Episode 66 – I Was a Federico, Almost

Scott: Friends with Brews.

Scott: That’s perfect, that’s a perfect countdown.

Ronnie: Good morning.

Scott: Wait, I gotta say something.

Scott: Hi, Peter.

Scott: Oh, wait, you’re not Peter.

Ronnie: People tell me I look like Peter Griffin, though.

Scott: I don’t know who that is.

Ronnie: He’s the dad off of a, I don’t know, like American dad or something.

Ronnie: I don’t, I never watched it, but.

Scott: Right now, you look like it must be allergy season there.

Scott: Your eyes look really, I don’t know what’s going on with your eyes, but you look either super tired or super, yeah, that’s better.

Scott: Now your eyes are actually open.

Scott: Now I know why you can’t see anything, Ronnie.

Scott: You never actually opened your eyes.

Ronnie: Yeah, I’ve never opened them.

Ronnie: It’s weird.

Scott: Yeah, get out of bed and open your eyes in the morning.

Ronnie: It is allergy season.

Ronnie: I’m also a little tired.

Ronnie: So it’s a little bit of both.

Scott: All right, well, your name is Rooney Lights.

Scott: Is that right?

Ronnie: Yep, yep, that’s correct.

Ronnie: 100%.

Scott: Rooney Lights, yeah.

Scott: Ronnie Lutes.

Scott: You’re not Peter, you’re Ronnie.

Scott: You and I, I don’t know if any, well, first of all, I don’t know if there’s any listeners to this podcast, but if there are, I don’t know if they know.

Scott: You and I used to podcast together several times.

Ronnie: Right, well, yeah.

Ronnie: Several different shows and lots of different times.

Scott: I don’t remember all the shows.

Scott: First, there was Pocket Size Podcast.

Ronnie: Yeah, that was funny because I took over after Peter, and I’m not taking over after Peter on this one, but he happens to be on this show as well.

Scott: And then what?

Ronnie: We did Habitashary.

Ronnie: We did a bubble sort type of show together, right?

Scott: Did we?

Scott: That’s what I was trying to, I don’t know.

Ronnie: Rabbit hole.

Scott: Right, right.

Scott: That was with Vic and Clay also, yeah.

Ronnie: Yeah, and I don’t even know if you and I were on there together so much.

Ronnie: I don’t know, but we’ve done at least two shows together and then randomly on shows together.

Scott: Yep, yeah.

Scott: Well, enough said about the bubble sort empire.

Ronnie: I thought you were gonna start this one with Pocket Size Podcast song.

Scott: No, no, no.

Scott: I’ve got it somewhere, but no, I’m not gonna do that.

Scott: The two people out there who still want and remember that song can send me money for it, and I’ll send it to them.

Ronnie: I saw a picture you sent the other day had a Pocket Size Podcast sticker on it.

Ronnie: Or in the field of view.

Scott: Yeah, I’ve got stickers.

Scott: All right, so let’s talk about our drinks immediately.

Scott: And the reason why is because I’ve got a lot of questions about you and your tannings or whatever, tannins.

Ronnie: Well, I don’t have answers for that, but I do have some hibiscus tea.

Scott: Okay, but I need a brand and all that.

Scott: You know how the show works.

Ronnie: It’s called Traditional Medicinal, so it’s some kind of little, I don’t know.

Ronnie: Traditional Medicinal’s organic hibiscus tart and fruity.

Ronnie: And it promotes heart health, by the way.

Scott: Can you hold that wrapper up again?

Scott: All right, so that is the brand is Traditional Medicinals.

Ronnie: Yep, out of Sebastopol, California.

Scott: I’ll admit that’s not a brand I would think of when I thought, huh, what can I have for a pleasurable drink?

Scott: I wouldn’t go, I don’t know, but it’s got to have Medicinals in the name.

Ronnie: Well, I’m not so sure it’s pleasurable either.

Ronnie: So there is that.

Scott: Yeah, I don’t know.

Scott: All right, I’m having, I don’t know about this brand, it’s called J Basket, never heard of it.

Ronnie: Yeah, Bonsha.

Scott: But it’s Bonsha Green Tea, and it’s loose leaf, and I brewed it in my little OXO infuser, Doohickey Mabopper, which works pretty well.

Scott: And Bonsha is a green tea.

Scott: It’s like the second round of Sencha, which is a really standard green tea in Japan.

Scott: I don’t know, I don’t think it’s the, like it’s not the top grade for sure.

Scott: It’s harvested from the same trees as Sencha, but it’s picked later, and so it’s cheaper tea.

Scott: But it’s good, I like it.

Ronnie: It doesn’t say medicinals in the name of it, so that’s a bonus.

Scott: It does not say medicinals, that’s right.

Scott: It doesn’t even pretend to say medicinals.

Ronnie: It’s supposed to help with heart health.

Ronnie: My wife actually got it because she has some high blood pressure sometimes, and hibiscus tea is one of the things you can drink to lower your blood pressure.

Scott: Has she thought about living in a separate house from you?

Scott: That might lower the blood pressure.

Scott: I don’t know, I’m just saying.

Ronnie: I’m assuming that’s what makes the blood pressure high.

Ronnie: However, I was gone like most of the time last year, and then her blood pressure was still high, so we tried it.

Scott: You guys are actually doing it right.

Scott: I mean, I have read studies that show that marriage is much worse for women than it is for men.

Scott: Like marriage benefits men.

Scott: Women usually just get more stress and work out of the deal.

Ronnie: Well, that makes sense, right?

Scott: Yeah, I guess.

Ronnie: Because they have to live with us.

Scott: Well, here’s the thing, and I’m guilty of this a lot too, and I have been thinking a lot about this lately.

Scott: First of all, it took me so long to grow up and start understanding this fact, but even now, my wife still does way more than I do, and even me trying to help out and share the load, she still does way more than I do.

Scott: And it’s like, when I think about when I was younger and how much I just took for granted that, I don’t know, man, it was like, I guess that’s because that’s how things were when we were kids and so forth, and we didn’t really question it, but it’s crazy how much in our society, even today, we kind of expect that women get the burden of most of the child, a lot of the childcare responsibilities, a lot of this and that, and they have to work too.

Scott: And it’s just like, it’s just weird, man.

Scott: It’s like, the degree to which we take it for normal is something that we really need to examine ourselves on, I think.

Scott: It’s not right.

Ronnie: No, it’s not.

Ronnie: We were actually having this conversation the other night.

Ronnie: It was interesting because when we sat down to a table, we just kind of sit down anywhere, wherever we sit.

Ronnie: And we were having that discussion, you know, like our parents, and not so much my parents, actually, but her parents, and then just a lot of people.

Ronnie: You know, the man always sits at the certain spot at the table, the head of the table or whatever.

Ronnie: I’ve never even thought about it because it’s just not something we do.

Ronnie: And as a kid growing up, we didn’t really sit at tables.

Ronnie: We just kind of sat wherever, like in the living room.

Ronnie: So we didn’t have a spot to sit, but a lot of families do that.

Ronnie: And it’s just, it’s so weird to me that that would be the thing that you would have to do, you know?

Scott: Yeah, yeah, right.

Scott: And you’d have to sit there and eat silently unless your parents asked you about a specific topic.

Ronnie: Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of crazy to me.

Ronnie: Luckily, a lot of that stuff’s going away nowadays.

Scott: It is.

Scott: So you didn’t have table, you were out in the yard waiting for Vic to throw food out there at you, I guess.

Scott: I don’t know.

Ronnie: I do remember my grandmother, that’s how she got rid of all her food.

Ronnie: She’d throw it out in the backyard.

Ronnie: They’re, yeah, because they had a-

Scott: Vic is your grandmother?

Ronnie: Yeah, Vic is my grandmother, that’s correct.

Ronnie: They had a hunting dog, so that’s what they would do, just throw the food out there and let the hunting dogs eat it.

Ronnie: Bird dogs.

Ronnie: That’s what happens when you grow up, where I grew up at.

Scott: What happens when she threw a spinach salad out, though?

Scott: I don’t-

Ronnie: Trust me, we never had spinach salad.

Scott: Only dog approved food was on the menu.

Ronnie: I don’t believe that I ever saw a salad till I was in my late 20s, and I had moved away from where I grew up at.

Scott: You’re like, what the hell is this?

Ronnie: True story, man.

Scott: Why are people putting their lawn on my plate?

Scott: All right.

Ronnie: I didn’t know there were vegetables other than potatoes until I met my wife, and then we kind of, now I like vegetables, but not so much back then.

Scott: Now you know about food.

Scott: Now you know about food.

Ronnie: Right.

Scott: That’s actually an interesting topic is how people either, because my wife and I were talking about this yesterday, is how some people are more adventurous with food, even if they came from the same background as some other people who are not adventurous at all with food, and it’s really intriguing to me.

Scott: She came up from a really small town in Oregon, and one of her friends is still not super adventurous with food, but my wife is.

Scott: Now, granted, my wife’s mom is Korean, and she used to cook all kinds of Korean stuff, even though my wife refused to eat it when she was little.

Scott: Now she loves it, of course, but.

Scott: And it’s intriguing to me how many people are raised with such a standard, here’s what we eat, and this is how we do it type of thing.

Scott: And it’s like, I get it, because that’s all you know, but at the same time, oh, my God, life’s too short not to…

Scott: Right?

Ronnie: Yeah, that’s how I grew up.

Ronnie: Like, I think my mom ate maybe like seven or eight different kinds of things.

Ronnie: I mean, I could name all of them kind of on one or two hands, and she didn’t eat anything out of the ordinary.

Ronnie: And when I went to college for the first time, I went to New Orleans, and I started, you know, trying…

Ronnie: I didn’t eat anything either, but I was like, well, I’m in New Orleans, and this family, you know, this Cajun family brought me over, and they made all this etouffee and jambalaya and gumbo.

Ronnie: I got to try it.

Ronnie: And then I just started eating everything.

Ronnie: Like, that was my gateway drug into just eating every single thing I could get my hands on, as opposed, you know, when it comes to foods of different cultures and such, that I just, I find it amazing.

Ronnie: That’s one of the reasons I love Vegas, because I can go anywhere like that and just get all these different things.

Ronnie: But yeah, if I would have stayed in Missouri, where I grew up at, I would have just probably eaten the same 10 things for the rest of my life.

Scott: I think my granddad had the same lunch every day.

Scott: It was a plain burger on a plain bun with applesauce, and that was it.

Scott: And there are no way could there ever be any spices or any type of flavor induced, no.

Ronnie: It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?

Ronnie: My dad had like a bologna and cheese sandwich and a Nutty Buddy bar every day.

Ronnie: That was his lunch.

Scott: He could have at least had applesauce.

Ronnie: Well, he liked the Nutty Buddy bars, which apparently only became Nutty Buddy bars in 2016, by the way.

Ronnie: They were Nutty Bars when we were-

Scott: So what was your dad actually eating?

Ronnie: So he ate Nutty Bars, apparently.

Ronnie: But although it’s one of those Mandela effect things, I very vividly remember them as Nutty Buddy, even when I was a kid.

Ronnie: But the name actually didn’t change until 2016, when they became Nutty Buddies.

Ronnie: Prior to that, the actual package just said Nutty Bar, which I don’t believe.

Ronnie: So I think we’re gonna-

Ronnie: Yeah, I don’t believe that at all.

Ronnie: They’ve always been Nutty Buddy.

Ronnie: He had one every single day for the entire 70s and the entire 80s that I remember because he loved them.

Scott: Either you are a time traveler or-

Scott: I think we’ve jumped multiple timelines already anyway.

Scott: I think there’s more than one Mandela Effect.

Ronnie: Yeah, and I know you haven’t watched Constellation on Apple TV, and I’m not gonna spoil it, but-

Scott: I have a huge list already, and I heard enough, there were enough people who kind of pooh-poohed it.

Scott: Were they wrong?

Ronnie: No, no, no, no, they’re not wrong necessarily, but as I was watching it, I was like, this kind of explains the Mandela Effect pretty interestingly.

Ronnie: So there’s something in it-

Ronnie: Oh, right.

Scott: I actually, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott: You know what?

Scott: I think I will watch it anyway, because I feel I like the act tour, and I like the premise, so maybe I can get past whatever imperfections it may have.

Ronnie: Yeah, because that’s the guy that does, I mean, isn’t Mike part of this podcast?

Ronnie: Isn’t it Ermingard or whatever?

Ronnie: It says that?

Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

Ronnie: He’s on the show.

Ronnie: Anyway, I thought the show was okay.

Ronnie: And the great thing about shows today, they’re only like what, seven, eight episodes.

Ronnie: So if you don’t like it, it’s not like you’re sinking a tone of time at all.

Scott: True, yeah.

Scott: And I’m actually doing that with Three Body Problem right now.

Scott: It’s eight episodes.

Scott: And the fourth one was a major disappointment to me, but the fifth one’s getting a little better again.

Scott: It’s got some really cool stuff in it.

Scott: The third one was great.

Scott: But I’m not gonna spoil that one for you, because I think you should watch it.

Scott: I know you don’t have Netflix, but Ronnie, let’s face it, you’re making enough money to…

Scott: You own a palace in Vegas.

Scott: You’ve got white tigers wandering your yard looking for intruders.

Scott: I think it’s time for you to pay for Netflix for a month and watch Three Body Problem.

Scott: All right, so let’s talk about the tea, though, because what is it about the tea?

Scott: Explain the tannins thing, because the only thing I know about it is they…

Scott: The only bad thing, the only negative thing that I know personally is they can interfere with the absorption of iron.

Ronnie: You probably know more about it than I do.

Scott: But they also help get rid of free radicals.

Scott: So they’re also good for you.

Ronnie: I don’t know nothing about free radicals or iron.

Ronnie: I just know that I guess we should probably tell people what we’re even talking about this for, because it doesn’t make much sense unless we tell them.

Ronnie: So I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and we don’t typically drink tea or coffee.

Ronnie: There’s a book called The Word of Wisdom that Joseph Smith wrote.

Ronnie: Anyway, in that book, it said, stay away from hot drinks is kind of what it talks about.

Ronnie: Hot drinks is what it says.

Ronnie: I mean, they didn’t really have any, they didn’t really have like soda back then, so cold drinks weren’t kind of a normal thing.

Ronnie: But coffee and tea were.

Ronnie: And tannins is one of the things that are in coffee and tea, and they’re the things that you tan hides with.

Ronnie: So like the stuff that you put on leather, right, to tan it, to make it, I don’t know the ins and outs of it.

Ronnie: I just know that fortunately for me, I don’t like coffee or tea to begin with, and I didn’t drink them prior to, I was a convert in like 2011.

Ronnie: So I didn’t drink them prior to my conversion, so it wasn’t something that I struggled with after my conversion.

Ronnie: There are a lot of people that probably would because they drink coffee every day, but I would try to drink coffee and it just disgusts me.

Ronnie: So it was never an issue for me.

Ronnie: So I never even really looked into it because it wasn’t like I was trying to get away from anything anyway.

Scott: Right, right, right.

Scott: Which is the best way to be.

Scott: But I will say when it comes to the coffee, you’ve just been drinking the bad, you’ve just been drinking the stuff that Vic drinks, that Folger stuff.

Scott: I don’t understand why he does it.

Scott: At that point, it’s better just to kick the addiction and not have it.

Ronnie: Right, I did drink, and I know this is not good coffee either, but like when I was a manager, when I first started becoming a manager, everybody drank coffee, right?

Ronnie: So I would drink just some of the Rock Good stuff.

Scott: But some people have bought me-

Scott: Managerial coffee.

Ronnie: Yeah, the Folgers that just brew in the coffee pot.

Ronnie: But then I did have some people buy some Starbucks coffee.

Ronnie: They had a bunch of stuff in it.

Ronnie: And I’ll be honest, it didn’t taste horrible, right?

Ronnie: Like it doesn’t taste like coffee.

Scott: It doesn’t taste like coffee, right?

Scott: It’s just a sugar drink at that point.

Ronnie: Right, and it tasted okay, but it wasn’t something that I was willing to pay as much money as they wanted for it.

Ronnie: So yeah, I’ve never had a good cup of coffee.

Ronnie: But since I don’t like coffee, and now since I’m not supposed to drink it, it doesn’t matter, I’m not going to.

Ronnie: I did have a bunch of tea when I was a kid, the sweet tea that they have in the South.

Scott: Oh yeah, for sure, yeah.

Scott: You had to.

Ronnie: Which is not like any other kind of tea.

Ronnie: I guess that’s black tea, right?

Ronnie: That’s what that is?

Scott: It’s, yeah.

Scott: If you didn’t have that, you wouldn’t actually be a Southerner, so.

Ronnie: And my grandmother used to make some that it was almost like molasses had poured out so thick because it was so sweet.

Ronnie: But I quit drinking that many, many years ago, and no one made it as sweet as her.

Ronnie: So it wasn’t like the stuff that you got, like the sweet tea that you would get at, say, Popeyes or whatever.

Ronnie: That’s not sweet tea compared to what I was used to.

Ronnie: So it wasn’t something I ever drank.

Scott: Yeah, I’ve had sweet tea before, but I got to be honest.

Scott: I’m not a sugar and tea person, and sweet tea can be pretty overwhelming.

Ronnie: It is, yeah.

Ronnie: Especially if you get it made there, like someone that makes it, that’s their normal style.

Ronnie: I don’t think the sweet tea that you get out, like a lot of, you can get sweet tea in places, that’s not even the right kind.

Ronnie: I don’t even know what they’re doing with that, but whatever.

Scott: No, but I mean, they don’t even make pop with real sugar anymore, except in Mexico.

Scott: Right.

Scott: So like, it’s a revelation to have Mexican soda pop.

Scott: It really is.

Scott: It’s like, this is how we used to be, what the heck?

Ronnie: Yeah, and we were probably skinnier back when we used to have that kind of soda.

Ronnie: I don’t know what happened.

Ronnie: The stuff in the diet is not good for you.

Ronnie: That’s for sure.

Scott: No, anyway, everybody go drink Waritos or something.

Scott: Or go to Mexico to get your Coca-Cola.

Scott: But just on that topic, and I’m not picking on you at all, but I was raised Baptist.

Ronnie: Me too.

Scott: And the dietary things always intrigued me.

Scott: Like the body is a temple and all that, right?

Scott: But it always intrigued me because you couldn’t drink alcohol, you couldn’t have wine, you couldn’t do the smoke, you couldn’t, you know, good rules.

Scott: Those are not good for you.

Scott: But then people would eat whatever and they generally wouldn’t take care of their bodies.

Scott: And it’s like, I don’t understand the distinction there.

Scott: Like is the body a temple or is the body not a temple?

Scott: I understand that certain things will cause you more damage more rapidly over time if you consume a lot of them.

Scott: Like if you drink alcohol, if you drink several beers a day, or you drink a lot of whiskey every day or whatever, you’re gonna have problems.

Scott: There’s no doubt about it.

Scott: But the same could be said for a lot of different foods.

Scott: Like we all, everybody I grew up with was, you know, ravenous red meat eaters, and I still eat red meat, but it’s not good for you.

Scott: Like I don’t eat a lot of red meat anymore.

Scott: It’s mostly chicken and fish, but red meat is great and all, but it’s terrible for you.

Scott: So when does the body become a temple and when doesn’t?

Scott: That was the thing about the whole taking care of your body based on what you put in it that always bugged me was, are we gonna do this or are we not gonna do this?

Ronnie: Well, the answer is we’re not gonna do it because we only wanna do, we’re only gonna follow the rules that we enjoy.

Scott: Right, exactly.

Ronnie: Eating correctly is a rule that we do not enjoy, so we’re not gonna follow that rule.

Scott: Yeah, I can’t.

Scott: And I agree with that.

Scott: That’s my philosophy, for sure.

Ronnie: It’s the same thing with, you know, Jesus and AK-47s, right?

Ronnie: Like he would love those or something, you know?

Ronnie: Same concept.

Ronnie: We enjoy AR-15s or AK-57s, so Jesus would have and everything’s great.

Ronnie: Yeah, which is wrong.

Scott: That’s the thing about Christianity where people try to, Christians who aren’t pacifists, AKA they believe in war, they believe there are just wars, they believe it’s okay to go to war.

Scott: I’m 100% on board with you if you’re just honest and say, look, I’m a human being, we’re gonna defend ourselves, we’re gonna go to war, whatever.

Scott: But don’t bring Jesus into it.

Scott: Don’t say, I think, yeah, but what about turning the other cheek?

Scott: Yeah, but he didn’t mean that for this and that circumstance.

Scott: No, he never said that.

Scott: There’s never a time where Jesus ever said, yeah, but in this circumstance, you need to mow down your opponents and napalm them.

Ronnie: Napalm them.

Ronnie: You went next level there, didn’t you?

Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott: I mean, standing around with photos of a Bible and a flag and an AK-47, or I guess it wouldn’t be, it would be an AR-15.

Ronnie: AR-15, yeah.

Ronnie: Well, I don’t know, they love Russia now, so maybe it would be an AK-47.

Scott: That is true, yeah.

Scott: They probably have some that they’ve been given.

Ronnie: Well, if you did have any listeners, they’re not going to listen past this point, so there we go.

Scott: No, we’re not here to bash religion, but I’m just saying the state of American Christianity right now is confusing to me.

Scott: Let’s just put it that way.

Ronnie: It’s very confusing.

Scott: Yeah.

Scott: Very confusing.

Scott: All right, let’s move on.

Scott: Let’s talk about one of the things that you and I have had, speaking of religion, is we’ve had our own mini Mac revival, and I don’t mean Mac mini revival.

Scott: I mean, we’ve had our own mini Mac revival.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: I think I, I don’t remember if I started doing this podcast when I was still using the iPad Pro a lot.

Scott: I think so, but I don’t remember.

Scott: But for a long time, my mobile device, I had an iMac and then my mobile computing device was an iPad Pro.

Scott: Started off as an iPad Air, then I went to one iPad Pro, then I went to another iPad Pro, and my daughter kept benefiting from the hand-me-downs.

Scott: And man, I used shortcut.

Scott: I mean, I went into, I was a Federico almost, to the extent that I would come up with automations, ways of doing things, blah, blah, blah and all this.

Scott: And once Apple Silicon came out, and I finally got my hands on an M1 Pro Mac Book Pro, I don’t know what I was doing.

Scott: I want to punch myself in the face for all that time I wasted.

Ronnie: Well, you say that, but Intel Mac Books weren’t as good.

Ronnie: So there were, now what you were doing-

Scott: That’s true, I hate, I used to hate laptops.

Ronnie: Yeah, because just turning one on would take forever and it sucked.

Ronnie: And now the M1 really changed all that.

Ronnie: So you can say that, but if you went back in time and you had a choice between a good iPad and a Intel MacBook, you would probably, you might still choose the iPad.

Scott: It’s very possible because sitting with an iPad Pro in your lap for several hours is way more comfortable and enjoyable than sitting with a traditional laptop that’s blowing and sucking and wheezing and coughing and generating heat and burning private body parts.

Ronnie: Right, and it takes forever to come on and it beach balls all the time.

Ronnie: I mean, it was a different experience.

Ronnie: So I was also a, well, weirdly, back when we did podcast, I hated iPads.

Scott: Right, so did I.

Ronnie: We had a couple episodes about how I thought they were dumb, and they were, honestly.

Scott: I was back and forth because sometimes I was in agreement with you, but then I remember, what was that guy’s name?

Scott: I want to say Jared, but I don’t think it was Jared.

Scott: He made a couple apps.

Scott: Yeah, it was Jared.

Ronnie: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott: He made that podcast player called Soads.

Ronnie: Yes.

Scott: And Jared was a really nice guy, but he was also like me in the sense that he was not built to interface with humanity because he could not handle any, he couldn’t handle any interaction without losing it.

Ronnie: Are you the only podcaster, are you one of the few podcasters that doesn’t like to talk to other humans?

Scott: Yeah.

Scott: And so when he, when people would critique his app, he would just get angry and I don’t blame him.

Scott: I understand the feeling, but at the same time, it’s like you can’t make an app and put it out there and then you just can’t do it if that’s how you’re going to be, right?

Scott: It just doesn’t work.

Ronnie: Right.

Scott: Right.

Scott: But I remember him coming on the podcast and saying, I don’t understand the iPad.

Scott: And at the time I was like, I kind of laughed because I thought, I don’t get it.

Scott: None of these developers understand iPads.

Scott: And it was true for a long time that if you were a Mac, if you were iOS developer, you’re sitting at your Mac all day or you’re going out with your iPhone.

Scott: And none of those guys knew what to do with the iPad.

Scott: None of them knew what to do with the iPad.

Scott: That’s why there were no iPad apps.

Scott: And that drove me insane.

Scott: That did drive me insane.

Scott: The exceptions are like your Boram Anders, guys like that who develop power user apps for the iPad Pro.

Ronnie: And back then, it was just basically a big iPhone.

Ronnie: But when they started getting multitasking, and I thought, well, this is the device that I could use every day, because I don’t do a ton of huge compute that requires a ton of huge computing power.

Ronnie: So I did use it for years, and I do have a 12.9 inch, I think it’s an M1 iPad Pro that I still have.

Ronnie: Actually, I need to sell it.

Ronnie: But anyway, that’s beside the point.

Ronnie: And I thought, oh, I can do everything I want to do.

Ronnie: But like you, well, I don’t know if you convinced me, but certainly talking to you all the time, once you went away from the iPad and you started talking about MacBooks all the time, I decided that, yeah, you know what?

Ronnie: I kind of want to do this myself.

Ronnie: And oh boy, am I glad I did.

Scott: Yeah, the problem is not the computing power.

Scott: The problem is in the flexibility, the memory management, so that you can’t background anything.

Scott: Like first of all, doing an FTP was almost impossible.

Scott: There are very few apps that could actually do FTP.

Scott: And then if you started an FTP and you went away from that app, it was gonna die in the background.

Scott: Your file is never gonna get transferred.

Scott: And just all kinds of stuff like that.

Scott: And then it made web development impossible because like modern web development environments have language support.

Scott: They have autocomplete, they have suggestions, they have plugins, they have all kinds of stuff that makes that type of thing possible.

Scott: You can’t get that on an iPad.

Scott: You can get a text editor that has some autocomplete only support for certain languages, but you better hope that whatever you wanna use is 20 years old and it’s built into that application.

Ronnie: And there’s no ports on them.

Ronnie: I mean, there’s a lot of issues with iPads that they do exactly what they are meant to do, I suppose.

Scott: I don’t know that they do.

Scott: I’m convinced that Apple doesn’t actually know what the iPad Pro should be or is, or what they want it to be.

Scott: I don’t think they honestly know anymore.

Scott: I think now that they have a Mac that’s as good as it is, I don’t think Apple really knows.

Scott: And I’m 100% convinced that they don’t actually care that much as long as it keeps selling.

Scott: Cause they just keep making better and more expensive hardware, and they keep shipping an OS that is just about there for a lot of things.

Scott: Like if you’re a writer or something, it’s probably perfect.

Scott: But if you have to go beyond that like I said, web development stuff becomes very difficult, if not impossible to do it comfortably or easily or do a lot of the stuff that you want to do.

Scott: Podcasting, very difficult.

Ronnie: If not impossible.

Scott: Right.

Scott: Stuff like that.

Ronnie: Unless you’re doing a one person show.

Scott: Right.

Scott: If you’re doing a one person show, it’s perfect.

Ronnie: Yeah.

Ronnie: I quickly outgrew it, and I decided that I needed to go to a Mac book as well.

Ronnie: Followed your example.

Ronnie: You know, I love the Mac book.

Scott: I love the Mac.

Scott: Well, I want to say I love the Mac in general, because I know the topic that you put in there was MacBook Pro, but I think Mac overall deserves a shout out and a conversation, because the thing that I like about the Mac so much, I like the hardware.

Scott: Like you won’t get a better display than our MacBook Pro, et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah, blah.

Scott: But the OS is really what makes it for me.

Scott: The OS and the fact that there are people who love it enough to make the kind of software that we like to use.

Scott: You can’t get that on Windows.

Scott: You can’t get that anywhere else.

Ronnie: That’s for sure.

Ronnie: I went down a rabbit hole of putting Windows.

Ronnie: Well, actually, yesterday, I put Windows on this MacBook, this here 14-inch MacBook Pro that I got.

Ronnie: And man, yeah.

Scott: I’m not a Windows hater.

Scott: I’m not a Windows hater because I use it every day for work.

Scott: But it’s not the thing that I will choose to use on my own given a choice.

Ronnie: I wouldn’t say I hate it because I don’t have to use it.

Ronnie: Luckily, I haven’t had to use Windows in many years.

Ronnie: My job gave me a MacBook Air that I’ve been using.

Ronnie: And so I haven’t had to use Windows in years other than yesterday.

Ronnie: I decided to put it on this Mac just because, well, interestingly enough, I guess we’ll just, I guess I’ll just start with the…

Scott: No, no, no.

Scott: You’re wrong.

Scott: Apple understands games, Ronnie.

Ronnie: Yeah, yeah, they do.

Ronnie: I mean, they actually have some quite nice ones on the MacBook.

Ronnie: Now that they have the M1, and you can find some stuff.

Ronnie: But my problem is I like games that came out like 20 years ago, even longer than that, and you certainly can’t play any of those.

Scott: Well, I don’t know, some of the games that Apple keeps holding up as examples of, look, what you can do on the Mac, most of those aren’t exactly all that new either.

Ronnie: No, they’re usually five to ten years old.

Scott: Exactly.

Ronnie: Yeah, and they weren’t, I mean, they were great games back then, but yeah, they shouldn’t be held up now.

Ronnie: But I just, for some reason, I don’t know, I never really, so we’ll go back to, this actually starts with YouTube for me, because on the iPad, I never watched YouTube, because well, I’ve never signed into YouTube, because I don’t like Google, so I never really had a Google account.

Ronnie: So therefore, I couldn’t really kind of, I couldn’t really subscribe to anything, because I didn’t have a Google account to subscribe to anything.

Ronnie: And I didn’t like all the ads and stuff.

Ronnie: And you know, on the iPad, there are apps that get rid of ads, so that’s not necessarily a problem.

Ronnie: There’s a vinegar that does it.

Ronnie: But anyway, it just wasn’t, I don’t know.

Ronnie: On the Mac, though, I found this app called Friendly Streaming.

Ronnie: And that should be in the show notes, I suppose.

Ronnie: But Friendly Streaming is a Mac app that actually, it’s really like an app that you just, you go to it, and it has like a little, I don’t know, it’s not a hamburger, but it’s like a little thing that you click on, and it shows all the different streaming apps that you can have like Netflix, Macs, Acorn, Paramount.

Ronnie: You can add any one that you want to it because, you know, on the Mac, there’s not an app for all those things, right?

Ronnie: So, but it has YouTube, and it has the ability in the app to skip all the ads, and like you can declutter the homepage, you can hide comments, you can hide recommended videos, you can do all kinds of stuff, you can disable autoplay, so YouTube becomes something that is actually usable.

Ronnie: So I created like a burner Google account just so I could subscribe to things, which I had never really done before, but in my subscribing to things, YouTube does a good job of kind of surfacing up items that you would want to watch.

Ronnie: Amazingly enough, it does a good job at that, right?

Ronnie: Like that’s kind of what it does.

Ronnie: And I was watching maybe about a month ago, and this video came up for this game that I used to play.

Ronnie: It came out in 1997 called Emperor of the Fading Suns, which no one will ever have heard of.

Ronnie: It was a fun game, and it just had a patch in 2022.

Ronnie: So 25 years later, it has a patch.

Scott: Wait, they had to patch the suns?

Scott: The suns weren’t fading, right?

Ronnie: Yeah, all the suns were dead and they needed a patch.

Ronnie: But they went through and they fixed the game.

Ronnie: So back then when a game shipped, if it was buggy, it was just buggy.

Ronnie: There was nothing you could do about it, right?

Ronnie: So you couldn’t fix it.

Ronnie: So this game was amazing, but it had a ton of bugs that didn’t make it unplayable, but it certainly was problematic.

Ronnie: Anyway, one of the guys, the designers on the game, him and a group got together and patched the game 25 years later.

Ronnie: So now you can play a game more like what they wanted to ship in 1997, but couldn’t ship.

Ronnie: And it was available on gog.com, which is good old games.

Ronnie: I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but you can get on there and play a lot of…

Ronnie: It’s like Steam, but for older games.

Ronnie: And they had it on there for like $5.99.

Ronnie: And I bought it and I tried…

Ronnie: There’s a couple different things you can try.

Ronnie: Like there’s wine.

Ronnie: Well, wine is the emulator, right?

Ronnie: Which doesn’t wine stand for…

Ronnie: Wine is not an emulator?

Ronnie: Yes, that’s what wine stands for.

Ronnie: It’s a recursive acronym or however you say that.

Scott: Made in the true spirit of nerds everywhere.

Scott: I’ll just put it that way.

Ronnie: Right, so it’s an emulator that you can emulate Windows games on in theory.

Scott: Well, they’ve got the cyberpunk games on here.

Scott: These aren’t all super old games.

Ronnie: No, like…

Ronnie: Oh, in GOG?

Scott: Yeah, yeah.

Ronnie: Yeah, it’s actually got a lot more games on it now.

Ronnie: It started out as something to where you could get old games, but now they’re actually getting bigger ones on there as well.

Scott: Hey, you can buy the entire Yakuza series for only $111.98.

Scott: Get on that.

Ronnie: It’s got a whole thing just like Steam does where you start it, and it almost takes over your computer anyway.

Ronnie: I’m not a big fan of SteamR, GOG.

Ronnie: I’d rather just have software.

Ronnie: But that’s how you get them on your computer now, is kind of those two, or mostly Steam.

Ronnie: Anyway, I started watching these videos, and there was this guy, he played like…

Ronnie: I spent an inordinate amount of time watching this guy play Emperor of the Fading Suns, like probably like six hours overall.

Ronnie: He played 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there, explaining all the different things that came with the new patch.

Ronnie: So, I tried wine, which was the…

Ronnie: which didn’t work, and whiskey, which is supposed to be a version of wine that is easier.

Ronnie: And these are both free, and that’s why I tried them, because I’m not…

Ronnie: There’s one called Crossover, which costs 75 bucks.

Ronnie: I’m not about to pay for that.

Scott: No, don’t buy that.

Scott: Crossover, I think, is basically just wine with better support.

Scott: Actually, I think it’s got some improvements.

Scott: I think it does support some stuff that wine alone either can’t or won’t or is very kludgy to support.

Scott: But I think Crossover is pretty good.

Scott: But with Whiskey, I poked around in their Discord a little bit, and I just saw a lot of people, every game is hit or miss, every game is hit or miss.

Scott: It sounded like more of a pain than it was worth, honestly.

Ronnie: It was a pain for me, and I didn’t want to play for like…

Ronnie: Because there’s parallels, right, that cost, I don’t know, $100 a year or whatever to put Windows on your Mac, and I wasn’t about to pay for that.

Ronnie: Because I just wanted to play a stupid game, and I’ll probably play it for like 25 minutes, and then that’ll be it, right?

Ronnie: So I didn’t want to have to deal with that.

Ronnie: So yesterday, I started messing with VMware, which is a free service, right?

Ronnie: You can just…

Ronnie: It is.

Ronnie: It’s not free for if you’re a business, but if you’re personal, you can get a free version of it.

Scott: I did not know that.

Ronnie: Yeah, so I got the free version, and I downloaded it and put it on my computer yesterday.

Ronnie: When you got 64GB of RAM, you can really kind of tear through these things.

Ronnie: So it really is easy to make a nice VM of Windows, and you can have Windows 11 while you’re doing other stuff, which is kind of nice.

Scott: How big of a hard drive do you have?

Ronnie: 2TB.

Scott: Oh, okay.

Scott: And you’re just using the internal only?

Ronnie: Yeah, yeah.

Scott: That’s cool.

Ronnie: It only…

Ronnie: I think it creates one with like 64GB, but then you can kind of create a…

Ronnie: In the VM, you can kind of create a bigger one.

Ronnie: So I created a bigger one, although I didn’t need it because those games are small.

Ronnie: The games like Railroad Tycoon 3 was another game I wanted to play.

Ronnie: Anyway, and actually, The Emperor of the Fading Suns is coming to Steam as well.

Ronnie: So if you’re into Steam, it’s actually going to be there.

Ronnie: I think tomorrow is when it comes out on Steam.

Ronnie: But it works well.

Ronnie: I couldn’t believe it like how fast Windows actually runs inside a virtual machine on your Mac while your Mac is also running and you can do other stuff.

Scott: Yeah, you know, we use Windows virtualization at work in order to…

Scott: Because we have…

Scott: One of the things that I help do is install servers in the semiconductor test tools.

Scott: And like when a new server model comes out, we have to qualify it with Windows.

Scott: And now we’re moving from Server 2016 to Server 2022.

Scott: And the reason we use server on everything instead of just regular Windows is just number of processes, number of connected users, all that kind of stuff.

Scott: But we use virtualization to build the images in order to test them and then install them from there and then create our baseline images from VMs.

Scott: And it’s actually pretty amazing.

Scott: The state of virtualization right now is pretty freaking amazing.

Scott: It really is outstanding.

Scott: You can’t tell you’re in a VM almost any of the time.

Ronnie: I really couldn’t.

Ronnie: It amazed me.

Ronnie: Like back, I don’t know, probably like five to 10 years ago, I tried to kind of do the same thing on an iMac that I had.

Ronnie: And it was such a pain.

Ronnie: And it really, I’m not a software expert.

Ronnie: So to me, it needs to be drop dead simple.

Ronnie: And honestly, VMware, which is what I used back then, I believe, too.

Scott: Both when Apple went to Intel, both Parallels and VMware were the two that immediately became available.

Ronnie: Yeah, and you could use Boot Camp on Intel machines, but you can’t use Boot Camp on…

Scott: Yeah, but for virtualization, it was…

Scott: Right.

Scott: But they were kind of a pain, because like even audio, there was all kinds of stuff that you would have to futz around in both OSs to get working.

Ronnie: Yeah, and I haven’t had that issue at all.

Ronnie: Like literally everything worked right out of the box.

Ronnie: And I was surprised that it worked so well, but what I wasn’t surprised about is Windows was distilled death by a thousand cuts, man.

Ronnie: Everything is just, it’s better than it used to be, but like I said, I haven’t used it in a while.

Ronnie: So Windows 11, there’s ads everywhere, man.

Scott: Oh, it is weird.

Ronnie: Even in the search bar, that little search bar they have down at the bottom, like I moved over it, and there’s like a little picture there, and I thought, I didn’t know what it was, but the mouse came up and it was like, search for rice or something.

Ronnie: I was like, why would this be here?

Ronnie: I don’t know, man.

Scott: That’s the thing that blew my mind was I only used my Windows laptop for Monolith 3000 stuff, and some of those ads were all over the place in that too.

Scott: And I’m like, why aren’t they blocking this stuff?

Scott: Why are they allowing this?

Scott: Why would Microsoft ship something to a corporation with a corporate license that has this crap in it?

Scott: How can this even be?

Scott: It was mind boggling.

Scott: I mean, I can see foisting it off on your poor innocent customers who are buying it for their home computer or whatever, because what choice do they have?

Scott: But to stiff corporations like that too, that’s insane.

Ronnie: The whole setup process is, man, it’s wild.

Ronnie: Setting up a Mac is so easy, especially if you already had one.

Ronnie: You just put in your Apple ID, and it pretty much just sets itself up, right?

Ronnie: So the Windows PC has the same thing where you can set up your Outlook, which I actually do have an Outlook account, because I like to play Minecraft, and that’s how I bought the actual app.

Ronnie: But then there’s all these things about Office 365, and there’s tons of stuff that comes up like, do you want these kind of ads?

Ronnie: Do you want these kind of ads?

Ronnie: And you turn them all off, but somehow they still show up, or ads still show up.

Ronnie: Which is amazing to me in an OS, and I guess you’re not paying money for it, because I didn’t have to pay money for it, but it’s not activated.

Ronnie: I think you can continue to use Windows forever, not activated.

Ronnie: There’s just certain things you can’t do, like you can’t change your personalization, so you can’t change it to like dark mode or whatever if it’s not activated.

Ronnie: I don’t know.

Ronnie: Man, it is like a pay-to-play game.

Ronnie: Windows is like a pay-to-pray or a premium game, where all these things are behind paywalls, and it’s just absolutely crazy to me.

Scott: I wonder if the ad levels are worse for you when you’re not activated.

Scott: Like, I guess I’m trying to remember now.

Scott: I think the ad situation actually got better, which makes me think either our IT was able to dial some of that stuff back, or I don’t know.

Scott: Anyway, it’s kind of a mess, and I’ll tell you one thing.

Scott: So we log in to a domain, and we’ve got our domain password, but now we’re also using Azure and Microsoft 365, and those passwords have to sync.

Scott: And the first few times, and also our corporation is dumb enough to still believe in the password, expiring password policy, right, which is stupid and doesn’t work.

Scott: What you should do is just require people to have a good, strong password and then forget about expiring it.

Scott: But anyway, they still have that.

Scott: So when the first time that Azure was set up and it needed to sync with the domain password change, I didn’t realize that.

Scott: And it was taking time for it to happen, and stuff wasn’t working.

Scott: So I kept trying to change my password over and over until I finally got locked out.

Scott: Then I finally figured out what was going on, and now it doesn’t happen anymore.

Scott: But we still have incredibly vague and stupid rules that don’t tell you what the rules are.

Scott: They just tell you that you violated the rules and you can’t use that password because you violated this rule.

Scott: Now it’s that rule.

Scott: Why don’t you give me a list, a comprehensive list?

Scott: I know it would be huge.

Scott: I know the European Union has nothing on the amount of paperwork that it would require for you to show me your password rules, but just show me them anyway.

Scott: Anyway, it’s a mess.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: I like it overall.

Scott: I like the whole Azure integration.

Scott: It’s better than it.

Scott: I say Azure, Azure, Azure, whatever.

Scott: I’m becoming John Cooper.

Scott: Anyway, I like it overall, but there are some painful things about it.

Scott: If I was a small business, I would still choose Microsoft 365 over…

Scott: What other option are you going to do?

Scott: Are you going to use Google for stuff?

Scott: I don’t think so.

Ronnie: No, no.

Ronnie: I think that’s…

Ronnie: The key thing about Windows is it works on what I want it to do.

Ronnie: For the three or four games that I want to play, amazingly enough, a thing that came out in 1997, I loaded this virtual machine up, and I was literally playing it within two minutes and having no issues.

Ronnie: And it just…

Scott: Right, and you were probably getting decent frame rates, too.

Ronnie: Oh, yeah, no, it was running amazing.

Ronnie: I mean, all of Windows ran great on this MacBook.

Ronnie: I mean, you can assign how much RAM you wanted to use, which was funny because it comes up with like four gigabytes, which actually it was running fine on four, but I was like, let’s just see how fast it will run.

Ronnie: Not that it matters.

Scott: No, no, no, you should test Bill Gates’ old claim.

Scott: You should dial it down to 128 megabytes and see what happens.

Ronnie: It’s funny, speaking of YouTube and watching videos, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this guy.

Ronnie: His name is Action.

Ronnie: Well, his name isn’t Action Retro, but that’s the title of his channel.

Ronnie: And he does stuff like that.

Ronnie: He just goes back and puts on, right before this, I was watching him put on Red Hat Linux onto a 1990s beige Windows PC.

Ronnie: Windows 95.

Ronnie: And he just does all kinds of stuff like that.

Ronnie: Mostly he deals with Macs, but he also tries to put Linux on anything, and it’s fun.

Ronnie: I actually have an old iMac.

Ronnie: I put Linux on, and that was one of the things I was working on today.

Ronnie: A guy on Macedon told me that there’s this Linux distribution that you can play these Windows games on from Steam.

Ronnie: And I was trying to create a virtual machine of that, but I didn’t have enough time to get that done.

Ronnie: No, no, it’s called…

Scott: It’s called Stolen from Steam.

Ronnie: It’s called AV Linux, which is a Linux version that is used for audiovisual.

Ronnie: But there’s a…

Ronnie: Like all Linux distributions, it’s called AV Linux, and then it’s got like MV, and then the long number, 20.3.1 or whatever, in grand history of Linux, naming things like no one can understand.

Ronnie: So somehow they’ve taken…

Ronnie: Because there is SteamOS, right?

Ronnie: Like the thing that you use when you go buy the Steam, whatever the device is, the handheld Linux.

Ronnie: So I guess it takes that part of Linux, puts it into AV Linux, and then apparently you’re supposed to be able to play the games, and then you don’t have to have Windows.

Scott: And Steam is okay with this?

Ronnie: You know, I don’t know.

Ronnie: Is anyone okay with Linux?

Scott: Well, no, I mean…

Ronnie: No, I don’t know.

Ronnie: Maybe they’re not, but they probably haven’t stopped it because it’s just one of those things.

Ronnie: Probably not too many people use it.

Ronnie: Maybe it doesn’t even work.

Ronnie: I don’t know.

Ronnie: I mean, maybe the guy misunderstood what I was trying to do because he said, you should try this, and I was going to ask some questions, but I didn’t really care because I just thought it would be an interesting thing to do anyway.

Ronnie: I might do it on my iMac.

Scott: Maybe when you said, I want to play games on my computer, what he heard was, I want to play around with my computer for hours and years and weeks and months, trying to get a game to run.

Scott: That’s probably what he heard.

Ronnie: Right.

Ronnie: That I already have running on Windows, just fine.

Scott: Exactly.

Ronnie: But I have a 2011 iMac that I put different versions of Linux on every now and then just to play around with it.

Ronnie: Right now it has Pop OS, which is an amazing version of Linux.

Ronnie: Beautiful.

Ronnie: It actually can make it look as much as Mac OS as you can make any of those kind of operating systems look.

Ronnie: And it runs very well.

Ronnie: I like it.

Ronnie: I like Pop OS a lot.

Ronnie: But I might just put on this other one just to see how it works on there.

Scott: I think the thing that people don’t understand, though, the Linux on the desktop guys, they don’t understand that at the end of the day, you need to get something done with your computer or you want to get something done with your computer.

Scott: And the software is just not there.

Scott: Whereas the Mac has tons of great software, which I think is also another thing they don’t realize.

Ronnie: Yeah.

Scott: That’s not a comment on Pop OS at all.

Scott: I’ve seen it and it is beautiful.

Scott: I’m just saying in general, I don’t know.

Scott: It’s like the people, I think I made someone mad yesterday.

Scott: It’s like the people who compare Pixelmator to Affinity and Photoshop.

Scott: Because as much as I like Pixelmator, it’s a great app and God bless the people that work on it, but it is not an Affinity replacement.

Scott: It is not a Photoshop replacement.

Scott: It’s just not.

Scott: There’s a whole bunch of stuff it can’t do.

Scott: And so I don’t know why you would claim otherwise.

Scott: But there are a lot of people like that when it comes to…

Ronnie: Linux especially?

Scott: Yeah, Linux especially.

Scott: They just want to hand wave away all the actual problems.

Ronnie: I just do it because I think it’s fun.

Ronnie: I definitely don’t do it to get anything done, but I do enjoy it.

Ronnie: And it is nice because a 2011 iMac, you’re certainly not going to get any use out of with whatever newest version of Mac OS it would run, because I had that on there, and it was slow.

Ronnie: It was dog slow.

Ronnie: And you put a Linux on there, and it runs just like it was brand new.

Ronnie: I mean, as fast as Linux is going to run anyway.

Ronnie: Sometimes Linux has some weird stuff going on.

Scott: No, I’m all for dinking around.

Scott: In fact, when I started running my Linux server, it was just for fun, just to dink with it and play with it and figure out how to set up a Linux server.

Scott: And now I use it for a bunch of different websites.

Scott: But yeah, no, in fact, I remember, I don’t know if most people remember Slackware, and I don’t even remember what year it was.

Scott: It must have been 94, 95.

Scott: And I was installing Slackware on some PC I had, and it was terrible.

Scott: You had to know your monitor frequency.

Scott: You had to know all these things.

Scott: I mean, you had to detail, set up your hardware and configure everything, or nothing would work, and you could destroy things.

Scott: And it was a whole different ballgame back then.

Scott: It was a lot of fun, though.

Scott: That was when I had time to dink around with stuff, and the purpose wasn’t to actually get the computer to be used.

Scott: The purpose was the process.

Ronnie: Right.

Ronnie: And that’s what I like messing with right now.

Ronnie: It’s just the computer is the process.

Ronnie: I wouldn’t use any.

Ronnie: I don’t know what I’d use.

Ronnie: There’s an app called Cider on Linux, which is kind of cool.

Ronnie: It’s actually an Apple Music named Cider, which makes sense, right?

Ronnie: It’s an Apple Music player-like thing, and it’s actually better than Apple Music.

Ronnie: I don’t know why the Apple Music…

Ronnie: Well, now Apple Music is starting to get all these things where you can look at your history of what you’ve…

Ronnie: What was your most played songs and all these kind of things.

Ronnie: Cider has had that for years on Linux.

Ronnie: Why couldn’t Apple have made this?

Ronnie: Well, finally they are.

Ronnie: They’re stealing it from Cider, which is nice, but I guess, well, I don’t know, whatever.

Scott: There’s just some dumb things in Apple Music.

Scott: Maybe it’s not this way anymore, but I remember last time I was playing a playlist, and I wanted to remove a specific song from the playlist.

Scott: Not delete it from the library, but just remove it from the playlist.

Scott: I couldn’t do it from the playlist.

Scott: I’m like, this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.

Scott: Now I got to go look through my library.

Scott: I have to get out of this view.

Scott: I have to go find it in my library, and that doesn’t make sense.

Scott: There must be a way now, but I haven’t.

Scott: But anyway, that’s just the kind of thing where it’s like, Apple Music has a whole bunch of stuff that you feel like is so obvious, and yet Apple didn’t feel like it was so obvious.

Ronnie: Yeah, I think it has a lot of legacy type stuff that was around before streaming, and now it’s trying to be a streaming platform, and it’s not as good as it could be.

Scott: Well, I also think when they went from iTunes to Apple Music and they rewrote stuff, they just literally could not.

Scott: There was no way they were going to get all the features added back in for several years, and they just made the decision, well, we got to do it anyway.

Ronnie: And then they keep adding them in, so that’s good.

Scott: They do.

Scott: They do.

Ronnie: That’s how they’ve done all their software, right?

Ronnie: Like Logic and Final Code or whatever.

Scott: Yeah, and there’s tons of good third-party music apps on iOS, because the phone…

Scott: So here’s the thing.

Scott: As much as I love my Mac and I use my Mac a lot, when it comes to listening to audio, I generally just do it from the phone.

Scott: And I’ve got my AirPods in.

Scott: I never really…

Scott: Once in a while, I switch over to the Mac.

Scott: Sometimes if I’m just listening through external speakers, I’ll use music on the Mac, or sometimes I will.

Scott: But for podcasts, it’s 100% on the phone.

Scott: And anyway, the point is, I have tried a bunch of third-party iOS music apps, and some of them are pretty good, but they just don’t stick.

Scott: For whatever reason, I’m always using Apple Music when I play music.

Scott: And it’s gotten to the point where, do I love it?

Scott: I don’t love it, but it doesn’t make me mad enough anymore to…

Scott: That’s my review.

Scott: It doesn’t make me mad enough to quit using it.

Ronnie: It doesn’t make me mad enough.

Ronnie: Well, one of the issues with those other apps, like Marvis and…

Ronnie: Marvis is one, and I can’t remember the other ones.

Scott: There’s Longplay, which is pretty cool, which has like an album concept to it.

Ronnie: One of the things that Apple doesn’t allow is…

Ronnie: They do allow it, actually, but it’s complicated, I believe.

Ronnie: From what I gather is that when you hit play in those apps, you can use their own player, but typically using Apple’s player is the way to go, right?

Scott: Yeah.

Ronnie: So when you go to your home screen, if you tap on the little thing that’s up on your home screen, that’s going to take you to Apple Music.

Scott: Yeah, right.

Ronnie: Because it’s using the Apple Music player, unless you’re using their own, and then their own kind of pops up on top of the Apple Music, like above it, it just doesn’t look right.

Ronnie: It’s a weird system, and it’s one of those, you know, I’m not going to talk about the EU’s DMA, but that’s kind of one of those things where Apple doesn’t allow the other companies to use the private API, so they can’t make it look as good or work as efficiently as Apple’s music did.

Ronnie: And if they could, and that box actually took you straight to, you know, Marvis or whatever, then it would be a better situation, because the apps themselves are very nice, because you get a ton of functionality that you don’t get in the regular Apple music app.

Scott: Right, and like long play, for example, is a whole different concept, where you just tap on an album, and it just starts playing that album.

Scott: It’s different, it’s album based right from the get go.

Scott: Like, you can play an album in Apple music, you certainly can by drilling into an artist or an album view, you can go into and find a specific album and play it.

Scott: But long play is just like, I don’t even want to have to think about it.

Scott: Here’s all my album covers, I’ll tap that one and make it play.

Scott: And it’s different, it’s a different approach.

Scott: There’s different ways of thinking about your music that people have, because music is inherently a kind of thing that you visualize different than work related stuff, let’s say.

Scott: And so coming up with different ways to approach how do I want to play my music is a good idea.

Ronnie: And I like long play, because when we were kids, there was only one way to really play music, and that’s just putting an album on and letting it play.

Ronnie: I mean, you could skip around songs, but it really sucked on a record player, because you get that squelching every time.

Ronnie: Every time you try to change it, you can never get it in the right groove that you wanted it into.

Ronnie: So I still enjoy listening to an album straight from the beginning to the end.

Ronnie: I was having that conversation with my daughter the other day, actually, because she’s young, and she makes all these playlists.

Ronnie: And I’m like, I just want the album, because the artists typically, especially back in when they did albums constantly, now they do singles, so I don’t know if they do it the same.

Ronnie: But they spend a lot of time deciding what song was going to be first, what song was going to be second, you know, how these songs played together, right?

Scott: Yeah.

Ronnie: And now everything’s a single, so who knows how they play together.

Scott: No, that is true, but still even so, even back then, it was always the case that there was a lot of stuff on albums that I would just soon skip.

Scott: I mean…

Ronnie: Well, it’s easy to do now.

Scott: It is very easy to do now, yeah.

Scott: In fact, I would say it’s the only way for most people is they just don’t have the concept of an album anymore.

Ronnie: I remember when you had a tape…

Ronnie: I remember when I got a tape player, like a cassette player that could actually…

Ronnie: You could fast forward to the next song because you didn’t want that, so it had the ability to hit fast forward, and then as soon as the next song would play, it would stop and start playing again.

Ronnie: That was pretty nice.

Ronnie: Yeah, that was a nice feature.

Scott: All right, so do you have any other games that you wanted to talk about?

Ronnie: No, I play…

Ronnie: Well, I play Minecraft on here, but that doesn’t require Windows.

Ronnie: But that was one of the things I was looking into because playing Minecraft on Linux or Mac is Java only.

Ronnie: And playing it everywhere else is bedrock.

Ronnie: Right.

Ronnie: So if you don’t play Minecraft, there’s two separate versions, and since Windows owns it, they’re never going to make the bedrock for Mac OS and Linux.

Ronnie: And you can’t play…

Ronnie: So like my wife and I are both big Minecraft game players, and she plays on the Switch, which is bedrock, as is Xbox, Windows, every other version.

Ronnie: And we can’t play together if I’m using the Mac, and I really would rather play on the Mac.

Ronnie: So that was one of the things I was kind of looking into.

Ronnie: But I think for Minecraft, you would need more than a virtual machine to run Minecraft and Windows to run it, because it’s a game that requires a lot more than that.

Ronnie: So ultimately, I just played Minecraft on the Mac, the Java version, and with this particular MacBook, I can turn the settings up to…

Ronnie: Well, they have a setting called Fabulous, which I never knew they had, and I can turn every setting to as high as possible and play it, and I still get 60, 70, 80 frames per second, and I love playing it.

Ronnie: So that’s one game that I play a lot, and this particular MacBook has helped me out, played that a lot, because prior to that, I didn’t have a machine that could run Minecraft, because Minecraft is an intense game.

Scott: Yeah, but you can’t interact with her.

Ronnie: No, so she’ll play on Minecraft on the Switch on the TV, and I’ll play on the Minecraft on my Mac.

Scott: Yeah, you can’t be on the same servers or anything like that.

Ronnie: No, unfortunately, you can’t even be on Realms.

Ronnie: Realms is kind of their servers, right?

Ronnie: You’d think you would be able to.

Ronnie: I mean, there’s nothing…

Ronnie: Well, I mean, aside from technology…

Scott: I feel like the Java edition is total maintenance mode.

Scott: Well, it’s not 100% true.

Scott: They still add some features to it, but I don’t think they really…

Scott: I think the only reason they don’t kill it is just because there would be an outcry.

Ronnie: Right, and it’s weird because they add everything that’s in Bedrock, so it’s never behind.

Ronnie: And then it has a couple of extra things that don’t make any sense that you can’t do in Bedrock.

Ronnie: For some reason, there’s a sword function, like when you swipe, you can do a different attack in Java that you can’t in Bedrock, which means you can swipe and attack all the mobs around you as opposed to just one hit, like you can do on a thing, on Bedrock.

Ronnie: And there’s the way you hold your shield in Java is a little different.

Ronnie: So it’s like there’s just a couple of different things, and there’s literally no reason why, other than maybe some people coding that Windows could not make it so that it worked, but they never will.

Scott: Java programmers sneaked it in and never told their Windows buddies down the hall, or they never told their boss or something.

Ronnie: It was weird when I installed Minecraft this time for my Mac.

Ronnie: It was the first time that it never asked me to install Java, and I don’t know if maybe because of…

Scott: I think it installs it itself now.

Ronnie: Maybe.

Ronnie: I don’t know.

Ronnie: Because back in the old days, they’d always say, you don’t have the right Java or Java runtime error.

Ronnie: But now maybe it does.

Ronnie: But I might have also had Java installed for some of the stuff that…

Ronnie: I don’t know if that required any of the stuff that you and I have been doing with the website has anything to do with Java.

Ronnie: But I don’t know.

Ronnie: Anyway, it never asked me.

Ronnie: And I love playing it on here because I can play it at the highest level.

Ronnie: And my wife just plays on her own world.

Ronnie: We used to play together a lot.

Ronnie: Because you could play it on the iPad and the Switch together because they’re both bedrock.

Ronnie: But I like playing it here better because it’s just a much better experience.

Scott: Let’s see.

Scott: I’m trying to see a Java Edition system requirements.

Scott: Mac OS 10, blah, architecture.

Scott: It doesn’t say Java.

Scott: So I’m wondering if it doesn’t just install it itself now.

Ronnie: It probably does.

Scott: If it does and it does it in a way that when you uninstall Minecraft, it would also get rid of Java, that would be nice.

Scott: I really don’t want Java on my Mac anymore.

Scott: I just don’t.

Ronnie: That’s the thing.

Ronnie: Like back in the old days, you could tell it was there because it made you install it.

Ronnie: Now I assume it’s there somewhere.

Ronnie: It has to be because it is actually a game written in Java.

Ronnie: But I have no clue where it’s at.

Ronnie: I can’t see it and it doesn’t show up for me anywhere.

Ronnie: So it’s all good.

Scott: Yeah, it must be included.

Scott: It must be integrated.

Scott: Yeah, because before it used to be in the…

Scott: Actually, it sounds a lot nicer now than before because before you had to get the Java from Oracle or whoever was maintaining it at the time.

Scott: You had to download their stupid package thing.

Scott: There was something in the control panel for it or whatever system settings was called at the time.

Scott: I guess control panel is a Windows thing.

Scott: What did it used to be called instead of system settings?

Scott: Preferences or something?

Ronnie: System preferences.

Scott: Yeah, right.

Ronnie: Yeah, now it’s not even…

Ronnie: Yeah, it doesn’t show up in there at all.

Ronnie: It’s not in system settings.

Scott: That’s good.

Scott: That’s probably a benefit, then.

Scott: So, assuming they can completely get rid of Java, if you ever remove Minecraft, that would be good.

Scott: That way, at least you have the choice.

Scott: But what are some good neat things that you found for your Mac that you’re using?

Scott: The things that are so much fun and cool, because you could never do it on your iPad.

Scott: I mean, the Mac just has so much versatility.

Scott: That’s one of the things that I’ve really enjoyed about it, being both my mobile and my desktop devices, just all the software.

Scott: I’ve gone crazy on the software, but what have you gone crazy on?

Ronnie: Well, I don’t know if you do it, but I love different desktops, right?

Ronnie: Which you can’t really do on an iPad, right?

Ronnie: And I love…

Ronnie: Well, I mean, most of the…

Ronnie: I love Mission Control…

Ronnie: Was it Mission Control Plus?

Ronnie: Yeah, Mission Control Plus, which is the app that you…

Ronnie: You told me about most of these apps anyway, because you were already using them.

Ronnie: But Mission Control Plus allows you to…

Ronnie: Well, when you swipe up with three fingers on your Mac, and it brings up Mission Control, which is all the different…

Ronnie: It puts all your windows out there for you to see.

Ronnie: But Mission Control Plus basically allows you to just close those out while you’re in Mission Control, because in Mission Control itself, you can’t close them out in the Apple version.

Scott: And the dumb thing is, the iOS equivalent of that, you can.

Scott: You just swipe up on that particular app, right?

Scott: So it’s crazy that you can’t do it on the Mac.

Ronnie: Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense.

Ronnie: So Mission Control Plus makes it work exactly the way you would think it would work.

Ronnie: Those little utilities like that, you can’t use on iOS.

Ronnie: So those are great.

Ronnie: I love Magnet.

Ronnie: I know if you use macOS, you probably use Magnet.

Ronnie: Magnet should be built into macOS.

Ronnie: I have no clue why it’s not.

Ronnie: There’s other ones, but Magnet’s the one I use, where you can drag your window into the left-hand side of the screen, and it makes it a half of the screen, like what Windows does naturally.

Ronnie: One of the things that Windows does 100% right.

Scott: Exactly what I was about to say is, Windows has great window management built into it, and it’s got amazing Windows management keyboard shortcuts built in.

Scott: And you can just fling your windows across multiple monitors and put them in specific spots just by using keys.

Scott: And it’s like, why did Apple never think that this was something that people do?

Ronnie: Why did they not?

Ronnie: I don’t understand it.

Ronnie: I mean, has it just gone so long now that if they did it, it would just be a meeting defeat?

Ronnie: Because it makes zero sense to not have something like it.

Scott: Yeah.

Scott: I guess they love those particular third party app developers.

Scott: I don’t know.

Ronnie: I guess.

Ronnie: You probably use Raycast, right?

Ronnie: That’s what you use to use your window management.

Scott: I use the Raycast windows management, yeah.

Scott: And it’s really good.

Scott: There are some things that it is missing.

Scott: So I’m not advocating that people…

Scott: If you have Raycast, you might still try some of the others to see if you have some other preferences.

Ronnie: Yeah, so Magnets One, there’s a few more of them.

Ronnie: I love the app Amphetamine that you told me about.

Ronnie: That’s a fantastic app.

Ronnie: You can explain that one probably better than me, because I don’t use it too often, but when I need it, I love it.

Scott: I have it running right now, and basically I’ve got a different app called Bunch from I think Brett Terpstra, and what it does is let you run a script.

Scott: So I have a podcast mode, and when I turn on my podcast mode, it opens up all my podcast apps, and it also enables an amphetamine session.

Scott: And what amphetamine does is it just says, don’t go to sleep.

Scott: Don’t sleep the display.

Scott: Don’t do anything.

Scott: And the reason I like that is because it used to be whenever I was podcasting, and I was talking for a long time with somebody, and I wasn’t touching my computer, my display would start going to sleep.

Scott: It would go into screensaver mode, and I would have to jiggle the mouse.

Scott: Now I don’t have to do that.

Scott: And then when I’m done podcasting, I just turn off that podcast session, and it closes all the right apps, and it turns off that amphetamine session for me, and that’s all that.

Scott: But amphetamine by itself is super nice.

Scott: You can just use it to keep your Mac awake for a while, and also it has some common sense that you can have a limit to it where it says, okay, this is long enough.

Scott: I’m turning off this session because clearly you’ve just wandered off and gone down into the basement to play pool or something.

Scott: I’m just imagining that’s what happens in your house.

Scott: You have a pool table down there.

Ronnie: No pool table at my house.

Ronnie: Another app that I love that you turned me on to was Alt Tab, which is another…

Ronnie: Kind of another bringing Windows functionality to Mac, right?

Ronnie: I think in Windows, they do a little better job with Alt Tab.

Ronnie: Is it Command Tab, right?

Scott: Yeah, Command Tab on the Mac, and it’s Alt Tab on Windows.

Scott: But the way that Alt Tab, the app sets it up, is it uses Alt Tab so that you can have both the standard Mac Command Tab and an Alt Tab with a preview of the apps that you’re looking at.

Scott: And also, it’s easier to click on them while you’re…

Scott: Like, you can click on one in addition to using…

Scott: Like, if you have the keyboard shortcuts held down, you can go ahead and use your mouse and click on one, or you can use your arrow keys to select one really fast.

Ronnie: And you can close each…

Ronnie: You can close them out with your…

Scott: Right…

Ronnie: .

Ronnie: while you’re in there, too.

Scott: But now I have it set up so that it’s actually Command Tab for me.

Scott: I have it overriding the built-in Mac Command Tab right now.

Ronnie: That’s what I do.

Ronnie: I just have it as Command Tab, because I don’t want to learn a different one.

Scott: Occasionally, it annoys me, because depending on the window, depending on your background, I don’t think they distinguish…

Scott: Sometimes there’s situations where it’s hard to tell which window is the active one selected in the Alt Tab app.

Scott: Not very often…

Ronnie: So, you know, there’s…

Ronnie: In the Preferences, you can change that to where…

Ronnie: I just did it today.

Ronnie: You can go in there and…

Scott: Yeah, it kind of highlights…

Scott: It puts a rectangle around the app on the desktop, too, and it also highlights the app on the desktop.

Ronnie: It previews it.

Ronnie: It previews the selected windows.

Ronnie: So, as you’re going through it, it just brings them all out.

Scott: I had to do that because sometimes…

Scott: There was too many times where I couldn’t tell which window it thought it was on.

Ronnie: Yeah, because they all kind of look the same.

Scott: And people have talked to that guy about that.

Scott: People have mentioned that on the GitHub repo, and he’s just like, I don’t think it’s a problem.

Scott: And it’s like, all these people are saying…

Scott: Okay, whatever, dude.

Scott: You’re the guy that makes it.

Scott: So, I guess you can make that decision.

Ronnie: You know, the best thing about that app is when you’re in just a regular Apple command tab and you’re switching tabs, for some reason, the apps don’t come up a lot of the times.

Ronnie: Like, you switch to it, and it just stays in the background.

Ronnie: But with Alt Tab, it doesn’t matter where that app is.

Ronnie: Once you click on it, it’s there.

Ronnie: It’s coming up, regardless.

Scott: And the best thing about it, Ronnie, is that for whatever reason…

Scott: First of all, one dumb thing about macOS is it has certain types of windows that will always be hidden, and they will never show up in Alt Tab.

Scott: Right.

Scott: Sorry, in Command Tab.

Scott: They will never show up in Command Tab.

Scott: You don’t know they’re there.

Scott: You have to literally get rid of all your other windows, and then there’s this dumb window asking a question or saying there’s an update or wanting to do something, and you’re like, oh, I didn’t know.

Scott: But if you do Alt Tab, all those windows are visible.

Scott: It picks them all up.

Scott: Any of those hidden, weird, dumb windows…

Scott: Help windows are another one.

Scott: Of course, those are on top of everything, and you can’t get rid of them, so that’s another stupid case.

Scott: But I don’t know why Apple has some weird windows that the finder treats completely different and just won’t let you get to easily, but this Alt-Tab app will find all of those.

Scott: So, it’s not just about the previews, it’s also about discoverability.

Scott: It will show you any windows that exist, whether or not Apple wants you to see them or not.

Scott: Yeah.

Ronnie: I don’t understand Apple.

Ronnie: I don’t understand Apple sometimes.

Scott: I don’t either.

Ronnie: But that’s the great thing about the Mac is you can configure it so that it works exactly the way you want it.

Ronnie: And in those two…

Ronnie: Well, for Alt-Tab and for Magnet or Raycast or however you want to do your windows, I want it to work just like Windows happens to do it because they did it right, so…

Scott: They did a really good job on window management.

Scott: Hey, do you use Menu Bar?

Ronnie: Yeah.

Ronnie: Well, I don’t use Menu Bar, the app.

Scott: Oh, Bartender is the one I’m thinking of.

Ronnie: Bartender is what I use, yes.

Scott: Menu Bar is the Menu Bar.

Scott: I’m talking about Bartender.

Ronnie: I use Bartender.

Scott: I’m just going to throw the names of things out there.

Scott: It’s going to be the wrong name.

Scott: It’s going to be a made up word, and you’re going to have to guess what I’m talking about.

Ronnie: I thought you were talking about Bartender, but I couldn’t come up with the name Bartender either, but I love that app, yes.

Scott: It shouldn’t be necessary, but it is, and so I like it.

Scott: And I do like the fact that it’s really customizable in terms of when certain apps show up, and you can make groups in there.

Scott: Like, I’ve got some shortcuts and some other app things in different groups, a couple different groups, and I really like it.

Scott: It’s not 100% perfect.

Scott: Like, what I wish I could do, like, when I’m connected to my studio display, it shows me everything.

Scott: But the way it does it is, it has all the stuff that it would always show at the right, over near the date.

Scott: And then it has all the stuff that is only going to show on hover, on the Mac, if it’s not connected to the studio display, or if I am connected to the studio display, it has all that stuff over the left.

Scott: I would like to intermingle those.

Scott: I want a mode where I says, look, when I’m connected to the studio display, ignore whether this is a temporary icon or not and just put it here.

Scott: But when I’m not connected to the studio display, obviously this stuff is going to be over the left because it’s only going to show up on Hover.

Scott: That’s fine.

Scott: But I can only order icons within their two separate categories.

Scott: This is always here.

Scott: This is sometimes here.

Scott: And that’s the one thing that bugs me about it, but it doesn’t bug me enough to care as much as it sounds like I care.

Ronnie: Yeah, basically just hides everything in your menu bar.

Ronnie: And I don’t like to have anything in my menu bars at the time on the far right, and then it has the control center, and then I just use the little dot.

Ronnie: And that’s all I see up there.

Ronnie: And then I like the fact that back in the old days of bartender, I think you actually had to hit that little dot, but now you just go to the top of your screen and it just hovers up.

Ronnie: I use the crazy, there’s like different themes.

Ronnie: So I use the theme that actually just has a rounded corner so you can’t actually, you don’t ever see the bar go all the way across your Mac.

Ronnie: It’s just the rounded corners right around the words or whatever.

Ronnie: I know you don’t like that one in particular, but I do.

Ronnie: That’s what I use.

Scott: Yeah, the other thing about bartender that makes it really necessary, of course, is the notch.

Ronnie: Yes.

Scott: And I don’t know what Apple thought you were supposed to do because they literally just let stuff go under the notch and disappear and become inaccessible.

Scott: And I don’t, I don’t, I literally don’t know what Apple’s plan is.

Scott: Those things are in the menu bar for a reason.

Scott: What’s Apple’s plan?

Scott: Just don’t use them when you’re on your, I don’t get it.

Scott: It’s so baffling to me.

Scott: I guess nobody at Apple has any apps in the menu bar.

Scott: I don’t know.

Ronnie: Maybe not.

Ronnie: There’s, I don’t know.

Scott: In addition to management, making stuff not so cluttered, it’s also about just literally being able to get to some of those when you’re using the built-in display and the notch is doing its best to make those things disappear.

Ronnie: Yep.

Ronnie: Yeah, I love that.

Ronnie: I don’t use it too often, but I have an app, and I know this is a controversial app.

Scott: Oh no.

Ronnie: It’s called Brightentosh.

Scott: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Ronnie: Which is an interesting app, and like I said, I don’t use it often, but every now and then, it’s kind of an interesting app.

Ronnie: Because MacBook Pros have the ability to go to 1600 nits, that’s correct, right?

Ronnie: That’s their max level, I believe.

Ronnie: They normally stay around less than that, 500 nits, maybe I’m wrong.

Ronnie: I believe that’s the case.

Ronnie: So when you’re on a MacBook Pro and you’re viewing an HDR video or an HDR picture, I believe the nits go up to 1600.

Ronnie: I believe that’s how it works.

Scott: 1600 nits, Pete, yeah.

Ronnie: Yeah, and it’s only when you’re viewing HDR content.

Ronnie: You don’t actually have the ability to go in and do, change it yourself.

Ronnie: Even at the highest level of brightness, it’s not 1600 nits.

Ronnie: I think it’s 500.

Ronnie: Something to that effect.

Ronnie: Well, Brightentosh lets you, it makes your computer think that it’s looking at HDR content and you can actually turn the nits all the way up to 1600.

Ronnie: I’ve read a lot about it.

Ronnie: There are people that say it does nothing because it’s actually just using Apple’s own ability, and I don’t know if Apple would, but Apple doesn’t expect you to have HDR content on 24 hours a day, so maybe there is a thing that could burn it in.

Ronnie: The only reason I would ever use it, though, is sometimes, especially when I was in where it was very bright, you could turn it up and it makes your screen look beautiful.

Ronnie: I mean, the MacBook Pro screen is already beautiful at 500 nits, it’s even more beautiful at 1600 nits, and when you’re watching something and you would need to be plugged in because it does burn through battery, you could turn it on and it makes like TV shows or whatever, movies just really pop.

Ronnie: Anyway, not everybody is a fan of that app.

Scott: It gives you a beautiful suntan as well.

Ronnie: Yeah.

Scott: We, at one point, so we have at work, we have this semiconductor test equipment and it’s kind of hard to see in when it’s doing things, sometimes it’s really dark in there and stuff is really small, so we were testing these gigantic LED panels.

Scott: They were like, you know, I don’t know, foot by eight inches tall or something like that.

Scott: And they were just LED panels.

Scott: And this guy calls me over to his cube and he says, look at this, and he plugs it in.

Scott: I was like, oh my God, I could not believe how bright that thing was.

Scott: It was like the sun.

Scott: So I took this LED panel from him and I flipped it up and pointed it at the roof and the reflection just went, it was like the whole floor lit up and people were literally popping out of their cubes to see what was going on because all of a sudden everything was bright.

Scott: It was like a sunrise.

Scott: It was amazing.

Scott: And everybody was popping up like little gophers to see why the sun came up.

Scott: And that’s what I imagine when you use that app on your Mac, is all of a sudden there’s this light from heaven.

Scott: Oh, an angel’s singing and then Ronnie’s sitting there with a sunburned face and everyone from miles away can see what he’s doing on his Macintosh.

Ronnie: Well, nobody sings, but it is like that about the brightness, yes.

Scott: Well, I guess it’s good that nobody sings depending on what kind of music they like.

Scott: Personally, when I imagine angels singing, it’s not country music for sure, though.

Scott: I’ll say that.

Ronnie: Well, I mean, it could be some kind of country music for me, but not anything that is new, no, for sure.

Scott: Not even the old, yeah, angels, no, no, no.

Scott: That would be from the other place.

Scott: Those would be the downstairs angels.

Ronnie: Right, right, right.

Scott: What else do you like?

Ronnie: Oh, I don’t know, because those are kind of Mac specific ones.

Scott: Well, you wanted to talk about blogging.

Scott: You’ve been a blogger.

Ronnie: Oh, I just do it on the list.

Ronnie: Well, I have started blogging some, thanks to you and Vic for making the website.

Ronnie: You know, I’ve been looking at, have you looked at Scribbles?

Ronnie: Have you seen anything about that?

Scott: I have seen something about it, and I looked at it.

Ronnie: It’s pretty interesting.

Ronnie: It doesn’t do Markdown, but I wish it did Markdown, but it doesn’t.

Ronnie: But anyway, yeah, we, you and Vic designed, well, you designed my website when I was a podcast, when I was podcasting.

Scott: Yeah, and to be honest, it made more sense for you as a podcaster than it does for you as a blogger.

Scott: This particular static site builder mechanism, to be totally honest.

Scott: If you didn’t already have a website, and you said, I want to be a blogger, this is not the solution I would come up with.

Ronnie: No, well, I would never come up with a solution, because I wouldn’t be smart enough to create it myself.

Ronnie: But interestingly, I’ve learned how to use Github and some other stuff a little bit better now, because I’m using it.

Ronnie: But anyway, I wanted to write, and you and Vic had already made the website, and apparently enjoy working on it.

Ronnie: For whatever reason, y’all do it.

Ronnie: I guess that’s what friends are for.

Ronnie: But anyway, y’all work on this website anyway.

Ronnie: And I figured I wanted to write some stuff, and I’ve been having a lot of fun.

Ronnie: I haven’t written anything recently, but I have, I don’t know, 10, 12 posts on there already.

Ronnie: And I have some more stuff that I can put in there that I want to write that I just haven’t put on there yet.

Ronnie: But it’s interesting.

Ronnie: And I try to, not necessarily every post, but most of my posts, I try to have some music and history in it since that was what my podcast was about to begin with.

Ronnie: And some of them I just throw out because when I would write the podcast, I would write it all out.

Ronnie: And a few, like I put in some of those in there as well, just kind of like the transcripts of the podcast, but you can read them, which I find fun reading them.

Ronnie: I don’t know if anyone else likes that, but they’re fairly long.

Ronnie: My posts on there are pretty long.

Ronnie: A lot of people use microblog, and they’re like their posts like six word posts or whatever.

Ronnie: My posts are very long, sometimes thousands of words long.

Ronnie: I don’t know if that means people are not going to read them or they are, but basically I think it’s for me anyway, so I can read it whenever I want.

Ronnie: But I’ve enjoyed it.

Scott: It should be for you.

Scott: It should be for you, because if you’re writing for you, for sure you’re going to be writing about stuff that at least some people will find interesting.

Scott: The thing that I can’t answer is, how do you get those people to find you?

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: No clue.

Ronnie: Yeah, and I don’t…

Ronnie: I mean, you know, all I do is post it on Mastodon whenever it comes up and says, hey, I did a post here.

Ronnie: You’re going to go read it.

Ronnie: I have no clue if anyone’s reading it.

Ronnie: I don’t have any…

Ronnie: I don’t have any, don’t care really to have any kind of metrics to see if anyone’s reading it, because like I said…

Scott: You should be able to see stats.

Scott: FIC can make those available for you.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: That’s…

Scott: Now you have to decide whether or not that’s what you really want.

Ronnie: Yeah, see, that’s the thing.

Ronnie: Like, I don’t even know if I really want that.

Ronnie: Like, is that a thing where it bothers you that you don’t have any readers or…

Scott: Right.

Scott: Yeah, you might bite that apple, and now you wish you’d never met that stupid snake.

Ronnie: Right.

Ronnie: So that’s something I definitely have not pushed for because I really don’t think I care that much.

Ronnie: Like I said, I just do it for me, but I am finding it fun, and I think in the long run, I’ll probably figure out an easier way to do it, like an easier site, because I know you’re not always going to be there to do…

Ronnie: If there’s maintenance that has to be done, you’re the one who has to do it because you’re the only one smart enough to do it, and that’s probably not going to always be the case.

Scott: You either know something that I don’t, that my doctor hasn’t told me yet, or you’re threatening me, and I don’t know which, but I feel scared right now, Ronnie.

Scott: So I have some…

Scott: Speaking of history, I don’t know what music you would use to write about this, but I became kind of interested in the Cultural Revolution the other day because I’m watching Three Body Problem, and I was like, when exactly did the Cultural Revolution take place?

Scott: Because they had this thing in 1966 that happened, and I became curious about the Cultural Revolution, so I started looking it up.

Scott: And interestingly, I can read all these Chinese characters that they used to call it the Cultural Revolution, but I only know the Japanese way of reading them.

Scott: I don’t know the Chinese way of reading them.

Scott: But anyway, it lasted quite a while.

Scott: Mao was actually kind of serious about this.

Scott: He wasn’t screwing around.

Scott: This guy wanted to…

Scott: Anyway, it basically was like 10-year-long thing that went on.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: I find that fascinating.

Scott: So I guess my question to you is, have you ever…

Scott: I know that you know a lot about…

Scott: It’s not just music history that you enjoy.

Scott: In fact, I would say predominantly it’s other types of history probably.

Scott: Is that fair to say?

Ronnie: Yeah, for sure.

Scott: Have you ever studied anything about Chinese history at all?

Ronnie: You know, it’s funny.

Ronnie: Not much until recently, and my daughter, when she started going to college, is doing a minor in Chinese culture.

Ronnie: There’s not really a name for it.

Ronnie: Anyway, she’s been taking Mandarin, so she is fairly adept at speaking Mandarin today.

Ronnie: Not 100%.

Ronnie: It’s a hard language apparently.

Scott: It’s a very hard language.

Ronnie: There’s lots of different…

Ronnie: She was doing some Duolingo the other night, and she’s like, here, or not Duolingo, some other app, something that she had got from school, but they were saying ma and ma and ma, and each one of them was different, and I was like, I can’t, I don’t hear the differences.

Ronnie: Anyway, in addition to that, she’s been taking a lot of Chinese culture classes, because in Vegas, there’s a huge population of, well, almost everybody, but there’s a huge area of Chinatown, and there’s a huge, so she’s just, and I mean, why wouldn’t you, right?

Ronnie: There’s a couple billion, well, there’s a billion, over a billion people that speak Mandarin, and it’s something that I think, as the future goes, the language is only going to become more important in our world.

Scott: Seems that way, yeah.

Ronnie: So she has to read a lot of stuff about, you know, all of Chinese history.

Ronnie: She’s been doing tons of it.

Ronnie: So I know a little bit about it, but not as much as I should.

Ronnie: It’s one of those things that is amazing, as a country that’s been around, what, 4,000 years, something like that.

Ronnie: Like, I don’t know.

Ronnie: It’s been around forever.

Ronnie: Not as just China, but in different…

Ronnie: But it really hasn’t been taken over by too many people.

Ronnie: It’s kind of been there forever.

Ronnie: And it’s an amazingly advanced country.

Ronnie: We don’t really know anything about it in this country because we choose not to, but it’s got such a long history.

Ronnie: It’s amazing.

Scott: I know it really is.

Scott: Yeah, yeah.

Scott: And it’s weird because it really does seem like the Cultural Revolution destroyed a lot of their, like they wanted to ignore a lot of their own history.

Scott: They wanted to overcome a lot of their own past in a way, which is kind of weird because a lot of the stuff they did was pretty amazing.

Scott: Like here’s a question that you could ask your daughter sometime.

Scott: There’s simplified Chinese and there’s traditional Chinese.

Scott: Which do they actually use right now?

Scott: Like when you pick up a newspaper, is it simplified Chinese?

Scott: Because when I look at the two, the Chinese characters that the Japanese use are the traditional ones, not the simplified ones.

Scott: Like for example, this one for this kanji, or well, this Chinese character for nothing.

Scott: The traditional one, I know that character.

Scott: The simplified one, I wouldn’t recognize that if it hit me over the head a thousand times.

Scott: So I guess what I’m asking, I guess that’s the kind of thing that I don’t even know.

Scott: That’s fascinating.

Scott: Like when did they switch to simplified Chinese and why?

Scott: And do people recognize it?

Scott: Do young people still know how to read the traditional one?

Scott: I would assume they do, because I assume it’s still everywhere.

Scott: I don’t know.

Ronnie: I think it is becoming less and less of the traditional, although I believe, and I could be wrong about this, but I know she is learning with all the different characters, but I believe she is learning a lot of the tradition.

Ronnie: I mean, the simplified, because when we go through Chinatown, there’s a lot of traditional characters, and she cannot read those, because there’s so many of them.

Ronnie: It’s unbelievable.

Scott: There’s billions.

Scott: At least one thing that I think is true is that at least the Chinese are consistent with how they read them and use them, whereas the Japanese only use a subset of Chinese characters, but they still use enough to blow your mind.

Scott: But then they also have the Japanese reading and what they call the Chinese reading, even though it doesn’t sound like the way the Chinese would say it.

Scott: And then they combine those two readings sometimes.

Scott: They have rules about how you’re supposed to do it, but sometimes they don’t.

Scott: And sometimes they use the Chinese character for its visual representation.

Scott: And other times I’m convinced they choose a specific Chinese character for a word or phrase based on how it sounds, and they needed that sound, so they chose that character.

Scott: But if you looked at it, you’d go, why that character?

Scott: That makes no sense whatsoever.

Scott: So Japanese made a mess, is what I’m saying.

Scott: And I think, at least with Chinese, even though there’s billions and billions of them, and you do have the, like with Mandarin, you do have the tonal thing and all that, at least with the Chinese characters, I think if you learn a Chinese character, you know the Chinese character.

Scott: Whereas with Japanese, it’s not always a given.

Ronnie: Yeah, and I actually think the language from what I understand from her is, it’s complicated, but it’s fairly straightforward.

Ronnie: And if you know the words, you can learn, you know the spelling and all that kind of stuff.

Ronnie: Like you can figure it out fairly easily where the letters kind of all make the same.

Ronnie: Whereas English is just a hodgepodge of nothing.

Scott: And Japanese, you don’t know, when you hear the sounds, you don’t know what kanji it’s related to, unless you already know.

Scott: Like you have to, like with names, people literally have to look at each other’s business cards to understand the name, because you can say your name, but that gives you no clue what Chinese characters are involved in the name until you actually see it.

Scott: And a lot of times, I’ve gotten to the point where, even though I’m super slow at reading kanji, and there’s still a lot of them I don’t know, now I’ve gotten to the point where, when I hear a specific word, I’m like, I need to see the kanji for that, and then I’ll understand the word better.

Scott: It literally is a duality that way, whereas my understanding of Chinese, it’s not quite like that.

Scott: I don’t think there’s, there have to be some overlap.

Scott: With all those Chinese characters, they are certainly multiple sounds per character sometimes, or single sounds per character, and there’s certainly got to be overlap where a lot of characters have the same sound, for example.

Scott: But I think they’re more consistent in how they do it.

Scott: It’s not as random, whereas the Japanese just kind of went insane at some point in their history, I don’t know.

Ronnie: It seems so, at least from what I gather from her.

Ronnie: But she’s all in the Chinese, China, so we talk about China all the time, constantly, which is interesting.

Scott: Tell her I need to understand the Cultural Revolution and I need to understand the simplified versus traditional Chinese thing.

Ronnie: I’ll let her know.

Ronnie: I don’t know if she can explain the Cultural Revolution.

Ronnie: That seems like a big topic.

Scott: That’s not a small topic.

Scott: I just don’t understand.

Scott: It just seems like they…

Scott: I guess what I’m curious about is what built up this overwhelming desire to smash what came first?

Scott: Because it seems like they really want to destroy what came before them.

Scott: And it’s intriguing to me that they took a lot of young people and said…

Scott: So, clearly, there was some unhappiness, I would think it’s fair to say.

Scott: And they were able to prey on that.

Scott: But it’s just a fascinating phenomenon to me, because I’m not sure…

Scott: It’s almost like…

Scott: I don’t know if you could compare it to the United States today where people are anti-knowledge, but it almost seems vaguely like that, you know what I’m saying?

Ronnie: Yeah.

Ronnie: I read about Chinese history, and I’ve read a lot about it.

Ronnie: I can never fully understand it, because I believe they have such a different mindset of the entire world.

Ronnie: Like everything in their mindset is completely different to a capitalist, Western kind of mindset, right?

Ronnie: They have such a long view of everything, right?

Ronnie: The fact that Taiwan is…

Ronnie: How long has it been since it’s been part of China forever, right?

Ronnie: They still believe it is, and they care about it, and they believe it’s going to come back eventually, but they’re not doing anything necessarily to get it back, right?

Scott: Right, they’re taking their time.

Ronnie: They have such a long view.

Ronnie: They’ve been around so long as a country that they really don’t care about 10 years from now or 100 years from now.

Ronnie: They think in 500 years, and our country’s been around 240 years, whatever, 50 years.

Ronnie: We don’t have that same ability to think about things like they think about.

Ronnie: So when I read their history, to me, it’s just wild.

Ronnie: It’s wild that we live on the same world, but we think of stuff vastly, so vastly different.

Scott: Right, and we have no…

Scott: I don’t know what the Chinese sense of history is right now.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: I remember reading a book by this guy who lives in Japan, and he collects Japanese historical artifacts, whereas Japanese have thrown away their history fairly rapidly.

Scott: And I gotta go back and reread it, because I’m not sure what he said about the Chinese.

Scott: He started off being interested in Chinese stuff, and I can’t remember, I know the Cultural Revolution made huge changes and they didn’t want to know their past, but I think they still have more of a sense of the past there.

Scott: In the United States, we have zero sense of our own history, let alone anyone else’s.

Scott: We know nothing about anyone else at all, and yet we keep stepping into situations as though we are here to save you all and we know nothing about what we’re doing.

Scott: It is pretty fascinating.

Scott: The United States is definitely a different type of country than China, no doubt about it.

Ronnie: Yeah, and we can’t, I don’t think we can.

Ronnie: It’s hard to, it’s just hard to rectify the differences.

Ronnie: Japan just threw away everything after the Meiji Restoration, right?

Ronnie: They just said, nothing came before the Meiji Restoration, everything’s new now.

Scott: Basically, yeah, they started throwing it all away.

Ronnie: Said everything, we’re a totally different country now.

Ronnie: And maybe that’s what the Cultural Revolution was, I don’t know.

Scott: They get amazed when somebody holds on to a 50-year-old artifact there.

Scott: Like a lot of their stuff is just dying.

Scott: Part of it’s the way they do it though.

Scott: Like he likes calligraphy, and he went on and on and on about calligraphy and how it’s dying.

Scott: But part of it is the way they practice it, where you sit rigidly for hours on end, and you do everything a certain way.

Scott: Whereas some of the really old school calligraphers who were famous at the time, they would get up and dance around and slither paint on their bodies and do all kinds of weird stuff.

Scott: I’m not saying it was a calligraphy orgy or anything, but it was definitely different than what they’re doing now.

Scott: Anyway, it’s fascinating.

Scott: There’s a lot that we, as Americans, don’t know about culture in general.

Ronnie: Calligraphy orgy.

Scott: Calligraphy orgy.

Scott: I guess that’s the name of this podcast.

Ronnie: That’ll get people wanting to listen to it all.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: Anyway, yeah, I’m…

Scott: It’s interesting that when I had the iMac at the desktop, and I still used it a lot, it’s funny that I didn’t…

Scott: Now I’m way more invested in a lot of the utilities and the automations and a lot of the stuff that I’m doing now.

Scott: And I guess part of it’s because I’m not trying to waste time getting my iPad to do all that stuff that it really can’t do.

Scott: And it’s kind of interesting.

Scott: And then part of it, yeah, I guess that’s a lot of it.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: I wonder why.

Scott: I wonder why.

Scott: Like, it’s not that I wasn’t kind of power using my Mac before, but not to the degree that I am now.

Scott: And I don’t know.

Scott: Maybe part of it is just that I can carry it around.

Scott: I don’t have to stay at my desk all the time.

Scott: I can take it into my room.

Scott: I can mess with it there.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: It’s interesting.

Ronnie: I think that’s the big deal.

Ronnie: It’s so much more accessible.

Ronnie: You can use it everywhere.

Ronnie: And with the battery life, you really can use it everywhere, as opposed to, you know, the…

Ronnie: Although, I mean, the iPads have great battery life, too, but that’s, you know, that’s always kind of been the case.

Ronnie: But compared to the other Macs, the older MacBooks…

Scott: Oh, yeah, everything I had before, what was it, like, two or three hours, and you’d be looking for your charger?

Ronnie: Yeah, it’s crazy.

Ronnie: Yeah, crazy.

Scott: Who can live that way?

Scott: Oh, how did you like the Formula One Grand Prix down there?

Scott: Did you ever get over your anger of the streets being closed up?

Ronnie: Uh, I mean, I…

Ronnie: It doesn’t matter whether I got over it or not, the race happened, and…

Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah, nobody’s checking in with Ronnie to see if they should cancel the F1 race or not.

Ronnie: Right, like the article you sent yesterday said the city made 800…

Ronnie: It’s the city, county, state, who knows?

Ronnie: Whoever gets the money…

Ronnie: I guess the race overall made $884 million, so I think that’s probably pretty successful.

Ronnie: And it was the single biggest betting day or whatever, which is kind of amazing because I thought the Super Bowl was.

Ronnie: But anyway, it looks like it’s probably here to stay.

Ronnie: And I’m okay with that as long as hopefully they’ve figured out what they’re going to do with the streets.

Ronnie: Because in that same article, what did it say?

Ronnie: Something like 25,000 bus routes were changed, right?

Ronnie: And people had to wait hours on end.

Ronnie: And that’s what we found out.

Ronnie: My daughter goes to UNLV and she rides the bus.

Ronnie: And dude, sometimes the bus, she would miss classes because you couldn’t get around the city.

Ronnie: And maybe that was just a one-year thing based on them trying to get the infrastructure.

Ronnie: Because a lot of that stuff now they have built, like the paddock that they built, that’s still there.

Ronnie: That’s going to be there for the foreseeable future.

Ronnie: So I assume that next year that they won’t be quite so bad.

Ronnie: I hope not.

Ronnie: I like the fact that Vegas had an F1 race, because what, there’s one in Miami?

Ronnie: Was there one in Miami, one in Austin, and one in Vegas?

Scott: One in Austin.

Scott: Austin was the first one back in the United States for a long time.

Scott: It was the first one back in the United States for the first time in a long time.

Scott: And it’s been around for a little while now, the Circuit of the Americas.

Scott: And then Miami is another street track.

Scott: Circuit of the Americas in Austin is an actual racetrack.

Ronnie: Ah, okay.

Ronnie: I just, I mean, I love Vegas, right?

Ronnie: And I love the fact that we get something like that.

Ronnie: So it’s kind of like a pride thing that we’re one of the few cities in America that have it.

Ronnie: And honestly, watching the race, it was pretty amazing.

Ronnie: Like Vegas is the perfect city to have that race in.

Scott: Yeah, when they showed the track layout, I thought, this is going to be horrible because it’s got the world’s longest straight.

Scott: It’s got all this stuff.

Scott: I thought, this is going to be a terrible track.

Scott: It’s just not going to be good racing.

Scott: But it was a great race.

Scott: And I don’t know if it just happened to be that way.

Scott: Now, it is, if this would have happened a few years ago, it wouldn’t have been as good a racing because the current rules allow the cars to follow each other a little closer than they have been able to in the past.

Scott: They’re huge ground effects cars.

Scott: And so following another car closely has huge effects on your downforce.

Scott: But it’s a little bit better now.

Scott: But that race turned out to be a great race.

Scott: It really was.

Ronnie: Yeah, and like the spectacle of it, like when they drove around the Sphere, oh my gosh, the Sphere was…

Ronnie: The Sphere is an amazing thing anyway.

Ronnie: Like it’s…

Ronnie: I think they’re going to make some in some other cities now that they have this one built here.

Ronnie: But, you know, it’s like $2 billion, and it’s unbelievable.

Ronnie: It’s a thing that, you know, a place like Vegas would have that not a lot of other cities would have.

Scott: How did they fund that?

Scott: I know that Bono didn’t give the money from their sales for that.

Ronnie: So it’s called the MSG Sphere by the people at Madison Square Garden.

Ronnie: So I don’t know how they funded it.

Ronnie: I assume they’re probably losing money now, and they’re going to make money off of it later, hopefully.

Ronnie: But the ads on it are cool.

Ronnie: Like, I hate ads, right?

Ronnie: Like, I have ad blockers everywhere, but the ads on the Sphere are like the coolest ads ever.

Ronnie: They always have cool ads.

Scott: That’s good, because you can’t block those anyway.

Scott: How much do you have to pay to get your representation on there?

Ronnie: I don’t know.

Ronnie: I wonder what it does cost.

Ronnie: I wonder what it costs, and I wonder how they make the content for it, because it’s not like there’s a bunch of them laying around.

Ronnie: Anyway, I think the F1 race is here for good, and it brings a sense of pride.

Ronnie: I’ve not been in Vegas my whole life, but for the last 25 years, I’ve lived here, and I love Vegas.

Ronnie: I don’t want to go anywhere else.

Ronnie: We now have a football team, hockey team, F1.

Ronnie: They keep saying in Vegas, they talk about all the sports, but we do have the UFC.

Ronnie: The WNBA has won the championship for the last year.

Ronnie: The hockey NHL team won the championship last year.

Ronnie: It’s a great time to be in Vegas.

Ronnie: So as much as it kind of pained me at the time, I guess I’m going to say, I’m proud that we have a F1 race here in Vegas, and I’m proud that it went over well.

Ronnie: Hopefully, they don’t blow up any cars with stuff coming off the streets like they did in the practice rounds next year, and everything else will be better.

Ronnie: I think the race will be great whatever, but hopefully leading up to it, everything else will be great too.

Scott: Vegas does not have a men’s NBA team, right?

Ronnie: Not yet, nope.

Scott: They were, the Malufs, I remember decades ago, I don’t remember how long ago it was, the Malufs were going to move the Kings there.

Ronnie: Yeah, because the Malufs own the Palms.

Ronnie: Well, I don’t know if they still own the Palms, but when it was built, they owned it.

Ronnie: They actually own a lot of casinos, or they are involved in a lot of casinos.

Ronnie: Yeah, I don’t know.

Ronnie: It’s weird too because the NBA was the first sport to come here frequently.

Ronnie: When they do the NBA G League, which is kind of the minor league for the NBA, and they do that in the summer, that’s been in Vegas for a long time, and now it’s even bigger because they advertise it on the sphere and everything.

Ronnie: But it’s been here forever, and they did some All-Star games here back.

Ronnie: So I thought the NBA would have been the first one to come here, but then it was the NHL, and I was really surprised the NFL came so quick.

Ronnie: That was surprising.

Ronnie: And I guess theoretically, Major League Baseball is coming.

Ronnie: I don’t know, there’s some issues with the A’s, so I don’t know how that’s working out.

Scott: Well, you’re going to have a lot more Shohei Otani situations when they get there, so you’ve got to watch out for that.

Ronnie: I’m a little disappointed with the A’s, because they’re…

Ronnie: So I read an article a couple nights ago at their game.

Ronnie: They had like 3,000 people in their stadium, right?

Ronnie: The Coliseum, right?

Ronnie: Why would anybody want to go watch them there?

Ronnie: It is what it is.

Ronnie: But our AAA team, their AAA affiliate team that’s here in Las Vegas, the Las Vegas Aviators, at our stadium here called The Ballpark, they had 12,000 people at that game.

Scott: That’s crazy.

Ronnie: And Oakland will not play here for the next three years.

Ronnie: I do not understand it.

Ronnie: Why would they not just play at the ballpark that we have that can seat at least 12,000 people, which they would sell out every night when there’s 3,000 people in Oakland?

Ronnie: Because no one wants to go watch them there.

Ronnie: They’re leaving.

Ronnie: Why would anybody care about them?

Ronnie: It’s not like they’ve been good friends to the city anyway.

Scott: Is it a little bit smaller?

Scott: Does it seem like a small park for a major league team, maybe, or something?

Ronnie: Oh, it does.

Ronnie: It’s very small.

Ronnie: I mean, it probably can’t seat more than 12,000 people, but if you’re only getting 3,000 at the stadium you’re currently at, what’s the difference, right?

Scott: Yeah, but I mean, would they be knocking home runs out every time they swing the bat?

Ronnie: Oh, no, no, no, the ballpark, I don’t know.

Ronnie: It’s a normal AAA ballpark, so that’s fine.

Ronnie: But it’s a beautiful, beautiful facility.

Ronnie: We also have another one.

Ronnie: We have the one that they used to play at prior to this building.

Ronnie: But anyway, I don’t know if Oakland 100% is coming, because they can’t…

Ronnie: So when the Raiders came to town, Mark Davis was in the city.

Scott: You’re just taking everything from Oakland, aren’t you?

Ronnie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ronnie: But he was here, man.

Ronnie: He embraced Vegas.

Ronnie: He actually owns the Las Vegas Aces, too.

Ronnie: The WNBA team has won the championship for the last two years.

Ronnie: And he really seems to care about the city, right?

Ronnie: Like, it’s not just…

Ronnie: He’s not just someone that lives somewhere else.

Ronnie: He, like, lives in town.

Ronnie: You see him all over the place.

Ronnie: And I don’t know nothing about the A’s ownership, other than it seems to be a complete disaster.

Scott: They’re probably a conglomerate of some kind.

Ronnie: I’m sure they are.

Ronnie: I don’t know anything about it.

Ronnie: But it would just seem like…

Ronnie: Of course, the Golden Knights are very good.

Ronnie: Everybody loves them here.

Ronnie: I think the Raiders are starting to become more and more like…

Ronnie: I mean, there’s a lot of people here that like them anyway, because they played in LA for a long time and in Oakland.

Ronnie: But their owner helped out a lot, because he’s always in town, and he’s putting himself out there, and he’s always at the WNBA games when they’re playing.

Ronnie: Even when the Raiders play, sometimes he’s at the WNBA games, if they’re playing at the same time.

Ronnie: Of course, when you win championships, I guess, that makes you want to go there, as opposed to the Raiders who don’t win championships.

Scott: I guess, yeah, I’m terrible with football.

Scott: The Raiders did go to Los Angeles after Oakland, right?

Scott: And then they went to…

Ronnie: They did, and then they went back to Oakland.

Ronnie: They were in LA for like 10 or 15 years, and then they went back to Oakland.

Scott: They moved a lot.

Scott: They’ll be back.

Scott: They’ll be gone from Vegas any time.

Ronnie: I don’t know, man.

Ronnie: That stadium they got is absolutely beautiful.

Ronnie: I mean, they’re making money now.

Ronnie: They held the Super Bowl there this year.

Ronnie: Probably, I’m sure we’re going to get it back again.

Ronnie: I don’t think they’ll go anywhere.

Scott: Why would you leave Los Angeles and go back to Oakland?

Scott: As a team, I guess.

Ronnie: Well, I think because none of the places in those areas wanted to give them the money required to build a stadium, right?

Ronnie: The Oakland Coliseum is just a decrepit place, and that’s the same way with the A’s.

Ronnie: Oakland is not willing to…

Ronnie: It’s not a city that probably has the ability to do that.

Scott: Right, but if you’re in Oakland and then you go to Los Angeles, why would you go back to Oakland?

Scott: As from a team perspective, I can’t see…

Scott: I don’t know why you would do that.

Scott: And that’s not a diss against Oakland.

Scott: It’s just a bigger…

Scott: Los Angeles is a huge market.

Ronnie: Yeah, but you know, every team that goes…

Ronnie: LA fans suck, man.

Scott: They do.

Scott: They’re kind of privileged.

Ronnie: In 2016, when the Cubs were playing the LA Dodgers in the NLCS, the National League Championship Series, which is kind of a big deal, right?

Ronnie: It’s the series right before you get to the World Series, right?

Ronnie: My wife calls me at work at 8 o’clock in the morning.

Ronnie: She’s like, Hey, you can get tickets for this game for $80.

Ronnie: $80 for game five of the NLCS.

Ronnie: She’s like, you should take off work today.

Ronnie: We should drive down to LA and we should watch the Cubs play.

Ronnie: Well, watch the Dodgers play, but I don’t care about the Dodgers.

Ronnie: Anyway, so we did.

Ronnie: We drove down there, and they didn’t get there until like the second or third inning because LA traffic sucks so bad and people have to work or whatever.

Scott: But that’s probably a lot of why it’s like that though, Ronnie.

Ronnie: Maybe.

Ronnie: But then the Cubs were beating them bad.

Ronnie: So by the seventh inning, they were all gone and it was literally only Cubs fans left.

Ronnie: They are the biggest fairweather fans.

Ronnie: You know, they, what do they pay?

Ronnie: Shohei Sotani $750 million or whatever to play for them, but their fans won’t even come and watch the games.

Scott: I know.

Scott: Well, it’s deferred.

Scott: Maybe the fans are all going to show up later.

Ronnie: It’s deferred like their fans are.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: I do agree that they are a little, but it’s just, I think LA is just more laid back about everything.

Ronnie: They are, and they have so much stuff to do.

Ronnie: I mean, it’s, I mean, there’s everything in the world to do there.

Ronnie: So what’s the, why would you go watch the Dodgers when you can do so many other things?

Ronnie: I don’t know.

Scott: I don’t know why either.

Ronnie: I mean, there have been times when the Dodgers haven’t been so good, but they have been perennially great, like for the last 15 years.

Ronnie: So there’s no reason not to go watch them.

Scott: Yeah, if you were ever going to support a team, these have been the years to do it, for sure.

Ronnie: Right, it seems like LA supports the Lakers, right?

Ronnie: But that’s about it, really, they support the Lakers.

Ronnie: They’ve had plenty of chances with different football teams.

Ronnie: Now the Rams are there again, right?

Ronnie: They were in LA, then they went to St.

Ronnie: Louis.

Ronnie: Now they’re back.

Ronnie: The Chargers are there now.

Ronnie: They have two football teams.

Ronnie: So maybe, I don’t know.

Scott: Maybe there’s too much.

Scott: I don’t know, it’s like, I gotta tell you, though, I’m kind of a fair weather friend, too, because now I’m kind of watching the Dodgers, because Freddie Freeman went there, and I kind of thought maybe I’ll watch these guys for a while.

Scott: And it did coincide with when they started being really winning again.

Scott: And that’s not why I decided to start watching the Dodgers.

Scott: I do have a friend that in his youth, he would always, like he was Celtics fan all the way, blah, blah, blah.

Scott: And then it was the Bulls.

Scott: And I’m like, and then it was the Yanks.

Scott: And I’m like, have you ever noticed you’re always picking the winning teams every time you decide that a team is your favorite?

Scott: And I didn’t want to be like that, but I also wanted to see, I also just wanted to watch some of the games with Freddie Freeman in it.

Scott: So I’ve been watching some of those.

Scott: I tried to like the Giants, the San Francisco Giants, but at the time, some of the people on the Giants, I just couldn’t stand.

Scott: And don’t tell Jason Snow that because, but I think I like the Giants roster right now.

Scott: But anyway, the reason I went away, I used to watch Atlanta Braves for years because that was the easiest channel for me to watch.

Scott: When I first came back to the United States from Japan, they were the easiest team to follow.

Scott: And so I watched them, and of course, that was when Maddox was there, and that was an amazing trio of pitchers, and always some fourth guy thrown in.

Scott: And then, honestly, Ronnie, I got to the point where I couldn’t stand the Tomahawk Chop anymore.

Scott: And I think it was in, whenever the Braves were in a last playoff or something like that, I don’t remember.

Scott: Anyway, it was like a couple years ago.

Scott: I was just like, I can’t do this anymore.

Scott: It just, seeing in the entire stadium full of people still doing that as though it’s okay, it just bugged the heck out of me, and I finally was like, you know what?

Scott: I’m just not going to support these guys anymore.

Scott: I’m just not, I don’t want that.

Scott: I know that’s not what the team is about, but they still have the tomahawk, they still have the thing, they still let the fans do it, they still don’t say, hey, you know what, guys, let’s try something else.

Ronnie: Right, and they haven’t changed their names.

Scott: No, right, and so, I don’t know, it just felt like in 2022 or whatever year it was, I decided to nope out of there.

Scott: It just felt like I just, I can’t hand wave it away, and I don’t want to keep saying, yeah, yeah, I like the Braves, but I really can’t stand this thing they do.

Scott: That’s really awkward.

Scott: But yeah, I just didn’t want to do it anymore.

Scott: I just didn’t want to do it anymore.

Ronnie: Right, and you’re pretty hardcore, because you always had the MLB plan, and we would talk a lot of baseball back then.

Ronnie: And I agree with you, though.

Ronnie: If I were a Braves fan, I would certainly have left that a long time ago, just like the Chiefs.

Ronnie: I’m not a Kansas City Chiefs fan, but I’m from Missouri.

Ronnie: And when I was a kid growing up, they sucked.

Ronnie: Yeah, if I had been a fan of them, I would have left their fandom, because I think that these teams need to make better choices.

Ronnie: I’m happy that Cleveland and Washington did.

Ronnie: I was a Washington fan when I was a kid.

Ronnie: I’m glad they’ve changed, especially Washington.

Ronnie: That was the absolute worst.

Ronnie: That was the worst.

Ronnie: You could make an argument maybe about Braves.

Ronnie: There is an argument to be made, but there is no argument to be made about Redskins.

Ronnie: And that was a disaster that that lasted as long as it did.

Scott: And even Cleveland Indians, that in and of itself isn’t so bad, other than the fact that Indians is incorrect.

Scott: But their mascot, that was bad, bad, bad.

Ronnie: Horrible.

Ronnie: Yeah, they had a horrible…

Ronnie: I mean, I personally think some of those teams, like the Florida State Seminoles, right?

Ronnie: Like I think they do a good job of embracing the culture as opposed to, and they do the Tomahawk Chop as well, but they also do a better job of actually, they have the chief of the Seminole Nation that comes out there, and they really seem to care a little bit more than, say, the Braves, which their Tomahawk Chop seems a little disingenuous.

Ronnie: I don’t know.

Scott: Yeah, it’s certainly not earned.

Scott: Let’s put it that way.

Ronnie: Right, like the Florida State Seminoles seems earned.

Ronnie: I am not a Native American, and I cannot speak for how they feel about it, but they do have an actual Native American that comes out onto the field and throws the sphere into the middle of the field, and it just seems that they actually maybe care about that kind of thing as opposed to the Braves, who is just a cartoon.

Scott: Yeah, at least they’re thinking about it.

Scott: Maybe it’s still problematic.

Scott: Maybe there are still people who don’t like it and with good reason, but at least they are thinking about it, and maybe they make more changes going forward.

Scott: Maybe they don’t, but at least they’re cognizant of the fact, whereas teams like the Braves and so forth, they just seem to be like, we’re just going to ignore this, pretend like it’s not a thing.

Ronnie: Right, right.

Ronnie: We’re just going to keep going with this, even though it’s bad.

Scott: Yep.

Scott: Well, speaking of that, should we end this podcast?

Ronnie: Hit the big red button?

Scott: Yeah, speaking of people not going with things even though they’re bad.

Scott: No, that was a joke.

Scott: Only a listener can decide that, not us.

Scott: You don’t seem to like your tea.

Scott: Do you like it?

Ronnie: No, it’s not very good.

Scott: Okay, so you’re giving it a thumbs down.

Scott: That’s what I have to ask for the review.

Scott: How would you describe its taste?

Ronnie: I guess it tastes like a biscus.

Scott: Does it taste medicinal?

Ronnie: Well, not really, no.

Ronnie: It does say it’s tart and fruity, so I would say that is correct.

Ronnie: It is tart and fruity.

Ronnie: I think I could probably get used to it, but I would not.

Ronnie: It’s not something I’m going to try to get used to.

Ronnie: How’s that?

Scott: That’s probably the best, yeah.

Scott: Why try to get used to something you don’t like?

Scott: My Buncha is okay.

Scott: It’s a weird, I’ve never heard of J Basket.

Scott: I’m going to have to look them up.

Scott: Here’s a weird thing.

Scott: It says, distributed by JFC International.

Scott: They could have chosen a different acronym there.

Scott: That’s not very good.

Ronnie: That’s awesome.

Scott: So anyway, I don’t know about this distributor or this company, but the Buncha itself is pretty good.

Scott: And it’s not bad.

Scott: I’ll definitely drink this whole.

Scott: It was $8 for $1 an ounce.

Ronnie: Not bad.

Scott: Yeah, not bad.

Scott: All right, Ronnie, do you have anything else you want to say before we go?

Scott: Any parting shots at anybody?

Scott: Any vows of Vegas victory or anything like that?

Ronnie: I think Vic should finish his bathroom.

Scott: Oh my God.

Scott: It’s been what, 12 weeks?

Scott: I really think so.

Ronnie: I think he should do that.

Ronnie: Yeah.

Ronnie: And I think the Golden Knights are going to go into the playoffs and maybe win another Stanley Cup.

Ronnie: They’re finally starting to play well, so we’ll see what happens.

Ronnie: That’s my two things.

Scott: Okay, it’s pretty likely.

Scott: By the way, I just want to ask you one question, going back to the Vic and the bathroom thing.

Scott: Would you have let your bathroom be torn up for that long?

Ronnie: It’s funny, I did a little bathroom project.

Ronnie: I took out the grout and took out the caulking and all that stuff.

Ronnie: I didn’t send any pictures during the time when Vic was doing that.

Scott: It probably started and stopped by the time between rounds of pictures or something.

Ronnie: Yeah, it took me a little longer than I would have wanted, but our shower is freaking huge.

Ronnie: And when they made it, I think they, I don’t know, some kind of grout, silicone stuff that they put in it that was really hard to get out.

Ronnie: Anyway, it took a long time and I’m 50 years old and wallowing around on the shower floor for hours is not my idea of fun.

Ronnie: So it took a little longer than it should have, but it did not take near as long as what it took Vic.

Ronnie: And I didn’t have near as much work as Vic had to do.

Ronnie: However…

Scott: Yeah, he did have a lot.

Ronnie: We only used a shower, a different shower in our house for two days.

Ronnie: So I’m going to say that was a success.

Scott: That’s how to do it.

Scott: That’s how to do it.

Scott: That’s what I’m talking about.

Scott: I don’t know why it just…

Scott: Yeah, Vic said when he was growing up, something was always under construction.

Scott: I just don’t think I could live that way.

Ronnie: No, I mean, I live in a brand new house.

Ronnie: Well, I say brand new, but now it’s six, seven years old.

Ronnie: But since nothing breaks, typically, it’s new enough.

Scott: Brand new compared to me.

Ronnie: Yeah, when I lived in my other house, it was born in the 70s.

Ronnie: It was made in the 70s.

Ronnie: We always had something going on, but nothing like that.

Ronnie: Now, my wife would probably divorce me if I had something like that.

Ronnie: It wasn’t their main bathroom, but still.

Scott: Still, yeah, it’s too much.

Scott: It’s stressful.

Scott: It just makes you, it just messes up your peace of mind.

Scott: That’s all.

Scott: Right, right.

Ronnie: Sorry, Vic, that we drug your bathroom into the podcast, but you deserved it.

Scott: Yeah, and sorry to everybody else that has actual problems that we’re here whining about how something messy in our lives disturbs us.

Ronnie: Not even our lives, it’s someone else’s life.

Scott: Yeah, it really disturbs me.

Ronnie: It’s not even in my bathroom, my bathroom runs just fine.

Scott: Damn it, Vic, you’ve ruined our lives.

Scott: All right, with that, we should hang up.

Scott: I’m going to tell our friends.

Scott: Tell your friends.

Scott: Friends.