Rich Ziade: [00:00:00] Do you wanna know one of my best qualities?
Paul Ford: Jesus. Yeah, okay, tell me your best quality.
Rich Ziade: When something really consequential is at stake, I don’t wanna work with anyone else. I become uncollaborative.
Paul Ford: Boy, is that true. That’s fantastic. It’s really great [chuckles], I’m on like year 10 of work with you. Here’s what’s tricky as, as your business partner in, in so many things, uh, when you become obsessive and you want to get something done, you’re very valuable.
Rich Ziade: Aww… I think that was a compliment.
Paul Ford: It’s, it’s worked out great for me, but there’s a part of me that’s just like, could you just talk about it for a minute? “No, no. We’re gonna [00:01:00] have that meeting and everyone’s gonna have to …”.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. So I go through spells, where I look for like tools. I don’t call ’em power tools, I call ’em tools of empowerment.
Paul Ford: Right.
Rich Ziade: You ever heard of Alfred?
Paul Ford: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What’s that do? It’s like a little, you hit space and it –
Rich Ziade: It’s a, it’s a, for, for the Windows Vista users out there, it’s a Mac app that turbochargers like shortcuts and stuff, you do, you do like option space and then everything is wired to Alfred. Like you could-
Paul Ford: Yeah, so you can like open up your mail editor and you can bring up a URL directly and send-
Rich Ziade: Bring up url, pre-fill a form and upload an image.
Paul Ford: Always the fantasy. I mean that’s the fantasy with, with AI right now is that we’re gonna, everything is now your personal assistant.
Rich Ziade: Yes, automation exactly. And I always, uh, bail.
Paul Ford: Mm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: I try ’em, I feel good about it for a [00:02:00] bit, and then I always bail and I go back to yelling at someone else.
Paul Ford: Do you remember the, of course you do, do you remember the phase when everybody was like, we’re gonna create the most minimalist writing editor imaginable. That was –
Rich Ziade: IA writer.
Paul Ford: I think it was a 10 year period on the internet where everyone tried to make the blankest screen.
Rich Ziade: Yes, yes. There were a bunch, I remember there was one where it would like, as you were writing the clouds would kind of open up a little, you’d see
Paul Ford: Oh yeah, yeah.
Rich Ziade: like the outline of a tree [chuckles].
Paul Ford: Yes, you know what, I’ll tell you my, my thing on this, I have a bit on this, which is cause it comes up. I used to be a guy who I like a good minimalist writing environment. I spent enormous amount of time not writing, creating one. And uh, I really did realize at one point I just had to kind of, I had to deal with, deal with it and accept, uh, there’s one technology that will help you get a piece of writing done.
Rich Ziade: What’s that?
Paul Ford: A deadline.
Rich Ziade: Oh.
Paul Ford: And, and it’s a pencil and a piece of paper it’s not radically [00:03:00] different than a really great word.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, pressure.
Paul Ford: It’s, it’s somebody waiting and saying, you know, when the, um, I still do my column for Wired, and I’m, I’m more on time than I used to be. But, uh, every now and then I’ll get, it’s like, “Hey, the managing editor just used the phrase, contingency plan. So how’s that going?” And I’m like, I’m gonna stage my career where I’m like, oh, managing editors are always saying contingency plan. Gimme an hour. You know? And um-
Rich Ziade: It’s funny because, you know, that’s the promise of a lot of these sort of this flourish of AI ideas of how it’s gonna solve this or that. We’ve talked about it in other podcasts. It’s kind of hilarious how everyone’s like that thing that was burdening you is no more. And it turns out that every time someone promises that, it’s, the output is always shittier.
Paul Ford: It is, it’s not just I watch somebody like try to, you know, figure out to how to do a really [00:04:00] complicated scheduling algorithm and they’re just programming after, they’re just programming by telling- they’re not a programmer.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: So what is nice about these interfaces is that, um, I was doing some programming over the weekend.I’m doing, I’m doing a weird project, which is my father was an experimental writer, and he left, he said, could you put my manuscripts online after I died? So he passed away.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: It’s God bless my father.
Rich Ziade: 10, 10 manuscripts?
Paul Ford: No, it’s two stacks of just loose paper that he threw into a box.
Rich Ziade: Oh, so it’s all physical?
Paul Ford: No, there, there’s that. And then there’s the Google Drive, which is 20,000 separate files. Each one of them is a poem, uh, or a short story or a novel, you never know. And, um, uh, and about, uh, about half are duplicates.
Rich Ziade: Right.
Paul Ford: So, so I’m, I’m, I had to do a lot of scripting to de-duplicate and sort of hash and so on and so forth. And there’s a point where I’m trying to put stuff in the database and I didn’t have my single apostrophes right.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: And it’s just a half hour of my life, I’m never [00:05:00] getting back for that. And I, I do feel that, like, where AI is gonna be amazing is it’s, you’re gonna, you’re gonna ask it a question and it’s, you’re not gonna be able to skip that whole extra apostrophe thing.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: You’ll see it, you’ll be like, what’s going on here? Like, I, I feel that it’s smart that way.
Rich Ziade: Hurdles, around little annoying hurdles is good.
Paul Ford: But it turns out that solving problems as a human being is fricking hard. We just had a business structure meeting in the other room.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: I couldn’t ask a bot to do that. Like, that’s not it, it’s complicated.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. And, and, and, um, you know how I view it, we were supposed to talk about something else, but we don’t give a-
Paul Ford: Oh, we’re gonna get there. We’re gonna get there, hold on.
Rich Ziade: Okay. Um, do you know how I view the whole AI flurry right now?
Paul Ford: How?
Rich Ziade: It’s like the– you ever see Goodfellas?
Paul Ford: Yeah, about 20,000 times.
Rich Ziade: Right, you know, the final scene where he is like all coked up and the helicopter won’t stop chasing him and he is trying to make the meatballs.
Paul Ford: I don’t even like to think about that scene. It’s so stressful.
Rich Ziade: It, to me, the AI flurry is sort of the, like the, [00:06:00] that final scene of work from home [laughter].
Paul Ford: Oh, you’re right [laughter].
Rich Ziade: Like, wait, you think you got your time back? You think you got work-life balance? You think you could spend time with your kids? Wait, it gets better, it gets better, hold on.
Paul Ford: Helicopters are hovering. You’re trying to make the be-
Rich Ziade: Hold on. You thought you had to make a grocery shopping list? No, you don’t have to do that. You have to do anything cause the cocaine, AI will take care of it.
Paul Ford: It just ends with the cops just coming in.
Rich Ziade: It is, it is the, the sort of culmination of like, how can we actually gain absolute freedom? And here’s the farce in all of it.
Paul Ford: Mmmm.
Rich Ziade: We are terrible with free time.
Paul Ford: Oh, humans?
Rich Ziade: Well, what do we do? We end up going back.
Paul Ford: World War 2, is what we do.
Rich Ziade: DevOps is a product of free time.
Paul Ford: There’s a lie. I, it’s, um, oh God, well, idle hands make the devil’s work. That kind of like, there is a truth to that, which is if you’re not busy, we know a lot [00:07:00] because of where we are in life. We, we know a lot of people who’ve done really well and, uh, they, they have too much free time.
Rich Ziade: They talk to you about the craziest things.
Paul Ford: Yeah. You wanna know an observation about the wealthy?
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: They buy stuff for their stuff. So they get a boat and then they spend all their time thinking about the chandelier on the boat.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, the leather, the leather trim of the… yeah.
Paul Ford: Listen, the way capitalism works, it’s all, it is what it is … okay, there you go. But the trade off on that is when you spend all your time thinking about the chandelier on the boat, you are never ever gonna be able to connect with a normal human being ever again on earth.
Rich Ziade: You also won’t enjoy the boat. That’s the strangest thing.
Paul Ford: No, no. Cause you’re, all you’re gonna do is look, you’re gonna look at that chandelier.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s the Reno project that takes four years.
Paul Ford: Mm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: And it’s like, wait, that’s like minus four years of my life of not being in the kitchen.
Paul Ford: Oh, wealthy, wealthy people tend to communicate through furniture like they no longer.
Rich Ziade: They do.
Paul Ford: Yeah. [00:08:00] It’s-
Rich Ziade: Let’s bring it all the way back around and set this up for you cause we got a really cool, um, bag, mail, bail bag.
Paul Ford: Oh, right, okay, so thank you. Yes.
Rich Ziade: Hold on. Let me just say, let me just say.
Paul Ford: Back to Alfred.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. Well let’s, let me just say productivity it is good. It feels good, you feel useful. I fixed an outlet this weekend in my bathroom. I like turned off the power to it. My wife thought I would die in the bathroom from an electric shock.
Paul Ford: She was a little hopeful. She’s like, this is almost over [chuckles].
Rich Ziade: Unwired the old one, wired the new one, wrapped it in tape. And when I plugged in my like, rechargeable toothbrush, I felt like a hero.
Paul Ford: Mm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: I felt so good about myself.
Paul Ford: What’s better than that? The feeling-
Rich Ziade: Productivity.
Paul Ford: The checkbox. The X going into the box.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: One of the greatest feelings in the world.
Rich Ziade: It’s a great feeling. And so all of this stuff, you’re depriving yourself of something if you think you’re gonna automate away everything. [00:09:00] And so we got this really interesting, first off I thought it was you.
Paul Ford: So this is, this is from Joshua.
Rich Ziade: Go.
Paul Ford: And, uh, I’ve been a longtime listener to your podcasts. Do you have any advice, or consulting towards getting better at Emacs. That’s my text editor, Paul. I keep hearing people rave about org mode, but I can’t seem to get the hang of it. I do like the Emacs overall, but I’m a two to three trying to get closer to a seven plus skill level out of 10. Thanks so much. Keep up the good work, Josh. Thank you Josh, first of all.
Rich Ziade: Thank you.
Paul Ford: So let’s talk about this for a minute. Let me give a minute or two of real advice and then let’s go Meta.
Rich Ziade: Okay, well I don’t know if people will understand that now.
Paul Ford: I’m gonna explain the whole thing.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: So there are many kinds of ways to edit documents and one of them is a text editor that runs on your computer.
Rich Ziade: Notepad, Microsoft notepad.
Paul Ford: Exactly. So Emacs is like a super notepad that came out of super nerd [00:10:00] world, like literally out of MIT in the seventies.
Rich Ziade: Okay, and just the name is weird. Is it only on Mac?
Paul Ford: No, it’s editor macros. It’s even like before the Macintosh, right? We’re just, we’re way back –
Rich Ziade: It’s called E M A C S?
Paul Ford: Yes. And it’s, it’s legendary as like the super editor. It has a programming language built in. It can do anything.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: And it’s, it’s not attractive in the way the modern software is, but it’s very, very powerful and it can like, you know, for a while, like Slack was out and you could do slack from inside, inside of Emacs. You can tweet from inside of Emacs.
Rich Ziade: You can interface.
Paul Ford: You can read, you can read mail, search mail. You can do anything. Anything you do at words.
Rich Ziade: Okay. Is this free?
Paul Ford: It’s all open source. It’s completely free.
Rich Ziade: Is it in, do you download it for your Windows computer?
Paul Ford: You can download it for any computer.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: Okay, so it is like, it is a, and I’ve been using it for 25 years at this point. It’s a go-to text editor for building complicated piles of code.
Rich Ziade: It’s worth noting, by the way, this is, you’re not gonna see cool icons here.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: This is a [00:11:00] hands-on keyboard power tool.
Paul Ford: No Rich likes to look over my shoulder when I’m using and just laugh at me. And he goes, what the hell is that?
Rich Ziade: Yeah, it’s, it’s ridiculous, but it’s very powerful and people love it. It has incredibly loyal, talk about the community for a minute.
Paul Ford: Programmers love it. Well, look, it’s one of the flagships of the open source movement and it has, you know, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of regular users and it’s free, and it’s been around forever. So it’s very powerful. It has all these special modes for different kinds of programming. So like, If you program it in the C language has a really good mode for that, and if Python and so on, so it’s –
Rich Ziade: So is it an IDE?
Paul Ford: It can be. It’s a little bit of everything, it’s sort of older. It predates all those sort of tools.
Rich Ziade: You’re a writer. Do you write in it?
Paul Ford: That’s the thing. There’s this mode that came out more than a decade ago called org mode for organization. It’s kind of an outliner, like you put an asterisk in front of a of a line and then gives you a headline.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: And you put two asterisks in and it gives you a subhead.
Rich Ziade: Okay, so it’s like markdown.
Paul Ford: Yes, but then you can add to-dos and then you can add, uh, dates and times to the to-dos as headlines.
Rich Ziade: [00:12:00] Okay.
Paul Ford: So now it can create your agenda for you and it can export that to your Google Calendar.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: And if you, if you like all that and you’ve structured your whole world in that way, in one big text file where you bounce around and keep all your notes and ideas and thoughts, you can then hit a certain, um, set of command keys and you can export that to a Word document or a, um, a pdf, uh, or an epub and take it with you. And so, It is a personal organization, slightly, it’s a little bit of a spreadsheet, a little bit of an outliner, and it can make any, you can make any kind of document out of it.
Rich Ziade: Yep.
Paul Ford: So if you’re somebody like me and occasionally I, I used to use it at, I, I’m mostly writing relatively short things, but when I was at Postlight, we’d have these sort of big documents that would need to get produced from time to time. I would start there and I would do my outline, I’d write it, and then it’s very easy to move the chunks around, so on and so forth.
Rich Ziade: Right.
Paul Ford: So, to Josh’s, question, I would say that, and, and back to the, the point that we made earlier, right? It’s all [00:13:00] about the utility. There’s a million videos to watch and there’s a, but you need that goal. For me, the goal was I wanted something, I was writing things and what was beautiful about a to-do list in embedded in your document manager, is you could say this section needs to be written.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: And now I had a, the ability to write things and check them off and export them and make them look pretty and send them to people.
Rich Ziade: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Paul Ford: That goal, like not just organizing my- organizing your life.
Rich Ziade: Mm-hmm.
Paul Ford: Is a false goal that I think everybody has.
Rich Ziade: Oh, the, the to-do app.
Paul Ford: Mm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: Organize your life.
Paul Ford: I tell you what, I’ve given up on it. You know what actually works? Recurring things that you do every day. Emptying the dishwasher. I check that off my head.
Rich Ziade: Patterns, yeah.
Paul Ford: Yes, as long as I empty the dishwasher every day, a lot of other stuff happens. So like the idea that I’m gonna organize it all in a checklist. Nah, but the idea that like, Hey, I know I have to finish that manuscript, and that’s made out of lot of [00:14:00] subtasks. What I love about work mode, what I think is really interesting is it blurs the boundary between the thing you need to do and the thing itself.
Rich Ziade: Hmm.
Paul Ford: And —
Rich Ziade: So write the essay. Is it to-do? And you write the essay in the same tool as the to-do.
Paul Ford: And you check it and it says done.
Rich Ziade: Interesting.
Paul Ford: And it’s all flat text, it’s, so you see, you see elements of this show up in, you know, GitHub checklists and in, in notion and, and things like that.
Rich Ziade: Do you use this every day?
Paul Ford: I used to. I’m not writing as much anymore.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: And so, and so what’s happened-
Rich Ziade: You publish articles, when you write articles for publishing, do you write ’em in, in Emacs?
Paul Ford: Sometimes I outline, sometimes I do note-taking. For the most part, I’ve pitched in Slack to my editor, and then I just pop in and write two pages in Google Docs because I’m writing, when you’re writing six paragraphs, if I’m writing anything longer, I’m gonna be back in this.
Rich Ziade: I see.
Paul Ford: And if I’m doing any sort of granular, like as we’re [00:15:00] talking more about the marketing for our product and we’re doing stuff like that, I’ll do the first draft of the checklist of like, what needs to get done.
Rich Ziade: Mm-hmm.
Paul Ford: I’ll do that in this tool.
Rich Ziade: Let me restate what I’m hearing for, uh, as, and, and frame it as advice, um, for Joshua.
Paul Ford: Yep.
Rich Ziade: Two things. One, the, I think that one of the mistakes people, one of the mistakes people make because software touches our lives in so many ways, is that they think if you, if I just get the right software, I’ll be happier.
Paul Ford: Mm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: That’s got nothing to do with anything.
Paul Ford: Well, and to be fair, all software is marketed that way.
Rich Ziade: All software is marketed that way.
Paul Ford: Here it is, it’s happiness in a jar. You put it on your screen and you, it’s just gonna be amazing for you.
Rich Ziade: Now, um, that’s a trap and doesn’t really work. What, but there are other ways to feel happier, back to what we were saying earlier. When you feel a sense of [00:16:00] control and you feel, um, a, a flow that comes out of even a shallow level of expertise, you are happier, like the power in your hands of knowing your way around a platform or a system or a piece of software is really power, really, really great, really powerful and, and makes you feel good. Put aside how many boxes you got to check.
Paul Ford: Mm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: It’s kind of not the point. The trend of software, and this is, you know, not a bad thing, is that they wanted to make it more and more accessible to the whole world. But I think it’s, there’s a double edge to that, which is, people feeling like experts and feeling good about their skills around it has kind of been shunned aside for, Hey, not only are we gonna make it better for you, but we’re gonna finish your sentences.
Paul Ford: Yes and draw your pictures. You know, there’s a, there’s a really, a thing just popped in my head that I think we [00:17:00] could explore here for a sec, which is, there’s a really big difference between configuration and customization. So configuration is where you spend an enormous amount of your time, Emacs is, is dangerous that way cause you can configure it all day long and just adapt it, adapt it, and anticipate your needs and so on.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: There’s actually, one, the one piece of advice I would give Josh is, if you’re not using it yet, go download Doom Emacs, which is a version where everything’s already configured for you. Then there’s customization, and that is like, not necessarily setting things, but sort of like, here’s the policies and approaches that I use to get good results, right? I, this is, I’ve set my environment up. It’s a few little things. I used to spend an unbelievable amount of time in, configuring everything. It was, it’s a hobby.
Rich Ziade: It’s a hobby.
Paul Ford: right? I’ll get it. I’m gonna solve it. I’m gonna figure out, what you want instead is, and this is the irony with productivity software. Figure out one thing you wanted to do for you.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. [00:18:00]
Paul Ford: Do as much of what it asks you to do to achieve that goal. Do that one thing, and then decide if you want to learn more. See the thing about org mode when he says he’s a two to three and you’d like to be a seven, two to three is a really great place to be because it means you haven’t given your whole life to some freaking piece of software yet. Means you’re just kind of figuring it out as you go.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: Seven should happen organically.
Rich Ziade: Exactly. And, and this was the second point you just made, my second point that I was gonna make. So this is a twofer, two, two pieces of advice for the price of one, um, which is this promise of like, I mean, what you hear in Joshua’s note is like, I’m not good at this yet,
Paul Ford: Yeah. No, Josh, you’re great. You’re
Rich Ziade: you’re great, like
Paul Ford: You can never be bad at productivity software.
Rich Ziade: You can never be bad.
Paul Ford: software’s fault if you’re not great at it.
Rich Ziade: at it. And, and frankly, you could apply this to a lot of different. Aspects of life, like I learned flask and some of the flask libraries like sequel,
Paul Ford: [00:19:00] Okay, you got it. Gotta gotta like, you just lost everybody.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. Python has this really lightweight framework called Flask that lets you build apps really quickly. Python’s a programming language, and I, I go, I went back and forth from wanting to be really good at it. And just wanting to get my thing done smartly and efficiently. And, and there were moments where I felt like such a loser because I was like, wait, I shouldn’t, I cash these pages, they’re never gonna change.
And then I thought to myself, this is for you and like three friends, rich, what you’re building. But I couldn’t help it because I sought out the full knowledge picture.
Paul Ford: let me articulate the goal for you. The goal is to learn when it is not purely for work.
Okay. So there’s work, and work is somebody is, we’re back to deadlines. Somebody’s looking at you and saying, I need it.
Rich Ziade: and it needs to be
Paul Ford: So you better learn. Learn all the skills and tools you can that allow you to meet those goals. But then there’s things you’re doing like flask on the weekends, I’m learning a lot about sound synthesis.
Watch the video and learn just enough to be creative [00:20:00] and solve one little problem.
Rich Ziade: That’s, see, that’s, you’re more mature than
Paul Ford: me. Well, no, I. I went all the way down the path and then I realized like I need one goal to understand sound synthesis, and I decided to simulate a trombone. Okay. And I’m, I got a pretty good trombone going.
Rich Ziade: your poor wife.
Paul Ford: Uh, it’s, I got headphones on.
Rich Ziade: It’s,
Paul Ford: Um, no, and then I’m like learning, I’m reading about tube resonances on the internet, right? Like, this is good for me. And I, I feel that like, that, that is, unless if there’s work that’s work, make it part of your job. And if it’s not, you should be learning just enough that you have a more creative toolkit.
And just fully acknowledge and accept that you’re not gonna be among the best. It’s okay. You’re
Rich Ziade: great, right? You’re doing great. And, and, and it’s fun to learn. It’s fun to grow skills. But there’s comes a point where like, I’m learning stuff just to somehow get accepted
Paul Ford: mm-hmm. And
Rich Ziade: Overflow than, than I am really to become more productive and feel more
Paul Ford: that’s a very dangerous [00:21:00] question.
The, am I a real blank? Is the, is the bane of the technology
Rich Ziade: Yes. And productivity tools actually kind of go at you, right, at the God, because it’s essentially saying, are you a good enough person?
Paul Ford: Yes, that’s right. That’s right.
Rich Ziade: Do you love your children?
Paul Ford: God. And I’ve seen, I’ve seen engineers be like, you know, there’s, there’s just no language that’s better than JavaScript.
And you know, unless they program JavaScript, I don’t wanna work with them. And
Rich Ziade: right. Yeah.
Paul Ford: you lost your mind?
Rich Ziade: exactly. Exactly. Um, so I, I think this was a, this was a useful, uh, uh, Zian Ford,
Paul Ford: for us to decide.
Rich Ziade: it’s true. I hope, uh, people can take something away from this.
Um, uh, Check boxes are good. All the power tools around them. Be careful. Yeah. Look for stuff to make things a little more useful. I think we should use another one. I have a list of things that, that have made me five times faster on my computer that we should just give tips and
Paul Ford: tricks.
Rich Ziade: that we can share with people and then tweet them out
Paul Ford: All right. Give us, give us one more.
Rich Ziade: I’ll give you one. [00:22:00] This one is killer, man. I use it probably 50 times a day. I have a key combination that turns my mouse into a cursor, uh, a plus cursor. I drag it on a region of the screen, it screen grabs it, and then puts it in my clipboard in one
Paul Ford: time. Oh yeah. This is wild.
Because the Mac, you take that screenshot and now it like puts a little preview down the bottom and then you got,
Rich Ziade: tells you, do you want to annotate it?
Do you want to save it?
Paul Ford: I want is the screenshot to paste into this
Rich Ziade: I need it in my clipboard and, and it’s, it is an
Paul Ford: What tool did you use to do this?
Rich Ziade: There’s a wonderful macro, super simple macro tool. You can use Automator,
Paul Ford: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: There’s a super simple macro tool for Mac that’s free.
I didn’t even hit the pay trip wire on it. It’s called Keysmith
Paul Ford: Keysmith,
Rich Ziade: Yeah. There’s another Keysmith combination. Um, Command V means paste, right? Mm-hmm. In Mac or [00:23:00] control V means paste,
Paul Ford: Command V and Mac. Yep.
Rich Ziade: Um, I have option V that does paste and match style. Oh
Paul Ford: Oh yeah. It’s important,
Rich Ziade: uh, because you know, a lot of angry emails get written in different places and then get pasted in and it’s in different gray colors.
Paul Ford: have sent so many emails that look like ransom notes.
It’s so disappointing.
Rich Ziade: So pace and match style. Like I often, I wanna do it more than just paste and there’s others and we should maybe have you just st This has been like a five pack of
Paul Ford: No, no, but you know what, what, what we’re getting to and this is how we can close this out. Getting better at the thing is fine.
That’s a good goal. But just like identifying the small things and fixing them one at a time. Absolutely. That’s the way forward.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. Um, we should have that podcast. I think let’s just give people cool little snack size tips.
Paul Ford: The hell with this podcast. Let’s go have that podcast.
Rich Ziade: what is this podcast sponsored by? Do we have a sponsor yet?
Paul Ford: God. We do. And, and we’re very, very, very, very, very close to [00:24:00] bringing people in to use this tool. Our.
Rich Ziade: Wait, what? Yeah. Isn’t someone paying us for ads, Paul?
Paul Ford: Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Yes. We’re sponsored by a board, a company that, uh, rich and I co-founded, but whatever. Uh, a board. What, what does a board do?
Rich Ziade: A board.com is gonna let you take. In the entire internet and organize your passions in one place. And it’s beautiful and it’s gonna be launched very soon.
A few weeks from now.
Paul Ford: God, it is good.
Rich Ziade: Sign up for the beta.
Paul Ford: All right, well that’s it. Check us out z ford.com. Check us out on Twitter at z Ford.
Send an email to Hello at z ford. Josh, thank you for your email. Uh, let’s get back to work.
Rich Ziade: have a lovely
Paul Ford: this product. Yes. Bye. [00:25:00] [00:26:00]