Off-Nominal - 93 - Go Touch Some Grass

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

Jake and Anthony talk about Jake’s decision to end WeMartians, and what goes on behind the scenes of Making Stuff™.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 93 - Go Touch Some Grass - YouTubeGoodbye, for nowThe Off-Nominal Discord - Off-Nominal@Nostradambot DashboardWilson on Twitter: “Launching Boeing Astronauts in a Boeing Capsule on a Boeing Rocket under a Boeing Jet from Boeing Soil @offnom”Follow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalThe Off-Nominal Discord - Off-NominalOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine start. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the one and only podcast Jake Robbins has ever done. This is the show that he does on the internet. This is it. This is the one. If you were wondering, I've heard that Jake podcast, this is it. You found it.

Yes, yes, it's true. This is my gig now, I guess. I'm just a full-time off. No, I'm going to hoax now. You are. So I, since you have made an announcement, that we'll talk about. I'm making a new announcement today that I am in the domain sales business, and I have three domains up for sale. If you want, we Martians, we Martians, or we Martans,

let me know I'm selling them. They're novelty items. So that would be great. Yeah. Throwbacks. Yeah. Did you bring a nice big drink? I did. Yeah. I thought, you know, it's the start of a new time in my life. So what better than sunrise with tequila. Is it a sunrise or a sunset? It's got, well, it could be both. Which way are you looking? It's up to you, I guess. But it's the right colors, you know,

pour one out for all we Martians. So yeah, what do you got? I brought an entire bottle of a Sicilian wine, a white wine. An entire bottle, you're taking this worse than some of the other than you can tell it's not an entire bottle. I drank a little bit the other night. I actually used some for cooking at some point. but.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's my favorite part about making risotto is I get to open a bottle of wine. Yeah, and then you have to drink it because it would go bad otherwise, so. Yeah, I mean, yeah. And like putting a cork back in, like, who does that? I'll use these little things.

I use the little rubber things. Oh, nice, nice. Reusable. I hate jamming a quart. Not available tax alcoholics. Because what if you screw up the one? What if you screw up the one side? And then you don't want to, you know,

and then the other side's hard to get back in there. This is why you just drink it. Just got to go for it. Make a whole thing risotto and drink three glasses of wine. Yeah. Well, you got some news for everybody. Yeah, yeah. So this is a week we made some changes over at the We Martians Incorporated.

So yeah, so I decided it's time, you know. So I was thinking a lot about, I was thinking a lot about, I was thinking a lot about, what things there are left to do in this medium. So like not in like, you know, not in planetary science because there's always going to be stuff to talk about. Like that news never goes away. But there's like, there's not many things that I haven't done on the show yet, you know. But you say medium.

You mean subject area. I mean. Because when you say medium, that means podcasts, which means I need to find a new ghost. No, but I mean, it is podcast a little bit, but it's the podcast format. Format. And me and the topic and like us three things together, like what new things can we do? And, you know, we've done lots of really good interviews.

We've done deep dives into topics. We've done current events. We've done a little bit of history. We've done a little bit of live stuff, you know, on the scenes. I've tried all these things. I've had a ton of fun with it. And at some point, you just sort of run out of steam. So seven years was the time for me where I decided that I wanted to move on to new things.

And this was, you know, you get to a point where it starts to hold you back because you're just like, well, I don't have time to fit that in if I want to keep doing this and this and this and this and this. And that makes it, uh, makes it hard. So that's how that goes. Yeah, man. I mean, it's, it's, uh, like, that's a serious run. Seven years, 134 shows, full shows, right? Is that correct? Plus, I don't even know how many Patreon posts.

Yeah, like. Yeah, yeah, a lot of Red Planet reviews. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a funny thing about the way that we do stuff, right, is that I've done 200-something shows or whatever, 238, 239. Yeah. But, like, I've done way more than that on Patreon for, like, weekly shows. There's, you know, way more a year on there. So that caught up and surpassed it very quickly.

So there's, like, the iceberg effect. So you've done 130. five full-length things that require more effort than I would ever put into a single episode. And then an equal or more amount of the, off the cuffs. Let's pour one out off the cuff specifically. Those are my favorite we Martians properties was off the cuffs. Yeah, if you know, you know, but those are the best. No, but that's why they were like especially, honestly, it had the same level of excitement to me as

like when Dan Carlin puts a new common sense in the feed. And I remember that I had that subscribed like from years ago. I'm like, oh, man, some new stuff. He's still alive. Like, I had the same level of excitement about an off-the-cuff episode. Because then it also was highly correlated with some shit is going down, and Jake has some things to say about it. Yeah, that's Jake has an opinion.

Yeah, if something happened hard enough that Jake has an opinion about it, like, it's a fun time in the industry. Yeah, well, maybe, maybe, I mean, so the nice thing off the cuff is there was no No schedule commitment. So they just happened when I wanted to do them. Maybe I'll sneak a few those in every once in a while. We'll see. If you stick around to the Patreon because you're a good loyal subscriber to Jake Robbins and whatever work I do,

you might get an off the cuff. It might be about home renovations or like Starlink setups. It might be about some random stuff. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing, Jake. You're just got to get into the lifestyle, lifestyle casting. There's a name for that. I don't know.

Life vlogging. I don't know. I think this is like a segment. of the industry. It's kind of creepy to me. All the influencers that do that, just like, following this account, is it an account about me and you like me? Here's what I have for lunch. Here's what I wore today. You should do out for the day videos.

Inevitably, at like some point in the trajectory of that career, it just turns into a blockchain crypto account. That's the ultimate. It's the charzart of all influencers. Is it blockchain or MLM? Well, no, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, fork, right? Is it blockchain or MLM? Yes. Do you ever get an MLM?

Does anyone ever pitch you on an MLM like any of your friends? Pitch me? Yeah. I mean, besides cryptocurrency? I'm talking like back in the day, you know, when it was, MLMs were hot. I'm trying to think if, yes, someone did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was one going around in Ontario.

that was like reselling your utilities. So, like, instead of going to, like, the power company to buy power and getting a power bill, I would, like, go to, like, a middle person that would, they would bill me and then they'd pay the power. And then, like, you would. You got to have a good downstream. So you could be, yeah, and you could be, like, an agent for this and, like, go get. And every time you got one of these contracts, you got to have a little bit of the money. And then you got other people, you know, it was one of those.

So, yeah. That's one that's been pitched to me direct. the one that I'm trying to pull it up this is it yes this is like going around our high school for a little bit there was one called VEMA and it was this verve like energy drink thing um and one of our one of the guys in our friends group like got like sucked into it and we went to his house one time for this thing and there's like a thousand of those cans in this basement yeah yeah but like two minutes in so we were like what what happened to this guy right so We went in there and then like two minutes in, I went with one of my best friends and I looked

at him was like, this is going to be great. Like, this is some good stuff. And then we walked out of there and my friend was like, so that's a total scam, right? And I said, yeah, total scam. And then to cap this story off, since this is the most random five minutes of off nominal history at this guy's wedding, we bought a case of Verve and delivered it to his wedding, which was the best completion of that storyline. Like the arc, the 15-year arc of that storyline was quite incredible.

So, no? Oh, wow. Anyway, so that's what you're going to get up to. No, let's dive back into this because one thing people should know is that I am the devil on your shoulder when it comes to projects and the end of any particular given project. And I don't know how much we want to unpack that. I'm not saying I kill the Martians. Here's the funny story about that. So obviously, you know, the way this has to work in my brain is like you get like an inkling.

You're like, what is that? What is that feeling? And then you got to kind of explore a little bit. And then you get to the point where you realize kind of what it is. You're like, oh, I'm thinking about the show. That's a weird feeling. I never thought about that before. And then you kind of, you stew on that for a while.

And then at some point I tell my wife, I tell Amy that I'm thinking about ending the show. what do you think? And she, you know, she's very supportive. She tells me, whatever you want to do, I'll support you, you know, like it's totally fine. Seven years is fine. You don't need to keep me this if you don't want to do any, brother, all this, you know, good supportive, spousal stuff. And then she's just like, what does Anthony think? And I'm like, well, I haven't told him yet. You know, I don't want to tell Anthony until like I'm a little closer to being sure, right? And then she's like, well, he's probably going to support you too. And I was like, yeah, you probably will. And I'm going, he's going to tell me to quit instantly as soon as I

down there. If you feel any friction, you've got to throw that thing out. No, overboard, man. Get it out of there. Like, get it out of the way. So maybe in the back of my mind, I didn't want to tell you quite yet because I knew you just pushed me into it. Yeah, that was the moment where you're fully committed at that point. Yeah. Yeah, that's my MLM sales pitch of like, yeah, you should stop doing that, like 100%. No, my whole thing is that the, your fear that you expoused through this was that you didn't want the show to just like trail off and be kind of lame at the end. You wanted to like, if it was time to end it, end it on a good note, don't let it trail off, which is precisely what my strategy is like that is the key thing to my strategy. My strategy is

if you are somebody who makes anything, any sort of content, if you're making an app, if you're making a service, if you're running a business, it should be, it should be feeling frictionless for you to work on it. And at any moment when you start to feel friction, and what I mean by that is just like procrastinating a lot or feeling like bummed that you have to go do a thing that you're obligated to do per the creation and engine that you've started, that's the moment when, like, that is the first sign that this isn't the thing that you should do anymore, just generally. Like you're not actually giving this 100% of your effort. It's not going to be 100% the best thing you could make. So I'm ruthless. If I feel some friction about anything, that

thing is done immediately, right? And not like immediate, not the first time I feel friction, because it might just be like I'm having a bad day. But like, so it may be like the third or fourth time you go to do it and you're like, oh, this is like a slog now. End it. So I've got some of these, right? I had some things I tried with Miko that I was like not, that's not what I'm doing anymore. I did a newsletter for a little bit that were like, I don't know, I think they're still in the CMS. There's like 15 issues or something of a newsletter that I would email and post and by like the 10th one I was like this is stupid like I don't like doing this it's not a thing that I feel good about ended that I used to do a blog and then I I didn't like where it was going so I

just stopped doing that to stop doing writing and so I'm not immune to this but this is 100% my strategy yeah yeah yeah and that's you know that's how it's really got to be if you're in this kind of work right like you know what we do is very it's very creative it's a it's a it's a building kind of work where you're you're creating things and they have to be kind of like you can't do that as a making widgets kind of job you know it has to be a has to be a thing where that comes from from your soul you know like it not to over dramatize anything but it has to be kind of like that right it's got to feel like that and and it should be sort of by nature probably dynamic and it's going to change because people change right so yeah

So that's how that goes, I guess. Did you feel like you, because when you say you fully explored what there is, right? I guess I'm interested to dig into what that scope means. Like, do you feel like you answered the list of questions that you had about Mars and Mars-related topics generally? And you were like, I've talked about science. I've talked about the human stuff, obviously you talked extensively about in the early days in it. That got less and less over time because it did feel like, you know, somewhat, stagnant to an extent, but was there, what is that list? I don't actually even know what that

list would be. Yeah, I mean, kind of, right? Like, I don't want to pretend like I know everything about planetary science because I don't and, you know, I never will. But like there are sort of different categories of topics that excited me when I started the show. So doing deep dives on like a specific kind of thing, you know, you always make fun of me for the Dune episode, did a whole episode just about sand dunes on Mars. And it's just like, I need to know everything. There is no about sand dunes on Mars. And I get a sand dune expert.

We talked about sand dune. It was amazing. It was super fun. And I did a few of those for all that kind of different things that I want. You know, we did volcanism and we did a sedimentary stuff and channel creation and all these kind of different topics about that sort of thing. And there was operational stuff. So, you know, what does the perseverance team do during Mars opposition and they can't talk to the rover for 10 days?

Okay, let's unpack all that and do all those. kind of things, right? And so that side's pretty important to me. And then I guess like maybe just some of the current eventy livey stuff, right? So we covered a couple launches. We covered a couple landings, you know, a different sort of this is happening. Let's cover it sort of situations. And, you know, the end of opportunity was a big one that stands out. And so, you know, you kind of do all those things. And then it's fun, for example, to watch a launch. but like how many times am I going to put together the launch episode with the music and the exciting thing like okay like I've made that show even though like the missions could be changing you

know what I mean and it's just like so I'm not it's it becomes it goes from from being a creative process to a routine like something you just kind of churn out right and that's that's tough so yeah do you feel like does that answer the question yeah yeah I'm also trying to like you you definitely had, with those missions in particularly, the live kind of aspect, it operated on the cycle of Mars missions, right? So there's the launch years and the landing years, and then it would be back to the launch years and the landing years, and then there would be that kind of ebb and flow. Did that schedule have anything to do with it? That either, either that it got tiring to keep up with all that over the one, you know, remember the summer of Mars where it was just like a thousand

missions launching, but also looking ahead, is there a gap in the schedule that you're like, I'm not excited about any of that stuff? Well, I mean, there is, right? Because now we're kind of done for a while, right? There's nothing for Mars, at least, which is a big reason why we took on all the extra planets this year, right? Was to fill some space because I didn't think Mars was going to be enough content, right? But yeah, I mean, it's just over time, some of the stuff,

stuff just starts to get routine and then every little bit of routine change to it makes it less and less exciting and brand new, right? So I don't know if, I don't know if it's that how much, I don't know if it's that complicated, right? Yeah, yeah, totally. Sometimes you just kind of feel like it's the end of something. So, and you mentioned the journalisty side of things, like keeping up on all the stuff is. Well, and that's the, that's the thing, right? So, you know, people, obviously the epic Q is like, well, you're quitting altogether from space. No, like, I'm still want to do This show still excites me because it's very, it's very dynamic. Like, I never know what we're going to talk about in the show, even when we schedule it.

It's always like, let's do this. Something random is happening. Okay, this is fun. And we do this weird stuff for the game. Like, it's fun. So I didn't want to go, this to go away. So if I kind of like unpack it, it's really about like the journalistic part of We Martians, which is like took a ton of energy to like stay on top of stuff,

reading all the blogs and all the articles and all the papers and all. all that kind of stuff is like a lot of work. And, you know, I have so much respect for journalists because they just, that's their job is just, you know, staying on top of stuff. And I, I'm excited for that part to be kind of offloaded from my plate. And I'm going to sort of step back from being subject matter experts on these things and just sort of enjoy it more as a fan and move to something more creative with my, with my brain power, I guess.

Yeah. Yeah. We definitely talked about that recently, and like the amount of stuff that there is to cover now is ticking up so much. So even I've noticed, like, on the headline show that I do for Miko, like, that was for a long time really consistent on Fridays. And sometimes it was Mondays, like, every week on kind of, I was recording them at the same time.

It is highly variable now because if news stacks up in a certain way on the wrong day and it screws up my schedule, like, it'll be 10 days between episodes because I'm, I have six articles to like read and digest and go down all these rabbit holes on before I feel like I have an understanding enough to talk about it in the headlines show. So you used to get four and a half a month, right, every single time. Now you're getting like four because it's like every 10 days is really where the rhythm has fallen in just because there either will be like nothing happening and that everything happens on Friday or there's just you get a conference week or there's like so much. So, and the effort to sort out, like, what is and is not worth covering is important, too, which is different. What we do is different than what, the reason that we always joke about the capital J journalism thing

is because the pressures and the expectations of jobs are entirely different. Like, Capital J journalism is your number one, an original source, so you're going out finding, like, which we do to a significant extent, but having to report on it as it's happening real time or like the day after your story's up, you have deadlines, there's a particular pattern to it. And there's the other side, which is like, you are expected. And this, Caleb and I on the drive to Wallops were kicking this around on the drive at some point. I was asking him about like being out of journalism and now having a different look at it. And the expectations of how many times are you posting that week? And are you hitting the frequent?

that you need to be to be contributing to, like, the, the activity around your outlet, that's a totally different thing, too, because that does, and I love all of our Capital Day journalism friends, but, like, sometimes I know, like, hmm, that's a thing that you wouldn't talk about if there was other stuff going on. Like, that's a thing that would fall under the radar. It's a slow news day still, yeah. Yeah. And so, like, if there's pressures in that job to cover those things, and we have the ability to... to ignore them, but we still have to sort through them. And so it's not like that, that's not a non-zero part of it, which is kind of interesting.

So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, it's just, it is a not insignificant amount of work to read all those things. You know, I had a big RSS feeds that I would hit, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 articles a day. And it's like, just reading all that would just take, you know, two hours a day for sure. And that's a non-exnificant time commitment. And so it weighs on you, right? So, yeah, I bet you've noticed, like, your headline shows, have they gotten longer

over time? Like, you know, if you take the first, the first 50 headline shows in the last 50, what I didn't mean time? Oh, probably 2x increase. Yeah, I think the first couple were probably like eight minutes long. Honestly, the first couple were probably the original origin story of the name, main engine cutoff where every show is going to be. shorter than a shuttle flight to Miko, which is hilariously inaccurate. Yeah. People are surprised that with a common sense stand. Common sense rocks.

Like, Dan Carlin's is a bomb. I love that guy. Oh, shit, we were supposed to reach out to him and get him on this show, Jake. We'll work on it. Yeah, we got to work on that. Now we have time. Anyway, yeah, the original headline shows were definitely more in the, like, as envisioned theory of Miko than.

The recent ones are full-blown Miko episodes. They're just like less well-considered opinions. It's like instant opinion and headlines. And it gets, you know, whittled down through the time I spend thinking while I'm cooking or showering or whatever. And then it comes out as a main podcast. That's kind of how it works. Oh, that's really funny. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, there's just a lot. Space has just grown so much. And like you almost have to, like, I almost wonder if, if. like you have to even all of our capital J journalists friends if they're going to start specializing a little more like you know like Berger kind of does this already

he's got he's got a very particular niche but you know take someone like Faust or Lauren or or you know anything's like they just cover everything that's big you know and it's like wow like that's such a vast scope and yeah

I felt that just with covering planetary so you know yeah and Eric's Eric's hiring at Ars Technica now so people are suggesting in the chat that you should apply for that job. He's hiring for his niche. I don't want journalism, guys.

Yeah, again, we like going to launches and and, and, uh, just screwing around. Like, we like partaking in launches and conferences and not be tweeting the whole time or or mastodonning the whole time. So there's a different constraint there. too. There is for sure. You in the past have ended a different space project

which again many people do not know and always are shocked to find out that you are the KSP history guy. KSP2 I haven't been following. Is it like imminent Jake?

It's three weeks away. I've been trying to work so that I can not for a while. Me too. Me too. I may or may not have bought a new computer today that's on route. Wow. That's a big of this way. We didn't even talk about it.

It is. Geez. No. Wow. Okay. We got to catch up about that. People are saying Valentine's Day. No, I think it's like the 24th.

I think it's the 24th. All right. Well, that's good. I could be wrong, though. I'm not that sharp. Anyway, what I'm curious about, I know we talked about you being the KSB history guy, but I don't know that we ever talked about you stopping KSP history. And I'm curious to now, like, were there parallels? Did you feel similar? What was that? Yeah, yeah. It was

honestly, yes, yes. Maybe quitting KSP history was practice. That was the trial run for quitting, quitting a project. So that one, I mean, there are definitely some parallels because, you know, I came out of the gates with that one, just sort of like, I'm going to do these missions. And I was like, churning them out, like, you know, because they were short and simple. It's like, you know, how long does it really take to recreate the V2 launch? You were building the original ones. No, the original ones. Oh, okay, okay.

Oh, that's the, okay. So it's the complexity snowball. And then so you do a few of these, then you get kind of bored of them. You're like, thank God you get to Apollo and there's some complexity of that. So you do those and those are big. And then you get to shuttle. There's even more complexity. And then you get to mirror into Space Station.

And there's like, now they were taking me like, an entire weekend just to like play through these things and then putting it all together. Like I couldn't do as many as I wanted to do. And yeah, so you know, you keep adding complexity because otherwise you'll get bored, but then you add the complexity and then it gets too hard. And that's how that went. So yeah, I think I only made it to like 1990 or something. I want to say like Mir was half built, shuttle was flying.

But there wasn't any space station yet. So it was somewhere in there, right? That's kind of where it ended up. I can see you raising eyebrows now. That's a pretty fun spot to leave off. It is a fun spot to leave off, yeah. But probably not going to happen. We can crowdsource it, right?

There's a multiplayer aspect to KSPB, too. We can crowd source it. Yeah, yeah. You guys will build all the stuff and fly it into my game and then I'll talk about it. 100%. There it is. That's the concept. I mean, you know, let us know.

Is that an avocado straw? No. It is an avocado straw, yeah. that's two weeks in a row. Yeah, you know, like the KSP stuff, I definitely want to play it. So I'm kind of, you know, there's a silver lining and putting the show aside right now. And I've got some other work that's wrapping up. And so I'm going to have a little bit of space in February, which is nice.

And yeah, so I thought maybe I'll build a computer like I did when I was a young person and play this video game. Oh, this is like a build? You're doing like a build. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. I got all the parts. Yeah. It's going to be fun.

Just like the old and tiny. This means a stupid, ugly-looking gaming, you know, one of those stupid... KSpy's coming out on Mac, right? KSP too, or is it not? Not right away. Oh, it's not. Okay. Well, that gives me some extra time.

I was going to say, you realize, like, the chips that you've got in there are going to be great for it. No, no, they don't have it released for that yet. So, yeah, so I thought, you know, I play a little bit of that, have a little bit of fun. I have a couple ideas on things I could do, like, content-wise for KSP, but. but I haven't decided on any of it yet. And I don't really want to make any decisions yet. You know, I just want to enjoy a break for a bit.

Yeah. My problem is I'm a serial like project star. Yeah. And so like I have to like, I have to like gate myself. You're like, no, take a break. Don't make anything for a while. And just like breathe outside and like go touch grass. And and, you know, so I'm forcing myself to do that right now.

It's hard. You do have that special. Oh, I could I could make that a project. like watch me. Hell, you made installing a toilet a whole piece of content at one time. That's right, yeah. You're fit for the lifestyle vlogger.

Yeah, yeah, I totally am. That's all I'm saying. You do a whole show about what it's like to be a white guy in Mexico and yeah, yeah, it'd be good content. Nitch, very niche content. The other thing I want to talk about is the fact that we have a hilarious mirroring now where last year, two years ago at this point, a year and a half ago, whatever, I quit a full-time role as a developer to become a podcaster.

And then you quit a full-time podcaster role to become a little bit of a developer, I guess. It's like the most hilarious inverse gone pro of all time. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Gone pro past tense. How's that? No, I mean, so I actually, I talked about that. That is one thing that I do want to do more of is I had so much fun building things like that Mars time site that we've talked about a couple of times. You know, trying to blend space and content and development to like make useful and exciting, entertaining things that, you know, we don't have right now. And so I think there's a lot of joy in those intersections that I have some unique talents for. So I will probably be exploring something like that yet. Again, I'm not quite at a decision point on what to build yet or anything like that, but I'm sure that's going to be a part of the future. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's fun stuff. It is. It's fun to build stuff like that. It is. Yeah. And you've got to do all this stuff by hand now because the Twitter API is gone,

so you can't even scrape this stuff, you know. You've got to, you just got to do it yourself. Do it live. Yeah. Spacey. Dot space. where we're hanging out these days. Spacey dot space. We're hanging out of Mastodon. They were tooting. And I felt great about that decision when mastodon.

That social got dedos or whatever happened. I didn't even see that. Is that a... Oh, yeah, a couple days ago. It was down for several hours. So... Did all the attacks come from Twitter.com?

Some... It was weird. It was all... The IP is crazy to an airstream in Bocahika, Texas. Really weird. I don't know what's going on there. Starlink turned into the greatest DDoS weapon of all time. All of the Starlink satellites were like more Mastodon.com. Holy crap. That is an amazing sci-fi storyline.

Man launches 3,000 satellites, D-DOS, his enemies. To D-D-D-S competitors. I can't get to rocketbuilder.com. What a callback. Oh, my God. Is that still up? Is that still up? What a callback.

Wow. People probably don't even remember this. Yeah, this is a... It's scrolljacks. This is really annoying. Can you still get... There was a hot minute when you can get prices out of this sucker.

Yeah, yeah. Super inaccurate, because there's no launches left. Oh, you can't even select a year anymore. Yeah, this is very, very not maintained. Sorry, Amazon bought all of them. Oh, it still has a price on here. Oh, wow. Maybe that should be my first project is rebuild this and sell it back to ULA.

I think. I'm not sure that would be a valuable product. 73 mil, it turns out. I don't think this is that. This is the ULA value. This is the ULA value. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'll tell them that I'll build the site and then I'll put the prices up and then I'll tell them that every day I'm going to lower the price by a million bucks and they're going to have to just buy it at some point.

Otherwise, I'll be advertising really cheap rockets. Yeah. Speaking of which. We figured it out. We figured it out. I don't know where to go with that. God, Rocket Builder. What a time to be alive.

Yeah. What a time. That was a good time. One last question about your quitting from Kyle in the chat. Are you going to retire like Tom Brady? What does that mean? Yes or no. Yes or no.

No follow-up questions. Well, he's got retirement in quotes there. Jake, you told me something right before the show that I think might mean yes. Look, so the plan is to be done. that being said sometimes what happens in the flow of making we Martians is that people you email about being on the show who ghosted you and never replied suddenly come back that does happen sometimes and so I will I'll leave the door open for something else we'll see I have a couple of puns that I'm thinking of but I don't want to unveil any of them because

it would give away who it is okay Yeah, we'll see, we'll see. It's not confirmed yet. Well, where does that leave us, Jake? We Martians sail off into the planet encircling dust event. Yes, the planet encircleed dust event. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, so I'm excited about this show still.

I'm really stoked that we're going to be doing this still. Weekly feels right still. I'm really happy that, you know, we've been doing that for a while now, It still feels right. Because we get to kind of use this for, for, it's more agile. You know, you can kind of like respond to things a little easier with weekly, which is nice. Yeah, monthly was, monthly was rough because we would have more ideas than we had slots. Yeah.

Yeah. But also the funny thing about this is that I don't think, so when I quit my full-time gig last year, right, I was like, okay, like, you know, more Miko. what it turned out was like, no, all of the additional podcasting time is off nominal. Like, this is the part that filled that gap, right? Miko is at the frequency. This is the show. We are the show, yeah. Miko is the frequency that it needs to be for what it is.

And again, like that friction balancing, I think that is, it is in the right format now. It is sustainable for me, and that's great. and then when I decided I was going to quit, we were kicking around, hey, we should try, we did the happy hour for a couple weeks, and then I was like, this is the right,

that's the format, you know, people were like, why isn't it feed? You know, people identified before we did that that was the show. And that,

I'm like, this is the best setup because we still have such a long list of guests that we're trying to reach out to, but we need to reach out to like Dan Carlin, if anyone knows them, just hit him up, let him know because he hasn't done a common sense in a while,

so maybe he's itching to talk about some stuff. So, like, that's... And we also, off nominal always was like our other show. You know, like... Yeah. We both felt like that. Like, oh, it was our other show. Yeah.

As soon as we still say the mains, right? The main shows on the main podcast. Yeah. But that's not accurate. And even less so now. Well, honestly, like, when we first launched it, it might have been true, but like very quickly, it became not true. And I think, you know, today, I think the off-nominal podcast feed, just the podcast feed,

not any of the YouTube stuff, is still like two or three times the listenership of Weymarsians. And so, like, it's really funny for me to think about, yeah, it's really funny for me to think about Wee Martians being my main show when, like, most of you are seeing me here. and I do it more often and it's like longer and like you know all it's is more in every way and you know ever I never ever treated that way so

yeah so now now this is the main this is the main podcast now yeah yeah look at that almost yeah we're damn near scratch and half a million all time downloads trackable downloads for plus the YouTube stuff it is funny we thought like YouTube would be

this is where we're at and it's like, it is where we're at, but there's a bunch of people that still listen to this, just audio. So if you're out there,

hello, which we know you are. You audio for outside. I get it. I get it. I don't watch a lot of YouTube personally, but it's fun to do this

because the stuff that we've done here is, again, back to your thing about, like, you've explored that We Martians medium. It is fun to like do things

like we did last week, last week? When did we have Ben on? Is that last week? Two weeks ago? Two weeks ago? Two weeks ago. Two weeks ago.

Two weeks ago. Yeah, yeah. We stomped on small launch last week. Oh, yeah, yeah. We took small launch for a ride and kick the shit of it. That whole road trip really screwed up my sense of time. I forgot everything about that week. But like we would never do a show like that if we were just in an audio format.

Be the weirdest show ever to book. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and like being live is also a whole different beast, right? So we are, you know, this is unscripted and it's happening. Like you're just watching us right now as this happens.

And so it puts you in a totally different frame of mind when you're doing the show like this. And it does not get old because it's so different, right? Yeah. And like we do a good job of like not having like a locked in format, you know? Like we don't have like, okay, well, at 25 minutes into the show, we flip over to this segment and then we run a commercial. Like that's not how the show works.

And so we have a lot of fun. second hold on we're we think that we're supposed to like we have some stuff on the end of our show notes that we never get to yeah that's the one thing is that we we are like oh well we'll have more of a format in the future but we get carried away because it's too fun and we end up getting into interesting rabbit holes and then we're half drunk by the time that the show's over and we forget about everything so yeah yes yeah we're right We're going to try. We're always saying we're going to try. We're going to try and do better and remind you of these things.

We're getting a couple of bits of feedback we should address here, Jake, in the chat. Number one, we had a couple of people saying, well, somebody, it's scrolled past before I could read it, but somebody said they used to only listen and now they watch because we talk about stuff on screen enough, and that's good. Kyle likes our facial expressions. And JJ would like to know what happened to the lightning round, which I believe was a thing that we are supposed to call terminal count. Yes. Lightning round. The thing we're supposed to call terminal account. Which was my favorite segment of this show that we've ever done.

Well, I guess I can't say I don't have time for it anymore. This is your first assignment, yeah, is more lightning rounds. Terminal counts. I'm making a note, I got a pencil here. I'm making a note lightning round, aka terminal count. How's that? It's great. Thank you.

Should you write it down? Nice. It's blown out. I can't see it. but I'd trust you. I see it. It's the only thing on this entire piece of paper.

I'm sure you'll keep that piece of paper around. It's also a coaster. Let me circle back to what I just mentioned, that we always forget about stuff at the end of the show, that we acted like this was our playground and our secondary show for so long. And what we have discovered over the last year was this is the show.

Part of why we felt like it was the secondary show was that we were experimenting, We were collaborating on a thing that we didn't really know what form. We were playing with like, do we live stream them? Remember, we did a couple of Twitch live streams back in the day to just while we're recording monthly. We just did a couple of lost forever. We used to stream it, right? It's live into the Discord.

That's the thing we used to do. Remember that? We did try that a couple times. Yeah. I think only one Twitch recording survived, which is like the Jason Davis one that we did right before we received too. Right, right. One of the reasons we felt like that

was that the other ones we were doing and we had this whole Patreon set up, right? People were paying us money for the show. And we had never really figured out what that thing was for Off Nominal. And then we were like, oh, we'll do YouTube, like that'll be a thing. We screwed around with YouTube memberships,

which are still a thing. If you are doing that, super cool. You can join there. If that's a thing that you like, you'll get into the Discord as well. we're not turning that off by any means. Hell, we may also, we're not going to stop experimenting. We may experiment with, like, do we want to do some member-specific stuff in the future?

I don't know. I'm not promising it, but I'm leaving it open as a possibility. Recently, Discord released this thing that are server subscriptions. Because formerly, you had to get, the thing that I hated explaining the most, to get into the off-nominal Discord, you had to be a Patreon member for either main engine cutoff or we Martians. I still hate saying that. It's terrible.

It's still so bad. So as the Discord champion, Jake, person who's building all these bots, can you explain what the hell is going on with Discord now? Yes. So we're trying to reduce that complexity. That's the shortest thing, right? So if you want to support Off-Nominal and you want to be a part of our Off-Nominal Discord community. Now it's just very simple. You just go into it and pay your five bucks. So Discord

has the premium memberships now, 499 a month, and you just sign up right in Discord. So there's no third party client to be a member. There's no other thing. There's no other show you have to go weirdly support in order to support this show. It's not, it's its own thing now. So it's just like nice and straightforward. You can pop in there. So when you join like the, if you click the link, it'll actually just invite you into the server and then in there you can you can sign up for your thing and that'll unlock all the channels. So yeah, we're just trying to make it easy because it, any time someone asked us on Twitter when we mentioned it, it was just like, how do I get in the discord? It's like, well, I only have 280 characters in this tweet. So what I'm going to do is call me and then

we'll talk through it. Well, quite literally you made a landing page on the website in order to explain it so that we could link in Twitter to go to this thing because it needed more explanation. And that's that's silly. That's not a way to run a business. So now if you're all-nom.com slash discord, there's just a big green button there that says join the discord. And I want to be clear about two things. Number one, the discord is amazing.

The people in there are exceptional human beings. The fact that it is like not just join and you're in there means that the quality bars is really high. Everyone is super nice. No one gets angry. Some people get angry about space arguments, but everyone is civil all the time. We have ended up at some sort of self-moderated, to chagrin of the other mods, a self-moderated community that has exactly the right kind of attitude for discussing space topics. And I just find it like with the weird spot that's that Twitter's in, Reddit, I feel like has had some like weird times recently as well like it's kind of still around but it's sort of just is what it is and it's going to always be that way discord has become the place but like this new

discord thing is the way to support off nominal so if you like the show and you want more of it and you want us to do bigger and better things that is the way to support it because like we're both still independent Jake's not taking a full-time gig even though he's ending we Martians so if you like we're doing get in there there's still two levels. There is the typical $5 level. By the way, Discord revenue share, way, than all the other options, like, by a couple percentage points. Five dollars, you're in there, you're supporting off nominal, you're hanging out with the best people. But listen, I'm going to go full screen here, Jake. All right. I'll see it. Are you, you're out there. Would you ever, ever be caught dead on a

ride share mission? Would you ever be just another cube set, just thrown into, the orbital debris field that is low earth orbit these days, thanks to all sorts of actors? Or, are you somebody that would never, ever fly ride share? Are you somebody like that? You need to join the never fly

ride share tier, Jake. $25 a month, never fly ride share. Let it be known, you would never fly ride share. You would never be caught dead. That's the salesman. If that's you, boy, do we have a tier for you. It's literally the exact same thing, but you like us that much and you would never fly ride share.

Bradley, coming with the better pitch, are you a mark for Astra? Are you buying the Astra? The Astra, everything but their stock, is that what you're buying? Never fly ride share. Wow, the small launch stomping continues. I'm just saying, we don't yet have a never fly ride share member because we haven't told anyone about it until right now. I think I've noticed like that Discord channel where people join is just like a lot of people joining because they're like, what the hell is this link?

Like, why am I clicking on it? And yeah. And I know like, I think the other people I can see that channel are probably like, what the hell's going on in here? And I'm just like, no, we just haven't explained it yet to people. If you want to support Offnominal, offnom. Offnom.com slash discord. Join the thing and never fly ride share. Those are the ways of life.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, like we're working really hard. and this is something that I want to spend more time on on making it more than just like a chat room, you know, because like there's a million chat rooms out there.

Like, why is this one special? So besides the actual quality of the people in it, which is bar none like the best, you know, we're trying to do like different experiences in there. So we have, we're leveraging like a really great API that one of our listeners made.

Shout out to Pat from rocket launch. Live. This is an API that serves up all the launches. And now our Discord is. is connected into that. It's reading upcoming launches from the API, creating Discord events. These can be triggered in the actual thing.

You can subscribe to them to get notifications. We have launch parties to go over these where we have like a channel dedicated to that. We're doing things like trying to try to showcase all the different community bots that we have. So we have members in there that make their own bots that different experiences like, you know, the most famous one, of course,

made by our friend Ben who does a Nostradam bot, which is basically like a prediction thing where we, you know, so you can go on and be like, I predict that the Vulcan rocket will fly for the first time before, I don't know, whatever, May 1st or something. You can like go on it and put yourself on record for like weird predictions. And then people can like upvote them or downvote them and then we award points if they're right or wrong. And it's like super fun. Like there's like hundreds of these predictions that we're doing. And so there's lots of like fun kind of activities in there besides just like hanging out with cool people all the time, which is, you know, which is enough of a foundation on its own.

So we're trying to make this place, like, really interesting and special. Yeah, I just wanted to bring up the leaderboard of, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just wanted to bring this up for a minute. You know, there's all these categories here. Who's got the best prediction percentage? Who's got the most best predictions?

Who's got the most endorsements, that kind of thing? The real pride and joy of this, of this Nostradambat, is how many day points do you have? Because that is the real key. Because you could just predict something like SpaceX will not sell an additional Falcon 9 today and predict that. And you'll get one point for that. But if you're a real pro, you've got a long vision, Jake.

That's what I'm keying on here, right? Is that something, would you endorse this statement? Daypoints is the real king of the Nostradonbant? Before I zoom, would you endorse that? Yeah, I would. Before you zoom. I'll give this one to you. After I zoom.

Oh, hold on. My Zoom screwed me up. I'm just a cool 3,000 points up on everybody in the day points in here. So listen, get in. You got a lot of work to do to make up 27,000 day points. You got a crackness leaderboard. So we have to dethrone Anthony with his silly, silly prediction days. Yeah.

No, I can't remember how you got. No, hi. Did you just go in in 2016 and say Starship won't fly for at least five years? and everyone was like, no way! And then you just raked in the points. I think I learned from Chris and took an opinion on the most things. Like, I just went in, I bet. I occasionally sweep through all the predictions and just say yes or no.

So I've now got 74 years worth of day points here. So there it is. 74 years. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. Yeah. Well.

So anyway, the Discord's a cool place. and we would love you to join it. It supports the show. This is the main show now. So this is the show you can support. You don't need to be a WeMarsian supporter. But, yeah, that's it. I don't know what else we got here.

That's the pitch. This has been a show about the show. It's a meta show. We do an inside baseball one every now and then. People enjoy it. If you don't enjoy it, skip to the next one. Or go to the last one, whatever. I will say.

So in terms of this show, in particular, there, especially looking ahead to this year, like we would love to hear any ideas that you all have. So as we're lining up guests and stuff, you know, we're about to probably sit down, Anthony and I to do some long-term planning in terms of like who we want to like target. So if there are any guests that you're like, how is this person not been on off nominal yet or like, you know, someone you really want to hear from? Send us an email. We'd love to take care.

What emails can we send now? What's the, what's the, this email keeps changing. So I can't get track of it. Now that you've shut down We Martians, I'm about to set up a really. email server so that we could send emails from at Offnom.com, but if you currently send... Never fly Rideshare at Offnom.com. Is that available? Sales at Offnom.com. Yeah, anything at Alphanom.com will get to us, or at least me. Jake's redirect is not working now,

but we'll have actual email addresses soon, so... I was getting something the other day, so I don't know. It's like partially working. We've got to figure it out. Yeah, I don't know. If only we knew a couple developers who could work for me. Yeah, I mean... Yeah, I don't want to give away the domains that I was thinking about buying recently, but I may or may not be thinking about buying a mastodon instance. Well, hey, that sounds like great of my own. I'll build one together at the off-know amount of Mastonaut.

I'm not doing anything before that. I thought it might be cool to have our own, but, you know. Yeah, it's actually a lot of work, so. I know, I don't want to do that. No, me. That's why I've jumped on the good work of spacey. If you're interested. that's what I wanted to say about your long-term planning comment

just to give people for doing inside baseball it's crack open the door a little bit here those guests that we have that you're like oh wow like they got so-and-so right Tori Bruno Lori Garver Jim Brynstein I don't I think all of those we were like

working on for several months six months probably like the Lori one was easy to schedule because she's awesome but we booked it like six months out because we knew time Tori Bruno just took a long time because it took a long time Jim Brianstein took a long time and then a pandemic happened

and then it continued to take a long time so these are the kind of guests that we're talking about that like because there's a list of people we can just text and DM and get on the show all the time that we love and we do that all the time but there's these other ones that need like

deep work need to work yeah and we've got a short list of this stuff obviously you know Victor Glover on that list right Gwen Shotwell

Like, there's some ones that are long shots or are currently in a position that doesn't seem like they do a lot of these kind of shows. But if you have one in mind, or hell, if you know somebody that is like a space history legend, that you're like, you know, this guy worked on a thing back in the 60s and would love to tell some stories. Please tell us about that individual if you have a line in because like there's some ones that I'm like, I still want to find somebody who worked on DCX and kick that around. And I feel like the people I know at Blue Origin have said there might be some DCX people around. So if you're one of those people, can you please find that person and email sales at offnom.com? Email DCX at offnob. Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we're excited about this year. Lots of fun stuff planned. Lots of fun stuff that you're going to tell us about that we will then play. plan. It's going to be really good. And I'm stoked for for new projects and new ideas. So 2023. It's going to be big. I do. Since we only planned 55 minutes of content for the show, apparently, since I'm shit out of ideas for what to do now. I did have one link in the show

notes. I forgot to click on earlier, Jake. We have some important follow-up from last week. Last week, I believe we were accepting ideas for what Virgin orbit should do now, right? like who's going to buy them what should they do um i think i know where this is going yeah this week we found out they're like definitely going out of business i didn't read the news story yet jake can do you remember any of the details from that thing i didn't read the news story remember i quit so i haven't read the news story yet either but uh looking at the at the tweets from our friends uh it looks like they're it sounds like they're making moves because things aren't great

rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic that kind of thing Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're here to provide solutions, right? And mostly not us, but our listenership out there. Occasionally, we fire off requests to the world, and occasionally you do terrible at them, like you did with the newlyweds questions. You guys did just absolutely horrible at the format of those. So we did get a lot of discussion prompts out of it, which is great, and we might do one

of those next week. But occasionally you deliver on a level that is never before seen. and that is exactly what at username 3967, who barely is named Wilson. I have no idea who Wilson is or if that's actually a real name or if they are username 3967. Some Twitter egg, yeah. My lord, Jake, this is the greatest thing that I've ever seen in my life. Would you care to narrate this for us? Well, what we see on the screen here is the cosmic girl Virgin orbit plane in flight.

But it mysteriously has a Boeing symbol on the side. Boeing orbit. Wasn't that, isn't that something that we teased? It was that Boeing was going to buy them because it's like already a Boeing, Boeing first aid. It's a 747. They wanted to buy them.

Yeah. Yeah. And so Launcher 1 is hanging off the wing of this thing. And the payload gloriously is a starliner. It's just like a full starliner attached to Launcher 1. Hold on. You're underselling. Please read the tweet.

Launching Boeing out. astronauts in a Boeing capsule on a Boeing rocket under a Boeing jet from Boeing soil. Yeah, it's fantastic. That is what I'm talking about, people. This is the kind of stuff. This is what I want. This is hashtag content. This is content.

Because not only is this an amazing idea for Boeing, it's also a hilarious, like, the fact that it's Starliner and it has that weird little arrow skirt that it needed for fly on Atlas 5 is also hilarious. completely like oversized for the right yeah it's great it's really funny this is the funniest thing I've seen because there's at least one higher up they'll be like why so why not why aren't we doing this you're telling me I can have even more cramped seats on this thing like I could jam in some worse seats than are in row 23 on a 747 actually don't know I never sat in row 23 The only seats I've ever sat on on a Boeing 747 are the very last seats in the plane, which you would think are terrible. But there's a row that goes from three seats on the window to two seats on the window.

Ah, because the tail tapers off? Exactly right. Yeah. So if you've got to, if you're booking a flight and you have a, I think British Airways lets you have that nice. I think the one time I did this was to London or something. I was connecting through there, and you could pick those last seats. So, Katie and I got to sit in that spot that felt like we had our own little row, but we were in the very ass of the plane, and it was fun. My old co-worker, old co-worker might used to call them,

well, an old coworker used to call them the blue water seats. The blue water seats? For the bathroom water, you know, it's that kind of blue. The blue waters, yeah. I always enjoyed that name, but. So, yeah, best I like, idea for Virgin orbit, Boeing, Boeing sales for Starliner flights. Exactly the kind of shippost we want in our life.

Yeah, yeah. We retweeted that really fast. Well, if you want to hang out with us, Discord or Offnom at Spacey. Dot space since the Twitter API is going away next week. And I don't know. I was out when the third-party clients were killed. I don't know if Jake's reading Twitter anymore because he quit now. It's a lot easier to not go on there.

I'll tell you that much. One of the features of our Discord that was already up and running is that it's feeding, we have RSS feeds that are feeding news articles right into the Discord and a special channel. So you don't have to go on Twitter, which is nice because all the news articles just dump right in there. Right there for you. Right up there for you. So that makes it a lot easier to not go on Twitter. I'll tell you that much.

Well, to an amazing run of Weymarsians. Cheers. Do you have a drink left? There's a little bit, a little bit of ice left in here, yeah. Come on. A little bit of... Go the other way. Give me a cheers. Clink.

Clink. Oh, that's how we're doing it? Oh, this way. Oh, somebody's giving us a super chat, Jake. Bink. 50 bucks. I'm spam happy. Thank you.

I'm spam happy. That's a throwback. That's a throwback. Really a throwback. Speaking of lifestyle. That's early days. All right, everybody. Y'all are the best.

We Martians forever. Say it, Jake. Say it. Say it. Say the sign off. At Aries Martians. One, two, three, four, five.