hi everybody today I talk with Travis fantina someone who I've known for almost 20 years he's built some really amazing projects many of which I've had a front row seat in watching him ideate build and share his creations with everyone leading all the way up to his most recent creation postal box we'll talk more about that how we got started with tech just how complicated Tech has become and how unapproachable it is for beginners and a whole lot of other topics so stick around it's going to be a fun one Travis it's great to meet you I feel like I've known you forever and technically I have known you forever we talked about it beforehand but 2006 is when we first crossed pads and we of

course kept in touch VI have various online meetups and so on since then on the forums but it's great to have one-on-one time with you to kind of just chat about all the interesting things you've done in tech and and in general since then so before I go on please introduce

yourself uh yeah so I'm I'm Travis uh I have a lot of interests and like a lot of little side things I'm I'm going on about uh but yeah like primarily uh I I like to just like build stuff and make stuff Tinker with things um I'm really interested in art and graphic design and I think that is probably originally what led me to uh the coup of forms back in 2006 I guess um and yeah I mean go going back a little further like school and a couple of my friends uh they were the ones who did the website for it and it was just like HTML in like notepad uh like probably just like live patching it on on uh probably like into

like a text editor on the hosting provider uh but I remember watching them do it and just like thinking it was so cool that they could like turn this into this thing that like anyone in the world could see and the the possibilities for like that distribution was just so cool I I felt so connected to anyone and and it's like you know like most people won't see my website but there might be like some random like kid in you know like Italy or Spain who who stumbles across it and that was really cool so I learned enough like HTML and like you know like a couple little PHP Snippets just like throw together other website with like some partials and stuff and that mixed with just like an interest in

graphic design it's what led me to your your uh forms back in the day we spoke about core memories a little bit before we actually ended up you know hitting the record button for me one of my core memories of you was not actually the graphic design work and

things like that but it's your PHP stuff you know you actually love PHP you know and I remember you talking all the time about it and in many ways you got me hooked on to PHP as well because I never did PHP before until I had to deal with it because the forums were done in PHP but I had a surface level knowledge of it but you would often ask questions about PHP and we end up actually creating a server side category on the forums partly because you kept answering questions for people's PHP questions because at first I was always going this is not a place of PHP or service that questions people go somewhere else but you know you were very eager to help

others always had questions for it and so end up creting an entire Forum category most so that PHP questions could go there you were of course a huge contributor to it and I end up learning PHP and even today now PHP is still one my favorite languages so whenever I look online and people are always figuring out how do I make these basic client service interactions go when they're coming with this very complicated technology the lamp stack still works fine and there's no reason to reinvent it I do sound like an odd person out when I mention that but it works and so so that's one of my you know strongest memories of you from back then is that you're a PHP person and you always did

interesting things with like on more things like that you know like have no recollection though of the graphic and front and stuff that you

did okay yeah I like I got a bunch of stuff that that triggers like in my mind that's that's pretty funny because I I wouldn't you know to this day I I like actually know very little PHP like I I've done it at work for certain things um but I've never really sat down and done like a full stack like PHP thing um that's that's awesome though I'm I'm like glad that that has seeped into your core and if I help to like expand the forms in any way like awesome uh not

just the forums even as part of my day job I work on I I help work on a team that created a web-based developer environment and one of the templates we have is a PHP template you know purely a backend API template PHP based entirely partly because of connecting the dots to back when I learned PHP and got excited about it from your content so you know it's not it's never going to go away

well thank you I I don't I don't want to take too much credit it sounds like you're remembering someone who like knew more PHP or like I can definitely see myself asking a lot of questions I don't think I was answering a lot of questions but I'm sure I was asking a ton of questions because I was uh I was yeah usually lost in the woods trying to figure stuff out but um yeah I I just want to shout out to PHP and actually that whole stack like you said like the ability to like just write PHP like in a in a like a PHP file with like inline HTML and stuff and just dump it on almost any server uh is so powerful and I think that's like something that

web development unfortunately has lost with all this complexity layered on top it's it's so hard to spin up like even just a basic website now and not to say that PHP was simple but I think it was approachable because a a beginner like myself could just go in and find these little Snippets and get them to run just by like changing the file type to like. PHP and it's like oh index.php oh wow now I have like this cool thing pulling in from another file and it it's just like magic and I think that like you have to have a little bit of that to get people who are who have no experience with coding like just to get them excited and interested uh if I had to

like I think back in 2006 like rails was hot and if I had to go through the the headache of like installing Ruby on my machine and opening up the the terminal which like at that time I I just thought was like a way to break my computer you know if I had to do all that it's just not very approachable for a beginner I think the approachability part is something we lost heavily

because programming is still hard has it always been and understand the technical concepts of loops and data structures and things like that still very important but I do agree with you that what has happened in many ways since then is that it's not just good enough to know how to write the syn understand the syntax write the code and make your logic represent in whatever way the language expects you to do it's also the setup and getting to that point as well because back then notepad paste a file save upload you're done now it is a combination of more abstractions that you just have no concept over because I feel like I could make sense of how what I'm making change here how it contribut

to seeing something in the browser much more easily back then whereas today I run npm run or npm build I have no idea what exactly is happening what exactly is all my code being transpiled into where's that one giant bundle going I'm uploading it somewhere but that's also being handled by a cicd pipeline of sorts that I may have set up or I'm paying a service to handle for me and all of it is just completely magic and the amount of magic to decipher is just too much and if I didn't know already the value of programming and how what I'm doing is going to be beneficial to what I'm trying to solve I would have given up a long time ago and I do think

we see a lot of that where the kind of creative individuals who aren't convinced that it's going to be the thing they need to do but it's going to get them on the path to getting a web page up and running or getting an animation or something like that I do think we lost a large for that audience because of the complexity of just what

we're doing today yeah and I one thing I think like I think like there's this disservice that's been done in like um so many tutorials and uh I don't know about boot camps but just like in in like sort of the more approachable things like YouTube videos and tutorials I think they're great and they're awesome but so often like the they're chasing like I would say Enterprise level Concepts so like you know if there's like and in some ways like maybe that's good to help people get jobs but if you just want to create something if you just want to build something it's like maybe you don't need this this like massive like over architected stack and stuff and you know whatever it is like like

setting up graphql graphql makes so much sense for like a large Enterprise uh you know like with all these microservices and stuff and where like little components need to be updating here and there and there's just like tons and tons of data but I don't think any person ever needed like graphql for like their their starter project but when you look at all the tutorials and like what's like intros out there like graphql for a time maybe not anymore but for a time it was like it seemed like it was required and you know the same thing with mongod DB like when the mean stack or M Stack was like so big that's that's around the time I was like sort of seriously starting to get

into actually programming programming and it it felt like if I didn't learn that I had no chance of of building anything but there's just so many layers of complication and it makes a lot of sense for Enterprises where you have you know dozens or hundreds of Engineers working on something but for one person trying to learn or just trying to make a side project like I I think there's more approachable ways to just get up and running but they're they're you know they're not really talked

aboutmore why do you think that is why do you think that it got all so complicated

um I I I think it's just people chasing like the Fang companies like you know like what what's hot in Tech uh is dictated by those companies and those companies have you know very complex needs and and massive teams resources and like they do they do a good job like like these tools are good uh for what they're supposed to do they're awesome um but you are you are you familiar with like um the 37 signals guys dhh yeah yeah so I think I think dhh said he's like you know if you're trying if you're trying to follow if you like as a solo developer or a small team of like five or 10 developers are trying to follow like Netflix's lead like you're GNA fail you

just don't have the resources or the requirements that Netflix does so like don't build a stack based on like what Netflix is doing but but you know they're they're hot like that's that's that's cool Tech and so I think people people like want to follow it but like deep down in your gut it's like that's

like that's that's too much yeah there's never going to be a world we you to send like a billion notifications and in like less than 10 milliseconds around the world most people never have run into that problem your to-do list does not require you to have the most complicated you know several degrees of 999 percentage uptime to make sure that you and your family can store information text based information at that exactly and and again like I think it's you know if you like learning those things that's that's a way to use your time but it's it's like that's just that's a hobby and like you know it's good to have hobbies so you know learn that it'll be beneficial as a developer but you you

don't have to certainly to get started

and in fact my favorite my favorite quote from developer docs is from the Ruby World um stimulus reflex uh which I don't know if you're familiar with that at all but it's like uh it's kind of uh yeah like server rendering um HTML over the wire one of those like early libraries um but right at the GetGo right when it's getting started they have a disclaimer and I love it so much it just says like are you sure you need stimulus reflex in your project every minute you spend learning another library is time you could spend building something meaningful to the world or with your family or out in nature so think very carefully before you learn this library and I just I love that I

love that they've had that in their docs for years um and because it's so true like it's a very valuable tool but do do you need

it Y and I also partly think it's the complexities also caused by who exactly is writing the content these days you know back then I felt like it some sort of just fun environment where we all just kind of wrote stuff just because we were filling with it we had fun there was no end goal in sight like when I was writing my tutorials on flash I had no goal of like doing anything with that I just did it because I enjoyed it it was just purely a good hobby for me and I still do that partly because I just enjoy doing animation and filling with technical things whereas most of the content I see today is from people employed at companies whose main goal is

to try to weave in how this company services can be used as part of doing something and monetization in tools and Frameworks and so on is almost non-existent unless you're cutting donations from GitHub or patreon you have to WR way to monetize and the way you monetize is by having people pay for some kind of a service and almost all the services are not you're not paying for it because it's a notepad file you're uploading a PHP file to a server it has to be more things to make it you know viable so I think incentive structure for making simple comp content in general I think that is completely broken down and I look at the next generation of people who are creating content I think there in a the much more

difficult environment that they're operating in is because they don't have Leisure Time quite as much I feel like as I may have had you know 20 years ago because I didn't have Tik Tok that was no social media there was none of these things that would basically keep me distracted so I wasn't consuming content as much as I was creating content I think the that that equation has flipped a bit since then where it's just so much easier to just consume content and the content is just so good and high quality and addictive in so many ways that I'm not going to spend what limited time I have creating the content when I can just relax consume it and just have

fun yeah yeah I mean you're absolutely right you mentioned the Flash tutorials I think I think I found uh your site from the the falling snow animation CU I was I was doing some flash stuff back then but um that's that's just an side but that was that was a lot of fun back then but you're totally right I think I think a lot has happened and I think yeah there's there's more opportunities to consume content people are just less bored today like like less Bor we've traded like real boredom for just sort of like a general Malay of like you know infinite scrolling where like you know everything's kind of interesting enough to go to the next one but but nothing is really profound I think um and then yeah

everything is monetized uh which you know like like everyone has to make money it's it's hard times and like I want to make money and anything I put on the internet I of course hope there'd be some Financial return for in in some way down the line but uh that's kind of dangerous and and there's just so much pressure on it so it's like no one can just like write tutorials on flash because it's fun like you were doing um now it's like I'm going to write a tutorial because I want to like grow my audience so I can get you know like a YouTube play button and they'll start monetizing my videos or you know like so I can just drive people to my course

which I'm selling on you to me or like so I can drive people to my service I'm selling whatever yeah um and that's that's different there's yeah it attracts a different kind of person uh person to create the kind of content you know the type of things you create because it's just for fun you can see from a mile away it's like oh wow this is very different then someone who has an angle of trying to upsell you something or another but it is because also when it comes to creativity there's so much being written that the way Master creativity and get more creative is by just having free time letting your mind wander not always being on you know high gear all the time trying to figure

out what needs to be done or what am I going to be doing next I think that is in some ways missing as well and there's so much also written about just the I think what is it called I forget the exact phrasing but just the lack of opportunities and Open Spaces where people can do something that doesn't require their phone those have also been slowly diminishing over the past you know several decades in many ways and it doesn't help of course that our attention is probably the most monetizable thing that companies have these days and so every second you're not doing something is a loss opportunity for a company to figure out how can you be you know having your eyeballs and your attension on their

product or service and they've gotten very good at that yeah for sure I I actually just read a really good book called um how to do nothing resisting the attention economy by um Jenny Odell it's a really good book uh and like I kind of like just from the title and the way it was pitched to me it would sort of just be like you know get off social media but it was a lot more than that it was really Broad and she she delves into of course like the incentive companies have to like monetize your your time and attention but then she also like takes another like angle and just talks about like getting back in touch with the the world around us and our

community and building communities and like what what works in a community what doesn't what what has traditionally held communities together um the natural world like it was It was kind of all over the place but it was really

interesting yeah and I think there's another book I think by Michael hate I was reading recently I'm probably butching his name as well but it's really about how do you get kids to have more attention and not be focusing on cell phones and things like that like the decline of a lot of indicators of you know good mental and social health was all being you know going on the downside because of it and that was a very fascinating book as well it you know it dealt a little bit more on just how much attention people are spending in aggregate on phones and just digital tools which when you count it it's actually very very high you know I my phone tells me how many hours I'm on the

phone over a given week and it's like almost six seven hours even though I'm not consciously aware of six seven hours I'm actually spending on the phone because I don't do a whole lot of social media I don't use Tik Tok and all these things but I do use email a lot a lot of my work emails I'm always like you know emailing on the phone because it's easier and in many meetings I'm always emailing as well on my phone while the meeting is happening and that by itself is a huge amount because I'm on a computer at the same time and I'm also on a physical device you know multitasking and that eight hours could have meant eight hours could have spent doing like you mentioned something more

in you know in nature getting to understand the community more and so on

yeah yeah I like I'm totally with you and actually it's funny because I I try and run like things into the ground I had a SE that just cocked out like the first generation SE I replace the screen twice I replace the home button I replace the battery uh and then what is an SE like iPhone SE oh iPhone SE gotcha gotcha yeah yeah uh so I had that for almost eight years it's like an eight-year-old phone I got it you in 2016 and I I actually just it went through the washing machine like last week and so I've I'm in the market for a new phone but there's like part of me that's like I just I just shouldn't but then the thing is like

it's nice to always have a camera on you it's nice to always like make a note of something and then you know uh when I'm at the grocery store like I'm I try and like I'm I'm like a very like socially conscious consumer so I'm always like looking up Brands and stuff so it's nice to have like a research device but it's it's really like it's it's a like a fan bargain because like it's nice to have like these five things but you open yourself up to just like always being attached to the phone and it's hard but but just getting back to what you were saying about like the time you spend like I think about the way I use my phone and like how much time I spend

on it and on the one hand yeah it's it's like it's too much time looking at a screen and just doing nothing but on the other hand it's not it's not always replacing something good like if you're if you're in a meeting and you're multitasking that's like work time where like you'd be working anyway it's not really your free time on your own or like me you know if I'm if I'm just like I mean you shouldn't look at your phone before bed but like if I'm if I'm lying in bed just scrolling through checking a few things like people have always just sort of like read the paper or read a book right before bed so I'm sort of swapping that with another form of just

like Mindless entertainment before bed so I I think that like definitely phones are a problem but when you look at that number it's like how many of those like six or eight hours that you're on the phone every week how many of those are actual hours that you could say like oh I could have been in nature for that time or I could have been with my family

because that's a fair point yeah that's a very fair point I think the V diagram would be more at work than you know when I'm just like waiting to pick up my daughter from some program or something and I'm just checking my emails and doing those things which would have been sunk time anyway but I guess I could also be I could use that time to just you know just relax let my mind wander a bit as well so it does in slowly whenever you least expect it and that's that's actually and again like that's a really good example where it's like yeah it's sunk time when you're just waiting for your daughter or you're like at the DMV or something it's like yeah that's

that's like I I don't have that time to do what I want but like you said earlier you know true creativity comes from like a place of boredom and just sitting and so anytime you pick up the phone to quell that it's like you're missing out on a chance to to to just let your mind wander so yeah I get what you're saying for sure yeah so getting back to your background in how you got started what was your first computer what was the first thing you created what was the

first thing you built um yeah my my first computer well uh yeah I remember we had a computer like from the time I was born but it was it like I think it was just like dos based I don't know if it had like a real graphical user interface I don't know what it was for I only saw it on like once or twice I don't know why we had it uh then probably like in 96 or 97 we got Windows 95 with um the just like the local computer store built like a tower and everything the the beige box and that was my first introduction to Computing I mostly used it just for some games like very like kids games I I was young I was

probably like seven or something at the time six may maybe six or seven um had that for a couple years when I was 10 I got a a I don't know Gateway yeah Gateway and that was the first computer that I started making stuff on uh doing like HTML and yeah that was geoc cities Geo cities we um yeah like I said my friends my friends um we're doing the school website my friends and I we started a a clothing company we're all into skateboarding and we started a company we screen printed our own shirts and we sold them just to kids at school and and friends and stuff uh that was really cool just making shirts and and like selling them uh obviously we didn't we

didn't have any e-commerce but we we put together like a website with like photos from like our our skate shoots and photos of our merchandise and stuff like that so I don't even think we had a domain name it was just like at geoc

cities but yeah that's amazing yeah my starting I also got started in geoc cities that was like the he had like 500k one megabyte of space and he had to drag and drop things into it or actually no that's not Dragon drop it was upload he had a button and he had like actually upload F into it those are that's actually really fun and Gateway of course most people are probably like what is Gateway you know it's the it was the thing back then you know was like people who were boring and needed like you know professional kind of things Gateway was the quirky one I think it had like the the black and white cows the Spotted Cow like their mascot and then they're actually physical stores as

well like you just go to a Gateway place and you can get by like you know your your stores you get the service you all these things like before the Apple Store was the thing there was always the Gateway store you could always go to yeah I don't I don't think I like ever went to the store I just I remember like I got that computer from for Christmas and for the next several years that was that was like a primary thing and you know I was also into film and so I I would like make home movies and stuff and edit them on that with some real like really crappy early like just I don't know editing software and stuff later on as a teenager I got into um

like I I got a a apple and got final cut studio when I was like 17 or 18 and that was

was like real powerful editing but it's a huge step up in terms of like what people had on Windows back then and what Apple was able to provide because people often go why were creatives so much into Apple devices and things back then because there was no good alternative you know Final Cut Pro did not have anything that competed with it on Windows even they had tools and of course Premiere is good they had various things that could make various things work properly but the ease of use and like the very targeted thing that solv for was almost like unheard of and that's those are some of the things that I think people always don't realize I what Apple was able to provide to the

ecosystem back then yeah yeah for sure that yeah that was incredible like Final Cut was such a breath of fresh air even iMovie with you know just the free stuff it it was very different from Final Cup Pro but it fed into it and um yeah it really boggles my mind cuz I feel I feel like about like 2011 Apple decided to like tank all their video editing and like all their software just got bad uh and I mean fortunately I don't know if you do that much but like uh Da Vinci I think is is pretty good that's what I use but I I don't really use it for anything but it's on my computer but

no I primarily use Camtasia for doing able to do screen recordings for tutorials to record and then I Ed premiere for only one thing which is to get captions it has a nice Auto caption generator that you can put it in there people use like online services these days that can do all these things for me but for me it's a I already pay for the Adobe subscription so I already have Premiere why would I pay extra to some other service when I do this and also aspirationally I'm like I can do a lot more with Premiere than just use it for captions I can do all kinds of video color editing and things like that of course I've done none of it it's aspirational it's like I like having the

idea that those things exist but that I'm haven't learned it yet it's just one of those things that you know will just never be learned I guess yeah I I had a

job where I I was doing Premiere all the time I was I was on Windows I was using Premiere and it was really nice it was kind of like it was at the time final cut studio was like disappearing and being really bad but like but I wasn't using it at all so I didn't know that was happening so I like I had frustrations with premiere in some ways I was like I could do this better in Final Cut not knowing that like that feature might not even exist in Final Cut anymore but uh then you know premere Premiere was like actually pretty nice to use it felt like really strange to be working at this job where I was editing videos on Windows but you know it worked

and it was it was a nice experience yep

it it's very powerful because my primary experience with like just graphic Tools in general was Flash that the only to used my and even used flash for a long time for graphic editing like I would create vector graphics and Export like you know 200 DPI 3 DPI and so on just so you can get it like you know large size and look good on all these screens and so whenever I went to any of the traditional Adobe products which I didn't realize at the time that Mac media had a very distinctive visual style you know fireworks and Flash and dream were had a you know interesting panel design and so on and Adobe had their own various ways of doing it Premier is my first month and I always

felt overwhelmed by all these like why why it why is there a timeline within my timeline with my property inspector within a timeline and it always never made sense to me that how many levels of inception style editing you had I was like all I want to do is move this text from one side to another and then oh use after effects for that I load up after effects and I'm like wait this is even more complicated at least in that one was like constrained to things that make it sense for film and video this is like a full-fledged animation system where the output is going to be video formats or gifts or something like that so not anything interactive which means that there's no constraints anymore at least

it flash with some constraints you could only technically do these things with the browser good and render these other kind of things so you always had a little bit of a a ceiling in how complicated things could be whereas the premier and after effects because everything's going be mushed down into pixels and Frames anyway that it was just like horrifically complex and horrifically Powerful as well because I've seeing now all the designers today are creating really impressive things using after effects for example and it and looking at the screenshots of it where I just see like motion paths in multiple colors and 3D lines and so on overwhelming because again I don't know anything about it at this point but it's just great to see that there are still

tools out there that people have ended up using to kind of continue translating ideas into things that can be seen on

screen yeah yeah although getting back to like uh Simplicity versus like you know like we talked about with PHP how simple that was that was what was great about Flash you know you could you could do like graphic design you could make games and websites and animate them and just do all this incredible stuff just in one program I think it was like you know if you wanted to buy it outright like the MX 2004 whatever I think it was a couple hundred dollars uh and that was just that was so approachable and so easy to like you know and that's why there was so much of it like that flash animation was was so ubiquitous back in the days of like new grounds and stuff like that

homestarrunner everyone was doing it um and it was it was very easy and now it's I think it's it's very hard like I don't know how you really would make that kind of Animation or like those kind of interactive websites um you know it's all been there's there's programmatic tools like there's JavaScript libraries there's there's After Effects and things like L animations and stuff but yeah there's there's not one like kind of full stack tool that will will get you there

unfortunately no but flash actually still has life now among game developers there's a plugin called ruffle not a plug-in technically it's just a web assembly based compiler where it takes Swift files and it turns it into things that your browser can understand I'm seeing a lot of people not a lot of people you know it's all relative but I'm seeing more people than ever actually using again to create these animations or interactive content and having be viewed on a ruffle player which works on iPhone for example without any of these complications that's that is really cool

I've I've seen the ruffle screen but I always assumed it was Legacy flash stuff but that's uh that's neat so are they

using like the last version of their the old like creative sweet 3 or whatever the last version of flash was or is there a I think so I think so I think even today if I were to use noi animate which is the replacement and basically rebranding of Flash in many ways and I publish a swift file I can actually open that in the ruffle player and be able to do all these things and there's another app that people speak highly of it's called r r i v it uses the flutter runtime behind the scenes to it's a web assembly and web JL based but that has actually been really promising as well I've seen a lot of really cool animation Feld have created using that and I'd say

that spiritually looks more like flash from its hey than any other tool I've actually seen like it actually has really good timeline tools it looks a bit like after effects simplified down for a modern world where the output is going to be animation and interactive animation and that might be something to kind of look into as well but it's definitely not like it was back in the day because I like lahi a lot but the challenge with lah of course is that if my After Effects composition is more complicated and you don't know what that complicated actually means L just falls apart doesn't quite know what to do in these situations so you have no idea of am I going too far are there things that

could be exploring pushing the boundaries a bit because L supports it I don't know how to enable that so there's a little bit of a a mystery there because the runtime and the tool aren't nicely integrated in that sense and it's hard to know what is and isn't going to

work yeah that uh yeah I've never produced a lot I've like I've like taken the files and and gotten like little events happening on people's on on one client's website but um yeah I don't know much about the production side of it that makes that makes sense though but RVE you mentioned RVE I have checked out RVE I've never like I've gone to the site and like you said aspirationally it's like I want to learn this I want to do something with this and it's cool like it looks like in their in their portfolio I think they even have like some of the DU lingo animations I don't know if they made that or if that's actually part of du lingo stack but it's pretty neat it

wouldn't be surprising because if the output is something that works on ly on multiple devices and you know Android and iPhones primarily it wouldn't surprise me if they actually are using it because what's the alternative embedding MP4 files essentially or Avis

yeah but the thing about Flash also or this back in the day it's and I still carried this with me is this an emphasis on low page sizes you don't want your pages to be bloated or very large and and so on and when you add lah for example I think the core runtime is about 300K and your animation that adds more to it and so for basically having a you know a simple hello world swipe or something like that you're downloading about a one megabyte of data that could be a a webp animation you know give file convert to web you know webp and then you're good to go and then you go to like Apple's website and you're just scrolling on any product page you're

like this whole page is about 100 megabytes and each little animation like 20 megabytes each and you're like probably living in a bizarre world where like wait what's going on why does nobody care anymore about that level of performance and fundamentals and things like that where it also seems like kind of like the old person you get the cloud I feel like that person like old man young cloud is GNA be like my you know Tombstone picture one day where i'm just like complaining about things that no one cares about anymore like who cares the pages are like you have fiber I have fiber gigabit down gigabit up nobody cares you know it take longer our CPUs are more powerful than it ever have been

our graphics cards and RAM is plentiful it doesn't matter you know what it's going to take to render some of these things because our computers can easily handle it yeah yeah no I it's funny

because like I I did work for a client just a few weeks ago or a couple months back now and and he they were actually like a development firm and they just wanted a a website made and um yeah they're like just like make it so simple and and like just keep it small page loads like don't do any Frameworks don't bring anything in and so I got really mindful about it to like I converted like all the images like webp and stuff and I was just like keeping it small and that like that actually made me really think about a lot of these things and I agree with you in a lot of ways like there there's like Apple's website is so cool and going to a website that

like I know people hate squirrel jacking but I think it's cool when there's like some kind of like wild experience going on that's really cool in a way but more recently I've like I've just been thinking about the internet and like the idea of like you know you can put something out there for anyone in the world to see and accessibility is important to that like if if you're making it for everyone well like you have to think obvious obviously like just basic accessible elements like you know color contrast and then also Al proper labeling on buttons you know visual impairments other things like that but part of accessibility I think is Page size because you know the people on like 3G Connections in the mountains um you

know I I always heard that there's like there's so many developing nations that just like jumped over desktops and are just using phones uh I think about people like that and you know can can you save that money by not you know using like 100 megabytes of data to load your page um yeah Al also just like efficiency uh so yeah I think I might be in your boat a little bit I the whole just it's a right thing to do it doesn't matter it's a right thing to do is to not have unnecessary data being sent if it's not needed like I go to react I build a hello world I you know use the bundler and I publish it why is that paid 300K

like why is what is possibly going on to your hello world in just plain text no custom fonts nothing embedded need to say that much and that's the world we're going into now though it's almost like you and I learned assembly and machine code back then and we're telling all the people using like C++ and C like you know you're too much abstraction here there too much blo you can optimize it further and go all the way back and meanwhile all the kids are learning like you know managed language like Java and Python and so on where God knows how much abstraction and blo being added behind the scenes to just be a simple you know couple of like bit flips behind the scenes yeah no that makes sense my cat decided

to pay us a visit oh hey it's pixel you know he's a regular in a lot of these videos that I do pixel say hi to Travis my daughter loves cats we don't we don't have one yet but oh cats are cats are great I grew up with cats but my parents took care of them so I never really appreciated that but when you know wife I got a cat you know he's the he's the oldest we have two cats he's about 7 years old now one year older than our daughter it it's a it's a lot of fun they're very they take care of themselves they're pretty much plug-and-play just like back in the day it's like buying a Mac almost you know you take a video camera put plug the

fire wire port in it just works whereas on the PC I'm like what driver am I installing is a driver correct and all what is my extra capture card you all that stuff cats are pretty much like a Mac they just work they other quirks of course but they are liter trained they don't require walking or constant attention and if they are you know chill like like he is for example they'll just greet you in the morning greet you when you come into the house sit in your lap and just basically just enjoy being on your company yeah yeah I that's that's the ideal like you know dogs are great companions but they're high maintenance and and really to to do it right you need to be spending a lot of time with

them exactly you know it's great in the summer when you're like walking you're like oh look at that people like walking their dogs and it's great when it's like middle of winter and freezing cold and you know at 5:00 a.m. you know they're like walking their dogs they're like I'm so happy that I don't have a dog right now but yeah my daughter has been asking for a dog for quite some time so when she's like you know a little bit older she can help take care of it you know I know we're saying that but I was older when my parents got a cat I not take care of it at all and so most a case where we're g be know wife be taking

care of the dog you know and doing all that and of course dog walk or some things like that to kind of make some of these things more easy but yeah it's a it's a crazy time with pets and kids

they actually have a lot of fun I think my my daughter yeah has been like crazy about cats since she could talk um even even before probably just just loved cats so much and you know even now like we'll go out like after work we'll go on catwalks because like you know we just moved to into this neighborhood it's quiet and so we just wander around and yesterday we just like a cat just wandered I was like skateboarding she was on her scooter and like a cat just wandered up to us and we're just petting it and that made her day but about a week ago she's like oh cats aren't my favorite anymore they're dogs and I think like we went to the fire station

we're just wandering by and the fireman like or the firefighter like let us in and he's like oh do you do you want like a little dog stuffy and so she got this little stuffed she's like oh I love dogs I really want to get a dog I like okay like just like with a cat like we want to think about it for a while we're not going to jump into it we're gonna spend some time and so for about a week it was dogs dogs dogs uh but then like two days ago she's like actually I like cats more I want a cat so I guess what's what's what's preventing you from getting a cat

um uh it's funny you mention that uh there there's you know just like like right now we're pretty unencumbered I mean we have a daughter and we have another child on the way so

congratulations thank you thanks so yeah so like that is encumbered in a big way but in another way like we've been able to do a lot of traveling and just sort of living in different places for six weeks or you know just like travel whenever we want because I work remotely um with a cat you know we'd be more anchored uh less so than with a dog obviously but that so that's a big pause and then just you know like pet ownership in general it's like you know are we going to be able to like give it the attention it needs I know cats are pretty hands off but still we don't want to neglect it um and then also like I we're all vegetarian uh so it's just weird to me

to think about like getting an animal that I'm gonna have to feed meat too for like the next 15 years uh yeah so oh

very fair points I love it very reasonable but yeah yeah I I feel like one of those you know Cloud providers now you know writing complicated tutorials just so I can self a like cat you know wouldn't it be great for you to have like you let your mind wander and you know what helps your mind wander the purring of a cat yeah click here buy the cat you know shipped to you in 24 hours could start a cat business on the side yeah no that's a yeah it is it's a it's a it's an industry in its own because you know we talked earlier about just like time flying and growing up and like how much things have changed I never realized until you know my wife

and I had a daughter how much of the places we walked by normally catered to children and kids and daycare like for me it's just like a building but I'm like wait this the building where you go and like you buy you know things for kids or this is a daycare facility and all these things and similar to pets as well in many ways you're like this entire block of buildings here is designed to cater to like dogs like dog walking dog sitting dog washing and dog grooming and I always wondered if my hobbies and interest were you know slightly different would I discover more parts of the city and the place I go by day in and day out for years on end where I would discover something new

about them that I just completely glossed over because to me they just like background characters or NPCs in like a video game lingo it's like okay it's just there and and I keep driving by but then as I've got older and my interests and responsibilities changed those places aren't just places they actually are doing something that's now critical to me being able to function which is really bizarre in terms of like just how time has evolved in how our perception of things change yeah that's it's really

interesting you bring that up um because I I I am in that same boat 100% I think the two biggest things like having a daughter at least is like parks and libraries like I I didn't think about parks at all really uh certainly not playgrounds um and then like have a daughter and it's like hugely important like how close is the nearest playground is it good like just because there's slides there doesn't mean it's it's good like uh there's all kinds of different playgrounds uh that's big and then we've been going to the library with my daughter since she was little any anywhere we live like Library getting tons of books and libraries provide such a Val valuable service not not just for kids obviously like there's tons of

stuff happening at the library that was just like out of my world and and even if I didn't have a daughter like I would still take advantage of stuff at the library I just I might not have discovered it though yeah it just

something about just having books that are there on so many topics you're like there's no distractions so you're kind of forced to just take a book look at it flip through a few pages and then you're might be hooked you learning a new topic about something you never have done before

yeah I mean tot like just from that perspective reading yeah absolutely and like I still like Librarians are great for reference and stuff I mean you know like a lot of that like the internet and stuff is like has replaced that functionality but I think like the internet is as we talked about earlier I think things are really degrading on the internet and uh um like the quality of search results aren't as good you have to filter through a lot more to find really what you're looking for and against that backdrop it just goes back to the library it's like well that's not degrading like that's still a great experience so if if you're really looking for something maybe not like programming stuff but almost anything

else that doesn't change so fast like yeah the library is a great resource and there's there's a lot more to it than that like um you know just there's there's often times really interesting like meetups and speakers some liaries like you know have like other things you can take out like the libraries here like they have Parks passes so like if you want to get into like the national parks or whatever you can get like a pass for the weekend and and like just take it out um a couple libraries I've been to have 3D printers uh just you know so there's all kinds of interesting things equipment and stuff you don't really

think about but a human connection angle as well because I often talk about this frequently is that I feel like growing up and all of that I I run into new people all the time I have a conversation with new people all the time with the convenience of the internet you are having conversations but it's more superficial in the grand schema thing there's no like Beyond you know all you can see is the text or whatever you're being spoke speaking to at the time nothing Beyond it whereas the serendipitous conver the magical hallway conversations we always joke about about return to office and so on I do see huge value in that and that's something I really like about the live or doing things in general like when you

go to a physical location and you're outside the house you're doing something differently just put in a different mindset where you're more open to both observing things around you but also having social interactions as well like the conversation with the with the librarian or if someone's reading a book that you were also reading you're probably more inclined to go and just like you know make small talk even if it's like you know smallest of small talks which would otherwise be completely non-existent in our digital

world yeah yeah totally I mean just to give like some weird examples of stuff that's happened at the library recently like um I went into the washroom and I was just like washing my hands a librarian I I hope this isn't their job description but like someone some staff member came in and was just like checking like the Stalls and stuff to make sure like no one had ODed in there because like you know libraries attract people like that's a place where like if you're unhoused or like kind of rough sleeping whatever like you can you can connect to the internet which like resources there's also just like other resources so you know I think that especially as like the housing crisis has like kind of persisted Librarians

have taken on a different role in that regard um so that's one thing my daughter was able to just like 3D print a couple small things at the library just for free um and then also we took my daughter to like this big festival for hooy um just at the library so like three things like nothing to do with books but just like three Community Services very like different that I never would have expected to be at a

library yeah no I think these are all like just things that if you never went to it You' have never found out and and one of the big reason they found out is just like accidentally stumbling upon things you know as you're trying to discover what what can do in the area but yeah you know I do want to sh gear a little bit to talk about something you created recently which kind of got you know bring me to start chatting with you is you created postal boy or postal box sorry postal box XYZ postal box XYZ tell me so you know I we're chatting right now but in the video um you know for people watching it I'll have like a screenshot of it and you know you can

see what's going on but sure it basically is a way for you to write some text put a physical address down and then you print the message and you mail it to the address there what got you interested in it's a very fascinating idea I actually filled it out I don't know if you ever saw it but I actually did actually put my information down so I'm looking I never check my physical mail ever but now I'm actually like let me go check the mailbox because the mailbox is like you know half a block down and like it's like subdivision that we're in and it's 100% spam like I it's 100% spam but for now I'm actually like I sign up for usps's like delivery

notification thing where it sends me S me a picture of all it's coming in and so I'm like okay this from Travis nope nope okay not going to check it today not going to Che today but so you've actually rekindled my love of like checking the mail at some point which I never knew I had but yeah tell me more about the project what got you started in it how do you build it as well I'm

okay yeah yeah so first of all yeah I got it I I've sent your your letter is there I think it's um you're on the other side of the continent from where I I'm mailing these letters now so it might take a little while I'm in Canada you're in the states sometimes that takes a while as well

where in Canada you are because Seattle and Vancouver Canada are literally about two hours away by driving but you I think you're further east I so I

actually didn't realize you were in Seattle I lived in Vancouver uh for like a year and a half and we just moved back to like kind of closer to Niagara Falls area um so that's where we're living right now but man like next time I'm in Vancouver because I love Vancouver I love the Pacific Northwest which in Canada I guess would be called the Pacific Southwest but I love that that region I love that region and you next time I'm well you know like next time I'm there for any length of time I'd love to to come down and visit you because oh absolutely know sound sounds like a plan um but yeah so that's uh that's you know another life hopefully a future life I can move back out to BC

again um but yeah yeah keep looking for that keep looking for that um but yeah so postal box is just it it sort of grew out of like I I don't know I come from a family of like letter writers my my dad's a big letter writer my my uh his side of the family a lot of like birthday cards and then also longer form letters as well and so even if it was just like sort of social responsibility or pressure like that kind of got drilled into me I I'm like very technical and like I I sort of went through a long time where I like had no use for paper I was like this pointless but there was always still like I gotta write a birthday card for

someone or a thank you note or something which involves like writing it and then the the hardly the hardest part was like chasing down their dress and a stamp and like getting those things together and then mailing it and I was like that like I don't like searching for addresses and I don't like searching for stamps so like I I don't I wish I could just like kind of use my phone's a dress book but not like not like have to like write it down because my handwriting is pretty bad so I I had this thought for a long time and then it just kind of intersected with the idea of like you know you're talking about just like making the internet sort of fun again and like weird and like back

in the day people just made stuff for like just the heck of it and put it on the internet and I was like I I just want some like weirdness on the internet and the idea that like maybe I could like get people to write letters to a friend and instead of like an email get a like a physical letter that's really cool so I was like well let's just try it put a text box out there you enter an address and you know you just see like a week later your friend gets a letter and it's kind of bizarre but it's it's also like the most normal thing in the world like you know we people sent letters for hundreds of years uh and that's sort

of a Dying art but it doesn't have to be and like you said there's an excitement to getting a letter so uh if I can facilitate that or make it like easier for people with Like A busy life all the better and that's that's really where it came from um and you know I have I have like a hundred ideas of course of like how to make it better you know like I I've already I've been working on like Auto completion for the addresses um long term my idea would be like you sign in you actually save the address and then like you have like an address book uh you could like maybe buy like like 10 stamps or whatever so you don't have to like check out every time you

just kind of have a tab you like these are features that will come later right now it's really just like does anyone want to send a letter through the internet no I think that's actually

really cool and I've always seen ideas like this people talking about but you actually built it though which I thought was actually really really fascinating ah thank you so is your goal to essentially go big with this at some point um

yeah like as big as possible I think um like I said you know I I would like to add better features um and I'm I'm kind of going to continue to toy with it and play with it but uh it really depends on if people use it if if I start making enough where because right now I charge basically for a stamp plus like a a dollar that you know I get um so we need a lot of people to invest in it but I I've thought about like you know the prospect of of developing some of these other features I've also thought about you know like maybe partnering down the road with like a paper company or like graphic designers to make cards and it's like

you can get like a really nice card and choose like your card stock something like that kind of like it just as an upsell but a unique little feature so I have a lot of ideas and I'd love to go you know as big as as those ideas get and and what whatever people want like if if this takes off yeah if you want

like more unsolicited feature requests one of the things I've seen recently is that a lot of AI tools now where you just give a snippet of like handwritten text it can create a font or it can be extrapolate how other letters would look like if you did it so it would even be cool to kind of say like how it be in my own writing style where I upload like you know to some like I write like maybe like a few letters and numbers on this accend screenshot of it or not a screenshot but an actual photo along with the message I want to send and you can use that to then use like the actual message to be in the same handwriting style that I would have actually written

it in so that it adds a little bit of extra personalization to it that's yeah

that's really cool I actually wasn't familiar with that and that's a very

very cool idea yeah yeah because I think you know I always like been because I work at Google it's I work in like the intersection of tooling and AI I spent a lot of time just like being you know inundated with cool things people were working on again like have you seen this what are you doing here and all these things and so I run across really interesting things all the time and you know the one about like you give it a snippet of your voice and it can create like extrapolate like how you would actually sound and generate Dynamic audio things that's that's one extreme but the other extreme that gets less attention is actually this case where your handwriting can then be extrapolated into a basically a type set

that can be used to create anything you want in that same style because it's not new that's existed for a long time there were a lot of tools that kind of said like draw an A draw capital A and each letter could then be mapped into its own little slot and then you go basically be able to write from that accordingly but this one of the first few times where you just write a few letters or just like give it a sample of like things you've written already and it'll extrapolate all the missing characters all the missing glyphs and so on which is extremely cool that that is yeah that's extremely cool so so people like how you know how did Abraham Lincoln sound like and they're able to like kind

of you know actually they can't but you know other people who like have like very limited recordings of their voice they can extrapolate and be like here's how they would have spoken you know some famous thing or here a rap song by Einstein would actually sound like using his voice and but it hasn't been done too much for letters and words quite as much yet and so I think we're going to see a lot more things like this in the future yeah that's that's really exciting and but I love the Simplicity of it though I think like the Simplicity of what you have right now is actually what I like a lot in many ways and that's the that's always a challenge is that the more features you add it gets

more complicated and then someone else comes back and you know what I'm going to create a more simple version of postal box and then there you go the whole process I always use the example and I talk about all the time is the idea of not taking apps you know all not taking apps start off great because I'm like it's fantastic I can take notes and do all these things and they slowly start adding features to it and I'm like nope I can't do it anymore I go to simple note taking app and around the same time someone would have created a simple not taking app like notion thing for a long time but it do all these things you know simple I you take notes

very effectively now notion a fullon CMS platform in some ways and now creating like probably another version of basically notion light that is what notion was five years ago or same with what was the what was the other one that's actually really popular Evernote every thing like for a longest time and then that became more complicated more bloated and people went to you know notion and then notion is GNA have his own cycle where someone's going to come in and use some other tool for it are you you in the windows Android world

world or the I'm in the Mac OS iPhone world oh okay so you know uh bare notes I really like bear not bear is like they've kept it simple and you know they get a lot of feature requests but they're I mean they're their development pace is Glacier slow but like that as like a markdown Notes app oh man I've

been using that for yeah I have actually seen this before and it does AB look really nice and for the most part now I just use there's a tool of Quip I know when work at Salesforce quip was a tool that they had bought to basically get their their co-founder at the time Brett Taylor to join them and it's a very simple not taking app has simple collaboration features you can share with people but it works in the browser works on any device and that's been pretty convenient but I use Apple notes for the most part in many cases well you know especially when I'm just like just need to jot some ideas down very quickly I use that a long time is a pretty good

one it's free work for your Gmail account and you're good to go on that

okay I'll check it out yeah because it's been a long time since I've actually even Apple notes I haven't looked at it I've been using bear for so long but uh um yeah I'm always interested in like what's Chang how the landscape of these things changes and I I just I also really appreciate the craft of things and like you know a well-designed app a well functioning app so yeah you know and of course pencil and paper and notepad so works really well also you know and I do have like so many posted notes are just thre around my desk on like various things that just jotted down ideas for so it's like yeah it's not a cohesive Story by any means my note taking world you I have notes I

have quip I have physical notes as well and I'm sure when I want to look for something I can never really find it

anymore yeah uh yeah I started I actually started carrying like little like field notes or just like like tiny little bo like pocket size notebooks um I started doing that a couple months ago uh just again to like be on the phone less and have something I could pull out and like doodle on rather than like using my phone uh so I'm in the same boat like fragmented note landscape notes everywhere um yeah and I've see a lot of people using like a stylus on like an iPad or like a Chromebook to like take notes and I've got I haven't kind of gotten into that yet you know because I will say the apple pencil with the iPad extremely nice in many ways like little little design touches

they've added little details they have and there responsiveness where when I'm actually writing there's no lag between my finger and like I mean my stylist and then like what's actually being seen yeah but I think if they ever make it a phone thing I might consider using it but I don't want to carry another iPad along with my phone place when I might need to just take notes yeah exactly because people just say your retention your memory is you know better if you actually physically write things down as opposed to like typing it and I don't know how true that is but if if that is the case then there may be something to be said about being able to have the you know the physical form of writing things

down yeah I've heard that as well um yeah but getting back to postal box yeah and so are you seeing Tailwind uh partially in a way I think so I looked at a view source and looked at some of the column names and and things like that which is really cool actually because most example of tail I've seen are like extremely complicated things and you made very simple with this

actually yeah so yeah I I'll tell you a little bit about the the tech stack um this is this is you know what I think uh I'm I'm really excited about not because it's different I just you know love talking about this stack but um so it's it's actually Elixir and Phoenix um and that's what I do everything in now because I've actually I've been developing with Elixir professionally for the past five years so I just know it very well and I don't you know we talked about learning new things earlier and I I love to learn new stuff I've got like like five languages I want to learn and 10 Frameworks I want to learn but I'd rather build things I'd rather just like make stuff than learn

stuff uh at this point so the learning usually takes the backseat and I just make stuff with what I know and that's elixir and Phoenix uh Phoenix comes now with like Tailwind sort of out of the box so actually you know there there are some very nice flourishes I think like the Phoenix whoever is doing design for the framework just has a really good eye so there's a lot of like sensible like nice defaults uh with the the install but I'm not like a huge Tailwind fan and so a lot of the custom CSS is just me like I I sort of have my own system that I created and have worked off of um have you heard of Utopia Utopia is it a CMS no it's like

a if you type in Utopia CSS utopia. FYI is their website utopia. FYI and it's like fluid mod type scales and so like basically instead of having like responsive break points they use clamps to basically like dynamically change the size of everything compated sorry I clicked the video but that's okay but yeah like Utopia it actually because I'm looking at your markup I do see that a clamp you know like mentions in the attributes and yeah yeah never heard of this really cool so I kind of yeah so I've been using Utopia for a little while and it's not it's not like a framework it's just it's just a system and they have you can generate different sizes on their site you could do it yourself as well just

CSS and math but um it's it's a little complicated so I just use their inputs uh and copy the CSS over but um it's funny like because this is a personal project it's actually like maybe like the worst example of my work because you know are there a lot of tests written no not really is is like all the markup perfect no not really are like some things half big yeah but it's like it's just like how can I get this done as fast as possible so that people can start using it and I've had so many projects that I like overdeveloped or spent years on literally in some cases that never went anywhere and now I just want to say like I have an idea I want

to try and do it in like a couple of weeks and put it out almost as like just a standalone single page how far can we get with that because I don't want to keep wasting time on things no one's going to use and so even like postal box like if you know no one continues to like send letters with it just let it die you know the domain can expire in a year and that's that's fine um I like the idea I'm glad I did it but if it's not if it's not going to go anywhere I don't want to keep spending time on it

so yeah and I think that so many people get caught up in just building and building and building without actually shipping something and seeing if it actually tracks so I like how you have it where you talked about have it very simple here's the simple ideas that I have and then in the future I'll enhance it with more things whereas I think less experience or less season developers would probably not sh even the first version until they got everything up this like figured out first you know which is often a huge Miss in so many ways because you learned so much from the initial feedback get from people and you might even be taking a direction you never thought you would have gone because of the initial ideas you other

people have for it are interesting enough where you want to Pivot which you would have never been able to do if you spent too much time on it yeah yeah it's really cool I also like how you're the the classic red and blue envelope style design it's a gradient and not an actual gift or PNG that has been a background you Loop yeah yeah that was uh I I love those like those CSS gradients it's so cool what you can do with them exactly it's these are some of those times where I'm always like you know if only we had tools that made these things like just easier to do but there a lot of grading generators that help you create this on its own but this is where it kind of

gets back to if you are not a uh you know if you weren't familiar with building websites and building some of these things that even doing something like this would be almost impossible for someone to get started and to get up and running doing some of this yeah yeah um

sorry I was just uh you find a bug while you're chatting

with me about something no I didn't but I actually uh I can't even I'm not positive how I did it but I have on my personal website which is Travis fanam I've got buttons and if you hover the buttons I don't remember if it's a gradient but there's a really like I don't think the design is great on this site but I I'm so proud of these buttons I'll never let them die oh I like it a lot oh that is great do you remember like the O style of many of The Flash sites from back in the day where you had like you know shapes and then you had like lines like that to IND simulate depth of various sorts mhm yeah I love that it was it PR

station that has something like this oh I like the theme picker you have on your oh yeah thanks that's that's called like not being able to commit to a color scheme yeah you had like a pretty cool theme actually you still do right okay yeah yeah I have a theme picker I have like so many colors again I couldn't figure out what color teams to use as well I think I have like one two 3 four five eight and then light and dark versions of all eight of them yeah it's no I I like I think like definitely your site um and there's a couple other like designers who like they just had like a couple palettes you could choose I always thought that was really cool even

actually like before light and dark was a thing back in the day like even when Facebook was new I always thought it'd be a cool feature if like right up on the that blue bar at the top back I don't what it looks like now but back there was like just like a blue bar I like I'd love to have essentially what you have on your site just like a couple color squares and you could just like just change the color of that bar and like the accents and that's it I I I always wish they had that you know small amount of personalization to make it your own but that you know that goes completely against I think what all these companies in many ways stand for

because it's really about how do you take the individual out of all the things you're doing how you take personality out completely and just have the content and be the only brand you see be that of the surface you're currently in and is often talk about you know why I'm like why is important for Content creators who are content creators to own their content and not be dependent on other platforms is partly because at the end of the day there's no incentive from them to actually make your content be better than either content if it doesn't serve their very unique interest which is like kind of sell more ads can of get more eyeballs on it so the algorithms everything is tweaked to basically make it seem like

you're you know you're on LinkedIn you're on Twitter you're on Facebook you're on you know all these on YouTube you're not on Travis's you know profile you're not on Travis's thing you're in LinkedIn and Linkedin has a link to it the the top level umbrella brand cannot ever be you you can never be bigger than that it has to always be the the overarching you know company you're on and that's something I've always been worried about and always like you know if I had a pet peeve it would really be that is how do we just keep all of the information we're doing from completely siphoned off and I think with AI it's getting even worse in so many ways because this is like the holy grail for

these companies because they finally found a way where they can completely bypass you as a in a brand and or a you know Creator and be able to regurgitate the same content in a way where it's only through open AI or only through you know Gemini only through any other AI

system yeah no I I agree completely and like I think the the truth is think Society is like going to split I was thinking about this a lot a couple years ago when they first started like talking about Ai and movies AI screenwriters AI you know character Generation all this stuff I was like you know like Disney the the big companies they're going to go after that because it's it's a very effective way to make a lot of money yeah but there's people are always going to want to tell stories and some people will always want to go to the stories that people are telling and so just like indie films haven't taken over the market like you know it's still it's still just like the big the big studios

it's their world but there's still a niche of you know Indie movies that make good money and I think like with AI that's kind of almost happened in society where it's like the flow of everything is going towards like the AI generation it's just it's too easy to get caught and that but if you look you can find like the weird uh wonderful like human Alternatives out there and some of them will be you know like utilizing the best bits of AI some won't be but that's it's it's just like finding those weird places and it's it's on the internet especially it's about breaking out of the silos and like finding sites like ca.com where it's just you know it's fun and it's whimsical and it's so unlike you know

just like a a news feed or something or you know like postal box just like a weird project one person did I I love finding sites like that and I think that the internet is pretty saturated with big social networks and and like monoliths siloed sites but if you break out of that you can find some really neat things um it just takes a little

effort and that is very true and it's probably one of the best POS positive ways we can end our conversation here Travis so you know it was a blast talking with you and can't wait to see more cool projects you create and we'll chat more about it when that happens