WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.000 So you guys don't want to bring up any of your dodge coins or any other things that you're starting up with? 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:12.000 Still in the bottom there. 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:15.000 How about next month? 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:17.000 Let's check next month. 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:18.000 We'll release a bit of episode. 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:19.000 Let's do the ICO. 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:21.000 Do the sprint. 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:28.000 Yeah. Hello, hello, hello. 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:32.000 Welcome to episode 12 of the Metacast podcast. 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:35.000 This is the podcast about podcasting. 00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:41.000 And today we have Rona Knahtani and Guanyang from the software Misedventures podcast. 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:46.000 In their podcast, Rona Knahtani and Guanyang bring in experienced folks from the tech world. 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:56.000 And they discuss stories from their companies, problems, Misedventures that they have had, as well as their career progression and topics like that. 00:00:56.000 --> 00:00:59.000 It's been one of my favorite podcasts over the last few years. 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:01.000 We didn't pay you to say that. 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:04.000 So just wanted to clarify to the audience. 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:06.000 I wish I was paid. 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:09.000 I mean, if you want to pay, I'll talk more about you. 00:01:09.000 --> 00:01:12.000 It's too late. You already said it. 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:15.000 And with me here, we have Ilja. 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:19.000 Hey, everyone. I'm a co-host of the Metacast podcast. 00:01:19.000 --> 00:01:23.000 Nice to, well, I guess nice to have everybody here, guys. 00:01:23.000 --> 00:01:25.000 Because I can say nice to see you. 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:27.000 But yeah, welcome, guys, to our show. 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:30.000 It's really a big honor to host you here. 00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:32.000 I discovered actually your podcast through Arnab. 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:34.000 Because he's like, listen to these guys. 00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:36.000 They have really cool vibe, the jokes and all. 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:38.000 And you also have some amazing guests. 00:01:38.000 --> 00:01:44.000 Some of those guests actually either heard their name, heard them talk, or even talked to them myself. 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:48.000 So yeah, it's really great to have you here and learn from you from your misadventures. 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:51.000 We could have called our podcast the podcast to misadventures. 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:54.000 And we could ask people about what went wrong with our podcast. 00:01:54.000 --> 00:01:56.000 Hey, that would be a good name. 00:01:56.000 --> 00:01:57.000 I like your name. 00:01:57.000 --> 00:01:58.000 I like Meta too. 00:01:58.000 --> 00:02:02.000 Except we have to say on record that we're not affiliated with Meta. 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:05.000 Did I come from anything like someone complaining? 00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:07.000 No, I would just joke around. 00:02:07.000 --> 00:02:12.000 I mean, if we get to a point where somebody's complaining about it, that would be nice, I think. 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:14.000 That's a good problem to have. 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:16.000 Yeah. All right. 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:19.000 Do you folks want to start with a quick intro of yourselves? 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:21.000 Hey guys, my name is Guwang. 00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:25.000 I started my career in data engineering and then started slowly to go up the stack. 00:02:25.000 --> 00:02:31.000 So more into ML. And I met Ronek, actually at one of the book camps I did for data engineering. 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:39.000 And then if in fact since these days, I'm doing a little bit consulting and then trying to work on my own like small internet business ideas. 00:02:39.000 --> 00:02:42.000 Yeah, folks, Ronek here and thanks for having us guys. 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:44.000 I love the t-shirts that you have. 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:46.000 We should probably do something like that. 00:02:46.000 --> 00:02:47.000 We just got them. 00:02:47.000 --> 00:02:53.000 Yeah. Nice. So similar to Guwang, I'm an electric engineer by trade, but somehow got into software engineering. 00:02:53.000 --> 00:02:59.000 I always believed that at least during my undergrad days that I couldn't write code and I wasn't cut out for this field. 00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:01.000 Somehow I ended up here. 00:03:01.000 --> 00:03:04.000 Guwang mentioned both of us met at inside data engineering program. 00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:06.000 Guwang not a boot camp. 00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:11.000 We spent some time there and that's where my love for infrastructure kind of grew. 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:14.000 And I worked at inside for a couple of years and then joined LinkedIn. 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:18.000 And over the last five years, I've been working on computer infrastructure there. 00:03:18.000 --> 00:03:20.000 And these days leading our Kubernetes initiative. 00:03:20.000 --> 00:03:23.000 So our map is also a civil engineer. 00:03:23.000 --> 00:03:26.000 It seems like I'm the only one with actually computer engineering training. 00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:29.000 But I am the only one who doesn't work in the engineering. 00:03:29.000 --> 00:03:39.000 Yeah. I'm a civil engineer by education, but I got tired of building bridges about three years into the four year course. 00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:41.000 I was like, okay, I'd like software more. 00:03:41.000 --> 00:03:43.000 Are you still a real engineer? 00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:51.000 Yes. I think that was the job at me because I did operations research, which was called industrial. 00:03:51.000 --> 00:03:58.000 You can't see the air quotes, but industrial engineering, which the undergrad called it imaginary engineering can't really fault them. 00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:05.000 So just a bit of, I think, backstory back when we started the podcast or we were brainstorming, starting the podcast in October. 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:10.000 Ilya and I were like, okay, we're going to get at least 10, 12 episodes scheduled in. 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:12.000 So let's figure out who we want to invite. 00:04:12.000 --> 00:04:17.000 And I think Ilya, you got like four or five people that you were listening to all the time. 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:20.000 And I got four or five podcasters that I was listening to all the time. 00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:25.000 And we sent out invites to or like reached out through Twitter and email and all that. 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:28.000 Whatever we could find. And this is back in October. 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:31.000 So I first got a straight rejection. 00:04:31.000 --> 00:04:32.000 The first one. 00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:34.000 The second, the other two people didn't reply. 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:36.000 Actually, the other three people didn't reply. 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:39.000 And Ilya kept getting like, yes, I'm interested. 00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:40.000 Yes, I'm interested. 00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:47.000 And then eventually, I think in February, Ronna replied to it saying, hey, sorry, we didn't see that email. 00:04:47.000 --> 00:04:48.000 We love to come on. 00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:50.000 And I was like, yes, finally. 00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:51.000 Glad to be your first win. 00:04:51.000 --> 00:04:53.000 And sorry about the delayed response. 00:04:53.000 --> 00:04:55.000 We need to improve on that alertly. 00:04:55.000 --> 00:04:56.000 At least me, particularly. 00:04:56.000 --> 00:04:57.000 They're all good, all good. 00:04:57.000 --> 00:04:58.000 We'll get into all that. 00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:04.000 So do you want to talk a little bit about what the software, misadventures podcast is? 00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:07.000 Why did you decide to do the podcast together? 00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:08.000 Let's start with that. 00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:13.000 This was, I think, somewhere of 2020 where everyone was starting a podcast. 00:05:13.000 --> 00:05:17.000 And all of us had a little too much time at our hands. 00:05:17.000 --> 00:05:22.000 And actually, I've been a podcast listener for eight years at this point. 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:25.000 I think I first started listening to podcasts in about 2015. 00:05:25.000 --> 00:05:27.000 And I still love podcasts in general. 00:05:27.000 --> 00:05:31.000 And I was thinking about a podcast where we talk about technology. 00:05:31.000 --> 00:05:35.000 But if you're more in depth, then what I was getting at some of the other forums. 00:05:35.000 --> 00:05:38.000 So I reached out to going out at the time Austin as well. 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:40.000 Three of us actually started the podcast together. 00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:45.000 And when we started discussing what the podcast should be about, at least the initial theme was, let's talk about misadventures. 00:05:45.000 --> 00:05:48.000 Because there is a lot that we learn when things don't go as planned. 00:05:48.000 --> 00:05:51.000 And that doesn't get talked about very often. 00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:59.000 And while this was the topic, the main motivations where there are enough people who are much smarter than us have had different experiences than us. 00:05:59.000 --> 00:06:02.000 And in some cases, just have a lot more tenure. 00:06:02.000 --> 00:06:04.000 And we want to learn from them. 00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:08.000 One of the best avenues I've found to learn from people is through listening to podcasts. 00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:12.000 But at the same time, we wanted to be in a position where we could ask these questions. 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:16.000 And we should more specific to our own interests instead of questions someone else was asking. 00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:21.000 So it became kind of an excuse to get really cool people to talk to us. 00:06:21.000 --> 00:06:25.000 And people have an extremely kind to say yes and spend some time with us. 00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:29.000 One of the other reasons was we wanted to get better at asking questions. 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:34.000 This is something that I've admired a lot in many podcasts that I listened to. 00:06:34.000 --> 00:06:36.000 I'll just throw out one name like Tim Ferris. 00:06:36.000 --> 00:06:43.000 He's the one I've listened to the longest and the quality of questions he asks or I think Shane Parrish from the knowledge project. 00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:58.000 And there are a few others and I love when these guys go deep into a specific topic or are able to pull insights out from the guest because I don't think it's easy to give the guest enough room to express what they're thinking at the same time navigate the conversation. 00:06:58.000 --> 00:07:03.000 I've loved this art of asking good questions and it's something that we wanted to get better at. 00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:09.000 And the third thing was as we're having these conversations, we wanted to make sure that others could learn from what you were talking about. 00:07:09.000 --> 00:07:14.000 We want to be the dumb people in the room who can ask stupid questions and say, hey, this doesn't make sense. 00:07:14.000 --> 00:07:17.000 Please tell us more. I think many people feel that way. 00:07:17.000 --> 00:07:26.000 I mean, I'm not sure about you guys, but I've always felt weird raising my hand saying, hey, by the way, I got a question and this question is pretty dumb and I don't want to ask that in front of 100 people. 00:07:26.000 --> 00:07:29.000 But in this forum, we just wanted to be comfortable doing that. 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:34.000 And as we were asking these questions, we want to make sure the conversations you're having were accessible to others too. 00:07:34.000 --> 00:07:39.000 Initially, it was more like, hey, let's just start a podcast and I was thinking of starting it myself. 00:07:39.000 --> 00:07:42.000 And I was like, ah, starting it with others would be a lot more fun. 00:07:42.000 --> 00:07:46.000 Like you guys are doing it together and I love working with other people in general. 00:07:46.000 --> 00:07:51.000 And going in Austin and I, we've known each other for, well, at this point, seven years, eight years. 00:07:51.000 --> 00:07:55.000 Austin's dead, he left us. So maybe two or five, six years. 00:07:55.000 --> 00:07:59.000 I reached out to these guys. I just pinged them. 00:07:59.000 --> 00:08:05.000 I was like, hey, guys, thinking about this idea, what do you think? Somehow I have no idea why both of them were very excited about doing this. 00:08:05.000 --> 00:08:10.000 So that's how we got started. I'm curious, what was it like for you to get your first guest? 00:08:10.000 --> 00:08:13.000 Nobody knows you, right? Nobody knows about your podcast. 00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:18.000 Podcast doesn't even exist, right? What was the process of getting the first guest or maybe the first three guests? 00:08:18.000 --> 00:08:21.000 When we decided to start the podcast, we actually didn't even have a name. 00:08:21.000 --> 00:08:26.000 We just knew what we wanted to talk about at the time and the kind of guests we wanted to bring on. 00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:32.000 We started indexing on the people that we had been following in tech for a while and wanted to reach out to them. 00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:35.000 And obviously all the things that you said, the podcast did not exist. 00:08:35.000 --> 00:08:38.000 We didn't have a name, no website, but we decided to reach out anyway. 00:08:38.000 --> 00:08:42.000 So we reached out to three or four people just describing what we wanted to do. 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:47.000 And if they would be interested in talking to us, I was in Boston at the time on vacation. 00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:50.000 And we were going from the airport to our Airbnb. 00:08:50.000 --> 00:08:53.000 And I got a response back from Kelsey Hightower. 00:08:53.000 --> 00:08:56.000 Wow. And I'm sitting in that car right next to my wife and like, holy crap. 00:08:56.000 --> 00:09:00.000 He's responded and he's saying, yes, now we got to figure it out. 00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:09.000 We scheduled it, I think six weeks after we got this funds in those six weeks figured out what the name should be, what the website should look like, what the logo should be. 00:09:09.000 --> 00:09:13.000 And that kind of acted as a motivator for us to get things done on time. 00:09:13.000 --> 00:09:21.000 There were some nose as well, like we reached out to some people who said no. At the same time, people have been very kind enough to respond not as delayed as we respond it to you. 00:09:21.000 --> 00:09:24.000 So sorry guys, that's how we got it first guest. 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:27.000 Not everybody who listens to us is from the software world. 00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:30.000 So Kelsey Hightower is a big deal. 00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:32.000 Let me just put it this way. 00:09:32.000 --> 00:09:36.000 One of the many things I like about working with Ronik is the lack of shame. 00:09:36.000 --> 00:09:38.000 Did you reach out via Twitter or via email? 00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:39.000 I think it was Twitter, right? 00:09:39.000 --> 00:09:41.000 I think I reached out via email. 00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:46.000 It took a little bit of searching to get to his email, but yeah, I reached out to his email. 00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:47.000 Twitter too much traffic. 00:09:47.000 --> 00:09:51.000 Yeah. That's it, because that was a huge fan of Kelsey Hightower for the longest time. 00:09:51.000 --> 00:09:53.000 All of us, all of us. 00:09:53.000 --> 00:09:54.000 We're right, exactly. 00:09:54.000 --> 00:09:57.000 So then first I think when Ronik was like, you know, I'm gonna do that. 00:09:57.000 --> 00:09:59.000 I was like, yeah, right. That's gonna happen. 00:09:59.000 --> 00:10:01.000 Maybe let's wait until 10 episodes. 00:10:01.000 --> 00:10:03.000 He was like, ah, you know, let's just try it now. Very good idea. 00:10:03.000 --> 00:10:06.000 It was a great episode because we were very new, right? 00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:08.000 We were just, hey, we don't know what the hell we're doing. 00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:12.000 But it really just started talking about really interesting stuff. 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:14.000 And we just had to chime in. 00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:16.000 It was a really nice. 00:10:16.000 --> 00:10:24.000 I think it also set up your style of the podcast where you go deep into technical topics in that first episode. 00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:27.000 I think you went to do lots of Kubernetes problems and things like that. 00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:32.000 But also talked about talking in front of a conference in front of a lot of people, stuff like that. 00:10:32.000 --> 00:10:33.000 It was really good. 00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:36.000 And I think that said the tone for your podcast quite a bit too. 00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:37.000 Yeah, for sure. 00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:38.000 I wanted to ask a question about that. 00:10:38.000 --> 00:10:40.000 I listened to that episode actually this morning. 00:10:40.000 --> 00:10:42.000 So I have very fresh memories of that. 00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:55.000 There he talks quite a bit about how the big company wants you to be in that square box that HR wants to put you in with your skills and your capabilities, which is not always representative what people want to do or what people are capable of doing. 00:10:55.000 --> 00:11:03.000 And then he also talks about mentoring and how he really deeply loves and cares about people that he mentors, which was absolutely fascinating. 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:08.000 But then in between these two topics, he talks about schedulers and it's CD and all that stuff. 00:11:08.000 --> 00:11:15.000 So my question is obviously people who listen to your podcast, I suppose most of them are in the engineering field. 00:11:15.000 --> 00:11:18.000 But I would say maybe not everybody is interested in Kubernetes. 00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:22.000 So if somebody does mobile development, Kubernetes to them is not as interesting, right? 00:11:22.000 --> 00:11:29.000 So I'm curious how you are thinking about over the course of your podcast, how to balance those topics that are just universally appealing. 00:11:29.000 --> 00:11:30.000 You talk about career. 00:11:30.000 --> 00:11:33.000 Anybody can take advice from Kelsey on mentorship. 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:35.000 But Kubernetes stuff is very specific. 00:11:35.000 --> 00:11:38.000 So some people would just be not interested. 00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:41.000 So how do you think about that if you thought about it at all? 00:11:41.000 --> 00:11:42.000 I think that's a great question. 00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:45.000 And exactly to your point, I think it's a spectrum. 00:11:45.000 --> 00:11:52.000 So on one end, you have podcasts like software engineering daily where at least how I used to listen to it is just look at the topic. 00:11:52.000 --> 00:11:55.000 If it's not interesting or I don't find it relevant, I'm going to skip. 00:11:55.000 --> 00:11:58.000 On the other hand, do you have, I think Tim Ferris is example, right? 00:11:58.000 --> 00:12:03.000 We're just so generic such that you can read just doesn't even matter where you're working on. 00:12:03.000 --> 00:12:05.000 There's always something that you can learn from. 00:12:05.000 --> 00:12:10.000 I think to your point balancing that is super hard and it's a work in progress. 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:17.000 We're still reviewing trying to figure out who are the people that we want our listeners to be and then to kind of tailor towards that. 00:12:17.000 --> 00:12:20.000 What we've been using is proxy of like using ourselves. 00:12:20.000 --> 00:12:24.000 If it's something that we find super interesting, then we're going to have them on. 00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:31.000 I think in terms of delving into the more technical stuff as engineers or as people in tech like product managers or something. 00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:41.000 Usually even when you're on a hacker news just browsing, it could be something that's not exactly relevant to what you're doing, but if it's told or described in a way, right? 00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:43.000 It's so interesting. 00:12:43.000 --> 00:12:49.000 The point of the story is that I think it can be quite detailed but still be engaging. 00:12:49.000 --> 00:12:57.000 So a lot of that depends on the delivery, but I do think that part of what we've been trying to narrow down is to find that framework. 00:12:57.000 --> 00:13:02.000 I think on one hand you have too much detail on the other hand, you have these things are too generic. 00:13:02.000 --> 00:13:09.000 But in the middle, it's sort of like these kind of frameworks that you can apply such that you can use that for other things as well. 00:13:09.000 --> 00:13:21.000 Before recording the episodes, did you have a plan that we want to go into these areas for this guest or do you just figure it out on the field of the episode while recording what you want to venture into? 00:13:21.000 --> 00:13:31.000 Every time we talked to a guest, we had an idea of what we wanted to dive into. In fact, when it comes to just choosing topics as going said, one aspect is we don't make money from the podcast. 00:13:31.000 --> 00:13:35.000 That's not the intention. We want to continue doing it because we like it. 00:13:35.000 --> 00:13:39.000 And that's why our interests take the top priority. 00:13:39.000 --> 00:13:42.000 In some cases, some episodes are not enjoyed by everyone. 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:48.000 But as long as every episode has some people who really love it, that's good enough. And as long as we are having fun, I think that's good enough. 00:13:48.000 --> 00:13:58.000 At least for us right now. So in that case, like when we reach out to people, we reach out to them with a specific focus in mind that I could hit this person super interesting for various reasons. 00:13:58.000 --> 00:14:03.000 These are topics you would love to get into. So we have a high level idea of what you want to talk about. 00:14:03.000 --> 00:14:12.000 If you took Kelsey Hatt, however, as an example, we knew we wanted to talk about career. We knew we wanted to talk about how he mentors people because he is mentoring people on Twitter. 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:22.000 Trains he doesn't know and he's awesome, by the way. And we also wanted to talk about Kubernetes because he played an huge role in making Kubernetes successful as it is today. 00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:25.000 We start with that outline and that's how we go. 00:14:25.000 --> 00:14:28.000 And then you can go talk about it's CD and stuff. 00:14:28.000 --> 00:14:31.000 Yeah. Our poetry. 00:14:31.000 --> 00:14:32.000 Our poetry, yes. 00:14:32.000 --> 00:14:37.000 Yeah. Again, we don't keep a rigid structure when it comes to talking to a guest. 00:14:37.000 --> 00:14:45.000 Just like here are the topics you're interested in, but something we learned through some episodes. So you don't care about going through each and every question that we thought about before. 00:14:45.000 --> 00:14:50.000 And we also don't care about the ordering as we did at least in the first episode. 00:14:50.000 --> 00:14:55.000 I was like, let me just go through with this thing and finish it on time and not make a fool of myself. 00:14:55.000 --> 00:14:58.000 That was the goal, but at this point, we can just navigate it. 00:14:58.000 --> 00:15:01.000 Yeah, that both sailed, making the fool of ourselves. 00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:09.000 It feels very similar to ours because we kind of do some research and right now we have three pages of things to talk about, but we don't know how much of that will get into. 00:15:09.000 --> 00:15:17.000 But it depends on the feel of the recording like right now, we'll venture into some of these and go deeper, maybe in some areas. 00:15:17.000 --> 00:15:30.000 I think the one important thing for podcasters is to have enough things written up beforehand to be able to venture because some topics you bring up and abruptly ends or yeah, I did that find done. 00:15:30.000 --> 00:15:37.000 Let's move on right. So you've got to have like enough research done. So you have lots of things to talk about in that. 00:15:37.000 --> 00:15:55.000 So while talking about that, you did have three people in the podcast in the beginning and we were wondering how because with Ilya and me, we are always stepping on each other's toes sometimes in the podcast or sometimes somebody's forgetting to introduce the other person and things like that. 00:15:55.000 --> 00:16:02.000 I wonder what that happened. So how about the past if I go in on. 00:16:02.000 --> 00:16:16.000 An intentionally. Yeah, with three people that's going to be even more right, especially with a guest. You always had one guest at max, but let's say you have two people coming in. How did you manage all that? 00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:26.000 I like it. I thought you were going to ask why do the other person leave. But okay, I see we're taking the nicer route. Actually, often the other guys my best friend. So we're all very good terms. 00:16:26.000 --> 00:16:39.000 I think y'all's relationship is a bit similar. Right. So like I'm usually for comic relief and Ronnick asked the serious good very thoughtful questions and I just make my dog jokes to keep things light. It works out really well. 00:16:39.000 --> 00:16:53.000 Is that what you're talking about in terms of the conversation itself? We're talking about prep and I'll do W up the work and stuff in the conversation itself. I was wondering like if you have specific things that you yourself are interested like Wang. Let's say I want to talk about this or Ronnick. 00:16:53.000 --> 00:17:05.000 You say I want to talk about this or do you just write everything up and get the feel for the podcast and just go. So I really like working with Ronnick because have similar interests general interest, but at the specific stuff. I think it's pretty different. 00:17:05.000 --> 00:17:14.000 He's background is longer infrastructures more lower in the stack versus my is higher. So ML application and really interested in the hacking things like that. 00:17:14.000 --> 00:17:25.000 So I think that makes it a very natural split in terms of when we do ask someone who has experiences in different buckets. So that categorization becomes very obvious to us. 00:17:25.000 --> 00:17:39.000 Yeah, one thing which I would add to that is if you can example of an episode for instance when we're prepping we usually write down topics at one point we would write down the exact questions to not that we would read it out but it helps us formulate our thought in the head before the conversation itself. 00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:50.000 So what we use it is we would split out sections and one would be a lead by other person would assist. So in that case what happens is it's the responsibility of one person to drive that section forward. 00:17:50.000 --> 00:17:58.000 And the other person can ask follow up questions if needed for example so that allowed us to not step on each other's toes start us one thing that we tried. 00:17:58.000 --> 00:18:05.000 We have tried a different version of that sense where there are no sections split up that way but there are high level idea split up that way. 00:18:05.000 --> 00:18:11.000 So it's still like okay this topic is something that going would cover this topic is something that I would cover, but there is no sequence at that point. 00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:20.000 So what happens is when we are talking about it and when the other person feels this is a good time to introduce the subject that person would jump in take the conversation there. 00:18:20.000 --> 00:18:34.000 But then one person is still responsible to make sure we go through the conversation bring it to a close don't go off on tangents way too much think of it this way one person's responsibilities to make sure you start at the source reset destination. 00:18:34.000 --> 00:18:40.000 The second person can take you on detours and whatnot but it's that first person's responsibility to make sure you move forward. 00:18:40.000 --> 00:19:01.000 We have a name for this we've been trying to do checklist since episode one but we failed to do that until episode 10 I think because we just get to excited and then we would go on all sorts of tangents once we call it an episode an entire episode we didn't talk about podcasting at all because we just got so excited about sci-fi must be a fun episode. 00:19:01.000 --> 00:19:08.000 So yeah we had to read this is a bonus episode and I think there was one episode where the guest did not say their names all true. 00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:19.000 So yeah we introduced a concept of check police check as in check Republic but it's also as in checklist so they are now is responsible for making sure that you stay on track. 00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:22.000 Let's move on to the next topic. 00:19:22.000 --> 00:19:25.000 Very good. 00:19:25.000 --> 00:19:38.000 So I've been listening to your podcast as soon as they come in yours the indie hacker and Scott Hanselman's that podcast those are three like as soon as an episode drops I listen to it. 00:19:38.000 --> 00:19:40.000 This is the ones that told you no right. 00:19:40.000 --> 00:19:44.000 I love the indie hackers podcast I think it's amazing. 00:19:44.000 --> 00:20:03.000 It's an honor to be named next to indie hackers and Scott Hanselman's broadcast so thank you means a lot right. Yeah we have our own favorite episodes and moments from your podcast we're not talk about that but before we get there I want to hear what are your favorite episodes what we're like some of those surprising or memorable moments that you have. 00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:20.000 For me it's very obvious Michael Lynch he was also on the hackers do this fucking amazing he's just such a awesome guy like I want to be his friend he's very transparent right sorry so for context he could Google I think maybe five six years ago so he was there for like a couple years and then he left to into hacking. 00:20:20.000 --> 00:20:29.000 And I love how he thought about it because he said a budget being like I'm going to try to do this for three or five years and then if I can make it happen and come back and do something else. 00:20:29.000 --> 00:20:57.000 So then he just post these monthly retrospectives what did I do this month or project them working on super transparent and just reading through it is like taking you on like a journey of all the things all the ups and downs because for the first two years he made negative profit negative money for the third year the business really started to take off and it was a very surprising enterprise that came out of that as well so I think the subject the guy just amazing and I think he had pretty funny stories at the end. 00:20:57.000 --> 00:21:24.000 It's not surprising that was my most favorite episode to in fact I heard that episode and then I found more about Michael he was also on the India hacker podcast at a different time so I went and listened to that episode so last year back story I was working as a principal engineering AWS but I had this each kind of going on like I'm in too many meetings and I'm not doing enough I love building things and I was not building enough anymore. 00:21:24.000 --> 00:21:53.000 So that was already going on but your episode and I think there was one from India hacker as well the Daniel was solo episode he was a engineering AWS maybe in 2019 or something those two episodes inspired me that what am I waiting for right so I immediately went on a leave of absence in June last year took three months height around and figured okay I'm just going to take the lead and I left my job and then I think I actually seriously started working on stuff. 00:21:53.000 --> 00:22:11.000 In January but it's been amazing so far so thanks for that bit of inspiration that was my top episode to that's a cool that is pretty awesome by the way I take courage to do that it's not easy courage and finances to I think of course. 00:22:11.000 --> 00:22:37.000 You know I think that I really like the quote from the simnical as the lab he is a philosopher and a trader hero blacks one and anti fragile and a few other books I think he said something like that the worst addictive thing in the world is the monthly paycheck or something like that it basically makes you hooked onto that salary that you get every month and you become complacent and stop taking risks and actually start doing things to avoid taking risks that's where complacency is bread. 00:22:37.000 --> 00:22:53.000 Okay so now you have had enough time to think over I think sure so in general answering questions about what's your favorite X it's always very hard for me people to ask questions about what's your favorite food what's your favorite place in what not and I always struggle with that question because it's hard to pick one. 00:22:53.000 --> 00:22:57.000 So before you get to that what's your favorite food place. 00:22:57.000 --> 00:23:00.000 How much time do we got here. 00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:16.000 I mean I love food by the way and I can go on talk about food I don't think your audience would be interested in listening to all all my weird food habits but in terms of episodes again all of our episodes were very different we learned something different from each one of them. 00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:27.000 The ones that just come to memory right now Kelsey's episodes and start was actually the second one we recorded the first one we released the reason we recorded the second was we recorded one way it's Ryan and 00:23:27.000 --> 00:23:36.000 I was a little bit worried about who was my colleague at length and I felt a lot more safer was recording it with him our first time and making all the mistakes but he was super kind of this time. 00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:45.000 So Kelsey's episode we were essentially star struck and wanted to just get it going but came out to be a really good episode much better than what we thought. 00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:55.000 The other one was with David Hengke of been at Lincoln for about five plus years at this point and David Hengke was at length and he was the SVP of engineering at some point where he led the reliability engineering org. 00:23:55.000 --> 00:24:07.000 And he has tons of stories about LinkedIn from the days past at least before my time and he is an amazing storyteller I've someone is to know how to tell a story about tech I think he's one of the really good ones. 00:24:07.000 --> 00:24:23.000 There are a couple of the episodes which was very hard to expect what it would turn out to be but we were super interested in the topic one was with Ashwin Kumar he's a close friend with Gwang and we talked to him about hackathons and pitching toilet ideas which was very different from everything else we did but the conversation was super fun. 00:24:23.000 --> 00:24:31.000 The last one that comes to mind is the one we have with Kailash Nath he is the CTO of zero zero the is the stock trading company back in India. 00:24:31.000 --> 00:24:47.000 His episode took a very different turn than what we thought we talked about absurdism or being an absurdist we talked about philosophy for 20 minutes we talked about how they run zero as a company with like 30 plus engineers running the largest stock broker in India and 00:24:47.000 --> 00:25:04.000 the world by volume that was a very fine episode to by the way we just lost Gwang he there got tired of talking to us or maybe some internal trouble because his picture was getting pixelated before to it says internet I'm just going to pay him this is usual with 00:25:04.000 --> 00:25:20.000 this happen while recording more than once more than once yes I don't know if he minds but I'll share it anyway so he's been traveling around the world he did this three four years back where he took 12 months off traveled around the world and liked it so much came back 00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:32.000 worked as a machine learning engineer and decided to do it again and I think right now he's in Mexico yeah he's in Mexico City right now and when he's traveling he's living in Airbnb's or hotels 00:25:32.000 --> 00:25:50.000 so at many times either the internet is party or there is some construction going on and otherwise some neighbor is screaming somewhere and making loud cooking noises or whatnot so we've did pretty much all of those at some point he was talking to us just before we started recording about that it's fun yeah 00:25:50.000 --> 00:26:00.000 it's interesting you mentioned this starstruck when you interviewed Kelsey high tower I remember first time talking to him because we were part of the same org at Google working to Bernadier's and I was in a group picking with him 00:26:00.000 --> 00:26:20.000 and he was saying some good ideas and I just think him on our internal chat I'm like Kelsey like can we talk and he's like yeah sure how about today at 4 p.m. or something and I'm like oh my god Kelsey right now is talking to me and for the first few minutes I'm like oh my god what if I ask dumb questions and stuff like this but he was just so so nice to me and I guess to everybody who he talks to 00:26:20.000 --> 00:26:31.000 we had a bit of that experience I think our very first guest on our show was Brian McCollum who is the host of the Internet History podcast which was the podcast that hooked me on the listening to podcasts in the first place 00:26:31.000 --> 00:26:49.000 I listened to maybe hundreds of his episodes and I love it so much he's like a dead speaker and he was the first person to say yes and you were like oh my god the interesting thing he said in the episode though is we ask him why he did he agree to talk to us we are nobody in a podcasting space and he just said that I know what it's like to get started I just said yes 00:26:49.000 --> 00:26:58.000 because if nobody says yes how are you going to get started so I just want it to be nice to you and it came out great episode and all I'm not surprised to hear that people actually said yes to you 00:26:58.000 --> 00:27:12.000 because you guys send the right energy and people react to that. Oh yeah it's incredible. It's been wonderful in how people are willing to help once you're ready to open up and ask how easy it is to get people to help you out it's been amazing. 00:27:12.000 --> 00:27:22.000 For sure people are super nice. I do think even the code email that you guys send to us I assume you just similar area right for the other guy I think it was a great email. Oh yes. 00:27:22.000 --> 00:27:34.000 You talked about with the why it just felt very personalized right because we get also spam emails I was surprised by how many people reach out either to place someone on your podcast or business stuff. 00:27:34.000 --> 00:27:59.000 So it's really refreshing to read a nice email from someone who's also in the trenches. There's actually a subreddit and service right now I think called podcast guest exchange or something like that where you can put in like I am the host of this podcast and you invite me to other podcasts and what you're going to charge and all that we were like okay we're not doing all that we let's just send out personal notes about why we listen to their podcast and all that yeah. 00:27:59.000 --> 00:28:25.000 I think it was by a guy who has a YouTube channel in Belarus and he was talking about how he never takes money for people kind of being on the show because he did it once and it was his weird guy it was a final discussion up until the point where he started to promote his stuff which ended up being some kind of scam and I think he eventually had to take down the episode and people like bitching to him why you didn't read this guy like he took all over my money. 00:28:25.000 --> 00:28:41.000 So yeah. That's rough. That's rough. He was like oh, it never did again. So we always reach out to people who we know. So you guys don't want to bring up any of your doge coins or any other things that you're starting up right. 00:28:41.000 --> 00:28:49.000 Still in development. Okay. How about next month? Let's try next month. We're really the worst episode. 00:28:49.000 --> 00:29:01.000 I see you. I was driving today when I was looking at your logo which has always this line and triangle or thing. It's a mountain with the eye. 00:29:01.000 --> 00:29:11.000 Oh no, you thought he was. Oh no, you think it's about to. Oh no. No, no, no, my first thought when I saw it was that this is a regular expression. 00:29:11.000 --> 00:29:21.000 A regular expression. Okay. Okay. Wait, wait, why regular. It's like M or S inside that. So I don't have over things that you know. 00:29:21.000 --> 00:29:29.000 Hey, who was the fabulous artist which we paid good money to commission this piece of art. It was our dear friend Austin. 00:29:29.000 --> 00:29:45.000 We're thinking about how should we represent Miss adventures and because it's about tech, we introduced the curly braces and Austin works on the monitoring infrastructure team at LinkedIn and has been on that team for a couple of years now. 00:29:45.000 --> 00:29:55.000 And he's like, how would a graph that has a blip because you know, like that's when things are not going as expected. So let's just put a blip there with an eye and like, yeah, works. 00:29:55.000 --> 00:30:07.000 I like it. It's a very catchy logo actually. You're very kind. You're not. You're very kind. Too late to say too late to your dissent. He looks like a mountain or regular expression. 00:30:07.000 --> 00:30:18.000 For me that blip is you know, like you watch a movie when somebody is dying on the hospital bed. Oh yeah. And they have this flat line and then they get can't reanimate it and you get the blip there. 00:30:18.000 --> 00:30:32.000 That was my first association when I saw that. I think someone else told us this. I forget it was it Catherine Boston's wife or I shan't use my wife either of them told us it. 00:30:32.000 --> 00:30:42.000 This might be misinterpreted with someone's heartbeat and someone the hospital for example. Yeah. And we were like, it's okay. 00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:51.000 In a way that's what it is. Right. It's a critical thing in your software world that that kind of a blip is a problem open to interpretation. 00:30:51.000 --> 00:30:56.000 Guang. Well, you were absent from this conversation. We talked a bit about you and your travels. 00:30:56.000 --> 00:31:02.000 I like to study when now the buildings that I just didn't want to know you can't make this up. That's crazy. I was just talking about your travels. 00:31:02.000 --> 00:31:14.000 And just this morning I actually read news about Amazon forcing everybody back into the office and how there was a huge backlash because people bought houses, moved their kids or whatever because they expected this to last. 00:31:14.000 --> 00:31:22.000 Well, the company's made policies right that you could work in definitely from anywhere. I mean, I moved to Florida for one from Seattle, even though most of my team is in Seattle in California. 00:31:22.000 --> 00:31:33.000 That's just curious. What do you guys just take on the remote work and how that you'll liberate it you or on the contrary, as the media feel worse like that work from home topic. 00:31:33.000 --> 00:31:43.000 I think is what I want to talk about a little bit. That's actually one of my goals this year is to figure out where longer terms to the five years where do I want to be based off of. 00:31:43.000 --> 00:31:55.000 I think exactly what you're alluding to right you have so much possibility. And for me, before I think I thought always the proximity to people like to friends to family is too important. 00:31:55.000 --> 00:32:07.000 But then COVID made me realize like, oh shit, like you have to be very be very intentional about it. Honestly, the past cast is also the next way to catch up with Ronek as well, just like maintaining that friendship. 00:32:07.000 --> 00:32:13.000 Obviously, it's better still to have friends and stuff in real life also be difficult if you have a girlfriend, right. 00:32:13.000 --> 00:32:32.000 But I do think that there's a lot of possibilities for me. I realize my priorities are the food has to be really good. Hopefully a lot of Asian options, which makes a lot of places in Latin America difficult. And I really got into dancing, but chat, so type of a Latin dance, which then makes Asia kind of difficult because I don't think that's not popular in Asia. 00:32:32.000 --> 00:32:46.000 And then also the third is like somewhere cheap, right. Cause I want to kind of work on like different small internet business ideas. So then I want to reduce my burn as I'm trying to figure out because I know that it's going to. 00:32:46.000 --> 00:32:55.000 Thanks to Michael which kind of showing the way of like it's going to be pretty painful. I think the first two years, especially if you're not going to the VC route right that kind of ruse like US. 00:32:55.000 --> 00:33:05.000 So for me right now, I think the top two choices, so Mexico City, I think has been great. There's also a lot of expats. So it's also easier to make friends with more similar experiences. 00:33:05.000 --> 00:33:19.000 And then I'm thinking about going to checking out fall along for in Malaysia. Cause I think it's also very big city is very diverse. They speak English very well as well as Chinese, which I speak. And then the food is really good. 00:33:19.000 --> 00:33:27.000 And then you're not planning to go to Portugal. I think people in the India hacker community would know what I'm talking about. But yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:33:27.000 --> 00:33:38.000 No, you got super popular. And then now there's a backlash right because they got rid of the digital nomad of visa and things. The other thing that I thought was important to me is to be able to at least sort of speak the local language. 00:33:38.000 --> 00:33:52.000 So then Spanish for me was like something I'm trying to learn, but then Portuguese me just like only if you go to Brazil, the accent is so different that's so I just don't know how I spent all that effort trying to pick up Portuguese. So for me, I think that was the reason. 00:33:52.000 --> 00:33:56.000 Have you guys thought about going to different places other than Canada in the state? 00:33:56.000 --> 00:34:11.000 Class summer, but we did want to go back to Russia in a couple of years, but after the Holy Crane situation, it's like off the table. Basically last year, we've been re-adjusting our expectations and just figuring out that you can't predict what's going to happen tomorrow. 00:34:11.000 --> 00:34:14.000 So it's best to enjoy today. 00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:31.000 Playing for the future became not a thing anymore. We moved from Seattle to Vancouver about four years ago now. So I have a daughter, she's 11 and a dog is actually right behind me. So she made lots of good friends and also it's not going to be easy to like just approve. 00:34:31.000 --> 00:34:50.000 Well, we did it already once to her and we don't want to do that again, but we do like to go to new places like you. I love Mexico. I've picking up Spanish quite a lot too. And I think it would be nice to be able to spend the dry season there or somewhere else traveling around the world, but that's still at least 10 years down the line. 00:34:50.000 --> 00:35:01.000 For now, last year we spent a month in Banff. My wife was working from there. I was basically hiking with my dog and my daughter the whole time was fabulous. 00:35:01.000 --> 00:35:04.000 Sounds incredible. You know, pamphlets on my list. 00:35:04.000 --> 00:35:07.000 There's good climbing there as well, right? Do you climb a chain? 00:35:07.000 --> 00:35:16.000 I don't climb much, not like technical ones, but the hardest ones I did were rope climbing where there's already somebody has laid out a rope or letters are there. 00:35:16.000 --> 00:35:22.000 It was beautiful. My definition of hard hikes became different after that. 00:35:22.000 --> 00:35:30.000 And Ronik, you've been doing remote work since you got to Canada, right? How has that been like? 00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:39.000 Yeah, it's partly remote work or work from home that actually made it much easier for me to move to Canada while still continuing with my team before COVID. 00:35:39.000 --> 00:35:49.000 There was no company wide remote work policy. It was more of a case by case thing. And there were some people who worked remotely, but that that was done as an exception more than a norm. 00:35:49.000 --> 00:35:54.000 And we had already decided before COVID that we would move to Canada at some point. 00:35:54.000 --> 00:36:03.000 And I didn't know at the time whether I would be able to continue with LinkedIn or not in the current job, but with COVID again worked from remote policy became an easy thing that transfer was pretty straightforward. 00:36:03.000 --> 00:36:11.000 And because we had been working from home anyway, like even in the barrier, moving here was mostly adjusting to the time difference, nothing other than that. 00:36:11.000 --> 00:36:20.000 But on the whole work from home thing, I like hybrid instead of one or the other. Honestly, there are days when I love just being at home and being able to focus. 00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:26.000 So either I have a lot of back to back meetings or if there are, I need a lot of focus time, I love being at home. 00:36:26.000 --> 00:36:33.000 But then there are times when you're not physically in the same room with people, let's say you want to brainstorm something or discuss something and you're missing that whiteboard. 00:36:33.000 --> 00:36:40.000 I mean, I've tried, I don't know how many different apps to whiteboard over a Zoom call their teams call. It's not the same. 00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:49.000 And the biggest difference I found over the last couple years was when you go back after a long weekend or a break, you go back to a call and you're right to business. 00:36:49.000 --> 00:36:57.000 And the biggest difference when you're at work was you go to your seat and people just talk about how is your weekend, what do you do there? 00:36:57.000 --> 00:37:03.000 So LinkedIn has an office in Toronto, so I go here as well, even though there are not many engineers here or no one from my team. 00:37:03.000 --> 00:37:10.000 That interaction, which is more informal and not a bar just work. I don't see that organic over a call. 00:37:10.000 --> 00:37:16.000 So I definitely miss meeting people in person a little more, but I think that's preference more than anything else. 00:37:16.000 --> 00:37:23.000 So do you travel to the Bay Area once in a while? I worried if I had my visa. 00:37:23.000 --> 00:37:33.000 My work visa was cancelled after I moved to Canada and my visitor visa, I've applied for it except there are no appointments available. 00:37:33.000 --> 00:37:41.000 Oh, yeah, I know that story. Yeah, exactly. So my appointment is like next year in January. Jesus. Yeah, that's ridiculous. 00:37:41.000 --> 00:37:50.000 I also just applied for a B1 visa and I got next year April, but I kept looking. If you keep looking, there are spots opening up. 00:37:50.000 --> 00:37:56.000 So I actually got it this April. Oh, wow, we didn't like a week or so. Yeah, okay, keep looking. I should do that. Thanks for the tip. 00:37:56.000 --> 00:38:04.000 Yeah, talking about moving to Canada, I think my story was very similar actually. We wanted to move to Canada and at that time. 00:38:04.000 --> 00:38:14.000 So Ilya and I have been peers working together. I think for a year or two, you are my manager too, right? So when we decided that we want to move to Canada, you are my manager. 00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:19.000 I don't know if you remember or not. And this is before COVID. 00:38:19.000 --> 00:38:29.000 And these policies were not there, right? You can't just go to a different country and report to a manager from a different country because of tax and financial things and all that. 00:38:29.000 --> 00:38:36.000 But somehow Ilya was able to convince people to let me do that. And so that's how I moved. That was awesome. Yeah. 00:38:36.000 --> 00:38:43.000 Does a lesson in like anything is possible as long as you know the right people. Oh, yes. Can tell a story. 00:38:43.000 --> 00:39:04.000 Yeah, Ron, you're a senior staff engineer at LinkedIn and you've been working at like big companies LinkedIn for a while now. How do you enjoy that part flipping that on Guang? I think you're starting to explore the indie hacker and you prefer working and startups and small companies. 00:39:04.000 --> 00:39:23.000 I want to hear from both of you. What do you like? What do you not like? I first worked at inside which was a startup. I was I think 18th or 19th employee of the company. And I was pleasantly surprised how much trust they put in me would not done anything before from a professional side would except for going to school and doing side projects. 00:39:23.000 --> 00:39:37.000 It's like, hey, by the way, do you want to run this program for us? I'm like, well, you trust me to do this. Okay. So the amount of things that I learned over two years at inside was in terms of density of learning. I have not experienced that anywhere else. 00:39:37.000 --> 00:39:48.000 And it wasn't just technical stuff. It was everything else. Learning how to communicate to people at all different levels. How can you go from deep technical issues to abstract it out at the high level and talk about strategy. 00:39:48.000 --> 00:39:55.000 How can you talk about business development, talk about leaders, other companies about sales, for instance, because we were still trying to sell a product. 00:39:55.000 --> 00:40:06.000 Being able to do that at a startup was amazing for me. Just getting their autonomy. I knew that I enjoyed autonomy and I don't like being micromanaged. If I need to do something, give me a task and trust me that I can do that. 00:40:06.000 --> 00:40:14.000 And you can always check in to see if it's on track. And from there, I reached a point where it felt like I wasn't growing as much or learning as much. 00:40:14.000 --> 00:40:21.000 So I decided to make that move. I explored a few options and land at LinkedIn. At LinkedIn, it was very different as compared to a startup. 00:40:21.000 --> 00:40:29.000 As you said, it's a big company. So things are a lot more structured. You're not working on very white things like I'm not going to do sales for LinkedIn ever. 00:40:29.000 --> 00:40:35.000 I'm not going to talk about business ever. And I would do that as startup that allowed me to go much deeper into the infrastructure layer. 00:40:35.000 --> 00:40:40.000 At the same time, all the learnings I got from working at a startup helped me in many other areas at LinkedIn. 00:40:40.000 --> 00:40:45.000 If I'm pitching an idea, for example, how do you go about even thinking about it? Like, why should you do this? 00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:53.000 So thinking about business metrics, thinking about how it's effective to the company, that all came very organically instead of just talking about engineering pipelines. 00:40:53.000 --> 00:41:00.000 I've been there a while, as you said. I hit a point every year where I think about am I learning? Am I growing? Am I having fun? 00:41:00.000 --> 00:41:03.000 And if these things are not true, then what's the point? 00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:10.000 And so far, I've had the opportunity to work on different things that LinkedIn and all of those things have kept me very engaged. 00:41:10.000 --> 00:41:17.000 These three things still continue to be true. One thing which I'll also say is that LinkedIn has a company cares a lot about people. 00:41:17.000 --> 00:41:22.000 And it shows up in culture as well. It challenges you in various ways at the same time. 00:41:22.000 --> 00:41:29.000 It recognizes when you need to set your own pace, when times are difficult. And people in general are pretty awesome. 00:41:29.000 --> 00:41:32.000 And I think that makes all of this worthwhile. 00:41:32.000 --> 00:41:36.000 Nice. Guang, you want to give us your take on this? 00:41:36.000 --> 00:41:39.000 Not nearly as smooth as how I run it. 00:41:39.000 --> 00:41:43.000 Have you guys heard of the thing? Like for your career, three things that are important. 00:41:43.000 --> 00:41:45.000 And then you figure out your own priorities. 00:41:45.000 --> 00:41:49.000 Like purpose, craftsmanship or mastery and then autonomy. 00:41:49.000 --> 00:41:56.000 I haven't thought about it this until maybe like two or three years ago. And then it makes sense. Like for me, autonomy, I think is the most important thing. 00:41:56.000 --> 00:42:02.000 So then I've only worked at startups. The first one was like employee three. The second one, there's only 60 people, 70 people. 00:42:02.000 --> 00:42:08.000 And the last wave, three people, I think every like the fact that you can explore like different roles. 00:42:08.000 --> 00:42:17.000 What Ron was saying. I think it's kind of funny. Before I was a while, they trust you to do this super important task without any experience. 00:42:17.000 --> 00:42:21.000 And then you kind of realize it's not that they trust you, but they don't really have a choice. 00:42:21.000 --> 00:42:24.000 That's nobody else. You know what an option. 00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:30.000 So I think it's something to keep in mind, but I do think that it really does give you a lot of opportunities. 00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:34.000 The thing is that you have to be very intentional about it. It's very like you don't want to just cruise. 00:42:34.000 --> 00:42:41.000 You make far less money and I'll write there's far less certainty in terms of the future as well as you want to get a new role. 00:42:41.000 --> 00:42:51.000 So for the last two jobs, I think going into it, I got one with discipline about like, hey, this is what I envision where the company is going to be and where I'm going to be in one year. 00:42:51.000 --> 00:42:54.000 And then in one year, let's revisit. 00:42:54.000 --> 00:42:59.000 What I have is, you know, you're like 80% off when you're expecting. 00:42:59.000 --> 00:43:04.000 And then it's kind of like, okay, shit, clear is something's not working out. Maybe it's time to go on. 00:43:04.000 --> 00:43:09.000 I think that's a great framework, yeah, especially in a startup because the startup is moving so fast. 00:43:09.000 --> 00:43:18.000 I think for you to set up your own expectation of what you will be doing and what the startup would be doing in a year or two year horizon. 00:43:18.000 --> 00:43:27.000 I love that. Yeah. Maybe we should start moving towards the actual podcasting logistics and mechanisms and all those kind of things. 00:43:27.000 --> 00:43:31.000 Yeah, let's actually go back to the topic that we brought up before we start recording. 00:43:31.000 --> 00:43:34.000 So what microphones and gear do you guys use? 00:43:34.000 --> 00:43:38.000 I use the shoe SM 58. This also came from a recommendation. 00:43:38.000 --> 00:43:44.000 I think I was listening to Tim Ferris show and I looked at what gear he uses and he was like, this thing you can throw on the floor and it will be fine. 00:43:44.000 --> 00:43:46.000 I was like, I'm going to go for that. 00:43:46.000 --> 00:43:48.000 Have you thrown it? 00:43:48.000 --> 00:43:50.000 Not that I threw my microphone on the floor. 00:43:50.000 --> 00:43:54.000 There are way too many options. I didn't have to think about which one to pick from. 00:43:54.000 --> 00:43:57.000 I tried this one and the other one I tried was audio technica. 00:43:57.000 --> 00:43:59.000 Forget the exact model. 00:43:59.000 --> 00:44:03.000 It's about $100 USD. The nice thing it has is that it plugs into a USB. 00:44:03.000 --> 00:44:07.000 What I found was that that mic was a little too sensitive for my taste. 00:44:07.000 --> 00:44:10.000 So I tested out this one and the other one. 00:44:10.000 --> 00:44:14.000 This one I felt the audio quality I like that it will better than the other one. 00:44:14.000 --> 00:44:18.000 So I just went with it and hindsight should have gone with something that gives you a USB plug. 00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:24.000 So you don't need to go around with this focus right interface with an X- So you've got the focus right solo. 00:44:24.000 --> 00:44:26.000 Yes, I've got the focus right solo. 00:44:26.000 --> 00:44:30.000 And just for the record I got the focus right to mine is I think it's two I-2. 00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:34.000 It's basically the same as yours but it has two ports instead of one. 00:44:34.000 --> 00:44:38.000 Yeah, because I was playing the guitar and I can plug the guitar into the second port. 00:44:38.000 --> 00:44:40.000 Oh, that's pretty sweet. 00:44:40.000 --> 00:45:13.099 Yeah. but this one has a USB connection too, but it can also be plugged into XLR. 00:45:13.099 --> 00:45:16.039 In the respect, I should have just bought an SM7B. 00:45:16.039 --> 00:45:17.019 SM7B is nice. 00:45:17.019 --> 00:45:21.340 I didn't use it, but I think Joe Roganizes that one, Lex Frieden, Renus is that one. 00:45:21.340 --> 00:45:23.940 Kelsey Hitever had that one as well. 00:45:23.940 --> 00:45:31.539 Oh my gosh, Kelsey Hitever said, I was so good at the camera, like the webcam, was ultra HD, and then it just looks like, whoa, so cool. 00:45:31.539 --> 00:45:33.340 Do you have video from that episode? 00:45:33.340 --> 00:45:35.980 Funny story, we were actually using Squatcast at the time. 00:45:35.980 --> 00:45:41.699 We moved away from Squatcast to Riverside because on Squatcast, we lost our recording a couple of times. 00:45:41.699 --> 00:45:54.460 So for example, if someone's internet connection got lost, that person would drop off, and the recording would stop if any guest drops off, and that was annoying because at times we wouldn't notice, like if a guest is talking, recording stops, well, you lost the part that they said, 00:45:54.460 --> 00:45:57.380 and it's weird to go back and ask them to, hey, can you do that again? 00:45:57.380 --> 00:45:59.500 Like if they had in the flow, it's not natural. 00:45:59.500 --> 00:46:00.619 When was that? 00:46:00.619 --> 00:46:06.460 This was, I think late December 2020, and the first tough of 2021. 00:46:06.460 --> 00:46:12.980 This is when it was, and I'm sure they've improved their reliability quite a bit, but it wasn't fun back then. 00:46:12.980 --> 00:46:25.420 To be fair, to Squatcast, I think part of it was also armistic where they put the recording button, or like the indicator, I think it was at the bottom, and then it wasn't very obvious, versus now it's like very highly distributed. 00:46:25.420 --> 00:46:27.019 So part of it was our fault. 00:46:27.019 --> 00:46:31.380 Basically when someone dropped off, like so we stopped, but then we didn't really click the thing. 00:46:31.380 --> 00:46:36.300 But to Ronis Point though, like now it's doing what he's supposed to do, right, which is recording throughout. 00:46:36.300 --> 00:46:38.059 Doesn't matter when some drops are not. 00:46:38.059 --> 00:46:40.900 We just to come back to your question, what Kelsey's episode in the video? 00:46:40.900 --> 00:46:42.500 So that happened in that episode. 00:46:42.500 --> 00:46:45.900 We didn't have the recording on Squatcast, but about like 20 minutes. 00:46:45.900 --> 00:46:50.820 And the nice thing was that we were recording locally, and he was also recording locally. 00:46:50.820 --> 00:46:53.019 So we got all the tracks and mixed it up. 00:46:53.019 --> 00:46:56.340 Wait, so you were recording locally separate from Squatcast? 00:46:56.340 --> 00:46:57.900 Oh, interesting. 00:46:57.900 --> 00:46:59.099 That's what the series do. 00:46:59.099 --> 00:47:02.500 It's like one is none, two is one. 00:47:02.500 --> 00:47:09.019 We always, well, not always, but many times we had off-onic running on the background and not off-onic, sorry, our Dacity. 00:47:09.019 --> 00:47:12.380 Running in the background and yeah, we would all have local recording. 00:47:12.380 --> 00:47:22.139 It was something I never saw that was, but then Ronis was like, oh, you know, just in case we should ask the guest to, you know, do that, I was like, oh man, I sound like such a hassle, but then second episode. 00:47:22.139 --> 00:47:23.139 Of course he happens. 00:47:23.139 --> 00:47:24.940 So thanks, Ronis. 00:47:24.940 --> 00:47:29.940 For the record, our episode number eight is with Squatcast founders. 00:47:29.940 --> 00:47:32.818 So it actually came out this week, the big one we were recording this episode. 00:47:32.818 --> 00:47:36.619 So it came out in, I think February 28th of March 1st. 00:47:36.619 --> 00:47:39.179 Well, it's good we're saying there's a free record with them. 00:47:39.179 --> 00:47:45.539 Yeah. No, I've been using Squatcast for pretty much every single episode except one. 00:47:45.539 --> 00:47:47.699 And also I've been using for my other podcast. 00:47:47.699 --> 00:47:52.019 The issues you have experienced, I can't tell it don't exist anymore, but we have not experienced them. 00:47:52.019 --> 00:47:55.898 In the episode they did talk about some of those early challenges. 00:47:55.900 --> 00:48:00.300 And I think during COVID their usage kind of skyrocketed, right? 00:48:00.300 --> 00:48:01.940 And they found a lot of problems. 00:48:01.940 --> 00:48:05.539 So I think they've learned from that and fixed a lot of things. 00:48:05.539 --> 00:48:08.820 Yeah, I feel like we're defending Squatcast, but yeah. 00:48:08.820 --> 00:48:09.820 We love Squatcast. 00:48:09.820 --> 00:48:14.099 Are you getting that sweet, sweet Squatcast sponsorship money? 00:48:14.099 --> 00:48:15.739 They don't pay us, too. 00:48:15.739 --> 00:48:17.059 So good. 00:48:19.940 --> 00:48:21.699 So what microphone do you use? 00:48:21.699 --> 00:48:25.898 I just have this very hilariously tiny Samsung goal. 00:48:25.898 --> 00:48:29.179 So S-A-M-S-O-N-G-O. 00:48:29.179 --> 00:48:32.418 Oh, it doesn't have any model number. 00:48:32.418 --> 00:48:34.619 It's the smartness I have. 00:48:34.619 --> 00:48:37.539 I can tell unlike your fancy microphones. 00:48:37.539 --> 00:48:40.938 I just Google with the smallest form factor because I travel kind of bit. 00:48:40.938 --> 00:48:48.898 I think blue Yeti has like a snowball or something that's quite small, but this thing comparing to that is like hilariously small. 00:48:48.900 --> 00:48:54.059 So when you hear this episode, it sounds like asked them, maybe this is a bad choice. 00:48:54.059 --> 00:48:55.619 But I think it sounds great. 00:48:55.619 --> 00:48:57.699 And I think for traveling, it's a really good choice. 00:48:57.699 --> 00:49:01.380 We pay to sound engineer to produce our podcasts. 00:49:01.380 --> 00:49:04.860 So I think you'll be surprised how nice you will sound. 00:49:04.860 --> 00:49:07.139 Sometimes I get surprised is like, how great is this? 00:49:07.139 --> 00:49:10.139 Well, we would request that contact from you, by the way. 00:49:10.139 --> 00:49:11.340 Yeah. Keep it the share. 00:49:11.340 --> 00:49:12.820 How did you guys find the audio engineer? 00:49:12.820 --> 00:49:14.260 Do you have to like interview and stuff for it? 00:49:14.260 --> 00:49:16.179 Or is it a previous contact? 00:49:16.179 --> 00:49:17.940 I worked with him on my Russian podcast. 00:49:17.940 --> 00:49:19.500 Basically, what got me into podcasting? 00:49:19.500 --> 00:49:23.179 So somebody invited me to a podcast in Russian in 2020. 00:49:23.179 --> 00:49:25.139 So I went there, I talked to the guy. 00:49:25.139 --> 00:49:26.980 I'm like, okay, it's actually a great thing. 00:49:26.980 --> 00:49:28.780 I want to do a podcast too. 00:49:28.780 --> 00:49:30.940 I asked him, like, who he used as a sound engineer. 00:49:30.940 --> 00:49:32.380 So it's all nepotism. 00:49:32.380 --> 00:49:34.619 So like, I'm not even writing all that. 00:49:34.619 --> 00:49:35.460 That's excellent. 00:49:35.460 --> 00:49:37.699 Nice. But I'm happy to do the intro. 00:49:37.699 --> 00:49:39.300 What's your other podcast about? 00:49:39.300 --> 00:49:41.219 One podcast, which is kind of dormant. 00:49:41.219 --> 00:49:44.139 It's about technology, more career in technology. 00:49:44.139 --> 00:49:50.219 So I invited people who work in different companies, like Amazon, Google, whatever, and we'll talk about their experience. 00:49:50.219 --> 00:49:53.420 And then the other one that has started in January is here. 00:49:53.420 --> 00:49:55.219 But I already have 29 episodes. 00:49:55.219 --> 00:49:58.739 I would just turn on my microphone, like every now and then in the evening. 00:49:58.739 --> 00:50:00.900 And just talk for 10, 15, 20 minutes. 00:50:00.900 --> 00:50:04.099 And then I published it without even listening back to it. 00:50:04.099 --> 00:50:04.940 It's also in Russian. 00:50:04.940 --> 00:50:06.820 But sometimes I will talk about career. 00:50:06.820 --> 00:50:08.900 Sometimes I will talk about something that happened to me. 00:50:08.900 --> 00:50:10.820 Like, cops stopped me or something. 00:50:10.820 --> 00:50:11.940 Basic stuff, you know? 00:50:11.940 --> 00:50:17.219 I was in this particular retreat in Peru and I was talking about that, which got quite good reception because I was pretty transparent. 00:50:17.219 --> 00:50:18.860 I call it the audio blog. 00:50:18.860 --> 00:50:20.059 So it's like a journal. 00:50:20.059 --> 00:50:23.739 And it resonates with some people because it's across different topics, yeah. 00:50:23.739 --> 00:50:27.818 It's surprising just how easy it is to publish podcasts these days. 00:50:27.818 --> 00:50:29.139 I give this one a sub-stack. 00:50:29.139 --> 00:50:31.818 Like Arnab was saying, I know the sound stuff. 00:50:31.818 --> 00:50:38.380 So I have this kind of setup where I can actually go turn on the mic, record, render the file, and just publish it. 00:50:38.380 --> 00:50:39.699 So it's actually post-produced. 00:50:39.699 --> 00:50:42.539 I just don't have to do it every single time because I have this template. 00:50:42.539 --> 00:50:48.338 So I'm curious actually, how do you post-produce your episodes and also where do you host the podcast? 00:50:48.338 --> 00:50:50.298 Blood and sweat is what it takes. 00:50:50.298 --> 00:50:55.579 We post-produce our episodes ourselves, we use our acetate. 00:50:55.579 --> 00:50:56.898 Everything is a monotract. 00:50:56.898 --> 00:50:59.259 We combine it together, clean it out. 00:50:59.259 --> 00:51:03.139 Again, both of us edit the process might be different for both of us. 00:51:03.139 --> 00:51:04.259 Mine's easier. 00:51:04.259 --> 00:51:10.099 Prozago's like, listen to the entire episode, find out the things that are definitely not good and I need to clean it up. 00:51:10.099 --> 00:51:17.340 We rarely cut things out, but what we clean up is like, uh, um, so our background noise at times sort of like the mic volume is too low for someone. 00:51:17.340 --> 00:51:22.219 After all of this is done, add the intro outro, and then we usually run it through off-onic. 00:51:22.219 --> 00:51:25.619 If you haven't tried that, I mean, you have a sound engineer, so you're good. 00:51:25.619 --> 00:51:32.860 But otherwise any audio, like it doesn't matter how much we equalize it on our Dacity, sanding it through off-onic just brings it to another level. 00:51:32.860 --> 00:51:34.380 Oh, that's what it looks like. 00:51:34.380 --> 00:51:36.259 And we host it on Lipson. 00:51:36.259 --> 00:51:38.619 How long does it take you to produce one episode? 00:51:38.619 --> 00:51:41.619 Two, damn long. 00:51:41.619 --> 00:51:43.298 Yeah. Two long. 00:51:43.298 --> 00:51:45.739 This is the story of every podcast that I've been doing. 00:51:45.739 --> 00:51:47.739 I'm sorry, I'm sorry, everywhere I think. 00:51:47.739 --> 00:51:52.739 I would say anywhere between four to six hours, like from editing to publishing for, like, how long? 00:51:52.739 --> 00:51:54.739 Like one half hours, one hour of content. 00:51:54.739 --> 00:51:56.739 Yeah. Actually, 90 minutes. 00:51:56.739 --> 00:52:03.739 Yeah, one thing I'm trying now is actually just this morning I was talking to my wife's sister, who is currently a student, she's studying English language back in Russia. 00:52:03.739 --> 00:52:06.739 What we're trying to do is I showed her how to use the script. 00:52:06.739 --> 00:52:14.739 So she could remove all of those arms and ooms and repeated words, all these basic stuff, basically first pass of the content on. 00:52:14.739 --> 00:52:16.739 And then after that, we would send it to the sound engineer. 00:52:16.739 --> 00:52:21.739 His job would be primarily to just make sure that equalizer's all good, like breaths are removed, all the technical stuff. 00:52:21.739 --> 00:52:26.739 So she would be more like doing the content and he would be doing the technical audio bits. 00:52:26.739 --> 00:52:27.739 Let's see how that works. 00:52:27.739 --> 00:52:28.739 That's really fun. 00:52:28.739 --> 00:52:29.739 Keep us posted. 00:52:29.739 --> 00:52:32.739 Yeah. Yeah. Nepotism again. 00:52:32.739 --> 00:52:39.739 Also, what we do is one episode we have guests like you and then the next episode we call that a metasod because we're very metta over here. 00:52:39.739 --> 00:52:41.739 We're not affiliated with Metta again. 00:52:41.739 --> 00:52:44.739 We talk about these kind of things that came up in the episode. 00:52:44.739 --> 00:52:49.739 So yeah, next week our listeners will listen to more about this story, I think. 00:52:49.739 --> 00:52:51.739 Yeah, we'll talk about you next week. 00:52:51.739 --> 00:52:53.739 Yeah. Great things, I'm sure. 00:52:53.739 --> 00:52:55.739 How annoying were these guys? 00:52:55.739 --> 00:53:00.739 Yeah, but we were always very positive about all of our guests because we want people to come to us, right? 00:53:00.739 --> 00:53:02.739 So you can't stress our guests. 00:53:02.739 --> 00:53:04.739 Yeah, but also we are not the kind of people. 00:53:04.739 --> 00:53:10.739 Okay, so just before we close, if you can share how many listeners do you get, do you do anything to market the podcast? 00:53:10.739 --> 00:53:14.739 We don't do anything special to market the podcast, except for post it on Twitter and LinkedIn. 00:53:14.739 --> 00:53:20.739 And any listeners that we've gotten have mostly been like, through people we know are people who discovered the podcast themselves. 00:53:20.739 --> 00:53:27.739 In terms of numbers, the numbers I remember right now is like, we have about 20,000 total downloads. 00:53:27.739 --> 00:53:31.739 We get the maximum downloads we've had as 3 1 1 1 1 1 episode. 00:53:31.739 --> 00:53:33.739 I think we have 18 episodes now. 00:53:33.739 --> 00:53:35.739 That number might be a cloth. 00:53:35.739 --> 00:53:38.739 On average, it comes down to about a thousand downloads per episode. 00:53:38.739 --> 00:53:41.739 Cool. Nice. Those are great stats. 00:53:41.739 --> 00:53:42.739 We are at time. 00:53:42.739 --> 00:53:44.739 So just quickly, where can people find you? 00:53:44.739 --> 00:53:47.739 What's your favorite podcast before you say bye-bye? 00:53:47.739 --> 00:53:52.739 People can find me on LinkedIn, Ronnick and Nathaniel, Twitter, same, Ronnick, Nathaniel. 00:53:52.739 --> 00:53:59.739 I have my website, Ronnick, Nathaniel.com and that will point you to every other link, as well as the podcast software, MrDrincer.com. 00:53:59.739 --> 00:54:00.739 Favorite podcast? 00:54:00.739 --> 00:54:04.739 I love many of them, but if I had to pick one, I would say the Tim Ferry show. 00:54:04.739 --> 00:54:05.739 Very cool. 00:54:05.739 --> 00:54:07.739 I'm like looking at LinkedIn here, though, right now. 00:54:07.739 --> 00:54:08.739 Sorry. 00:54:08.739 --> 00:54:11.739 But it's for the podcast. 00:54:11.739 --> 00:54:13.739 Andy Hackers, pretty easy choice on Alan. 00:54:13.739 --> 00:54:21.739 I love their format now, but anyways, and then my LinkedIn is a GY-ANG, eight, too many Chinese people with the same names. 00:54:21.739 --> 00:54:22.739 Yeah, it's a problem. 00:54:22.739 --> 00:54:23.739 All right. 00:54:23.739 --> 00:54:24.739 I got to drop a folks word. 00:54:24.739 --> 00:54:25.739 Thank you so much for having us. 00:54:25.739 --> 00:54:26.739 This was a blast. 00:54:26.739 --> 00:54:27.739 Yeah, thanks so much for having us. 00:54:27.739 --> 00:54:28.739 It was awesome. 00:54:28.739 --> 00:54:29.739 Thanks for coming here. 00:54:29.739 --> 00:54:30.739 All right. 00:54:30.739 --> 00:54:31.739 Thank you for listening. 00:54:31.739 --> 00:54:35.739 And please send us a note if you have any questions. 00:54:35.739 --> 00:54:38.739 Or if you enjoyed the podcast, if you listened up to this point, set this a note. 00:54:38.739 --> 00:54:40.739 I want to see, actually, who is listening? 00:54:40.739 --> 00:54:42.739 Because all we see right now is just raw numbers. 00:54:42.739 --> 00:54:44.739 We really want to meet our audience. 00:54:44.739 --> 00:54:48.739 All our listeners really want to understand who the people behind the numbers. 00:54:48.739 --> 00:54:52.739 And also, if you haven't already, give us a faster review. 00:54:52.739 --> 00:54:54.739 Whatever you listen to the podcast. 00:54:54.739 --> 00:54:56.739 And see you next week. 00:54:56.739 --> 00:54:58.739 Post-scriptum. 00:54:58.739 --> 00:55:00.739 We have a newsletter on substags. 00:55:00.739 --> 00:55:04.739 Eight is at newsletter.metacastpodcast.com. 00:55:04.739 --> 00:55:06.739 It's also linked in the show notes. 00:55:06.739 --> 00:55:08.739 Please subscribe if you haven't already. 00:55:08.739 --> 00:55:11.739 If you're a podcaster, I think you'll find a lot of valuable info there. 00:55:11.739 --> 00:55:20.739 Because every time we have an episode coming out, we summarize all of the takeaways and links and all the useful things that guests said. 00:55:20.739 --> 00:55:28.739 So even if you actually don't even listen to the podcast, but you read the newsletter, you will get something out of it if you do podcasting. 00:55:28.739 --> 00:55:31.739 But obviously, they go very well together with the bundle. 00:55:31.739 --> 00:55:35.739 And yeah, if you like it, please share it with your friends and networks. 00:55:35.739 --> 00:55:37.739 Yeah, I feel like our growth is kind of stuck, right? 00:55:37.739 --> 00:55:40.739 So we need to eat people to share more. 00:55:40.739 --> 00:55:45.739 So please share our podcast with people who might be interested in this. 00:55:45.739 --> 00:55:52.739 Or just share it in your LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Mastodon, Google Plus. 00:55:52.739 --> 00:55:54.739 Oh, Google doesn't listen. 00:55:54.739 --> 00:55:56.739 Yeah. All right. 00:55:56.739 --> 00:55:57.739 Bye for now. 00:55:57.739 --> 00:56:05.739 Yeah.