For engineers, architects, and technical leaders navigating careers in an era when AI assists with almost everything else.
He thought I had switched careers entirely.
This was a leader from my previous company, someone I had worked alongside on solutions for enterprise customers. He knew me professionally. He knew I was an engineer. And somewhere along the way, watching my LinkedIn feed, he had concluded that I had left engineering behind to become a full-time podcast host and creator in the AI space. He said this explicitly, on the call, when he reached out to brief me about a role.
The Job I Did Not Apply For
I was not looking for a new role when he called. I had not updated my resume. I had not done a job interview in years. No recruiter was involved. No former colleague had passed my name to HR.
He had simply watched my social media feed: podcast episodes, engagement with guests, consistent presence around a specific topic. That was enough for him to decide I was worth a conversation. That conversation led to an interview process and, eventually, an offer. I joined as a Consultant Software Engineer at one of the largest software companies in the world, in a role with an AI angle.
Somewhere in the middle of that interview process, I stopped and traced it back. The podcast content itself (the healthcare domain, the clinical conversations) wasn’t what had got me in the door. The new role had nothing to do with healthcare. What had got me in the door was what the podcast represented: consistency, follow-through, genuine interest in a subject, and a public work log that anyone could look at and verify. The website was the proof. The archive was the evidence.
I had not planned it that way. But that’s what it had become.
The Hard Stop
I stopped podcasting when I started the new role. The last episode I recorded was in late January 2022. I had a pipeline of guests, people who had agreed to come on, conversations I was genuinely looking forward to, and I had to send them declines. That part was harder than the decision itself had been. There were actual people on the other end of those messages.
Leaving it was genuinely hard. The podcast had reached Top 8 in its category globally. The audience was growing. In Season 2, as I had expanded beyond clinicians to scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and solopreneurs, something had started shifting in who was listening. Back-channel DMs were arriving from a different kind of person: builders, thinkers, people who were making things with AI rather than just reading about it. Episodes like the one with Chris Lovejoy, a doctor turned data scientist, and Dr. Josh Case, a physician who taught other doctors to code, were drawing listeners who lived at the same intersection I did. The audience was finding itself.
I did not delete anything. The website stayed live. The social handles stayed active. Everything I had built stayed exactly where it was.
What Happened During the Silence
A few weeks after I stopped, I got a notification: monthly podcast downloads had crossed 100. A few months later, 150. I assumed it would taper off.
It didn’t. Eight months after I stopped recording, the downloads were still arriving. Twelve months. Twenty months. I would check the stats expecting to see nothing, and find the counter still moving. Requests for new episodes kept coming in through 2023, 2024, and into 2026, from listeners who had found the archive long after I had walked away.
I’ve come to think that a dormant brand isn’t a dead brand. The archive was doing work I was not doing. Every month, somewhere, someone found an episode and kept it alive a little longer.
The Layoff, and Coming Back
In November 2025, I was laid off. I took the rest of the year off. In January 2026 I started learning again: LLMs, agentic AI, the tooling that had emerged while I had been heads-down. By February I had hit a wall. The learning fatigue was real: consuming content about building things while not building anything. The itch to make something concrete became impossible to ignore.
That’s when I remembered You+AI was still there.
I went back to the website. The domain was live, the social handles were intact, the archive was still pulling in downloads. Years of public work were sitting there, timestamped and searchable, exactly as I had left them. It felt like coming home to find the lights still on.
I decided to build open-source agentic AI tools to solve the cloud network troubleshooting problems I had experienced firsthand: cloud opacity, the gap between what a network is configured to do and what it is actually doing. A real problem. A worthy cause. And I had a brand that could carry the work.
The Name Had Foresight I Did Not Know I Had
I briefly considered whether to change the brand name. You+AI had become associated with AI and healthcare. Would it carry into a completely different domain?
Then I looked at the name again, and at what had already been happening in Season 2. When I had expanded beyond clinicians to engineers, builders, and entrepreneurs, the back-channel DMs from that new audience were already telling me something about who You+AI was really for. It was not only about healthcare. It never had been limited at its core. It was about the intersection of human expertise and AI, whoever the human is, whatever the domain. Back then, that human was a clinician. Now, it’s an engineer working at the edge of what cloud infrastructure can see about itself.
The brand had already started pivoting before I consciously decided to pivot. The name just made it possible.
One former listener reached out and asked if I would return to AI and healthcare content. I told him I was open to it, but asked whether he would be willing to contribute and collaborate toward it, because my focus had shifted and I couldn’t carry both directions alone. Several newer followers sent messages welcoming the change. The brand held.
What I Know Now
All new things start slow. They simmer and then reach a point where they feel worthless, where you find yourself with the quit announcement already written, wondering why you are still doing this.
I had that announcement ready once. I almost sent it.
What kept me going was a prior commitment, a cold DM that got answered, and two episodes that reminded me the foundation was real. From that foundation eventually came a job I never applied for, because a leader had been watching long enough to revise his entire understanding of who I was. What came after that was three years of passive downloads, and a brand that was still standing when I needed it again, under a name flexible enough to carry whatever I wanted to build next.
Long shots work, I’ve found, if your foundation is real. The recognition, the call, the return: none of it was planned, and none of it was an accident.
I know this because it happened to me. Twice. Under the same brand name.
You can follow what I’m building now at youplusai.com, or find me at @youplusai, the same place it has always been.