 Turn out my spotlight. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. I got a good opening bit. I had a different opening bit about the race, but now I got a better opening bit because of these dumb guys who were on the subway on the way home. I guess it's live, I guess we're good to go. Womp, womp, womp. And it is Thursday. It's Thursday, June 8th, 2017. I'm rim. That's good. And this is Geek Nights. Tonight, barbecue. And I suppose, to a lesser extent, just grilling because I feel like a lot of people say barbecue when they mean just literally cooking anything on a grill. It's not the same thing. Which isn't even a barbecue, I guess. Yeah. Are you going to get mad at people saying Hibachi when they mean teppanyaki? Yep. That's why I don't get mad. I usually point it out and then I laugh. But the problem is I can't call it teppanyaki because no one will know what the fuck I'm talking about, except in like, well, actually, anywhere but the US, it's fine. So remember when we were in Melbourne and we just Googled for what is the best teppanyaki place in the entire city and we just ate there? That was a lot of money. It was lavish money. Yeah, but it was more money than I had budgeted for in terms of like eating on that trip because that was not a cheap trip, all told. But no, the plague. What's crazy is that round trip flights now cost like a fifth what we paid back then. Because no one wants to fly anymore. But so Australia is super cheap, but like going to Tokyo, not any cheaper. For some reason, like it's way more expensive to go to Tokyo than go to see people want to go there. People want to go to Australia too. Not as much as they want to go to Tokyo. But why is it so much cheaper? There's so many people going to Australia back when we went to that first PAX Aussie just aren't going now. Like, I don't know what's going on. Anyway, it's Thursday. It's the lounge on Geek Nights here. We can talk about whatever we want. And if you're hearing this new from me right now, you are so late to the party you might as well start looking at PAX West 2018. I got some badges you can have if you got money. So this happens every year. And of all the PAXes, PAX East and PAX West are equally difficult for different reasons. PAX West is difficult because it is the mothership PAX. People from all over the world try to get in. And as best I can tell, you have about two to 2.5 minutes between when the PAX account tweets that badges are live. It's not a lot of minutes. Before the last person enters that queue who will then buy the last badges. At least the last Saturday. One thing you can still buy a Monday one. There are a small number. And it's been hours. It's been hours and you can still buy a Monday one. There is a small number of Monday badges left. And everybody else sold out. A lot of people just go there even though Monday's Labor Day, they're buying Friday, Saturday, Sunday badges and they're not buying Mondays. Yep. I don't know. I mean, I want all four. If I'm flying somewhere, I'm going to the fullness of the convention. That's just kind of hard roll. Local types. Yeah. The thing is, I feel like, I mean, I've heard. You're missing that Omegathon finale. What's wrong with you? Yeah. Cause there's only one Omegathon. Like they try to replicate the content. Like there's two Q and A's. So like there's more chance to see in both. But the Omegathon, nothing gets replicated. There's just round, round, round, round tournament. And the Omegathon finale is one of my favorite parts of packs and it's been so consistently. But yeah, anyway. Yeah. I clicked on the link within like 30 seconds. I was sitting at work in my phone. I had the alert set up for a while. Tyco tweeted. He's like, Hey guys, you know, you can pre buy that. You can buy this merch when the tickets go on sale. Whenever that is. And I'm like, yeah, I was like, all right. We're on high alert. Right. So I go into the forum like, Hey, everyone remember? We're on high alert. And then like a minute later, the tweet dang click. No, I saw his tweet and for a second, I was like, that's nice. And then the lizard part of my brain said, Ram, you got to start hitting fucking F five as fast as you can. But at Pax East, the badges don't sell out quite as fast. You have like dozens of minutes before the main one sell out. Not a lot of minutes. But yeah, dozens of minutes is not a long time when you think about it. But the hotels that don't require mass transit or a cab. They sell out in seconds. They're basically sold out before the badges go on sale because, you know, exhibitors can buy their bed there. We should, you know, if Pax ever gets bad enough, we got money. We should buy a million times. You're not saying anything new. The point is today was the day for Pax West 2017 tickets. I got four full sets of tickets. The maximum allowed ticket purchase. The price went way up. It cost like seven hundred dollars. Yep. But I'm not using all these. So these are for friends. And in case our panel doesn't get accepted. So I'm holding back a set. The rule. The reality is if you're going to kind of like Pax, you need to have a pool of friends who are all going and you need to together coordinate because of our friend group, not everyone got into the queue in time to buy badges. And enough of us did to get badges for all of us. So whoever needs the badges, you got to let me know because I need to pay back this money's because I cannot afford to spend seven hundred dollars. And we don't want to scalp them. We basically just want to sell them at cost to like a friend. I only bought them for insurance purposes in case our panel is not accepted and such like that. I have no, you know, I want them to go to someone who's going to go to Pax. I don't want to put in a lot of effort trying to find someone who will buy them. So, you know, it's the face value. Not hard to do that for Pax. Well, no, the past one year, I just sort of like met people on the street outside Pax that are arranged with at the Pax pass exchange on the internet, Reddit, whatever. Also, you know, I'll be in town because Pax Dev. There is some interesting effects. Dev is actually a day earlier than usual. So there's a gap day between Dev and West. So I had to stay in town basically an extra day. But something crazy happened when I clicked on the thing because I went straight hotel and Scott went badge. The Sheraton showed up as not booked, which is insane. The Sheraton traditionally is 100 percent booked long before badges go on sale. Like you just cannot be in that hotel. It used to be the hotel that like everyone stayed in every year because it's the one connected to the convention center. It's like right there. So I see it, I click on it and it totally has a room. Like there are rooms available. So I like immediately is phallic. I'm like, oh, shit, I start typing my credit card stuff in. I hit submit maybe 15 seconds later and I get an error saying the room you're trying to book was booked by someone else before. Website transacted bad website. And then it says, but click because it says click here to try a different hotel. I click there and it says, oh, your session took too long. You got to start over. And then it just showed me an error that went forever. And every time I went back to the site with that web browser, it was stuck. I used a different. I went in incognito mode and I got back in. And by that point, all the hotels were booked. And I found one at the last second and I got a hotel room. The real problem was there were no rooms available at most of the hotels for the gap day between Dev and West. And you can't book two rooms. So if you're going to Dev, you were basically fucked unless you picked like the two hotels that had rooms on that one day. You go through the system, book goes to the system and book again. I tried that once years ago. In fact, remember, you know when I tried to do it? Remember when we bought John St. John hotel room? Yeah, that time. So when I tried to book the second one, the system said, you already have a Pax room. Fuck you. You can't get to you scalper piece of shit. Use a different. You can't scalp a hotel room, first of all. Yeah, but it basically said you're only allowed to have one. Just use a different name, you know, use my Emily's credit card. Yeah, I've used different name, email address, everything. So all I did back then is I just booked directly at the Hotel Max because, frankly, I love John, but I didn't care if he stayed further away from Pax. So. But anyway, each one full set of Pax passes this year. They're $48 per day. Yeah. That's a lot of money. Actually, it's $192 for a full set. And then on top, and then there's a $10 fee that applies to the whole transaction. So if you want to go to a day of Pax, to all of Pax West, it will cost you $192. Yep. Go into the change. Go into the single day. Badges was partly a ploy to substantially raise the price of Pax without saying they raise the price of Pax. That's something that happened. Yeah, because look, the price to get into Pax to enjoy Pax is $48. If you just want to experience Pax, that's totally reasonable. Before it's like, well, weekend passes are pretty much all anyone's buying. So the price to get into Pax is to buy one of those is like, you know, hundreds of dollars. Yeah. But so, yeah, we'll see. There's rumors of other Pax is like Pax East also becoming four days at some point. And we'll see if that happens. That adds that adds to my enforcing burden at Pax East, but it also means Pax East could be a little more chill. Anyway, if you don't already have a Pax badge, you missed it so hard. I don't know what to say to you. I hope you got $192. Yep. Send it my way. And be ready because MagFest is going to have the exact same problem. Like any nerd con that's good is going to have this problem. There's no way around this. So you got any news? I do have a news to take this out. It's kind of weird, right? And I'm still I'm, you know, not being super hypereducated in this area. I got a lot of questions that no one ever answered, right? All right. So I'm not going to pretend. I'll pretend that I know the answers, but I probably don't. We all know. Yeah, of course you'll pretend you know the answers. That's what you do for everything. So we all know you find fossils in all kinds of places, usually in rocks, right? But also in precious amber, which I think most and also learn that from Jurassic Park. Right. So anyway, some scientists. Where was this like Burma or something like that? Or somewhere far away, Malaysia, something, something. I didn't read this order. I actually don't know about this new location. I don't remember. But basically they found an almost completely intact bird and not like a skeleton of a bird, like an actual bird, like its head, neck, part of its wing, its feet, a lot of skin. Right. That's some biz. Like actual, you know, and it was in amber. So oh, yeah, Burma, it's Burmese amber. I guess Burmese amber mean it's in Burma or does Burmese amber that the type of amber that could be in places that aren't Burma? I don't even know enough to pretend that I know the answer to that. Anyway, the point is this shit is 99 million year old bird. This is a bird that lived with dinosaurs. Oh, man, look at the reconstruction. It's a cute little guy. Yeah. So stubby tail thingling. But yeah, he's in this amber and they got him. They can't get any DNAs from there, apparently, they say. But you can still learn a hell of a lot because usually a fossil is a skeleton or an outline of a shape. Right. So this is like pretty holy shit right here. The questions I have is I don't really understand how amber works. Do you know what amber is? Yeah, it's just like tree juice. Tree sap. Right. So here's the thing, though. If you imagine a tree with some sap, right? Tree sap is thick and slow. How does a bird get into tree sap that deep? I had to be like the dumbest bird. And how does there had to be like a bowl full of tree sap somewhere? Like so much of it. I have seen trees that have so much crazy thick like sap coming out of them, pulling around them. I think most of the fossils in amber, though, are a little tiny guys. This is a pretty tiny guy. You know, if you look at that, there's a coin next to the picture of the amber, it's pretty small. But it's like, how do you mean insects getting stuck in the amber makes sense, right? Maybe a leaf getting stuck in the amber makes sense. But even a small bird getting stuck in there to this extent, it's like, it's like if I got caught in a race by a sloth. It's like it makes it doesn't make any sense. I think a lot of them, I would guess, are animals that died and fell somewhere where they got stuck in amber. But the amber doesn't flow like a river. It's like, it does just real slow. The bird would decompose a lot by the time the amber covered that much of it. I guess this is just the random chance, right? That's why we haven't found these all over the place. I was Googling to try to like find like a succinct explanation of this. And mostly what I'm finding are webpages that have bad backgrounds and bad fonts, which is always a bad sign when you're Googling for something. Yeah. So I don't actually know. And I can't answer it without pausing the show long enough to read one of these things. Yeah. But like, I just, you know, like, I know that things were trapped in amber. And once you're trapped in there, it gets hard and is preserved for a long time. I get the impression that anything I ever even worry. I think anything large that gets trapped in amber is a fluke. And it's just there's so much history that like there's some place where an entire bird's nest fell into some amber and I got a bunch of birds. It's like, I couldn't possibly get stuck in an amber. I just had to wash my hands. I guess you stuck in some amber. How much amber are you going to get? What if I tie you up and just like tie you to a really sappy tree and leave you there? How long it would take? I would probably just give you even if someone rescued me weeks later, if I wasn't dead from dying of dehydration or lack of food or exposure or something, I could probably just peel myself off. I don't know. It depends on a man like I have to tie you up pretty tight and just let the amber wash over let the sap wash over you. I, yeah, all these websites have bad funds. Like I don't actually know the answer to that question, but I like that little birdie. Yeah, it's interesting stuff. There's some really actually interesting political news over in the UK. So you know, their elections happening. Well, they have elections whenever they want. They don't have an election day. They just dissolve their government when they give up. I mean, there's normal times to have elections and there's ways to call for elections. I'm not going to explain like the UK parliamentary process because it's this is a called for. This is a this was the government. The way I'll put it is the a conservative government came in partly on the heels of Brexit and Brexit likely happened for a lot of the same reasons that Trump happened in the US. So this happened and the conservative government that had a very like narrow stranglehold on power called for early elections, thinking that they could ride this wave and totally take over the government. And what appears to have happened is that I thought it's not counted yet. So exit polls are done. And exit polls are usually real accurate usually. So the exit polls heavily imply that at best it's a hung parliament, meaning no one doesn't mean it doesn't mean they need to have another election. No, it means that no party has a complete majority and anyone who wants to do anything has to do it in coalition with at least one other party. This has so if this is so the read on this is that America is fucked up so much shit since Trump got elected that the forces that were similar to the things that caused Trump to get elected in the US in places like the UK kind of slammed on the brakes. And there's been sort of a regression to the mean or a reaction back toward the left. So it's almost like the bad politics in the US scared all the dumb people who are, you know, the so-called undecided voters and people who call themselves centrists into not voting for crazy people. That's how that's how democracies have worked for decades. Right. You see whoever's in power, you hate them because you see all them fucking up shit. So you're mad at them and you vote for the other guy. The other guy gets in power, but they're shitty too. So you're mad at them. So you vote for the other guy. The other guy is just the first guy. You forgot that you hated them because it was so long ago. They fucked it up. So you vote for the other guy. And we've been doing that for like longer than I've been alive. But then we broke and voted for like so bad that you don't even know what to do. Like, I mean, like our president literally didn't know we have an airbase in Qatar. And I mean, do you know where I knew that is? Do you know where every single base is? No, but yeah, everyone knows there's a base in Qatar because it's in the news all the time because shit happens. Yeah. Yeah. I know we have a base in Germany and Korea more than one there in Japan. Yeah, that's true. OK. Yeah. But it's only exit polls. This is actually pretty big news in that it has potential substantial ramifications for whether or not Brexit goes forward. We'll see how this all goes. The problem is now it's a hurry up in wait situation because until they actually count the vote, which probably won't be done tonight, all we have is these. Why can't they be done tonight with voting? We don't take that long. Yeah, we do. We don't actually finish counting the vote for a long time. Yeah. But we know what the deal is like. Yeah. Well, partly enough of them. Every day. How are they voting in the UK with like signal flags? I don't actually know what they do. I'm like, what kinds of voting machines they use or whatever. But this is sort of developing news. And even if you don't know anything or care about politics, you probably see what's going on in the UK because it'll depress you a lot less than what's going on in the U.S. And a hung parliament might actually be pretty funny and interesting going forward because imagine if that happened in the U.S. If instead of just like a swing of either the normal party gets it or the crazy party gets it, it would be if you're too close to a 5050 split that nobody gets anything and the government's just paralyzed for another four years. Well, they can just have another election whenever they want. And I would ever they want the rules about when they can't. She can't just like immediately call the election right after this one. Also, it's still technically a monarchy. The Queen can just shut the whole shit down. Yeah, but not really because the monarch, the monarchy seated a lot of powers to the parliamentary system. Taking back the King Queen. Yeah, King Queen, whatever you are. Well, I mean, it could be weird, like, you know, you know how France the system works. There's no King of France anymore. But there is both a president and a prime minister. But the president is just like a person who doesn't do anything. The president is actually a symbolic figure. A lot like a U.S. president and the prime minister is more like the president of the Congress. Anyway, this stuff's all fascinating. The parliament, they don't have a Congress. Yeah, well, I said the Congress. So I'm trying to analogize it back to what the U.S. is. Like imagine if we had a president, president for like war and like one narrow area of stuff. Then we had another president who like was basically the head of Congress and like represented Congress. We kind of have that with the majority leaders. But I don't know. Our government is like the weirdest, most complicated version of democracy in the world. It's because ours isn't old. See, as well, the U.S. is much younger country. I would say ours is the oldest because their constitutional monarchies are, we're in many ways pretty democratic long before the U.S. Pretty, but they weren't like having everyone vote the way we were. All right. So you can go about Athens. Athens wasn't around. It doesn't exist anymore. I'm talking about the oldest one, the oldest democracy that still exists. OK, OK. That I mean, I guess Greece has voting now, but it's not the same. It's not it wasn't a clean line from Athens to the current Greece. It's not the same, you know, anyway, the same country. So speaking of hotels, this newsman making the rounds everywhere and I've been looking thinking about it a lot in the sense that the hotel industry is having a lot of problems, partly because people like us, Airbnb, Airbnb is one problem. The other problem is that people like us, much like with flights, don't really give a shit where we stay. We just want to be close to the thing we're doing. Yes, we're not flexible like we're going this weekend. We literally we are not willing to show up a day earlier. We're not willing to show up a day later. We have a very specific window we want to go anywhere. Our only real concern is being as close to the thing we're doing as possible and not having bedbugs. So hotels really can't compete with each other with our entire generation other than on price and proximity. Stop offering all the services that no one uses. Yeah, the problem is those services are probably the only way they actually make money. And if they don't offer those services, they probably just raise their for example. Do you have a room service that delivers like five dollar eggs to people? Right? No one's stupid enough to buy a lot of people are. Well, listen, you're not at packs. Do you know how many of those trays I see sitting out of people's rooms? Rich people. I don't think I think it's packs people who are just dumb. I know the point is if you get if you're selling five dollar eggs and a lot of people buy them, you're raking in big cash. And if you're selling five eggs and no one's buying them, you should just close your goddamn kitchen. Yeah. Well, the funniest thing is still sell the five dollar eggs and just buy the eggs from like the nearby deli. What hurt the most was smartphones and tablets because suddenly people had internet that just worked on their phones. They didn't need to pay like 20 bucks a day for internet from the hotel. Give me free internet. And I might choose your hotel over the one that does not free. I say that if I have a choice. I've literally never checked. Well, because I usually don't have a choice. And that first I just have to get a room wherever I can. Yeah, that first packs went to back in 08 where stuff didn't sell out. The red line was like, hey, if you stay here and you're going to packs free Wi-Fi. They gave us like a little like tax thing and everything when we checked in back in 08, which was like almost a decade ago. I also if I'm choosing a hotel to host an event, then I'm going to be very choosy. Yep. But what's hurting hotels? What hurt hotels then? The biggest thing was that businessmen didn't pay for porn anymore. Nope. On the TV networks. What's killing them now is that pretty much everyone just books hotels either by going to like Google Maps or like a kayak or something and just typing in their dates and looking at a list of hotels and pick what everyone's cheap. The same thing we do with airline. Yep. Except those services for hotels take a way bigger cut than the airline ones do. Oh, they're taking a cut from the hotel. Yeah, they take up to 30 percent according to this article. Well, listen, if you want to the hotel, should do what the airline does, make the room smaller, have more rooms. So actually, I would stay. I would stay in like a capsule hotel if it existed. Why not? Convention. Sure. Why not? Because I'm pretty much only I just need a place to put my stuff a place to sleep and a shower. I don't need any of the other stuff and I don't use the TV. I don't need any power outlets to charge my. And San Antonio uses giant ass living rooms in the Contessa to play our RPGs because it's quiet. Yeah, but you can just have if it's a capsule hotel, you have, you know, you know, just shared as a shower room and there's a room of, you know, tables and, you know, yeah, use like a common area, common area. You imagine how lit a capsule hotel would be at a place like Pax. Everyone in their little capsule with their switch at night. Yeah, good times. But so this is an article kind of talking about that because I think the hotel industry is going to go through like a major their fucked situation in the few years by some cheap hotel and capsule it. Yeah, the probably actually the. So I looked into that like a decade ago and I buy a hotel into why there weren't capsule hotels like in the US laws. Yeah, the fire code in the US compared to the fire. Japan's fire code, as far as I can tell, is actually way, way, lax. I mean, you can do some shit that would not fly in the US. Well, I mean, the thing is, you know, Japan, unlike the US is way old as you were talking about. Also, I feel like Japan trusted citizens to exit a building in an orderly fashion in a way that you could. This is the place where people use objects like the Kotatsu in every home. Scott, I was on a bus the last time I was there with Emily and we're going up into the mountains, like go to the fancy restaurant. And the bus had its aisle down the middle and had two seats on each side, like Rose, right? In the aisle, you could pull a thing out of any given seat, pull it across entirely blocking the aisle and making another seat. So you could turn the entire aisle into into another set of seats. So like another 20 seats or another 40 seats. That is that would be so illegal that you would go to jail in the US. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I was just the whole bus ride. I was staring at it like marvelling. And I like I use my thin internet connection to like read articles and try to figure out like, has that ever caused a disaster? Like, has that killed people? Yeah, probably. Yeah. But I mean, think about it. If you've got buildings that are so old and wooden that they're not going to pass any fire code on earth, but you're not going to destroy them because historic reasons. And also you're not going to stop using them because they're amazing and whatever. Why even bother having a fire code for you? No, but you know, it's like, well, our whole place is already flammable and we're not changing it because we got more important reasons to not change it. So but here's what's real different about the hotel situation compared to airlines and all the other industries is happening to a lot of castles burnt down. Airlines have some regulation. It's weak, weak sauce regulation, but it is regulation where they if they just bump you from a flight, there's some stuff they have to do to like make it up to you to a degree. Hotels can just bump you and give you the finger and you're just completely fucked. So what a lot of hotels apparently are starting to do is they'll take the bookings from these like these travel sites. But if they fill up, they'll only bump the people who booked from the travel sites instead of the people who booked directly. And that's happened to people I know a few times. And I think it's going to be a huge problem going forward. I bring this up because it's illegal to sell something you don't have. Yeah, I think period. And no matter what business you're in, I think you shouldn't be allowed to sell something if you don't have it. I think hotels that includes kickstarting some product. You haven't manufactured. I can sell stock. I don't have. I just have to clear it like I have to settle. But I can totally put a seller in even if I don't own the stock. Now, you should you should have to buy it first and then sell it. The time the timing should be. I think with both airlines around here with airlines and hotels specifically, I think there'd be a very there should be a very specific regulation. You can never bump anyone who does not volunteer and you just have to keep raising whatever accommodation you're going to offer until someone is willing to take the offer. If you have to give someone 50 grand for this, say, yeah, I'll go stay at another hotel. That sucks. That totally sucks for you. That's effectively the same as just preventing people because if that was the penalty, if that was the rule, people just wouldn't sell things they didn't have. And thus, the go back to my role, I feel like airlines would because there are efficiencies because a lot of I am always shocked whenever I fly and how many people miss their flights. Like every time I'm at the airport, there's always like constant repeated calls for people who have checked in who may in fact be at the airport and yet somehow are not at their gate and are not about to take off on the flight. I do not understand to this day how that happens. Who these people are? Like what what happens in your life that you're at the airport and you just like forget to go to your gate? Boop. Anyway, that's good. I'm on that. There's like 14 people watching San Marino. September 3rd, 301 San Marino was declared a republic and they remained a republic consistently. So from 301 A.D. There's not a country. It's like a principality or something. You're saying city states aren't countries. They're sovereign. It's a city state. It's not a country. Well, Dan Marino never got a ring, so it doesn't count. There's nothing to do. There's a bunch of stuff. There's a whole chat in here. Anything about Amber? I don't think anyone else knows anything about Amber either because no one was like actually. So I don't feel I don't feel bad about that. Yeah, no one said anything about Amber. They don't know shit because I don't know shit. What do I know? I'm just I'm not I'm just I'm asking. I'm not even. What do I know about Amber? Nothing. I know it's orange, yellow. My mom has a bunch of Amber fossils, actually. OK, because she collected stuff like that. Full bird in one of them. No, one's got like a leaf in it. One's got like a little bug in it. You can just buy those like the gift shop. Oh, yeah, they're not cheap, though, for nice ones. Actually, we get a lot of fossils, some of which might have been acquired under shall we say gray markets? I will not tell those anecdotes live on the show. But anyway. But anyway, things of the day. So this came up on the Tuesday show. When I when we were kids, both of us watched an American show. It's like a big part of like 80s kid Americana. It was a show in America called Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack, and I watched this throughout basically my entire childhood up until about high school. I only watched it like a few times when it was on and nothing else was on. See, the thing is, you know, I watched it a lot. It always happened because we went to our grandparents' house like one hour ago. I definitely watched it at grandparents' house at least a few times. It was always a grandma's house. That was definitely a show that grandparents wanted to watch because they were really into it. And as a result, they'd always watch it. And it was always on around like seven, I want to say, which is when we were there, like after dinner. So we'd how much of old people now believing nonsense on the Internet is due to nonsense on TV back in because of Unsolved Mysteries. I was 100 percent sure that aliens literally existed. I believed in aliens until like high school times because of all these stupid things on TV. Yep. I was 100 percent convinced that certain kinds of ghosts existed. I was also convinced. I didn't believe in God. I was also convinced that a lot of the murderers that were featured on this show totally were in the car next to us on the way home from Grandma's. And I need that. No, I didn't believe that. I was watching this when I was pretty young to be fair. I mean, the show started, what, in 86, 85? Oh, 1987. All right. The other reason I believe in aliens is not just based on TV, right? TV wasn't enough to convince me of anything on its own. But because like I would look outside and see like, you know, there'd be planes flying or whatever. And I, you know, I'd be like, oh, that's a plane because you'd see like, you know, a white light and then the red light in the back, right? But then occasionally you'd see some lights flying around at night that weren't the same. Scott, I live next to Selfridge Air National Guard Base. Fighter jets and nonsense would be doing bullshit up in the air all the time. One time, one time, this is this is true, right? But obviously not alien. Oh, no, I got a similar story. I saw what looked like a plane. It was a white light and a red light that looked like they were attached to each other, flying in the same direction across the sky, far away at night. I just saw two lights, blinking, white, red, you know, one was in the front, one was in the back. So it looked like the red one was on the fin in the back, right? And the white one was in the front, something like that, right? Yeah. And it kept just going across the sky. Halfway across the sky, the red one starts going down. Like, like it, like it looks like it dropped, like someone, like it was attached to something and someone threw it off the side of the plane. And the red ones going down, like, and the white ones still going straight. And I'm like, I'm like, what the fuck? And, you know, things like that, you know, noises you would hear in an old house. You'd be like, oh, alien. Yeah, you know, similar, similar situation. I saw I've seen a bunch of weird things in the sky as a kid that at the time, at least as one hundred percent sure it was either aliens or crazy government nonsense. I didn't believe in crazy government nonsense. Yeah, except for, except for hiding aliens, which now I'm more convinced than ever. They ain't hide no aliens because the government we have now would definitely be leaking that shit. If you think that you still think those aliens now is the last straw has been broken. I feel like there's no way that the aliens are still a secret with the government the United States has, unless it's some other government that's keeping them a secret. I feel like Chinese aliens, even if I hadn't become like ultra internet atheist and, you know, the modern era of the information age, say I remain like ultra naive, like well into my adulthood. What does what would have destroyed my belief in aliens and ghosts is that as cell phone cameras got better, appearances of both dropped off at a catastrophic rate. How can this never an HD picture? Yeah, many of these things. It's always some blurry as VHS camera. They don't got no HD DSLR to film them aliens. But anyway, the thing about himself, mysteries was that they'd like to follow up episodes like, Oh, we found the killer. Check this shit out. And like they had a tip number you could call and be like, I saw the killer. I thought I thought the tip number was America's most wanted. Not. Yeah. I might be conflating the two. Yeah. Kind of like how I conflate kickboxer and bloodsport. Way more than I realized. The only thing I remember Kickstarter is the one Kickstarter. He puts a glass all over his hands. See, I thought that was bloodsport. But then it's it's about kicking kick is in the name of the movie. I don't know why there's not as much kicking in the fight. Should have put glass on his feet. Bloodsport is when they throw the sand in the eyes, though, right? I don't know. I don't remember. Because I feel like I don't even know if I've seen bloodsport. I've definitely seen a kickboxer. Yeah. So if you've only seen one, you've seen them all. Bloodsport is way better than kickboxer, I think. Just like just watch actual martial arts movies from the other side of the world. You know, even cops, I probably just sort of blur them all together. But Unsolved Mysteries, Robert Stack, cops is nothing like the other two shows. Yeah, but I still blur like anecdotes from all together. OK, because those are all the shows like we watch at grandma's house. But here's a wiki about Unsolved Mysteries, which is my thing of the day specifically because they have a whole section on all the cases that were legit solved with like the follow up story like, yeah, in 2016, this dude totally got arrested and here's all the news articles and I was randomly clicking on these over lunch at work the other day and reading some of them. And a lot of them were like, yep, it turns out there wasn't an alien. It was a hoax. It turns out that that long lost relative was a scammer. Here's he's in jail. But a couple of them actually were way crazier than the show actually guessed. The one I remember the most that I didn't believe even at the time. Yep, was there are these people and they bought a bunk bed and the bunk bed was on it. I think I remember that. We would like it like it was making noises and the kids were getting sick and all this horrible stuff. And then I'm going to find it right now. I'm going to find it here. It showed them like demolishing the bunk bed at like the great at the at the junkyard, like it was getting crushed. And then like, oh, as soon as it is the Talman House, the bunk bed, as soon as he got rid of the bunk bed, that's it. There it is right there. As soon as they got rid of the bed, everything was great. And I'm like, that's just sounds like a coincidence. There's probably nothing wrong with that bed. All right. So results unsolved. There is no further evidence related to this one. It was not enough evidence to begin with. So the two guys didn't hurt anyone. It was an innocent victim. So one of them, I remembered this one from a kid as a kid. I don't remember the name now, but I clicked around until I found it. And it was basically this really creepy story of a dude was like driving like he was at a gas station and someone approached his car and like asked him for help and was really weird and was holding a screwdriver. So we got unnerved and tried to get away. And then the guy like jumped into the car and threatened him with a screwdriver and told him he had to drive him somewhere. So just a crazy guy. So he like fought with the guy and like the whole thing happened. And eventually like he ran away from the car and the guy chased him down and dragged him back to the car. And then like as the guy was walking around the car, being crazy to get back in because he agreed to drive the crazy guy somewhere, ran him over. No, he just drove off. Good job. But the guy, the crazy guy kept wandering around in the area because the guy lived nearby. So the guy drove off and drove to the nearest police station. Meanwhile, the crazy guy wandered around because he knew the guy that ran away, lived in the area, found a house that happened to be his house, snuck in and brutally murdered the guy's like mom or wife. And they actually caught the guy and there's like the whole like the follow up was kind of crazy. And the other one was there was a couple that just disappeared. It was like this big mystery. Like they just one day they went out for a drive and they were never heard of, never seen again. You know what happened? Their car fell off like a ravine or something. Basically, yeah, they drove off the road into basically like a lagoon and a farm and the car sank. And it was found recently because droughts caused the lagoon to dry so much that the car was visible. And I was that say, if you were as a kid, bothered by not knowing what happens to unsolved mysteries, a whole bunch of them are solved and you can just go to the website and read like exactly what the deal was. I hear something that doesn't take 10 minutes to talk about. So some people decided they want to take this tree out in their yard or whatever. It's like, OK, and they decided to take the tree out with with peers to be like this tiny bulldozer. Like, you know how you go to the store to buy like a drill and there's like this real drills like the whole hog. And then there's like the plastic crapo drill. Yeah, this is like the plastic crapo, you know, bulldozing equipment. It's got like a little shovel claw thing on it. It's like a track. It's almost like a little John Deere size. But it's not for mowing the lawn. It's for, you know, like what you like a big construction. So already like I got this on here. This looks like shaking hands with danger. Like what? Here comes the danger. Like whatever the hell this little tractor guy is. Right. They use it to try to take down a tree, which A, if you want to take down a tree, just use a saw or chainsaw or regular saw or something like that, right? B, if you're going to use a motorized vehicle to pull down a tree, don't do it this way. You can just tie a rope to the tree and drive and pull the tree. And that's that's much safer than what this is. Because when you do that, you're pulling the tree directly at your car. No, you do it in a certain way. One of the trees in my yard was taken down by that method. Oh, yeah. If you know the method, I'm saying the kind of person who is trying to sort of Jimmy, they knew it. They did it so well. It looked like it was like they were basically like yokels because they like literally tied a rope around the tree and a rope to the back of a pickup truck and started driving. But they knew exactly how to do it. Like, you know, it looks like actually doing it looked stupid and dangerous. Like YouTube was about to happen. But the tree didn't hit the power lines. It didn't hit land on anything, right? The tree landed exactly where they're like, it's going to land here. And that's where it landed. Even though it was just a guy in the street with a pickup truck going room. So, you know, it reminds me there's you see this a lot. It's when people. But yeah, this guy does it stupidly and hurts himself. Hilarious. When people and he doesn't die as far as I can see. No, but it's still funny. The people who do these kinds of things tend to have a number of tools and then they have a problem and they don't want to. They never decide to do research and you got a hammer. Everything looks like nails and they don't even like go to the Internet. Like if I want to do I don't think they have. They must have Internet because they upload it to YouTube. But like they have Internet. My like the grout in one of our showers like moldy. So I was the caulking, not the grout, the caulking. So I was like, oh, maybe I'll just recock it. And I imagine to myself if I was dumb, like if I just tried to do it with no research, how I would do it. And then I went and typed, how do you recock a bathtub into YouTube? And it was super easy. And I watched a tutorial and the tutorial gave very, very specific advice on exactly how to do it. And it's actually like really easy. But the technique they tell you is not what you would do if you just tried to figure it out on your own. I'd probably just take the tube of cock, put it in the cock squeezy thing and just squirt it in there. And no, you got to take the old cock out first. If you just put the cock on top, all you're doing is putting something for mold to grow on over a bunch of mold. Right. Well, I think is I would only be using it not in the to replace moldy cock, but I have some areas where there's no cock at all already. And I would just I would just be using it to fill in those areas. So apparently you don't you don't like put a bead and then like pull the cock gun across to like squeezing the trigger. Yeah, push it forward. Like I watched a video that shows the technique and there's all these specific reasons why. So when I was in middle school, I had shop class and shop class, at least back then, I don't know how it is today if they even have shop class anymore, was pretty legit and dangerous. Like it was just a it was a machine shop. We had saws. It was wood shop. We had like plastics labs. Like I had vacuum forming machines and all sorts of dangerous nonsense in there. But a kid in my middle school, he did the belt sander is being used by someone else and he didn't want to wait. So he tried to send a piece of wood by turning on the band saw and rushing the wood against the side of the blade. Genius. And yeah, he cut off at least one finger. And we had this whole lesson after that on don't use a tool for a thing that it is not explicitly designed to do. Unless you either really, really, really are a professional and know what you're doing or you're really, really hate having ten fingers or you really, really, really want to get a lot of YouTube views regardless of the danger. Shake hands with danger. Danger will give you YouTube views. Shake, shake hands with danger. So yeah, barbecue. Gonna give a full I guess the met a moment first. The booklet book is Frank Herbert's Dune. I'll read it at some point. My YouTube channel has a whole bunch of stuff on it. Scott's YouTube channel has a whole bunch of stuff on it. You should subscribe to both because we're both escalating our YouTube content and we're going to do more and more and more as time goes on. Yeah, follow us on all our biz. And other than that, back to the show. So you got any meta? No, we are not experts on barbecue. I am not even going to pretend I'm an expert on eating barbecue without looking at my mouth. I put it in to it and I taste the deliciousness. But if you had me some barbecue, I'm not going to be able to tell you if it's Kansas style versus like North Carolina style or I guess Memphis style like I do not know. All I know is that I like barbecue and we're going to be real wrong about a lot of the details of barbecue and we know we don't care. Well, listen, when I was young, right, I thought there was a device called the barbecue, which is basically a metal bucket with legs that you would put charcoal in. Yeah, you mean a grill? Yeah, well, you would like we called it a barbecue even though we used it for grilling and not for barbecuing. But as you know, I can I didn't know, right? So it's like we had a device. We called it a barbecue. We had a barbecue, right? We would put things on there. So I figured, oh, that's we barbecued those things. But no, we did not barbecue those things. Right. Putting, you know, having hot coals, even if you put them in a barbecue and then putting meats on there or other things in the fiery area like hot dog, hamburger, etc. That is not barbecuing. That is grilling. Yep. Barbecuing, actual barbecuing. And it's even worse because you have things like shrimp on the barbie. That's not doing that's grilling, right? Of course, I mean, in the Midwest, like the word barbecue just means grill to 99% of people. I mean, that's, you know, but actual barbecue, the genre of food is when you take things and you put them not in a fire, but sort of near a fire, you know, usually in a very smoky, concealed container where the fire is quite far from the foods. But yet it still gets real hot in there, you know, relatively speaking. Yeah, but not that hot. Not as hot as near as directly in a fire. But still you put your hand in there because your hand will cook, right? Hundreds of degrees. And that shit, the meats you put in there that are far away from the fire and being hit by smoke and such, they cook mad slow. Mad slow, like it takes overnight or even a day or just a long ass time to cook, right? No, no, Scott, why would you start this shit like an hour before dinner, right? Why would you cook your meat so slow when you cook the meat so slow like that? Somehow due to the magic of science, right? The deliciousness factor multiplies by like a thousand, right? The meat is such that it is very moist and delicious and all the smoky flavors come in there. Well, more importantly, it's some meat that if you cooked it another way would be pretty crappy meat. And it takes all that hard, grizzled nonsense and turns it into wonderful, delicious meat food. That meat just like slides off the bone, like it's not even attached anymore. God, I just want to eat some barbecue like real bad. We're going to eat barbecue all weekend. Oh, yeah, it's the barbecue party in New York. So, yeah, I didn't, you know, I'll read the work video right now, barbecue or barbecue in formally barbecue or Barbie is both a cooking method and an apparatus. Barbecuing is done slowly over low indirect heat and food is flavored by the smoking process. Well, grilling a related process is generally done quickly over a moderate to high direct heat that hardly produces smoke. So, barbecue also comes with a lot of associated foods, you know, cornbread. Cornbread is literally one of my favorite things on earth. Remember at RIT, one of that one of my staple foods was that 99 cent that cornbread was garbage. But it was better than nothing. It was no, I was worse than nothing is better than nothing. You ate it. No, I didn't. You ate it when I made it barely. You know, I think it's the cornbread I like the most. Is the cornbread that's like almost cornbread pudding? Like it's got like big corn is just in it. Yeah. Beans. Right. Big beans. Yeah. Big beans. Well, this big beans at the barbecue in New York City or from this guy, I think he's from Illinois somewhere. But like that guy, those beans might be my favorite food on the whole earth and cornbread. Right. Beans and cornbread. Right. You know, but, you know, it's like the barbecue is the actual meats, right? Even though there's other things to go with it. Because, you know, I was recently in Michigan. So and I actually had barbecue with my family in like in Northville, which I haven't done since I was a little kid. And being older and adult and having experienced the world and had a lot of different barbecue around and actually knowing on some level the differences in barbecue and grilling, I now know that some of my relatives, when they said barbecue chicken, they meant like literally slow smoking chicken with barbecue sauce for a long time because I remember it. Yeah. When we said barbecue chicken, it meant grilled chicken wings with barbecue sauce on them. Yep. So when I was out of the sauce and something does not make it when I was out there, this branch of the family, their barbecue chicken was grilled chicken. It was good. Like it was a very nostalgic meal, but it was not technically barbecue chicken. It was grilled chicken. Now I know the difference to a degree. But I've been thinking about barbecue a lot lately, partly because when I bite to work and when I think the popularity of barbecue in at least this geography has increased substantially over the years. Two different people when I mentioned barbecue earlier today on social media, we're like, oh, they like they mentioned like this specific like Brooklyn barbecue and like, like there's a certain derision for the like neo barbecue in New York City. Okay. So I mean, like to extent, I understand, right? That like we grew up in New York. It's like pizza. I grew up in New York. Don't even don't even talk to me. Well, good. Fuck you then pizza bagels, these sorts of things, right? It's like there's a right way in a wrong way. You know, some Chicago style is garbage. Well, you know what? Like I grew up in Michigan. So breakfast sausage, that means something specific. If there ain't fennel in it, it ain't breakfast sausage. It's just some nonsense. Right. But you know, you go somewhere else. They don't have pizza and bagel. You're like, what the fuck is this garbage? And if someone tries to have pizza and bagel there and it's obviously no good, right? But with barbecue, it doesn't seem to me, you know, I have been around and eaten many barbecue at many places, right? Including ones that people who are, you know, very strict and, and, you know, believe, you know, certain things about barbecue, right? Including those places. And the thing is, I do recognize that there are different styles of barbecue. And I could see if you had grown up with a particular style that you then might, you know, have a dislike for the other styles like if you grow up eating real bagels and you go up when you consider real bagels, you go somewhere else. But this is the difference here, right? Is that a real that it's not the thing you grew up with. A real bagel is delicious. And a non-boiled bagel, a steamed bagel is disgusting. Is inedible, disgusting garbage. It's not an animal. It's just white bread in the shape of a bagel. Yeah, it's not right. But you know, if I have some barbecue that is like, I don't know which plate with, you know, which style is which, but like, I might have some rib that is like, has all the sweet sauce going on. And I might have another rib that's more like the dry kind, right? Yeah. And it's like, they are both delicious as long as they're actually barbecued properly. And you know, the meat is so tender that it falls out. See, it just depends on where you grow up, though, because it's like, both of those are great. You know, some are better. So I grew up in the Midwest, so Chicago style pizza and New York style, all the different styles of pizza. They all existed around me. And I didn't have any like one true pizza fallacy built into my blood and my jeans or my family. So I like all kinds of pizza. And I think I'm lucky that I grew up in a place where barbecue was not such a like religion. So that like you, I can just enjoy all kinds of barbecue. There's no one style that I think is just better than others. Like, you know, they're all just different. I like most of them, but there is definitely, you know, quality highs and lows that I can recognize. Right. You know, sometimes you get a big bean and it tastes too much like bean and not enough like barbecue. Right. Well, I tend to judge places by that. It's too close to a boiled bean. Kind of like how I judge burger joints by their sides. Sometimes you get a cornbread and the cornbread is all dry and crumbly and not moist and buttery and hasn't have big chunks of corn in it. Right. Like a good, right? No, it depends on the kind of barbecue. I like a dryer more crumbly. And the meat is like all kind of tough to get off of there. Well, that's, that's insane. If the meat is tough, that, that barbecue fucked up because the whole point of barbecue is to untuff in the meat. Right. But sometimes you get like, you know, or something, you know, there's tons and tons of, you know, factors that can separate, you know, good barbecue from bad. Sometimes, you know, the, the sauce they make, it's like, okay, I like the sweet sauce style. That's a fine style. Right. But sometimes they put too much sauce. It's just like, it's just buried in sauce and it's like, you don't even taste in meats. Even if the meats are good, they're hiding under there. You can't taste them because the sauce is just. Well, the worst is when someone pours a bunch of barbecue sauce, like cold, like a condiment over what was all, what was previously perfectly good barbecue. Yep. Yeah. Barbecue sauce is the thing that you put on before the cooking. I don't like it when you put barbecue sauce on after the cooking. It depends on what I'm doing. Like it's like it's freaking ketchup or something. If it's like a pulled pork sandwich, I like a little bit sort of like. It's okay. If the barbecue sauce is room temperature or warmer, you can like dip a French fry in there. Oh yeah. That's real important. Right? But, you know, you don't want to add more to the already sauced up rib or pulled pork sandwich or whatever it is. So when I was a kid, I think my favorite barbecue was like regular like barbecue chicken, like beer can chicken, that kind of barbecue chicken. And that is still one of my favorite foods to this day. Like that has not changed. I mean, there are so many different kinds of barbecued food, right? You got your, your rib, your chicken, right? Your pulled pork, but then you got the other, you got the brisket, which is like, oh, the brisket. Watch out. You're starting to get into good territories now. Right? And I feel like, you know, the best of the best, like the connoisseur's barbecue item is the burnt end. Oh my God. So John Brown, the state, there's one barbecue place like really near us. It's like super, super legit. There's another one that we haven't like figured out where it is or if it's open yet, like what the deal is with it, but this place has burn ends. There's a new place near me too. The people have said it's okay. And they run out of the burn ends. Like they, like they just run out of meat every day. Like they make their meat. Well, that's the thing is when it takes food so long to make, right? Your, your barbecued device, whatever it is, usually a big metal thing outside, out back behind your restaurant only holds so much meat. So you fill it up literally all the way with meat. And if people, and then it takes a long time before anything's ready to sell at all, things are ready to sell. So you start selling and as soon as some of it, you know, frees up some space, you can put more in there, but it might not be ready until like the next fricking day or something. You don't even know how long, you know, maybe if people are buying things like early before lunch, maybe you can put some more meats in there that'll be done for dinner, but like you have a capacity and it's like that capacity might be enough for like people sitting in your restaurant, but if people come in and get takeout, it's like there's an infinite number of people can do that. And then you're out of food and you, it's going to be time before there's more. There's nothing you can really do about it. So for, I don't know what I have more, more barbecues. I don't know if it's just because we're talking about barbecue, but the chat is like lit over here. I'm sure it is. People are very passionate about barbecue for some reason. Grover's real excited about going to the barbecue thing this weekend. Oh, so the bar, let's talk about the barbecue thing this weekend. So in New York every year and I missed it last year for, I don't know what reason. I also missed it last year. I've been to it almost, I found it about it actually by accident. I was biking around one day and bumped into it. And then since then I put it on my calendar and I hit it every year since then, except last year. I don't know why it's dangerous though, if you bump into it biking, cause you're already hungry from biking. So now I, what it is, is the, it's the big apple barbecue. It's a man's square park for one weekend a year in the summer, usually June something. And for two days, Saturday and Sunday, barbecue people from all over the country, nay world, mostly US though. I don't think there might be Canadian ones. I don't even know. I think it's mostly US, if not all, but from all parts of the US, they come and set up shop in Madison square park, right? On Friday, they get those barbecues rolling and then Saturday morning at 11, out comes the food, right? And the way it works is you walk up to any booth you want and you shell out like 11 bucks or something. They give you a, you know, disposable food tray with a little bit of like maybe, you know, a little bit of rib, maybe like a quarter rack or less, right? It might not be a rib. You know, it might be a pulled pork sandwich. It might be whatever that place is serving. Each place serves one or two things, you know, the side, whatever their side is, you know, and you walk away and eat it and the popular ones at Mad Long Lines and the not so popular ones, you can just walk right up. They also sell these VIP passes, which are, even if you're rich and love barbecue more than life itself, you should not buy one of these because they cost hundreds of dollars. They entail you to some like, you know, free meals or, you know, you're basically paying for meals and advance effectively, but you can walk basically behind the booths to where they all have separate checkout lanes. So you don't have to wait in line. You can go to basically the VIP line behind each booth to get food everywhere and go like that. But you can only eat it like two or three places before you're full. Unless you're, well, I mean, so I think that is aimed at the Homer Simpsons. Yes, sure. So what I do is I go on Saturday at 11 before there's any lines. I hit up my guy with his bean, the best, maybe my favorite food on earth, maybe, right? And then I hit up one that I haven't hit up before because I've hit up a lot of them are repeats year to year. Right? And I try out to see if there's anything new out there. And then I come back on Sunday and I do a little rerun. And that's how I do. Except last year I've, I've missed it. I don't know why. Probably just go Sunday this year because we're running that race Saturday morning. Well, my plan is to bike to the race, say hi. Oh yeah. Bike to the barbecue. No. Eat, bike back home where they got the mural project block party is going on Saturday. Oh yeah. I forgot about that. You mentioned that. And then maybe bike back to you. Yeah, because we're only hanging out. I could do all kinds of shit on Saturday. And then Sunday, my plan is bike to the barbecue. No. And then you know what I might do. There's not a lot of things happening Sunday. Like they're on since we'll have our guests over and maybe I'll spring for them to get a city bike pass for the day so they can bike over and look because I don't think they want to bring their bikes. Oh, a whole day. Yeah, it's not expensive. Well, I'm going to Sunday at 11. I'm going to be in the square park. Yeah, I will also be there. What times your race on Saturday? I don't remember. It's morning-ish, I think. Well, we'll coordinate our business tomorrow. Like what our deal is. But so the debate they were having in the chat here was, wait, so the definition is just low and slow because they were saying, what about like Turkish barbecue or the barbecue is you're like heat some stones and then put it next to the meat. And I'd say that's all good. If it's not cooked on indirect heat for a long time. There's another component you're forgetting. Probably with smoking. I was about to say smoke is the critical component because otherwise you could argue that a slow cooker is barbecue and that is BS. Then it is some other kind of food, right? That is not, you know, in the barbecue genre. Smoke is key. There's a reason liquid smoke exists as a thing. Even though it's carcinogenic and it's a preservative, I will take that hit. I'll take that risk. I love the taste of smoke so much. Yeah. Barbecue is bad, really bad for you, by the way. Yeah. We know based on relatively recent research that red meat is bad in ways that we never imagined. It's super bad. Like the fat and like all those pieces of it actually aren't so bad for you. What's bad is the red meat part itself. It's not as bad as tobacco though. No, no. And how often do I eat it? Like two or three times a year at most? Yeah. I eat red meat, I think. No, I mean, I mean barbecue specifically. Red meat, I eat maybe once or twice a month. Yeah. Once a month for barbecue tops. Yeah. Tops. Well, barbecue like maybe once every three months, but red meat once a month. If I eat barbecue, I go all out and I usually try to not eat. Well, that's what I do. It's like, you know, if I'm going to eat a red meat or a barbecue, I'm going to eat the best and I'm going to go all out. I'm not going to eat some. I'm not going to eat some Crapo burger, right? But I'll eat a burger if it is an Amazo burger. Yeah. You go to the Bernas or you eat a steak somewhere. Yep. Steak burger. So what's your favorite of all the barbecue dishes? Like what's your favorite that isn't burn ends? Because that's kind of like cheating. Actually, the thing is, you know, as a Jew, pastrami is a deal that you might be saying, whoa, pastrami is like a cured thing. It's not a it's not a barbecue thing. Smoke pastrami. There are places, barbecue places that are doling out the pastrami. And let me tell you, I'm into that. And I don't care about what purist or technicality thing you want to count that as. Smoke pastrami is so good. When I was visiting up in Albany with Pete and Erie a while, not too long ago. Smoke pastrami, man. I'm down with that. That is my deal. Right. I remember that one time we were up in Albany. We're going to have that party and we decided we were going to smoke prime rib for the fuck of it and eat that. And then we went to the place to buy a meat. And the dude talked us out of it. He's like, you don't want no prime rib just by this. Like, you know, by this brisket. You're going to, you're going to waste that prime rib. It's not the brisket will be way better. And he did like, he literally like talked us out of this. Like talked us off the cliff. He told us in the buying something cheaper. So like, okay, whatever. We don't care. But I feel like we should have just smoked that prime rib and gone for it. Well, I mean, we ate a delicious meat. I didn't care what meat it was. Other people were the ones who carried what meat it was. I just really, really wanted a delicious meat. I got to tell you, though, the barbecue, like kebab barbecue stuff that I had in Istanbul to this day. Like I have never had. I mean, I would say that it is not better than American style barbecue in any absolute sense. It's just great. I have never had that style of barbecue as good as I had at an Istanbul because I've tried to get it from like every Turkish or like Mediterranean style place. I've ever tried in the city. Never quite lives up. Meanwhile. Yeah. I don't know like how come some foods because like there doesn't seem people are trying to find a reason you can't make a food in a certain place. Right. Like you can't make New York bagels in a lot of places because the water is shitty. I don't know about that. I'm going to find out if that's true or not. Right. But that's what people say. I'll bring you some water back from Arizona in a bucket. But obviously there's no reason you can't make good barbecue regardless of location because the people who make their barbecue far away come to New York with their equipment and make the same goddamn barbecue they make in their home place. Right. And even if it does if you go to the restaurant far away. So why is it that like not one Turkish person who can make that good food has come to New York with the knowledge to make it and done so here. Right. It's New York City. You've got pretty much every freaking thing that you can think of. Someone has come here and brought it here. Right. Well it's partly just that like where you know Mexico with Mexican food and barbecue when we went to San Antonio we were like let's find the best goddamn barbecue and the best goddamn Mexican food and the best Mexican food there is about as good as the fancy Mexican food I get in New York and so far none of the barbecue places we've tried in San Antonio are better than John Brown smokehouse which is like right next to our house. And John Brown smokehouse is it's pretty good. Yeah. It's not like the best barbecue ever. It's pretty legit though. It's legit. It is Kansas style. Yeah. I like it. I like it a lot. Their cornbread is like ridiculous and amazing because it's like it's almost like a cake. It's cornbread pudding. It's like a giant cube. It's all super yellow. It's super buttery and moist. It's got big chunks of corn in it. It's like the ultimate cornbread. It's just so hard that that place is there because it's right next to where we go bouldering. And when I bite to work they're starting up like they're doing the smoking just as I'm going to work while you're climbing. I smell it while I'm biking to work and I get crazy hungry. No. Like I want to go in there but even if I why don't you just get a job there. Yeah. You can just quit your job and grill instead. I am sure that being a barbecue professional in a restaurant will make the exact same amount of money that being like a Wall Street. I'm willing to bet that the pit master dudes who put their names all over these restaurants that come to Madison Square Park and will be there this weekend make a lot more money than you do. But also more to the point I am pretty confident I would become fat. They are all fat. I mostly fat old white dudes but not all of them. Not all now but mostly. I feel like fat old white dude exploits expresses literally 90 percent of the pit masters I've ever met in my life. I'm visualizing them over the years. Occasionally they're not white occasionally but yeah they're all. I've actually taken note over the years which of the places that show up there are not run by fat old white dudes and they are particularly you know I don't know if they're the most delicious ones necessarily because I mean you know pretty much anyone who shows up there is great to begin with right. They don't have any crappy people there but their styles are definitely the most divergent right. It's like you know they don't all the white dudes are just trying to stick to what you know just like with chili I like the same thing with chili that it with barbecue like there's all these specific like I have the Wikipedia article up and they're like there are only four main styles of barbecue Carolina Memphis Kansas City Texas and then there's like weak sauce sub ones like Alabama California Hawaii Kentucky Oklahoma St. Louis Virginia and other states has a section I guess but I like fusion food a lot and people who do barbecue techniques but twisted in some way I had not only have no problem with that that's usually some of my favorite barbecue even though that stuff would net is there literally an entire article on there's an entire Wikipedia page on burnt ends specifically. Oh baby. Oh look at that burn those burn those ends and put them right in my mouth. And then I die of heart disease. All right I think I think I just love barbecue and I'm going to not eat it tonight because I'm going to be eating it this weekend. That's right. No meats until this weekend and no meats next week. All right. That was easy. I'll do the patreon thing and then I'll go run my 5k. Let's see I got a change to the Patreon manager. Patreon manager. Current patrons. Oh we have some new people I think. All right. And the patreon patrons for this episode of Geek Nights are Nicholas Brandow, Alan Joyce, Heidi McNichol, Amanda Duchette and Tom Hassan, MyStady.com, William Eisneros, Jeremy Miner. That when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing, a genuine bonafide like Chris Midkiff, Chris Knox, Daniel Redman, Sean Klein, Chris Reimer and Thomas Hahn. I'm going to run a 5k race in a few minutes as practice for a more serious 5k race that I'm running on Saturday and now I leave you with a story.