Chris, tell me about your vision.
It's kind of a wide open question.
So for many years I was a tech guy.
So about 43 years in high tech.
But in the meantime working towards what I'm doing now,
which is a full-time travel journalist.
So I've been doing this for 19 years.
And basically trying to encourage people to travel places
that they wouldn't have thought of before.
And the big reason for that is for travel for me is both
one of the best forms of education,
but also I think shortens the distance between us and other people.
Yes, it does.
The more you know people from pick a country,
the more you think of them as like us rather than different from us.
That is a very well set point.
I'm from India, born and raised.
I moved to the United States when I was 18.
And I haven't been back since I think a year before COVID.
It's been almost four or five years now.
Maybe six.
So I can see that.
There are so many people that want to come talk to me.
They want to meet me.
And there are so many people I want to go meet in India.
And there are so many people that, even family and friends.
And I can see that a little bit.
The more I don't see them, it's different than what I am.
So I think I see what your point was you're saying.
So I agree to that.
What would you say, Chris, your vision from being in the tech industry?
Because I'm also in the tech industry.
And that's how I started my career.
And now I'm in the podcasting world, transition, so many things.
From being tech for you to going to the amateur traveler,
I think that's very, very interesting.
It's something that blows my mind a little bit.
So how did that come about?
Well, I did both for 19 years.
So I was tech by day and travel journalist by night for about 19 years.
Working into some form of retirement, and I have to put that in quotes,
where I wasn't doing the tech job and basically could travel more.
I'm not sure I understand the question, so I'm not sure I can give you a good answer.
So what are you looking for here?
So how did – let's talk about the journey from the tech and the traveler journey,
and you did it at the same time simultaneously.
How was that?
So you were passionate about traveling, but you were in this tech world that you could not,
because that pays the bill, right?
And that's what you wanted to do at the same time.
How did those come together?
If you're spending eight hours a day in the tech world and somebody just –
That would be nice to spend just eight hours a day, but yeah.
Yeah, I'm saying at least.
If you're working at least 40 hours a week, five days for five days,
and then traveling at the same time doing that, how did that –
I'm sure you have to be working online or remotely, right?
Well, so often I wasn't – so one of the things when I started the show,
because I discovered podcasting relatively early on, within the first year of podcasting I started,
and my original plan was that I was going to be talking about my travels,
but that actually made no sense because I did have a full-time job.
I was working 48 weeks a year and traveling four weeks a year, and podcasting 48 weeks a year.
And so that very quickly turned into a show about other people's travels
because then that aligned with what my life was actually like, right?
You have to build into your life these other projects, these other jobs that you have.
So it definitely turned into – at some point I was doing two full-time jobs basically.
I was doing the travel influencer, travel podcaster, travel blogger.
I'll also run another podcast, not in the travel space.
And then doing a full-time job quite often at a startup company
because I've spent about – well, over 20 years in Silicon Valley startups.
So it would be nice if it was a 40-hour a week plus the other job on the side,
but it was a combination of the two.
But I mean part of the thing is a lot of us are not just one thing, right?
We don't just have the one interest.
And so I was still loving the tech jobs.
And as you say, they do pay the bills, and they pay a lot of bills,
a whole lot easier than being a blogger especially.
And when I started certainly being a podcaster
because podcasts were pretty tiny way back in 2005.
People didn't really hear about it, thanks to Joe Rogan.
A lot of people hear about podcasting now.
Yeah, podcasting predates Joe though.
Yeah, but he definitely made it much bigger, influenced a lot of people
who want to be on podcasts now. They want to talk about it.
Even recently, someone in my family and friends,
they're like, hey, let's just start a podcast and talk about a mom's life.
I'm like, that's the way that you have confidence to do so.
So kudos to Joe, I would say, to making that.
So your Joe is my Leo.
So for me, it was this week in tech was the first place I heard about podcasting
way back in 2004.
And for some people, it was serial.
For other people, it was just getting it when it showed up on the iPhone.
So there's no one person, no one show that has been that influential.
If you look at the graphs of how podcast consumption has happened,
it's almost all up into the right since I started,
except for one year around COVID where the consumption went down
as people were trying to figure out their lives and their habits
and all those sorts of things.
But it's pretty much been up into the right.
The first day of podcasting for someone is going to be tomorrow
because they're going to hear some show.
They're going to hear your show and be introduced to podcasts or whatever.
But it's always been people discovering it through a variety of shows.
Yep, awesome.
What would you say, Chris, that gets you out of bed every morning to do what you do?
Both with the tech and with the travel stuff now,
it's something I love to do. It's passion.
And part of it is the joy of creation.
So I certainly spend a lot more time or have spent a lot more time
over the last 20 years creating content than just consuming content.
You're not going to find me living all day on Instagram or TikTok
or something like that just watching other people's work
because while that's fun, it doesn't have quite the same juice for me
as the joy of creation, putting out something and building an audience
and those sorts of things.
A lot of frustrations along the way there also,
but it's pretty cool when you build something and other people appreciate it.
What did you do in the tech world? What did you create in the tech world?
A variety of things.
Most recently when I retired, I was a director of engineering for American Express.
I had been at a six-person startup company creating some software
for financial planning that American Express bought in 2022
after we had been around for about three years, they bought our company.
And we launched that as a product for them.
I think it's Smart. What is it called now?
I want to call it Smart Budget, but that's not quite the name of the product
under the American Express logo, but basically that product is now available
to their users for free, at least a portion of what we wrote.
The full product didn't launch before I left.
But before that, I started in ICCAD,
so integrated circuit computer-aided designs in simulation.
I went to pen-based computers and then really have been doing internet
since the internet was steam-driven, basically building websites
or building communities online at a variety of different companies,
Apple and TripAdvisor and American Express, as I mentioned,
and some startups in between there as well.
That's awesome. Thank you, Vaishana.
What would you say, some of the lessons that you learned in your journey
as an amateur traveler or as a tech person who is creative
and wants to create more and more things,
what would you say, some of the impactful lessons that you learned,
maybe that changed you?
I've been talking about 43 years of a career trying to break it down
and impactful lessons.
The people that you're doing things with make more important than anything else.
I've been in a variety of different fields and you form a good team.
I'm not a financial guy, or at least I wasn't when I went to a financial services
of FinTech company, but it was an interesting product,
but it was the people that made it fun.
It was the team around you and a good team.
One of the reasons that I've done 20 years in startup companies
is I like that environment in terms of everybody's pulling in the same direction,
small group of people.
You don't have a lot of excess, you don't have a lot of extra,
but that's a pretty fun thing for me.
That has probably been the number one thing, for instance,
that got me back into my last startup.
It was a friend who I've worked with for four different companies said,
hey, I'm doing a startup.
He wasn't saying do you have one more in you,
but that was the thought in my head is can I do yet another startup company?
This was about a year pre-COVID.
That's awesome.
I completely agree to that.
When I'm working in first class business right now,
I think focusing on who is very important.
A lot of people talk about the Simon Sinek's like, hey, a why, what you doing,
then the how and the what comes later.
Then through wisdom that I learned from a few of my friends,
the who comes first before the why
because if I didn't know about Simon Sinek, I would never have read his book.
That was for me.
If you focus on the who first and then the why,
I think things are much simpler, much easier.
The other thing, and this applies to both,
in the startup space one of the sayings is that you do the first one focusing on the product
and you do the second one focusing on the distribution.
For a lot of us who are tech people, the tech is the easy part.
It's the how are we going to sell this and who are we going to sell it to.
Similarly, in the podcast, for instance,
you were asking before we started recording how many times have I been to a lot of podcast conferences recently
and I used to go to podcast conferences way back in the beginning.
I went to the first one, the Podcast in Portable Media Expo in Ontario, California in 2005
and went for successive years there.
But the tech is not really the interesting part of that.
The story and what are you creating of value for an audience is really the interesting part.
For me, that is in travel and then I've got another faith-based podcast.
You could easily put your emphasis on the tech,
but that's kind of like being an author and saying it's all about the word processor.
It's really all about the story.
It's all about what are you providing people?
What is your vision for them?
How are you helping them get to where they need to go?
What are you doing that is a value to them is more important.
I see a lot of people get distracted by other things.
It might be social media or it might be...
Basically, every time you're turning on the microphone,
you're saying how is this going to be valuable to my audience.
Thank you for sharing that.
I think that's very insightful for you to say.
What would you say, Chris, is maybe one of the few stories
that pertains to your wife that you'd like to share with us?
One of the few stories? Well, I don't know that there are a few stories.
These stories?
Just to give you a little broad thing in terms of the travel,
let's talk about the love of travel being one of the why things now.
What I am doing right now, the podcast and the blog,
has led to a huge variety of unexpected consequences,
a huge variety of unexpected things.
Most recently being voted into the podcast Hall of Fame,
but it included being invited to the White House,
being paparazzi for the Pope for a day,
following wild dogs as they go on the hunt in a safari in Africa,
just all sorts of amazing and unexpected things have come out of this project
that started with a, hey, I want to do a podcast. I wonder what I should do.
Yeah. That's awesome.
I think that gives hope to people.
It took some time.
Yeah. Like what?
So I was doing a podcast, just to put it in context,
I was doing a podcast with the intention of I'd love for people to invite me places,
and I was doing that for five years before I got ever invited to anything.
And it took more years until it became something like a source of income,
more than a hobby.
Now, obviously, that's in part because podcasting has grown so much.
It has, yes.
So hopefully those who are climbing on my shoulders will have it easier than those,
I was going to say those who came before me.
There weren't that many that came before me.
So it is probably easier now from that point of view,
but on the other hand, it's a much more crowded marketplace as well.
Wow. Yeah, that's awesome.
My last question for you today for Chris is,
you can answer it whichever way you feel like.
There's no definition for it.
From what you're doing now after retirement and maybe where you're going,
maybe where you're going with your vision, what is success to you now?
So success to me now is when I go into my email as I did two weeks ago
and you get an email like the one that I had from Megan at United Airlines
who said, we're fans of your podcast.
We'd like you to talk about our Polaris business class travel
and how it's suitable for solo travelers.
Where in the world that we fly do you want to go?
It's those sort of opportunities that come sometimes like that
just completely out of the blue.
So I'm just back from Dubai because that was what I picked,
but basically they said we will take you anywhere you want to go that we fly.
And it's those sort of opportunities are pretty darn cool.
And the fact that some of the times that I get the opportunities like that now
it's not someone offering me something,
but it's that the show itself is generating enough revenue for me
to not have to have somebody offer me that trip,
that I could afford that trip on my own just using the proceeds from what I'm doing.
But those sort of things are pretty darn cool when that happens.
And it happens not as much as I'd like, but certainly a lot more than it used to happen.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.