Joe Natoli is a renowned UX design consultant, advisor, and educator. Now, he’s collaborated with Leah Buley on a new edition of her classic book, The User Experience Team of One. That is the subject of our conversation.

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Transcript

Jorge: Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe: Good to be here, sir.

Jorge: I’m excited to have you on the show. We were talking before we started recording that I’ve long had you on my list of folks that I wanted to talk to, and now we have a great opportunity to actually have one of these conversations. Folks tuning in, though, might not have come across you and your work before. How do you introduce yourself?

About Joe

Joe: Oh boy. I introduce myself as somebody who’s been doing this a long time. I’ve been working in design since the eighties, since the late eighties. I started out in graphic design; that morphed into web-enabled design right around the time when the web shifted from black text on gray type to something that maybe businesses started paying attention to. I couldn’t convince the old guys that ran the ad agency where I worked at the time that the internet wasn’t a passing fad. I was either young enough or brave enough or dumb enough or arrogant enough, whichever you choose, to say, “Alright, I’m gonna design for the web. I wanna do this.” Now, mind you, I had no idea what I was doing or how I was going to do that. I just knew that, okay, this is an exciting thing happening, and these guys weren’t paying attention to it.

So I jumped ship, started my own thing, started with one employee, grew to six employees, and rode through the dot-com boom and the subsequent busts, which was a pretty wild ride. But it was trial by fire. We learned a whole lot in a really compressed space of time. And that was when SaaS started as a thing in earnest as well. Along the way, of course, there were books that just radically changed my life. The most notable one being Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience; at that time, I came across Alan Cooper and the work that he and Sue were doing at Cooper. Mind blown, just constant exposure to new things, and wow, this is amazing.

Fast forward some 35 years later, I think it is, I’ve consulted with all sorts of companies from startups to Fortune 100 organizations to government agencies, taught over 350,000 students online courses, personal coaching, one-on-one coaching, written books, spoke on stages, done podcasts. I live a very charmed life, my friend. I get to do a lot of stuff that I’m very passionate about, and that’s at the core of all this.

The Importance of People in UX

Joe: I care a great deal about the people that are involved in these situations, in these processes. It’s not so much about the end product, so to speak. Of course, it is if you’re serving users, but it’s always about people. It’s about users, it’s about customers, and it’s also about the teams in those rooms. It’s about individual practitioners. It’s about the ways in which people struggle in a corporate setting and what I can do to alleviate that and remove obstacles so people can do their best, be their best selves in a way. I know that sounds fluffy, but that’s what gets me outta bed in the morning.

Jorge: I get the sense that when you say that you care about the people involved, you care, I’m gonna say equally, but you can correct me if I’m wrong. You care equally about the end users of these experiences and also the people who design them. Because I see a lot of your output aimed at designers, right?

Joe: Yes. No, that’s absolutely true, and it’s true of people in other departments. It’s true of marketing people, of salespeople, of VPs and executives, of product managers, of developers, engineers. I think that there’s an element in all this that tends to get missed when we have conversations about UX and product design, and that’s that everybody is carrying a weight on their shoulders of some sort. Everybody’s working under pressure. Everybody’s doing the best they can in a very imperfect situation. The minute commerce enters the conversation, things get a little wonky. It’s difficult. And I think that what’s been proven true to me time and time again is that we are absolutely stronger when everybody is collaborating, truly in the true sense of that term. Again, that’s cliche. But it’s the truth.

Reality-Based Approach to UX Design

Jorge: I get the sense from following your work, mostly the things that you share online, that you advocate for — I’m going to use the phrase “reality-based” approach to designing — in that there’s a lot of stuff that is — and I’m guilty as charged — there’s a lot of stuff in this field that is very theoretical, right? And there are some folks, again, I think that I’m especially guilty of this, who share a lot of somewhat theoretical stuff. But the stuff that I see coming from you is oftentimes very actionable and very practical, is the sense I get.

Joe: Yeah. And that’s the goal, quite frankly. And please understand, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a more theoretical approach. I’m as much a fan of all that as anybody. And I don’t think you can succeed without that level of critical theoretical thinking, right? It’s not possible. What I’m always advocating for is my three favorite words: let’s get real about this, okay? The world is not the way we would like it to be. Your corporate environment that you work in is not the way that you would like it to be. Your circumstances in any given project are generally not what you would like them to be. You never have enough time, you never have enough budget, you never have the approval or the executive understanding or even the collaboration that you would like.

A lot of this is imperfect, and I think that people in all walks of life, but us especially as UX and design folks, I think we get in our own way a lot, and we spend an inordinate amount of time wishing that it were different. So my job is to say, “Look, this is not perfect. It’s not going to be the way you want it to be.” What I would much rather spend my time doing is giving you a way to navigate all that, to transcend it, to take away some of that stress and frustration and agony, and say, “Look, there are simpler things you can do. There are different ways. There is no one right way. There’s no magic formula, okay? Your way is your way. Your context is your context. There’s always a way forward.”

Jorge: I think that you and I are more or less contemporaries. You talked about getting into design in the late eighties, I got into it a little bit later than that. But I also left my career in another branch of design, in my case architecture, to basically go into web design. And you described the early days where we frankly didn’t know a lot about what we were doing. And then…

Joe: Right.

Jorge: … little by little, the field started producing models and frameworks. You mentioned Jesse’s elements of user experience, which I still see people bringing up all this time later. Little by little, we’ve seen the field of user experience design become more defined, more formalized, and I said earlier that now was the perfect time to have this conversation. And what I was alluding to was the fact that you and Leah Buley have just published a second edition of one of the books that I think helped formalize the field.

The UX Team of One

Joe: Sure. This book is an amazing story for me. It really truly is, and I’ve said this as loud as I can to anyone who will listen. I was a fan of that book when it came out, right? I read it when it came out, and it was one of those things where I’ve always been a writer. When I read it, it was one of those instances where I thought, “Man, I wish I had written this book.” Because it was right in line with the way that I think. It’s simple, it’s practical, it’s down-to-earth, it’s very kind, it’s very generous, it’s very inviting. It has a tremendous amount of empathy for the reader, for the practitioner. So I was already a fan.

Fast forward a bunch of years later, and my wife and I had just finished putting the editing touches on a book that we’re working on about starting your own business. Out of the blue, I get an email from Lou Rosenfeld, and he says, “I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but I haven’t emailed you. But would you be interested in working on helping bring the second edition of The UX Team of One to life?” That was one of those things where before I even read the rest of the sentence, I was saying, “Yes, absolutely. I’m in. Are you kidding me? This book, are you serious?”

So I emailed him back. I said, “Lou, in a word? YES!” All capital letters. “But let’s talk about the details. But absolutely, I’m a huge fan of this book.” So to be involved in it, to help bring the second edition to life, and then, cherry on top, to have Jesse write the foreword. Jesse James Garrett was my introduction and the beginning of the pivotal shift into UX. That book changed my life, right? So imagine these two things come together, and now I get to be a part of this. Are you kidding me? Instant yes.

Jorge: Listeners can’t see me, but I’m grinning broadly because I remember getting a similar email from the folks at O’Reilly when I worked on the fourth edition of the Polar Bear book. It’s like, “Will you help us work on this?” And I was like…

Joe: Of course! Is that really a question?!

Jorge: Okay, so let’s talk about the book. And I’ll say this right off the bat: I did not read the first edition. I’m someone who, by the time the first edition came out, was already practicing in UX. I remember also seeing the title and thinking, “Team of one? UX is a team sport!” Right?

Joe: Sometimes.

Jorge: Why is it called The User Experience Team of One?

Joe: Yeah. Here’s the interesting part about that. We’ve all had conversations about how this title is misleading on a number of fronts. Number one, it absolutely applies to teams of one, of which there are many. Nobody talks about it, okay? But I’ve encountered many over the course of my career. But it also applies to, I think, any UX team because, in general, inside any company, no matter how large the company is, the UX team is pretty much outnumbered by people in every other role. The ratio of, for example, developers and engineers and programmers to designers is, if you had to average it, I think it would probably be like one to 400 or something like that.

So I think they’re operating in a lot of ways like a team of one, in that you have this small group of people who are swimming against the tide to some degree. Because the rest of the organization has infrastructure and process and things in place, and it’s just moving. And you can’t radically ever change an organization, right? You try to be integrated, you try to go along with the flow. So I think it applies there.

But the other way that we talked about, the editor, Marta, and I particularly talked about this a lot; this book is like a UX 101 book as well. It’s a really wide shot across what this practice looks like, why you do the things you do, and how things work for anybody who’s new to it or anybody that needs a refresher. It applies to anybody just about at any point in their career. I’ve had lots of people message me now that this is out and say, “It’s amazing to me that twenty years into my career, this book is still as useful as it was when it came out, when I first read it.” I’ve heard that more times than I can count at this point. So, title notwithstanding, I think it’s one of the best books ever written on the topic, and that was before my involvement.

Timeless UX Methods and Practices

Jorge: One of the downsides for me, having read the second edition as my first experience of the book, is that I can’t compare the two editions, right? But in reading the second edition, as I was reading, I was thinking, “My God, these tools and methods are timeless, right? There’s nothing here that is applicable to Figma or whatever,” right?

Joe: Right, on purpose.

Jorge: Well, I was gonna ask you about that. Because, again, I don’t have the context of the first edition. How did you and Leah and the team at Rosenfeld Media decide what to change? Because, again, it does feel like a lot of these are pretty timeless. So what’s new in the book? What y’all cut out, how much Joe is there in the book versus Leah, and how did you decide on that mix?

Joe: I think it’s probably half and half. Much to everybody’s chagrin, to Lou’s, to Marta’s, to their operations folks, we increased the page count dramatically. We increased the cost dramatically as well. And that was their call. To their credit, they left all this stuff in. In terms of what changed? We didn’t cut a whole lot out. There were certain things, certain practices, that were a little dated that probably wouldn’t fly in an organization where agile and lean practices are a thing just because there’s never enough time.

I’ll say this, we didn’t cut out anything that wasn’t worth doing. We cut out things that we thought, “Okay, if you propose this kind of thing inside an organization, you’re probably gonna have a hard time getting a yes.” But by and large, the bulk of what’s in there is intact from what it was. What we’ve done with each one of these principles and practices is expand them to include more context as to here’s how this works in a more modern situation where everything’s going faster than it should, in a situation where a lot of people are not going to play with you, not gonna collaborate with you, right? “If it doesn’t happen, that’s okay. Here’s how you proceed.” So I think a whole lot of it remains intact. My job was to expand on this and bring it into the present and address all the idiosyncrasies that have popped up in this industry and in practice, again in corporate environments, over the last decade plus.

Jorge: I asked the question about how much Joe is there in this. There’s at least one concept in there that came across as being pretty clearly yours, and it’s the UX value loop.

Joe: Yes, that’s me.

Jorge: I was hoping you would share that with folks because it felt to me like one of those things where it’s like, “I understand this idea. I have articulated this idea in the past. I haven’t expressed it quite as clearly and as succinctly.” So, I thought it would be useful for you to share that with listeners.

Joe: Yeah, I think there’s two sides of the equation when we talk about UX. This was born out of clients asking me like, “How do you define what is UX? We’re hearing all these different things about what it is.” And finally, remember there was one day specifically, I drew this on—it was either a napkin or a paper I happen to have at a table at lunch—and I drew a variation of that diagram. And I said, look, you have a product in the middle—product or service, whatever. On one side of that equation, you have users; on the other side, you have a business. Both parties need to see value in that product, and both parties contribute a role to improving it.

So on the user side, a user has to look at this and feel like, “Yeah, okay, this is worth my time. I’m gonna at least check it out. I’m gonna try it, I’m gonna see what happens.” If from that first interaction, they get value back in some way. “Yeah, that was worth my time. Yeah, that was worth my money. Yes, this makes my life better in some way.” They keep using it, which generally means that value comes back to the business as well. Money made. Sometimes money saved if it’s an internal app or it’s more downloads or it’s market share or whatever.

But here’s the kicker to the entire equation. Unless that value does come back to the business, people on the business side of the equation are never going to spend the time and the effort and the money required to continuously improve that product. So my thing has always been—much to the chagrin of many people that I’ve talked to—but after a while, they understand that this is actually empowering. My thing is business first, user second.

Nobody likes to hear that. All right. I’ve had workshops with teams, with product teams, training days, right? For the first twenty minutes of the day, everybody is looking at me with this betrayed look on their faces. “You’re supposed to be on our side. What are you doing?” But by the end, they feel very differently. And like I said, they feel empowered. If you’re butting your head up against the wall, if you’re constantly being told no, if you feel like you’re literally bruised from how many times you’ve banged your head up against the wall, or rolling a rock up the hill only to have it come down, there’s a reason for that.

If people are arguing with you, it’s because they don’t see the value in what you’re proposing. They don’t see how it benefits them, quite frankly, and sometimes that is a very personal and/or political pursuit. Goes back to what we said before about getting real, right? People wanna believe that politics and personal interest and personal gain don’t factor into any of this. It does. It does. You can either deal with that, or you can ignore it. If you ignore it, you’re never gonna push anything through that’s actually going to help people. So my thing is, always, I start with the business because I want to help those customers. I want to help those users. I want to push something through that makes their life better. But I know to do it, I’ve also gotta prove that it’s worth doing from a business perspective.

Jorge: It’s funny, I’ve brought this up in several recent episodes that one of my pet peeves in the field is this phrase, “I fight for the user,” in that it sets up this dynamic where designers often see themselves as these kind of embattled agents who are acting on behalf of the user in spite of the needs of the business or the wants of the business.

Joe: Hero. It’s a hero complex.

Jorge: That’s another good way of putting it. This implies that UX design is not just about design methods per se. Or maybe another way of putting it is design methods include more than just the craft of moving rectangles around some kind of canvas, right?

Joe: Yes, exactly. Most certainly.

Jorge: And this is one thing that I really liked about the book, that it does include a lot on methods. So the book is divided into two parts, and the first part is a framing of the practice: what is design? And it talks about things like the UX value loop. But the second half of the book is about methods, practices, how do you actually do this stuff, right? And I was happy to see that those extended to things like not just how do you do the work, but how do you advocate for the work? So here’s a question for you that came to mind as I was reading it, which is this is a book that is going to be especially helpful to folks who are new to the discipline, right?

Joe: Yeah.

Jorge: Part of the implication of what we’re talking about is that you have to be able to advocate for design itself, particularly if you’re a UX team of one, right? You have to be able to be an ambassador for UX design in the organization, right?

Joe: Agreed.

Jorge: How can someone who is still relatively new to UX and perhaps suffering from a little bit of imposter syndrome be effective advocates for UX in the organization?

Being an Effective UX Advocate

Joe: I think that starts with, and this is what I tell every person I coach, or every young person who’s a student. You have to know what’s important to all the people outside your department, outside your role. You have to know what’s important to that product manager. You have to know what’s important to his or her boss, or that person’s boss and that person’s boss. What’s important to the board of directors, what the company’s quarterly goals are, right? You gotta pay attention to the press releases they put out. If they put out an annual report, you need to start reading it. It doesn’t matter that you understand every single thing in it, but you have to have an understanding of how this organization makes money and where its best profit margins are, where it overspends, and where it wants to cut costs, so that when you’re advocating for UX improvement or design improvement, when you’re advocating for “we need a week of research,” it can be framed in a way that speaks to that need.

For instance, you frame research as, “Look, I’m aware that we’re placing a very big bet on this product update. We’re taking a gamble because we need to increase our market share. Our competitors have eaten our lunch a little bit.” You say, “I’m aware of that. I think that if we spend at least three days researching and talking literally verbatim to users to make sure that we’re correct about these things that they actually want and need and will use and will pay for. What I’m trying to do is minimize the risk of this bet.” That’s how you frame it. As opposed to, “It’s best practice, we need to know more about our users, we need to know more about our customers,” like, “In order to design better, we have to do research.” It’s the wrong argument.

So even if you’re new, I don’t care how new you are, anybody can make that argument, okay? You can absolutely educate yourself about the things that you don’t know, and you can absolutely start asking questions about what’s important to people. You start framing what you’re advocating for in the context of those conversations. It changes the dynamic, it changes the way that people relate to you, changes the way people trust you, quite frankly, with information.

Jorge: I would expect that it would engender trust because you are showing that you are aligned on what the work is in service to ultimately,

Joe: Yes.

Jorge: And to be clear, just because I know that we have folks listening in who are in different sectors, it could be that you are working for something like a nonprofit organization or a civic institution, right? Like, those organizations have things they care about as well, it doesn’t need to be like a profit-driven enterprise.

Joe: Absolutely correct. Nonprofits have the same issues. And think about it, the stakes are higher because nine times outta ten, they’re trying to do something that really does benefit human beings in a big way. And those are grand gestures, a lot of them. And they cost a lot of money, and they take a lot of time. So it’s a risk, almost everything for a nonprofit. Most nonprofits I’ve worked at, even the ones that are fairly well funded, it’s still a big risk. So you have all the more reason to understand what their goals are and what they need from this endeavor so that they can keep going, so they can keep providing those kinds of services.

Jorge: And again, it starts with this notion of a UX team of one, but this part of the conversation is highlighting the importance of acknowledging that you are not a lone actor, you are working within a broader context, and you have to understand what that context cares about because ultimately your work as a participant in that environment is in service to goals that are broader than what you, in your little part of the org, care about.

Joe: Correct.

Jorge: Joe, you and I both have been doing this kind of thing for a long time. I don’t know if this is true of you, but it’s true of me. Sometimes I get pleasure out of revisiting the basics, going back to first principles, going back and reading the classics, so to speak, and rediscovering things that I learned a long time ago. As you were working on updating this book, were there any of these methods, tools, practices that kinda sparked joy in you in that, rediscovering them where it’s “Oh my gosh, this is, I know this, but this is so awesome, coming back to it at this point.”

Joe: Oh yeah, absolutely. The first month, literally, of working on this project was really all about picking through, especially on the practice side, on the methods side, picking through each one of these things and, essentially trying to, not in a bad way, but poke holes in them to say, “Okay, would this work? Does this still hold water? Does this still hold true? Could I still see myself walking into an organization, a client tomorrow, and suggesting that they do this?” And to my great joy, to your point, the answer to almost all of that was, “Yes, yes!” And the more you do it, and the more we are talking about it, like the more excited you get, because it is really remarkable that so much of this still works and it’s simple, it’s clean, it’s clear. It doesn’t require some massive special skill or knowledge or infinite years of training, like, “Now you’re a master after forty years, you can practice now.”

So yeah, it made me incredibly happy and I had that experience all throughout the writing of this book. I kept hitting on things and you have this feeling of how awesome is it? This stuff is still true and still timeless, and that’s one of my things, by the way. I am in everything that I do. I’m always looking for something that’s not ever going to be put on a shelf, that’s never going to wear out its use. So I don’t wanna talk about trends, I don’t wanna talk about fads, and I wanna talk about the latest developments and whatever. I wanna lean hard on the principles and practices that I know are never going to change, as long as human beings are human beings.

Jorge: That said, has the move towards hybrid work changed any of these methods in significant ways?

Joe: It has. In a way, it is dramatic, in another way, it isn’t. I’ve always mixed and matched processes. I don’t think there’s a single method I’ve ever used verbatim from the source I got it from or where I learned it. I’m always pulling things in and out based on the client, the context, the situation, the timeline, the whatever. People in play. So on one hand, that hasn’t changed. I’m used to pivoting. I’m used to flexing. I’m used to adapting. I fully expect to change direction at any given moment. When I do client consults, I do not set agendas, ever. Not ever. I just said the answer to that is no. I’ll tell you what I think we’re gonna investigate on the first day, and that’s gonna dictate what we do on the second. What we learn dictates what we do on the third, on the fourth, month three, month four, whatever it is. Alright? Because you can’t, there’s no way to predict any stuff if I know anything. After three plus decades, it’s don’t make any plans. Okay?

So the hard part about hybrid is not having people in the room. A lot of what happens in a collaborative space has to do with human emotion, in conversing with each other in a way where you can fully get the person’s emotion, their body language, all sorts of little subtle things that happen when you’re in a room with somebody, that kind of changes the tone. When you are offsite, when I’m doing this remotely, hardest thing in the world, and I understand why people do it, and I think it’s totally okay, it’s a personal choice, but it is hard to talk to somebody who has their camera off. Exceedingly hard. You don’t know whether what you’re saying is landing. You don’t know whether they understand you, you don’t know whether you’re pushing a button that you probably shouldn’t in some way.

That stuff is important to me. When I’m in a room, I pay attention to people’s cues, the look on their face. If somebody leans back and folds their arms, I will politely call that out. I’m like, “Okay, tell me what that’s about, ‘cause we’re here to solve problems.” So if that’s an issue, that reaction tells me something bad happens here, tell me what. But if I can’t see that, I can’t do that. So it does, in a lot of ways, limit my effectiveness.

I’m not ashamed to tell you this. I had a situation months ago where there was a fight among all the other people on the call because different people had promised different things to other different people, and none of this was on the table until this call. And it got outta control really fast. It was the kind of thing where if I was in the room, I could control that. I can move my body, I can walk over to people, I can say, “Hey, I understand. Everybody’s upset and you all have a right to be upset, but hear me out. We’re here to work through this together.” Doing that in a room is very different than trying to do it through a camera. You can’t, what I learned is you can’t do it through a camera. It’s not possible.

Jorge: I think implicit in what you’re saying is that some methods are more prone to suffering as a result of being done remotely. Things like workshops, as opposed to something like desk research, which obviously you can do anywhere. Anything that involves interactions with people. And the way that you’re describing it just brought to mind your introduction earlier about caring about people. Clearly, relationships are at the core of this.

Joe: Yes.

Jorge: I’m gonna do something I shouldn’t do. I’m gonna, I’m gonna do a spoiler for the book, and we can cut this out.

Joe: Nah, go for it.

Jorge: Toward the end of the book, after the reader has gone through and learned about UX and what it is and the value loop and the methods and all this stuff, you say that the book has a secret agenda, “to give you the confidence and ready tools to take on the non-UX world as unwitting allies, essential and welcome co-conspirators in creating the human-inspired, technology-enabled world of tomorrow.” So what’s the number one thing that someone listening now can do to take on the non-UX world as unwitting allies? Joe: Yeah. And I think that nails it. And, by the way, I honestly don’t know how much of that is Leah and how much of that is me because we are so much on the same page about so many things. So it could be that it’s entirely her, for what it’s worth. But that’s absolutely every word of that. So how can you do that? You can do that by internalizing and adopting all the things that we’ve said inside these pages, right? It’s not just about doing the work; it’s about making sure that you understand all those other people that you work with every day. That you understand their pain points, that you understand their reticence, that you understand their fear, and that you speak to it. That you go out of your way to say, “Look, my job here is to get all of us what we need out of this. It’s not just about what I want or what design wants or what UX wants. It’s about what all of us want. I want everybody here to succeed. When we launch this thing in three months, I want all of us to be proud of it. Like, yeah, that was worth the time and worth the effort, and we did an amazing job.”

I think that when people get the sense that you’ve got their backs, in a way, that you care about what they care about, that’s how they become allies, right? That’s how people start rowing in the same direction. That’s how people start advocating for one another, even though their job titles are radically different. I’ve seen that over and over in my career. It’s a core thing I do as a consultant. There’s nothing that’s more important to me than that. This client, my contact to everybody I deal with, I go out of my way to make sure that they understand, “Look, my job here is to advocate for you. My job here is to make sure that everybody gets what they need here. We all win, or nobody wins, period.” It’s the way I see it.

Jorge: When you said internalizing the lessons of the book, the idea that came to my mind was something that I learned in architecture school. When I first started studying architecture, I thought that I was in architecture school to learn how to design buildings, the things that you needed to do in order to design a building. But at some point, it became clear to me that the point wasn’t so much to learn the mechanics of designing buildings as it was to see the world through an architect’s eyes.

Joe: Wow.

Jorge: And I think that this is a book that teaches people how to see the world through a UX designer’s eyes, which is really interesting because it’s a relatively new discipline.

Closing

Jorge: And, I want to thank you for the work that you’ve done in bringing this second edition to life, and I want to thank you for sharing it with us here today. Where can folks follow up with you?

Joe: The honor is all mine, sir. You can find me at two places, givegoodux.com and UX 365 Academy. That’s ux365academy.com, which is my online training services. You’ll see me on LinkedIn all the time, spending more time than I probably should. I always have conference gigs and things coming up. I say yes to too many things, but I absolutely welcome anyone in any way on social media, via the website, whatever, ask questions, right? Curious about something, want some advice? I get way too much mail that I know what to do with, but at the same time, I really try very hard to at least answer people when they ask me. Because, again, we’re all here to help each other. Lots of people have helped me greatly in my career, and I’ve learned from all of them. They were very kind and very generous. So it’s the very least I can do, to try and pay that back a little bit. And the book, of course, you can get at rosenfeldmedia.com.

Jorge: Awesome. And it’s just being a Rosenfeld author myself, it’s also available wherever you find your books. I’m just a big fan of supporting the publisher, right? Like the folks at Rosenfeld, it’s a small team of awesome people, right? And not only that, if you are into eBooks as I am, you get DRM-free copies when you buy the book there, which is not something that you get in the other bookstore. So…

Joe: No, nobody does that.

Jorge: Joe, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been such a treat. I’m glad that we had the opportunity to talk.

Joe: I am too, sir. And you know this already, but I’m gonna say it anyway. You’re one of a fairly small list of people who I respect greatly. So this is an honor for me. Thank you very much for having me.

Jorge: Very much a mutual appreciation society here.

Joe: Yes, sir.