82: Balancing Legacy Code, Content Creation, and Career Growth with The Primeagen

Robbie Wagner: [00:09] What's going on, everybody? Welcome to another Whiskey Web and Whatnot with myself, Robert William Wagner, and my co-host, as always, Charles William Carpenter III, with our guest today, The Primeagen. What's going on?

The Primeagen: [00:25] Hey. Howdy. Thanks for having me here. You know, I immediately recognize that you both have beautiful voices, and I'm coming in like strong Rick and Morty vibes, where you guys are definitely like, oh, hey. Oh, whiskey and woo.

Robbie Wagner: [00:37] It's all in the microphone.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:38] Seriously? Yeah. We don't sound like this in real life. Yeah, I actually sound like one of the lollipop kids in real life, but I'm able to tune that.

The Primeagen: [00:46] Yeah, no, totally. Totally. I definitely just sound like this is a microphone. No, it's definitely not the microphone. You guys are significantly more manly than me, clearly. I don't know what happened to my voice, but I wish I had it.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00] Well, I'll take the compliment.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02] Yeah, okay. Or maybe we should do some Twitch streams on having a voice for Radio.

The Primeagen: [01:07] You do. You have a beautiful voice for radio. I didn't say you have a face for radio. I said you had a voice for radio, so you should be happy about that.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:12] Yeah, maybe I've got a little bit of both. It's hard to say.

The Primeagen: [01:14] Yeah, you never know.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:17] I'm only 45. I could still do a pivot.

The Primeagen: [01:19] Yeah, you can try.

Robbie Wagner: [01:22] So, for folks who don't know who you are, do you want to give a little bit of an intro into who you are and what you do?

The Primeagen: [01:28] Sure. I'm probably best known for either YouTube or Twitch. Effectively, I try to make dumb things, for the most part, on Twitch. Recently, I'm actually trying to make something serious. I'm trying to build good technology on Twitch. For the most part, I don't build good things. Right. It's just something I just feel like doing in the moment. For whatever reason, I feel like it. So, yeah, that's pretty much what I'm known for, is being fast at Vim, having strong opinions that I tweet with very little context, and dumb YouTube videos, performance YouTube videos, something like that.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:04] I feel like, though, you're cycling back a little bit to the YouTube channel more and trying to massage it a little bit. It seems like some of the newer content there is, like the Twitch stuff, but more focused and like, oh, okay, we're going to focus on this one thing, and I'm going to walk you through how I do it, and some feedback I have about it. Something like that. Maybe I'm not gleaning it correctly, but.

The Primeagen: [02:25] You're close, so I don't know if you've ever ran a larger channel. For those that don't know, I'm right. Almost 170,000 subs on my main channel. Twelve or 13,000 on my side channel, and it feel this immense pressure all the time to do good content on my main channel, and it is really hard. I released, by far, my most well-crafted, best-ever smoothest video of all time. Worst video in a long time, and it just emotionally crushes me. That's something I can spend two weeks on and just get destroyed. Whereas my side channel has kind of been like my creative outlet where I can just dump whatever I want from my Twitch stream onto, and it's just been outrageously successful, and kind of that's like the direction I realize is that when you start off doing anything, you start off in a very niche way, right? Like, you just have to be building something around something very specific, like Vim, or this is like I am the person that knows everything about TypeScript you can think about, like Matt Pocock. And as you grow an audience, you can no longer remain in your niche. And so I've been just having this falling out of my niche crisis where I don't know what I'm even doing anymore. So I'm just uploading me doing nothing. And it's actually been working super well. And it makes me feel even more meaningless because now I'm like, what the hell have I been doing for these last couple of years? Am I just, like, not knowing? It's been an emotional roller coaster, this whole YouTube thing.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:48] Yeah, I can see that. Where you start to question whether you are popular due to entertainment value or are you providing other value to people.

The Primeagen: [03:56] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:57] Maybe a little of both.

The Primeagen: [03:58] And I think that at some point, when you get to a certain level, you have to be entertaining. And I think I was always first entertaining, and then I would say dumb things, and then I'd probably say something technical because I've been programming for 15 years. I've been at a FAANG company for ten. I have open offers many places. I'm not a bad programmer. I know that maybe not a good one, but I'm definitely not a bad one. And so it's just like I think I have something to offer that's technical and sound, but I don't think that that's what causes me to be where I'm at. I don't know. Sorry. These are just things I've been thinking about. Just like, I know this may not be entertaining for your audience, whatever, but it's like an emotional struggle being these things where you're just trying to, or at least my personal goal is that the thing I want to see is that people to stop just accepting where they're at as that's the best place to be. Right? Like, I want them to go, okay, I'm learning how to program. I want to build and breakout of tutorial hell. Programming is not supposed to be difficult because you don't know what you're doing. Programming is supposed to be difficult because you're building something hard, and it takes time and thought, but you can do it. I feel like most people get stuck on point one. They don't make it to point two. And I'm trying to make them get to point two, and it's very important for me. Sorry, I'm all over the place.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:09] No, no.

The Primeagen: [05:09] You guys can direct to the conversation.

Robbie Wagner: [05:11] No, no, that's fine.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:12] That's okay. We're kind of like our main podcast is like your side channel. We have a very loose format, and it's really just arbitrage for free whiskey anyway, so.

The Primeagen: [05:21] I love it.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:22] Different things that we glean along the way are entertaining. They do make a couple of points there that I think we'll come back to while we start to move forward a little bit into some of the hot takes. Because you are mentioning you like, sometimes like to post either videos or things on Twitter to, like, spark controversy, whether you mean it or not. So we'll talk about some of those in a second. But I'll dive into the whiskey. You did get it, right? You got a bonus, too.

The Primeagen: [05:47] I did get it, and I have a very special cup I have brought. May I show you my cup?

Chuck Carpenter: [05:51] Absolutely.

The Primeagen: [05:52] You can see it. I don't think the people at home can see it, but it says victory on one side, and it has a chiseled in AK on the other side. Do you know what this is?

**Chuck Carpenter: **[06:00] Controversial in itself, but no, I don't.

The Primeagen: [06:03] It is from the movie set of Netflix's very first movie we ever produced, Beast of No Nation. And so all the people that worked either on the website of things or on the show, there was this as one of the many things that came out of it. And so I helped work a little bit on the show, and so I got a little nice little chiseled cup. And so it's a fun little etched-in whiskey cup. That's from Netflix 2016, I think.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:26] Oh, wow. Yeah, that's funny. I would think longer ago, really? Like their first produced thing. But yeah, that's pretty cool.

The Primeagen: [06:34] It was first produced movie.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:35] Yes.

The Primeagen: [06:37] Our first produced thing was Lilyhammer. Nobody remembers that. 2015. 2015. I just looked it up right now. October 16, 2015. So I wasn't far off.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:44] No, I guess that's seven, eight, almost eight years ago.

The Primeagen: [06:47] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:47] So interesting. Well, I don't I think I don't even know what mine is. Oh, I think this came with some kind of kit, but it's a Glencairn. Pretty traditional, like, whiskey-tasting thing.

Robbie Wagner: [06:56] Oh, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:57] And then we've got this thingy, the old Nelson Brothers. So this is a Nelson Brothers Reserve bourbon?

The Primeagen: [07:04] Ooh.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:05] Yes. 107.8 proof. So it's got a little heat to it. Can't find out the mash bill nor the age statement because they're super secret, at least. But all bourbons must be four years minimally aged by law. This is actually a bourbon out of Tennessee. And Robbie and I have been to the distillery there called the Greenbriar Distillery. I was like, oh, I want to try one of those things.

The Primeagen: [07:26] I thought you couldn't have a bourbon if it's not from Kentucky. Am I wrong on that?

Chuck Carpenter: [07:29] That is incorrect. It's the only federally regulated spirit. It's also, like, organic in that sense, and so you can't artificially flavor it or anything like that, but there is no bounds in terms of where it can be created. So it has to be, like, 51% corn. It has to go into the barrels at a certain proof. It can't be artificially flavored, four year minimum. All those kinds of things are the laws, but it doesn't have to be in Kentucky.

The Primeagen: [07:53] I thought it was like but isn't that, like, the phrase, like, proper bourbon is from Kentucky, or am I just making that up?

Chuck Carpenter: [07:58] I mean, as someone from Kentucky, yes, we have a little pride, but that's really all it is. Now, if they try to call it, like, Kentucky straight bourbon, obviously, it should be from Kentucky and not Tennessee. But the only thing that makes Jack Daniels not bourbon because it has the same mash bill that fits all of that is that when they filter it, they filter it through maple-flavored charcoal. So no, not bourbon anymore.

The Primeagen: [08:20] Disgusting. That's what I think.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:24] Says the man with an AK cup.

The Primeagen: [08:27] Hey, it's a sweet cup.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:28] Okay, you know what? I hope it's still a good day, even though you had to use your AK.

The Primeagen: [08:33] I think it's going to be.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:35] Smells good.

The Primeagen: [08:36] Are we taking our drinks now?

Chuck Carpenter: [08:37] Yeah, we can do whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [08:38] We're evaluating.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:39] Yeah, I do a little smelling first. Try to glean something.

The Primeagen: [08:42] I'm mimicking you guys. I'm not whiskey versed if you will. I poured a really big drink. I realized that I went, like, almost two fingers on this one. I'm going to have to slow down.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:51] Perfect. I think this is going to get exciting. This is probably why you're more productive than I am, though.

Robbie Wagner: [08:56] So I smell some steamed green beans.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:58] What?

Robbie Wagner: [08:59] I don't know if you're getting that.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:01] I had a little vanilla. I don't know what you put on your green beans.

Robbie Wagner: [09:04] Some leather as well.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:05] Yeah. Rich mahogany.

The Primeagen: [09:08] I smell a light alcohol set. That's what I was smelling. Picking up a slight burn in the nose.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:15] It's got a little burn on the tongue, too. This one's hot, for sure.

Robbie Wagner: [09:18] Yeah. 107.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:22] Yeah. Trying to glean a little more out of this. I'm getting some orange rind. I'm getting a little vanilla in the beginning. I'm getting the hell burned out of my tongue. As long as it stays so.

The Primeagen: [09:33] Yeah, this one's spicy. Do you guys ever make mixed drinks with these? Are you guys old-fashioned?

Chuck Carpenter: [09:39] I do like an old-fashioned.

The Primeagen: [09:40] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:41] Not on the show, but personally, yes. Old fashioned would be one of my go-to, like, a boulevardier. I don't know. Especially in the rope winter, for some reason. So that has amaros in it and sweet vermouth. I don't know. I don't make a ton of other ones. Are you a cocktail connoisseur?

The Primeagen: [09:57] I wish I was. Every time I see someone make cocktails and talk about the origin and these stories, I'm like, I could totally do that. But then I also don't want to have to drink that many cocktails to get to this point of being good at it.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:10] Right.

The Primeagen: [10:11] What did you do for the last two years? I was hammered. What did you do?

Chuck Carpenter: [10:13] Yeah. And I think they were delicious. I don't remember.

The Primeagen: [10:17] You want to try one that I think was a good time?

Chuck Carpenter: [10:20] Yeah. You did invite people over frequently, so you don't have to drink them all yourself.

The Primeagen: [10:24] This is true. That's actually a good idea. Speedrun cocktail tasting.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:29] Yeah. This almost has, like, an orangey creme brulee kind of thing for me. A little burned sugar, little leathery on the finish.

Robbie Wagner: [10:37] Getting a little apple.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:39] We usually make this stuff up.

The Primeagen: [10:40] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:41] Also, I watch your channel. I know you listen to this podcast, like, religiously, but I'll repeat for everyone else. So we do the very stringent rating scale, one to eight tentacles. We use tentacles because our agency's logo is an octopi like character. So one being horrible, eight being, like, amazing. Drink it every day for average, and then you can kind of skew anywhere in between for you and just kind of compare it to things you have already. Do you like it better? Do you like it worse? We categorize it around, like, bourbons and whatever else, but we also do this every week, so we've had way too much liquor for this year already.

The Primeagen: [11:23] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:23] So I'll let Robbie go first. He can set a tone for you.

The Primeagen: [11:27] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [11:28] I might give this one a seven, I think. Can't really say why, but I like it.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:32] I don't know. Should I just call you Prime?

The Primeagen: [11:35] You can call me Prime. Prime is good.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:37] Yeah. Okay. So, Prime, yeah, if you would like to.

The Primeagen: [11:40] All right. So I've only had a few whiskies in my life, right? I've had your bottom shelf ones, or at least what I consider bottom shelf, your Jack Daniels. I've never really enjoyed that. And then I have with me at my house. I have a few bottles of Blanton's. There's a guy locally that every single time he gets a shipment, and he goes, do you want Buffalo Trace or Beaton's? And as a smart individual, I always buy at least one just because you got to always have them on available. Even though now I currently have ten years worth of whiskey, I'm still going to just keep buying them because they're very good. And Blaton's, I think, is really smooth. It's easy to drink, but it's not nearly as flavorful as this one. This one has a lot of flavor. It definitely hits the tongue harder. My tongue already feels almost, like, a little sensitive from drinking it, and so for me, I don't know if I could drink a lot of this because I think it's going to give me heartburn. It's, like, a really intense drink, and so I think that if I got into whiskeys more, this would probably be a lot higher rating. But since I'm not super into it, and this is just really intense for my palate, I'd put this at like a five.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:39] Yeah, that's above average. That's all right. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, it might be very flavorful, but all of the intensity around those flavors might kind of turn you off as a regular sipper. And maybe if you were going to make cocktails with this high heat and you were adding other, like, sweet, like ingredients, then it would temper some of that for you, too. So still give you some of the flavor without so much spice and heat to it.

The Primeagen: [13:00] Yeah, this seems like a very good one to mix.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:02] Yeah, I could definitely see that. Or even just a few drops of water. An ice cube. That's another way to kind of curb some of that.

The Primeagen: [13:08] I was actually going to go get some ice cubes for our next one because I love.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:11] That's fair.

The Primeagen: [13:11] Ice cubes with these.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:12] Yeah, we can make that work. Any pauses or snafus get edited anyway, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, I don't know. I'm about a six and a half on this one. I think it's pretty flavorful. I think I'm getting kind of a punch in the face, so maybe it'll open up and evolve for me, but for now, it's like, this is good. It's pleasant for a bourbon and not too sweet. So, yeah, I'm gonna go six and a half.

Robbie Wagner: [13:33] Cool.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:34] All right, so from the man who has so many opinions, let's start with something that I haven't seen go too crazy on Twitter. Git rebase or Git merge.

The Primeagen: [13:45] Okay, so I have pretty strict policies around this. So first, I should probably talk about what do I work on. I work in an old legacy, also modern C++ code base that has existed longer than I've been at Netflix. I've been at Netflix for a decade. We have something like. I don't know. 500,000 commits to the code base. Very large. Right. It takes a long time to download if you're doing the full history and all that. And so for me, personally, I think the best way to use Git is that you take your set of commits you commit frequently, put little squash me, whatever things you take your commit, once you feel like that's the item, get it into a singular commit. Good. Nice tagline. Exactly what you worked on. Worked on widgets. Change this thing. So that way, when I need to just go find the commits associated with widgets, I can go, whoop. widget being like a domino. That's what we call them at Netflix. So I do that, and then I rebase that change on top of the current release train that is being worked or developed on. Because, again, remember, we're a television product. That means every X times a year, we actually have hard cuts in our C++. And therefore, all changes need to pretty much always go forward, and only critical things need to go back. And it's not like we can just ask our television partners to go deploy some C++ to the field, right? So it's like, it's a very complicated process. So mine comes from, I think, a need of complication and strictness. And so I always try to be very strict when it comes to Netflix stuff. Personally, I just don't like having more commits in a code base. Sometimes when I'm looking for a bug, especially on a smaller project, I know in my head, oh, it's probably right here. Let me look at this. Changed that really quickly. I can kind of just get log look at the last ten, see? Okay. But the more merges, the more of that kind of stuff. I feel like it just clouds things up a little bit. I don't really like it. I like just kind of a clean thing, and then on like a philosophical level, when you merge something in, I feel like your change, your atomic change, what you've considered the thing that you built, I really think that it should rest on top because whatever's below it has been tested, approved, and stamped to go out. Your change fundamentally has not had that. And so interweaving it into the commit history kind of feels almost unclean to me, if you will. And then, lastly, reverting or cherry-picking is super complicated if you don't keep things clean and squashed. And so, for me, it just seems to make most sense to always just rebase keep it simple when I need to commit or cherry-pick, which is already a sign you're in a bad place, to begin with. What has happened? I think we've all been there where we had to just cherry-pick something out. So that's kind of like my philosophy, which just comes from working on a team with twelve people in a large code base that has existed for over a decade. And so I try to follow that as the best I can.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:31] I think that's all very reasonable. Yeah. And I think strict over less strict for the most part unless it's like a personal project, a very small thing is kind of a good principle to use in your career in general because you never know where you're going to land and what kind of projects you will come into or even start yourself. And so, like, why not have a base set of principles and not have the context change too much?

The Primeagen: [16:52] Yeah. And I find that no one is upset if you rebase your changes and commit on top. Right. No one's going to argue you if you don't add any merge commits. You don't do any of that, and you have a single little commits that you're throwing in. They're fairly atomic, and they're very nice. Nobody argues that. But take the inverse. You got yourself a little bit of a problem. You're going to have some things you're going to be challenged on. You could have coworkers upset. So I just tend to operate in a way that causes the least disturbance to the ecosystem.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:17] Yeah, that's a good citizen. That's what that is. I agree with that.

Robbie Wagner: [17:21] Yeah, I totally agree with that.

The Primeagen: [17:22] Hey, good citizen, can I ask you guys a question?

Chuck Carpenter: [17:24] Sure.

The Primeagen: [17:25] You're in a code base, and there's two definitions of a good citizen here. The first one in, which is probably the one we all use, is that a good citizen does what the other people effectively do. You follow the style guidelines. You do everything that you want to make code such that it looks as if someone was perusing the code. They couldn't tell your spot from somebody else's. Right. You've done a good job. When and how do you decide not to be a good citizen?

Chuck Carpenter: [17:52] Interesting.

The Primeagen: [17:52] Sorry. When you say the good citizen thing, what I realized is that all good citizens pave a road to hell if your code base is starting to go down because you keep mimicking each other in worse and worse practices.

Robbie Wagner: [18:02] Yeah, I tend to just come in and disagree with everything as much as I can. With the Git rebase stuff. I've been trying to force everyone to squash and merge PRs. Like, I get that sometimes that's not the best thing to do because maybe you do actually want three commits or something that are like atomic commits. But overall, it's like using Prettier. To me, it's like if we all do it, it's always the same. It might not be your favorite because Prettier has opinions and whatever too, but that is the best thing to use, in my opinion. So I think doing things like that and forcing people to do things the cleanest way, whether everyone likes it or not, is, like, good for people, but it can also, I guess, cause a lot of problems if everyone hates the thing you're trying to introduce.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:51] Right, exactly. So I was going to say I have a lot of my career that has been in, like, a leadership perspective, so I have the idea of coming in to, like, if there's a challenge coming up, I'm not personally going to become the bad citizen. I'm going to start to rally around the discussion of a potential pivot in whatever the rules of engagement are because a problem has started to show itself. And so instead of, like, saying, this problem surfaced, I know the better way, and then evangelizing a forced, like, path through that, I'm instead going to say, we all live here, right? This is our home, you know, looks like some walls are falling down in our home. So let's talk about how we're going to deal with getting the foundation solid again and then go down a path which is more time-consuming. So there's some trade-offs to that. But I'm never like a guns ablazing kind of fellow. Unlike Robbie, it sounds like.

Robbie Wagner: [19:44] Yeah, I'm bad cop. Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:46] I am good cop. And I'm like, I want to be your friend, and we all have to live together, so let's figure out a solution here.

The Primeagen: [19:52] So, at what point do you know to pull that trigger? Because I always find that, or at least one thing I find difficult, is that there can be established pattern of code base. So I'm not even talking about style, right? Like, say, using classes or only using functions or this or that. Right. Whatever. Soup du jour is the thing. Inevitably, all decisions turn bad over a period of time. Why? Because we are using an imperfect language to describe a perfect set of logic, blah, blah, all the philosophical talk we can throw on top of it. And we're imperfect people trying to describe something that demands perfection. Right? And so it's like, at what point do you try to break it and start something new and then even harder? How do you make that change happen when someone new comes to the code base and now they have do I take the code pattern and how they're doing things from Search, or should I take it from over here? And how they do it from Member?

Chuck Carpenter: [20:43] That's an interesting thing. Well, I think conversely, so there's one thing, is that the speed of change has accelerated massively over the last like five years or so. So I think that, like the point, you initially make where all decisions at some point kind of end up being wrong, and then you have to take a look at things and how does it rear its ugly head? Right. Either like someone sees something and they raise their hand, or you have a massive error that makes it into an environment and freaks people out or something. It does make it to production. You got like a series of hot fixes, and then in your retrospective around that, you say, we fucked up. Where are we going to go with this? But I think right now, stuff is changing so fast that I don't know that things that frequently get to that point. There's a lot of architectural pivots framework, pivots language, pivots, every web tool getting rewritten in Rust. 64 new frameworks.

The Primeagen: [21:41] Let's go, Rust.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:42] I know. I mean, to a degree, I loved, and I think you were doing a kind of tongue-in-cheek to Kent, but Kent was just like type strips here to stay. Yeah, like it or not, this is the thing. And you're like. Rust is here to stay. We're all going to do this. And I don't think you're necessarily wrong. I am very intrigued by Rust and that the potential of web components delivering on that promise from more than ten years ago.

The Primeagen: [22:05] Yeah, the promise of WASM it's going to be there? This is the year of WASM. And then it's like next year. This is the year of WASM.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:11] Yeah, exactly. You can even write JavaScript that compiles over like I don't know what's stopping you.

The Primeagen: [22:17] So for those that don't know, the Tweet effectively went, mic, unless I'm teaching the fundamentals of JavaScript, I'll be using TypeScript from here on forward. Let's just face it. TypeScript won. I believe I've effectively nailed it. There's no going back. Just get used to it. You're going to be using it. Big thing. I think this is like a Twitch thing, and I think this likely comes across offended. I think he didn't really like it, but it's like a very Twitch thing to do, which is just copy-paste. When someone says something, you just copy it, you just paste it. You just say the same thing, and all of sudden a you'll see like a chat that will just take over as just like the same thing being said by 15 people because one person said something pretty serious, and so everybody else is like meme, meme, meme. And so, of course, I just copy and paste and just replace the word TypeScript with Rust. Because I'm like, oh, funny. For Rust instead. Yeah, right, because it makes no sense. Why would I be teaching JavaScript fundamentals, let alone using Rust all the time? Both those things don't even make any sense said together. But it accidentally blew up. I didn't even mean it for it to blow up. But it is a good point, which is the web, in the next three years, is going to actually arrive at a crossroad where more than one thing can happen. We can all get a chance to use something that maybe is a little less traditional. If you consider JavaScript traditional, like in the sense that Go I think will be a real viable option. Because how much do you want to bet that web assembly is going to start shipping or at least VA will start shipping its own garbage collection, memory [unintelligible], whatever you call that thing? I'm trying to think of the right word. The whiskey has made my words go.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:44] Already.

The Primeagen: [23:44] I know, can you believe I'm a huge lightweight? And so it's like once those things start happening, all of a sudden, it just opens the door for everything to execute. And so the next big revolution is coming. It's just like, what is it going to be? And I think Rust plays a very exciting future because it's just so different.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:02] Yeah, I can definitely agree with that. And I think that there's already a hard look at what is the architecture that creates the web, and it's not so singular as it had kind of evolved back into like the big joke is like actually, PHP wasn't so bad anymore.

The Primeagen: [24:17] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:17] You can web render, or you can server render everything. So now we can do it again.

The Primeagen: [24:22] That's Astro, like that's Fred. Fred was like. It's actually not bad. And it really isn't bad. I think that the promise of interactivity and JavaScript and Ajax requests and all those things that kind of came about in 2011, 2012, it just made everything really hard. And it's now like we have two worlds that exist. We have this kind of, like, simplified, more simple SSR model, and then this really complex one that everyone is like, it's still inventing terms and things like, I don't even know what an island is currently. I know that there's islands and they exist, and I'm very confused by this term, but nonetheless, there's just so much happening for somebody to get up to speed. It just seems like I don't even know how I do web programming at this point. Like, if I had to start now, the deficit that I would be in is just enormous.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:09] Well, you would learn React in the way that people learned jQuery to work on the web years ago. It's never like vanilla JavaScript, which is interesting because it always turns out that demands in the hiring market end up being a learning path because CS programs lag behind in real world training, I think. And then your boot camps or whatever skill acclimation paths that happen when you first get started. I mean, for me, when I first got started, I was slicing Photoshop files and putting things into tables for layout and so, like.

Robbie Wagner: [25:42] The good days.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:43] Yeah. Dreamweaver was a thing, which is funny because I was watching a stream with Jason Langstrom, and somebody mentioned Dreamweaver, and he was like, does that still exist? It does. It still exists. So somebody's doing that right now in some way, shape, or form.

The Primeagen: [25:59] Netbeam still exists. It doesn't mean it's, like, a good idea to use it.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:02] Right, yeah. But where somebody is just sticking around and paying that licensing fee every year just magically.

The Primeagen: [26:09] Can we jump on yet another really hot topic?

Chuck Carpenter: [26:11] Yeah, absolutely.

The Primeagen: [26:12] Because you said that universities aren't producing people that are, like, really up to speed for work environments. Yeah, I'd like to make a counterargument. I think they actually produce people better equipped for the real world than anything we have today.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:27] Okay. I can say that there's probably a slight misnomer in that statement. For me, I think that it depends on the job. And I think that demand for the web in marketing departments, for example, has existed for many, many years. And that was like an entryway if you weren't, like, working in .NET doing ecom, set up, things like that. Right. So obviously, CS programs are setting you up to work for a bank. They're setting you up to work in a FAANG environment, or what is it now? It's a MAANG? Anyway.

The Primeagen: [26:57] MANGA.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:58] Yeah. Where you really need to do serious algorithms and computation and stuff. Right. Not like edit a WordPress theme. So I guess that I think in terms of what the skill set is for a lot of jobs, like common jobs out in the marketplace and not like SaaS products necessarily, things like that there's rather than highly specialized actual programming and really just like web work. So that was my tie into things like jQuery, but now jQuery is React, and a lot of the React is UI.

Robbie Wagner: [27:31] Yeah.

The Primeagen: [27:32] I can buy that.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:33] So, in that sense, computer science programs aren't necessarily getting people ready for that either. Although I hear they're starting to teach React as like the gateway in a bunch.

The Primeagen: [27:43] Ooh, that's sad.

Robbie Wagner: [27:44] Just in time for it to die.

The Primeagen: [27:45] What about you, Robbie?

Robbie Wagner: [27:46] Yeah, I think traditional degree prepares you for taking on challenges of whatever sort. So it's like if you can prove you get through college, then it's like you can probably debug stuff, you can probably find your way through different languages or whatever, but there's a huge lack like Chuck was saying in teaching the things you actually need for your job, but it teaches you how to learn those things. So you should be able to learn on the job, provided they're flexible and aren't only hiring like senior in X framework devs.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:20] Because at the end of the day, learning HTML, learning plain CSS, learning Vanilla JavaScript set you up into why these tools help you, you know, and they accelerate through like, oh, here's the sugar that helps me get there faster. And I understand like what this API provides. I understand these utility classes solve this problem on a different scale. Like just walking in and knowing Tailwind is like pretty challenging because when you go to another project and they use material UI or a BEM framework or something else and you're going to be like, what does this mean?

The Primeagen: [28:49] So here's my counter to all this, which is the point of university isn't to prepare you for a practical job in the moment at a design studio, at a marketing place, whatever you want. It is to teach you what a function does and why a function works the way it does so that no matter what framework you're using, you can guess and understand how it works. Therefore, you can debug and route a problem significantly faster. The reason why I can understand closures and those things when I first learned JavaScript, really like in a night or in a very technical sense, is because I had to build a compiler that used IL intermediate language, which is Microsoft's kind of LLVM before LLVM and there was no such thing as closures. You had to generate closures by programming in the assembly to actually make hidden functions with variables, think Groovy, and kind of like actually create those things. And so when I was using the web or using a more loosey goose language that didn't have this concept of closures because I came from like Java 1.5, there was no closures. It's not how the world worked back then. And it was very simple because I'm like, oh, I know exactly what's happening, and I know why it's happening, and I understand why this for loop which is relying on I, but I is changing and the functions failing. I understand why because I have written this like I understand the fundamental concept for what's happening here, which I think makes all forms of learning and acceleration 100 times easier. You may start further behind, but it's kind of like, do you want to start at the starting line and go 10 miles an hour, or do you want to start 100 yards back and go 20 miles an hour? I want to choose the 20 mile an hour because, after a mile, I'm going to be way ahead. I'm going to be crushing. And so that's kind of like my main argument for it, and I understand why people can't do it, all the practical reasons, blah blah blah. But I do think that as a web in general, we are really undervaluing. Why do languages look the way they look? Why do we use the things we use? Like what is type discrimination? Why does it work? How does pattern matching work? Have you thought about these things in a more deeper level? And it makes a lot of sense. Once you understand memory and layout and why JavaScript behaves the way it does, all of sudden, it becomes very clear.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:02] And beautiful, and now I'm going to counterpoint your counterpoint, which in that I agree with everything.

The Primeagen: [31:07] Checkmate.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:07] That you just said, except for I don't think you have to get it from university agree? I think that there can be a more technical training program that focuses on these things and makes it an important part of initial training. And perhaps if you're an accelerator program, that's not where the money is. I need to get you out and in a job in twelve weeks or 18 weeks or whatever else. But yeah, coming in and understanding programming fundamentals, I think, is an important part of that, and then it helps you find answers so that if you don't know whatever framework, you can walk in and go through it and understand why it's doing some certain things and how that helps you.

The Primeagen: [31:48] Yeah, I love that answer, and I really want it to be true. But practically speaking, like who's going to spend three months learning computational theory? It's just so that then in three months they can now finally start doing their initial compiler approach, right? It's an emotionally hard commitment to make, and the most impactful class I've ever had was compilers. That thing has benefited me more than any other class in the last 15 years, and it is by far the most useless class I have ever taken. So it's kind of interesting, like dichotomy that ends up happening, which is like here's a completely useless class that ends up being the most useful foundational stuff. I don't build compilers. I built one compiler professionally, just one.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:33] How could you turn that into a plural site course and make it engaging? I wonder.

The Primeagen: [32:38] It is a good question which is how do you make this into something that people can practically use? Because let's just face it, you don't need to know pigeonhole theorem. You don't need to know any of these things. You don't even know what a pushdown automata is. Right. You don't have to know those things to start writing compilers. So there is some practical application to it that you can skip over the theoretics.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:55] Yeah, it would be interesting because I think there's a gaping hole in some of those things in terms of, like, things that you can self-learn. Because I'm self-taught. You know, I didn't take computer science.

The Primeagen: [33:06] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:06] In college. I was supposed to be an architect. Damn it.

The Primeagen: [33:09] The hardest degree, I think, to earn is architecture.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:12] Right. And honestly, it's a very saturated market, second to lawyers, so it's really hard to actually be successful in that and do exciting projects. Not everybody gets to be Frank Geary.

The Primeagen: [33:24] Yeah, it's kind of sad because I feel like architecture is by far. Like A, just the hardest degree. The kids that had to work the hardest, longest hours were always architects. They're always just nonstop, but B, it's just like, yeah, it's great that you got this degree, but that one architect just produced five plants that has sold to, like, a half million houses. Sorry, there's only going to be, like, 4 million houses built this year, and 20% of them just went out the door to one person.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:52] Right?

The Primeagen: [33:53] You're just like shit. Sorry. Darn it. Can I curse on this if I actually?

Chuck Carpenter: [33:59] Oh, absolutely, yeah. I dropped the F-bomb earlier.

The Primeagen: [34:02] Okay. I only curse to convey an emotion. I don't curse to convey a word that I should have used. So you'll never hear me say, like, oh, I'm trying to think, what's that shit? All people are like, oh, what the fuck is that? Right? It's just like, no, you're ruining the thing. You're not describing what you're trying to say. You're not describing your feeling. You're only just saying how it feels. Like, you got to get smarter with your language. Sorry, that's like a passion point of mine. We should use words that convey meaning as best we can.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:32] Yeah, I don't know. Fuck has a lot of different connotations and meanings based on the emphasis, and very versatile. Yeah, I understand that. There definitely can be some lazy use. Right. Because there are some people who don't like comedians that use profanity, and then I think there are comedians that use profanity that enhances the subject. Like, George Carlin is a master of combining that street language and very intelligent speak.

The Primeagen: [34:59] Yeah, I'm totally on that team. So, growing up, my two favorite comedians were Brian Regan and Dave Chappelle. They're about as far on the spectrum from each other as you could possibly get. But that was like my 2005 era was walking on the Moon and the Chappelle Show. So it was like those were, like, the formative years of my life. And so I just don't like it when it replaces thought, but when it is an emphasis, like, you have to.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:23] Or it's an attention grab.

The Primeagen: [35:27] I don't like using it for shock. That's weak. I think using it to make somebody feel what you're thinking that's good. Like, it's good.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:33] Yeah. For emphasis, I think, is kind of like, get your attention now. We're going down this journey. But in Deadwood, I mean, everybody uses polite language. I figured, like, there's a lot of cursing and, like, leather chaps or something, but not like motorcycle chaps, like horse chaps.

The Primeagen: [35:51] Yes, absolutely. You've nailed it. A lot of can't, like, all the great words hitherto thitherto.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:58] Oh, my boy.

The Primeagen: [36:00] Come here. Come sit thitherto, boy. I'm like, oh, here I come.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:06] So before I forget, actually, one of our colleagues, he had a question for you, too, and I was like, I want to make sure I squeeze it in. And we talked a little bit about other things that you could teach or whatever, and he said, Any plans for future longer format courses? Like the one, you did for Frontend Masters. Comparing TSCO and Rust.

The Primeagen: [36:23] Yeah. So actually, first off, for those that don't know yet, I did like this polyglot course. I think it's too much, too quick. I can operate within three languages fairly easily, and I think that probably was maybe too quick for the format. So on March 10, I will be doing another Frontend Master as just Rust for TypeScript devs. So I'm just trying to take concepts from TypeScript and map it over to Rust so that way you can understand, like, what are unions in TypeScript? This is a union. How do you represent a union in Rust? Okay, this is a class. How does a class work in Rust? This is function. This is functional programming. And then, of course, obviously dispel the borrow checker list versus vector, all those kind of fun things. But, yeah, I do a little bit of long-form content. So this is like another one of these emotionally hard parts for me is that there's this thing that I really want, is that I really want to be able to work full time in content. But I also recognize that if you're not working in the real world, you become divorced, and you start just being wrong about things. You're no longer operating in reality. And so I don't want to quit my job, but I do want to quit my job, if you understand that. And so one of the things is that if you quit your job, you have to be able to make a living. And obviously, I have a lot of knowledge of TypeScript. I would say that I'm not Matt Pocock slash Trash Dev level of TypeScript knowledge, but I'm not far from that. And I also know a lot about Rust, right? I'm not faster than Liam smart, but I am fairly smart at Rust. And I know I could teach a really good solid course and sell it by myself, and I could make a lot of money, and I could go out and do those kind of things, but at the same time, I don't want to be one of those influencers that have a course, you know what I mean? Every person that does influencing does ads. If you've watched all my products, I've had two ad placements in the entirety of hundreds of videos and all that, that's it. Because I really want the content itself to be good, and I feel like people lose some of their confidence when they see that. I don't want to be another tech lead. I don't want to be another guy that sells out, and then everybody hates. Right. I want to end this like Seinfeld, where I go, well, hey, we're at the peak, but I'm done here, everybody. Take care. I hope you guys all do good and just end in a good, positive way. And so that's one of the things I see, and so I struggle with that question. I think about it a lot. I've talked to my wife, I've talked to people who do it for a long living, and I've really tried to figure out what's the best way to do it. And it's super difficult. There you go.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:50] Yeah. I mean, if you want to maintain the balance, I think that is pretty challenging because, at the end of the day, everybody has bills to pay, right?

The Primeagen: [38:56] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:56] Sometimes you have to make sacrifices for that. So if you have a stable income, then obviously you can make choices that are personally feel good to you without any loss. If there's a gain, gravy. If not, that's totally fine as well. Yeah, I get that. That's interesting.

The Primeagen: [39:14] Yeah. One of the hard parts about that is that for me to maintain my current lifestyle, meaning that every day I stream on Twitch for a couple of hours, every day I do a bunch of stuff. I think about YouTube. For me to be able to maintain that, I wake up at 5:30 no matter what, and I usually wake up at five, but lately, I've been doing 5:30. Recently, health issue, all that with my wife, had to kind of recover from that. Totally threw off the sleep schedule, so I'm, like, working my way back. So two nights ago, my daughter was up until 01:00 a.m. There's nothing I could do about it. She's not even two years old. That's how it works. And so, I'm still waking up every day at 5:30 to maintain the schedule. And it's just like the difficulty of making it so that it doesn't feel like it's selling is really hard, and most people don't know what it takes to actually do that.

Robbie Wagner: [39:55] Yeah, a lot of people make it sound really easy. Like if you listen to Syntax, West Bos, it's always like, yeah, I record a video every day, and it's just super easy to do, and there's tons of time to do it. Everyone should record a video per day. And it's like, no, sir.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:09] Right?

Robbie Wagner: [40:10] I do not have time for a video every day.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:12] Yeah, I mean, I have two small kids, I day job work across multiple clients. And then doing this once a week is one thing, but every single day, keeping it interesting and fresh, it's just challenging for me. And maybe that's just me versus Wes. But yeah, I think that if marketing yourself and having a brand, and I'm not saying that's his sole motivation or anything, maybe it's just a different beast, but that, I think, is trading to a degree, right?

The Primeagen: [40:43] It's hard.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:44] If it's not fun, then what is it then? And if it's not your primary source of income and not fun, then what are you doing?

The Primeagen: [40:52] I think the big thing that to be successful at this longer than a year, or longer than two years, or longer than three years, there's a couple of different axes that you have to kind of think on. And one, growth is fun. No matter what somebody says. You'll always hear content creators being like, oh, I just do it because I love to do it, right? And it's just like the reality is that if you start growing, it's fun in of itself. You're like, wow, two years ago, I had 100 people watch me on Twitch. When I signed off, I was at 1200 people watching me on Twitch. It feels fun to have that kind of stuff, right? No matter how you feel about it, it's fun to have growth. But that only lasts for so long. You can't infinitely grow. So what's the part that gets you through the not growing seasons? Right? Because there was also three years that I was less than 100. I was 30 people for a year, then 40, then 50, then also 100, then it just took off like a rocket. But nonetheless, it's like you have to be able to have fun. And so I bet you Wes likes and loves that, right? He likes being able to investigate these things. And so he may not make videos if he were doing it by himself. If he is in a closed loop by himself, he probably just investigate those things, laugh at it, have it in his knowledge, talk about it with people. But since we live in a world where that's happened, and he's successful at it, he gets to do both. Which I think is really where the glory of it all is. That if you can grow or be big and then also love what you do, you're like excited about the thing for the sake of the thing. I think it works really well. And even if you have to get up every day at 5:30 and go to bed when hopefully you can go to bed every day at nine but doesn't work that way.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:26] I was going to say good for you. My kids go to bed at eight and sometimes have, oh, they want to get up a few more times or whatever else, and then we're like, we just want an hour or so to ourselves. A lot of times, that's the time to, like, watch a show or spend a little time with my wife. And then ten. I can usually get ten, and then I'm back up at six. So the cadence isn't completely off. But yeah, I feel that you need some consistency to sort of keep going, and then things get thrown in there every once in a while.

The Primeagen: [42:54] Yeah. I think the hardest part is dealing with a slowdown. I don't know how you guys feel about your numbers and all that kind of stuff because I'm sure you've been running this for how long now.

Chuck Carpenter:[43:05] A little over a year, right?

Robbie Wagner: [43:06] Yeah, year and a half, something like that.

The Primeagen: [43:08] Yeah. I bet you there's been inevitable times where it's just slower than it's been faster, and no matter how much you don't want it to be true, it hurts a little bit. It always does hurt a little bit. You want to be like. I'm making a thing that I'm pouring my heart into. I hope people like and then when people don't watch, you, like, oh, that hurts. It hurts right here because it's an extension of who I am in some sense, and that hurts a little bit.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:33] I get that too. Yeah. That was to say. You do have an identity that people know. Yes, you work at Netflix, but how many people are like, oh yeah, I heard you work at Netflix. No, they're not talking about that. They're talking about the other aspects. I don't know. I choose the Ostrich syndrome, and so I just put my head in the sand, and I don't know what's happening. I just show up and sometimes ask people personally to be on this. And I pick the whiskey sometimes with Robbie, like, I'm the shipper.

Robbie Wagner: [44:00] It's more about the whiskey and just chilling.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:03] Yeah, I try to keep it there. Robbie is a little bit more attuned to those metrics, and I'm like, I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [44:08] Yeah, I watch the numbers.

The Primeagen: [44:10] Yeah. It's still a real thing, right? No matter how you feel about it, it's a real thing. And this goes to, I mean, this really can apply to any part in life, right? If you work really hard at a job and you're hoping for a good pay raise, recognition, a better title, whatever, and it doesn't happen, it hurts because, in some sense, what you've been pouring into feels invalidated. Right. And so this is a universal feeling anyone can understand. It's just that most people's understanding of it is in vague titles. The difference between senior and staff or from senior to lead or whatever you want to say, whereas yours is like an actual number, right? You're like, it's the fifth hour in, and it's not performing as well statistically. It just hurts. In a more specific level.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:53] We lose 50 subscribers. We're like, what did we do?

The Primeagen: [44:56] It's. That AK cup. They just did not like that.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:59] That was it. Yeah. War will really spike in the Midwest. I don't know. It's hard to say.

Robbie Wagner: [45:04] Yeah, it's always random and weird. Like, you'll get a bunch of people from some random area, or like, an episode that we didn't think was that good does way better than others, and it's like, what is going on? I don't understand.

The Primeagen: [45:15] So the weirdest thing happens, and I have this one video that I look back on. It's like the weirdest thing ever. I believe I called it Why I Used Vim. And that's it. I turned on the camera and recorded a single take all the way through. My editor lightly edited it. It's six minutes long. I didn't think it would do anything. It is overall the second-best-performing, or it's the first-best-performing video of all time. 6000 subscribers added to the YouTube channel just from that one video alone. And it's like the box art is like my green background with me going, that is it. And somehow, that's the best one. It blows my mind sometimes, like, what people pick up on, and it just shows. Like, it's so hard to predict these things.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:58] I do think that Vim is an interesting subject. I think it's like a morbid curiosity for tons of developers, particularly on the web. I know that it has been on, like, a list for me to, like, learn proficiency in for probably at least ten years. Because I can remember when I was at National Geographic, and I had a colleague broke his wrist, and he all of a sudden, like, had to one hand stuff. He's like, how do I figure this out? He spent two days learned Vim and became the fastest developer on our team. And I was like, wow, that seems worthwhile, but I'm going to put that over here for now.

The Primeagen: [46:31] You know, it's odd because this applies to all things in life, right? Like, if there's something that could immediately benefit you, but it's hard, you're like, yeah, I'll just do that later.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:42] Yeah, low-hanging fruit first. Low-hanging fruit, there's definitely that.

The Primeagen: [46:48] The thing is that sometimes they're not even hard. Like, just imagine the situation in which you're not a very good typer. Becoming a better typer will dramatically impact a large part of what you do. You type out emails. You type out Slack messages. You type out code. You don't have to think. You don't have to look. It just happens. It's natural. That dramatically improves your life. Yet what is it, like, one out of five people can actually type? Well, even in the programming field, it was just kind of shocking because you're using it every day, all day. To me, that's always one of those things where I'm like, why don't you improve that one thing, you know, it's going to be benefit. I understand that you spend a lot of time thinking, but spend a lot of time typing too. Yeah, it's not just thinking.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:31] Yeah, absolutely.

The Primeagen: [47:32] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [47:32] I think, in general, people that kind of use the keyboard for everything I find is just amazing. I don't know how to start learning that, but I watch them perform tasks, and it's like, that's so much faster because I'm like, oh, I'm just mousing around and clicking where I want and whatever. And I always give the example of Pzuraq from the Ember community. His keyboard was blank. It was just like all black keys. And he would just type shit and just control his whole computer with just the keyboard. Like he used Dvorak instead of the normal layout. It seems like your mind needs another level. I don't know how there should be courses around that, of just how to figure that all out and do all that. Because if I even tried to learn Vim for a couple of days, I would just go back to what I'm used to because I'm just like, that's hard.

The Primeagen: [48:23] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:23] At what point can you take the production hit to regress before you get forward kind of thing? I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [48:29] Yeah, I don't know. I don't have an answer for that.

The Primeagen: [48:34] As the person who doesn't use a mouse types in Dvorak customize, the keyboard layout uses a space-age keyboard that makes no sense for those that are at home. I use a Kinesis Advantage 360. Boom. Best keyboard. Men in black. You may have seen Men in Black, and you know, like, all of those were time investments. I remember the feeling learning them. I remember it. It was just the worst feeling in the universe, and it lasted for like a week, but then I was like, oh, I think there's something here. And I'm one of those people where I always beat every video game that I rented. I always tried the hardest I could. Everything I did, I just wanted to be the best at. StarCraft changing scenes, trying to get the 200 APM, they're just like going as fast as I possibly can. And so that was a natural transition for me, right? Because it already kind of fit this desire that I have. Whereas I don't think everybody has that desire. They don't want to use what they do to the best of its ability. They just want to do what they're doing because it just is not important. Right. Wasting X amount of time, x amount of mental overhead, whatever you want to call it, it's just not important. Right, and that's fine, you know, it is what it is. But I like the world where we all try to become the. Best we can possibly be on all angles.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:50] Yeah, that's obsessive-compulsive disorder. Hey, I've got a Kinesis, by the way. I got the Kinesis game.

The Primeagen: [49:54] Oh, you have that one? I have that, too.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:55] I have wrist issues. I think we talked about how I'm falling apart slowly but surely.

The Primeagen: [50:00] I have wrist issues, too. That's why I learned the Dvorak, for that exact reason.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:04] Maybe that's my next step. I got this, like, mouse thingy that lets you have upright, oh, yeah, the Lift.

The Primeagen: [50:10] Yeah, I hear that helps. I just quit using the mouse. I found that to be way more efficient.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:14] Just cut that out altogether.

The Primeagen: [50:16] You just get that out of my life?

Chuck Carpenter: [50:18] Yes. Okay. So what about the man behind the legend? The man behind the videos? I mean, what other hobbies do you have outside of making crazy videos and streaming and tweeting significant amounts of counterculture?

The Primeagen: [50:35] I used to really love playing video games. I still do love playing video games. But honestly, for me, the biggest thing that I do now or the thing that I spend all my time is just being whatever my kids want to do, right? If they're playing Roblox, I think Roblox is stupid. They haven't even put an inverted mouse. I use inverted mouse, okay? I've been an inverted kid since StarFox, because StarFox was a Super Nintendo, screwed an entire generation of people. All of us are inverted, and we're victims of StarFox.

Robbie Wagner: [51:01] Inverted.

The Primeagen: [51:01] Yeah, I know. Victims of StarFox is probably where it comes from, right? It's, like, just the worst. And so we're all stuck like this, and Roblox is just like, no, we're not going to add a negative one option. That's all it is. Just like, throw a negative one in that. I know what it is. Checkbox negative one. That's that. Don't do it. And so it's like I'm running around trying to figure out how to play this ninja legends, jumping on these platforms that my kids can't jump onto while there's the sky, there's the ground. Okay, here we go. I'm recalibrating. Recalibrating. And all I want to do is play, like, Fortnite or Apex Legends with them, but instead, I'm playing Roblox. And so for me, my hobby now, besides for Twitch, which is a hobby in some sense, is just whatever the kids think is fun. If they want to play soccer, I'm going to get great at soccer. If they want to play basketball. I already like playing basketball. I play in a city league. I play basketball. But it's not really a hobby because I don't do it for more than just game time.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:54] I'm going to move to South Dakota so we can get on the same team. I used to play a lot of soccer. I used to play a decent amount of basketball.

The Primeagen: [52:00] Good.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:01] Yeah.

The Primeagen: [52:02] Basketball is my favorite sport by far. I don't watch any sports ball, right? None of it. I didn't even watch the Super Bowl. Who played in the Super Bowl? I think the Eagles and the Chiefs.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:11] That's correct.

The Primeagen: [52:11] I might be wrong. That's how out of touch I am with basketball or anything.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:15] I made it to the halftime show to see that weird Rihanna performance because my wife was like, yeah, let's watch this.

Robbie Wagner: [52:21] You didn't like it?

Chuck Carpenter: [52:22] I don't know. It was weird. It was just kind of like a greatest hits thing, but not as good as they were. I like commercials. I don't know. I think they're kitschy and funny. But yeah, I watch a lot of soccer. Soccer is my thing, and mostly just English soccer. But I live in Phoenix, and the Suns are a good team to cheer for this year, just so you know.

The Primeagen: [52:41] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [52:42] Yeah. And the Super Bowl was there.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:44] Yeah, was here. I stayed home. Should have watched the whole no, we had a massive golf tournament, and the Super Bowl was here in the same weekend. And I was like, not leaving the house.

The Primeagen: [52:51] Oh, I forgot. I do play golf. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Go on, Robbie.

Robbie Wagner: [52:55] No, sorry, we'll come back to that. But I was going to say, did you see that the turf for the Super Bowl had to be wheeled out to be in the elements for like an hour or two a day and then wheeled all the way back in? Why wouldn't you just make the dome open more?

Chuck Carpenter: [53:08] Or, like, I don't think it opens that one.

Robbie Wagner: [53:10] Control that with the dome. No, it opens. It doesn't open enough, I think. I don't know. It was silly anyway, golf.

The Primeagen: [53:18] So I started last year, first year ever playing golf was last year. Started off with no handicap, and then my brother-in-law was like, hey, do you want to play the member? I joined a little local country club here in South Dakota. It's like $200 a month. It's not like it is in the Valley. I'm like, okay, I'll join that just to be able to play golf and whatever. That'd be fun. It's been a lot of fun. And so I'm like, okay, I have to get a handicap. So I got a 44 handicap. Obviously not very good. Ended up shooting like a 36 during the time. So people were very upset at me, calling me a sandbagger. I was like, hey, I'm not sandbagging, okay? I'm playing. I'm just playing out here. It's not my fault I'm hitting the green every time. And so golf is like, I'm very excited for next season. I'm going to try to go a bunch with the kiddos. I think it's going to be a really fun time because I think my kids like it because I have a fun little game. I play with him. You might like this. Charles III. Robbie, I don't know if you have any kids, but if you do, here's a good play. Here's a good tip.

Robbie Wagner: [54:10] I have one.

The Primeagen: [54:11] Is that what I do? Is I let them tee off, and then I'll play up till the hole, and then they have to throw it from the cart towards the hole? And wherever they land, they have five strokes to get it into the cup. And if they get it into the cup, they get an m&m, and so they're stoked, and it gets, I mean, short games the hardest part of golf. And so it's just like, here you go, just practice that. Hey, if you guys want to get good at this game, let's have fun. And you won't even realize you accidentally just got better because you want to get better, right? Like I'm giving them a reason to get better and making it fun.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:41] Plus, they got a sugar high, which they all want. How old are your kids?

The Primeagen: [54:45] Nine through two or nine through one and a half.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:47] Oh, through. Wow. Today I learned. Yeah, I've got two.

The Primeagen: [54:52] I have a lot of kids.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:52] Six and three. Yeah, that's why you need some space.

The Primeagen: [54:55] Yeah. That's why I chose South Dakota.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:57] That's reasonable.

The Primeagen: [54:58] No, I'm kidding. We had family here. It was good. It was during COVID, right? Like right when tobid happened, we left California because, I mean, no matter what you thought about COVID in March of 2020, you knew it was going to be there for a while, right? I don't think anyone was like, oh, this will be like a week. No one shuts down the world for a week. Right. That's just not going to happen. So I was just like, I can't sit in a house with three kids because at that point we had three, in California where I don't even have a backyard. Like, this is just not going to happen. This is not going to happen. We're going to go nuts. And so our family already lived in South Dakota. I've always grown up in a small town and always loved the small town anyways. I was sick of being in a city. I don't care about good weather or fantastic restaurants. I just want space and fun and niceness and so obvious. When went to South Dakota.

Robbie Wagner: [55:48] Yeah, I do care about fantastic restaurants.

The Primeagen: [55:50] How much do you care?

Robbie Wagner: [55:51] I'm in the middle of nowhere right now. So we're like 30 minutes away from most fantastic restaurants right now.

The Primeagen: [55:58] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:58] Outside of DC. He is where he's at.

Robbie Wagner: [56:00] Yeah. So I'm an hour from DC. I'm in Middleburg, Virginia. Kind of nothing going on but horses and cattle and stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:06] Polo matches.

Robbie Wagner: [56:07] And we're going to be not here soon because we're too far from everything.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:12] I'm in the best of both worlds, I think. So we lived in DC. For seven years and we moved back to Phoenix because family kind of like you, except for, like, we have nine months of incredible weather and the summer is kind of hot, but get out of here, or whatever else, but the same thing, like space. Very happy that we made this move. We did do it two years before COVID because we were already, like, we had a young son.

The Primeagen: [56:32] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:33] No backyards. We can't do any fun stuff in the city anymore. Why wouldn't we just go get a yard? And so we have like some outdoors things here to do here, some walking and some nice weather. So it was a little bit of both here. If you get really into golf, this is a place to visit.

The Primeagen: [56:49] I am going to be there in two weeks. Going on a little golf thing.

Robbie Wagner: [56:52] Nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:53] Well.

The Primeagen: [56:54] Yeah, right. I think in Scottsdale.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:56] Okay. Yeah, I live down the road from there. I live in the neighborhood, basically between, like, where downtown Phoenix is and Scottsdale Road. It's right by Camelback Mountain. It's called Arcadia. You have my email. If you have any free time.

The Primeagen: [57:06] I might have free time. I don't know. I have a meeting that I really want to make happen, so we'll see.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:11] No worries.

The Primeagen: [57:12] I'm going to try to break the Internet with an image. We'll see if it works out.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:15] I can't wait. Looking forward to it.

Robbie Wagner: [57:17] Yeah. Now I have to figure out what that's going to be.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:21] You'll learn when we all learn. Oh, by the way, I wanted to go back to one statement you made earlier talking about the gnarly back end at Netflix. And one of the things being there was Groovy.

The Primeagen:[57:33] Yeah. With that, hold on. Were you trying to do an Ash impersonation? Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:37] Groovy.

The Primeagen: [57:38] Really?

Chuck Carpenter: [57:38] Was it good?

The Primeagen: [57:40] No, I feel like you're not leaning into it. You're too slow on the uptake, but you're good on the back half.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:46] Okay. All right. So the correct octave at one point, but then just all right, I'll work on it.

The Primeagen: [57:52] Okay. Yeah. Ash one of my favorite characters. I don't know if you know that, like eight years old watched Evil Dead 2. Thought it was like the greatest show ever.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:58] Yeah.

The Primeagen: [57:59] And then I learned about Army of Darkness when I was like twelve years old, and I was like, oh, my goodness, this is the greatest thing in the universe. I didn't even know there was a third part to this. Never watched Evil Dead 1?

Chuck Carpenter: [58:08] Oh.

The Primeagen: [58:08] I don't know. Never. I've never seen it or the remake or any of them.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:12] Same level of camp. And then there was a video game at some point, like on PlayStation or something.

The Primeagen: [58:16] I did play the Dreamcast.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:17] Dreamcast. Okay, there you go.

The Primeagen: [58:19] I beat through it. It's great.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:20] I've got an emulator for everything now.

Robbie Wagner: [58:21] Forget about Dreamcast.

The Primeagen: [58:23] All right, so Groovy, so during the beginnings of Netflix, somebody again, coddling is like the worst thing you can do to developers. And one of the things they did was a bunch of JavaScript devs couldn't write Java, so we're going to give them Groovy. Well, Groovy is just really like just a worse form of Java. That's all it is. You can write Java, but you can also write horrible syntax at the same time. And then somebody thought, people love that RxJS business, but it's not available in Groovy, so we're going to write our own. And somebody wrote their own. So we had this just like just so many headaches. And I did the great Groovy upgrade. I upgraded to 2.3.6, so I had to align every back-end team I had to align every front-end team and get this thing released. And it was a huge headache. And there was like PlayStations in Brazil that were still not updated, that were pegged to these old endpoints. So I had to go through like 100 separate endpoints and patch code to make it to work because there's like 15 people still using it. I spent weeks. I think I ended up calling it. Hold on. I'm on my work computer. Let's see if I can actually find the name of this a Great Groovy upgrade.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:40] Well, I love to hear that Netflix is committed to their members.

The Primeagen: [59:43] We are committed right now. Especially right now with the whole upgrade of not being able to use Netflix wherever you go, and there's this whole location business and all these kind of things. The thing is, you're right. It's definitely a change. It's a little bit different. It is what it is. But Netflix is just like a decade behind Spotify, right? All these people complaining about it. I can't share an account with my wife right now on Spotify because it's too damn complicated. At least I can share it with Netflix and her it works. I can make it happen. And so it's like, is it terrible? It's just inconvenient. I wish things were easier.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:20] I don't know. I don't like my parents that much anyway. Oh, sorry, you can't use it, not my fault. Yeah, it can inadvertently kick them off.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:28] I do use my dad, so I'm part of the problem here.

The Primeagen: [01:00:33] Nice. Alright, so let's see. Right now, I'm actually looking at some of these. So it turns out like PlayStation 3.1, 2011, 2012, 2012, point 2 builds were all broken. Ridley. I don't even remember what Ridley or Vita browser was. I think those might have been maybe Wii U builds. I had to go through so many things. But it's called the Great Groovy upgrade in the Sky With Diamonds, named after a Beatles song. I got the name it, of course, then I made it just the world's largest initialism. So it's like great Groovy upgrades. So GGUISWD, so people are like, what is that? I'm like, oh, great. Groovy upgrade. And this guy with diamonds. Of course, everybody knows that.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:14] Although, you know that was just an acronym for LSD, right? Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.

The Primeagen: [01:01:19] It was also one of the first songs to have a breakdown. It was like an inverse breakdown, right? It's nice and slow, and then it went fast for the chorus.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:26] Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I wouldn't have realized that that was the first, but definitely.

The Primeagen: [01:01:30] Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was one of the first. Like, it was like one of the very first albums to really show that in a modern sense. Obviously, we're not talking about classical music where people had actual talent, but during, like, the rock phase where you just throw four instruments together, one being a voice. That was like a really technically hard thing to do back then. It was really amazing.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:49] Yeah, they used a lot of mixing and, like, weird equipment tricks and stuff too.

The Primeagen: [01:01:53] Yeah, it was like a really amazing thing. Sorry. That was a weird thing that I used to be into as well.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:59] Yeah. Well, I'm hoping it's because you finished the AK 47 of bourbon.

The Primeagen: [01:02:06] I'm almost done with it. I can switch to the next one, though. I don't want to get too hammered because I still got that wife time.

Robbie Wagner: [01:02:12] We're at time here, so we need to end here soon.

The Primeagen: [01:02:16] Oh, we are? Yeah. Let's try the other one. Can we try the other one?

Robbie Wagner: [01:02:20] Well, the other one is just for you to have whenever. We don't need to have it right now. That was our barrel pick.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:24] Yeah. That's a special one for you.

The Primeagen: [01:02:26] Oh, yeah. Well, thank you.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:28] So, like, a year ago, we did a barrel pick and branded it with the podcast, and yada, yada yada. And it's just like one of our faves.

The Primeagen: [01:02:36] Nice. Okay. Sycamore spirit rye.

Robbie Wagner: [01:02:39] Sagamore.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:39] Yeah.

The Primeagen: [01:02:40] Oh, Sagamore. Sorry. Yeah, there's no Y in there. You're right. Or C, I'm a good reader. I genuinely appreciate being on this. I hope that this is what you guys wanted to get out of it. I had a fun time.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:52] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

The Primeagen: [01:02:53] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [01:02:54] Before we end, is there anything else you want to plug or anything we didn't cover?

The Primeagen: [01:02:57] No.

Robbie Wagner: [01:02:57] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:58] Oh, yeah, fair enough.

Robbie Wagner: [01:03:00] Thanks, everybody, for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe. Leave us a rating and reviews. We appreciate it, and we will catch you next time.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:03:09] Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and Whatnot. This podcast is brought to you by Ship Shape and produced by Podcast Royale. If you like this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or two and leave us a rating, maybe a review, as long as it's good.

Robbie Wagner: [01:03:24] You can subscribe to future episodes on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more info about Ship Shape and this show, check out our website at shipshape.io.