Transcript

Chris Coyier: Ooh, dawg! And I don't like that either!

[Banjo music]

MANTRA: Just Build Websites!

Dave Rupert: Hey there, Shop-o-maniacs. You're listening to another episode of the ShopTalk Show. A podcast all about... 650 fricken' ones and I messed it up!

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: --about Web design and development. I'm Dave Ruper and with me is Chris Coyier.

Chris: Ah...

Dave: Hey, Chris.

Chris: How ya doin', Dave? Glad to be here.

Dave: Flawless intro for 651 here. [Laughter] We're doing great.

Chris: Wouldn't rather be anywhere else. Beautiful time here.

We have a special guest this week. I promised you we were going to have guests and here they are. See! I'm a man of my word, God dang it. It's Jason Lengstorf. Hey, Jason. How ya doin'?

Jason Lengstorf: What's happening? Thanks for having me.

Chris: Good. Doing just fine. Perfect, really. This sort of started... We saw a tweet from you just like a couple of weeks ago, just kind of wanting to be on some podcasts. I was like, "I know that guy. We should get him."

Jason: Mm-hmm. [Laughter]

Chris: What was the last episode he was on? Wasn't on one, apparently. Sorry about that, bud. Wasn't trying to snub you there. We just... It just hasn't happened yet.

Jason: It is... It's funny because I feel like I'm friends with a lot of people who all make content. Then, I'll realize that I've never reached out to them about anything. I'm like, "How have I known you for this long and we've never made anything together?" [Laughter]

Chris: It's been a long time, man. It's not like we've made nothing together. Way back in the CSS-Tricks days--

Jason: You were my first foray into publicly doing anything. You published my first article.

Chris: Hell yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, and look at what happens, people. You hear that? You work with me; you're going to be a star. That's what they say. I make country music stars.

[Laughter]

Dave: You cut your teeth on Gatsby stuff, right?

00:02:07

Jason: Dave, I've been around a long time. [Laughter]

Dave: Well, you're in Austin at IBM, right?

Chris: Oh, I remember that era.

Jason: Before that, I ran a Web agency for like ten years.

Dave: Oh, I didn't know that part. Okay.

Jason: Yeah, I got my start doing Flash websites.

Dave: Oh, exciting.

Jason: I was building customized base pages for my band and stuff, and then I realized that if I learned Flash, I could embed our music on the webpage without letting people download the music. I was like, "Ah! This seems like a thing worth learning as a musician," and that sort of kicked off that. Then I needed the band to be able to make updates, so I learned PHP and MySQL. Then got into WordPress because trying to roll your own CMS is a terrible idea.

Then I pitched Chris an article on rolling your own CMS, and we hit the front page dig on CSS-Tricks. Then everybody told me how bad I was at PHP and MySQL.

[Laughter]

Chris: I vaguely remember that one because it is a little bit of a stretch to be like, "Here's all--" It was the golden age of PHP CMSs.

Jason: Oh, yeah. It really was.

Chris: Here's Jason being like, "Just do it yourself. Just insert star," or whatever. [Laughter]

Jason: Kind of that, yeah. [Laughter]

Chris: Just write down the SQL statements. Yeah.

Dave: I mean if you don't get thrashed on whatever the Hacker News of the era is, you haven't blogged enough. That's how I feel.

Chris: Yeah. Well, Jason helped me in many ways, too. I'm sure that series probably was... Just the fact of calling it a series is interesting. We probably didn't really do series until then. But it needed it.

It's moments like that that make you grow up as a publisher and be like, "Ooh... We're going to have to figure this out. How do we do three-part'ers?" That type of thing.

Jason: Yeah, that was an interesting experiment, too, because we did it across our blogs. So, we did this article on... The app was called Colored Lists. Do you remember this, Chris?

Chris: Oh, my God! Is that what it was? Yeah, I do remember that, and I was the esteemed designer.

00:04:07

Jason: The first one I wrote was just this kind of one-off on how to roll your own CMS. It was fine.

Chris: Yeah.

Jason: But then I pitched Chris. I was like, "Let's do more!" [Laughter] Like a fool, he agreed. [Laughter]

Chris: Did we even buy the URL for it and stuff?

Jason: I think so. Yeah.

Chris: We were going to have maybe even a hosted version of it.

Jason: It ended up being a solid five or six-part article where you did the jQuery front-end interaction, the CSS design. I did the backend so that people could create and update their lists. It was honestly a lot of fun and great learning experience for me.

Chris: Yeah, that was really cool. I do remember that now. Wow! You could go to any one of these scaffolding tools and describe what colored list was and you'd just get it. It would just do it.

Jason: I know. I know.

Chris: It would take one second. Wow!

Jason: [Laughter]

Chris: Wow! And it was in the ages before... Like, "How do we even do a color picker?" You know? There was no input type color back then - for sure.

Jason: Yeah.

Chris: Oh, gosh. Just found a jQuery plugin, I suppose.

Jason: [Laughter] Probably.

Chris: Whew! All right, so that was back in the day. Then you go run an agency for a while. Or you were, at the time, I think, right?

Jason: I was starting the agency when I reached out to you, and then I worked there for about ten years. Burnt-out super-hard.

Chris: Okay.

Jason: Gave myself health problems from stress kind of hard.

Chris: Oh, bummer.

Jason: And then decided--

Dave: Yeah.

Jason: Yeah, right. Right?

Dave: Yeah. The old freshman 45. [Laughter]

[Laughter]

Dave: Self-employed at 45, basically. Yeah.

Jason: For me, it was that plus I got so stressed that I gave myself self-induced alopecia.

Dave: Blah! That hurts.

Jason: So, I was having big old patches of my beard were falling out.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Oh, my God.

Jason: I read up on it, and they were like, "Nobody can explain this." Then a couple of people were like, "It's stress." I was like, "Oh... stress makes sense," because my stress got real bad. So, I sold the agency. When I say "sold," I mean I got somebody to take over it so I didn't have to do it anymore. I didn't make any money.

But I took one contract with this one really good client that was enough money for me to get by, but I didn't have to do anything else. I just took a year to be completely burnt out. My beard grew back. [Laughter] I started to want to live again, you know, all the things that I'd forgotten about when I was in year nine of my agency.

Chris: Started buckling my seatbelt again.

Jason: [Laughter] Yeah.

Chris: That's what my friend always said.

[Laughter]

Dave: That's macabre, but that's pretty grim, man.

[Laughter]

Dave: But I like it. I like it but it's pretty grim. Yeah, that's pretty grim.

00:06:35

Jason: But then I ended up at IBM, and IBM hired me as a front-end. I don't know exactly what my title was, but what I ended up doing was kind of being a front-end architect for their cloud offering, which caught the attention of the Gatsby guys, which got them to make me an offer to come over and be--

They just gave me a job without a job title. They were like, "You'll figure something out that we need."

Chris: Sure.

Jason: And so, I got into the community stuff, which got me into Netlify. Then Netlify got me to here.

Chris: That was probably your biggest public... Right? It seems like I think a lot of people remember you from those days because Gatsby was so cool for a minute, and then you got to ride the cool train. Or maybe you created the cool train.

Jason: I think it was a little bit of both, right? Gatsby had such strong technical promise. It was such a novel... Nothing was doing what Gatsby was doing at the time that they introduced that.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Jason: And so, when I came in, they had the super-nerds were really into it.

Chris: Yeah.

Jason: But they didn't have a community motion, so I built the community motion where we had a robot in our GitHub that if you submitted an issue, we'd automatically give you a coupon code for a T-shirt and make you part of the contributors' club. I did a lot of the community action stuff, like I started up the livestream, which eventually became Learn with Jason, and I did a lot of the meetup stuff.

So, I think I helped build the community side of Gatsby. And then, as they realized they needed to be a company that made money, they sort of lost interest in all of that, which is when I jumped ship and went to Netlify.

Chris: That's funny because it seems like we've seen it happen over and over - a little bit, right?

Jason: Yeah.

Chris: The "Aah, this community stuff isn't working. Let's kill it," only to have that be the death knell.

Dave: Yeah, it's like, "We're really popular! Great!" The dev rel panic just hits, and then everyone just gets wholesaled. It's just like, "Did you not know the causal relationship there?"

Jason: From being briefly on the inside of the executive meeting rooms, what I've noticed is that as companies get bigger, the board starts to put more pressure on the founder.

Dave: Yeah.

Jason: And so, the founder (thinking it's going to help) will go hire somebody that the board recommends who is like a spreadsheet guy, an operations person, a finance person, whatever. That person then comes in, and their job is to prepare the business for exit - or whatever. What ends up happening in a lot of these cases -- in Gatsby it happened, at Netlify it happened, and a bunch of my friends' start-ups -- is that those people come, they look at the thing, and they say, "Okay. You're growing really fast. You've got great community love. Let's go down the budget. This doesn't have direct tie to ROI, so cut that community program. This doesn't have direct ties to ROI, so no more fun dev rel trips. This doesn't have--"

They just cut everything that made the company work because they don't understand third and fourth order effects or the thing that happens when you get somebody to trust you early on and then, six months or nine months later, they get into a new job and they say, "I really want to bring this tool in because I really like what they're doing and I like this community." They just don't believe that exists, and so they just defund all that stuff in the interest of efficient. Then they're confused when nothing works anymore.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Jason: Then when you say, "Well, what worked was this," they say, "We can't justify that kind of spend with a downturn like this." [Laughter] Then it's like, "Okay, well, that's the death spiral, I guess."

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: When you probably don't have the "No, we've got 82 sign ups from a livestream," or you're like, "We have three, but they're super-customers." You know? You probably don't have that data because you don't have the infrastructure because you would have to build the infrastructure.

Jason: And you can't. You can't attribute. If I go to a conference and I talk to Chris, and we have a great conversation. Two months later, Chris is back at CodePen, and he's like, "You know, we were talking about this problem and I actually think Jason had a good idea for this, so let me look at their thing." He makes a decision to use that tool.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Jason: There is zero chance that's attributed to me.

Dave: Right.

Jason: Maybe there's an onboarding form that will say, "How did you hear about us?" and maybe Chris will remember and write down my name. But almost certainly that won't happen.

Dave: Right.

Jason: It'll be attributed to performance marketing or something.

Chris: Yeah.

Jason: Because when you Googled, you hit the--

Chris: I even know you and like you and know that that's the case and still probably wouldn't do it. Sorry.

Jason: Exactly.

Chris: Just because you're thinking about something else at the time. You know?

00:10:57

Jason: Yeah. Nobody attributes that way, and that's fine. So, you end up having to do what I've started calling tethered metrics where you have to look at, okay, we spent a bunch of money on community awareness. And so, what we're looking for is that we get a baseline deviation from how many people visit the site or the docs or whatever.

If typically it's 7,000, we're looking for that to jump up to 7,500 or 8,000. At the same time, we're looking for our conversion rate to not change. So, if I'm able to drive qualified traffic to the site through community actions and I can get us 10% more people looking at the website and our conversion rate doesn't change, that means we're getting 10% more conversions because of the work that I'm doing. But that doesn't fit neatly into a spreadsheet, and we can't prove that that extra 10% of traffic is because of the work that I was doing, so it ends up kind of getting discounted as, like, "Well, because we can't measure it, we're not going to fund it." That's really hard to justify in later stages of a company.

Well, actually, it's just the middle stages because, later, they just understand that there's a reason that Coca-Cola spends 10% of its revenue on marketing. It's because they understand you've got to be out there. You've got to put your name out there.

The early companies don't think about metrics yet. They just think about vibes. So, they're like, "Do people like us? Are people talking about us? Are people interested?" So, they understand that they've got to invest in that.

But then in the middle, they start worrying about money and they don't understand strategy, so they just start thinking about one-to-one, one unit of effort, one ROI unit. If they can't draw that direct line, they're like, "We can't justify this."

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, I like the idea. People always want the conversion rate to go up, right?

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Dave: But conversion rates staying the same is also valuable. [Laughter]

Jason: Yes.

Dave: There's a lot of value in conversion rates staying the same. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, people don't see it.

00:12:57

Chris: I always liked how Adobe, in our coming up, was so dominant and still is in a lot of ways. It's because they kind of didn't care that much if you pirated their crap when you're 18. They had to pretend to care a little bit. But I think, secretly, it was a strategy to not care too bad.

Dave: "Don't do that." [Laughter]

Chris: Yeah.

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Because they knew they were big enough and long-term thinkers enough that, to this day, I have Photoshop on my computer because I pirated it when I was young.

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Chris: It became locked in part of my muscle memory.

00:13:31

Dave: I was reading this... listening to this book about the history of Nintendo and how they conquered America and stuff like that. There was this point where Sega got really cool. Sonic, right?

Jason: Hmm...

Dave: It's overtaking Mario, and it's a super-threat. Then Sony comes along and comes out with the PlayStation. The secret of the PlayStation was the little DVDs, right? It was a DVD player and you had these DVDs. These DVDs were super-easy to pirate, so it's like a lot of kids -or whoever - would buy the system and pirate games. That meant they weren't buying a Nintendo.

It's this weird... I started seeing piracy and open formats as a potential - I don't know - market game. Like a heist that you can do to steal customers because you were just like, "Oh, we have this pirate-able software. Now we have customers, indirect customers, that don't give us money but they're not going to our competitors."

Jason: Right.

Dave: Very weird situation, but I think it applies to Adobe.

Chris: "You should open-source your product," is the same vibe, right?

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Because they're using that then. Yeah.

Jason: And Epic Games has figured this out in a big way with Fortnite and all these games being free. Then you make the money because people get so stuck into that game that they want to be part of the culture of it.

Dave: Oh, yeah.

Jason: And you end up playing the other games on their store, and so you pay for those. It's just like let people come in and have a whole lot of fun.

Chris: That's amazing to me that that works as well as it does.

Jason: Yeah.

Chris: Don't you--? I'm speaking a little bit from ignorance here but you get the full Fortnite for free.

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Chris: You are not hampered by playing that game, right?

Jason: No.

Chris: You do not need a special dance or special clothes or the things that you pay for.

Jason: Yeah, they're purely cosmetic.

Chris: Yeah, that's amazing that they're purely cosmetic. That's amazing because you can imagine that not working in some cases.

Dave: But your 11-year-old son absolutely needs it. That's what I'm discovering.

[Laughter]

Jason: And the other thing is I realized... I played Fortnite during the pandemic. It was a big part of my coping mechanism because I had friends who just hung out in Discord and we'd play Fortnite together. I absolutely... I ended up paying Fortnite $20 a month so that I could get the free dances and do the missions that they would give you if you were a paying member. And so, I've probably given Fortnite (a completely free game) somewhere around like $300 to $500.

Chris: Holy crap! Really?

Dave: Yeah.

Jason: For absolutely no reason other than I was there with my friends, and they were buying the banana costume, so I wanted to be able to... You know we wanted to go banana squad, so I bought the banana. You know what I mean? It was so easy to get into it and want to do the thing that your friends were doing.

Chris: Yeah.

Jason: It was $5. Who cares?

Chris: $5. That's amazing.

00:16:22

Dave: My son probably has five figures into Roblox, man. It's just--

Jason: [Laughter]

Dave: I'm like, "Dude, you're not going to play this forever." [Laughter]

Chris: He's got to do it.

Dave: He doesn't think so, but it is shocking.

Chris: Oh, my gosh. That's interesting. It seems like that model works for Discord a little bit, too, where most of the crap in Discord is just like, "Cool!" Reaction emojis or a special kind of header, which is fine. Obviously, it's working for Fortnite. Surely, apparently working for Discord, too. They seem to be doing just fine.

But I'm in this category. I'm not above aesthetics or buying cool stuff like that. I've been trapped. In these two cases, to me I'm just like, "Well, not me, though. Sorry."

Jason: Yeah. I think a little bit of it is it's an opportunity to belong to a community. It's a status-signaling kind of thing. We buy the brand name clothing that we think makes the people we want to think are cool think we're cool. I think Discord is a way to do that online. You buy the banner profile that signals that you're a hardcore gamer or whatever it is that you're into - or an anime person. Then people see that. They go, "Oh, you're my kind of people!"

It's very interesting to me because I get it sometimes, and I don't get it other. I don't give Discord money except for the server that I run because I wanted to unlock features for it, so I pay them to unlock all the features I wanted. But I don't buy the--

They definitely have a professional use case in Discord where you want to be able to add custom server controls and roles and things like that, so you just have to pay. It's like - I don't know - $300 a year or something to run your professional Discord.

Chris: Yeah. The one that got me, the videos were really short - or something. It was like 60 seconds or 10 megabytes. It was really low, and I coughed up because just the basic amount of payment unlocked the, like, 100 megabytes or 10 minutes or something. I was like, "Okay, well, we obviously need that," because I just felt like we did at the moment. I can't remember why now, but I don't like being hampered by that.

Dave: There's this old, basically, white paper or real paper... Sorry, not a white paper. Real paper about the status symbol stuff. They looked at Team Fortress II, and they could basically predict your status in the game, like senior or whatever of a player you were, based on if you had a hat or not in the game. They could kind of check the value of your cosmetics versus your standing in the community. It was really kind of interesting just how that works.

Jason: Fascinating.

Dave: Yeah. We can put a link in the show notes there, but it's a weird status-symbol thing.

00:19:22

Chris: These days, your life is a little bit different working for yourself, trying to make bigger things happen, right? You've got Learn with Jason is kind of a brand and a channel, but maybe that brand is changing a little bit. Making not just one show but many shows. Tell us about what's going on right now.

Jason: Yeah, so back in 2018 when I was at Gatsby, I started live streaming as a way to just make more community-focused content. The premise of that show was I wanted somebody to come on and join me for 90 minutes to teach me something new.

It ended up being a really fun concept. It gives me a chance to ask a bunch of beginner questions, which it turns out people were... the questions people didn't want to ask themselves, they could come watch the show and get a sense of what was going on.

I started to see the potential of this format of, like, I really want to do entertainment for developers. I love watching shows on TV that show me somebody being really good at something. I was like, "I want that for us. I want that for what I do."

I started working... Probably 2019, I started pushing for this idea that I had, which was the Great British Bakeoff for Web Developers. I was trying to convince the Netlify team, and then I couldn't get them around on it. And so, when I left Netlify in '22, I was still pushing for this. I started pitching it to potential customers, and I couldn't get them around on it.

Then finally, it was like eight months ago now, just decided I was going to do... It was like a year ago. It was like a year ago I did this remote version of what I had in mind that was super stripped down. It was just like, "Hey, let's get four people to build something and demo it," and then we'll all film ourselves reacting to the thing they built. It's a format I'd seen on YouTube before and it worked really well.

That got me enough interest that I was able to do this kind of rough version of the in-person thing, which was what became Web Dev Challenge, which is a show that I run now. We bring four people to Portland. We give them a challenge, four hours to build it, and then we all kind of demo together in one room. It's shot like the Great British Bakeoff, basically.

That kind of struck a chord in a way that nothing else I had done had hit before. People were really interested in sharing it out.

Chris: You were right!

Jason: And I was right. Yeah, so it felt like it really proved a point that, like, "Okay, this is something that we want," we as an industry want to see ourselves in these more entertaining, story-based things. So, then I started planning a gameshow, and I made this thing called Leet Heat, and it's kind of Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and Hot Ones all rolled into one format. And that got a really good reception.

Now what I just did this week, actually, is I rebranded because the company had been called Learn with Jason because that was what I had registered when I was just getting liability set up for this live stream. Then as I was making Leet Heat, which is hosted by Mark Techson--

Dave: Perfect choice, by the way. Mark is really good at it.

00:22:20

Jason: He's so good. But that's not a show about me, so we're not learning with Jason anymore. Now it's starting to not make sense.

Web Dev Challenge, it used to be that I was always one of the devs, but now I'm not anymore, and I'm actually more of an advisor host than I am one of the devs, so again it doesn't feel like we're learning with Jason anymore. It feels like it's something else. So, I just rebranded to CodeTV.

The brand went up. It's codetv.dev. I redirected everything so that now when you go to one of the channels, it's called CodeTV. We've got a new, snazzy logo and all that.

The plan now is to take this theory and just push it as far as I can working with companies, working with individual creators, to try to come up with what do developers want to watch. I've been talking to people. Somebody wanted a developers' dating show. Somebody wants a version of, like, Survivor or something. I was talking to another company about, like, what's the equivalent of Queer Eye but where we go in and rescue a terrible website?

Chris: Oh, man!

Jason: There are so many fun things that we can do. My thought is that, under CodeTV, I can make these even if I'm not in them. So, the plan is to find people who have the ideas and the talent and then I use my experience in production and in storytelling and developer education to make sure that we do it in a way that's going to land but just try to expand it out kind of following the model of if you've ever seen Dropout TV or if know Nebula.

Dave: Yeah. Love Dropout. Yeah.

Jason: Those platforms have done extremely well for creators, and so I just want to niche it down into Web development, basically.

Dave: What about this? What about the circle, but you have to find out who is a manager or a recruiter - or something like that.

Jason: [Laughter]

Dave: You know what I mean?

Chris: Huh?

Dave: Everyone is in their own room on chat. You could even just do it at their house over webcams. You have to find out who is the recruiter or the manager in a big chat.

Jason: [Laughter] I like that.

Dave: I want producer credit, okay?

Jason: I like it.

Dave: That's good. That would be--

Chris: Dave's and my first show was called CSS Riffin where we opened up a website with dev tools open. Then you have full control, right? You can just mess with it.

Jason: I love that.

Dave: Drink a few beers and just go for it.

Chris: The idea was to be pretty drunk. Yeah.

Dave: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Dave: And just wreck a site.

Chris: Just wreck it.

Dave: Just have fun wrecking a site as best you can.

Chris: Oh, that was pretty good. CSS Riffin.

Dave: We could bring it back for you, Jason. We're qualified.

[Laughter]

Dave: We're even more skilled now than before. [Laughter]

00:24:58

Jason: There's this mini format that I've seen on TikTok where I think it's Morimoto and his son where his son brings him a bag of Jack in the Box, and he's like, "Hey, dad. Can you make this gourmet?" He deconstructs the meal and reassembles it into something that actually looks pretty dang good.

I like that idea of, like, let's take a terrible website. We're just going to peal it back and CSS Zen garden this thing into something that looks really nice.

Dave: Yeah, we're just going to break it down, tear it apart, rebuild it. Sort of like... But it could also be like WhistlinDiesel - or whatever. The guys who take cars and put jet engines on them and stuff like that.

Jason: [Laughter]

Dave: It can be like that. You know?

Jason: Yeah.

Chris: I actually wonder if design-focused shows work nicely in here (like maybe even better) because they're so individual.

Jason: I think they would.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah.

Jason: Yeah.

Dave: Layer tennis style.

Jason: A plan for season two of Web Dev Challenge is to bring in two-person teams where one person leans more visual UX and one is more back-end biz logic so that we have more time to focus on how things look.

Chris: Nice. Nice. You should be like, "Your challenge is to make a list where each item is colored."

Dave: You should put two buttons in a Flexbox, and you say, "How many pixels is that gap?" Just eyeballing it.

[Laughter]

Jason: I do love shows like that. We could just take all of the tropes of being a designer and just turn it into a gameshow.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: How wide is a non-breaking space in Arial?

Dave: Ooh...

Jason: Oh!

Chris: You don't even get to look. You just have to guess.

Dave: You just have to guess. You have to be over or under.

Chris: Nine! That's hilarious.

Dave: That's beautiful.

Chris: Well, it's cool. The fact that we're just riffing on this at all means there's a lot of potential for a network like that, right? Then what's the idea? Just like Nebula and whatever else, you just sell subscriptions to it, and then you can watch all the shows? Then the risk for you is that you've got to lock down the shows.

00:27:04

Jason: Well, and what I'm trying... The way Nebula has done it, as far as I understand. I probably need to look into what they're doing today. But when I first looked at it, it was set up where these people were still publishing on YouTube, but they would publish on Nebula a week early, so you got early access but not necessarily exclusive access.

Chris: Oh...

Jason: That was enough for a lot of folks to subscribe. Then the other piece of it that I'm kind of interested in is how do we make more behind the scenes and exclusive content because one of the things that I was really big on when I was at Netlify (and something that I've tried to carry with me going forward) is, okay, we're going to do a big production. We've got people in a room. So, how do we make more stuff for the effort?

If we're going to be here already, can we pull out a phone and do some short format content like a little, fun, 15-second interview thing? Can we pull somebody who is going to be here for an extra day and do a podcast in-studio, like an in-person podcast thing for 30 minutes or something? Are there some questions that we could ask that aren't super important to be out in public that we could release as an exclusive, members only interview? Director's commentary kind of stuff, right?

Those sorts of things, I think, would be really fun to do. They're not super high effort because we've already got people there. If we just sort of know what the formats are that we're trying to capture, it's just kind of like, "Hey, do you got a couple of minutes? Let's do this quick conversation."

Chris: That's fascinating to me. We're just CSS riffing here, but it could be the exact opposite. All that cool stuff, those little conversations, little, short form stuff, could be public. It just acts as a total teaser for how good the other stuff is, which is behind the wall.

I'm sure nobody loves that. Let's stick to this podcast. They're like, "No! Don't lock it all up."

Jason: The trick is always trying... You just experiment a little bit, right? The dropout model has been everything is behind the wall but they publish a ton of clips.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Jason: You'll see Game-Changer, or whatever. You'll see the funniest moments from the show come across your TikTok feed. But if you want to watch the full show, you've got to pay the $50 a year. I think that's okay. I'm not necessarily opposed to that.

I think the biggest challenge is if my plan is to take, let's say, an Egghead or Frontend Masters kind of approach where I'm trying to bring people in and producing content on their behalf. Then it's sort of royalty-based. Is there enough of an incentive? Does the platform bring in enough revenue that somebody would be happy to do all that work to then have something that they can't share publicly? That's a little bit of the balance that I'm trying to walk.

We could always do the first two episodes of every series are free. Then if you want to watch the rest, you've got to pay the subscription - or whatever. I'm trying to keep it super-affordable so that it's not like... I think it should be drop $55 or $60 a year.

Dave: Yeah, $8 a month or something. Yeah.

Jason: I'd be shooting for something similar here.

Dave: Yeah.

Jason: I don't want it to be expensive. I just want it to be sustainable.

Chris: Then it's still sponsored? Probably, right?

Jason: Some of it will still be sponsored. The sponsored stuff obviously is going to end up being public because the companies aren't going to pay to hit a small audience.

Dave: For private videos? Yeah.

Jason: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Jason: But that's also another potential sustainability model is the sponsored stuff goes public and the non-sponsored stuff is behind the paywall.

Chris: Yeah! That seems like the cleanest break potentially.

Jason: Yeah. Yeah, it just kind of depends. Right? Distribution is hard and not having YouTube as a distribution platform is tricky. But some of it also just isn't very algorithmically friendly. I think the best show that I make just bombs on YouTube.

I meet people for lunch and we have a conversation over a meal. Obviously, it's very self-indulgent for me because it's the sort of stuff I love to do. But I actually do think that it's the most insightful, practically applicable show that I have because it's talking to somebody like Adam Argyle at Google talking about, like, "How did you structure your career? How do you think about a career now that you've basically hit what people would consider the dream job?" What is Sunil Pai doing now that he sold his company? What's Salma Alam-Naylor thinking about content?

Those sorts of conversations to me are so valuable, and that's the insight that I want into how this industry goes. But YouTube doesn't care. They don't like it. [Laughter] They're not sharing that with anybody.

Chris: That is too bad because I would... I'm sure I would find that stuff interesting, too, whereas - I don't know. Maybe it's just where you're at in your career, but I like listening to Cody's stuff sometimes. A lot of times, I feel like that's awful close to work for me.

Jason: [Laughter]

Chris: You know what I mean? Just building this thing, and I could build it. I just need time and whatever.

00:32:00

Dave: After Deep Mind came out, my feed was 7,000 "How to run Deep Mind on your computer." You know?

Chris: Deep Seek.

Dave: Sorry. Yeah, Deep Seek. Sorry. It's like there are a thousand "Get Started with React," or do this with that videos. It's a shame that this person's experience is devalued against the quick win in the algorithm.

Jason: It's the same reason I think that a lot of podcasts don't go viral is because the value is very difficult to encapsulate. When you write about what's in a podcast, it's usually like, "They have a conversation about careers and fulfillment." It's like, okay, that's whatever.

But then when you listen to it, you'll pick up these little nuggets of just a tiny little thing about world view or some little strategy about how to manage upwards or whatever it is that made this huge difference in this person's career. And it'll completely change your life in a way, like how to install new tech. That'll help you mechanically in your career, but it's not the sort of thing that becomes an identity shifting, like, "Holy shit! That’s really going to make a difference for me."

Who is going to sit and listen to... Who listens to a full three-hour podcast? It seems to be a very limited subset. But I think part of the trick, too, is figuring out how to encapsulate things in a way that show people what they think they want and then give them things that are truly valuable. I feel lie some people are really good at this, and so they end up being like self-help gurus or whatever. Some people are less good at this, so they write these incredible things or make these incredible things that a lot of us will just never see because I'm not going to pick up a book called The Sunny Nihilist, but I did. Somebody recommended it to me, and I was like, "Dang! This is actually really useful stuff." Or a podcast called Philosophize This where a philosophy professor just reads every philosopher's major works and explains them in modern language. It sounds terrible but oh, my God, what a useful podcast. It's hard to get somebody to take the first click.

Chris: Yeah. That's very interesting that podcasts don't go viral because it's too long, it's too deep, or whatever. But what it makes up for then is the people that you do reach, it reaches in a deeper way.

Jason: That's true.

Chris: Which has always spoke to the value of sponsoring that type of thing, for me, I think, because yeah, okay, you're not going to get huge numbers. But you're getting a voice in your ear of somebody that you have a relationship telling you that this technology is cool - or whatever.

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Dave: My dream podcast is one where it's like, "Tell me the moment you hated the thing that made you famous," where I talk to Marilyn Manson or somebody like that. "Tell me about the moment you were putting on makeup and you said, "This is stupid," or whatever." [Laughter]

Jason: Yeah. The moment that Billy Joel decided he would never play Piano Man again on stage.

Dave: Right. He just can't do Piano Man. Tell me about it.

Jason: [Laughter]

Dave: Tell me about that moment where you were just like, "I don't like this." Cyndi Lauper, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," I'm sure she smiles about the money she makes from it. [Laughter] But she's probably sung it enough that she doesn't need to do it again. I don't know but... And I like Cyndi Lauper, but I think everyone probably has that moment where they're like, "Man, I went all-in on that and I just don't know if I could do it again."

00:35:41

Jason: This is a tangent, and it might be made up, but I heard that Prince wrote "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" for Cyndi Lauper.

Dave: Oh, really?! Well, this seems worth investigating. I would believe it. I don't know.

Did Prince write "Girls Just Want to Have Fun"?

Chris: Are you asking Deep Seek?

Dave: I'm asking... Yeah, I'm asking a Chinese LLM for this answer.

[Laughter]

Dave: We're going to find out. It was written by Xi Jinping, and that's really surprising.

[Laughter]

Dave: No, it was written by Robert Hazard, apparently.

Chris: Oh, geez.

Dave: So, I don't know.

Chris: That sounds like a pen name if I've ever heard one.

Dave: It sounds like a BA country star. [Laughter] That's what it really sounds like.

Jason: Somebody's pseudonym. Get old Bobby Hazard in there.

Dave: Bobby Hazard.

Chris: Yeah.

Jason: [Laughter]

Chris: Oh, my gosh.

Dave: I drink Marlboros.

[Laughter]

Dave: Just put them in a can and let it steep.

[Laughter]

Dave: Oh, Bobby Hazard.

Chris: Oh, my gosh.

Dave: What a guy.

00:36:50

Chris: I do think the sponsorship shouldn't be limited to tech stuff, too. It's always been like... We've long wanted a barbeque sauce sponsor on this show. It's never happened.

Dave: Oh, for sure.

Chris: You know who likes barbeque sauce? Everybody. You know?

Jason: It's true.

Chris: Everybody. So, why is that off the table? You know?

Jason: I have noticed it's out there. So, the companies that have been sponsoring me are definitely tech adjacent. But BenQ monitors has all in on Web Dev Challenge. They are both a gear in kind sponsor as well as a financial sponsor of the show because they know that developers are the market that's going to have the disposable income and that they're going to use that thing. I've talked to desk companies, chair companies, lamp companies.

Chris: Really?! Nice.

Jason: There's clearly interest in sponsoring this kind of content. I think the next leap is just starting to think about, well, what are the consumer brands that are really just targeting professionals like us? Really, if you think from a brand ideal customer profile standpoint, we're all 25 to 50. We're all making quite a bit of money because we work in tech. We all work from home, so the comfort and quality of our home goods is pretty important to us. You know what I mean? We're a really good target market for a lot of these types of companies.

Dave: It shocks me people haven't locked into that.

Jason: Some of them do.

Dave: I need a Casper mattress. Fricken' sponsor Jason's show.

Jason: Yeah. [Laughter]

Dave: Or statistically probably affluent just from tech job salaries or whatever. I even think about you know how every streamer has a fridge full of G Fuel in the back. You know? Code Fuel. Come on!

[Laughter]

Dave: If anyone is mainlining caffeine, it's us.

Jason: Yeah.

Dave: And so, why not make Code Fuel? Give it to me. Make it a thing.

Jason: Just skip over the Code Fuel and go straight to selling us $3,500 espresso machines because we're clearly gullible enough to buy them.

Chris: Nice.

Jason: [Laughter] I'll convince myself I'll use that thing.

Dave: The Code Fuel super system. Yeah.

Jason: [Laughter]

Dave: We'll sell them by the dozen. Yeah. Man.

Chris: I think BenQ is genius, though, in that regard, isn't it, that they make these really specific monitors?

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Like this monitor is designed for coding. It's like whatever the deal is, that's just smart because it's like whatever. They're in the thousands of dollars, right? Maybe they make some a little cheaper than that. I'm not exactly sure. But what a genius thing to sell.

Developers have the money. Sell them the thing that's expensive. That's great. It's a genius idea.

Jason: Well, and they did something that was really novel, which is it's a 3x2 aspect ratio. The way I found BenQ initially is I was looking for a square monitor.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Hmm...

Jason: Because I had tried the vertical monitor because I felt like the standard 16x9 was too squishy. I couldn't fit four things tiled on it. Then I tried vertical, and I felt like that was too narrow and I couldn't do anything there. I was like, "Man, I just want a square monitor. That's all I want so that I can do a 4x4 tile." Then I came across this BenQ 3x2, and I was like, "Dang! That's kind of exactly what I wanted." Then they had... They've got all these other cool features that I don't care about but they optimize for a light or dark theme so that your light mode or dark mode code thing has better contrast depending on what your preferred color scheme is. Just little stuff like that.

Chris: That's nice!

Jason: It's a nice touch. But yeah, anyway, I found that, and I was like, "Man, they got my number," because as soon as I saw it, I was like, "That's exactly what I want. I'm going to get one of those." Then because I'm me, I just emailed their marketing department instead of buying one. I was like, "Hey--"

[Laughter]

Chris: Right.

Dave: Hello. I have a TV channel. Please--

Jason: Anybody with more than 6,000 followers can probably email one of these companies and just say, like, "Hey, if I post a picture of me using your thing, can I have one?" and they almost certainly will say yes. It is kind of amazing how aggressive the influencer culture is and how aggressive a lot of these consumer brand companies are about that because, to them, their raw parts, their raw costs of one of those monitors is probably $200. For them to send you a $200 raw parts monitor for you to then post, they would spend so much more than $200 to run ads.

00:41:34

Chris: It better be good though, right? Can't it backfire a little bit? Send them a monitor and the review is like, "This thing sucks."

Jason: I would say a really, really good example of that backfiring is the Opal C1 webcam.

Chris: Oh, man. Yeah.

Jason: They spent so much on packaging and influencer marketing and getting all the reviews, and it is universally hated. It's as bad as the $50 Logitech camera, but it has proprietary software and it's harder to use.

Chris: I hate it, too. That software is what killed me.

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Chris: I don't need a webcam that requires me to run some dumb software. Nope.

Jason: Yeah. So, you've got to have a good product, for sure.

Chris: There were a couple of others in that category, too. I want it to work because what I want is an absolutely amazing webcam that just squishes on the top of my monitor that I want to put there because it's way better than whatever is built in there (if that is the case). But amazing quality. At least the high quality of a point and shoot, like a $600 one or whatever. And that there's one cable that comes out of it.

Jason: You've got to be able to beat an iPhone, right?

Chris: That's true.

Jason: It is going to be really difficult for any camera at that price point to be better quality than an iPhone. Really, the only selling point they have is, "But you can still use your iPhone while this camera is running," and that's about the only selling point they have which, for most people, I don't think is enough of a dealbreaker.

Chris: Yeah, probably not. It surprises me that there isn't even a single one, though, because usually there's a market for premium stuff, even if it sells less. I guess that's what's shocking to me is there isn't even one.

Jason: I have a hunch that the technology to make good cameras has a really steep cliff between low quality and pro level where I don't know that you can make a mid-quality camera. I think they're garbage or they're really good, and there's not really an in-between.

Chris: I'd buy it.

Jason: It seems like the way that iPhone does it is that they do it with a ton of on-device processing power. Obviously, if you put all that on-device processing power into a webcam, it's now a $900 webcam. At which point just buy another iPhone. Who cares? I think it just puts them in a really difficult spot in terms of the quality to cost tradeoff. I don't think you can win.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah. It's a glass to processing to everything combo.

Jason: Mm-hmm.

00:44:07

Chris: I wouldn't mind trying, like, "I've got an old phone sitting here, so I'm going to--" I think Apple made it even easier recently, right? If you have one on the same network, it just kind of shows up as an additional camera to switch to.

Jason: Yes. They call it continuity cam. If you've got your phone... Right now, if I were to look, my phone is listed as a webcam input.

Chris: Right. Right, right. Yeah, don't hate it. I just want it mounted. I want to forget that it exists. I never want to charge it. I never want to do a software update to it. I don't want it to show up anywhere. That's where it doesn't work for me is it'll just be like another Apple device then sitting there instead of being benign.

Jason: Do you all know Michael Chan?

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Michael Chan? It sounds familiar.

Dave: Yeah.

Jason: Chan just did a comparison of every webcam that he has in his house ranging from a cheap little Logitech and the built-in ones on his MacBook and monitors. Then he also went up to a Sony A7-4 and a Lumix 2, I think, everywhere from the built-in ones up to the $200 to $300 webcam price range up to the $2,000 to $5,000 DSLR range and did comparisons of how they work.

It's a great video. It's about 30 minutes long. He just steadily unplugs one and plugs the next one in and then talks about how they look. It's definitely like, "Use your iPhone or pay for the DSLR," is more or less where the quality is at right now.

Chris: Hmm... What do you do? DSLR?

Jason: I have... [Laughter] I have a Sony FX3, which is a cinema camera, that's on a tripod back here that operates off of a battery that runs into an HDMI capture card. It's a whole, like, don't be like me.

Chris: Well, you're in the business.

[Laughter]

Chris: It's like a $10,000 setup or something.

Jason: Yeah, probably at least that. I've kind of just slowly upgraded everything over the years and most of it because it's fun not because I needed to. And now I have an egregious amount of gear.

Chris: Well, for sure. It's a hobby, too.

Jason: Yeah. I mean cameras are one of those things that if you want to spend money for no reason, there's no better way to do it than cameras.

Chris: [Laughter] Nice. Ah, that's cool. But you also have the space for it. You have a literal studio, right?

Jason: Yeah.

Chris: I always think that's different. There's a cost thing. There's a technical debt thing, like, do I really feel like dealing with all this? There's an aesthetic and wires thing because if you want good but I was always trapped between, "I want to do this but I despise having 15 wires hanging all over the place."

Jason: Yeah.

Chris: Then a space thing as well, so there's a lot of stuff. You can't have it all. I'm sure there's a Venn diagram to be drawn.

00:46:56

Jason: Absolutely. Yeah, because over here is a whole audio rig. Then six feet in front of me is the camera rig on a tripod. Then I've got giant lighting rigs all over the place in here. I'm probably 12 feet of open space behind me to give me depth of field. There are a lot of really, really impractical to do at home stuff.

A lot of the reasoning for me getting a studio in the first place is that I was finding myself trying to buy really, really wide, super low depth of field, glass. I was like, "Why am I about to spend $7,000 on this lens when I could spend significantly less than that to rent a space that's just 18 feet deep?" Then because I don't have an off switch, I ratcheted that up to where now I'm renting a 2,000 square foot studio. But because I use it for CodeTV, ultimately, versus what I would spend to rent locations every time I film, it's averaging out. If it's not your job, it's probably not worth it.

Chris: Nice. So, Web Dev Challenge, season 2, booking soon. I think you've done a casting call or something, right?

Jason: I did. I'm currently looking for people who are more on, like, the creative UX side. I'm also trying to throw down the gauntlet. I have an idea, and I talked to you about this a little bit, Chris.

I want to get some of the OG podcasters to just show down. I want you two to come as a team, and then I want to get Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski to show up as a team and just do a Web dev challenge that's just all the folks that I've been following for 10+ years. And let's just have a little fun. Do a silly challenge.

Chris: That'd be amazing.

Dave: I could do it. Yeah. I don't know. [Laughter] Every time I watch a Web dev challenge, I'm like, "I would panic right here."

Jason: [Laughter]

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: And not be finished. You know? I don't know. Yeah. Sometimes it's incredible. I don't know. People are like, "Oh, I just farted out a whole whatever, LLM-based content management system that auto-tags your T-shirts," or whatever. You're like, "Really?! Okay."

Jason: I know. That's one of the reasons why I don't do them anymore is I'm like I'm out-classed here. [Laughter] I'm going to be an advisor. I'll just stand back here and give you ideas. I'm not going to try to build this stuff.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: I think we should just spend the whole time picking out a Drupal theme, Dave. Be like, "This one looks pretty good."

Jason: [Laughter]

Dave: Yeah, I know. Yeah. Ooh... Uh... Drupal 8. What's this one called? Default. Okay, yeah.

[Laughter]

Jason: That sounds good. I'll have that.

Chris: That looks good.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: We're fighting against Coding Train Daniel Shiffman or something.

Dave: Yeah. He's like, "I'm using P5 JS to simulate Earth."

Chris: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Dave: I made a cat that jumps.

Jason: Honestly, between the two, the cat might win.

Dave: Yeah, maybe.

Jason: Never underestimate an animated cat on the Internet.

00:50:13

Dave: I like Lee. Again, Mark Techson is a perfect host for it. I would love to do it, but if I eat spicy things, I get the hiccups.

Jason: Me too.

Dave: And so, I would be in shambles after two wrong answers.

Jason: [Laughter]

Dave: I would just be like... everyone... I'm fine because I'm used to it, but other people are concerned, like, "Are you dying from hiccups?" It's like, "I'll be okay."

Jason: Now you have to do it.

Dave: I know, but I--

Jason: [Laughter]

Dave: I don't know. I'm just like... a lot of tummy things to think about, too. Can't have that go wrong on set.

Jason: On the top of my fridge in the studio, I have a bottle of Pepto Bismal and a bottle of Tums.

[Laughter]

Chris: That's great.

Dave: Perfect. Perfect.

Chris: I had a day a couple of months ago where I woke up, and I was like, "I think I have an ulcer." Can you just tell if you have an ulcer?

"It's not an ulcer." I’m like, "I don't know. Feels like a hole in my esophagus." It really hurt, and I was like, "This is a problem." I was like, "What did I eat yesterday?" I was like, "Well, 2,000 jalapenos."

[Laughter]

Chris: I had this huge bag of pickled jalapenos. I thought they were so good. I just ate crackers, humus, and jalapenos all day long. Then I was like, "God. No wonder." You know? It was for the first time in my adult life.

It's like when you have these embarrassing moments when something that makes sense to the rest of the world you just realized. You're like, "Oh... If I do that to my body, it's bad." [Laughter] Cool.

Jason: First time you go out to a fancy restaurant and they feed you a beet salad. The next day you are 100% sure you're dying.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: That first experience is something.

Jason: [Laughter]

Chris: I just cut it all out for months. I was like, "I'm not even going to put hot sauce on my god-dang burrito. I'm just going to--" and of course, it went away. Now I'm fine. But now my tolerance is just nothing. One little dot of hot sauce, and I'm just like, "Ooh, dawg!" You know? I don't like that either.

[Laughter]

Chris: I don't like that either, so I don't know what I'm going to do.

00:52:23

Jason: I got kind of baptized by fire with heat because we were in Thailand. We were doing this... This was part of my being completely burnt out thing. I went and spent a couple of years living on the road.

We were in Chiang Mai, and across the street from us were all the food vendors. And most of the food vendors in Thailand, if they see you coming, they know you're not local. Spicy is not spicy. They will dial it way down. Like a foreigner spicy is a 2 out of 10, right?

Chris: Okay.

Jason: They know.

Chris: They know. Yeah.

Jason: But one of the vendors did not care. They premade their meal, so when you ordered, you got what they made and it was just... everybody got the same thing. And it was a 10 out of 10 Thai spicy, and we didn't know that at first. So, the first time we ordered this, we sat down, and we took our first bite. That was how we got over our fear of drinking water in Thailand. That was the first time that I ever hallucinated from something spicy.

[Laughter]

Jason: There's this thing that happened that I didn't know happened where I took the bite and it was so spicy that my full panic response kicked in and I started dissociating.

[Laughter]

Jason: The way that capsaicin works is it's tying to the same pain receptors that tell you you're on fire. That's what it's triggering, right? And so, my brain fully shorted out. It just stopped working.

I remember just feeling like I was out of my own body. Then we looked around at the other, like the locals, and the locals were sweating. I was like, "What have we done?"

Dave: [Laughter]

Jason: Like, "We've made huge mistakes here." But as a result, my wife and I, our spice tolerance now is a lot. [Laughter]

Chris: Oh. Even that... Because I'm sure it went on, right? It wasn't the only meal you ever had that was hot. You just kept having them, right?

Jason: Yeah. And by the end, we could actually eat at that place, and we weren't dying.

Chris: Oh, wow.

Jason: It was pretty interesting to see how quickly your body adapts to that because you know it's imaginary pain, basically. It's telling you that you're on fire but you're not. So, as your body gets used to it, it realizes, "Well, I don't need this. I can just turn this receptor off."

Chris: Nice. Good job, body.

Jason: It's kind of fascinating. I don't know what that means if you eat a lot of hot sauce and then you actually catch on fire. Your body is like, "You're fine." [Laughter]

Chris: Oh!

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Two out of ten. Two out of ten. I thought you were going to say you could... Your spirit left your body, and you were having a conversation with yourself. [Laughter]

Jason: I mean for those couple of minutes, I don't remember what happened.

Dave: Yeah.

Jason: It was... I've gotten to see it now from recording Leet Heat where people, when they get past a certain level of spicy, the part of their brain... I can see why they do it on Hot Ones because that part of your brain that regulates what you say just shuts off and you kind of start babbling.

Dave: That's great.

Jason: [Laughter] You'll see somebody get to a certain level of heat, and they just kind of start going, "Oh, this is really spicy. Am I supposed to be feeling like this?" It's like their inner monologue just starts rolling and they're not filtering, and it's extremely funny to watch.

Dave: Interesting. Yeah. It cuts off the governor. That's funny.

Jason: [Laughter]

Dave: That's beautiful. Oh, man. Everyone needs that every once in a while. That's the secret.

Chris: Absolutely. That's the perfect idea.

Dave: All right. Well, hey, Jason. I think we're at time. But thank you so much for coming on the show and telling us about codetv.dev. It looks exciting. But for people who aren't following you and giving you money, how can they do that?

Jason: The easiest way to find everything I'm doing is go to codetv.dev. There's a link right on the homepage if you want to be a supporter, get early access to stuff, and just generally make my day. You can also find all the stuff that I'm doing linked at jason.energy/links is where I keep a roll of everything I'm working on.

Dave: Jason.energy would also be a good drink, coder drink.

Jason: That could be my next... Yeah. I'm just going to try to serial entrepreneur this thing. We'll just keep going.

Dave: You just need to white label G Fuel. Literally, a bad sticker would be perfect. [Laughter] All right. Cool. All right. Well, thank you, Jason.

Thank you, dear listener, for downloading this in your podcatcher of choice. Be sure to shart it up. That's how people find out about the show. Then join us in the D-d-d-d-discord because that's the cool one.

Chris: Yeah!

Dave: That's where all the cool people are. Then we have a Bluesky now. We are powering down the old bad site and we have a Bluesky now, as well as Mastodon. Follow us there. Chris, do you got anything else you'd like to say?

Chris: [Lip trill] ♪ ShopTalkShow.com ♪