Strictly From Nowhere: A Podcast Experiment by Cause of a Kind

Back in the lab after a 12 hour day and a car episode that nearly gave Justin motion sickness.

The topic picks up exactly where yesterday left off. Automate or eliminate. But today it goes deeper.

When everybody chases the same puck, you end up with kid's soccer. They all flock to the ball. Mike and Justin break down why the AI first agency label is already dead, why the path to commoditization is paved in automation, an...

Three stooges. One car. License plate CTO. On the way to visit a customer to shake their hand. And somewhere in the Long Island traffic, one of the most honest conversations we have had about automation, customer success, and where AI actually belongs in a service business.

Last week Justin gave Mike and Matt a task. Go try to automate the agency processes that seemed automatable. Come back with a report. The answer they came ba...

Mike almost did not make it to this episode. On Easter Sunday, in an Airbnb in upstate New York, a furnace malfunction filled the house with gas while his family slept. Something told him not to go to sleep. He listened. Everybody got out.What followed was one of the most clarifying weeks either of us has ever had. And it happened to collide with one of the most chaotic weeks in recent AI history, the Mythos AGI panic, the informat...

My four year old son and I sat down at the kitchen table this morning for a 90 second sketch challenge. Same crayons. Same prompt. Same clock. What he drew and what I drew told me everything I needed to say on today's episode.

Justin goes solo on The Stand Up to break down what it actually means to build the right thing at the right time. Everyone defaults to minimum viable product. But viable is doing a lot of heavy lifting in ...

What does it actually mean to be a first-time CTO at a startup — and how is that role nothing like what most people expect?In this episode, Mike sits down with Ben Howdle, author of The First CTO, to unpack five years of hard-won lessons across two fintech startups. Ben shares the raw, unfiltered truth about growing into the CTO title, why imposter syndrome nearly got in the way, and how admitting his weaknesses turned out to be hi...

What if your AI had its own computer? Ben Guo, co-founder of Zo Computer, joins Mike to talk about building the cloud PC for the agentic era.

Ben's path to founding Zo is anything but ordinary — from studying neuroscience at Harvard, to building iPhone apps on a whim, to joining Venmo when it was just 20 people in New York, to spending 8.5 years at Stripe. Now he's co-founded Zo: a fully managed, elastic cloud computer t...

Joe Leo built a Rails consultancy for 12 years — here's what he'd do differentlyMike sits down with Joe Leo, founder of Def Method and co-author of The Well-Grounded Rubyist, to talk about what it really takes to run a software agency long-term — and why niching down, building in public, and falling in love with the work matters more than chasing the big exit.They get into:Why Def Method went all-in on Ruby on Rails moderni...

Ash Hess has been in the profession of arms since 1995. He changed how one million soldiers in the United States Army shoot guns. He wrote the doctrine. He ran the marksmanship school. He deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. And then he retired and had to figure out how to turn all of that into a business.

He built a competitive shooting match company called Kona 5 Performance from a single $15,000 event into a $150,000 a year oper...

Daniel Pratl joins Mike on CTO Confidential to go deep on the technical and philosophical architecture behind Quadron. This is a different conversation from his Forward to Extraordinary episode. This one is about the systems, the incentives, and the infrastructure that needs to exist if we are going to make human expertise the most valuable asset class in a world flooded with AI generated noise.

This is a conversation about what hap...

Cathy Hickman taught anatomy and physiology for 20 years in Dallas public schools. She watched 18 year olds walk into her classroom unsure of themselves and walk out ready for the world. Then she got her real estate license, went all in, and started building a career helping first time home buyers and veterans find their way.

Then one night she went to show a vacant property and someone opened the door from the inside. She called he...

It is real. If you were wondering whether you actually get the thing when you cross 100,000 subscribers, yes you do. And today we are unboxing it live.

Justin and Mike open the Silver Creator Award from YouTube and read the letter from CEO Neil Mohan. But more than the plaque, this episode is about what it actually took to get here. Years of recording with zero signal.

Almost a thousand episodes across five shows. Guests who...

Daniel Pratl went from law school to the SEC to open source to crowdfunding to crypto and now to building Quadrant. Every stop taught him something he needed for what he is building today.

Quadrant is a big bet on human beings being the most valuable asset class in the future. Markets are about to unbundle the same way media did. When they do, your expertise and your verified body of work become the thing markets are built around.

Da...

Someone shipped a fake security audit powered by AI and charged real companies real money for it. Another founder launched a product riddled with known bugs and put his name on it. And somewhere in between, the rest of us are trying to figure out where the ethics went.

Justin and Mike break down what happens when AI gives people beer muscles. When baseline competence gets mistaken for mastery. When speed replaces integrity and n...

Someone posted that their team spent $60,000 on tokens last month. Another post celebrated an engineer burning $10,000 in a single day. No mention of revenue. No mention of what was built. No mention of a single customer paying for anything.

When did we start measuring success by how much money we light on fire?

In this episode of The Stand Up, Justin and Mike go in on the dangerous trend of companies chest beating about toke...

Raul Proenza is an 18 year software engineering veteran who has seen every wave of tooling come and go. Now he is deep in the AI agent coding revolution and his perspective is one every engineer needs to hear. The fundamentals have never mattered more.

Mike Rispoli sits down with his longtime friend and colleague to unpack what agentic coding actually looks like in practice. Not the hype. Not the demos. The real day to day of us...

Michael Bromley started Vendure as a solo open source project in 2017 because he looked around the e-commerce space and could not believe what he saw. The tools were outdated. The stacks were legacy. And nobody was building what developers actually needed. So he built it himself.

David Höck found Vendure while running his agency and saw a raw diamond. The code was beautiful. The website was terrible. He reached out to Michael on Lin...

James Colistra spent a decade at Forbes giving founders and CEOs a stage to tell their stories. Then one day an HR invite hit his calendar and it was all over. No warning. No explanation.

His eight year old daughter looked him in the eyes and asked, "Daddy, why did they get rid of you? You're the best." That moment broke him and rebuilt him at the same time.

James decided he did not need a big brand to do what h...

Separate income from career path.Epic Games just cut over a thousand employees. For once, a company told the truth: it's not AI, it's not efficiency. Fortnite isn't as popular. Revenue is flat. In business, staying flat is dying.Justin and Mike tackle the hardest conversation in tech right now. You have to separate the need for income from pursuit of your career. Sometimes income looks like retail. Driving Uber. Picking...

The hardest days are the most valuable.

Justin and Mike open up about faith, loss, and why they built a Bible study app out of nowhere. This episode is raw. Personal. Different.

Mike's daughter won her first dance competition. Trophy twice her height. His son had first Holy Communion. Same weekend. Justin's grandmother is passing from Alzheimer's. And it's the five-year anniversary of his best friend's fentanyl ov...