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Well, the dog didn’t buy me because he doesn’t have a bank account. Yet that I know of. But, and I have definitely spent more money on Basil than Basil has spent on me. His name is Basil. He is like a border collie black lab mix. If you Google the phrase McNab dog, M-C-N-A-B, it’s like a boutique breed from Northern California imported from Scotland. And you Google this and put it on Google image search, and it’s just 300 pictures of basil, which is weird because. When you think purebred fancy dog, Basil does not come to mind. More batshit space alien. More ludicrous excuse for a throw rug, you know, like he’s not. He’s sitting at my feet right now, and I love him very dearly. I’ve wanted a dog for over five years, and I haven’t been able to because my old apartment was perfect except for the fact that I could not have a dog in it. The landlord would not allow us to. So I bought a house, which if you’re a long time listener of this podcast, you’re well aware of. But then after I bought the house, we wanted to put a dog inside of it. I went to Philadelphia and Durham, came back, went to Stockholm and Copenhagen and Amsterdam, came back. And I said, you know what? I’m going to be home for like six months. Pretty damn good time to have a dog. And we spent a lot of time. Thinking about what kind of dog we want, which ultimately gets thrown out the window when you actually get a dog, right? Like there are certain parameters that make sense for wanting a dog. I kept saying they were parameters, but they’re suggestions, right? We don’t care about the gender of the dog. Some people don’t want male dogs. We don’t care about whether or not it’s okay around children because we don’t plan on spawning. We wanted a shelter dog that was pretty well constrained. However, you know, if somebody from some random breeder or farm was like, hey, we got an extra one that’s a runt or a mutt or something like that, we don’t want them. You want them? I’m like. Not going to say no. That never happened. We said it would be good if we could get a black dog because this is. Not very well known, I feel, because I always surprise people when I tell them this, but black dogs are substantially harder for shelters to adopt out. It is like Google black dog adoption rate and Prove me wrong on this, please, because it’s bonkers. And it’s horrifying, right? Like, why would a yellow lab get adopted out instantly and a black lab stay at a shelter for four months? They’re basically the same type of dog. It’s insane and horrible. Another reason you want to do a shelter dog, or kind of several reasons. There are always too many dogs, right? There’s a recent study that was posted in the New York Times that counted over 10 billion dogs on Earth. I mean, it’s horrible, right? And I mean, most of those are in like slums or they’re street dogs, or they’re feral or something like that. But like, that is still over the goddamn top, which means There is always vast supply of demand, vast supply of dogs, and almost no demand for dogs. Right? There is always, always, always going to be more dogs than humans to give them forever homes. And so I personally, I cannot, I have like a moral obligation at that point to adopt a shelter dog. And you may disagree with this. One thing I’ve learned in the process of adopting a dog, I’ve never encountered more like moralizing and high-falutin statements about what I should be doing with my dog. It is, if you get a farm dog, great. You know what? You have given a lovely dog a home for the rest of its life. It’s not like you were going to unbirth the dog anyway, so the dog would be there. Great. You know what? You did great. I can’t do that. I personally can’t do that. Getting Basil was a very, very deeply personal decision for me and Aaron. So keep that in mind while I’m talking about all of this. Other parameters to the dog. We did not want an enormous dog because they have low lifespans. I love Newfoundlands and Like mastiffs as much as the next human, let me tell you, I have so many photos of like random malamutes and Newfoundlands on my phone that I take photos of on the street because I’m a weirdo, but um I don’t want my dog.

Yeah, that’s true. But I want my dog to last for six years, right? I don’t want a puppy. I want a dog that at least has been like housebroken because I frankly It’s going to be the point where I admit to being a horrible person. Everybody’s got their like horrible person admissions about dog, and you have them too, dear listener, I assure you. I don’t have the time or energy to house train a dog. I don’t. I run a consultancy. It would be very difficult. So I need that to be kind of locked in. And I don’t want an especially old dog for aforementioned reasons of, I want to have a long relationship with my dog. I want Basil to be around, I mean, knock on wood for the next decade plus. The target age for all of this was three. Basil turns four in two weeks from this recording. So we nailed it. And Let me tell you, oh, other things. Don’t want a pit bull. One of the most heartbreaking things about this whole fucking process is how many pit bulls we encountered. Hundreds, hundreds of pit bulls. Pit bulls are great animals. They are um not that intelligent, but they’re extremely loyal. And but they need so much exercise. And for aforementioned reasons of consulting, I don’t have the time to work a dog for three hours a day. And that’s what pit bulls realistically need. They can also be trained because they’re so dumb, they’re really suggestible. So you can have pit bulls come into your house that are nigh untrainable. Because a lot of it is foundational. So, one of my close friends, his name is Brent, and he owns a pit. Brent. Literally lives out of his car traveling the country going on like bike rides around mountains. And he has a lifestyle that’s perfectly suited to having this dog. I don’t have that lifestyle. I have a very quotidian and chill lifestyle at one house, you know. So I don’t want a dog that can be worked a lot. And I know you’re thinking, dog being worked a lot, Border Collie, Nick D, what are you talking about? Got some news for you about Basil. Basil is Basil is furniture. Basil is a piece of furniture in the shape of a dog that occasionally turns all four paws up, demanding tummy rubs to no one. Basil is not the kind of border collie that needs to be worked for three hours a day. He is more, I think, black lab or McNab or whatever you want to call it. And that’s great. That actually works tremendously well for us. We went through Fuck, how many? Probably around 600 dogs. Yeah, some crazy high number. And I it was far easier to say no to a house every time we said no to a house than it was to say no to the literal goddamn puppy i dog because you know You can say yes to any dog and change the life of this organism that has a face forever, you know? And I remember thinking like the day. The day I signed Basil’s paperwork that formally adopted him, he wasn’t even there. Like, I left him at home and I just drove over and brought the crate that they gave me for fostering him and all the supplies and stuff. And I go there and I, you know, swipe my credit card to pay the adoption fee, and sign some paperwork, and I come home and I see him just being a normal dog, having another day, and thinking like that was the most important day of your entire life. That was the most important thing that’s probably going to happen in your entire life, and you never got to see it. You never even get to know about it because how am I going to impart this fact on something with the Brain of a pea and you know, like and that is a mind fuck to contemplate. Like, it is so crazy to think about, like how you can impact the life of a pet so significantly and stay accountable to it.

So I’m staying home for six months. That’s the number one thing. Like, I’m not actually traveling. The answer is the dog won in the game between dog and traveling. But that’s. To give him stability and to let him acclimate to a routine and a good environment, like there were, and honestly, this took two months. Like, I could probably leave now and be okay with it. But there was no way to know how long, for one. There was no way to know if he would have abandonment issues because, I mean, border collies don’t really, but like if you get like a Husky or like an Alaskan or something like that. They will flip out when you leave, like to go on a grocery run on anything. And so that mattered a lot. But I mean, come January, or actually end of December, the trips will resume, right? I’m going to Charlotte for five days for Christmas, and my friends are looking after him. I’m going to Bangkok and Hong Kong at the end of January. I’m not going to see him for nine days. And we’re having a friend come in and dog sit him and crash in our house. So we’re leaning on our social structure to deal with it. We’re leaning on, I mean, I’m happy to board him if I need to, but I would really rather not. He is going to come back with Kennel Cough and a litany of issues. Like any dog, you know, like, um, so, you know, that’s definitely something that is You know, we care about that a lot. We walk him three times a day. You know, like we have changed a lot of our routine to accommodate this guy. And we know that other people might not be able to actually handle it in the same way. So when Emily comes by, she’s going to walk him in the morning and then walk him in the evening. She’s gonna do like a big involved walk, assuming the weather is not horrible in the middle of January. Which is kind of a crapshoot in Chicago now. Climate change is helping us a lot. Which just sucks to say, but makes the winters a lot more bearable. Yeah, so we’re you know figuring it out. I’m We took a trip over Labor Day weekend and we brought him. We found a hotel that was dog-friendly and we took him to like a dog park. We went to Madison, just like a two-hour drive away. And that was pretty easy. But like, I mean, the answer is you have to figure out a way to sensibly work the dog into your life. And. This is a decade-plus commitment you’re going to take. It’s not like having a cat where you can leave the cat all day while you’re at work. It’s not like having a goldfish where you could leave the goldfish into a basic perpetuity. Oh, you have a goldfish. It must be hard. Must be hard filtering that water in the tank.

But Kaya’s saltwater tank is different.

Goldfish are freshwater, you schween. Were there goldfish in your tank incorrectly?

Well, the nice thing is, I have a lifestyle that I’m like actually one of the laziest humans of all time. And so. Yeah, working from home all day and just walking my dog occasionally and noping out of meetings so that I can walk my dog sounds good to me. Like, that’s pretty chill. Me having this job allows us to have a dog that does need really frequent walking. So there’s definitely that. But and I don’t think there’s. What are the risks? Let’s audit, let’s do a risk assessment of Basil, right? I get too busy and I have to get a meeting, or I have to skip walking Basil. Well, okay, you know, I had electricians over all day today, and I walked Basil for 10 minutes during a time when I knew that they would be out at the store getting stuff. That worked out pretty well, you know? So you’re finessing the timing. I changed my calendar link so I perma block an hour in the morning and the afternoon to feed and walk my dog. Right? Pretty practical. Definitely feasible. If that doesn’t work, walk them in the early morning or the evening. Figure out how it works. You know, like you can have a fluid routine around it. You just have to honor a commitment. What would be the risk? He needs three and a half hours of exercise every day. Okay, we de-risked all of the lifestyle impact issues by fostering him first. So I signed up with a shelter called One Tail at a Time to foster dogs. And they have a common term, which is called a foster failure, which is funny. I think that’s like a common thing in dogs. But like, um, Usually they’ll be in like high kill shelter environments, and they’re trying to get the dog into a home where for even temporarily. And then The bargain there is you have the dog, you get to feed them for cheap. They give you all the food and everything. Any additional supplies are actually 100% tax deductible when you are fostering a dog. So that’s a fun little IRS like deep cut thing. And then you get to hang with a dog. And it’s very much this try before you buy situation. Now, yeah, it is awesome. So now, you know, somebody could have adopted Basil while he was at our house, but we only had him for six days before we pulled the trigger. Because I got to spend that much time with him. And I did it during a time when I knew that I was going to have a lull in work. So I dealt with a lot of work right after I came back from Amsterdam. And then it dropped off for like two weeks. And I’m like, okay, getting a dog in the house. And Aaron actually was the one who was like, let’s try this one. And we saw the adoption email come in. And I was like, okay. And I was actually very hesitant to foster Basil at first because He was a border collie, so I was concerned he was going to have a lot of exercise. He was also way too fat. Basil, when we got him, was 64 pounds. If you know anything about a border collie, you know that that is a very high number for a border collie. And also, just as a general rule with dogs, if you rub their sides, you should be able to feel ribs, right? If you like, press hard. Basil had like an inch fat cushion around his entire chest. And now he has an inch skin cushion, which is hilarious. He’s so flappy. Oh, baby. Oh, my God. Yeah, but motherfucker went to fat camp. Sure. You are in the thunderdome with me. And that involves just feeding you real food and not the garbage that the shelter gave us. And um. And exercising you like a dog that’s not stuck in a cage all day. And lo, he lost seven pounds in two and a half months. Hey, that’s a huge like win for us. And he’s not like, and he’s also become food responsive, which like he wasn’t at all. It was actually quite difficult to feed him for a while.

He, when you put down a bowl of food for a dog, what is the expected reaction of the dog? Yeah, good point.

Flip the fuck out about the food. This is the most important thing that is happening to me during the day. Oh my God, you gave me food. I love you. I love you. I love you. Because food is the training medium that you’re using for the dog. When you give a dog a treat, they’re supposed to flip out because, and you’re not starving them, it’s just the natural appetite of the dog, and you leverage that in order to teach it commands. House train it and do all these other things, and like you know, it’s it’s basic stuff, and he never responded to like even stinky treats, like fish treats. We got cat treats that were made with fish oil that dogs like shouldn’t be eating because they’re way too unhealthy for them. And but dogs would go bonkers if you put one in front of them. And he was just like, meh. B plus try harder. Earth the earth. Fuck you! You have a treat! That’s a but the dappa dappa! I grew up with a beagle. You want to know how food responsive beagles are? And then I have this guy? Right? Like, oh my God. It’s crazy. And so, um, we We cut his food intake uh by a third, uh temporarily. Um and Upped his exercise significantly. And thank God it was middle of the summer when we got him because then it was like 90 degrees out and we could take him to the park. Just run him around until he’s like flopped over. And then we came home and then he would just fall asleep. And it was great. And we did that for like a few weeks. Slowly started to respond to the stinkiest of the treats, and then the less stinky treats, and then the non-meat treats. And now he’s an actual dog. And, like, I want to be abundantly clear through all of this. He is not undernourished. He is not starving. He is sitting under my desk as I record this podcast, sleeping. He is. He is in a good environment. So, if you’re like cringing about how this is operating, keep in mind the environment he was in beforehand. He was overfed, underworked out. We are now doing reasonable amounts of both of those things, and he’s great. So, um You asked me about how we came upon finding this guy, and then I just went, didn’t I?

Yeah. And I mean I just want to be abundantly clear in this. There is not a plan B. There is not a, oh, well, if we need to move out of the country or like change our lifestyle significantly, we can just give Basil up. We’re not giving Basil up. This is Basil’s last home. I will do everything in my power in my lifestyle to keep this dog. If we move to Europe, we need to get him USDA authorized for export. I’m serious! I know this! I swear I laughed! I’ve googled this! You have to give them a vet checkup, and then it has to happen exactly 10 days before your plane ticket. And then you have to get. Time, you have to get placed in a cargo hold, which is like 500 bucks, and you have to do it only during the winter, or the dog will die from heat. Issues during summer. So like, fine, that’s but like you have to do all of those things. And then you have to quarantine them in customs on the European side for like five days. So like if we’re going to move Which could happen given the infinite amount of outcomes that could possibly happen in our lives. There is a plan B to continue having this stupid fucking creature in my life. If I’m going to go digital nomad, great. He’s coming in the car. Great.

No, he’s the best. I don’t deserve him. Society does not deserve a dog as great as Basil. I’m serious. I can’t believe it.

This is a long-term thing, but. So given infinite time, I’m probably going to outlast Basil. And I am sad about that because he’s the greatest organism. But when Basil does, there’s two things. Number one, Basil wants nothing more than to sniff your dog’s butthole. He really craves companionship, and he has none of it right now, other than me. And I don’t count because I’m not a dog, and I don’t have a dog butthole worth sniffing. But more importantly, we kind of want continuity in having a dog. Like, this sucks to talk about, but when Basil passes away, we would like there to continue having a dog presence in the house. So part of it is for him. Most of it is for us. You know, it’s definitely something that we think about. So we want to get a dog that’s a companion for Basil in like five to seven years. That way they get to play together and be friends for a while. They get a lot of time together. But then we have another five years after Basil passes away, and then we might get a second dog. But we’re going to do it the whole foster way because we want to make sure that Basil has established himself as the alpha in the house. He’s historically a dog that gets alpha a lot at like parks and stuff. And we want to make sure that it’s clear that it’s his house so he doesn’t feel intimidated or betrayed in any capacity. But we have dogs over. I mean, the aforementioned Pit Bull actually came over and they got along quite well. And in Thanksgiving, we’re having two Westies over. And Basil loves small dogs, so that’ll work out pretty well for him. But yes, the plan is to get a larger or not larger a second dog, but not soon. Not soon. Eventually. Yeah. There will be two dogs in my house at some point, and then they’ll be able to actually play with each other and work each other out so I don’t have to. Because I’ll probably be even lazier in five years. Yeah.

Hi, I’m Nick D. I love dogs. Do you have a dog? Can I have a dog now? Why don’t I have a dog? It’s nice to meet you. Okay, business. That’s been me for how long, you know? Like, I can’t tell you how many It’s going to be we’ve gone like over half an hour on this podcast call so far, but I’ll tell you how many client meetings I have interrupted because a dog has walked in the frame on the client’s end. And I’ll be like, and now we’re going to turn to page eight of the wire. Frame deck, and as you can see here, we’ve changed the oh my god, who’s the little guy? And then they’re like, What? That’s noodles. Can we talk about the wireframe deck? Noodles? You named your dog noodles. I love noodles. How old is noodles? We’re talking about business, Nick D. I Noodles does not give a shit. Like, what is going on? And I just changed the subject line of our Slackroom to Noodles chat. The channel name to pound noodles.

I think so. Yeah. It’s definitely the culmination of a lot. I tell you, man, I was talking about the electricians, and they installed like the last of the major furniture changes that require contractors in this house. And for all intents, like the house is we could just go into perpetuity and never optimize the house at this point. But it didn’t feel done until he came here. He made it a home. He did.