Breakeven Brothers

Bennett Bernard (00:11)
Alright, welcome everybody to the ninth episode of the break even brothers podcast as always I am Bennett and joined by me is my co-host Brad How's it going Brad? It's been a while

Bradley Bernard (00:24)
Pretty good, yeah. Our last recording was like middle of September. And I think at that point talking about signing a job offer and all that busyness and, you know, just being busy is the theme of this month and last month. And so on top of that, I got married, not last weekend, but the weekend before. So that was a really fun time. Had pretty small wedding, pretty intimate. And yeah, was down in Southern California where we're at now.

tons of great friends and family attended that. then before the wedding day, we did a welcome party. So this is something that we hosted at Huntington Beach, kind of a fun event to actually talk to people because when I had planned the wedding with my fiance at the time, there's so much that people tell you that's gonna be really busy down your wedding day. I think it was ultimately very true and having that day before to invite, you know, kind of the same crew that was at the wedding and just actually have time to talk with people.

That was super fun. And so we did like an in and out on the beach at Huntington beach, got everyone there, did like bonfires and s'mores. That was really fun. But yeah, I've been busy. I think in the last few episodes, I've talked about life events. This was a life event. So now we've got the ring on, married to my best friend. So yeah, it's been fricking awesome. It was probably the best day of my life so far. So yeah, it was great.

Bennett Bernard (01:40)
Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. It's been super busy. yeah. And you've had a lot of life going on. So happy to get back in recording for sure. And yeah, your wedding was a blast. Of course, you know, being there, you and in your now wife did an amazing job. And I told you this in person, but you know, all the time you're like, I had to go do this stuff for the wedding. And we're always like, what is he doing for the wedding? Like you're cause you were, you guys were super busy doing all kinds of things. and so, but

Bradley Bernard (01:46)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (02:07)
You being there on at the bonfire first of all and then the actual wedding day it was like This is what they spent all that time and effort and intent doing and it yeah, it was a blast It was it was a good time funny you said small because I feel like that was not small for like my definition of small but

Bradley Bernard (02:17)
Mm-hmm.

I think there's yeah, there's definitely smaller weddings. I think we had wanted to make it like very, very probably probably a bit smaller. But I think it was for one thing or another just was like, okay, this is the size we're going to end up at. And then we had a few people drop out. And so it felt smaller than what we're going for. And I think we wanted to go a little bit smaller, but honestly, it was the perfect size. Like everyone we knew really well. And I feel like it was fun to have the collision of worlds where, don't know, growing up,

meeting people in high school and elementary school and middle school, college, post college, it's all different friend groups for me. And I've never really had a ton of cross pollination. I don't really try too hard to bring people around. like, Hey, you know, I knew these people before high school. They know each other. Let's go hang out with them. We're like post college. I'll go hang out with these group of guys. And so I think at the welcome party is like the first time where they're in the same room, like they're meeting each other and maybe they've heard a little bit about each other, but it was like,

pretty cool to see them naturally interact. And so that was really, really special. And I think even on the wedding day, it was really cool to see people on the dance floor that don't know each other, but like, I'm Brad's friend or I'm Ellen's friend. It was just a nice environment and nice vibe. So yeah, it's not the smallest wedding I've been to, but I think for us, it was the right size and felt small. So that's kind of why I say that.

Bennett Bernard (03:43)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was awesome. Do you remember not that you like, you know, not do you remember from like a drinking thing, but like, do you sometimes those days can be such a blur, you know, where it's just like you're doing so many things and all that like is there do you remember at all? Like in terms of like just soaking everything in okay, because it was not like not for you know, not for being like intoxicated at all, but just like such a big event such a big day. There's so many moving pieces.

Bradley Bernard (03:54)
Mm-hmm.

yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah.

Bennett Bernard (04:09)
It can just fly by, but I'm glad that you feel like I'm glad to hear that it was the best day of your life, because that's obviously amazing.

Bradley Bernard (04:14)
Yeah. I, I think one of the things I'd set out on was trying to take things at a normal speed and not be too fast about it. had a fantastic like day of coordinator and planning team that we had this timeline. These are the events of things. It was very, very detailed and almost like too detailed you'd think, but it just made everything smoother where like they had the checklist. They were kind of shuttling us around to the next event. And we knew what was coming since it was planned already. I think, making sure.

that things were handled by other people in a way that I could like enjoy my time and not be stressed about where I need to go next. That was like so worth it. cause we did a lot of the wedding planning ourselves for them, like reach out to vendors, got all the contract signed and all that. And our planner, while we hired her and her team way before, like her official role was like day of coordinator and planner. And so her job was to make sure the day of went well, but also like doing

Bennett Bernard (05:04)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (05:09)
lots of work beforehand, at least specifically like the few weeks beforehand, there's a lot of work for her to do to coordinate everybody. And so I think if I didn't have as much good folks on our team to like make sure we're situated and cared for, I think it could be stressful. I could be running around like crazy and worried about it, but I felt pretty comfortable when I got there. And I think the photos are always like, you got to warm up to the camera. You got to do this and that. That's always like, I'm much more comfortable at home in sweatpants, not in front of a camera.

Bennett Bernard (05:36)
Hehehe.

Bradley Bernard (05:38)
And so like that's always a challenge and then you know making sure like the special moments of the ceremony like the first dance all those are like really really amazing memories and and fun times although it can be nerve-wracking to Dance like a formal dance. It was still fun to do. So yeah, it was was a lot of fun I think I remember everything but again, there was so many like conversations I had that day that

Bennett Bernard (05:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (06:02)
I remember the grand theme of things. wasn't like too intoxicated or anything. I made sure to be like way under any level that I would be like regretting later. So I achieved that successfully, but still had like enough drinks to have fun. So yeah, it was definitely the perfect day. think people had told me, I thought it'd be like one of the best days in your life. And I was like, you know, that sounds so baloney, but like, think looking back on it like the time that Ellen and I had that day, then seeing all the friends and family together, like.

Bennett Bernard (06:23)
Hmph.

Bradley Bernard (06:30)
As long as everyone's having a good time and we're having a good time like that energy like feeds off each other and makes it a fantastic day. So yeah, it was great. We got our photos back like sneak peek photos and it was super nice. And yeah, we had, think we're getting more photos in like eight to 10 weeks, which is like the full set. imagine, I don't know, maybe a thousand photos or something, but it's going to be cool to look back on those.

Bennett Bernard (06:37)
Yeah. Yeah.

Crazy. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. My favorite moment was when the roof opened up at the venue. Are we allowed to shout out the venue? Can we shout out the venue where it was at? OK, OK. Well, so, you know, I've been to El Adobe, which is like where it was at in San Juan Capistrano. Been there for the restaurant, of course, because we'll talk about that later because I want to talk about that. But I never been back there for like the venue and all that. So.

Bradley Bernard (06:58)
sure. Yeah. Shout it out.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (07:14)
You know, it was beautiful, amazing. And then we moved inside as it was like during the reception, I think I'm not a good big, yeah. So the reception, yeah, yeah. Okay. I got married. It was a long time ago. and you know, then you guys were doing the first dance and like the father daughter dance for my favorite moment. The moment that stands out, like, one of the moments that stands out the most to me was when the ceiling, retracted open up. That was super cool. I, cause I wasn't expecting at all. And like when that happened, it was just like, this is awesome.

Bradley Bernard (07:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, you know that that's right. That's right

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (07:41)
And like, no wonder, I don't know if that was like what sold you on the venue, but like that would have been like huge for me because I was like, that's yeah.

Bradley Bernard (07:41)
Yeah.

I think it was part of it. Yeah, because the outside when we have the ceremony, it's outside, then you come inside to like, not the restaurant, but behind the restaurant kind of where that area is at with the bar. And it just gives it that indoor outdoor feel because we wanted people to be dancing on the dance floor, but it can get hot and like, yeah, it was hot, but it's better having that, you know, open roof and better airflow. And funnily enough, our coordinator said,

she's kind of the person on the crank on the lever to make that happen. She knows it exists and she's done weddings at Adobe before, but we didn't tell her, open it then. She was like, I want to watch, I want to see. like, whenever I think it's the best moment, I'm going to open it and press the large red button to make it open. And so yeah, it was like our first dance. I think it was right as it started. She opened it up. And I think it's funny you say that because a lot of people actually didn't notice. Like there was friends that I had talked to said, the, like the ceiling opened up. Like I just thought it was open the whole time. And other people were,

Bennett Bernard (08:29)
Yeah, yeah.

Bradley Bernard (08:39)
my God, that was like the best detail ever. So it was really fun. We didn't tell anybody. It was like, even if that didn't open up, like it still would have been a fun dance, but it just gave a little bit more to it where people were like, you know, like that's so cool. So.

Bennett Bernard (08:41)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I didn't know about that about her manually pressing the button. I guess it kind of makes sense. I didn't think about it, but like kudos to her because she timed that perfectly. So that was like it was the timing with the music and like what you guys are doing in the dance to that. was like, snap, you know, like it was.

Bradley Bernard (08:56)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know where she was in the venue. I'm curious where the button is, but that's really how she had phrased it to us is like, you know, leave it to me. I'll make it happen and you're, you're going to like it. And so, yeah, that was really fun. And we did like a three minute dance to a Thomas Rhett song, which we had practiced that pretty much the only that week leading up to it. Cause I had done my job search. We had to plan our welcome party and then everything kind of came to fruition, but that was like our last piece and that was a lot of fun. So.

Bennett Bernard (09:10)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (09:32)
Yeah, that was a good memory. think for folks, you know, everyone who missed it, think Ben delivered a fantastic speech. I think that the title was The Roast of Bradley Bernard, but it was a loving and caring joke about how my diet has evolved from the early days to now after meeting Ellen. And that was probably one of my favorites because the photos that were captured when Ben was kind of, you know, joking about things was hilarious. And looking back on the photos, was like, yeah, that was like a really good one. So.

Bennett Bernard (09:39)
Thank you.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (10:02)
had a lot of good moments, but I think that one was pretty freaking awesome. yeah, we got the video. think Ellen's dad recorded it. So I sent it over to them, but I was like, I was really impressed with the delivery. was like, wow, I guess the manager in Zillow's got it.

Bennett Bernard (10:18)
you know, it's funny I pulling this out because I wanted to show you you know, I had started writing and So it was like probably a week or two before probably can't just look it's all trying it close in and you so for those are just listening and you'll go to see it but like I started writing and then I just have a bunch of scribbled out because You know, there's so much, you know grown up as your brother There's so much I could say about you and like, you know, I had to kind of keep reframing it to

Bradley Bernard (10:40)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (10:44)
this is about you and your now wife on this special day. And what do I have to say about your guys' relationship and how you've grown and grown with her? And so I kept going back and forth. And so it's funny, when we left to go to California, I had been practicing it. I'm someone I can't just riff. I have to practice and rehearse it. We've talked about that on the podcast before.

Bradley Bernard (10:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (11:10)
we're kind of needing to like have a little bit of preparedness. And so I had been practicing it at home before we left. And the right when we left, I think probably like 20 minutes down the road from like, you know, leaving to go to California, I was like, I left my notebook at home. And, my wife's like, like, you know, Brooke, she's like, do you need to go back? I was like, no, I got it. We're good. We're good. I got it. Yeah. I was like, at that point I was like, I feel good about it, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, I was nervous, you know, when we, you know,

Bradley Bernard (11:12)
Yeah.

Ugh.

Hahaha

Nice, nice.

Bennett Bernard (11:36)
that the day before and the day of, I kind of kept drilling it in my head, you know, and, you know, I think,

Bradley Bernard (11:42)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (11:49)
When it came down to time to do it, I wasn't nervous. When I got up there and started delivering it, I wasn't nervous because I I prepared for it. I was very nervous before that. You could ask Brooke or our sisters because they were sitting at the table with me and I wasn't eating the food yet. I was like, I need to do this first.

Bradley Bernard (11:54)
Mm-hmm.

Hahaha

Yeah, I remember that you had told me like, yeah, I haven't ate or drink anything. But now that I've delivered that I was like, it's time to eat and drink. And I was like, yeah, I felt the same because I feel like I had obligations throughout the day. near the end of the night, it was like speeches and dances. I think you know, you folks gave the speeches and it was parent dances where Ellen did one with her dad, and then I did one with my mom. And after that, I was like free and I felt that same way to like now it's just open dance floor, hang out with your friends and family like

Bennett Bernard (12:11)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (12:31)
you know, this is the party of the night. Well, it wasn't like super wild, it still fun to like, you know, have people around and yeah, like having that weight off your chest. So when you told me that I was just dying, cause I was like, I feel like you did such a good job. Like you didn't seem nervous or stressed at all, but I know it's, it's way different internally of like, I need to get through this. I don't want to do it well. And then once that's done, like, like all that weight is just boom, gone.

Bennett Bernard (12:47)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, I was loosened up the tie after that. I had a couple of cocktails. I was ready. I was ready to go. Cool.

Bradley Bernard (12:56)
Yeah, that's how I felt too. was so happy about it. Yeah, it was a great day. Tons of friends and family were there and everything turned out really well. So yeah, I was really, really happy about that. And then we did karaoke. The event ended at like 11, then we did karaoke after that. And yeah, I think we got home at like two or three, was super tired, but I just wanted to talk with Ellen at the end of the night. I am so freaking tired, but like so happy about how everything turned out that just felt really lucky to have like.

special people in our life and then just a great team to support us because any of these like vendors like, you know, could go wrong or have challenges. think, yeah, nothing was like perfect, but I think the threshold of things going wrong was relatively low for us. And so it was, was very, very smooth. I appreciated that.

Bennett Bernard (13:43)
Yeah. Yeah. No, it was awesome. I remember, you know, we, hung out the day after, and it was just like, you know, I could tell you guys were just happy. It was like, did what you wanted to do. Everything was like good. You know, we hung out, me, you and a couple of friends, hung out, you know, the night after. So yeah, it was a great time. And, yeah, I'm glad that you enjoy the speech and I'm glad that you and your wife had an amazing day because yeah, that's one that you remember forever. So.

Bradley Bernard (13:49)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it was great. And shout out to one special guest. we had, well, I guess two special guests. had two folks on the roster that came out from Texas. Tyler, I've been playing games with forever. And he came out to the wedding. It was great. We had a little LAN session and his girlfriend, Karina. So yeah, they were awesome. Super fun to meet in person. And it was kind of funny because I would just tell like the wedding guests, like, I've been playing games with this guy forever.

And they're like, what? No way. You never met him? Like, is he going to catfish you? And I'm like, no, no, no. Like, I've seen him on Instagram. He's a real person. And then we met him at the welcome party, which is really awesome and special. And then, yeah, we had a little gaming event the day after the wedding to get kind of our gamer chat together at my place to play some games. So yeah, pretty fun, really special. And I was really happy to like just have all of that, like the welcome party go well, the wedding and just like the friend events and family events afterwards. Just like.

Bennett Bernard (14:40)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (15:07)
It was a great weekend and then after that was, yeah, I was like, whoa, that was like a high high for sure.

Bennett Bernard (15:13)
Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, shout out Tyler. Good to see you, buddy. One thing, last thing I want to say on L. Adobe real quick. So it's again, that's where you got married, but it's also like a restaurant. And do you know why it was kind of famous or do know who was there that made it kind of famous?

Bradley Bernard (15:15)
Yeah. Yeah, too long.

Mm-hmm.

I had seen something on Yelp about like a murder, if that's what you're referring to. okay, yeah, I had heard there was something about like a, I don't know what the exact story was, but I think there was like some murder in the surrounding area or maybe in the restaurant or something and it's like quote unquote like haunted. I saw it like a few Yelp reviews, I didn't know if that's what you're referring to, but.

Bennett Bernard (15:38)
no, I haven't heard that, no.

wow.

Bradley Bernard (15:58)
Please, please fill me in on what you're talking about.

Bennett Bernard (15:59)
No, wow, that's the opposite direction of where I was going. So the food's amazing. And Brooke and I, my wife, as often as we can, try to go down there and eat. But it is pretty far down in like South Orange County. So it's a bit of a hike from where you and I grew up, 45 minute drive. the food's amazing. It's delicious. And

Bradley Bernard (16:03)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (16:20)
The bit of history behind it is that I think it was at once visited by President Eisenhower back in the fifties or sixties. after that, it became like a frequent spot of President Nixon. So that was like his spot because he's from Southern California. I think he's from Yoruba Linda, to be exact. And so that's like that was like his spot. And so much so that there's a certain like table that he used to always sit at.

And like you can go and see it. Yeah. And then they had a thing on the menu or they have a thing on the menu called like the presidential. I think is what it's called. And so this is completely like unrelated to anything we ever talked about. But like I just have to share it it was so good when we we went back to L.A. W. the following day before you and I and Tyler and Chris hung out and me, Brooke and her family. And normally I get like a burrito or something like that, and it's amazing, but.

I saw the presidential on the menu and I was like, I was like, I'm feeling, I'm feeling presidential today. Like I'm going to get the presidential and it's like two chili rellenos. probably butchered the pronunciation of that. one like chicken enchilada and like one like beef taco and like a giant plate with like rice and beans. Dude, dude, I almost got through everything, but like, and you know, I can eat, I got through almost everything, but like half, I finished like left half the taco cause I had a bunch of chips and salsa and chips and guacamole before.

Bradley Bernard (17:13)
Mm-hmm.

You

That sounds like a lot.

huh, their chips and salsa is good too.

Bennett Bernard (17:41)
So good. Yeah. And so like that was one of the best meals I've had. Like Brooke and I have talked about that meal like like 10 times since. like, dude, that was incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Before you guys go, because let's let's talk about the next thing that we wanted to get into with your your life events and your busyness. So before you go. Yeah, before you leave Southern California, go to El Adobe and get the presidential. Yeah. So what else has been?

Bradley Bernard (17:47)
Really? Wow.

Dang, I'll have to try it.

Yeah, the list forever continues.

Yeah, I think we're talking about doing like a yearly, if we're around like a yearly dinner at Adobe would be pretty cool.

Bennett Bernard (18:13)
that's cool. Yeah, because of the wedding and like sentimental. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (18:16)
Yeah, like anniversary or something like that. But yeah, speaking of next life events, again, I had the job search and then got married and then kind of tying back to that first one of the job searches. My job will be back in the Bay area and in the South Bay. so working at Snapchat and their Palo Alto office. And what that means for us is I need to be back up there in person four days a week. And we're down here in Irvine right now. And so.

Yeah, it's been a little bit of a frantic, like how do we get up there ASAP, but find a spot that's good enough for us. And so, last weekend made like the impromptu trip up there after subscribing on Zillow for like housing and tour maybe four or five spots. and I think there was like the final two, one was like a pretty large one, like a three bed, three and a half bath, a triple story, like townhouse was really nice.

And then the other one is like a two bed, two bath, kind of more similar to what we're in now. Also roughly the same size, but also two stories. So think you lose a little bit of square footage due to the staircase. And so we also went with a smaller one, but this means we've signed a lease and we'll be moving up there very, very shortly. got movers come pick up our large furniture. We're have to pack the rest of our life in boxes and then drive that up. Like kind of the more delicate items like my

giant gaming PC sitting next to me and there's no way that's going in the moving truck because that thing would get crushed. But yeah, exciting news that we're moving back. lot of life happening at once. I do gotta say I was spending time this week writing down a checklist of things to do for work, things to do for VoxBite, things to do for like moving to the new spot, things to do for leaving the current spot, like cancel utilities, da da da. I had to write all that down because in my head,

Bennett Bernard (19:48)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (20:00)
I have like a decent amount of free time right now, given that like the job search went well, the wedding went well. And now that I've signed a lease, like that went well too. And now I'm just kind of waiting to move and get all that sorted. But in the meantime, it's a unique opportunity for me to like touch up anything and get ready for work. So that, you know, on day one, I don't have a bunch of loose threads, like, you either in bucks bite or my personal life or just anything really. And so probably the past few days, I've just been going through this giant checklist that I made that

I'd be happy with getting a lot of these things done. And thankfully I've had time to do them and some are large, some are small, but yeah, it's a moving back to the Bay in like two and a half weeks, moving all of our stuff, super excited about where we're at. We're going to be in Mountain View. Previously we're kind of in the Sunnyvale area. So it'd be nice to try a new city out, live in a new spot, then, you know, start a new job. Pretty excited about how things are going. I've getting the emails of like, here's your first two days. Here's the schedule, et cetera. So yeah, I'm pretty stoked.

Bennett Bernard (21:00)
Nice. have you gotten any swag yet or is that coming?

Bradley Bernard (21:03)
I actually just ordered the Snapchat like new hire swag and it's this Super super yellow hoodie like the snapchat color of the app icon. It's that the full thing is yellow You would think maybe like a black hoodie with like a yellow icon Yeah, or like a gray hoodie with a yellow icon now. It's like the full thing is yellow with the icon I think I come maybe is like white or something on the sweatshirt, but That's coming next week sometime. And then yeah, they sent me the first

Bennett Bernard (21:13)
Mm-hmm. Like a banana.

Nice.

Bradley Bernard (21:30)
like two days of onboarding. And I think there was an engineering onboarding that I don't have access to yet, but yeah, I'm pretty excited, but that's pretty much all the life updates. I've just done everything in a shortened timeline, back to back to back. And it's stressful. mean, making sure things go well, like in making sure you're ready for the next events, like doing the job search was like before the wedding. Like the wedding was being planned and then pause for job search and then continued. then.

Bennett Bernard (21:42)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (21:57)
The move was like pause while the wedding happened and then once that's done, boom, like we're back. And so I try to give myself a few days to like do whatever I want and then I get serious about it. But there is that perfect stress point of, hey, I need to go up there or I need to move up there within the next few weeks. Like when are Zillow listings going to be available? When do I feel like the right amount of stress to go work on it? And I think I've done well at timing those things right where I've been stressed, but not like over the top, like pulling my hair out.

Bennett Bernard (22:24)
Yeah, people have asked me like, like, what's Brad doing, blah, blah. And I tell them, like, well, this was like before he got married, but I was like, he's getting married, he's moving, he's starting a new job. I was like, he picked three of the most stressful things to just do them all at one time. So I guess everything after this should be pretty, you know, pretty simple and easy compared to, you know, the time you were going through back then in September. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (22:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we moved like only, I don't know, what is it, October? We moved like in January. Yeah. So like it hasn't been that long and for better and for worse, like that's just how things ended up. And I think we're decently good at moving and that area is not unknown to us. So it's like, we're kind of snapping back to that in a way that like I'm happy about, because I think like, you know, for my career, it's going to be a huge move. And then for, for Ellen too, it'll be nice for her to be, you know, kind of back talking with.

Bennett Bernard (22:48)
It's like January, right? Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (23:13)
old coworkers that she had previously before we moved down. But yeah, I think, starting my own company, was just this giant question mark of, was at least going to do it for 12 months after that. was kind of TBD and I've written on my blog, probably maybe three blog posts so far about like how my past 12 months went, what I'm doing with a future of VoxBite. and then what was the last one? Let me open up my blog. There was one more that I wrote.

and my job search, of course. like we had talked about it in the last pod episode, but outlining more the details of like when I started, how many places I applied to, how many I got into, how I decided. wrote that all down on my blog at bradleybernard.com slash blog. So if you're listening, sorry, I used to call it articles. So when it's I'm like articles or blog, I think blog sounds too old, but I just kept it.

Bennett Bernard (24:01)
Okay, yeah.

Bradley Bernard (24:06)
so if you're curious, yeah, deciding on the future of Vox by is one of my titles. also searching for a software engineering job in late 2024, then one year recap, my solo entrepreneur journey, fulls full of ups and downs. So yeah, I've been a busy time and was happy to write those. Cause when I write those, sometimes it feels more like getting out of my own head, all these thoughts and feelings, put it down on paper, then go look at it later, like a few years later.

what was my life like when I was starting my own company and how did I feel at the time because you forget about those things and it's nice to have that of jotted down in stone.

Bennett Bernard (24:37)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And it's funny, you know, so you've been busy with like real real life stuff like, know, getting married, moving, starting a new job. And, we've talked, we've had trouble scheduling again. been a while since we've had these podcasts because I think in the rare moments that you've been available, that I've been like unavailable and it's nothing really like as exciting as those things. But like either my kids are sick or they're not in bed yet and it's like too late in the night or like I'm just busy with.

Bradley Bernard (24:57)
You

Bennett Bernard (25:08)
You know my regular job and I'm just too zapped. I'm like I can't do it tonight. I'm completely spent. So that's why it's been such a hot potato to like find a time I think for you and I to kind of schedule and I think this was this session was like, okay, let's get back on the books even though it's late right now. Like let's get it going and yeah, it's good to be you know, it could be back and we started having this this kind of podcast where we started scheduling it. You know, you and I had talked it was like, you know, I don't have like a ton.

Bradley Bernard (25:11)
Mm-hmm.

You

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (25:35)
Like going on like I've read any articles and I haven't like, you know, like it's been completely like just focus on like two things Just been doing like, you know work and then like family stuff but it's been kind of nice, you know, it's been a bit, you know, kind of just quieter in a weird way or just like less, you know less spread around and so one of the things that we can talk about a little more too later, but one of the things I've been like making my kids for no reason I've been making my kids like learn knots like how to tie a knot

Bradley Bernard (25:46)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (26:04)
So like I have this I have this book called my first book of knots and we'll link it in the show notes. for whatever reason, last two weeks, I've been like obsessed with like tying knots. I don't know why. And so I have that. I have my own version of it. The book of everyday knots. It's pretty thick. So.

Bradley Bernard (26:24)
Wait, so there's so many different types of knots. What's like the TLDR on like, you know, top five.

Bennett Bernard (26:27)
yeah.

There's a bow line. There's an overhand knot. There's a constrictor knot. Let me see what else I got. What's some other ones? You know, shoelace.

Bradley Bernard (26:37)
But they're all for different use cases, right? It's kind of like a tool.

Bennett Bernard (26:40)
Yeah, yeah. So there's knots for fishing, which is one of the reasons, the real reason I actually wanted to start getting involved in knots, that's a weird sentence to ever say out loud, but is because the weather's getting better here in Arizona finally. So it's like, we can do things outside again. my kids, I don't know this is actually going to hold true, but my kids had always found fishing in shows and video games interesting.

You know, like just the, the, you put it out there and they, catch it like just on their tablet or watching a show. And so I'm like, you know, I'm going to try and go fishing this fall. And so therefore I need to learn to like tie some of these knots because I'm fishing at the tie the fishing line and tie the hook. and so there's certain knots that are for that. So think that's kind of like where like the gateway drug of knots went for me. and then talking to our friend Tyler again, who's a big, a big fisherman. He was like, you got to do the Palomar knot. Like that's the one to do for fishing, you know, lasso.

Bradley Bernard (27:06)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (27:34)
So all that, you know, and then there's like neck ties, you know, you know, we're just wearing suits and I had to tie, tie our ties. So like, you know, I'm like, that's a good life skill to have.

Bradley Bernard (27:39)
Mm-hmm.

How many do you have memorized from the book so far?

Bennett Bernard (27:48)
Probably like four or five. Yeah. Right now, but I read every I force us to read one of these pages every night. They don't sometimes they're not like, dude, why are we learning? I'm like, I don't care. This is an overhand knot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have like two little ropes that we use. Yeah, bow line is like my favorite. Like, I'll just do that. Like, you know, I'll be listening like on calls, but I'll be like just doing the knot to like it's just like a nice like kind of like

Bradley Bernard (27:51)
So it's more like a reference book.

Ha

Wait, so you make him do it too, right? Like you pull out the rope. Okay.

That's funny.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (28:18)
almost like a fidget tool. You know, there's hitches. So like if you're on a horse, you need to hitch your horse to a post. Now you know, now you know.

Bradley Bernard (28:26)
You might need invent your own knot, maybe make a break even brother knot, just a few loops here and there. Like I just can't imagine there's a hundred and something knots, like how is that even possible?

Bennett Bernard (28:38)
I just feel like, you know, like what if my kids want to tie up like a tire swing right now? But part of this book, I wouldn't know how to do that. But like now it's like, got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they're like, my dad knows how to tie this. Like, dude, that's it's all you want is like your kids that think that you know what's going on and you got all the answers. So I'm like, I can see there. getting to the age where like this is going to come in handy and like they're going to be despite them complaining about it now, they're going to be thankful that they know some things.

Bradley Bernard (28:46)
for you.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's cool.

Bennett Bernard (29:07)
as I get older, hopefully.

Bradley Bernard (29:07)
Yeah, I don't think we ever did maybe a short stint of like boy scouts or girl scouts. I think that was like, you know, tying knots, doing like the wilderness stuff, making fires, all that, like camping. I don't think we ever did that, but.

Bennett Bernard (29:20)
Well, had the benefit of growing up in Southern California with the beaches and ocean access. We did that marine science camp a lot. Remember that? Yeah. Yeah, that was the best.

Bradley Bernard (29:27)
Yeah, yeah, that was really cool. Yeah, we're on television. I think we're on television, like the local TV for something in the marine bio layer. I don't know. I couldn't even tell you, but.

Bennett Bernard (29:36)
Yeah.

Yeah, it was a camp in Long Beach and it was like, you know, obviously marine biology. like we'd kayak, like go find like fish and like study them and like watch videos about like stingrays and like go out and like just swim in the ocean. I mean.

Bradley Bernard (29:51)
My favorite core memory from that camp was playing large scale capture the flag on this giant green field. I don't know if you remember it, but it was really fun because I feel like we're young enough that everyone was just sprinting around full speed trying to get away doing capture the flag. That was the most fun part. I did love doing the kayaking and all that because I think even now as an adult, if you go to different lakes or amusement parks or fairs, there's maybe a little

Bennett Bernard (30:07)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (30:19)
I'm like, I have many hours like on a kayak, like, it might seem weird for someone like me who's like in tech and like at their desk all day, but like that camp we put in so many hours kayaking. It's not like you can, there's a certain threshold where you know what you're doing and that's it. And like I've hit that and there's not, I don't know, to me there's not much past that, but it's just funny when people ask me, I'm like, yeah, actually I have, you know, if you ask, I'm pretty experienced. Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (30:22)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, like I can fly on the water. Just watch out. OK. You'll think there's a motor back there. Yeah. Yeah, it's that was a fun one. And then it's funny. I was actually to bring this up in the speech, but there wasn't really a good way to fit it in anywhere. And again, I kept coming back to this needs to be about you and Ellen. And so I cut it out. But I was thinking about like some funny events that we had as kids. And one of the ones do you want to go where I'm going with this with fishing?

Bradley Bernard (31:00)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (31:08)
Do you know where I'm going to go with this? Where our dad took you and I both fishing. And so there's three of us, but he only got one rod. like, you know, as a kid, that was horrible to have to share the rod. And, you know, so we all we gave him hell for it. And there's that funny picture somewhere in our parents' house of, think, you know, I think I was one throwing the temper, throwing the tantrum more than you. But I think there's a picture of us, all three of us on the boat. And like, I'm like all like red eyed, you know.

Bradley Bernard (31:09)
Yeah, I remember that.

You

Yeah.

Yeah, I do remember that photo. I feel like we're like turned around and like life-vess looking at the camera.

Bennett Bernard (31:37)
Like upset. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I was like 10, okay? Like I was not like, you I was not an adult, like just to be clear. It's like 10 years old. So like I'm entitled to my tantrum over that. But yeah.

Bradley Bernard (31:50)
Yeah, I can't remember the last time I went fishing, honestly. I feel like it's been a very, very long time. just, it's just like a very slow activity. Like you, you know, cast your line, you wait what feels like forever. I think you just have to have the right people and the right vibe there to be able to hang out and talk. But yeah, I haven't done it in long, long time.

Bennett Bernard (32:07)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we'll see if I can get out there with my kids when the weather cools down a little bit. I'll be there. You know, their kids, their attention spans, you know, are not long. But again, they've had like a natural inclination to fishing and just being out there and being outside in general. So maybe maybe it'll work. But but we'll see. We'll see how it goes.

Bradley Bernard (32:20)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I did this week was send out a monthly balance reminder for my split my expenses user. So what that is is on the platform, you have debts or people owe you, or you owe people. And it's been on my to-do list forever to create a monthly email that tells you who you owe and who owes you. Part of that's just to keep you informed. The other part is for user retention. So it's, you know, if

I'm owed money. I'm to go to the platform, tell my friend to go there too and say, Hey, pay me through SME. And so I worked while I was touring houses in between that I was at a coffee shop working for like four hours straight. Like I bought a coffee and then went to Starbucks to get food. And then was just like posted up in this table for like four hours using cursor, the fantastic like. VS code with AI IDE. And I was like, I've been hearing so much on Twitter.

about cursor, so I want to give it a full run through. And so what I did is I used cursor to draft a HTML email using Laravel and Blade, their templating system. And it worked out really well. I think I had sent out 5,000 emails to users. So I think 10,000 users right now, about 5,000 still had a balance, which is much higher than I thought. I think I should probably add in like reminders or nudges so people can get that sorted out.

Bennett Bernard (33:45)
Hmm.

Bradley Bernard (33:52)
But yeah, I was working on that, sent Ellen a few test emails like, hey, how does this look from the coffee shop? And I was like, all right, I'm going to do it live because I just had been busy. And like, I just want to cross this off the list. Like when you get that momentum on your to-do list where you just boom, like check, check, check. That was one of those things that I think I had dragged my feet for so long because I was, I'm always concerned about sending like an email to the masses. When I was sending out the first

Bennett Bernard (34:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (34:18)
welcome email for split my expenses, I'd onboard onto this new email system. Part of that's taking all of your users, taking their emails and dumping it into the system. Then you write like a series of emails and you send them over a period of time. While I was doing that for the first one, I wrote a test email that was just like, hello world, like nice to see you or something. And when I went to go send like the real email, I accidentally clicked the test email and click send. And so the test email went to like 450 people,

and they like immediately responded saying, hi, hello, how are you? How are you? And I was like, crap, like I'm so glad I didn't write anything bad in there because sometimes you can just like write whatever, you know, as a test email. And so I like was stressed out. was like, holy crap, that could have gone way worse. But the funny part is I got the highest response rate I ever could. Cause I think people realized it was like a mistake and were like, like ha ha ha, like here you go, here I am. And then when I sent out this one,

Bennett Bernard (34:48)
Ha

Bradley Bernard (35:14)
the good news is that I sent out this email to 5,000 users. So basically half the user base. And then I logged onto the website on my admin panel on the admin panel. It tells me who's been active within the past 10 minutes. And after I sent that out, I was like, there's gotta be people who are logging in and seeing what's going on. Right. I think I had like 60 concurrent active users, which is the highest I've seen it. I'm not really sure if it's had higher numbers while I've been offline, but I was, that was pretty cool to see. And then the downside of that.

Was I wrote the email well, I'm pretty sure there was like no exceptions. Nothing was wrong with it, but I did have a few people reach out and say, Hey, can you delete my account? I don't want this anymore. I said, damn, well, they probably forgot about it. And so here's an email to say, Hey, you're still subscribed and doing all that. So, the delete account process. It's like fully like quote unquote GDPR, like your data scrubbed and deleted, like in a full realistic way. but.

Bennett Bernard (35:50)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (36:06)
It's like not a perfect process since there's all these like relationships tied to your user. Like if you create a group, you create expenses, all this. So I spent a crap ton of time making it like fully wipe all your history. and part of that is just so people can come back to the platform if they want to later. And it's also like, like I said, compliant to like GDPR. and so there's a few people who reached out to me like, Hey, come, can you delete my account? And I would tell them like, log into your account and delete it. but I.

What always happens as an engineer is you are creating a new feature and you change one line of code here and think, now this works for my new feature. Then you broke something else. And so what I ended up doing is breaking a small thing for delete user. So people would say, would say, Hey, can you delete my account? said, Hey, go delete it on your own. I made that be a reality. They would go delete it and say, Hey, I'm running to this error. And I'm like, why are you getting that? That shouldn't happen. And then I go fix it. And I'm like, that one line I added one month ago, like affected like 5 % of users who want to delete their account.

Bennett Bernard (36:41)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (37:02)
And so I think that was like the common theme of split my expenses in these past few days is like getting that email out and then fixing like a few edge cases that you'd think wouldn't come up. But having a bunch of users come to your site is like an influx of activity and traffic and also bug reports. So it was nice. check that off the list, deleted maybe five or 10 people's accounts, like on my end. And maybe there was more out there, but honestly,

They can come back, not too worried about it. My tool isn't like social media. Like it doesn't hurt me. and usually when they asked to delete their account, I'm like, Hey, well I have you like, could you tell me why you're deleting it? And usually it's like, I liked it, but I just don't need it anymore. Or like my friends didn't use it so I couldn't use it, which, you know, it is like a constant problem. So there wasn't anything crazy, but yeah, I was really happy to like bunker down in the coffee shop in between Zillow listings and

Bennett Bernard (37:30)
Yeah.

Mm.

Bradley Bernard (37:55)
get stuff done and not have like a major headache like I first had with my test email.

Bennett Bernard (37:59)
Yeah, that's funny. didn't think when you said it at first, it's like, that doesn't seem so bad. But then when you said like you could have written something like, I'm like, yeah, I've done that before. You know, like, like so and so sucks. And like just let you leave it in there. Yeah. one thing, cause when you set and describe that process, the only thing that just jumped in my head was you said that people say, Hey, you know, my friends aren't on the platform. therefore like my use is limited. Did you ever try, to like do any kind of like referral programs? Sometimes that's pretty

Bradley Bernard (38:06)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (38:28)
popular with like, you know, banking and like Venmo where it's like, if you get your friend to sign up, you get like, you know, some kind of discount or credit. Do you ever try anything like that? Or was that kind of just too much effort for the squeeze, you think?

Bradley Bernard (38:31)
Mm-hmm.

I thought about it. think it has a strong pull to bring people in naturally. Like if you don't have your friends on it, it's not as effective period, like in a large magnitude. but I think I didn't really have a ton to give. Like I have a premium subscription, which is, you know, $9 a month, which I'm thinking about changing to be cheaper. But anyways, like there is something to be paid for. just don't, I think there's a small sliver of users that want that like paid add on.

I think it wasn't strong enough to say like, this should be the main goal for a referral. Where like, if you look at Robinhood, like get a free stock, like who doesn't want free money? Like I had a paid offering to link your bank accounts and credit cards, which I think is very useful, but it's not useful for everybody. So I never really had like a great grasp on how I could reward people for doing the hard work of getting referrals. And usually it's like one person who's adopted the site, created the group to add expenses and

sending out to all their friends and making sure that happens. There's always like someone on top of that. And yeah, I didn't really find a great way to incentivize, but it's a good question. It crossed my mind. just was like, I don't

Bennett Bernard (39:47)
Yeah. When you were like in the in the thick of, you know, Vox by and split my expenses, really, this is the accountant in me. Did you ever like use like any kind of accounting software to keep track of like revenue or expenses or were you kind of just like looking at it from your bank statement and be like, OK, that's good to know like.

Bradley Bernard (40:07)
I had my company bank account, which is through Mercury. And then I had my company Amex card, through American express. And I did try to use QuickBooks for my end of year taxes last year, which at that point was six months of business since I started it. like June 1st, 2023, QuickBooks wanted to like link all your accounts, reconcile all these terms that were super familiar to me. And I'm sure they were correct, but it felt like

way too much work. What I had done manually is over time, I created this Google spreadsheet, took my expenses from Amex, dumped them into the spreadsheet, and that gave me a tally of like every month I spent this. And it was like manual in the way that I had to write Excel formulas to some if it was like that month, but it wasn't, I wasn't copying the expenses and descriptions and dates. I would export it from Amex and just drag it in and clean it up a little bit. So that was like my bookkeeping.

And then when I did my taxes, it was like, how do I go get my profit or my revenue? Like I had my expenses, but I have my revenue. And so that was like going to Stripe and other various sources. That one was a little painful. but yeah, I tried to use QuickBooks. I felt like it was overkill for my small one person business. That was only for six months. And I signed up for their, I dunno, maybe $20 a month, like online license for like a really small company. So I think if I fit the bill, but I just couldn't figure out how to do it.

It was asking me like, where is this coming from? Like inbound, outbound, like since I had a single member LLC, it was just kind of like floating to my personal funds. And it really tried to draw a line there and say like, you know, categorize all these things. And to me, I felt like the problem was I just need to assign a category to these expenses. I know what my revenue is. I know my expenses number is, I just need to categorize these so can take that to like, you know, whatever tax statement or document I did. And so I tried.

Bennett Bernard (41:57)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (41:58)
I really tried.

Bennett Bernard (41:58)
Yeah, yeah, I was just curious. Yeah, I think they have a QuickBooks. They have so many different like categories or tiers. There's one that's called solopreneur. At least there might be. Yeah, it's either that or the self employed. I can't remember what they call it. I think they've changed it actually. But there's a solopreneur or and or self employed version. But yeah, there's a bit of a learning curve, especially for a non accountant. But I was just curious if you felt like there was even a need.

Bradley Bernard (42:05)
Yeah.

Maybe that's what I did, honestly.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (42:25)
to like see that, you know, I figured you just being the engineer, you were tracking it in some way that worked for you. You know, it's not like you to not track those things, but yeah, I was just curious if that was, if you had any QuickBooks, you know.

Bradley Bernard (42:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I wanted to like it I wanted to go by the books and processes because I feel like once you spend the effort to get set up and like link your accounts, kind of like I have on SME, then you're sitting good and like maybe you do it, you know, every end of the month, you just kind of go in the system, categorize things and you're done. For me, I had done a lot of upfront work and it was only six months. So was like, I don't want to go through all that again. I felt like I was kind of starting over in their system where I had like my own, that was maybe 60 % already done. So when I

I recently just did my expenses for this year just in my spreadsheet again. And I thought, should I do QuickBooks? Should I try? But I would only buy it for the tax season. I also feel like it doesn't work well with things that you've already kind of pre-processed. It works great if you connect Rob to your accounts and handle it all through their system. But if you have some kind of half-baked lists like I have, that's kind of where it's like, it doesn't do that well.

Bennett Bernard (43:33)
Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So you were using cursor to do some engineering work while you're in the Bay Area. What else you've been working on kind of as your last few weeks before you start the full time gig?

Bradley Bernard (43:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I'll be honest the the main goal which It's not happening, but the main goal was to get the mobile app out and that was something that has been on my to-do list Forever, I think I started in end of April. So let's call it May worked on it May and then started the job search Probably late June. So it wasn't a ton of time to like actually work on it

and that was kind of the deciding point was, like, should I finish the mobile app and then do the job search or should I pause job search, come back, and then join a company? Cause in my head, I think I'd outlined a way where I would sign a job offer and start in like three months. And that three months would be like time for the mobile app to just be cranked out. And the wedding was tossed in the mix, the start date with tech being a little bit.

not as golden era as it was back in 2017 or 2020, for instance, you don't have the three months window like you used to be able to have or like four or five months. And so when I was left with the time that I have today with the move, with the wedding, all that being smack dab right here, not a ton of room, I thought I could try to grind really hard in the mobile app, but I'm a little scared to not burn myself out, but just be too peddled to the metal.

Bennett Bernard (45:03)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (45:03)
So what I've actually been kind of working on is, like I said, I had this giant to-do list of kind of like life things, finance things, Vox by things, blogging, you you name it. On top of that, just been having fun, like, doing some reverse engineering. So if you're not familiar with that, it's essentially diving into like web apps or mobile apps, understanding how things work under the hood. So for example, if I open up American express and I have their login screen, if I type in my credentials and press log in,

How does the AMEX servers know how to respond to this request and what request is being sent to begin with? So essentially, it's going through HTTP, hitting the network. And what I'll do is essentially kind of listen to that web traffic so that I could emulate it. So for example, on Split My Expenses, if I wanted this, I haven't done it, but this is just an example. If I wanted to allow people to give me their AMEX login,

I could like open up the Amex app on my iPhone, like sniff the traffic is what they call it, like see what's going back and forth between the iPhone and their servers and replicate what that looks like. It's like a fun engineering challenge. Like for me as like a mobile coder, for me knowing like web and iOS technologies, I feel like reverse engineering a mobile app is pretty fun because it's just curious to see how things interact and like what the response looks like and what security measures they have to like harden things.

and so I've been doing that probably for the past few days on like random apps, just to see. Like, you know, what financial apps are doing or what, you know, other social media apps are doing just to like get a lay of the land. I don't really have anything to share on. If it has like an opportunity for me or the business or anything like that, but more, just kind of like learning super deep, fundamentals of like iOS apps. it's pretty cool. had a coworker from LinkedIn, Bryce Palkin, who, has like a series of

reverse engineering iOS apps to like fix bugs or add features. like TikTok or Disney plus, it's a really cool concept of like being very, very in the know. And so I was just like, I want to try it out. So that's, that's kind of what I've been tinkering on.

Bennett Bernard (47:07)
Yeah, that's cool. When you look at the traffic, is it like a Google Developer Tools? Like is it F12? And you're looking at the browser? What are you using to see that traffic? I'm just curious.

Bradley Bernard (47:18)
Yeah, it's way, way more complicated. So if you're curious, I can give a brief overview. So I have a jailbroken iPhone. So what that means is I have an iPhone that can run any code that I want. So right now when you have your iPhone, it's from Apple. Only the apps that are signed by Apple can run on your device. So you can't take the Twitter app, for example, which exists on your phone, open it up in like a code editor, change things, bring it back to your phone and run it.

If you change anything, it's not going to be like quote unquote valid. The jailbroken iPhone, there's an exploit in the operating system for iOS. They kind of go down that rabbit hole, open up the system and remove all the security checks. So this means you can do literally whatever you want. And part of that is if you want to look at the network traffic, usually what apps will do is it's HTTPS, so HTTP secure. And that's

encrypting the data in transit. So if you try to sit in the middle, so like you have the iPhone client, you have the server. If I wanted to sit in the middle, I would see junk because it's encrypted from end to end. But with a jailbroken iPhone, you can install programs that remove that encryption on the iPhone and kind of like disable it. And so that's pretty cool because I can boot up any app. I can sit in the middle with a proxy. So it's not like F12 or network tools, but it's a

standalone application called a burp suite, weird name, but what it does is allows you to take the iPhone traffic pointed at your computer, your computer's running this program and it'll proxy all the information. You can like intercept the requests, you can modify them, whatever. And so it's really cool. There's a thing called SSL kill switch. And so HTTPS is SSL secure socket layer. And this jailbroken tweet called SSL kill switch basically disables all that security. And so you.

download this tweak, turn it on, connect your iPhone to your Mac through a proxy. After setting all that up, which is a lot of effort, it's kind of a pain, after getting that set up, then you're off to the races and you can pretty much boot up any app, see what the app is doing behind the scenes. And then you can replicate that. Like I could boot up a Laravel app that like does what the Amex app does, assuming I can get past their security. And I think that's the big challenge is.

Bennett Bernard (49:15)
Hehehe

Bradley Bernard (49:33)
These apps and services have different security measures and I'm not endorsing anything. I'm not a hacker. It's more just like for research purposes to understand like, Hey, like what is, you know, what is a bank doing for security as like their number one, like fraud prevention systems. So it's pretty fascinating to see that. think part of it's like doing fun stuff on iOS and part of it's just like understanding cool security technologies.

Bennett Bernard (49:55)
Yeah, I'm just curious when you're using the device and being able to see the traffic, you are, I guess, decrypting it is the right word or like unencrypting it. I don't know the right terminology is there, but.

Bradley Bernard (50:09)
Yeah, think... Yeah, go ahead.

Bennett Bernard (50:11)
Well, as I say, you're only, I guess this is a question more than a statement, but I'm saying it as a statement. You're only seeing the request unencrypted that's going from the iPhone client to the, in this case, the Amex server. You're not seeing the Amex server data getting unencrypted back to the iPhone. Or are you? It seems like that'd be hard to do.

Bradley Bernard (50:35)
I see, so like if you do F12 on your Chrome browser and you open up the network tab and you make a request. So if you're on Twitter and you click like bookmarks or something, you'll see a new request pop up that gives you, you know, going to fetch bookmarks and you see the request and the response both in plain text. And so I see like the exact same format on this burp suite tool. So it's nothing encrypted and decrypted. I'm not exactly sure what the exact term is for what this kind of like

Bennett Bernard (50:39)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (51:03)
SSL kill switch is doing, I think in technical terms, it's like secure. So it's, it's like encrypted in transit, but it's turned off. And what apps usually have is a thing called cert pinning. so it's like a complex way to say the iPhone client has a asymmetric key, I think to the server. And so if for some reason you're on a network where like I replace google.com with my home server.

If I had the Google app on my phone, it was connected to my home network. And so all this kind of spoofing was happening on my home network. If my iPhone reached out to my fake Google.com, my iPhone has a copy of this key that knows what the real Google.com is. And it would say, Hey, that's not real. Like I'm not going to send traffic there. So there's like one, it would be encrypted into a check to make sure that the receiver is the right person. But I turn off both of those with this simple, like SSL kill switch jailbreak tweak is what they call it. Like tweak is like a.

user downloadable configuration or tool. And so you download that, you check the box and then that just like breaks the walls and you can literally see everything as if you could open up the network tab.

Bennett Bernard (52:12)
Yeah. Yeah. Sounds technical. I was just curious. seemed like, yeah, the, it'd be interesting to see the requests more like, I guess from like those other companies sides of things. Like it just, the way that you described it, you know, it seemed like you'd be able to see it definitely from your jailbroken iPhone, but, being able to see like what other companies are doing. It sounds super interesting. And like doing that.

Bradley Bernard (52:30)
Yeah, you see the request and response. You don't see what they're doing on the back end. You just get that final result. So it would be cool to see theirs, but yeah, you can only get so much. even then looking at how they package their data, like what the JSON format looks like, all that, because if you're opening up like AMEX, like you just see the UI or like you open up chase, you just see the UI. don't know, like maybe they're sending like only as much as you can see in the UI or they're sending way more, but they're just not using all that. And I think that part's kind of interesting to see how they architect and design.

Bennett Bernard (52:35)
Yeah, yeah.

Is it just me or I feel like back in the day, you used to be able to open up the developer tool and like, you know, for your basic sites, like see like the HTML and kind of see like, you know, to follow along. Now I feel like if I ever, you know, I'm in using Google Chrome and open up developer tool, if I'm on the site, like, you know, Netflix or Nike or, know, New Balance, like if I look at the developer tools and look at like the code, it's just like all

Bradley Bernard (53:08)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (53:26)
I'm going say this as a non-technical person, but I'm curious if you feel like I'm barking up the right tree. It's just so much like gobbledygook in there now. It's super hard to figure out. So I'm trying to think of when I was using this, because I was trying to use this for something. I was trying to do some web scraping. It might have been for that Hello Kitty thing I was talking about earlier on in our podcast episodes. Yeah, it's like I used to able to find like, OK.

Bradley Bernard (53:37)
You

You're definitely right.

Bennett Bernard (53:53)
This tag has like, you know, this whatever div or this, you know, paragraph tag is like what I need to like scrape. And it's like, I can easily go into the developer tools to find it and be like, okay, write that in, you know, the beautiful soup is the library in Python that does the web scraping. but now I feel like that it's so difficult to do. And, you know, I'm not using like AI, I'm not, you know, just, but just.

Bradley Bernard (54:09)
Yep, yep.

Bennett Bernard (54:17)
You know, for my own skill set, if I go try and do that, it's like so much harder to figure out like where is this data sitting when I'm looking at the HTML like it's hard to figure out what's what anymore. I'm do you know that my is that resonating at all with you and do know why that is?

Bradley Bernard (54:32)
It is. And it's exactly as you mentioned. So back in the day and like the web 2.0, I mean, I don't know if that's even the right term, but maybe in the 2010, 2012 era, there is bootstrap. So the most popular is CSS and JavaScript kind of like theme or library or framework, whatever you want to call it. and so that was using CSS classes. And so when you looked at the HTML elements, maybe you had a button, that button was like,

BTN for button dash primary or something like that. Very readable and understandable. Then we moved to Tailwind. So everyone's on Tailwind now, Tailwind CSS. What that does allows you to have class names as utilities. So if you wanted to have a five or six pixel margin around top left, bottom right. In Bootstrap, you couldn't do that. You have to create your own custom CSS class like button primary dash M6 and fill out all that. Now you have

classes and tailwind that give you all these small utilities and you compose those together to create a layout that looks good. And on top of that, we transitioned from like bootstrap as a single CSS file that you just included in your HTML to a giant build system with VEET and rollup and webpack and all these things. And while that is a developer nightmare at times, what it allows you to do is actually

Bennett Bernard (55:45)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (55:52)
Rename all of your CSS classes so that people can't web scrape you so exactly as you mentioned if I could go to Twitter.com and I can see that if I load up my timeline every tweet Was like class name profile icon class name tweet text It'd be really easy for me to write a scraper on beautiful soup to say give me all the p tags with this class saying tweet text What they do now to make it way harder. I think I think Twitter does this

If you open up Twitter on your browser, inspect element, right click, inspect element. If you look at any of the elements and you look at their classes, what they have written down there, it's just gibberish. It's random letters and numbers in a bunch of different sequences. And if you open up the dev tools and you look at those small identifiers, they map to real CSS. Like maybe it's a margin, maybe it's padding, maybe it's a background color. But it makes it really hard to write scrapers because you lose that.

selectivity of having these exact classes get you to the data you want. And so the fallback to that is to actually figure out the DOM structure. So like you have, you know, your body element and then you have everything under that cascading. You might have to say, you know, find me the eighth div and that's where the tweet container is. And then within there, find me every third paragraph tag. And that is like what it ends up being. And so it is intentional. It is very hard to read. times were simpler, but I think

Bennett Bernard (57:08)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (57:15)
It's combating like the web scraping problem. But now even with AI, what people are doing is scraping a web page. No one cares about your class names anymore. Throw it into AI and say like, extract me all the tweets and I can figure it out. So I think you're right on the money for that one.

Bennett Bernard (57:30)
Yeah, one of the most frustrating things that I've ever there's there's been probably to stand out frustrating like developer slash programmer like learnings that I've ever gone through. One of which was deploying with Django, which I've talked about before on this podcast, using like G Unicorn or whatever it's called and like NGINX. Like it was just like a nightmare.

Bradley Bernard (57:53)
Didn't she use like Jango Anywhere or some service?

Bennett Bernard (57:57)
No, no, I was so I was using Docker. I had built everything in a Docker container and it ran totally fine locally. It was like a Formula One game that like me and some friends are playing. And I was doing it on a Google Sheet and I was like, let's I'm going to just make this for fun and put it up on, you know, the Internet just for shits and giggles. And it was working beautifully on my local machine. It was built in Django using Docker with nothing too fancy. And I wasn't doing any, you know, react or.

view, it was just basic CSS. And when I go to deploy it, there's like a deployment checklist that Django has. And like, I swear I followed that thing out like to a T and I try to do it with a digital ocean as like, you know, just a VPS and whatever, whatever I had to change and like, I'm not good at get, you know, so like, I know how to commit things, but like, you know, it's

Bradley Bernard (58:26)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (58:48)
Anytime there's an issue, I'm pretty much just like, what's point of Git, honestly?

Bradley Bernard (58:53)
Yeah, there's been a few times where think Ben has ran into issues and he's like, yeah, I think I just like deleted the whole thing and restarted.

Bennett Bernard (58:58)
Yeah, I really I guess a certain point I just select all my files and Fox board just copy them and I delete the old one or something Yeah, yeah, so I try and use git but yeah, I changed some settings, you know put it like in like production mode and Django and like Configure the server and it just never worked and it was just a horrible nightmare. So that was that was one And then I think I had like, you know was like committing

like my database migrations or something like that. And like, I think you're supposed to exclude that on like, ignore, you know? So like that, I think that was another thing. So get is a problem in general for me. and you know, I'll just own that and never learn it, but that's okay. but, the other one was, web pack. Learn. was trying to do some stuff in react again, just for fun, just trying to learn something new. And I was like doing a tutorial.

Bradley Bernard (59:30)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (59:49)
You know that YouTube has so many great tutorials on these kinds of things and the person's are walking through is like, okay install webpack install babble, you know, blah blah blah and My computer for whatever reason like wouldn't there's something wrong every time I try to like install babble or webpack Whatever was it like wouldn't work and it was and I was like just trying to work within like the JavaScript ecosystem And it was just a nightmare and I never even got it to work and I was just like screw this. I hate JavaScript

Bradley Bernard (59:56)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:00:14)
I don't want anything to do with these libraries. I just want basic CSS and bootstrap. And I'm still on that hill today. I won't learn those other ones. So yeah, those are like because of that experience of like I was on a Mac, you know, it should be pretty straightforward to like install, you know, like whatever home, you know, what's the thing called homebrew or whatever. I don't have a Mac anymore. But yeah, like just, you know, brew install, blah, blah, blah. But like, no, it didn't work for me. Couldn't figure out the error codes. And I was just like, this. I'm done. It's too late.

Bradley Bernard (1:00:32)
Yeah, Humbert.

Yeah, you kind of sound like DHH. think there was a large shift from the original bootstrap days of just like raw CSS, no complications. And then a very quick shift into like webpack, Babel, Vite, all these kind of like build tools, bundlers, like there's all these terms for it that, you know, I'm not perfect at, and I like kind of know them just cause I've had to work with them. Not that I love them by any means. then.

DHH on Twitter has been pushing two major things. I haven't been on Twitter like the past kind of like two weeks, but he's been kind of beaten this drum of one. The web has been, you know, kind of evolving to crazy developer complexity. Like you mentioned, like, it's just not what it should be. And people know what it should be, but we've just grown into this system and situation where it's just not that easy to work with. And so he's kind of bringing it back to the roots, which is,

Lots of browsers have implemented what these bundlers and tools do on your client side. like what, you know, you write code across 50 different JavaScript files. What these tools will do is like package that into one giant JavaScript file and deliver that to the browser, which made it more efficient versus downloading 50 files. but browsers have gotten better in so many different ways that some of these requirements that these tools originally built around are no longer a problem. And so now you can kind of work around.

having a simpler setup and let the browser do more work where originally you're doing a lot of work because the browser isn't handling any of that. And then the second one is back to dedicated servers. So I'm not sure if you've seen it, but there's been lots and lots of drama about, you know, Versel, the AWS wrapper, which is a great platform, but they charge boatloads of money for traffic or other things that, you know, I think they have like a

Bennett Bernard (1:02:21)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:02:29)
500x markup on various AWS services. And so it's just kind of crazy, but his theme, like RailsConf, maybe is what it was called, is similar to LeraCon, where Laravel has their yearly US conference. think Rails has their yearly conference. I'm not sure if it's US-bound, but I'm pretty sure it was US this time. And like the Laravel crew went, lot of the Laravel folks went there. And I think DHH opened with his opening keynote of SQLite.

which is again, back to basics, like normal CSS stuff, which is, know, ditch all these web pack tools and all that. And then the third one was buy your own damn server, that being a dedicated server and don't rely on these, you know, super expensive cloud providers that charge you a ton because there's been many horror stories where you create an app on Versel, it goes viral and your bill is 40 grand and they come knocking and you know, we'll, we'll let you get away for free.

Bennett Bernard (1:03:01)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:03:22)
And so it's kind of something I've took to heart because I converted my expenses from, you know, a rented server into my own dedicated server on Hetzer, which is kind of the de facto standard for value in this dedicated server space. And it's a company that he's also been pushing recently too. So it's funny that you say like, things have gotten complicated. I don't like these tools. Class names are crazy. I feel like it's a very, you know, timely time to bring that up because I think he's also felt the same.

He's radically trying to bring back simplicity and you know, people hate him, people love him. It's worth debating.

Bennett Bernard (1:03:56)
Yeah, we him and I have talked about that. You know, simple is always better. you know, for real, though, for real. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But for real, simple, simple is always better. You know, I think it's 99 % of the time true, you know, minus like, you know, maybe medical things or whatever. But like, you know, even in accounting, you know, it's easy to like try and come up with like every possible solution for something. And then you just end up getting this like spaghetti bowl of like

Bradley Bernard (1:04:00)
You saw my Rails comp.

Bennett Bernard (1:04:26)
stuff and like you can't untangle it. You know what I mean? And it's like things I tell people that I work with and my team is that like something should be as simple as possible to the point where it works in like a nice efficient way, but also still scalable. Cause if it's, it works right now, but it's not scalable or it's not flexible. it's, you know, that's going to present an issue later on down the road because nothing stays the same. So it's gotta be simple, scalable and flexible. And if it's not

Bradley Bernard (1:04:51)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:04:55)
then it's going to probably spell trouble later on. And I think that can apply not just to accounting, but to engineering, to lots of other areas as well. So yeah, hopefully they figure that out because it's a miserable experience trying to write Tailwind as well. Sorry, but Tailwind's the same exact way. I'm like, it's brutal. So y'all know it. You all know it. Don't even sugarcoat it. It's horrible.

Bradley Bernard (1:05:15)
The learning curves are steep.

Bennett Bernard (1:05:20)
It looks great. I'm not saying it doesn't look good. It's amazing. I've seen the stuff that people build with like tailwind and react and view. I'm just like, wow, it's super impressive. But like, is it worth it? You know, is it worth just nuking the rest of our experiences? know, so.

Bradley Bernard (1:05:32)
No.

Yeah, I feel like every few years there's like some large thing to learn. If you don't learn it, you're left behind. think Tailwind was one of those catalyst moments where I first picked it up and I was like, this feels kind of heavy. And then as I got used it, was like, okay, I get the appeal of this. And it's nice in a way that's different, but yeah, I think from the onset, it's very easy to be like, don't know if I want this.

Bennett Bernard (1:05:56)
set up your Tailwind config file, like yeah, yeah. Yeah, run the server.

Bradley Bernard (1:05:59)
Yeah, the whole build system. Yeah. One thing I've been kind of, working on this week as well on my to-do list is figuring out the future of my photos. So I had a, you know, for the wedding, we had a QR code on our tables that said, if you took any photos or videos, like scan this QR code and I'll bring it to Google photos. And so we have an email for us together. We use that for like the Google photos shared album. I'll copy the link, put that on the QR code.

What's done is done. And after the wedding, we reached out to people and said, hey, you you got the email, maybe Brooke got it, you know, go add to the Google Photos album. And, you know, a decent amount of people have, think plenty of people probably have stuff that they didn't upload, which is fine, but getting anything is better than getting nothing. But part of that was like, one, how do I save those images now that people put in the album? Cause I hadn't really gotten that far. And two, every three or four years, I come up with the same debate of

Bennett Bernard (1:06:35)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:06:57)
Do I go Google with Google photos or do I go Apple with iCloud? Because we had a friend at the wedding, Steven, great guy. He brought his like, Polaroid camera, maybe it's Polaroid camera. It's not an iPhone, but a camera, a legit camera. He took a bunch of photos and he created an iCloud shared album, which is kind of adjacent to our Google photo shared album. And all the photos were uploaded. It was really easy to get onto my device. I kind of clicked like the top right.

Bennett Bernard (1:07:17)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:07:25)
said like save all 400 photos and I was done. And I thought to myself, like, I don't know. try to be platform agnostic, which kind of leans me to Google, but the simplicity and the ease of use of iCloud in terms of iCloud photos is like unmatched. And, you know, I work on iPhone apps. I've been on Mac for as long as I've known and nothing's going to change. That's what I think in the future.

Bennett Bernard (1:07:41)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (1:07:49)
You know, it's iCloud or die, but I just do like having like a better web interface for Google Photos and it supports, you know, iPhone and Android. So like, I don't know. So I want to ask you, where do you, where do you stand on the iCloud versus Google Photos?

Bennett Bernard (1:08:03)
Yeah, that's a good point. So by nature, I'm Mac or an Apple, I guess. So I cloud. But a couple of things I've been complaining about, like the quality of like Apple products as of late. like it feels like every new device I get minus the computer, but every like phone, every like iPad. I'm trying to think of something else, but like I got Apple TV.

Like they feel like they just kind of don't work like they should. Little things here. There are Apple watch. My Apple watch sometimes like, you know, if you're on a walk or if you're on like a jog, it'll like tell you like, hey, are you working out like mine? Like sometimes does that sometimes doesn't. I don't know why I expected that. So like I'm kind of like a cynical Apple user at this point. But what you said, I had never thought about this way. So what I was going to come on and tell you was I'm definitely pro iCloud. I'm like, why are you using Google at all? But when you said

Bradley Bernard (1:08:43)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:08:59)
a better web interface that was like, yeah, for sure. Because I don't ever interact with iCloud on the web. It's all just on my phone or on my MacBook. And I don't even know. honestly, you always tell me I'm a boomer. I don't know how to get to iCloud photos from my computer. Do I type in just iCloud.com? Does that take me there?

Bradley Bernard (1:09:07)
Mm-hmm.

I think it's iCloud.com and it's like a, once you log in, it's like a little mini iPhone home screen where there's like apps you can click on. I think one of those is photos and it brings you to like their photo sub product on iCloud. But yeah, I haven't been in a long time.

Bennett Bernard (1:09:31)
I had no idea. Yeah, I had no idea about that. yeah, so that's a good question. I think I'm more iCloud, by, again, because I'm in the Mac ecosystem like yourself. But I've looked at that Google shared link that you have all the wedding photos from. it's fine. I think the one thing that I struggled with was I was trying to just download pictures on it. And it was like, that's kind of hard. I was trying to figure it out.

Bradley Bernard (1:09:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing is like, yeah, all these systems, like you can either add it to your own library, which downloads it, or you can download like the raw, you know, JPEG file. And so I think the good news about it being a shared album and people spending the effort to like upload it, however that may be, maybe they had Google photos and like they can open up their camera picker and like choose a bunch of photos. However, it ended up being the good news is that

Bennett Bernard (1:09:57)
I was just like, damn, am I really that old?

Bradley Bernard (1:10:23)
Now that I'm, well, I've been on Google Photos, but if you're on Google Photos, you can like check mark any that you like and just click save. And what that does is it kind of copies that into your own library. And I think if you're not on Google Photos and you want the photos to your device, I think you have to check mark them again, but just click like download. I think then it might end up in your camera roll. But again, there's not a clear connection to me of how that works out completely.

Bennett Bernard (1:10:50)
Yeah, like so you sent me the link to the speech I did. I remember I was like trying to download it and Brooke and I were trying to download it together and I'm trying to figure out how to use it. And I think I kept like downloading as like a file, not as like to my camera roll. And then like it wouldn't let me say to my camera like I try to save it. It was just like some like, you know, some weird file type. And so Brooke and I did was we just.

Bradley Bernard (1:10:56)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Bennett Bernard (1:11:15)
screen recorded the speech like playing. It's like here, you know, we can't figure this out. So this is what we're to do. Yeah. I was like, whatever. long as it as long as it's saved somewhere I can get it. I'm fine. But yeah, it was it was a challenge. So yeah, that's my complaint with Google. was like it's like and I figured it was just like a user issue. I'm like, I don't know how to download anything. I hold down. I'm on my phone. It's like a hold down. Doesn't do anything. I click on the three little dots doesn't tell me to download. It was just like.

Bradley Bernard (1:11:17)
god. That is so Boomer.

Yeah.

I think, I think both systems have like the challenge of they each have their own libraries. It's hard to download and upload. Like if you're not in that system, it's hard to do both those actions. But if you're in one of them, it's easy to upload and download. And that's why I go so back and forth. Cause I'm like, do most of my friends use iCloud? Do most use Google? Cause I think, just for people that I was talking to at the time, like a few years ago, mostly Google photos, like I think they're giving free storage, which zapped a lot of people. Then they kind of like.

Bennett Bernard (1:11:43)
How do I get these photos? These are great photos.

Bradley Bernard (1:12:10)
discontinued that and said, only 15 gigabytes in your storage. After that, you have to pay. And so right now I'm a paying user of, I don't know what they call it, Google one, maybe. And that's their Google products overall. think I paid 20 bucks a year for a hundred gigabytes of storage. And when I last looked at my photos, I was at 45 gigabytes. And I think that includes drive and everything else. So maybe not just photos, but maybe 40 gigabytes of photos. And if you think 40 gigabytes over the past like,

Bennett Bernard (1:12:21)
okay. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:12:40)
I don't know, five years and I still have a ton of space there. So that's how I'm like, I don't want, if I did switch to iCloud app to like take it all and dump it and pay over there. I don't want to pay for both. I'm like, I don't know.

Bennett Bernard (1:12:52)
Yeah, yeah, we have Apple one, which is like the same thing. It kind of I think is what it sounds like. it's like originally got it because I was running out of storage space on the cloud. And so was like, well, I need to do this because, you know, we have a family plan and that gets me Apple TV gets me Apple News, which I read every now and then, like workouts, which I don't use. And like arcade, like the Apple arcade, which is kind of fun. like that's a good deal for me. But it's like

Bradley Bernard (1:12:56)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:13:20)
40 bucks a month. It's a little bit pricey and

Bradley Bernard (1:13:24)
How much storage?

Bennett Bernard (1:13:27)
us while we're Apple one subscription and it's like a family plan.

Bradley Bernard (1:13:31)
Yeah, because I'm also nearing my iCloud storage limit of five gigabytes, which is so hindering. I'm one not to delete my email, so like four gigabytes of that is to email. I'm not sure if other people are like that. I just kind of read things and keep it there as like a giant ledger. But now I've realized that if I continue to do that, I'll have to pay Apple some money just to keep my email in there.

Bennett Bernard (1:13:57)
So I get 2 terabytes.

Bradley Bernard (1:14:00)
That's huge. That's a lifetime worth right there.

Bennett Bernard (1:14:01)
Yeah, yeah, so I'm looking at it now. yeah, so why so basically it was like comparing then it was like, well, might as well just get arcade and news. I do read the news a lot. And then it Apple TV. We watched that show presumed innocent. If you watch that, it's pretty good. That's good. I told you about it. You just don't listen. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:14:13)
Mm-hmm.

I haven't heard of it.

Bennett Bernard (1:14:24)
What was I going say? But yeah, so it's 40 bucks a month, basically, $37.95. And this is another embarrassing admission on my part. But I have Verizon. And Verizon does a deal. It's like, hey, you can get Apple One for $10. And I was trying to go through, because we already had Apple One. We already had it. But I needed them to merge.

Bradley Bernard (1:14:39)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:14:48)
It was like my Verizon's like a bill through my Verizon and get for $10 instead of $40. But like it was kind of like Dicey and I felt like I was going to lose all the things I had in there for my family plan. And I was like, I'm just not going to go through with it. So I'm I'm paying 10 extra dollars a month for nothing with Verizon. need to tell them to stop. But I just haven't gotten in there yet because I'm like, I'm just scared to lose everything. My kids got all their stuff on, you know, I cloud like and all like all our memories and our photos. I'm like, if I lose that, like my ass, we toast. So like I was like.

Bradley Bernard (1:14:51)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's one of those things that you don't like messing with, but I also want to be set up like years in the future where if I make a decision today, like I got to be cognizant of that. And it's also one those things that's like a lifetime subscription, which sounds like daunting, but I think the value get out of it is worth it. I just don't want to have like one to Apple and Google. So I was nearing my iCloud storage limit, and then I had the Google photos for the wedding and the welcome party.

Bennett Bernard (1:15:21)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:15:41)
all that kind of bubble up to be like, should I be using Google photo? Should I jump to iCloud? Like, I don't know. And even today after thinking about it for a few days and like asking people, I'm still kind of on the fence. And if I'm on the fence, I'm like, maybe I'll just keep it. I don't

Bennett Bernard (1:15:55)
The I'm I wonder I don't know anything about this but you Apple has that Apple one where it has like all those different services that they have we use YouTube TV or we have YouTube TV and Brooke and I were just talking and be great if they had like a plan where you got like YouTube TV plus like YouTube premium so you don't have to watch ads and stuff like that and like there's so many other Google services I'm surprised they don't already and maybe they do I just oblivious to it but

If they don't, I'd be surprised that they don't have like something competing directly with that Apple one because like Google has lots of products, you know, I don't use them all. like you could technically bundle YouTube TV, YouTube Plus or whatever it's called, YouTube Premium and like Google Photos, for example, and Google Drive. And like that would be a bunch of people be interested in that. But.

Bradley Bernard (1:16:45)
Yeah, I think the one that I'm paying for is just storage and they yeah, they do have the YouTube premium. I think for premium, they have a family plan within that. So you could buy premium for 40 bucks a month and then share that with five people. And so it seems like they have family plans for each of their products, but they don't have like a bundle and they don't have a family plan for that bundle either. And so maybe they'll get there. I don't know. They take a while.

Bennett Bernard (1:16:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah interesting Well cool well one other random thing that I have that would be remiss not to mention on the podcast because You know, we talked about random things all the time So as the weather's getting been getting better as I mentioned talking about fishing and knots and stuff. I Went to the library with my kid over the weekend Wasn't really going for anything in particular was going to get some new books like Halloween books for them, but

I wandered into the like gardening section and I was like, I would like to grow something like that. That would be cool to grow some crops, you know, here in Arizona where it's super hot. Like, can I, someone with no farming experience, like grow a vegetable from, I don't know this is like actually how it works, but from like seed to table, you know what mean? Like just, so yeah, yeah. So,

Bradley Bernard (1:17:55)
Mm-hmm. C to mouth.

Bennett Bernard (1:18:00)
So I got a book here. I'll show you grow more food. think. Yeah. So it's OK. I'm also like looking at some YouTube videos, stuff like that. But I went to Home Depot earlier today and I was looking at like getting some raised raised kind of vegetable beds. I might just make one, honestly. It's think it's cheaper with like just getting some lumber and just kind of nailing it all together. But yeah, so I'm like, I want to just try that. And I've been cooking a bit more and making some more like.

Bradley Bernard (1:18:05)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:18:27)
you know, burgers, stuff like that. So it's like, be kind of cool to like, you know, have like a vegetable that was like in the backyard here, like on the dinner plate. So I don't know, though, I got to kind of like commit to it. I again, I just picked up this book because I didn't go there for this book. I just kind of saw it there. I was like, I'm going to look into that. I need to like go and like add up all the commitment and like see like, OK, like, do I really want to pursue this right now? I'm into it. I'm going to keep reading this book and.

Bradley Bernard (1:18:34)
Very cool.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:18:52)
Maybe next time we have the podcast, I'll have some updates about this is what I'm growing or I'll say, yeah, never mind. I'm a city boy and I can't do that. So we'll see.

Bradley Bernard (1:19:00)
I think it's cool because when you go to those places to look at the seeds it feels like a So much opportunity in front of you and you're like, should I pick this? I grow that? Should I grow that? It's like cool to have that opportunity

Bennett Bernard (1:19:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and it's funny too, because it's like, I was like joking with with my wife about like, you what should we grow? What should we grow? And, you know, in my head, I didn't I didn't say this to her, but I was just like, you know, there's so many cool things you could just grow like, and like, don't even know if I'd use them, though, you know, but like, it's just like, grow like beans, you can grow like, I would definitely use like jalapeno peppers, I use like a lot of jalapeno peppers and like omelets and stuff.

Bradley Bernard (1:19:34)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:19:37)
And I was like, I like cigars, can I grow tobacco? I don't even know if that's allowed, you know, is that like against the law? You know, like make my own tobacco, probably against, you know, the alcohol, tobacco and firearms ATF squad. yeah, it was just cool to like, you know, do something like, you know, because we spend our lives behind the desk, especially, you know, you and I with the jobs that we have, but I was behind the desk, you know, in our house or in the office, just always inside. And it's like, man.

Bradley Bernard (1:19:40)
You

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (1:20:06)
You know, again, I don't know if this is because the weather is getting better. I'm like looking at the weather app and seeing there's like 70 degrees on the horizon. I'm just like, yes, I get to be outside. But like just it's I feel like it's good for the soul to like go do something outside. So like maybe maybe fishing, maybe maybe gardening. I don't know what it will be, but like I'm just looking forward to like trying some new things and just getting out from behind the desk every now and then.

Bradley Bernard (1:20:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I like that. There's also, if you haven't seen it yet, there's like, I don't know what the word is, but an indoor, I don't know, like, what is the word? You plant plants in this like little device that has little pots and there's like a fake, yeah, maybe. Yeah, it's like fake sunlight with a light. Yeah, okay. Hydroponics. I lived with a roommate who had one of those and.

Bennett Bernard (1:20:43)
hydroponics?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:20:53)
It was like a full system where they would send you like their own seeds. You would grow it. Like it's easy to water since it's inside. So I think you'll lose part of that outsideness that you're mentioning, but could be a little bit easier. I think it's much smaller scale. So yeah.

Bennett Bernard (1:21:00)
Yeah.

Well, well, Bradley, there's certain plants that you need to start as a seed indoors first, and then you have to transplant them outside. So you already know a couple of things. I already know a couple of things. Yeah. So I'm like, don't want to, I don't want to grow anything in my house. I want to just do the ones that are like seed seed to like vegetable all the way outside. So I have to figure out which, which plants have that. Cause I don't want to like

Bradley Bernard (1:21:15)
Mm.

Wow. Wow, that's impressive.

Yeah, I feel that.

Bennett Bernard (1:21:32)
Yeah, I don't want to bring something inside. I have to like have a little area for my house like isn't that big to like have extra space to do that. So yeah, yeah, that's that's I'm saying that gets a commitment. But, know, we'll see. We'll see what goes to start small. Start with a little tiny like four by four little raised bed and see if I can get something to grow. And yeah, we'll see. See if it up tasting good. We'll report back on that. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:21:37)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's kind of large I think

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Cool. Well, I think we're at time. Let's talk about bookmarks. So I have one again. I haven't been on Twitter that much. My bookmark is from DHH. He's highlighting not Hetzer. So he's been kind of on the Hetzer grind. I've go buy these servers from Germany, but there's another cloud provider called OVH cloud. And so his tweet is talking about a dedicated server. So 24 cores, 48 threads, like 128 gigabytes of RAM.

500 gigabytes storage all for I think $92 a month, which is a pretty good deal and it's in the US. So Hetzer, the only problem about them is they have great servers at great prices, but their data centers and server locations for these prices are non US centric. And so if you go to splitmyexpenses.com or at least you go to the app.splitmyexpenses.com that's where my application server is. It would be

You know, twice as fast if it was in the U S but I bought from Hetzer in Germany is like where my server is. And so being, you know, in California reaching to Germany, that's. I don't know. 150 milliseconds round trip. And so my app is already like quote unquote slower. And so the second they come out with a U S data center for Hetzer, I'm on it, but OVH cloud is kind of an alternative with similar pricing, not as good, but for dedicated servers for pretty beefy box in the U S it's hard to beat that. So.

I'll share it in the show notes, but dedicated servers are back. You got to make sure you choose the right cloud provider and get like a pretty solid deal where you don't have a surprise bill at end of the

Bennett Bernard (1:23:30)
Yeah, that sounds pretty cool. Hetzner, you said that was in Germany. I think that's what you're saying. Isn't DHH from Germany or from somewhere over there, right? I think he's... Someone got to look into that. See if he's getting any kickbacks. I'm just kidding. Pretty sure he's not... I don't think he's from the United States. Now I'm like... Yeah, now I'm super curious.

Bradley Bernard (1:23:36)
Yeah.

Is he? I don't know. Maybe he is.

Ha ha ha.

Check out the wiki page.

Bennett Bernard (1:23:58)
While you're pulling that up, my bookmark is I've already alluded to it, but it's my first book of knots. So like Brad, I've been pretty out of the loop of like, you know, tech and business world, to be completely honest. And I think we've talked enough about, you know, AI in the last couple of podcasts. So what I've been into is, again, reading that book. think it's super cool, again, to do something that's like in the real world with your hands.

In my case, I got two young kids, so it's fun to teach them something and impress. You try to impress people that you work with all the time and then try to impress yourself with the skills you learn. But the best thing is impressing your kids. You're like, this is how you do this. And they're like, my gosh, I can't believe it. Even if it's nothing crazy, just following instructions from a book. yeah, it's super cool. And again, the reason why I like this one is it has like

Bradley Bernard (1:24:41)
Magic.

Bennett Bernard (1:24:52)
the when to use kind of thing. And it has great pictures. It's interesting. It's not just like a how to like my other one is, which is like the one that I know technically is for me. It's very, very dry, but it's kind of like a reference book. But the one that my first not book, it's like very like colorful. It's written by some people, I think, in Sweden. So they got good taste and like artwork, of course. You know, so it's like if everyone to go camping.

I got the top line knot right here. I can do that, you know, start cooking something. So yeah, it's cool. I'll put in the show notes for anyone who's interested in knots like I am, or anyone who has kids that wants to teach their kids knots like I am. yeah, something a little different this week than our usual kind of a.

Bradley Bernard (1:25:19)
Nice.

I like it. I have a small update. He was born in Copenhagen in Denmark.

Bennett Bernard (1:25:38)
Okay, that's close. That's close, you know, in the area. Yeah, I'll take it. Not German, but...

Bradley Bernard (1:25:40)
That's close, yeah. I'm looking at his photo on Wikipedia and I didn't realize he was a racing driver. It's like a racing photo of him in like a, you know, F1 suit or something like that.

Bennett Bernard (1:25:54)
Really? Huh. I wonder if that's pre-37 signals or post-37

Bradley Bernard (1:26:01)
think it was, he went on 24 hours of Lamans. Do know what that is?

Bennett Bernard (1:26:03)
I go ahead.

that's cool. Yeah, that's really cool. I don't know that. That's that's really cool. I won't look that up really fast.

Bradley Bernard (1:26:09)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (1:26:16)
Wow.

Bradley Bernard (1:26:19)
He looks so young in his photo on his Wikipedia page.

Bennett Bernard (1:26:23)
I wonder if he, when he did this. Yeah. Well, I'll read about that. That's, that's really cool. Yeah. It's a really famous race. it's 24 hour race, like all like the big, you know, brands do it like Toyota, Ferrari. think Ferrari just won, which was a big deal. the last time they did it, but, yeah, that's actually super cool. Well, good for him. A man of many talents, not just writing, code and books. Yeah. He's also a race car driver. Good for him. Cool.

Bradley Bernard (1:26:44)
I know, impressive, honestly.

Yeah. Cool.

Bennett Bernard (1:26:51)
Awesome. All well, let's wrap this up. Like always, good catching up with you, Brad. And yeah, we'll put our links in the show notes. And I know you're traveling again, so enjoy your upcoming trip out of the area. yeah, yeah, you got lots of travel going on. So yeah, we'll try and find another time to record the next episode when you get back. Cool. All right. See you, everybody.

Bradley Bernard (1:26:56)
Mm-hmm.

Dallas.

Yeah.

Cool, sounds good. Talk to you soon. Bye.