#161 How to go full-on Renaissance Man mode in 2025 with Vaughn Gene
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just make as many mistakes as possible and don't be afraid because i think that's one huge limiting factor in growth in just about anything you've got to be willing to make a lot of mistakes and don't care about how you look externally your ego or how people are going to judge you because it doesn't matter welcome back to the free code camp podcast your source for raw

unedited interviews with developers. This week we're talking with Vaughn Jean. He's a software engineer who works with lots of freelance clients. Vaughn lived in Japan for 10 years, speaks Japanese, Spanish, plays guitar, plays piano, and is skilled at MMA. He is obsessed with learning new skills and he's going to share his learning methodologies with you.

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For this week's musical intro, with yours truly, on the drums, guitar, bass, and keys, we're going back to 1984. Balloon fight! Balloon fight!

Vaughn, welcome to the show. Thank you, thank you. Hello, hello.

Yeah, it's great to have you here, man. You are somebody who has just, like, you are the poster child for autodidacism, for self-teaching. You've taught yourself Japanese. You're teaching yourself Spanish. I mean, like, the teaching never really ends. You're probably still continuing to explain your Japanese. You're learning piano. You're learning guitar. And, of course, you've learned software.

engineering, using resources like Free Code Camp. So you have just taught yourself a tremendous amount of things, and it's incredibly impressive. What is the biggest misconception people have about teaching themselves a new skill? I would say that you need a whole lot of resources to get some sort of meaningful results. That's probably one of the biggest issues I see people run into.

They think you need a lot of DVD courses or maybe a lot of books, things like that. But you really only need just a few things and to just use it. That's really it.

Yeah. And when you talk about like books, like I know the first thing when I want to learn something new, like my instinct is, oh, let's go to Barnes and Noble or whatever bookstore and let's get a book on it that somebody's, you know, carefully written that's been professionally edited. That's going to like take me from zero to hero with this different skill. Right. And yeah. And it feels really good buying a book because it feels like you're also buying the time and energy to read through that book and to practice all that stuff.

But you're saying you don't need a lot of resources. You really don't. You really don't. And unfortunately, along with that, what you just mentioned about the whole getting a new book or buying something specific, some people think there is a dedicated plan from start to finish. And that's not true either. There's a lot of different directions you can learn things, a lot of different directions you can take things, but you just have to find something to get you going. Yeah. Yeah.

And what is something that you have found to get you going in the past? Like maybe you can walk us through one of the skills that you've acquired and what your learning journey was like.

So I'll use guitar, for example. I initially was a bit confused, but thankfully back then we didn't have so many options. There wasn't a million videos on YouTube and all that. But what I did is I chose what genre I was into or what my focus was. So I think that's really important. Find out what your niche is or what you want to actually do with that thing. And then find some fundamental resource on getting that.

And that is how I started. So I got a DVD by Doug Marks called Metal Method. I think that was like a three-part DVD thing. And he just basically went over the basics of rock and metal and technique and the basic theory that you need. It didn't have anything super advanced, but all I did was use that DVD as much as I could. And I learned a whole lot from it. And that was like a really good way to get the ball rolling on my music.

And one of the things you said about just getting like a DVD or something in the past, like getting some kind of like single resource that is designed to help you get running, like Free Code Camp has been built basically to be a kind of the shortest path to getting things done. It's not pretending to be the end-all, be-all, like one-stop shop. It is just one of many resources that you can use, but we want it to be a solid resource.

resource and then of course we've got like literally thousands of extracurricular tutorials and videos and stuff like that that people can like branch out and they can explore the intention is that we have like this path and then you can stray from that path and you can always come back to that path if you want to but it sounds like this DVD from like Doug Martin like he wasn't saying like this is all you should just focus all your time and energy on doing this course it's probably like go listen to a lot of music go try to learn a lot of songs things like that right

Yeah, it pretty much is the free code camp of rock guitar for the most part. You will get to a high level of doing that, but it's not the end result, that kind of thing. Yeah, and would you say, and I don't want to tee this up, it's too much of a leading question, would you say anybody who purports to be the definitive resource for XYZ or this is all you need, that they're

Probably going to overcharge you for something you don't necessarily need. Yeah, that's really what it is. And honestly, it's a fear tactic. If I can convince someone that I have the secret or like, hey, if you buy my course on learning guitar, you'll know everything you need to know and you don't have to worry about buying anything else. It really is sort of a fear tactic and sort of like if you do anything else that's incorrect and my way is correct.

And which it's really just not true. That's something that people just need to know. It's not true at all in a lot of activities. Yeah. So one of the things that you've talked a lot about is like the smarter the person is who's trying to learn some skills, the more procrastination is going to creep in. The more perfectionism is going to creep in to prevent them from actually taking action and actually getting in the reps that they need to get to actually get good at something. Yeah, exactly. And honestly, I think it's,

It's not a bad thing. Like, it's important that we want to take a good route to find something because I think what the more intelligent people are worried about is like, what if I do it the wrong way? Or what if I do it the slow way or the unoptimal way? But in doing that, it's so easy to forget that all that time we spend or all that time that someone would spend doing that, you're just not doing anything. And that's the only bad choice to make is really just doing nothing.

Yeah, I can relate because I definitely – when I first started – so I studied Japanese in university. I took like a Japanese 101 course, and I was so obsessed with making sure that I got the conjugation right at the end of all the verbs and stuff like that because Japanese has all those different –

conjugation is like the vowel, depending on which of the hiragana or the end of the verb, you have to conjugate it differently, and things like that, that it was just completely stymie, and I didn't feel like I was ready to go and actually talk with native speakers or really do much of talking at all. I felt like I needed to memorize this grammar book before I could get going, and that was a huge stumbling block for me because it probably set my Japanese language development back by many, many months.

Because I was so stubborn about like, I don't want to learn it the wrong way. What if I reinforce the bad muscle memory? And like, you know, somebody who's totally naively stumbling into it, who just like dropped into Japan and didn't know anything about language learning, they'd actually be better off than I was because my kind of like meta knowledge and like all the time and energy I was putting into like how to learn Japanese properly was probably just causing more anxiety and ambiguity than anything. Yeah.

And that really is, it's a huge problem, especially in language learning. It's just one of those big things. It's like, you know, we try to get things a little too perfect. And I think one thing we overlooked is just how many mistakes we make in our own native language, using the wrong words and um, ah, ooh, and all these other things. And then we try to sound a little too perfect in a target language, which when you think about it, it's just unrealistic. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, like, people are going to give you a degree of affordance. Certainly if you're speaking Japanese and you look like I do or you look like you do, like, people aren't going to expect you to just drop, like, perfectly formed and conjugated verbs and sentences that are all, like, neat and tidy and don't run on. Like, that was one of the other problems I faced a lot with Japanese is, like, just kind of continuing to, like, staple clauses onto the end of a sentence. So it's like this. Like, what I'm saying is, like, one giant sentence is just instead of just stopping it and ending a sentence.

Yeah, yeah. And that's a big thing too is like just like a normal person who speaks English, when you hear someone who's – you know English is not their first language. You're not picking apart, oh, did they use the right pronunciation? Did they use the right preposition and all this other stuff? What you're really doing is just trying to hear what they're saying. And it's the other way around. Even at work, working in Japan, I said a lot of crazy things.

But it was just more so like, okay, I can hear what he's saying. I can understand what he's saying. And then eventually you will correct those mistakes as you get around more native speakers or you get more content. And those issues do take care of themselves. But like you mentioned earlier, if we're trying to wait until we're perfect to just get started, it's just not going to be good for us. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, like that's definitely the biggest thing I've taken away from your many, uh, like video essays, I guess is how I would describe them on, uh, on YouTube where like, if you haven't watched a Von Jean video, I'm going to link to like one in the show notes that you should check out. But basically it's you kind of like playing, like alternating between playing guitar and playing piano, doing these beautiful, like kind of, uh,

almost like gospel chord arrangements or jazzy kind of like sequences and stuff, chord progressions. And then you're just very calmly talking over it. And sometimes you'll have like text on the screen, like underscoring the point of what you're trying to make and stuff. It's just so relaxing to watch it. And you have so many great insights. So what,

Like we can definitely delve more into your philosophy, but I want to take a moment to like learn more about you as a person. Obviously, like you did spend 10 years in Japan. You worked in Japan for 10 years. So you have like professional Japanese fluency and capabilities, even if like you don't necessarily check all the different bodies. Did you ever take like the Japanese proficiency test or anything like that?

Not once. And yet you were able to work. It's just kind of like, did you ever pass all these leak code problems to work as a software engineer? No, yeah, yeah. That's just one of those things. It's like the practicality is so much more important than any certificate or any milestone you can achieve that's like a handout to you. If you just do what's practical, it really will override anything that you're missing on the other side.

Yeah. Well, I want to learn a little bit more about you and your developer origin story. You grew up here in Texas, where I'm based as well. You're just outside of Austin in the metro area, like three-hour drive from where I am, basically. So I imagine there weren't a lot of Japanese people all around you when you were a kid. Did you get any exposure to Japan or anything like that?

No, it was just the basic anime that came on Cartoon Network after a certain time. That was pretty much it. So take me back to maybe your high school years. You're trying to decide what you want to do, and you made this very consequential decision to join the U.S. Navy. Maybe you can rewind to that part of your life. My understanding is you did get interested in music at the time. Mm-hmm.

So in high school, I liked music and that was like kind of all I really cared about that in video games. Those were kind of my two main things. And in school I had did so bad. My grades were not good. I got like basically barely passing on everything. C's a B here and there, maybe an a for showing up to some random elective class. But to me, college was out of the question. Cause I said, you know, I,

I really did not like high school, so I'm not trying to do this for another four years just to get a degree. And so I just thought, like, you know, what's something I can do to go make some money real quick? And it was either just find a job and go with that and maybe climb a ladder, that kind of way, or just go to the military. And so for me, it got me out of town, and it was something that was just new. So I said, yeah, let me just join the military. Let me see. My parents encouraged me to do it as well.

And that's pretty much how that started. So school was never even learning. If it was not music or video games, I really wasn't trying to learn it. And that once I got into the military or once I got going towards the military, I started opening my mind a little bit more to learning new things or learning.

You know, just seeing how I can improve the way I learn. And that's kind of where the seed was planted. Once I started realizing that I was going to be gone and out of school and I don't have to follow someone's curriculum, that kind of thing.

Yeah. So it sounds to me like, uh, like many people who struggle in school and then find a great kind of like achievement later in life. Uh, I, I certainly like I dropped out of high school. Uh, I've talked about this a whole lot on the podcast. I'll spare everybody. Yeah. Basically like I, uh, I, I lived in my car for like a year and just worked at like Taco Bell and like worked at like grocery stores and stuff. And eventually, uh, uh,

the state of Oklahoma where I grew up, Oklahoma City, there was a school that was pretty inexpensive. It was like literally $1,000 a semester. Oh, wow. This was like 2000, 1999, 2000, 2001. But I was able to attend school, and that's really when I started working for the school newspaper, and that's when, like, wow, the world kind of opened up to me. Oh, school doesn't have to just be some person at the front of the room talking to you and stuff. School can be...

running around, like learning in real time and like hanging out with the, you know, the Japan student association. I was like big on that. And I was, I was really active in like the Taiwan student association and the Pakistan student association and like learning all about all this stuff. So it's like, I had it mapped out. I want to go overseas. I want to get out of Oklahoma city. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so like I can kind of relate to an extent to what you're saying about like the, the strictures of, of,

Exactly.

economics necessitates that we get all the roof around all the kids off the street and put them into a building all day so the parents can go and work and then we're going to have a class of 40 kids and they're just going to step through this thing whether they're ready or not you know the the brightest kid in the class is going to be held back by the least bright and vice versa like the least bright is going to get dragged along by the median right everybody's going to have to like cater to that so it sounds like that system didn't work well for you

And you were mostly just checked out, like, you know, focused on music, focused on anime, things like that, that like I certainly loved as a kid. So, so yeah, it sounds like we have a lot in common in that regard. But something changed when you were out of school and suddenly learning became fun.

Yeah. And really, it was kind of what you just mentioned that there was no more streamlined. There was no like someone telling me exactly what to learn. Or if I was doing math, it wasn't like, hey, show your work, but show your work in this exact way. It was more so, hey, here's.

Some topics, here's some ways you can learn it. Here's different things, some fundamental aspects, and you can see what you get. You know, try this, try that, try this. And that's opened up the more experimental side of me. And that's when I really realized that I like to learn things and I could change.

pick out what I wanted to learn, pick out some fundamentals, make my own sort of course, my own sort of learning path. And that really just healed my relationship with learning because school, like you had mentioned, this streamlined process, I was just completely rebellious. I did not like it. I barely did my homework. I would only just pass the test and just sleep in class, that kind of thing. I just did not like that whole process. Yeah.

Yeah, I remember going to class and I'd get my William Gibson book or something and I'd put it inside the textbook. And I'm sure it was very obvious to the teacher, but she probably just overworked it, underappreciated it, underpaid. Teachers have it rough here.

In the United States, for the most part, it's not like Korea where their teachers are exalted or like Scandinavia where the teachers get ridiculously good. They're paid as well as doctors. I'm not sure if that's actually true, but they're paid very well compared to their U.S. counterparts. The plight of the U.S. teacher. I just want to be sure that people don't hear this. I'm not denigrating education or anything like that, formal education or teachers. I'm just saying that it's under-resourced.

And that is the problem. But the amazing thing about learning resources is they're abundant. Everybody has access to public libraries where they can go out and they can check out a book and learn. Check out a Japanese grammar book or check out a copy of some DVD series on how to play guitar. Maybe you can find John Petrucci or somebody. The public library actually has a lot of really good stuff.

Like if you can buy it on eBay, you can probably find it at the library. Did you make a lot of use of libraries? Kind of, but more so things started coming out online a bit once I got into learning more. So that was my library in a sense, just going on the internet, buying PDFs or finding PDFs and downloading those and seeing what I could do. That was like my overall library. Yeah. Yeah.

So let's talk about your experience overseas because a lot of people haven't served in the U.S. Navy, including myself. So you enlist and they fly. You go through basic training, I presume, and then eventually you end up in Japan. Can you talk about that period of your life?

Yeah, so I went to boot camp at 18. We did that thing. It's like two months and or was it three months? I can't remember. And then you go to what's called an A school after that, which is the school for your job. And so we mine was two months long because you did most of your learning on the job. So during that time, they were telling us, you know, pick some places you want to go. Of course, it was needs of the Navy. Like they're going to send you where they want to send you.

But you can have what's called a wish list. And so initially, I actually wanted to go to San Diego and stay in America. Yeah. Because I wanted to play music. And from what I was hearing, like, if you go overseas, you're not going to have the accommodations to play music, you know, traveling around and all that kind of stuff. And so I'm thinking, like, that's going to make playing music way harder. Yeah.

And I put San Diego. I think I put a couple other places in the States. But they basically came and told me like, hey, you're single and 18. So you're definitely going to go overseas. And so at that point, I just said, well, I guess let me just pick an overseas place. And so I picked Italy and I think it was like Spain, Rota, Spain, Rome, Italy, Spain.

And then Japan, Japan was there. And so they came back the next day. They said, all right, well, congrats. You're going to Japan in a couple of weeks. And so I said, oh, okay, well, I guess that's the move then. And it seemed like in a blink of an eye, I went from high school just straight to Japan and I landed in Japan, got to the airport, all that stuff, checked into my command. And it was just like, oh, I guess I'm really here now. Like,

I guess I'm here. And the funny thing is, even speaking Japanese, I always think about how I never wanted to go. I liked Japan. I liked video games. I appreciated anime. But it was never something that I just wanted to go do. And it was funny how I just kind of ended up there. But while I was there, between deployments and little operations we would do,

I just really started liking the country. I would go out and I knew like very basic sentences, very basic words. And I would just talk with the locals here and there, just kind of practice. But I really noticed it was just such a nice environment for me. I could go talk to people and the convenience was nice getting on the train. I'm sure you have some of those similarities in China as well, where like you can get around and do what you want. Accommodations, food, food is a big thing for me too.

And little by little, it just started to grow on me. And then I had decided, okay, I guess I'm going to try to get fluent in this language and see what I'm going to do with that. And that was really the spark that kind of sent my life into where it is now. Yeah. And I want to talk a little bit, like we can definitely go back into autobiographical mode, but I want to talk about like those first few months of like, okay, I want to get good at Japanese. Like, how did you approach it?

So I looked at what people were doing on the Internet versus what I saw while I was there. And I noticed the people I saw who could speak Japanese, they weren't afraid to go talk to people and make mistakes and sound kind of silly, use the wrong vocab words and mess up their conjugation and all that. And eventually I noticed that their skills got better. Some of the people I actually worked with in the Navy could speak a lot of Japanese fluently.

while we were in the military, but it still wasn't a thing for me at that time. And then on the other side, I noticed on the internet, the echo chamber of this perfection and everything has to sound great in your pitch and all these other things, which some of those things are important, but

It will hold you back so much because you just won't get any repetitions in. And that's the thing I saw, the vast contrast in the repetitions. So the people who were just going out and doing it were doing thousands of repetitions. Even if they were wrong, they could correct them. Meanwhile, someone on the Internet may be stuck in the wrong echo chamber of information that just says, hey, you got to just know this, know that, don't practice, make sure it's perfected.

Perfect input a lot, but don't output that kind of thing. And when I saw in real life the results that these people were getting who just went out and did the thing, that's where my method came from, where I just said, OK, if it's not practical, I'm the I don't really care about it. Yeah. So that was pretty much it. Practicality was just my main thing.

Okay, and now that we've just laid that out, I want to compare and contrast that with learning software development because that's another big ambiguous thing that there are lots of people on the internet trying to tell you how to learn to code or why you shouldn't learn to code or coding's dead or whatever. There is that big internet echo chamber on Reddit. Again, I don't want to slight any of these places, but our programming, Hacker News, all these places where people are almost trying to cosplay as...

you know, Nobel prize winning, like computer sciences. Exactly. Like it feels like that a lot of times. Yeah. And they're not people. They're like these, you know, entities that are above mere, you know, devs that are just trying to like get, you know, get a job and like get paid and provide for their families and stuff. Right. Uh, so maybe you can talk about like how you approach software development and when, when did you start actually learning programming? So, uh,

I started learning while I was working as a personal trainer in Japan. That's a long story how I ended up doing that on accident. But while I was a trainer, I liked it. But then I said, you know, I want more money and more time. That was like the two things I just wanted more, which mine was fine at the point. But I said, you know, if there's something else I can do to improve that, why not? And that's how I stumbled upon software engineering.

And I pretty much took the same approach of practicality versus what I'm reading. So practicality, I saw on the websites, people were still looking for software engineers. You know, you're going to see on Indeed and LinkedIn, we need a front-end developer here. We need a back-end developer here. We need this. We need that. There was no posting saying, hey, there's no more jobs left because AI took it all. That was just something you read in forums. And so I'm thinking, well...

You know, like I may as well just start trying to do this thing. And that's how I got into the initial research of like, what is front end? What is back end? Cause I didn't know anything. And then I learned, okay, back ends a bit more literally back end front end. You can kind of see it more. So I said, well, I want to see what I'm doing. Let me just see what front end is like. And I found a YouTube video. I think it was by Anya Kubo. Yes. That's her name. It was like very prolific teacher. Yeah.

Yeah. And so it was like a 12, 14 hour video called, you know, I think bootcamp. I think it was like a YouTube video bootcamp type thing. So between that and then your website, I would just do yours when I was out away from home and I would follow that video when I was at home and I would just mark down what time I was at and then come back the next day. Okay. I was at seven minutes in where she was showing like how to set up VS code and

And I would just continue on. And then I would get to like maybe flex boxes or centering a div or justifying content. And I would stop there, come back the next day. And basically that was the most practical thing for me to do is just stick with that one video. Cause I figured, okay, by the end of this, I'm going to at least know something like I'm going to have a very beginner basic software development mindset to go off of. And then I can find the other stuff.

So it sounds like you already kind of approached it with like, okay, this is good enough of a resource. I could spend a whole lot of time searching around trying to find the perfect resource, or I can just trust that this is good enough to get me going. And it's an extremely pragmatic approach to learning resources. And I did find other books. I looked around a bit because I didn't just find one video and start right away.

I don't want to give off that. I did have, you know, the curiosity that most people have. Okay, what is the fastest source? What is the best source? All that. But I...

I have a limiter in my head of like, okay, I'm only allowed to do that for a certain amount of time. And after that, I need to just get going because I know how that gets. I know people can get stuck trying to become a software engineer for several years. And so I found like, I can't remember the book's names. It was some Python books, some other things, some JavaScript books. And then I said, okay, let me just start with this free YouTube video and this free website.

Because I'm not going to buy anything if I'm not going to really get into this. And that is pretty much where my...

approach came from again just the practicality side but i did look around a bit and then i just ultimately decided let's just get going on this and we'll cross that bridge when we get there yeah yeah and i 100 agree it's totally natural to like if you drop a cat into a new room the cat is going to explore a little bit before they figure out where they want to sit where they want to perch right uh that's just like a natural kind of like innate property of all animals you

you know, and, and human, like any entity is going to want to have some idea of the lay of the land, but so they can make kind of like best fit line, so to speak as to where they're supposed to go. Um, and, and,

Yeah, the trap is people get into that loop of arguing with people, and there's no one definitive perfect answer, and there's all these trade-offs, and so people just spend all this time on the forums, or worse, they don't actually post on the forums. They just read the forums, and they're not actually participating in any sort of discourse. They're just kind of sitting there, like, stun-locked, essentially, by the various arguments going back and forth, and they throw up their hands, and they kind of hit this...

this helplessness reflex that a lot of people seem to have, right? Including myself. I am guilty of this too. I started learning the program and stopped several times before I actually like putting the time to go through a bunch of like project oiler and like do a bunch of Python and, uh, and to actually build a bunch of websites, uh, you know, that, that actually, uh,

that I was proud to show people or like not proud to show people, but willing to show people. Right. It takes a lot of audacity to take the project you built and put it on the internet and like have, you know, our programming tear it apart. Right. Yeah. And honestly, that's,

That's good. It's not a bad thing that people want to look around and be curious. I always tell people now, it's not a horrible thing, at least. It's not bad that you want to look around. It's really a good thing. Because if you just go, okay, let me just try this and go. I think that's a bit dangerous because then you really don't know what you don't know. But if you have a general look, like you said, the cat kind of looks around and then finds a place, then

The finding a place part is really important, and we often just run around the room, basically. And I've done it, too. You know, I'm not going to pretend like I haven't had those perfectionist moments and all that. And a lot of what I put out is so other people can avoid that. At least on my channel, I...

I know what it's like to just sit there like piano. I believe I've mentioned it in some of my videos. I had a piano for years before I even started because I fell into that trap myself, even though with guitar, I didn't, I kind of had forgot what worked for me. And so it was like, well, I did this before. Let me just stop trying to find this perfect place.

course or perfect thing and just get started. And coding really is the same way. There's a lot of people with good information and there's a lot of good resources, but you just pick one and you're going to learn most of the same things anyways that someone else would teach you. So it's really important to just

start coding just get on the vs code and just get moving yeah yeah and i think a lot of people also get it in their head that like what if what if i learned something wrong and i have some bad habit like this is certainly plagued me as like like learning japanese learning chinese and stuff like that like what if i say something really foolish in this conversation or what if i develop some bad habit that i then have to like somehow unlearn like like a kind of a bad muscle memory like like

I talk to guitar players all the time who have been playing for years and they're like, I just figured out I've kind of been holding my pick wrong, you know, like that. But at least they played for years and now they can kind of like gradually figure out how to correct it. And they didn't just like spend years like with the guitar on the shelf, like thinking like, wow, I don't know even the first thing. Like I don't even know how to hold my pick. They just grabbed the pick and started playing. Right. Yeah. And so, so there's definitely a lot of merit in,

Erring on the side of action. And it sounds like that's something you're a big advocate for. Exactly. And unlearning those bad habits is not as daunting as people like to think. You know, like you mentioned, some people, they don't even realize they're doing anything wrong, but then they correct it on. And then some people will also think that.

If you do learn it wrong, that your brain is just never going to be able to fix it. You're doomed and that's over, you know, but that's not the case. You can fix those things. You can correct those things that you have deeply ingrained in your muscle memory. All it does, all it takes is just slow practice or just a couple of repetitions, just deliberate practice to override it. And your brain's really more efficient than we like to give it credit to.

And it can overwrite those things. And especially with coding, if you're not coding in an optimal way or like you have a bunch of useless code that you could just put in one like the for you loop or something. Yeah. Then or one for loop, then you can just learn how to do that. Practice it a few times, maybe try it in some different projects. And there you go. You've got it down.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I want to talk a little bit about life in Japan now that we've kind of covered your learning approach, and we can talk some more about that. But a lot of people may be wondering, what is it like to live in a completely foreign country where people speak different languages, where you physically look different?

differentiated from the other people. Like in the U S it's extremely multicultural. Japan is actually becoming more multicultural. They are allowing a lot more people to get work visas there. Like I was there last summer and it was amazing. Like when it went into the restaurants, tons of people from South Asian countries like, like India, uh, like Malaysia hanging out there. And, uh, it was really cool because it felt way more multicultural than when the first time, which was like 2002, I think.

And, of course, China is a similar thing. When I went to China, I was literally the only Westerner. I'm not sure if people are still called that. But I was the only Westerner. I was the only non-Chinese person on a campus of 20,000 people other than a few international students from Japan and Korea. But it is becoming a more multicultural society. But let's talk about your experience in Japan. Yeah.

Yeah, so it was kind of like that because I went to Japan in 2011. I was there from 2011 to 2021. So back in 2011 towards like 2015 or so, when I was really getting used to it, there wasn't really a lot of Americans, especially, you know, black Americans. It was just...

people taking pictures of you here and there can I take a picture with you you know come up and talking to you so it was actually more fun than I thought I thought it would be a bit more isolating a bit more like they're going to be afraid of me type thing but it's really not it was a lot of friendly people a lot of friendly environments and then it's also depends on where you go to because if you're going out clubbing and doing other things you may have a different experience

But I really enjoyed adjusting to it. And then it kind of just felt like home again.

more quick than I thought it would be, especially because I would find things that I like to do, whether it was going to the arcades or going to certain restaurants or hanging out at certain cafes. And then you also meet similar people, other Americans, other veterans, other military guys, and then you kind of have the same interests. So you build like this little mini community in

in a foreign place and you don't really feel like you're missing out on much yeah and then you also meet a lot of the locals that way and you just it starts to grow from there but honestly it was a really really amazing time i had like one bad experience from some drunk guy he was just drinking a little too much one bad experience out of 10 years of being there yeah so really it was just amazing time

So, like, a lot of people may be thinking about this, and I want to point out, you work remotely, right? Yeah. I mean, you're basically your own boss. You work as a kind of, like, doing freelance work for a variety of different clients. So I just want to get that out of the way. Like, you could, in theory...

potentially move back to Japan and continue to do the work that you're doing or you could potentially go and live like the digital nomad life. I know a lot of people who do that sort of things. They have their skill set, they have their clients and they're able to do that. Like, is that something that has ever occurred to you? And is that something you would encourage people to do?

I, it is something that's occurred to me. Uh, once I was actually just about to go back funny enough, and then my channel just took off. So that kind of just threw a new loop into the mix, but yeah,

Yeah, that is something I've been thinking about just going back, doing what I do. And I would encourage it, honestly. Any country, it doesn't even have to be Japan. It could be just going somewhere else because you never really know if you like it. I look at myself where I never thought about going to Japan. It just wasn't a thing when I was a kid. Just, okay, I'm going to stay in America and play music. That was just kind of what my thing was. Yeah.

They sent me. I accidentally just fell in love with the country and then that changed my entire life. So you really never know. You can just end up in a place and accidentally really love it and learn the language and get accustomed to it. And so you just you just never know. Honestly, I would say, yeah, it's definitely worth it.

trying to go somewhere. Yeah. Well, let's talk about your time in Japan. So, uh, of course, like how, uh, how long did you serve? Like, I understand you got the GI bill and you were able to actually attend university in Japan, Temple University, uh, which is like, uh, English is the language of instruction there. So, uh, like, like what, what was that experience like? Yeah. So the transition phase for me, it was like 2011 to 2015, I was in the military and,

And I liked Japan, but I was not ready to do what I was doing for another 15 years or so. So I thought about it. For context, sorry to interrupt. So generally after 20 years of service, I think, you can get retirement and pension and stuff like that. So 20 years is a military career. And then you can go and have a second career, and you have this fixed additional income. I'm not sure if it's extra, but basically it's like an amount of money that you can live off of so you don't necessarily need to work full time.

Yeah. Yeah. And so that was an idea. But then I, I said, you know, I may as well risk it. I had no family, no kids. And so it was like, I'm just going to get out and use this GI bill here. And once I learned that I could do that, that was immediately my decision. I said, okay, I'm going to get out and I'll apply to Temple and see how that goes. And once I got into Temple, I,

After the military, once I got into Temple, that's kind of where I started getting into software engineering, or at least taking a look at it. I had some people around the school who were using FreeCodeCamp. One of my buddies, Dusty, he was actually an art major, used FreeCodeCamp to get a job in Japan right after we graduated college. So that was like my introduction into that website, sort of. And then it was also like, okay,

I think this is a doable thing for me and I can just continue to ride this wave of being here, just kind of doing my thing one day at a time, as I like to say. But getting in the coding industry,

came after I got a job as a personal trainer in Japan. And so that came just on accident. I was working out at the gym. The manager came and talked to me and it just so happened to be at the perfect time where I was graduating. And he said, Hey, would you ever thought about working here? Which that wasn't even an idea to me too. I wasn't thinking about it. I never asked for a job. I have a bunch of tattoos. And so it was like,

I don't think they're ever going to hire someone like me. In Japan, tattoos are a big deal too, by the way. Like you go to like bathhouses and they're like, no tattoos. Exactly. If they're associated with the Yakuza, like organized crime. Exactly. So, but of course, like, so you felt like that was...

you were probably kind of just like unlikely to be able to work in a professional capacity in Japan. Yeah. As a basis, like with the tattoos being a consideration. I mean, is that culture changing around tattoos in Japan? It is. It is. And it's honestly because a lot more international companies are going there and the Yakuza, uh,

is not being looked at as like non-Japanese anymore. So if I will say this, what I noticed is Japanese people with tattoos and non-Japanese with tattoos did get a different treatment. They would look at me and some people would obviously know like, okay, he's probably not into that kind of stuff. But if a Japanese person does have tattoos, there is that sort of like, okay, well, what's he up to? However, that whole culture is dying down. It is.

Which is a good thing because it's not, you know, we're not living in...

years ago where that kind of thing is exclusive anymore. It's a whole different time these days. Well, my understanding is organized crime as a whole is like going down pretty badly. Uh, like the Yakuza has fallen on hard times, but who to them, but, but like maybe people are just not like, they don't even really care about Yakuza anymore. It's not like a, like a, uh, ongoing concern for, uh, most people in Japan. Uh, but,

I mean, they've done a very good job of like kind of stamping that out. And in the U S like it's just, I think my understanding is just becoming much harder to be a criminal. Yeah.

Unless you're doing crypto scams and stuff like that. It's still easy to scam people and be that kind of scammer, but you're not talking about beating people down and taking their money if they don't pay you protection money. That sort of era may be largely behind us as a civilization, if you consider all the civilization, as a human race. Maybe the protection money racket type stuff...

Maybe I'm too rosy-eyed and looking through rose-colored glasses, but I know crime has been dropping dramatically in the United States for the most part. Certainly violent crime, and it's mostly just scams. The scams are up everywhere. I've been scammed before. I'm embarrassed to say it, but it's true. So not for anything consequential. I bought something counterfeit, but it felt terrible, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It sucks. It hits you in the gut. You're like, damn, I'm such a sucker. Yeah. Why did I fall for that? Yeah. You know?

So, again, it was a few hundred bucks, but it permanently made me much more vigilant. Anyway, that's not what we were trying to talk about. So, okay, so you get offered a job. Talk about this opportunity at this gym. Yeah, so every once in a while I would just talk to the manager, and it was basically just small talk. What are you working on today? Basic gym talk. Oh, I'm doing this, doing that, and whatever.

It I guess he noticed that other people caught a liking to me and that I could speak Japanese because he didn't speak any English. So we would always be speaking in Japanese. And I guess they had an opening that they needed to fill in just at the time that I was graduating. And it just kind of.

fell into place right there. And that's when he asked me, like, would you be interested in working here? Because I had and what really caught me off guard is I had always heard it was so hard to get a job in Japan and all these other things, which is true. It is hard for some people to get a job.

And I'm thinking, man, I hope I don't run into that while I'm in college. I'm thinking this, like, I hope I don't run into that issue or I'm probably going to run into that issue because tattoos and all. So, but we'll, we'll see. And then that happened. And I said, oh, well, is it visa sponsored? Is, is this going to happen? Like what kind of things are going to be under? And they took care of all that. And then I found myself just working as a personal trainer right there in Japan. And so, um,

That also kickstarted my language studies a lot more because at that time I could speak conversationally fluent, but there was no way I could sit there and train a client. Like, oh, put your knees outside of your feet when you do squats and blah, blah, blah and form. I couldn't dictate that in Japanese yet. So that was really a spark of, OK, I need to push this a lot further and see what I can really get to as far as a higher level of speaking and instructing and that kind of thing.

Yeah. Yeah. So you had this kind of extrinsic catalyst, uh, like you yourself were probably getting somewhat comfortable with your current Japanese. Oh, it's good enough. Right. But then suddenly it wasn't good enough. And the standards for which, you know, your Japanese would be good enough. Like just, there was a step change and you had to hit the books again. Can you talk about that? How did you approach that?

Yeah, so like you said, it was really, I got into a comfortable groove. I would have considered myself not fluent, fluent, but at that time, just conversationally fluent. I could hang out, I could talk about my hobbies and music, MMA, all that stuff, and then I could talk about little anime episodes or shows, or I could ask what people liked, but I definitely could not go into detail about more complex things. And so once I talked to the manager, he

He was very quick about the process, too. He was like, OK, are you ready to start in like a week or two? And I that's when it like my heart kind of sank. And I said, OK, I really have to learn this stuff quickly.

And so to go into my process, all I did is I looked up a lot of gym vocabulary. I started making sentences on how to instruct someone to do certain things. So basically the things I was just saying, how to squat, how to brace your core, how to do all things. Cause I couldn't say these in Japanese yet. And so my practicality list, I spent like a couple of days just building out everything I thought I would ever say at the gym. And basically,

That once I had a pretty good going list, I just immediately started drilling that I would practice the sentences over and over and over and over again in my room and to the point where I could say it without thinking about it. And then what I noticed is that the more vocab and the more sentences I learned, the more things I started to do. When it came time to talk to clients, they would just come out and it was like I had done it.

for a long time already. And that was one of the big realizations to me that solidified my whole practicality approach because I got gym fluent in just a month or so. I like to call it gym fluency. There's a term I call local fluency where you basically try to get fluent in certain areas. So in my case at the gym,

Anything about the gym that I thought I would ever talk about, I would watch YouTube videos and all that and see how the Japanese people said it. I would just study that. And so outside of the gym, I would probably fall apart outside of conversational skills. But at the gym, I sounded like I had been doing that for years. Yeah. And that was my goal. It was just all about practicality. And that really...

That helped me out so much. I can't explain how useful that was. It built my confidence at the gym. Clients would talk to me and say, did you grow up here? That kind of thing. I'm like, no, I just drilled exactly what I needed. But if the conversation had shifted to something else, there was still a bunch of gaps. So it also led me to...

Just continue to fill in the vocab, continue to fill in the sentences. But as far as gym talk and being a trainer and nutrition and all that, I had it down. And it was such a nice process. And this is why I like to tell people, even in coding, just do what's practical. If you don't need JavaScript or all these high advanced functions, don't even worry about it. If you know you're not going to be doing that on the job and you're not going to be doing that for clients, don't worry about it.

Just forget about it for now. You may need that later. But for now, focus on form validation or just little things like that, whatever you're going to need to just to get your money, just to get paid, just focus on that. And so that was really huge, like not only just the concepts of how I think, but just a life changing moment right there. It taught me a lot just right there on the spot.

Yeah, there's always going to be that fear of some person on Reddit or Twitter or wherever calling you out as not a real developer. Yeah.

But the practical reality is you are getting paid to write code, right? You were getting paid to train people, uh, in Japanese. And, uh, I love what you said about them, like asking, Oh, did you grow up here? Like that, that just shows the success of your like localized learning process. Like for me, it was always like, like I always felt really good when I could get off the phone with somebody, like some random person, like I'm like booking a hotel or I'm ordering food or something like that. And, and,

it was clear they had no idea that I was just some, uh, some white war and some, some Guilo. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a nice feeling. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to dig deeper into this localized learning because you have definitely talked a lot about the need to kind of scope your learning. It's an ocean out there and you can't explore the whole thing, right? Like the practical reality is like if you want to learn every single programming language or every different like –

data structure, design pattern, like all these different things that as a software engineer, in theory, you could encounter in some area of software engineering that you're never going to actually get good at anything because you're, you're never going to get in reps with any one thing because it's just simply too much ground to cover. Uh, but what you were able to do was figure out like, okay,

I just want to focus on learning the Japanese that I need for the gym. And then later, when you got your clients in, I just want to get really good at front-end development, specific to working on things that my clients will actually pay me money to do. And I imagine you're very good at that specialized skill set because you're a professional and you probably had a lot of practice at it. What would you say to somebody who is just getting into...

Tech. I definitely want to hear your thoughts on this in terms of picking a specialization and sticking around with it. But I also want to hear a little bit more about how you got your first clients. Sorry, I'm kind of jumping all over myself. There's so much time to cover here. So let's talk a little bit about that transition into actually working as getting paid to code.

Yeah. So as a trainer, I would use my downtime because like I said, I wanted more time and more money. So I would use my downtime either between clients or at home or before I would go hang out with friends on the weekend to just study some code. And then once I narrowed it down from back end to front end, I said, OK, I see full stack is both. That's probably not something that I need to be doing because it's too much.

So let me just pick one of these. And that's what I did. And how I got to that conclusion is I would look at job postings because I didn't know what I should be learning. So I went on and I learned this from coding phase, I believe. Yeah. I would go look at job postings and then I would see like, okay, they need a Swift developer. They need this. They need that. They need JavaScript. Okay. I kind of have an idea of what's popular. So let me just go with this. And

And that's what led me into just, okay, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Let me just focus on that for now. As I learned that, okay, I'll see what's next. And what got me to making money is Shopify. The people I ran into and the people I talked to said, oh, I need a store. I need someone to run the store. I need products. I want to start a business.

And thankfully, well, not thankfully, because it was during the time of COVID. I'm not happy about COVID. But during COVID, a lot of people were going online. They were going into the e-commerce realm and trying to get their stores online or trying to move from things like Wix over to other platforms or Shopify so they could sell something. And that's what I started focusing on then. I said, OK, well, if I can learn something.

Yeah.

Some information doesn't show up correctly or they want to integrate their social medias, that kind of thing. And so that's literally all I would do. Anything outside of that, I just deemed it as I don't need it, you know? And so liquid and templating syntaxes, I've gotten pretty good with those just because of the repetitions. And thankfully, yeah,

Those people, when I got my very first client, that person started telling other people like, oh, this is who made my site or this is who does my thing. And so it was kind of a word of mouth thing. And people would reach out to me and say, oh, could you make me one? And I'm thinking, OK, yeah.

sure, I got you. Let me make you one. And you know, I need all the information, blah, blah, blah. And then that person would tell another person and it just kind of kept happening in that same direction is like, okay, well I guess this is my business now. Like I guess I'm a freelance software engineer and I have learned a lot of things from, uh,

Aaron Jack and Jan Frey as well. I learned a lot from them about, you know, their program Fremote. Actually, I had got that and I learned a lot of little useful things in there to reach out to clients, find them on Google Maps. And I didn't even need to do so much of that because people were just telling others like, hey, this guy did my site and it looks good. And so just hire him.

And thankfully, that's kind of it built itself, really. And all I did, I just kept trying to learn, OK, what are some potential things I should learn for their site? What are some things I should look out for? What's most useful for me to learn and like build my confidence in this? Because of the whole time, I still had a bit of an imposter syndrome, because like you said, I'm.

you'll read like, okay, you're not a real developer. You don't know all this. I don't know advanced JavaScript. Even right now, I don't. I don't know advanced JavaScript. I would have to go to Stack Overflow or ask ChatGPT to do something like that. But I'm okay with that. I'm totally okay with that. And I honestly learned so much on the spot and can internalize it that it's really built my confidence in just focusing on the practical and anything else, any variables, I'll just get to it when I can.

And so that's how my software career kind of took off. It was just focusing on practicals and word of mouth, really. Yeah. And like, do you have very many, did you have any clients that were Japanese or?

I had one client that was Japanese, didn't need them for much longer. They only needed like a couple of things, but all my clients were American after that. And which was also great because I, if I had got into that, then it would be another gym situation where I would have to learn software engineering for Japanese and, you know, kind of go into that bubble of like, okay, now I need to get software fluent in Japanese. It's interesting. I didn't have to do that.

It's like you've got this kind of like core, and you're just kind of like installing different modules into it. Like, okay, now I've got to go to the gym. Yeah, exactly. Now I've got to go to the software. You didn't have to install that module is what you're saying with the Japanese. Yeah. Exactly. So you were in Japan for like 10 years, which is a long time to be abroad. Yeah. At what point were you ready to move back? How did you navigate moving back?

So I was about to move back to just to do software because that's when I was just taking off and learning software engineering. And I said, OK, I think now that I'm getting people, I want to stop doing personal training. But at the same time, you know, if I stop doing that, I lose my visa. So that was that kind of thing. OK. And then that sent me back and I was trying to go back during covid, but then that happened later.

And it was like, I'm stuck in Japan. So basically, I came back a bit later than I should have. And I was stuck over there just doing that and still learning more software engineering. But it actually turned out to be good. And when I came back, it was a hard decision because I really love Japan. But I said, OK, if I come back to Japan, it'll be as a software engineer, a full on software engineer, no personal training or any of that.

And that's pretty much why I'm here right now is just software started taking off a little more than I thought even after that. And just one after the other things piled on to itself because like you said,

I'm really that kind of guy. Just give me the module here. Give me this. Give me that. Whatever I need at the time, I'll just go get that. Kind of like a brutal pragmatism as far as learning. Yeah. And yet you learn so many things that are not particularly remunerative. It's very hard to make a living as a guitarist.

In 2025, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have these kind of like hobby things. And one of the things that strikes me is also you're learning Spanish, which being a Texan, almost half the people in Texas probably speak Spanish. Two of my neighbors. Yeah, it's extremely useful to be able to speak Spanish.

Maybe you can talk a little bit about why you decided to go down that route of learning additional musical instrument and piano and learning Spanish when you could have just kind of stayed in your comfort zone. And learning a natural language and learning a musical instrument, two very different skills. There are philosophical similarities and like...

kind of heuristics that you can apply to both, but they are very, they probably use completely different parts of your brain and stuff like that. Like what inspired you to install a second language and install a second instrument? And so for Spanish, it was a lot like Japan where, uh,

I'm around so many of the people that speak this language. I should probably pick it up. Of course, there's a much less demand here to pick up Spanish because everyone speaks English. But I was I guess because I had fell in love with the process of learning and just that kind of thing. It was just another challenge for me. Like, OK, let me just see if I can pick up another language and speak.

just take the same steps that I did with Japanese, just with Spanish. So right now it's just vocabulary. I haven't even gotten to like deep conversational skills yet. I'm just in the vocabulary phase. And this is something very interesting. Sorry to interrupt you, but like you, you have often said, just start with vocabulary. Don't even worry about grammar because if you think about it, like you can bark out some words that may not make grammatical sense, but there's a good chance that somebody can kind of like read between the lines and figure out what you're talking about. And like my Spanish is very,

bad. I've never formally studied grammar, but I can go and talk to people if absolutely necessary. I can talk to people in Spanish and it's probably just like caveman language, but it gets the job done. So you've often emphasized just starting with vocab. Why is that? Yes. Yeah. Well, vocab, it's like a kid. Sometimes a kid may come up to you and say like,

I food eat want now. And yeah, that's a completely incorrect sentence, but maybe, you know, okay, this kid wants to eat some food now. And when I thought about it, I said, okay,

I'm just going to learn more vocab. And what really solidified it for me is I would be out in Japan. This was before I could really speak it well. I would do that. I would say, no bacteria soap. Where? And like the guy would say, oh, he wants to know where the antibacterial soap is. And he would walk me over there and get it. Or I would be somewhere else and I would just throw out random vocabulary words. And

And they would say, oh, so, so, so, so, so. And then they'd run me over there and help me out. And I noticed how much that was working. And vocabulary for me at the time was like my insecurity because I could get some ideas out, but then it would be like, okay, what's the word for build or what's the word for this or what's the word for that? And then I said, well...

By that same logic, even if I just learned 10,000 vocabulary words with zero grammar, I could still get my point across by just spitting out random vocabulary words. Yeah. And that's why I tell people if you start with vocabulary, not only will you be able to say a lot of things, but you'll also hear things. And like say you're listening to –

Some anime episode or you're watching some anime episode you may only understand three words out of that sentence But you can see it understand those three words and you can know like oh, I kind of know what he just said and I

That was pretty much it. That solidified my belief of like, okay, vocabulary is the gatekeeper to language in the broadest aspect of it. It really is the gatekeeper to understanding and speaking it. And it's also, unfortunately, the thing that goes on forever because I can tell you, like I've studied...

Chinese for like 20 years at this point, like fairly steadily. Like a lot of things you espouse on your channel. Like I study a little every single day. You talk about like the plan, repetition, rest, kind of core loop of learning. I'm like a big believer in that. And so like I'll learn Chinese for like

you know, 30 minutes a day is not a lot, but it's every single day. And, uh, you know, it's like, it's like 20 years. I don't even know how many days that is. It's a lot. Um, so, you know, you're getting a lot of vocabulary, even if you're only learning a few new words a day over time. But, um,

the vocabulary never ends, right? It's just like English, like a typical native speaker who's like high school educated. We'll probably have a vocab of like 20,000 English words. Yeah. It takes a long time to learn 20,000 words and actually like retain them. Get like recognition is one thing, but recall so you can like speak them and use them correctly is another thing.

It really is. And with vocabulary, when you're learning the ones that you need, it builds up so much confidence because now you're like, okay, I don't have all these knowledge gaps anymore. And you can start to get this feeling of relief. And then you can kind of branch off to other things. Like even in Japan, I've...

I've had conversations with some people. I'll say shinrigaku, which is psychology. And they don't even know what that means sometimes. Or they'll be like, what? No. Oh, it's psychology. Oh, shinrigaku. And then we'll go on from there. Or I'll say a word that maybe they don't use too much that I've used at the gym. And even if someone said...

Say like for moral for moral artery or something. Yeah. Like, yeah, someone may not even know what that way. That's in your leg. That's in your leg, in the leg. It's like someone may not even know what that means as a native speaker. They may not know what that means. And so I tell people, learn the vocabulary that's most important, but then learn what you need. And like you said, it really never ends.

It's so, cause there's still a lot of vocabulary. I don't know. There's just, I can hear a sentence and pretty much gather the meaning, but maybe they say something that's just like, I don't know what that is. I need to go look it up. And, uh,

Even with that gap, if there's other vocabulary words that I can get or there's other vocabulary words that I can catch, I can still gather a meaning of the whole sentence. And that's another reason I say vocabulary is just so important because you can kind of skate by with a bunch of knowledge gaps with just a high amount of vocabulary. Yeah, and to some extent, like...

a lot of people do that like just in daily life. Like maybe they learned some Spanish when they were a kid. And so when they interact with their grandma who doesn't speak English, they just have used, they use that restricted vocabulary, but it's good enough. And they never necessarily go back to a retop and like have in-depth conversations about like Russian novels with their grandma. Yeah. Talk about like how the weather is or something like I try to think about conversations I would have with my grandma. They weren't usually that in-depth.

And so they didn't need to install the literary module. You said psychology earlier. You actually studied psychology as an undergrad, right? So that was your field of study.

Completely unrelated to personal training, completely unrelated to working as a software engineer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, let's talk about university real quick because you had the luxury of going on the GI Bill. You earned that, of course. But a lot of people may, if you're old enough, like I literally cannot join the military if I want to. I'm over the age limit to join. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a lot of people, like they may live in countries where like maybe they have mandatory military.

Military services don't get anything in return, right? If you're in Korea or Iran or a place like that, it's just obligatory. Or a lot of places. It's just like the U.S. I think doesn't do enough for its troops, but it does a lot more than a lot of countries do. But maybe somebody doesn't have a GI Bill type thing. How much of what you've accomplished do you think you could have accomplished without going to university? And what did you get out of university that was valuable for you?

So as far as if I didn't have that, when I met people in Japan, like other foreigners who didn't have that, their main ticket to getting to Japan was like some sort of English teaching job. And this is more so for people in America because they want native English speakers.

And so that was like some of the guys I met, they would say, you know, I took the lowest paying job. I didn't really care. I just wanted to get in the country. Because if you're applying for things overseas, your scope is a lot more limited than someone already living there. It's a lot easier to change jobs than it is to just get a new job and go to the country that way.

And so when I met people, that's what they said. They said, okay, well, I'm a this so-and-so now, but I initially started as an English teacher. And so that's probably the route I would have taken if I was really set on going to Japan as a native English speaker. Like even if the pay sucks and the hours are long, what they did is they told me they use their free time to learn other skills, learn Japanese, and just get a new job that way. And then that is what...

They ended up doing and not just teaching English the whole time. Yeah. So that's probably the same route I would have taken doing that. And what was your second question? Well, like what did you learn out of university that has been really helpful? Like, even though you're studying something that is like completely unrelated to working as, I mean,

In theory, there may be actually a lot of insight that you have from having studied psychology that is helpful, working with clients and things like that. But what are the main takeaways from your university experience where you felt it was a good use of your time?

So what I really, really noticed is that people skills is so much more important than people think. Like I know with coding in particular, people often focus on the tech skill, how much knowledge they can acquire, things like that. But learning how to talk to people, learning how to interact with people, learning how they think, maybe their frame of reference, that kind of thing. You may get a job or way more opportunities over someone who's way more qualified than you.

And this is something I learned just interacting with people. It's like, I don't like quotes because I think they go over people's heads, but really people do like people more than what they can do for them. You know, it's like people love people, that kind of whole selling like salesman type quote. People love buying from people, not like a business in a sense. So when you learn how people work,

And how to interact with people and how to listen and understand. And just, I happen to be fortunate at that college. There was so many different types of people from all over the world that you could just get,

A lot of input, basically a lot of scope, a lot of different variables of types of people, what their beliefs are, where they're from, that kind of thing. And so it really taught me a lot about just human interaction, which I think is really overlooked in not only business in general, but really software space. Cause there's so much technical knowledge that you do need, which is really important, but really, especially if you're freelancing, knowing how to talk to people, knowing how that works, knowing how to solve their insecurities first, um,

it really does take you far away. It takes you a long way. Even just basic communication. It does so much more than people may realize. Yeah. One of the things that I want to talk to you a little bit about is,

When you're learning these new skills, it can be really daunting. And there are lots of naysayers. We've talked about the haters on the net who are like, oh, yeah, you're not good enough. Or when I was learning to code, a lot of people told me, oh, you're never going to learn. There's just too much to learn with software development. And one of the things that...

Yeah.

That can also hold you back if you're constantly falling back on that. Like, oh, well, I may suck at this, but I can speak Chinese, you know? But like, how do you deal with judgmental friends, family, people on the internet who are telling you that you're wasting your time learning a new skill? I think for me, especially now on YouTube, I think it's really important to focus on the positive feedback because like,

It's so easy to focus on the negative feedback and what you may get and things like that. Even videos that I've done, like completely in Japanese or whatever, someone may say, oh, your accent doesn't sound like, you know, the correct accent.

But to me, it doesn't bother me because, again, I can just draw back on my experience working in Japan. I had a lot of clients reaching out to me. I had money. My bank never really asked about my accent and all that. So it was like, well, I'm not going to worry about irrelevant things. I'd rather just focus on the positive feedback and focus on who may support me or focus on like.

the main mission. And as far as discouragement from others and discouragement from communities, I would say look at their life too. Most people who are like that really don't have much to show. But if you look at the more successful people, they're probably going to tell you like, yeah, you know, you're going to make mistakes. You're not going to know things. You're going to have knowledge gaps, but that's okay. You're still going to get some sort of result. And so really,

I think as humans, we focus on negatives so much easier. I know I do. And I make it a point to ignore that or delete it or remove it or just block that out. And I go focus on the positive things because that when you keep doing that,

You just get so much good feedback and you'll just go practice more. You'll go learn more. You'll go code more. You'll do whatever you need to do because now you don't have that, you know, that devil on your shoulder like, ah, you're doing it wrong. Yeah. It'll never work and that kind of thing. And so even with me in software, no one was really telling me I would never make it. But there were those doubts of like, OK, I never went to school for this.

I never had a formal training in any sort. I'm just kind of YouTube. What career is going to say, oh, well, this guy from YouTube wants to work for us or what client is going to be OK with that? But then I would look and see, OK, there's a lot of self-taught software engineers out here. Let me just do what they did. They're obviously making money. They're making a career doing that thing. So let me just try to do that. And so.

overall what i'm saying is like shifting towards that positive look or that positive side or the good feedback that's super super important these days especially because you can get negative feedback quickly the internet someone around you it's so easy to just look at the negatives that if you just focus on the positives though i really think it'll just wash everything out yeah well you've talked a lot about like on your channel about um

Not necessarily putting too much stock into things you read on the internet and stuff like that. And one of my favorite all time quotes from you is do not forsake anecdotal evidence for something you read on the internet. Yeah. Yeah. Can you expand upon that?

Yeah, so I, again, a lot of it came from just being at the right place at the right time. And I learned this really with Japanese and even music. I would look at people who had the proficient skills and what they would say. And there was no scientific study. They didn't even read any scientific studies. They wouldn't read Reddit. They wouldn't read forums of any type. They just went out and practiced the thing. Meanwhile,

A lot of people, and you know, I don't want to talk down on them because that is, it's sort of reassuring to look things up. But there's echo chambers that you may accidentally fall into. And unfortunately, most of that information is just not correct. Some scientific study says do this and do that, you know, like if...

If I'm learning a language and I'm so focused on grammar and pitch and accent and all that, that I forget to study vocabulary and actually just saying sentences. By the time it's time to talk to someone, I don't I just draw a blank. And that actually I used to see that in person often. I would see people who.

Yeah.

You can get caught up in what you read. You can get caught up in forums, these echo chambers of people with not that much experience that you forget right in front of you are right there as someone who's doing the thing. Just ask them or look at what they're doing. And that solidifies my beliefs a lot because my own experience and just seeing other people and when I mimic what they do.

I get the same results. And so I continuously say that and I'll probably say it more. You know, some people don't like me saying that, that, you know, bookworms and all that. But it's true. I think a balance of both is good. But do not forget what's actually working. You know, that's really I think one of the main keys of just getting anything down.

Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit more about another term you've used, scheduling your dopamine in terms of like I want to talk about how you actually get things done because you get a remarkable amount done. And one of the things that you said is like when you wake up, first of all, you wake up early, right? You're a morning person now. Yeah, I'm a morning person. Mm hmm.

And yet you resist the temptation to become one of those grind set guru type people, which you probably could. You've got the credentials. You've got the proof is in the pudding. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, right? You can do all these skills. You're sitting there literally playing, improvising chords while you're talking and stuff like that. And you can even talk in Japanese while you're playing piano or guitar and do all these things at the same time. It's really impressive. So you could easily just buy my course and you'll learn everything you need to know about how to do it.

The Vaughn method or something like that. Yeah, I really could. You could have gone that route. But one of the things you said about grind set is you said, you don't have to be a superhuman. I'm just a regular guy with results. And you've also said that I don't have a grind set because that's not long-lasting.

that it doesn't, it's not sustainable to try to take some scientific approach, uh, like it, it looks, it's specious in that it looks like it actually is some sort of formal methodology that works. But then you realize at the end of the day, like, Oh, it's just something this guy made up so he could sell me a course, several hundred dollars or get me to go to some seminar or something. Right. Like, uh, but, but, but,

But you don't do any of that stuff. You just focus on what works and sharing kind of like practical things that have worked for you because of the power of anecdotes and the power of like being able to look at yourself and say like, hey, it's worked for me, so maybe it'll work for you too. Here's my perspective, one of many perspectives. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided – not just for like obviously moral reasons. Like I think it's wrong to do people like that. But like how you think that a lot of stuff out there is just fundamentally flawed and won't work.

Yeah, so most of this content these days and people trying to sell you these things, there's like a big emotional appeal and emotional response that will sell. And I know this from just business. Emotional ties into getting people's money is one of the strongest ways to do it. And if you can convince someone like,

Yeah.

It's no it's not fun. You're just doing it over and over and over again. But that is a part of the process. And this is something you have to get through and you don't need this big emotional response to do it. And I think, unfortunately, when this content gets more popular and more extreme, it's people don't.

know that that's the reality of practice and learning and doing things. It's just regular days. A lot of the day, 99% of the time I'm doing things. It's just normal. It's quiet in my room. I'm just practicing a run on guitar, practicing some sentences. There's no epic things going on in the background and all this other stuff. It's just sitting there. Yeah. It's really, it's just anything that a normal person can do. And that's the thing I try to put across is,

I don't have, I sleep eight hours a day. I don't wake up at two o'clock and, and go to sleep at midnight. I don't do that. I just get up. I say, okay, well I want to do these things today. Let me just go practice. And that's it. And it's just stuff that most people can just do. And as far as the scheduling, the dopamine thing and the using your leisures wisely, I don't believe in things like monk mode and all that other stuff where you delete things

All your apps forever and you're not using anything you to go in a cave mentally and you're like away from society. I don't believe in that because I think it's silly and most of those people they say that but I know what they're doing. I know in real life they're still doing that thing, but they can tell other people. Hey, I'm doing this. So give me the likes and subscriptions and all that stuff. Yeah, and

In reality, I've noticed you're either going to kind of crash out a bit if you try to do that, or you're just going to binge when you come back to it. So it's much better to say, hey, okay.

In a day, I want to practice piano. I want to practice guitar and I want to practice my language. Let me just do that first. And then when I'm done with that, let me just go log on Instagram and scroll reels, send cat videos to my friends, whatever, you know, whatever you feel like doing. Yeah. And to me,

Something I really noticed in doing this is that you get a lot of time for both if you just separate them. Because if I'm playing guitar or playing piano or practicing something and I'm checking my phone, I get lackluster practice and I'm not really enjoying my phone. Yeah. But if I just focus in on the guitar or piano for a while and get really intense practice down in that short amount of time, then...

I can get to my phone later and just happily scroll reels. I don't have to worry about, oh, I need to be practicing. I need to be doing this. I need to be doing that. I can just enjoy it. And it sounds counterintuitive, but if you really separate them and just put your practical things first, you get more time for both. So you get more time to play video games. You get more time to scroll social media and you get more out of your practice. So you really get the best of both worlds here.

It's just the discipline of the separation part is kind of difficult. It does take some practice, some days where you're just going to accidentally pick up the phone and start scrolling. You're going to accidentally play video games. You're going to fire up Steam and get going. And you realize like, oh, no, I need to be practicing. And so the trial and error is there. But once you find a groove, you'll realize, yeah, you don't need to go to these extremes of waking up, taking ice baths and whatever.

cold showers, all this other nonsense that you see flying around the internet. Yeah. You can just do regular things. Yeah. You don't need to read meditations by Marcus Aurelius or, or, uh, I mean like a lot of this stuff, like it is silly and you're an MMA guy, right? Like there are lots of people in MMA and like the kind of like the manosphere and stuff that they're talking about. Like, Oh, you gotta be like really tough. Don't be like the soft, you know, uh, like,

like intellectual bookworm type people or something like that. Right. Like, like they, they wear it as like a badge of honor, uh, that they are hardcore. Yeah. Yeah. And yet like so much of that is just kind of like productivity theater. Um, and, and so much of it is just like a very basic, uh,

and heuristics. Like, okay, I wake up, I'll just go autobiographical for a second. I promise I'm not going to go too long. But like I wake up at 7 a.m., I walk my kids to school, I walk to the gym, I come home. By then, I've usually done like a few vocabulary drills

with either Japanese or Cantonese are the two I'm focusing on primarily right now. Yeah. And then I, you know, pick up the guitar and I'll pick up the guitar like maybe six times a day and I'll pick up the bass maybe like once a day cause I'm a little more familiar with it. Uh, and I don't do as much, but like just play for like five minutes and then put it down and I'm kind of like trying to program some muscle memory into my hands. And it's not like, I'm like, okay, I've cleared my entire weekend. I'm just going to play guitar all day and like get good. It's not like that at all. And then I do like,

This may sound crazy. This may be sacrilegious in Silicon Valley, which I'm not in Silicon Valley anymore. I'm here in Texas. No, I know what you mean. But I actually only work like 40 hours a week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get the work done and then I go play with my kids or I do other hobbies and I focus on my skills. And then I think you can be incredibly productive. And I consider myself –

I hope this doesn't sound conceited or anything. I consider myself really productive. Like I get a, you know, a podcast each week. I learn a video game cover song that I played at the beginning of every thing on drums, guitar, bass, and keys. I, I go to the gym like every,

every other day. So three or four times a week, depending on, you know, like I have all these routines and then I also listen to tons of podcasts and I also read a lot and, and I focus on all my languages, like all this stuff. And it is not insane. Like I, like you, I'm a huge advocate of sleeping eight hours a day and not burning the candle at both ends and, and just focusing on taking a lot of time. And I, I definitely, I,

vibe with what you're saying about like kind of moving back to Texas and just, just chilling and focusing on getting better at what you're doing. And you can do that anywhere, right? You don't have to be in San Francisco or New York city or something like that to get good at guitar and keys. In fact, like the more remote place you are, the probably the better it is in terms of like time you have really. Yeah. Yeah. You really do. Yeah.

Yeah. So anyway, I just wanted to kind of share a little bit of that, but, but like, I'm like 100% there with you that, uh, I, I think a lot of, uh,

what you're going to see, like, like if you're listening to this or you're seeing, you're going to have people out there, like, I'm not going to name names, but like people that are basically like trying to sell courses, they're trying to sell, uh, conference, like events, uh, whatever you want to call them, where, where like you go there and there's like hundreds of other people and you're all standing around looking at Jordan Belford up there trying to sell you a pen or whatever. Right. Uh, but that is not how the world really works. That's how desperate people are separated from their money.

And, uh, exactly. You know, the gene, uh, the Vaughn genes of the world are just at home practicing guitar and, uh, watching anime when they finished all their guitar. Right. And there's a lot, there's a lot of us too. It's not just me. There's a lot of us. And that's really, like you said, that that's normal people.

just doing things. And when you, when you can do that, it's so much more relieving because you realize like, Oh, I don't have to take these silly extremes or,

You know, go explore some mindset and go meditate in the rocks for a couple days and all this other stuff. You can just do normal things and then get to what you want later. That's really it. I mean, the amount of discomfort in my day that is imposed by myself, that I afflict upon myself. I used to try cold showers. I used to go run half marathons in the morning and, like, try to, like, brutalize myself and build up all this willpower and stuff like that. These days, I don't do any of that stuff. I just, like, try to have, like, a comfortable, like...

you know, hum, uh, baseline essentially like, like, uh, a good energy level, uh, not excessively doing anything. Uh, like one of the things I know about you is, you know, you said that you don't drink alcohol. No, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. And I got into that because of MMA. I, I noticed if I drank it would, I mean, it physically just dehydrates you. So I'd go spar the next day and it's just not, I'm not feeling it. And then,

You're not learning anything and you're wasting your time and you could have been doing something else if you weren't at MMA, but you still wasting even more time. And so for me, it was like a stress thing. Like, okay. And overall that concept of like not drinking, it's just removing things that you really don't need. So if you can drink and it doesn't hinder what you want to do, then that's, I think that's okay. You know, you live your life. I think that's,

As long as you know that something's getting in your way, you need to get that out of the way. And so for me as an athlete, just a hobbyist, really, I'm not like a professional fighter, but hobbyist MMA is still hard. And I cannot afford to be going into practice dehydrated or, you know, even playing guitar or bass. That's still a mentally challenging.

like exhausting thing. You need to be able to think what key am I in? What am I learning? What, what is this triad arpeggio, all that kind of thing. And if you're suffering from dehydration and you're not really there sharp mentally, it's just, you're not going to get the most out of that time you're doing it. And so that's,

Not alcohol alone, but just many things like that. It's just whatever I can get out of my life that's not really that useful, especially if I don't really have a reason to do it, then I'll just get rid of it. And then I can really do the things that I like more, like video games or watching more anime or something. I can have a more right mind to do the correct things at that point.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it seems like a really chill way to be. So you have a successful software development consultancy. You've got a lot of things figured out in terms of you're able to live a lifestyle where you can work remotely. You can continue to practice your skills. You can continue to go to the gym and train and play music and create these amazing videos. Thank you. What is the next –

few years look like for you? Like, do you have, do you have it mapped out or like how much, how far ahead do you plan ahead? And, and,

in what areas do you plan in? What areas do you just like let spontaneity occur? So I used to plan out a lot, but I noticed every time I did that, it would never ended up happening the way I thought it would. So I have the opposite approach. Now. I don't even know what I'm going to do two months from now. Honestly, I plan out like a couple of weeks and that's pretty much it. Whatever comes up, it just comes up. And for me, it's,

I noticed not only is this more mentally freeing, but it just allows me to do more things because I believe if you're just doing actionable steps, whether it be in your business or your career or hobbies, the rest will kind of show itself when it's time. So staying present is a really big thing I had to learn because I used to be an over-planner.

Despite me talking about all this practicality and all that, I know what the other side feels like. I know what it's like to overthink little things and where am I going to be here? Where am I going to be there? I dealt with this in Japan too, because you're not even at home. You know, I was in another country, uh,

What am I going to do for work? What am I going to do for money? But I notice if you do the most useful things, a lot of those things kind of take care of themselves. And then you can take care of that when the things come up. So two months from now, I don't know what I'm going to be doing. That's really I don't even plan as far. Like I said, a few weeks, maybe a month from now, I don't have a long term goal. Make this many dollars or reach this many subscribers. I don't know.

I have zero idea. And so...

for me it's freeing, but it also just, I know that's going to work out for the better because I'm doing what it takes anyway. So I don't really have to think about it. Yeah. And I, it sounds like a lot of it, you can just fall back on just having really good habits and trusting that those good habits and that, that, you know, balanced perspective that you have from everything you've experienced up to this point, uh, you know, serving and then, uh, going to school, then working as a personal trainer, now working as a software engineer, like,

that you can just trust that you're going to be able to kind of flex with whatever situation comes up. And so do you feel like a lot of anxiety? I used to, but I have so much evidence now of things just working out that I really don't. I kind of have the opposite. I don't really have anxiety at all because I know that,

Whether I need to ask certain people or connect with the certain people or whatever, it's just things just happen to work out if I'm doing what I need to be doing. So yeah.

That's really all I worry about. Am I doing what I need to be doing? And I have setbacks too. There's some days I just won't pick up the guitar or the piano and I just scroll Instagram for three hours or I'll go watch anime for a while and just screw practice. I don't want to do it, blah, blah, blah. I have those days too. But for the most part, most of my time is pretty productive. So yeah,

I can just kind of relax knowing that, all right, well, whatever comes up, I'll take care of it. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I'll say like myself, like if I'm sick, I just throw all that stuff out the window. I don't even bother. I don't, I certainly don't try to work out when I'm sick. Uh, I basically stay home, sleep as much as possible, pull up criterion collection and just watch old movies is my big thing to do whenever I'm sick, you know? Um, and then, uh,

We could definitely end the conversation here. What you just said is so profound and great. Have you ever seen One Piece? A little bit, but I've never watched a lot of it. He wants to be the greatest sword fighter in the world. That's his goal throughout the series. He just sleeps. He doesn't do anything he doesn't have to do.

Except he gets up and he trains very hard. And then when he's on, I mean, it's supposed to be kind of like if you've ever watched any of the old Kurosawa movies, like...

What is his name? Mifune? Toshiro Mifune or something like that. He plays the archetypal samurai in all these movies. And he's basically just a happy-go-lucky, relaxed, almost vagabond-type character. But then when he's on, when he's got a job, and he, as a samurai, has to defend...

you know, uh, like a village or something like that from, from, uh, Raiders or something like that. He's like, so zero zeroed in and, and like on, but like, you can tell like the level of stress outside of battle for him is like, just, he'll just go to like Roman Azor, the character in it. And in one piece, he'll just go to sleep all the time. Like he just sleeps wherever. And they're always giving him a hard time. Cause it'll be sleeping in the middle and then they'll wake him up. Oh, it's time for you. And then he picks up his sword and he's on because all,

All the muscle memory kicks in, all the training, all the self-discipline, all that. And then he can just immediately be on. I mean, do you feel like you have something like that where you could be having kind of like an off day and you just pick up the guitar and you can get in the zone fairly quickly? Yeah, actually, yes. Yeah, honestly, exactly what you're just talking about. When you do the repetitions or the practice when it's timed,

At other times when it's like go time per se, or you just want to pick up and improvise, your brain kind of has something to go off of and it can just take care of the rest without you really having to do too much thinking and too much extra effort. But yeah,

That effort is put into the practice time, like you mentioned, like the intense training, even someone learning an instrument or learning to code. That is intense training where you're sitting there going through the repetitions. OK, what does this tag mean again? Let me look up how to center this flex box again. You know, those are repetitions. And eventually.

You'll get to the point where, okay, you got it down. And then when it's time, like, okay, hey, can you help me build this site? You feel pretty good going into it. Like, okay, I've built a lot of sites now. I've done a lot of repetitions. Let's get this up real quick. Let's get the Shopify set up or whatever coding language someone may be watching this is studying. Yeah. Like they'll say, okay, I've done this enough times or like at least a certain amount of times. Yeah.

to where I can kind of figure out the rest as it comes up. And so, yeah, I really like that because that's pretty much what I do. I just try to get my repetitions in when I can. And then when things come up,

We'll let it take care of itself. Yeah. Yeah. Well, like one of the things you've said that I love, I don't have the exact thing. Like I usually write down, I take notes when I'm watching your videos and I have notes in front of me when I'm doing these interviews, but this isn't in my notes, but it's just jostled this loose in my head. When you said, you said one thing that I thought was really good is,

You want to be uncomfortable when you're practicing so that you can be comfortable when you're doing like you want to front load that discomfort, that ambiguity, that, uh, that kind of like icky, like, ah, I'm so bad at this. So then like, you can just get it out of the way so that when it comes time to actually execute, you can be like 100% and, and you can like free yourself of self doubt and things like that. Yeah. And, and that was something I learned from language, um,

that was really one of the biggest realizations, language and MMA. Those are like the two things I learned that because I,

There's a term, train hard, fight easy. Train hard, fight easy. I don't know who says it. Yeah, but it really is true. If you're doing the conditioning, if you're doing the drills, it's annoying doing double leg takedowns 500 times. But then when you see that gap or you see someone posture up after you've been jabbing them, you say, okay, I can shoot now. Like I'm close enough to shoot. And then you don't have to think about it. It just happens.

But that's because you've done a lot of those uncomfortable reps. Same with language. If I've said, I can say like, okay, this world is changing a lot. And now I know, Yes. Yeah, constantly changing. So I can say, The weather is constantly changing. Oh, the weather is constantly changing. Yeah, so...

Having that down by the time someone can interact with me in a conversation, I can say like, oh, the lights are constantly changing or the temperature in the room is constantly changing or the music key is constantly changing. And I'm a big fan of that.

Because now I don't have to think about, okay, kawari, what does that mean? Tsuzukeru, is it tsuzukeru, tsuzukete ima, tsuzuketa, like which ending is it supposed to be? I can kind of just get those repetitions out of the way here. So when it's time to use it, okay, I got it. Even sekaiju, I haven't used that word in...

But I can say it because I've said it so many times. And it's just one of those things where if you get those repetitions out in your room or in your office or just in your free time, you can really free up a lot of that stress. Yeah. I think we could actually stop here, but there are a few – like this has been really amazing, but I actually have a few quick lightning round questions for you if that's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. For sure. Yeah. What is shiny object syndrome?

So shining object syndrome is when you're, you have something ready, at least in my sense, you have something ready that you can use. And instead of just using that, you try to find something else. So you see something else come up and you get distracted from what you're already working on. So in reality,

Say I'm learning triads on guitar from one video and I click off that video to go find something else. Oh, maybe this guy teaches it faster. Maybe he teaches it better. Maybe he teaches it in a different way. I click off the one that's already working and then I click onto that and I see like, oh,

he's teaching it this way. But then I see another thing. Oh, this other video, he's showing it a certain way. So let me run over here and see if that'll work. And honestly, it just ruins the progress for so many people because at the end of the day, yeah, they're going to be different, but you're still going to learn generally the same thing. And so shiny object syndrome, it's so, especially these days, because every day there's a new video for every topic.

And you just really need to stick with something and move with it and try to like, okay, I see the shiny object, but I need to stay focused on this and see what this will give me. Yeah, that's how it is for me. That's what I would define that as.

What would you say to somebody who keeps starting something and has well intentions and seems serious, but then they keep kind of falling off? After a few days, it's just like, oh, damn, I forgot. Well, I'll do it tomorrow. And then tomorrow never comes. Yeah. What would you say to them if you could intervene? Yeah, I would definitely say try not to start goals from the – what's the word? The basis of –

Like I need to make up for past time or lost time, that kind of thing. I think it's natural for us to want to do that. Like, okay, I know I want to learn guitar fast now because I quit years ago or quit so many times. But unfortunately that is a negative feedback loop and you'll kind of get into this zone where you're just not, you're not going to really make progress. And unfortunately you're just going to do the same thing. You're going to stop and you're going to,

say like, oh, well, I guess it didn't work again. Let me try another time. And that's the quickest way to get over that, though, is you have to let go of all those other times that you've quit because it's something comforting to along that line is that everyone does it. Everyone has things that they've started and stopped and started and stopped and like, let's try it again. Or maybe it didn't work or I want to get there now. Everyone has that. So feeling alone in that is one of the worst things you can do, because even me,

I've had things I've started stopped. I've gone to MMA for years. I was really about it. And then I had these moments where I kind of showed up to practice here and there, you know, just kind of got lazy with it. And if I'm worried about like, I'm not as good at this area as I used to be, it's not good. So it's the quicker you just kind of let that go, the better you'll just move on to what you want to do. Yeah. Yeah.

You have said that you don't believe immersion learning works. A lot of people just hear this kind of meme that's been going on for years. When I was good, oh, you want to learn Spanish? Go to Mexico. You'll learn it really quickly. And that was that. That was all the advice was. As if arriving in a country would magically endow you just through exposure. Through osmosis, you would pick it up. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

And so I noticed this from other people as well. Like I said, a lot of the things I just kind of look at what's working, what's not working. And I noticed people had been in Japan for years and could not say anything. And meanwhile, people who have not been there that long could understand what I said or like, what did I just say? Kawarichizukete imasu. I think that's what I said. Yeah. Kone sekai wa kawarichizukete imasu. You know what I just said, but someone who,

Had been living in Japan for 10 years would not know what I just said, because being around it, it literally it does not have much to do with the language. And that's something I'm going to continue to say, even though people don't like to agree. I don't really care. But I want to encourage people like it's all about the practice. Even if you're there in the country, you're not going to just magically soak up the knowledge. It's like.

In a coding sense, if I'm watching a bunch of coding videos, I'm watching free code camp tutorials, all that, but I've never logged into VS code. If someone says, Hey, build this, it's just not going to happen. You're not going to know what to do. You're not going to know where to start. You're not even going to know how to get the boiler plate going. It's just, okay. It's all information, but I have no way of accessing it. And so that's why I tell people like immersion is,

It's something that you have to force on yourself and you can do it anywhere. You can go to the country and do it. Sure. It would be useful. But even doing that, you still need to do a lot of at home practice. You still need to drill vocabulary words. You still need to practice your sentences over and over and over again. And then you can kind of.

Get an immersion anywhere so you can be in, you know, in Texas fully immersed in whatever language you want because you're doing a lot of active repetition. Yeah, that is more so immersion than rather than going to some place and thinking, like you said, you're just going to.

breathe in the language. It's just not, it just does not work that way. I mean, in my experience, a lot of like, uh, Americans abroad will just like cluster and form like kind of social group. And then they, they may have limited interactions with the actual locals. Exactly. And that's another thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, what, what you're saying is exactly what I saw because, you know, I don't want to sound rude, but many people don't even talk to strangers in their own home country.

You know, they kind of go about your day. You only talk to who you need to. But if you think you're going to go to a foreign country and do that in a different language, more power to you because that's not usually what happens. Usually people like you said, and even me, my main group of friends in Japan was Americans. Other gamers like myself, people like me who play instruments and play video games and that's it. But we all can speak English and Japanese, but we mostly just sit there and speak English because that's just our group.

And you can find your little bubble and stay there and you'll have no need, like you just said, for the language apart from small interactions. You know, is this place open? What time do you open? That kind of thing. I want to order delivery food, that kind of thing. But outside of that, you really don't even need the language in many areas. Yeah. And I think it's important to like get this out there because.

I don't know that I've heard a lot of people just flat out say immersion doesn't work, but it doesn't work in my humble opinion. I know so many people who lived in China for like a decade, you know, working with suppliers and like doing factories. Like it was huge back in like 2000 ish when I was in China, I was like there for like six or seven years, like just dealing with all these factories and like,

doing like very basic like interpreting and stuff like that and giving factory tours and stuff like that. And I would just meet lots of people who've been there forever who, uh, would act as though like they, they knew it, but they never used it. So they, it was this illusion of competence. Uh, but when you, when they actually got in the situations where they weren't like, you know,

higher up than somebody in terms of that. It's like when you're talking to an employee, it's okay that your language sucks because they have to like nod and act like they know what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if you're talking to like some person who has no idea who you are and they're just busy trying to get something done, who's this crazy foreigner who can't speak my language? Get out of my face, you know? Uh, so it's easy to delude yourself into thinking you're way better than you are. And, um, but, but,

But with immersion, a lot of people will use that as an excuse to not learn a language. They'll be like, oh, I can't afford to go to Japan, so I can't really learn Japanese. But in my humble opinion, if you have a university experience,

a short ride or a drive from where you are, you can be immersed among Japanese people. Like just go find their activity calendar. The, you don't necessarily have to be a student at the university to go and participate in events. And some people might think that it's creepy, especially if you're like a 44 year old dude, like me showing up at a university. Uh, but, but the practical reality is as long as you're like, Hey, I'm,

I'm just like a software engineer who works in the area and like, I want to improve my Japanese. Like, can I hang out here? Can I do your board game night? Stuff like that. Like you can learn a lot from just hanging out with people. And of course you can do the thing where you like label all the different nouns, you know, around your room, like, Oh, this is the hairbrush. You know, you get, you know, you can do all that sort of stuff and you, and you can like listen to Japanese music and, uh, you know, get, get your city pop playlist going and all that stuff. But, um,

But you can do all that stuff. You don't need to have a giant budget to go to Japan. I think a lot of people are like, I'm going to go to Japan and I'm going to immerse myself. Or I'm going to go to France and I'm going to immerse myself. And I've only got a budget to stay there for a month, but I'm going to hit it really hard when I'm there. And they use that as a procrastination tool. Exactly. And I get a lot of harassment for that too because they say, oh, well, you speak Japanese because you live there. And I...

Most people know that's not true, like as far as what I my beliefs on immersion. But unfortunately, like I talk about a vocal minority, there's a lot of people or a small amount of people who say a lot. And that becomes the belief of like, oh, you need to be over there. And that's kind of how immersion is.

It's a vocal minority sense. I think in general, people are misled by that vocal minority and they think, unfortunately, like, oh, I have to go there to learn the language. But it's really, it's just not true. You can immerse anywhere. Your phone is an immersion if you can make it, you know? Yeah. How much money do you think you spent learning Japanese? To conversational fluency, maybe a hundred bucks or

Okay. Because I was using a lot of Google and YouTube for the most part. How much money do you think you spent learning software engineering and programming? Maybe as much as the one course I bought, which I can't remember. And I didn't even need that for my first client. It was free. And then after that, I'm trying to remember maybe 500, 600 bucks, something like that. Yeah. How much money have you spent on like learning guitar or piano over the years?

a couple of guitar courses for like 30 bucks each and then piano two courses, which totaled out to like maybe 40, $50. Yeah. So a lot of it really is just the practice. That's really it. It's just the practice. Yeah. And, and like, I'm going to, I'm going to just stay on the topic of money for just a second longer. How much do you think you spent on like, like if you wanted to learn guitar, learn keyboard and you just wanted to get some basic gear, um,

To learn that, how much money do you think you would spend? My guitar, even this Ibanez, is $200. The one I use in my videos that people like. And they say, oh, it sounds great. It's a $200 guitar with standard pickups. Yeah. The most expensive one is that one right there, that TOD 10N.

And that is maybe, I can't remember, $800? But I didn't even need that. That was just a recent purchase. To get to where I am, $200 for the guitar, $100 amp, and then like a $100 multi-effects pedal.

And before that, actually, like in high school, I had a starter kit, which is basically you buy the box. I'm sure you've seen those. It has everything. It has a pick, a little cheap off brand guitar, a little amp. And it's just really for you to get the repetitions. And I think it was like a knockoff of a Fender Squire. Basically, I can't even remember the name of it.

But that is what I just started learning on. And I would just go through the things. I wasn't worried about my tone. I wasn't worried about how good I sounded as far as effects and amplification goes. I just said, okay, this is something just to get started. And that small investment combined with practice, then you see what you want later on. But you really don't need much.

Yeah, and I'll just point out the gear that I use. I've got a Fender P-Bass, like $600. I think made in Mexico. I didn't buy some vintage thing hand-assembled by Leo Fender himself. And then a Fender Strat that was like $600. And that keyboard there is literally less than $100 at

Maybe $100 off Sweetwater. So, like, the gear you need... The only thing that I have that is expensive is this drum pad, and it was, like, $700, $800. Yeah. The OctoPad. But, like...

I've spent basically no money on learning programming, no money on language other than, you know, of course, like the university course I took on Japanese. That was the only formal training. And then I did like an intensive Mandarin program in China that was like at the Japanese or at the Chinese university. I think I paid like,

800 RMB for that, which is like the equivalent of a hundred dollars for like an entire semester. Okay. So like, like the, the point of all this, if you're like, okay, what is it going on about? Like, you don't need a lot of money to do this and you can probably get a guitar or a keyboard or something, whichever country you are in. Like, even if you're in a remote village, you may be able to like, just get one off the internet or you may have one lying around at a friend's house that you can borrow or something. You, you,

And if you're learning natural language or if you're learning programming, like literally any device, you can learn on a phone. I talk to people all the time who are using FreeCodeKeep on their phones to learn to code. They don't even own a laptop. So I guess what I'm trying to do is just take away people's excuses because I feel like I hear a lot of excuses. And I think one legitimate excuse people have is like, I'm really busy.

And that's the hardest one to overcome. But you've shown that like – I mean you and I are both working like 40-ish hour work weeks and also kind of maintaining these skills and continue to push forward with these different skills. It can be done, but like a lot of people may be taking care of their folks. They may have kids. They may have multiple jobs. They may have long commutes. That is the hard one to solve is the time dimension. But the money dimension –

really shouldn't be that big of a consideration in my humble opinion. And, um, and I hope that doesn't come across as, you know, like, Oh, of course you live in like the wealthiest country in the world. And like, you know, I don't know. I think people will know what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, one last question I want to ask is, I think it was really insightful when you started learning, uh,

which you said you bought that piano and you had it for years before you really got into the swing of actually learning how to play it. It's daunting. 88 keys. Like, like I always like to say, like, you know, if you think dark souls is hard, wait till you try to learn a piano. Yeah.

Yeah. But your plan for learning piano was very different from my kids who are doing competitions and trying to learn piano so that they can get into conservatory and stuff like that. And they have a piano teacher and all that stuff. That is the more traditional approach that kids would take when they're young, learning piano and stuff like that. But you approached it as an adult and you approached...

Language learning as an adult and learning programming, all this stuff happened mostly as an adult. This is one of the things that I always tell people. Adults can actually learn much more efficiently than kids because they're motivated and they're organized and things like that. But the way you went about learning piano was not, okay, I'm going to learn how – I have this goal. I want to play Moonlight Sonata and I'm going to learn everything involved so I can be like a classically trained pianist and stuff like that. That's not how you approach it. How did you approach it?

So for me, my main goal on piano is to get the sounds in my head onto the piano. So I said, okay, what do I need to do that? And basically, it's just a lot of theory knowledge. So knowledge of scales, triads, chord progressions, inverted chords, seventh chords, ninth chords, what those sound like. If I hear a C major 7 flat 5 in a song, I need to know what that is. And so...

For me, I said, okay, what can I do to get recognition of these sounds and then how to produce them? And so what I do to learn piano is I listen to music and then I study it. So I'll listen to...

I'll say like Eternal Forest from Pokemon. Yeah. Right. Good song. That song had the main chords are C major seven flat five. I think I just said that. Yeah. And then G major seven. And so I'll learn how those look on the piano, how that how I can play them, how they're played in the song. And I internalize that memory. OK, this is what that sounds like. That progression, that four to one or that one to four progression.

and I can internalize that. And then I take that same process and I apply it to a lot of other sounds. So maybe I like a four, six, one, two progression. First of all, how did I come to that conclusion? Okay. I like this song. Why do I like this song? Okay. I break down this chord four, six, one, two, for example, in B major is E I believe at B and then, uh, or not, not B it's E. Let me look at my thing. Yeah. Um,

A sharp. So E, A sharp, and then B, and then C sharp minor. Or G sharp. G sharp, B, and then C sharp minor. I'm here putting my hands on the keys right now. But even that is like...

How does it feel on my hands? Even the reason why I couldn't just say that is because my goal was to get it on my hands. Yeah. And I can hear it, recognize it, get it on my hands. So if I say E major 7, it may take me a while to say like, okay, E, the seventh note is over here, blah, blah, blah. But I can immediately press it on the keyboard. And boom. Exactly. It's just E major 7. Okay, what is a G sharp minor?

or a G sharp major. What is it? What is a B major? What is a B major nine? What is a B major seven? What is a C sharp, whatever. And I can just take that shape and put it on the keyboard. Yeah. And for me, that's more important than something like reading sheet music or being able to name all the notes in some core or some key and all that, which I'm working on even right now, like

I can play stuff and not even know what I'm playing sometimes, but my brain can take the sound and put it to my hands. So I'll play something and I say, well, what chord was that? Or like, what notes is that? And for me, I'm okay with that because I don't, I don't have anything to prove as far as,

like knowledge and all that. I just, I'm so focused on getting the sounds in my head to come out on the piano that that's all I care about. Even right now, people think I'm some advanced piano player, but I'm really not. The sounds I can make,

can be advanced. I can do advanced arpeggios and advanced chords and all that, but it would take me a while if you said, Hey, label that chord out. I would have to, like I just had to do. Okay. That's an E major seven. That's a G sharp and E a B note. Okay. Now I can remember that, but I can't maybe just spit it off the top of my head. But for me, what's way more important and what is unorthodox for some people is just getting the sound right.

to play. If I can get the sounds in my head to play, that's what I care about. I think notes and intervals and all that is really important, but you have to just sit there and do the thing you're trying to get out of your head. So now even in little micro learning, like I know exactly what a C major seven flat five feels like in all of the inversions, but I can't tell you the chord order of like, I can't tell you the note order of C major seven flat five.

Like if I said second version C major seven flat five, but the B is in the bass, it would take me a while to spit that off or I would have to visualize a piano in my head and okay, B is here, then it's C and then blah, blah, blah. But I can just do it. And for me, that streamlined my piano playing so much to where I can play hard songs. I can play a lot of complex things.

But that's my goal. I want to be able to play what's in my head and I don't care about anything else. Sheet music, whatever random scale that I don't need. If like Dorian sharp two or something, I don't care about it. And maybe I'll learn that later. But if it's anything I like to hear video game music or some sort of thing like that, I just learned how to play that and then cross the other bridges when I get there. And that's how my piano playing has been going. And honestly, I,

I've gotten so much results from that and I can immediately make music that I like. And that's my favorite part about it. The practicality aspect. Again, I can just say like, oh, that sounds cool. I wonder if I can add some sort of color note here or some sort of other thing here. And while someone on the more technical side may know what that is, like they may know that means, OK, Lydian has a sharp four, which I know that now. But at first I just know, OK, I need to raise this note a bit.

And then it gives me that sound and I can produce that sound. And so going back to like the main thing, the learning aspect of just focusing on practicality, it's so much, it's so important. And it's really just gotten me so much results on piano and many other things. Honestly, it's, I can't talk about it enough. Really this, the practicality aspect of it. Yeah.

And I want to like kind of dive into something you said there. Like there are people out there that have like PhDs in musicology or people who are orchestral musicians who like eat, sleep, and breathe this and who've spent tens of thousands of hours behind the piano or with their instrument or composing on sheet music or something. And they may be able to just open up MuseScore and just like –

quickly map out a song, note it down, stuff like that. And that is not something that you nor I have optimized for. We've optimized for actually being able to play music and get what's in our head onto the digital audio workstation or wherever, right? Exactly. And I have profound respect for people who do have expertise. I have profound respect for people who go really deep on Chinese and can read the old...

you know, scrolls from hundreds of years ago and can recognize, like they understand how the characters have changed over the millennia and stuff like that. And they can read that stuff or they understand these archaic words for like some sort of instrument you would use to like hoe the earth because there was a really big deal back in the agrarian days or something like that. Like I have profound respect for that level of expertise. We're not, you know, saying, Oh, you know, the experts are useless. Cause you know, like, let's just sit down and like do it, you know? But, uh, there's, there's a big difference between, uh,

Spending your entire life becoming an expert in data structures and reading the Gang of Four book and really appreciating all the different design patterns in there or going and reading Donald Knuth and understanding all this esoteric

in software design and stuff like that. Like, like I respect people who go that deep on that, but that is not me. I am not the kind of person who goes deep on any one subject. I'm a person who wants to do a lot of things. And you've created a lot of videos around this, like how to manage having multiple interests. And really that's exactly what you just said. Is it like not getting so caught up in all those extra things?

Yeah. And do you think that there are going to be a lot of people like, I like to say like our generation, but I'm probably like at least 10 years older than you. Like, like people who are coming up now,

who are maybe watching this on YouTube or watching some of your other videos or listening to this while they're driving. Maybe they're driving a truck or something. I often think of people who are listening to the podcast as they have the time to listen, but their hands have to be busy doing work or taking care of their kids or something like that. Do you think there are people that are listening to this right now that there's going to be this whole generation of kind of like,

renaissance men, so to speak, and renaissance women who are not daunted and can pick up multiple instruments or pick up multiple languages and are not all like, I'm a polyglot. I can speak like 20 languages. You'll fall into that on YouTube. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that. I think it's kind of toxic. The people who just... They're trying to impress you with the sheer volume of languages they've learned or something like that rather than actually going deep and actually learning. So there's like...

There's kind of a spectrum. On one hand, the people who are like total dabblers and are just doing the bare minimum so they can add it to their checklist, right? Yeah, yeah. And then there are the people that go extremely deep, and those people are also very impressive. And then there are the people in the middle that they can do a lot of different things, but they are not necessarily experts in one given thing. But their ability to do a lot of different things may give them some insight into the overlaps.

Like if you study several East Asian languages or you study several Romance languages or if you learn several stringed instruments, you see these parallels that other people who are on either side of the spectrum may not have because these people don't have sufficient depth and these people have just only learned one thing their entire life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And really, I do think that's going to be on the rise because people are going to see there's way more benefit to not –

Having that super extreme expertise in one thing, but rather more benefit to having multiple avenues and just a pretty adept skill in those, you know, even me, like the only things I would really consider myself advanced in is maybe guitar and MMA.

And I guess technically fluency in Japanese because I work there and I can say what I want and understand stuff without content. But other than that, I'm not the best piano player. I'm not the best at anything else. I just I have my main kind of peaks, like my main things and then everything else. It's all about what I need and not what I can flex and learn all these intricate things that I'm never no one's ever going to even know what I'm talking about.

I can do that and only in guitar and MMA, maybe that's about it. But even then, if I'm doing it, it's probably just to make myself look good and not really to help anyone else out. It's just to say like, Oh, I know what Phrygian dominant notes are in E Phrygian dominant. I know all the notes and blah, blah, blah. But,

Most people don't even know what that even means. So it's like, well, who cares? And I think as people realize there's no need to flex or there's no need to brag or there's no need to reach those levels because it's kind of useless. Then they'll be okay with saying like, okay, I can learn up to this skill in something or this practicality in something. And I can just pick up another hobby after that. I don't need to be the most advanced at it. Like me, even in a fighting sense, I'm,

I'm never going to beat Jon Jones. It's just not going to happen. I'm not going to be a UFC champion because that's not my goal. I like fighting. I did it for like a decade or plus. But even that, I'm not going to go into the cage right now and win the lightweight title. It's just not going to happen because that's not something that I'm really driven on. And I like to do a lot of other things at the same time.

But I have a good enough level to where I feel good. I like what I do. I can think I can be creative on pretty much everything I do now. But I never really need to get to that super expert level because there's no like I guess what I'm trying to say is the higher you get, the payoffs diminish. Yeah, they diminish a lot more. And once you reach a certain level, that's really the only practical part. And really a good example of this is music.

Music is a thing where the most popular and famous and best musicians are not the most technically skilled at all. There's music, popular musicians, pianists and, you know, rock bands and all that who don't even know basic music theory. They, if I told them to show me a G major seven drop two on a guitar, they wouldn't know what I'm talking about, but they can make really good popular music. And because they have, uh,

their necessary skills and they focus on, okay, let me do what I just like in this and explore that. So I do think it'll be on the rise as people get more evidence that you don't need to be in this extreme bracket of things. You just, there's, there's really no use for it. Yeah. I think that, uh,

A good closing question for you is just why? Why learn all these different skills? What is your motivation for continuing to, you know, picking up Spanish, picking up piano, other things that you've recently picked up? Why do you continue to learn? Really, it's just curiosity. I just naturally have a, like a, I guess a curiosity to learn more things or an interest to learn more things and

It's never really been external. I guess even since when I was learning that learning can be fun, that spark, even before that, though, I was always interested in different things like outside of the norm and all that. It's just once I realized that learning could be a certain way, then, OK, now I'm really curious. What else am I curious about? What else do I want to do? And that is kind of what build upon itself is.

And so really for me, it's just curiosity. Curiosity is just my main thing. I may have a new interest next week that I don't even know about and I'm going to test it out and see what I want to do. There's probably a bit of ADHD involved in that too. Neurodivergence going on. I'm not really sure. I think most people who are into a lot of things have a bit of neurodivergence, but I'm not a doctor. I don't know any of that stuff.

But like in general, I always had this curiosity for things. And I think many people do. They just don't really express it. But I really do see, especially now with the direction of my channel, many people have that curiosity. And so it'll be nice to see people explore it more. Yeah. Awesome. Well,

Really, really appreciate you taking so much time to talk with me and share your world and many of the things you've learned through the process of learning all these things, communicating and inspiring other people to go out there and learn, helping steer people away, steer people around icebergs.

like that they need to save a bunch of money up and go overseas to learn. Steer people around like listening to the vocal minority on places like Reddit, the naysayers. Steer people away from falling prey to judgment from friends and family that might limit the scope of their ambition. And just giving people this really pragmatic worldview. This can do. Let's pick things up. Let's see what we can do here.

Yeah. I think it's super energizing. Well, thank you. Thank you. That and just, I guess one thing before I go, I will say mistakes are like,

You need to get those down. Just make as many mistakes as possible and don't be afraid because I think that's one huge limiting factor in growth in just about anything. You've got to be willing to make a lot of mistakes and don't care about how you look externally, your ego or how people are going to judge you because it doesn't matter. Just make the mistakes, learn the things, grow, learn from those mistakes, continue to improve and

And I think that's where the most results in anything comes, especially coding. You're going to mess things up. It's okay. Just make as many mistakes as possible, really, so you can just learn from those. Yeah, 100%. Yep. Juan, it's been an absolute pleasure, man. Oh, yeah. Same here. All right. Well, everybody's tuning in. Until next week, happy coding.