We come (mostly) clean about our past to discuss our education in the classics from the Great Books program of St. John's College of Annapolis and how we think that equips us to be better agency executives than if we'd gone conventional business education routes. Mike and Jason just want to discuss this 1,500-year-old book with you.

We welcome Maark Creative Director Alex Carr to talk about why digital product designers should have the strongest opinion on the team, the prevalence of dumb UX paradigms, and where strategy and design really meet. Mike and Jason just want designers to be more than police sketch artists.

The agency world has been in upheaval for a while, so much so that companies are looking for any way around the Big Guys that they can find, no matter how off the wall the replacement. In this episode we look at a Forbes article and an Accenture report that seem to claim that the future is 100% freelance. Mike and Jason just want you to send us your 1099s as soon as you can.

Maark went from a posh office on Boston's State Street to a completely virtual office spread across the world and everywhere in between (including a few months in a rock climbing gym). In this episode, we discuss our firsthand experiences trying to remotely control our work environment in every possible configuration. Mike and Jason just want the dog to shut up on conference calls.

We welcome Maark colleague Michael Dowd back to the podcast to discuss our experiences pitching work to potential clients, while turning the tables and scoring clients on how they judge pitches. Clue: It shouldn't be merely on skill sets and case studies. Mike and Jason just want people to clap and throw roses at the end of their pitches.

Our eleventh episode centers on Maark, the agency behind AOR; where it came from, and its role as an unlikely veteran in a field that may not exist. More like Quantum Leap than AOR, Mike and Jason just want this episode to put right the wrongs of practice podcasts past.

AOR welcomes Alex Carr, creative director at Maark and the one in charge of user experience (UX) engineering at the company, to discuss how UX engineering takes as much art as engineering, the myth of the full-stack developer, and why there's no such thing as a simple handoff between the design team and the development team. Mike and Jason just want a clean QA phase.

We still don't know if Google faked its Duplex demo, but the idea of it still made us break out our brand new recording equipment so that we could wonder out loud and on mic about the ethics of A.I. in life and marketing. Resident Maark futurist Michael Dowd returns. Mike and Jason just want robot butlers the size of the Iron Giant.

Comparisons between B2B and B2C marketing usually focus on the complexity of B2B solutions and sales. However, the real difference might be (unfortunately) that B2B knows less about its market than B2C. Mike and Jason just want that Star Wars Company to name a robot B2B2C.

Why naming B2B products is often a fool's errand, why the path to a great tagline is through five pages of narrative, and why you should consult a French dictionary before doing anything. Mike and Jason named this podcast in 15 minutes.