When I got my green card, I'm like, okay, now I'm a free person.
I can do whatever I want.
But 10 years of being on the work visa and student visa, they foster almost like a victim mentality, right?
Where you can't, therefore you don't.
And therefore, that's the way things are.
It changes your risk appetite.
I want to say it actually removes, there is no risk appetite.
Yeah, you start to optimize, but not taking risks.
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Metacast podcast.
And I'm your host, Yili Bestelev, and he's my co-host, Arnab.
They won't say hi.
Hello, hello, hello.
Yeah. I always, but just recovering from a cough and cold, so a little bit less high and hello.
So it's going to be quite podcast.
I will see.
All right, so Metacast behind the scenes podcast is a podcast where we talk about how we build our company.
A podcast app is our main product.
We are currently in close beta.
We haven't shipped publicly yet.
It's going to be the best postcard ever.
Postcard?
Yes. The best podcast ever created by mankind.
We think so.
We've been using the app for a while now in our internal beta.
It's an awesome app, and we can't wait to share it with the world, but there is still some work to be done.
And on this podcast, we share how we build the company.
We talk about entrepreneurship.
We invite entrepreneurs to talk about their journeys.
So yeah, it's a mix of about stuff about everything that goes into building a company, which we hope will be interesting for us to listen many years online.
And if people can benefit from this right now, that's great.
But also when we ship our app, this podcast is going to be our community engagement channel, sort of where people can learn about who is behind the app, how they think about building the app.
We can discuss customer feedback and all that.
So yeah, we are taking it really meta and using the podcast as a podcast listeners engagement thing.
So Arnab, what are we going to talk about today?
You and I are both immigrants in these countries that we live in now.
Where else would you be in the grinsing?
Well, no, actually, I was immigrant in two countries.
So we're going to talk a little bit about our journey so far.
And Ilia has reached one of the most important milestones in being an immigrant.
So we're going to talk a little bit about that.
But before we get to all that, so every few episodes, when we start recording, we have this Google doc.
Every time we write up some bullet points about what we're going to discuss.
And that's the time when I look at it and realize, wow, it's episode 39.
And back in January, we knew we wanted to do a weekly one.
So of course, if you do the math, it would be like, OK, 40 episodes in by the end of September.
But it just feels surreal that it's episode 39.
It just feels surreal that almost a year has passed.
It seems very cordially very first episode in late October, I think, on November.
And we started publishing them in January.
That's been quite well.
Well, that's the reason why I name all of our MP3 files with the output audio with a three-digit number.
So it's like 001. This one will be 0039.
Because I knew we were going to cross into 100 at some point.
So but we still have about a year to go.
So this numbering thing will work for about 20 years, you're saying?
I didn't do the math, but I think you're right, yeah.
52 weeks per year, so yeah.
Remember how we discussed in one of the episodes, what would it be like to work together for 20, 30 years?
And I think none of us wanted to do the same thing for 20, 30 years.
But we were fine working with each other for 20, 30 years.
And actually thinking about it, when we started recording, if I think back to last October, to you, you had done a few podcasts already.
To me, it was all new.
I have gotten very used to it now.
And I really enjoyed the process of recording it.
And then listening to it again, because the first few times that was like the recording thing was itself a bit stressful.
But listening to it again was like really painful.
I'll say something now and then I'll clarify it.
So you feel yourself like fish in the water.
And this is what it means.
It's an idiomatic Russian expression translated directly into non-idiomatic English.
It's something in English too.
Oh, is it?
You feel like fish in the water, yeah?
I've never heard of this in English.
But the reason I brought it up is, I've been trying this thing recently.
So I post stuff in our newsletter, and also I adapt this to LinkedIn.
But I also started taking that from LinkedIn plugging into chat GPT, and telling it, translate it into Russian.
And then I do a little bit of edits, and then I cross-post this to my telegram channel as well, from my Russian audience, which is much faster than writing this from scratch, right?
But what I noticed is that chat GPT is not yet good enough to translate idiomatic English into idiomatic Russian, or any other language as I suppose, which sometimes results in really weird phrases, which obviously would have to correct.
And this kind of tied to our topic of immigration a little bit.
I knew somebody who would use idiomatic Russian expressions, translate them directly into non-idiomatic English, like I just did.
And it would make no sense to anybody, except me, because I was the only one, like I could make a connection about his doing.
So this being meta-cast, let's go a bit meta now.
I follow you on Instagram, obviously, right?
And I see most of your posts are like with Russian words, and all, and sometimes they're in the image itself, so I can't translate them.
I don't read Russian, by the way, listeners, or speak it for anybody else, just casually wondering, yet, maybe.
Well, if you hang out with me, you're not as one year's sheep, you might.
Right. Well, I do love learning languages, and Spanish, I've been doing it for about a year and a half now.
I'm OK with it now, there.
I can talk like in basic Spanish in casual with people.
Anyway, so the meta part, so I saw your post in Russian, and sometimes if you have actually written the words, right, and it's not in the image, then Instagram offers like C translation.
So I did that translate.
So what it did was it translated you talking in Russian about how your translations from English to Russian are not good, which was in Russian, back into English, and it made no sense at all.
That's because I don't really want to say this, but I would say I'm pretty good at idiomatic Russian, and I've also grown, I guess, pretty good at idiomatic English, especially when I'm writing.
That's why the translations don't make sense, I think.
It's because those idioms, they are not easily translatable from one language to another.
We should take the original English one, put your Instagram Russian thing, and then put what I see when I translate it, and put it in the show notes.
I think it was really funny.
I could get a sense of what you're trying to talk about, but it made no sense.
Anyway, I think this is enough meta.
Right.
So one thing we wanted to improve, or I wanted to improve, this episode is that jump straight into the main topic, and then do some chitchat at the end.
We already failed a bit, improvement.
11 minutes in.
Let's do it.
Yeah, cool.
So the reason I want to talk about immigration is that I've been thinking a lot about how I spent, and same for you as well.
So I spent over 10 years on work and student visas, and basically all of the time from my mid 20s to my mid 30s, which is some of the most productive years in terms of like trying things, risk taking, like you don't have kids yet, or at least some of those years.
And then when you're in a work visa, you're kind of screwed because you can't try much, right?
You're tied to your job.
You're tied to your job, right?
And we also talked to somebody.
He was like, yeah, if we'd been interesting to work with you guys, but I'm on H1 visa, which is dependent on my employer, and you know it's non-starter for a small starter.
We can't do that.
So yeah, we want to talk about immigration, how it affects work in both good and bad ways, kind of what you learn from it, and also how it affects entrepreneurship.
Because both of us lived in multiple countries, which is one that to chat about that, and hope people will find that interesting.
So tell us where all have you lived, how many years, what's been your journey?
So I was born in Russia, actually, my hometown is in Siberia.
You're the only person I know who's from Siberia, by the way.
OK, I know many.
Four of you's reasons.
Yeah, so six hours flight or five times zones to the right from Moscow.
It's like two hours drive to Mongolia.
Let's have how it is.
Like one half hours flight to Beijing.
You were probably closer to India than to Moscow.
Or at least the northwestern side of India, yeah.
It's probably about the same distance.
But if you talk about Assam, where you're from, it's probably very close, yeah.
So yeah, then I moved to Moscow when I was 22, I think.
And then I had an opportunity to work in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates when I was 25.
This was DHL?
Or was it DHL, yes.
They were doing some re-working, and there was an opportunity to move to Dubai.
Well, there was an opportunity to get fired or to move to Dubai.
So it was an obvious challenge, kind of, because I always wanted to leave a broad.
I was exploring.
I wanted to move to the US since I was like 16 or so.
I wanted to be a rock star.
And obviously, where do you go?
To be a rock star, you go to Los Angeles, right?
And I actually, I told my mom, I remember, I told my mom that I would do the dishes in restaurants just to move to the US and play the guitar in the evenings or whatever.
Luckily, that never happened.
So yeah, I spent a year in Dubai.
Then I did another rework.
I was moved to Singapore.
So just one year in Dubai and then off to Singapore now?
Just one year in Dubai, yeah.
Then I spent a year and a half in Singapore.
And are you already married?
Do you already have kids at this point?
I was married, but no kids.
And actually, that was a good thing that we were married before moving to Dubai because we had to do a bunch of paperwork to prove that she's my wife.
And we had to go to like UAE embassy to legalize that.
Because they're very particular about people living together.
I don't think actually it's legal if you're not married.
So some of my friends had to marry like ASAP, to immigrate, which it didn't have a good optics, you know?
So yeah, then Singapore, one and a half years, also with DHL.
Then we kind of got tired of the weather.
And my wife really wanted to live in Europe.
So we moved to Germany to bond.
So my wife was already pregnant back then.
One of the reasons why we wanted to move to Germany to Europe is because we just wanted to have a better, well, more suitable climate for us to have the first child.
I think some people would be wondering, wait, wait.
So you wanted better climate.
So you move from Singapore to Germany.
More suitable for you, I think, yeah.
The climate we used to, right?
So yeah, we moved to Germany soon after my son was born, my first son.
It was 2012. So I was like 28, 29.
We spent there almost two years.
Then I applied for my MBA, moved to the US.
That was Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
It was Philadelphia. Yeah, I went to work there.
Then I started the job with Amazon in Seattle.
So I was first in a student visa in the US.
And then I got converted into a work visa, H1B.
And then from that I got my green card.
And then from green card, I got my citizenship.
So overall, I've been the US for 10 years at this point.
Nice. Yeah, what's your journey?
So in India, I spent the first 17 years or so in the place that I was not exactly born in, but the same state, same province.
We moved around quite a bit.
My dad had a job that anyway.
But then after that, I went to study in southern part of India, then worked in a different city in India, Bangalore.
And then pretty quickly, within a few months, I moved to New York.
And I was working for Infosys, for Goldman Sachs.
Were you an H1 visa?
I was on an H1 visa, yes, the first time.
And then after about a year, I got tired of the bank and I was working stuff.
And I wanted to do something else, got a job in Amazon as an SDE1, and I moved to Seattle.
Still on H1.
And after a few years, I was like, I want to do something interprenurty.
I didn't know exactly what.
And that was not possible to do on an H1.
So me and my wife, we both wanted to do that.
And we were both on H1s.
So we moved back to India.
And we both worked at very small companies.
She worked in like a four person company.
I worked in like a eight person company or so.
In spoiler, we will have people from those companies on our next episode, right?
Yeah. Although I worked with them only for a few months, I primarily was contracting for a startup in DC, while also helping out small projects and all that there.
So we already had like our daughter, she was six months old, when we moved from Seattle to India.
And that was great.
Like she got to spend a few years with her grandparents, like pretty much all the time, right?
Like somebody would be over all the time, either my parents or my wife's parents or something like that.
But then we kind of started to feel like, again, like you said, it was more, we were more suited.
And we liked the lifestyle in North America a bit more.
So we decided to move back.
And till this point, I had not considered all the green card and all of the, we had never applied for all of this light.
We had never thought about permanent residency and citizenship in a different country and all that.
But this time when we moved back, this isn't 2014.
I'm about 33 year old at that time, I think, 1981.
So yeah.
So that's when we started, right?
And that's when we started realizing that for Indians in the US, it's basically like a never ending line.
So we got into the green card queue in 2015, January.
But very soon it was a parent like, okay, this is not going to work out.
Me and my wife both are on H1Bs.
We have renewal, stamping every two, three years.
And then the political situation in US changed and the policies for like H1s and all that change.
It was much more harder.
And at that time you were my manager, I think that's when I told you, okay, I want to move to Canada, make it a bit easier for ourselves because we were serious about immigrating to a different country at that time.
And it was very uncommon, I think, in big companies or maybe in any company where like you have a manager and you're an individual contributor, but you work from a different country.
But you and our like people in our leadership chain made it happen.
So I moved to Canada.
And then it was very smooth, I want to say.
It's like we within a year and a couple of months we got our permanent residency and we qualify for citizenship now.
So we just started the process.
So hopefully we're in about a year.
It'll all be done.
We'll see.
So I almost feel bad telling people of India and all Chinese origin that I got my US citizenship or even green card because I know a few guys it takes 10 years, 15 years to get a green card.
How does it work?
Why is it so bad?
You don't know.
I mean, I still have friends who have been in the queue for more than 10 years at this.
I mean ours was applied in 2015 and I mean, it's still valid.
Do you know that our application for green card is still in the queue?
So you can still get a green card at some point?
If you're dead, the priority date, if the line catches up to that date, then you will get some sort of notification apparently or Amazon will get it because they applied.
But we won't do anything with it now.
But yeah, it's that long because US has a country-wide quota for number of immigrants.
They will get in on the permanent residency track every year.
From each country?
Is it like per country quota?
It's not citizenship.
It's based on your country of birth.
So you may be a British citizen, but if you're born in India, you're in the queue with everybody else who was born in India.
And because there's a much larger population and a larger volume, especially in tech of people coming on like H1Bs from India and China, those queues are extremely long.
I don't know the latest because I'm not following it honestly for the last few years, but when we move and there are different categories, right?
The most common two categories, I think for Chinese, it was about 10 years or so.
And Indians was probably about 20 years or so.
I don't know what's happening now.
This is pretty incredible because I didn't have to go through any of that.
Things took time, but the same time as, let's say, anybody from Germany or Britain who were not born in India.
So it was fairly quick by, I guess, your standards, but still it took a long time.
And one of the things I want to talk about today is just how being in a dependent situation affects your psyche and restaking appetite.
Because when I was in H1, actually let me start when I was on work with us, when I wasn't to buy, the reason why I got moved to Singapore is because the company was doing layoffs.
And it was closing the office there.
And it was my very first opportunity to live abroad.
And I was like clinging on to it.
I didn't want to go back.
Because one of the things I realized when I first became an expat moved from Russia is, Russia has a pretty aggressive culture at work.
There is a lot of pacifaggression.
There is a lot of active aggression.
I mean, things might be different now, but there's quite a bit of toxicity in the office space.
The Western companies who work in Russia, they are better because they had a lot of management.
They were used to have a lot of management coming to work from Britain and other places.
But local companies, they were no good.
I never liked that culture.
I never felt like I fit there.
In Dubai, my colleagues were mostly, like my manager was from Wales.
My colleagues were mostly from Great Britain, a bunch of people from India, a bunch of people from Belgium.
Because they actually used to be headquartered in Brussels, but the global headquarter.
So lots of people moved there as well.
And that culture was so nice and polite.
And things were getting down without having to backstab each other.
So I almost felt like this is my kind of culture because I've always been like that.
But in Russia, it never set well with me working in Russia.
And then basically, when they announced layoffs, by the way, it was almost a poster child for how to not do layoffs.
So what happened there?
So it was 2009. So they moved an office from Moscow to Dubai at the onset of the financial crisis when it started to pick up his team.
And then they realized they made a mistake, and they actually don't want to pay for an office in Dubai.
So they moved everybody around March, April.
Some people came in May.
And where did all these people move from?
They shut down an office in Brussels.
And they shut down an office in Moscow.
And I think there were also people from other places who wanted to work.
OK, but these people didn't come from Singapore to Dubai and then move back again to Moscow.
No, no, no. They came from other places.
There were people who approved their lives in places like Belgium and places like Moscow.
There were a few people from Bahrain, as far as I remember, because they wanted to consolidate all of those kind of smaller regional offices into one place in Dubai.
So they decided to shut it down.
And somebody flies in, actually somebody from Singapore flies in and said that now this region, this EMEA region, which included North Africa, sorry, all of Africa, Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe, we are going to combine you with the Asia-Pacific region.
And we are going to reduce this office by 50%.
And then he flies back to Singapore.
And then for about a month, you can imagine, no work gets done because everybody just freaked out.
Morales gone.
Because people just moved there.
And everybody is in a work visa.
And everybody sold their places, sold their stuff, bought cars.
And also in Dubai, you can meet to rent for one year and you actually pay upfront for a year.
The company paid for us, but then the company deducts from your paycheck or something.
I don't remember how exactly it worked.
But it was not clear how that's always going to work.
I just bought the car, we just got the contract for a place.
And I'm happy.
And this guy comes and tells it's all going to go away at some point.
And you don't know if you're going to be fired or not.
And then if you weeks later, they come back.
And this is what happens.
So imagine in an open office.
In an open office where everybody can see everybody, our operations group was just half a floor.
So you can see pretty much everybody who works with you.
And managers, let's say my manager, what come out of somewhere, he would come to one of my colleagues, his director's report and say, hey, we need to talk.
And then this person is walked to another room where the SVP of ops at the time tells this person that they are being laid off.
These are the conditions, sign these papers, right?
And then the person is walked back to his desk, or her desk, and the security is there.
And then they are told to just grab their clothing, their backpack, whatever, leave everything else on the desk, without even being able to say goodbye.
And they are walked out of the building.
And you can imagine about half of the people are getting fired.
And everybody sits there and watches this happen one by one.
So compared to layoffs that happened, let's say at Google this year, or at other places.
Which was also a shit show, but different kind of shit show.
It was a different kind of shit show.
At least you got an email and you know you're gone, right?
Well, not everybody apparently.
But yeah.
Yeah, but that felt like torture.
Because you just see this happen one by one, and it's not nice.
This is like movie shows.
I think it was in the office or office space.
One of those movies, there was a thing like that.
Where two management consultants come in, interview everybody to figure out like, who's a good fit, who's not a good fit, in front of everybody, was very stressful, like, and imagine.
Yeah, there's my specific immigration, right?
Is, so I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, okay, I might just be laid off.
And my visa will basically expire because it depends on my employer.
Like, what am I gonna do?
I've just changed my life a few months ago.
What am I gonna do?
And that has always been at the back of my mind for 10 years I was on work visas.
So it's like, I wanna try something new and like, you can't because your immigration status doesn't allow you to do that.
Or like something that shit starts to happen in the economy or in the company, or even like in your job and you like, fuck it, I don't wanna work here anymore.
But then you're like, what are you gonna go?
So, and then you just like, swallow this and just persevere through stuff that you normally wouldn't go through, right?
Yeah, so that's my kind of story.
We have talked about your moves from the White House Singapore, but never at this detail.
This resonates with me a lot.
Like, I continuously am amazed how similar our life paths have been.
Because I'll tell you what happened in that financial crisis with me.
Although it wasn't like this, I got a really lucky break out of that.
So like I said, I was working for Goldman Sachs in New York.
This is around like 2006.
And after a year, I had the age like I wanna do something else, right?
I'm not enjoying this anymore.
I had very little development work.
I had more like support and that sort of on call sort of stuff going on, right?
So I started looking for jobs preparing.
I don't have a computer science degree.
So all the software engineering that I did was like I learned on my own and stuff, right?
So I started preparing for stuff and started interviewing.
I got three offers.
I did about six interviews and I got three offers.
So lemon brothers, then the Anderson baby.
I don't tell you, yeah.
Lemon brothers, Morgan Stanley and Amazon.
Okay. And for whatever reason, this is 2007 October-ish.
The conventional wisdom would tell you to go to one of the banks.
Yeah, because my experience kind of like applies there.
And I had a really good like position and all that and more money there too, I think.
Amazon was an HDE one.
But my thing about like I wanna work in a different space, not in banking, really helped me out because I decided to join Amazon.
So I joined in January 2007 because it takes like four or five months for all the visa paperwork to be done, right?
When you change companies in the US.
So I joined in January.
After two weeks, all of lemon brothers, or maybe not two weeks, two months, whatever, all of lemon brothers was gone like the whole company.
The whole division that I was going to join.
It's like your or maybe like 200 people under the VP or that sort of leadership was down size to 12 people.
And I had a friend there who survived in those 12 people, right?
So he told me like you got such a lucky break that you didn't go come to Morgan Stanley or you didn't go to lemon brothers.
And instead Amazon was booming at that time, right?
Like I joined, it was very early on.
I think we maybe had like 200 or so engineers only at that time.
In the whole company?
In the whole company, yeah.
Like Amazon.
Wow. I was in the original, the Pacific medicine, the hospital building.
You know where Amazon starts?
It's the building that's like on the hill that you can see from I-5.
It's on Beacon Hill. Yeah, it's like orange is beautiful looking.
It's a hospital and Amazon shared some space with them.
That's the building I started in.
And I love the culture and I grew so much when Amazon learned so much.
But yeah, it all was thanks to a lucky break during the financial crisis.
This is why it resonates with me because our life facts kind of completely changed because of this event that we had no foresight into.
We didn't know that this was going to happen.
When you moved to Dubai, you didn't know that this was going to happen.
And when I moved to Amazon, I had no clue that the whole world is changing.
Right.
And sometimes you just have to relax in the changes and just let them happen.
Anyway, yeah.
But I think ultimately what you said, the limitations of the visa, like I always had this entrepreneurial thing.
Like I didn't know what I wanted to do but I knew that I wanted to do something of my own.
I think it's a good plug for our episode 24, part one and part two where we talk in detail about our entrepreneurial journey.
Yes. But it was impossible, especially you have to get to like permanent residency in a country to be able to work on your own in most countries.
It's like illegal actually in most countries to do something on the side when you are on an employment-based visa.
Right. And so I didn't see a path there.
Like we discussed, my path to Green Card in the US might have taken 20 years or so, we don't know.
I think I moved to Canada, that was good.
I kind of always knew that I want to do something on my own.
But once we got the PR and we talked about it in episode 24, part one and part two, I got promoted to my level of incompetence in Amazon.
Once those two things happened, I figured, okay, I really want to build something of my own and do hands-on and all.
So yeah.
I actually am remembering when I got my Green Card.
And I'm like, okay, now I'm a free person.
I can do whatever I want, work-wise, in this country.
But then it was like, I think 10 years of being on the work visa and the student visa, they fostered that mentality of like coming to peace with like, oh, I can't do anything.
So it's almost like a victim mentality, right?
Where you can't, therefore you don't.
And therefore, that's the way things are.
Right.
You mentioned very early on that it changes your risk appetite.
I want to say it actually removes, there is no risk appetite.
Yeah, you start to optimize for not taking risk because otherwise, your entire life might change.
It's not just work anymore.
It's like your family will get sent back home.
Oh, I mean, your home country, like kids are in school.
All of that, it's, well, worst case, you also have a mortgage.
It's not fun.
Actually, one part of the story in Dubai that I don't tell as often, I bought a car.
I had a dream car in mind.
I really wanted to Mustang.
It was the orange Ford Mustang GT 2008.
I think it was 2007.
My favorite kind of model year, I loved it.
I bought it a couple of weeks after I moved to Dubai.
I really wanted that car.
I hunted for that car.
And then this whole thing comes, it's financial crisis.
I can't sell the car.
Nobody wants to buy it.
And people who come, they kind of sketchy and they try to buy it for half the price.
And then I need to move to Singapore.
And I don't know what to do with this car.
I have to pay back because I have a loan in the bank.
So what I had to do is I actually borrowed cash from my boss to pay back the bank.
So I'm no longer in debted.
And then I found somebody who bought the car for 60% of the money I paid for it just a few months ago.
And the money was just enough to pay my boss.
I lost all of my money that I had to put into this.
And that was a big lesson in terms of.
If you overextend yourself financially, it might come back to you back in unexpected ways.
We talked a little bit about the financial independence path in episode 24, part one, part two also.
But generally speaking, I feel like you are still even with these experiences, you take more financial risks than I do.
Like I'm almost a conservative when it comes to financial risks.
And I'm amazed.
I'm impressed by how much risk you are able to take in.
But like you said, I think you have to take these kind of risks if you want to do something big once in a while.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think a car is not worth the free areas for sure.
Even actually right now, the car I drove right now, if I was buying a car now when I'm already an entrepreneur, I would have bought a cheaper car.
But because I was buying this car when I was still employed by Google, I'm like, OK, so let's just go for a fancy one.
Anyway, we talk a lot about that in episode 24, which I think is one of our best episodes in terms of insights of how to become an entrepreneur.
Will end this thing on a positive note, though.
I would say being an immigrant in a country is hard.
You and I, well, I don't want to speak for you.
But my path has been well-trodden.
There's a lot of people in tech who have moved from India to US and to Canada.
So there was a lot of like experience to lean on internet forums and all that to get advice from.
Having said that, I think there's a lot of people who move and being immigrant in a new country is not easy.
US and Canada, if you're already English-speaking, it's some, you have already solved a huge part of the challenge.
But there's all these other banking and everything, all the little details.
But I think living in a different country or multiple countries changes your perspective on life itself.
And that's the thing that I'm most grateful for is meeting people from different places and seeing their perspectives.
And yeah.
I actually recently did a post on Instagram where it took screenshots from the map.
So when I was a kid, we would drive to this lake by a cow, which was about 70 kilometers away, about 45 miles.
It felt like a trip when I was a kid, right?
And then there was another thing with different places in the lake, which was about four hours drive 250 kilometers.
And that was a whole adventure to go there.
And now, this last weekend, we drove 500 kilometers north of Florida and it just felt like we can get away.
And then I kind of zoomed out on the map and it just shows by US standards, this 500 kilometers is just nothing.
Oh, I saw that post, yeah.
You compared that how long it takes to drive from, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But then it's also a perception of this, right?
And the point I wanted to illustrate is when you zoom out, you really start to see things differently.
When you move countries, you really start to zoom out.
You really start to see that things are not the same ways are in your culture.
And like we were talking about the idiomatic language kind of thing, right?
You really start to see things differently, even learning different languages, it changes you.
It changes you for the better, I think, for most part.
It breaks some people, though.
Some people just come here and like, no, nope.
And they go back.
And some people stay here and they adjust, and they assimilate, and then you become a whole different person in a way.
Even for people who don't like it, and they're like, oh, I don't want to be here, I do think they may not realize it, but it does change the way they think.
Well, by actually going somewhere and discovering they don't like it, they are becoming more aware of what they like and what they, and otherwise, it would always be a regret, right?
Like, oh, I never moved there.
I have the opportunity.
I know many people in my parents' generation who are like, well, I have the opportunity to move to Australia or New Zealand.
We never did it, and we still talk about it.
Anyway, yeah, cool.
So let's move on.
We don't have much time.
We have a hard stop today.
What are you reading and listening to?
What do you recommend to people right now?
Oh, OK, so I actually want to recommend two podcasts.
So one of them is Mark and Dresden on the Hibirman Lab podcast.
It came out maybe in the last few weeks, maybe a month ago.
Sometimes in late August or early September, it's a great episode.
I always keep surprised at how fast Mark and Dresden talks, especially when he gets excited about stuff.
But he makes these really nice connections between history and science and all that.
I totally enjoyed that episode.
What he talks about AI.
And I mean, I won't spoil it.
It's just a great, great, great episode.
I think I listened to about 30% of it, and then I switched to something else.
It's still in my continued listening list.
So I'm going to go back to it.
But it is a very dense and long one, too.
You know what I have to have continued listening?
In our app, of course, the continued listening section in our app.
Oh, yeah.
That's such a great feature.
So the other episode I'll say really quickly.
I went to the Avengers 7 Fold show, a couple of FIXCO.
It's one of my most favorite bands.
An amazing heavy metal band.
Like, people are actually mine, your age.
So it's kind of unusual, I guess.
I think you and our James, you were the two people who introduced me to Avengers 7 Fold.
I love them, too, yeah.
Probably actually, these are the guys who listened to Metallica when they were growing up, because they were our age.
So therefore, actually, they're styled very much with them, as Metallica, but with a lot more color for the day, broad.
So as I was driving to the show, I listened to an interview with their vocalist, Machadios, on the podcast called Talk Is Jericho.
And the main point I want to make here is how awesome is that to be able to find an interview with the band member that you're going to see in an hour, and you just listen to this guy talk and get more context.
You know, it's like when you go to a museum and you enjoy art, you're really only able to enjoy it if you really know the history, the context that the artist was in.
It's the same as the story from music.
I guess music is easier to enjoy without context, but context gives these colors.
And what I learned is that this guy, Machadios, after they did the tour with Metallica in 2016, I think, he damaged his vocal cords.
So I learned a lot about vocal cords.
I learned that he couldn't sing for a few years, and how he was going through that, all the kind of psychological trauma, he couldn't sing happy birthday at like family events, even though he is the singer.
He's an amazing singer.
And then how he recovered all his surgeries and all that stuff, and the psychedelic journey that they took.
And that's why their last album is the way it is because they prioritized art over money.
And then I was able to enjoy the show in such a different color.
But what I have to say about this podcast, it had like 25 ads in it.
It was incredible.
And our app doesn't have a way to skip on CarPlay yet.
So it was painful for you.
It was very painful.
Yeah, anyway, but it's not everybody's podcast, not everybody's kind of episode, but the meta point I want to make is like, you go to a show, just search for the name of the people you're going to see, and you might be surprised at how much more enjoyment you get from the show afterwards.
Ask Chad GPD to tell you about them.
This is one of the great use cases of Chad GPD have found is whenever I enjoy a TV show or something, I ask it to like, there'll be more about this person.
It doesn't replace an actual interview when they actually hear the people talk.
No, no, but it gives you a gist, and then you ask, where can I read more about them?
And then it gives you all these podcasts and YouTube links and all that.
Cool. Okay, so my list, so I'll skip over the regulars.
Like I love HardForg, HardForg, Lex, and a few other podcasts had Walter Isaacson recently because he did the Elon Musk autobiography, or biography, sorry.
He's a little show.
He's, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And those episodes were great, by the way.
You should listen if you have not heard.
HardForg, I really enjoy the chemistry and the kind of banter and the comedy they have along with all the journalism.
So I really like that.
But today I'll focus on like, so last week was Climate Week.
Climate Week is an annual event big in New York, but also becoming big in places all over the world kind of makes sense.
And I'll talk about three things related to that.
First one was, is a book called Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Actually, one of your friends, I don't wanna attempt to say, let's do it, do it, do it, man.
Say the name.
Shooksa. Okay, Shooksa.
Shooksa.
Yeah. She'll have to listen to this episode now too.
But she's in Austria, right, Vienna.
She posted this on Instagram and I really liked it.
So I started that book.
I'm about 80% into the book now.
I love the book.
It's two things, right?
It's fiction, science fiction, about the climate and how geopolitics and everything else in the future is changing because of climate change, like water crisis and all that, immigration and all that, how it's changing, right?
It's fascinating, but that's all science fiction.
What it also does is it'll have a chapter focused on some characters and fiction and then have a few couple of pages of facts based on right now, that kind of correlate why he's writing that fiction and narrative based on what he's writing that on.
So it's like, what has happened up to now is fact and then he extrapolates this into the future which will it becomes fiction.
Yeah. It's a really cool way of like, I've never had a fictional book where every few chapters you will have a essay of like facts and the reality currently right now.
It is pretty long though and I do feel it's a bit idealistic in some ways, but you can read it for yourself and figure it out.
Like it also brings about a positive thing which is actually a common theme across all the three things.
But anyway, that was the first thing.
The second thing is I do enjoy nature and wildlife related stuff.
You know, we do a lot of like wildlife stuff anyway.
Is dogman wild life?
Dogman is wild life.
Wild, yes he is.
The wild.
Yeah. But I don't generally enjoy the new trend of nature and wildlife documentaries which are very sensational.
Like this polar bear dying on the piece of ice in the Arctic, therefore even is doomed kind of stuff.
But not just that the story, but the way it's presented itself, it's like you know those history channel kind of like, and then next up what will happen next.
I don't enjoy this.
So there's this new national geographic show called Animals Up Close, it's on Disney+.
By Bertie Gregory, a British like explorer and photographer and all that.
It's amazing, you have to watch this.
He goes to these remote places and captures these things that you will never see in your life basically, right?
He spends like six months trying to capture these things and the kind of storytelling he does along with it.
And it's not just about the animals, it's also showing how he and his team are doing this with drones and- Behind the scenes.
Sorry, metal.
It's really good and it's not presented in a sensationalist style.
It's a very, very easy listening style.
But one common thing where he keeps talking about is how this is not going to be possible to see like in a decade.
Wow, yeah.
The last thing I'll say is science Friday podcast.
They had September 22nd episode.
It's called Our Fragile Moment, Climate Comedy.
So they had a comedian in there in that episode.
They had a few jokes, stamped up comedy jokes about climate crisis.
And the whole gist is like the way we kind of use doomsday scenarios to talk about climate to try to affect change is not working.
So this comedian, what he's trying to say is, okay, we need to make it more relatable and humorous and his style brings it in.
Yeah, I really enjoyed that episode.
I should speak about humorous.
One thing I'll just say in the middle of finishing that.
One of the most memorable moments for me on that Marc Andreessen episode was the bicycle phase.
So in the 1800s, people were so afraid of the bicycle giving the women freedom to go to other villages and marry men from other villages.
So that the magazines in France of that era, 150 years ago, they invented a thing called bicycle phase, which is like when you pedal very hard on the bicycle, your face kind of becomes, it's almost like an agony, right?
Because it's hard to pedal a bicycle.
And they said, if you pedal the bicycle for too long, you'll get stuck in the bicycle phase.
So you will be ugly and nobody will ever marry you.
So that's how they try to discourage people from using the modern technology.
And Marc Andreessen makes this thing about how there will always be people who are against the modern developments.
And for some reason, I feel like it ties into climate change, but we are out of time.
We're out of time in this podcast, but we are not yet out of time for the world.
Anyway, cool.
All right, see you next week.
Bye bye.
See you.
See you. Bye bye.