Ep. 2 - Growing Advocacy with Hannah Seligson | Devs:After Dark

Yeah.

Yeah. All right, should we, uh, why don't, uh, let's, let's cue that beautiful theme music. That's one that'll, that'll, that's in my head, that's when that happens, right? And then we get to, um, you're such a leader.

Like in that episode of Scrubs where everything is musical.

Yeah, in my head that's what's happening right now.

The music's going, there's people dancing behind me, and I'm just sitting there like, yeah, good. Hello and welcome to episode 2. Now, this is a milestone, episode 2 of Developers After Dark. Now, the reason it's a milestone is because we Didn't suck so badly in episode 1 that we now have the opportunity to continue this, which is a good thing.

Wait, is every episode a milestone at this point then? Like, we didn't suck enough last time, here's another milestone?

It's almost like living paycheck to paycheck. Like, we're just waiting to see the next— that's a good— that's—

I hit close to home, my friend. Close to home right there.

It's a beautiful way of looking at it, I guess, right? You're just— you're living dangerously, and you're living on the edge. So we are, and we have made it to episode 2. Before we get into introductions, let me do a little bit, just a tiny bit of housekeeping where we'll do a little corrections and then Dennis and AJ can admonish me. And just found out, and we just found out that AJ also made a mistake as well. So it'll be two for me, one for him.

So I won't feel nearly, and zero for D over here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I didn't. I I figured you guys failed so badly at the questions at the end of the last episode. I didn't really want to put that much more added pressure at the beginning of this one. Well, I mean, then it's one.

I, I, I lost. Dennis beat me by like a quarter of a point.

When, when you score 50%, I don't exactly call that winning, but, but, well, if you're comparing both of your scores, yes, Dennis did win. But, um, in the last episode, I, I had mentioned, we were talking about, uh, a Sherlock episode, and as a fan, I'm very embarrassed, and, uh, admonish me for this, but, uh, I kept referring to the episode with the, uh, the guy with the glasses where it looked like he was wearing the Meta glasses. As the, uh, the Rheinbach, uh, I, I can't remember what I called it, but I kept calling it the Rheinbach Theory. But it was actually— the episode's called The Rheinbach Fall, and it's not actually the right episode either. So I was both wrong on all accounts. The Rheinbach Fall is the end of season 2. The episode we were talking about was called His Last Vow, and that's the end of season 3.

So, so many people on Reddit right now, they're finally— okay, they were so upset by it.

You're our Sherlock fans. Like, just got an email.

Benedict Cumberbatch is no longer going to appear.

So I've lost that sponsorship, which is— I'm a little upset. I don't want to tear up on this episode. I promised I wouldn't. But, you know, I'm a fan, and I'm embarrassed.

Really not.

I'm embarrassed that I didn't know. And then the other thing we mentioned too was I had these really, really great funny jokes at the end, questions that were jokes at the end, that one of them was about cats or colonies. Uh, that Dennis decided to ruin by asking about geographical regions, completely destroying my comedy workshop. Uh, but I had mentioned, uh, I believe it was east of the Mason-Dixon line, which would put you in the Atlantic Ocean when quite frankly, the Mason-Dixon line runs east and west. So you'd either be on the north or the south. So I failed the geography quiz, uh, last week on that one. So that one, just want to get that out of the way too, because anyone who even listens or knows what that was, was probably like, that puts you in the Atlantic Ocean. And then AJ, more importantly, AJ made a mistake mentioning that Kalamazoo was in Wisconsin when it was actually, in fact, in Michigan.

What are you saying? Wisconsin?

Yeah, I was saying Wisconsin. I totally did not even—

I didn't catch it, but I caught it now.

I don't know if that's acceptable. Aren't you like miles away from Kalamazoo?

I mean, like, definitely.

Yeah.

Like Wisconsin's above me. Michigan's more that way. At least the way I'm looking at a map, I could be doing—

Clearly you're not. You're not looking at a map is the problem.

He's so obsessed with the musician beating him in the search results as a, as a tech person where he should actually be doing better.

No, it's not even the person. It's the, it's the technology that like, because, because of the way search engines work and like the large sizes of things and you remember want to get really well on SERPs, you should be putting your music out on Spotify, on Apple music on all that because that is a profile page, that is SEO, that is everything. And those sites are trafficked way more than my personal site. I can guarantee you that. So that is why, like, I, you know what, I'm—

This doesn't bother him at all. This doesn't really bother him at all. He's not really hurt by it at all. Um, but, um, but yeah, with that, with all that said, um, I'm your host, uh, Nick Laporte, and, uh, this would not be possible Without my co-hosts, who I will let them introduce themselves.

No, I'm AJ.

I'm Dennis.

Hi, I'm Dennis Hudson, developer advocate at HubSpot.

I'm AJ, also developer advocate at HubSpot.

That really, really well, Nick. I think this, we're really greasing the machine here.

Now I'm crying for a different reason. But without further ado, Let us get to our guest because she is amazing and a friend of the show, whether she knows it or not. I wanna introduce you to Hannah. Hannah, tell everyone who you are and what you do.

Oh, okay. I'm Hannah. I'm also a developer advocate and I get to work with all of these folks. And yeah, I guess— I feel bad for you. No, but like, yeah, and I focus Um, more on like the CRM and API. So usually I'm just helping folks with, um, anything that's related to like our API functionality or anything like that. So yeah, that's—

That's, that's, that's an understatement. I, I also, uh, rely on this person, um, like on a day-to-day basis to make sure I'm alive to put out our Lightning Reviews. Hannah supports me so much in the On the CRM API side of things. So there, there's my—

and also you can't forget Postman. Like the work you've done with Postman is just through the roof and has honestly changed a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. There's, yeah. So for context, like I, I do, I do try to maintain HubSpot's Postman workspace and, um, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a beast because of how many APIs we have. We have like 80 plus. and it's more, and I need to make some updates. I'm behind on that a little bit, but yeah, there's just a lot going on. But it's exciting because at least for 2025, like, I'm planning on getting more of our community involved. So I wanna start creating more use case specific collections that I think will be a lot of fun for people to contribute to, get credit. And yeah, like creating an onboarding collection for new developers. Um, things like that. And yeah.

Now you mentioned Postman. Did you, like, you represented HubSpot at the conference, right? Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's—

Yeah.

Like Dennis said, there's understatements here. Like there's—

that's—

Yeah. Yeah. So like, um, we were invited to attend PostCon, which is Postman's, like, their, their big conference. And this was like the first one that they had since COVID So it was the first in-person, I think. Or at least in person in years. And we— HubSpot got recognized as kind of like a new up-and-coming service, like on Postman's network. So just because we were getting so much usage for like our CRM-specific API usage. And so, yeah, so we got like a huge shout out for that. We got a fancy award. And now it's like, You know, I think right now, so far, we've just established like a central place for folks to reference any sort of API spec and be able to test them out and use them. Now it's just a matter of like, how can we enhance that? How can we scale that? So that's, that's what's next. And I'm excited to figure that out.

Did you have to do like an Academy Award thing where you had to—

Yeah, there is a legit— like, there is a real like statue. Yeah. You're just gonna keep it?

Like a Moongman with a flag, right?

Like a— Yeah, yeah. Like the MTV Awards. It felt like that. Yeah, like a bunch of us, because there are folks from like Zoom, Mastercard, Salesforce, like all the folks. And like we were all up there with like our little statues with like Postman CEO. And we were like, yeah.

Did you get to give a speech or like a little like—

No, no, unfortunately no. Like we were hoping maybe we could all say something, but no, unfortunately.

Here's your chance. Here's your chance.

Speech.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, gosh.

This is how cool Hannah is. Nick, Nick, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if you were there for Pure Week. I don't even remember these.

Not this year. No, I wasn't able to make it there.

There was people following Hannah around, like, with cameras as, like, you know, she's like this famous person. Was it Pure Week?

Paparazzi? Yeah.

It was really awkward. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They came. It was funny because they had reached out to us and were like, hey, we want to do, like, a use case study. And they had mentioned like coming to our office and like filming our team. And it was like, like all of us, like the advocates, like we're spread every out around the US. So I was like, oh no, like how are we going to do this? And then talking to our manager Chris, he was like, what about Peer Week? And I'm like, oh, well, for, for those, like, for those of you who like, are like, what the heck is Peer Week? Peer Week is like a way for HubSpotters, like certain groups, certain departments to get together and like hang out with everybody and like it's more of a social thing. But we used it and had the Postman team come and like film us and it was, it was very awkward, but it was fun. Like, yeah, they were just like kind of—

Movie star.

I think I'm gonna do that now. Every time I go to Boston for anything HubSpot, I'm literally just gonna hire people and just be like, don't tell them what to do. Just follow me around as if you're important. Like that, that right there, that's a talking Boy, it's just—

I would respect that if you wore a cloak of some sort, you know, some sort of—

Yeah, some sort of like outfit costume.

A fedora and a cloak and kind of like, you know, it looks so mysterious.

Wear your, uh, your, your chainmail coif that you have.

That I, I still have that. I still have— they, you know, I broke that out once because they, um, I can't remember, somebody in product, we were doing some sort of like take a group picture together thing And then they're like, well, wear a hat. And I was like, I don't, I don't have any hats. Like, obviously I can't. And I'm like, all right, the only thing I've got is like, so I literally just put on a chainmail headset and just was like, this is what I got. And it just was sitting around for years. I was gonna get rid of it, but I was like, wow, this worked out really well.

Is this when you were a waiter at whatever, uh, nights?

Like, what was it? Yeah, that was my, that was my college job. The other college was Medieval Times.

Wait, was it really? No, no, no. Did you actually?

No, that would be great.

In between serving chicken legs, I was jousting. That was like my big thing on my resume.

I would, I would pay to see you joust. That would be— and, and I would bet on the other person, no offense.

Oh yeah.

I mean, it's pulling horses.

Our horse riding ability and jousting ability are not up to par with medieval times standards.

I'm not a plane person, but horses I can do.

Horses are—

they're ground. I can, I can do that. That's fine. Yeah.

I will also pay for this.

Nice.

Now, Andy, you mentioned that they didn't give you the opportunity to give you a speech at Postman, but you're not unfamiliar with speech giving, right? You actually spoke last year at Inbound.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dennis and I both did.

Yeah.

See, I brought the— I've got love for Dennis. I tease him more, but there's love there. Now, what stage was that on? Because if people who haven't been to Inbound, there's different types of stages that you can speak at. There's like the smaller ones are what, the deep dives? And then you have like bigger like hero stage ones. Which ones, which stage did you both talk at?

We were on the hero stage, so we were kind of like out on the floor, out on the open where like people could just come. Like it was just, yeah, it was very open.

It felt so naked.

Yeah.

Yeah, I remember because I would— I remember seeing John's because I was working the booth right across. There was people standing like outside of the bleacher area. It was—

It was amazing. Yeah, like John and Loy, because they're on the same stage, they had perfect timing because I think that they were right before like the opening, like intro, like welcome to Inbound session. And then people just kind of flooded into their their, their stage area. And yeah, like, they had a massive crowd, and I was so nervous for them, but like, they kicked butt. Like, it was pretty cool.

Now, that was— was that the first time you had ever spoken in a large group like that, or have you done that previously?

No, I've done it some, some, like, previously, but it's just— it never gets more— it never gets less nerve-wracking in some ways. So yeah, like I think with advocacy, there's just kind of this like, well, I don't know if it's like a rule, but like, you just, there's a lot of opportunities to do like talks and like public speaking and things like that. And I've always been more introverted. Like, I like to like write blogs. I like to kind of be behind the scenes in some ways, but it is good because it teaches you to be more confident and share your knowledge. So, so yeah, so, but yeah, so.

I, I do have a secret to, to, to talk. I, I don't talk much as it, but what I tend to do is I set the bar so low for myself and it's an act. Like, I, I, I sound like an idiot for a guy.

You maintain that low bar, Nick. You really maintain that low bar.

I do.

I sound like an idiot and I act like an idiot most of the time to set a low bar when in reality, like, uh, you know, much lower. It should not be smart. Like, I'm, uh, just, Yeah, so it's, uh, it's a little trick I do so that they think I'm just a big dumb animal, but like, I actually, I might know a thing or two. So that way when I speak, I can, uh, make a bunch of mistakes and then be admonished later, and then it all works out very, very well. And it's a little bit—

we tell you everything that you've done wrong, so it's okay.

Oh, that's it. It's a perfect— it's like, it's a circle of life. I'm—

yeah, yeah.

Oh boy. Oh boy.

Usually, I say usually, we've only done this one other time except for now. But what we want to try to do is traditionally, we'll call it traditionally, but it's only one other time. But everybody comes from like a very, like some of the stories and the journeys to get where we are today. Like I know mine and Dennis's are a bit unique and AJ's as well. But None so more than I think mine and Dennis's, which is like where we started and how we got to where we are. If you don't mind, like, can you talk a little bit about like your journey to joining DevRel, like in your experiences and how you got to where you are?

Yeah, I guess. So I originally went to school for journalism and it's so funny how like you go to school and you're like, yeah, yay. And then you never use that like degree. Anyways, one of those. But I, what I ended up doing was In like 2000, what year is it? Like 2015 or '16, I did a coding bootcamp and I felt like this was kind of like when coding bootcamps first started. And mine was like an in-person one and it was 2 cohorts, like one focused on Java, one focused on C#, .NET. And so I stuck with, I went with C# and I did this program.

Out of curiosity, I'm sorry to interrupt you.

Um, because before that I was working as a project manager, and so I was doing like some front-end work, but it was hard to like, because I would work, I'd be more customer-facing and managing these projects and kind of being that liaison between like customers and then like a design team. And we, there were like small things that customers would request and be like, oh, I can figure this out, I'll try to build this or, or make this revision and something to like their, the front end of like their website. And then I was like, huh? And like, I just got really into it because I like problem solving. And I had some friends who were developers who were kind of like, yeah, like check it out. Like, you know, look into like some of these classes. And then that's when I came across the bootcamp and I was like, oh, okay, maybe this might be the route. Because before that, I was kind of like a little lost, like just like Doing sales, doing like advertising, things like that. And it just was not for me. And so, yeah, so that's how I got into the bootcamp. And that was rigorous. Like, that was like 4 to 5 months of just like nonstop coding. And from there, I was able to get like my first engineer role. And it was kind of just like full-stack development, worked for a home insurance company. And then from there, I went to, like, business insurance, like commercial business insurance. And I was more, and that's when I got focused more on, like, backend development, building APIs. And what was interesting was that second job as an engineer, we worked, like, we, first of all, like, we had, like, these really big legacy systems, and we needed to break them down into microservices. And so we were gonna use Like, we needed to start, like, building APIs just so that we could essentially, like, re-architect our systems, just because the way it was going, it was just not sustainable. And so I was on, like, a specific API team. Like, we were brand new. We essentially had to learn, like, how to build and design APIs, and then we had to share that knowledge with, like, all the different development teams so that they could learn.

And so that's where the API love was born right there.

Yeah. Yeah, it seriously was.

Yeah.

Like, cuz what was nice was like we would build these like courses, like there was me and like a couple other teammates. We built these actual like API courses and we would focus on like a technical one with developers. And then we had like more of a high-level one that would be catered to like kind of like our business analysts who would be the ones who would come up with requirements for tasks for us. So, we had to teach them how to translate, like, high-level requests, like feature ideas, and how they would translate that into a technical request for developers. So, we had, like, these 2 different courses, and I think that's where I was like, oh, like, because I've always loved writing, and I've always loved, like, helping people. So, I guess that's where DevRel comes into play, where it's like, oh, like, I can use, like, my writing skills and, like, my my passion to help people in DevRel. And at the time, like, I'd been there for a while, and then I was like, huh, like, I enjoyed engineering, but in Bailey, like, I was not that great. And so I was like, well, hmm. And I was like, I wonder, like, what other job opportunities are out there? And then that's when I discovered, like, developer, like, I think at the time, like, we were called, like, evangelists or Like, 'cause that's kind of like what we were when I was on the API team, like API evangelists. And yeah, and then that's just how I got into advocacy. And I started with a— I started working for a company that had like a CI/CD platform, which is like a system you use for like deploying containered applications. And so I just totally got like, I guess, what's the word I'm thinking of? Like, kind of, it was like drinking from a fire hose, like introduced like this new world of advocacy where it was like, okay, I'm creating content, like I'm managing communities, I'm like doing talks, I'm all these things, like all new to me. But it was a great experience and I guess that's kind of how I got to HubSpot. So yeah.

Was the bootcamp the, your first kind of endeavor into coding or had you had done it previously and like kind of, because everybody kind of, yeah, I feel like everybody does it differently, right? Like they, everybody, it's either like a hobby you pick up or you're just kind of messing around. Mine was from necessity because I was like, at the very, very beginning I designed, uh, like did web design and just out of necessity it was like, well, we need to put this into practice. Like, do you know this?

No.

Okay. Start to learn this.

Yeah. Yeah.

How did you like first fall into like the coding aspect of it?

I guess it was more like a little bit of necessity and also just curiosity. So, um, like with when I was a project manager, it would be more of like that necessity where there'd be a change and be like, I wonder if this is something I could do. Um, and, you know, just go from there. And then I was like, oh, I wonder How would I build just like a landing page? Like, what would that look like? And kind of just doing like small individual projects by myself. And back then I felt like it was— I had a really hard time like connecting with people. Like, I don't think Slack was really a big thing like in the, you know, 2000— I don't know, 2015. Like, it wasn't like— I don't even know if they existed. I don't think it was a thing. Yeah. So it was like, it was really hard to find a community and like Like ask people questions or like know how to grow. Um, so I think that's what ultimately pushed me towards the bootcamp where I was like, I want to be with people who I can like learn from and like ask questions. Um, because yeah, I was just finding things online where it was like, you know, just online courses or just threads. Yeah. And just trying to like figure it out.

How successful were you at that model of like changing it into the microservices? At the— was the business—

The insurance company?

Yeah.

What was the question?

How successful were you at, like, converting that legacy monolith system into, you know, microservices?

We were pretty successful. And then, you know, it was funny because, like, once teams were building, like, started building these services, it was next to, like, okay, like, how do we start utilizing the cloud? Because, We had like huge servers, like physical servers and like places in Texas.

On premises?

Okay. Yeah, I know. Yeah. But because I'm in Cleveland, Ohio, it's like we would have just like these huge like server farms or that type of thing. And that's what we were leveraging. And so it— yeah. And so I kind of like was kind of bummed because I left as they were like going the cloud route. And that was also like the community and the work that I was all of a sudden like in and engrossed in. And so I was like, shucks, like, I wish I could like work both at the same time and share knowledge and all of that. But—

I have one last question, and this is more of a— I'm— I feel left out because everyone here has worked in real estate in some capacity.

Like, uh, AJ and Nick are realtors, and, and, uh, I'm just by proxy happen to be exposed to it.

That's awesome. I'm a man of many talents.

What can I say?

That's it. I had nothing more to say. I feel left out. I'm not really sure why I'm here anymore.

You said there was a question. That's why I was like, oh.

Maybe I said that. I'm sorry. Yeah, you did.

You did.

No, that's okay.

That's right.

That's all right. Way to throw the whole rhythm of everything.

That's right. You're welcome. You're welcome.

That's why I'm here. I'll bring it all back on track. So as much as we like to talk about tech and we like to talk about the ones and zeros, a part of this, for me as like a dream of doing this type of thing is also to get to know the individual and like some of the things that kind of drive them, right? It doesn't necessarily have to be tech, but, and if you don't wanna talk about it, this is fine. But I believe AJ, you're the one that mentioned that you also have a flower business, correct?

Oh yeah.

Tell us a little bit about that because like, and the reason I ask is not to be like prying into your personal business, but One of the questions we asked, uh, of the 3 of us last episode was like, if there was something you could do, and again, under the premise that nothing is ever going to be non-techie, like there's gonna be some sort of tech aspect in everything, whether it's coffee shop or I believe AJ said he wanted to be a musician in Kalamazoo.

Yeah.

Like there, there, there's, there's always something that's less techie that like, if you could do that to take you away from it. And I kind of feel like when AJ was telling me about this, I was like, well, that kind of fits into that thing. So tell us a little bit about the business.

Yeah. So I have, um, so I guess I have like a side business. It's called Grace Rose Flowers. And it's, I've always been a gardener. Like I've always like, I don't know. I think something that I've also had like a hard time in the past, not anymore, but like it's kind of balancing like your outside interests and then your technical work, day job, and making space for both of those. And so I've always been a gardener. I started off growing mostly veggies, and then, I don't know, I just got introduced to flowers from— there's a famous flower farm in Washington called Florette. And they, you know, I knew like flower farming was a thing, but not really. And then I discovered this farm because they had like a show and then they, they had, they were selling seeds and I was like, oh, this is so cool. And I was like, okay, so like flower farming is a real thing. Like people are literally focusing on just flowers and it makes sense from like a profit margin perspective, but also it was just, it's beautiful. And So when I was started growing, I was like doing kind of both, but then this was the first season where I was like just flowers. And it's taught me a lot. Like, I think what's humbling about having something like gardening to do is that like you're always learning. And I think that also ties into like my technical mindset as well. Like, I like learning new things. I like fixing things. I like learning from mistakes. Um, and so I was able to kind of apply like my day-to-day mindset to that where I'm like, okay, like this, I got this disease. Like I need to, this plant has this disease. I need to figure out like, what's the best way to, to treat this? Or can I treat this? What does that look like? Um, but yeah, like I just have a real passion for growing flowers because ultimately, like, I really like sharing them with people. And this is the first season where I started selling them and like making bouquets and going to a market and all of that and like setting up my website where People could learn about like what, you know, I, I sell. I had set up like a porch stand, like instead of a farm stand, instead of a porch stand, so people could come and like pick up bouquets from my porch, my front porch. And it was like a self-serve setup. And so, yeah, it's just like, it's, it's really exciting when like people are like, hey, like, um, like I, I got these from my grandma and she absolutely loved them. And, you know, that like makes me feel really good and It's just like, it's really nice to like share that with other people.

So. No, that's fantastic. What is your favorite, uh, you said you started like half and half at first with veggies. Favorite veggie to grow?

My favorite veggie, I guess I grow a lot of like tomatoes and peppers, so probably that. Uh, yeah, but there are other things I want to grow. Like I know Dennis was growing pumpkins, and so I want to check out like growing like melons and pumpkins next year.

You gotta have a lot of land for that, right, Dennis?

Or a fair amount of space, right?

You can grow them vertically though.

Yeah.

We're gonna—

Oh, there's like a— is that pretty sturdy trellis, right?

Yeah.

No.

Well, the, and the, I mean, the actual vine's pretty darn sturdy. Like I have a pumpkin still hanging out there. It's probably, you know, uh, 10 pounds, something like that, that it's easily hanging.

So, so when the pumpkin falls, are you gonna play 1979 or?

Is that the music you played to get him to grow? Is it Smashing Pumpkins?

I love that we're all old enough to know what AJ was talking about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyone under 20 is gonna be like, if they even listen to this, they're like, I don't get it.

Yeah, what are these old people talking?

There's something to be said about, uh, good music and being old enough to know what It actually is. But no, don't they, like— because you were saying, like, with the growing of the flowers, like, just— I can't remember if it's—

oh, God.

I was just— because I was just— I bring this up because I was just watching Spider-Man: Far From Home with my son. And I remember there's a scene, and I can't remember if it's in Norway or if it's— but there's a scene where they land to pick him up. Happy does. And— but it's like, it's just rows of, like, different colored flowers. But it's just like—

Yeah.

It's like a flower field.

But it's like one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life.

entire life. So that even on the, regardless of the scale, it's gotta be just something just to be in awe of, you know?

Yeah. Like those exist, like, um, like there are, there are like, like probably I'm thinking of tulips and there are tulip farms on like a commercial level where it's like that, where literally it's like acres and acres of just tulips, just flowers. And a lot of 'em, they're, they're kind of all over. Like I know there's a famous one in Washington. A lot of them are in like Holland and like Norway. Um, and they're just stunning. And yeah, like next year we're planning to buy property so that we can scale because that was, yeah, like that was a challenge for us where we were like, we, we just didn't have enough room to like keep growing inventory. And so, um, we were, I was getting requests for like, you know, events, like doing floral arrangements and to like You know, sign up at a weekly market. Oh geez. Sorry.

This is the hard part. Like, I want, I want Hannah to be successful with this dream of hers. At the same time, I want you to fail because I don't want you to leave us ever.

I have no plans of leaving HubSpot anytime soon, but yeah. Great.

I'll tell you right now, if I become famous, you know, it's been nice knowing everybody. Um, yeah, I told them last episode, I was like, if, you know, if I need to do like, you know, one-on-one interviews with like really big names, I'll, I'll remember both of them very fondly. You got to do what you got. Yeah, when that Justin Timberlake kind of moment calls, you, you gotta, you gotta answer the door. Yeah, I can't just be like, who's there?

Um, I mean, talking about moments, just make sure you don't ruin the tour.

I mean, you know, you don't want to Oh, wow.

Yeah.

I mean, so far I guessed Norway. So geographically, I'm on point on this episode so far. So like, the admonishment list will be like smaller this time. We still got time. We got time. But I'm hoping smaller, especially when we start getting into— and this is a really good segue. I was supposed to try to bring up a funny way of mentioning botanophobia, which is a fear of plants, but I didn't get to do that. Uh, so I just wanted to just say it out loud because I, I, I wrote it down in a note and I just, I literally have— huh?

That's real?

That's a real thing.

Yeah. Fear of plants.

I have show notes and I just have a little comment on the side that says botanophobia with no context.

So I wonder, I wonder if that's like stemmed to like allergies or something. I don't know.

That's a good question.

Yeah.

I don't know. Like what would like the root, like any type of root cause of that would be interesting.

Yeah.

Like, All— I mean, that's just like you walk with a desert and you see like a cactus, like, are you suddenly like afraid and running away?

You can't have grass. Your whole yard needs to be concrete, I would imagine, at that point. So it's like, I don't know, that's—

yeah, but I, I would appreciate that because then you don't have to do all like the landscaping and all that stuff.

Is there a word for a person who's afraid of a person who has botanophobia? That's the kind of person I would want to avoid. That person.

Could you imagine? Like, I imagine trees, just like nature in general, they'd be scared of.

Right. Yeah, it's— yeah, I just, I made that note and I was like, find a funny way to get this in there. I didn't.

I failed.

You failed.

You failed. That is a fail on my part. Um, but this brings up a next segment of ours where I can probably fail multiple times because, uh, and we can't—

it—

I want it like Of course, like This Week in Tech is already taken by somebody else. So it's not like we can call it that, but we kind of wanted to kind of carve out like a little part of the episodes where we can kind of talk about some of the emerging tech, some of the news stories from a technology perspective. And, you know, not too many ones and zeros in it, but just kind of, I don't know, rapid fire, just talk about like certain things within reason. Because there were some interesting stories that AJ had put in there too, where it was like— Yeah, we didn't. It'd be great to talk about him, but it was just like, yeah, well, weird.

He wants to talk about this AJ LaPorte character musician, like, all, like, just constantly.

That's all. In every note, that's what he's got. Don't forget about Kalamazoo. But no, I figured we could throw around a couple of rapid-fire ones where, like, the first one that I know we had on our list here was the— it was from Yahoo Finance, but it was about Redbox and the— because we're talking about plants, we're talking about making things beautiful and whatnot. But At the end of the day, Redbox is going to be leaving behind, uh, something around, what, 20,000 of their Redbox machines just all over the United States. Um, really?

Like, and, and the— so, so just Redbox, for everyone who is, um, younger than 20.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like a DVD service, right? So like, I don't even know how they operate. Like, people come out and restock those? There's a— I don't Yeah, I understand.

Local area people that it never basically was what video stores like video stores were that spot in the grocery store.

Remember the grocery store had like a little spot in there?

Yeah, yeah. I used to watch. I worked in those video stores. These stores can't remove them because I think that when I was reading the article, like some of the Walgreens have it literally wired into their electricity in the store.

Oh wow.

Power to the store.

Brilliant. Well done, Redbox. Like, yes, too difficult are their systems.

That's wild. Yeah.

This, this saddens me because like one of my first jobs in high school was at a video store for like the longest time. So at the end of the day, this is like watching an era end, right? When it went from like the Blockbuster or, um, Hollywood Video into the, uh, Redbox era. And it was like, it was really crazy just to like kind of watch these things die out as Netflix became a thing. But With stuff like this, I mean, from what I was reading, I think it was in a different article, these are not, it's not like you could, because like, for example, right? Like the older, even older technology, like you can go, best example I can give is I went and I picked up a, like one of those, I think it's a Valley Cougar dartboards, right? That you would see at a bar and things like that. Like that was a piece of technology that while you could still find dartboards like that kind of one, that big, that bulky, That kind of usability.

What are you, what are you talking about?

No, no, but what I'm saying is like leaving behind technology, like in the, in the bars where there's like the dartboards, but they were like giant consoles. They were giant, right? As opposed to like a little thing. Like you could go, like if you found someone that had that and they weren't using it anymore, you could go pick that up. These Redbox machines are like 900 pounds. So even if it was like, they're massive. So even if they were, so even if every Walgreens didn't have them connected to their power, it's not like they could go and say like, yeah, just somebody gimme $50 and come pick it up. Like it's not, you need like a team or machinery to get this thing.

What? Why? What's in it?

So there's DVDs. Sure are DVDs.

It's, you can still reuse.

I mean, if you have a DVD player, but yeah.

Yeah. That's another, yeah. I feel like nobody might know.

I have a solution for these.

You ready?

So it's not going to work everywhere naturally, like out here, it's not going to work at the local Walgreens. I don't think we have that many, but places like Nashville or where like music centers are, why not re— like refurbish them as like, look at local area music artists and grab some CDs, grab some like, yeah, like use it in other terms of it. Because it really, when you strip it all away, it's a vending machine.

Yeah, yeah. Is it, but is it connected? Like how, how does it display the, the contents of it? Is that like wired?

So it's like the picture of the movie kind of thing. And then you just kind of press like, oh, I want like the Barbie movie or I want, you know, Paw Patrol because—

No, no. My, my, my question, AJ, is like, are those, is that, is there like a Raspberry Pi in that machine that houses all that information? Or is that like coming from some server somewhere else?

That's a good question.

I've never used Block. I don't even know. That's like, because whenever I'd see them, I'd be like, wow, I wonder if people— and every once in a while I'd see like 1 or 2 people like at the machine either. Like, and I, yeah, I was always curious, like, at a certain point, like, how, why and how do people still use that when like on demand or Netflix or anything else? It's like, yeah, I was still surprised that people actually still use them. But at a certain point, some people still did. So, but Yeah, I don't know what you do with like even, even other like vending machine type things like CDs or, um, you know, any type of like, you know, shirts or something like of that caliber where it's like, it's almost like, like pop out of vending machine where you just need a picture and then, but yeah, I don't know how like the technical aspect works in that because you'd have to figure some way to like, you're renting it, when are you returning it?

Mm-hmm.

Type of, you know what I mean? Like, because at a video store, you'd obviously, you'd have the computer, you know, like the old, old computers there, you know, checking people in and out. Where does that— how does that checkout actually work? Yeah, that's a, that's a really good question. I mean, that's how, I guess, unused they've been over the last— like, no one really even knows how they work. So that's—

How do you get, like, movies that aren't streaming now? Like, what— how's that work? Like, any older movie, like, has— is, is that— are we just losing movies at this point? Like, I know Criterion does a thing, you know, they refurbish older films, but like—

Yeah. No, that's a good—

What about like all the home videos that like we all have? Like, I know, like, I know our parents that we bought one year like this, you basically plugged it into like the old camcorder and it brought it and it made it to a CD or like the projectors they would have.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right. So it's like, how do you take, like, there are, there are conversion things that you can buy. that will convert them digitally, but it's like you lose some quality or you lose like things like that. But like, I mean, nothing beats— like, a VHS tape was awesome back in the day. I mean, I still think they're pretty cool now. Unfortunately, you leave it in a car and it's over with, but you know, right? Like, I was a big fan of like VHS and stuff like that.

It almost had that like music CD type of, uh, like we were talking about last time with the artwork and stuff like that, where it almost had that same type of Um, people like bought it not just for the movie but for the, like, the COVID and everything like that too. So that's another, um, digital design lost kind of, uh, artwork type of job, if you will, that kind of just went the way of— yeah, that's, that's, it's unfortunate, like some of that stuff. I mean, they become collector's items at a certain point, but still, like—

I think they are. Like, I think like old Disney VHS tapes are collector items.

No way, really?

Which kind of blows my mind. And I'm like, Well, I know my parents definitely still have our stack of Disney VHSs somewhere sitting somewhere. So yeah, it's just wild. That stuff's vintage. Vintage now.

Why don't we jump to— this is one that I like this one because this is funny, but I think, AJ, I think you put this one in here, but it was the— I don't remember what particular brand, and I don't even know if it's even worth mentioning the brand, but the Hatch robot vacuums. Across the United States that start yelling. Dennis, were you the one that talked about this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. To me, this, this is— it's unfortunate, right? But like, I find that you could really use this in a way where you could— I would want a vacuum that yelled at me. Not obviously not the slurs and racist slurs. But it could shame me into telling me how dirty my floors were and that I needed to clean my house. And I would kind of feel bad because I'm just like, this robot, he gets it.

It's so messy.

Like, you know?

So you want a nagging robot vacuum cleaner that follows you around and admonishes you for all your failures.

You need motivation. You need some sort of motivation, right? I mean, I could see this. Imagine this application across other things. Toothbrushes, man, your teeth are dirty. As you're just like, yeah, I'll do it for another minute or do it for each minute, right? Like, for the game, I can see the application of this like across multiple things. I think it would be, uh, it's almost like having a motivational speaker next to you.

We need to talk about negative reinforcement and how that's not a good thing necessarily.

Yes.

Hey buddy, hey, hey, we're here for you, man.

It would be like having a motivational speaker next to you the whole time. It would be good.

I think it would be good. But see, whereas my thought is like, looking at this, I'm like, oh my God, we're one step closer to DJ Roomba from Parks and Rec. Like, you don't need a camera or like an iPod plugged in anymore. You can just program it to start blasting music.

That is awesome.

See that?

And you could do that in your kitchen with like a blender or like a toaster where it's like it could be playing music in the morning. This is like— I like where we're going with this.

I do.

I mean, there's certain things obviously it might not apply very well to, like, even like, because the Roomba is like actually kind of, it's quiet with respect to like a normal vacuum. Like you couldn't do it with like—

Well, not if it's yelling at you. It's not. Right.

But I mean, like, even like— Not this.

This is always yelling at them.

Oh, constantly. Constantly. Right. But yeah, I could see where this applies to most things, right? It's not every single thing, but yeah, I like where we're going with this. Baby monitors are probably the only thing where I don't want it like, Because I've seen those videos too where, like, people were hacking into the baby monitors, right? They were able to, like, you know, use the microphone. And there's a certain line I would draw there where I don't know.

Like, Nick has a line.

Yeah, I have a line.

I do. I have a line.

That would be the line. Anything to do with, like—

Yep. I mean, you say where we're going with this as though, like, this is an intentional thing. This was not supposed to happen.

Like, I— No, no. I— but you have to keep in mind though, let— you have to keep in mind that where there's a will, there's someone's gonna do it. They're just They're going like, yeah, people live just to break things, like intentionally. So, you know, some people it's their job. So it's like, um, I, I don't, whenever something like this happens and it's kind of sad too, but I kind of look at it where like, yeah, yeah, that, that doesn't really shock me too much. But—

So that also brings up a great tangent that I'm going to go on. And then like, think about all this stuff that like companies push code-wise that you don't Expect, like, ah, no one's going to use this, but it gets exposed and people end up using it. Yeah.

Give an example.

Like, okay, like HubSpot, we have some undocumented endpoints because they're technically endpoints that, you know, we made them, they were used for certain things, but people were like, hey, what if I ping this? Do I get something back?

Oh, look, I get something back.

Yeah.

And like, naturally, we're doing all of that. Like, we're, you know, we're working on it. We always say, like, don't do, don't use undocumented endpoints because they could change at any time.

That was HR pinging you, just so you know. Stop talking, stop talking right now.

I did it with, uh, like Postman as an example, right? Like I kind of started digging into, or no, was it Postman?

No, it wasn't Postman.

I used Postman when I was doing it, but there was a thing I was using where like you needed to be logged in in order to use the system. Well, I just browsed the network tab, saw what was being used to check for the login, copied the cookie, copied what I needed to do. Put it into Postman, and then I was able to pull from that API because I basically authed without, you know, being documented to do that.

I'm just watching all of our sponsorships drop just as you're discussing. Yeah, we're just, okay. Just to let you know, just let you know, man.

But it brings up a good point because like you do have to be careful what you create because if you leave it open, like you said, where there's a will, there's a way. People may not do it maliciously, but people like to play with code. People like to do these things.

So.

Plus the Internet of Things is not known for its strong security apparatus around things, whether it's the refrigerator that you can tweet from. Like, it's, there's not really, you know what I mean? There isn't really like, I don't feel like there's a lot of focus put on the security aspect of those type of things, especially when they're like little things, you know what I mean? Like where it's like, it's not like you're talking about an entire computer. It's just like this little, you know, refrigerators and like things where it's like, it's out of sight, out of mind, the, the, the technology and security aspect of it. So, that's why these things don't surprise me.

Oh my God. This, this reminds me of like a, a movie back in the early '90s, maybe late '80s. That was a smart home that like went crazy and, yeah, started heating up the, the, the water in the water heater while someone was taking a shower. I need to find the name of this movie. This is, I wanna rewatch it.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah. I think I know what you're talking about, but it, it is creepy because there's like, there's like home camera systems. People break into those. Like, though, people will legit, like, talk to people through those cameras. Like, that is terrifying.

Yeah.

And, and it's nothing new.

Like, people have— this has been around a while. It's just the more and more people that are becoming more adept at technology, like, you're starting to see it really unfold. Is that— I remember way back in the day, I don't know if you remember this site, Where, uh, you were able to control somebody's Christmas lights.

Do you remember that?

Yeah.

You got put in the queue and it was in a different country. I forgot which country the person lived in, but he had a camera facing his house with his Christmas lights. And if you got into the queue, you got— I think it was like 2 minutes or something, but you got to turn on and off like his entire display. And then you got booted and the next person came in. But like, it was super cool. But it's like, this kind of stuff always existed where you could kind of get into other people's things, but like it just hasn't been mainstreamed.

Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Gives me flashbacks. I remember I would— there was like a way— do you guys remember, um, Photobucket? Like a hosting service for photos? There was a way where you could hack into people's Photobucket accounts for a while and like mess with it and like all that stuff. I was like, oh, that's fun.

Do you remember Google Wave? And when they didn't noindex Google Wave and then all of a sudden you could search anybody's personal phone? It was a way for like 2 days or something when they were like, whoop, made a mistake.

Yeah, it's absolutely terrifying. Speaking of being or having a will and a way, the Internet Archive going down. What do we— that's another one where some of you give somebody the opportunity. Well, it's not like they were given the opportunity, but if you're motivated enough, I feel bad too because like I was reading a little bit more into this because Being a fan of SEO and everything, not too long before this happened, Google, I think it was in like September, Google actually started referencing the Internet Archive for cached versions of the site. Because before, you used to be able to search in Google and you could, they had like a link where it was like view cached version or view cached view or something like that. And Google would serve that up. Now they started moving away from them being the one serving it. to actually relying on the Internet Archive. I think this was somewhere mid last month even. So it wasn't like too far off.

Wow.

Yeah. So yeah, and then they started doing that and then this whole thing happens and it's just like, it's crazy too because I don't think people, like, especially like if you're non-techie or, you know, you've maybe heard about it in passing, I don't think people understand the breadth of like what is stored in the archive itself. Like, this is just the massiveness of it. And yeah, for something like that to just kind of be compromised at all is a— yeah, that's a big one for sure.

Yeah. So the compromise, like, it stole people who had logged in their user information. Is that correct?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I didn't know you could actually have an account with the Internet Archive. quite honest. I've been there many times, but I've never actually logged in.

Because I think there's certain things you can— you can't download unless you actually have an account and are logged in. Like if there's archival stuff, or I remember, sorry, one time it was like a ballet thing my daughter wanted to watch, but it was like from years and years and years ago. The only way to get it was if you were logged in to do it.

No way. Okay.

Yep.

So your information has been stolen. Mine has not because I've never shared a dang thing with Internet Archive.

Right, right. But like we were talking about last time too, it's like they probably don't have anything that they probably don't have from a previous, like, data breach from some other—

for sure—

Home Depot. I keep mentioning Home Depot. I'm like, literally, we're gonna get like in trouble for that eventually. But I just remember that letter and I was like, Really? The way it was, it was just worded weird, at least to me when I read it. But it was like, have you, what you're trying to say here? You know?

Have y'all got any letters about your children? Like information about your children's information being stolen?

Oh, that's scary.

No, I have.

I recently got something from a doctor's office or something like that where, oh yeah, it's just crazy, right?

Yeah. I feel like that should be like the most secure databases.

I can help you there. Yeah, I did get one from a medical place, but it did, it just referenced like, it probably was related to the kids too because they also go to that doctor. But yeah, they, but it's weird though too, the way they word it though. It wasn't as bad as the previous one, uh, that I won't mention the company anymore. But, uh, it just, it's like, I know what you're trying to say. You lost a bunch of information, like a bunch of important information.

You know, that's different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not good, but it's different, right?

Right, right. So, but yeah, that's always something. But yeah, just the amount of like, plus too, it wasn't just that they got the information, but I think they took it down for, I can't remember what it said, how long the archive was actually down for, but it was down for a considerable amount of time, like for internet standards.

And it's still kind of down, right? Like it's only in a read-only state, right?

Yeah, it's in a read-only one.

Yeah, I don't know if they've even I don't know if they've gotten past that yet. I still, I still, I still think it's actually in a read-only state.

That's wild.

The last time. Yeah. But that's like something where it's like things like that that get hit that are that impactful. It's, yeah, it, it makes you wonder just about like cybersecurity in general, right? Whether, whether you're either talking about the Internet of Things or you're talking about like certain websites and things like that, just like how much of a better job. And I say we as if like I know anything about making it better, but like, Just overall, I think it's just because like we, I kind of feel like, and maybe this is me personally, but like we've, I guess the word I'm looking for is grown, but like as we keep progressing, like we're outpacing how we can like solidify and lock it down. Like we're getting so, you know, we're gonna make this next, this next, this next, and this, this, this, that, that like we're like literally running away from like the security aspect of it can't keep up. With the innovation, right? Where it's like, that never ever leads to a good thing if those things get too separated from each other. So, yeah. But yeah, it's just one of those things where at a certain point, something has to happen big enough where that makes everybody stop. I don't know if the Internet Archive going down is going to be that thing just because of the fact I don't think techs, people that are less tech savvy really even I mean, they understand what it is if you say like, oh, it's just a backup of websites. It's a lot more than that. So I don't— it doesn't affect people's dailies as much as like, you know, Verizon going down or Facebook going down where it's like the end of the world, right?

Yeah. Which that is kind of terrifying. That happened to me, I think, I don't know if it was this year or last year, but like AT&T service like went down, like just like It's kind of scary because you're like, is there like, why? Like, why did that happen? And there is, I forget what the reason why it did happen, something with their satellite, but like, yeah, it's kind of scary.

Yeah.

I just had that happen, um, inbound this year. I was, I was going to get lunch or something and like, I don't know if this was widespread, but at least for me, my Verizon just stopped. Like, dead. I'm like walking. I'm not, not near Wi-Fi and I'm trying to like get a Lyft and I'm like, Oh, I can't do that now. Like, I have— it's like no service, no anything. So I'm like literally standing next to, I think it was like an Outback Steakhouse, trying to use their Wi-Fi to get a Lyft. I was like, oh, please connect. I'm like, please. So, but yeah, that's like, I, I, that is one of the most paralyzing— and it's crazy too, because it's like we're talking about like a phone and it's like the most paralyzing feeling in the world.

It's someone doesn't—

Lose it. Yeah.

Yeah. That's I always, I always worry about that kind of stuff because then you do have those type of like large-scale things where like, let's say a Facebook goes down. Because for some people that's— and, you know, I, I, I laugh at that a little bit, but, you know, for some people that's their, that's their world, right? They put all their pictures up there. They, they like pour themselves into this thing that they can't control.

Yep.

And it's terrifying.

And what does that mean?

It's, it's just an ease of technology for families to stay connected and stuff like that.

Because I know like at first I was like, I, I don't, I don't like personally posting pictures of like the kids and stuff on Facebook and whatnot, but like we do have family that lives in different states, different areas, and like they, it's a way for them to kind of stay together. But yeah, like it's, it's crazy when one of those does go down, but at the same time, like I'm kind of relieved sometimes because I'm like, oh good, we're back to like, like we didn't have any of this growing up.

Facebook wasn't—

I remember when Facebook asked for a Social Security number way back in like the very first iteration in order to get an account on there. Yeah, so when people look at me and they're like, oh, your information, I was like, dude, I get to suck my social like way back in the day.

That's wild.

I was just this naive kid in the college being like, look at this cool thing, and like, I'll fill out everything.

And like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember on Facebook you had to have like a college email address and that was like you're in.

And I was like, petition, like if it wasn't at your school, you had to petition for it to To be released for your, like, email address. Like, I remember signing a petition being like, yeah, you should go to EIU.

And I'm like, the stuff we did back then, man, it was just crazy. You need it here. Yeah. Well, let's, let's, let's, let's steer away from gloom and doom just a little bit and let's go into something that— because, uh, there was a, there's this TikTok, and I think AJ, you may have posted this one, um, but it was, uh, why don't you explain it, right?

Uh, which one are we talking about?

The glasses.

With the, with the, with the, with the glasses.

Oh, the glasses.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So It was really cool. It was a TikTok that I came across where it was accessibility tech built into glasses.

So cool.

And essentially it was live translating like what this person was hearing and it was putting the words across the glasses. So it was almost like closed captioning, but only for you because you're, you're the only one seeing it at the time, which I just thought that was super cool. Just thinking about the accessibility in general, like I know when we do events in the dev side and stuff, like, we always make sure captions, you know, um, how do we get a, you know, an ASL translator, things like that. Like, this is just bringing it to, like, the next level for everybody. And I just think that that's super cool to be able to have a piece of technology that basically is just like you pop on your sunglasses and go.

Were these— these weren't Meta, right? This was just, uh—

This was just somebody. I think this was just, um, somebody doing a test of it. I didn't— I only watched the TikTok, like, once, but I saw it and I was like, guys, look at this. Like, this is cool.

Yeah, no, I think it does in a noisy circumstance, like where you have a bunch of crowd noise. How is it?

Yeah, I know.

That's what I'm wondering. Like, because it seemed to work really well in concept for what they were doing, but like, okay, go to a food court in a mall. Like, yeah, what happens? Is it just like, you know?

Yeah. Or like, is it— can you—

I guess you have—

you can turn it off, right? Like, let's say you're just driving and all of a sudden someone turns the radio on. Like, honestly, yeah. That would be nice.

You got Megan Thee Stallion just like flying across. Yeah, yeah, that would be— I could see like, I like the concept of this too because then I can see this being applied to other things from accessibility as well. Like especially like, uh, like I always remember, uh, AJ, and I don't remember if you remember, uh, but our uncle was, uh, he was colorblind but with only certain colors, right? So like I think it was like greens and blues or— no, I think it was like It was like blues and browns, whatever it was. I remember the one time, the story they always tell us was he bought this suit and he came home and he's like, this brown suit is the— and they're like, it's blue. No, this brown suit is like, this is the best suit. You're wearing a blue suit. Do you not? It was at that point that he realized he couldn't distinguish the browns and the blues, I think it was. There's a certain color combo. Stuff like that where the glasses could point out if you did have that type of deficiency. With differentiating colors, like to be able to point out like things that were blue or green, like that kind of thing, like the potential there, like I just, I love that. I honestly love that because that's where things I could see. Because when I, and I know these aren't like specifically Meta glasses, but when I was like watching like Zuckerberg's Meta glasses like demo, right? I was trying to think of like really useful things that it could be used for. Because I always like, I always see stuff like that and I'm thinking like, Yeah, no, I saw Google Glass. Cool. Nobody used it and ended up, you know, people have them like sitting on a, you know, as like a, like an artifact, you know what I mean? Like nobody used, you know what I mean? So I'm like, yeah, I hope this isn't that. But then I was trying to think of like things where like, whether it was Meta Glasses or not, like what could be used for, but stuff like that, I think it's fantastic. Just absolutely.

For sure.

I mean, I like to mention the same technology that what Pixel Buds have, right? Where it can do the live translation.

Even the— what was that phone? Even the flip phone now. Uh, maybe it's the Motorola, but you ever see that commercial where I think she's ordering food but she puts the phone down and flips it up and she's like talking? And because it's like the dual screen, like it's translating on one side of the phone and then on the other side of the phone. So she's got like in an L-shape in front of her, for those listening, like, and then she's telling the person cooking like what she wants and it's translating it on the, on the front side.

No way.

And then, yeah, and then when the chef is talking back, it's translating it on the other side. I'm just like, that's, that's the buds thing. Like, yeah, visually, I'm like, that's fantastic.

This is a Motorola device.

It might be Motorola because that's the only one I knew that was phones, man. They're indestructible, right? I'm guessing Motorola because, like, it was, it was a flip phone. And there's those other ones that are making— I think Samsung has one too, but It was one of those, but definitely it was one that where the glass— it had the, um, I don't know what they call that glass, but it's bendable essentially. So yeah, that was fantastic. Let's jump. We'll do one more. And this one, uh, this one, I, I, I didn't put any of these in here, so I'm glad you guys did.

Some of us actually care about this next one.

I know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So for people to do the research, I just, uh, I find funny things to say, like, you know, Botanophobia. But like, no, this one I did, I did see the video of it, which I thought was really, really—

Congratulations for being somewhat informed of what we're talking about.

Half informed is better than not being informed at all. But again, I, I hide behind, I hide behind big dumb animal and that's, that's my excuse. But no, in the SpaceX arm that catching the rocket ship person. Coming back, I thought was like one of the coolest things. The question I did have though, because I didn't know much about how it actually worked, was, was it somebody actually controlling the arms to grab it or was this like all completely touched?

Yeah, it was one of the bar robots that was serving people that they used later on to—

After sobering up, of course. Yes, of course.

Uh, actually, I, I did not look at this at all, so if anyone wants to fill me in on everything that's happened with the space launch.

So ideally what it was is, uh, SpaceX launched the rockets as they, as they do, and then when the rocket was coming back down, I think this was the— was this the first successful one that they had? Because I think they've tried this before and it's kind of— didn't go to plan.

Wow.

And this is the first one where it actually, like, came back down.

And just watching the video was astonishing on, like, the slow and the, like, the precision.

It was—

Yeah.

During this. And I, I believe there were people operating the thruster control.

Yeah, I would imagine.

Yeah. But I don't know why, but in my head, everything you said just now, I'm thinking about a scene from The Incredibles, you know, the, the car scene and, like, the, the evil people, like, A rocket coming back down into that factory and hands coming out and grabbing it. And that's in my head right now. That's all I see.

It would have been better—

it would have been better if the arms had like gloves on the end.

Yes, like the big Mickey Mouse white gloves.

Yeah, I don't know why, but that's exactly what I was thinking with these like big ridiculous Mickey Mouse hands. It's like, boy, and just grabbing it and all.

It would have been— yeah.

They would have loved that. That would have been fantastic. But no, like the precision, uh, it's crazy to think too, like just— and again, like I, I guess this comes with like the whole— I, yeah, I think I mentioned this last episode too, like growing up not having and then having. Like it's not that we didn't have rocket ships, right? It's not like, you know, it's— we, you know, we didn't grow up in the Stone Age. But like you think of like NASA versus now the commercialized Like SpaceX, like just what they've been able to do where it's like, you know, you can watch like archival footage of like, you know, the parachuting, like the pod essentially coming back down with astronauts versus like this basically landing itself coming back down. Like just that jump in that amount of time is just, it's remarkable. And then to watch something with such precision now.

Yeah.

Versus like you go back and you watch rocket launches, you know, of the past that NASA did. It's crazy to think that those 2 things are only, what, tens of years off.

Yeah, no joke. Talk about the apex of disposable society. Like, you launch a rocket and you just throw away this giant—

That blows my mind.

That was okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Space has always been like this big unknown, right? So like, it's always been interesting to me to be like, oh, uh, because I think like, isn't there still training for like the manned Mars mission or something that they were gonna do? And it's like, oh, by the way, it's a one-way ticket.

One-way ticket. I know. Doesn't that like—

like, I applaud the people that are doing it because that is just— I would love to do something like that. But I would never be able to do it. I would never— I would say I would never do it. But it's just one of those things where, like, it's crazy, though, how fast technology moves and how quick things are going. Because, like you said, back in the day, if somebody went, oh, they launched a rocket.

What?

They launched a rocket?

Where?

Now it's like, oh, they sent a rocket somewhere?

Cool.

Like, it's just— it's crazy. It's crazy.

I imagine. It's like, It'll be the equivalent, and who knows how far off this will be, but like signing up for Starfleet and being like the first person to go out on like the 5-year mission, right? To go explore. Like, we're not, you know what I mean? Like, we've come this far from there to now. Like, how much longer is it going to be before we get from there to like that? That's what I always wonder. Because it's like, you always see these things and you think like, oh, that's so far-fetched, though. Or like, You know, any kind of technology, you know, in, um, whether it's movies or TV shows or whatever like that, but they start from somewhere, right? Like even some of like what some of the military— I'm not like—

people aren't walking around, man.

We got a Space Force. I mean, people aren't walking around with tricorders yet, but like even some of like military tech and some of that other stuff, it's been pulled from like conceptual things that have been in movies and like even stuff like Gene Roddenberry had like dreamed of like at the very, very beginning. Like some of those things in some form or fashion or shape find their way into like the mainstream. I'm just wondering at what point it's like, hey, you signing up for Starfleet? It's like, you know, we're gonna be there at some point. So, um, but yeah.

As long as that first mission you have Patrick Stewart leading it, that's, that definitely is all I want in life, obviously.

Well, they'll be, they'll be cloning by then, right, of people that'll be legal. So we'll have like a somewhat of a, a Captain Picard Although I'm more of a Captain Kirk fan myself, but like—

Yeah, didn't Kirk go up in something a while back?

Didn't he like do— Yeah, was it, uh, the Virgin Space Flight, I think, wasn't he?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, into a low or a high atmosphere flight or something like that, so it was technically space.

That is nightmare fuel. That is like—

Oh my God, you should— wait, wait, I mean, come on, at a certain point, like, you're too high, you're too high up to even be worried about heights, right?

I would have died a quarter of the way up just from a heart attack.

Like, I would have just—

my heart would have just stopped. Like, I would have been like, yeah, we're not doing this.

Boom.

And it just would have came off. How do you get in the spaceship?

Oh, you got to go up to the 10th floor. Nope, I'm out.

No, yeah, I wouldn't have been able to get in the ship, right? That's tall. Like, that's like—

How many floors up in the hotel were you?

6?

Oh yeah, no, uh, 7th. That was the 7th.

7th.

He walked up the stairs, Anna.

For part of it, yeah, for part of it. After the 3rd or 4th day, my legs were just like—

Yeah, they'd be burning.

Yeah, they were, they were. It was, it was painful.

It was.

Yeah. And then the fire alarm at 1 in the morning didn't help either.

Oh, that's right. Yeah.

For those who are listening, there was an inbound that just passed. There was a— the hotel me and Dennis stayed in, we were on the 7th floor. And at like 1 in the morning, I think it was like on— what was it, Thursday or something, or Wednesday night? Somebody, I guess somebody wandered into the downstairs in the foyer area and like Pulled the fire alarm and everybody had to funnel down the stairs and it was just like this traffic jam.

Traffic jam.

Yeah, I was thinking about it. I'm just like, it's probably on the other side if there is anything. I'm like, but no, people started funneling out. So I'm like, all right. But it was crazy because it took so long because everybody was funneling down these stairs. By the time you got to the bottom, everybody was pushing you back up saying, oh, it's nothing. And then you're like, I can't.

They're here.

I can't do Yeah. So it took—

it was a ordeal.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So no, nobody slept that night basically.

It was awful.

That place. Yeah.

Awful.

But, uh, but yeah, no, for me that was like, I can do like, I don't know if it's under 10, it's doable. But like, yeah, there's no, I'm not, uh, we went to, um, the last time I went, uh, cuz we were talking about Pier Week, the last time we came down to, I think it was either Pier Week or Inbound last year. Um, I, my family came with me and we stopped at Niagara Falls. And I don't know if I told you this last time, but they, I, I, it really sucks cuz on the American side there's no, you can see when you see on the Canadian side, there's this nice little walking path and you can walk down. It's beautiful. On the American side, I'm like, where's the, where's the, where's the walk path? They're like, oh, well, there's like, there's no walk path. I was like, no, no, no, no, no. They've got one. Why don't we have one? Canada's got it. We can have it, right? Yeah. No, no, it's this, uh, 30-story elevator that's like a, looks like a cargo elevator.

Americans don't walk. What do you think about those though?

Yeah, I didn't go down that. I, I was like, nah, nah, I could see it from here.

I'm good.

Yeah, that was nightmarish. Just so I couldn't imagine even going up to into a, yeah, you're gonna go sit in the very tippy top of that, uh, 30, 40 story rocket ship. Yeah. No, I'm, I'm, I'm out.

What I'm saying is we need to have an outing and the next team outing is going to be here at the, I think it's, I'm gonna call it the wrong name for the tower, but I'm gonna call it the Sears Tower 'cause that's what it was originally way back in the day. But they got that sky deck where you like lean out and you're like hanging off the edge.

That's great.

Yeah.

Come on. There was somebody who stood on that once and didn't it like— it didn't crack. Like, it's not like it broke, but there was like a crack. Yeah, like one of the pins.

They jumped on it. They were like—

or did they jump up?

Try to be funny and like jump up and down on those things. They're like, that's where I can't. Like, that's—

I can't. Yeah, there's actually— there's, there's one like that, but I think—

I can't remember.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna bomb this geography, uh, quiz as well, but I wanna say it's in China, but there's like a bridge that's that same concept where it's like, yeah, you could see right through it. Why, why would you do that? Like, I don't like— it's bad enough being that high. Why would you want to see?

It's a bridge though that like purposefully like has the screen built in and it starts to crack to like scare people.

Oh, that's awful.

That's awful. I've seen that in elevators too. Elevators have that where it's like the wall is like a video wall. Yeah. Like, like water starts like leaking. They're like, what?

It's like, yeah, right.

Yeah.

That's just— there's no need for that nonsense. That's— ah, that's—

You might enjoy House on a Rock in Wisconsin. That I know is in Wisconsin. Oh, you might enjoy House on a Rock, Nick, because like literally you go up, you like drive up this basic like mountainside.

Okay.

And then there's one thing that you can walk across, then go out over the, over the cliff to kind of like see around. But it's literally like this house is on top of a mountain and then you just walk through like rooms upon rooms upon rooms down in the mountain.

Oh, wow.

I mean, it's not bad. You can get to it without having to fly to it. So I mean, that's— I mean, the heights—

I mean, it's a lot of up and down hills, but there's, you know, bigger hills are okay.

They could have built it on a plateau somewhere. That's a little unnecessary, but that's fine. I mean, I, I think I can handle that. That's not too bad. But no, like, under 10 stories is decent. Like, it wasn't bad. It's just not a fan, I guess.

I prefer to be in a hole in the ground.

A hobbit hole.

I think it was— who was I talking to? It might have been John. But I told him, I'm like, yeah, I'm all for— I can't remember what decade this was in or what time span, but at a certain point, you couldn't build any— in England, you couldn't build any building higher than Buckingham Palace. It was like you couldn't build anything taller than that. Something like that. I could have lived in that era.

I mean, I probably wouldn't.

Diabetes wouldn't have been my friend at that point. Yeah, I would have died about a thousand other things, but you know what? I wouldn't have been happy. I wouldn't have been high up anywhere. So like, there's a give and take there where, you know, we would've tried it. Why not?

I'm curious about that balance of give and take. It seems like you are—

Oh, I would've died for sure. But like, I would've died happy cuz I wouldn't have been like really, really high up in, you know, whatever. I once had to like, I don't know if I was telling you this, Dennis, or I know AJ knows this, but when I had to get my, When I had to get my passport for my honeymoon, I can't remember what had happened, but the place I was supposed to go get it at here locally, it was either closed or there was a problem. So they said, oh, well, you have to go downtown to like the official building or whatever it was in the city in Chicago. And I'm like, all right, this can't be too bad. Some government building, whatever. Well, what they didn't tell me was it was like on the— it had to have been, I'm not even exaggerating, 30-something In the 30s, maybe in the, in the even 40s in this building. Tall, tall high-rise. Might've been the Daly Center downtown. I can't remember a specific building, but it's a tall building either way. It doesn't matter. Way too tall regardless of the name. But I, I, I, I never wanted to like—

Never got married.

Yeah. Well, they know it's like, never had a honeymoon.

No, I never wanted to just pass out so much in my life. I was just like, maybe if I just pass out, someone will roll me off. at the right floor. Like, it was so terrifying because it was just like I, I could feel myself like going up 30 because it was like— and it was slow too. Whoever set the speed, shame on them, because that was like way too long. I was like, I'm watching that number like it was— oh, like it was a blood sugar. I'm just like, come on, go up, go up, let's go. Like, this was—

Calling you for making travel easy for people. It was just—

oh.

I truly hope you believe, like, If you passed out, someone just like would roll you out on a floor.

Right.

I would've been, yeah, I would've been happy with that.

I would've been happy just on your handprints.

411. Yeah.

Yeah.

And the kicker is I get to the floor, right? And I'm like, I literally was dizzy. I was like, oh my God, I know I'm high up. And, and like, I go to go and there's like this, you know, waiting area to sit down. The only seat, and I kid you not, the only seat by the window, the only seat that's available. This place is packed because like, Everybody with passport problems is there, right? That's where you go. Nowhere to sit but right next to the window. Windows wide open. I'm looking, I'm like, can we shut the curtain? I know it's the daytime, but we don't really need this open. And they're just like, they don't care. They're like, get away. I'm busy. So I'm sitting there trying not to— did you ever see that in Beetlejuice where he's looking over at the guy next to him? I was trying so hard not to stare at the window. Oh, God. And then I did stupidly, and I thought my heart was just gonna drop. I just like, yeah, it was, oh, just the worst. Just nightmare fuel.

Are, are you actually in like a dungeon now? I mean, I, I've, I've noticed you never have any outside light that comes into this.

No, this would be Hannah's nightmare cuz you can't grow anything in here. Like everything has to be plastic. I, I might as well have botanophobia because like There's no light, so nothing. I've tried to grow stuff in here and like there's a window here, but there's not enough light. It's like on the side and it's— yeah, so everything has to be like fake palm trees.

You could invest in like the Lego, like the Lego plants. I do have those too.

Yeah, it's just like straight Legos everywhere. Yeah, I have to be that.

Yeah, palm trees in your room. Please tell me you really do have those.

I would, I would.

Yeah, I haven't found one that's like reasonably priced. But I probably would if I did.

Like an inflatable one?

I could do that. Yeah, that's actually—

yeah, growing up, he used to have the inflatable furniture, like the inflatable—

I was just thinking of them.

That was— yeah, that was totally him growing up.

That was awesome.

I had one from the Super Bowl, like, uh, the, like, the Miller Lite ones, which I don't know if— yeah, I guess that thing lasted like for a while though.

Like, I remember that thing lasted for years.

I used it like it was like something from like Ashley Furniture, or like, like it was something like Well, Nate, like, I would clean. It was pristine.

Like, yeah. And the best part is it's just like the grandparents. Like, there was already— it was made of plastic, so you didn't have to put plastic on it to keep it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Perfect clean.

It was great. Yeah, absolutely great. I think it eventually just got worn.

I'd be curious how many other people's grandparents were also the same way. Like, did everybody else's grandparents have plastic on the furnitures? Like, when you walk down, like, this is our dining room, or this is our living room. And everything is covered in plastic.

Yeah, I've seen that.

I've seen it. Yeah, I've seen.

It's got to be an Italian thing because that's every yeah every Italian grandmother I know always has plastic all over her floor, which is actually kind of funny because I think that actually is going to lead us into. I would say. I lay it out. No, we aren't. We would no. It is the per no. It is the perfect segue. It is in the next. This is great. I don't even know how this worked. Thank you, AJ. That was brilliant. Uh, it's not till question 3, but, um, what we'll— what I'm trying to do, like, as we kind of land these planes, uh, uh, is to not have a rough landing, uh, to use an analogy of something I absolutely hate.

When you say landing plane though, you're talking about like the plane from like Madagascar Pixar movies where it's like falling off and things are—

Yes.

Yeah. I mean, as long as we can get a perfect picture of the plane, like this isn't like Air Force One coming in for a landing.

No, no, there's wheels down, but it's not perfect.

That by one wheel's down, one's stuck, and someone's down there has to mechanically, you know, like crank it.

It would— yeah, it's—

it—

as long as it gets— as long as it hits the ground, it— we'll all be there. It'll be fine, trust me. But what we like to do is— what we're trying to do is we do a little bit of a fun game at the end. Uh, last time, uh, as, as we— you heard us mention at the beginning of this about Dennis and AJ failing miserably in getting 40%.

Whoa.

Um, I mean, miserable from, from the ass. I, I have a, I have a high standard. I want to—

Rating on the curve, I think I am— I've got an A+.

I like to bet.

But Nick, your standards can't be too high, otherwise it would be uncomfortable for you, right?

No, they're no higher than Buckingham Palace. That's the height of my standards. Uh, but, uh, what I didn't want to do— What's that?

I think we have a show title.

No higher than Buckingham Palace.

I like that.

That's good.

That's good. That's not bad. That's not bad. I like that. See, I'm glad we do this at the end with the titles now because it saves me from looking like an idiot trying to squeeze in things that were completely irrelevant.

I don't think it saves that, but—

Irrelevancy. I'm a complete idiot in other aspects, absolutely. But irrelevancy, this saves me from that. But for this game, what we decided to do is the last time we did like a 10 questions and I purposely made them almost unanswerable for both Dennis and AJ. But this time, we had— well, we were talking, trying to set this episode up. We had— somebody had mentioned something, and I think all 4 of us were actually in the Slack chat, but something about a rider. It was in my rider that Dennis had to do something, like, or I had to do something, or I wanted something done specifically. And I thought, okay, that interestingly, that can't be the most ridiculous thing, you know, in a celebrity rider. And for those listening, like, and it who don't know what a rider is, it's basically just like, it's a document that like a band, a musician, or a performer will have, uh, for like the, the person booking things, which is—

AJ LaPorte has a really, really crazy rider.

Right.

Like, but it's the requirements for the performance, right? And it can be just about like, you know, weird things that they ask for. Like, I think one of them, I think like Kanye once wanted like his carpet in his dressing room ironed.

It was weird.

Like, but like, but that's the type of things, right?

When you talk about the person requesting it, that doesn't sound weird.

Well, the request itself. But what I did was, I kind of— we're gonna call this a famous writer 6-pack. So I picked 6 famous writers. And I'm gonna give you 3 choices of 3 different celebrities, movie stars, and so on and so forth, or bands. And you have to match who made the ridiculous request. And one of these is about things being wrapped in plastic wrap. So that's where the whole, uh, just to kind of bring this full circle, the whole, uh, Italian grandma covering furniture with plastic made me think like, okay, this is a good segue into, uh, kind of how we kind of land this plane. And this is, uh, so we did this. What's that?

How do we answer it? How— so like, are we gonna—

I'll give you 3 choices.

No, no, no, no, no, no. Are we always gonna say at the same time? You're gonna go 1, 2, 3, and we yell out the answer?

No, no, you guys, the 3 of you can decide who You think, like as a group.

Okay.

As a group.

Oh, oh, wow.

All right.

Because last time AJ pretty much copied off of Dennis's answers. That's why he got really close.

Dennis is right. I can't argue with facts.

I mean, 5 out of 10, not really factual, but I mean, I can argue with cheating, but that's, I mean, that's a different thing. But so I figured this, I figured this would be a kind of a nice way to shake things up so that way it's not always 10 questions because I'll be very honest, like I don't want to keep asking the same 10 questions, but then it's hard to find 10 really funny questions that kind of tie into what I wanted to talk about during the thing. So, but I figured this would be a nice way to kind of land this plane and then we can all get off safely and go about our day. So we'll start with number 1. Now this one's a— these are 3 singers. They're all in a band, but these are the 3 individual lead singers. Uh, of these 3, one of them asked for on tour in the venues that they provide them with a square-shaped melon. Right now, I did— now, at first I didn't think this was a thing, but when we start, when we start doing rider notes, we'll put this stuff in there because it's interesting. They really make watermelons in like square shapes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I did not think was a thing. I thought it was a joke at first. But so at all of their venues on their tour for that year, was it Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses, Mick Jagger, or Bono of U2? Of course, Mick Jagger being of the Rolling Stones. Which one of those 3 do you think demanded— well, not demanded, but asked that on tour of all their venues, that providing them with a square-shaped melon?

Sounds like an Axl Rose.

That's what I'm saying. It's like Axl Rose. Like, who would ask for that? Like, who would want to ask for that?

I'm gonna go with Bono only because Bono is just out there, and I feel like he's the most world-traveled person of the others, so he would know that that exists.

All right, we gotta decide as a group.

So I thought— I think, I think Aegis went on his own right now.

Okay, I'll go right to— I'll go Axl Rose, but in my heart I feel like it's Bono.

Okay, it's Axl Rose. It's actually Astaroth. Oh, I know.

I mean, honestly, I'm not good at this.

Can we just go ahead and take points off of AJ just for run?

I mean, I can score this in a way where it's all 3 of you. That's fine. Yeah. And then because, I mean, I'm feeling—

You did say we were going to make a leaderboard, and I do want to see how far into the negatives I could possibly roll this. If this is going to be like Top Gear where there's the one driver who's the absolute worst, it's most likely going to be me.

Yeah, we can make a leaderboard. But the problem is now, because we're doing separate different types of— they won't always be different, but since the games are kind of different and there's 6 questions here, 10 questions there, we'll have to figure out how that leaderboard works because it's not—

Don't overthink this.

It'll be great. You're asking me not to overthink things.

Bono would ask for tears of a child in a cup.

Yeah, something creepy. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. Exactly.

Now this one's total side tangent, and that's just because we mentioned it.

Does anybody remember when Bono in his concert was like, like, asked for a moment of silence and then they gave silence and then he goes, every like 30 seconds or whatever, such and such happened, that somebody screamed up? He's like, then stop talking or something like that.

No, no, no, no.

Just, just look it up because it's really funny. He said something in regards to like every time there's so many seconds of silence, like, this happens. And somebody yelled at them. They're like, well, then stop doing whatever you're doing. It was just a terrible, lightweight thing.

That's what happens when you get overserved at a music festival. That's pretty much how that works. Now, the second one is a more famous one, from what I understand, from what I've read. But this band asked for— and the reason they asked for it was because they didn't think people were reading the rider, actually. So this wasn't This wasn't a— yeah, so this wasn't a serious— yeah, it wasn't a serious one where they really thought they were going to get it, but they asked it just to see if they would do it to make sure that the people who were fulfilling the riders were actually paying attention. But the request was for a bowl of M&M's with all of the brown ones taken out. So a big bowl of M&M's, take out all the brown ones. There's a— and I've heard this referenced on like TV shows and like joking and like making jokes about it. But, uh, of these 3 bands, which one was the one that requested this? Was it Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, or Van Halen?

Van Halen.

Wow.

I know, I know that I—

Okay.

I just feel like that, like, he's not losing the notes. He's not cheating this time.

Okay.

Wait, so it's AC/DC, Van Halen. Who's, who's the, uh, Led Zeppelin?

Zeppelin. Yeah.

Okay.

I'm, I'm going Led. I'm going Led Zeppelin.

I don't know what I'm going with. It can be all 3. Um, I'll go with AC/DC.

It's Van Halen. Ah, okay.

Wow.

That's a lot of confidence.

Yeah, apparently they were, uh, I was reading it and they, they, they didn't think, um, I can't remember if this was on tour or at one specific place, but they didn't think the people were paying attention to the stuff they were putting in the rider. So they put that in there just to see if they were actually reading the thing and fulfilling everything.

Was it, was it Van Halen that did Right Now? Like that, um, the clear Pepsi commercial? Remember, like, that was—

that's their song, right? Yeah.

If I was Van Halen, I'd always require clear Pepsi to be, uh, in my dressing room.

I mean, obviously mine would have to be, uh, zero sugar Oreo Coca-Cola since that's our unofficial sponsor for, uh, for, for, uh, Uh, Hannah, they were, uh, I was, uh, the last episode I was, I was literally talking and I started choking on air. And like, so I took it, I took a sip. I had like next to me, I had this like, and it was, it was a, it's a special edition. I can't believe I'm actually taking time to describe this. It was like a special edition, like Zero Coke, but it was Oreo flavored and had zero sugar. So I was like—

Was it good?

I honestly had to drink a couple of them because it just tasted like regular zero sugar Coke. I didn't know, it didn't feel like there was a difference. Maybe there was a slight difference, but it was—

I hope someone somewhere creates an ad for us to play for zero sugar Oreo Diet Coke.

I'm gunning for the sponsorship. That's what I'm looking for. I'm hoping, I'm hoping somebody, I'm hoping somebody at Coca-Cola is up late one night on YouTube and is like done watching all of the pop videos they can and then just comes across this and is like, yeah, that's the guy we want.

You know, the person who did the Oreo edition of this has watched all the videos on YouTube and probably is at that point. So this is, this is a possibility.

Yeah, that's— I'm, I'm just playing the odds, really. That's all I'm doing. Okay, now for number 3. This is the one that brought the, uh, the good segue in transition here. Uh, this particular artist asked for all items in the dressing room must be covered by clear plastic wrap until uncovered by main artist. This is absolutely necessary. And this is in quotes. So this is what, this is what it said in the rider.

Can I just take a guess right off the bat? Howie Mandel.

No, but I get where you're going with the, with the germophobia. Okay. That's a good guess. But no, it's not that. Of the 3, was it Marilyn Manson, Prince, or Megan Thee Stallion?

Oh my God. Prince.

Marilyn Manson.

It was Prince.

Oh, okay. What? Why? Why did he—

I have no idea, honestly. I didn't get that far into the reading, but because I just stopped when it was like everything had to be covered. I, I, you know what, actually, no, I think he didn't like people— it was specific. It was— I think they did it like that to be kind of like a blanket statement, but I think it was specifically geared towards food. He didn't like people touching his food.

Oh, that makes sense.

Opened.

Yeah, so everything had to Covered or either wrapped in plastic or— yeah, he didn't like people touching food, which I get. Like, I don't— yeah, I'm the same way, but I don't think I would have everything covered in plastic. And it doesn't say to what extent things were covered in plastic.

Yeah, like bananas, like an apple.

Yeah, I mean, just feeding fruit through a shrink wrap machine, like, just would be like—

is like sitting there trying to rip sheets of plastic, which it never happens from this, right?

Right.

Or, Jeff, it's like when they do like the toilet paper mummy thing, but instead it's like just shrink wrap around everything, like Everything.

Yep. I can see that print. Y'all, y'all watch that Chappelle show with Charlie Murphy?

The—

yeah, yeah, yeah. So freaking good.

I love it. I love it. For this one, this one was from specifically from a 2011 show in Northern Ireland. This particular artist asked that an entire koi pond be built right there For them, working, working functioning koi pond. So it was either pond or did they bring their own koi? Nope, everything a koi pond fill it with koi everything whole koi pond. It was either Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, or Eminem.

Oh, Dre, Snoop Dogg, Snoop Dogg. I'm going Snoop Dogg.

It seems like a chill atmosphere.

Yeah.

What'd you say, Anna? Dre.

Okay.

It was actually Eminem.

Really? Did he have like a love for—

interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, it's— I saw it on a couple of websites that it was like confirmed that like in the rider he wanted a koi pond right there.

I'm gonna have such weird Google searches after this.

Like, yeah, right? Was it actually confirmation that was actually built? Did someone follow through?

Yeah, did they do it?

I believe they did from what I— from what I read, unless they didn't, uh, and I just didn't catch it. But I It is— most of these things that I've read was the rider was fulfilled in some way, form, or fashion.

I mean, you found it on the internet, so it must be true.

It must be true. The only one that, that I saw that it specifically didn't happen, and it's not one of the questions, so I'm obviously— I'm not gonna give one away, but, uh, it was Mariah Carey at one of her Christmas specials asked for like— and I'm gonna get the numbers wrong— but it was like 100 doves and 20 cats or something, and they said Yeah, no, that's a health hazard. We're not doing the cats and the doves. She only got the doves. So like that was the only one where I read where they specifically said absolutely not.

So, uh, well, yeah, that time of the year where they do need to start thawing her for the Christmas special.

That's true.

I'm surprised it's not there now.

I mean, like, I will never forget her MTV Cribs episode if anyone ever watched that. Oh my God, she had used her like butterfly era and it was like everything in her house is butterflies.

It was like, yes.

An animal sanctuary.

Yeah.

Okay, this one, this one's, uh, this one's near and dear to my heart because I also have a love for bacon, just not this much. Uh, but in the rider it said, very important that bacon be available at every meal and during day, end quote.

And during day.

It reminds me of that. I don't know if you've ever seen that Taco Bell commercial. I don't know if anyone that's a football fan where I think it's Davante Adams, but he has a Taco Bell in his house so that way, like, in the commercial, he can get Taco Bell any moment, any given time. There's a Taco Bell person in a booth right there.

I told you I had a Taco Bell in my dorm.

Randomly, MTV Cribs, I think Kid Rock had a Starbucks in his house or something like that. Really?

Oh, that's nasty.

MTV Cribs, like, That I could do. That, that would be kind of cool. I don't know, like some, some barista always there, kind of like, you know, moping around.

That's true.

I mean, that's true, but you'd have to like, you'd have to have other stuff going on. It couldn't be—

For some odd reason, they always misspell your name on the cup still, even though you're the owner.

We hate you so much for doing that. Yeah, every single time. Yeah, I could see that.

Kim Drock, your drinks.

Kim Rock.

Yeah.

Who's this Kim Rock person? I don't know. Okay, so this one is very important that bacon be available at every meal and during day.

Was it?

No, no, no. This is more in the— now I'm not— I don't want music, uh, fans to be mad at me, but more during like the metal era, if you will. So it was either Alice in Chains, Iron Maiden, or Metallica. Hmm.

Alice in Chains.

Who loves bacon? Who loved bacon that much? Who do you think?

Metallica. Was it—

you want to guess the third one too? I was gonna say you're going across the board.

Yeah, I'll go back to Alice in Chains. I'm going to Alice in Chains.

Okay.

Yeah, I'll second that.

Yeah, Alice in Chains. I think it's Alice Cooper.

It was Metallica.

Oh, really?

No, we're gonna— Dennis, I— did you hear what I heard too? Because I will admonish that one next time.

Yeah, yeah, we'll come back to that.

Okay, thanks. We'll come back to that. Great.

Alice in Chains wasn't Alice Cooper. That was a lot of fun.

I was like, you know what it is?

Ignore everything I just said.

No, the guy in Kalamazoo is living rent-free in his head, and now all music to him has been completely broken. Completely broken. That's exactly what it is, and you know it.

Alice Cooper.

She's like, "Is he from Kalamazoo?" No, it's gotta be. But nope, nobody got that one right. It was actually Metallica. So I I saw that on one or two sites. So I'm I'm gonna question the legitimacy of it. But like, I mean, I I've seen crazier stuff, and I can respect the bacon. I I would like that as well. I mean, I wouldn't last much longer cholesterol-wise, but it. It'd be pretty damn good. I'll give them that. So kudos for that one on the bacon. So this is the last one in the 6-pack. This is going to be— and this, I don't— I did not read why this is. I think this is just people being weird. But, uh, you requested that, um, and I— they said this was on a couple of occasions during a tour. So I don't know if it was every single stop, but a 5-foot-high inflatable animal Species unspecified.

For what?

Did it actually say species unspecified within the rider itself?

Yeah. So it, it, it, as long as it was a 5-foot-high inflatable animal, species unspecified. Is it going to be? I, I mentioned something about why, but I, I, it wasn't 100% sure, but it was, it was a DJ Khaled. Deadmau5 or Skrillex?

Deadmau5.

Does it have to be something— could it be good music?

Could it?

I mean, I—

all right, lead singer of Alice in Chains.

You're gonna—

yeah, you're gonna have some people mad at you about that, so I'm not gonna bail you out on that after you got, uh, Alice Cooper. It's one of the 3, I can tell you that.

I'm gonna go with Skrillex.

Yeah.

And I'm Deadmau5.

Okay.

Dennis was right, it was Deadmau5.

Okay.

Yeah, they, they mentioned, they mentioned the possibilities is because he's just an introvert and he doesn't like people, so he just had like— that was one of the theories, but there wasn't anything that was like concrete where it's like specifically did this as a joke or wanted to see about— it just mentioned that that was in the rider, and I think it actually had a picture of like it written in the rider. So that was, to me, that was, yeah, I mean, all right, if you're gonna, you know, make friends, you gotta start somewhere, I suppose.

So. There's a trend with your questions. They all seem like mostly in the '90s. The last one was not, right?

No, I mean, the last one probably in the 2000s. I mean, yeah, 2011 is when Eminem wanted the koi pond. So that was But I mean, the muse expands across maybe a couple of them.

Are writers still a thing? Could you not find anything from the current generation?

Honestly, I looked at some of the most ridiculous. So maybe people have been a little bit more realistic in their writing. Maybe that's— I don't know. But yeah, no, a lot of them weren't. And some of them just weren't that funny where it was just like they wanted a bunch of food or specifically one of them was like Britney Spears wanted McDonald's cheeseburgers with no bun. I'm like, that's just because you don't like— if you don't want carbs, I do the same thing when I go to Portillo's. I don't think that's weird. So, like, it's like, I guess, you know. But, uh, no, these were some of the ones where I was just kind of like, even I was like, wait, why? Why? Why? What? I was like, plastic wrap? What? I'm like, explain more.

White bun is easily the most outrageous of them.

Yeah, that's pretty wild. I can't even—

Portillo's though.

He— I mean, I've—

yeah. Is it like in a pool? Like, what is that?

Like a kiddie pool?

Little kiddie pool?

It depends on how they build it, because I mean, you could put a tarp in the back of a truck and create a koi pond technically. Yeah. Like, did they dig it? Did they like—

right, right.

I'm like, is it still there?

Is it just like now a permanent fixture of this place?

You know, if we ever get an investigative team to go along with this podcast to do any reporting, I think Northern Ireland is where we're going to send them first to see if this koi pond still exists.

All right. Yeah, I volunteer for that mission.

We'll see if our managers can put that in the budget. It's just one plane ticket round trip to Northern Ireland to see if there's a koi pond somewhere in Northern Ireland.

It's totally work related. Totally work related.

Might take a couple of months, but I think we'll get to the bottom of this.

This is good.

This is how we expand the podcast.

This is good.

I like this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Always, always thinking, always thinking. But that does end our wonderful game. I hope you guys enjoyed that because, uh, yeah, these are— I, I want to make them funny, but at the same time, it's like, it's hard to find stuff that's actually like worth asking where I don't sound like an idiot, uh, more than normal. So, um, but I do want to thank Hannah. Thank you so much, uh, for being our guest and friend of the show, whether you want to be or not at this point. I'll understand if you don't, but, um, yeah, but from everybody here, uh, I want to say thank you. Um, we've put another episode into play here, which is great. Um, fingers crossed for 3. And, um, yeah, I— Hannah, why don't you tell everyone where they can find you?

Do I want that? No, it's okay.

Um, address versus trading number. Yeah, right. Pretend like we're Home Depot. Just give us all of your info, you know, and Home Depot.

Absolutely.

Yeah, find me at Home Depot, um, plant aisle. Um, but yeah, you can find me on the developer Slack, you can find me on LinkedIn, um, I'm on the community forum, all those fun things. So anything HubSpot, just Google my name.

So would you be willing to share the website for your flower stuff too?

Oh yeah, um, it's called graceroseflowers.com. So yeah, check it out.

We definitely need show notes because we need to be able to put this stuff in show notes at some point.

That makes sense. That sounds professional.

We're gonna— yeah, like I said, we're ironing out a few things. So we got— we'll have show notes for sure. For sure. Besides, we want all of the mistakes we make to live forever.

Exactly.

I won't have a resume for my next job. I'll just point at that and be like, that's all the fun stuff I do. Maybe. Yeah.

Yeah.

And Dennis, why don't you—

Yeah, you can find me in the nuts and bolts aisle at Home Depot stocking regularly. On the LinkedIn/Dennis Edson, I think it is, and on your normal channels within HubSpot world, I will be there.

Nice. Same for me. You can find me on LinkedIn/AJLaPorte. Find me on the developer Slack. LinkedIn's probably the better spot if you're, you know, not in the developer Slack.

So that makes sense. And, you know, when will you be playing next, AJ? What's your next show?

I am not as well-versed as a musician to be able to play a show.

And since your geography's off, will it be in like Austin, Massachusetts? Or will it be in like Seattle, Texas? Like, where can we find you?

Yes, Seattle, Texas.

Just east of the Mason-Dixon line, right?

West.

You'll go west.

You'll be in the Pacific Ocean this time, west of the Mason-Dixon line.

You can find me on a manmade raft with some cornfruit.

And if anyone is looking for me, uh, to either yell at me or correct me, um, I'm also on LinkedIn. If you're on the developer Slack, you can find me under AJ LaPorte. If you have any questions that are too hard for me to answer, or Dennis. And, uh, yeah, no, at the end of the day, um, hopefully you'll be able to find me here hosting every other week on Wednesdays, maybe more. We'll see. Um, but yeah, on behalf of everybody here, I just want to thank everyone for listening. Uh, as always, it's been a pleasure to, uh, make fun of, uh, my co-hosts and to have wonderful guests like Hannah. So thank you. Um, and we'll see you next time.

Bye. Ciao.

Bye-bye.