This week on PandemicQuest Josh, Starr and Ben share insider trading tips via the dark web, explain why aliens haven't attacked yet, and their thoughts around starting a SaaS company for hand sanitizer. The truth isn't out there, it's in here! Can you handle it?
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Full Transcript:
Starr:
What's today, March 20th?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It stays March 20th for the next two months.
Josh:
So the freeze as a solution to the economic crisis. Just pause everything until it blows over. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, and the thing where that falls down is at that... it's like, well that would also... You wouldn't have to be your mortgage and all that. It's like they wouldn't be able to evict people. But then also you wouldn't get paid, and you still have to eat, so... I don't know. If you have to have a-
Josh:
Well, but maybe that's where the tax stimulus comes in. We just... Future tax payers can... can pay for that.
Starr:
Oh, I guess so. I was thinking an amazing potluck. It's just what you want in a pandemic.
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know about that.
Ben:
I like the idea of changing our whole calendar system for the pandemic. You know? Let's-
Josh:
Yeah, that wouldn't cause any trouble.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. Let's forget Gregorian, forget Julian. Let's just build a new one. I like it.
Starr:
The COVID?
Ben:
The Covian?
Josh:
The COVID.
Ben:
I think it was Kodak... Kodak built their own calendar and for the greater part of 20th century actually ran by it. It's pretty sweet actually.
Josh:
Are you serious?
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. We should switch to that.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. You know, that's so... I mean, I don't really think I'm ever going to be like founder of Kodak rich. I don't honestly want to be, but if I was, that's the kind of shit to pull. It's like, okay guys, I invented a new calendar. You all have to do it just because money. You know? Because I've got it, so here's my calendar, chip chop. You know?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I should probably clue in our listeners. Given the current, crazy state of the world with everything literally being on fire and... I'm expecting aliens to come next week and blow up the White House or something. We're sort of just going to be winging it for the next few weeks until things stabilize a little bit, because it feels kind of weird to go on and in the midst of all this stuff be like, all right, so we're going to do... we're going to talk about VC versus Bootstrap. Go. And it's like, who even knows if VCs will exist in two months. They might just... right? They might all be wiped out by the virus. You don't know.
Josh:
It's possible. I was going to say, I don't know about the aliens though, because I think the aliens are probably also self-isolating right now. I don't know if they'd want to actually come here.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. Yes. I mean, it's kind of like a spaceship. It's like, I wish I had a spaceship for my self-isolation.
Josh:
Maybe that's why the aliens haven't actually arrived, because they've been just self-isolating this entire time. The entire history of earth. You know? This is hitting us late, so...
Ben:
Yeah. They're all like, humanity is a virus.
Starr:
So the one thing I was thinking about in the past couple podcasts we've done is we go... We come on and we do a podcast and we're like, oh yeah, this is the state of the world. And then we come in a week later and everything's completely changed.
Josh:
We're lagging. Yeah, we're lagging by a week. So just keep that in mind.
Starr:
Yeah, we're lagging by a week. So it's just... it's just interesting to me to think about because last week I was... I was saying, well you know, maybe we might be... Like my daughter's daycare might be shutting down, something, whatever. Then by Sunday my wife and I were both like... we're like, we're pulling that girl out. She's not staying there anymore. And then an hour after we emailed them, they're like, we're closing anyway. Sorry. And now, basically, we're in our tiny little Seattle, city house. We've got two people working from home, or trying to. We've got... My four year old daughter's at home. And I've been working on this backyard shed for a long time, or it's an office. It's intended to be a backyard office.
Josh:
Well, it's a daycare now.
Starr:
Yeah, I spent most of yesterday picking up the razorblades off the floor, literally. Use a lot of razor blades in construction. Who knew? And vacuuming up all the carcinogenic dust and everything, and to make it into a big playroom because it's like our living room is getting a little tight.
Josh:
Starr, even if you did none of those things, it sounds like it was still a safer environment than the daycare.
Ben:
Josh, that reminds me of the movie Daddy Daycare.
Josh:
You know, I haven't seen... I don't think I've seen that one.
Ben:
You still haven't seen it?
Josh:
I still haven't seen it.
Ben:
I know we've talked about it before. You have to see it.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's hilarious.
Josh:
All right, well-
Starr:
That's not the "It's not a tumor" one, is it?
Ben:
No. No, that's Kindergarten Cop.
Starr:
Okay. Okay. Similar premise?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It sounds like a similar premise. It sounds like a direct rip off actually. You know?
Ben:
Daddy Daycare basic plot line is two executives get laid off and they can't deal with their kids. And they start a daddy daycare and hilariousness ensues... hilarity ensues.
Josh:
Classic. Classic thing to do.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. We got to corporatize this... this stay home thing.
Ben:
Can you imagine what Honeybadger Daycare would look like? I think that would be awesome.
Josh:
Absolute chaos.
Ben:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I think you just put in some padding on the walls and the kids go crazy.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
But back to the VCs. I read... I was reading the other day just because I've been doing a little trying to keep up on the state of... the state of that world where people's minds are at. And there are at least a few people talking about VCs investing in some sectors still. Especially sectors that are... the few that are still potentially seeing an increase as a result of this health, obviously, and in remote... remote work and stuff.
Starr:
I'm just trying to figure out how we can make a SaaS that like a hand sanitizer. It's like you pay a monthly fee and then you go on the website and then your hands are sanitized.
Ben:
That'd be cool.
Josh:
That would be... that would be an invention. Yeah. I do... We are going to be making some hand sanitizer here pretty soon. I've got... I've got a surplus of supplies, let's just say. So, I think-
Starr:
Oh, wow.
Josh:
I think we're going to be-
Starr:
Are you sure you want to be announcing that on the... to the public, Josh? Are you sure you want to be letting that-
Josh:
Well, I'm pretty sure that I have... I have enough to... I would share with everyone in the neighborhood so I might... we might have to go door to door. And I thought it's... Not only is it a nice thing to do but it also might actually help improve the neighborhood's odds of like staying healthy. So it's a little bit of a... it's also a bit of a selfish gift.
Starr:
That's funny. It's like, in 50 years it's going to be some grad student who's... who's pouring over all the data to try and come to some... trying to figure out some thesis for their post-doctoral degree or something, and they're going to be like, huh, this one little cluster of houses survived. I wonder what's the story there? And the story is a hero with some rubbing alcohol.
Josh:
Exactly. 99.8% alcohol.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Ben:
So speaking of things dying and surviving, I'm wondering what's going to happen with colleges. Because my older son's in college and they've... their next quarter is going to be online. They announced that this past week. So he's not going back to campus for the next quarter. But longer term, this goes on for several months into next year, let's say, like some people are theorizing that it will, does the perception of the value of a college education finally change, right? I mean, people have been talking about this for a long time. Have we reached the point where it's just not worth it to spend ridiculous amounts of money to send a kid off to college, right? And now that colleges in the U S are like, well let's just do it all online, people are like, okay, why am I even paying you? You know? I was like, um? The colleges are like, well, we're still provide a quality education. It's like, it's a Zoom Meeting. Really? You know?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I don't know. I'm interested to see how that plays out.
Josh:
There seems to be like there would be more competition for online education if the colleges are forced to compete.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Purely... purely with the online model. Although of course they still have the upside of actually an accredited degree.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
But, I don't know. Yeah, I mean the other thing is it could, it could just... it could encourage more of the online. Maybe they... the online thing will stick in some places more than it is now. And yeah, I don't know. I think... Personally I think it would be... It's cool the more asynchronous it can be in my opinion, the easier it becomes for people who aren't full time students to... If they, say you want to get a degree or maybe you want to get a second degree or whatever, it makes it a lot easier if you can basically do it whenever. Work it into your schedule.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
So, yeah it's pretty cool.
Starr:
I wonder if... I'm going to guess that if anything, pandemic world is going to make the value of a college degree be perceived as higher. Because I bet you most of the people who are working from home are college educated, or have some college and most of the people who are having to go out into the world and who are really stressed out about that probably aren't. So, I don't know, it's like-
Josh:
That's interesting.
Starr:
It's like people are going to be like they kind of fight each other for those shitty office jobs that you can do remotely at least.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And then on the flip side... So my younger son's in high school and they're trying to figure out what they're going to do for the rest of the school year basically. But at this point the teachers are saying, well, here's some stuff that you could do, but it's really just enrichment because, for the sake of equality, they can't be handing out assignments and grading them because not every student in the school or in the district has access to good internet or has the computing resources at home that they would need to be able to actually attend lectures or even complete assignments. And so basically the school is done for the year. I mean, really it's not coming back before the summer. So at that point it's like, okay, so what do we do for public schooling? Right? Because if you want to be equitable and make sure everyone has access, well then maybe you... we finally have to treat internet access as a public utility because, frankly, everybody needs it to get an education.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So yeah, it could be a lot of interesting results that come out of this particular event.
Josh:
Now that everyone is on the internet at the same time I could see... I'm already starting to see the effects. I think we all are... of things getting overloaded. The three of us on video right now are kind of jumping around the screen erratically.
Ben:
You mean we're going to spend it on a podcast episode complaining about Comcast?
Josh:
Right. I mean, our internet's... Yeah I mean the Internet's fine. It's, we're just jumping around erratically. Like we-
Starr:
Remember to tell your children about the times before so that the memory of them will last... will linger on. You know? Beyond us.
Josh:
So my internet, it has been... It has been disconnecting a little here and there and I've been using my LTE tethering as a backup. But yesterday my LTE was kind of getting spotty and then my... We have an alarm system in our house that has a cellular transmitter to notify our, the alarm company and that thing started like going off because it has an alarm when it disconnects. The transmitter on that was having LTE issues, so I called the company and they said that they blamed it on the 5G rollout. So apparently my... Apparently the tower is experiencing 5G growing pains because they're diverting 3G resources to 5G apparently.
Ben:
That poor tower.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Thoughts and prayers for that tower.
Josh:
Right. So I don't know what it is, but that's another data point that... Yeah, either 5G or everyone tethering on their phones is causing some issues. Although it did seem to be signal related. It wasn't like a bandwidth issue. I think the signal was actually like getting weaker.
Ben:
That's because Joe was standing in front of the dish while he's putting a 5G in. I mean there's really... I just... Okay. So I don't know anything about cellular networks, right, but I find it, as a technical person, a little difficult to believe that doing... adding a new service through a tower should degrade the old service. You'd think they have protocols for making sure they don't degrade their existing servers when they're trying new stuff? You know?
Josh:
I think... I mean yeah, I would assume they would. Yeah, I don't know either, but I've never heard... I've read a little bit about cellular, how cellular networks work, and I have not read that they take the... I've heard they add. It's usually like they're adding equipment to the tower versus re-purposing old equipment. That's why these towers start out with one little antenna on them, or whatever, and end up looking like... You know? I don't know. Like... yeah.
Ben:
Like something from Star Wars.
Josh:
Like a pin cushion or, yeah. Yeah, like a Star Wars. And then they have to make them look like trees so that we don't all realize the society that we're living in. If you just took Star Wars and just made everything look like a tree, or like something natural... Just put... Just disguise it all. Maybe that's what we have now. We don't know.
Ben:
Yeah, I could just imagine Han Solo flying around in a ship looks like a pancake.
Josh:
Yeah, just drinking some Kombucha.
Starr:
I don't know. The emperor just think all that stuff looks tacky. The emperor likes his vistas. He likes his nature.
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know what the modern equivalent of the Death Star would be.
Ben:
I don't know about you two, but I have definitely noticed my performance this week has taken a hit. I'm just... Even I've seen a lot of people on Twitter saying... people who have been working from home for a long time, like we have, telling people who are new to working from home this is not normal. If you don't like this, don't freak out because this is crazy for all of us. And that is totally true. You would think, I'm kind of used to the idea of checking the news on a regular basis and still getting work done, but this is just taking it past any kind of normal.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, who would have thought society collapsing could distract you a little bit.
Josh:
I know, right.
Starr:
The complete dissolution of the world in which we live in. Who would've thought, who would have thought that would have any effect?
Josh:
See, I've been... I normally try not to check the news. I read the news on the weekends. I try to stick to more of a slower news cycle. But lately... I mean, I've been checking it way too much.
Starr:
Oh yeah?
Josh:
But I've been... I'm going a little easier on myself because... I mean, this is a historical time. This is not normal times and it's all so interesting. Everything that is happening is interesting, as well as terrifying. But it seems like... I mean it's not... I'll give myself a little leeway right now to kind of experience-
Ben:
Well that's a good point.
Josh:
I'll look back on it and I don't want to have... I don't want to look back on it and realize that I just went through it not paying attention.
Ben:
Yeah, I like that. I have a friend of mine from church, she's a teacher. She teaches second grade, and one of the enrichment assignments that she sent out to her class, to her students, was for them to journal about their experiences during this time. She said, because, talking to her students she said, you are going to be a primary source for a historian 50 or 100 years from now, or even your own grandkids are going to be looking back at this time saying, what was it like for grandma. You know? What was it like for grandpa to live through this? And I thought that was an excellent suggestion, to... I like to journal, but I hadn't thought of documenting the kinds of firsthand experiences that we're going through right now so that my grandkids could be like, Whoa, that was crazy. You know?
Josh:
Yeah, I was thinking about that. I was thinking about that too this morning, actually. I might do a little writing and... Actually, I started a physical journal around the first of the year in addition to my yeah Notes app and stuff. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I can imagine, in 50 years or whatever, these kids sitting around the fire with these old journals being like... being like, oh, grandma keeps talking about... She's really into the craft of mining or something. Or it's like, did they still use that word fortnight back then to mean two weeks. That's weird. I thought that was... that was something from a hundred years ago. But they spelled it funny. Huh? Just...
Josh:
How can you have fortnight all weekend?
Starr:
I know. It doesn't make sense.
Ben:
We totally need to release a game called Furlong.
Josh:
Yeah, what would that one be about?
Ben:
I don't know, but you know... You know that-
Starr:
A really long piece of fur.
Ben:
Yeah, the furlong's for Fortnite, right? So we definitely need a furlong to go with our Fortnite.
Starr:
Oh, I don't know. I don't... I've never played Fortnite. I don't... I just know that the kids were obsessed with the last year and I'm kind of assuming that they're not obsessed with it anymore. I don't know.
Josh:
It's still pretty big.
Ben:
Speaking of obsessive games, you know what today is, aside from being March 20th?
Starr:
What?
Josh:
DOOM?
Ben:
Not DOOM.
Starr:
Are they really an Animal Crossing?
Ben:
Animal crossing.
Starr:
Animal Crossing, yeah.
Ben:
Today's Animal Crossing day.
Starr:
Awesome.
Josh:
Hey, you're pretty stoked about that I see, Ben.
Ben:
Oh yeah.
Starr:
I got my switch? I got... It was my birthday a few days ago. I asked everybody... Everyone is like, what do you want for your birthday? And I was like Nintendo gift cards because I don't want any of that. I don't want things from the outside world entering my house right now. So yeah, I'm going to set that up, maybe tonight, and play some Animal Crossing.
Ben:
Sweet.
Josh:
Nice. Yeah, I might play some DOOM.
Starr:
It's like, what a perfect game to released at this time.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Well I was saying the same thing about DOOM. I've been on the fence of picking that up but that's always a good time.
Starr:
Is there a new DOOM coming out?
Josh:
Yeah, there is. It already is. It already is out, yeah.
Starr:
Oh, I haven't... I'm sorry I haven't been paying attention.
Ben:
That's a nice contrast in options there. You can go with DOOM or you can go with Animal Crossing.
Josh:
What type of person are you?
Starr:
There you go. So I actually don't mind these... these Zoom lag... the lagging in the Zoom calls, because my reflexes are already kind of on a one second lag. So things like DOOM just don't really... I'm just not very... very competitive at them. You know? And I thought I was when I was in college because I was on a good college internet connection that was back when everybody had 28.8 dial-up modems and I was like, man, I'm really good at this. But I just had a really fast connection compared with everybody. And yeah, I learned my mistake.
Josh:
You were like those stock traders that are on the New York stock exchange fiber.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. I should have... Why wasn't I doing that instead?
Ben:
Made a lot more money.
Josh:
Gosh, I'm so much better than everyone. Look at all this cash that is reigning upon me. Validation.
Ben:
Speaking of stocks, my stock pick from last week is up by $1.
Starr:
Oh boy.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Raking in the big bucks now.
Josh:
$1.
Ben:
$1.
Josh:
I hope you bought a million shares.
Ben:
Well, maybe a little less than a million.
Josh:
Nice. Yeah. Yeah, I did not buy any stocks. I decided that stock picking is just not my cup of tea. So I'm going to stick with my boring, long-term... Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. I think that's the way to go.
Josh:
Jack Bogle investment plan.
Ben:
I think-
Starr:
Now what was it you were saying, Josh? About the risk minimization or regret minimization, that you laid out this argument for why you weren't going to pick stocks.
Josh:
So the argument was... Actually, I wrote a blog post about this on my blog too, but the argument was that I'm so risk averse that I'm never going to dump... I'm never going to spend a substantial amount of money doing that. And so Ben and I were talking and we were like, well, you know you can do it. It's kind of just... It's a hobby. It's for fun. It's almost like fantasy football or fantasy sports or something. You pick the companies that you think are going to do well and then it's just kind of fun to watch it go up and down, or whatever.
Josh:
But I realize... I mean, if I do that and the stock does really well, I'm going to regret not dumping, not putting more money into it because I'll be like, well, what could have been if I would've just taken a risk, or whatever, but that is not... That's not me. So I was like, I'm actually going to regret rash... Acting rationally for me is like, just not to don't do that in the first place. So I decided that I would have less regret if I just didn't do it.
Starr:
Yeah. And I don't know, like I remember... I remember the moment where I actually realized how the math worked on sort of individual stock trades and sort of how... Suppose that you had some sort of magical knowledge that was totally legal to use and not insider information at all, but you had figured out the code and you knew that the stock market, or one particular stock was going to jump by 25% tomorrow. Right? That would be a incredible piece of knowledge. Right? So it's like, okay, I'm going to invest all of my available money in this. I want to invest $100 grand in it. And so then the next morning you get a profit of $25 grand. So it's this... You've had this great once in a lifetime piece of knowledge and it got you $25 grand. Which, it's nice to have $25 grand, but-
Josh:
But it's also a felony.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean it's a felony. It's a-
Josh:
And it's... Yeah, because there's no compounding, right? Like there's no... There's the longterm part is what makes you the money. So, yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. And also you might be wrong, so I don't know.
Josh:
Right. And then, yeah... you know there's the risk. Yeah. It's still a gamble, yeah. We were... I read a article today about our... Not today, but this week, about apparently there's on the dark net, which I think is-
Starr:
That's my favorite net.
Josh:
I think it's just Tor. There are stock tips trading sites, so where people in the financial industry can go and share their insider trading tips.
Starr:
Oh.
Josh:
Or sell them, basically sell them. But yeah, so they are-
Starr:
And there's some sort of peer to peer cryptographic thing that makes them tell the truth, right?
Josh:
Well it's... I mean it's all... It's a house of whatever. Like a house of mirrors or whatever type thing where everyone... No one knows who anyone is and everyone's a cop. But yeah, apparently the price of entry into one of them is one Bitcoin, which at the time was about $5,500 for an annual membership. And you have to trade... You have to share, I think it was a couple, up to two decent sources of information every year to maintain your membership. So just... Yeah, I don't know. If you want to be a criminal, it's a... You know, it might be a better subscription than the Wall Street Journal. I'm just saying.
Ben:
You know, it's just... There's proof that there's nothing new under the sun because that totally reminds me of the Warez-BBSs back in the day where you had to... you had to upload, download credit. You had to upload some Warez before you had enough credits to download other stuff. So you had to prove your cred first. Yep.
Josh:
Nice. Oh, you know what it was called? What this one was called? If I recall, it was called StockNet, which is... I mean, I love the names that they come up on these things. It's always the most... It just sounds like that's... It sounds like something out of Tron or something. Right? I don't know.
Ben:
You know what their tagline could be? StockNet, only slightly less evil than Skynet.
Josh:
Nice, yeah. Yeah, let's go tell a Skynet thing.
Starr:
And the irony is that it was a Dragnet all along.
Josh:
Right?
Starr:
So I've got a hot tip for you guys.
Josh:
Let's hear it.
Starr:
This is my stock investment tip, which yeah, I've definitely researched this, but I'm just saying Eucerin Lotion, right? Because when you've been washing your hands as much as I have, my hands get dry and I didn't think to hoard that. You know? Everybody's hoarding this hand sanitizer. Well what happens if you use hand sanitizer 20 times a day is you need some lotion. So yeah. So we went out and bought that. We... My poor little daughter has... The back of her hands were all red and she doesn't like putting on lotion. So we got her some magic socks that you put them on your hands while you sleep and they do a magic spell which is called lotion inside the socks. And that will... that'll fix them right up. But oh gosh, it's just a dry chapped wasteland out here.
Josh:
See, I thought this would be good for you to Starr. Because when you're finishing your office, you don't need sandpaper, you can just use the back of your knuckles.
Starr:
Oh there you go. That's a great idea. I should, do that.
Josh:
In these trying times, you have to get... You have to be resourceful.
Starr:
You have to make due. You have to make due. Well you know I... This is all very unfortunate circumstances and very, it's difficult for everyone, but... And also I am more busy than I have ever been in my life because we've got two people working from home and we've got my daughter here. But one silver lining is that I've really actually gotten to spend some great time with my daughter in a way that I don't usually get to.
Starr:
Usually if we see her, we're both together with her and that's cool, but I haven't gotten to spend just four hours a day one-on-one with her before and it's really neat. I'm sort of seeing a new side of her that I didn't really know was there. She is really into this idea now that we're this family who's all working together to keep everybody happy... to keep each other happy and try and be kind to one another. And, I don't know, it's just really great. She's really stepping up and we're getting to have more fun with her. So I'm maybe... Once this is all over, maybe we can, or maybe I can figure out a way to sort of keep that a little bit somehow.
Josh:
Yeah. That's a good... It's a good opportunity for bonding.
Starr:
And it's of course, as soon as I say that she's screaming no. I don't know if y'all heard that one.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
We should probably leave that one in. And that's comedical.
Josh:
I mean, kids stay in on request. Yeah.
Starr:
Well, I should probably better go pretty soon because we've got the... the office needs to be used by another video conferencer.
Josh:
Yeah, you're rotating. Got to rotate out.
Starr:
All right, well this has been a FounderQuest. This has been a pandemic quest.
Josh:
Pandemic quest.
Starr:
Yeah. If you enjoyed the show, please give us a review on Apple podcast. If you are a Ruby or elixir developer interested in writing for us, we're still doing that. Just shoot me an email. All the information about that is on our blog. Go to our blog. There'll be a link in the top navs. Shoot me an email. And yeah, we'll catch you next week maybe. Hopefully. I think we're planning to, but I think we shouldn't make promises at this stage.
Josh:
Yeah, internet... If the internet allows, we'll be here.
Starr:
Yeah. If the internet exists, if the economy's still here.
Ben:
We need some dramatic out music for our pandemic coverage.
Starr:
Oh, we should get some, yeah.
Josh:
That would be good.
Starr:
And if it doesn't... if everything's gone next week, I'll just sit around a fire Friday morning and just pretend I'm talking with y'all.
Josh:
Burning your furniture.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Playing Animal Crossing.
Josh:
With your Switch.
Starr:
Like on my... I've got one hour left on my UPS, I'm going to play Animal Crossing. All right, well we'll see y'all later. Have a good one and yeah, stay alive.
S2E23