Christina and Jeff kick off the new year of Overtired sans Brett. They delve into Christina’s impending cervical spine surgery, ICE raids, and neighborhood signal groups. How do you keep mental health in check when Homeland Security is in your alley? Tune in for a wild start to 2026.

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Promise Not to Whine

[00:00:00]

New Year Kickoff

Christina: Well, happy New Year. You are listening to Overtired and I am Christina Warren, and I’m joined as always by Jeff Severance Zel and, uh, Brett Terpstra couldn’t be, uh, here with us in this, uh, happy early 2026 episode, but I’m, I’m super excited to be able to kick off the, uh, the first pot of the year with you, Jeff, how are you?

Jeff: I am good. Happy New Year to you.

Christina: Likewise, likewise. Um, oh, here, here, here’s to 2026 being significantly better than 20, 25. So

Jeff: So far, not so good, but I’m, I’m really, I’m really excited about 2026. I’m

Christina: I was gonna say, like, like globally, globally, so far not great, but, but,

Jeff: in here. Good in here.

Personal Updates and Health Challenges

Christina: So, um, so how are, uh, uh, how, how, how is the, I guess a, I guess we can kind of a drill into like a, a brief kind of mental health or, or just personal update thing if we want. Um, how, um. How are things for you so far? Um, I guess the end of the year. How are things with the kids? Um, the [00:01:00] wife, everything.

Jeff: the, how the year ended is, and that gets us back to almost a political level. I will save for a topic ’cause boy do I have a story. Um, but, uh, generally speaking, doing really well. Like we traveled, saw my dad and stepmom in Iowa. Saw my in-laws in Indiana, had a really nice, just like generally had a really nice time off.

Um, and despite the fact that I’m under a super stressful deadline over the next few days, I feel good. How about you? You got a lot going on.

Christina: I, I do, I do. So I guess just kind of a, a, an, an update on, um, the, uh, the Christina, you know, cervical spine, um, saga since we last spoke a couple of weeks ago. Um, I guess maybe two weeks ago now. Um, uh, it was maybe a week ago. Um, uh, it was two weeks ago, I think. Sorry, it was, it was right before Christmas.

Surgery Details and Insurance Woes

Christina: Um, I was still awaiting, um, hearing back about when I would be scheduled for, uh, surgery and I’m getting, um, uh, artificial disc replacement in, um, I guess [00:02:00] between like C six, C seven of my cervical spine. And I do finally have a surgery date. Yay. Um, the bad, yeah, the bad news is it’s not until February 2nd, so I’ve gotta wait, you know, a month, which sucks.

Um, I would have been able to get in, you know, uh, three weeks ago at this point. Um, had I been able to like, I guess like book immediately, but without insurance, like approval, um, I didn’t really want to do that. Um, I think, I think people, uh, can understand why, like, you know, when the doctor’s like, well, we can book you now, but you’ll just need to sign some forms that say you’ll be responsible for the bill if insurance doesn’t pay.

Jeff: Oh fine. Get Where’s my pen?

Christina: right, right. And I’m like, yeah, this is, you’re gonna keep me overnight just for, you know, observation to make sure like nothing bleeds or, or, or whatever’s a problem. Um, ’cause they’re gonna go through like the, the, the front of my, of my neck to, to be able to reach, you know, um, things that way and, and, and so, [00:03:00] you know, and be under, you know, anesthesia, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s not like a huge critical procedure, but it’s still neurosurgery.

Jeff: is through the front of your neck.

Christina: and, and, and, and, and, and again, and it’s a neurosurgeon and it’s like, you know, they’re gonna, you know, take some stuff out and try to make sure that like, you know, very, like they’re gonna be, you know, um, screwing up against my trachea and stuff. And like, yeah. I mean, like, you know, it’s, it’s not, it’s not minor.

It’s not like I can just go in in an afternoon and be like, oh, I’m, I’m, I can just like walk out.

Jeff: Right.

Christina: Um, um, although apparently I will feel better, uh, as soon as it happens, but yeah, I mean, this is probably gonna be a six figure, you know, operation, I’m assuming so. No, I, I, I’m sorry. In, in this climate, uh, I don’t feel comfortable.

Just, I need my name to be like, oh, yeah, I’ll, I’ll be responsible for that, and then be responsible for trying to track everyone down to, to pay. So that’s the frustrating thing is that, and now of course, you know, you, you get the beginning of the year, a bunch of people have been waiting, you know, to get, you know, things scheduled, I’m sure, and [00:04:00] whatnot.

So I’m grateful that I’m scheduled at all. Um, I’m also grateful that right now I’m not insignificant pain, which is a really good thing because if this had been the pain level that I was in for the first few weeks, then like, I wouldn’t, I, you know, I mean, I would wait. I mean, if, if, if you have to wait, you have to wait.

But, um, I, I, I might have like pressed upon them like. Is there any way we can move this up? Um, but I’m not in that position, which is good. The only thing is just that the numbness, um, on both arms. But, but, but primarily, yeah. No, I mean, that’s not gone away and, and it’s, and it’s not going to is the thing, right?

Like there are a lot of people and like, and I, I’ve started now that I’ve got, got it like actually like done and like scheduled and you know, I’m going through all like the, you know, um, checklist stuff before you, you go in and whatnot. And I have like my, you know, pre-up appointments and all that stuff scheduled.

Exploring Surgery Options and Recovery

Christina: Um, I am starting to, to look more into, I guess like, you know, I guess recovery videos that people have put up on YouTube and, and reading a few things on Reddit. Although I’m doing my best to, to stay off the internet with [00:05:00] this stuff as much as possible. Um, just because for me it’s, it’s not beneficial, right?

Like, it, it’s, it’s one thing if you know, um, you, uh, you don’t like. If, if you can separate and not kind of go down rabbit holes and like freak yourself out or whatever, sure. Maybe it can be good information, but for me, like I, I know my own kind of, you know, limits in terms of, of how much is good for me.

And so I’ve, I’ve tried to keep that in moderation, but I have watched a few, you know, videos of people, you know, kind of talking about their experiences. And then of course then that gets used sent with like videos of like doctors who of course, for their own reasons, like are trying to promote like, oh, well you should do the, the, the fusion versus the, the, the disc replacement and, or you should do this versus that.

And I’m like, okay. I actually watched one interesting talk that, that some guy gave it a medical conference and neurologist gave it a medical conference and it was a neurosurgeon, I guess is, is the proper term. But that I think kind of really distinctly a, it was very similar to. Exactly what my surgeon said to me, [00:06:00] um, when he was kind of explaining the differences in the procedures.

Um, and, and b but kind of went into, I guess like the, the difference in terms of outcomes and, um, and it made me feel better about like that if I’m a good candidate for this procedure, that, that this is, um, the right thing to, to do and probably will be better for me long term. Um, because the, the results are, are better and, but not by a small portion, not like by like a, a gargantuan portion.

But they are, they are, there is like a sizable difference between outcomes in terms of whether like the average person who needs a revision, um. For, you know, cervical spine versus getting, you know, disc replacement versus, um, uh, fusion. Fusion has been around a lot longer, and so insurance companies are a lot more likely to approve that.

But in Europe, they’ve been doing the, the disc replacement stuff for 25, 30 years. Um, and so there is a lot of data on it, but it’s been a much more recent thing in the United States because insurance companies didn’t really start to do it until about five or 10 years ago. And so, and so, you know, some people will, [00:07:00] like some doctors who very clearly have an agenda on, on YouTube and like, that’s fine, like your practices, your practice and you’re comfortable with what you’re comfortable with.

But they’ll be like, oh, we don’t have enough data on, you know, the types of, um, you know, discs that we’re putting in people’s, you know, necks and, and how, how long they, you know, last and, and there might be some differences in terms of if you’re doing like a multi-step, meaning you’re doing like multiple discs at once.

Or if, you know, depending on like what, what, what part of the spine you’re in. And like, I, I think at this point for, for artificial disc replacement in the US they’ll do it two steps. So they can do two at once, but they won’t typically do three, although they will do three in Europe. And so there are people who will go to Europe and get the three

Jeff: They’re so liberal in Europe. We’ll do three.

Christina: Well, I mean, I think it’s a difference in, in that case, just a matter of like, if they’ve been doing the surgeries there longer, you know, then, then they, you know, and, and, and you know, and, and this is not uncommon in, in various forms of, of medicine, you know, where like you have different, you know, procedures and different exploratory things in different fields, in different areas.[00:08:00]

So anyway, so then I get kind of trapped into those rabbit holes. But the interesting, the night, the, the, I guess comforting thing is that like, you know, I’ve been reading, you know, around reading, but watching people who were doing vlogs, like after their surgery and like there was this guy who. I was a few years younger than me, but he, you know, posted some updates.

I, I guess he got his in July and he kind of did like, you know, updates, you know, kind of like, you know, this was me right after surgery. This was me, you know, three weeks later. This was me however many months later. And that was really great to see. Um, and, and his, his scar actually healed really nicely, which was encouraging.

So, um, yeah, I mean, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m hopeful. I mean, the one thing that’s interesting that, like almost the universal thing that people say, of course you have a few people who say, this didn’t help or, or, you know, this, this was bad or whatever. And, and obviously like that’s always terrible to see that, but you know, you’d have to kind of like go by law of averages.

But the, one of the central kind of things is a lot of people being like, I should have done this earlier. And, and so I’m feeling good about that because that is, I, I, I, I don’t know what this says about me, [00:09:00] but like there’s was never a moment in my mind where I’ve been like, oh, I’m not gonna get the surgery as soon as I can get the surgery.

That’s never even been part of my like, thought process. And, and, and, and, and it’s funny because I think that like, that is actually odd compared to almost everybody else. Um, the general public, I guess, who goes into these sorts of things. Um, or at least the people who are vocal on the internet, right? So, so maybe like, maybe there are a lot more people like me who just don’t go to forums and comment on stuff and are just like, yeah, I’m gonna get the surgery because that’s what the doctor says.

There’s the right thing to do, and that’s what makes sense to me and I wanna, you know, not be in pain and I wanna be able to feel my arm and all that stuff. Um, but there are a lot of people who, I don’t know why, um, I mean, I guess the idea of surgery is, is really scary. And, and like, I can, I can understand that obviously, but to the point where they’re like, okay, well no, I’m gonna try physical therapy and I’m gonna do everything I can to avoid surgical intervention.

And I’m, I’m like, no. Like, like [00:10:00] freaking cut me up, doc. Right? Like, like, like, get me in, get me in. Like, let’s get better, right? Like, I, I’m not, I’m not here to like fuck around with like, ’cause right now, because the immediate pain is not there, I could be okay. Right? Like, I

Jeff: Sure.

Christina: try steroids, I could try pt, I could try to do other types of therapies and be like, well, maybe that will move the nerve around.

Or maybe it can get the disc like UN you know, bolt, whatever the case may be. And maybe I won’t need surgery. Um, or I could let this go on longer and continue to be weakness, you know, and, and, and in, you know, it’s not like I’m not in, I’m, I’m not in active pain, but it’s not, not painful at certain times.

Not worrying about is this just going to become like a permanent way that I feel, which would be. Awful. Um, and, you know, and, and, and like, it’s not the most debil debilitating thing, like I said. Um, if, if I was in a position where I, I couldn’t get surgery, obviously I could be okay right now, but you never know.

Also, like, when is it going to, to swap again? Right? [00:11:00] Like, and, and, and, and for me, I’m also, I’m like, I, I don’t wanna have to like, live in fear of doing something, you know, to my arm or my neck or, or whatever, and, you know, making things worse. So,

Jeff: right. Oh, I’m glad you’re doing it.

Christina: yeah, me too. So anyway, that was a long-winded update, but Wow.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s intense. So I’m really glad the pain is not what it was ’cause Holy shit.

Christina: Yeah, the pain was, was really, really bad. And I, like, I look back now and it’s, you know, I, I guess ’cause it’s been a couple of weeks since it’s been really debilitating and it is, and again, I don’t know like that this is me or this is like just somebody else, but I, or this is me or this is the comment with other people.

Sorry. Um, is that. Like when I’m not in pain anymore. It is such, so much like, I mean, depression is like this too. It’s so much like a vacuum. It’s like when you’re in it, that’s all you can see. But when you’re out of it, like it’s so easy to forget what it was like

Jeff: Yeah, yeah, totally. Completely.

Christina: totally completely right. Yeah.

Jeff: Yeah. I can even imagine being in the [00:12:00] situation you’re describing, knowing I have a surgery coming up and being like, well, do I want to? Which, like, to your point now, you make that call and you’re worrying forever. Am I gonna wake up? And this thing’s there. Next time it happens, I gotta wait another God knows how long before the surgery, when I’ll know it’s time.

Like, you know it’s time now. Get in there.

Christina: No, totally, totally. And and that’s the thing. And I think sometimes it can be. Like I said, like when you’re not in the thick of, of it, whether it’s like, you know, feeling depressed or feeling overwhelmed or, or stressed or, or in physical pain or whatever, like it’s easy for to forget like what that can be like.

And so I have to just kind of like remind myself like, no, this was really fucking bad. And yeah, you got through it and now you’re on the other side of it. And so you’re like, oh, okay, well, you know, I, I, I could, you know, do whatever, but you’re like, don’t, don’t forget what that was like. Right.

Journaling and Mental Health

Christina: Um, sometimes I think like, and, and I, and I’m bad at remembering to do this, but new thing for the new year, I guess is why, um, it is important I think to like write things down, right.

Like however we’re feeling, whether it’s, you know, good, bad, whatever. [00:13:00] Sometimes, like for me, like it is

Jeff: Just like journal you mean, right?

Christina: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Be, because it can be useful just to like look back and like, if you’re in a darker spot to remember, hey, there were times when I felt this way. Right.

Might not bring, bring me back to that place. But it’s a good reminder. But also I think almost just, it’s importantly, it’s, it’s, it’s the inverse where it’s like you need to remember when you’re in a good place. What it can be like to be in a worse place. Um, because, you know, I think that’s why sometimes people make decisions they make about what medicines they’re going to take or not take or what therapies they’re going to continue or not continue.

And, um, and it’s, and it’s really easy to get into that, you know, cycle of, okay, well I’m fine now, um, because you’re removed enough from what it felt like to be bad, you know? And, and then, and, and, and also I think sometimes like, uh, and this is why I wish that I’ve been journaling more over the last few years.

You can really get yourself into a deep depression and not realize it.

Jeff: Yes, yes. Yeah. And I feel like journaling too, just like helps you internalize some of the flags and [00:14:00] warning signs, even if you’re never looking back, like, ’cause you’re gonna process them a little bit.

Christina: yeah, yeah.

Jeff: can’t, I, I’ve journaled over the years for stints of time. I can’t go back into them. I almost like, I almost like bounce off the page when I try.

Um, but I really have come to believe that just the act of doing it is the thing.

Christina: agree.

Jeff: Yeah,

Christina: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I, I usually don’t re reread my old stuff either, and I haven’t journaled regularly in a really, really long time, and I actually would like to get back into that again. I think it would be better for my overall health, but similar to you, it’s one of those things I wouldn’t necessarily revisit,

Jeff: But now, you know, you have a document, you have a reason to go back into it.

Christina: right.

Well, but, but also, I mean, I think to your point, just the act of doing it, um, you know, and this is case, we’re both writers. I think this is the, the case for a lot of, of people who, who write like it, it is one of those things that like, that’s what will almost like cement it in my mind. You know what I mean?

Like, as, as, as mattering [00:15:00] like, like even if it’s something innocuous, even if I don’t remember the small details of just that, that the fact that like, I’ve done it, like, like to your point, helps you kind of process things and kind of, you know, act more as kind of a therapeutic place.

Jeff: Yeah, I don’t, when I’m writing like that, or just in general, I don’t feel like I’m writing from my brain or feel like I’m writing on my brain.

Christina: Yeah, yeah.

Jeff: It’s like I am actually putting the information in, not drawing it out weirdly.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I know, I, I, I, I love that actually, I’ve never thought of it before. Writing on my brain. I love that. That’s really, that, I think that’s really profound.

Jeff: Yeah. So there’s, um, there’s a kind of journaling that I wish I, I, well, I don’t beat myself up at all to be clear about this ’cause that I’m too old to do that anymore.

The Artist’s Way and Creative Practices

Jeff: Um, but there’s this book I read back in. Oh God, 2019 99 called The Artist’s Way by this woman Julie Cameron. And I don’t remember much about this book except for, and I probably have talked about it on this podcast [00:16:00] years ago at this point, but she has this practice, she calls morning Pages.

And the idea is you sit down first thing in the morning, you fill three pages, you don’t think about what you’re writing or why you just keep the pen moving. And, and I, what I have found, that’s the only kind of real regular journaling I’ve ever done. It’s a great, great hack for me. ’cause it, it, I can do that.

And I fill, I’ll fill a, you know, big notebook and I have a box full of them from over the years. ’cause again, I’m old. Um, but what is, I have never, I don’t think there’s been a single day that I’ve done those morning pages when I haven’t been a little surprised and something hasn’t emerged that. I’m like, I’ll think to myself, well shit, if I hadn’t have done this, where would that have stayed and lived and, and lodged itself.

Right. Like, um, so anyway, I I’m glad you are bringing this up ’cause it’s reminding me of that and New Year is a great time to be thinking about that.

Christina: Totally, totally. No, I love that. And I, yeah, I, I found the book The Artist’s Way, a Spiritual Path to Higher [00:17:00] Creativity.

Jeff: Yes,

Christina: and it’s like this yellow gold book, but like, apparently, and then like they, they, they, they, they sell Morning pages Journal, a

Jeff: they do, of course. I

Christina: Yeah. Yeah, of course.

Jeff: it probably took her two decades to realize she should be cashing in on that, but she did.

Christina: No, honestly, so the book, it looks like it was published the first one in 92,

Jeff: Yeah.

Christina: then they were selling the companion volume to the Artist’s Way as December 29th, 1997. Um, so, so like

Jeff: that you’re doing this history. This is delightful.

Christina: I, well, I just looked at Amazon is just kind of filling this out for me, so I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, so at least it is possible that, that the, the book pages might have been even earlier than that, but like, good for her on like, recognizing there’s also a Artist’s Way workbook, um, now that was like a decade later, like 2006.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s what I, maybe that’s what I’m thinking of. That came much later.

Christina: Yeah, yeah. But, but it does seem like she got into that, like a David Allen kind of, you know, like, you know, whatever steps of highly, you know what I mean? Like, like all that kind of like stuff, [00:18:00] which

Jeff: You’re letting the publisher have those meetings with you.

Christina: Which honestly look good for you if you’re selling that many and whatnot.

And, and if you come up with this journaling way, yes, sell the freaking paper. You should be selling PDF copies so that people can have it on their iPads now, like, you know,

Jeff: Yeah.

Christina: or, or, or on the remarkable tablets or whatever.

Jeff: she had another thing actually I haven’t thought about in a long time. It wasn’t as useful to me long term. It helped me in the moment I. In the moment I was in, she called ’em artist dates and the idea was like, ’cause as you said in the title, it’s all about creativity. She was like, you, you take yourself out, go to a, whatever it is, a museum, a art supply shop, something like that.

But with intention, like, I am going out to do this thing on my own alone because I know that it has some connection to what feels good to me about art and creativity and expression, whatever it was. That seems like a silly thing. Like it’s basically her saying, go to a museum. There was something about calling it an artist date.

I think I was in a relationship too at the time where I was like not, it was not easy for me to [00:19:00] just go do something on my own. It was just a weird dynamic a little bit. So anyway, that was another good thing that came out of it. I mean, I, you don’t really have to work hard to tell me to go do something on my own, but at that time in my life you did. Yeah, she was great. That’s awesome.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah. No, that is funny. Yeah. So yeah, so apparently that book was published in, in 1992 and, um, you know, uh, was immediately like, well, the first printing was about 9,000 copies. In 1992, the book was published by Jeremy Tarcher. Now part of Pink Wing Group revised and millions of copies have since been sold millions.

Jeff: it was total like guru status by the

Christina: Oh yeah, absolutely. No, absolutely. You know, and, and in a, yeah, she, she was, uh, she’s a, she was born in 1948, and so, uh, she’s still alive. She’s still kicking it. Um,

Jeff: yeah. I think she made some new book that was like kind of a take on it, but it was a different, I don’t remember. Anyway. You’re the

Christina: Yeah, no, no. Her, her list of like, of like books that she’s published is, she’s the, the most recent one. So she’s still doing the, the, the [00:20:00] writer’s way thing, living the, the artist’s way. An intuitive path to greater creativity. So I guess they did a 2024 version Write for Life, a toolkit for Writers Seeking wisdom, A spiritual Path to Creative Connection.

Six week artist program.

Jeff: it’s kind of like David Allen, where it’s like, wouldn’t it be nice to have created something when you were, whatever, reasonably younger, like 20, 30 years ago, that not only that you can ride for a long time, but you probably don’t feel bad about riding it for a long time. Right? Like, ’cause you can create things or have a band or something like that, that like your only choice is to ride that thing, but it gets pretty ugly.

I see you Vince Neil. Um, but yeah, anyway, must be

Christina: No, it ha it has to be nice, right? ’cause it’s like, okay, well no, and, and then it has all these little spinoff things, so it’s not like you have to feel like, I mean, although th this actually, this would, this would be an interesting idea for like a, a, a novel or a screenplay or something, which would be to be like, okay, you know, and people have have done like riffs on these things before on, on, you know, shows or whatever.

But, so this would be an interesting story, I think to kind of focus on where it’s like you have somebody who is like, just famous for like, this, this one thing that they did, [00:21:00] and now their whole life has to revolve around it. But what if it was like, something that they didn’t like actually, like, believe in?

Jeff: yes,

Christina: what if you have the guru? What if you have the guru who’s like, actually is like, actually I don’t really, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m David Allen, but I, but I can’t actually get anything done. I have to have like a whole, you know, cadre of assistance to actually organize my, my, my, my calendar and my life.

For me, you know, I don’t

Jeff: Carol and Pluribus, I don’t know if you’re watching Pluribus, but that Yes. Her, her whole like book series. Clearly she was at a point where she’s like, yes, I should still ride this, but I cannot. That’s all right. Things changed for her. Um, okay. I have to tell you about something insane that happened to me at the end of 25.

Christina: Okay. Alright. Before, before we do that, let me let Ru first, um, let’s, uh, let’s, let’s go ahead and, and get our, our sponsor read

Jeff: Oh, way to remember the sponsor. We remember you sponsor.

Christina: We, we, we do. So, um, I, I, I, before we hear about what happened to you at the end of 2025, let’s, uh, let’s go ahead and talk, uh, forward a little bit about 2026.

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Jeff: Bam. Can you hear my Synology?

Christina: No,

Jeff: Oh, that’s funny. ’cause I, I get this. Hum. I recently com I, I’ll visit this in GrAPPtitude. I, [00:24:00] uh, I completely clean, installed my Synology after like six years. ’cause when I did. Build it. Initially, I actually didn’t really understand how to use it, and I, and I made some mistakes that because of all the stuff I put on, it was hard to sort of, I was treating it like it was gonna be an external drive and I could just kind of work with, you know, which was a huge mistake.

Um, but anyway, I, it’s working so hard. It’s working so hard and it’s on my desk, which it normally wouldn’t be. So I hear this humming. Didn’t know if you heard it.

Christina: I, I did not, I did not, which is a good thing. So, okay, so, all right. Uh, let, let’s, let’s go back. So what, what, yeah, I’m ready. I need to hear what happened to you at the end of 2025. All right.

Unexpected Alley Incident

Jeff: All right, so, um, my boys are out. They’re almost never out, but they’re both out with friends, different places. My wife and I we’re home and we were eating dinner and I got an alert from my back door ring camera, and. That almost never happens. It’s only exists to, to notify me of like alley shoppers.

We’re in, in the city. We have an alley behind us and, and we get a fair amount of pretty [00:25:00] harmless alley shopping. Like it’s, is the car unlocked? If it is, you got some change. If not, I’m moving on. Um, but I like to know when they’re there.

Christina: yeah,

Jeff: We’ve had some bikes stolen and some people go into our garage and stuff like that.

It’s very rare that it goes off less than I actually thought it would. Um, and so it goes off and it goes off at around 7:00 PM very unusual. And, uh, and so I, I, I pull it up and I look and, and I, all I can see is there’s two cars parked in the alley. I have this weird view where, um, it’s kind of a fence and then our garage.

So I can see between those two things to the alley basically. So there’s two cars. That’s weird actually. And when I see some of people’s like videos about folks breaking into their cars, there’s often two that come. And so I was like, oh, okay, well it’s, I should just like go out and look. So we go and we kind of look at our, at our back window to see if we can see anything.

And we’re just like, yeah, it’s weird. They’re not only parked but the headlights are off. And like, I’m gonna go out and check it out. She’s like, well first, why don’t you look at the video it recorded, which I wasn’t thinking of at all. So I pull up the video, it recorded, and I see these [00:26:00] cars park, but it’s like three or four of them come through the two that I can see park.

And all of a sudden there are probably seven or eight figures running down the alley from these cars. Okay? And I’m like, well, that’s crazy. And so I walk out there and I go up to the first car and it’s got Texas plates. And around here where we have a little bit of an ice invasion, Texas plates are reported a lot.

I look at the next car and it’s got no plates at all. And I look at the car after that and it’s got vanity plates, specifically chosen one with a Z. Um, and, and I’m like, oh my God. It’s the thing like ice is in my alley. And, uh, and so I come back in, I I’m like, you tell my wife, like, should probably get your coat on.

I think it’s the thing is what I said. And, and we go out and sure enough, like at the end of our alley where there is a family and, and they are, um, US citizens, they’re Mexican immigrants, um, that’s where I see all these officers sort of, or these agents sort of coalescing and um, I’m gonna leave some aspects of this out.

They were [00:27:00] actually, they were serving, uh, uh, narcotics warrant that ended up being totally misguided. Nothing happened of it. Um, but it was super scary. But I kind of don’t wanna say more than that because I wanna be really clear that as everyone should know about policing, a search warrant is not an indictment.

Um, and oftentimes search warrants are so searching and, and, and often come up with. With nothing. Right? And, and maybe even were targeted at the wrong person. And there’s didn’t even have the name of my neighbor on it. It’s this whole thing. But the point is, it was a little different from what we’ve been hearing because there was a different agency there serving a warrant.

It was the airport, airport, police department, ’cause of a package. So there was that piece, there was actually a signed warrant. ’cause everyone’s trained to say, show me the warrant. Show me the warrant. So everyone, you know, my wife and I were the first ones there. Um, and then another neighbor rolled up, and then I’ll get to the rest in a second.

Um, so it, it’s shocking that it’s happening in our alley.

Christina: in our alley, right?

Jeff: just like,

Christina: you, yeah.

Jeff: what? What the

Christina: I, I mean, how [00:28:00] I would feel to a certain extent would be like, I’d be like, am I in Amer in an episode of the Americans? Like, like, you know,

Jeff: is, did they have to write it this way? Just ’cause how else are you gonna bring it to the people? You know? It’s, you gotta bring it to the characters. Um, so anyway, we go down there and, and there’s one, so all of the, everyone decides the airport PD guy who has no mask and is kind of like presenting like a pretty normal cop basically.

And he is got a badge and a name and a number. But walking in and out of the house, all around us are these guys who are in full battle fatigues. They’ve got masks on, they’ve got ars. Um, they are, they are a weird mix of people. There’s a woman in there who’s like looking like, literally like she was cast for a movie to be, uh, an, an ice person.

In this case they were Homeland Security Investigations, HSI. But it’s all intertwined at this point. Um, and then there was a guy that must have been like eight feet. That was crazy. There was a single guy that was wearing a, like a straight up like helmet, uh, for, as if he were going into battle. [00:29:00] Nobody else is wearing a helmet.

Um. And none of them were talking. They were just passing through. And, um, and so we tried to engage one of them, talked to them for a little bit, do the thing you do. Hey, why don’t you take that mask off? You know, I don’t wanna get docked. I was like, uh,

Christina: around.

Jeff: it was like, I both understand why you don’t wanna get docked.

I also feel like you’ve got the power here, brother. Um, and which was the conversation we had, um, I was like, you have a mask on. You also have your finger on the trigger of a gun. And he’s like, well, that’s not, it’s not on the trigger. This is how we hold guns, dude. I was like, I understand that, but your finger is itching at the trigger of a gun.

And so he put his hands on top of the butt of the gun. ’cause it was kind of, you know, mounted the way it is. Is that better? I was like, no, you’ve still got all the power. Take the mask off. Like, at least. Um, and uh, what, what was really interesting, and I I have this sort of like wrap up that occurred to me later that kind of blew my mind is, you know, in our neighborhood, um, because ice activity has been going on all around our neighborhood, like in.

Neighborhoods [00:30:00] surrounding our neighborhood or a little further out, but all within a, I could get in the car and rush out there distance. Basically we have these, we have these neighborhood signal groups. The first one that popped up was actually around my son’s school, which is very close to here and has a lot of East African and Hispanic, um, immigrants and, and, um, and so that we knew that was like, you know, people were scared there.

Some kids weren’t coming to school. And so, um, some neighbors organized in such a way that they could a, have a signal, uh, communication channel. But also part of that was planning at the beginning of the day and that release time for enough people to sort of be paired up in areas around the school, but not so close that it freaks the kids out.

That like if something happened, there could be sort of a rapid response. So we had that signal group. There’s a broader signal group that probably covers like a four block area, and then there’s a wider one that’s our wider neighborhood basically. And that one’s like a rapid response signal group. So these have been going.

Pretty, like consistently [00:31:00] ever since it was announced that we were getting ICE and Homeland Security folks here. Um, so the network was all in place. And, and so I’m out there initially and I see all the cars. I’m like, holy shit. Wife and I go to the end of the block. We start talking to first the airport PD guy who’s there, and then the the one HSI guy who comes out.

Then another neighbor, another neighbor. I go back to take pictures of the plates because folks around here are keeping a registry that you can get through the signal group of all of the makes and models of cars that we know have been at these, um, kind of ICE activities or homeland security activities, and then their license plates.

And so there’s like a running log, which has happened in other cities too. So I was taking pictures of all the cars. Um, but I was pretty like, I mean, I’ve been through some shit and. Having it in your alley is very different from going halfway across the world as like an activist or something. Um, and having it ha neighbors are people we know and care about.

And so knowing that, not knowing what’s happening for them, which I don’t mean to bury that lead [00:32:00] ’cause I’m kind of getting to that part, but I also want to just respect their privacy. Um, so like the thing I should have mentioned at the top is like, we know these folks and it was fucking terrifying to be standing there arguing with these HSI guys knowing that at some point, or just assuming at some point these people we know are gonna be dragged outta the house in front of us.

And then it was just like this constant question of what the fuck will we do? Then? It did not happen to be really clear, uh, ahead of time. So I’m taking pictures of these cars, I’m like, oh shit. I’m supposed to notify like the signal group, but I’ve got, I’ve got all the presence I need to take pictures of cars.

I’ve got the presence I need to engage these guys, which my wife was doing plenty good job of, so I could just like walk away and do the license plate thing. But when I pulled up my phone. To open signal. I opened Slack three times, like I could not, I got an S into my search, my app search, and like kept clicking the wrong thing.

I was shaking. It was also freezing out and so like I’m shaking and so [00:33:00] thank God it occurred to me. I have one friend I know on this signal group that I, I know would answer the phone, so I called her. I called her and I was like, I need to be quick. Here are like the fundamental details. Can you please notify?

The signal group and the rapid response people. So that was great. She did initially, the first group that showed up, which was just incredible, were like all of our neighbors, we all know this family. Like it’s not, they are just neighbors. It’s not like it’s a special offset group or something. Like they’re neighbors.

So all of the neighbors show up. We have a really tight block. Um, that was incredible because it’s not like it’s a neighbor of activists. It’s what’s been incredible about this stuff from the beginning, which is like how easy it seems to be for people to pop outta their house and be like, Uhuh. Like it seems like, it seems like a lot of people are not feeling inhibited about that, which I think is really cool.

And I totally respect the people that feel inhibited, right? Like, ’cause it’s just, it’s a whole thing to go out there. So we had this great group of neighbors and they were all, we had a public school teacher who was just killing it with this one HSI guy. It was so, [00:34:00] so good to watch and it felt really powerful and I think she was doing a really good job of trying to sort of like.

Knock some things into this guy’s head knowing that like, you know, you’re in a dynamic that kind of you, there’s not a lot of room for things to change. Right. But given that she, it was really just inspiring watching her do her thing and then the like rapid response community showed up, which is like a mix of, you know, folks who are kind of just dedicated neighbors and then people who are sort of what you might call the usual suspects, right?

Like the people you would expect, especially in South Minneapolis to show up at a thing like this. And I don’t know if you’ve heard about the thing people do with whistles around these things.

Christina: Yeah. Well, I, I, all I’ve heard is that, and I ha, so all I know is I think sometimes people have whistles and kind of like, like, like blow them, almost like to alert people like that, that like, like the, like the, the, the, that like ice is there.

Jeff: Yes, exactly. And that yes, that’s exactly it. And that’s been going on here and, [00:35:00] and everybody’s getting whistle. You know, sometimes when you get a good, it’s, I’m not calling it a bit, ’cause I’ll tell you in a minute why it was effective, um, in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. But, uh, you know, it’s like a, it’s, I can do this, I can get a whistle, I’m gonna get a whistle, right?

Like, that’s something I can do. Like, it’s something that really caught on and there’s all these whistles being passed around and people on the neighborhood group being like, got a bag of whistles if you wanna come by. So I, ima imagine at this point that when these HSI or ICE people roll up to a thing before they get out, they’re like T minus 15 minutes to whistles, right?

Like, this is how long we have before everyone shows up. And, and so pretty soon it’s whistles everywhere. I had a neighbor who kept putting off her, um. Car alarm just to make more crazy noise. We had another neighbor next to this neighbor who is a very conservative like Trump guy who, when he doesn’t like the noise that’s happening in the neighborhood sets off fireworks.

And for some reason he was like, I’m gonna do the thing I do, even though there’s all these guys with guns and I’m gonna set off fireworks. But in that case, ’cause he is pissed off at all of us, like it was so [00:36:00] fucking chaotic for a minute. Um, but it was, it was an incredible thing to see how quickly people can deploy basically.

Um, ’cause we aren’t like Chicago where like we’ve had a lot of activity here, but it’s been pretty quiet activity. Like, it’s like what happened here? It’s like you and your neighbors know about it and maybe 20 people showed up from your neighborhood rapid response. But like, they’re not the kinds of stories that.

They’re not landing on rooftops, they’re not showing up with a hundred cars and calling people away. They’re hauling one person at a time away. And you hear about it here and there, but it’s been very quiet, unlike Chicago. Um, and so to have it given that, especially to have it show up just in your alley was like really, really insane.

Um, so anyway, so it all, fortunately the, the police HSI, everybody left with nothing. They did not carry our neighbors away. They did not have any, any result of this warrant that we could tell. But of course, we’re not gonna know. Another [00:37:00] theme of this is how, how hard it is for good information to be resilient in a moment like this, right?

That’s a whole other theme. And that, that’s one that gets me kinda riled up when people start after the fact or during the fact really kind of shouting out almost things that are wrong. Like the, the call that went out. For people to come. Said there were six cars in my alley with Texas plates, but I was very clear, there are six cars in my alley.

One of them has Texas plates, right? So it’s like, that kind of stuff is a little spooky, but here’s what happened. So at the end it was all over. Our neighbors were able to pop out, wave at everybody, thank everybody. They had been handcuffed this family, um, in their living room while HSI figured out if they were citizens.

And, um, what had what the whistles meant in this case was that they knew people were all over around the house. And that was, I’m sure, a level of comfort to know that like something’s happening out there. And then we learned later that there was an immigrant family down the block in the [00:38:00] other direction, across kind of a thoroughfare that we’re on the intersection of who heard the whistles and knew like, let’s stay in the house.

There’s a lot going on out there. I dunno what it is, but now I hear whistles. Let’s stay in the house. And, um, and so it was quite a, quite a thing.

Family Activism and Signal Setup

Jeff: And what I kind of realized afterwards. Was we started this year. My family, my in-laws, my in-laws especially, were very, they’re, they’re, they’re very, um, active.

They do kind of activist work, but it’s very like, um, service oriented. But they’ll go to an anti-war protest. They’ll go, you know, they’ll do the thing. They’re, they’re lovely people. And my father-in-law, especially at the beginning of the year, I was like, I don’t know what’s coming. Um, I hear that it’s good for everyone to have signal if we wanna be able to communicate to each other.

So I wanna learn how to use signal. And so I helped him, my mother-in-law set it up. I created kind of a family group for Signal and everyone was setting up signal, right? Like at that point, not knowing what was gonna come. It wasn’t even January 20th yet.

Unexpected End of Year Incident

Jeff: And I wrapped up my year activating a signal network for rapid response because I [00:39:00] had masked people in my alley with guns refusing to identify themselves driving cars from out of state.

That is insane. And I was like, that looks pretty tight. Season wrap up. Like, what the fuck? Because I kind of had gotten to the point, I guess prior to when ICE got here in, in the first place, I’d gotten to the point where I’m like, I don’t even really think about Signal anymore. Um, but then they came here and it, and it popped up.

So that’s what, that’s what happened in my alley. Um, at the end of the year.

Christina: And, and, and, and, and, and I mean, and, and, and you said, you said your neighbors are okay.

Speculations and Concerns

Christina: I mean, do, do you know anything more about like, like what, what happened or like what the, what the situation was?

Jeff: I don’t know anymore. And that’s where I’m like a little cautious because since it was like a warrant for something, it was a narcotics warrant, right? Like, I, I have no idea what happened there. I don’t know. I can, I can only speculate. Um, but I know that the, the [00:40:00] name on that warrant was not someone that lives there.

Um, so I can tell you that ’cause I saw the warrant. Um, and, and that’s the most I really feel comfortable saying.

Christina: Fair enough. Yeah. I, I, I, I, yeah. I’m not, I’m not trying to like,

Jeff: No, I get it. I get it. That’s me actually.

Dealing with Law Enforcement

Jeff: I’ve been wrestling with like, how much, even on the, I kind of like was asking people to be cautious, even on the signal, because they were sharing details about the warrant.

I was like, Hey, details in a warrant. Do not share those, because that sticks to people. And like the details in the warrant were just like, no, we’re not gonna do this. Even when the guy read me the warrant, I was like, are you serious about that? He’s like, oh man, for sure. Okay, sounds good. Let’s, we’ll talk in an hour when you’re all done and you don’t have anything.

Like I, I’ve been down this road before. I was a reporter for a long time, like I watched The Wire. Um,

Christina: exactly. I was gonna say, yeah, I was gonna say the, the sort of reporting I did, like, yeah, I watched the Wire. Um, so would be

Jeff: I said that to the guy. I didn’t say I watched the, yeah, I didn’t say I watched The Wire to the guy, but I was like, he [00:41:00] kept gaslighting us and I was like, come on man. Like you and I we’re smart people, you and I, and that was me being generous. But like, we’re smart people. You and I like, we know this thing you’re saying.

It’s like, it’s totally not the case. Like when I asked him. The airport PD guy. What’s up with the cars with Texas plates and no plates and vanity plates? I don’t know, I don’t coordinate with those guys. I was like, okay, that’s weird. ’cause like here you are and they’re walking all around you. Surely you coordinated with them enough to get them here.

It was just like, what the fuck? Just so much gaslighting that I won’t even get into, but it was just nonstop. But I was so proud watching my neighbors when the rapid responsible showed up. It was a, there’s always like some people in those situations where I, I, I get pretty activated around lack of discipline and I understand how that happens.

But having been in like really super high stakes situations where people could, and who this was one, right? Like I don’t, I don’t react well internally to people who I feel like are working out something that’s theirs. Um, [00:42:00] and at the same time, how do we know how to process this, right? Like, I don’t, we, it was something incredible to watch Mask men and one masked woman walking up and down my alley, bumping past me with guns, with masks, with no idea, with no badges, refusing to pro produce any saying, why does it matter anyhow, saying how much threat they’re under, seeing how they get followed, like just, it was, it was an incredible thing.

I had my reaction, but my reaction was based on wiring, based on really intense, unusual experiences. Um, other people, this is new to them. This kind of thing is new to me too, but, so anyway, I, I just like, I saved that. I didn’t even tell you guys when it happened. I’m like, I’ll just tell them on the podcast.

’cause

Christina: yeah, no, I mean, that’s, that’s wild. I mean, like, and it’s just, it’s just, well, and, and it’s, I don’t know, it’s so dystopic, right? Like, it’s such a, like a, a terrible like thing to like have to like witness part of, right? Because like, look, yeah, there are going to be circumstances when maybe like, you know, Homeland Security or somebody else, like really actually does need to be involved and, you know, [00:43:00] um, you know, at your neighbor’s house.

And like, that’s unfortunate, right? But like, there, there are real circumstances where that could be a case. Like I, I, I, I, I mentioned the, the Americans earlier, that was like, based

Jeff: I need to watch that.

Christina: It’s a great show. But, but the, the, the, uh, a former CIA agent was one of the, the, the, the creators. But the, um, the idea came to like, uh, one of the showrunners basically, he read an article, I think in the New Yorker or something about a, a family that like seemed like, just like the perfect, like normal family next door.

And like the kids came home from school one day and the parents had been picked up because it turns out that they had been Russian spies living in the United States for like 20 years. And like, they were like actual Russian spies. And, and then that kind of like went into, okay, well, well, well, what happens then?

Like, what happens to that family and, and what happens to get to that point? Like, what happens? Like if your neighbors are those things, right? And so there are those like very much like stranger than fiction. Like, like things, right? But in most cases, that’s not the circumstance. And, and certainly the way that like all this has been handled and the way that they’re doing all of this treat things for, [00:44:00] you know, like whatever the warrants were for whatever the situations are where they’re like, okay, now we’re gonna bring all these other groups in.

We’re not going to have any due process at all, and we’re not going to, to bother with any sort of thing of humanity at all and then freak everybody else out, like is just, you know, then, and then it puts you like, as, as the neighbor, like in this position where you’re like, okay, well how do we get the word out?

How do we help, how do we, you know, make sure that if’s something, is that if this is something that you know, isn’t what we, what we think that it is or whatever, that we can make sure that they’re not going to be. ’cause we see all the reports all the time. I mean, US citizens are getting arrested for,

Jeff: Yeah, totally.

Christina: the wrong way,

Jeff: Oh yeah, we had a, we had a woman here probably, I think she was like in her sixties, and she walked out of her house ’cause there was something happening across the street. And in moments she was in the car, she was gone. Her husband didn’t know where she was. She was released later that day.

Like we’ve had a lot of stories like that. And so that was stressful too, going in, right? Like when my partner and I went, went up to talk to this guy, I, I left down the alley to take pictures, but I [00:45:00] was like looking over my shoulder constantly. ’cause she and I have talked about how, like, can you imagine if one of us was taken and we didn’t know?

And I was like, oh, we are in a situation right now where no way can I say, there’s no chance one of us will be taken. Like, no way. And you know, the longer you’re there, the more you push it a little bit, you know, not push it like physically or something, but just like push it a little more people out front.

Someone kicked an ice car in, in an HSI car and got like pepper sprayed or whatever. Um,

Christina: and it’s, and it’s like, don’t do that. Like, don’t like,

Jeff: Well, it’s funny because, it’s funny because that per I, this is, I, I know there are people listening who will think I’m such an asshole for this, but I, to I, I feel zero apologetic for it.

Reflections on Responsibility

Jeff: So I am, I’m not like a huge fan, like kick the car when there’s a family that we don’t know how they’re doing and these people are around, like, don’t escalate in that way with these people.

Don’t set off fireworks behind the guys that have their fingers resting near triggers. Like you

Christina: That’s what I’m saying. That, that, yeah.

Jeff: yeah, you just don’t do that. Uh, but here’s the part that makes me sound like an asshole and, and I don’t mind at all. [00:46:00] Um, they were, they were the only person that was pepper sprayed. And, and it was this, you know, certain people that come from outside the neighborhood.

It was this very dramatic thing, whatever they pepper spray, you know, whatever. And I was like, what, what happened? They kicked the car. I was like, eh, I’m going in like, I mean like, yeah, you got pepper spray because you kicked the car. I assume you were in for that. Like you signed just like the guy with the mask who’s worried about being docked.

He signed up for this dude.

Christina: I was gonna say, you, you, you, you signed up for this, you, you, you, you’ve signed up because you saw Christina O’s you know, like ridiculous, like, you know, like, come, come join Ice, you know, like, like, you know, freaking social media, you know, posts or whatever, like there ads you’re doing like, yeah.

Like you, you know exactly what you’re doing, so fuck off. I don’t, yeah, I have zero.

Jeff: I I said you signed up for this. I did not sign up for this. I said you signed up for all of it, dude. Like you

Christina: Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, honestly, well, well look, you know, it’s the same thing like the military, frankly, like, you know, like in the, in, in the seventies and stuff, and we saw, you know, more of it then, like, I’m not saying that it was like the, the right or like nice or like humane thing to spit in the, in their faces.

[00:47:00] Right. But like. Especially after the draft was gone. Like, you sign up for that shit,

Jeff: It’s a tough man. I, I had that, I, that experience throughout the Iraq war where. I knew. I mean, there’s the economic draft. There’s all right, there’s all these reasons people end up in war. But at the end of the day, when I am walking around a city I love, and other Americans are there in armor and Humvees and they have destroyed a city, I feel like this is what you signed up for.

It’s not what you signed up for, but it is literally what you signed. Same with police. It’s a little bit

Christina: that’s

Jeff: I totally respect the trauma. I respect that you’re in situations where

Christina: that’s real. No.

Jeff: your values. Like I

Christina: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and, and that, that is real. And, and to your point, there might be like, like economic scenarios, drafts and other scenarios where like you’re like, well, I had a choice, but I didn’t have a choice.

Okay, but you knew that this was a trade off. Like you knew that this was a thing that comes with, with, with the territory. If it comes with adulation, but it comes with the bad stuff too. Right.

Jeff: And if you’re killing people, I don’t feel super bad about saying that. I feel super bad for you for having to live with that [00:48:00] fact. But like I don’t feel bad for saying, Hey man,

Christina: well, I mean, like, and, and it’s a

Jeff: have said no.

Christina: and it’s a completely different like thing.

I’m not even trying to categorize it the same way. ’cause it’s, it’s not. But like, just, just like in, in my life, you know, people oftentimes will like, yell at me about stuff that they don’t like, about, like the companies like that I work for. And you know, what I, I’m, I’m part of my job is to kind of be a public face for, for those things.

And that means that I get yelled at and that’s okay. And like that, that I, I quite literally knew that I signed up for that. Does that mean that I always appreciate it? That is, does that mean that I don’t get annoyed sometimes? Does that mean that I like being like tarred and feathered with like mistakes or decisions that like, I had nothing to do with Absolutely not right.

But like, that’s quite literally part of my job. So, you know, it, it, it is. So I can’t like turn around and be like, oh, well, you know, you can’t, you know, like. You know, say, say this to me, or whatever. Right. Um, but, and, and again, I realize it’s a completely different scale of things. I’m not in any way trying to equate the, the, the, the two [00:49:00] scenarios,

Jeff: No, but it’s, I mean, it is, yeah,

Christina: but all of us, but all of us, we have jobs and we do things and like in a case like this, like if you work for those agencies, right.

Especially right now, and like I recognize and I can be sympathetic that you may not have signed up. Under these circumstances. Having said that, I will say that if you signed up in the last eight years, you knew that these were things that were going in a certain direction, right? Um, I, I, I, I, I will, I will further say that like I, I’m not gonna say that like every single person is involved, but I will say like in the last eight years, you’ve, you’ve seen which way the wind was going and, and, and, and, and that’s okay.

You can make that decision and, and like, I’m not gonna judge you or your character as a person for that decision. I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m not. ’cause we all have to make decisions about where we work. Having said that, that just also means like what we’ve been saying, you’re gonna have to deal with some shit.

You’re gonna deal with people recording your face. You’re gonna have to deal with people being angry with you. You’re gonna have to deal with, to your point, people kicking the cop car. And if that’s all that happens and like, and, and, and, and it’s not gonna lead to another escalation point, that’s fine. I, I’m with you.

I’m like, okay, whatever. I will [00:50:00] say though, like I do sometimes get like annoyed with that. ’cause I’m like, okay, this didn’t help anything. And you potentially put somebody who, you know, could have been in harm’s way,

Jeff: I mean, if you have enough people to turn a car over, I’m all for it. But I No, I agree. I feel like, and, and with the stuff around making a choice or sign up for it, to me it’s like anything in life you’re saying yes until you say no. And, and so it, when I was standing there, we were all standing there trying to understand this person or help him understand us or even his own position as we see it.

He’s saying yes every second. He is not saying yo no. In that moment. Right. Like, so that’s the other piece is like, I, I don’t mean like what’s wrong with you even for signing up. I do in this case, but like when I think about the military stuff, like I have families in the military, family who are police.

Like I understand what it means to say I didn’t sign up for this. I get it like on some level, right? But there’s a point at which you always have the option of saying no, and, and there’s a point at which things get to a certain place. And that is where it becomes really [00:51:00] important to either say no or say I have signed up for this.

You just signed up for it. Like

Christina: no, I, well, I was

Jeff: waking up this morning and putting that Kevlar vest on, you signed up again.

Christina: No. A, a, a. Absolutely. And that’s the thing, right? That that’s why like, I feel like, yeah, don’t use that excuse. Well, I, I didn’t sign up for this. No, but you did. And that means you have to eat the shit right now, right? Like, it means that this is the shit sandwich and you have to eat it.

And that doesn’t mean that, like I’m saying, that you have to like, aate yourself or you have to like flagellate yourself. Sorry that you have to wrong. Not

Jeff: way. I think you shouldn’t do any of those things in this

Christina: right? It doesn’t mean you need, you need to self

Jeff: to work.

Christina: does doesn’t mean that you need to, you know, um, like, uh, I’m not, I’m not even asking you like, quit your job, right?

Because that’s. That’s really complicated and, and not, like, I I, I’m not gonna, I’m not, a lot of people are go, well, I would just quit my job in a second. Well, I’m glad that like, you have the means to be able to just do that. Like, you’re very lucky that you have the ability to just walk away and that you, that you are, are, are comfortable with the consequences of that.

Like that’s, and I mean that genuinely, right? Like, I think that that is, [00:52:00] but I also think that that’s such an easy thing to say, oh, well I would never be in this position. Well, you might not be. And there are a lot of positions that like, I can say I would never be in. But I can also say there have been positions where like, you know, you’re at a job and you’re doing things and you’re like, I don’t love this.

And you have to get that point where like, we each have our own lines. This is either I’m, I’m, I’m done and I’m going to, and I have enough of a safety net, or I have enough other things going on, or I, I feel, you know, secure enough, or I just can’t go on any further, whatever the case may be, that I can walk away.

That’s, that’s great if you can do that. But if you’re not, if you’re not in a place where you can do that, then yeah, you have to deal with like the fallout, which can mean people being mean to you. People like, you know, filming your face, people calling you a piece of shit, people, you know, spitting at you, people like turning your car over or kicking it or whatever.

Right. People yelling at you and being like, you know, work criminal, like, that’s just gonna be part of it, right? Like, that’s just, that’s just part of it. And then that needs to go into your overall, you know, like calculation of is this a place that I wanna continue [00:53:00] to work?

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah.

Christina: I wanna continue to do?

Jeff: I feel like, um, if I could have established ground rules, having had this experience with this one guy in particular who is with Homeland Security invest, I would’ve said, all right, here’s, here’s the deal. We’re gonna, we’re gonna have a conversation, but I’m gonna promise not to assume you’re rotten to the court.

If you can promise me you won’t wine.

Christina: Yeah, exactly. That, that, that, that, that, that, that’s the biggest thing, right? Yeah. ’cause because I feel like

Jeff: I’m asking. A lot less of you than I’m offering.

Christina: Absolutely. I will treat you with, you know, have a respectful conversation and I will not make these like worst case assumptions. But you have to not bitch about it.

Yeah, exactly. Well, and, and, and, and, well, I didn’t, I didn’t wanna do this. Okay. But you’re here and, and, and, and you, and you are doing this. So it’s great that you didn’t want to, but it’s great that you feel bad about this. No one cares like that. That doesn’t matter to

Jeff: ’cause here you are.

Christina: You’re No, that doesn’t matter To the family that’s here.

That doesn’t matter to anything else. I’m just following orders. Okay. Well, you know what? A lot of people said that, and like

Jeff: it’s a problem. I know, exactly. One guy was like, we don’t send people to concentration camps. I was like, well, there is [00:54:00] a continuum.

Christina: do we do, do I mean, but, but, but come on. I mean, some of those detention centers.

Jeff: And some of those things are kinda like concentration camps. I, I, you know.

Christina: I kind of,

Jeff: Yeah. I could actually couldn’t believe he said that. He said that to my, to my wife. I was like, wow, you just said that.

Holy shit. Yeah. So you’re thinking about that,

Christina: you are right, right. So, so, so you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re gonna compare, like okay, because have you been to those facilities? Because I’m not saying that they are, I’m not saying that it’s the same as what the camps were, but, um, you know, uh, you also couldn’t pull off with what the camps are.

I would hope in the United States of America, although who fucking

Jeff: But you can send ’em somewhere else where they

Christina: can send them somewhere else. I was gonna say, I was gonna say, you can send ’em to El Salvador

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. We’ve figured out, uh, we’ve figured out all kinds of ways over the years. Oh. Um.

Gratitude for Signal

Jeff: The most hilarious, uh, uh, transition ever is the one we’re about to make, which is into GrAPPtitude. I guess I’m grateful for Signal.

Um,

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. I actually, it’s, it’s funny, I, I get annoyed with them a little bit, um, as a [00:55:00] company, but I did just pay for, ’cause they just introduced like their, their, their backups schemes or whatever for, for iOS where like you can pay for cloud backup so that, um, if you’re restoring a new phone. You don’t have to do the, the current thing you have to do now where you have to like have the two phones next to one another, like removing phones and like it transfer alls your messages over.

And, and it does that because it doesn’t wanna use iCloud, which I totally get and I respect. Now, apparently they have their own like backup kind of like system so you can, you know, do that and also see things with cloud. And so it’s like, it’s like two or $3 a month, it’s like $36 a year. So I went

Jeff: That’s good. I didn’t know that was a thing.

Christina: Yeah, it’s a thing as of like last month. Um, so it’s, it’s a new thing. Um, and, and I’m happy to do it. The only thing I get annoyed at with Signal, and this is just such a petty, but like me thing, is like, they go on and on about how, oh, well we’re a nonprofit and we’re this, and we’re that. And I’m like, okay, you are, but you pay, you know, relatively high salaries, which is great.

I’m not saying that you

Jeff: Yeah,

Christina: Um, and, and, and you have like the large s from like several, like, you [00:56:00] know, like. Deck of billionaires. And so, you know, uh, you know, people who have like more than $10 billion or whatever, whatever, whatever the term is, you know, who, who who’ve given you, you know, grants and whatnot.

And, and then you, you know, when you then like cry poverty to me, like your Wikipedia, like, I have the same problem that I have with Wikipedia, which is like, I can look at your, you know, um, your annual budget things. I see how much your, your, your stuff makes, I see what your revenue, what, what your stuff is.

And I’m not saying that you don’t deserve it, but I am saying don’t cry poor to me, right? Like, there are actual nonprofits and you know this far better than, than I do, but like, who really do struggle for every grant

Jeff: Oh my God. Yeah, for

Christina: right? And then, then you,

Jeff: But their appeal uses the same language.

Christina: likers, right?

And, and, and then you have Wikipedia, you know, pulling up the, the, the big, you know, half page banner things like, oh, you know, I need this. The only thing annoys me is the signal. I’m like, okay, well I have now paid you, I now pay you $36 a year. Please don’t put up the donate thing. Because, because, because I’m, I’m, I’m, I, I have, [00:57:00] uh, I promise you that like the, the, the, you know, um, you know, 600 megabytes or or six gigabytes, whoever knows how much it is, the very small amount of cloud storage that I’m using, you know, and, and you give me a certain amount, I, I promise you that you are still making money off of this, which is why you’re charging it that way.

Right? So, like, don’t,

Jeff: yeah.

Christina: like, can, can you just cut out the, the, the, the e begging, like popups when I’ve already paid you,

Jeff: The the full half page, I just wanna learn about the Corn Palace, dude.

Christina: Right, exactly. I’m like, I’m, I’m, I’m like, I’m like, okay, stop Wikipedia. ’cause A, I’m never gonna give you a dime. Um, I, I, you, you, you are rich enough and you don’t need my money. And I, I’m not, I’m not going to, but, but, but b, like. I would much rather give it to like groups that like, can actually use my money.

And that’s, that’s not to take, that’s not to say other can’t donate or whatever. It’s just like

Jeff: Yeah.

Christina: plenty of big corporate donors are already, they are good. They’re, they’re fine. Like, I promise you Wikipedia is completely fine. Um, uh, but, uh, and, and Signal is completely fine, but I’m happy to continue to, I will give them money, right?

’cause I’ll pay [00:58:00] for a service. I’m just like, please don’t, please don’t pull this. Like, oh, well, we’re just like a poor, underfunded startup. I’m like, but you’re not. But you’re

Jeff: being used by such a ma. I mean, the number of people in these groups that I see joining Signal is unreal. I mean, it’s just like, it’s a constant flood every day here on the groups I’m in, like, okay, you guys are doing a pretty good right now, and I, especially if you can now charge service fee,

Christina: I mean, if you can, I mean, I mean obviously, you know, they’re, they’re hard Costco up every time they have people join, you know? Um, so, so, so like, but, but like, but

Jeff: But it’s like they’re becoming, it’s like they’re not omnipotent obviously at this point, but like you do, it’s like, okay, you’re on your way to being one of those services that so many people use that we can’t do without it anymore.

Christina: Well, not only that, but like, you know, and, and this is why they’ve gotten, like, however, you know, many, you know, uh, millions, um, you know, from, um, like the WhatsApp guy and some other people, it’s like, you know, this is, it’s, it’s a, it’s a really good tax write off for

Jeff: Yeah, yeah,

Christina: wealthy. And in a way that also helps them [00:59:00] protect their own conversation logs.

Jeff: yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Christina: I don’t know, man. Like if, if, if, if I were somebody trying to hide things from the SEC or someone else, or, or, or, you know, my, my, my, my, one of my, my wives or whatever, like, I would be very much, or I don’t know, Pete, Pete, hedge man. Like if I’m, if I, I’m like, if I’m, you know, the, the, the Secretary of Defense, I don’t know.

There were like a whole lot of situations where I’d be like, yeah, I don’t know, maybe I should throw these guys, you know, a few bills.

Jeff: Yeah. Right, right.

Christina: I

Jeff: Well, I’ll make signal. I guess I’ll just make, I’ll say it briefly. I was going to get into something boring.

Tech Talk: Synology and Backup Solutions

Jeff: I do have a feeling that talking about Synology now officially makes me like an old person. I think that’s where Synology has probably gotten, I don’t know.

Christina: No. I mean, I think, I think, I think Synology is great. Yeah. Talk, talk about your Synology.

Jeff: well, just that it, I mean, I’m, one of the things that I’m doing with it now that’s, uh, amazing.

I’ve been trying to kind of, um, think about risk with our business for a while and, and especially thinking about it in terms of like our digital world and, and to be able to [01:00:00] completely back up our Google workspace, um, every night in a way that can keep as many snapshots as I want, um, knowing that it’s very unlikely that that data will ever be at risk and it’s also entirely possible.

Um, and, and so getting to know kind of some of. I had not really worked with much of the functionality. I may have pretty much fucking pirated shit. Um, and, and, and had all of my, you know, digital like archive there and hadn’t done a lot of the smart stuff you can do with it. Um, and so anyway, I’m just starting to do that, but I, some of the backup stuff that’s there, I was like, oh, I should have been using this a long time ago.

And I just appreciate, it’s a really easy to use system and it’s really like well done, well managed. Um, I, I’ve been really happy so I don’t have a lot of important stuff to say about it. Um, certainly not as important as, as how Signal has been in my life, but I have wanted to, um, redo this for a long time.

It just took having a couple of real big external drives to dump my data off of my [01:01:00] Synology onto so I can reset it, which is its own terrifying and slow process. But

Christina: it is, it is. But yeah, Synology is great and, and I, I’ve been using it for a long time and, and you know, yeah. Can you get a less expensive like system that is probably like, a little bit, like less hamstrung about what type of ram you use or what sort of types drives you use and whatnot. Yes, you can. Um, but the, the software is good.

Um.

Jeff: There’s not a lot of fussing. There’s not a lot of

Christina: There’s not, which is the, which is the thing, right? Because if you don’t mind fussing, some people don’t, some people like to kind of do that. I don’t know. For a thing like this, like for, for like what I use this Synology for, I really do want it to be as appliance like as possible.

Like I really don’t wanna futz around. Like sometimes it’s fun to do that, but like, for like data storage and like for rate arrays and whatnot, like, I really kind of don’t. Right? Um,

Jeff: I don’t wanna wonder if I got it wrong

Christina: yeah.

Jeff: what would happen, you

Christina: Well, no, totally right. And, and, and, and like, look, it, it is, you know, the, the thing then how do you back up your syn analog is its own complicated, uh, [01:02:00] thing.

Um, but um, yeah, you know, you, from there you can kind of pick and choose, okay, what are the most important things to back up, right? Like, a lot of times, like

Jeff: And that’s what’s what I’ve been able to do in redoing it, was have that kind of care. Right. So it’s, ’cause before it was like, I just dropped everything in there and that was like not a good situation.

Christina: Right. Yeah. ’cause like, ’cause like for me, like, yeah, I would, I would miss like if my, my, my Plex stuff went away, but like, that’s not gonna be the thing that I need to be paying, you know, hundreds of dollars a month to like, ensure that I’m backing up in a cloud someplace. But it’s like, no, you know?

But if I have like a, a, a few hundred gigabytes, uh, or, or maybe, you know, a terabyte or two of, of stuff that I wanna like, have, you know, and, you know, as, as offsite like in, in, you know, re glacier or whatever, some other kind of, you know, cloud like that, that, that’s, that’s a different scenario. So, you know, but just, just, just picking and choosing, you know, what you want.

But yeah, it is great to just be able to have all of your stuff, you know, backed up and,

Jeff: It’s also the reason I, it was my entryway into tail scale, which I’m grateful for ’cause Oh my God. Um,

Christina: Yeah, tail skills. The [01:03:00] best tail skills the best.

Jeff: All right. What about you?

Christina: What about you? Alright, so my pick is update. So we’ve talked a, a number of times about, um, I, I, I’ll, I’ll put a link of it in the doc, it’s update app.

Mac Updater Alternatives

Christina: Um, so basically Mac Updater, which was an app that, that Brett and I both love and I think you liked it to was, um, as of January 1st, 2026, it is no longer getting any updates. Um, he did release kind of a standalone 3.5 version that will not, you know, he will not be kind of doing the manual things that he did anymore for apps, I guess, that have, you know, things like the Mac App store or, you know, in, um, like, uh, the, um, sparkle or some other things.

Like it will still show those updates for now. But he’s not caching updates on his servers. He’s not doing the manual checks. Like there were a lot of things that, that Mac Updater did that made it expensive to run. And because he didn’t wanna sell, you know, sell it as a kind of a, a, a subscription service, um, that, um, like was, was kind of a, um.

A problem [01:04:00] and, uh, not a problem. Sorry. Finding a way to make money was a problem for him. And so he basically, you know, version 3.5 is now kind of available to everyone. He did say that he basically, you know, like would be entertaining ideas of like licensing or selling, you know, the, the, the stuff to, to anyone.

But I don’t think anybody really bit who, you know, would’ve been doing that in like a, um, a good way. So that, that’s unfortunate. Um, and so like, I, I think Brett did inquire about like how much it would cost to potentially, like, how much he was looking for. It was far more money than like, I was like, yeah, there, there’s no way.

Um, like I, I wouldn’t be able to, uh, I don’t even think I would get a loan for the amount of money that, that it would’ve been. And, and even then like, okay, what’s the business plan and what’s not? And it’s like the only business plan that I see, unless you are somebody like an MDM, like a company like Jam or like some sort of other, like, you know, big enterprise management company.

Um, I, I think the only way that you could make money on it. Would be to, you know, [01:05:00] charge more. And, and, and if you’re gonna charge like a, a, a yearly, you know, or, or monthly fee or whatever, obviously people are gonna be annoyed. But I would’ve been happy to continue to pay. I would’ve paid $50 a year without, without question to have Mac data or work.

I would’ve very happily done it. And I, and I think that a lot of people would have, but I also respect and, and understand his decision. Okay. The problem with this is this now leaves updater apps in a bit of a lurch. Okay? So how do I update, you know, my applications? And there are a few things that have been out there that have, that have kind of, you know, um, popped up.

The one that I found that is the most promising so far is called Update. I think it used to be called something else, but it is at U-P-D-A-T-E-S-T, uh, app. And it’s basically, um, how it builds itself. It’s still in beta right now, so you can try it out, um, uh, you know, either, uh, for, for, for trial or you can, you know, um, buy it.

I went ahead and bought it, um, after I, I, I did the trial for, um, a bit of time and, um, it basically works with Homebrew, [01:06:00] the Mac App store, sparkle Electron, and GitHub releases. And so, um, it’s, it’s one interface. It doesn’t get everything that, um. The other, uh, like the Mac updater got, but it gets a lot of stuff.

Um, it it, this used to be called Cly, which was kind of basically like a brew updated based thing. But what I like about this is a few things. One is in some cases it’s kind of like a visual home brew way. Like if you’ve, if you’ve installed apps with Home Brew, you can see that and you can use the Home brew updating engine to go ahead and, and update that way.

The second thing is, um, if you want to move applications from how you’ve installed them into being. Managed and, and, and run by Homebrew. You can do that, which is great ’cause that way you can then just update things from the command line if you want to. Um, you, you can move things that way too. Um, if you have the, the, the, the Homebrew, M-A-S-C-L-I, um, extension installed, it can also handle your, your Mac app store updates and show you that.

And then of course, it, it, it does things, you know, coming from, from Sparkle and whatnot. [01:07:00] Um, and, um, he, uh, so, so this is, it’s still in beta. Um, they’re pretty upfront about that. Um, but, but they’re, they’re offering the pay licenses because it’s gonna, you know, support, ongoing development. Um, you can get it at a, at a lower price.

And then, you know, the feedback influences what they’re building next. And so, um, this guy’s been really active on Reddit. Um, there’ve been a lot of, um, updates that are, uh, or a lot of frequent updates just in the last couple of weeks that I’ve used it. It is, um, it’s priced really well. It’s $10, um, one time purchase, no subscriptions, no renewals.

Again, I don’t know how long that’s gonna last, but

Jeff: say, yeah.

Christina: The, the good thing here is he’s not maintaining his own servers like the other guy was. So he’s basically just going based on off of sources that other things are doing. And so it’s a little bit of less of a heavy lift. But I also, I, you know, I, I love this sort of thing.

I’m also kind of like, okay, you know, software has ongoing development costs, especially now, but the, the, it’s $10 for, for three Max at once. It, it’s, it’s $20 for, for 10 Max at once. I bought the, the [01:08:00] household license just because I was like, I’ll just, I’ll drop ’em 20 bucks. Um, and even though I only have three Max, um, but you know, that way I, I can, you know, help support that a little bit more.

Um, but yeah, but there’s a, but there’s a free trial. Um, I, I like it. Um, and, and he also has a 30 day money back guarantee, so, um, I, um, I don’t know who this guy is. I, I’ve never met him. Um, but um, I am, I’m happy with update and, um, it will never be as good as, you know, the, uh, my beloved, you know, Mac updater, which I was like.

Such a huge fan of, but

Jeff: So good. But man, I, I have in the course of you describing this app, I’m now have it open on the free trial and slick

Christina: It is very slick. It is very slick. Um, I, I, I like it a lot. I also like how you can just kind of view like the, the, like your, your home brew stuff too. There’s another app called a Cork app, which is you can compile yourself for free, or it’s, um, um, maybe it’s called Coly, but it’s, [01:09:00] uh, for, for Mac os basically like a, like a home brew.

Um, manager is Cork Mac Do app. Is, is, is the, is the URL and that does some similar things too, where you can update or even migrate applications. From not being installed by Homebrew to being maintained by, like, managed by Homebrew. So you can do updates that way. Um, but that’s basically just kind of a gooey for, for, for, for home brew, for anybody who’s interested in that.

And, and it’s, and it’s pretty inexpensive as, as well. Um, but it, it, it’s like, it’s like 25 pounds or whatever. So, um, this is, uh, update is cheaper than that, but it does some of the, some of the same things. Um, and so, um, I, uh, anyway, um, like I said, the, the guy is, the guy is pretty active on, um, on Reddit. Um, and, uh, and he’s, uh, you know, it’s, it’s a pretty privacy respecting app. You can actually install it using Homebrew. Um, but uh, yeah, it’s, it’s pretty cool.

Jeff: That’s awesome. Cool. I’m glad to know. [01:10:00] Alright, well by golly we did another one.

Christina: We did another one. All right.

Conclusion and Well Wishes

Christina: Well, happy, uh, happy 2026. Um, hope that the year goes, goes better for, for, for all of us out there. And, uh, you know, um, that’s, that’s, that’s with your neighbors. I hope everything, you know, works out with that situation as, as well as it can, you know.

Jeff: Me too. Good God. Yeah. All right. Well get some sleep world.

Christina: Yes. Get some sleep.

Brett and Christina host an OG episode. Christina talks about her upcoming spinal surgery and navigating insurance hassles. Brett talks about his sleep issues, project progress, and coding routines. They dive into the complexities of USB-C cables, from volts to data rates. And TV’s just ‘okay’ now, except for some softcore gay porn. Kagi search saves the day. Happy holidays — and get some sleep.

Copilot Money can help you take control of your finances. Get a fresh start with your money for 2026 with 26% off when you visit try.copilot.money/overtired and use code OVERTIRED.

Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all eCommerce in the US, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark, to brands just getting started. Get started today at shopify.com/overtired.

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Check out more episodes at overtiredpod.com and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Find Brett as @ttscoff, Christina as @film_girl, Jeff as @jsguntzel, and follow Overtired at @ovrtrd on Twitter.

Universal Serial Bitching

Introduction and Greetings

[00:00:00]

Brett: Hey, you’re listening to Overtired. I am Brett Terpstra, and it’s just me and Christina Warren this morning. How you doing, Christina?

Christina: Doing pretty good. Doing pretty good. Yeah. This is the, this is the OG Overtired configuration.

Brett: right back to basics. Um,

Christina: We do miss you Jeff, though. Ho, ho, ho. Hope that Jeff is having a great holiday with his family.

Brett: we’ll have to have some, uh, gratuitous Wiki K hole that you go down just to, to commemorate the olden days. Um, so yeah, let’s, uh, let’s, let’s do a quick check-in.

Christina’s Health Update

Brett: Um, I’m curious about your health and all of the wildness that’s going on with your spine and whatnot.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. Um, same. I wanna hear about you too. Um, so, uh, Christina’s cervical spine update, as it were. Um, I am [00:01:00] still waiting to, as we’re recording this, which is like. Uh, three days before Christmas, uh, I’m still waiting to hear from the, uh, hospital to see if I can, when I can get scheduled. Um, insurance has sort of been a pain in the ass, so when I talked to them last week, they were like, we sent them some paperwork.

We’re still waiting for some things back then. I called the insurance company and the, the, uh, like my insurance is like, has like an intermediary service that is supposed to contact the insurance company on your behalf and that person, but like, I can’t contact them directly. And then that person was like, oh, you don’t need pre-authorization.

Go ahead and schedule the surgery. And I’m like, this doesn’t feel right. Um, so, but, but we, we went ahead and we called back the, you know, the, the surgeon, um, his office and they were very nice and we were like. They say that we can get on the books. So I don’t know when that will be. I’m hoping that it will be, you know, like the first week of January, um, or, or, or thereabouts.

Um, but I don’t know. Um, [00:02:00] so I am still kind of in this like limbo stage where I don’t know exactly when I’m gonna have the surgery, except hopefully soon. And, um, and, and for anyone who hasn’t caught up, I, uh, I have a bulging disc on C seven on my cervical spine, and I’m going to get a, um, artificial disc replacement.

Um, so they’re gonna take out the, you know, bulging bone and all that and put in, uh, some synthetic piece and then hopefully that will immediately relieve the, the pain that has been primarily through the left side of, uh, my arm and my shoulder, um, uh, down through my fingers. But it’s been on my right side a little bit too.

So hopefully when that is done, it’ll be a relatively short recovery. Um, I’ll have an early scar and um, I will be, you know, not. Uh, the pain right now, like the levels aren’t terrible, but I’m pretty numb, uh, on my, my, my left arm, my, my right arm, um, uh, or right fingers I guess too, but, but really it’s, it’s, uh, the, the, the left side [00:03:00] that’s the worst.

And traveling. Um, I’m, I’m in Atlanta with my family right now and, you know, kind of doing other things is just not, it’s not great. So, um, hopefully I’ll be getting surgery sooner rather than later. But obviously all that stuff does impact your mental health too, when you’re in pain and, and you, you know, are freaked out too about, you know, like, even though like they do, you know, it, it’s not an uncommon surgery and, and it, and it should be fine, but you know, there’s always these things in the back of your mind.

You’re like, okay, well what if something goes wrong or whatever. So I’m just, I’m looking forward to, um, you know, light at the end of the tunnel, but um, still kind of in a holding pattern with that. So

Brett: Wow. So that scar’s, that scar’s gonna be on your throat.

Christina: Yeah,

Brett: Wow.

Christina: yeah. Like probably like. No, not really. I’m, I mean, I’m hoping that it’ll be, uh, like no, it really won’t be at all.

Brett: I, I, I would like to have it. I can understand why you wouldn’t.

Christina: yeah, I mean, you know, I will obviously, you know, uh, hopefully it’ll be like low enough to be [00:04:00] primarily covered by shirts or other things, although, who knows? ’cause I do like to wear like, lower cut things sometimes. I don’t know. It, it’ll hopefully, you

Brett: I heard chokers are coming back.

Christina: Yeah, I don’t, unfortunately. I think it’s gonna be too, uh, low for that.

Brett: Okay.

Christina: uh, like, it, it’s gonna be, I think like it might hit against my laryn is, is what they say. That’s the other thing too. I might have, you know, some hoarseness after, won’t we permanent? Um, you know, knock on wood.

Um,

Brett: go on Etsy, you can get, um, they’re for BDSM, they’re like neck, uh, they hold your chin up. They’re like posture enhancers. Uh, but they sell them within leather with like corset straps. ’cause they’re like A-B-D-S-M accessory. That would work.

Christina: No, no. Not even once. Uh, not even once. I mean, look, a good group of people who wanna do that, uh, I I will not be wearing a collar of any sort of that sort of thing. Uh, I, I, I don’t, I don’t really wanna, wanna be part [00:05:00] of, uh, one of that, those types of, you know, uh, Harlequin romance novels. ,

Brett’s Sleep and Work Routine

Brett: All right, well, I will go ahead and check in. Um, I, I’m sleeping really well for like two days at a time, and then I’ll have.

A string of like five or six hours of sleep, which isn’t nothing. Um, but it’s not quite enough for me to not feel tired all the time. And two nights of sleep is not enough for me to catch up on sleep. And, um, so I’m kind of, this has been going on for like a year though, so it’s, I’m just kind of, I’m used to it and I’ve learned to operate pretty well on six or seven hours of sleep, even though historically like I need eight and a half.

Um, but I’m doing okay and I get up about four every morning and I start coding and I usually code from like four to noon, so an eight [00:06:00] hour workday, uh, with a breakfast somewhere in there. And, um, I’ve made really good progress. Marked is, as far as I can tell, ready to go wide with the beta. Um. I think I’ve solved every bug that’s been reported so far.

I only have about a hundred testers right now, um, but I’m gonna open it up, uh, try to get maybe a thousand testers for a couple weeks and then go for a live release. The biggest thing that I’m running into is problems with getting the, like free trial and the purchase mechanisms working, which is the exact same thing that’s holding up NV Ultra right now.

Um, so if I can figure it out for Mark, I can port it to NV Ultra. I can have two apps out there making money, hopefully never have to get a job again. Um, I’m teamed up right now with Dan Peterson, formerly of One Password. Um, and we’re [00:07:00] working on some iOS apps and. And, uh, apex. My, my, all my Universal markdown processor is, it’s coming along really well.

I’ve, I’ve put it out there. Um, I’ve talked to John Gruber a little bit about it. He’s gonna give it more of a workout and get back to me. Um, but I think, I think it’s getting to a point where I would be comfortable integrating it into Mark and even talking to some other, uh, apps about using it as their default processor, um, and kind of alleviating some of the issues people run into with, uh, differences in syntax.

Um, I. I, I, I talked to Devon, think, uh, Eric from Devon think about using it. ’cause they use multi markdown right now, uh, which has a lot of cool features, but is not [00:08:00] really in sync with what most of the web is using these days. Um, so I talked to them about it and they’re like, oh, we had the exact same idea and we’re almost done with our own universal processor.

Um, and theirs is gonna output like RTF and things that I don’t need apex to do. ’cause you can just pipe apex into panoc and do everything you need. So anyway, I’m, I’m tired. I’m, I’m in good spirits. I. I’m dealing fine with winter. My, I’m alone on Christmas, which is gonna be weird. Um, my family’s outta town.

Elle is house sitting I’ll, I’ll go visit Elle, but most of the day I’m gonna be like by myself on Christmas and I don’t drink anymore. And I, I don’t, I don’t know how that’s gonna go yet. Um, initially I thought, oh, that’s fine. I like being alone. But then, [00:09:00] then the idea of like, not having anyone to talk to you on Christmas day started to feel a little depressing.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. Um, but, um, hopefully, um, when, when will, uh, when will I’ll be back from, from house sitting. How long is, uh, are, are they going to be

Brett: I think. I think the people, the, the house owners come back Thursday or Friday.

Christina: Okay.

Brett: Then we’re gonna take off and go up to Minneapolis to hang out with her family for a weekend. So, I don’t know. It’ll, it’s gonna be fine. It’s gonna be fine. We’re gonna like cook on Christmas Eve and, and have leftovers on Christmas day.

It’ll be fine.

Christina: Yeah, yeah. Well, but, but it, but, but that is weird. Like, I’m sure like to be, you know, not, not, not, not with like your usual crew, but, um, [00:10:00] especially without the alcohol there. But that’s probably a good thing too.

Brett: Yeah, I guess. Um, I will have all the cats. I’ll be fine. I have to take care of the dog too.

Christina: Have, have you heard any updates, like, um, I guess, um, about when you were, you know, you were in the hospital a few times over the last year with, with various things. Did you ever get any definitive update on what that was?

Brett: On which one? I have so many symptoms. Which one are we talking about?

Christina: Well, I guess I, I guess when you, you know, you’ve had to be like hospitalized or

Brett: The pancreatitis.

Christina: had the pancreatitis.

Brett: the, the fact that it hasn’t happened again since I stopped drinking, um, really does indicate that it was entirely alcohol that was causing the problem. Um, so yeah, I’m just, I’m never gonna drink again. That’s fine. It’s, it’s all fine. Um, I did, I did get approved to get back on Medicaid.

Um, so [00:11:00] yeah, I haven’t gotten the paperwork in the mail yet. Uh, but my old card should just start working and I’ll be able to, my, my new doctor wants a whole bunch more tests, including an MRI of my pituitary gland. Um. Like testosterone tests and stuff that I guess is more specific to what she thinks might be going on with me.

Um, but now I can, I can actually get those tests That would’ve been just a huge out-of-pocket expense over the last couple months. So I’m excited. I’m excited to be back on Medicaid. I wish everyone could have Medicaid.

Christina: Yeah, that would be really nice. That would be really nice if, if, if we had systems like that available, um, for everyone. Um, but. Instead, you know, if they’re, like, if you have really great health, I mean, you, you pointed those out. Like you have really great health insurance if you [00:12:00] can prove that you, you know, make absolutely no money.

Um, but, but that opens up so many other, you know, issues that most people aren’t lucky enough to be able

Brett: right. Yeah, totally.

Christina: right.

Brett: All right, well do you, okay, first topic.

USB-C Cable Confusion

Brett: How much do you know about USBC cables and the various specs?

Christina: Uh,

Brett: you know a shit ton.

Christina: I do, unfortunately, I know a lot.

Brett: So I, I had been operating under the assumption that there were basically, you had like data USBC cables, you had, uh, thunderbolt USBC cables and you had like, power only USPC cables.

It turns out there’s like 18 different varieties of different, uh, like vol, uh, voltage, uh, amperage, uh, levels, like total wattage basically. And, um, and transfer speeds. And, [00:13:00] um, and there’s like maximum links for different types of cable. And it, it, I started to understand why like. One device would charge with one cable and another device would not charge with the same cable, even though they all have the same connector.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think this is, this is why, um, some of us have been really like eye rolly at the EU for their pronouncements about certain things, because simply mandating a connector type doesn’t actually solve the problem.

Brett: No, it actually confuses it a little bit

Christina: I think Yeah, I was going to say exactly. I think in some cases it makes it worse.

Right? And, and then you have different, like, and, and then getting SB four into it, uh, uh, versus like, like, like, like various Thunderbolt versions. Like that adds complications too, because technically SB four and Thunderbolt four should basically be the same, but they’re not really, there are a couple of things that Thunderbolt might have that [00:14:00] USB four doesn’t necessarily have to have, although for all intents and purposes they might be the same.

And then of course, thunderbolts five is its own thing too. So like I bought off of Kickstarter, I got like this, you know, like a cable charger, basically like, like a connector thing. It was like $120. For this, this, this thing that basically you can plug a cable into and you can see its voltage and um, or not voltage, I guess it’s uh, you know, amperage or whatever.

And you can see like, it, it, it’s transfer speed and you can basically like check that on like a little display, which is useful, but the fact that like, you have to buy that sometimes. So like figure out, well, okay, well which cable is this? Right? And then, uh, to your point about lengths, right? So like, okay, so you want something that’s going to be fast charging but also high speed data transfer.

Alright, well that means that you, the cable’s gonna have to be stiff. It’s not gonna be able to be something that’s really bendable. Um, which of course is what most people are going to want. So like you can get a fast charge, like a 240 wat or a hundred and, you know, 20 wat or, or [00:15:00] whatever, um, like a USB 2.0 transfer speed cable.

But if you want one that’s, uh, going to be, you know, fast charging and. Fast data transfer, then like that’s a different type. And they have like limited lengths, which again, can also be associated with like Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt. You know, cables are much more expensive. Um, and, uh, uh, you know, the, the, the, but their, their lengths are limited.

Um, yeah. Uh, it’s very confusing.

Brett: Did you know that in rare circumstances there are even devices that will only charge with an A to C cable.

Christina: Yes,

Brett: That’s so insane.

Christina: yeah, no, I’ve run into that myself and then that’s a weird thing and I don’t even know how that should work. ’cause it’s, it’s, it’s a bizarre thing. You’re like, okay, well I thought this was just like a, you know, maybe like a dumb end, but it’s like, no, there’s like, you know, basically a microchip

Brett: Like a two pin to two pin.

Christina: at this point.

Brett: Like two pen to two pen, no pd like you would think that would work with C to C, [00:16:00] but somehow it has to be A to c. I am getting one of those cable testers. I asked for one for Christmas so I could figure out this pile of cables I have and like my Sonos Ace headphones are very particular about which cables and what, um, charging hub I hooked them up to

Christina: Right. Oh, yeah, hubs. I was gonna say, hubs introduce a whole other complication into this too, because depending on what hub you’re using, if you’re using a USB hub, it may or may not have certain things versus a Thunderbolt hub versus something else, versus just like, um, you know, a power brick. Like, yeah.

Brett: Yeah. It’s fun stuff you.

Christina: Yeah. No, it’s annoying. And, um, like, and what, what’s frustrating about this is like some of the cables that they’re better, like you can look at the, you know, the bottoms of them and you can see like they will have like the USB like four, or they might have 3.2, or they might have, you know, like the thunderbolt, you know, um, uh, icon [00:17:00] with, with, with its version.

So you can figure out is this 20 gigabits, is this 40, is this 80? Um, but um. That’s not a guaranteed thing, and that also doesn’t guarantee authenticity of stuff, right? So a lot of the cables, you know, you buy off the internet can be, you know, and they might be, or even at stores, right? Like you’re, you’re not buying something from, even if you get things from Belkin or whoever, like, those things can have issues too.

Um, although they at least tend to have better warranties. I bought a Balkan, um. Uh, like a, a, a PD cable, like a two 40 cable that I think it was like, you know, uh, 10 feet longer something. It was supposed to have some sort of long warranty and, and because the, the, you know, um, faster transfer ones, um, are, even though it was braided, you know, it stiff and it, it broke, like there was, uh, the, like the, you know, the connect with the part of the, the, the cable near the, the end, um, did that thing that typically apple cables do, where like, it, it sort of [00:18:00] fraying and you started like seeing the exposed wires and then like, you start to like, feel like, you know, like an electric charge, like

Brett: A little tingle.

Christina: you’re Yeah.

And you’re like, okay, this isn’t good. Um, and so I at least had my Amazon receipt, so I was able to like. Get them to mail me a new one relatively easily. And like Anchor has an okay warranty too. But it’s one of those things you’re like, okay, when did I buy this? I was like, I didn’t even buy this a year ago, and this thing already crapped out.

Um, versus, you know, you can get some really nice braided cables that are flexible, but they’re just gonna be 2.0 speeds. Um, and, and then if you buy, you know, you just buy like some random cable, you know, like at the airport or whatever. You’re like, all right, well, I don’t even know

Brett: Great.

Christina: anything about this. Uh, yeah,

Brett: I have heard good things. I’ve heard good things about the company. Cable Matters.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. They make good stuff. They make good stuff. But again, at least the cables matters, cables that I have have been primarily stiffer cables because they tend to be like the, the higher transfer [00:19:00] speeds. So, um, like I have a cable, cable matters Thunderbolt cable, and I have like a USB four cable, I think.

Um, but like, these are cables that like. I don’t, I mean, I, I have one that I, I kind of travel with, but I don’t, um, either keeping it as little cable matters, uh, uh, plastic, um. Like, so they come in like these, these case, uh, not these cases. Uh, they come in like these, uh, almost like Ziploc bag type of things.

Um, which is a great way to ship cables honestly, you know, rather than using a box and, and like I, and I might toss one of those in a suitcase or a backpack, um, rather than having like the cable just out there loose. But I do that primarily because again, like they’re stiff and they’re not the sorts of things that I necessarily want, like in the bottom of my bag, you know, potentially getting broken and, and, and, and twisted and all of that.

Um, they are overpriced for what they are and they are definitely not like, they’re not a high transfer cable, but if you can find ’em on sale, the beats, cables, the, the, the, the, the, the branded Beats cables, I actually like them better [00:20:00] than the apple cables that are the same thing, because they are, they’re longer, uh, by, you know, um, a, a few inches than, um, the, the Apple ones.

But they’re still braided and they’re nice. And I was able to get, I dunno, this was a, this was not even Black Friday, but this was. Um, you know, sometime in like early November, I think, um, or maybe it was like late October. It might’ve been a Prime Day thing, I don’t know, but they were like eight or $9 a piece, and so I bought like five or six of them.

Um, and they are, you know, uh, uh, PD and like, like, like fast charging peoples, they might not be 240, but I think they’re, they’re, they were like a hundred and you know, like 20 watts or whatever. But, um, you know, not high transfer speeds, but if you’re wanting to just quickly charge something and have it, you know, be a, a decent length and be like flexible.

Those I don’t, those I don’t hate. Um, anchor makes pretty good cables. You green seems to be the company that’s sponsoring everyone now for various things. [00:21:00] But, um, I don’t know. I’ve started using MagSafe more and more, uh, like wireless charging when I can for some things, at least for phones,

Brett: yeah. I actually have some U green wireless charging solutions that are really good.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. I just got one of their, uh, their 10,000 million pair battery fast charging battery things because now the MagSafe, uh, can be like up to, you know, 30 watts or whatever, or 25 watts or, or, or, or whatever it is. Like it’s, um, a lot more, um, usable than, you know, when it was like 10 or, or, or even 15.

You’re like, okay, this, this is actually not going to be like the, the slowest, you know, charging thing known to man. But of course, obviously it’s like you can use it with your phone and with your AirPods, but the rest of the things out there don’t, don’t all support shi too, so,

Brett: Right.

Christina: yeah.

Brett: All right. So, um, I want to talk about TV a little bit.

Christina: Yeah. I think before we do that though, we should probably

Brett: oh, we should, we [00:22:00] have two sponsors to fit in Jesus. I should get on that.

Sponsor Break: Shopify

Brett: Um, let’s start with, uh, let’s start with Shopify. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Have you been dreaming of owning your own business?

In addition to having something to sell, you’ll need a website, a payment system, a logo, a way to advertise to new customers, et cetera, et cetera. It can all be overwhelming and confusing, but that’s where today’s sponsor, Shopify comes in. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, and 10% of all e-commerce in the us From household names like Mattel and Gym Shark to brands.

Just getting started, get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready to use templates. Shopify helps you build beautiful online store to match your brand style, accelerate your content creation. Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography.[00:23:00]

Get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise and everything from managing inventory to international shipping, to processing returns and beyond.

If you’re ready to sell, you’re ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling [email protected] slash Overtired. Go to shopify.com/ Overtired. That is shopify.com/ Overtired. Thanks Shopify.

Christina: Thank you Shopify.

Brett: It’ll be, it’ll be just tight as hell by the time people hear it. But that was rough. I, that, that, that, that read, you just heard I [00:24:00] edited like six places. ’cause I kept, I, I don’t know. I’m tired. I’ve been up since, I’ve been up since two today.

Christina: Yeah. Shit, man. That’s, yeah, you again, like you’ve been having like sleep issues. It’s, it’s,

Brett: Maybe, maybe I shouldn’t be doing sponsor reads.

Christina: No, no, no, no, no. Uh, no. We definitely wanna talk about tv. Do you wanna do, do we wanna do our second, um, uh, uh, ad break

Brett: let’s do a block. Let’s make it a

Christina: Let’s do it. Block. Alright, fantastic.

Sponsor Break: Copilot Money

Christina: Alright, well, since we are about to go into 2026, this is a great time to, uh, think about your finances.

So are you ready to take control of your finances? Well meet copilot money. This is the personal finance app that makes your money feel clear and calm with a beautiful design. Smart automation copilot money brings all of your spending, saving and investment accounts into one place. It’s available on iOS, Mac, iPad, and now on the web, which is really great, uh, because I know, uh, for me anyway, that’s one of my one kind of things [00:25:00] about some of these like tools like this is that there’s not a web app.

I’m really bothered by it. This is, you know, it’s a frustration that like the Apple card, for a long time, you know, you couldn’t really access things on, on the web. Even now it’s still kind of messy, like being able to handle things on the web. But as we enter 2026, it is time for a fresh start. And so with the, uh, mint shutdown and rising financial uncertainty, consumers are seeking clarity and control.

And this is where copilot money comes in. So copilot money can help you track your budgets, your savings goals, and your net worth seamlessly. Plus, with the the new, um, web launch, you can enjoy a sudden experience on any device, which is really good. And guess what? For a limited time, you can get 26% off your first year when you sign up through the web app. New Year’s only don’t miss out on the chance to start the new year with confidence. There are features like automatic subscription tracking, so you’ll never miss upcoming charges again.

Copilot money’s privacy first approach ensures that your data is secure and their team is dedicated to helping you stress less [00:26:00] about money. So whether you’re a finance pro or just starting out, copilot money is there to help you make better decisions.

Visit, try dot copilot money slash Overtired and use the code Overtired to sign up for your one month free trial and embrace financial clarity. That’s try.copilot.money/ Overtired. Use the coupon Overtired. And again, that is 26% off for your first year. So thank you copilot money for, uh, sponsoring this week’s, uh, uh, episode.

Oh, one other note about copilot money. They were, um, an apple, uh, design award finalist. So it’s a really well designed app and, um, we love to see, um, apps like this available on, on the web as well as iOS and, and MAC os.

Brett: I have started using it very much because of the web version, and it is, it is really good.

Christina: yeah, yeah. No, yeah. For, yeah, for me, that is like a, an actual like. Concrete requirement.

Exploring Rocket Money and Web Interfaces

Christina: Any money

Brett: Like I’ve, I’ve [00:27:00] paid, I have about eight months left. I paid for a year of, of Rocket Money or whatever it’s called now. Um, and I’ve always loved that app, but yeah, it does not have a web interface. And once I started trying copilot out, I realized how much I really did want a web interface for that stuff, you know?

What else have you seen?

Discovering Umami Analytics

Brett: Umami the analytics platform.

Christina: Yes.

Brett: It is so good. And it’s, it’s open source and you can self-host. And it is like, I, I’ve been using Fathom Analytics for a long time and I like Fathom, but Umami is, it has like all of the, uh, advanced stuff you would get with Google Analytics, but with like way more privacy focus and you’re not giving information to Google for one.

Um, and the interface is beautiful. I love that. It’s so good.

Christina: Yeah. Um, umami is really good. I think, uh, there’s another one, I’m [00:28:00] trying to think of what it was called. There are a number of these various, um, analytics, uh, hosted things, but no, umami is definitely a really good one.

Nostalgia for Mint and Fever

Christina: And I like, um, it reminds me, um, it was, what was it? It was Mint. It was Mint, Sean Edmond’s Mint.

Which

Brett: I was just gonna ask you if you remembered that.

Christina: yeah, which was, which was one of the, uh, plausible analytics. It’s another one too. Um, which is also like, um, they, they have a hosted version, but you can also self-host. Um, and then that’s also a, a, a, another, uh, good one. But yeah. Um, was like my, my all time favorites, uh, you know, app.

I, I, I loved that.

Brett: Um, what was his RSS one? Uh, fever? Fever.

Christina: was, was the best fever, was the best.

The Decline of RSS and Google Reader

Christina: And it was funny, like I, I think I’ve talked about this before, I was more insulated and like less upset than some people by the, the Google reader death because I had a, a, I’d been using Fever for so long, and then obviously, you know, stuff being updated and doesn’t really work [00:29:00] super well with like, the latest versions of PHP and things like that.

But, you know, a lot of people were really, understandably and, and still more than a decade on, you know, very upset by the death of, um, Google reader. But I think because I, I had paid for and used, you know, my own, um, self-hosted fever installation, and then there were apps that people used for, you know, APIs and whatnot to build, you know, Macs or iOS apps or, or whatever.

Like, I, I was obviously upset about Google Reader being shut down, but I was like, okay, you know, I, I can just, you know, move on to something else. And, um, and I’ve used, uh, feeder, um, not, not, not feeder, um,

Brett: Reader

Christina: is. No, no. Maybe, uh, it’s, uh, not Feed Demon. Um, that was like the OG one. Um, it’ll come to me, um, because I, I, yes.

Thank you. Feed Ben. Thank you, thank you. One of the ones that’s still around, uh, from like the, of the, you know, various Google reader alternatives, like many of them. You know, closed up shop.[00:30:00]

Brett: Yeah.

Christina: if they kind of realized, you know, by Google reader, like this is the, unfortunately a niche market. Um, now that didn’t help the fact that like, you know, when people, when web browsers Safari, I think started at first and then Firefox did, and then, you know, uh, Chrome was, was fairly early too.

Like when all the web browsers took away like RSS buttons to make it easy to subscribe to feeds or to auto discover feeds, and you had to like install like a, an extension or whatever to do that. Like, that all helped with the, the demise of RSS in a lot of ways. And of course, people moving everything into closed platforms and, and social networks and stuff that, you

Brett: In, in the tech world though. So I have, my blog gets about 20,000 visits a week, but it gets 30,000 RSS downloads, like, uh, like daily, 30,000 readers are, are, are pulling my site. Um, so RSS is far from dead in the tech world.

Christina: Right. Well, [00:31:00] well, I think, I think in a certain demographic, right? I think if you were to ask like a new, like college grads, I don’t think that any of them are using RSS at least not actively, right? Like, I mean, you might have a few, but like it’s, it’s just not gonna be like a thing where they’re gonna be, act like they might be using some apps that do similar types of things and might even pull in feed sources maybe.

But it, it’s, it’s just not like a, like when, when I was graduating from college or in college, like everybody had, you know, RSS clients and that was just kind of a, a known thing.

Brett: Yeah. So speaking of traffic, um, I don’t, did I mention that I got delisted on Bing and

Christina: You did,

Brett: I am, I’m back

Christina: figure that out? You’re back now. Okay.

Brett: I’m back now.

Switching to Kagi Search Engine

Brett: And, um, I have switched to using Kaji, um, as my primary search engine and they replicate all of duck duck go’s bang searches.

Christina: Yes.

Brett: So I

Christina: one of the things I love about them. [00:32:00] Yes.

Brett: I was pleased to see there’s a Bang Turp search on Kaji.

Um, I actually use

Christina: or is it kgi? Because I think I’ve always called it kgi. Yeah, it’s KA, it’s K, it’s KAGI. For anybody who’s who’s, uh, I don’t know how to, how, how, if it’s kgi, kgi, um, uh, you know, Kaji, whatever,

Brett: It’ll be in the show notes. What the fuck ever, we’ll just call it KGI. Um, and yeah, so like I was super happy ’cause I used the Bang Turp to search my own site. I just got used to doing that.

The Rise of AI-Generated Content

Brett: Um, and, but it is like you can, the reason I switched to said web, uh, search engine is um, because you can report sites that are just AI slop and they will verify those reports and remove or flag slop sites in your search results.

’cause I was getting sick, even with DuckDuckGo, like five out [00:33:00] of 10 results were always, I’d get in, I’d get there, I’d get one, maybe two paragraphs into, uh, an article and realize, oh, someone just typed in my search term into chat GPT and then

Christina: Oh yeah.

Brett: automated it.

Christina: Oh, I was gonna say there, there it is. Automated at this point. And, and like, to be clear, like a lot of search results, even before like the rise of like genre of AI were a variant of this, where you would see like people like buying older domain names that expired. Well, yeah, but even before that happened mean that, that obviously when, when, when the Christina Warren and Brett Terpstra and then they, they changed your name.

Um, I

Brett: know, like Jason Turra or

Christina: Or something like that. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was weird. Um, I mean, you know, um, does that site, did, did have they given up the ghost on that? I’m curious. Um, yeah. Wow. Okay. They are still, well, no, they haven’t published anything since November 30th. So something has happened where they, uh, are [00:34:00] they, they’re definitely cutting down on, on various things.

Um, oh no. Paul Terpstra. Oh my God. Paul Terpstra. You are still,

Brett: Yeah.

Christina: you were like the one author there that I see on this website. Um, now what was, what was messed up about, about this? Um, although no. Okay. Their homepage, the last one they say is like, OCT is like, uh, November, um, uh, 30th. But if you click on the, the Paul trips to handle, then like you see, um, December 22nd, uh, which is, which is today as we’re recording this,

Brett: Wow, I didn’t even realize.

Christina: Yeah. So, alright. So that is still, somehow that grift is still going on. But yeah, I mean, even before the rise of those things, you would see, you know, sites that would either buy up dead domains and then like, have like very similar looking content, but slightly different maybe, you know, like, uh, you know, injected with a bunch of, you know. Links or whatever, or you would see people who would, you know, do very clearly SEO written and, and probably, you know, [00:35:00] like, again, pre generative ai, but, you know, assisted slop content. But yeah, now it’s, it’s just, it’s crazy. Like, and it doesn’t help that, like the AI summaries, which can be useful, but, um, and they’re getting better, which is good only because they’re so prominent.

Like, I’m not a fan of them. But if you’re not using an alternative search engine, like, you know, you see these AI summaries and like if they’re bad and sometimes they are then.

Brett: Often

Christina: You know, well, they’re, they’ve gotten better, uh, is the only thing I would say. I, I still wouldn’t rely on them, but I’ve, I’ve noticed a, like, I’ve noticed a, a genuine, like uptick in like, improvements and in like, how awful they are probably in like the last six weeks, which is damning with faint praise.

I’m not at all saying it’s good. I am simply saying, it’s like, I’m primarily thinking for like, people who are like, like less tech savvy relatives who are going to just go to, you know, bing.com or, or google.com and then see those sorts of things. Right. Um, and, uh, you know, we’re not gonna be able to convince them to go to a, a, a third [00:36:00] party search engine.

Um, although, you know, some people, like, I think my mom was using Duck to Go for a while as like her default on her iPhone, um, which I was, I was like proud of her about, but I was also kind of like, uh, that’s got its own issues. But no, I, I like ka a lot. Um, I, I’ve

Brett: Well, and it’s so keyboard driven, like DuckDuckGo has good keyboard shortcuts. KAGY slash Kaji has even better keyboard shortcuts. Like you can navigate and control everything with, uh, like Gmail style, single key keyboard shortcuts, which I really like.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah, I like that too. And then they, they, of course, they make like a, a web kit, um, like a browser, um, that, that has, they’ve back ported, um, you know, a lot of chrome extensions too. I personally don’t see the point in that. Um, I, I think that if you’re going to be like that committed to, like, using like the, you know, the web extension format and like using like more popular extensions, you might as well [00:37:00] just use a Chrome fork if you don’t wanna use Chrome, which is fine, but like, you could use a browser like Helium, which, which we talked about last show, which has, um, the, the, the hash bangs kind of integrated in, or you could use, you know, if you wanted to use, um, um, you know, the, the, the, the

Brett: o is Orion, is Orion the one you’re talking about that? Yeah.

Christina: that, that, yeah, that, that, that, that, that, that’s Katy’s thing. And that was actually originally how I heard about them was because it was like, oh, this is interesting. Um, you know, this is a kind of an interesting, you know, kind of alternative browser. And then it turned out that that was just kind of a, in some ways, kind of a front to promote the, the search engine, which is the real, you know, thing.

Um, which is fine, right? I mean, that, that was Google’s model. Um,

Brett: Well, and we should mention for anyone who hasn’t tried it, it is a paid service. Um, and you are getting search results with no ads and, and spam, uh, ai, slot protection and all of the benefits you would expect from a paid service. So [00:38:00] I think, like for me, five bucks a month gets me, I think 300 searches, which is.

Plenty for me, like, I guess I, I’m still waiting to see, I’ve never counted how many searches I do a month,

Christina: Yeah,

Brett: you know, like three searches a day, uh, would come out to like 90 searches a month and I have 300 available, so I think I’ll be fine.

Christina: yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, basically being able to get to do 10 a day, which in most cases is fine. What I’ve done is I’m on, like, they have a, a, a family plan, um, and they don’t care. They even, I think in their documentation, or at least they did, they do not care if you are like actually in a family with the people that you are on or not.

So if you, you know, find some folks that you wanna kind of sync up with, you can like, you know, be on a family plan together and you can save money, um, on, uh, whatever their, uh, um, their pricing [00:39:00] stuff is. So, um, so me, me and Justin Williams are, uh, in a, uh,

Brett: Justin Williams, I haven’t heard that name in forever.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. We went to C Oasis together.

We went both nights in Los Angeles, um, in August. Yeah. Um, or September rather. Um, yeah, so, okay, so this is how this works. They have, their starter plan is, is $5 a month, which includes, and they do have an AI assistant too. So it was funny, they had the AI slot protection, but they also have like an AI assistant that you can use and like an AI summarizer and whatnot.

Um, that’s $5 a month. And then there’s the professional plan, which is, so that’s for 300 searches a month for the standard AI for starter $5 a month. The professional plan is unlimited searches and standard ai, that’s $10 a month. And then the ultimate is, um. Uh, everything in professional plus you get like premium model access, which, okay, but the family plan, um, is, is the, so you can do one of two things.

You have a duo [00:40:00] plan, which is two professional accounts for a couple, which is $14 a month plus sales tax. So it’s, uh, you know, average of $7 per person, which I think is what Justin and I are on. And then there’s a family plan with up to six family members. And again, they don’t care if you are actually in a family or not, and that’s $20 a month.

So the real thing to do if you’re wanting to like, you know, save on this is like find five friends,

Brett: Yeah.

Christina: get on the $20 a month, you know, family plan thing. Spread the, spread the cost, and that way you can get the, you know, professional plan for, for, for less. But to your

Brett: All right.

Christina: most people, it’s probably $300, 300 searches a month is probably plenty.

And if you search a lot like we do, I, I think it is worth paying for.

Brett: yeah, yeah. All right.

TV Shows: Is TV Just Okay Now?

Christina: anyway, but we wanted to talk about tv, so let’s

Brett: Well do, we’re, we’re at 50 minutes already, so I think we need to choose whether we do TV or gratitude. What

Christina: do you have a [00:41:00] gude, like a good one?

Brett: I, I, no, I have a, I have a throwaway one.

Christina: Okay.

Brett: I, it was one of those, like, I looked at my doc and I was like, oh, I don’t think I’ve talked about that even though I probably have, um, yeah, let’s just talk about tv.

So I, I have been noting, and my question in the show notes was, is TV just okay now? Because I’ve been watching, I watched Stranger Things, pluribus Down, cemetery Road, platonic, and all of it was, it was entertaining, but it wasn’t like, must watch tv. None of it was like, none of it was as good as like Modern Family.

Modern Family was fucking good. Tv, like family friendly and just like I’ve, I’ve been through that series so many times and it’s always fun and it’s always better than like pluribus. I like the, I like the concept kind of, it’s not. not all that, um, engaging, I guess.[00:42:00]

Christina: I like it. But,

Brett: Yeah. I don’t hate it like I do, I do like it, but it’s not like, I don’t, I don’t count the days until the next episode comes out and I miss, I miss things being really good.

So you had a couple responses to that though.

Christina: Well, I mean, I tend to agree with you. So first of all, there, I put in the, in the show notes, um, there’s a link to a thing that, uh, that James and Pozak wrote for the, the New York Times, uh, God a year and a half ago now called, um, the Comfortable Problem of Mid tv. And he said it, it, it’s got a great cast, it looks cinematic, it’s, um, fine and is everywhere.

And kind of talking about like, you know, we went from like the era of like peak TV to now being, um. You know what, what he’s dubbed like mid tv and I think that there’s, there’s some truth to that. Um, and, and, and he even says at the beginning, let me say up front, this is not an essay about how bad TV is today, just the opposite.

There’s, um, little truly bad high profile television made anymore, um, is it’s more talking about, um, like [00:43:00] what we have instead Today is something less awful, but in a way more sad, the willingness to retreat, to settle to trade, the ambitious for the defendable. And I think that there’s some truth to that.

Um, I think that we see this movies now too, and with movies it’s actually much more of a problem. Like there’s some really high highs. Um, but because the movie industry is in such a bad place, um, it, it’s that much more notable when like, you don’t have like a big strong slate of, of things. And so, you know, it, it, it’s more of a problem.

TV for, for better or worse, has become the dominant entertainment form. And yeah, I think that it, it, it’s fine. Uh, but there are very few things that I’m like, oh, wow, yeah, that, that’s like, you know, the wire. Um, not that anything is, but you know what I mean? But is, but even like, you know, pluribus, which I really like.

I actually think that’s, um, my, my favorite show of, of, um, 2025, um, at least new show. Um, well, maybe the studio. The studio. I might have, I, I, I might put,

Brett: That was pretty

Christina: above that. But, but, but, but [00:44:00] like, it’s one of those things where I’m like, okay, you know, um, it’s not breaking bad, right? Like, if we’re gonna be comparing Vince Gilligan shows, and maybe that’s unfair, but, you know, it just, but, but still, like, you know, you’re gonna be compared to your last hit.

And, and, and, and that is what it is. Um, I will say though, like, I haven’t watched Stranger Things in years, and I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think I can force myself to like, care about that again, but I’ve heard kind of mixed

Brett: That’s where L is too, L doesn’t care. And, and then there’s the whole like two cast members being Zionists kind of turned a whole bunch of people off and

Christina: Well, and well, David Harbor, David Harbor’s whole Lily Allen thing. Are you, are you, are you familiar with this floor at all?

Brett: No.

Christina: Okay. You know who Lily Allen is?

Brett: Yes.

Christina: Okay. So she and David Harbor were married and, um, she wrote an album called, uh, uh, west End Girl that, that came out, uh, like in November, which is actually a really good album, [00:45:00] which is like White Girl Lemonade, where she just basically reads him to filth for being an absolute piece of shit.

Like, apparently like, you know, they were together, they were married or whatever. She goes off to London to perform in a play and he’s like. Oh, we’re gonna be away for months. I, I wanna sleep with other people. And so they kind of like, she kind of accepts getting into an open relationship with him, even though she didn’t really want to be, which look that her, that’s her bad, whatever.

But then he proceeds to like, do things that was not what they’d agreed upon on, upon the parameters of their, of their relationship. And then she’s just like brutally honest about the entire thing. And so as you’re listening to this album, you’re just learning more and more about like, David Harbor’s like sex life and, um, and stuff.

And, and like, it’s just on blast. It’s incredible. Um, but, uh, yeah, so there’s, there’s some of that stuff. There’s, I, I don’t know, like I don’t, I don’t really follow the rest of the cast stuff except that, uh, the girl who plays, um, 11 like. Frequently want to smack because just the most annoying [00:46:00] celebrity in on the planet.

But like, putting that aside, um, I just, I stopped caring. It took them too long between seasons and the, and, and, and the budget for that show was also so insane. I’m like, you, you cost more than strain than thinking of Thrones. Game of Thrones is, was even at its worst, was a better show than Stranger Things.

So like it, yeah. But but that goes to your point. Like, it’s like, it’s okay.

Brett: Yeah. Yeah,

Christina: Um, I will say the new season of Fallout just, um, premiered and so far I I’m still really enjoying that. Um,

Brett: yet to see it.

Christina: you should, you should definitely watch the

Brett: What is it on?

Christina: uh, Amazon

Brett: Okay.

Christina: and, uh, and it’s, and it’s really, really good. Um. And this year they are doing the episodic, um, not episodic, the weekly drop, right.

Rather than the binge thing. So the first season, uh, they dropped it all at once and um, and I was a little bit worried. I was like, fuck, does that mean they don’t [00:47:00] believe in this? What are they going to do? Wound up being like Amazon’s biggest hit after their Lord of the Rings, um, you know, thing. And so it was immediately kind of picked up for a second season and it was picked up for a third season before the second season even, uh, premiered.

Um, and uh, and that might be the final one. Um, they’re saying, but, but, but, but who knows? But, but so far anyway, like they’ve only, there’s only been one episode, but it’s, it’s been good so far.

The Cultural Phenomenon of Heated Rivalry

Christina: Um, but, but what I was gonna talk to you about is the gay hockey show.

Brett: Which is.

Christina: It’s called Heated rivalry. It’s on HBO Max.

It was originally just supposed to be on, uh, a Canadian streamer called Crave. And um, then at the, like, the, the like 11th hour, HBO Max picked it up and was like, okay, we’ll play this in, um, some of our territories and other things. And I wanna be very clear, this is not high art at all. This is like, no way.

Like this actually in some ways it, it personifies [00:48:00] the TV is just okay now thing, but in other ways it’s actually a little bit more interesting just because the cultural phenomenon that has happened around it in like the last, like, like it hasn’t even been out a month and it’s only six episodes, although they are also going to be getting a second season.

Um, it’s sort of wild how, like I went from, I’d seen a trailer for it and I was like, okay, whatever. And like it came out, I think like right after Thanksgiving. Then like within like two or three weeks, like literally I wasn’t following anything around it, but my Instagram, my TikTok, Twitter, everything that I was seeing was just all about the discourse around the show.

And it’s like a bunch of us all seem to have to have discovered it. Like one weekend where we were like, okay, we’re gonna actually sit down and watch the gay hockey show. Um, and this is exactly what it is. It is a gay hockey show. So it is based on, there was a series of books that this, uh, female, uh, writer Rachel Reed wrote, um, uh, about like, uh, I think like they were like eBooks, types of thing.

Um, uh, I think although there, there is now I [00:49:00] think like a, a hard cover release because they’ve been so popular and they’re just, it’s just ero, it’s just smut, right? It’s basically fanfic dressed up in something else. And the idea was like, okay, you have like these, you know, male like hockey players who are closeted and kind of have like this, this romance that, that starts from like 2008, um, through like, I dunno, like, like 2017 or 2018.

And there are a number of different. Books or stories in the universe. But the one that people liked the most was the, the second book, which is called Heed Rivalry. You don’t really need to know any about that. The big thing about the show is that it is essentially like soft core gay porn. Um, but yet it’s like weirdly compelling in a way.

Like, it, it is very, like, there’s, there’s some sweet aspects to it. Like you were before the, the show, you were saying, oh, it’s kinda like Heart Stopper could not be further from Heart Stopper. ’cause Heart Stopper is very sweet and twee and kind of like loving and like whatnot. This is like. You know, like guys in their twenties with amazing asses, [00:50:00] you know, like doing things to one another kind of an in secret.

And, and the, the thing is, there’s not a whole lot of plot. Like the plot is the porn. Because, because the whole thing is, is that like they don’t spend, they don’t have a time to spend a lot of time together because they’re, they’re closeted and their rivals. Oh, that’s the whole conceit. It’s like they’re these two great hockey players and they, they, they, um, you know, um, play for opposing teams and they’re like, each other’s biggest rivals, but like, they’re, they’re fucking, um, and uh, it, it’s, uh, again, it’s not high art at all, but

Brett: the target audience for this?

Christina: And here’s the interesting thing. So the books are almost entirely read by women, um, and which, which makes sense. There’s, there’s a lot of like, you know, like, male, male, like, um, like the history of slash fiction goes back to like, like Fanfic in general, like goes back to like women writing, like Spock and, and, uh, um, what’s the space together?

Kirk Together. Yeah. Um, and so the books are almost entirely, uh, consumed by, by women and probably straight women, although probably some queer women too. Um, but the [00:51:00] show seems to be a mix of gay men, straight women, all, although I’ve seen a lot of lesbians. As well. Um, yeah, yeah, because again, like the discourse is just kind of ridiculous and, and the memes are fun.

Um, the guy who created it, he’s gay or created the, the, the television adaptation. He’s gay and, uh, I think he’s done a, a, a pretty good job with it. The, the leads are the thing that’s like incredible, like the, especially the guy who plays the, the Russian character, Ilya, uh, that actor is really, really good and he’s Texan, and yet he does like a great Russian accent and, um.

And, and he’s very attractive. And like I, I, I can see like why a lot of people are into it, but it’s funny ’cause like New York Magazine, like they weren’t even covering the show, which, why would you, it was like some Canadian kind of, you know, you know, thing that barely gets picked by HBO. Then it takes off and now like they’re covering it.

The, the last time I remember New York Magazine covering a show like this, like Vociferously was Gossip Girl, like 18 years ago. Um, [00:52:00] and it kind of reminds me of that, where like everybody woke up one day when they’re like, oh, this is like a cultural moment now. So again, not good television, probably not gonna necessarily be for everyone, but, but it’s a moment.

And like, I kept seeing edits, I kept seeing Mo, I kept seeing edits on TikTok and stuff and I was like, okay, do I have to watch the gay hockey show? All right, I have to watch the gay hockey show so that it’s, we might be at the point where like TV is just okay, but at least there are some good like moments about, whereas the culture, we can all like agree.

Okay, we’re all gonna be talking about this one thing.

Brett: That sounds like what I’ll be doing on Christmas Day.

Christina: Oh my God. Actually that would be a great thing to watch on Christmas. And I think that the final episode is gonna come out like the day after Christmas, so there you go.

Brett: Done Deal. Cool.

Wrapping Up and Holiday Wishes

Brett: All right, well thanks for, we’re recording this the same morning. The show’s supposed to come out, so I gotta do some editing, but uh, but [00:53:00] thanks for showing up while you’re in Atlanta and yeah, this has been a classic, a fun classic Overtired.

Christina: absolutely. Well, um, get some sleep, uh, take care of yourself. Um, happy holidays. Um, uh, hope that a, a Christmas isn’t too weird for you. And, um, and happy New Year.

Brett: you too. Get some sleep.

The Overtired trio reunites for the first time in ages, diving into a whirlwind of health updates, hilarious anecdotes, and the latest tech obsessions. Christina shares a dramatic spinal saga while Brett and Jeff discuss everything from winning reddit contests to creating a universal markdown processor. Tune in for updates on Mark 3, the magical world of Scrivener, and why Brett’s back on Bing. Don’t miss the banter or the tech tips, and as always, get ready to laugh, learn, and maybe feel a little overtired yourself.

Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all eCommerce in the US, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark, to brands just getting started. Get started today at shopify.com/overtired.

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Check out more episodes at overtiredpod.com and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Find Brett as @ttscoff, Christina as @film_girl, Jeff as @jsguntzel, and follow Overtired at @ovrtrd on Twitter.

Brett + 2

Welcome to the Overtired Podcast

Jeff: [00:00:00] Hello everybody. This is the Overtired podcast. The three of us are all together for the first time since the Carter administration. Um, it is great to see you both here. I am Jeff Severance Gunzel if I didn’t say that already.

Um, and I’m here with Christina Warren and I’m here with Brett Terpstra and hello to both of you.

Brett: Hi.

Jeff: Great to see you both.

Brett: Yeah, it’s good to see you too. I feel like I was really deadpan in the pre-show. I’ll try to liven it up for you. I was a horrible audience. You were cracking jokes and I was just

Jeff: that’s true. Christina, before you came on, man, I was hot. I was on fire and Brett was, all Brett was doing was chewing and dropping Popsicle parts.

Brett: Yep. I ate, I ate part of a coconut outshine Popsicle off of a concrete floor, but

Jeff: It is true, and I didn’t even see him check it [00:01:00] for cat hair,

Brett: I did though.

Jeff: but I believe he did because he’s a, he’s a very

Brett: I just vacuumed in

Jeff: He’s a very good American

Brett: All right.

Christina’s Health Journey

Brett: Well, um, I, Christina has a lot of health stuff to share and I wanna save time for that. So let’s kick off the mental health corner. Um, let’s let Christina go first, because if it takes the whole show, it takes the whole show.

Go for it.

Christina: Uh, I, I will not take this hold show, but thank you. Yeah. So, um, my mental health is okay-ish. Um, I would say the okay-ish part is, is because of things that are happening with my physical health and then some of the medications that I’ve had to be on, um, uh, to deal with it. Uh, prednisone. Fucking sucks, man.

Never nev n never take it if you can avoid it. Um, but why Christina, why are you on prednisone or why were you on prednisone for five days? Um, uh, and I’m not anymore to be clear, but that certainly did not help my mental health. Um, at the beginning of November, I woke up and I thought that I’d [00:02:00] slept on my shoulder wrong.

And, um, uh, and, and just some, some background. I, I don’t know if this is pertinent to how my injury took place or not, but, but it, I’m sure that it didn’t help. Um, I have scoliosis and in the top and the bottom of my spine, so I have it at the top of my, like, neck area and my lower back. And so my back is like a crooked s um, this will be relevant in a, in a second, but, but I, I thought that I had slept on my back bunny, and I was like, okay, well, all right, it hurts a lot, but fine. Um, and then it, a, a couple of days passed and it didn’t get any better, and then like a week passed and I was at the point where I was like, I almost feel like I need to go to the. Emergency room, I’m in pain. That is that significant. Um, and, you know, didn’t get any better. So I took some of grant’s, Gabapentin, and I took, um, some, some, uh, a few other things and I was able to get in with like a, a, a sports and spine guy.

Um, and um, [00:03:00] he looked at me and he was like, yeah, I think that you have like a, a, a bolting disc, also known as a herniated disc. Go to physical therapy. See me later. We’ll, we’ll deal with it. Um. Basically like my whole left side was, was, was really sore and, and I had a lot of pain and then I had numbness in my, my fingers and um, and, and that was a problem the next day, which was actually my birthday.

The numbness had at this point spread to my right side and also my lower extremities. And so at this point I called the doctor and he was like, yeah, you should go to the er. And so I went to the ER and, and they weren’t able to do anything for me other than give me, you know, like, um, you know, I was hoping they might give me like, some sort of steroid injection or something.

They wouldn’t do anything other than, um, basically, um, they gave me like another type of maybe, maybe pain pill or whatever. Um, but that allowed the doctor to go ahead and. Write, uh, write up an MRI took forever for me to get an MRI, I actually had to get it in Atlanta. [00:04:00] Fun fact, uh, sometimes it is cheaper to just pay and not go through insurance and get an MR MRI and, um, a, um, uh, an x-ray, um, I was able to do it for $450

Jeff: Whoa. Really?

Christina: Yeah, $400 for the MR mri. $50 for the x-ray.

Jeff: Wow.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah.

Brett: how I, they, I had an MRI, they charged me like $1,200 and then they failed to bill insurance ’cause I was between insurance.

Christina: Yes. Yeah. So what happened was, and and honestly that was gonna be the situation that I was in, not between insurance stuff, but they weren’t even gonna bill insurance. And insurance only approved certain facilities and to get into those facilities is almost impossible. Um, and so, no, there are a lot of like get an MR, I now get a, you know, mammogram, get ghetto, whatever places.

And because America’s healthcare system is a HealthScape, you can bypass insurance and they will charge you way less than whatever they bill insurance for. So I, I don’t know if it’s part of the country, you know, like Seattle I think might [00:05:00] probably would’ve been more expensive. But yeah, I was able to find this place like a mile from like, not even a mile from where my parents lived, um, that did the x-rays and the MRI for $450 total.

Brett: I, I hate, I hate that. That’s true, but

Christina: Me too. Me too. No, no. It pisses me off. Honestly, it makes me angry because like, I’m glad that I was able to do that and get it, you know, uh, uh, expedited. Then I go into the spine, um, guy earlier this week and he looks at it and he’s like, yep, you’ve got a massive bulging disc on, on C seven, which is the, the part of your lower cervical or cervical spine, which is your neck.

Um, and it’s where it connects to your ver bray. It’s like, you know, there are a few things you can do. You can do, you know, injections, you can do surgery. He is like, I’m gonna recommend you to a neurosurgeon. And I go to the neurosurgeon yesterday and he was showing me or not, uh, yeah, yesterday he was showing me the, the, the, the scans and, and showing like you up close and it’s, yeah, it’s pretty massive.

Like where, where, where the disc is like it is. You could see it just from one view, like, just from like [00:06:00] looking at it like, kind of like outside, like you could actually like see like it was visible, but then when you zoomed in it’s like, oh shit, this, this thing is like massive and it’s pressing on these nerves that then go into my, my hands and other areas.

But it’s pressing on both sides. It’s primarily on my left side, but it’s pressing on on my right side too, which is not good. So, um, he basically was like, okay. He was like, you know, this could go away. He was like, the pain isn’t really what I’m wanting to, to treat here. It’s, it’s the, the weakness because my, my left arm is incredibly weak.

Like when they do like the, the test where like they, they push back on you to see like, okay, like how, how much can you, what, like, I am, I’m almost immediately like, I can’t hold anything back. Right? Like I’m, I’m, I’m like a toddler in terms of my strength. So, and, and then I’m freaked out because I don’t have a lot of feeling in my hands and, and that’s terrifying.

Um, I’m also.

Jeff: so terrifying,

Christina: I’m, I’m also like in extreme pain because of, of, of where this sits. Like I can’t sleep well. Like [00:07:00] the whole thing sucks. Like the MRI, which was was like the most painful, like 25 minutes, like of my existence. ’cause I was laying flat on my back. I’m not allowed to move and I’m just like, I’m in just incredible pain with that part of, of, of, of my, my side.

Like, it, it was. It was terrible. Um, but, uh, but he was like, yeah. Um, these are the sorts of surgical options we have. Um, he’s gonna, um, do basically what what he wants to do is basically do a thing where he would put in a, um, an artificial or, or synthetic disc. So they’re gonna remove the disc, put in a synthetic one.

They’ll go in through the, the front of my throat to access the, my, my, my, my spine. Um, put that there and, um, you know, I’ll, I’ll be overnight in the hospital. Um, and then it’ll be a few weeks of recovery and the, the, the pain should go away immediately. Um, but it, it could be up to two years before I get full, you know, feeling back in my arm.

So anyway,

Jeff: years, Jesus. And

Christina: I mean, and hopefully less than that, but, but it could be [00:08:00] up to that.

Jeff: there’s no part of this at this point. That’s a mystery to you, right?

Christina: The mystery is, I don’t know how this happened.

Jeff: You don’t know how it happened, right? Of course. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Brett: So tell, tell us about the ghastly surgery. The, the throat thing really threw me like, I can’t imagine that

Christina: yeah, yeah. So, well, ’cause the thing is, is that usually if what they just do, like spinal fusion, they’ll go in at the back of your neck, um, and then they’ll remove the, the, um, the, the, the, the disc. And then they’ll fuse your, your, your two bones together. Basically. They’ll, they’ll, they’ll, they’ll fuse this part of the vertebrae, but because they’re going to be replacing the, the disc, they need more room.

So that’s why they have to go in through the, through, through basically your throat so that they can have more room to work.

Jeff: Good lord. No thank you.

Brett: Ugh. Wow.

Jeff: Okay.

Brett: I am really sorry that is happening. That is, that is, that dwarfs my health concerns. That is just constant pain [00:09:00] and, and it would be really scary.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not great. It’s not great, but I’m, I’m, I’m doing what I can and, uh, like I have, you know, a small amount of, of Oxycodine and I have like a, a, a, you know, some other pain medication and I’m taking the gabapentin and like, that’s helpful. The bad part is like your body, like every 12, 15 hours, like whatever, like the, the, the cycle is like, you feel it leave your system and like if you’re asleep, you wake up, right?

Like, it’s one of those things, like, you immediately feel it, like when it leaves your system. And I’ve never had to do anything for pain management before. And they have me on a very, they have me like on the smallest amount of like, oxycodone you can be on. Um, and I’m using it sparingly because I don’t wanna, you know, be reliant on, on it or whatever.

But it, it, but it is one of those things where I’m like, yeah, like sometimes you need fucking opiates because, you know, the pain is like so constant. And the thing is like, what sucks is that it’s not always the same type of pain. Like sometimes it’s throbbing, sometimes it’s sharp, sometimes it’s like whatever.

It sucks. But the hardest thing [00:10:00] is like, and. This does impact my mental health. Like it’s hard to sleep. Like, and I’m a side sleeper. I’m a side sleeper, and I’m gonna have to become a back sleeper. So, you know. Yeah. It’s just, it’s, it’s not great. It’s not great, but, you know, that, that, that, that, that’s me.

The, the good news is, and I’m very, very gratified, like I have a good surgeon. Um, I’m gonna be able to get in to get this done relatively quickly. He had an appointment for next week. I don’t think that insurance would’ve even been able to approve things fast enough for, for, for that regard. And I have, um, commitments that I can’t make then.

And I, and that would also mean that I wouldn’t be able to go visit my family for Christmas. So hopefully I’ll do it right after Christmas. I’m just gonna wait, you know, for, for insurance to, to do its thing, knock on wood, and then schedule, um, from there. But yeah,

Jeff: Woof.

Christina: so that’s me. Um, uh, who wants to go next?

Jeff or, uh, Jeff or Brett?

Jeff: It’s like, that’s me. Hot potato throwing it.

Brett: I’ll, I’ll go.

Brett’s Insurance Woes

Brett: I can continue on the insurance topic. Um, I was, for a few months [00:11:00] after getting laid off, I was on Minsu, which is Minnesota’s Medicaid, um, v version of Medicaid. And so basically I paid nothing and I had better insurance than I usually have with, uh, you know, a full deductible and premiums and everything.

And it was fantastic. I was getting all the care I needed for all of the health stuff I’m going through. Um, I, they, a, a new doctor I found, ordered the 15 tests and I passed out ’cause it was so much blood and. And it, I was getting, but I was getting all these tests run. I was getting results, we were discovering things.

And then my unemployment checks, the income from unemployment went like $300 over the cap for Medicaid. So [00:12:00] all of a sudden, overnight I was cut from Medicaid and I had to do an early sign up, and now I’m on courts and it sucks bad. Like they’re not covering my meds. Last month cost me $600. I was also paying.

In addition to that, a $300 premium plus every doctor’s visit is 50 bucks out of pocket. So this will hopefully only last until January, and then it’ll flip over and I will be able to demonstrate basically no income, um, until like Mark makes enough money that it gets reported. Um, and even, uh, until then, like I literally am making under the, the poverty limit.

So, um, I hope to be back on Medicaid shortly. I have one more month. I’ll have to pay my $600 to refill. I [00:13:00] cashed out my 401k. Um, like things were, everything was up high enough that I had made, I. I had made tens of thousands of dollars just on the investments and the 401k, but I also have a lot of concerns about the market volatility around Nvidia and the AI bubble in general.

Um, so taking my money out of the market just felt okay to me. I paid the 10%, uh, penalty

Jeff: Mm-hmm.

Brett: and ultimately I, I came out with enough cash that I can invest on my own and be able to cover the next six months. Uh, if I don’t have any other income, which I hope to, I hope to not spend my nest egg. Um, but I did, I did a lot of thinking and calculating and I think I made the right choices.

But anyway, [00:14:00] that will help if I have to pay for medical stuff that will help. Um. And then I’ve had insomnia, bad on and off. Right now I’m coming off of two days of good sleep. You’re catching me on a good day. Um, but

Jeff: Still wouldn’t laugh at my jokes.

Brett: before that it was, well, that’s the thing is like before that, it was four nights where I slept two to four hours per night, and by the end of it, I could barely walk.

And so two nights of sleep after a stint like that, like, I’m just super, I’m deadpan, I’m dazed. Um, I could lay down and fall asleep at any time. Um, I, so, so keep me awake. Um, but yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s me. Mental health is good. Like I’m in pretty high spirits considering all this, like financial stuff and everything.

Like my mood has been pretty stable. I’ve been getting a lot of coding done. I’ll tell you about projects in [00:15:00] a minute, but, um, but that’s, that’s me. I’m done.

Jeff: Awesome. I’m enjoying watching your cat roll around, but clearly cannot decide to lay down at this point.

Brett: No, nobody is very persnickety.

Jeff: I literally have to put my. Well, you say put a cat down like you used to. When you put a kid down for a nap, you say you wanna put ’em down. Right? That’s where it’s coming from. I now have a chair next to my desk, ’cause I have one cat that walks around Yowling at about 11:00 AM while I’m working. And I have to like, put ’em down for a nap.

It’s pathetic. It’s pathetic that I do that. Let’s just be clear.

Brett: Yeah.

Jeff: soulmate though.

Jeff’s Mental Health Update

Jeff: Um, I’m doing good. I’m, I’m, I’ve been feeling kind of light lately in a nice way. I’ve had ups and downs, but even with the ups and downs, there’s like a, except for one day last week was, there’s just been feeling kind of good in general, which is remarkable in a way.

’cause it’s just like stressful time. There’s some stressful business stuff, like, [00:16:00] a lot of stuff like that. But I’m feeling good and, and just like, uh, yeah, just light. I don’t know, it’s weird. Like, I’ve just been noticing that I feel kind of light and, uh. And not, not manic, not high light.

Brett: Yeah. No, that’s

Jeff: uh, and that’s, that’s lovely.

So yeah. And so I’m doing good. I’m doing good. I fucking, it’s cold. Which sucks ’cause it just means for everybody that’s heard about my workshop over the years, that I can’t really go out there and have it be pleasant

Brett: It’s, it’s been Minnesota thus far. Has had, we’ve had like one, one Sub-Zero day.

Jeff: whatever. It’s fucking cold.

Christina: Yeah. What one? Brett? Brett. It’s December 6th as we’re recording this one Sub-Zero day. That’s insane.

Brett: Is it

Jeff: Granted, granted I’ve been dressing warm, so I’m ready to go out the door for ice related things. Meaning, meaning government, ice,

Brett: Uh, yeah. Yeah.

Jeff: So I like wear my long underwear during [00:17:00] the day. ’cause actually like recently. So at my son’s school, which is like six blocks from here, um, has a lot of Somali immigrants in it.

And, and uh, and there was a, at one point there was ice activity in the other direction, um, uh, uh, near me. And so neighbors put out a call here around so that at dismissal time people would pair up at all the intersections surrounding the school. And, um, and like a quick signal group popped up, whatever.

It was so amazing because like we all just popped out there. And by the time I got out, uh, everyone was already like, posted up and I was like, I’m a, in these situations, I am a wanderer. You want me roaming? I don’t want to pair up with somebody I don’t like, I just, I grabbed a camera with a Zoom on it and like, I was like, I’m in roam.

Um, it’s what I was as an activist, what I was as a reporter, like it’s just my nature. Um, but like. Everybody was out and like, and they were just like, they were ready man. And then we got like the all clear and you could just see people in the [00:18:00] neighborhood just like standing down and going home. But because of the true threat and the ongoing arrests here, now that the Minneapolis stuff has started, like I do, I was like wearing long underwear just, and I have a little bag by the door ready to like pop out if something comes up and I can be helpful.

Um, and uh, and I guess what I’m saying is I should use that to go into the garage as well if I’m already prepared.

Brett: Right.

Jeff: But here’s, okay, so here’s a mental health thing actually. So I, one of the, I’ve gone through a few years of just sort of a little bit of paralysis around being able to just, I don’t know what, like do anything that is kind of project related that takes some thinking, whatever it is, like I’m talking about around the house or things that have kind of broken over the years, whatever.

So I’ve had this snowblower and it’s a really good snowblower. It’s got headlights. And, uh, and I used to love snow blowing the entire block. Like it just made me feel good, made me feel useful. Um, and sorry I cough. I left it outside for a [00:19:00] year for a, like a winter and a spring and water got into the gas tank.

It rusted out in there. I knew I couldn’t start it or I’d ruin the whole damn engine. So I left it for two years and I felt bad about myself. But this year, just like probably a month before the first big snowfall, I fucking replaced a gas tank and a carburetor on a machine. And I have never done anything like that in my life.

And so then we got the snowfall and I, and I snow blowed this whole block

Brett: Nice.

Jeff: great. ’cause now they all owe me.

Brett: I, uh, I have a, uh, so I have a little electric powered, uh, snowblower that can handle like two inches of snow. Um, and, and on big snowfalls, if you get out there every hour and keep up with it, it, it works. But, but I, my back right now, I can’t stand for, I can’t stand still for 10 minutes and I can’t move for more than like five minutes.

And so I’m, I’m very disabled and El has good days and bad days, uh, thus [00:20:00] far. L’s been out there with a shovel, um, really being the hero. But we have a next door neighbor with a big gas powered snowblower. And so we went over, brought them gifts, and, um, asked if they would take care of our driveway on days we couldn’t, uh, for like, you know, we’d pay ’em 25 bucks to do the driveway.

And, uh, and they were, he was still reluctant to accept money. Um. But, but we both agreed it was better to like make it a, a transaction.

Jeff: Oh my God. You don’t want to get into weird Minnesota neighbor relational.

Brett: right. You don’t want the you owe me thing. Um, so, so we have that set up. But in the process we made really good friends with our neighbor. Like we sat down in their living room for I think 45 minutes and just like talked about health and politics and it was, it was really fun.

They’re, they’re retired. They’re in their [00:21:00] seventies and like act, he always looks super grumpy. I always thought he was a mean old man. He’s actually, he laughs more easily than most people I’ve ever met. Um, he’s actually, when people say, oh, he is actually a teddy bear, this guy really is, he’s just jovial.

Uh, he just has resting angry old man face.

Jeff: Or like my, I have public mis throat face, like when I’m out and about, especially when I’m shopping, I know that my face is, I’m gonna fucking kill you if you look me in the eye

Brett: I used

Jeff: is not my general disposition.

Brett: people used to tell me that about myself, but I feel like I, I carry myself differently these days than I did when I was younger.

Jeff: You know what I learned? Do you, have you both watched Veep,

Christina: Yes,

Jeff: you know, Richard sp split, right? Um, and, and he always kind of has this sweet like half smile and he is kind of looking up and I, I figured out at one point I was in an airport, which is where my kill everybody face especially comes up. Just to be clear.

TSA, it’s just a feeling inside. I [00:22:00] have no desire to act to this out. I realized that if I make the Richard Plet face, which I can try to make for you now, which is something like if I just make the Richard Plet face, my whole disposition

Brett: yeah. Yeah.

Jeff: uh, and I even feel a little better. And so I just wanna recommend that to people.

Look up Richard Spt, look at his face.

Christina: Hey, future President Bridges split.

Jeff: future President Richard Splat, also excellent in the Detroiters. Um, that’s all, uh, that’s all I wanted to say about that.

Brett: I have found that like when I’m texting with someone, if I start to get frustrated, you know, you know that point where you’re still adding smiley emoticons even though you’re actually not, you’re actually getting pissed off, but you don’t wanna sound super bitchy about it, so you’re adding smile. I have found that when I add a smiley emoji in those circumstances, if I actually smile before I send it, it like my [00:23:00] mood will adjust to match, to match the tone I’m trying to convey, and it lessens my frustration with the other person.

Jeff: a little joy wrist rocket.

Christina: Yeah. Hey, I mean, no, but hey, but, but that, that, that, that, that’s interesting. I mean, they’re, they, they’ve done studies that like show that, right? That like show like, you know, I mean, like, some of this is all like bullshit to a certain extent, but there is something to be said for like, you know, like the power of like positive thinking and like, you know, if you go into things with like, different types of attitudes or even like, even if you like, go into job interviews or other situations, like you act confident or you smile, or you act happy or whatever.

Even if you’re not like it, the, the, the, the euphoria, you know, that those sorts of uh, um, endorphin reactions or whatever can be real. So that’s interesting.

Brett: Yeah, I found, I found going into job interviews with my usual sarcastic and bitter, um, kind of mindset,

Jeff: I already hate this job.

Brett: it doesn’t play well. It doesn’t play well. So what are your weaknesses? Fuck off. Um,[00:24:00]

Christina: right. Well, well, well, I hate people.

Jeff: Yeah. Dealing with motherfuckers like you, that’s one weakness.

Sponsor Spot: Shopify

Brett: let’s, uh, let’s do a sponsor spot and then I want to hear about Christina winning a contest.

Christina: yes.

Jeff: very

Brett: wanna, you wanna take it away?

Sponsor: Shopify

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shopify.com/ Overtired [00:26:00] cha. Uh,

Brett: the, uh, the group, the group input on the last URL, I feel like we can charge extra for that. That was

Jeff: Yeah. Cha-ching

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Christina: You did. You got the Overtired

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Jeff Tweedy

Jeff: What was, uh, I was watching a Stephen Colbert interview with Jeff Tweedy, who just put out a triple album and, uh, it was a very thoughtful, sweet interview. And then Stephen Colbert said, you know, you’re not supposed to do this.

And Jeff Tweety said, it’s all part of my career long effort to leave the public wanting less.

Christina: Ha,

Jeff: That was a great bit.

Christina: that’s a fantastic bit. A side note, there are a couple of really good NPR, um, uh, tiny desks that have come out in the last couple of month, uh, couple of weeks. Um, uh, one is shockingly, I, I’ll, I’ll just be a a, a fucking boomer about it. The Googo dolls. Theirs was [00:27:00] great. It’s fantastic. They did a great job.

It already has like millions of views, like it wrecked up like over a million views, I think like in like, like less than 24 hours. They did a great job, but, uh, but Brandy Carlisle, uh, did one, um, the other day and hers is really, really good too. So, um, so yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah. Anyway, you said, you saying Jeff pd maybe, I don’t know how I got from Wilco to like, you know, there,

Jeff: Yeah. Well, they’ve done some good, he’s done his own good

Christina: he has, he has done his own.

Good, good. That’s honestly, that’s probably what I was thinking of, but

Jeff: It’s my favorite Jeff besides me because Bezos, he’s not in the, he’s not in the game.

Christina: No. No, he’s not. No. Um, he, he’s, he’s not on the Christmas card list at all.

Jeff: Oh man.

Jeff’s Concert Marathon

Jeff: Can I just tell you guys that I did something, um, I did something crazy a couple weeks ago and I went to three shows in one week, like I was 20 fucking two,

Brett: Good grief.

Jeff: and. It was a blast. So, okay, so the background of this is my oldest son [00:28:00] loves hip hop, and when we drive him to college and back, or when I do, it’s often just me.

Um, he, he goes deep and he, it’s a lot of like, kind of indie hip hop and a lot. It’s just an interesting, he listens to interesting shit, but he will go deep and he’ll just like, give me a tour through someone’s discography or through all their features somewhere, whatever it is. And like, it’s the kind of input that I love, which is just like, I don’t, even if it’s not my genre, like if you’re passionate and you can just weave me through the interrelationship and the history and whatever it is I’m in.

So as a result of that, made me a huge fan of Danny Brown and made me a huge fan of the sky, Billy Woods. And so what happened was I went to a hip hop show at the seventh Street entry, uh, which is attached to First Avenue. It’s a little club, very small, lovely little place, the only place my band could sell out.

Um, and I watched a hip hop show there on a Monday night, Tuesday night. I went to the Uptown Theater, which Brett is now a actually an operating [00:29:00] theater for shows. Uh, and I, and I saw Danny Brown, but I also saw two hyper pop bands, a genre I was not previously aware of, including one, which was amazing, called Fem Tenal.

And I was in line to get into that show behind furries, behind trans Kids. Like it was this, I was the weirdest, like I did not belong. Underscores played, and, and this will mean something to somebody out there, but not, didn’t mean anything to me until that night. And, uh. I felt like such, there were times, not during Danny Brown, Danny Brown’s my age all good.

But like there were times where I was in the crowd ’cause I’m tall. Anybody that doesn’t know I’m very tall and I’m wearing like a not very comfortable or safe guy seeming outfit, a black hoodie, a black stocking cap. Like I basically looked like I’m possibly a shooter and, and I’m like standing among all these young people loving it, but feeling a little like, should I go to the back?

Even like I was leaving that show [00:30:00] and the only people my age were people’s parents that were waiting to pick them up on the way out. So anyway, that was night two. Danny Brown was awesome. And then two nights later I went to see, this is way more my speed, a band called the Dazzling Kilman who were a band that.

Came out in the nineties, St. Louis and a noisy Matthew Rock. Wikipedia claims they invented math rock. It’s a really stupid claim, uh, but it’s a lovely, interesting band and it’s a friend of mine named Nick Sakes, who’s who fronted that band and was in all these great bands back when I was in bands called Colos Mite and Sick Bay, and all this is great shit.

So they played a reunion show. In this tiny punk rock club here called Cloudland, just a lovely little punk rock club. And, um, and, and that was like rounded out my week. So like, I was definitely, uh, a tourist the early part of the week, mostly at the Danny Brown Show. But then I like got to come home to my noisy punk rock [00:31:00] on, uh, on Thursday night.

And I, I fucking did three shows and it hurt so bad. Like even by the first of three bands on the second night. I was like, I don’t think I can make it. And I do. I already pregame shows with ibuprofen. Just to be really clear, I microdose glucose tabs at shows like, like I am, I am a full on old man doing these things.

But, um, I did get some cred with my kids for being at a hyper pop show all by myself. And,

Christina: Hell yeah. A a

Jeff: friends seemed impressed.

Christina: no, as a as, as as they should be. I’m impressed. And like, and I, I, I typically like, I definitely go to like more of like, I go, I go to shows more frequently and, and I’m, I’m even like, I’m, I’m gonna be real with you. I’m like, yeah, three in one week.

Jeff: That’s a lot.

Christina: That’s a lot. That’s a lot.

Jeff: man. Did I feel good when I walked home from that last show though? I was like, I fucking did it. I did not believe I wasn’t gonna bail on at least two of those shows, if not all three. Anyway, just wanted to say

Brett: I [00:32:00] do like one show a year, but

Jeff: that’s how I’ve been for years this year. I think I’ve seen eight shows.

Brett: damn.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s

Brett: Alright, so you’ve been teasing us about this, this contest you won.

Jeff: Yeah, please, Christina. Sorry to push that off.

Christina: No, no, no, no. That’s, that’s completely okay. That, that, that, that’s great. Uh, no.

Christina Wins Big

Christina: So, um, I won two six K monitors.

Brett: Damn.

Jeff: is that what those boxes are behind you?

Christina: Yeah, yeah. This is what the boxes are behind me, so I haven’t been able to get them up because this happened. I got them literally right in the midst of all this stuff with my back. Um, but I do have an Ergotron poll now that is here, and, and Grant has said that he will, will get them up. But yeah, so I won 2 32 inch six K monitors from a Reddit contest.

Brett: How, how, how,

Jeff: How does this happen? How do I find a Reddit contest?

Christina: Yeah. So I got lucky. So I have, I, I have a clearly, well, well, um, there was a little, there was a little bit of like, other step to it than that, but like, uh, so how it worked was basically, um, LG is basically just put out [00:33:00] two, they put out a new 32 inch six K monitor. I’ll have it linked in, in, in the show notes.

Um, so we’ve talked about this on this podcast before, but like one of my big, like. Pet peeve, like things that I can’t get past. It’s like I need like a retina screen. Like I need like the, the perfect pixel doubling thing for that the Mac Os deals with, because I’ve used a 5K screen, either through an iMac or um, an lg, um, ultra fine or, um, a, uh, studio display. For like 11 years. And, and I, and I’ve been using retina displays on laptops even longer than that. And so if I use like a regular 4K display, like it just, it, it doesn’t work for me. Um, you can use apps like, um, like better control and other things to kind of emulate, like what would be like if you doubled the resolution, then it, it down, you know, um, of samples that, so that.

It looks better than, than if it’s just like the, the, the 4K stuff where in the, the user interface things are too big and whatnot. And to be clear, this is a Macco West problem. If [00:34:00] you are using Windows or Linux or any other operating system that does fractional scaling, um, correctly, then this is not a problem.

But Macco West does not do fractional scaling direct, uh, correctly. Um, weirdly iOS can, like, they can do three X resolution and other things. Um, but, but, but Macs does not. And that’s weird because some of the native resolutions on some of the MacBook errors are not even perfectly pixeled doubled, meaning Apple is already having to do a certain amount of like resolution changes to, to fit into their own, created by their, their own hubris, like way of insisting on, on only having like, like two x pixel doubling 18 years ago, we could have had independent, uh, resolutions, uh, um, for, for UI elements and, and, and window bars.

But anyway, I, I’m, I’m digressing anyway. I was looking at trying to get either a second, uh, studio display, which I don’t wanna do because Apple’s reportedly going to be putting out a new one. Um, and they’re expensive or getting, um, there are now a number of different six K [00:35:00] displays that are not $6,000 that are on the market.

So, um, uh, uh, Asus has one, um, there is one from like a, a Chinese company called like, or Q Con that, um, looks like a, a complete copy of this, of the pro display XDR. It has a different panel, but it’s, it’s six K and they, they’ve copied the whole design and it’s aluminum and it’s glossy and it looks great, but I’d have to like get it from like.

A weird distributor, and if I have any issues with it, I don’t really wanna have to send it back to China and whatnot. And then LG has one that they just put out. And so I’ve been researching these on, on Mac rumors and on some other forums. And, um, I, uh, I, somebody in one of the Mac Roomers forums like posted that there was like a contest that LG was running in a few different subreddits where they were like, tell us why you should get one of, like, we’re gonna be giving away like either one or two monitors, and I guess they did this in a few subreddits.

Tell us why this would be good for your workflow. And, um, I guess I, I guess I’m one of the people who kind of read the [00:36:00] assignment because it, okay, I’ll just be honest with this, with, with you guys on this podcast, uh, because I, I don’t think anyone from LG will hear this and my answers were accurate anyway.

But anyway, this was not the sort of contest where it was like we will randomly select a winner. This was the moderators and lg, were going to read the responses and choose the winner.

Jeff: Got it.

Christina: So if you spend a little bit of time and thoughtfully write out a response, maybe you stand a better chance of winning the contest.

Jeff: yeah, yeah. Put the work in like it was 2002.

Christina: Right. Anyway, I still was shocked when I like woke up like on like Halloween and they were like, congratulations, you’ve won two monitors. I’m like, I’m sorry. What?

Jeff: That’s amazing.

Christina: Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Jeff: Nice work. I know I’ve, you know, I’ve been staring at those boxes behind you this whole time, just being like, those look like some sweet monitors.

Christina: yeah, yeah.

Monitor Setup Challenges

Christina: I mean, and, uh, [00:37:00] uh, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, and I, I’m very much, so my, my, my only issue is, okay, how am I gonna get these on my desk? So I’m gonna have to do something with my iMac and I’m probably gonna have to get rid of my, my my, my 5K, um, uh, uh, studio display, at least in the short term.

Ergotron Mounts and Tall Poles

Christina: Um, but what I did do is I, um, I ordered from, um, Ergotron, ’cause I already have.

Um, two of their, um, LX mounts, um, or, or, or, or arms. Um, and only one of them is being used right now. And then I have a different arm that I use for the, um, um, iMac. Um, they sell like a, if you call ’em directly, you can get them to send you a tall pole so that you can put the two arms on top of them. And that way I think I can like, have them so that I can have like one pole and then like have one on one side, one

Jeff: I have a tall pole.

Christina: and, and yeah, that’s what she said.

Um,

Jeff: as soon as I said it, I was like, for fuck’s sake. But

Christina: um, but, uh, but, but yeah, but so that way I think I, I can, I, in theory, I can stack the market and have ’em side by side. I don’t know. Um, I got that. I, I had to call Tron and, and order that from them. [00:38:00] Um, it was only a hundred dollars for, for the poll and then $50 for a handling fee.

Jeff: It’s not easy to ship a tall pole.

Brett: That’s what she said.

Christina: that is what she said. Uh, that is exactly what she said. But yeah, so I, I, the, the, the unfortunate thing is that, um, I, um, I, I had to, uh, get a, like all these, they, they came in literally right before Thanksgiving, and then I’ve had, like, all my back stuff has

Jeff: Yeah, no

Christina: debilitating, but I’m looking forward to, um, getting them set up and used.

And, uh, yeah.

Review Plans and Honest Assessments

Christina: And then full review will be coming to, uh, to, I have to post a review on Reddit, but then I will also be doing a more in depth review, uh, on this podcast if anybody’s interested in, in other places too, to like, let let you know, like if it’s worth your money or not. Um, ’cause there, like I said, there are, there are a few other options out there.

So it’s not one of those things where like, you know, um, like, thank you very much for the free monitor, um, monitors. But, but I, I will, I will give like the, the, you know, an honest assessment or

Current Display Setup

Brett: So [00:39:00] do you currently have a two display setup?

Christina: No. Um, well, yes, and kind of, so I have my, my, I have my 5K studio display, and then I have like my iMac that I use as a two to display setup. But then otherwise, what I’ve had to do, and this is actually part of why I’m looking forward to this, is I have a 4K 27 inch monitor, but it’s garbage. And it, it’s one of those things where I don’t wanna use it with my Mac.

And so I wind up only using it with my, with my Windows machine, with my framework desktop, um, with my Windows or Linux machine. And, and because that, even though I, it supports Thunderbolt, the Apple display is pain in the ass to use with those things. It doesn’t have the KVM built in. Like, it doesn’t like it, it just, it’s not good for that situation.

So yeah, this will be of this size. I mean, again, like I, I, I’m 2 32 inch monitors. I don’t know how I’m gonna deal with that on my

Jeff: I

Brett: yeah. So right now I’m looking at 2 32 inch like UHD monitors,

Christina: Yeah,[00:40:00]

Brett: I will say that on days when my neck hurts, it sucks. It’s a, it’s too wide a range to, to like pan back and forth quickly. Like I’ll throw my back out, like trying to keep track of stuff. Um, but I have found that like if I keep the second display, just like maybe social media apps is the way I usually set it up.

And then I only work on one. I tried buying an extra wide curve display, hated it.

Jeff: Uh, I’ve always wanted to try one, but

Christina: I don’t like them.

Jeff: Yeah.

Christina: Well, for me, well for me it’s two things. One, it’s the, I don’t love the whole like, you know, thing or whatever, but the big thing honestly there, if you could give me, ’cause people are like, oh, you can get a really big 5K, 2K display. I’m like, that’s not a 5K display.

That is 2 27 inch, 1440 P displays. One, you know, ultra wide, which is great. Good for you. That’s not retina. And I’m a sicko Who [00:41:00] needs the, the pixel doubling? Like I wish that my eyes could not use that, but, but, but,

Jeff: that needs the pixel. Like was that the headline of your Reddit, uh,

Christina: no, no. It wasn’t, it wasn’t. But, but maybe it should be. Hi, I’m a sicko who only, um, fucks with, with, with, with, with, with, with retina displays. Ask me anything. Um, but no, but that’s a good point.

Brett: I think 5K Psycho is the

Christina: 5K Sicko is the po is the po title. I like that. I like that. No, what I’m thinking about doing and that’s great to know, Brett.

Um, this kind of reaffirms my thing.

Thunderbolt KVM and Display Preferences

Christina: So what’s nice about these monitors is that they come with like, built in like, um, Thunderbolt 5K VM. So, which is nice. So you could conceivably have multiple, you know, computers, uh, connected, you know, to to, to one monitor, which I really like. Um, I mean like, ’cause like look, I, I’ve bitched and moaned about the studio display, um, primarily for the price, but at the same time, if mine broke tomorrow and if I didn’t have any way to replace it, I’ve, I’ve also gone on record saying I would buy a new one immediately.

As mad as I am about a [00:42:00] lot of different things with that, that the built-in webcam is garbage. The, you know, the, the fact that there’s not a power button is garbage. The fact that you can’t use it with multiple inputs, it’s garbage. But it’s a really good display and it’s what I’m used to. Um, it’s really not any better than my LG Ultra fine from 2016.

But you know what? Whatever it is, what it is. Um. I, I am a 5K sicko, but being able to, um, connect my, my personal machine and my work machine at the same time to one, and then have my Windows slash Linux computer connected to another, I think that’s gonna be the scenario where I’m in. So I’m not gonna necessarily be in a place where I’m like, okay, I need to try to look at both of them across 2 32 inch displays.

’cause I think that that, like, that would be awesome. But I feel like that’s too much.

Brett: I would love a decent like Thunderbolt KVM setup that could actually swap like my hubs back and

Christina: Yes.

MacBook Pro and Studio Comparisons

Brett: Um, so, ’cause I, I have a studio and I have my, uh, Infor MacBook Pro [00:43:00] and I actually work mostly on the MacBook Pro. Um, but if I could easily dock it and switch everything on my desk over to it, I would, I would work in my office more often.

’cause honestly, the M four MacBook Pro is, it’s a better machine than the original studio was. Um, and I haven’t upgraded my studio to the latest, but, um, I imagine the new one is top notch.

Christina: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Brett: my, my other one, a couple years old now is already long in the tooth.

Christina: No, I mean, they’re still good. I mean, it’s funny, I saw that some YouTube video the other day where they were like, the best value MacBook you can get is basically a 4-year-old M1 max. And I was like, I don’t know about that guys. Like, I, I kind of disagree a little bit. Um, but the M1 max, which is I think is what is in the studio, is still a really, really good ship.

But to your point, like they’ve made those, um. You know, the, the, the new ones are still so good. Like, I have an M three max as my personal laptop, and [00:44:00] that’s kind of like the dog chip in the, in the m um, series lineup. So I kind of am regretful for spending six grand on that one, but it is what it is, and I’m like, I’m not, I’m not upgrading.

Um, I mean, maybe, maybe in, in next year if, if the M five Pro, uh, or M five max or whatever is, is really exceptional, maybe I’ll look at, okay, how much will you give me to, to trade it in? But even then, I, I, but I feel like I’m at that point where I’m like, it gets to a point where like it’s diminishing returns.

Um, but, uh, just in terms of my own budget. But, um, yeah, the, the new just info like pro or or max, whatever,

Brett: I have, I have an M four MacBook Pro sitting around that I keep forgetting to sell. Uh, it’s the one that I, it only had a 256 gigabyte hard drive,

Jeff: what happened to me when I bought my M1,

Brett: and I, and I regretted that enough that I just ordered another one. But, uh, for various reasons, I couldn’t just return the one I didn’t

Jeff: ’cause it was.[00:45:00]

Brett: so now I, now I have to sell it and I should sell it while it’s still a top of the line machine

Christina: Sell it before, sell, sell, sell, sell it before next month, um, or, or February or whenever they sell it before then the, the pros come out. ’cause right now the M five base is out, but the pros are not. So I think feel like you could still get most of your value for it, especially since it has very few battery cycles.

Be sure to put the battery cycles on your Facebook marketplace or eBay thing or whatever. Um, I bought my, uh, she won’t listen to this so she won’t know, but, um, they, there was a, a killer Cyber Monday deal, uh, for Best Buy where they had like a, the, the, the, so it’s several years old, but it was the, the M two MacBook Air, but the one that they upgraded to 16 gigs of Ram when Apple was like, oh, we have to have Apple Intelligence and everything, because they actually thought that they were actually gonna ship Apple Intelligence.

So they like went back and they, like, they, they, you know, retconned like made the base model MacBook Air, like 16 [00:46:00] gigs. Um, and, uh, anyway, it was, it was $600, um,

Jeff: still crazy.

Christina: which, which like even for like a, a, a 2-year-old machine or whatever, I was like, yeah, she, my sister, I think she’s on like, like a 2014 or older than that.

Like, like MacBook Air. She doesn’t even know where the MagSafe is. I don’t think she even knows where the laptop is. So she’s basically doing everything like on her phone and I’m like, okay, you need a laptop of some type, but at this point. I do feel strongly that like the, the, the $600 or, or, or actually I think it was $650, it was actually less, it is actually more expensive than what the, the, the Cyber Monday sale was, um, the M1, Walmart, MacBook Air.

I’m like, absolutely not like that is at this point, do not buy that. Right? Like, I, especially with eight gigs of ram, I’m, I’m like, it’s been, it’s five years old. It’s a, it was a great machine and it was great value for a long time. $200. Cool, right? Like, if you could get something like use and, and, and, and if you could replace the battery or, you know, [00:47:00] for, for, you know, not, not too much money or whatever.

Like, I, I, I could see like an argument to be made like value, right? But there’d be no way in hell that I would ever spend or tell anybody else to spend $650 on that new, but $600 for an M two with

Jeff: Now we’re talking.

Christina: which has the redesign brand new. I’m like, okay. Spend $150 more and you could have got the M four, um, uh, MacBook Air, obviously all around Better Machine.

But for my sister, she doesn’t need that,

Jeff: What do we have to do to put your sister in this M two MacBook

Christina: that, that, that, that, that, that’s exactly it. So I, I, I was, well, also, it was one of those things I was like, I think that she would rather me spend the money on toys for my nephew for Santa Claus than, than, uh, giving her like a, a processor upgrade. Um,

Jeff: Claus isn’t real.

Brett: Oh shit.

Jeff: Gotcha. Every year I spoil it for somebody. This year it was Christina and Brett. Sorry guys.

Brett: right. Well, can I tell you guys

Jeff: Yeah. [00:48:00] Brett Software.

Brett: two quick projects before we do

Jeff: Hold on. You don’t have to be quick ’cause you could call it

Brett: We’re already at 45 minutes and I want

Jeff: What I’m saying, skip GrAPPtitude. This is it?

Brett: okay.

Christina: us about Mark. Tell us about your projects.

Brett: So, so Mark three is, there’s a public, um, test flight beta link. Uh, if you go to marked app.com, not marked two app.com, uh, marked app.com. Uh, you, there’s a link in the, in the, at the top for

Christina: Join beta. Mm-hmm.

Brett: Um, and that is public and you can join it and you can send me feedback directly through email because, um, uh, uh, the feedback reporter sucks for test flight and you can’t attach files. And half the time they come through as anonymous feedback and I can’t even follow up on ’em. So email me. But, um, I’ll be announcing that on my blog soon-ish.

Um, right now there’s like [00:49:00] maybe a couple dozen, um, testers and I, it’s nice and small and I’m solving the biggest bugs right away. Um, so that’s been, that’s been big. Like Mark, even since we last talked has added. Do you remember Jeff when Merlin was on and he wanted to. He wanted to be able to manage his styles, um, and disable built-in styles.

There’s now a whole table based style manager where you

Jeff: saw that.

Brett: you can, you can reorder, including built-in styles. You can reorder, enable, disable, edit, duplicate. Um, it’s like a full, full fledged, um, style manager. And I just built a whole web app that is a style generator that gives you, um, automatic like rhythm calculations for your CSS and you can, you can control everything through like, uh, like UI fields instead of having to [00:50:00] write CSS.

Uh, but you can also o open up a very, I’ve spent a lot of time on the code mirror CSS editor in the web app. Uh, so, and it’s got live preview as you edit in the code mirror field. Um, so that’s pretty cool. And that’s built into marts. So if you go to style, um, generate style, it’ll load up a, a style generator for you.

Anyway, there’s, there’s a ton. I’m not gonna go into all the details, but, uh, anyone listening who uses markdown for anything, especially if you want ability to export to like Word and epub and advanced PDF export, um, join the beta. Let me know what you think. Uh, help me squash bugs. But the other thing, every time I push a beta for review before the new bug reports come in, I’ve been putting time into a tool.

Markdown Processor: Apex

Brett: I’m calling [00:51:00] Apex and um, I haven’t publicly announced this one yet, but I probably will by the time this podcast comes out.

Jeff: I mean, doesn’t this count?

Brett: It, it does. I’m saying like this, this might be a, you hear you heard it here first kind of thing, um, but if you go to github.com/tt sc slash apex, um, I built a, uh, pure C markdown processor that combines syntax from cram down GitHub flavored markdown, multi markdown maku, um, common mark.

And basically you can write syntax from any of those processors, including all of their special features, um, and in one document, and then use Apex in its unified mode, and it’ll just figure out what. All of your syntax is supposed to do. Um, so you can take, you can port documents from one platform to another [00:52:00] without worrying about how they’re gonna render.

Um, if I can get any kind of adoption with Apex, it could solve a lot of problems. Um, I built it because I want to make it the default processor in marked ’cause right now, you, you have to choose, you know, cram

Christina: Which one?

Brett: mark and, and choosing one means you lose something in order to gain something.

Um, so I wanted to build a universal one that brought together everything. And I added cool features from some extensions of other languages, such as if you have two lists in a row, normally in markdown, it’s gonna concatenate those into one list. Now you can put a carrot on a line between the two lists and it’ll break it into two lists.

I also added support for a. An extension to cram down that lets you put double uh, carrots inside a table cell and [00:53:00] create a row band. So like a cell that, that expands it, you rows but doesn’t expand the rest of the row. Um, so you can do cell spans and row spans and it has a relaxed table version where you don’t have to have an alignment row, which is, uh, sometimes we just wanna make quickly table.

You make two lines. You put some pipes in. This will, if there’s no alignment row, it will generate a table with just a table body and table data cells in no header. It also allows footers, you can add a footer to a table by using equals in the separator line. Um, it, it’s,

Jeff: This is very civilized,

Brett: it is.

Christina: is amazing,

Brett: So where Common Mark is extremely strict about things, um, apex is extremely permissive.

Jeff: also itty bitty things like talk about the call out boxes from like

Brett: oh yeah, it, it can handle call out syntax from Obsidian and Bear and Xcode Playgrounds. [00:54:00] Um, and it incorporates all of Mark’s syntax for like file includes and even renders like auto scroll pauses that work in marked and some other teleprompter situations. Um, it uses file ude syntax from multi markdown, like, which is just like a curly brace and, uh, marked, which is, uh, left like a double left, uh, angle bracket and then different.

Brackets to surround a file name and it handles IA writer file inclusion where you just type a forward slash and then the name of a file and it automatically detects if that file is an image or source code or markdown text, and it will import it accordingly. And if it’s a CSV file, it’ll generate a table from it automatically. It’s, it’s kind of nuts. I, it’s kind of nuts. I could not have done this [00:55:00] without copilot. I, I am very thankful for copilot because my C skills are not, would not on their own, have been up to this task. I know enough to bug debug, but yeah, a lot of these features I got a big hand from copilot on.

Jeff: This is also Brett. This is some serious Brett Terpstra. TURPs Hard

Christina: Yeah, it is. I was gonna say, this is like

Jeff: and also that’s right. Also, if your grandma ever wrote you a note and it, and though you couldn’t really read it, it really well, that renders perfectly

Christina: Amazing. No, I was gonna say this is like, okay, so Apex is like the perfect name ’cause this is the apex of Brett.

Jeff: Yes. Apex of Brett.

Christina: That’s also that, that’s, that’s not an alternate episode title Apex of Brett. Because genuinely No, Brett, like I am, I am so stunned and impressed. I mean, you all, you always impressed me like you are the most impressive like developer that I, that I’ve ever known.

But you, this is incredible. And, and this, I, I love this [00:56:00] because as you said, like common Mark is incredibly strict. This is incredibly permissive. But this is great. ’cause there are those scenarios where you might have like, I wanna use one feature from one thing or one from another, or I wanna combine things in various ways, or I don’t wanna have to think about it, you know?

Brett: I aals, I forgot to mention I aals inline attribute list, which is a crammed down feature that lets you put curly brackets after like a paragraph and then a colon and then say, dot call out inside the curly brackets. And then when it renders the markdown, it creates that paragraph and adds class equals call out to the paragraph.

Um, and in, in Cramon you can apply these to everything from list items to list to block quotes. Like you can do ’em for spans. You could like have one after, uh, link syntax and just apply, say dot external to a link. So the IAL syntax can add IDs classes and uh, arbitrary [00:57:00] attributes to any element in your markdown when it renders to HTML.

And, uh, and Apex has first class support for I aals. Was really, that was, that

Christina: that was really hard,

Brett: I wrote it because I wanted, I wanted multi markdown, uh, for my prose writing, but I really missed the als.

Christina: Yes. Okay. Because see, I run into this sort of thing too, right? Because like, this is a problem like that. I mean, it’s a very niche problem, um, that, that, you know, people who listen to this podcast probably are more familiar with than other types of people. But like, when you have to choose your markdown processor, which as you said, like Brett, like that can be a problem.

Like, like with, with using Mark or anything else, you’re like, what am I giving up? What do I have? And, and like for me, because I started using mul, you know, markdown, um, uh, largely because of you, um, I think I was using it, I knew about it before you, but largely because of, of, of you, like multi markdown has always been like kind of my, or was historically my flavor of choice.

It has since shifted to being [00:58:00] GitHub, labor bird markdown. But that’s just because the industry has taken that on, right? But there were, you know, certain things like in like, you know, multi markdown that work a certain way. And then yeah, there are things in crammed down. There are things in these other things in like, this is just, this is awesome.

This

Brett: It is, the whole thing is built on top of C mark, GFM, which is GitHub’s port of common mark with the GitHub flavored markdown

Christina: Right.

Brett: Um, and I built, like, I kept that as a sub-module, totally clean, and built all of this as extensions on top of Cmar, GFM, which, you know, so it has full compatibility with GitHub and with Common Merck by out, like outta the box.

And then everything else is built on top of that. So it, uh, it covers, it covers all the bases. You’ll love it

Christina: I’m so excited. No, this is awesome. And I

Brett: blazing fast. It can render, I have a complex document that, that uses all of its features and it can render it in [00:59:00] 0.006 seconds.

Christina: that’s awesome.

Jeff: Awesome.

Christina: That’s so cool. No, this is great. And yeah, I, and I think that honestly, like this is the sort of thing like if, yeah, if you can eventually get this to like be like the engine that powers like mark three, like, that’ll be really slick, right? Because then like, yeah, okay, I can take one document and then just, you know, kind of, you know, wi with, with the, you know, ha have, have the compatibility mode where you’re like, okay, the unified mode or whatever you’re calling it, be like, okay, it’ll render all of it.

Like maybe having, you know, a a, a caveat on there that’s like, okay, you might run into some breaking things if there’s some things that conflict or whatever. So like, keep that, you know in mind. But the, the less people have to think about what, like

Brett: well, yeah,

Christina: marked an inch and

Brett: wanna open, you wanna open documents that, that are written for GitHub. You wanna open documents that you created in obsidian. You wanna open your bear documents like every, every source you have has slightly different syntax. So one. [01:00:00] One processor to rule them all kind of makes sense.

Christina: It totally does. And I think, I mean, you know, and I, I don’t know like how useful this would be for a lot of people, but like I’m, I am imagining a scenario, like you’re talking about this, like, if you have a website and like you’re wanting to, you know, render things and, and not having to have, you know, the, the different c files for each processor, right.

And then have a different, like, you know, um, you know, send, you know, thing at the top to basically, I guess like define it, right? Like to basically just have that kind of bundled in, like with, with your blog editor or, or whatever. Like you can be like, all right, whatever, whatever. Now I can know whatever markdown file I’m throwing in here, it’s gonna render the way that it’s intended to.

Brett: I’m thinking about writing a Jekyll extension to make it a default renderer for Jekyll as well, because it can handle pretty much like, I have to see how it handles liquid syntax in com in compatibility with Jekyll. But anyway, yeah.

Christina: No, but that, but that, that, but that could be cool too. ’cause [01:01:00] to your point, like if you have that, like if it’s Jekyll or some other, you know, you know, um, a blog engine or whatever with whether it’s, you know, static site thing or WordPress or whatever, like, then you could just be like, okay, I could take this thing from obsidian, or I could take this thing from something else and, and drop it in and have it render and know that it’s gonna render the right way.

And I don’t have to worry, do I have a plugin installed? Am I formatting this the right way? Like, whatever the case may be, or if, if this takes off, right? Like for, for LLMs, if they’re, you know, coming up with stuff, you know, to go in whatever, you know, JavaScript framework, you know, you want, like not having to worry about, okay, get another thing to, to, to bundle on top of something.

Brett: I get so many support requests these days from people who copy pasted chat, GPTs, markdown, output, and chat. GPD honestly doesn’t really understand markdown. Um, and, but they get this, they, they didn’t write it. They just assume it will work, and they have no idea what processor it needs. So they don’t even know what choice to [01:02:00] make because they weren’t really part of generating the syntax to begin

Christina: Oh yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah. Which, which, yeah, it’s a problem, right? Because it then it’s gonna be with whatever chat GBT saw, and in most cases it is probably gonna be GitHub flavored markdown. ’cause that’s what most of things are. But it might be older, right? It depends on what it is. It may, it’s crammed down.

Maybe it’s, you know, something else may,

Brett: Maybe it’s bar ruku

Christina: yeah, maybe it’s, maybe it’s something that made up,

Brett: Che GPT. Yeah. Sometimes makes up, uh, its own syntax. And people will be like, why doesn’t this work? And I’ll be like, I have never seen this

Christina: this does not actually exist,

Brett: I don’t think this is.

Christina: This, this is not a valid markdown

Brett: if you can show me where this does work, I can help you figure out how to make it work in Marked, but I don’t think it works anywhere.

Christina: No, it probably doesn’t. ’cause what’s happening is that it’s, you know, it’s generating things based on what it thinks the rules are, but it’s not being given anything. Although now this makes me think this would be a cool thing, like to use with Claude skills or something where you could maybe point Claude skills to this [01:03:00] library and basically be like, render, you know, markdown that I’m requesting you and render using this library.

Right. So then you, then, then, then you could know like definitively, like on a, on a, you know, reproducible basis that it’s going to, to do that. But like, like, use this processor. But that way you don’t have to have like separate rules and everything set up for each, for

Brett: it has a, it has a full CAPI. And can, and the build system will generate Xcode frameworks for you. Um, so this could be easily incorporated into, you know, your favorite, uh, app. You could ask them to like, oh, can we switch from Carbon Meck to Apex? And then I can use all my syntax in your app. Yeah,

Christina: No, I think that would be sick.

Brett: I’m pretty excited about it.

I, I hope it, I hope it takes off. We’ll see.

Christina: great. Yeah. When, when, when you’re, once you have a blog post and stuff on this, um, you should submit this to Hacker News, [01:04:00] or, or let me know and I’ll, I’ll submit it to

Brett: I’m gonna, I’m gonna send a copy to Gruber and see what he thinks he Gruber is very, um, particular about what markdown flavors he will endorse, and I’ve never quite figured out. Where the line is for him. Like he, he, he loves GitHub flavor markdown. He hates multi markdown. Um, and like there’s reasoning behind it isn’t always, um, consistent.

And, and so I, he may, he may hate Apex, he may think it’s worth mentioning on his huge social platforms. We’ll find out anyway. Anyway. All right. Do you guys wanna fit in a quick aptitude or are we skipping it?

Christina: If we wanna, if we can go real fast, we can do rapid lightning round, I think that’d

Brett: Yeah, rapid lightning round. I’ll kick it off. I found this app a while ago [01:05:00] called Indigo, and it is a bare metal map app for Mac where like for serving virtual websites and you load it up, you create a stack, which is like Nginx or Apache, and then PHP, um, and you can add MySQL or post post Postgres and like you build like whatever stack you need for an app and then you add a virtual website to it and then it just serves it up on your machine.

And you can go to your, your local virtual website, I, uh, URL and see your directory served. And like, this is what I used to do with M and virtual host X, neither of which are working for me very well anymore. Uh, VIR virtual host is unsupported at this point, and map is kind of. It just doesn’t work for me anymore.

Christina: And, and, and it’s been kind of an abandoned wear state, like [01:06:00] where they continue to charge money for it for years. And I haven’t looked into it since the Apple silicon transition, but they didn’t handle it. But even before that transition, I kind of, and I paid for it for years, and I was like, I’m not paying for, and I was like, I’m not paying for upgrades anymore.

Like you’re not actually actively developing stuff, and I’m new to.

Brett: oh, go ahead. Sorry.

Christina: I was gonna say, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve tried other solutions, like there was local, there are a few other things, but none that do what you’re talking about where you could just, you know, point it at a local URL and have it served

Brett: Yeah. Um, and Indigo, you can run for free. It will constantly remind you about upgrading, but I have not paid for it yet. Um, I’m waiting to see how active development remains. Uh, if. If, because it kind of, it started strong and then it kind of plateaued. And I’m not, I’m not a hundred percent sure it’s gonna last yet.

Uh, it’s the best solution I have for now. And if it looks like development will continue, I will gladly pay for it.

Christina: Totally, totally. Yeah. That was gonna be my [01:07:00] question for you. ’cause I looked at this, uh, I, sorry, I know we’re supposed to go short, but, ’cause I, but I, but I was looking at this when, when, um, I was reading the notes in advance and I was like, is development still active? Because I’ll use it for free, but before I drop down 80 bucks a year or whatever it is they want, I wanna actually know that this is being actively worked on.

Brett: Yeah. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll update, I’ll update you in a few months and see if they, uh, if they’re updating, but, all right. That’s it.

Jeff: Awesome. I’ll do my lightning round. It’s the same thing I always do, which is come up with something that I, I used, uh, five years ago, but I’m using again. So I was doing a writing project for work. It was really complex. I was making a bunch of tabs in, in Google Docs, which by the way, generally I love the feature, but what it’s not as scripter, and it was such a complex thing I was trying to work on, and it was like this client that has.

Like a ridiculous amount of like, frameworks, language, and uh, and I needed to be able to move it around, whatever. And I’m like, this happens to me every couple years. I’m like, this sucks. I’m having such a hard time.

Scrivener and Writing Tools

Jeff: I was like, oh, fucking Scrivener. So I opened up [01:08:00] Scrivener. I have no idea what’s changed in Scrivener ’cause I use it the same way every time.

Um, but God bless Scrivener. And I think what I’m gonna do this time, one of my new favorite things to use AI for is to take a change log when I haven’t used something in like two years. Throw the change, log in and being like, give me five things I need to try with very blatant steps. So maybe I need to do Scrivener.

But anyway, it remains, there’s nothing, there’s nothing else. I mean, I know there’s people that will say, you could do this, this, this, but for me there’s nothing else. And, uh, and also works with the new marked in extra special ways as I imagine, uh, much like my grandma’s handwriting.

Brett: Yeah,

Christina: And,

Brett: Mark’s. Mark Scrivener integration is completely rewritten. All native can handle all kinds of new, uh, document formats, uh, in a way that you don’t have to think about. You just drag your Scribner file on and it should just render. But

Christina: Amazing.

Brett: I would love it if people would test that out

Jeff: I’ll test it out today actually, ’cause I’m using it.

Christina: Amazing. Yeah, no, I think [01:09:00] I, I think, um, I think, um, what, what was I gonna say? Uh, yeah, Scribner is, is great. Um, I, I have bitched about this before. I think last time we talked about this, I wish that the way that they handled, like cloud kind of stuff,

Jeff: Oh my God,

Christina: was better, but, but like,

Jeff: collaborate a little

Christina: yeah.

Like, or, or just have like a built in like way of, you know, the, like the, the, the, the way that it works right now, it’s not ideal, but, but like, it is such a good app and, and I am like very happy with, with, with what they’ve done. And I, I just looked back like, I bought 3.0, I think as soon as 3.0 came out, that was in 2018.

Like,

Jeff: Yeah,

Christina: I, I almost feel bad that that was, it was like May 21st, 2018 was the last time I bought it. And I think before that I bought it in. Like 2014, um, or, or, or 2013. So I, anyway, they, they provide updates for probably too long. Um, but, but Scribner’s awesome.

Jeff: yeah,

Brett: I don’t know how to [01:10:00] pronounce the developer’s name, but I think it’s ioa IOA.

Christina: yeah,

Jeff: you have them on? Uh, Systematic, I remember that was how I learned about Scrivener.

Christina: yeah. Literature and, yeah, literature and, and Latte is the company name, but I don’t know how to, how you pronounce them. The, the, the developer’s name, but No, but they’re, um, but they’re, they’re, they’re great people. And, um,

Brett: Yeah. Very cool. And they’ve given me Scribner for free for years now, so I could work on marked integration,

Christina: Amazing. Amazing. Well, and like, honestly, they do great stuff. Uh, one thing just real quickly, I, I know we’re supposed to be super fast, but this was annoying. Um, uh, uh, uh, Kirkham, uh, mle, um, who, uh, I think a, a number of us know who, uh, who writes for the Scribner blog. Um, and he was like, he’s been a long time, like, like Mac, um, uh, writer, I think he wrote, wrote for like Mac Tips and, and Mac World and places like that,

Brett: tidbits, I

Christina: tidbits he had.

Yeah. Um, a great guy. Um, he, uh, this sucks. Uh, they had to like have a whole thing on their blog vault. Why do I see AI prompts in my Scrivener projects on Mac? There’s no AI [01:11:00] with Scrivener at all, but, but.

Brett: tools.

Christina: Correct, correct. And so, and, but, but understandably, many people of the core Scribner audience are gonna be very, very sensitive to seeing any AI shit.

And so simply by having these, because if you’re using a, if you build a native app, Mac app the right way, and you use like, you know, native like the text fields, then like the, the, the bullshit AI writing stuff that is, look, if it were useful, I wouldn’t even be mad at it, but it’s not useful. So that’s where I get pissed off.

Like, honestly, that’s where my consternation comes in. But, uh, but um, someone in a group chat that I’m in was like, imagine having to like do a blog post to like, explain why your operating system is doing this and not your app.

Jeff: yeah.

Christina: Like, that’s, that’s, that’s, that, that’s, that’s gross. Anyway. Um. Uh, but, but they’re, they’re, they’re great people.

Um, and I will be quick this time. I promise I’ve made us go long. But, uh, my pick is, uh, is Helium.

Helium Browser and Privacy Features

Christina: We’ve talked a bunch about, uh, alternative web browsers. And Helium [01:12:00] computer is, uh, where you can get this, it is in, um, beta right now for, for for Mac. Um, and I, and I think they’re gonna be coming to other platforms, but it’s basically kind of a privacy focused.

Um, a chrome fork and, um, or, or chromium browser is not really a fork. Um, and the whole thing, like it has built-in, like you block origin, it has, uh, ka e as the default, uh, search engine. But, um, like so there’s no adware, no bloat, no noise. It’s, it’s fully open source. Um, the people who make this are the same people who make Cobalt tools, which are like the web-based tools for converting anything like, like from any format to any format that is not actually just a total FF eg front end.

Like the way that they do the YouTube video conversion doesn’t actually use YY 2D LP. Um, it, it’s actually pretty, pretty cool, but I think I’ve mentioned cobalt tools on, uh, on over tire before. Uh, yeah, no, but helium, uh, computer, I really like it. The thing I really like about it is that it has, um, the, this, this bangs feature where, uh, which is something that, that, uh, Kagy can do.

[01:13:00] But, um, I think that arc let you do this too, where you can basically do like, you know, um, bang, you know, like, um, uh, K or bang kagy to search kagy bang gh to search GitHub bang W

Brett: duck, duck. Go.

Christina: Yeah, basically it has all those things, but it has support for, for more of them too. So you can choose which ones you wanna install, but like, that’s built in by default, which I think is really nice.

Um, and anyway, I, I, I like it. Like we, we’ve, we’ve talked about, um, alternative browsers here quite a bit in the past. Um, it is available, no auto updates yet for Windows, and there’s an app image for Linux, but it’s. The primary way that this is, I think, being actively developed is on, um, Mac Os, but it’s, it’s, um, it’s based on, on Google chromium, but then they’re adding in like other stuff to it.

But anyway, um, for people who are looking at wanting to check out a, a, you know, a Chrome compatible alternative browser, um,

Brett: that doesn’t support bra politics. Sure.

Christina: Right, exactly. Exactly.

Bing Delisting Incident

Brett: Um, side note, um, I we’re, I know we’re [01:14:00] so far over, but, um, I, uh, a month ago got delisted from Bing, um, like my website just, there were zero results from Brett turre.com, which also meant that I didn’t show up on Duck dot go anymore ’cause that’s where they source their results from.

And um, and I had no idea why this has happened. And, um, they still had the bang turp. Uh, like I have my own bang

Jeff: That’s right.

Brett: dot go. Um, and that, that still worked, but my website was no longer there. Um, so I started doing all the debugging. I found, uh, six or seven other bloggers that had had the same thing happen, and some of them got an explanation, most of them didn’t.

I finally got a response from Bing Webmaster Tools and they said they were going to review it and it would take a couple weeks. It took a couple weeks, and then they sent me an email that said, oh, you’re good. [01:15:00] And all of a sudden I was back and they explained nothing. I have no idea why I was suddenly delisted and summarily restored,

Jeff: Wow,

Brett: um, but the nightmare is over.

I’m back now.

Jeff: Welcome back, Brett.

Brett: Thank you.

Christina: back.

Brett: Thanks everybody.

Jeff: You should also get some sleep.

Christina: Yes. Get some sleep.

Brett: Get some

Jeff: to talk to you all.

Christina: Yeah, likewise, likewise. See you guys all later. Bye.

Jeff: Bye.

Jeff and Brett are joined by Merlin Mann, who brings his usual blend of humor and chaos, including witty takes on knife-brandishing, app issues, and nostalgic TV shows. They discuss everything from kids growing up to intense medical appointments. The trio dives into language usage pet peeves and the weird world of higher education, touching on family, technology, and just how much they can all survive. Entertaining and, as always overtired.

Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all eCommerce in the US, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark, to brands just getting started. Get started today at shopify.com/overtired.

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Check out more episodes at overtiredpod.com and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Find Brett as @ttscoff, Christina as @film_girl, Jeff as @jsguntzel, and follow Overtired at @ovrtrd on Twitter.

Chekov’s Roast

Introduction and Guest Welcome

Jeff: [00:00:00] is the Overtired podcast. I am Jeff Severance. Gunzel. Uh, we have Brett Terpstra. Christina is not here this week, and we have a very special guest who’s brandishing a knife? Merlin Mann. Welcome Merlin Mann.

Merlin: Brandish. Hi guys. Thanks for having me.

Jeff: You’re welcome.

Merlin: Nice to be here.

Jeff: Mm-hmm.

Merlin: Oh, sorry. Should I be funnier? Should I be funnier? Oh, I’m sorry.

Jeff: Dance monkey?

Merlin: Let’s see.

Technical Difficulties and Knife Jokes

Merlin: It’s, uh, 22 minutes after D Oh, last 50 minutes trying to get connected to your cockamamie series of apps. And now I’m the weird guy

playing with a knife. F am I

Jeff: Fucking weirdo.

Merlin: Oh, hey. Hey guys.

Thanks. I, I, I’m gonna figure out what, what I, what I’ve done to Christine someday. I’m not sure I wanna know at this point, but

I don’t know why I

Brett: miss your last one too?

Merlin: I think I’ve talked to Christine twice in the last

Brett: We, we call you, we call you when Christina can’t make it. ’cause you,

Merlin: make sure you call her Christina. I, I You called her Christine earlier. [00:01:00] No, I, I, I, I misspoke.

Brett: you’re, you’re, you’re like the perfect fill for Christina. You, you both can opine about, just about any topic.

Merlin: Mm-hmm.

Brett: Elaborate.

Merlin: I

just, I wanna be

Jeff: or elaborate?

Brett: Yes.

Merlin: I want to be supportive to whatever it is that you guys want to do. ’cause you both seem a little bit, now the, the listener cannot see, they’ve, oh, by the way, we’re, I, I can see you guys and myself on video, which I did not know at 10 0 6 this morning. Um, I wanna be supportive ’cause you guys both look like you’re physically and emotionally falling apart.

Since

I got on this call with your cockamamie app, did you know there’s a separate cockamamie app, uh, you could also use instead of Chrome or Vivaldi?

Then it wouldn’t let me, it said there all because I got the sparkle update on that and that had an error. So I went back to Vivaldi. Steven, I know you’ll listen and you’re gonna hear me bitching about the goddamn app.

Hey guys.

Music and TV Show Discussions

Jeff: Have you ever listened to the, to the Max Richter, uh, recomposed of the Four Seasons?

Merlin: Yeah, it’s [00:02:00] really pretty. I do, I do. I like it a lot. I think it’s, I think it’s really pretty and I like the way that it, like hints at elements that you’ll like, even if you aren’t, don’t know if, if you don’t think you’re familiar with the Four Seasons or you might be a little familiar with the Four Seasons, like you’ve heard it having brunch

when you used to have money, that kind of thing.

Uh, the way that it just kind of weaves in and out. I think it’s really pretty. I think he’s a very interesting

person.

Jeff: is very interesting.

Merlin: were watching, uh, the Leftovers, which is a big rewatch for my wife and me in a first time for my lackadaisical team. And every time that gorgeous theme comes on, he, he doesn’t even look up from his phone.

He goes, get another theme.

Jeff: that’s a

Merlin: Because as of yesterday, my child is 18 years of age.

Brett: my, so.

Jeff: as Wait, what? As of yesterday, my son is 17.

Merlin: 10,

Jeff: no, as of Saturday, as of yesterday, my brother is 55.

Merlin: I do that,

I do that.

Brett: my partner’s dad has been dead for

Jeff: we cheese.

Brett: Um,

Merlin: No shit. As [00:03:00] of October, uh, as of, wait a minute, as of two days from now on, my father will have been dead for 51 years. So that’s a feather in your

cap.

Brett: You guys have, you, you guys have paternal death day anniversaries near each other. I should

Merlin: Title

Brett: Um,

Jeff: Paternal death days.

Brett: um,

Merlin: Death Day is the worst. Tom Cruise movie.

Brett: I’m a big, I’m a big fan of audio design in, um, TV shows and when it’s done well, it’s amazing. And the, the thing that’s. That really got me going right now is the, like intro song for interview with the vampire. The, the song is so discordant.

It makes you feel like

vomiting.

Jeff: huh?

Brett: crazy.

Merlin: It’s so what?

Brett: So discordant, it makes you feel like vomiting. It’s just this five seconds of like, like every instrument in the orchestra [00:04:00] being tuned simultaneously.

Merlin: Ooh.

Brett: Yeah. It’s wild.

Merlin: Do you think it’s effective? Is it,

is it

Brett: sets the stage.

Merlin: I filled that with Christopher, uh, Nolan.

Brett: Yeah.

Merlin: Like he’s, he said, or, you know, like the Johnny Greenwood soundtrack and that, uh, Winick Oil movie,

the PSH movie. Um, Johnny, uh, uh, no Country for Old Oil cans.

Uh, there will be

Blood. There will be Blood.

It’s got that, that could be John Green Johnny Greenwood soundtrack. You think it’s effective though?

It,

Brett: Oh my God.

Merlin: yeah. I, it’s, um, I remember this is a phenomenon. I remember first noticing, and I, every time I say this, I feel like I, I sound like I’m trying to be fancy and I’m not, but like, I, I like everybody, you know, I grew up watching tv.

I watched, I loved Law and Order in the nineties. I would watch it all day on a and e while I was making web pages, but after I watched The Wire. After I had like, uh, shotgunned a lot of the wire, it became more and more difficult to go back to regular procedurals with the same frame of mind. Now if you’re folding [00:05:00] laundry or you’re in a hotel room or whatever, you can always get back in that frame of mind.

But for me, that’s like task Master and Survivor right now where I watch so much Task Master that Survivor, where the challenges have been getting less important over time and it’s really more about the drama. But you know how it is. Do you know what I’m talking about though? You get into something and then other stuff starts to feel like kind of a pale

Jeff: Well, Deadwood and other westerns with a couple of exceptions.

Merlin: deadwood’s pretty spec, especially those first

three episodes.

Jeff: oh

Brett: see Wayward?

Jeff: No,

Merlin: No. Is it good?

Brett: It’s so good. That was, that one made all other shows pale for me for the three days it took us to binge

Merlin: Netflix? I feel like it’s been, oh wait, is it with, uh, is it with Tony Colette? No.

Who’s in

Brett: May. It’s May. What’s her name from the handsome podcast? What’s their name? Um,

Merlin: Oh, Mae Martin.

Brett: Yeah.

Merlin: Who was also on taskmaster. She, they, God, my, so I, I think I knew of Mae Martin when they were less commonly known as they, and now [00:06:00] my wife keeps correcting me. Yes. Uh, I could not get with that. I could not get with the dialogue. There’s a lot of, as you know, Bob, but my wife loved it.

Brett: I loved it.

Merlin: Well, as you know, we’re in a relationship and this is the house that we’re going to be

Jeff: What about complimentary shows? Right now my wife and I are watching Slow Horses and the Diplomat at the same time,

Merlin: Oh man. That Hal is a stinker.

What are we gonna do with Hal Brett? Do you watch a lot of tv?

Brett: do,

Merlin: Yeah.

Um, Hal’s a Stinker. I love that show. Did you know the

Jeff: are you watching the current season because

you meet Todd. Todd,

Merlin: is that, is that the, the, the.

Jeff: the first man

Merlin: I love, I love Todd. And when he bleeds on the oysters, it really

Jeff: Amazing. Brett, you

Merlin: Anyway.

Health Issues and Personal Stories

Merlin: Hey everybody, it’s Overtired and Christina, ie. Is not here.

Brett: should we do a, should we do a quick check-in? We don’t have to spend a whole episode on it. It tends to bleed over either [00:07:00] way.

Merlin: made a Hitler mustache outta

my

Jeff: that. Don’t do it.

Merlin: Isn’t that kind of funny?

This is my last territorial demand.

Jeff: did that for a minute.

Merlin: Ann Ecstasy, Dayton land.

Brett: to that end, I will just say I’ve been up since 2:00 AM I

Jeff: is what your head sounds like.

Brett: I have added time tracking and plugin architecture to my NA project and set up

Merlin: Not applicable project.

Brett: next action project, um, and, and have also spun up a server to handle payment processing for Mark three all in the last 48 hours

Merlin: Mark three super recent? Is it super

recent

Brett: not out yet.

Merlin: I, okay,

Jeff: It’s

Brett: coming In the next couple weeks, the beta will be out,

Merlin: well ask me why. I know. I’ll tell you why. Because I wanted to go do something with Mark and I couldn’t figure it out and I was trying to change something [00:08:00] and um, and then I was searching around and then I did a search and I searched on marked, and then I saw Mark three and I went there and I kept clicking on stuff and it didn’t go

Brett: I know, I I, put that,

Jeff: did that same thing.

Brett: I

Merlin: Also, you still can’t hide style sheets. You don’t wanna see

Brett: I put that website up. You, you just remove them. It’s in preferences.

Merlin: Amblin

Brett: oh, you can’t, you can’t remove the default

Merlin: Oh, are those style sheets? Did I get that wrong?

Brett: They’re styles. Um,

Merlin: What if I wanted my numbered ones to go to the ones that I want instead of having to use the extra medic key?

Brett: um,

Jeff: Mm, feedback.

Brett: I will, I will take that under

Merlin: I am Brett. I don’t sleep. Meet mo. Meet mo.

Brett: I put that website up, um, as a placeholder while

Merlin: They gobble it up fast, don’t they?

Brett: and I, I, uh, I put, I put no index on it and it still got picked up by all the search engines.

Merlin: Oh, that’s such a bummer. Oh, that sucks.

Brett: I either I can just take it down, but it’s [00:09:00] so

Merlin: No, it looks pretty. I’m looking forward to it. Sign me up, man. I’m ready.

Jeff: I’m excited.

Merlin: Is set up. Okay. Am I okay to use set up?

Brett: Oh yeah.

Merlin: I’m gonna say this in a way that I, I normally don’t, ’cause I actually really usually don’t care. You’re, you’re a grown man. You can decide what programs you want to be in.

Am I, I’m not harming developers, but you.

Am I harming? Am

Jeff: great, Brett has a great, take on this. I asked him early on.

Brett: half my income comes from set and it’s sustained repeatable income that like I didn’t have to put out of subscription based

Merlin: Is it based on seats? Is it based on number of installations?

Brett: It’s based on usage.

Jeff: It’s based on how long it’s

Brett: every, every time you, every time you open the app, the developer gets a little bit. Um, and then for apps like say default folder X that are always running, um, it, it, it has different, um, calculations

Merlin: to feel bad about using

Brett: No, no,

Jeff: I just opened, I just opened, marked. Did you get a [00:10:00] little cha-ching sound in there?

Merlin: got, he has a bespoke separate stream deck that just lets him know when he needs Six Sense.

It’s called, it’s called the Spotify plugin.

Brett: See the new stream deck software?

Jeff: No, sir.

Merlin: Stream deck software where you can’t quit it with, you can’t get it out of the forward facing app without quitting the whole fucking app, that app.

Jeff: Ooh.

Merlin: Okay. No, I

Brett: they just released an 800 megabyte update that adds a whole bunch of stuff, including a virtual stream deck. And, um, you can now apply single double and Long press taps to every button on your

Merlin: Really? Oh

my

Jeff: like, no matter how old your stream deck,

Brett: Yeah.

Jeff: Hmm,

Merlin: on 7 0 3.

Checking for updates. All right, well I’m gonna check that out. Thank you, Brett. I’m gonna write that down.

You have my

Brett: for my check-in.

Merlin: Goodnight everybody. Da.

Brett: Thank

Jeff: Your check-in has been up since two and, uh, getting shit done

Brett: Oh, I should mention, um, I found a new [00:11:00] doctor that is a specialist in POTS and EDS and dismia and,

Jeff: in Winona,

Brett: yeah. Um, lives in lacrosse. Practices in lacrosse, but comes to Winona, like on Thursdays

and

Jeff: Lacrosse is Wisconsin

Merlin: post organizational tit syndrome.

Brett: Yes. Um, the.

Jeff: they used to call it that.

Brett: Lacrosse is known as the drunkest city in the u in the us but, uh, pots is post postural ortho something, tachycardia syndrome

but um,

Jeff: Is it like a purely POTS doctor?

Brett: um, her specialty, she’s, she’s an np

Merlin: it on the sign. Purely

Brett: and her specialty is pots above all else, but she is very well versed in all autonomic function disorders. Um, so she ordered like [00:12:00] 15 vials of blood,

Merlin: What? That’s a lot of blood.

Brett: I have never had a problem having blood drawn before. I have no fear

Jeff: But 15 vials was a

Brett: don’t

Merlin: When I was in the hospital, I don’t think I ever

Brett: I passed out. It’s the first time I’ve

ever

Merlin: From not enough

Brett: out from blood.

Merlin: So like that’s like more than giving

Jeff: I think they call

Brett: I don’t, I don’t know if that’s true and I don’t know if I might have just had some kind of vagus nerve reaction to you

Merlin: I gotta learn more

Brett: 10. I passed out after 10 vials, and

Merlin: Oh no, Brett. Well that must have made it easier to get the rest.

Brett: well they said, I, when I came to and I was like cracking jokes with the, with the people there.

They’re like, oh, we can just, you know, take the 10 vials we have and spread them out across 15. I’m like, what?

Merlin: just basic science. Why did he do it with three?

Brett: but they also had me do

Merlin: You sure you went to regular science doctor school?

Jeff: a what? A what Table test.

Brett: A tilt [00:13:00] table test. They like, they lay you on a table, they for like 10 minutes and they take your blood pressure every minute and then the table tilts up to 70 degrees and you have to stand there for 15 minutes at 70 degrees while they take your blood

Jeff: Wait, stand. Stand on the table. You’re standing on the table.

Brett: the table tilts.

Merlin: Okay, so, so, so my hand, my hand, is, that’s 90. And so then it goes like this. So you’re at a slight. Okay.

And so is it, is it sort of like how some people pass out because they stood up too fast?

It’s a way to

Brett: That’s what, that’s what pots. Is. Pots. Pots is

Merlin: Oh, so it’s not your, it’s not your all, it’s not your fucked up brain. It’s your

body. Oh shit, I didn’t

Brett: And cause I started passing out, I would stand up and I would just pass out. Um, and that’s pots. So the tilt table was supposed to help determine what kind of pots I have.

I passed, I, I, the tilt table test revealed nothing. [00:14:00] So the fact is I do pass out. The fact is, every time I stand up, I get dizzy and have to sit back down. But the tilt table said I, I was normal. So now we have to figure out what all that means. I have another appointment with my doctor in a week.

Jeff: Tilt table test. It looks, I mean, it literally looks like Frankenstein,

Brett: Yeah,

Merlin: it,

is it, but

Jeff: that Frankenstein’s the

Merlin: in a fairly short period of time, you realized that

you would get like, what do they call it? Syncope. Like you would get dizzy and then sometimes pa you would, would you actually pass like loose consciousness?

Brett: I have passed out five times. I’ve gone to full unconsciousness, but,

Merlin: You know who hates that? Is the people who are in the room with you when that

Brett: Yeah, they

Jeff: like your, like your male person.

Merlin: Yeah.

Or your female

Jeff: no, is, this is a good story.

Brett: I went to the door. My, the, the male person rang the doorbell and I went to the door to answer it, and I opened

the door and she hands me the packages and I faint. [00:15:00] she, she’s, she’s about a foot shorter than me, but she

Merlin: Just seeing Lucille on Arrested Development, he just keep passing out.

Brett: she, she shoulders me into the

Merlin: no,

Brett: and lowers me with her shoulder. And then I woke up on the floor. But she had prevented me from like, crashing my head or anything.

Um, it was, Um, it was, some fast, right,

Merlin: that’s so

cool.

Jeff: crazy.

Brett: heroes of the US Mail Service. Um, but yeah, like I was passing out all the time kind of, and then.

I got way better at recognizing when it was going to happen. So I would just immediately sit back down or take a knee,

Merlin: Be because of, because of how you felt or because of conditions.

Brett: Um, I it, you know, I’m sure you’ve gotten lightheaded when you

Merlin: Oh, no, no, no. I, no, I’m, I’m just, I mean, like, ’cause I’ve, I’ve wondered about stuff like this too, where like, you know, one thing I, this is not a joke. Like, I’m 50 something, I’m [00:16:00] 58, I’ll be 59 next month. And like, I really, I do worry about like, my eyesight’s not as good and I worry about falling down, tripping on things.

And I don’t wanna be like a kook about it or make my family put me in. They’ll never put me in a home. They’ll just drive me to the emergency room, cut the tags outta my clothes, probably. But it’s your problem now. Hong Kong off to college. But, um, but, but no, I, I, I worry about that stuff too. So I guess I just mean like, ’cause like the thing is when you go out, it happens so fast.

You do, you get tunnel vision first.

Yeah,

Okay.

Brett: it, but

Merlin: I hate that feeling. I hate that feeling

Brett: I go from like woozy to tunnel vision to passed out in about six seconds.

Merlin: Well, the way I would put that is I go, you what’s happened to me? I ha that has happened to me a few times. Mostly when I’ve had way too much weed. Um, but you go from, everything’s fine to, this is weird to a woman is screaming in your face that, should I call 9 1 1 is the way that it feels, which is, it feels like the same way, that it’s not very fair to blame me for snoring.

If I’m

asleep and I don’t know I’m doing it. I didn’t

[00:17:00] know I was gonna pass out.

Brett: I never pass out for more than a few seconds. But when I come to you, I’ve had entire dreams,

like in those few seconds, like, I don’t know if my brain like backfills subconscious thoughts or what, but I’ll come to, and I’ll feel like I just had a good dream and it, well, I’ll be like, how long was I out?

Was that like half an hour? And be like, no, you literally just fell out and then woke up.

Jeff: wow. When I

Merlin: how, I wonder if that’s what it’s like to die. Wouldn’t it be amazing if it was that easy? It’d

Jeff: When I was 18, I stood up too fast. I passed out and I woke up in a ball saying the name Michael Jackson.

Brett: Huh? How much, how, how, how, how many drugs were involved with

Jeff: Zero Jo. I didn’t, I I’ve, I’ve

Merlin: He was very popular. Brett, he was on the radio all the time, always on the radio.

Jeff: Always on the radio. Yeah. Oh, Michael Jackson. Totally. And then I had MTV, he was on that.

Merlin: Oh yeah. He was, and he actually, he at one point apologized to Darrel Hall for the extent to which he lifted [00:18:00] parts of what became Billy Jean

Jeff: But he was only on MTV, uh, as part of a package deal with Rocket by Quincy Jones.

Merlin: Rocket

Jeff: weren’t putting black artists on. And so

the record label was like, you’re putting rocket on,

Merlin: But then Darryl Hall said, I forgive you. We all do it. But think, think about that Billie Jean. Think about how much it sounds like, um,

Jeff: Oh

Merlin: I can’t go for that.

No, can

Jeff: true. That’s true. I assume there’s a mashup

Merlin: I’m sorry, Brett. That must, that sounds stressful. That’s, that’s really stressful.

Brett: Yeah. It’s been a rough year and a half now.

Jeff: Is it, is it like basically stabilized or is it you, have you learned just to be careful?

Brett: I, I’ve learned to be careful. I’ve learned like the treatment, the drug they treat pots with is Vyvanse, which I already take, so that

worked out well.

Merlin: I wish it did anything.

Brett: the other,

Merlin: I had one an hour ago. I’m still

apparently

Brett: the other treatment is to drink two to three liters of water with five grams of salt a day. [00:19:00] Um, so I

Jeff: much is five grams of salt,

Brett: It’s, it weighs about five grams.

Um,

Jeff: That doesn’t help me.

Brett: uh, you know, those liquid IVs,

those little packets of

Jeff: oh, yeah, yeah.

Brett: those are 500 milligrams.

Jeff: Got it. Okay. Thank you. That’s all I

Merlin: this is the beauty of

metric is ’cause they all, they’re all kind of the same

Jeff: Mm-hmm.

Brett: so

Merlin: the weights, and the volumes. It makes a lot more sense.

Jeff: I’m into it. I’m just not gonna learn it. Sorry, go

Brett: element spelled LMNT, and that is one gram of salt per little packet. So I really, I just drink five of those a day.

Jeff: okay. Got it.

Merlin: Oh, I

see, I see, I

Jeff: makes sense. And that helps.

Brett: Yeah,

Merlin: The additional salt,

Brett: yeah. It, it, so I don’t understand what this means.

Merlin: controlled for a typical blood pre. I see. I don’t know a ton about this, but I’ve got high, I’ve got high

Brett: the thing is the salt doesn’t change my blood pressure. If

anything, [00:20:00] my blood pressure has gone down significantly since I started doing the salt. Um, but what it does supposedly is increase your blood volume. And I don’t know what that means or how it works, but by increasing your blood volume, it means your legs have to work less to pump blood to your brain when you stand up.

So. You’re basically just keeping your, it’s not blood

Merlin: Or if it’s making more of it or make no, yeah, no, it’s, it’s really confusing. ’cause like if you, if you stop to think about everybody, you, we use these words all the time, but if you were to like pop quiz somebody on the subway and go, well, like, tell me about the difference between heart rate and blood pressure and all these things.

It’s, you get a little confused. But blood volume, it’s, that’s, I mean, volume is what it says on the tin. It’s either getting more, it’s either more of it or it’s more like, sort of dense. You’re topping it off, you’re topping off your leg tank.

Brett: I guess Yeah. But it works. It helps.

Jeff: Hmm.

Merlin: Uh, I’m sorry [00:21:00] man.

Jeff: Yeah.

Merlin: You don’t need one more thing. Nobody needs one more

Jeff: Nobody needs one more thing.

Brett: But it, so insomnia is apparently a symptom of justia too.

Merlin: yeah, no, I mean, you, you, you having insomnia, you having sleeping problems. That’s odd. You should get a podcast.

Jeff: You should,

Brett: All right.

Jeff: man. Wow. It’s fucking crazy. Weren’t you scooting down the stairs on your butt for a while? ’cause you were afraid of passing

Brett: Yeah. Well, I had to crawl

Merlin: What can a man just Scoot Scoot down the stairs on his butt? ’cause it’s fun. Why do we need a reason for everything?

Brett: I had to crawl from the couch to my bed on multiple occasions because I couldn’t stand up for even five seconds.

Merlin: Oh my gosh. Oh, that is, that must have felt in the moment. So, panicky, scary.

Brett: Panicky. Scary.

Disability and Aging Reflections

Brett: And also, like, I don’t like the feeling of being disabled. And what I’ve been dealing with for the last year and a half is [00:22:00] coming to accept that I am now disabled, um, between like multiple bouts of extremely rapid weight gain and my back going out

Merlin: Oh my gosh,

Brett: pots and. And all of the things that have kind of, uh, floor, uh, like knocked me out of everyday life.

Um, and I, in my head I’m like, I’ll, I’ll just, I’ll get healthy again and everything will be fine. And I’m coming to realize

Merlin: that’s a young man’s

conjecture really. It really, no, no. I mean it’s, it’s super duper is, and it’s why it kind of bums me out that, that we look at disabled, that word as a binary and it’s, it bums me out. And not in the typical like boo don’t be ableist way, but in honestly practical way of like, well, sometimes you know what, even a little kid isn’t feeling as good today as another day, and some kids are better at climbing a rope and some kids can hold their pee and some kids can’t.

And like [00:23:00] through your entire life you encounter all this stuff. And if there’s anything that fucks us up, in my opinion. This is not a criticism of people who are young or of the concept of youth because I did the same thing. But you don’t understand that youth is the anomaly. Youth is the temporary condition you have.

Absolutely. You have absolutely no way of knowing. So if, so, I’m sorry. Let me take a step back and I, I promise I’m trying to be supportive here, Brett. This, I’m not trying to like hijack your topic, but it’s frustrating to me when people act like, uh, we could call it aging. You know what I would call it, I would call it still being alive.

Jeff: Uhhuh.

Merlin: Still being alive. I mean, it, it is anomalous in the sense that most people who’ve lived are dead. But that’s why you fucking people should be really happy to be alive and seek out things that make you feel better about life rather than things that make you feel, ugh.

Fucking people. With that said, um, the. The anomaly is the youth part. And you would have no way to know that ’cause you’ve never been anything but young. And so Brett, if I could say like, I used to [00:24:00] talk, I used to say like, I always used to feel more like Spider-Man or Wolverine, where I had this healing factor where like, I could drink coffee at 11 and be up at 5:00 AM or you know, whatever.

I could always bounce back. My bounce backs were really, really quick. And, um, because that’s what it is to be young. Really that’s not any special trick. I mean, that’s like, think it’s, it is a superpower to be able to reach things on a shelf. And you’re like, well, yeah, well that person’s six four. That’s why they can do that.

That’s what’s called what’s called being taller. That’s what height is. In that case though, what you can’t realize and won’t realize, and don’t worry, you’re, you’re gonna learn all this later, people, you don’t need to listen to me and you auten listen to me. Later on, you will learn. Youth is the anomaly.

And people like me and Brett and probably to some extent Jeff, go like, oh, I just need to get back to how it was. I just need to get back to this homeostatic state where I heal, where I heal, like I’m a 19-year-old man. And like, I don’t think that’s wholesome, but I do think it’s normal and I think it’s a bummer that it’s normal because the reason that it’s normal is ’cause that’s how we talk to each other.

And Dan Benjamin used to like have a lot of fun with talking about how old I am. And I’m like, well, you know, I wish my dad had gotten [00:25:00] older. I would’ve really liked that. I would love to see my dad be old and have so I could make fun of him. But he didn’t. He died when he was 45. And that really sucks. And we, I think we ought to be light in, in how we treat this stuff.

Because first of all, any, everybody’s got a quote disability. What a dumb fucking word. I mean, you know, I, I use, you know why I use the ramp at our library? I use the ramp at our library ’cause I’m lazy. I use the ramp at our library because I’m on a scooter. I’ve only ever, I think, used the ramp at our library because of infirmity, maybe once or twice ’cause of my gout or some old man disease.

But you know, like where I’ve got, like had my knee hurt or something. But the, the ramp helps everybody. The ramp harms no one. And to look at as a conveyance or an affordance for people who had this sin or bad taste to age and not be young and perfect anymore is very silly. And I know, I, I realize how this sounds.

I realize the, the, the, the, the dozens of theoretically pairs of deaf ears, this will fall upon. [00:26:00] But that’s why Brett, I think that’s what don’t you feel, find yourself feeling sort of like chastened and you’re like, my wife is still like this ’cause she’s an athlete. And I’m like, honey, we’re all getting like, it’s okay.

For things to slow down. It’s okay for things to break and remember, the grade that you get is not like how good your corpse was, but how you handled it while the corpse was still anate and like we make, I think we need to lift people up in that, trying to keep their corpse alive. Business. I lift you up.

I do it, Brad. I don’t, I don’t care. I don’t fucking care. That’s a lot to, that’s a lot to you. You’re hit getting hit on all angles.

Brett: side story. Uh, right before I logged into our, um, problematic app here, i, I, I have a special email folder that. me, um, emails that I need to reply to, and then once I reply to them, they disappear. And there was an email in there and I read it before I realized somehow an email had surfaced from 2014.

And it [00:27:00] was my kind of breakup email with Dan Benjamin when I left Five by Five.

Merlin: Oh, wow.

Brett: it was, it was quite a jolt to like be back in that kind of,

Merlin: Isn’t it? It’s so weird to get parachuted, but, but, also, it’s also the other thing with old meme emails. ’cause I run into this looking for old photos or old emails all the time where I’ll be like, oh, like there’s so little context to, to like what you’re like, you’ve gotta like kind of go back and up and down and forward and look through the history.

’cause you’ll, that isn’t that part of what’s jarring is you’re like, whoa, you wanna almost say, oh that escalated quickly. But like, you’re like, no, I, I actually escalated a normal amount over time and I just didn’t have the context. Nah, you should have warned me. I was gonna see this again. Also, also Brett, uh, fight, fight, flight, freeze, you know, um, there are people like John Cusso, whom, whom I love, who insists it’s always been fight, flight, freeze in his life.

And he is always heard that and I’m like, what the fuck are you talking about? I never heard freeze until like five years ago.

I

never, I always heard fight or flight. It’s a fight or flight. That’s, that’s all I ever heard.

Brett: I first [00:28:00] heard freeze maybe, maybe five

Jeff: yeah. Yeah. Body,

Merlin: My boy Bessel body keeps the score. And, but like if you’re, and I, I, gosh, I, I, I, I’m on, this is not a bit, this is not a bit about, you know, trigger warnings or content warnings, but, you know, if you had something physically traumatic happen to you that involved being held down or not being allowed to leave someplace, if you’ve ever been like, you know, uh, my, my roommate locked me in a locker at military school one time as a haha joke,

and there’s no amount of time when you’re locked into a children’s small clothing locker that it’s fun for the person on the inside.

It isn’t like you, gosh, I, I, it’s like, I wonder if in some lizard brain way, that is also part of it is like, I don’t want to be frozen here. Like, I, I have to, I have to get, I have to get to bed or get to the bathroom. You know? And that’s the other thing with crawling around in a situation like you’re describing is like, you might have urgency to go to the bathroom or you might be disoriented or whatever, but you gotta get there.

And like, now these two things are at war. And like, the last thing [00:29:00] I want to do is be frozen under a priest again.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Merlin: I took it a different direction at the

end.

Jeff: But the freeze is so huge because by not knowing

about it and not being common, you, you miss a whole

Merlin: And if you’ve got a DD, does

it not make sense how much freeze shit makes total sense in A DHD? Not the people who’ve heard of A DHD, but the people who have a DHD. And doesn’t that seem oddly close to procrastination in

Jeff: Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Merlin: What’s your problem, Jeff?

Jeff: I

dunno.

Merlin: guys are, you

guys are falling apart. You gotta get off these

apps. These apps. are killing you. You gotta get a normal fucking app. Can Christina get you hooked up with some kind of like, uh, some kind of like enterprise app?

Brett: probably

Merlin: I don’t remember who she works for, but like I can, can you get onto some kind of like, uh, like, I don’t know, a spec special team mojo for the enterprise?

Jeff: Hmm. Take the vowels out [00:30:00] and you’ve got an app.

Brett: she works for the company that made the place, you’re getting her show notes right now.

Merlin: Oh, I thought she worked at Microsoft. Didn’t she work at Microsoft?

Brett: She left.

Merlin: Microsoft.

Jeff: Hmm. Okay.

Merlin: Why am why am I talking like this? Y’all, y’all can’t see me? I’m talking my mouth. Oh, she got a better deal. I, I’d leave for a better deal.

Ian Mackaye and Punk Stories

Jeff: I gotta tell you guys something. This has nothing to do with anything except for

Merlin: You forgot. You forgot to hit record.

Brett: Oh shoot.

Jeff: this is super random, but I, I want to, I wanna put it in here. So, my son, who’s just turned 17, was doing a, an English class. You had to do an analysis of song lyrics, and he chose Smallpox Champion by Fugazi off the Great album in on the kill taker.

And, and he needed to just fact check that Gee Pto, who, who sings the song, had written the lyrics. So he writes to Discord records and, and asks if he could get a question to Mr. Mackay.

Two hours later, Ian Mackay writes him back on his school email account to be like, oh, yeah, that was, that was, gee, that wrote [00:31:00] that.

That was Gee, that wrote that. Yours, Ian?

Brett: Nice.

Merlin: Someday I’m gonna hear a story about this guy that makes you think he’s a real piece of shit.

Every, every single thing I’ve ever heard about this guy is, he sounds like he is a busy grownup, but he’s pretty fun. How cool. Your was your kid freaking out? Yeah. But you were freaking

Jeff: he was like, what the

Merlin: Do you know who that is?

Jeff: and I was like, you know, when I was a kid, people would write him with just issues they had or, or worries, and he would write them back. He would always write them back. And if it was two months late, he would apologize and say he was on tour. I have, I have a few friends that have these letters from him.

He would just write back and so it’s a lot easier with email, but fuck sake, he didn’t have to respond. Right.

Merlin: that’s so

Brett: photos of Ian Mackay and um, Henry Rollins at the

Jeff: At the, at the Haagen-Dazs. Yeah.

Merlin: it’s in, you know what? I can tell you exactly what it’s in, it’s in that,

Brett: Get in the van.

Merlin: no, no. The, uh, the, the, the, oh God damnit, uh, 81 82, the, the band whose, uh, [00:32:00] tour went really bad, different state of mind, uh,

movie’s

Jeff: another state of mind.

Merlin: Another State of Mind by the band is not my favorite band.

Jeff: What is the band?

Merlin: You know, the band.

But

Jeff: the cover

Merlin: everything fell apart. The everybody like flew the, their parents flew them

home from the tour. And Mike, Mike, what’s his name? Mike What’s his name, is like the only guy still, I think they go to Haagen Doss and it’s Henry Rollins. And if memory serve, it’s Henry Rollins and, and McKay in Hagen Dos, I might, this might be a fantasy or fan fiction.

I’m pretty sure it’s them at Ho and Dos where Amika worked and I think can, yeah.

Jeff: So here’s a way that Ian McKay ruined me. I had to interview him for Punk Planet and, and he was, um, it was really fun to interview him, but like he was kind of all over the place.

Ian McKay’s Hilarious SUV Game

Jeff: And I realized that those interviews with him are really edited and he was great, but he was fucking all over the place, which I loved.

But at one point he did the most UN Ian McKay thing and it has ruined me forever. ’cause I can’t not do this when I’m driving. He is like, Hey, you know what’s funny? I wish I had a recording of this because I don’t know how the fuck it came up. He’s like, you look at an SUV, we do this [00:33:00] on tour. He is like, you see an escapade?

Yeah. The word anal, anal escapade. You see an explorer, anal explorer, he see an avalanche anal avalanche. And I

Merlin: pretty, it’s pretty funny. That is

Jeff: happening right now? And so, for the rest of my life, that’s what I do. And now you will too.

Merlin: I will too. I, I add prescription to a lot of things.

Um, yeah. Try adding prescription to any, uh, especially plural. Noun.

Jeff: Oh, that’s

Merlin: Ooh, prescription Escalade. That must have been

Jeff: prescription Escalade. Yeah. Yeah.

Cross Country Team Shenanigans

Merlin: Here’s my kid. Yesterday, it was also senior day. He’s the captain of the cross country team, and

Jeff: my kids are cross country runners. What a

sweet. We just hosted the

Merlin: Oh my god, these kids are so fun. These kids. It’s like, well, you’ll see from the photo it is a lot like the bad news. Bears, uh, meets rain, man. It’s, it’s a

Jeff: We had a

Merlin: it’s a very

Jeff: team over for, for dinner. It was like 70 of ’em, and one of them was shotgunning. A LaCroix. Just like the most cross country thing ever.

Merlin: like with the pen.

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. I [00:34:00] did the whole thing.

Merlin: Ooh, LaCroix, by the way, the flattest of the busy waters.

Jeff: The flattest. All right, I’m looking at this, this image. Oh, sweet.

Merlin: Look, they made, they made these, they might be giant style masks.

Um, isn’t that cute? You,

Brett: I was in track in high school, but they made us

Jeff: Go, Billy,

Brett: country team

and I one i 100% did not sign up to run cross country. I don’t understand how

Merlin: you gotta go up hills a little bit in those.

Jeff: now and again,

Merlin: Oh man. Oh, here’s them singing ’em. Happy birthday. Okay.

Discussing Music Preferences

Merlin: Anyway, um, Hey everybody, you know what? You get through all this stuff. You get, you get through it or you die,

Jeff: social distortion.

Merlin: social

D

Jeff: band I do not like,

Merlin: I don’t care for them. It is not my thing, not my thing, but I get it.

There’s a lot of those early eighties bands where I get why people love them. People like Brett, but like they

Brett: kind of always wanted to, like social distortion,

Merlin: Yeah,

Brett: there.

Merlin: yeah. There’s, it’s,

you

Brett: to mix social distortion up with bad religion.

Jeff: Performative plaid pants.[00:35:00]

Merlin: I like

Jeff: distortion,

Merlin: Triple P, I like, um, uh, yeah. To me that’s a lot of that, uh, well, I’m not gonna say ’cause ’cause Brett will get mad. A lot of that

Brett: Why

Jeff: bad religion.

Merlin: because you like that sc bullshit.

Jeff: Oh, man. You, you guys have all toured,

Merlin: You gonna miss my, Hey, you missed my English beat beginning.

Brett: I,

I like, I like the specials. I’m not like a big

Merlin: I like English

Brett: general.

Merlin: Oh, I know, I know. Well, and and what’s the one with the guy who died? Uh, that used to be, is that the one that used to be Operation Ivy? No,

Jeff: the one with the guy who died? We’re 50 and

Merlin: the one with the guy who died. The one with the guy who died. Oh, that guy. The singing guy. Uh, rancid. Rancid. No, what are

Jeff: uh, do it again. Uh, y’all

get close.

Brett: no one, from Rancid has died. Are you talking about the Mighty, mighty Boss tones? That voice you just did.

Merlin: no, they do. Uh, it’s spin. No,

Brett: Oh,

Merlin: just kidding. I’m just no, I’m just sitting on [00:36:00] weird nineties music.

Jeff: It’s been seven

Merlin: Now the addition that Chris, the addition that the wonderful comedian Chris Fleming has made to that is he adds a very slight. Constant y sound to the beginning and, and try, try doing that song, but do it with just a little bit of a

Jeff: What song?

Merlin: yin,

Jeff: been Seven

Merlin: because no, no yin one week since you look at

Jeff: Oh, this one?

Merlin: do YY spin, um, uh, but anyway, you should check that out.

You should check out that, that, uh, show hip parade. And, uh, and the emo one is, is really, really good. And also, you know what, that guy, he also makes, um, a playlist for, uh, the trash theory guy also on, on

YouTube. Highly recommended. I like it when people make playlists of their stuff. That makes me

Brett: So Jeff, in your head, in your head, was that Prince or was it Ena

Jeff: I was going,

Merlin: oh, it spin.

Jeff: spend seven

Brett: Right, right.

Jeff: I was doing Sade. I was doing Sade. I know what Prince wrote it, but [00:37:00] I

Merlin: Oh, that’s good.

Brett: He did a really good

Jeff: Uh, yeah, he did. He was good at what he

Merlin: I just heard his, uh, somebody on the internet just posted, I’d never heard, have you heard him do a short but lovely version of a Case of You by Joni Mitchell from the same show where he premiered Purple Rain 83. It’s really pretty. It’s really

really pretty. I love, uh, if like Power Pop, uh, Jason Faulkner, formerly of Jellyfish and other things, and, uh, Brendan Benson, he, um,

Jeff: Jesus Christ. I haven’t

Merlin: yeah.

Oh, come on, spilt Milk. That’s a great album. Uh, but anyhow, he, uh, he does a wonderful power pop version of, uh, both sides now by Joni Mitchell that Jeff will specifically find for show notes

Jeff: Mm. Fuck. Well, hold

Merlin: I, I don’t, I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to log into your app.

Jeff: was jellyfish one of the bands with the guy had a funny hat?

Merlin: Yep. And he was in before Spilt Milk. That’s spilt milk is my, is my jam. And the drummer stood up

Jeff: And the drummer stood up like low,

Merlin: like low sh Lowe’s playing. I’ve [00:38:00] been shushed at so many Lowe shows. Um,

Jeff: I walked out of the only

Merlin: Sh

Jeff: I went to, and I love that band.

Merlin: I, there’s no way to be any quieter. Why are you sitting on, why are you sitting on the floor? This is not romper room. It’s a rock show.

Stand up.

Jeff: Those sticks are mallets. Quiet.

Merlin: It is the,

Brett: Low was

Merlin: yeah, I, I, love them. I love that curtain meets the stage. It’s a great band, but Jesus Christ, people stand up.

Jeff: Yep.

Shopify Sponsorship Segment

Merlin: This episode of Overtired is brought to you by Shopify. Lemme ask you a question. Have you ever, uh, been dreaming about owning your own business? One that you can call your own because in addition to having something to sell, well, you’re getting another stuff.

You’re gonna need a website, a payment system, probably need a logo, maybe a way to advertise the new customers. Um, I’m just here to tell you, it can be so overwhelming and confusing, but that’s what we’re here to talk about today, Shopify. Uh, if you wanna learn more about Shopify right now, you can go to shopify.com/ Overtired, but you probably already know them.

And even if you don’t know them, I can pretty much promise you that you’re using them. Um, I use Shopify all the time, and sometimes [00:39:00] I don’t know it, you know, bet on them and myself. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. 10% of all get this, this is crazy. 10% of all e-commerce in the us.

From household names like Mattel and Jim Shark, which is definitely a company to brands. Just getting started,. so you get started with your own design studio. Hundreds of radio to use templates that Shopify helps you. They build a beautiful online store to match your brand stock. Because here’s the thing, during that business, ’cause you want our business, as I like to say, like Seth Bullock says, you know, I’m in this hardware business.

If you’re in your hardware business, business down, you know you, you gotta pay the rent elsewhere, engine every morning. And the thing is, you’re there to sell stuff. You’re not there to be good at this other stuff. If you’re good at this other stuff, you’d have a different job. And if you, if you lived here, you’d already be home.

So what do you do? You accelerate your content creation. ’cause Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and they can even enhance your product photography. Because remember, if you’re a photographer, you’d already be a photographer. You can get the word out.

Uh, like let’s look. You have your own very own, uh, marketing team all behind. You [00:40:00] can easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or scrolling. That’s yet Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping, to processing returns and beyond.

So if you’re ready to sell, you’re ready for Shopify. Turn those dreams into

Jeff: Cha,

Merlin: and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. So here’s what I want you to do right now. This is called the call to action.

Jeff: listen

Merlin: This is a call to all my past actions. Here’s what I want you to do right now. You sign up one, do you get into one? Do do you know how little that’s hardly any money at all?

Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling [email protected] slash Overtired. I’m gonna say that again. Please listen carefully. You can find this on your, uh, on your home, home computer set. You go to shopify.com/ Overtired, say at thrice, and it’s almost like praying shopify.com/

Jeff: Overtired.

Merlin: There’s nothing worse in this world than an American

Jeff: on, hold

Merlin: than an American man in his second [00:41:00] year of college,

Jeff: Oh,

Merlin: a woman major in Synology.

College Life Challenges

Merlin: What was your question, Brett?

Jeff: on. My son, my son and his is in his second year of college and, and he just had me order green body paint ’cause he’s gonna be, let’s say his name is

Merlin: Is he a psych? He’s not a Synology major,

is he? Oh,

Jeff: computer science, but let’s say his name is Jimmy. I said, what are you doing this for? He is like, ’cause I’m gonna be green Jimmy for Halloween.

I said, that’s pretty fucking funny. That’s pretty fucking funny.

Merlin: What’s screen Jimmy?

Jeff: Nothing. It’s just him but green.

Merlin: Oh,

Jeff: We’re pretending his name is

Merlin: See, I used to do that

and it was never fun. I, I used to do like a minimal effort, Halloween costumes. One time I came as everybody I went to high school with, and all I did was wear a Guns N Roses shirt and make fig Its, and I, it wasn’t funny. It

Jeff: I can beat you. I did Robert De Niro one year, and all I did was put a little black dot where

Merlin: Oh, that’s sweet. You could also be, uh, yeah, a beauty mark. Um, I’m fine. Um, we’re just about done here, right? Look, how don’t these kids look little? Did you see that Billy got a shirt? Did you see Billy got a shirt with his name on the back? Did you see that? [00:42:00] Uh, second year of college. Okay. One thing at a time, you guys.

Jeff: Okay.

Merlin: getting really confusing.

Just kidding. I’m just kidding. Um, second year of college. Oh no, you survived the first year. You’re not dead. Now you’re smart and you know stuff and there’s somebody who’s younger than you and you’re closer. Not again, I sound like I’m anti youth and I am not. I really enjoy being young and I enjoy aspects of young people quite a lot.

Um, but it’s an anomaly. I want you to know that. But second year of college, oh man. There’d be dragons because it’s not just me. I think, I think it’s a lot of people.

Brett: as seniors then? Like does something mellow them out by the time they’re in their

Merlin: Well, you know, one part of expertise, this, this, this is gonna sound very head up your As ’cause it kind of is. But you know, there’s things we know. There’s the no knowns and the unknowns and all that Donald Rumsfeld

Jeff: Yeah. Go to the war with the army you have? Yeah.

Merlin: but the same, same guy. But the, uh, but in that case, like you don’t know what you don’t know when you’re, uh, in your first year, or at least I didn’t, I didn’t know what I didn’t [00:43:00] know.

And it’s just, it’s really easy to get. It’s the thing that Dreyfus and the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, it’s called being an advanced beginner, which is the kind of person, like if you’ve got two Zen mind beginner’s mind and all you can do is follow exact recipes, you’re probably less likely to fuck up in a lot of ways.

You’re not gonna go off the beaten track. The real dangers with the advanced beginner, which is somebody who thinks they know stuff about stuff and where they don’t really have any broader domain knowledge, it’s just they haven’t failed enough. Somebody, somebody like Marco Armand, like Marco Orman, somebody who hasn’t failed enough in life to really understand how hard it can be. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. But that, that’s, I mean, uh, le less dangerous than a senior. I don’t know about that, but I think you do learn more stuff about stuff and.

Brett: No, that

Merlin: you just gotta put miles, you gotta put miles on the tires before you really know, you know?

Brett: I would say so. I. When I, I, I, I’ve been writing music since I was [00:44:00] very small. Um, got my first Casio keyboard when I was like

Jeff: SK one, was it an SK one?

Brett: I don’t remember.

Merlin: That’s, that’s a, that’s a sampling one. I had a, I had an SK

Jeff: Hello? Hello?

Merlin: I also had an MT 40.

Brett: but then in high school I took music theory and up until I took music theory, I was very creative and I was making like, just some crazy stuff that I went back to and listened two years later.

And I was like, wow, where did that even come from? But then I got a little music theory in me and it kind of ruined me. Um, not

Merlin: we overthinking it or feeling

incompetent?

Brett: Well, I just felt like I had this basic set of rules. Like I, I was not advanced in music theory. Like I had year one. Like four, four part harmony like rules in my head and, and it made me stop.

Every time I would write something, I would [00:45:00] second guess what I was doing and

Merlin: Just even thinking about like something like a chord inversion, you don’t really need to worry about that. If you play long enough an inversion, you won’t even know I didn’t, I would do chord inversions without knowing that’s what it was. It’s just, if you call it that and you make, and you say like, oh, well, you got the wrong number of sharps on your staff, or all that stuff.

It’s almost like somebody who, like, they want you to learn all of the quote unquote rules of advanced Dungeons and Dragons before you ever learn how to tell a story. And it’s like, well, we need all these tables and dice throws and stuff, because that’s how we looks at all those rules are important, but ultimately it’s a game and it should be fun.

You know what I mean? And like, I had the same, I mean, I, I failed music theory when I was a senior. ’cause I was, I was very oppositional. But I, I agree. Also agree with you. It’s like that phrase, a little learning is a dangerous thing. We’ve learned just UN just enough to start overthinking.

Brett: Yeah, exactly. Which is when? When you say second year of college, that’s what I think of. But I was a freshman my second year of college. ’cause I

Merlin: year in a

[00:46:00] person’s life. Oh,

Brett: Yeah.

Merlin: where, where

Jeff: translate. I didn’t go to college. I’m trying to translate what a second year is, or if you can even translate or if

Merlin: no. It translates to a, it translates to a million things. I mean, I think of the workplaces, this is off the dome, but think of the workplaces you’ve been in that have like self-appointed experts, like somebody who knows how this place runs. That’s not the office manager. Or, or for, I mean, there’s all kinds of places where like you’ll, you’ll run into people who espouse, I’m gonna put this carefully, espouse a confidence in their skills that may not be based entirely in good reasons or reality, but they, they do like, have the, the confidence.

Uh, I I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s specifically a college thing, it’s just, it becomes, now we’re on a different topic. But the thing with colleges, and the thing that sucks is that in the United States, at least in my lifetime, college has become so synonymous. With, um, cutting the cord. I don’t know.

Becoming an, becoming an adult, right? In a way that becoming a [00:47:00] teenager maybe kind of was a big deal, you know, in the fifties or sixties. All I’m trying to say is like, it sucks to me that, okay, so when you go out on your own re regardless of how independent you’ve been, regardless of how caring of an environment you’ve come up in the bottom line is somehow the rent has to get paid.

The clothes have to get washed, gas has to get in the car. Uh, another thing you learn in college, good low stakes environment to learn this in is, you know, sometimes you’re just gonna have to decide what you’re not gonna read or do. This week, there’s not enough time to do everything. Well, guess what? This sucks so much.

And I’m not saying this to like look point down, but like another youth thing, but like, guess what that’s fucking life is, there’s all kinds of stuff. And like how do you become good about that? How do you become smart about that? With that becoming emotional about that? How do you learn the difference, for example, between, um, we can’t afford that and that’s not in the budget.

Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Merlin: That’s a distinction lost on a lot of people. And so, you know, uh, there’s all these kinds of things where you’re like, well, yeah, that makes sense now. Fucking a I am [00:48:00] in my forties or fifties. Like of course that makes sense, where you’re like, yeah, but you earned that through so much difficulty in your life.

And the part that bums me out is I wish there was something besides even, let’s exclude the hassle, stress and cost of going to college in any way. Let’s just leave that off. Let’s act like that’s all taken care of. Well, the laundry has to get done. The gas has to get in the car. The books you, if you have two.

How can I put this? If you have five pounds of work and a two pound bag, there is not a single person who’s gonna help you with that. And, and if you haven’t figured out you’ve got five pounds of work that needs to, however you’d like to think of that, I you could just think of it as time. You could. Maybe it’s easier to think of it as time.

If you have three one hour tasks and one hour left, something’s gonna have to happen. You could choose to shave a little off all of those. You could completely skip two of them. I can’t tell you. And right now you can’t tell you because you haven’t done it

enough. Uh, this is why I think it’s good for kids to fail in low sticks environments.

I think it’s good for adults to fail in low sticks environments. I think it’s good for [00:49:00] everybody to fail in low sticks environments.

Jeff: be able to know when it’s a low stakes environment. I feel like that’s its own

Merlin: Everything. If you’re me, everything feels like a high stakes

environment. Yeah, exactly.

But I know that this is just something, again, in that document, which I’m always happy if you would wanna link to it. Uh, the wisdom, the thing it is like is that, you know, you. You, you ought to let yourself and others fail in a low stakes environment because, and this is, this is the money shot.

Success need not always be costly or deadly. And we get so used to fail failure, fail as like a zero again. Zero or one kind of binary as like you succeeded or you didn’t. What do you mean you succeeded? Or you didn’t? You succeeded so much every day and you haven’t even fucking realized it. ’cause you didn’t realize that whether or not you went to college, you eventually mostly learned how to do laundry.

You mostly learned how to get gas in the tank. You mostly learned how to deal with a roommate. We all have had to deal with roommates. It’s just that, you know, college, all this pressure, you could drop into that and like, Hey, guess what? Welcome to adult world. See you Thanksgiving. Like, have [00:50:00] fun. Go be kids.

Just go figure this stuff out. And the way that we treat and. Teach and counsel kids. This has come up so often in so many of my shows lately. It drives me bananas the way that we, we add so much unnecessary pressure and emotional valence to so many things in our life. And then wonder why people get upset about

it. And like you go like, oh, oh kid. Well I hope your grades were perfect for 12 years. ’cause now you’re putting your mother and I in the poor house so that you can go off to, you know, whatever college and and like. But it’s entirely possible that one reason college didn’t work out in the first year. Sure.

Could be academics or whatever you wanna call it, school work. It could mean maybe it’s the first time you’re out from under your parents’ fucking thumb and you finally get to do your own thing. And it could be something as anodyne as you stay up later than you should too often and you get a cold sore and then you’re not getting your work done.

You didn’t realize it soon enough. You had five pounds of work to put into a two pound bag. There’s so many points of failure in that first year of college for [00:51:00] everybody. Um, and I just wish there was a way to ease into that more easily and to not feel like if I don’t succeed, if I don’t, I will never succeed at my four to 14 years of college if I don’t succeed in my first term of college.

So if I don’t succeed hugely in my first. Try at college. My, my life is over. I mean, I might as well just like make or get made into sandwiches. Like what used do I have to the world? I’ve disappointed everyone. I suck. I can kind of do my laundry. And that’s partly because you asked somebody to do all of these new things at the same time.

There’s no other point in your life except maybe what joining the Marines, I don’t think there’s that many other points in your life when you’re asked to do so much impossibly different. To get good at so many impossibly different. Yeah, exactly. At the same time. ’cause each has a stake. It isn’t just that like, well if you forgot, you know, your mom can throw your jeans in the dryer because she knows that trick.

Like whatever it is. And then that, that day, that morning, that dark night of the soul will come where you’re like, we’ve all had that. Where you’re like, oh [00:52:00] no, the walls are closing in around me. ’cause I thought I was spinning all of these plates. Okay. But actually things are worse than I thought and now I have to man manage.

I don’t even know how many points of failure at the same time. And I think,

yeah, go ahead. No, that’s it.

Jeff: Learning through my, my son in his first year of college, he’s in his second now, uh, just so you have all these big things, so you have to learn at once, but then I get a call because he is at the Walmart, and he is like, I don’t know which of these laundry soaps to buy.

You know, it seems like some of them are a bad idea for me. And you’re like, oh my God, you’re mad. You’re

Merlin: You should see me with Instacart telling them what toilet paper to get. I, I, it’s not even that I care that much, but like you’ve asked and now I’m like, that is so overwhelming. And that’s also time, that’s time. That’s, that’s, that’s cycles picking classes. I mean, isn’t that kind of another one? All this stuff we think of as ancillary and like water under the

Jeff: stay in a class. Right? Like and what

Merlin: Yeah. To to to draw, add, drop stuff. [00:53:00] Yeah. Yeah. All that kind of stuff. Um, I just, um, I’m talking about myself today and that’s gonna have to be okay. Um, I do the show. Thank you. Thank you. I’m gonna get my hiller mustache back. Um, I. Do a show with John Siracusa and, uh, we were talking about on a recent episode that I really enjoyed.

The Wisdom Project and Life Advice

Merlin: We were talking about like, him trying to advise, especially his son who is gonna be going into computer stuff, like trying to advise him like, Hey, look, you know, I’ve been in a lot of workplaces and like I know how there’s warning signs and red flags, and we’ve all, I’m sure I imagine had those of like red flags, you know, where, where, you know, for example, when they bring you in for the interview, everybody in the office looks kind of like Stockholm Syndrome.

Like, Hey, how’s it going?

Jeff: Yeah.

Merlin: Get back in the closet, Patty Hearst type situation. But like, the thing I said to him is like, because I don’t, I, as much as I love the Wisdom Project, which I can be misconstrued, the Wisdom Project is not me trying to give you help and except insofar as I hope you’ll find [00:54:00] it useful, but it’s not designed to be a self-help book from somebody who’s smart.

It’s designed to be a catalog of pain from somebody who has not been good at it. And every single one of those things in that document came from somebody’s pain. Often my own, very much, often somebody else’s pain call somebody what you, what call someone what they wanna be called and don’t be a dick about.

It didn’t cause me any pain. I caused a lot of other people pain because they didn’t meet my id, my idea of what they should be called. And I had to learn that and that was hard. Um, so whilst I’m not single-mindedly interested in giving advice to anybody, especially my kid, my kid’s fine. Doesn’t need my help.

But what I was saying in the Syracuse is if there’s anything I really do wish I, not that I could have been advised, but I wish I could have gotten, I wish I’d had bio available to me, is the idea that you can survive a lot more than you think.

Jeff: Yeah.

Merlin: And the thing I said to John is you have to be careful how you apply that.

’cause on the one hand, if that were advice to his son, it sounds like you might be [00:55:00] saying, oh, you got this great job at a start. You barely got this really good job, quote unquote, good job at a startup, gimme a break, whatever you, but you got this job where you’ve basically agreed to go in and have your entire life turned upside down for the prospect of a seam of gold and gotta produce that color just like Ellsworth.

But I may have fucked my life up flat on hammered shit, but I stand before you today. A man beholden to no cock sucker,

Jeff: no human

Merlin: human cock sucker or the God anyway.

Jeff: No. Human cocksucker is the genius, the human.

Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right. He just leaves in the

Jeff: It’s a theology.

Merlin: Keep your own tally. Um, but, um, the, it sounds like you might be saying in that horrible, horrible way that so much advice came to me.

I bet you get this, Brett. I just, I just, I really bet you got this, and I bet you get this, that kind of like caustic. Midwestern, maybe Northern Midwestern, but that certain kind of caustic, you know, I dunno if you guys have been following on rectus the whole thing with compulsory [00:56:00] naked swimming in public school, but where we normalize these incredibly insane things and make them codified policy.

And then to, to, for a long old John Siracusa quote, we’ve always cut the ends off the roast. Why do we cut the ends off the roast? Because we’ve always cut the ends off the roast in passing. Do you guys know that story?

Jeff: Pat, cutting the ends off the

Merlin: Yeah. There’s an old, there’s an old, old story that illustrates that I learned about from Syracuse.

And when I say that over and over, I like people to make, make sure people that aren’t just Syracuse fans. Now, um, whenever we make a roast, you, before you put it in, you’re learning how to cook, right? Your, your

mom or grandma. Let’s just, let’s just keep it matri Petra matri linear. Your mom goes, oh, we’re gonna teach you how to make a roast.

You get the, get the, the, the pot out. You cut the ends off, you put it in, you see sand, it’s like, oh, why don’t we cut the ends off the roast? Um, um, I, my, my mom, it’s just, it’s part of, part of the preparation.

Jeff: Yeah.

Merlin: Now follow me. And at that point you’re going like, well that’s crazy. ’cause you can tell already the, the, the uh, chekhov’s, uh, chekhov’s roast at this point is obviously in evidence.

So [00:57:00] you’re going, haha, that’s the clue, right? I’ve watched law and order, but, but hang on. ’cause then you go like, so you play the story out and eventually you get all the way back to, well, when my family came here from Poland, we only had one pot and it was very, very small. And even though we didn’t have a lot of food to make something like a roast, when we could afford it fit into there, we had to cut the ends off to

Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Merlin: just sit with that for a second. I know it’s not that profound, but boy does it. Doesn’t that ever come up in life?

Why ‘

Jeff: cause I’ve never cut the ends off a roast,

Merlin: Why do, why do we cut the, we cut the ends off the roast because we’ve always cut the ends off the roast. Well, is it because it didn’t fit the pan? No, it fits the pan fine. What does that have to do with it? It’s true. You got the, you, you, you’re so successful now. You have so much roast and so much pan. You have so much going on. You could put, you could put roast in pans all day. You never even had to find out why. You used to have to cut the ends off the roast, but it became received wisdom and you kept passing it along.

And that’s the same kind of Midwestern. Horse shit advice that used to get passed along to me [00:58:00] with this feeling of, you’re gonna do this or you’re gonna go to hell, you’re gonna do this, or you’re going to gravely disappoint grandma, you’re going to do this. Or like comes like fraught with all of this, I accidentally quoted one of my all time favorite back to work titles and I thought I was making up a new expectational debt.

You arrive in the world, you, first of all, you got original sin that’s on you that before you, you were born with original sin. Brett, that’s you. I’m looking at you original sin. You probably never ran into this anyway.

Jeff: Brett definitely ran into this.

Merlin: But what could be greater than original sin in terms of you fucked up, you never asked to be born, but you were born, but you’re part of the species that killed Jesus. So you begin with, with, red on your, on your, on your ledger, and we’re gonna leverage that, things like that for the rest of, for as long as we can control you.

And finally, last thing from the doc there. Be careful of people who try to motivate you with fear, [00:59:00] because a lot of the people who try to motivate you with fear, that’s all that they’ve got. And they know it. It’s just you haven’t figured it out yet. You have not yet figured out that all they have is motivating you by fear.

Brett: Sure. Well, and in a lot of cases it’s all they’ve known.

Merlin: That’s all they’ve known. They’ve always cut the ends off the roast.

Brett: Right.

Jeff: Yeah.

Merlin: It’s just, it’s um, it’s weird and it’s, it’s weirder than weird right now because my kid, my kid does well in school and I mean, nobody in our house gets mail anymore except my kid. It’s, it’s just so weird to me to like be, I was so unattractive to colleges. I was attracted to the Marines, uh, because of my PS or, uh, asvab.

I did it. I did extraordinarily well on the asvab, not very well Armed Services, vocational aptitude

Jeff: Ah, got it. Okay.

Merlin: the Marines were coming out to h the house in government cars to like pick me up and take me in to like, watch movies and drink coffee. Like please join the Marines. And I was really thinking about it for a [01:00:00] while ’cause I didn’t have anything else, but, um, very desirable.

But right now it’s, it’s crazier than ever, ever, ever. It’s been crazy for so long. And Jeff, you must get this to some extent, like where you’re like, oh my goodness, it is really quite awfully expensive to go to college. And even let’s, again, let’s even assume it’s paid for, which it ain’t. Um, I mean, I, I’m not, I’m certainly not that alarmed AI guy, but at the same time, like, I don’t know if I wanna undertake a. Maybe not Cs. I don’t know if I would do like a computer programming major right now. Uh, there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know if I

Jeff: looking at bailing on that

Merlin: for 40. For what? For 40, 50, 60. 80, 80 grand a year. Talk about debt.

Jeff: kid too and he is recognized that quickly. He is like, I love programming. That doesn’t mean I need to be a CS kid.

Merlin: Sorry, last thing. And then we’ll do whatever you want. Um, the, you’d be surprised what you can survive because you bounce. And the thing is, if you’re me, [01:01:00] uh, I can’t speak for you. Uh, bt but like, I thought everything was a catastrophe. I thought everything that went wrong. I thought every eviction, I thought every, I thought every empty tank of gas.

I thought every late bill I could feel in my bones. I can say this to you guys. I now know because of trauma. I, I could feel it in my bones. Excuse me, shivers right now to think about the sense. Um, the sense is that I associate with that. I can feel like you ever been panicked and your, your arms and hands get cold and it feels like the blood’s leaving your body.

That I, I now know that’s one of my panic responses is that it feels like I could, right here in this particular, I can feel blood. It feels like blood is leaving my body because I’ve been through that so many times and I’ve been more than happy to rehearse, rehearse and rere, rehearse and do dress re I got a title coming Be Ready, the dress rehearsals of my trauma.

Jeff: Oh, I don’t know if that beats Chekhov’s roast

Merlin: pretty good. We always cut the ends off. We always cut the ends off checkoff. [01:02:00] Um, but not sulu. Oddly enough, the, um, but’s not funny. The, the, the, the, uh, the, it was the advice part talking about John’s kid with Alex and the advice that we give. ’cause it kind of sounds like you’re saying, Hey, I’m gonna be Midwestern dad.

Now. You’d be amazed what you can survive, you know? My father beat the shit out of me for no reason, and I turned out great. I beat the shit outta you for no reason, and you’ll turn out great eventually. As long as you accept my beatings in the spirit that they were

Jeff: Well, and and you’ll be surprised that you can survive is different from saying you’ll be fine.

Merlin: It is, but the final part, just, just, yes. I would love to talk more about that. That just the part I was saying that Syracuse is, this is a, the kind of fine distinction that gets lost on someplace like the internet is like if you is, let’s say his son were to be fortunate enough to get a job at a startup somewhere.

Yeah. Sounds great.

Jeff: Mm-hmm.

Merlin: Um, and then they [01:03:00] find that it is a toxic environment and all those red flags were true, you know? Um. The mean dad voice would seem to be saying, you’d be surprised what you can survive. Stick with it. I never want, and this is the other thing I said to Syracuse, like, what if your kid’s gay?

What if your kid’s an actor? What if you’re constantly telegraphing to your kid? What, even with your best advice about their specific situation, if it comes couched in a judgment about their deeper decision making, you’re a piece of shit and they should hate you because you were not supportive of them.

And now you’re trying to say, I told, not saying Syracuse does this, but you’re trying, which he does, but you’re trying to say, I told you so to your kid now. ’cause you’re like, well you didn’t try hard enough not to be gay or to not be an actor. Like you didn’t, whatever it was, you did these, but now I’ve still got lots of great advice for you because I love you and you give all this advice.

It sounds like you’re saying you’d be surprised what you can survive as an, as a, um, kinda a patois of, you’d be surprised what you can put up with because of what I’ve put up with. But what it also means is you’d be amazed what you can survive. [01:04:00] What if you bounced from this job, but what if you went into it with a different state of mind than this pervation, um, mentality, or this like Merlin’s blood is leaving his shoulders feeling.

What if you saw it as simply not, not to be Pollyanna, not to be positive, but to avoid being catastrophic about it and to avoid making it always the worst? So yeah, you could say that if you’re a piece of shit, you could say you’d be survive surprised what? You can survive as a way of saying, well, like the way you survived my beatings for now.

But it can also mean you’d be survive surprised what you can survive if you’re true to the little voice in yourself that tells you where the good version of you lives, and that’s the direction that you need to be moving. Now, which dad do you wanna be? Which anybody do you want to be? Do you wanna be the one who’s constantly reminding them of the mistakes they made to disappoint you?

Or do you wanna be the kind of person who lifts them up to say whatever the fuck you’re becoming could not make me any happier? And I wanna put all of my wood behind that arrow.

Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. [01:05:00] Yeah. How old were you when your dad died?

Merlin: Seven, almost eight. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Halloween, Ron. Halloween. Woo, spooky.

Jeff: Wow. Yeah.

Merlin: Um, yeah, so, I don’t know, man, but it’s, it’s, so, actually it’s funny because the more I think about, I hate to call it advice, but that’s what it ends up being. But that document’s been so good for me, writing that, thinking about that, forcing myself to edit and change and then rethink about those and are there ones I wanna take out and all that kind of stuff.

’cause it, that, that’s what got me reconnected with the idea of how much pain I’ve caused, or how much pain has been, in some ways unintentionally, often been caused to me by doing what seems like the right thing, or to quote the movie Rules of the Game. The terrible thing in life is that everyone, everyone has their reasons.

Everybody’s got a reason that they’re, how they are. They, everybody’s doing the best they can every day and more is the pity. Fred, are you doing okay?

Jeff: he’s shaking his tic-Tacs.

Merlin: TicTacs.[01:06:00]

Brett: I, I am,

Merlin: Let’s get down to Tic-Tacs.

Brett: I, uh,

Jeff: Oh, ouch.

Brett: we should, if we’re, are we going to do a Gude this week? Do you guys feel like it?

Jeff: Aptitude.

Merlin: got nowhere to be, I gotta pick up some medicine and then I’ve got to record with Syracuse tonight.

Jeff: on, hold on. Guitar.

Guitar Moves with Matt Sweeney

Jeff: You were talking about guitar. Have either of you watched the YouTube series by Matt Sweeney called Guitar Moves? Holy shit. Do you know who Matt Sweeney is?

Merlin: I know that name.

was he in Sunset

Jeff: Chavez, you remember that Band

Merlin: Oh, Chavez.

Jeff: But he’s, but since then, he’s a session guy who’s done everything from Cat Stevens to Iggy Pop, to Bonnie Prince Billy, um, uh, I mean it’s just, he’s unbelievable.

He is a total sweetheart. He’s a super fan in, in the best way. And he does

Merlin: Oh, I like that. He likes the music that he likes. I.

Jeff: He like, is it 15 minute? Roughly 15, 20 minute edited videos with guitar players where he talks, he has his guitar and they have their guitar and they show him things he’s done. Like James Williamson from The [01:07:00] Stooges, he’s done Ace Freely, which is a really great one, a really like sweet one.

Um,

Merlin: I played the trout. He

Jeff: did, he did Josh Ey Hammi Hammi.

Merlin: I love that

guy.

Jeff: he’s great and it,

Merlin: Oh my God. I love the way he plays guitar.

Jeff: you would both love it. And given that Ace Freely just died, I wanna really recommend that. So here’s the thing. I don’t care for Kiss. I fucking love the man Ace freely. I don’t even know. Not the guitar playing.

Even

Merlin: Did you ever see him interviewed on the Tom

Snyder

Jeff: was just gonna say, I was just

Merlin: I play the Trout.

Jeff: If you go watch the Tom Snyder interview a Kiss, all

Merlin: Chris and Space Ace. Um, Peter, Peter and Space A are over here in one world completely high on shake

Jeff: going

Merlin: He

Jeff: that

taste freely in every interview, in that, in that era. and

Merlin: Actually women are very attracted to us. Yeah, I play the trout

Jeff: Gene Watch you Highly recommended it. I’ll put a

link to the Thomas Slander show, but that caused me to watch a whole bunch of interviews with these f freely. And he doesn’t

Merlin: I don’t know what, I don’t know what he’s is. Is he, is he as wacky as he [01:08:00] seemed?

Jeff: he, he doesn’t

Merlin: Because he drank, he drank a lot, right? It was mainly

Jeff: a lot. Oh, real, real big problem.

Yeah. Anyway, watch

Ace Frehley and KISS Trivia

Merlin: I like New York Groove. I think that’s, I think that’s one of the best tracks on all of the Kiss Solo albums,

Jeff: So I went and listened to the first KISS album, which I’ve never listened to all the way through because I decided I love Ace Fraley. And then I

was like, no, I don’t need kiss, I guess. But I, I appreciate it. I appreciate the

Merlin: that the one with No, that’s

not Strutter.

Jeff: New York Ballsiness

Merlin: Which one’s? The first one? What’s on there? Is it, um, black Diamond?

Jeff: Uh, black Diamonds on it.

Merlin: Yeah. Oh, is it dressed to

Jeff: Which I only

Merlin: Not dressed. Is it, is it dressed to kill?

Did I get that to write? Right. And I remember it’s black and

Jeff: here for Kiss trivia. That’s the point. But I fucking love Ace

Merlin: You can

Jeff: as a person, even though he is clearly a very difficult person.

Merlin: Hey, well the joke is ’cause Tom, Tom Snyder mispronounces the instrument that Gene

Jeff: Yeah, he says, uh,

Merlin: So you play the

Jeff: Yeah. Here you play the bass.

Merlin: And then a and a space, a and I don’t remember this ’cause this was a running joke in Bacon Ray for five years. And then occasionally Mike Coleman would just say over the [01:09:00] microphone. Yeah, I play the trout.

He,

Tom Snyder Interviews and Iggy Pop

Jeff: Also recommend any Tom Snyder interview, but especially his last show, which

Merlin: he’s wonderful.

Jeff: But his interviews with the PLAs Asthmatics with Iggy Pop. Iggy Pop with that one really changed me in certain ways. But Iggy Pop says, Iggy, you’re bleeding. You just played. Why are you bleeding? ’cause I’m on your show, Tom.

Merlin: Oh,

Jeff: Wendy Williams. Great. Tom

Merlin: Detroit. Rock City, they call it. Wow. Wow. That was there, there was a commonality. Huh?

Wendy O. Williams and Milwaukee Riot

Merlin: Where’s Wendy? Where’s uh, Matics? Where’s Wendy Williams? Are they from New

Jeff: she’s from Milwaukee, I think. The PLAs asthmatics I think,

Merlin: Uh,

Jeff: they had just played in Milwaukee when she did the interview. I’m looking, yeah, there was a riot in Milwaukee at their show, I think is the point. Hold on, I’m looking it up.

Merlin: She, I just, I remember she had, uh, she had electrical tape over her

Jeff: Yeah. Electrical tape over her nipples. Yep,

Merlin: nipples.

Brett. Brett say nipples. Brett say nipples

funny. [01:10:00] Nipples Nipples

Brett: that

Merlin: Nipples.

Brett: very German

Merlin: Did you know this? Here’s a life

Jeff: I nipples

Merlin: nipples I’ve on seen my nip mine nipples. Mine. Mine nipples. Um, before you name any animal, you should yell it, uh, out of the back, the, you should name it off.

You should yell the name of your prospective animal name off the back of the, the porch of your trailer and see how it sounds and how you feel about it. I would feel good about yelling nipples. You should not name your animal anything you wouldn’t want to yell.

Jeff: Uh, that’s

Merlin: Same for your kid. This is why you shouldn’t name your kid ris.

Jeff: Oh, that’s a problem. Okay, so she was born in Webster, New York. And, um, let’s see, uh, famous for partial nudity, exploding equipment, firing a shotgun and chainsawing guitar. She was like, Gibby Hanes before Gibby Hanes, um,

Merlin: Yep. And but also you got, you got the Detroit connection with Iggy. ’cause the Stooges are from Detroit. And then of course, kiss, um, had, had, uh, had, uh, on the album, uh, [01:11:00] destroyer, I believe,

Jeff: Uh, just to real quick, before we’re done with

Merlin: Detroit Rock City.

Jeff: to, she traveled to Florida and Europe, landing various jobs as a lifeguard, a stripper, and a macrobiotic cook. She’s

the best. She’s the best.

Merlin: Your time starts now.

Jeff: She’s the best. Anyway,

Taskmaster and Playlists

Merlin: Do you guys watch Task Master? You don’t, do you?

Brett: No.

Jeff: a couple episodes ’cause of you, you, you sent me a

Merlin: Yeah. It takes, it, it takes some getting

Jeff: I, no, I need to, I need to get

Merlin: No, no, no, no. I have a really good starter list on, uh, YouTube that I, I, I update. No, no. Here’s the thing. I’m fucking great at playlists. It’s, it’s my, it’s my oils. I love playlists, but I, I mention it

Jeff: Wait, what does that mean?

Merlin: Oh, like how you paint.

Jeff: Oh, yeah.

Merlin: But I, um, I update them also. Like I have a very good, one of very good live performances that I keep updated. And my, the one that I baby the most right now is my taskmaster starter list, which is six or seven episodes where if you don’t know where to begin with taskmaster, pick any of these. And as with all my playlists, feel free to skip [01:12:00] around.

Like, I won’t be mad. Like if you go to the one that’s like, just thousands of songs that are in the order, they were on the album. You don’t have to listen to all of those. If you don’t like Huskerdoo, you can skip around,

but you probably should like

huskerdoo. I will never forget you. I will, I will never forget.

I I will,

Jeff: Okay,

Merlin: I will. I I will never, I will never, I will never forget you.

Jeff: No, thank you. It is a

Merlin: I will never, I will never. I will never. I will never. I will.

Never forget you. I

Jeff: You know, Bob

Merlin: You think you’ve made it to the top? If people know your name, you’re still the same. Yeah. He used to, he used to write, I heard he used to write stories for,

Jeff: Great. Live performances. Just please go check Iggy Pop doing the song. Five Foot one on Tom Snyder. Can I please read the first lines of five foot one?

I’m only five foot one. I got a pain in my neck. I’m looking up in the city. What the hell? What the heck?

Merlin: That’s pretty

Jeff: mean, god damn. Bob Dylan.

Brett: Can, can, can you guys drop some links for say this taskmaster playlist and this, this interview [01:13:00] and, ’cause I’m losing track.

Jeff: I’ll

Merlin: No, no. I, I, I would love to do that. Can I also ask a favor? And in band favor? Um, in-band favor. Can you guys, no, it’s okay. Your people can hear it. I don’t care. Um, can you, could also, could you please send me just the raw, shout it out

so I can, yeah.

Jeff: Are you putting it into your, um, jato?

Merlin: My dingus. Mudding

Jeff: Are you using

transcripts, like

Merlin: Jato. You say what? What, what, Jeff, what’s Jao What that means is that another one of your apps?

Is that like Spur or Fluk or one of your other notetaking

Jeff: song where he says, Jato?

Merlin: Oh, I see. I, I know who you’re talking about. Uh uh Wait a minute. Hang on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s from, uh, is the actor Happy? Is that from, he has the actor

Happy. I saw him in Hayes Valley and he was fucking great,

Jeff: You, you saw him?

Merlin: Mm-hmm. Um, and I think, I think, wait, I saw Lamb Chop around that same time.

I don’t think I saw them together, but I saw Lamb Chop at, uh, great American. Was that until [01:14:00] started, you know, what’s that song is that is the Aer Hector, happy Brett. This is all gonna be in notes.

Brett: you.

Merlin: Vic Chestnut. Vic Vic, Vic Chestnut, and then he played, he had, he had all those kind of physical problems and he played guitar.

Jeff: He was in a wheelchair, right?

Merlin: He was super in a wheelchair.

Jeff: was he a paraplegic? I forget the,

Merlin: Don’t know he

was

Jeff: paralyzed, I think below the waist,

Merlin: Well, I think he had, he had some kind of a movement situation,

Jeff: Okay.

Merlin: is my new dance move that it is not

Jeff: Uh, my diagnosis is you have a

Merlin: You have a movement situation.

Jeff: have a movement

Merlin: We need to get you on the negative 70 degrees to the table til you’re facing forward. Animals would be raised UN slaughtered,

Jeff: guitar

Merlin: In danger of having a mine Cheff gap?

Jeff: mineshaft

Merlin: I watched House of Dynamite. It made me think a lot. Don’t watch House of Dynamite. It’s not good. I have others TV shows that I’d be happy to suggest. I, I’m currently suffering through a blight of, uh, B plus tv.[01:15:00]

Jeff: B plus tv.

Merlin: Too much, B plus tv. Yeah, there’s a lot of good stuff out there though. Um, and I got a lot of music.

Very excited about music and apps. Apps. You people love

Jeff: fucking love music?

Brett: I have, um, I have stopped listening to audio books momentarily, and I just fall asleep listening, not watching Bob’s burgers

Merlin: Oh, we walked out of my kid’s tr my kid has a terrible cold. Like, oh, my kid has a terrible cold. My kid had his captain on the cross country had Billy’s birthday, 18th birthday yesterday, and Billy’s senior day where they say, I sent you guys photos of when you say goodbye to the seniors on the team. He had all of that happen yesterday.

We were walking back to the car to go home and you know how this is in life. You, you can’t unhear this, but we’re just walking to the car. And my 17-year-old son goes, oh my God. And for some reason, the way he said that sounded so much like Bob Belcher. It was [01:16:00] so funny to hear it like a high school student go, oh, you know how he does.

You seen the, have you seen like, oh my God, compilations.

Jeff: No.

Merlin: Compilations of just Bob Belcher saying, oh my God,

Jeff: Oh, I’m,

Merlin: if you like Bob’s burgers, you know how funny that is. Are we, Are we, doing this?

Brett: Um,

Merlin: Things haven’t been so great with Tony

Brett: h John Benjamin is a

Merlin: John Benjamin has a van also, which o has, uh, Nathan Fielder on it.

Brett: love that show.

Merlin: That show’s so fucking weird.

You know, that’s Comedy Central, right?

Brett: I don’t, I don’t remember

Merlin: I think so. They, they take some weird little swings like Key and Peele. How did Key and Peele ever get made? Me, neither.

Jeff: Oh my God. How did Key appeal ever get made?

Merlin: Oh.

my, I got to be there two weeks ago. I, I, Alex has so much less expo, my friend Alex, that I do a podcast with has so much less exposure to what I consider classic media than I do, but also has no recollection of having seen anything.

And really, it, it’s like having a beloved family member who, like, say for example, likes the Marx Brothers or thinks they like the [01:17:00] Marx Brothers, but doesn’t remember anything they’ve done. Or Chris Fleming for that matter or the

Jeff: will I be able to play piano?

Brett: have the com. The

Jeff: We

Merlin: I couldn’t before.

Jeff: if we had eggs. No,

Merlin: can leave in a minute.

Brett: DHD and, and complex trauma has destroyed my memory. Like, and I can remember that I like something if someone says, Hey, have you seen? I can be like, yeah, I love that movie, but I don’t remember the movie.

Merlin: I, oh,

Brett: the time.

Merlin: it makes conversations so awkward. Especially if you’re talking to somebody who still has their faculties and still likes to play that funny game of do I did the, sorry, how can I phrase this? You’re somebody who still has their faculties, still has their memories, still has their importantly saliently confidence about their memories and constantly makes announcement about how they remember everything, about everything.

Well, sometimes what I’m telling you, the story, it’s not about a fact. It’s not a, sometimes it’s about a vibe and, and example of this from a couple years ago that has come up more than once. [01:18:00] Hey, mad, you’re not gonna believe who I saw at the coffee place.

Jeff: Two.

Merlin: Uh, I saw Melissa from preschool. Melissa? Yeah.

You know, the one with the daughter who did long list of things? That is all shit that happened. Oh, you mean Alyssa?

Jeff: Yeah. Yep.

Merlin: Because now you’ve made the story fun, but the shame on me for trying to bond.

Jeff: Thank you for that bow.

Merlin: Uh, uh Are you, are you watching the Murdochs?

Jeff: No,

Merlin: Oh,

Jeff: uh, hold on, hold on. I, I, I said it wrong a minute ago. We could have, if we had eggs, we could have bacon and eggs. If we had bacon. That’s it. That’s the Marx Brothers thing I love.

Merlin: um, I, I like to cite the one from, uh, duck Soup. When, uh, the one about who says to Margaret Dumont that you, you better, you better make, get a move on. I heard they’re gonna tear you down and put up an office, bu in our apartment building where you’re standing. [01:19:00] Um, you can leave in a minute if that’s too soon.

No, you could leave, you could leave in a huff if that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a half.

Jeff: Yeah.

Merlin: You haven’t stopped talking since I came in here. Have, were you vaccinated with a phonograph needle? 1933. Boom, boom, boom.

Jeff: that’s amazing. My dad still uses the one when he has a surgery where I’ll be able to play piano when I get out. Uh, yeah, sure. Oh

Merlin: I couldn’t before

Jeff: always wanted to play piano Good

Merlin: Uhhuh. Uhhuh, I think, I think the one I heard was doctor Dr. Uh, Dr. Will I be able to play violin after

Jeff: that’s what it is. Yeah. He does piano. He fucked it up. I’ll

Merlin: it’s okay. ’cause I understand the point of the joke,

and this is why you’re doing the thing. And this is why I say, say somebody, somebody, somebody that I love maybe might tell a story and go, yeah, I saw Alyssa.

And I go, oh, that’s awesome. And we talked for a while. And then two minutes later, the person who is just a, an anonymous character, a Chekhov’s wife, uh, goes, I met Melissa. And then I would [01:20:00] go, I knew what you meant.

Jeff: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Grammar and Usage Pet Peeves

Merlin: And I’m gonna tell you something that I tell all my kids, by which I mean everybody in my life, I will only, I will almost never correct you about anything. And if I’m confused, I might ask a question. But I would love it if we all got out of the correcting business.

’cause I don’t think it

Brett: on that. I’ve,

Merlin: hard. No, it’s hard not to. It’s the

Brett: been a well actually guy

Merlin: Well some, ’cause sometimes it’s important

Brett: but I see it in other people

Merlin: if you’ve created a confusion.

Brett: necessary? Yeah.

Merlin: Well, Like if I started talking

Brett: if I’m gonna, press a point, it’s because I feel that understanding it is important, that the clarity is important to understanding it.

And like in those moments I can, I can justify saying, do you mean this or do you mean that? And, but people can take that the [01:21:00] wrong way. They can take that as a criticism

Merlin: I, I, I will, I will. Very rarely. I think I could be wrong. I could be very wrong, and frankly I don’t care. But I, I really feel in my bones that I am not a correcting guy. I’m also not an, I told you so guy. I’ve really worked on that. It does not help anybody. I’m not a correcting guy. If I have questions, if I was confused about what you said, like I, I think I have a pretty good idea what you’re saying, what you’re describing though.

And I think what, what I’m, what we’re describing though is like if I started going off, like I don’t know much about sports, but if I went off on the Jag about the San Antonio Spurs and started talking about this one player that I’m very interested, that plays there, and I talked about this for five minutes, not really knowing what I’m talking about.

And then at some point somebody realizes, is there any chance that you were actually talking about the um, Oklahoma City Thunder? And I would go, oh, that might be it. That is a totally coro,

I think you

Jeff: interesting. ’cause what I was just thinking, I do a ton of interviewing for my work now and when I was a journalist, and I don’t tend to correct people when I have a feeling what they’re saying is wrong. I will, after the interview [01:22:00] look at it and think, I wonder if they meant this, and then write

Merlin: But that’s, that’s one. ’cause language is a virus. Ooh. Like

it’s

Jeff: an energy killer too, right?

Like

Merlin: Oh, it, it

Jeff: injected something into the conversation that ruins the flow and the trust as well.

Merlin: I, I, I totally agree. But then there are, so like, I mean, over here on this other end, though, of course, just ’cause on how I am, there are the usage things that I think, but right up against. That’s not what you think it means. Like, I, I know when you say, I just, I don’t like when people say things, dumb things, pretentiously or pretentious things in a dumb way.

And this is a f

I’m

Jeff: the proverbial ex.

Merlin: could be, could be.

Jeff: That’s an example.

Merlin: Well, I’ll give you some examples. And this is what, uh, these are dumb guy problems because if you’re a dumb guy, uh, you have learned ways to mask being a dumb guy by saying things that you’ve decided sounds smart. And you’ve heard people say something a bunch of times and you know, I I, I’m not saying this is a catastrophe that’s gonna end civilization.

We’ve got plenty of [01:23:00] other candidates for that. But like wars do mean things. And one of the ways the communication, and it isn’t that it can never change, I understand that when I say out of pocket, that means somebody who’s unavailable when anybody under my age says out of pocket, it means they were acting all crazy.

And like I know that. And when I talk to somebody, I can know that now out of pocket used to mean they they can’t be

contacted.

Brett: with you. Yeah,

Jeff: Yep.

Merlin: Well, and now I know that. And so I, how do I avoid that? Well, I cut the fucking Gordian knot by not saying out of pocket to people who I think might take it in a different way. Then there’s the other dumb guy stuff. Gotta pull this up. Um, well, you know, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Donald Trump is tearing down, uh, part of the White House, which begs the question,

Jeff: Ah, can we do, can we do radio reporting stuff now?

Merlin: well, let’s do, we could just do a classic. Well, I think what you mean is it probably, I think what you mean is it raises the question,

Jeff: Yeah.

Merlin: it does raise that question, but it doesn’t beg that question because not a, that’s not a specific [01:24:00] logical fallacy that you’re trying to identify.

Jeff: you’d be forgiven for asking,

Merlin: Oh, I could not overstate this more. I heard someone say three times yesterday, and each time I’m muttered increasingly less under my breath. Actually, you super could overstate it and you just did. It cannot, it cannot be overstated how much rain is gonna fall in Jamaica. And I would say, well, if you’re saying that, uh, whatever, 20 to 30 inches, which is a fuck ton of rain, I mean, you don’t need to, you don’t need to jazz that up.

30 inches of rain in

a

day

Jeff: they started saying and they started saying three feet today, I think when I

Merlin: Uh, they said three feet. I heard that yesterday as well. But, but no, no, no, no. But, but just, just, just the idea of like, I cannot over, well, you can overstate it. Just don’t overstate the fact of it. What you’re over, the part that you’re overstating is the ential part, which is how strongly you feel about making a big deal about it.

I’m gonna pull up my usage.

Jeff: Well, you do that. I’m gonna tell you one of my proudest moments as a father. So my kids have had to hear me [01:25:00] rant forever about when a, a radio journalist says, but some disagree. And, and my son, who works for his student newspaper, wrote on their April Fool’s Day, uh, story. This long story. It was hilarious.

And the last fucking words were, but some disagree. it was beautiful. And I thought that is the funniest thing. He was, he did. It was satire. He was doing it for me. It was a little, it was an

Merlin: that’s so, that is, man. Do you realize how lucky you are to have that? Isn’t that sweet? You’re gonna appreciate

Jeff: Oh my God, I appreciate it. Now my, I felt like a hug. All right. Where’s your usage guide?

Merlin: Well, I’m screwing up our whole, uh, our app intents.

Brett: Yeah, we’re gonna skip, we’re gonna skip the, we’re gonna skip that. We’re gonna, we’re gonna

Merlin: I have such, I have such a good one for you. Maybe in the after show. I, I, I, I have, I have a game changer that involves my action button and drafts.

Jeff: you might as well say it,

Merlin: Maybe I should do my

Jeff: but do your usage then. Let’s do it. I

Merlin: No. No. Now see, like the problem is yeah, you play the [01:26:00] trout. Uh, what’s better? Should I send it to you? In the cockamamie app or in the text messages Thread cockamamie app.

Better.

Brett: to a text. I

Merlin: Okay. I think that’s you guys. Uh, this is on GitHub. This is a gist called usage. I dislike, sorry. This is called usage. I dislike, uh, AKA, an epicenter of wordsmithing for the enterprise.

Don’t. Here, Here, I’m just gonna do these rapid

Jeff: Okay.

Merlin: Don’t say this if you really may mean this. ’cause you can say signage.

Signage has a meaning, but don’t say signage if you just mean a sign. Don’t say enterprise. If you mean big company.

Not everybody’s an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur. Some people just own a company. Like artisanal really just kinda means fancy epicenter guys. Wordsmith learnings. Price point. Oh, you mean the price?

Oh, you know the price point. Well tell me, tell me in two sentences how a price point is different than a price in a way that is salient to how anybody would use that term. Learnings. Gimme

Jeff: Okay, hold on. You have words. Discount [01:27:00] convergence. What is a discount conversion? What do you mean when you say that?

Merlin: because you take a part of speech and adapt it to be a different part of speech in a way that weakens rather than strengthens the usefulness of the word. Is there anything you’ve ever experienced?

I know that was a big ask, but as one of the ho hopefuls as uh, the, who could, somebody who could oust the person who pens any of this stuff.

I just wanted to detail you on some of the ways that creatives are working on that spend. It’s a big ask.

Jeff: For anybody not looking at the list, which is probably most of you right now, Marilyn is

Merlin: If it sounded like you had NPR on, that’s because you did.

Jeff: Yeah, exactly. It is a random sentence generator for a

Merlin: Hi, I’m 25. I’m 25 and used to have a blog. Now I write for something. I guess. Well, that hopeful has been ousted and that’s why we penned this and why I’m detailing all the creatives on the

Jeff: rush to the hospital. Mm-hmm.

Merlin: Yeah. Unlike those times,

Jeff: When we amble,

Merlin: double down. Double down has got double down, has got to end.

Jeff: It’s gotta

Merlin: And then not penultimate, like, do you [01:28:00] understand?

Penultimate is such a good dumb guy word because they think it means even more ultimate.

Jeff: Even more. Yeah. It’s a great one.

Merlin: Okay. And then here, and, and I’m, this is not addressed to anybody. I’m just gonna put this out there. If you’re ever wondering in usage, in grammar, here’s a really good trick. You know, sometimes it’s difficult to know once you use the objective or subjective term of different pronouns or um, verbs.

And so you might say something like, um, Jeff and I. Uh, went to the Dairy Queen and you say, oh, I, is it Jeff and I or Jeff and me? Well, here’s the

Brett: take out

Jeff: Mm-hmm.

Merlin: And so yeah, go, walk me through that, Brett. How does that work? How, how does that sound when you, when you do that, if you’re, if you, in your mind, you’re thinking, am I getting this right?

So how do you do it?

Brett: yeah, so if you’re, if it was Jeff and I, Jeff and I went to the ice cream shop, you would just take out Jeff and say, I went to the ice cream shop.

Merlin: Does it make sense If it’s just one of those

Brett: you wouldn’t say me. Went to the ice cream shop. It gets a little weird with certain conjugations. Um. Especially with [01:29:00] she and I are in love.

You wouldn’t say I are in love, but you also wouldn’t say, me are in love. So like in that case it’s I, But,

Merlin: But, but, but like, here’s the thing is when you’re a little kid, you think that, and I is, sounds fancier. So you would say, oh, ’cause like things like the king and I, so you would say like, um, you might say something if you were using it when you should be using the objective, you are using a subjective, so you would say something like, uh, they went to the Dairy Queen with Jeff and I, did I get that right?

No, I didn’t because it would be Jeff and me because they went with me.

Okay. I’m

Jeff: I, I do this almost every day. The same way you hold your fingers up to see which one is

Merlin: left and right. Oh, oh. All the time.

Jeff: kind of trick.

Merlin: Um, so here’s the thing. Uh. Avoid. ’cause people tend to prefer, if they wanna sound smart, they wanna sound not like a dumb guy because you sound like a dumb guy who drinks from a jug. If you always use the objective form and you say, um, me want food

Jeff: Mm-hmm.[01:30:00]

Merlin: GenOn 30

rock me want.

So you say, I want food, you know, like a civilized person. Me want food. But like, if you wanna sound fancy, you always go to the subjective form. So you say I, you know, so, um, you know, uh, vacationed with wi uh, withnell and I, but you know, there’s almost never a need to say myself unless you are a rural Irish poet.

You don’t need to refer to yourself as myself.

I, that’s a classic

Jeff: I says to myself, says I,

Merlin: I said, I said, oh my God. I got tied up with my own shoe laces tied to the radiator. Were you just doing grandpa from dairy, girls

Jeff: was doing column from, Yeah.

Merlin: yeah, uncle from dairy girls.

Jeff: Yeah. best.

Merlin: he says to me, says.

Jeff: my wife and I say that nonstop.

Merlin: He just got tied to a radio with his own shoelaces.

It’s just not as nice.

Derry Girls and TV Recommendations

Merlin: Um, Brett, this is a very, very, very funny comedy on Netflix called Dairy Girls. And it’s Oh, okay. Um,

Jeff: Watched it twice.

Merlin: the episode with the tests and the dog peeing and the [01:31:00] Jesus crying. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever

Jeff: Ever fucking put on

Merlin: Just the, the just all, all the scenes that, uh, I can’t, you guys can’t see me, but I’m, when, when there’s a scene where she thinks Peter thinks Peter the priest thinks she’s special and she’s trying to explain that to the Mother Superior and like, just that entire scene.

And did you ever notice that? Um, what’s her head? Uh, who’s the girl? Who’s the girl I like? Um, who’s the funny one? Mar Mar

Jeff: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Is this the one that’s also in Bridger,

Merlin: she’s, she’s, always, no, no. Oh, I love her too. RoCE Royce. But what’s her name? She’s always eating something. The weird girl is always eating. She’s always putting something in her mouth and she like, Hmm.

Good point. Um. Myself. That’s so funny. Call him. And, you know, you know who’s in that, you know, who plays grandpa in that?

Jeff: Hmm.

Merlin: Uh, just a little guy named Sir Baron Sway.

Jeff: Who is

Merlin: Uh,

Jeff: Let me pull up call sheet, which

Merlin: hanging the hang of the, uh, uh, head of the Kings Guard, uh, in the early parts of Game of Thrones. And remember, remember, he won’t go all in for Gioffre who [01:32:00] sucks and starts, he gets him fired, and then he goes and he rescues Denarius from the Scorpion Robot.

Remember when the kid throws the scorpion robot and he goes and puts a dagger through it?

Jeff: yeah.

I didn’t realize that was grandpa.

Crazy.

Merlin: that actor. And I’ve just watched several things with a guy named, uh, a guy called, as they say, as John. John, uh, s says, Rory Coler. Rory.

But the rural ju, the guy who plays twins on our flag means death.

Oh, oh, sorry. Fucking TRO Bridge.

Jeff: Trobridge.

Merlin: TR Bridge, fucking TRO Bridge.

Jeff: That’s, uh, Brett, that’s the diplomat, which you must watch. Trobridge is unbelievable.

Merlin: Trevor is fucking great. That guy. Rory K. Rory k. He also

Jeff: nickel.

Merlin: have you Hmm? Have you seen, this is UN releasable. I love this, but don’t release this.

Have you seen, Have you seen, you could tell I’m getting really into it. ’cause I’m starting to do, y’all can’t see this, but I’m starting to do [01:33:00] my Steven Sondheim hand gestures.

Jeff: Yeah. It’s like a solar

Merlin: When Steven, when Steven Sondheim is instructing someone on how to sing, he does a lot of this kind of stuff.

Brett: Mm.

Merlin: It’s got that guy and he, who’s also does a lot of good Shakespeare stuff and he’s in a fantastic movie. I wanna recommend, uh, called Men Starring the Great Jesse Buckley.

Jeff: Oh

Merlin: And it’s by that director I like.

Jeff: Wow. That’s great.

Merlin: don’t say myself if you can work around it now, see some of these last thing, some of these are just, I would avoid these if you can. And the same way that I would avoid. If I wanna say to my, the person who lives in my house, who’s a young person, I don’t like, somehow I can’t, I’m trying to get it past that.

But if I say I wanna say to Billy, I wanna say, uh, let’s see. Uh, um, oh, um, if you don’t see me on fine, my if, because I’m in the tunnel, you know, I would just say I’m in the [01:34:00] tunnel. I wouldn’t say, if you don’t see me out, find my, it’s ’cause I’m out of pocket. ’cause it sounds like I’m personally conducting a riot.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah,

Merlin: So I would just avoid that

usage because if there’s a, if there’s, and this is why we like words people, especially word people, is that if is a more specific word, that if it, it has the, the meaning that you want and the feel that you want, you know, like, like the kind of thing where like Sue Sue Perkins calls, you know, calls Alex Horn like a human shit stand or something.

Like there’s certain kinds that have so much power to it.

Jeff: yeah.

Merlin: You know, gone missing really? Has the person gone missing? Did they turn up missing? Is that, is that a sentence that you’re proud of? This person has gone, where did they go? They went missing. You could just say the

person

Jeff: I, what I love about this is we’ve tipped over into fucking grandpa mode and

here and another one, God damnit.

Merlin: Yeah. Well, you like to interview people. You, you like to interview people. You ever sit down with somebody or catch [01:35:00] up with them? And when you do sit down or

catch up with them, do they

Jeff: of ’em, I share the learnings.

Merlin: and leavings, because you should clean up the leavings before the next people get the

Jeff: end trails.

Merlin: And, and so you say,

Brett: are indefatigable.

Jeff: Oh,

Merlin: oh, I don’t think we say that anymore. We do not say that anymore.

Jeff: I love that word. Invariable. Commensurate.

Brett: I’m gonna ask for an exception.

I, I’m fading. I can’t, I can’t go on. Do you guys wanna just go on without me?

Merlin: No, no. We should stop.

Jeff: that’s, that’s a But we’re not gonna leave you behind. Don’t never leave a man

Merlin: But, but if you’re in a place you’ve never been before that would nobody’s been. That’s, that’s unchartered

Jeff: He’s

Merlin: territory. Because if there’s no chart for it, it’s uncharted.

Jeff: Oh my God.

Merlin: Gilligan’s Island

Brett: side, side, side, side note, did you

Jeff: It’s all side notes,

Brett: did you know that it’s not chomping at the bit,

Merlin: it’s champing at the bit?

Brett: chomping at

Jeff: champing at the

Merlin: It’s absolutely

Brett: lifetime not

Merlin: I don’t correct people ’cause I know what they meant. But it is [01:36:00] technically champing

Jeff: What’s it mean? Championing.

Merlin: because a champ is the thing is not the thing that a horse is biting on.

It’s, isn’t that called

champing?

Brett: I,

Jeff: they were biting

Merlin: Chomping. Chomping is what teens do to popcorn. And

Jeff: bit was the champ.

Merlin: what?

It’s a problem with

Brett: I learned that this was a thing, I understood why, but I have already forgotten why. All I came away with

Concluding Thoughts and Sign-Off

Merlin: Let’s wrap this up and get Brett outta here. We’re, we’re not gonna release this anyway, right? Are we?

Brett: Uh,

Jeff: We’re gonna release it at half speed,

That was so fun. Thanks Merlin.

Merlin: Oh, thank you. Wait, is that’s the, that’s the show, right?

Brett: you. That’s the That is, I’m gonna, I’m gonna hit stop.

Merlin: Bye.

Jeff: What we’ve gotta say, get some sleep or, uh, what do you wanna do here? Hmm?

Brett: Hey, you we doing here?

Merlin: Hey, sleep.

Jeff: Hmm. hey, hey.

On this episode of Overtired, Christina Warren, Jeff Severns Guntzel, and Jay Miller dive into tech talk, nonprofit initiatives, and some unexpected baseball chat. Jeff raves about his foray into Linux, while Jay updates us on Black Python Devs and their efforts to support developers in Latin America. Christina brings her Mac app gratitude like a pro, and baseball makes its way into the conversation more than once. Expect laughs, tech tips, and a lot of goodwill.

Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all eCommerce in the US, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark, to brands just getting started. Get started today at shopify.com/overtired.

You’re downloading today’s show from CacheFly’s network

BackBeat Media Podcast Network

Check out more episodes at overtiredpod.com and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Find Brett as @ttscoff, Christina as @film_girl, Jeff as @jsguntzel, and follow Overtired at @ovrtrd on Twitter.

This Time It’s Love (with Jay Miller)

Introduction and Guest Welcome

[00:00:00]

Christina: You are listening to Overtired. I’m Christina Warren, and I’m joined as always by Jeff Severance, Gonzo. And this week we have back one of our favorite guests, Mr. J Miller. Jay, welcome back to the pod.

Jay: What’s up? What’s up? Glad to, glad to be back. Glad to, to be here with the crew. I think I’ve been, now, I’ve been on the show with every variation

Christina: was going to say, I was going to say, you’ve, you’ve been on, like, every iteration you’ve been on with just like, like, uh, like, like, like Jeff and, and, and Brett. You’ve been on just with me and, and, and, and Brett and now with, with, uh, Mia and Jeff. So yes, you’ve done like the full, like, you know, uh, yeah.

Jeff: Due for a solo, solo episode, Jay.

Christina: Yeah. Oh, honestly, honestly, that that, honestly.

Jay: have a guess.

Christina: I was going to say, that would actually be hilarious if we’re like, okay, we can’t do it for hire this week. So we’re gonna have, uh, uh, Brian and Jeff, uh, no, Brian and Jay take it. Right? That would be, that would be like a

Jeff: That’s good. Yeah.

Jay: I can [00:01:00] see this happening.

Jeff: Well, it’s good to see everybody.

Christina: yes.

Jeff: Um, so Brett is out, uh, this week. Hello Brett. Um, wherever you are, specifically in the editing window right now, probably as you listen to this.

Linux Teaser and Framework Desktop

Jeff: Um, but yeah, Jay, it’s awesome to have you back and, um, I, I’m just gonna like spoil it for everybody and we’re not gonna start here, but I’m gonna talk about Linux and, and I don’t care who knows it,

Christina: Hell yes.

Jeff: but that’s just, that’s just a teaser.

That’s just to keep people listening.

Christina: Excellent. Excellent. Um, well, well, this is fun. I, I’m excited about this because I bought a, uh, a framework desktop a few months

Jeff: Oh,

Christina: and, and, well, well, more than a few months ago, but, but it arrived I guess like a month and a half ago. And, uh, it’s super, super fun. So I’m very excited to know. I didn’t know going into this, I, I didn’t look at the document beforehand, so I didn’t realize we were gonna be talking about Linux, but this is exciting for me.

Jeff: man.

Jay: I, I, I mean, I have some Linux stuff going on.

Jeff: I’ve got some Linux.

Jay: yeah, not as much as y’all. I [00:02:00] mean, but

Jeff: So,

Jay: a Linux box back there.

Christina: Hell

Jay’s Plant Obsession

Jeff: Jay, Jay, greet the, the listeners who have been waiting for the next Jay Miller episode tells how you’re doing.

Jay: Oh, I’m, I’m doing good. Um, I’ve, I’ve dealt with some, some title changes that don’t really mean anything, so we can just skip ’em. And I am. I’m just out here. We were, we were talking about this before the show started. Uh, I’m getting ready for a very, uh, stressful trip to Lavia next week. Um, now is not the time to be traveling like out of the country and trying to get back in

Jeff: You’re fleeing

Jay: def Well, I mean, you know, the, to be honest, YouTube video somewhere, Picon 2025, I sat on a panel and it was like, what do you tell folks who are wanting to come to like picon us in 2025 or getting ready for 2026?

And I’m like, to be honest, just don’t, like, I [00:03:00] wouldn’t tell you to miss out on all the fun, but also I can’t promise your safety, so Yeah, just don’t, so I’m, I’m rolling those dice, but, uh. Not much has really changed for me. It’s still working, still doing the same stuff, still talking. Um, I’ve become an obsessed plant person in the last year.

Um, so that’s fun. I think my camera has like five plants over there, and then there’s three more on the other side of the camera, and then I’ve got like another seven or eight downstairs.

Jeff: So it follows that you’ve become someone who can keep plants alive. Not that you couldn’t before, but I’m just thinking when people have plants, they think, oh, you’re a good person. You can keep them alive.

Jay: I mean, one could argue I bought so many because I keep killing them, but, you know, it’s, I’m trying, I’m, I’m trying to keep ’em going.

Jeff: What made you a plant person? Like what’s tell, I mean, that’s a thing.

Jay: Um, I mean, I’ve always liked plants. I, I noticed sometime earlier in the year, I don’t remember when it was, [00:04:00] honestly, that I was spending a lot of time like in my office and. It just felt horrible. Like it felt very drab and like I kept watching these like how to like spice up your, your office space and all this stuff.

And one of the things they talked about was like, get some greenery in there, like get a plant. Usually they say like, get a fake plant, but you know, there’s some benefits to also getting real plants. And I got one, I’ve had plants for a couple of years, but they were all like, I had like two plants downstairs.

I barely water them and they’re okay with that. But like I just started getting more and more and then all of a sudden I like blink and I’ve got like a monster behind me that’s, you know, doing its best. It’s living its best life. I saved it from the Home Depot, so, you know, it’s, it’s probably happier to be here than there.

Jeff: awesome, awesome. You know, I meant to say this at the beginning.

Meeting in Person for the First Time

Jeff: This is a hard pivot, but Christina, this is the first time we’ve been on the pod together since we [00:05:00] met in person for the first time ever,

Christina: I know, which has been months, which was so amazing. I was so happy to meet your beautiful family and, uh, your, your wife who’s amazing and, and your two sons, and like, that was so fun. Like that was such a great, I was,

Jeff: had lunch.

Christina: we, did we had lunch? Did you guys have a, have fun the rest of your time in Seattle?

Jeff: We had a good time in Seattle. We had a good time in war ravaged Portland, and we had a great time on the Oregon coast. Yes, it was awesome. Yes. But yeah, it was so, it was so weird because I mean, Jesus, you and I for what, three years now, have known each other through these little video boxes.

Christina: No, I mean that, well, it was finally, it was like, oh yes, good. Finally like a name, like to, you know, it, not a name for the face, but you know what I mean? Like a, like a face, like to, to the person that I’ve seen their face, but like now I really get to get to know it, which was really, really cool.

Jeff: awesome. So fun. I can’t believe that we have not recorded together since then.

Christina: I know. I know.

Jay: the last time I saw all of y’all. I think I haven’t, I still haven’t seen you in person, Jeff. That’s okay. I’ve got an event in Cleveland you [00:06:00] can come to, um, later this year. We’ll talk

Jeff: me, okay,

Jay: Well, actually I can’t talk about that. It hasn’t been announced yet, but spoiler alert, there’s an event in Cleveland that I’ll be at doing things.

Um, you should come. Um, but, uh, Christina and I met at scale. Right. And then, uh, I was just looking at scale to go back next year. So like a small world. And then Brett and I met, wow, that was probably like six. Was that before COVID? I can’t remember if the wood, the Woodstock, or Max stock that we went to was before or after COVID. I’m confused now.

Jeff: luck figuring that

Jay: been that long. It’s been at, it is been at least five years. Probably six or seven.

Jeff: Brett and I have only been in person three times, which is also crazy ’cause not only have we been doing this podcast, but we were working together for a while before that and I met him after being a guest on Systematic, like way, way, way, way long ago.

So anyway,[00:07:00]

Jay: This is the first company that I’ve worked for in tech where I’ve actually met all of my teammates. And that was, that was after like several rounds of layoffs and now it’s like, hey, some have, most have gone and now there’s like one person I haven’t met in person yet, but who knows? Actually I don’t even, I don’t have a team anymore.

It’s kind of weird, but again, like we’re not talking about that right now. Um,

Jeff: Jay, I have something. And it wasn’t something I initially put on our list to talk about. ’cause you have a couple of recent posts. I just want like, at least for you to touch on.

Conference Presentation Pet Peeves

Jeff: But you said you’re going to Latvia to talk to people about how to prepare for talks and I was just at a conference in which like whenever I met a conference, all my fucking pet peeves about conference presentations come up and I get like Larry David angry. Um, but I just want to, I really want you to talk about what you’re gonna talk about to prepare for talking.

Jay: Okay, so I’m, I’m giving two talks at, uh, Postgres Comp Europe. Uh, one is called [00:08:00] like, don’t Leak, PII, to ai. Um, those that love acronyms, we’ll get that like, Hey, it’s a lot of good best security practices. Like, don’t give this thing that you shouldn’t fully trust, like unfettered access to your entire database.

Duh. But you know, there’s some, there’s some more niche niche tips in there. But then, uh, I got asked by two former colleagues to do. Uh, to, for us all to team up and basically give this talk that is about what we call the speakers corner. Um, companies tend to have ’em, speakers, corners, speakers bureaus, speakers, whatever former KGB affiliated organization that we won’t call.

And then, like effectively the goal is to get a bunch of people in a room and let someone rehearse a talk. And it’s great specifically for folks like you, Jeff, who are, you know, might be a little pedantic, might want. Specific slides a certain way or you know, hey, you could just ink out a little bit more value from your talk if you [00:09:00] just did this.

This gives you a place to call home where you can, you can do that at the behest and, uh, consent of the people presenting, uh, whether it’s a upcoming post. I actually did this for my keynote, um, that I did at Picon US last year. Um, and we wound up raising like 20 grand. And one of the biggest benefits that I can like tie directly to that is someone in my speaker’s rehearsal said, yo, this is lacking the big call to action.

Like, you’re missing the donate slide. Like add, add the donate button, big text, give it lots of space. Let people do the thing where they lift, they, you know, lift the phone up to take pictures and like. Sure it works. So, uh, we’re just gonna talk about that. Whether you’re an experienced speaker or you’re giving your first conference talk, there’s something to benefit from these things.

So, yeah, we’re just gonna dive into that a little bit

Jeff: that’s awesome. In Lavia,

Jay: in la in, in Lavia. Yes. [00:10:00] Step one was indeed find lavia on a map. Step two was like, figure out how to get there. Step three was prepare slides.

Jeff: Nice. Oh, I’m remember that checklist. Next time I’m doing talks in Latvia. Um, uh, okay. So let me ask both of you and, and I can give one example just to get us started, but shit that drives you crazy, uh, about presentations at conferences, besides how unnatural it is to be at a conference in the first place as a human.

It’s like being on an airplane. It’s like we weren’t supposed to be here like this. Um, this is so small, it drives me crazy and I have done it, but I haven’t done it in a long time, which is when someone starts in a room and they believe they are the person that doesn’t need the microphone and they say, Hey, I talk really loud.

Can everyone hear me? And of course the people who can’t hear you are not raising their hand to be like, no, this sucks for me. But everyone who’s like, oh sure. And then you go ahead and you can’t hear anybody. That’s a huge pet peeve of mine.

Christina: Yeah, well this is especially true now that like a lot of these things are, are recorded, you know, or, or sometimes live [00:11:00] streamed, right? Like, like, um, although that’s changing a little bit now, places are like getting really weird where being like, oh no, we’re in person only we, we, we’ve completely forgotten that Zoom exists.

And it’s like, really, guys? Really? Um, but I so it, it was annoying for, for those folks, but also if there’s any sort of recording, but, um, even more so like I, I’m with you, like a, people can’t hear you. They won’t say it, but like, if people have questions and then you don’t repeat the question, you know, for everybody who can out, who, who’s out there, it’s like, that’s, that’s very frustrating to me.

I’m like, okay, I’m not saying you need to pass a microphone out because that can take a lot of time, but at the very least, you should repeat what the question that the person asked is before you answer it.

Jeff: Yes.

Jay: good for the recording. I mean, specifically for the recording, if it is recorded, like I don’t, I don’t hear what dude said. I don’t wanna rewind, so

Jeff: Yeah.

Christina: Well, exactly. Well, it’s good for that, but it’s also even just in person, depending on how big the room is, I might be able to hear you, but that doesn’t mean that somebody on the other side of the room can

Jeff: Also, I should say, I mean, related to this, [00:12:00] in this two day conference, the only one that was like even moderately accessible, meaning in this case it had live captioning, was the one about digital accessibility. That’s the other thing. It’s like a little, little shitty, but Jay, what? What do you got?

Jay: I don’t, I think, I think the biggest one for me is, I mean, it’s, it’s the classic like. I’m gonna read to you exactly what, like this is for code conferences. If you’ve got a hundred lines of text, like a hundred lines, like code lines on your slides, don’t, don’t read it. Like

Jeff: please.

Jay: you can point to samples.

Like I do that a lot. Like I will have like a large wall of text there and I’m like, look, I know this is scary. The scariness is for effect, but we’re gonna break this down in a way that we can understand. And then you bring in the boxes, you bring in the highlighters, you bring in like the little laser pointer thing.

You talk to those specific points and you keep it moving. But like, if you’re gonna tell me like, well, the first thing you do in Python is install your dependence. Like, we know, we know, I’m sorry. And if we don’t know, [00:13:00] again, that’s when you raise your hand and you ask the question and, and then they repeat that question.

And we, we remind ourselves that there are people of all different experience levels, but. I, I want, I want dynamic slides. I want slides that are doing something. I don’t want to sit there and look at text on white background with no images, no graphs, no charts, no dates, like nothing but just straight up text because I will fall asleep

Christina: Right.

Jeff: Right.

Jay: So like we don’t want that.

Jeff: I will snore. That’s a great point. That’s a great point. Um, I was, I was at a session, this conference was for nonprofits. I don’t work for a nonprofit, but we, we serve a lot of them. Kind of wanted to just know in this moment, like what people were talking about and afraid of and wondering and all this stuff.

Right. It’s obviously a crazy time to be a nonprofit. Um, although nonprofit can mean all sorts of things, but we’re all thinking of the same kind of nonprofits probably. And so they had [00:14:00] the very first session, the very first day was about what do the federal funding cuts mean for you. The Descript of it sounded like they were really gonna hit on the really important stuff.

The room was packed. I mean, there were probably 200 people there who were clearly there to just like. Be in a room together and figure this thing out. And the first 20 minutes of the hour long presentation was about the Johnson Amendment, which is just the amendment that kind of names that you can’t as a nonprofit, um, endorse political candidates.

So a little history about that. Then they did about 10 minutes on the government shutdown in which they. Said nothing that was relevant to these people in the room. And then they finally got into it after the lady showed pictures of her baby, which is another pet peeve of mine, because not everybody here has children.

Not everybody here likes children. Not everybody here can have children, even if they want to have children. So let’s not show eight pictures of your baby, um, when you’re already giving a shitty presentation. So this, this led, this led to my other, other, other pet peeve, which is when the time ran out, they had four slides left.

And what was the [00:15:00] last slide? Questions and answers. And this was a room where no doubt people needed to talk. Right? And they ran out the clock talking about stuff that was totally not, I mean, it’s the kind of thing where like when you can tell a talk’s not getting where it needs to go, you can almost feel it in your stomach, right?

Where you’re like, come on, get to the thing. Anyway, that was, that’s another one is like, and don’t cut it off when your last slide and then do this to the last slide. Question and answer. Say sorry, what didn’t have any time. That’s another one for me. Especially when people are hurting or scared. Right?

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think time management is, is, is a, a big challenge for a lot of speakers. I definitely have had those experiences where I’m too early or I, or, or I go too long and yeah, you just,

Jeff: all the things I’m talking about.

Christina: Oh yeah. No, I was gonna say I have too, but, uh, uh, we definitely have. But, but yeah, but that’s one of those things you gotta just like keep it in mind.

I mean, and this is also why, at least for me, I, I can’t speak for anybody else, but like for me, like the one time that I ever like, was really off time-wise, that was like a really good indicator that was like, oh, I haven’t rehearsed enough. [00:16:00] This talk is not actually, like, I, I’ve actually, I’ve fucked up because I got like, you know, big ego brain, like, oh, I don’t need to

Jeff: I got this

Christina: this.

And you’re like, no, I don’t. I don’t. I actually had a talk in India, um, this, uh, this year, this was funny. I had timed it and I knew that I was on time. And then when I did my rehearsal, there were some issues getting the computer set up, and I knew that the time was still going, like for their thing. And so I was manually like subtracting, you know, however many minutes from it.

And then I get off the stage and they told me, they’re like, no, you went too long. You were w we’d accounted for it for the new time and you were this many minutes over. And I was like, okay. I really don’t think that I was. But fine. And so I cut a demo, um, from the talk and whatnot. Anyway, long story short, I wound up ending three minutes early, so like,

Jeff: like, yeah,

Christina: know, but, but, but they, but they drilled it into me so much because this was one where they were gonna be like, we’re gonna cut you off.

You know, we’re, we’re gonna start flashing big lights if you go too long. [00:17:00] Right? And, and, and I wanted to be respectful of that. I knew that there were a lot of people after me and I, I didn’t wanna, you know, keep people from their lunch or from anything else. Um, but it was one of those funny things. ’cause I was like, okay, but I’ve actually been practicing this.

This is a really long talk and I’ve already had to cut a lot of things out of I, and I, I thought that I had the timing. I did actually have the timing, but yeah.

Jay: Not, not to move this into a, a, the career conversation of, of how we give proper talks, but like there, there is this part of me that wonders very much so when it comes to presenting your, like I, I know people who are so prepared and like they’ve over rehearsed their talk. Like you, you can tell they are reading from like a mental script that they have.

And like that is, I mean, some people dig that, some people really love that. I think that there is something to, like, I’ve seen talks as a performance where like there’s music involved and people come on [00:18:00] stage and interrupt the talk intentionally to do a thing and it’s all like, it’s a bit, and to me there is a level of rehearsal about that that takes away from the moment of. People have kind of come in here to hear your expertise and that if you have prepared the talk that like that deep, just make it a YouTube video. At this point, like I feel like there has to be a little bit of, I don’t, I don’t know what the word is, but I would call it like organicness

Christina: Yeah, qua, there’s, there’s, yeah, yeah. There, there has to be a little bit of unpredictability, right? Like, like, so, so something makes me feel like it’s live, right? Like, I mean, honestly, this has been my problem with, with Apple’s, um, conferences and, and like events for the last few years, like since COVID, is that we always knew it was scripted and that they were reading off scripts, but there was, there were live demos, and there were, there were kind of these senses that like, okay, they are rehearsed to the nines and it is impressive, but this is like a live person doing this in front of me.

And now it’s like, no, this is, this is a video. Right? And, and that’s fine. It’s just, you know, that’s, that’s not [00:19:00] the same thing. Which, which to your point, yeah. If, if it’s gonna be so perfectly rehearsed down to the millisecond, maybe, maybe I, I don’t, I don’t know,

Jay: Like make, make it a video. Hey, play the video

Jeff: Well, and if it’s rehearsed that tightly, if you have some, all of a sudden it’s one of those sessions where everybody’s raising their hand, even though there’s a time at the end, which good for them. ’cause they probably predict that they’re, you’ve gotta be able to like, adapt. And if it’s that tight, you just end up kind of like, you know, being a little stuck,

Jay: Yeah. But I, I recognize that that’s, you know, that might be what people need to be comfort, you know, comfortable getting up on stage and presenting. Like, I, the more I prepare, the less comfortable I feel because it’s like, I’m trying to remember what I’m saying versus I know the, I know the context.

Like I know the content, I know the flow. I can speak to the flow. If I’m trying to think about the exact ways to say it, I’m going to wind up messing up. Whereas if I’m like, all right, well, I know that. Slide two is [00:20:00] me talking about this thing and I have approximately 30 seconds, like I will feel the 30 seconds of this slide talking about it or talking to it.

Christina: Yeah. I mean, I will say this though, I would rather someone, like if it were up to me, like I would rather see somebody who was super over-prepared and maybe even like robotic than someone who is not prepared. Right. Um, like, like, like I, I I’m with you. I think like it’s a better talk if it can be more organic.

I think organic is a, is a good word for it. Um, but, but I also, like, if I had to choose, I would rather take the person who is overly polished to the point that you’re like, is, is, is this a video? Um, versus, you know, the person who’s just trying to kind of, to muddle through it. And, and I’ve been in both of those situations, right?

I’ve both been the person who has probably given the same talk a million times and, and it’s very practiced versus person who’s like, oh, I’m actually completely doing this for the first time in person. And you can tell, you know.

Jay: us. Usually my third, third version of the talk is the [00:21:00] best one. Like some, most of the time you don’t get to the third one, but like the third version, I’m like, in my bag. I’m like, cool, I could do this blindfolded. It’s almost like Linux, you know? The third time you’ve spun it up, it’s, you might know what you’re doing.

Speaking of Linux.

Christina: gonna say listen to that segue. Listen to that segue. Um, actually though, but, but before we do that, I was gonna say, do we need to have a sponsor break?

Sponsor Break: Shopify

Jeff: Yeah, we should probably have a sponsor break. Um, and, and I’m, I’m happy to be, um, our sponsor break for today. Our sponsor today is Shopify. Look at Overtired. We’ve tried to sell merch before. It was a long time ago, but it seemed like, you know, you gotta figure everything out on your own.

You gotta do design marketing. Gotta figure out the sales platforms, like the whole deal. Um, it can be super overwhelming. We, we try to keep it simple, um, but every day, uh, can introduce a new decision that needs an answer. And when you’re starting off with something new, it seems like your to-do list keeps growing every day with new tasks.

And [00:22:00] that list can easily begin to overrun your life. And if you wanna know how to deal with that. See any number of Brett TURPs tools. Finding the right tool that not only helps you out but simplifies everything can be such a game changer. Um, for millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US from household names like Mattel. Mm. Mattel made me very happy as a child and Jim Shark to brands that are just getting started. Get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready to use templates.

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Supporting Python Devs in Latin America

Jeff: Now, before we go into Linux, um, I want you, Jay, to update us on Black Python devs. You had a post about supporting, um, Python devs in Latin America, and I would love for you to just like talk about that. And there’s also a call to action, if I’m not mistaken,

Jay: there better

Jeff: can give some money.

Jay: so yes. Um, so it’s been, yeah, it’s been a couple of years. Uh, black Python [00:24:00] devs is in its second year as a nonprofit, third year of existence, which is wild and like. We operate on about 20 to $30,000 a year, and that allows us to sponsor about 20 to 25 conferences. It looks like that’s what we’re tracking for.

Uh, and these are conferences, these are user groups meetups, um, across the u uh, different parts of the us. Uh, several in Africa. And this year I bitched and moaned about like, Hey, how come we we’re not sponsoring anyone in like the, in like Latin America and South America? Like, you know, I don’t know how people think about like, colorism in other countries, but you have several Caribbean islands.

You have several like, like places like Brazil, um, the last country I believe to like abolish slavery in the Americas. Um, yeah, there race is, is [00:25:00] a complicated thing. Um, so. Finally, we had a couple of people from Columbia reach out to us and we started sponsoring some places in um, Columbia, which was super awesome.

And then shortly while I was in the, the throes of trying to figure out this problem, we also had a, a friend of mine who now lives in Montreal but is heavily invested in the Dominican saying like, Hey, look, I understand that like in America, and I guess for people who don’t fully know, in America, there is actually this strange like black.

Black-ish doesn’t identify as black unless someone who’s not black is identifying them. Like there is this weird context around blackness that happens and it, it tends to happen a lot around like, uh, Puerto Rico, like Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. Um, it’s why our president wants a nice American Super Bowl, although the halftime show is presented by someone from Puerto Rico, which is [00:26:00] America.

Yes. Um, these, these things are weird. So all of that to say, I’ve been thinking a ton about like, what, what is next? And a lot of that is just doubling down on what we’re doing in the us, doubling down what we’re doing, um, in Latin America and specifically Latin America. So this is my call to action, like, so everybody, everybody take a, a pin out, open a keyboard, do something like if you know of an event in Latin America and anywhere where there could be.

People who are we? We’ll even say indigenous, native, indigenous to that location. Um, so we’re talking about like Mayan ancestry, Aztec ancestry. Uh, we’re talking about people who were brought over to Latin America or their, at least their ancestors were brought over during slavery or the slave trade. Um, let [00:27:00] me know if there is some type of tech event happening and we are happy to support it.

Now granted, we don’t have a ton of money, um, but we do have some, and it’s what we’ve learned is having some is better than like. Not giving it to people. So like, let’s, let’s make that happen. And our goal is we’re gonna, right now we only have two events that we sponsor in Latin America. My goal is to triple that by 2027.

Um, I think we can do significantly better than that, but all of my advisors are like, you can’t keep making these lofty goals. Eventually you won’t hit one. Um, and I’m just like, shut up. You can’t tell me what to do. So again, at least six, I’m gonna say seven by 2027. And, uh, yeah, we’re, otherwise we’re doing great.

I’ve learned how to give other people responsibility and just trust that they do it. And it works like 95% of the time. And the five.

Jeff: success rate.

Jay: [00:28:00] Yeah, the 5% that it doesn’t work. Usually it’s my fault anyway. So like it’s, I, I’ve like delegated a task and then like something’s sitting in my inbox and I didn’t send it to them and I’m like, oh my bad.

I am the screw up here. Um, can we please try and fix this quickly?

Jeff: what does, what does sponsorship look like? Is it donating to the organizing costs? Is it sponsoring someone to attend?

Jay: um, usually we leave that to whatever the conference needs. Uh, the first few years we were very, very like, Hey, we’re gonna sponsor getting people to the, like, to the event. And what we learned was that injecting 30 or 50 people into an event that was designed to hold a certain number of people only causes more problems.

It increases all of the other budgets. Um, so instead now we just look at the prospectus, we donate, you know, at whatever sponsorship level we can. And I tell people my barrier to entry is like. If [00:29:00] you’re looking at the event and you’re like, I know at least two black people that could get to this event, like, it qualifies.

We, we’ll figure it out. We’ll work with their community to figure out how to make it like the best possible sponsorship that we can. But ultimately it’s, it’s gonna be, Hey, what needs do y’all have? Here’s some money. Like, address those needs. And I guess the way that we keep from, I guess, Nigerian printing, which I, I don’t like that phrase.

’cause now we actually do sponsor a significant number of events in Nigeria. So it’s like,

Jeff: Yeah.

Jay: it’s like, oh, we, we actually do sponsor a lot of those events, but our community members also attend those events. So usually if we’re sponsoring an event, we’re also showing up, we’re inviting people from the local area to join and get started.

So it’s, I, I tell people like, if you’ve ever wanted to donate to like a large number of diverse events, donate to us. You know, if we look at the whole Red Cross, like oh 0.3% of your donation goes to [00:30:00] bottled water, like 76% currently of your donation funds immediately go right back out into the community.

So like, if you really want your money to, to get to the community in like a impactful way, like black python devs.com, hit the support button, you can set up recurring donations. I tell everybody recurring donations are so much more important than big number on screen. Like I can plan a budget around $5 a month.

Jeff: You can plan. Oh my

Jay: Yes, take, take your $500 and just split it up in like $5 a month intervals. And then you’ll have given us like nearly, not as much, but that’s fine. Like we can plan around it, double it, make it 50, whatever.

Jeff: That’s such a great point, man. I didn’t really, I mean, I see the recurring stuff and I get it as soon as you say it, but like makes a lot

Christina: I had never thought about that either. And now, now I feel like kind of bad ’cause like I’m gonna have to shift like my giving patterns. ’cause usually what I do is that like I will give in, in the month of [00:31:00] October, because that’s usually when there’s like a big giving drive, like a, you know, a past companies that I’ve worked at or, um, on like giving Tuesday or, or, or whatever, you know, if, if there will be like a, a, an additional match that the companies will offer.

So I’ll usually try to do like my big, you know, donations like during those months, once a year. But, um, what I, what I should be doing, I guess, is looking about seeing if I can somehow get credit for that and, and donate, you know, on a, on a recurring level, um, or maybe make a. You know, maybe, maybe split it in two.

Right. Give like, if I, if there’s an extra match, give the bigger amount, like on giving Tuesday that gets like the double match or whatever, and then take the other half and, and say, okay, I’m gonna have that recurring over the course of the, of the year. ’cause that’s, that’s a great point. I never thought about that.

Jay: That’s been like, the biggest challenge for us was, again, we, we raised so much money the first year that we were like, okay, cool, we’re up. And then we knew that that money wasn’t coming around the second year. ’cause like [00:32:00] there was no big keynote, there was no big funding event. There was no like, congratulations we’re a nonprofit and getting featured and like the new stack and all this other stuff.

So we basically had to be overly conservative about how much money we could give out because we had no idea how much money was going to come back. And I think we’re still probably more conservative in how we we give than like we need to be. We could probably give a little bit more, but the, the challenge with that is we’re still very much in the infancy of like.

Hey, I didn’t know this community existed. There’s also like, people have questions about like, well, hey, how do I know my money is going to a certain event? Or like, you know, how much of my money is going to the US versus like Africa? And I don’t know why that matters, but people ask. And a lot of this stuff is, I mean, it’s hard for us to tell, you know, a couple of years ago the Python Software Foundation was like, yo, we have plenty of money to sponsor your events.

Come [00:33:00] get us. And then like the next year they’re like, we have to cut off sponsorships because we’ve given way more than we budgeted for, and way more than we expected. And like, my goal is to not ever have to do that. So in order for us to, to really budget effectively, it, we, we look at like what’s the bare minimum that we bring in, which is now about $500 a month.

And what goes out, which is also about $500 a month. Which I’m like, okay, cool. So like we can basically just. Give out what we’re getting in and then let that interest build up and let things just happen. And then when we have something that’s a little bit bigger, we wind up running these small campaigns for it, we’ll raise a little bit of money and then from there it’s like, okay, cool.

We now, we now have a little bit extra to support this big event. Like something like a pi ladies comp, um, that’s happening. So like we have to, like, I don’t budget this much in my own personal [00:34:00] finances and it’s so frustrating at times, but we’re, we’re extremely meticulous about like, like we are cheap.

Like our, um, our North American executor, the guy who runs North America, um, he likes to go down to Mexico just for vacation every year. And he came back with like $400 worth of shirts and stickers and stuff. And he was like, cool, I’ve covered our merch budget for the rest of the year. And I was like. We have a Canva account, like you don’t, like we can just drop ship to like, whatever you need.

And he is like, no, no, no, no, no. This is much cheaper. It’s fine. Um, so it’s, it’s been fun, uh, working with different people and seeing how different people like do things. But yeah, again, get out there, donate and also like take that advice that I gave you and give it to like other small nonprofits and stuff.

They, they might, they get really excited by big numbers. Trust me, I get excited by big numbers, but I’m more excited when I can go. I know that we can sponsor [00:35:00] this event because we’ve budgeted for this much going out based on what we’re bringing in every.

Jeff: That’s amazing. It seems like too, the way you’re set up, very simple. You could scale up if you scaled up. If all of a sudden you’re like, holy shit, somebody just gave us 10,000 more dollars

Jay: Yeah, well a a lot of that goes into like 10,000 more dollars. What does that allow us to do? And, you know, I had a, a great conversation we’re for those that dunno, we’re a part of the OME Foundation. Another linuxy thing, uh, we’ll, we’ll keep tying it back in, um, but it’s coming. But, uh, one of the conversations we had with, with them was, this was never meant to be a permanent, like, fiscal sponsorship agreement.

Like basically they are our bank account, they’re our insurance, they’re our lawyers, they’re our advisors. Like they teach us how to be a nonprofit. Um, but then they don’t have any say in, you know, how we operate outside of, Hey, you can’t give money this way because that’s illegal. Um, so other than that, they’re like, just letting us do [00:36:00] our thing.

But. Eventually we are planning on becoming our own nonprofit that’s in the works. Eventually I’m going to also step down and someone who like knows how to run nonprofits will come in and do that thing, or I’ll pursue that full-time. I don’t know. But we have to save up for that to happen. Hire, putting a lawyer on retainer is not cheap.

Getting, getting insurance because you’re, you’re like, nonprofit is called Black Python devs. And people want to ask about, well, what about white Python devs? And I’m like, they’re invited too, I guess. Like, cool. Like I’m, I am

Jeff: all devs matter, Jay,

Jay: I am dreading and planning for the lawsuit to eventually happen and like just having that money saved up and ready to go, like it sucks because that’s money that could go out into the community, but it’s money that we’re going to have to spend

Christina: No. Well, right. Well, no, that’s the thing, right? Is like you’re being, you’re thinking about this in a smart way. You’re like, it [00:37:00] sounds like you’re, you’re running this the right way. And you know, it, it’s hard to, to run budgets and, and to, to do these things with nonprofits. Like we’ve seen bigger organizations, you know, struggle with that, with with, with budget things.

I’ve seen that a number of times. So I’m, I’m applaud you for that. And, and also for, yeah, like either having the, the insurance, um, you know, the legal insurance, you know, about the potential lawsuit or, or having, you know, the, the things on file, you know, ready to go in, in case something like that happens.

’cause. Unfortunately, this is, it’s, it’s not like a, oh, this, this is a, a far off possibility of a thing, right? Like, that is unfortunately a very real threat that your organization faces. And frankly, I think that’s a thing that a lot of organizations like nonprofits don’t think about enough, which is like legal liability, whether it’s, you know, people, uh, trying to, to come up with bullshit lawsuits or not, right?

I mean, especially if you’re, you’re giving money for people to attend events and whatnot, you’re like, okay, you need to have some sort of insurance plan. Um, and, uh, I, I think a lot of [00:38:00] people who, when they start up, like they’re, they’re nonprofits, don’t even think about that. So I think you guys are way ahead of the game, so that’s, that’s awesome.

Jay: Yeah.

Jeff: man, that’s so cool. I’m glad, I’m glad you were here to talk about that. And I, I will, um, become a recurring donor and I’m sorry I haven’t done that till now.

Podcast Guesting and Braves Fandom

Jeff: Um, but I’ll,

Jay: Th this, this is what I do. I just guest on podcasts and then get the host to spot to donate.

Jeff: Jay did not put me up to this topic.

Jay: I was actually surprised to see it in there. Like, again, I forget what I write about. I’ve been wanting to blog more and genuinely I was, I was sitting at Los Bravos night, which I mean, see a couple episodes back. Big Braves fan this year. Sucked. Uh, first season tickets this year sucked. Um,

Christina: Well, well see. See, now, now, now, now you’re a real Braves fan because that’s, that’s how it goes.

Jay: pain. Yeah, that’s, it’s just the pain. I, but yeah, I’ve, I love Los Bravos night.

Indigenous People’s Day and Baseball Anecdotes

Jay: Um, we’re recording this on [00:39:00] Indigenous People’s Day. Um, trying to explain to like my 7-year-old daughter, like. What indigenous peoples means has been great. But then like she got the connection, she’s like, oh, like Los Bravos.

And I was like, kind of, um, but your, your heart’s in the right spot. I see what you’re, I see what you’re doing here. Um, but it was, it was a great moment and it just reminded me of, you know, a year before I had taken again, said friend from Montreal who’s in the Dominican, um, I was like, Hey, we’re going to a baseball game.

And he’s like, are you inviting me to a baseball game because I’m Dominican? And I was like, I mean, I’m going to the game either way, you can come with me. And he was like, well, that’s fine because I’m Dominican, I love baseball, and like, this is, is how this works.

Jeff: I must bust your balls.

Jay: But, but you know, he runs a couple of orgs in Santa Domingo and I think, I think we’re going to, you know, we’re gonna wind up giving him like $1,500 next year.

We gave him like 500 this year. Um, so, you know, we got more of that on the way.

Jeff: That’s [00:40:00] awesome. And that’s kj miller.com

Christina: KJ

Jay: miller.com for the blog, black python devs.com for the nonprofit. Um,

Jeff: Awesome.

Christina: We will, uh, we will have all those links out there. Um, I did just wanna say, uh, while we were speaking about baseball, um, so I only fuck with baseball in the postseason. I, I can’t bo be bothered

Jay: been so good.

Christina: but, but, but I love the postseason. I like love postseason baseball. Like I get very into it and, and uh, you know, um, obviously, uh, four years ago, you know, the Braves did win and I was very excited.

I was in Atlanta when that happened. And like, as much as like, I don’t, I don’t like claim ’em as like my main team anymore, but like, that was the team I grew up going to see. So go Braves.

Mariners’ Historic Game and Baseball Memories

Christina: But, um, but the Mariners are doing incredibly well. And I don’t know

Jay: out Big dumper.

Jeff: saw,

Christina: I, I, I don’t know if either of you saw the game on Friday.

No, seriously. Yeah.

Jay: does,

Christina: on Friday night.

Jeff: night I did not see it. No, but I should be tuning in. Okay.

Jay: I was say, Jeff, do you understand the context of Big Dumper?

Jeff: [00:41:00] understand the context of big Dumper, and it made me really happy to hear that

Jay: I feel like I would have to explain this with Brett. So, uh, Brett, since you’re, you’re not here, big Dumper is the catcher. His name is Cal Rowley. He broke, king Griff Junior, single season, met, uh, Mariners record for home runs.

He broke Mickey Mantle’s switch hitting home run record. Um, he broke Mike Piazza’s, like dedicated catcher, home run record, like absolutely ridiculous. Dude is amazing. And also he has a big ass like that’s

Christina: he is. He’s, he’s the biggest ass

Jeff: and because it’s baseball, that means he’s the big dumper forever.

Jay: Yep.

Christina: No. And he’s an incredible player. But, but so, so the game, so basically like to get into like the, the playoffs, um, uh, which, um, so the, the Mariners are the only major League team who’s never been to a World Series. And, uh, and, and like that’s much, much to like our, our eternal like seattleite, like shame, right?

And there was, you know, they got close, um, a few years ago and then [00:42:00] like, blew it. Like they were up, like so many runs. And then like to the point that like, I stopped watching. I was like, oh, well they’re gonna win, and then they lost. And I was like, well, that is such an Atlanta team move. I, I guess I’ve brought the, I, I guess I’ve brought the, the, you know, Atlanta team energy to, um, to Seattle.

But no, the, the game, um, against, uh, the, um, the Tigers on Friday night went 15 innings. And it was, it was completely tied. And like finally at the bottom of the 15th, the, the Mariners were able to, to, to get, um, a run. And, um, and honestly it was partially because of Big Dumper. He wound up getting out, but him getting thrown out, like set up a play that then this, this guy who was a pretty shitty player to be honest, um, managed to get a hit off.

And like, we all love him now, but, uh, but no, the, the downtown area everybody was, was screaming and cheering and it was, it was wild. ’cause that was honestly like one of like the most insane baseball games I’ve probably ever watched. 15 innings, like, like [00:43:00] last time I screamed that much. Which, which

Jeff: I love a good, excessive, excessive inning baseball game.

Christina: No. Totally, totally. I mean, I, I, I was saying to my husband, I was like, I think the last time I yelled this much was probably when the, when the Cubs won the World Series, um, in 2016. And, uh, ’cause I think the neighbors had to like knock on the wall in Brooklyn then. And I think before that, the time I yelled as much was when the, the Falcons lost the Super Bowl, which I’m still mad about.

And, and, and I was like, and, and, and like, let the Patriots just like walk all over them in the, in the fourth quarter after they were up. So it was, ugh. I’m still, I’m still pissed about that, but, uh,

Atlanta’s Unique History and Museums

Jay: welcome to Atlanta. Uh, a city that loves to like name their sports teams after a fire that happened in the Civil War, I noticed that like we used to have the Thrasher, which was like a bird on fire. And then you have like, there’s a, like a blaze team that’s there, and then all their minor league teams are called like the blaze, the fire, the flame.

And I’m just like, dang, y’all really hated history.

Christina: [00:44:00] Yeah. Yes. Oh, dude. Growing up, like learning, like history, like Georgia history, like in Atlanta, like, it was very weird because we’d had like these two like dichotomies where like they would, and, and you would know, like I would know as a kid that like, this is not correct. Like, we would be going in the same year, we would go to both the Margaret Mitchell house Okay.

And we would go to the Martin Luther King house.

Jeff: Mm

Christina: A little, little bit different. Little bit

Jeff: They call that both cider.

Christina: yeah. Well, but they wouldn’t even try to draw, they wouldn’t even try to draw like any parallels being like, oh, well, can we see how maybe the actions of like this sort of thing that we’ve lifted up led to this thing?

No, there was none of that. It was just like, oh, well we, we, we need to take the buses someplace so that the kids can, you know, go to a field trip and. So we’ll, we’ll all go to a plantation house and, and celebrate that bullshit. Um, and, uh, but then we’ll also go to the n Kay House, you know, and, and, and pretend that the civil, you know, rights movement was different than it was.

Jay: And after that, the world [00:45:00] of Coca-Cola,

Christina: Yes. Which gr which granted is the greatest museum in, in the world. Um, it’s not, but, but, but, but in terms of corporate museums, it’s actually worth your time. If you’re ever in downtown Atlanta, it’s like $5.

Jay: it, it’s good to go to at least one time,

Christina: it is. You wanna go one time?

Jeff: that has cocaine in it.

Christina: No, no. But you can. Yeah, no, no. But you can sample every other type of coke in the world, so

Jay: including the most disgusting one

Christina: yes.

Jeff: which is,

Christina: just,

Jay: I ever, or Beverly. I can’t remember if it’s, or that’s.

Jeff: yeah. What is that? I, what is that? I don’t know. Beverly

Christina: syrup.

Jeff: What is it? It’s like, is it in the US or is it something that like exists in Latvia? Yeah.

Christina: It’s like, it’s like Germany, I think or something, but like, it’s, it’s bad. Um, no, but. Italian. Yeah, it was one of the ones in Europe. But, um, yeah, it’s one of those things where, so they have like, you know, like the, the machine where you can taste every Coke flavor, but the thing is, is you can actually take taste Coke from like every region of the world.

So it’s not, so, it’s not like, [00:46:00] so it’s not like a normal freestyle machine. It’s like the, the, the real good freestyle machine. And then of course there’s like the corporate, you know, video set. I mean, it’s a corporate museum. It, it, it’s, it’s great propaganda. Um, uh, and, uh, but hey, if you’re downtown, if you’re there, if you’re in Atlanta for a conference and, and you happen to be in the downtown area and like you don’t have a lot going on, like it’s not that expensive.

It’s a really go at least once. Honestly.

Jeff: Awesome, awesome. All right.

Linux Adventures and Distro Discoveries

Jeff: It’s Linux time

Christina: Yes.

Jeff: and I know, you know, we’ve got gratitude to get through. Um, and I don’t mind this being like my extended gratitude, but I actually, there’s, I wanna see what conversation comes of it.

If you all have a little more time. Um. So, okay, so I, the, the, the, the joke in the show notes was, it’s that time of year, again, Jeff’s using Linux, but the, the other piece of it is like, this time, it’s love. And, and I’ve always like, truly once a year I pull out my think pad and I, I install some distro.

’cause I just feel like being in a [00:47:00] different world, a different environment. I have never since Tahoe, I have never felt more a desire to be in a different environment in my computer. Um, I haven’t even. I haven’t, no, I haven’t put it on my main computer, but I have a monitor. I’m looking up at my monitor.

That monitor is attached to a Mac Mini. And I went ahead and I put it on, and it is, we don’t need to get into it. It’s well documented. It’s truly hideous, and it, and it scares me that this thing that I’ve loved for so long, whatever, blah, blah, blah, we’ve all heard it. Um, there’s also sort of a little bit of a, of a, of a YouTube phenomenon right now of the, of the YouTube video that talks about this distro I’m using now, which is, I believe pronounced Achi.

When I watched the videos from the creator, it, it is spelled O-M-A-R-C-H-Y, like anarchy, but om at the top. I was hoping it wasn’t some kind of weird, like Buddhist

Jay: see. I just given, given who the creator is, which I’ll, I’ll let you answer who

Jeff: Uh, okay. So I was hoping to be able to say that last,

Jay: no, no, no, no, no. Lead,

Jeff: because [00:48:00] there’s a problem. There’s a, there’s a huge problem here, which is that it’s created by David Meyer Hansen, DHH, who among many other things created Ruby on Rails, but that’s not the reason we’re all groaning. Um, and he also, he’s at 37 Signals, which is another reason to groan.

And this thing lives on the 37 Signals GitHub. Um, so there’s lots of groaning, uh, about this thing. And maybe I’m a terrible

Christina: though. I’m sorry. It’s a

Jeff: Oh, my. God. So basically like what what was interesting to me is it was pitched, who’s the guy of the prima, the pri, the,

Christina: Yeah. Prima. Yeah.

Jeff: YouTuber, prima Primo, who I have like a guilty pleasure.

Um, I, I watched

Christina: entertaining.

Jeff: He’s insane. And uh, and he just had a post that was kind of like the thing that you’re seeing, which is like, Tahoe sucks. Windows is a mess. Is this the year of the Linux desktop? Which by the way, that is a post I see every year, and it will never be the year

Christina: And it and, and and the answer is, and the, and then the answer is no. It’s like, it’s like, and if it is, it’s like Steam O West, which [00:49:00] barely counts, but yeah. Anyway,

Jeff: And will it be more

Jay: a hot take on that. I do think that the year of Linux will happen, and it’s gonna be in the worst way possible. Windows will eventually just become a Linux dis.

Christina: Yeah, I mean, I’ve, I’ve had, I I, I’ve had that thought too. Um, the problem is it’s ’cause I know a lot of the Windows kernel folks, the problem is, is like the NT kernel is actually quite good. Like, this is like the problem, like the Windows kernel is actually in a lot of ways better, sorry, Linux guys. It’s the, the problems with, with with Windows are not at the kernel level.

Um, but, but yeah, I, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s like, I, I kind of had that theory for a long time too. I was like, oh, Microsoft is just gonna wind up making windows, but

Jay: single, single text prompt in the middle, powered by copilot and everything else is a Unix like

Christina: see. We’ll see what, what you just described. So this is my, my theory, my hot take is that, yeah, it’ll be similar to yours, but it’s, it is the year Linux accessible will be when OpenAI, uh, comes up with, with the chat, GPT Os.

Jay: Mm.

Jeff: Oh

Jay: That replaces like all the chrome boxes out there.

Christina: Yeah. [00:50:00] Or, or Mac os, right? That goes after the whole thing, right? Because they’re not gonna do their own kernel, they’re not gonna do their own thing. But like, I do feel like they are gonna wanna have their own operating system, um, so that they can have full control over stuff that you can do. And, uh, unfortunately guys, I think people will, will try it.

Jay: Oh yeah,

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay, so I see, I see a post, I put aside the signals and the David Meyer Hansen thing, and I, and I loaded onto my think pad. Um, by the way, the first time I ever heard someone talk about a ThinkPad was weirdly Henry Rollins in a live show, um, where he was just discussing his computer. And this was in like 95 maybe.

So whenever I open my think pad, I also think of Henry Rollins, which is super weird.

Jay: ThinkPad is the unofficial Linux laptop. I think the official Linux laptop is the, uh, the framework, but like the

Jeff: yeah, exactly,

Jay: the unofficial one is like that ThinkPad you got in 1996 that is

Jeff: Yeah, totally, totally. So this, I mean, what everyone will tell you this thing, it stalls super fast. It is, it’s [00:51:00] based in Arch Linux, but it’s not actually terrifying, like Arch Linux

Christina: No, the defaults are really sane and good.

Jeff: oh my God, you go in, the defaults are amazing. It uses Hyperland, the like Windows management thing, window management thing, and Linux, which means that like you’re just like right away.

The keyboard shortcuts are there. They’ve done a nice job of just making a really digestible list of keyboard shortcuts so that, like when I log in, I hit Super O and obsidian opens, I hit Super B and my browser chromium opens, which you can change of course. Right? And, and you’re just like, you’re, you’re moving through it so quickly right away.

And none of the experiences I’ve had in the past with Linux, which is like, okay, now I’m gonna go over here and this thing’s over here. Like, it all is just like at my fingertips. And it’s beautiful, it’s beautifully put together. And I was more than any other time, it was instantly. Able to be my work computer, like within, I’d say about a half day of just setting it up and playing.

I was like, oh, I can use this every day now. And, and I am playing with that. I’m not on it right now, but like I have been using it for three days as [00:52:00] like my main computer. And that operating system is beautiful. I love, I love being so free of my mouse, but I also love that like there’s just little touches, like when you’re using your mouse, if you have three windows open and they’re all configured, just so whichever.

Whichever window your mouse is hovering over is the active window. And that, that is like, that little piece of like hyperland magic is so fucking beautiful. Um, so anyway, like I dove right in, I started using it. I love it. I’ve been customizing it. And here’s the thing I realized is that this is the first time that like this really hit me and that’s stupid.

But the kind of user I am in this podcast is, is this room is full of people like this and this, the listeners of this podcast are like this. I do so much of my configuration on my Mac from text files, right? Like I’ve built a world like that and all of a sudden I’m in this os where I’m like, oh, right.

That’s just what it all is. And I’m already doing that. I’m already finicking, like I’m already doing so much. Custom configuration wherever I [00:53:00] can in a text file and like, let’s just fucking admit it, I’m like a Linux guy like a little bit already. And so like that’s the other thing going into this, it’s really easy to just start bouncing around between config files, just making your changes.