135: Ian's Over AI Coding?!

Ian and Aaron discuss hiring new employees, Ian claiming he's over AI coding, huge updates to Outro, going big or going home on Token Town, and more.

Sponsored by Laracon AU, Honeybadger, Bento, Vask, and DropInBlog.

Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical?  Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.

Going to Laracon?  Sign up for the Mostly Technical Pre-Party!

• (00:00) - Down to the River
• (05:33) - Ian's Over AI Coding?!
• (13:45) - Aaron's Employee's First Week
• (21:42) - Marketing & Content
• (27:27) - Ian's Been Busy With Outro
• (37:41) - Slash Brag Update
• (41:06) - Ian Finally Hired Somebody!
• (47:00) - Token Town Update
• (55:28) - Horse Business
• (01:04:14) - Aaron Went Fishing
• (01:13:16) - Kids Sports

Links:

• Texas Hill Country
• Token Town w/ Josh Pigford
• Kristen Foxen
• SEP IRA
• Corey Haines Marketing Skills on GitHub
• BlockNote
• Ian's tweet about AI & coding faster
• Joe Masilotti's post about deleting WebSockets

Creators and Guests

Host

Aaron Francis

Founder of Solo. Sincere poster. No cynicism. Dad to two sets of twins!

Host

Ian Landsman

Founder HelpSpot, LaraJobs, and Outro.fm

Producer

Dave Hicking

Agency Partnerships at @laravelphp

What is Mostly Technical?

Hosted by Ian Landsman and Aaron Francis, Mostly Technical is a lively discussion on Laravel, business, and an eclectic mix of related topics.

Ian Landsman (00:00)
Hello.

Aaron (00:01)
I'm back, baby. Did you miss me?

Ian Landsman (00:02)
You were gone I

did miss you. You made me do a whole episode of Toketown without you. We got it done. But you were doing busy important stuff.

Aaron (00:13)
I was doing busy important stuff. I went to I went to the river. ⁓ so me and ten of my college friends went down to Wimberley, Texas and hung out in the river for a couple of days. It was great.

Ian Landsman (00:23)
Wow.

What are you inside the river? Is the river deep? Are you is it shallow and you're wading out there? Give me the river details here. Okay.

Aaron (00:37)
It's it's pretty shallow. So every year,

this is our fifteenth year in a row. Fifteen years in a row. And we had, yep, we had ⁓ 11 people there. We were missing we were missing one or two, which we always are each year, but ⁓ got eleven this year for our fifteenth year. ⁓ Wimberley, Texas, which is in the hill country outside of Austin.

Ian Landsman (00:41)
Well that's crazy. That's crazy. Wow.

Right.

Aaron (01:03)
And so we rent a house that always has river access, not always the same house, but always has river access. And the river is, you know, in some spots four feet deep and slow, and in some spots a foot deep and kind of flowing. And so

Ian Landsman (01:08)
Mm-hmm.

This is w

what we would call a stream in New York. Okay. A big four foot deep river. Okay. That's a flood's a different thing. But I'm with ya.

Aaron (01:20)
No, it's a pretty big it's a pretty big river. This is the one that this is the one that flooded forty feet just recently. ⁓ but it's a slow

it's a slow moving broad stone based or ⁓ stone bottom river. So yeah, so we just go out there and we, you know, find a little a little pool in the in the river bed and we just sit there and hang out and

Ian Landsman (01:36)
Okay.

Aaron (01:47)
Just have the best time in the whole world.

Ian Landsman (01:51)
Have some zins.

Aaron (01:52)
Have some zins, have some beers, some people fish. We mostly just sit around and laugh the whole time.

Ian Landsman (01:57)
Okay.

that's awesome. Have you missed any? Have you been to all fifteen? Wow. Okay. How how many people have been to all fifteen, you think? Okay.

Aaron (02:03)
I've been to all fifteen. Haven't missed one. Yep.

Not very many. I think

I think like three or four. Maybe maybe four or five. ⁓ so there's I know. There's there's one guy that's like in charge of mostly in charge of planning it every year. ⁓ and then a couple of guys do the cooking duty, and I feel like none of those guys have ever missed. ⁓ but we have several doctors who missed during med school.

Ian Landsman (02:17)
Okay. You got to have a special little pin or something, you know. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron (02:38)
We've got people that have missed for family trips and stuff. But yeah, for the most part, I think everybody's hit like ninety percent.

Ian Landsman (02:45)
This is the interesting part about this group that I happen to know from the side combos in the past, that it's like all doctors and lawyers, right? It's like isn't that seems impossible. Like, how do you have like ten, twelve people? They're all doctors and lawyers. Like

Aaron (02:52)
It's like all doctors and liars. They're

There are

three doctors, two attorneys, one dentist, ⁓ an architect, and then me a vibe coder. Yeah, it's crazy. It's a it's a high achieving group for sure.

Ian Landsman (03:08)
That's crazy.

Yeah.

There you go. Do you you get into business with them? Are you business talking? Are you ⁓ okay. All right.

Aaron (03:20)
yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Not much to talk about with the doctors. They're they talk to each other about how much insurance sucks and we all just kind of listen in and and laugh. ⁓ but yeah, there's one there's one guy ⁓ that is a business broker. ⁓ and then, you know, the dentist was exploring buying his own practice, and then there's a

Ian Landsman (03:25)
Right.

Yeah.

⁓

Aaron (03:44)
⁓ a guy that is in high end residential real estate that like sells these like incredible windows and doors and he's he's thinking about doing some business stuff and everybody wants to know about what the hell I do for money and so it's yeah, we talk about business for sure.

Ian Landsman (03:53)
Mm.

⁓

man. D any of them ⁓ are they AI users? How's the AI represented down there?

Aaron (04:09)
AI is represented pretty well. the doctors talked about ⁓ it helping them with like basically with scribe duties, so taking notes, ⁓ and then also like ⁓ gathering sources. So not like, you know, doing diagnosis or anything, but like, hey, go find all the literature on this and give me the give me the sources for it. ⁓ and then some of the attorneys have just gotten

Ian Landsman (04:11)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Aaron (04:36)
internal claude access, you know, how strict they would have to be. So they haven't been able to do anything until they got their firm provided AI. And now that they have it, they're finding it incredibly useful, especially for menial stuff like, let's build out this PowerPoint deck. It's like, dude, I don't want to do that. ⁓ so yeah, everybody everybody's starting starting to dabble. ⁓ and there were, you know, lots of questions.

Ian Landsman (04:40)
Right.

Right.

There go.

Right. Yeah.

Aaron (05:02)
You know, when I tell I just burn tokens all day, they're like, You do what all day? Uh-huh. ⁓

Ian Landsman (05:03)
Mm-hmm.

The like we just make a PowerPoint once a week, man. Like you're like, no, I'm

I'm in there deep. ⁓ I'm kinda I it's kinda related to this. I'm kinda I'm kinda over the AI coding. Are you over the AI coding yet?

Aaron (05:20)
Wow

Ian Landsman (05:22)
Not over a using AI to code, but like, you know, it's like there was this chart I tweeted there that was like about ⁓ you know, the number of app store ⁓ apps has like, you know, doubled, but the number of like actual users is the same. The number of apps like with any users is the same. Like so all these apps like they're going nowhere, right? Like obviously, which was what we knew was gonna happen. and it's like, you know, it's like kind of like it's like I'm

Aaron (05:46)
Sure.

Ian Landsman (05:51)
I'm a commitment guy, right? I'm a commitment guy. Like I I I've had the same lady for 30 years, right? I had the same product for 20 years. It's like I'll have outro. Outro is my side project, right? I Larry Jobs, another side project. But like I don't think I could be one of these guys who's like, I got I got 50 apps going. Like I think this is it. I think I'm good on the apps. Like I have a vibe goaded app and I'm done. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Aaron (06:11)
Is is this coming on the back of the Josh Pigford interview? Is that what I'm is that what I'm gathering?

Ian Landsman (06:17)
Maybe the radiation of

Pigford just like like was too much for me. But it's like, you know, I was like doing I was watching poker last night, all right? I'm watching poker. And it's the final table. One of my favorite poker players, Kristen Foxon, is at the final table of this big big tournament. And it's like in the past, like I'm not saying I wouldn't have my laptop there sometimes, because I probably would, but I wouldn't be coding. You know what I mean? Like, because it would be too hard to like really actually I'm actually coding and thinking that hard about it while I'm trying to watch this thing.

But like with the AI, you can, right? So it's like, well, I am coding. I'm coding while I do this. But it's like it's not as nothing. It still takes a lot of cycles. So it's still highly distracting from the thing I want to be doing. Because like even though the AI is doing it, I still have to like manage the AI and it's UI stuff. So I gotta see what the hell it's done. It's probably screwed some shit up and I gotta fix it. So like it's still like a lot of bandwidth there. And I don't know. I just feel like I'm good. Like once it gets outro to a good spot.

Aaron (06:57)
I agree.

Ian Landsman (07:14)
I don't know. I don't know if there's gonna be any large news in that way. I think there's there might be you know, you never know I might redo outro again. I might larval new outro. But I don't know about a larval newing another app. I don't know. Are you over the apps, the new apps? I don't know.

Aaron (07:20)
You will.

So I don't know. I don't no, I

don't think you're over AI coding. I think you're over I think you're over the the the product side project land grab. You you still you still like using AI for help spot and for outro. Right. Correct. Yes. So you're you're over the

Ian Landsman (07:27)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's that's trap show.

Yes. I'm never going back. I'm not typing any brackets ever again. We're done with the brackets. Okay. That's true.

Aaron (07:49)
You're over the anyone can build anything, therefore we must build everything. Yeah. Yeah, you weren't.

Ian Landsman (07:52)
Yes. Which I was never really on, but I there was something like

I wasn't on it, but it's like it's something really hit me this weekend that was like deep in my core. I was like, nah, like this is even though I could build stuff faster in theory, like there's just not enough good ideas, which is like what that chart's all about, right? That chart is all about there's not any ideas. You could build stuff, but it doesn't mean it's a good idea just because you built it and it's probably a terrible idea as most ideas are, and nobody wants it.

Aaron (08:10)
Yeah.

Ian Landsman (08:20)
And so I don't know, what are you gonna keep building stuff for? Just build, get get behind something and stick with it, you know? Commit to it. This is yeah, this is my standard shtick, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Man.

Aaron (08:27)
Yeah, this is not this is this is not a revelation to me. This is always this has always been your stick. Yeah. You just you just didn't want to work while you were watching TV and that's okay. But this th this is no this is no revelation. You've always been

you've always been pick a thing that is has a market need and work on it and figure out how to do distribution. That's that's that's old news.

Ian Landsman (08:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

It's like the AI weighs on you a little bit though, you know? It's like you could be working. You could be working. It's not all the cycles it used to be. You could, you could just throw something in there and it'll churn away on it. Maybe you should do that.

Aaron (08:53)
It does. That that that part is true, yes.

Yep. I had

when I was on so we left on Thursday morning and got back on Sunday. And I didn't I didn't really rip any tokens at all while I was there. And yeah, I fixed like one or two minor things. ⁓ somebody was probing my filament admin login from South Korea and I got, you know, alerts, and so I deployed a Cloudflare rule to block But

Ian Landsman (09:06)
Mm-hmm.

good job.

Right.

⁓

Aaron (09:28)
Beyond that, I didn't I didn't rip any tokens. And I will say, and I don't know how true this is, I kind of felt like I had like an adrenaline crash. Like I I got there, you know, we drive down three hours. I'm driving with with two other guys, and one of them is working in the back, and so me and this other guy are just talking the whole way down. Get there, don't get my computer out, go to dinner, go to bed without.

Ian Landsman (09:38)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron (09:56)
looking at my computer, wake up the next day, we go straight to the river, no computer. Took a midday nap on Friday, like under the covers nap. And I kinda I kind of felt like I was like I was coming down. Like I like I felt like I had been running a hundred miles an hour and I just ran into a vat of like molasses and I was like, ⁓ God. And so it was this very strange feeling of

Ian Landsman (10:05)
But yeah.

⁓ You have been, yeah.

Alright.

⁓

Aaron (10:26)
like almost like a wave of exhaustion hitting me because I'm not running I'm not running at a hundred miles an hour. I'm not constantly like dopamine fried from you know ripping these agents. And I got like I got physically very tired. It was so s it was so strange. Yeah. ⁓ just like yes totally a hundred percent. ⁓

Ian Landsman (10:30)
Yeah. I could see that.

Yeah.

Wow. Interesting. It's like some kind of drug, you're co getting off the drugs like kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron (10:55)
And you know, there's probably a combination of we didn't have any Celsiuses there, we didn't have any diet cokes, and so like I had my coffee in the morning, and then the rest of the day I didn't have any caffeine, and I'm so I'm not hyped up artificially, I'm not hyped up from the agents. And it it was very strange, just being like, is this should I be like this more often? Is this normal? Maybe.

Ian Landsman (11:01)
Mm.

No caffeine. Mmm. All right.

This is yeah,

that's exactly what I was feeling last night. I was like, I c used to just be able to sit here and watch something on TV. I could just watch it. But like now you gotta be like going, going, going, gotta do stuff, more stuff to do. And it's like, nah, I don't know. I don't know. So, but you know, you also have four kids. I don't know if you're aware of that. So between like this also give you the break from the four kids routine of like the w taking to school in the morning and ⁓ putting to bed at night and all the stuff. So you're kind of withdrawing from everything.

Aaron (11:36)
Yes.

It did. Yep.

Yes.

Ian Landsman (11:48)
all at once for three or four days or whatever you were there. So ⁓ so by the end, how did you feel?

Aaron (11:54)
⁓ by the end I still felt a little a little sleepy. Like I didn't I didn't feel like ⁓ like on the last day, you know, I we stayed up later than I normally stay up because I don't stay up very late at home. But like on the last night, we probably went to bed at eleven thirty or twelve. ⁓ I woke up at nine. It was just like yeah, way later than I ever sleep. ⁓ so I don't know.

Ian Landsman (11:57)
Yeah. All right. Interesting. You're not recovered.

Mm-hmm.

Wow. That's a good night's sleep.

Aaron (12:20)
It and then I got home yesterday on Sunday. I got home and immediately went into, you know, dad mode. And then after I put the kids down, I didn't get my computer out last night, which is like the first time in the first time since, you know, December or whatever. I haven't got my computer out at night. And so I'll be back. Don't worry, I'll be back. I'll I'll hook I'll hook back up to the big adrenaline machine. But it was it's very strange.

Ian Landsman (12:31)
⁓ look at that.

No, maybe you shouldn't. This is my boy!

Maybe this is the marker of the end of that phase of solo. Maybe you're good. Like solo works. There's lots of stuff to fix and lots of stuff to do, but a lot of us are out there using it every day, all day. So it's not like if you don't ship something in a week, it's gonna make any difference. Like you're people are just cruising around, working on it, whatever. Maybe this is it. Maybe you gotta go back to regular errand.

Aaron (12:51)
Maybe. Solo works.

I know.

Maybe. That would be nice. We we we will see. ⁓ I do think you you might be right for a different reason as well. Maybe maybe you're right for your reason, but the other reason is my full-time employees started last week. That's right.

Ian Landsman (13:12)
Yeah, it could be.

Mm. Okay.

What?

that's amazing. Tell us about this. We we heard she was coming. Sam was in route last week.

Aaron (13:35)
She was in

she was en route and she has now landed. She is my first full time employee. ⁓ so I hired her and then went on vacation, which is awesome.

Ian Landsman (13:46)
That's ⁓

I have the exact same thing. We did hire our new employee, which I can talk about in a bit, and she is starting on like the twenty-second or something, which I'm leaving the twenty-first for WSOP, so I will be not be here for any of her first week. Funny how that works out.

Aaron (13:57)
Good luck. Have fun. Yeah.

⁓ yeah. So she started last week. She came over, ⁓ she came over to she's she's local in Dallas, and so we'll get to see each other from time to time. She came over after the podcast and we got her set up on OnePassword and Fernand and you know, Google Suite, all of all of that stuff. got her got her, you know, she got a new computer, so we got it all

Ian Landsman (14:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron (14:23)
Hooked up, ready to go. Got two factor off on everything, so don't worry. We're good there. ⁓ gave her the login to my personal bank account, my personal email, of course. Yep. So so she's she's in there mucking around. ⁓

Ian Landsman (14:24)
Mm-hmm.

Gotta have it.

This is the worst idea you've ever had, by the way.

I I don't

like any of this. I don't approve. I don't like it.

Aaron (14:42)
She's

she's got ⁓ she's got intros to the accountant, ⁓ to my financial advisor, she and Kelsey. This is a great idea. She and Kelsey have already had a few calls. ⁓ she's Yep. Yep, she's

Ian Landsman (14:51)
W that is a terrible idea. ⁓ Well that that makes sense. I'm down with that. Okay.

Aaron (15:02)
She's taken over the Texas Secretary of State stuff because we're transferring the LLC was formed in Idaho, where Steve lives, and we're transferring it to Texas. And Kelsey got it about halfway there. And so she's taken over all of that. I got a letter from the Texas Secretary of State that was like, here's the new to Texas unemployment wage rates. And I was like, take a picture, send it to Sam. Don't worry about it. It's great. I love it so much. So she

Ian Landsman (15:11)
⁓ okay. Yeah, that's a good idea.

Ha ha ha.

Aaron (15:31)
The first thing she did was like go through all of the backlogged emails, and like, you know, respond or archive. Yeah, basically. and then she's setting up QuickBooks to get all of the bookkeeping ⁓ handled. It's just like she's just doing business dad stuff, man. It's awesome.

Ian Landsman (15:38)
Triage and whatnot. Yeah.

I mean, I love that. I love that. What is okay, what's her take on the running your whole life aspect of this?

Aaron (16:02)
Well, she's listening to the show, so she can she can tell me if I'm right or wrong. Yeah, part of her job part of her job is to listen to the show. So ⁓ we'll find out. ⁓ okay, so her her take is I think her take is the more successful I am, the more successful we are. ⁓ Sam and I have been very good friends for a long time, and it was it's always been kind of a running joke that.

Ian Landsman (16:06)
Lot. Okay. Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron (16:32)
We're gonna get rich together. And so we're we're like, we're buds. We're more than just like coworkers or God forbid, someone random off the street that I just hired. ⁓ and so I think her take is she she is very operationally ⁓ ruthless. Like she is, she is just disciplined and good at stuff. And I am good at

Ian Landsman (16:34)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Right. Mm-hmm.

Aaron (17:01)
You know, creating a spectacle, creating products, creating videos, making, you know, people like me. And so if the two of us can work together and each cover the other side that, you know, the other person can't do, I think we can both make a lot of money. And so I think, you know, and in in her past, she's done like high level, she's been like the assistant to the CEO and basically done more stuff like this where the CEO would

Ian Landsman (17:03)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron (17:28)
send her out to buy presents for his wife and like, I'm not gonna make Sam do that. But she's she's used to I think she's used to let me be the operational brain behind this kind of wacky, chaotic person. So I think sh I think she's okay with it. I think she's into it, yeah.

Ian Landsman (17:31)
Right. Right.

Mm.

She's okay with that.

But like your personal finances is just a little, it's a little different than like the business stuff, or even the like kind of in-between stuff. Even your personal email, which I think is insane that you give somebody else access to that. Like, I still kind of get that. Like, whatever. A lot of shit comes in there. Like it makes sense. ⁓ you know, time-wise, you're gonna save a lot of time by having somebody triage that for So I get all that.

Aaron (17:51)
A little.

It does.

Ian Landsman (18:07)
But I don't know, your financial planner and your stuff. That's it's a lot it's a lot of responsibility on her. It's a lot of a lot of ⁓ you know, ⁓ risk in a certain sense on her. Like, is she gonna get the blame if you don't make as much money as you should, right? Like there's some on your investments, you know. I mean, not not in the business. The business is fair game, but like in the Aaron Francis empire.

Aaron (18:12)
It is.

no, no, no. So sh she's not directing yeah,

she's not directing my investments. The so like the accountant and the financial planner, and we have like a health insurance broker, because our family is on Obamacare. ⁓ so we have like an independent broker. All of those connections and like why I put her in touch with my financial planner is so that we can figure out, okay, what are the vehicles available? Like

Ian Landsman (18:32)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. Right. Mm-hmm.

Mm,

Aaron (18:53)
⁓ now that I'm an S Corp

Ian Landsman (18:53)
okay, for the business stuff.

Aaron (18:55)
with one employee, I think SEP IRA is off the table. What is now that I have an employee, what vehicles become available for investment? Okay, talk to him, talk to her, the accountant, talk to the health insurance guy. Should we get a company plan? Is that gonna end up better? So she's doing all of the like research and planning, but financial advisor's still in charge of directing investments at

Ian Landsman (18:57)
I say. Right.

Mm-hmm.

Mm. Mm, okay. Gotcha.

Aaron (19:20)
at my direction, but she's she's not like the CFO of no.

Ian Landsman (19:22)
I see. She's not actually running all the way

to your every aspect of your personal life. Okay.

Aaron (19:28)
No, she's not like buy this, sell that. No. ⁓ but she is

doing the what I think is a little bit hard of all right, Aaron has an S Corp entity, he's got an employee, he's got ⁓ you know, a nanny that they pay through household income, he's got a healthcare plan. How do we optimize the Aaron Francis universe so that more money ends up in the after tax bank?

Ian Landsman (19:44)
Right.

Yeah.

Okay. All right. I'm excited to hear how this goes. This is this is it's gonna be a good bit. I don't know about that. It is gonna make great content either way. Obviously, if it's a deva disaster, sorry Sam, but if it's disaster, it's better content. But I hope it's not a disaster. And I don't think it's gonna be a disaster, most likely. Yeah.

Aaron (19:59)
I know you are. You think this is gonna be a disaster and it's gonna make great content.

It's not.

Most likely. And

I I will say again, this is not financial advice. Don't do what I'm doing. Do it do as I say, not as I do. ⁓ but I just have a hundred percent trust in Sam. And that's that's the other thing. Even even Kelsey, who's incredibly trustworthy, it took me a while to like get to know her. ⁓ and I don't know that she ever, she never had access to my personal bank account. ⁓ but like that's cause that's crazy, yeah. Cause she's not Sam, you know.

Ian Landsman (20:34)
Right.

Right. That's because that's because that's crazy. ⁓ huh. ⁓

Aaron (20:45)
⁓

so this is a very unique situation, I think.

Ian Landsman (20:49)
Yeah.

Hmm. Can you ever really trust another human being, Fokker? That's what I want to know. Have you seen that movie? I I hope you've seen that movie. Okay, thank goodness. All right, we don't have to stop the show. We can keep going. All right. okay. Well, Sam, congratulations. Good luck. Maybe we'll have Sam on the show at some point for like a 15-minute give us the scoop on Aaron Francis. That'd be fun. Like

Aaron (20:53)
I can, yes. Can you? Is the is a better question. Of course I have. Yes, I have. Yes.

⁓ she would hate that and I would love

that. That's great content. Yeah.

Ian Landsman (21:14)
Yeah, no, we're doing that. We gotta give her a couple months at least, like to

get settled in, then she can give us all the dirt. That'll that'll be fun. all right, before we go farther, let's do some ads. First up, Bento, the email marketing and CRM platform built for the AI era. Send your product marketing and transactional email with Bento at BentoNow.com. Honeybadger.io, if you're stuck between basic noisy error trackers and bloated APMs.

Honey Badger gives you exactly what you need to debug production and nothing you don't. Check them out at honeybadger.io slash for slash Laravel. And drop in blog, a headless blog CMS with first class Laravel SDK, your domain, your design, your stack, dropinblog.com. ⁓ side note on that, like this is a thing I've wanted to like build forever. Like, so I'm glad they did it and seems like really well done because.

You know, it's a every time you had to set up WordPress for something you're building, and you're like, it's a that's a whole world over there and it's all by itself. So I started just doing my own, like very sleazy blog. Like the HelpSpot website now has just this thing I slapped together, which has like the bare minimum to even call it a blog. So I do think this is a cool idea. So thanks for sponsoring the show. All right. And you can look, I can see your little flag in there. So you can see my flag. I don't know if you can see that.

Aaron (22:39)
This

this drop in blog website is really pretty.

Ian Landsman (22:43)
Yes. They have a bunch of good stuff on there. ⁓ I still had like a what's it like a tal a talk with the guy too? And the hit he's had there's some interesting content deeper in this blog. If you dig around in the blog, there's a lot going on there. They have a bunch of good content. I wanna get, you know, look at they're very regular with multiple blog posts on the same day. I guess if you're a blog company, you gotta have a lot of blog posts, but

Aaron (23:03)
Yeah.

Ian Landsman (23:06)
I don't know. What are you what are you doing on your blog situation? Are you blogging? You you trying to automate anything? What are you trying to do? Yeah.

Aaron (23:09)
Man.

I'm not trying to automate anything. ⁓

I am so right now everything is just markdown driven, just on a like a Laravel website. I have had a redesign ⁓ of my own site in process for quite some time that I just need to finish because ⁓ I do now that now that I have Sam, I'm trying to like get this content system going a little bit better. Like

Ian Landsman (23:19)
Mm-hmm. Right.

⁓ yeah. Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Aaron (23:40)
articles and newsletters and everything kind of like feeds into each other. And so ⁓ I have ⁓ plans to start writing more more non technical stuff ⁓ soon, but I need to get the website design done first.

Ian Landsman (23:52)
Mm.

Yeah. I don't know. Part of me is like I never know where like it's like you have the SEO is kind of iffy, but then you have like the AEO or whatever you call it, and like that seems kind of valuable and open. Then you have like open AI released like ⁓ where you can have ads in open AI and there's like cost per click and stuff. I saw he was trying them, yeah. Which the pricing seems kind of high for this new thing, so I guess, but whatever. I guess that's not that crazy. It is crazy, there's no AI in it.

Aaron (24:05)
Mm-hmm.

I know. I think Jesse from Bento is trying

Ian Landsman (24:26)
It's just like some form fields and there's no AI stuff in the thing to create ads, which seems ⁓ like an interesting to choice for them. But ⁓ I don't know. I might throw some money at that at some point, I guess. But help the so hard. Like the, I'm sure Zendesk is already in there spending $200 a click or whatever. But ⁓ anyway, lots going on there, but I don't know. So you're you're in you're in flux. You're not solo, you haven't like done anything. Have you done any content marketing for solo?

Aaron (24:28)
Yeah.

So hard. Yeah.

⁓ I have done I used Corey Haynes' marketing skills to do a few things. One is like ⁓ comparison, competitor, or alternative pages. ⁓ and those have actually gotten quite a few clicks. Like if I look in the Google Webmaster Tools or whatever they renamed it to, Search Console or whatever. ⁓ yeah, so I have like CMUX versus TMUX.

Ian Landsman (24:59)
Mm-hmm.

Right. Mm-hmm.

Really? Hmm. Yep.

Aaron (25:19)
And so not even all of them are like solo versus. ⁓ you know, warp versus Zed. ⁓ and then e of course, each one will throw solo in there as well. But those actually get a lot of clicks. ⁓ so I have all of that, and then I have very robust docs pages. ⁓ and then I have like one standalone page about like the meta harness, just to kind of grab that.

Ian Landsman (25:19)
Mm. yeah. Right. That's probably smart. Yep.

Hmm.

Aaron (25:47)
that space out there. ⁓ but no no true blog or anything. ⁓ but the the big competitor pages and the alternatives I think are working pretty well.

Ian Landsman (25:48)
Yeah.

Right.

Okay. I haven't actually thought of doing the competitor versus competitor without yours in there. That's I I like that. That's actually really good. I might have to steal that one. ⁓ 'cause yeah, I think we talked about

Aaron (26:05)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, grab grab Corey

Haynes' marketing skill for the the competitor thing. ⁓ because it's really helpful in terms of structure as well. He like has a thing that's like set up this hub page that shows all of the competitors and then on each one link out to the other ones. And I've done a lot of work of like interlinking pages.

Ian Landsman (26:14)
Right.

Mm.

Right.

Right.

Aaron (26:32)
So like

on the download page it links to the docs and the change log and the competitors. And on the competitors it links to the, you know, the docs or the what is. ⁓ and so it's actually I think a pretty good set of skills, those Corey Haynes marketing skills.

Ian Landsman (26:39)
Right.

Mm.

Yeah, those were like an early one too. Like he was kinda early on the I guess, well maybe it was when they they published that, ⁓ what was it, Vercell, right? Yeah. No. Which I haven't spent any time on really, but I did see the Corey one. Right. ⁓ anyway. Okay, let's do outro corner. ⁓ yeah, we

Aaron (26:49)
Mm-hmm.

Skills.sh. Yeah. No, it's I don't think it's the right model. Yeah, I don't think it's great. ⁓ I wanna do I wanna do outro corner. We got a couple of things. Outro

outro's working. I'm in it right now. It is ⁓ it is fundamentally different from the last time I I was in here. We got a new notion style block editor. So what the hell's going on here?

Ian Landsman (27:13)
Mm-hmm.

Block editor, because you know, I was in there and it's like the old way it was doing it. First of all, the the way we've been using it was the most vibe coded part of the entire of all of outro. Cause it was just like, okay, build these things called resources and it's like links and files, whatever, and like just build the forms to do it. Like I was just like, just make it work, right? Yes, exactly. So that's what the AI did. And it was a bunch of old clunky form type things, and it was probably okay-ish, but

Aaron (27:40)
Right. Just expose the database schema on the page.

Ian Landsman (27:52)
It's a lot of clicks to like get anything added. and the other thing I didn't like, which this is not so much for us. So part of me was just like, this is not like I want something a little slicker than this, because it's like, you know, you're in here a lot and ⁓ whatever. And then the other part is for this doesn't apply as much to us, but for a lot of other big shows, like people are working together on like the notes and the documents. And

Aaron (28:14)
Right.

Ian Landsman (28:16)
It was really bad for that because it's just like all traditional form field stuff and that you can't even really work together. You're gonna be like either clobbering each other or you're gonna be making separate notes, which is sort of interesting and okay. But then, like, if you're doing it more like a script, that's not gonna really work because you're gonna want to edit the notes, but now you have two people editing the notes, it's gonna be weird. So I was like, this is not working. So yeah, so I went to notion style block edit call block editor called block note. ⁓ and then it's also backed by this thing called live blocks.

so now it's a block editor, which we all know what that is. I won't describe that. But ⁓ so it's all real time. ⁓ there's a little flag. If we're both editing the same thing at once, we can both edit the same document at the same time and we could be in the same note at the same time. We can highlight things and whatever. And it all works and it's works pretty well so far.

Aaron (28:46)
yeah.

So this Block Note thing is a JavaScript plugin or JavaScript library. So how does this play with your live wire front end?

Ian Landsman (29:14)
It's React, yeah.

It's been surprisingly okay. Livewire does have the tools to like separate out a zone and be like, don't screw with this zone, which is just what I do. So this is just like a little, it's like a tunnel of little special React goodness. which there's no other way to do this. Like all of them are like basically some type of React thing. ⁓ I could have gone all the way down, I guess to tip tap and like built my own, but then like that's just I'm not gonna do that. Right. So

Aaron (29:26)
Yeah.

for sure, yeah.

No.

Ian Landsman (29:43)
I was a little worried about that. I'm not I'm not a person who cares about the size of the files or whatever. So, in that regard, I don't care about any of that. ⁓ so I think that part's fine. I'm sure it's bigger, more JavaScript now, whatever. Who cares? It loads in and it's been quite performant. And then with the live, it's kind of ironic because I pulled out all the web sockets as I talked about last week, but now I've added back in WebSockets for this. So just for live blocks. Live blocks is like

Aaron (29:49)
Sure.

Right.

Just for live blocks?

Ian Landsman (30:13)
So block note is the widget. Live blocks is the backer that gives you it's the web hooks, but it does a bunch of other stuff. So it's not just like using pusher, it does like whatever, more stuff than that. So live blocks.

Aaron (30:26)
So are you saying that you

like subscribe to live blocks and then they handle the live updating? So you're not you didn't like add reverb back in. You're just inside this React component, you put in some sort of live blocks key, some sort of like ⁓ page identifier, and then they make sure that the that block set stays up to date. Is that right?

Ian Landsman (30:30)
Right.

Right. Right.

Yeah, there's like an awe thing and the whole thing. Yeah. Could

Right. So the block note, which is the widget, supports a bunch of different providers for the real time aspects. One of them is live blocks, which seem the most real to me. So I went with that. And yeah, I pay them the 25 bucks or whatever. And then they will message the back end with updates and then keep all the clients in sync on real time, like the little flag for who's editing and any content updates and whatever.

Aaron (31:12)
Mm.

Ian Landsman (31:15)
⁓ and yeah, and all gets sent to the back end for actual storage. They they will be the storage provider too, if you want them to be, but I don't want them to be. So they send the updates over to the server and it saves, you know, the changes. ⁓ yeah. I know that's the part I didn't like, but

Aaron (31:30)
God, there are so many things. They're just so I I mean, I'm just looking at this live blocks page

and I'm like, I didn't even know this existed. What do I need to how do I how am I supposed to build with this? Like, I gotta build a multiplayer thing. There's just something new. And this is not even new. This has been around. But I I'm just discovering that I can do live Google Docs style with.

Ian Landsman (31:39)
Exactly.

Yeah.

Right. This isn't even new, but it feels new. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron (31:56)
a

few lines of code, so now I have to do it. It's like, there's always something.

Ian Landsman (32:02)
I know. And I was torn on it at first, but I was like, I'm gonna try it. I did the like, let's let's do it, and then like we're gonna see how it goes. Like, I I often just like do stuff and push it the main. I'm like, okay, yeah, let's go. This I was not. I was like, we have the branch, and it was like 130 commits. Like, I was like, I'm not pushing this until I'm really sure it actually works. And it did it work like really well. Like the AI, I I tweeted this too, but like Claude was like genius mode this weekend. I don't know what was going on, but it was like.

Aaron (32:14)
Yeah.

I saw that. I feel like we're

we're entering voodoo levels of belief. Cause I saw you say like if you got work to get done now might be a good time to do it. And I'm like, no, this is crazy.

Ian Landsman (32:32)
I don't know what was going on.

It might be the time. Do it. Man, it was so

good. I don't know what was going on. It was so good. Maybe it's me. I shouldn't give it the credit, but like it was cooking and things were just working. And it's like this was a pretty complicated change. Like, take put this reacting inside the live wire thing and like do this other connection stuff with this other tool. Who even knows if it knows about the other tool? Like, and it all kind of just worked. I mean, there's obviously some little things here and there, but it like the it one-shotted it working and it was working. And then it was just like.

Aaron (32:53)
Yeah, it's complicated.

it's pretty impressive.

Ian Landsman (33:07)
Me like whatever. I would some design stuff, a few positional things and stuff. But yeah, it was good. And then I have a bunch of custom stuff in there, a bunch of custom blocks, like a summary stuff, and like whatever. When you place links in, it does stuff and there's files and whatever. So I don't know. We'll see. I'm excited to hear if you and Dave ⁓ like it or not. But ⁓ I think I do prefer it for us, but especially for I think.

the kind of more true target audience of people with like different styles of podcasts where there's more pre planning, more write ups, more notes, things like that. I think this is gonna give them more flexibility in like building out longer scripts and things like that. So

Aaron (33:48)
Yeah, I've already I've already found it to be I found it to be better already. ⁓ because the old one was very form based and like you had to click in and then click in and then enter this form and then yeah, and it's like what's a note, what's a body, what's yeah. ⁓ so I think this this is probably this is probably correct. ⁓ so you also have on here that you deleted or there's maybe it's an article deleted WebSockets, never look back. So let's roll that one in. You haven't looked back?

Ian Landsman (33:52)
Okay. Cool.

Yeah.

Saving thing, yeah.

Yeah, let's go, baby. So I like it.

Yeah.

No, so this was j Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's

Aaron (34:18)
Besides besides this island of live blocks, which someone else manages, so I'm fine with. Someone else manages it. what are you

you're still doing the polling now and you're still happy?

Ian Landsman (34:28)
So I'm still doing the polling. I mean, so far so good. It's only us using it. So maybe it's gonna implode on itself once there's more people using it. But I mean, I feel like when I'm in outro, like I do stuff and it just seems to w work correctly. And like when you mark something done, I see it in what seems like the correct time frame and like

Aaron (34:32)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Landsman (34:48)
So I'm still loving it. Like I feel like it's much more reliable. And again, I don't know if it's a WebSocket thing. I don't know if it's like the WebSocket with LiveWire was a little bit fragile feeling to me. So I don't know if it was like that combination. But yeah, but then yes, this article is from Joe Mazzalotti. ⁓ sorry, Joe, if I mess up your name. Yeah, Joe's friend of the show. And ⁓ so ⁓

Aaron (34:57)
Yeah.

⁓ Joe, we like we like Joe.

Ian Landsman (35:12)
Yeah, he he did a post referencing me how I di ditched ditched it, ditched WebSockets. And he said that he did the same thing with his product, and ⁓ that so far so good with it, and that it's more reliable there too. And that's like a Ruby app using the, you know, Ruby on Rails live, whatever stuff that they use over there. And it's just using that stuff and not and polling and not ⁓ using the webhooks anymore, except for things that are.

Web hookie, which is that's how that's where I feel like I'm at with outro. WebSockety, yes, WebSockety, sorry. ⁓ which is like, okay, so for this real-time collaboration Google Doc style in a document, yeah, that has to be WebSockets, right? Like that makes sense. ⁓ so so yeah, anyway, I thought this was you should check it out, put the link in the show notes. But he wrote up a nice ⁓ kind of article about his move ⁓ over to that and kind of had similar results to me so far. Again, we will see.

Aaron (35:41)
Web sockety, right? Is that what you mean? Yeah. Okay.

Ian Landsman (36:07)
It's terrible mistake, but ⁓ hope hopefully.

Aaron (36:11)
He's doing ⁓ he's doing Ruby native, which is ⁓ PHP native, which is, you know, the PHP mobile thing, but for Ruby, and he's already got he's already got maybe one or two apps in the app store. ⁓ he's doing an I think he's doing an interesting model where he's not doing purely like let's let's build and sell Ruby native, which he is, but he's also a consultant. And so he goes

Ian Landsman (36:14)
Ruby native, that's what it is, yeah.

Yeah.

okay.

Mm.

Aaron (36:37)
And has been for many years. But now one of his offerings is I'll take your Rails app and turn it into a mobile app. by the way, it uses this framework that I built and so it's like a nice little a a bootstrap cycle there.

Ian Landsman (36:47)
Right.

That is interesting. I do feel like that's probably the angle with that stuff. Like you gotta get the consultants on board. Seems like an important piece of this, even for the PHP guys as well. To like get you get those consultants who are building apps for people and they're doing twelve a year or something, like you get them using it. ⁓ seems like they're gonna be your best customers, even more than like like if I was to use it for something, it's like, well, I'm just gonna have this one app that uses it. Yeah, yeah. So like if you have two I'm building twelve or twenty or fifty apps, like that seems like your best customer. So ⁓ cool.

Aaron (36:55)
Yeah.

I'm just gonna do it once, yeah. Exactly.

Ian Landsman (37:21)
All right, you wanna pay some bills and then we will we got a bunch of stuff.

Aaron (37:22)
If you are

not an old head who wants to scream at the cloud and you do want to use WebSockets, let me tell you, let me, let me tell you about vasque.dev. Vasque is pusher compatible WebSockets, but build sanely because there are no fan out fees. It is powered by Cloudflare. Get the first three months free on any tier using coupon codes mostly or.

Ian Landsman (37:29)
Ha no no

Aaron (37:49)
Code technical at Vasque. That's V-A-S-K dot dev. Also brought to you by Laracon AU. As tools accelerate and workflows shift, depth matters more than ever. Join us at Laracon AU in Brisbane this November, November 4th through 6th, for deeper technical sessions, practical architecture, and meaningful conversations. Tickets are on sale now.

At Laricon dot AU. So thank you to both of them for sponsoring the show.

Ian Landsman (38:20)
So when is the AI gonna make it so that where I said web hooks, it can just swap it out for web sockets and it just magically fixes it? That's what I want. Want the AI to fix it. It could happen, yeah. ⁓ fix it up. Man.

Aaron (38:29)
Prob probably n probably now. I mean honestly. I think we're yeah, I think we're totally there, actually. it's just a matter

of us wanting to do that and I don't care enough to do that. ⁓

Ian Landsman (38:41)
Yeah. It

it kinda that is like the human element that you s kind of lose. Like it's like, the mess up. People like the mess ups. So yeah. ⁓ all right, what do you got? What's what's a slash brag update you got for us?

Aaron (38:45)
Yep. People love the mess up. Yep.

So I got ⁓ I put out a call for slash bat slash brag directory ⁓ designs last week. And ⁓ throughout the week, I think maybe three or four trickled in. ⁓ so then of course I left on Thursday and haven't had a chance to like do anything with them. So today I'm gonna look through the the ones that were sent in and pick one that, you know, looks nice, looks easy to maintain as a open source thing.

Ian Landsman (38:59)
Mm-hmm.

Wow. Okay.

Yep.

Aaron (39:21)
And I'll get it up on slash brag dot com.

People can start listing their brag pages with fuel with full impunity. Like now you can have a brag page and say, I'm just part of this thing. I'm not an egotist. Yeah, it's great. ⁓ so yeah, some people actually went out and did it, which I thought was super cool. So

Ian Landsman (39:28)
Yes. It's a movement.

That was really cool.

I think I saw yeah one or two of them. So that'll be cool to see which one ⁓ you pick. And I I gotta do my brag page. I gotta do my brag page. You gotta do a brag page too, because one of them I saw linked to your tuple page, but to me that's not quite a brag page. Like you need to modify that. You need to tweak into a more generic brag page and updated for modern you, which is also different.

Aaron (39:44)
Yeah.

You gotta do it.

I do. I do. Yeah. So

yeah, I I've I've gotta work on mine. I gotta, you know, get the website. I I got a lot of personal side of the house things I gotta work on. But ⁓ I'm excited to have like a a full directory. I think that'll be fun.

Ian Landsman (40:07)
Mm. ⁓ true.

Yeah.

I think it's gonna be huge. Cause like you need that central place where people can point to otherwise it's like, well, on this podcast, these guys talked about like it's too hard to like Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Aaron (40:17)
Yeah.

Right. These two these two randos at this time stamp, yeah. Talked about it for thirty minutes before they landed on the

thing that I'm linking you to, yeah.

Ian Landsman (40:30)
We should we should probably clip that segment of that blog of that podcast out though and ⁓ put it on the website. We can stake our claim and kind of just give the background, which I think would be interesting for people. So ⁓ we got a new employee hired. So yay, yes, new employee, customer success lead. So very excited for her to start.

Aaron (40:37)
That is a good idea. Yep.

Yep, I agree. Yeah, we'll do that too.

You did too.

This is the AI forward

⁓ customer success lead.

Ian Landsman (40:56)
Yep. So she's gonna be doing all kinds of stuff, like regular support, but also like ⁓ all kinds of like more success-oriented stuff with the existing customers of like getting them, you know, because we build all these features, AI lets us build the features, we're building features, but all the customers like they're not using the features necessarily because they're like just doing the stuff they've been doing, right? It's like, no, stop doing the stuff you've been doing and do this new stuff we gave you the new tools for. So bunch of stuff around that. We got a bunch of AI stuff coming. so we wanna kind of have

Aaron (41:11)
I know. Don't I know it? Yep.

Ian Landsman (41:24)
Especially around that, I think people are gonna need a lot more sort of hand holding. We also have like a whole spectrum inside help spots universe of like people who hate the AI and despise it, and then other people who are like, Why don't haven't you built full AI auto answering so I can fire everybody? So we got like the big spectrum trying to balance that out a little bit. ⁓ so yeah, so she's gonna be helping with all that stuff. And yeah, very exciting. ⁓ she's in.

Aaron (41:51)
So how big is

the team now?

Ian Landsman (41:52)
So that will be five of us. Yeah. No. And I mean, we might actually hire somebody else here at some point, but right now, I mean, not yet. Definitely gonna be a few months if we do it. ⁓ but we're gonna see how how this goes. This woman's a little less technical than other people we've had in this role before, but she's way more experienced in like the support and success side than other people we've had before. So we've like intentionally made a little different trade-off there.

Aaron (41:55)
Wow.

Ian Landsman (42:21)
⁓ so that's gonna be, I think, a cool new addition to the team with somebody who's like thought deeply about all this stuff and was really into it.

Aaron (42:28)
Okay, so you you've

you've complained about hiring no less than one hundred times on this podcast. So so tell me, how did this woman ⁓ how did she run the gauntlet? Like what was what was her application? What was it that like set her apart? Like give us the final you know, we've we've talked about resumes on the front side. On the back side, how did she get through?

Ian Landsman (42:33)
No, me, I love hiring.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Yeah, so I think the front side's important. Let me just touch on that. She did have a nice cover letter. She had a resume that stood out. It had like some a color aspect to it and like was also just like a good resume that was obviously like customized and relevant.

Aaron (43:03)
And the cover letter, was it directed

at you?

Ian Landsman (43:06)
I don't remember if it's actually titled to me, but it did like have it was a good cover letter that like had the proper, she had researched us and the job and like all that stuff. and ⁓ yeah, and then we did two interviews and a take-home kind of assignment thing. And she was great in the interviews. and obviously like she also runs this whole ⁓ like kind of support person website.

Aaron (43:14)
Okay.

Mm.

Ian Landsman (43:32)
that has a

newsletter and different things like that. So she's like really into the ecosystem and like all that stuff. So she had a lot of just great kind of public history. So again, like what we've talked about, right? Like there was a lot of external proof, a lot of like things we could go look at that are like, here's her thoughts about this or that. And that she's obviously into this and has thought a lot about it because she has a whole website that's dedicated to it. And I can clearly see she's into it. ⁓

Aaron (43:44)
Yep. External proof. Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Ian Landsman (44:00)
So then yeah, like obviously the I think the first call was like half an hour, probably 40 minutes. And then the second call was like an hour. And then we did take home, which was like one part of that was like something really technical, which we didn't we knew she wouldn't like know the answer to. I mean, even I wouldn't know the answer to it, like off the top of head. And then she like records herself going through her research process of that. So we can kind of see like how she thinks and that kind of thing. So that was interesting.

Aaron (44:24)
Mm.

Ian Landsman (44:30)
And then there was also a couple other things like writing a support reply and some other stuff. And yeah, she did great. ⁓ both the people, the two finalists, one was the person who did the custom website, which I talked about on the show, ⁓ and who is definitely less qualified from a like job history type of thing. And like, but he jumped the line by standing out and then he impressed us with the interviews, and so he made it to the final two, ⁓ without.

Aaron (44:57)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Landsman (45:00)
With just on paper, he wouldn't have made it that far. Like if it was just like look at my resume and that's it. So again, put in the effort. It does help. He didn't get the job, but he got to the final two, and that was pretty impressive. ⁓ and then yeah, so she's ⁓ yeah, I'm really excited for her. Her name's Stephanie, and she starts in a couple weeks here, and yeah.

Aaron (45:23)
And she's what, like head of

customer support success? Okay.

Ian Landsman (45:25)
Yeah, she's the customer success lead is the current

title, with the goal of her kind of really fully taking over kind of everything, success and support. ⁓ you know, but that's the the long term goal after maybe a year or two. so yeah. So but gonna be great to have somebody in this role 'cause we've been kind of without this role for a while. And yeah, but

Aaron (45:38)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Landsman (45:47)
She put in the effort to all the stuff I've talked about in the show. If you're wondering how she got the job, just go back and listen to every other episode because those are the things she did. Like she did all the stuff and it worked for her. So ⁓ yeah. Yeah, we should do that. Yeah. There's a lot of good stuff in there. That's fine. People have.

Aaron (45:57)
We need a supercut of you complaining about hiring. I the problem is it would be like forty minutes long. Even if it's a

supercut.

Ian Landsman (46:07)
That kind of is a good idea though. It's like here's the here's the handbook on how to get hired. Here it is. 40 minutes. Can you if you can't watch 40 minutes and be ranting about the things people do wrong, you're probably not gonna get a job. You gotta do this stuff. What do you want from me? ⁓ you're not looking for a job though. That's a thing. If you were looking for a job, then maybe you would. You've heard it already first person, though, so you got it.

Aaron (46:11)
Yeah.

I don't know, I don't think I could watch forty minutes of you ranting.

I I've I've heard it. I've heard it many times. Well, congratulations to Stephanie.

I'm excited to hear of her assured success at ⁓ at the company. So I listened to Token Town.

Ian Landsman (46:38)
Yes. Yeah. It's gonna be cool.

Mmm, what'd you think? Okay. Interesting.

Aaron (46:44)
I thought it was great. I thought it was great.

So ⁓ you said ⁓ in response you thought it was great, but thought it was more of a traditional podcast than a specific Token Town. So we can expand this more broadly, but what did you mean by that and like what are we thinking about Token Town?

Ian Landsman (46:58)
Right.

Yeah, so I mean, so I we had Josh Pickford on as like a guest because you were out at the boys' trip. And ⁓ so yeah, we've been we've only done two or three episodes of Token Town before this point, anyway. Maybe it just two, I think. ⁓ so even that, like the format still was trying to get it down, you know. So like I'm trying to straddle of like, is this an interview or is he the other host of Token Town? And

Aaron (47:26)
Right.

Ian Landsman (47:30)
Obviously, like Tokertown hasn't been out there enough for people to be like, I know the format. And like the people we'd have on as guests can just like, they get the format. So yeah. So that part was just a little tricky for me. Like, do how where do I cut him off? Where do I push ahead on the next topic? again, like with you and me cutting each other off, we're like totally fine with that. When you have like a guest, you feel like, I don't want to like cut him off or whatever. So some of that might be my end of just being comfortable with cutting him off. But

Yeah, I think it went I think it went well. I mean, I think it was interesting and like good. I just didn't know it felt more like maybe a sweet hang and less of like a token town, but it was certainly faster moving and set topics in a way that, you know, a sweet hang on here would not be. So it it was kind of like a middle ground. I don't How about how did it come across?

Aaron (48:02)
Mm.

I'm curious. ⁓

I agree. It came across as the middle ground. It was definitely faster than like a tell me how you got into computers, which I hate when I'm when I go and I'm like, there's a cool podcast gu podcast guest. And then it's like, so how did you get into computers? And it's like 10 minutes of I played Red Alert 2 when I was a kid. And I'm like, I don't care. So that part that part was much better. ⁓ it did feel a little bit less like news rundown, but

Ian Landsman (48:17)
Okay.

Right. Yeah.

That's the worst. Yeah. Yeah.

Right.

Aaron (48:42)
That's okay. I thought that was fine. ⁓ I enjoyed it. I also like Josh a lot, so it was enjoyable from that perspective. Also, he he and you are like diametrically opposed on the how many projects should I take on, what should I do? And so that's always fun to have a little bit of like ⁓ fundamental disagreement. ⁓ but what did you tell him when you invited him on? Maybe that's the

Ian Landsman (48:48)
Yeah.

Yeah. Right.

Right.

Aaron (49:07)
Going forward, if we if we do another guest, maybe the briefing needs to be more clear up front.

Ian Landsman (49:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, I didn't give him a super clear briefing. I mean, I did tell him like the basic format, and I was just like, he's filling in. Obviously, he's super into AI. So getting his takes on the kind of news items would be interesting. So I mean I gave it to him, but like, yeah, I I don't think we didn't have like a formal prep session where we sat for 10 or 15 minutes and like we went through it. So we could do that. But even if it's like a different I could I do think it was interesting to have somebody on, even if we have a guest with both of us, because it does cut having the news items.

Aaron (49:23)
Yeah.

Ian Landsman (49:41)
does force it into a structure where even if it goes longer than like when we're doing the show regularly, it does prevent all of that like, here's 20 minutes about who you are and like what how you got in the computers and what are you just what are you thinking about right now? Like, you know, it's like, no, like we're gonna seed it every topic. And then maybe you go off a little bit on some tangents or whatever. But it's like in the flow of the show, it has like a pacing to it. So I did like that possibly as like an aspect of how we might have guests on the show, whether they're like

Aaron (49:51)
Right.

Ian Landsman (50:11)
they co-host the whole show or they come on for a segment or something. But there is something where it's like does I do think it was nice to not do like an in I hate interview podcasts because it's so long and so boring. So I do think you got the flavor of Josh without like 40 minutes of extra bullshit that's like nobody wants to listen to. So that part though was cool if we do more guests.

Aaron (50:34)
Yeah.

I think we got I think we got a lot better. I don't know if we did two or three, but I think we got a lot you and I got a lot better after the first one. The first one I was I was a little nervous and we were doing we were doing strict here's here's what happened, unless here's what I think about what happened, which I think is you can get here's what's happen here's what happened anywhere. ⁓ but yeah, I think we're starting I think the 30 minute timeline's a little tight. I don't think we've stuck to it at all. ⁓

Ian Landsman (50:43)
Yeah.

Right.

Right.

Probably. No. Yeah.

Aaron (51:04)
Which is fine. But I do

Ian Landsman (51:05)
Yeah.

Aaron (51:05)
I do think we're getting better at ⁓ here's the topic, here's the ground level truth, and here's why I think you're wrong about it. Like that's what people, you know, that's what people come for. So, ⁓ but I'm I'm loving the I'm loving the live aspect of it. I think that adds a whole a whole nother layer that I think is super fun.

Ian Landsman (51:15)
Yeah. That's what they want. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Super fun. I think the live is working great. I think Dave popping in and doing questions in the middle works great and like breaks it up and like has another voice on the show without like the complexity of like a full-time third person and like that gets weird sometimes. So I like that part a lot. ⁓ yeah, the live QA is cool. Like, yeah, I think the live has been a huge success. So now we just gotta like double down on like, yeah, figuring out the right number of segments. I think there's just some stuff there of like trying different types of segments.

Aaron (51:38)
Right.

Ian Landsman (51:56)
The number of segments, how much is us pontificating, how much is the news? Obviously, we don't want to do straight news, just reading the news. That's not in interesting. How much can we assume people know? I think that's sort of an interesting thing we have to figure out too, is like sometimes obviously like that Microsoft thing I linked to in the last one we did together. Like I know nobody knows about that. So we kind of have to like explain what it is. But then like maybe with other things where we can, do we just assume or or is it people are coming here really being mostly checked out?

Aaron (52:07)
Right.

Ian Landsman (52:24)
And so we actually have to explain it always, you know? Yeah.

Aaron (52:26)
I think we have to explain it. I think we

have to assume it's kinda like the you haven't heard of it's kinda like, no offense, the LinkedIn crowd where they hear about everything like three weeks late, you know? So I think I think we kind of have to assume that. especially if it if the shtick is basically like here's what's here's what happened. ⁓ we need to say what happened and then we can opine on it. So like with the Microsoft thing, it was helpful for me to listen to you explain what the hell's going on.

Ian Landsman (52:31)
You haven't heard about it?

Right. Right. Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

Aaron (52:56)
⁓ because I I

had been, you know, mostly offline that week and so it was nice to hear you guys talk about it. ⁓ so yeah, I think I think it's working. I think I I'm really enjoying it. And I think we already have a small but loyal group of listeners. ⁓ question is just how do we make it go huge?

Ian Landsman (53:06)
Yeah.

Yes, that's the question. That one has to go huge, people. That's the goal. This is our fun little place where we have our you the inside kind of our circle. But Toketown's gotta go big or go home is kind of its goal. So but I think we're on I mean, we have I think we had over a thousand live list viewers, Dave said with Pigford. And I think we've been around that a lot of the other times too. So like I mean, to get a thousand people live is is good, a good start for sure. So I think

Aaron (53:19)
Yeah.

Yep, I think so.

Ian Landsman (53:43)
Just gotta double down. How do you get people to talk about it while we're on on live? Is there stuff we need to tell people to spread the word? I don't know. We gotta figure it out. But it's getting there. It's not, it's like it's all to a good start for sure. So happy with the start.

Aaron (53:54)
It's getting there. Yep.

And it's it's fun. The the mostly technical listeners are getting a a live look at a brand new joint venture. I mean, this is this is a you know, this is a entity from scratch. Yeah. It's fun.

Ian Landsman (54:04)
Yeah. Getting inside baseball. Yeah, yes.

Yeah. Yeah. This is why they're here. This is why this is the behind the scenes podcast, right? So we can go deep with them on the behind the scenes. It is kind of fun having a show that's like

Aaron (54:13)
This is why they're here. Yep, exactly.

Ian Landsman (54:20)
We are like we're very focused on like the entertainment aspect and the like production of it. Whereas like this show, we show up and we're doing a show, you know? It's like whatever pops in our head. Not without show, we're a little more organized than we used to be. We are kind of mostly putting topics in place beforehand and stuff, but still we're kind of wandering if we need to wander and whatever and going long or if we need to go long and we're not worried about any that stuff. But so it's it is.

Aaron (54:34)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Landsman (54:46)
Interesting from that regard. It's not boring like we're just doing a second podcast that's in the same format and like, ⁓ this is just a slightly different take on the same thing. Like I think we've differentiated enough for our own motivation and entertainment. So it doesn't feel like we're just doing the same thing again and that's like super boring. And what are we doing here? So I like that too. So far, that that's worked out.

Aaron (54:51)
Agreed.

Agreed.

Well, speaking of wandering, shall we wander into the horse stables? Tell me, we've got a we've got a business dad a horse topic on here. What it could mean, I have no idea, but it says business dad a horse. So what are we what are we business daddy with this horse?

Ian Landsman (55:10)
Mm.

Horse business. I

That's the topic. Business Dad of Horse. Yeah.

That's the perfect summary.

Okay, so here's the deal. We finally got a horse. Daughter's riding a horse. Jamie just actually messaged me while we're on air. Here I saw it come through that she signed the bill of sale. So we own a horse, like right now. We own a horse. But here's the thing: I had the business data. I had the business. And Jamie was business momming it too. So it's just both of us together. ⁓ I've talked about this horse stuff, but a quick refresher.

Aaron (55:33)
Okay.

You own a horse. Wow.

Ian Landsman (55:57)
We initially, you know, my daughter's been doing it a long time. So you use the barn's horses when you start and you're just doing lessons. The barn has horses, you're doing those things. But eventually you they want you to get out of their horses because when you jump higher things, that's hard on the horses. They claim, which I have a whole other side tangent we could talk about today or at some point. But anyway, they say it's hard on the horses. They don't want that all the kids jumping high on the horses. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly.

Aaron (56:19)
They don't they don't want that horse depreciation on their books. They want it on your books.

Ian Landsman (56:24)
And I mean,

listen, I my rant to them is always like these people in the 1800s didn't baby their horses. They weren't like, boy, I rode that horse for 45 minutes. I better give it 24 hours off. They were like, they rode the horse all day, every day. That's what they did. Whatever. Apparently, these horses are delicate and whatever. You gotta be careful with the horses. Fine. These are janzy horses, yes. So, okay. So anyway, they don't want you to use their horses for jumping forever. Once you get more advanced, then you're jumping higher amounts.

Aaron (56:42)
These are Gen Z horses. They need they need their brakes, you know.

Ian Landsman (56:54)
So they're like, you gotta get your own horse. Okay. So they everybody tells you to lease a horse. So that's what we did the first time. We leased a horse. And then it got sick, which we talked about in the show. We'll go through the whole thing. Had to have surgery. So that horse is fine and whatever. But like we had to give it back. Okay. So now we back in the market for a horse. Horses are expensive, and so you know, you know how it is out there. So it's like it's this big expense. You're like, the horse, and it's a lease. It's

Aaron (57:12)
Up sh I know.

Ian Landsman (57:19)
A lease, right? So like you spend the money and you throw the money away. It's like the money's gone, right? Whatever it is. Right. And then it just had this epiphany that, like, if you're leasing it, you have this expense. But if you buy it, that's an asset. So if you buy it, and as long as you get one in the right scenario, like you don't want one too old or whatever, now it's an asset that could just pay for itself. So it's like, okay, the first.

Aaron (57:23)
Never lease anything, never lease anything.

Mm-hmm.

Okay? How?

Ian Landsman (57:47)
The first couple years,

it will not pay for itself exactly. Although we if we had to lease a horse, we'd just be spending that money elsewhere. So, okay, now we we bought the horse, we own it, so it costs us nothing for the horse. Like we invested that money. Yeah, because it's barn fees and well, whatever, fine. But the horse itself is paid for. Great. So our kid uses it for two years, three years. Okay. And she grows out of it or whatever. She

Aaron (57:56)
Okay.

That was air air quotes nothing for the for the audio only crew, yeah.

Ian Landsman (58:15)
jumps higher than it can jump or she gets too big for it. Fine. If the as long as the horse isn't too old, then we can take the horse and we could be the ones leasing it. And leasing the horse is you literally print money because it's not like a co it's not like anything else you've ever leased in your whole life. The owner of the horse is responsible for nothing, like literally nothing. We've talked about this. So all maintenance is on you, all vet bills are on you, everything is on the lease or

Aaron (58:25)
Mm.

I remember.

Ian Landsman (58:44)
And ⁓ yeah, so it's just you don't have any other expenses, it's all profit. They're just giving you money, you give them the horse. And if it lasts two or three years, you're back at least even or to profit. ⁓ because the other thing is the insane part is that the way they price the leases is usually either half the value of the horse or sometimes a third of the value of the horse. So it's a lot. It's like if you got yeah, per year. So if you got like a Toyota Corolla.

Aaron (59:09)
Per year? Geez.

Ian Landsman (59:13)
But your payment was $900 a month on it, right? Because it's like, well, we're just we have to get back a third of the cost of the car in the first year or $1,500 a month because we're getting back half the cost of the car. So that whole ratio is insane, right? It's like, it's not like five years or six, it's no, it's right away. So if this thing, and some of the the Barnes horses, they're in their mid-20s. So if we have a horse that our kid rides from 12 to 15, and then we lease it for 10 years.

Print money. Print it.

Aaron (59:44)
Playing the long game, baby.

Ian Landsman (59:45)
Yes, that's where we had the business data. And then it's like, well, I don't even care what we spend on it because now, which isn't totally true, but it does open up your mind a little bit to like, okay, well, now it's like a math problem and it's just a business thing. And can we make it work where we get at least our money back? And in the end, we actually ended up getting a horse that was quite again, air quotes inexpensive. ⁓ and we got a good deal on it. We had to go, it's from Pennsylvania out in the wilderness, like, you know, you

You don't want to get one up in New York State because they're not that cheap. So we got a good deal. We got a good plan. It's 12 years old. We're locked in. The my daughter loves it. The horse is great. So everything so far is so good on the horse front. But we business dated it. And I think it's going to be okay. I think we got an asset that's going to make us money.

Aaron (1:00:34)
I I feel like I'm sitting in a hotel conference room getting the hard sell on why I should buy a horse from you specifically. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what it feels like. Yeah. You too can reach financial freedom if you owned a horse. Wait a second.

Ian Landsman (1:00:37)
You gotta deposit. Give me ten thousand. Deposit it now. You you w you don't wanna miss this opportunity, Aaron. You don't wanna miss it. It's a money printing machine.

Yes.

But if it lasts even two or three years and our kid just rides it and then that's it, we still make out. We're still saving money over the leasing it. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. So it's like even in that scenario, it's like, and if it drops dead, we have insurance for that. So you're you're pretty covered. Like there, there's this little gap where like it's hurt.

Aaron (1:01:03)
Yeah, I mean if you're paying half or a third of the value of a horse every year, that's two or three years before it makes more sense to just own the thing. Yeah.

Ian Landsman (1:01:22)
And can't work, but isn't dead. That's a bad zone. That's a zone where you lose all your money. So that's the rolling the dice aspect of this is yeah. That's exactly. So yeah. But but besides that, feeling good about the horse, excited to be a horse dad. ⁓ there's a nice little horsey. So

Aaron (1:01:25)
⁓

That's why they the barn doesn't want you jumping too high.

I I'm excited for two to three years from now when when the tables flip and you're like, I'm buying five more horses. This is the best thing I've ever done.

Ian Landsman (1:01:50)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's good happen. That could

happen. I already told JBS, now we gotta keep our eyes out. You know, if there's a deal out there, like, man, then we just I mean, if we're just buying one just to lease it, we just buy it and lease it back out. So, you know, it's tricky because obviously they're trying to lease it too. So it's like, you know, it's a little bit of a game. This whole world is insane. There's no like websites where people buy horses off of, it's all like who you know. You have to like.

Aaron (1:02:07)
Right.

Ian Landsman (1:02:21)
the trainers talk to each other and it's all back channels and WhatsApp stuff and people run into people at a show and just say, Hey, I got a horse like this is all, you know, eighteen hundreds level of businessing is how you get this done. But

Aaron (1:02:35)
But that's that's what gives you the moat, man. You're in. You're in the back channels now. Yeah.

Ian Landsman (1:02:37)
I know that's true. Once you're inside, you're not outside. Yes.

So yeah, it's it's interesting. It's an interesting world. The main thing is you gotta try to business dad these things, right? Like whatever it is, can you turn something that's an expense into an asset that makes you money? This is the this is the sh the the change in vision. Yeah, there you go. Exactly. So anyway, that's the horse update. We got a horse. It's it's a cool horse.

Aaron (1:02:58)
This is Rich Dad Poor Dad, man.

Did she name

it using her vibe coded horse name generator?

Ian Landsman (1:03:09)
No, which she should have, but she didn't name it at all. It came with a name. She liked the name. It was actually named Lavender Haze, which is ⁓ Taylor Swift's song. So he's good marketing on their part. ⁓ so she liked that. That's its like official show name. And then ⁓ this barn name is Lily. You know, the horses, they're not really like dogs, they don't answer to names, so kind of doesn't matter. But ⁓ yeah, she was okay with the names. So the names are staying, apparently, is

Aaron (1:03:37)
Okay, well congratulations to young landsmen on getting a new horse named Lavender Hayes. Very exciting. Yeah, yes. Same. I had a I had a pony in an underground garage. Sure.

Ian Landsman (1:03:43)
Just like just like my childhood. Same same thing. ⁓

man. All right. You went fishing.

Aaron (1:03:56)
All right, let's wrap it up here. I went fishing. So I get home from I get home from Sausage Fest, which is the official name of the guys gathering. Get get home from the trip on Sunday afternoon, around like 2:45, which is when the big kids get up from their they don't really nap anymore, but they have like quiet time, rest time, and the babies nap. So I get home and everybody's just getting up and

Ian Landsman (1:03:58)
Tell me about this fishing.

Mm-hmm. Very guys.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Aaron (1:04:25)
you know, immediately start helping and the big kids are like, We want to go fishing. Like, we're gonna go fishing today. And I'm like, ⁓ are we? Cause I didn't I didn't know about this. ⁓ and they're like, We want to go to we want to go to grandpa's, you know, grandpa's neighborhood has a little pond in it that is specifically for little kids to fish, basically. so I want to go to grandma and grandpa's pond. and I'm looking at Jennifer like, what

Ian Landsman (1:04:31)
Okay. ⁓

Mm.

Wow, okay.

Aaron (1:04:54)
Have we told them? Have you already committed to this? What is going on? and I think I think some of it comes from they have like a summer, like a summer bucket list of like things to do, you know, and one of them is go fishing. And so I think it had gotten lodged in their heads that they were going fishing today. And, you know, I've I've been gone for four days, and so I'm like,

Ian Landsman (1:04:56)
Right. Yeah.

Mm. I say. Right.

I love that. Yeah.

Sure.

Aaron (1:05:21)
One, I you of course I want to spend time with him. Two, I want to like get some of these kids out of the house for Jennifer. ⁓ and so I'm like, great, let's go fishing. So we call, you know, we call grandpa, and he's like, yeah, I got all these kid fishing poles and literally all of them are broken. And I'm like, yeah, that checks out. Like that is the zero percent surprised by that. ⁓ so me and the big kids go to academy, sports and outdoors, the right stuff, the low price. And

Ian Landsman (1:05:27)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Yeah. ⁓

Okay. Never heard of

it?

Aaron (1:05:51)
We are we're over in the fishing aisle and boy, I have not fished since I was my children's age. Since I was five. I have not fished. You know, this this weekend, a bunch of dudes, bunch of these friends of mine are out there in the river with all of their gear and like their, you know, their vests on that have these hand tied flies and they're fishing out there and I'm just sitting in the river just watching ⁓ so I know I know literally nothing about fishing.

Ian Landsman (1:05:53)
Mm.

Same. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm.

Aaron (1:06:20)
So we walk over to the fishing aisle, we find ⁓ an Elsa fishing pole and a Spider-Man fishing pole. And I'm like, great, we're off to a good start. We found some fishing poles. And I'm looking at and the fishing poles have no hooks on ⁓ They've got, you know, I can't tell if there's line in there or not, which there is. Dude, it's all reeled up. And so I'm like looking down into the little spinner, being like, is there fishing line in there? Am I gonna have to like wind my own line or something?

Ian Landsman (1:06:28)
Got

Why don't they come ready to go, you know? Come ready to go. Yeah. All right.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron (1:06:50)
Feeling very inadequate. ⁓

and I see a fellow dad in the fishing aisle. So I see a dad with about a 10 to 12 year old boy, and the dad is looking at grown-up fishing poles for himself. And I'm like, this guy knows fishing. And I thought, you know what? I have no ego whatsoever about this. And so I walked over and I said, Hey other dad. I and I'm holding these two kids fishing poles. Hey, other dad.

Ian Landsman (1:06:57)
⁓ okay.

Mm-hmm.

So he knows what's up, yeah. Yeah.

Ha ha ha.

Yeah.

Aaron (1:07:21)
I've never been fishing in my life. Yeah, I don't need to explain I went fishing when I was five. It's it doesn't count anymore. Yeah. I've never been fishing in my life. What the hell do I what am I doing here? What else do I need? And I'll tell you what, America is still a wonderful place to be. Cause this dad, this dad, who couldn't have been like two or three years older than me, was like, ⁓ dude, I gotcha. Like, come over here. Here's what you need.

Ian Landsman (1:07:23)
Sure. Cut to the chase, yeah. Hmm.

What's going on? Yeah.

⁓

Right.

Aaron (1:07:49)
Grab this tackle box. It has all the hooks. It has everything. Go around the corner. Get these worms. ⁓ you're gonna pull this thing out, you're gonna tie it. There's a little thing on the back. It'll show you how to tie the hook. Here's everything you need to know. This is the one my son had when he got started. You're gonna be fine. Y'all are gonna have a blast. And I'm like.

Ian Landsman (1:07:52)
Mm.

there you go.

Aaron (1:08:09)
Thanks, other dad. That was incredibly

helpful. And so you know what? There's still there's still nice people out there that are willing to help out a a city slicker when they're trying to go fishing.

Ian Landsman (1:08:13)
Wow.

Th a person is nice and people are terrible. This is like a this is a thing, you know, forever, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Aaron (1:08:24)
That is a hundred percent true. Yes, a person is

nice. And so we went, ⁓ and it was disgusting. I hate fishing. I hate it. Everything about it's terrible. I'm tying these little hooks on. I got two five-year-olds swinging hooks around.

Ian Landsman (1:08:31)
qua everything about it is terrible, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

my god.

That's like my worst nightmare. You're just giving me cringe just like thinking about the hooks flying. ⁓ worms. Dude, this is terrible, of course.

Aaron (1:08:43)
I'm sticking these I'm sticking these gross, nasty little grubs on these hooks. Nobody's catching anything.

Their hooks are getting caught in the little reeds and ⁓ so they the kids had a blast. They had the best time. And then no, no, not a thing. No, these worms were a disaster. I need to just use hot dogs next time. ⁓ so then when we're done, we drive over to ⁓

Ian Landsman (1:08:58)
Okay. So they get a pull, a tug, anything, nothing? They got nothing? ⁓

Right.

Aaron (1:09:12)
You know, we drive over to grandma and grandpa's house just to say hi. And ⁓ you know, they both come out and we're all showing them the new fishing poles. wow, it's amazing. and the fishing poles came with these little, they're almost like toys, but they're like little fake fish. ⁓ and so ⁓ we get out and grandpa ties the fake fish on, and then they're just standing in the yard.

Ian Landsman (1:09:15)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron (1:09:37)
Casting the fake fish and reeling them in. And they did that for 30 minutes. They had the best time of their life. And I'm like, why didn't we just start here? I don't need hooks. I don't need worms. Just tie the plastic fish on, cast it into the street, and reel it back. You guys are having the best time ever. So it ended up being a lot of fun. And I think my son really took to it in a way that he hasn't really taken to anything, you know, because I'm helping I'm helping my daughter put another worm on.

Ian Landsman (1:09:39)
⁓ my gosh. There you go. No worms.

There you go.

⁓

⁓

Aaron (1:10:06)
Over and this boy, this five-year-old's just got this perfect cast going, and he's just having the best time in the world. ⁓ and so it ended up being a lot of fun, but fishing is disgusting and I hate it. ⁓ plus, of course, it's a million degrees out there. and when I got, you know, when I got to grandma and grandpa's house, grandpa tied it on, they're casting, and I'm standing there off to the side with grandpa and

Ian Landsman (1:10:11)
He's going. Wow.

Aaron (1:10:30)
Dude, fishing's the worst. He's like, I hate it. I hate it. It's so, yeah. He's like, I is so no. He's he's only into it in the sense that he's a good grandpa and he'll do it with grandkids. But he's like, dude, I don't like it either. It's awful, isn't it? It's so stressful because all the hooks are everywhere and it's gross. And then you get the fish, and you're like, what the hell am I supposed to do with this fish? And so not really cut out for it, but the kids love it, and so I'll do it for them.

Ian Landsman (1:10:33)
real? ⁓ I thought grandpa was into it. ⁓ you thought okay.

I say to ⁓ yeah.

In it.

You know what you need is like Taylor Otwell's kid is super into fishing. And I think it's like I don't think Taylor's I don't I don't know if he's ever gone or I d he's not the fishing guy. So I think it's like an uncle. You need an uncle. Yeah, you need an uncle to the uncle's the guy who fishes, you know? That's what you need. You gotta hook up the uncle. Yeah. Offload the kids. Good. ⁓

Aaron (1:10:59)
Mm-hmm.

I think it's Taylor's uncle. Yeah, I know.

I know. I need I need a hunting and fishing uncle so that I can send my kids off to become men and then come back home to my house. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Landsman (1:11:21)
man. I always love this spot too, because like you're in that aisle. You're like, if the if the Armageddon comes, if the AI antichrist takes over, like this guy's gonna make it. I'm not gonna make it. Like this guy, he's surviving. He's gonna fish, he'll be fine. Like you, you're gonna be out there hooking yourself in the neck like you're dead.

Aaron (1:11:31)
Yeah, totally. Yes.

I need Iep.

I need an apocalypse uncle is what I need. And the problem is I have an apocalypse brother, but he lives like an hour, hour and a half away on like 40 acres, and he does his own like he's just out there by himself working the land. Yeah. So I need him to I need him to come into the city and teach my kids survivor survival skills. That's what I need.

Ian Landsman (1:11:41)
Yeah, that's okay. Yeah.

Okay.

He just yeah, he he's he's ac he's too far gone.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Get that got him in

there. Yeah. Well, really, you should go out there. You should invite yourself out there and be like, We're gonna w wander around the wilderness for a couple days and you're gonna teach us how to survive and we're gonna fish and start fires and do all the things. Yeah, I think you should do that. I think you should make that happen. Especially since your son, he's he's into it. That's cool.

Aaron (1:12:06)
I should go out there. Yes.

Yes, that is exactly what I need.

He's into

it. And that's the only thing I told Jennifer after they all went to bed. I was like, listen, that was awful. But if he like if this is his thing, e even for like, you know, kids, three months or whatever, and this is a way that I can bond with him and something that he can like really like get, you know, emotionally invested in, then I'll I will one hundred percent do it. ⁓

Ian Landsman (1:12:35)
Yeah. Right. Yeah. It could be a summer thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Aaron (1:12:48)
But if we can lean towards just the practice fish in the backyard, that would be my preference. But I think we're gonna have to go back to the pond pretty soon.

Ian Landsman (1:12:56)
It is fun when they get into the stuff that you don't know. It's like first you're like, this is the worst. Like, why are they into the thing I don't know anything about? But then it is even with sports and stuff, that'll probably happen too. It's like my son got super into soccer and I was like, What? Soccer? Like, I know baseball super well. I know football. Why are we doing soccer? Like, but but then it's like, I got into the soccer. So Yes, it is too late.

Aaron (1:13:14)
Well, if it's not too late, I can be I can be soccer uncle. You send down here, I will teach them.

I will teach them soccer and I'll send my kids to you for baseball because baseball's the freaking worst.

Ian Landsman (1:13:23)
There we go. There we go.

Yeah. That would be fun. anyway, yeah, you gotta get them in the soccer. You have them on you gotta be you could be the coach, the whole thing.

Aaron (1:13:32)
I

know we did ⁓ we did co ed YMCA soccer last year and it was just like run around and tackle your friends. But ⁓ yeah, I would like I would like them to I'm not gonna be in North Texas and maybe across the whole United States, but in North Texas there's this huge culture of crazy sports parents, ⁓ especially as it relates to to Texas football and

Ian Landsman (1:13:36)
Okay.

Right.

Mm. ⁓ that's everywhere. Yeah.

Aaron (1:13:57)
specifically North Texas soccer. We're a huge soccer region down here. and I'm I have no I have no interest in being a crazy sports parent, but I do think like growing up sports were a huge part of my life. And I think the the team aspect and the like listen to authority, your coach, you know, and work hard and suffer and lose and win. I think all of that is fantastic.

Ian Landsman (1:14:00)
Mm.

that's the worst. Yeah.

No.

Right.

Yeah.

Aaron (1:14:25)
So I hope

I hope that they get into some kind of sport. ⁓ even if it's not team, tennis or golf would be would be awesome. Just the whole like, you're gonna try really hard and lose. Like that is such a valuable life lesson. ⁓ so I will I will encourage them to try sports, but I'm not gonna be you have to play sports all year round kind of dad.

Ian Landsman (1:14:35)
Right. Yeah.

Yeah, right. You're

gonna live. We gotta you gotta make the national team. I didn't make son and we're gonna get you there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that stuff. No, one of the last games my son played on the his main team he was on, but and then he left after this was like I mean, it's like the season final game, some I don't know, whatever it was. And like the all the parents are like literally cursing at the refs. And I was like, This is like a bunch of eleven year olds or whatever. It's like, why are we yelling?

Aaron (1:14:50)
No, yeah, exactly. No way.

Yeah.

Ian Landsman (1:15:10)
Cur like literally cursing at the refs and getting thrown out like all this. It's like this is the stupidest shit ever. Like, none of your kids are gonna be anything in soccer. They're not gonna do anything. We don't need to curse at the like 24-year-old ref. Like, let's just be adults here. It's crazy. But anyway. All right. Well, that's good. I like this fishing idea for you. I'm glad I don't have to do the fishing, but that's good for you. Yep. And yeah. So thanks everybody. I think we'll wrap it there.

Aaron (1:15:15)
Not great. Yeah, it's not great. No.

Yeah.

Yes, lucky you. Yeah, thanks.

Ian Landsman (1:15:39)
check us out, mostly technical.com for the humongous bat catalog. You it's almost three years. I just realized this the other day. Crazy. I was like, how many? I said, no, it's gotta be two years. It's three years. This is crazy. Anyway. All right. So check it out, mostly technical.com. Email us at mostly technical podcast at gmail.com. Forgot to mention that one. Email us, say hi. And we will see you next week and token town later this week. Talk to you later.

Aaron (1:15:44)
Crazy. Crazy.

Insane.

See ya.