But before we start, we'd like to know how many of you are from the BI world? Target, okay. And then, you're from Phoenix, Arizona. Anybody else from BI? Yourself. Trump? Fidelity Investments. All the rest are going to be from BI. Then, alright. So, how many of you have been practicing adults for the past one year?  More than a year. That's a cue to say that the presentation is going to start. Thank you everybody. We'll just start with Raghu. Can you guys hear me? Okay. Thanks, Anu. And apologies for the delay. One lesson learned is not to use 16 by 9. 4 by 3 for your presentations lessons learned. So, the way we kind of structured this talk is we want to kind of talk about a little bit about BI data. Data analytics. Data science. What challenges we've had. And then talk about how we actually leveraged agile and continuous integration and continuous development for delivery for that matter. And then finally come back and talk a little bit about some of the use cases where we actually used it. And what our experience says, how it worked, how it didn't work. And kind of give some insight to people what really worked and what didn't work. So hopefully at the end of the session you will see some use cases where we actually made it work. And some guidelines on to what to do and probably what not to do. So firstly, how many of you have heard about orbits? One, two, three. Cool. Awesome. I don't have to talk too much about orbits then. Personally, I've been with orbits for a little over 12 years now, mostly in the Chicago office. And then the last three years I've been in Bangalore helping start up our office in Bangalore. And as part of this office, we work on mostly half of our offices data, which includes BI, advanced analytics. And then the other half is product development, which is mostly building up our websites and stuff. So again, I think we're not that old of a company in Bangalore at least like two, three years. But in US, we were one of the top three travel agencies for the longest time. We started in 2001, five airlines kind of started orbits. I have a gift if anybody can tell me what are those five airlines? Wild guess. North American Airlines. United American Delta? No. Big airlines. Continental and Northwest basically. So in fact, our first machine names or rather our internal server names were Dunk LLC. Basically, it stood for Delta United Northwest Continental American LLC. So that's kind of how we started. We call ourselves a tech company rather than a product company or anything because we have really good people who have been involved in open source technologies, contributed a lot of books to the community. And with that, I will actually move on to the next part of our story. How many of you actually heard about Expedia.com? Okay, a little bit more. So last year, we actually got acquired by Expedia. So Expedia is basically number two right now in terms of travel agency and price line kind of neck in neck where we are. So Expedia started in 96, I think, right after Travelocity. And Expedia actually owns Travelocity, orbits, hot wire, hotels.com. Anybody knows where Expedia started off? Actually, no, it's an expensive garage called Microsoft. So yeah, so eventually they spun off from there and had their own stuff. In fact, we have offices in Gurgaon, Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore, Bangalore being us, obviously. Gurgaon is our bigger office, around 800 people right now. So I actually have two questions here. Let's see if you can take a guess. How many room nights do you think Expedia books in a year? I'll give you some clue. It actually fills up an entire city for X number of days. I don't need the number. You can tell me which city and how many days. US. Manhattan, actually. It can fill, yeah, probably at the end of the day or end of the session. It actually can do 30 days of room nights of all the hotels in Manhattan. So that's the amount of hotel rooms that we as Expedia book there. And that includes not just Expedia, the family of Expedia, pretty much everybody, right? And the other thing is airlines, right?  So how many tickets do you think we book in a year? Okay, it fills up N number of planes, a type of plane, 737, 600 planes. So with this, right, you can imagine the sheer number of data that we collect. It's not just air and hotel. Like it's a slew of travel products. So with this being the foundation, we want to kind of talk about a little bit about how we worked at Orbez and how Expedia kind of deals with data. What are the challenges we have? Basically, how we actually use agile and continuous integration, especially to the world. So I'm going to skip this slide. Basically, I just introduced myself. So at this point, what I want to do is I want to bring Anu in here, who's going to talk more on what BI data and the challenges that we face. And then we're going to go to the next section of it. I think Shruti told I have. And when I lost what he said over there, I'm still figuring out what I'm doing. So 17 years back, when I started BI, my first job, it was very simple. Just a data warehouse, build a cube on top of it and give reports. That's what it was. Mostly waterfall. You have time-based people based. These are the problems. But over the last few years, we have all seen how BI has evolved. It has become a very small part in this big plethora of landscape. Sentiment analysis, social analysis, infrastructure, architecture, cell service platform, data platform. So you can name it technology initiators, business initiators. So all have gone into the landscape of BI, big data, big data analytics. So it's all more about unstructured data, real-time analytics, batch, right? So when this place is evolving so much, so much in an unstructured way, I think it becomes more and more important to bring process on the floor. So how have you actually delivered these projects? How have you delivered these different types of solutions, business or technology-driven? It becomes more important and how your teams are. What are you processing? What is your philosophy? How soon your feedback is? How are you knowing that you are reaching what you want to reach, right? Are you on the right track? Are you doing that square thing in the round thing? Right? So over the last few years, we've done agile in like 20 different ways or 2,000 different ways, right? It's never been a right way to say what agile is. Since my joining orbits probably 2 years ago, I can say that we have learned and I saw some hands go up when we said plus 5 years. So I'm just 2-year-old in agile, a good practice agile and we've seen how, what has worked for us in the BI world, specifically in the BI world, where we have different kinds of projects. We have web businesses. This is what I want very clearly, structured data. We have done agile in ways where they are migration projects like move DB2 to Taradita, move Green Plum to Taradita, right? How do you go about doing it? Because business are not going to give their time over there because they already have their solutions. It's a technology-driven initiative. It's your CTO sitting over there and saying, I want this to be done in this period of time. Then you have the other cool projects, right? The semantic layer. You want to build a self-service model for your business. So how do you go agile in that way? So these are small things. We are not in the next few slides. We're not going necessarily into the tools of how to do it. That's basically a choice. But the process, the philosophy is not a choice. What you need to do, what you need to keep in mind is what we have learned and that is what we will be going through in the slides, in this BI landscape. So how many of you can actually relate to this picture out here? In your world of BI, right? So I think if you look at any organization where they've done practice of BI, I can speak for orbits.  But it's evolved over the last decade into what it is today. And every time there is a learning opportunity in terms of what works, what doesn't work, what do you do, how do you do everything, right? So the first challenge, so I come from a product development background. That's where most of my experience has. But last five years, I've been working on the data side of the world. So the first time I actually moved over and I looked at the problems and said that why can't we use Agile here, right? And we've done Agile since 2006 in our organization. Why can't we actually do it here? Then actually came out the problem saying that there are different set of skillset that they're there within an organization and within BI especially, right? How do you actually put them together and really look at solving a problem rather than basically saying that, hey, my job is gonna be taking six months of whatever you need. You come back after six months, I'll tell you what it is, right? So this involves your ETL, your data modeling, your visualization, whatever the analyst-related work. So time-to-market was very important for us. In an e-commerce company, right, you have a hypothesis or let's say you have something that you wanna do from a product perspective. You have to act quickly because the market changes so quickly for us that we can't expect to think of something and say, hey, we'll do it after three months. Our release cycle in product development is actually weekly with at least 10 to 20 deployments every day. That's the kind of speed we move in the non-data world of product development. Now how do you take that and bring it to the BI world, right? So that was one of the big challenges that we had. The second challenge we had was real-time analytics, right? And everybody talks about real-time analytics. And I don't know how many of you guys actually do real-time analytics within your organization, but you have to question the people who are asking for real-time analytics. Do you really need real-time analytics, right? And those are the questions we started asking our business people, right? They cannot change the strategy near real-time. Impossible, right? If you have a strategy of growing room nights in near real-time, then they're lying to you. So you need to figure out where real-time makes sense. So we found out and carved out business areas where real-time makes sense. Campaign management, right? Let's say you launch a campaign on TripAdvisor, which we call the travel research area. You want to see how the campaign is happening right now, not tomorrow. You want to see, okay, are people really coming to our site based on this? What are they doing? Great case for us in terms of real-time analytics. Personalization, right? We do a lot of personalization on our site. You cannot have stale data to do personalization. So you need to funnel the data back in real-time or near real-time so that we can actually do personalization. Simple example I'll give you is anybody's heard about the controversy of orbits with Mac and PC? Nobody. All right, so this was in 2010 where we actually did personalization based on the browser settings. And we said that, hey, based on our analysis, we noticed that people with Mac tend to book higher rating hotels than with people with PC. That might be true, might not be true, but according to our data, that was true, right? So we wanted to do a test and see, okay, is it really true? So we had to funnel that data in real-time for our personalization and saying, okay, show them better hotels first in the sort order, right? Don't touch the pricing, just the better hotels on the top. And we actually proved the hypothesis. And that's one of the examples where for us, real-time made a lot more sense because it was not just the browser. We connected a lot of other things like, for example, is this person a new visitor or a repeat visitor? Is he coming from which marketing channel? So there was a mix of variables that we actually collected. So that's the second example of where real-time analytics made sense. And the third one, which was really big for us, was buy versus build, right? If you go back in 2009 when we started using Hadoop, the ecosystem was not as great as it is today. So we had to make a choice or decision to build a lot of things in-house. And we still use some of those things. And actually right now, you look at the slides further down, we're actually moving some of those things to cloud right now. So that's traditional BI, right? What we were before. So where does agile come into picture, right? Again, like I said, my background is mostly product development. We've been doing agile since 2006. 2008, we transitioned agile in the large. Do you guys know what agile in the large? So anyway, so agile in the large is basically what we did was the entire organization, right? They work in smaller agile teams, either a feature team or a component team. And it includes everybody who can actually get things into production and make decisions. So obviously a product owner and UI and data modelers and stuff like that, right? But we got our business teams and marketing teams ingrained into that model. Because now you have a part or a feature team which can actually execute end to end with making decisions, right? So that's what we did in 2008. Now when we come back to BI, that was not as so simple for us. I will tell you our journey was very tough getting BI people to start using agile in 2010. One, people usually come from a waterfall background. So they are always looking at the way of designing the model, doing the ETL, building the visualization, and then putting it in front of the customer. So for us to change that mindset was the trickiest thing and the most difficult thing. So if you think you're using agile, I think I want you guys to question yourself. Is it the mindset that we have changed with people or the behavior of using two-week sprint stand-ups retrospective? Is that what we are doing? I think that's the key difference out there. So for us, it was a rough journey and I won't say we are there. Perfect, we are perfect. We're not. It's an iterative approach. We learn, we change. Further down, we'll talk about a few examples where we started playing around with the sprint size in terms of two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. What is the ideal? So that's kind of one of the things we challenged. Again, so that is kind of where we really introduced agile to BI, right? So getting in front of the customers in a shorter span of time even though it's a tiny bit of information that they need from the big picture. So that was our first step in terms of getting BI transition to agile. Again, I think the question is scrum, can ban, what do you want to do, right? Eventually you need to figure out what's the right rhythm for you and then stick to that. Anu's going to talk a little bit more of some of our use cases where we actually use scrum and some of the use cases where we actually use can ban. So that is kind of, again, we don't enforce our teams to stick to either of the ways so they can pick what it is and based on that they execute. Actually, has anybody read this book called Phoenix Project? Okay, fantastic book. If you guys haven't read it, it's about IT and DevOps. So in this book, the common theme is called whirlwind. So what whirlwind is, you will relate in BI, right? So you're working on some changes. Somebody from marketing team is going to come over and say, hey, we are bleeding. Our sales are low. I need your help to pull this data out. That's basically whirlwind. You cannot control it no matter what, right? And in those situations, what do you do when you're in BI? You drop your existing work and pick on that or you say no to that. It's a very tricky situation. I'm sure each one of you have been in this situation if you're in BI. That's really tricky. So you guys have to be cautious of that in terms of how you balance those things when you're working in the agile fashion. So this is something we actually call disruptive BI. Not very common in a lot of the organization. But when you talk about continuous integration, automated deployments, continuous delivery, automated QE framework, outside BI, this is beaten to death. So if you talk to anybody from product development side or like a regular developer, they will just say, hey, what's the big deal about continuous integration? But I would want you guys to go back to your people from different organization in BI and ask them this question. What do you guys use for version control? So I'm asking this question to you guys. What do you guys use for version control? Anybody? Get? Get? Okay, good. When did you guys start using it? A year ago? Exactly. For us, five years ago, there was basically, BI didn't use any version control, but they used version controls from the proprietary software that would allow them to do.  So they would still use it, but when you really want to do continuous integration, version control is the fundamental thing out there. So we use Git prior to Git, we used to use something called Acura and CVS, CSV, and so we had a long history of different version controls. So that was the first step, right? Changing the mindset of people in BI and say, hey, can you go use Git?  Does it have a UI? Can I use it? So that's where the mindset and adapting to change comes into picture. So for us, that one was a big deal. We worked through, in terms of how we integrate this with Jenkins, how do we integrate with Stash? By the way, Stash is called Bitbucket now. I don't know if you've heard. So, and then how do we really enable these people to think in the fashion of CI and CD? So that is where we spent a lot of time last year, actually. And I wouldn't say we are done, but we're all almost done. We are there. We know how to use it, what to do. So that's pretty much what it is, right? Cloud, again, it's basically, everybody uses cloud now, right? There are different reasons to why you want to use cloud, but I think it's a very touchy topic when it comes to BI and cloud, because of data privacy and all sorts of things. But eventually, everybody is moving towards this. So that's inevitable, I would say. So I wanted to kind of give you guys the glimpse of how we actually use CI and QE automation framework. So for visualization, we use MicroStrategy, and then obviously we use Informatica, we use ClickView, we use a lot of things. So the gist of this is basically, we have a Jenkins server that basically executes our automated tests every time somebody checks in. So we use Stash, Jenkins, Git. The one thing we actually tried, I know the bottom portion of the thing is it's not visible that well. Obviously we use Selenium for all the MicroStrategy tests. So that is actually pretty cool. So if you use MicroStrategy, invest in Selenium, it's actually very good. It's for automated UI testing. And then we evaluated this thing called SQLI. I don't know if you guys have used it, but it's a paid tool, but we weren't really, not sorry, query search. It's not, I don't know, we weren't really convinced of that, but anyway. So at this point what I'll do is I will transition over to Anu. So you kind of heard where we started with BI and where we are right now with both agile and continuous integration. We want to dive in a little bit more in terms of how we are going to do the use cases or what we did, what are the use cases we solved. There are a lot of technologies, tools, processes that we are following. What we also realized is we need to have, to my point earlier, a lot of discipline on the floor. How we are doing around the team. How we are looking at your project. When we say Envision, when we say Execution, Development, what it actually means. A retrospective, is it the same for every project? An Envision, is it the same for every project? What we realized with BI is a dialogue like a live in relationship.  You just keep hovering around. So, yeah, I know. So it makes it more complicated because under the tour of BI projects, as I talked earlier, as I talked earlier you have the migration projects, you have business driven projects where they know what they want and then you have these data scientists and ad hoc power users, advanced analytics users saying just give me the data, I will know what I want to do. But then you just can't take and give the data. You need to build pipelines, power platform, et cetera. So how do you go about doing that in Agile? And then the cell service. There's pretty little tools which has just to begin with drag and drop, but then it becomes, can you give me a scheduler? Can you give me this? Can you give me that? So there are all these layers that happen in the BI. So exactly how do you fit in each of these into Agile world? And then not to just stop that. You have, sorry, I'm just going loud sometimes. I don't want to say this is important or less important, but, sorry. And then you have global locations, right? Like Expedia and the orbits, we were saying we have Gurgaon, we have Bangalore, we have Chicago, we have Bellview, and I'm sure Target has the same thing and several Dell has the same thing. So you have people located everywhere from Brazil, India, China, US, Europe, and all kinds of places, different kinds of roles. So how do you actually, you know, make sure all are going in the right direction? And, okay, I missed my thing, but we know we are Agile, we say make your decisions as you go, make your decisions this way, that way, but we all know that we are time bound. You can make your decisions, but I really know that I want this in two months. I really know I want this in one month, right? So you can't beat it, you are time bound. So how do we go about being Agile? So I'm going to quickly go through three projects that we have done in the last one year. I'm going to slightly touch upon, because of time, what were the challenges and why we decided what we wanted to do. So the first is the most favorite catered project with any team, that is the platform migration, which I talked about, right? Move from one platform to another platform. Move this report from MicroStrategy for some decision, move everything to Cognos or move to business objects. We're all very familiar with this. So what happens with that? What are the challenges? They are time bound because you want to move there. The license is expiring, blah, blah, blah. They're quite lengthy projects sometimes, but they are quite like, for example, Teradata or you have columnar storage, no SQL database, SQL database, you want to be moving across to say that this is most efficient or that is most efficient. You have a strong user mindset that why do you want me to move? I'm happy where I am. You are pushing them outside of their comfort zone, right? That's a big challenge because you're not going to get that time. Okay, I think half of it is not visible. But anyway, so what we did for these challenges is the first thing is we learned to break down into components, right? For example, in the travel industry, you know that we have products like Air, 48 car, cruise, et cetera. So Air, so okay, what is the 16 data of Air and the transactional booking data of Air? Within the booking data, what is blah, blah, blah?  So we started channelizing the data. So you break, basically, I wouldn't call it vertical slicing, it's also a very controversial subject, but just break down into components that you can relate into. You can say that yes, this is something that I can relate it as an epic, build stories and start working on it. The other thing that you would have seen is the team composition, which I said is very important. You know, whether you're going to have a small team, you're going to have product in the same team, are you going to have QA in the same team, how are you going to do team allocation, whether it's 70% of your bandwidth in the sprint for your daily job, for your job that is envisioned, and you know, the other 30% for admin support, and your personal goals that you might have that I want to learn Python this year, right? Whatever it is. So we were very clear that we have to attribute only 70% of our sprint. Make sure you put in your vacation or unless it's an emergency leave. So such discipline was very, very important. So the team composition, and also to the challenge that we had teams half-split in Chicago and then in Bangalore, we went through a very big exercise in the beginning of 2015 to say we are going to have co-located teams unless otherwise, which will be in the same or similar time zone as our business, as much as possible. So that, you know, you have the product and the QE and that helped really well. So the iterations, I am not able to see that. Okay, there are certain other things like early feedback, iterations, where it's so key that we started, we kept talking to the business, to the stakeholders, the feedback. This, when I was putting this slide and Raghur and I was just talking, isn't this common sense, but we struggled. We struggled to put this on the floor. To make sure people log in efforts every day to make sure we have our sprint metrics at the end of the sprint. So we tracked velocity and over a period of three months we could really see the velocity, the burn down charts that improved drastically. It was a struggle to put it down and though it seems very simple, those were the things. And last year, the same Agile conference, the two people you see on the slide, Anushan Pradeep attended and you see the Scrum Master pointing our head on the developer who didn't log in the efforts. So the Scrum Master has to be harsh. We took it that the Scrum Master will be on a rotation basis and it started off with a lead so that they can set an example and then there were all, Anushan is just a college recruit but she did it. So the team discipline and the way we are doing the backlog rooming, the sprint metrics measurement, all this was very critical for us to finish the migration project. Similarly, there was another project example which is a business project, business driven project, these are user generated content. The previous project we knew that we needed a product and a QE but here we decided we don't need a product and a QE because it's a new venture, it's uncertain requirements, businesses don't know what they really want. We are going to figure it out with the business. So do you really need the same team model? Do you sprint envision, whereas in the other stuff was about technical feasibility, about doing a requirement for one week and then doing a technical feasibility. Here the sprint was more like data analysis, doing a wireframe, getting again an early feedback and getting into the system. So we actually called out what your envision should be, when should your execution actually start. So that played a very critical role in seeing that we progressed with feedback and the iteration.  So similarly we had the technology initiated project that I talked about where it's a moving goal post, it's technology challenges, you have features starting from little bit to a lot more. So again, here I have not given what we did but essentially it is about again defining the challenges we are going to face.  And then the fireworks which Ragu was talking about, you're going to have some SLT tell you I need this report in the middle of the sprint. I need this, there is one P1 bug, some Informatica failed or something failed and you need to look at that. That is why the 30% allocation is just a lot to not get our sprint work affected when you have a certain time written off. If there are no bugs good, you have your personal goals and you can always go ahead and help them. There is kind of a cheat sheet, not necessarily just two in all cases but for us to at least take us quick because there's always a question on the floor. Do you want to go scrum? Do you want to go crumb? So both the projects that I talked about other than the semantic layer we opted for scrum because of the reasons that it was short iterations we knew what we needed to deliver we were self-managed teams whereas on the other side like what Ragu was talking about it's continuous delivery consistent randomization, what do you do? So this was a quick graph to say whether we want to go scrum or whether we want to go crumb. And what we realized at the end of the year is agile works with consistent constant feedback, within the team members to your business stakeholders, again sounds very simple but the feedback was the most critical part to ensure that you are reaching what you defined for. So finally this is the last slide and what not last, my last slide what work for us, migration project any guess I already told what's your take, product roadmap driven projects, either you already know or you've been listening to me at home, I was hoping okay good, so somebody said Kanban though, so yeah he gets the t-shirt and you don't he spilled the beans, anyway self-service was Kanban and ad hoc's integration like he said we just got acquired by Expedia, there's a lot of integration happening around the world and we choose Kanban because we have to work with a lot of teams and there's a lot of randomization lessons learned. Yeah, so we're not going to hold you guys from your tea break so just another minute you can bear with us, one thing I want to reiterate from the previous slide is that's what work for us doesn't mean it's going to work for you, so you will have to really figure out what works for you so that's one thing, the other thing is again I cannot stress enough of this mindset stuff because if people are not committed and they don't understand the philosophy of agile without executing it then I think that's going to be a challenge and for us last one and a half years continuous integration and continuous delivery has been very critical within the BI framework and then the last one is test and learn and you can call it search and discovery test and learn whatever it is but you need to figure out what works for you so that's kind of the bottom line, attrition what attrition number for us people so so attrition rate it's different for us in different locations obviously I don't know how it's connected but yeah fine okay so nobody quit because we were agile so bottom line so we do exit interviews nobody came and complained you forced us to do scrum versus scan ban but it definitely leads to a lot of heated debates definitely yeah like I said right people skill set people mindset in my mind those were the two biggest challenges we had so if people don't believe in agile no matter what you do they are not going to give you the best and you cannot extract the best out of them first thing is change them if they can't change them figure out somebody else right that's the first one the second one is skill set with BI you have different skill set right a ETL person might not know how to do visualization so we did a lot of cross train again not everybody were interested in cross train we figured out who was interested we asked them to cross train across the different areas of expertise so that was another area for us in terms of working and the third one bottom line is holding people accountable right we come to standups and we upfront to their face ask what you did and if they don't have an answer people are going to hold them accountable so these were some of the things people were not used to yes one last question by the way before you ask a question right if you guys want to know more about how we track metrics what are the metrics we track feel free to reach out to us later we'll be more than happy to share some of our burn down charts or metrics that we track challenges and stuff see I would probably I had the advantage because our product development went in first with agile so we had almost four years of experience in agile within our organization and I was part of that four years and obviously you don't question a product development team whether it's successful or not for them right so you bring the same concept to be I and try it out it will work it has worked for us in way too many places not to discount it where it didn't work out so that's so I'll give you a simple example I know this was the last question simple example I'll give you have you ever built a data mart okay so anybody who's built a data mart what's the simple example I'll give you a site site analytics you guys know site analytics right so if you want to build a data mart for site analytics what's the time estimation in BI just a rough estimate before you give something to the customers when I say customers or internal customers six months three months eight that's fair enough it is nine months is the estimate we got when we started off this in 2010 they said it will take nine months to build this data mart alright we vertically slice this based on each of the use cases so that we can actually get one metric to the customer okay in three weeks so we actually took eight months to build the data mart but guess what time to market that makes a huge difference with agile if you're giving a metric to a customer there is a huge difference between giving in three weeks versus at the end of the nine months that is where you're going to win so thank you again thank you


Tablespoons in the freezer. Yeah. Yeah. You got when you want to make something. It's like, well, how many tablespoons do I need to defrost that many and then you cook, but if you have the tube, you just leave the tube in the fridge. Yep. It doesn't last as long once you open it, but it lasts a while. Yeah.  Also, it's good for making chili. So it's kind of a good segue. I think I guess. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Anyway, well, I'll start the show. I think the tube is the correct way to get tomato paste and not the can. Oh, 100 percent. The probably in the minimum order, we have like 24 tubes. So we're just spreading them out among everyone. OK. Well, they give me I'll take two tubes. Yeah. Well, give you a couple tubes. All right. I mean, until I open it, it'll be good for. Oh, exactly. Like it doesn't even need to be refrigerated until you open it. Right. All right. It's Thursday, April 9th, 2020. I'm rim and this is Geek Nights tonight. We are talking about chili, the food coming to you live from our remote quarantine pipeline studios. So, yeah, the funniest thing about this quarantine for me, like just the fact that we're not going out and everything shut down is that I'm not eating out like I now realize restaurants are close.  But also, I'm finding that because we're cooking, we're cooking much healthier food than I normally eat in my like day to day life. I'm like, I don't know if I'm cooking healthier. Yeah, we're definitely cooking healthy. And I think part of it is that the cooking is perfectly normal and healthy, but the baking, right?   Yep. We even got a bunch of crazens left over that we can use to make like crazen shortbread cookies and ever set. So, sure.  I've lost three pounds since this started. I don't know if I've lost any, I guess, because I'm not exercising because basically it's like the time that I would exercise, like, say, commuting to work, right? Yeah, instead of, you know, being like, well, I have all this free time now. Let's, you know, let's go for a bike ride before after work. Right. I mean, I would like to do that. The problem is, you know, a weather, but, you know, whether it's been OK is that that time has been spent just waking up later. Yep. No, I literally I just wake up. I used to wake up at seven. Now I'm waking up at like nine to ten every night. I look at my work calendar and alarm anymore. I just wake up whenever every night I look at my work calendar to figure out when my first meeting is and I wake up 11 minutes before that meeting. Yep, exactly. So it's like, that's the time and the thing is, you know, my building has a little gym in it and I was actually literally finally about to use it. Like, well, I'm trapped inside. I might as well actually use. Yep, I'm using mine. I would never otherwise use, right? And I was about to go use it and they closed it.  They're keeping, they're keeping ours open. But our building only has like 150 apartments, so there aren't that many people who would use it and they have rules about like, there's two treadmills, only one person can be on either of them at any given time and all that stuff. I'm just saying it just as I was like, all right, I find that I'll use this day because I'm trapped inside. I would never otherwise use a gym if it wasn't such an extraordinary circumstance. Yep. Okay, we'll close that gym right before you use it.  There's a sauna in there. I could be in that sauna as soon as that work is over.  I hate it to a degree that is palpable. But what else am I going to do in the winter? Like it's either that or nothing. But yeah, they closed it.  It's getting warm out though. It's going to be sunny. It's like the governor ordered gyms to be closed. So we're closing it. And I'm like, okay. Uh, they so technically, as far as I know, the governor only ordered like public gyms to be closed. I'm I'm aware of that, but that's not what, you know, the building did what the building's going to do. Yep. Our building's different for now, but we'll see. I hopefully they don't close it on me because that's the one thing I got rid of when we moved to this building 11 years ago is I got rid of all my weights because there's weights down there. Now I don't have any weights. The only way to do weight lifting is to go down. I got rid of my, I got rid of, it was kind of broken.  It worked, but it wasn't great. The thing where I could ride my actual bike in place. Yep. Yep. Right. And yeah, good luck buying one of those now. Oh God, right? I wanted to buy. I thought about buying new free weights just like during this crisis. Yeah, they are gone everywhere. Those are impossible to get. I should just try to buy something heavy like two buckets and just start using that. Right. Even if I were to buy one of the fancy ones that goes with my bike computer, right? Like the, uh, it's like, okay, are these in stock anywhere? Yeah. A thousand dollars anyway. Right. Yeah. I found the thing, the crazy expensive versions of a lot of these things are still in stock, but even now I don't really certified reconditioned ones. Ooh, but there's still a fortune. Yeah. That's a problem. Even in even outside of a crisis, things like that are a fortune. There's a lot of things I thought, oh, maybe now's the time to buy, but then I look at the price and I'm like, you know what, Eva, I think I can still wait. I think I can still hold out. Yeah. $1,200. It's like, yeah, I could just buy another bicycle. So what do you got news wise on this lounge episode of geek nights? Sure. It's sort of thing of the day adjacent, but it's also news adjacent. Right. Um, the date on this is what April 8th. Yes. It's from yesterday. So, uh, so sometime on Wednesday, which, uh, guess, uh, you know, today's Thursday. It's like Wednesday. Oh, okay. Never mind. It was sometime yesterday. Uh, there are a pair of some space action going on, right? Uh, oh, no, they were the launch is Thursday at 105 local time. Oh, did the launch happen already? Anyway, Russians launch in a rocket to send, uh, so Americans and two Russians into space, right? Like you do. So they were in quarantine, which you do when you're an astronaut anyway. It's not an unusual circumstance. Yep. I'm sure they did not bring coronavirus into space. Yep. That's part of part of what being an astronaut or a cosmonaut is. Yeah. I'm sure they didn't do that, but there's a story here about apparently when you go to space in Russia at Baikonur, I've never knew how to pronounce that name of that place. Don't even a Cyrillic. I can't read at all, but it's the place of the right. It's basically the Cape Canaveral of Russia. Yeah. If you've never, if you've never heard of it before, that's like their place, right? Where they launch other rocks. Yeah. In Kazakhstan. Yeah. Whenever you launch from there, uh, apparently it's mandatory that the day before launch when you're in the cosmonaut quarantine hotel, you must watch this movie like they make you watch it. That's kind of amazing. Right. It's mandatory. It's always the same movie. It's an old Soviet film from the 70s called White Son of the Desert. I want to see this now. Is this like the Soviet? This is my new. Yeah. It's on YouTube at some time. Is this like the Soviet Lawrence of Arabia? It looks like Laura. I thought that the movie was Lawrence of Arabia, but apparently it's not. It's White Son of the Desert. Wow. Um, but yeah, I'm fricking watching this movie once soon as I get the chance.  Hey, there's our next Thursday show next Thursday. We're going to review this movie. White Son of the Desert. Yes, for now, everybody nice movie club. Let's go. I don't think it's actually going to be that good. Yeah. But looking at these stills, it looks like the kind of movie that I will enjoy. Oh yeah.  Anyway, uh, here's a movie for you. Oh, it's got some Western action. The guy watching it. You'll be cleared to go on this. The guy with the bolt action rifle like firing from under his horse. Yeah.  I've been off and on on a Western kick over the last few years, but I've kind of run out of Westerns to watch. So I got to dig deeper into like older, weirder stuff. So my news, you don't know. I have Fark is a website. F F A R K dot com, but the best way to describe Fark is it is internet 2.0. Before internet 2.0 was really a thing like so and it hasn't changed. So it's like going into the past of the internet, but there's still people like, you know, that thing and the reason I'm bringing this up, the reason I think this is newsworthy is not like I like Fark, but it's not just because I like Fark. And I think Fark is actually moderately important, but I think it's important in a lot of the same ways that like something awful was important or even fortune in the early days was important that it was kind of foundational to how the internet culture for him's important being separate from good or bad. Exactly. There are a lot of important things that are not good and a lot of good things that are not important. That is a lesson you need to learn in life. Significant, but Fark for a lot of reasons was and is to a degree still important, but the deal with Fark is that there was nothing like it and when it came out, it was sort of like a revolutionary idea how to do a community online centered around news and current events and somehow while Reddit and 4chan and something awful and YouTube and all these other places to say that it was very Fark. Oh yeah. Slash that was true slash that was older, but slash that is also in the category sites that tried to do the same thing like dig and what Fark is older than dig. Obviously. Yep. Remember meme pool. Right. Right. Exactly. Well, mean pool was a little slower and I think it was one person. Yeah. Meeple was was a was a that was a blast from the past. That was a product of its era. But right, but it basically is, you know, these sites that would be aggregators of news that were manual aggregation to a large extent, but not editorial. Yep. And also somewhat crowd sourced the aggregation, but not to the extent where you say Reddit does exactly and they develop distinct and in many cases overlapping communities.  Like the people are awful people today. Right.  Right. Yep. And everyone else in the tech scene who was checking slash dot because that was the tech news site of the day has left. And those the only people who are still there are the ones who are old, old bad white guys. Yep. But Fark is unique in that that never happened to Fark. Fark has younger people and older people using it. Like in terms of online communities that are centered on broad topics and just topical news.  The only good reddits are the hyper specific ones are the ones that have very like communities around a particular thing. But Fark is one of the broader large internet communities and it's kind of amazing how much of a like local culture it has in an era when there really aren't that many websites anymore. Well, I think it's it's simultaneously broad, but also not. Yeah. It's like a niche take on people who are interested in policy and like pay attention to weird news. Right. Fark is about the news, which is huge. Like any news goes. Yeah.  A specific subset of news. It just looks broad because that slice slices across the whole watermelon. Like you think Florida man, Florida man, like that meme partly came directly from Fark. But Fark is where you see the Florida man of the entire Earth. Right. So for example, right on Fark that Fark will very, very much enjoys a news about injustice, right? But you'll see news about injustice from every country, every place, every kind of injustice. Yep.  But I think that's it also by you know, Tiger bites a dude's foot off in a submarine or something crazy, right? Yeah. It's like, but it'll do crazy things from everywhere. So it's really Fark likes a few specific things. It also just posts the biggest news story. Yeah. But that's another thing is it's like this community and it's just like all fun and games. And it hasn't descended into Nazi hellhole. Like a lot of other communities have due to a really robust system of moderation that a lot. Like I'm really kind of amazed at how relatively civil the conversations are in Fark to this day compared to almost any other broad community on the Internet. Well, I think that's because, you know, Fark is sort of like, you know, all the other ones have some a greater idea of like openness, whereas Fark is more along the lines of a Craigslist, right? It's owned by one guy. He just gets to say he can just be like, no Nazis owned by Craig. Fark is owned by this Drew guy. Yep. Drew Curtis. He's just owned by a guy. They run it right there in charge of it. You can comment there. You can post content there, but it's run by the guy. There's not there isn't this expectation of, you know, culturally and in the community wise. There isn't this feeling of, you know, I have rights to post here, right? You can't they will ban people if they need to be banned. And the other thing is Fark was actually really ahead of most of the rest of the Internet in terms of community safety tools, like blocking and shadow banning and automated moderation. Like Fark really pushed the envelope a lot of this stuff and because because unlike the other places say like Reddit, right? They're they're outsourcing that stuff to the, you know, to the community. Yeah, like here Reddit, you start your own subreddit and moderate it, right? Slashdot is like, hey, everyone up and down vote stuff to moderate and report for us. We don't want to, right? Whereas Fark is doing it themselves. And when you have to do something yourself with your own company and your own money, you build tooling. Yep. And you also by having a strong community, less motivation to build tooling when someone else is doing the work for free. Yep. So I read far. I've read Fark for like more than 20 years. Like it's pretty much my whole adult life. I've been reading Fark daily and like I like this community. I like the people in it. I don't like all the people in it, but whenever I encounter a shitty person, I use those tools that still exist and they disappear forever. And I just never see them again. But, uh, Fark is in trouble because the reason why we keep saying things like, you know, that common theme, there used to be more websites, independent websites like college humor, like places where people would like make a community to make content have been vanishing for all the late capitalism reasons. We talk about a lot on Geek Nights and yeah, because, you know, if you're getting your aggregated stuff through a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed or any of those other Instagram, right? When you are in those places, you're largely staying in those places. Those do a lot of embedded content. You know, you have a Twitter thread rather than a Twitter with a link to a blog post, right? Things like that.  Yeah, some of this stuff is a link somewhere, but a lot of the posts on Reddit are I uploaded a video to the Reddit. I uploaded the image to the Reddit, right? I wrote a text post on the Reddit. That's the post, right? Whereas on Fark, everything is a link usually to some local newspaper or local TV station. Fark actually is a significant source of like how people find real news, especially during a crisis. Like I remember during like on 9-11 or during the hurricane in Louisiana and all that. Fark was in some cases hours ahead of the regular news media because Fark is a wide community.  I see stuff on Fark sometimes before I see it on like a Bloomberg terminal. It's kind of amazing. Oh yeah. No, and also there's a lot of people who use Fark and don't credit it appropriately. I remember when I was in college and I would do a short drive from our apartment to the one parking lot. I was allowed to park in. Sometimes in those days we didn't have podcasts. So I would still have to listen to local radio guy and I could tell 100% guaranteed no question. There was no doubt in my mind. Local radio guy literally, he might not have even known that he was doing this because his writer or his producer was doing it. But basically getting stories from Fark probably printing them out and handing them to him. And then that's what they would discuss on the show as they would go through the wacky stories on Fark. Like, Hey, did you hear a Florida man did this? Hey, right? And I was like, those are all the headlines on Fark right now. Open up Fark. He's literally going down the bottom right. There are still lots of people out there producing other content in that exact same way. They're definitely still local radio. Yep. Zoo shows that are just going down far. So why am I talking about Fark so much? Because their listeners don't know far because I partly because I'm old and the Fark demographic is definitely a little older. Like when it comes to politics, people seem to know more in there than the general population. Even if Fark is not getting Fark is not doing great at getting new people because it's such an old, you know, but it is advertising. Yeah, but it does still grow like there are people younger than me there. Like more of them than I you would expect. The reason I'm talking about Fark is that somehow Fark has survived so long and they're on the verge of failing now between the virus and subscribe ad revenue dropping and subscriber numbers dropping for a lot of reasons. Fark is actually running out of money and might have to shut down by the end of the year. I don't understand why, you know, it's so you could just cut back. It's so cheap to run.  Well, it uses a terrifying amount of bandwidth for one and there are support staff that have to keep it all running. It also has developers because it's a little janky and needs people to continuously update and fix things that are broken with it. What wouldn't it's so old and it's been developed for so long, wouldn't it be just fine and it's got some issues? There's more. You can read you can read some of the details that I don't want to take the whole show and make it the Fark show. But basically, you know, Geek Nights has the newsletter that's just whenever Scott feels like it, he writes a newsletter. Drew Curtis has been doing that in Fark like for a long time. Like I just get this email from Drew Curtis every now and then that just talks about like, Hey, here's the deal with Fark or here's what I'm thinking today or whatever. And he's explaining that like here's all the reasons why we're in trouble. A website like this is very hard to continue to run in the modern world. Part of the reason like one of the dangers is litigation risk sites like that get sued all the time. So does they have insurance of some? Oh, yeah. But we just talked about that again. Basically, if you are someone who has never used Fark before, I recommend just going poking at it might not be for you. I'm not saying you should use Fark, but just go look at it because if nothing else probably benefiting from Fark indirectly without knowing, but it's also it's a time capsule into a different kind of Internet. It is a lot like what the Internet was like in the early to mid 2000s. And I think you'll be surprised if you do go to Fark that you'll go there, read it and like an hour or two later, you'll see a lot of the things that were on there appearing on your Twitter feed. Yep. Like, oh, what? I already read this somewhere. Where did I see this? But there's a basically the other thing that I just want to point out if you if you find if you read Fark and like Fark, what I would recommend much like with important news sites, they have a subscription service that does give you a bunch of stuff. And they had to they really just while they have one that removes ads, but they had blockers work like they've never stopped ad blockers from working because they're not evil. They know. But to you can pay for total Fark. It's not that you don't want to do that. I'm paying for it now. But I mean, you might want it. You could pay for it because you don't use it. If you use it, it's like serotonin straight and you see every issue that you're paying for is not a thing you want. It's a thing that you want if you work in a job where there is no actual work and you're literally just sitting at a desk reading Fark all day. That is the kind of person who pays for total Fark and uses it. But if you use Fark at all, that is a way to give them money. And if they get enough subscribers, they can probably continue to run for a long time to come without getting bought out shutting down or having to make the kinds of compromises that sites like Slash.  So I care a lot about Fark. So I'm just putting this out there. Yeah. Rim is basically Fark the person. If you read a lot of Fark, you'll turn into a rim. Yep. Fark poop report. Not that I've read poop report in a decade, but but anyway, things of the day. So check this out. This is this. There's a video in this tweet. It's from South Korea. I don't I haven't like researched this or looked into the deal with it yet, but it's a highway and in the middle of the highway. I've seen this real. There's a median and in the U.S. When there's a median and a highway, it's just grass. Usually, but this highway in the middle is a really good, really wide bike lane, but that's not notable because like Australia has stuff like that. You can just ride the ones. The ones we saw in person in Australia were on the side of the highway. So there are in the middle. In some cases, I've driven. I've driven a lot more in Australia than you because I've been there. I saw a middle one. Yeah. I saw middle ones too. I God, I've been to Australia a lot of times now that I'm thinking back. But anyway, so here's one in South Korea, but the deal, the cool part about this is that the bike lane is in the middle. It's aimed at commuters and long distance cyclists. The entire thing is covered. Protecting you from the rain and the wind and you're completely isolated from traffic because the roof is just miles and miles and miles and miles of solar panels.  This is what the United States needs.  That's my thing of the day. Other countries do smart. Basic ideas in the US doesn't do anything. We're no longer a country that does the best stuff. We haven't been for quite a while. People are just seeing it more and more every day. They're like, yeah, the United States is not.  And now over the last three months, we've moved from being just kind of a shitty falling man country to actively harming the rest of the world. Yeah, I mean, you know, we more so than like when we overthrew peaceful socialist governments to replace them with dictators in the 70s, but I digress.  We didn't pay to take care of the stuff. So we had a real fragile thing. Now here, a pandemic came along and then broke it. So now it's like before, it's like we had stuff that was just fragile and shitty. Now our stuff is broken. Well, like what made America so powerful? The much of the rest of the industrious world got bombed that one time when we didn't get bombed and we were just there ready to profit from it. Like that's the main reason the U. S. was so prosperous for so long. Pretty much. Yeah. So what do you got? What do I have? So hot. So yeah, so hot. So I posted this in our forum, which you should join. But, you know, since there's a, you know, coronavirus going on in South Korea, which RIM just mentioned is all smart, at least smarter than other places with regards to that. They were shutting things down. It's like the K-pop scene was shutting down way before it was anything was going on in the U. S. Like several weeks before we did anything like I was at PAX East and there were K-pop groups like performing their songs to empty rooms because they were like, nope, no more crowds. Gigi, that's it. So, you know, if you don't know K-pop people, one of their things that they do really well is they post lots and lots of video content constantly to keep their fans well fed and, you know, give them all kinds of things, right? Where, you know, as opposed to say J-pop where they'll give you, you know, if you're not in Japan, you're getting something never and you have to pay for it, right? So they're running out of stuff to post obviously because everyone's blocked in somewhere, right? Usually not with video equipment or video editors. So here on the JYP channel, they reposted an old video that I'd seen before, but the one that I saw before was not as complete and was not as, you know, a good quality as this, right? So what this is, the video of the person, the JYP, who's an interesting person if you look him up. He's written many, you know, hit songs over the years and one of the hit songs he wrote, one of the biggest hits was so hot for the Wonder Girls, right? The song he wrote. And in this video, he shows you exactly how he made that song. It's, he's only like two to four measures of the song, right? Like the main part of the song. He shows you exactly how he made it, piece by piece, instrument by instrument. And it's, you know, it's only a small part of the song, but basically that's the, that's the song. It's like, the song is that over and over with a little bit of this. You know what it's like? It's like, what's the two mix song? There's a, then just repeat that forever. Right. But it's fascinating. I think to someone who is, if you're not a songwriter, right? You're like, you're thinking like, okay, I understand conceptually how you write the song. Yeah. Really? How do you write a song? Like how, like how, right? Here at it, like after you watch this, you will not never ask that question again. You will say, oh, that's how you write a song. And then you'll be like, and then you'll say like, you'll hear him do it. You'll like a little bit of the ways into it. You'll be like, I could do this. I could be a writer. And then you'd be like, no, I can't. Yep. There are a lot of, there are a lot of that. One thing I love is seeing like different artists process for writing songs because it's all over the place. Like writing a symphony is very different for writing a pop song. Well, yeah. This is the pop song process. Yeah. And it's also great to see in this video because he's got like, it's not like a power Mac over there on the side or something. Oh, wow. Yeah. This is from like, you know, 2000. I guess the song came out. Oh, look at all those synth boxes. Yeah. The song is 10 or 11 years old. Maybe I think it's at least 10 years old. So and then he must have made this video after the song became a hit. So this is probably a 10 ish year old video. Oh, I see both the audio and the MIDI cables coming out of that keyboard. Yeah. He's basically just got like a old Mac probably a not a probably a power PC Mac. I'm imagining at a big old keyboard, right?  He can switch the keyboard to right with some MIDI. You know, actually, I've realized something sad as of when I got the new audio equipment and set up this whole new pipeline. I now have in my apartment zero ways to connect MIDI devices to my computer. There's no way to do it right now. That's the end of an era. I mean, if you're not writing songs, I don't think you need. I haven't written songs since music theory class in RIT or like high school. Yeah. And the songs I wrote sucked. Yeah. Well, the song he wrote was as all time hit in the meta moment.  So stay tuned on the book club. We are streaming a lot. Follow us on YouTube and go to the Geek Nights official artificial discord Scott and me soon. We'll just be streaming random games in there sometimes. We're hanging out online doing as much as we can mention Geek Nights forum. Actually, there was a problem with the forum. It wasn't sending emails. I fixed that. Yep. Which means some of you may have gotten a flood of emails that were in the backlog. I'm sorry. Yep. You might have noticed we're seeking comments. We are writing a new clarified code of conduct for the Geek Nights community as a whole. Oh, yeah, we didn't actually pub. Oh, we did publicly announce that. Yeah. But I just want to remind you all like you can contribute to this. It's just in GitHub. I would love to hear your feedback because we're too like middle-aged white guys. We need a lot of help to write a good code of conduct because we definitely have blind spots. Right. And I don't just want to steal someone else's. I want it to be one that's appropriate for our community and our beliefs, even though I have stolen from many masters from other communities. Yep. Right. I went around and read a whole bunch of them to take what they were doing that was good and put it in ours. But, you know, I need, we need feedback. And part of it is we don't to the forum. There should be a stickied post about the beta, you know, draft of the code of conduct and you can go to the GitHub and you can, you can communicate with us however you're most comfortable with. You can email us. You can post in the forum. You could make an issue on GitHub. You can make a poll request on GitHub. Yeah. Try to find me on Discord and send me a message like whatever. Yeah. You can DM me on Twitter. You can do whatever you want to comment about this code of conduct because it's not in state yet. Yep. But when it is, it will apply to not just our forum, even though that's primarily what it's for. It's also for literally every single Geek Nights community thing. Including the live stream on YouTube, which we are streaming right now. We are streaming shows again. So if you stop paying attention to the YouTube channel, pay attention again because there's 14 people watching this right now. People are starting to come back. Right. But if you were to say, if we were to have a gaming meetup in the city or something, the code of conduct would be applying to that event as well. Right. So if you ever, if you're listening to Geek Nights, if you ever want to participate in our community in any way, this is relevant to you and your interests and we want to make sure that A, it is not something that is, uh, onerous and ruining your fun if you're a good person. Yep.  Yeah. But also we want to make sure that literally anybody on earth who is a good person, right, will see this code of conduct and they will feel safe enough to join and not be afraid to come to Geek Nights community events. Right. We want you to feel welcome and safe and any Geek Nights thing, uh, no matter what your situation is, if you're a good person and not a bad person. So speaking of good and bad people, let's talk about chili. I can't believe we haven't done a show on this. Well, so the thing with chili, the food, right, is that I think because of the culture of the chili cookoff, right? Yeah, which I'm a big fan of, right? There's this sort of unlike other foods, right? Chili has competition sort of built into it. Whereas I guess barbecue does a little bit, but it's really chili is like the forefront of food that's competing. Well, it's not not like they're a pie. You know what I'd say? There's contests for all these things, but chili has a lot more like people will just kind of do a chili cookoff on their own and sort of self-organized like my work had a chili cookoff recently just randomly like all the engineering teams were like, let's do some just make a chili cookoff.  Let's go. Right. You know, the county fair will have contests for, you know, pies and things like that. But, you know, the chili cookoff is really the preeminent American, you know, food competition. Yup. Also chili is one of my favorite foods, right? And that culture of competition around chili, I think results in this particular food being giving people very strong opinions about the right way, the wrong way, the better way, the worst way, what makes it good, what makes it bad, like how to score a chili, right? I'm unwilling to talk about the true origins of chili. I don't care about the debate of whether or not beans are traditional.   There's the cowboy stuff, beans are not beans, but whatever really what we're talking about are braised dishes that involve some combination of chili powders and and then beyond this, this could be an or list, obviously, beans, braised meats, other like onion, celery's, tofu's, but usually it's like a chili con carne with braised meat, tomato and onions and stuff. Yeah, I mean usually, but yeah, it's just it's a stew, right? And the stew is usually red and spicy. It has a bunch of stuff in it and it's such a wide variety of different things meeting like this minimal like common factor that they all qualify as chili, right? So if you can get a turkey chili with bean, you can get a vegetable chili. You can get a chili. It doesn't even a tomato going on.  It's basically just your scooping ground up bits of meat that have been spiced and sauce lightly, right? Or heavily up. There's there's there are people who are already taking issue in the streaming chat with our inclusion of beans. Yep. Well, deal with it.  What is not chili? And you know what?  I just care that it is delicious. Yep. And if I have to say the word chili to have someone bring that food to me so that I will eat it, then I will say that word and I do not care. The same person is saying that tofu is bad, not because it's vegetarian. That's awesome, but because it's also beans. Tofu is beans. Yeah, correct. But it is also delicious and I would welcome a tofu chili that is tasty.    But yeah, if you're good at it, just get chili mix at the grocery store, get the cheapest one, buy a meat and follow the instructions and like get a can of sauce. Yeah, have a chili that is food. And even if you mess it up, if you just let it sit long enough simmering, it'll eventually taste good. Yeah. But at the same time, if you understand the fundamentals of cooking braised dishes, then you don't need a recipe like you can just make any kind of chili and it'll always be good, not edible, but like good. Because there's not that much to it. I have like there's a chili recipe I've used for most of my life that basically is just how to make the the three like stages of preparing a chili. And I know what kinds of ingredients to put in at what part of the chili cooking process.  Well, that's I think that's also right. The that that wide birth girth. Yeah. No, birth as birth be we ain't talking about Gandalf. Yeah. That is an inside joke from a long time ago. The wide birth of things that could count as chili is also what leads towards, you know, back into that, you know, competitive scene, right? Because it's like if chili was one specific like if you have a cheesecake competition, it's like you can't have that much variety where things are still cheesecake. It's like a different topping, different flavors, how smooth is it, right? It's it's wide, but it's like it's not chili wide, right? You could have chili with different meats, different sauce, different spice, hotter, less hot bean, no bean throws a vegetable in there. Yeah, I like to use a primarily celery base, a looser chili, a thicker chili. Yep. It's very stew adjacent to but I think the distinction is chili all chilies are stews, but not all stews are chilies.   All right, so some of my favorite chilies stew Leonard's chili, Leonard's chili. So if you don't know, this is a grocery store. We may have mentioned it on Geek Nights before. It is I guess Ripley's believe it or not says it's the world's largest dairy store. It was owned by a guy stew Leonard who got in trouble protecting his son took over who got in trouble for something else and I think his son is out of jail now. I don't know who's running the store now.  But then I went to not from Michigan, you wouldn't hear, but then I went to it and I understood from that point on why you talked about it so much. Yeah, it's like, you know, the way people talk about Trader Joe or Whole Food, that's because they haven't been to stew Leonard. Yep. Well, like me as roller coasters, the way people know about Six Flags or Disney World, that's because they ain't been to Cedar Point. But anyway, stew Leonard among the other things that has, which are off topic now is that they make a lot of their own food, right? So one of the foods you can buy there is their award-winning chicken chili with beans. It comes in, you know, a plastic takeaway container. It's like a court or whatever. It's so good. It's so good. Every time on YouTube that shows you how to make it every time would make it as good as it is when you buy it at the store. It's just it's just refrigerated there in a plastic container, you take it home, you pour it out on top of something, some rice, maybe just a bowl of it. Not have anything, right? For years, anytime Scott and I drove within like 10 or 15 miles of a stew Leonard's, we would always deviate and go get some of this. Yep. Why wouldn't you? And it's just like a solid chicken chili. Chicken is chili is really underrated chili. It's harder to make. Well, because you can kind of burn the chili of the chicken. If you braise it the wrong way, it'll be kind of tough. I think one thing I've learned cooking chicken lately is I've pretty much, you know, it's like I already like dark meat better than white meat. That's not new, right? But basically now I'm like, I realized I've sort of taken that thing I already knew, which is dark meat is better and just been like, wait a minute, I know dark meat is better. I've known that for super long time. Why don't I go all in on that? So whenever I make chicken, almost any chicken thing I make, I'm making boneless skinless thighs or getting boneless thighs and removing the bone, right?   You got to be careful with the braising. Like you got to use more oil. You've got to like really, you have to spice that chicken to basically, you know, really season that chicken and keep it, keep it juicy. And you really got to deglaze. Like deglazing is important for like a beef chili, but with a chicken chili. If you don't deglaze, you're like all the flavors just going to be stuck to your pan. Yep. Yep. But that's, you know, the key to making a good chili for me is the process of like the first thing you have to put into that bowl is you braise whatever meat you're going to use. If using tofu or something like that, that isn't like a primary meat. You don't put that in right away. You put that in way later. You braise the meat. Also, if you have something like a tofu, right? It's not a meat that's going to give off a lot of delicious fat when you braise it down. Got to put that oil in there. You got to add some oil, right? So if you get a tofu, you got to go sesame oil, maybe for Asian style chili with the tofu. I don't know. Ooh, I've never used sesame oil before. Yeah, why not? You can make an Asian style Asian fusion chili. What I tend to do is I'll braise either cube chunks of beef or ground beef, and then I'll set it aside and without cleaning out the pot, I'll put in a bunch of oil and usually as much as I like to make the traditional like just a pile of onions for the base, I actually tend to use primarily celery, like one onion and two hunks of celery, like big hunks. And then I just braised that down until it's like unrecognizable mush and the whole pot is covered in fond. Yeah, it's a lot like making curry, right? It's like a curry from scratch. And I think, you know, all the really difference with the curry is that curry. It's like, okay, I take some onions, right? Disintegrate them down into nothing. Yep. Right. Get your braised, you know, boneless, skinless thighs in there. Yep. Right. You know, whatever.  The butterflower. Oh, the, yeah, I know what you're talking about. Yeah. You take butter and flour and you cook them together and you make a whatever it does a word. A roux? Yeah, the roux, right?   So I'm saying that's the difference between curry and chili, right?  And then you roux it up with chili. It's like, you're not really putting too much water going on there. You're definitely not making a roux with butter. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, right?  So I learned something recently that's made my chili way better. Like reason like in the past five or six years that as it, when I was younger, I didn't understand it's made my chili so much better. I realized you don't add the tomato until way late in the process. Oh yeah. The acid in the tomato kind of fucks it up and makes it harder to like make the meats. Like it causes all these chemistry problems in the chili. The other thing I learned to do better was instead of cooking the garlic, because I like to put a ton of garlic in instead of cooking it separately. What I do is after I've made the fond and I've got all the vegetables, I make a little hole in the middle of the fond and I put some oil in the middle of that hole and I put all the garlic there and cook it by itself in the middle of the hole for like two minutes. Then I mix it all together and then I deglaze. Now you could do that. It really depends on if you're looking to keep the garlic in there. It's like you're you're maybe getting little nibblets of garlic or do you want it to be a paste that just causes garlic flavor? You could do that too. Or you could just take a whole head of garlic, right, chop it in half down the middle, toss it in skins and all, right? And then you just got to get it out. Yep. Before you serve it and that'll really use it like you use a bay leaf. Right.  I'll admit I've found that if I want that kind of chili, using a bunch of granulated garlic has the exact same effect. You can't taste the difference. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm saying like that's a, you know, usually I think the put the whole head of garlic in you could do you do with the chili. It'll be good. Yeah. But I think, you know, usually you're not, you're not pouring a chili through like a strainer, right? The way you would say making. Yeah, you don't want to have to fish it all out. I've done that a couple of times in my life. But you could, you know, but you can, you can put a little string on it and then you want to get out. But for those of you who might not know a lot about like better cooking techniques to find what we're talking about there.   Assuming, assuming you don't have some nonstick. Yeah, I don't think you can make a good, a particularly good chili in a nonstick pan. You don't think you could either because you need that fun. The fond will form normally when I was younger.  But then I learned the secret of deglazing deglazing is like our reaction happens. Like so you put an onion in a pan, right? Yep. The onion starts to brown because of the my art reaction, right? That brown is not bad. That is pure flavor country. That is the delicious part.  So it's like, okay, I got this piece of onion. It's grilled and heated nicely. So it's got, you know, browning and it tastes great. But some of the browning fell off. It's on the bottom of my pan. Yep.  That's why you deglaze use something like alcohol and you put a little bit of it in and it'll basically just melt all the fond into your food. Right. So for example, a lot of and this isn't just chili. A lot of food cooking. This happens, right? De-glazing, like look that up and there's whole sets of instructions and techniques. A lot of times, you know, like I'll like take some chicken, bone the skinless thigh, right? With some olive oil, right? They brown up nicely and then it's like, okay, let's throw in all this other stuff and a splash of cooking one. Yep. Or savinagar or sherry or brandy works really well. Yeah. Or even sometimes depending on what you got, water can do it too, right? And suddenly all that stuff that was on the bottom of the pan comes right up and absorbs in, right? And there you go. So you can even, for example, like say brown some chicken, take the chicken out of the chicken's done now, take it out and then make a sauce. And, you know, while you're making the sauce, all the stuff gets incorporated into the sauce. Yeah. I've done that a few times pour that sauce over the chicken out of the pan and your pan should look clean, but you still need to clean it for my basic chili.  And I'll basically pour half a can of beer into the pan and use that to deglaze because that adds a really nice flavor and all the alcohol obviously evaporates. Another thing you can do, right? Yeah. A lot of people, I think when they make chili, right? They're, they're like, you know, you got to worry about the actual chilies, right? That's where the name comes Yeah. I just use chili powder, but or in the state after I get the onions in the celery down, then I'll do that again with a whole bunch of peppers that I've chopped up. Right. But I think the real pro technique is to get dried chilies, right? Because that if you're not growing your own, if you're looking at dry chilies, there are so many more available varieties. Yep. And especially if you live in like a city, right?  Right. So you can rehydrate them, which is totally easy to do. Right. You can get fresh chilies and like roast them down a little bit on a sheet pan in the oven. Yep. Especially don't don't use poblanos in particular roast them first because they will not break down fast enough if you cook them in the pot by themselves. The skin's thick. Right. The other thing. Well, yeah. Well, you roast them and you could take the skins off. Yep. Exactly. There's a whole technique about that. It's like, look it up. It's a crazy technique with plastic bags, but it works. I don't know. You don't always need plastic bags. The plastic bag me this works so well. It's so easy. You cook things to get the skins to peel off. Yeah. But it depends on the chill on the pepper too. Like a lot of the peppers I use, you don't need to do this. You can just cook the whole pepper chopped up. But the other thing you can do is you can take those right and throw them in if you got a blender or food processor. Yeah. You get all your your actual, you know, chilies right. Blend it up real good that way.  So after that, if you get so much chilies in a pot, it's not going to work out as well. So I have to get the meat in. I let it cook for like an hour, maybe longer. Like chili just gets better the longer you let it cook. Like that's just that's the magic of chili. That depends on certain things. Right.  You want to do more like a barbecue chili, right? You can use that long chili cooking time as like a slow cooking for the meat to get it to be, you know, very barbecue tender. All right. Like a pulled pork situation. But maybe if you've, you know, got like a ground beef and you you browned it already, you don't need as long a cook time there. But after all that cooking, then is when I add the tomato and if there's beans or tofu or anything, I put all that stuff in. Like so it's cooked for an hour. Then I put all the tomato and everything in for like 10 more minutes of cooking. Because the thing about eating the chili, right, the most important part is you could just put it in a bowl and eat it with a spoon. Isn't that that's perfectly acceptable? My go to is put it over rice or have croutons on top. Those are my two main ways. I feel like you have to add some kind of bread rice grain. It just makes it a complete meal. It tastes it feels right. But I never want that grain to be a if the chili is next to the grain, right? Then the grain could be special. So for example, I could have a bowl of chili with a garlic bread next to it. I could have a bowl of chili with a cornbread next.  That's right. If the chili is touching the bread or the rice or the grain, right in any way, top or bottom side, then that bread has to be plain as hell because it is just a bread vehicle, a wheat train, right? Meat passengers. Chili in a bread bowl is like literally like one of my top 10 favorite foods on earth. It is an extremely convenient way to eat chili because you don't have to think about the bread part or the bowl.  It's not even fancy ski resorts.  But every ski resort, even the shittiest one has fantastic chili. So even someone who's not a great chef can make a chili. Yep. My dad was a fireman and like part of the reason like I was so obsessed with chili is because we eat chili a lot because firemen in firehouses like they'll go on rotation for like a week at a time. They all take turns cooking because they're living in the firehouse. They make chili like 80% of the time. The stereotypical fireman, right? Like firehouse chili is a thing like that's a kind of chili. Put some cayenne pepper in it and they'll even say things like, you know, five alarm chili. Yeah. Or, you know, I don't I can't think of a single firehouse on earth that doesn't have their own chili cooker. Oh, 100% and their own chili recipe. At least in the United States and because I ended up because my dad was lieutenant and he ended up being like the deputy chief. So as a kid and growing up, I met a lot of like I went to a lot of different like firehouses over the course of my life. And the one thing I remember is that every one of them had the one guy who made the chili for that firehouse because he was the best. Like everyone had like one guy. That's the guy's entering the competition at the end of the year. It's the other firehouses that my memory may be a little faulty but I'm pretty sure 100% of the chili guys had full mustaches. Oh, yeah.  My chili got worse when I shaved off the mustache. That's one problem. The other important component of eating the chili not always, but for most chilies I want to have a cold thing either a sour cream or a cheese to mix into it. On one. Okay. So mixing in. I'm not too big on. Well, you put it. No, you put it on top and I only mix it in right as I'm eating it. Right. That can dilute the power of the chili.  Oh, yeah. I like to put a blob of sour cream on top of the chili bowl. Do that just like in the house not even chili but like if I'm eating chips and salsa I'll just get sour cream and I'll dip the chip in the salsa and then in the sour cream. Yeah. But I think if you're doing cheese or any kind of dairy I just get the bowl of chili ready so we're doing the bread. Yep. You're waiting to the bowl these sprinkled on the top make a layer like a French onion soup. Top top sprinkle. Right. I get the cheese greater. I get the block of cheese and they go right on top of the bowl. Right. No mixing. Right. And I don't use a fancy cheese. They use like Monterey Jack or Cheddar. Oh, no, no, no. I use the regular old just cheddar cheese. You know, rectangle from the Monterrey Jack is a good choice. Give me a sharp one. Yep. But you know, but if your chili is particularly powerful or good on its own and you don't want to even like compromise at all. You just want that cheese like texture and flavor Monterey Jack is not a bad way to go on a chili. No, no.  Right. And I think most of the laughing cow varieties aren't even chili appropriate. I don't. Yeah. So in terms of the other bits of chili, I think we've gone on for long enough about chili.  Like that works pretty well. Sometimes I'll make but if I don't want to mess up the flavor, I'll use use a vegetarian broth or I'll just use water and add enough salt to the water to make it as salty as broth, but to not add any flavor. Yeah, I'm still not expert on this. I know that stock comes from like, you know, bones and broth. We made some the other night. I can try to make broth. No, no, no, but I'm saying it's like, you know, it's like, I know this stock versus broth, right? But it's like, when would you, you know, when do you use one and when the other? Or is it just better? And in terms of chili, I found it doesn't matter. I've used all different kinds of stocks and broths and like, even my saltwater technique because I get the feeling that like, you know, when I hear like chefs, I've never heard them say it directly, but I get the feeling whenever I watch cooking programs that stock is just better than broth.  Right. It's like the vibe. All right. I just googled it. What's the difference between stock and broth? The term stock and broth are used interchangeably and you can substitute one for the other within recipes. There's slight difference in their preparation. Like, that's it. Anyway, if you go to the grocery store, you'll definitely see the same brand selling in a carton, right? Stock and broth of the same animal and they're two different products. Yep. So, but seriously, like you can get away with just water and salt if you put enough good ingredients in there and in terms of tomato, I either use fresh crushed tomatoes, like from a lot fresh, but like from a can, but like crushed or diced or honestly, tomato. If you got tomato can is the way to go unless it's that one moment of the year where tomato is in season. Yep. Tomato paste, however, you can't tell the difference. Tomato paste, like if you're chili, like tomato paste is from a can. Yeah, but tomato paste is fine compared to like a big thing of diced tomatoes and way easier to work with and you can start longer and tomato paste is just like magic. If a chili doesn't feel quite right or you kind of messed up the flavor profile, more tomato will just make it taste more like generic chili and save you. Tomato paste is like tomato concentrate. Yeah, I mean, tomato paste is literally tomato concentrate. If you need tomato sauce, just take tomato paste and water and look, you got tomato sauce. Yep. So that's how it works. Yep. That's the point. In terms of the spices, I tend to the one thing I really don't deviate from is I tend to mostly just use chili powder.  I love cumin. Oh, yeah. We got Amanda was making a chili today. She's like, I bought this giant cumin, but look, it's running out. I make so much. It's like I had ever we never buy big things because there's not a lot of people and you don't eat that much food in New York. You don't have a lot of storage space.  Only now am I buying big things. Right.  Cumin is so good. Like, however much cumin you think you should use in the chili, Jesus, three times as much, it'll be fine. Right. We use so much cumin in the chili that the big one was the right purchase. Yep. And then I either use smoked paprika or cayenne pepper, depending on what kind of kick I want to give it and all the rest of the flavor. I just wanted to come from they're pretty similar. Yeah. Mostly depends if I want it smokier versus like spicier. Yeah. I think that's the thing is you got to make, you know, that the the great chilies you're mixing together different chili flavors. You get like a fruity pepper and a spicy pepper and a smoky pepper. I'll get all three or balance them. Yep. In some way, or don't balance them and lean in heavily to one and make a very like specific kind of chili. Habaneros are real good for flavor, but do not try to make a chili with just habaneros. You'll be in for a bad time. Whichever one of the peppers you lean into, the rest of the chili has to sort of contrast. True. Right.  Right. Then you might want to come back on it and go maybe more, you know, with some dairy. Yeah. Right. Or, you know, maybe a sweeter, a sweeter tomato. Yeah. To go on the other side. Like one thing I really like to make is instead of using a lot of chili powder, I'll get like three or four pounds of rainbow peppers, just like random sweet peppers. Chop them all up and I'll I'll braise those down just like I would with the celery and the onion.  That works real well. And it makes like almost a sweet chili. So you get this contrasting about chili, contrasting sweet and spicy. Last thing about chili. Yeah, the show. Yep. And I'm getting hungry. So is that you can talk about chili? I know I'm getting real hungry. I want some chili. I eat food already. I think we're going to get a Baroness burger tonight. No, exciting. Is that unlike a lot of other foods, chili is good all times. Oh, yeah. Breakfast, chili, Bob, chili, chili, right? Not right. Breakfast, chili, lunch, chili, dinner, chili, all appropriate late night snack.  Right. And then not only that, but all seasons summer, chili, winter, chili, right? You're I'm cold.  It's summer. Let's go outside and have a chili cookup. And also made to have chili barbecue made too much chili dog. I'll dip my hot dogs in the chili in the summer. But in the middle of winter, cooking some chili. All right. Now there's much humidity in the apartment. Everything smells good. I've been running the strike because the heat's on. Yeah, but you make humidity. Right. There's never a time where it's not chili season because everything you're using in the chili is meat, which it doesn't have a season. Right. And canned vegetables and dried peppers and all these beans from a can. Right. All the ingredients going in the chili. So almost none of them are fresh and seasonal. Well, like onions, dried, preserved meats, like onions and celery in particular. It does not have to be good. Onions are good celery. Like usually what I when I use celery, it's because we have too much celery. You can always get a good onion anytime if you live in a, you know, a place that has food. Yep. So that's that's the one of the greatest things about chili that even other better, not to say chili is the greatest food on earth. You know, it's a great food for sure. Yep. It's not my number one. It's just in my top 10. But it's like other greater foods are often seasonal in some way or time based, right? I wouldn't eat the delicious steak dinner for breakfast. Yep. Don't steak and eggs. But you don't, you don't. I'd steak for breakfast. Yeah. But if you make steak and eggs, you're not making a filet mignon steak and eggs. Exactly. But chili is appropriate at first. Every meal in every season and every time and every place. The other main property of chili, the other last one that's real important that you didn't touch on. The real last I already did the last. There is a last, last one. Coming with the last. There's it's impossible to make too much because you can just freeze it and thought like frozen chili recooked just tastes better. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's made of preserved stuff. Just preserve it again. And as long as you're careful with the temperatures and like if you freeze chili that you made, thaw it and cook a bunch of it. Don't finish it.  Yeah. No, it's not. What's wrong with it? Yeah. The only problem you can have is if you don't do right food safety and let it sit out too long because you'll slowly increase the bacterial load.  Yep. So here's the secret. If you make a lot of chili and you want to freeze it or get into your fridge, don't just put it in the freezer. It'll actually mess up the rest of your freezer or fridge because it's so hot. And if you let it get cool to room temperature naturally, that usually works. But it's not super safe unless you'll be sitting in the danger zone for a while. Yeah. Way too long. Meaning, sure. Meaning if you freeze it once that way, do not do that again. But right. But usually just separate it into individual serving containers. Freeze those. Well, separate individual serving containers. But then what I do is I seal those containers and I put them in a cold water bath to bring their temperature down rapidly before I put them in the fridge and then the freezer. Just that really minimizes the time it's in the danger zone. Putting them in the containers is going to already cool them off a whole bunch. Remember, I worked at that shitty restaurant at RIT. So one of the things I was actually responsible for was taking the chili and the hot saucy, like, you know, the meaty hot sauce stuff that they had down there and doing the quick cool before we then staged it into the fridge and then the freezer. That was literally my job. Yeah. But I think that the individual containers is key because if you have like a giant bucket of chili in the fridge or the freezer, what are you going to get to chisel out and split that up? That's not going to fly. You got to heat that whole thing up when you want chili again. If you got individual containers, you could just pop one out and chili any time. Yeah. My God. I'm going to next week I'm going to make some more chili. Actually, no next week I'm going to eat all the chili in my freezer. The following week I'm going to make more chili. I have a fridge full of chili right now. I'll probably eat one tomorrow. All right.  Okay. All right. I think we're good.