ANTHOLOGY – Self-hosted, self-confident & self-employed

Well, have you met Jerod before?

No.

Well, this is Jerod.

I’ve heard you many times, but…

Yes. And I’ve heard you many times.

Oh. Awesome.

Yeah. Happy to meet you. Mutual fans.

Alex runs – is it selfhosted.fm?

.show.

.show. What happened to the .fm?

Too expensive.

No.

You wanted the show.

I don’t know. I just figured that .show was – it’s Self-Hosted Show, so selfhosted.show seemed to be the…

It works.

Okay. I’m not a hater.

We have shipit.show…

We do.

…but that’s because we could not get shipit.fm.

Yeah. Somebody owns that. Whoever you are, give it up.

Give it up!

It’s ours.

Somebody owns selfhosted.com, and I’d love to know who that is.

Yeah. That’s probably expensive. That’s a nice domain.

The question for you is this. Could you do, like, similar to a commercial open source company forms a company around open source, could you form a company around the podcast? Like a services business?

Around Self-Hosted?

Yeah. Could you do that?

It’s an interesting one, because I think…

Because you’ve got the media – what is it called again?

Collection. The media collection apps.

No, that guide you have. What was the name of it?

Oh, Perfectmediaserver.com.

Perfectmediaserver.com. Okay. Thank you.

Yeah, it’s an interesting one, because you look at the routes people come into self-hosting through, and it’s typically things like Plex, and collecting media through nefarious means…

Nefarious…

But I think these days there are a whole new subset of people coming in through home assistant and home automation.

Yeah.

This mythical new Linux user that we talk about in the Linux world for years and years… It’s happening through those platforms, because they enable things to run on like Raspberry Pi’s, that you couldn’t do full fat Windows; you just couldn’t do it that way.

Right. It’s like a gateway drug.

But one of the big appeals of self-hosting is - yes, data sovereignty is important, but it’s free as in cost for a lot of people, too. So they can ditch subscriptions with a lot of these apps… So in terms of like a services company, I’ve thought about it quite a bit, but you’d have to charge more than most commercial services, standalone services for just one thing, which is like a… Well, I could go and do it for free on Unraid. I can go and do it for free on Linux, or Docker, or like whatever. It’s tricky.

Yeah.

Have you thought about writing a book, or a guide to like capitalize on your… Because you’re putting a lot of information out there, and the consolidation of information enables what? Value exchange. So what happens when value exchange is? Money. A little education for you, Jerod, in case you didn’t know.

Thank you. Thank you.

I do put a lot of stuff out on YouTube these days. On the Tailscale channel, also KTZ Systems, Self-Hosted podcast, perfectmediaserver.com… It’s all over. But maybe I should write a book.

I’m just curious. Did you know that Alex started Linux Server IO?

Yes, because I listened to your guys’ episode.

Right. Did you know that before that?

I didn’t know that before that.

It was proof you were listening then.

And neither did I. Did I? I mean, I prepped for that show, but…

What, you’ve found out on the show?

I discovered it on the show.

I think you thought I was making it up.

[laughs]

I was like – I had to check this guy.

He’s like “No, you don’t…!”

I paginated back to like page one of the blog… Sure enough.

Boom. Yeah.

Sure enough. Right there.

So for me, a lot of this stuff started just by – I was trying to compile a kernel to put PCI pass-through in it… Because I was cheap. I couldn’t afford a second computer… I could afford a GPU though, so I threw that in my server, in my Unraid server, did the pass-through in there, and I’m like “Everyone else needs to know how to do this, because this is awesome.” So I started writing blogs about it, and sharing information. And that’s how it’s…

How many times have we heard something like that? Like, that story, in a different space, is the beginning for so many people. It’s really rinse and repeat in your little niche, and there’s not guaranteed success, but if you do it long enough… I mean, you’re going to bring so much value to so many people.

[00:08:06.22] I hope so. I mean, sometimes I wonder who’s actually listening after a while…

Sure.

Because I feel like – I mean, for me, the message has been the same for like eight years now. But there’s always new people coming in and want to hear new stuff. So…

Yeah. Well, you might become jaded, but your audience might not, even.

It’s not so much jaded, because I mean, I still get a lot of utility out of it myself. I run Home Assistant at home, I run Jellyfin, I have Proxmox… Everything that I can self-host pretty much is self-hosted. And Tailscale obviously helps with that, because I don’t need to open ports in my firewall, and all that kind of stuff. But from my perspective, it’s weird to see my episode.

Your episode’s right there.

Did you plan that?

No.

We sure did.

That’s random.

We have a TV to Alex’s left, my right, and we have clips playing there for the audience. And there’s Alex and me talking about Jellyfish…

Great lighting, too. Very nice.

Well, you were actually shooting a log, right? And then you changed…

Yeah. I actually figured out after our episode, how to get my Ninja V to output the log profile straight out of HDMI in through OBS, so… Now it’s fixed. But for that episode, that was the log.

It was good lighting. Good lighting, for sure.

Yeah.

What’s got your interest these days? Whether it’s Tailscale, or personal… What’s got your attention?

NixOS.

Linux?

NixOS.

NixOS.

Yeah.

Like the package manager, or the actual operating system?

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, because it’s really – so Nix is talking about the language and the package manager and the OS, as you say.

Right. Yeah, it completes.

But I started managing all my MacBooks using Nix Darwin, and then trying to build a single flake that can configure all my different Mac systems using Home Manager. And then I’ve started trying to get involved in NeoVim as well, and mechanical keyboard… Like, I’m going down the rabbit hole pretty hard, of being like –

[unintelligible 00:09:56.10]

No… [laughs] Factorio also. That came out this week and that’s been a big time sink.

Okay…

Victoria Metrics?

Factorio.

Oh, Factorio. Oh, that’s the game, right?

Yeah.

Like some sort of a builder game…

Yeah.

I haven’t played it, so I’m literally ignorant right here. I’m like telling you how much I know about it. You play it…

I’ve got like a thousand hours in this game, and I don’t play video games. But that one… What’s different about that one?

It’s basically software development, but in game form. Like inputs, outputs, API interfaces, all that kind of stuff…

Yeah. So Chris Hiller on JS Party is big into that game, and he was trying to tell me about it… And I was like I don’t want to try playing that, because I’ll probably never stop.

It kind of feels like work sometimes. I’m not going to lie.

Like a grind? Are you grinding?

No. In just so much as the fact it’s exactly like software development.

Wow.

Like, I am building this entity, and it’s got to interface with these other entities… And before you realize it, you’ve built basically a modular piece of code that you can reuse different – and then you spend most of your time refactoring the base, to make it more efficient… And the analogies to writing code are very strong.

Okay.

Very strong.

And the joy, I guess, would be similar… Joys.

The joy is there’s no boss.

Ah…

But there is this kind of guilty pleasure in it of “I must be productive.” I don’t know if you guys feel that too, but I feel like I’m wasting my time playing video games, and yet sometimes I just need to…

Right.

Whereas the rest of the time I’m busy making content, probably like you guys, thinking on it in the shower, and just… The grind never stops in that regard.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. I use video games now as like a decompression from work, 45 minutes to an hour after I’m done working…

Yeah.

Put everything else away and just play for an hour, and then I can be done and move on.

Have you played Geometry Dash yet?

[00:11:48.27] Oh, yeah. I played Geometry Dash way back in the day. I mean, I’ve moved on from it, because I was kind of addicted to it.

Do you ever move on from it, really?

Well, maybe not. I mean, it changes you.

Yeah.

But yeah, I love Geometry Dash. I just don’t play it anymore.

Well, my son got me into it because he’s got into it…

Great music, too.

Yeah. And he loves – he wants to be a DJ.

We should give BMC some Geometry Dash. Just a side note…

Yeah.

I remember the first time I got heavily into Transport Tycoon, and I was about 14 or 15. It was OpenTTD when that started. We took a holiday… [unintelligible 00:12:20.25] lived in England at the time, in case you couldn’t guess… We took a holiday in Florida, Orlando. You’ve got all those interchanges flying around, and I’m like looking at designs, thinking “I could implement this in the game…”

[laughs] Yeah, I got big into Roller Coaster Tycoon and SimCity…

Oh, yeah.

After that, I kind of moved away from builders myself.

Yeah.

But now it’s Rocket League. My kids like Rocket League, and now I like it… And so we play it together, which is a great co-op…

Can relate. I’m somewhat of a Bluey fanboy these days myself. Yeah.

[laughs] There you go. So you’re talking about things, you try to self-host everything you can… What services do you not self-host and why?

Great question. My password manager. I pay Bitwarden $10 a year to host that, because if I get locked out of my vault, I can’t get back into anything to unlock the vaults… And it’s like this catch 22.

Yeah.

And so I’d much rather pay Bitwarden. Because it’s only $10 a year, or $12 or something for them to do it. And it’s like, that trade-off is worth it for me. I still pay for Google Photos as well, for right now, at least… But Image is coming up real good, which is like a self-hosted Google Photos clone… It’s got things like machine learning, face detection and duplicate detection, and all that kind of stuff in it, too. It needs a good GPU to do that, so it’s properly doing CUDA library stuff…

Oh, wow.

But yeah, I think really password managers is the only one where I’m like…

“Nah…”

…cloud, please.

Even though you could. Bitwarden, you could totally self-host. Easily.

Yeah, you could. Absolutely.

Right. Well, can’t you just like literally host Bitwarden itself? Because it’s open source…

Well, they’re changing things…

Are they?

Bitwarden?

Yeah, Bitwarden re-licensed an SDK…

I thought I saw they reversed that though, because of –

They might have since. This was like last week though. So there’s news since then?

Yeah –

Because they pushed – there was pushback.

They got to the top of Hacker News a couple of times, and… Nobody wants that.

Right. So they reversed course? That’s cool. I’m glad to hear that.

I recall, years ago, probably like at least two years ago, I was standing up my own Bitwarden, just to play. I’m with you, I don’t know I want to host my own password manager, because it’s just… It’s too much of a – I suppose if the tech is already secure, I don’t have to worry about it. And like whoever gets access to it, you have to authenticate. So if that’s good to go, whatever. But it’s like if it’s down, and then I have that access from everywhere… I wasn’t that good at poking holes in my firewall at the time, you know? So I was like “Nah, I don’t know if I want to do that.”

What else would you not host? You obviously host your data, right? Like, you host a ton of data, and you’re cool with that.

Next Cloud is what I use to host – that’s like a Google Drive replacement, Dropbox replacement…

Yeah. Are you happy with that?

Mostly.

Okay…

It’s a big fat PHP app. It’s kind of slow, it’s kind of clunky. It breaks a lot. But I have it now as a Nix module, and I just don’t touch it. Now it’s stable. I just leave it alone, and it just does its thing in the corner. But it’s trying to be a platform for small to medium businesses, I think. You can install Office suites on it, you can install calendars, contacts, email, file syncing… There’s a million different add-ons you can get for it. Once you start getting beyond the core product, it starts to get pretty crufty pretty quickly, really.

Gotcha.

Brittle, I think would be the word.

Brittle, yeah. Photos is interesting, because we’ve debated photos recently…

We did.

…as kind of a hard line of like the one thing you don’t want to mess up.

Mainly, my point is know what you’re getting into. If you’re going to self-host your own photos, and you’re the arbiter of the final copy, know what you’re getting into.

Yeah.

Have a backup plan.

The only reason I trust myself to self-host photos is because I have an offsite server back in England that I replicate everything to.

That’s right.

With ZFS [unintelligible 00:16:24.15]

[unintelligible 00:16:25.00]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Does it snapshot, too?

[00:16:31.05] Yeah. ZFS is cool like that. So like copy on write, all that kind of stuff. It will only sync the blocks that have changed, or the delta. So…

Yeah. Send Receive is pretty cool…

I recently got Fiber as well. So I’ve got like a five-gig upload now, which is…

Wow.

I’ve gone from 30 meg to 5,000 meg, and it’s like… I upload stuff to YouTube every day nearly, and it’s amazing.

Yeah. That’s awesome.

What’s with Tailscale these days? What’s new and fresh there? What’s the latest?

Still developing relations with developers, I guess…

[laughs]

Yeah. It’s pretty good. We just had our company offsite in Mexico… Whole company gets together once a year, because we’re fully remote. So everybody looks at Tailscale being like head-officed in Toronto, and they’re like “Oh, they’re a Canadian company.” In reality, there’s four people in a WeWork in Toronto.

Yeah.

And everyone else is just geographically spread. Like, I’m here in Raleigh, there’s people in San Francisco… All over the place.

Yeah.

So there’s a lot of excitement at the moment in the company about where things are going over the next year or so… We’ve made a bunch of new hires, and new blood, and stuff like that. And just changing the structure, and growing into our next phase.

It sounds fun.

I think it will be. Yeah.

I like Tailscale still yet. I’m not a hater. I’m a lover. My use case is pretty simple though… You know, that’s it.

How do you connect to your stuff at home from here?

Just put up Tailscale…

Exactly.

That’s it. This is so easy.

And that’s fine. And it’s free…

“Is it on? Is it connected? Okay, cool.”

And it’s free for you, because you’re just one person, right?

That’s right. And I love that. And I do run an exit node at home, on a dedicated VM. I guess, could you say a VM is dedicated? It’s not an Apple TV, let’s just say. It’s a VM that’s dedicated to being – that Ubuntu server is a VM, and it’s meant to be the exit node. That’s it. Tailscale makes my life simple. It’s kind of boring, because it’s so easy… And that’s kind of good, right?

I often say it’s WireGuard on Easy mode, and it sounds super-cheeseball, but it’s true, right?

Yeah. I mean once you’re – there’s not really a lot of setup. You do all the heavylifting, and it just blends in. I don’t have to think about it and worry about whether or not it is working or not working.

I remember the first time that I went to set Tailscale up… This is like probably three years ago before I worked there. I set aside the whole weekend to retool my WireGuard around Tailscale… And I was done in like 10 minutes, and I’m like “Well, what am I going to do with my weekend?” I was expecting that to be really difficult, and…

It was not hard at all.

…Tailscale was just really easy.

Tailscale is really easy. Dig it, man. Jerod doesn’t Tailscale though, do you? You don’t need to, right? You have no need for Tailscale.

What about if you need to control a mixer back in Texas from here?

Don’t do it. Jerod lives a simple life.

I do. Very simple.

And it’s not that he tries to not be complex… He tries to be simple.

I do.

Which is a different thing, really.

That’s a feature though, not a bug.

It is a feature, yeah. I’ve designed my life around it. I mean, we are homebodies, we are homeschoolers, I work from home… I have one laptop, I take it with me when I go somewhere… I’ve got nothing to connect to back home…

Yeah.

I mean, the Mac Mini has some old movies on it, but I’m not going to watch those if I’m on the road. I’m going to watch whatever’s on Netflix…

You’re going to watch the world go by the window, right?

Yeah, exactly. So young Jerod would be all about Tailscale, but old Jerod, I’m just like… I’m not a self-hoster.

Yeah.

[00:20:00.16] I still think it’s cool tech. I remember the bad old days of Hamachi VPN, I think it was called… Which was, I think, open source, but it was definitely free. It was my closest analog to Tailscale, before Tailscale. And it was cool, because you could do a lot of the same stuff… And that’s pre-WireGuard even. I’m not sure how it worked. I know it was a VPN, but… You know, we had NAS’es in different people’s houses… And we were sharing backups with each other. Like, I backup your stuff, you backup mine. I did all that stuff the hard way, probably 15 years ago. And so now…

You’re just not interested now.

No. I just have different interests. I like to talk about the stuff. I like to hear what people are up to… But I just don’t have that hacker mindset with that kind of stuff. I just don’t.

Yeah. I think for me it’s when companies like Disney just jack the price up, to be double in the space of a year, or… You’re beholden to business models. And it’s a trade-off that you’re making of convenience versus time versus sovereignty of that data and information, and stuff like that. Your choice is time and money. My choice is “Invest a lot of time, and a lot of money in hardware”, and then I also get the sovereignty of the data as well.

Yeah. I 100% understand that. And I understand it would be cool to have a Plex library with like all the movies, and all that kind of stuff, that I own… But my choice when Disney does that - I just canceled Disney Plus. I’m like “Peace out, guys. I don’t need you” you know? I’ll live the simpler life…

Until the kids are like “Where’s Bluey?”

And then I tell them. “Bluey’s no longer with us.” [laughter]

Bluey’s no longer with us.

You know? So yeah, I mean, that’s another trade-off, right? It’s like, okay, now I’ve got to deal with that situation.

Yeah.

You can’t do that to everything in your life, so you make choices.

Yeah.

But then you end up spending thousands on hardware, and… For me it’s also an educational piece, too. The skills that I’ve learned through building my home lab have gotten me the jobs that I’ve had over the last decade. And by staying true to my passions, and just doing what I find interesting, and talking about it, that comes across in all the content that I make, and things like that. And I think ultimately it makes for better content, that people can relate to better, and all that kind of stuff. As opposed to scratching around for ideas for content the whole time… It’s like, no, this is what I’m doing anyway. If I find it interesting, probably at least a couple of other people will.

Yeah. I had the chance to – and I still might, actually. Do you know Techno Tim, by any chance? Tim Stewart?

Of course, yeah.

So when he was on the pod a couple of times, I was like “Dude, you really need to spin off and do a podcast that’s adjacent from your YouTube channel, because you’re sort of like diving deep into certain things… I think there’s a room there for it.” And he and I were skunkworking the idea. But then I felt like… I was like “Tim, I don’t know if I could be your co-host, man. I like the idea… One, I don’t know if I have the time for it, and then two, I kind of feel like even though I’m a home labber, I kind of think I’m an imposter in a way, because I’m not like every day, every weekend, every possible moment am I thinking about like tinkering in my home lab.”

It’s a problem.

And whereas Tim is. That’s Tim’s MO. That’s his style. I kind of even felt like imposter there… I was like “Tim, I think – I don’t know if I could be your co-host, man, for this thing. I like the idea of you doing it.” And I think he’s spun up a couple other channels now, that’s like gone from his single channel to like giving him more freedom… And I think he’s kind of doing that now. But I even feel like there’s times I’m like “I’m not even sure I’m home lab enough for home lab.” And so like for you and your job and what you do with Tailscale and other things, like…

YouTube’s a whole beast, though… And it’s turned somewhat in – I’m going to get on my soapbox for a second.

Please do, get on it.

It’s turned somewhat into a bit of a shopping channel, where there are these guys like… I mean, no disrespect to Tim, to Jeff Geerling, to Craft Computing, to Raid Owl, to all these guys.

Those are four great channels.

They do a lot of really good stuff, but they’ve got to pay the bills. And so they take a lot of sponsored videos, and a lot of hardware… And woodworking YouTube suffers from the exact same problem…

Totally.

[00:24:14.01] Where you think “I need this massive garage.”

What’s the latest planer?

Right.

[unintelligible 00:24:16.28]

Full of a bandsaw, and a jointer, and like…

Right.

The reality is a track saw and a table saw and a couple of sanders and you can get most things done with that. And the same is true in home lab. You don’t need to be home lab enough to be home lab. Like…

Well, I feel like it’s even gone beyond home lab. It’s like, well, now it’s literally a data center in your home lab.

Right.

And it’s almost – and I’m not hating either. I love Tim, and Jeff, and all those guys.

Same. And I don’t mean to be negative. It’s just…

Precisely. I think it’s the nature of the content beast in a way, where there’s not good enough. You almost have to like almost give it your soul, or feel compelled to. And I’m not going to do that.

Like, a 30,000 view video gets you a hundred dollars. I can’t pay my bills with that. “Just get more views” is the answer, but there are only so many home lab views around. And you see these big guys, and they’re getting one, two, three hundred thousand maybe. So let’s just take the 30k and extrapolate to it… Well, it’s a thousand dollars for one video that does really well. I’m doing four of those a month… That’s still pretty tight if you’ve got a mortgage and a kid to pay for. So you have to take these third party deals and sponsorships… And I know you’re not immune to that in the podcasting world as well. And it’s trying to strike that balance between finding sponsors people find interesting, versus… And we have this on Self-Hosted, too. At what point does a hobby become a business?

Precisely.

It’s easy to turn a hobby into a business, and then learn to hate it because you’re doing it all day, every day. I was a classically-trained musician. I hate music now, because it’s just too… I love listening to it, but I don’t play anymore, because it was too competitive. Too real. Too much.

It demands something from you, and I think that’s what separates those who go beyond all that, and “make it”, and those who don’t. It’s not the ability, it’s the desire to go through the slog of what’s required to get to greatness. Perceived greatness, not literally greatness. Because it takes a lot out of you to produce a podcast for 15 years, or to do all the things you’ve done. It takes a lot.

And I don’t think people realize the content grind of – I mentioned the shower earlier. I’m thinking about how I’m making a Tailscale YouTube video today… I’m in the shower thinking about how I present that idea, how I make it interesting. Who’s watching? What do they find interesting? Trying to second-guess every little detail that you can. It’s a lifestyle. It’s not a job. To be good at it, I think, it’s a lifestyle.

Precisely.

I hadn’t appreciated that before taking this DevRel job at Tailscale and going full-time.

Is it a lifestyle that is worth living?

I think so.

Is it sustainably so?

If you tell 15-year-old Alex he would get paid a salary to make tech videos, I think he’d be pretty happy.

Yeah.

I dig it, man. So I was wrong, it’s not a .fm. It’s selfhosted.show. And I think one of the things you talked about recently was No Google November… Is that right? Or No Google October?

No Googtober.

No Googtober?

No Googtober? Okay.

Yeah. So we’ve been looking at a bunch of stuff. Self-hosted search… There’s an app called Searxng. It’s spelled Sear, like you sear a steak, and then xng.

Okay.

It creates an anonymous Google search profile for every query you make. So there’s no tracking cookies. I mean, they know your IP address that it’s originating from, but beyond that it’s a brand new empty search profile every single time. There’s no ads, there’s no tracking, there’s no spyware… All of that stuff. And it presents the results – do you remember how Google used to look 10 years ago?

[00:28:02.04] Yeah.

And now it’s got this AI nonsense at the top, and pictures, and… I’ve trained myself to scroll to about a third of the way down the page before anything interesting actually happens. With Searxng, it’s right there at the top. Every time.

And it can self-host it, and I connect to my instance, through Tailscale, of course, running in my basement. What I didn’t expect though was to start looking at other things, like AI search, like Perplexity. Have you come across Perplexity yet?

A little bit, yeah.

Amazing. Google must be quaking in their boots, because you can self-host Perplexity with something called Perplexica. And then you can use searching to – Perplexity goes out to the internet and does those searches on real content, because ChatGPT is based on two years ago, right? The data they scraped two years ago.

Right.

It’ll say, “Sorry, I have no record before October 2022” or whatever. Whereas perplexity is searching YouTube videos right now.

Constantly. Yeah.

And it’s summarizing videos from like right now.

In real time. That’s dope.

So you’re like “Is the AMD 9950X the best CPU right now?” And it will go out and it will transcribe a bunch of videos, figure out the answer, and then you can ask it questions. Google’s done, in my opinion. Until a proper chat style comes out… Perplexity is so good.

And so you’re self-hosting Perplexi-ta? Is that right?

Perplexi-ca, yeah.

Perplexi-ca.

Perplexi-ca isn’t quite ready for prime time. It crashes quite a bit at the minute. And you need a GPU to do the machine learning, like the AI… Because it plugs into Olama.

But the idea is there.

It plugs into Olama underneath to do the –

Could you run it on like an M4 Mac, or something like that?

Yeah. Anywhere Olama will run.

So maybe you can throw like a Mac mini on your network and just let that be the workhorse.

Yeah. A couple of Docker containers, Olama, and you’re good to go.

Dope. That’s a couple down in your most recent episodes, so… Selfhosted.show. Full length, go deep, I’m sure, right? Chris is your co-host?

Yeah.

So you guys go deep on that. What else you got, Jerod? Anything else?

I’m just now realizing that I’ve been without Google for a long time, but I’ve just been suffering with DuckDuckGo. And it’s like, I should just replace that with Perplexity and I won’t be suffering. I’ve just lived without. And I’ve learned how to use DuckDuckGo to the best of its abilities…

Example… I was doing some messing about for my talk here, and I wanted to know the file path that the Nginx Docker uses for its default volume mapping. And I literally said, “Perplexity, what is the default Docker Nginx mapping for the HTML directory?” It came back with the slash user, slash share, whatever. Boom, right there. I didn’t have to go to look at the actual Docker hub page, nothing. It was like right there, and it was…

So non-self-hosted, what’s their model? What’s their business?

Perplexity - you get a certain amount of searches for free, and then you can pay $20 a month for Pro searches, whatever that means. I haven’t looked at that.

Cool.

So you said Perplexi-ca is not ready for usage, necessarily…

Mine’s been unstable. I mean, I don’t know if that’s just an Alex problem or what, but…

Right. What are you running that on?

An Epic 48-core thing with like an NVIDIA –

So it should be humming.

It’s not a hardware problem. It could just be –

A software problem, yeah.

It could just be that revision has a – I don’t know.

That’d be dope. That’s cool. I mean, especially if you’re on the LAN… I suppose you can always expose that via a Tailscale URL.

Yeah.

Thank you very much, Tailscale. To be able to match your own search that’s self-hosted. I can get down with that. I mean, we’ve given so much to Google… So much.

It’s time to take it back… Take it all back.

It’s time to like just stop giving it to them. You’re not gonna get it back, but you can stop giving it to them at least.

I can hear Tom Morello warming up somewhere over there, you know…

There you go. Good reference. I was trying to go for a Goonies reference, but it’s probably too deep of a cut…

Do it. I want to hear it.

He’s like “Those dreams up there… Those are other people’s dreams.” He’s like “Down here, these are our dreams. And I’m taking them back. I’m taking them all back.”

Yeah, I remember that. Yes.

[00:32:09.02]

“But you know what? This one. This one right here. This was my dream. My wish. And it didn’t come true. So I’m taking it back. I’m taking them all back.

That was my big cut.

That was good. Sean Astin. We love you, man.

Yup.

Alright. Well, thanks, Alex.

Yup. Thanks, man.

Thank you.

Isra. Isra, Isra…

Yes.

Yes!

Here we go.

How close do I have to be? Is that good?

It depends on how loud you’re going to be.

You’re golden.

You’re golden.

Sweet.

So we asked you to come on the show yesterday morning, now it’s today afternoon… But you made it.

I did. I almost didn’t make it.

You’re stepping outside your comfort zone.

I am.

Do you find that hard to do?

It is, but I gave my first conference talk this year, and it was because somebody pushed me to do it… And so if I don’t start to take more of those chances myself, I’ll never step out of my comfort zone… And I can’t rely on other people pushing me to do something until I do it myself.

Right. We kind of pushed you into this one, didn’t we?

Yeah. Well, a gentle nudge is what I like to call it…

We gave her a nudge… We didn’t require it of her, but we…

Constant gentle pressure.

…we just wanted her to come on the show. We’re happy to have you. First time at All Things Open.

It is.

Impressions.

It’s great. Every day I walk through and I find more booths and more floors.

Lots of booths, yeah.

Yeah. It’s a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. I’m used to more smaller conferences, capped at a thousand people… So it can be a little bit intimidating, but I think going to more conferences made me a little bit more comfortable speaking to people, whether at the booths or at the hallway track, just kind of finding people that you have things in common with, whether you went to the same sessions, or just at lunch… Yeah.

Yeah. We’re hallway trackers ourselves, aren’t we, Adam?

That’s right.

It’s where all the fun is.

It’s where we belong, you know?

It is.

It’s our home.

It’s where the people are.

Yeah. I’ve had more conversations with people than I have been to sessions, and I think I like that a lot better. Because you can find a lot of the content online, whether it’s on YouTube, or a blog, or things like that. But the thing that I miss most is that interaction with people, because I do work remote. And so I go to conferences for those connections, for those interactions, and not really for the sessions.

What if we just had a conference that was only the hallway track?

That would be incredible.

Hallway Conf.

I would go to that.

That’s right.

Coming to a…

Hallway near you.

Yeah. “Don’t go in there! There’s no talks!”

The nice thing about that is you don’t really even need a place to gather. You just need a hallway.

Yeah.

We don’t need an auditorium.

Would you have vendors and stuff, too? Would it be like this?

Everything would be in the hallway.

But it would get pretty crowded though.

Yeah. You would need a pretty big hallway.

Would there be a revolt attempting to organize?

What would be cool would be to put it in like an arena, but just in the hallway of the arena, in the circular… And so you would just walk in circles.

The whole time.

We’d call it Circles.

A figure eight.

Yeah.

Well, that’s not how they’re designed… Oh, you want to cut through the middle?

Just thinking out loud, you know… [unintelligible 00:40:24.24]

This is what we do. Welcome to the podcast. We think out loud…

What do you think? Would you go to that conference?

I would.

If we just made you walk in a square circle, or a figure eight circle, or a continuous –

Kind of like a speed networking kind of thing…

Yeah.

Yeah.

What would attract you to that conference? The hallway? Because you come here for the people that come here, to hang out in the hallway.

Yeah. I think it’s a hard sell. Especially if you have like the company paying for it. It’s hard to sell your employer on “I’m just going to go talk to a bunch of people.” Like, where’s the business value? And that is what a lot of them would probably have a little apprehension with.

Right.

But it’s kind of like a meetup, just on a larger scale.

Yeah. Or like an unconf, Basecamp style. Basecamp? Barcamp.

Foocamp.

No, not Foocamp. Barcamp.

Barcamp.

Barcamp was a response to Foocamp. Do you know Foocamp?

I don’t.

Do you know Barcamp?

No.

Okay. So Foocamp stood for Friends of O’Reilly.

Okay.

And that’s Tim O’Reilly.

Tim O’Reilly.

The creator of the O’Reilly Empire. Media empire.

OSCON…

And he had an event that was, I think, on his property, or somewhere near where he lives… It was very exclusive, invite-only. You had to be a friend of O’Reilly to go. And it was a camp. Foocamp. I think they camped out.

Okay.

That part might be gray area, but the rest is true, at least. And cool for everybody who gets invited, but not cool for anybody who doesn’t get invited. Right? So Barcamp was a response to Foocamp, because Foobar…

Oh, okay…

[00:42:07.19] And so Barcamp became an un-conference, where anybody can come. You don’t have to be a friend of O’Reilly. You can be anybody. And because it was an un-conference, there was no pre-planned schedule. So you show up on a Saturday morning, for instance, everybody gets together, and there’s whiteboards, or even just construction paper, and there’s a schedule, like “Here’s slots.” And you just show up – a lot like lightning talks. You just show up and sign up for a slot. And then you’re putting together the conference as it’s going.

Yup.

Pretty fun.

They actually did that on Sunday at All Things Open.

Oh, yeah.

That first day there were two tracks. There was the community track and then there was a diversity track. And the community track was essentially a bunch of people writing down talk ideas or session ideas. And they just get around in a room, in a circle, and kind of talk about that one topic.

Yeah.

That conference also does a similar concept.

That’s right.

Open Spaces.

Open Spaces. So we went to that conference in Austin, in January.

Yeah.

Were you at that one?

Not in Austin, but I went to the Wisconsin one.

We wanted to go to Wisconsin. We didn’t quite make it. But you did…

I did.

…a Spaces. What was that called? Birds of a Feather? Was it called Spaces? I don’t know, like there was tables…

It was called “Come to my table and hang out.”

And you would sign up… The tables were lettered or numbered, and you would sign up “What we’re going to be talking about at this table.” And Adam, you did home lab, or something?

I did. I did home lab and I did podcasting.

Was that cool?

That was cool.

Did you get a lot of people come to it?

Describe a lot.

More than one?

Four or more.

Oh. Yes. A lot. Yeah, it was good. We had some good conversations about both. Home lab and podcasting.

I think a lot of people are probably interested in podcasting, in some way, shape or form.

Yeah.

I did a really good job with my placard, though, because you could put it up on the board… And I decorated it.

Oh, nice.

I made it look flashy, you know?

Do you think that’s how you got such big numbers, like more than four?

I think it was a great topic, but it was also “Oh, look at me.” I was peacocking, you know?

[laughs] I guess you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.

Get your attention, bro, you know? Get your attention.

So that’s cool. I like the idea of – I like improvisation, I like spontaneous things… And so I really have – I’ve gone to a lot of Barcamps over the years. There used to be a Barcamp Omaha every year for a long time. And they were just fun, because you never know what you’re going to get.

Right. You don’t know who you’re going to meet, and what you’re going to talk about.

Exactly.

Oh, that’s pretty neat.

Adam is showing her a picture of what he put on, the That Conference…

It was the main thing, and I put a little subtopic.

Let me see it. I’ll describe it.

Go ahead, Jerod.

It says, all caps, in blue, across the top, “Homelab!” Exclamation mark. That’s it. Oh, no. I thought those are names.

I thought people signed up. It also says now, in kind of a cloudy, kind of a [unintelligible 00:45:05.24] “Unifi. ProxMox.”

Tag cloud.

Oh yeah. It’s a tag cloud. VLANs. Ultimate. Ultimate? Ubuntu. [laughs] Texas. Docker. Oh no, TrueNAS.

Texas… Can you read?

Your handwriting leaves a lot to be desired. Wi-Fi 6. Pi-hole. Now, did you talk about all these?

Yes.

So that’s not even false advertising. Now, the other one says PODCAST in all caps, and then ing in lower caps, because I think you probably forgot to put that in there… Exclamation mark. Mics. Software. Sales. Editing. Questions.

Community. Clips. Gear. That’s good. That’s good advertising.

I like that, because a lot of times you have a topic, but you don’t really know like what they’re going to be talking about…

Almost too open-ended.

It’s too generic.

“Oh, I don’t Unifi.” Or “I know about”, you know, something or other…

Or you want to.

Yeah.

Switching ports, and stuff… Come on now. Wi-Fi 6?

Right.

And they get you.

I don’t know what that is.

See? But you would want to…

[00:46:11.10] You might show up and find out.

…because you know about Wi-Fi’s generally, right?

Yeah.

What is Wi-Fi?

Wireless… Something?

Yeah. I think it stands for fidelity, but I could be wrong.

That’s right.

But yeah, wireless networks.

And 6 is a good number.

And 6 is just better than 5, you know? It’s the next version.

Yeah. Better than 4, too.

It’s here though, right?

Wi-Fi 6. It’s here.

Many devices are Wi-Fi 6 enabled, but not all of them.

Yeah. It’s not faster. It can do more concurrent bandwidth.

Right.

Than Wi-Fi 5.

It’s a wider pipe, but not a faster pipe.

That’s right.

Cool.

Interesting. I learned something today.

So if you were to command a space and advertise it - did you do that at that conference? Did you start one?

I did not, but I attended my first open space this year, which is surprising, because we’ve done open spaces at that conference for 11, 12 years, but I was always interested in the sessions, and I didn’t realize that the interesting conversations usually happen in those open spaces or in the hallway. But I went to my first one this year, and it was on meetups and how to get people to show up to meetups, how to organize meetups… Because a lot of them have died down since COVID. A lot of them are pretty much gone. So how do we bring those communities back? How do we, in a sense, resurrect those meetups, and get people more involved in those things?

Yeah. That’s cool. So if you’re going to start a space though, you’re going to step outside your comfort zone, and next year at That Conference, I’m going to run a space.

I would probably do it on React Native.

Okay.

I’ve been a React Native developer for two years now, but I’m a solo dev, for the most part, and I don’t know a lot of others in the community, at least immediate community, that do React Native development. So it would just kind of be interesting to see if there are people doing mobile development, what are they using… If they’re interested in React Native, I could maybe talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. How do you keep up in the React Native world?

I listen to the React Native Radio Podcast. That’s hosted by Infinite Red, who is one of the leading consultancies, actually one of the biggest consultancies in the US for React Native development. I also read their newsletter. They have a newsletter that they publish with some of the latest news. I keep up with the React Native releases. They’ve just released 0.76 recently… And then just kind of keeping up on Twitter, just reading up on new libraries and frameworks with Expo.

Brand new architecture, right?

Yeah. New architecture by default.

Yup. Do you have a take on that?

I haven’t used it yet, but it’s supposed to be faster, and then obviously the old architecture…

Yeah.

So there’s a lot of push for React Native packages to switch to the new architecture, because there are ones that are still not compatible with it. So if you do switch your project to new architecture, there might be some packages that kind of have issues with that. I know there’s a big movement to get those packages compatible… So yeah.

What else, man? Anything else?

Is it GPT-able, React Native? Like, how do you level up and learn? Where do you get your new skills?

By doing. It is GPT-able, but some of the stuff is a little bit older, or outdated.

Right.

So you kind of have to keep up with documentation, you kind of have to try it out for yourself and play around with it… But yeah, that’s kind of been one of my biggest struggles, is where do I find those resources when I have questions on “How do I do this?” or “This isn’t quite working the way that I expect it to. Where do I go?” And so Twitter… Infinite Red also has a Slack community of a lot of React Native developers… So if you have questions, a lot of times you can go into their Slack, ask a question, and somebody will be able to either answer, or point you in the right direction to figure out where to go from there.

[00:50:18.17] Nice.

What are you doing? You said learn by doing. So what are you doing?

I’m building a React Native template. So I am using React Native CLI to build a template with React Native Hook Form and Zod for forms and validation, and integrating authentication, with the idea that if I wanted to build a mobile app with React Native, these are the things that just kind of come with it… So I don’t have to rebuild it from scratch.

So these are things that I like to use, or would make development easier… And just kind of learning by doing. So how does validation work with Zod and React Hook Form? How does authentication work with Auth0? How do you implement state management with all of these technologies, and what’s the best way to do it? So it kind of helps me learn about the technologies that I’m using, but also how to integrate them with other technologies, and have something that I can then take and use to build a real world app.

Awesome.

If you had a magic wand to change React Native, an angst, or just something you haven’t learned quite as well as you’d like to yet, what would it be? How would you change it?

Debugging.

Debugging?

Yeah.

What’s the problem there?

So I think the tools that we have today aren’t like the tools that we’re used to in web development. There is – I know there’s a debugger that’s coming out with React Native 0.76. I’ve heard about it in React Native Universe, or React Universe… I can’t remember the name of that conference, but it was held in Poland earlier this year.

Most of my logging and debugging in React Native is console logs, and I’m sure a lot of people kind of do that… It’s just not a lot of good tooling around debugging in React Native. There is Reactatron; it was also built by the folks at Infinite Red. I haven’t had a chance to try that out yet, but it’s one of those things where if I could know more about debugging in React Native, I’d probably try Reactatron, try out the new debugger in 0.76, and kind of figure out how best to do that.

Awesome.

Dope. Good job.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for sharing with us.

Now you’re a podcaster.

Awesome.

Damn. You did it. We did it. We all did it.

It’s done.

It’s not as scary as I thought it was going to be.

I told you.

Yeah.

It’s fun. You just talk to each other.

Break: [00:52:49.04]

Well, we’re here with Avi Fernando.

Fernando.

Fernando.

We’re here with – I was about to call you Avi. I just changed the A sound.

Avi. “I’m Avi now, y’all.”

Avi Fernando.

That’s right.

From Kansas.

Kansas City.

Kansas City. Born and raised?

Not born and raised. Born in Sri Lanka.

Okay, Sri Lanka. How did you get to Kansas? Are you in the Missouri side or the Kansas side?

I live in the Kansas side.

Okay.

Yeah. So I got here when I was 19. I wanted to pursue a degree, so that’s why I’m here.

KU?

KU.

Rock Chalk Jayhawk.

Oh, Rock Chalk. Yeah, absolutely.

Sorry. We speak a different language here in the Midwest.

What did you say? Say it louder.

I said Rock Chalk Jayhawk.

Yeah.

Rock Chalk?

That’s their saying.

Rock Chalk Jayhawk?

That’s our chant.

Yeah. The KU Jayhawks.

Chalk’s the motto. The mascot.

They’re the Jayhawks.

Rock Chalk Jayhawk.

That’s right.

Yes. You’re saying it right.

That’s what they all say to each other. It’s kind of like saying –

Keep going, and you’ll be chanting it.

It’s a chant.

Give me a demonstration. Give me a demonstration.

Rock Chalk… Jayhawk… KU…

I did not go to KU.

Alright…

But I’ve been there many a times, and I know the chants, because I lived nearby. Alright, so you’re 19, moved from Sri Lanka to Kansas, of all places.

That’s right.

[laughs] And then you never go back.

No. Yeah. I stuck around in Lawrence, finished my bachelor’s in computer science…

Nice.

And then decided right after, “Let me do a master’s as well.” So I pursued my master’s right afterwards, and then stuck around in Kansas City since.

Got married, started a family, started a business.

Yes.

In that order?

Eventually. Yeah.

Eventually. Sure. Probably skipping over a lot of life there, but…

So my wife and I, we met at KU. We were both teaching assistants, so we started dating right around the time of graduation. So we both started at Cerner, which is a large healthcare IT company in the Kansas City area, on the same day.

Wow.

So we’ve had a great journey from the very beginning.

Yeah, you have.

In lockstep. That’s good stuff.

Yeah.

And you are a React guy?

Oh, one of my specialties. Yes.

Okay.

What’s your list of specialties?

Mostly front-end. Yeah. I would say React, Next.js, I do a lot of Playwright tests, Cypress for my clients…

Yeah. And you are running your own business.

Yeah. Since 2021.

How’d you get there?

Great story. So back when I was working at Cerner, I got to meet a lot of architects and senior engineers, which I had learned a lot of knowledge from. And then this journey goes along… At one point I decided to join another big company. At that point, I started to feel like I was attending a lot of meetups locally, because I wanted to spread the knowledge that I was gaining from the other people. And I spoke to a couple of directors at RSA, at the time, and then they were like “Yeah, you bring the meetup in-house and we’ll let you host it, we’ll let you have people in it…” So it was awesome. So I was really motivated by all of that. But then I realized what I’m missing is I’m seeing how big companies run, how they operate, but let me see how the small companies run. So I took the risk and I said “Okay, let me just go join a startup.” A product startup. So that was my journey into seeing how a product works. And from a startup level, there was only like five people at the startup, and everyone was wearing different hats.

Sure.

[01:00:25.09] Getting started with it. Learned a ton there. Constant innovation, constantly grinding… Great, great, great time there. What I was thinking to myself at that time was “Okay, now I’ve got the product startup perspective. How does services or consulting work? Let me go experiment that.” So I joined a services startup, which their motto was consulting. A couple of guys, amazing, amazing dudes. Got to work with them, see how they negotiate contracts, bring in different contracts…

One of the contracts was so interesting to me. I was working on an app for someone; that was his hobby. He wanted this idea of a virtual bar. So he was mapping out all the bars in the cities that they go to, and would give the ability for someone to purchase a seat in the virtual world, which was a fascinating idea. I was like “People pay for this stuff?” It’s like, yeah, this is cool stuff. So I got really motivated by that.

And then I eventually decided, “Okay, I’m just going to start this journey on my own and see how things go.” So that’s fast forward to 2021.

Sure.

I worked with a client, and at that point I decided, “Okay, the project’s going really well, and I think I can pull the plug on my full-time job”, and took that leap and never looked back.

Gotcha. So you were kind of a weekend warrior at that point.

Yes.

You had a job at your nights and weekends…

Yes.

I was wondering, because for a lot of people going into their own business, especially a services business, a consultancy, the question is “How do I get that flywheel going? Do I just quit my job and take the leap, or do I weekend warrior it for a while?” So did you have a plan from the start, or was it just kind of like opportunistic?

Yeah, I think I jumped into the opportunity. Maybe in hindsight I probably jumped in too early… But again, I have no regrets.

It’s never a good time, man.

Yeah, absolutely.

There really isn’t. You can’t time that stuff. It’s like the market. You can’t time the entrance into a stock.

Oh yeah, for sure.

I mean, you can, but it’s hard… It’s basically impossible. So just get in.

Yeah, absolutely.

The best time is now.

Oh, yeah.

And so you’ve been doing that for three years?

Yes.

What’s the hardest part?

Hardest part is managing the different clients, and keep the pipeline full all the time. So now, wearing different hats, not only consulting, not only coding, not only mentoring…

Selling.

Selling. Yeah.

Closing.

Invoicing.

Invoicing, collecting money…

Contracts are tough too, because you want to scrutinize those contracts. Those contracts are obviously like words of bond… So it’s got to be clear. And you don’t want your client relationship to go haywire because you did not word your contract well enough. There’s always little details between each contract that changes. And there’s a lot of details in that process.

And finding the right people who actually write the check. Some companies it’s the CTO who does that, some companies it’s not. The CTO still has to talk to the CFO, or the senior engineer will have to go talk to someone else… So getting everyone on board.

So do you have to spend a lot of time hunting down a check? Once you’ve delivered your invoice, is there sometimes like “Hey, you know, y’all owe us the money [unintelligible 01:03:44.10] to pay us”, you know?

I’ve been fortunate so far. So… Knock on wood.

You’ll hit it, eventually. Especially larger – the larger the org, the less they care.

What’s your TTP?

What’s that mean?

I’m making this up right now. [laughter] Time to payment.

Yeah. Do you have like a net 30, or…?

MTTP, sorry. Meantime to payment.

Mostly net 30. That’s my standard. But a couple of months, too.

[01:04:10.05] It’s good.

But I learned a new word today.

MTTP. I just made that up just now. Meantime to payment.

Here’s a pro tip on your terms. Take that net 30 and turn it into “Due upon receipt.” Because if they’re big enough, they’re not going to care anyways. They’re going to pay you when they want to. And if they’re small, they’ll take that net 30 very seriously, and they’ll pay on the 30th day. So if you just change that to “Due upon receipt” and they’re serious, they’ll just pay you as fast as they can. But the other ones will ignore you anyways. They’re not going to pay attention to your net 30. It won’t really matter that much, but you might as well try to get paid as fast as possible.

Gotcha. That’s what I do with one of my clients, and they’re really good about it.

But yeah, the larger ones… It’s like, you’re a vendor in the system, and there’s some…

They don’t even care what your net anything is. It’s like “Net whatever I want to pay you. If you’re lucky, I’ll pay you.”

The nice thing is though on larger ones, once you get that deal set up and you’re in the system and you’re on those terms, they will actually pay you reliably.

That’s right.

Whereas the smaller customers, they might run out of money in the meantime, or something, and just not have the money to pay you. I certainly hit that as well in my time.

Yeah. It’s interesting, I worked with a foreign client too, and sometimes you have tax concerns too. You’ve got to get the right documents before they can pay you. So I had to go obtain a tax certificate saying that I pay taxes in the United States, so that I don’t get double-taxed in the other country. So yeah, there’s a lot of hoops you’ve got to jump through when your actual customers are from outside of the US.

So when I first started, I thought to myself “If I want to work 40 hours a week, and I can bill X dollars per hour”, I think it was like 75 when I started… “And I can get that 80% of the time, then I’ll make this much money.” Does that dog hunt? And then you look at that number and you’re like “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can live off of that.”

What I didn’t realize is that working 40 hours a week - if that’s what you want to do, which is what I wanted to do - and billing anywhere close to 40 hours a week, those two things don’t happen, right?

No. Very rarely.

It’s a dream. So what percentage of your working hours are you billing? Is it 50%, 80%? Because you’re a solo consultant, right? So you don’t have any help on anything; maybe some software doing some stuff…

That’s right, yeah.

But like everything that has to happen in your business, you’re doing it or software is doing it. How much of your time are you billing on a weekly? Percentage-wise, don’t need hours.

Yeah, I would say about 80%.

80%.

Yeah, that’s a good estimate.

And you have a large customer, which helps…

Yes, absolutely.

How many hours a week do you work?

About 35 to 40 right now.

Nice.

Self-employed? Working 35, maybe 40?

Yeah. Which is pretty good.

[unintelligible 01:06:54.16]

What are you looking at me for?

Well, because I just – I want a response.

From me?

Yeah.

Well, I was telling Jerod earlier that I do have a capacity. I’m always constantly looking to keep a couple of clients at the same time. So I can agree to some more contracts, and get those hours in.

But you’ve got an 80/20 rule on your customers. Like, currently you have an 80% customer, and everything else.

Yes.

Yes. So that helps you get to that 80% billable…

Yes.

If you had three smaller customers at the same time and no larger one, you’d spend more of your time trying to fill that pipeline.

Yeah, yeah.

And if that 80 turns into zero, now you’ve like flip-flopped. So there’s risks on either side.

Going like on a big hunt.

There’s no perfect way to set it up.

Yeah. And it depends on the year, it depends on the month. All of these formulas would change, and you’ve got to constantly keep adapting to the new role.

I’m just surprised.

What are you surprised about?

That you only work 40 hours. Not a lot of people do that.

Yeah. Well, there’s a primary reason for that. So we have a little one at home, and I deliberately want to spend as much as time with –

Good for you. That’s the way to do it.

Heck yeah.

With the kids.

Just because you have that principle doesn’t mean you get to always do it. And that’s good for you that you do.

That’s right. Yeah.

[01:08:11.21] I’m surprised, not because I think you should, but because you don’t.

Yes.

Which is a good thing. And you’re talking to two people who prioritize their family deeply. Is there a better way to say that? Deeply? Hugely? Massively? Bigly?

Bigly is the right word.

Bigly is the word.

Yeah. I thought about it. It’s like, those years of my son and my daughter…

They’re not coming back.

Yeah. The time, once it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s the most valuable thing.

Yeah. And I have a bunch of them, so the way I look at it is – I’ve got six kids. And I look at it like every year I lose six years. Because all six of them get one year older. So that’s six years they’ve actually gained on a single year, and so how precious is each one of those?

Oh, absolutely.

Once they’re all adults, those years won’t matter quite as much. But right now, they aren’t coming back.

I’m about to start crying, man…

Look at the three of us here.

It’s hitting me hard…

Although Avi’s got [unintelligible 01:09:08.27] because his kids are literally with him… Last year I had a son with me, and the year before, but…

Yeah. I considered bringing my son, and I really wanted to bring him. I was just thinking… I’m just not sure.

How old is he?

Eight.

He’s a little young.

Yeah. I think he needs like one more year before he can… I would not be able to concentrate, I think. And it’s not his fault, it’s that – I would actually probably want to experience it with him, so I would be distracted as a dad, you know? Whereas otherwise, I can totally focus.

Yeah. So we pick and choose. So this is the second conference. My wife - she’s speaking here too, and she gave a keynote earlier. So that’s why everyone’s here.

Are you flexing on us right now? Is he flexing?

He did. He literally flexed his body when he said that. [laughter]

He’s flexing. Alright, we get it. You’re cool. Continue.

No, your wife is cool.

Oh, you’re both cool.

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

You’re both cool.

That is nice though.

He’s cool by proxy. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Well, the truth is we couldn’t find a babysitter.

They’re still in lockstep.

That’s true. [laughs]

They’re still in lockstep. Yeah, look at that. After all these years. So you’re doing the consultancy. What does she do then?

She does very similar, consultancy as well. She does mobile, so… Yeah, that’s her specialty as well.

Alright. So you’re both kind of doing everything the same.

Yes.

Now, is one of you better than the other?

There are talks about merging the companies, because we don’t want to pay the same accountant two times.

Yeah, exactly. You might as well minimize your costs.

We started at different times and different specialties. Going forward - let’s merge.

Yeah, totally.

Brand new company name. Maybe even like – I don’t know, what’s the company’s names?

So my company is [unintelligible 01:10:49.13] So we can hyphen it, maybe.

The old hyphen…

We’ll have to sit down and talk about that one. [laughter]

Well, she’s not here to speak for herself…

That’s right. So we need to decide right now, before she gets here.

That’s right, yeah.

See if she agrees. And if she does…

You’re both eyewitnesses, right?

Yeah, exactly.

We signed it in the document. We’re good.

Well, that’s good, man. I mean –

That’s very cool.

Power couple. It’s a power couple right there, man. So much potential and possibility.

Yeah.

That’s cool, man. Good for you.

Thank you.

And you get to have your kids with you, too. I mean, what a blessing.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

That’s where it’s at, man.

Yeah. I’m hoping my daughter - she came to my wife’s talk. She’s inspired. So hopefully, she wants to be a speaker one day.

Yeah.

That’s where dreams begin right there, man.

That’s right. But Jerod - I mean, I’ve got to tell you. Six kids… You’re a power dad. For sure.

Well… My wife’s pretty amazing, too.

He’s either foolish, or very smart.

I think he’s pretty smart.

A little bit of both. Yeah.

There’s a fine line between a crazy person and a wise person, isn’t there?

Any twins in there?

Nope.

Okay.

All organic.

Power dad.

All organic. [laughter] As if twins are non-organic. That’s what it is.

Well, thanks for chatting with us, Avi. It was fun.

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me.

It was a blast. It was the best.

Break: [01:12:21.24]

So who are these people?

These are people that have been on the show.

Those are not you.

Oh, okay. I’m like “Who are they?”

Future yous.

Oh, God. Oh, this is video. Oh, okay.

We’re not doing video here.

Oh, okay, good.

Do you have a drone? I’m just kidding.

So this will be audio only, but…

What did you have for breakfast?

Is it started?

We’re just sound-checking, yeah.

Gotcha. Yeah, I had scrambled eggs and coffee.

You ate scrambled eggs?

Mm-hm…

And coffee?

Yeah.

Lots of coffee?

Lots of coffee.

That’s a very common breakfast.

Yeah, very standard. Yup.

What did you have for breakfast?

I had two eggs, over easy…

No toast…

No toast… I had some hash browns.

Light fruit.

And one strawberry. And one slice of orange.

Wow.

Yeah.

Very detailed.

The breakfast of champions. I remember it like it was just this morning.

Usually, my breakfast is just leftovers from my kids.

Yeah, I know how that goes, too.

Leftovers, huh? So you’re a leaders eat last kind of person?

Sort of, yeah.

Tell me more.

Yeah, I have a couple kids, and just look at them waste all their food, and then I know they’re not going to finish it, and then I just eat off their plate.

“Give me that muffin you didn’t eat… There’s the half a bagel I wanted…” Right?

Yeah, my daughter is good at loading up the plate, but she’s not going to eat any of that, so yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

My mom used to do that constantly. We’d call her like the garbage disposal, because she would not let anything get thrown away… And whatever was left over, she’s like “Just give it to me.” She was never happy about it. She’s like “Yeah, I’ll eat that…”

My mom did the same.

“You didn’t eat this?! I’m going to eat it now!”

Yeah, just “We’re not throwing anything away.”

Yeah.

Which I appreciate that sentiment, but it’s like “Well, you’re just taking in empty calories on our behalf, mom.”

Yeah. It’s got pros and cons. You don’t want to overeat, for sure.

Yeah, totally. So we spoke with Avi yesterday, and so we got his side of the story.

Okay.