S02 E20 — The Rationalist
Critical Thinker | Serial Entrepreneur | Creative
This is the un-edited auto-transcribed version of the episode. If you would like to listen to the episode as you read, check out the episode here —
Andy Sparks 0:00
Hey, buddy, everything sucks right now. I know you feel awful. What’s going on? It’s gonna be all right. It’s just trying to figure out how to get comfortable with with where I am. And, and oftentimes when I feel like there’s a lack of confidence in a situation, it’s because there’s something that I just haven’t teased apart enough. Don’t judge it. Don’t judge your inside by looking or comparing yourself to other people’s outsides. Just know that it’s normal. Second of all, whatever it is that you’re scared of, that’s something to pay attention to, and just try to tease apart Why are you afraid of it? And fear is a super normal emotion. It’s the thing that comes from our lizard brain.
Naga Subramanya B B 0:40
Hello, and welcome to the passion people podcast. But also, welcome to a very wonderful new year 2020. Thank you for all the support that you’ve given the passion to build podcast over the last year, and I look forward to your continued support this year, as we launch another brand new podcast and Take the passion people’s podcasts to the next level. It’s 2020. And this is season two, Episode 20. The passion people podcast Chronicle stories of people who follow their passion and make it manifest in tangible ways. So you can get inspired, and get one step closer to what you’re passionate about. Today, we’re in conversation with Andy sparks, the CEO of Holloway, and he is a serial entrepreneur, and with Holloway is building a publishing and tech company that publishes comprehensive practical guides, written and refined by experts. And he also runs the good work newsletter that talks about what it means to do good work. And trust me, it’s a wonderful way to start off your week on a Sunday or a Monday morning, you can subscribe using the link in the show notes below. I’ve been a subscriber over the last couple of months and trust me it’s worth every minute you spend reading it during our talk today, we speak about And he got into journaling, and how much he reflects on things. Oh my god, how to reflect on the positive and negative the importance of having one’s own system of values, and how to ask for help. Let’s dive right in. And you thank you so much for being on the passion people podcast. I’ve been a big fan of hardware. I’ve been the I read good work every Monday morning. So I am really, really excited to have you on the show.
Andy Sparks 2:28
Awesome. Well, thanks for having me.
Naga Subramanya B B 2:30
Thank you. So Andy a good place to start would be maybe to wind back the clock. And, you know, take our listeners through your journey. I think you have a really interesting story to tell with, you know, starting a microbrewery to finding out that it’s illegal for the time that you started and the subsequent startups that you went on to.
Andy Sparks 2:53
Yeah, absolutely.
Andy Sparks 2:56
I got my start with I don’t know if you can even quite call it started. Companies are just starting things pretty pretty early on. My dad always encouraged me to take side jobs and stuff like that around the house and gave me reasons to understand that, you know, doing things for yourself. Could be a lot of fun. And as you mentioned this, you can hardly call it a brewery but it is a lot of fun to talk about. When I was in college, a friend of mine asked me what I knew about microbrew beer when I was 19 or 18. And I can’t even remember which one it was. And I said, either my dad at home, brewed some beer at home growing up and said, Well, do you want to start a micro brewery? Like you know, that sounds like a lot more fun than anything that anything else I have planned, right? Like I was going to class and so we just got together and it was probably the first time in my life that learning was so applied. You know, in school, you you It’s so abstract, you need to learn math, because one day you’ll need it. And you need to new clients because one day you’ll need it. And maybe you have some cool science experiment where someone comes in and does something very practical. But for most, for the most part learning and education for me growing up was just also theoretical and abstract. they’d sit in a classroom and talk about how you need this knowledge one day. And so suddenly, we found ourselves trying to start a microbrewery. And so I needed to learn everything I could about business in order to incorporate a company so we could start to sell people beer. And I needed to learn how to design labels. So I needed to learn how to use Photoshop and Illustrator so we could put a label on our beer and all these cool things that there’s not really a major and a school that puts together design and business and all these weird things, including chemistry, the chemistry of how you create beer, like it was just a very interesting journey for me to go through that and while our brewery was as you said, 100% illegal. All of the the Homebrew Supply stores were happy to sell us all the ingredients we needed in order to go make beer when were 19 years old. was a fun journey and then going back to class was always just kind of a boring process. Again, it was so abstract and I was studying history at the time. Conveniently, right around the similar time the iPhone had come out. And I was pretty proficient in Photoshop and Illustrator at the time, or at least I thought I was. And I found this one guy who was making iPhone apps near my college in his absolute horrible and I said, hey, there’s a program to the university where you don’t even have to pay me. The university will pay me 15 bucks an hour. And I’ll come to work for you. And I’m going to make all your apps look better. Oh, wow. And he gave me up. I wrote him an email and I asked him for a job and he ended up giving me the job. And you know, obviously, it’s very easy for him to give some student a job. He didn’t even have to pay me. But it was my first taste of getting into tech really. And that was really interesting. It was it was very cool. We ended up going to build a, an agency that built software for, you know, iPhone apps and websites for we have like 10, or 10 or more employees, and we had some pretty sizable contracts. And he would take me to all these meetings that we had where, you know, we’d be selling people and doing several hundred thousand dollar contracts. And I learned so much so fast. I was like, 21 years old, the entire, I think, maybe 22 when I ended up leaving that company, but that’s kind of how I got started and everything. I don’t know, if I ended up going off on a tangent. I feel like I should stop talking.
Naga Subramanya B B 6:30
No, no, no, this is this is exactly where I wanted the conversation to go. Because, you know, I relate to you, when you said that, you know, I had to do everything that it took to get my business up and running because I went through something similar when I started the podcast, whether it’s making a website, designing a logo, understanding what makes aesthetic sense. And what what’s also interesting to hear is this concept of transfer, right? You learn something in one context, but you were able to apply the same thing and it Totally different context in a in a new situation.
Andy Sparks 7:03
Oh absolutely. And that just continues right it’s funny you said starting a business it’s almost like an onion where there’s just layer after layer after layer where you think you understand it and the brewery I guess you could call it my first business and then I ended up leaving that software development company to start another company and I moved out to California. I learned a bunch of stuff there but I feel like I maybe only got two or three layers of the onion deep even though it felt like it was so you know, several years of learning and then started matter Mark after that and work there for almost four years and maybe got eight or nine layers deep into the onion. And now starting Holloway, we’ve been working on Holloway for almost three years this month. And, and or maybe we’re 15 layers deep into the onion. And I think a lot of founders or people who could be founders or whether its founding a company or you’re starting a nonprofit or just a local organization, or be Coming up politician, I think a lot of people quit after they get two or three layers of the onion deep. And I think so much of the richness in life in general, whether it’s a relationship with a friend or a family member, or a co worker, or working on a project, the real value, or like the gold at the end of the rainbow, whatever, whatever metaphor you want to use is in getting really deep into it. And getting really good because then all the different transfers that you that you talk about, start to make so much more sense. You see the interrelation between all these different fields, once you get deep enough into it, that it becomes rewarding in and of itself, not just so much the end that you’re seeking, whether it’s a big company or a successful political campaign, it’s the end and it becomes really cool. It’s just the journey itself.
Naga Subramanya B B 8:51
Absolutely. In addition to the relationship with the others and the relationship with you know, the business, you also speak about of your relationship with yourself. And you know your journey of self awareness that you went on. Can you also elaborate a little bit on that?
Andy Sparks 9:07
Oh, man, absolutely. Not even sure where to start. Let’s go way back. Let’s go way back. I, the first thing I got really excited about. I remember there’s this moment when, when I was a kid, and my dad, we were like picking we were in Boy Scouts. And we had to pick a leader who was going to be the leader of the boy scout group. And I remember we had to vote and I was going to vote for someone else. And my dad was like, you know, you don’t want to be a follower. You want to be the leader. And in the end, he convinced me to run. It was like my first leadership position is like a seven or eight year old or something like that. And then that’s just been something I got comfortable with read it really fast. And the next place that was just like really, getting into the self awareness and reflection for me was like, when I was in high school, I joined the church and I had found a really great community in our church. And I didn’t even get so much religious as I got really curious. And it was an environment that I could learn, and I could get people to follow me. I could, you know, get our youth group excited about certain ideas, and we would all spend time together. And we were we were part of something it was like building a community. And so the first place that I got really excited was in was strangely in religion, and I’m no longer and religious. But that group for me was like creating this community and I realized in in high school and early in college, that community was really important to me in the first place that I found community was in a church. And then when I got to college, I started to find community in groups that were more around building businesses together and creating things and all kinds of thinking about the world and what we wanted to be different about it and then And feeling and using the agency that we had to to effect some change whatever it was, whether it was like creating a T shirt company or trying to sell beer or creating apps or websites, whatever it was, I ended up finding these people that were just always very interested in creating something together. And that was really, really cool to me. But the whole time also, it’s like, there’s this journey of just thinking about what drives you nuts I think that’s probably been at the core of everything for me just like really trying to listen to my intuition when something feels off or when I don’t like something to try to figure out if there’s some way that I can change it or or come to the conclusion that I have no control over it and so I just have to figure out how to get comfortable with it. So I got introduced to the idea of journaling every day in a college class by this guy already Isaac. A lot of people are probably be familiar with this. He used the book The artists way by Julia Cameron as the textbook So we all had to write these. She has this exercise in the book called morning pages where you write on like three pages stream of consciousness. And you do it every day for three or four months. And it’s just to give someone the sense of the value of writing, and reflecting and thinking and the first couple of weeks you hate it. But after a month or so you start to realize that you’re writing about the same things over and over again, right, there’s that friend that keeps driving you nuts or that roommate, that whatever or you hate your job, or I don’t know about this major, I really, I really enjoy doing this thing, or this thing makes me feel great. And you start to just become a little bit more conscious of those things in your life that are good influences or negative influences. And ever since then, I’ve written a lot. I’ll go through these phases, where I’ll journal heavily for months and other phases where I won’t write at all and usually the phases that I don’t write it all start out as growth periods because I feel really confident. But then by the end of the the no writing phases, usually it’s a disaster because I haven’t reflected and I haven’t paid attention to my My gut or instincts or feelings or whatever, and I have to kind of come back and figure out how to solve that. But I’m just fascinated and really curious by what it’s like to be alive. And the idea that you can have multiple different versions of you, you know, if I went back in time, 12 years ago, and I met myself, would we even get along?
Andy Sparks 13:21
Like, it would be pretty, pretty fascinating to go back and meet yourself not long ago. So I think about that stuff all the time. And when along the way of just starting companies, a lot of the route for me starting a company is I’ve wanted to work on something that really mattered to me and my dad impressed on me the importance of that. Growing up, he really talked about how hard he worked so that my sister and I would have the opportunity to actually work on something that we wanted to. I think it’s a little bit of a false choice. For my dad, I think that he probably could have done a lot better You wanted to as well, it wasn’t quite as binary. But I feel like there’s this pressure to, to build something and work on something that is interesting and important to me. And so every step along the way of building a company, you have to reassess, you know, how are we doing? Whether it’s are we building the kind of workplace that I want to I want to build? Are we fostering the right environment for people are working on a problem that matters? Are we for every moment that you think that you’re a values driven leader or co worker, colleague, you know, we all screw up and make mistakes and you have to reflect on those things in order to figure out what kind of person or what kind of leader you want to be and what kind of company you want to build every step along the way. And it just takes a lot of reflection and thinking
Naga Subramanya B B 14:42
these done is done for self consumption, is it you know, to also publish some of these journals for you know, for people to read.
Andy Sparks 14:50
I do have been publishing a lot more. For the first several years it was just purely for myself and I would just, you know, put them in Evernote or Microsoft Word docs or whatever it was, at the time, and I started this habit of going back and reading. I have them in Evernote and they’re written, the title of each document is the date. And it’s kind of cool when you’re writing on, say, November 13 2019. You can go back and see all the other times that you published in November across other years. So maybe you’ll see that I also publish something right? I wrote something on November 9 2012. And you’re like, Man, what was I thinking seven years ago. Then you go back and you look at that, and it’s a really fun exercise. And they extended that last year for the first time where I went back at the end of 29 2018. And when I read every single journal entry, which was over 100 journal entries from 2018, and I took notes, and I found there were about 12 themes throughout the entire year is so funny, and frustrating because it turns out that over the course of over 100 journal entries in 2018 I just was consistently banging my head at the Against the wall around the same 12 things. And at the end of 2018, I was like, you know, there’s one thing I’m going to work on at 2019. And it’s going to be confidence. And confidence was the most frequently cited problem of 28 of 2018. For me, whether it was in personal relationships, whether it was in work or wherever it was, I just was continuing continuing to battle confidence in a lot of different flavors. And so seeing that through my writing was really helpful for me to prioritize that as something that I could work on really actively. And then as far as publishing publicly, I published as a result of that whole journey. I published one of these essays on confidence last year, but also publishing I write good work, good work every week is me kind of just thinking about something related to what it means to do good work, and publishing that for a couple thousand people to read. And I love getting the responses to that and it’s also just a really fun journey to say every week. I have to find four paragraphs to write on what it means to do good work. And so it makes me kind of strangely attuned to anything related to that. So I’m going to meet up with a friend after this, who I haven’t seen in a long time, who just raised around for a company and we’ve known each other for 1010 years or so. And I’m excited to talk to john because I almost guarantee that we will sit we will stumble on something in that conversation that will be what I end up writing about and good work.
Naga Subramanya B B 17:33
That I can totally relate to that because the you know, there have been so many instances when you all of my Monday start with good work, first of all, but Devon so many instances where, you know, I keep talking to my colleagues and saying, See, I told you this and this is what Andy is writing about in the newsletter. And yeah, and and it’s so great that you’re sharing these thoughts and insights with with the rest of us as well. And you know, just coming back to the to the team of confidence I, I find it really hard to believe that someone who has as much experience and has founded as many companies as you struggled with confidence, right? So for me, that’s a really, you know, hard nut to swallow. So, you know, that can I can ask you to maybe double click on that, and going to elaborate on how you worked on your confidence because the theme of this podcast is passion. And, you know, we can only be moved to do something that we’re passionate about, if we are confident that it’s going to work out. And, you know, in a lot of ways, or you know, maybe embarking on a passion project or embarking on a company, which is often a result of a passion project is the result of you know, you want to do something when you care about something so much.
Andy Sparks 18:47
Yeah, well, when it comes to confidence. For me, it’s, you have a certain set of standards or anything, whether they’re formal or informal. Everyone has Some set of standards of how your how you think it’s acceptable or ideal to treat people. Now, if you if you met an old friend and they were struggling with becoming an artist or building a company or getting a new job, you expect that you would treat them with a certain level of kindness. But we’re often not very good at doing that with ourselves. And I’m certainly not the way that I look at myself in my career. It’s really easy for me to see someone who has started. I don’t even count the brewery is a real company. I started three internet startups, the first of which I crash and burn within a year, the second of which we worked on for almost four years, and we ended up selling it for less than the amount of money that we raised from investors. And then the third one I’m still working on for 60 or 70 hours every week. And it hasn’t reached escape velocity and I’ve actually only For a brief window in time worked on a company that I started, that was profitable. And that was matter mark for a super short period of time. And so when I look at the type of businesses that I admire, I admire sustainable companies who have found a way to sell a product to an audience and then what I mean by sell a product, I mean, they, they found a way to help a group of people so much that people are willing to give them money, that when they figured out how to do it profitably and sustainably, that’s the thing that I’m really interested in learning how to do. So it’s almost like thinking of yourself as an athlete areas and aspiring Olympian, and looking at your times, and realizing that you’re still 30 seconds away from the fastest person on earth. And just trying to figure out what you need to do in order to train or change about your diet or change about your lifestyle or get a new coach or whatever it is in order to approach you know how you become That Olympian that you’ve been wanting to become for your whole life. And so for confidence for me, it’s not as obvious as it is for, say, thinking about an Olympic swimmer where there’s a certain set of strokes and things that you very obviously can do. And there’s certain things about your biology that will either work or not work for building a profitable, successful company that really changes something significant about culture and the economy and the world. It’s so intricate. It’s like a chess game with billion possible different moves or a billion different pieces on the board where you’re trying to mimic all these things that successful business people have done and you’re just kind of stumbling around in the dark. And so oftentimes with confidence, this comes down really, practically to every day you have to make a set of decisions. And if you’re not making decisions, you’re looking at the decisions that your team has is making and you’re trying to get a sense of whether If the team is making good decisions or bad decisions and how you can coach them on that, and all that comes down to confidence so before you make a decision, you have to informally or formally make an assessment of how confident Am I that this is a good decision. So that’s for me a lot of what I struggle with is evaluating my own career and with with the right lens. So another lens to evaluate my career through could be you know, what I did had a lot of fun and learned a ton. And I didn’t have to go pay for an expensive master’s degree in my 20s. And can I should be really fortunate and feel like I’m at a really great place and be really excited about the future so that in, in both lenses are true. So it’s just trying to figure out how to get comfortable with with where I am and, and oftentimes when I feel like there’s a lack of confidence in a situation, it’s because there’s something that I just haven’t teased apart enough. For some thread. There’s something going on, but I haven’t paid it off until into and gotten comfortable with. And so that’s often again, where reflection can be really helpful. I don’t know if I fully answer the question, but let me know if there’s anything else I can say
Naga Subramanya B B 23:09
you did. I have a full I have a little bit of a follow up on that. So for people who are struggling with confidence, you said for you, if you’re not confident about something, maybe it’s an indication of you know, you’ve not researched something enough or you’ve not worked on something enough. But for people who want to start something on their own of people who are embark on a passion project, and they’re not feeling confident, what what would your inputs be for them?
Andy Sparks 23:37
Oh, man, that’s I feel like there’s a lot of pressure for someone sitting here listening this dealing with the the bottom of a well thought out with is that I’ve never met a single person that I respected. He didn’t doubt themselves regularly. I think that it’s really easy. I can’t remember who said this, but it’s a I want to say that it was Hunter S Thompson. And who knows, but it was don’t judge it don’t judge your inside by looking or comparing yourself to other people’s outsides. So whatever it is that you see from the surface, whether it’s people on Twitter or Instagram or the news or whatever it is, you’re not getting the full picture of who that person is. And oftentimes you’re getting only what they want you to see, which is the most confident the strongest, the most practice version of themselves. It’s part of what I like going and having conversations like this, because I think that it’s important to show people that creating something, whether it’s writing, or it’s a company, or who knows, whatever, whatever it is, I’ve got to imagine it’s similar when you’re a parent, that you have no idea what you’re doing. But one of my favorite articles of all time was written I think was in The Guardian, it’s called. Everybody’s just totally making everything up or something like that. Everybody’s just total winging it all the time.
Naga Subramanya B B 24:58
Guy link to The article in the show notes so people are listening and you want to read I’ll share that article in the show notes. Yeah,
Andy Sparks 25:04
It’s like a picture of Barack Obama, right? And it’s and it’s like, what is it like to be in the White House? You’re just totally winging it all the time. I’m just going to stop there before we send them to anything political. But so the first step to answer your question is, just know that it’s normal. Second of all, whatever it is that you’re scared of, that’s something to pay attention to, and just try to tease apart Why are you afraid of it? And fear is a super normal emotion. It’s the thing that comes from our lizard brain that is trying to tell us whether we should fight or whether we should run away. And whatever that fear is, just try to pay attention to what is it that you’re scared of is are you scared of quitting a job because you think it’s going to lead to some lack of status or you’re going to lose money or your parents are going to be angry at you. That even then brings the inventory philosophy around Well, if you’re scared of whatever this thing is because of an extrinsic factor, then maybe you need to start determining whether that’s actually something that you value. Oftentimes, when you go off on your own, whether you’re creating a company or film or anything, people around you say, What are you doing? You have this very stable strong thing in front of you that is very practical. And, you know, that’s, it’s, it’s always like, Don’t quit your job or you have this great career, you have this very safe thing and everyone around you gives you this advice or almost criticism of how could you give up something so safe? And you have to really get to a place of confidence and strength for yourself to just know that you that’s the thing that you want to chase when you talk about passion, right. It’s passion is having conviction around something and being willing to slog through the mud around that for five or 10 years. So, I think that another place to get to which I think is a very helpful exercise is to come up with your own system of values and write it down. So you can start to make decisions. Very few people do this, if I could change one thing about the modern education system, it would be that when you turn 17, or 16, you take a class and you sit down and you start to write down things that you value, which might be even too early. But the whole point is that you continually revise. And so a few examples of this are like, I value humor. I think that people who can’t make fun of themselves are just totally awful to be around.
Naga Subramanya B B 27:44
It could just be that struggling to accept the other person’s version of themselves, okay, that
Andy Sparks 27:52
very well, and oftentimes they are I just know that when I leave, you know, when I’m trying to relax in my free time and the people that really stimulate and challenge me are people that are usually pretty comfortable with themselves. And so a friend of mine taught me this trick, when I meet people as I usually try to make a little bit of a jab, just to see how they take it something. And if they laugh about it, then I’m okay this person, this person’s in, I think that I’m going to be able to get along with this person, they can laugh at themselves. That’s what value for me another value for me is that I value risk. I think that you can’t get the really rich parts of life unless you take a risk. And so that’s something that I look for. But then it also helps me feel really confident that it helps me in situations when I receive some criticism, whether it’s from family or whether it’s from friends or mentors, or anyone and I realized that this is a person who doesn’t value risk in the same way that I do that I can understand it as not being a personal thing, and that it’s just a difference in values and that I’m pursuing something that I value and they’re giving me advice, cautioning me towards something that they value. So I think that it’s a helpful exercise to get an idea of what you value just so you can Stand what’s going on. And then when I think you’ll start to see with a lack of confidence is that there’s just things that you haven’t teased apart in terms of what you value or what you’re afraid of. And so when you, when you get into the values and the fears, you start to just see the things that are causing you to have a lack of confidence a little bit more clearly. And there’s something that become less of a dragon in your mind and something more like a task to be worked on or like a it’s almost like a muscle that you need to just work out and exercise and improve incrementally over time. And you just got to be willing to put into work. I don’t know if I have a better answer than that. And does.
Naga Subramanya B B 29:46
That’s a fantastic answer that I think a lot of the inputs that have given is something that I implement sooner rather than later, like journaling or, you know, paying attention to my fears or trying to see what kind of things emerged. But what? What I see from what I hear from our conversation is that you’re, you’re very, you’re very self aware. I heard you mentioned the word reflect like multiple times. Right? So how how does one reflect on a good situation? Something that’s gone their way or the way they emphasized it abroad? Did it? And how does one reflect on a situation that really, really didn’t go that way? Or how how do you reflect on failure?
Andy Sparks 30:33
Yeah, for either it does. For me, there’s no single playbook. There’s not one thing I do every time that something’s going really well, or one thing that I do every time something goes very poorly. But one place to start is, I find writing really helpful. Some people hate reading, it’s fine. If you hate writing, you’re going to be fine. You’ll find another system for me, it’s very helpful. I literally just sit down on the computer and I consider it a conversation with myself. So something’s going poorly. One of the opening lines might be, Hey, buddy, everything sucks right now. I know you feel awful, what’s going on? It’s going to be all right. Let’s get to the bottom of this. And that’s like the opening paragraph, I physic I actually typed that out. And then I just kind of act like I’m sitting next to another version of myself, who’s compassionate and kind, and we just kind of try to work this thing through and just ask ourselves questions. I love this question that the author Tim urban from Hawaii asks, If at the beginning for his blog is way, but why, right? What’s going on here? So if you’re sitting there and something’s going feeling like it’s going all the wrong directions, just sit down and say, Wait a second. What’s going on here? Why did this happen? And don’t think of it so much as a as Peter To blame, but just try to isolate the different variables that were inputs into whatever went, whatever happened. And ask yourself if there’s something that you could control versus something that that was out of your control and the things that are out of your control, you can just start to get more comfortable with the fact that there’s nothing you could have done. And so you can stop beating yourself up, and the things that were in your control, then you just take them as a lesson for something to learn from in the future. You just think about it, like, you know, the first time that you stepped on a sharp rock as a kid, you started looking out for sharp rocks again, it’s just the same thing over and over again to life. It’s just the sharp rocks turn into, you know, emotional outbursts and conversations or whatever they are.
Andy Sparks 32:45
And that’s where things that are going really well.
Andy Sparks 32:48
I think I’ve actually gotten worse at that.
Andy Sparks 32:52
But there have been times, again, writing where I just want to capture the moment for what it feels like where they’re beneficial. times in my life that I’ve just been sitting there and I’m like, you know what I’m just going to write down as in as much detail as possible, what this feels like, just so I can remember it. I think there’s this there’s this interesting idea that I don’t know we hit 18 you graduate high school and you think, you know, all the the set of human emotions is happiness and sadness and fear, regret and all these different things. I think that our understanding of human emotions is just so Elementary, and that there’s emotions you can like, there’s an emotion that I feel, which is it’s a I know that I can write when I feel that way. And sometimes I’ve literally left a bar before with friends because I’m like, I sorry, I have this feeling. I know I can write and I leave, because I don’t know when I’m going to get that feeling again. And sometimes when you’re in a moment of being successful, whether you’ve written something that you’ve loved or whether you’ve had a great conversation with your spouse, whatever it is, just write down how that feels so you can remember it and then I just started to kind of chase that feeling. I also sometimes write down big decisions when I decided to work with my co founder, Josh, I just wrote down Hey, this is what I expect to happen. This is why I’m making the decision. And then I revisited it a year later and just trying to get a sense of how good I was at predicting how the decision would go. And that’s just another thing that you you again, you look back and you’re just kind of keeping yourself honest where if you think that you make great decisions well keep a journal of decisions and find out if you actually are good at making decisions and if you’re not then you just ask yourself well, what happened there? Why did I make a poor decision and what can I learn to try to get a little bit better at it next time?
Naga Subramanya B B 34:44
Right, you mentioned that you know, whenever things are not going your way that you start off with you know, a Hey, buddy, I know that things are not really going your way but that’s something that I really struggled with the the conversation with myself and you know, I’ve always felt that I need to be more gentle. And I need to treat myself the way I would treat my best friend who was going through the situation. But I’ve always been, that that’s been something that’s, that’s been really hard for me or, you know, even even a conversation with my spouse that whether it’s what what comes out is a lot more harsh than what we intended to be. So, how do you, you know, at least what do you suggest for me to you know, kind of tone down the harshness and, you know, the gentleness up a notch, I guess,
Andy Sparks 35:43
oh, this is great. So part of why I mentioned writing down your values is because whether whether we’ve formalized our values or not, whether we really feel like if I asked you, you know, what are the what are the 10 things that are most important to you and human relationships and In whatever, how do you make decisions, maybe you’d be able to pick a few, maybe you wouldn’t. But the more that you get to a sense of awareness on those, the more you’ll start to see that they’re at the root of a lot of that those sort of negative emotions that you’ve got. And look, there’s no I have no science around this. I’m just this has just been my own experience. And I don’t claim to know have any authority on it. But what I found really helpful is usually when there’s something going on, that makes me feel ugly, in whatever way it is. It’s because that there’s some misalignment between something I believe in something that I’m doing. So if I’ve been avoiding a particular task, for whatever reason, I’ll sit there and beat myself up about it. I can’t believe I did that. Why am I avoiding that? And what’s really going on at the root of that is, I believe in being reliable, but for some reason, there’s been something pulling me away from being reliable on so what is that? What’s that thing and just trying to get an idea of of what it is. For me, I guess it’s just very practical just trying to get a sense of what’s going on there and not stopping until you’ve gotten a sense of what it is. Let’s see, other times, you are not an island, you can’t, you’re not going to be enough. Sometimes you do need to go to your friends and say, Hey, I feel awful about this thing. I’m just, there’s I’ve been doing something or embarrassed or I’m sad or I’m angry or I just can’t stop getting in my own way. Well, can you help me out here sometimes you just really need those people in your life. And I think that oftentimes, we’re not very good at fostering a good supportive community of people who can be around us and build us up like that. Another interesting framework for this is Jerry colonna, Who’s a management coach for quite a few CEOs in Silicon Valley in a really good guy. Jerry says the and I don’t know if you got it from someone else or or where it comes from, but I know he says it. And he’s basically like, anytime someone is upset, what they’re really looking for is either belonging,
Andy Sparks 38:25
love, or safety.
Andy Sparks 38:29
And so, in a context of reflecting on yourself in your own life, it’s like, do I feel unsafe right now? Is there something about what’s going on that makes me feel unsafe? Is there something that makes me feel alone, which would be the opposite of belonging? Is there something that makes me feel abandoned or unloved or unlovable or something like that, and whatever those things are, you have to know that everybody’s got everybody’s got stuff that they’re sharing. Going with I mean, everybody, everyone’s done something that is in Congress with what they are, who they think they are. And so part of what you could do, I think the cool thing, one way I look at it is that there’s no such thing as a single self, the person that you were five years ago is not the person you are today, which it doesn’t excuse you from. If you if you did something truly horrible, then I think that we’re still trying to figure out how to hold people accountable for things like that. But, you know, if you killed somebody, obviously, you’re going to have to be held accountable. But most of us didn’t kill anybody. Most of us just had a crappy conversation with someone at work or our spouse or we did something, we lied about it or we avoided something or we said something we didn’t mean that’s usually what we’re dealing with, right? Or some flavor of that kind of thing. And in those situations, you can just you have to just figure out what it is. What is it actually and sometimes you need someone’s help with that. So sometimes we just can’t see it. My girlfriend, I talked to A lot about these things and and sometimes you look at each other, like, you know, we’ve been talking about the same thing for the last four months. And I can tell you that you’ve already made your decision.
Andy Sparks 40:12
Like, you have an active decision, but we’ve been talking about it for four months and know that the dis I know how the decision is going to come out.
Andy Sparks 40:20
And sometimes, people have said that kind of thing to me. And I’m like, Is it really that obvious? Because
Naga Subramanya B B 40:28
I guess the people around us can see through us a lot better than what we can see ourselves, I guess, in some ways, right?
Andy Sparks 40:36
Oh, this is a great segue. One of my favorite just one of the people I cherish the most My life is my old co founder, Kevin, Kevin moral from matter marking. Kevin has these. He has this remarkable habit of asking people these amazing questions. We call them Kevin questions most people don’t know. And the way so good at is he knows well enough to ask a question. That’s pretty personal. And it really makes you think, and sometimes his questions, Kevin questions can make some people uncomfortable, but amongst close, trusting friends, you know, I, I’ll go months without seeing Kevin and we’ll sit down and 45 minutes and he’ll ask me a Kevin question and I’m like, Damn, that’s that one really hits to the heart of or, you know, or it’ll be something that’s just like, wow, I never thought of it that way. That’s really interesting. And so I think that as to whatever value there is to reflecting and being self aware and and earnestly trying to just do your best to not be a jerk or, or, or live your life in violation of whatever values you have. That’s all well and good, but, man, we’re social creatures, and to have a group of people around you who share some of those values and know you well enough to hold you accountable or to to tell you your Silly and beating yourself up is really, really helpful. I even wrote about that. One was that just in I think it was in good work last week. Yeah. My friend Samir, and I was standing at this bar. And I just left matter, Mark, and he had just left and I had come across this framework that they use Uber. Now, Uber might have a lot of bad habits, but I think this one was interesting, where they would ask people, you know, what are your top? What are the top three things you’re good at? And what are the top three things you’re bad at? And so I felt comfortable that sumir knew me well enough, in a work context, asked him that question. He gave me three things I was good at which I don’t even remember what those are now. And then he gave me the three things I was bad at. And I remember those. And I just took those as a list of things to try to get better at as opposed to condemnation. I think that’s oftentimes what we do to ourselves is we’re condemning ourselves for something. We’re making ourselves feel bad for some set of behavior and stead of saying, Hey, now that I know what I want to improve, I can just choose to work on this thing over the next six months. And then if for whatever reason you don’t make a ton of progress on it, then maybe you were focusing on the wrong thing. I don’t know if any of that answers your question, or it’s helpful.
Naga Subramanya B B 43:18
Absolutely. And it also gave me like a nice segue to my next question, right? You said, it’s really important to have a community of people that you can trust, it’s important that you know, you’re vulnerable enough to them or to your inner circle of friends that they can ask you stuff that makes you question your values, if you know what they are. And you’re mostly, you know, going through a rough patch because something that you’re doing is not in alignment with what what you believe. Right. So, my question is, how, how do you ask somebody for help? Because that’s another thing that a lot of people find difficult especially Actually, you know, again, maybe this is a, this is a question for me. But I know there’s a lot of people who have who go through this, that they find it really hard to ask people for help. And as an extension of that they also find it really hard to be vulnerable or open up to someone and say, Hey, I’m going through a rough patch room and multiple points in my life that
Andy Sparks 44:23
opening up and being vulnerable to somebody has been almost a turning point either for my life or for relationship. So asking for help is but I think the first the first thing that makes this really easy as there’s actually a psychological principle called the Ben Franklin effect. And the Ben Franklin, there’s a story behind why it’s named after Ben Franklin and he’s certainly not the first person to discover it, but it’s all about sort of reciprocity. A lot of people assume they go into a help. They think about asking for help and like why would this person ever want to help me? This person must have all this going on in their life. Why would they care about little old me? First of all, that’s not true. almost anyone. Actually, I don’t think that there’s ever almost everybody’s had someone help them in some immense way in life. Especially if you’re thinking about asking them for help, then you person has almost undoubtedly, had somebody helped them enormously, especially in a career. Everyone that I know from a mentor, people that I look up to, they are so happy to give back to others by helping them out because they are where they are because they’ve had other people help them. And a lot of people don’t know that or think about that or realize that and so they assume that they’re imposing by asking for help. So that’s one thing. Another part of the Ben Franklin effect is once somebody does help you, they are more likely to help you again in the future. And so it’s kind of like a principle of networking, which is leader, like, you get someone to help you in a small way, give you an introduction or whatever. And then they’re kind of invested in you, they want you to be successful, and so they’re more likely to help you out again. Another part of this though, is you can’t just come right out to a stranger and ask them for help with the deepest, darkest thing. Now, some people you can, but you might scare some people off if you said, Hey, if someone just emailed me and said, Hey, I’m actually you know, someone I literally have had a stranger emailed me before and say, Hey, I read a blog posts that you had on shutting your company down, and I’m actually shutting my company down right now. And I’ve emailed these people and just been like, hey, when can you get on the phone in the next day or two? Let’s just talk about it. Granted, if I get 300 people showing their companies down, sending me emails, I’m not gonna be able to do 300 phone calls with people. But if you if you connect with someone on a meaningful level, like hey, I read something that you did. I’m in a similar spot. There’s probably fewer people that take the time to go right. And ask for help than you think. I think that we oftentimes imagine that people that we want to connect with our where we might want to ask for help are so busy that why would they have time for us when in reality, think about it another way, think about it as you’re kind of doing them a favor. Everyone wants to be useful. There’s a whole field of philosophy that I love, it’s just all about the core purpose of the human experience is just to be useful. And we want to feel useful. And so when you ask someone for help, you’re actually doing them a favor, by giving them an opportunity to be useful. And a lot of people don’t think about it that way. As far as vulnerability, sharing the parts of your life that are hard or challenging or scary or embarrassing.
Andy Sparks 47:52
Those are all ways that you show that you trust the other person.
Andy Sparks 47:57
There’s obviously such thing as sharing too much too soon. We’ve probably all been on the other side of someone who’s over shared too soon. So you have to take a little bit of a gamble and some people are more open than others are. But I found that what’s helpful for me is the type of people that I really find that tend to be supportive and helpful and caring, are ones that are open to listening in to hearing and into getting into the vulnerable messy stuff pretty fast. I used to wait pretty long before I told people certain things about myself and I now I’m pretty quick to talk about this stuff that used to be really embarrassing or scary or sad. So I think that the deeper you can go with somebody, the more rewarding you’re going to find that relationship. Man, how can I translate this from the abstract to the practical though, I think practically. I love this idea. I’m a broken record on it to people who know me there’s this idea from Kurt Vonnegut, the writer that he believes that the majority of conflict in relationships, specifically spousal relationships are that we’re asking our spouse to be too many people. So human biology evolved to basically adapt to the fact that we grew up in these tribes of 100 or so people. And so we had 100 people to serve different needs, right? There’s the people you went hunting with, there’s a people that you talk to about this or that there’s elders, you know, you name it, you had all these, you had a village, you had a community. And oftentimes we find ourselves now and in civilization where we’ve got maybe our spouse if we’re lucky, or some family members, and we’ve got a couple other people that we grew up around, that we’ve just kind of gotten into the habit of spending time with, but those people might not be the most supportive people and the best people for us to be around and we might have a need that those people can’t meet. Maybe you really need to talk to someone who understands what it’s like to be an early stage founder. And there’s other people in your life who are just never going to get that because they’ve never been there. And so what you’ve identified is that you have a need to find some Someone that you can trust and build a relationship with who’s an early stage founder. And so the way that I’ve gotten into great, I’ve found great relationships. In the past, like I met Daniel, moral co founder of matter mark, we met at a conference. And when I go to conferences, I have this mental model of, I’m just trying to meet one person that can be friends with for 10 years. That’s the whole point. If I can go to if I can spend, you know, $1,000 on a conference or whatever, and meet one person who would be a really close friend of mine for 10 years. That’d be worth it. I mean, would you pay $1,000 to even sure that there’s some amount of money for people to meet someone who could be your closest confidant and mentor and business partner and sibling basically, that you adopt? That’s pretty cool. And when you meet people at a conference, and you have that filter on the women going to be friends with this person for 10 years, you filter out a lot of people. Like pretty quickly in a conversation you find that this person out of it, I don’t know. But then you meet someone you know, this is interesting you say Hey, I’m really enjoying this conversation Do you want to go get another beer, if you don’t drink, you know, I’m really enjoying this conversation, I want to go for a walk or whatever it is. And you just start to slowly open up and you peel back some of the layers and some of the some of the elements of the mask and the things that you are defensive about. And if the other person, you know, it is a good match for friend friendship, then they’ll start to peel back the layers of their mask and there again, and eventually, you’ll feel comfortable. And you can just try to say, Hey, you know, something I’ve been really struggling with is I think that I need to shut my company down. And I haven’t told anybody about it. And based on how the person responds, you’ll find out if you think that someone that you can trust. And it’s hard, it’s not something that you just figured out one at a time. But I have found that, that that trust and vulnerability and relationships is something that pays off big time, especially if you think about it on a 10 year time horizon as opposed to just thinking about what you can get out of somebody in a few minutes.
Naga Subramanya B B 51:54
And I and I totally echo your thoughts there in terms of you know, looking at a longer term perspective. Its burden I feel and in everything, right? Because otherwise you won’t be willing to put in the work that is required, maybe you know, to peel all those layers of an onion in the case of a business or really understand that other person in case of a business associate or someone you met at a conference. So I really agree, you know, to do all of the things that you said
Andy Sparks 52:23
in I guess the last thing I’d add to it is something that’s really odd about, at least in my opinion, American culture is how much we we think of business relationships, like another business contact, someone that I’m going to go network with. It’s a very sterile and it’s very odd to me, because, you know, we’re, we’re just animals. And we’re social and we all know that great friendships make us very happy. And if you find people that you can trust and love and they care about you, and you care about them, and it’s going to be good for you, but For some reason, when we show up to a work event or a professional event, like a conference, we look at it in a different lens, almost like what kind of utility Can I get from this person? How can they help me? Or what can I get from them? or How can I use this? And that’s not how people work. And I think that, looking at the relationships that we build, not so strictly in a professional, utilitarian sense, but more in a Can I just surround myself with people who I respect deeply, who are creative in some sense. One of my, one of the people that I just adore, a friend of mine is a filmmaker who I found his work on YouTube 10 or so years ago. And I just emailed him and I said, Hey, I love what you did with this. And I have no idea if there’s any way that we could one day work together, but I just really admire your work and I hope that we could get a drink sometime or hang out. And he responded The next day, and we and we’ve been friends for 10 years now. And and it’s just Instead of thinking about things, so transactionally it’s more just trying to surround yourself with people who, who you respect and and share your values. And who knows, maybe one day, you’ll find something to work on together or one day, they’ll introduce you to someone who could be your business partner, or whatever those things are. I think that it’s trying to build your own little in the absence of a village. It’s kind of like building your own village that can be built on your own terms. And there’s no, there’s no wise chief or anything. It’s just like you and you and 100 people you respect going through life together and helping each other out along the way. I think that that’s a much more productive way to think about professional professional moves and career. Whatever LinkedIn is.
Naga Subramanya B B 54:42
I couldn’t I couldn’t agree with you more. I also wanted to touch upon the topic of what you said about Kurt Vonnegut and asking are supposed to be like to any PR and, and it’s something that you know, I really struggled with a couple of years back when I was going through a rough patch with my then girlfriend now wife. And that’s when I realized that I want my wife to be my best friend, my intellectual friend, someone I’m attracted to someone who cooks great things. Well, someone who wears great clothes on is very successful in life. And that’s where it’s so unfair. It’s
Andy Sparks 55:17
in there’s the quality isn’t there. And so I want them to be someone that I could have fun with, after a bad day at work, and I want them to be someone who can do this and that and then like, actually, what if I could just have somebody that I respected who I could get a drink with on Friday after work and talk about work? And that’s what they’re in my life for.
Naga Subramanya B B 55:35
Absolutely. And you’re I also loved your, your take on professional relationships. I really connect with all the stuff that you said, and it would be I would love to continue having these conversations with you.
Andy Sparks 55:50
Yeah, hundred percent. That’s what this is a great example of something where, you know, you emailed me and it’s like, yeah, let’s get on the phone and let’s talk for an hour and then who knows? something comes up, I learned we learn more about each other and something is cool, and we throw it each other’s way. And who knows what happens. That’s what’s so cool about the internet and email and Twitter. And podcasting is that it’s just a bunch of people who are all kind of creative, and they can be all over the world. And I’ve got a friend now who did some, he wrote an edition of good work. And he emailed me about a podcast, and I did his podcast, and he wrote an additional Good work, and he lives in Taipei, and was like, I’ve never been to Taipei. I don’t have plans to go to Taipei. But now I’ve got a friend in Taipei.
Naga Subramanya B B 56:36
We also have a friend in Bangalore
Andy Sparks 56:38
in like, That’s so cool. And so I don’t Yeah, you maybe you could probably give a couple minutes on, on how to ask for help because you seem good at it.
Naga Subramanya B B 56:50
I don’t know that they always start that, you know, that’s not something that I’m really good at. So, you know, that’s the reason I asked you those questions. To conclude, I know That, that we’re out of time and I’m not going to hold you back. I wanted to know what you feed your brain. Because I believe that the the things that we put into our body and the things that we put into our mind, shaped the way we think and the way we feel. So I’m just to conclude, I’m just really interested to know the kind of books you read, how you how you consume your news, or any kind of social media, so that the people listening in can emulate some of the some of the points that have already mentioned, and also figured out how to filter and better refine their brain for man.
Andy Sparks 57:35
So I am addicted to Twitter. I follow way too many people. At one point I was really disciplined on Twitter and I followed a certain set of people because I thought that I admired them or whatever and now I just follow a couple thousand people. Some of them are customers, some of them are some of them are people that I you know, who knows, I don’t even know how, why I follow half people, but it’s really interesting on Twitter, and I’d love to engage and I meet all kinds of interesting strangers there. Were Going to be publishing a whole miniature guide on all the ways you know how to use Twitter to grow your professional village. Wow. So that’ll be fun. Let’s see, I read the New York Times regularly. I also will read Fox News and Drudge Report to get an idea of how the other side of the political spectrum spin every everything that happens and kind of figure that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle of the times in them. read fiction. I’m on a huge fiction binge this year, I’ve been reading fantasy and science fiction books. I’m on book like 20. And I, I download them on Kindle and then also the audio book. And then I listen to the audio book a lot like I get lunch by myself twice a week, and I’ll read just while I’m eating lunch. And that’s one of the ways that I stay sane. I’m kind of an introvert. And so it’s really nice for me to be able to recharge over just reading a book over lunch. It’s amazing how much you can read when you read for, you know, four or five hours every every week, I read professional nonfiction books when I’m trying to learn something. So when we were trying to figure out how to price the first Holloway guide, I found, I just did some research, I tweeted and ask people what the best books are on pricing, I ended up finding four or five books on pricing, I found probably 10 articles on pricing products, I read all the articles and took notes on them. And then I read the books and took notes on all them. Kind of like one project, like I needed to learn how to price something. And so I had a window open, where all my notes were for pricing. And then I was reading and I considered that part of my job to understand the ins and outs of pricing. So when we made a pricing decision, it was something that was done from a place of rigor, as opposed to just something where I read one blog post that was earlier and when I was just getting started. And companies would just read one or two blog posts and figure that I knew what I was doing. And now I realized that there’s actually quite quite a bit more I need to understand. So when I read nonfiction books, it’s usually because I need to solve something Specific. Occasionally I’ll read a nonfiction book that someone recommends that’s kind of more abstracts or something that’s interesting to me. Usually I read them because there’s something very practical I’m trying to solve. And then friends and I share podcasts and stuff like that with each other occasionally, and I’ll listen and listen to things like that. And then I’m also, you know, this is this is the most important part a lot. Everyone are so many people kind of project that they are so productive. They listen to all these podcasts, and they read all these professional nonfiction books, and they’re just like, these knowledge sponges. And I would definitely put myself in a category that I do that, but I also watched like, a pretty reasonable amount of Netflix, I love I love storytelling. I’m just a total sucker for a good story. And so when there’s a good series out on TV or a great movie, I mean, I love that stuff. So I Will binge, a show you know, like I love billions this year that was a great one there’s a new, His Dark Materials just started on HBO which is like a sort of fantasy world thing based off of a set of books there was a movie called the Golden Compass from the same world a few years ago. I just love that stuff. So in addition to all the fun things I put in my are the all the very like, learning and practical things I pour in my head. I also love this stuff, this storytelling and participating in sort of like global culture. Right, so there’s Hollywood is is good at portraying one lens on that, but I also read read it. I read the front page of Reddit every day. Because it’s like, what’s happening? What’s happening with all the crazy people on the internet? Do something funny, sometimes there’s something whatever, you know, like, I think that that’s so fun to I think that’s not talked about enough
Naga Subramanya B B 1:01:52
that I so if I had to put you in a place and ask you for your favorite book, favorite podcast and favorite TV show what would be
Andy Sparks 1:02:04
my favorite, absolute favorite book?
Naga Subramanya B B 1:02:07
It can be two or three, it could be with your top three list.
Andy Sparks 1:02:10
Um, I would say one of my favorite books. nonfiction is the pleasure of finding things out. It’s a series of lectures by Richard Feynman. Okay, I also really enjoyed mastery by Robert Greene. It’s a good framework for thinking about how to go about your career and apprentice somebody or decide to strike out on your own. As for fiction, I would say I recently really enjoyed this book called The Name of the Wind. I think it was Patrick Rothfuss is a beautiful, beautiful book. My favorite podcast. Man, I really enjoyed this series by gimlet media called science versus where they take a controversial subject And then they look at all the peer reviewed academic research on the subject and they tell you what the real research says. It can make a really fun conversation when someone says, you know, organic food is better than than GMO food. And you’re like, Well, actually, the science doesn’t really support that.
Andy Sparks 1:03:22
So I like those. And then what was the last one podcast books? Was there one other
Andy Sparks 1:03:26
Movie? My favorite. My favorite movie is Big Fish. It’s by far big fish is my favorite movie.
Naga Subramanya B B 1:03:32
Fantastic. Andy, thank you so much for taking time for being on the passion podcast. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you. To conclude, can you share thoughts on how it feels to be on the podcast?
Andy Sparks 1:03:48
This has been great. Yeah, it’s a fun and casual and it’s something that I really enjoyed about your podcast, is that it wasn’t just like a preset formula questions. That’s like, you know, we’re just going to run through these and you did follow ups. Were actually listened to I think very few interviewers on podcasts, like listen, you’re just kind of like looking for content. So this has been fun.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Check out the Holloway Guides — https://www.holloway.com/
· Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation — https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-compensation/about
· Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation — https://www.holloway.com/g/venture-capital/about
· Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring — https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/about
The guides just aren’t everything, do check out the website for other mini-guides and syllabus ranging from B2B Sales to using Twitter effectively.
Books and Brain Food Suggested -
The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self by Julia Cameron —
The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal: A Companion Volume to the Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron -
Lunch by oneself twice a week — Read alone and recharge 😊
News — New York Times, Fox News and Drudge Report to get the whole spectrum of news.
Professional Non-Fiction — Billions, Dark Material, Golden Compass
Reddit — Front Page
Non-Fiction — The pleasure of finding things out — Richard Feinman, Mastery — Robert Greene (how to go about your career)
Fiction — The Name of the Wind
Podcast — Science Vs
Movie — Big Fish
Reach out to Andy — Tweet him at @SparksZilla (he’s addicted to Twitter), follow Holloway.
Get in touch here :-
Andy Sparks
Check out Goodwork — https://www.audiocraft.com.au/
Check out Holloway — https://www.holloway.com/
Reach out to Andy — Tweet him at Andy Sparks
Podcast Information:-
Interview by: Naga Subramanya B B
Recorded on: AudioTechnica ATR 2100
Recorded using: Audacity for Windows 10
Jingle Credits: Shankar from Writer and Geek, Edited by Naga Subramanya
Recorded online: Zencastr
Photo and Logo Edited on: Canva
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