Justin's Podcast

Justin Harter
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A semi-regular review of the books Justin’s read, writing, and other musings. Sadly, another white guy with a podcast.

Episodes

  1. 01/29/2025

    Hoosier History Live: The Tri-State Tornado of 1925

    Nelson Price, host of Hoosier History Live, interviews me about the 1925 Tri-State Tornado. We talk about the magnitude of the storm and primarily its impact on Posey, Gibson, and Pike Counties in southwestern Indiana. This show was broadcast live on January 25, 2025 from 12-12:45pm on WICR. It has been unedited from the original.

    45 min

  2. 03/03/2023

    S2E6: Above average mediocrity

    David Brooks calls it the “second mountain”, I call it “struggling with above average mediocrity in lieu of a mid-life crisis.” As my generation ages into their 30s and 40s, there’s a struggle — particularly among men — of how to deal with being “merely average”. I think it’s slightly worse recognizing you might be “slightly above average” in many things, but still not good enough to be great at anything. Transcriptions for this episode are generated by automatically AI. A copy of the transcript follows. 1 00:00:00,000 –> 00:00:08,000 It’s probably no surprise that as people get older they tend to question their averageness, right? 2 00:00:08,000 –> 00:00:17,000 Sometimes I think about all of the people who have ever lived in the history of the world, in the history of civilization, 3 00:00:17,000 –> 00:00:25,000 and thinking about all of the things that most people did day to day that are completely forgotten. 4 00:00:25,000 –> 00:00:32,000 There are a handful of people that maintain sort of a vaulted status in our society. 5 00:00:32,000 –> 00:00:35,500 And a lot of them are the kinds of people that you would expect. 6 00:00:35,500 –> 00:00:46,000 Titans of industry like the Rockefellers or great rulers or great military leaders like Napoleon and that sort of thing. 7 00:00:46,000 –> 00:00:49,000 Queens, Cleopatra for example. 8 00:00:49,000 –> 00:00:53,560 But there are so many people who even get to positions similar to that 9 00:00:53,560 –> 00:00:59,240 Like there are plenty of presidents that most people have really never heard of or have almost no information about 10 00:00:59,240 –> 00:01:04,840 And I think about that and it sometimes depresses me a lot that there’s this 11 00:01:04,840 –> 00:01:08,880 lack of longevity to a person’s life and 12 00:01:08,880 –> 00:01:11,840 I think that I think about that more 13 00:01:11,840 –> 00:01:15,040 precisely because I 14 00:01:15,040 –> 00:01:16,640 Don’t have kids 15 00:01:16,640 –> 00:01:22,480 I’m probably not going to have kids if I do have kids. It’s almost certainly not going to be biological and 16 00:01:22,480 –> 00:01:25,760 as a result of my being an only child 17 00:01:25,760 –> 00:01:28,600 there’s something that bothers me about 18 00:01:28,600 –> 00:01:31,080 the fact that 19 00:01:31,080 –> 00:01:35,040 I’m the end of the line for this branch of this tree and 20 00:01:35,040 –> 00:01:39,780 genealogists would tell you that trees are very complicated and that branches 21 00:01:39,780 –> 00:01:45,300 have all sorts of sub branches and other things and that this doesn’t mean that this is sort of the end of 22 00:01:45,800 –> 00:01:49,780 the gene pool of my descendants are 23 00:01:49,780 –> 00:01:53,440 But at the same time it doesn’t feel great 24 00:01:53,440 –> 00:01:56,640 and I think about this too from 25 00:01:56,640 –> 00:02:01,120 An early age of my academics, right? Like I was always 26 00:02:01,120 –> 00:02:03,480 above average 27 00:02:03,480 –> 00:02:08,100 But I was never the top of my class. I was never the very top of my class. I was never 28 00:02:08,100 –> 00:02:10,600 the best at 29 00:02:10,600 –> 00:02:15,520 anything, except maybe, you know, here and there, maybe in elementary school, you know, 30 00:02:15,520 –> 00:02:21,600 I was the first kid in my third grade class to complete my multiplication tables. 31 00:02:21,600 –> 00:02:23,520 Whoop-de-doo, right? 32 00:02:23,520 –> 00:02:29,640 At the same time, I was 10th, or no, excuse me, 11th place in my fifth grade spelling 33 00:02:29,640 –> 00:02:30,640 bee. 34 00:02:30,640 –> 00:02:39,440 And so I feel like most of my life has been shockingly average, but only slightly above 35 00:02:39,440 –> 00:02:40,440 average. 36 00:02:40,440 –> 00:02:47,400 about how some people overcome this, right? David Letterman famously always had a scholarship that 37 00:02:47,400 –> 00:02:52,680 was offered to students at his alma mater at Ball State that was awarded only to a communication 38 00:02:52,680 –> 00:03:01,160 student, which he was, but also the most C average communication student because he himself was 39 00:03:01,160 –> 00:03:09,400 almost a straight C average student. And I don’t know that there’s a way that a person can overcome 40 00:03:09,400 –> 00:03:17,720 that, right? Like I feel like people can master certain things and we know a lot about mastery 41 00:03:17,720 –> 00:03:25,080 of topics or subjects or activities like athletics for example, or learning how to play an instrument. 42 00:03:25,080 –> 00:03:33,640 But it’s also true that a lot of people just don’t have quite what it takes for one reason 43 00:03:33,640 –> 00:03:39,400 or another, right? That, you know, to be a Michael Phelps-level swimmer requires that 44 00:03:39,400 –> 00:03:46,080 you have a wingspan like Michael Phelps, right? He has a biological advantage. And we can 45 00:03:46,080 –> 00:03:50,520 argue whether that’s fair or not, and I think a lot of people would argue that the equity 46 00:03:50,520 –> 00:03:55,600 of that is unfair, and inherently we should just sort of do something about that. I’m 47 00:03:55,600 –> 00:04:01,560 not one of those people. I tend not to think that it’s inherently unfair that some people 48 00:04:01,560 –> 00:04:06,180 have more money than me or that I have more money than other people or that some people 49 00:04:06,180 –> 00:04:11,440 are more physically attuned to certain things better than me than not. 50 00:04:11,440 –> 00:04:18,200 I think that the world has to recognize that sometimes there’s just luck, right place, 51 00:04:18,200 –> 00:04:27,400 right time, biological factors, economic factors, placement of things that just are in so many 52 00:04:27,400 –> 00:04:31,340 ways unfair but just the way they are. 53 00:04:31,340 –> 00:04:39,240 And as I’ve gotten older and I’ve gotten to a part of my life where I start working professionally 54 00:04:39,240 –> 00:04:45,500 with people, for a long time, for many years over the last six, seven, eight years, it 55 00:04:45,500 –> 00:04:53,120 has been really hard for me to think about how to make websites better, right? 56 00:04:53,120 –> 00:04:54,980 I make websites for a living. 57 00:04:54,980 –> 00:04:59,660 Now I sort of consult a little bit in a different capacity and I write for websites in various 58 00:04:59,660 –> 00:05:00,660 ways. 59 00:05:00,660 –> 00:05:02,660 And I don’t know how to make them 60 00:05:02,660 –> 00:05:08,120 World class right like I don’t I don’t I don’t know how to make them 61 00:05:08,120 –> 00:05:11,980 excel I can only seem to do about as well as 62 00:05:11,980 –> 00:05:18,060 It’s not budget right like 63 00:05:18,060 –> 00:05:26,620 There are some things in this world that no amount of money will make a big deal right you can’t take a small client or an author 64 00:05:26,620 –> 00:05:30,060 or an organization or something and 65 00:05:30,060 –> 00:05:35,060 and make them into a big deal globally known 66 00:05:35,060 –> 00:05:38,860 simply by virtue of a great website, right? 67 00:05:38,860 –> 00:05:41,900 There are so many other factors in that, 68 00:05:41,900 –> 00:05:43,660 including the team that they have in place 69 00:05:43,660 –> 00:05:45,300 and sort of the work that they do 70 00:05:45,300 –> 00:05:47,980 and where they do it and the geography of that. 71 00:05:47,980 –> 00:05:52,820 And that reminds me of this notion that Aaron Ren has, 72 00:05:52,820 –> 00:05:57,820 who’s a writer and podcaster here in Indy, 73 00:05:58,420 –> 00:06:00,900 where he talks about superstar cities, right? 74 00:06:00,900 –> 00:06:04,580 Where that there are places in the world like the London and New York and 75 00:06:04,580 –> 00:06:11,580 Hollywood and L.A. of the world where people there are just better, right? 76 00:06:11,580 –> 00:06:17,460 Not all of them, but that superstars in their fields will go to these places 77 00:06:17,460 –> 00:06:20,300 and just sort of be elevated to new heights. 78 00:06:20,300 –> 00:06:24,740 And I don’t know that a person can reasonably do that 79 00:06:24,740 –> 00:06:28,660 from within the confines of most other cities. 80 00:06:28,660 –> 00:06:31,700 Certainly every city has their celebrity du jour. 81 00:06:31,700 –> 00:06:35,060 Indianapolis likes to hang its hat next to Kurt Vonnegut, 82 00:06:35,060 –> 00:06:37,980 as well as others, Dave Letterman being another. 83 00:06:37,980 –> 00:06:41,340 But I don’t know that that works for everyone. 84 00:06:41,340 –> 00:06:45,660 I don’t think that a person in my position 85 00:06:45,660 –> 00:06:49,420 that a website consultant can sort of become 86 00:06:49,420 –> 00:06:54,260 a world-class website designer, developer, consultant, writer, 87 00:06:54,260 –> 00:07:03,500 whatever, but even being here or by being any place outside of some major agencies that 88 00:07:03,500 –> 00:07:09,880 have already attracted talented organizations and clients that they themselves are already 89 00:07:09,880 –> 00:07:11,960 a big deal. 90 00:07:11,960 –> 00:07:18,080 You think about Mad Men, for example, and Don Draper starts talking about Mohawk Airlines 91 00:07:18,080 –> 00:07:23,000 in this, which was a small airline for, and so as a small ad agency, they got this small 92 00:07:23,000 –> 00:07:25,240 airline having an airline was the big deal. 93 00:07:25,240 –> 00:07

    18 min

  3. 02/17/2023

    S2E5: No one tells you how to feel when you sell a business

    After dedicating nearly my entire career to the endeavor of growing a business and counting on the talents of so many people over the years, I sold a business in 2020. But no one ever tells you how you’re supposed to feel or what to do, look for, or figure out in the lead-up to that process. So much of selling a small business boils down to, “Well, you look like you have money.” Here’s what I learned. Transcriptions for this episode are generated by automatically AI. A copy of the transcript follows. Every time I told somebody I was selling my business, they would say, “Congratulations!” And I would think, “What are you talking about?” I just screwed everything all up. Nobody ever tells you how you’re supposed to feel when you sell a business. Because from the time I started my freelance business, which in earnest sort of started in the blink. I don’t know, 2003-ish, 2004. I grew that business steadily for literally my entire career. And it was a hard-fought thing. I didn’t never have money for large advertising schemes or grand marketing plans or whatever, which is ironic considering I ran a website design and developed as a marketing advertising agency. But I did it one client at a time, doing it the way that people who have been doing it for a long time will tell you is the best way to grow a business, which is that you just provide a really good product or service, and the rest should just sort of take care of itself. I still sort of believe that, but that’s not entirely true, of course, advertising certainly makes things go a lot faster, and if you have the money to be able to do that, you can sort of turn that success dial up a lot faster. From my experience, though, I had been putting everything into this business, and particularly around 2009, or excuse me 2007 rather, when I really started in earnest, there was a time when I made the commitment to leave what was then my full-time job that had benefits and steady salary and start this business. And I think that year that I made something like $7,500. I think actually my tax returns that you reported something in the neighborhood of like $74, $1,700 in revenue and profit really. And the amount of money that can revenue that I managed to bring in was something like $13,000. It was like $13,000 or $14,000. And in retrospect, I don’t even know how I did that, but I did it through not spending a lot of money. A lot of tuna salads in, which is, I remember that. There were a lot of those for lunch. I’d have a half a can for lunch, and then the other half, which would make the other sandwich for dinner. And over time, I got a few more clients here and there. And then somewhere along the way, things went off the rails. Things changed when I got an office space because somehow the expense scheme changed. I got more clients as a result of that. It generally was a good thing for the business to have the office space because it allowed me to be near other people, other business owners and sort of give the ability to meet new people and that networking had a useful effect based off of the office space that I was in. It was affordable space by all measures. But in that time, I also managed to bring on interns and staff, I had contractors. I was trying to scale up in useful ways. And most of that scaling was just sort of churning around and around and around with clients all day all night on stuff that truly just kind of didn’t matter for a lot of people in a lot of ways. I had a lot of clients that just took up a lot of time. They were high touch, they needed a lot of handholding, they wanted everything explained to them in a way that most businesses just can’t quite scale. Certainly not at the rates that I had been charging. And so I had agreed this business and I continued to grow this business in a way that was really great for one person, but not great for a lot of people. And once I sort of was approached by this idea of like, “Well, maybe you should consider selling somebody that I knew and trusted had a connection that they knew and trusted who might have been interested.” And so there were actually a couple of suitors who had proposed Bids to buy the book of business that I had made. And by this point in time, the business was making some place in the neighborhood of about $150,000 a year. I wasn’t pulling that much money out of it. A lot of it was kind of going right back into the business in ways that paid for other people and paid for help and other office space and that sort of stuff. And so I wasn’t realizing a lot of it. And I felt like I was working a lot to not really have a whole lot of benefit from it. And around 2018, things had been off the rails for a while. The number of clients that we had was just a little bit too much. I used to call it the hump problem, because if you imagine that if, if, say, for example, as a business, you’re able to maintain 10 clients of a certain size and scope, and then you want to keep growing, you need another 10 clients pretty quickly in order to pay for another person, right? And so if you have 11 clients, that’s really hard because you don’t have the money from those 11 people to pay you and somebody else. And it’s difficult to find, you know, talented, young people, talented juniors or talented part-time people, particularly in the web design development industry that are loyal to those sorts of things because they themselves are probably trying to do other things. And so even if you had 12 or 13 clients, it’s still not enough to sort of get you over the hump. You need probably 16 or 17 clients to in order to pay for yourself and most of of somebody else or at least to break even in that. And then you really want 20 clients because that’ll make it comfortable for you and the other person. The problem then is that when you have 20 clients, well, then you’re in the exact same hump all over again where it’s like, well, now we got 21 or 22 clients because somebody referred somebody else or somebody came in the door or whatever. And then the result is that you’re always fighting this hump where it’s like I just need a little bit more money to afford this XYZ thing over here or this person over here. And I was constantly in that struggle. It was incredibly stressful for me. I think I’ve probably aged more in the years between like 2017 and 2020 than just about any other period of my career so far. I enjoyed having a lot of long-term clients that were still good for customers of ours. We increasingly had other clients that we would occasionally recognize that we should turn down or turn away. But by large, we did what a lot of businesses do, which is that you just sort of take people on because at least within a service business like ours, you just don’t know quite what you’re getting into with people until you’ve worked with them for a while. And no amount of interviewing or vetting or anything like that is really going to change that dramatically. And so by the time 2018, 2019 rolled around, I was just burnt out and I just did not know what to do until somebody came along and said, “Hey, maybe you should consider selling the business.” And I had never thought about that before. It just, I was kind of in this mindset of like, “This is just what I’ll do until I die, I guess.” ‘Cause I just didn’t know what else to do. And if it didn’t seem like, I certainly couldn’t walk away. I couldn’t leave all those people hanging, right? because there were some people who I genuinely liked very much and were relying upon us to do a job that’s very important to them, represents them in their organizations and their businesses. And part of it too is that in addition to being burnt out on all that sort of business administration stress and sort of the constant grind around the hump of always getting over the next problem, I was also kind of bored with a lot of the work because a lot of it was is just so repetitive. It’s like, oh, this person’s got their golf outing again this year. This person’s got the such and such event. This person’s doing this thing. And it’s not even like the themes of these things changed very much, right? It’s not like they’re like, I’ve had some clients that have like nonprofit fundraisers, for example, or big galas every year, but it’s a different theme so you kind of get to do different interesting things with it. In my case, a lot of the work was just like, no, but it’s the same golf outing. It’s the same expo that we’ve always done, the same conference we’ve always done, same this that and the other the same father’s day say all the same mother’s day event the same everything right it’s always kind of the same routine and so for a lot of clients that was both a blessing and sort of a stickiness of us because we mostly me just deeply understood the patterns of things I knew what they liked and if they didn’t like I knew what they couldn’t couldn’t say based off of policies or internal preferences or laws or whatever and so there was never a moment where they had to run out and like onboard some other agency or whatever or some other person or freelancer and then have to explain all that to them all over again because we just knew it, right? We could anticipate their needs, we could anticipate what problems they were going to run into, we just got better and better every single year. But even though we got better and better at providing a service to them every year, it didn’t necessarily mean that we got faster at it every year. Sometimes it just took up a lot of time. And a lot of times, that time was consumed doing things that just weren’t that interesting. Even like month to month sort of things, where it’s like, well, here’s their monthly meeting or their quarterly whatever, and just sort of producing al

    28 min

  4. 02/03/2023

    S2E4: Hetero-normative gift cards

    It’s an odd thing, telling people who you want to have sex with. But, we humans do that a lot.

    26 min

  5. 01/19/2023

    S2E3: I don’t remember what happened at the funeral

    There’s a lot that I remember about the day my mom suffered a seizure, including the weather. And the day she died, and what happened at strange intervening moments in between. But what I don’t remember is what happened at the funeral. It seemed like the most unimportant thing in the entire 732 day affair.

    43 min

  6. 01/10/2023

    S2E2: The low down on Amtrak's real plans

    Episode 2 of this season’s podcast, wherein I remember the time I picked up a random man at Wal-Mart. He gave me the low-down on Amtrak’s real plans and vaguely remembered where his sister lived.

    15 min

  7. 01/04/2023

    S2E1: 21 things I learned teaching Photoshop last semester

    Welcome to Season 2 of my award-self-nominated podcast. This season is more personal stories and anecdotes. If you didn’t like last season, good news! It’s not about books. If you like books, bad news! It’s not about books this time around. To kick off this season of Justin’s Podcast, I’ve got a list of 21 things I learned while teaching Photoshop at IU last semester. Here’s the summary: Asking pointed questions elicits pointed answers. Having two tracks makes double the work for me, but seems worth the cost. Need to discuss logos with clarity early in the semester. It comes up a lot. Having uniform rubrics is impossibly hard for visual arts. And devolving to technical criteria risks making everything too easy — like repeating a flower 20 times for sake of hitting a “minimum layer target”. Better to let people run with their instincts and trust they’ll rise to the occasion. I wish I had a better way of recording and editing more visually interesting videos. The first week’s swipe file assignment is probably too easy and not considered by anyone later in the semester, despite being a truly useful way of collecting good ideas. Probably just isn’t vital to most people, most of the time, though. Creating a newspaper ad would be an interesting challenge due to color restraints. But maybe not super applicable. It’s not clear to me that it’s clear to most students on the business track that most of the requests, files, ideas, and “emails” are, truly, from client interactions I’ve had over the years. Canvas stats show many people aren’t viewing the videos, suggesting they’re too long or boring. Not sure if the value of “real world” demo versus “tightly edited like a cooking show” is worth it or not. Almost no one takes advantage of office hours or focus times, despite being a problem most readily admit to needing help with. Not sure if that’s because of timing or not. A shockingly high percentage of students will wait until the last few hours before a deadline to submit. I don’t recall this from my time as a student at IUPUI. Halloween week was probably the most fun, despite not being particularly common for sake of future career use. There should probably be more opportunities to post in the forums, but without a point penalty no one will. Also conflicts with my student experience of assuming the forums were shallow and people just reply for sake of replying with banal comments. But many students do exceptionally good work — and having others see that level of quality is valuable. Everyone in this class will be competing against everyone else for work someday very soon. I wish more than I thought I would that I could talk and interact with students more, if only via Zoom. Most students need the weekend to work on projects. Regardless of when or how the semester starts and ends, try to permit a schedule that allows for two weekends instead of one for projects.  There is a significant gap — perhaps from mere lived experience — between thinking about what a project needs and what a project demands.  Some students will face challenges in their lives that I can’t do anything to help with. But sometimes, just asking seems like more than most people do. Messaging students directly is vitally important to better understand students’ careers, hopes, and needs. Can tailor work for them while class sizes remain modest. The price students pay for this class must live up to that cost, even if they may not realize it until months or years later, if ever. Students who aren’t self-directed, or aren’t sure if they’re self-directed enough, should be advised early this class might not be for them. It’s incredibly hard to teach or even relay what is good taste, style, and panache.

    35 min

  8. 02/12/2022

    Off Balance – Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth by Mathew Kelly (ep. 017)

    I like parts of this book and not others, but it’s probably the most “aggressive” of any book I’ve read on what it takes to achieve some kind of life satisfaction. But therein lies another rub, too, which is that there’s not a lot here about work-life balance and it’s mostly just about making the decisions to make big changes in your life. But there are some interesting bits in here that reflect the author’s personality in ways that are unique and interesting for such a short book. The writing is clear and direct, maybe a little too direct at times even. Available at the links below and on YouTube and Vimeo. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

    32 min

  9. 02/09/2022

    Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (ep. 016)

    This book is seemingly everywhere lately, or at least the author is. I listened to the audiobook version of “Stolen Focus” and found it holistic, compared to many other books on the same topic. Though there are some things in here—like treating Facebook as a public utility and all the regulatory trappings therein—downright absurd. If there’s a fault here, it’s that Johann Hari’s method of dealing with lack of attention and focus was a cold-turkey detox that involved spending three months on Cape Cod. Maybe, just maybe, that’s a bit unrealistic for literally everyone in the country save the few hundred people who live there. It would have been more charming if he’d spent three months in Montana. I assume just about anyone can afford to live in Montana. Some of my notes from listening to the book below. I talk more about it in depth in this episode at the links below. Also available to watch on YouTube and Vimeo. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ You’ll like this book if you like something that’s informative, holistic, and makes you reflect on yourself. I appreciate he was trying to put some matters into practice and find a solution. Even if they were a bit privileged I like how he made an obvious effort to claim where some of the research is very convinced, conflicted, and maybe downright wrong for one reason or another.There are parts of this book where he makes points that seem so flatly absurd I don’t even know why they’re in the book. Like how the Government should take over Facebook and run it like a public utility. Harvard research says mind wandering is a road to ruminations and bad feelings. People report mind wandering as their least happiest moments. You need focus on something else. Fiction builds empathy because you imagine yourself in someone’s head and practice understanding characters. Nonfiction doesn’t do that. But empathetic people could just be inclined to read function. But some research shows this partially true with kids who pick their own books developing better understanding of other people. A society that can’t focus is keen to gravitate toward authoritarian regimes with simplistic answers. I don’t think that’s entirely true — people could focus fine in the thirties. This is just exacerbating human nature. We have a social problem causing obesity. We have bad food and cities and it’s making us fat. (Body positivity?). And focus is also a social problem. There are many books on this topic, but this one is probably the most comprehensive at citing or sourcing material from many other long-time sources, like Tristan Harris, Cal Newport, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

    30 min

  10. 01/31/2022

    “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan (ep. 015)

    The Dust Bowl probably got a fleeting mention in your elementary education. I knew it as a time a bunch of dust blew around sandwiched between poodle skirts and Hitler. This book is a good way unwinding all that bunk in your head and understanding the people who lived in the Great Plains of Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, and Nebraska. A masterclass in well-researched work, it’s almost frightening how much Egan seems to know about people’s day-to-day lives. And like most events in history, the real reason for them happening is far more complicated and economically-motivated than we think. The Dust Bowl happened because the economy happened, and the economy happened because the Dust Bowl happened. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Available on Vimeo and YouTube, and via the links below in your favorite podcast app.

    30 min
  • 10 Episodes

About

A semi-regular review of the books Justin’s read, writing, and other musings. Sadly, another white guy with a podcast.

Information

  • Creator
    Justin Harter
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2025
  • Episodes
    10
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Justin's Podcast