Varun Rajan 0:06

Hey everyone, I am excited to launch season two of the Push Pull podcast where we explore how people navigate careers. In season one, I specifically focused on the push and pull factors that informed career transitions and ahead of recording episodes for this season, I realized that my view was pretty narrow. It's true that a focus on transition points really helped me understand decision making and paint the most compelling picture of a person's career journey. But I realized there was so much more that I wanted to dive into. How should people think about what they want to get out of their work, and how work or place of work enables people to build and experience the lives that they truly wanna live? And what does that mean for the rest of us? Amidst the backdrop of all of these larger economic shifts. As someone who is really excited about AI tools and workflows, I was trying to avoid AI becoming the central focus of the season, but when we think about work. Today in 2026, AI is absolutely the main character of the story, and the mass layoffs associated with it are this looming sword of Damocles that's hanging over nearly everybody that I know, especially in tech. Most people that I meet at meetups and conferences feel like they're treading water at best and drowning at worst. Those who are unemployed feel like they're sending job applications into the ether never to be heard from again. Trying to signal that they're still with it by chasing every new trend that they see. While those who are lucky enough to still be working, feel like the expectations to adopt AI have pushed them to the point of exhaustion and burnout, struggling to keep up, and they still worry that their functions are going to either get axed replaced or offshored under the guise of being automated. as far as I go, I'm kind of living my best life. I can't deny that AI has been a game changer for me. I am building new tools at a rate that I never thought possible. My own consulting CRM, a custom portfolio to showcase my work. A portfolio builder for non-technical folks who just want to reduce speed to signal on the job market. And. Honestly most exciting for me. I built a dog food and med tracking app called Goofy Scoops, uh, because my dog is a huge goofball and, uh, well, I have a long list of feature requests that mostly come from my wife. It's awesome. And of course, AI tools have been in heavy rotation while editing my podcast interviews. But with. Powerful tools fueling the potential for abundant and limitless opportunity. My social feeds are inundated with fear and a sense of scarcity. Oh, product management is over. Ux design is over. Software engineering is dead. The job market is never coming back to where it was. Your skills are already obsolete, and it is so. Annoying as a perennial optimist, I have been surprised and dismayed by the sheer amount of doomerism that I've seen recently. And I'm not saying that we stick our head in the sand and hope that everything works out, but we get to proactively shape what our futures look like, and if we're paying attention and acting with conviction, we can build a much better life for ourselves. Technological revolutions happen. There is always near term displacement and doubt, and that is all real, but we cannot fall victim into abandoning our role as the champions in our own lives. So this season. I'm taking a slightly different approach to my interviews. I still ask about career transitions, but I let my intuition guide me more. I speak to friends about how they've seen things changing and how they've stayed true to themselves while continuing to find fulfillment in their careers. I speak to founders who are building in the talent space using AI to enable fulfilling work one way or another, whether it's helping job seekers as humans to put their best and most accurate representation into the world, or helping employers learn the truth about the emotional landscape of their companies to promote and build a better environment for the people that get the work done. I keep coming back to this idea of conviction as the antidote to fear, uncertainty, and doubt that surrounds us in this day and age. Not certainty. Certainty to be sure is a trap. it is what we wait around too long for when we're too scared to be wrong. Conviction on the other hand is when we have a baseline level of evidence that meets our intuition. And it is the fuel that you need to move and find direction when the road signs point in 10 different directions and suggest that every direction leads you to some likelihood of doom. It's informed faith Place bold bets. Take chances on projects that don't fully make sense. Pursue something that you cannot fully justify to everybody else and trust that you'll be able to justify it in hindsight because you'll figure it out along the way and make it happen. And stop listening to the goofballs who are selling you cortisol spikes. It's engagement bait, it's doomerism and none of that is building the world we want, need and deserve.