Jonathan Harris- Cloud Engineering, Priority Management, and Mermaid Parties (#34)

Andrew: [00:00:18]Hello, everybody. We have another episode for you  So today we have Jonathan Harris with us. Heis a friend of Daniel , he's actually part of the. I guess you'd call it theOJI gaming squad that has been going on since college. So Jonathan is a nativeof Amarillo  as a kid, he wanted to be anastronaut and play in the NBA.

And instead settled on doing computer things. He'spassionate about finding solutions to problems and is the father of the futurefirst female NFL champion. I'm sure that's going to trigger a lot of people. SoI'm excited to see the hate on that. So let's get this going, Jonathan. Welcomeon. Thank you for joining us.

How's it going?

Jonathan: [00:00:57]it's going good. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for that. Nice intro. You know,us as Harris's are all about breaking barriers. So I know if she's going to bea kicker or a quarterback or a coach, but we'll see if we can get it doneeventually.

Andrew: [00:01:10]I will support you in whatever way I can. So I heard you had a mermaid themebirthday party for this daughter, actually. how'd that go? And uh, was thereany actual mermaids, Merman, or what is a three year old's birthday partylooked like nowadays?

Jonathan: [00:01:23]so for our family, Joelle is the, she's one of four kids that are within a fewyears of each other.  So every timethere's a birthday, there has to be plenty of activities to distract them fromdestroying things.   We were mermaidtheme this year, trying to incorporate a pool that we, we moved into a newhouse this year.

I haven't been able to use the pool yet because it's beencold.  So try to incorporate the poolinto the theme. And lo and behold, it's been a very weird weather spring foreverybody in the U S and like soil, temperatures are too low. And so our poolwas at like 70 degrees. So we. We kind of had to aboard on the swimming.

So there was like, wehad like a buried treasured station where the little kids were digging throughsand, trying to find coins and gyms. And then we had some toys, like underwaterthat they had to fish out with little nets and then they had little woodentreasure chests that they had to paint to keep all their treasures in.

So we just had to kind of game plan out a lot of little funactivities around the mermaid theme. Oh, there's also like. Bubbles andjellyfish hanging from my ceiling as part of the theme,  , none of that creative stuff was my doingthat was my wife, but that's what a three-year-old birthday party looks for me.

At least we had maybe 10 adults around just trying to keeptrack of the chaos, but it was a good time. We did ended up swimming becausethe kids insisted and it was really cold, but it was fun.

Daniel: [00:02:41]And you may have given this away a little bit, when you said whose idea it wasto, to do all these creative things. But I was certainly taking some notes onactivities and things to do for birthday parties, any parents listening, , Ihope you're taking notes as well. And within our, as Andrew said, within our gaminggroup, You have for a long time, for lack of a better word, kind of been our,daddy, our expert. You were you,

Andrew: [00:03:09]oh, no. Oh no.

Daniel: [00:03:11]but really know you. You're the first, the first one of my close friends tosort of move and start working the first one to have kids. And for a lot of us,at least for me, you're kind of one of the first people that I go to and say,You know, Hey, what do you do about this? Or is this weird? Or what should Iexpect on this?

And so is that something that is true in other areas in yourlife at work? Do you have like a secret or are we all just like really dumb andyou're a pretty normal person it's like, you guys are idiots. Just do it thisway.

Jonathan: [00:03:44] I'm definitely just a normalguy that has not been afraid to make mistakes in the past and try toincorporate things I've learned from mistakes into doing new things.  I try to do that at work as well. I've been atechnical lead for a couple of teams in the past and I'm sure we'll get intooccupational stuff later, but  I'm anengineer now, now where my job is to kind of think about problems in creativeways and try to find either a better way or a right way to do something.

I do think creativeproblem solving is probably.  One of thethings I'm best at. So, I mean, it means a lot to me that you would saythat  you value my opinion on, on certainthings.  Things like being a dad are verymuch like, you know, you kind of roll the dice and if the dice don't turn out,right, you just reroll them and try something different.

But we've, we've learned a lot. I think we've done some goodthings. We've done some things that I'm sure we'll find out. We're not so good,but we're doing our best.

Daniel: [00:04:38]So let's talk a little bit about the occupational side of things. Can you tellus a little bit about what it is that you currently do? And I also am curious,is that something where , Andrew, in your bio, you, you said that Jonathanwanted to be a NBA player and an astronaut.

I don't think that'swhat you do. So what, what throughout life, I guess your life kind of leadingup to going to college and getting an, a career like. What were some of thethings that you were redoing to get to where you're at now?

Jonathan: [00:05:07]sure. So for the, for the NBA thing, which spoiler you're right. That is not myoccupation. I was one of many kids in the nineties that had a Michael Jordanposter and. Would watch highlights that were on whatever the sports shows wereback then probably sports center. I don't remember back in that day.

So that's what Iwanted to do when I was growing up. And my, I remember the doctor telling mewhen I was like tan. He was like, you're probably going to be like six, three.And I was like, yeah, I could make that work in the NBA.  But that didn't happen. I'm almost five10.  So the other thing that was kind ofa theme in my life growing up was played a lot of video games.

I was on the computer a lot, just trying to tinkering withthings like Hey, I can, you know, write a couple lines of code and it makes alittle colored square up here on the screen. Didn't want to be a programmer, but I did love messing withcomputers.  I ended up going intocomputer engineering when I went to school with absolutely no real engineeringtaught to me.

They didn't do that in my high school.  Pretty much got blown out of the engineeringdepartment at the school I was in. I mean, I didn't like fail or anything, butI was like, there's people that have been doing engineering, like actual codingand engineering since middle school. And I haven't done any of that.

So didn't want to dothat. Ended up going to work. Basically it's just like an it guy fixingprinters and computers and monitors and plugging things in and unpluggingthings.  So I started working at a placecalled bank on it in Oklahoma city, where they serviced a lot of little localbanks in the states and surrounding Oklahoma. Where I would go in things, tryto get things to work, try to get applications to work. And after that, Istarted working at Sonic  the corporateoffice for Sonic the drive in is in Oklahoma city.

And  all of the. Techsupport for getting stuff in the stores to work goes through the corporateoffice. So I went over there and I was doing the same thing. I was trying tofix things on the phone printers and stuff. And then I would occasionallytravel to a store and try to fix something that was really broken.

And how I got into engineering was I was really tired ofhaving to look at a store individually to troubleshoot it. We there's um,around 3,500 Sonic drive-ins across the nation. And like 10% of them are brokenin some way at all times. And I did not like, you know, looking at them one ata time. So I ended up building a little application that could connect tomultiple stores at once, grab some information and we could sort oftroubleshoot things in a larger scale than one store.

The little labapplication I built got really popular and it spread to  different texts and other teams acrossSonic.  And at the same time, Sonic wastrying to. Bring more engineering and development in house. And they gave me anopportunity to be on engineering team for the different Sonic drive-ins acrossthe country.

And from there, Ikind of learned to love coding again, even though I hated it in college,because I got to write things that I saw actually fixed things out in in thereal world. And that's, that's about it from there. I've learned a lot ofthings and just continued to be an engineer.

Daniel: [00:08:04]and for the record, I don't believe you're at Sonic anymore because I was alittle. Upset when you left. I mean, selfishly for, for two reasons, one, youwere always our inside source for when there were like dollar corn, dog daysand, and things like that. And actually one time , we were taking advantage ofthe dollar corn dog day in Dallas, and I was having issues ordering, like therewas something wrong with the driving thing I was at.

And I'm pretty sure you like remote connected in. To thedrive in thing that was, I like read you some terminal number or something likethat. And I don't remember if it actually fixed my order. I think I eventuallygot corndogs, but I just remember thinking that was like the coolest thing everthat you could just connect in.

And I don't know, it just, to me, it felt like you had somuch power over a technology.  I was inawe in that moment.

Jonathan: [00:08:56]Yeah. If I recall, I didn't fix your issue cause it ended up being a hardwareproblem, but I did try to show off while you guys are there. And I, I think Irebooted some things remotely.  Yeah, I,I felt cool in the moment, even though I didn't fix your problem,

Andrew: [00:09:08]It's like a ocean's 13, but it, you know, you're our inside guys Sonic insteadof a casino and instead of millions of dollars of cash, it's, you know, half adozen corn dogs. So it's basically the same thing.

Jonathan: [00:09:20]Yeah, and you're right. I worked for a company named Heartland now.  So when I was working at Sonic, actually mywife and I both were working at Sonic and fall of 2018. Sonic was acquired by acompany called inspire brands who Kind of spun off of Arby's Arby's createdthis other company called inspire, which then owned Arby's.

Then they bought Buffalo, wild wings, and then they boughtSonic and then they bought Jimmy John's and then they bought Baskin Robbins.And now they've bought nothing bunk cakes and they're slowly taking over theworld, one restaurant brand at a time. And after they did that, they startedkind of centralizing all of the fun work.

To theirheadquarters, which is in Atlanta. So I didn't get to do as much engineeringafter that. So that was the biggest reason why I left.

Andrew: [00:10:01]That makes sense. Makes sense.

If they're taking away all the fun you want to keep growing,I get that.

Jonathan: [00:10:06]Yeah.

Andrew: [00:10:07]So let me ask you a little bit about this because the term engineering haspopped up a couple of times, but. We're not talking about the traditional senseof engineering. You know, we've had a couple engineers on, you know, we hadAustin and Kevin and Austin was very much the hard hat, ranch kind of engineer.

And Kevin wasn't quite hard hats and wrenches, but he wasstill pretty tactile with the, what he was working with and especially at theentry level, but you don't fall under that, you know, team fortress, twobuilding the turret kind of engineer. You fall under a much. More gentle sideof life on engineering.

So how does that work? And like, tell me a little bit moreabout how you actually do engineering in a computer world versus a non-physicalworld.

Jonathan: [00:10:50]sure. So I am a cloud engineer and when I was at Sonic, I was called a dev opsengineer. And all my job really was, was. Looking at a problem, taking it apartand trying to fix, fix it in small manageable pieces. So like, as an example,the biggest project I worked at Sonic was when Sonic deploys a new applicationor a new version of something to a store, it breaks stuff all the time.

Every store isunique. They have their own configurations, they have their own. Crap thatemployees put on the desktops and in folders and stuff. And so my job was howcan we deploy things safely? How can we make changes safely stuff doesn'tbreak. They don't call in  and have tohave us fix it.

So I've been lookingat  just trying to make things like that.And this, this case deployments let's make the problems as small as possibleand fix them as small as possible.  Andthat. We'd go about that in vastly different ways, depending on like the typeof software where you're deploying or something.

And one, one technique that we were moving towards iscalled. I'm going to try not to like bore people with technical stuff, butconfiguration as code. So what that means is say, every store in a Sonic needsto have Google Chrome installed. So we would have that in essentially a scriptthat a tool could read and say, you know, Hey, I don't have this version ofGoogle Chrome.

Let me go get it and install it. And we'd go down the listfor every application on the store. So like, if there's a hundred applications,we'd have the application and the name and the script would install it. Andthat helped us to look at each store and say, well, we know these hundredthings that the script looks at are all good, so we can look at other thingsand see if they're broken.

And that's kind of atrending  solution for  engineering in the cloud and engineering,just across computer systems in this day and age.

Andrew: [00:12:39]that's very cool.

Okay, let me spin this around to something you said earlier,then we were talking about wisdom and how you're kind of this voice of reasonand the daddy of the group, which I just have trouble saying out loud, eventhough I think it's sometimes, but your own father has also shown.

A lot of wisdom based on some financial stuff we've talkedabout in different things. And so your dad's also pretty much a guru that Iwould trust with my life. So is that maybe part of where that came from or doyou emulate your dad or you and your dad actually in a dad battle,

Jonathan: [00:13:19]Yeah. So I do look up to my dad a lot. He is an expert problem solver, and Ithink a big part of that is he comes from two wildly different phases of, of. Of life. He grew up on a ranch inNew Mexico where he's fixing fences and birthing calves and  reroofing cabins and stuff like that. He, hewould fly airplanes to it from Amarillo to New Mexico.

So he grew up kind of the handyman. And then when he wasabout to go to college, his dad was like, you know, I don't want this life foryou. Long-term like the, my livelihood depends on the weather and wolves andcoyotes and bears. And. I'd rather you work something more normal where youhave more control over things.

So my dad went to school and became a CPA, which is like themost boring thing ever. And so he, he kind of looks at everything through twolenses of. How can the handyman go around fixing this versus how can this veryrisk averse numbers guy figuring out this problem? And I, I think that is  why he's so good at figuring things out.

He has those two wildly different perspectives bouncingaround his head.

Andrew: [00:14:27] that makes sense, because Iam a big proponent of the more flexibility you can get with perspectives. So,and this is partly because I have a stupid degree that doesn't actually doanything, but that was one of the main things that we were taught with. It waslike, Hey, you might not be able to be a CPA, but you're able to connectdisparate.

You know, disciplines and you're able to use them in adifferent light. You can shift paradigms and look at something differently thanother people might because of experiences. And so I've always kind of used thatas like this little personal philosophy of like, Hey, if you can build upexperiences and be able to look at a problem and then shift your mind aroundthis problem through a couple of different lenses, instead of saying like, Hey,I see a nail, so I'm going to hit it with a hammer.

It's that ability to look at problem solving from differentlights and different perspectives is really, really important on finding the optimalsolution for something, instead of just a solution that works in that moment,at least in my personal philosophy.

Jonathan: [00:15:22]Yeah, I feel you on that for sure.

Daniel: [00:15:25] something I'm a little bitcurious about as you've moved from job to job is do you feel like. What youstarted out in, you know, fixing printers and things like that. Have youmaintained, and are you sort of employing the same skill set that you've goneor as you've made moves, are you kind of employing different skill sets?

Cause it sounds like when you were at Sonic, you, you havethe opportunity to kind of build this little app, as you said application thatlaunched you into more. Engineering. So was that a pivot point or are you stilllargely employing a lot of those same kind of like hard technical skills thatmaybe you picked up in college?

Jonathan: [00:16:03]I think I'm definitely using the hard technical skills still.  I think the thing that has allowed me to  take on a few different roles throughout theyears is  Just looking at a problem,deconstructing it into small pieces and then attacking it no matter what theproblem is. And the other thing I would say is learning to use the correct toolfor whatever problem you're you're attacking.

I'll give you twodifferent examples in my old house several years ago. We had a wasp problem.And on top of our garage, there's like a little nook and I didn't notice it,but for a long time, at least weeks or months, there was these four differentwasps nests growing. And I didn't notice them until they were almost as big asa basketball and.

I, the tools they had was I have a six foot ladder that itcan get me up there and I've got some wasps spray. And so my first attempt atfixing the problem was climbing up on the roof and I was going to spray thesewasp nests and then jump off the roof and tuck and roll. Cause it was only aneight foot roof and I was 26 and I was like, that's no problem.

I can tuck and roll out of that. So. I,

Andrew: [00:17:06]Famous last words.

Jonathan: [00:17:07]so I sprayed the first desk. I jumped off the roof and didn't break anything,but only addressed one of the nests. So I was like, I can't do this four times.So. I did some research and I found this little telescoping pole that's made for,you can put like a spray paint can on the end.

So you can spray paint things like 15 feet above your head.And it worked with the wasp spray scan cans. So I could stand on my ladder andI could spray these wasps from like 20 feet away, which was a lot easier.  So. That's my more practical example of beinglike let's use the right tool for the job.

Kind of on thetechnology side.  When I was talkingabout configuration as code, there's a lot of new pieces of software popping upnowadays, one's called Terraform. And what that allows you to do is you canwrite code saying like, I need to spin up a server in the cloud. I needed to.Be accessible from this IP address.

And I needed to have this much horsepower and you write thatin a script. And so he spin it up. You use it, and if it stops working, youjust rerun the script and it goes away. It spins up a new one.  And then use it go along your Merry way. Andinstead of having to like, as a human, going into the cloud and clicking allthese buttons saying, I think this is what I want.

I think this is what I had last time.  If you use a tool that's kind of built forwhat you're going after. It can definitely help you get the results you want.

Daniel: [00:18:27]those are both really good examples. And I love that you. Had an example ofboth from personal life and in a work in it. It definitely reminds me of whatyou were saying earlier about the approach that your dad has and why hisperspective is unique. And I think that's just something that, you know, hopefullylisteners pick up a little bit on is that you are taking kind of thisperspective and this mindset you have of finding the right way to solveproblems.

And you're applying it really. Across the board. And that'svery likely something that you did before being in the workplace. And, and youfound a way to take a skill that you have and make it applicable within yourjob and make that a strength that you have. Because I think a lot of times wejust. Do what's in front of us.

And we just say, okay, well, you know, my job is to spin upthe servers and so I'll do it. And even if the way that it's going or the waythat it's happening, it sucks and it's tedious and whatever it is like, well,that's why I'm, I'm getting paid money, but I like that you have thisperspective, this mindset of, well, if I'm going to have to do this thing overand over again, surely there is a better way to do it a more efficient way.

To sort of get this done and that's something, again, it's,you can apply that in literally any, any area of your life. And I feel likethat's something I've seen in the amount of survival video games we've playedtogether, even in the way that you play video games. I feel like you applythat. Like you're very consistent in that mindset.

Andrew: [00:19:59]Definitely a min-max there. It's very impressive.

You're not playing chaotic neutral. That's for sure.

Jonathan: [00:20:04] Yeah, so you're right. Ikind of, along those points, I definitely believe in preparation. Like there'sa good quote by Abraham Lincoln. If you give me six hours to chop down a tree,I'll spend the first four sharpening the ax. So. Michael asked me one time whenwe were playing apex legends. And he was like, tell me, like the one thing thatmakes you good at this game.

And I said, don't take on a challenge or fight somebody ifyou don't have the advantage. So like, if you feel like they have the advantageon you, if it's positioning, if it's something else, like get out of thereuntil you have what you need to win. So you're right. I do try to apply that toboth video games and work stuff.

Andrew: [00:20:40]Don't even look at me, Daniel don't even look at me. I hate you both for therecord for everybody listening. That is Jonathan and he is so much better atvideo games as specifically the shooter. So you play.  And unfortunately I don't have. Theself-awareness or whatever you want to call it. If I see something to killspecifically, a bad guy, if there's somebody out there, there could be twosquads.

I'm going in. And Daniel and Jonathan can be off stillmaxing out their weapons and getting all their stuff going. And they look upand they see me 200 yards away engaging two different squads by myself and byengaging. I mean, I shoot twice and I'm dead. Usually it just happens every time,no matter what the game is, this is history.

So I am not a smart player like Jonathan.

I also live my life similarly.

Daniel: [00:21:24]the thing I'll say is that at least, you know, you're, you're pretty, you'repretty true and consistent to yourself. I find that if I'm playing with you,then I'm right there in the thick of it with you probably making a baddecision. But if I play Dubose with Jonathan, if it's just the two of us, thenyeah, yeah.

I'll, I'll totally do the smart thing as well. So, at leastyou're consistently, you.

Jonathan: [00:21:44] So, this is a really goodsegue, I think, to like how I feel about Andrew as a person. So I feel likethat sounds for boating, but.

Andrew: [00:21:52]We're having one of those episodes.

Jonathan: [00:21:55]No, but no, what I love Andrew is like, we went to Las Vegas a few years ago.I'd never played craps and I'm not much of a gambler. I'm a tightwad, I get itfrom my dad, the CPA.

And if I lose 20 bucks, I'm in a bad mood. But Andrew islike, no, let's sit down, let's play some video craps. I'll show you how to doit. It'll be fun. And you know what? We probably lost money. I don't remember.But, we risked some money. It was not very much, but I had a blast now. That'slike a super fun thing we get to do with if we're ever in a casino orsomething.

So I love to embrace your, like, who cares? Like what couldhappen. Let's just do the, the cool thing or the fun thing or the risky thing.And I admire that you apply that to other things like you've, you're rentingout a house right now. You you're kind of the most entrepreneurial person Iknow. But it it's actually a good balance to my nature, which is a very riskaverse.

Let's calculate everything before we do something.

Andrew: [00:22:48]well, I appreciate that. And I hope you remember that you said this when I'm onthe streets in two years and I need a couch to sleep on.

Daniel: [00:22:57]Okay.

Jonathan: [00:22:58]there's always one here for you.

Andrew: [00:22:59]But no, it is. It's funny how this is why I like playing Dungeons and dragonswith people, which you got to experience with us. And it's, you know, peopleact like they're playing this random, crazy person in D and D, but really mostof the time people are playing in a more extreme version of themselves whenthey're playing Dungeons and dragons or a video game or anything like that.

So it's really fun. Playing those kinds of things, evenboard games, because you get to see your friends and see who they are as aperson, because these weird translations come out like me running down the hilland apex, engaging too many people all at once. Or, you know, Michael alwaysplaying the good guy in mass effect.

Like we talked about yesterday, it's we have what we, whatyou do in life translates exponentially into what you do when it doesn't countalmost, which is weird, right? Like you would think like, oh, I'm super safe.In my real life, you would think that Jonathan would be the guy going nuts anddiving into a group of people in apex or whatever shooter we're playing.

And you'd think that Michael being this very, veryconservative astute person, really good-hearted person would let loose and bethe bad guy in mass effect every once in a while. But we just kind of play whowe are. It's it's goofy.

 since we're talkingabout this and I, Suffer from a lack of this skill. And I'm cheating because wetalked a little bit about this beforehand. You are kind of the guy who's reallygood at priority management. Like that's, you can triage your life pretty welland figure out like, Hey, this is what I need to do right now, whatever thatkind of thing.

Do you want to jump into that a little bit for us and kindof give us your rundown on port priority management, what led into it andeverything like that

Jonathan: [00:24:36]Sure. So,  I, I take a lot of the thingsI'm going to save from a book. I read recently by mark Manson and it's called the subtle art of not giving a and thenan F bomb. I'll call it flip for the remainder of this for, so you don't haveto put a little explicit tag on your podcast, but. His basic fundamentals inthe book, or, you know, everything has a cost.

If you, if you want something, it's going to cost something.If you want money is probably going to cost you risk or time. If you want agood physique, it's going to cost you pain and time. If you want, you know, tobe married and have a partner and a spouse, it's probably going to cost yousome emotional turbulence, something like that.

So the, the. The real question for success in his viewpointis which pain do you want to go through to get to the success? And it's, a wayto look at a perspective of, you know, what what's worth spending the time on,in when I was younger in my career, I, I feel like I spent a lot of time makingsure other people had what they needed or, or felt like they were.

You know, doing really well. And as a tech lead, that wasprobably good to a degree, but I was spending a lot of extra time that I couldhave been spending with my family and trying to, you didn't get this done,right. I'll help you redo it. Or  thiscould have been done better. Let me I'll stay late and I'll help you do this.

And it probably kind of bred some laziness amongst the team.I was the lead for. And in addition to that, I was taking away from time frommy family or doing some leisure activity I wanted to do. So this sounds reallykind of brash, but the book is brash and it's, it's like you have a limitednumber of flips, make sure you're spending them on the things that are importantto you.

And so , I probably spend more worrying about my family thanabout my, my coworkers, my extended coworkers, that I don't even see all thatmuch. And it kind of sounds kind of anti team, but you know, you really onlyhave a limited amount of time. You gotta figure out what you want to spend iton.

Andrew: [00:26:30]I love that.  so I've read that book. Inever thought of it necessarily as priority management, but that's a hundredpercent and I I'm mostly latched on to his, you know, what pain do you want totrade?  That is a currency that I workedin my small limited math capacity is, Hey, X amount of pain equals this result.

And I just keeping things in that mind, lets you get througha lot of stuff that most people won't deal with because they're like, Hey, Iwant to get that good physique or I want to make a bunch of money. And thenwhenever they start the journey, they're like, Ooh, this isn't fun. And thenthey stop. And so going into something with that idea of like, Hey, I've got totrade out a certain amount of pain.

I've got to do it. And using that as priority management isgreat because yeah, you don't want to suffer everything you can for your teamand then come home empty for your family. That's not a good trade off for yourfriends or whatever's going on in your life. So that's good. Definitelyrecommend that book.

Also. I know both of you are married. A lot of our listenersprobably are in relationships, but for anybody who's not. And just in caseDaniel, you or Jonathan, y'all want to have a. Refresher on relationships,despite this being kind of a, how to get a girlfriend or girls book. I mean, itwould work for boys too, if you're trying to get boys probably, but mark Mansonactually has a, almost like a pickup artist book, but it is the anti pickupartists book.

And the whole thing is about basically being vulnerable andhonest and truthful with people and building a relationships off of that andhow healthy and good that is for you. So he wrote that long before the subtleart came out. And it's just weird because I read the book. Back in college,loved it. And then I followed his blog and all of a sudden, there's this bookof his that's just hugely popular and kind of unrelated to what he firststarted doing when he was writing.

So just a heads up it's out there called models.

track01: [00:28:08]If

Andrew: [00:28:08]you want to check it out.

Jonathan: [00:28:09]Good to know. I appreciate the recommendation

the other couplethings from that book that I really took away, that I thought wereimportant.  Was he said something alongthe lines of life is not your fault, but it's your responsibility.

So if, if someone steals your cell phone or something, likethat's not your fault, but it is your responsibility to deal with it. If you'redealt a bad hand in life. Like it is your responsibility to either fix it orchange it, or, you know, you get fired. It's still your responsibility tofigure out what you need to do.

Cause we kind of, welive in a society where  there's thingslike Twitter and Facebook where people can just voice how displeased they arewith what's happened to them or what could happen to them. And they just. Theycan complain about it very publicly. And a lot of the time it would probablywould be a better use of their time to, you know, this sucks.

Let's try to figure out how to fix it.  And he tells a tale, he tells a story abouttwo different  musicians. The first one'sDave  use attain. He was um, part of theband Megadeath. They sold 25 million albums and his net worth is almost 20million. And he feels like he has failed in life. He said this publicly ininterviews.

And he says that because he was kicked out of Metallica,who, you know, is much bigger than Megadeath. And so despite the fact that healmost has $20 million and sold all these albums in his tour and is part of avery successful heavy metal band, he considers himself a failure. And then theycontrast that to a guy named Pete best who was actually the first drummer thatthe Beatles had.

He was kicked out of the Beatles for, I dunno, some reason,but since that point he's never developed a drug problem. He's been married for50 years. He is alive, which is better than. A lot of the Beatles. And so he,you know, he's like, I wouldn't change anything about my life. I've beenmarried to the love of my life for ever.

So it's, it's very much looking at success as you know, whatis it I want to go through, not what is the end result I'm trying to get to. Sothat's, that's all I got on that book, but it was really good for me.

Daniel: [00:30:04]Yeah. I, I really love the, the concepts from that book. And I think somethingthat is important to keep in mind is that when you're approaching your team atwork Jonathan, or when we're approaching our teams at work, it's not that you.Don't give any of your flips about work or your coworkers, right? It's justabout where is your priority and your, your family is a higher priority andmost people would respect that.

And so you're still giving energy. You're still givingeffort, but you, you are keeping things in the right priority. And that maychange how you approach the problem. And you can even also take your mindsetand your mentality and kind of breaking things down to small, smaller problemsand making things more efficient, even apply that to your team as well.

And so, like in your example of, you know, if somebody. Hadcode that was not right. And you were staying late to help them fix that. Imean, to them, maybe that feels like you're prioritizing them and you really careabout them. But then if you take that long-term approach and realize it'sactually making them a weaker programmer, that's not the most loving thing youcould do for them.

That's not the best thing for them. And so by prioritizingyour family and prioritizing them, you can develop that win-win and sayinglike, Hey. I want you to be successful. I want you to be able to stand on yourown two feet and also I want to get home to my family. And so we're going toapproach this the right way for the longterm.

And, you know, you're not just being led by the nose anddoing what , people think that you should do. And so I, I really like thatmentality and that mindset.

Andrew: [00:31:53]All right, Johnny it's story time. What kind of stories do you have for us? Itcan be about me. It can be about Daniel. It can be about you. It could be aboutsome third party we don't know about or made up whatever you want.

If you got something, let's hear it.

Jonathan: [00:32:06]Okay. So I'll tell you my, you know, made a fan fiction that happens in theparallel universe of star wars.

Now

Daniel: [00:32:13]Does it involve Shrek?

Jonathan: [00:32:14]it's rec wars. Yes. It's just, it's basically centered around Shrek and canes,which are the two defining factors of, you know, our relationships.  

Andrew: [00:32:22]Oh, okay. We're writing this after this episode.  

Jonathan: [00:32:25]So now what I will say is I'll talk about how I met you guys. Cause I've knownDaniel off and on. Since middle school, we were in the same, , Really cool kidband group in middle school, Daniel played baritone, which is like the sexiestinstrument, obviously. And then I played trombone, which they actually makelike the same sound.

I don't know why there's two different instruments for it.  And I didn't really know, I knew of Daniel,but didn't really know him until much later in life. We were in college and ourmutual friend, Kurt was like, Hey, you remember Daniel winter, that band guy.And I'm like the baritone player. Kurt was like, yeah, I've been hanging outwith him.

We been playing video games and hanging out. So we sort ofconnected towards the end of college. And I think the first thing that you andI really did together without a whole lot of other people is the game Diablothree had just come out like right as I graduated. And I had just put togethera computer and bought it and I didn't really know anyone else that bought it,but I think you had bought it.

So you'd come over and we'd play Diablo three, like rightafter it launched together, even though it was really terrible in the servicesucked and we could never connect, but it was like the first thing you and Idid one, like just the two of us we'd stay up late, like trying to be this gamethat didn't even play very well.

But that was really cool. We kind of started gaming afterthat, and that was, you know, nine years ago. And then for Andrew, like I metAndrew much later through you, Daniel, and we were either playing Frisbee orvolleyball or something in Dallas and Andrew was in town. And so I met him andI was like, who's this weird Metro guy who just like, wants to take his shirtoff and play volleyball. And Daniel's just probably just like, oh, that's justAndrew. And I'm like, all right, cool. Whenever I see this guy again, and thenuh, sure enough, you were really cool guy too. And we, we somehow startedplaying video games and hanging out in Dallas, occasionally in Amarillo. Andthat's when the original game night squad kind of formed and we've been playingvideo games pretty much every Monday night for the last several years.

And it's definitely one of the things I prioritize in mylife is on Monday nights, that's what's happening at my house. So it's, it'sbeen cool. You guys are kinda my uh, the guys I speak to more consistently thananybody. And I feel like if I were to come to you guys and I was like, Heyguys, I don't have time to explain, but I have this dead body.

I need to need to bury it. Both of you guys would be like,okay, let's go. Let's find a place.

Andrew: [00:34:39]that is my goal in life is to be that guy.  

Jonathan: [00:34:43]So, I know that's kind of a weird way to say that, but I know you guys got myback and I've got yours, so it's been cool

knowing you guys for sure.

Daniel: [00:34:50]one thing

I'm realizing now, Jonathan, I. I've been chasing you almostmy entire life. I, it didn't fully Dawn on me until this moment, but I uh,because you're a grade ahead of me, I've followed you from middle school intohigh school. I mean, that, that was kind of like AISD, right? Like, I didn'tnecessarily have a choice.

We'll, we'll just call that one fate, but then you went toANM and then I went to an M. And then you were like the only person that I knewin Dallas whenever I was trying to figure out what I was going to do aftergraduating. And  , I was trying to figureout like, do I leave Texas or not? And I actually through praying about it,like, felt like Dallas was a place to go.

And so it was gonna be this like happy circumstance of, oh,okay, well Jonathan's in Dallas. And like, we had a lot of fun this past summerplaying Diablo and we uh, We also watched the first season of game of Thronestogether. And that was a bonding experience to say the least, but hit you upand was like, Hey, I'm coming to Dallas.

And you're like, cool. I live in Oklahoma city now. I washeartbroken, but I'm wondering if that means that somewhere in the futureagainst my will, maybe am going to be moving to Oklahoma city.

Jonathan: [00:36:00]Well, I'll let you know if I'm ever moving out of Oklahoma city. Cause thatmeans you're about to move here.

Andrew: [00:36:04]That would be funny.

Jonathan: [00:36:06]Yeah.

Daniel. You got any funny stories about Jonathan? You wantto share? We can always turn this around.

Daniel: [00:36:11]Oh, let me think for a second because the story that immediately comes to mindis not necessarily mine to tell it's it's about how Jonathan hurt his back. Andso. I can't really tell it. That's more like a story for Jonathan, just to L.

Jonathan: [00:36:26]Okay. I can tell that story. So we have a mutual friend named Michael who's,you know, he was on this podcast a while back and Michael and I have beenfriends since sixth grade hung out, did a lot of athletic things like Frisbeeand stuff together. And. Michael is like a, a small guy he's really skinny.

And there was one time we were studying for a business lawtest and we were, you know, procrastinating, just doing whatever else besidesstudying that we could think of. And Michael jumped on my back, which was fine.He weighed like 130 pounds. And he said, how high is your vertical? I'm on yourback? And I was like, I don't know.

Let's see. And so I started jumping up and down with littlemic on my back. And then just, I landed once and immediately felt like a squishin my back, a squish followed by just intense pain. And I collapsed. And like Iwas an athlete growing up and I know what muscle pain feels like. And I knowwhat breaking a bone feels like, and this did not feel like either of those.

And I took a lot of Advil and I went to target and I waslike limping around. I got heating pads and ice packs and. Like I laid down.I'm like, oh, I'm going to feel better in the morning. And then I felt wayworse in the morning. And I ended up having to get an MRI within a few days.Cause I like couldn't stand up.

I was like having leg pain and I just couldn't stand upstraight and found out I blew out a disc in my back. And try to do physicaltherapy, didn't work. They, they said, you've, you've got a 1.5 centimeters ofdisc that has blown into your spinal cord and we need to remove it. And I'mlike, oh crap, I'm going to get back surgery as a 21 year old.

And so that's what I did. They put me under the knife andthey had to remove all these little pieces of Disc. And then pieces of bone where my, my vertebrae had hit togetherwhen the disc broke. And so now I have this, like this like vertical scar on mylower back. And it's, it's really cool. And I, I feel like an old mansometimes, cause it definitely hurts if I don't stretch or something beforesome activity where I'm using my back.

Andrew: [00:38:22]That is such a sad way to hurt yourself, but also there's so few ways that weactually get hurt. That are interesting. So,

Jonathan: [00:38:29]Yeah, and I was sober. It's not like I can blame it on alcohol or anything. Itwas just stupid.

Daniel: [00:38:34]So for, for all the if we have any college listeners, just remember you're notinvincible, despite what Andrew might claim the invincible until proven otherwiseit's, it's been proven otherwise in more people, all people really.

Andrew: [00:38:48]Yeah, I don't claim that as well. I claim I'm on killable still, but theinvulnerability is definitely not there anymore. It sucks to be proven wrong onthat one because it really hurts as I'm sure Jonathan can attest to.

Jonathan: [00:39:00]Yeah. In the next 30 minutes of this podcast are dedicated to old man like painand feelings. We're going to go through all the things that hurt when you're inyour thirties.

Andrew: [00:39:08]What's that little kid song, head, shoulders, knees, and toes. We'll just

Jonathan: [00:39:12]yeah,

Andrew: [00:39:12]Just raise your hand.

Okay. Okay, Jonathan, we're going to close out with achallenge.  So what would you like ouraudience to try this? Episode in whatever timeframe they happen to listen to iton.

Jonathan: [00:39:28]So my challenge would be whatever problem it is. You're looking at, make surethere's not another tool you could use. It's better. Cause it's life is kind oflike, life is kind of like buying a new couch at Ikea and they give you all theparts with like 10,000 screws and then they give you the little Allen wrench.

That's like an inch long. And they're like, just put ittogether with the Zelle and orange. Like I don't ever use those anymore. Ibought an Allen wrench. A drill bit so that I can just scroll that in becauselife doesn't come with life often doesn't come with the right tool for the job.You really got to figure out what the correct solution is to whatever it isyou're facing.

So I challenge you to, if you've got something that's reallyhard or really bugging you, or, you know, really messing up your life, justtake a step back, make the problem as small as possible and see if there'sanother thing you can attack it with.

Daniel: [00:40:16]that is great advice. And if you are somebody who is not super creative just byand the drill, like an hour. Drill bit for Ikea furniture and call thechallenge. Then that alone will save you so much time and effort and pain. Sothank you, Jonathan, for, for the challenge. Thank you for coming on andtalking to Andrew and I about  your lifeexperiences, your failed NBA career, your you're a hopeful future daughter'scareer in the NFL.

They can tell all ofour listeners for coming by. We look forward to connecting with you. If youwant to be on the podcast, if you want to hear other questions or interviewees,just reach out to us and let us know.

Jonathan: [00:41:01]Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

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