Josen Ruiseco almost walked out of a business class when the instructor asked the room to say their harshest inner-voice talk out loud, one person at a time. He stayed. He worked his way around the room. And the reactions he got back, people visibly shocked at how he spoke to himself, cracked something open. The conversation with Sam Sapp moves from that moment through Josen's road from Southern California to Kansas City, losing his mother at 19, building Shout Cloud Studios, and why relationships now sit at the center of everything he does.
What You'll Hear
- The business-class exercise where Josen had to voice his inner critic to strangers, and the reactions he got back
- How talking to yourself in the third person, by name, changes how the brain receives those words
- Growing up in Southern California near the Port of Los Angeles, and his father's journey from Mexico to the US
- Losing his mother to lung cancer at 19, and moving to Kansas City in 1991 without looking back
- Early work at IHOP, church janitorial jobs, and mowing lawns before finding his way into tech
- A five-year stint in Phoenix as an Equifax insurance premium auditor, then back to Kansas City for early e-commerce in 1997
- A 25,000 dollar backup recovery lesson, and why RAID is not a substitute for real backups
- How Shout Cloud Studios started in 2012 after a layoff, and where Josen sees the business heading now
- A plan to connect addiction recovery centers in Kansas City with Regen, the weekly program he leads at Abundant Life in Lee's Summit
The inner voice exercise that almost sent him to the bathroom
The conversation opens on something Josen did the Friday before recording. In a business class, the instructor asked everyone to write down the negative things their inner voice said to them. Then she asked them to reframe those lines as though they were speaking to someone else in the room, with the same intensity they used on themselves.
Josen's first instinct was to leave. He describes an avid screaming in his head telling him to run, to find an excuse, to say he needed the bathroom. He stayed. He went around the room and delivered lines like "you don't deserve it" to strangers, as dismissively as he said them to himself.
What came back surprised him. Person after person reacted with some version of "you talk to yourself like that?" Most of the other attendees had softer material, things like "you're bad at time management." Josen's were deeper, and hearing that difference out loud was part of the point. He walked out feeling better, not worse. The exercise reframed something he had been working on for a year and a half, which becomes the spine of the whole conversation with Sam.
Third-person self-talk and where that shift started
Josen shares a practice he has been using for a couple of years. When he talks to himself, he uses his own name and speaks in the third person, the way a loving parent would. He mentions research that suggests the body and mind receive third-person, named self-talk as though another person is saying it.
The starting point was prayer. He describes a moment where, in his words, the Lord told him to stop talking to himself the way he had been. That was the push. The how-to came after. He had to figure out what kinder self-talk actually sounded like, then practice it until it stuck.
He ties this back to something he realized along the way. He would say things to himself that he would never say to another person, not to a friend, not to someone he loved, not even to someone who had upset him. That gap between how he treated others and how he treated himself was the problem. Closing it, he says, has been transformative, and it changed how he shows up for other people. He can encourage a friend without shame interfering, because he is living the thing he is saying.
From the Port of Los Angeles to Kansas City
Josen grew up in Southern California, along the coast near the Port of Los Angeles, in what he describes as a middle to high income neighborhood. His father was born in Mexico and migrated to the US in the early 1960s. His grandfather was a colonel in the Mexican army, and Josen's father was the second to the last of 27 kids across nine families.
His dad finished high school, worked for the Mexican government briefly, then took a job on an American cruise ship running up and down the coast of Mexico. He and a friend lied about having printing press experience to get hired. They learned on the job. When the ship docked at the Port of Los Angeles, Josen's dad met his mother, who was Croatian by birth. Neither spoke the other's language. They figured it out.
Josen's mother developed lung cancer and died at 46. Josen was 19. She had lived through a lot before motherhood. He had been attending church with neighbors since he was about nine, and friends in that church knew of a Kansas City church hosting conferences. He visited, fell in love with the Midwest, the space between properties, the friendliness in grocery stores, and when a friend said they were moving to Kansas City, Josen went with them. He landed in 1991 and never looked back.
The path into tech, and a 25,000 dollar lesson in backups
After Kansas City, Josen worked at IHOP, then as a janitor for the church, then mowed lawns for his father-in-law. He took a job with Equifax's insurance services division doing premium audits, got good at it, and moved to Phoenix for five years before coming back.
Back in Kansas City in 1996 and 1997, he joined an early e-commerce company. He wasn't on the programming team. He was managing an online shopping site. He taught himself to code on the side with stacks of programming books, nights, lunch hours, and tutorials. In 1997, he built his first website for a cousin of his wife. From there, freelance work never stopped.
He eventually joined a large manufacturer a month after 9/11, where he worked as a web developer across the whole enterprise until 2012. That is where he learned ASP, VBScript, and JavaScript in a safe environment. It is also where he learned, expensively, that RAID is not a backup. One incident cost the company 25,000 dollars in recovery. The lesson he offers to anyone listening is direct. Check your backups. Test your backups. Test multiple backups. RAID handles a failed drive. It does not handle a disgruntled employee, ransomware, or a bad deletion.
Shout Cloud Studios, and why relationships sit at the center now
When the manufacturer shut down the e-commerce side of the business in 2012, partly because of the 2008 drop in disposable-income purchases like diecast NASCAR memorabilia, Josen was laid off. He and the director of marketing at that company partnered up and launched Shout Cloud Studios. His partner stepped back around 2016 for family reasons. Josen has been running it since, with one steady team member right now, and as many as three at other times.
He says business is great. He is seeing a resurgence at the start of the year, clients are ready to invest, and he is getting to do new work with AI. But the thing lighting him up is not the work. It is the relationships. He points at Sam across the conversation and says he often asks himself what Sam would do, because Sam is intentional about reaching out to clients even when there is no immediate reason to.
Josen leads a weekly program called Regen at Abundant Life in Lee's Summit, Missouri. Regen is an addiction recovery program that treats not just drugs and alcohol but emotional addictions like pride, fear, and anxiety. He is thinking about marrying that passion with his business by visiting addiction recovery centers across Kansas City, introducing them to Regen as a free Christian weekly program their graduates can plug into, and, where it fits, offering web services as well. It is a plan that starts from the relational side first and lets the business follow.
About Josen Ruiseco
Josen Ruiseco is the owner of Shout Cloud Studios, a web development and internet marketing agency in Kansas City. He moved to Kansas City from Southern California in 1991, worked in restaurants, lawn care, and insurance auditing before teaching himself to code in the late 1990s, and launched Shout Cloud Studios in 2012. He also leads Regen, a weekly recovery program at Abundant Life in Lee's Summit, Missouri.