Upgrade - 11: Drifting Shower Schedule

Episode Date: November 24, 2014

This week Jason and Myke are joined by Greg Knauss. They talk about whether web comments are a good thing and what it's really like to work for yourself. Greg and Jason also quiz Myke on Thanksgiving.

Hello and welcome to episode 11 of Upgrade on RelayFM. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Studio Neat, makers of the Glyph, the Cosmonaut, and the Neat Ice Kit. Drafts, where text starts on the iPhone and iPad, now easier and more powerful than ever. And MailRoute, a secure, hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam, which you don't want. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined, as always, by your host and mine, Mr. Jason Snell. Hey, Mike, how's it going? Very well, sir. How are you? I'm doing great. How's your Thanksgiving week going?

Oh, so good. I have so many thanks to give. I don't even know where I'll start. Well, we'll cover that later, then. I don't even know where I start. Well, we'll cover that later then. Our episode where we had Scott McNulty on went so well that I've invited somebody to join us on this episode too. Oh. I'm not going to make you guess because you know who it is. It is my friend Greg Noss.

Hi, Greg. Hi. Greg and I went to college together. Greg knows everybody on the internet, or at least knew everybody on the internet in the early to mid-90s. Would that be accurate? Literally everybody. I think, actually. There were like three dozen of us.

A lot of the people who were early website creators and bloggers and the like in the 90s, that was, believe it or not, a very tight-knit community. There were not that many of them. And Greg, every now and then I would run into somebody and they would know Greg. It was very funny. And I would say, you know I went to college with Greg. It was just because Greg was a common bond in a lot of conversations. There was a day where John Gruber mentioned Greg on Daring Fireball, and I was like, what is happening? Welcome to Upgrade, Mr. Nuss.

All around the other way, yeah. Thank you very much. Greg is here for a very good reason, which we'll get to, which is that he, like Mike and me, is somebody who no longer has a big company employing him as a full-time employee. Is that still accurate, Greg? You didn't take a job last week when we set this up, did you? No. Okay. No.

But we'll talk about that. Couldn't if I wanted to. But we should do follow-up first. Indeed we should. Follow-up. Follow-up. Sorry. I'm used to that sound effect from a totally different podcast that doesn't exist anymore.

Just a little bit of follow-up this week from previous episodes. We talked about podcasting, and I wrote about podcasting today on Six Colors. Enough talk about podcasters. Talking about podcasting on podcasts is boring, and we shouldn't do too much of it. But I have a couple little bits. One, oh my God, I lost who this is from. Now I feel really terrible. I'm going to see if I can figure that out.

It's this person wrote in. I can find this. I can do this. Unnamed. Oh no, it's Listener Russ. Good work. Listener Russ. I just got it in time.

Listener Russ wrote in just talking about how, when we're talking about the uptake of podcasts and having them break out into a broader audience, that he wanted to point out that many churches have podcasts of their sermons. And there's actually a white label app called the Church App that lets you basically, I think, build an app version for your church with a podcast feed. And they actually do like the drives to donate old phones or iPod touches that they can put the app on and take to people who can't make it to the service to shut-ins so that they can get the sermons every week instead of like sending them CDs or something like that. And he says that the company he works for does web and app platforms for agriculture companies, and one of their customers has a podcast player built into their app. So it's an interesting idea that there are some closed platforms that are basically podcasts, but they're tied into one organization and it's sort of hardwired,

which actually kind of makes sense if you want people to listen to what you have to say and you don't want to say, kind of makes sense if you want people to listen to what you have to say and you don't want to say, oh, go get a podcast app and search for us in iTunes. If you just build it into your app and just say, you've got our app, right? Well, you can go to this screen of this app and just listen to what we have to say, which is an interesting perspective. I hadn't really thought about hardwiring podcasts into other apps. So that's neat. So so mike there's a future for you in um agriculture related podcasting it's kind of all i've already wanted so i figured you seem you seem like uh like an agriculture kind of guy like a good old farm boy yeah yeah um i guess i guess technically i would be the one who should be doing agriculture related

farmcasts very farmcasts oh my god i said farmcast farmcast it's a thing copyright trademark r with a circle in it farmcasts it's gonna happen um i'm gonna do one about sheep i'm gonna do one about horses uh do it about horses and buggies which is totally different vertical from horses. We may talk about barn maintenance. These are all things that I actually did grow up with. All the important things, really. Farmcast. Look out. See you, Relay FM.

The Farmcast Network is on the air right now. I did grow up. We weren't really as much a farm as a ranch, but yeah, we had cows and barns and stuff. I'll do a podcast about that one day. Nobody will listen. Listener Jeff also wrote in with a definition of podcast. He said it's like a radio talk show that's distributed over the internet instead of over the air.

That's not a bad way to define it. And I actually just had somebody today on Twitter argue with me a little bit about my definition, listener Ash, Ash Doyle, who said, well, is it really a medium? Isn't just spoken word a medium? And you could argue whether it's a medium or a format or whatever. I think podcasting is very different from what we think of as radio. And I just wanted to mention that Tim Goodman from The Hollywood Reporter, who I do a podcast with called TV Talk Machine, he's always described podcasting as radio without the listeners, which I think is a lovely description. That's how I tell my mother what I'm doing. It's like radio,

except nobody listens. So there you go. Nobody but us people. that's a podcast follow-up um listener sebastian wrote in uh via twitter to talk about app store pricing and basically he says i paid 15 for an ios game civilization revelation 2 and i think it's fairly priced i hate in-app purchases for games i prefer to pay more and have the whole thing right there um which i agree with i think i might have mentioned this on a previous show like i really like super stickman golf and uh i felt like when super stickman golf 2 came out they had calibrated it so much for buying you know coins and tokens and unlocking things piecemeal. And Rob Griffiths did this analysis and figured out it would take several hundred dollars to unlock everything in Super Stickman Golf 2.

And like listener Sebastian, I feel like if I really like a game, I would like to pay one reasonable price and just unlock it and be done with the... Even if they... I'll pay up front, but if they want to do some sort of nickel and diamond kind of thing, I'd like the option to say, look, I want to go all in. Just buy this now. So many times I wish this,

like, okay, I get it, but just let me pay like $10 if that's what it takes. So I don't have to keep jumping around and round through these hoops of purchasing things. Right, because some people will just keep paying 99 cents for everything and that's fine that's fine but i'm not going to do that so they have two choices either i can just abandon their game and maybe that's fine with them or give me the option to pay them a reasonable price to unlock their game i i would i would like to do that i wish wish more game developers would do that. So if they're not going to make me pay up front,

could they make me unlock later? I don't know. App store dynamics are difficult. Greg, you released an app for $2. Is that right? $2, yes. And how'd that go? Publicity was terrific.

Economically, it hasn't been like great i could have freelanced with that time and made quite a bit more money um my thinking with the two dollars was if you're going to spend a buck you're going to spend two and um the one year anniversary is coming up and i'm toying about whether just to make it free um and with or without ads just because it's it's selling like three or four copies a week now, and that doesn't mean anything to me. And I'd rather have my code out there and in use than have it not be in use because it's a couple of bucks.

Right. I don't want to disappoint the people who forked over the $2 anytime in the past year. forked over the $2 anytime in the past year. I am officially now cannibalizing all sales I'm going to make between now and the one year anniversary. But it wasn't frustrating because I did it for fun. But if I had to make a living building apps, I have no idea what the line is between being reasonable and exploitative in order to make enough money to get by the app economy just seems like a disaster area to me that that in order to be successful there has to you either have to get really really lucky or you have to exploit your users in some way and neither of those seem like viable options. Yeah, Mike was talking on Inquisitive this week

with the executive producer is the title that he invented so that people would not ask for his manager who did Monument Valley from Us Two Games. And that was really interesting to hear Mike walk through that and people out there who haven't listened to that interview, you should go listen to it. It's really interesting to hear Mike walk through that and people out there who haven't listened to that interview, you should go listen to it. It's really interesting. But they invested a lot in it. They took a risk. They had some luck, but they've been successful with that. But I feel like the game, you take the game economy out of the app store and the rest of the app economy is more

problematic. And then you look at somebody like Marco Arment, who I think if you asked him a year or two ago if he would do a freemium app, he would be like, no, that's crazy. And that's what he did. Overcast is free with an upgrade. I think Overcast is a pretty good model. It's not exploitative because you can just buy it once you've tried the app out. Well, it's a demo, right? It's using in-app purchase for demo purposes. Yeah.

But if, I mean, I don't know how many copies Marco has sold, but is having a single app or two with a reasonable price point in the app store a way to make a living long term? I don't know. I just don't see it. Some people do it, but they seem to have a spread of... Like James Thompson has pCalc for iOS and pCalc for Mac

and DragThing for Mac. And he's got a spread. And I think iOS is doing better for him than the Mac is. But pCalc is also the very best than the Mac is. But, you know, it's not... But PCalc is also the very best app of its kind. That's true. That's definitely true.

And it's got a wide audience and universal acclaim. And to stand out in the App Store, you need to have basically all of those things. Yeah. It's a challenge. I mean, it's a challenge for game developers too absolutely it's i think game developers have it even worse just because if you don't get noticed in your first like eight hours you are you are rolled under the avalanche of what's coming behind you right talking about games can i just uh recommend crossy road to anybody that hasn't played no

no stop it so you're spreading the disease i think i think my high score is 129 nice that's a good score what's yours mike uh i think i got into 200 wow let me double check i want to double check now i'm i'm at one point impressed by the fact that i've got 129 and another point i felt like it was doable to the point where i could go a lot further yeah if i if i really put my mind to it and took a day off and just played crossy road all day i have stopped seeing anybody's name i can reach my high score and not pass anybody. Yeah. 236 is my top score. Oh my God.

Well, that's good. I'm pretty proud of that one. I got 128 as my high score, and the next day I played it some more, and I got 128 again. And then I was like, this is it. I'm going to break it.

And I died. I was like, no, but I got the same. And then I got 129 another time. Just one more and then died. But it's a good game. You understand and achieve your peak. You know, you've got your level there. You know, I took the SAT, the college exams, twice because I wanted to improve on my score. And the component scores changed slightly, but in opposite directions.

So my score was the same the second time. And I had friends who were like, well, are you going to take the SAT again? And I said, nope, I think I found my level. I got the same score twice. We're done. I did exactly the same thing. It's like this was accurate. I don't know if this is an accurate depiction of whether I'll be successful in college or not,

but whatever score I get is the score I'm going to get. Just a random US-UK aside uh we call them sats but same idea oh it's the same letters same letters but we call we've ruined we've ruined college yeah sats sure okay anyway should we take a break to talk about our first friend? Our first friend. Well, I just want to explain. Crossy Road is a game. It's like Frogger, except it's infinite. There aren't levels. It is in the style of, you know, pixelated art. I suppose it's in the style of Flappy Bird, but it's really not anything like Flappy Bird. And it's really fun and funny and easy to play and frustrating. And I found out about it because Andy Baio, one of those people that Greg knows who's on the Internet, tweeted about it and said basically, I played Flappy Bird all day, got 70 and threw my phone across the room. And I thought, yep, that's, yep, that's. Andy's son, Elliot, is a video game savant, and he has like a 384 high score now. Oh my God.

Yeah. Yes, you're being humiliated by a 10-year-old Jason. It's fun. Andy's super good for stuff like that. Yeah. Oh yeah, Andy spots everything before it's big. He's a cool finder in the term of the 90s. Let's talk about a friend mike good idea this episode is brought to

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It can be as powerful as you need it to be, which is pretty cool. Our friends. I have two. So we're transitioning out of follow-up. There's one little last bit of follow-up, but it sort of fits into our next topic, which is listener Kev wrote in and said that we overlooked when we were talking about differences between the U.S. and U.K., linguistic divergences, which he says are committed with great frequency on this very show. Fair enough. Here in the U.S., things that are not alike are different from each other, whereas in the U.K., these things are different to each other.

Is that accurate, Mike? Would you say that? Yeah, I would say it's different to this rather than different from this. And listener Kiv says, the latter formation sounds so deeply rung to my ears, which is true. One of the wonderful things about having a podcast with Mike on it is that Mike gets to expose all the strange things that Americans say and all the strange things that English people say. It's nice. It is very nice. Which brings me to my topic, which is Thanksgiving. And I wanted – it is Thanksgiving week. And I wanted to ask you, what do you know of thanksgiving mike what is your what

is as as an english person what is your perspective on what this holiday is what and what we do for thanksgiving so my understanding of thanksgiving is that it's celebrating the pilgrims coming from europe somewhere to the shores of your place your place, your place actually, but yes. And it was when, I mean, I think like the story goes, like you arrived and worked with the Native Americans to build a new beautiful land, but it's probably more like arrived, killed them, stole the land.

And how do we assume? It's not, in in fact the story of thanksgiving is about the um the the first settlers in new england um having i i hope i don't get this wrong actually having a hard winter and having um having difficulty uh feeding themselves and that the indians brought um brought them food right and it was a it was a sort of like a celebration and a bonding and things, which, you know, I'm not going to talk about what happened in the long run, but it's this nice sort of moment. And obviously it's a harvest celebration.

Canadians have Thanksgiving and they have it about a month earlier because the harvest is earlier that much further north. But it really is sort of in the tradition of a fall harvest holiday. So what do you know of what we do for Thanksgiving? So everybody gets together, the families all come together for holiday times. So in effect, like a Christmas dinner or something like that, that everybody gets together you have a big family meal i know that cranberry sauce is part of it uh there is some sort of dish which has marshmallows in it um like a casserole or something uh this feels like that show like one of those shows where you ask a child to explain like what is this item uh there's uh the macy's parade thing sure uh with

the big inflatables uh and there tends to be a big american football game that day these are things that i've mainly picked up from friends you mean the tv show friends or friends on the internet a bit above but mainly the tv show okay that's what i thought you meant the one with the thanksgiving parade so uh on this turkey turkey is a big thing turkey well i was gonna say i feel like in some ways your uh conception of of christmas in the uk you could just kind of like take that and make it thanksgiving because it's kind of like that. It's a big meal. Families get together, have a turkey. The dish with marshmallows, I wouldn't say – this is not like Passover where they're like very specific things that everybody does. It's not quite as regimented as something like that.

It's – people do have a marshmallow-y candied yam kind of thing. Greg, what were the main Thanksgiving things that you'd have at Thanksgiving or that you have now? Absolutely classic Thanksgiving. Turkey, stuffing. Stuffing. Yams? Cranberry sauce in the shape of the can. Yes, for sure.

Oh, I know that one from The Simpsons. Yeah, yeah. See? That's it. That's about right. I mean, it is families, people travel to do it. One of the nice things about it, one of the things I like about Thanksgiving is that it's kind of a firewall against Christmas. Really, the Christmas season doesn't start. Oh, God, if only that were true. really well i i consider uh that uh thanksgiving is like a firewall that holds back most of the tide of christmas and christmas music and christmas displays until after thanksgiving

it's not entirely true but i'm telling you i was at coming back from wool last year i was at the oh no it was that was spring coming back from ireland when i was there with idg last fall it was mid-october and there entire Dublin airport was full of Christmas stuff. And I asked somebody why that was, and they theorized that there's no, you could really do it anytime. Whereas I think in the US, we've got Thanksgiving as at least a little bit of a dividing line, like this is when the holidays start. And so that's nice. And you get a second feast day basically you've got this big meal day there are uh there used to be two now there are three american football

games on that day um so you turn on the usual often terrible um so you usually turn that on it's in the background and the dallas cowboys are winning by 50 points or whatever or losing by 50 points it's really a good game and uh but it's a feast day like like christmas except there are no presents really it's just about the family and the feast part and my mom always made candied yams so that was the weird super soft sweet potatoes with melted like marshmallow we do on the top which i never really liked they were weird and sweet and all that um we're having people over um i think we're having like 10 or 11 people this year and we're having it here we usually go to my wife's

uh parents house for thanksgiving and last year we went to my mom's house this year we're having people here so we're we have to write a table because our table only seats six and we've got like 10 11 12 people coming i'm cooking a turkey using Alton Brown's, uh, brine, turkey brine recipe. Um, we're going to have, my son has insisted that we have rolls. We have crescent rolls. Um, so we're going to do that. And my wife makes a cornbread dressing. That's again, an Alton Brown recipe, and there'll be some sort of vegetable and I won't eat it. And that's pretty much been a constant in my life since my first Thanksgiving. Somebody makes vegetables and I go, nope, not going to eat that.

You also forgot having the relatives that you avoid on Facebook come over to your house and spend eight hours. Oh, yeah. Well, before Facebook, that weird cousin or uncle that would say impolitic things at the table, that was like a Thanksgiving thing, right? And now you can just go on facebook and they're doing that all the time thanksgiving has gotten a lot easier since my in-laws died ouch ouch well on that happy note well that you got it you got it now are you clear now mike you got

thanksgiving it really is the beginning of the holiday season it is it is it's fun i like thanksgiving a lot i i feel like it is it is not only a firewall against christmas so it doesn't spill too far into into november and october but i also love that it's a kickoff that it's like this is the beginning of this period where there are so many different kind of holiday things going on ending at New Year's. So I like that about it, too. So it's a lot of fun. And is there anything – so my last question before – this is the US-UK divide vertical we're doing here. Is there anything like this some other time of year in England where there's a feast day like this?

Or is it really just for Easter and Christmas and that's about it? To my knowledge right now I can't think of any specific meal that we don't share with you guys. We also don't have something that's kind of like the 4th of July.

We don't have a celebration like that. I mean the only other thing that we do that you guys don't do is fireworksworks Night on the 5th of November, which is about Guy Fawkes Night. Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament. I've seen V for Vendetta. There you go, V for Vendetta. Documentary.

It's a very historically accurate movie about Guy Fawkes. That's kind of the only thing that I can think of. You know, I feel like I'm forgetting something glaringly obvious, like Britain's Day or something, but I can't think of anything. And my last question is, has US culture infiltrated to the point where people in the UK are actually like some people do something for Thanksgiving, like we've infiltrated you with Halloween. Or has that not happened?

No, because Halloween you can kind of get away with, but, like, Thanksgiving, like, well, we're giving... It doesn't make any... It can't translate. Like, what are we giving thanks for? I mean, things like Black Friday exists here now. Huh. So we have Black Friday. I'm sorry.

That's okay. It's not like... It's not like the Black Friday sort of sales that happen in the States. People aren't trampling each other. But it's not even really called Black Friday. It's just a day that there are sales because there are a lot of American companies that just carry the sale over. So like Apple, for example, they have a sale day on that Friday. So the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Okay. I feel like we've worked this out. And Joe Steele in the chat room is pointing out that he's looking forward to you quizzing me about Boxing Day come whenever Boxing Day is. I know where it is. It's the day after Christmas. Boxing Day is. I know where it is. It's the day after Christmas. And that's a day that Britain celebrates its most famous

boxers, including I can't name an English boxer, sorry. It's really for Muhammad Ali, though. You mean it's not for the dogs? Oh, good question. I actually can never remember what Boxing Day is about. There's so many

conflicting things. It's just a day after christmas basically lost a history yeah exactly many families like mine kind of celebrate it by having a repeat of christmas dinner so we have another one so that's when we have our thanksgiving dinner on Boxing Day. I was talking to somebody who's doing just that. They have two Thanksgivings. They're at one person's house on the Wednesday, and then on the Thursday they're doing their own. It's like double turkey, double shot of turkey. We used to have three Christmases, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day,

and then the 26th afterwards, depending on who we had to service with our presents. Wow. Well, happy holidays, everybody. day and then the 26th afterwards depending on who we had to service with our presence wow well happy happy holidays everybody hey mike yes it's time to talk about another friend it is this is actually a a good friend to talk about in regards to the holiday season this episode of upgrade is brought to you by studio neat studio neat is a design company with just two employees, Tom and Dan. They make cool stuff with the aim

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or prop it up at any angle, like a little kickstand. It's a great gift for anyone getting a new iPhone this holiday season of its fancy new camera and high frame rate video. The Glyph is a perfect companion. It's just one of those little things that ends up being super useful in a ton of situations, especially of all the photo and video apps that are out there nowadays. Tom and Dan have a couple of ideas of some things that you can do with your iPhone over the holidays, and I really thought they'd be cool to share with you. So these are some things that you can do when you pair your iPhone and the Glyph together. So maybe you're being a super

cool parent and helping your kids build their Lego sets this holiday season. Of course, they're just for the children, not for you at all. Well, if they are, you can make a cool stop motion video with them. So maybe you could make a stop motion of you building the set or maybe make a little video of Lego Batman coming to life and catching the Joker or something like that. So it'd be pretty cool to do. Maybe you want to be in those family portraits for once. So you could use your glyph to mount your iPhone to a tripod and use the new timer feature in the camera app to do that. Or maybe you want to make a much calmer opening gifts time lapse. You can prop your iPhone up and take a time-lapse video of the chaos of wrapping paper being torn apart. With the Glyph and some nifty apps, your iPhone can do so much more than take

still photos and video. And the Glyph actually works with all phones. It's the adjustable Glyph now, so it works with phones of all sizes. And talking about apps, Studio Neat have their own super cool app called Slow Fast Slow that you should check out. It's in the App Store right now. It's now free, and it helps make your slow-mo video even cooler. Head on over to studioneat.com right now to check out the Glyph and some of the other cool products that the Studio Neat guys do, too. They're great gift ideas, great for the holidays. And if you use the code UPGRADE at checkout, you can get 10% off absolutely anything at studioneet.com. Thank you so much to Studio Neat for their support of this show

and all of RelayFM. And a good friend. They're a good friend indeed. They are. All right, we have two topics, and the big one is the fun employment topic. But before we get there, I wanted to cover a really mini topic, which is, and I think Greg might have opinions about this too. So I'm glad Greg's here. And if you don't have opinions about it, Greg, then, you know,

it's fine. Don't read the comments is what my notes say. Recode this week, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher's website with news and reviews and things like that turned off comments. They shut down. They did a site redesign and they got rid of article comments. And there was a varied reaction to this. There were some people saying, yes, yes, it's about time. And there were other people saying, boo, Recode doesn't care what their audience has to say. other people saying, boo, Recode doesn't care what their audience has to say. And people who have big commenting communities like The Verge made sort of snide comments about how their comments are

great and so they're much cooler than sites that don't have them. And other people have made it a policy never to read the comments and have said comments are a cesspool and good riddance. have made it a policy never to read the comments and have said comments are a cesspool and good riddance. Chris Breen at Macworld, my former colleague over there, wrote a nice piece, I think, where he went into the reasons why you'd want to kill comments and why you'd want to keep comments. And in the end, his point was comments can be good if you've got a good community with clear rules. And, you know, in fact, at one point at IDG, we had a community manager whose job full time was to patrol the forums and set the rules

and work with the community. And that was great. These days, as you might imagine, I think there's, you know, Chris Breen basically is patrolling the Macworld forums himself, the story comment threads himself. But he feels that it's valuable to do that because

you get a much higher quality of comment if you bring down the banhammer on bad behavior and make it clear what's okay and what's not okay and um so and that that can have some value that just sort of diffusely saying talk about this on social media which is what rika had said um might not be able to to let you do so um you guys have any thoughts about about this story and about uh comments on the internet and whether they should be on or off i like never find a situation in which comments on most articles are useful so much i never never even bother to read them. The only time that I ever look in comments is when, like, say I'm looking at an instructional article,

like, for example, how to flash an Android phone to put the new ROM on it. Yes, I have done this. It's a horrible thing. If I'm having some sort of bug or problem with the process then i may look in the comments to see if anybody else is having the same issue like i never look in comments of articles for like thoughtful opinion because like 90 of the time most of the stuff that i've ever seen is kind of kind of useless i feel like if comments are the type of thing that you're looking for, like communities like Reddit are a lot better for that type of thing. I genuinely feel like

myself that comments on an article on the page in which the article is written tend to trend towards uselessness. Yeah. Greg, do you have any thoughts about commenting? Well, Neil Dash, dash i think wrote a couple of years ago the definitive opinion on comments which is you get the community that you work towards that if you decide to just leave your comments open you're going to get every foul-mouthed little jerk out there who can you know manage to create an account and leave horrific profanity that's what you're going to be stuck with unless you actually actively work towards patrolling your community and cleaning up your comments.

And that takes time and that takes money and it can be very expensive. But when it works, it can really work. You can have a vibrant community. But if you're not willing to put in the effort, I would not provide the trolls with the platform. Yeah, I... It just seems as simple as that to me. And so many people open up comments because they think it's going to increase the number of views they have or it's going to increase participation. But your community becomes how people recognize your site. And if you're not willing to patrol your community with the same attention you give your content, then they will override it and make everything else you do moot.

I mean, there's a reason why newspaper, so many newspaper sites, the comments are terrible is the newspapers didn't put the comments there because they value your comments. They put them there because and this I know this from my time at IDG forums don't make money, right? Like advertisers don't want to be on forums. If you put ad rotations on forum pages, nobody clicks on them. Nobody's looking at them. They're there to be in the conversation. So instead what you do is you stick them on a story page. And then it's a page view. Every time people come back to comment, it's a page view for the story. And stories have value, right? Even though these people are not really reading the story, they're just going there to argue. And so there is one aspect of it from some publishers that is completely cynical, which is, you know, we're only doing this because it improves our traffic. And most of those publishers

do not have very much of an, are not making much of an investment into having it be a real community. I know at Macworld, we had for a long time, Lisa Schmeiser did it for a long time. And then Kelly Parker did it for a long time. But we had moderation and we had volunteer moderators. And the community was better. I would say you can do that. And if you have really strict rules, it's a lot of work, but you can eventually cultivate a community that knows the rules and knows how to behave and

recognizes one another and cares about what that community is like. But it's a long hike to get there. It's a long way to go there. And that said, I got to say, a community of people is still people. And it is very difficult. They're awful. Well, it is very difficult. And I don't have comments on Six Colors. And I've had people ask me, why don't you have comments? Or are you going to add comments? And my answer is no. And it's very much the Gruber answer, which is, this is a place for my stuff and stuff that I want to approve and opening a box where anybody can say anything. I'm not comfortable with that, not because they're going to challenge me,

but because this is my place and I want the conversation to be, the conversation can happen around what I write, but I want this to be a place where my words come out and this is where I say what I feel. And one of the problems that I observed at Macworld with the comments was even if you police them really well, you've got people who have pet issues who are going to come into threads about a pet issue and they're going to grind their ax. And at some point it becomes very difficult to say, well, just because you're passing on this story, you know, I'm going to delete,

I'm going to delete what you said because you, you understand the rules and you're within the rules. You're just hijacking it to take it on a different tangent, or you're asking about something minor. We've seen that when we talked about Gamergate a few weeks ago. You know, there's so many different rhetorical tricks you can do to push people off of the subject or to question something that's irrelevant. And people do that in the forums and and i decided with um with six colors that i just didn't want to deal with it and i when i did that i also discovered that i had a little uh forum commenter troll uh on my shoulder when i was writing articles that i would literally there

were sentences that i would pause and be like oh geez i need to rewrite this or not mention this even if it adds to the story, because somebody is going to use this for their pet topic, or they're going to try to split hairs about something that I think is very clear, but they're going to use it to go in a different direction. And it was actually really freeing for me to say, if they want to, you know, basically, if they want to talk to me about it or post about it somewhere else, that's great. But here, I'm going to say this, and I'm going to feel free to say it, because I'm not writing to avoid a stupid comment at the bottom of my article anymore. And that's the thing is 10 years ago, it was much more difficult to get your own content onto the onto the internet. Now, I mean, between Facebook and between Twitter and between, it's hard not to post.

And so anybody can participate by posting their own content to a different system and pointing to your article. It's not like the only way they can react to it is in comments. And if you talk about something like Reddit, if you talk about something like even Hacker News, which I know that's sort of the de facto Marco Arment comment system because they always post his links in there. And I think that's a corrosive, awful environment actually generally, but it's theirs and they can talk about it. I think Twitter and Facebook would be well served to make better linkages between web content and commenting. make better linkages between web content and commenting. So it was easier for publishers to say, you can talk about this on Twitter and round up a list of what people are saying on Twitter.

And I like how Ars Technica does it. They have a forum, and they'll actually show you how many comments are on an article. But the comments are not on the page with the article. You have to choose to go see them. You have to choose to be a part of that community and have a conversation about the article. It's not people writing their own stuff on top of what you wrote. It's like literally if somebody wrote in the margins of a book you wrote and it appeared on all the books that were published. It's just not, you know, and I didn't want to deal with it. Plus, it's just me. And I don't want to have those fights and police that and have angry people who are feeling like I'm abridging their rights, which they don't have on my website, by telling them what they can or can't say. I'd really just let them say whatever they want somewhere else,

write their own blog, post it on Tumblr, put it on social media. And that's not the right choice for everyone. And you can have, if you put in the effort, have a good community. That said, I think I'm very happy to i get lots of feedback on twitter um i'm happy to get it and it's not all positive but i i'm happy to have my words be the words on my site and have uh and not have that moment where i'm reverse engineering literally reverse engineering what i write in order to avoid specific trolls or forum members at Knack World.

Valued members of the community. Valued community members. So I get what Recode's doing. Recode's saying, look, this isn't important to us. We're not going to invest in the community. We're just going to go on. So Joe Steele in the chat room is going to follow up because there are comments. Greg, you and I put discuss comments on the incomparable site and and joe's like well any

second thoughts about that i don't have second thoughts about that only well okay i have had second thoughts about it but i'm actually kind of happy that there are comments on on the incomparable site mostly because um we podcasting, it's a little harder to close the loop. I mean, you get comments on Twitter. Also, it's harder for people to see those comments unless I like retweet them. And in the past, when we did comments

on The Incomparable back when we started it, the first year we did it, before we went on 5x5, there was actually a little bit of a community there. The fact is most episodes get no comments. And every now and then there's an episode where there are some comments. You would not want to hear what everybody shouts back at the podcast while they're listening to it. Right.

But people can add things and they're great ways. They have to seek out. It's the same as the comments not being on the page with the article. Exactly. Comments are not on the broadcast with the podcast. Right. They're attached to the show notes. And so the people who care enough to seek out the comments are going to have something that they care about saying.

They're not going to immediately react. Yeah. Because I shout back at the incomparable all the time and you wouldn't want to hear that. No, definitely not. So would I implement comments on the incomparable site today? Maybe not. But I'm okay that they're there. Complement comments on the Incomparable site today? Maybe not. But I'm okay that they're there.

It's not, like Greg says, that's not the canonical bit of content. It's the podcast. This is supplemental material. Show notes are supplemental material. Whereas when I write something on Six Colors, that's the canonical content. That's what I wrote. And then if I've got some jackass making a point that is not technically in violation of any of the rules, but is completely distracting from my primary point. I have to make a decision about just deleting it because I don't want it to be there because artistically it's distracting. And then getting in an argument with that guy because he thought it was a perfectly valid point, or I can just not have them. And that's the decision that I've made. But I don't think it's wrong to have them. And I don't think

it's wrong to not have them. And I think social works for me. We have great feedback about this podcast, Mike, from people on Twitter and people send in emails too. There are lots of ways. And people can write blog posts and Tumblr posts about it. There are so many different ways to do it. And I love, like, The Incomparable has this whole collection of people around it on Twitter. And that's hugely fun to get that kind of feedback, too. So there's plenty of ways to give people feedback. And it's not like we don't interact with the people who write in. I think, in fact, when people write to the Upgrade.fm Twitter account,

you and I almost always write back and thank them for saying a nice thing about us. So there are plenty of places to do it. Jason, I'm interested on a couple of things with how you work in this world now. Because, I mean, you've probably had comments on the stuff that you've written for your entire career up until Six Colors. So you said it changed the way that you worked in that way

well we actually added them to Macworld in the I'm going to say like 2000 2001 before that we didn't have them but it's been a long time nearly 15 years basically yes so obviously it's changed your writing style because you mentioned about the the comment troll on your shoulder do you still not feel that though like with people are going to be upset at you on twitter or something like that it's different um you do you're always anticipating what an audience's reaction to what you write is going to be and you always try to it's like if a writer writes something and everybody misunderstands them and they get angry at the people for misunderstanding them, that's problematic

because they wrote it in a way that it could be misunderstood. It's really on them. However, you know, there are limits to that. So what I would say is if I'm writing to reverse engineer so that a commenter doesn't post something really annoying and make my article weaker, that's bad. But sure, I know that some stuff is going to maybe engender a response on Twitter, and it doesn't bother me as much. Maybe I've got a thicker skin on Twitter. Maybe not. And I don't know.

I mean, throwaway accounts. The fact is people who are on Twitter are generally invested in being being on Twitter and they're much less likely to be trolls. They may disagree, but they're much less likely to throw do a throwaway account. You know, Gamergate may be accepted, but that, you know, annoying them or block them and move on with your life. But there aren't as many of those on Twitter, I would say, as you see in these comment threads where it could just, you know, you register for an account, it could literally be anybody. But it does. So, yeah, I mean, you're always anticipating what your audience's response is to what you write, but it's not, it's just a little bit different when you're, like I said, when I, I feel like I worked on a story and for the, until the end of time, this asinine post that takes us completely off topic is going to be right below what I wrote. Then you start,

I mean, that's problematic in the extreme. Then you start asking yourself, how do I avoid that guy? Because I know if I mentioned this one thing, that guy's going to come in there. And with the comments gone, I don't do that anymore. Well, that's that topic. How do you feel? Summing up, people are awful. Avoid them. Well, the line is from Seinfeld, right? Which is people, oh, they're the worst, right?

That's the fundamental misanthropy. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, everyone, anyone, and someone. Happy Thanksgiving. Should we move on? Yeah, I think we should. Should we hear from a friend? Or should we wait and hear from a friend in a little bit? No, let's talk about a friend now. Jason, why don't you tell us from a friend or should we wait and hear from a friend in a little bit? No, let's talk about a friend now.

Jason, why don't you tell us about a friend? I would be happy to, Mike. This is what friends do. Friends let other friends occasionally talk about friends. That's it. Now, one of our friends this week is MailRoute. I asked specifically, are they mail route or mail route? And I believe they're mail route, but they're happy if you call them mail route.

It doesn't matter. I don't think that's a US-UK thing. I think that's just a word that can be. Is it always route in the UK, Mike? No, it's route. It's always route in the UK. Yeah, but I don't say mail route because that's weird. That's not their name.

It's never how I've heard it said, you know?'s mail route they should have a little accent somewhere but we'll let them work that out anyway mail route is a uh it's a really great service that i've been using for more than a year now it's a it's an email filtering service so if you can imagine a world where there there is no spam there are no viruses, and there's no bounced email. If you can imagine opening your inbox and seeing only real mail and not spam, this is a world that mail route can make happen. And I've seen it happen myself. You set up mail route. It basically sits in between your incoming mail and you.

It receives your mail. It cleans it of spam, and then it passes it on to your existing mail server. There's no hardware to install. There's no software to install. They get your mail, they sort it, and they deliver it. It's super easy to set up. It took me about five minutes to set it up. You have to tick a couple of boxes and change a couple of things depending on your mail provider, but they make it easy. They let you walk it through. And then my favorite thing about MailRoute is that, or MailRoute, now I'm saying it backward. Wow. Mike, you've destroyed me with your British ways. I'm so sorry.

MailRoute, you can set it up to send you a notification every day with what it's filtered out. And I always worry about filtering out legitimate mail. And so every day I get a mail route notice, which lists all the mail that was filtered out. There are links in this email, so you can immediately whitelist a sender. You can deliver the message or you can do both. You can deliver the message and whitelist the sender so that from this point on, they will always get through and not be viewed as spam. Very convenient. What I've really learned in the last six to nine months is that MailRoute is really efficient. That report is almost always entirely spam, and I'm not seeing spam in my inbox. So it's really a great service. If you're an email

administrator or an IT professional, the tools are built with you in mind. They've got an API, they support, you name it, LDAP, Active Directory, TLS, outbound relay, everything you'd want. And if you're a regular person like me, it's super easy to set up and easy to use. And I set it up for my whole domain because I have a Google Apps domain. And so I'm filtering mail for me and for my wife and for my mom and for my kids. And it's really great. So if you want spam out of your life, you don't have to fiddle around with plugins and extra software or hardware or anything like that. You can just get MailRoute and it will do all of the work for you. And that spam will never even hit your inbox. So here's what you need to do. Mike, are you listening? I'm really

listening. I'm ready. I'm ready for your instructions. Okay. This is what you need to do. You need to go to MailRoute or MailRoute if you like,.net, MailRoute.net slash upgrade. Easy to remember. And you'll get a free trial and 10% off. And this is not a one-time 10% off for the first month or something. 10% off for the lifetime of your MailRoute account if you go to mailroute.net slash upgrade. And thank you so much to our friends at MailRoute for filtering the spam out of my mailbox every day

for more than a year now and for sponsoring Upgrade. How'd it do, Mike? Oh, it was perfect. Top notch. I couldn't have done any better. So you did a fantastic job and I'm jealous of your incredible mail route skills. Other than calling it mail route a couple of times. Other than that. Don't worry about it. Yeah. All right. So fun employment. Now that we've done an hour,

we've come to the real topic. We are three gentlemen of leisure in a certain sense, which is we are no longer employed by big companies. Greg, do you want to talk a little bit? I mean, Mike and I are recent members of this class. You've been doing this for a while. Do you want to tell people a little bit about your story of where you were and what happened? What the heck happened? Um, so like 20 years ago, I entered the workforce a little over 20 years ago, and I held dreams of always being able to go off and do my own thing, have my own little business, make my own products. But the first thing you do after you get out of school is start applying for jobs. And I got a job, and it was with a

massive corporation. And then I just kind of spent 20 years almost being inside massive corporations just as the next thing. I got married. I had kids. I had a mortgage. I have car payments, all the kind of stuff that goes into making the modern American middle-class life. And then the next thing that goes into making the modern American middle-class life was the company decided to move their headquarters to Austin, Texas. And I would rather sever a limb than move to Texas. And so I took the buyout and I thought, okay, here I have a little chunk of money and I can go off and start doing my own thing. And so three years ago, I set up a business.

I started contracting. And my plan was to start producing all of the products that I've had in my head for a couple of decades. All sorts of crazy stuff on the web and in apps. And, you know, the opportunities are endless. So what happened? This is where you insert the sad trombone sound um because my ambition didn't account for a lot of what goes into actually running a business day-to-day i have technical skills but i don't have managerial skills and i don't have accounting

skills and i don't have all sorts of other things that actually are done semi-invisibly when you're working for someone else. You go in, you do the technical work, they give you a paycheck. It's a nice, simple transaction. When you're working for yourself, you sit down and you realize that somebody's behind on an invoice, and you actually need to invoice this other client, and oh my God, taxes are due, and all sorts of other things that continually pile up. And it's awfully easy, since there's nobody looking over your shoulder, to just end up watching Netflix the whole day instead of dealing with all that stuff. And so now three years later, I'm in a comfortable groove. I've got contracting clients that I like and that I think I've done

really good work for, but I have never kind of executed on my original plan, which was to produce my own products, to own my own thing. And I've gotten part of the way through some of them, and I've actually shipped one, but that's a pretty poor track record for three years. And I've been struggling lately with why that is and how I can correct it or if I really want to correct it. Because when I started, I was dealing with 20-year-old dreams, you know, the startup-y thing, the mid-90s, Wired, San Francisco, Web 1.0.

And is that still a realistic goal for a man who is now edging into his late 40s who still has all the obligations that he built up over the past 20 years? I'm at this weird place where I don't know if my dreams are still relevant to my current life, and I certainly haven't executed on them. One of my favorite aphorisms from Merlin Mann is that priorities are discovered, they're not assigned.

And so if truly shipping my own apps were my priority, then i would be doing it but i i don't have the conscious realization of or an explanation of why i'm not and so i'm i'm doing okay i'm not making my corporate salary but i am also not sitting in all-day meetings which is seems like a totally fair trade to me. Um, and I'm doing work that I enjoy with people I like, but it's not what I thought it would be. So it's interesting to me that, that, um, for you quitting the corporate job and staying at home was not you, there's this dichotomy to what you're saying. There's the, there's the doing, doing what you want, working on your projects, and there's

building a business basically as a consultant and a contractor and supporting yourself and your family by doing that. And the second one, you are doing. You are doing that. And yet, I sense some disappointment that your dream, was your dream more about quitting to work on your own projects than it was about escaping the man i i had a very good job um for the most part you know let's say it was insanely maddening only like a third of the time um i wanted to create my own stuff i wanted to own my own stuff. I wanted to own my own stuff. I felt like I'd spent a couple of decades creating value and then leaving that for my employers to enjoy the rewards of. They paid me very well, but obviously I thought that the value I was creating was worth

more than what I was getting paid. And the makeup in that, the kind of gap in that is made up for insecurity and consistency. And, you know, if I decide I'm just going to be brain dead for a couple of days, nobody notices. That's kind of the way corporate America works. And that's just not the case when you're working for yourself. And so that I'm not shipping my own products is my failure now. And there's no place to hide from that. I think it's interesting that, you know, you're here, you are the, we talked about this at XOXO, you are the voice of our future, or at least the cautionary voice from our future, because Mike and I both are... Haven't I demonstrated relentless optimism to this point in the podcast? Mike and I both left our jobs and wanted to set out on our own to build our own things, right?

Yes, exactly. And I wonder about this too. When I talk to people about me doing this, I say, well, look, my plan is to do the website and podcasting and maybe some freelance and stuff like that, but really to do this as my primary job and make a living doing it. And I had that conversation where I say, well, in the end, we'll see how it works. Maybe I'll need to do more freelance. Maybe if it doesn't work out, I'll have to look for a job. If I do that, I would really prefer it be something that I could do from home and be similar to what I'm doing now. And it's weird when I have that conversation too, because that's not my intent. My intent is to do my own things

primarily and have those projects be what I do. But there's also this kind of knowledge that may or may not work. And that part of the components of this life may be what you're describing as, you know, mostly what you do now, which is working with clients on projects. And it's not your stuff, but you are still working, you know, out of your house and not commuting

and not sitting in meetings all day. So there's like a couple of things going on. In every aspect other than financially, than just the straight up money, it's better. All right. I have more, I have a much more flexible time for my kids. I can coach little league, you know, cause I'm not going to be at the office until six every day. Um, I, you know, if I feel like blowing off a morning, I can blow off a morning. Um, and so, and, and now my wife has, has gone back to working now that the kids are old enough to get themselves in trouble all by themselves.

And, um, so our income has remained fairly stable between me working a corporate job, me going independent and her returning to work. So Mike, Mike, how do you view this, um, in terms of terms of doing your own thing versus making it work so that you don't have to go back to a job like the one that you had? I kind of don't even see it as like a possibility, like going back now. I feel like I couldn't and I really don't want to. So it's just not going to happen. It's just like this feeling that I have in my mind. I was like, this will work because I'm going to make it work

because I won't give myself even the safety net of, oh, I'm sure you could still get a job somewhere else. It's really not what I want to do, you know? So it's kind of like for me right now, it's like, well, this is what's happening. This is what I do now. This is my job, and it's going to work. And like have this idea i mean things are going really well like relay is is uh well it became um my full-time employment much faster than i thought it would um and i'm making more money now than i did before currently which is is fantastic. And I'm sure it won't last forever.

But I was quite underpaid in my corporate role because I was loyal to my company and was there for eight years, which strangely means that I get paid a lot less than my colleagues. However, that was a great thing, though. That worked out for me, because it meant that I was able to quit sooner, because I only needed X amount of money, right? So I could just quit quicker. But I mean, you know, the finance thing is horrible. I spoke about this on on on analog with Casey Lewis. Like I received my final paycheck from my employer was a lot lower than i expected it to be so it was kind of like a wake-up call because it's like oh you have to look after your money now like you have to think about these things and budget better because who knows if the money's

going to be in and when it's going to be in and how much it's going to be and you know so it's like the the finance thing is something that i never really paid too much attention to, but now I kind of don't have a choice. But I also, I kind of take some, I don't even know what the right emotion would be, but I take a feeling in the fact that it's up to me how much money I make. You know, I can work really hard, or I can maybe not work as much hard, and as much hard apparently is a phrase I'm going to use now.

Sure. That's UK phrase, right? It's UK. It's UK English. It's different to how we would say it, Greg. So I can choose how hard I want to work. And from that will be an amount of money that is equivalent to that. And I am very much

enjoying the balance i'm having and trying to settle into some sort of schedule which makes sense for me now um and i'm trying to not feel guilty about taking long lunches with friends if i really want to and stuff like that you know yeah i i mean how much you work is is one of the questions that i wanted to ask both of you because this is something that I've struggled with in the two months that I've been doing this is, is how do you structure your time? And you have the flexibility to walk your kids to school or, you know, or whatever. But there also is a job to be done. And then what I find, too, is that literally I could do it forever. I could be working all day, every day, forever. I could certainly create

that kind of work for myself. My wife was talking to her parents who were coming for Thanksgiving on the phone last night. And I could intuit from the conversation that what my mother-in-law was asking was, am I working on Wednesday when they're going to get here? And my wife said, well, his boss is really mean. He makes him work all the time. And there's something to that because she was like, well, what about Wednesday? And I said, well, I don't know. I got a lot of, I got some deadlines. I got some stories I need to turn in for other people. And then I've got, you know, I don't want the site to be just tumbleweeds blowing through the whole week. And, and so I've been struggling with that. Like,

when do I, when do I shut it down? When do I say, I'm going to step out of the, out of the office and not work on Six Colors or not work on podcasts anymore. And it's coupled with the extra complexity that back when I was working at IDG, I would work in the office and I would come home and we'd have dinner and then I would go and do Incomparable, right? We would record a podcast or I'd have to edit an episode in order to get it live. And so it was my, it was my nighttime job. So I was used to putting in that extra time. And I'm struggling with that too, of like, do I balance, do I keep doing some of that? Or do I really owe it to myself and my family to not put in that extra time and schedule that time into my regular day. And I don't have any answers here. It's just, it's interesting to have that moment of trying to be able to decide, well, I could do more work, but I need to stop. Even though, yes, if I don't do it, it isn't going to get done. But at some point I need to just call it and say i need to not do this now i i hardly ever work after 2 a.m that's good it's important to have barriers some boundaries so like i i currently

put in more hours than like an eight hour work day but i work less than than i did two months ago because because you were you were doingay and you were doing your job. Yeah. Like at the moment, I'm not doing like an exponentially large, you know, amount more of work. Like I'm not doing

two times the amount of work on Relay as I was before. I'm working more. I'm putting more time into things. But I am doing less work in total because I don't have to put in eight hours in an office as well as doing everything else. And it's nice because I'm able to actually do things,

social things, or play video games or watch movies. I can find that time in my day. But the weird thing for me is my my work day is extremely long like i wake up say say i wake up at like 10 a.m or something i will be working until like two in the morning because i work in sort of chunks throughout the day because i still need to record in the evenings so my work days is very long, but it's just my whole day can be filled with work stuff, like with little gaps in between where I'm doing

things for myself. And that's been the biggest change in my life over the last few weeks, is being able to actually find some of my own time. But Jason, I think that for you, with The Incomparable, you should start counting that into your workday, I think. Oh, I'm trying to. Other than the fact that we record at night. But I'm trying to.

I've actually put something on my calendar for Fridays now that is edit The Incomparable on Friday during the day. I've scheduled in the time for that because I do feel like that should be something that's in my day and I should get my Saturday morning back if I can, if at all possible. And every now and then that may shift, but that should be the plan to do that. It's just, and some of this is getting started with something new. It's a very big change from the kind of work I was doing the last couple of years at IDG because I was much less involved in writing things and, and,

and I wasn't doing as many podcasts. And so some of it is, is adjusting to it being different work. It's very hard for me to compare it to the work I was doing before where it was sitting in meetings and, and managing things and not being able to write, which was frustrating. That said, I got destiny for Xbox the day that, in meetings and and managing things and not being able to write which was frustrating that said i

got destiny uh for xbox the day that um the day that the apple event happened which was the day before the layoff and it's still in its shrink wrap and that says something because i was really excited to pre-order that game and i pre-ordered it like last year and i still haven't opened the box two months later and it's really down to the fact that I have not had time nor have I scheduled time in to my life to play a video game. I also don't have a video game podcast like Mike does, which is a really good excuse to play video games. Amazing excuse to play video games.

I have a great excuse to watch movies and TV shows and read books, which I do. And, and that's, that's great. But, um, so yeah, I, I, I, I'm trying to structure

it. I'm trying to do things. My wife and I have scheduled walks in the morning where we drop my son off at school and then we go for a walk for an hour. And if it's on the calendar, it happens. And if it's not on the calendar, it doesn't happen. So it's coming into focus, but. Like I have noticed so much is my calendar is king right now. If something's on my calendar, it's getting done. I mean, I always used a calendar for things, but it feels like now my calendar has become so much more important than it was previously because everything's going in there.

For example, if I put swimming on the calendar, swimming will happen. If it's not on the calendar, it's not happening. Yeah. Do you guys have any regrets at this point? I mean, it sounds like you're both doing exactly what you wanted, and it's going very well. I love the Greg, ooh, bring out your regrets. I'm curious. I'm curious.

I do not regret what I've done. I regret my inability to pursue what my original intent was. I don't have regrets. I have a huge list of things that I thought I would try that I haven't even gotten to yet. And Destiny, I'm not even saying like playing Destiny. I'm saying like content things that I wanted to do. I wanted to do. This is funny because Dave Wiskus did his video about people doing more than just podcasts, like for example, videos like Dave Wiskus does. And I talked to him about that at

Singleton and I was already on my list of things to do when I left IDG was going to be like a video series of some sort. And I want to do it. And I have not had any time to do that. So I've got a list. I've got like a to-do list of things. It's like, boy, I didn't realize that I was going to be able to pack my schedule as full as I've been able to pack it without even doing some of those things. So some of it is that. And some of it is just being open. Like I did a little consulting and I'm working on a couple of freelance articles and I, I said, said yes to those assignments because I wanted to see what it was like and to work with some people who I thought were really interesting and get a sense of, of how you balance freelance versus doing your own thing. But I've got a whole, I've got a whole list of things. Um,

the, the, uh, that I want to do that I just haven't gotten to yet. I wouldn't say those are, I wouldn't say those are regrets. I didn't have, unlike Mike, my timing was not a choice that I made. I spent eight months between trying to leave and having this layoff, and then my timing was tied to the layoff. So it had to happen on that day. And I'm not sure I... Well, if I have any regrets, it's that I realized the other week that I probably could have gone to my boss when I tried to resign last December

and said, you should lay me off. And they probably would have done that instead of just offering to leave with no money. And then I could have started this in January instead of in September. So maybe I regret that. But at the same time, I'm eight months more prepared to do this on my own than I would have been back then. Are there any business aspects that have taken you by surprise?

Any things that the corporation was handling previously? Well, so the incomparable was training wheels for me because we set up up not only did we start taking ads last year but we incorporated and we we got an accountant and we set up a bank account and so so that was good because i'm still using that corporation and six colors is in the incomparable corporation it's the same it's the same thing and so i feel like like i mean everything i was doing for the last year and a half was a, was set up to leave. It was totally set up to go out on my own. That was always part of the idea was to, to try this stuff out. I'm fortunate that my wife has an MBA and is only, is only a part-time librarian. So she's got a little bit of time to do some of the business

stuff for me. And I'm really grateful for that because if I had to do more of the business stuff, that would be more problematic. But she's been able to take on some of that stuff. And that's been really helpful. I feel like there doesn't exist a... Oh, I'm sorry, Mike. Go ahead. Regrets.

Bring your regrets, Mike. I don't have regrets yet or any. And I don't think... Like, it's interesting to look at regrets. You mean you don't regret making more money and working less with greater freedom? Funnily enough, I'm not sure how I feel about that. But I get the idea that there are things that I want to do that I haven't done, but I don't look at that as a concern because in my mind, I have another 50, 60 years to do them

so it's not a concern of mine you know because i will do my my plan is to do this forever for as long as the internet will have me and and like to echo like jason's point in the business stuff like it is tricky i mean luckily i have steven you know my wife i suppose uh and we work on this stuff together and it's great to have a co-founder because we're able to balance a lot of things um and there are things that either i don't want to do or i don't know how to do and it's the same for him and we're able to balance that stuff and even like you know when it comes to working out like how we pay people and when we pay people and going through all of the invoices and stuff like that we can just jump on a call together and cry about it for an hour and get it done and and that that has been a great thing like i don't think i could do this

without him and i think he would feel the same about me too. And that's a real great thing to have in a business. And it's one of the main reasons why I know we both wanted to do this together is because we would be able to have each other. And that makes it, it feels much nicer doing this as a partnership than on your own. I have some other key questions that I wanted to ask you and share my experience as well. What about getting out and doing things? Do you have those issues where you're like, oh my God, I didn't go outside today? I've been trying to go outside a lot. I actually think I spend more time outside the house now than I did before. And that's simply because I know that if I don't leave the house, I'll stay in the house. Like, I know that sounds stupid, but like I,

if I don't make an effort to go out, then I'm just not going to. So I try and work outside now. So like I go to a coffee shop or something and do stuff in the daytime, or I go out, meet a friend, or I just go out for a long nice walk or something like that because i i genuinely had a fear that it would get to the point where it'd be like six days past and i realized that i'm still at home eating cheerios yeah your fingernails are five inches long you got a beard yeah and and that was the same thing like there were people like people in my family and important people in my real life that were saying you need to go outside and like what would you really concerned when i was telling them i was going

to do this that i would just sit at home all the time so it's also part part for me and part for them to show them that i can actually be a member of society and not a crazy person you know what about you jason do you go outside i know you got you obviously you take your kids out and stuff but do you do you do make an effort to do other things well that that's being in the being in the suburbs it's a little bit more of a challenge where it's not like i've got a big vibrant if i could step out my front door and be south of market where my old job was it would be different but i step out my front door and i'm in a quiet neighborhood and so it's a challenge we do my son's elementary school is within walking distance so we we walk him every morning, and I do that some mornings. And like I said, my wife and I try to schedule it so that we walk him and then just take a walk.

I'm busier than I thought I would be. I thought I would have moments where I'd be like on my work from home days back when I worked at IDG where I'd say, oh, I'm going to go to a cafe and write for a little bit. Won't that be nice? And instead I just, you know, my office is comfortable enough that I sit here and I'm like, all right, I'm just going to keep on grinding. I got another thing to do and then I got another thing to do. And so it's a challenge. I'm trying to be more receptive to if there are, you know, if somebody's going over to somebody's house in the afternoon because the kids are going to be there and, you know, various kids are going to be there and we can, you know, we'll have a beer and talk to go to. And I keep telling my wife that, you know, I'm going to ruin all of her social engagements now by showing up for them. But she's been really supportive of that.

So off me ruining her social engagements. So it's a work in progress. I keep telling myself I need to get out more. I need to ride my bike or go for a walk or something. But right now, the fact that I'm walking my son to school a bunch and picking him up from school a bunch, that sort of at least gets me fresh air and some sun, if not a lot of human interaction. So it's a work in progress. I wouldn't say that I'm happy about that. Greg, you're in a suburb. Do you get out of the house? I actually started renting office

space to give me an excuse to shower and leave the house. I feel like since I'm paying for it, I have to use it. And the first year I was working just from home and you sit down and you start working and you work with people on the East Coast. And so by the time you sit down, it's already 11 o'clock where they are. And suddenly the whole day has gone by and you're still in your pajamas and you're unshaven and unshowered. And you can only do that for so long. And usually it's just the freshman year of college. And so my wife and I, who she also works for herself, we got some office space. And so we use that as an excuse to actually leave the house.

Oh, that's good. And it's worked out pretty well. I mean, I'm sitting in it now. It's not fancy, but it's a place. It is an other. It is a place to go and work. Now, too often I'll leave to go pick up the kids and then sit down when I get home and start working again.

And so I haven't completely separated my home and work lives, but it has helped. And it's given you some structure. Yeah. And certainly that is lacking. I mean, I can't believe that there used to be a time where I was actually 45 minutes away wearing a shirt and a tie at 8 o'clock in the morning. Yeah. You guys both worked in financial-related industries industries too. Oh my God. You have that

in common. Um, for me, I have to say the, the, the whole blogger in their pajamas thing. I mean, I've discovered that sort of kind of true. Um, today I was very proud of myself. I took a shower in the morning and am wearing pants. I'm wearing, I'm wearing pants, not shorts or flannel pajamas, but actual pants. I am wearing slippers because it's kind of cold out here and they keep my feet warmer. But there are days, I have a drifting shower schedule. There are days where it's 11 o'clock and I'm like,

okay, I'll jump in the shower now. I've done some work. And on one level, that's kind of great because I just sort of like started working at eight in the morning or 7.30 in the morning and And on one level, that's kind of great because I just sort of like started working at eight in the morning or seven thirty in the morning and was at a full. I was kind of feeling it. I was in the flow. I was really busy doing stuff. And then it's eleven. I'm like, OK, well, I'm I'm I'm smelly. I need to go take a shower now. But I've also had days where I've taken a shower at like three or four in the afternoon. And I on one level, it's

like, hey, freedom. And on another level, that's not good. I disgust myself. Yeah, well, you start to think, hey, if I shower in the afternoon every other day, then I can just move to a day and a half schedule. No, that's not good. Nobody wants that. I now work a 40-hour day, so I only need to shower twice a week. That's right. I'll see you tomorrow at 4ZM.

That's right. I'll see you tomorrow at 4 ZM. The biggest problem I have with structure is that I find inertia to be way more powerful than it did when somebody else was basically setting my schedule. So that if I start working in my pajamas, I will keep working in my pajamas. And then if I finally take a break and shower, I will just want to stand in the shower for an hour and a half. And if I take a break to go out to lunch, there's no real pressing reason to go back to work. That's just a matter of discipline, I think, something that I haven't mastered yet. Yeah, I'm not having problems with that. For me, I think mine is the discipline to be um the discipline to allow myself a little bit less discipline i don't know like i said you know i thought i would be seeing

like a movie a week well yeah you know i i keep thinking well interstellar um you know i don't want to take my kids to see it i'm not sure my wife really wants to see it she'd probably be up for seeing it but it's like one of those things where i thought uh i could just go in the day to see it but it's three hours long and there's podcasts and i haven't done it and i haven't played destiny right and i i could i could plan it and i instead i'm like no no i'm just gonna work more so some of that is is i think in there that i need to be better at at uh at uh turning it on and off a little bit more and and putting it on like mike said calendar is king put in calendar, maybe then it'll happen. Basically, I spent the first week.

I mean, I know I'm only like three or four weeks into this, so this is pretty condensed, Jason, but I spent my first week panicking that I wasn't working enough, but forcing myself to do things that I wanted to do. And now as I'm getting into that rhythm I feel better about it but about playing a video game for a week or two because when I did that not a week or two an hour or two I'm just playing a video game for a week I play like video games or whatever or I went and had lunch with a friend today for a couple of hours that you know go into

London and it takes like 45 minutes to get to London, and we're having lunch. So I lose like four hours of my day doing that. But the thing is, the business has not fallen apart. That was all that. And I think once this, and I feel, I feel silly giving you advice about this stuff, but like once you get to the, once you do that stuff

and you make time for yourself, and you see that the site doesn't cease to exist, I think you might feel better about it. Some of it, too, is a reaction to what my job was before. And I realized this. And it's like literally, oh, you get to write things now. And so part of me is like, we write things and so then i'm like writing like if you factored in like how much money i i hope to make from the site and from podcasts and all that i'm probably spending way too much time on six colors honestly i think it's good because i'm more content is good it's building it up it's

hopefully growing the traffic there's an investment aspect to it but there's also a release of like yay i get to do this and it's so much fun that i'm just going to do it because I wasn't able to do it at my previous employer. And likewise with the podcast. It's like, finally, I can do that podcast with Mike. And then we're still doing Clockwise. And I added the thing with Tim Goodman. And it's like, so some of it is just the glee of being able to do these things that I've wanted to do for two years. And so I'm just doing them because it's fun and I want to do them.

And so I don't mind. But I am also trying to not overdo it where I'm with these things I'm going to get tired of because I'm not giving myself breaks. So there's a little bit of both in there, I think. You know, as as down as I may sound on what my original goals were, I still have survived for three years, you know, taking the jobs I want to take and working with people with, uh, working with the people I want to work with and blowing off an hour and a half in the middle of the afternoon to do a podcast with some friends. Yeah. Um, on the whole, yeah, it, it seems to be working.

So, and that was my, my, the last question I wanted to ask, which, uh, for you, Greg, can you envision, um, can you envision going back to a job where you had to, you know, get in your car and drive for 45 minutes and wear a tie and be there at 8am? Can you imagine that? Or are you pretty much spoiled for doing contract work and stuff for yourself and, and, and charting your own course? I can see the possibility of a company that impresses me so much that's doing something that is both important and interesting that could lure me back to a full-time job, but it would have to be amazing. It would have to be a special situation. Yeah, well, I think there are some companies out there that I see, and they just look like they are doing

things right. And I'm not seeking employment because there's a lot of constraints with that too. I live in Los Angeles. They have to be within driving distance of Los Angeles because this is where my home is. I have a ton more freedom doing what I do now. And so it would be a big hill to climb. It's not an impossibility, but I can't imagine the set of circumstances

coming together in a way that would require that I pursue them. And Mike, you said earlier you forget it. It's not even like a, it feels like it's not even an option. Like I definitely couldn't do anything like I did before. I definitely couldn't do anything like I did before. If one day I had to try and find a job again, I would try and find something else. But if I felt like Relay was failing,

I would try and find some other creative work to do, or try and get the audience to save me or something. Like, please help. Because it's just not something that I'm interested in. And I think I'm best placed doing this rather than that. I think I add more to this world creating podcasts than I do in financial services marketing. Well, I think that's almost certainly the case. I mean, I don't know how wonderful you were at financial services marketing. Well, I think that's almost certainly the case. I mean, I don't know how wonderful you were

at financial services marketing. Pretty great, Jason. Possibly awesome. Yes. You can apply a 10,000 multiplier to a 0.001% world benefit. Yeah. Still not have it come out on the right side.

So, I mean, I sort of feel this way too. People are asking this now, and it's early days for you and me, Mike. But I fully accept that after a year away from 20 years of commuting every day to an office, that I might say, oh, you know, it wasn't so bad and there are benefits and teamwork and all of that. So I'm not shutting the door to that either. But I mean, I have spent the last few years looking at this and saying, well, you know, what I really ought to do is something like that. And I want to build something and maybe grow it to the point where that can be my thing

and that can be my business and I can have a team that's my team and work with a lot of interesting people and do podcasts and do websites and things like that. When I think about ways that I could be induced to come back, it is definitely that slippery slope of there's the stuff. Well, it's not a slippery slope. It's like a hierarchy. There's the stuff that I'm doing that's my stuff. And then there's the stuff that I'm doing for other people like freelance and consulting. But it's their stuff, but it's my stuff that I'm doing for other people like freelance and consulting but it's it's their stuff but it's my stuff that I've choose I'm choosing to work on with them and then below that there would be like uh working hourly for somebody but from my house from my desk is it's a job but it's a job here and then or whether it was like 20 hours a week or full

time even from from here though doing the stuff that I like to do from my office here instead of commuting. And then below that is the commute job. And some of that, I think, is just having not had to get on a bus an hour each way every day. I don't miss it. And I don't really want to go back to doing that. That's not a life that I would choose. I'm fully aware that I may need to choose it at some point. If that's the difference between my kids eating or not, then I'm going to choose it. But it's low down on the list. And right now I'm trying to focus on the things that are in box number one and learn a little bit about what's in box number two.

When I first started, and every once in a while I would have doubts, you know, you get hooked up with a bad client or you're worried about how much income you're going to bring in a month. I would schedule a lunch with my old coworkers and I would just listen to them complain about politics and corporate stupidity for an hour. And then I would feel much better about the choice I had made. Though I do miss listening to podcasts on the commute. Me too. Me too. It's actually really hard to find time to listen to podcasts now. I've taken all that time.

It's housework. Yeah, that's what I do when I'm making dinner or doing the dishes or anything like that, or if I'm taking a walk by myself to get out of the house and be and get some exercise if my wife doesn't come with me then I am doing podcasts then because that is the one thing that I had a I had some mandated podcast time that was uh only thing that kept me sane I'm not I'm not 100 sure what I'm doing uh but I listen to more podcasts now than i ever have and i i don't know how i'm doing that because it seems to fly in the face of basically everybody else that start that

doesn't have a commute anymore i don't know what i'm doing but but i listen to podcasts all the time at home uh as well as when i'm traveling around so So like I might like when I'm in my morning routine of trying to wake up and make coffee and breakfast and check email, I just put a podcast on then. Total Party Kill was a great show and it's very nice for my morning wake up ritual. So thank you for that, Jason. Yay.

Because it's nice, it's long shows where it's like you can kind of just leave them on and enjoy them because they're more like entertainment they work really well for that kind of stuff i think yeah that's good to hear i i you know when i'm sitting at my at my computer writing i i can't listen to podcasts that's the only thing i also can't listen to them whilst i'm podcasting indeed or editing podcasts yes especially well you can listen to the one that you're editing yeah but that's really the limit is the one. Yes, but by the time you finish editing it, you hate it. Every now and then I cue up music to play while I'm working, and then I open up Logic, and I'm like, wait, I can't do that.

I can't listen to music while I'm editing a podcast. It doesn't work that way. But for other things, I'm trying to do that. I've got a little Bluetooth connector to the speaker that's in my kitchen. And so I can put it on there. When my kids are around and my wife is around, I end up putting in the headphones and it's a little antisocial, but I do that sometimes when I'm cleaning up or whatever. But I admit that there are different kinds of podcasts too. And they're the ones that are more kind of entertainment based that are telling you a story or something. And then they're the ones where you're, you're listening. Cause it's, you know, that's with

ATP. I can't really tune out ATP because I really want to listen to ATP and, and, and the technical details of everything that they're saying. Whereas, you know, as something that's a more entertainment podcast, I can just listen and it's fun and I'm not taking notes mentally. When I'm doing yard work or housework with a podcast in, I ask my kids to text me rather than try and get my attention audibly. Yeah. Yeah. When I'm doing podcasts, that's what I tell my son. He's in the other room right now. They have Thanksgiving week off. And I just said, I said, he's got an iPad. Send me a text if you need me. I'm podcasting now. That's the future. You don't have to hear from your kids anymore. Just like my dad did for me. Yeah, exactly. And my daughter's a teenager now, so she's happy to not speak to me. So it's beautiful. Well, that exhausts all my questions

about this funny world that we're living in. But I think it's really interesting. I always listened when Dan Benjamin would do quit and, you know, and then, and, uh, Merlin would talk about the, the, you know, the J-O-B jobs and all of that stuff. I would always listen and be like, oh, that's interesting. And, uh, uh, and now, especially, um, especially when you've got the perspective of people who mostly I've known so many people who are like freelancers and that's what they've always been that it's different when you are used to the the job life and then you're not in it anymore and um it's not like i'm not working i think we've all said we're all other than mike who's working less and making more we're all

working pretty hard i don't like that that summary by the way i would like to point that out that I'm not on board with that. He plays video games. Your objection is noted. He takes four-hour lunches. And we'll save you a turkey leg. But it's different. And it's an interesting – the contrast is kind of breathtaking in some ways of being out on your, of having it being out on your own and having no more support structure, but also no more meetings and control structure and, uh, having to make those decisions yourself. Um, uh, but my fear, which is that I would not have enough to do

and would be like, Oh crap, what do I do now? It hasn't been borne out. So, uh, that's, that's a good start. And I, I, uh, hopefully,. And hopefully, you know, that'll continue because I'm enjoying it. And as I've said on previous shows, although I'm in my garage, it has been converted almost to the point. There's still a garage door and there's some bikes parked. But they're like, I got curtains and carpet and it's all insulated and there are new windows. And it's, other than the fact that the washer and dryer is over here threatening to spill out and flood me at any moment, I am otherwise in a pretty comfy spot that I had a year or more to set up. And so I'm pretty happy being able to execute a plan that I sort of like, okay, I'll say it,

I'm living the dream because for two years, this was the dream and now I get to actually do it. So that's pretty great. Don't mess it up. Thanks, Greg. Voice of regret later. But it's good to have the voice of warning out there because I know that's why I wanted you on. That's why I asked you to be our guest today is I wanted you to say, look, I lived through this and And, you know, you have the positives of it and also the things that you expected that didn't come to pass. And I thought that was worth talking about for young Mike and for me, both of whom are out on our own now. And I think that's it, Mike.

So this so ends the group, the group therapy of the home workers on the internet. We will reconvene at another point and check in to see how these guys are doing. Via Skype, not in person. And what regrets myself and Jason have about our new pajama lifestyle.

If you'd like to find the show notes for this week's episode of Upgrade, you want to point to your web browser at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 11. Mr. Noss, where can people find you if they would like to do so? At eod.com.

Perfect. Yeah, how about that three-letter domain? End of days. I think the post that's there is almost exactly a year old how about how about gnos at twitter perfect there you go

they will of course both be in the show notes too if you'd like to find me online I am at imyke on twitter and Mr. J. Snell is at jsnell and he of course writes the fantastic six colors dot com we'll be back next week of another episode of upgrade thanks again to our sponsors this week drafts studio neat

and mail route until next time say goodbye everybody goodbye everybody