Ep. 5 - You need the Highlights magazine with Jon McLaren | Developers:After Dark

Yeah, that's fair.

There's a lot of chinks in this armor.

I mean, it's. It's a fair assumption. It's a fair assumption. It's.

Belly of this dragon is quite easy to hit with the arrows.

Well, I mean, when he makes his own armor, it's kind of hard to. We're talking quality craftsmanship. Maybe Nick shouldn't make the armor.

But.

Yeah. So let's. Let's get started then. Like, we are here at episode five with our good friend John, who. I'll let him introduce himself in a minute, but just to kind of start everything off, we'll do a little bit of. Just a little bit of housekeeping. Corrections, notes from the management. As I promised last week, there is now a website for the podcast, and that's going to be devsafterdarkpod.com. that is devsafterdarkpod.com. you always have to say it twice. You ever see the infomercials where they always repeat the domain twice? That way it sticks.

One more time. Just one more time, please, just so I can.

Yeah, that is devsafterdarkpod.com.

Is that dub, dub, dub. Or is that.

I mean, you can add the www. I think we're in an era where that really. That'll just. It'll take care of itself if you just get the first part right most of the time. If not, contact your provider. But yeah, no, it should be fine. But that. Again, that's Devs After Dark. Pod.com.

Oh, my God. Stood up, went to the mic and everything. For the last one, I leaned in.

Did you see that? I've been watching. I've been watching other podcasts and I see a lot of people mess with the mic or lean in when they want to be really serious and get really down.

I felt very ser.

It's like asmr. Like I'm like, right. Eating the mic right now.

But no.

So that. That. That is up and running as promised. There's show notes for all of the shows. You know, show list and then links to subscribe and watch all of our YouTube or listen on Spotify or Apple Music or anywhere else you get your podcasts. As far as any corrections from the previous episode, there are many. I have a. There's. There's some. There's some. I'm going to. I'm going to bring this down a little bit to a serious note and I want everybody to. I want. I want you to put on your empathy hats for a minute for me because There is. There is. And I have to have it confirmed by. By a doctor. But I. There is a disorder I have where when it comes to movies and any type of nostalgia, my brain is stuck in the 1990s to the 1996 time era. Especially with. When it comes to trivia. Now, there. There. There isn't a specific diagnosis for that yet. I'm sure I'll be one of the ones they name it after. But there is something there. And we do have to give a shout out to Bri last episode for putting up with it.

Seriously.

Because, yeah, it was not my. Not my finest quiz moment ever. So any of those British quiz shows I will not be invited to?

No, no, no. Those invitations have been canceled for sure.

But they can redirect them to me because I would love to appear on them.

I mean, I. I wanted to meet Richard Iowade. Like, it's never gonna happen now. It's never gonna happen. Yeah, I suck at movie trivia. At least with. With within the bounds of prior to 1990 or after 1996. Frame 6. Your time frame. I'm golden.

Do you have like that Trivial Pursuit that's like from 1990 to 1996? Is that what you have?

I get all my references from board games that were bought when I was in like, my early, early 20s. That's it. So, yeah, that's. Yeah, I'm basically like early stages of like, AI where like, I was locked to a certain year and then I was not allowed to go past. So that's. But that. Yeah, I'm gonna have some. I'm gonna have some tests done, you know, and then those ones that are.

This year, like that.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to do some of that. You know, admit that although I did watch totally off topic, kind of money. Cristo, the French version with the subtitles. That was this year, very good movie.

But.

Yeah, but I'm working on it. Baby steps. Baby steps. It's all baby steps.

So ironically, that's a reference from what About Bob? Which was another movie from the.

On the bus. Right. Baby Steps on the Bus. Baby steps on the bus. I love it. Yeah, I'm subconsciously doing it. That's the problem. I can't really. It's. It's. Listen, there'll be medication for it. They're going to name it. And others that are afflicted by it as well will also be able to. The support group is going to be very, very massive at a certain point.

Yeah.

So you realize that. Oh, go ahead, Dennis.

I just want to make sure everyone, if there's someone out there listening who has medication for this, we're looking for sponsorships. So.

I'm thinking the best medicine is like Netflix, Hulu, just sign up for a streaming service that you start watching things.

I always told AJ that I guess the job I wanted was I wanted to name some of that stuff. Like I'm not going to name them out loud because I don't want to give any of them credit for anything. But like, like, you know what I mean? Like I want to name those like late night, like infomercials at like 2am like medications. I think that's got to be probably one of the funnest jobs that you can possibly have. It's got to be. I just make up random stuff. It's great.

Speaking of naming things, I think in the comments people should come up with names for whatever this 90s era conditioning put you out.

Bringing the community in. I love that. John, that is absolutely brilliant.

Great segue for an intro there, don't you think?

Yeah, I think it is. Just one more quick thing just to point out Dennis doesn't know what a walking tackle bar is. So I just wanted to point that out because I wanted to knock him down a peg so that way I could kind of get the ball rolling, make myself feel better after the first disclaimer. So yeah. And then also too I wanted to see. There was just one that just happened previously and I was telling John before we started taping, I always miss him. But any dehugs that we need to like point people out to coming up.

Or quite kind of you. There is one coming up on December 5th where we're going to talk about the new custom channels API coming out. I think it's. I said this yesterday, I think it's in private beta now and by the time we get to this, we're going to be pushing probably to public and really trying to let people know what it's all about, why it's important. This is kind of a new thing for us. We always focus on the objects, APIs and things like that. And now we're talking more about the service hub parts of things and support which is very interesting. So I'm excited about it. December 5th at 2:00pm Eastern Standard Time on the YouTubes. There's also, I don't know, I'll put in the show notes. So I'll give you a link for the show notes for it. Nick.

Awesome. Thank you. Perfect. And aj, whatever you're doing, we don't really care yeah, it's true.

No, no, it's fine.

So, without further ado, I'm Nick, he's Dennis, depending on how he arranges the screens later. He's Dennis, he's aj. Those are co hosts. I'm the host. But let John introduce himself and tell everyone who he is and what he does.

Hi. So my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. Sorry. I think Nick's condition is contagious.

That's the only reason I understood you. You were speaking my language now.

I'm John McLaren. You've probably seen some videos from me as well as the blog posts. I'm a developer advocate with AJ and Dennis. Yeah.

So you're on the YouTubes then too, aren't you? I've seen you around, haven't.

Yes, I'm on this channel. There was a.

There was a series called Coding with John that he did a while back, which I really enjoyed, and I want to do more of that, John. So, you know, let's. Let's get that back going.

We're going to bring it back. It'll keep going this time. AJ might be on it too.

Possibly. Possibly. I do know some things contrary to what people believe.

Yeah.

I wanted to ask you, what is some of your. To get. To get the ball rolling. What is some of your favorite things to create content around? Is there a particular language or a particular focus that, like, that you do where you're kind of like, I could do this all day non stop.

I would say the things that are my favorite to actually work on are the things where. So before I worked at HubSpot, I worked at the development agency that worked with a bunch of HubSpot Solutions partners. And so the things that actually are most interesting for me to work on are the things that I think of that are problems that I had back then or problems that I know that I would have now that I'm like, I knew I would have to solve this in a creative way or something like that. And so those are the most fun for me to tackle. It's not specific to if it's JavaScript or CSS or Hubble or GraphQL. I kind of just enjoy all of the above. But I will say I am a little bit of a self professed CSS wizard. I will use HTML and CSS to solve problems that most people would use JavaScript for because I love accessibility and it makes it easier to do it that way.

John, John, can I push back a little bit real quickly? I do agree that you are a wizard at these two things, but I would say. And more specifically, you are a tables wizard. Css, sure, whatever. But give John a good table and he'll go to town.

Interesting. Now, have you heard of. I'm also a big fan of css. I think that was, like, one of the very first things when I started getting into just doing HTML coding in general that I really kind of gravitated towards. Did you ever hear of the. There's a competition, it was called. And I don't know if they still do it, but I don't even know if the website's still around. But CSS Zen Garden, where it was. Yeah, that to me was kind of the first thing I actually got into that was. I don't want to say beyond the basics, but it was where I started to understand, like, just how awesome and like, the cool things that could be accomplished. Because, you know, you're doing like one little task or something like that when you're first starting out and you're like, yeah, I get the purpose of it, but this was like one of those things where it's like that. That, oh, this is cool moment where it was. Do you know what I mean? And. And then any kind of, like, CSS awards website after that. Because there was a. There was a time, like, not too far, you know, back where like, that was the biggest craze was like, CSS awards websites, you know, and it was just like, for me, that's what gave. Did you. Did you have any of those things that you first saw when it came to css?

Yeah. So for me, it was definitely codepen. And then also there was a thing that's kind of similar to CSS Zentergarten, but it's css. I didn't actively play it a whole lot, but it did inspire me to think of doing things in unorthodox wave. One of my favorite little things that I actually did for some client work as well, so it came in handy, is it's a total CSS hack, but it is so freaking cool when someone does an amazing job with it, something that people don't often know about. I know we're not trying to dive into code, but this is really cool today. Perfect. So with CSS drop shadows, if you didn't know that, didn't know this, your box shadows, sorry, you can actually get really crazy and make pixel art out of them because you can layer them on top of each other. And so you can do basically particle effects, like having things explode, fireworks, etc. Have the individual pixels. If you make your box shadow be on an element that is one by one pixel, you now can create an infinite number of box shadows on there and have each individual pixel animate in a different way from all the other ones. And you can create some really crazy effects through that.

That's awesome.

That was probably the first time where I was like, okay, this is super cool. And then you combine that with the.

Blink tag, and I'm like, this is amazing.

You can do the blink tag. I love it. Yeah. Wasn't there a marquee tag as well? Right. Wasn't that one?

I used both of those heavily on my first website that I ever built.

Oh, yeah.

Hey, John, so you. You joined HubSpot and what, you're at five years now, right?

Yep.

Right about. And then you were coding, like, every day prior to HubSpot. I'm. I'm not. I'm guessing you don't code every day at this point. Like, not as, like, heavily as you did when you were at the agency life, but, like, I would say around five to three years ago is when CS went. CSS went kind of crazy. Right. How are you keeping up with all of. I mean, it's like a programming language now. Like, you can do anything with it.

Yeah. So thankfully, I'm just naturally interested in all that. So for me, like, I'm already subscribed to. I'm glad, by the way. CFS Trips seems to be back, in fact, being dead. But I follow Chris Coryer, Jen Simam, a whole bunch of really awesome developers, dev advocates and engineers and whatnot. And so whenever I see that something is coming down the pipeline. Oh, I also watch or listen to the shop talk show podcast and the syntax podcast, and that also is a tie in the Scott fluency from Syntax was that React Summit. But anyways, I am giving you Subway like crazy. You're gonna have the whole company now.

I was literally gonna go make lunch. I was just gonna. I was good. I got. I got pizza upstairs. I can go. It's. I'm good. But no, I'm glad that you mentioned some of that stuff that you use to, like, keep up to date, because, like, I literally just follow the Kardashians on X and I really. My CSS skills have not improved at all. So I'm. I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong. No, no, no.

Keep up that path.

That's what you're doing wrong. Chloe's the one you gotta follow.

She knows stuff. You see, there's multiple, like, with me and aj it's like if you follow one of us, you'll at least get 50% of some like really interesting but boring stuff. There's just, there's too many to follow at this point. But I wanted to ask you. Not even a segue to anything, but I, I wanted to ask, I wanted to ask you before. I want to talk about the, the react summit. Absolutely. But I, I wanted to get first though, one of the things we like to do and we've asked just about everybody and I mean anywhere from external to internal people, but your journey to here or your journey basically into the, into the business or into the, the atmosphere of, you know, coding or tech in general. How did you, how did that happen?

Real estate.

I can say for once. Well, I think Bri also was not real estate.

Right, right.

There are dozens of us that are not.

We're breaking the chain. I had nothing to do with real estate. Same, same situation as free. Most I've gotten into real estate. It's buying my own house and playing with things. But my start was actually when I was 8 years old. I was really into a video game called Guild Wars Create game, the whole series games. And I decided I wanted to make a website for my guild at the time and I knew nothing. I knew absolutely nothing. So I was just googling HTML tags and trying to scrapily put this thing together. And this was at the time when like the font tag was a thing. So yeah, this code was horrendous and everything was very in vertical because I didn't know how to do table based layouts at that time yet. And doing CSS responsibly just definitely was not a thing yet. Yeah, it was horrendous looking marquee tags and blink tags everywhere. It was great. And then after that, well, probably for my benefit, that site is no longer online and to my knowledge it is not on archive.org I was just gonna.

Ask, I was gonna be like Ripley to archive.org this is that what we need? But no, I can respect that because I similarly like PHP forum like templates. Right. Like customizing those was kind of like my first journey into that same type of process as well. When I was a kid, like I can't remember, I think it was like, like stuff like original like Medal of Honor or Call of Duty, like those type of ones, like the original ones where it was like guild or clan, like websites and stuff like that and forums for things like that where just like building those out and like customizing those was like break it and learn type of situation. So. Yeah, no, that. The utmost respect for that kind of.

That kind of reminds. That kind of reminded me. I did do a tiny bit of the like forum customizing and stuff too. But what I really did a lot was MySpace was big back in the day. And so I would make little. Like, for example, MySpace started having ads that would appear on your profile. And so I wrote CSS that would hide those ads or replace the ads with something else.

You were the original ad blocker. You literally, you were the original ad blocker. Is.

Can we say that Tom is like perhaps the most influential developer advocate out there?

Probably.

I agree. And he's all of our friends. Yeah.

Not many people want to be our friends after being on this podcast. But Tom, Tom's always there for us. He's always been the dress. So I appreciate that. That's really good. So after a, so after, like, after a young age, after getting into like coding for let's say the gaming sites, like that, what was one of the next things that kind of sparked. Because at a certain point then, right, you're, you know, as, as a hobby or as something like you do to gain the knowledge, there has to come a point, right? And this is with anybody, not just one person in particular, where you hit that either milestone or you hit that point in time where you're like, okay, this, this could become a thing, like a career or this could become something more than just me. And I don't mean to sound disingenuous, but like this could be more than just me like messing around with a site and just like, you know, trying to break stuff. Do you remember like the point in which you thought I could do something with this?

Yeah. So I was maybe, I'm going to say like 10 years old. So again, I got a weird start. But at around 10, my mom had this friend that had a like videography business. So like he would, he would shoot like videos of conferences, videos of concerts, videos of just everything, like weddings, everything. And he decided he needed a website to promote his business and he wanted to put samples of all of his videos up so that potential clients could actually go, oh, like this is, this is my, like what I could get. And well, I, I was dumb and, and a 10 year old and my mom was like, hey, like, are you interested in doing this? He said these, he's willing to pay. Like, I, I don't remember the exact number, but I want to say it was like between 100 and 300 bucks for this. And like I was like the extension to Gilmore's is coming out here. I think I want to do this.

For a 10 year old. That's like, that's millionaire money right there.

You're like, I'm gonna get my own house, make my own rule.

Yeah. And I did a terrible job like looking back like, I mean I did the best that I could for my age and everything but basically it was like I was putting you remember back when not iframes but frame sets and frames were there.

Yeah, yeah.

So I didn't learn yet that you could like use like PHP or anything to create like templates that would be reused across pages. So what I did was I created frames and frame sets. So you'd have like your nav menu within a frame. You'd have the individual video within a frame. Yeah. And the videos, I didn't know how to actually like embed them on a page. So I just uploading them to Google videos at the time shout out to the team. That worked out that and I'm happy there worked the random way. But yeah. So I uploaded all that to there and then just basically made a ton of individual HTML files for each video. Wow. And it worked. It looked terrible. I'm not going to call the name of the business because it is still around and I have looked it up.

And the funny part is they're still using that. Please.

The funny part is he's still using a website that was clearly made from that time period, but probably is not mine. Someone else did it and somehow did just as poorly at it.

Another 10 year old. This person.

This is the last 10 year old I hire. It's 12 year olds from now on. That is it.

Exactly. Yeah. And then from there I knew right from then and I was like, okay, this web development thing, it's fun, I'm enjoying it. I'm solving problems and I'm kind of good at it. Not, not great at it clearly. But I was good enough at it that like I took like a high school class that was web development and fun fact, I failed.

Were you still 10?

No, no, no, no. This is later on. Yeah, this was later on but in high school I took, I took a web development class and the fun fact of it is I actually failed it.

I'm going to slack your manager as you're talking. Keep going, say more.

So what happened was the teacher actually really hated the way that I did everything because I did it in code. We were using Dreamweaver. She only knew how to do everything with the wysiwyg interface. And I was like, I'm way faster just writing the code. Like I might just do this. And. And so the funny part is like, I did all the assignments and I did them, like to see, like, perfect. And she failed me because I was doing it in the code view, not exactly ethical, but so I was like, well, I'm not accepting the failure. So next year after that I'm back in her class again just to annoy her. And I didn't change my tactic. I stayed doing the, like manually coding everything. But I also had all of my assignments from the prior year. So I just like went nuts on all of them. Like make them very clearly, like, okay, this person absolutely knows what they're doing kind of a thing, like making little like explosions happen when you clicked things and doing goofy. Whatever you can imagine a kid would, would do to make a website cool. Including, like my final project was a friend of mine in the same class. We built these websites that were as if they were for like warring countries, that the countries were like, the people were produce, not people. So like mine was like the Idaho potatoes or something and his were something else, like oranges or something. And so I built on my site. I know this is ridiculous, but I built on my site because what I figured out I could do in Dreamweaver that I didn't know how to do by coding by hand was Dreamweaver had this really cool, really early animation system. So you could like do keyframes and everything.

Yeah.

And I was just loving that. And so as a kid, I like, that's right, his team, his team was the Florida oranges. So I made a map up here. Not ethical, but made a map map appear and then add a button at the top of the screen and it's just like a Google map or whatever. When you click the. The button. What it would do is it would show a nuke launching from Idaho traveling to Florida and then it would get to Florida and it would explode and, and show like sparks and whatever all over the street. But then, but then immediately after that, it would show my friend's website in an iframe and then it would show that like the whole website was getting disfigured and blown up.

Oh my God, that's amazing.

John is still in this class, by the way. He's failed.

Yeah, it's like a 20 something year doctorate that you have to get to get in order to. As you're describing this, I'm imagining like hamburgers and hot dogs and bayonet warfare. I'm like, what is going on?

Yeah. So it was, it was ridiculous. And the funny part about it is, well, funny and sad. So the teacher still strongly did not like me, did not give me a good grade. I can't remember if she either failed me again or gave me a date, but I ended up bringing it up to another teacher who then advised me to bring it up to the principal because, like, I showed what I had built and they were like, like, I get that it may not visually be the most appealing or whatever, but this is freaking amazing for your age and your, like, class and everything. And technically it met all of the requirements that the teacher had. So you shouldn't be like, I could understand getting a B, but you shouldn't be getting an F or a D. Yeah. But I brought it up and ended up my grade got changed drastically in that class from a really low grade to an A. And I had heard that the teacher didn't work there anymore. So I, I, I feel bad that she may have been fired. I don't know.

I can imagine. Like, John's assignments were like, just create this thing in like tables and he submits as like the final thing, like a, you know, a database driven commerce site.

It's a little much, but okay.

Watching buds at your teacher?

Yeah. So little weird start for me.

I mean, everybody has a unique journey, so I mean, it's no more weirder than anybody else's. At what point then did you, at what point did developer relations start to, like, play a role in what you were doing as your career went on from. Because I imagine, like, if you're already building like, complex things at 10, you created probably the beta of Facebook at 12, and then so what? So when did developer relations start to make its way into some of the work that you were doing?

So, honestly, it started. So I worked for a company called Spin Group. Some of you may be familiar with that name because that company possibly works with your company. But also another hubspotter now also came from Spin Group. His name is bj And I worked over there. I was building for a period of time. We were able to build a website in two weeks turn around time. And these were enterprise websites. And then clients started wanting more complicated things, so stuff started taking longer, et cetera. But my start started there. So I honestly took that job from a. I posted my resume on Craigslist. And this sounds crazy because I was like, man, Craigslist, why would I put that? Sounds sketch. But I had worked with another web developer who is from Wisconsin. I was originally in Minnesota. And that guy was like, hey, yeah, I used to do freelance and I would get all of my work through Craigslist. And I was like, really? So I of course did the LinkedIn thing and all that, but I also put my resume out on Craigslist. And what do you know, I got offered the job before I even moved out to Wisconsin. And so at that company, they're like, hey, like, we're building a lot of these sites in HubSpot. Do you know HubSpot? I was like, I know. And then I don't know anything. And so he. He made me full time focus on building HubSpot websites. I got pretty darn good at it and then started coming up with, like, little tools and helpers to make it easier to build fast. So, for example, many of you out there might use the developer Chrome extension. I forked that basically from something that William Spiro, a hubspotter, who was a hubspotter at the time, had built. And I was like, hey, I want to add a whole bunch of features to HubSpot to make it easier to build things for myself. And I was like, but it's also cool if, like, everybody else can use them, because why wouldn't I give it to everybody? So I did that. Got super active in our developer Slack. Started doing some talks at a prior inbound side event, et cetera. And then the wobbly AJ and Dennis and I went. We organized a whole developer meetup because HubSpot was not going to have a official event for developers that year. And it was a ton of fun. And to the dismay or to the confusion of Dennis, AJ and I had to hide from him that we were outspotters.

I feel bad. We. I hide from Dennis all the time.

Yeah, I saw mine bush at inbound last. I was like, why?

Yeah, we were on the same hotel floor and I had to, like, peek out every time to make sure he wasn't around so I could leave without having to talk to him.

It was so awkward.

He just camped out outside your door. Oh, hey, you're waiting.

I had to call. I had to call the front desk every time and say, is there. Can you page Dennis, please? And they're like, oh, he's not there. Then I know I could leave my room. So that's why it took me so long to get anywhere. It was very awkward. But not to derail. Sorry.

Well, it's not a. It's not a derailment because speaking of hotel rooms. So while we were planning this whole Thing and trying to hide from the community members that we were suddenly now HubSpot employees. AJ and I got swollen out to HubSpot headquarters for in person training, and we were put in the same hotel. So we were on this call with probably six different people, and we were all just planning out the event. And thankfully, AJ caught this, and I didn't know until after, and he told me, but. So we both picked the exact same place in our hotel rooms to do the call from. Well, the problem is the pictures are identical, you know, hotels.

Yeah.

Was like, sorry, I'm sick or something like that. Yeah. Were you both eating a Chick Fil.

A at the same time?

Yeah, that's literally what it was. It was the same. Like, the couches were the same. The artwork. It literally looked like if I would have just turned my computer, John was next to me.

Like, you should have just said, we both shop for furniture at the same place. What's the problem, folks?

Yeah, I just remember him and I were talking at great lengths because it was like, what do we do? We're supposed to be jumping on this call with all of the community people, and they don't know that we just got hired by HubSpot, but we weren't allowed to say anything yet because it hasn't been, like, told to everybody yet. So, like, we were just kind of, like, literally, him and I, we. We paled around for, like, two weeks, and, like, we went everywhere, and it was. It was. It was hilarious. But I do remember, and I want to call this out, like, at that time, that first week was really rough for me because I was switching up medications, and John was a lifesaver. Like, he was there for me every minute. So, like, I do want to call out that, like, when John says, like, he likes to help people, he's not just saying that. Like, he literally is one of the most helpful people ever and will always help you, so.

Well, I already have diabetes, but that was really sweet.

It was really.

Why I just have to call that out, because that's literally, like, one of my favorite pictures is the picture of you and I in front of Emmett's bar where we're both giving the thumbs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love that idea. I've seen you're. You had that as, like, a profile picture at one point.

He loved John and that so much. Or was it the other way around?

It was the other way around.

Other way around. So we have. So we have an internal emoji in slack that is AJ approved, and it's AJ doing This for that fiction. That's great.

Now you mentioned that before you were doing speeches and stuff, you did that before you were at HubSpot.

Yeah, so I did that before I was at HubSpot. And actually that and the work that I did on the Chrome extension and the interactions in the developer Slack where I was doing a lot of like, I kind of learned that by helping other people, I would learn things faster, I would have fun, I would grow relationships. Those people would then teach me back things that they learned. And so from there, it just kind of turned into a snowball effect of like, hey, this is a lot of fun. This is the fun part of my job, the part where I have these deadlines. Not as fun. Like, granted, when you have like a talk to do, it's still a deadline and it is stressful. It's even today, it's. It's stressful to have like a short turnaround for giving a talk. But I was like, I could just like when I. When I heard that there was an opening for developer relations. Being a developer advocate. Fun fact. Well, I'll wait a moment. So, Ben. So when I had heard about that, I was like, man, that's the fun part about what I'm doing. And I really love where I work right now. Bin Group, awesome company, awesome owner. I swear by it. DJ swears. Swears by it as well. But the opportunity was like, I should at least try. This is what I'm already doing for free. I could just be getting paid to do it full time.

So you guys get paid here.

Oh, sorry. This is awkward.

Don't worry.

I. Yeah, I mean. Okay. Wow.

The checks in the mail, the same speed as my shirt is. You should get that.

Sometimes my checks are sitting in a box somewhere and HRS is like collecting that. Yeah, that's okay.

Postmark to Illinois, but they'll get there eventually.

Yeah, yeah.

The shirt. The shirt should be there by like Monday. I'm just letting you know.

Sure.

But John, let me ask you, does it get for you, does it get easy? Like as you keep doing? Because when we talked with. Oh, God, I can't remember if it was Hannah or if it was Bri. And everybody knows this, like at. Not the. The previous. Not at this inbound, but the previous one. Like speaking in front of larger groups or more people as time goes on, do you find it easier or the same? Or is there like a tactic that you use where. Yeah, maybe it. It doesn't really even affect you at.

This point, so it definitely still affects me. But it's different. Something I learned about myself. And I didn't actually learn this directly through giving talks for HubSpot or about HubSpot. I actually learned it at weddings. So I've been a buffian or a bruising inc a few times. And what I learned is I enjoy public speaking. But then here's the crazy part about it. In the run up to doing the public speaking, I am nervous as all heck. I have notes like crazy. My like, like I, I was so anxious the first time I had to give one of those kind of talks. But like I, I enjoy making people laugh. I enjoy talking about interesting things. And so what I found was in the moment when I'm actually talking, giving a talk, I'm on autopilot. My brain is not like, like I, I am aware that I am on the stage or on, on video talking, but I am not. I don't have to think as hard about what I'm about to say. I am saying something I already know. And I am also just trying to enjoy that I'm talking to all these people. They. Their facial expressions are. That they seem like they're at least interested. Or I tell a joke and it gets a laugh. Or in my case, I like to tell a lot of dad jokes. So occasionally I'll get it grown. And I enjoy that too. So I enjoy all of that. And I kind of just learned that I'm going to be anxious. I'm never going to feel fully comfortable. When it came to inbound doing that talk, we don't know the exact numbers of how many people were there because we had a badge tracking system and it was literally not possible for it to track everyone because we were outside of the bounds of that tracking system of how many people were there?

Well, there were people lined up. I was, I was working the booth directly across from it, like the customer service booth and there were people flooding like outside the stage. Like it was, yeah, it was, it was immense. The amount of people there, everyone yelling, yeah, John, John.

It was so cool. And it was so nerve wracking at the same time because like, I don't know, I, I gave that. In the run up to that event, everything was like Covid situation. Everything was virtual. I was in my office or, or I had like even a fake facade banner behind me when I gave talks. And then all of a sudden now there's like a ton of people in front of me. And what's funny is. So I actually brought new. One sec. I had brought these notes up on stage with Me. And there goes my earbud again. I'm just too excited. So I had brought those notes and the funny part is I didn't actually like print anything on them before and see if I could find.

They're just blank note cards. So they just.

Are they, were they blank? Do you have blank note cards up there?

So this is. Yeah. So I, I did have some cards that actually had like a bullet point, so just in case I totally failed remembering anything. But I also had one note card that had just a music note drawn on it. And this is a callback to. So my mom passed away when I was 18. Don't mean to be a downer, but this is actually a sweet thing. So when my mom passed away at the funeral service, we had an open mic and my uncle, he, he went up and he went to, to give a speech and he had through note cards and he said, I don't know if I can make it through through talking about my, my sister like this way. It was really hard. And, and my, my uncle is known for a lot of jokes, so what he said, so I hope you don't mind, but I brought along some notes and he pulls out his notes and it's just a giant music note. It was one of those moments where when you're at a funeral and it's like you're having a really sad time, yada yada, and all of a sudden there's that little bit of light that you're like. That took me out of a little bit of a funk. And I was present, I was enjoying the moment for what it was. And so that's my thought. So my thought was I was like, I'm going to reuse that. If I actually get hung up and I don't remember what I'm going to say, what I was supposed to say, I'm going to just pause and go say the same joke effectively. Hey, sorry, I hope you don't mind, but I have to look at my notes and then flip it around and all I got is. And then use that time while I'm doing that to catch my brain back up to where I'm at so that I can, I can actually continue. And the funny part is if you watch the recording, I'm holding those notes the entire time, but I never once ever looked at them. And so I'm just like waving them around because I do these big hand gestures all the time. And I could have been like, it could have been like a card throwing thing, but it makes me look, it.

Does make you look, though, like, super professional, like, at an inbound talk like that when you're holding those. Because actually, remember, Dennis, we were sitting at the table before we did our. Our talk, and I'm like, I feel like I just need to have a note card. And, like, it doesn't have to have anything on it. But don't I look just like, I. Like I belong here as opposed to, like, not without, like, just in general. And I was just like. But no, it does, like. I don't know, it must be like some sort of, like, placebo effect. But, like, just having those note cards up there, it made, like, when I was watching other people, it was like, yeah, yeah, those are professionals. I'm just here, like, you know, talking about, you know, you know, weird Johnny Depp pirate stuff popping up on my, you know, SEO slides. So. But yeah, no, it's. That's a really cool kind of like, brain pause that actually gives you that moment. That's really, really cool. I love that.

Speaking of looking professional, though, so what I wore that day was I was wearing this. This blazer with an orange T shirt under it. And so I. I didn't want to look super businessy. I wanted to, like. I learned this from Chris Riley, our manager. I was like, he can pull off wearing just like, a nice cute blazer thing and just a T shirt under it. And I was like, you know what? That's the look. That's the look I want for this talk. And then to top it off, though, what did you do, Dave? Dennis.

Oh, no, I'm so sorry. I'm blanking.

What did I do at the end of my talk after I finished?

Didn't you do that?

Oh, the cape, the cape.

I brought the cape. Right?

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I remember that.

Oh, my God.

I was like. I was 50ft away and I still.

It's all out of body for me, man. I don't remember anything past yesterday.

And so that's where context there. The stage was called the HubSpot hero stage. So it felt obligatory that I needed to have this cape with me.

Yeah, yeah.

Full context. The cape is the community champions cape. Before being hubspotter, John was a community champion. Curious John, Like, I'm kind of similar to you is like, once I get on stage, it's kind of like out of body. Like, you're just doing your thing. You go and you know you're there and you're just going through the steps. This last inbound, when I was doing it same Situation the second I got to the computer to have to code. Oh, my God. Everything. Like, just, like, not without you, but.

I know the feeling.

Yeah.

It is hard, though.

Like, oh, my. This is, like, this is the easiest type of coding I've ever done in my life. It's. But at the same time, I have no idea what I'm doing anymore, like, at all. Do you have a similar situation, or is it. Or are you better?

Oh, absolutely. And the one thing that I kind of just sort of learned from doing it a bit with, like, the coding with John, that was kind of like a. A moment for me to do two things. So for myself personally, that coding with John series, I was actually trying to teach myself a couple of things. One of them is avoid ums and ohs and diller words. I am still working on that. I think I've gotten better because of it, but I've still got a bit of that going on. And the other thing was live coding, being comfortable in the moment, allowing problems to happen, and then troubleshooting around the lives. Because what I learned and kind of realized was people are super forgiving. Alvira.

Yeah, for sure.

You make a typo or you. You code something wrong and you get an error, they. They're not there to laugh at you when you make a mistake like that. They're. Unless. Unless you do something that's really hilarious with them. Like, I don't know if I'm in the audience.

I'm judging you. I'm silently judging you.

Don't worry. But in. But, like, from watching different events and speakers talking, I'm there wanting them to do well. I want to see them succeed because I want to learn from them. I want to experience what they intended to show me. So, yeah, I learned a lot from that.

Yeah, that. The whole error thing, like, that's. I was okay until I got to, like, I made it. I don't know. I didn't put something in, like, a default value for something, and so it didn't show up on the screen. And at that moment, it all just went out of my mind. I had no idea what I was doing anymore. I was like, okay, I'm just gonna leave. I, I, I wanted to blame Nick, you know, just for some sort of, you know, his phone going off or something like that. But at that point, I would have took it.

You did terrific. You did terrific.

And I'm not searching for compliments here.

I'm just like, I don't know how.

I did, guys, but I don't want compliment off Camera.

Tell me, tell me, how did I do?

You did terrific. And if anything, the audience that was there for that talk felt like they could relate to you in that moment. Before that moment, they were like, okay, these two people are like, developers. I don't. For context, what was the name of the talk inside of you is Coding for Marketers. So, yeah, I think they were mostly marketing.

What do you call it when someone compliments you? An underhanded compliment. Where. As well as.

No, it just made you relatable. It made you feel like you weren't on credits.

Dennis, it's okay. You have a great personality. Like, that's.

The.

You have a nice smile.

He also had a very charismatic co speaker, so that helped him out a little bit.

So I've heard the chemistry that you both had was amazing. I loved that you were both teasing each other while you were up there. It made it feel so much more fun.

That literally sparked this podcast. Like, seriously, that was the whole basis of it. It's like, yeah, let's keep doing this. Well, how are we going to do that? Well, let's do a podcast. Oh, yeah, okay, let's do that. That sounds good.

I think also you guys are all talking about something that's really important and that is, like, the chemistry between presenters, right? Because a lot of the times you see companies will match people up, they'll be like, oh, you're going to go talk with so and so sometimes it knocks it out of the park. Other times, like, if the chemistry isn't right and the, like, they don't have the same. And it's not a knock on anybody, but, like, personalities sometimes don't clash well together. Like, you have people that present in two different ways. You have people that, you know, do their own thing in a certain way, but, like, you two have that same, like, sarcastic wit. Like, but you're serious. And like, you. You like, if, like, anybody who, like, first of all, anybody who's, like, tuning into this episode probably knows that the four of us know each other very well. And anytime that there are meetings internally that are happening, anytime you look in the zoom comments, we're, like, ripping on each other or we're, like, making fun of each other and the team. We all make fun of each other on the team. It's fun to poke fun at each other when you have friends like that and you all have the same kind of mentality and personality. So I think that's what makes. When you guys were talking, it made it so engaging because it was as if two Friends got together and said, let's just talk to people. And it's very much poured into this. Like, this is such a casual conversation that it's not overly scriptive. And, like, there's not screaming and yelling and fighting back and forth. It's because everybody has, like, this, like, mind. And I just think, like, that's. That's shown in a lot of presentations, and that's what makes them as engaging as they are.

I mean, it's not scripted because the leader of this podcast doesn't script it at all.

Oh, yeah, no, he's totally lost in anything he does. But, like, it's great.

Dennis. They think we're friends.

You. I haven't even gotten my freaking shirt from the guy.

Yeah, real friend would ship it overnight. I'm just saying that's good friends that.

I forgot to mail them something for, like a week.

Coming. It's like, oh, it's not, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's. That's love right there. If. If nothing else, complete neglect. That's how you do it. That's how you show it. But no, that's fair. That's fair. That's fair. I deserve that. Let me ask you this, John, because this is something that. It's pretty much become a staple in these episodes, because I love the answers because they can vary so greatly from person to person. But. And of course, there's a caveat to it, because, one, you can't remove tech from a. Nowadays, you know, more and more. So you can't remove technology from a position, like a job, regardless of what it is. But with that being said, if you could choose something as a profession, whether it exists now or you have to, like, semi make it up, what would you do to get yourself away from technology as much as you could? For example, just to kind of give an example. Like, for me, it would be like opening up a coffee shop, knowing you can't. There's still technology to it, but that would be something that would take me out of my current element. What would be that for you?

Yeah. So goes without saying, I'm a huge tech geek, and so no matter what I do, I'm going to pull in technology into whatever I'm doing. But this is actually my wife and I's like, retirement plan. And this may change. This may change down the road. It's had some mutations, but largely it stayed the same. We want to own a campground. My wife wants to run a little store selling camp supplies, firewood, etc. And then I would do the overall management of the whole campground and our ideas that are a little possibly new or at least something that I haven't seen that's common. So we want this campground to be in the middle of nowhere. Okay. Hopefully some are pretty, but. But middle of nowhere in a swamp or something.

That's ridiculous.

Nevada desert, gone.

We will have one portion of the campground where there will be WI fi available at all of the camp sites. That's one portion. And the other side is for people who want to disconnect. And there will be no electricity, no no wi fi, etc. And we won't even give those people the WI fi password. So if they want to cheat, they can't. And then the other thing is. So at least AJ and Dennis know this about me. Well, about my wife actually. My wife is a pilot. She's not a commercial pilot. She doesn't make her money through that. She's actually a school teacher, but she has her pilot's license. And so in this campground we want to build a grass Runway so that she can have a plane as well as pilots can come fly in and camp at our campground.

This is all a front because you're going to do drug run. You're gonna.

Oh no.

It'S all on top of a bitcoin mining thing.

Those aren't trailers, those are just server farms.

Yeah.

A bunch of Jeep GeForce like video cards.

You check out the Borscht Belt in New York, my friend. There's all kinds of abandoned campgrounds and stuff from the 50s 60s that they're just waiting for you to take. I've been talking to Hannah about that a lot.

Yeah, I'm interested. I don't know how soon we're going to dive into bat plan, but that is something we want to do. And like something else I want to do is like I want to make it such as automated thing that we can leave and like maybe. Maybe. Sure. For like the camp store, we have to have an employee show up. But like checking in, checking out, getting your firewood, you don't need a person there. Everything just automated. You know what? Probably put everybody in a CRM, tie it all back. I wonder what you would use for that.

Like what CRM could we possibly use to manage camping?

I know, I mean we could send like some email, come back.

I'm imagining half of this campground is like a five star Hilton and then the other half where there is nothing is like Lord of the Flies.

Yes, exactly.

It's like a prison yard. There's the double Fence in the middle so that way you can see each other but you can't get to it.

Exactly, exactly.

That's amazing. Now what kind of, what kind of hobbies do you do outside of. I mean like everybody. It's because like I always find it hard like because people have asked me that question too or ask me this question too because like working in this industry and like, you know, even in my prior jobs it's been tech related. But are what are the. Some of the things that you do that are not as techie as hobbies to kind of give yourself like that, that mental break?

Yeah, it's probably not going to be a big surprise here, but since I got my start in web development, basically because of video games, I'm super into video games. Just in the last month, some games that I've been playing are Tape to Pape, which is a hockey roguelike game. Rogue Command, which is a brand new StarCraft ish roguelike game. I've been playing a lot of those. Bravery. I've been playing a sequel to Life is Strange, Stardew Valley, Baldur's Gate and like the Portal Theory's all time favorite game. Also now I've been playing a lot of board games. My wife and I play board games about once a week to every two weeks. We have a group of friends that we play games with. We're super into a game now called Root, which is kind of like in video game world analogies, kind of like playing the Warcraft series of games. There's also. My next favorite is Cult Express, which is like themed around robbers robbing a train. But it feels like a board game version of Super Mario Brothers. Or not Super Mario Brothers, but Super Smash Brothers where you're.

It reminds me of that movie. And, and this now this is in the 2000s. So Dennis, you'll be very proud of me. But Game Night with, I can't remember who's the main actor in that. Bateman, I believe. But where they like, they get together and they do the games and it gets like crazy and out of hand. I don't know if you've seen it, but that, like that, that, that, that to me is like. I don't for some reason, like that.

Popped in my head wasn't Jumanji or something like that.

That could have been it too. Yeah, because there's been a couple of those in this decade. So that's. Well, there's Jumanji too. So that's not fair because the rocker was in it, right? Or was it? Yeah.

There's also Jumanji 3. I think they made it.

Yeah, they came out with the third.

Dang.

See, that covers all my decades, covers all my bases. All I gotta say is Jumanji and I'm set. Well, that's good. No, that's good. No, that's, I, I, I, I often find that, like me, AJ and some other, you know, cousins and stuff like that. It's, it's sort of a good stress reliever. I mean, and it's hard too, because you'll talk to people that maybe are a generation older. So. And I, I don't know, I don't think that there's a, not that they don't understand it, but I, I just don't think that there's a, there's a difference, right? Because like, the way we grew up, you know, or the way people grew up now, like in this era, if you will, like, video games are a lot more mainstream, right? They're a lot more connected to everything, right? You can't drink a Mountain Dew without getting Call of Duty points. So it's like, you know what I mean? So it's, it's, it's there, right? So. But no, but I, I do find, like, as long as it's like anything in moderation, you know, consult your doctor, it's, it helps kind of like deflate, you know, when you're constantly working on stuff or you're constantly, like, even if you're coding eight hours a day or something like that, right? Even. And when you're done and at the end of the day, even if you play video games after that, it doesn't feel like you're on the computer still. You know what I mean? It's like, it's a bit of a different. So, yeah, like, I, I too am kind of like subscribed to doing that as kind of like a decompression, you know, towards the end of the day or at the end of the day kind of thing. So, but no, that's do, Are there any type of. Because like, you got started at a young age as far as like tech and all things techie. Are there any things that, like, from a non tech perspective, like any kind of like, I don't know, like, you know, like there's Magic, the Gathering, or there's like things like that that are like card based, which even that is like digital to a certain point now. But like, did you ever get involved or interested in any of that kind of stuff?

I would say that Pokemon was huge for a little bit But I, I, I didn't get super into them. I had a deck of magic card Magic, the othering cards. But I probably only actually played the game maybe twice. And even with the Pokemon cards, most people didn't actually know how to play. At least, at least when I had them, they didn't actually know how to play. They were just like, it's shiny. I like this one.

That's literally my son. Like, he, he just started doing that, and I'm like, well, let's learn how to play this. He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, and then it'll, like, go off and it'll just start. But look how much damage it's at. But I'm like, do you know what that's for, though? Like, do you have. Like, he doesn't care. He's just like, yeah, but it looks cool. And look at it. And it's like, all right, fair enough, fair enough. But, yeah, I totally get that. That's so true. Even though I don't want it to be. I'm like, could you, could we just learn to do this first and then we'll like, you know.

Do you guys remember dogs? Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember having those.

I probably honestly have a set up in my attic right now because it probably just got moved into a bunch of boxes that just kept going from place to place and never was like, okay, this just means you go.

Now, every once in a while on here, we like to talk about some of the. Call them some of the things happening. I don't call it this weekend tech, because that's. That's actually the name of a podcast, so I don't want to infringe on that at all. But, like, you know, every once in a while, we kind of just throw around a couple topics. I had picked, like three of them just to kind of. And I try to pick ones that, like, you know, they're not controversial or they're not, you know, they don't invoke any kind of, like, argument or anything. You know what I mean? Like, so. But some of the ones that I actually picked. What's that?

I said pound versus space lookstar. Oh, God, no.

I still don't like the fact that double spacing on a Mac makes a period every time.

Thank you.

Don't need it. Well, I mean, Dennis, you still double space your documents when you type, don't you?

Listen, I am from 1953, and I do everything on a word processor first.

See, I always go tabs, but four tabs in when I code. Like, it's gotta be the four tab. I like things to be very, you know, so. But I'm just saying it's the right way to do it. But I'm just saying, like, it's. It's awake.

Well, I know when Dennis sends me anything, it's like, Hey, I FedExed you this document that I printed out. Can you fax me things still?

So that's how we express the pony express. So just.

And you know that you got to read whatever Dennis sends you because you would know that it took him a lot longer because he's typing on that typewriter. He can't hit multiple keys at the same time. Or the hammer.

Yeah, yeah. It's in the dings. Like, you could see where he's like, manually adjusting it every time. Line up the code.

It's just in the white out that I use. White out, yeah.

And he complains about me being stuck in the pat. Like, I'm just. Just saying. I'm just like, this is a bit hypocritical. Just a bit hypocritical. I just want to point that out. But one of the ones that came up that I saw that I just. I had a double take, it was. There's a company that's now developing, and I kid you not, it is a human washing machine. It is like, literally, it's like a washing machine for human. Like, it's essentially like you would be sitting down in the cockpit of like, a. But it's like a. You know, it's built like a. Like a bubble shaped whatever, you know, and it's like. But you'd sit down in a chair and then it fills you.

Yeah, well, yeah.

I was talking about this, like, with my daughter, like, when we went to the car wash. It's like, what if this was you?

I couldn't do that. I'm just saying, what if this goes wrong?

Yeah, right.

You know, the pictures. But I'm in my head, I'm like, I'm imagining like a mechanical arm with a nozzle shooting at you, just spraying you a bit face.

I'm all for innovation, but this is just like, I. I just don't think I do it. I don't want to be locked in this because it fills with water. So you'd realize, like. So you figure it has to be like. It's like from the picture, it's like, shut. It's locked. It almost looks like, you know, like one of those, like, tiny space capsules. But you wouldn't be like, you'd be sitting up like, like, like a little race car almost. But you know, and then there's like a kind of a HUD in front of you but like it has to be kind of like watertight and then it has to be closed and it fills up and I'm just like what.

Happens if like does it fill up or does it just like it does.

It feels it fills up.

Absolutely horrib for anybody who has claustrophobia.

Right.

Well think about like when you make coffee with a Keurig. If you push the wrong button and you make a 12 ounce instead of an 8 ounce, what happens? It just keeps filling up. Like what happens if it doesn't realize, oh, I'm not six feet tall, I'm only five nine and it puts six feet of water in there. You're gone. Like you're just gone.

I think if you're 59 and it fills the 6 foot, you could just do one of these and raise yourself. No, because there's not much of a difference.

There's not a lot of space in there.

It's not like I'm more concerned with a sentence that says we're up to eight. People can experience a 15 minute long wash and dry each day after first booking.

Is.

It looks like it's.

I'm even more concerned about the fact that this thing looks exactly like. If you just change the title of the post for this and you said self driving car.

Thank you.

You'd be like, yeah, that's totally self charging car. Why this?

It looks like Gordy Weaver comes out of in Predator. Like it or not Predator. Jesus. That would have been a mistake.

It looks like a geometro basically metro that fills with water.

That's what I want. I'll be going to work and just in my self driving car taking a bath at the same time.

But I mean part of me, part of me wants to think of this as like, okay, think of this like when you go to the gym. For those of you that do. I do not. I am not athletic whatsoever. But like just because you spray a bottle with some like cleaner and wipe down the bench. Is it really clean?

Like oh yeah, for sure.

About like how many people. Like if this is somebody's personal thing in their home. One. Outrageous. Two. I get it. But if we're going to start opening up like hey look, I'm going to go shower down at the corner to fifth and whatever for 15 minutes. I'll be back. Like it just seems, seems like this is one of the things that was made. But did it really need to be.

Made in there, you know, someone peed. Come on.

Yeah, I know, right?

I'd be curious if this is being made for, like, public, like, implementation. Like. Like, there's no this. This would have to be something you just get for your house.

There's no.

I can see this beneficial in the medical field when it comes to having to wash patients.

Or I can see that being in.

Hospital or like, people with disabilities, where. This is very, very great for somebody like that.

Right.

The problem is looking at this thing, there's no way anyone's going to afford it. This thing literally looks like a space shuttle capsule. Like, where are you going to put this? In your home?

And if you already have a bathroom in your home that has a shower, you're probably just going to modify the shower to make it a dustable rather than replace it with this space pod that will randomly drive out of your house.

John, your campground, the WI FI connected side better have these.

Oh, yeah, you could. Like, it's either that or Starfleet. That's. That's where this is going. Like, it's one of the two. Like, that would be.

Wow.

Can you imagine that? It would look just. Just rows of these things at the campground. And then that's where you're. That's where you're.

Delivery drones. These things just come out of the sky.

No, that's where you go in the winter to hibernate for the next summer. You just go sit in there for a while.

That's hilarious.

Which makes me. Which brings me up to a question real quick. Talking about technology. Do we think the technology from Demolition man will ever happen? Do we think cryogenic chambers like that.

And you say I'm the one that brings up movies from a certain era.

Oh, I'm sorry. I bring up one of the greatest documentaries of the future ever called Demonstration.

Someone's a little touchy.

It's not a movie. It's a documentary we shot in real time. That's.

I get it.

I get it.

Yeah. Why not, right?

Sure. Sure.

And I don't say no.

Yeah.

Well, I think the food thing. Maybe the food thing might be a little like the Taco Bell, like.

Yeah, I don't think Taco Bell is going to last in the wars against restaurants. I just don't. I don't see that coming on top.

I mean, I don't know, man. Hardee's, they're. They're. They're strong. I don't know.

That's.

That's. My money's on them. And this Battle, but. Or Carl's Jr. I don't know if they're the same.

Thing now, but for sponsors yet again.

Like, I'm just. One of these days, I'm hoping I just open my front door and there's just like a box of Chick Fil A there and they say, yeah, I'll try, I'll keep pitching, I'll try. But. But yeah, like, I, I can imagine some of that stuff, like they're already looking at like, like non lethal. Like, what was one of the. I can't remember, was it the shock sticks that were in that one where it's like right where it was like, you just hit him in the knockout. Yeah. So, like, they're already like, there's already been like tech or like military stuff, like, trying to delve into that, like non lethal kind of corralling or like, you know, subduing. So I imagine like some of that stuff will. Because I remember we were talking about this on one of the episodes where it's like, like some of the stuff like Gene Roddenberry had came up with, you know, like original. Some of the Star Treks, like, it makes its way into pop culture, will always bleed into real life if it's. It's catchy enough, you know.

So if you're looking into what I've kind of. The Physics of Star Trek is an amazing book. Like talking about how like, really half of it's not possible.

I'll never.

I never. I'll test that. Check it out.

Good book.

Speaking of Star Trek and all that, something that I've kind of just kind of come to, at least in the last 10 years to feel is whenever it comes to anything cool, sci fi related, yeah, we're going to have whatever that thing is for sure. For sure. We're going to figure out how to build it, but it's cool. And some geek like me or AJ or Dennis or Nick is going to be like, we got to build this just because they want to. But then they're like, we gotta somehow make money. So apps or subscription or you're gonna have to. You're gonna have to accept some cookies.

Stuff or, or buy the Battle Pass. You always have to buy the Battle Pass. You're gonna buy the Battle Pass. And every season is only like a month long. So there's like 12 seasons in a year, which is kind of outrageous. But I mean, I'm not complaining about anything. But yeah, yeah, I imagine there's going to be somebody that wants to monetize it to the extent where get like kind of almost where it was. What was it?

The.

Well, yeah, like that. Like you're talking about gaming and stuff like that. That type of subscription or like the.

What.

What is it? Like, not the beta model, but you would have like the early access. Early access, right? Yeah, exactly. Where it's like, oh, you're. You're paying for this. Or there's this one game, and I've only played it a couple times, but Stellaris, it's made by this Paradox is the one. And they're like, they will. And I'm sure I'm not supposed to like, say these type of things, but they'll nickel and dime you to death with like, DLC like all day long.

Well, I mean, that's the whole point of DLC is to make extra like, microtransaction type stuff.

Right.

But to an extent, it'll. It like some places will kill you with it.

Like. Yeah. And this topic is an interesting one because there's certain types of DLC that I think majority of folks. Folks are okay with. And then. Then at some point things tip over. So everyone generally agrees. Like, if you're playing a multiplayer game and you buy something and that gives you a competitive advantage, that's not cool.

Pay to win is not.

Yeah, but it's like. So here's an example of actually a game that a lot of people like, and I wish I actually liked it more because the model for the game I like, Elder Scrolls Online, is known for the fact that every little piece of content possible, they put into a DLC that you can purchase, and it's actual game content. So you're not just like getting like a skin or something. You're getting something to do and hey, white that. But at the same time, I'm like, I don't really want to keep having to throw money every like, two hours at the game to be able to keep playing some more new content. And so I don't know. And they have a subscription, which is a good model too. I'm okay with these things, but for some reason, the gameplay itself, to me. But.

Well, I mean, Fallout 4 did that, right? Fallout 4 had some really awesome DLCs with like whole campaigns attached, like new areas to explore. Like, that is DLC that's worth buying. But if it's like, buy this $15, your character now has an overcoat. Like, I think that's a little like.

The original DLC of all time, the Skyrin Warhorse. If. If anyone's not familiar, it basically the first DLC that was ever created was a warhorse skin for your horse in Skyrim. It was either Skyrim or Oblivion. I don't remember which came first, but, yeah, it was that. And people were okay with it at first, and. And then all of a sudden, yeah, everyone was like, man defense to. You started. You started a whole thing.

Yeah, no, it's turned into a culture of just kind of like. It's like, bleeding you dry slowly, you know, mentality.

So I. I think of all three, all four of us here, I am the only person who's really not a gamer. I don't do these things. I. I kind of, like, stopped it a long time ago, and I don't know. I've lost. I've tried to get back into it a few times, but. Oh, yeah, 1957 typewriter dude over here. Everything's too complex now, man. I. I like the old arcade style, you know? Like, I went with my daughter to the arcade to play the Simpsons. Then that's, like, kind of my jam. Like, that's where I'm happy. This. This whole thing you all talk about, you kids, you. You do you.

After this podcast, Dennis is gonna go curl up in the corner with his Atari and just go, it's okay.

Well, he points.

It's okay.

Dennis plays Stardew Valley in real life. He has a whole.

He really does.

Plenty of chickens. He's got a whole thing going on.

So you have chickens. I know you grow strawberries as well.

Yes, of course.

And then what else are you growing? Are you growing grapes?

We do have a grapevine. Yes, we have grapevines. We do blueberries. We got, like, a small little farm in our backyard. Tons of.

She's doing Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley in real life.

My wife wants to raise chickens, but luckily, the association doesn't allow it, so I'm happy with that. I don't want to raise chickens.

Same exact situation.

I'd be getting eggs from you, that's for sure. That's fantastic.

Yeah, my daughter has a whole business now. She sells eggs to the people across the street. $5, you know, for a dozen.

You got to get her a site and then hook it up to a CRM. I know a good one you might be able to use.

Tell me more later on. Don't stump now.

Dm me later.

All right, let's do one more, and then we will get to. I wanna. I wanna get. Get to our game. That.

Please do the song. Do the song one. Because I. I'm just. I'm starting to read this story, and I want to.

Yeah, okay.

Do you want to post in the. In the chat for John? You may have heard of this, too. And apologies, I didn't share this doc. I did it a little late.

Yeah.

So I came in really, like, really late. Like super late. Like, like maybe three hours ago. Yeah, three hours. But, you know, who's counting? But no, this. This actually happened two weeks ago. But when I saw it, I didn't get a chance to talk about it last week. But for me, it was something, because I had. I. I actually had this song on, like, a playlist because I was so intrigued by the. The mystery behind it, so basically, and so much so that I kind of like, not know it by heart. But I know the. This, The. The kind of. The story of this. But, you know, you know, over time, and I think it's even in the article, it mentions about 17 years, there was. There's been this song that they literally has been dubbed the, you know, the most mysterious song on the Internet. And basically the gist of it was, and I'm going to get the time frames wrong in the year, so I'm not even going to take a stab at it, but on a. On a radio station in Germany, there, this song was played, and it had been on a tape. It had been recorded off the radio station on a tape by someone. And for the longest time, they couldn't figure out who wrote the song. So it kind of went down. And this was, like, for years, right? Almost, I think 17 at this point, until now, until. And again, I believe that the way this is positioned is they have solved it. They've confirmed with the band and the person, and they reached out to everybody, but it was just a mystery for so long, and people were trying to track this down. And then, you know, you know, in comes. What's it?

Ooh, reverber.

Oh, I like it. I like it. No, no, that's good. I like to hear my. I like to hear myself talk, so I get to hear any place.

This feels like a Twilight Zone kind of topic anyways, so, like, the reverb was perfect.

We need Dennis. Can you give me a stinger that, like, is like an Unsolved Mysteries thing and I'll get in a really deep voice and I'll start talking. But. But no. Yeah. So they. For years, you know, they tried to track this down, and then, you know, comes the Reddit era where, like, you know, there was more attention paid to it and people tried to, like, you know, through various resources, tried to figure out who it was. And then after a certain amount of time, I believe someone had come across. There was a. I want to say it was a competition. There was something that like, and this is all in Germany at the time. They would play like songs for like exposure and things like that. And somebody thought, oh, you know, maybe this song might be one of these, you know, one of these songs that was played in this. I don't know if it was a show or it was like a thing where it's like, it's like a showcase or whatever. But they said, okay, well maybe it's that because there had been articles previously where they thought they had found the person or the band or they, they had a really good idea of where it came from. But I don't think any of those, from what I remember reading or even came close to this. But apparently somebody had tracked down one of the band members, had switched bands. Like they had located the name of a person and then found out through just like Internet sleuthing that he had joined another band. I think it was called is it. Is it PEX or FEX fx. And that person was actually. He reached out to them and was able to confirm the actual origins of the song. So this thing had been buried for like years. Like we're talking early 80s I think is what the, the, the article states. But yeah, and then like through like, like imagine like tirelessly people had to put like hours and hours into this, right? Like there was.

You got a really long, I mean curious later. It's now probably the most. One of the most blamed randomly makes the top charts after his own dead and the people don't even care about it anymore.

I would not be surprised at all. But like so the person found the individual and then made sure they went and they reached out to every band member that was I believe still alive.

If they're.

Maybe they're all still alive. But I thought it was really cool because it like it solves an Internet mystery and then actually had like a really nice ending to it because they said they wanted to get together at some point and re record it like so many years later. But I mean it wasn't a bad song either. I mean the quality of it. It was from a cassette tape from like 2007. I believe it said it was recorded to a cassette tape. But. But yeah, for the longest time. I remember reading articles about this like over the years where they're like, hey, we finally found out what the mysterious, most mysterious song is and who did it. We're Just we're checking into this and nothing would ever like pan out. But they finally after like. And there's there was sleuthing where they needed to like. I think it said they had to like call up help from like hundreds of people and go through spreadsheets and spreadsheets of songs.

Did you look at the spreadsheet? My God, that's like. This is some serious stuff.

Yeah, it links the spreadsheet.

Where's the linked at?

It's in.

Oh, extensive spreadsheets, man. And it's a Google Doc. Well, this has to go in the show notes.

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm gonna, I'm grabbing put in it. But it's like, it's just fascinating that like the dedicate. You know what I mean? Like, imagine what we can do in the future if like this much dedication and this much manpower without getting paid was just put into finding who sung this song. Right. Like we're going to Mars easily.

I mean, I'm convinced if AI starts doing more and more work for us and we like go down to like four, four day work weeks or something, what are people going to be doing? Ancient songs and whatnot.

I mean, at this point I just watched like when you mentioned AI, I just watched. There was a couple people, they were posting it in various places and there was an article about it too. But like the video, I mean, Dennis. Yeah, no offense man, but you're gone like they. I'm just kidding. But no, they like, you know, you'd feed it. I can't remember what it was. What the input said was whether whether it was just a script or it was like actual imagery as well. But like creates like a movie out of. And they did like a political one with like presidential candidates and like world leaders and stuff. But it was, it's pretty good for just like AI generated like video, you know, for movie. And it was just. You've got that you've got mid journey and you've got other things too. And it's just like I was just telling my wife the other day, I'm just like. It's, you know, because you hear people say like, oh, it's the end of this job, that job, and rightfully so. There's room to be skeptical and fearful. But it's like at first you always hear this stuff and you're like, yeah, okay, sure, okay. This is the newest shiny toy. Let's not get crazy. But there's something to be said about some of the output that's coming from these things that it's just like. It's pretty impressive. I'll say.

Well, one of those is what Runway?

Right?

Because I just looked it up. It's not like I knew that off the top of my head. I literally was typing that just so, you know, like, I don't want to. Don't want to make it seem like I know everything.

John, are you coding from a windsurfer? Are you on the water surfing right now and coding at the same time? Because it's that easy. You can do it now.

Yeah. You can't tell. This is just one of the zoom filter type things. It just makes me look official. But I'm currently diving under the water right now. It's even filtering the audio. Perfect.

The fun fact is there is no John at HubSpot. This is. You're literally just an AI bot. That's it. He's not an AI person. So we just couldn't find a guest, so we created one.

And that's.

That's how John came about. So little. Little fun fact that probably nobody knows.

But.

No, yeah, it's. Yeah, I. I just, I. I find it fascinating that, you know, with. And. And I wonder too, like, if this hadn't gone solved or this hadn't been solved, like, at a certain point with this much data, being able to feed it right into a language model and knowing, like, here's all the songs, here's all the things pinpoint, like this stuff. You know what I mean? Like, solving these problems in the future will just be that much more easier. And then creating this kind of, like, you know, creating this kind of work, whether it's music or movies and stuff like that, it becomes, I don't know, it goes into a realm of, like, a lot of discussion is going to have to be made about, like, who owns what. And like, like, especially, like, think about it, like, if it can create a video and then like, it can create, like, let's say John is real. Maybe he is.

You don't know, let's say.

But let's say. Let's say he is a bot.

Can you check off this box for me, John, to prove that you're human?

I'm going to hold up.

Let me hold that.

I'm going to hold up a picture of a bicycle. Can you point to which one it is? But imagine, like, who own the rights to that, you know, digital person, or like, who gets paid for that? Like, what actor gets paid for that? You know, it would be different.

It's already a thing because digital influencers, like, completely fake people are on social media, and it's companies that own and run them, and they're just sponsored by all these other companies trying to get their products shown and everything. And it's kind of funny because it's like their products are just photoshopped into.

Images of their Facebook, littered with those ads. Like, if you go through Facebook, which I barely did, like, I. But you. You see it, you'll see it. Like, just create this person for. To sell your product. Create this person. Create this person.

Or.

Or there'll be ones where it's like, create a better screen or not a better screenshot, but a better, like, headshot for your, like, of yourself. You know, just put in like, the crappiest photo and it's like. Like, it's almost like not the same.

Suddenly it's a business photo and you're like, what?

And then it. You tried that with one of your pictures and then, like, it gave you, like, a picture of looking like this. But then there was like, this mysterious hand out of nowhere.

I tried that in mid journey with our pitchers, the three of us, like, and it was just like, it could not. That's why I'm wondering, like, how good their stuff that, like, it could.

I swear to God, Nick, you can't reproduce this.

No, you can't. You cannot. Like, yeah, it made me look like, first of all, I couldn't tell the difference between me and AJ and it would, like, merge us into one person. I was like, with these three people.

Uncommon outside story of my life.

It was always two people. It was me and then, like, somebody that sort of looked like Dennis, maybe. And then I was like, where's the third person? And then I started to realize. Oh, okay. That it's literally merging us together and it, like, it's like a seamless. Okay, I get it.

It did create some really cute images, though. Like the three skeletons when we were trying to do one for the Halloween. Like, that was adorable.

No, some of it's good. Like, I wonder, like, especially too, like, you can just tell, like, I told mid Journey, like, do it in, like, Disney style. And that one was good, too.

Yeah.

I would have. I could never have guessed that it wasn't done by, like, you know, a Disney animator or something like that. So that's. Yeah, it's. It's pretty impressive. So, yeah, it's like, you know, buckle your seatbelts. It's only going to get crazier from this point on.

So. Yeah, speaking of that, like, mimicking style and whatnot, like, who, Like, Mojang who made Minecraft.

Yeah.

Could never have imagined, like the year that he officially like put it out there. Could never have imagined that there would be a completely AI stakes generated version of Minecraft. Granted, if you've ever played it, or ever if you haven't seen it, you need to see it. If you haven't played it, the gist is it visually looks like Minecraft. You have the same relative controls. Not every feature is implemented. And the idea is all it was, was trained on a ton of video footage of Minecraft. It's just an tool and it has no game engine. It is just predicting based on your input what should render next. So if you turn your screen, it will try to fill in those pixels based on the footage it's seen before. If you click and you start hammering away at the block in firmview, it's seeing pictures that are like that. So it starts to do that action and you can also place blocks. Now, where things get super trippy is because it's not a game, it's not a game engine. It has no concept of the 3D space that you are in. It is only rendering pixels based on what it's seen. So if you turn, say your field of view is like this and you turn to your right. Well, now if you turn back, suddenly everything over there is completely different because there's no memory, there's no 3D object saved in the world. It's just recreating what it thinks should be there. And so if you watch some videos on it is the trippiest. Like, no one needs to do psychedelics. Just play this game, bro.

I was gonna say, hey, I've ever played Minecraft on lsi, but I didn't know if I could. I was gonna say, like, yeah, that's what I was thinking, but diverse. I was gonna. I mentioned this last episode too, because you brought up Minecraft. But like, speaking of, did I ever, Did I ever mention on here the story of the $300? But my son.

No, I don't think you.

I don't think you've told people the story. It's a great story.

I mentioned it last episode and I was like, remind me. But I thought you mentioned Minecraft. But I don't know how much. I don't want to like waste up all of our time just talking about like me not taking a credit card off of a Minecraft or a Microsoft account properly. But that's essentially the gist of it. And like, I had left it on there and my son, I hadn't taught him yet that the coins relate to money. And they're not, they're, they're not separate or mutually exclusive. They are together. And they, like, you spend coins, you spend daddy's money on his credit card. Like. And I didn't, he didn't realize that until $300 in. When I was, I was literally, I was sitting here working and he hadn't, I don't think he had started school this year yet, but he was sitting at his computer next to me and I just see my capital one like, ding, ding, ding. And I'm like, what is. I'm like, why is Microsoft. I'm like, this ain't like Microsoft Office charges because I don't use it. And I'm like, what is this thing doing? And I'm like, trying to track it down. I'm on the phone with them. Meanwhile, he's doing it while I'm like, wally? And I'm like, are you, are you buying something? And he might. And he was like, no. And I'm like, oh, all right. And I'm just. And then finally the guy's talking to me on the phone and he goes, yeah, it's from, you know, it's Minecraft. It's from, you know. And I'm like, what? And I'm looking at him and he's like, literally he just looks at me and he gets up, he puts his headphones down and he walks out. And I was just like. So I had to have like the talk with him about like, yeah, okay, these are coins, sure. But those coins, you need this money to do it. And then of course, that's the whole. Credit cards aren't infinite money. And it was like this whole. It's like, imagine trying to teach a seven year old at the time, like an Economics 101 class and trying to like relate that to Minecraft and coins. I'm like, this is, this is, this is insanity. I'm like, yeah, so. But that's just. Never leave your credit card on an account where someone else is buying stuff. Hot tip.

Don't tell Dennis that I'm still using his account to buy things off Amazon.

Linus Tech Tips, like Linus from Linus Tuck Tips has this policy when I, when it comes to his kids, he decided he's going to, he's going to just try to teach them. And he's like, Anything you see in an app, like, anything that is not a physical thing that will be mailed to you, this isn't real. You need to recognize this is not real. We Avoid spending money on it. If we can. If it's a new game that's different, maybe you spend money on it, but you don't just keep buying new games. You play the games you have until you're done with it. And I don't know, that's the philosophy I'll take when I'm eventually a parent, because it's also hard. Like, I get, like, a kid being like, well, I want that cool, fiery skin in this game. Right. Because I'm playing it with my friends all the time. But, like, at the same time, like, Wolf, you do not want to end up, like, randomly dealing with. Calling a credit card company on a Friday night, $3,000 worth of.

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. All right, well, we're gonna. Let's. Let's jump to the very last thing here where we do a little bit of a. Just a quick quiz. Let's do a little game. At the end here. We're gonna. We'll land this plane. Seeing that you're from Wisconsin, we. I wanted to do a cheese quiz because I felt that that was absolutely necessary. So I tried to redeem. Trying to redeem myself from last episode. Although they were good questions, I just. Yeah, Briel never talked to us ever again.

That's a type of cheese.

Yeah, I was gonna say.

Are you.

Are you hinting at one of the answers?

Is this. No, no, no, no.

I didn't even know Brie was a type of cheese. He's probably.

I do know that it's just coincidental, but. Yeah, well, we'll. We'll fire through these real quick, and then we'll. We'll end this. And, John, I want you to be able to tell everybody, like, you know, where they can find you and stuff that you're working on. And in that case. But let's go through these because they're.

Hopefully this quiz isn'.

Easy.

I'm just gonna put it out there. That's for you, John. That one was for you, buddy.

I'm sure it'll be Gouda.

And on that note, thanks, everybody, for listening. Let's. Okay, I'll jump to number one. And again, you guys can answer individually. Just keep it honest. Some of these are. Choose of the three, and then some of them are just, you know, give an answer. But for question one, which cheese accounts for almost two thirds of the Netherlands production? Is it Gouda, cheddar, or Edom?

Edom.

Edom.

Gouda. Actually, it's Gouda.

Yeah.

I don't trust Dennis anymore.

You are all wrong. And That's. That's the kind of the way I like these to go. I just want to say. Yeah, see, I. I don't take pleasure in this. I mean, come on.

I just.

I'm just calling them. I'm calling balls and strikes here, folks. That's all I'm doing. Question 2. A cheese much used in pizzas. That takes its name from the Italian for cut. Is it mozzarella, ricotta, or provolone?

Mozzarella.

Mozzarella.

Ricotta on a pizza.

So this is. This is maybe more actually a Chicago thing, which makes me wonder why YouTube didn't come up with that. But mozzarella and ricotta get used in deep dishes.

Well, that's why it's awful. Continue.

And I just. I just assumed. It sounds like. Out of all of the things having to sound like cut, I was like, ricotta sounds more aggressive than. Yep.

Question 3. How many pounds of milk does it take to make a pound of cheese? Is it 3, 5, or 10?

It is.

Oh, my God.

It's actually. It's 10.

He's thinking like he knows.

So my daughters have highlights magazines in National Geographic Kids, and I swear this was one of the things that they just recently said in like, month and.

A half, so you can't.

I'm not giving you credit for that. Abby and Scarlett gave you that answer.

Was it 10, though? Was it 10?

It. Well, what does everybody else think? I don't know.

I'll say five just to be.

Yeah, I'm gonna go with 10.

Yeah, it was 10.

Yeah.

But John's the only one getting the point, so I.

I got my answer from an 8 year old, so I got two 8 year olds.

So, yeah, I'll. I'll give my nieces a point, but I'm not. I'm not giving you a point.

Highlights will be the new sponsor of the show.

Great.

Okay, number four. In which century did people begin to start dying cheese orange to fool people into thinking it was better quality? Was it the 16th century, the 17th, or the 18th?

When did Mac and cheese come out?

I want to say 18th century.

18Th. Yeah.

Or 1975, 2007.

No, the 17th century.

How does it feel that I'm winning again, Nick?

Do you like that?

Oh, Are we keeping score? I didn't then realize we were keeping score. Question number five. What type of cheese was used as a cannonball during a naval battle in 1841? Was it mozzarella brie or edom?

This had to be from the witchcraft chick. Navel.

Eat them.

Eat them.

It Wasn't. It wasn't from Wisconsin, but yeah, Brie.

You don't dance. No, Brie is too. I'm gonna go with cheddar just because.

I don't know.

I mean, you can go with cheddar. It wasn't one of the options, but.

What were the options again?

It was mozzarella brie or eat them.

Oh, I think the girl eat them. Even though.

It was.

It was a. It was a. It was actually. It was between Uruguay and Brazil. There was a naval battle and the Uruguayan commander was running low on ammunition. This was the story I as. As to the trueness of it, couldn't tell you, but they used a hard edom cheese as a makeshift cannonball. That's. It's intuitive. I like, goes to that whole battle.

Becomes the food site again.

Hot dogs, hamburgers, bayonets, the cheese balls as cannons. I love it. It's all good.

Well, you brought up. Well, before. Before that, you brought up hot dogs there. I have my own question for y'. All. I'm throwing this whole quiz show up a little bit.

Interesting.

Okay. Is American cheese a cheese? And I bring this up because you said, you mentioned about hot dogs. Here's the debate. Is it a sandwich that of Eastern cheese?

Is it a cheat? I mean, I think it is plastic a cheese, because.

Yeah, that's the same thing, right?

Yeah. So American cheese is technically by the fda, not considered a cheese. However, the only products in it are cheese. And to be common preservatives, it's cheddar cheese, but they add. I think it's like sodium nitrate and one other chemical. There's no plastic. It actually just literally comes out like that. It's strange. And yeah, that history of American cheese is also wildly weird. There's literally government vaults filled with cheese. American cheese.

That's.

I love that. Still to this day.

That's a dream of mine, actually.

If only it was a better tasting cheese.

Yeah, yeah, there's always that. Yeah, that's fair. Okay, question number six. On average, how many pounds of cheese does each American adult eat every year? Is it 30, 42 or 51?

51.

Me is 51, but I would say the average American.

Yeah, ideally, 51. Got highest. Yeah, I'm going to say 51. And that's mostly just because I know that the population in my state probably makes up like 30% of that raises the average. You raise that average quite a bit.

It's up 42, actually. So it's right in the middle there. Yeah.

Failing. We're failing as A country.

Yeah. I gotta start eating more cheese, apparently.

Get on it, folks. Get on it.

You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers. Okay, what are the. What are the holes in Swiss cheese called? Are they called holes, eyes or windows?

Windows.

I've heard eyes before eyes.

Dennis, you're wrong, man.

I'm really. I love cheese.

You need the highlights magazine, is what you need, guys. Yet another one where I heard that from my kids.

I know what I'm getting you for Christmas. Great. Which, again, question number eight. Which country is the largest producer of cheese in the world? Is it the United States, Germany, or France? Not. Not cheese. Naval cannonballs.

Just cheese. United States, Germany, or France? France.

France it is.

I'm gonna go Germany.

I'm gonna go with America. I don't know.

Followed closely by Germany. Germany's a second. Close second.

So I was totally wrong.

Wow.

So just like in real life, John is first, I'm second, Dennis is third.

Got it.

Checks out. That checks out according to mine. Question number nine. Now, this is one that they're there. You have to guess the answer. There is no three choices. What blue cheese is named after a village in Italy where it was first produced. And the answer is not blue cheese. So that was the first thing I thought of. I was like, what a dumb question. Is it blue cheese? It's not blue cheese, is it.

Is it blue cheese spelled differently?

No, it was B, L, U, E. It's. Yeah, that's the way online.

It's L, U, E. What? That's how it's spelled.

I know, but that's the way they spelled it online. I'm just saying it's. You cannot trust the Internet. But yes. I'm assuming they mean, like, blue cheese.

Yeah, Absolutely no idea. So I'm just gonna throw out Burano, the grand.

It's a good guess, but no, I.

Want to say Uruguay.

Okay. That's close. You're in the vicinity.

I mean, I'm just gonna say that there's a city named Blue that's spelled funky. Nope.

It is Gorgonzola.

Okay. Okay.

Yeah. Look at me nodding like I knew.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, question number 10, final question. What is the most popular cheese variety in the United States?

American.

Because it's officially an actual cheese. Technically, it's a cheese.

I'm going to say it's probably cheddar, because that's the default that ends up on most things, but I don't think it's people's necessarily favorite.

So repeat this question one more time, because I feel like you Said variety, meaning there's more than one that I need to answer. I feel like this is a trick question because you've been doing this.

This is the way the question was worded. I didn't word the question like this, but it does say, what is the most popular cheese variety in the United States. Now, there might be multiple varieties of this particular cheese. Okay, it could be that, but it's. Yeah, there's one answer on this one.

Yellow.

I'm gonna go with Monterey Jack, because there's Colby Jack, and then there's like, a bunch of different ones. So I'm just thinking, like, variety that way.

Well, can you say Jack, then? Can you just say the Jack?

Yeah, I guess you could say Jack, but you're all wrong. But let me explain the reasoning. Now think about it in terms of pizza. Mozzarella is the most popular cheese variety, because pizzas. Mozzarella cheese on pizzas. That's what. Yep, yep, yep. So, you know, I was kind of scoring, like, on the fly here. Dennis probably got, you know, one or two. John definitely won probably, like, in the fives. And aj, you didn't get any. You really didn't get anything. But Addie and Scarlett got one point, so they beat you out in, too.

Because they also got the. The. The Swiss cheese eyes thing.

So.

Wow, you really care here.

Why we got to live in the past. We're living in the past, man. We can't live in the past. But, John, why don't you tell everyone where they can find you and anything that you're working on or just anywhere they can find you online if they want to get in touch with you or see some of your work?

Yeah, you can Find me on LinkedIn. You can also find me now on Blue Sky. I have an xcount. I'm not. I haven't been active very much on that for, like, two years. I mostly post out, but don't actually look at anything on there. I'm also on Mastodon and I can't remember you. We follow the Hunspot Developers YouTube channel as well.

And is your MySpace page still up?

I wish. I don't think that works that way anymore. I think it's only banned now.

Yeah, it's worth a shot. I mean, that or geocities. You know, it's one of those three. You gotta have at least one of those running still. Possibly, but no. I wanted to thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. It is always a pleasure to have one of the developer relations crew here, me being as an honorary one with the advocates.

You actually are on the team. What do you even say?

No, I know advocate.

Okay I. I caught. Yeah.

I didn't say I I know. I know what team I'm on. I'm just saying like as an honorary advocate, I. I checks in the mail.

The checks in the mail.

Do you do you said no, you.

Say I thought I was. I thought I was a freelance podcast host but it's not really working out. I'm b.

Maybe you should get Che.

No, I should get into custom naval cannonball cheeses and like sell those because I could Uruguay could be customer at this point. So I think we could work something out Sponsorship but yeah but no. I want to thank you for coming on. We really appreciate it and from everybody here at Developers After Dark, we appreciate everybody taking the time to listen to us and we will see you on our next episode.

Bye bye.

Later.

Love it, folks. Love it indeed.

Ending.

Sa.