this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore keys technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering podcast your favorite podcast that you probably found somewhere on the internet because guess what that's what we do we we soak ourselves in the internet all day every day i'm one of those people my name is aaron engineered you can find me pretty much on every social media platform as well as my website aaronengineer.com with me i have aj hey guys how's it going aj you can find him he is at no blinky blinky in case you're living under a rock you can find him just about everywhere too at no blinkyblinky um and then no blinkyblinky.com wordpress got the blog going all of that we got dan and dan's a special character because today i'm going to unveil dan's actual handle which is voted by you the people and it seems the winner is dan go ahead and say it because i'm having a run i'm doing it justice it's uh it's at how do you pack it that's right so yes i think it's fitting h-o-w-d-y for those of you who don't know how to spell howdy which would be everybody on my side of the country yeah they can't spell out or i've never heard that word before it is a southern greeting for hello um it's really texan though isn't it it could i have not heard howdy outside of texas that's true that's true um and then also uh you just heard him um but i'm gonna get to him in a second but uh right quick before i get to our guest um last and certainly not least mr rebrand himself whose name we did not put to a vote however uh he's putting out different versions of what he would like his logo to look like so maybe he'll uh grace us with those and and maybe put that to a vote andy that's probably a good idea i just thought of that on the spot so he had a couple of different iterations of what his logo should look like and i thought he had some pretty cool ones but i'll let you uh tell the world what your handle is hello everybody i go by permit ip andy andy and there is currently a fiverr artist working on three versions of a logo for me and i'm sure that your communication between you and that person is going extremely well at this point i'm just guessing i'm just guessing it is and you guys helped me with that i kind of got my ducks in order before i reached out you got to tell them what you want you don't ask you tell them um yeah you know um and before again i know we you heard the guest poke in and if you didn't recognize his voice um you are also living under a rock and i don't know how you found this podcast but but with us we have uh the thunder from down under um not from australia but from uh where are you at where you are you from nollins or just in louisiana in general baton rouge was about 45 minutes away from new orleans okay it's kind of not quite sister cities but close enough pretty close so so that that for those of you who can't recognize it that is knox hutchinson he is a cbt nuggets trainer he's all over the internet currently doing a ccie journey on youtube which is really cool because uh you know he's kind of sharing tips and tricks even before he got started so it's been like a front to back book almost that we're all just like watching along with kind of like a little bit how tony e did which is really cool um so we're following along with that and in our discord server i i mentioned this earlier and i want to just make sure that i get it out of the way now but our buddy in the hashtag winning channel netsec wheezy we know who you are you're the you're the guy that was too tall to get to the navy which i made fun of a couple of days ago i don't know how that's possible but somehow today this is this is not gonna make any sense to anybody listening to this but the guy went and got a root canal and if that wasn't bad enough he decided after that that he was gonna go take a certification test that certification was for uh splunk so he shows up to the test center half his face is numb you know he's probably spitting blood like mike tyson and he passed wow this is so epic like what do you hear that like that you're talking about like your pre-exam nerves are just completely gone at that point so you must be just so ready to take an exam and you don't even care yeah he's white he's white so anyway knox introduce yourself sir tell us tell us who you are where you came from um give us the skinny what's up y'all uh knox hutchinson trainer at cbt nuggets uh long time fan of cbt nuggets before i was affiliated or worked for them um the journey to get to where i am now is was a tumultuous one a little bit of bumps on the road started my journey late and it's it's been pretty well documented but if we want to get into it like we can do that or we can you know punt to youtube or something else yeah no we're going to do both actually because i think you've got a lot of cool stuff to talk about um one thing i wanted to get off of my chest before we got too deep in your story was that you used to do a little youtube segment where you were eating crawfish with other people uh-huh first crawfish and uh crawfish and tech yeah okay what the heck happened to that because i love crawfish dude yeah so um coronavirus happened was the first thing so crawfish season is february till about may um may-ish is when they get too big ah so then when they're that big their shells get really hard it's kind of hard to crack them open they also like they don't absorb the seasoning as much so it kind of just dies off and februaryish of the next year so um you know coronavirus happened everybody's world got tossed upside down at that point it was hard to i really wanted that segment to be like very personal and intimate um we had one remote interview with a guy named ketran he's actually the reason i got into tech and i thought that was one of the best interviews i've ever heard like i didn't he didn't know any of those questions i was going to ask him ahead of time and that dude just crushed the answers like i sat there going like man i like i really learned something in this segment just talking to you dude he's a baller you know and i hope you uh take this with as much uh stride as possible but coming from someone like you saying that about somebody else is a little intimidating so uh you seem to and that leads me to my next question which isn't a question please tell us in the world one thing that you are absolutely awful at like we have to know uh so i mean you could steal from the movie spelunking not crying at the end of my girl okay so um no i mean like there's there's a whole lot of things that i'm terrible at uh and for the most part i'm a master of nothing um disagree so i like i okay i started in tech i started studying tech and networking in october of 2015. so it has been five years to the month when i started in tech five years ago i didn't know what an ip address was what so like that's what i'm saying i started my journey really really late and for me to like i being a trainer very frequently feels like you get a bad case of imposter syndrome i would imagine and that's just that's just kind of part of it because you're like you're like especially with something new like dna center that we just rolled out right like that's a brand new technology nobody in the world knows it it land like i get a brown box in my front door and it's like go get them tiger and you know like two months later i'm like i'm the expert of sd access when am i really the expert of sd access but who's gonna tell you otherwise right i mean like i'll tell you what if you watch my course you're gonna learn a lot about sc access you'll be able to deploy it and that's what i think matters um i i often tell trainers that a lot that the job of being a trainer is that when it comes to new technologies your job your purpose in this world is to suffer through learning these things where there's no resources out there there's no textbook like to pull that sd access course together i went to like reddit uh forum posts video training white papers cisco live blogs cisco live training like there was not one place that shows you how to implement sd access you have to pull from like 9 000 different places and then versions of dna center change from one version to the next so i'd try something it didn't work because that was in an old version so i'd have to factory default the entire lab and start over again so my whole point of making this course was so that nobody else would have to and that's what i try and tell other trainers it's like it doesn't actually matter if you're god's gift to networking or not it matters if the person who watches your stuff becomes god's gift to networking that's what the job of the trainer is so that's very uh maybe that's me being vulnerable and exposing too much dude no not at all i think people like i mean me personally i like to hear that because uh there's a uh you know you are human i guess it's the moral of the story which we did not think you were honestly um just because you just kind of know stuff so so okay so you didn't know what an ip address was in september of 2015 right was it because you were were you in the always in the um like data world before that because your original cbt nuggets content obviously was geared towards uh like devops and things like that right no so it was specifically business intelligence and data analytics oh um so my my segue into tech so i started out graduating 2008 with an econ degree and the short answer to what an econ degree is is you're really good at taking data and predicting what it's going to do so that was like okay well this is what my skill set is what jobs could i do that aren't an economist because economists have to be phds and ain't nobody got time for that oh so okay so i'm like so i found a job working so at first it was the middle of the the recession so i got a job selling insurance for five years that was you know to pay the bills which i didn't even do that i just barely survived um and then eventually found a job basically so if there's lawyers and then there's paralegals there's economists and then there's para economists and i was a para economist that makes sense for for uh the the state's department of labor so that's how i got into technology in general was i was analyzing labor statistics trying to predict like okay this segment there's like a huge demand for this job in this county we call them parishes but they're counties everywhere else so how do we create some sort of like training program or implement some sort of like law that influences the labor market to go into this job so that was what i was doing analyzing statistics and stuff but what i found out pretty quickly analyzing all of these this data about like jobs and pay and more importantly what are the requirements to get these jobs i looked at uh sql developer systems engineer network engineer it was all like no college like one certification and then you're looking at in our state 60 to 100 000 bucks a year yeah and i'm looking at my pay and i'm looking at my credentials and i'm going i could do that yeah so so i took like a little online course to learn sql um so actually that's not true i interviewed for like three jobs and i told them like if you hire me i will be the best thing you've ever hired i promise i will work harder than anyone you've ever seen and they're all like man this was the best interview we've ever sat in you are so good we can't hire you because you don't know sql okay so that's good to point out because because you actually got in the door in front of someone without sequel how did you pull that off so because we always hear this all the time right guys like i don't have the experience yeah yeah no i mean so i when i apply to jobs i apply to jobs like i'm homeless um even if i'm not like hurting even if i'm not struggling like if i decide i'm going into the labor market anything that's even a little close uh is going to get my application okay um and it's it's a brute force attack of hr okay yeah it is uh and that's that's just that's just how i i do things i just blitz the job market as hard as i can and i make sure that every hr department in the city knows my name um and then like you know what you know if you don't quite meet the job maybe you gotta fluff it up a little bit maybe you gotta use the thesaurus can you give us an example give us some big words i mean you know like you could say proficient and sequel when you're not proficient they're like sir you spelled you spelled sequel wrong uh yes that's right i know it's uh so i mean like i i did get a sql job i knew how to do querying in sql but i had never used microsoft sql server before and that wasn't necessarily a job requirement they didn't ask me about it in my interview i knew how to write a select to join and insert a delete and update but when it came to doing the job i couldn't do the job i needed to learn sql server but i got my foot in the door and i got the job and within eight months of that job i was becoming the senior architect so you know it's that's that's how i kind of just it made it sound so it was one yeah right but so that's the thing is like this is where everything changes i landed that job i started learning sql yeah i realized that i wasn't good enough at sql and then i got that fateful email that was we just got 20 subscriptions to cvt nuggets and we've got 20 subscriptions to i can't say their name uh competitor uh there's no way i can say the the other abc the other video company someone who would compete directly with cbt nuggets you probably know who they are mcdonald's um so i i went with competitor abc and uh after one week i'm like i can't find what i want i'm not learning sql like where do i even start like it's disorganized just throw it away uh so i pinged my friends i pinged the other people who were in the environment and i said if you were trying to do this what would you do and they said you need to go for it certifications and cbt nuggets is primarily like a clear spot for certification training yeah so that this was like 2016 2015 mid 2015 at that point so um that's when i got cbt nuggets i started i got really deep into sql and then then it all really happened the big thing that happened there was that i was on the database team i was architecting sql and xml solutions and we would have to frequently work with the systems engineers and the network engineers and one team was speaking greek one was speaking japanese and one team was speaking zulu it like and it was the emails might have been written in the in those native languages too with the same you know the different alphabets and everything so it like it was just not working and the biggest point that i saw was that networking were like the network engineers in particular were not nice people they were like i'm looking at andy looking directly at andy grumpy old man if you weren't in i.t and you had a stereotype of an i.t employee that was them basement that like just that air of superiority my title ends with engineer your title ends with specialist like therefore i am superior to you that type of thing so i'm like f you guys i'm gonna go learn networking so um dude this is crazy i'll be like him right yeah so october so so legitimately i reached out to key that guy in that video and i said what would you do dude he said build a home lab so he walked me through buying a dell r710 um he walked me through installing esxi on it he walked me through spinning up my first windows server vm and what i learned through going all of that is that without a network none of this stuff works so it's time to learn networking and that's when i decided i'm committing to going for my network plus and i started with keith barker's network plus and keith barker's network plus textbook and that was it that was it was just like once that started i took the exam i started in october i took the exam in january and i i haven't stopped studying and going for certification since that's that's really how it happened if you had stopped i would call bs on you because of the amount of stuff that you have i'd be like there's no way you stop because i think at this point you gotta tell us like what is your secret sauce here because you're snowballing and when i say snowball i mean like it's almost like uh adhd and i can say that because i have it so it's okay it's like yeah no you're good let's do that now whoa what was that let's do that now but for some reason most people like myself and everybody else like here like you know dan and aj and andy were like okay guess we got to do this now i guess we got and then then we struggle through it and then it but it seems like and this is where i want you know to kind of pull back the curtain a little bit it seems like you're just like ah i guess i think i'm gonna go get my ccmp encore today because to be fair you did that you did do that and i was like this guy's this guy cannot be for real this is what i'm saying like out loud to myself my wife's like what are you talking about like you know we're like eating dinner i'm like this guy can't be for real he's like i passed encore with an 825 the minimum score okay yeah okay okay but okay if you listen to the other episodes which i know you have like aj failed that one not the exact one but you failed it like 10 times i failed uh ccnp three or four times andy as well and i failed route yeah okay that's fair oh that's the that's the only one i think i feel better now i feel better now too see this one this guy's this is why i'm asking but yeah you you were and this is just kind of my uh i don't know like my distance view like my spectator view of what's going on is was like you were studying for the ccie the ccnp is like it's there but that wasn't your goal right and i think you've even said that out loud it's like that was never my goal it was my goal was get a ccie just so happens ccnp is on the way so of course you were learning all that stuff and then one day you're like i know all this stuff let me just go take it and lo and behold there it was right yeah yeah kinda kinda so i mean there were a lot of other things that that played into that i mean five years of studying for exams and working two jobs after 2015 um the 2016 job i took a job at an msp and i stayed there for two just over two and a half years okay um small company uh the msp had like eight employees but like 200 clients and all of those clients were eating clients i think the biggest client was like 150 employees but the average client was probably like 10. so very diverse budgets mean very diverse solutions which means very diverse technology sets and with a small staff you have to be good at everything and you have to be flexible so these dudes when they interviewed me like i at that point i went back to that employer where i was trying to learn networking and i told them like look i got my network plus i decided i'm going to work on my ccna you should make me a position in networking and i can bridge the gap between us and they were like nope we're networkers so i was like all right peace and and i went to this msp and when i interviewed with that msp like the interview turned into like a three-hour conversation where we just like had fun and i like connected to my vpn at home on my cell phone and pulled up there was a vsphere app for your phone at the time so over vpn i connected to my vsphere app and they're like wait a minute like you've never done this before though you've never actually done this in any production environment i'm like yeah i just got it at home i'm just trying to like get my way in and they're like okay you're hired so wow home lab strikes again folks that is it so i was like within my first two weeks there i took icnd1 and my very first day on the job they like took a stack of cisco switches and a stack of juniper switches and they said the client has cisco switches they're moving to juniper switches go and that that was my first project so i had to like i was in the middle of learning cisco i never learned a thing about juniper at the time so now it was like okay uh i'm about to take ic and d1 i've got to continue icnd1 studies but also learn the juniper variant of the commands in order to do my job so it was kind of like my job my 40 hour a week job there at the msp was like legitimately learn your butt off for two years so you know with all with being in an environment where you're like you have to be fueled with constant technology it actually makes kind not going for certifications easier but um there were a lot of incentivizations to be like well if i could just fill in this one more gap then i'm good enough to take the exam okay hmm yeah basically so that in if you're in that position again you know instead of just saying yeah i worked with junos you're like i have a jncia or gncis or whatever um that way you don't have to log in to your vpn when you're in an interview although uh we've talked about this before having the home lab and i'm just gonna make fun of andy because we always talk about physical versus uh virtual labs um plus one for the for the physical lab though on that one right yeah i mean let's look software developers have to have a personal github like when you go into a into a develop a developer job interview one of the things that will stand out to me as a hiring manager is if you're so enthusiastic about this tech that you do it on your own free time and post it up for the world to see for fun yeah the home lab is that for for infrastructure hmm physical or verge or virtual i feel like you somebody should just take that as a sentence right so we have these books i actually have one right behind me it's like 50 interview questions that someone could ask you know what i mean all these canned answers but what i like about the book is it tells you what they're really trying to glean from you when they're asking those questions right and i feel like you're the way you just explained why you have the lab would be almost like a complete perfect answer if somebody could memorize that like look i don't have all the skills on paper necessarily but this is what i do and this is this is this is why i have the lab and then someone could easily just be like sure and quite honestly if someone an employer isn't respecting the lab like they should like put some respect on the lab folks like if they're not respecting the lab you probably don't want to work there right is that fair that's that's why i asked when i was a hiring manager that's why i asked to review every resume i had a feeling that like hr was going to miss something like that i am looking for inspiration and motivation before i look for experience yeah well that's that's the honest truth yeah and why wouldn't you though because like you've lived that situation it's definitely hits home for you because you mean you said you were like apply for places like you're homeless which i'm stealing that too like dude i'm telling dudes this all the time i'm like why would you apply for something that you were qualified for how boring is that gonna be right like what do you do like on day one when they're like i'm looking for a guy who got a ccna yesterday and all we need him to do is log in and change the password on a bunch of vty lines like that's your only job oh hey heck yeah baby that sounds easy what are you paying at 17 bucks an hour i don't care it's easy you don't want to be there right that's what aj does thanks well it depends on how many kids you have and how much sleep you get okay so do you have kids so sometimes people are like just give me something where i can drink like nine million cups of coffee and just type the same commands all day long and that's true that's true that's right so just survive do you have kids though i i have one kid and i have two on the way oh twinsies hey so that's that's why i've been hinting at it on youtube that's the big secret is that like if the exams don't open this year it's gonna be a while oh buddy they're doing they're doing february oh congratulations in january she's on bed rest i ain't traveling to texas in january yeah and that's so that's that's it is it is it boys or girls or do you know what to say yet yes okay and what's your oldest then he's a boy okay cool that's cool we got a nice little mixture there way to go yeah we we got a happy family man yeah and so how long have you and your wife been married we've well we've been together for 13 years we've been married for seven wow wow y'all you guys are like dan so dan hasn't ever quit his job he's had the same job since he was like 19 now uh 22. if we're going to get titanic yeah no he found out it he found out about the job via the pony express you know and then he was down at the local where are you at dan you're in tennessee i'm in tennessee uh just way around south of nashville it's called columbia tennessee i know exactly where colombia is i lived in murfreesboro telehome in johnson city heck dude you're close and my entire family's from union city on the on the west side but yeah okay you guys you guys could have uh exchanged howdy's and not even knowing yeah you never you never know yeah i've got uh my wife has family in uh rockville right outside of murfreesboro there yeah we could probably take this offline but yeah we've probably got a lot to catch up on yeah and now i'm feeling like the weirdo because i'm you know yeah whatever first time for southern california the southern states are a small world man everybody's got family that's true and you guys are just so nice you end up meeting everybody like we're just not like yeah sometimes we're nice sometimes we're really off talk to andy he's got like two friends because like those east coast guys man they they can't even watch their own sports team without throwing rocks at them when they're winning they throw batteries at santa claus philadelphia y'all i was also i've been waiting for you to pipe up andy look you've been looking awful pensive over there man i i could see the wheels turning the smoker coming out of your ears the whole nine yards nope just enjoying the conversation man taking some donations so let me let me say this to bring it back on track for a second then so i mean you all mentioned something about how like you could tell okay i guess we got to do this now like that that was me when i was with an msp like when i started there like networking was my jam like i was the network guy even if i wasn't when i started out like i was going to be that guy within a few months because i was obsessive about networking so when i failed route that really crushed me and i got really bitter about it because i was like man freaking frame relays on there and dialer interfaces like all these old technologies that nobody uses but there was a question on there about like totally like doing something beast mode about ospf and eigrp and redistribution and engineering the heck out of the route and i crushed that that should have been the entire exam right there why didn't i pass like that that sat with me for months and i always felt like i had unfinished business with ccnp but my employer at the time saw it as an opportunity to wedge me away from networking and they incentivized me monetarily to go into systems and they told me i had to get my mcse so that was like okay well i guess it's one of those things that i'll have to do and to your other earlier point that was the one time i did take a pause because i got burnt out going for the i actually did the active directory test first um and then i did the hyper-v test second and during the hyper-v test i just got fried because nobody was implementing hyper-v and it's like wtf why am i why am i like killing myself over an exam and tech that i will absolutely never use yeah so i i took like a two-month pause there but i ended up getting my mcse so so that was your your consolation price so you fail route and your prize is getting an mcse and that was i will let me look i'm going to say this this is i hope y'all get downloads because of this statement but i'll say it because i believe it the mcsc might have been harder to get than the ccie oh shots fired it took me 15 months from the moment that i started uh my mcse journey to finish it um now it's different the exam itself obviously is not going to be as hard because it's four separate exams they're you know multiple choice sitting in front of a computer there's no specialized lab uh is the mcse the gold standard of expert exams that uh ccie is obviously not or else they wouldn't be retiring in january true but um but the mountain to climb i feel like the mountain of the mcse was larger than the ccie wow that was just 15 savage grueling months and i'm gonna i'm gonna paraphrase something jeremy charles once said when they asked him like why microsoft why cisco over microsoft jeremy chara in an interview said because cisco works shrug like it was that was basically it he's like you do stuff with windows server you do stuff from microsoft and it's like i don't know what if i do it over here is it going to break over there or what but like when you type the command in cisco you press enter it it does what it's supposed to do and if it doesn't it's because you screwed it up i'll i'll give him that for sure and just so everybody knows chara is a long time windows admin dude right like he's an og windows admin dude i mean he's an og everything window server guys he's best known for for i think cisco networking he's yeah and garth would be our windows guy if anyone but like okay you know you you work in it you have to know it all at some point like char actually owns his own business he's actually i think it's i don't really know what it is that they do but they they do some cool stuff yeah um supporting school assistants yeah yeah in arizona and texas uh and that's that's what he primarily that is via the via yeah um so that's that's his thing but he said that in an interview like a few years ago and i remember i was going through my mcsc at the time when i saw it and i'm like that's what made me groan and go uh i wish i were still going for for my ccnp i felt like i had unfinished business so obviously you went out and got it the next day right so well i mean this was i mean this was years ago you waited for a cert apocalypse so did you take did you take switch and t-shoot then and that was the only one you failed okay that was the only one i took and route was the only one i failed okay that makes me feel a little better how long did you study for route three months uh january to march and you passed you passed encore as well i passed encore in june yeah that was recent how long how long did you study for encore 28 days see you see what i'm saying that's why this is why i have a hard time liking people like you because you see what i'm saying because here's what happens for me knox right and you're about to have two more kids so i i got a very busy job during the day which you know i'm not studying during my work day because i can i'm too busy and then you know the wife and kids beat me up until about you know 8 30 p.m yep so when i'm exhausted at the end of the day i i got to jump into the books and try to study so for for a superhero like you who can bang it out in 28 days what's your story i'm lucky if i yeah i mean how are you doing this you must be you make me an imposter man yeah there's no syndrome here andy's a straight up imposter the first thing is let me say that i was in your position for a long time for two years i worked two full-time jobs i had two salary positions two 401ks two health plans like literally two eight two forty hour week jobs with a newborn so and were you getting certs at that time or not i was a trainer at cbt nuggets and i was the director of is at the lsu foundation um you take that andy so that that was pretty tough i did go for a couple certifications during that time most notably the devnet associate in auto devnet professional and jncia devops but dude you didn't just go to get the certs you turned around and started teaching other teaching us how to do it and we still can't figure it out so i mean there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes though like you got to understand that when it comes to training there's two types of trainers there's trainers who are in their comfort zone and they're going to train the thing that they're good at okay and nothing else and there's nothing wrong with that because like there's a reason why they're that good at it and there's a reason why that's what they're training and then there's me who's like my entire existence for the last five years has been uncomfortable like i have to learn this new technology i have to learn it by this date for this client to get this certification and that is now my norm so when i roll into cbt nuggets and they announce dna center is this new product or here's the sd-wan exam and here's uh devnet associate devcor in auto all of this brand new technology and i mean not to mention azure developer and the power bi exam there's no other training out there on that or at least not at the time so i'm the guy who's going hey we could create this training that nobody else has but you have to have faith in me that i'm gonna learn the heck out of it and lab it and practice it you're gonna have to bear with me so there's gonna be like a whole month of time where i upload nothing to cbt nuggets because i'm just like practicing like freaking crazy trying to figure out yourself basically so so the real truth behind this is for some trainers like their job is to talk about what they've been doing for 30 years because their master's at it whereas other trainers job the job is literally to study and that's that's where that's why for encore i'm sitting here like i'm doing studying for encore because i'm recording the automation portion of it and simultaneously i'm peer reviewing keith and jeremy and jeff's content so i'm sitting there watching their nuggets anyways i learned what sd-wan and sd access is so with a little bit of effort and a little bit of intellectual curiosity i get hands-on information with that and that way it's like okay well in 28 days i'll read the textbook do a little bit of labbing take a couple practice exams and i'll be ready because i've really been working on this for like six months now so no i didn't like i didn't dedicate myself to taking encore until i had to uh and the honest truth about that here's the real thing like the ccie journey that's all filling a void because i lost my job at lsu in april when kovit hit this is kind of a funny story my first day on the job was my birthday october 22nd 2018. and i sat down thank you i sat down and everybody some people like a handful of people were using skype for business everybody else was using email and they were requesting reports to be run by the it team so they would they would create this big sql query dump it out to an excel file and all our data was being exchanged via email or whatever and i'm like hold the brakes let's let's implement microsoft teams right now that's it's super secure sharing a way that we can exchange data collaborate uh and then let's implement power bi so that we can even automate some of these data report requests and uh and the day that i was let go because of coronavirus it was over a microsoft teams call so i was like killed by my own solution let me say this up front like that was one of the best jobs i've ever had i have no qualms with why i was let go or anything like that it was coronavirus it was nobody's fault um you know just ever this is what happened across the economy this wasn't a unique thing um and you know thank god i had that other full-time job because i literally picked up the phone called cbt nuggets i'm like can y'all handle this much production because it's coming so yeah so you had two j so you that's interesting because obviously like there's some things that you just don't tell people oh i get it but you are very transparent right because you're showing you're showing us what you're doing basically on a day-to-day basis but it's nice i say it's nice to know uh it's comforting to know that someone like yourself you know is not immune to the same pressures that we are out here right like i don't think any of us for a second thought that you know we would have lasted this long into this right if this was going to last this long because i was thinking like gosh where are the customers going to go you know aj's in the same boat um and also andy i mean his job is money and nobody has any anymore um and then dan i don't even know what he does one day he's like he's plowing the field and the other days you know doing whatever but i know it's man it's insurance right so yeah so no it's it's good it i i'm having a hard time phrasing that but it's comforting to know that you are you are just like the rest of us in some of these regards where it's like hey dude you you you did lose your job but kind of what andy was saying earlier it's like hey i got all this going on you know like how do i do that and i think what it sounds like is your answer pretty much all the time is like i got so many irons in the fire that there's no way i could get burned because there's not enough fire to burn me right there's things are things are occupied like i'm ready to go but so there's also the flip side of that like you can do it too much and it comes at a significant consequence um and that's mental health or even physical health you know working working two 40-hour a week jobs uh looking back on it like when i was let go at first it was very depressing and sad and then it's like maybe that was actually the best thing that ever happened to me because it was two cups of coffee tea monster energy drink repeat and like the heart palpitations were a very real thing and then the anxiety and the depression and then the more anxiety and then the fear and then the i should be working but i'm not working so maybe i should fill that void with some other thing like it it is okay to be who you are and not kill yourself trying to be somebody more or something else like that that's the one thing i actually took this away from y'all's podcast and this helped me calm down for a second this was one of y'all's first messages and one of those very first episodes was that you like help desk freaking crush help desk man i know several people who like crush the help desk and they don't want to do anything else and kudos to them like that's it's cool for me i'm so jealous of them on so many levels that like they have this ability to uh you know go home to their family and disconnect and be happy whereas me for the last years it's just been go go go go go somebody's better than you go go go beat them go go go go stop being so competitive yeah like that's that was that was something that has coveted 19 has forced me to adapt to and slow my pace down a little bit because the the 80 hour a week which was instantly shifted down to a 16 hour a week because my wife works we have a small child we have to watch after him uh you know and then i like trying to make it work like okay i'll work from eight till midnight i'll sleep from midnight till five i'll work from five till nine she can work you know what i mean yeah it doesn't work you like it just doesn't work it doesn't kill yourself it's like like keeping up you know yeah the competition thing is interesting you say because i i feel the same way but it's never about like other people like it's never about like the people here even you know in this virtual room i don't ever feel the competition i actually get like stoked by these guys like like they help me like light my fire but for some reason whenever i'm you've got a co-worker you've got a co-worker that you've got a target on dude dude yeah it's always it's always at work it's been at work since day one dude i'm talking like i was flipping burgers at mcdonald's and i'm like why is this dude so slow at rapping give me the wrapper like i'm i'm gonna crush this double cheeseburger dude like this like also i can count to 10 in a scooper to get your chicken mc nuggets out quicker than most uh accountants can count ten so like i'm pretty freaking good at that but to your point it's like always people at work that are like and i don't know if it's driving me to be better but to your point it's like driving me to be different and maybe it's not who i really am because i like coming home i'm like you dude there's a there's definitely a balance um and i was actually thinking about taking a ccie as well and i'm thinking now like i don't know that what that would get me at this point right like don't get me wrong it's not gonna do anything bad for me obviously right it's all good but i don't know that i would be able to parlay that into something that i would be happy with does that make sense it does make sense and i think there's something else to be said about the ccie journey here that i think is very important that i've learned the hard way that nobody else has said yet you hear about everybody else's ccie journey and what are the things that stick out to you the most i studied x amount of hours every day yep don't do that if you can't do that that's the thing is like i've said like i when i set out in this journey and i was like okay if i'm gonna get my ccie by x day i'm gonna have to do four to six hours every day at least five days a week because you have to have a thousand hours and it's like but for what like why do you have to do it in six months and also who said that in 18. exactly like everybody says it appears right that's the thing but like it's like passed down it's kind of like you know andy mentions this all the time when we talk about uh high school counselors and college counselors they're like yep you need to go to school and you need to get a cs degree they say that all the time but like why why why think he's saying that like what is it can you tell me exactly well because you're going to get a that's not nah you don't know me you know what i mean like so the ccie is not for everybody also the reason why someone would take eight hours a day to study that's like to me that almost has become like if you're in like a circle like we are like a community right where it's like we're all like-minded we know how much it takes right um and if you're in that community and you understand then the the contest does not become who has a ccie and who doesn't the contest is well i studied eight hours a day um and i still failed it so good luck buddy because you're doing you're doing seven and a half hours a day so that probably won't happen because you know and i mean and this is this is easy for me to say because i don't have a ccie but in social media it sure does feel like us versus them doesn't it it sure does feel like people who do have a ccie and people who don't yeah and it's maybe maybe it's because like that's their twitter handle there's a there's and i mean that's you know if i got my ccie i'd probably put it somewhere but you know what i mean like the it it does feel very intimidating it does i don't want to say it makes me feel belittled or something but it does inspire me and motivate me it makes me feel like i have something to prove and going through this ccie journey has revealed a lot of in my opinion like truths or maybe fallacies i don't know it's again i haven't taken the exam so i don't know how bad i'm going to get beat up by this thing but it i felt like there was more content or harder to study for the mcse i've already said that one yeah okay uh the ccie itself i am going through these like one bullet point at a time and there hasn't been anything in particular that i found hard that's the thing that i want to say that to everybody is like if you if you haven't ever gone for your ccie and it's because you're intimidated by the content don't don't be intimidated by the content because i haven't found necessarily any of this it's a tremendous amount of content that's probably why it's hard but individually like i could explain ccie level topics in probably 60 seconds yeah like like an eigrp leak map and how that's basically the same thing as a bgp unsuppressed map like there there's there's not much to it if you create an aggregate route you know you summarize routes if everybody here is kind of comfortable with route aggregation where it's like instead of sending you 24 prefixes i'm going to send you one that summarizes all of them but with a leak map i could let one of those more specific prefixes out that's there you go there's a there's a ccie level topic and bgp's version of it is called the unsuppressed map and the reason you would do it is because you have two exit points to your network and i want the more specific prefix to leak out of one side so that that way traffic comes in there there you go there's two ccie level topics there in what 60 seconds and you'd like if you didn't think you were going to learn something by turning this on today think again because you just did i mean that's that's kind of my point is i'm like i'm going through all of this stuff and i'm like huh that's cool that's not hard oh that's cool that's not hard by the end of it i've read you know like 5 000 pages of books and it's like well i can't remember all of it but going through it one at a time i didn't find like any one thing was hard microsoft windows server network policy services where you're configuring radius authentication in windows server like you're kidding me dude i've i've lived that yeah i'm the i'm the mps guy at our company okay then you know you better you better block out a month of studying for that thing like that's that's why i feel like the dif there's a very real difference between ccie and other types of journeys that you go through in the mountains to climb like my big stressor is don't look at the cci exam blueprints and see a big word and think i'll never learn how to do it because at the end of the day it's probably just one command yeah i've noticed that i've noticed that yeah yeah you're right and a lot of stuff carries over right like like even look at the ccna to ccnp like so many like things that if you would have just like honestly just studied for a ccie and then just went like kind of what you did and just like just oh i'm gonna take a ccna today because i've been studying ccie level stuff yeah you have to have foundational stuff right but that it's all there it's all similar ideas it's all like then as chris bryant would say the name is the recipe in some cases kind of like to your point it's just one command sometimes the bullet point is one command does part of you because you've kind of turned into like it's what it sounds like it's almost like this like anti-hero right are you are you gonna go to the ccie because this is what i would do if i was you just putting that out there are you gonna go to the ccie pass it and then come out and do everybody a favor and just go guys it was freaking easy like go do it well i mean even at this point i've been studying for like five or six months so and i'm you know if you're watching my ccie practice lab i'm screwing up pretty bad so uh it's it's not that i'm gonna say it's as a whole it's not easy the topics themselves individually are easy but am i going to be able to do multicast within a vrf on the fly and then jump over to dna center then jump over to sd-wan then jump into python like that's where i think the exam that's why i'm going to say the exam itself is going to be the hardest part to the entire topic it's not the mountain it's not the individual topics it's just that you have to cram it all into a five out well three hour design and five hour deploy operate optimize like that's where i think they're gonna crush me and that's why i think it is going to be the gold standard of expert if i took it right now i'd probably fail but i would take it right now if it was available let me stress that okay so knowing you were going to fail because you just said it straight up like i know for a fact i would fail right now but i would go take it so why would you do that because where else am i going to get the experience and learn where i'm good or where i'm bad at what is the exam really like i've never taken a ccie before you hear all these nightmare stories about it i'm kind of like studying right now and kind of shrugging and going like oh let's just see yeah um and that's like i'm okay with failing on my first try pretty much everybody else does the only person i know that didn't was keith barker um so yeah and keith barker has he's forgotten more than i'll ever learn yeah i don't know some of those guys like you said the trainers the trainers that are just speaking to their 30 years of experience yeah right he probably does a little bit of both but but so i mean so keith is a freak like you know sd-wan rolls out and he's like i'll learn sd-wan in a week and he does and then he's like he's like hey let's have a meeting real quick and we'll use my lab topology that i built over the weekend uh to build our entire course on and that's literally what happened wow so i mean like don't don't overlook some of these guys and think that they're not learners because they can they can learn but again that's that's the job of a trainer is to learn and study all day long recording and editing and uploading is like 20 of the job really because like yeah that's the hardest part for me because i'm an idiot but also also i don't know what i could really teach anybody anyway well the cool thing about like you know cbt nuggets is different from everybody else because our videos are like five minutes that's why they're nuggets perfect it's perfect whereas everybody else like is uploading this one hour thing like our our thing is like just tiny little bite-sized bits of information so me as a trainer the night before i'm like i only have to learn a tiny little bite-sized bit of information so maybe i study for an hour or two and then the next day i know it well enough to where i can just click record and just vomit into the microphone for a half an hour about what i learned last night yeah and and lab it up and then watch it 10 million times to make sure it doesn't suck and i don't have any like you know errors in there or like is somebody going to poke my a hole in this video somewhere else yeah like i do like spot check the hell out of it but that's that's the the process when it comes to making digestible content yeah that's a good point because like it's very very concentrated obviously that's that's the cbt nugget niche it's the name the name is the recipe um but yeah i think that's what a lot of people are drawn to by by cbt nuggets too is obviously you guys are a huge part of that all the trainers and stuff because people learn to you know we invite you into our i mean this is my bed behind me right i invite you into my bedroom and and it just got weird just go did you guys want me to go over there i can give you a nice little uh preview of what it looks like when i'm snoring at night and drooling on myself but yeah we invite you in and you guys have no idea that you know you're spending every night with us right like how does that make you feel like dude so you in particular knocks i'll just you know maybe virtually pat you on the back for this like there was a period where on the when i was driving to work like a year and a half ago or so that all i did was listen to you right so your voice is playing through my car for like an hour twice a day is that weird to you no i yeah i mean no i don't think so because i mean that's that's what i always wanted like cbt nuggets changed my life like in the hugest way possible that's what i've been studying with for years and getting certifications and this to me was a way to give back uh and try and spread it forward and specifically like my my specialty within cbt nuggets is new tech like things that nobody else is tackling um that's that's where my happy place is that's where uh i get my endorphin rush from learning a new tech and then possibly passing an exam on it um you know and i there's also the flip side of it like i i will never and i mean never be able to teach ospf or eigrp as good as keith barker and i'll never be able to do white boarding in theory as good as jeff kish so my specialty is within now that you've got this new appliance what do you do with it here let me show you the first thing that you click on because i just suffered through it for the last month so you won't have to that's that's my role in cbt nuggets and the other thing is is not everybody not everybody's down with that style and that's okay too the best compliment that i ever received or really we ever received was learning from competitor abc was like learning in a classroom whereas learning from cbt nuggets was like learning from my mentor and like that that almost brought a little tear to my eye the flip side of that is is like five days ago i got the absolute most brutal comment or review on one of my nuggets ever oh wait wait wait wait wait where do they come from is there like a suggestion box or something no there's a comment on every video like there's there's comments on every single video and someone like just really does not like my voice i mean like here's the highlights of it i can read it yes i don't know about anybody else but i can't stand this new guy doing these training videos this this guy's voice is incredibly annoying and i just plain don't like his presence in any sense of the learning experience i seriously don't i seriously hope i don't have to do any more series with this guy in him and he goes on he goes on to say like i'm sure he's nice and a decent person and i'm not trying to be mean but i feel like he should not be a trainer or a teacher so what does that do to you what does that do to you yeah i i've always been very self-aware of my voice every drive-through i go through i get mistaken for a girl i was walking my dog about a year ago full beard and everything a little kid runs up to me and goes like hey can i pet your dog and i say yeah sure he's a nice dog and he goes are you a boy or a girl and i'm like come on yeah it's not that bad dude i mean i didn't i don't think my voice is that bad but like you know like you get we get feedback like this like this style this very informal like let's have some fun with networking like you know it's not for everybody and i get that too but it really resonated with me uh especially coming from a formal classroom lecture environment um that's not what i wanted i wanted to learn from a friend and i wanted to to learn from people who i felt like i could have a personal connection with i wanted to learn from people who were as enthusiastic about the technology as i was and when i try and sit down and record i'm trying to let my enthusiasm bleed through two because 99 of the time when i hit that record button i am freaking stoked to be talking about what i'm talking about today today i recorded um some stuff for the score exam the security core and i recorded uh how cisco ice can perform profiling on in devices uh how it can do different kinds of authentication how it can communicate to amp to determine when a vulnerability has taken place on an endpoint pc and send a message to the switches to say change its authorization level like stuff like that is like that's freaking cool that's really yeah and i was like stoked to sit down like watch this stuff yeah but like i get it how some people are like very serious people and they don't want you know you know me and my annoying voice to you know come jump in their face and get stupid stoked about amp for endpoints so you know yeah i know everybody knows i get that but yeah that i am i for those of you whose bedroom i'm in uh i'm happy to be there within the right context and if you want someone in there in the wrong context i will leave my phone number in the show notes and hey guys it's aaron here if you noticed the show is actually still going on but i am rudely interrupting to bring you an important message about this episode being split into two episodes sometimes when you talk to a guest like knox you end up with a little bit more information than can occupy one episode so we've split it into two so in order to hear the rest of that please stay tuned check out the next episode and until then see ya hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net edge that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering.com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you