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Chris, tell me about your vision.

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It's kind of a wide open question.

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So for many years I was a tech guy.

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So about 43 years in high tech.

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But in the meantime working towards what I'm doing now,

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which is a full-time travel journalist.

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So I've been doing this for 19 years.

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And basically trying to encourage people to travel places

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that they wouldn't have thought of before.

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And the big reason for that is for travel for me is both

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one of the best forms of education,

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but also I think shortens the distance between us and other people.

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Yes, it does.

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The more you know people from pick a country,

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the more you think of them as like us rather than different from us.

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That is a very well set point.

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I'm from India, born and raised.

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I moved to the United States when I was 18.

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And I haven't been back since I think a year before COVID.

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It's been almost four or five years now.

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Maybe six.

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So I can see that.

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There are so many people that want to come talk to me.

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They want to meet me.

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And there are so many people I want to go meet in India.

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And there are so many people that, even family and friends.

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And I can see that a little bit.

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The more I don't see them, it's different than what I am.

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So I think I see what your point was you're saying.

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So I agree to that.

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What would you say, Chris, your vision from being in the tech industry?

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Because I'm also in the tech industry.

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And that's how I started my career.

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And now I'm in the podcasting world, transition, so many things.

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From being tech for you to going to the amateur traveler,

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I think that's very, very interesting.

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It's something that blows my mind a little bit.

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So how did that come about?

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Well, I did both for 19 years.

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So I was tech by day and travel journalist by night for about 19 years.

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Working into some form of retirement, and I have to put that in quotes,

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where I wasn't doing the tech job and basically could travel more.

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I'm not sure I understand the question, so I'm not sure I can give you a good answer.

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So what are you looking for here?

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So how did – let's talk about the journey from the tech and the traveler journey,

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and you did it at the same time simultaneously.

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How was that?

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So you were passionate about traveling, but you were in this tech world that you could not,

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because that pays the bill, right?

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And that's what you wanted to do at the same time.

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How did those come together?

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If you're spending eight hours a day in the tech world and somebody just –

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That would be nice to spend just eight hours a day, but yeah.

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Yeah, I'm saying at least.

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If you're working at least 40 hours a week, five days for five days,

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and then traveling at the same time doing that, how did that –

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I'm sure you have to be working online or remotely, right?

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Well, so often I wasn't – so one of the things when I started the show,

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because I discovered podcasting relatively early on, within the first year of podcasting I started,

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and my original plan was that I was going to be talking about my travels,

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but that actually made no sense because I did have a full-time job.

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I was working 48 weeks a year and traveling four weeks a year, and podcasting 48 weeks a year.

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And so that very quickly turned into a show about other people's travels

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because then that aligned with what my life was actually like, right?

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You have to build into your life these other projects, these other jobs that you have.

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So it definitely turned into – at some point I was doing two full-time jobs basically.

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I was doing the travel influencer, travel podcaster, travel blogger.

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I'll also run another podcast, not in the travel space.

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And then doing a full-time job quite often at a startup company

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because I've spent about – well, over 20 years in Silicon Valley startups.

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So it would be nice if it was a 40-hour a week plus the other job on the side,

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but it was a combination of the two.

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But I mean part of the thing is a lot of us are not just one thing, right?

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We don't just have the one interest.

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And so I was still loving the tech jobs.

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And as you say, they do pay the bills, and they pay a lot of bills,

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a whole lot easier than being a blogger especially.

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And when I started certainly being a podcaster

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because podcasts were pretty tiny way back in 2005.

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People didn't really hear about it, thanks to Joe Rogan.

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A lot of people hear about podcasting now.

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Yeah, podcasting predates Joe though.

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Yeah, but he definitely made it much bigger, influenced a lot of people

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who want to be on podcasts now. They want to talk about it.

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Even recently, someone in my family and friends,

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they're like, hey, let's just start a podcast and talk about a mom's life.

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I'm like, that's the way that you have confidence to do so.

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So kudos to Joe, I would say, to making that.

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So your Joe is my Leo.

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So for me, it was this week in tech was the first place I heard about podcasting

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way back in 2004.

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And for some people, it was serial.

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For other people, it was just getting it when it showed up on the iPhone.

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So there's no one person, no one show that has been that influential.

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If you look at the graphs of how podcast consumption has happened,

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it's almost all up into the right since I started,

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except for one year around COVID where the consumption went down

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as people were trying to figure out their lives and their habits

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and all those sorts of things.

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But it's pretty much been up into the right.

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The first day of podcasting for someone is going to be tomorrow

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because they're going to hear some show.

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They're going to hear your show and be introduced to podcasts or whatever.

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But it's always been people discovering it through a variety of shows.

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Yep, awesome.

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What would you say, Chris, that gets you out of bed every morning to do what you do?

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Both with the tech and with the travel stuff now,

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it's something I love to do. It's passion.

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And part of it is the joy of creation.

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So I certainly spend a lot more time or have spent a lot more time

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over the last 20 years creating content than just consuming content.

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You're not going to find me living all day on Instagram or TikTok

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or something like that just watching other people's work

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because while that's fun, it doesn't have quite the same juice for me

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as the joy of creation, putting out something and building an audience

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and those sorts of things.

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A lot of frustrations along the way there also,

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but it's pretty cool when you build something and other people appreciate it.

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What did you do in the tech world? What did you create in the tech world?

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A variety of things.

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Most recently when I retired, I was a director of engineering for American Express.

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I had been at a six-person startup company creating some software

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for financial planning that American Express bought in 2022

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after we had been around for about three years, they bought our company.

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And we launched that as a product for them.

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I think it's Smart. What is it called now?

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I want to call it Smart Budget, but that's not quite the name of the product

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under the American Express logo, but basically that product is now available

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to their users for free, at least a portion of what we wrote.

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The full product didn't launch before I left.

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But before that, I started in ICCAD,

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so integrated circuit computer-aided designs in simulation.

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I went to pen-based computers and then really have been doing internet

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since the internet was steam-driven, basically building websites

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or building communities online at a variety of different companies,

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Apple and TripAdvisor and American Express, as I mentioned,

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and some startups in between there as well.

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That's awesome. Thank you, Vaishana.

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What would you say, some of the lessons that you learned in your journey

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as an amateur traveler or as a tech person who is creative

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and wants to create more and more things,

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what would you say, some of the impactful lessons that you learned,

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maybe that changed you?

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I've been talking about 43 years of a career trying to break it down

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and impactful lessons.

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The people that you're doing things with make more important than anything else.

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I've been in a variety of different fields and you form a good team.

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I'm not a financial guy, or at least I wasn't when I went to a financial services

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of FinTech company, but it was an interesting product,

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but it was the people that made it fun.

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It was the team around you and a good team.

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One of the reasons that I've done 20 years in startup companies

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is I like that environment in terms of everybody's pulling in the same direction,

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small group of people.

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You don't have a lot of excess, you don't have a lot of extra,

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but that's a pretty fun thing for me.

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That has probably been the number one thing, for instance,

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that got me back into my last startup.

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It was a friend who I've worked with for four different companies said,

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hey, I'm doing a startup.

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He wasn't saying do you have one more in you,

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but that was the thought in my head is can I do yet another startup company?

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This was about a year pre-COVID.

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That's awesome.

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I completely agree to that.

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When I'm working in first class business right now,

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I think focusing on who is very important.

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A lot of people talk about the Simon Sinek's like, hey, a why, what you doing,

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then the how and the what comes later.

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Then through wisdom that I learned from a few of my friends,

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the who comes first before the why

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because if I didn't know about Simon Sinek, I would never have read his book.

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That was for me.

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If you focus on the who first and then the why,

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I think things are much simpler, much easier.

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The other thing, and this applies to both,

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in the startup space one of the sayings is that you do the first one focusing on the product

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and you do the second one focusing on the distribution.

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For a lot of us who are tech people, the tech is the easy part.

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It's the how are we going to sell this and who are we going to sell it to.

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Similarly, in the podcast, for instance,

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you were asking before we started recording how many times have I been to a lot of podcast conferences recently

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and I used to go to podcast conferences way back in the beginning.

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I went to the first one, the Podcast in Portable Media Expo in Ontario, California in 2005

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and went for successive years there.

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But the tech is not really the interesting part of that.

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The story and what are you creating of value for an audience is really the interesting part.

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For me, that is in travel and then I've got another faith-based podcast.

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You could easily put your emphasis on the tech,

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but that's kind of like being an author and saying it's all about the word processor.

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It's really all about the story.

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It's all about what are you providing people?

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What is your vision for them?

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How are you helping them get to where they need to go?

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What are you doing that is a value to them is more important.

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I see a lot of people get distracted by other things.

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It might be social media or it might be...

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Basically, every time you're turning on the microphone,

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you're saying how is this going to be valuable to my audience.

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Thank you for sharing that.

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I think that's very insightful for you to say.

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What would you say, Chris, is maybe one of the few stories

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that pertains to your wife that you'd like to share with us?

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One of the few stories? Well, I don't know that there are a few stories.

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These stories?

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Just to give you a little broad thing in terms of the travel,

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let's talk about the love of travel being one of the why things now.

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What I am doing right now, the podcast and the blog,

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has led to a huge variety of unexpected consequences,

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a huge variety of unexpected things.

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Most recently being voted into the podcast Hall of Fame,

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but it included being invited to the White House,

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being paparazzi for the Pope for a day,

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following wild dogs as they go on the hunt in a safari in Africa,

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just all sorts of amazing and unexpected things have come out of this project

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that started with a, hey, I want to do a podcast. I wonder what I should do.

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Yeah. That's awesome.

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I think that gives hope to people.

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It took some time.

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Yeah. Like what?

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So I was doing a podcast, just to put it in context,

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I was doing a podcast with the intention of I'd love for people to invite me places,

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and I was doing that for five years before I got ever invited to anything.

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And it took more years until it became something like a source of income,

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more than a hobby.

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Now, obviously, that's in part because podcasting has grown so much.

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It has, yes.

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So hopefully those who are climbing on my shoulders will have it easier than those,

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I was going to say those who came before me.

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There weren't that many that came before me.

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So it is probably easier now from that point of view,

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but on the other hand, it's a much more crowded marketplace as well.

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Wow. Yeah, that's awesome.

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My last question for you today for Chris is,

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you can answer it whichever way you feel like.

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There's no definition for it.

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From what you're doing now after retirement and maybe where you're going,

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maybe where you're going with your vision, what is success to you now?

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So success to me now is when I go into my email as I did two weeks ago

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and you get an email like the one that I had from Megan at United Airlines

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who said, we're fans of your podcast.

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We'd like you to talk about our Polaris business class travel

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and how it's suitable for solo travelers.

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Where in the world that we fly do you want to go?

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It's those sort of opportunities that come sometimes like that

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just completely out of the blue.

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So I'm just back from Dubai because that was what I picked,

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but basically they said we will take you anywhere you want to go that we fly.

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And it's those sort of opportunities are pretty darn cool.

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And the fact that some of the times that I get the opportunities like that now

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it's not someone offering me something,

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but it's that the show itself is generating enough revenue for me

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to not have to have somebody offer me that trip,

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that I could afford that trip on my own just using the proceeds from what I'm doing.

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But those sort of things are pretty darn cool when that happens.

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And it happens not as much as I'd like, but certainly a lot more than it used to happen.

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Thank you for being here today.

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I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.

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I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.

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This is going to get more and more fun.

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We'll have more and more engagement as well.

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We'll invite people to participate in the show.

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And thank you for giving us your time and attention.

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Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.