Episode 95 – Workshopping Our Cult

Scott: Friends with Brews.

Scott: Brewskis.

Scott: Peter, can you hear me?

Scott: Are you there?

Scott: What’s happening?

Peter: Scott, I can hear you.

Peter: I’m here.

Scott: Hi, Peter.

Scott: What’s happening?

Scott: Hi, Peter.

Scott: What’s happening?

Peter: We’re podcasting.

Scott: Yep.

Scott: We are podcasting, Peter, and because we are who we are, we are drinking coffees today.

Scott: And unlike usual, unlike normal, I should say, because I don’t think unlike usual is grammatically correct, but who cares because all our listeners are dumb enough to listen to us, so they wouldn’t know.

Scott: What?

Scott: Too soon?

Scott: Sorry, listeners.

Scott: What was I going to say?

Scott: Oh yeah, let’s start off with our coffees.

Scott: Let’s talk about our coffees.

Scott: Peter, drinkest thou what?

Peter: I drinketh coffee, Scott.

Peter: Today, I am drinking a fine, nice piping hot cup black brewed with my old school original Aeropress, a cup of Whole Foods brand whole bean Italian roast.

Peter: It is, as you would expect, any self-respecting Italian roast to be.

Peter: It’s dark, it’s smoky, it’s strong, and you’ll be proud of me.

Peter: I did not adulterate it in any way other than adding a little more water.

Peter: So I brewed around 20 to 30, I didn’t measure, grams of beans with around 250 liters of water.

Peter: So that’s what I’m drinking.

Peter: And it’s a, this is a repeat.

Peter: I’ve gone back to this one several times.

Peter: This, between this and the Fog Buster and the Down East Coffee Roasters that I’ve recently sent you one shots.

Peter: I don’t think we’ve published them just yet though.

Scott: No, I haven’t.

Peter: I have finally started to desire to move away from Wegmans Dark Roast as my default.

Peter: When I have a cup of Wegmans after having one of these, now I’m like, you know what?

Peter: I used to think it was good enough, but I don’t think it’s good enough anymore.

Peter: So which is a problem for me because the good stuff, like the Fog Buster that, you know, and wait for that review, dear listener, it’s worth the wait.

Peter: It literally costs triple what I pay for Wegmans.

Peter: So it’s a little disappointing.

Scott: Yeah, I think the episode with the Fog Buster just came out a couple of days ago.

Peter: Okay.

Peter: So yeah, Fog Buster, I mean, it’s really good.

Peter: Is it three times as good as Wegmans?

Peter: Oh, no, I don’t know.

Peter: I don’t know.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: Peter, let me ask you a question.

Scott: Is it three times as good as Wegmans?

Peter: I literally just said I don’t know, dude.

Peter: You’re just freaking, you’re badgering the witness.

Scott: No, I’m just, no, the witness is a badger.

Scott: And I was hoping that this time you would know.

Peter: Okay, you badger.

Scott: You could say the witness was badgering the questioner.

Scott: Okay.

Scott: All right.

Scott: I will talk about my coffee.

Scott: I am drinking a horrific coffee, Peter, that I just don’t like.

Peter: Horrific coffee.

Peter: Is it horrific coffee roasters?

Scott: I wish it was.

Scott: I should start one.

Scott: Anyway, this is New Seasons Market, Cottonwood Whole Bean Coffee.

Scott: And let me tell you what the bag says, since their website says nothing.

Scott: It is from Delano’s Coffee Roasters in Sumner, Washington.

Scott: That’s where the beans are from for New Seasons, no doubt.

Scott: It is a medium roast.

Scott: It says it has a chocolatey aroma and a balanced sweet finish.

Scott: I’ll tell you what it has.

Scott: It’s got a lot of bitterness.

Scott: It’s just a hell of a bitter coffee.

Scott: And it’s not good.

Scott: It’s like something you would get in a cheap cafe, you know, where they don’t really care about the coffee.

Scott: It’s just something to sip on while you eat a sausage or pancake or whatever.

Scott: Right.

Scott: It’s not the kind of coffee that you would normally buy for yourself.

Scott: But we didn’t know.

Scott: We had never tried it before.

Scott: So Anna bought this and I tried it and I said, let’s never do that again.

Scott: So that’s my review.

Scott: Let’s never do that again.

Peter: Let’s never do that again.

Peter: OK.

Scott: So the listeners probably by now have heard all of the glowing reviews that we’ve done in the past and thought, these guys are just coffee yes men, but we’re not.

Scott: We sometimes say no.

Scott: Computer says no.

Scott: Scott Willis says no.

Peter: No.

Scott: No.

Scott: All right.

Scott: Are we done?

Scott: Is that the episode?

Scott: Is that the show?

Peter: Yeah, that was it.

Peter: I mean, I don’t see how we can improve on that.

Scott: I mean, John Chidjie on Whiskey Whiskey, as soon as he’s done reviewing his whiskey, he’s done.

Scott: He just leaves.

Peter: But what are we still doing here?

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: We’re not John Chidjie though.

Peter: We are not John Chidjie.

Peter: That is true.

Peter: Shout out to John Chidjie.

Peter: We are not you.

Scott: We are not you.

Scott: We cannot be you.

Scott: I love whiskey whiskey, by the way.

Scott: Keep it going.

Scott: People do have chimneys.

Scott: My house has a chimney.

Scott: If people don’t know what I’m referring to, go listen to all the whiskey whiskies and you’ll find out.

Peter: John Chimney?

Scott: John Chimney.

Scott: John Chimney of Australia.

Scott: Okay.

Scott: All right.

Scott: What are we going to talk about today?

Scott: Peter, we had a few different topics that you wanted to talk about, it sounds like.

Peter: We did.

Peter: And they’re all in the reminders app as we talk it.

Peter: So let’s start off.

Peter: You recently told me.

Peter: Now here’s one thing.

Peter: I believe it’s a fair statement to say, I am more loyal to technologies and trying new things, less inclined to try new things than you.

Peter: You are more likely to, you know, put on a hat, drop it, and then choose a new something or go back to an old something and shift platforms more than I.

Peter: Most recently, you mentioned you’ve stopped using warp because you got sick of Warp’s bulls**t and you’re now using Ghosty again.

Peter: Explain to me, what are the virtues of Ghosty, Ghost-TTY, and what specifically was Warp’s bulls**t that was the last straw?

Scott: Okay, for the listeners who don’t know, what we are talking about is terminal apps for our Macs.

Scott: And Warp is a terminal app that has AI integration, and what that means is that you can ask the AI about things that you’re doing in the terminal.

Scott: It will also do things like, remember recent commands that make sense in the context of where you’re at or whatever, and suggest them to you.

Scott: It will suggest things to you like, hey, how about I make some beautiful test cases for this code or whatever.

Scott: And initially, I liked Warp, and it filled a need for me, but once Claude code started getting good, I didn’t see the need for Warp AI.

Scott: And in fact, every time I would use Claude code or sometimes OpenAI Codecs in the terminal, Warp would become very insecure and start badgering me, why don’t you use Warp AI?

Scott: Hey, what about Warp AI?

Scott: Did you know there’s Warp AI?

Scott: You don’t have to use that other guy, you can use me.

Scott: And I was like, yeah, but I didn’t want to.

Scott: That’s why I typed the word Claude and hit return.

Scott: So anyway, I for sure didn’t want to pay for any plan.

Scott: So I downgraded to the free one.

Scott: But even with the free one, it would do things like, hey, how about I create, use some unit tests?

Scott: And I’m like, dude, I wasn’t even talking to you.

Scott: Okay.

Scott: Also, as you found out, there were times where you would start to type a normal bash command and it would go, oh, it must be talking to me.

Scott: I’ll interpret that as an AI response.

Scott: And then it is a thousand times slower to do the bash command because the AI wants to process it and ask you permission to run it.

Scott: And now you can cancel it.

Scott: You can just, there is a way to get out of it.

Scott: I don’t remember if it’s command I or what, but you just hit that and then it’s back to normal bash prompt with your command still intact.

Peter: When I hit command I, though, it gives me a prompt, but it still is trying to run that AI query in the background.

Peter: It doesn’t stop what it’s doing.

Scott: Oh, well, you’re apparently hitting return before you do the command I then.

Scott: Because if you don’t hit return, you just notice that it’s dropped into agent mode and you haven’t actually.

Peter: Oh, no, I don’t notice it’s dropped into agent mode until it starts saying like, I will think about what the LS command means and generous.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, I know how I can tell.

Peter: I don’t do that.

Peter: I’m not in the habit of looking to see first, will this do what I say or will it run some kind of AI fork on it?

Peter: And apparently, if I’m going to keep using warp, I need to get into that habit.

Scott: For the listener, there’s a visual indicator that you’re suddenly talking to the AI as opposed to just executing a command line command.

Scott: And if you see it before you hit enter, you can do a command I and get out of it and then you’re back to your bash command.

Scott: But why should I have to do that if I don’t want to?

Scott: That’s the thing.

Scott: Why should I have to fight with it over, are you an AI right now or are you a terminal right now?

Scott: So warp started getting really annoying.

Scott: I didn’t like the fact that it kept asking me, do you want unit tests?

Scott: I didn’t like the fact that I had to keep fighting with it over whether I was trying to enter a terminal command or talk to an agent.

Scott: And so I was like, I’m done with that.

Scott: So I installed Ghosty, which is a popular alternate terminal.

Scott: It does take some learning about to get it configured the way you like it.

Scott: Because they claim it’s zero configuration, which is BS, because they have a config file.

Scott: And you actually have to edit that config file in order to get it to work the way you want.

Scott: Now, so on the Mac version, that’s in your library folder.

Scott: It’s where you would expect a Mac app preference file to be.

Scott: It’s not just in your directory as a dot file or a dot directory or something like that.

Scott: So it’s a little different than warp in that manner.

Scott: Anyway, I just have it set up, so it works great.

Scott: And then I installed another utility which is Terminal Program Agnostic.

Scott: It’s just for your shell.

Scott: And what it does is it keeps track of commands you’ve used and it can suggest them to you.

Scott: So I can do the same thing where it’ll pop up if I’m running a git command or if I’m changing to a specific directory.

Scott: It knows, oh, he wants to change this directory and run VS code and start the dev server.

Scott: I can just hit arrow to complete that whole thing and hit enter if I want to.

Scott: So it has that similar to warp now because of that git repo, whatever it is, that utility that I installed.

Scott: I’ll put a link to it in the show notes.

Scott: And several other things.

Scott: I have it looking nice the way I like it.

Scott: And so that’s what I’m using.

Scott: And it doesn’t get in my way with AI stuff, but I still have the autocomplete type stuff that I want.

Scott: I can use Claude code in it.

Scott: I can do everything I want AI-wise by just using Claude.

Scott: Otherwise, it’s just a really good terminal that’s fast and looks better than Apple’s terminal and blah, blah, blah.

Scott: So that’s basically where I’m at right now, all with Ghosty.

Scott: And by the way, yes, I do switch things a lot.

Scott: These days, usually it’s not just boredom.

Scott: It’s me trying to solve a problem.

Scott: It’s me saying this thing is getting in my way.

Scott: It doesn’t work the way I do.

Scott: I want something that just works or I’m just going to access it.

Scott: That’s the thing I’m doing.

Peter: Yeah.

Peter: Yeah.

Peter: I mean, there’s a reason, like, you know, one could say like, hey, I’m bored or hey, I like to try something new.

Peter: And the other is this isn’t working.

Peter: I need to, you know, to do it.

Peter: And depending on, you know, like if your role is like product developer or tester, or you’re evaluating some systems and stuff, yeah, you should be changing all the time, right?

Peter: Or if you’re facing problems, absolutely, you should change all the time.

Scott: Now, when I first tried Warp, I would say it was more a matter of curiosity and boredom.

Scott: I wanted an alternate terminal.

Scott: I did not like iTerm2.

Scott: I don’t know why so many people like iTerm2 on the Mac.

Scott: It is slow.

Scott: It is just freaking slow.

Scott: I’m sorry, guys.

Scott: Try anything else and you’ll see how slow iTerm2 is.

Scott: And Apple just doesn’t have a modern terminal, let’s face it.

Scott: But I was happy with Warp until I stopped caring about its AI and its AI started getting more insecure and annoying and trying to insert itself into everything I was doing.

Scott: And that’s when I was like, I’ve got to get away from this because it’s just slowing me down now.

Scott: And so that’s when I, you know, decided I’m going to try Ghosty.

Scott: And then it did take me an evening of looking stuff up and learning about stuff and configuring things.

Scott: And then I finally had a terminal that works great for me and I’ve been using it ever since.

Scott: So that’s that.

Scott: OK, what else we got, Peter?

Scott: What you want?

Scott: What you want?

Peter: What I want for Christmas besides impeachment.

Scott: And anyway, I’d rather have in Merriam Berryment because I like Merriam Berry pie better than peach pie.

Peter: So what AI tool are you paying for at the moment?

Peter: Or tools, playwright?

Scott: Yeah, exactly, because I still have, although I haven’t been using social, probably cancel.

Scott: I have a $20 GPT account and I have a Claude account.

Peter: So both Claude and GPT, the big two, so to speak.

Scott: The big two, yeah.

Scott: And I’m very happy with Claude, more happy since Opus 4.5 just came out.

Scott: I started doing some limited testing with it, having it create some scripts for me and modify some other scripts.

Scott: And not only does it do a really freaking good job, and it thinks of a bunch of interesting things, but it doesn’t go off on a tangent going, hey, let me create this for you.

Scott: Let me add this feature.

Scott: What about this feature?

Scott: Have you ever thought of this feature?

Scott: It does add stuff that I didn’t ask for, but it’s stuff that I agree with.

Scott: And then the other thing is it’s just not as smarmy.

Scott: It hasn’t said, you’re absolutely right to me once.

Scott: Not one time, Peter.

Peter: Opus, I don’t think I’ve used Opus 4.5 yet.

Peter: I think I’ve still been going to Sonnet because all my stuff couple of days has been general purpose.

Scott: Yeah, right.

Scott: And for general purpose now, I’m working on another project where I’m just trying to get some ideas about, hey, I’m gathering information on this thing, and here I’m using this tool, how would I best use it?

Scott: And I also need to write up some correspondence regarding this, help me word this and stuff like that.

Scott: And for that, I did switch back to Sonnet because there is absolutely no point in burning Opus tokens for that stuff, I don’t think.

Peter: Okay, now, how does that work for a paid plan?

Peter: Do we know, like, how many tokens were burning and stuff, as opposed to API calls?

Scott: That is an excellent question.

Scott: There is a way to see, I don’t know what it is.

Scott: Opus makes it very, there was something in Claude code that started showing me, and it shows me how many tokens it’s using as it goes, but I can’t remember where to see the summary.

Scott: There is a way to see the summary, and then inside the Claude Mac app, if you want to look at it in there, settings, account, billing, usage.

Scott: Here’s the usage.

Scott: Resets in two hours and 55 minutes.

Scott: Current plans.

Scott: We’ve increased your limits, and remove the Opus cap, so you can use Opus 4.5 up to your overall limit.

Scott: That’s good.

Scott: As of right now, I’ve used 3% of mine on all models and 2% on Sonnet only.

Scott: But at the moment, now I will say, as needed, I have jumped up to the $100 a month plan for Claude, because I am using it so much.

Scott: Am I going to stay there?

Scott: Boy, it would be really…

Scott: I don’t want to, but it depends on how much I use it.

Scott: And again, that is one nice thing about Anthropic versus OpenAI.

Scott: $100 is still a lot of money, but it’s half the price of the only other option that OpenAI has for their GPT product.

Peter: 200 bucks a month.

Scott: From $20.

Scott: You jump from 20 to 200, and I’m definitely not doing that for sure.

Peter: I have not been at all tempted to pay more than $20 a month for any of these tools.

Scott: Yeah.

Peter: Like, not at all.

Peter: I know plenty of people are, Theo, Daniel Measler, etc.

Peter: They’re like, oh, I’m so productive.

Peter: I’m amazed.

Peter: I’m like, I’m just not seeing it.

Peter: I’m really not.

Scott: But I am with scripts and utilities and stuff like that and getting answers, stuff like that.

Scott: It just, it just, I don’t know.

Scott: It’s, it’s working for me for those use cases.

Scott: Like, I’m not a person that asks a lot of personal stuff.

Scott: I don’t ask it life advice.

Scott: I mean, it’s not a life coach for me.

Scott: I don’t use AI that way.

Scott: I don’t necessarily think that AI should be trusted that way as much, but for programming stuff, it’s great.

Scott: And I’ve used it to write a ton of scripts and redo a ton of things.

Scott: And now I’m going to set Opus on that little timer app that I was working on with Sonnet and see if it can do a better job, because I have some questions about how are you storing the data for this?

Scott: Is this going to be scalable if I just do time entries from now until the end of time, or, you know, et cetera, et cetera?

Scott: So I’m going to have it look at stuff like that, but it does a pretty good job of planning stuff out.

Scott: So, no, I definitely have been using them more and more as I integrate.

Scott: Now, like example, I have a program called Orchard that runs on my Mac, and it gives Claude access to some Mac apps like notes and, yeah, mail, contacts, maps, et cetera.

Scott: And then I can define what access level it has for those.

Scott: Like, can it read only?

Scott: Can it write?

Scott: Et cetera, et cetera.

Scott: It has access to my calendar, has access to Apple Music, which is a weird one.

Scott: But Siri is useless when it comes to saying, hey, play music.

Scott: Because usually what happens is you ask it to message somebody and Siri starts playing a song.

Scott: So anyway, things like that.

Peter: It’s even better having three or four virtual assistants scattered around my house and having different ones respond to different cues.

Scott: Yeah.

Scott: And like you could tie the ability, you could also tie notion into, like Claude, I believe there’s a connector for notion for Claude.

Scott: Yep, there is.

Scott: You could tie it into that.

Scott: So you could ask it questions about stuff that’s in your notion database.

Scott: I have one setup that will look in my Obsidian stuff, so I can ask it anything about anything that’s in Obsidian for me.

Scott: It can look at my file system.

Scott: It can control my Mac, but I’ve never actually tried that.

Scott: I have one called PDF tools, which lets me analyze and extract stuff from PDFs.

Scott: Just a bunch of different things.

Scott: Oh, Anybox, which is what I use for Bookmarks, because I can quickly access Bookmarks, no matter which is my current default browser, whether it’s Chrome or Safari, but my Bookmarks will just open in that browser.

Scott: I use Anybox for that, and Claude has access to that too.

Scott: As I am adding tools and experimenting with them more, I would say I’m definitely getting at least pretty close to my money’s worth out of it for sure.

Peter: OK, but you don’t feel like spending $100 would be more impactful or efficient or useful?

Scott: I am spending $100.

Peter: Oh, I thought you were spending the $20, too.

Scott: No, that’s OpenAI.

Scott: That’s GPT, and that one I’m probably going to cancel because I just haven’t been using it lately.

Peter: Got it.

Peter: OK.

Scott: Claude, I am on $100.

Peter: You are on?

Peter: OK.

Peter: OK.

Peter: All right, then.

Peter: Well, there you go.

Scott: OK.

Scott: And the only reason why is I was working on a project.

Scott: I ran out of tokens and I bumped it up and I haven’t bumped it back down yet.

Scott: So again, the question is, will I bump it back down at some point and bump it back and forth as needed?

Scott: Maybe.

Scott: Maybe.

Scott: It is a lot of money.

Scott: But it’s also stuff that I can use for some work projects.

Scott: So it’s a write off.

Scott: That doesn’t mean I’m not paying it.

Scott: I know that people always say, it’s a write off.

Scott: You’re still paying the money.

Scott: It’s still money going out of your pocket.

Scott: Yeah.

Peter: Yeah.

Peter: It’s money you could be using for something else.

Scott: Yes, absolutely.

Scott: So anyway, that’s where I’m at with it.

Peter: All right.

Peter: Let’s switch gears and talk a little bit about psychology.

Scott: Okay.

Scott: Is this where you ask me a series of questions or are you going to flashlights at me and I have to respond in a certain period?

Peter: So we watched a video from Theo, who I originally learned when you sent me his review of Chat GPT-5 a few months back.

Peter: And I immediately came to know him as the, it just does it guy.

Scott: That’s right.

Peter: Because he was just so wowed with the GPT-5 model that he was testing, which by the way turned out not to be the one that became the general release for everybody later on.

Scott: Right.

Scott: He was testing it at OpenAI and then when they rolled it out, it behaved quite different.

Peter: Right.

Peter: But like, like every other sentence that he was dropping was like, it just effing does it.

Peter: You tell it to it, it just effing does it, just it.

Peter: And I was like, I even took to the YouTube comments, which is something I rarely did.

Peter: And I was just like, you know, whatever other word that you use is, it kind of loses its meaning.

Scott: Yeah.

Scott: And to be fair, he does swear a lot in general, but not that much.

Peter: Not that much.

Scott: Right.

Peter: Right.

Peter: It was excessive.

Peter: Just like you having to bleep all these out is going to be.

Scott: Did I tell you I have a broken finger?

Peter: Yeah.

Peter: Well, it’s got to heal after this or it’s going to completely break off.

Peter: So anyway, Theo, I have grown to like his videos, especially with the little hand-drawn stuff that he does in the middle of his little diagrams and stuff.

Scott: He bursts into teacher mode real quick.

Peter: Yes.

Peter: Plus, he also lives in Massachusetts and called out Senator Warren on some of her, which I agreed on, which was great.

Peter: Anyway, he recently talked about, I forget what the original website was that prompted him, but he, you have a link to that.

Scott: I can tell you right now.

Peter: He was citing a story about how people identify, like programmers will identify themselves as like a specific type of programmer.

Peter: Like, I’m a Perl programmer or I’m a Rust developer or I’m a full-stack Node.js developer or something like that.

Peter: And of course, this goes right back to, well, anyway, it’s how you identify as something.

Peter: And the theory is that if you identify as something, then any sort of critique on that something comes across to you as a personal attack.

Peter: And this is just how our brains are wired.

Peter: And this is why, when this happens, people often literally cannot think any other way, right?

Peter: They feel like they’re being attacked and they respond or they react as if they are being attacked.

Peter: Instead of thinking rationally, let’s think through this and how can we get around this and, you know, change our views.

Scott: Right.

Scott: And I think they actually, as part of the studies, that either the article that he was referencing or the study that he thought it was, was referencing, they’ve done brain scans on people.

Scott: And when you prevent, when you present people with information that matches their biases, it’s all hunky dory and it’s normal activity.

Scott: When you present people with information that contradicts their beliefs, the, especially if it’s something tied to their identity, like it’s a fundamental belief of theirs, the parts of the brain that light up are the same parts of the brain that deal with actual physical threats, actual danger.

Scott: So your brain sees, oh no, this is a threat to me because that’s, I don’t believe, that can’t be right.

Scott: And you become obsessed with knocking down each point as a threat to be canceled, rather than information to be absorbed and evaluated.

Peter: And I know plenty of people like that.

Peter: I mean, I used to be one of those, like, you know, I was an OS2 guy, right?

Peter: You know, Windows is stupid.

Peter: And also in the Mac versus Windows camp, right?

Peter: I looked at Mac users as a bunch of velots.

Peter: Okay, I still do.

Peter: Anyway.

Scott: I don’t think that’s true anymore.

Scott: I think Mac users are a deluded group of people now.

Scott: Deluded.

Peter: Diluted?

Scott: Diluted.

Peter: Not deluded.

Scott: Well, they’re deluded if they don’t see all the bugs with Apple software these days.

Scott: But aside from that.

Peter: Yes.

Peter: So as I was saying, though, you know, back in the day, it was just like, you know, like, I would hear people who, like, they loved their Macs and they’re like, you know, like, Macs don’t crash.

Peter: Macs don’t have bugs.

Scott: I’m like, if only.

Scott: I remember the days.

Scott: I remember the days when I would hear Windows people saying, that’s just how computers are.

Scott: You just got to reboot them all the time.

Scott: I was like, what?

Scott: Well, okay.

Scott: Maybe computers are that way for you.

Scott: They’re not that way for me.

Scott: And at the time, that was true.

Scott: That is not true anymore, Peter.

Scott: That is not true.

Peter: No, Macs are, like I said, it was back, I think it was OS 10.6 when they introduced pop-up notifications.

Peter: I said, oh good, they’ve got feature parity with Windows, because now you can be in the middle of doing something and something can pop up in the middle of it and interrupt what you’re doing.

Peter: That’s great.

Peter: Thanks so much.

Scott: The one nice thing, the one thing that I do like better about the Mac in that regard, though I do agree, Mac OS notifications are abominable, terrible.

Scott: But one thing I do like about them better is sometimes I would get notifications on Windows that I could never find again.

Scott: They would pop up and I would be like, wait, I think I need to see it and then it would just be gone.

Scott: I could never, there’s a list somewhere, but I couldn’t get the, I don’t know, it’s just gone forever and it’s like, I guess I didn’t need to know that thing that I really needed to know.

Peter: Wasn’t that big a deal after all.

Scott: Yeah.

Scott: But I’ll give you a more recent example of that mindset with me is when I was trying to use the iPad as my only away from the desk computer and do hardcore work on it.

Scott: And I had this mindset that people who couldn’t use it that way were just not trying hard enough, or they just didn’t understand something about the iPad, or this or that.

Scott: And then eventually I came to the point where I was like, okay, this is just stupid because Apple is clearly telling me they don’t care and they don’t really want me to be able to do all those things that I can do in two minutes on my Mac, on my iPad without spending hours and then finding out that nope, there’s something that just quietly fails.

Scott: Something as simple as FTPing files or SSHing files, you can’t do it.

Scott: Why?

Scott: Because even if you can find a program that can do it, it’s going to die in the background.

Scott: You have to keep it in the foreground and you have to keep the screen awake, or there’s just so many examples like that.

Scott: So anyway, I finally woke up.

Scott: First of all, I do like the Mac a lot.

Scott: It’s just using the terminal, using all the stuff that’s available, being able to script and automate things in about a billion different ways on the Mac versus one way on the iPad, which doesn’t always work, by the way.

Peter: Right.

Scott: Just all those things.

Scott: I think more pragmatically, if I had stuck with that mindset, I couldn’t 100% not do the kind of work that I’m doing now.

Scott: It just is true.

Scott: And I would have argued against that, but I would have been wrong because I did not know.

Peter: Oh, you did.

Peter: You did argue against it.

Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott: So that was 100% one of those things where for some reason, I decided I’m doing this, and that became a thing I didn’t want to be talked out of.

Peter: So here’s the question, though.

Peter: What was the turning point?

Peter: How did you get over it?

Peter: Because I don’t remember.

Peter: For me, eventually, I just stopped caring, right?

Peter: Like, I don’t care about the holy war of Linux versus Windows or whatnot.

Peter: I mean, I might still look, you know, cast a side eye over, it’s like, oh yeah, you’re doing it on Windows, huh?

Peter: Okay, well, whatever.

Peter: But I’m like, hang yourself.

Peter: But what happened?

Peter: At some point, you know, I stopped caring.

Peter: And all I can think of is like, I just started focusing on other things and not caring as much.

Peter: It wasn’t like I had a sudden, you know, revelation one day, the skies opened up and it was like, you’re a technology bigot.

Peter: And I was like, wait, I am?

Peter: I don’t remember that, right?

Peter: But something happened along the way.

Scott: Well, I think part of it is just growing up, Peter, because first of all, if you are always going to be upset in trying to convert people who don’t use your tech stack, you’re 100% going to be busy.

Scott: You’re going to have homework that you’ve created for yourself all the time.

Scott: If you don’t care what other people use, you don’t have any of that.

Scott: It doesn’t matter.

Scott: It’s not your job to convert people.

Scott: Let them use whatever they want.

Scott: You can focus on making your work environment the best it can be for you.

Scott: It doesn’t matter if other people like it or they agree.

Scott: If it works the way you work, that’s all you need.

Scott: I think you just slowly come to that pragmatism of, this doesn’t make sense.

Scott: Why do I care what other people, why?

Scott: Who cares what they say?

Scott: Who cares what they think?

Scott: They have a way of working.

Scott: They like that way.

Scott: Good.

Scott: Let them do it.

Scott: I think that’s part of it.

Scott: For me, the big one with iPad was when I really started doing a lot of web development stuff.

Scott: You just can’t do it on the iPad.

Scott: You don’t have the browser tools that you need, the inspector tools.

Scott: There are some apps that will kind of do it, but not all of it.

Scott: You can’t run the development servers locally.

Scott: You can’t run certain web technologies locally.

Scott: You have to SSH into a Mac and start a server there and access it from the network.

Scott: It just becomes this big dumb pain and you’re like, I could just be doing this on a Mac.

Scott: I could have my Mac with me if I would just.

Scott: Apple Silicon was the big one for me where it suddenly made laptops not just usable again, but nice to use again.

Scott: That was a huge change for me because it gave me the ability to say, but the iPad is so nice when it’s portable, the battery lasts forever, it’s quiet, it doesn’t heat up.

Scott: Now all those things are true of my MacBook Pro when I’m using it away from the desk.

Scott: And so I think that was one of the things that gave me the opportunity to change my mind and say, I don’t have to use an iPad because the laptop doesn’t have all these horrible compromises that it used to have anymore.

Scott: And it did, I just remember using my MacBook Pro in like 2008 for certain stuff, and it would just be burning a hole in my lap.

Scott: I literally bought things that you throw in the freezer, and they freeze, and then you put them under your computer.

Peter: To cool it off.

Scott: To cool it down.

Peter: Oh yeah, you were not alone.

Scott: Dumb.

Scott: But you don’t have to do that anymore.

Scott: And so I think those things combined just brought me to the point where I’m like, I don’t need to play this stupid holy war anymore.

Scott: I can actually get work done.

Scott: Instead of spending hours making a shortcut that may or may not be reliable, I can do this chore in five minutes and move on.

Scott: And plus, like I said, I do like Mac OS a lot.

Scott: But getting back to where I could get a portable Mac that doesn’t annoy me at every turn was a huge thing for me.

Peter: Now, question, and we only have about eight minutes left before my next meeting.

Peter: What about the elephant in the room, the 800 pound red hat wearing elephant in the room?

Scott: Oh, the orange elephant?

Peter: Yeah.

Peter: Well, so here’s the thing.

Peter: I mean, this directly goes to current political events, right?

Peter: And this is, and you may remember a few months ago, I sent you, someone did a YouTube video on this and it was a cartoon explainer video.

Peter: And it was explained that it was in, they used the analogy of a goose.

Peter: You know, it’s like, and whenever the goose hears criticism, the goose feels like they’re being attacked for being a goose.

Peter: It was the same thing, you know, citing the same sources, essentially.

Peter: So can we just walk away and not err in this case?

Peter: Because that seems like maybe not the best.

Scott: Yeah, I don’t think so.

Scott: That’s a different thing where the beliefs actually kind of do matter in a lot of cases, because they have ramifications for everybody in society.

Scott: The only ramifications for everybody in society are of five people trying Linux on the desktop and a million people running Windows for some reason, even though Microsoft clearly doesn’t care about the consumer anymore.

Scott: Who cares, right?

Scott: All it means is Windows is still in the world.

Scott: Big deal.

Scott: Who cares?

Scott: But the ramifications of McGaw are split families, corrosive views, supporting policies that are terrible, like, you know, we’re regressing on the way we want to use energy, all these things, right?

Scott: So anyway, no, I don’t think we can do that, but this study does prove that shouting at people and calling them stupid and getting mad at them is not going to change their mind, is only going to increase their belief that they are correct.

Scott: And so the answer is waiting for them to change their mind on their own.

Scott: But they have to have some kind of input to help them do that.

Scott: And I don’t know how to provide that input, Peter.

Scott: I really don’t.

Scott: But I am saying, any time I’ve changed my mind on something that I felt very strongly about, I just kind of went through a process and eventually I got there.

Scott: But I had to be open minded enough to be willing to make that.

Peter: Yeah.

Peter: There are, I’ve mentioned them on the show before, a guy, Dr.

Peter: Stephen Magnus.

Peter: He’s written several books on the topic of not just maga, but also cults in general.

Peter: And he has, I mean, his business is essentially working to extract people out of cult.

Peter: But in a nutshell, I think he said, like, the way is you have, first off, you have to have conversations with these people, which is not always easy.

Peter: But you also have to ask them, do you remember a time when you didn’t think that way?

Peter: And what was that like?

Peter: And so somehow you get them to sort of regress back to their previous way of arguably more sane thinking.

Scott: Yeah.

Peter: And, you know, it’s like, okay, so what happened, right?

Peter: You know, and so again, I’m not a therapist.

Peter: I’m not a psycho, whatever.

Peter: I’m not an expert on cults, anything like that.

Peter: So I have no idea.

Scott: You know, we should start a cult and then you can be an expert on cults.

Peter: Ooh, there’s an idea.

Peter: How about the cult of Brews?

Scott: Will it make money?

Scott: Because the main thing that we’ve learned from Scientology and other cults is you got to, you got to have the incoming cash flow.

Peter: I thought that was the whole point of cults.

Scott: And that’s also, and the cult known as Bitcoin, they also prove that too.

Peter: The cult of coin, yeah.

Peter: The cult of coin.

Scott: I don’t know, we’ll workshop our cult anyway.

Peter: All right, let’s do that.

Peter: But in the meantime, dear listener, if you want to join our cult, you can do so by going to friendswithbrews.com and you can find out how to contact both of us there.

Peter: So I won’t belabor that point.

Scott: If you’re a true believer, you’ll just know.

Peter: You will know and you will do it too.

Peter: That’s the more important part.

Peter: So yeah, we’d love to hear some feedback, some criticism, some topic suggestions.

Peter: Yeah, shoot us a, there’s a contact form on the website, isn’t there?

Scott: No, but there’s links to our social accounts.

Peter: Close enough.

Peter: That counts.

Peter: It’s a form in the form of a link.

Scott: It’s a form of contact.

Peter: It’s a form of contact.

Peter: So there you go.

Peter: On that note, I think it’s time that we end this, put a big bow in it, wrap it up and push that big red button.

Scott: Tell your friends.

Peter: We just did.