Planning Through the Vibe Shift

March 26, 2024  ·  27 min 11 sec

Can we all agree that the vibes are off? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich dig into our broader societal malaise (the effects of the pandemic; our phones as an endless portal to misery) and discuss how business leaders can combat these feelings. Plus: Some early analysis of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Apple, and a story about a Formula 1 team using a single Excel spreadsheet for…everything.

Transcript

Paul Ford: Hello, friends. I am Paul Ford, the co-founder of Aboard.

Rich Ziade: I’m Rich Ziade, the other co-founder of Aboard.

Paul: And this is the Aboard Podcast.

Rich: You can check out Aboard at aboard.com. It’s a tool to help you organize everything, get work done. It’s personal productivity, but it’s also, you can share it with others. Check it out.

[intro music]

Paul: So Rich, we have a couple subjects for this podcast. I kind of want to move us along, give it a little, you know, like a classic twist.

Rich: You drive.

Paul: All right, I’m going to do that. So I thought we could hit a little news, and then you had a subject you wanted to hit, which was how the vibes are off.

Rich: The vibes are off.

Paul: And we want to talk about the vibes for a minute.

Rich: It’s March 21st—

Paul: 2024.

Rich: 2024. This will air next week, so this might be old news next week. Everything is old news within an hour.

Paul: I think the vibes may still be off next week. So we should tell the people also, we’re the co-founders of this company. We talk about big, broad, interesting, wild, weird stuff that we think is cool, rather than beating you over the head with our wonderful, wonderful product that you should check out, great new things are coming soon. We should just hit it. Just because we always talk about this. Apple’s getting sued for antitrust. The whole market was up, and then it was like, “No, I’m sad now.” Market’s sad.

Rich: I don’t know if the market’s sad. It’s just that Apple is one of the biggest planets in the solar system. As you look at, like, when you see the S&P 500, that’s just 500 stocks.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: One of them is Apple, and Apple—

Paul: 50 of them.

Rich: Apple got punched in the face today.

Paul: What is the case? What is the U.S.—

Rich: The United States.

Paul: OK.

Rich: Is suing Apple.

Paul: OK.

Rich: For pretty much anti-competitive practices.

Paul: Which one’s bigger?

Rich: United States.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Definitely.

Paul: It’s got a couple trillion in spending, whereas Apple is just worth a couple trillion.

Rich: I saw a chart once where they went through the biggest economies and companies, and Apple was kind of in the middle amongst countries—

Paul: You know who always does badly in that is Spain. Like Portugal, everybody’s given up on years ago.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But then they’re like, Spain. Apple’s a lot bigger than Spain.

Rich: It’s shocking.

Paul: Yeah. And you’re. That was they. They used to really be quite something. Anyway, so why are we suing again?

Rich: Well, I think the Apple iPhone ecosystem—

Paul: Okay.

Rich: You can’t say, oh, Apple dominates mobile phones, because Androids, I don’t know the stats, it’s probably exceeds—

Paul: It’s more.

Rich: —around the world.

Paul: It’s cheap.

Rich: It’s cheaper and whatnot. So that’s not the issue. They’re not shutting out another device maker. The issue is the billion—one billion—iPhones out in the world have effectively created an economy inside of them.

Paul: Right, fair enough. Yeah.

Rich: I mean, my phones are used as wallets, so you can put your credit cards on them.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: Phones can install apps where other businesses effectively thrive through Apple’s ecosystem as well as others.

Paul: No, and I mean, as a company that produces software, I love being in the Apple App Store, going through their approval process, and then if I ever try to get any revenue, I can gladly give them 30%. That’s great for me and the capitalist society that I live in.

Rich: [overlapping] That’s right. There’s a set of rules that you have to comply with to be in Apple’s ecosystem, and those rules pretty much openly, it’s not even covert, say that if you tread on functionality that we already put in?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: We won’t let you in.

Paul: It’s just Tim Cook going, “I need to wet my beak.”

Rich: [laughing] Well, it’s not just about them taking money. Well, I’ll give you an example. This was big news years ago. To buy a book for your Kindle app, you had to leave the Kindle app, go to a browser—

Paul: Yeah. Yes.

Rich: Open Amazon, buy the book, then go back to your Kindle app and sync it. You couldn’t buy things in the Kindle app. You couldn’t do that why? Because they had iBooks, which is their bookstore thing.

Paul: You know what I love is when something like that doesn’t really work. But then one day it starts working and you’re like, wow, you guys got together and decided to really screw us together. That’s beautiful.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. There are other examples of where really, the businesses that are on the ecosystem make their money through smaller transactions as part of the relationship with the customer. Like video games—

Paul: Sure.

Rich: Where you’re buying items and whatnot.

Paul: Oh, and they’ve been at war with Epic Games for a while.

Rich: That’s right. And so, you know, Apple’s like, look, you’re going to do money transactions on a phone—on our phone. We want our cut.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right? So Apple’s counterargument is this—

Paul: If it was 2.5%, like a credit card? Okay. It’s 30%.

Rich: Well, even 30, I don’t know if that’s the—that’s not their argument.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Their argument is, Apple’s argument, let’s start with Apple’s argument, is, you don’t have to be here. You’re on our land.

Paul: True. Go on over to Android.

Rich: Go to Android. Right? And that argument, for many years, was valid. And for a lot of companies, if you look at the history of companies that start to get anti-competitive is they reach a certain scale.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Well, you could say, yeah, we are on your land, but you’re two thirds of the earth.

Paul: Right.

Rich: It’s too big.

Paul: Right.

Rich: And now what you’re starting to see is it is big enough to thwart markets, to thwart marketplaces, to thwart competition, and it actually becomes counterproductive to the economy as a whole. That’s the argument. That’s why the United—why would the United States care to sue Apple? Is if you’re starting to constrain the forces that can drive growth in a marketplace, then we’re going to come and rein you in.

Paul: All right. What’s the best thing for consumers that could happen as a result of this?

Rich: I mean, the best thing that could happen is that we have more options, that competition drives down cost, because what happens is a lot of people have to factor in that cut that Apple takes. It’s kind of like the mob.

Paul: It is real. You’re like, all right, I need to add—and a lot of people do that. They’re like, if you don’t buy it on apple, I can give it to you a lot cheaper.

Rich: They try that.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But very often they eat it. And by eating it, essentially, the dynamics that lead to innovation and competition, that is good for everybody, often consumers, too, is sort of stunted. Like, they effectively have control over this gated community, and they can price how they want. That’s what you have here. So we’ll see where it goes. This is not new.

Paul: No. There’s—

Rich: It’s happened to everybody.

Paul: This will take a long time. Congratulations to the lawyers, though. A lot of lawyers are going to win.

Rich: It’s a good time.

Paul: Yeah. Good time for a lot of paper flying everywhere—

Rich: Something, Something & Something law firm will be billing out—

Paul: [overlapping] Yeah, a lot of testimony, yeah, a lot of depositions. I’m going to share a piece of news just because I thought it was fascinating. I don’t follow F1 racing, do you?

Rich: No. It’s big now.

Paul: It’s huge. The team called Williams, they have a new leader.

Rich: Uh-huh.

Paul: And he’s like, “We got to clean this place up. We got to figure out, why is everything so slow?”

Rich: Uh-huh.

Paul: One of the reasons everything is so slow, this was in Ars Technica, is that they were managing all the parts for the car in a single Excel spreadsheet with 20,000 rows. Like, the whole team.

Rich: Oh my God.

Paul: So I’ll read you just one. “The consequences of the row/column chaos and resulting hiccups were many. Williams missed early preseason testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team’s factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority. Other parts came late and some piled up. And yet, transitioning to a modern tracking system was viciously expensive, making up for the painful process required, ‘humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking.'” So it was harder to update the software than to race a car in F1.

Rich: An incredibly common story.

Paul: Very, very common. I mean, that’s why we exist. But it was nice to see it validated right there in the article.

Rich: Yeah, I guess what is throwing me off is you just stumbled on this spreadsheet? Wasn’t it kind of like the thing that everyone knew about?

Paul: Well, new boss.

Rich: Ah. He’s like, “What the heck is this?”

Paul: “Wait, what? What?!?!?”

Rich: Yeah yeah yeah.

Paul: The thing is, that’s everywhere. And the reality is the old boss, I’m sure, wanted to get rid of the spreadsheet.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And everybody’s like, “You can’t…can’t touch my spreadsheet.”

Rich: Well, free advice for this F1 team. There’s a product called Zoho Sheets— [laughter]

Paul: Oh God.

Rich: —that will solve this all.

Paul: Oh, no, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it. That is a solvable problem. I’m glad that the F1 team is looking into it.

Rich: I mean, I think the stat that gets thrown around, two billion people use spreadsheets and not all of them are doing math on them.

Paul: No.

Rich: They’re just putting stuff in boxes.

Paul: This is so… We’re in there, too.

[interstitial music]

Paul: You had a subject you wanted to hit, so I’ll set this up for you, which is you and I are in a co-working space, and we noticed it’s a little…kind of gloomy. Often people just don’t come to work.

Rich: Yeah…

Paul: We’re just kind of watching. The vibes used to be very different in a place like this as little as five years ago.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: It wasn’t that it would be busy and thriving and everybody would be like, high-fiving and saying—

Rich: There was an energy.

Paul: “I love my job!” But, and it was, you know, people say hi in the halls. It’s all good. But, boy, it all does feel a little bit bleak, doesn’t it?

Rich: Not only in a co-working space, but getting a coffee has a hint of bleakness to it.

Paul: All right, explain that.

Rich: I’m—

Paul: You go to the coffee shop.

Rich: You go to the coffee shop and look, I get it. We’re in Brooklyn, New York. It’s almost part of the shtick to either be a bartender or a barista that’s kind of in a bad mood.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: Like, apparently you get better co—the worse the mood, the richer the flavor.

Paul: The flavoring is actually barista tears.

Rich: I don’t know if they’re cry—yes, tears, exactly.

Paul: You know what it is, though? Like, the male barista with the tattoos? Boy, is he crabby.

Rich: My brother owns a restaurant and he said to me once, beware of chefs with sleeve tattoos.

Paul: Yeah, there’s just something going on there.

Rich: Because like, three in a row quit on him.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: He says, “Now I find myself looking at their arms.”

Paul: Yeah, there’s just something going on where it’s like, “I got a lot of ink, I’m living my life.” And then it’s like, “You want a cortado? You absolute, you are just fascist monstrosities.”

Rich: Yeah. There’s like a grey cloud over things, I feel like, to some extent. I have a theory about it, Paul—

Paul: So wait, this is—so we walked around, the office is empty. People are being grumpy serving you coffee in Brooklyn, and that’s it? You’ve been able to extrapolate that to a theory?

Rich: Here’s what I think has happened. I think humans do a very good job of keeping themselves busy and not worrying about dying. Like, it’s necessary.

Paul: It’s our number-one priority.

Rich: It’s our number-one priority.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: You got to get a job. You can plan for your vacations. You redo your garden. You just keep busy, keep busy, keep going, keep going, keep going. And then all of a sudden, life hits you. Everyone gets hit, eventually, but you just keep going. And then three years ago, the pandemic hit. And I think it reset our relationship with work. I think it reset it in such a profound way that now when we go to work, we see work differently.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I don’t think we fully processed how consequential that was. I am 54 years old. I lived through 9/11. My family fled a civil war. I have more context. But let me tell you, a 27 year old today who went through that at essentially a nonstop hit after hit, booming economy for pretty much entire lives, and then getting that thrown at them and hearing numbers like millions are dying and it’s coming for you and how divisive the country was and the world was about it, I think it fades away. And then to me, the best analogy I can think of is, like, the soldier that’s coming back from Vietnam, who’s just trying to go back to work now, they’re putting their shirt on, and they’re going back—

Paul: Do you ever see The Hurt Locker?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: There’s a scene in The Hurt Locker where the guy who defuses IEDs goes to the supermarket, and he’s like, “Yeah, no.” And then he’s back.

Rich: And then he’s back. That’s a case of, like, I got to go back. But for many, there is no going back. Like, Vietnam ended, right? The war ended, and they come back and they try to kind of ingratiate themselves back into society, but there’s a lot still stewing underneath, and I believe that’s the case. I’ve been real harsh, even on this podcast, about how really old man vibes of, like, young people don’t seem to work anymore. It takes me 20 minutes to get anything, blah, blah, bllah. It was just a lot of grumpy old man stuff? And I’m realizing that I don’t think it’s just about that. I think it’s also about the fact that I don’t think we’ve fully forgotten—

Paul: No.

Rich: This seismic thing that happened. It’s still there in the background. We’ve made it through it. But I think trauma tends to kind of stew underneath and manifest itself in other ways. And I think it’s hard for people to just be overly excited about work. I’m generalizing. I don’t have statistics or anything. Paul.

Paul: All right, let me give this back to you, because I think that there’s another way to look at this. There’s a couple different ways to look at this, and I think we need to talk about where things are going. That’s what we do. So okay. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt because I also kind of picked it up. Like, it’s just weird.

Rich: It’s funky vibes.

Paul: Walking around New York City is weird. Everything feels a little hollowed out. And then you go into, like, a fancy lunch spot, and it’s completely mobbed. And you’re like, where is everybody?

Rich: [laughing] Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And then the offices are empty. It’s like a zombie movie in one neighborhood and a rom-com in the other.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay, so let’s just say for the purpose of this hypothesis, the vibes are off. I think there’s a couple of different ways to react to this. One is to be like, all right, we got to just kind of process this, figure out what’s up, and get back to it. Let’s start our businesses. Let’s get our health insurance. And let’s going again.

Rich: Let’s get goin’ again, America!

Paul: That’s Joe Biden. Let’s go! On the other side, his opponent is like, “This is the worst time we’ve all ever experienced, and America is going to hell again.”

Rich: Right.

Paul: And so people are like, literally half the country is, like, split down the middle, desperately trying to avoid that debate, but we’re having it. I think in the middle, you have this other thing, which is like a group of, if I’m 27, if I’m that mythical 27 year old—I don’t know if they exist, but let’s say—and you tell me this, I’m going to look at you and I’m going to go like, “Yeah, that’s a really interesting supposition. You’re twice my age. Work is stupid. Like, everything you’re asking me to do is meaningless. I can die at any moment in a pandemic. I literally came to all the town halls and all the meetings you asked me to, and you weren’t able to protect me from this endless void. And aside from health insurance, what do you have for me?” And I think that, first of all, I think every 27 year old fundamentally asks that question about their job, even when there isn’t a pandemic.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But I think they have a good reason to ask it because the whole structure of, like, I’m going to get a job and I’ll do okay and I’ll get my house and so on, whether you can still do that or not, the national narrative is such that you can’t. America is like, nah, you’re never going to get a house, kid. Sorry.

Rich: There’s a lot of that. I mean, the truth is, inflation, as a product, probably also a byproduct of the pandemic is, we sort of opened a firehose of money into the economy and we got to pay the bill.

Paul: Right.

Rich: And so inflation went out of control. So borrowing money became nearly impossible. Rental markets went through the roof because young married couples couldn’t buy that house that they wanted. They’re like, we’ll rent for a while. So everybody rushed to rent, and rents went like, we’re in New York City. They went out of bound, like, out of control, right?

Paul: So let me ask you, this group of people, let’s put the vibe shift back to the people who are like, “Hey, I’m not feeling it. I’ll go to work as much as I need to in order to pay my rent, which sucks anyway. But honestly, I don’t see a lot of upside. And I don’t really want to smile when I’m serving you your coffee, because who cares? Who cares?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay, now you got to tell me what to do. How do you get out of that? What’s next?

Rich: Yeah I think there’s a couple of things. How do you get out of that? I think we are coming out of it.

Paul: Some of it, yeah.

Rich: I think we are coming out of it, to an extent. I think we didn’t talk about just being online and phones in our pockets as a component of this. I think that’s a real component.

Paul: Man, I got to tell you, since I broke my foot, I’m in this boot. So I’m walking in a very, like, I’m slow.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: I’m just, like, kind of slow. And I got to watch where I am because my balance isn’t that great. And it’s really hard to get around. Like, literally on the subway, four inches from the tracks, just people just staring at their phone. Just like, I’m like, they’re all going to die. [laughter] I can’t get past them. Like, they don’t perceive me.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I’ve noticed it before, but it’s actually a little dangerous how much people are checked out from the physical environment that they’re in. This isn’t like, “Oh my God, they’re spending too much time on their phone.”

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: I’m like, “A 90-ton hurtling cannonball is within one hand’s breadth from your magic glow screen, and you don’t care.”

Rich: I think that’s right. And I think, I think…I’m not going to sit here and lecture everyone of how phones are bad. I’m on my phone a lot, too. I’m not going to lie about that. But—

Paul: I don’t think there is a lecture here. Where I’m at is like, okay, this is like a macro thing. There isn’t an individual behavior that’s going to change this.

Rich: Yes. And I think phones are a microscope on how brutal the world actually is. And you can peer into that brutality anytime, and many hours a day. And when, if you peer into it and stare at it and just become conditioned to it, your relationship with others, I think, changes. You become a little more… You feel like, why bother? It’s depressing. It could be depressing. The world is a brutal place.

Paul: What happens when you punish the mice with little electric shocks, or the dogs? You punish them with little electric shocks, but there’s no reason. It’s totally random. What happens to them? Do you know?

Rich: No.

Paul: They give up. They lie down. They get depressed. They’re just like, I don’t know why it’s way.

Rich: It’s no control of it.

Paul: I have no control. I give up. I’m not going to eat.

Rich: Right.

Paul: Okay? Let’s be very empathetic. Maybe we’re going through that as a culture. People still have resources. They can still do things. They can still ride jet skis. But regardless, they feel that they’re getting randomly punished by the universe.

Rich: I think that’s real…

Paul: Okay, so they’re lying down a little. They don’t want to give you their coffee, or they’ll give you your coffee, but it’s grumpy. Okay, the 2020 answer to this was, “Guys, I’m going to get you motivated. We’re going to do an offsite, and we’re going to talk about how great it will be to serve coffee. We’re going to talk about our single-source beans, we’re going to hug it out, and we are going to get in there, and we are going to change the culture around serving coffee in Brooklyn, New York.”

Rich: Pre-pandemic.

Paul: Can’t say that anymore. People will shoot you. They will drive a coffee spoon through your eyeball.

Rich: You’re a fraud.

Paul: Go away. So now, what is the post-fraud way to motivate and engage people?

Rich: I will say this. I’m going to answer that question. I think we had a bad set of things come together all at once. We had this pandemic, which is just terrible. Terrible psychologically for everybody, really terrible physically for some. Killed a lot of people.

Paul: Yep.

Rich: That happened. We watched the world be the world at close up with our phones—

Paul: During this whole mess. In fact, we had no choice. It was the only way to feel safe and in control. And the phone was right there, and you weren’t allowed to talk to anybody anyway.

Rich: That’s right. And on top of that, the phones gave us sort of a false sense of activist power that we thought we could like, “If I just yell into that input box, I could probably make a difference.” And it turns out you can’t, most of the time. And so now here we are. And look, for all that activism, all that motivation, essentially melted away. It disintegrated and it left people feeling very powerless. That’s the word I would use. The pandemic plus the sort of numbing nature of a phone and the fact that you really actually don’t have much of an impact because you’re one of six billion people, left everyone feeling powerless. And when I see a grumpy barista, I see someone that has just decided that they have no power over the world in any way, shape, or form. And guess what? You don’t.

But here’s what you do have power over. And I think this is where we’re paying the price. I think you have power over making the person next to you feel good. Because when the person next to you feel good, you actually feel good, too. And we’re doing a lot less of that. I think that…I think I’m going to say something maybe slightly controversial. I think it’s becoming less controversial. I think working from home and staring into our phones and only going out for coffee once in a while is not good for us because we are social creatures and we need to be around people. I think young people need to be around people. I think older people need to be around people. I feel it myself, because I thought it was nice and convenient, and I started to see it wear away at me.

Paul: I told you we had to leave the little office near your house.

Rich: I just, am I saying—

Paul: The way I put it was you have to wear a belt.

Rich: Yeah. And look, I think this got appropriated as, like, your boss doesn’t have to tell you where you need to be. The world is connected. You have control. That’s not the point. You’re not doing this for your boss. You’re doing this for yourself because it feels good. I grew up Lebanese. The way the Lebanese coped with all that instability is the houses were always full of people. Like, your neighbors didn’t have, there was no locks on doors. Like, people just hang out around each other. And they were some of the best memories for them.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: Because humans find peace in each other. Like, even if they’re not buddies, just being around each other and mocking each other and making fun of each other, it is something fundamental to us. And I think all this convenience and all this isolation, I think has led us to a certain place. I have no scientific backing for any of this. [laughing]

Paul: All right, so here we are, you and me. We’re going to build an organization together.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah, we’ve been building it, but we need to keep growing it. We need to do things like sales and marketing.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Factor this in.

Rich: I have a theory—by the way, we didn’t talk about AI. All the while, while we’re sitting there alone and sad, computers decided to get real chatty. [laughing] All of a sudden.

Paul: It is weird, isn’t it?

Rich: They won’t shut the hell up.

Paul: Yeah, I know.

Rich: Even when they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Paul: It’s like the really cheerful friend who just, like, your grandma just died and she just won’t stop talking about The Sopranos. [laughter] Right?

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a lot, right? I have a theory about business, and I’m not going to give people life advice. That’s not this podcast. Not going to give people life advice. I’ll give people business advice. I believe that in a world that has been over-indexing on automation and quick answers, that people are actually hungry to connect. And I believe that if you want to differentiate your business, and it doesn’t even have to be in tech, go see people. People want to see each other. People acting—they may not say they want to see each other, but they actually want to see each other. I see a lot of sales calls in coffee shops, dude, on video. And let me tell you, man, if you can go over, if they’re in the same city, get up and go see them. That’s the best advice I can give.

Paul: It’s the one thing the robot can’t do.

Rich: It’s the one thing the robot can’t do. How else are you going to differentiate? How else? Cool ads? [laughing]

Paul: We didn’t solve it. We didn’t solve it. Uh, we pointed at it. We said, it’s real. And we said, we’re going to try to factor it into our future.

Rich: We will.

Paul: We will.

Rich: I will for my own personal mental health. [laughing]

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But I think if we are fortunate enough to be able to have influence over the kind of culture we want to create.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: I would like to create a culture where it is valued that you want to see people. I think that’s healthy. Like, even beyond the goals of the business. I think I want to create that culture. I think if it’s a culture where you’re repulsed by the idea of having to be around other people, I don’t want to build that culture.

Paul: All right, well, then let’s rehearse. Okay. I just walked into the office.

Rich: Good to see you.

Paul: HEY!!!

Rich: [laughing] No, no, don’t do that.

Paul: Hey, Rich!! How are youuuuu?

Rich: I like talking to people!

Paul: Hey!! What’d you do this weekeeeeeeend?

Rich: I like talking about the weekend!

Paul: You ready? You ready? Get ready, Rich, because that’s what’s coming, if you want to build this culture.

Rich: I’m okay with that.

Paul: I like your sweater!!

Rich: My goal, for a lot of my life, is to find people I want to—I’m going to be around the people I work with more than I’m going to be around—

Paul: COFFEE TIME!!!

Rich: Oh jeez.

Paul: MONDAY!! High-five! [laughter] All right, that’s it. That’s all we got. Okay. Boy, this is a weird one. It’s a weird one right here.

Rich: You asked for it, Paul.

Paul: I did? I don’t know—well, this is the conversation we’re having now.

Rich: I think a lot of this is getting written about and talked about. I said it as if it’s fact, which it’s not. This is just a vibe thing. I think it’s about vibes.

Paul: It is…

Rich: When we pick the graphic, it should be about vibes.

Paul: Vibes. All right, I’ll go pick the stock art.

[outro music]

Paul: This conversation should inspire you more than anything else to check out an amazing software tool called aboard on the internet, at aboard.com. If you want to get in touch with us, Rich, what’s a good way to actually have contact with these two human beings?

Rich: Hello@aboard.com.

Paul: But we’re also going to throw a party soon. We’d love to actually see more humans.

Rich: Yes. And eventually we’re going to want to talk to people who are interested in Aboard personally.

Paul: Eventually. Eventually.

Rich: I don’t want to deal with people. [laughing]

Paul: COFFEE TIME!!! Bye.

Rich: Have a good week.