#051: Unlocking Network Engineering Insights with Dr. Russ White, Part 2

Eric: 0:00

Network Automation Nerds Podcast. Hello, welcome to Network Automation Nerds Podcast, the podcast about network automation, network engineering, python and other technology topics. I'm your host, eric Cho, today. I am super excited and I don't want to waste any time because there's so much gold to be dig out of this person that I'm a well-coming back from part one. In part one, we talked to Russ White about his career path and how he became so proficient in so many different fields. If you missed that episode, I really, really encourage you to go back, because it's going to be very relevant to what we're going to talk about in part two.

Eric: 0:43

In part two, we're going to talk about his recommendation on people who are just coming out of college, for example, people who has been mid-career and or maybe just three to five years into their career, and people who has been 10 plus years. What would be his recommendation on which direction to go? I cannot wait to dive into this. I want to bring back a little bit of what you talked about, russ. You started with the why, you talked about your electronic background and eventually getting to routing, but you were never satisfied with just living in other people's reality bubble, should we say. They created these show commands and you're like well, why does the show command do this? I want to hear more about that. Why don't we start with, I guess, people who just right out of college? What would you recommend them do or learn, or what is the direction?

Russ: 1:39

If you're right out of college now, of course, this might be somebody who's just coming into the career field as well. Yes, just starting.

Eric: 1:45

Just starting.

Russ: 1:46

Either way, I think the biggest thing that you need to do is to start building a mental map of everything. Find a way to model internally. Now I use a model personally. I call the four things model. I've been writing packet pushers. It's just my thing. I'm not saying it's the right thing. Don't ever take anybody's. Oh, you should do the right thing. The right thing is the OSI model. The right thing is the DOED model, tcp, whatever.

Eric: 2:14

Yeah.

Russ: 2:14

Whatever who cares, Do what works for you, but you do need to find a way to build a mental map. By the way, this is not something that I intentionally did from the time I started in any of these fields. This is actually something that I encountered when I did my PhD.

Eric: 2:30

Okay In philosophy, nonetheless, right In philosophy.

Russ: 2:34

And that's actually what happened was like I'm talking to my major professor before he was my major professor, yeah, and I'm like but I don't know anything about philosophy. He's like look, if we can get you a mental map of philosophy, then you'll be able to take all the philosophy bits and integrate them into what you already know. And I'm like what's a mental map Like?

Eric: 2:53

what do you mean?

Russ: 2:54

by that, like what are you talking about? Yeah, and so he goes off on this thing about you have to understand the basic branches, like in philosophy, it's really the basic branches and the history it's who is the philosopher, who are they reacting to and how are they reacting to that person, which then develops their way of seeing things, like okay, you know, socrates is all about asking questions. And then Plato is like okay, enough with the questions we need to figure out, like how we find truth. Yeah, right, you can ask questions all day long, but and you can tear down everybody else's idea of truth but what are you doing to find truth for yourself? Like, what is your definition of truth? And then so Plato does this oh, I'm going to talk about the forms and this, that and the other, which is a lot more than you think it is.

Russ: 3:45

And you know, and everybody remembers Plato for the Republic, but in reality his more important work is followed with the law, because he tried to apply the Republic in the real world and it didn't work. Okay, so he ended up writing the law to say this is this is really the way things work, so it's better, anyway. And then you get Aristotle right, and Aristotle is like all this knowing about truth is great, but how do individual people live? So, like you're just understanding, like what is the purpose? What is this person asking questions about? Yeah, how are they answering them and why are they asking those questions?

Russ: 4:21

And that's kind of how you build a mental map of philosophy, is going through the history and things like okay, before, before Descartes, everybody was worried about ontology. What is truth? After Descartes, everybody's concerned about epistemology. How do I know truth? And if you might read anything in the modern world and philosophy, it's all about how do I know truth? I mean, everything is about justified true beliefs and warrant and all this other stuff. And so just understanding like those kinds of things builds a mental map. I can take a single philosopher I've never heard of before. I can place them inside this historical timeline. I kind of have an internal. I mean I have it written down too, so I don't have to memorize it all and say, okay, where do they fit? Who are they reacting to? Like, what are they coming from? Okay, same thing in the networking world.

Eric: 5:11

Yeah.

Russ: 5:11

Right, this is the four things model for me. The way the reason I do this is because I'm like okay, what is the problem I'm trying to solve?

Eric: 5:19

Yeah.

Russ: 5:20

Right, what is the full range of possible solutions and how does this particular protocol solve that problem? Right, because there's no new ways of solving these things. All these things are being solved the same way they've always been.

Eric: 5:32

And you talked about the compromises that each of your solutions making.

Russ: 5:36

Yes, exactly, and so that's the mental model, that's the mental map, right? Is you kind of build a mental map of what you're going to do? It's like building an outline for a book. You're going to write a book. You build an outline. Why don't you build an outline so you can get the flow, so you can get the pieces, you make sure you cover everything. It's the same thing with the mental map and networking or engineering of any kind. You're just building like an outline, basically, and using like a mind map piece of software or something like that would be really good for doing this. I've never done it, but I think that'd be a really good thing to do, because you're like sitting there going okay, if I look at routing, what is routing really trying to solve? Right? What are the fundamental questions I need to answer here?

Eric: 6:15

Yeah.

Russ: 6:16

And that's all it is. And so, once you build that mental map, the cool thing is that you can just apply it to everything, like everything. So, coming out of college, if I were in that position, I'd be trying to build a mental map One and two. I'd be trying to get hands on experience. Okay, I'd be in the lab, I'd be like backing up my mental map.

Eric: 6:38

With experiments and understanding the theory with the experience. Yeah.

Russ: 6:42

And not just doing other people's labs Like, okay, In theory BGP should react this way.

Eric: 6:47

Yeah.

Russ: 6:48

Okay, I'm going to try it Right, let's go see what it does Like. Let's not just accept that that's what it should do. Let's go see what it does.

Eric: 6:56

Yeah.

Russ: 6:57

Right. How do you learn how BGP converges? You set up BGP networks in the lab and you do in very stilted, very weird apologies that don't exist in the real world.

Eric: 7:07

Yeah.

Russ: 7:08

That force BGP to act in certain ways. And then, once you've done that, you can take out links and take out speakers and go oh, I can actually see the process step by step by step, and now I understand it.

Eric: 7:20

Yeah yeah, I mean this totally unscripted too, russ. See, like I dig out this book, yeah yeah, of the shortness of life. Just because you're all talking about philosophy, I'm like, okay, I'm now inspired to read this book because, as you could tell, like it's not even open but it's right within reach. But no, I like that, the mental model and you kind of. It's kind of like the first degree, right, like you eliminate everything else and just simplify it down into the first degree and say what is the routing protocol trying to solve? In particular, how does BGP solve these issues that they're trying to solve?

Eric: 8:00

Right and look for patterns. Right, Look for patterns.

Russ: 8:04

Look for patterns. Isis and OSPF are very similar protocols. They're not the same. I was used to joke when I taught ISIS and OSPF and TAC. I would like teach OSPF first and I would get to the end of OSPF and I'd say, okay, now it's time to learn ISIS. Just forget half of everything you already know about OSPF. Which half?

Eric: 8:23

though Every other line yeah every other line.

Russ: 8:27

Now you know ISIS, but really I mean it's not quite that simple, but still like it is. They're similar enough that if you think about how OSPF works right and think about how flooding works, then you can really understand, like, what's going to happen. You can take a network diagram and say this link fails. I know exactly how this is going to converge. I can build a time chart. I can build a timeline and say, time one it's going to do this. At time two, it's going to do this. At time three, it's going to do that.

Russ: 8:56

Now there may be changes because things change and blah, blah, blah, but generally speaking, I know how this is going to converge by looking at it. I don't need to actually see it happen, but backing it up with things that doing it in the lab is really good, because then you can integrate that knowledge to what you're doing. So that's the two things that I think I would be focused on if I were just coming out of school or something like that. College degrees tend to be much more focused than they used to be, for better or worse. They tend to be much more single issue things. I'm going to teach you to code Java. That's a college degree nowadays.

Eric: 9:39

You're teaching at University of Colorado. You have first hand experience.

Russ: 9:45

And I'm contrary to the whole thing. I teach a master's level class and it's basically a mental map class. That's what it is. I'm going to throw all sorts of information at you about lots of things so that you have an idea of what IoT is, so that you have an idea of how encryption works. I'm just going to throw everything at you and so it's like 14 weeks of total fast as you can go learning every topic and, of course, every student is going to have some topics they already know so they can relax that week and then so yeah, so that's basically. That course is just a let's just go and hit every field in network engineering. All of them, everything from everything from everything. I'm not teaching modulation. I mean, I went into modulation principles and stuff in this new book, which is actually something I've never done before, believe it, or?

Eric: 10:42

not Okay. Well, you see, I want to talk about your double click on what you're talking about before, on your advice, though, because I think let me play devil's advocate a little bit, because I think the problem of doing what you said before, russ, is it's so they're under. When you're a new grad, you're under pressure to actually perform on the job right. You need something that you could like a command line, like how do you construct a beach in the neighbor? These are the four lines that you form and I type into Cisco, juniper or whatever, and going down to the fundamentals, you're spending all these time that may or may not be able to translate into your job for tomorrow, so what would be your answer for that?

Russ: 11:26

So I'm contrary to everybody.

Eric: 11:28

Okay.

Russ: 11:29

All of my career devices.

Eric: 11:31

It's Russ against everybody else.

Russ: 11:33

I'm contrary to everybody about this. I think my perspective is that engineering is like. I actually have a presentation that I did for UT and I've done for USC and other places and actually it's incorporated in the UC class as well. It's like engineering to many people is like a treadmill. The technology is thrown at you and you're on a treadmill trying to learn oh, Juniper came out with this new feature, I need to learn the commands for that. Oh, Cisco came out with a new feature, I need to. Or there's this new thing called EVPN. I need to go learn the configuration commands for Juniper, Cisco, et cetera, et cetera. And what I really want to do is, if you build the mental map, you jump off the treadmill, you stop learning the commands and yes, it's a lot of work and yes, it takes five to 10 years at least right To do it.

Russ: 12:24

But once you've done it, you're off the treadmill. And instead of somebody saying oh, there's this new thing, evpn, let's go learn how to configure it. You say oh, what problems does that solve?

Eric: 12:34

Right, or how does that fit into that how?

Russ: 12:36

does that fit into the larger picture? How is it so? I already know there's only four solutions to this problem. Which one did they choose? And then, when you approach a configuration, your question becomes all right. If I'm configuring BGP, I know that BGP does not have automatic neighbor discovery. Well, some do now, but typically for an EVGP session. For an EVGP session, most of the time in inter-provider connections I'm not. I don't.

Eric: 13:02

No, you don't want to do that.

Russ: 13:04

Exactly. You don't want to do that right. So now I need to know, I need to ask, I need to query the configuration. Right, how do I go about configuring this? Rather than having the commands memorized, you're learning what questions you need to ask and what you need to look for in the CLI, and it turns the entire situation around. And once you do that, then you freeze yourself up to learn new protocols very quickly and to expand your horizons. So I would always begin with build the mental map. I know it takes time. I know it's hard when you're configuring stuff. Drive your coworkers crazy with yeah, I see this configuration, but why? Why do we?

Eric: 13:49

configure BGP that way.

Russ: 13:52

And go look it up right.

Russ: 13:53

Go find out. Don't just go, oh, that's what the command does. No, what does that do in BGP? What does that do in OSPF? Go find the specification. Okay, if you're crazy enough, go grab a copy of FR routing and find that command in the command structure and figure out what bits it twiddles in the configuration files and then what happens in the code when you make that change, like really seriously, then you'll understand, like what the protocol is doing. And once you understand that, then you can turn the situation around from how do I configure this to what am I trying to get done?

Eric: 14:33

Yeah.

Russ: 14:34

Right, what's my goal here, now that I have a goal?

Eric: 14:37

That's a great point, because I mean back then, when, at least when you and I started or you started much more early than I did but we didn't have FR routing, we didn't have Quagga, we didn't have like all these lab equipment that are virtualized, we actually have to hold in like the AG. What is it AGS?

Russ: 14:54

Plus yeah.

Eric: 14:55

AGS Plus, like those white hunky. It sounded like it's about to take off from my basement. Yeah, but yeah. So now you have all these tools DPDK, as you mentioned that are just excellent in trying things out without a lot of risk, so that becomes a. I'm not saying it's free, like a free is in free of effort, but it's a lot easier.

Russ: 15:18

Yeah it takes time. It still takes a lot of time, clearly.

Russ: 15:22

It still takes a lot of effort. You have to learn things, but that's okay. Again, the first part of my career I would be focused on flipping the script, okay, getting from configuring things by rote to understanding how to how like asking the questions that helped me learn do the configuration. And, by the way, this drives me nuts. When I'm in interviews I've actually had people ask me if you were on a Juniper router and you wanted to make PGP do this, what configuration command would you use?

Eric: 15:52

Oh my God, alicia's the wrath.

Russ: 15:55

Yeah, you know, is there no search engine that I can use here?

Eric: 15:59

Like, why would?

Russ: 16:00

I. Why would I want to memorize that Right? Yeah, like because it's going to change in five years anyway, or? It should change and, frankly, when you get to intent based networking and automation, you really don't care about those configuration commands.

Eric: 16:12

Or you just add chat, GPT or whatever. Yeah, exactly.

Russ: 16:15

You know I don't need to know that stuff and so like for the CCIA do, because the CCA is all about speed. Fine, yeah, let's get past the CCA. But once you're past the CCA, get yourself to the point where you are beyond learning the commands and you're learning the protocols and the why's, so that you can ask questions and figure out what the configuration should look like, what you expect to look for. That's my. If you're young in this, you're young in the field. That's where I would start. That's really where I would start.

Eric: 16:48

Well, is that? Is that the same advice? Would you change anything? I mean I sense a little bit of a tweak when you say get past the CCA Right. So for people who's I don't know three to five years into their career, so maybe they've done a little maybe eight to 10 years.

Russ: 17:04

It's not pressure people into thinking they have to be done at three to five years. Okay, some people might be, I don't know. I'm just saying I don't want to pressure anybody and say, if you're five years in and you haven't done this, then you, then you really stink. No, it's not the point. I'll be in that category, right Like five years in, I'm still.

Eric: 17:21

I'm still like trying to pass my CCIE. That's, that's a fact, right? Yeah, that's fine, yeah.

Russ: 17:26

I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, and I it didn't. It wasn't five years for me, I don't think. I think it was much longer than that I have no idea what it really was. But again I was raised asking why. So it's much. You know I've never done the peer configuration thing in my life. It's never been that way for me, so anyway. So yeah, when you get beyond that, though, my my thing would be to add breadth.

Eric: 17:51

Okay, right.

Russ: 17:52

Read philosophy, read business, get out of your comfort zone. Read crypto. Yeah, like you know, learn what other people do for a living and how they do it. Yeah, really, broaden out, and that's not going to help you. That is really not going to help you in your specifically in your networking career. But there's more to life than your career. There's being a whole person, right, right, you want to be a whole person, for sure, and so, to be a whole person, at some point you've got to look up from the workbench out the window and say, oh, you know there's grass out there. If you walk outside, the graphics are incredible, like the DPI rate is so much better than it is on the screen. Just say it.

Eric: 18:41

Like, instead of doing virtual reality, you actually take off the glass and go.

Russ: 18:44

oh wow, you guys should test this.

Eric: 18:47

Yeah.

Russ: 18:48

So there needs to be a definite point in your career where you kind of turn and you say, okay, now I've built a mental map and I've encountered two or three new protocols and I felt very comfortable at being able, or two or three new networks and I felt very comfortable at, like, understanding how they're going to converge without actually having to work on them. Right, and, by the way, this is something that's really cool, you can do. You can actually go look at other people's networks. Facebook will sometimes post a research paper. Now, that's not their current network, sure, that's some older network. Sure, don't let them fake you out and think that's what they can't do now.

Eric: 19:22

With thousands of lines of connectivity.

Russ: 19:25

Yeah, and just think to yourself. You know, like, if you see an undersea map or a map of a large provider network, you can be like you know, how would I design BGP? Yeah, what would I do to make it run on that network? And then compare to what they've done. As much as you can and like, bolster yourself, gain confidence in your own skill set and once you're past, once you're to the point where you have fairly good confidence spread out like learn crypto, like learn security, learn app security, learn to code, learn I don't know philosophy, learn stuff, get out and learn stuff, Because the more stuff you know like that, the more effective you're going to be as a person in a wider range of environments. And soft skills. You know, although Mike Bichon hates that term, he doesn't like soft skills, he calls them superpowers.

Eric: 20:20

Yeah, superpowers, watch them, superpower. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I do enjoy listening to. I think I enjoy listening to the podcast for you know the Hedge Podcast so much is because of the breath that it brings, right. Like I especially enjoy the forum type of like a panel type of discussion, right, because everybody brings a little bit on. I mean the last episode I listened to was for network automation, right. And then you have I think it was Yvonne who's saying do you even need network engineering? Like I don't think she specifically said that, but she's just like okay, this thing carried us for so long and maybe it's time to just move on, or whatnot, right? So that actually brings a whole new perspective to me. I'd love to hear your thoughts about that.

Russ: 21:09

Oh well, yeah, I think the law is being network engineers.

Eric: 21:11

Okay.

Russ: 21:12

I just do. I mean, it's like electronics engineers, it'll always be electronic engineers. But when I first started in electronic engineering, the electronic engineers were in the field. Now they're in laboratories and offices. They're not in the field anymore for the most part. And the same thing with car mechanics, right, growing up. We grew up and it was like, okay, we need a car. So we go down to the state auction and buy a car and it'd be like you get it home and you're like, no, the head's got to be pulled, it's leaking oil or something. So we'd actually rip the engine down, you know, and put it back together. And those kinds of people still exist.

Russ: 21:53

Yeah, but they're just more rare than they used to be. Most car work nowadays is done in an office, honestly, by some engineer who's sitting there designing. If this happens, I'm going to have a spit out this code. Yeah, yeah, right that's the real engineering work that happens, and then the guy sitting there working on the car or the woman working on the car or whatever it is they're going to say, well, I get this code, so I go look at this manual, right.

Russ: 22:18

Yeah yeah, and that's not necessarily as much engineering, that's more operational work. Right, right, right. And so the engineering still happens. We'll still need network engineers, it's just a matter of where it happens.

Eric: 22:30

Yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, I remember trying to turn off my like change oil light the other day and I looked into it and it wasn't like before, like you're punching some kind of you know trick, punches of like buttons, but it's, you know, you do these ODB to like things that you plug in and you use your mobile phone to turn off. So I think that goes back to what you were talking about, how we will always need this, this context, but they may happen differently and like what Steve Jobs was saying right, we still need, like back when, when the car was first invented, it was all trucks.

Eric: 23:07

Well, we still have trucks, but now we have sedans and SUVs, and so the people who are working on trucks are a very limited amount of people, so maybe something good. It's applicable for network engineering.

Russ: 23:18

Yeah, and I also don't want to make it sound like network engineering is going to move strictly into hyperscalers and stuff like that, because that's not true. I don't think.

Eric: 23:25

Right.

Russ: 23:26

I think network engineering like again. We have people who work on cars not just for pleasure but for a living. We have real technicians on the car side. Still, they're not as common as they used to be, but there are still people out there who rebuild engines, I mean in corner shops. There are still people out there who build race cars in corner shops. Right, they still do this stuff and they still understand the engines really well. They don't all work for auto manufacturers right.

Russ: 23:54

Networking is really the same thing. There may be fewer companies and actually I think there's a pushback now against the cloud. It's starting to happen. I think we're starting to see the pushback against the cloud.

Eric: 24:03

Yeah, now everything could move to the cloud.

Russ: 24:04

Yeah, exactly, and I think we're starting to see a bit of pushback and I think that you know, most companies will still have network engineers. They just may be fewer, right, they just may be, you know, higher level and fewer, or whatever you want to say, which then poses the problem of how you build these people, because that is an issue, right, when you have fewer of them and they work in an office.

Eric: 24:29

And then they need a lot more breath, right, because now you have to overlays and underlays, yeah and so how do you build those people, right?

Russ: 24:37

Yeah, that's always. That's always a hard question. I don't know the answer to it most of the time, because college education doesn't always get you there, you know, certifications don't always get you there, and so right. So where are modern like? If you look at a car manufacturer today, where do the people who work on, who design engines come from?

Eric: 24:59

Yeah.

Russ: 25:00

Right, they come out of graduate programs, sure, but there's fewer opportunities for somebody to go to a corner garage and rip down, or in their own garage and rip down an engine.

Eric: 25:10

Yeah.

Russ: 25:11

And learn how it works. So there's a smaller pool of people from which to draw to do that.

Eric: 25:17

But the knowledge required for that smaller pool is much deeper. So how do you short circuit the 15 to 20 years that required to you know, to maybe you to get there and get there faster?

Russ: 25:29

I don't know the answer to that. That's hard to me. That's a hard question. So, yeah, I mean. Yeah, I mean you get to a point in your career you should learn to write, you should learn to speak, you should learn to like go speaking engagements, you should learn to mentor people. You should pick up other skills beyond just the networking skills. Yeah, networking, engineering skills, and that's kind of the turning point to me. That's. That's where that's like second stage of your career.

Eric: 25:55

Yeah, just to do that stuff.

Russ: 25:57

So that's kind of the way I see career progression. Like, if I'm, if I'm interviewing somebody who's just out of college, my primary questions are going to be around. Are they the type of person that's going to ask why, or are they just going to spit configuration commands at me, like what is their personnel? That's my main thing.

Eric: 26:16

Okay.

Russ: 26:17

When they get beyond five to ten years, then I'm less interested into they know how to configure stuff and more interested in tell me about the last white paper you wrote Like. Tell me about like.

Eric: 26:30

I would have failed on that.

Russ: 26:33

Some other things you know, like for you a podcast, right? Yeah, yeah. Tell me about your podcast.

Eric: 26:37

Well, thank you.

Russ: 26:38

Yeah, I'm saying you know what are your communication skills. I'm trying to get at your communication skills. I'm trying to get at your other skills, your superpowers right, more so than your basic network engineering skills, Right, and of course I don't. I'm actually thinking about doing a thing on interviewing skills for Pearson. I've been kicking it around for a long time and I need to go do it. I need to do the slides and do everything. Yeah, Because I don't interview like most people do either. I'm contrary to everything most of time. I just it's just not a thing with me.

Eric: 27:09

Yeah, I look at. We could tell by the last hour. You're just like it's me and and there's everybody else.

Russ: 27:17

Yeah, there's me and everybody else. That's right, yeah, that's okay. I don't, yeah, that's okay.

Eric: 27:22

That's okay. Um no, I buy that. I mean I have this, this book called soft, like exactly call self skills, by John Somas. I mean obviously there's some, some other things that happen with his, with his attitude and so on, but I mean that book itself really helped me as far as just you know it's branching out and a lot of what you talked about on. You know, yeah, your your first code is gonna suck, but just go learn it nonetheless. Right it's. It's gonna ask your dimension.

Russ: 27:50

Yeah, that's exactly right. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Hey, when I worked for tack, when I first came into Cisco, doc. Yeah the way it worked was is we had certain people we knew, knew everything, like we had this guy who was like your SME's yeah well, we had the guy. We had the guy who was the ISIs Coder. There was one ISIs Coder in all of Cisco when I was in tech. He's a nice enough guy. I like him a lot and I still talk to him today. He's really cool.

Russ: 28:15

But, you know, or like Tony Lee. Tony Lee was one on for this as well. Tony Lee was like the router architecture dude, because he designed the, the, the. He designed the first silicon switching engine for the 7500. Oh, wow, and so you know you would email these people and you would know that it was gonna come back. The answer was gonna come back with a lot of cuss words and a lot of anger.

Eric: 28:39

Yeah, things that you can't repeat on the show, yeah but?

Russ: 28:42

but you were gonna get an answer. Yeah and so you just put your fireproof suit on and you go do it. Yeah, so what if I ask a stupid question like I'm not gonna know. It's stupid unless I ask right.

Eric: 28:52

Yeah.

Russ: 28:53

And and if I get back a really nasty answer, well, you know, deal it's okay. Yeah, it's life and you just go on, you move on and you know I'm actually friends with those people today. I can, I mean, I kind of consider Tony Lee to be an acquaintance. I know Tony pretty well, I've met him here and there and yet I've gotten some really bad emails from Tony Lee and that's okay, you know I asked stupid questions and he gave me the answer.

Russ: 29:17

You know he wasn't happy about having to answer it and that's cool. I understand he was busy. You know he's doing stuff. It's got it's, I got it, it's fine.

Russ: 29:24

Yeah and so, yeah, and and you know Hank Schmidt, who was the ISIS guy from very funny stories about Hank and and emails from Hank and stuff, but he's a great guy. I still talk to him and you know, you just have to put your fireproof suit on and just go do stuff and it's just is what it is. You can't, you can't be shrinking violet. You got to be willing to ask stupid questions and just let it be.

Eric: 29:47

I I would say, I mean, I agree to that, but I think, in order to build out that resiliency and in order to build out that bulletproof Mindset I used to just mentioned, for me it took many, many years and it took a lot of small wins, right like it took me to be Multi-dimensional so that when they get, you know, knocked down on one and I still fall back on I don't know my family and you know my daughters, I mean like they'll always love me and you know, it doesn't matter how many stupid questions I asked, and for sure I've asked my share of stupid questions.

Russ: 30:22

Yeah, I mean, the great thing is to go out, go ask your daughter, like ask them the same question. You asked this really smart person and they go. I don't know, dad, you see, see, we'll see it. Maybe it wasn't a stupid question.

Eric: 30:32

There's one other person or two other person. I have two daughters, so that that are in the same boat and we're just like hug each other and go go either go on some grass or something, right like you said Exactly whatever.

Russ: 30:46

Unconditional love yeah, I mean, it's like if you decide to write and people like, oh, but it's so much work and oh, I'm gonna get really torn up by it. That you're good, good, I'm happy. Yeah, like you know, whatever. Yeah, the first couple of books I wrote you should have seen them. Oh, you should have seen my dissertation. My feelings got hurt by red ink. I would be totally a little puddle of crying on the floor, you know. But hey, I Don't know. It makes me a better writer, that's yeah, yeah, for sure.

Russ: 31:20

That's their goal is to make you a better writer, to make the text better. Good, you know.

Eric: 31:26

Yeah yeah, I think I read this on gay reviews blog post at the summit or Twitter post on the other day where it's like, yeah, your first, everything is gonna suck, but if you don't go past that first one, you'll never get to your hundredth one. Where's excellent, yeah, so so I totally Roger with that. Um, yeah, I think it's a being a great session. Russ, I mean I truly enjoy what you talked about going back to the basics, the mind maps, and then adding breath later on and you put your, put the money where your math is right. You got your PhD in philosophy and adding so much breath and you know your trail of works is approved to that. So I thank you again for sharing those knowledge.

Russ: 32:08

Thanks for having me on Eric. These are great podcasts, by the way.

Eric: 32:12

Well, thank you. I mean both of the listeners enjoyed it, I think.

Russ: 32:18

Yeah. I'm sorry you waste your time to talk to people in total, but I'm sure you have as many listeners as I do on the head. No, no no, that's for sure, not true. I complain to Ethan all the time about the number of listeners I have on the hedge and he's like, yeah, but the market for packet pushers is like 100,000 people or a million people in the world. The market for your podcast is like a thousand people, so don't complain.

Eric: 32:44

No, but it's, you know 80% penetration, right, like 80%, you know saturated, and yeah, it's thousand, but you got high penetration.

Russ: 32:53

Well, that's what he's always saying. He's always like no, it's true.

Eric: 32:55

It's true, your market's so small.

Russ: 32:57

What are you complaining?

Eric: 32:58

about. The denominator is small, but, hey, your percentage of adaptation is high. So where can people find your work? Where can people follow you? I know we mentioned last episode, but do you mind just reminding us again? Yeah, that's fine.

Russ: 33:10

Yeah, rural of Nuttech is the primary place that you can follow me. I'm on LinkedIn. You can PM me there Most of the time if it's an interesting question. That's more than just a simple thing. I'm just going to give you my email address and you can email me from there, because, like I just don't, I don't do. I don't do social media very well. It's just not a thing for me. Yeah, so Rural of Nuttech, you can find most of my stuff. I cross post everything I write there. I try to. Sometimes I forget, but I really try hard to cross post everything there and anything I'm teaching at Pearson or whatever. I try to post something there so that people know it's coming up.

Eric: 33:42

Yeah, I mean I. Whenever you teach, I try to make time for it, and you know when the new podcast comes out, at least I'll read through the description and try to listen to it.

Russ: 33:53

Yeah, I've been trying to post transcripts that are just done by a machine thing. Yes, it's kind of forget sometimes to push all the right buttons and then the way that the podcast service works is I have to wait like three days for the, for the trend, and then I sometimes forget to go back and grab to click Okay. To actually grab the URL for the transcript and put it. Yeah, it's show notes and everything. So yeah, it's just one of those things.

Eric: 34:20

Well, no problem. I mean you know a lot of these. It's not like you're getting paid, right. So you know, thank you for all of these stuff and, like I said, whenever you teach, I listen. So thanks again for being on the show.

Russ: 34:33

Yeah, thanks.

Eric: 34:35

Thank you for listening to Network Animation Notes podcast today. Find us on Apple podcast, google podcast, spotify and all the other major podcast platforms. Until next time, bye, bye.