Embedded - 399: Hey, What's Going On?

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Jen Costillo joined us to talk about voice acting, reverse engineering, podcasting, and dance. Jen’s podcast is the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast, found in all your usual podcast places. Jen and her co-host Alvaro were on an episode of Opposable Thumbs podcast. Find Jen on Twitter at @RebelbotJen (also @unnamed_show and @catmachinesSF). Rebelbot.com has her blog and Cat Machines Dance is her site devoted to dance (including the mentioned video about dancers and the pandemic). The Hardware Hacking Handbook: Breaking Embedded Security with Hardware Attacks by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn  Jen is studying voice-overs at VoicetraxSF  Jen has been on the show many times in the past. Some of our favorites include 108: Nebarious about security and privacy 82: I Was a Chewbacca Person about movies that influenced their path to engineering 51: There Is No Crying in Strcpy about interviewing 25: Thunderdome for Antennas about RF and manufacturing consumer products 10: Hands Off, Baby about C keywords

Welcome to Embedded. I'm Alicia White, alongside Christopher White. Remember what owl sounded like in the last Winnie the Pooh reading? Well, let's talk more about voices and what it means for our talking devices. I'm pleased to welcome Jen Costillo back to the show. Hey, Jen. It's nice to talk to you. Hi. Nice to be back. It has been a long, long time.

7,000 years. Is that how long you've been doing the podcast? You know, 400's coming up. And we don't do 50 a year, so that's a long time. But since it has been a long time, could you introduce yourself as though we had never heard your podcast or knew anything about you? Sure. I'll try to keep it short-ish. Hi, I'm Jen Castillo, and I'm a firmware engineer who loves to work on wearables

and sensor-related items, including the awful, awful Amazon Fire Phone. But I also, you're not supposed to laugh, but also I'm a dancer. I do fashion design occasionally as part of doing the wearables. And lately, I've been doing a lot of knitting and voiceover. Okay. Are you ready for lightning round? Can you ever be ready for lightning round? We're not. Okay, well. We are never ready.

Do you want me to feed you questions? Yeah, go ahead. jen it's your turn okay which is your favorite nostril to pick i just think about that um oh oh of of my own oh yeah oh well that limits it too much it does okay how about favorite looney tunes cartoon voice honestly okay it's uh it's either gonna be marvin the martian or babs bunny which depending on whether you count her as part of the original. Which is probably just also Dot, Dot Warner, same woman. Yeah. Fictional robot with the best voice. Oh. Poop.

I really love Alan Rickman's voice, and when he was in Hitchhiker's Guide, I loved that one. But I had to recently do an AI voice for class. And I had to rewatch 2001. So I'm going to go with H. John Benjamin's How. It's just so relaxed. So relaxed and menacing. If you could teach a college course, what would you want to teach?

Reverse engineering. Current favorite new thing you've learned about or seen or obsessing about? Oh, I guess it would have to be probably voiceover specifically for video games. Give a tip everyone should know. Always disconnect the power. Yes. Even if you want to use it, disconnect the power and then reconnect the power. I used that tip today.

I was very careful about disconnecting the power today. It's really important. I've seen it happen too many times. Okay, you mentioned class and games and voices, and what's going on with that? So, I think, Elle, if you remember from our little jaunt to Vegas, there was one of my partner's friends who came in from Israel named Zahi. And he, for Israel, he was basically the voice of Israel for many, many years. So he did all the voiceovers on TV, radio, and what have you. And if you remember, he did some voices for us while we were there. I think he had like Al Pacino and some other stuff. Anyway, talking with him a little bit more, it felt like,

oh, I mean, something that I'd want to do, because as many of you know, I don't put my face out. I don't put my face online. So it felt like this is something I could do, potentially. It felt like something that didn't rely on my face. It felt like it was also something that was portable. I didn't have to be in a particular location to do it, depending on the type of work that you're doing. We can talk about that more. There are some types of voiceover work that you actually need know, in your studio, which for me is just my closet. That said, I haven't booked paying gigs.

I book a lot of like free stuff or, you know, pick up something at work. But yeah, so that's how it started. But this is a side gig hobby? I would say right now it's a hobby. I consider myself a student and a wannabe, so i'm just learning a lot of stuff it turns out there is absolutely no bar whatsoever in this industry it's like you know hawk and dance classes theoretically you don't need any credential there are no credentials but um somebody who really wants to be a ballet dancer professionally will go to a somebody who has a strong background in ballet, maybe certified by ABT to teach ballet. But on the whole, no, it's it's just the same way. It's just like exactly what you would expect from, you know, actors and models and things like that. There's a lot of bullshit out there. So is it a similar process for getting a gig? Do you have, I guess you could have like a portfolio, but is there like an audition process for stuff? Or is it mostly, here's a casting call and submit your voice files and we'll get back to you. Yeah, there's a couple different places.

So there are places that are free and some of those jobs, most of those jobs are free. Sometimes there's like Fiverr. Fiverr apparently has upended the voiceover industry so that you could like someone like me, if I sound good enough, I can get that $5 away from somebody who's trained and does this professionally. As long as I have good enough equipment, and as long as I am what they want. I am not what they want. I don't have a really perky voice, naturally. So if you want a big commercial, I'm not that person. Probably. Not going to do the movie trailer. Well, OK, so we have it. So I'll try to finish up answering your in a Disney film or a Pixar film, or I was in the latest documentary from Ken Burns, stuff like that. It just opens the door. Same thing kind of for like, if you want to do a big name

audiobook, you probably need to be signed. So in the Bay Area, audio books are really popular. Toys are really popular. Video games are very popular. I know about toys because when I worked at LeapFrog, we would send off our scripts for people to say and then chop up the audio so we could put it in the toy yeah yeah i did i did i did take the class on that i did talk to is it man dave hammond who did the voices for all of furby and then let's come back to the games and that, sorry, the toys in just a second. But, um, where were we? Yeah. So there's, so there's all the agents and union related stuff, and then there's pay for play. And those are sites like voice one, two, three voices backstage,

backstage now owns voice one, two, three. And you basically pay a fee, monthly or yearly, to have access to audition. So they'll give you the specs. And you'll deliver something online for them to peruse. And they'll decide if they want to hire you or not. It's pretty damn competitive. And it gets dropped at all hours of the night oh so okay so you might we can talk more about that okay yeah we'll leave that for later but um huh okay that's that's very it seems very uh what's the word i'm looking for almost Almost Wild West. There's just a lot of different ways to get into things and no definitive process then.

Yes and no. I think right now voiceover is really exploding because there are more products that require voiceover. So popular genres, we already talked about video games and animation, audiobooks, but there's all of your audio tours and documentaries. And gosh, you know, every company wants to have a sizzle video, which means, and I have one in front of me from a company that we know that's gotten billions of dollars that I like auditioned for because they're pivoting to something else. You actually doing these auditions, I find out a lot of what's going on in the Bay Area with some of these companies. Yeah, because you're getting their early marketing. Yeah. So there may be NDAs if they decide. They may not give you the whole thing, but like

you may actually find out a substantial amount of stuff. Right. Would you do this for a career? Well, that's what I've been trying to figure out. Like I said, I wanted it to be portable because I was anticipating that when I leave the Bay Area in not too long, you know, not too far out, and we're talking about moving and working internationally, I want to be able to, if I can't get like a firmware job or engineering job to fill my time, then it would be nice to have voiceover work and then maybe teach dance on the side or something like that. I tried to record a whole short story and, you know, like five or six pages ends up being 45 minutes. And it was really hard. It was exhausting. and that was just doing it for my own amusement uh and with chris's help what happened yeah what were the things that you were running into

it's it's hard to talk for that long without and stay and without your voice changing. Without your voice changing. And there were a couple of voices. And I'm okay keeping voices for a little while. I tense certain muscles and that makes my voice change. And so I usually get it pretty close. And yet by the end, I was just really sick of it. That's how I feel about writing a book. To be honest with you, I have not done any audiobook classes yet. I mean, I've taken like kind of work through intro level items related to audiobook.

But I think the main issue, were you trying to do characters too? Not totally radio play style characters, but audiobook style. People should have different voice characters, yes. Yeah, it's tough for everybody. So not only are you basically engaging in the marathon of voiceover, depending on how long it is, but you have to, one of the things they tell you is you have to get each word correct. You can't ad lib the way you would in a video game or animation you need to honor what they wrote very precisely so that's one facet luckily you wrote it it sounds like so that's good um it's hard to have energy but also read slow enough that everyone can understand what's being said keeping the enunciation smooth, clear. Yeah, there's a whole trick to that. There's a whole personality. And like I said, book narration is going to be different,

slightly different than when you're doing a audio tour for a museum versus doing that sizzle video, where you want to have a little bit more energy and it depends on whether that you know but you don't want to have so much that it's over powering what video there may be on the screen with doing the class and some of the video work i've been doing around that uh i have found that i do retakes very well. If they say, oh, we didn't catch something, I can definitely just pretend it never happened and do it with the same enthusiasm all over again. And I don't think I knew how to do that before the podcast. Has having a podcast made you more excited about this? Made it easier?

Been related at all? I actually would say not related at all. It just was a good excuse for me to buy more equipment. I think Chris will relate. I mean, I already had a lot of it, which is another comment on me, but yeah, I, I mean, I mean, I had, you know, I have a lot of Korg stuff from, you know, from my past partner and things like that, like Synthie stuff. But, you know, I had, I was not familiar with Sweetwater prior to picking this up. I know, it's shocking, right? Even I shop at sweet water right right but you have to remember so like i was you know i was going to guitar showcase and i would go to nap like like and i would never buy from starving musician i would go to gilbs up on the peninsula like completely you know i i just would avoid chains whatever possible like it's not surprising to me that i would be completely unaware of

oh no that wasn't why i was laughing i'm laughing at sweetwater because i find them funny for reasons which we can talk about you know what i i have mixed feelings about sweetwater like yeah they're they're a big chain i would rather go to them than uh guitar center yeah by far but and and they they do know what they're talking about. So it's not like surly teens trying to tell you why you should buy this, whatever, you know, bargain basement, whatever amp. Um, but you still, you know, it's still, you were still very reliant on yourself to make the choice, the correct choice for yourself for yourself um but i only really have to worry about you know microphones so i have it way easier but yeah it's nice to go through and look

at all the stuff actually the other thing i look at a lot now is acoustical paneling so i can make my room very silent yes we have a lot of acoustic paneling. Have you been getting the fancy stuff? We got the hexes, and I made a pattern on one of our glass surfaces. And other than that, we have, what size are these? Oh, these are very large panels. We had these at the old house, so I've had these forever. Four by 24? Yeah, they're like four feet by two feet, one and a half inches thick, movable panels.

There was some company for Christmas. They didn't get it here in time. It still hasn't arrived, by the way. My partner got me, ordered me some fancier ones that have more specific designs. Yes. I'm very looking forward to that yeah the the gray oralex is not particularly attractive but they come but they do have nice designs now so it's well these these you could get the which we didn't but the ones we got these big ones you could put art on them if you really wanted to pay a lot of money and stuff but yeah yeah but what art would you put

on there i don't know yeah that's why we didn't get it yeah i'd rather have the anniversary now i can't hear you how much does it relate to your engineering job as a firmware engineer at whatever mysterious company you work at. Well, gosh, thank you. Thank you for maintaining my anonymity. It is so important to me that genuinely is not sarcasm. I, oh man, gosh, I would say not to firmware, maybe to the product I work on because i my product is um audio related on the other hand um i would say as an engineer my voiceover work has been helpful

in so much as there's an awareness of my voice to and i'm going to use this as one engineer said to me and i was very offended, to manipulate people. Oh, yeah. Sure. One of the reasons to get a really good mic for Zoom calls is because it makes you sound authoritative. Well, there's other things that help there. I mean, I have a pretty good mic right now,

but I don't think I sound that authoritative like this. It doesn't matter how downlanding I'm doing it. I will say that that is a distinctive voice right there that it would be hard not to listen to. I mean, honestly, if it was up to me, I would already have my Christian shawl impersonation down. It kills me. I can't do do it i can't do it i can't do it she's got all that east coast stuff going on too so it's hard yeah yeah yeah um where were we uh okay so manipulating manipulating people i don't so i don't think of it so much as manipulating people,

but this one engineer who was, I guess, being very blunt, as they're prone to doing, said, he's like, you're just like me. You're good at manipulating people. And I'm like, what the? I'm like, oh, my God. When HP sent me to win-win negotiation class, I came home and Christopher said, this is just manipulation for idiots.

So yeah, it's not manipulation. It's negotiating. Sure, sure. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being aware of, having a skill at communicating. I mean, that's being good at communicating and being good at communicating and getting better at that. However you do it, that's not manipulation. And often it starts with awareness. Being in the Valley, being an engineer for so long, knowing that my normal speech, I don't think I always talk like this, but this is what I usually talk like. It sounds aggressive to people. It sounds low. Really? Okay. is where gender this is where voiceover starts covering gender stuff in particular having precision down landing lower voice really helps come across as

the expert okay that makes not going up not asking my name is jennifer really will really help you. And I think it's very crucial for when you're doing your presentations and so on. So that's going to help any engineer move up the ranks. Introducing yourself should have no uplanding. It should not be, I'm a firmware engineer. It should be, I'm a firmware engineer. I'm constantly surprised, I'm a firmware engineer. It should be, I'm a firmware engineer. I'm constantly surprised that I'm a firmware engineer.

Well, yes. I'm a firmware engineer? When did that happen? Not again. It is so crucial. It is so crucial for the image of the expert to land down. Not medial, not up, not kind of trailing off, landing down on every single point that you want to make and every single bullet point that you want to make with pauses in between and not being afraid to pause. That can be hard. That does invite people to interrupt you. That is a separate issue. But, you know, the other thing, what I did find is that, you know, when people are agitated, not agitated, but sometimes the way to get people to listen to you is getting quieter and quieter.

And slower, quieter and slower. Yeah. Which is very important when they're just kind of running roughshod. Just kind of sit there, let them say, I mean, that's also kind of negotiation in general. that I found is learning how to soften just a little bit to create an opening for them to come across and also reveal themselves becomes very important. So figuring out how to add warmth to your voice becomes super important. I mean, I know we all dream of being robots as engineers, but we have to know when to turn on the warmth in our voice. I don't think I've ever heard you do that. And it really did make a pretty big difference. It made you sound nice. Yeah, I'm not nice. What are you suggesting?

What are you saying? But, you know, it made you sound, I don't want to say warm and cuddly, but yeah. I mean, it had the effect that you're obviously going for. Right. Yeah. So the one thing I would also say is that just doing this voiceover work means that now when I listen to all of the commercials. Oh, no. When I listen to all of the commercials, I can hear exactly what they're trying to do, why they're picking that tact to sell you stuff. And here's the biggest thing that you'll probably notice.

If you think back to when you watch old movies and listen to old radio, how it also has that announcer voice, brought to you by Maxwell's Coffee. Oh, yeah. And then they'll have the boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. It's like ham-fisted marketing. Very, very, very affected voices with... Yeah, yeah. Welcome to Embedded.

For more. And that's why we... I don't want to give away the game, but that's why the Unnamed podcast always, like, we always laugh a whole lot not because we can't get our shit together but um so so anyway so the today's commercials if you listen to them they're trying to be super relatable super authentic and conversational so they sound like they're talking specifically to you as opposed to some of the older ones which sounded

authoritative like you should listen to me because i know better than you oh yeah and there's like a nice smattering of like sexism always embedded in those old ones oh my god ask your doctor if wizardium is right for you no that it may kill you instantly what about the micro machines guy? Oh, that's also a special genre. People can do disclaimers. Yes.

Just disclaimers. Another area that I'm really in love with in voiceover, not popular, but pays really well, medical narration. Can you say ridiculous words really fast? I mean, really slow, but can you pick it up really fast? Like for transcription or? No. When you're talking, so they'll do a lot of these videos. They'll do voiceover videos for introducing a new medicine.

Okay. And they'll go through and they'll say, okay, when is it appropriate for you to use this treatment? Right. You want to check for this, you know, when indicated by this particular test with this and editotside and metazamine. And there'll be words that you're just like, holy crap, that you will have to learn how to say. It pays really well. It's super interesting, too. I was thinking about technical books and how there are some that are being recorded, and I really think that's a great thing, and it's something I would like to do with mine if I do a second edition.

And yet, that is going to be hard. And there will have to be images translated to words, which I guess really should happen anyway. But I don't know how you would not make it boring. Wait, what? Like reading a technical book. Technical book. How do you make a technical book not boring? Technical audio book.

I guess this is back to audio books, too. This is back to audio. So it's going to be down to what the producer wants the voice to be. What the mood is going to be. There's going to be a take on what that voice should be like usually it's just all the energies bubbling under the surface as you as the expert explaining like why this thing is so cool but it has to have that smooth legato feel throughout but not so much that's going to put you to sleep um so the the what what what your voiceover actor is doing is they're visualizing. They're trying to point

in very minute pauses and shifts in their voice, trying to show you, oh, when you look down here to the right, you can see how there's an opening here where we would then put the XYZ machine. And if you look to the left over here, hey, that's going to line us up really well so our signals come out as blah. Helping them to create that picture in the reader's mind is what's going to help them. And the voiceover person should be, the narrator should be

helping to craft that visualization with their very minute inflections and pauses and so on. Really, it's a musical instrument, right? But it has all the nuances and the same kinds of, not the same kinds of things, but you're trying to convey emotion and create emotional responses by changing how something sounds. And learning to do that seems extremely difficult yeah so for narration it's considered like it's considered you're like walking on a tightrope you're like just so boxed in because you can't just go on and do all this other stuff you can't be changing

words you can't be you know put on voice like you have to you have to you're basically working on a type wrote in this case um yeah versus like some other things like commercials commercials like you could just pretty much be anything they're not asking you to be like an alien reading a book to somebody oh but we did talk about toys toys you can yes you can get a lot of voices in toys yeah so I think maybe when you were there you were working with Chuck Wedge I don't recall that particular name um there were a number of artists we worked with but mostly I didn't work with the artists I worked with the sound people who worked with the artist so right I can tell you about the sound people. So maybe we should fill in what happens with the toys. Let's shift gears away from narration. Yes. And because we could probably talk about that all day. Let's talk about the process

of making a toy. And I will fill in what I know about what happens on the voiceover side. Because it was really fun for me to go through that class and then fill it in from the technical side for them. Okay, so someone comes up with an idea for a toy and it gets developed a bit until it gets to the point where scripts are written. Like, if you push A, it should say, well, actually let's do N. If you push N, it should say, n-n-n-nibble on nuts. I can't believe they let that one through. That was so funny. But then N may be used in multiple different cases. So that needs to be recorded probably separate from the nibbling part. Do you just get a list? Do you get a list of what needs to be said?

Yes. So I have a couple of these scripts. And there could be hundreds or thousands of these. And they're unconnected, right? You just get nibbling on nuts. You don't know that that has anything to do with the letter N. There are particular types of scripts for particular types of toys. So in this one, because, you know, memory considerations, like you're going to be concatenating together vocabulary to save space, potentially.

Oh, my God. Numbers are a different way. There's a difference when you say one, two, like versus when you say it and it gets concatenated with something else. 21 is not 21. No, no, they they'll use slashes and that will tell you, like if there's a slash at the beginning and at the end, they'll tell you, that basically tells you two other things are going to get sandwiched around it. So that little slash will tell you how you say it, which is, if there's something at the, a slash at the end, you want to land up. If there's something at the slash at the end you want to land up if there's something at the

beginning you also kind of start a little up and when it's sandwiched like that you're basically saying it as fast as you can um so if you think uh like like i want four of i i want this with that the width is going to go really fast because of that. So it doesn't sound disconnected and awkward. This is the one place that you basically, in toys, you're doing the exact opposite of narration. You're going to have a really fun vibe. And you're going to be talking to kids and really thinking that you're trying to teach kids all the time. And you'll use contractions.

And you use upspeak. I'm enjoying this. I'm glad you're, you can book this on. Um, yeah, this is how I learned to do my little kid, my,

my boy voice, which is all like, hi and everything like that. But then you just add a little rasp on it, a little attitude. This is fantastic. How do you remember the voices? Oh, God, yeah. In my head?

Well, like, when I do Winnie the Pooh, I totally forgot what Eeyore sounded like. I know that I made Eeyore more feminine than most people expect. And I can definitely redo Owl's voice. Well, you know what my partner said to me? I was watching Daria again. And he's like, Jen, I didn't hear you. What did you say?

And it was just Daria's voice. I was like, oh, no, that's not my voice. My voice baseline is. How do you remember the voice? So when you send in your audition, presumably you're working from home, you will play that back. Presumably you will probably play it in the car as you're going back to record your final thing. So you remember that. And then the studio will probably also play it for you in case you forget do you have like a catalog of voices on your phone like these are my voices

this is my repertoire of voices honestly you you kind of will yeah to some degree so in toys you want you're going to want a certain amount of consistency but one of the things that happens is you'll go in and you'll audition or you'll be like this one main character. And then when that's all done, and this is particular for like animation and video games. I know we're like all over the place. I have not organized my mind very much. They'll ask if there's like extra characters that they have that are like only a few lines here and there. They'll just ask you, hey, can you do these ones? ones and just give me a couple different like two or three takes of this

and they'll what what that means is like you need to come up with a completely different character in a few minutes like not even a few minutes like now just pull something out of your back pot yeah so basically a lot of these these well-known voice actors have have character books um or something they just they've done so many times that they like just, I was like, okay, I'm going to take this one, which means I have this voice, this voice, this background. And I'm just, maybe I'll just like, you know, place the voice higher up or lower down on my chest or something like that. And maybe I'll give it a little different color, which is more like an attitude than anything. And then you have a new character that's slightly different than one maybe you did a couple weeks ago. So it's all like making super minute changes, changing their backstory, why they're accenting certain words. There's just so much you can play with. It's, oh my God, there's just so much you can play with. It's, it's, it's, oh my God, there's just so much

you can do. But it's all very intentional. Have you ever come home and forgotten that you were still in character voice? Some, one of my first voiceover recitals before we went into pandemic, I had a character, we were doing a radio play and there was some girl in the audience that clearly was from Brooklyn or New York, and I never got rid of that voice, ever. I now refer to her as the bagel princess. And it just happens all the time in our household, honestly. honestly i have this problem where if i talk to someone new for a while like we're working together or or if i see a character in a tv show enough i start to i start to absorb things unintentionally into my voice that could be like a problem i think that's just being an american who watches a lot of tv well it's probably i mean i i can't say that I'm any different than that.

Yeah. It could be a skill. I mean, if you, not that I have that skill, but. If you can match it, that's a trick. Then maybe you'll have, there's a couple of different areas that that can end up being useful in. If they need people to do dubs. Or IVR, where it's like, yeah, which is basically just dubbing. There was one thing that I auditioned for. They had an Israeli yogurt commercial where the actress slash model,

they didn't like the way she sounded for whatever reason, so they needed someone to come in and say, hey, what's going on? Which is just like, and they liked my audition for that, which is insane. Hey, what's going on? And I think that was like worth over $100 dollars just saying that um or there's international like there's international companies that are looking for you they want to make they want to move into the united states so they have their like dutch jingle that they want you to do their rewrite in english so now you have like dumb stuff in your head like fish and bread it does seem like the

international dubbing would be an additional challenge, right? Because the translations don't necessarily match the length of the... Yeah. So is that something that you may not know, but is that something that the voiceover talent has to worry about so much? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, kind of yeah kind of kind of um it's just kind of like whenever you watch any of those older hong kong films like there's there's what's been subtitled and then there's what comes out of

their mouth and you're just like those are not the same thing and that's in english too so i don't even know what's going on um but we were talking about toys uh i i'm glad that you guys are having a good time with this because i wasn't sure when i proposed this to elle whether she was going to enjoy this or not um toys toys toys so so yeah there's a particular way that you're supposed to speak um to make things sound like they flow together um not to mention the fact that, you know, that's pretty much for an educational toy. There's a whole range of toys of just like nonsense gibberish. And so I've learned how to talk gibberish or how to make up gibberish. Like they'll give you a line that says like, we want an octopus character or a llama.

And then here are their lines. And they'll say like, hi. Right, right. Exactly. So it'll be like that's the octopus right right so so they'll say like hey this is she you know she's really friendly except you know if you touch her food or something like that and then you'll they'll give us like they'll be like hi i'm so and so like and then you have to like gibberish talk

hi i'm i'm opal the octopus or something like that and then they'll say like what are you making to eat what are you making for me? Hey, that looks gross. Like you have to like act that out in gibberish and non-words as an octopus. See that I could do. That I have no problem with. And the thing is that the secret to all of this is, is like if the kids love, love what they're hearing, but the parents hate it, you've done a great job. That's what one of my teachers told me.

Yeah, that's all toys. Okay, let's set that aside for a minute. Okay. You have a podcast, which we've mentioned. Have you named it yet? I know that was a burning question. I felt like I built in this marketing joke because I was really hoping that people would suggest names for us over the course. And that like, you know, much like, you know, long running sitcoms like How I Met Your Mom or, you know, whatever. I don't know that's the first one that popped in my head i you know what honestly i never really watched how i met your mom and i most definitely never watched friends so i'm kind of not the right person but you know things that

you know the show is over when so and so hooks up with the other person there's just like no point to having the show anymore so like when when your show is named, you're just going to call it. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of, let me tell you, I had to spend a lot of time convincing Alvaro that this was the right name.

It's a little mysterious. It's a little ridiculous. It means I can have UNRE as our, as our acronym for the podcast, which is clever because I have an idea for the logo. I mean, it's probably the best marketing I've ever done in my entire life. I'm really bad at marketing. Yes. I joined the club.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast. Just so that we get past the not having mentioned actual name of the unnamed. The full name. Yes. And we've had your co-host Alvaro on a couple of times.

Yeah. Not always talking about the show, but because he's... Cheese. Did you guys talk about cheese? We talked about cheese, yes. He's good for that. Yeah. And bread. Yeah. And bread.

Yeah. How do you describe the unnamed reverse engineering podcast to people who have never heard it? Well, mostly that it's unnamed, and if they have a name, please suggest one. But then right after that, I talk about that we talk about any aspect of reverse engineering, which is suitable for anyone from beginner all the way through expert. What's been interesting is how much people like listening to sometimes very, very long interviews. I don't know necessarily if anyone's getting anything out of them. It is difficult because reverse engineering is such a hands-on visual media, it seems like. How do you make that into something interesting in an audio medium has been

challenging. I understand that. Yeah, I can't imagine. And are you baffled that people listen to it? I feel blessed. Yeah? I definitely feel blessed. I feel bad because we don't release more episodes.

You're monthly, right? Pretty much. That is a very kind, that's a very kind, beautifully. Mostly monthly. I would say we're like three to four weeks. Sometimes it leaks out a little bit longer

than we'd like. It is, you know, the thing that amazes me is like some of our better received episodes were ones where I was just like, look, we're going to talk about this guy who's doing something on Animal Crossing. And he was super nervous. I wasn't sure how it was going to pan out from a reverse engineering perspective, but like it worked out really well. And actually it begat more guests in different places.

So I don't know. Sometimes you get a... I'm not saying that Animal Crossing is a bad thing. I love Animal Crossing. But not everything has to be like, and then I applied the acid, and then I read out all the bits, and now I have an nft farm that i've created just just using all these greeting cards that i reverse engineered

which episode was that i don't know but i think it might be coming we we kind of realized a while ago that we the two of us are terrible at kind of predicting what episodes people will respond to and what they won't. Like, we'll have a show where they're like, well, that was awesome. And we went great depth into this and that, and it was great educational, and then crickets. And then we'll have a show about, I don't know, cheese, for example. People are like, yeah, that was great. It's like, I don't know what people want. People like cheese.

That's true. I think the issue is, and this is meant with a lot of love for every reverse engineer, some of the most interesting projects in reverse engineering, which I will fully admit, and Alvaro and I pretty much agree on this,

it's really just really hard debugging, debugging that nobody wanted you to do. The types of people who do these really incredible breakthroughs, not, you know, that aren't researchers and so on, it takes a very particular focus. And the person who is focused in that way to bring all this, not necessarily the right person to talk about it. And I mean that with a lot of care and love. It's one of the things that I've learned from voiceover is to prep the guests to remember to check in, take a breath, slow down, visualize. Because, man, otherwise, not only are you going to lose me and Alvaro. I mean, I feel like a dumbass on the show all the time, by the way. It's so important to pull in the audience by slowing down. It's the same thing that I'm trying to learn with narration. If you just talk in, you know it's like popular science. Like, yeah, the person's going to feel pretty cool because they got a subscription to it. But like, are they really learning anything?

Is it helping them? Is it inspiring them in some way? Or is it just kind of like a background for making them feel kind of cool? I can just put out a techno remix if that was the case. I have done a little bit of reverse engineering, not much. But I find as I'm teaching, it's something I really want to teach because it's the way that I can explain debugging hardware. And your point about this is debugging that nobody really intended you to do. Are there other places that reverse engineering really helps as far as being a non-reverse engineering, a forward engineering?

Forward engineering. That seems like somebody who's asking you things you don't want to answer. Well, let me think about that question again. So I know you and I had worked for, had shared in a place of employment at one point. Yep. And that place really liked to do teardowns to learn how did someone make, you know, how did someone build out this product? And I think that that's interesting. You know, I think they mostly viewed it as a little bit of technology with mostly mechanical engineering.

They didn't necessarily go deeper than that. But I feel like if you keep going deeper and you get to, okay, I took, you know, I reversed engineer to the chips. I looked at this. Now I understand like, oh, this is how other people are trying to do their security on their IOT product. This is how they're saving extra money. This is one of the reasons why I like tearing down toys and grading cards, because I can't think of anything cheaper. Taking apart toys is just super interesting. Yeah. I knew Jen and I would be friends when we were quite happy to take X-Acto blades to Barbie.

But her joints are really neat. Yeah, yeah. I feel like for engineers today who are making consumer products, they really need to know what everyone else is doing in terms of security. Some of that means getting your hands freaking dirty. Figuring out like, oh, if I do this, maybe I shouldn't do this on my next product. It's way too easy to figure out X, Y, and Z. And if reverse engineering sounds too much like hacking, call it competitive analysis. I don't think the lawyers would like it if you said that. And I think you were also, you know, maybe one time this came up, like hacking versus reverse engineering versus whatever, what term you want to call it. I don't know. It's kind of funny the way that hacking is now kind of considered kind of a dirty term i don't know i'm not particularly fond of the term hacking because it implies cats um coffee no what cats and hairballs no no no sorry um maybe i don't know. But not right now.

It implies to me, it implies a lack of sophistication in your in your intention. Yeah. It's like it's like when I used to operate a startup out of a hacker space and people would run up on me and ask me what i'm hacking on when i'm just trying to do my freaking job and i it at that time in particular i guess that's where the genesis of my annoyance what the word is like i just found it super offensive i mean it because it was like i'm like i'm not messing around with an arduino here oh man you're gonna have to do so much editing. I'm good at it. Okay, good.

I hope you're all enjoying that sound of the Apple II disk drive. I was so prepared to say monkey fighting and stuff today, but it didn't happen. Yeah, no, but you're right. The connotation of the word has always bugged me too. And I have the same kind of feeling you do. It's like it implies just kind of flailing about, trying things and, you know, oh, that didn't work. Let's try this. Oh, that didn't work.

I'm not going to think about it. I'm just going to typey, typey, typey it. You know, maybe they have some, you know, there's some technical skill, but we're just going to go at this without really, you know, a plan or whatever. Right. One thing that I'm really enjoying i don't did you guys check out uh colin and jasper's book on reverse engineering not yet i saw that it came out um i've been slowly going through it it but it's really good it really it it really formalizes a lot you know instead of me having to kind of brainstorm, okay, what else can I do? What else can I do? Like now I feel like I have kind of like some backup here, like a formal doctrine for how to think about what I'm doing as a system.

Cool. Admittedly, I've only gone to like maybe chapter three, but that's what it feels like to me. That can be a companion book to Alan cohen's book about prototype to product this will be product to product product to to exploit it's part of a series um one of the shows you were on long ago was about interviewing where we talked about suggestions on how to conduct an interview more than how to interview how to be the other how to be on the grown-up side of the table no that's not what are you implying i think this is where l admitted to making somebody cry. And it was the interviewer.

She was the interviewee in that case. I have both sides. It's very impressive. I have made interviewees cry. I've made interviewers cry. It's just, talk about not using the right voice. Did you talk very slowly and quietly? No.

No. Oh. I think she said dumb or something. I don't think I called my interview. No, I don't remember. I think you said the question was dumb. I definitely said the question was dumb. I was saying it was a filtering issue more than a...

Yes. Somebody asked me deep C++ questions, and I said it was a dumb question, because if you're using that level of C++ on your 8051, you're doing it wrong. I have also answered questions that way and did not get that job either. Right. Anyway, in that show... If you were interested, go back. Go back to that episode.

We talked about the interviewing, and it's going to come up in my class soon, where I'm giving a presentation that is remarkably similar to that show. Are you going to ask them what their dream interview is? Because I think Chris has the answer. No, but I did ask them to give me all of their interview questions and what they look for in case I ever have to interview again. So you just basically made a cheat sheet for yourself. You hacked the interview. Are you going to put those on Twitter? Huh.

I suggest it to the class. This doesn't come out until after their assignments do. Oh, dang it, it does. You tell me. Anyway, in that show, we talked about diversity. And it's an issue that I always bring up because it's very, very, very, very, very important. And something we don't talk about enough in engineering. But I said diversity of thought, and I usually try to follow that up with, and diversity of thought follows diversity of body, and try to let people understand that

if everyone looks the same, the chances they all think the same are pretty high, which makes it easy to communicate with them, but it gives you giant holes in your product. Oh, yes. I mean, yes. You have a more direct thing that you would say, and I want to hear it because i may be saying it myself soon i'm gonna come at this slightly backwards way and i apologies to people who wanted a direct answer it's coming i swear to god so one of the things in voiceover um because it's an extension of hollywood is approaching diversity because voiceover historically has been you know pretty much all white and anytime there was a character on screen that was of color probably still played by a white person so there's a very active intention right now um to one um

in the scripts they're actively asking for persons of color and being very specific. And secondly, the actors are, particularly if they're white, they're not applying for those roles. If they know that they're asking specifically for a person of care, they're trying to, or if for some reason they want, they're asked to perform those, they do not want to, they obviously don't want to inadvertently do vocal blackface. They're trying to, hey, say, hey, look, there's this other person that would be great for this script here, you know, have them take this role. They're really trying to change all of that at this particular time. But tech really, really hasn't done much. I mean, they've talked a lot. So now I'm going to answer the question with more of a story also, but still I'm getting to the answer. Back on that interviewing episode that we did, we were talking through diversity of thought. And one thing that always kind of bugged me there was I said, right.

And when I said that, I meant, really what I meant was, uh-huh, please continue going because I'm waiting to see what happens. Not that I was necessarily co-signing at that time. And it's one of those things that I've always felt was regrettable in that episode. And to elaborate further on why I thought that was a problem is that when I, you know, what bugged me about it is like, yes, we want diversity of thought, because exactly you said diversity of body, because what what we end up seeing is that people say, oh, diversity of thought, they use this, they're like, they're unintentionally, whether they realize or not finding like, instead of honoring the intention of it,

they're finding a little loophole by saying, oh, well, we gave money to, you know, to go find, you know, these candidates or to help these candidates get through college so they could apply to us. Or, but we tried really hard and we didn't find anybody who was as good as this other candidate. Or, oh, I just picked, you know, we just picked somebody who was like, you know, still white, still a guy, but, you know, but he's autistic or, you know, which fine, but it's not ultimately changing the discussion and the social issue that we're experiencing, which is the example precisely is this, you know, Google made a phone with a camera that could not pick up people with darker pigmentation. They really f***ed up.

And now they're doing a release, a new one, and now they're making a big deal about how, yes, it can now pick up, you know, deeper skin tones. It shouldn't be a feature. A new feature. Oh, that's infuriating now with brown people detection oh my god but it basically goes back to y'all didn't have any people on your staff like clearly your your data sets were were not good completely biased you only had whoever you had on hand and didn't think to go bigger. Or you just asked your friends of friends of friends who clearly not that diverse to begin with. But you can see how the problem is, is, you know, there are qualified people of color out

there. There are qualified women out there. There are qualified, there's lots of people out there. But if you're not looking for them, and if you're just looking for a little way, who just thinks a little different, like, oh, he likes to wear his ties to work in Silicon Valley instead of, you know, what everyone else wears is hoodies. That is not enough diversity. That is not honoring the intention of diversity of thought. And we're really f***ing this up, Silicon Valley. I mean, we're really messing this up, Silicon Valley. And maybe the words diversity of thought need to go away. Because it is too easy to say, oh, yeah, no, we all went to different Ivy League colleges and count that as diverse. Well, and it's such a broad thing, right? It's like, oh, okay, well, anything counts. This person likes rust and this person likes C, so there we go. So diverse.

Oh, my God. And yet you end up with problems just as Jen said. Yet nobody on your team, on your QA, on your initial testing, nobody you knew was a person of color. And it shows in your stupid product. Your test plan did not include that. Just like, I know everyone had those stupid test cards. They all had, you know, the ones that were historically used for camera and

film. But man, yeah, those weren't even optimized for people of color. So there's just, yeah, not knowing our history is hurting us. Not not taking people who at least have some history to know the history. like it really nothing really burns my hide these days more than like uh well they're uh they're a senior engineer okay well they have three years of experience we're gonna toss them into a completely different area because you know all senior engineers are the same it's like you're gonna you're gonna have them do this specialized thing let's say factory work, manufacturing design, let's say. They don't know anything about manufacturing. I mean, poop.

And what do you expect to happen? They're just going to reinvent the wheel. They're going to make all the same mistakes on your dime as opposed to somebody who knows it. And as long as you press them to like make better choices you may actually get get something better i don't know silicon valley just really bugs me sorry when they do dumps it like oh we'll just take a 20 something who doesn't know anything and then we can just make him do whatever we want well you're just doing it so you could like own him in all the decisions because he doesn't know any better. Actually, they don't know any better. I think we've gotten off diversity and on to Silicon Valley work ethic.

Would you like to hear my opinions on computers? Yes. I don't like them. And I think the people who made them are evil. You know what? This is also an unpopular opinion. i thought snow crash was a dumb ass book and i blame i blame that book on what silicon valley is now oh my god i can't think of like how many more stereotypes and like bad ideas have come out of that book there you go it's

funny i loved that book when it came out and when i tried to reread it like last year it infuriated me it was just like i never read it i yeah i i never read it and then i was like okay well i bought the audiobook and then like the whole metaverse thing came out i was like i mean now I have to finish it. And yes, I was upset on every one of my bike rides as I listened to it. And by the way, at some point, I just turned it up to 2x. I didn't finish my reread because I have better things to do. Okay, so I have one more question for you. And that is, catch machine's dance.

Those three words are all very good words, but they go together somehow? Oh, I wasn't sure if you were testing me if I had Alzheimer's or not. Yes, that is my dance company. I've had this now for over 10 years. So in my intro, I did mention I was a dancer. And yes, the pandemic has been difficult. So yes, I've done a lot of voiceover stuff because there's only so much dancing I can do in my kitchen, which is not very big. So I can do like ballet. I can't really do point without a bar because I will fall and hit everybody in the house. dance company. Let's see, before the pandemic, I had just won an award from SJ Dance Co. for choreo projects. So I got something for a piece that I did on social media and how it is dividing us. Because there are people who can't or won't go on social media like myself, who

basically feel like they're left out of some part of social interaction now and how that's affecting us. So the company tends to deal with technology, issues of technology, and so on. But during pandemic, I made one other piece. In fact, I was supposed to finish a piece and present it like days before shutdown and uh or days into shutdown and then shutdown happened and now i've forgotten that piece i should have recorded it when i had a chance i guess i don't know um but if you're interested parts of that are on my website and are referred to in the podcast opposable thumbs that alvaro and i did together um we went on as guests so anyway the hope maybe that'll be in the show notes um so i ended up making another piece

from home with a bunch of dancers all all of us sitting at home about quarantine and the pandemic um that was in may of 2021 we released the dance video. And since then, I have not created anything. And I'm so depressed. But you've created voiceover work. You haven't created any dance work. Yes. I've also created lots. Well, not that much knitting.

But some. Yes. Yes. It's hard to be an artist that does physical things during the pandemic. It's hard to be an artist at all because most artists, there's a lot of art that's not necessarily collaborative, but you're still engaging with an audience. And there's a lot of art that the last few years, but I'm doing it in a collaborative way. And it kind of sucks to send files back and forth and kind of write music that way. It's not that fun. And there's a lot of spontaneity when you're together with people doing stuff and that's just gone.

And unfortunately, the speed of light means that even doing collaborative music over zoom doesn't really work that well oh god so yeah it's just it i've gotten kind of good at it but it's also not the same thing and i don't think you get the same art out of it there's a lot of i mean i 100 agree with. There is a lot of energy that, you know, the Zoom, the computers, not being in the same room really adulterates that energy that another artist puts out. And it makes it hard for us to harness it, grab it, utilize it. So yeah, dancing, taking dance classes through Zoom. I mean, I did an entire, last May, I went to Lions Adult Dance Intensive, which was, God, it was so much fun asking to do choreography and then perform in front of people in my kitchen and everyone taking turns and getting feedback. Like, that was so exciting. But at the same time,

it's entirely dependent on how good the camera is, how good your internet is. Yeah, there's just so many factors that make it unsatisfying and feels defeating. But the fact that anybody's still doing it at this point in the pandemic, I think is amazing. Yeah, because it's exhausting to even just have normal life. Yeah, I don't know. But I mean, maybe your life's been pretty normal. My life has not changed in the last two years. And I've regressed. I'm not dancing back in the studio since the Omnicrom surge has taken place. Omniram?

Omnicrat. Omn-what? Omnicrom? Oh, I thought you said Omnicrap. No, I wish I had something witty to say. It's not that witty. Omnicrap is just the description of the current state of everything. All right.

Well, Jen, it's been wonderful to talk to you. And I know some of your podcasts last upward of six hours. Upward of six? Wow. Wow. Was I awake for this? Had some long ones recently. We have, we have, but they've been so good. Yes, they have.

I try to keep a lid on things because I don't like editing four-hour podcasts. I don't either. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Your voice can be a key to unlock new opportunities. Our guest has been Jen Costillo, the professional cat petter. She is also an embedded software engineer, co-host of the unnamed reverse engineering podcast and a voiceover artist thanks jen and a dancer thanks jen and a knitter thanks jen you're screwing up you're screwing up my routine and i pet cats professionally

what do they pay you with hacking? Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. Now a quote to leave you with. Oh, let's do the original old white man, Voltaire. Hey, Voltaire is pretty funny. He is. Let us read and let us dance. Two amusements that will never do any harm to the world. Boy, does he not know what he's talking about.