Crisis Meets Opportunity
Listen to this podcast if you like: Current events, tech stories, life advice, insights, opinions
I met Kai Wang, a fiery Asian Australian superstar in the tech industry. She graduated with a MBA in NYU Stern, worked in Bain Consulting, and has a job in Google now. We argue a lot but we always have interesting conversations. I don’t have many friends who like to talk honestly about money, business, job history, and traveling, as much as her. She wanted to start a podcast as a distraction project for her busy life transitioning to New York.
I can do podcasts in my sleep now so this was easy, but also rewarding. I’ve always wanted to do a duo podcast with someone who would provide good insight and she is probably one of the most efficient partner I’ve ever worked with in creating a podcast.
We do a podcast based on Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway where a tech reporter and an entrepreneur bicker and talk about technology and startups. We generally are super topical and talk about current events, dissect businesses and give life advice (we both love to give career advice and I find it really rewarding)
For those of you who don’t know, the title is a play on the word WeiJi, a Chinese word where generally white influencers take this word and say that “the Chinese have a word WeiJi that when you look at the characters, one means crisis but the other means opportunity” and so we cheekily named it that.
This podcast is really fun to do. Kai and I have intense travel schedules but we still find time to record and discuss our thoughts weekly. I think the discussions are really enlightening and thoughtful and I always feel a little bit wiser coming out of them. By not just talking about the food industry, it allows me to connect the dots and find new ways of thinking, and explore new perspectives that I can use for future endeavors.
Generally, with My Food Job Rocks, I let the guest do the talking but Crisis Meets Opportunity gives me a nice little chance to express my opinions. If you like my opinions, I welcome you to listen to them. I plan on continuing this podcast while I travel.
Second Shot City
Listen to this podcast if you like: Fiction, Improv, Table Top Games
We suggest you do not listen to this podcast if you do not understand table top games like Dungeons and Dragons.
I announced this last year and a lot of people have listened to it. However, they could not understand it! They didn’t like anything about it, and people dropped it after the first episode. Though I don’t market this podcast, I love creating it. It’s just so different from My Food Job Rocks.
For those that don’t know, I manage a board game with an original story that I interact with a few friends and make a podcast out of it. For those that don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, I’m playing Dungeons and Dragons (DND) and recording our sessions. Except it’s not DND, it’s another game called City of Mist that’s new and no one understands, I don’t play by their rules, so the community of that game doesn’t like it.
However, it’s fun and I love creating it.
For one, it’s a story I’m creating with friends. I make the plot, my friends make the characters, they make decisions that affect the plot, and I have to revise the story because they shape the narrative. For me, that is the most amazing thing in the world. I have to act out unique characters with motivations that propel the story forward, I have to delegate “screen time” for each player without the other players getting bored, and I have to improvise when players don’t follow the path I want them to follow, I have to naturally convince them to follow my story, but if they don’t, I have to write a new path. For me, it’s allowed me to think quickly, and be more entertaining.
Not only that, but I invested a lot in hardware and software. I’ve made a lot of mistakes creating live sessions, but it’s been enlightening getting people together and recording. Nothing really beats a face-to-face recording.
Also, the software is a lot more complicated. I’ve been using Audacity for My Food Job Rocks, but to get the sound effects, and the voice modulations, to run smoothly, I invested in Adobe Audition. It’s a game-changer but I would have never switched and learned more professional software if not for this nerdy hobby.
Though I don’t market it, it’s a lot of work, and overall, a sunk cost, it brings me great joy to not only gather with my friends to create a story that might last a long time, but it also allows me to really upgrade and explore podcasting through a different lens. I’ve done all the recording to finish the story that will last me half a year and I’ll be launching episodes during my travels.
I’ve always found that unrelated projects that are done with effort eventually transfer to things that matter. I’m not sure what that is, but we’ll see.