Meta-Cast
By Bob Galen & Josh Anderson
Categories: Business, Careers, Technology
Bob Galen and Josh Anderson draw on decades of coaching experience to support your leadership journey. If our 400+ episodes don't have what you need, ask us a question, and we'll help you out! www.meta-cast.com
406 episodes indexed on PodSearch.
Recent episodes
- 10 Questions to Ask Before You Accept a Tech Leadership Role
The job market has been rough on tech leaders lately, and picking the wrong company can cost you a year or two of your career. In this episode, Bob Galen and Josh Anderson each share their top 5 things they look for when evaluating a company during hiring. (Bob brought 6, plus 3 more he doesn't…
- We Got Leadership Wrong for Years. Here’s What We'd Change.
Bob and Josh frame the episode as “letters” to their future or past selves, sharing personal and leadership advice. Josh emphasizes trusting his gut even when he’s “annoyingly early,” dialing back intensity without stopping completely, continuing to make hard decisions and have difficult…
- The 1 Measuring Stick We Hold Every Leader To
What would change if you treated every person on your team as someone else's precious cargo? A friend of the show visited her son at Fort Bragg and came home less worried, because his leaders clearly took responsibility for the people under their watch. That post sent Bob and Josh into what caring…
- The 4X rule every feature MUST pass
Josh and Bob discuss growing finance pressure over AI token spend—dubbed the “great token reckoning of 2027”—and the mismatch between claimed 10x developer productivity and lack of comparable revenue gains.Bob shares a Silicon Valley example where companies over-invested in engineers while QA…
- The "New" AI Hiring Skills Are the Ones You Always Needed
Open any hiring feed this year and you'll find a fresh list of skills for the AI era. Discernment. Judgment. Taste. Bob Galen and Josh Anderson think the list is fine. They just think it's old.The human skills behind every team they're proud of (collaboration, coachability, comfort with ambiguity…
- Does Code Quality Still Matter When AI Writes It?
The hottest take on LinkedIn right now is that coding was never the bottleneck. Josh and Bob have hired hundreds of developers, sat through the "why is this taking so long" meetings, and lived through waterfall, so they're calling it: coding was slow, expensive, and scary, and pretending otherwise…
- Most Leaders Can't Answer This One Capacity Question
There's a squeeze on right now, and it's landing hardest on middle managers and senior leaders. Do more with less. Do more with the same. Lead the team and ship the code. The player-coach role used to be a startup thing, something you did because there were 6 of you and someone had to. Now it's…
- Expectation Inflation Is Stronger Than Ever
Bob and Josh take on expectation inflation, the widening gap between what executives believe AI can do and what your team can actually deliver. Bob tells the bourbon and cigar story about a date he was committed to before anyone asked him. Josh makes the case that pushing back and accelerating…
- Just Ask Us For Help
Somebody finally sent Josh a message asking for help, and it turned into an episode. Bob and Josh break down every reason people talk themselves out of reaching out, what separates a good mentee from a one-reply conversation, and why coaching somebody else is how a coach stays sharp. The ask is…
- When Being Stubborn Is Leadership And When It's Ego
Bob sings The Gambler and turns it into a leadership question. He quit a job after 4 days when he learned he'd been hired as the ax man. Josh called off an office redesign mid-move. A million-dollar pod experiment survived one day. Hold, fold, walk away, run, and the cost of doing none of them…
- 10 Leadership Habits Most Managers Skip
Football's back. And on the first day of the 2026 preseason, Josh and Bob take one of the oldest lines in coaching and point it straight at leadership.Good teams don't win on trick plays. They win because they run the routine plays routinely. Block, tackle, catch the ball, do it again next week…
- Bob and Josh Finally Disagree About Something: Transparency
Bob opens with a metaphor about window blinds. Truth isn't a switch, he says, it's a set of slats you're constantly adjusting. Closed all the way, open all the way, and every shade of dim in between. He argues we're all doing this already, whether we admit it or not, because nobody walks around…
- Everything We'd Tell a New Leader
Bob and Josh each bring a list for the person thinking about stepping into leadership for the first time. Your why, the loneliness, the burdens you can't share, why most leaders are bad at hiring, and how to keep from getting pickled by the leaders around you. Stay Connected and Informed with Our…
- AI Answers Everything, So Who's Having the Ideas?
AI can hand you an answer to almost anything in seconds. Bob and Josh spend this episode asking what that convenience is quietly costing us.It starts with an IEEE Spectrum article showing that researchers who use AI publish more and get cited more, while the range of what's actually being…
- 6 Leadership Characteristics We Admire After 20 Years of Working Together
Bob and Josh go round robin, naming the leadership characteristics they admire in each other after 2 decades of working together: generosity, genuineness, the courage to evolve, openness to crazy ideas, and speaking truth to power while scared. The real takeaway is Bob's ultimate leadership…
- Life Balance for Leaders on a Hard Sprint
A CEO's LinkedIn vacation post sparks one of our most personal episodes yet. Bob shares the real cost of putting the company first, Josh shares the question from his kids that changed everything, and together we cover why a leader's absence is the truest test of their leadership. Plus the rocking…
- Can AI Make You a Great Leader?
Can AI make you a great leader? Josh says no, Bob agrees, and they spend this one drawing the line between the tactical work AI can absorb and the human work it can't. They get into Meta's 50-to-1 manager experiment, the unscripted moments that reveal who you really are as a leader, and why great…
- The 60 Second Habit That Builds Better Leadership Instincts
The smartest leadership tool you've got isn't in any AI model. It's your gut.Bob and Josh dig into why intuition still wins the hard calls, the ones data alone can't make for you. Bob owns up to the hires he botched by ignoring his gut. Josh shares the story of the client who told him he was being…
- Why Great Leaders Get Comfortable Being Wrong
Every leader gets it wrong eventually. The question is what you do next.Josh and Bob dig into one of the hardest things any leader faces: admitting a mistake out loud. Not waffling, not deflecting, not the classic move of saying the wrong thing louder and hoping it becomes true. Actually owning…
- Lean Into the Ambiguity Before the Ambiguity Leans Into You
Bob and Josh sit with a hard truth this week. The change rolling through software and leadership isn't optional anymore. It's not Agile in 2007, where you could adopt it or sit it out. AI is rewriting what application development looks like, what team size means, and what kind of leader your…
- The Courage Gap in Tech Leadership
Josh and Bob dig into the courage problem that runs through every layer of tech leadership right now. The courage to push back on your team. The courage to be honest with peers. And the hardest one, the courage to tell the people above you that the thing they want is the wrong thing.They get into…
- Agile Isn't Dead. The Free Ride Is.
Bob's back from Agile Coach Camp Cologne, and the room was heavy with "agile is dead" energy. Josh and Bob aren't buying it. What's actually dead is the free ride. The coaches still talking in burndown charts and psychological safety while leaders ask "what did YOU actually do" are the ones with…
- When Your Words Sound Smooth But Mean Nothing
Bob Galen and Josh Anderson dig into one of the most quietly destructive habits in leadership communication. You know the feeling. You sit through a thirty minute all hands, and when it ends, you cannot answer the simplest question. What did they just say? What do they want me to do?This episode…
- The Hidden Glue That Creates Resilient Organizations
Bob and Josh dig into a recent HBR article on the leadership case for friendship-based culture. Not the toxic "we're a family" version, but something real, where leaders model and encourage genuine relationships, invest in face-to-face time, and treat connection as the glue that holds…
- How Great Leaders Handle the Pressure of AI Hype
The AI hype cycle is testing leaders everywhere, and Josh and Bob are here to cut through the noise.Bob opens with a sharp observation. Everyone became an AI zen master overnight, coining terms and jumping on bandwagons while leaders outside that bubble struggle to discern what's real and what's…
PodSearch is a free, independent podcast search engine. Read about PodSearch, the privacy policy or contact us.