Are you guys familiar with Shoeshine Johnny?  Now there's a name you probably haven't heard in a while unless you're a fan of Police Squad like I am. Probably one of the best plot devices in any show, ever. He was the guy you went to for two things: a good shoe shine and even better intel.

Sgt. Det. Lt. Frank Drebin would sit down, get his shoes buffed to a mirror shine, slide Johnny a few bucks, and ask, "what do you know about the Henderson case?" Johnny would give him the scoop - quick, accurate, and worth every penny. Then Drebin would leave, and someone else would walk in - maybe a heart surgeon needing help with a tricky procedure or Tommy Lasorda looking for strategy tips. And of course Johnny always knew exactly what to say, for the right price.

This was back before Google. Back when if you needed to know something, you either had to look in an encyclopedia*, take a trip down to the library, ask the right person, or just go on not knowing. Shoeshine Johnny was basically a pre-internet search engine with better customer service and no pop-ups.

Then Google came along. Suddenly you didn't need Johnny. You just had to type a few words into a box and - Boom! - you had pages of information at your fingertips. Sure, you had to dig through a few sketchy links and try to dodge the ads, but the answers were there. The price? Your eyeballs. Google figured out early that the real money wasn't in charging you to search - it was in selling your attention to the highest bidder. Believe me, I tried getting in on that action. Ran ads for years. Never got a decent return. It was like trying to sell hot dogs outside a vegan yoga studio.

Fast forward to 2025. Now we don't even go to Google half the time. We just ask ChatGPT. You toss in a question, and it does all the sorting and sifting for you. It's like having a digital Shoeshine Johnny who doesn't even need a chair. You ask, it answers. Sometimes it's dead-on. Sometimes it's a little confused. But it tries, and it gets better every day. It usually gives you something resembling an accurate answer - sometimes even with a little personality.

It's kind of like the bartender role on Star Trek. You know the type: Guinan, always offering just the right wisdom over a drink, or Quark, handing out advice as long as there's latinum in it for him. For some reason, bartenders always seem to know everything. Except mine. The only advice any bartender ever gave me was, "don't drink the stuff that glows. Last guy woke up in Tampa."

ChatGPT is still in its growing phase. They're still figuring out exactly how to make money off it. Right now I pay the twenty bucks a month for the Plus version because I use it like a Ferengi uses a loophole. But make no mistake - there will be a cost. Don�t be surprised when the bill comes due in some new form. The price of knowledge is still the same as it was in Johnny's day: the right question, the right timing... and the right price.

LLAP/RR

* Not every family was lucky enough to have one of these. We did. My grandpa had an old New World Family Encyclopedia set from the 1950s, kind of like this one. I credit part of my nerdiness to this encyclopedia. I'd always leave one volume in the shi... I mean my "office" and by the time I was in high school I had finished the whole set.