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15: Farming, Threadbois, & Meme Lords with Jeffrey Way

/ 01:53:40/E15
Intro:

You're listening to Mostly Technical, which is brought to you by Lara Jobs, the official Laravel job board, and Screencasting .com, where you can learn how to create high quality screencasts Faster than ever. Now, Ian and Aaron.

Ian:

Alright. Hello. Welcome back. We have another special guest this week, Jeffrey Way, the OG.

Jeffrey Way:

OG. Hey, guys.

Ian:

OG. Hey.

Jeffrey Way:

Thanks for being

Aaron:

here. Mhmm. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

I'm glad we can talk about the important issues of the day. Yeah.

Aaron:

I was I was I was gonna say, like, one of the, Like, the pillars of

Ian:

the community. Should we talk about Laracast? Should we talk about content business? No.

Aaron:

We should talk about Twitter.

Jeffrey Way:

Let's talk about Twitter. Twitter is all anyone cares about. Course.

Ian:

That's And

Jeffrey Way:

I see, clearly, you guys are like me. Like, I can't bring myself to say x. And it's not related to Elon or anything. It's like, I just can't do it.

Ian:

Now this is It makes no sense to care about that. Forever. We're going down with the ship. It's Twitter. That's it.

Jeffrey Way:

For sure. For sure.

Aaron:

We were actually just talking about Actually important things, which is ages of kids and how kids reach a certain, like, point where they get actually funny, and they really still wanna hang out with you before They age out into teenagers, and you're it sounds sounds like, Jeffrey, you're in a good spot, and we're all in different spots. That's interesting.

Ian:

I was just gonna say that.

Aaron:

Yeah. Yours are quite a bit older. Jeff's older than yours. Minor minor super young.

Ian:

Yeah. So, mine are the oldest is 17, looking at colleges and all that. He's a senior, And then the middle one is 13, and then the baby is, 10.

Jeffrey Way:

Okay. So, Ian, when did they start to hate you? That's what I wanted. Like, what year is the cutoff point when they stopped liking

Aaron:

people?

Ian:

Here, there's oh, man. That that we could literally Jin, because it's so complicated in some ways, because what's really interesting is as they get older, like, their personalities, all 3 of them are very different And there's just all these different elements to that. So, like, the oldest is a little more like, Yeah. He's a little more kind of His own person they removed. The middle one's more of, like, the lovey bear kinda guy.

Ian:

The, like, the youngest, she's kinda like the Family historian and stuff. So, like, there's all these different things. So far, nobody actually hates us, I'd say, which is good. We haven't had this whole, I hate you. You're the worst, sort of thing, but it is interesting.

Ian:

As they get older, they definitely, like, are withdrawing in certain ways or finding their own space and things like that, but

Jeffrey Way:

It is something that you're talking about,

Ian:

you know?

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. I I would imagine it's more like, slowly, they just spend more and more time in their own room.

Ian:

Right.

Ian:

Which is weird.

Jeffrey Way:

Like, my kids never want to be in their room. It's so weird. Like, my kids have so many toys. I'm like, just go play in your room. Like, give me 30 minutes.

Ian:

Oh, man. We can't get anybody to play with toys. Forget that. There's no toys.

Jeffrey Way:

I know. It's ridiculous. But I would imagine as they get older, they just kind of want to be away from you a little bit more every single year.

Ian:

Maybe not. For sure. To some degree, I would yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

Go ahead. No. Go ahead.

Ian:

Go ahead. Go for it.

Jeffrey Way:

I remember years ago you talking about Doing something where you guys did the traveling thing where you traveled all over the world. You pulled the kids out of school. Did that ever pan out?

Ian:

Yeah. So it did. So we started, homeschooling in 2018, I'd say. And the oldest was, in his, like, 6th grade, I think, at that time, something like that, and it was awesome. We spent, like, 3 months in Europe and traveled all around Europe.

Ian:

Been a big chunk of time in Paris, which was really cool to spend, like, 6 weeks, I guess, in just 1 spot in Europe because it's, like, not just, like, Let's go see all the sites and run through. It's like, no. Like, we went to the grocery store and, you know, we did all these sorts of things like that. Found the little local coffee place we went to every day or whatnot. You know, like, just had all those real life experiences in a different location, which was really cool.

Ian:

I mean, there was just things like I mean, I mean, there's just so many things you pick up when you do stuff like that. One that really stands out is, like, us being this American family with 5 people, 3 kids. We're in this little Parisian apartment. Right? And we're going to the grocery store.

Ian:

Like, the grocery store is there. They don't have carts. They don't have anything. Like, people are, like, have 3 things in their hand, and they go to the checkout. Right?

Ian:

I'm, like, for 1 day with my big American boys. Like, I'm, like we had to bring our own car. It's loaded full of stuff. It's like like

Aaron:

I know. Like, we're we're in Costco country. Right?

Ian:

Yeah. Exactly.

Aaron:

And they don't literally have big refrigerators either, so you get it all at home.

Ian:

You go every day. Right?

Aaron:

You go every day. Yeah.

Ian:

But, like, I'm going every day, and I'm, like, you know, with piles of stuff and, like, everybody else has, like, some sliced ham And, like, you know, that's it. And I'm like Some sliced Liam. It was crazy. So yeah. So that worked they work out.

Ian:

And then the 2nd year, we were gonna do a big trip to Joshua Tree and, like, all around the desert in California and whatever. But then, we were leaving the day, like, That week, like, COVID started, and they were canceling the flights and everything, and we were like, man. If we, like, get to California and then, like, The flights are canceled, and we're driving them across the country, and there's this disease going you know, whatever. We were just, like, I I guess, whatever. We're not gonna

Jeffrey Way:

Oh, so so COVID and yeah. That would make sense. COVID.

Ian:

COVID impacted that, the 2nd wave of big travel. So yeah. But the first one worked out, and, yeah, it was great, and the kids were homeschooled for, like, 3 years. So then we, like, kept homeschooling in COVID. And then now, you know, everybody's back in school, and we're back on the More standard path there.

Ian:

But,

Jeffrey Way:

What do you think, Aaron? Are do you homeschool? Are you going to? Have you thought about it?

Aaron:

So our kids are both We have twins. They're 2a half, and the new ones are not here

Jeffrey Way:

yet.

Aaron:

Yeah. Yeah. So the new ones truly could be here this this week.

Jeffrey Way:

Oh, no

Ian:

way. We're on the clock.

Aaron:

Yes. We are on the clock. My wife is 36 weeks pregnant with twins. So yeah.

Ian:

It's gonna be you and me here.

Jeffrey Way:

Possibility that we end this podcast in the next No.

Ian:

We keep

Aaron:

Oh, we keep going.

Ian:

We keep going.

Aaron:

Are not he just leaves. Yeah. I guess that that's the answer. There there's a nonzero chance that I leave and Ian and you keep talking. Yes.

Aaron:

Gone 0. Or sure. Fair enough. Wow. So right now yeah.

Aaron:

Right now, they're in, like, a 3 day a week, basically, just mother's Stay out kind of thing. Mhmm. We will probably put them in public schools all the way through High school is our is our goal, and so we just moved we actually just bought a house in a district that has really good public schools through Like, all the way through high school, and our goal is for them to be, like, in the schools, in the neighborhood, in the community, just trying to be a part of the neighborhood that we live in. So that's that's our goal. I would love I would love to personally homeschool, but, I think I would do it, and I don't think Jennifer has very much interest in doing it, and so, yeah, we're not gonna do it.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting.

Ian:

Yeah. We weren't super on the homeschooling. Like, our main thing was about the traveling, really, which is then it was kind of a bummer, the back half because, like, there was COVID and all that stuff. Because, like, it's like, well, we have this business. We could do, I can do it from anywhere.

Ian:

We've never left the town we grew up in. Like, we're here. Like, let's just take a few years and go Do something different and live somewhere different, without the full, like, we're actually fully moving to Europe or Australia or something. It's, like, no, we can just, like, go Take 3 months or 4 months or whatever it was and go do that. So, yeah, it was kind of an an interesting middle ground.

Aaron:

Jennifer and I did that before we had kids. We'd spent 3 months in Paris. Wow.

Jeffrey Way:

Yep. 3 months. We lived

Aaron:

I didn't even know. 3 months. We split it between 2 Airbnbs. So we did, like, the first half in one, you know, neighborhood in the second half in a different neighborhood could experience 2 things, and it was amazing. It was totally unlike anything else any other travel I've ever done because, yeah, we started to, like, Know where the grocery store was and have our, you know, our quote unquote friends, which were just the people that served us

Jeffrey Way:

coffee at the coffee shop, We'd

Aaron:

be like, hey. Hi. We know you. And it was it was just so so fun. So, yeah, I mean, if you can pull it off, 3 months feels feels about right.

Aaron:

It's long enough to feel like you're you're there, but it's short enough that you can come home and your friends are like,

Ian:

Oh, yeah. You

Aaron:

weren't gotten that long. You're like, well, it was 3 months.

Ian:

Yeah. Yeah. Have you guys done any big traveling, Jeffrey?

Jeffrey Way:

My wife and I did a big trip to Europe for about it wasn't 3 months. I wish we had been 3 months. It was like a month and a half, something like that, where we we did the whole thing where it's like we went into the UK and then we took the train and we traveled down to Rome and we spent a week and a half there and it's like we just kind of did that little circle that a lot of people do Mhmm. In that area. And, yeah, it's it's, like, it's one of the best memories I have.

Jeffrey Way:

Like, everyone in there, especially as young as possible in your early twenties,

Ian:

you should

Ian:

do it,

Jeffrey Way:

For sure. It's expensive.

Ian:

Was that be

Ian:

But it

Ian:

Was that before kids? Or

Jeffrey Way:

Oh, of course. Of course. Yeah.

Ian:

Okay. Okay. Before

Jeffrey Way:

kids. It opens your eyes to think like, Growing up in the US, you just have your idea of how things are. Like, I'll give you an example. When I worked at this company called Envato, we had A company meetup in Malaysia. And I grew up in Tennessee, so I had my ideas of, like, what Malaysia is.

Jeffrey Way:

And then you get there, and it wasn't that at all. You know, like the nicest mall I've ever been into in my life was in Malaysia, you know? And you just don't Yeah. You just don't think this at all.

Ian:

Right. We were exposed

Jeffrey Way:

to It's horrible to say, but we were thinking, like, is it okay? Is it safe for us to go? Like, what what are the safe areas of the none of that applied whatsoever. It was a wonderful experience. And those are things you can't imagine until you go there.

Jeffrey Way:

Otherwise, It's just whatever you were brought up to believe is what you think, and you have to go there to see for yourself, what it's actually like. So, yeah, we we were very ignorant before doing that, I think.

Aaron:

The ultimate hack, you said it it's not cheap. It's not cheap, but it's way cheaper if you book an Airbnb for, like, 6 weeks. It's like That's what we do. They they mark it down by, like, 60% or something.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah.

Aaron:

And so if you go and then you're, like, you're shopping at the grocery store, so you're not eating out every meal. And so if you wanna if you wanna, like, go to a spot, do it for, you know, as long as you can, and that's a that's a hack to get it a little bit cheaper. Yeah. I

Jeffrey Way:

think that's definitely the way to go too because otherwise like, sometimes when you when you go to places for a few days, like, you're just going to different cities, You know, and the city is somewhat all are the same, but it's like you have to spend a long time there to really see what the city is about. Otherwise, it's like, oh, another city with a bunch of buildings, you know, and a bunch of streets that I don't know where I'm going to miss all of the cool things I should actually do because I'm only here for 3 days for a conference, you know?

Ian:

Yeah. And you're just in the tourist zone. You know, you're not you don't get a chance to get out to the real parts of the city and all that.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Ian:

That was one of the

Ian:

things when in Europe, one of the biggest things that hit me kind of along the line of your story, Jeffrey, was like, we were so after we left Paris So we're with the 3 kids and we we didn't even think we packed that much for 3 months. We're, like, everybody had a a rolly bag and a backpack, but that's what we had for 3 months in Europe. Right? And we were on the train to Italy because that was like the 2nd country we went to after France. And When we're on this little train to the little town we were going to, like this, you know, local type train, and we just had our stuff packed in there, and we looked in Sane.

Ian:

Like, nobody else on the train had anything. Meanwhile, I have this, you know, 5 rolly bags.

Aaron:

Griswold family, basically.

Ian:

This is we are ridiculous. This whole thing is insane, and just like we went to Europe, like, like, a year ago, and we just had a backpack each. That's it. Well, like, no rollie bags. No nothing.

Ian:

We pack what we have in our backpack. That's it. We'll do laundry, whatever, like but we'll make it work, and we were only there for, like, 3 weeks that time, but still, it was like, No. This being a crazy American with 10 pieces of luggage, no way. Can't do it.

Ian:

Not doing it.

Jeffrey Way:

Absolutely. Oh, like we had a we had a similar story. We were in Italy and we just didn't know. We thought on Sunday, like, oh, let's just get a get on a train in Italy and go to one of the small towns. And I'm like, I cannot remember what the town name was.

Jeffrey Way:

I hate that I can't remember it. But anyways, we get there on Sunday, and it just didn't occur to us that in some of these small towns, like, Sunday, everything shuts down. Right.

Ian:

It's

Jeffrey Way:

not like businesses are open on Sunday. The entire thing is shut down. So we get there on a Sunday and we're walking around because of course we don't have a car. We're just walking. I have like the most American hat on, of course, and people are looking at us, but there's nothing for us to do because Every single business, every restaurant, every store is shut down because it's Sunday morning, obviously.

Jeffrey Way:

And so we were just kinda stuck There for, like, 6 hours until the train came back and we could go back, to the city. It's just things you don't think about.

Aaron:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian:

But you

Jeffrey Way:

know what's weird? It was a fun trip because it's one of our Yeah,

Ian:

of course.

Jeffrey Way:

The funniest memories is us walking around this deserted town trying to figure out what to do.

Ian:

Yeah. Exactly. That's the serendipity of those things. It's like, this is you had all this, I'm sure, interesting experiences and great food and whatever, but that's the story you told. Right.

Ian:

It's like Yep. This one where you're just Exactly. Wandering around randomly on Sunday.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. For sure. Shall we

Aaron:

do it?

Ian:

So yeah. Let's go let's jump into the actual topic.

Ian:

Alright. I'll set I'll set the scene here,

Aaron:

and then I'll let I'll let Jeffrey, uh-oh. Oh, he is Stacking his nose.

Jeffrey Way:

He's got a nose. This morning. He's got

Aaron:

a notebook. Okay.

Ian:

Oh, boy. Alright. We're in trouble. We're in trouble here.

Aaron:

So here's here's the inciting incident, And then I'll I will allow Jeffrey to make his points, and I will rebut. And, Ian, you can you can interject and moderate. Sure. It would be great, Ian, if you took my side just as, like, a, you know, just as, like, a friendly little

Ian:

Just the

Aaron:

reminder. Alright. The inside of

Jeffrey Way:

your side My instinct is Ian might take my side on this I'm very curious to see how this turns out. The whole that comes with

Ian:

us right now.

Aaron:

Ian, remember who's gonna be here next episode. So remember which relationship You want to be forging here. Actually, maybe next episode. Ian, you're Gen

Jeffrey Way:

X. Right? Okay. Yes. You're Gen X.

Ian:

Right? Gen X.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. Okay. Well, Aaron, okay. Let's see how this goes.

Ian:

Alright. Tough road to go. Here we go.

Aaron:

Jeffrey underscore way on Twitter says, What's the most generous explanation for why most of us at some point retweet compliments? You would, emphasis, never Do this in real life. So the question being posed by Jeffrey is why do we retweet nice things about ourselves when that would be insane behavior To do in person. Jeffrey, the floor is yours.

Jeffrey Way:

Okay. Alright. I

Ian:

love that he has notes. This is,

Jeffrey Way:

like, a little bit of cereal. A Viral notebook. Don't take this too, sir. I had coffee this morning. I was like, oh, I should probably think for 5 seconds before

Ian:

I can take my test, but

Jeffrey Way:

I do feel like I'm at the Oxford Union. Thank you, everyone, for having me. No. Look, I don't care that much about this. You know, this is just some dumb, dumb tweet.

Jeffrey Way:

And, Actually, I would love it if you guys would convince me I'm wrong on this one because maybe I'm maybe I'm super overthinking this, but I think there's a little bit of grossness that you feel, when you see these things. And okay. Is there okay.

Aaron:

Don't be shy. This is not the show to be shy on. Don't be shy.

Ian:

Lay it out. Lay it out.

Jeffrey Way:

Is there etiquette when it comes to Twitter as to what is acceptable behavior and what is not. Okay. For example, we have to distinguish between, retweeting a comp like a personal compliment. We talked about this, Aaron, and retweeting a business compliment. So if I said like, Oh, Aaron, I saw you got a haircut.

Jeffrey Way:

You look really good and you hit retweet. Is that gross at all? All right. That's my first question. Is that kind of Gross.

Jeffrey Way:

Okay. Ian, you first Are

Aaron:

we are we doing question response, or are you going to

Jeffrey Way:

lay out the questions

Aaron:

and then we'll you want to do question response?

Ian:

I don't

Jeffrey Way:

know. This show, I haven't planned anything.

Ian:

I like this. We can I know? Let's go with not Jeffrey's later on. Let's let's

Aaron:

start there. Is it gross to retweet a personal compliment like that? Ian, what do you think?

Ian:

So I, I do a totally agree. Well, at least with this premise of that, there is a distinction of some sort between a personal compliment and Hey. I love this open source thing you're doing. Hey. I love this your product.

Ian:

Like, I do think that there's something there that's a distinction, and whether or not it's important or not. I don't know. There is a distinction, though. Right? Like so I think it's, is it gross or not?

Ian:

Man, you know, I'm gonna go a little bit towards. I know. You go a little bit towards Jeffrey. I guess on this one, like, I don't think it's I guess I'm sort of in the middle of you guys, honestly, a little bit, but, I don't know if I would do the, like, yeah. You have a nice haircut.

Ian:

Am I gonna retweet that? May I'm sure I have. Right? Let's just start there. I'm sure I have because of Twitter.

Aaron:

Yes. Like,

Ian:

like the thing. Like, I'm

Ian:

just gonna hit the retweet button.

Ian:

Right? Like, everybody needs

Ian:

to go.

Aaron:

Prior history. Just take take

Ian:

a word out of nowhere.

Ian:

Should is a different thing. Like, yes. Should I do that?

Jeffrey Way:

And that's why my tweets for sure. And that's why my tweets specifically said, why do we do this? Because I was thinking, like, every I've done all of these things that when I see it sometimes from other people, annoy me a little bit. And then there's just the reality, like the way we receive things, you know, that phrase, the way you Steve thinks says more about you than it does about the person. Right?

Jeffrey Way:

So the things that maybe irk you about what a person posted, It has nothing to do with them. It has to do with your own your own crap. Right? So, like, I try to keep that in perspective, but it doesn't change So wait. Go ahead.

Jeffrey Way:

You go. You go. You go.

Ian:

The Let's go.

Jeffrey Way:

Let's go.

Aaron:

Ian Ian says Ian says there's a distinction, but maybe not a difference between personal and business. Maybe a small difference. I think I I draw a distinction with a difference between retweeting a, hey. Your course was good. Your video was good, and, hey.

Aaron:

You're looking handsome today. I think Those are those are very different things, and one feels I don't wanna, you know, I don't wanna show my cards too early. 1 feels like it serves a purpose, and 1 feels like vanity. So, yes, 1st question, I think there's a difference, and it does feel weird for me personally to retweet like a almost like a personal or vanity compliment.

Ian:

I agree. Think too there is this element though. Right? Think about humans in general. Forget Twitter.

Ian:

Like k. Humans. I feel like Twitter unleashes this thing people have always wanted. Like, when someone how many times have somebody wanted you want somebody's compliment in front of somebody else. Like, you're in school, and you want the validation of someone's compliment in front of the girl you like, in front of your friends for whatever, right, or whatever your scenario is there.

Ian:

Like, you wish that compliment had happened in front of a certain person Yes. Or people. Right? And then Twitter lets you unleash that. Whether that should be unleashed is a a an interesting question, but it lets you be like, oh, I got this compliment over here 2 days ago.

Ian:

Now I can just show it to the girl who likes me and The peer group I want to know about my coolness in whatever way that is, right, which and very hard to not take the Twitter up on that. Right?

Jeffrey Way:

Maybe that's why we're all slowly going crazy, though. Right. You know what I mean? Like, don't you ever wonder like We got there. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

Are we all just slowly being morphed by social media? Know how they say everything goes back to the invention of the like button? Like, they can trace

Aaron:

Yes.

Jeffrey Way:

Everything going on today to Facebook adding the like button and then suddenly that tweaks the way you create a post because now you're not just saying like when I first joined Facebook in 2000 four. It was, what are you doing? And I, you know, I was I was thinking about this the other day. I think originally it had your name in the beginning and then you would fill in the blank because I have a lot of posts from 2004 that start with the word is. Like, is currently figuring out blah blah blah, is doing this.

Jeffrey Way:

And all I can imagine is They had your username at the beginning in bold.

Aaron:

And it was it was status only. There was no wall. So you would just there was no, like, notification feed, I guess. There was a wall, but there was no fees. So you were just

Jeffrey Way:

That's right. The wall was added later.

Aaron:

At the soccer game. And if someone came to your profile to look, they would see that.

Jeffrey Way:

Right. Right. So when I when I I'm not on Facebook anymore, but when I was, they would do that thing where it's like, here's what you wrote 10 years ago, And then they always started with the word is and they were so crunchy. I never wanted to see them. You know?

Jeffrey Way:

I was like, Oh, God.

Aaron:

How long

Jeffrey Way:

was I actually writing that stuff? But The original version of Facebook was just what are you up to, you know? Yep. But Twitter feels like a different thing. Twitter feels like it's not, I don't know.

Jeffrey Way:

I remember explaining Twitter to my family and coworkers, right, when it came out and I remember saying, oh, it's like the digital Water cooler. Right? This is what this is what everyone said. It's like, oh, this is especially if you work remotely, it's the water cooler. But then it got to a point where it's like, oh, no.

Jeffrey Way:

Twitter is kind of both things. It's the water cooler, but it's also like a PR branch for your personal brand. Right?

Ian:

And that's

Jeffrey Way:

why I think that's where it Tricky is like, is Twitter for you, Aaron, or me? Is it just for you to talk about what you're working on or is it a vessel for you to Sell me products, and the answer is probably both. Right? Maybe? Yeah.

Ian:

It is for me.

Aaron:

Is that the is that the next question? Because I'm ready.

Jeffrey Way:

I don't know. Like, this is Junk. Like, whatever you want. Yeah.

Ian:

Yeah. Go with it, Aaron. Go with it.

Jeffrey Way:

I don't have 1 cheat

Ian:

for him here.

Aaron:

I think I think That is the hard part. Right? So that was that was kind of my point of view. Like, we retweet things. We retweet compliments, Or I'll speak for myself.

Aaron:

I retweet nice things when they are related to some other outcome I'm trying to get besides just, like, People knowing that I'm good and nice and smart. Right? So if I'm trying to if I'm trying to sell a course or I'm trying to Get people to go watch a PlanetScale video or something. There's some amount of, like, I can say I can say that I've just released the thing and then never talk about it again, and that's just not gonna work, unfortunately. So I think my options are I can say over and over and over that I have a thing or the thing is good or please remember that I did the thing, and that's like,

Jeffrey Way:

that

Aaron:

feels almost almost worse to me, honestly. Or, you know, when somebody's like, hey, I just watched this PlanetScale video, and it was really good. I learned Whatever. I can just retweet that and other people that brings back to mind in in, like, my followers' minds. Oh, yeah.

Aaron:

Aaron did this thing, and this other person, this this third party, is saying it's really good. Maybe it is good. Maybe I'll go watch it. And so that's where I think it's like, yes, I'm definitely trying to use that as social proof and promote stuff, But I also personally like to hang out on Twitter and, like, joke around with friends. And so there's this weird mix of business and personal, which is why I draw a distinction between business and personal retweets, honestly.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. It's interesting, but it's still the same account. That's the weird thing.

Aaron:

It is still the same account. Yes. And it is definitely the PR for the personal brand line. Yeah. That is a 100% true.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. Because if it was a business account and it retweeted compliments, I wouldn't think anything of it. And I do it from the Laracast account all the time And I I guarantee I do it from my personal account too, but I don't know. There's there's there's a level of shame involved when I do that. You know what I mean?

Jeffrey Way:

You know, that's where

Aaron:

they're so what is the shame what is the shame for you that's involved? If somebody so let me give you let me give you an example. Let's see. I just watched the Laravel 10 from scratch series by at jeffrey way, And I'm fully up to speed. What a great course.

Aaron:

Like and you yes. You're welcome. You Retweet that and feel shame. What is where is that like, what are you feeling?

Jeffrey Way:

Okay. I like I like that. I'm sitting on the couch here. Let me think No.

Aaron:

I lay down at mine. You you get to sit here. That's awesome. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

Do people actually lay down in there at the islands when your neighbors?

Ian:

Lay down. I don't I've never

Aaron:

laid down. Is that a movie thing?

Jeffrey Way:

Like, they lay down?

Ian:

I think it is.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. It's not a shame. It's okay. Alright. I got it.

Jeffrey Way:

I got it. I got it. Tell me. I got it. It's manipulative, I think.

Jeffrey Way:

Mhmm. No. So here's my bad.

Aaron:

Enters the fray.

Jeffrey Way:

You know what Twitter should have? I feel like Twitter should have a section for because it is true. It's like it's partially your personal account Mhmm. But it's also your personal brand, and you see this on Instagram, especially. Everyone has a personal brand.

Jeffrey Way:

People aren't just posting photos anymore. It's like, no. This is my brand and this is all I post on. Okay. When if there was a way to just say this is a testimonial that I would like included as part of my account, that would be cool.

Jeffrey Way:

Just like they added highlights, maybe there's a testimonial section. But when it's a retweet where you're like, oh, this warms my heart that this person got so much from my course, It's like, it doesn't warm your heart. You're just retweeting it so that you can make more money. You know what I mean? That's where I feel like it's manipulative.

Jeffrey Way:

And I'm I'm not going after you, Aaron, because I do this more than you. No, no, no.

Aaron:

I don't feel gone after.

Jeffrey Way:

But I do it more than you. So just to be crystal clear, this is so this is this is me analyzing myself here, But it feels manipulative because you're you're you're you're representing flattery or modesty, like, oh, thank you so much. But in reality, it's like, I'd like more people to buy this product and this is a good way to do it, is to act like I'm just so humbled by how my course affected This person when it's really not bad. You just want more people to buy your stuff. You know what I mean?

Jeffrey Way:

Wow. Okay. So am I am I the crazy one? No. No.

Jeffrey Way:

No. No. No.

Ian:

I'm crazy.

Aaron:

Love a stance.

Jeffrey Way:

No. No. No.

Aaron:

We love a stance. Cool.

Ian:

I wonder I wonder, though. See, there is this whole other side of this, which is, like, what Do what does the audience want? And so when I'm following Jeffrey Way and Lara Cass and Aaron Francis, right, like, Those compliments that you retweet of, like, a course or whatever. Right? Like, I actually find them super useful Because it's like I mean, Larry has produced so much stuff.

Ian:

I can't possibly keep up on all of the Yes. That you do. Right? And, like, you and Aaron's freaking always Yes. Keeping produces.

Ian:

Like, when something comes gets put back in front of me, right, I think that's that's useful because it's like, oh, yeah. Jeffrey did that course on whatever, And I got a big time to, like, hop over to Lyricast and, like and look at it. And now, obviously, you could do the same thing by having, like, structured, You know, just tweets about each course that go out over time and whatever, or you could do it that way too. But I actually I mean, I'd rather see what somebody thought about it, because sometimes there's even little interesting nuggets in the bit of text that's in the retweet. Right?

Ian:

Like so, like, you have an extreme example, like, your hair looks nice today. Yes. That's, like, useless me to know that somebody said your hair looked nice today. Right? But everything slightly above that and beyond actually often is either Entertaining or actually useful.

Ian:

And so I think that that's there is like the audience people aren't mass, unfollowing you when you do these things right now. I guess there is the idea of, like, is that manipulation and that ties them to you in a manipulative way? And, like, maybe I've been manipulated to look forward to your retweets about your courses, and, I've been Pavlov dog trained somehow by this and, like, that's Bad that I am, but, I do yeah. I don't know. And it is interesting to, like, know somebody who is a brand of themselves.

Ian:

Like, it's more interesting to follow Jeffree way and what's going on a little bit personally plus the business as opposed to just like Hertz Or Vercel Right. Let's say or whatever.

Aaron:

RSS feed from LaraCasts

Ian:

or something.

Ian:

Right. Something

Ian:

generic. Yes.

Jeffrey Way:

So Yes. That's true. Yeah.

Ian:

Because Twitter is such a weird amalgamation of these things, of entertainment and information. Like, they're not nothing's like Twitter, which is why it's sort of irreplaceable in that way because it is a combination of everything all at once.

Aaron:

Mhmm. Yeah. Tim Ferris has turned into pure brand and no personality. And if you go look at his Twitter account, he's got, like, you know, 2,000,000 followers or something, and it's basically just an RSS feed and each post gets, like, 3,000 views or something like that. And it's just because It's like, I don't I don't wanna follow an RSS feed.

Aaron:

That's just not interesting to me. Yeah. So I think there is something, like you said, Ian, to be said for like, I actually do want to follow the personality brand knowing that it's, like, some amalgamation of personal and business.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, there's a good argument that we're numb to it. You know? Things that maybe like like I said, you would never Whatever the the real life version of a retweet is, he would never do that in real life. But it's still like, yeah, maybe maybe we're sort of numb to that, though, where we don't We don't perceive it in the same way.

Jeffrey Way:

It's funny. I'm always thinking like, how would my grandfather think about like if somebody complimented me and I shared it with all my friends? I feel like my grandfather would be like, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? But it's like, yeah, it is true.

Jeffrey Way:

It's like social media in the same way that Instagram is its own culture and things are

Ian:

Mhmm.

Jeffrey Way:

Like, posting selfies on Instagram is is far more acceptable than it is on Twitter. Twitter, it's like you can sometimes do it. But if if I was posting a picture of myself multiple times a day, people would start Unfollowing because it's kind of against the culture. I'll I'll I'll give you an example. There's this guy.

Jeffrey Way:

He's the CEO of an educational site. I'm not going to out him. I unfollowed him. Is he laryngcast.com? Yes.

Jeffrey Way:

I'm talking about myself. No. If I if I said the name of the company, you would know it. But I quietly unfollowed him because I just couldn't take it anymore. He he would do this thing where he would post screenshots of famous quotes, you know, from like Einstein or Abraham Lincoln or whatever.

Ian:

Those are the ones that got him.

Jeffrey Way:

Right. But it got even worse. Next to the quote Was a picture of this guy, not not the person responsible for the quote, but a picture of himself. And he would do it 6 times a day. Quote, picture of me, Screenshot.

Jeffrey Way:

And then 2 hours later, famous quote, picture of me. And it that's the weird thing about social media is it makes you do things that you wouldn't otherwise do. Like, he had it in his head that That was probably like a way to, I don't know, make it look like you're talking to each other. In the same way that we're talking to each other right now, there's nothing vain about us showing our faces because it just makes for a better experience. But there was just something about that where I was like, I can't do this anymore.

Jeffrey Way:

I can't. But, again, it comes back to what I wrote here. The way we receive things says more about us than them. So maybe that's my own, like, I get idiosyncrasies or neurosis or

Aaron:

So that's just an example of someone playing the game really poorly, in my opinion. I don't think I don't think that's an indictment on the medium in any way. I think that's an indictment on a lazy player. So I think that's somebody that was, like either got coaching or saw You know, hired a firm or saw other people doing it and thought, here's a hack where I can have infinite content because I'm supposed to be posting. Right?

Aaron:

Everybody's supposed to be posting, and I can schedule these 6 months out and never have to worry about the platform. And it's like, yeah, that that's never gonna look good in my opinion because you're gonna end up looking kinda like a doofus, Which is what which is what that is. And, like, the 3 of us here, I don't think would ever drift into, you know, vapid thought leadership Content quotes, that sort of thing. And I think that's a fundamentally different like, that's a fundamentally different problem is that he's just a bad player of the game.

Jeffrey Way:

Yes. Okay. So what is wrong? Like, why do we respond to thought leader style tweets negatively? Like, what is wrong with it?

Jeffrey Way:

Even the and I do. I agree with you. But what's wrong with it then?

Aaron:

I don't know what's wrong with it. I don't know why I bond negatively to it. I think there's a mismatch between, I think there's a mismatch between, like, The medium and the perceived like, the voice that you're using to communicate. So for example, if you're hanging out at If you're hanging out at a friend's house and you're, like, playing a board game and having drinks and somebody starts, like, going all, megachurch preacher, And you're all sitting at the like, with tone of voice and cadence and volume and that sort of thing, and you're sitting at the table with 6 friends having a drink and playing Settlers and somebody takes on that tone of voice, you're like, this is this is weird. Like, what are you doing?

Aaron:

It's just us hanging out. And I feel like that's what happens when people go into real thought, like, real, like, aphorism, like, sweet a pithy quote. That's what happens on Twitter When people go into thought leadership mode, it's like, we're all just kinda hanging out, and you're you're over here just, like, spouting off Little quotes and preaching and, like, bro, that feels that feels weird. And so that's what I think. I think it's a a, like, a format that doesn't match The communication means or, like, maybe

Ian:

It's interesting, though, that it works. Right? Like, not with us OG Twitter users. It doesn't work with us. We're like, ew, that's gross.

Ian:

But you obviously, we can all enlist a whole bunch of accounts that have millions of followers that basically all they do is that with the occasional sprinkling of Whatever the other thing they're trying to sell is, but, like, it's 90% thought leaders.

Aaron:

Is James Clear? Is that James Clear now?

Ian:

Oh, James. Anybody follow him. I don't know if The

Jeffrey Way:

Atomic Habits

Ian:

Holiday does it with the stoic stuff.

Jeffrey Way:

I love his book.

Aaron:

Ryan Ryan Holiday's. Yeah. That's another one.

Ian:

His stuff.

Aaron:

I'm trying to think of somebody that's like, adjacent to us that does That, like,

Ian:

ass person's dick thing. He's like a Yeah. Abuser of the thought leadership.

Jeffrey Way:

But it seems like the biggest abusers are people that you've never really heard of, yet somehow every post they make gets, like, crazy retweets and likes. So it's like, clearly, they figured out the algorithm, and yet at the same time, my response to that is almost like repulsion. Like, I I feel like it's It's like farming or like fishing or or whatever the term that is for that.

Aaron:

That's why it's so dangerous to do in my opinion. And that's why I also like, Being a thread boy was dangerous, and that's why also I think being a meme a meme lord on Twitter was dangerous because you get this short term hit of, like, The algorithm shows you to a bunch of people, but you also you also, like you kinda alienate the the people that you wanna be in the room with. Right? And so you end up, like, you end up getting all these followers that are like, the memes. What funny memes?

Aaron:

And then a bunch of other people mute you because you're always making memes about Rust or whatever. Right? And so I think it is Yeah. It is like, yeah, we see people having success with it, but at what At what cost? Like, yeah, maybe they've got a ton of followers, but have all of the serious people muted them?

Aaron:

Because they're like, God, this guy is just memeing all day every day.

Jeffrey Way:

I guess that's maybe where I draw it back to when you said why do you feel shame about, like, retweeting your own stuff, which I do constantly. It it's that same idea. It's like, oh, I thought we were all hanging out here, and then all of a sudden, no. I'm actually using you as a sales funnel. And we thought we were just hanging out, but we're really not.

Jeffrey Way:

I'm I'm selling to you. But at the end of the day you know, it's like, you read an article and it's like, Oh, fill out your email for this free PDF and you do it. And it's like, it's not about the free PDF. It's so that 6 months from now, they're gonna sell you their Black Friday thing, you know? Mhmm.

Jeffrey Way:

So your metric was What is most generous and, friendly to whoever you're trying to sell to? That's the way to go. So if you're trying to mislead them, I feel the same way about things like, sign up now because in 2 days, the price doubles. So this is your last chance before the price go like, everything feels a little Manipulative, like you're trying to sell to the people instead of be friends with them. You know what I mean?

Aaron:

So yeah. So here's here's a question. It keeps You keep mentioning, manipulative or misleading. And I think one thing one interesting thing you said earlier about the the retweeting is, It's like, kind of like, oh, I'm so humbled, this false humility of, oh, this person really loved my thing, and I'm humbled by that. I kind of have Maybe in a a hot take or an opinion on that that a lot of people say humbled when they really just they're they're lying, and I I think I agree with you there.

Aaron:

And so whenever like, it's it's happened many times where people have reached out to me privately or publicly and told me about the MySQL for developers course and how, like, important it was to them because they never understood databases, and I never I do not, Frankly, feel humbled by that. What I do feel is honored. And so I will always tell them, like, I feel that's I'm honored that you think that because it is, like, I don't feel less. I feel more. Like, I feel, like, elevated to a place of, you know, honor.

Aaron:

And so I think there's this thing that maybe you're ascribing and maybe certain people do this, but you're ascribing generally, which is, like, everyone is pretending To be humbled and moved and, like, low am I, when really they want to sell to you. And I think there's a second there's 2nd way where it's like, hey. That really meant something that you said that. I'm honored that you think that, and I want to share that with My audience, not under any false pretenses, but to share that as, like, the the testimonial to my audience. And I I think, like, trying to say I'm humbled, and this means something to me personally Maybe does feel a little bit weird versus

Jeffrey Way:

But why does it have to

Aaron:

be shared test

Jeffrey Way:

why does it have to be shared with your own audience? Why can't you just accept the compliment? You know what I mean? Like, at the end of the day, there there is motivation. It is like, well, if I retweet it just more just By definition, more eyes will see the link to my to my course, delerikast.com.

Jeffrey Way:

And the likely all of this is like increasing the likelihood. The likelihood that you will see the name of my business and sign up goes up every single time I retweet a compliment or something like that. And maybe, like I was talking to a guy I met. He's the CEO of Code School, and we met up for coffee a couple years ago. And I was we were talking about, Running sales.

Jeffrey Way:

Very similar for your conversation with Caleb about a week or two ago. And I was talking about, like, doing the Black Friday ads, and that makes me feel a little bit gross. Very again, Caleb and I had a super similar conversation on Telegram about a year ago about this exact thing. So it's very funny. And he was telling me He will send out, like, the Black Friday announcement ad, but then the one at the very end that says, hey.

Jeffrey Way:

We're gonna close-up shop in 2 hours and the sales guy. He said, that's the email that makes everyone sign up. And I was like, oh, that's really cool. And still, like, I feel gross every time I send it, just like Caleb. And he responded, like, treating me like I was kind of like, Okay.

Jeffrey Way:

Like, who cares? Like, you're running a business here. Whether you feel better or not is irrelevant. This one, whether did it increase sales or did it not? And I thought, oh, maybe I am overthinking this a little too.

Jeffrey Way:

It doesn't matter. It's like you're running a business. You know, Target's not thinking about like, what are The ethics around promoting target, like, they don't care. You know, it's irrelevant. You know, it's just a numbers game.

Jeffrey Way:

Do the numbers go up when you do this thing or do they go down? And then everything else is maybe irrelevant, but then again, it's like it's very different when it comes to your personal brand. It's like it's not it's not your business. It's not HubSpot. It's Ian Lanceman, the product, or or Aaron, the product, and we're all trying to figure out, like, how do you how do you manage that because it's it's a it's a brand new thing.

Jeffrey Way:

You know, it's very strange.

Ian:

They're very I think also people who come from the development background, I think a lot they don't have, like, that natural self promotion instinct quite as much In general, I think some of them do, and if everybody who does, it usually pays off. Right? If you can put that Fear aside and be like, no. I'm gonna be okay with, like, feeling uncomfortable sometimes because what I've done is valuable and useful, And I'm gonna be okay talking about it in that way. Right?

Ian:

But that's still not something natural that maybe a more natural, somebody who came up in marketing might Feel more naturally or whatever. But if you think about all the great promoters of our time, Steve Jobs, right, or whoever, like, they're not worried about the self conscious part as much is getting their story out and what they've done and what the products do. And, yeah, I mean, I think that's sort of, Kind of something that you have to overcome to some degree, and it's just then finding different people find their different levels with it of how much they're willing how far they're willing to push it because I'm sure Both you guys, right? Especially I feel like with the B2B app, it's a little different. I feel like the self promotion has never worked quite as strongly as like a content thing does, or maybe I've just done it poorly, and I definitely haven't been all in on it at certain points, but, but, yeah, if you have that, like, Tie to yourself and how that feeds into the individuals buying your your services and What they feel about you impacts if they buy or not, what they feel about the product, then how you can let them get that information to them about the product impacts that.

Ian:

And so yeah. I mean, I think there there is at the end of the day, right, like, you're not helping anybody if Lara Cas goes out of business. Like, then then you help nobody. Right? So there is this element.

Ian:

There is some level of, like, where you have to promote it so that People buy it so that you can keep making more of it, so that you can keep helping people, and have that virtuous cycle go, That you have to be okay with it. And then but there is, like, this line, of course, of like yeah. And and obviously, the original conversation being Twitter and Personal versus business and all those things. But I think on the business side of it anyway, I think the upsides are are bigger than the downsides. Right?

Ian:

Like, that's how That's how you give back to the community. Like, Jay z has a line about this where, like, you got rich and gave back. Like, that's how he did it. Right? So, like, that's kind of the thing is, like, you can't give back if Zara cast out of business, and you're working at some job somewhere.

Ian:

Right? So, like, there is this cycle of of promotion that's required to Do the awesome things for the community, and, obviously, same with Aaron and the things you're doing to show.

Aaron:

I think it's different for the CEO of, I forget, Code School or whatever. The business at some level, the business becomes an entity on its own, and so, like, Target is an entity unto itself, And they'll send millions of Black Friday emails to me specifically, not in general, just to me, to my inbox. They will send me 1,000,000 Black Friday emails, and that's fine for them because they have, you know, fiduciary duties to shareholders. And I think it gets really the the difference then is Laracasts is an entity, but it's also you. Right?

Aaron:

It is It's it's Jeffree way. And so then there's a big difference between, like, what what is what are Jeffrey Way's What's Jeffree's brand, and how many emails can Jeffree's brand sustain? Or how many emails does Jeffrey want to send, and I think that's the big difference between, like, Codeschool or Target and Yeah. Lyricas and, you know, Darren Francis galaxy of

Jeffrey Way:

Well, in my mind, everyone has like a budget. That's how I think of it on social media. They have a budget for what they're willing to take from you. Right? So it's like, Oh, I'm following this person, but if they go too far into this territory, they use up their budget and I just can't do it anymore.

Jeffrey Way:

You know? And it could be anything. Right? It could be like Like political views, like, Oh, that's they've gone too much. I can't do this anymore.

Jeffrey Way:

It could be promoting their sports. It could be, Oh, I'm really interested in your programming content, but you keep talking about movies or something like that. So now I'm not Like this is all the stuff that we have to think about. And I think the same thing is true for marketing. And every time I tweet about Veracast, it is marketing and I feel like I'm using up that budget for people Mhmm.

Jeffrey Way:

So that if I do it too much, they're gonna unfollow me because I would unfollow me. Like, you you don't wanna feel like you're being sold to. Well That's the big problem. Nobody wants to be like

Aaron:

sold to it. That's the right equation. Yeah. I think that's the

Jeffrey Way:

right equation.

Ian:

I don't I don't even I actually don't agree with that. Honestly, like, I think there are people who how many times have people looked through, like, in the old days, you look through a newspaper or whatever. Right? Or you look through the computer catalog when we were kids. That's just literally

Aaron:

an idea what building those things are, Ian. What is a computer catalog?

Ian:

A catalog where you buy the parts of a computer

Aaron:

out of.

Ian:

You never looked through one

Ian:

of those old catalogs and, like No.

Ian:

That's all advertising. Right? But you enjoyed looking through it. Or A mag a fashion magazine, and you're looking through it to, like you're literally there for the ads. Right?

Ian:

You're there to see what Louis Vuitton has put out. Right? Like, you are you want to be marketed to. So I think that there is I think people do wanna be marketed to. Not everybody

Aaron:

all the

Ian:

time, but

Jeffrey Way:

Hold on. That's where it comes back to the idea of, like, is this the water cooler or are we all numb to the fact that we're we're friends, but we're really just kinda trying to sell Our our junk to each other. Right. Right? Like and maybe we were we're all numb and we just accept, like, it doesn't affect me.

Jeffrey Way:

This in the same way, like I said, with Instagram, when I see a selfie, I'm not I don't think, oh, you're being bad at it. I just think, oh, that's the that's the culture. That's how it works. Everyone does it, and I like that. You know, there's a there's a funny thing that

Ian:

Right.

Jeffrey Way:

Aaron, you you have definitely I guarantee you have learned with YouTube. Everyone learns it. If your face is in the thumbnail, the likelihood people click on the thumbnail

Aaron:

on YouTube

Jeffrey Way:

goes up, like, significantly. Like so at that point, it's like it's not like, oh, shit. Am I being, narcissistic or anything like that? It's like, no. People will click on this video if your face is on it, period, and you don't need to overthink it.

Jeffrey Way:

And so now everyone is numb to the fact That we're all putting our faces on every single thumbnail we create because that's just the way that way it's the way it works, and nobody's offended by it. You know?

Aaron:

And this is a great this is a great example of what is, like, what is okay on the platform? What does the platform and what is Aaron comfortable with because I refuse to do the pretend shocked face where my mouth is open, And I'm like, I can't believe that, you know, this thing that didn't happen happened. Like, personally, I refuse to do that, and so I'm willing to say, like, I know that the click through rate will be higher if I put my face on it. How can I do that in a way that aligns with who I am as a person? And instead of, like, writing off wholesale, I'm not gonna do this because because, you know, the platform wants it.

Aaron:

I'm I'm no. I'm gonna do that, but I do have I do have boundaries. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna lie in a thumbnail. And so I feel like that's a nice that's a nice corollary that you could bring back to Twitter as well.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. It's funny how things change. Go ahead, Ian.

Ian:

I was just gonna say this make this as we've been talking about this, I've had, I'm wondering if the premise of the original question is not even correct. The idea that you would never do

Aaron:

this in real life because, like first principles.

Ian:

Because, yeah, first principles. Because I was thinking about it. Like, think about again, I'm gonna go old man here. The newspaper.

Aaron:

When you're on your rotary phone and you're going out of

Ian:

the horror.

Ian:

Yes. Exactly.

Ian:

I use a rotary phone.

Ian:

The The newspaper, right, was Twitter in the day. If you were mentioned in the newspaper, you would cut that out or you would buy that newspaper and you would show people that you were in you scored a goal. You hit a home run. Right? Yep.

Ian:

How many businesses do you remember going to where, like, there was

Ian:

a review

Ian:

of the restaurant? They cut out the review. It's in a frame. It's out on the front window of that restaurant as, like, here's our validation that someone important in this community Thought that our hamburgers were the best. Right?

Ian:

So, obviously, Twitter allows us scale and reach that's impossible for Your local burger joint, but I think the premise is is very similar.

Jeffrey Way:

Good. Not to

Aaron:

look up what a newspaper is, that's a pretty good example. Well, how old

Ian:

are you? Okay. Bye now.

Jeffrey Way:

How old are you, man? Oh, come on. Dude, you're a millennial.

Aaron:

How old

Ian:

are you? Do you? Like, 37, Jeff? 38?

Jeffrey Way:

I'm 38. I'll be 39 in a few months. So, I think I think you're right, Ian, but it goes back to business versus personal. Alright. So, for example, what if I invited you over to my house and you came into my house and you saw that I have this wall?

Jeffrey Way:

And on the wall, I took Screenshots of every time somebody said something nice about myself and I put it in my bell. You'd be like

Ian:

I think that'd be awesome. Alright.

Aaron:

That's a little weird. I I I object I object to the analogy, because it's purely personal. And I think we have we just have to say that Twitter is is personal plus business. There's just no way that it's not there's no way that Twitter's purely personal. You've got 80,000 followers.

Aaron:

Like, you are a you are a brand on Twitter. Personal is like hanging out in Telegram with 6 people or in a, you know, a little Slack with 50 people or whatever. That is personal, and that would be weird if every time someone tweeted something nice, you took it to, you know, Taylor and Adam, and you're like, hey, guys. Check this out. It'd be like, bro, that's not the forum for this.

Aaron:

Don't do that here. It's it would just be so weird.

Jeffrey Way:

I mean, maybe you're right. Maybe Telegram has become The water cooler. Like, nobody's selling each other crap on Telegram. Twitter is different. So maybe maybe the key is just accept Twitter has become its own thing, especially in the programming community.

Jeffrey Way:

And if you just want water cooler chat, then Telegram is where it's at. And it it may not it

Aaron:

may not even be Twitter versus Telegram. It may be a function of where you are on Twitter. Like, if you had if you had 400 followers and they were all your friends, it would be more of a hang space. You just you just don't you don't have that, and so I think you may be viewing it You may be viewing it from a lens that other people aren't.

Ian:

Well, there's also the I think so, because there's the idea of, like, We are out there. There is this idea of ascribing what we do to everyone, but the reality is something like 97% of people on Twitter never tweet Ever. Like they only read. Right? So we are already in this ultra minority of people who put themselves out there for some goal.

Ian:

Right? Whether it's just personal gratification, whether it's business, but we are out there in a way that 97% Of the other Twitter users are not out there, and so Correct. You know, what are they there for? Right? They're not there for their businesses.

Ian:

They're not there to

Ian:

Maybe some

Ian:

of them would like to be, and that's kind of what we've been talking about on the show quite a bit. Aaron talks about a lot. It's like being comfortable with putting yourself out there and the the benefits there are to that. But

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah.

Ian:

But most the vast majority are not doing that. They're just they're reading. So what are they trying to get out of it? They're following you, whatever. Jeffrey probably has a 100,000 followers or whatever you have.

Ian:

Right? Like, The vast majority of them never tweet anything at you, never tweet at to anyone. So they're they're following you.

Jeffrey Way:

It's like a 1000000 followers. I think, like, 79,000 of them are inactive, because it's like it's like a hardball.

Ian:

Reading? A lot of them are active. From people who've been on there a long time, a big chunk are definitely dead. Right? But, like,

Aaron:

You know, that

Ian:

that's, like, physically dead, but they're not they're dead to counts. But still, my my my instincts 20,000 active accounts of the 80 there has to be.

Jeffrey Way:

It doesn't feel like that. I'm telling you, like, if you had because you told me, hey. You have could be. Maybe you're right. But if you had told me, hey.

Jeffrey Way:

You have 80,000 followers. What is it like when you tweet? It's it's nothing like I would expect.

Aaron:

It's it's it's the same 50 people Right.

Jeffrey Way:

Instead of reply. People. Yeah. And may yeah. Maybe you're right, Ian, is everyone else is is reading and scrolling.

Jeffrey Way:

Like, I'm on Instagram, and it's read only for me on Instagram. I don't post anything, but I'm on it every day.

Ian:

Right. There you go. You're that. You're the other side of it there. Yeah.

Ian:

Yeah. Yeah. All these stats came out. When Elon bought Twitter, all this stuff came out, and it was like, It's something like 90 something percent of people, like, literally never tweet. Now how how but and and, you know, who 97% of the people who log in, you know, whatever their scale was, once a month or whatever their scale was, it was some scale like that.

Ian:

90 something percent of those people never Even though they log in and are presumably active, obviously, some of the bots and whatever, but, like, yeah, it's a lot a large percentage of people are just reading.

Aaron:

Well, I I wonder that be interesting

Ian:

They're there for the ads. They're there for the ads.

Ian:

They're there for the ads.

Jeffrey Way:

Interesting to

Aaron:

like scale it. Scale it scale it up one level. Like, who do we follow that we don't interact with that we really enjoy following? Like, one for me is is Bond to DHH. I don't ever like his tweets.

Aaron:

I don't ever retweet him. I'm just there following, and I like I like to see when he tweets and when he talks about real world.

Jeffrey Way:

Aaron, are you aware that your cohost is not a big fan of DHH?

Aaron:

Oh, I believe you me.

Jeffrey Way:

Has there been an episode on this?

Aaron:

There there has there has been one when he when he wrote the manifesto recently. He had made fun of him pretty hard. But, yeah, it's like I'm not man. I'm so bad. I'm Okay.

Ian:

We can go on that tangent. Like, literally, every single thing he said about b two b software was wrong in that thing. Unbelievable. Like, he tried to make it all

Jeffrey Way:

his crap.

Aaron:

I was trying to blow past it, and you put a pin at

Ian:

it. Man.

Jeffrey Way:

Look, I'll say if nothing else, if we can completely

Aaron:

somebody else.

Jeffrey Way:

If we can completely redirect, it has been interesting to watch DHH change over the last 10 years.

Ian:

I'll say that. Like, he

Jeffrey Way:

is comfortable. Completely morphed. Okay.

Aaron:

Let's pick somebody less, controversial. So, like, Elon Musk, for example. But there are good people. Right?

Ian:

We gotta get the DHH take.

Ian:

We got Jeffrey, don't interrupt. Don't interrupt. I gotta hear this.

Ian:

Alright, Jeffrey. Hit us with your DHH take.

Jeffrey Way:

I don't have it. I I'm sorry, Ian. We were we were kinda bonding, but

Aaron:

I kinda like it. I can't buy it. I

Ian:

don't even hate it,

Ian:

man. I've been I've been misrepresented

Ian:

to some degree. It's not even the

Jeffrey Way:

highest yourself.

Ian:

DHH as a person. Yourself. I just think DHH gives Tons of horrible advice. That is terrible advice for so many people and like like all his recent stick of, like, Take all your stuff

Ian:

off the cloud and go buy a

Ian:

bunch of servers. Horrible advice for nearly everyone.

Jeffrey Way:

You think so?

Ian:

Right? But yes, of course. It's terrible advice.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. Yeah. That has been everything lately.

Ian:

If you if you haven't run a real server and you try to go run a real server, it's not fun. Like, we were all very excited to get off of running real servers. I was very excited. Everybody who ever did it is like, great. We're done with real servers.

Ian:

All these huge businesses are getting rid of the real servers. Obviously, they have infinite money. So, yes, if have infinite money and you can hire 5 people to take care of the real servers, great. Do that. I'm all for it.

Ian:

Certainly better, but

Jeffrey Way:

in This lines up nicely. Okay. So when when DHH posts things like that this is this is a great example. Is this DHHS a person just talking about what he what he thinks or Are are all of these things marketing funnels for businesses that he's working on? You know, like, whenever he does something in the inflammatory?

Jeffrey Way:

Changes. It's like, Are you being inflammatory here, or are you promoting hey.com? The Which is

Ian:

h is the king of

Aaron:

the inflamed cordial postcode.

Ian:

Oh, come on. A chapter in

Aaron:

his book about it. Yes. It is

Ian:

He is totally all about the

Aaron:

But here's here's the other thing. Here's the other thing. He truly believes it. Like, you here I I get I get frustrated with I get frustrated with, like, Primarily on the JavaScript side, the content creators that manufacture drama out of nowhere just for clicks. Like, DHH is actually pulling all their stuff off the cloud.

Aaron:

He truly believes it. Whether whether he then takes a true belief and and packages it up Well, such that it serves as marketing, I think it's an interesting question, but there's no denying that it's a true belief. I mean, He truly thinks Rails is the best way to build applications because he's been on that train for 20 years. And, like, Yeah. He's a little inflammatory.

Aaron:

He's a little, like he's good at marketing, and he loves to pick a fight for the sake of clicks, but I think it's a firmly like, I think it's a closely held belief.

Jeffrey Way:

So what do you think? Like, when they when they famously or notoriously fired, What percentage of their company was it? Or they didn't fire, like, half

Aaron:

was it half of anybody? Yeah.

Ian:

Yeah. They let well, they fired 1 guy, and the rest they let leave if they want to leave or Okay.

Jeffrey Way:

So so what I wonder about that I find that story so interesting. Did they know that was gonna happen? That's what I would like, The fact that half the company was gonna say, hell no. We're leaving. But, like, am I correct that the original version of that story was they were like, hey.

Jeffrey Way:

In the company group chat, we're not doing any politics. And then it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And then they said, if you wanna leave the company, we'll give you this nice severance whatever. And then half the company left. Did he know that was gonna happen is what I'm curious

Ian:

No. I think that was a an example of one of the few times where they weren't controlling the narrative or, like, it was outside of their control and that they reacted sort of poorly to the narrative being outside of their control. And then they kind of doubled down on some things that maybe they Shouldn't have doubled down on if they were in a situation where they controlled it, I think they would have acted differently. But

Jeffrey Way:

I don't know. Maybe they knew.

Aaron:

Yeah. I think that's what

Jeffrey Way:

I wanted. I'm so curious.

Ian:

People were gonna leave at that point, but the lead up to what happened, I don't think was something they controlled. And I don't think they were like, figure out a way to get rid of half the company. I think it was more organic than that.

Aaron:

I think it was more organic than that, and I think they They found themselves in a position with their company that they didn't wanna be in, and then they changed the rules on the employees and said, we're changing the rules. Sorry about that. If you wanna leave, we'll do our best to, like, give you a bunch of money. So But you know

Jeffrey Way:

they had conversations about this. Like, alright. How many people can we Yeah. I think more

Aaron:

I think more left. I would guess that more left than they expected. That would be my guess. Yeah. Because that's a That's a big blow at a small company, and there's no way they thought this is gonna be half.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. But I think I think he would say he was vindicated, maybe. I don't know. Either way, I I think that is such a great case study just to see how something plays out. Like, that was even being covered on Coinbase.

Jeffrey Way:

Coinbase did the same thing. Fox News. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

Coinbase. Yeah. That's why I wonder if he knew because he had Coinbase as an example Yeah. Because they did something similar. Right?

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. By the way,

Ian:

you you follow them as a a more complicated scenario though than that because that all that stuff happened after like, there was a bad employee that people wanted fired because he was doing sad things, and then there was friction there. And then the, like, when no politics stuff kinda came after that, So I think it's sort of it's a little more complicated than just Coinbase was different. Coinbase was just like, we're just gonna not have politics at work.

Aaron:

We're not a mission to lead company.

Ian:

But that would be impetus Was the CEO's decision to do that? This was a little bit different where there was an incident and then following the incident, it's like, hey. Okay. Now That didn't go the way we liked it. We're just done with politics at work.

Ian:

Yeah. I'm obviously with Coinbase as an example for them already, but, so I do I think it's a little different scenario, but

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. I think Yeah.

Ian:

We I don't think we should go all the way down that road necessarily, but, What

Ian:

do you mean all the way down that road?

Aaron:

We we just went all the way

Ian:

down there. We're done. We're coming back. We're Circle in here.

Aaron:

We got him back up, man.

Ian:

Anyway, I follow him on Twitter,

Aaron:

and I don't interact with him. And so maybe people do that to you too, Jeffrey. That was the point.

Jeffrey Way:

Glad we got there. No.

Ian:

There you

Jeffrey Way:

go. I I ruined that. I'm sorry, guys.

Aaron:

No. That's catnip. That's catnip for Ian. The fans are gonna love it.

Jeffrey Way:

I do love watching what Ian becomes obsessed with. Like, I don't know you that well, Ian, but I see on Twitter, like, okay. He he is obsessed with this right now. So what whatever is currently going on at the moment, I can tell by the do, like, together. Frequency of tweets of similar subjects, I can see, alright, this is what he's about Well,

Ian:

this is Yeah. So I like it.

Ian:

Very interesting thing kind of, I think, gets back to what I said before. The difference between, like, me and you guys a little bit here is that, like, I'm I could treat Twitter Twitter a little differently because, my business is not nearly as tied to Twitter as I think You guys probably are. I don't know if that's true with Jeffrey as much as Aaron, but, you know, like, I get no business from Twitter. Like, nobody's buying anything on Twitter, at least in terms of help In terms of Lara, job is probably a little bit different, but still

Aaron:

online a little

Ian:

bit different. A minority, you know, a vast mass minority compared to, like, the other avenues People buying the things I sell

Jeffrey Way:

And is that because you focus on b to b heavily?

Ian:

I think

Jeffrey Way:

that's why why aren't you promoting more on Twitter?

Ian:

Right. I will. This is part of it. I as I wanna do better about promoting more on Twitter and other places, part of, like, this podcast is like, hey. Let me actually promote some of the stuff I'm doing here.

Ian:

And, like, There's an ad that

Aaron:

runs the whole line up right now. Marketing, Ian?

Ian:

So I've never really approached Twitter that long, but I do think

Ian:

it is partially the b to b aspect because is this layer of abstraction with b to b, because this is why you can charge somebody b to b $10,000 and you can't charge $10,000 for a single user of Lyricath, Even though it's probably delivering $10,000 value to that person or to screencast thing.com. Right? It's because it's not the person's money. It's also why they feel free sending a bunch of emails. Right?

Ian:

It's like it's not there's not a personal relationship between the marketing woman and

Jeffrey Way:

There's a corporate deal.

Ian:

Customers. There's an indirection there, and so yeah. So in b to b, like, people don't buy HubSpot Off the cuff. Like, there's, like, they're evaluating 6 different solutions, and there's a committee, and, you know, the CEO has to approve it. And, like, it's, like, this whole thing, not that we have no customers like that.

Ian:

We do have some smaller customers where it's the owner, and they come in and they buy it, and that's fine. But, you know Okay. The vast majority are not that, and so, yeah, it's less it's less tied to that. And I would have to do one other thing that's important about this is I would have to do stuff I don't wanna do, which is If I wanted to be in the, like, social media of customer support game, that's a whole world that I'm not interested in. I just don't have any interest in participating in it.

Ian:

I don't wanna do the thought leadership of how customer service agents should think and act and all those things, And so I've just decided, I like the developer world. My Twitter is gonna be more developers fear, and I'm abandoning that even though maybe I could become some bigger head leader and make a few more bucks if I did that. It's like, I I don't wanna do that. So

Jeffrey Way:

Because you feel shame, Ian?

Ian:

No. Because I don't have interest in doing it. I that's not a shame one. I don't think

Jeffrey Way:

Okay.

Ian:

Although I maybe I would feel shame

Ian:

if I doing it. That's interesting. Like, if I force myself to do it and I don't wanna be doing it Yeah. Then I would feel potentially shameful about that. But Yeah.

Ian:

I don't wanna do it, and so I just choose not to do it in in my case.

Jeffrey Way:

Ian, if I can further, derail this conversation. Should I be focusing on B2B more for Lyricas?

Ian:

Oh, I'm sure you should be. I would think.

Jeffrey Way:

I mean, I have team accounts. You

Ian:

have some stuff up right. You have some teams.

Jeffrey Way:

But should I be doing more? Like, would that be if I wanted to go to the next level? Is that where I go?

Ian:

I've almost feel like That's where you would have to go for like the next level because you have such a like saturation in the end developer that you can reach over Twitter It's fear, I would think, that that's like fresh ground is like, hey. Because this is actually a thing I wanna do with Lara jobs more. We're actually working on trying to do some stuff. There's whole world of Laravel. That's like Disney.

Ian:

Like, Disney posts 20 jobs at a time on vice.com or whatever for Laravel jobs, and they don't post on Laravel jobs Because there's just some corporate cog in the wheel somewhere that's, like, hire 20 Laravel devs and the HR person

Ian:

goes and buys

Ian:

right. This is who we use, blah blah blah. It was a tech job. It goes on dice dotcom, whatever, fine, and there's nobody in that loop who can change that, so, like, how do I reach into those companies and be, like, hey, you know, we have an actual official job board thing that you should check out, and the same, I think, will be true with Laracast. Like, hey.

Ian:

There's a 100 Larabell devs somewhere in Disney Churning away. Right? Those they're not on Twitter, I don't think. Who knows where they are, what they're doing, but, hey. You could sell them a Laracast subscription to Disney, for example, that would you could charge a lot more money for than individual devs will pay and, you know, get to a 100 people using it who are on the team, at Disney or whatever.

Ian:

So

Jeffrey Way:

yeah. Actually, on that note, here's here's one thing. This shows you how ignorant I am. I'm I'm seeing if Anyone at Disney. We do have 2 2 people from Disney signing

Aaron:

up for

Jeffrey Way:

the AirCast. I do wonder, like, what are what are the rules around a company signs up For your for your subscription site, can you promote them? That's something I have not done, like, on on on the landing page. Such and such company, Microsoft, blah blah blah. They use this product.

Ian:

I'm a I don't even know who knows. I'm I'm a yes. I'm a hard yes on that.

Aaron:

I I'm a hard head shake no.

Jeffrey Way:

What is that Conscientious objector or that's That

Aaron:

that is, and I I I say this as a ruthless capitalist. That's ethically murky to me. Not a good question. If you were to pull up table plus and look for good domains in your database and one of them

Jeffrey Way:

is Disney, and then

Aaron:

You throw you throw Disney on the homepage? I feel icky about that.

Jeffrey Way:

Nah. But what if you ask

Ian:

first Never think about it.

Aaron:

If you ask first, great. Do it. Make the make the logo as big as you can. Yeah.

Ian:

I I disagree. Here's why. Interesting. 1st, it should absolutely be in your terms. It's in our terms of service.

Ian:

If you wanna use HubSpot loop, you you give the right to use your logo. You have a way out. If you don't want us to use your logo, There is a process. You can just basically just let us know, and we, of course, won't use it. I mean, I would just do that anyway, but it's official in the terms, like, you can request us not to do this, and we won't.

Ian:

We've literally had, like, 2 people ever do that. I think it's totally fair game. Yeah. I think it's fine. And the problem is you could ask, but they're not even the right people to ask.

Ian:

If you email the person, if you speak on behalf of this nigga. To the right person? It's not possible. They're never gonna

Aaron:

get a good point. Terms. They can't sign terms on behalf of

Ian:

the agency. Approval to sign terms.

Aaron:

Nah. That sounds like

Ian:

a short space.

Ian:

Maybe if that's a there's also different levels. Right? Like, I'll give a story because it's old. The NFL used help spot for quite some time. The NFL read the terms and the NFL was like, no, no, no, no, no.

Ian:

You can't use our logo because we're the NFL And we control our brand extremely carefully. Right? And so we said fine. Then at one point, they wanna do some custom thing with it. But, but yeah.

Ian:

So I think that that's fine. I mean,

Aaron:

I think That's pretty cool. I didn't know that. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

That is very cool. That's that's a big one.

Ian:

Yeah. That's a

Ian:

big one. Here here here big names.

Aaron:

You should do. You have

Ian:

to utilize these big names. Again Again, if you go out

Ian:

of business, that's bad for

Ian:

the people at Disney who use Lyricast. Right? Like

Jeffrey Way:

Okay. So here's here's an idea

Ian:

of what this goes on or the question.

Aaron:

Okay. Go on, Jeffrey.

Ian:

I

Jeffrey Way:

have I have technical competitors of Lyricas that have signed up for Lyricas. What if I put their names on my home page?

Ian:

Would be funny.

Jeffrey Way:

As a power move.

Aaron:

That is

Ian:

like that.

Aaron:

That is a power move

Jeffrey Way:

that I would never feel.

Ian:

I think that's probably not one. You would feel bad about that, first of all, but also second of all.

Jeffrey Way:

Shame. See, it

Ian:

all goes back

Jeffrey Way:

to shame. What is what is ethical?

Ian:

That's that might be too far.

Aaron:

Here here's the real answer about Disney. The logo is not gonna, I don't I don't care about the logo. What you need to do is email these at disney.comlarcastusers and ask if you can get in touch with their manager because you would love to offer them a discount for their 50 person team.

Ian:

Definitely do that. Mhmm.

Ian:

Because that's the easy to

Ian:

do. That's one of the problems with the Lara Jobs angle we're trying to take with us is, like, Obviously, if they've used Lara jobs, we know their contact, but, like, we have a lot of these companies that just haven't used it, and it's, like, yeah, how do you find the right person inside Disney to, like because they would probably love to post on their job. They would be like, yes. This makes sense. I wanna higher level developers.

Ian:

This is the main place to do it. I would love to post on there. I don't even either know it exists Or I haven't been motivated enough to go through the red tape required, so it's like, how can we help them get to that point? So, yeah, if you have, like, active subscribers at these big companies who you could approach and be like, hey. Because it's also good for them.

Ian:

They're paying for it out of their own pocket right now. Right? Or through some budget of their own or whatever.

Aaron:

An expense report that's Right. It's like, Hey.

Ian:

Just like we could escalate this up. Your whole team could be using it. You find it valuable. They're gonna find it valuable. You don't have to pay for it anymore if you happen to be

Aaron:

Land in the first place. Baby. You know,

Jeffrey Way:

it's always hard. It it ends up being an issue of just time. It's like, oh, we should probably like, I don't have time for that anymore, but maybe we could hire somebody for that. But what is the job description for that specific role, and will I have enough work for them to like like, this is all the junk Yeah. You end up picking.

Jeffrey Way:

And then I end up just going to, like, OpenAI and saying like, hey. I run I bet everyone does this at some point. I'm like, hey. I run a business called layercast.com. Here's what we're currently doing.

Jeffrey Way:

What are your recommendations for we can you know? Like, I guarantee every small business owner has gone through the OpenAI. Tell me what I'm not doing.

Ian:

Tell me what to do.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. Tell me what to do because I'm not I'm not sure what the next step would be, you know?

Aaron:

Yep. Well, that one that one feels so discreet to me that you could hire A competent VA and give them a discreet task

Jeffrey Way:

to don't even know what a VA is. What's the VA?

Ian:

I know. Everybody always says the VA is we're gonna try with some kind of for this Laravel stuff, but I'm like, I don't even know what it is. What the hell is a VA? What do they do? Like

Aaron:

So VA for those Listening. VA stands for virtual assistant, but it's basically somebody you know, historically, I think it's been somebody overseas, but it can just Be somebody remote, that does that does more of the admin tasks, whether that's bookkeeping calendar, booking travel, that sort of stuff.

Jeffrey Way:

So

Aaron:

it's just kind of like an executive assistant, but virtual. So at the place where I used to work, we hired it was a property tax company we hired Through a service called Support Shepherd, which is it like a it's like an agency. No. That's not right. Yeah.

Aaron:

It's an agency where it would find VAs in the Philippines and do all the vetting and the early 1st round interviews and then give you candidates. And we probably hired 20 or 30 people through that agency, and it's, like, full time placement, so they ended up working for us full time. And It was, like, it was amazing. They we hired them for customer support, and so they would, like, actually answer the phones and talk to our customers, and it was wonderful. They still you know, most of them still work there.

Aaron:

But I think I think my, like, my dream state is to get some stay at home parent who used to work some, like, consulting job, and then, you know, the family had kids, and one of the parents was like, I wanna at home. And it's like, you're one of the smartest people that I know, and you're not working right now. Can you just run my life? Like, can you be the project manager of my life?

Jeffrey Way:

And That would be cool.

Aaron:

I think I think that is totally possible. You just have to find, like, you just have to find The right person who is highly organized and you can trust, which is, of course I

Jeffrey Way:

think that's the hardest part, though. Like, again, you run a lot of jobs. Do you Do you have trouble finding good people at HubSpot? Yeah.

Ian:

I mean, we end up just doing it internal. And then for HubSpot, like, So I mean, this is the eternal when you are a bootstrapper like we all are, this is the biggest downside is every bootstrapper has the same issue, which They only wanna hire people they know and trust already, which is a a very small pool of people. Yeah. And so that's very limiting, because it's again, it's very tied to you and your it's like this is a very apt conversation for what we've been talking about because it's, like, it's tied to you and who you are. Your business is one with you in large And very different from, like, yes, the manager at Target was like, I'm gonna go out and hire 20 people and whatever.

Ian:

Let's just turn to them. We'll fire the bad ones. We don't even care. Right? If after 2 weeks, this person's bad, I'm gonna fire them and literally never think about them ever again.

Ian:

Whereas, like, if we have to fire somebody, we're gonna be like, oh, I gotta fire somebody. I feel terrible. Like, They quit some other job, and now I have to fire them and, like, get the whole thing, so I'm gonna delay.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah.

Ian:

And this person's gonna be with me for months even though I don't wanna because I You don't wanna fire that, like, you know, so that's the part that's not ideal, which is a a total negative. It hinders our businesses Greatly, but, but, yeah, I fall into that camp for sure. But with your stuff, Jeffrey, I feel like you don't even need somebody for this. You should just go through your database and find the biggest 20 active companies that are, like, big name companies with probably a lot of developers, and you should personally do it. And then you'll know how to do it and see if it works.

Ian:

And if it does, then it becomes easier to, like, try to find you would know what kind of person you need. Like, is it the easy part of

Aaron:

the world that you have a VA?

Ian:

Is it, is it Hard and need somebody with a little more who's gonna be more expensive and talented. Yeah. I don't know if he'll actually do it at all. Right? There's all things you

Jeffrey Way:

should be doing. Notes right now.

Ian:

The limiting reaction is not like like, you have the lead there, though. It's not even like, oh, I gotta go out and, like, cold email these people who I don't you know, I don't even know if I'm emailing the right Person and the whole thing. Like, you have a relationship already with the person that you can go in there and contact. Like, that is that's the gold standard right there. So

Aaron:

It is. If if you can emotionally assent to doing that, you should just do it yourself. If the if the question is, like, Does Jeffrey have, does Jeffrey have time to do it? I think you could do the first 10. You could find the time to do it.

Ian:

Yeah.

Aaron:

If if the question is more like, I feel I feel icky or shameful. Like, I can't sit down to actually write this email. I feel like I hire somebody to do it. Hire somebody to do it and

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. That's where it comes back to the idea of, like, oh, shut up. You know? Like, just get out of your head. You don't need to feel icky.

Jeffrey Way:

This is what every single business does. Stop stop like, it it's it's irrelevant to the conversation. Right. And I think I got there.

Ian:

Selling. You're not selling something,

Jeffrey Way:

snake oil. Yeah.

Ian:

Yeah. Or even even, like, a

Ian:

a bag and you feel bad or whatever. You thought You're providing tremendous humongous value to people's careers and jobs. Right? Like, you getting more people to use it is super good for them. Right?

Ian:

So, I think you can feel really good about that. Right? And it's just about get getting in that mindset where it's not icky to expose people to it. It's good for them and for you to expose them to it.

Aaron:

Going back to VAs real quick, there's another agency that I have heard very good things about, that hires military spouses to be via

Ian:

them. Yeah.

Aaron:

Because they are traditionally, traveling or or moving every couple of years. It's, gosquaredaway.com. I think they're they're not inexpensive. I think it's like $40 an hour or something, but It's, you know, pretty highly vetted, and it's people who are, like, structurally unemployed. Like, they can't get a job because they just moved to France for a year stint at a base or something.

Aaron:

And so I think you could probably get good people through there. And they will, like, they will continue to rematch you until you find the person that works for you.

Jeffrey Way:

Aaron, do you worry that it will end up doing the opposite where they're supposed to manage your life, but you find It's like, oh, I need to give them stuff to do. Like, you wake up in the in the morning and you think, oh, I haven't given them anything to do.

Aaron:

So the only experience I've had with some Something like a VA is when I was at Resolute, and I had basically, like, a right hand person. She wasn't she wasn't, like, an assistant. She was kinda more of like a manager, operations manager, and she made my life so much Easier by just taking things off of my plate and helping me figure out what she should be doing. And So I I think if you can find, like, a competent assistant, they'll make your life a lot easier. I think if you find If you find somebody who's not quite as competent, then you're stuck in, like, the task hamster wheel where it's like, I gotta give them this thing in such great detail that I might as well

Jeffrey Way:

just do it myself. Right. That's what I think about. Yeah. So as always, I guess, this is finding the right people.

Ian:

This is where I've always tended towards hiring full time people because Kind of that. It's like I can get a full time person. I can spend the time to train them, and then they're here. Like, they are part of the company, and, it just feels more, like, permanent to me, whereas, like, yeah, the VAs or part time, you know, it does feel like a riskier in some ways, but then I've been trying to work myself out of that mindset because it's like, no. For some things, I don't have 40 hours a week of stuff for somebody to do, and it would be great like, you know, the side job Like, I could have somebody work on that 15 hours a week to, like, reaching out to, like, companies that have either used us in the past or that don't know about us, But I don't necessarily need 40 hours a week of somebody doing that.

Ian:

And it's also that easier, like, if you don't if that doesn't work out, it's like, well, you were only Contract hourly anyways, so now we're gonna part ways. Or if they're super good, then they can become full time, and great. So there's more, like, flexibility and less sort of Commitment there.

Ian:

Jeffrey, you're

Aaron:

telling you're you're you're telling me there's no stay at home parents that, like, their kids go to school with your kids that you're like, That person is super smart. Their kids are now, you know, 57, like my kids, and so they're not they're not home all day every day. They probably wanna Make some money, maybe 10, 20 hours a week. I know that they used to be, whatever. Yeah.

Aaron:

1 100%

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. Right? Oh, you see it all the time? Everywhere. Like, I know we're getting into stereotype territory, but it's just kinda true.

Jeffrey Way:

It's like moms take time off to raise the baby and then when it's time to go back to work, often they will choose like, I just I'm gonna I'm gonna stay a mom for a little bit longer, But it's they still have this time available and they have the skill set that's through the roof. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with you. I just wonder what I would have them do.

Jeffrey Way:

I go, what can give me examples. What would be the, like, the top thing, the first thing you would have them do for you to take some time away?

Aaron:

For you or for me? For you. For you. For me, personally. Yeah.

Aaron:

Okay. So there is a project that Ian and I have talked about where I figure out the top five to 7 DSLRs that can be used as webcams. And then I watch 10 to 20 YouTube videos on how to set up each one. And from those YouTube videos, I take the parts only the parts that are relevant for setting up a good webcam Setup. Not the, like, I wanna be a lifestyle vlogger, not, I wanna take beautiful pictures.

Aaron:

I'm gonna sit on my butt all day on Zoom, and I wanna use this camera to do it. What are the Four things that I need to know. I need somebody to just do all of that research. Yeah. Figure out what the cameras are, watch all of the videos, distill it down into the parts that matter and deliver it to me, and then, frankly, go to rent oh, I forget what the name of it is, but, like, you can rent, cameras.

Aaron:

Go there and rent the camera and tell me when it's gonna show up. Like, I would I would do that today. In fact, I'm I'm kinda working on that.

Jeffrey Way:

But do that right now? Like,

Aaron:

Yeah. So I I think that's something that I would I would absolutely have them do today. And that's like a big that's kind of a meaty project that I don't super care how long it takes. I just want it to be done and done well, and it's not like I that that I could give that brief to the person, and that took me 38 seconds to tell you what the brief is, you know?

Jeffrey Way:

I like it. Would you ever do it, Ian, VA?

Ian:

Well, I don't know. I think there is, like there's also the idea of, like, a VA in the true sense of, like, they are your personal assistant versus just, like, hiring a VA to do other stuff, which we are exploring now, this idea of hiring a VA to do some other stuff. For me, the thing about a VA personally that I would want, is I want them to be physically here

Aaron:

Yeah.

Ian:

To some degree because I want them to take away a lot of the BS that's like, go run over and pick up that thing that I don't wanna do. Yeah. Go take that return nothing. Go charge my Rivian.

Ian:

Like, what are your

Ian:

this yeah. It's my Rivian.

Jeffrey Way:

Oh, well, I mean, to we need to talk about Rivians.

Ian:

Yeah. Yeah. I

Jeffrey Way:

would love to get one.

Ian:

Yeah. It's Are you selling on it? Truck. Oh, super sold. It's very good.

Jeffrey Way:

You got the truck, not the SUV?

Ian:

Yeah. Get the truck. Get the Truck is so useful when you have the kids and the junk and the bikes and the things and whatever. It just goes in the back of the truck. It's so good.

Ian:

Truck is the only way to live.

Jeffrey Way:

Do you have any complaints?

Ian:

Garbage.

Jeffrey Way:

Anything bad?

Ian:

So far, no complaints. It's only been maybe 3 weeks or something like that, but, yeah, so far, it's been perfect. I really like it. I like it even more than I thought I would have to say. It's really good.

Ian:

No problem.

Jeffrey Way:

I'm gonna have to write this back because I'm sort of in minivan territory, and now I'm I could be in Rivian 3rd

Ian:

for I'm going at all. The Rivian SUV, but don't don't discount the truck. The truck is so useful. A place that calls dirty things, So good. So good.

Ian:

Yeah. House projects. Yeah. I like that.

Aaron:

You need a college kid. Are are where are you are you in Buffalo?

Ian:

I might I mean, literally, I'm sitting right now across the street from Vassar College, and we have hired

Aaron:

You know how many Good students want, like, a hourly thing to just do stuff.

Ian:

I know. I'll have to stop it. Like, we're busy. We're super busy and it's like, well, to take the time, it doesn't work out, whatever. We also, you know, we did the babysitting.

Ian:

We had tons of babysitters. I know if you guys have been through this, but the babysitter thing was is a whole bizarre world with, like like, we drop the kids off at the day care back in the day, then you're, like, practically, like, hitting on the people who work there because you're like, so what are you doing? Like, do you wanna babysit? Like, you know, like, we're gonna go on You're right. Yeah.

Ian:

We're just, like, grabbing anybody we can out of desperation. Like, please come, like, watch our children, like, like No. No. No.

Aaron:

No. Not like that. I don't wanna hit a babysitter.

Ian:

So yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like, this is just a babysitter gig. So I don't know.

Ian:

I think me and my wife are both, like, semi scarred from that, and we're just, like, Sick of, like, dealing with, like, the people who would, like, build the helpers because then they disappear, and you gotta find a new one Yeah. Like, the whole thing.

Aaron:

You need a guy. Everybody needs a guy. You just need a guy.

Ian:

Like, you just

Jeffrey Way:

need a guy.

Ian:

Our life to not

Ian:

need it,

Ian:

but it would still actually be quite useful, but I don't know. So we're kinda warming up to maybe take

Aaron:

a look at that. I think

Ian:

you should. I don't know.

Ian:

Aaron, I

Aaron:

feel like someone.

Jeffrey Way:

Are we not for what you need, are we not there already with AI That you could ask AI to to review these top DSLRs and summarize them, rank them. Like, all of that can be done. Can't do it.

Aaron:

No. I don't think so. Part part of it part of it, again, is activation energy. Right? Part of it is I know that I would have to go sit down And either learn how to effectively prompt better or just, like, bang my head against the wall telling it, be like, no.

Aaron:

No. No. Do it better. No. Do it better.

Aaron:

No. Do it differently. And I'm just like, ah, gosh. That feels like I'm now I'm doing the whole thing just faster. And what I want What I want is I, like, I want somebody to hand the packet of information to me that I can then review and be like, yeah.

Aaron:

This is good. I'm gonna do this, and then record the thing. You know?

Jeffrey Way:

And then they hand the packet that you didn't think to ask for. Like, that that's the dream for me. It's like, oh, I want you to do the thing that that I didn't have time or I didn't think to ask you for, but we did it anyways. And it turns out that's incredibly difficult to find from my experience. Yes.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah.

Ian:

I mean, listen, here's the other thing that's like, it's not, easy to do what we do, and I think that it's underrated. It's like people are like, just hire people to flow in, throw in there and they're going to be able to do the stuff you do. And it's really not true because you're As an entrepreneur, you're a mix of an odd grouping of things, and so this is one of the things where I've had some pretty good success, I think, with hiring developers who are entrepreneurial. Like, that's always a thing I look for. Like, do they have side gig?

Ian:

Do they want side gigs? Like, are do they have some experience selling something, anything? Because those are people who are more like, the developers here often are working with customers directly. Like, go figure out their problem. Like, something that you Other certain other types of developers, right, would not do.

Ian:

They'd be very unhappy in that job where some percentage of the time they are talking to the end customer and clicking through bugs or server issues or weird issues. Right? They're like, no, I just want to be in this code, write in classes. Don't make me go talk to the other humans. Right?

Ian:

So I do think that that some of that is, like, that's one angle I found to be successful. Like, if you find people who are entrepreneurial inherently Makes them a little more flexible even though they may not always be as good at any one thing. Like, I'm not good at anything, but I'm sort of okay at a bunch of different things. No. And that's No, buddy.

Ian:

Kind of works.

Aaron:

I'm gonna I'm gonna hit you with a yes, and classic improv. Yes. I agree. And there are certain things, Ian, that you're really good at and certain things that don't like, you don't need to do. And so for me, for example, Like, I don't need to spend the 20 hours doing all the research.

Aaron:

I do need to be the 1 on camera, apparently.

Ian:

Right.

Aaron:

And so, like, for Jeffrey, maybe he doesn't need to be the one sending email to, you know, bob@disney dotcom. Oh, that's actually the CEO's name. Lower employee at Disney.com. Notch. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. Bob at Disney. Hold on. Let me write that down. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

Bob at now I gotta I mean,

Ian:

you should do that. Imagine if he would try something with that bit.

Jeffrey Way:

I just entirely like, oh, that's the email.

Aaron:

He does. Like, What is the thing in Lyricast that Jeffrey probably does need to do is is teach. Right?

Jeffrey Way:

And so Right. I don't need to edit this video. Right. Exactly.

Aaron:

Yes. Yeah. There are

Ian:

things I do.

Aaron:

We are unique and really, like, interesting and good as entrepreneurs, but, like, Half or more of the job is not the part that people want from us, and so I think that's the part that you can hire out.

Ian:

And getting good at that of the things you should say no to or the things you should offload because they're not bringing that special something that you have as the person with The whole vision in their head. Right? Like, yeah. Agree.

Jeffrey Way:

But to bring it back to Twitter, like, I think about this sometimes. Do you guys Ever think about how it seems like the word of the day is is manipulation. You ever think about how all of our perception is manipulated by the types of people who use Twitter if Twitter is your main social network. It's like it takes a specific kind of person to, want to sign up for a social network. And then of that group, A specific percentage of people sign up for Twitter.

Jeffrey Way:

And, of that group, a specific percentage of people, tweet. And then, of that group, tweet regularly enough you actually see it. And then so you get to the point where it's like my my idea of what people think probably isn't even remotely close to what The world thinks or the country thinks or any of that stuff. But that's where I get all of my information or my views on tech or programming or politics or news or, you know, all of the above. Yes.

Jeffrey Way:

100% a little bit.

Aaron:

Even even making the jump over to YouTube has opened my eyes to the entire not the entire another Set of developers that I had not previously been exposed to.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah.

Aaron:

And, like, YouTube is 1 I spent, You know, a month on Twitch and realized, oh, this is an entirely different community unto itself, and one that I didn't feel very comfortable in, so I eventually left. But it was like, Oh, yeah. Each thing is a bubble, and they don't necessarily overlap, but they are certainly, like, They're certainly not, representative of the population at large.

Jeffrey Way:

Of the whole. Yeah. Yeah. What was wrong

Aaron:

with Twitch? In my opinion, there's a very, there's, like, a very So there's a culture of, like, man, how do you say it? It's a very, like, gamer heavy culture that is A little it's fumble. I didn't like it. Yeah.

Aaron:

There is it's super crass. It's super, like, insular. It's very I didn't get any of the jokes, first of all. I didn't get any of the memes. I didn't get any of the references.

Aaron:

It's very, like, edgy and just, like, almost immature gamer, I think is, like, the easiest the easiest way to say it. And it's not a it's not not a place It's not a chat that I would want to hang out in, and so I had a hard time, like, interacting with the chat that was there because it was like, Guys, can we, like

Jeffrey Way:

we just want

Aaron:

can we not make can we not make the same jokes over and over and over? Like, can we do better jokes maybe?

Jeffrey Way:

Yes. It's probably just like In real life, on average, you're you're a different age group from most of the people watching, and it's, like, you just can't you can't connect. It doesn't work. It yeah. Like, all of us felt like social go ahead.

Aaron:

It felt like a, almost like a degenerate gamer hang. Yeah. Like, it's a bunch of it's a bunch of young men playing video games who happen to wander into a programming stream. And it's like, That's just not I don't I I don't really connect with that. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

I wonder if you're gonna get hate for that. I'm curious. For Sure. If you

Ian:

think so, I definitely You guys can

Aaron:

hate Zoom. It doesn't leak out.

Jeffrey Way:

How much time would you get

Ian:

beyond that? SPRA. No.

Jeffrey Way:

I would think you'd get nothing but that.

Ian:

The pods? The pop fan is

Aaron:

Don't clip this one, Dave. Yeah.

Ian:

Don't clip that part, Dave. But no. I think, I mean, I think Twitch kinda wears that on its sleeve a little bit. Like

Jeffrey Way:

It does.

Ian:

In terms of it's, like, we're a little edgier and crasser to some degree. I think there's been backlash, my understanding, because, like, The Amazon overlords have tried to clip the wings of some of that a little bit.

Aaron:

They've tried

Ian:

to clean it up. Yeah. But yeah. I don't know. It's interesting about Twitter too, like, that we all get our information there, but then part of it, I'm so torn on this because it's like that's not really a bunch different than in the old days and you had your local newspaper And that's kinda where you got your information a lot of places there was 1 newspaper maybe if you live in the city there's a couple, but are you really you subscribe to a couple?

Ian:

You probably only subscribe to 1 or maybe 2, even the speed like, I was just watching The Godfather with my middle kid the other night.

Aaron:

You're always just watching The Godfather. Yeah. So one

Ian:

of the early scenes in The Godfather is they find out

Aaron:

spoilers.

Ian:

Ron's been shot. Oh, spoiler a 50 year old movie. Because they walk past the newsstand, And it's the evening edition of the news and they see this news about him being shot. So that's like, you know, it's whatever it happened 2 hours ago and it's in the newspaper, so it's like Almost real time, like it's not as real time as Twitter, but it's in the ballpark, and so I don't I mean, obviously, the big difference is that The newspaper was more one direction. Right?

Ian:

Like, maybe there's an opinion section where you could go write your thing or whatever, but there wasn't you don't get everybody's opinion back Like, we can get on Twitter. So from the one hand, it's actually not that different, but then on the other hand, yes, that you can then also find every Rando's Opinion on any random thing and how do you absorb that and deal with that Yeah. Is definitely a bit tricky.

Jeffrey Way:

I even find Twitter a little bit scary. Like, Ian, I think I saw you write something many years ago where I loved it. And and maybe it wasn't your quote, but it was something like every day on Twitter, somebody is it And the goal is to not be that person or whatever

Ian:

or something

Ian:

like that.

Jeffrey Way:

I love that. That is so

Ian:

true. Yeah. It's true.

Jeffrey Way:

It is. Especially back then, there was just a period where it's like, oh, this guy getting blasted. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

And it

Ian:

is like

Jeffrey Way:

the goal is don't be that person every day. And, you know, it's a bit

Ian:

Do you think it's

Ian:

kinda I do think that's sort of interesting as it's a lot of what we're talking about here were, like, whereas Twitter's formalized Into this, like, hey, it's a little more business. It's a little more corporate even if corporate is just us as individuals being more refined and slightly careful about what we're doing. I do feel like that's even, like, changed a little bit. Like, there's not so many of those, like, every day is the main character because we're blowing you up because of how you use the div weird or something. Like, it's It's a little bit less of that, or maybe I've just cut that scene out a little bit.

Ian:

I've muted

Aaron:

I've muted a lot of those people.

Ian:

Yeah. Sam was on the other day on the podcast, and he was sort of the main character about this, like, the sequel inside reacts there. Right? But he wasn't, like, upset about it. People weren't even like, they were kind of harassing the idea, but not like him directly so much.

Ian:

Like, it wasn't so much of, like, this guy's an idiot. It was more about at least, like,

Ian:

the the idea's an idiot,

Ian:

I think, a little bit more.

Jeffrey Way:

Let's talk about that. That's interesting.

Aaron:

Yeah. You know, here here's a counter. Apparently, some guy yesterday tweeted, PHP tooling sucks.

Jeffrey Way:

And I just read that 5 minutes left.

Ian:

We all we found it. Right.

Aaron:

And now and now he's he's PHP's main character because Taylor has challenged him to a code battle, which

Ian:

code off.

Aaron:

I would pay $50 to watch in Prime Time

Ian:

for sure.

Ian:

Money if that happens. We're gonna run the book

Jeffrey Way:

Taylor actually do that? He's sweet,

Aaron:

and the the primogen the primogen said he would he would be the, he would be the narrator or the the The color commentary

Ian:

It does.

Aaron:

Theo could be the yeah. And so, like, the main character thing still very much happens. It does It definitely still happens. Happen.

Ian:

I do. Don't you feel like it's a

Jeffrey Way:

it's still a Humana game.

Ian:

A little different, though. Even that's a little different. He made a very aggressive statement that people in that community countered. I still think it's different. We used to just find, like, truly randos for over really stupid stuff.

Aaron:

I I think chili to my neighbors. This one.

Ian:

Do you remember that woman? Chili.

Aaron:

Which one would be know, but she she got she just got excoriated. She brought chili to her neighbors, and then everyone said it was, like, ableist or something. And then there was one that was, like, I really enjoy walking in the garden in the morning, drinking my coffee with my husband, and that went, like, Mega viral

Jeffrey Way:

and people are lucky are you that you can drink this in the

Aaron:

morning while people are dying? Exactly. Yeah.

Ian:

But, again, it was like

Aaron:

That was the heyday of, like, let's Drag people from milk milquetoast takes.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. I think that's gone. Yeah. And that's a good example of, like, I feel like

Ian:

mostly gone. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

Didn't everyone kind of agree, like, alright. That's ridiculous. But it didn't feel that way

Aaron:

at the time. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

But it's like you would talk to your to your buddies in real life and everyone would be like, alright. Alright. Come on. Yes. Nobody is offended by this.

Jeffrey Way:

You know, obviously, big things, but not that.

Aaron:

That's where the security online thing comes from. That's where we say, like, oh, Those people are very online. Like, they need to log off because they're too online, and that like, the chili thing was an example of people being too online for sure.

Ian:

There is this whole, like, human evolution thing that I find quite fascinating where, like, a 1000 years ago, right, like, the only other humans you knew like, you knew your tribe, And then you knew, like, whatever butted up against your tribe, the other tribe, right, that had their own gods or their own deal. You hated them. They hated you because they were different in whatever way they were different or whatever. And then, like, whatever the world grew and information moves faster, and it's like, well, Now we kinda know more like about, well, there's all these different people with different ideas and whatever. Right?

Ian:

And then but now it's just like you're exposed to everybody And Yep. All their ideas and all their so there is, like, some natural instinct of, like, the other the The people just across the line from me, but then Totally. There's, like, lizard brain stuff that's like, well, all these other people are out there, and they're all on the other side of my line from my general eyes, whatever that means.

Jeffrey Way:

And we're probably hardwired to to think of this stuff. Yeah. Like but we have no reason to feel that way anymore, but it's still built in here. It's That it's Yeah. Exactly.

Jeffrey Way:

It's totally different. Before, like, the whole idea that Laravel is a tribe, you know, sort of. It's really weird. So it's it's a coding framework, but it has become a group and a community that needs to be protected from Invaders on Twitter. You know, I'm being hyperbolic, but there's a little bit of truth to it.

Jeffrey Way:

People, like, you and Hoda literally. Yeah. And then you have people saying, like, Laravel forever, and there's a Chance, there's a battle cry, and we're talking about a coding framework, which is ridiculous. And it's still made in this process.

Ian:

And, like right. Yeah. Mhmm.

Jeffrey Way:

For sure. Like

Ian:

Yeah. Yeah. There is this group. People want these structures. Right?

Ian:

Like, at some fundamental level, people want A group

Aaron:

want to prolong this.

Ian:

Part of, and they probably want something to be against. I mean, I kinda feel like we're getting a little bit political here, but I'd kind of feel like part of, like, Post cold war, like, this is a big part of problem in the in our country. It's like people hate each other because we used to have the Russians to hate, and it was so nice and simple. It was unprecedented. Shared.

Ian:

We all agree you might be in the south, the north, or the east, or the west, and you have different Parts of your life you treat differently, and I'm but

Aaron:

at least you're not

Ian:

Russian. All kinds of things,

Ian:

but at least you're not Russian.

Ian:

We all are against the Russians, and we're on the same page here, people, And we have that in common, and then since there's no shared enemy of that that at least at that scale, right, where it's like existential Us versus them, they are trying to kill us at any moment if we open the door 1 inch, right, at least that was our perception, and we all agreed that we were against And now since we don't have that shared group, we all hate Yeah. Like, there's we gotta There's no shared. There's

Jeffrey Way:

no shared common good that we all subscribe to. Like, it is crazy. We don't agree on anything. That's why it's funny now with anyone who was like, oh, Americans think that it's like, no. Americans don't agree on Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

Anything. Like, you can't pick anything that, Eric, Americans are in agreement on right now.

Ian:

Right. That's crazy.

Jeffrey Way:

Like, western civilization, Culture, capitalism, none of

Ian:

it is

Jeffrey Way:

gonna be

Ian:

on Renault.

Aaron:

Yeah. Yeah. And instead instead of a instead of a good war, maybe we just need to, like, Make the Olympics better or make our soccer team better so we can have World Cup, and we can all be like, alright. We can pretend so that everyone else bad guys. You guys have these every year.

Aaron:

Fight a war. Yeah.

Ian:

Right. Every 4 years,

Aaron:

they'll have those numbers. Soccer team, and then we can pretend to to pretend to fight. Yeah.

Ian:

But We all

Ian:

do this

Jeffrey Way:

for it's don't even care about the Olympics anymore.

Aaron:

Oh, yeah. The Olympics are

Ian:

at the Olympics.

Jeffrey Way:

That was a big

Ian:

deal for

Jeffrey Way:

me when I was young, though. We watched the Olympics every day. Yeah. Nobody cares anymore.

Ian:

Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. They still care about World Cup, but they don't care about the Olympics. Yeah.

Ian:

World Cup's the last bastion of

Aaron:

World World Cup is

Ian:

the last sort of Competition.

Aaron:

Agreed. And we suck, so it only lasts so long.

Ian:

Well, I would that's one of the

Ian:

parts that always bothered me is I always thought America has this huge advantage. I always liked that we didn't allow Professionals in the sports because it's like whatever. Like, putting a professional basketball team out there is ridiculous if they're from America, but they have to be all yeah. For the Olympics. So it has to be all college kid.

Ian:

It used to college kids. And then they, you know, they switched it, and then it's like, that's what I needed here now.

Aaron:

But Who cares about

Ian:

makes it like, even though now other countries do compete pretty solidly with us in these different sports, but it definitely yeah. I think it's like a cold war vestige too. It's, like, lost a lot of juice since there's not, like

Aaron:

I agree.

Ian:

Big baddies on the other side of it.

Aaron:

Yeah. There's no stakes. We're not we're not sticking it. We're not sticking it to an empire. We're just, like Yeah.

Aaron:

You know, we're gonna win probably basketball and swearing somehow. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. Unless World War 3 happens. Do you guys think about that at all? Oh, wow. Let's go.

Jeffrey Way:

Let's go in deep, guys.

Ian:

There you go. No.

Jeffrey Way:

I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But for real.

Ian:

You're ready.

Jeffrey Way:

No. I'm kidding.

Ian:

So I don't know. Do we do we solve this tweet? Are we are we resolute in our beliefs now?

Jeffrey Way:

I think we agreed. I'm overthinking it. Is that right?

Aaron:

I think so. I think you're overthinking it. Also, the the last the last point is you have you have a different you have a different luxury. Like, I just told you this on Twitter. The scale that Lyricast is at, you can just not do it.

Jeffrey Way:

Oh, well, that's not fair, though. Yeah. But I was thinking that's not fair. Like, because I would have subscribed to that if Lyricast was one day old. You know?

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. Like, isn't that a little like, oh, well, that doesn't apply to you or that doesn't apply to This

Aaron:

What I mean is you don't have to do it anymore. And I think it's to some level

Ian:

I disagree.

Aaron:

Some level, Other people do have to do it more.

Ian:

Because, again, he could be doing oh, think about all the awesome stuff Jeffrey's gonna create for the rest of the good of our industry with more resources. Like, I feel like that's just Oh,

Aaron:

I agree.

Jeffrey Way:

More things

Ian:

he can do. So I think he has

Aaron:

Like you said earlier, he's maybe saturated the Twitter Dev space, and so he doesn't have to

Ian:

do it

Aaron:

as much.

Ian:

People are coming for Jeffrey too. Right? I mean, there's a lot of people out there.

Ian:

They're coming for Laracasts. Right? He's not like To be clear, I think

Aaron:

you should continue To do it. Yeah. Yeah. I think you should continue to retweet stuff

Ian:

like that.

Ian:

He's not gonna go hungry at this point, I think, if he stopped doing it. No. But No.

Jeffrey Way:

Some of it I think is a reaction to just there's so much content right now. Yes. And I I find it a little overwhelming. So maybe it is a defense mechanism a little bit where it's like, I just don't I don't wanna see more content shoved in my face. Like, do you guys ever do the thing where it's like you browse Netflix for 45 minutes, You watch nothing and then you go to bed.

Jeffrey Way:

You know, it it kind of feels like that with the the educational space, especially. It's just nonstop Content. Every single person has a course. Everyone has a product. Everyone is selling to you, including me, and it's like, something's gotta give at some point.

Jeffrey Way:

You know? That's I don't

Aaron:

know if it does.

Jeffrey Way:

I don't know your eyes. I just have to get in for it today.

Ian:

I really

Ian:

don't. I've thought this is

Ian:

partially because software has gotten so complicated. Like, it's so hard to do Software. Like, a lot of these people wanna be building software, but it's so hard to do it. And then it's like, well, I could try the content space. Like, that's an easier first step, right, than, like, just going right to

Aaron:

the software.

Ian:

Yeah. So

Jeffrey Way:

Me

Ian:

right here.

Ian:

So I feel that's important to hear to some degree. Like, that it's not you can't it's very hard to get off the ground software that every there's a 1000000 people in every space. You know? I think partially, it's a this people have been sold at this service, right, with, like, this whole, like, heavy JavaScript front end. And while you need these 38 tools in the stack to build something, Which is what I love about Laravel.

Ian:

Right? It's like you can just use Laravel and use nothing else in your stack and make a successful product, or very little, or you can Sprinkle in LiveWire or whatever, but you don't necessarily have to go with the full modern quote unquote of, you know, 72 layers to serve HTML. But yeah. I don't know. That does seem like for sure that there's tons of people trying to do it, and there's only so much even with so much more sort of surface area of attention, ultimately, there's only so much that people have.

Jeffrey Way:

Hey, guys. When I was getting into it, when I was first learning, I started with .net, and I was trying to watch video tutorials about .net. And there was, like, one place on the Internet I could go to, and it was on their website. It was guy named Joe Spagner, and he would record these little 8 minute videos that were, like, I don't know, 800 by 600 resolution, really crappy audio quality, and that was it.

Ian:

Awesome.

Jeffrey Way:

Like, there was nothing else you could do. And you compare it to now when it's like Some of the best content in the world is being given away for free. This blows my mind. Like, I'm really into to guitar. The best guitarists in the world are teaching you for free on YouTube.

Jeffrey Way:

It blows my mind. Like how nuts that is. And yet you can still have a paid course that does really well too. And where it gets very interesting where it's like often people will buy your course not because they need the course, but it's almost like, oh, I've gotten a lot from you for free And now I'm gonna pay you back even though like, the number of people, I bet, who buy courses and never watch them is through the roof.

Ian:

Mhmm.

Jeffrey Way:

Because half the time, it's like it's either

Aaron:

That's me.

Ian:

That's me.

Jeffrey Way:

Me too. It's it's either, like, education Addiction. You know, it's like, oh, I I wanna learn, but I don't have time, but I wanna buy this. But then a big component, I think, is just people wanting to support you, which is which is a crazy like, we talk so much on the Internet about how, mean spirited people are, but then there's the flip side where some of the nicest things that have ever been said to me were not said by my family. They were said by strangers

Ian:

on

Jeffrey Way:

the Internet, which was really cool. So so it's it's kind of a a double edged sword, I guess.

Ian:

What what do you think about this? I don't know if you're up on, like, Netflix and all that stuff, Jeffrey. I kinda think of, you know, Lara Cass is our, like, little world version of Netflix And, like Yeah. Netflix and Disney plus and these things that are going, like, they're kinda coming full circle with, like, alright. It's paid content, paid content, and now they're really trying to push people Into the free or cheaper tiers so that they can run ads so they can have enough content to run ads at scale.

Ian:

Basically reinventing cable television. I don't know.

Ian:

Do you have anything on

Ian:

that stuff and how it impacts you? And

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. I I'm I'm always worried about, like, watering down the, Again, I hate to say the word, but the brand. I hate I don't wanna water down the brand. I think about that with YouTube as well, where it's like, should I be should we do anything on YouTube?

Ian:

And I

Jeffrey Way:

think the answer is probably yes. But then I wonder if people see like, Oh, there's Laracast stuff on YouTube. Why do I need to go over to the website? Yeah. And the answer is like, well, there's way more.

Jeffrey Way:

But are you are you accomplishing the opposite? You think you're promoting on YouTube, you being me. You think you're promoting on YouTube, but you're actually losing potential, visitors to Aircast? I don't know.

Ian:

Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

But, yeah, other than that, you have thought about doing different tiers. It's been interesting to watch how Disney plus has been. Like, they've even done things where, like, they release a show And then 4 months later, they they removed the show entirely. And I think it's something related to this. Like, they would have to pay licensing fees keep the show further.

Ian:

And And

Jeffrey Way:

if the show didn't do well enough like, I know, like, they released a Willow show, like like, you know, the old Willow movie. Mhmm. They released a TV show based on that, And I think it didn't do very well, and then they just pulled it completely. They don't wanna they

Aaron:

don't wanna

Ian:

be the world leader at all.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. That's really strange that there's, like, content and big Shows that are impossible to watch right now. Yep. So so it's interesting just as an aside to see how they are dealing with things because my understanding is Disney plus is losing Money. Right.

Ian:

I don't understand how they lose so much money, these services. That's like

Jeffrey Way:

I don't get it either. If you have huge Gmail, I love it Disney, and

Aaron:

we can find out.

Ian:

Aren't there, like, just so many people would pay for Disney Plus if you just showed us Star Wars and old Disney movies? Like, you could do nothing else. Don't make any content. Like, I'll go,

Ian:

people are gonna pay I'll be able to pay for it.

Aaron:

Like, I hope Absolutely.

Jeffrey Way:

I have kids. It's like we pay Disney. I don't even I don't even think about it. I'm never like, maybe we should cancel our subscription. Right?

Jeffrey Way:

It's like, no. That is different what we have, you know, and they're still losing crazy amounts of money.

Ian:

Yeah. I don't know. They should be paying us some of this money. That's what we're saying here.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah.

Ian:

Sprinkle it around a little. We're not getting about 10,000,000,000 they lose.

Jeffrey Way:

All right. The last thing, Aaron,

Aaron:

Tell me.

Jeffrey Way:

Do you think about how to promote Screencasting .com. Like, do you have, a pipeline? Like, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna release more content, we're gonna have a new chapter. Is that something you think about?

Aaron:

Yeah. That's something I think about a lot, and something that right now is is not, is not moving quickly enough on my side. Yeah. I think about that I think about that a lot because I think it is evergreen, and I think This could be a good durable asset for me. And so the plan the plan right now is to Create a few more videos.

Aaron:

There have been some questions and I think some good extra content that I can do, basically just as an excuse to send email and talk about it, some more. But then I think ongoing there, there are a few like, I'm always looking for like veins of content to mind, to to mine, like, Like, what is the thing I can tap into and just get content over and over and over out of it? One is,

Jeffrey Way:

I'm going

Aaron:

to do Yeah. So, I'm And I do that at PlanetScale too. I'm always like, where can I just find more things to, like, feed me content ideas? It's very tough, as you know. So one that I think I'm gonna do is these screen caster spotlights where I, you know, just reach out to people.

Aaron:

Mateus has already recorded one for me where it's like, hey. Show me your setup because I've showed everyone my setup, but I am but 1 man. Right? So show me your setup. Show me your camera, your tools that you love, that kind of thing.

Jeffrey Way:

I have a setup too, Aaron.

Aaron:

I know. We're saving you because I

Jeffrey Way:

send me that email, Brian.

Aaron:

Yeah. I can't I can't reach out to Bob at Disney with my first email. You know? So,

Ian:

I get the process now. Right?

Aaron:

Yeah. I'm gonna have some of those so that people can see other Setups and you know, for example, like, Matthias will hopefully get a boost on his YouTube subscribers. So it's hopefully, like, a mutually beneficial, like, I'm promoting you to this audience and this audience has something, you know, to

Jeffrey Way:

get Like, if I went to screencasting.com and I wasn't ready to pay, Is there a way for me to to sign up and get anything for free or,

Aaron:

like, first couple videos? Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

It's You find a newsletter, you know?

Aaron:

You can watch several for free, and then you can watch several if you give me your email. And so it's like free taste, and then You can unlock it with your email, and then after that, it's just totally locked. And so that is the that's, like, the very, very, You know, off the street, top of funnel. And I'm hoping to build continue to build out the free stuff, including screen cast or spotlights, including, These camera not even reviews, but, like, setup guides

Jeffrey Way:

Mhmm.

Aaron:

That we talked about earlier and Put some of that content on YouTube as well because I think the distribution you're asking about Lyricas. I think the distribution potential of YouTube is just fundamentally unmatched by anything else. I agree. And I just can't like, Twitter is adorable compared to YouTube. Like, YouTube can decide your video is good, and it's like, here's 250,000 views.

Aaron:

Like, I just can't get that on Twitter. And so that's kind of the that's kind of the long term vision is, like, I have a pipeline of these screen capture spotlights. I'm doing camera gear kind of stuff Reviews with the help of a future VA that I will at one point have, and then just kind of recording 1 or 2 videos as people or as I discover new tools, techniques, or as people ask questions.

Jeffrey Way:

Very cool. Yeah, it's cool. It it seems like just in general, though, the course is is pretty evergreen. Like I have to record courses that it's like it just it has an expiration date. You know, like, like we

Aaron:

were talking about Laravel Country. So disheartening.

Jeffrey Way:

So disheartening. It's like 100 hours worth of work and it literally has an expiration date of about 18 months from now, you know, and that's just one of the reasons I

Aaron:

I mean, and You have to go in and mark them in Laracasts as out of date, which has gotta be just like,

Jeffrey Way:

Oh, yeah. I have I have an archived test Because it's literally like archive basically on Laracast means hide these 50 videos from the search and from Google and from the main website, it's like, oh, I spent 100 hours recording those videos and but you have to at some point. Yeah. So, yeah, I wish I had more content where it's like this can last for 10 years and you can do that. You can definitely do that.

Jeffrey Way:

You can. But More like, tool based stuff. You can't.

Aaron:

Like, what do people want from you? They want they want the new stuff from you. Yeah. Like it would be great if you had software fundamentals and stuff like that, but they just wanna know how do I use Folio? How do I use Volt?

Aaron:

And it's like, well, I have to record that right now.

Jeffrey Way:

Yeah. And it's tough because you have to be super sensitive to, newcomers and the friction that might be there. So even though it's like we have Laravel 8 from scratch, but there's Laravel 10, but it's, like, it's 98% the same. But that 2% where it's Like, oh, wait, the routes file was over here, but now it's over. It's like that for a newcomer, that's sometimes a deal breaker.

Jeffrey Way:

You know what I mean? Like, we've all felt that way where you're trying to

Aaron:

Go ahead. They won't even click. It says Laravel 8, and they're, like, oh, I'm not gonna click. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

It's Laravel 10. I know. But do I just say Laravel, And then they're gonna be up, well, what first? Like, I don't know how to deal with that.

Ian:

Thought this is, like, your secret sauce to me is, like, this whole stuff right here. Like, When you go into a Laracast video, you know you are getting something that is going to walk you through it, like, front to back very Carefully and very step by step where it's like you can I don't know? I feel like I never watched a video, series really that is so You can really follow it step by step. There's nothing skipped.

Aaron:

You can trust

Ian:

it. There's nothing.

Ian:

You can

Ian:

totally trust it. If you're new to this concept, like, You're gonna you're gonna make mistakes in the video and leave that in and then talk about the mistake you made so I can learn from the mistake you made and whatever. So, like, I think that stuff's so good. And since software's never done this is the worst part about software is software's never done. Agree.

Ian:

This I mean, I've been working on the same product for 20 years. Right? And it's like, This product is never done. Like, there's always more stuff to do or the tech or AI shows up and people want AI. Right?

Ian:

Like, whatever. There's always something where the the stuff's not done, And Mhmm. I think the videos need to reflect that. Right? Like, Laravel's never done.

Ian:

Yeah. You just Workers supporting tools are never done. Like, All this stuff is evolving, and then yeah. So it's gotta be up to date. So that's Yeah.

Ian:

That's the gig, but that's the value too. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way:

Very cool. Alright.

Ian:

Well, it's great. We'd love to have

Jeffrey Way:

you on the phone.

Aaron:

Ian. Yeah. This was awesome. Thanks for doing this. Sorry for taking fully 2

Ian:

hours of your Yeah. No. It was awesome. Yeah. We were like, I don't know.

Ian:

Maybe it should be,

Ian:

like, half an hour. No. We got up in 2 hours.

Jeffrey Way:

I am alone so much every day, so this was really Hey.

Ian:

Yeah. We had Feel free to come back on if you get lonely. Just ping us.

Aaron:

Yeah. We had this theory that was like, yeah. We'll come on for 30 minutes and then drop off. We'll do a regular show, and that'll

Jeffrey Way:

Alright. That was great.

Aaron:

Tell us where can we find us.

Ian:

Alright. Thank you, everybody. You can find us on mostlytechnical.com, mostly tech pod on Twitter and, mostly technical podcast atgmail.com. And then, obviously, you can reach Jeffrey at Jeffrey We're way on Twitter and laracast.com. So yeah.

Ian:

So thanks a lot, Jeff, for coming on, and we will, see you on Twitter.

Jeffrey Way:

Awesome. Thank you, guys.

Creators and Guests

Aaron Francis
Host
Aaron Francis
Co-founder https://t.co/iQBe3dPhc1.Sincere poster. No cynicism. Dad to two sets of twins! 🖥️ https://t.co/wIdhAlsrlX 📹 https://t.co/hM9ogEIevT🎤 @MostlyTechPod
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Ian Landsman
Host
Ian Landsman
Founder HelpSpot, LaraJobs, and Laracon Online.
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Dave Hicking
Producer
Dave Hicking
@UserScape Product Manager. Previously at @TightenCo, @BeineckeLibrary, & @uconnlibrary. 1/2 of @CRSPodcast (I'm @doc_beats). 1/3 of @cheese_weather.
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Jeffrey Way
Guest
Jeffrey Way
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15: Farming, Threadbois, & Meme Lords with Jeffrey Way

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