Episode 132: Founder Origins Stories: Rob Walling

In this episode of the Founder Origins Stories, Sherry interviews Rob. They talk about his early experiences coding on the Apple IIe, selling candy, and the role his dad had on his life.Support ZenFounder

Episode Transcript

Sherry Walling: Today wraps us this round of the Founder Origin Story series. We do have this on the roadmap to do again next summer, so if you have a founder in mind that you absolutely want to hear from, you wanna hear about his or her background, where they came from, how they grew up, how they were shaped then please send us an email, Tweet at us, get in touch with us somehow and submit their name and we'd love to get them on the deck for the next round. But we're ending the series today with Rob's origin story. So we talk about some things that I don't think we've actually talked about on the podcast anywhere else or that he hasn't talked about that publicly. His early experiences of learning to code on an Apple 2E, his early experiences writing comics, inventing things and being an entrepreneur selling candy at school, selling other things. And we also talk in this interview about the central role that his dad played in both helping him learn how to cope with hard things, to face anxiety, but also in terms of building up his belief in himself and his own ability to contribute meaningfully to the world. So it's a good interview. There's a little bit of crying but it's mostly by me. So thanks for listening to the series, and we have a lot of things coming up this fall. Love to see any of you join us for Business of Software in Boston in September, Robert and I'll both be at MicroConf Europe in Lisbon in November, and we're doing a lot of other traveling and speaking. We're hosting a retreat, hosting some zen tribe groups, so all of that of course is available on the Zen Founder website and feel free to be in touch with us if you are listening to the podcast and you realize there's something that we might be able to do to help bring a little bit more zen to you or to your business. You know how to get ahold of us. Sherry Walling: It's a little bit funny to interview you about this since I know a lot about your life story, but I think it's a really interesting story and it'll good for the listeners to hear this part of you, which I don't know that you've shared a lot publicly. Rob Walling: Yeah, I haven't really had the chance. I think a lot of folks that you've interviewed for this series, there hasn't really been a venue to talk about growing up because typically we start with ... There's often the question of "Were you an entrepreneur when you were a kid?" and then that's it and then it moves it on. It's like okay, so take us to when you started the business and we kind of skip through that, so I really haven't gotten in depth about growing up and what my formative years look like. Sherry Walling: I think it is important to have that time to talk about the development of the founder and not just the development of the business, so I'm glad we're doing this. So let's maybe start from the beginning. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Rob Walling: I was born in Santa Clara, California. I grew up basically in the South Bay and then in the East Bay area, so what's interesting is that I didn't realize growing up that the bay area was different then the rest of the world, and so seeing billboards for computer chips and manufacturers it was like Intel and then there were Biotech and I didn't realize that the whole world wasn't all about technology, it just kind of was all around me. Sherry Walling: You didn't know that you were in the epicenter of the technological revolution? Rob Walling: Yeah, that's right. And what's a trip is all the stories you hear about Steve Bosniac and Steve Jobs and the Homebrew Computer Club and all that stuff, I mean that stuff happened 20, 30 miles from my house, and I at the time didn't know what was going on but I did get an Apple 2E computer when I was really young, and I wonder if that had something to do with it. If it was just ... 'cause I don't know, my dad was just a construction worker, I don't know why he would've known about that or why getting a computer was such an urgent thing other than the fact that perhaps we were in the epicenter of it. Sherry Walling: Didn't he get it as a bonus from work? Wasn't his work directly involved in the computer? Rob Walling: No, I think he and my mum decided to buy the computer and it was ... I mean, this was 1982 and so that Apple 2E was $4000 in 1982 dollars, I mean it was very, very expensive. And again, he was an electrician, so this was a splurge for both of my parents and it was a Christmas present to both my brother and I. I had a single little floppy drive, a green monochrome monitor and a clacky keyboard and that was pretty much it, we didn't get a printer, there was obviously no hard drives back then and it was kind of like tapping on a main frame. It was the cutting edge of technology but looking back now one of my kids ... I showed our eldest a YouTube video of someone typing on one the other day and he said, "That looks ancient." Sherry Walling: Well, it is ancient in technology years. So you were, what, 7 or 8 then when you got the Apple 2E? What did you do with it? What did you make of it, having this computer in your house? Rob Walling: Well there wasn't much you could do with it because the games or programs as they call them then, now we call them apps or applications, but they were $50 a piece, again in 1982 dollars, and we didn't have anywhere near that so we bought this book called "I speak basic to my Apple" and it was about learning this basic programming language and so if you wanted it to do something for the most part you had to write the programs, you had to build the games. There were some open source games out there, it wasn't called open source, I'm trying to think of what it was, like Shareware or something I think is the term. So there was a lemonade stand game and a few others but for the most part, as an eight year old and my brother was three years older, we would type in these programs from these books and anytime we could get our hands on new code we would type it in and that was the initial dopamine rush, right, was being able to type a bunch of words then have it do something intricate that you didn't expect, and then slowly learning what those commands meant. It's like learning to speak a new language by being immersed in it. Sherry Walling: What were the first aha moments for you; what hooked you in? How did you know that you loved playing with this particular toy? Rob Walling: I was fascinated by the fact that ... As an eight year old, you don't have a lot of influence on the world, on your outside world. Like you're told to go to school, you're told to do homework, you watch TV, you read, you play with action figures, those are the memories of my life. And yet in this one glimpse, this one window, I could sit at this machine and I could impact my world. I could impact the world by writing a program that someone else might use and that was a very unique thing to have influence and to be able to create something that, in my eight year old mind, was somehow changing the world in a way that I had almost no other avenue in my life to do. Sherry Walling: Like it gave you this kind of incredible power? Rob Walling: Yep, that's right. And I must've seen movies like war games and stuff where I saw people on computers and to be able to get on a computer myself and to be able to kind of wield some of that power was game-changing. And not only that, it wasn't just about the power but I remember learning the languages very quickly and feeling like my mind spoke the same language as the computer, like it just all made sense very quickly. I took to it and I imagine some people are naturally gifted with, you know, hand eye coordination and they throw footballs and they become the quarterback of the football team or whatever, or the captain of the volleyball team. I played sports as well but the thing that has always resonated with me from the time I was eight until today when I'm still hacking PHP scripts on the weekends, is that there's something about the logic and the way that you code that really fits the way that my mind works. Sherry Walling: In my conversation with Jason Cohen we talked about this kind of experience, as like native language, that you sort of feel like you came in this language or this ability to code and it was not something that you had to learn, it was almost second nature. It felt really automatic for your brain. Rob Walling: Yeah, it was a long time ago but that's my memory of it. So not only was it easy but other people ... I remember people saying "wow, these things are really complicated" or "this is really hard" whether it was my mom or relatives would come over and it just all made sense to me and it was something I could do that few others could do. My brother and I basically knew how to work it, and that was also as an eight year old something that's kind of cool to have a unique skill that others don't. Sherry Walling: So you started at eight and do you march on through to yesterday, like you've been coding your whole life? Were there ever times when you fell out of love or didn't like it very much? Rob Walling: I coded a lot until about seventh or eight grade and I built a lot of text-based adventure games and fairly intricate lemonade stand games with randomizers to determine what's gonna happen on this day, you know, intricate by my 10 year old, 12 year old standards, and then computers weren't cool. And so in high school I left it all behind for sports and whatever else people do in high school, driving around, hanging out at the 7/11 so I walked away from it and it's years that I feel like ... I don't know if I regret it per se, but I do wish that I had been more authentic to myself and who I was because during those years I was always thinking about either coding or even just playing games. I used to play a bunch of adventure games on the computer and I took about a four or five year hiatus and it was fine but certainly when I got into college and I was majoring in electrical engineering and realized that computer engineering was just a couple extra quarters to get a double major and so when I started doing that I had to take programming courses and it kind of rekindled that desire to start coding again on my own. Now I hated coding in class because it was all structured and I had been hacking my own stuff for years and so I had my own styles and I had to adjust to the styles of the class, but I definitely remember it igniting the spark again, almost like an addiction where it's like "Oh yeah, I forgot what this feels like." Sherry Walling: So you took a hiatus in high school to sort of do high school things, girls and dating and football and 7/11. Sounds like you were working on a different set of skills during that time. Rob Walling: Often unsuccessfully. Sherry Walling: Hey, hey, you did okay. So when did you catch the entrepreneurial bug? Rob Walling: That was also when I was young. That was a means to an end because we didn't have much money and I remember saving up Kool Aid UPC barcode symbols to send in to get my first Walkman, and it was the cheapest, the absolute cheapest piece of crap Walkman you can imagine, and so it's a cassette player obviously and for that I needed batteries and my parents ... We just didn't have batteries around the house like you do these days. There wasn't Costco, there wasn't Amazon so I had to save up money for batteries and if I wanted to listen to my music I needed batteries and so I was trying to figure out how do I make money here. We had no allowance, we made $1 an hour if we wanted to work so I used to grab a weed whacker and I would weed whack in the middle of summer in the bay area and it was, I'm sounding like an old guy, but I mean it was 100 degrees and I was all sweaty and tired and stuff but I had worked six or seven hours a day in order to make money and I started thinking there has to be a better way, like this is really hard- Sherry Walling: This is too hard. Rob Walling: Pretty hard, and I would do that for several days at a time then I'm like this sucks. Yeah, I gotta figure out a better way so that was when I went back to school. I was into collecting comic books at the time and I realized that I went to the comic store once a month and a bunch of other kids did not and so I started kinda getting them into the hobby and I would then buy at a small discount at the store and I would bring 'em in and sort of sell 'em at a small markup from cover price. I was just a middleman at that point but I was making 50 cents a book or something and when you compare it to a dollar an hour it's kind of a big deal. Kids didn't have the outlet to get their own so even though I was charging more than cover price I was making a few bucks here and there doing that. Sherry Walling: What were your other early entrepreneurial endeavors? Rob Walling: The one that was most successful was I bought a bunch of candy at Price Club, this is before Costco and Price Club merged, and I remember getting Now and Laters, getting 100 Now and Later packs in a bucket or whatever it is, you know, a small plastic jar and I got 'em for 3 cents a piece and I sold 'em for 25 cents. So I spent $3 of the money that I had earned from this stuff and I parlayed it into $25 and I remember looking at that over the course of weeks selling those and being like, those is the most money I've ever seen and it was good. I was kind of addicted to it at that point like boy I really gotta do this. And then people started coming to me at school for that. They're like, "Hey, do you have any Blow Pops?" And it's like, "No, but I can hook you up." You know, like I started to become the dealer it was- Sherry Walling: You become the candy dealer at school. Rob Walling: Yeah. Sherry Walling: Did you ever get in trouble? Rob Walling: No, the only time I got in trouble was, you know again, I was a kid, but I would bootleg tapes, cassette tapes, so music, and I had this whole list that I printed up on the computer and I'm like these are all the albums that I have and if you ... I forget what I even charged, it was like you pay $2 and then either give me a blank cassette or another $2 and I will make you, I will copy the tape for you basically. And I didn't realize at the time that this was piracy but that's what it was so I did some of that and the principal got pretty mad. I think both 'cause I was doing it and he told me this is illegal and I didn't know that but then he ... There was foul language, it was rap music and so he got really upset about the music and so I actually stopped doing that at that point when he came and talked to me. Sherry Walling: So your dad's a construction worker, an electrician, and your mom's at home and then also raising dogs at a dog kennel. What do they make of you and your coding and you of your candy pushing business? Rob Walling: Yeah, it's interesting. They definitely encouraged the coding but they kind of didn't need to. You know how they encouraged it? Is they gave me unlimited time to do it and I would sit there and do it for four, five, six hours straight because you're in the zone, you're in flow and you're tryna build something. That I think was one of the biggest gifts that they gave is that they didn't say oh you only get 30 minutes to do this, 'cause I was able to go so deep in some of this stuff and learn it so well just by spending time. And then the entrepreneurial stuff they didn't know most of it was going on but then I remember talking to them about it once and they said this is great, you should do this, this is a good way to make money, and they were kind of impressed that I had thought of it or that I ... They said you have these entrepreneurial instincts, you should follow those. But that was it, there was no conversation there. I don't remember there being many conversations beyond that other than, it was definitely encouragement. Sherry Walling: Do you have a sense of where that came from in you? Is it kind of intrinsic, is it just the need to solve a problem in an easier way, like selling candy versus weed whackering? Or is there something in your family or in your parents or in the ways that you were raised that fostered that? Rob Walling: There really wasn't anything in the way I was raised, honestly. I've thought about this a lot, no one else in my family is an entrepreneur, not of my extended family was, I had no model, I had no mentor, I don't know why it happened other than I wanted to make money to buy batteries and to buy more comics and to buy the things that I wanted as a kid, and I didn't know ... There was just no other way that I knew of to do it. Sherry Walling: Another piece of at least what I know about your story that we haven't yet touched on is that you were also very active in creating your own things, so writing your own comic books, even patents for inventions when you were in junior high and high school. Rob Walling: Yeah, to touch on all those things I wound up getting paid to write a couple scripts for some independent publishers, that was in college, but I mean it was like a hundred bucks to write a script for an entire comic, which is a lot of time but that was interesting. I was a sophomore in college and it was something I loved to do. I wrote booklets on how to collect comic books. I wrote one on how to become a comic book artist that I researched, bunch of other books and kind of compiled it into a booklet and I was selling those through classified ads. Those were never that successful. You know, I was selling these booklets for 10 ... It's kind of like the infoproducts, it's like what eBooks are today, is what is was then and I had read about someone doing it and so I said screw it I'm gonna do that and I never, I mean given the costs of copying and classified ads and all that, I didn't make money. I was doing that in high school I think. Sherry Walling: The other one that I was thinking of was inventions. Didn't you pursue a patent for your hanger helper? Rob Walling: I did, so that was late high school and I think I actually started pursuing a couple of those in college but it was the typical ... You know, it's funny, these days I would go on Shark Tank, right? But I just had ideas like any of us. I had ideas for stuff and I remember thinking there were certain clothes that I wore multiple times, like a nice dress shirt or something or a sports coat that my dad had gotten me, and I was like how many times have I worn this and should I wear it again? And I remember thinking there should be a counter attached to hangers and I called it the hanger helper. Stupidest name ever but I didn't apply for a patent 'cause it's really expensive but I talked to a couple of these ... What are they? They're like organizations that help inventors get patterns and do stuff and so I did a drawing and I did all the work to submit for a patent but to actually do it and do it right it's $10 grand or $20 grand to submit and I didn't have the money and I also didn't have the confidence that it was actually that good of an idea. Sherry Walling: You weren't sure it was a $20,000 idea? Rob Walling: I was not sure it was gonna make me a thousand there so it was just a little bit too big of a risk. Sherry Walling: You know most people just smell the armpits. Rob Walling: I know. Now I realize that. Most people solve things in a very normal way and I think entrepreneurs sometimes overthink these things. Sherry Walling: What were the things that were hard for you as you were growing up? What struggles did you have to battle with that shaped who you've become as an adult? Rob Walling: I battled with lack of self-confidence, especially early on and I was scared, like a timid, anxious, scared kid. I remember not liking social interactions very much. I was fine socially, it wasn't like I was super awkward but I just always felt like other kids were mean and I always had a group of friends but the whole dynamics and the politics of these at school all the way from junior high through high school was just the most irritating thing for me, that people wasted time and that I had to waste time worrying about what jeans I wore and worrying about what my hair looked like and I didn't A) have any guidance of how I should be styling my hair and B) I didn't have the money to buy the right hair gel that other people were using so my hair looked different. I mean, it just pissed me off the whole time and I wanted more social connection with of course the popular people, which in retrospect I regret 'cause I don't think that would have been at all interesting for me but that was a struggle growing up. There was a big struggle with my dad who has OCD, like clinically really bad. Sherry Walling: Obsessive compulsive disorder? Rob Walling: Yep, and people joke or even say oh I'm really OCD about XYZ and when people say that it totally doesn't offend me but I think to myself, nope, you're not. You may be a little type A about something, like I've seen OCD I know what it looks like, my dad didn't leave his bedroom for seven months when I was a senior in high school and he basically almost lost his job but he was protected because he had worked for the company for 30 years and basically the chairman of the board said we're gonna keep him on payroll and he eventually returned and did really well, but that time was crazy, I mean my family kind of was imploding. My brother was at college, my mom was struggling to keep my dad sane in essence. An OCD person looks kind of like an insane person at times and that was junior and senior year of high school when I was finally coming into my own in terms of like self-confidence and I was doing really well at track. I went to the state track meet, qualified for that, like I was really doing it but at the same time my personal life was just crumbling. My home life was completely unstable and that was one of the hardest times in my life I would say. Sherry Walling: Your dad's a really important person in your life ... Sorry, I'm getting all choked up. Rob Walling: Wow, I made the interviewer cry. Sherry Walling: Just go ahead and say something about your dad.  Rob Walling: Yeah my dad was my best friend growing up and it was hard to see him go through that. It's something he'll struggle with his whole life. They didn't even know what OCD was until, I don't know, the mid 80's, late 80's, and so this was the early 90's and they finally had a few medicines that people could start taking and so he was on medication and it fixed that, or you know, I shouldn't say fixed that, it helped him get through it and get back to work and he had a successful ... He had a really good run after that actually 'cause he had become a project manager and the dot com boom came after that and those were kind of the best earning years of his life and kind of the most successful and so I do feel like he had a great, great second act before you retired in the early 2000s. And he still has OCD but he can get around and do normal stuff but you can see it if you know him, you can see the stuff that still hampers his life. OCD's an anxiety disorder and so it makes sense that as a kid I had anxiety and that my brother has it and my dad would just live with that, and so that's been a thing that risk aversion, you know I often say I'm an entrepreneur but I'm risk averse and it's because I often think about worse case scenarios and I think that that comes from upbringing and probably from some genetics as well. Sherry Walling: Yeah there's always this challenge of how to manage your fear and how much to listen to it, which can help you make wise decisions when it comes to risk but also how much to fight it. Rob Walling: That's right and I think I've learned, if anything, I've learned that it's like knowing yourself. If you are crazy and you do impulsive stuff, then you should probably reel that back little and I am on the other end of the spectrum where I am risk averse and don't wanna to take risks so I tend to try to push myself to take more risks and to fight through the fear of things and ask myself why am I scared of this, is it a real thing or is it just something in my head, and then sometimes I completely freak out and say things like what have I done spending $30,000 on [inaudible 00:23:22] Sherry Walling: Yeah you need someone outside of you to just be like, it's fine. Rob Walling: No, that's right. To get a sanity check. Sherry Walling: As you look back on your early life experience and now being in your mid 40s and having done a lot of things and achieved a lot of success, what are you most grateful for about the way that you were raised or the way that your life was when you were a kid? Rob Walling: I'm extremely grateful that my parents, both of them, built us up. They told us that we were great and they told us that we would be great someday and told us that we were smart and I've heard of parents who just rag on their kids or say that they're never gonna be anything or don't instill self-confidence in the kids and that may be one of the biggest things that fought against all the voices in my head over the years is them trying to instill this sense of you are gonna be something, that you're gonna do interesting things in your life. Sherry Walling: Do you think they recognize that in you now? Rob Walling: I do, yeah. They've both told me that, actually. Sherry Walling: And how's that shaping how you raise your children? Rob Walling: Well I certainly am deliberate about telling my kids when they're doing good stuff and that they're gonna be something, it's also balance. I don't want to brainwash the kids into thinking that they don't have to work hard 'cause that's the other thing is when I was young, like obviously talking about whacking weeds in 100 degree weather, I did that a lot, like I have many, many memories of that and so I also knew that I had to work hard to achieve the things that my parents were talking about and that I think is the balance, is trying to raise our kids to understand what hard work is and that stuff doesn't just fall in your lap. And then I think the third thing to be honest, the other thing I'm grateful for, is that I had time to explore. Like I said, that I had hours and hours to invest in stuff and that I didn't piss it away playing Nintendo, you know? I didn't become really good at Super Mario. That we lived out in the country. The only TV station we got was PBS. I had a ton of books so I didn't hang out with the kids in the neighborhood 'cause we lived in the country. So I wasn't ... Like a lot of my friends lived near each other and would play games. I always wanted to do that but I was almost forced into this isolation and I think that was actually a blessing because it forced me to in my own head and to read and write and I learned so much from PBS, I cannot underscore how important this early life education stuff was and it just gave me a perspective on the world that I'm not sure I would've gotten had I grown up in a suburban neighborhood with the normal grammar school junior high life that a lot of my friends did. Sherry Walling: The lines between your early life and your adulthood are pretty clean, in a sense that you were such a learner then, you were such a creator, you were so willing to just jump into something, figure it out, learn how to be creative, you were a writer, I mean those things sound sort of lofty maybe, you sound like this sort of Renaissance man as a child but it's also very much who you have always been and still continue to be and I guess one of the reasons that I love doing these interviews and it's even fun to talk to you about this even though I know your story so well, is that when you feel sort of adrift or when you feel like you're at a point in your life where you're like I'm not really sure what I'm about, I feel like it is so helpful to look back and be like oh my gosh, I really knew who I was even as a child. The things that I was drawn to, the things that I spent my time on, the things that I did, they're still applicable today. Rob Walling: Yeah I would agree, just at a different scale, right? It's about learning, like this hunger to learn new things, a hunger to push things into the world and a hunger for creativity. And creativity maybe not in the traditional sense, I've never been like an artist or a sculptor. I do a little bit of music here and there but certainly not ... I wouldn't say I'm anything great at it but it's like creating something out of nothing, right? Creating podcasts out of nothing, creating a blog, creating a conference, software, companies and whatever it is, songs, you know, I still like to write songs. There's something about that that has always inspired me, I guess. I mean it's a double-edged sword because it sounds great but it's also I become really angsty and frankly kind of sad when I'm unable to do those things, when I'm not able to push things into the world, when I'm not learning and when I'm not able to create at a level that I feel like befits what I'm trying to do. Sherry Walling: Well you're angsty 'cause you're kind of ... You're getting away from your native language, from your essence, your true self. Rob Walling: Totally, and that was the hard part of having normal jobs. I didn't fit in in normal companies, like the longest job I ever had was two and a half years and it was way overdue when I left there, like I don't fit that normal corporate hierarchy and large teams of people don't tend to be my thing. It comes back to perhaps being that loner as a kid, you know, even though there was family around me it was like I wanted to do a lot of stuff on my own and so I struggled with that. I mean you remember from 2000 until probably 2008 when I really went out on my own, I was like man, I was kinda ... I was ashamed of my resume, remember, because I was job hopping because I would work a job for eight months and I'm like this is terrible, this sucks so I would hop it to the next one and then I worked for a couple of years and then I was a contractor and it wasn't that I was a deadbeat, right, or that I can't get along with other people because I do get along with other people it's just I don't- Sherry Walling: Every job you were in was desperate for you to stay. Rob Walling: That's right. That was the difference, right. I wasn't being asked to leave. I was so unhappy at those jobs that I kept seeking what am I gonna be happy doing? And that of course leads you down the path of entrepreneurship. Sherry Walling: And here we are today. Rob Walling: Yep, indeed. Sherry Walling: Any last things that you wanna say about your origins, where you came from? I feel like it's worth at least telling like a little story about the fact that your mum had a dog kennel in your house while you were growing up, so it was chaos. Rob Walling: It totally was. My mom ... It was my parents, but really it was my mom's thing, and they had 30 something dogs the entire time we were growing up, it was Chinese Shar-Peis, they're these wrinkly dogs that you see on calendars, super cute and they were almost extinct in the mid-70's and my mom got one of the first that came over from China and they bred the dogs and were part of the people who were revitalizing the breed and we had a kennel on our property, which is two acres of land in the East Bay and then we had six or seven adult dogs in the house at any given time and then we often had litters of puppies, one or two litters in the house, so my house was very supportive of us but it was complete chaos all the time. It was just like people milling in and out, relatives and friends and puppies and dogs and as a kid that's actually a really good vibe to be around 'cause there's energy and weirdness, in terms of like, no one else lives like this. People would come over and be like what is this house? Like friends would come over and they were just trippin' and I would go to their house and I'm like wow, everything's really clean here. Everything's really orderly. Wait, you don't have any dogs? And then like, huh it smells so different here, like it just was completely oblivious when you grow up in an environment that is so different than anything else that anyone lives under. Sherry Walling: And I also see why you needed to retreat to some quiet time in your room to just focus on something 'cause it was so loud and chaotic all the time then that quiet focus was kind of a counterbalance to that. Rob Walling: Yeah, I think so. And I enjoyed both of them. I have fond memories of all the dogs and the people and the conversations and then I have fond memories of being in my room plunking away on that plastic case Apple 2E for hours on end. Sherry Walling: Well it seems a good place to leave it. Rob Walling: Yeah. Sherry Walling: Alright, I know you gotta get to work. Thanks for squeezing this in, I appreciate it. Rob Walling: Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. Thanks for inviting me. Sherry Walling: Thanks for twisting my pinky.