Podcasts about ken oh

Ken Hardison from PILMMA joins us today to discuss what PILMMA is and how it started. Ken also covers the benefits of mastermind groups, how the PILMMA Super Summit works, his favorite part of the conference, how firms grow with the help of each other, and the future of PILMMA. PILMMA Super Summit 2025 will be April 29, 2025 - May 2, 2025 in Denver, Colorado. Visit PILMMA online here: https://www.pilmma.org/. Get Ken's book, The Mastermind Effect, here: https://www.amazon.com/Mastermind-Effect-Owners-SECRET-Growth/dp/0983937974. See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. Transcript: Intro: Lindsey: Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I'm your host, Lindsey Busfield. As a legal SEO agency, the law firms we work with all have a dedicated interest in growing their firms with strategic marketing initiatives. As such, we field a lot of questions regarding which marketing strategies are worth investing in and which are more hype than results. One organization we have been asked about multiple times is PILMMA. Many of the clients we work with are already PILMMA members and they consistently praise the strategic marketing and business management strategies that they receive as a result of their membership. Additionally, I had the opportunity to meet Ken Hardison, the Founder of PILMMA at their annual summit last year. And while I could talk secondhand about the great work that PILMMA does, nobody is going to be able to explain the game-changing resources PILMMA provides as well as Ken can himself. Thank you so much for joining us today. Ken: Oh, thank you, it's my honor. How Did PILMMA Start? Lindsey: Well, let's start with a little bit of information just about you. Can you share a little bit about your journey from becoming a lawyer to a leader in the legal marketing and management industry? Ken: Yeah, so I started practicing in '82 in a little town called Dunn, North Carolina. And I was a partner in another firm from 82 to 96. And I wanted to start marketing because I had went to court one day, I used to do PI, disability and criminal, and one of the partners did estate, real estate and the other one did domestic. And I went to court and this guy came in with crutches and I said, "What happened, Joe?" He said, "Well, I got hit by a semi." I said, "Well, you know, I do PI." He said, "Yeah, but I hired this guy off the TV." And it just hit me. Well, I went and tried the case and we won the case and I drove back to the office and I told my partner, I said, "I wan to have a meeting," I said, "We have got to change with the times," I said, "We need to start marketing." And they said, "No, it's unprofessional. We're not going to do it." So we had a dialogue for about six months. I left, took one associate and three staff and I went out and kind of went out, spent three days with John Morgan, this is in '96. Back then he only had 25 lawyers. I went Ken Nunn up in Indiana, and I shadowed him for two or three days and then I went and got involved with Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham, and I just learned everything, read everything I could about marketing and then tried it to law firms. And I went out and mortgaged everything I had to my name, half a million dollars at that time and went on TV and started Yellow Pages. And of course the Yellow Pages are dead now. But anyway, in five years we went from two lawyers, three staff to 13 lawyers, 47 staff, and the rest is history. 2010, I just got up one morning and I just wasn't challenged, I wasn't looking forward to going to work, and I said, "I think I'm ready to do something else." And so I sold a law firm and I was going to retire, and I moved down to Myrtle Beach from Raleigh, I was living in Raleigh then, and I fished in golf for about six months,

No programa desta semana, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato batem um papo sobre as várias versões de "As Meninas Superpoderosas". Venha conferir o que nossos insurgentes acharam desta revisitação.

No programa de hoje nossos insurgentes rolam os dados para uma das melhores aventuras do ano Dungeons & Dragons: Honra Entre Rebeldes. Venham descobrir o que Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato acharam deste filme RPgistico. Data de Lançamento: 13 de abril de 2023 Direção: John francis Daley, Jonathan M Goldstein Elenco: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, Regé-Jean Page, Sophia Lillis, Hugh Grant

No programa mais sem noção da internet, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato batem um papo sobre a animação nacional "Oswaldo". Venham descobrir essa excelente animação nacional que poucas pessoas conhecem. 

Kenneth Rose, CTO at OpsLevel, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how OpsLevel is helping developer teams to scale effectively. Kenneth reveals what a developer portal is, how he thinks about the functionality of a developer portal, and the problems a developer portal solves for large developer teams. Corey and Kenneth discuss how to drive adoption of a developer portal, and Kenneth explains why it's so necessary to have executive buy-in throughout that process. Kenneth also discusses how using their own portal internally along with seeking out customer feedback has allowed OpsLevel to make impactful innovations. About KenKenneth (Ken) Rose is the CTO and Co-Founder of OpsLevel. Ken has spent over 15 years scaling engineering teams as an early engineer at PagerDuty and Shopify. Having in-the-trenches experience has allowed Ken a unique perspective on how some of the best teams are built and scaled and lends this viewpoint to building products for OpsLevel, a service ownership platform built to turn chaos into consistency for engineering leaders.Links Referenced: OpsLevel: https://www.opslevel.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/opslevel/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpsLevelHQ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, about, oh I don't know, two years ago and change, I wound up writing a blog post titled, “Developer Portals are An Anti Pattern,” and I haven't really spent a lot of time thinking about them since. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at OpsLevel, and they have sent their CTO and co-founder Ken Rose, presumably in an attempt to change my perspective on these things. Let's find out. Ken, thank you for agreeing to, well, run the gauntlet, for lack of a better term.Ken: Hey, Corey. Thanks again for having me. And I've heard, you know, heard and listened to your show a bunch, and really excited to be here today.Corey: Let's begin with defining our terms. I'm curious to know what a developer portal is. ‘What would you say a developer portal means to you?' Like it's a college entrance essay.Ken: Right? Definitely. You know, so really, a developer portal is this consolidated place for developers to come to, especially in large organizations to be able to get their jobs done more easily, right? A large challenge that developers have in large organizations, there's just a lot to do and a lot to take care of. So, a developer portal is a place for developers to be able to better own, manage, and run the services, they're responsible for that run in production, and they can do that through access, easy access to self-service tooling.Corey: I guess, on some level, this turns into one of those alignment charts of, like, what is a database and, like, how prescriptive you want to be. It's like, well is a senior engineer a database because you can query them and they have information? Would you consider, for example, Kubernetes be a developer platform, and/or would the AWS console?Ken: Yeah, that's actually an interesting question, right? So, I think there's actually two—we're going to get really niggly here—there's developer platform and developer portal, right? And the word portal for me is something that sits above a developer platform. I don't know if you remember, like, the late-90s, early-2000s, like, portals were all the rage.Like, Yahoo and AltaVistas were like search portals, they were trying to, at the time, consolidate all this information on a much smaller internet to make it easy to access. A developer portal is sort of the same thing, but custom-built for developers and trying to consolidate a lot of the tooling that exists. Now, in terms of the AWS console? Yeah, maybe. Like, it has a suite of tools and suite of offerings. It doesn't do a lot on the well, how do I quickly find out what's running in production and who is responsible for it? I don't know, unless AWS shipped, like, their, you know, three-hundredth new offering in the last week that I haven't, you know, kept on top of.But you know, there's definitely some spectrum in terms of what goes into a developer portal. For me, there's kind of three main things you need. You do need some kind of a catalog, like, what's out there who owns it; you need some kind of a way to measure, like, how good are those services, like, how well built are they; and then you need some access to self-service tooling. And that last part is where, like, the Kubernetes or AWS could be, you know, sort of a dev portal as well.Corey: My experience with developer portals—there was a time when I loved it. RightScale was what I used—at some depth—back in I want to say 2010, 2011 because the EC2 console was clearly not built or designed by anyone who had not built EC2 themselves with their bare hands and sweat of their brow. And in time, the EC2 console got better where it wasn't written in hieroglyphics, as best we could tell, and it became ‘click button to launch instance.' And RightScale really didn't have a second act and they wound up getting acquired by our friends over at Flexera years later. And I haven't seen their developer portal in at least eight years as a direct result of this.So, the problem, at least when I was viewing it purely in the context of AWS services, it feels like you are competing against AWS iterating forward on developer experience, which they iterate slowly, sometimes, and unevenly across their breadth of services, but it does feel like at some level by building an internal portal, you are, first, trying to out-innovate AWS, in some ways, and two, you are inherently making the trade-off of not using recent features and enhancements that have not themselves been incorporated into the portal. That's where the, I guess the start, the genesis of my opposition to the developer portal approach comes from. Is that philosophy valid these days? Not as much. Because I can see an argument for it shifting.Ken: Yeah, I think it's slightly different. I think of a developer portal as again, it's something that sort of sits on top of AWS or Google Cloud or whatever cloud provider use, right? You give an example for example with RightScale and EC2. So, provisioning instances is one part of the activity you have to do as a developer. Now, in most modern organizations, you have, like, your product developers that ship features. They don't actually care about provisioning instance themselves. There are another group called the platform engineers or platform group that are responsible for building automation and tooling to help spin up instances and create CI/CD pipelines and get everything you need set up.And they might use AWS under the covers to do that, but the automation built on top and making that accessible to developers, that's really what a developer portal can provide. In addition, it also provides links to operational tooling that you need, technical documentation, it's everything you need as a developer to do your job, in one place. And though AWs bills itself is that, I think of them as more, they have a lot of platform offerings, right, they have a lot of infra-offerings, but they still haven't been able to, I think, customize that, unless you're an organization that builds—that has kind of gone in-all on AWS and doesn't build any of your own tooling, that's where a developer portal helps. It really helps by consolidating all that information in one place, by making that information discoverable for every developer so they have less… less cognitive load, right? We've asked developers to kind of do too much that we don't… we've asked to shift left and well, how do we make that information more accessible?Regarding the point of, you know, AWS adds new features or new capabilities all the time and, like, well you have this dev portal, that's sort of your interface for how to get things done. Like, how will you use those? Dev portal doesn't stop you from doing that, right? So, my mental model is, if I'm a developer, and I want to spin up a new service, I can just press a button inside of my dev portal in my company and do that. And I have a service that is built according to the latest standards, it has a CI/CD pipeline, it already has a—you know, it's registered in PagerDuty, it's registered in Datadog, it has all the various bits.And then there's something else that I want to do that isn't really on the golden path because maybe this is some new service or some experiment, nothing stops us from doing that. Like, you still can use all those tools from AWS, you know, kind of raw. And if those prove to be valuable for the rest of the organization, great. They can make their way into the dev portal; they can actually become a source of leverage. But if they're not, then they can also just sit there on the vine. Like, not everything that eight of us ever produces will be used by every company.Corey: Many years ago, I got a Cisco pair of certifications because recession was hitting and I needed to be better at networking. And taking those certifications, in those days before Cisco became the sad corporate dragon with no friends we all know today, they were highly germane and relevant. But I distinctly remember, even now, 15 years later, that there was this entire philosophy of pretend that the entire world is Cisco only, which in networking is absolutely never true. It feels like a lot of the AWS designs and patterns tend to assume, oh yeah, you're going to use AWS services for everything. I have never yet found that to be true, other than when I'm just trying to be obstinate.And hell is interoperability between a bunch of different things. Yes, I may want to spin up an EC2 instance and an AWS load balancer and some S3 storage or whatnot, but I'm also going to want to monitor it with PagerDuty, I'm going to want to have a CDN that isn't CloudFront because most CDN these days don't hate you in quite the same economic ways and are simpler to work with, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, there's definitely a story wherein I've found that there's an—the interoperability of tying these things together is helpful. How do you avoid falling down the trap of oh, everyone should be multi-cloud, single pane of glass at cetera, et cetera? In practice that always seems to turn to custard.Ken: Yeah, I think multi-cloud and single pane of glass are actually two different things. So multi-cloud, like, I agree with you to some sense. Like, pick a cloud and go with it, like, unless you have really good business reasons to go for multi-cloud. And sometimes you do, like, years ago, I worked at PagerDuty, they were multi-cloud for a reliability reason, that hey, if one cloud provider goes down, you don't want [crosstalk 00:08:40]—Corey: They were an example I used all the time for that story—Ken: Right.Corey: —specifically the thing woke you up was homed in a bunch of different places, whereas the marketing site, the onboarding flow, the periphery stuff around it was not because it didn't need to be.Ken: Exactly.Corey: Like, the core business need of wake you up was very much multi-cloud because once upon a time, it wasn't and it went down with the rest of us-east-1 and people weren't woken up to be told their site was on fire.Ken: A hundred percent. And on the kind of like application side where, even then, pick a cloud and go with it, unless there's a really compelling business reason for your business to go multi-cloud. Maybe there's something credits or compliance or availability, right? There might be reasons, but you have to be articulate about whether they're right for you.Now, single pane of glass, I think that's different, right? I do think that's something that, ultimately, is a net boon for developers. In any large organization, there is a myriad of internal tools that have been built. And it's like, well, how do I provision a new topic in the Kafka cluster? How do I actually get access to the AWS console? How do I spin up a new service, right? How do I kind of do these things?And if I'm a developer, I just want to ship features. Like, that's what I'm incented to do, that's what I'm optimizing for. And all this other stuff I have to do as part of my job, but I don't want to have to become, like, a Kubernetes guru to be able to do it, right? So, what a developer portal is trying to do is be that single pane of glass, bringing all these common set of tools and responsibilities that you have as a developer in one place. They're easy to search for, they're easy to find, they're easy to query, they're easy to use.Corey: I should probably have asked this earlier on, but let's disambiguate for a little bit here. Because when I'm setting up to use a new service or product and kick the tires on it, no two explorations really look the same. Whereas at most responsible mature companies that are building products that are—services that are going to production use, they've standardized around a number of different approaches. What does your target customer look like? Is there a certain point of scale, a certain level of complexity, a certain maturity of process?Ken: Absolutely. So, a tool like OpsLevel or a developer portal really only makes sense when you hit some critical mass in terms of the number of services you have running in production, or the number of developers that you have. So, when you hit 20, 30, 50 developers or 20, 30, 50 services, an important part of a developer portal is this catalog of what's out there. Once you kind of hit the Dunbar number of services, like, when you have more than you keep in your head, that's when you start to need tooling like this. If you look at our customer base, they're all you know, kind of medium to large-sized companies. If you're a startup with, like, ten people, OpsLevel is probably not right for you. We use all playable internally at OpsLevel, and you know, like, we're still a small company. It's like, we make it work for us because we know how to get the most out of it, but like, it's not the perfect fit because it's not really meant for, you know, smaller companies.Corey: Oh, I hear you. I think I'm probably… I have a better AWS bill analytic system running internally here at The Duckbill Group than some banks do. So, I hear you on that front.Ken: I believe it.Corey: But also implies to me that there's no OpsLevel prospect or customer deployment that has ever been greenfield. It's always you're building existing things, there's already infrastructure in place, vendors have been selected across the board. You aren't—don't to want to starting a company day one, they're going to all right, time to spin up our AWS account and we're also going to wind up signing up for OpsLevel, from the sound of it.Ken: Correct—Corey: Accurate? Inaccurate?Ken: I think that's actually accurate. Like, a lot of the problems, we solve other problems that come as you start to scale both your product and your engineering team. And it's the problems of complexity.Corey: What do those painful problems look like? In other words, what is someone sitting at home right now listening to this, or driving to work debating whether want to ram a bridge abutment or go into the office depending on their mental state today, what painful problem did they have that OpsLevel is designed to fix?Ken: Yeah, for sure. So, let's help people self-select. So, here's my mental model for any [unintelligible 00:12:25]. There are product developers, platform developers, and engineering leaders. Product developers, if you're asking questions like, “I just got paged for the service. I don't know what this does.” Or, “It's upstream from here. Where do I find the technical documentation?” Or, “I think I have to do something with the payment service. Where do I find the API for that?”You know, when you get to that scale, a developer portal can help you. If you're a platform engineer and you have questions like, “Okay, we got to migrate. We're migrating, I don't know, from Datadog to Honeycomb, right? We got to get these fifty or a hundred or thousands of services and all these different owners to, like, switch to some new tool.” Or, “Hey, we've done all this work to ship the golden path. Like, how to actually measure the adoption of all this work that we're doing and if it's actually valuable?” Right?Like, we want everybody to be on a certain set of CI tooling or a certain minimum version of some library or framework. How do we do that? How do we measure that? OpsLevel is for you, right? We have a whole bunch of stuff around maturity.And if you're engineering leader, ultimately, questions you care about, like, “How fast are my developers working? I have this massive team, we've made this massive investment in hiring all these humans to write software and bring value for our customers. How can we be more efficient as a business in terms of that value delivery?” And that's where OpsLevel can help as well.Corey: Guardrails, whether they be economic, regulatory, or otherwise, have to make it easier than doing things incorrectly because one of the miracle aspects of cloud also turns into a bit of a problem, which is shadow IT is only ever a corporate credit card away. Make it too difficult to comply with corporate policies and people won't. And they're good actors; they're trying to get work done. They're not trying to make people's lives harder, but they don't want to spend six weeks provisioning an EC2 cluster. So, there's always that weird trade-off.Now, it feels—and please correct me if I'm wrong—once someone has rolled out OpsLevel at their organization, where it really shines is spinning up a new service where okay, great, you're going to spin up the automatic observability portion of it, you're going to spin up the underlying infrastructure in certain ways that comply with our policies, it's going to build the CI/CD pipelines around it, you're going to wind up having the various cost instrumentation rolled out to it. But for services that are already excellent within the environment, is there an OpsLevel story for them?Ken: Oh, absolutely. So, I look at it as, like, the first problem OpsLevel helps solve is the catalog and what's out there and who owns it. So, not even getting developers to spin up new services that are kind of on the golden path, but just understanding the taxonomy of what are the services we have? How do those services compose into higher-level things like systems or domains? What's the whole set of infrastructure we have?Like, I have 50 AWS accounts, maybe a handful of GCP ones, also, some Azure. I have all this infrastructure that, like, how do I start to get a handle on, like, what's out there in prod and who's responsible for it. And that helps you get in front of compliance risks, security risks. That's really the starting point for OpsLevel building that catalog. And we have a bunch of integrations that kind of slurp all this data to automatically assemble that catalog, or YAML as well if that's your thing. But that's the starting point is building that catalog and figuring out this assignment of, like, okay, this service and this human, or this—sorry—team, like, they're paired together.Corey: A number of offerings in this space, which honestly, my exposure to it is bounded simultaneously to things that are ten years old and no one uses anymore, or a bunch of things I found on GitHub. And the challenge that both of those products tend to have is that they assume certain things to be true about a given environment: that they're using Terraform to manage everything, or they're always going to be using CloudFormation, or everyone there knows Python or something else like that. What are the prerequisites to get started with OpsLevel?Ken: Yeah, so we worked pretty hard to build just a ton of integrations. I would say integrations is are just continuing thing we have going on in the background. Like, when we started, like, we only supported a GitHub. Now, we support all the gits, you know, like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, like, we're building [unintelligible 00:16:19]. There's just a whole, like, long tail of integrations.The same with APM tooling. The same with vulnerability management tooling, right? And the reason we do that is because there's just this huge vendor footprint, and people, you know, want OpsLevel to work for them. Now, the other thing we try to do is we also build APIs. So, anything we have as, like, a core integration, we also have kind of like an underlying API for, so that there's, no matter what you have an escape hatch. If like, you're using some tool that we don't support or you have some homegrown thing, there's always a way to try to be able to integrate that into OpsLevel.Corey: When people think about developer portals, the most common one that pops to mind is Backstage, which Spotify wound up building, internally, championing, open-sourcing, and I believe, on some level, turned into a product because if there's one thing people want, it's to have their podcast music company become a SaaS vendor, which is weird to me. But the criticisms that I've seen about and across the board have rung relatively true, including from people internal at Spotify who have used the thing, which is, well first is underestimating the amount of effort that is necessary to maintain Backstage itself, that the build versus buy discussion is always harder to bu—engineers love to build, but they shouldn't be building things outside of their core competency half the time, and the other is driving adoption within the org where you can have the most amazing developer portal in the known universe, but if people don't use it, it may as well not exist and doing the carrot and stick approach often doesn't work. I think you have a pretty good answer that I need not even ask you to elaborate on, “Well, how do we avoid having to maintain this ourselves,” since you have a company that does this, but how do you find companies are driving adoption successfully once they have deployed OpsLevel?Ken: Yeah, that's a great question. So, absolutely. Like, I think the biggest thing you need first, is kind of cultural buy-in and that this is a tool that we want to invest in, right? I think one of the reasons Spotify was successful with Backstage and I think it was System Z before that was that they had this kind of flywheel of, like, they saw that their developers were getting, you know better faster, working happier, by using this type of tooling, by reducing the cognitive load. The way that we approach it is sort of similar, right?We want to make sure that there is executive buy-in that, like, everybody agrees this is, like, a problem that's worth solving. The first step we do is trying to build out that catalog again and helping assign ownership. And that helps people understand, like, hey, these are the services I'm responsible for. Oh, look, and now here's this other context that I didn't have before. And then helping organizations, you know, what—it depends on the problem we're trying to solve, but whether it's rolling out self-serve automation to help developers, like, reduce what was before a ton of cognitive load or if it's helping platform teams define what good looks like so they can start to level up the overall health of what's running in production, we kind of work on different problems, but it's picking one problem and then you know, kind of working with the customers and driving it forward.Corey: On some level, I think that this is going to be looked down upon inherently just by automatic reflex of folks with infrastructure engineering backgrounds. It's taken me some time to learn to overcome my own negative reaction to it. Because it's, I'm here to build things and I want to build things out in such a way that it's portable and reusable without having to be tied to a particular vendor and move on. And it took me a long time to realize that what that instinct was whispering in my ear was in fact, no, you should be your own cloud provider. If that's really what I want to do, I probably should just brush up on you know, computer science trivia from 20 years ago and then go see if I can pass Google's SRE interview.I'm not here to build the things that just provision infrastructure from scratch every company I wind up landing at. It feels like there's more important, impactful work that I can do. And let's be clear, people are never going to follow guardrails themselves when they have to do a bunch of manual steps. It has to be something that is done for them. And I don't know how you necessarily get there without having some form of blueprint or something like that, provided for them with something that is self-service because otherwise, it's not going to work.Ken: I a hundred percent agree, by the way, Corey. Like, the take that, like, automation is the only way to drive a lot of this forward is true, right? If for every single thing you're trying—like, we have a concept called a rubric and it's basically how you measure the service health. And you can—it's very customizable, you have different dimensions. But if, for any check that's on your rubric, it requires manual effort from all your developers, that is going to be harder than something you can just automate away.So, vulnerability management is a great example. If you tell developers, “Hey, you have to go upgrade this library,” okay, some percentage [unintelligible 00:20:47], if you give developers, “Here's a pull request that's already been done and has a test passing and now you just need to merge it,” you're going to have a much better adoption rate with that. Similarly with, like, applying templates being able to [up-level 00:20:57], you know, kind of apply the latest version of a template to an existing service, those types of capabilities, anything where you can automate what the fixes are, absolutely you're going to get better adoption.Corey: As you take a look at your existing reference customers—which is something I always look for on vendor websites because, like, oh, we have many customers who will absolutely not admit to being customers, it's like, that sounds like something that's easy to say—you have actual names tied to these things. Not just companies, but also individuals. If you were to sit down and ask your existing customer base, “So, why did you wind up implementing OpsLevel and what has the value that's delivered to you been since that implementation?” What do they say?Ken: Definitely. I actually had to check our website because we, you know, land new customers and put new logos on it. I was like, “Oh, I wonder what the current set is out right now?”Corey: I have the exact same challenge. Like oh, we have some mutual customers. And it's okay. I don't know if I can mention them by name because I haven't checked our own list of testimonials [unintelligible 00:21:51] lately because say the wrong thing and that's how you wind up being sued and not having a company anymore.Ken: Yeah. So, I don't—I definitely, you know, want to stay [on side 00:22:00] on that part, but in terms of, like, kind of sample reference customer, a lot of the folks that we initially worked with are the platform teams, right? They're the teams that care about what's out there, and they need to know who's responsible for it because they're trying to drive some kind of cross-cutting change across the entire, you know, production footprint. And so, the first thing that generally people will say is—and I love this quote. This came—I won't name them, but like, it's in one of our case studies.It was like, “I had, like, 50 different attempts at making a spreadsheet and they're all, like, in the graveyard, like, to be able to capture what's out there and who's responsible for it.” And just OpsLevel helping automate that has been one of the biggest values that they've gotten. The second point, then is now be able to drive maturity and be able to measure how well those services are being built. And again, it's sort of this interesting thing where we start with the platform teams. And then sometime later security teams find out about OpsLevel, and they're like, “Oh, this is a tool I can use to, like, get developers to do stuff? Like, I've been trying to get developers to do stuff for the longest time.”And they—I file Jira tickets and they just sit there and nothing gets done. But when it becomes part of this, like, overall health score that you're trying to increase a part of the across the board, yeah, it's just a way to kind of drive action.Corey: I think that there's a dichotomy of companies that emerge. And I tend to see the world through a lens of AWS bills, so let's go down that path. I feel like there are some companies presumably like OpsLevel, whereas if I—assuming you're running on top of AWS—if I were to pull your AWS bill, I would see upwards of 80% of your spend is going to be on this application called OpsLevel, the service that you provide to people. As opposed to the other side of the world, which is large enterprises, where they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but the largest application they have is a million-and-a-half a year in spend because just, they have thousands of these things scattered everywhere. That latter case is where I tend to see more platform teams, where I start to see a lot of managing a whole bunch of relatively small workloads. And developer platforms really seem to be where a lot of solutions lead, whereas 80% of our workload is one application, we don't feel the need for that as much. Is that accurate? Am I misunderstanding some aspect of it?Ken: No, a hundred percent you'd hit the nail on the head. Like, okay, think about the typical, like, microservices adoption journey. Like, you started with, you know, some small company—like us—you started with a monolith. Ah, maybe you built out a second app—Corey: Then you read on Hacker News and realize, “Oh, if we want to hire people, we've got to be doing what all the cool kids are up to.”Ken: Right. We got a microservice all the thing—but that's actually you know, microservices should come later, right, as a response to you needing scale your org and scale your—Corey: As someone who started building some application with microservices, I could not agree more.Ken: A hundred percent. So, it's as you're starting to take steps to having just more moving parts in your production infrastructure, right? If you have one moving part, unless it's like a really large moving part that you can internally break down, like, kind of this majestic monolith where you do have kind of like individual domains that are owned by different teams, but really the problem we're trying to solve, it's more about, like, who owns what. Now, if that's a single atomic unit, great, but can you decompose that? But if you just have, like, one small application, kind of like the whole team is owning everything, again, a developer portal is probably not the right tool for you. It really is a tool that you need as you start to scale your engineer work and as you start to scale the number of moving parts in your production infrastructure.Corey: I tended to use to think of that in terms of boring companies versus innovative ones and I don't think that's accurate. I think it is the question of maturity and where companies lead to. On some level, of OpsLevel starts growing and becomes larger and larger in different ways and starts doing acquisitions and launching into other areas, at some point, you don't have just one product offering, you have a multitude of them. At which point having something like that is going to be critical. But I have to ask, given that you are sort of not exactly your target customer profile, what are the sharp edges been on using it for your use case?Ken: Yeah. So, we actually have an internal Slack channel, we call OpsLevel on OpsLevel. And finding those sharp edges actually has been really useful for us. You know, all the good stuff, dogfooding and it makes your own product better. Okay, so we have our main app, we also do have a bunch of smaller things and it's like, oh yeah, you know, we have, like, I don't know, various Hackaday things that go on, it's important we kind of wind those down for, you know, compliance, we have our marketing site, we have, like, our Terraform.Like, so there's, like, stuff. It's not, like, hundreds or thousands of things, but there's more than just the main app. The second though, is it's really on the maturity piece that we really try to get a lot of value out of our own product, right? Helping—we have our own platform team. They're also trying to drive certain initiatives with our product developers.There is that usual tension of our, like, our own product developers are like, “I want to ship features.” What's this security thing I have to go take care of right now? But OpsLevel itself, like, helps reflect that. We had an operational review today and it was like, “Oh, this one service is actually now”—we have platinum as a level. It's in gold instead of platinum. It's like, “Why?” “Oh, there's this thing that came up. We got to go fix that.” “Great. Let's go actually go fix that so we're back into platinum.”Corey: Do you find that there's often a choice you have to make internally, where you could make the product more effective for your specific use case, but that also diverges from where your typical customer needs or wants the product to go?Ken: No, I think a lot of the things we find for our use case are, like, they're more small paper cuts, right? They're just as we're using it, it's like, “Hey, like, as I'm using this, I want to see the report for this particular check. Why do I have to click six times to get?” You know, like, “Wouldn't it be great if we had a button?” Right?And so, it's those type of, like, small innovations that kind of come up. And those ultimately lead to, you know, a better product for our customers. We also work really closely with our customers and developers are not shy about telling you what they don't like about your product. And I say this with love, like, a lot of our customers give us phenomenal feedback just on how our product can be better and we try to internalize that and you know, roll that feedback into the product.Corey: You have a number of integrations of different SaaS providers, infrastructure providers, et cetera, that you wind up working with. I imagine that given your scale and scope and whatnot, those offerings are dictated by what customers say, “Hey, we're using this thing. Are you going to support that or are you not going to maintain our business?” Which is a great way to wind up financing a lot of product development and figuring out what matters to people. My question for you is, if you look across the totality of your user base, what are the most popularly used integrations, if you can say?Ken: Yeah, for sure. I think right now—I could actually dive in to pull the numbers—GitHub and GitLab—or… I think GitHub, like, has slightly more adoption across our customer base. At least with our customers, almost nobody uses Bitbucket. I mean, we have, like, a small number, but, like, it's… I think, single-digit percentage. A lot of people use PagerDuty, which you know, hey, I'm an ex-PagerDuty person [crosstalk 00:28:24] and I'm glad to see that.Corey: I have a free tier PagerDuty account that will automatically page me for my home automation stuff. Specifically, if you know, the fire alarm goes off. Like, yeah, okay, there are certain things I want to be woken up for, but it's a very short list.Ken: Yeah, it's funny, the running default message when we use a test PagerDuty was, “The server is on fire.” [unintelligible 00:28:44] be like, “The house is on fire.” Like you know, go get that taken care of. There's one other tool so that's used a lot. Datadog actually is used a ton by just across our entire customer base, despite its… we're also Data—we're a Datadog partner, we're a Datadog customer, you know? It's not cheap, but it's a good product for, you know, monitoring and logs and there are [crosstalk 00:29:01]—Corey: No other than cloud infrastructure providers, I get the number one most common source of inquiries is Datadog optimization. It has now risen to a board-level concern in many cases because observability is expensive. That's a sign of success, on some level. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, like, Date-a-dog? Oh, my God, that's disgusting. It's like Tinder for Pets. Which it turns out is not at all what they do.Ken: Nice.Corey: Yeah.[audio break 00:29:23]—optimizing their Slack integrations, their GitHub integration, et cetera. Or are they starting with the spinning up the servers piece of it?Ken: A lot of the time—and again, that first problem they're trying to solve is just get me a handle on everything we have running in production. You know, if you have multiple AWS accounts, multiple Kubernetes clusters, dozens or even hundreds of teams, God help you if you're going to try to, like, build a list manually to consolidate all that information. That's really the first part is, like, integrate Kubernetes, integrate your CI/CD pipelines, integrate Git, integrate your Cloud account, like, will integrate with everything and will try to build that map of, like, here's everything that's out there, and start to try to assign it to, like, and here's people that we think might be responsible in terms of owning the software. That's generally the starting point.Corey: Which makes an awesome amount of sense. I think going at it from the infrastructure first perspective is where I've seen most developer platforms founder. And to be fair, the job is easier now than it was years ago because it used to be that you were being out-innovated by AWS constantly. Innovation has slow down there. And you know that because of how much they say the pace of innovation has only sped up.And whenever AWS says something in a marketing context, they're insecure about it. I've learned this through the fullness of time observing that company. And these days, most customers do not use the majority of features available for any given service. They have solidified to a point where you can responsibly build on top of these things. Now, it seems that the problem is all the ‘yes, and' stuff that gets built on top of it.Ken: Yeah. Do you have an example, actually, like, one of the kinds of, like, ‘yes, and' tools that you're thinking about?Corey: Oh, absolutely. We have a bunch of AWS environment stuff so we should configure CloudWatch to look at all these things from an observability perspective. No, you should not. You should set up Datadog. And the first time someone does that by hand, they enable all have the observability and the rest and suddenly get charged approximately the GDP of Guam.And okay, maybe we shouldn't do that because then you have the downstream impact of that on your CloudWatch bill. So okay, how do we optimize this for the observability piece directly tied to that? How do we make sure that we get woken up when the site is down or preferably before that, but not every time basically, a EBS volume starts to get a little bit toasty? You have to start dialing this stuff in. And once you've found a lot of those aspects, being able to templatize that and roll that out on an ongoing basis and having the integrations all work together feels like it's the right problem to be solving.Ken: Yeah, absolutely. And the group that I think is responsible for that kind of—because it's a set of problems you described—is really, like, platform teams. Sometimes service owners for like, how should we get paged, but really, what you're describing are these kind of cross-cutting engineering concerns that platform teams are uniquely poised to help solve in an [unintelligible 00:32:03] organization, right? I was thinking what you said earlier. Like, nobody just wants to rebuild the same info over and over, but it's sort of like, it's not just building an [unintelligible 00:32:09]; it's kind of like solving this, like, how do we ship? Can we actually run stuff in prod? And not just run it but get observability and ensure that we're woken up for it and, like, what's that total end-to-end look like from, like, developers writing code to running software in production that's serving traffic? And solving all the problems [unintelligible 00:32:24], that's what I think of was platform engineering.Corey: So, my last question before we wind up wrapping this episode comes down to, I am very adept at two different programming languages, and those are brute force and enthusiasm. What implementation language is most of what you find yourself working with? And why is it in invariably going to be YAML?Ken: Yeah, that's a great question. So, I think there's, in terms of implementing OpsLevel and implementing a service catalog, we support YAML. Like, you know, there's this very common workflow, you just drop a YAML spec, basically, in your repo, if you're a service owner. And that, we can support that. I don't think that's a great take, though.Like, we have other integrations. Again, if the problem you're trying to solve is I want to build a catalog of everything that's out there, asking each of your developers hey, can you please all write YAML files that, like, describe the services you own and drop them into this repo? You've inverted this, like, database that essentially you're trying to build, like, what's out there and stored it in Git, potentially across several hundreds or thousands of repos. You put a lot of toil now on individual product developers to go write and maintain these files. And if you ever had to, like, make a blanket update to these files, there's no atomic way to kind of do that, right?So, I look at YAML as, like, I get it, you know? Like, we use the YAML for all the things in DevOps, so why not their service catalog as well, but I think it's toil. Like, there are easier ways to build a catalog. By, kind of, just integrate. Like, hook up AWS, hook up GitHub, hook up Kubernetes, hook up your CI/CD pipeline, hook up all these different sources that have information about what's running in prod, and let the software, let the tool, automatically infer what's actually running as opposed to requiring humans to manually enter data.Corey: I find that there are remarkably few technical holy wars that I cannot unify both sides on by nominating something far worse. Like, the VI versus Emacs stuff, the tabs versus spaces, and of course, the JSON versus YAML folks. My JSON versus YAML answer is XML: God's language. I find that as soon as you suggest that, people care a hell of a lot less about the differences between JSON and YAML because their job is to now kill the apostate, which is me.Ken: Right. Yeah. I remember XML, like, oh, man, 2002. SOAP. I remember SOAP as a protocol. That was a thing.Corey: Some of the earliest S3 API calls were done in SOAP, and I think they finally just used it to wash their mouths out when all was said and done.Ken: Nice. Yeah.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to do your level best to attempt to convert me, and I would argue in many respects, you have succeeded. I'm thinking about this differently than I did half an hour ago. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Ken: Absolutely. So, you can always check out our website, opslevel.com. We're also fairly active on LinkedIn. If Twitter hasn't imploded by the time this episode becomes launched, then they can also check us out at twitter.com/OpsLevelHQ. We're always posting, just different content on, like, how to be successful with service maturity, DevOps, developer productivity, so that you know, ultimately, that you can ship out to customers faster.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:35:23]. Thank you so much for taking the time, not just to speak with me, but also for sponsoring this episode. It is appreciated.Ken: Cheers.Corey: Ken Rose, CTO and co-founder at OpsLevel. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this has been a promoted guest episode of Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment which, upon further reflection, you could have posted to all of the podcast platforms if only you had the right developer platform to pull it off.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

 No programa que gosta de colocar ideia desta semana. Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato batem um papo sobre o filme Inception, conhecido no Brasil como "A Origem". Venham descobrir o que nossos insurgentes acharam desta película do diretor Christopher Nolan. Data de Lançamento: 6 de agosto de 2010 Diretor: Christopher Nolan Elenco: Leonardo DiCaprio Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Elliot Page, Michael Caine, Ken Watanabe 

After talking about the summer's big blockbuster movies during two of our past three episodes, we return to the small screen for a bittersweet conversation about fan-favorite streaming programs. HBO's "Succession" and "Barry" both concluded their runs after four seasons for each program. "Ted Lasso" on Apple TV+ came to an end after three seasons. And Amazon Prime Video's "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" closed after its fifth season. While we don't reveal any major plot points about the final episodes from each series, there are some light spoilers about each season to help keep the conversation moving along. Next week we talk about the second season of ABC's "The Wonder Years," the 2021 series inspired by the 1988 show of the same name starring Fred Savage. We'll even have interviews with some of the stars of the show. Where to watch "Succession" on HBO/Max "Ted Lasso" on Apple TV+ "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" on Amazon Prime Video "Barry" on HBO/Max About the show Streamed & Screened is a podcast about movies and TV hosted by Bruce Miller, a longtime entertainment reporter who is now the editor of the Sioux City Journal in Iowa and Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer for Lee Enterprises based in Madison, Wisconsin. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;25;15 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode. Before the introduction, I did want to mention that we are talking about the series finales for Ted Lasso, Succession, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Barry. We do not give away any major plot developments about the final episodes of the shows, but do share some less consequential spoilers to help move the conversation along. 00;00;25;17 - 00;00;47;02 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Welcome everyone to another episode of streamed and screened and entertainment podcasts about movies and TV from Lee Enterprises. I'm Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer at Lee and co-host of the program with Bruce Miller, editor of the Sioux City Journal and a longtime entertainment reporter who is back from the big city scarfing down dirty water dogs on the sidewalk. 00;00;47;02 - 00;01;06;12 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Right. You can't beat a city that serves orders all day long, right? That's New York. But, you know, I went on the subway. No, I did not get attacked by anybody. And I was reaching for the pull that you grab on to. And apparently the train started moving before I got to it. And just as I grabbed it, I did a pole dance. 00;01;06;16 - 00;01;12;20 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller I was all the way around and on the floor by the end of it, and nobody applauded. Now, how bad is it? 00;01;12;23 - 00;01;16;16 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Oh, man, you did a show. You were on Broadway. A Broadway performance. 00;01;16;18 - 00;01;39;24 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Was way right. And then there were a lot of protesters because the Writers Guild strike is still going on. And you saw them out in front of it used to be MTV. Now it's a CBS branded building on in Times Square. And so they were marching there and you could vaguely recognize some of the people you think, well, isn't that somebody who is also a performer? 00;01;39;26 - 00;02;01;27 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller But it will have an impact because the Tony Awards, which are coming up next week, cannot have any scripted material. They can have off the cuff introductions, but they can't have, you know, little goofy skits or anything that will introduce them. So it might be a good award show. We might be able to enjoy just seeing who wins here, their speech. 00;02;01;27 - 00;02;25;18 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller They won't be, you know, running them off because nobody wrote that stuff. It's all from the heart. So that was interesting to see. And I'll tell you, New York was packed. It was stuffed with people. So it must be back. Now, people are interested in going and seeing and doing things. And one of the fun things we did get to do while we were there was Lin-Manuel Miranda does a thing every Friday called AM for Ham. 00;02;25;24 - 00;02;44;29 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller And what he does is he combines his cast from Hamilton with shows that are on Broadway right now. And so it's been all the Tony nominees lately, and they come out and sing a song from their show and then they move on and they do another show and they know that's maybe 15 minutes and the thing packs the streets. 00;02;45;06 - 00;02;51;01 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller It's wall to wall people just watching this. And you get to see all the stars of the show. So it's kind of fun. 00;02;51;04 - 00;02;52;13 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz It's a lot of fun. 00;02;52;15 - 00;03;00;17 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Yeah. You didn't pay $300 for a ticket or have to, you know, wrestle somebody down in the in the ticket line to try and get there. 00;03;00;20 - 00;03;12;20 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz It is good for these shows, too, especially people go to New York. It's so expensive, so expensive to go in New York these days. And they have something like that. It's a good way to give back to the community. 00;03;12;20 - 00;03;13;26 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller And, yeah, allow. 00;03;13;26 - 00;03;16;26 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz People to experience something that maybe they can't afford. 00;03;16;28 - 00;03;35;06 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller And, you know, interestingly, you mentioned about how expensive they're charging for bags. Now, come on. You go to a store and they say it's a nickel if you want a bag, what am I going to do all this crap out in my arms and look like I'm not stealing merchandise from their store? A nickel for a bag they can afford the nickel. 00;03;35;12 - 00;03;43;21 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller You've added in more than that on your on your fees. But yeah, that was a new one to me is that I got to pay a nickel to put this stuff in a bag. 00;03;43;24 - 00;03;46;20 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Did you grab breakfast from a bodega while you were there. 00;03;46;23 - 00;03;53;16 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Did not. Did. Now I was, but I was proud of myself because they only eat burgers once. 00;03;53;19 - 00;03;54;14 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Okay. 00;03;54;16 - 00;04;09;08 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller So that was pretty. That was pretty good. But all during this time, you know, the big thing that was blowing up was Little Mermaid. Little Mermaid was like, huge there. People were all rushing to see that. And I finally did see it and I was not impressed. 00;04;09;11 - 00;04;21;15 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz We talked about this a little bit on our last episode, and neither of us were really thrilled with the concept of remaking a classic Disney cartoon as a live action show. 00;04;21;16 - 00;04;48;27 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Well, they they've dumped things and added new songs or Lin-Manuel Miranda to write. And they're not that good. They're really not that the idea. The young woman, Halle Bailey, who plays Ariel is good. She's very good. And they've really expanded the part of Eric, the boyfriend. So he's got a whole storyline now, too, that I didn't really care about. 00;04;48;27 - 00;05;14;15 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller I didn't need it. And then all of those creatures look very scary. Sebastian actually does look like a crab and flounder. He's out of water more than he's in water. And I'm thinking, How does he do this? This is this is really weird. But I was it's excess. It's a lot of stuff and way too much unnecessary stuff. 00;05;14;17 - 00;05;29;26 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller And so, you know, I will do well. I suppose it will, because parents got to take their kids to something and that's available. But that was a surprise to me. I thought it was going to be a little better and it wasn't. 00;05;29;29 - 00;05;36;26 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller What is the deal with these actors who suddenly have children when they're in their late seventies and early? 00;05;36;28 - 00;05;39;09 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Pacino Pacino's got to keep up with DeNiro. 00;05;39;12 - 00;05;54;12 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller I know I was going to see the DeNiro film, and then I thought, Oh, do I need this? This is, you know, Father's Day. We'll wait for Father's Day and I'll go see it then. And then the news breaks about Al Pacino, and you think, What is up with all this? Is this kind of a contest? And maybe it is. 00;05;54;15 - 00;06;02;02 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Where is Nick Cannon in all of this? You know, is Nick Cannon still going to be having kids when he's 79 and it will be up to child 43. 00;06;02;05 - 00;06;08;20 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz I just saw Harrison Ford with Calista Flockhart. They were at their son's college graduation yesterday. 00;06;08;22 - 00;06;11;09 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Well, see, then life is good. 00;06;11;11 - 00;06;12;05 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Yeah. 00;06;12;08 - 00;06;27;19 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Life is good. But, yeah, there are these old guys that are doing a lot of work, which I think is just to be able to pay the bills and then having new families. These families will never see their dads after they've graduated from high school. 00;06;27;21 - 00;06;42;11 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Yeah, it is kind of sad. Personal choices do whatever you want to do. But I always think about that where you know, when you're 60, 70, having a kid, the kids, you're not going to see this kid, maybe even graduate high school. 00;06;42;13 - 00;07;06;04 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller I've had friends who had children, and I'm thinking I will not get to see this kid get married because it's enough years that, you know, I'm out of here. But it's it's bizarre. And so, you know, whatever they want to do, let them do it. It's fine. But it also has been a big week for last episode's. A lot of the streaming series have been running their last episodes. 00;07;06;08 - 00;07;26;06 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Succession was the big one that everybody was waiting for. You know, how will this and who will get control of that company? What's going to happen to all of them? I am not a succession person. I'm a I'm counting on you to be my succession guru this season. 00;07;26;08 - 00;07;51;11 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Yeah, I've been the best man in the best. It was so good. It was. I really love the first season and even the the second season was pretty good. I thought last season was all over the place at times because you start getting tired of it, right? The idea of like, okay, it's it's going to be Kendall, who is the oldest son, but then Kendall has some issues. 00;07;51;11 - 00;08;19;28 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz So then it's, you know, it's going to be Roman, but Roman has a lot of issues, like Roman is a man child. And then you have Siobhan, who's she's a liberal. Will she take over the conservative media company? Is it a fit? So you have all of these things and then you have Logan, who at the beginning of the series, looks like he's not going to have the mental capacity to continue on and then all of a sudden he's he's like back and he's fine and he's running things again. 00;08;20;01 - 00;08;44;00 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz You have four seasons of constant jockeying. You know, we know Logan, regardless of of what you know about the show, there has to be an end. And there obviously is a show called Succession. There has to be somebody at the end that's going to win regardless of how we get there. Somebody has to get there. This last episode, it was like 90 minutes long. 00;08;44;00 - 00;09;12;14 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz It was it was basically a movie and it felt like 15. That's how quickly this thing flew. The only dry spell was there was this this moment kind of midway, two thirds of the way through where the those three kids, Kendall and Roman and Shiv, they kind of got together and they were trying to, you know, come to some sort of agreement, who's going to run the show, who's going to who's going to take over? 00;09;12;20 - 00;09;38;28 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz And then they kind of had this like, playful moment in a kitchen where they're kind of their siblings. Again, they're not these media moguls. And at that point, you're kind of wondering, well, what's going to go on here or not? And, you know, from that point, though, then it gets serious again. And I always felt I wish I could go back in time and just write down what I thought would happen. 00;09;39;00 - 00;10;01;28 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz And I in my head, I had kind of like two possibilities of how the show would end with, you know, who would who would get it among the cast of characters we know. So obviously, right. One of the options could have been somebody comes out of the blue, buys a company and just takes it. But if it if it's only the characters we know, who would those characters be? 00;10;01;28 - 00;10;10;04 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz And I wish I could have written them down, put it into an envelope, because the final two were the two that were like down to the wire. 00;10;10;06 - 00;10;11;28 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller And now there. 00;10;11;28 - 00;10;25;11 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Is like twists and turns and you just it always felt like, okay, it's going to go back here or is it going to go here? And I loved it. I thought it was just like a phenomenal ending to the series. 00;10;25;15 - 00;10;33;02 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Could they reboot it with, you know, starting with whomever they had chosen to go ahead or would that not work? 00;10;33;04 - 00;11;02;05 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz These characters are so self-absorbed and so, so crazy. Sure. But I really liked how it ended. It just kind of it just kind of ended not not like Sopranos ended where, you know, it went to black. You just kind of it kind of like got to a point. There was a winner. Somebody came out on top and then the credits rolled and that's all you kind of needed because it's it was the journey. 00;11;02;05 - 00;11;04;27 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz The show is about the journey and we finally got there. 00;11;04;29 - 00;11;13;27 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller This is not a spoiler because everybody should know it by now. But the dad died early in the show this year. Was that a good thing to have him exit that early? 00;11;13;27 - 00;11;41;24 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Yeah, I was a little unsure when it happened, but I thought it got him out of the way. So it could come down to the kids just fighting with each other. Because as long as Logan was there, he was always the puppetmaster pulling the strings. So it's like, Yeah. Kendall, you're back on my good side. Oh, no. Roman How about how about, you know, we we boost you up and, you know, you can be my protege and and why don't you go fire Jerry now? 00;11;41;24 - 00;11;58;26 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz And, you know, it's time to get tough, and then, you know, and then it's like shiv, like, I don't know, Shiv. It's. I think. I think we we need a female touch here. It's time for you to take over the company. And he was always playing them off of each other, either either on purpose or even just because he was just that kind of guy. 00;11;59;02 - 00;12;00;26 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller It's like what you do at home, Right? 00;12;00;26 - 00;12;23;17 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Exactly. Exactly. Getting him out of the picture just allowed those three to kind of go at it along with the other half of the company, because it was it was coming down to there is a deal on the table to sell Waystar Royco and there was obviously the faction with the kids. You know, would they sell? Wouldn't they sell? 00;12;23;17 - 00;12;51;29 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz And then you have the people that are still on the board that, you know, obviously want to sell to kind of cash out and get their golden parachute. So you have those players and Alexander Skarsgard, who was playing the character of Lucas Mattson, who is the CEO of a streaming giant, Gojo. So he was the one trying to acquire the company and was really largely replaced. 00;12;51;29 - 00;13;21;08 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Logan is kind of like that, that hovering figure, you know. But again, they're playing each other to the end, like they're playing. They're playing him off of each other. So it was just it was just a really great episode that that left you kind of guessing until the end. You kind of as that episode is slowly coming to an end, you kind of got a sense where it was going, but yeah, it was, you know, a lot. 00;13;21;08 - 00;13;28;28 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz And Cousin Greg, for anyone that loves Cousin Greg, like he he plays very prominently in this final episode. 00;13;29;00 - 00;13;40;26 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Well, now I'm excited to see it, but I went through a couple of other ones that had their final episodes, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Did you see the last of that? 00;13;41;00 - 00;13;43;17 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Not yet. I'm like two episodes away from getting there. 00;13;43;22 - 00;14;09;02 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Okay. It it brings everything up to, you know, the latest it can. And still you find out what has happened and you get a chance to see Mrs. May's. I'll do what I think is her best stand up routine In the course of all of that. You also find out about the relationship with her ex-husband. You find out about the relationship with Susie, her manager. 00;14;09;02 - 00;14;37;23 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller It's very good. But I really felt that it became the Joan Rivers story. I really think that they were leaning into that a little bit more than you might have wanted. I had a friend who saw it and he said I he was very disappointed in the ending and he thought that they spilled too many things early on in the in the last season where, you know, by doing those time jobs, it kind of ruined the the surprises that you get at the end. 00;14;37;25 - 00;15;04;03 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller He said. I already knew what she was going to be like because they had done a 60 Minutes story on her early on in that run. And so that was interesting to me. I did see the last Ted Lasso, and I loved it. I loved it, I loved it. I loved it. Not because it was cheesy, which is what I'm hearing all over the place, but because it did wrap things up if they want to end it. 00;15;04;06 - 00;15;23;09 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller You had no questions as to where things were going to go. They they talked about, you know, the final game that they had with Ted. And it's no secret that Ted had been plotting to leave the home all season long. It wasn't like suddenly heat. He came in and said, by the way, I'm going to leave. Goodbye. We'll see you all. 00;15;23;12 - 00;15;47;01 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller They were able to address that and there is one moment with the players and I kid you not. It's the dumbest move that you'd ever see in a show like this, but it's the perfect move and the players all get together and say their goodbye to him. And I thought it was remarkable. Cheesy. You betcha. And it was just it was really, really fun to watch. 00;15;47;07 - 00;16;16;22 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller And there were tears throughout the whole thing. When he says goodbye to certain people. And again, I don't want to be too specific about this. You feel it because they built this show. This was a pandemic show that we started watching when we were all kind of sequestered, and it was about somebody going outside of their comfort zone, which we were, and went to this this team that he knew really nothing about and was able to find his way in with them. 00;16;16;24 - 00;16;36;06 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller And they talk about that bleed sign that he put up on the on the wall and what that meant to the rest of them. And that plays a factor in the in the final episode as well. So it was I thought it was very good. I thought it was really good. And I do see an end to it. 00;16;36;06 - 00;16;58;02 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller And I do feel like, all right, the pandemic is largely over and it's a nice way to end it. You don't need to have like seven seasons, 20 seasons, whatever it might be of a series to just really appreciate an ending. It's like a British series where it's built to last for maybe two years, three years, and it's done. 00;16;58;04 - 00;17;03;13 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller And if they want to reboot it, there is an opening to reboot it in a different way. 00;17;03;20 - 00;17;15;07 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Okay, I was going to ask you about that. Now, I haven't watched the season yet because we've talked about this before. I kind of like ADD and drop Apple TV, you know, as the wind blows. So I was. 00;17;15;07 - 00;17;19;09 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Waiting for a product and they actually me a free subscription. 00;17;19;10 - 00;17;40;04 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Yeah. You've read me like a book. So, you know, I'm probably going to resubscribe to it this weekend and just knocked through the episodes really, really quick. But the, the thing that I had read a lot of after those first couple seasons was this was always planned as a three season arc. You'd have that beginning, the middle, the end, and that would be it. 00;17;40;04 - 00;17;55;29 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz And Jason Sudeikis is very clear about it. But after that second season, and I think because of the popularity, the show and the awards and the accolades and all that, there was some discussion that like maybe, you know, yeah, we're going to wrap it up but. 00;17;56;00 - 00;17;57;07 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Need more money. 00;17;57;09 - 00;18;01;07 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Yeah. So what do you think? Is it are we going to see more Ted, or is this really it? 00;18;01;12 - 00;18;23;10 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller I really think that they could take supporting characters and make them leading characters and you could continue the story and you could do a movie too, if you really wanted to. It's interesting because you get to see Ted back home, and I don't see this kind of longing that I've got to be back with my team. I have done that. 00;18;23;17 - 00;18;44;16 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller I'm moving on to something else, so I don't he doesn't need to be in it. But I do think that you could take Rebecca any of those characters. Keeley any of them, and make a series. And then there's also the team. The team still has another season if they want it, but you do get them in a game situation near the end. 00;18;44;20 - 00;18;51;12 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Who we get a spinoff of? Roy Ken That's what I would pay good money for. Eric. Roy, Roy, Ken Oh. 00;18;51;15 - 00;19;12;26 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Perfect, Perfect way to do it. I think what they'll do is take a little time and act like they were really thinking about this and they'll come back with that because it's it's too good and the characters are too ideal for a situation like this. And again, you can do the short term run with all of it and nobody is in forever. 00;19;12;29 - 00;19;17;15 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller I enjoyed it and I think it will lead to something more. 00;19;17;17 - 00;19;37;07 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz All right. Well, I'm looking forward to it. I've been trying to stay away from from spoilers or anything. So, yeah, I'm going to I'm going to resubscribe to Apple TV pretty quickly and jump on this one. You know, there is one other very notable series finale this past week as well, and that's Barry also on HBO. 00;19;37;10 - 00;19;39;14 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Oh, yes. And did you watch? 00;19;39;15 - 00;19;41;08 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz I did. I did. 00;19;41;09 - 00;19;44;00 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Yeah. Were you shocked at. 00;19;44;02 - 00;19;59;22 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz How good it was? Who? Yeah, I was. I was very I guess. Well, it's a show about a hitman, so, you know, I guess we shouldn't be too shocked by what happens. Have you watched Barry at all? Are you a fan of Barry? 00;19;59;22 - 00;20;18;02 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Yeah, I know the. I mean, I'm the tie. This is me. Okay, I'll skip the middle parts and go right to the ending. I am like the type of person who will read the murder mystery the last chapter, and then go back and see if they did a good job of leading up to it. So, yes, I do know how Barry ends. 00;20;18;02 - 00;20;22;05 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller I did see the Barry ending and I did not see that coming. 00;20;22;05 - 00;20;37;02 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz I was very surprised. Yes and no. Like, I mean, obviously, it's a show about a hitman. Anything can happen. I thought the ending was, wow, we have we have no no happy endings. 00;20;37;04 - 00;20;38;26 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller But it makes perfect sense, doesn't it? 00;20;38;26 - 00;20;39;28 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Right? It does, yeah. 00;20;40;00 - 00;20;41;19 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Person Yeah. 00;20;41;21 - 00;21;04;16 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Yeah. It's a an episode that I was shocked at, kind of how, how, how quickly things develop. Like, you know, we're like, okay, we're going to go do this and then it nope, we're on to the next thing and then, you know, next thing and nope, we're on to the next thing. And then the way we kind of like closed up the chapters, you know, each storyline. 00;21;04;16 - 00;21;23;04 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Barry and, and Sally and Fuchs and, you know, NoHo, Hank, all of those characters. I didn't, you know, if you told me one of those things is going to happen, I'd be like, okay, you know, I could see that. But to have each of those things happen for all of them is like, Whoa, that's that's a little shocking. 00;21;23;11 - 00;21;52;27 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz I felt that this season, I like I liked it. I you know, I've always loved the series. I came into it. I think I started watching it maybe near the end of season two. I didn't watch it the very first season. And then I was talking to somebody one time during that fine. I think it was the final season of the Game of Thrones and it was the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, the Long Night, where they're fighting the white walkers. 00;21;52;29 - 00;22;15;16 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz So the night that that aired, there was also an episode, a new episode of Barry, and I believe the episode was called Ronnie and Lily, and it was a phenomenal episode where Barry goes to make a hit on somebody who's like a Taekwondo instructor. But he was also, you know, he needed to be killed. For what? I don't even remember The reason at this point. 00;22;15;18 - 00;22;38;09 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz So he does it and it's a little bit, you know, it doesn't go as planned to begin with. But then after that, Ronnie's like ten year old daughter comes out of nowhere and is stalking him for the rest of the episode. And it is like to go from the long night Game of Thrones to this Ronnie Lily episode was just like emotionally draining and it was crazy. 00;22;38;09 - 00;22;56;08 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz And that was kind of, yeah, and that was kind of like when I heard about that, I whipped back, watched all the episodes, got caught up with Iranian lilies, like, Whoa, how, how do you drop this episode on the same night as Game of Thrones? So it's kind of a long way of saying, though, is we didn't have in this season that Ronnie and Lily moment. 00;22;56;10 - 00;23;15;25 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Even the third season, there was this episode where Barry was. He was trying to get somewhere. I can't I think he was, you know, going to go see Gene or something, and he ends up in this crazy chase with dirt bikes and and it was like this chase on the highway and there's crash is and shooting and it was bananas. 00;23;15;25 - 00;23;38;02 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz And it was like that was another attempt to do that just crazy off the wall episode. And I don't feel like this the season the Barry had that kind of craziness. There was one, you know like second to last, third to last episode of the season where it goes a little bit off into the future so you can kind of see how things have developed. 00;23;38;05 - 00;24;03;07 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz But yeah, it just never quite it never quite hit that craziness for me. And and I always feel like with Barry, it's it's gotten a lot of accolades, it's gotten awards, but it's also never quite cleaned up at the awards season. Right. Like we've gotten a few Emmys here, but they've got a lot of nominations, so it's always playing second fiddle to Ted Lasso or something else. 00;24;03;07 - 00;24;07;15 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Like, it's a really good series, but it's just not quite as good as some of the others. 00;24;07;18 - 00;24;50;00 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller You know, what I find interesting about this is and you look at both Ted Lasso and Barry, they're both created by people who were on Saturday Night Live, knew that work ethic and then got into this and realized, I don't want to be stuck for a long period of time. They got great success after their first year and then I think had those moments where they go, All right, can we end this so I can try something else because I know what a long run is like, and maybe I don't want that as creators here with the their series, they were writing for everything and, you know, being real big, real big forces in the 00;24;50;00 - 00;25;06;25 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller development of it. They weren't just actors. And so I think that does take its toll. And I think that more than anything will help create more of these short run series. They'll give deals to people, but they'll the people will say, I don't want to go five years. I would like to go three or maybe two. 00;25;06;29 - 00;25;25;28 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz I agree. And I, I think that this show, it definitely did not need to go any more in this. Like when I knew that Barry was coming back for season four, part of me was like, Please, please, please make this the last season because I love it. But this is a show that really doesn't need to keep on going on and on and on. 00;25;25;28 - 00;25;30;05 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz And I kind of would have liked it to have wrapped up even after season three. 00;25;30;08 - 00;25;52;12 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller It could have been a movie. Yeah, it could have been a really good movie. And same way with Ted Lasso. That would have been a really cool movie where this goofball from the United States goes to Great Britain, gets involved very much like these coach stories that we see where the coach kind of pulls this ragtag team up to winners. 00;25;52;16 - 00;26;17;03 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller It's Friday Night Lights or you name it and could it could exist as just a film itself. But I'm glad that you know what, again, this pandemic time, they these were things that got us through those days where we were sitting at home and thinking, what is life like outside my house? And they they helped us laugh. They gave us something to care about, and we got involved with the characters. 00;26;17;05 - 00;26;25;15 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Did you know that there was a huge thing with Jason Sudeikis shoes that he had like different shoes on all the time, which I had no clue about. 00;26;25;15 - 00;26;26;15 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Until I know. 00;26;26;17 - 00;26;47;07 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller This and that. He wore different Nike shoes throughout the course of this show, and there were certain pairs that were favorites, and they do come back in the final episode. And if you're Asian, if you're one of those shoe fans, you can look and go, Oh my God, there's no shoes that they talked about. There they are. And they had some meaning for certain times. 00;26;47;10 - 00;26;50;27 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller So, you know, we'll be rewatching this stuff for years to come. 00;26;51;04 - 00;26;58;00 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Several prominent shows are now gone, but that means we've got more to watch. So what's on the horizon? 00;26;58;02 - 00;27;21;06 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Well, I'll tell you, I am going to be talking with the folks behind the Wonder Years. Remember, they rebooted the Wonder Years like more than a year ago. And then it's been a big pause ever since because there have been some issues. Fred Savage was a producer. He left the show because of some claims about him. And I think they were in a kind of a a shift. 00;27;21;12 - 00;27;40;25 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller So I'm talking to people from the Wonder Years and that'll be coming up this summer in June. It starts in mid-June. And where they go with that, and I've watched an episodes of it and it is interesting, very interesting because it's not the Wonder years that I remember. It's not like the Fred Savage Wonder Years. It's very much its own show, and I think that's a good thing. 00;27;40;25 - 00;27;45;12 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller It would be a perfect fit with Abbott Elementary if they put the two together. 00;27;45;18 - 00;27;58;01 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz I have not watched the rebooted. I watched the original pretty religiously, at least through the first few seasons. It was one that I kind of drifted off on as it went along but have not had a chance to watch the new one. 00;27;58;03 - 00;28;20;29 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller It's set during the same period, but it's from a black perspective and it's really, really, you know, it's interesting how telling some of this is because you'll remember this situation. You go, Yeah, I remember my black friends acting like that and I didn't know why. And so it's Dad gets to work with Marvin Gaye. Mom is singing in the choir. 00;28;21;00 - 00;28;35;23 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller I mean, there are a lot of things that are fun to see in this new season of the Wonder Years. So I think it'll be a welcome summer addition, particularly since we're getting way, way, way too many game shows and reality shows. 00;28;35;26 - 00;28;36;15 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz That. 00;28;36;17 - 00;28;47;25 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller I, I am tired of celebrity Family Feud. I am tired of Celebrity Wheel of Fortune. I'm tired of all those things that maybe give somebody a job, but I don't care. 00;28;47;27 - 00;28;55;28 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Every commercial I see now on TV is like, we got a new game show coming out. Like, Oh no, we have a writers strike, don't we? 00;28;56;00 - 00;28;57;29 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller Would you go on a game show? 00;28;58;01 - 00;29;11;23 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Maybe. I always there used to be a version of Jeopardy called Rock and Roll. Jeopardy! And I would watch it and I knew pretty much every answer. So I kind of wanted to go on that one, but I don't know if I would do that. 00;29;11;29 - 00;29;35;29 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller I find that I would be the one swearing throughout the whole show because my buzzer doesn't work. Come on, my buzzer isn't working that way. I'm not getting it. That wouldn't be the answer. I blurt out the answer before the person got it. So I'd be just a real mess on those shows. But you watch Jeopardy and you think I'm pretty good at this stuff, but a lot of it has to do when you click in. 00;29;35;29 - 00;30;05;08 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller And I think you have to wait three of time and then you click in, I don't know those stupid prices, right? Games where they do somebody you'll give like $1,200 and then the jerk next to you says $1,201 and you want it to kill. You think right there, I'd kill that person because I do not want somebody to steal my little good beard because you were just standing in the right spot. 00;30;05;10 - 00;30;10;14 Speaker 1: Bruce Miller So anyway, that's what we're looking forward to embrace the series when you get them. 00;30;10;16 - 00;30;22;28 Speaker 1: Terry Lipshetz Well, on that note, I think we'll we'll wrap this show and look forward to next week when we talk a little bit more about the Wonder Years. As always, thank you for listening to stream that screen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

No programa desta semana Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato batem um papo sobre a melhor adaptação de games para os cinemas. Super Mario Bros. O Filme. Venham descobrir o que nossos insurgentes acharam desta linda animação da Nintendo em parceria com a Illumination Entertainment. Data de Lançamento: 6 de Abril de 2023 Direção: Aaron Horvath e Michael Jelenic Elenco: Anya Taylor-Joy, Jack Black, Chris Pratt,Charlie Day, Seth Rogen e Chales Martinet

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Aproveitando a estreia do novo filme "Super Mario Bros. - O Filme",  Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato gravam um programa sobre o fatídico filme de 1993, "Super Mario Bros. Ante de assistirem o novo filme do encanador mais famoso dos games, escutem o Weekcast 99. 

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No Programa de hoje, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato batem um papo sobre a nova animação de Dragon Ball. Em Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, vemos, Goku e Vegeta que continuam seu treinamento sob Whis, agora acompanhado por Broly para ajudá-lo a controlar sua raiva. Enquanto isso, na Terra, o Exército Red Ribbon é revivido e liderado pelo Comandante Magenta e o Oficial Carmine. Os dois recrutam o Dr. Hedo para se vingar contra Piccolo e Gohan. Sob a orientação de Hedo, o Exército cria dois novos androides, Gamma 1 e Gamma 2. Para atrair Gohan para uma armadilha, Magenta decide sequestrar sua filha Pan.

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No programa desta semana, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato, batem um papo sobre um dos clássicos da ficção cientifica. O Enigma do Outro Mundo. venham descobri o que nossos insurgentes acharam desta película. Data de Lançamento: 3 de fevereiro de 1983 Direção: John Carpenter Elenco: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, keith David, T. K Carter

This week: Disney+ Ms. Marvel & Obi-Wan Kenobi After It's Been a Week, we jump into Ms. Marvel and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Plus find out how you can get our new, exclusive SDCC sticker! Follow us on Instagram @stsguys

This week the boys discuss Die Hard 4, South Park The Streaming Wars, Strange New Worlds Episode 5, and Obi Wan episodes 1-3. As always, SPOILERS ARE EVERYWHERE!!!!

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No podcast, mais atrasado da semana, pela segunda vez, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato, batem um papo sobre o filme do Homem-Aranha no Aranhaverso. Será que o filme é melhor que os filme da Marvel com Tom Holland. Data de Lançamento: 10 de Janeiro de 2019 Diretores: Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti Prêmio: Oscar de melhor animação Elenco: Jake Johnson, Shameik, Haille Steinfeld, Oscar Isaac, Nicolas Cage

No programa atrasado desta semana, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato, batem um papo sobre um filme meio que esquecido. Free Guy. Data de Lançamento: 19 de Agosto 2021 Diretor: Shan Levy Elenco: Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Taika Waititi, Joe Keery

SUMMARY: Overcoming Health Anxiety is possible! Today, we interview Ken Goodman and his client Maria on overcoming hpyochondria using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. In this episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, you will learn key concepts of health anxiety and how to overcome their health anxiety. In This Episode: What it is like to have health anxiety The key concepts of treating Hypochondria Tips for managing fears of death and cancer. A step-by-step approach to overcoming health anxiety. Links To Things I Talk About: https://www.kengoodmantherapy.com/ Quiet Mind Solutions ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com. CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors. Go to cbtschool.com to learn more. Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 226. Welcome back, everybody. If you have health anxiety, hypochondria, health anxiety disorder, or you know of somebody who has health anxiety, you are going to love this episode. I mean, love, love, love this episode. Today, we have Ken Goodman, who's on the show. He's a clinician who's here with his patient and they're sharing a success story, a recovery story of health anxiety, and it is so good. I am so honored to have both of them on. It was so fun to actually interview other people and the way they're doing it, and look at the steps that were taken in order to overcome health anxiety. And this is the overcoming health anxiety story of all stories. It is so, so good. I'm not going to waste your time going and telling you how good it is. I'm just going to let you listen to it because I know you're here to get the good stuff. Before we do that, I wanted to do the “I did a hard thing” and this one is from Dave. It says: “I've been trying to get back into meditating regularly. I was sitting at a desk this morning, reviewing my work emails. And I told myself, before I get even further in my day, I need to meditate. I did a guided meditation, even though I felt a strong pull inside to go back to work. I kept getting caught up in my thoughts, but I just kept telling myself it doesn't need to be a perfect meditation. I said the goal today is just to be able to sit without being busy for three minutes. Nothing more. It was hard, but I did it.” Dave, thank you so much for the submission of the “I did a hard thing” segment, because I think that meditation is so important. In fact, I keep promising myself I'm going to implement it more into this podcast. And Dave has really looked at some of the struggles people have with meditation. And look at him, go, it's so amazing. Totally did it. So amazing. Dave, thank you so, so, so much. I love it. If you want to submit, you may submit your “I did a hard thing” by going to KimberleyQuinlan-lmft.com. If you go to the podcast page, there is a submission page right on the website. And from there, let's just go straight to the show. I hope you enjoy it. Kimberley: Welcome. I am so excited for this episode. Welcome, Ken and welcome, Maria. Ken: Thank you for having me. Maria: Hi, Kimberley. Kimberley: So, as you guys, we've already chatted, but I really want to hear. This is really quite unique and we get to see the perspective of a client and the therapist. If I could do one of these every single week, I would. I think it's so cool. So, thank you so much for coming on and sharing. We're going to talk about health anxiety. And so, Maria, we're going to go back and forth here, but do you want to share a little bit about your experience with health anxiety? Maria: Yes. I think I've had health anxiety probably for like 15, 20 years and not known about it. Looking back now, everything comes clear when you see the multiple pictures that you've taken of certain lumps and whatever five years ago. I'm like, “Oh my gosh, I have so many pictures that I've taken and so many different things.” But yeah, I've been struggling for a while I think, and had multiple doctor's appointments. Until I realized that I had health anxiety, it was an everyday struggle, I think. Ken: Well, you came to me and you were mostly worried at the time about ticks and Lyme disease and skin cancer, but you told me that for the previous 15 years or so, you were worried about other things. What are those things? Maria: Well, I was mostly completely obsessed with moles on my skin and them being cancerous. And I was scared of ticks. I would not be able to walk through any grass or go hiking. I was scared that I would have to check my whole body to make sure that there were no ticks on me. I was completely scared of Lyme disease, and it just completely consumed my life really. And they were the main things. But looking back before that, I think that I always had a doctor's appointment on the go. I would book one, and as soon as they said, “You can book online,” That was it for me. I would have one booked, and then I'd go, “Oh, what if there's something else next week? You know what, I'm just going to book one for next week, just in case something comes up.” I am a terrible person when it comes to that because I'm taking up multiple doctor's appointments. And I knew that. But it was trying to reassure myself, trying to control the situation, trying to control next week already before it even happened. So, yeah. MARIA'S SYMPTOMS OF HEALTH ANXIETY Kimberley: Right. What did it look like for you? What did a day look like for you pre-treatment and pre-recovery? Maria: Some days it could be fine. I remember days where nothing was bothering me. It was such a nice feeling. And then I was scared because I never knew what was going to trigger me and it could be anything at any time. And I think that was the not knowing. And then as soon as I would latch onto something, I would come to the phone, I'd start Googling over and over again, hours of Googling and then checking. And then it was just ongoing. And then my whole day, I was in my head my whole day, just what if, what if, asking questions, going back to Google, trying to find that reassurance that of course never happened. Ken: Yeah. You tell me that you would take pictures of your moles and then compare them with the cancerous moles online and do those things. Maria: Yeah. And I would book-- and interestingly enough, looking back now, I went through a phase of always having a doctor's appointment. And then I also went through a phase of completely avoiding the doctor as well, not wanting to go because I didn't want them to say something that I knew was going to trigger a whole host of anxiety. So, I've gone through multiple doctors. And then once you start the doctor's appointments, then you're on a roller coaster. Because you walk away from that appointment, never feeling, or for me, never feeling reassured. Or feeling reassured for maybe a few minutes, and then you leave, and then the anxiety kicks in. “Oh, I never asked them this,” or “Oh my gosh, well, what did that mean?” And then the what-ifs start again and you're back to square one. So then, you go, “Oh, no, I didn't try just what they said. I'm going to book another appointment and this doctor is going to be the doctor that reassures me.” MANAGING DOCTOR VISITS WITH HYPOCHONDRIA Kimberley: Right. Or sometimes a lot of clients will say to me like, “The doctor made a face. What did that face mean? They made a look and it was just for a second, but were they questioning their own diagnosis and so forth?” And I think that is really common as well. Ken: Well, the doctor will say anything and it could be something very simple like, “Okay, you're all good. I'll see you in six months.” And the person will leave thinking, “Why would he want me to come back in six months if nothing was wrong?” Maria: Well, that's interesting that you would say that because I think probably at my lowest point, I was keeping notes about my thought process and what I was feeling when I was actually going to the doctors or waiting for the results. And actually, I thought it might-- if I have a few minutes to read what I actually was going through in real-time, I know it's probably very relatable. Kimberley: I would love that. Maria: I had gone to basically a doctor's appointment, an annual one where I knew I was going to have to have blood tests. And they're the worst for me because the anticipation of getting the results is just almost worse than getting the results, even though-- Ken: Did you write this before we met? Maria: No. While I was seeing you, Ken. Ken: In the beginning? Maria: Yeah. When you'd asked me to write down everything and write down what I was feeling, what I was thinking, and then read it back to myself. And this is what I had written down, actually, when I was going through the doctor's appointment and waiting or had just gotten the results. Kimberley: If you would share, that'd be so grateful. Maria: So, my blood results came back today. I felt very nervous about opening them. The doctor wrote a note at the top. “Your blood results are mostly normal. Your cholesterol is slightly high, but no need for medication. Carry on with exercise and healthy eating.” “Mostly,” what does that mean? “Mostly”? I need to look at all the numbers and make sure that everything is in the normal range. “Okay, they're all in the normal range except for my cholesterol. But why does she write mostly? Is there something else that she's not telling me? I need reassurance. I'm driving down to the doctor's right now. I can't wait the whole weekend.” I go into the doctor's office and ask them, “Is there a doctor who's able to explain to me my results?” The receptionist said, “No, you have to make another appointment.” I explained to her, “You don't understand. I just need somebody to tell me that everything is normal.” Finally, this nice lady saw the anxiety on my face. She calls the doctor over to look at the labs. The receptionist shows the doctor the one lab panel, and he says, “Everything is completely normal. Nothing was flagged. Everything is completely fine.” I thank him so much for looking and walk away. As soon as I get outside, I realize I didn't ask him to look at all the lab panels. What if she meant mostly normal on the other lab panels that I didn't show him? When I get home, I look over each one multiple times and make sure that each one is in the exact number range. After looking over them four or five times and seeing that each one is in the number range except for my cholesterol, I still feel like I need to have her explain to me why she wrote the word “mostly.” The crazy thing is I'm not concerned about the high cholesterol. I can control that. I don't know what she meant by the word “mostly.” I'm going to send her a message. And I'm going to ask her to clarify. I have to believe that she would tell me if something was wrong. I wish there was an off button in my head to stop me worrying about this. Ken: I remember this now. I remember. And this was in the middle. Maria was really avoiding going to the doctor and she had overdue with some physical exams. And so, we really worked hard for her to stop avoiding that. She got to the point where she felt good enough about going to the doctor. And she really, I think I remember her not having any anticipatory anxiety, handling the doctor very well, host the doctor very well, until she got the email and focused on the word “mostly.” And that sent her spiraling out of control. But the interesting thing about that whole experience was that we processed it afterwards, and that whole experience motivated her to try even harder. And then she took even bigger strides forward. And within a couple of months, she was really doing so much better. And I think it's been over a year now since that and continues to do really well. Kimberley: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. I actually was tearing up. Tears were starting to come because I was thinking, I totally get that experience. I'm so grateful you shared it because I think so many people do, right? Maria: Yeah. And there's always and/or. You go into the doctor's appointment, they tell you everything. And because your adrenaline is absolutely pumping, you forget everything. And then you come out and you go, “Oh my gosh, I can't remember anything.” Then the anxiety kicks in and tells you what the anxiety is like, “Oh no, that must have been bad. That must have been--” yeah. Ken: And that boost in adrenaline that just takes over is so powerful. You can forget any common sense or any therapeutic strategies or tools that you might have learned because now you just get preoccupied with one word, the uncertainty of that word. Maria: Yeah. I would have to have a family member come in, my husband to come in and sit in the-- it got to that point where he would have to come in and sit in the appointment, so then after the appointment, I could have him retell me what was said, because I knew as soon as the adrenaline kicked in, I would not be able to remember anything. ROADBLOCKS TO HEALTH ANXIETY TREATMENT Kimberley: Right. Ken, this brings me straight to the next question, which would be like, what roadblocks do you commonly see patients hit specifically if they have health anxiety during recovery or treatment? Ken: Well, unlike other fears and phobias, the triggers for health anxiety are very unpredictable. So, if you have a fear of elevators, flying or public speaking, you know when your flight is going to be, you know when you have to speak or you know when you have to drive if you have a fear of driving. For health anxiety, you never know when you're going to be triggered. And those triggers can be internal, like a physical sensation, because the body is very noisy. And everyone experiences physical sensations periodically and you never know when that's going to happen. And then you never know external triggers. You never know when the doctor is going to say something that might trigger you, or you see a social media post about a GoFundMe account about someone that you know who knows someone who's been diagnosed with ALS. So, you never know when these things are going to happen. And so, you might be doing well for a couple of weeks or even a month, and suddenly there's a trigger and you're right back to where you started from. And so, in that way, it feels very frustrating because you can do well and then you can start becoming extremely anxious again. Another roadblock I think might be if you need medicine, there's a fear of trying medicine because of potential for side effects and becomes overblown and what are the long-term side effects, and even if I take it, I'm going to become very anxious. And so, people then are not taking the very thing, the medicine that could actually help them reduce their anxiety. So, that's another roadblock. Kimberley: Yeah. I love those. And I think that they're by far the most hurdles. And Maria, you could maybe even chime in, what did you feel your biggest roadblock to recovery was? Maria: Being okay with the unknown. Trying to be in control all the time is exhausting and trying to constantly have that reassurance and coming to terms with, “It's okay if I can't control everything. It's okay if I don't get the 100% reassurance that I need. It's good enough,” that was hard for me. And also, not picking up the phone and Googling was the biggest. I think once I stopped that and I was okay with not looking constantly, that was a huge step forward. Ken: You really learn to live with uncertainty. And I think you start to understand that if you had to demand 100% certainty, you had to keep your anxiety disorder. In order to be 100% certain, that meant keep staying anxious. Kimberley: Yeah. Being stuck in that cycle forever. Ken: You didn't want that anymore. You wanted to focus on living your life rather than being preoccupied with preventing death. SKILLS AND TOOLS TO OVERCOME HEALTH ANXIETY Kimberley: Right. So, Maria, I mean, that's probably, from my experience as a clinician, one of the most important skills, the ability to tolerate and be uncertain. Were there other specific tools that you felt were really important for your recovery at the beginning and middle and end, and as you continue to live your life? Maria: Yes. I think the biggest one was me separating my anxiety from myself, if that makes sense. Seeing it as a separate-- I don't even know, like a separate entity, not feeling like it was me. I had to look at it as something that was trying to control me, but I was fine. I needed to fight the anxiety. And separating it was hard in the beginning. But then I think once I really can help me to understand how to do that, at that point, I think I started to move forward a bit more. Kimberley: So, you externalized it. For me, I give it a name like Linda. “Hi, Linda,” or whatever name you want to give your anxiety. A lot of kids do that as well like Mr. Candyman or whatever. Maria: Yeah. It sat on my shoulder and try to get in my head. In the beginning, I would be brushing off my shoulder constantly. Literally, I must have looked crazy because I was brushing this anxiety off my shoulder every 10 minutes with another what-if. What if this? What if that? And I think I had to retrain my brain. I had to just start not believing and being distracted constantly by the “What if you do this” or “What if that?” and I'd say, “No, no.” Ken: Yeah. I'd treat a lot of health anxiety. I have a lot of health anxiety groups. And I do notice that the patients that can externalize their anxiety and personify it do way better than the people who have trouble with it. And so, whether it's a child or a teenager or an adult, I am having them externalize their anxiety. And I go into that, not only in my groups, but in the audio program I created called the Anxiety Solution Series. It is all about how to do that. And it makes things so much easier. If now you're not fighting with yourself, there's no internal struggle anymore because now you're just competing against an opponent who's outside of you. It makes things easier. Kimberley: Right. Yeah. And sometimes when that voice is there and you believe it to be you, it can make you feel a little crazy. But when you can externalize it, it separates you from that feeling of going crazy as well. Maria: I felt so much better as soon as I did that because I felt, “Okay, I think I can fight this. This isn't me. I'm not going crazy. This is something that I--” and I started to not believe. And it was long, but it was retraining my brain. And I would question the what-ifs and it didn't make sense to me anymore. Or I would write it down and then I would read it back to me, myself, and I'd be like, “That's ridiculous, what I just thought.” And the other tool which was hugely helpful was breathing, learning how to breathe properly and calm myself down. I mean-- Ken: Yeah. There's lots of different types of breathing out there. And so, I teach a specific type of breathing, which is, I call it Three by Three Relaxation Breathing, which is also in the Anxiety Solution Series. And it really goes over into detail, a very simple way to breathe that you can do it anywhere. You can do it in a waiting room full of people, because it's very subtle. It's not something where you're taking a big breath and people are looking at you. It's very, very subtle. You can do it anywhere. MEDITATION FOR HEALTH ANXIETY Kimberley: Ken, just so that I understand, and also Maria, how does that help someone? For someone who has struggled with breathing or is afraid of meditation hor health anxiety and they've had a bad experience, how does the breathing specifically help, even, like you were saying, in a doctor's appointment office? Maria: I've done it actually in multiple doctor's appointments where I've had that feeling of, “I've got to get out of here now.” It's that feeling of, “Uh, no. Right now, I need to leave.” Before, before I started, I would leave. And now I realized, no, I'm not. I'm going to sit and I'm going to breathe. And no one notices. No one can see it. You can breathe and it really does calm me down, especially in the past, I've had panic attacks and feeling like I can't breathe myself. When you start to realized that you can control it and it does relax you, it really helps me a lot. I do it all the time. Kimberley: It's like a distress tolerance tool then, would you say? Maria: It's something that I can carry around with me all the time, because everyone needs to breathe. Kimberley: Yeah. I always say that your breath is free. It's a free tool. You could take it anywhere. It's perfect. Maria: Yeah. So, it's something that I can do for myself. I can rely on my breathing. And now knowing after Ken teaching me really how to do it properly, it's just invaluable. It really is, and empowering in a way. Now, when I feel like I can't be somewhere, and in fact just not so long ago, I was in a doctor's appointment, not for myself, but I sat there and it was really high up and there was lots of windows around. Of course, I don't like being [00:22:34 inaudible]. And I felt I have to get out. “Nope, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it.” I sat there, I did my breathing. I actually put my earphones in and started listening to Ken's anxiety solutions and listened and took my mind off of it, and I was fine. I didn't leave. And actually, I walked away feeling empowered afterwards. So, it's huge. It's really helpful. Ken: Yeah. You just said a couple of very important things. You made a decision not to flee, so you decided right there, “I'm not going anywhere. So, I'm going to stay here. I'm going to tolerate that discomfort, but I'm going to focus on something else. I'm going to focus on my breathing. I'm going to listen to the Anxiety Solution Series.” And then by doing that, I'm assuming your anxiety either was contained, it stayed the same, or maybe it was reduced. Yeah? Maria: Yeah, it was reduced. It stayed the same. And then it started to reduce. And naturally, by the end, I was like, “I'm fine. Nothing is going to happen.” So, it was great. And the other-- I want to say actually one more thing that really, really helped me. And it was actually a turning point, was that I was in another appointment. The doctor came in and told me I was fine. And it was actually like an appointment where they had called me back medically. So, it was a different scenario. It wasn't me creating something in my head. But anyway, there was a lot of anticipation beforehand and he came in and he said, “You are fine. Go live your life.” And I walked away and I went home. And within maybe about 40 minutes, I said, “Maybe he was lying to me. Maybe he was just trying to make me feel good because he saw how anxious I was.” And at that point I realized, this is never going to stop, never. Unless I fight back, I will never-- I felt robbed of the relief that I should have felt. When he told me that, I wasn't getting that relief and I was never going to have that relief unless I used-- and at that point, I actually got angry. And I remember telling Ken, I was like, “I'm so angry because I felt robbed of the relief.” And at that point, I think I then kicked up my practicing of everything tenfold. And that was a turning point for me. Ken: Yeah. That anger really helped you. And anxiety is a very, very powerful emotion, but if you can access or manufacture a different emotion, a competing emotion, and anger is just one of them, you can often mitigate the anxiety. You can push through it. And for you, it was an invaluable resource, because it was natural. You actually felt angry. For other people, they have to manufacture it and get really tough with their anxiety. But for you, you at that moment naturally felt it. And you're right. You said it is never going to stop. And physical sensations, the body is noisy. People will have the rest of their life. You're going to have a noisy body. So, that will never stop. It's your reaction and your response to those physical sensations that is key. And you learn how to respond in a much more healthy way to whenever you got any sort of trigger external or internal. TREATMENT FOR HEALTH ANXIETY/HYPOCHONDRIA Kimberley: It's really accepting that you don't have control over anxiety. So, taking control where you have it, which is over your reactions. And I agree, I've had many clients who needed to hit rock bottom for a certain amount of time and see it play out and see that the compulsions didn't work to be like, “All right, I have to do something different. This is never going to end.” And I think that that insight too can be a real motivator for treatment of like, “I can't get the relief. It doesn't end up lasting and I deserve that like everybody else.” So, Ken, how do you see as a clinician the differences in recovery and treatment for different people? Do you feel like it's the same for everybody, or do you see that there are some differences depending on the person? Ken: Well, when I treat people with health anxiety, although the content of their specific fears might be different – some might worry more about their heart, some might worry more about shaking that they experience and worry about ALS – the treatment is basically the same, which is why I can treat them in classes or groups because it's basically the same. There are some variations. Some people are more worried about things, where other people feel more physical sensations. And I may have to tailor that a bit. So, some people have to-- their problems are more the physical sensations that they feel and they can't tolerate those physical sensations. And other people it's more mental. They're just constantly worried about things. But in general, they can be treated very similarly. It's learning how to tolerate both the uncertainty and the discomfort and the stress that they feel. Kimberley: Right. And I'll add, I think the only thing that I notice as a difference is some people have a lot of insight about their disorder and some don't. Some are really able to identify like, “Ah, this is totally Linda, my anxiety,” or whatever you want to name your anxiety. “This is my anxiety doing this.” Whereas some people I've experienced as a clinician, every single time it is cancer in their mind and they have a really hard time believing anything else. Like you said, they feel it to be true. Do you agree with that? Ken: Completely. Yeah. Some people will come to me and they know it's probably anxiety, but they're not sure. And some people, they are thoroughly convinced that they have that disease or that disorder. And even after months and months and months of-- and oftentimes the content changes. So, I have patients who, when I first start seeing them, they might be afraid of cancer. And then two months later, it's their heart. And then a couple of months later after that, it's something else. There's always something that can come up and they're always believing it's something medical. And of course, they go back to, “Well, what if this time it is? What if this time it is cancer?” And that's where they get caught in the trap. So, for them, it's answering that question. For Maria, it's the word “mostly” that she became fixated on to get lured in and take the bait. It's like, what happens to a fish that takes the bait? Now they're struggling. So, now once you take the bait, you're struggling. Kimberley: Right. And I would say, I mean, I'll personally explain. A lot of my listeners know this, but I'll share it with you guys. I have a lesion on the back of my brain that I know is there. And I have an MRI every six months. And I have a lot of clients who have a medical illness and they have health anxiety, and it's really managing, following the doctor's protocol, but not doing anything above and beyond that because it's so easy to be like, “Well, maybe I'll just schedule it a little earlier because it is there and I really should be keeping an eye on it.” And that has been an interesting process for me with the medical illness to tweak the treatment there as well. Ken: Yes, absolutely. I have a patient right now and she has a legitimate heart issue that is not dangerous. They've had many, many tests, but all of a sudden, her heart will just start racing really fast, just out of the blue. And it happens randomly and seems like stress exacerbates the frequency of it. But it's not just irritating for her, it was scary because every time she would experience it, she thought, “Maybe this is it. I'm having a heart attack.” But she really had to learn to tolerate that discomfort, that it was going to happen sometimes and that was okay. It happens and you just have to learn to live with it. Kimberley: Right. So, Maria, this is the question I'm most excited about asking you. Tell me now what a doctor's appointment looks like for you. Maria: It looks a lot better. You can actually pick up the phone and book an appointment now without avoiding it. I practice everything that I've learned. I'm not going to lie. The anticipation, maybe a couple of days before, is still there. However, it's really not as bad as it was before. I mean, before, I would be a complete mess before I even walked into the doctor's office. Now, I can walk in and I'm doing my breathing and I'm not asking multiple questions. I'm now okay with trusting what the doctor has to say. Whereas before, if I didn't like what he had to say or he didn't say exactly the way I wanted to hear it, I'd go to another doctor. But now, I'm okay with it. And it's still something I don't necessarily want to do. But leaps and bounds better. Leaps and bounds really. I can go in by myself, have a doctor's appointment, ask the regular questions and say, “Give me the answers,” and leave and be okay with it. GETTING TEST RESULTS WITH HEALTH ANXIETY Kimberley: How do you tolerate the times between the test and the test results? How do you work through that? Because sometimes it can take a week. You know what I mean? Sometimes it's a long time. Maria: Yeah. I mean, I haven't-- so, obviously, it's yearly. So, I'm at that point next year where I will have to go and have all my tests again and get the results and anticipate. But I think for me, the biggest thing is distraction and trying not to focus too much beforehand and staying calm and relaxed. And that's really it. I mean, there's always going to be anxiety there for me, I think, going to the doctors. It's not ever going to go away. I'm okay with that. But it's learning how to keep it at a point where I can understand what they're telling me and not make it into something completely different. Ken: I think you said the keywords – where you're putting your focus. So, before, your focus was on answering those what-if questions and the catastrophic possible results. And now I think your focus is on just living your life, just going about living your life and not worrying or thinking about what the catastrophic possibilities could be. Is that accurate? Would you say it's accurate? Maria: Yeah. Because if you start going down that road of what-if, you're already entering that zone, which it is just, you're never going to get the answer that you want. And it's hard because sometimes I would sit and say to myself, “I'm going to logically think this out.” And I would pretend. I mean, I even mentioned to Ken, “No, no, I'm logically thinking this out. This is what anyone would do. I'm sat there and I'm working out in my head.” And he said, “You've already engaged. You've already engaged with the anxiety.” “Have I?” And he said, “Yeah. By working it out in your head, you're engaging with the anxiety.” And that was a breakthrough as well because I thought to myself after, “I am.” I'm already wrapped up in my head logically thinking that I'm not engaging, but I'm completely engaging. So, that was an interesting turning point as well, I think. Kimberley: Amazing. You've come a long, long, long way. I'm so happy to hear that. Ken, before we wrap up, is there anything that you feel people need to know or some major points that you want to give or one key thing that they should know if they have health anxiety? Ken: Oh my gosh, there are so many. There is a tendency for people with all types of anxiety to really focus their attention on the catastrophic possibilities instead of the odds of those catastrophic possibilities happening. The odds are incredibly low. And so, if you're focusing on the fact that it's probably not likely that this is going to happen, then you'll probably go through your life and be okay if you can focus your attention on living your life. But if you focus on those catastrophic possibilities that are possible, they are, then you're going to go through life feeling very, very anxious. And if you focus on trying to prevent death, prevent suffering, then you're not really living your life. Kimberley: That's it right there. That's the phrase of the episode, I think, because I think that's the most important key part. I cannot thank you both enough for coming on. Ken: This is fun. This is great. Maria: It was fun. Kimberley: Maria, your story is so inspiring and you're so eloquent in how you shared it. I teared up twice during this episode just because I know that feeling and I just love that you've done that work. So, thank you so much for sharing. Ken: Yeah. She's really proof that someone who's suffered for 15, 20, some odd years with anxiety can get better. They just have to be really determined and really apply the strategies and be consistent. She did a great job. Kimberley: Yeah. Massive respect for you, Maria. Maria: Oh, thank you. Kimberley: Amazing. Ken, before we finish up, do you have any-- you want to share with us where people can hear from you or get access to your good stuff? Ken: Yeah. So, quietmindsolutions.com, I have a whole bunch of information on health anxiety. I have two webinars in health anxiety on that website, as well as other webinars in other specialties I have. Also, I have the Anxiety Solution Series, which is a 12-hour audio program, which focuses on all types of anxiety, including health anxiety, as well as others. And you can listen to a few chapters for free just to see if you would like it, if you could relate to it. And there's other programs, other articles, and videos that I produced. I have a coloring self-help book, which is basically a self-help for people with anxiety, but every chapter has a coloring illustration where you color. And the coloring illustration actually-- what's the word I'm looking for? It's basically a representation of what you learn in that chapter. It strengthens what you learn in that chapter. Kimberley: Cool. Ken: Yeah. And then a book called The Emetophobia Manual, which is a book for people who have fear of vomiting. Kimberley: Amazing. And we'll have all those links in the show notes for people as well. So, go to the show notes if you're interested in getting those links. Ken: Ken Goodman Therapy is the other website. It has similar information. Maria: I wanted to mention as well that I actually watched one of Ken's webinars quite by accident in the beginning before I realized I had health anxiety. And after watching it, I thought, “Oh my gosh, I've got that.” And so, it was hugely, hugely helpful because I think that having this for so many years and not realizing, there's a lot of people that still don't realize that they suffer from health anxiety. For me, as soon as I could label it as something, it was a relief because now I could find the tools and the help to work on it and get that relief. Kimberley: Amazing. Okay. Well, my heart is so full. Thank you both for coming on. It's really a pleasure to hear this story. So inspiring. So, thank you. Ken: Yeah. Thank you for doing this, Kimberley. Maria: Thank you. Ken: And thanks, Maria. ----- Thank you so much for listening. Before we finish up, we're going to do the review of the week. This is from kdeemo, and they said: “This podcast is a gift. I just found this podcast and I'm binging on the episodes. I learn something through each episode, and love her practical advice and tools. I feel like part of a community-what a gift!” Oh, I'm so, so grateful to have you kdeemo in our community. This is a beautiful, beautiful space. My hope is that it's different to every other podcast you listen to in that we give you a little bit of tools, a little bit of tips, but a huge degree of love and support and compassion and encouragement. So, thank you so much for your review. I love getting your reviews. It helps me to really double down in my mission here to give as many practical free tools as I can. It is true, it is a gift to be able to do that. So, if you could please leave a review, I would be so, so grateful. You can click wherever you're listening and leave a review there. Have a wonderful day.

Gravando anteriormente ao inicio do programa, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato comentam o BBB22. Venham descobrir onde nossos insurgentes, erram nos comentários e onde eles acertam.

No podcast mais secreto da internet, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato, batem um papo sobre o primeiro filme da Era Craig, como o Agente mais famoso da ficção. James Bond. Data de Lançamento: 16 de novembro de 2006 Direção: Martin Campbell Música Tema: You Know My Name. Elenco: Daniel Craig. Eva Green Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini.

No programa desta semana, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato, batem um papo sobre o mais novo sucesso da Netflix. Round 6, série Sul Coreana que volta a lembrar para pessoas que a vida na Coreia do Sul, não é tão fácil assim. Série: Round 6 Número de Episódios: 8 Você pode assistir: Netflix Elenco: Jung Ho-yeon, Lee Jung-jae, Gong Yoo, WWi Ha-Joo, Lee Yyoo-mi, Park Hae Soo

No programa desta semana, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato, gravam um programa sem pauta, mas como muito conteúdo. Venham descobrir o que os Insurgentes acharam de Esquadrão Suicida, Cobra Kai e outros assuntos neste Weekcast imperdível.

Voltamos com os Clássicos do Weekcast está de volta. Desta vez, vamos revisitar o episódio sobre "roubo de dados" por empresas. O que esses dados pode "No programa desta semana, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato batem um papo sobre o "roubo" de dados das empresas de internet e como isso influencia a vida das pessoas e como podem influenciar no futuro. De que quebra, Bigode fala um pouco sobre Westworld."

No programa de hoje, Bigode e Ken-Oh, batem um papo sobre um problema comum das redes sociais. O engajamento de conteúdos que não apoiamos, mas que acabamos dando um RT ou compartilhado para reclamar e acabamos divulgado mais esse tipo de postagens tóxicas. Seja do mundo da politica seja do mundo pop.

No programa desta semana, nossos insurgentes batem um papo nostálgico sobre o famoso desenho Ratos Motoqueiros. Venham descobrir as opiniões de Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato

No programa desta semana, Bigode, Ken-Oh e Pato, batem um papo sobre um possível Hq esquecida pelo publico dos quadrinhos. Batman - Eu, O Coringa. Lançamento: 2002 - Editora: Mythos Roteiro: Bob Hall Arte: Bob Hall Cores: Lee Loughridge Letrista: Daniel de Rosa Tradutor: Claudio Carina

The rumors Ken-not-be happening! Excuse the puns, but we are losing our minds at all the hot leaks and rumors The post Obi-Wan Ken-Oh-Boy! – FSW Radio Podcast appeared first on Faking Star Wars.

Neste décimo sétimo episódio eu, Maximus Decimus (@andreomaximus) recebo o integrante do Weekcast e fã original do Em Outro Castelo (junto com os Marcos e Malco), Ken-Oh (@kenoh_00) e o integrante do Em Outro Castelo que não jogou o jogo, General do Panda (@generaldopanda), para te avisar que você já está morto com Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise!   E não percam na semana que vem um dia quando voltaremos para falar de Ghost of Tsushima (ou outra coisa, vai saber). Então de logo o play no player abaixo e entre em SHOCK

An Untold Love Story (Part 1) - Ken and Joni TadaAn Untold Love Story (Part 2) - Ken and Joni TadaFamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Sufficient Grace Guests:                      Ken and Joni Tada              From the series:       An Untold Love Story (Day 2 of 2)  Bob:  Joni Eareckson Tada remembers a time in her marriage to her husband Ken when both of them were starting to drift farther and farther apart. Joni:  I was fearful that I was making Ken depressed. My disability was depressing my husband. So, I would be very careful to take care of as many routines as I could possibly do before he came home from school so that I would not have to walk on eggshells and ask him to do anything for me because I knew that asking too much of Ken would plummet him into depression. For a long time, it was this strange tap dance that we both played. Bob:  This is FamilyLife Today for Friday, May 3rd. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. We'll hear today what Joni and Ken Tada did when they realized they were drifting apart in marriage. Stay with us. And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. I've been thinking about—I have a son who just proposed to his girlfriend. They're going to get married soon. I was thinking, “If I could sit them down with anybody, for a little premarital counseling—the couple that could give them the benefits of great experience and theological understanding— Dennis:  You really had thought of me. Bob:  Ah-h-h. You were on the list. [Laughter] Dennis:  I'm kidding you. I know who's in the studio, Bob. Bob:  You were underneath our guests today. Dennis:  Way underneath the guests. Bob:  I just thought, “Would it be okay if we got some premarital counseling for John and Katie from our guests?” Just let them—they've written this book. Tell them about the book that they've written. Dennis:  Well, this book is called Joni and Ken: An Untold Love Story. So they need to hear a love story—one that's gone 30 years, plus. Bob:  And that has gone through some rocky times. Dennis:  Some? Bob:  Yes. Joni:  A few. Dennis:  A few, no doubt about it. Bob:  I just thought, “I wonder what counsel they would give to a couple, just getting started, on the frontend of the journey?” Dennis:  Well, let's ask them. Ken and Joni Eareckson Tada join us again on FamilyLife Today. Ken, Joni, welcome back. Joni:  Absolutely. It's good to be back. Ken:  Thanks. Dennis:  I know Ken would like to teach your son how to fly— Joni:  Fly fish. Dennis: —fly fish. I don't know if Ken ties the flies. Ken:  Yes, but— Bob:  Would that help his marriage if he learned how to fly fish? Ken:  It could, but don't do it the first year. [Laughter] Joni:  But you know what I had Ken's best man tell me on our wedding day? He drew me aside and whispered in my ear, “Let your husband keep his dreams.” I didn't know what he meant, at the time; but of course, this whole fly fishing thing—about which we joke—it's really important, I think, for guys to have that space—to have those times of connection with other men.  Ken:  And Joni's been my biggest supporter, during that—the whole time—not that I abuse it—but she knows that I need to have time with guys. Joni:  Oh, yes! You know how you abuse it; don't you? Ken:  How? Joni:  We're driving down the freeway and he'll say: “Hey, there's a Jaguar that just drove by. Joni, can I have a Jaguar?” “No! Of course, not!” Then, of course, that sets me up for—“Oh, then, you'll give me the fishing reel.” [Laughter] Okay. I know what you're up to! Ken:  It took 30 years—but you start high and you aim lower [Laughter]—and asking for a brand-new Jaguar convertible—obviously, I'm not going that direction—but a new fly rod—that would be kind of cool! Dennis:  Yes, there you go. Let's go back to Bob's question here. Let's put it on the line, here. Let's go back to your honeymoon to talk about some of the most important lessons you started out your marriage learning. Ken:  Well, the one lesson we learned is—I think Joni and I have said before—but we had friends who told us to go out and experiment. We decided, “No.”— Dennis:  Move in with each other. Joni:  Pretty much. Ken:  Well, for the weekend. Joni:  Just to try it out for the weekend—for a couple of weekends. Dennis:  And the reason is— Ken:  Because you know, with a disability, it was a little bit different than perhaps with an able-bodied person. Joni:  Expediency. Ken:  And just to see whether or not it would fit. Joni: If this was going to work. Bob:  See, I hear that story. I just imagine, in my head, you guys going off for a weekend and then you going, “Oh, I guess it's not going to work.”  “What? Hello!” Ken:  Where's the commitment? Bob:  Yes. How do you break that news to somebody, “I'm out of here because this part doesn't work.” Well guess what? You may have seasons where that part of your relationship doesn't work— Ken:  Exactly. Joni:  Exactly. Bob: —and you'd better figure out how to love one another in the midst of those seasons! Joni:  Absolutely, which is why—even before we got engaged and even during our engagement—there was no experimenting. There was no testing: “Let's try this out. How's this going to fly?” We went into our marriage, with our conscience tender and intact, with no violation of our convictions. As Ken has often said, “Of course, it made our honeymoon a little like handicap-awareness week; [Laughter] but that was okay.” Dennis:  Well, let's talk about that for a second—what that was like—because you write about it in your book. I wouldn't ask this question if you hadn't put this in print; alright? Ken:  Oh, there's nothing we wouldn't discuss. I think we're pretty well open with everything. Joni:  I put it delicately in print, though, Dennis—as delicately as I could. Bob:  And we can stay delicate right here. [Laughter] Dennis:  That's the truth, but you're a quadriplegic—for those who don't know your story. You had an accident when you were 17 years old. You had a great fear, going into this marriage, that he was going to find out what it meant to care for someone who was so helpless. Joni:  Okay, well let's talk about the brass tacks. Ken and I went off on our honeymoon. We took two friends—two girlfriends of mine—who stayed at a different hotel, down the beach—but they would come up during the mornings and evenings and kind of like educate Ken on my routines—not to throw everything at him at once—but just to kind of get his feet wet: “This is what it means for Joni to get up in the morning: bed, bath, exercising her legs, and then those toileting routines.” Well, I had to do a particular toileting routine in the evening. I don't know how to say this. Ken had to help carry me to the bathroom. I didn't make it. When that happened—it's funny—I choke up, talking about it now, 30 years later. Yet, it's so long ago and far away—but I was the young girl. I wanted everything to be perfect. I wanted my husband to have great illusions of me and: “This is going to be wonderful! Everything is so romantic!”   Yet, I remember that first night—lying in bed after the lights were out and all was quiet. I fought back the tears: “Oh, God! This man—You are going to have to give him grace. You're just going to have to. You have to give him grace because I don't know that even I have the grace. But help him through this, Lord. You can do this! Help him through this!”  It was a desperate cry of a very young bride, but I'm so glad God answered because things did not get easier in our ensuing life together. There were even greater challenges; but at every turn, I saw God's grace show up in my husband's life. That was huge, and that's growth. Dennis:  There are times, in every marriage, after the honeymoon—in fact, there are seasons that occur where you move into a bit of a valley. Obviously, your marriage started in one and has continued on in one—but you move into something where there is—you describe in your book as “negotiated spaces” and “demilitarized zones” in your relationship. You guys had a plateau. You kind of had the “Cease fire”— Joni:  Yes. Ken:  I think it was those middle years, where Joni was going to the ministry and I was teaching high school. Basically, we were living together but separate lives— parallel lives. Not that our marriage was bad—it's just I was occupied with what I was doing, as a high school teacher; and Joni was occupied in the ministry. We would travel during the summer. So, there were a lot of connections; but during those school days, I don't think we spent the kind of time that— Dennis:  You were teaching at the time. Ken:  I was teaching high school, yes. Joni:  And I was fearful that I was making Ken depressed. My disability was depressing my husband. So, I would be very careful to take care of as many routines as I could possibly do before he came home from school so that I would not have to walk on eggshells and ask him to do anything for me that might encroach on his emotions because I knew that asking too much of Ken would plummet him into depression.  For a long time, it was this strange tap dance that we both played—where we had to negotiate these spaces. But through it all—through it all—we both recognized we were doing this, and we didn't want to live this way. So, we prayed—prayed together and prayed separately— that God would help move us beyond this emotional fog that we were in to help us see the possibilities, in our marriage, that were ahead, on the horizon. Ken:  I think the other thing that happened during that time, Joni was—especially, this was earlier in our marriage—but because of your notoriety—people would recognize you when we were in public. One of the things that was really hard—that we look back on it now—was we'd go to church. There'd be a line of people, half an hour long, who would want to speak to you.  I was finding my—if I had a self-image problem, it was healed when I went to school because: “That was my classroom. Those were my students.” When I was in Burbank, those were people who recognized me—not that I needed it—but it was just that self-assurance, that affirmation that I was getting through what I was doing—that I think there was a balance there. Joni:  But to help move my husband past that: “Let's go to a different church. Let's get out of this big church. Let's go to some small, little church.” So, we started going to a small, very little church, just a few miles from our house. We stopped going to the big mega church, where everybody knew me, just trying to find ways, as a wife, to make it easier and finding that those negotiated spaces became smaller and smaller—to the point where we both were in it together. We weren't adversarial; we weren't on parallel tracks anymore. We were on the same track. It took a while to get there, but we did. Bob:  Did you feel invisible for a long period of time? Ken:  Boy, that's a great description of exactly what I was feeling. I mean, people would—we would stand in a crowd. I would stand next to Joni, and nobody would want to talk to me. Bob:  Yes. Ken:  But Joni has been so good about bringing me into the conversation. She would stop them and say: “I want to introduce you to my husband. He's standing right here.” She realized that, from that standpoint, that I needed that—at least, in those early years—that we were a couple. I think, over the years, it's gotten to the point where there are more people that recognize us as a couple. It hasn't been an issue. It actually has been kind of a benefit—that I think, for the both us—that we are recognized in a ministry for couples. Joni:  In those early years, when you were struggling with your self-image, those were the same times I was struggling with my self-image. I would hear him on the phone with all his buddies, talking about all kinds of things that he wouldn't talk about with me. I'd hear him hang up the phone, saying, “Love ya, Buddy.” It was like, “Ahh! Gee, I don't hear that tone of voice with me.” I remember being so— Dennis:  Now, wait a second— Joni:  No. I felt— Dennis:  —the Joni Eareckson Tada could have a pity party; really? Joni:  Oh, my goodness! In the early years of my marriage, when I would hear him on the phone with Jan or Pete, I'd be so jealous of his tone of voice with his guy friends. But okay, later on in the marriage, as we're praying—as I'm seeking God, “How can I get my husband out of depression?” Boing! This light bulb went off in my head. I realized he needs his guy friends. “Don't be jealous of them, Joni—” Bob:  Yes. Joni:  —“Put him in their camp.” So, I began encouraging Ken: “You know, your buddy Jan has been asking you to go fly fishing. Please, really, why don't you go fly fishing? Get away from the tuna boats—you gaff tuna, blood on the decks—guys with big bellies and cans of beer, cursing, and profanity—get away from that. Go fly fishing. It's more refined. You're going to enjoy it.”  I was the one who kind of pushed him—not so much because I wanted to get him away from the tuna boats—but I knew, that if he was with his Christian guy friends, that it would be invigorating—that he would get a validation, as a man, from other men that would help him and help our marriage. I think that was one of the best moves I made to help you up and out of your depression. Ken:  Joni was the instrumental tool for getting me into fly fishing. I really didn't, at the time, want to go fly fishing. I didn't want another sport; but she said, “No, you ought to go.” More than the fly fishing, I have a friend—we have a ministry to men. We use fly fishing as kind of like— Bob:  The bait. Ken:  —the bait; exactly. It gives guys a chance to get their hearts back. Bob:  Yes. Ken:  We talk about all kinds of things. We use John Eldredge's book, Wild at Heart, but— Joni:  But you got your heart back. Ken:  —but I got my heart back. Joni is a big supporter of what I do there, but one of the things that happened was—a little exercise that we had was go out and try to hear what God had to say to us. The first time I did this, I didn't hear a thing. Two years later—I can tell you exactly where I was—on a fly fishing trip. A gentleman said, “Take this afternoon and go out and try to hear God's voice.” That afternoon, I heard God say to me—not in an audible voice—but I heard Him say, “Joni is the most important gift I've given you. You take care of her.” Dennis:  And in your book, you talk about when he came back from that trip. You saw it in his eyes.  Joni:  Oh, my goodness! He stood in the bedroom and said, “Joni, you're never going to believe what God said to me.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. rocked back and forth on his heels, and said, “God said that you're the most precious gift, and I'm to take care of you, and I'm going to do it.” It was like a breath of fresh air had just blown through our bedroom. It was like the fog of depression is lifting—I can see the sun, the clouds. There's hope. My husband likes me! He wants to take care of me, for the sake of Christ. I began to see all my prayers answered or, at least, beginning to get answers.  And now—even back then—when his buddies call the house, and I get them on the phone, before I hand it over to Ken: “Jan, God bless you. Sir, I don't know what you're doing in my husband's life. Keep it up. I know you're memorizing Scripture. I know you're doing some new Jerry Bridges Bible study together on the phone. Keep it up! I love it. You're going in the right direction.” I'm thanking Pete, I'm thanking Chris, and I'm thanking Jan—all these guys—that I used to be jealous of—they're the best because they help my husband be the man that he can be. Dennis:  And that story occurred—what I want our listeners to hear—21 years into your marriage.  Bob:  And the next time you go out with Pete, and Jan, and Chris, we've got a resource for you to take with you—a Bible study for guys called Stepping Up™, based on Dennis's book by that title. It's a video resource, and it'll spark some great discussion with you and the guys. Okay? Ken:  Great. Thank you, Bob. Dennis:  One last story. Joni, this one's for you. You battled cancer. You went through chemotherapy. In the process of going through that, fell prey to pneumonia. You had a moment, in the midst of that, that was pretty grim. You had your own encounter when God spoke to you. Would you share with our listeners that story? I think that is incredibly powerful. Joni:  Well, as a quadriplegic, I'm susceptible to things like pneumonia. I have extremely limited lung capacity. I had to be in the hospital for nine or ten days. My husband, bless his heart, made a little cot, out of a couple of plastic chairs. He slept by my bedside. Instead of me having to be intubated, Ken got up every night—would cough me—pound on my chest. One night, I was so exhausted. I had so flattened out, emotionally. I was crying out to God. I had no physical ability. My lungs were gurgling. I could hardly breathe. I felt like I was drowning. I just didn't want to have to get my husband up another time. I remember saying, “Lord Jesus, I need You. I need to see You tonight. I just need to feel Your touch. I need to feel Your hand on my head. I need You!”  I fell into a sleep. Then, when I woke up, with the gurgling and needed to be coughed again, Ken came over to my hospital bedside. As he began to lift me up, I looked at him, wide-eyed, and I said, “You're Him! Oh my goodness, you're Him!” Jesus visited me, that night, through my husband. I felt his hand on my forehead, and it was the touch of Jesus. I felt him push on my abdomen, and it was the strength of Jesus. I felt him pound on my back to give me air, and it was Jesus, the Breath of Life. Everything about my husband was Jesus. I said to Ken, “You're Him! Jesus showed up and you're Him!” It was such a beautiful revelation of how God can answer prayer—the prayers that are desperate and show up best through them. That was a beautiful moment. You know, we've talked a lot about cancer. We've talked a lot about quadriplegia. I'm going to confess to you those things are a cinch compared to the daily grind of pain that I deal with. Through my PET scans—a couple more years, maybe—I'll be declared cancer-free. Things are looking hopeful. My quadriplegia—I kind of know that route. But boy, the daily grind of pain is so hard. My husband, a couple of weeks ago, did a beautiful thing. Before he saw me head out the door, he could see the look in my eyes that I was going to have a very painful day. He said: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” He quick ran and got a stick-um, and etched on it a big “C”, and put it over my heart—slapped it right over my heart. He said: “There you go, Joni. You've got courage, and you're going to rise to that challenge.”  I think what I love best about my husband is that he can find the infinitesimally small Christ-like characteristics in my life—he can find them, pick them out, and affirm them. He can water them and nurture them with actions such as he did with that stick-um on my chest. He believes that I can be courageous. I don't want to disappoint my wonderful husband. I want to be courageous, in Christ, for his sake and for the sake of the Gospel. That is, honestly, how I get through the toughest days of my pain. Dennis:  You both are courageous. Recently, I did a little Bible study in Joshua 1—three places where courage comes from: God's mission, being obedient to God's Word, and third, practicing His presence. As I'm watching your lives, as a couple, you're on mission. You're on task, as a couple. You're about the glory of God and running the race to finish it well. Secondly, you've both been obedient. You've kept your covenant. You're not only still married—you love each other. And third, you're practicing the presence of God, whether it be fly fishing or whether it be flat on your bed, in a hospital room, battling pneumonia. You're experiencing the presence of God, and you're bringing a lot of hope to a lot of people. May God's favor be upon this book and you guys, as you go forward. Joni:  Thank you, Dennis. Ken:  Thank you, Dennis and Bob. Bob:  We love you guys and hope folks will get a copy of your book. It's called Joni and Ken: An Untold Love Story. Thirty years of marriage—as you guys peel back the veneer and show us what real marriage is all about. I hope listeners will go online at FamilyLifeToday.com to order a copy. Again, the website is FamilyLifeToday.com. Or you can call to request a copy of the book, Joni and Ken: An Untold Love Story. Call 1-800-358-6329; that's 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then, the word, “TODAY”. Don't forget the title of the book—Joni and Ken: An Untold Love Story. We'd love to get a copy to you. Now, I know most of you are excited that summer is almost here—got graduations happening this month and all kinds of activities during the month of May—and then, it's summertime, just around the corner. I love summertime, too. I love vacations. I love the break you get. I love the warmer weather. But for a ministry, like FamilyLife Today, summer can be a challenging time because a lot of listeners get out of the normal pattern of listening and out of the normal pattern of helping to support the radio program. Donations to the ministry fall off a little bit during the summer. We had some friends, of the ministry, who came to us, knowing that that happens every summer. They said, “We'd like to help you guys build a little surplus—a cushion before June, and July, and August hit.” They have put together a matching-gift fund of $576,000. They have said, “We'll match every donation you receive, between now and the end of May, dollar for dollar, until that fund is gone.”  We appreciate their generosity; but obviously, the only way we can take advantage of their generosity is if listeners, like you, will go to FamilyLifeToday.com, click the button that says, “I CARE”, and make an online donation. Or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Make a donation over the phone. When you do that, your donation will be matched, dollar for dollar, with funds from the matching-gift fund. You will help us get ready for the summer months ahead. So, can we ask you to do that? Go to FamilyLifeToday.com. Click the button that says, “I CARE”, and make a donation; or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Make a donation over the phone. We appreciate your support, and we are always happy to hear from you. And we hope you have a great weekend. Hope you and your family are able to worship together this weekend. I hope you can join us back on Monday when we're going to talk with Laura Petherbridge about some of the challenges that step-moms face. Ron Deal will be here with us, as well. I hope it works out for you to be here. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. Have a great weekend. We will see you back Monday for another edition of FamilyLife Today.  FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow. We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you've benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?  Copyright © 2013 FamilyLife. All rights reserved.www.FamilyLife.com    

This podcast episode is from December 2016. Now my brother Ken has two cats of his own, Lucy and Jackson. When he comes home at Christmas and for a couple weeks in the summer, there are five cats in my mother's house! ---------- LnR 086 I call Ken (Replay) Nancy: Hey, Kenny, when did you (whendidja/whenja) get home? Ken: Oh, about two hours ago. N: Did you (didja) have a good drive? K: Yeah, no problems. I drove through Atlanta before their morning rush hour, so that was OK. The highways through Alabama and Mississippi were fine, too. It rained a little when I hit Arkansas, but not for long. N:That's good. Did you (didja) enjoy Mom's surprise? K: Yeah, that was so funny! I couldn't believe that Mom had gotten a new cat! I was so surprised! N: You've got to (gotta) send me some pictures. K: Yeah, sure will. N: Well, I'd better let you go (letcha) go. K: Yeah, it's getting late here. Almost time for bed. N: Sleep well. Tell Mom I love her. Love you, too. I'll call again on Christmas Eve.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Wendi: So I wanna know who your basketball team is?Ken: Who my basketball team is?Wendi: Yeah.Ken: Oh, my favorite pro team?Wendi: Now, like who's your team?Ken: Oh, OK. I'm from Atlanta so my favorite team is the Hawks, unfortunately. For the past six or seven years, they have sucked it up royally and they haven't been much to cheer for but they're signs of them turning it around. They've got a nice young core. Like we have the slam dunk champion on your team. A nice free agent pick-up recently. Hopefully, in a couple of years, we'll make the playoffs, something to cheer for.Wendi: Alright, in any basketball game I've ever been to, it's like, at half-time, those cheerleader girls come out and cheer. What's the relationship between basketball and cheerleading?Ken: It's not the relationship between basketball and cheerleading so much as the relationship between the basketball fan and the cheerleader and that a basketball fan is normally a man, and men like to look at beautiful women moving around I think. That's the relationship. It's just a crowd-pleaser more than anything else.Wendi: That's an honest answer, Ken.Ken: I don't think the players are any more motivated than they would be just because some girls are dancing around in skimpy outfits but the fans still love it.Wendi: Fair enough... Alright, if you think of all the teams you have ever been on, what characterizes the best type of teammate to have?Ken: The best type of teammate to have is one who is a good leader. I like good leaders, like people who know how to win, know how to get their teammates involved in the game. They motivate you. They praise you when you do well. They'll give you constructive criticism when you're not playing as well as you could be. But ultimately they know the strengths and weaknesses of each of the players on the team and they'll make the most of it based on what they feel is best for the team.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Wendi: So. I wanna know why you think The Simpsons were so successful?Ken: They have a kind of humor that funny to people of all ages. It's funny to people from all different walks of life. So I guess it appeals to the masses more than any other show.Wendi: But how do they do that? How do you make something appealing to 8-year olds and fifty-year-olds?Ken: Yeah. It's difficult. Like I haven't really thought about it all that much but like they have jokes that only old people would get and they have the fart jokes that, you know, children love at the same time, so. Yeah. So I guess that's what, yeah. It's a phenomenon.Wendi: It is crazy. The thing that I think is wild about that show, is that just the colors even. Do you know what I mean? It's so basic. Kind of like the lines and the colors. Everything is like incredibly basic, yet it's so, kind of strong and powerful. It's really weird. Do you have any idea of what I'm talking about?Ken: Not really. No.Wendi: It's just like a coloring book kind of with bright colors filling in the lines. I don't know. The animation, just the style, all of it. It's just all so simple yet, I don't know, it really works, like the characters and everything.Ken: It doesn't have to be visually stimulating, or visually...Wendi: Like sophisticated or anything.Ken: Sophisticated to be funny, just like South Park isn't at all yet it's one of the more popular shows on TV right now.Wendi: But I don't know. I think one of the really funny things about the Simpsons are like the shapes of the people and stuff, like the way like that guy has the big kind of beak, like the bartender guy.Ken: Oh, yeah, Mo.Wendi: He has like a beak. He almost looks like a duck in a way. And it's like you know. Marge's hair and then like Homer's crazy beer belly. It's all just so funny and then like the people that are supposed to be stupid like they look stupid. You know, they have the really like stupid look. Like hammerhead sharks looking.Ken: Yeah. Yeah.Wendi: It's just all brilliant.

Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada, and welcome to Joni and Friends. You know, um, I’m winding up this treatment for cancer and I have received so many letters and emails, posts on Facebook from you friends listening, and asking about some of the details of what it’s been like to go through this battle. And I wish I could answer every single letter, but, you know, I thought today it might be good to get my husband in here, into the studio in front of the microphone to help answer some of those questions. Our listeners know that 8 years ago I had my first bout against cancer, but we’re back in the boxing ring with this cancer again, coming up on the last few radiation treatments that I have to have. KEN: You know what Jon? If it wasn’t for the people who are out there praying for us, it would have made this journey an awfully lot more difficult. JONI: Absolutely. I have felt, and I think you have too, we’re like hydroplaning on people’s intercessions. KEN: Aw man. JONI: It’s amazing. And we need it because for me, going to radiation, it’s not like anybody else, who might change their clothes and get into a hospital gown, and hop up on the table. It’s a real feat of energy and effort, isn’t it? KEN: We need to rely on friends, as well as the technicians who are there. It’s interesting, with chemotherapy it’s different. You go in, and you get an infusion. But with radiation, you have to get up on the table, every day. We couldn’t do it by ourselves. JONI: I’ve got one x-ray technician, usually it’s Steve or Jason, on the other side of the table, he’s reaching over, and on one, two, three, you guys kind of like lift me up on this high table, and get me situated just perfectly, so that I’m in line with the machine. It’s not easy. But I’m kind of glad that it’s not, because it gives us a chance to involve more people in our journey. Not just the girlfriends who come with me to help me get undressed, but the x-ray technician, like Jason and Paul and Gene and others that we’ve met, who assist me in getting up on that table. They see our vulnerability. And when we enlist them to help us, it kind of like gives us a platform to share the Good News of Jesus. Doesn’t it? KEN: Oh, absolutely. It’s a team effort. JONI: Have you given Joni books to all of them? KEN: I start off with tracts… JONI: Okay. KEN: You know, the Joni tract, and then develop a little bit of relationship with them. And I say, “You know what? Joni’s written this great story, I’d like to share with you…” and then they take the books and are very thankful. And hopefully we get a chance to talk with them… JONI: Great! When I was going through chemotherapy 8 years ago, in the chemo lab, someone had put out a big bowl of these little rocks, with words like hope, and breathe, and faith, and also some scriptures written on these rocks. And it was so encouraging to know that somebody had prayed over all those rocks. And the people like me who take one. And I still have my rock from 8 years ago. And I thought I’d pass on the idea to these other people. And part of what has inspired us is Genesis chapter 50, verse 20. You know, the story of Joseph when he tells his wicked brothers, “You might have meant this for evil, but God intended it for good...” And I love this part, “… for the saving of many lives.” If anybody gets cancer, if anybody breaks their neck, if anybody gets the flu, has an injury or illness, or experiences brokenness, it should all be for the platform of showcasing your trust and confidence in God to others. KEN: People say isn’t it a shame that Joni’s gotten this cancer again, but if there are lives that are going to be changed, and will come to know Jesus because of it, then it was all well worth it. JONI: So it’s all an opportunity to spread the Good News of Jesus… which has made this radiation cancer battle, journey thing, so much more meaningful. KEN: And I think as we learned from the first bout, it’s brought us closer together. JONI: Yeah. KEN: Cause we can’t do it without each other. JONI: No we can’t. Well Ken we’re finishing up, as I said, this cancer, radiation treatment. It’s been 35 tough, difficult sessions but with your help, and with the help of the x-ray technicians and with the help of our friends listening, who are praying, it’s been an amazing journey of faith and a chance to share the Gospel. Right? KEN: Right! Onward and upward, cancer be gone! © Joni and Friends

A disability doesn’t have to destroy you – that’s today’s issue on "Joni and Friends". Hi, I'm Joni Eareckson Tada and I'll be the first to confess: when you get that bad medical report, when you learn the broken neck means paralysis, when you hear you have some terminal disease, when any of these physical hardships hit you broadside, it can come close to breaking you. I’ve experienced many of these things and Jesus is right when He said, “In this world you will have trouble.” Because this world is so very broken, and God wired it to be very difficult. Disability is part of it and it is not easy. And it’s the little things that can get you down -- like this battle with cancer you know I'm going through right now? It’s making it harder for me to feed myself with my right arm where the muscles have been weakened where I had the tumor removed. Suddenly something that I had taken for granted for decades has been taken away from me – so for the first time, as I sit at the dining room table with Ken (having to feed myself everything on my plate), well… let’s just say Ken has to help me, and sometimes he has to have the Kleenex nearby, because it’s just so disappointing. But I have learned these many years that embracing God in the midst of a physical affliction involves a lifetime of small choices. And if you are going through a physical hardship right now, I invite you to join me in committing to four simple things: First, give thanks to God for great and small things. I Thessalonians 5:18 tells us that in everything we are supposed to give thanks. So as I’m sitting there at the dining room table, I’m thanking God -- but I can’t feed myself as well as I used to. It prevents bitterness from getting a toehold. Next, if you want to learn how to embrace God in the midst of a disability, learn to look out for other’s interests before your own. I often say to Ken: “No, no, it’s your turn to take a bite of your own food.” Philippians Chapter 2 tells us to do that, even though a disability seems to scream for your own attention; even though your arthritis or autoimmune disease can turn your focus inward, learn to resist that temptation, and always think about other’s needs. I’ll encourage Ken ‘Oh, take a break from helping me, you help yourself.’ Another tip: Take responsibility. Galatians Chapter 6 tells us that we need to carry the load that God gives us. Yes, there are many ways others can share your burden, but you are the one who must face your own physical limitations head-on. So as much as possible, manage the needs surrounding your disability. Are there things you can do for yourself? Then do them (I tell you, trying to feed myself with weak muscles is not easy. More food spills on my lap than gets in my mouth). But I want to encourage you as the weeks have gone by and as I am getting near to the end of radiation, I am able to feed myself a lot better and I was never so thankful as when I was finally able to feed myself again with my right arm). Finally, if you want to learn how to embrace God in your hardship, then don’t forget to have hope in your future. God's plans are not to harm your soul, but to strengthen it, to refine and mature your soul. Friend, our cynical world is looking for Christians who will act on their beliefs and exhibit grace in hardship. So I’d like you to join me in this challenge. After all, He does have the final word. God gives it and the word is ‘hope’. Hey, if you’d like to learn how to help people with disabilities like me, then contact joniradio.org and ask for your free copy of “Start with Hello.” Because there’s so much hope available for anyone with a disability, and I should know having had to learn to feel myself all over again. So go to joniradio.org today and ask for the free booklet “Start with Hello.”

In this episode of Building Infinite Red, Jamon, Ken, and Todd touch on the exciting world of lawyers, accountants and bookkeepers, as well as a variety of finance-related topics such as cash flow and different types of accounting. Be sure to listen to the end of the episode as Jamon shares the vision for Season 2 of Building Infinite Red. Show Links & Resources YNAB – You Need A Budget Saturday Night Live Highlight: First CityWide Change Bank Episode Transcript TODD WERTH: Hello, everyone. Today we were talking about which topic to talk about, and we had the idea, how can we come up with a topic that's extremely boring, that no one wants to talk about, but actually is super important? So, we're going to talk about lawyers, accountants, bookkeepers, finance, and other things. Basically, how to start a business and still feed your family. Let's start off with you, Ken. If I were starting in business and you and I are sitting in the airport and I knew you had started one and I asked, "Hey, Ken. What should I worry about first off when I'm starting a business?" What would you say? KEN MILLER: I would tell you to go find a good accountant and a good lawyer right away. You don't need to pay them to set up the business for you. You can do that yourself or you can use a service like LegalZoom or something like that. But you need to have somebody who is familiar with the kind of business that you're planning to do. We have a great lawyer who happens to specialize in digital agencies. I've got an accountant that I've personally worked with for many, many years. It's not the cheapest, like you want your accountant to be good. A bookkeeper is sort of a different matter since your accountant is not doing your day to day books, and you don't necessarily need a bookkeeper right away because you're probably not going to have a lot of transactions right away. To be honest, I found it was helpful for me to just do it personally for a little period because then I understood what was going on better. JAMON HOLMGREN: Ken, what's the difference for those who may not know between an accountant and a bookkeeper? KEN: Well, I'm told bookkeeper is a little bit old fashioned, but it's still very descriptive. Your accountant, aka your CPA, your Certified Public Accountant, that is someone who will do your state and federal and maybe even international taxes for you. They may or may not have people who will keep your books and stuff. Now, bookkeepers, they're the ones who will record transactions coming in and going out basically, so that your books are an accurate reflection of what's happening in your business. Todd, do you want to interject? TODD: Yeah, just real quick. Sorry to be pedantic, but my wife's an accountant. Bookkeepers often are not accountants. Some of them are just people who started doing books at their company and continue to do it. When you get to accountants, you have two types of accountants: One is CPA, which is a tax accountant; and then there are other accountants who specialize in corporate stuff, like my wife. She went to college for it and is highly trained. KEN: That's the kind I recommend you get, is the kind of who is trained in accounting practices. JAMON: First of all, what's the more modern term for a bookkeeper? Is there? KEN: I think Heather liked the term, what was it? Financial assistant, something like that? JAMON: Okay. TODD: I think that's what she said. Heather is my wife, by the way. JAMON: And then secondly, what does an accountant give you that a financial assistant does not? KEN: Well, A, They are literally certified by the state. And B, They have experience in tax law. JAMON: CPA does, but they're more corporate accountant. They're going to bring more like ... It's my understanding that they can bring more strategic ... KEN: Yeah, they can be more strategic help, they can help you design your practices for paying people, for collecting money, because there's just a lot of i's and t's that need to be dotted and crossed. JAMON: Yeah, that makes sense. TODD: Yeah, not to keep on interrupting about accounting. Sorry, my wife's an accountant. JAMON: We're gonna play a little game. How many times will Todd mention that his wife is an accountant? TODD: All CPAs are accountants. Not all accountants are CPAs. My wife has absolutely no interest in being a CPA, she never did, it had nothing to do with her job. However, if you need ... One of the things she specializes in is international accounting. So, a bookkeeper is someone who enters data, basically. They're gonna get bills in from the outside via mail, they're gonna enter those into the bookkeeping system, or the accounting system, they're gonna pay invoices, whatever. They're a clerk. An accountant is more like a programmer. They investigate where things went wrong, they figure out the best ways to do things. If you have a half million dollars in pounds in the UK, and you need to transfer in the US as US dollars, how do you go about that? There's very different ways. Some are very expensive, some are not. So, that's ... An accountant spends a lot of time doing strategic-type accounting stuff, as opposed to data entry, which is more what your bookkeeper does. JAMON: Yeah, so when I started ClearSight back in 2005, one of my early employees, his dad was a controller, which is like kind of an accountant, but it's specifically to a- TODD: That's really interesting, Jamon. Did you know my wife was an accountant? JAMON: I did not know that, Todd. I hope you remind me again. A controller is basically, it's a type of accountant that's kind of high up in a company and focused on ... Basically, in charge of the company's finances, and ... So, he was a controller and I went to lunch with him and I asked him for advice. And the first question he asked me, this was kind of interesting because I did not expect this, he said, "How's your accounts receivable?" And I was like, "Uh ... I know what that is, but what do you mean by 'how is it'?" And he kind of helped me think through my terms, like how long until the payment was due, and was I taking money upfront? Which I wasn't, weirdly, I wasn't taking money upfront. I was just doing the work and hoping I'd get paid. TODD: Hoping is the key term. JAMON: Hoping, yeah. And more than once I didn't get paid. And that sucked, especially when I wasn't getting paid very much. KEN: That's definitely one of the harder things to learn when you start doing this, is if you've only ever worked at a company, you don't realize how much effort goes into just getting people to actually pay you, right? 99% of the time it isn't out of any malice, it's not people trying to mess with you, it's just their processes are also run by humans. Maybe they're a small company, maybe they're a big company and something got lost, or things didn't get signed off correctly, right? There's just a million little things that have to be kept track of. And so, whoever is doing your day to day accounting, be nice to them. TODD: Yes. KEN: Be nice to them because you really need to trust them to be on top of what they're doing. TODD: You do not want to piss off an accountant if you value eating, for sure. Cause they won't do anything wrong, but they will sure drag their feet on your particular account. One other things I wanted to add, especially with larger companies or companies that have accounting departments, accounting is never personal, okay? And Ken said they probably don't want to mess with you. They may not want to mess with you, but they may actually have a policy not to pay their vendors, which seems absurd but it's true. So, in other words, if you're sitting in an executive meeting at a company that has 5,000 people, and your cash-flow ... you need some cash or whatever. The directive to the accounting department could be, "Only pay the vendors with the highest interest, the top 25% of them. Do not pay anyone else." And so, it's not ... they're not trying to get to you, it's just business. KEN: I think it's also very tempting when you're ... If you're a creative person and you're getting into business and you wanna be able to be a partner to your clients, and that's all very laudable and we wanna do that and we strive to do that. But at the end of the day, when you're negotiating a contract, you have to take it seriously. You have to take what it says seriously because there may come a situation where it's no longer you and the friendly person you're talking to, it's just you and the contract and someone unfriendly. Or you and the contract and someone not unfriendly, but as Todd says they're just ... implementing a policy. It's a lot harder to do something about it than possible which ... It really highlights how important the relationship is, as well. So, you need to have a good contract that actually reflects what you and your counter-party actually mean. And you have to keep that relationship good all the way through. JAMON: Absolutely. We had a client a while back that wanted to use their own contract, which is not uncommon. I mean, we have our own kind of Master Services Agreement that we'll send over, but in this case they had their own, they wanted to send it over. And this sort of brings it back to having a good lawyer, because in this case, something fell through the cracks and we signed it without sending it over to our lawyer. And this was a big mistake because- TODD: Big mistake. KEN: Big mistake. Did we mention it was a very big mistake? TODD: My wife, who's an accountant, by the way, said it was a huge mistake. JAMON: Oh, she is? Oh, that's interesting. But what happened was the project started off really well, and it went very well through the first month. And then, abruptly, we don't know what happened because the whole way through the client was telling us we were doing good work. Even after things went weird, he was telling us that we were doing good work, which really didn't make sense. But he wanted out of this contract, or he wanted to hold our feet to the fire. And we realized, and we sent our contract over to our lawyer, and Ken ... Wasn't his response something like- KEN: He said it was the most punitive contract he'd ever seen. JAMON: And he said that it was designed to be used as a weapon. TODD: Yes. That's what he said. JAMON: Which was not a great place to be in after we had already signed this thing. TODD: Against us, by the way. Not for us. KEN: Yeah. JAMON: So, luckily this particular client ended up taking a route ... It wasn't an easy route, but he took a route out of our contract that let us off the hook, essentially, with some work from Ken. So, thanks Ken. But we made it through that one, but not everybody would. That could be a really big problem. So, having a good attorney, which we did, and actually using him, which we did not, is really important when you're putting these contracts together that you're talking about. And then, of course, there's a certain amount of teeth to it, so they will pay you. KEN: We designed our standard contract to be, we think, really, very fair. JAMON: I think so, yeah. KEN: And so, if a client wants to use their own contract, we now ... It always goes to the lawyer. It doesn't matter what it costs. And he's very reasonable with how he charges for that- TODD: Sorry to interrupt. That's a good rule. If you don't feel that it's worth paying your lawyer the $300 an hour, or whatever your lawyer costs, it goes up from there, trust me, because this project isn't big enough, then don't take the project. And that sounds harsh, but if you can't pay your lawyer to look at the contract, then don't sign the contract. It's not worth it to you. KEN: If it's a small project, we don't accept- JAMON: Yeah, and that's why we have a standard contract, because the lawyer drafted it. And so, we can send it over and we don't have to pay him every time. Of course, it costs more to have him draft it, but then if they sign it then we know that we're good to go. But if they want their own contract, you need to have it reviewed by your attorney. And if you don't know of an attorney, you can ask around on social media and stuff, you can generally get some recommendations. TODD: One thing I do wanna say, though. And this is often somewhat shocking to people who have never ran a business, who worked for other people or other corporations throughout their career. The world for you as a business owner, is very different than the world for you as an employee. If your employer doesn't pay you, you can go to the labor board, and the government will come in and they will sue that company and they'll get that money for you. Because of that, your employer's gonna pay you. KEN: And your wages are legally privileged. So, if they're in bankruptcy, you get your money, not necessarily the very first, but it's a very high priority. It's a very high priority debt. TODD: Correct. If you have a personal contract with ... between two people or between two companies, or between you and a company, there are no such protections whatsoever. You will get paid if the person who's paying you wants to pay you. If they don't pay you, there's no government agency you're going to go to who's gonna help you- KEN: Well, there's the courts. JAMON: The court, basically. TODD: ... other than the courts. And if you're talking about a $10,000 bill that they owe you, you are not going to court for that. You can try to go small claims court, that kind of thing. But the reality is you're not going to go to court for that. And people know this. And there's a lot of people ... And you're like, "Well, you know, I did this contract with Bob, and Bob's wonderful. I mean, I love Bob. He spends his time saving orphan kittens on the weekends." That's great, but Bob's company was just bought by Joe, and Joe is a complete jerk. And Joe now has all your contracts. And Joe used to be a lawyer, bless his heart. And Joe knows that you're not gonna do anything when he doesn't pay your $10,000, so he just refuses to pay you. JAMON: By the way, this is not a hypothetical, this happened to me. TODD: And so, we changed the names, obviously. But Joe does that, and there's really nothing you're gonna do and you're just gonna lose that $10,000. You can try to do collections and irritate them into paying you. But here's the raw fact, if they need you for something they will pay you. Meaning if you still have work to do, they will pay you because they need you. Be very weary of the end of a working engagement when they no longer need you. KEN: This is not to say that everybody is like this. There's plenty of extremely honorable- TODD: Like Bob, Bob's one of them. KEN: ... companies out there. Yes, there's many, many, many great, wonderful, honorable clients who pay what they owe, and they would never screw you. TODD: Correct. KEN: But there's more people out there who, like I said, not necessarily even out of malice, sometimes just out of laziness, kind of don't get around to it. TODD: Another example is if you get a contract where you take liability for stuff that you really have no control over. So, you're like, "Well, Bob's not gonna sue me. Bob's a great guy. He has the same values as I do." But Bob gets successful and Google comes and buys Bob, trust me. Google's lawyers will sue you. If they can, they will. It's not personal, it's just business. JAMON: Beyond accounts receivable, which is obviously a big topic ... And by the way, get as much money upfront as you can. That's a very straightforward way to fix some of this stuff. But beyond that, accountants can also give you a really great insight into the engine of your business. So, they're sort of like your oil pressure. They're your check engine light. And they will give you information that allows you to make decisions, business decisions, going forward. So, an example of this is how much are we gonna pay our employees for bonuses? We need to know what we can afford and what's budgeted for that. Other examples are could we go out and maybe acquire a small business? Or can we invest a bunch of money into R&D? These are all things that we've actually looked at within Infinite Red over the past three years. And we needed to have good information from our bookkeepers and our accountants. And we haven't had always that. That has actually been one of the stumbling blocks that we've run into with Infinite Red, is that we've run into situations where we've been fed what turned out to be inaccurate information. And we've made decisions based on that, and it's caused the engine to run more roughly. KEN: Suffice to say, you really need it to be accurate. So, one of the things that we've done to help make that be the case is that we have our CPA, our tax accountant, and our bookkeepers are totally different, so that we at least have two competent people looking at it periodically. It's not a perfect safeguard by any stretch of the imagination, but it does help a little bit. JAMON: And it's tempting to have one company do both, right? KEN: It is tempting. And I would argue you should not do that. JAMON: Always keep them separate. TODD: Yeah, I would say at the beginning, you do your bookkeeping and then let your CPA do the taxes. And we get to a point where ... For instance, this is the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant. If you're setting up your books and you're setting up your own chart of accounts, and that kind of stuff, a bookkeeper will just do it. They'll do what you say. Put this in here. Do this, do that. An accountant will say, "Okay. You see how you set up your accounts here? Later, when you get audited ..." And then you're like, "Why would we get audited, what does that even mean?" Well if you need a big loan, the banks are gonna require an audit your finances. Obviously that's the audit on the tax side, but that's your tax accountant. And so, what she'll do is she'll say, "Look, I've been through many audits, this is what they're going to look for. You should set it up this way so that that audit goes smoothly so that loan you need ... Say you get a big new client and you need $250,000 to service that client, and you're gonna make millions? Delaying that loan by a week or two could be disastrous." So, that's the difference between an accountant and a bookkeeper. They know what they know, and they know what's possibly gonna happen. JAMON: Yeah. Banks are a whole other aspect about this that we could talk about. One of the things about banks is that they are generally very slow. You're just one file on their desk. They're not particularly invested in making sure you succeed. And it can really trip you up. Like if you need that loan ... We've been in a situation where we said, "Hey, we wanna borrow some money for a particular thing." And it took ... I think ... I don't remember the timeline, but it was months longer than I expected. Like it was a lot longer. KEN: It took forever. JAMON: Yes. And it felt like most of the issue was on the bank side. Now, being prepared for that, as Todd said, is really important. KEN: In that particular case, there was something that didn't get filed correctly two years ago with the ... I mean, it's ... JAMON: So, another aspect of this, and we can touch a little bit on another property of our business, and that is remote work, is the- TODD: Oh God, banks and remote work. JAMON: Banks, as well as government agencies ... Ken, you've had to set up I don't know how many states now for Infinite Red employees. KEN: Seven, and I need to set up an eighth. JAMON: Yeah. So, this is a whole aspect of kind of the boring ... We're talking about the boring parts of business. But if you're starting a remote work company and you're hiring people from all over, you need to keep this in mind that you're gonna have to set up, what's it called? Nexus? If you have nexus, you have to set up the state ... KEN: Yeah. And having an employee- TODD: What is nexus, by the way? KEN: Nexus just means that you legally exist in a location. And typically the place where you have nexus or not have nexus, as a US company, is in individual states. So, if you have ordered something online and you live in a sales tax state, but they didn't charge you sales tax, the reason they didn't have to do that is because they don't have nexus in your state. So, famously Amazon, for a long time, didn't have nexus in California, or at least they argued that they didn't. And so, Californians didn't have to pay sales tax when they ... I mean, nominally they were supposed to be paying it to the state, but Amazon didn't have to collect it for them. So, that's nexus, and it applies to all kinds of tax, not just sales tax. So, for example, basically everywhere we have an employee, we have to pay taxes. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: This is one of the less glamorous, less wonderful parts about remote work, to be honest. JAMON: There are PEOs or POEs ... KEN: PEOs. JAMON: PEOs, and those will ... They're basically companies that have all this stuff figured out already and you hire your employees through them. KEN: Yes. I believe there's some issues with that. If I were doing this over again, I probably would go with a PEO to avoid a lot of that stuff. JAMON: They're expensive, but they kind of ... They make it ... It's sort of like, in a software engineering world, using Heroku, which kind of spins it all up for you, versus setting up individual Amazon AWS servers. TODD: The other problem with banking, especially with governments in general, is their complete ignorance of the laws about things like signatures. So, I think this is a funny story. So, Ken sent over something that needed to be signed. And I have a bunch of digital signatures of mine that I apply to PDFs. Which is my real signature, and it's perfectly legal, as my wife, who's an accountant, would say. She actually worked for a company that did digital signatures- JAMON: You said your wife's an account? TODD: Yeah, my wife Heather is an accountant. I don't know if I mentioned that. But the signature's legal. So, I legally signed the document Ken sent, and Jamon legally signed it. And they're like, "Well, we can't accept this. We can accept a fax." Okay, so a fax. So, I'm going to go back to 1995 where my fax machine is, and I'm gonna fax it over. "So, okay can't do a fax cause you don't live in that decade. But it can be digital, right? But it can't be digital, it can be a picture of my signature, right?" So, you take the PDF you just signed digitally, you print it out, then you take your camera out and you take a picture of the digital signature you put on the PDF. And then you send them the picture, and then that's fine. It's this kind of ... In some cases we had to have things overnighted between the three of us to sign things. In some cases, we had to go in to the local Chase branch or Bank of America branch or wherever and sign it. And none of this is required by law, at all by the way- JAMON: It's just their corporate policies. TODD: They probably have pneumatic tubes in their offices where they send things to each other. It's crazy. I literally took a picture of ... I made it quite obvious I took a picture of it, too, just to be a jerk. JAMON: So, another aspect of finances is budgeting. So, one of the things I did was I ran a budget with my business, was very happy to hand it off to Ken once we merged. That was one of my favorite parts in the merger. But it was really, really important. So, I did it on just a straight up cash basis. So, money would come in, and I would use a program called youneedabudget.com to enter these transactions, whether they were in-flow or out-flow. And then they have this zero-based budgeting system that lets you allocate money for this and that. It's really good because then you know if you had a couple hundred thousand dollars in the bank, and you needed a certain amount of money for payroll, or you needed a certain amount of money to pay your SaaS products, like your GitHub bill, things like that, you know that you had the money or not in the bank. And it gave you really kind of granular data there. It's not quite the same as using QuickBooks. QuickBooks has a useless budgeting feature. I've looked at it. It's just not ... It's sort of like, "Hey, let's plan out the next year." Which you hardly even know what the next month is gonna be like. But having some sort of zero-based budgeting system is quite useful, I think, especially at first. KEN: Can you explain what zero-based means? JAMON: So, essentially, a zero-based budget is where you start with the amount of money that you have, generally, in the bank, and you take that money and you start moving down the line of categories, allocating bits and pieces, subtracting it from that total until you get to zero. So, such and such for payroll, and such and such for your credit card payment, and such and such for your SaaS products. And maybe you need some for team dinners and travel. And you're just moving down. And eventually, the money runs out, right? You hit zero. Or you run out of categories, and you're like, "Okay, I've got money left over and I'm gonna put this into a kind of slush fund or something that just kind of like keeps it for a rainy day." TODD: Isn't slush funds illegal? We should probably just use a different term. JAMON: Okay, maybe I used the wrong word there. Did I use the wrong word? Sorry. A rainy day fund. TODD: Ken would know. JAMON: An emergency fund. And then eventually, you could even bring that money home if you're the owner. But that's what zero-based is. You always get to zero, and you don't go any further than zero because there's no more money. If you don't get to zero, then that means there's money just kind of hanging out not- KEN: Yeah. So, the amount of cash you have determines how far into the future you can budget, basically. JAMON: Exactly. Yes, that's right. So, when you're starting up, it's really important because you don't actually know what kind of expenses are gonna be coming in. You just can't really predict that. So, doing budgeting gives you that insight into where is your money going. You have to allocate for it, and then you enter it into the system. Once you've got a pretty good rhythm going, it's less necessary because you know where the money's going and you can keep an eye on sort of more macro numbers that will give you ideas of health. I would definitely recommend it for probably the first ... I would say, probably the first three years. KEN: And to be clear, it's not a substitute for real books. But I did find it very helpful in just thinking about how money moves around. JAMON: It's also a little bit inadequate in that it is cash basis. And while cash flow is king, and we need to talk about that, Ken, there's also accounts receivable and accounts payable that will affect the money going in and out. TODD: Yeah, there's something called cash basis accounting. KEN: Yeah. Talk about it just a little bit, which is if you're starting up a business you should be cash basis. Like almost full stop, unless you're doing a hardware startup, right? If you're doing something which has a ton of physical inventory, then you might not want to, but frankly if that's true, I mean you need to be talking to a professional, already. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: The other one's called accrual basis. KEN: Accrual, yeah. So, cash basically is very simple. It's like money coming in, money going out. Period. TODD: It's what you would do at home. KEN: Exactly. It's what you would do at home. It's what you probably think accounting is already like. Accrual is like as soon as we have agreed to pay something, then it immediately goes out- JAMON: And as soon as someone agrees to pay us, then it immediately comes in. KEN: Fancy ways of accounting for inventory, and I personally don't actually understand it very well, so that's about all I can say about it. JAMON: It's useful because it gives a more accurate model of where your business actually is, versus cash which can lag or be ahead of itself. But cash is so much simpler that it's definitely worth doing for a while. TODD: Not to turn this podcast into a company meeting, but Heather actually said we probably should consider going to accrual. KEN: Yeah, well we're large enough now that- JAMON: Wait, Todd. How would Heather know to do that? TODD: Oh, Heather, my wife, she's actually an accountant. JAMON: Oh, okay. Okay. That's helpful. KEN: She's been helping us with our books lately. Anyway. So- TODD: Joke never gets old. Never gets old. JAMON: We gotta liven this up somehow. I mean, it's about accounting and lawyers. TODD: And she's gonna listen to this podcast and today's our anniversary, so this is a special "I love you" to my wife. JAMON: Oh, yeah. Well, happy anniversary Todd and Heather, the accountant. TODD: Twelve years. KEN: Of accounting. TODD: Of marriage. KEN: Oh, I see. Okay. I know this has been a very dry podcast, and I apologize but I tell you what. If you guys are thinking about doing this, if maybe you're already doing this and you're feeling the pain already, this stuff is absolutely vitally important- JAMON: It really is. KEN: ... to what you're taking on. JAMON: If you have a solid basis, if you've got some professionals working with you, it gives you so much more confidence and the ability to sleep at night if you know where things stand and what you need to do. KEN: Yeah. TODD: And here's the truth. Many of you are just gonna ignore us. Cause I heard this, too. KEN: Yeah, I know what you mean. JAMON: I did, too. TODD: It's like, "Okay, yeah. Sure. That sounds like the right thing to do. I should do that, but I'm not going to because ... " for whatever reason. And then you learn and suffer like we have, and you eventually do a podcast where you tell others about it, and they ignore you. KEN: You whistle into the wind. TODD: And the perpetual cycle of business stupidity continues. KEN: So, I'm gonna talk about cash flow last. JAMON: Oh yeah, please. TODD: Make it impassioned, Ken. We want some fire here. KEN: So, I remember my very first job that the controller ... So, the controller is sort of the chief internal accountant. Not the CFO, but the kind of hands on- JAMON: Sometimes it's called the comptroller for some reason. KEN: I think that's a British thing. JAMON: That's a British thing? TODD: In government call them comptrollers. KEN: So, they're the ones who would be doing this at a typical company. So, I remember he had a little sign on his desk that said, "Happiness is positive cash flow." And I remember a client saying, "Cash is king." And I remember hearing these things, but I didn't have anywhere to file them. I didn't understand what that meant, right? And I really understand it now. I really understand it now. Where it's basically, cash flow, it's very simple. It's literally the flow of actual money in and out of your business. So, the money you pay out to payroll, the money that your clients actually pay you, not that they have on contract, but they have actually paid you. And what we found is what you think of a business is trying to do is create a profit. And that is true in the long-term. What you want to do is create the largest profit you can. However, to get there you have to keep operating as an entity. And the lifeblood of a company is cash. The lifeblood of that company is that cash, it's the food. So, if you don't get the food in time, it doesn't matter how much you were gonna get. If you run out of money and don't make payroll, something like that, that company will cease. JAMON: I think that's actually a good analogy. If you're playing Minecraft or any other game where you have a health or a hunger bar, and if you're planting fields and fields of wheat and you're waiting for it grow and you wanna go harvest it but you die of hunger before you get there, that's a problem. That's a cash flow problem. It's the ability for you to pay your bills on a day to day basis. So, yes, cash is extremely king. KEN: Well, yeah, imagine your business is collecting Beanie Babies. And you're like, "I'm gonna buy a bunch of Beanie Babies and I'm gonna wait for them to become valuable." That's not a business. Maybe it's an investment, maybe, right? But because you don't have this cycle of things coming in on a routine basis that lets you continue to operate, you just spend a bunch of money and then you wait 20 years. Right? So, it may be profitable in the long run, but it's not really business. JAMON: So, Ken, how does that look in practical terms for Infinite Red? How do you apply that principal of cash is king? KEN: So, yeah, for example, I was very resistant for a long time to take credit cards. This is another thing you learn once you're on the business, you're like, "Holy crap, the credit cards, they take a lot of money out." JAMON: Yeah they do. TODD: Three percent. KEN: Three percent. TODD: Which is a lot on $100,000. KEN: Yeah, exactly. On a $100,000 project, that's actually a lot of money. I think I'm a little more nuanced about it now, because what they do is they make it easier to pay. They make it easier for someone mid-level in a company to pay. They reduce that friction, and it means you get paid sooner. Getting paid a month early is worth actual- TODD: Money. KEN: It's actual money to you. It is worthwhile getting paid early. And so, we're a little bit more lax about how we accept that. TODD: Why is that, Ken? Why is it when you get paid sometimes more important than any profit you made from that money? KEN: Well, for us our biggest expense is payroll. And that happens twice a month no matter what, right? And so, having that money in hand now- TODD: Knock on wood. KEN: That's right. Having that money in hand now makes a real tangible difference. It's not that you don't wanna pay attention to profit at all. It's like there is this ... I remember back in the original dot com boom, there was a Saturday Night Live spoof where they were like, this business was like, "We make change." Right? They're like, "We make all kinds of change. How do we make up for it? Volume." You can, in fact, cash flow yourself into the dirt if you're not paying attention. JAMON: It is interesting to see in situations where we're really monitoring our cash flow very closely, and we do some things that we know maybe they're not going to pay us for a few months and you're maybe struggling through. And then boom, it does come through. And you see that profit actually hit the books, and that is actually a cool feeling, as well. So, you do need to obviously pay attention to your profitability- TODD: Profit matters long-term. Cash flow matters to stay in business. JAMON: That's right. TODD: Cash flow's also power. And this is something that not everyone groks, to be honest. There's a reason that congresspeople like their job. And it's not because they may not personally be getting rich, and the reason they want to get on committees, especially the finance committee and that kind of stuff, is because what really gives you power is not wealth. Cause wealth sitting in a bank account gives no power, cause you're not transferring it. But control of cash flow gives you power. Now, in the case of Congress, congresspeople or senators, most of that's just evil. But in the case of your business, what I call power isn't necessarily a negative thing. Power means you can buy services. Power means you can give that bonus to your employees and that sort of thing. And really how much cash flow you have flowing through is how much you can do, more so than the profit. JAMON: And this is one of the things that if we can point to anything that is sort of a mission for Infinite Red, a lot of it, I think, centers around enabling remote work and the lifestyle that we all want from Infinite Red. And having the ability to pay for that and enable that through our cash flow is what you're talking about, Todd. TODD: Yeah. So, a lot of lawyers and accountants, to be honest, suck. And that's true of all professions, whether it's doctors, programmers, or whatever. So, I know it's not like you can just Google it and find a good one of them a price that you can afford. So, I know we went through a variety of stuff, a variety of people and/or companies, and I was just curious your experience in how you find a good lawyer, a good bookkeeper, a good accountant. That sort of thing. JAMON: I needed an attorney ... I forget when it was. It was during the ClearSight days. And an employee that worked for me at the time, he was my creative director, Mike [Wozezak 00:37:49], really great guy, he knew an attorney that specialized in creative agencies. And I went and met with him, and talked with him, and I really liked him. He was a former CPA, so he knew kind of the nuts and bolts of accounting, which was helpful. And he also specialized in companies like mine. I kind of brought him along to Infinite Red afterward, and we sort of just adopted him as our corporate attorney. And that was really helpful. So, it was a word of mouth thing, for sure. I think one piece of advice that I would give to people is treat it sorta like you would a doctor. It's okay to go someone, have them do something, see if you like the way they operate, and move onto the next one. If you have to do 10 different lawyers before you find one, do it. Don't settle. Do not settle for a bad one. Keep moving until you find a good one, because I can tell you, I think our lawyer is so great that he is absolutely worth every penny that we pay him. And he's helped save us from bad situations, he's helped us get out of some scrapes, and it's totally been worth it. So, definitely treat it more like you would a doctor. TODD: His name is Josh, and he is wonderful. I've had other lawyers at other companies and I wish I had Josh back then. KEN: Do some networking. Talk to other people in similar positions to you. See if they have someone they can recommend. I would also say, for both, having someone who is always willing to take the time to actually explain to you what they're doing in language that you can understand. That is vital. If you feel like you're being snowed, if you feel like you don't understand what's going on, keep looking. JAMON: Yes. And there are professionals that will do that. KEN: They do exist. They're doing a very important service for you, you want someone that you can trust implicitly, they're gonna be interested in earning that trust. JAMON: There are also specialists. So, we had looked into some legal implications surrounding some blockchain work that we were doing. And we talked to Josh, and he said, "I can't provide the insight that you're looking for. This isn't something that I have training on." And so, I did find another attorney. We didn't end up using her, because we went another direction with the service we were looking at. But she was a former FCC attorney who really understood the blockchain legal ramifications. That was helpful. KEN: Once you start getting into specialized stuff it's a little different. But that's where having that primary counsel- JAMON: Exactly. KEN: ... is very helpful, because they can help translate. JAMON: Now one of the things that attorneys do is they ... A good attorney will do, is they will inform you of the risks, but they will also let you make the decision. They won't try to control the process. So, one of the things that Josh will do is say, "There is a risk. I think it's a fairly small one, but here's the risk that I see. And if you feel that it's worth it from a business standpoint, then go ahead and pull the trigger." But he'll let you make the decision, and he'll give you the information to do that. KEN: Yeah. And a not as good lawyer, will be like, "Oh, no, no. Don't do this because there's this horrible risk." Right? Guess what. Every single deal you do has risk. Every single one. And the truth of the matter is, people will sue you, not usually because they have a case, but because they're pissed, right? A lawyer who understands the limits of the legal process is also really important. TODD: I'd like to add that some previous companies that didn't have a Josh or a good lawyer, and a couple things. And it's true of accountants, by the way. Both are true in what I'm gonna say here. So, Ken said the worst ones are ones that think everything you're doing is horrible and you shouldn't do it. I mean, they only care about risk reduction. Of course, you can reduce your risk by simply not being in business. That is horrible, for sure. But there's another one that I think is even worse. One that's doing that on their side, and they won't even tell you to begin with. So, anything that's risky that they don't wanna ... I mean, they basically just cover their ass at all times, they don't tell you anything. They only do what you tell them to do. I'm not sure how you're supposed to know what to tell them to do because you're not a lawyer, you're not an accountant. I deal with that a lot. They're just an assistant, they just do what you tell them. Well, I don't ... If I could do that, I wouldn't need you. And it's actually something that ... With our clients, we're really trying not to do. We don't expect our clients to know anything. That's our job, to guide them through, give them good, coherent options. Tell them the risk and reward of each option, and let them choose. JAMON: Exactly. TODD: That's our job as professionals, and sadly it's kind of rare, unfortunately. JAMON: Yeah. I'm glad we're taking on this topic. Obviously, it is sort of more of a dry topic, but we can only go so far with the series. And this is our last episode of the series. TODD: Of this first season. JAMON: The first season of the series. We are gonna do more seasons. TODD: Unless you're in the UK, and then in which case it is the first series. They call a season a series. JAMON: Oh, funny. TODD: A little factoid. JAMON: Yeah, I'm sure that our UK listeners will appreciate that. TODD: That sounded snarky. We have people in the UK who love us. JAMON: Do we? Awesome? TODD: Why you so mean, Jamon? JAMON: I didn't mean it to sound snarky. TODD: That's why my wife, who's an accountant, doesn't like you. No, she loves you. JAMON: I like Heather. Even if she is an accountant. No, it is good. It's ... This is what ... Well, we took on two topics at once and we were able to kind of lump them in, but it's something that everybody who's starting a business ... And I know, cause we get feedback that there are some people who are listening to our podcast and using some of our advice as a guide as they start their businesses, this is something they need to pay attention to. And when I started my business, it took me many years to get a lawyer and many years to get a good accountant. I did have a bookkeeper, or financial assistant, I guess, for some of those years because once I started payroll, I started getting out of my depth. I had no idea how to do that. And she was great, I could ask her for advice. She was actually trained as an accountant, as a CPA, actually. But she was, at the time, sort of semi-retired and just kind of doing her thing. Now, with Infinite Red, I feel like we have a really great attorney. We have good accountants. We're still working on figuring everything out, but having Heather help us has been really helpful, as well. It's nice to have professionals that know what they're doing. TODD: Thanks so much. Maybe a little dry, but I think super interesting to people out there, especially when you're starting. I've actually found- KEN: Bookmark this, like when you're actually starting this, bookmark and go listen to it again. JAMON: Yeah, it's a good reference. KEN: If your eyes glazed over, I totally understand, but trust me. TODD: I actually found it pretty interesting. I'm surprised how that flew by. And a podcast that flies by when you're recording it, it usually comes out pretty good. So, I would like Jamon in the close to explain what our plans are for this podcast going forward, since this is the last episode of this series/season. JAMON: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm really pleased with how season/series one went. And it was a ton of fun to do with you, Todd, Ken, Chris. We do plan to do more. We probably won't take a really long break. I'm hoping to maybe take a month, or at the most two, and then hit another season. This season we really wanted to kind of get our voice out there as a founder team. So, Todd, Ken and myself, as the founders of Infinite Red, we wanted to talk from our perspective on building Infinite Red. But as Todd mentioned, I think in one of the early episodes, it wasn't just us that built Infinite Red. It was definitely a team effort. It was, in a lot of ways, our vision, but there's so much impact that our team has on what Infinite Red is. So, for season two, the intention is to bring in key team members, and have them sit around the round table, so to speak, with us. They're not gonna be interviewed. We're not gonna be talking at them. They're gonna be just involved in the conversation as we go forward. And we'll be talking about more things that are, I think, a little more specific, a little more even maybe situational, or things like that. I think it'll be interesting, from a standpoint of getting to know some of our team members. They're really great. We- TODD: They are, they're awesome. JAMON: They're so awesome, and I'm really excited to give the world a glimpse into who else is here at Infinite Red. But it will probably be one, maybe two guests on, and just co-hosting with us. They're not going to be an interviewee. I also wanna say thank you to everybody who has listened and promoted our podcast, who submitted questions to us. It's an incredible honor to actually to be in your podcast rotation. We don't take that for granted. I know there are a ton of really good podcasts out there. I had one person, actually, I went to lunch with Bruce Williams, a really great guy here in Portland. And he said, "Jamon, there a lot of good podcasts out there, but I think one of the things about Building Infinite Red is that you are doing an important podcast. The message needs to get out there about our remote work and the way that we do work." Which was a huge compliment. Bruce isn't the type to just hand out compliments lightly. He's a great guy. We take it seriously. This isn't something that we're just doing as a marketing stunt, or anything like that. We really do believe in the message that we're putting out there. So, thank you all for listening. TODD: Yes, thank you.

In this episode of Building Infinite Red, Jamon, Ken, and Todd touch on the fears, anxieties, and struggles of running a business. They share stories and thoughts on starting a business, managing stress, how success and failure impact focus, the difference between venture capital and other sources of funding, fear of missing out, and the importance of knowing what you stand for. Show Links & Resources YNAB: Personal budgeting software Four Yorkshiremen by Monty Python Episode Transcript TODD WERTH: So I thought a good topic today, one of the reasons because I'm personally interested actually, hear what Jamon has to say and Ken has to say, and of course I'm sure they're interested to hear what I have to say. But the topic is when you start a new business or you're an entrepreneur doing multiple businesses, or anything of that particular area. What are some of the biggest fears, anxieties, apprehensions, that you might have you know before the process, during the process, whenever? I find this very fascinating, because I imagine a lot of people, well maybe some people who are listening are experiencing these right now and A) it'd be great to hear someone else express the same thing so they know that they're not alone in this, and B) it's kind of interesting to think about yourself. It kind of, it's not something you typically sit down and think about, so if you two don't mind, that'd be a really interesting subject for today. KEN MILLER: Sounds good. JAMON HOLMGREN: Yeah. Well I think back to when I started by business. It was 2005, and I was working for a home builder at the time, so I had a, you know, decent job. It was an office job. I was doing I think cad design and marketing for this builder. Not really doing programming. But I decided that one of the things that ... well I had, prior to this time, I had thought, you know I'd be really nice to own my own business at some point. It'd be something that I would aspire to. And I think that part of that was my dad owning his own business and knowing a lot of entrepreneurs kind of played into that. I thought it would be an interesting thing. I've always been a little bit independent. Want to kind of set my own course. So I started thinking about doing this and talking with my wife, and at the time I had a six month old baby. That was my first kid, my son, who is now 13 years old. Around actually this time of year is when I decided that I was going to do this. What helped was an opportunity that came up. So the apprehension of how do I get my first customer was sort of already taken care of. My uncle had a bunch of work that he needed done, and he asked me if I wanted to do it kind of on the side, or as a business, and that gave me the confidence to pull the trigger and say, let's so this. Because I had a built-in customer right away. But I do remember the first month sending my bill over to him, and it was only eleven hundred dollars, and that was all I had earned that whole month was eleven hundred dollars. And that was a wake up call to me that, hey I can't just expect the money to come in, and that was definitely ... I sat up and noticed. TODD: Yeah, that's really interesting. So when you started ClearSight, that was your first company, correct? At that time? JAMON: That's right. Yeah, ClearSight. There were other points along the way where I was sort of I got kind of gut-punched. Many times along the way. One was when ... my first business was doing websites, but it was also doing CAD designs, so I had essentially two business, and the CAD design part of it, you know designing homes, designing remodels, those sort of things eventually dried up, because remember that was during 2008, 2009 the housing recession kind of came along and that impacted the designers first, because we were the first ones in the process. People stopped taking money, equity out of their homes to do remodels. They just stopped doing it. So basically the whole market dried up. I remember my uncle told me, "I don't have any work to send you anymore." And I had a few accounts myself, but they were pretty slow too. And I kind of sat at home for a few days and felt sorry for myself. But in typical Jamon fashion, I was like, well I guess it's time to go do this myself, so I went out and literally started knocking on doors at offices and stuff and handing out my business card. Wasn't too successful at that, but it was at least doing something, and then things turned around eventually. TODD: Since you had a new baby at home, and obviously you're married, and you're trying to support them. JAMON: Right. TODD: Did that add any worry to you at that time? JAMON: Yeah, for sure. It certainly did, because any worry that my wife felt was reflected back on me because I feel very a sense of responsibility that I need to be making sure that we're not losing our house. Making sure that we can keep food on the table, things like that. So that was a lot to process. My health definitely suffered because of it and a few other things, but there was a lot of stress involved with that. I think that if I were to go back now, knowing what I know now, I could very much have probably pulled out of it much faster. I could have found a better path, but you live and learn. TODD: I'm sure there's more to tell about that story, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts Ken. KEN: For me the biggest worry was always money. Right? I mean, since I came out here to Silicon Valley, I had the dream. I had the Silicon Valley dream for sure. I wanted to start my own company. And to a certain degree, the Silicon Valley dream as sold is not sold accurately. Right? It's sold as this sort of fantasy. And the truth of the matter is you have to have more resources than is reputed in order to do the Silicon Valley way effectively. You need to know VCs or people who know them. It helps to have affluent parents who can bankroll you not making any money for years and years and years. I'm luckier than most on all of those accounts, and even I found that very intimidating, challenging. And especially living in the Bay Area, once you have established a life in the Bay Area, the idea of not taking a salary for a couple of years is utterly terrifying if you don't have a big pile of money. In fact, I wasn't really able to do this until I had a little bit of a windfall from the Yammer acquisition to lean on. Basically just enough to let me barely scrape by for a year for which I'm still very grateful 'cause I probably wouldn't be here today if I hadn't had that. And there were some scary fricking moments. There've definitely been a few extremely close calls financially. So I don't ... that fear I think was justified and surmountable. Let me put it that way. Right? You can definitely figure that one out, but I'm not gonna lie. It can be super scary sometimes. For me, the biggest mental shift that got me where I am now is that I had always had in my head this sort of venture capital model, because that's what I knew. Right? Because that's the kind of company I'd worked for. I saw how that process basically worked. But it always felt wrong to me. Right? Like, I was always like, what's so wrong with profit? What's so wrong with actually making a business that can support itself fairly early on? And I think it was the Paul Graham post that was like, the difference between a start up and a small business. And a start up is specifically optimized for hundred S growth or nothing. JAMON: Right. KEN: And that's what venture capitalists want for the most part. Right? No venture capitalist wants you to be one of the nine or ninety-nine that don't make it. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- KEN: Nevertheless, the model is set up that way. The model is set up so that only one in ten or less have to make it. And so once I realized, oh no all along I wanted to make the lifestyle business, basically, the small business. TODD: I just wanted to point out that especially in Silicon Valley the term lifestyle business is a semi-derogatory term. KEN: Pejorative, yeah. TODD: Yeah to refer to a normal, actual business. KEN: Exactly. TODD: And I always found that amusing when they said lifestyle business it was insulting you, because you make a profit. I always thought that was funny. KEN: Yeah, right. It's sort of like the Silicon Valley model is for people who would rather be a billionaire or nothing. Right? It's kinda like a shot at a billionaire is worth way more to them then a pretty good path to a millionaire. Once I realized that that was the exact opposite of me, I was much happier and I could actually work towards something that mattered. Right? And not even the millionaire part, right? It's like, if that happens, that would be awesome, but it's more creating the environment that I wished that I'd had. JAMON: When it comes to fears and those types of feelings, do you ever feel maybe that you are missing out on those wild rides? KEN: Do I have FOMO for the- JAMON: Yeah, a little bit of FOMO. KEN: Sometimes. JAMON: FOMO being, of course, fear of missing out. KEN: Yeah, living here especially. I think that's inevitable. JAMON: Right. Because we're not set up for just rocket growth at Infinite Red. KEN: I've been at enough companies that ended up making everybody thousandaires or worse. Right? Or negative thousandaires in at least one case. I had a friend, he seemed like he was living the dream. This was way back when in the first boom. Right? He seemed like he'd lived the dream. Right? He was just an engineer at a start up and he was suddenly a millionaire overnight. And then within six month, he was a negative six hundred thousandaire with a gigantic tax bill. JAMON: Oof. KEN: The whole model has kind of lured a bunch of people into the stock option thing. This is what I'm talking about specifically. I think there is absolutely a place for the venture capital model, but the stock option compensation model that a lot of people have done, is kind of a raw deal in a lot of ways, but that'd be a whole other topic, so- JAMON: Yes TODD: Just real quick, I own tons of stock and stock options that are worth absolutely zero- KEN: Yes. TODD: But, if I ever run out of toilet paper, I am set. JAMON: So Todd, you started a business well before Ken or I, and you know I actually I don't know if I've ever heard the story of your very first business and how you went from being a software engineer at a company to owning your own business, and I'd like to hear about that from the perspective of the topic of this episode which is about fears, and uncertainty and things like that. TODD: Yeah. Yeah. That's great question, so I've owned three businesses. This hopefully is my last one here at Infinite Red. My first one was in 1999. We started, it was three of us, it was also a consulting company like Infinite Red which lasted for nine years. It was a little bit different. Real quick, we did mainly enterprise, not start ups, larger companies, that kind of stuff. And our model was kind of to be subcontractors. So we had a lot of relationships with other consulting companies. One of the things we did, is we did really hard things well. So all the other consulting companies, like especially at that time it's gonna sound funny, but you'd have companies coming to us saying, "Look, we're doing most of the project, but they want something on the web, and we have no idea how to do that." And we did. And we knew Visual C++ and we knew all sorts of things. And so we specialize. We were higher priced because of that, and we'd come in and do the fun parts, in our opinion, which was really great. This is circa 1999. That one wasn't ... there wasn't too much anxiety from it. It was a small company, so later I'll talk about most of my anxiety at Infinite Red come from my worry of the 25 families I'm responsible for. JAMON: Right. TODD: It's not so much myself, because I do not have affluent parents. Well, most of my relatives are dead now, but I never really worried about money. I mean worst case scenario, I can be a developer. I'm pretty darn good developer, and I can make good money at that. And I moved out of the Bay Area, so for me my lifestyle is much cheaper than it used to be. So I don't worry about that so much, but I do worry about everyone's families who work at Infinite Red. My first company, we didn't have that. It was all just high level people. There was three to six of us, depending on the time. And we kind of just slipped into it. We had our first few big customers before we even started. So that wasn't really stressful at all. The second company, which came after my first company, I went back and worked for companies, for other start ups as an employee, and that's how I met Ken. Ken was my boss. And I was doing that mainly just 'cause after nine years running your company, I was just kind of tired, and I wanted to be an employee for a while. And I did that for about three, three and half years. And Ken, sorry boss, it was super relaxing, easy. You work like seven and a half hours a day or whatever. KEN: This has been noted on your permanent file. TODD: You know, regular jobs often are pretty lax compared to start ups. As an aside, I was in a pizza parlor once, and I saw a sign behind the wall. It was obviously the pizza parlor was owned by a person, it wasn't a chain, and the sign said, the only thing more overrated then running your own business is pregnancy. Which is true, if you do it for low hours and high pay, you really should rethink that, but there are lots of great reasons to do it. Any who, my second company was venture capital backed company which means we didn't use our own money. It was intentionally designed to do the hockey stick which means go from zero to very high very fast, and we had investors. And we had to pitch to venture capitalists and angel investors, and we had all the kind of normal Silicon Valley stuff. And that lasted for about a year and a half, and I cherish that experience, because it taught me a lot about that process from the inside. It was completely a failure which is fine. The fears in that, once again, were not personal, because as I did right after that, I went and got a job with Ken. JAMON: Right. TODD: And I made plenty of personal money. And because we weren't investing our money, the VCs were, there really wasn't a lot of anxiety there. I would say the main anxiety there was performance. Meaning it's kind of depressing when you're failing, and sometimes you have a great success. We did one month, especially. And we were shooting to the moon for a whole month, and it was super exciting. So it was just kind of a roller coaster of anxiety for that kind of business. Yeah, Jamon? JAMON: I think it's really interesting to hear you and Ken talk about the idea of, well I can just go get a job as a developer. Because for the longest time, I didn't feel that I had that option. Whether that was reality or not, I don't know. I was basically, I kind of thought of myself as just building websites. I just built websites for people, and I didn't really think of myself as a software engineer. I just happen to be someone that happened to built websites. TODD: Knowing you Jamon, and the quality of engineer you are, you are completely wrong. You could have totally got a job, but I get why- JAMON: Yeah. TODD: -from your perspective you felt that way. KEN: Yeah, well and it's a matter of ... it highlights how important just knowing the scene is. JAMON: Right. Yeah, totally. KEN: If you know the scene, yeah if you're an engineer, even like an old rusty engineer, like we're going to be before too long. TODD: Too late, Ken. KEN: Right. JAMON: Too soon and too late. KEN: Even if you're an old rusty engineer, you can figure it out. Right? JAMON: Right, yeah. KEN: The demand is so overwhelming and so consistent and so pervasive that- JAMON: Yeah. KEN: -if you know sort of the ins and outs- TODD: Even you Jamon could get a job is what you're saying. JAMON: Even I could get a job. KEN: No, if you're half-way competent, and he's more than half-way competent, about 60 percent. JAMON: I appreciate it. KEN: No, it's- JAMON: 60 percent. Yeah. No, and to hear that now. It's something that is obviously more of an option now that I don't need it, but at the time it didn't feel like an option, and so especially when I started getting employees in 2009. And most of them were young. They didn't have much in the way of family, but they would obviously still have ... they needed jobs, and I felt that. I felt that in every part of me that if the business wasn't doing well, that I was failing them. And that actually drove me for a long time. I think if I'd had the option to go work for someone, or felt I had the option to go work for someone, I may have actually quit at some point. But I didn't. I kept the course there. KEN: I will say, that I'm glad that I did not know everything that I should be afraid of going into it. 'Cause there is plenty that you should be afraid of, and if I'd known all that stuff going in, I probably wouldn't have done it, and I'm glad that I did it. And if I had to redo it now, I would do it again. JAMON: Right. KEN: And that's an important distinction is that it's not that I would do it again, it's that only hearing the bad stuff at that point, would have been a disaster. TODD: Ignorance and hubris are the two best tools of the entrepreneur. JAMON: I feel like it's both more stressful and more scary than you think, but also you're more resourceful and more able to deal with it then you think. KEN: Yes. TODD: Hundred percent. I would say, talking to other people who are new to it, and I certainly had to learn this, the biggest problem is the buck stops here. Meaning in every other situation where you worked, you could always throw a problem up the ladder. JAMON: Yes. TODD: And when you're a small business person, you don't know accounting? Doesn't matter. Do it. JAMON: Someone's gotta do the accounting. TODD: Right, like there's literally no excuse. There's none, and you don't have that money just to pay for people to do it. KEN: I guarantee the IRS does not grade on a curve. TODD: No, they don't care about your excuses. KEN: Yeah. TODD: So Jamon, Ken, and I come from very different places. So Ken obviously went to Harvard. He's impressive on paper. I actually did not. I didn't finish college. I started making way too much money as a programmer to be honest. But when I first started out in 1996 as a professional programmer, you know I wasn't making tons of money, but it was plenty for me, because where I'm from, it's a lot of money. And at that time, I'd probably be more like Jamon meaning I didn't see myself as really deserving that kind of stuff, but this was in San Francisco in 1996. So I saw the first boom, and then I saw the crash, and then I saw the second boom. And after a while, you start to learn, although I don't have Ken's personal background. I do have Ken's professional background. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Yep. TODD: And so, one of the things I've noticed when talking to Jamon, because he's in Vancouver, Washington, and not around that stuff as much, is he feels a little bit like an imposter. He's totally not. And I bet even now in his mind he imagines that those people working at Google somehow have this huge, amazing, genius to them, and Ken's probably in the middle. He probably thinks some of them do. I personally have yet to meet one of these fabled geniuses. So the more you get involved with that, the more you realize they're just humans, and you're just as good as they are. KEN: That is true. JAMON: I think that's been something that I've become more and more aware of over the past several years. And it's funny because I don't usually think of myself as having imposter syndrome. I'm actually quite a confident guy, but in that regard I definitely did not really realize ... it felt like they were a different breed. They were a different type of person. And I always felt like I could probably learn anything, but there was still this degree of separation. But, anyway, coming back to the topic at hand, I think that sort of uncertainty and fear can be a motivating factor. But one of the things, so one of the things I'd like to talk about, is there are healthy ways and unhealthy ways to handle that stress, and I've done them all. Believe me. TODD: Like cocaine? JAMON: Maybe. TODD: Jamon's mother, he's totally joking. He's never done cocaine. JAMON: Yes, thank you Todd. And my mom does listen to this, so thanks Todd. TODD: He really has not, trust me. JAMON: You wouldn't want to see me on cocaine. KEN: Oh god. Yeah, that is the wrong drug for you my friend. JAMON: Yes. KEN: Oof. JAMON: But you don't want to transfer stress to clients. You don't want to transfer stress to employees. You don't want to transfer it to your significant other. To your family. And unfortunately, I've done all of those things, because I'm human and that's what happens. You get a lot of stress, and then you feel like you need to let off steam. One of the things that I actually really appreciated about this partnership is that we're able to let off steam with each other. And in a way, that is healthy. That isn't transferring to someone else who has nothing to do with it or has no power. Where I have two partners who are actually in the same spot, and they can help. It's been really, really helpful. So that is really important. I think how you transfer stress. Yeah, Todd? TODD: I agree. I don't kick the dog. I kick Ken. Which is better. The dog appreciates it at least. JAMON: You don't even have a dog, Todd. TODD: I don't have a dog, and I've never kick a dog by the way. I'd kick humans all day long, but never a dog. JAMON: This is true. TODD: Just to be clear. JAMON: Yes, Todd is the one who canceled a meeting because he had to bring a bird to the hospital that had hit his door, actually one time. TODD: It's true. It is true, and that bird is flapping happily today. KEN: As far as you know. TODD: I hope. Back to my story, because it's all about me. Anxiety at Infinite Red really does come around to team members mostly, and you two Ken and Jamon because I don't want to let you down, and I certainly don't want someone's family not to be able to have a Christmas because of something stupid I did, or because I was acting emotionally when I should have been acting rationally. That kind of stuff. JAMON: This year, me not having Christmas had nothing to do with you Todd, so I can let you know that. TODD: Jamon's house was burglarized and burnt down. Not burnt down, but set afire on Christmas Eve. KEN: Torched. TODD: So, if you're feeling good about humanity up to this point, now you can feel bad about it. So, there you go, but they're back in their house. KEN: You're welcome. TODD: Everything's good. JAMON: Yes. TODD: You're back in your house. Everything's good, and he has a wonderful family, and all is well. JAMON: Yeah, it's really nice to be back. Anyway, I cut you off. TODD: But so that's a lot of my anxieties about it. At my age, I'm 46, and I've done this a long time. I don't stress as often. Like I used to get very stressed out doing sales calls or that kind of stuff. I've done all that stuff enough where it doesn't really bother me too much. Even tough things where you have to be really tough with the client, or vendor, or something like that. It doesn't, I mean it bothers me temporarily of course you get the adrenaline going and no one likes that. But it's really the things that give me anxiety and up at night is if I make a mistake that will cause us not to be able to pay payroll. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: Now, one note. We've always paid payroll. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: But that is something- KEN: There's been some close calls. TODD: That is something that- KEN: Yeah. TODD: That makes me work harder, and it makes me worry. Me, personally, I could figure it out, it's not as big of a deal to me. KEN: Well, I think also a big stressor that I didn't ... it makes sense in retrospect, but it wasn't one that like occurred to me, is how hard it is to maintain focus over time- JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative) TODD: Yeah. KEN: -when you don't have a boss doing that for you. I was a small scale boss at my previous jobs, but this experience definitely makes me want to write a nice little note of apology to every boss I've ever had. Like, however bad they were, I have more sort of sympathy for what they were dealing with then I did before. TODD: That's so true. KEN: Yeah, and the surprising thing is how hard it is to cope with success. When you're doing well, that's when the monster of de-focusing really starts to rear its head. It's like driving a car fast. If you've never driven a car at 150 miles an hour, it's a different thing from driving it at 60 miles an hour. It takes a little getting used to that state, oh things are going well, but that doesn't mean that I get to take my eyes off the road. TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- KEN: So. CHRIS MARTIN: Can you guys go in a little deeper on how you manage some of these things? 'Cause you've talked about having the feelings of stress and fear, but maybe some of the ways that you manage it, a part from kicking Ken. KEN: That's Todd's favorite. TODD: Well, Ken mentioned that success can be hard to deal with, and I have a tried and true technique I've used for many years with dealing with the problems of success. And here it is. And I'll share it with you. I normally would charge for this advice, but I'm gonna share. Don't be successful. There you go. KEN: Yeah. TODD: You're welcome. KEN: That one we're still figuring out. Having co-founders you actually trust is probably the number one. TODD: Yeah, it's hard to do, and at one time in my career I said I would never ever had a partner or a co-founder again. And here we are, so. JAMON: I think getting together in person is important. Of course, we're a remote company. So I'm up here near Portland, and Ken's in the Bay Area, and Todd's in Vegas, but we did get together a couple weeks ago to talk. And there was a stressful situation going on, and that was something that we went through together in person. TODD: Well, we also hang out in zoom a lot. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: Every week. And that's similar. But, yeah having good co-founders who are your friends, and you become almost married at a point, because when you're in business together it is like a marriage, and you know everyone's finances. You know if someone's spouse is having problems with the way the company's working. You have to deal with that- JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- TODD: -at least as an auxiliary person in that particular thing. So it's a very intimate thing for sure. I definitely choose that very, very, very wisely. I've had bad experiences, and of course I've had great experiences here. JAMON: I think that one of the things that we actually do fairly well is we will say when we're stressed. You know, we'll say, "Hey, I am currently feeling a high degree of stress." And then the other co-founders can say, "Okay, what is causing this." And we can talk about it more objectively. And just saying it out loud sometimes is a way to kind of like let go of it a little bit. TODD: We also know how to fight which takes a while. That's a hard one to learn. JAMON: It is. TODD: But we've learned how to fight. Yell at each other, and know that afterwards we're going to be okay, and that's important. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: The trust that you would gain with a girlfriend or boyfriend or your spouse- KEN: Sibling TODD: -where you can have an emotional throw up as it were and know that you're still gonna be loved as it were. KEN: Well, and also it's sort of on the focusing issue, actually. It's relevant there too which is that I'm pretty ADD I would say. I think that's probably pretty common I would say for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is one place where you can actually challenge your ADD tendencies. However, I also know it's like, "Hey guys, I'm having some trouble focusing and motivating on x, y, and z- JAMON: Right. KEN: -can I have help with knowing that there's not going to be any judgment coming along- JAMON: Right. KEN: -with that help?" JAMON: Right. Yeah. TODD: To be clear, it's all not roses. Sometimes one of us gets irritated with the other person because of these issues and- JAMON: Right. TODD: -but ultimately once we get talking to it, we're not super human. Sometimes I get irritated with Jamon or Ken and vice versa. But the whole point is, when you get to the end of that, you're supportive. JAMON: Another really important thing is to have some really core principles. Some kind of tent poles so-to-speak that you can come back to. One of the things that we really strongly believe is that the core of us three is one of the most important things about this company. And so we can come back to that. I mean, if the most important thing that we had was some technology or some financial goal or something like that, then it would put a lot of stresses on our relationship, but since we've made that relationship such a high priority, it's extremely important. And another thing, along those lines, is we recognize that we are human, and that sometimes it's actually a personal situation that's contributing to work stress. TODD: Yes. JAMON: You might have situation where maybe a family member has health issues or you're having trouble with a relationship, or anything along those lines, and we ... I was actually talking to an employee recently who talked about a personal situation that they were having and how it was contributing to their stress, and I had noticed the stress that they were going through at work, but I didn't know about the personal situation, and it's okay. I told them, "It's fine. It's a normal, human thing to have situations that arise. I understand. It's something that you can tell us, if there's something going on, you don't have to be specific. You don't have to tell us private information, but just tell us that something's going on, and we will do our best to be as understanding as possible." TODD: And it's a matter of trust. That particular person trusted Jamon. That's fantastic. It's trust that we build up between founders. It's trust with the team, and to some extent, trust with your customers, and your vendors. Especially with customers and vendors, if you can do that, that's fantastic, but the others you can do with time. Just to give you an example, trust. I try to be trusting even when I shouldn't be. I picked up this guy the other day, in my car, he gets in the backseat. I just picked him up. I didn't know him, and first he gets in, understandably he's like, "Thanks for picking me up, but how do you know I'm not a serial killer?" TODD: And I just looked at him. I'm like, "What's the chance two serial killers would be in the same car?" Pretty low. So, yeah trust is very important. Any other tools or techniques that you all have for dealing with these anxieties or stresses or whatever? KEN: Drinking. Drinking is important. Water. Water. JAMON: Lots of water. KEN: What do you think I meant? Oh, come one. JAMON: Yes, stay hydrated. KEN: Yes, stay hydrated. Yeah. JAMON: Actually, along those lines, I started working out a couple years ago, and that has been a really good help for my stress level. When I get through with a workout, I feel better about myself. I feel good. There's probably some endorphins or something that come with that. And it's really hard when you are really critically needed at work to take two hours to go workout, but it's also extremely important for your long-term health. And so you have to prioritize it very high. And you can basically justify it to yourself which I had to do with if I go and do this, I will be better equipped to handle the issues that come up, and it's so true. Working out has been a very good thing for my stress level. TODD: A lot of people might be worried about their finances or their spouse's opinion and that kind of stuff. Which can be super challenging, so you have to deal with that. Another thing that I've noticed is, and this is pretty common, especially in our world, and I have to remember that 110 years ago, Ken'll tell me a real number, but somewhere around there. Most people worked at home, and most people had their own business. They didn't call it their own business, they were just a blacksmith, and people paid you to hoove their horses or not hoove. JAMON: Shoe. TODD: Shoe. KEN: Shoe. TODD: Shoe their horses. Thank you. It's been a while since I've lived on the farm about 30 years, but anyway- JAMON: It's that a farrier or something? TODD: Huh? JAMON: Ken, isn't it- KEN: A farrier. JAMON: Yeah, it's a farrier. KEN: That sounds right. TODD: Whatever that means. Anyways, so you would just do that. You'd just offer your services and that was a home business quote unquote. But, you know, since we all grew up in the late 20th century or the 21st century, for our younger listeners, you know that has been not the normal but the minority. And so a lot of people I've talked with, they said, "Well, can I do that? Do I have the permission to do that or whatever?" And it is kind of hard to get to their skull like who are you asking permission from? There isn't ... there is the government who has rules, but despite what you might think about the government, the rules are actually fairly basic and the IRS of course wants you to pay the money, but that's actually not the difficult to be honest either. So it's just really an internal stumbling block. You don't have to ask anyone. You can go right now. Get a business license, and sell bottles of water at a popular park. Right now, and you technically have a small business. JAMON: Regarding the personal finances side of this, one of the things that my wife and I did early on that really helped was we did a monthly budget. So we used the tool called YNAB, youneedabudget.com, and we sat down every month together, and we entered all of our receipts and we had categories and we split everything up. We were kind of finance nerds during this time, and that was helpful, because it gave us a sense of control over our finances. We knew where we were. We knew whether we had enough money to pay the mortgage. We knew how much, we could specifically tell you what day we would run out of money if we couldn't bring anything in, and that was helpful. Now, sometimes the math brings its own anxiety, but at least you know where it is, and it's not this unknown out there all the time. Actually, more lately, we've gotten away from that. After almost 15 years of marriage, and I kind of want to go back to it, because there are some stresses that come from not knowing. TODD: Yeah, sometimes everything is just fine, but just don't know it, and you assume the worst because- JAMON: Exactly. TODD: -people do. So I have a question for Ken. I grew up very poor, just some background, but later in my early 20s and stuff, my family actually started doing pretty well. My mom and my step-father ran a couple businesses. My brother started businesses and has done very well for himself. So, although, in my younger life, we were almost less than working class, to be honest. Later in life, we had a lot of experience with business. So me being in business was very natural to me, and my family understood, and they actually didn't understand when I was working for someone else. It was weird to them, but Ken, I know from discussions with you, the opposite was true. From your family, there wasn't anyone who were business people and that kind of stuff, and it was kind of outside your culture. I would love to hear if maybe that caused any particular issues for you? KEN: Yeah, for sure. I grew up in what I would call kind of professional slash academic class household. Right? College degrees going very far back in my family. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, illustrators, artists, also but professionals of various kinds. Going back quite a while. There was a flavor of business being looked down upon a little bit, and that was definitely, even when I got to Harvard. There was that divide was still there even though Harvard certainly has both types. The professional type to kind of like, well I'm good at something. I'm really good at this, and I'm so good at it people want to pay me good money for it. And that's a perfectly good life. And I'm actually here to tell you right now, if you have those skills. If you are happy doing them, you're in a good position. Should you start a business? The answer is probably no. Right? I did it because I couldn't stand not doing it. Right? It was just this terrifying but enticing thing for as long as I could remember to be ... I just wanted to be on my own. I want to do this. Ah. Right. It was this dragon inside that I couldn't contain. In some degrees, it made me a bad employee. Sometimes. Right, because anybody who's not doing what they're sort of supposed to be doing is not happy. Right? Jamon, do you want to interject? JAMON: Oh, I just want to say in Ken's family if you say someone is a painter, that means that they are an artist, and they paint on canvas. In my family, if someone's a painter, that means they spray paint on houses. KEN: Yes. TODD: In my family, if someone's a painter you're like, "Oh, he's got a job. That's wonderful." KEN: Yeah, so the three of us we talk about this class stuff all the time because when you start talking with people who grew up in different backgrounds, you start to realize what your blind spots are. Like, I remember Todd saying, growing up people who went to the movies were rich or something like that. Todd, do you remember what some of your things were? TODD: Oh, there's a long list of what rich people do that most people would find amusing. KEN: For me, not only ... I grew up in a fairly prosperous town. I would say. Right, but I wouldn't call it, there weren't a lot of rich, rich, rich people, but it was prosperous. And then going to Harvard, of course you get exposed to all sorts, and you start to realize how high the ladder goes. Right? And that gave me I think a sort of warped perspective on life. And Todd's perspective was warped in a different way. And by sort of, not like the three of us, by any stretch of the imagination, now encompass an enormous swath of life experience. JAMON: No. KEN: We're all white dudes for one thing. Right? JAMON: Yes. KEN: But nevertheless, it gives us sort of perspective on things that helps. It blunts some of the fear. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- KEN: To have that breadth of perspective. TODD: I'd like to ask Ken, because your family culture wasn't business-oriented, and as you just mentioned, almost a little bit looked down upon business people, I guess for the crassness of it all. KEN: It wasn't overt, but it was definitely outside of our purview. TODD: And definitely your friends from Harvard who weren't in business school or that kind of thing ... do you, like for me. It's easy for me. The bar was so low. I surpassed almost everyone I grew up with long ago. JAMON: Yeah. Similar. TODD: I don't have to prove anything to anyone. KEN: Well, so at this point I don't care very much. At this point, I'm doing my thing and that's that. However, I will point out there is something very interesting about Silicon Valley. Which is that Silicon Valley is a business culture that was grown by people kind of like me- JAMON: Yeah. KEN: -from the professional and scientific culture. JAMON: That's true. KEN: And as a result, that is where, I think, I'm not a sociologist. I haven't studied this or anything, but my theory is that that's where that sort of disdain for lifestyle businesses comes from. I think it's seen as sort of a grind. Where you're getting paid for the brilliance of your idea, you're just getting paid for hard work. JAMON: Yeah, I think that this idea of a lifestyle business, which I don't have any negative connotation whatsoever. In my world, a lifestyle business sounds like a luxury. KEN: Luxury. TODD: Luxury. JAMON: Okay, we're gonna have to link to that YouTube video. TODD: Yes. JAMON: But some Monty Python there. But I think that's actually something that was really, really helpful was when we merged was the idea that we can design this business to be lower stress. That doesn't mean we take our eye off the ball, which we kinda did for a little while there. That doesn't mean that we don't work hard, cause we do when the situation demands it, but we can design the type of business where the general day to day things are not drudgery. They are things that we enjoy doing. That we're good at, and that we can contribute to the success of the business. And I think that that's something that's actually overlooked a little bit when you're owning a business that you do have the ability to change things. You have the ability to enact change. It may be painful. It may be hard. It might be expensive, but you can look at something and say, "You know what, this isn't fitting for me, and I'm gonna change it." Whether it's cutting off a client that's being too stressful. Whether it's hiring someone to do something that you're not good at. All of those things are things that you can do. My sister started a small WordPress website company. So she's building WordPress websites. And she asked me for a lot of advice along the way, because she knew I'd kind of- TODD: Is this Meredith, Jamon? JAMON: Yeah. That's right that's Meredith. And one of the things I told her was that you want to stay with your kids. You want to be at home. You want to build this business that does not interrupt those things, so make those very core priorities. When you make decisions, they should be based on whether they enhance that or take away from that. It kind of gave her permission to look at things through that lens. That you don't have to necessarily measure it on dollars and cents or even things like customer satisfaction. That may be a goal and you don't want to let people down, but ultimately you don't want to let your family down. And that's something that I think is really important. So for her, you know her husband's an engineer, a mechanical engineer. He makes good money. It's not something where they have to have the business, but she wanted something that challenged her while she was also able to be at home, and I think it's done that. TODD: And the people she worked with on her team are similar, correct? JAMON: Yeah, that's right. So she not only provided a business that works for her, but also for the people on her team. So she actually has people that do code. That do design. That do content. And in many cases they are people who stay at home with their kids. And that's kind of a cool concept that there could be a business that enables that. TODD: I think that super important to mention the reason why, because people think that their business has to be like they see on TV or they read about it in a magazine or a book or whatever, and it doesn't. What principles you base your business on is up to you, and then your job is to figure out a way to make that happen. I think it's awesome that she wanted to help herself and her team who want a particular lifestyle and still be able to have this business, and she's doing it, and that's wonderful. KEN: Yeah, and I think it's worth saying on the list of reasons to start a business, getting rich should probably not be your number one. If getting rich is your number one reason, well I mean that's fine, and depending on your personality, it at least has that as a possibility. JAMON: Sure. KEN: Whereas most jobs done. At least not on any sort of short time frame. The number one reason to do it is 'cause you want more control over your life. And that's why we did it. So the first year that I took off, when we were still trying to build an ap and we hadn't done the consulting yet, my daughter was two, and to save money we took less daycare. I had to still have some, 'cause we both work, but did less daycare. So I spent time with her. I cooked for the family. I found all these ways to save money, and I was sort of part-time house husband while this was going on, and even if the rest of this fails, right? Even if we crash and burn, the chance to have that year and do that will be with me the rest of my life. So, part of our mission here at Infinite Red, and something we've always agreed on is that we don't just want a successful business. We have to do that in order to make the rest of this work. And it's a perfectly good goal in itself, but that we also want to be an example of how work can work. Right? Not that there aren't others, but this is us. This is what we think work should be like. Not that it's never intense. Not that it's never hard. Not that it's some sort of walk in the park. It is not. But that it can co-exist with the rest of your life in a much more harmonious way than has been the model for 20th century corporate whatever. TODD: Yeah, there are other ways to run a business, all of them are wrong. CHRIS: Ken do you think that when we ... that struggle occurs when we move away from those principles and values and what's important to us as business owners or whatever that label would be? So like, when you move away from maybe wanting to spend time with your family or building a company where it fuels the lives of your employees. You know, do you think that fear and intention is magnified if you move away from those things? KEN: What do you mean by move away from those things? CHRIS: So that they're no longer a priority. Maybe you're making decisions that go against those values. KEN: That is definitely a source of stress. And the fact of the matter is, we are still a business. We still have to operate in the same environment that every other business does. And we have to compete against businesses that don't operate the way we do. JAMON: Right. KEN: And to whatever extent our values create, like I said, put us at a disadvantage, and I think sometimes in the short term that is true. We sometimes have to make hard choices in order to survive and work another day. And I think there's probably kind of a core, not exactly explicitly articulated, there's some core that we won't push past, but when we have to hopefully temporarily do things that are different from our stated values. Yeah, that's rough. Absolutely rough. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: The trick is to kind of figure out ... this is why it's so important to figure out what your real values are. Right? And we've had to sort of narrow it down in certain places, because if you have this long list of things that you claim to care about, but that's not actually true. Right? Then, when it really comes down to it, there are some things that are more core than others. If you die on the hill of one of the non-core ones, and it causes you to fail, that is an unacceptable outcome. And so, figuring out which hills you're really willing to die on and which hills you're not willing to die on is super important and there's not really a shortcut. It's something that you figure out as you go along. TODD: If you're getting chased by zombies through a forest and the zombies are starting to catch up to you, sometimes you have to give grandma a cookie and push her down the hill. That's all I'm saying. It sucks. It's against your principles, but grandma's lived a good life, and she loves those cookies. Fact. JAMON: I don't even know how to follow up on that one, but one of the things I was asked early on when I started my company was, what are your core principles and I kind of fumbled through an answer, and I don't even remember what it was at the time. But I actually think it was probably not reasonable for me to even know what those were at the time other than personal values, but over time, taking lumps here and there and bruises, and the stress and anxiety of various situations, it's made it very clear what is really important. At the time I was young, I was idealistic. I didn't really understand what could go wrong. What mattered. What didn't. But I think that all of those stresses and fears eventually taught me a lot of things and so in a lot of ways, even though they kind of sucked at the time, they were necessary to get me to who I am today. You know, I don't want to go back and relive them, but I wouldn't trade them away. TODD: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Well that was super interesting to me. I knew some of that. I learned some new stuff which is always fun, and I hope it has some value to the listeners for sure. You know, our experience. At least it's hopefully an interesting story if nothing more. JAMON: Absolutely.

The theme of this episode is centered around the lessons learned in charging for software development. Starting with a question from the Infinite Red Community, Todd, Ken, and Jamon touch on hourly vs. project pricing, the tension between time and value, how software estimating is a lot like weather forecasting, and the many experiments conducted over the years to find the right pricing model for Infinite Red. Episode Transcript JAMON HOLMGREN: We received a question from the community, community.infinite.red, it's a Slack community that we have. Trent asks, "Hey Jamon, I'm enjoying the podcast. Will you guys be covering hourly pricing versus project pricing? It's a question we're dealing with right now. Which do you guys prefer, and what are some lessons learned to bring you to that choice?" I think this is a really great question. Todd, do you wanna talk about what we're doing right now? And then we can go into maybe what we've done in the past, and what brought us to that choice? TODD WERTH: Sounds good. Yeah that's a great question, and it's actually a really tough one to deal with. So, what we do now, is we do weekly pricing. We charge per person-week, and we call it "person-week" as opposed to "a week of work" because it could actually be two people working maybe half a week each and that would be one "person-week." Because we're doing person-weeks, we have a point system. So, 100 points equals a person-week. We don't track time. We used to, and we can talk about that—we used to bill hourly. We don't track time, we don't actually know how long things take, it's just, we estimate our tasks in points, and if we've reached a hundred or more per person-week and we charge per person-week, then we're accomplishing our goal. JAMON: There's a bit of a tension between time and value, and this has been something that we've dealt with, I mean, I've dealt with, since I started my first consultancy. Of course, value-based pricing is kind of a holy grail of pricing for consultancies, and we've heard this for a long time, that you should charge for the value, not just the time that it takes. So an example, this would be fixed-bid pricing, where you're essentially betting on delivering the software in a reasonable amount of time, but you're getting paid on the value to the client. The problem is that our costs are not based on value. So, we're not necessarily paying our people based on the fixed-bid, a percentage of the fixed-bid, or something like that. There are industries that do that, but ours is not one of them. So we're paying people salaries, and our costs are over time, and so if something takes a very long time, then our profitability and the ability of the company to remain financially solvent is threatened. Conversely, you have, of course, hourly. We've done that in the past, and the nice thing about hourly is that it corresponds, obviously, very tightly with the amount of time that it takes to do. But the problem is that every hour is not equal. You have hours that are maybe really valuable, you've automated something and in a lot of cases you're actually delivering more value than the client is paying for, quite a bit more. And then there are others where the person's getting spun up, or they're hung up on a particular problem, whether it's their fault or not, and that turns into a bit of an issue, because then you're billing hundreds of dollars an hour for something where the client isn't really getting a lot of value. So I think that's why we ended up where we are, in a way. TODD: Yeah, both have issues. When you're doing hourly, it might seem to a client that's more fair, but it's not. It means every time there's a bug, or any time there's an issue, we basically are nickel-and-dimeing them, and they don't necessarily like that. We have to spin up someone, like Jamon said, where in our value system that we use now, they don't see any of that. We fix the bugs because it's part of the value of that particular feature. It does mean, though, sometimes, that we can produce a feature faster than the hourly would've been, and so they get charged, I guess, more for that. KEN MILLER: There's a couple of different ways that hourly works out sometimes, though. There's certainly the very literal, like, you sit there and you run a clock, like the way a lawyer would, you actually have a little timer that shows exactly what you're doing. When I worked for a large sort of corporate consulting company, Big Five-style, back in the '90s, I remember my first week I was filling out my time card, and I filled in the insane hours that I worked, because that's the kind of work that you do. And my project manager comes over to me and he's like, "No no no no no no no no, this is not what you do." And he took my time card and he filled in "eight, eight, eight, eight, eight." (laughter) TODD: That's ridiculous. But... KEN: Right. So that's how the Big Five work, often. TODD: So it's completely fake in that situation. KEN: It's completely fake. It's basically pretty close to what we do now, which is that weekly billing. Where an hour is just a way of measuring a week. To answer the question directly, you know, do we prefer hourly or project-based, we prefer hourly. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Hourly leads to less problems in the long term because the trouble with fixed bid, although it seems like it's appealing—It's appealing from your point of view, if you think you can be really efficient, and it's appealing from their point of view if they think you can't. But that's exactly it right there, it creates this adversarial relationship. Todd? TODD: Yeah, clients all– not all, but many clients think they would love a fixed bid. And in truth, they will hate a fixed bid. Ken's right. Fixed bids create an adversarial situation. Even if both sides are extremely... They're at the table in good faith, and they're trying to do the right thing and do their part and stuff, it still means that the client is trying to get as many hours as possible out of you for the same price, and us would be trying to do as few hours as possible. Like I said, even if you're both being very nice and very ethical in the way you're billing, that always creeps in. It also means that you have to lawyer every change. You'll have companies that have change order systems that are pretty complex. Clients hate that. When I talked to especially start-ups, one of the things I say is if the project we're working on at the end ends up exactly as you envisioned at the beginning, that's a huge red flag. That means you didn't listen to your beta testers, that means you didn't think at all during the process even after you got in your hands what could be better, it means a bunch of different things. So, we have a pretty strong process, but it's designed to be flexible. We wanted it to be flexible. So when we get to the point when we do estimation after a research phase, it's fairly accurate. The likelihood that it will actually produce your project for this estimate is extremely low. Not because we're incompetent– I'm sometimes incompetent– not because we're incompetent, but because you're gonna make a bunch of changes, and we welcome that. We don't lawyer that. But that's a little bit difficult, there's a little bit of education involved in getting people to understand that fully. JAMON: One of the objections is that, well, there are other companies that do fixed-bid, and they seem to do just fine. They're able to sustain that and their customers are generally happy, and things like that. But I think there's a hidden cost in there that people don't take into account. Which we've sort of driven a stake into the ground, we've said, "Hey, we're not willing to go down this route." And that is that those companies put the burden of hitting those estimates onto their employees. They essentially say, "Okay, well, we estimated this amount, you're not done yet, so you're gonna stay late until it's done." And they push, and push, and push, and they really, really just drive the screws in on their employees. Maybe not overtly, maybe not directly, but there's a culture and an expectation of being able to hit those estimates that puts a lot of stress on the employees. KEN: Yeah, that doesn't necessarily look like a slave driver. It can look like a "Rah-rah, sleep when you're dead," "work hard, play hard." "Rah!" But like, that kind of corporate culture. There are firms out there that I respect that do fixed-bids, and they seem to make it work, and that's fine. But in our experience, someone is paying for that somewhere. JAMON: Exactly. TODD: There's another type of fixed-bid which isn't just slave-driving your employees into the dirt. It is, you think it's gonna cost $100,000 on this project, you bid $800,000. So no matter what, unless you're ridiculously off, you're fine. The problem comes in when clients want both the lowest possible price and a fixed-bid. That just... It's not really possible. JAMON: So, our system is different. And Todd, I'd like you to talk a little bit about why our... Because, we are giving an estimate with points, and we're trying to hit those points, so it may feel like a fixed-bid, but do you want to explain what we're doing differently, where it really does change over time as you do a project? TODD: Yeah, so we do spend a decent amount of time doing research, architecture, that kind of stuff, before we estimate the points. So we're not just doing a ballpark estimate. We do a ballpark estimate at the beginning, but that's a few hours of our time. But we spend a few weeks or whatever doing research, architecture, that kind of stuff. And at the end of that, we produce an estimate in points. So those are fairly accurate. Obviously, anyone out there who does software development... By the way, everything we're talking about here is for development. On the design side, we do fixed-bids, and that's a different discussion. The gentleman who asked us the question was more towards the development side, so that's what we're talking about. JAMON: Right. TODD: So, our estimates are based on a whole lot more information than a lot of people do. And we do have clients who want an accurate estimate earlier, and we just have to push back, because in that situation we have only two options: We either push back against them and try to educate them in the process and help them do a successful project, or we lie to them. (laughter) And unfortunately a lot of companies just lie. They just come up with a number, they act like they put some thought into it– they didn't. I worked for a consulting company in the late '90s where the way we estimated was we asked the sales person how much they could afford. That was our miracle estimate. Which to me, I hated as an engineer. I just loathed it. I'm digressing a little bit here, but I don't want to make it out that our estimates are super accurate or that estimating software at all is an accurate thing at all. We know it's not. KEN: One of our sort of colleague companies out there calls them "forecasts," which I really like. People understand, like, a weather forecast is not necessarily going to be accurate. It's like, "Based on what we can see right now, this is what we think is gonna happen." And everyone understands that. So I really like that as a bit of language. TODD: Yeah, we should call it "forecasts." KEN: I'm tempted to steal that, but... (laughter) TODD: The other cool thing about a forecast is it's known: the further out you are from the date, the less accurate the forecast is, and the closer you get, the more accurate, and that's very true in our situation as well. JAMON: That's a great point, Todd, because we will definitely adjust those estimates as we get into things, and as we learn more. And I try to, I do a lot of the sales calls now, and one of the things I try to do is set the expectation that over time, the estimates will get more and more accurate, as we know more. The same thing with the weather forecast. You look at the ten-day, and you look at day number ten, and as you get closer and closer, you're gonna see a better and better forecast. And it's not uncommon for that to change even quite drastically, because weather systems can get delayed a little bit or something, and that can impact which day they land. KEN: Unless you live in California, in which case our weather never changes. JAMON: Yeah. No, I live in the Pacific Northwest near the Columbia River Gorge, and nobody understands the weather here. TODD: Our weather's hot and sunny. Tomorrow? Hot and sunny. The next day? Hot and sunny. JAMON: What if it's- KEN: And then a terrifying thunderstorm. And then hot and sunny. TODD: Once a year, we have terrifying water from the sky. I live in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is in this very small patch– I'm totally digressing here– but it's a very small patch in the US with the most sunshine out of the whole US, and it's just basically Las Vegas and around the desert area here. I think it's something ridiculous like 300 and some days of pure sunshine. Which is nice, as I lived in San Francisco for 20 years, and it is the opposite of that. And I enjoyed that for a long time, but I enjoy this. Anyways. So one of the things I wanted to bring up is, and we should talk about estimates. Because estimates are a big part of how you charge. And it is a difficult problem, and we have all sorts of issues that, I think, would be very interesting for listeners to hear that they're not alone in, and that we're still struggling with. KEN: Nobody has a magic bullet. Nobody has a magic bullet on that. TODD: It's a soft problem, it's definitely a people problem, and it's something that I'm actually actively working on all the time. But to finish up what we were saying before, we do find that weekly billing has worked out very well. It does require education. Your clients may instinctively go, "Okay, well they're just doing this to make more money because they're gonna get it done way faster, and they're actually gonna charge me this extra money, and they're not gonna do anything." And that's a perfectly normal human reaction. But one of the ways that we added some sugar to that tea is we say, "A bug comes up, sometimes bugs take five minutes, sometimes bugs take a half a week to fix. That's all included in that estimate. You don't have to worry about that. No nickel-and-dimeing." When the estimate goes up, say we add person-weeks to the overall estimate, and then maybe we add some calendar-weeks... By the way, we have typically a minimum team of two, and most times people work on one project full-time, so if you have a two person team on a project, we're producing two person-weeks per week. From that, and the number of points we estimate, we can calculate the calendar time, as opposed to the person-week time. And the calendar time does get extended, and the person-weeks do get extended. But it's always– not always, but it's usually from changes, and we try to be very good about being very transparent in explaining, and the client should know what all those changes were. They hopefully have approved them, and that's what adds the person-weeks and that sort of thing. JAMON: There are some times where we will feel like maybe we made a mistake, in such a way that it was maybe, we're not comfortable charging the client more for a particular thing. And in that case we will adjust what we're billing for a particular chunk of a project. And we'll take on that risk. There's a shared expectation of being reasonable in this. If a client's asking for something, then we're gonna bill more. If we make a mistake, then we'll try to rectify that as much as possible. But it does have flexibility built in, and that's important. But then also, like you said, Todd, the bug-fixing is built in and things like that. That really helps mitigate the amount of risk that the client is taking on. TODD: And truthfully, it's much easier for people doing the actual work, because they don't have to constantly, "Oh, this three-hour task is now a five-hour task, I have to ask permission for those extra two-hours, and it's just a lot of paperwork and a lot of thought about stuff that has nothing to do with making a great project." But yeah, and I also want to add on to what Jamon just said, the way we deal with issues... Let's say the value wasn't there, we had some problems, we typically deal with it on the invoicing side. We tell our people, "Okay, for whatever reason we're not gonna be charging for these person-weeks." But from their perspective, it doesn't matter. They're estimating points, they're working during the week, they're getting at least a hundred points per person-week, and they just keep on going forward. We'll adjust it on the back side, on the invoicing side so that our process keeps going and we have accurate data, even if we're in a situation where we made a big mistake or something like that, and we're not charging them for, say, a few weeks or whatever. JAMON: Yeah, totally. And Ken, would you wanna talk about the chronic problem of under-estimating? 'Cause I know this is something that's near and dear to your heart. KEN: Yeah, I don't know why engineers... I don't know if they want to feel like they, you know, they're really fast, or they feel guilty, or if it's imposter syndrome, or whatever it is, but it is a chronic problem. Engineers will estimate too optimistically. So we have sort of structures and practices, and this is not an easy problem to solve, right? But we have sort of structures and practices in place to sort of counter-act that, hopefully, whether it's sort of checklists like, "Have you considered these sort of failure cases? Have you included the bug-fixing and the testing time? Is the testing time including every platform that you could possibly use this on?" Et cetera, et cetera. Todd? TODD: Yeah, this is a problem we have not solved. We really try to hire, and I think we have hired, really decent, ethical people. Which is fantastic, and that's the intention, and I very much enjoy working with almost everyone here (maybe not Ken, but that's okay). (laughter) KEN: You can't fire me. (laughter) TODD: I cannot. I've tried many times. KEN: It's a perk of the job. TODD: Actually, it's funny, because I've been working on this a lot lately. We hire good, ethical people, which I very much enjoy. But they tend to feel more guilt, and they tend to be a little... They contemplate it and worry about it a little too much, to be honest. And so we do have chronic under-billing. One of the things we do is, we ask them for estimates, and we never ever– up to this point I've ever said, "This estimate's too high. You need to reduce this estimate." Because this is the estimate they're giving us, and they're gonna do the work, and it's not fair for us to come and say, you know, "You said it's gonna take a hundred points, I think it'd take 50 points." And of course when they do it and it takes a hundred points, they've failed, but only because in my opinion it should've been 50. We never do that. We never push back on that. So you would think that just human nature, in order to alleviate stress, they would say, "Okay, that's gonna take 50 points, but I'm gonna make it a hundred and 50 points just to give me an allowance." No one does that, surprisingly. That is not the problem we deal with. It could be just our team. Probably not just our team, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who do that. KEN: I mean, I've seen this everywhere I've ever worked, right? People wanna feel like a hero, people don't... It's not as much fun to think about all the ways that things go wrong, well, depending on your personality I guess. But yeah, the ideal way that we're always striving toward is basically, the engineer gives us as accurate and conservative of an estimate as possible. And then in terms of how we present it to the client, if we feel we need to make an economic adjustment in order to get a sale, for example, then we will do that on our end. We don't want it baked into the estimate. JAMON: And Todd actually ran an experiment with our own engineers at one point. He took a screen, I think it was a login screen of a project we'd actually already done- TODD: Yes. JAMON: -and sent it to several engineers and asked what their estimate was. Do you wanna talk about that, Todd? TODD: Yeah, I've done a few of these to try to kind of understand this problem. In that case, it wasn't clear what kind of project it was, whether it was a mobile app, an iPad app, a website. I did that on purpose. I also didn't give them any requirements other than I gave them a screenshot. Which is not untypical to get from a client if we didn't do the design, to just get the screenshots. So I wanted to see A) how they approached the estimation process, and B) what their estimates were. I'll skip to the spoiler part. The lowest one was like three hours? This is back when we did hours, we weren't doing points. The highest one was like 46 hours. So the range is three hours to 46 hours. Some people, their estimate wasn't accurate for obvious reasons, they got back to me within five minutes and didn't ask any questions. And that was more on the junior side, and that's perfectly fine. Estimating is probably one of the most difficult things that we do, and so it's understandable when people with less experience do it less well. But the interesting part is that a lot of people didn't even ask what platform it was on. The person who did 46 hours, the highest one, had a huge write-up of all the reasons why it was 46. And when you look at it, you're like, "Yeah." Because it seemed very simple. Like, it's a login screen. It's two text inputs and a button that says "Login." But there's actually a huge amount of stuff. A lot of people assumed they were just doing the screen as opposed to actually making it work, like, making you log in to the backend, and Facebook integration and all this stuff. But the fascinating part is how different it was and their different approaches. KEN: It should be mentioned, though, just for the record, that the way this exercise was set up was intentionally, on Todd's part, very vague. Right? It wasn't like, "Hey, I need you to do this for a client so that we can get a good estimate." It was a very off-hand... But the range of responses to that very vague setup was illuminating. Because some people are constitutionally incapable of not treating that seriously. (laughter) And some people are like, "Whatever Todd, I've got work to do." Right? So there's gonna be a very broad range there, and the range of real estimates is probably not gonna be quite as wide. But still. TODD: Ken has a particular personality, and so does a few other people on our team, where he really didn't like the "gotcha" part of that question, the vagueness of it. And he felt like I was looking for a real answer and he was set up to fail on the real answer because I didn't give him any information. That wasn't the point of it. I actually didn't care what their answer was as much as the process by which they went around the answer. And I didn't say that, on purpose, too. And so he was a little bit like, "You're setting me up to fail, I don't like this, go to hell." Which was kind of funny. But it's funny from my perspective, but it's also illuminating. For people with that type of personality, that's the reaction they have to that, and that's a very real thing. KEN: Well, it's also, like, if you just ask me a very vague off-hand question, I'm gonna devote a vague off-hand amount of attention to it. Right? And I think a lot of other people are gonna be that way too. It's kind of like, "Oh, okay, without any further information, why am I gonna spend an hour breaking down this problem for you?" Or however long it takes. JAMON: I will point out that mine was both quick and accurate. TODD: Yeah, I hate giving Jamon a compliment, but I thought Jamon's was one of the more accurate, and he did it very fast, and it was very thorough. KEN: We brought Jamon on because he's lucky. TODD: That's right. I have a rule: Every quarter, I randomly fire one of our team. And the reason I do this is very simple. I don't want anyone unlucky working at our company. That's a joke, in case anyone thought it wasn't. We don't horribly fire people because they're unlucky. But yeah, so that's a very interesting thing on that. There's other interesting things too. Another experiment I did was, I had people estimate something simple again. Then they gave me the estimate, whatever it was– the numbers don't matter, but let's say they said 10 hours, and this is once again, back when we did hours. If they said 10 hours, then I would say, "Okay, what's the likelihood– are you 100 percent confident that you can do it in 10 hours or under? Are you 90 percent confident? 80 percent confident?" And then I would ask them, "Okay, how about eleven hours? How about twelve hours, how about thirteen hours?" And what I found is that the first estimate they gave me, almost no one was confident they could do it in that time. Which was fascinating- JAMON: Yeah, it'd be something like 60 percent or something, and then you'd have to go quite a ways up before they were 90, 95 percent confident. TODD: Correct. So I'm not sure exactly what to make of that, except for, that's a phenomenon. JAMON: I did ask some of our employees that were doing an estimate to include a confidence factor. And that estimation is not done yet. It should be in the next week or two, and it'll be interesting to go through that and see where they landed. KEN: Yeah, that would be interesting. JAMON: There are some other reasons why you might not be confident. Maybe there are a bunch of unknowns that we will have to dig into before we'll know for sure, and there's no amount of hours that would satisfy that necessarily. But I think that that's something... You should give a number... Again, we're not doing hours, but doing the point system you should have your estimate units, of course, for each task, but then also include a confidence factor. And that might be a percentage or something that you're confident. I think that's an aspect that maybe will be helpful going forward. TODD: To be clear, that's a hypothesis. Jamon has at this point, we haven't tested that. So take that as an idea. JAMON: That's exactly right, yeah. TODD: Another thing I asked them was, it's very fascinating, the same kind of line of questioning on giving them a very simple thing to estimate. And then I asked them, "Does that include tests? Does that include QA? Does that include bug fixes? Does that include any production issues when it goes out to the real world?" All over the map, whether or not they included, very few people said it included all of that. So when you asked them, "How long will this take?" They didn't take that question as, "How much time will you spend to have this completely done and you never touch it again?" Very few people took it that way. They more took it as, "I could get it done and in the app and then later we would debug it or test it or make changes or whatever, but that's not included in my estimate." So that was a fascinating result, also. Now, I don't have any recommendations for any of this, other than it's very interesting to see how people's minds work, and how different people's minds work differently when they're given a task to estimate how long something will take. JAMON: There's a couple of ways that we can mitigate that. Ken mentioned earlier, checklists. I think those are probably under-utilized. That's something that we should use more. So when you're looking at a screen, you'd have a checklist of things. And maybe some of them don't apply and you just mark them off. But some of them are definitely... KEN: Yeah, there's something else that we're trying, which I've never really heard of anyone else doing, I've never encountered it before. We're trying to keep a database of past features so that instead of sitting and de novo every time, sort of like thinking through step-by-step every feature, you say, "Does this feature feel more like this one or that one?" Right? And then you just take the number that we actually empirically determined previously. JAMON: So it gives you kind of an anchor point, and then you can determine if it's maybe more or less than that. KEN: The jury's out on whether this could work as a system or not, but. JAMON: Exactly. TODD: What does "de novo" mean, Ken? KEN: From the beginning, from new. TODD: So, you replaced "from new," which is two syllables, with a three syllable word, "de novo." Okay, just making sure I understand. (laughter) KEN: It has further implications, but whatever, Todd. Feel free to make fun of my vocabulary as much as you like. TODD: I would make fun of your vocabulary, but the word "vocabulary" isn't in my vocabulary, so... KEN: Obviously. TODD: It's a vicious circle. JAMON: So I think it's good maybe for us to go back a couple years, maybe. When we merged, we had... We try to be a little bit unconventional in our thinking. We try not to bring a lot of preconceived notions into what we're doing here, and think things through de novo, you know, start from the beginning, start from– you like how I did that?– start from first principles and kind of look at it in a way that... "Okay, can we innovate on this? Can we look at it and come up with something new?" And we did, actually. And I don't actually remember whose idea this was, maybe one of you does, but we had the idea, "We're gonna bill hourly," was what our initial thought was. "We're gonna bill hourly, and then let's have a base salary for all of our developers and designers, but then pay them per hour billed that they personally billed." And it was an interesting experiment. I think we ran it for probably a year, maybe it was two years? Something like that, with varying success. And we learned a ton of things that you wouldn't when you just start out as salary employees. I will point out that we are now on salary. But we should talk a little bit about that experiment and what we learned there. TODD: Yeah, that was... We had specific goals, and we had tons of good intentions for those goals. And like all good intentions, we fell on our face. But that would be a very interesting podcast in itself, the lessons... What we did, what we went through, what we changed to, and the lessons we learned during the process. JAMON: I think to just kind of give it a really quick little thing, since we've teased it here, one of the things that we found is that people are generally not that motivated by money. Because they can certainly bill more hours and make more money, that was one of the benefits of the system, if you were very productive– KEN: A couple people did. JAMON: Yeah, some people did. KEN: Some people took advantage of that. JAMON: Yeah, for sure, but it was not anywhere near even a quarter of those people. So that was good to know. Other people, they were just motivated by different things. They were motivated, it's not that they're not motivated, but it just wasn't purely by money. Another thing was that there were some situations that ended up not really being very fair. So, some people would be in projects where bill hours were very easy to come by. And others where we really either had to supplement their bill hours or something along those lines. It also didn't really encourage collaboration between people, so there's some silos. The benefit to the company, obviously, is that if we're having sort of a down month because, you know, it's cyclical, then your costs go down. And the benefit to the employee is if you're having a really busy month, then you're getting paid more. But ultimately, that whole system, we went away from, and went to the system that we're using today. TODD: Yeah, I can, in my opinion, it was a complete failure. That being said, it was, I'm pretty sure, originally my idea. And like I said, great intentions, but I think that was one of our biggest failures, to be honest. JAMON: We learned a lot. I think that was the big thing. And those lessons will stick with us. TODD: We learned a lot, and we changed, and, you know... But I think it was more painful than it should've been. KEN: I forget where I sort of read/heard this advice, but basically, when you're starting a new company, you're trying to do something innovative, you should limit what you try to do that's innovative. Focus your innovation where it really counts, and then don't try to innovate too much in the rest of your business practices. I think that that's part of what we learned there. Even setting aside all these sort of incentive things, there's a bunch of things that just work better when people are on salary. Right? Their benefits work better, insurance works better– TODD: Vacation time. KEN: -vacation time works better, there's a bunch of things where there's a whole ecosystem of support for how to run a business. And if you try to innovate in how you do that, you cut yourself out of all those things, and make yourself less competitive on the labor market. You make yourself... You know, you spend more time on things you shouldn't be spending time on. And so, you know, I think we've become in some ways a more conventional company in certain aspects, so that we can stretch out into places that we still want to stretch out. TODD: It's so interesting you said that, Ken, because I literally give people that advice when they're starting out producing an app or a website or whatever it is. For the things that don't matter to your particular customers, or don't matter to your particular business, stick with tried and true. That's well-known, you don't have to worry about that stuff. Put all your innovation and your avant-garde ideas into the things that really differentiate your company from other companies. So it's so funny that you said that in respect to our company, because although we didn't apply it ourselves, it's advice we give. KEN: Well, I had heard that advice before we did all of this. And the truth is, when you're there, you don't always know which one is the most important, right? So that's gonna happen. But it's worth bearing that in mind, to always be asking yourself the question, like, "What really makes us different as a company?" And if it's not this thing that we're doing and spending a lot of time on, maybe rethink that. TODD: I'll personally admit to hubris. KEN: What?! Never. TODD: "We can do anything, and we'll just apply our big brains to it, and we'll figure it out." KEN: Big brains are not the commodity that's in short supply. It's time, right? It's time and attention. JAMON: I think I'll actually disagree a little bit, here. We've actually gotten the feedback that we all agree a little too much here. So I'll play the part of the devil's advocate here. I think it was well worth trying, and I think it was actually based on some things that we... I think in certain cases, actually, it could work, I think it could be actually be something that a particular company could actually make work. It's just that we didn't like some of the side effects of it. Sort of like, taking a certain experimental medication. Maybe it works, but the side effects are not worth it. And I think that that's actually where we ended up with that. I wouldn't, like Todd said, I wouldn't necessarily classify it all as a complete failure. I think there were parts of it that were a failure. And I'm happy with the system we have now, but I'm also very much happy that we tried that. TODD: It was 90 percent a failure. KEN: It got us to the point we are now. TODD: Well, sure. JAMON: What's your confidence level on that, Todd? TODD: I am 90 percent confident that it was a 90 percent failure. CHRIS: Do you guys wanna touch on psychology and perception in the role of pricing? KEN: Oh, man. **CHRIS: That's something I was kind of thinking about as you were talking.## JAMON: Yeah, actually, I do have some thoughts on that. So, one of the questions that comes up is, "When you are selling fixed-bid or hourly, what do clients think? Is it hard to do?" And I've found that neither fixed-bid nor hourly are particularly hard to sell. Both are well-understood. Our current system takes a little more explanation, and so I think that's something we need to continue to work on, our messaging on. But most people understand them. Some people have a problem with it. They'll say, "You know what, we're not willing to do hourly. That puts too much risk on us." And that's totally cool. It's not something that... maybe they're not a good fit for us. KEN: Well, yeah, the thing is, whenever you're asking a vendor to assume risk for you... You're paying for it somewhere, right? You know, if they want you to be the insurance, then you're paying them to provide insurance. Either that, or they're mismanaged and they're gonna go out of business and then you don't have support. You know, when we switched to weekly, I was concerned that we'd have trouble selling it. It doesn't seem like it's been too big of a deal. For the most part, people still mostly care about the total number, correct? And how you get there? TODD: Correct. KEN: They're not as, they're not usually as concerned with... We've had a few cases where... We had something recently where the upstream source of funds was a grant that had rules about how it's charged, so there's things that come up around that. So sometimes we'll make exceptions. And we have at least one enterprise client that we still use hourly. But for the most part, this has been pretty popular. We feel like it has the best of both worlds in some respects, that it has more predictability than hourly, but it still has built-in flexibility that a fixed-bid doesn't. TODD: Our team definitely thinks the weekly is a success. It wasn't that difficult to convert clients from hourly to weekly, and for new clients, they don't seem to mind whatsoever. It's interesting from our team's perspective. Sometimes they could be working more than they used to, because they have to fix these bugs or whatever, but because they don't have the stress or the guilt, a lot of times of the hourly, they still like it better. It's kind of counter-intuitive, in that way. JAMON: Yeah, I think there's three vectors, or three metrics that you would go off of, you know. "How satisfied is the client?" "How stress-free is it for the employees?" And then, "How much do we as owners like it as a business model?" And from those metrics, I feel like all three have been a success. TODD: Yeah, it's definitely been a success. I think we could definitely do with hourly, but I think the weekly billing has been a huge success. I'm 90 percent sure that it was 90 percent a success. (laughter) As far as the psychology from the client standpoint? We understand... One of the things we do, we hire a people who have a lot of experience, either they ran their own small businesses, they ran teams, that kind of stuff. We have a lot of people who have real-world kind of business experience. We're definitely not business consultants, per se, but we do work with a lot of start-ups who need some basic, not basic, but need some of our business consulting. And one of the things that we do is we understand the risk involved. And there's a lot of companies like us don't talk about this at all. For example, from a client's perspective, it's a big purchase. If you're spending 100,000, 200,000, 500,000 dollars? That's a large purchase. If you're a start-up, that's a risky thing. So we try to really think about their risk. Now, we have our own risks, too. We could put five people on a project for a few weeks, incur a huge amount of money, and they could just never pay us, go out of business, whatever reason. So we have risk as well. So we're not here just to alleviate all their risk and put it on our shoulders, being the insurance risk, insurance Ken just mentioned. But we do try to figure out a way to have a nice balance between us helping them with their risk, and them helping us with our risk, and just being up-front. Like, "This is risky, you don't know us. You've had a recommendation, maybe you liked us during a sales call so you're choosing us, but you really don't know us." And we're a huge believer in gaining trust over time. So at the beginning, or whatever that word is Ken had, I forgot now, already, at the beginning, the risks are much higher. So we do put a lot of thought into that. Some clients, to be honest, aren't a good fit for our system. We're very happy to help them find someone who would better fit the system than us. So we do lose some clients, for sure. JAMON: One way that some clients have asked us to share an undue amount of risk is when they ask us for hourly with a cap. That is sort of the worst of both worlds for us. If we finish early, we make less money, but we also take all of the risk of when it goes over. So we really do refuse, essentially, to do that. Now, there have been some situations where we've put such a cap on ourselves because of particular circumstances, but we don't work for clients that demand that sort of thing. TODD: Yeah, we have a general rule where we strive not to work for free. Which sounds funny, especially if you're in a different kind of business than ours, but it's actually super common for businesses like ours to work a lot for free, for nothing. And it's actually, in my opinion, a rampant problem in our industry. So we really strive not to do that. I think that would probably come to a shock for a lot of people. If you're selling hamburgers, the concept, "Well, you know, 30 percent of the people walk through today, you're just gonna give them the hamburger for free." That would be shocking to them. But that's kind of like what people like us do, too much so, in my opinion. Anything else on the psychology from the client standpoint that we could talk to, or talk about? KEN: I mean, pricing is a huge topic. TODD: Could you talk about pricing per week or per hour, the psychology? Because I know you've discussed this in the past, Ken, and I'd love for you to tell people. KEN: Yeah, so one of the things we... We've tried a bunch of different ways of pricing. So one of the things we did before, we would only bill for extreme, like the instant we step away from the keyboard, the timer goes off. When we first started, we tried to do this. So we would charge like a pretty high hourly rate. But then, the actual number of hours burnt would be low. Nobody liked that. Nobody understood that, it was much better to bill in the way that people kind of understood about that. When we would bill hourly, like an hourly rate, we're much more likely to get really kind of angry responses sometimes. To people who didn't really have a sense for what software costs. Because what people will do is, they'll look at the hourly rate, and they'll compare it to how much they make. Right? They'll go, "Wait a minute, that's what a lawyer makes!" Or something. It's not actually what a lawyer makes. But we would get this very visceral reaction to that. But by doing it weekly, where we've kind of smoothed all that out, then they can kind of approach it more like a product that they're buying. Kind of like, "Well, it comes in this many chunks, and okay, that makes sense." So that, I think, was always one of the benefits of fixed-bid for people. Fixed-bid in sales has always been nice, because you can just say, "Here it is, and that's your price." Although, it's 100,000 dollars, they were like, "Well, my budget's 150, so I could do that." Right? And with doing this weekly, although it's not quite there, it is a little bit like... The way we're doing it now is a little bit like fixed bid plus an extremely well-oiled change request process, basically. JAMON: Yeah, exactly. KEN: And that seems to solve both of those problems. Where it's like, they can look at that and instead of being some unknown number of hours, weeks seem like they're easier to kind of grapple with. And that's exactly what we want, right? I don't think we end up charging more, particularly. But it does come in these chunks that are easier to grapple with. They know what size the check are gonna be that they're writing next week because it's gonna be a certain cadence. It's not the surprise every time. It just seems to work better. Go ahead, Todd. TODD: People will pay extra money to remove the surprises happily. KEN: Yes, absolutely. TODD: I don't think our weekly is more money, but even if it were, they would be happier. It's so funny, what Ken said is they associate their salary with their hourly, or even if they take their salary and divide it by 40 and divide it by 52 or whatever, and they compare it to ours, and they think, "Wow, these people are getting paid a massive amount." Of course, they don't see all the other business stuff. There's actually no– KEN: They're not counting the overhead, they're not counting the things that they're not having to pay for. TODD: I'm not complaining at all, but it's just a fact of our business: we actually have fairly low margins for a business type. Our team is extremely expensive compared to other businesses, extremely. Not saying we overpay them, I'm not claiming that, it's just the nature of their jobs. JAMON: Yeah, and another aspect of this, and I realize we're going a little long here, but another aspect of this that we could talk about is that with the point system, it's not 100 points for each person, it's if we have three people working on it, the whole team needs to deliver 300 points. So they work together to divide up the work in such a way that maybe someone's doing 150, the other person's doing 50 but they're doing a lot of client communication. And allow them to divvy up the work in a way that makes the most sense to them. Where with the hourly bonus structure that we had before, that would actually hurt the person doing most of the communication with the client. And that was a problem. TODD: That's huge. And that was a decision we made. And because we chose that, meaning that we don't track individual contributions. I mean, technically we could probably figure it out based on Trello cards and that kind of stuff. But we don't track individual... It's team-oriented. So if it's three people, like Jamon said, it's 300 points. And we give them the flexibility to figure it out, how to be the best, most efficient to do those 300 points that they can. And I think that's worked out really well. It has some downsides. It is harder to keep metrics on individuals that way. JAMON: Yeah, a lot of what we do for that is to simply ask their teammates how it was to work with them, try to encourage them to be honest about their contributions and things. It's not a perfect system, but we are able to track individual contributions a little bit better, just through the perceptions of their teammates. TODD: I do it more efficiently, I get 'em all in one room and I say, "Out of all of you, who's the worst?" (laughter) And then I let 'em... It's kind of like that inspirational movie, Hunger Games? JAMON: The inspirational movie? TODD: Yeah, so, and it's quite efficient, and you get right to the meat of it, literally, sometimes, to the meat of it. JAMON: Literally. KEN: And what they say is, "You are, Dad, you are!" TODD: And I remind them once again, I'm not their father, that's Darth Vader. Fact. JAMON: There's a lot more we could talk about here on this topic, this is probably something we could revisit at a future... KEN: You may have noticed that we like to talk? Especially Todd. But, yeah... TODD: My words are all very small, so I need lots of them. KEN: We get very passionate about very dry things, sometimes. TODD: There's some things to be said, too, on the subject of billing... It's a touchy subject, because although you can say that clients can be difficult in certain ways in regarding to this, it's all... Assuming that the client isn't a jerk and they're just trying to squeeze a rock for as much blood as they can, and let's assume that's the case, and most times that is the case. From their perspective– KEN: Wait, you should be clear on what you're saying is the case. 'Cause otherwise, you mean... Most of the time, they are not trying to be jerks. That's what you're saying. TODD: Most of our clients– KEN: Okay, good. TODD: Most of our clients are really great, and they're showing up, and they're partnering with us, and we're both working towards the goal of making something awesome. So if they are being difficult in a certain way that we may complain about in the background, they always usually have a reason why. It's usually a miscommunication, it's just something that they're misunderstanding on their end. KEN: And like you said, presumably they're getting the software because they need it for some reason. Right? And it's a lot of money– TODD: It's scary! KEN: Yeah, it is scary! TODD: And the last thing they wanna hear is, I mean, if you're doing a bathroom, you don't want a contract to come over and say it's gonna be from 50 dollars to 50,000 dollars. Which may be a true statement, but you don't wanna hear that, that's horrible. JAMON: Well, one of the ways that we can mitigate that is if someone does have a fixed, like, hard-cap budget, which does happen and we understand when that is, then something else has to be flexible. And usually it's scope. We're not gonna compromise on quality. We wanna deliver really quality experience. But scope can be adjusted, and if a client is willing to work with us on scope, we can accommodate a tighter budget and still deliver a quality, but narrower scope, piece of software. TODD: That brings up something very interesting, Jamon. It is a trade-off between low-price and low-risk. So, if we crank up the risk, we can give a quote at a very, the lowest price possible, because it may change. "We think we could possibly do it at this price." The easier thing to do is have a much larger price that reduces risk, but they're almost guaranteed to pay a lot more. Some companies hate the first one. They'd much rather have a much bigger price that's reliable and low-risk. Other companies, especially if they're really lean, they would prefer the first one. And the problem from our perspective is, we don't know who's who. And it's hard to get them to tell us, or they may not even know. So when you choose to go down one of those paths, do we give them as lean as possible estimate but we know it's much more likely to change? Or do we give them a much larger estimate that reduced the risk? When you're doing that, you're kind of choosing your customer at that point, too. It's all very complicated.

In this episode of Building Infinite Red, we are talking about clients and some of the assumptions that often need to be challenged when creating software. Throughout the episode, Todd, Ken, and Jamon touch on the importance of knowing who your audience is, what they value, and how your ideas will meet their needs. Show Links Dropzones App Release by Mark Rickert A Dark Room by Amir Rajan Uncommon Sense by Derek Sivers Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: Today we are talking about clients. It's an important topic and one that pretty much every business owner inevitably gets asked a variety of questions. The question that we could start with is: what's your favorite moment in working with clients? JAMON HOLMGREN: You would think it would be when you launch their app or their site, or something like that, but I often find that actually to be a little bit anti-climactic 'cause there's so much going on. There's usually already plans in place for a version 1.1. It's not usually like everybody gather around the big green button and then the founder pushes the button, and it goes live. Although a little side note, Mark Rickert, who is one of our developers has released an app to the app store while in free fall during a skydive. That is true. We can link to it and there's a YouTube video of it. But that's not usually how it works. KEN MILLER: It wasn't a client app I don't think. I think it was one of his apps, but still. JAMON: That was a pretty cool way to do it. But no, you would think that would be the most exciting time. The exciting time is usually during design, for me, because I feel like you start getting a lot of enthusiasm, the energy. A lot of those things start coming out during the design process. And when we get a chance to use our design process—some clients will come to us with something already designed, others will come to us who need design. When they're going through the design process, it's really exciting, you can see a lot of the possibilities. The development side of things is also fun, but a little slower moving. TODD: I agree with Jamon on the design side. Once we get through the product development and start getting into design, probably past the wireframing and into some more concrete examples, it's pretty fun to see the client get really excited. Especially if it's a situation where they show people who are interested in their product, or their stakeholders and investors, or whomever, and they had a good reaction to it. I would add the second most fun time with clients is once there is a beta or an alpha available for their beta testers. And again, they send it to them and they use words like "blown away," or something like, that's awesome. I'm not gonna lie and say, that's always what happens, but those two times I think are the most fun to me. CHRIS: One of the things that Jamon wrote in Slack that was interesting is: what are some common assumptions that clients bring to the process that have to be corrected? TODD: I don't know if there's anything that's common or consistent across clients. There are some things that come up. I would say, depending on the experience level of the client with software product development, we may have a little to a lot of teaching to do. And that's one of the things we like to do is teach. I find it particularly fun when our start-up clients are newer, they're not on their series B or something. Because there is a lot of moments that you can help them and give them kind of golden information. Both from our personal experience running start-ups, but also we work with a lot of start-ups. So we've been through this before. There are some misconceptions about software. Not necessarily from our clients, but from people who weren't a good fit for us. For example, it's very common in the world at large, to believe software is orders of magnitude cheaper than it really is. People also get very used to the quality that they see in apps like Facebook or Gmail, or these kind of things. And they think they can spend less than a car to get those things. When you're in our industry of course, that doesn't seem super logical, but from their perspective it makes sense. An app costs nothing, or $1.99. JAMON: Right. TODD: Or $4.99, so of course something like that seems cheap. What they don't know, of course, is Facebook has tens of thousands of employees. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: And even a smaller app, let's not chose Facebook, which is huge. But like Instagram, for example. And not what it is now, but what it originally was, probably cost half a million to make. JAMON: Yeah, I think I saw that they put $250,000 into their MVP originally. And it's a very simple app when you look at it, compared to a lot of apps out there. I think that's definitely something that, as Todd said, it's not necessarily the clients who end up being good fits for us. But usually we get calls from everybody, all kinds of people. KEN: Well, even those prices are reflective of just how far software has come in terms of developer productivity. JAMON: Right. KEN: Because half a million dollars doesn't even get you a house in the Bay area. And the people building your house, most of them are being paid 20, 30, 40 dollars an hour and not $200 an hour, or $100 an hour. The Bay area is full of software engineers being paid $150,000 a year and up, many that are way higher than that. And you can still build software for half a million dollars, which is actually is pretty impressive when you think about that in terms of it's inputs. JAMON: Another interesting thing that the clients don't necessarily realize when they come to us is the impact that the design process can have on their product. Usually you're thinking of design as making it look pretty, making it look nice. But there's a whole lot more that goes into that. The visual design aspect of design is usually, maybe, the last 30%, something like that. It's not the bulk of the design work. But there's a lot of value that can be added there. You can avoid expensive mistakes during design by spending the time upfront to really learn as much as you can about your core customers and the features that are necessary. Because software is expensive, so you wanna build as little of it as possible until you really know the direction that you need to go. TODD: Yeah, and I wanna be clear. You can make, for instance, a mobile app for $100,000 to $200,000. It's not a half a million. But something that's larger could be millions as well. Just wanna make that note on that price there. JAMON: I think another misconception that some clients might have when they come into it, is they don't understand necessarily all of the breadth of things that need to happen to make an app. We've had people come to us and want to build an app, but they don't necessarily realize that they also need a server and they need some sort of cloud connectivity. They might need offline support. They might need access to certain APIs for GPS or whatever. And beyond that, how to get through the app store. And how to get through Google Play. What is a compelling app store listing? What does that look like? You know, what screenshots are important? And one of the most successful apps that I've ever been involved with, which is called A Dark Room by my friend Amir Rajan, he actually only has one screenshot on the app store, and it's a very uninspiring one. But he has millions of downloads. It's just, he hit it right on the head. TODD: You know which store is incredibly hard to get through? IKEA. (laughter) Just saying. KEN: It's true. TODD: We've mentioned before in this podcast, but it's worth repeating, design is not how things look. Design is how things work. And through the very first part of our design process is product discovery. And that's even before how things work. That's what product is you want to make at all. Since we work with a lot of start-ups, we also sometimes coach them, if they need it on coming up with a customer acquisition plan and a revenue plan, which their investors, prospective investors that they pitch to, will definitely ask them about, having pitched to them myself. So design is very important and it's also one of the most difficult things that we mentioned in a previous podcast was getting from zero to one. Product discovery and design really help our clients get from zero to one. JAMON: And they're starting a business, you know, it's not just building an app. They're starting a business, or they're continuing a business that they already have. And there's a lot that goes into building a business for sure. I think that's one of the things that, maybe some friends of mine who might message me and say, "hey Jamon, I've got this app idea, it's a billion dollar idea." (laughter) "Promise not to go off and rip me off. I wanna tell you it." And it's fine, you know, the ideas are a very necessary part of this, they're a spark. They're really important. But the execution side of things involves designing and building the app, which we can do. We're really great at it, we've done it a lot of times. But also, the business side of things. There's no one right answer to how to build a business. You can see that with many different business models. And that's the tough part. Now, it can be very rewarding though, the whole journey and it's been really fun to watch our clients build business models that are sustainable and come back as they grow, as they succeed, they find new opportunities and they come back to us and say, "hey Infinite Red, we need some new features. We need a new app. We need to rebuild the app for maybe a different purpose." Those things are very fun to see. TODD: Ken, you had a great thing about ideas, when people have an idea for a business. You've talked about a lot and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. KEN: Oh, and how they're not usually worth the paper that they're written on. (laughter) TODD: Yes. KEN: Where this came from was that, like back in the days of the dotcom boom, when everybody and their brother had some amazing idea. I would be at a social dinner with somebody and they would be like, they'd whip out an NDA and be like, I wanna talk to you about this idea I have and I need you to sign this NDA. And I'm like, "No. I'm not gonna sign your NDA." Ideas, per se, are not worth very much. Right? A high level idea, per se, is not worth very much. Like my idea's like, "hey, I have an amazing idea. What if you took a car, then you made it fly?" Right? And people will be like, "that's an amazing idea." Now, how are you actually gonna do that? And so it's kinda like, just because I have this amazing idea, "oh what if you made cars fly," doesn't mean that when somebody goes and actually makes cars fly that I have any right to that idea. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: Right? Because the high level idea by itself, although cool, doesn't actually get you there. It's the millions and millions of other good ideas that follow that, that really make something work. Jamon, do you wanna tell the dating with music, I could tell you wanna tell the dating with music story. JAMON: That's exactly what I was gonna interject. So Derek Sivers, who founded CD Baby, he has a YouTube video, it's very short. We can link to it in the show notes. Essentially it's talking about ideas versus execution. And the general premise is sort of this, that he met with a friend of a friend, and they were having lunch. And this guy had this billion dollar idea. And he says, okay, what's this great idea that you have? And the guy kind of leans over, very intense, and says, dating with music. (laughter) And Derek's like, is there anything else? (laughter) Is this ... He's like, no, dating with music dude. And it was ... he's like, okay, this idea is worth maybe the price of a lunch. Right? Like, the execution of it is the multiplier, you know, you can have a multiplier ... a great idea, not execute it at all, is really not worth much. A bad idea, executed really well is also not worth all that much. But a really good idea executed really well, is a multiplier that becomes your billion dollar idea. I don't think it necessarily tells the whole story, you know, that particular anecdote because there's also timing and other things like that. KEN: Well and that idea isn't even a multiplier idea. That's like a hint at a maybe multiplier idea. Right? JAMON: Yes. TODD: He was just being nice to the guy. KEN: He was being nice, right. So it's kind of like, when I say there's a chain of ideas, the first germ of the idea is the kind of idea that someone might get when high. Kind of like, "hey man, what if it was like dating, but with music. Yeah." (laughter) Right? That's exactly a high person's idea. I would almost bet money that that was a high idea. But anyway. The next thing is like, oh well you get people to put in their music that they like and we match people up. That's starting to be an actual idea. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Right? That's starting to be like, what's the actual hook. And even that, there's still, like well how does it work? What's the UX? What's the viral engine around that? JAMON: Yeah. KEN: It's not just programming. Like, we're all programmers historically, so we're gonna tend to see all of the stuff that's gonna go behind that. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: Really, it's the product development of design that, or really, what's important. And a lot of the details that matter, are sometimes the ones that are not obviously to your competitors. TODD: Almost always. KEN: Almost always. So this idea that your super secret idea is gonna make everything work is, frankly, BS. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: You have to keep having those good ideas over and over and over again. Every techy who's been in Silicon Valley, or a similar environment, and around the sorts of people who have these sorts of ideas, every single one has a story of being approached by somebody who's saying, "hey I've got this great idea. I'm gonna get you in on the ground floor with it. But I just need somebody to make it." JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: And we'll split it 50/50. Young techies fall for this. Very quickly you learn, uh, no. You'd better have a lot more than that for that to be a 50/50 bargain. TODD: I'm not even joking when I say that in San Francisco at least 50% of your Uber drivers will pitch an idea to you on your ride. JAMON: We got pitched in an Uber, us three. We were in an Uber not that long ago and we got pitched on an idea. And I think that it's kind of interesting because the apps that do tend to be more successful that we're involved with, they're often not big ideas. They're good ideas, they're not like huge ideas. They're existing companies that have a need that their customer base has kind of expressed, they can see it's fairly obvious. And they come to us and they say, hey we need really good execution. And that's what we're good at. They've identified the need. Have a lot of the infrastructure already in place. They already know how they're gonna monetize it. They already know how it's gonna impact their business. They just need a really great app. And that's where we really plug in. Now it has been kind of interesting to watch start-ups where they don't have that in place and how they develop that. And where they go with that. It's much more risky. A lot of them do fail. And one of the things that I've heard from some of those clients sometimes is, "Jamon, why aren't you so excited about my idea?" Now I'm not trying not to come across excited, I am excited about their idea. It's just that I've seen so many of these where there's certain other parts of the business that they lack. From my standpoint, if I was in the business of picking winners and losers, I'd probably be doing my own start-up, right? But, honestly, there's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of variables. And not all of them are in your control. So I think it's been really cool to see the ones that do succeed. See how they piece it all together. I have a lot of respect for them, it's a difficult thing, but it's very rewarding. And then, of course, the companies that come in, like, we just started a project recently, this week actually I think. And they are an established company, they have a very big user base. A lot of people have heard of them, but they need a much better app. And they need a better app experience. And that's really where you see the clients that really shine. KEN: There may be a few people listening who are kind of mentally going like, "hmm, is that me?" What I would say is, if you think it's you, it might be. (laughter) If you wanna know, like I wanna do this thing. And I don't program and I'm not a designer, like, I don't know how to make these things and I don't really wanna be that person. If the idea isn't what's important, then what is important? What do I bring to the table that is gonna help me succeed and help a company like Infinite Red, or even just an individual programmer who I happen to find? What am I bringing to the table that will help beyond the big idea? And there's really two things. And they're big ones. And you need at least one. And preferably two. And one is, access to capital. Not just building this, not just paying us to build this. But all the marketing and everything else. Right? You're gonna need money. And you're not gonna want to be in a position where when you run out, it just dies. You need to have a plan for that. That's number one. Number two, is access to audience. If you have one of those, in good form, then you can usually get the other one. Having both is ideal. But those are the two things, those are the things that the makers that you're coming to work with, don't necessarily have. And so, if you wanna know what you can be busting your hump to be doing right now, it's getting those things. And then, if you have those and you come to somebody with your big idea and you want them to turn it into something real, you actually have something to offer. JAMON: One of the things that I think Ken and Todd bring to this conversation that I don't necessarily bring to the conversation is I haven't been on the other side. I've been a consultant for a very long time, so I see our side of it. But both Ken and Todd have worked for start-ups, probably who have used consultants. And seen the ones that have succeeded. Ken you worked at Yammer and there was an acquisition that Microsoft made there. And so it was a successful exit. And then of course there are some other start-ups that you and Todd have worked at that failed. That's something that I, maybe, don't necessarily bring that perspective to. But the consultant's side of it for sure, I see all kinds. I see all kinds of start-ups that rise and fall. TODD: I hope no one takes this as a reason not to try, for sure. I would recommend to focus on your customer acquisition strategy and your revenue strategy. You have to remember Zappos when it came out, and if you're not familiar with Zappos, it was a large company and eventually hired by Amazon, and they sell shoes. KEN: Acquired, not hired. TODD: Sorry, acquired, not hired. They sell shoes, which is probably the second oldest profession in the world. (laughter) So, obviously not a new idea. Hey, I have an idea, I'm gonna sell shoes. And you're like, horse shoes? Space shoes? No, shoes, like you put on your feet. But they had some innovation ideas inside there. Mainly extreme customer sport, and the big one was, buy five pair of shoes, send back four. Good ideas, but once again, there's a series of little ideas, like how do we allow them to buy five pairs of shoes and send back four and still make money? There's a hundred and fifty ideas in there, maybe a thousand ideas in there that matter. So it's hard to be an A-list actor, right? But if no one tried, we'd have none. So you can succeed. We get a lot of clients and sometimes their very obvious that they'll see just because they have a lot of experience or they just really understand. But we have people who don't know what they don't know. And don't know what they know yet, and that's fine too. Those people may succeed also. KEN: The number one problem that we see is under capitalization. Over capitalization can be a problem too, incidentally. If you raise too much money all at once then it can lead you to be too profligate. I've definitely seen that at start-ups. JAMON: It's way harder to say no. KEN: Yeah, that's a problem with venture capital backed companies that have just seen a bunch of interest all at once and then they have issues with that. But, under capitalization is definitely a much bigger problem because it means that every single decision you make, you're terrified. TODD: If your problem is over capitalization, please send an email to hello@infinite.red. KEN: We can help you with that problem. TODD: Today's episode is brought to you by, too much money. KEN: I'm actually being serious. (laughter) I mean, we're joking. But I'm also serious. Like, we actually know how to make your money go farther. JAMON: Yeah, and I agree with that. And we can also help with saying no. I think that that's actually one of the things that's probably surprising about working with us, is often we are pushing for not adding features. TODD: This is sounding like a commercial this time. KEN: Yeah, I'm sorry, but we're not the only ones. I'm just saying that experienced people will tell you no. And you need that if you've got a lot of money. JAMON: I think that's an important port, you look at some consultants and their not necessarily pulling in that direction, but we want people to succeed 'cause obviously that looks good on a portfolio. It's a benefit to us. One of the things we've always said, and we tell customers this, if we finish your project early, and don't spend all of your money, I'm sure you're gonna come up with more ideas. You know? It's not like we're gonna miss out. It's never been the case. If we finish a project early, the founders aren't just pocketing the rest of the money and going home. What they're gonna do is say, what about 1.1, let's get on the schedule. Let's move. There's always something else. 'Cause during the process of building an app you learn so much. And there's always more ideas. KEN: I've never seen a software project where at the end people were like, phew, I'm sure glad that everything that we could possibly think of was in that. (laughter) Like, that has never ever, ever, happened. TODD: You never know. There was that app where you just said "Yo" to people. Yo. JAMON: Yeah, didn't they raise a whole bunch of money to add more stuff? KEN: And what happened to that app? TODD: I don't wanna rant about VC. Some VC's ... not all. Some are great. Another thing, going back to your original question Chris, which we've been talking a lot about, is, common things that customers or clients may not understand. Another one is just the pure complexity of software. It's hard to understand because it's not in the real world. You can't hold it. In your house, if you ever owned a house and had work done on the house, you'll know that doing something in your living room is relatively cheap. Doing something in your bathroom is extremely expensive. Doing something in your kitchen is extremely expensive. The reason why a tiny room like the bathroom is so much more expensive than a huge room, say like, your living room. Is because the bathroom has tons of different contraptions in it. Lots of different moving parts. Lots of different things can go wrong, from your sinks to your plumbing, fans, lighting, that kind of stuff. So the number of pieces matters a lot to cost. Because software is virtual and because we can fairly easily throw on pieces. Software tends to be an order of magnitude, or more, complex than any other physical machine. A bathroom, even a car engine, is less complex than software is. KEN: It's compensated for somewhat by the fact that our tools are also more powerful. TODD: Yes. KEN: I mean, there's countervailing things there, but your point about the complexity is right. If you run out of lot when you're building a house, then your contractor says, hey we can't build there, your lot ends there. There's no such constraints for software and that makes it easy for things to get kind of hairy. TODD: If you completely disregard our part in the complexity, meaning we have to build all the moving pieces and test them and make sure that they coordinate together. Even disregarding that, sometimes people are shocked at how much they have to think about, and they're not building it all. If you just said, I wanna login screen, for example. Every app has that. That's simple. Right? The number of questions that you could be asked by someone like us, to someone who's less experienced will be shocking. And they won't have the answers to it. And each one could be thought of. Now of course we always give people common things that they should do, or whatever. But if you were to really think through the whole thing, just that one screen is way more complex than anyone imagines. JAMON: Recognizing our experience, the fact that we've done hundreds of apps and encountered so many different scenarios, I think is important for working with a company like ours. I think back, in prior years, there have been some projects that haven't gone as well. And one of the common traits of those projects is that the person I'm working with, they feel like they kind of know it all, because they do have a pretty big picture of it, and they want to put their vision down into software. It often comes with blind spots of, what are you missing here? So having a high degree of trust and communication between the two parties is one of the hallmarks of a successful project. We certainly respect what the founders bring because they have the vision, a lot of the times they have a much closer relationship with their potential users than we do. KEN: Absolutely. JAMON: We're not trying to impose our view of what that might be. But we can often bring things, like Todd was saying about the login screen. Like, you didn't think of this aspect like what happens if you forget your password, or if you don't have access to your email or something. TODD: Or you're on a plane, or Facebook changed the rules and half the users can't login. That kind of stuff. JAMON: Exactly. TODD: Another thing too, is we sometimes experience this when we get designs outside of our company. Now, a lot of designers are great, but they're never have been trained in, or have experience in software design. Our designers are classically trained designers. They can do all the normal things people think of designs, but they chose to specialize in software and website design. So, sometimes when we get an outside design, we never used to do this, but we kind of now require it. The bare minimum is we'll do a half week of design review. And we did one recently. And from a cursory look at their design, it looked like they had everything. Looked good, seemed to make sense. The design looked fine. But after a half week of a couple of our designers reviewing it, they went through in great detail and produced a map of the whole app and how everything interacts with each other. And the flows and the different actors, different type of users. That kind of stuff. JAMON: There were dozens of screens, right Todd? Like dozens. TODD: There were a lot of screens, and probably half of them weren't in the original design at all. JAMON: It was striking 'cause you could see the outline of the screen, it was empty and there's a title of whatever that screen was supposed to be. TODD: So that's an example of, even at the design part, where you have to factor in all these different scenarios that you may not have thought about. And how the user would experience it if those scenarios happen. And also make a business decision whether or not you're gonna address some of those scenarios. Sometimes you don't because it's a very small minority of your users, edge case as we call it. And it's just not worth ... the ROI and something like that would be poor. So that's something too, where it's just half the app is really missing. JAMON: And that's where, I think having that high degree of trust is really important because then our spidery senses are saying, hey, there's something missing here. Let's spend the time up front, I know you wanna get started right now, but let's spend the time up front to map this out and see if everything is here. CHRIS: I'm actually curious when someone comes to you with an idea, how do you know when to start challenging the idea? And when to write the idea off? KEN: I wouldn't say that there's very many ideas that we would write off. Because lord knows if we knew which ideas were going to succeed in this business, we would be billionaires already. And frankly, the people who are billionaires don't even necessarily know. There is a healthy degree of luck in terms of like, who ends up on which gravy train. But, that said, there's always gonna be a variety of factors that go into whether something is successful. Some of them are universal. And some of them are highly specific. And it's a little bit of a judgment call on which is which, however. We think that things like software quality and good UX, these sorts of things, are basically universal. Like that humans are humans. In those regards, we are going to push for what we think is right. When it comes to the intimate understanding of the customer, the end customer, right, the people that these start-ups are trying to attract. That's where we defer to them. We're always looking for clients who clearly have that intimate understanding of their customer. And this sort of leads into another point, which is that, someone on their team, whether it's the founder, if they're the only ones. Or someone on their team, had better really have that intimate knowledge. And they're gonna have a full time job working with us. Basically. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Right? And that's also something that I think people have not understood. It's kinda like, hey, here you go make the software and I will dip in periodically. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Uh-uh (negative). No. Yeah, you gotta be really committed because you're the one who really understands that like, so we're gonna be working with you to go after this. And we need you, obviously. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Not just to write the checks, but also to tell us who this person is and what they're really gonna need. And sometimes our idea of a universal solution won't work for something specific. But that tension is really important. We're always fighting for those sort of universal values, but we're also listening to hear what specific values are and the ways that they might override universal value. TODD: Yeah, and there's not one right answer and one right design to solve any particular problem. I would pile on with Ken, the people coming to us, the founders or the department heads or whomever they are, coming to us. They really wanna understand the end user and be able to articulate that to us. And over time we learn them too. And some industries have very strong cultures that you have to be within, and if you don't speak that cultural language it instantly turns off those people. It's not just culture, but for example, we did a project for a company called PRO-TREAD, which does training for truckers. I don't know if they're the largest, but if they're not, they're probably closest to the largest in the country. And this traditionally was done if you had a trucking company, you would set up computers in the corner and then when that driver was by their home base, they would sit at that boring computer and do the forced training that they're required to do by law. Not fun. No one wants to do it. The people at the company don't wanna pay for it. Truck drivers don't wanna do it. Of course it does increase safety and stuff, so it's important to do, but it's just human nature not wanna do something that's, you know. JAMON: And I believe, Todd, that PRO-TREAD was one of the first to even computerize it. Before that is was paper tests and in classrooms. So they were kind of moving that direction already. Now this was another iteration of their platform. TODD: Correct. And this is a great example of an idea because it's simple, everyone understands it and it's obvious. Truck drivers spend a lot of time in the sleeper cabs of their trucks. At truck stops and whatnot on the side of the road and stuff. So, obviously making the training mobile was important because the training materials being on a tablet or an iPad was important. Making it not so painful for the person, so that it's not ... If you're the manager telling the drivers that they have to take this testing, getting 50% less push back because it's not as painful is a big deal to you. And also, they do need to not just get through the training material, they do need to understand it and internalize it. It actually does help, even though no one wants to do it. So the basic requirements was, it has to be mobile, it has to work inside of a sleeper cab on the side of I-80. And it still needs to maintain their already high level of guaranteeing that people actually pick up the information, and they had a variety of ways to make sure that happened. And also, be more engaging and not as painful. That was the directive to our designers. JAMON: I believe that when they first came to us they sort of envisioned the app looking basically like their web version and no real changes other than that. And we talked to them, this was a situation where we had a great rapport with the owner of PRO-TREAD and we're able to talk with him and explain where design could really add a lot of value to a touch interface. TODD: Yeah, so we actually did re-design it, not just to make it more mobile appropriate, let's say. But to really push those goals they had. Now, designers and us and them now understood the goals. I just stated them. Fairly straight forward, the goals. However, we can take those goals and we can design to those goals for sure, but we probably don't know truck drivers as well as our client PRO-TREAD does. So them having been in this industry for a very long time, really understood the nuances that would make meeting these goals through design possible. Having them really understand their users, having us really understand how to solve problems. Us having the problems be both simple, straightforward and well defined, that was a successful project and although maybe not as exciting as Uber for gerbils. Because gerbils have to get around too, and no one likes to walk. JAMON: Well gerbils do, actually, don't they? TODD: They kind of do, yeah. And they like tubes. So maybe be like Elon Musk's ... JAMON: Hyper loop. TODD: The hyper loop for gerbils. JAMON: For gerbils. TODD: Yeah, so that's a very exciting, so if we had a client came and said we want a hyper loop for gerbils and we respond, "of course. Who doesn't?" But it's just funny, but teaching truck drivers important lessons is more fulfilling when you know, when it rolls out, there's gonna be tons of men and women out there on the road having a slightly less painful day because of something worked on. And probably saving some lives. It's not as sexy, but it is very satisfying in my opinion. JAMON: Yeah, I totally agree. I actually have five uncles who are truck drivers. Very strong truck driving kind of familial influence. And maybe one or two of them might actually listen to my podcast here. So, hi uncles. (laughter) But what I think is kind of cool about this is I do know truck drivers. I didn't get a chance to work on that project myself, but there's totally a personal connection there. I understand what they go through and the types of things that they care about. TODD: I only have one brother and he owns a shipping company and he has lots of truck drivers, so I'm going to trump your four uncles. (laughter) JAMON: Let's have them fight. They're all six foot four. TODD: Although in the past he did drive, so, but anyways. Yeah. Ken, how about you buddy? JAMON: Any truck drivers there at Harvard? TODD: Aww, pick on the Harvard kid. KEN: No, I don't know any truck drivers. (laughter) You got me. TODD: Today, brought to you buy Captain Obvious. You can cut that, that was a bad joke.

Bem amiiiiiiches das interwebs, sejam bem vindos a mais um podcast que trava e sai voando! A vida é um jogo com o maior números de bugs jamais contabilizados. Mas nem só de vida vive o homem, principalmente no quesito social. E é pra falar dos bugs dos nossos companheiros de vida anti-social, os games, que Evandro, Cgui, Godoka, Sir Vinnie, Zweist, Hellbolha e Ken-Oh se uniram, para relembrar os maiores bugs dos melhores e piores jogos que já nos brindaram com seus frames cagados, personagens flutuantes, contorcionistas sensuais e muitos outros. Pois a arte imita a vida e a vida imita os bugs. Bem demais, as vezes… https://www.superamiches.com/bem-amiches-171-melhores-jogos-bugados/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/superamiches/support