I've been a guest on Brodie Robertson's Podcast

I recently wrote a short essay called Linux Asceticism, and it got a lot of attention on platforms like Hacker News and Reddit. I also received an email from Brodie Robertson, telling me that he would soon release a video on his main channel about my essay. He also invited me to be a guest on his Tech Over Tea podcast series.

It really surprised me to see a Linux content creator that I was already following not only featuring my essay but also inviting me to his podcast to discuss it. Despite not trusting my English speaking abilities as much as my writing, I told him I’d love to be a guest. I shared my concerns about not being very fluent in English and wanting to prepare beforehand. We briefly talked about the podcast format, and the topics we could cover, and set a date for the recording.

You can watch/listen to the Podcast here:

We talked about how I came up with the Linux Asceticism essay, my Linux journey and workflow, “Software Minimalism,” and the idea of stupid light software. We also covered the difference between essential and accidental complexity, creating personal blogs, my experience with NixOS, and some of the other essays I’ve written.

Reflections

At first, the idea of joining a podcast channel in a language that I was not as confident as my native language felt a bit stressful. I also had never been a guest on any YouTube channel before, let alone a channel that has over 10k+ subscribers. So, that also did not help much. But, I figured out that preparing could help me ease my stress. So, I prepared a lot before the day that the recording of the podcast took place. I started thinking, writing through possible topics we might discuss. I also asked one of my friends Aras to interview me like he is Brodie, which also helped me relieve my stress a bit more.

While preparing for the podcast, I ended up with a file of around 9 pages if you consider each page to have around 500 words.

> cat brodie-prep.md | wc -w
4614

In the end, I did not talk about most of the things I prepared for, but it still helped me a lot to feel ready.

I also realized that giving a disclaimer about my English skills upfront would help ease the pressure by lowering the audience’s expectations. So, I went ahead and did that too.

In the end, the actual podcast experience was much smoother and less stressful than I had expected. Despite frequent misspellings and struggles expressing myself, I believe the podcast turned out to be better than my initial expectations. I think this is also partly thanks to Brodie being an experienced host who knows how to make the guests comfortable by keeping the setting relaxed as well.

But again, all these experiences reminded me of one of the famous Stoic quotes;

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
- Seneca

I think it was a great experience overall. And I also plan to turn some of the notes I’ve taken in the preparation document into separate essays as well.