Speaker 1: 0:00

This is the Art of Network Engineering, where technology meets the human side of IT. Whether you're scaling networks, solving problems or shaping your career, we've got the insights, stories and tips to keep you ahead in the ever-evolving world of networking. Welcome to the Art of Network Engineering podcast. My name is Andy Laptev and in this monumental episode an episode like no other in our world we have a very special guest. But before we get to the very special guest, I would like to other in our world. We have a very special guest, but before we get to the very special guest, I would like to reintroduce to our listeners our new full-time slash 1099, because we don't have full-time employees here at the Art of Network Engineering. Jeff Clark, how you doing, jeff? Doing great.

Speaker 2: 0:37

Happy to be here.

Speaker 1: 0:37

Good, I'm happy to have you here. Thanks for joining, thanks for hopping on the team and helping us out. As soon as you can, help me get our pictures up on the website. That would be great, because Jeff is much better at we have complementing strengths and navigating. Wordpress is not mine. I added Jeff and then deleted my picture, so as the wheels fall apart as I try to add things, jeff's going to help me fix it. But while we're really here today, this is a very special episode for me and hopefully for you listeners we have of Packet Pusher's fame, ethan Banks. How you doing, ethan?

Speaker 3: 1:12

Hey Andy, nice to be here. I am doing all right, I'm doing all right.

Speaker 1: 1:17

This is surreal for me. So I know You're always so like, oh whatever, I'm just a guy, right? But so let me tell you why this is surreal for me. When did Pack a Pusher start? It was like 2010, 2012.

Speaker 3: 1:31

2010 was the first podcast we ever put out the door. Yeah, Right.

Speaker 1: 1:35

So I think why you and your show means so much to me and why every time I get on calls with you, even at work, it's getting less and less weird for me. Every time I get on calls with you, even at work, it's getting less and less weird for me. But when you meet somebody who's had such a big impact in your career and in your life, it kind of it does something to me so quickly and then I'll shut up because I want to hear from you. But I met my now wife, then girlfriend, in 2010. And I was a cable guy for an ISP, getting my butt kicked, not making much money, climbing up and down ladders, getting hurt. And it was right around that time in 2010, when you started Packet Pushers, that I decided to start studying for my CCNA and I'm like I need to build a better life here. My wife had an amazing job and education and I'm like making 20 bucks an hour killing myself climbing ladders, I'm like I really need to do something.

Speaker 1: 2:23

I went to like this career fair thing while I was out hurt and you know they were saying and I wanted to go into network engineering, how do you do that? Right, it's we've all talked about it a million times. The chicken or the egg had to get experienced without the job, blah, blah, blah. Right, and there's a lot of answers to that question, but some of the best advice I got at this career fair thing was you know you can. You can join social media. At the time, twitter is big. You can join Twitter and you can connect with people in the industry hiring managers, thought leaders, whatever you know.

Speaker 1: 2:50

There are things like podcasts and YouTube videos. You can go and you know. They said what you want to do is you want to get in these virtual rooms. You want to hear how these people speak and what? What are they dealing with day to day? Like, what's that world like as you're studying your CCNA? So, anyway, I'm in my cable guy truck studying for the CCNA with almost no support outside of my girlfriend and close family at the time, and I came upon the Packet Pushers and what you and Packet Pushers show did for me was it let me in rooms that I didn't have access to. Yet you know, I heard you guys talking about the different protocols and the different problems and what's happening and, like I think I looked it up earlier, I think like some of your first episodes might have been like Trill, just to, like you know, ground us in time, right?

Speaker 3: 3:32

But yeah, in 2010,. We were like what's an Ethernet fabric going to look like and what's the successor to spanning tree and stuff like that. Those were all the rage conversations we're having for quite a while.

Speaker 1: 3:42

And we're having for quite a while and we're all going to move to ipv6 soon, oh yeah, and automation right, don't get me started. Um, so anyway, the reason I think I I'm so thrilled to talk to you and why this is amazing for me and it's just. I want to thank you for the impact that you had, because I listening to you, to your team, week after week as I was studying, it took me quite some time to get that certification, quite some more time to get my first networking job. I think in 2012 was when I finally got my first job, or 2013, in networking. So, anyway, thank you for your contributions to not only my life and my career but the community, because I think without you and without all the people that connected with me on Twitter and tried to help me, you know, I might've given up.

Speaker 1: 4:26

Right, there was people that were like, when I was going to give up over subnetting, you're like, hey, man, hang in there, let me show you a trick. And when you know I'm like I'm never going to learn any or I'm not ever going to understand any of this, I'd hear one of you guys on your show and be like, yeah, this is really complicated years and it's hard for them. You know, like, maybe I can so so anyway, man, that's. You know that's that's my little fanboy thing, but thank you so much for being here. Um, I thought we'd start with like I don't know anything about you outside of this packet pushers founder guy, and you know we're not going to go back to like your birthday. Like you know what was it like being a baby? But what got you into networking? Like I know you were in FinTech, right, you were a computer science guy, yeah that was along the way.

Speaker 3: 5:06

Yeah, I got a computer science degree that prepared me for programming is what that degree was. So I graduated from college in 93, and that degree was built around coding and the languages of choice at the day were things like COBOL huge COBOL was big at the time. It wasn't Java yet, it wasn't you know a lot of languages, it wasn't Python yet. And I went out looking for work and, just long story short, I wasn't really finding anything. And I ended up after a couple of years of poking around looking for some kind of programming work, going to Novell School around looking for some kind of programming work, going to Novell School. Novell NetWare was the operating system of choice for this brand new thing called client server networks and building LANs at businesses and it was like this is an opportunity, man, there's not nearly enough engineers that understand how this stuff works and just hop in and go. So I, I I refinanced my car so that I could go to Novell school and got, get my, get a network three certification as a certified network engineer. And the company that ran the training school also ran a consultancy and they needed someone and they saw me in the class and went hey, you interested in working for us as a consultant? I'm like, yes, and it started from there. So I started doing. I was a junior consultant at a consulting firm doing mostly network and network related kind of work. This was before Cisco was a big thing. This was before Palo Alto was a big thing. Microsoft was just Windows primarily. They weren't the behemoth that they became. They were big, but not in the way we think of them in 2025, for sure, and that was the start of it.

Speaker 3: 7:01

My Novell education taught me Ethernet and what an Ethernet frame is, and it wasn't really TCP IP at the time. It was IPX. In the Novell world that was the transport that they used for everything, not IP. Ip came later in the NetWare world. It eventually became IP, but in the beginning it was IPX and so I worked on networks in the beginning that were a lot of network and then also a mix of other stuff.

Speaker 3: 7:30

A lot of shops had like deck minis, these mini computers that would take up a substantial amount of space in a computer room and you'd log into them with a remote terminal of some kind. But there was a lot of communications that would happen across a network using DeckNet lot of communications that would happen across a network using deck net again not ip, and I ran. I worked at a college for a while that was a big apple shop and again it for a while it wasn't ip, it was apple talk. And so networks back in the mid 90s were this mishmash of all different kinds of networking protocols that eventually consolidated it on ip, I'd say by 99, 2000, 2001,.

Speaker 3: 8:05

Pretty much everything was IP at that point. Network converted, microsoft ran on a mix of things but settled on IP and everybody else had followed suit at that point because the internet was blowing up big. So that's how it started. I spent the first five years of my career doing a variety of things, but mostly consulting, mostly around network, and then later converting people off of network onto Microsoft technologies because it was just way cheaper to go that route, and so I did a lot of work migrating people from network to Windows NT and then later Windows 2000 backends.

Speaker 1: 8:42

I love that you refinanced your car to go back to school.

Speaker 3: 8:44

Like I love that, oh yeah, and then I wrecked it, and then I was upside down on the loan.

Speaker 1: 8:48

Oh no, oh yeah, I used to sell cars. I know what that means. It's terrible. You should have had gap insurance, sir.

Speaker 3: 8:53

Oh yeah, Gap insurance was dad, my dad helped me with the balance and we found an absolute beater of a replacement car that was like 900 bucks in reverse. Only worked half the time so you had to be careful where you parked and uh, and that got me through novelle school until I got my consulting job and then I could. I could get an actual car that worked and stuff, yeah, resourceful aren't we the networkers?

Speaker 1: 9:20

and what I love most about that refinancing your car story is like when I see successful people, I think they've always been successful. There's like this weird cognitive bias I have.

Speaker 2: 9:28

I'm like, oh, he's always been on the top, Right, yeah. But then you get to know people.

Speaker 1: 9:32

But you get to know people and you're like yo. I had to refinance a car to go back to school because the comp side didn't get me my job. So like I just love hearing this stuff this stuff like hey, you know, listen her out there, like what you ever see, that meme of, like you know it was nothing's a straight line, it's you know how it was a grind for years, I mean.

Speaker 3: 9:48

So I'm talking about the consulting gig but the rest of the stories. In that five years I consulted for a while. I had full-time jobs for a while. In order to get ahead or to get a job that either paid better or had better benefit benefits or had more responsibility and more interesting challenges, I had to move around around a lot. I mean some of my gigs. Just I wasn't there for five, 10 years. I was there for two years, maybe three, maybe four was usually my longest stint anywhere that I went.

Speaker 2: 10:17

But I so. It's funny you mentioned that, because that's actually one of the things that I tell a lot of newer engineers who were talking to me about. You know, how do you move up in your career. I'm like sometimes you got to move out. It's really easy to think you're going to get that job or you're going to stay there forever and maybe you really like the people you work with, you like your manager, but there's going to come a time when you're going to get stale on what you're learning or the pay Sounds like you learned it too.

Speaker 3: 10:44

It was no choice. You're a young guy, young married, two little kids at home, mortgage car payments and you're scraping and fighting and I'm doing work on the side. I had two jobs a lot of times the main job and then some kind of moonlighting In. Let's see, sort of been 2000, 2001,. Maybe I moonlighted running a web hosting services out of my basement. I got a uh, I had done that work for a service provider that was a startup and went out of business. So I had all these skills where I understood how to do web hosting, dns, uh, email and so on, email and so on, got a business line from my isp so that I could have the ip addresses I needed and all that stuff. And uh and did, did that for people as a way to make a few extra bucks. Uh, that's just, that's just what you did and it's.

Speaker 3: 11:35

It's a wicked grind, it is hard, and all during that there's certifications. I'm studying for certs. Novella is just the beginning. Then it was Microsoft certs, later on it was Cisco certs and it was just this constant how do I qualify myself to have a more responsible position? And figuring out a strategy and then going after the next thing. And it was constant.

Speaker 1: 12:00

How did you get?

Speaker 2: 12:00

your industry insight.

Speaker 1: 12:02

Like I would listen to pack of pushers or on Twitter posts and people would say, oh, you got to get your CCNA, it's the first thing, right, like where were you getting your industry knowledge from when you were coming up?

Speaker 3: 12:11

There was a paper trade rag that I got. That was, I think it was a weekly called Network World. Network World it was large format. It was not like a traditional magazine, it was quite a bit bigger and more like somewhere between a magazine and a newspaper. I guess I'd read that. They report on things the IETF were doing things that was happening at at ICANN big changes going on in the internet, a big lab report. We tested all the MPLS boxes. I didn't know what MPLS was, but I read about it, trying to get my head around what was going on. And there were also mailing lists. There were news groups, nntp, usenet that whole world was out there. So there were places to exchange information for sure. More or less the same as we have today, just different protocols, different platforms.

Speaker 3: 13:00

And then classroom. There was a lot of classroom work I did and you'd pick up a lot going to those classes. So you go attend a class, you're surrounded by a bunch of other nerds that are in some I don't know firewall class or something, and you just talk to people at once. What are you guys working on at your shop? Well, we've got this project. We're doing this. What are you in the classroom, for Well, I've got to figure out how to standardize our firewall build so that we can deploy this to, you know, 150 remote offices or something like whatever it was.

Speaker 3: 13:27

And you, you pick up a lot of things that way. It was slower, but you, you picked up stuff like that in that way. There weren't podcasts, some amount of newsletters, there were RSS feeds from from a lot of websites that had articles and then and then paper. Literally, I look forward to getting Network World on my desk in my office every week, or in my cubicle, as the case may be, and I'd thumb through it and read what I could and you just pick it up as you go. Just a little different than now where everything's real time and everything's clamoring for you and you've got the waterfall on LinkedIn and you couldn't keep up. There's too much to keep up with in 2025. And it's kind of been that way for a while.

Speaker 1: 14:10

Now it feels like there's too much right, and you're such a pro. You made the segue for me, so thank you. You said there was no podcast back then, so I'm doing the math. It looks like you're in industry. I Setback Pushers started around 2010. So how do you get from the guy that you just described to like hey, I want to start a podcast? There's this new thing called podcasts, right?

Speaker 3: 14:31

Yeah, yeah, Yet another industry source were blogs. So there were a lot of us that were independent people that were blogging, and I was one of them. I blogged through my CCIE studies, starting in 2007 through 2008 until I finally passed that lab. And there were others of us that had some notoriety because of blogging and we all kind of knew each other, and Greg Farrow, who was the other founder of Packet Pushers. He retired in 2024.

Speaker 3: 15:00

But he approached me. He's like hey, you want to write for my blog? He had a really popular blog called the Theory of Mind. That was an honor to be asked and I was like, well, I got my own blog, that's doing okay. So I don't really have the space to write for the Theory of Mind, but I had this idea about a podcast. He's like, yeah, because I've been talking to people about a podcast too.

Speaker 3: 15:28

So he and I were both had been thinking about that because we'd both been listening to podcasts on our own. We're kind of there, wasn't? We both knew there was nothing in the networking space and we were intrigued and and I had some audio background and Greg had spent time in a band, so we both knew a bit about audio and about performance and that kind of stuff and we're like, let's give it a shot, and so, and so we did, we, so we did. That's the long and the short of it. We kicked it around.

Speaker 3: 15:47

There was a third guy that had joined us, Dan Dan, not long after the podcast started, went to work for AWS in Ireland and was not allowed to speak publicly anymore. That was just the rules of working for AWS. So he had to drop pretty quickly. But there were three of us in the very, very beginning and then it was Greg and I and I took some classes and did some different things and Tom Hollingsworth, who you guys might know from Tech Field Day fame and some of the podcasts that Tom is on, covered for me while I was doing some classes in those early days. And then I got done with that work and you know, and I was Greg and I, you know, for for a long time.

Speaker 1: 16:29

Are the old episodes available? Like I know, sometimes it ages out of pod catchers and you have to like subscribe. They're not stuff.

Speaker 3: 16:35

They are available if you but you have to, but but not conveniently. You need to go Backupbushesnet. Just dig through the archives. All the MP3s are there, all the way back to the very very beginning, when Greg was even more free to say what was on his mind in the very early days. There's some gems.

Speaker 1: 16:51

Wait, there was a more free Greg version of the Greg I know.

Speaker 3: 16:56

You have no idea.

Speaker 1: 16:57

Oh my God, I mean I love Greg, I love his snark, I love his. You know I love the. So I came up listening to radio as a kid and I was a howard stern fan and like. So you guys, you and greg, kind of had a really good. You know he was the wild man right like he would just say whatever and poke whoever and like, but then you always seemed way more.

Speaker 3: 17:18

I don't know we, we played it. That uh, he was the a classic comedy duo, if you will is the straight man and the funny man. So I would be more of the straight guy and he'd be more of the funny guy. But we weren't doing comedy exactly, but he would be. He'd lean into his personality and say the things that were outrageous. It was a persona that you wear to be this larger than life personality. That, uh, that he did so well it was, it was so effective in that role. But it got to be. He and I would trade off editing duties was back in the day, we edited the shows um, ourselves, and you know, depending on the week, I'd do it or he'd do it, and uh, it'd be his turn to edit and I'm like you're gonna edit out that bit where you said whatever, and he'd be like oh yeah, yeah, sure. And then I'd listen back to the show. It's like, oh crap, you left it in, so let me ask you this was early 2010.

Speaker 2: 18:16

Were you guys in the same room recording then, or? No were you able to manage to do it remotely, and then what? You send the files to each other.

Speaker 3: 18:24

Because we, yeah, we, we, exactly we we did it remotely. Um, greg has lived in in England for the whole time. I've known him and I live on the East coast, us and we'd record with Skype. In the very early days I don't think there were any other tools that we were using. We share some kind of a script document and we record.

Speaker 3: 18:49

We would record our individual tracks locally and but typically the way we do the edits in the early days were just record Skype as an application. There was the software we would use would grab Skype as an application. Right, there was, uh, uh, the software we'd use would grab skype as an application because you get both tracks on the same you know audio file, which you know meant sometimes people talked over each other and whatever it wasn't you know like. You know perfect quality, like you can get if everybody's on an individual track, like we're getting, and not the recording platform we're using now. Um, but it was good enough and that's the thing. That's one of the things Greg and I learned early on. It's like just hit, publish, just stop fussing over it, just get it, just get it good enough and get it out the door, hit, publish, go. And we did.

Speaker 3: 19:34

We came up with a formula in our editing workstation so that the audio would be good enough and we'd edit out the worst of the errors and whatever, whatever we needed to, and uh and just hit publish. That's we. We did, uh, did it that way. So it was a little raw, it was a little unhinged at times, but we were always trying to have good quality content out there for network engineers to. Like. You were saying, andy, we wanted people to have community, we wanted people to be like I'm not alone out here. I'm not because so many network engineers in our experience were alone. We were the only ones, or there were maybe two of us, and we didn't work in the same office, whatever company it was, and so it was a lonely gig.

Speaker 1: 20:16

It was before social media, right, it wasn't even like everybody was connected everywhere there was Twitter, but it hadn't blown up yet.

Speaker 3: 20:25

There were blogs and, like, the commenting world of blogs mattered more and you'd see some of the same handles come up and again there were use net groups and you know there was kind of community, but it wasn't. Social media wasn't as popular as it is now. It wasn't the thing. You just counted on that back in those days not everybody had a phone in their pocket because they were expensive and not everybody could justify them. And you might have still had a BlackBerry for marketing, you might even still had a pager and so on. So yeah, we evolved through all of those changes. And what is normal modern society these days?

Speaker 1: 21:00

Did you have day jobs at the time?

Speaker 3: 21:01

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, big time. Yeah, greg was consulting for a cloud operation in Europe that I can't remember the name of, and I had a mix of jobs. I was working for a company that published IT training and I wasn't doing any of the training. I actually was internal IT support. I was building the network and running the network for all their offices. That was like a three-year project. I did a full overhaul of that network at that time.

Speaker 3: 21:31

Then I went to work for a medical information exchange startup that didn't end up going anywhere, but they hired me because they were going big boy, here we go and I'm like you know, it's going to cost seven figures to do the network right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get the funding, it's gonna be fine. They never did, as far as I know, get the funding, and so I gave up after a while on that. But but we went full time with packet pushers in 2015. Greg had come to the end of his contract and didn't want to renew it. He could have kept working at the where he was at, and it was just like I'm done, I don't want to and packet pushers looks like it's going somewhere, and for me, I was in the same boat. It's like I've been working two jobs for a long time and I was getting pretty tired and again packet pushers looked like it was going somewhere, and so he and I had both like paid down our mortgages to de-risk things and we're like let's try it and see what happens fingers crossed.

Speaker 1: 22:24

2015 about five years in yeah, five years in a bit yeah, but that was five years of grinding man.

Speaker 3: 22:32

I mean, you, you have a podcast. You know the deal. To put a show out every week just a single show is like a lot of work. Um, you got to coordinate guests. You got to do the editing. You got to, you know, hit publish. You got to plan shows. You got to be looking ahead and thinking about what you're going to do, not just this week but the week after that and the week after that, and you know, and then as sponsors started to work with us.

Speaker 3: 22:53

Now you've got responsibilities to them and you got to deal with accounting and you have to start an LLC and you got to think about an accountant that can help you with taxes and it's all this stuff that comes. You're running a small business. Now is what's happening, and it took a lot. So we were doing that as well as working the full-time jobs, and it got to be a bit much. So when we had a shot where we could just go full-time with it, we decided to lean into that and that seemed to be a catalyst for, like, well, pack-a-punch is doing okay to okay, this is a full-time thing, and that seemed to kick it up a notch where, all of a sudden, when we could devote our full time to it, it felt like it took off.

Speaker 1: 23:37

Yeah, you just read my mind. It took off right around the time you two made the commitment that, like, this is now our job. And I wonder if they're related. You know, like when you guys just committed and had more time. And because I often wonder, and again, I don't, I can't imagine it ever working, because I know how much we charge for one sponsored episode and then I think of how many I'd have to sell just to cover what I make at a vendor and I'm like, oh my god right, so so it's, it's. It's always like a scary thing, thinking like how could I ever make this happen? But it's so amazing.

Speaker 1: 24:06

Refinance your car. Yeah, that's what I need to do for sure. Do you have any favorite guests or episodes that stick out? It's probably impossible because you've been doing it so long and I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but are you like, oh my God, that day that Greg told the AWS CEO to screw off was the best day ever? I'm guessing it's something Greg said.

Speaker 3: 24:29

I don't have a story like that. I guess that sticks out in that I probably recorded, I'm going to guess, a couple of thousand podcasts over the years and a lot of stuff blurs together like heavy networking, which I've been on the majority, vast majority of is we're approaching 800 episodes now. I did a lot of network breaks in the early days that's, that was the new show. I did a lot of a different series that we've sunsetted but it was called Priority Q. It was kind of our overflow for heavy networking. So there's just there's all these shows that I've been on, you know, plus guest appearances on shows like this one and Russ White's, the Hedge and you know and other shows. So you know, the answer to your question is I can't give you a specific episode, but I can give you a specific type of episode. So there are shows that we've done where the guest was such a deep subject matter expert in whatever their thing is. They know their topic so well and have the ability to explain it and they're passionate about it. Those are my favorite shows where you're just like I don't want this conversation to end, I want to keep talking to this person, just going deep, deep, deep in it.

Speaker 3: 25:41

One show like that that comes to mind that I've recorded, I don't know, within the last three years. Maybe there's an instructor by the name of Ed Harmoosh. I don't know if you know Ed, but Ed went deep on TLS 1.3. He studied that topic intimately, knew so deeply that topic, and he and I got on and I said, well, let's do a show about this. And he was able to use that as a promo for a full-blown course he had taught on this which demonstrated he was just demonstrating his knowledge. Oh man, that show was awesome and someone emailed me I could fix it.

Speaker 3: 26:18

A few people that emailed us and said that show you did with that about TLS. I have listened to that three times because this change from 1.2 to 1.3 is really impacting our environment and I need to understand this deeply, to know what we're going to change to accommodate this Shows like that. I love that stuff, man. I never get bored of the super deep, nerdy content because it addresses problems people have and it's hard to come by the information in a digestible format. But you find that guest who knows that topic super well because maybe they're in the IETF and they've been in the working group that's been developing the standard and they just they can go hard on the topic. Oh, love that stuff, it's great.

Speaker 1: 27:03

So, before we pivot away from podcasting because I'd like to get into some industry and career stuff, just because you've talked to so many people for so long and I'm hoping, part of at the end of this episode, we can give a little bit of insight into, maybe, where the industry is headed, maybe the kind of skill sets we see that successful engineers have. That might not be replaced by our new favorite two letter word that that I won't say out loud. Two letter word that that I won't say out loud. Um, so, before we pivot out, do you have any? I would hate if somebody asked this to me, but it's one of my questions um, any advice for aspiring content creators? Right, like people who are listening that. So we always espouse, like, if you can communicate, create content. Like people who were trying to look for that differentiator.

Speaker 1: 27:46

How do I get the job? How do I get my name out there? How can I, you know, show experience? Home labbing is always a thing. Right, build a lab if you can show this and that and the other thing content creation. And it's probably because I do what I do here, but I always think it's a need, like blogging, to your point. I started blogging back in 2011, before anything else, and I still refer back to those sometimes like oh, what was that? You know frame relay Delsey thing that was on the CCNA exam that I wrote about. So, um, do you have any advice for an aspiring content creator? We have the King here. What would you tell somebody to do?

Speaker 3: 28:17

I would say don't be intimidated by what other people have written. Ah, so-and-so already wrote about that topic, I'm not going to write about it. Yeah, that's not how content creation works. Um, yes, somebody else wrote about it. They're not going to write about it. The way you can write about it, you've got your own way of communicating. So don't be shy, get it out there, write your thing and your style, develop your own audience. Different people connect to different humans for different reasons and in different ways. And that person that wrote that other article you're like oh, I can't, I don't need to write that. Look at that article. It's amazing that someone else might not connect to that article, for whatever reason. You're going to write it. You're going to have your own take and your own I don't know diagrams, analogies, way of explaining things, and someone's going to read your version of that and go I get it now, I get it Subscribe. And now you've just made a fan and they're going to try to keep up with what you're doing. So just don't worry about what's out there, just do your own thing.

Speaker 3: 29:14

There's a lot of things you can do with content creation. One is I think I want to make a living. Don't think about it that way, not to begin with, think about it because you want to learn a topic deeply. There is nothing like creating content around a topic to figure out if you truly understand a topic or no. You're going to start writing about a thing or creating a podcast or a YouTube video and then get two thirds of the way through and go oh crap, I actually I actually have no idea what happens next, or, or it'd be like I was working in the lab. I thought this was supposed to happen. That is not what happened. Okay, okay, okay. I got to stop, I got to review this thing, figure out what I did not understand, and then, you know, go again. Um, there's nothing like that sort of work, to make sure you truly understand a topic. So that's another great reason to uh, to create a uh, to create content, um.

Speaker 3: 30:02

Another thought is I want to be a YouTuber and make a million dollars. Yeah, you won't, especially not in a niche world like this. It's very difficult. I don't want to discourage anybody here, but if you think you're going to go and make content and that's going to be your living, that's hard. One of the advantages that Greg and I had when we started, the show we did was first to market. We were there at the right time. We got lucky. There's an element of luck that happens Now, in 2025, everybody wants to be a YouTuber or a podcaster and it's very trendy and there's all these tools out there that make it much easier to do it than what was out there when we started. So it's just it's tougher.

Speaker 3: 30:43

So many things are going after people's attention. There's all kinds of streaming services now that didn't use it In 2010,. Cord cutting was a question mark. Do I have cable or do I cut the cord and go to Netflix or something? Now there's 15, 20, however many streaming services all competing for your attention, plus YouTube, plus TikTok and all the rest, and you, as a creator, are competing against all those services now for someone's attention, and it's tough and people's brains have been rewired where it's harder for them to pay attention to deep technical content. They got to really want it and be willing to put the effort in to make the attention, to have it penetrate their brains that they can learn something. That's a choice. They got to make it's way easier to watch. I don't know brain rot stuff, honestly, and that stuff tends to be addictive, and so, as a creator, you're up against that and I can tell you from a packet pusher perspective we're up against that.

Speaker 3: 31:40

It's not like our subscriber numbers have been up and to the right since 2010. Nah, it peaked in, I don't know, 2017 or so probably 2018. And it's been kind of up and down. It kind of oscillates since then and part of it is just there's too much content in the world for people to listen to. So if you're an aspiring content creator, you got to find your niche, you got to find your voice and you got to be patient and it's a grind to build up that audience, grind to build up that audience.

Speaker 3: 32:11

But if you find your voice and you, you and it'll take you a little bit of time to find your voice what your writing style is, if you're a podcaster or YouTuber how you present on camera, how you say things, how you phrase things, who you're working with and finding the chemistry. If you're like, do a co-host kind of a thing, all that stuff takes time and you gotta be patient with it and and it. And if you're going to do technical content, then you've just narrowed your audience down because anybody can watch I don't know a car review or a music podcast, let's say, people that are interested in network engineering or cybersecurity. It's a smaller crowd, there's a smaller TAM total addressable market that's out there, and so to find your voice for those people, it can be tough, but if you really want to do it and you're good at it, you'll find them. They'll be there. Just put the time in. It's not going to happen overnight. It just isn't.

Speaker 1: 33:02

It's such a good answer. Technical content is so hard. I have like an eight minute NetFlow video that I did. It probably took me three weeks to like produce an eight minute. Just you know, you're building the lab and figuring it and to your point I'm like I know how this works. And then you configure it and you're like crap, what, why didn't it do the thing? And then that's a weak rabbit hole of like something else I didn't know.

Speaker 3: 33:29

And I'm like, oh, the thing with the other thing in there, uh, or the dependency that you didn't expect to see show up, or it worked the previous three times and now it failed when I, after I, hit the record button. Why what?

Speaker 1: 33:36

just why, yeah, or this always worked in production, but now I'm at home and I'm virtualizing esxi and now it's not working. Is it the emulation? Is it the feature? I don't know. I spent three weeks fighting BFD and the 9000, you know the virtual 9000s 9Ks for Cisco and ESXi. I spent three weeks fighting BFD to come to find out that it's not a supported feature.

Speaker 3: 33:59

I'm trying to install Librand MS on a brand new Ubuntu, install that I did on this old Mac I was doing that just before we hit record here Couldn't get PHP installed, why? Well, you know I've been around the block before and it's like oh, you know what Ubuntu doesn't know about the repo that the PHP is living in. And I got it. What's the command for that? I don't know. You know, again 10 minute rabbit hole. You finally find the command, put it in, do the thing. Yay, php is installed. Now I can continue with Libra NMS, install Stuff like that. It's constant. Yeah, so yeah. Three weeks to produce an eight minute video, I believe it. That sounds about right.

Speaker 1: 34:32

But you have to love this stuff and I think people who've created content if you're interviewing someone across the table and they have created content to me it shows a level of passion and curiosity that, like these people, go through the pain, dig in the rabbit holes, get it right, because you really have to just smash your head into the table sometimes to create some of this stuff.

Speaker 1: 34:52

And you know you reminded me earlier there's this weird dichotomy between, like on TikTok, you can get 100,000 viewers and get people to pay you making one minute videos, but on the other side of the spectrum, the YouTube videos that perform the best are like long form. So it's so strange and I don't know if that's just where the old people are, like me like, oh, I like the long, technical thing, but there's such a weird kind of chasm between if you can do it in a minute, great, you can get rich and famous. Or if you can spend an hour, you can be network chuck and have a bajillion followers, like I don't know where the difference is between I think it's two different kinds of audiences.

Speaker 3: 35:28

I think there's one audience that's got their brains kind of wired for the short form stuff and they can't, because they need time away from that to rewire their brain back to being able to actually read a chapter of a book or whatever, something that would take their they could take a long time. And then you got other people that aren't hooked that way and they can watch longer form videos and they're motivated by something. They're motivated by the creator, they feel a connection to him. Like you mentioned, Network Chuck yeah, he's great, he's very personable.

Speaker 3: 35:59

Oh man, you can't help but watch that guy and feel immediately connected to him. He's real, he's authentic, he's funny and he's got a great beard. Funny and he's got a great beard. So you know all those things. You're like I like this, I like this guy, I want to watch this guy and it's okay, you can sit there and watch him and you're going to learn something when you watch Network Check, do what he does. But those are two different personality types and two types of brains. I think that if someone's motivated enough to want to learn like I was reading in a subreddit about CCNA, just to kind of get the vibe of where people are at as they're studying. They will go and watch content about CCNA because they really want that cert, because they're trying to break into the industry. They are highly motivated. Yeah, they'll watch longer form content, but how many people are highly motivated like that? That is the question.

Speaker 1: 36:48

You think that's still the cert to go after? Here's our segue you keep doing my job for me. I really appreciate this. So you know how do we? Our industry is changing right? I've been around for about 15 years in this industry and what has changed?

Speaker 1: 37:02

So for me, when I think of what's changed in the 15 years I've been in, when I started it seemed to be like you alluded to earlier the deeper you could go, the more minutiae into the detail. Get your CCNA, then get your CCNA voice, then get your NP, then get your NP something and then go for your IE. It seemed like the deeper, and there's always going to be a need. In my opinion, this is like the old guy crew, right? So the TikTokers, who are like 22,. I don't know if this resonates with them, but I came up that the deeper you can go and the more knowledge you have, that seemed to be better for your career. But I feel like we're kind of swinging back towards more of a generalist kind of. It seems like we're asking network engineers to do more and more. Does that sound true? Or is that just my weird little view of the world?

Speaker 3: 37:51

I'll give you my my feeling. Uh, I can't say, I have hard data to back this up, but my my feeling is you're a network engineer, but you're also other things too. Um, you're, you're, you have to know something about cloud. You, you almost certainly have to know something about cyber security and anything you know at an application level, like if you understand how web servers work, particularly like HTTP and proxies and reverse proxies, and then, well, I mean I was going to say network adjacent, but this is still network load balancing and those sorts of skills. There's a core set of technologies that if you were a network engineer 20 years ago, it's kind of most of what you needed to know and I would put those in as route and switch. If you knew routing protocols, if you knew switching VLANs and so on, and you know how to operate a LAN and a WAN, that was a job for a company that was big enough to need your skills. That's all you needed to know. Along the way you picked up cybersecurity, you probably needed to know. Along the way you picked up cyber security, you probably needed to know something about firewalls, because you were plump to the internet and you had to kind of rethink a lot of things and that became also. Now you need to know ids, ips, and now you're a specific kind of company facing specific kind of threats and there's some other piece of hardware you had to throw in to do proxy TCP handshakes or something, whatever it was that you had to put in, and the skill set just kind of got broader, what you needed to know as a network engineer, and that hasn't stopped.

Speaker 3: 39:21

Then cloud came along, now, okay, well, now I got to know cloud networking and I got to understand IPsec better than I did before maybe, and I never really got into BGP. But now I got to know more BGP and they're doing what it's a load balancer, but in the cloud. Okay, well, I was used to my F5 thing that you know sat in the rack and I knew what that did. Now I got to figure that functionality out, but in AWS or Azure or or gcp or all three, and let's add oracle cloud to the mix too. And now, of course, in 2025, what's all the rage? Automation. Now it's like, okay, so I'm going to take all these things that I used to configure by hand and now figure out a set of tools that are going to allow me to automate the deployment installation of all of that stuff. So that's a whole different thing and apparently I have to do it like a software developer does it. So if I didn't know anything about software development before, I got to get my head around those concepts and so I guess what I'm saying is, when you're breaking into the industry in 95 or 2000 or even 2010, the things you needed to know was a smaller set and they were complicated and technical. In 2025, you got to know all that stuff and more. That's also hard and figure out how all these different things work together. So a show I started with Holly Metlitsky. She is two years in working for Juniper Networks and I started this show with her called NS for Networking because we saw this need for network fundamentals and Holly's like I want to know how this stuff works forwards and backwards. But you know what we've been getting requests for from junior engineers.

Speaker 3: 41:08

I want you guys to talk about EVP and VXLAN. Well, to get to EVP and VXLAN, you have to know so much about so much. You need to know VLANs. You need to know VXLAN as a protocol translation types, vtaps, tunneling. You need to know BGP as a routing protocol. You got to understand layer two, switching, because you're moving Mac addresses around now and not as in your NLRIs, et cetera.

Speaker 3: 41:34

There's all this stuff that goes on. There's hardware implications for this. It's a really complicated thing. You can't start there. The industry has evolved to EVPN, vxlan as a pretty standard way to build out data centers particularly, but other sorts of topologies as well. But the technology stack that is used to build that is really complex and there's a lot of layers to it. And it used to be. Vlans were a thing you'd scratch your head about and try to get your head around and understand. And now it's yeah, that's just one teeny piece of this much larger puzzle to put together this fabric. So I don't envy a network engineer trying to get their heads into it. So this is a long way to get back around to. Is CCNA the right place to start? Okay, let's take a step even further back from that.

Speaker 3: 42:30

Training programs by vendors like Cisco are marketing tools. That's their primary purpose in life. The reason Cisco systems is the I don't think anyone would fight me on this the most successful networking company that's ever been. By sales volume, by products, by acquisitions, however you want to do the measurement, I mean Cisco's the biggest, baddest company that's ever been as far as networking goes. One of the reasons that became true is because back in the day, you followed the Cisco certification ladder to become a network engineer. It was more or less the only game in town. It was respected, it was thorough. Their training was you couldn't fault it. Really, it was absolutely excellent and they took you from the associate level to the professional level, to the expert level, and CCIEs were like deities. Someone was a CCIE, they had their number. You, someone was a CCIE, they had their number. Oh, you know, that was like oh, may I? May I ask you a question, sir? You?

Speaker 1: 43:32

said I still, I still treat you like a deity. By the way, the IE is I'm still amazed by, because I know how hard the NP was.

Speaker 2: 43:40

I've been abused lately.

Speaker 3: 43:43

So that but that but. But why did what? Was the the benefit for Cisco to put that training out the door? They didn't do it altruistically, so that, like you know, we think we're going to shoulder the burden of education for the community. Well, no, what they were doing was building soldiers for their army.

Speaker 3: 44:05

You get your CCNA NP and whatever else you might get. What do you know? You know your CCNA NP and whatever else you might get. What do you know? You know networking? Yes, absolutely. You knew networking really well. You also knew it from the Cisco perspective and you were comfortable at the Cisco command line and you knew the Cisco product set. And so what were you most comfortable with and what were you going to recommend? As a consultant or as the tech lead at your company where you were a network engineer? You're going to recommend Cisco gear. That's the way that worked. And Cisco took over the planet on to, in my mind, on the backs of, uh, of their certified people, uh, people like me, and, and thousands of others, millions of others that got some level of cert. Uh, and if you're really bonkers, yeah, and thousands of others, millions of others that got some level of cert. And if you're really bonkers. Yeah, you went all the way up to the IE level and you were an advocate for Cisco In 2025, I don't think those certs are quite the same.

Speaker 3: 45:03

Is it still excellent education? You bet Absolutely it is. But the market has fractured a lot. And Cisco does networking. That's still what they're known the most for. But if you look at their acquisitions over the years and the other things that they've been doing, they do a lot of stuff that's IT related and they're working on quantum computing now and they got storage stuff and they've made a bunch of security acquisitions and they'll sell you all kinds of things. They were big into voice. I remember when they bought somebody to help them get into the voice world and they started making IP phones and we were all like, yeah, is that what you're going to do? And I don't know what that. That was a huge business for them. They did a massive business in that and that's been their strategy, where it's networking and then networking adjacent stuff. That feels like networking but it's more like applications that run on top of the network, like voice, where you got to know things like quality of service and how to configure a switch that when an IP phone plugs into it, it's going to get the right IP address and be put in the right VLAN and the traffic is going to be prioritized in the right way. And so now, in 2025, if you look at what most of the Cisco certification programs are, it is still good network education, but with a heavier accent on the Cisco way and the Cisco product lines and the Cisco way of doing things, because in part of this fracturing that's in the market.

Speaker 3: 46:29

Like Andy, you work for Nokia. Well, the Nokia way of building things and the tooling that is used and the approach is different. It's just a different, a whole different vibe from doing things. The Cisco way, juniper it's the same boat. Juniper has been fighting against Cisco forever and the Juniper way of doing things is different from the Cisco way of doing things. Are they the same protocols? Do we end up with the same result? Do we recognize that this is a router running BGP? Sure, but the implementation details across these different vendors is wildly different and your comfort level to be able to make the thing, do the thing changes based on your training and education.

Speaker 3: 47:10

So, if you get your CCNA in 2025, are you able to go work on a Nokia network? Yes, and no, because you're not going to understand a lot of the configuration of the tooling. You're going to understand VLANs and OSPF and BGP and a lot of other things that are going to be common, but the feel of it's going to be different and you're going to have some learning to get you over there. So maybe you want to do Nokia training or maybe you want to do Juniper training or maybe you want to do something else. There's training alignments that have got you more tied to the vendor ecosystem than what you really wish you had, which was general network engineering knowledge. I can apply no matter what there is out there which you get to. You do get there over time, but that only comes with experience.

Speaker 3: 48:01

I had a lot of Cisco background and CCNA and P&IE training and so on, but I got to a point where it's like someone would interview me for a position and he'd be like you're a Cisco guy, but we got a lot of Juniper here. Are you okay with that? I'm like, yeah, that's fine, tell me about your Juniper now. Well, we're doing this and this. Yeah, fine, okay, I've never run a Juniper SRX firewall. I could figure it out and I did and it was fine.

Speaker 3: 48:32

It was not threatening once you kind of realize configuration matters. But it isn't the thing. Being able to configure a device isn't the core skill set you want to major on. You want to be able to explain to somebody how a firewall passes traffic, and then writing and applying policy is an important implementation detail, to be sure, but it's an implementation detail. And now we're looking at networks that are run by controllers. We're looking at networks that are, you're, abstracted a level from the command line of these devices in many cases, because we're using automation to configure this stuff. It's become much more key to know what the end result is that you're going for, and it's less important that you understand the CLI. And some people are going to scream and be upset that I said that, but I think that's the reality of it, where your value as a network engineer is in understanding the result that you're going for and being able to figure out what the implementation details are.

Speaker 2: 49:35

The configuration details to get you there no matter what vendor gear is sitting in front of you.

Speaker 2: 49:39

I've often said that nowadays, I think, where a network engineer really shows that the engineering part is understanding why we're doing anything in the network, not just how to do it, because, like you said, so much of it, how you do it on one platform is different than how you do it on another. But what you're really wondering is why are we making that change? What's the reason that we're looking to use IBGP here instead of OSPF, or what's the reason we're doing whatever? So understanding the why, I think is really critical. And you're right, that's not taught in a cert. That's taught by banging your head against the wall and getting experience. Sometimes a cert will get you into that first thing. But again, that cert, it may not be a Cisco cert, it may be whatever they need for that job right then.

Speaker 3: 50:23

Yeah, the real learning is going to happen on the job. When you have a choice to solve a business challenge, to implement a particular feature, and so you go ahead and do it and then realize six months later, I should have done it a little different. It's too hard to support the way we implemented it, for example. There's things like that, choices that you would have made differently had you had that experience the first time. Then the next time the issue comes up you're like we're going to do it right this time. That stuff you don't get in a cert. It just it doesn't happen that way and it doesn't matter what the benefit.

Speaker 3: 50:54

Like Jeff, you got a Fortinet hat on. You know you guys run 40. Oh, I don't know if you work for. You work for Fortinet, so. So 40 OS, that's a whole different ecosystem again. But you can do all the things. I know that you guys have all the stuff from switching and access, not just firewalls. You've got 40 OS on all kinds of things. That's yet another. You should be able to, if you know what the end result is, sit at a Fortinet network and make it do the same thing that you can do with a Cisco or Vista or Juniper, whatever network which is where I got my start with Cisco and Juniper and HP and Sienna.

Speaker 2: 51:24

And next thing you know, you HP and Sienna and next thing you know you're at Fortinet. But it doesn't really change what my overall job is. My job I'm an SE now, so my job is a lot of education, a lot of presenting, but it's still about understanding the why. Why are we doing this? What's the overall goal? And then how do we get there? It's not as much about the vendor even though I work for the vendor Sometimes. It's not as much about the vendor as it's about the tool that you've got in your hands right now and how can you use that tool effectively.

Speaker 3: 51:56

So I think the cert attached to your resume might be the thing that a lot of people are concerned about. Hey, if I get CCNA, that's recognized more broadly than a lot of other certs and so I think I have a better shot at a job if I get CCNA. Okay, but just don't limit yourself to that. Don't lock yourself into the Cisco way of thinking, because increasingly you'll find more and more stuff out there.

Speaker 3: 52:20

Everybody runs a multi-vendor network. There's few shops that are like we're all Cisco end-to-end Probably not. There's going to be some Cisco and all Cisco end to end Probably not. There's going to be some Cisco and there's going to be a bunch of other stuff too, odds and ends, depending on how your company grew through acquisition and what that other network ran. Or they had a, they someone really believed in Palo Alto networks, firewalls, and so their Cisco switching and routing, and Palo for their cybersecurity. Let's say that's really common to walk into a multi-vendor network. You're not going to get your CCNA, go get hired by a company and it's going to be all Cisco and you're just going to be in this happy place. Now you got to know networking for networking and be able to apply it to whatever the gear is, that's in front of you and how each vendor interprets that stuff. Because they don't all interpret it, the same is.

Speaker 1: 53:07

that's in front of you and how each vendor interprets that stuff because they don't all interpret it the same and places that were traditional one choke to throat shops. I think during the covid supply chain stuff kind of got forced to go multi-vendor, like well, we need, you know, 200 top rack switches from vendor x and you can't get x for eight months yeah, you're you're 14 months out, but you can get.

Speaker 1: 53:27

You get vendor Y over here in three months, like oh okay. And then you start going down that path, like, oh well, maybe multi-vendor, because there was no choice then, right Like, supply chain was just so wacky.

Speaker 3: 53:37

And then people figured out, wait, things still work if it doesn't say Cisco on the front. Oh huh. And people's minds were expanded during that time.

Speaker 1: 53:46

For those reasons, yeah, which then kind of gets into like automation right and more multi-vendor. Like okay, how do I operate this shop right If I have, I don't know, let's say Juniper and Cisco, like all right, well, how do I do both of those? Can I do an infrastructure as code thing? How do we translate? Like I worked at the comcast knock and it was cisco and juniper and my brain would explode every time I'd go from one to the other, even looking at like light levels on an sfp, like show xeve or something to this other arcane command, like I just couldn't keep all the languages you know straight in my head.

Speaker 3: 54:13

But I think good, automation, tooling right, kind of does some of that translation for you and you just kind of and it's what drives a lot of uh, the data model conversations how, how do I model this thing so that I can abstract away whatever the command is underneath to get that thing done? Just give me a model that has all the things in it I need and I don't want to have to care about what's underneath. Give me some way to abstract that because, again, it's an important detail, but it is configuration, is an implementation detail.

Speaker 1: 54:42

So before we wrap up I know we're at the end here I think you know we the question of how to get into network engineering. To your point, ethan, you eloquently talked about it. I think the question gets harder and harder to answer in 2010. For me it was get your CCNA and, honestly, that was enough. And I worked for a place that was so big. I was just a WAN person, so CCNA I learned. Wan never touched the LAN Yay. I went to another gigantic place Same kind of thing, just touched data center WAN yeah. A lot of that's changing. They're asking more and more that CCNA. That did set me up for success.

Speaker 1: 55:16

Five or six years later I wound up at a place like, okay then, all right, now we're, you know, now we're doing automation bloody hell, you know, not python again right. So they just even even someone like me who got by on the ccna as the only thing I needed, uh, I experienced that in my career where they just started piling more and more things on and even if you were in a big, siloed place, it was like, well, you know, tough like route switch isn't enough anymore. And I took that personally, honestly, like like wait a minute, what do you mean route switch isn't enough anymore. You told me, and I did the thing, and now you're like, well, we need you to do three other jobs, but we're going to pay you the same. I'm like this isn't fair and nobody cared that it wasn't fair and I yelled about it for years on my show and on social media and then, you know, I eventually got laid off and realized nobody gives a crap that I don't think it's not fair. Go learn the thing Right.

Speaker 1: 56:05

So I think I think the best answer to that question, which you and Jeff touched on, is, like you know, be adaptable, go broad, right. And and I think, if you can learn one vendor's ecosystem to your point, like when somebody asked me, well, what cloud should I learn? Well, I go by market share. Aws still has the lion's share of the market. Go get AWS.

Speaker 1: 56:23

If you're at a place that does GCP, can you learn GCP? Sure, it's a different thing, but it's a similar concept. Same thing with Cisco. What should I start with? I mean, I guess you could go CompTIA, NetPlus. I didn't do that.

Speaker 1: 56:35

I don't know how much weight that carries in the industry, but based on market share and based on how difficult the CCNA has been over the years. They'll probably say stay with the CCNA. Is it marketing stuff? Yes, but you're going to learn that basic stuff. And if you're interviewing and it's a Cisco shop or Nokia shop, well hell, this poor person got through the CCNA. And if they're willing to, you know, if they're adaptable and they're willing to learn another syntax or, to your point, you know, get that base certification be adaptable, go broad. And something I wish I knew earlier or internalized earlier was embrace kind of the automation devs type of stuff a little earlier, even if it's just python and figuring out what the hell git does, to be able to have those conversations and have the ability to abstract things. Because it kind of came late for me and I wish, yeah, I wish I had done that earlier and it's part of the ccna.

Speaker 3: 57:25

Now they have a module in automation. They they start to get you into it. So yeah, it's, it's an expected skill set. Unfortunately, because again, I'd hate to have to learn all that stuff if I was brand new to it.

Speaker 1: 57:38

It's so well at least you were a comp sci major. I failed out of comp so I wound up in sales and then I got back into networking and years later they're like you have to learn programming. I'm like God, come on. I'm like not again, leave me alone. But honestly, now I'm enjoying it and I do get stuff here and there and I'm still trying to learn Python and I finally I have learned in life. If you complain enough and realize no one gives a crap about your complaints, then you just kind of get on with it and do the thing anyway. So, but you feel better a little bit. Old man yelling at cloud right. Um um ethan, what podcast do you listen to? I know you're. You don't listen to tech stuff, right?

Speaker 3: 58:15

yeah, actually I don't, uh, I don't listen to much tech stuff because it's my job and so, weirdly, I'm not listening to a lot of a a lot of tech uh shows. But, uh, I trail run and uh, and so a lot of the shows that I listen to are related to trail running. So, uh, there is sally mcrae's show which is um, oh gosh, I'm gonna forget the uh, forget the name of it, but she's a, she's a trail runner and she and her, her husband, eddie, do a great show. Just search Sally McRae, you'd find it Great stuff. There's a show called Fuel for the Soul, s-o-l-e. It's great about. I'm still a nerd even though I run, so I care about things like how many grams of sugar should I be, or carbs mostly sugar Should I be consuming per hour on a trail run so that I can stay fueled properly, and they nerd out about stuff like that and that's important.

Speaker 1: 59:09

So you've bonked on a long training thing and bottomed out on sugar. You don't realize how important that is.

Speaker 3: 59:15

It's huge. Yeah, there's the FKT podcast. Fkt stands for fastest known time and there's people that come on that show and talk about how they completed some route in the fastest known time which correlates with the fastest known time website, and they talk about their stories and how they did it. And people that go out for these bonkers, you know multi hundred mile runs and, uh, you know it takes them several days to complete the route. I nerd about, about stuff like that these days. Um, which doesn about stuff like that these days, which doesn't mean I don't like tech, but it's like that's what I do for eight to 10 hours a day. I'm reading, I'm researching, I'm preparing for podcasts, I'm recording shows, and so, outside of it, it's not like, yeah, I want to listen to another show for networking or whatever I don't, and there's a lot of great shows out there.

Speaker 1: 59:59

It reminds me when I was a busboy at an italian restaurant in ninth grade and after a year of just smelling and having red tomato sauce spilled all over me all day, every day, I like couldn't even look at italian food for like three years because it just, you know, I was in it all the time and I'm like, oh, you know, I'm overwhelmed with it. Get away from me. Same thing with tech, you know. You just you need a break. Your brain shouldn't be in it all the time.

Speaker 3: 1:00:22

Yeah the sally show I just remembered is called choose strong. So if anybody out there's yeah, I, I, my brain, decided to cough up that information. I'm at that age where it's like, yeah, my brain picks and chooses what information it'll give back at it in real time. Sometimes I've got to pull it out of cold storage and it takes a while, and but then it pops up, you know, welcome to my crappy club if, If it is.

Speaker 1: 1:00:42

Hey, jeff, you got anything?

Speaker 2: 1:00:46

No, I've just been sitting here and enjoying watching you guys, who both have a wealth of knowledge in the podcasting side, and then, uh, I feel more like a spectator than I have really a co-host on this one. But I've enjoyed it, it's been. It's been really great. I mean, what is it? 10,000 hours of what they say makes you an expert. With 15 years of the podcasting, I think you're well into the expert phase there. So it's really been nice to have you on here as an expert, and it's also nice to see that, even though you spend a lot of time talking about tech, it's really nice to see that you still play with it. As we were talking before the show, that you're still building stuff in your own labs. I think that's really an important thing. For any engineers we're talking about what's the most important thing they should be studying right now study what really interests you and then try to get a job doing what you really like, because that's where you're going to shine, and obviously you're really shining it at being such a great communicator.

Speaker 3: 1:01:34

oh it's awesome having you here. I love this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I still love, love this stuff. I still like doing networking very much and playing with this stuff. It's yeah, 100, it's still uh, I still love nerding out about it. No, yeah, no, yeah, it's my job to do podcasting, but I still love this stuff, no doubt about it.

Speaker 1: 1:01:52

I feel stupid asking this question, but it's part of my closing remarks for those living under a rock that aren't familiar with you where can people find you and and what do you have cooking? Do you have anything new happening that people should check out?

Speaker 3: 1:02:04

Yeah, so you can find most of my content creation work by going to packet pushersnet or just anywhere you listen to podcasts. If you search for packet pushers, you're going to find what do? We got 13 shows that we do now under the packet pushes umbrella. We have too many? I don't know. I don't know that we'll be doing 13 shows in a year. It's a lot of shows, but you can find all different sorts of shows that are buying for engineers. They're shows where people that are experts in wireless or cybersecurity or DevOps create content by talking to other experts that are in the industry, and all that stuff is free. It's paid for by sponsors and even with sponsored content, it's not sponsors like Squarespace or mattresses. It's sponsors who are vendors in the industry, who have products that you probably care about because it's of interest to your job and your business, where you that you work for and and then and that's how we pay our bills, that's how we do the things that we do. So PacketPushersnet the shows that I specifically am on are heavy networking. That was the original Packet Pusher show the OG back in 2010, the same series. It's gone through a couple of rebranding because it's like we have more shows. We can't just call it Packet Pushers, right, and so anyway, it's called Heavy Networking. These days I'm on that show, uh, every week, uh. The other show about network fundamentals that I mentioned earlier is called and is for networking. I do that with uh, with holly, and we have great conversations. We've gotten a lot of really positive feedback about that show. People like our banter. We have good banter and uh and good discussions where we explain network fundamentals. So I I mean, if you're learning, like you're a junior engineer trying to break in, trying to get your CCNA, you're in sales or marketing and find yourself working for a networking company, you're like, what has happened? What did I sign up for? That show can help you and we've gotten lots of feedback from folks there.

Speaker 3: 1:03:58

And then YouTube. There's a packet pushers channel on YouTube that I do. The vast majority of the content that comes up there that is either original video content or, like Holly and I do, our show is Talking Heads on YouTube and I'm working on more of that, more original content for YouTube. That will be mostly lab focused, and you can also find me working with vendors to like show me the cool thing. Like Andy, you work for Nokia. Nokia has done some, some videos with us at packet pushers. That has been, you know, super cool. So you can find me over there. Uh, as well on youtube on the packet pushers channel, and I feel like I'm forgetting stuff. Oh, newsletters, we, you can find all that at packet pushersnet. Yeah, there's a slack group there's a slack.

Speaker 3: 1:04:39

yes, we got a big audience slack with community about 4 000 people in it. It's a good community. We break out the channels into technical topics, like you want to talk about campus networking, you've got a channel for that. You want to talk about Linux networking, there's a channel for that, et cetera. Plus all the pods have their own channels in that Slack group. And yeah, again, you can find that at packuppushersnet.

Speaker 1: 1:04:59

And you have the best tagline in the business Too much networking would never be enough.

Speaker 1: 1:05:04

Yes, it's so good. I smile every time I hear it at the end of a show Ethan, thanks so much for coming on. It means the world to me. It's, it's I've had. You know.

Speaker 1: 1:05:12

Once you got rolling and started, I'm like, oh, here he goes, and I just started learning stuff and hearing cool things. So I I learned valuable information every single time I listen to you speak, and that's been constant for 15 years. So again, thank you for your contribution to not only my career but our industry, and you guys just continue to be a shining light and a place to go to learn new cool stuff. And even the N is for networking show. I love it because there's somebody said a saying once like if you stick to the basics, you never have to go back to the basics. And when I listen to Anna's for networking I'm like, oh yeah, that like I forget half of what I learned, probably. And then when I hear you two dig into it, I'm like, all right, that's the thing with the and then it goes over to that thing. So I just love the networking fundamental breakdowns that you guys do. It's been a great show so far.

Speaker 3: 1:05:56

Yeah, thanks for saying so, and it takes a long time to prepare because I have to relearn stuff. I've forgotten to make sure I get the details right and then sometimes I still get little things wrong and people send us a well, actually, well actually.

Speaker 2: 1:06:08

Oh yeah, I forgot about that.

Speaker 3: 1:06:10

Whatever it was, yeah, which is great, I love it. I love the interaction.

Speaker 1: 1:06:13

Gotta love the well, actually crowd. Yeah, Jeff, as always. Thanks for being here, Ethan, it's been fantastic For all things. Art of Network Engineering you can check out our Linktree at linktreecom forward slash artofnetenge. The podcast is on there. We have a study group, Discord, called Tell About the Journey. You can join there. Thanks so much for listening and we'll catch you next time on the Art of Network Engineering podcast. Hey folks, if you like what you heard today, please subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher. You can find us on socials at Art of NetEng and you can visit linktreecom forward slash Art of NetEng for links to all of our content, including the A1 merch store and our virtual community on Discord called it's All About the Journey. You can see our pretty faces on our YouTube channel named the Art of Network Engineering. That's youtubecom forward slash Art of NetEng. Thanks for listening.