403: Don’t Be a Regex Princess with Bryan Guffey

Don’t Be A Regex Princess with Bryan Guffey

[00:00:00] Jeff: Hi, everybody. This is the Overtired podcast. I am Jeff Severins Gunzel, and I am here with my co hosts, Brett and Christina. Hi. And we have an awesome, awesome guest today, one of our favorites to have on, Bryan Guffey. Hello, Bryan.

[00:00:22] Bryan: Hello! How is everybody?

[00:00:26] Jeff: Hello!

[00:00:26] Christina: We’re so glad to have you back.

[00:00:28] Bryan: I’m so glad to be back. It’s

[00:00:31] Jeff: I’m glad to be here with you, because I missed you. I missed you last

[00:00:34] Bryan: Yeah, it’s really great, yeah, that we all get to be here together. I’ve been bugging Brett a lot, Jeff, being like, I want to, I want to be on a podcast with Jeff. I want to be on a podcast with Jeff. His brain, I love his brain.

[00:00:45] Jeff: I hope it’s worth it.

[00:00:48] Don King and Katt Williams

[00:00:48] Bryan: Listen, your hair already does it for me. Like, I’m so here for your hair.

[00:00:52] Jeff: Oh, man. I, I love my hair.

[00:00:55] Bryan: No, absolutely. I mean, it is just very, like, it’s very on par with [00:01:00] like it fits you.

[00:01:01] Jeff: I don’t, I, here’s why I, I love my hair, because it sounds like a fucking weird thing to say, but, um, I haven’t had to put a comb through it. Since, like, I don’t know what, because at some point I landed on the, like, Mad Professor hair, and, and I don’t have to maintain it, but I kinda, I like a little swoosh.

[00:01:19] Jeff: There’s a lot about, about me I don’t love, but I like my hair.

[00:01:23] Brett: both have a bit of a Don King thing going on.

[00:01:26] Jeff: Oh, yeah!

[00:01:28] Bryan: yeah, this is all hiding behind the, the,

[00:01:29] Jeff: Well, yeah, Bryan just made it Don King.

[00:01:32] Brett: who is actually black can pull it off

[00:01:34] Jeff: Bryan, who is actually becoming Don King before us right now, I wish you could see it.

[00:01:38] Christina: Yeah, I was gonna say, you, this, this is very much, um, who, who played Don King in the HBO movie? Cause like, you’re totally giving like those vibes right now.

[00:01:47] Jeff: Who did

[00:01:47] Brett: idea There was an HBO movie? Was it Idris Elba? I’m just kidding. Of

[00:01:53] Jeff: Did anybody else I’m gonna be such a

[00:01:56] Bryan: In, in the HBO, in the NDH, not in Ali, [00:02:00] then

[00:02:01] Christina: No, it was Don King only in America. It was a 1997 film developed, uh, uh, directed by John Herzfeld and written by Cario Salem. Um,

[00:02:08] Bryan: Ving Rames.

[00:02:09] Christina: yeah, fuck yeah. That was actually who I thought it was. No. Okay. But, but I’m sorry. That’s who I thought it was. And I was like, I’m going to say that and I’m going to be wrong.

[00:02:18] Brett: heh.

[00:02:18] Bryan: that’s so awesome.

[00:02:20] Christina: good, good job.

[00:02:21] Bryan: to watch that, I love Ving Rhames.

[00:02:23] Christina: He’s the best baby boy. Uh, RIP, John Singleton. But like, genuinely like that film like gets slept on and that’s like one of like the best films.

[00:02:31] Jeff: Love John Singleton. That’s

[00:02:33] Bryan: Right, isn’t, isn’t, and, and, Ving Rhames is in, he’s the one who’s in, he is, yeah, he’s the one that’s in every Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise, they’re like best friends.

[00:02:43] Christina: Yes. He’s like the smart one. He’s, he’s like the one, he’s like, he’s like, he’s like, no, chill dude. what are you doing?

[00:02:51] Jeff: heh.

[00:02:52] Bryan: so good.

[00:02:54] Jeff: Oh,

[00:02:54] Christina: Bernie Mack is, was was in this, this is

[00:02:56] Jeff: Bernie

[00:02:57] Bryan: Oh, Bernie

[00:02:58] Jeff: Did anybody follow the Cat [00:03:00] Williams thing?

[00:03:01] Christina: Yeah. Oh my God.

[00:03:02] Jeff: God, that was a blast.

[00:03:04] Christina: That’s the best three hours of my life.

[00:03:07] Jeff: And now on TikTok, my algorithm is so tweaked to Cat Williams because I looked at every response and watched every clip like three times that now it’s like all Cat Williams and monkeys in my TikTok feed.

[00:03:20] Jeff: Baby monkeys,

[00:03:21] Christina: so,

[00:03:21] Bryan: That’s a really hilarious pairing, I just want to point out, and then we’ll move on from

[00:03:26] Jeff: yin and yang, you know?

[00:03:28] Christina: it is, just for background, for anybody who wants to go down this rabbit hole, because it is delightful, um, the, the comedian, Cat Williams, who has had problems, um, and, and, but I used to very much enjoy his stand up specials, does an absolutely unhinged, um, uh, podcast with a, who is it with, with Shannon Sharpe, right?

[00:03:45] Jeff: Yeah, I think that’s it.

[00:03:46] Christina: yeah, uh,

[00:03:47] Jeff: all I see is Cat Williams in my head.

[00:03:49] Christina: And, and so, and it’s like, it’s like over three hours long and it’s Saturday Night Live even parodied it. And he like makes the most unhinged like [00:04:00] declarations about all the people he’s ever had beef with and like just makes these like claims that are just provably false. It’s the most unhinged, delightful, insane interview you’ll ever watch. And then all these people like fact checked him on everything he said.

[00:04:13] Christina: And it’s,

[00:04:14] Jeff: And the problem is, like, if anybody else had done that kind of interview, I would have been like, ugh, gross, but it is irresistible. Like, the like, the extent to which Kat Williams is like, I’m not getting up from this chair, I’m not apologizing, I’m just gonna go deeper and deeper.

[00:04:31] Bryan: And I think that’s partially because, like, Cat Williams over the past couple of years has sort of been, like, a truth teller in certain areas, about, and saying things like, calling out Dave Chappelle and some other

[00:04:40] Christina: yeah.

[00:04:42] Bryan: so I think people were like, Oh, we don’t expect this wildness from Cat Williams now, but here it is again, he’s back.

[00:04:51] Christina: Right. He’s back. He’s like, he’d had some like incident a number of years ago. I can’t remember what it was when he’s, when he was having some problems that was like seriously [00:05:00] deranged. Um, but yeah, then he was like speaking truth to power and you’re like, okay, maybe he’s doing well.

[00:05:05] Christina: Okay. Again. And you see this interview and you’re like,

[00:05:08] Bryan: Nope.

[00:05:08] Christina: this is, this is great. Um, uh, but, um, Yes. Yes. Shannon Sharpe was the one who, who, who did the

[00:05:16] Bryan: you’re talking about NFL, the NFL’s Shannon Sharpe.

[00:05:20] Christina: And, and,

[00:05:20] Bryan: That’s even more

[00:05:21] Christina: funny. And what’s funny to me is,

[00:05:23] Bryan: a podcast.

[00:05:23] Jeff: Watching him handle that was incredible.

[00:05:26] Christina: Yeah. Well, okay. Well, Shannon Sharp, not only does he podcast, he has a very successful ESPN show, and he used to have a show with, uh, he was on, um, with a Skip Bayless on his, uh, um, a Fox Sports show. And then they had a very, very bitter breakup.

[00:05:40] Christina: And, uh, now Shannon Sharp has, um, a, um, a very popular like ESPN show, but um, apparently it’s received 54 million views. So far,

[00:05:52] Jeff: And the last thing, I mean, the one thing I want to say about it that was amazing about watching Shannon Sharp is like, here, Cat Williams is essentially firing a machine gun [00:06:00] over, just over his shoulder. And you can see him being like, I am not moving into the target. Like, I have to figure out how to both like, keep my own integrity in the midst of this and not end up in the line of fire somehow, either now or afterwards.

[00:06:16] Brett: Alright, is it okay if I reign this in

[00:06:18] Jeff: Yeah, yeah.

[00:06:19] Christina: Yes, of course.

[00:06:20] Brett: we decided this week to do a new format, um, maybe just this week only, but we’ll see how it goes, but we’re going to start the show with Graptitude, um, which is usually the final segment on the show where everyone talks about one favorite piece of software or developer for the week, um, I have mine picked out, do you guys, are you prepared for this early onslaught of Graptitude?

[00:06:48] Brett: Jeff, do

[00:06:48] Jeff: you suggesting that sometimes we pick our graftitude in the course of recording?

[00:06:52] Brett: absolutely do. Yes.

[00:06:54] Christina: I absolutely do as well. But no, I got one. Wait, did we do? We didn’t do one last [00:07:00] episode, right?

[00:07:00] Brett: Nope, we didn’t. We skipped it

[00:07:02] Christina: cool.

[00:07:02] Jeff: ended up essentially being Chat GPT.

[00:07:04] Brett: still two hours long.

[00:07:07] Christina: right. No. Okay. Yeah. No, I just wanted to make sure that I didn’t share the one that I had last week, um, for, for, for this week. So,

[00:07:13] Bryan: I love, I love Brad being like, it was still two hours long and I’m like, that’s what I loved about it. Even though I understand from like the perspective of being in it, how hard it can be to go two hours because your brain goes, And

[00:07:26] Jeff: definitely.

[00:07:27] Brett: Alright, Jeff, kick us off.

[00:07:30] grAPPtitude off the top

[00:07:30] Jeff: I will, I will kick us off, but first I’m going to suggest a slight change to our tagline, which can be Overtired, Tech, Mental Health, and Cat Williams. Just putting it out there. Um, I mean, you know, it’s just an option. So, um, okay. So.

[00:07:44] Bryan: Cat Williams could also be, Brad has a new cat named Williams.

[00:07:47] Christina: yeah,

[00:07:47] Jeff: Oh, that’s good. I like that. Yeah, cat with a k though,

[00:07:50] Brett: do, I have a cat named Morris. It would fit.

[00:07:53] Bryan: Perfect. Oh, now we’ve got an agency going.

[00:07:55] Christina: yeah, exactly. Yes. Well done. Well done.[00:08:00]

[00:08:01] Jeff: Um, okay. So mine is actually something that, um, that, uh, Alex recommended. Alex Cox recommended on the first episode of the year, uh, in answer to My Graptitude Then, which was, um, Datum, um, which is a great app for sort of just tracking whatever it is you want to track. Um, and they had recommended at the time, um, Chronicling. an app by the developer Rebecca Owen. Um, and the first thing I want to say about this app, and then I’ll talk about the functionality in a second, but it is so, um, it is so incredible to me when you start using an app. It’s, it’s beautiful. The UI is intuitive.

[00:08:40] Jeff: It, it has just the right kind of constraint, right? Like it does some of the things you need it to do right away when you go looking in the settings, but then it doesn’t, doesn’t give a person like me, too much opportunity to just fiddle and not actually utilize the app. And it’s in regular development and updates and meaningful features are added.

[00:08:58] Jeff: And it’s just a wonderful app. [00:09:00] It’s chronicling, um, uh, uh, with a L I N G and not, it’s missing, let’s just say it’s missing a vowel. That’s all I’m going to say. So you go on that little, uh, goose chase. Um, but anyway, so it’s one of these apps that allows you to say, you know, I want to press a button every time I, actually call my father.

[00:09:18] Jeff: I want to, I want to press a button. Um, every time I get an oil change, I want to press a button every time. I think a shower in my case is. Joking with Alex about that on Mastodon, but it’s not really a joke, like it’s a good indicator of mental health, right? And, um, and, and Rebecca in this app has made that not only very easy to do, but also very beautiful.

[00:09:37] Jeff: And there’s also just kind of a, the cool thing is you can choose the scope of time in which you’re tracking these things. Is it inside of a week, inside of a month, inside of a year? And then next to each thing, each item on your, on the home screen is just a little chart. That just kind of shows a little line for each time inside of a week or a month or a year that you did this thing.

[00:09:58] Jeff: And then also tells you how many days [00:10:00] it’s been since you did the thing. So I happen to know that it’s been 37 days since we trimmed our cat’s nails. Um, and

[00:10:06] Jeff: It’s been 13 days since, uh, since I got a haircut. Um, and, and what I love about it is it’s not, it’s not at least the way it allows you to use it, not.

[00:10:15] Jeff: So much for like habit building, like, I think a lot of those apps, I said this when we were talking to Alex about this kind of app, it’s like, a lot of those apps are designed in a way that makes sort of a judgment call, like, you’re supposed to decide what you’re supposed to do, and then you’re rewarded with haptics and confetti every time you do it, right?

[00:10:32] Jeff: Which feels great.

[00:10:33] Brett: prescriptive versus descriptive.

[00:10:36] Jeff: Ooh, nice. And, and what I literally want is to be like, when’s the last time I hung out with a friend in person? When’s the last time we went out to a restaurant? Like, I actually want to see that stuff. Not because I feel bad when I see it, but it like, it helps me a little bit. I’m like, Oh yeah, no, I, I probably should get a haircut or whatever it is.

[00:10:53] Jeff: You know? Um, haircut’s a terrible example. I have so many things I’m tracking in there, but a lot of them are about [00:11:00] Relationships and, um, and just like well being, like things that are sort of good indicators. Um, it does in some cases encourage me to actually do a thing. Like if I see it’s been X number of days since, you know, I took a long walk or something, I’ll be like, Oh, I should do that.

[00:11:13] Jeff: But it doesn’t, it’s, I don’t know what it is. It’s the designer. It’s the overall vibe, but it doesn’t in any way inspire guilt. It’s just like, I just want to know, you know.

[00:11:23] Brett: like this that have always worked for me are the ones that are descriptive that just give me the data and let me make my own, um, kind of judgments. And, and okay, this worked in this way, I should keep doing this, so I’m going to make, you know, a judgment call based on their description of what I have done.

[00:11:46] Brett: Um, the ones that are prescriptive, the ones that are like, here’s my goal, now I’m gonna hold myself to this New Year’s resolution kind of idea. Where I’ll just feel guilty when I once again fail to keep them. Um, [00:12:00] yeah. I, I can appreciate that. Uh, by, by the way, that is how you spell chronicling. It’s not missing a vowel.

[00:12:08] Jeff: uh, I wish I could say edit that out, but that’s not, that’s, that’s not what we’re gonna

[00:12:13] Bryan: perfect.

[00:12:14] Jeff: Um, I don’t know, that’s funny. Okay, fine. Fine. I didn’t finish high school. I mean, I, I work alongside PhDs, you know, like, I’ve seen their spelling errors,

[00:12:27] Bryan: Absolutely. Spelling is not, spelling is not an

[00:12:30] Jeff: No, like I need the red line. You know, I need the red line.

[00:12:34] Jeff: Like, it’s fine to show me what’s wrong. Um, all right. Sorry, Rebecca. You’re, you’re, you’re also brilliant because you know how chronicling is spelled. I mean, that’s incredible. You know, like, it’s a thing to just remove. Here’s the thing. I’m not, I’m not defensive. I’m a little embarrassed. But like, the thing about assuming that there was a vowel missing is that, um, Okay.

[00:12:54] Jeff: That’s what all apps are missing.

[00:12:57] Brett: And, and

[00:12:58] Jeff: saw that and I’m like, [00:13:00] Chronicling, what an interesting

[00:13:00] Brett: and I didn’t look this up. I’m going for my own innate sense of spelling. So it could turn out in retrospect after this episode is out that someone like Harold comes along and says, actually it’s Proniculling and, and I was totally wrong. So last week I called Harold a pedant, a pedant, a pedant, a pedantic

[00:13:21] Jeff: ask Harold.

[00:13:22] Brett: And, and

[00:13:22] Bryan: love that you said feed in. Are we, are we getting into, uh,

[00:13:26] Brett: he. He laughed

[00:13:28] Bryan: ahead.

[00:13:29] Brett: He told me it was fine. I told him I was afraid that that came across as mean, but he was okay with it. But back to Chronicling. This looks good.

[00:13:37] Jeff: Yeah. And also, I mean, like, uh, certainly, uh, uh, something that has to be true for me is that you can, you can export your data, right? So you can also export your data. You can pull it into something else you want. And the last thing I’ll say about it is like, that’s a good sign. Maybe it’s as much about me as anything, but like, it’s almost the end of January and I started it at the beginning and I’m still keeping stuff filled on it, which is like, So that’s gotta be something to say about the app.

[00:13:59] Jeff: So anyway, that’s, [00:14:00] that’s my thing.

[00:14:02] Brett: All right, Christina.

[00:14:05] Christina: so my pick is the new version of Prompt, uh, Prompt 3 from, um, Panic. Um, I, um, You know, I don’t know. So, and it’s interesting. This is a universal app now, so it works on Mac as well as iOS. Um, it is moved to a subscription model. So how you feel about that, or I think you can buy it one time and the one time price is a little bit high.

[00:14:27] Christina: I’m not going to lie. Uh, I think it’s probably more, more than I would spend. I’m going to do the subscription for a year, mostly to support Panic and to see how much I like it. There are a bunch of, at this point, I think, really good SSH clients for iOS. There’s, um, um, ISH, uh, which is, uh, available both from a test flight and, um, it’s in the app store.

[00:14:48] Christina: Um, there’s, um, La Termina from, um,

[00:14:51] Brett: Yeah, that’s

[00:14:51] Christina: Miguel De Queza, which I really like a lot. Um, and then there’s the things like specifically for, for Mosh and, and, and whatnot. Um, but, uh, [00:15:00] but I love the, the, the team at Panic. Um, this had been an app panic, uh, prompt to, maybe I’m misremembering this, but I thought I remembered at one point that they’d kind of put it in maintenance mode or basically killed it.

[00:15:12] Christina: And so I was glad to see this revived. Uh, and so, um, I, um, uh, and I do have to say like the, the intro video and stuff is really good. Um, again, it’s interesting that it has the, the Mac client. I don’t know how necessary that is when you have terminal, just being completely honest. But, um, you know, and certainly this is not as good of a terminal emulator as iTerm.

[00:15:37] Christina: It’s, it’s just not. But I do think that this is, um, a, uh, a good thing for, for, for Mac, uh, or not for Mac, for, for iOS. Um, and I’m not mad. It now does have MOSH support. Um, you can, uh, it has a CLIFFS feature so you can have like your most frequently used commands and text snippets right there. That I think is actually Pretty useful.

[00:15:59] Christina: And then of course it [00:16:00] works with Panic Sync, which I like a lot. Um, usually what I, I use these sorts of things for are for like, Using for, for jump boxes. Um, that’s mostly what I use, uh, the, the iOS types of clients for. But, um, anyway, I, um, I, I, this came out, I think it had come out last week when, uh, we were talking, like I was going to make my picket.

[00:16:23] Christina: It had just come out. I’ve been playing with it a little bit. Um, and, and I like it so far. Like I said, I don’t know if this is going to be something I remain subscribed to all the time, but, um, um, I’m happy to see more apps like this. And. Always happy to see Panic have apps. So,

[00:16:40] Brett: I gotta look back into Mosh. Like, I’ve been, I’ve been using Tmux Sessions. Um, and like all of my, uh, config files, when I SSH into a remote host, it always loads up a tmux with my last session. So before I disconnect from an SSH host, [00:17:00] I just exit out of tmux and then disconnect, and that has given me really stable, uh, SSH sessions.

[00:17:08] Brett: But, uh, but I, I remember seeing Moush and thinking, oh, that might be a great answer and then forgetting about it. So,

[00:17:16] Christina: same. And so I do remember from like the prompt two days that that was always like a much requested feature. Uh, and so, um, I was glad to see that, um, exist. I do have to say, I do like the, the, um, website that they’ve created for, uh, for prompts.

[00:17:31] Bryan: I was about to

[00:17:32] Brett: good. I was just

[00:17:33] Christina: The aesthetic, yeah, the aesthetic is really good, and the music, um, when you install it, if you go through, like, the trial or whatever, is really good.

[00:17:40] Christina: Also, the video and stuff that they created, um, I think, I think Christa still makes all their videos, is, like, just fire, so. Um, um. There are, at this point, it’s a different landscape than when, uh, Prompt 2 came out. Um, there are a lot of good options for iOS, but, um, I’m still gonna [00:18:00] make this my, my Graftitude.

[00:18:02] Brett: I like, on their

[00:18:03] Bryan: make status port again?

[00:18:05] Christina: Yeah, right?

[00:18:06] Brett: why, why did they cancel that? I don’t remember.

[00:18:10] Christina: I think at the time, it was too hard to make money off of it. And also, like, Apple

[00:18:17] Brett: it away for free.

[00:18:18] Christina: Well, they tried. And then, and then, you know, trying to do kind of like IAP stuff. I think what was hard at the time, it would be different now, but at the time, this was right when Apple switched the connector type.

[00:18:30] Christina: And so the AV connector from the 30 pin could let you do things that you couldn’t do from lightning for a long time. And I think that kind of fucked them. And then there were also problems where they had with like certain companies, like if you wanted to put in like API keys and other sorts of things, like.

[00:18:44] Christina: Apple really limited what you could do and how, how you could customize those boards. Like, it’s weird. Like, this is a product that I honestly do think you’re dead on, Brett. Like, I think that you could revive this now and you could make it work. Honestly, web technology has gotten good [00:19:00] enough that you could just do, you know, like, some certain calls, you know, like, without having to do things the way they did them now.

[00:19:06] Christina: Like, you, honestly, you could probably build it out even more as a web thing. But, um,

[00:19:11] Bryan: Cable, are you listening?

[00:19:13] Christina: yeah. Bring it back.

[00:19:16] Brett: There’s, uh, in the, like, kind of video that’s running on the computer on the website, bus out to a Matrix terminal for a

[00:19:25] Christina: I love that.

[00:19:26] Brett: There are, you can install a matrix app through brew.

[00:19:30] Christina: Yep. I

[00:19:31] Brett: have an, I have an old bash script that uses TPUT and a random, like a random kernel to put Kanji characters on the screen, but what it’s super random and doesn’t create those nice falling columns, uh, that you get from whatever’s on homebrew.

[00:19:48] Brett: I think it’s written in Rust.

[00:19:49] Christina: Yeah, it is. I think so. Um, and then there’s also a, um, um, there’s a way that you can get like the sneakers, um, effect, uh, that, [00:20:00] that’s also, um, on, on GitHub somewhere. I’ll find that because I made that like

[00:20:04] Brett: Yeah, drop that in the show

[00:20:05] Christina: Yeah, I will. Yeah.

[00:20:07] Bryan: Amazing.

[00:20:09] Brett: Bryan, what you got?

[00:20:11] Bryan: Okay, so, it was very difficult. I’m gonna do two. And the first one, I’m just gonna go super, super

[00:20:18] Brett: allow it.

[00:20:19] Bryan: I’m gonna do Basic White Girl, and it is the Starbucks app. I

[00:20:25] Christina: It’s a great app.

[00:20:26] Bryan: love It’s such a good app. It is such a good app. And they just added live activities for your, um, for your pickups. If you order,

[00:20:35] Jeff: what’s that mean? Live activities.

[00:20:37] Bryan: Yeah, it comes up on the lock screen, and it’s an updating, so it tells you like when your order’s ready and it’s done being made. Um, and like, it’s so great, and I just, I mean, and I, recently I hadn’t even realized that they had added like, uh, Siri shortcut support, so when you search for Starbucks, you can just press to like, order your regulars, and it’ll, it’ll ask you like, Hey, [00:21:00] is this what you’re getting?

[00:21:01] Bryan: And then you can tell it, yes. And then it’s like, okay, so we have this much money on your card and we’re going to charge it. And it just walks through a shortcut and does the whole thing. You don’t even have to open the app to order stuff. I use this. I mean, it’s one of my most used apps. Like I use that app every single day, almost more than Nathan thinks I should.

[00:21:17] Bryan: Um, um, and I, it’s such. It’s such a good app. It almost is like, there’s almost never any issues with it, even though they’re running a massive backend, web backend, it’s almost always up and running, like it’s just rock solid. And so I really love the Starbucks app.

[00:21:34] Christina: To your point about like how long that has been, um, like it, it’s been an app that’s been around for a really long time. And I have to give, um, I think the Starbucks team immense credit that they have from the very beginning. I remember when that app launched and it was, Apple Pay didn’t exist, Apple Wallet didn’t exist, and they were already kind of creating a way where you could pay using kind of like the, the, the, you know, kind of a predecessor of QR codes, and we’re really kind of getting into that space where you could [00:22:00] make it easy to use, like they had their own kind of terminals and whatnot.

[00:22:04] Christina: And I have to say, like, of all the various commerce apps, Most companies have stopped making native apps and, uh, because it just kind of doesn’t make sense. I mean, if they have them, they’re, you know, like little more than wrappers, but like the Starbucks team has continued to work really hard on that app.

[00:22:19] Christina: And you’re right, like for the fact that it is a massive web service on the back end, it’s really performant and it works really well. But also, um, I didn’t realize that they’d added the, um, um, Live Activities feature either, but like that’s really great and um, they’re always, I think, like a really good iOS citizen.

[00:22:37] Christina: That’s all I was gonna say.

[00:22:38] Brett: What do you usually order at Starbucks?

[00:22:42] Bryan: Oh my.

[00:22:44] Brett: When, when Siri suggests an order, what does, what does Siri know you want?

[00:22:49] Bryan: I normally order, these days I order a, like basically a decaf [00:23:00] iced coffee. So, um, which is complex sometimes because of what they have on they don’t make decaf iced coffee so you have to like order What I realized actually was that I was not ordering that for a long time when I was just ordering an iced coffee with decaf espresso shots in it.

[00:23:18] Bryan: I had no idea. Um, which is now what I just do, um, because I was supposed to not be drinking caffeine because I was on Vyvanse, but surprise, my blood pressure’s been stable. Um, So, I mean, it’s usually an iced coffee with, um, far too much, far too much sugar and, like, far too many caramel, like, syrup shots, um, and caramel sauce shots, and then Stevia, as if that’s going to fix the problem of all the caramel sauce I put in. Um, and then also,

[00:23:44] Christina: Right, right.

[00:23:46] Bryan: and then also the Impossible Breakfast Sandwich. I love the Impossible Breakfast Sandwich.

[00:23:52] Brett: Yeah, like for me, we have Starbucks here in little old Winona, but they don’t make great espresso. [00:24:00] Um, I make better espresso at home, way cheaper. And I’ve never figured out like, what the draw of like, intelligent adults is to Starbucks. Um,

[00:24:14] Bryan: things. I

[00:24:15] Brett: I’d be curious. I’m just curious. Like I, I know that a lot of smart people go to Starbucks that, that could

[00:24:22] Jeff: Smart Bucks.

[00:24:24] Brett: that, that could afford their own, could afford their own coffee setups and like cook their own breakfast. But is it a time thing? Is it, does it just save time? All

[00:24:34] Bryan: Well, and the food, I love, I mean, their hot food is, their sandwiches are actually like, pretty banger. And so And also their pastries, like, uh, during the winter, like the gingerbread loaf during the holidays,

[00:24:46] Christina: It’s good.

[00:24:46] Bryan: the, I don’t know what they put in the icing on their, on their things, but it’s so amazing. It is, I, I’m really sad that they, they discontinued the Thanksgiving turkey sandwich that they used to have.

[00:24:56] Bryan: That was also the greatest thing in the world.

[00:24:59] Christina: Oh yeah, that was like the [00:25:00] Monica sandwich, right? Like, I never had it, but, but, I never had it, but, but it, that’s what, like, what it looked like.

[00:25:05] Bryan: It was so good. Yeah. I mean, for me, it’s mostly, I love seeing the baristas and saying hello, even if it’s just through the drive thru, so there’s that part. And I used to spend a lot of time at the Starbucks, um, in Columbus when I lived there.

[00:25:19] Brett: Yeah, so there’s a personal connection. That makes sense.

[00:25:22] Bryan: And it’s also that I don’t have to make, like, I forget to make, uh, I forget to brew a pot of cold, brew some cold brew and so on, and I have to have it in the morning.

[00:25:30] Brett: Oh, I would never forget that. Um, there’s a, there’s a bar here in town that has a big ceramic pizza oven. And, um, I believe they opened with the intention of being a high end bar, but also became a pizza place in the process. And they made a special pizza around Christmas that was essentially just a Neapolitan pizza.

[00:25:52] Brett: And it was, in my opinion, their best pizza. And then it ended. Christmas ended and they stopped serving it. So, [00:26:00] like, I went back to the kitchen. Or I had, I had a, a hostess who’s, who had a boyfriend who worked in the kitchen. And, and she was my proxy to say, how can I continue ordering this year round? And we worked out a deal, like, here’s the code word, here’s what you say, because it’s simple ingredients.

[00:26:18] Brett: It’s stuff they always have on hand. It’s just off menu, and, and I worked it out, and that’s why I would go out to a pizza place rather than make my own pizza, is that kind of, like, ability to order off menu, that, the ability to have some kind of personal connection. And I just assumed that you would never have that at Starbucks.

[00:26:40] Christina: Well, weirdly, so for food, probably not so much because most of it is pre packaged, um, and or pre made, but like for the drinks, that is like, honestly, the whole thing is that it’s off menu. Like you can get it customized however you want. Um, and that’s why I think they make so much money. Now I live in Seattle.

[00:26:57] Bryan: Cause you pay, you pay like three times as much for [00:27:00] your off menus. Like, when you start to customize the additional shots and everything, the price goes up in this. Oh,

[00:27:05] Christina: Additional pumps, which is why, like, they had to, like, there was a whole bunch of drama. I remember, uh, God, this was so long ago, but I remember going down this rabbit hole because I loved the drama of people who would, like, save up coupons and things from their Starbucks stars and, like, really use it to get, like, the most ridiculous drink orders they could.

[00:27:20] Christina: Like, they would basically find a way to get, like, 13 drinks. I’m not even joking. Um, you know, with, like, their, their, their coupons. And so Starbucks had to kind of, like, cut down on, on how much they were giving out the, the bonus points and whatnot. Um, I live in Seattle where there are a ton of Starbucks and we have a thing called the Starbucks Reserve.

[00:27:38] Christina: And there aren’t many of them in the world, but we, there is one, um, literally like three blocks from my house. Um, and they have like the most expensive type of coffee machines and they do like really high end types of brewing and whatnot. Yeah. Oh, that they do. They do. [00:28:00] And, and, and it’s insane, and like, and that’s, that’s a good place to go.

[00:28:04] Christina: We don’t have Dunkin and that I’m not gonna lie, like, I grew up my entire life having access to Dunkin at all times, and there are no Dunkins in the state of Washington because of the Starbucks mafia. And so, um, because Starbucks started in

[00:28:20] Jeff: That sounds like a really lame reading group name.

[00:28:22] Christina: It really

[00:28:23] Jeff: Like a great, like a book club. We’re the Starbucks mafia.

[00:28:26] Bryan: Jarvox

[00:28:26] Christina: God, you know, you know that, you know that some bitches in Bellevue, like, some, like, some moms group have fuckin done that, or like, Woodinville, uh, all the fuckin wine

[00:28:35] Jeff: one of them as a, as a food blog, Hubby’s, Hubby’s away this week.

[00:28:39] Brett: there was a, there was a coffeehouse in, I think it was in St. Paul, um, and Their claim to fame was that they had bought three Clover machines when they opened, which are like, I think at the time, 20, 000 espresso machines. And

[00:28:57] Bryan: every Starbucks has a Clover now.

[00:28:59] Brett: [00:29:00] yeah, they had, this place had a small sign and their windows were always steamed.

[00:29:04] Brett: Like you could never see inside the place and you could walk by it and never have any idea it existed, but I

[00:29:10] Jeff: the, like the boxing gym in my neighborhood.

[00:29:13] Brett: Yeah, we’d go there just for their clover machines. Um, that was, that was worthwhile to me. So, if every Starbucks has a clover, I might need to check it out again.

[00:29:23] Bryan: Yeah, so if y’all remember, that was my, that was my, that was my basic one. So, the other one is this app called AHEAD, and AHEAD is a, it’s an emotions coach app. So this is a great lead into Mental Health Corner. So, um, It’s science backed, started by, I think, I forget, they’re in another country, because I met with one of the co founders just the other day. Um, but, I struggle a lot with, uh, anger, actually.

[00:29:58] Bryan: Um, and I [00:30:00] didn’t realize it was anger, but like, underneath all of the defensiveness and all this other stuff, it’s just anger, anger, anger, anger, anger. Um, and AHEAD has been really helpful in teaching me how to be Uh, Less Angry, How to Get Less Defensive, How to Reframe the Angry Thoughts. And, it takes you through little bite sized lessons, it, uh, has, it like, it has you, like, draw little things on the screen to, like, commit to doing a thing.

[00:30:26] Bryan: Um, it, it, it, then it gives you the opportunity to, like, record when you got angry or when you had an angry situation and, like, how it made you feel. And like what the underlying feelings were. And so then over time you start to be able to see like, oh, most of my angry moments come from feeling, feeling like misunderstood.

[00:30:49] Bryan: And then that gives you, and then it gives you tactics on like how to address it