And I'm sure for you, that's how you got into your career. You know, that's how you got at this level in your career, whereas a bunch of other people perhaps aren't at that level that you even started with. And it's because of your ability to constantly push that boundary. And I think we so often take that for granted, you know, or we think about it and we know it, but we don't take action on it. You know, I know a lot of people that say they know that, but they aren't doing the actions that sort of reflect that knowledge. Hey, everyone, and welcome to the second part of my interview. With Dane Miller, my name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. In the first part of our interview, we discussed some of the hardest problems that I have faced and the hardest problems that Dane has faced in his role as a director of technology. I hope you'll go back and listen to that part of the interview and stick around for the second part of the interview today. Thank you again for listening to Developer Tea. I'm going to get out of the way and get this interview rolling. So let's prove this theory. Let's talk a little bit about how grit kind of plays into the ability to succeed. So you are the director of technology at Midroll, and Midroll is responsible for consuming millions of podcast feeds, correct? Yeah. Okay, so if you can kind of rewind and give us a little bit of backstory as to how you got to where you are today. Yeah. Well, I think the most, you know, I get this question a lot from students that are interested in getting into web development for the first time. I work with a lot of people that are in other industries, like they started as a lawyer or something like that, and they want to transition to web development. And I always give them the same answer, which is you have to change before your situation changes around you. So for me, I grew up in North Carolina in sort of a lower class environment, like sort of a negative environment. And when I graduated or when I dropped out of college, I was a little bit more of a, you know, a little bit of a, you know, a little bit of a, you know, a little bit of a, you know, I dropped out and then moved back home with my parents. And I was there and I really wanted things to change for me. But I had to come to the like hard realization that unless I changed the environment that I was in and changed myself, nothing would change for me. So I basically ended up selling some of my stuff and moving to Chicago. I didn't know anybody in Chicago, but I ended up finding somebody on the internet that I could meet. And I ended up staying on his couch for a couple months. And, you know, through this type of radical change in my life, I was able to kind of get I've been able to understand that the more we thrust ourselves out of our comfort zone, the quicker we can achieve the most ridiculous goals. That's by far the like most, if there was a formula, that's kind of it. And so if you can kind of harden yourself to change in weird ways throughout your life, even if it is, you know, perhaps going a day without eating, you know, if you can just find little strategies to harden yourself to change over time or push your comfort zone, I find. It's just easier and easier to succeed. So for me, it wasn't hard after that to get a client. You know, it wasn't hard after that to get my first job. It wasn't hard after that, you know, to do other things and get other jobs. As long as I had that mentality that allowed me to just kind of totally uproot my entire life. If I had that mentality, I knew I could do anything. And, you know, that might be a strange sort of relationship I'm drawing between these two things, but it's really not for me because I experienced it. You know, when you when you uproot your whole. Life, you kind of experience this transformation, especially when you're moving from an environment you've been in your whole life. Yeah, so something completely different. So I just kind of took that energy and used it, to be honest. And I got my first job as a front end developer and I so passionate about JavaScript and still am and responsive design and stuff like that. And we did a lot of great work there and just kind of continued to to apply for opportunities. And that's one thing I tell students, too. I say. How many? Jobs. So they'll come to me and they'll say, I want to be a web developer. And I'll ask them, how many jobs have you applied for in the past month? And if the answer is less than five, then I know they aren't serious. Yeah. So I literally applied for maybe one hundred and fifty opportunities in the course of three years. And that's how I got the opportunity to work at the White House as a presidential innovation fellow, just purely because of the volume of opportunities that I applied for. So many people I know don't apply for things because they don't have the money. They don't have the money. They don't have the money to do things because they don't think they should have them or can get them. There's all this weird guilt and doubt in their brain. Yeah. And I understand that. I deal with that every day. But you have to kind of thrust yourself out there. And you know, I still remember this moment, this pivotal moment in my career. I didn't I hadn't had a job yet ever. I had a freelance client. I had just moved to Chicago and I was like kind of nervous about the future. Right. It was very unclear. And I was I was walking to my interview for my first job. And I was like, I'm going to be a part of this. And I was on the street and I was walking there across this bridge and I was about to not go because I was so nervous, man. And I didn't know if this, you know, in my head, I was doing that thing of if this job doesn't play out, I might have to move back home. And that was so painful to me. And so in my head in that moment, I just there was a switch that flipped and I said, what's the worst that could happen? And then I just visualize them saying no to me. Like I just visualize that. And there's just this switch flipped. And I was like, that's not that bad. And I went in it because I distressed. It wasn't that bad. And I did pretty well. And I failed that interview and I failed the next four. But I eventually got one. Right. So it's like this persistence and this consistency that I think is so powerful. I think that's what a lot of people are missing. I talk to a lot of young kids and a lot of them either aren't putting in the hours or they aren't applying to enough opportunities. Those are probably one of the two biggest problems I see. Yeah. The research. At the end of the day, evolution brings evolution. evolution brings evolution evolution brings evolution evolution brings evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution kind of keywords that I want to zoom in on is comfort zone. So effectively, our brains, we were talking about this earlier, our primitive brains view change as a potential threat. And so our comfort zone is based on this primitive idea that as long as we are safe now, the things that are around us are good, right? The things we have experienced up until this point are not threatening. We can continue to sustain our life. And if you think back to primitive times, it's like, okay, well, I just built a shelter and it's been safe for 100 days. So that's training me to believe that on day 101, it will probably continue to be safe, right? And your primary form of thinking is protection and avoiding risk. And that's what your brain is programmed for because the cost of a predator coming and tearing down your shelter and eating you is death, right? Like it's an immense cost. And so our brains are wired to be, and this is kind of at least the hypothesis, our brains are wired and research shows that our brains are wired to be extremely loss averse. We're terrified of loss more so than we are excited about gain. But the magic question that you said, Dane, is what is the worst that can happen? So something I like to do now, when I think about, for example, if I'm going to spend a little bit of money on something and I'm kind of afraid that if I spend that money that it will have been lost, I'll have buyer's remorse. So I get a little bit afraid to spend the money. And this keeps me from going on a trip that I want to go on. And I look at that opportunity and I think, well, and I think to myself, okay, what is the worst that can happen? And I take some time to really almost meditate. And that's exactly what you did in that job interview. You said, I pictured them saying no to me, right? Meditate and imagine in very clear detail, the worst possible scenario. And what you're doing is you're creating a familiar context of failure where you feel safe in your brain. Finally recognizes that the threat is not nearly as grave as a predator tearing down your shelter. And I think at its most basic form that everybody can benefit from, like you mentioned, is just this meditation and visualization of the fear of the worst case scenario. Because again, like you said, it's probably not as bad as you think. But I also nowadays, I do a little bit more of actual writing this down. So in the four-hour work week, he calls this fear-testing. And I think that's a really good way to kind of get rid of that fear. Right. Where you have multiple columns, right? And I'll do a call and I do this with business now. You know, I'm trying to launch these businesses and these different things. And I always do a column that's the worst case scenario. And then the most important column, the next column, which is how can I get back or reverse the worst case scenario to get back to right where I am now? And I find that, you know, most things are easily reversed, you know? Yeah. So I found that to be very powerful too. Yeah. And because you're using more, basically you're forcing your brain to walk one step further than your intuition is willing to walk, right? Oh man, well said. I think that was just fantastically said. Like I feel like there's so many people who meditate, but one of my mentors one time told me he does business meditation, which he describes as in his head, he'll take a problem and think multiple moves deep on it. So what he'll do is he'll- Yeah. Take a problem and he'll say, okay, let's say this goes bad. Like let's say I call this person to sell this advertising client on something, but let's say they don't want it. He'll do business meditation and actually walk through the whole scenario like a game of chess. And I feel like people don't do that. I've never heard anybody else in my entire life tell me to do that. And I remember the profundity of that statement and going home that night and saying to my, making a list of all the problems I have in my life and doing that mental chess. And being like, how can I solve this problem? Let me think for 40 minutes on each of these. What are all the moves I can make? It's very powerful. And most of the time you're going to find that the problems you have, first of all, are typically easily solved. But secondly, you've got, there are more ways to win a chess game than one set of moves, right? Like you have so many moves in 40 minutes that you can actually determine for almost any problem. And it's like that quote, you know, the same level that caused a problem can't solve it. The same level of thinking that caused a problem can't solve it. I think that's why this works. When you're in the midst of all these problems, you can't necessarily solve them. You know, even for our management job and some of our day job stuff, doing this thing where you sort of, a lot of management calls this going on retreats where they'll go away for a couple of days and spend that time really thinking deeply about these types of topics. I find that to be helpful. To even to go away, like maybe even go to a hotel or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And once again, all the stuff you're saying is like super good heuristics and that point to really solid research. The idea of going away, you're provoking your brain to take in something new, right? Which means that you're basically saying you can't be lazy here. This is a new place. This is a new environment. And I'm going to basically fire the, the engines up. Right. Whereas if you're in your normal routine, then your brain effectively receives the signals of this is normal and I can do what I did yesterday. And once again, be safe, right? Your brain's ultimate motivation is energy, energy management, like doing the least possible thing to get by and survival. Yeah. I never thought of it that way, but you're totally right. When you, when you go to that separate location, you're kind of kicking your brain into, into overdrive just from that change. Yeah. And I always, I modeled that a little bit off of, you know, Bill Gates calls it his reading vacations. He'll go to a hotel and bring a stack of books and in the hotel could be right next to his house or whatever, like in LA or wherever he lives. He, you know, in the article, he talks about that. And I found that so interesting. I was like, why would he change environments just to go read? But it's to think, you know, it's to read and think is my hypothesis. Well, and I, it's kind of like that story. I can't remember who the author was, but they, they found that they were particularly effective at writing when they were on a plane. And so they bought themselves a two-way ticket to, or it may have been a one-way, I don't know. It doesn't really matter, but to Tokyo from, from Los Angeles. And they wrote an entire book on the plane. I've heard of this. I don't know where I heard this, but I had heard that. We'll have to look it up. That was so cool. In the show notes. Yeah. It's such a cool idea. That's so cool. The concept is how, how valuable is a, a book, you know, and, and if the investment is a plane ticket or if it's, you go to a hotel and go on a retreat with your company, you know, what you're buying, isn't the retreat. You're not buying a trip to Tokyo. You're buying yourself that, that's whatever the weird thing in your brain is that makes planes the perfect place to write. Maybe you don't have a super good control or understanding of what it is, but if you find it, use it, you know, that's another tool that you can use to your advantage. And I guess that goes along with, Yeah. creative boxes, like being in a, in a little bit of a restricted, having bounds put on you increases your creativity a little bit. Do you find that at all with programming or with management? Well, I'll say this with the podcast I have, you know, because I'm delivering so many episodes per week three episodes a week is, is not a trivial amount of content. Right. Yeah. But I find that, that the restriction itself has caused me to, you know, I've been in a position where I've taken these things and they've caused me to be more decisive. I don't have a choice, even if I feel a little bit unsure about a piece of content or an idea, I'm more apt to move forward now because I knew the cost of, of not delivering this content is significant, right? I have people who were, who are waiting on this content to be delivered on a, on a almost daily basis. It's not quite daily, but almost, right? I things, signed up for these things, signed up for these things, signed up for these things, Almost, right? I have sponsors who are waiting on to be delivered. So the thing that I'm uncertain about, I have now the more confidence that the idea will stand on its own. It's kind of like keeping your funnel packed with leads as a freelancer, something you always want to have a bunch of people ready to go. And I noticed that when we booked our call for this interview, you sent me a booking for the next day. And I was like, oh, okay, let's go. Let's get it. Yeah. And part of that is because it waxes and wanes and it's really difficult. So I will go through a short period over the course of a weekend where I can produce six or eight episodes. And it's not always interviews. Sometimes it's monologue type episodes, but I'll have a huge burst of energy coming from reading something. And that's another kind of side point I wanted to make that the raw material that you put in your brain is so important. But for me, raw material, interviews are important. It ends up being reading or listening to other people's podcasts or listening to the problems that the developers of Whiteboard are having. All of that feeds this podcast. Every single time I do an episode, it's coming out of something that I've either read or experienced. I'm not Googling for things to talk about. That's not the way it works. But that's what I'm so impressed by. Not just this podcast, but any business that's able to do this, other podcasts too, where you're able to harness that natural cycle of motivation, yet you don't let it impact your release schedule. You still somehow manage to do a certain amount of things per certain amount of weeks, but you still harness that motivational up and down flow. I think the way that you've structured the business is intriguing. I'm learning from people like that. I find it fascinating. Users have a lot of expectations of their applications. They expect them to be fast. They expect them to work everywhere, and they expect to be able to interact with your application in real time. Pusher, today's sponsor, allows you to build these real-time features directly into your application, and they make it basically trivial. Pusher is built on top of WebSockets. You can use pretty much any backend language that you want to use. PHP, Node, Ruby, ASP, Java, Python, Go. Those are the ones that are going to be able to connect to your application. that they have featured on their homepage. And they say that pretty much any language, they have a library for it. So from any of those backend languages, you can trigger an event and effectively listen for those events on all of your clients, whether that is an iPhone app or a front-end web app. And you can respond to those events in real time. So an example of this, you could pretty easily implement a chat system, like for example, one of the big companies that uses Pusher, Intercom. You've probably heard of Intercom. Other companies that use Pusher, the New York Times, GitHub, MailChimp. These companies are using Pusher for their real-time features. And you can get started today with a free account. Go and check it out, spec.fm slash pusher. That's spec.fm slash pusher. Thank you again to Pusher for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. Yeah, I'm interested to know, you know, to talk a little bit more about your podcast, by the way, and start here. I love this. So let me just go on a short rant. I love this basic idea of you have to start somewhere. You might as, like, not you might as well, but this is your place. Like, there's, the most important thing is that you press the go button. This falls in line with the philosophy that you've already presented. This idea that, you know, motion is the most important thing and people are so crippled by, not starting far too often. So I'm really excited to talk about your podcast. I'd love to know a little bit more about, you know, the drive behind it and what, you know, some of the stuff you're going to be talking about on the podcast. Well, like you mentioned, I think my main motivation is this sense of movement. Like, one of these, we talked about personality tests online a little bit. There's another one where they sort of try to evaluate what motivates you. And they do it in an interesting way. What they do is they give you a list of things that you feel the most jealous of somebody, else about. And that's what, that's what their hypothesis is. That's what might motivate you the most. And for me, what I'm motivated the most, therefore from that test was motion or momentum. And I think that's why this brand so naturally fit with me to start here concept. And a lot of my podcast topics, if you listen to the show, I'm not super technical in nature. A lot of the stuff that I talk about is more mindset related because I find that you can Google anything. And everybody knows that. We've known that for years. It's all about why aren't you Googling right now? Like, why aren't you doing it right now? That's the thing that stops people. It's not. And the other thing that stops people is our other mindset issues. Like, well, I don't know what, there's too much to Google. Okay, well, I'll give you a formula of a way to think about this, right? Or a way to approach this so that you can apply it to this, but also to other areas of your life if you want. And originally when we created Start Here, it was with a buddy of mine who's since left the network. But we were, we're trying to build something that we could, you know, make it easy for somebody to start anything, you know, and, you know, just even Start Here gardening and stuff like that. Like we envision this future where there's this media network perfect for people that just like want to start something new. You know, this concept of being in a rut is really painful. You know, I know a lot of people that get stuck in ruts and when you're in a rut, it's so painful. And I've been there so much, even day-to-day programming ruts. And, you know, just the ability to have something new, something you can start to bring yourself out of that rut or a network specifically dedicated to that and the fundamentals and the high-level thinking. I find that to be, I found it to be missing at the time. I don't necessarily know if it's missing now. I think a lot of podcasts like yours, a lot of the episodes where you talk about the science of kind of some of the stuff we were talking about today, you know, we talk about the different theories and stuff. I find that to be great because it's similar impact. I think similar effect. Yeah, it's, you know, I don't think there will ever be a critical mass of content on reducing this barrier to entry. It's a huge problem. And it actually, you know, the amazing thing is that the same fears persist even throughout your career. And for a lot of people, this idea of starting really every day you're starting. And I know that sounds, that sounds kind of catchphrase-y, but every day, as long as you were hoping to grow, and this is exactly the mindset you were talking about, the growth mindset, what was the opposite of the growth mindset? The fixed mindset. There you go. The fixed mindset. So you could be a high performer and you adopt a fixed mindset and suddenly you're facing the same problems, right? And we see that happen to colleagues of ours. It even happens to us. And it's like, a constant war against your own brain to not go into fixed mindset. You know, I find, you know, let's say we're in a meeting and we're discussing something about security. You know, it's my natural mindset to be very much like guarded about our security and not to be open to new technologies, right? Because that's the, but at the same time, we have to understand that's fixed mindset. And that's not, that's not allowing us to open to other technologies that might enhance ourselves. So, you know, I think that's a really important thing that we need to be able to do. at the same level it is now. Technology around us is changing. That would be fine if things didn't change, but things do change. So therefore that's actually a suboptimal way to handle that. You know, and I find that that's just a daily battle with pretty much every aspect of life, but. Yeah, that's definitely true. You know, this concept that change is bad. We don't actively think that way, right? There's no one who is, well, very few. I'm sure there are. Some people, but there are very few people, especially people who are working in technology who look at change, particularly, you know, progression, new tools, new innovation, that kind of stuff. There's very few people who are in tech and say out loud on purpose, change is bad, right? Because change has made our careers possible in the first place. These tools that haven't been around for, you know, I mean, it's, you think about the iPhone being around for 10 years, and, you know, when I was born, 90% of the people that are working in the company that I work at, their job titles didn't even exist, you know? And the other 10% are mostly management titles. And even in their form, they didn't exist. So we're talking about brand new stuff that's come about because of change. And yet we're still resistant to change every single day. And just to get back to that point of like, what I think everybody being resistant to change is so negative. One interesting thing is that, you know, one interesting aspect when you, you know, so for me, what I did was I decided I wanted to move to a different city every year, just as an experiment in completely altering my beliefs of what I could do. And I had a little bit of a family, like a cat and a girlfriend too. So it was difficult. It wasn't just something I could do easily, but I wanted to try it. Just like those people that want to rent a van and, you know, kind of cruise up and down the coasts of Cali for a year to just experience that. Similar kind of thing. And I was like, okay, well, can I do this? And what ended up happening was I found that the more that I changed, the more I realized that the only way to control your life is through constant change. So the only way to be okay with never changing is to be constantly changing and realizing that things are constantly changing. And once you sort of ingrain that into your mindset, it's kind of heady to talk about and not super practical, but when you kind of get that mindset and you ingrain that into your mindset, you're able to change. And that's what I found. When you ingrain it, you basically become a momentum machine. And that's somewhat powerful, especially if you're working in the startup world. I find that to be the place that it's the most sort of fuel on the fire for that type of person. And here's the, so the opposing viewpoint in terms of like the traveling developer, which Dane, that's you in my mind now, you're the traveling developer. The opposing viewpoint is where I'm at. Where I stand, I've been in the same place for seven years. But if you are, if you're like me and you have, you know, a lot of commitments or you have a mortgage like I do, there are things that you've decided, okay, well, these are worth putting in roots for, right? That does not mean that you are discluded from this conversation by any stretch. Let's just go ahead and cover that base before somebody turns the podcast off thinking that, you know, the only way to get ahead is to move to a new city every year. That's not the spirit of what we're saying. And hopefully, Dane, you agree with this. And in fact, no jobs I took were in the city I moved. So let's just dispel that myth, right? I wasn't moving for the job. It was just as a sort of personal besting, you know, an exploration. Yeah, personal exploration. And there's so many ways that you can change. You know, if you look at kind of the, the genesis of a lot of these ideas are self-exploration or self-awareness. A lot of this stuff has been talked about for thousands of years, right? This is not new in terms of, it's not new for people to have fear that is unfounded. It's also not new for change to be important, right? And so a lot of this stuff, you can find it in, in ancient like meditation techniques, for example. They'll talk about observing change and observing your mind and understanding your fear. And instead of being the thing that you are feeling, you're observing the thing that you're feeling distantly. And that's a super powerful concept to recognize that, hey, wait a second. I am not a product of my situation. I can look at my situation. And separate my, my thinking away from it. And again, we're getting, this is, this is definitely heady, more heady than the average episode. But I do think it's important. I think it's important for people to take on that kind of responsibility to say, you know what? Like this is, this is not anyone else's responsibility. And, and it is mine, my responsibility to do this. And to have the level of, of commitment to change that Dane has, even if it doesn't mean that you're going, to pick up and move every, every year, that level of commitment is what's important. And just tactically, you can change one aspect of your life. You know, why is military bootcamp so effective? Because they thrust you into this completely new environment. So if you really feel like you're in a rut right now, it could be as simple as sort of going on a walk every day to some place. You've never been consistently for the next seven days, just as a, as a little tactic. Another thing is a lot of the students that I work with, when, when they come to me and they say, I'm not programming per night as much as I want. A lot of the times it's the people around them. So a lot of the times when people are being not, are not changing or something like that, it, it most of the time it's you. So take full ownership and full responsibilities, probably you, but sometimes it's not, sometimes it's a little bit of other people rubbing off around you. And I'm definitely not suggesting that you stop hanging out with people, but take a hard look at your social circle. That's one of the best things. I was ever told, you know, the whole, you're the average of the five people you associate with most. I know everybody knows that sort of cliche, but guess what? It's so true. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that's negativity. So if you're, if you're a little bit too negative, get rid of that one negative friend. You know, if you're not a little, here's the thing. If you're not motivated enough, get around motivated people. It'll, it'll just exponentially boost you. That wraps up. The second part of my interview with Dane Miller. And, uh, I'm so excited that I haven't had a chance to talk with Dane. Of course, Dane's ideas and my ideas mixed together. You can see we're different people with a very similar, uh, outlooks and value sets. And I challenge you to forge your own way of being, uh, action minded, being growth minded. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I also challenge you to share it with another person that you think you can do it. You can have a critical conversation about this episode with, I challenge you to do this in the previous episode, and perhaps you take it to the same person and say, Hey, you know, this, this, uh, second part of this same interview, uh, and like to talk with you about, you know, the value of perhaps moving around, being a nomad, uh, definitely would love to hear about these conversations that you're having. You can reach out to me at developer T at gmail.com. You can always join the spec slack community, spec.fm slash slack. And you can always find me on Twitter. I'll see you next time. Twitter at, at developer T. Thank you again to today's incredible sponsor pusher. If you are trying to get some real time features in your application, and you're trying to home roll, uh, some of these things, then you probably know it's pretty tough to do on your own. Pusher makes that architecture incredibly simple. Just a few lines of code can get you up and rolling and you can get started for free by going to spec.fm slash pusher. Thank you again to pusher for sponsoring today's episode of developer T and, until next time, enjoy your tea. .