Podcast appearances and mentions of Brian Hall

It's our first Criterion episode of 2025! Grant joins us to talk about The Long Good Friday, a classic 1980 British gangster film, starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.

Brian Hall was a featured pianist in a Valentine's Day performance at the SOU Music Hall.

In this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we revisit a spirited debated between Corey and the VP of Product and Industry Marketing at Google Cloud, Brian Hall.  The topic — How much time should one spend in a job? But thankfully, their conversation doesn't limit itself to just that! Corey and Brian chat about how social media's failure to capture nuance and context can lead to some unfortunate misinterpretations. Brian offers some insight on his significant amount of time spent at Microsoft under various roles. He gives his perspective on how one should optimize their career path for where they want to go, and not just follow the money. Tune in to see how Corey and Brian let the dust settle, and develop what was a disagreement into a well-rounded conversation.Show Highlights:(0:00) Intro(1:02) Chronosphere sponsor read(1:36) Job hopping vs. job loyalty(6:14) Being in the right place at the right time(9:57) Investing in the job vs. the job investing in you(13:31) Weighing the cost of job hopping(20:14) Chronosphere sponsor read(20:47) Changing jobs to get a raise(24:02) How to attract people as a cloud employer(26:31) Changing paths into the industry(30:14) What's ahead for Brian(32:33) Where you can find more from BrianAbout Brian HallBrian Hall leads the Google Cloud Product and Industry Marketing team - focused on accelerating the growth of Google Cloud. Before joining Google, he spent more than 25 years in different forms of product marketing or engineering.Brian is the father of three children who are all named after trees in different ways. He met his wife Edie at the beginning of their first year at Yale University, where he studied math, econ, and philosophy and was the captain of the Swim and Dive team my senior year. Edie has a PhD in forestry and runs a sustainability and forestry consulting firm she started, that is aptly named “Three Trees Consulting”. They love the outdoors, tennis, running, and adventures in Brian's 1986 Volkswagen Van, which is his first and only car, that he can't bring myself to get rid of.Links:Twitter: https://twitter.com/IsForAtLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brhall/Episode 10: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/episode-10-education-is-not-ready-for-teacherless/Original Episode:https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/letting-the-dust-settle-on-job-hopping-with-brian-hall/Sponsorhttps://chronosphere.io/?utm_source=duckbill-group&utm_medium=podcast

Pour tester les réactions et sensibiliser les individus à la sécurité, rien de tel qu'un exercice grandeur nature. Le 18 août dernier, l'Université de Californie à Santa Cruz (UCSC) a mis en pratique cet adage en lançant un test de phishing sur l'ensemble de sa communauté. Étudiants et membres du personnel ont ainsi reçu un e-mail alarmant : un cas d'Ebola aurait été détecté sur le campus. L'objectif ? Évaluer la vigilance des destinataires face à une potentielle menace en ligne. Mais l'exercice, bien que pertinent sur le fond, a rapidement dégénéré.L'e-mail, conçu pour imiter une communication officielle, annonçait la présence du virus Ebola sur le campus et incitait les destinataires à cliquer sur un lien pour obtenir plus d'informations. Un scénario classique de phishing, destiné à mesurer combien de personnes se laisseraient piéger. Cependant, l'approche a semé la panique au sein de l'université. La crainte d'une épidémie a pris le dessus, et la formulation du message, jugée inappropriée, a provoqué l'indignation.Alicia Riley, professeure adjointe de sociologie à l'UCSC et chercheuse en santé publique, a été l'une des voix les plus critiques. Elle a dénoncé le choix de l'université d'évoquer l'Afrique du Sud dans le contexte d'Ebola, estimant que cela renforçait des stéréotypes nuisibles. Riley, comme beaucoup, a d'abord cru à l'authenticité du message, créant une véritable onde de choc sur le campus. Face à la polémique, Brian Hall, responsable de la sécurité informatique de l'université, a présenté des excuses publiques, admettant que le test avait provoqué une panique inutile et sapé la confiance dans les communications de santé publique. L'incident soulève des questions sur l'équilibre entre sensibilisation et éthique, certains experts, comme Matt Linton de Google, plaidant pour des méthodes moins surprenantes et plus concrètes Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Brian Hall - Tattoo Artist - Worship Leader - Musician - and More! I recently marked getting a tattoo off my bucket list! After sitting in the chair for 5 or 6 hours - I realizd that Brian has a fascinating story! I really enjoyed getting him in the studio - we talked about tattooing, church, God, music, how many head of cattle do they own, Texas, AND life! Please consider supporting the podast by becoming a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/duringthebreakpodcast THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: Vascular Institute of Chattanooga: https://www.vascularinstituteofchattanooga.com/ The Barn Nursery: https://www.barnnursery.com/ Optimize U Chattanooga: https://optimizeunow.com/chattanooga/ Alchemy Medspa and Wellness Center: http://www.alchemychattanooga.com/ Chattanooga Concrete: www.chattanoogaconcreteco.com Roofingco.com: www.roofingco.com Please consider leaving us a review on Apple and giving us a share to your friends! This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Well, the boys are back together.  Yes Tid had other things to worry about last week, but this week he and Donnie are sitting in the captain's chairs ready to carry you through another installment of this goofy show!  And, back by popular demand is last week's replacement for Tid!  Our guest co-host Christmas Abbott is BACK again!  Christmas sits in for the entire episode, and she booked a guest!  Our guest is a celebrity mentor and spiritual coach.  His name is Brian Hall, and he's an energetic, and charismatic guy.  This is definitely an episode you should check out! This is a great episode and you should definitely check it out!  Send us your feedback by texting 437 375 2000.Please check out our sponsor Black BorkBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-godfathers-of-podcasting--4303576/support.

Sermon on the Mount E24 –  Many of us first learned the King James translation of the final, personal request in the Lord's Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” But does God actually lead us into temptation? In a motif that weaves throughout the Hebrew Bible, we see God allowing tests to strengthen his partnership with humans. When this motif picks up in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is the one experiencing testing. In this episode, Tim, Jon, and Michelle explore the theme of testing and temptation throughout the Bible and in the life of Jesus. From his own experience, Jesus teaches us to pray for protection from temptation and for rescue when it comes.View more resources on our website →Timestamps Chapter 1: (00:00-24:17)Chapter 2: (24:17-32:48)Chapter 3: (32:48-56:55)Referenced ResourcesCheck out Tim's library here.You can experience our entire library of resources in the BibleProject app, available for Android and iOS.Show Music Original Sermon on the Mount music by Richie KohenBibleProject theme song by TENTSShow CreditsJon Collins is the creative producer for today's show, and Tim Mackie is the lead scholar. Production of today's episode is by Lindsey Ponder, producer; Cooper Peltz, managing producer; Colin Wilson, producer; Stephanie Tam, consultant and editor. Frank Garza and Aaron Olsen edited today's episode. Aaron Olsen also provided our sound design and mix. Tyler Bailey was supervising engineer. Nina Simone does our show notes, and Hannah Woo provides the annotations for our app. Today's hosts are Jon Collins and Michelle Jones. Special thanks to Brian Hall and Liz Vice.Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Sermon on the Mount E23 – The second half of the Lord's prayer contains four requests on behalf of the person praying. The second personal request is for God to forgive us. But forgiveness is not just a transaction between individuals or between God and humans. Forgiveness plays a central role in the arrival of God's Kingdom. In this episode, Jon, Tim, and Michelle explore what forgiveness is, what it isn't, and what it looks like to set each other free. View more resources on our website →Timestamps Chapter 1: A Conversation on Release, Repair, and Delivery from Sin (00:00-28:19)Chapter 2: Forgiveness in the Life and Teachings of Jesus (28:19-36:54)Chapter 3: Is There a Limit on Forgiveness? (36:54-01:05:38)Referenced ResourcesNew International Dictionary of New Testament Theology in Exegesis, Moisés SilvaCheck out Tim's library here.You can experience our entire library of resources in the BibleProject app, available for Android and iOS.Show Music Original Sermon on the Mount music by Richie KohenBibleProject theme song by TENTSShow CreditsJon Collins is the creative producer for today's show, and Tim Mackie is the lead scholar. Production of today's episode is by Lindsey Ponder, producer; Cooper Peltz, managing producer; Colin Wilson, producer; Stephanie Tam, consultant and editor. Frank Garza and Aaron Olsen edited today's episode. Aaron Olsen also provided our sound design and mix. Tyler Bailey was supervising engineer. Nina Simone does our show notes, and Hannah Woo provides the annotations for our app. Today's hosts are Jon Collins and Michelle Jones. Special thanks to Brian Hall, Liz Vice, and the BibleProject Scholar Team.Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Sermon on the Mount E22 – The first half of the Lord's Prayer features three requests on behalf of God and his Kingdom: he is our Father in the skies, whose name we recognize as holy and whose way of life we want to see on the land. The second half of the Lord's prayer focuses on four personal requests, where we seek to align our needs with God's wisdom. In this episode, Jon and Tim discuss the first request of “daily bread” and its connections to stories and wisdom in the Hebrew Bible.  View more resources on our website →Timestamps Chapter 1: Recap up to This Point (0:00-10:47)Chapter 2: The Meaning of “Daily Bread” in Greek (10:47-16:55)Chapter 3: “Daily Bread” in Exodus or Abundance in Proverbs? (16:55-34:36)Chapter 4: Reorienting Toward Radical Trust and Dependence (34:36-43:52)Referenced ResourcesJesus: A Very Short Introduction by Richard BauckhamCheck out Tim's library here.You can experience our entire library of resources in the BibleProject app, available for Android and iOS.Show Music Original Sermon on the Mount music by Richie KohanBibleProject theme song by TENTS“Flows” by Abnuu“Lost Memories (feat. Bastien Brison)” by ØDYSSEE & Ruck PShow CreditsJon Collins is the creative producer for today's show, and Tim Mackie is the lead scholar. Production of today's episode is by Lindsey Ponder, producer; Cooper Peltz, managing producer; Colin Wilson, producer; Stephanie Tam, consultant and editor. Frank Garza and Aaron Olsen edited today's episode, and Tyler Bailey was supervising editor. JB Witty does our show notes, and Hannah Woo provides the annotations for our app. Today's hosts are Jon Collins and Michelle Jones. Special thanks to Brian Hall, Liz Vice, and the BibleProject Scholar Team.Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Sermon on the Mount E21 – Prayer is at the center of the center of the Sermon on the Mount. And it's in this section of teaching that Jesus gives us a simple prayer that we can participate in. It's only 12 lines long, but it contains a universe of ideas that center us with God. In this episode, Jon and Tim discuss the first half of the prayer: “Our Father who is in the skies, may your name be recognized as holy. May your Kingdom come and your will be done as it is in the skies so also on the land.”  View more resources on our website →Timestamps Chapter 1: Our Father (00:00-9:38)Chapter 2:  In the skies (9:38-16:20)Chapter 3: May your name be recognized as holy (16:20-26:15)Chapter 4: May your kingdom come, and may your will be done (26:15-36:01)Chapter 5: Checking in on the Lord's Prayer Song (36:01-40:33)Referenced ResourcesCheck out Tim's library here.You can experience our entire library of resources in the BibleProject app, available for Android and iOS.Show Music Original Sermon on the Mount music by Richie KohenBibleProject theme song by TENTS“Empty” by Oddfish“High Beams (feat. Dotlights)” by Kreatev & 88JAY“And That's Okay” by Ian Ewing“Stay” by YasperShow CreditsJon Collins is the creative producer for today's show, and Tim Mackie is the lead scholar. Production of today's episode is by Lindsey Ponder, producer; Cooper Peltz, managing producer; Colin Wilson, producer; Stephanie Tam, consultant and editor. Frank Garza and Aaron Olsen edited today's episode, Aaron Olsen mixed the episode, and Tyler Bailey was supervising editor. JB Witty does our show notes, and Hannah Woo provides the annotations for our app. Today's hosts are Jon Collins and Michelle Jones. Special thanks to Brian Hall, Liz Vice, and the BibleProject Scholar Team.Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Sermon on the Mount E20 – We are now halfway through studying Jesus' most famous sermon, which brings us to the Lord's Prayer. What's the significance of a prayer being right here at the center? And what's the purpose of regularly reciting a short prayer like this one? In this episode, Jon, Tim, and others kick off a five-part series on the Lord's Prayer, exploring its structure, core ideas, and historical background.  View more resources on our website →Timestamps Chapter 1: A Story of the Lord's Prayer in Jerusalem (00:00-6:23)Chapter 2: The Epicenter of the Sermon on the Mount (6:23-10:52)Chapter 3: Reading the Prayer (10:52-18:50)Chapter 4: The Structure of the Lord's Prayer (18:50-22:02)Chapter 5: The Core Ideas of the Lord's Prayer (22:02-25:30)Chapter 6: Interview About Liturgies With James K. A. Smith (25:30-36:49)Chapter 7: Historical and Cultural Background of the Lord's Prayer (36:49-50:17)Chapter 8: How the Lord's Prayer Shaped Jesus (50:17-52:04)Chapter 9: Writing a New Lord's Prayer Song (52:04-59:12)Referenced ResourcesYou Are What You Love by James K. A. SmithJewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History by Ismar ElbogenCheck out Tim's library here.You can experience our entire library of resources in the BibleProject app, available for Android and iOS.Show MusicOriginal Sermon on the Mount music by Richie KohenBibleProject theme song by TENTS“Open Wings” by Liron Meyuhas“From Srinager” by Guy ButteryShow CreditsStephanie Tam is the lead producer for today's show. Production of today's episode is by Lindsey Ponder, producer; Cooper Peltz, managing producer; and Colin Wilson, producer. Tyler Bailey is our audio engineer and editor, and he also provided our sound design and mix. JB Witty does our show notes, and Hannah Woo provides the annotations for our app. Special thanks to James K.A. Smith, Brian Hall, Liz Vice, and the BibleProject scholar team. Today's hosts are Jon Collins and Michelle Jones, and Tim Mackie is our lead scholar.Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

It's" high cotton" time when I talk to Past District Governor's Fellowship board of Directors member, and WASH action group leader Brian Hall. You know how I love action groups, and fellowship, why not combined the wonderful story about both of these action and fellowship groups with a man who helps leads both. Time to meet Brain Hall, today on the show 

Brian Hall, a dynamic force in spiritual coaching, is the esteemed founder and Lead Pastor of two non-profit organizations – Cincinnati Dream Center and Cincinnati Dream Works. His unwavering commitment to transforming lives extends beyond his pastoral duties, as he is also the president of his family's thriving development company spanning across three states.   With an impressive range of cross-functional expertise, Brian excels in Business Operations, Executive Leadership, Life Coaching, Pastoral Guidance, and Preaching/Teaching. His true passion, however, lies in witnessing the profound transformation of souls from within.   Over the years, Brian has earned a stellar reputation as a spiritual coach, guiding over 1,000 of the world's most renowned influencers, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and CEOs. His unique blend of wisdom, compassion, and insight has made him a sought-after mentor, leading him to travel the globe for the past seven years, providing spiritual guidance to his clients and their families.   At the heart of Brian's life is his cherished family. He has been blissfully married to Traci for 16 years, and together they have been blessed with four beautiful children. Brian's dedication to both his personal and professional life is a testament to his unwavering faith and commitment to making a lasting impact on the lives of those around him.  

Hour 3--J&J Show Tuesday 2/20/24-- Jason Smith discussed new co-branded NIKE/1 Cent Memphis Tigers gear + UFC Winner Danny Barlow's trainer Brian Hall from Law School MMA in Memphis

Brian Hall, MMA Fight Coach/Barlow's coach/Law School MMA, w/Jason Smith on Danny Barlow UFC 298 Victory

In the intro, Jeff talks about his night at Hadley's for the Fevertree show with Stretch; we announce our new band sponsor, Fevertree, and give a special shoutout to Tim Dills. Our featured guests are Brad Riales and Brian Hall from 5 For the Kill. We learn all about their beginnings and writing music for a few years before performing publicly, their quick rise into the local club scene, and how their good friend Steve Owens gives them the push.     5 For the Kill https://www.facebook.com/StoicSoundOfficial   YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@5ForTheKill

In this riveting episode, join us as we delve into the inspiring journey of Brian Hall, the dynamic CEO and founder of Rehab1. At the young age of 28, Brian embarked on a mission to revolutionize the rehabilitation industry, founding Rehab1 and paving the way for a new era of wellness. Discover the entrepreneurial prowess that led Brian to not only establish Rehab1 but also implement the highly effective Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) business model. Uncover the strategic insights and leadership principles that propelled Rehab1's growth from a single entity to a thriving franchise model. As we navigate through Brian's experiences and lessons learned, gain valuable perspectives on leadership, business strategy, and the power of a resilient vision. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned business professional, this episode is packed with wisdom and inspiration from a trailblazer who turned a vision into a transformative reality. Join us on this journey of innovation, growth, and the entrepreneurial spirit with Brian Hall and the incredible story of Rehab1. MAGID MIND!! You get 1 month for free, when you're subscribing for 3 months at: https://www.magicmind.com/JANwillpower AND with my code: WILLPOWER20 It's an extra 20% off, which gets you to a 75% off. This only lasts until the end of January, so hurry up before it goes away.

This is a selection of 10 of the most downloaded episodes of 2023. In this episode, we hear from: Major Incident Management with Keir Rutherford and Alec Wilding. The future state of Pre-Hospital Care with Jason Killens. Safe Sedation of Acute Behavioural Disturbance with Tim Edwards. Addiction part 3 with Dr Brian Hall. Paramedic Burnout with Liz Thyer These conversations were the last 5 of the ten most downloaded episodes of 2023. Needless to say, I learnt a lot from every guest on the podcast and feel privileged to have interviewed some great clinicians, guests and professionals on the podcast. Please feel free to reach out to me with feedback on the podcast and also feel free to rate, review and subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. My thanks again for a great year and all the engagement along the way. If you have any feedback, suggestions and/or comments, please feel free to reach out to be at eoinwalker@hotmail.com Happy 2024! Eoin 6ntc23zu

In this illuminating episode, join us for a profound exploration into the realms of faith and business with our esteemed guest, Pastor Brian Hall. As a seasoned spiritual leader working closely with business owners across the nation, Pastor Hall delves deep into profound Christian topics that extend far beyond the conventional. Together, we embark on a soulful journey, unraveling the mysteries of Judgment Day and pondering the profound implications of free will in our lives. Pastor Hall shares his unique insights, bridging the gap between spirituality and the entrepreneurial landscape, offering a perspective that goes beyond the ordinary. Discover the divine intersections of faith and business as we navigate through thought-provoking conversations, seeking to understand the purpose of free will and its role in shaping our individual destinies. Join us in this episode as we explore the spiritual dimensions that guide business souls and unveil the intricate threads that connect us to a higher purpose. Get ready for a contemplative and enlightening conversation that transcends boundaries and invites you to ponder the profound mysteries of existence. MAGIC MIND: https://www.magicmind.com/willpower USE CODE: WILLPOWER20, for 20% one time purchases and 50% off when applied to subscriptions!

Brian Hall, Chief Marketing Officer of Explore St. Louis gives Debbie Monterrey a tour of the expansion at America's Center. 

In this episode, Isabel discusses the whys and hows of navigating pet-friendly rental homes with El Paso-based top-producing realtor, Brian Hall. It's not always easy but there are ways to find the perfect pet-friendly rental home. Brian Hall, who specializes in military moves, helps pet parents ace their next rental application and interview by highlighting the importance of a pet resume, why size matters when it comes to pets, and what breeds he has seen present challenges in the rental process. Watch this show today, and when looking for a new rental home. You and your pet will love the tips as they are sure to steer you into the right rental. EPISODE NOTES: Paws and Property: Navigating Pet-Friendly Rentals

Brian Hall is the Facilities and Maintenance Director of Sylvania Recreation District in Sylvania, Ohio. In a single year his department will prepare the fields and grounds to host over 350,000 people for soccer, baseball, softball and so on. Brian joins us to talk about how he plans, budgets and tracks everything in order to be successful year after year.

Rundown on Thursday Night Football- Detroit, Chiefs and more NFL + UFC'S DANNY BARLOW in-studio

Danny Barlow and Brian Hall UFC in-studio with J&J

Danny Barlow and Brian Hall UFC in-studio with J&J

Academic Dr Brian Hall talks about his research into the development of communications in the American Expeditionary Force during the Great War. Brian is the Programme Leader, BA (Hons) Contemporary Military & International History, University of Salford.

Jeff Stanfield & Andy Shaver are joined by former Stanfield Hunting Outfitters waterfowl guide, Brian Hall. Since his time of guiding goose hunts in West Texas, Brian and his wife have taken a more natural regarding their family's food, and the couple now grow and sell their own micro greens at Farmers Markets in the metroplex area.

Description:Brian Hall, a realtor with EXP Realty in El Paso, Texas, has a unique background as a military chaplain in the army, which has shaped his current career in real estate, specializing in assisting soldiers with their transitions. His perspective on the topic of "from army chaplain to realtor, assisting soldier transitions" is deeply rooted in his belief in the importance of soldiers' freedom to practice their own spiritual beliefs within the boundaries set by the Army. He also discusses his own transition from being an army chaplain to a realtor, explaining that he felt he couldn't give the reserves what it needed at that point and wanted to honor his job. His skills as a chaplain, such as listening, have been beneficial in his real estate career. Join Bill Risser and Brian Hall on this episode of The Real Estate Sessions podcast to learn more about his unique journey and perspective.Social links for Brian:Facebook PageInstagram Timestamped Outline(00:00:29) Real Estate Success Stories: From Army Chaplain to Realtor(00:01:34) Brian Hall's Diverse Texas Market Perspective(00:07:28) Providing Spiritual Support to Soldiers in War(00:14:34) Inclusive Spiritual Support for Soldiers of Different Faiths(00:17:31) Military Skills Enhance Real Estate Success(00:21:46) Smooth Housing Transitions for Service Members(00:35:26) The Power of Mentorship in Real EstateFollow the podcast:https://www.therealestatesessions.comhttps://www.facebook.com/billrisserhttps://www.youtube.com/billrisserhttps://www.instagram.com/billrisserhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/billrisser

Chestnut Mountain Church pastor Brian Hall.

Culture can make or break your law firm, and it is absolutely essential to nurture a positive, supportive environment to truly have a successful firm. Senior law firm leaders Holly Draper, Hannah Hembree Bell, Brian Hall, and John Meredith discuss their session from the annual meeting focused on ways to improve your law firm culture. They share experiences from their firms and emphasize the importance of developing vision and values, being flexible enough to recognize changing needs, and striving to live out and support your cultural vision at all levels of your organization.  Holly Draper is CEO and managing partner at The Draper Law Firm and host of the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast.  Hannah Bell is the founding attorney of Hembree Bell Law Firm, where she specializes in family law, divorce, and estate planning. Brian A. Hall is a member of Traverse Legal, PLC and the managing partner of its Austin, Texas office.   John Meredith is the Chief Operating Officer for Chamberlain Hrdlicka law firms with offices in Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia and San Antonio

Culture can make or break your law firm, and it is absolutely essential to nurture a positive, supportive environment to truly have a successful firm. Senior law firm leaders Holly Draper, Hannah Hembree Bell, Brian Hall, and John Meredith discuss their session from the annual meeting focused on ways to improve your law firm culture. They share experiences from their firms and emphasize the importance of developing vision and values, being flexible enough to recognize changing needs, and striving to live out and support your cultural vision at all levels of your organization.  Holly Draper is CEO and managing partner at The Draper Law Firm and host of the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast.  Hannah Bell is the founding attorney of Hembree Bell Law Firm, where she specializes in family law, divorce, and estate planning. Brian A. Hall is a member of Traverse Legal, PLC and the managing partner of its Austin, Texas office.   John Meredith is the Chief Operating Officer for Chamberlain Hrdlicka law firms with offices in Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia and San Antonio

Today we talk with Bruce Elliott, the CEO & Co-Founder, and  Brian Hall a Board member and the Director of the UK and International business for  Memory Lane Games. Also joining us is Kait Clavette,  a speech-language pathologist who is using Memory Lane Games with her clients dealing with cognitive-communication and swallowing disorders. I can't wait to learn more about Memory Lane Games! Contact     Memory Lane Games      LinkedIn      FaceBook     Instagram       Twitter      Tic Tok    Contact Lori La Bey Find FREE Educational Resources and a variety of services at www.AlzheimersSpeaks.com Alzheimer's Speaks Radio - Shifting dementia care from crisis to comfort around the world one episode at a time by raising all voices and delivering sound news, not just sound bites since 2011.   SR FeaturedSupport this Show: https://alzheimersspeaks.com/donate-now/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nacha, the institution that governs the ACH Network in the United States, recently hosted their annual payments conference in Las Vegas. Attended by banks and corporates from across the globe, the theme for this year's Nacha event was Smarter, Faster Payments. In this podcast episode, Bottomline's Michelle Pasquerillo and Brian Hall chat to us about conversations around the room and some key take aways from the event.

How do you design a great website for your freelance business? Today our guest is Brian Hall, a conversion optimization consultant. He's helped big brands like Udemy, L'Oreal, and Ghirardelli increase their website revenue and now helps small business owners and freelancers improve their website strategy. Join us as we discuss the single most important element of a successful freelance website and recommended platforms to choose from. We'll also share some effective alternatives to help you keep it simple and still reach your target audience!   Podcast Outline: [0:00] Introduction to Brian Hall and the topic of setting up a great website for your freelance business or your clients - Brian explains how he started freelancing/consulting and where he's at today.  [4:32] How Brian's transition to freelancing finally worked - Brian shares three important things that contributed to his success. [6:39] Craig describes his experience starting a business while implementing similar strategies - the importance of joining a mastermind group and lowering your cost of living to give yourself a longer runway. [8:28] Should freelancers have a website today - Brian shares his thoughts about whether or not you need one and how it can help you. [10:25] How your choice to have a website depends on what focus you want to have - Craig explains how creating a branded website doesn't have to be complex these days. [11:12] The most important elements of a successful freelancer website - Brian describes the one important element that's worth 80-90% of your attention.   Three Basic Types of Offers (Calls to Action) for You to Choose and Optimize [12:18] #1 A scheduling embed or calendar link - so people can book time to talk to you so you can sell them your services. [12:30] #2 A “contact me” form - so people can send you a message. [12:46] #3 A lead magnet or newsletter - so people can read or download something of yours. [13:24] How a website differs from a resume - Craig explains how a website needs to focus on an offer and the headline. Brian describes how the headline wraps up with the offer to attract your audience.  [15:35] Personal branding - Brian explains whether an “About Page” is necessary and important. Craig shares an example of how some people include anecdotes on their LinkedIn profile to showcase their personality. [18:49] One of the best reasons to have a website - Brian explains how it gives you the opportunity to be yourself, express yourself, and share things about yourself. [19:39] The need for a balance between being fun and offering value - how you need to decide how to serve your audience best on social media. [21:05] How it's good to experiment with social media platforms and trends - the importance of noting the outcome and putting your effort into the offer on your website.  [23:00] The recommended website platforms for freelancers to consider - Brian suggests questions to ask yourself to help determine what type of platform you need. [23:28] Platforms for a one-page website - Brian lists the elements you need and a common platform that would work. [24:23] Platforms to help you focus on lead magnets and an email list - Brian suggests tools that support marketing automation and lead magnet download by letting you create a landing page. [25:00] The importance of considering different options and starting with the thing that's closest to your offer - Brian explains how there's no single recommendation for a multi-page website platform. [26:20] The value of WordPress - Craig explains how getting to know WordPress better gives you the option of offering WordPress services to clients. [27:11] The importance of following your joy - Brian shares his insights on WordPress and the additional elements you need to think about. He also proposes another way to choose a platform. [28:42] The importance of keeping it simple - how you can start with a simpler platform and then transition to a more complex website later on. Craig and Brian discuss how building a website helps but can also become a distraction from building your business and networking.  [30:42] How the energy you spend thinking about your offer is not wasted if you later redesign your website or migrate to a different platform  [32:27] How “ugly converts” don't matter - Brian and Craig advise against worrying that your website design will cost you business. [33:51] When does design matter - Brian explains how the design can get in the way of people finding your offer on the website. [34:20] How to access Brian's recommended resources and offers [36:05] How to level up your skills and access free resources at Freelance University   Resources and tools discussed in this episode: Freelance University The Freelance Podclass  The Building Your Authority Class The Marketing with Content Class with Julia McCoy The Winning Lead Magnet Class  The Winning Discovery Call course    Learn more about Brian Hall: Links to Brian's recommended resources  Freelance Website Blueprint course    Resources and Tools: Upwork  Zoom  LinkedIn   Instagram  Instagram Reels  Carrd.co  Mailchimp  ConvertKit  Calendly  Wix  Weebly  Squarespace  WordPress DigitalMarketer.com

Will Brinson of CBS Sports weighs in with Adam Gold on the Carolina Panthers trading with the Chicago Bears for the No. 1 overall pick in the 2023 NFL Draft. Did the Panthers give up too much? Let us know in the comments.  Also, UNC-Asheville play-by-play voice Brian Hall discussed the men's basketball team making the NCAA Tournament. 

Brian Hall has been at Leeboy a long time. As long as I can remember. He has always been there whenever I have seen the brand represented and knows as much about the machines he sold over the years, as he does this Industry. He is the Territory Sales Manager at Leeboy and also an article writer for APE Magazine, where he regularly drops a wealth of knowledge on the readers. In this episode he tells some great stories and gives us a history of his run, as well as drops some hints about what we can expect at ConExpo / ConAg coming up this month. -Marvin

Episode 118 of The Adventure Podcast features climber, mountaineer and author, Brian Hall. Brian has been a key figure on the big mountain scene, and has carried out expeditions to some of the bigger and bolder mountains of the world including Mount Everest (in winter), K2, Jannu, Nuptse, Makalu, Baltoro Kangri, Shivling, Ogre II and peaks throughout the Andes. He's a mountaineers mountaineer, and has had a sensational career, often shying away from the fame and glory that often comes with climbing at that level.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/the-adventure-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you ever told yourself to bet on yourself? BET ON ME. It's pretty neat concept that Dr. Hall shares in this episode. Tune in to hear an inspirational story and a big WHY for being a health & wellness advocate in the field of chiropractic. Find True North on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TrueNorthChiropractic?mibextid=LQQJ4d

About BrianBrian leads the Google Cloud Product and Industry Marketing team. This team is focused on accelerating the growth of Google Cloud by establishing thought leadership, increasing demand and usage, enabling their sales teams and partners to tell their product stories with excellence, and helping their customers be the best advocates for them.Before joining Google, Brian spent over 25 years in product marketing or engineering in different forms. He started his career at Microsoft and had a very non-traditional path for 20 years. Brian worked in every product division except for cloud. He did marketing, product management, and engineering roles. And, early on, he was the first speech writer for Steve Ballmer and worked on Bill Gates' speeches too. His last role was building up the Microsoft Surface business from scratch as VP of the hardware businesses. After Microsoft, Brian spent a year as CEO at a hardware startup called Doppler Labs, where they made a run at transforming hearing, and then spent two years as VP at Amazon Web Services leading product marketing, developer advocacy, and a bunch more marketing teams.Brian has three kids still at home, Barty, Noli, and Alder, who are all named after trees in different ways. His wife Edie and him met right at the beginning of their first year at Yale University, where Brian studied math, econ, and philosophy and was the captain of the Swim and Dive team his senior year. Edie has a PhD in forestry and runs a sustainability and forestry consulting firm she started, that is aptly named “Three Trees Consulting”. As a family they love the outdoors, tennis, running, and adventures in Brian's 1986 Volkswagen Van, which is his first and only car, that he can't bring himself to get rid of.Links Referenced: Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com @isforat: https://twitter.com/IsForAt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brhall/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is brought to us by our friends at Pinecone. They believe that all anyone really wants is to be understood, and that includes your users. AI models combined with the Pinecone vector database let your applications understand and act on what your users want… without making them spell it out. Make your search application find results by meaning instead of just keywords, your personalization system make picks based on relevance instead of just tags, and your security applications match threats by resemblance instead of just regular expressions. Pinecone provides the cloud infrastructure that makes this easy, fast, and scalable. Thanks to my friends at Pinecone for sponsoring this episode. Visit Pinecone.io to understand more.Corey: This episode is brought to you in part by our friends at Veeam. Do you care about backups? Of course you don't. Nobody cares about backups. Stop lying to yourselves! You care about restores, usually right after you didn't care enough about backups. If you're tired of the vulnerabilities, costs, and slow recoveries when using snapshots to restore your data, assuming you even have them at all living in AWS-land, there is an alternative for you. Check out Veeam, that's V-E-E-A-M for secure, zero-fuss AWS backup that won't leave you high and dry when it's time to restore. Stop taking chances with your data. Talk to Veeam. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This episode is brought to us by our friends at Google Cloud and, as a part of that, they have given me someone to, basically, harass for the next half hour. Brian Hall is the VP of Product Marketing over at Google Cloud. Brian, welcome back.Brian: Hello, Corey. It's good to be here, and technically, we've given you time to harass me by speaking with me because you never don't have the time to harass me on Twitter and other places, and you're very good at it.Corey: Well, thank you. Again, we first met back when you were doing, effectively, the same role over at AWS. And before that, you spent only 20 years or so at Microsoft. So, you've now worked at all three of the large hyperscale cloud providers. You probably have some interesting perspectives on how the industry has evolved over that time. So, at the time of this recording, it is after Google Next and before re:Invent. There was also a Microsoft event there that I didn't pay much attention to. Where are we as a culture, as an industry, when it comes to cloud?Brian: Well, I'll start with it is amazing how early days it still is. I don't want to be put on my former Amazon cap too much, and I think it'd be pushing it a little bit to say it's complete and total day one with the cloud. But there's no question that there is a ton of evolution still to come. I mean, if you look at it, you can kind of break it into three eras so far. And roll with me here, and happy to take any dissent from you.But there was kind of a first era that was very much led by Amazon. We can call it the VM era or the component era, but being able to get compute on-demand, get nearly unlimited or actually unlimited storage with S3 was just remarkable. And it happened pretty quickly that startups, new tech companies, had to—like, it would be just wild to not start with AWS and actually start ordering servers and all that kind of stuff. And so, I look at that as kind of the first phase. And it was remarkable how long Amazon had a run really as the only player there. And maybe eight years ago—six years ago—we could argue on timeframes, things shifted a little bit because the enterprises, the big companies, and the governments finally realized, “Holy crow. This thing has gotten far enough that it's not just for these startups.”Corey: Yeah. There was a real change. There was an eye-opening moment there where it isn't just, “I want to go and sell things online.” It's, “And I also want to be a bank. Can we do that with you?” And, “Huh.”Brian: My SAP—like I don't know big that darn thing is going to get. Could I put it in your cloud? And, “Oh, by the way, CapEx forecasting stinks. Can you get me out of that?” And so, it became like the traditional IT infrastructure. All of the sudden, the IT guys showed up at the party, which I know is—it sounds fun to me, but that doesn't sound like the best addition to a party for many people. And so essentially, old-school IT infrastructure finally came to the cloud and Microsoft couldn't miss that happening when it did. But it was a major boon for AWS just because of the position that they had already.Corey: And even Google as well. All three of you now are pivoting in a lot of the messaging to talk to the big E enterprises out there. And I've noticed for the last few years, and I'm not entirely alone. When I go to re:Invent, and I look at announcements they're making, sure they have for the serverless stuff and how to run websites and EC2 nonsense. And then they're talking about IOT things and other things that just seem very oriented on a persona I don't understand. Everyone's doing stuff with mainframes now for example. And it feels like, “Oh, those of us who came here for the web services like it says on the name of the company aren't really feeling like it's for us anymore.” It's the problem of trying to be for everyone and pivoting to where the money is going, but Google's done this at least as much as anyone has in recent years. Are those of us who don't have corporate IT-like problems no longer the target market for folks or what's changed?Brian: It's still the target market, so like, you take the corporate IT, they're obviously still moving to the cloud. And there's a ton of opportunity. Just take existing IT spending and see a number over $1 trillion per year, and if you take the run rates of Microsoft, Amazon, Google Cloud, it's certainly over $100 billion, but that means it's still less than ten percent of what is existing IT spending. There are many people that think that existing IT spend number is significantly higher than that. But to your point on what's changing, there's actually a third wave that's happening.So, if the first wave was you start a company. You're a tech company, of course, you start it on AWS or on the Cloud. Second wave is all the IT people, IT departments, the central organizations that run technology for all the people that are not technology people come to the cloud. This third wave is everybody has to become a technology person. If you're a business leader, like you're at a fast-food restaurant and you're responsible for the franchisee relations, before, like, you needed to get an EDI system running or something, and so you told your IT department to figure out.Now, you have to actually think about what apps do we want to provide to our customers. How do I get the right data to my franchisees so that they can make business decisions? How can I automate all that? And you know, whereas before I was a guy wearing a suit or a gal wearing a suit who didn't need to know technology, I now have to. And that's what's changing the most. And it's why the Target Addressable Market—or the TAM as business folk sometimes say—it's really hard to estimate looking forward if every business is really needing to become a technology business in many ways. And it didn't dawn on me, honestly, and you can give me all the ribbing that I probably deserve for this—but it didn't really dawn on me until I came to Google and kept hearing the transformation word, “Digital transformation, digital transformation,” and honestly, having been in software for so long, I didn't really know what digital transformation meant until I started seeing all of these folks, like every company have to become a tech company effectively.Corey: Yeah. And it turns out there aren't enough technologists to go around, so it's very challenging to wind up getting the expertise in-house. It's natural to start looking at, “Well, how do we effectively outsource this?” And well, you can absolutely have a compression algorithm for experience. It's called, “Buying products and services and hiring people who have that experience already baked in either to the product or they show up knowing how to do something because they've done this before.”Brian: That's right. The thing I think we have to—for those of us that come from the technology side, this transformation is scary for the people who all of the sudden have to get tech and be like—Corey, if you or I—actually, you're very artistic, so maybe this wouldn't do it for you—but if I were told, “Hey, Brian, for your livelihood, you now need to incorporate painting,” like…Corey: [laugh]. I can't even write legibly let alone draw or paint. That is not my skill set. [laugh].Brian: I'd be like, “Wait, what? I'm not good at painting. I've never been a painting person, like I'm not creative.” “Okay. Great. Then we're going to fire you, or we're going to bring someone in who can.” Like, that'd be scary. And so, having more services, more people that can help as every company goes through a transition like that—and it's interesting, it's why during Covid, the cloud did really well, and some people kind of said, “Well, it's because they—people didn't want to send their people into their data centers.” No. That wasn't it. It was really because it just forced the change to digital. Like the person to, maybe, batter the analogy a little bit—the person who was previously responsible for all of the physical banks, which are—a bank has, you know, that are retail locations—the branches—they have those in order to service the retail customers.Corey: Yeah.Brian: That person, all of the sudden, had to figure out, “How do I do all that service via phone, via agents, via an app, via our website.” And that person, that entire organization, was forced digital in many ways. And that certainly had a lot of impact on the cloud, too.Corey: Yeah. I think that some wit observed a few years back that Covid has had more impact on your digital transformation than your last ten CIOs combined.Brian: Yeah.Corey: And—yeah, suddenly, you're forcing people into a position where there really is no other safe option. And some of that has unwound but not a lot of it. There's still seem to be those same structures and ability to do things from remote locations then there were before 2020.Brian: Yeah. Since you asked, kind of, where we are in the industry, to bring all of that to an endpoint, now what this means is people are looking for cloud providers, not just to have the primitives, not just to have the IT that they—their central IT needed, but they need people who can help them build the things that will help their business transform. It makes it a fun, new stage, new era, a transformation era for companies like Google to be able to say, “Hey, here's how we build things. Here's what we've learned over a period of time. Here's what we've most importantly learned from other customers, and we want to help be your strategic partner in that transformation.” And like I said, it'd be almost impossible to estimate what the TAM is for that. The real question is how quickly can we help customers and innovate in our Cloud solutions in order to make more of the stuff more powerful and faster to help people build.Corey: I want to say as well that—to be clear—you folks can buy my attention but not my opinion. I will not say things if I do not believe them. That's the way the world works here. But every time I use Google Cloud for something, I am taken aback yet again by the developer experience, how polished it is. And increasingly lately, it's not just that you're offering those low-lying primitives that composed together to build things higher up the stack, you're offering those things as well across a wide variety of different tooling options. And they just tend to all make sense and solve a need rather than requiring me to build it together myself from popsicle sticks.And I can't shake the feeling that that's where the industry is going. I'm going to want someone to sell me an app to do expense reports. I'm not going to want—well, I want a database and a front-end system, and how I wind up storing all the assets on the backend. No. I just want someone to give me something that solves that problem for me. That's what customers across the board are looking for as best I can see.Brian: Well, it certainly expands the number of customers that you can serve. I'll give you an example. We have an AI agent product called Call Center AI which allows you to either build a complete new call center solution, or more often it augments an existing call center platform. And we could sell that on an API call basis or a number of agent seats basis or anything like that. But that's not actually how call center leaders want to buy. Imagine we come in and say, “This many API calls or $4 per seat or per month,” or something like that. There's a whole bunch of work for that call center leader to go figure out, “Well, do I want to do this? Do I not? How should I evaluate it versus others?” It's quite complex. Whereas, if we come in and say, “Hey, we have a deal for you. We will guarantee higher customer satisfaction. We will guarantee higher agent retention. And we will save you money. And we will only charge you some percentage of the amount of money that you're saved.”Corey: It's a compelling pitch.Brian: Which is an easier one for a business decision-maker to decide to take?Corey: It's no contest. I will say it's a little odd that—one thing—since you brought it up, one thing that struck me as a bit strange about Contact Center AI, compared to most of the services I would consider to be Google Cloud, instead of, “Click here to get started,” it's, “Click here to get a demo. Reach out to contact us.” It feels—Brian: Yeah.Corey: —very much like the deals for these things are going to get signed on a golf course.Brian: [laugh]. They—I don't know about signed on a golf course. I do know that there is implementation work that needs to be done in order to build the models because it's the model for the AI, figuring out how your particular customers are served in your particular context that takes the work. And we need to bring in a partner or bring in our expertise to help build that out. But it sounds to me like you're looking to go golfing since you've looked into this situation.Corey: Just like painting, I'm no good at golfing either.Brian: [laugh].Corey: Honestly, it's—it just doesn't have the—the appeal isn't there for me for whatever reason. I smile; I nod; I tend to assume that, “Yeah, that's okay. I'll leave some areas for other people to go exploring in.”Brian: I see. I see.Corey: So, two weeks before Google Cloud Next occurred, you folks wound up canceling Stadia, which had been rumored for a while. People had been predicting it since it was first announced because, “Just wait. They're going to Google Reader it.” And yeah, it was consumer-side, and I do understand that that was not Cloud. But it did raise the specter of—for people to start talking once again about, “Oh, well, Google doesn't have any ability to focus on things long-term. They're going to turn off Cloud soon, too. So, we shouldn't be using it at all.” I do not agree with that assessment.But I want to get your take on it because I do have some challenges with the way that your products and services go to market in some ways. But I don't have the concern that you're going to turn it all off and decide, “Yeah, that was a fun experiment. We're done.” Not with Cloud, not at this point.Brian: Yeah. So, I'd start with at Google Cloud, it is our job to be a trusted enterprise platform. And I can't speak to before I was here. I can't speak to before Thomas Kurian, who's our CEO, was here before. But I can say that we are very, very focused on that. And deprecating products in a surprising way or in a way that doesn't take into account what customers are on it, how can we help those customers is certainly not going to help us do that. And so, we don't do that anymore.Stadia you brought up, and I wasn't part of starting Stadia. I wasn't part of ending Stadia. I honestly don't know anything about Stadia that any average tech-head might not know. But it is a different part of Google. And just like Amazon has deprecated plenty of services and devices and other things in their consumer world—and Microsoft has certainly deprecated many, many, many consumer and other products—like, that's a different model. And I won't say whether it's good, bad, or righteous, or not.But I can say at Google Cloud, we're doing a really good job right now. Can we get better? Of course. Always. We can get better at communicating, engaging customers in advance. But we now have a clean deprecation policy with a set of enterprise APIs that we commit to for stated periods of time. We also—like people should take a look. We're doing ten-year deals with companies like Deutsche Bank. And it's a sign that Google is here to last and Google Cloud in particular. It's also at a market level, just worth recognizing.We are a $27 billion run rate business now. And you earn trust in drips. You lose it in buckets. And we're—we recognize that we need to just keep every single day earning trust. And it's because we've been able to do that—it's part of the reason that we've gotten as large and as successful as we have—and when you get large and successful, you also tend to invest more and make it even more clear that we're going to continue on that path. And so, I'm glad that the market is seeing that we are enterprise-ready and can be trusted much, much more. But we're going to keep earning every single day.Corey: Yeah. I think it's pretty fair to say that you have definitely gotten yourselves into a place where you've done the things that I would've done if I wanted to shore up trust that the platform was not going to go away. Because these ten-year deals are with the kinds of companies that, shall we say, do not embark on signing contracts lightly. They very clearly, have asked you the difficult, pointed questions that I'm basically asking you now as cheap shots. And they ask it in very serious ways through multiple layers of attorneys. And if the answers aren't the right answers, they don't sign the contract. That is pretty clearly how the world works.The fact that companies are willing to move things like core trading systems over to you on a ten-year time horizon, tells me that I can observe whatever I want from the outside, but they have actual existential risk questions tied to what they're doing. And they are in some ways betting their future on your folks. You clearly know what those right answers are and how to articulate them. I think that's the side of things that the world does not get to see or think about very much. Because it is easy to point at all the consumer failings and the hundreds of messaging products that you continually replenish just in order to kill.Brian: [laugh].Corey: It's—like, what is it? The tree of liberty must be watered periodically from time to time, but the blood of patriots? Yeah. The logo of Google must be watered by the blood of canceled messaging products.Brian: Oh, come on. [laugh].Corey: Yeah. I'm going to be really scared if there's an actual, like, Pub/Sub service. I don't know. That counts as messaging, sort of. I don't know.Brian: [laugh]. Well, thank you. Thank you for the recognition of how far we've come in our trust from enterprises and trust from customers.Corey: I think it's the right path. There's also reputational issues, too. Because in the absence of new data, people don't tend to change their opinion on things very easily. And okay, there was a thing I was using. It got turned off. There was a big kerfuffle. That sticks in people's minds. But I've never seen an article about a Google service saying, “Oh, yeah. It hasn't been turned off or materially changed. In fact, it's gotten better with time. And it's just there working reliably.” You're either invisible, or you're getting yelled at.It feels like it's a microcosm of my early career stage of being a systems administrator. I'm either invisible or the mail system's broke, and everyone wants my head. I don't know what the right answer is—Brian: That was about right to me.Corey: —in this thing. Yeah. I don't know what the right answer on these things is, but you're definitely getting it right. I think the enterprise API endeavors that you've gone through over the past year or two are not broadly known. And frankly, you've definitely are ex-AWS because enterprise APIs is a terrible name for what these things are.Brian: [laugh].Corey: I'll let you explain it. Go ahead. And bonus points if you can do it without sounding like a press release. Take it away.Brian: There are a set of APIs that developers and companies should be able to know are going to be supported for the period of time that they need in order to run their applications and truly bet on them. And that's what we've done.Corey: Yeah. It's effectively a commitment that there will not be meaningful deprecations or changes to the API that are breaking changes without significant notice periods.Brian: Correct.Corey: And to be clear, that is exactly what all of the cloud providers have in their enterprise contracts. They're always notice periods around those things. There are always, at least, certain amounts of time and significant breach penalties in the event that, “Yeah, today, I decided that we were just not going to spin up VMs in that same way as we always have before. Sorry. Sucks to be you.” I don't see that happening on the Google Cloud side of the world very often, not like it once did. And again, we do want to talk about reputations.There are at least four services that I'm aware of that AWS has outright deprecated. One, Sumerian has said we're sunsetting the service in public. But on the other end of the spectrum, RDS on VMWare has been completely memory-holed. There's a blog post or two but nothing else remains in any of the AWS stuff, I'm sure, because that's an, “Enterprise-y” service, they wound up having one on one conversations with customers or there would have been a hue and cry. But every cloud provider does, in the fullness of time, turn some things off as they learn from their customers.Brian: Hmm. I hadn't heard anything about AWS Infinidash for a while either.Corey: No, no. It seems to be one of those great services that we made up on the internet one day for fun. And I love that just from a product marketing perspective. I mean, you know way more about that field than I do given that it's your job, and I'm just sitting here in this cheap seats throwing peanuts at you. But I love the idea of customers just come up and make up a product one day in your space and then the storytelling that immediately happens thereafter. Most companies would kill for something like that just because you would expect on some level to learn so much about how your reputation actually works. When there's a platonic ideal of a service that isn't bothered by pesky things like, “It has to exist,” what do people say about it? And how does that work?And I'm sort of surprised there wasn't more engagement from Amazon on that. It always seems like they're scared to say anything. Which brings me to a marketing question I have for you. You and Amazing have similar challenges—you being Google in this context, not you personally—in that your customers take themselves deadly seriously. And as a result, you have to take yourselves with at least that same level of seriousness. You can't go on Twitter and be the Wendy's Twitter account when you're dealing with enterprise buyers of cloud platforms. I'm kind of amazed, and I'd love to know. How can you manage to say anything at all? Because it just seems like you are so constrained, and there's no possible thing you can say that someone won't take issue with. And yes, some of the time, that someone is me.Brian: Well, let's start with going back to Infinidash a little bit. Yes, you identified one interesting thing about that episode, if I can call it an episode. The thing that I tell you though that didn't surprise me is it shows how much of cloud is actually learned from other people, not from the cloud provider itself. I—you're going to be going to re:Invent. You were at Google Cloud Next. Best thing about the industry conferences is not what the provider does. It's the other people that are there that you learn from. The folks that have done something that you've been trying to do and couldn't figure out how to do, and then they explained it to you, just the relationships that you get that help you understand what's going on in this industry that's changing so fast and has so much going on.And so,   And so, that part didn't surprise me. And that gets a little bit to the second part of your—that we're talking about. “How do you say anything?” As long as you're helping a customer say it. As long as you're helping someone who has been a fan of a product and has done interesting things with it say it, that's how you communicate for the most part, putting a megaphone in front of the people who already understand what's going on and helping their voice be heard, which is a lot more fun, honestly, than creating TV ads and banner ads and all of the stuff that a lot of consumer and traditional companies. We get to celebrate our customers and our creators much, much more.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Uptycs, because they believe that many of you are looking to bolster your security posture with CNAPP and XDR solutions. They offer both cloud and endpoint security in a single UI and data model. Listeners can get Uptycs for up to 1,000 assets through the end of 2023 (that is next year) for $1. But this offer is only available for a limited time on UptycsSecretMenu.com. That's U-P-T-Y-C-S Secret Menu dot com.Corey: I think that it's not super well understood by a lot of folks out there that the official documentation that any cloud provider puts out there is kind of a last resort. Or I'm looking for the specific flag to a specific parameter of a specific command. Great. Sure. But what I really want to do whenever I'm googling how to do something—and yes, that—we're going to be googling—welcome. You've successfully owned that space to the point where it's become common parlance. Good work is I want to see what other people had said. I want to find blog posts, ideally recent ones, talking about how to do the thing that I'm trying to do. If I'm trying to do something relatively not that hard or not that uncommon, if I spin up three web servers behind a load-balancer, and I can't find any community references on how to do that thing, either I'm trying to do something absolutely bizarre and I should re-think it, or there is no community/customer base for the product talking about how to do things with it.And I have noticed a borderline Cambrian explosion over the last few years of the Google Cloud community. I'm seeing folks who do not work at Google, and also who have never worked at Google, and sometimes still think they work at Google in some cases. It's not those folks. It is people who are just building things as a customer. And they, in turn, become very passionate advocates for the platform. And they start creating content on these things.Brian: Yeah. We've been blessed to have, not only, the customer base grow, but essentially the passion among that customer base, and we've certainly tried to help building community and catalyzing the community, but it's been fun to watch how our customers' success turns into our success which turns into customer success. And it's interesting, in particular, to see too how much of that passion comes from people seeing that there is another way to do things.It's clear that many people in our industry knew cloud through the lens of Amazon, knew tech in general through the lenses of Microsoft and Oracle and a lot of other companies. And Google, which we try and respect specifically what people are trying to accomplish and how they know how to do it, we also many ways have taken a more opinionated approach, if you will, to say, “Hey, here's how this could be done in a different way.” And when people find something that's unexpectedly different and also delightful, it's more likely that they're going to be strong advocates and share that passion with the world.Corey: It's a virtuous cycle that leads to the continued growth and success of a platform. Something I've been wondering about in the broader sense, is what happens after this? Because if, let's say for the sake of argument, that one of the major cloud providers decided, “Okay. You know, we're going to turn this stuff off. We've decided we don't really want to be in the cloud business.” It turns out that high-margin businesses that wind up turning into cash monsters as soon as you stop investing heavily in growing them, just kind of throw off so much that, “We don't know what to do with. And we're running out of spaces to store it. So, we're getting out of it.” I don't know how that would even be possible at some point. Because given the amount of time and energy some customers take to migrate in, it would be a decade-long project for them to migrate back out again.So, it feels on some level like on the scale of a human lifetime, that we will be seeing the large public cloud providers, in more or less their current form, for the rest of our lives. Is that hopelessly naïve? Am I missing—am I overestimating how little change happens in the sweep of a human lifetime in technology?Brian: Well, I've been in the tech industry for 27 years now. And I've just seen a continual moving up the stack. Where, you know, there are fundamental changes. I think the PC becoming widespread, fundamental change; mobile, certainly becoming primary computing experience—what I know you call a toilet computer, I call my mobile; that's certainly been a change. Cloud has certainly been a change. And so, there are step functions for sure. But in general, what has been happening is things just keep moving up the stack. And as things move up the stack, there are companies that evolve and learn to do that and provide more value and more value to new folks. Like I talked about how businesspeople are leaders in technology now in a way that they never were before. And you need to give them the value in a way that they can understand it, and they can consume it, and they can trust it. And it's going to continue to move in that direction.And so, what happens then as things move up the stack, the abstractions start happening. And so, there are companies that were just major players in the ‘90s, whether it's Novell or Sun Microsystems or—I was actually getting a tour of the Sunnyvale/Mountain View Google Campuses yesterday. And the tour guide said, “This used to be the site of a company that was called Silicon Graphics. They did something around, like, making things for Avatar.” I felt a little aged at that point.But my point is, there are these companies that were amazing in their time. They didn't move up the stack in a way that met the net set of needs. And it's not like that crater the industry or anything, it's just people were able to move off of it and move up. And I do think that's what we'll see happening.Corey: In some cases, it seems to slip below the waterline and become, effectively, plumbing, where everyone uses it, but no one knows who they are or what they do. The Tier 1 backbone providers these days tend to be in that bucket. Sure, some of them have other businesses, like Verizon. People know who Verizon is, but they're one of the major Tier 1 carriers in the United States just of the internet backbone.Brian: That's right. And that doesn't mean it's not still a great business.Corey: Yeah.Brian: It just means it's not front of mind for maybe the problems you're trying to solve or the opportunities we're trying to capture at that point in time.Corey: So, my last question for you goes circling back to Google Cloud Next. You folks announced an awful lot of things. And most of them, from my perspective, were actually pretty decent. What do you think is the most impactful announcement that you made that the industry largely overlooked?Brian: Most impactful that the industry—well, overlooked might be the wrong way to put this. But there's this really interesting thing happening in the cloud world right now where whereas before companies, kind of, chose their primary cloud writ large, today because multi-cloud is actually happening in the vast majority of companies have things in multiple places, people make—are making also the decision of, “What is going to be my strategic data provider?” And I don't mean data in the sense of the actual data and meta-data and the like, but my data cloud.Corey: Mm-hmm.Brian: How do I choose my data cloud specifically? And there's been this amazing profusion of new data companies that do better ETL or ELT, better data cleaning, better packaging for AI, new techniques for scaling up/scaling down at cost. A lot of really interesting stuff happening in the dataspace. But it's also created almost more silos. And so, the most important announcement that we made probably didn't seem like a really big announcement to a lot of people, but it really was about how we're connecting together more of our data cloud with BigQuery, with unstructured and structured data support, with support for data lakes, including new formats, including Iceberg and Delta and Hudi to come how—Looker is increasingly working with BigQuery in order to make it, so that if you put data into Google Cloud, you not only have these super first-class services that you can use, ranging from databases like Spanner to BigQuery to Looker to AI services, like Vertex AI, but it's also now supporting all these different formats so you can bring third-party applications into that one place. And so, at the big cloud events, it's a new service that is the biggest deal. For us, the biggest deal is how this data cloud is coming together in an open way to let you use the tool that you want to use, whether it's from Google or a third party, all by betting on Google's data cloud.Corey: I'm really impressed by how Google is rather clearly thinking about this from the perspective of the data has to be accessible by a bunch of different things, even though it may take wildly different forms. It is making the data more fluid in that it can go to where the customer needs it to be rather than expecting the customer to come to it where it lives. That, I think, is a trend that we have not seen before in this iteration of the tech industry.Brian: I think you got that—you picked that up very well. And to some degree, if you step back and look at it, it maybe shouldn't be that surprising that Google is adept at that. When you think of what Google search is, how YouTube is essentially another search engine producing videos that deliver on what you're asking for, how information is used with Google Maps, with Google Lens, how it is all about taking information and making it as universally accessible and helpful as possible. And if we can do that for the internet's information, why can't we help businesses do it for their business information? And that's a lot of where Google certainly has a unique approach with Google Cloud.Corey: I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where's the best place for them to find you?Brian: cloud.google.com for Google Cloud information of course. And if it's still running when this podcast goes, @isforat, I-S-F-O-R-A-T, on Twitter.Corey: And we will put links to both of those in the show notes. Thank you so much for you time. I appreciate it.Brian: Thank you, Corey. It's been good talking with you.Corey: Brian Hall, VP of Product Marketing at Google Cloud. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas, if you've hated this podcast, please, leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an insulting angry comment dictating that, “No. Large companies make ten-year-long commitments casually all the time.”Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Brian Hall lived through one of the most exciting and deadly eras of Himalayan exploration during the 1970s and 80s. In his new book, High Risk, he reflects on the many friends he lost to this deadly game and seeks to hear the wisdom to be learned from these lives lived and lost.

We're reprising our episode (S1 E20, August 20, 2020) - our conversation with Michael Rothenberg - upon the sad news of his passing. Our hearts go out to all of those whose lives he touched. He will be very dearly missed. The twentieth episode of the Meat For Teacast, and the season one finale! Join Elizabeth in conversation with Michael Rothenberg, writer, artist, and co-founder of 100,000 Poets, Artists and Musicians for Change. And hear the world premiere of a track from his new album Dystopic Relapse, with the track "Incarceration of the Orange Bartender." (Longineu Parsons-trumpet. Michael Bakan-drums and percussion. Brian Hall-double bass. Tribal Records. Tribaldisorder.com). --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/meatforteacast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/meatforteacast/support

Welcome back to The Adventure Podcast, and this introduction to season 7. We have a sensational line up of guests to share with you over the coming months. The first thing we're releasing is a 4-part specialist series that tells the story of Charlie Walker, an author who found himself on the wrong side of Putin's Russia just after the invasion of Ukraine. It's a new format of podcast that features recordings from in the field intercut with an interview I did with Charlie when he returned home from his eventful expedition. We've also got interviews with expedition guide and photographer Ian Finch, addicts turned adventurers Jamie Leibert and Sandra Zinovyev, glaciologist and science advocate Dr Heidi Sevestre, explorer and adventure Lucy Shepherd, CEO of Shelter, Polly Neate and mountaineer and author Brian Hall. There's also an episode about what it means to love with Davor Rostuhar, and a wonderful chat with David Shukman who spent 20 years reporting on climate change for the BBC. Enjoy!Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/the-adventure-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

About Brian Hall: After decades of personal experience with religious trauma and abuse, Brian decided to take all that he experienced and overcame to help others see their abuse as a gift, and learn how to reconnect with their true Self. Brian uses his educational background gained, along with his MDiv and several years of counseling training in his career as a military chaplain and a hospice chaplain, to help guide clients on their individual journey to quickly explore their true beliefs and learn to create a life where they are abundant and full of joy. At Pneuma Counseling, Brian focuses on complex PTSD-based religious trauma recovery and integration of true personal beliefs into everyday life.   In this episode, Kim Andryc, Lora Solomon, and Brian Hall discuss: Taking back control after life in a cult.  Brian's experience with QHHT and his journey to find his true Self.  What religious trauma is and how it impacts individuals.  The transformative discipline of gratitude.  Holding space to share and connect, regardless of beliefs.    Key Takeaways: A cult, essentially, hypnotizes people to believe a narrative and they use a lot of different things to enforce that hypnosis. Religious trauma can affect individuals in different ways. It does not look the same for everyone.  Meditation and gratitude can help you to connect with your highest and best self. In our developmental years, we are easily influenced by everyone and everything around us. But we can erase and rewrite over those habits and patterns that we were taught.  "This religion that I was a part of is supposed to give you hope, I felt very hopeless throughout that entire process. The only time that hope came into me is when I knew that I could control my own destiny and I knew that I have freedom. Then a plethora of hope came into me." — Brian Hall  Resources Mentioned:  7 Ways Religion Traumatizes People: https://youtu.be/7HwSGXPKzw8 I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here's why I left. | Megan Phelps-Roper: https://youtu.be/bVV2Zk88beY Global Center for Religious Research: https://www.gcrr.org/ The Inside Out Experience: https://theinsideoutexperience.com/ Freedom From Religion Foundation: https://secure.ffrf.org/  Mark Karris: https://markgregorykarris.com/    Connect with Brian Hall:  Website: www.PneumaCounseling.org  Email: brian@pneumacounseling.org  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pneuma-counseling-spiritual-services/  Connect with Sacred Rebellion:  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LoraAndKim  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sacredrebellionpodcast/ Email Lora:  connect@lorasolomon.com Email Kim: kim@kimandryc.com Show notes by Podcastologist Chelsea Taylor-Sturkie   Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

Brian Hall is sick and tired of us teasing our audience and is here to finally give you the topic you have all been waiting for MURDER! Dum dum Duuum! Is there a topic you would like us to explore? Send us your suggestions  to sidehustlequest@outlook.com. Our intro and outro music is by Commuted. Find him at https://commuted.bandcamp.com/Our art is by Zachary Groombridge. Adapted by Kellie Macdonald.

Writer Brian Hall joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Ford Madox Ford's 1928 quartet of novels, Parade's End, focusing particularly on the first book, Some Do Not.... Their conversation covers the book's place in Modernist literature, comparisons to the work of E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and particularly its descriptions of World War One: as granular as a soldier's perspective on the field all the way outward to the war's effects on every part of British society. Brian Hall is the author of eight books, five of them novels, including The Saskiad (Houghton-Mifflin, 1997); I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company (Viking, 2003); and Fall of Frost (Viking, 2008). The Saskiad, a coming-of-age novel about a precocious and imaginative young girl, has been translated into 12 languages. I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company was named one of the best novels of the year by The Boston Globe, Salon Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor. Fall of Frost was named one of the best novels of the year by The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. His most recent novel is The Stone Loves the World (Viking, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week I had an amazing conversation with artist, Adie Russell. We discussed her incredible new "Lacuna" series of charcoal works on cotton rag paper (based on old Victorian glass negative studio portraits that are put through an obscure Photoshop filter) and also, her newest video work, "Hydriogenesis," which was born of a craving for a feeling of safety in nature and from the long periods of introspection we all experienced during the pandemic. We also talked about the trickiness of navigating Instagram in an authentic way, what can be used as a sourdough starter for abstraction, Adie's "Covers" video project and Marlon Brando's idea about how everyone is ALWAYS acting, AND of course, the Caterpillar Pillar. (Please check out Episode 30 to learn all about said Pillar where I do a deep dive into Adie's recommended artist-pick-me-up book from the 70's: Hope for the Flowers.) Adie's website: adierussell.com and Instagram: @adie_russell Adie is opening her studio up (w/ guest artist Jesse Bransford) for Upstate Art Weekend, Sat-Sun July 23-24 12-6pm and is #20 (near the Stoneleaf Retreat) on the Map : upstateartweekend.org Adie is a mixed media artist currently working in drawing, painting and video. Russell has exhibited regularly since 2001 in the United States and abroad. She was the subject of a solo exhibition The Reveal at the Leeds College of Arts in Leeds, UK as well as the exhibition I Am (Richard Nixon) at The Center for Photography at Woodstock in Woodstock, NY, amongst others. Her work is in the collection of The Dorsky Museum, in New Paltz, NY. Episode mentions: Stephen Gill's "Night Procession" series, Rembrandt, Marlon Brando's interview with Dick Cavett, Ingmar Bergman's near-death anesthesia experience, Art and Ventriloquism by David Goldblatt, The Library of Congress online archives: Civil War era glass negative photos & the Arnold Genthe collection, "Photochrom" color postcards, Hilma Af Klint, Mediumistic drawing and Spirit Photography, Early 20th c American advertising postcards, Pessimistic postcards: "The Worst is Yet to Come," Stereoviews, Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus, Nog's Vision - A Fantasy Journey by Brian Hall & Joseph Osburn, "The Point!" a film by Harry Nilsson ("Think About Your Troubles" song) Send me a voice message on Speakpipe.com about what you love and dislike about NYC! I'll use the recording in a future ep about Marsden Hartley: https://www.speakpipe.com/peps Follow Pep Talks on IG: @peptalksforartists & Donate to the Peps: https://anchor.fm/peptalksforartistspod/support. Amy's website: https://www.amytalluto.com/ All music tracks and SFX are licensed from Soundstripe. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/peptalksforartistspod/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/peptalksforartistspod/support

In this episode, writers Sandra Lim and Brian Hall join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Jean Rhys's 1939 novel, Good Morning, Midnight. The novel is about a grieving, impoverished woman wandering through Paris, intermittently hopeful and despairing, The conversation addresses the novel's artistic and political context and biographical links to Rhys's life, as well as literary depictions of poverty in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly the Great Depression. Sandra Lim is the author of three poetry collections: The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021), The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). The Wilderness was the winner of the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including The New York Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, Boston Review, The New Republic, and Gulf Coast. Brian Hall is the author of eight books, five of them novels, including The Saskiad (Houghton-Mifflin, 1997); I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company (Viking, 2003); and Fall of Frost (Viking, 2008). The Saskiad, a coming-of-age novel about a precocious and imaginative young girl, has been translated into 12 languages. I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company was named one of the best novels of the year by The Boston Globe, Salon Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor. Fall of Frost was named one of the best novels of the year by The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. His most recent novel is The Stone Loves the World (Viking, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

About JohnnyJohnny was born in Cleveland, OH and graduated from the University of Toledo with a Bachelor's in Computer Science Engineering. He began his career as a software engineer focused on embedded device protocols and systems engineering. Eventually he realized that Program Management worked better with the grain of his brain, so he took his career in that direction.In 2019, he was hired by Google Cloud to serve as a Communications Lead on their incident management teams. Most recently, he joined Waymo in November 2021 as a Technical Program Manager, acting as an anti-entropy agent for the self-driving car company's offboard infrastructure teams.Outside his day job, Johnny enjoys mountain biking, playing piano and trumpet, personal finance, coaching, and studying complex systems. He currently lives in Sunnyvale, CA with his wife Emily, and is expecting their first child in April 2022! Links: Original Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1436129343399346184 Personal website: https://jmpod.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmpod Twitter: https://twitter.com/gratitudeisfree/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gratitudeisfree/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service is flexible, full-featured and fully managed with built in access via key-value, SQL, and full-text search. Flexible JSON documents aligned to your applications and workloads. Build faster with blazing fast in-memory performance and automated replication and scaling while reducing cost. Capella has the best price performance of any fully managed document database. Visit couchbase.com/screaminginthecloud to try Capella today for free and be up and running in three minutes with no credit card required. Couchbase Capella: make your data sing.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while I get feedback from people who I've encountered who are impacted in various ways. Most of it is feedback delivered of the kind you might expect, like, “Unsubscribe me from this newsletter,” or, “Block,” or sometimes bricks thrown through my window. But occasionally, I get some truly horrifying feedback, and far and away one of the most horrifying things I can ever be told is, “So, I was reading one of your tweet threads and it changed the course of my career.”It's like, “Oh, dear,” because nothing good is going to happen after something like that. It's, “Yeah, they were going to name something terrible here at AWS, so I ran over my boss in the parking lot,” is sort of what I'm expecting to hear. But I got that exact feedback about life-changing tweet threads from today's guest. We'll get into what that tweet thread was a little bit, but let's first let the other person talk for a minute. Johnny Podhradsky is a technical program manager at Waymo. Specifically, of Offboard Infrastructure. Johnny, thanks for suffering through a long, painful introduction, as well as, more or less, the slings and arrows that invariably come with being on the show.Johnny: Thanks, Corey. I'm grateful to be here.Corey: So, first things first. I always like to find out what people actually do for a living that is usually a source of entertainment, if nothing else. You are a technical program manager—or TPM as they say in tech companies—of Offboard Infrastructure. I'm assuming because Waymo, is at least theoretically, a self-driving car company, ‘offboard' means things that are not on the vehicle themselves.Johnny: That's exactly right. Yeah.Corey: Fantastic. Now, ask the dumb question because I'm still not sure I have an answer after however many years in this industry. What does a technical program manager do?Johnny: [laugh]. I get that question a lot. Often people try to distinguish between what's a technical program manager do versus what does a product manager do.Corey: Or a project manager, too, because there's a lot of different ways it can express itself, and I'm a PM, and it's, “Oh, wonderful. That's like four different acronyms I can disambiguate into and I'm probably going to get it wrong.”Johnny: And to make it even more confusing, it varies company by company. So, just focus in on specifically what I do as a technical program manager, I'm an anti-entropy agent, right? I make sure things stay on track, specifically embedded into technical teams. So, I have a degree in engineering; I'm able to speak fluently about technology. And the entire idea, the entire purpose of my existence is to make sure that things don't fall apart. So, I'm keeping track of people and resources; I'm keeping track of overall timelines; risks and mitigations for programs that are ongoing, whether they're small with just a few people or cross-org, cross-functional teams; serving as an unblocker and making sure that all the dependencies that exist between the various tasks in the teams are addressed ahead of time so that we know what needs to be done when.Corey: It's one of those useful almost glue functions, it feels like that is, “Well, what have you actually built? Point at the thing you've constructed yourself from your hands on your keyboard?” And it's hard to do and it's very nebulous, when you're not directly able to point to a website, for example. “Yeah, you see that button in the corner? I made that button.” Great.Like, that's the visceral thing that people can wrap their heads around. Project and program management feels to me like one of those areas that, in theory, you don't need those people to be a part of building anything, but in practice you very much do. Another example of this—from my own history, of course—is operations because in theory, you just have developers write code correctly the first time and then they leave it where it is and it never needs to be updated again, and there's no reason to have operations folks. Yeah. As they say, the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is none.Johnny: I'll buy that. Yeah, when it comes to actual, I mean, digital, but physical deliverables and things that you can show that you've done, there are standards that you can have with documentation, like Gantt charts and risk registers and all that sort of thing, but it is very much a glue role. It is very much a gentle nudge to get things done. And it really revolves around the transparency and making sure that the people who are invested in the success of whatever it is that you're doing program-wise are aware of what's going on as far ahead of time as possible. That's why I like to consider it sort of an anti-entropy role because things will just naturally go off the rails if no one is there to help guide them.I mean, that doesn't happen in every situation, of course, but having someone dedicated to the role of making sure that things are moving according to a good rhythm is a critical role. And it just so happens that that is sort of the way the grain of my brain works and I discovered that throughout the course of my career.Corey: So, let's get back to the reason you originally reached out to me. I think that is always an interesting topic to explore because whenever someone says, “Wow, your tweet really helped me with my career,” I get worried. Because as I said before, I am one of the absolute best in the world at getting myself fired from jobs, so when it comes to being a good employee, mostly my value is as a counter-example of advice I'll give [unintelligible 00:05:49] job interviews. For example, when they say something condescending and rude, insult them right back because A, it's funny, and that plays well on Twitter. And B, interviews are always two-way streets, and if they're going to treat you like crap, you don't want to work there anyway, so you may as well have some fun with it. But a lot of what I say doesn't really lend itself to the kind of outcomes that lead to happy employment scenarios. So, I've got to ask, what the hell did I say?Johnny: Yeah, it was kind of serendipitous. I'm in a number of Slack communities, one of them being the Cleveland Tech Slack—if you're in Cleveland or around Cleveland, I highly recommend it—and someone just randomly posted this thread right in the middle of me interviewing at Waymo. So, previously before Waymo, I was at Google, and I loved my job. I loved the team that I was on, I loved the—I mean, I was still very much in the honeymoon phase of Silicon Valley. I had moved to Silicon Valley from Cleveland in 2019 with my then fiance.And so I was just, you know, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and everything was just incredible to me; why would I ever consider leaving this? So, I had an interview at Waymo and I ended up getting an offer and I just didn't know whether I should take it. Because I loved where I was at and I really enjoyed the opportunities, so it was just, you know, ten out of ten. One of the things that I was thinking about then was, you know, I kept thinking back to our first team dinner where our teammates were sharing their stories of their careers. And my mentor, Ted, had mentioned how he had worked on the iPhone at Apple and was in the same room with Steve Jobs.And me being a Cleveland boy, just it sounded like, “Whoa.” My eyes got really big like dinner plates. And it's just like, “I'm sitting at a table with people who have done these things with these people.” And I was wondering, like, what did that mean for my career? And so where did I want to take my career and have those kinds of stories? So fast-forwarding, you know, I was interviewing at Waymo; I ended up getting the offer. And I was just on the fence; I couldn't decide if that was the way I wanted to go, if I really wanted to leave my amazing job at Google.Corey: What was holding you back on that? Was it a sense of well you want to be disloyal to the existing team? You were thriving in the role you're in? Was it the risk of well, I don't know how I'll do in a different company solving different problems? What was it that was holding you back?Johnny: It was all of those. When you do an apples-to-apples comparison, you don't really know what you're getting into when you're going to a new company, and that's part of why your thread was so critical in making my decision. Just to say exactly what you said in the tweet, “So, an anonymous Twitter person DM'ed me this morning with a scenario. Quote, ‘I work at a large cloud company that makes inscrutable naming decisions, and I have an offer elsewhere for 35% more. Should I take it?'” to which you said, “Oh, good heavens, yes. A thread.”What followed is a number of questions that you asked exactly like you just asked now and your short answers to them. And they were just so on point and so quick, and it was so serendipitous for me to see that because this ended up being the tipping point that made me decide that, yes, this is the direction that I want to go. And you know, I'm—let's see, I started in November, so five months into the role. It was more than I ever expected; it's harder than I ever expected, but I'm growing so much, I'm getting a ton of eustress, if you're familiar with that concept of the positive stress that makes your muscles grow. And just wanted to give back to you and in thanks and gratitude for being that tipping point. And that thread definitely led me down this path, so thank you for that.Corey: It's interesting because so far as of this recording, there are no two podcast episodes that came out of that thread because, to be clear, this was the thread-summary of a half-hour conversation I had with the person who messaged me about whether or not she should take the role. Because her manager had gone to bat for her to give her a raise and… yeah, she wanted to be loyal and show thanks for that. Which I get, but the counterpoint to that is okay, you turn down the offer out of loyalty. Great. A month goes by.Now, your manager tells you that he or she is leaving to go work at a different company. Well, that opportunity is gone. Now, what? When it comes to career management, you can't love a company because the company can't ever love you back. And I got some pushback on that from Brian Hall, the VP of Product Marketing at Google Cloud—something about Google seems to be inspiring feedback on this one—because he spent something like 20 years at Microsoft and learned how to work within an organization, and then transfer jobs a couple of times to Amazon, they tried to non-compete lawsuit him on the way out—because, I don't know, his PowerPoints were just that amazing or something, or they're never going to replace his ability to name services badly—who knows why.But he took the other position on this. And I'm not saying that my way is always right, it is provably not, as a self-described terrible employee, but it really is interesting that that's the thing that resonated the most. I take a very mercenary approach to my career and I'm not convinced that's at all the best way, but when someone dangles a significant opportunity in front of you, I always take the view that it's better to explore and learn something about yourself if it appeals and the rest of the stars tend to align. And there's a certain reluctance to go out and try new things, but it's not like you're leaving your family. It's not like you're selling out people who've come to depend on you.Employment is fundamentally a business transaction and the company is never going to be able to have any sort of feeling for you, so you shouldn't necessarily have this sense of loyalty, and oh, it'd be it would leave the team in the lurch if I left. That is the company's problem to deal with. No one is irreplaceable.Johnny: Yeah, and a lot of times when you were talking there, you talked about ‘the company, the company,' but really, it's the people that you're working with that—and that was really what was weighing on me the most. I found myself in the same position. I had just recently gotten promoted. You know, my manager, and my team had gone to bat for me a lot, and so it's hard for me to walk away. But it was ultimately the strong relationships that I had built with the team and my managers over time that allowed me to make this step because as a program manager, I'm always thinking that anything I work on needs to survive multiple generations of stakeholders.So, everything that I do on a day-to-day basis has a breadcrumb trail, so that, hey, if I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, someone with minimal amount of effort, can pick that up and move forward. And I've actually built that mindset into my entire career. Walking away from a role, you know, it'll always leave a gap, it'll always be challenging for the people and the teams around you, especially if you, you know, have a great affection for them, but by setting myself up to exit and still being there, since you know, Waymo is within the Alphabet companies and I can still talk with my old team, it wasn't like I was completely leaving; I was kind of still there if I needed to be, if they needed help or needed to find something. But I can definitely see what how that would be challenging moving to a totally different company. But yeah, it's really important that if you're thinking about exiting, you have a good exit plan. And I'm all about planning as a program manager, and that just helped kind of grease the wheels a little bit.Corey: I want to call it my own bias. You're right, I use the term team and company interchangeably because that's been my entire career. I, right now, have 12 employees here at The Duckbill Group and it is indistinguishable for me to make any meaningful distinction between team and company. Personally, I'm also not allowed to leave the company, given that I own it, and it looks really bad to the rest of the team if I decide, yeah, I'm going to go do something else now. People don't like playing games with their future.You're on the exact opposite end of a very wide spectrum. It's not that Google slash Alphabet is a big company, but you went from working on cloud computing to self-driving cars and you didn't leave the company, you're still at the same place as far as the benefits, the tenure, the organization, the name on the paycheck in all likelihood, and a bunch of other niceties as well. It almost presents is looking a little bit more like a transfer than it does leaving for a brand new job slash company.Johnny: It definitely was a soft landing to go from Google to Waymo. There were a lot of risks—again, talking about risks and mitigations—that I was concerned about that we're just kind of alleviated by the fact that okay, you can keep your same health care plan and various other things. So, that made it a soft landing for me. But yeah, it really was just making sure that the thing that I was working on at Google was able to be carried forward by the team and the people that I really enjoyed working with. So.Corey: As you went through all of this, you said that you were in Ohio before you wound up taking the job at Google—Johnny: Yeah, Cleveland [crosstalk 00:14:22].Corey: —and one of the best parts about Ohio [unintelligible 00:14:22] family and spending time there is you get to leave at some point. And—Johnny: [laugh].Corey: There was a large part of that of, great. I felt the same way growing up in Maine, let's be very clear here, where when I came to California, it was going to this storied place out of legend. And that was wild. And once your worldview expands, it feels very hard to go back again. At least for me.It took me years to really internalize that if this particular job or this particular path didn't work out, my failure mode—if you want to call it that—was not and then I return to Maine with my tail between my legs and go back to the relatively dead end retail fast food job that I was working before, comparatively. No. It's like, you go in a different direction; you apply the skill set; you have the stamp of validation on you. I mean, you have something working for you that I never did, which is the legitimacy of a household name on your resume. Whereas you look at mine, it's just basically a collection of, “Who are they again?” And, “You make that company up?”Which, fine, whatever. There's a bias in tech—particularly—towards big company names because that's a stamp of approval. You've already got that. The world is very much your oyster when it comes to solving the type of problem that you've been aimed at. I'm used to thinking about this from a almost purely technical point of view.It's like I'm here to write some javascript—badly—and I can write bad JavaScript for you or I can write bad JavaScript for that company across the street, and everyone knows what it is that they're going to get from you: Technical debt. Whereas when you're a technical program manager, that is something that you said varies from between company to company. And you hear founders talking about, “Oh yeah, our first engineering hire, we're going to bring in a VP of engineering; we're going to bring in a whole bunch of engineers; it's going to be great.” You very rarely hear people talk about how excited they are like, “Oh yeah, employee number three is going to be a technical program manager, and we're going to just blow the doors off of folks.” Which haven't been through the growth process myself, yeah, we really should have had a technical program manager analog far sooner; it would have helped us blow the doors off of competition. And great, the things we learn, but only in hindsight.Articulating the value of what a software engineer does is relatively straightforward, even for folks who aren't great salespeople for their own work. Being a TPM inherently requires, on some level, a verification that your understanding and the person that you're talking to are communicating about the same thing. Like, if you wind up having to solve code on a whiteboard, maybe that is part of your conception of it—I mean, you work at Google, probably—but for most companies, it's yeah, my ability to write shitty JavaScript is not the determining factor of success in a TPM role. How do you go about even broaching that conversation?Johnny: So, part of the way that program managers can be successful is through anticipating what's coming next and understanding not only the patterns that were implanted over time, but also thinking ahead. And this actually kind of takes me back to why I learned program management in the first place. Pretty early in my life, I started feeling a great deal of anxiety, especially thinking towards future situations, or, you know, even in the present moment. I mean, we've all been through it right? Right before the big test, you're feeling anxious; maybe talking to your crush—or before you talk to your crush—you're feeling this anticipatory anxiety; in hindsight replaying that interview that you just went through.For me, I was kind of like, constantly stuck in this future-state mode about being anxious about what's coming next, and that combined with ADHD—which is something that I also have—is kind of a wicked combination. And we can talk about that separately, but once I started understanding what program management did and how program management allowed businesses to keep things on track, I realized that there was a parallel into my own life there. The skill of program management actually became my defense against the crippling anxiety that I felt anticipating future events. And it's really become kind of the primary lens by which I understand and synthesize the world around me. And I know that sounds kind of weird, but with ADHD, I have a tendency to either being total diffuse mode and just working on nothing in particular, and letting my attention take me, or being in hyperfocus mode. And when you're hyper-focused and anxious, it can be a deadly combination, right?So, what I learned was taking that hyperfocus and taking that idea of program management and figuring out what it takes to get from here to there. I'm a strong believer in go as far as you can see, and when you get there, you'll see further. And this skill of program management kind of becomes the stepwise function by which I get to that later point, very much like you were saying with coming to Waymo: You never know what you're going to get until you get there. Well, now I see further and in hindsight, it was the right decision. So, the concept of program management is bringing structure, is bringing order, is bringing hierarchy to the chaos and uncertainty that we all naturally navigate in whatever we're doing and trying to transmute that into some kind of transparent order and rhythm, not only for my own benefit to reduce my overall anxiety, but also for the benefit of everyone else who's interested in what's going on. Does that answer your question?Corey: No, it absolutely does. Dealing with ADHD has been sort of what I've been struggling with my entire life. I was lucky and got diagnosed very early, but I always thought it was an aspect of business, but in many respects, it's not just about owning a business; it's about any aspect of your career, where the hardest thing you're ever going to have to do, on some level, is learn to understand and handle your own psychology where there are so many aspects of how things happening can impact us internally. I can't control what event happens next, of people yelling at me on Twitter, or I get a cease and desist from Amazon after they finally realized five years in, “You're not nearly as funny as we thought you were. Stop it.”Great. I can deal with those things, but the question is how I'm going to handle what happens in that type of eventuality? It's, am I going to spiral into a bitter depression? Am I going to laugh it off and keep going on things that are clearly working? Am I going to do something else? And so much of it comes from—at least in my experience—the ability to think through what's going on in a somewhat dispassionate way, and not internalize all of it to a point where you freeze. It's way easier said than done, I want to be very clear on this.Johnny: That's absolutely right. Stepping back, seeing the forest for the trees. I've recently become fascinated with systems thinking. You know, I'm in Silicon Valley, so I might as well start looking into a complex adaptive systems—Corey: Oh, no.Johnny: —[crosstalk 00:21:09] buzzword. We don't have to go down that thread because I'm very much an amateur when it comes to it, but what it does is it forces you to look at the connections between the components rather than the reductionism approach of let's look at this component, let's look at this component… instead, it forces you to step back and see the system as a whole. And so when you're responding to you just got a cease and desist, you know, of course you're going to feel depression, of course you're going to feel anxiety, and understanding all those as part of the system of experiencing that situation, it lets you kind of step back and say, okay, it's normal to be feeling this, it's normal to be feeling that. How can I harness these and structure my approach so that I can get to some further point where I not only know what I can do, and what options are available to me, but I have a clear path forward and strategy for how I want to approach this.Corey: How long have you been in your career at this point?Johnny: So, I graduated college in 2009. And I worked at my first company for about ten years from 2005, so I guess you could say 17 years, plus or minus, if you don't count internships.Corey: Looking back, it's easy to look at where we are at any given point in our career and feel that, oh, well, here's where I started, and here's where I am now, and here are the steps I took along the way where there's a sense of plodding inevitability to it. But there never is because when you're in the moment, in the eternal now that we live in, it's there are millions of things you could do next. If you were to be able to go back to your to talk to yourself at the beginning of your career, what would you do differently? What advice would you give yourself that would have really helped out early on?Johnny: You know, I think the thing that gave me the most leverage in my career was—as I move forward—is seeking out communities of like-minded, positive people. On the surface, that sounds a little shallow; of course, you would want to seek out communities, but what I've observed is that the self-organizing communities that pop up around technologies, or ideas, or roles, their communities of people who want to help you succeed. And I think, you know, one of the ways I reached out to you and was able to contact you was through one of these communities, right? So, you know, I talked a little bit the Cleveland Tech Slack earlier; most people aren't familiar with what mediums are even available. There's Discord, there's forums, there's Slack, there's probably other areas that I'm not aware of, where you can find people who will help you find that next step in your career.Actually [laugh] I got my first taste of community in online video games, so—Corey: Oh no.Johnny: —playing World of Warcraft back in 2003, you know you would have a guild—I was, gosh, how old was I in 2003, basically, early-20s and, you know, you'd have a guild of 40 people trying to coordinate all over one single voice chat server. And there was various groups and subdivisions, and so that was almost a project management exercise in itself. That's where I first learned project management. By the way, I have a sneaking suspicion that the roles that we play and that we are have an affinity for in video games mirror the roles that were best suited to play in life. So, I find myself playing a support class in League of Legends or a priest in World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online. I'm always that support person, the glue that helps keep things moving. And surprise, that's exactly what I do for my career. And it works perfectly. So.Corey: The accountant I keep playing gets eaten by goblins constantly, but, you know—Johnny: [laugh].Corey: —that's the joy that I suppose.Johnny: So, pretty early on, I developed this skill of creating friendships, and those friendships, in turn opened me up to these new communities. So, if I were to give one piece of advice to my early self, it would be to put more emphasis on finding and seeking out the communities that consists of people who are interested in the things that you're interested in, but also are willing to help you get to where you want to go. How do you succeed? Well, you find someone who is doing what you want and you talk to them. About it and you figure out how to get to where you're at from where you're at.And maybe they can't help you, maybe they can help you but, you know, we have a unique ability to crowdsource our questions, whether it's on Reddit, whether it's on Slack or Discord, and just say, “Hey, I'm thinking about this thing. Does anyone have any thoughts?” You're immediately—you know, if you ask the question correctly—given five or six different opinions, and then you can kind of meld and understand, okay, here are the options. Again, going back to what we were saying about how do you even decide what the next steps are? You can crowdsource that now, and so the one piece of advice that I would give is to seek out communities of like-minded positive people.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. 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My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: And I think the positivity is important. There's a lot as particularly in tech, that breeds a certain cynicism that breeds a contempt almost. And Lord knows, I'm not one to judge; I revel in a lot of that when it comes to making fun of companies' ridiculous marketing and some of the nonsense we have to deal with, but it has to be tempered. You can't do what some of the communities I started out with did. IRC, learn how to configure Debian or FreeBSD, where it was generally, “Oh, great, someone else joined? Let's see what this dumbass wants.”It doesn't work that way. It's like just waiting for someone to ask a question so you can sink the knives in is not helpful. Punch up, not down. And making people feel welcomed and valued, even if they don't understand the local behavioral norms quite yet is super important. I'm increasingly discovering, as I suspect you are as well, that I'm older than I thought were when I talk to folks who are just starting their careers about here's how to manage a career, here's how to think about this, I am veering dangerously close to giving actively harmful advice, if I'm not extraordinarily careful because the path that I walked is very much closed.It is a different world; there are different paths; there's a different societal understanding of technology and its place in the world. There's a—what worked for me does absolutely not work the same way for folks who aren't wildly over-represented. And I increasingly have to back off lest I wind up giving the, I guess, career Boomer advice style of irrelevant and actively harmful stuff. How are you thinking about that?Johnny: So, I guess that kind of gets into the underpinnings of what I think it takes to be successful, right, and how do you find success in any aspect of your career? And—Corey: And what is success?Johnny: It differs for every person—yeah, what is success? And we were talking just before the show about how every person experiences not only what is success, but what does success mean and what do you believe the key is differently. For me—and this is pretty on—brand with where I am in my career and what I do—is I think the key to success is preparation. And it really ties into finding those communities and asking those questions, right?There's three key aspects to it, right? First is understanding how you learn. Everyone learns differently, and so knowing how you learn—and you know, college and school is kind of meant to kind of eke that out; it's how best do you learn? How best can you succeed with these tasks that we give you, study for this test, learn these concepts? If you can understand how you learn, that's the first step in preparing correctly, right, building your personal knowledge systems around that, taking notes, ordered hierarchy, structured thinking, that sort of thing.Knowledge management is a good field, if you ever have some time to figure out what you want to do with your external hard drive of your whiteboard like I have back behind me here. The second aspect is just mastering how to seek out information, right? So, how do you prepare? Well, you have to understand how to seek out information. You mentioned, you know, positive communities versus potentially cynical or toxic communities. Their opinions are still very valid.They might be jaded and they might provide a cynical opinion, but you still need to encompass that within the spectrum of your understanding of the world, right, because they have something that happened to them, or they have some experience that still is very valid from their perspective. So, seeking out information, understanding the people and the tools at your disposal, the communities that you can go to knowing how to discern the signal from the noise. And again, that's really where your thread that really helped me—because you nailed a bunch of the questions that I just wasn't entirely sure on in that Twitter thread, and when I went through that, it hit some of the major points that I was just uncertain on, and you just gave very clear, albeit, you know, somewhat tongue in cheek cynical advice, to say like, don't worry about the company, worry about yourself. And that really was helping me get to that next step.And then lastly, how do you prepare? And this is the one I always struggle with. It's calibrating your confidence barometer. What does that even mean? How can you calibrate your own barometer of your confidence? It's a knowingness; it's knowing what to expect.And so for example, when I was getting into Google, I had no idea what to expect in terms of the interviews. So, what's the first thing I do? I go out and I ask a bunch of people, people who know people who are at Google people who are at Google, what do I expect? What should I prepare for? What communities should I join? What books should I read? What YouTube videos should I watch?I ended up finding a book called Cracking the PM Interview by Gayle—I think her name is Laakmann McDowell. There's a Cracking the Coding Interview as well. That ended up being, like, exactly what I needed, and going through that cover-to-cover got me into Google, amongst other things, and talking with the community. So, calibrating your confidence parameter, that knowingness of, I know that I'm ready enough for this. There will always be things that catch you by surprise, but knowing that you're ready and having that preparation and that internal knowingness not only increases your confidence, but it also increases your ability to operate improvisationally when you're in the moment.And in fact, that's exactly what I went through for this podcast. I have a little document in front of me where I just jotted my notes down last night, I was thinking through, what do I want to cover? What do I want to say? How can I respond to the questions that he's going to ask me? He might ask me, you know, a curveball, but I have some thoughts that are structured, I'm prepared for this so that no matter what happens, I'll be okay. And again, that really gets down to that essence of philosophy of program management that I have. No matter what happens, I'll be okay; no matter what happens, we'll be okay. And believing in that and having a level of knowingness—[laugh].Corey: I am not a planner at all. For me, my confidence comes from the fact that I can't predict what's going to happen so I don't even try. Instead, what I do is I focus on preparing myself to be effectively dynamic enough that whatever curveball comes my way, I can twist myself in a knot and catch it, which drives people to distraction when they're trying to plan a panel that I'm going to be on. “Okay, so we're going to ask this, what's your answer going to be?” I have absolutely no idea until I find the words coming out of my mouth.And if I try and do a rehearsal, I'll make completely different points, and that really bothers folks. It's, I don't know; I'm not here to read a script. I'm here to tell stories, which is great for, you know, improv panel activity and challenging if you're trying to get a software project off the ground. So, you know, there are different strengths that call us in different ways.Johnny: Exactly. I mean, the flip side of preparation is improvisation. And you know, I spent ten years as a jazz musician playing trumpet in a swing band back in Cleveland before I moved out here. And that really helped me understand how to think improvisationally, right? They give you the chords, the underlying structure by which you can operate, and then you can kind of choose your own path through there.And sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, you learn over time, you come up with libraries of ideas to pull out of your head at any given time. So, there is an aspect of preparation to improvisation. And I think if you, I would encourage you to think about it more; I bet you do more planning than you think you do; maybe you just don't call it that.Corey: No, I have people for that now.Johnny: [laugh]. “I have people for that.”Corey: I am very deliberately offloading that. Honestly, that was part of the challenge I had psychologically of running my own place. If I were just a little better at following a list or planning things in advance, all these people around me wouldn't have to do all this extra work to clean up my mess. Instead, it's okay, let it go. Just let it go and instead, focus on the thing that I can do this differentiated. That was my path. I don't know how well it works for others, and again, I'm swimming in privilege when I say it.One last topic I want to get into, I think it might be part of the reason that you and I are talking so much about the future, the next generation, and the rest is we're recording this on March 9th. I don't know the date this is going to air, but there's a decent chance that will be after April 22nd, where you and your wife Emily are expecting your first child. So congratulations, even though I'm a little early. I definitely want to get that in there.Johnny: Thank you.Corey: Have you found that since you realized you were expecting a child—with an arrival date, which is generally more accurate than most Amazon order dates—that you find yourself thinking a lot more about the future and how you're going to wind up encapsulating some of the lessons you picked up along the way for, I guess, the next generation of your family?Johnny: Yeah. I mean, everyone who finds himself in this situation, finds himself somewhere between panic and bliss, right? There's some balance that I have to find there. And fortunately, my wife Emily, and I have a very strong rapport when it comes to how I think and how she thinks, and so we're able to—you know, our emotional intelligence is very high; we talk about that sort of thing a lot. And we try to plan for the future as best we can, knowing that things will go off the rails as soon as you know, what's the old saying about the best laid plans and how, you know, every plan is—Corey: Man plans and God laughs.Johnny: Yeah, or goes awry as soon as the first shot is fired, et cetera. Thinking more than five years out is still pretty challenging for me, but thinking within the first five years, we can already sketch out some plans. I already have some ideas of where we want to go and what we want to do and how we want this new child, this being, to experience the world and how we want to impart the things and the wisdom that we've learned and experiences and skills that we've developed—Emily and I—to this new child, realizing that I have no idea what's coming and I have no idea what to expect because I just really haven't had much exposure to babies or children at all in my life, so I'm just kind of rolling the dice here and trusting that it'll all work out really well. And again, going back to communities, the communities that I'm in, there are parenting channels, there are friends and family that I can talk to. So, I have everything that I need in terms of knowledge.Now, I just need to go through the experience, right? So, I'm definitely thinking a lot about the future. In fact, I've got a—I don't know if you can see it here—quarterly plan for my life up here on the wall that I [unintelligible 00:35:33]. It's just something that I can glance at every so often, and there it is, right, there: ‘Q1 2022: Kid.'Corey: How long has that ‘Q1 2022: Kid' been on the board? Like oh, since 2014? Like that is remarkably good planning.Johnny: Mid-2021.Corey: Okay, fair enough.Johnny: No joking: Mid-2021.Corey: [laugh].Johnny: Yeah, just even having that up there and writing a sticky note and slapping it on there for, like, a hey, here's what I think, some of them fall off, some of them don't fall off, but I'll tell you what, more than more often than not, it actually ends up working and happening and being realized, no matter what it is. Because just having it there and glancing at it every so often is that repetition, it keeps it on my mind. It's like, hey, I should probably think about that. The next thing you know, it's done. And then I can take it off and put it in my binder of accomplishments.Corey: I am about five years ahead of you on that particular path that you're on because five years ago, I was expecting my first child. And I don't want to spoil the surprise entirely, but I will Nostradamus this prediction here, five years from now, when you go back and listen to or watch this episode and listen to yourself talk about how you're planning to parent and your hopes and your dreams, you are going to, in a fit of rage, attempt to build a time machine to travel back to what is now the present day for us, in order to slap yourself unconscious for how naive you are being [laugh] because that is—I'm hearing my words coming out of your mouth in a bunch of different ways, and oh my God, I was—it's the common parent story you all these hopes and dreams and aspirations for kids and then they hand you a tiny little baby and suddenly it becomes viscerally real in a different way where, “It's going to be a little while until I can teach you to do a job interview, isn't it?” And other things start wind up happening to, like—Johnny: [laugh]. Right.Corey: —what do I do? I've never held a baby before. How do I not drop it and kill it? And later in time they learn to talk. They talk an awful lot, and then it's like, how do I give them a bath without drowning them in the process? Not because I'm bad at it, but just because I'm at my wit's end because I haven't slept in three days.Parenting is one of the hardest things you'll ever do and everyone has opinions on it. And it's gratifying to know that the world continues to go on even in these after-times where things have gotten fairly dark. It's nice to see that flash of optimism and remember walking down at myself. It's exciting times for you. Congratulations.Johnny: Yeah. Thank you. It's a beautiful thing. And I'm self-aware and I have a knowingness of my naivete, right? And that's part of the fun.And the whole idea of it is an explorative journey. I have no idea what to expect, but I have a good support system; my wife is incredible. She has an early childhood education degree, so that's going to be really useful. Yeah. And so kind of going back to that concept of preparation.And I don't feel a lot of anxiety about it because I am feeling like I have the knowledge, the community, the friends, the family in place so that no matter what happens, I'll be able to maneuver through it. And I can ask, and I can get help. Yeah, so that's where my head is at with that. [laugh].Corey: We'll be checking back in once you're up to your elbows and diapers and I assure you, you'll be lucky if it stops your elbows.Johnny: [laugh].Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me about your own journey and, I guess, a variety of different things; hard to encapsulate it all at once. If people want to learn more or chat with you, where's the best place to find you?Johnny: Yeah, thanks for asking. So, I have a website jmpod.com, JM Pod. My middle name is Michael. So, John Michael Podhradsky. jmpod.com. That links to my blog, there's links to LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. I'm most active on Instagram.I'm always looking to connect with and just chat with new people, people who want a new perspective, people who are interesting or want to share their stories with me. Coaching is something that I thought of doing in the long-term. It's not on the plate right now because I'm focused on my current career, but that's something that I'm very interested in doing, so you know, happy to field that questions or if anyone wants to reach out and hey, what communities can I look for or where should I be looking for communities, I'm happy to help with that as well.Corey: I will, of course, put a link to that in the [show notes 00:39:39]. Thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it.Johnny: Yeah, this was a fantastic experience. It's the first podcast I've done, I'm hoping it went well, and I really appreciate that you even asked me to do this. It was a surprise. My eyes went like dinner plates when you said, “Hey, why don't you come join me?” And I said, “Absolutely. That sounds like a fantastic idea.” So, thank you again, Corey. I really appreciate spending time with you and looking forward to doing it again sometime in the future. With a baby in the background, screaming. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yes. They do eventually sleep; you won't believe it for the first three months, but they do eventually pass out. Johnny Podhradsky, technical program manager of Offboard Infrastructure at Waymo. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment telling me exactly which tweet of mine you followed for advice and it did not in fact help your career one iota.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.