Jake Weidokal

The post below is based on the transcript of this audio recording. The original transcript had many grammatical errors, so I uploaded it into claude.ai and it seems to have done a pretty good job cleaning it up.

Introduction

Trying something new here. I’m gonna call it a commute post. It’s 6:18 a.m. on Wednesday, March 5th. I’m driving into work for the morning. I’ve got probably like 42 minutes until I get into work, so I figured, instead of just listening to music or a podcast or a book, I would try talking to my phone and do a blog post just talking out loud, which is something I’ve never tried before. With coming into the office more and having a longer commute, I’ve found it harder and harder to have time to just sit down and write, so I wanted to try something different, shake things up, and see how this format works.

In thinking about it, I was trying to figure out what type of topics would work to just talk about in a car because I feel like typically, when I’m writing, I have some idea or concept, or maybe even just a concept of a title in my mind, and through writing about it, I’m thinking about new angles or counterpoints. Through the writing, I figure out what I’m actually writing about. I typically never start with a completely coherent vision, so I wasn’t sure how it would work just talking through that. I had some fears of just sounding dumb, to be quite frank, of working through those things in real time.

After thinking about it, I thought a topic that might work would be just telling stories from my life, things that I’ve told a couple times to different people that might be interesting to just have up on the blog and have a record of for myself. As time goes on, I get further and further from each of these stories, and some of the details slip away a little bit more, so I want to memorialize them on the blog. I also want to be able to share them out with family or friends, or whoever.

For this first one, I figured I would start with something easy, and something that comes up through work a lot - just talking about how I got into the line of work that I’m in now. I now work at NASA as a product manager. I own a few of the products at the NASA Safety Center. That includes the NASA Mishap Information System and the NASA Cause Analysis Tool. These are all applications for safety personnel at NASA to use, mostly for data entry and storage for mishaps that happen at NASA. These could be anything from something as small as someone trips and falls, where we need a record of that injury even if it’s just a skinned knee, all the way up to millions of dollars of property damage if we lose a satellite or something along those lines.

I came from a computer science and software background in college and was a software engineer right out of college. But how about I start back at the beginning and talk about where things started, at least in my mind, and then progress through the windy road in my career to where I ended up.

I wish I could hear more about other people in their career journeys, because I feel like every single person that I’ve talked to - when I asked them about where they are now and how they got there - almost nobody had just a clear vision and followed it to a T and knew exactly where they would be. It seems like everybody has this very windy, very interesting path where they’re sort of going along slowly and finding their way. And that’s how it happened for me, too.

The First Spark

I think a good place to start would be sometime between when I was 7 or 16 years old. I would say I was probably around 11 when my dad bought me a Python programming book for kids. Which sounds like the perfect start to the story for someone in my line of work. But while I’m picking this as the beginning, it seemed, and I think really was, pretty inconsequential at the time because he bought me this book when I was 11, and I really just didn’t care for it at all. It felt like more school to me, and I just wanted to go outside and play.

I think I looked at it maybe three times. We might have attempted together to do the different coding exercises in the book - they had little games to show you how to code but also make it fun. I think maybe we did one of those, and then I thought, “Man, screw this, I’m gonna go outside and play.” So that was all that really was at that point in my life. But it’s still something that I remember and think back on as maybe something that opened up my eyes and my mind to the possibility that coding is something that I could do.

First Jobs and High School

Fast forward to high school. It was time finally to get a job, and I had two places I was going to apply to. One was a little restaurant right down the road from my parents' place where I had applied to be a dishwasher. The other was Chipotle, where they just had some jobs that opened up. I don’t remember exactly how it went, but I believe before I even had an offer at Chipotle, I called the restaurant right away and said, “Hey, you know what? I’m not interested anymore. I’m going to go work at Chipotle.” I basically broke up with them right then and there.

I went and told my mom about it, and she was not happy because I had nothing solidified at that point. She said, “You call them back right now and tell them that you’re still interested in the job.” So I very sheepishly got back on the phone, called that restaurant back, and asked if I could still be considered to work there. I don’t remember if I had an offer at the time - I think I might have.

The way it ended up working out was that I did get a job at Chipotle Mexican Grill. I worked there through a lot of high school. I think it was my junior and senior year, and I think I came back maybe on one winter break in college as well.

It was an interesting place to work. Anyone who’s been in food service will know it’s hot and fast-paced. And I am not really a fast-paced person. As you can probably imagine, someone who takes time to sit slowly and write on a blog - I’m more in my head and like to really think through things and understand them. There’s some of that working at Chipotle, but a lot of it was just “get these burritos out and get them out fast.” So it was an interesting time of my life. I enjoyed the people, and I definitely enjoyed sampling the food, but I could tell that wasn’t anything I wanted to do long term.

College Decisions

Shortly before college, there’s that period where you know college is ahead of you and you’re trying to figure out what you want to be for the rest of your life. Who am I? Where am I going? Wrestling with all these big questions and trying to figure out what my major should be.

I had already been thinking about something along the lines of psychology, and I think what probably got me there was being raised in the church and very much thinking about and constantly hearing messages about serving and helping other people. That was something that I felt called to, and I felt was really important and interesting. I didn’t quite want to go into the church to be a pastor. It seemed weird to me to mix my income with my place of worship - it just wasn’t something for me.

Something that further confirmed that idea of going into psychology was that our church actually did these surveys where it would give you recommendations about what your job would be. I took this survey and the three recommendations were: youth pastor, bartender, and psychologist. I already had decided I didn’t want to do the youth pastor. The bartender - I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting, but I don’t know if that’s for me.” And that kind of just confirmed further that maybe I should go and get a psychology degree.

Psychology to Programming

So I went to college for psychology for my first year. In the spring semester of that year, I got a job working as an undergraduate research assistant in a psychology lab. I went to Kent State University, and Manfred van Dolman had the Van Dolman lab. The general focus was romantic relationships, but I got to work on a bunch of interesting studies.

I wasn’t super involved - it was more so helping with data collection or running different sessions with participants. Some of the things I did: they would have couples go into a room by themselves and just answer questions together. Some of it was about splitting housework - how would they do that? Sometimes these were people who already lived together, sometimes it wasn’t. They’d also dream about their future. One of my jobs was to just watch these recordings and transcribe them. This was before easy transcription services or AI, so I was just in there listening to all these conversations between my peers trying to figure out relationships.

Another study was an eye movement study, where I would bring participants into a room. We had a computer set up with a face harness in front of it so they would set their chin on there, kind of like if you go to the eye doctor. Right underneath or below the monitor, there was a camera that was positioned at their eyes. I would get that all configured with their eyes so I could figure out where they’re looking on the screen, and then I would leave and just play some images up on the screen and see what they looked at. I think it was images either of males and females just alone or together as couples, and the study was trying to look at where you’re looking - are you looking at the person’s face, their body, something else?

I didn’t stay around at the lab long enough to find the results of that study, but that was another interesting one to be a part of. But part of working in that lab, one of the things I got to do that definitely led me to where I am now was data coding. All this data they would get at the end, I would have it in a big Excel sheet and aggregate it, and they had some program where they would analyze this data. The grad students had always done it pretty much manually, or they would have one of their undergrad research assistants do it manually, but I found that through this program, it had a little section where you could write scripts to automate some of the manual work that we were doing.

So I got to work figuring out how to do that and implemented it for the lab, which sped up the data analysis process for the whole lab, and for me too. I didn’t have to sit there doing all this mindless work going through each data element and analyzing and coding and tagging each thing. That was maybe the first thing that really piqued my interest - like, “Oh, this is really rewarding to be able to just write something on the computer, make the computer do things for me.” It was just a small task that I could accomplish, and in the end, I can see that it worked, and now it’s done. I found that really rewarding.

I was doing that and enjoying it, but also while I was working in the lab, I was observing these grad students who were doing their research and just observing that I don’t think this was the future for me. They were spending a lot of time in the lab. They seemed stressed. They were all working on their papers - I helped them some with their papers and references at the bottom and the slog of all of that and the research - and I just thought, “Man, I don’t know if this is for me, and if I can do this, and if this is what I want.” Especially the way I was thinking of going, becoming an actual psychologist, it was almost guaranteed that I would need to go to some sort of graduate school, and just my undergraduate degree wouldn’t get me very far.

Changing Direction

So thinking about what would come with having to go to grad school, as I neared the end of the semester and got into summer, I was like, “Man, I really need to figure something else out because this is just not going to work for me.” I was thinking, “Well, if not psychology, what the heck do I do?” because that was the plan that I went to college with, and I had nothing else in mind.

But then I thought back to the data coding in the lab that I enjoyed doing, which was basically just writing little scripts in Excel, and then I thought back to that Python book that my dad had got me when I was a kid, and how even though I paid no attention to it really at the time, it was memorable enough that it stuck with me even now. So I was like, “I don’t know. Maybe there’s something here to explore.”

I think I went and looked for the Python book and never found it. I don’t know if we donated the book or not. I don’t know what ever happened to it. It’s like a ghost. I really - maybe it didn’t even happen, and I made the whole thing up. I’ll have to double check with my dad. I’m pretty sure it’s real, but I’ve never found the book. But it was memorable.

So that summer what I started to do was go on the internet and YouTube and just looked up like “coding - where do you start? What is it? How does it work?” and just started to play with it some myself just to figure out what it was about, what the possibilities were with the career. I had a lot of fun that summer making just some little tiny web projects, really nothing too fancy because I had no actual experience coding and didn’t understand any of the basic fundamentals. I would just follow along precisely with what they were doing. It was probably really only HTML and CSS, so I’m not even programming, but just displaying a simple web page. But I had a lot of fun with that, just figuring out how to place the elements on the screen, style them, and make it all work together. I was like, “Man, this is really cool.”

Digital Sciences and First Internship

So I just went for it and switched my major. Kent State had something called digital sciences, which I appreciate. It was very similar to computer science, but you drop some of the high level calculus and more theoretical or sciency computer classes and trade them out for more cross-functional classes based on a focus area. So I was digital sciences with a focus on software development. The types of cross-functional courses I got to take: one was in requirements gathering - how do you do that and get requirements for a software project? I got to take a class on design, and a class on just building a web project together, which was really cool.

We built an XR mobile app. Kent State, if you don’t know, had a really bad shooting back in the day, and they have all sorts of memorabilia or artifacts from that day archived back in a room. If you go request it, you can go see them - gas masks, bullet casings, and various things from that day. We got to go back into that room and see those, and we scanned them with a phone to make 3D digital artifacts. Through this app, we were able to display these 3D artifacts. We had these pedestals we set up in a room, we put QR codes on the pedestals, and then folks would come into the room, grab an iPad, and could point at the pedestal with the iPad. The pedestal was empty, kind of as an artistic representation of the lives that were lost, or the emptiness of that day, but you could still point your iPad at it and see this sort of ghostly 3D artifact rendering of different objects from that day, which was really cool. You could turn them around, and you could zoom in on them and take a look at them. It was opened up to the public so people could come in and see it, which they might not otherwise be able to get access to.

That was a cool project, and it was just things like that that I got to do with that digital sciences major, which I really appreciated, and I feel like prepared me probably better than a plain computer science degree would for the career I went into.

In college, I went for an internship at a place called Taazaa. I don’t remember how I found them. They were a little custom software shop in Hudson, Ohio, where different businesses would work with them for some website or different software product they would need, and this place would work with them and help them build it out.

I remember going to the interview for that internship, and typically for interviews for software engineering positions or technical positions, the interview will be very technical where they’re asking you programming questions or almost like riddles to solve to make sure that you really understand technically what you’re doing. They had some of those, and I’m sure they, knowing that it was an intern position, kept them simple. Thinking back on them, they were very easy things I could do with my eyes closed now - very simple sort or FizzBuzz type problems.

But that was after I think I did that interview after maybe one semester of college or one semester of that major in digital sciences, and really, no programming experience beyond that. So, even these simple questions, I just bombed that interview. It was so bad. I remember walking out of that and just feeling so despondent and dejected, so embarrassed that I had even shown up.

That was rough, but I don’t know why, even still, I thought, “You know what? Maybe there’s some chance that I can get this thing” because I think I did okay just talking to the guy and letting him know what I’m interested in, what I’m doing, and listening to what they’re doing and asking questions. It took him a long time to get back to me. I followed up with him, maybe twice a week or every week, for multiple weeks, until eventually they got back to me and said, “Hey, do you want the job?” And I said, “Oh my gosh, yeah, of course.”

At some point, I asked him, “Why me? Why did you give me that job because I feel like I did not do very good on the coding interview,” and they said, “You know what? You were the only person that followed up consistently. We had other people who did better on the technical interview, but they just didn’t follow up, and we didn’t see the same interest with them that you had.”

Hearing that was another one of those things like the Python programming book that really stuck with me throughout my career and my life - just that value of persistence and interest and energy. I think having those things - almost everything else will work out if you have those things, and people will really pay attention to that.

So, that was sort of a pivotal moment for me, but the internship itself when I got into it - I really liked the people and the place, they had some interesting work, but honestly I feel bad because I probably just was not ready to be working somewhere at that point. They were very generous with allowing me to use a lot of the paid internship time in training classes on top of my college work, to figure out specific skills related to the work they were doing, to learn how to do it and build some of my own prototypes before building actual things for clients.

I think I maybe did like one or two little pieces of a product for a client before I ended up leaving that internship, and I still feel bad. I left and got an internship at another place. I was there maybe eight months, and I could tell the look on their face when I said I was leaving. They were like, “Are you serious? We spent all this time investing in you. Now, you’re just gonna leave?”

Progressive Insurance

But something better came along. I was at a career fair at Kent State, and I had actually just gone to see the Taazaa guys. They had a booth there, and I was just gonna walk there to go visit them and talk with them. But I had some classes or something, and I got there towards the end of the career fair, and they had already packed up and left. So I was like, “Oh well, shoot, that stinks.”

So I was walking out of the building, and then there was a Progressive Insurance booth. As I was walking by, one of them flagged me down and was like, “Hey, want to hear about Progressive?” And I was like, “Oh yeah, sure, whatever, I got some time.”

So I was talking to them. I told them about the internship I’m doing, the coursework I’m doing, what I’m interested in, and they were interested in having me back the next day. They would be doing interviews somewhere, and they invited me for an interview. I got in my resume, they invited me for interviews the next day, and I thought, “All right, cool.”

So I went and did the interview there, which went really well. I think maybe I did another interview that went well, and then I got invited to their final round of interviews, which - as a junior in college at this time, maybe a senior - it was just mind-boggling to me for a Fortune 100 company, the expenses they went through for interns even just at the interview stage.

What ended up happening was all the candidates that had made it that far in the process, they brought us out to their headquarters. We were all local in the area, all college kids local. I don’t think there was anyone outside of our commute, but they put us all up in a hotel. We got nice hotel rooms. They brought us onto their headquarters the next day. We got to tour around and see headquarters.

Progressive actually owns the largest privately held collection of art in the country. The guy who founded it loved art and used it as an investment for the company, so they’ve got all these amazing artworks just around the walls all around the hallways of the headquarters building, so that was really cool and inspiring as a young college kid just walking around. They provided food. I was like, “This is unreal. I cannot believe this is happening.” And then they had a series of interviews throughout the day where you were interviewing with all sorts of different people. Then we left, and eventually I got a call back that I had gotten an internship there.

The way the internship worked was it started as a summer internship. They put us up in apartments - temporary apartments for the summer. We would live with some other interns, and that was great. I had a lot of fun living with the guys I lived with there who were also interning at Progressive.

I learned a ton. The position was another software programmer position, working on claims software for Progressive - the software that claims reps use there. So, while not the most inspiring product to work on, the people and the culture of the company and the technology we got to work with - all that was amazing, so I had a lot of fun and learned a ton there. Progressive was great too, like the place before, about providing training, giving me that time to really learn.

I think that is where my career really took off because that internship got extended into a further internship, or I think maybe it was a part-time job in my last semester of college. I really enjoyed it, and I really went all in on Progressive.

In college, I had that digital sciences major, but I also had a minor in Spanish. In high school, I had gone on a mission trip, a couple of mission trips actually, down to some Central American countries, and just fell in love with the culture and the language, so I was going for a Spanish minor. That last semester, man, it was loaded because I was trying to graduate a semester early. So I was really cramming things into my last semester. I had all my digital sciences stuff, which I had started on a year late because I started as a psych major. I had this Spanish minor that I had a few classes I had to take, and then I had that part-time job too.

I was just like, “You know what? I cannot do this.” So I ended up dropping the Spanish minor with only two classes left to go. It still hurts a little bit, but the decision, and I still stick by it, was just - I don’t think I really need or needed that piece of paper. All the lessons about the culture and all the language practice - I learned those either way, and I don’t know what I would have done with the actual minor anyways. So that was my decision at the time. I dropped the minor. I still speak Spanish a little bit. We get these bilingual books for our daughter, so I have a lot of fun getting to kind of speak Spanish to her and hopefully teach her some of that.

Progressive was great. I had that part-time job, which then went to their associate programmer, which was the lowest level, and then worked up to their mid-level programmer and was moving up really quick. I was learning a lot. I was taking on a lot of responsibility, doing a lot of extra things above my level. And I think that was seen, but also just working in a large company like that, there’s a lot of processes and bureaucracy involved with moving up and rotating through promotions.

I had been talking with my manager for a while and was on track to get to their senior programmer level, but it just felt like it was taking a long time. They’re like, “Oh, we gotta give this other person this thing first, and we’ve got you on the list. You’re gonna get to that senior programmer position. I have your name on the list, but we just gotta wait till it’s the right time.”

I was frustrated with that, even though I loved the company. It just felt like I was progressing very quickly, and there just wasn’t really room for me to grow or places for me to go. So I started looking for other jobs, and honestly, I wasn’t looking very seriously. I had no intention of leaving Progressive, but I was feeling a little frustrated, and I just thought, “You know what? Let me interview at some other companies for these more senior positions, just to see how it goes and learn what the interview process is like, get some practice with it again” because I hadn’t interviewed for a couple years at that point.

My criteria was, I would look for jobs that I would not think I would actually get an offer for. But if I did, I would consider taking it because I didn’t want to just apply places where I knew if I got the offer, I’d tell the place no, and screw a bunch of companies by doing that. So I thought, “You know what? I’ll just shoot for the stars. Go for places where I don’t think that I’d get the job, but get some practice interviewing there, and get some feedback about what I’m missing, or what I could do better.”

NASA

I applied to a few places. I think I got an offer at one that I turned down, and then I saw this NASA job come up, and this one I really, really did not think I was qualified for. I only applied because of the name on it was NASA. So I was like, “Man, how cool would it be to go and work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration?”

The job was very much a diagonal career move because it was a step up in seniority for sure from what I was doing at the time, and also a horizontal move, meaning it was very different work from what I was doing. My role at Progressive, I very much was a programmer day-to-day, writing code, building software applications directly, whereas this NASA job was more managing the work rather than doing the work. So it was a lot of oversight into the technical infrastructure of the team, helping the dev team with their processes, and how they’re writing code. At that point, it was less product management, but doing a little bit of product management too - working with stakeholders, gathering requirements, and instead of just building the thing, figuring out what needed to be built and how we would build it instead of just taking orders and building whatever little piece I was told to do.

That was scary but interesting to me. So I went ahead and applied, and I genuinely did not think at all that I would get the offer. But I went through an initial interview, where they had some questions beforehand, I think about, “Hey, you’ve got these different projects with competing priorities. How would you handle it?” or “You’ve got this new application with these requirements. What kind of technology would you build it in? How would you architect it?”

I liked that they would take home questions because I got to really research. I mean, I spent a lot of time building out a system diagram for this hypothetical system that they asked me about. I think they liked the time that I spent on it. After the fact, after I got the job, they said, “Yeah, I don’t think anyone else spent that much time on it. Yours were for sure the most detailed answers,” which I think just goes back to that persistence and energy that I had learned earlier in life.

I got called back for another interview, and even though I felt like the interviews and everything were going well, I was just like, “Man, I don’t know. All these people I’m talking to with this job are a lot older than me. The people who would be my peers, a lot of people are 15, 20 years older than me,” and I just thought for sure I was gonna get passed up, just due to inexperience, which I wouldn’t have faulted them for at all.

But I got a call one day that I had gotten the job and was just floored and shocked by it, and really couldn’t believe it. I remember getting onboarded. My manager at the time, Irene, I remember having a conversation with her before I really started, where she was like, “You know, you are younger than a lot of people that work here.” And I said, “Oh yeah, yeah, I know, I figured, I’m aware.” And she said, “Just feel like you’ll handle that okay? If there’s some folks who… there might be just a few folks who are not happy with that,” just letting me know that there might be some challenges specifically related to that. And I said, “You know what? No problem. I’m game for it. I’ll figure that out.”

But I do have to say that first year, maybe a year and a half, was a more difficult part of my career, because not necessarily with anyone I worked with directly or other civil servants on my team, but I did feel some of that of, like, “Who is this kid coming in here and trying to tell us how to work, help us work better, telling us what to do,” which I wasn’t necessarily doing. But I was coming in and trying to change some things and make things better. So I think very much there was this perception of “Who is this kid? Who let him in here?”

Growing at NASA

I actually got a really good clear view of that. I went through this NASA leadership program, which was amazing. It was kind of a select group they picked from. I think a little over 300 people across the agency applied, and they picked 60. I made it in, and that was so cool because we got to travel to all these different centers and learn about the mission and hear from different NASA leadership.

The part of it I want to share is they did these different feedback assessments or surveys. One was called a 360 feedback assessment, where you were asking everyone around you to give you feedback. At the time that I applied to this leadership program, I’d only been with the agency like a month or two. So by the time I was sending out the feedback assessment, I hadn’t even been there a year yet. I was still pretty fresh, getting feedback from people around me, and I couldn’t see who specifically, but I had it split up where I could see feedback from civil servants versus feedback from contractors.

From the contract side, I got some feedback that was pretty rough. I think some people might not have realized that the feedback goes directly to me. I think they might have thought that it goes to my supervisor because it was more worded towards a supervisor, like, “I don’t know why we hired this guy because he doesn’t seem like he has a lot of experience, and I have not worked with him enough to know to see if it’s gonna work out, and I don’t think it’s going to. And I think we should have hired someone else.”

Especially as someone who had that concern coming into the job, that was a day when I got that feedback where I just thought, “Oh, that was rough to hear and to receive.” That whole first year, it was a big transition. It felt like I had taken on a lot all in one bite. Despite it being difficult, I am proud of myself for having worked through that because I think now I’m in a really good place where I’ve built trust with my team and work well with them and really enjoy the work and enjoy the people too.

Where I Am Now

Especially the more product side - I’m glad I made that jump. I do miss some of the programming and writing code, and I scratch that itch by doing some side projects that I work on. I miss writing code a little bit, but I really enjoy having that bigger picture, getting to make decisions myself. I think what it was before, while it’s really rewarding to work on a little piece of code and then be done and see it work, it was more like, “Hey, here’s what you’re gonna build. Now, go build it.”

I like being on the other side and being able to implement with my team - not just being like, “Hey, here’s what you’re gonna go build, go build it.” I mean, sometimes that’s the case if it’s just a really small, simple thing, but really bringing in my team - bringing in the design side and the developer side and us figuring out together the best way to build something. That has been really rewarding, to maybe make that work even better than ways I had seen before.

I love that big picture product strategy work. I’ve gotten to do some zero-to-one work, like for the NASA Cause Analysis Tool that we built - that did not exist and was a new product we were building. That was a lot of fun to stand up from the ground up and talk with mishap investigators all across the agency and various other people and roles that do root cause analysis to understand, “Hey, what do you guys really need? How do you work? What does it look like right now?” I got to see all these different, crazy convoluted processes people do right now, and figure out what they need and turn that into a product they can really use.

We launched that back in March of last year, and we rolled it out iteratively. We rolled out a really small version of it and slowly built on it over time. But even with the limited set of functionality we’ve released, people are using it and finding it useful and enjoying it.

Wrapping Up

So that’s a look at how I got where I am. I just arrived at work for the day and parked in my parking spot. So who knows, this might be the last car post I ever do, but I enjoyed it as a way to just stay busy during the commute. Usually, I’m listening to a podcast or audiobook. I’ve been on a history kick recently. I just finished “1776” by David McCullough and then just started “John Adams,” which is also by David McCullough, but that one has felt a little drier, which is why I think I wanted to do this car post today. I was like, “You know what? I need to switch it up and do something different.”

I think at the top of the article, I’m going to try to put up a clip of the audio so you can listen to it if you want. The clip of the audio might end up being different to the text. I think what I’m going to try to do is just use Google Recorder, the recorder app just on my phone to record this, and it makes a transcript live. I think I’ll just post the audio clip, but I’ll take the transcript, and I think I’m just going to dump the whole thing into AI and be like, “Hey, fix all the grammatical errors and maybe separate some of this, so it’s not just one long blurb of me talking.”

So the audio won’t probably won’t perfectly match the text, but I’m curious to try that out and kind of see how it goes. If it feels like it’s modifying my words too much, I’ll just post the raw thing up there because I don’t want it to be too different from what I’ve been talking about.

Anyways, I’m rambling at this point. It’s been good talking into my phone for this car ride, and if you read this far, thank you, because this has been a long time of just talking.