Editing The Pen Addict 1/transcript (section)

== Brad Dowdy ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Sure. If you haven't caught it so far, my name is Brad Dowdy. I started a website called penaddict.com back in 2007, just to kind of capture my fascination with pens that I couldn't find at an office supply store or a grocery store or things like that. And, you know, during that time, there weren't a lot of resources for that type of thing. I'd go online and try to find pens that I liked and couldn't find anyone writing about them, taking pictures of them, showing how a writing sample looked on a piece of paper, things like that. So I decided to do it myself. And it just has kind of grown from there. I've turned that blog into, I guess you could say a full time job with a company called jetpens.com that I now work for full time. As of May of last year, I left a 10 and a half year IT career and became a marketing associate for jetpens.com, which is a company I love.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But, you know, we're going to have this at the end of the show later, but we're still looking for some outro music. So if you would like to submit any outro music, then please get in touch. And you can do that by going to 70decibels.com forward slash contact. We have a contact page where you can also submit general feedback about this show if you wanted to. But we're going to have a sort of a disclaimer, but I figured we'd say it now. So even though you are an employee of jetpens, jetpens is not associated with the pen addict podcast.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. This podcast is, you know, from me as the perspective of the pen addict, not from my employer. So we just want to make that clear up front. All opinions are mine and mine only and are not reflective of jetpens.com.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I love that sort of statement. You see it everywhere online.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I know. These opinions are my own. We need to speed it up like the drug commercials list all the side effects at the end. The potential side effects of being a pen addict. Right. No spare money. I have been called an enabler more than once.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, I think that that is a problem. And we're not helping out by doing it. Before we sort of kick into the first topic as well, I did mention the show notes. And for anybody that's not aware of where to find them, if you go to 70decibels.com forward slash the pen addict, you just find the episode number that you're listening to. Obviously, this is episode one and you can see the show notes there. Or if you use an iOS app, if you're listening on an iPhone or even on, I assume, on other devices, you can see show notes. Like our app of choice is an app called Instacast. And if you're on iOS, then I think that we will all definitely recommend that. And you can see all the show notes there. And if you're listening on the music app on the iPhone or iPod Touch, if you just tap the artwork, the show notes will appear there and you can just click them and go to the links that we reference. So there you go. So, Brad, when we were planning out this episode, you pointed me to a link that our buddy Dave Kaler over at 52 Tiger had posted about pen and paper.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right, right. It's very strange, maybe a little bit of fate how this lined up because, you know, you and I have been talking about this podcast for literally weeks now and doing some planning around it and different things like that. And we scheduled today, you know, weeks back to start the podcast. And then yesterday, our friend Dave on his 52tiger.net blog posted a link to an article from the Detroit Free Press called This Year's Killer App is Pen and Paper. And I was just like, you've got to be kidding me. With us getting ready to start this podcast and that type of article, it just, you know, really speaks to what hopefully this podcast is going to be about. You know, those type of tools and how, you know, just basic analog tools like pen and paper are still, you know, extremely useful and almost necessary in this digital age. And Dave's pull quote from the article was, even as we scramble to replace our daily activities with simplified digital solutions, there's still nothing quite like writing something down.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's so, it's so simple. It's obviously, obviously something I believe in hugely as we'll come to find out as the episodes go on. But I just thought that article was great. I actually, I actually wrote the, the, the journalist who wrote that article yesterday because I was, I was very happy with the article. And so I just wanted to say thanks to him for, for doing that. So it was a very good article. We'll show note that and, and that'll be in the, in the links for everyone to read. And I suggest you do. It's a pretty cool article.