Another rough day. Everything feels like one step forward and two steps back. Somebody new joins the team... another person leaves. And that person that left was loved by the client. A client who is now cranky because the team keeps changing. So you make time to smooth things over. But... you're tired. And for every hurdle you clear you can see two more ahead of you. So where do you find the energy to keep going? Journey on fearless reader, the answers await you below.
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Carl: Talk about a cold open, that one was ice cold. Oh my God. It's like, it's not very good. I'm pretty sure, that's why the audio version that doesn't have the cold open.
Gene: Right.
Carl: That's why more people do that.
Gene: Something special for the video watchers.
Carl: I feel taller than you. I'm watching what we got going on here. Maybe I'll scoot back a little. No, no. Then I can't hear myself. That's no good. I have, for those at home, I apologize for the change in audio quality.
Gene: Let's do the whole, the all forehead show.
Carl: Oh yeah. No, I can't go much further back because my forehead extends to the back of my head now. I can't really do that. Gene, last week I did a newsletter that felt repetitive and the subject line was 'Another Rough Day'.
Gene: Is this one Yet Another Rough Day?
Carl: Yet Another Rough Day and how to get through it. That's why, like when I was telling you, we just need to tell more of this stuff because when we did the we got sued episode, we had a lot of people reach out going, "Oh my God, I'm having a bad day, but it's not that bad."
Gene: Whatever we can do to help you guys.
Carl: The catharsis of this stuff I think is great. I just wanted to really quickly, I'm not going to say who sent these because I don't have permission, but we got some great stuff in the mailbox.
Gene: Do it.
Carl: The first one I thought was great, "You had me at fearless reader." These are all people who basically responded to the last newsletter. I needed this today. I already added expression is the opposite of depression to a post-it note. I thought that was a great phrase. I don't know who really gets credit for saying that originally.
Gene: Right.
Carl: I'm taking credit. No. Expression is the opposite of depression. Whoa. Okay. You know what? Thanks, Madonna. Express yourself. This 80s reference brought to you by Twix. Okay. The newsletter topics in recent weeks have assured me that I'm not alone. We're all in the midst of these industry-wide challenges.
Gene: Yes.
Carl: There you go.
Gene: You're not alone.
Carl: My absolutely favorite-
Gene: We're all fucking up here.
Carl: We are. My absolute favorite, my COO and I just forwarded this to each other at the same time.
Gene: Whoa. That's uncanny.
Carl: There you go. That's kind of fun.
Gene: Let's go.
Carl: Hey, thanks for sending those in. If you're listening to podcasts, you've got a question you want to ask, or if you read the newsletter, which you should be-
Gene: Or a vent, you want to vent-
Carl: There you go, or maybe hey, join and get in the Slack channels. Any of that stuff. I'm already selling stuff, Gene.
Gene: You can't stop.
Carl: I'm like a door to door membership salesman. Seriously, send us those notes. They go so far. I mean, they help us understand what's going on. Today, Gene, as opposed to hygiene, I am so sorry, that's like fifth grade. Did you have to deal with that a lot?
Gene: I apparently still do.
Carl: No, dude, if there's one thing I know about you, it's not hygiene.
Gene: No.
Carl: No. That's not [crosstalk 00:04:04], but I thought, hey, let's just talk about really shitty days we had that didn't involve the law, I mean, at work.
Gene: I did just get a speeding ticket.
Carl: Okay. Was it that bad?
Gene: Nah.
Carl: How fast were you going?
Gene: 60 in a 45.
Carl: Oh, that's not bad.
Gene: Yeah. It wasn't too bad.
Carl: I got pulled over once doing 108 in a 55.
Gene: Did you go to jail?
Carl: No.
Gene: Oh wow.
Carl: It was a county road from Ocala to Gainesville and I had a souped up Mustang-
Gene: [inaudible 00:04:47].
Carl: And the cop pulls me over and he was like, there's nobody on the road, and he was just like, "I was literally going home when something just flew past me."
Gene: It was you.
Carl: I was like, "Yeah?" And he was like, "Yeah." He goes, "Pop the hood."
Gene: Yeah. I want to see.
Carl: There's the privilege coming through for you. Yeah. But yeah, so that wasn't a bad day. Gene, you want to go? I got three here. I just realized a fourth one. I did have a couple of people ask me about the IRS thing with Pilar Sanchez. I probably should share that story a little bit too.
Gene: I don't think I've heard that story.
Carl: Well, I just mentioned it briefly on the last episode and a couple of people came out. You know what? I'm going to start actually with the only job I had in college, Gene, I was a sandwich artist. I worked at Subway.
Gene: I've heard that.
Carl: For three nights.
Gene: Three nights?
Carl: I was the jackass who had to pay a deposit for my apron because I don't know.
Gene: Wait, they make you make a deposit for your apron?
Carl: Yeah. Evidently a lot of people just make a bunch of sandwiches and bail.
Gene: Well, that's kind of lunch [inaudible 00:06:12].
Carl: I guess I had gotten to this point where my dad was just tired of floating me over the summers. I go and I get this job and it's across the street from a nightclub called Electric Avenue. It was just a shit show at 2:00 AM.
Gene: Sounds like it.
Carl: When that place let out, and the first night I was there, I guess I worked and my shift was done like around 8:00 PM. Not a big deal. Evidently, I didn't burn the joint to the ground so they let me close the second night I'm there.
Gene: Well, it is Subway.
Carl: I get to close. Now, there was somebody else there who had been working there a little while. I remember at 2:00 AM, because we were open until 3:00 AM. At 2:00 AM, that nightclub let out and so many drunks came over and I mean it was like puke city. It was like all this junk, everybody yelling at us, all this kind of stuff. On that third night, I unplugged the sign and I locked the door and I just went in the back.
Gene: [inaudible 00:07:21].
Carl: Oh man, because that was their most profitable hour of the week, Friday night, Saturday night.
Gene: Your job was to make sandwiches for drunk people.
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: That's all you have.
Carl: That was it. There was that and then there was also that we had, earlier that night, agreed that we were going to do it. Me and the other person I was working with, he had already gotten another job, a sweet gig at Winn-Dixie. I remember we called a bunch of friends and we were like, "It's free triple meat tonight." Yeah, that happened. I will say this, I will say this about that experience. I learned-
Gene: Why was that bad though? That sounds like a great afternoon.
Carl: Well yeah, the late afternoon-early evening was great. It wasn't until, again, when ... Okay, so I stole from the company. That's what we're saying. I locked the door and unplugged the sign. The thing I found out the next day, the guy who was the manager calls me at like 7:00 AM, because I had left a message for him the night before. The message was, "Hey, we kind of trashed the place. Sorry." I get a call from him at 7:00 AM. "Hey, corporate is coming in today to meet with me. I can't get in there because I have a DUI." I had to go pick up the guy, drive him the like 40 minutes to that place from where he lived, right, he lived in the outskirts of town. Then I just started cleaning like a mofo, trying to get the joint back to a place so he wouldn't lose his job. I think that was the first time I realized that every time I do something stupid, it's going to impact another human. I don't think I ever realized that before.
Gene: You realized your actions have consequences-
Carl: Thanks, dad.
Gene: And that was the worst day of your life.
Carl: No, it wasn't the worst day of my life, it was just a rough time. I remember he did not lose his job. I remember that.
Gene: Well, it is Subway after all.
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: You probably wouldn't have lost your job if you [inaudible 00:09:24].
Carl: I'll tell you what, my dad was so that I wasn't bringing home those sandwiches anymore. That was all he said. He said, "So you quit?" I was like, "Yeah." He goes, "What about the sandwiches?" I was like, "They're still making them."
Gene: I can't get the sandwiches anymore.
Carl: Whatever.
Gene: Well, I mean, priorities man. Well, that's a fascinating story.
Carl: That was the first job young [inaudible 00:09:47] had after numerous high school gigs. What about you? What's a time where you were just like, I have really messed this thing up.
Gene: Yeah. Wow. About eight years ago I think.
Carl: Okay.
Gene: I don't know. Shit all blends together, but I was sort of like doing way too much. Right? I was running, Period Three had been going for 10 years, 9 or 10 years. I'm cocky about that, I had been doing events for four or five years. Those were doing pretty well. I was cocky about that.
Carl: You were crushing on the events, man.
Gene: We were the first, it's not really a franchise, but sort of pseudo franchise thing of Iron Yard. That was the first class had gone and that was doing well. We'd started the co-work and it was doing okay. I was doing a lot of shit-
Carl: In the old days of fishing we'd have called that porcupining.
Gene: Porcupining?
Carl: You just had as many lines out as you could get out there, man.
Gene: Something like that.
Carl: Something's going to hit.
Gene: Yeah. But at the same time, the same team that I'd been working with was working at Period Three and we'd gotten involved in a project and it was probably beyond the scope of what we could pull off, as sometimes things tend to go. I just kind of took my eye off the wheel of that one and let the insane people run the asylum on that project. The client wasn't a great client. The team was kind of crazy. That was a bad mixture. They wound up taking a bunch of money and not doing anything, any work, for the most part. Then it got to the point where there's really no way to catch up, this is too far, too long of not enough shit being done and we'd spent the money and the client was like, "Well, I'll just take the money back." And it was like, "Well they spent it."
Carl: No you won't.
Gene: Yeah. That was a bad day in terms of dealing with that client, me, because I still own the business. I was still liable and responsible. This client called me out on my liability.
Carl: Publicly?
Gene: No, but very angrily. Just dealing with that, the things that were said, basically we were out of business at that point and it was kind of like just making a decision on how to go down. It was a bad day.
Carl: I'm going to tell you what I think you did wrong.
Gene: Go for it.
Carl: You were keeping your eye on the wheel.
Gene: Put your hands on the wheel, yeah.
Carl: And your hand on the ball. Just to say, the second you took your eye off the wheel, you should put your hands on it.
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: Starting to understand a lot more about what was happening over there.
Gene: Yeah. You have some good insight, but it's funny that that moment, while it was a very bad day, I mean, I'm not going to share the things that she said. I mean, it was very mean.
Carl: Come on, just say something, just one of them, just one of them, just one, come on Gene.
Gene: No.
Carl: Come on, get our numbers up. Get our numbers up, Gene.
Gene: It affected me, like psychologically, like it was a definite failure moment. You know?
Carl: You were like, what did you change?
Gene: Well, the first step was sort of coming to terms with like, okay, well, like everything, like Period Three, this company as it existed, is done. Just realizing that. Confronting the team and letting them know that this shit has changed, whatever, the client basically telling us that, but deciding that there's one way to do this where we just like, fuck the world and just blow it up and we hide from everyone, or face your problems and learn from them. That's the path we chose.
Carl: There you go.
Gene: I wound up, I think we talked about this. I wound up doing a bunch of work to sort of work off the liability.
Carl: Oh yeah. [inaudible 00:14:29].
Gene: That was me personally doing that, but doing that and doing it the right way, now looking back at it, I think I learned probably more in that instance about myself and the business than I did before that. It wouldn't have happened had I not screwed up so bad or not paid attention or took my eyes off the wheel.
Carl: Would you say the option you had was to unplug the sign and hide in the back?
Gene: Yes.
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: I thought about it. I struggled with it. I struggled with it.
Carl: That didn't work out.
Gene: I could have done that.
Carl: I had a career as a sandwich artist, Gene, and I flushed it down the yard after I took my eye off the wheel. Okay.
Gene: That was a very bad day, you talk about bad days, but that was not a bad day in terms of like, the police didn't show up or like I wasn't sued, there was no lawsuit, it was nothing. There's nobody knocking on the door trying to come punch me in the face. You know? It was just, I mean, this person was hundreds of miles away, but was still able to get into my head. I mean, they got into my head for a good week and it was bad.
Carl: How much money?
Gene: You know, I don't even remember.
Carl: Oh, come on.
Gene: I honestly don't because it was very much tied up into a bunch of stuff. We wound up working off about $45,000.
Carl: Okay.
Gene: It was more, but through negotiations and whatever.
Carl: It's not your fault. It's not your fault. You kept your ear to the grindstone and that's what's going to happen.
Gene: There's a such thing as the forensic GitHub researcher.
Carl: You mentioned this. I had never heard this before.
Gene: Crazy.
Carl: It goes in there and verifies if you did or didn't do, and they're totally wrong anyway.
Gene: Yeah. It's like, that's not how commits work, but whatever dude. You know?
Carl: Yeah. I didn't mention the Pilar Sanchez one before with the IRS?
Gene: Yeah. That's a new one. Right.
Carl: The IRS coming in to [Engine 00:16:41]. I didn't mention this one?
Gene: No, I've never heard that story.
Carl: All right. We had been working really hard with one of our clients, big bank, rhymes with race. You've probably heard of them.
Gene: Visa?
Carl: Yeah, you got it. No, it's Chase. Right? We had this amazing opportunity. We've been working with the Jacksonville Group, which they managed home equity and they manage lines of credit and all this kind of stuff. There was a group in Jersey that was coming down and they wanted to meet with us because they'd seen the work that we'd been doing. I was really on-point to make sure that we did everything we could to look just solid. The thing was we had a thousand square foot office with an open floor plan in a pretty nice part of town, but it was obvious when you walked in, I mean, it smelled like dudes. It was like, this is not a place of business. This is where some guys go to make sure that they can pay their rent. Right? Then, so we cleaned it up and all this kind of stuff.
Gene: I had that kind of office before.
Carl: Yeah you have, man. We go in there and we're sitting around this table, we've got the people from Chase in from Jersey, the Jacksonville folks, way too many people for this little Ikea table. We're sitting there and we're talking. They're saying about the things that they're impressed with and how they want to work together. There's a $200,000 project on the line, a usability project. We'd been doing some usability work for them. That was part of what we were going to get brought up to do. Right about then, the door opens and we look like a retail place. Right?
Carl: I mean, occasionally people would walk in and just be confused. We would say, "Unless you need a website ..." This woman walks in, she's probably about five foot three, has a determined look in her eye, and says, "Can I talk to the owner?" I was like, "Yeah. Yeah." I stood up because I was like, "I don't want to be disrespectful to this person, obviously it's a big deal." I walked over and I was like, "Yeah, how can I help you?" She goes, "I'm Pilar Sanchez with the IRS. I need to speak with you about some of your tax payments." I went, "Okay." And I literally said, "If this is like a jail and bail or one of those kind of things where somebody sends you over here and then you like, rough me up, I'd really appreciate it if we could do this later." She shows me her badge and she goes, "It's not a jail and bail. We need to talk."
Gene: We're going to do it now.
Carl: I was like, "Okay." In a thousand square foot office, I like walk over to one corner and [inaudible 00:19:22]. We can go over to the corner. We should have gone outside. In retrospect, we should have gone outside.
Gene: Probably.
Carl: That may have even been worse because our windows, you could see out but you couldn't see in. Suddenly everybody would have been ... I go over, all I can think is I've just got to give her money and she's going to go away. I said, "Detective Sanchez, Ms. Sanchez, I don't know what your name is." Right? No, but basically said, "What do I need to do for you to be able to leave right now?" And she goes, "I need a payment of $16,000."
Gene: And you're like, "What?"
Carl: I said, "We owe you $16,000." She's like, "No, no, you owe about $40,000. This would be a good faith payment that I would be able to go and we could schedule a meeting later." I just opened the checkbook which was sitting there and I wrote a check for $16,000 and I handed it to her and I had no idea if we had that money in the bank or not. No idea. Go back, sit down. It is obvious that this has spooked the crap out of Chase, because they think now we've got tax problems and all this kind of stuff. Yeah. We lost that project. We did get other projects later and maybe we ended up like recovering but man, at that moment, a $200,000 usability project where you hand over a report after traveling around the country to not the best places in the world, places that basically replicate America. Okay? That's where you're going.
Carl: I remember it ended up, we had hired a controller who had been kind of a friend from other places and they had not changed payroll. When people started getting paid more or we brought on new people, they never changed our payroll taxes for two years. Yeah. The thing was Pilar Sanchez ended up being an awesome human. I'm sure she just got the run around every time she went anywhere.
Gene: Oh come on, yeah.
Carl: I went in there and sat down with the controller and he owned it and she goes, "Look, I can get rid of the penalties and all that, and the interest and all that stuff." At the end of it, I think we ended up, we were probably somewhere in the mid twenties that we had to pay. I did call her after everybody left and I said, "Could you just give me a few minutes before you cash that check?" She did laugh. That was, I think that was when we kind of, she knew I was trying.
Gene: Right.
Carl: Yeah, that was a costly mistake. I'll tell you what, I learned that day you keep shit buttoned up with the damned IRS man. You never ever want to have that situation where, maybe we should have locked the door. I don't know what to do in that office. Yeah, that was not a great day, Gene.
Gene: Well it's a good idea to have an office with offices inside of it so you can go in there.
Carl: That was a money situation. I mean, think about it. We had just started out. We were maybe in our second year.
Gene: You were saving all that money from payroll tax.
Carl: We were.
Gene: What were you doing with it?
Carl: I think I mentioned this before, Gene, tequila. Really nice tequila.
Gene: Man, that's funny. Yeah. I've never had a situation, well, oh, I take that back. I have had an IRS situation. This was not a bad day. I don't know if it fits. This was a fun day.
Carl: You know, hey, let's, you know what? Let's have this be the sorbet into my worst day.
Gene: I used to work for this company Realty.com.
Carl: I know them.
Gene: It's different, man, this was like 20 years ago.
Carl: Parsippany, New Jersey, man.
Gene: Nah, this is a different company. I think they sold the domain.
Carl: Okay.
Gene: Whatever Realty.com is now, it's like a completely different business. This was a long time ago. Like the owner is not alive anymore.
Carl: Is this part of the story of your day where things went well?
Gene: No, but ... Let's see. I don't know. Apparently, like the company blew up. They went out of business, they sold all the assets, that's probably where somebody bought that domain name. Whatever, went out of business, it was a startup, I was like, "Oh, that sucks. I lost my job." One day, it was like three years later, I'm working at, we were working at home and I hear doosh doosh doosh on the door, like a police officer knocks on the door.
Carl: No way.
Gene: I was like, "Hmm, that sounds like the police." Before I can get downstairs, doosh, doosh, doosh. I go to the, I look through the people, and there's these guys in these blue suits, whatever. I'm like, these guys look like agents of some kind. I open the door a little bit. I'm like, "Can I help you?" They're like, "Are you Mr. Crawford?" I'm like, "Yeah." They flash me the IRS badge. The other guy has the badge. They've got guns on their hips. I'm immediately like, "What the hell did I do?" I was like, "What'd I do, fellas?" They're like, "No, we're investigating this case of this person." And it was the person's name that I used to work for. I was like, "Oh, come on in." They come in and I start telling them everything I knew. They were like, "What are you doing for the next two hours?" I was like, "I don't know." They're like "Get in the car." I get in the car. They race me down to the local IRS headquarters, I didn't know there was one. There was like an-
Carl: We have an FBI headquarters here.
Gene: Yeah. It was the FBI headquarters. They had me in the room and they made me record my statement or whatever, and that was it. A few years later, I get a letter saying, "Thanks, whatever, we were able to prosecute so and so. Thanks for your input." Or whatever. I was like-
Carl: Here's a gift card to Applebee's.
Gene: I was like, "Holy shit."
Carl: Try the fajitas.
Gene: I tell that story in contrast to what you just told. You had problems, but you were able to like-
Carl: Yeah. There was no gun.
Gene: Make some jokes, get your shit cut down by half. This guy went to prison.
Carl: Yeah, well thank God you didn't kill him. Because the way you started, I thought, "So I'm podcasting with an ax murderer." I didn't know where we were going here.
Gene: Well, it was fun riding in that car. They were driving really fast.
Carl: That sounds like it would be fun.
Gene: But what did this person do? I'm like what, they never told me like what they were doing, but like, holy shit, what was I part of? What was he doing? I was building a damned website.
Carl: Do you want to hear the worst one? You want to hear the-
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: The day I thought my career was over?
Gene: Let's do it. Your sandwich career?
Carl: No, no. This was in advertising. We'd gone through, we had an opportunity with Comcast and this would have been in, this was before Comcast was Comcast, right? Before they won the acquisition wars. We had just started doing interactive stuff at the agency. Comcast was coming down because we had had a lot of success with banner ads. We were working with the Jaguars. I had talked to Yahoo, there were seven people over there. I'll never forget Paul Marillo told me, he was helping me understand how to get people to click on stuff. We were click through trick through kings.
Gene: Yeah, I mean-
Carl: We could get anybody to click on something and then bail within two seconds. That was what we did, we're like [inaudible 00:26:57]. At the time we didn't even know we were doing anything wrong. They come down, I put together this presentation, I explained the movement we'd been able to get for Continental who was our local cable provider. Some other work that we had done and how we had basically helped the Jags with some season ticket stuff. You know? They were like, "Well, this is amazing." The guy who we were talking to was in charge of all of their interactive media, which was about $1.3 million in ad spend. Okay? Now, he said, as he's leaving the table, "This is great. Really want to work with y'all. Put together a plan so that I can understand what we'll be doing."
Carl: Now, I had already been doing some media director stuff. I had kind of taken that role over. I was kind of head of interactive, head of media, basically anybody I complained about how they did their job, my boss Melanie would basically say, "Okay, then you do it." I'd be like, "Okay, well I will." And then I would, and then suddenly I've got like all this responsibility and I'm like 26 years old. I don't know how old I was. Anyway, so I was probably 28, but I sit down and this guy was going on vacation for two weeks. He said, "When I get back, I'll give you a call." He's gone. I start just researching all of the different media outlets. Right? Point Cast was a thing at the time. I don't know if you remember this, but basically it was like your screensaver would suddenly be the news. This was big stuff.
Gene: I remember that. [inaudible 00:28:42] installed. Yeah.
Carl: Yeah. We all did, man. Point Cast. I'm calling them, I'm calling Yahoo, I'm calling all of the just huge consumer facing ... I'm calling Double Click, I'm calling the networks, I'm doing all this kind of stuff. I spent a week and suddenly I'm getting stuff sent to me, like swag and all this kind of stuff. People realize that-
Gene: Yeah, they're trying to win your account.
Carl: I mean, they know it's a multi ... I mean, I think it was actually bigger than 1.3, but it was definitely in that range. It could have been higher, but I just remember, I probably tried to make it lower over my lifetime so it doesn't feel so horrible. I remember just getting all this stuff and people calling me and people asking, "So what's going on with this?" And I'm like, "Well, we're just putting together the plan. When he gets back in town, we're going to review it and I'll let you know." And all this kind of stuff.
Carl: I get this plan together. I have literally put in a couple of 50 hour weeks. I am like wanting to impress this guy so much. My boss is so happy with me because we got this in. You get a good percentage of that ad spend, plus we'd get the creative, we'd get all the stuff. I mean, banner ads aren't exactly like everything, but it's something. Right? We go through, and this does feel like a crack in the door to getting more of this big national interactive media. The guy, I come back on Monday morning that he's supposed to be there and there's a voicemail that evidently came in over the weekend and it's from him. It's just six words. "What the fuck did you do?"
Gene: Six. Wow.
Carl: What the fuck did you do, and he hung up.
Gene: What?
Carl: Evidently, every single outlet that I called, everybody that I talked to called him and said, "We have contracts."
Gene: What?
Carl: "What are you doing?" Then the people they had been working with found out that I was calling these people saying that we had gotten the project, which I don't know if I ever said we got the account, but that doesn't matter. Right? I'm sitting there and I'm just going, in my head I don't know what's happened here. I'm nervous. I'm sweating. My stomach is tied up in knots. I call him and I say, "Hey, I'm just," he took the call. I'm like, "Hey, I just, I'm not sure I understand." He said, "We never gave you the account. I never told you you could act on my behalf. I don't know if this is immaturity or stupidity, but we're done." He hung up.
Gene: Whoa.
Carl: I was like, "All right, I got to go tell my boss. I got to go tell Melanie that I just lost this thing that I brought in."
Gene: Right.
Carl: No, no, it doesn't work that way. I am just one tiny little piece of this organization that got the opportunity to even sit at that table. I remember walking down the hallway, a total Hitchcock moment. Everything's stretching out. The difference is, I want it to take forever. I don't want to get to the end. I walk in and she's on the phone.
Gene: With the guy.
Carl: As far as I know.
Gene: Could be.
Carl: She just, this is the look I get. She hangs up and I just look at her. I said, "I really, I don't know what happened. I misunderstood when he left and he said, put this together. How can I put this together without ..." And she just looked at me and she goes, "Stop. You screwed the fucking pooch. Get out of my office. Close the door." I did, I remember I went back and I sat down.
Gene: I'm done.
Carl: That week, I just kept the lowest of low profiles. I called the majority of those media outlets to apologize and say that I had overstepped and I didn't realize it and that it was a mistake and I really appreciate it and I would send them back all the swag if they wanted. I didn't care, man. I just wanted everything to be okay. Then a few days later, I remember I was getting a cup of coffee and my boss Melanie walked in, she looked at me and she goes "Fucking idiot." And then she gave me a hug and she walked out. I was like, "Oh, thank God. Oh, thank God." But it took her a few days. There were still people that would not look at me. I remember, man. Yeah. That, without a doubt-
Gene: Did you really overstep or were you just, [inaudible 00:33:52].
Carl: I don't know. I think I was so excited. I don't have video of the moment, but other people who were in the room said "You got a lot of work to do." I just don't know how I could get those rates, I guess I could have said "I have a client. I can't explain who it is." I mean, that's the thing, and I walked away from that day knowing you double and triple check before you share anything publicly about a client or an employee or anybody.
Gene: Right. You have way more finesse now in your life, I mean, in the way you deal with things.
Carl: I'm very fancy. I am. Yeah.
Gene: I mean, early on, all of us were very much bull in a China shop, just the smashing shit, trying to get shit done.
Carl: Yeah. You don't think about it, right? I mean, I just remember he said-
Gene: Like I'm here on a mission, what's your problem?
Carl: Those seven figures, it's like when he said it, it was like a cartoon of that amount of money coming out of his mouth and everybody in the room on my side of the table going [inaudible 00:34:50] we just couldn't believe.
Gene: [inaudible 00:34:51].
Carl: We thought maybe they got a few hundred thousand dollars, but yeah.
Gene: You were earnest and you were earnest in your effort though, right? It wasn't like, I mean-
Carl: Aw man, I think I was super sincere in everything that I did. I'm sure I was cocky as hell walking out of that room, but never intended to screw up anything for anybody, even the other company that had it, and definitely not the person I love the most, who was my boss, Melanie.
Gene: What I don't understand is the fact that a search engine could do some unscrupulous stuff. I don't believe you at all.
Carl: Oh man, come on now, Comcast?
Gene: [inaudible 00:35:34].
Carl: They're the biggest of the bigs, come on now. That was crazy. We did keep working with them though. We did keep working with them.
Gene: Those providers hosed you, man. They were just like, "We got contracts." You were like, "How the hell do you have a contract?" They're just full of shit.
Carl: Yeah, it could be. It could be, but regardless
Gene: They were just going after that money.
Carl: Oh my God. You know what? You know what, Gene? This is going to bring me to the hot take of the day here.
Gene: Let's go man.
Carl: You ready for the hot take?
Gene: Let's do it.
Carl: This was in the newsletter. I realized, in this business, when you're running a digital shop, when you're working at a digital shop, whatever, you only lose when you quit trying. Because you just keep going, that's the thing. It's like, unless you end up in jail like your friend from Realty.com. Right?
Gene: He is not my friend. He is not my friend.
Carl: Oh, come on. Y'all were pals. That time when you didn't kill him, I think y'all bonded. Even if you're in jail, I know people who've been in jail. Okay. Whatever. They kept working, somehow. I don't get it. It's like, I know people who lost everything, but started working on a computer in the library to build the stuff they were building. We only lose when we quit. It's like, if you had enough and you got to move on to something else, that's great. If you love what you're doing and you had a series of unfortunate incidents that have knocked you to the curb, catch your breath, stand up, just keep going.
Gene: Get to work. Man. I love it. I love the [crosstalk 00:37:12]-
Carl: That's the hot take. That's the hot take baby.
Gene: That's a good one. All right, man.
Carl: Gene, I got work to do.
Gene: Me too. All right, man.
Carl: I got pooches to ... No.
