45: Stepping Into Leadership

It's easy to get somewhat complacent, I think, with things being the same for a long time, and then having them shift all of a sudden causes a wake-up call to say, "Oh, geez, like what do I want? What's going on here? And what have I been contributing? And how can I contribute more?" And so, yeah, I think it's been a really good opportunity to do some self-reflection. I'm glad that we're doing this thing. we're reading that book together and I think it was really a call for us to say like we want to preserve the culture that we've had and he was a big part of creating the culture and so it's like how what is what is the culture how do you identify that what are those key traits and things that make it up and then how do we try to carry that out right how do we keep that keep that going so there's a lot to process there I love the idea of the wake up call that was that's That's a really good way to describe it, because I definitely had that experience as well. I was pretty happy doing the management thing, and I'm still happy with it. I'm not saying that that's something that I want to get out of or unhappy with in any way, but it was kind of a shot across a bow, I guess, or something, that I need to continue to move forward. I need to be looking out for what the next thing is and planning for that and putting myself plotting myself on a course. And so a lot of what I've been trying to do and think about and like I said Self-reflect is how do I do that? How do I put my position myself in a great position for that? Whether it's something that I can do or whether it's other people that I can bring into my circle to help me with that. It's been a lot of those types of conversations and it's been really positive, which is really really interesting in the context of losing somebody who you think is extremely valuable. Right. Yeah. [Music] Welcome everybody to the Coffee & Codecast for only about 10 minutes late here. Not too bad, but we're live with the called difficultings. Episode 45 of the Coffee & Codecast, a tech podcast where we talk about neither coffee or code. I'm Kyle Johnson. Hey Kyle, I'm Mike Sheehan and today on the podcast, oh boy, the taste test that we've all been waiting for. The impossible wapper is right here. Right next to our standard wapper, so we're gonna get into that today. And I actually added some Tesla news for you this week buddy. you this week buddy. Well thank you. I thought it would be kind of fun to talk about this one. Someone, a Tesla owner, turned their arm into a key fob. That's an interesting idea. I don't know why you would do that. We'll get into that some more later. And so after several weeks of delay, our topic this week is dealing with the loss of a leader and how to respond to organizational changes. Got a lot to talk about in the next hour. Yeah. Sorry for the delay guys. We had a pretty pretty nifty set up that we're trying to work on. And as all things, like trying to do it live, sometimes it doesn't go as well as you think it's gonna go. - It's a multi-streamer. We were hoping to be out on YouTube today in addition to Facebook, but didn't go so well. It was showing up for me, but not for anybody else. - Yeah, so we'll have to mess around with that a little bit offline and come back next week. But the idea of this is pretty cool because that means that when the cast is live, - We got 6 p.m. Wednesday, central time? - No. - Pacific time. - 6 p.m. Pacific time, everyone's there. We'll be on what Facebook, YouTube, Twitch? - Twitch, maybe, yeah, we're still working on that one. - For all of our Twitch followers. So yeah, we'll be multi-casting once we get this thing figured out. So that's what happened tonight. We had some problems getting that to work and hey, we're back on Facebook today. So there you go. - We made it. - We made it. - Yeah. - 10 minutes. I was actually really impressed, speaking of making it. Before the show, we went down, the Rolling Stones concert tonight. And so the downtown area is already busy enough with rush hour traffic, and it was even crazier with Rolling Stones fans pouring into the city. But we had to do the impossible taste test because it's available now at all, 7,000 BK locations nationwide. And so yeah, we got in a car at what, five, 15 I think, and made it down there, and got back here with like three minutes to go. Made it so-toe and back. Use of the light rail, it worked pretty well. We got back with what, 15 minutes to go. Enough time to get a beer. - Yeah, good. - Frosty beverage and-- - Work on a few technical difficulties and away we go. - Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I was impressed that we got back here in time. It's crazy out there right now. - Yeah, let's get right to it. Want to, you have in here to give Gomer the Gomer? - Yeah, I just wanted to shout out to Gomer, you know, why it joined us on the cast last week and it was really nice to meet Gomer because he's been a longtime listener and chats us up quite a bit on the feed, but I haven't met him yet. So that was a really fun experience that we had and got to go out and have a few beers and have him on the show. Thought it was a pretty good visit. So thanks for coming on to the cast. - Yeah, and kind of in the same pain here, Dave Lester, who, you know, longtime listener of the show, likes to bust on me a little bit. - Oh! (laughing) a little more detail than I can to know. He likes to make fun of my speech impediments. He likes to give you a hard time. He's one of our long time listener critics. He's always trying to improve the cast. He's got a lot of good feedback for us. Yeah, exactly. I got to talk to him a little bit. I've met him a number of times, but apparently he didn't remember me. So I've talked to him. I got to talk to him of a fair amount at fuel the other night, which was pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. See you in my couple days in a row now. That's pretty cool, man. Well, I'm glad you guys are getting a little more face time. We've got to have Dave on the show at some point. I think it's just the matter of timing. He's got some things going on right now. It's not a great time for him to come on the show. But we're going to get him on here maybe this fall or later on this year sometime when he can make that happen. So looking forward to that as well. Dave is a good-- among other things like he's in UX-- his background's in UX design had worked previously with Amazon and various other startups. So he's got a lot of cool stories to tell, a lot of neat experiences in the startup space. - Yeah. Well excellent man, let's move on to the main event here. We got some cool stuff here, we got the Whopper. - We need a drum roll, I don't think we have a drum roll on there, but what do we have here? - Oh, that's not it. - Oh, that's not it either. - That's kind of like a drum roll. - Fair. - All right, we'll stick with that. - Hey, the main event. - We got the BK standard Whopper here. - Oh, I don't know if you can see this on the video. - And the BK Impossible Whopper. - And the Impossible Whopper. So I'm gonna pass that over to Mike and he can cut those bad boys in half. - I'm gonna cut it in half and we're gonna show you each what it looks like. - Oh, you're gonna walk it up to the camera there. - Yeah, I think we should do that. This'll be one of those Reddit posts where it's like reality versus the advertisement. - That's right. (laughing) - How does it really look? - Never really look. It just looks like a smashed nasty burger in real life. - Wow. - But you know, in the advertisements, it's some big fluffy bun. - Beautiful. - The lettuce is perfect. - Oh yeah, that definitely is a sloppy wapper. (laughing) - Excellent, I got that one, let me get this one open. - All right, number one, the real wapper, the all beef wapper. - Flame grilled, too, perfection. - That's a lot of mayonnaise or whatever, whatever special sauce they put on it. (laughing) - You're on a roll tonight buddy, let's see here. (mimicking) Riveting. - Yep, slicing through this one. So I'm a little quiet, I'm not quite on the mic here, I'm trying to cut this open. (laughs) - So these are available apparently at all locations and Mike informed me that via the BK app. If you wanna do a taste test, they have a coupon for this. - Yeah, you gotta download the Burger King app on your phone and they have a coupon. I don't know how long this promotion is gonna last. It said it was gonna expire on Sunday, but it was also available again today. So I think they keep rerunning it. But anyway, if you have the BK app, you can get a promotional offer. It's $7 for the original WAPR and also an impossible WAPR, which is basically half off 'cause like they cost about seven bucks a piece or something like that. So buy one, get one. They just want you to do it. It's the taste test promotion and you get one impossible and one regular. - All right, how are we gonna go about this? We need, do we start with the standard? - Yeah, I suppose we just start with the standard. Do you wanna like, I don't know, can you hold it up to the camera? Can you walk it up there maybe? And then I'll like you can just hold it up. Let's just hold them both up, you know to the camera. I mean, I don't know It looks like a fucking wapper. Yeah, they look pretty much the same. I don't think there's really much to show there All right, so we're just gonna dive in and just taste it. Yeah, all right. Yeah, let's do that then we need like a palette cleanser Sure. Yeah, I've got a little cook right there. I've got there you go All right Drum roll. All right the regular one There you go What do we got at the big onion? Here we go. Mmm. Alright. Pretty solid. It's a good burger. Flame broiled. Lavasauce. Mmm-hmm. Totally maybe got like tons of mayo. Saus the pickled. It's a good flame grilled patty. I like the patty. All right, now I gotta clean the palette. Hit reset again. That's a wopper. That's definitely your standard issue wopper right there. You need a spit bucket. Oh, that's nice. That's a nice sound effect. You can hear you swishing over there. Yeah, I really swish that around. All right. Here we go. Go ahead. This is the main event right here. This better taste exactly like a wopper. Now let's just say I'm looking at it. All the hype that you put into this. And really like to me, the size of the patty is the same, right? I don't see really any differences in the size. The texture looks about the same. You've got-- Definitely looks like meat, no doubt about that. Looks like meat, and it is flame grilled. It doesn't have the grilled sear marks on it quite the same. Maybe on the other side of the dish. Yeah, my mind has a little bit. Yeah, it does a little bit. It looks a little more dry, I would say. Yeah. Yep. But still has a pretty decent texture. I mean, it looks has the texture of meat. I don't really see any difference when I look at the two of these things. All right, well, here we go. - All right, buddy. - Now that's definitely a different flavor to me. I don't get nearly the hit of the flambroil as I do with the other one. - It does seem a tad drier, doesn't it? - Mm-hmm. - I would agree. but still tastes like a burger, just a drier burger. And then, yeah, not nearly the kind of fakey smoke BK flavor. - That's interesting. I wanna do that again because, yeah, I mean, I think, it certainly tastes like a burger. It doesn't taste like a veggie burger or anything like that. But yeah, it has a little bit. I'm just gonna try just the patty part of it. - Oh, just going for the meat. Yeah, it's a little, yeah, that's a good idea actually. - And mine does have the flame grill. - Yeah, you're gonna go on there. - Yeah. on the other side. - Yeah. - Texture is perfect. - It has the texture of a patty. - They've nailed that for sure. I wouldn't say it has like the most flavor I've ever had. - No, exactly right. Like to me, that's kind of a flavorless. Yeah, you go back to the regular and you get that super hit of smoke. - Mm-hmm. - It's also a little a coarser, it's a little harder to chew on, whereas I kind of feel like the impossible whopper, it kind of just falls apart easier. - Yeah, I would agree with that. It seems a little more like, I don't know, flaky. That's not a good word, but yeah. - Yeah, well, I wouldn't say it's bad. I definitely, like, if you were to just like pass out off on me, I probably wouldn't know the difference. If it was a blind taste test and you just gave me one or the other, I wouldn't probably be able to identify. Yeah, I agree. If someone just put this in a bag, I wouldn't know any different. You really have to-- it's a very discerning taste here. You really have to go back and forth a few times to kind of get the difference on it, too. What's the-- like, maybe we talked about this before, but what are the nutritional stats on one versus the other? Are there any difference? Like, are they still-- is it still pretty heavy in calorie, content, and sodium, and all that sort of thing? Is it generally-- is it healthier? It is pretty similar nutritional content. The one difference is it has 15% less fat than a traditional whopper does. - Okay. - Excuse me. And it has, what did she say? Well, the old wifey chimed in there. She goes, "Glad, I'm not slaving over the stove over here." - Oh. (laughs) Making me some dinner, maybe. - Yeah. Well, he might be ready for some dessert when he gets home. - Maybe you're ready for a, what is this? Incredible. - The impossible. - Impossible, that's it? Yeah, yeah, I'll bring you the leftovers. Yeah, welcome. Yeah, the leftovers that we chewed through all of them. That's really sweet, man. That's a nice gesture. Oh my God, the gentleman who are, I wonder if she married you, man. Yeah, 15% less fat and 90% less cholesterol is in the impossible opera. So in that regard, it is healthier. I heard anecdotally there's more car bohydrates in it. I didn't verify that on their website, but that's what others have told me. So I think it's very similar. I wouldn't label it healthy food. It's still fast food, but I think the main benefits here really are just about the impact on the environment. So this has grown in a lab. It's not like, you don't have to, all the CO2, all the carbon dioxide emissions from the methane gas and all the water, it takes to grow the food for the cows and all the whole process. It really has a dramatic reduction on resources for that. And I think that's the real benefit there. obviously not having to slaughter animals and go through that whole process. And so I think, you know, certainly for a ground beef substitute patty, I think it fits the mold pretty perfectly. And especially in a burger when you have all these fixings, when you have the pixels and the mayonnaise and the tomato and everything else, like you really can't tell the difference. Yeah. Only when we kind of did this, the patty by itself, could you kind of tell the texture was slightly different and a little less flavor? Yeah, I would agree. Well done. Definitely a little less smoky, but texture is perfect. And like I said, in a blind taste test, you would, I don't think you'd ever be able to identify which one you got. So I think everybody, I would recommend it. At least give it a shot. See what you think. I don't think you'd be able to notice. - I'm impressed. - Yeah. - That was a fun test, dude. - Yeah, thanks for organizing that. - Woo! - Should we move on to the news? - Let's get out of here we go. - Here we go. (upbeat music) - We have Tesla news. - Hey, I put that in there for you today, especially for you and not only one but two pieces of Tesla news today. I did not put any of the Tesla news into the show notes today. Thank you very much. Looking out for you, man. I know you had a little bit of a drought there last few weeks and so I wanted to help you out. Thank you. The first story is kind of fun. Tesla owner turns her arm into an implants in RFID chip into her arm into a key. This is fascinating. I don't-- so if you have a Model 3, the way that you access the car is through an RFID card. You put it up to the, what do they call that? The pillar between the two driver side. - Is that what it is? I don't know how it works. - Yeah. And that's how you unlock the card. There is no key. - It's not proximity though. You have to actually tap the card kind of. - Yeah, it's proximity, but it's really, really, really close. You have to basically be almost right on top of it. - Okay. - Not gonna use the, unrelated, but if you use the phone, that's different, because it's a Bluetooth or something. - That's correct, yeah. So you can see in this tech crunch article that you posted here, they have a kind of a black and key. That is literally the key to the car. And that's how you access it. And so you just tap that on the car as a matter of fact, here's exactly what they look like. That's it. Yeah, that's something I'm looking at. And so yeah, she just implanted a version of this, I guess, in her arm. And so she can just do the same thing. Tap her arm onto the pillar of the car and it'll open up the car. Very cool. Yeah, what did she say she tried doing a couple different things? She She already has another chip in her forearm and she was going to try to just get the code from this RFID into that chip because it's a programmable RFID. It didn't work because of the Tesla security. So now she had to get a second chip. She took apart the key fob and had that one implanted as well. So now she's got a couple chips. She's a bio hacker. Yep. Amy D.D. D.D. Has a page on Amy Double D. on Hackaday I/O that explains the project and the whole process. Doesn't show whether it works or not. Well, that's kind of a bummer. You would think that would be a pivotal part of the whole thing. I'm showing you work. I implanted this chip in my arm, but I didn't give a valid test. It's rough to me. It works. Well, and the funny thing about that is you could do exactly what you described with the Bluetooth key entry or Bluetooth phone entry and have that in your back pocket and just be like, "Oh, boop, look, it opened up the car." Well, the phone didn't, you just didn't have it in the video, right? true, you could fake that, but easily, right? It's interesting, though. I mean, that's definitely an interesting use case for something like this, like an embedded chip. All right, there's a lot of talk about that kind of stuff to store, I don't know, data about you. Right. Medical data. Yeah. Maybe think of like a pet, you chip pets, right? So that there's information about the pet that can be scanned. Same thing for people they want to, but that, you know, Of course, that's a big ethical or security concern for people. - You need to have a sleeve over the chip so that people can't just read it. - Or a FID sleeve. - Yeah. - Put it on the back of your neck. So you have to put something around your neck. - Metal, what is that? Like a metal, like, fair-a-day cage type of a thing. - Yeah. Well, they make wallets with that now. All it's just to have a metal, some kind of what metallic layer that's embedded in between the leather or whatever, and it blocks any kind of radio frequency signals, scrambles it so you can't really read what's on the chip. You can't get any of the credit card data or anything like that that's in there. - Did you play some non royalty free music again? - No, that was the royalty free station, dude. - Oh. - According to Spotify. - Well, it looks like Facebook is complaining. - Really? I wonder if somebody put some non royalty free music on the royalty free station. - Oh, that's not cool. I don't know. Well, the same volume three, electro house. Hopefully we're still here. Yikes, they threaten us down, huh? It's what it said. I wonder if that was the first time 'cause it was really quick. Like it went on and came off. No, maybe. And I had to restart it. All right. Well, I don't know. Hopefully we're still on. We'll see if not. I guess you'll catch us on the podcast later on. That's right. All right, what's the next piece of Tesla news here that you added to the show notes? Oh, this is cool. So this is another story, kind of a hack that another Tesla owner came up with. This guy was a security guy. So you've heard about Century Mode. You've talked about Century Mode on the Tesla car before. This is utilizing all the cars' cameras to, if they detects motion, I believe, it kind of captures some footage so you can see if someone's trying to break into the car. That's right. And so this security researcher wanted to take it a step further than that. And he developed this surveillance detection scout. Okay, it sounds like we're still on. That's good. A surveillance detection scout mod that turns a Model 3 or Model S into an observation deck. So this is interesting. The project plugs in Nvidia, Jetson, Xavier, computer. I'm not familiar with that one, but you plug that into the USB port and it uses open source machine learning to detect faces and license plates. And it'll send you a notification if it repeatedly spots the same plate or person, giving you a warning that someone might be tailing you or preparing to steal your car. This is pretty fascinating, man, because I can tell you like just knowing from my own use of the Model 3, like what we do for Century Motors, we just have a USB thumb drive plugged in. And in the Model 3 stores all that content onto the thumb drive in a specific folder structure. And there's a lot of these people that are doing hacks into this. and they'll plug in like Raspberry Pis and stuff like that. And they'll create all this sophisticated software that can pull immediately like when you get home and connect your Wi-Fi, it'll connect up, it'll pull all the data off of the thumb drive, upload it to some other third party storage so that you have your thumb drive and your data always synced. And so this is taking you to step further in applying machine learning to the videos that are being stored on the device. And that's pretty crazy and creepy in a way. It is very creepy because yeah, like they said, you can recognize if it sees the same patterns over and over again and notify you. So pretty cool case if you're on the, if it's your car, but it's kind of scary if you're being surveilled. So right. It's crazy that I can notice the same people, same faces and license plates. Like when I look at the video quality of the videos that are output onto the thumb drive, they're, I mean, it's good quality, but I don't know that I would be able to easily discern faces. that it's too grainy or it's not a high enough resolution. - Yeah, unless maybe somehow the Tesla sub system has higher quality video available and it's just writing a lower quality to the disk, I'm not sure, but this is pretty impressive. And it's funny that you could effectively be driving down the road and just be collecting all this information. Think about the, you could effectively, it can be like parking patrol, what's the word I'm looking for? Meetermades, right? Driving down the road and figuring out where people park on a consistent basis, right? Just based on-- You could collect a lot of data that way. Or even right now, I think they've passed a lot of block this in Seattle, at least. But the guys chalk your tires. Yeah. So that's defacing your property. That's right. Yeah, it's a violation of your-- I lost my train of thought. It's illegal. They declared it illegal. So you can't do that anymore. but uh... i don't think i don't see them doing it but they still i don't know what are they how do they enforce that then yeah i don't know well i mean now they don't uh... it's it's not even like because it used to be that you use the tickets you know the sticky tickets it's taking your window and now it's license plate based uh... i don't know how they determine whether or not you've moved in a given time period because to me this u_i_ would be one way to handle it or the machine learning is that you could just drive the parking enforcement cars go up and down the street and it would just take a note of where the car is at in the time stamp and to become back later, it could just flag it without even touching the vehicle or anything. Just looking at the license plate. The good news for Tesla owners is that, you know, if my car was parked right here on the street, I could just connect to it with my phone here and just move it, you know, a few feet forward. Yeah. Yeah. And then I'm in a different position than I was before. So then I won't get ticketed, right? If the chalk was still the method, then that would be correct. But now that it's, now that it's just using like license plates, I think you have to move down a spot or something like that. - Oh, all right. You gotta get a little more creative now. - Well, still pretty cool that somebody, like people are doing a lot of crazy stuff with like the data that these cars are collecting, 'cause I mean, effectively they're smart cars, right? - Well, what's crazy about it to me is that, yeah, and all they didn't really modify much of the car here, they plugged in a computer into the USB. - Right. - They're using data that's already available. - That's right, yeah. So really low, I don't know what effort he had to go to get it to that point, but I mean the solution itself is pretty simple. Plug it in and go. And it's pretty interesting. I wonder, did he does this say anything like needing an additional power source to do the processing on that or was the car able to supply the power via USB to power that because it's an Nvidia processor and if you're doing, if you're doing that kind of processing against that many images. That's got to be, yeah, that can't be. It's got to be pretty power intensive. I can't imagine that you're going to do that over what a five volt or connection there for usb it's got to be something else maybe add a third an extra battery off to the side or yeah Still very cool really cool cool project. Yeah, this is somewhat unrelated, but as far as Securities concerned. Did you hear the news that there was a Another security guy embedded a chip into apple lightning apple usb-c cable Feel like maybe I did, but I don't recall the details This shit was wicked crazy like they took a regular iPhone charger So it would be a lightning cable because they didn't go to USB-C yet They took a regular US Apple Lightning cable opened up like the fat end of the USB Embedded a chip in there That and basically like I could hand you a K. Oh, here's a cable man Like if you need to use a charger they plug it into your computer. It has a Wi-Fi access Point on it and it allows you the you know anybody that knows how to get into the Wi-Fi to take over your computer and like, you know, screen capture and do all kinds of shit at the command level. Read any data that's coming across that wire pretty much, probably right? Read data, take ownership of the machine, like do whatever they want. They have basically full access at that point. I've heard similar things like this about airport chargers. Like people warn very, very highly never to plug anything into an airport charger. Yeah, I just heard that recently too. That if you use the ones at the airport, some of them will actually scrape your data. >> Yep. Get your contacts, whatever they want to get. >> Yep. There's actually devices for this exact purpose of your seeing these. USB condoms. >> [LAUGHTER] >> Wrap it up. >> Yeah. There is such a thing. I'll have to find one and put it in the show notes, but effectively, what it does is it disables the data pins. >> Get out of here. >> You get the charge, but the data access is denied. >> Wow. >> There is such a thing, but yeah, I'll have to link it up in the show notes. >> Yeah. Data condoms. >> That makes a lot of sense because yeah, you've got what four contacts you get your positive negative and then you've got your data and data out kind of thing and so you don't really need those two when you're charging but you know if you're borrowing the charger they're gonna take advantage of all four of those things. Yeah exactly. That's crazy man. Didn't even think about that before. Okay well be careful out there. Yeah. So what do we got here? This looks like a piece of news that you put in I don't remember this one. Yeah are you familiar with Tumblr? That's just another blog site if I'm not mistaken, isn't it? I think it was called a micro blog. Really what it was back in the day was just like a really easy way to post a variety of different content. It might be a picture, it might be text, it might be just a single quote. I think they had like six or seven different specific types of things that you could post. They'd provide you easy theming for a website. You could stand up a subdomain type website, whatever, coffeecodecast.tumbler.com or whatever. - Yeah. - Really easy way to just join a, or create a blog and post content. And it's been around forever. Like they were one of the kind of, you know, back in the web 2.0 thing with, you know, everything with the R on the end. They were one of the original ones that did that kind of thing. So been around forever. And then recently, more recently, it's been kind of a place for dirty content, if you will. - Oh, really? - Yeah. - Yeah, just like what it's become known for, for whatever reason, but then that got buttoned up. Like suddenly they said, like, nope, Tumblr no longer allows this kind of content. So like, effectively now it's become kind of a junk platform 'cause nobody used it for anything but that. - Right, okay. - So anyway, the news here is that Verizon is selling, Verizon's the ones that clamp down on the adult content. But they are now selling Tumblr to WordPress, which is another probably the biggest blogging platform there is. - Yeah, and it really is so much more now, right? Like, isn't it really for a lot of people a fully featured website? I mean, really, you can create your own website inward press. They have so many modules and plugins, right? - It's kind of a full-blown CMS at this point. - Yeah. - Yeah. - You can add all kinds of different types of, I don't know, you would wanna call it content types in addition to your typical article. can handle images and multimedia and video and all kinds of different things. So just another thing under the word press umbrella, I don't really know exactly what they're going to do with it. But they bought it for what they say. It was like a nominal fee or something I think was the word or the verbage that they used. Okay. Yeah. So got it for a little bit of nothing. So somebody said, I'm just reading the Twitter comments. That's kind of funny. At least it's not Facebook. should have just been bought by PornHub by CornNub. Bringing it back around. Oh, funny. Okay. So, yeah, what the hell are they going to do with it? It's a great question. I don't know if they'll try and make kind of a micro-bloggy type website with WordPress based on this. Okay. Because it is, I do have to say that it was incredibly easy to use. WordPress is generally pretty easy to use as well, but I feel like gets a little bit more sophisticated than what Tumblr was. So I think if you want something quick and easy and set up really fast to start posting something, then I think Tumblr was really, really well done. It does say here just in terms of valuation. So when they were Yahoo bought them in 2013 for $1.1 billion. And automatic, oh that's automatic Incas, the owner of WordPress got it. So automatic reportedly bought it for less than 3 million. 3 million. So we'll change. Two thirds of its value, at least. So it's a bargain. Yeah. It's on sale. Yeah. Crazy. Okay. Kind of interesting. I've posted a few sites on there before. My wife's Zoom page when she was doing that. We posted on there and it worked pretty slick. Pretty easy to set up and pretty easy for her to post things and make modifications. So just thought it was an interesting thing that happened here. And that's pretty recent. I think it happened this week, earlier this week. - Yeah, that was news that I just saw come across there. - Yeah. - Tumblr. Yeah, that was like Flickr. - Yeah, exactly. All the ones that ended in R. - Yeah. - I don't know any other ones right off the top of my head, but I don't either. - Yeah, not that. - There was a bunch of them. - Wow, very interesting to see that. Okay. - Moving on, we got some shipping updates, logistics. - Yeah. - Shipping updates. - I just kind of lumped them into one because there was a few shipping related things. A lot of these came out of the, by trusty Puget Sound Business Journal. We talked about that this week too. Everybody was talking about what good content they have. - Yeah, yeah, they have great content. They are really the single source of local business news. They kind of have a lock on that. It's hard to get that kind of news from any other source. The times might run some of the bigger stories like the acquisition Salesforce buying tab low, but you're not gonna see a lot of the little stuff in the paper, so you just sound business journal. Yeah, this is cool. So the first piece of news here is that Amazon is seeking approval now to test drone delivery in more rural areas. And they have quite a lot of conditions on this one. They have there. So you know they have their own drone. They call it the MK27 drone. I believe that the request is that they could deliver packages that were five pounds or less. They're trying to seek some kind of Exemption from some of the FAA rules that typical aircraft have to follow But so so basically like what they want to do in this first test is have a delivery system that will bring packages the customers in 30 minutes or less five pounds or less and And it's got to be in places that aren't going to be in any kind of no fly zones of course and that sort of a thing But they're getting one step closer. I mean this is a huge thing that I think everybody's jumping jumping in on now in the commerce Space so you know the walmart's testing drones ubers testing drones for delivery For they're like they're you know not only uber eats, but they had like a little delivery thing going on there too, so Getting very close This is pretty interesting too because like in the in the rural areas like you're gonna have many many many miles between Delivery points probably right so like I'm looking here and it talks about like five pounds like you mentioned The drones range is about 15 miles so theoretically There's not a whole lot not probably a whole lot of households that are gonna be able to be in the range You know if you draw what a 30 mile circle right around their delivery center where it is if they're gonna do this Probably not that many homes in a rural area Yeah, and I guess it depends on how rural they're gonna get, but certainly you're right if you're gonna do this somewhere in You know Nebraska where I'm from my neck of the woods over there Iowa Then yeah, I could see it being if you're in very rural areas and yeah, that's gonna be a difficult feat It's probably gonna be a thing of scale because they're gonna have We saw the patent that they issued recently for their hot air balloon warehouse. No. Oh this thing's wicked man and you gotta check this out. So yeah, they filed a patent or patent pending on this design for, it looks like a huge blimp that just kinda, you know, the old Good Your Blimp. This thing like floats around up in the air and it's got a bunch of packages and shit. And then the drones can kind of go into it and come out of it and like go fetch more packages. - Okay. - Yeah, and I swear to God, I wasn't reading this like on April 1st, like this is a real thing that I saw, the Amazon blimp, I don't know what they call it. - This must be the Amazon Hot Air balloon prime, air patent. - Yeah. - Stealthy drones. - Maybe it was, is that, was it really just, that could have been April Fool's thing. (laughing) - Yep. - April 2nd. - Yeah, I came out the day after. - Aww. - Bummer, it looked so cool, man. You can see it. (laughing) - Oh, was, that was the April Fool's thing. - Oh boy. - I'm making false news, I'm sorry. The design looked very good. - Very good. - So yeah, I guess they still have to figure that out. I mean, that's one way to do it. But yes, this is just for testing by the way too. Like I'm sure that the range on these things can go far past that. By the time it's commercially available, they'll have greater ranges and capable of holding larger payloads and it won't be such an issue. But also it's gonna be so much cheaper than having all these delivery vehicles. They could have millions of these things all over the place. So who cares, right? Like they could just space them out everywhere. - Well, and it's gonna be highly dependent on weight too, right? If you're carrying a five pound package the range is gonna be much different than if you're carrying a one pound package. - Right, yeah. So very cool, I'm excited for this kind of stuff to come. I can see a day where I have a big landing target on my roof, you can just drop it right on my roof and I'll just go pick it up. That'll be great. For the thieves, I don't have to worry about people taking crap off my doorstep. - Yeah, they're gonna have to figure that part out too. I know that they have, like if there's a physical person delivering the packages, they have new services that'll bring it into the house or put it into your trunk. - Where your garage? I think there's a garage thing too. - So there's some of those options, the drone might not, I don't know if the drone can do that. So that would be another consideration is how do you do that? Do you have to have special delivery boxes? There are lock boxes that it can access or something like that? I don't know. Anyway, that was my first logistics shipping news. The other one, the other two actually are related around FedEx and some, I think this is interesting. I'm not surprised by this, but you remember back a few months ago that when Amazon really started to expand at prime air and there was a lot of what am I trying to say. Stories being covered at the time about like them being real competition to UPS and FedEx. And so they had interviewed the owners of both companies and CEOs and they were both saying to the time like no, Amazon is not a threat to our core business like they represent such a small percentage of our packages and blah blah blah blah like we don't really care what they're doing and they can they can buy their planes and we'll be just fine. Well FedEx recently had a contract with Amazon for renewal and they decided not to renew it and basically saying that they acknowledge them as competition now and that they don't want to carry the contract out. I don't know what else to say about it. That's kind of the story. It's pretty, like I think Amazon is delivering more and more of their packages. Like the things that I get anymore, usually, unless they're coming from clear across the country or usually delivered via Amazon careers. Yeah. So FedEx has been slowly being phased out, I think, by Amazon anyway, so I have a suspicion that under the covers there's probably a little bit of a disagreement as to how that contract was going to work. Okay. Yeah. Because I know that Amazon's prime, you know, their goal, just like you mentioned, is to become their own shipping company. Yeah. Just like any other thing, they're getting their hooks into that kind of organization as well. Yeah, vertical integration, right? They just want to own the whole thing. Everything. And that's all they're going to say of money. I think we talked about numbers last time where their shipping went from, it really exploded. I wanna say it was like from three million to, it's a three billion to 12 billion. I mean, it was some huge number. I don't remember now what I said last time, but it's like hockey stick growth kind of a thing. Like their expenses for shipping and now that they're doing one day deliveries and all of that, it's even more out of hand. - And it's just part of their business plan. like they get into this kind of space and then they get into the food business with the Whole Foods purchase. I think just recently I thought I saw something about them getting into the pharmacy market. - Trying to deal with the cost of pharmaceutical drugs. - Yeah, so they're just getting their hooks into everything, which is probably bad for a lot of reasons, but maybe good for others. Makes them a very large monolithic giant, which is pretty scary. But yeah, that's kind of their business model, just keep expanding and keep expanding and take all the profits that they get and reinvest and reinvest. I remember back years ago, you always hear that, "Oh, Amazon makes no profit." Well, it's because they just continue to reinvest it into something. - Everything went back into the company for a long time. - Exactly. - Yeah. - They make plenty of money. - Yeah, and Bayzo says said before that I think he gives six years for some of these things to be successful or not. So he's not looking for overnight results, right? Like he's willing to invest lots of money and R&D and lots of time to prove these things out and do it at a loss and eventually win by squeezing everyone out by margin and volume. So nobody else can compete. - And then that's all well and good until you're the only player now and now you control price, which is that's where it becomes a big problem. - Yeah, yeah. - Well, move it along to the last one. So this is the other FedEx story. Really that FedEx ground is going to start expanding Sunday delivery. - Sunday delivery. - Yeah. And so yeah, I think this is another competition thing because Amazon was partnering with USPS to do Sunday deliveries on their packages. So now FedEx is getting into the space. They've always done this, I guess, during peak holiday season. So that's not entirely new, but starting next January, it's gonna do it seven days a week year round for the majority of the US population. Everything okay? - Our disc is showing us red. - Oh, we're on our disc space. - We got 23 minutes left on the cast before our recording ends prematurely. - Oh good, well the show over by then. - We're good. - Excellent, I don't know why they got filled up so quick. Is it the multi-track thing? - Probably. - Okay, we'll figure that out. Yeah, so they're gonna be starting January, seven days a week, FedEx deliveries. - USPS hates this Sunday delivery, by the way. I know that for a fact. - Really? - Our carrier the other day was out walking around on the Sunday and we're like, what are you doing out here on the Sunday? He's like, oh, Amazon delivery, I hate to shit. - These bastards, yeah. - They can be delivered. - So is it mandatory? Are they have to do this? Or is it just like, you get time in a half, grumble grumble, but you do it? - Oh, I highly doubt they get paid overtime or any kind of additional wage. - You don't think so? - It's probably just another slot in the schedule. You know, maybe you work five days or whatever and then somebody else comes in for another two on Saturday, Sunday, I don't know. crazy man, I would think that they have to pay them more for that. But I don't know, that'd be something to look into. This statistic blew my mind. So I knew that when I worked at FedEx, no, I worked at UPS as the Hub Sorter. And this was back in 2003, 2005. So 14 years ago, they were delivering in the ballpark of-- this is before Amazon really exploded. But at that time, they were delivering 15 million packages daily, which was a pretty crazy number to think at that time. Fast forward and now across all networks, so FedX, UPS, USPS, 50 million packages a day are delivered. And that's just for small parcels in the United States. This isn't global. So this is huge. And they said that that volume will double to 100 million by 2026. You're going to need drones. You can't physically have enough drivers on the road delivering 100 million small packages in the United States. All your roads would be clogged with delivery drivers basically? In one day. Yeah. That's just insane. That is insane. FedEx is already working with Walmart and Walgreens to provide next day shipping. So that's what's going on here. They're really just trying to get a piece of the pie here with the next day deliveries and help out, get Wal-Mart's business and Wal-Greens business and try to take down or compete with Amazon on same day deliveries. Well, I like my packages a day earlier. That's all I have to say about that. Yeah, me too. Bob LaBla FedEx had nearly two million smart post packages given to the US. PS will now be delivered by FedEx. Cool. Well, I was trying to peek around to see if I could see anything about the pay, but I'm not finding anything good. That's helpful. What is Convoik? Christina said that's why digital freight network. Convoik is a service you could think of them as the Uber of freight. Okay. And is this autonomous? No. What they basically are trying to do is, as I understand it, the trucking industry will drive a lot. trucks on the road that are driving effectively empty. So like, okay. So you might take a load from Seattle to, let's say, Spokane. - Yeah. - But then you need to, that trailer needs to return somewhere to get another load. So it's driving empty to somewhere. And so what Convoys idea is to try and find that vehicle a load so that you can return with a load and be more efficient and obviously make more money. - That is really cool. I'm looking at this here. So you can bid on it. Yeah, we'll say, okay, here's 268 miles, here's how much cargo. Wow, what a cool deal, it's just a little app too. - Yeah, yeah, literally it's, I think, you know, like I said, the kind of the Uber for trucking a little bit. Like, hey, you have a gig here that you need to haul. - Yeah, you know, here it is. - That's a great idea, because yeah, I've heard of that. I'm familiar with that, you know, just had some experience with that back in the day And I know that you do have a lot of those, like they call them LTL less than truckload, where the whole thing is not, you know, you don't need a whole truckload for delivery. And so you have capacity to take on more stuff, but there was no easy way to kind of coordinate that before. So what a great idea. Yeah. Have been to their offices. They got some really cool offices over there. Where are they? Somewhere downtown, maybe in the Bell Tower. I can't recall at this point. Really? Definitely have been up there. Very sweet. Yeah, I'm looking at their website, it doesn't say. Has their number? 206. address but whoa what a sweet company. It's a great idea they're doing well. I bet. Or at least we're doing well and I think they, more than likely I don't think they've ever announced it but I'm sure they have their fingers into some autonomous stuff too as well. I would guess why wouldn't you at that point? Right. Yeah. Maybe you can get the Tesla trucks in your network. There you go. And bought a boom. Yeah. Great. Awesome dude. Well they're in West Lake. Okay. Thank you. Oh did they move? It's a Christina set. - Interesting. - I don't really know what's going on there. - I don't ever go to West Lake anymore, so I feel like that's a long way down there. - So, did we shoot ourselves in the foot again on this topic? What are we gonna do here? - No, we're good. Let's go for it. - All right. - Well, what do we got? - 18 minutes. - Okay, 18. All right, great. Yeah, 'cause we started 10 minutes later. A few minutes later. - Yeah. - Let it run. - All right, kick it off for us, buddy. This has been in the works for a few weeks now. - Normally, I'd be willing to go past the 18 minutes, but because our cards are going to fill up, that we pretty much have to call it quits. But yeah, recently in the org, we've had a pretty prominent leader that has stepped aside isn't gone, but is no longer-- - Taking on a new role. - Yeah, it's no longer in our organization quite as often. Like we don't have day to day interaction with them at all or much, right? - That's fair, yeah. Traveling a lot more, working in kind of a different capacity and so yeah like is definitely well hasn't been around a whole lot in the last few weeks actually. Yeah exactly so it's an interesting topic because it's been very top of mind here at the office and has triggered a lot of different I don't know emotions and conversations and things like that around around the office and around multiple people here between both you you know, for myself, you and many of the other people here, both in leadership and not. So I thought it might be an interesting topic to kind of unpack a little bit and discuss. - I think so, and what I will say to kick it off too, is that I think any organization struggles with change on any level. I know that when we were going through the acquisition process that a lot of people were on pins and needles and just didn't know what to expect because our group is pretty diverse and we've got a lot of people now that have been through this multiple times before. And sometimes these things can be successful and other times they can be really not lucrative for the employees where companies will come in and just say, look, we just want your technology and we're gonna get rid of everybody or you just don't know what's gonna happen. And even if things start off well, as ours has been very well, this point, what, nine months in, if not quite. And you just never know. At some point, something could happen. You don't have the same sense of control anymore, because it's really up to HQ, right? So I think there's always been some concern that things were going to change. And what's that going to look like? And this was kind of the first piece where there's been a shift. I feel like so far in the whole process. Right. Yeah, I would agree with you. This has been one of the biggest-- probably one of the bigger impacts. I would say that has happened since any kind of transition that has occurred for the company. And I think generally there's probably a couple of different ways that this might be approached by people, right? There's probably the kind of the fighter flight mentality, right? You might just bail. - Right. - I've lost the leader that I wanted to work for that I trust that whatever, there may be a whole slew of reasons. You might be fearful of who's coming. - What's gonna happen next? - Yeah. - And it creates a lot of uncertainty about my job I was in a good place, but maybe the new person's not going to be as easy to work with. All these things come to mind, right? Yeah, exactly. So I think in the office of that would be a fight, in which case we've talked about this a lot. So as other people stepping up to fill the void, trying to do a little bit more than their share or a lot more than their share or whatever, you know, there's a lot of different ways that that could be sliced. Because currently in this organization it's not being filled, right? there's a massive hole that's being left. And so everybody that's at the level below is trying to raise themselves up, pick up any of the slack, and carry on without. Yeah, I would agree with that. And it's been interesting just to see the responses. I think for the most part, we've seen more of the fight. I think there's a lot of unknown uncertainty still. And so nothing to be too alarming at this point for people to be taking off. but I think certainly a lot of people jumping in to step up and kind of see it as a land grab. Like, ooh, there's an opportunity here that I want to get it and it's time to let that be known and a lot of people have done that. - And it's early too. The flight idea I think would have in later, once a replacement had been named or something like that, or if they were going to decide not to fill it or whatever the item might be there at the end of the line, like that's when people would decide, "No, I don't want to hang out for this anymore." Right. So I don't think you'll see that until six months down the road or something like that. But it's been a really interesting experience just kind of for myself, I can say, just self-reflecting upon the person that we lost and trying to find the qualities and things that made that person a leader and made that person a-- somebody that I admire. And so it's been fun to self-reflect and figure out those things and figure out how I can kind of work some of those qualities into my own leadership skills. And I think it's pushed both of us in different ways, both with the book that we talked about last week, which we don't have in here, by the way. - Dare to lead. - Yeah, Dare to lead by Brunei Brown. - Yeah. - I'll put a link in the show now. It's a great, great, great book. I've been, I'm about halfway through that. And it's been really, really interesting. More of an affirmation really than like an aha moment. It's a lot of stuff that I feel like I already do are already new, but she puts it into a very clear context and I'm just like, yep, that's what I do. I'm glad that I'm doing what seems to be the correct thing. It's been a really interesting experience just going through all the different self-reflection steps and adding more to my leadership repertoire, I guess. Yeah, I would say that when something like this happens, it definitely forces you out of your routine or out of your habit a little bit. So it's easy to get somewhat complacent, I think, with things being the same for a long time and then having them shift all of a sudden causes a wake-up call to say, "Oh, geez, like what do I want and what's going on here and what have I been contributing and how can I contribute more?" And so, yeah, I think it's been a really good opportunity to do some self-reflection. I'm glad that we're doing this thing. were reading that book together. And I think it was really a call for us to say, we want to preserve the culture that we've had. And he was a big part of creating the culture. And so it's like, what is the culture? How do you identify that? What are those key traits and things that make it up? And then how do we try to carry that out? How do we keep that going? So there's a lot to process there. I love the idea of the wake up call. That was a really good way to describe it, because I definitely had that experience as well. I was pretty happy to kind of doing the management thing. And I'm still happy with it. I'm not saying that that's something that I want to get out of or are unhappy with in any way, but it was kind of a shot across a bow, I guess, or something that you know, like, "Oh, I need to continue to move forward. I need to be looking out for what the next thing is." - Yes. - And planning for that. and putting myself, plotting myself on a course. And so a lot of what I've been trying to do and think about, and like I said, self-reflect is, how do I do that? How do I put myself in a great position for that? Whether it's something that I can do or whether it's other people that I can bring into my circle to help me with that. It's been a lot of those types of conversations and it's been really positive, which is really, really interesting in the context of losing somebody who you think is extremely valuable. - Right. Yeah, I know for myself personally that I've been so caught up on the individual projects that I've been working on and there's a time a year ago and beyond that where I just felt always that I would be kind of a code monkey and just always be doing that and didn't really want to get into management and management was kind of a dirty word like no I'm an engineer I'm not a manager you know like the value is in the engineering and that's what I value and that's what I want to do and that's shifted a lot over the years and I've started to see the value in in that especially as we've got a lot of new guys coming on and we brought a lot of new people in. Like there's value in that experience and being able to say people time for making the same mistakes and say, "Listen, there's a reason why we do it this way and not that way and here this can help you save some time." And so the more I've gotten into these scenarios in the last six months, I have to say I really enjoy that role and it's more fulfilling to me than solving the problem myself. It's fun to to help people find their way to becoming better engineers and growing that way. And I didn't see it that way before. And what I would say about it is that because I'm so caught up in the projects, I think in my mind I just figured, oh, someday, like, you know, maybe someone will come in and just be like, hey, like you're doing good stuff, like you wanna lead, you know? And I think we've talked about this a lot, but that's the biggest mistake that I've made. And I don't have any regrets. I think it's not too late, but waiting around is just not a good way to handle it. So many people have stepped up and made it be known in this person's absence. Hey, I want to be that leader. I want to do this. And it's something, and I've been a part of that as well. And I just think, yeah, it's a good reminder that you always have to be thinking about what's next and how do you get from A to B and let it be known because it isn't something that you shouldn't assume that anybody knows that that's what you're interested in. I would agree with you on that. We've definitely had a lot of conversations this week, especially about making your intentions clear and making it clear what you want from your position, what you want from your co-workers, peers, managers, all the way up the stack. I think that's a very important conversation to have. I think it's been a big, this has been a big driver of those conversations. It's unfortunate that it took that. I think your point complacency does happen. I was kind of in that mode too. I've been a manager for a year and a half and I was kind of just like in that mode, I'm gonna continue to do this and continue to build my experience as a manager. And then maybe, oh, several years down the road, I'll figure out what the next move is. Well, you don't need to necessarily do that. You could be working on that the whole time. - You could start now. And having these conversations, I've recently expressed my desire to manage a team and I'm doing it in sort of an unofficial capacity as a lead right now, and so I'm doing some of those things, but even putting it out there on their radar, and for a couple of reasons. One is just so that they know and are thinking about you when there's opportunities arise for that position, or two, to provide constructive feedback, help you develop into that role. So maybe you're not ready. Maybe I'm not ready to do that today, but here's the three things you can do to really demonstrate that and maybe in six months or a year, hey, you're ready now. But at least you're working towards that. If I would have just not said anything and then brought it up, it said, oh, I want to do this now. I said, well, what have you done to demonstrate that? So I think you lose something by holding back instead of just saying, this is what I want. What do I need to do to get there? Help me get there. - Absolutely. I agree with you. I'm a little bit bummed here. We're kind of running out of time here on our cast. We've not even hit the hour mark, unfortunately. - We're running out of this space. - We're running out of space. more technical difficulties. That's just gonna be the episode name here, I guess. - More technical difficulties. - Yes, dammit. - We'll carry this on. This is a good start. I think there's a lot more to do here, so. - Yeah, and as we get more in the book, we can share some more on that too, as we have time. So, thanks everybody for joining. There was quite a few people online. It was pretty quiet on the comments today, but of course, artwork is by Yerne, the gentle giant. Check out more of his artwork at www.coffeecodecast.com/jentelgiant. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and email us at coffeecodecast@gmail.com. And the podcast, of course, is available anywhere you get your podcasts as well as www.coffeecodecast.com. Maybe next week we'll be on YouTube. We'll see. We'll try. Yeah, we'll do our best. In the meantime, jump over to coffeecodecast.com/review and help us out with any feedback that you have. Plus, minus. We did get a one-star review. We did. We did. Let's talk about it. Okay. more five stars that'd be great. Very good. As always thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. [Music]