Friends with Brews

Scott’s brother Keith joins the show. Scott has Laurelwood’s Pumpkin Ale, brewed in Astoria, which tastes spicy to him. Keith has Talking Cedar’s MMIW Tribal Pale Ale from the Chehalis Tribe in Washington, with a portion of the proceeds supporting Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Chloe the cat gets Tacoma tap water.

They talk about what they’re each building with Claude, American short-term thinking, China and Europe in AI, how narrow education has become, why people are so sure everyone else is wrong, biology that looks designed, and whether a business has to be online at all.

Peter is back on Athletic Lite, Athletic Brewing’s 25-calorie non-alcoholic light beer, because he’s already had three cups of coffee. It’s been on the show before, and it still gets a thumbs up: “For something that comes in as a non-alcoholic light beer, it kinda tastes like beer, so that’s a plus.” Scott has Water Avenue Coffee’s Blue Creek, an organic blend promising hazelnut, milk chocolate and a hint of navel orange. He finds the hazelnut, but the chocolate and orange are “in the class, but they’re sitting in the back row.”

Peter tried the iPhone Duo at an Apple Store and wants it to replace both his iPhone 17 Pro and his iPad Air. Scott runs through what the Duo gives up: no telephoto, a fixed 26 mm main camera, and Touch ID instead of Face ID. Scott’s fingers never got along with Touch ID, but Peter’s car mount and running mask make Face ID a pain for him. Mark Gurman already has the next Duo getting Face ID and an action button, and Scott makes the case for the action button as the way to start his dictation app without an app hop.

Then the money: over $900 in Apple Store credit, the Apple lease plan as a business expense, AppleCare costing more than the lease, and whether a thick, heavy phone even fits in Peter’s pants pocket. A delivery date three months out, which Claude confirms is about as long as any iPhone has waited, talks Peter out of buying it now.

Scott builds himself a Markdown “brain” so Claude always has his context (keep it out of your Documents folder), and explains why he now runs Claude Code in the Claude app instead of the terminal. Peter has Claude reading his email, Teams and Slack for a single daily briefing, turning leftovers into seared swordfish with gremolata, and running recipe mode with multiple timers. They also figure out how to connect a second Microsoft 365 account, and Scott praises fnMute.

It’s October, so Peter drinks Hofbräu Oktoberfestbier, the festival lager Hofbräu München pours in its own tent at the Munich Oktoberfest. “This is what beer was meant to be.” Thumbs up. Scott is back on Hopworks Great Gourds Pumpkin Ale, brewed with Bella Farm on Sauvie Island: a surprisingly good pumpkin ale, and he’ll have it again. Thumbs up.

Peter’s first rant: a Chase points booking for the Athens Marathon that Turkish Airlines keeps changing on its own, first stretching a 90-minute layover to seven and a half hours, then moving his flight home to the day of the race. After hours on hold and a $600 cancellation fee he’s on Swiss Air, and Scott suggests he just run straight to the airport.

Rant two: Peter’s Kia drops its all-wheel drive on the way home from New Hampshire, and no nearby dealer has a certified EV tech until November. That leads to Massachusetts right-to-repair law, why Kia and Subaru cars there have no online telemetry, asking Claude which EV makers do, and whether anyone cares about a Mustang SUV.

Along the way Peter files a bug against his own fnMute app and pushes the fix mid-episode, Siri hands a phone call to Claude, and Peter’s demand letter to Kia lists the car’s three breakdowns. Then a $13 Find My card, a hardware KVM that works over Tailscale, MagSafe everything, and a call from Peter’s contractor about his Vermont water heater.

Peter’s away, so Scott is joined by Donnie Adams of Obot AI. Donnie drinks Southern Tier Maple Warlock, an imperial pumpkin stout that’s a little sweet but not too thick for the style, and gives it a thumbs up. Scott’s Ancestry Irish Red tastes exactly like the can says: light-bodied, malty, caramel, and a touch of roast. Thumbs up.

Donnie then demos Obot, the open-source platform his team builds for managing MCP servers: combining servers into one virtual MCP, sharing a setup across a company while everyone signs in with their own accounts, pinned and rehosted server images, audit logs, and device management for the coding agents on company laptops.

After that: why agents love installing packages, how the team behind Rancher and K3s went from Acorn to Obot, the dot-com bubble, The AI Doc on Netflix, whether Silicon Valley has gone evil, and why a seven-month-old can’t look away from a phone screen.

Scott starts this solo episode with Coava Araponga from Brazil, brewed with an AeroPress. He gets a little chocolate, likes the lack of bitterness, and gives it a thumbs up.

Then it is onto Peter’s Scratch Itch Software and Hostbar, a Decoder discussion with Jonathan Kanter about AI companies seeking antitrust exemptions, and the 404 Media episode “We Are Getting Way Too Comfortable Talking To Machines” featuring Sherry Turkle.

Scott closes with a question for people building their own businesses: does an online presence help sell the work, or has the online presence become the business? He wants to see the books.

Peter cracks open Athletic Brewing’s Atlética — a non-alcoholic Mexican-style copper — while Scott pours a Sapporo Premium, in tree pose, naturally. From there it wanders the usual distance: backups that finally worked, tenants who never mentioned the leaking roof, two brand-new software ventures (one per host), and a sign-off recorded in full knowledge that an AI would be cutting the ums out of it.

Friends with Brews heads out to a brewpub — Medford Brewing Company in Medford, Massachusetts — and works through a twelve-glass flight between the two of us: a West Coast IPA, the PoWit witbier, a Mexican lager, a dry Irish stout, an English bitter, and the ~8% Rude Panda imperial porter. Thumbs go up, thumbs go down, and the bitter earns a very diplomatic 45-degree thumb.

As always, it wanders well past the beer.