Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. My name’s Doug Cunnington, and last week I recorded an episode and I kind of complained a little bit about AI and recipes. Really the bad recipes out there. I mean, we’re talking food, food recipes here. I like to cook a lot. And anyway, I promised you last week that I was gonna talk about poor.
Search results and just bad information online. And I have a couple things I’ve been working on, so like around the house. So I’ll tell you stories and tell you what I have been looking up and what I’ve eventually, you know, had to sort of figure out. So like many of us, I’ve been sort of trained, I found it very effective to look stuff up online.
I used to use a tool called Google where you could get results and sometimes they were okay. And I remember finding some kind of weird results. I think it was probably like 2005 or six when I first found. The evidence of like SEO where keyword stuffing was happening in like white text in the footer.
And I was like, what is this stuff? I think I accidentally highlighted something, or I did highlight all or select all, and I, I saw this, this text down there and I was like, what is that? I have no idea. And then I think maybe within a couple years I, I heard something about SEO and heard some. Actually not SEO, just like keyword stuffing and blah, blah, blah.
So a couple projects that I’ve been working on around the house. One, we moved into this home a few years ago and it was new construction, kind of fun. And it’s very well insulated modern, high efficiency stuff. But yeah, really nice to get a new. New construction. So when we did the walkthrough, the guy is like showing me maintenance stuff.
He’s like, Hey, here’s this thing, here’s the furnace thing. These outlets down here in the basement, they have a, uh, ground fault protection situation. So if they, the power goes out, down here, it’s actually on this other, this other, circuit. So if it, if it goes out down here, maybe check that one. ’cause it, it’s not really where you think it might be.
So they, they show you some things. One thing he mentioned was to check the, the gas meter and, and pipe. Around the natural gas and he’s like, it’s, you know, freshly painted. They just installed all this stuff, but just once a year come out here, have a look and see if it’s rusted. So I set a calendar reminder as I did for other maintenance things like change the furnace filter and a couple other items like that.
So I’ll go take a look and make sure the sump pump. Is not like the little, the little hole in the ground over there with a pump in it. It’s not filled up with water. And if it is, the pump is working. Yeah, like once a week, I’ll take a look. Knock on wood, it’s very dry here. Where we’re at specifically, so we don’t have like a high water table.
The sump is never turned on again. Knock on wood. We had problems in our last home. With some flooding that almost hit the furnace, which would’ve been very dramatic. But anyway, in the last six months or year actually much more recent than that, in the last three months, I noticed, hey, the gas pipe meter area is quite rusty.
It’s pretty rusty out there, so I. I watched a couple YouTube videos and I was like, do I need to be aware of anything? It’s a pretty straightforward, you know, maybe you grind off some of the rust, grind off paint, paint it, blah, blah, blah. They tell you what color, so here’s where the, the things are that I’m looking up.
So, YouTube’s cool, you know, you watch a couple videos at two x speed, a lot of home improvement and DIY things are out there. Production quality is hit and miss. Sometimes people, you know, record it on their phone. It’s horrible. They don’t get to the point. They should edit it down. Others are much better.
So I watched a couple videos and I was like, okay, this is pretty easy, straightforward. And the fact is it looks like they didn’t do a good job painting it because of the way that I see the rust forming. And I was like, you know what? I should be all right to, uh, do this. So no big deal. What I was trying to look up is the fucking color.
So simple. It’s uh, I think it’s called like smoke gray or something like that. And they mentioned it in the video. They’re like, this is what you need, smoke gray. And the thing is, I, when I was looking at the hardware store, I was like, they don’t have the brand that everyone mentioned. And they don’t have that gray smoke color.
I think that’s what it’s called. And I’m looking and I’m like, ah, you know what, sometimes they’re outta the stack. I’ll, I’ll just keep looking. Every now and then, no big deal. Of course, I get like, order it online, get a and like that, get the right color and all that kind of stuff. But here’s the thing.
I was like, you know what? Simple enough. Maybe they call it a different color. They make up other colors. There’s like several it’s like a Crayola cray crayon box of like all these different colors with made up names and it doesn’t fucking matter that much Anyway, so I try to Google it and I’m frustrated, immediately, frustrated.
So there’s a. AI summary result thing. And I was like, that doesn’t seem quite right, because there’s fucking conflicting information in there, right? So obviously that’s wrong, but it does cite different sources, hence the conflicting information. So I’m like, all right, whatever. So why don’t I look down through some other results?
And what I see is, i, ironically, I can immediately recognize these niche website type websites because of the, the domain names. So I’m like looking through, the titles are solid. I think there may have been like one E-commerce site and I’m like, I don’t even know if I could trust that because it looks like a storefront that probably ties to Amazon.
Not a hundred percent sure. I didn’t go and verify, but I was like, this looks like bullshit. There’s no reviews. It looks like maybe no one goes to the site. Why is it even ranking? And then I see some of the others and it’s like home improvement dude guru.com. It’s uh gas meter guru.com. It’s gas piping color.
matcher.com. So it’s all these sites that don’t seem quite right, little too on the money with the domain name and the keyword. And then there’s a handful of others that are more general and it’s like house improvement pros.com. I, I’m running out of things to make up. But you get the idea. These are clearly niche sites.
I think I maybe clicked on one and it has like FAQs and I’m like, this is ai. Best case scenario, this is ai. Potentially someone wrote this, but they don’t know anything about gas meters. And I’m like, this is a waste of my time. So essentially like I think I. I looked through all of the first page and then changed this because I, and I didn’t see what I wanted.
I didn’t see anything that I trusted, and then I removed that search query. I typed in something else to see if that would help. It did not, so eventually I was just like, I, I don’t know. I think it, I mean, I know the color should be the smoke gray. I will look. Elsewhere, look for another brand. And I did find it.
I found a different brand. It was a little cheaper, and it, it didn’t really matter. I didn’t care what brand, right? Like it’s, it’s spray paint. I’m gonna put a couple coats on there. It’s pretty much a commodity. It’s not really that big of a deal, but I could not find the information that I wanted. And from a website that I trusted.
So they may or may not had, have had like the right information, but it definitely wasn’t upfront and it definitely wasn’t trustworthy. I did not trust any of the sites. So similar to the AI recipes or even like recipes on food blogs, if it’s not someone I know. From as like a TV personality or a chef, or for some reason I trust their brand and website and recipe.
I’m probably not gonna, I’m not gonna go for it. I just, I don’t, I don’t trust them anymore. And this happened again because I’ve been trolling Craigslist for. Guitars and I sold my truck. I talked about that a couple weeks ago. I’ve sold and purchased a few guitars. And you know what, man? I just can’t help myself.
It’s fun. I like looking and with kind of uncertainty in retail shops, whether it’s guitars or anything else, prices may go up. And the fact is just like. A car most of the time, just like a car, a, a guitar. If you buy a brand new, then you’re probably gonna lose money if you resell it and if you buy it used it’s depreciated.
And if you look around, you might find a pretty good deal. Now, I can’t remember if I told you much about the new guitar that I got, but. It’s a very old guitar. I’m kind of into the vintage or vintage like, instruments. So I really like the idea of like depression era guitars. There’s something interesting about that.
There’s, I won’t go too deep, but I like, I like Gibson guitars and Oh, I like a lot of different kinda guitars, but Gibson’s. The people that I like, the guitarists that I like often they played Gibson’s and I just, I, I like ’em. So the Gibson acoustic manufacturing in the thirties, they were doing things to.
Keep running basically. So of course the thirties had the depression, so these are pre-war, these are depression era. And Gibson had a few different brands that they made and they were mail order essentially, or you can get ’em from like. Yeah, Sears Roebuck, they sold them at Montgomery Ward, and they were catalog guitars is what they, they called them.
So they were, I don’t know what like, Gibson back then would’ve cost, but these, these were like 10 bucks. These were very, these were cheap. Of course, $10 was a lot more back then. I’m not a hundred. I didn’t check, but you know, that could be like. Couple hundred bucks nowadays, right? So 10 bucks, lot of money.
But much cheaper than the higher end, like Gibson guitars. So there was a brand called Kalamazoo, Kalamazoo, Michigan is where the Gibson factory was. And there were other brands like recording King and there was a couple others. I think Cromwell may have been one. So there were, there were a few.
Anyway, so I, I look around for these older guitars sometimes and I was like looking on reverb where they, you know, people sell, use guitars or new instruments or whatever. It’s a whole marketplace out there and I’m fairly familiar with the pricing, so I was kind of looking, ’cause I got more for my truck than I expected.
So I was like, maybe I could treat myself and do something nice. And I was like, yeah, yeah. I look at Craigslist occasionally and then I found this listing for a Kalamazoo KG 11. It said it was from the thirties, but it, they didn’t do any further research. And in fact, there was only one photo and it was like cool guitar from the thirties plays well, not looking for a trade.
At all just trying to sell this thing and I sent a message to the person. A lot of times people get back to you like two hours, like it’s pretty quick, right? I didn’t hear back for a few days and I was thinking about sending another message and then I was like, I’ll just chill. Like don’t, don’t wanna be too eager.
Just chill. So I got a message back and I asked a few questions like, what’s the history of the guitar? Have there been repairs? Is there anything wrong with it? What do you think’s wrong with it? I ask a few things like that, and then I ask like I. Are you flexible on the price too? That said, it was actually listed for about half of what I would’ve expected, a guitar in that condition.
Again, only one photo, so I had to use some of my knowledge and skills of deduction, and I could see this specific sunburst on this guitar was very small. And this characteristic of a 1933 or a 1934, probably 33, but I was like. I think it’s probably one of those later. I could tell you there’s not serial numbers on those guitars of that period.
There’s a factory order number I think. So there’s a order number in there, and indeed it is a 33 after I, I got it. So anyway, the dude didn’t know much about it and he was like, ah, somebody traded me for a guitar and you know, I don’t really have. Any idea about this guitar? The guy runs a music studio basically he’s a producer, right?
So he has a recording studio and he edits and masters and, and helps people create music, right? And, and their albums and all that stuff. So typically those people have like various instruments and stuff that people could play on their albums, basically. He was like, I don’t know much about it. No one really uses it.
They think it’s pretty cool, but they never use it. I never play it. The guy plays electric most of the time and he was like, I’d rather have like the money than this guitar. So I think it’s pretty good. I’m no collector. I am familiar through reading. I owned a similar guitar. It was a 37 recording. King Carson, j Robinson, KHG 14, I think a model.
No, no. It was a model, K something or other. Anyway, I got it and it, it didn’t quite work for me. It didn’t fit my hands, cool vibe, but I was like, you know what, I’m gonna trade it and blah, blah, blah. So anyway, I got this guitar and got a good deal on it. Negotiated a little bit, it looked like it was mostly original.
It may have had like a little bit of fret work ’cause it actually played pretty well. I don’t think it had a neck reset when I got home and changed the strings. I think the bridge could have a little trouble and I probably need to get it looked at. I put some relatively light strings. These are extremely light guitars, lightly braced and everything, so you don’t wanna put too heavy of a string on there.
And I’m going deep into the details, but essentially I’ll have a little work done. I got a great deal on it. It’s again, I think it’s one of those where. I might immediately be able to like sell it for twice as much. Right? That’s how much they’re selling for out there on reverb. Not just the listings, but actual sold guitars are going for that much.
So anyway, I’m many guitars a little bit, and I have, I have a few, right? So I have a few, and I also have like the original guitar that I started playing when I was, I was about 20. I now thinking about it, I had a, I had a, a different guitar when I was a little kid. An electric, but I got rid of that long time ago, and I was looking around at some other guitars in here anyway, so I have a guitar that’s like 25 years old or so, and.
I played it a lot over the years and I don’t play it really much at all these days. And, and one of the reasons the frets are worn, so I’m getting to the point people so the fret are worn and I was like, you know what, maybe I could do some work on there as a kinda a testing ground. ’cause I have a few guitars and then I just bought this old guitar and I’m like, well, it does need to have like some fret work.
Done, basically. And I’m like, well, maybe I could learn how to do a couple of the things, some of the more basic things when it comes down to it. I should probably take a class like in person and like learn a few things, but I. Here is where we run into some issues. So again, YouTube is great, and there are companies that sell tools to work on guitars.
Someone that does work on guitars is called a luthier. So there’s these luthier supply companies and it’s a specialized thing. It’s you know, you, you could take a class for, I don’t, I don’t know how long. The courses are, but I imagine there’s, there’s some schools that you can go to. There are a couple years and there’s some where you’ll probably go through in like six weeks and you can learn like the basics to be able to like take care of most.
Normal, average maintenance, things like maybe cleaning up a guitar and putting new strings and setting it up and maybe removing the neck and like polishing it up. Right. Handful of things. I’m pretty sure you can, well, fuck. You could watch a bunch of YouTube videos and. Learn quite a bit, and that’s what I did.
Now, of course on YouTube there’s debate on how to do things, but here we are. I’m trying to look up a couple of specific things and I won’t bore you too much ’cause I, I already did that for about 15 minutes here. So there’s some maintenance, there is some maintenance that you can do on a guitar to sort of clean up the frets.
They call it like a level. Crowning in dressing the frets and essentially, or or dressing the frets. And essentially like you make sure all the frets are in line and you level ’em out, and then you re crown them, which is like getting rid of the flat part and making them round again. And then you polish ’em up.
And fairly straightforward. However, it’s quite specialized and you do need a couple sort of special tools or at least know how to use some files and a couple other things like that. Like many things, if you have the right tool, even if it can only kind of do one thing, like a very flat level like sanding block, that’s.
18 inches long. You fucking can’t use that for anything else. But like if you need to get your frets level like that is basically the only tool that you could use. You could get a piece of wood and wrap some sandpaper on there, tape it with double-sided tape or whatever you wanna do, but you end up with.
A situation where like you have to make sure that piece of wood is super flat and blah, blah, blah. But the specialized tools work well. So I’m trying to get some information about exactly like what I have to do and in what order. So can I just reran, fret without leveling them and a handful of other things.
And again, what you end up with when you, when you google this stuff, it’s like. Not quite what you’re, what I’m looking for, you end up on websites where it’s very clear, it’s like a niche site situation and hey look, I get the irony ’cause I. Have like a thousand videos where I talk about niche sites, I talk about keyword research, and I talk about the keyword golden ratio and like find these really specific things like can you crown frets without leveling?
That’s not out there by the way. Or if it is, it doesn’t come up on the search results anymore. So there’s a lot of things that I could try to search for, but I’m just not finding it. Or if the results or whatever results do come up, ’cause you always get results no matter which searching for. So the results that do come up, I’m like, these people, they’re not luthier like they don’t know what they’re talking about.
If it’s written by a person at all. It’s probably written by ai. If it’s not written by ai, it was like outsourced to someone who doesn’t fucking play the guitar and they are not a luthier. So like, even worse, they, they are completely clueless. So again, you’re in a situation where it’s like, I’m reading a recipe that was written by somebody else that doesn’t even know like what that dish is.
So it’s the blind leading the blind here, although I’m like. Fairly, I’m not blind though, right? Like I, I have some decent idea on like what I need to do and what I need to be working on and like what I think should work. So again, you can watch YouTube videos and learn a lot. I learned a lot from various like guitar magazines where they’re telling you how to do some of this sort of more advanced maintenance, and then there’s.
YouTube channels with like luthier that are actually showing stuff and there’s some disagreement. It, it’s interesting, like many things, there’s more ways to do it than like the one way that that person says it’s the only way to do it. There’s other ways, and the more sophisticated and maybe more advanced people, they’re, they’re able to say, oh yeah, like I do it this way, but you can’t.
There’s other ways to do it, but the comments get a little weird. And you may be thinking, Doug, why don’t you go look at Reddit. So while I don’t like Reddit too much, it is real people, often it is real people not selling a thing and they are, um, trying to give some advice. However, you do end up with a situation where it’s like someone asks a question, it’s pretty clear.
Person A says, you do it this way, person B says, no, that’s absolutely wrong. You can’t do it that way. You have to do it this way. And then you’re like, who are these people? Do I trust? Either one? Do I trust both? Are they both right? But they just can’t. I. They can’t see the other side, or is everybody wrong and they’re just like talking past each other.
And then there’s other people, you know, further on down, they give like the nuanced answer. And then there’s like one more where someone gives a simple answer. So again, I’m just like, I don’t know who to believe here. And you end up kind of defaulting. I mean, I was just working on it. I was regrounding some stuff and I think I made a little mistake on.
How much I was filing and crowning, but I, I figured it out ’cause I like res strung it and I, I’m doing things as minor as I can and then I’ll do more. So I essentially did some work, polished it up, things were looking good, right. And then I res strung it and then I played a minute and I was like, it sounds fine, but I’m like.
It’s flat. The frets are flatter than I think they should be. And why don’t I see if I could re-ran one, maybe a far away fret that I don’t use too often. So I did that and I was like, oh yeah. That looks much better. So it is gonna take a little bit more work, but I just, I learned something big and I mean, when it comes down to it, like whether it was cooking the recipes or me like learning how to do some fret work and polishing things up, making it look nice, essentially, it’s like, okay, we could read about this.
We could read about swimming, you could read about riding a bike. You get a pretty good idea about it, but you have to jump in the water. You have to get on the bike. Write around, fall down. Like understand like your limitations and like what kind of turns you could do and that sort of thing. And I have to get the fucking file out, practice on the guitar.
That doesn’t matter that much. So that, that was the other thing. I’m like working on my, my first guitar, the one that sort of banged up and it was $300 when I got it like 20 years ago. And I’m pretty sure you could buy like. Virtually the same kinda guitar for about 300 bucks now, which means it’s like way, you know, the, the value has gone up.
Or like I said, I’ve been on Craigslist and it turns out, I mean, if I wanted to get a comparable guitar from Craigslist, this used and has its first scratches and blah, blah, blah, I probably get it for like a hundred dollars or less. And side note, as I mentioned last week, Al, when, when you listen to this things.
Maybe, uh, even more volatile prices are up or prices are down, or inflation or whatever kind of thing’s going on. I mean, buying you stuff on Craigslist, like you can get a pretty good deal. And that was one of the crazy things with that Kalamazoo, which I’m gonna play at the end. I, I threatened y’all that I was gonna play, so I’ll pause and you can stop watching.
You can stop listening if you don’t care. I’m just gonna play for like a minute or two. Improvises a couple things and then you could hear, hear what it’s like. But you could find good deals out there. And the crazy thing is there’s more information and resources than there ever have been. Now, some of the information is like the bullshit that I’m telling you about, where it’s like, who wrote this?
That obviously doesn’t know anything about it. I don’t know who, but it’s someone useless. I had to cough there. So a little disjointed, but basically like, there’s so much information about guitars and I remember it must’ve been 15 years ago, I was hanging out with a buddy and he was into like vintage guitars and he was like, I, I have this Gibson like a 68.
B 15 or B 25 or something like that. And, you know, eventually I’ve started to get into those, but like many years later. But he, he was like, oh yeah, I found this in a pawn shop. Like I used to go to pawn shops all the time just to see what they had and I would buy guitars and sell ’em, keep ’em and whatever.
And I was like, oh, that’s cool. Like, can you find like really crazy deals? Like, like the old days? ’cause you would hear. People would go to a pawn shop, find something super unusual, and then the pawn shop didn’t know what they had because they, they didn’t realize how rare it was. Or maybe things were covered up like the serial numbers covered up.
So they don’t know. It’s actually rare, but if you go in, you could like get a great deal ’cause they think it’s just like a regular old guitar. He was like, nah, that doesn’t really happen anymore because they can just look on eBay and see what’s out there. And the thing is, like, that was like 15 years ago when you told me that.
Now again, there’s more data. There’s been you know, more websites and more information and blah, blah, blah. And more sites like reverb where you can see like, what did these things sell for? And the guy. Just, I guess he didn’t look it up, or, I mean, the thing is like, similar to the previous guitar that I mentioned, it’s like, in an amp that I got, it’s like the person that was selling it didn’t have a direct amount of money into it.
So the amp that I got, I got for like less than half off and like, gosh, I can’t remember, like 70 bucks cheaper than whatever the person had it listed for, which was super. Reasonable and it looks brand new, like it could have been on the showroom floor, like Guitar Center, and I would’ve not known any difference.
Looks pristine and, and basically, if the person doesn’t have a direct amount of money in it, like they bought it, then they don’t have like the price anchoring, they don’t have the sunk cost in their head, and they’re a little bit more willing to deal. So while the, the dude that I got this Kalamazoo from, I.
He was like, ah, I’m pretty firm on the price. He wanted to make a little money, which, which he did, but he, he did eventually negotiate ’cause I was like, Hey, there’s a little, there’s a bit of a crack here or a seam and I’m not sure if I’ll have to get it repaired. I. Will you gimme 50 bucks off? And he was like, yeah, that’s cool to totally fine.
I see what you’re talking about. And I’m like, I don’t, I don’t even know how much it costs to get repaired. I know that $50, definitely more than $50, but like, let’s do the deal. And he was like, cool, let’s do it. So, this guy didn’t have a specific amount of money now he, I think he had like a. Fender Jazz Master or something like that, that he was trying to sell for like 900 bucks or so.
So the guy that wanted it, they traded, I think, straight up. And basically the guy was like, I, that I bought it from was like, I want to get a little money out of it. So he, he had it for a little while, played it some, it still had the same strings on it. And by the way, the strings were like super corroded.
More so the guitar was like insanely dirty. So like the fret board had. Who knows. The last time it was clean, it could have been like, like 50 years of gunk on there, but it was like, I’ve had some dirty guitars or seen dirty guitars and like, you can use some cleaner and you wipe it. And like, I did that and like let it soak and all this stuff and it didn’t come up.
I had to be a little bit more aggressive with a cleaner and a little like light abrasive to, to get that up and once they cleaned up the fretboard be beautiful fretboard. Beautiful. That’s, uh, it’s like Brazilian rosewood, like you, you, they can’t harvest that anymore. So that’s one of the cool things with the old guitars, it’s like, it was old wood then from like old growth forests, which are now gone and like some of the wood you.
Can’t harvest it anymore. So if there’s like Brazilian Rosewood Fretboards or Rosewood guitar pieces like the back inside that’s been harvested years ago and it’s like very expensive, super rare. But if you get a old guitar, that’s just what they used. So anyway, all that to say. Retail stuff, if you buy it new, maybe expensive.
If you look around, you can actually find good deals. Again, blows my mind that you know, it was a, this Kalamazoo listing, it was a short listing. It was a poor listing. There wasn’t that much information. It was one photo. The person didn’t know much about it and then didn’t do much research. Now. He was just like, Hey, I would like to get some money for the guitar.
He has other priorities, like respect to that. People are busy. They have other shit going on. I’m not saying he was wrong. I was just like, I. Talked about selling the guitar that I had and I had like a long story how I got it, the improvements that I’ve made, some of the downsides and like who the guitar might be good for and it provided as much info, including the cons that I could, same thing when I sold my truck.
And the listings that you see out there are just so short. So there’s certainly opportunity if you, um. If you want to, I mean, what, whatever your thing is too. I mean, if you’re into other kind of collectibles or if you’re into whatever, boats and RVs or whatever, like there’s all sorts of things you could find a good deal on.
You just have to like be familiar with the market. And I was again, looking a lot on a reverb and messaging people and trying to figure out like what kind of guitar I wanted to get. And I have had my eye. On these depression era guitars. Super cool. Alright, I’m gonna pause for a second. I’m gonna lower the table and then, uh, I’ll, I’ll play, I’ll play a little tune and if you don’t care, you can tune out.
It’s okay. It’s, yeah. Before I go and play a, I forgot to mention my Etsy store, so if you wanna check it out. See what’s going on there. We’ll put a link. You could buy stuff there if you want. If you have a request for like other products in there, let me know. And then also shout out to Mind Lab Pro in Performance Lab.
I’m using the multivitamin here and I told you all before I dig those Nootropics, that’s Mind Lab Pro. I’m an affiliate for them, so if you get some stuff, I appreciate it. I get a commission if you do so, I. I’ll play you out now.