, I would be going out and applying to every single product manager job
55:12SPEAKERthat I'm remotely qualified for at Google in the interest of getting my foot in the door.
55:18SPEAKER- But also the other thing is like Metta laid off 3,500 people yesterday or day before, they said
55:26SPEAKERwith cause this time, because they were underperforming. - That's not what I read.
55:33SPEAKER- So the point is Metta said that they were laying off underperformers. The people who got laid off
55:37SPEAKERwere like, "Hey man, you gave me a raise and told me I was above expectations last year." - That's
55:41SPEAKERwhat I'm getting at. I can't remember again. I've got to do a better job of loading who I'm reading
55:46SPEAKERon stuff. Somebody, I read an article that was posted on Blue Sky, which site it was. I don't
55:51SPEAKERremember, but it was talking to a lot of, it might have been The Verge. - We talked about this on
55:55SPEAKERDTNS on Thursday. - I think it was The Verge, but anyway, they had spoken to a bunch of laid off
56:01SPEAKERFacebook employees who were like, "Yeah, I got exceeds expectations ratings for the last five
56:05SPEAKERstraight years, but I was on medical leave or maternity leave when these came down. And so I
56:11SPEAKERgot cut." It was a lot of people that seemed to think very strongly that it was not for cause.
56:16SPEAKER- I think there'll be legal challenges to that. But also, am I going to go... I would think twice
56:25SPEAKERabout taking a job at Metta as a result of that behavior, because there's already a little bit of
56:31SPEAKERa stink on people who've been laid off. When you're doing interviews, they're like, "Hey,
56:35SPEAKERwhy did you leave your last job?" And well, "Hey, we shut down the company." That one, it turns out,
56:41SPEAKERis okay. But you get the strong feeling that it was like, "Oh yeah, I was laid off from Google."
56:45SPEAKERThey're like, "Oh yeah, okay. Well, I don't know, but why'd they lay you off? You must not have been
56:49SPEAKERa great contributor." So coming out and saying that the people in this last round of layoffs
56:54SPEAKERwere the underperformers is really shitty, even if it was with cause. And it seems like it's not.
57:05SPEAKERAnyway, we talked about it in detail. I have thoughts about this. I think it's shit.
57:11SPEAKERSo yeah, job market's rough, which is why I'm just looking at other things I can do
57:15SPEAKERto piecemeal together a livable salary where we live.
57:20SPEAKER- It seems like the way of the future. A lot of people doing that.
57:24SPEAKER- I mean, look, there's pros and cons to it, right? Because it means that if my kid has
57:28SPEAKERsomething at class and I want to go hang out with her while she's doing something cool, it means I
57:32SPEAKERcan as often as not. But the health insurance, the current state of health insurance in the
57:39SPEAKERUnited States is a little scary. - That is the big one, of course.
57:42SPEAKER- Yeah. Anyway. - And just the unpredictability
57:45SPEAKERand lack of social safety net means that if the bottom falls out of something you're doing, oops.
57:50SPEAKER- Yeah. Yeah. Or like, God forbid I get sick. I pay a lot of money for disability insurance
58:00SPEAKERbecause I don't get any of that stuff right now. Anyway, I guess that's as good a place
58:06SPEAKERas any to leave it. - Yeah. That was a nice little
58:09SPEAKERwindow into what the self-publishing world looks like right now, I think.
58:12SPEAKER- Yeah. And just as a reminder, if you want to check out the newsletter, there's like,
58:18SPEAKERI think there'll be five posts up by the time you get this, maybe four or five. I can't remember
58:22SPEAKERwhere I ended up. I think I have one I'm holding right now because I wasn't all the way thrilled
58:26SPEAKERwith it, but it's at next.content.town, next, N-E-X-T. - All right.
58:31SPEAKER- Content.town. - And since we're talking
58:34SPEAKERabout sites that we own or have owned or contributed to in the past, can I just tell you that when I
58:38SPEAKERmentioned BlockSpot earlier, I went and checked and my BlockSpot blog is still up. You want to
58:43SPEAKERhear what the most recent post is? - Yeah. What is it?
58:46SPEAKER- September 17th, 2008, entitled We're All Doomed. The news on the television just reported
58:55SPEAKERthere's now a two month waiting period if you want to buy Sarah Palin's particular brand of
58:58SPEAKERrimless glasses. Two months. I've got a bad feeling about this.
59:02SPEAKER- Oh boy. - prescient. What do you think?
59:05SPEAKER- I mean, look, Brad, you weren't wrong. You were not wrong.
59:10SPEAKER- I'm going to close this tab now. - Yeah, just walk away from that one.
59:13SPEAKERThat's a bad tab. It's cursed. - Cursed.
59:17SPEAKER- I mean, who would think that one day I'd look back on the Sarah Palin days and be like,
59:20SPEAKERoh man, Sarah Palin, she was great. - That was quaint. Yes, that was highly
59:26SPEAKERcompetent governance or anyway. - At least not destructive. Anyway, yeah.
59:31SPEAKERSo despite me trash talking Patreon for my new newsletter, we really appreciate Patreon here.
59:38SPEAKERWe're on an old grandfathered end tier. We don't pay the high rates that they pay now. We pay
59:44SPEAKERslightly lower rates, which I think are more reasonable. - Slightly better percentage, but
59:48SPEAKERalso, you know, Patreon good for podcasts. Like when you talk about like just a text newsletter
59:52SPEAKERbeing the Patreon being overkill for that, like you're utilizing a lot more of the Patreon feature
59:58SPEAKERset by doing a podcast on there. - Yeah. And just to be clear,
1:00:02SPEAKERthe newsletter for people who live on other places, my thought is to make a podcast and
1:00:09SPEAKERYouTube for both of these, for all this stuff. So that if you want to see me talking into a camera,
1:00:15SPEAKERI can do that too. I'm more than capable of reading off of a prompter and reading a blog post
1:00:22SPEAKERor a newsletter to you. So yeah, that'll do it for us this week. As always, thank you to all of our
1:00:29SPEAKERPatreons for their support. We do appreciate you, each and every one. - We do. - If you want to find
1:00:35SPEAKERout how to support the show, you can go to patreon.com/techpod. Again, it's patreon.com/techpod
1:00:41SPEAKERwhere for as little as $5 a month, you get access to the fabulous TechPod Discord and our monthly
1:00:48SPEAKERPatreon exclusive show where often we dig deeper into topics of interest into weird stuff that we're
1:00:54SPEAKERworking on that we may not think is worth a full show. Or sometimes we just kind of ramble. - Yep.
1:01:00SPEAKERJust a stream of consciousness straight from our brains to your ears. - Just, hey, what's up with
1:01:04SPEAKERyour fudge hog, Brad? - Oh, the fudge hog's doing okay. - He looks happy back there. - I never put
1:01:10SPEAKERthe Borax in. Did we even talk about that here? - Wait, did you have ants? - Oh, God. Okay. We
1:01:14SPEAKERtalked about it extensively on Nextlander. - Oh, no. Ants are bad. - Ants got into the fudge hog
1:01:20SPEAKERbecause I had left the candy in the fudge hog. - Oh, dope, Brad. - Which turned out to be a terrible
1:01:24SPEAKERidea. - Yeah, that's a bad idea. - It was nice to have it in there because it just weighted down,
1:01:28SPEAKERyou know? It kept it good and sturdy and planted on the shelf. - But that's got to be like 15-year-old
1:01:33SPEAKERcandy at this point. - It was not quite, well, it's not nearly that old, but it was pretty old.
1:01:38SPEAKERAnd I didn't think about the candy escaping containment. - Yeah, ants will find it. - They
1:01:43SPEAKERsure did. They sure did. Anyway, candy's all out of there now. - Okay. - I think it's okay. I have
1:01:48SPEAKERnot seen ants in some weeks around it, but I still, I was going to put a mixture of Borax and cinnamon
1:01:52SPEAKERin the feet. - Oh, really? Is that what it's doing? So we do the Borax, I do a Borax line around the
1:01:59SPEAKERedges of the house where the ants come in and that just keeps them out entirely. - Yes, so Borax kills
1:02:04SPEAKERants, cinnamon disrupts their, I assume it's like a scent trail they're using, kind of like a chemical
1:02:08SPEAKERscent is what they use to establish their conga line. - Yeah, they love pheromones. - Yes, so the
1:02:13SPEAKERcinnamon, that infuses them and they don't know how to navigate around it. So I figured a mix of
1:02:18SPEAKERthose two things would probably be enough. - When it started raining two weeks ago now, the first big
1:02:25SPEAKERheavy rain of the year, apparently we had an anthill under our deck, our patio. - Okay. - And
1:02:32SPEAKERit flooded them and they just started swarming out and all of a sudden there was like a black carpet
1:02:37SPEAKERon the concrete patio in our backyard because there were hundreds of thousands of ants, I'm
1:02:42SPEAKERgoing to guess. - Wow. - It was a lot of ants. It was not okay. - You just let it be? Not much you can do?
1:02:48SPEAKER- I mean, it was really raining hard. That's so like I couldn't have done anything to them.
1:02:51SPEAKER- Not much you can do at that point? - I think nature found a way. The birds really liked them,
1:02:55SPEAKERit seems like. - Really? - There were a bunch of like ground birds that were just down there feasting.
1:02:59SPEAKER- Okay. - So anyway. - We're going to get some birds in here then. - Yeah, you should get a
1:03:04SPEAKERcouple of jays, that'd be great. If you want to find out how to support the podcast,
1:03:09SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/checkpod. And it's the end of the show, so we'd like to thank our
1:03:14SPEAKERexecutive producer, tier patrons who we shout out every week. So a very special thank you to
1:03:20SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny Felonies, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamik, and
1:03:26SPEAKERPantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you all so much. - Yes, thank you.
1:03:31SPEAKER- And that'll do it for us this week. We will be back next week with another episode
1:03:35SPEAKERof The Tech Pod. Thanks for listening. We will see you all then.
1:03:39SPEAKERAnd please consider the environment before printing this podcast.