Morgan Friedman: Hey everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. I’m excited to have with me the one and only Andrew Bolton. How are you doing today, Andrew?

Andrew Bolton: I’m doing fine. Thank you so much for having me back.

Morgan Friedman: So before we jump in, I always recommend to everyone who wants to come on Client Horror Stories to have alcohol while they tell the story. So what are you drinking today?

Andrew Bolton: This is Bushmills. I’m a Bushmills guy in our family. For anybody that knows the Bushmills-Jameson kind of feud — either you’re a Jameson drinker or you’re a Bushmills drinker. I’m a Bushmills drinker, and this is the 10-year single malt. It is absolutely fantastic. And the one whiskey I always recommend that anybody should have in their stash is Bushmills Black. It is a smooth, light, smoky caramel flavor that just — for the price point, for like $45, you get a really nice bottle of whiskey. You really do. I highly recommend it.

Morgan Friedman: I know absolutely nothing about the Bushmills-Jameson feud. I’d love the three-sentence version and then we can get into our regularly scheduled story.

Andrew Bolton: Basically, they’re just two different sides of Ireland. One is in southern Ireland, the other is in Northern Ireland. Bushmills is brewed in Dublin — it’s the oldest registered distillery in the world. So there’s always this kind of north-versus-south feud between Jameson and Bushmills drinkers. I mean, split one half dozen the other. If you’re in an Irish bar, you drink whatever whiskey they’ve got. But when they do have Bushmills, I do prefer a glass of Bushmills.

Morgan Friedman: I love it. Yankees versus Mets — even if in the big scheme of things they’re pretty similar, you choose your identity.

Andrew Bolton: Yankees and Mets — as New Yorkers and New Jerseyans, we have our quirks. Mets fans are Mets fans. Yankees fans are diehard Yankees fans. Our family is split kind of down the middle, so whenever there’s a Subway Series, it gets kind of interesting around here.

Morgan Friedman: I grew up right near Shea Stadium, so —

Andrew Bolton: I know exactly where you fall. I know exactly where you fall.

Morgan Friedman: There’s — hey, listen. I’ve got nothing against the Mets. I just grew up on the Yankees side of the family.

Andrew Bolton: Understood. You’re a Yankees guy. That just means we can never be friends.

Morgan Friedman: I might have to start drinking Jameson just to piss you off.

Andrew Bolton: You know what? As long as the rounds are on you, you can drink whatever you want. As long as the rounds just keep coming, we can drink whatever you want. As long as it’s not Jägermeister. I can’t do Jäger.

Morgan Friedman: The true capitalist answer. I love it. So with that awesome preface, let’s jump in. I’d love to hear your favorite client horror story.

Andrew Bolton: I haven’t been to a bar probably since about last year, with the company just being as busy as it is. But I remember in my earlier days going through Wall Street, meeting clients, doing the whole bar scene in New York City. I remember vodkas were like $30, and you had to be careful because you could run up a $500 bar tab very easily. I remember the first time I saw a tab over a thousand — I think it was $1,200 — I nearly had a heart attack. I couldn’t believe we went through that much money.

Morgan Friedman: Client acquisition can be expensive. It goes into your cost per acquisition.

Andrew Bolton: Oh, it does. Especially if you have like four guys with you. It was scary how fast that tab just started flying up.

Morgan Friedman: Totally. And now, with that awesome preface — let’s jump in. I’d love to hear your favorite client horror story.

Andrew Bolton: Our favorite client horror story is the one that is right now breaking our system. After we last spoke, we had a late-night phone call that came in at around 11. But wait — before we get there, I want to give some context on what we do for all the viewers today.

Morgan Friedman: Please, yes.

Andrew Bolton: My name is Andrew Bolton. I am the CEO of Tech Rescue LLC. We are a 24-hour customer support helpline. We handle everything from Bluetooth connectivity to skins on Fortnite, to Star Wars Battlefront, to Star Wars: The Old Republic. As long as you have data or Wi-Fi and you can get to us, we can get to you. We handle any type of technical issues for seniors, assisted living facilities, and small businesses. We handle the tech so you can get back to life. So if mom and dad are constantly calling about not being able to find a picture on Facebook, or they’re having trouble uploading pictures to Instagram, instead of you having to get up and do it yourself, just call us: 855-250-8586. Twenty-four hours, seven days a week, we handle it all — and we do it with empathy, because we’ve all been there.

Morgan Friedman: And by the way, I love the self-promotion. And just because we established a few minutes ago that we’re both New Yorkers and we seem to be about a comparable age — your whole pitch, including the phone number, reminds me of Crazy Eddie. I think no one watching this will remember because it was a New York thing from about thirty years ago, but you have to know what I’m talking about.

Andrew Bolton: Exactly. Exactly. So what we’ve noticed since our inception about two years ago is that we’ve been dealing with a much, much different demographic in terms of our senior citizens. We are dealing with a totally different senior — 65 and older. They are engaging much more with technology. They are buying computer systems. They’re buying video games. They’re buying Xbox and PlayStation because they’re trying to maintain connections with their grandkids. Their grandkids come home from school, and instead of meeting at the park — which kids don’t really do anymore — they’re engaging on Fortnite, they’re engaging in World of Warcraft, they’re meeting up with their grandkids on a Star Wars platform. They are connecting with their children and grandchildren in a much more digital but genuinely connective way.

And what we’ve also noticed is that with a much more active senior group, we are dealing with much more adult-like topics — such as dating.

Morgan Friedman: I just want to call that out because we’re not yet at the horror story, but I find it super interesting. The image I have of my grandma is just sitting in a rocking chair, back and forth, all day long, not doing much else. So the image of grandma hunched over a PlayStation is incredible.

Andrew Bolton: Well, I mean, over the past fifteen years or so, electronics, hardware, and accessories have dropped in price almost 183%. So what was once a thousands-of-dollars plasma screen TV, you can now go to Walmart and get a 60 or 65-inch for around $300. You can get a PlayStation 4 or 5 for less than $700. You buy a couple of games, you sign up for the PlayStation store, you subscribe to us, and we’ll help you set everything up. Now you can find your grandkids and children and engage with them. That’s what we’ve been doing. I would say almost 27% of our call volume is coming in on video games alone — whether that’s online platforms or hardwired platforms, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox. We’re dealing with a much more active senior citizen.

Morgan Friedman: Wow. It’s a whole new world out there. Okay — so you just mentioned you’re seeing a lot of adult issues with the senior citizens. Tell us a bit about that. 

I see you trying to choose your words carefully. I love it.

Andrew Bolton: This is being recorded. I know it is.

So one of the stories I have to share — not too long ago — I received a phone call that had been elevated past the point of our team’s typical expertise. I was elevated to a situation where a subscriber, a client of ours, called in and wanted to send a certain type of video to another person.

They had been told by their grandchildren what WhatsApp was and how it’s beneficial — how it’s encrypted, and how messages can’t really be hacked or saved if they’re done as a one-time view. Now, for anybody who doesn’t know: on WhatsApp, when you select an image from your files, you can select a video or a picture, and once you select it, a little circle appears just above the green send button. It’s a little green circle with a black outline triangle above it. You press that once, and that picture or video will only appear once. After it’s been watched, it can no longer be viewed again. This has become quite popular with today’s youth for various reasons.

The gentleman in question happened to be someone in the 70-plus age bracket.

Morgan Friedman: Okay.

Andrew Bolton: So for someone to be asking how to send a certain video — the origins of this call actually stemmed from a few weeks earlier, when we had originally helped him sign up for Tinder.

Morgan Friedman: Because you have a subscription basis, you see them across different interactions.

Andrew Bolton: We have two platforms — a monthly subscription and an annual subscription. Now, I was elevated to this conversation, so I pulled up the call and listened to it. The gentleman in question was nervous about talking to his children and grandchildren about this subject. So when we helped him with his social media and dating profiles, it was done in confidence. He was reassured that his family wasn’t going to be asking too many questions he didn’t want to answer. And I completely understand, sir. I completely understand. Less questions, more power to you.

Morgan Friedman: Just to be clear — he just wants to send one-time messages because he wants to share something private and doesn’t want it to be repeated or saved. 

Andrew Bolton: For whatever reason, he only wanted a picture sent once and seen once. 

Morgan Friedman: By the way, for the record, this is an R-rated podcast. So if you’re thinking anything,

Andrew Bolton: You can understandably think it — but I have to keep some discretion for our clientele and for our brand recognition too. We are a family brand. We are a family company.

Morgan Friedman: I love it. I support it completely. I’m a Tech Rescue fan.

Andrew Bolton: And so obviously this got elevated to the project manager. Our project manager did not want to touch this. 

Morgan Friedman: .And I absolutely totally agree.

 They didn’t want to touch this in any way, shape, or form — not now, not ever. 

I know. Pun intended. You like that? There you go.

Morgan Friedman:  I appreciate it. 

Andrew Bolton:  So I received the phone call, listened to the transcript, and I said, “Okay. I’ll handle this personally.” I called the gentleman and said, “Hi, this is Andrew Bolton, CEO of Tech Rescue. It’s been brought to my attention that you have some questions and need some help.” The conversation proceeded. I engaged in what we do — we send a third-party encrypted link that allows me to gain access to your phone, tablet, or computer, and we’re able to do whatever we need to do. And once we break that connection, I can no longer access the computer whatsoever. Once it’s over, it’s done.

I took over the computer. I went to web WhatsApp, and we went through the process.

Now — a very important note, gentlemen. A very important note. When you go into WhatsApp and you sign up, if your pictures and videos are synced to your Google Drive, whatever you take a picture of — even if it’s a one-time-view event — will automatically save and sync to your photo file in Google. Do not make this mistake. Go back to Settings. Go under Media. Click on Media and uncheck the sync box. Do not be stupid.

Morgan Friedman: I love the public service announcement.

Andrew Bolton: Because some of us in our younger days have made this terrible mistake, I knew exactly where to go — and I wasn’t going to go into that folder. Didn’t want to know what was in that folder. So because something like that was probably going to be somewhere in the top three rows of recent media, I was not going there.

There was a picture on his desktop. It was a picture of family. So I said, “Fine. Here is your personal phone number.” On WhatsApp, you can see your personal number, and you can actually send photos and videos to yourself first as a test. So I showed him how to do it and said, “By the way, this process works for anything that you might have interest in sharing with other people, but I highly recommend we do it once so it cannot be screenshotted, cannot be saved, and cannot be identified later.”

I also said: do not make the early mistakes that a lot of us did. Don’t do a downward angle — do an upward — no, wait. Don’t do an upward angle. Do a downward angle. And stay away from your face. Don’t be stupid.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, with every episode of Client Horror Stories, I try to get at least one new lesson that has never been shared on any previous episode. And no one has ever given the advice to make sure you do a downward angle, not an upward angle. So I’m happy.

Andrew Bolton: You don’t want to see your face. I suggested to our client: be smart. Don’t be stupid. Show it once and try to keep anything identifiable to a minimum. Generalization is always a good idea.

So with that, he thanked me for my time. I said, “If there’s anything else we can help you with, please feel free to call us, 24/7.” And then we moved on — and I said, why don’t we address this more broadly by creating a standardized response. So we wrote a standard operating procedure: if anything goes above what we would consider PG-13, it gets escalated directly up to me. I will handle that personally due to sensitivity, and I have a much more lenient approach to it.

And I look at it this way: somebody is calling us for help. That is what makes our company special. We are a technology support helpline, 24 hours a day. But what we have come to find out with our clientele is that we’re not really a technology support helpline at all. We are actually a human hotline. All of our calls are hot calls — they’re confused, angry, frustrated, lost, and just desperate. So the moment you call us and you hear, “Mr. Scott or Mrs. Anderson, how can we help you today?” — you’re already about ten degrees cooler than you were before you called. Because when you’re calling, you want help. You don’t want a menu. You don’t want bots. You don’t want a maze. You want somebody to pick up the phone and say, “Here we are. We’re here to help. How can I help you?”

Morgan Friedman: I want to observe to what a surprisingly huge degree all professional services are kind of just being human. I’ve discussed this with a few lawyer friends who consistently observe that more than 50% of their time with clients is just asking questions like, “Well, what kind of contract do you want? What kind of business do you want? How do you want to do it?” Just having someone to talk to through these basic human decisions.

Andrew Bolton: See, the problem is we have focused primarily on optimization and generating alpha. There’s nothing wrong with alpha. Capital and profits are something that we should strive for as an organization, as a business, regardless. But what I’ve come to learn through this journey of growing our business and meeting with other leaders — and I’m not going to lie, I love the free VIP ballgame passes that people use to pitch their services, so you get to go see the Nets, the Devils, the Rangers — the great thing I get out of those experiences is the chance to talk to other leaders.

And somebody actually made something really stick with me: how you treat your customers and your people is how they treat your bottom line and your wallet. Yes, could we optimize our system with AI bots and automated screening? Yes, we could optimize ourselves by about 13% — save maybe a couple of thousand dollars a month in operating expenses. But you know what? That’s not why we started this business. And at the end of the day, people don’t want another bot. They don’t want to press one for English, two for Spanish. They just want to talk to somebody. And I think where we’re going to see the next growth in every industry is going back to basics: customer service.

Ever since the pandemic, we have become so far distant from one another. I could go to your Facebook account and learn everything about you — what you have for breakfast, your family, your likes, your dislikes, your hobbies. I can know everything about you by the end of the day. But I don’t actually know who you are. And I think we are moving as a society in that direction — we know who we are, but we do not know each other. And that’s where I think we’ve found our niche, at least in the small businesses and assisted living facilities we serve. We’re providing that connection again — that humanity again. I know it sounds dramatic, but that’s the only way I can put it, because otherwise my business wouldn’t exist. The fact that it thrives is because we are desperate for that human connection. Math doesn’t lie, regardless of whatever else anyone believes.

Morgan Friedman: What I would add to that analysis is not just that people need the human connection, but that humans feel comfortable, safe, and better when there’s a plan — when they know someone somewhere has it handled. So when people’s technology is freaking out and they can’t connect, and someone says, “Okay, we’ll figure this out” — just hearing those words. You can relax so much. 

Andrew Bolton: Because at the end of the day we just want to be heard. We want to be heard. If we knew what we were doing, we’d be doing it ourselves. And on the second page of our orientation binder, after the cover, in big bold letters, it says: “Every call is someone’s most important person.” Because we started this company from my father and my grandmother. That’s where it all started. So when somebody calls in, they’re past the frustration point. They’ve exercised their resources. They’ve exhausted their knowledge base. And now they need somebody to fix it because they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re going to be agitated, they’re going to be annoyed — I would be too. So that’s where we come in. We come in when you are at that breaking point, when you’re calling your grandkids, calling your son, interrupting someone else’s day because you have a problem. And now we’re here to help. We’re going to fix the problem with you right there with us. You just get to sit back and watch us work.

Morgan Friedman: I want to share a quick story — slightly tangential but relevant to what you do. I’m old friends with a founder, the former CEO of one of the largest tech companies out there. I won’t use her name, but everyone listening to this has used their service. When the company went public — about twenty years ago, give or take, I lost count and I felt old when I did the accounting — my friend called me. He said, “Morgan, I just made a bazillion dollars. I want to come to New York and hang out with you.” And I was so honored. He stayed with me for about a week, and we had an amazing time. The first time I had ever really experienced true luxury like that. One day while he was staying with me — remember, he’s a founder superstar, company everyone’s used, made a fuckload of money — we’re walking down St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan and he gets a call on his cell phone. He answers it and says, “Hi, Mom.” Then listens for about thirty seconds, and then says, “Mom, unplug the modem… wait thirty seconds… and then plug it back in.”

And what I love about that story is: no matter how much money you make, no matter how successful you are, you’re still the tech support for your parents. And something really cool about you guys is you take that observation and turn it into a business. Everyone is someone’s most special person. They need that person to call for help. But most kids — what happens when kids are out dealing with their own kids and their own lives? You need that connection, that person to call. And that’s where Tech Rescue comes in.

Andrew Bolton: A hard pill to swallow is that we really do love the people we have in our lives. It’s just that they annoy the crap out of us sometimes. You’re doing whatever — let’s say you’re a gamer, you’re in the middle of your game, and you get that yell across the house. You’re weighing your consequences: do I pause, or do I keep going? Or you’re watching a movie and you get interrupted.

What we do is buy back your time. For $50 a month, they never have to call you again except just to talk, just to say hi. You don’t have to get up. You don’t have to stop what you’re doing. For $50 a month, we’ll take care of it — no matter how many times they call about photos, tweets, downloading a video, finding a song, finding a folder, finding a file, finding a tax return. No more. That pain, that annoyance, that frustration of, “I’ve told you five times this week where it was. I showed you where it was. I went over and did it for you yesterday. How are we still talking about this?” — no more.

For less than $400 for the entire year — cheaper than a pair of Jordans — it’s done. At Christmas: “How do I send the electronic card from Hallmark?” You know how you click on Hallmark, buy the e-card, and send it? How many times have you done that over the past five years? Every single year. No more.

Or my mother’s favorite: “How do I print the birthday card front-to-back on the printer so I can fold it?” You know how many calls we get from that? Mother’s Day weekend, we averaged somewhere between 500 and 600 calls a day that week — just for how to set up the folding cards on the printer. How do I change the ink on the printer? How do I get the flowers delivered to my mother’s job instead of home? We do it all. We go in, we help. As long as you can connect to us, we can connect to you. We’ll take care of it. You watch our mouse working on your computer — boom, done. Just call us up anytime, day or night, 24 hours a day. Sit there with your coffee or your glass of whiskey or wine, or hell, go straight from the bottle. You don’t have to do anything. You just sit there and let us work. Tech doesn’t judge. I’m not judging you. You could be in your underwear. We can’t see you. Please don’t be in your underwear. Please — for legal reasons.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I haven’t lived in New York for a long time, but I’m a New Yorker at heart. I love your style and your energy. It reminds me of all my friends from New York. Oh, where are you these days?

Andrew Bolton: I’m now in Argentina, but I’ve lived all over the world. South America is absolutely fantastic. I love Colombia — I’ve absolutely fallen in love with the country. And I recommend any person to get out of the United States for at least three weeks. You need three solid weeks outside of the US to understand what it’s like living in the United States. We are on a totally different planet. You have to stay out for three weeks to be desensitized — and then come back, and it will hit you like a frei ght train.

Morgan Friedman: I love it. So the historical story of the guy wanting to send a pic — that’s fantastic. But when we started the episode, you mentioned that there was another situation that just happened, possibly the biggest one yet. I’d love to hear it to round this out.

Andrew Bolton: This is going to poke at some of our flaws, because we are not perfect humans.

Late last week, we had somebody call in at a very odd hour. It’s a low-traffic time for us. We have heat indexes to optimize where we staff most effectively for operations. Well, somebody called in around 1:00 a.m. — that’s usually a dead hour for us. Now, mind you, we have people on staff, but this one happened to go through with an issue. This person was on hold for a very long time, and apparently they felt a certain way about it and kept calling.

We received about 150 emails from around 11:30 at night until about 4:00 in the morning.

Morgan Friedman: From 11:30 to 4:00 a.m., they literally sent you 150 emails?

Andrew Bolton: 150 emails. I had never seen anything like this ever. How is it even possible to send that many? They were one-sentence emails — angry, short bursts — coming in congregations of two-to-eight-minute intervals. The longest gap between emails was around 16 to 17 minutes.

Over the weekend, we re-evaluated our call times. We re-evaluated our flow-through process. This one incident cost us a good amount of money in terms of restructuring, because we have to pay to retrain and go through our systems. The process has to be slowed down, which costs quantifiable hours, and then we have to start from the very beginning in terms of calling in through the call center, going through the patchwork, going through the network channels, then making sure that the call is properly routed to the right people on shift.

Well, this one particular incident revealed that we had a glitch in our system. A glitch that broke through our distribution in terms of call volume. Long story short, we had a glitch in the switch that basically wasn’t channeling our calls properly. Technology is sometimes not perfect — and it allowed us to now put into our standard operating procedure how to properly check that switchboard at certain times.

What we also found out is that during the low hours, a major system update runs at the same time as our own updates. So what we now do is stagger our system update to run at dead-zone times, offset from the main system update — which happens roughly every four days. We’ve now scheduled ours based off that window. We’re hoping that fixes the issue. And this week, I have an alarm set to wake up at 1:00, 3:00, and 4:00 a.m. every night to hit our system right from my office and make sure we’re on target — to make sure that when somebody calls, that patchwork goes through. That is my job this week, every single night, to make sure that system is in place.

Is it fun? Absolutely not. I hate it. But to that person — thank you. I’m not happy about it, but thank you.

Morgan Friedman: What I like about your analysis is that you’re naturally doing something I always recommend to my clients, which is: look at every single problem through the lens of how do we update our process so this doesn’t happen again. A way I say it to my teams is: I will never criticize anyone for a mistake. However, I never want to see the same problem happen twice.

Andrew Bolton: After I calmed down — after I calmed down about all of it — my mother, who is the CFO of our company — yes, I know, mother-and-son is a surprising combination, but I trust her completely — we had a conversation and put our heads together. Alright, this is a problem. It’s going to happen again. So how do we prevent it from happening ever again? Because if it happens once, it will happen again.

The best way to look at any organizational problem is to think of it as a leaky pipe. There’s a reason why there’s a leaky pipe. You have to fix the pipe. You can’t just patch it. Otherwise it will keep happening. You can patch it, but eventually that patch will wear and you’re going to have the same problem. So do yourself a favor: find the origins of the problem and fix that. Because the patchwork only goes so far. I understand that sometimes budgets and time constraints are real, but what I’ve seen with companies is they take the attitude of, “We’ll patch for now and get back to it later.” And it never gets back to it.

Morgan Friedman: In software development, that very concept is called tech debt. And software developers always point out that tech debt is never actually paid. What often happens is it builds up to such a massive amount that you kind of have to just chuck the whole system and start all over. It’s a very common pattern. 

Andrew Bolton: When I was working for a small startup doing artificial intelligence work — artificial intelligence is easy to build at a basic level. It’s a 2×2 matrix with a one-zero, yes-no type of probability. That’s how the core of AI works. It needs a framework that builds and builds. That matrix is easy — that’s where the probability analysis lives. It’s the function in which it lives where things get complicated. As you keep going down the branches and develop the probability analysis for what it can and can’t do, that’s where problems start. And when you find a glitch in the code, you have to go back to the very top and work your way all the way down. And it is not easy. It is not fun. It could take weeks.

They call those sessions “blitzes.” We were doing code blitzes every week around 2018 and 2019, just going and going and going. It was rough. Because I was on the sales side, whenever I was trying to do a sales pitch and demonstration, the system wasn’t up because they were in the middle of a run. I had to coordinate with the development team to know exactly when they were doing a rollout or a crash or a beta — because the only time I could do a sales pitch was when they were absolutely not touching anything.

I remember one time I was in a conference room, opened up the door, and yelled at the top of my lungs: “Stop touching shit.”

Morgan Friedman: I knew I could get an R-rated word out of you eventually, as the episode came to an end.

Andrew Bolton: Really it was just — I opened up the door and said, “Get your hands off the computer and stop touching shit,” and slammed the door.

Morgan Friedman: Spoken like a true New Yorker.

Andrew Bolton: They were in the system while I was in a presentation. When we were trying to run the probability analysis demonstration, the system would freeze and an error would come up. And when you’re dealing with a high-end client, that is just — you’re trying to smile and you’re like, “Ha, just give me one second” — and you walk back in and you’re like, “Alright, we should be good now.” Believe it or not, actually, how we got that particular deal done was we took them to a Boston bar and we got them really well acquainted with the drink menu.

Morgan Friedman: We know it’s a good episode of Client Horror Stories when the end wraps all the way back to the beginning. We opened by talking about getting your clients a little too comfortable at the bar during client acquisition, and now we can close with the same point.

Andrew Bolton: Another learning from this episode: the best way in technology to get a deal done is with Irish car bombs.

Morgan Friedman: I have not had an Irish car bomb in fifteen or twenty years.

Andrew Bolton: They’re fantastic. And by the way — for any of you college kids who think you know what you’re doing when it comes to drinking, you don’t. Stop it. A proper Irish car bomb is a double shot glass: Bailey’s for the first half, Bushmills for the second half. Then you have a full pint of Guinness — Guinness, nothing else — full pint, drop it in, boom, chug. That’s an Irish car bomb. None of this whipped cream nonsense you kids are doing is an Irish car bomb. I have no idea what you are doing, but stop it.

Morgan Friedman: Lucky I’m not the dictator, because if I were, I’d make whipped cream on any drink given to a grown man illegal.

Andrew Bolton: In all honesty, it depends on context and location, because depending on who’s delivering it and how it’s delivered — Las Vegas and Miami Beach — there’s always a gray area for certain things.

Morgan Friedman: It’s 2025. If you like umbrellas in your drinks, I fully support it. 

Andrew Bolton: There’s nothing wrong with a mojito, and I will stand ten toes on that. Mojitos. Moscow mules. I will absolutely enjoy a strawberry daiquiri. I am not afraid of that whatsoever. 

Morgan Friedman:  You are a modern man.

Andrew Bolton: A Bahama Mama — absolutely. Out of a pineapple, please. I will absolutely drink my body weight in Bahama Mamas on a beach somewhere warm. There’s nothing wrong with that. Enjoy your umbrella in your drink with pride.

Morgan Friedman: There’s an old Yiddish saying that my grandma used to say — Jews aren’t allowed to eat pork, so my grandma had this old saying: if you’re going to eat pork, eat the best kind. And it’s like — if you’re going to put an umbrella in your drink, put a huge umbrella. Drink it with pride. Go all out.

Andrew Bolton: Absolutely. Absolutely. I love it.

Morgan Friedman: I love it. And with that, I want to thank you for coming, Andrew. This has been a very different episode than usual, but an awesome one. We got multiple lessons in. I think I’ve laughed more in this episode than possibly any other episode — probably all the other episodes combined. But that’s the sign of a good one.

To everyone who made it to the end, thank you for watching, and we hope you’ve enjoyed and learned as much as we have making this episode.

Andrew Bolton: Remember — one-time video, one-time photo.

Morgan Friedman: And the takeaway,

Andrew Bolton:  – downward angle, not upward.

Andrew Bolton: Discretion is key, gentlemen. Discretion is key.

Morgan Friedman: I love it. Great takeaway. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew Bolton: Thank you.