201: Don’t Call It a Comeback

[00:00:00] **Brett:** [00:00:00] Alright, welcome to… we’ll call it season two of overtired with Brett Terpstra and Christina Warren. How’s it going, Christina?

**Christina:** [00:00:10] It’s good ish being okay. It’s great to be talking to you. It’s great to finally be back with season two of overtired in general. I think that it would be disingenuous to say that the world is good. But right now, as we talk, like I’m genuinely thrilled to be talking to you again and to be doing this show again.

**Brett:** [00:00:33] if we’re being honest, the world is kind of shitty, and this is a, a shining, a gem, a light in the dark for me. To finally be podcasting again with you.

**Christina:** [00:00:45] 1000% in agreement, 1000% in agreement, it’s been over a year since we did one of these. For some reason, I thought that we’d recorded in October. No we’d recorded in October and then we recorded in June. And then now [00:01:00] it’s August. I don’t even know what month it is because a pandemic time

**Brett:** [00:01:05] It’s March.

**Christina:** [00:01:07] it’s honestly, in my brain, it’s still is.

**Brett:** [00:01:10] week, 100 of March. yeah, June 19th. Uh, just so everyone knows there’s a new home for overtired on the web. If you go to overtired pod.com, we’re still, uh, the misspelled version of overtired OVR, T R D on Twitter. So we’re, we’re working to rebuild our audience. Uh, maybe make it even bigger. We’re going to start, uh, broadcasting weekly, again, podcasting weekly again.

Uh, and the hopes of, uh, building a real show out of this once again.

**Christina:** [00:01:46] Yeah. Yeah. We’re actually going to be kind of taking this seriously again, like we were in olden days and I’m super excited. I was, when you reached out to me, you were like, you want to start doing this regularly? I was like, yes, [00:02:00] God. Yes. Because again, to your point, there’s. I’ve missed this. This has been one of the few kind of like shining beacons of light in an otherwise kind of terrible universe.

**Brett:** [00:02:12] So you had a birthday since our last episode, right?

**Christina:** [00:02:15] I did. I did. And

**Brett:** [00:02:17] have to, it’s been over a year. Of course. You’ve had a

**Christina:** [00:02:19] over a year, so of course I’ve had a birthday. No, but it’s, it’s funny because. Um, obviously, uh, yeah, I’ve had a birthday. You’ve had a birthday, but my birthday, which is in November, I was actually in Paris. And it’s so bizarre to think about because I had a few international trips.

Yeah. The beginning of this year, before the COVID stuff went into. Super hyper overdrive. In fact, I, I can’t say bunch of international trips. I was supposed to, I had to still go to Singapore because I had to fly through there, but I was supposed to actually do an event there that was canceled. This was in mid, mid February.

I was supposed to be in Zurich that got canceled. Literally, as I was leaving for the airport, I was supposed to [00:03:00] be in Tel Aviv. I was supposed to be, um, some other places. So. It’s weird. I was in, um, Australia in February, but I was in Johannesburg in January, but the last trip, I guess, that felt like completely normal in terms of, you know, nothing being in the least bit, even in the back of your mind, like weird was in November when I was in Paris for my birthday, I was there for work, but it happened to too.

Follow my birthday. And so, uh, it’s really, it’s bizarre to kind of look back on that, uh, you know, like a little more than six months later and to be like, the whole universe is completely different than it was then.

**Brett:** [00:03:45] Yeah, I have my birthday in the middle of a pandemic, so I can’t imagine right now being in Paris for my birthday.

**Christina:** [00:03:55] Right. So how, what, how, how did a, well, first of all, happy birthday and [00:04:00] how did the, the, the pandemic birthday go.

**Brett:** [00:04:03] happy birthday to you too. But, uh, so this was my 42nd birthday and I have planned for years to have a hitchhikers guide themed party for my 42nd birthday.

**Christina:** [00:04:18] As one does.

**Brett:** [00:04:19] and that did not happen. Um, I had a, I had a solo-bration with my girl friend and she got me a towel and a sodastream, but, but the towel was very thoughtful.

Uh, it has, it says 42 on it and it has the Hitchhiker’s thumb. Uh, so that was very sweet. It’s currently, it’s currently my keyboard pads so that you can’t hear me typing during podcasts, but it w the way I’m looking at it is when this is. Settled down when the, when the pandemic is less, um, uh, uh, a front of mind thing, maybe I’ll have [00:05:00] a, a belated 42nd birthday since it was the only party I plan to have.

I don’t plan to have another party until I’m 50. Oh my God. 50. Um, but I can wait till I’m like for my 45th birthday, I’ll have a 42nd birthday party.

**Christina:** [00:05:18] Yeah, no, I think that’s fair. And it’s interesting. I think that’s what a lot of us are kind of having to do is that it feels like in a lot of ways, like 2020 is kind of like a Mulligan year.

**Brett:** [00:05:28] for sure. For sure.

**Christina:** [00:05:29] You know what I mean? And, and so I feel like even if it was like 43, 44, 45, whatever, whatever you decided to do was like, this is the 42nd birthday.

This is the celebration. Uh, and I don’t know, in some ways it’s kind of interesting. It puts into perspective. it really does show how subjective. Things like birth dates are, right.

Like obviously there is an anniversary of the sun rotating, you know, uh, the earth rotating around the sun or whatever. Right. So you, you can say that it has been this year, the lunar cycles [00:06:00] since that happened, but the rest of it is fairly subjective. Meaning that like what numbers and what values we ascribe to those things can be fungible.

And that’s kind of, what’s been interesting about this whole time is that. Like the actual milestones and the stuff itself matters less than the, like what, what the actual value is, if that makes any

**Brett:** [00:06:24] Yeah, no, we’re finding out a lot of things matter less than we thought. Uh, employees or employers are finding out that having people in the office matters less than they thought. Uh, so many things that we thought were vital to American culture are less important than we thought. Some things turned out to be very important, but in general, it’s a exposed a lot of, especially in the capitalist economy, it’s exposed a lot of, uh, things that we had taken for granted that maybe we shouldn’t have.

**Christina:** [00:06:57] Yeah, I would agree with that. [00:07:00] It’s interesting because, okay. So I live in the city. And I have, you know, um, always liked living in the city I live in, in, um, Capitol Hill in Seattle, also known as the place where I wasn’t in the middle of kind of the, the occupational protest zone. I was a few blocks away from where all the hardcore stuff was happening.

The advantage there was that I was very lucky. I still got mail, uh, but you know, um, like support the movement. What not. The, the white people who decided to co-opt the black lives matter movement, less. So, but anyway, putting that aside, you know, I’ve always lived in cities, you know, ever since college I’ve, I’ve always lived in the city and I haven’t had any desires to live in the suburbs and I haven’t had any desire to be anywhere other than like in the middle of everything.

And. With us not being an offices. So commute times and things [00:08:00] become more negligible. And with the advantages of cities, things like, you know, bars and restaurants and nightlife and access to places that you could go no longer being a thing, all the advantages in many parts of like living. And paying frankly, exorbitant rents to live in the city kind of disappear.

And so I haven’t seriously considered this, but the first one, my life I have actually kind of looked at. Okay, what would it look like if I didn’t live like in the middle of the hustle and bustle of everything, which is it, which is weird.

**Brett:** [00:08:36] it would be, you could have a podcast, Christina and the country.

**Christina:** [00:08:40] I mean, as long as I have good internet, that would honestly be like a requirement.

**Brett:** [00:08:44] is, that is, I always say like with my kind of, um, introversion and like, even when I lived in cities, I enjoyed having places to go out to eat, but I didn’t, I, it didn’t matter to me. [00:09:00] Um, I w I could live anywhere. You could put me in a cabin. It isolated out in the boonies. As long as I had good internet, my life would be just as rich as, as it is in any city.

But I say that as someone who’s now lived in a town of 30,000 for like the last decade and I’ve just gotten used to it. I like this town. I don’t miss cities.

**Christina:** [00:09:29] Yeah, I mean, but it is interesting. You talked about like how we realize things matter less. I am hoping that cities come back because I think that they’re important. But, you know, but like for me, like, like Caitlin, you live in a town of 30,000 people, I think, uh, Seattle proper, like not counting the entire Puget sound area, which obviously gets way bigger is like 750,000 people.

And it’s just, again, it just kind of changes things. It’s like, what, what does your calculus look like when you don’t have [00:10:00] these things that you’ve put this big emphasis on and that you’ve paid a premium for? And that you’ve kind of like. Surround, like you basically centered your life around, you know, things like, okay, how, how long has it taken me to get to the office?

How long, you know, like, what is the right kind of location to how close am I to everything else? And so things, different things matter, right? So it’s less about like how close am I to different bars and restaurants and more, is it, am I within, am I in a location that has good delivery options? You know, is, is there a grocery store that is.

Uh, close by, like, does you know, to various food services or are there options that can deliver if those are things that are important? Like how long does it take to get to a store assuming that you have a store or how frequently can Amazon or, or who else, uh, deliver, you know, what we buy and that changes stuff a lot.

And, uh, yeah, it’s, it’s interesting.

**Brett:** [00:10:57] just for reference in my little town and I live [00:11:00] on the outskirts of a little town. I can get my Amazon deliveries in one to two days. I am five to 10 minutes away from every kind of store I need for a Central’s. Um, I have restaurant options. I get my hello, fresh deliveries every Tuesday. Like I I’m lacking for nothing.

**Christina:** [00:11:20] That’s awesome. And, and I think that that’s actually remarkably true for most of those things, right? Like I think that, that is the thing with that is that, um, at least people like me are kind of learning. Yeah, these, unless you were in a place that is really disconnected, which is getting harder and harder to find, it certainly still exists, especially in some parts of rural America, but it’s getting much, much harder to find thanks to just kind of the tentacles of how, you know, e-commerce and globalization and other stuff works that you don’t need to be in the center of a place that you may have [00:12:00] 20 years ago.

Right.

**Brett:** [00:12:01] Yeah. I think the only real reason to live in a city is because that’s where a lot of the jobs in certain industries are.

**Christina:** [00:12:08] right. And now all that changes demonstrably too, right? Like that becomes a very much a thing that is different, which is really interesting to kind of think about because, um, For instance, I’m not going to be back in the office. They claim that January 21st is the earliest school. We will be back in my gut tells me that that will probably be pushed back at least once more.

And so I could conceivably look at being out of the office for a year. And then once I do go back in, it’s not kind of a guarantee that it’s going to be the same thing and I worked. On a team that like every, every team at Microsoft is different, but my team was actually pretty remote friendly. You know, we had people who were kind of located all over the place, but what was different, I guess now is that people have had to, [00:13:00] um, really be remote friendly.

So it’s, it’s different, um, than it was even before. Right? Like, There were certain teams where it was kind of like understood, okay. We have people who are located all over the country or all over the world. And so we know how to deal with one another from different time zones and locations. And we can work together just as well using, you know, things like teams or Slack or, or whatever, as we could, anything else.

But there were other teams within the company who it’s like really need that FaceTime. Like you really need to be in the office and see people. And, uh, that is, is now changing and I’m not sure if that will be a permanent change. I have a feeling that it will become a hybrid. My hope is that it becomes a hybrid.

My hope is that I don’t want. The whole notion of an in person, an office for people who can benefit from it to go away. I think that that would be a mistake. I think that it’s a mistake to say we should just get rid of offices altogether, because although I think that [00:14:00] works well for some individuals and it’s certainly good if like you are doing your own business and like, you kind of work for yourself.

I. Don’t think that, especially for really big companies, my fear is that the same way that we over-indexed on office life with, you know, like perks of Palooza where, you know, it was like, Oh, you get your laundry and you have, you know, three or four meals a day. And we do every Google style. Facebook’s that like, it’s literally designed.

So you never leave the office. Right? Like that’s how it was. My fear is that with work from home, it’ll. Re it’ll over-index on the opposite way, which is basically being like, you never get to leave because your home and your workspace are one in the same and you never stop working. So I do still want there to be two.

However, I do hope that what this is proving is that a, the whole idea that, you know, even at Microsoft, we have things like. The only way that you can work on this team is if you live in Redmond or if you live in this certain location, and that seems [00:15:00] silly, right? Like I can understand for certain job titles and for certain teams, that that makes sense.

But for a lot of other teams, it really doesn’t like, can there be benefits if you can see people face to face shore, but as we’re learning. You know, nobody’s seeing each other face to face and it could be, you know, the better part of a year before, you know, the, at least the North American employees are back in the office and any sort of way.

And so. I hope that that is kind of right. Reinforcing what people like you and I who’ve, you know, uh, you’ve obviously worked remotely, uh, much longer than me, but I’ve kind of gone back and forth. And, um, certainly, you know, when I, when you and I started working together, we started working together remotely.

We know that people can be very effective that way. And that there’s been this bias where you have to live in a certain place and you have to be willing to make those concessions to take a job and you wind up missing out on really good people. And some people [00:16:00] look at that and they think like, Oh, you know, salaries will go down and you’ll just get talent from elsewhere.

And, you know, maybe. That could be true on some levels, but I don’t think so. I think more what it is is that you open your talent options up to candidates that otherwise wouldn’t either, either a apply or B you wouldn’t even consider just because of something that in retrospect is fairly arbitrary, like location.

**Brett:** [00:16:26] Companies like Google, uh, when this happened, they had been providing, like you said, uh, perks, a Palooza, uh, food, uh, daycare, transportation, like everything. And then when they sent people home to work, they wouldn’t pay that none of those perks carried over. They wouldn’t pay for people’s food. They wouldn’t help with the things that they had been getting for free.

So it was basically like a pretty, pretty big pay cut for a lot of employees. And that’s, that’s not [00:17:00] cool. Like you don’t view the pandemic as a chance to save money, if you, it, as a chance to provide a different work environment. Like your hybrid idea, I think is great because there are people who have discovered very quickly.

That they’re not cut out for working at home that they really want that separation, or they just really need the face to face contact. Some people do work better in an office, and I’ve always known that. Uh, it’s just become extremely apparent. Now. Uh, I, on the other hand, I, I, with her in an office environment, like I do not do well at all.

Um, it kills me so. Having a hybrid having companies, because for a while there, it seemed like remote work was gonna be the next cool thing. And then companies started turning against it, uh, even, even AOL where, where you and I met, I started trying to move everyone into, uh, San Francisco and New York. [00:18:00] And it seems like the world was closing off to the idea of remote work.

Again. And this is, this could be a great thing.

**Christina:** [00:18:08] I agree. I agree. Like I said, I do worry about the over-indexing and to your point. Yeah. A lot of the companies, uh, like, like Google and Facebook and others that were like so heavy on perks. I mean, on the one hand I did roll my eyes and probably a subtweet or like, let’s be honest, probably just like blatantly Clint called it out, you know, uh, Google employees who were, you know, complaining, Oh, I have to spend more on food now because I’m not getting free food at the office.

Like. Honestly when the, when the world situation is what it is and when the job situation is what it is, like, bring that to HR. Don’t like complain about that publicly. Like it’s, it’s not a big deal, like be an adult, but you are right in that. Some of the benefits and the things that it is in a sense, you know, kind of a setback.

And in that way, I was kind of like happy or not happy, but I guess, uh, [00:19:00] Like it ended up being an okay thing that Microsoft has never really followed that person. Palooza thing, at least in Seattle, they’ve had, they had free food in San Francisco because I think that’s just like the cultural norm. Like you would have to do that to be competitive, but like we had, you know, uh, subsidized food costs, but you know, you still paid for your food, like lat, you know, kitchen’s closed at 2:00 PM.

Um, the whole. Thing was kind of designed more around the idea would be like, you could get home because people have families. And, and it was definitely much more of a focus on like work life balance, which I appreciate. And so I didn’t have like, you know, all those amazing, you know, things like you, like you see in, in movies or whatever, um, to, to like feel a loss on, but it is definitely kind of a, um, a loss, right.

In a sense and you are right in that. Even with like, you know, where I work, like there that you get from being in the office, like you don’t get working from home. It’s like, okay, they are not buying me a chair. They are telling me, you can [00:20:00] use your, stay, fit credit towards a chair, but we’re not going to buy you a chair.

If you need to take, you know, equipment from the office. Home temporarily. Okay. But it’s not like I can, you know, call the facilities team and have, you know, a very expensive like Ergotron, you know, like arms installed or, or whatever, or like, I’m not going to be able to go in there and like take this sanding desk out of my office.

Right. So, you know, there are downsides, but yeah, to, to what you said, like, I, I do think that all in all, it can’t be, be a good thing because for so long, like we moved away from this. Idea that we could use technology to facilitate remote communications and remote work, um, because people wanted to focus so much on the offices.

I it’s interesting. The people I feel really bad for are people who had just signed really big leases on offices. You know, or, I mean, like it’s one thing. I mean, maybe you can get out of it or, or whatever, I guess it depends on [00:21:00] the size of your company. Uh, also we work like we work with already just in a terrible place.

What this, this is basically kind of cemented, like can’t think of a worst business to be in right now than something like, well, we work

**Brett:** [00:21:15] yeah. Nail in the coffin.

**Christina:** [00:21:17] completely.

**Brett:** [00:21:18] So you want to hear about my amazing gig that I just got.

**Christina:** [00:21:22] I do.

**Brett:** [00:21:23] very temporary, but it, it, it blew my mind that someone, uh, someone I’ve known for a while, uh, who works for a nonprofit reached out and they wanted a Jekyll website with basically all the features that I love building and spend my free time on any way.

And they had money to pay me for it. And it was. It was basically, I just switched my focus from tinkering on my own scripts to tinkering on their scripts. And it was the easiest freelance gig I’ve [00:22:00] ever gotten like, aye, aye. Aye. It’s happened to me too many times that I take a freelance gig that I know I can do, but I’m not super interested in and then fail at it.

Like I fall behind, I, I just fail and. Uh, and that’s always my concern when I take a freelance gig is with ADHD and bipolar and all of the things that make me, I feel like I’m just a better remote worker than anything else. I always worry that I’m going to fuck it up, but this time I rocked it and I think it’s going to be there some continuing work.

And it’s just hard to believe that. That very specific skillset that I’ve honed actually came in handy at some point

**Christina:** [00:22:48] That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And actually, what’s interesting if you wanted to kind of, if like, if you find that you like doing this sort of thing, the JAMstack, which is like the, you know, um, acronymed Azure, you know, everything used to be about lamp [00:23:00] and now it’s all about, uh, you know, jam like a, you know, JavaScript, uh, um, angular.

Uh, I don’t remember what the M is. Um, Uh, but like that whole thing is like basically the idea of, of Jekyll or any of the other kinds of static sections. Like that is like now, like the skillset, like everybody wants that. So. You could probably carve out a really nice business for yourself if you’re interested in doing that kind of thing, because everybody is like, I keep talking about this on various things I do for work.

I feel like, like we’re returning to like the early two thousands. You know, um, when it was all about like static sites and it was like the big, you know, like a battle between like static or, or dynamic, you know, like, should you use Perl or should you use PHP? And it’s like, the whole reason you would use Pearl would be because, you know, it would be more stable and it would serve cash things, but PHP was dynamic and you could update it more quickly and whatnot.

And it’s like now, you know, Uh, w with the fact that [00:24:00] server-side JavaScript and stuff has become so much better and, and it servers in general is so much more powerful that you can basically get the best of both worlds. So somebody like you having the skill set in that, it’s kind of crazy. Like, uh, my good friend, Sarah, uh, is, uh, the head of, um, I think it’s engineering.

I don’t remember what exactly her role is, but she’s, uh, she’s like a VP at and is a company that has done like massive stuff kind of in that space. So,

**Brett:** [00:24:31] Yeah. There’s there’s hope for me yet at the age of 42. I will say like Mac Mac, app development is still like the thing that I love as my primary income. Um, and it’s, it’s, it serves as passive income. Uh, and for me, that’s ideal because I do have, I have my weeks where we’re being on is not an option for me. [00:25:00] that’s, that’s horrible when you have a steady job that expects you to be on every day. And I like a lifestyle where if I have a bad week, if I, yeah. If I have three days in a row of insomnia and I’m just a wreck and can’t do anything other than maybe pod. Yes. I like having the Liberty. I like knowing that my paycheck is going to stay the same, no matter what.

That’s that’s freedom to me. I don’t need to make the six figures I used to make. I just need to be able to comfortably pay the bills and have the freedom to just fuck off once in awhile.

**Christina:** [00:25:37] Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think that, that, that’s awesome. And like, that’s honestly like kind of the perfect thing that, that you would want. Um, and I’m happy for you for that.

**Brett:** [00:25:49] I’m saying is I don’t have ambition.

**Christina:** [00:25:52] I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s different sort of ambition. Like I think that like, okay, like I have ambition, I’m pretty ambitious, but we have [00:26:00] different sorts of things. Like your goal is like your, you want to have like for you, why guess what you ambition to have is like to feel satisfied and to be able to kind of set your own pace and to be able to focus on the things that you love.

**Brett:** [00:26:15] Although I would like to retire someday and that at this point is not going to be an option. But then again, what I’m doing right now, I could easily do into my seventies.

**Christina:** [00:26:25] Well, that’s the thing, right? Like, and, and to be totally candid with you, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if I’ll be able to retire. I mean, I don’t look at it that way and I’m like, I’m making more money than I’ve ever made in my life and I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, but I don’t feel like it’s.

Uh, uh, given that I’ll be able to retire in 30 years, you know?

**Brett:** [00:26:48] yeah. Yeah. I don’t think that’s a given for anyone, especially if your generation you’ve got even worse than us Xers

**Christina:** [00:26:57] Right, right. So, [00:27:00] um, how has, uh, how’s yoga been in the pandemic?

**Brett:** [00:27:04] well, turns out I much like office work. I don’t mind doing yoga at home either. So. It helps that I live with a yoga instructor, but she’s teaching mostly over zoom. So I stay behind the laptop and, and we we’re also, we’re doing videos. Uh, she, I made her a website and she, she has students that don’t love zoom.

So we, we video classes and then they just pay. It’s a pay what you, what you can situation, but it’s, it’s. It’s not fully replaced her in person yoga income, but it’s definitely helped. And I’ve been able to keep doing yoga three times a week. Just like I was sometimes four, sometimes five times a week, depending on how motivated I am.

But three times a week, it’s a good number. [00:28:00] We’ve started doing classes on Fridays in the park, uh, because it’s. Pretty safe, uh, to pandemic wise, to have, if you’re outdoors six feet apart, uh, not facing each other. It w it’s, it feels better, pretty safe. So we’ve been doing that and I videoed those as well, and we publish them for people who still don’t want to make it.

Uh, the studio opened up and she is teaching reluctantly Monday classes in a studio, like with a max, the, if everyone’s six feet apart, this to do it can hold a maximum of eight people. So they’re smaller classes, but it’s it’s happening anyway. I’ve kept doing yoga. It’s helped. I’m happy.

**Christina:** [00:28:46] that’s good. I’m really glad to hear that. And it’s interesting how you talk about kind of the video stuff like we’ve all throughout this. I think this is the most interesting thing. We’ve all had to become like video professionals.

**Brett:** [00:28:58] Totally. Have [00:29:00] you ever used, um, uh, uh, DaVinci resolve?

**Christina:** [00:29:04] I have, I have, um,

**Brett:** [00:29:07] so good.

**Christina:** [00:29:08] it is good. Yeah. Black magic makes it and it’s, it’s free. And even like the version that you pay for is like not expensive.

**Brett:** [00:29:14] it disturbs me that it’s free. It’s so good that I worry about it being free, but it’s free with no ads because they make all their money on it. The

**Christina:** [00:29:22] Aha. I was going to say, like, I would be okay with like, I wouldn’t be disturbed that it’s free. Like, okay. I would say this. If they had anything approaching the market, share of an Adobe premier or a final cut pro 10. Yes. Okay. I would be like concerned with a free price because then you’d be like, Oh, they’re gonna like, you know, make a decision and just like flip the switch on one day and be like, Oh, we’re going to start charging thousands of dollars for this.

Right. But to your point, I mean, what they charge thousands of dollars for is all of their different interfaces and hardware. And they do charge thousands and thousands of dollars for that stuff. And people pay it cause they, it, they make fantastic cameras and [00:30:00] they make fantastic, you know, like kind of hardware things.

And so it was kind of this weird sort of reverse model where that is what funds, um, like DaVinci resolve in a weird way.

**Brett:** [00:30:11] Yeah, I, I want their keyboard. Um, I can’t even remember what it’s called now, but it costs thousands of dollars, like everything else, but

**Christina:** [00:30:22] Yeah. Yeah. I, um, Yeah. So I actually, I just ordered a new iMac and a partially for video stuff. So, uh, I’m going to, I can’t travel now. And so, uh, we’ve started to do a lot of streaming stuff on Twitch and other platforms, the streaming code and streaming other presentations, and I’m doing my video stuff, sands the studio, you know, like.

With I bought a, um, like a, a DSLR, like a Sony 80, 6,400. I could have used a less expensive camera, but I got the one that I got

**Brett:** [00:30:54] more money than you’ve ever made in your life. So.

**Christina:** [00:30:57] Okay. Fair. But also like that, that doesn’t mean that [00:31:00] you should like. You don’t, I didn’t need it. What I’m saying is like, I could have had like the comparable results without buying the camera that I bought.

Like, I didn’t need a thousand dollar camera. Um, I would have been fine, but like a $500 camera, but, uh, and I have that with like a cam link, which is like a, an interface that’ll basically take your DSLR signal from HTMI out and let you bring it in like a webcam. On your macro PCs that you can use an app like ops, which is the open broadcasting system.

And you can use that as basically like a, a switcher to, um, you know, send, uh, to composite, like, you know, Your face on top of the screen that you’re sharing and other things. Right. So, you know, I’m doing like a lot more or video stuff now. And so I just got a new iMac that will be here within the next week or two.

And it’s, it’s pretty beefy. And, um, yeah, I. It’s been interesting. Cause when I was looking at that, a lot of like the benchmarks and stuff that I’m looking at, like DaVinci resolve has been [00:32:00] one of those things and I’ve, I’ve been, I’ve really been a final cut person, but we, we use Adobe stuff, um, at work, like that’s what the team has kind of standardized on.

Not that it matters. Like I’m editing my own stuff. Like it genuinely doesn’t matter what I use, but, um, I have been looking at just cause DaVinci resolve is really good. So I’ve been like. Okay. Like maybe I should, maybe I should switch to that. Um,

**Brett:** [00:32:25] I haven’t used final cut since the early two thousands since before pro X was a thing. And. Um, like I, I missed it. Like I did a lot of video production back then and I had gotten out of video production and as I eased back into it, my instinct as, as I quickly hit the limitations of something like a movie, um, my instinct was to get final cut, but I was kind of weighing my options because I wasn’t making yoga videos.

It isn’t, it doesn’t pay real [00:33:00] well. Um, so I

**Christina:** [00:33:01] so final cuts and final cut. Pro 10 is like $500 or something.

**Brett:** [00:33:05] Right. So when I, I, I tweeted about, I don’t remember it wasn’t like a direct plea for alternatives, but someone mentioned DaVinci resolve and I thought, Oh, I’ll give it a shot. Uh, that and a couple others, but DaVinci resolve, stood head and shoulders.

And I can’t, I can’t make a, an obvious comparison to final cut cause I haven’t used it in so long. But it does everything I needed to do and has features that I don’t even know how to start with color. Correction is not my bag. I like, I don’t have the basic skill set to do a good job with that. But, uh, but as far as video editing, rapid cuts, it’s dissolves, transition, full digital audio, workstation, uh, media clips, uh, proxied media.

Like all, everything I could need is in there. I love it.

[00:34:00] **Christina:** [00:34:00] Yeah, I mean, and it’s hardware, like it really is optimized to take advantage of various stuff, not just on the PC, but on Mac as well. They do a good job with it. And it it’s, it’s, it’s a pro app. Like it’s definitely, it’s especially for free and think they have like a studio version where like, if you want, if you needed to do like more advanced stuff, that is $300, most people don’t need it.

And I actually just checked final cut pro 10 is also $300. So that’s interesting. It’s funny. But yeah, those like the, you know, the perpetual yeah. Since it’s $300, whereas, you know, Adobe who is at this point, the head and shoulders leader, uh, uh, The final cut pro 10 to buckle, kind of a killed that for Apple.

Apple had been the leader in that space and they are not anymore. Haven’t been for the last close to a decade, you know, but Adobe wants to charge you $50 a month, $55 a month for creative cloud. So yeah, I’m having a free tool that is hardware optimized that has all those options. Like you [00:35:00] were saying, that is, has a good interface.

That’s updated regularly. I guess. It’s pretty great.

**Brett:** [00:35:06] So what are you watching on TV these days? Do you have time for TV?

**Christina:** [00:35:11] I, but it’s become kind of a weird thing. Like a, so I don’t, I don’t know about you. This has been my situation with TB. Obviously I’ll watch some of the new stuff that comes out on Netflix and binge some of those series or, or whatever. And, um, historically like when new stuff comes out on HBO or whatever, like, I get really excited about that.

But because again, of the, uh, impact of, of COVID like, who knows when we’ll see some of those shows again, right? Like I really liked the morning show actually on Apple TV. I thought that was a really, that was a great show. They’ve already said, they’re going to write COVID into it, which is interesting because they’d already, I think, shot or started to shoot one episode.

They already had scripts for a lot of season two. And now that they’ve had to kind of readdress it face to, to, um, address COVID, which is similar to the first [00:36:00] season when they had to basically scrap almost everything and add all the me too stuff because of the Matt Lauer stuff. And, and so it’s sort of interesting how that show is sort of, you know, dealing with those things, but.

Um, you know, like succession, I don’t know when we’re going to see that again. And that’s my, one of my favorite shows. So it’s this weird thing where right now, I think both because of my anxiety, Katie, around everything that’s happening in the world and just, uh, also like paradox of choice. I’ve been just watching a bunch of stuff that I’ve already seen before.

If that makes any sense.

**Brett:** [00:36:37] totally me too. We decided we got, uh, we, we got through all of the fun, new Netflix shows pretty quickly. Um,

**Christina:** [00:36:48] You tiger King, do your way out. Like that was a

**Brett:** [00:36:49] I watch 15 minutes of tiger King and did not, did not want to watch it anymore. Um, that

**Christina:** [00:36:57] I mean, they’re all terrible people, all of them, but [00:37:00] it was, it was some good, like, you know, Jerry Springer type of content to be totally honest.

**Brett:** [00:37:06] I never got into that either,

**Christina:** [00:37:08] Fair.

**Brett:** [00:37:09] but we decided we were going to go back and watch some old shows and we started watching. Uh, how I met your mother. Cause we, we just needed like half hour shows. Like, you know, it’s almost bedtime. You don’t have time for a full hour show, but you want to watch some TV.

So we were watching, uh, how I met your mother. That show is problematic. That show has so much rape culture, like embedded into its core.

**Christina:** [00:37:36] Oh, totally.

**Brett:** [00:37:37] We gave up on it. We, we started watching life in pieces instead. That’s a great show.

**Christina:** [00:37:42] I haven’t seen that. I’ll ha

**Brett:** [00:37:44] it’s a good half hour. If you just want something well-written funny. Uh, kind of throw away TV.

It’s a good one.

**Christina:** [00:37:53] okay. I’ll check that out.

**Brett:** [00:37:55] on Amazon prime,

**Christina:** [00:37:56] Okay. All right. Fantastic. Yeah, no, I’m

**Brett:** [00:37:58] you have.

[00:38:00] **Christina:** [00:37:59] Yeah,

**Brett:** [00:38:00] Yeah.

**Christina:** [00:38:01] I, unfortunately I have everything. No, I have a, I have, uh, the HBCU max, which is a terrible name, but actually a very good service, the Disney plus, which they are doing very good things with. I think actually I think that that’s been a huge win Netflix, the Amazons.

And then, um, we haven’t talked about this because, well, we might have, but it’s been so long. Um, I sort of went into this thing where I kept finding deals on movies from iTunes. And so I like bought way, way, way, way, way too many movies on iTunes,

**Brett:** [00:38:40] they had, they had Donnie Darko for two 99 with all the iTunes extras. And I jumped on that.

**Christina:** [00:38:47] Yes. And, and like, there was this thing, this was now I guess, like two years ago, but they had this thing. Or they’d have like 10 movies and it was like 20 bucks and they were like good movies. Like, you know, [00:39:00] like, like, you know, a lot of the big hits from the eighties and nineties and other stuff. And it’s like, Yeah, this is actually cheaper now than ripping these that I already have on blue Ray or DVD.

Like this is actually like, this is from an opportunity cost standpoint. This takes less time to just buy it again, then do this. And what’s interesting is that, well, there are two interesting developments. So one. Um, uh, movies anywhere, which is a service that Disney owns, and they works with all the major studios with the exception of paramount and lion’s gate and, uh, whatever entity it is that owns Miramax.

So. Paramount’s a big one. You don’t get any of the paramount movies. Lionsgate is smaller, but there are still some significant like films that you will lose from that. But everything else, you know, anything from Warner brothers, universal Sony is all part of this. Disney is all part of the service, meaning.

That you can link your Amazon account, your Google play account, your Comcast account. [00:40:00] If you have them, your, uh, Microsoft, uh, movies account from like Xbox or whatever, I think, uh, Fandango and voodoo. Uh, I think that those are all the major ones and you. Basically any purchase that you make on any of those services will show up in the library of the other service.

So, so if I buy a movie on iTunes, I can have that same movie available on those other services, which is pretty great. Uh, but, um, that still meant that there was like a hole and I had a few hundred movies that, you know, I bought on iTunes that were not available. On these other services and the problem there is that, you know, we, you and I we’ve talked for many years about like our dissatisfaction.

Like we love the Apple TV, but I don’t know if you’re still, if you’re unsatisfied with the right now, I personally am like, I’m still using it, but like it’s, it’s old, it’s expensive. It is not kept up remotely. And that’s a problem because it’s like, okay, I have all these movies that have like 631 movies.

Within iTunes. And [00:41:00] I can access a portion of them on other services, like on my TV or on a Roku or on a fire TV stick or whatever. But the rest of them, I’m kind of stuck. Well, when Apple launched the TD plus service last fall, okay. They also launched a Apple TV app for Roku and fire TV. And what that did is in addition to letting you watch their original programming, you can watch all of your other movies, too.

**Brett:** [00:41:31] wow. I didn’t know that

**Christina:** [00:41:32] So I had, when I used to travel, which, you know, olden times, um, I would travel with a fire TV stick, like a fire TV stick 4k. Cause I got a great deal on one $30 for the four K version. I got it last year, still a tremendous value. It’s normally I think 50 bucks, but they have them on sale fairly often. And, um, you know, 4k, a fast processor.

It’s like a Chromecast. It’s just, you know, a stick you just [00:42:00] plug in, um, you need, right, right. Well, um, I love it for travel because unlike an Apple TV, it works over a captive, um, internet, uh, uh, network, meaning that if you’re like, if you have like hotel wifi, On Apple TV. You can’t log into that. If there’s like a popup where you have to enter in a username and a password, you have to use like a weird VPN.

Like the, the, the options to do that on Apple TV is you basically have to create a sub that if you want to do that, so it’s a pain, right? And, and like, that’s not what you want to do. Whereas with Amazon and also Roku, you can actually. Like it has like a popup screen that will let you get on those captive networks.

So I would have like this $30, really small dongle to travel with, have access to all the different services, be able to access a VPN from an app, which would then work on the device. So I could access like American services in another country [00:43:00] and also have access to literally my entire library of, of Apple TV content.

**Brett:** [00:43:06] nice. That is a, yeah, I don’t travel a lot, but when I do every time, I think, Oh, I should have brought my Apple TV and then remember the trouble I’ve had getting onto hotel wifi with an Apple TV. Yeah, I do. I own a stick and I never think to bring that either.

**Christina:** [00:43:26] Yeah, you should. I mean, presumably we ever go to hotels again.

**Brett:** [00:43:30] Yeah, right.

**Christina:** [00:43:32] You know, because at this point, every hotel I’ve been in, yeah. The last two years has had an accessible HTMI port in almost all cases, unless it’s been boutique hotel. And it can be a really good way of being able to access all your stuff from home.

Plus, you know, they have Plex apps and other stuff like that for the fire TV. So. It’s interesting. It’s interesting that you were revisiting how I met your mother. Talk about being problematic because I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right. [00:44:00] And that show isn’t that old, that shows like 15 years old.

**Brett:** [00:44:02] it’s not that old.

**Christina:** [00:44:04] Like I’m, I’m still mad about the series finale and what they did to the ending. Like I thought that was just, it was one of the worst endings ever. And I’m still mad about that, like however many years later, but you’re completely correct when you talk about like the, the, the really problematic aspects of that.

And the really funny thing is that he was like, kids, let me tell you about, you know, when I met your mom and he’s like talking to them and like, Like in the 2020s, which is really funny now, too, y