Unlimited vacation and taking one month off work (Hao Li & Ben Grynol)

Ben Grynol, Levels Head of Growth, sat down with Software Engineer, Hao Li, to chat about Hao’s recent vacation, a one-month cross-country road trip across Canada.

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When building a product, you want to have a roadmap. You want to know directionally where you’re going. Plan a little bit ahead, but you don’t want to get too far down the path because you don’t know what’s going to come up. Well, that same philosophy is analogous to a literal road trip. In this episode, Ben Grynol, Levels Head of Growth, sat down with Software Engineer, Hao Li, to chat about Hao’s recent one-month cross-country road trip across Canada.

I think it’s all started with a wildlife Slack channel we had in our old Slack workspace last year. I think Shin Lu post her Honda Element. She actually modified it so she can live in there, and some other people posted some wildlife pictures as well, so it got me interested. Also at the time, we were looking for a car just to get commute done after we moved from Victoria to Sooke. We had two cars before, but we downsized to one and now we need another car again. So I started looking at used market and found this beautiful 2001 Outback and I always been a Subaru fan. So I know if you want to go with all wheel drive, Subaru is still only one you can trust so I pulled the trigger. It’s pretty cheap and need some fix up but overall it’s a pretty reliable car after we acquired it. And then I joked about, “I will go across Canada with this car,” and I posted a picture in our Slack channel and then it actually a got me thinking and got my partner excited. So we actually decided to just go ahead and plan for a trip.

07:06 – Channeling his inner digital nomad

Another inspiration for Hao was Sam Corcos, Levels co-founder. Sam is a self-proclaimed digital nomad, who proved to Hao that you can be productive from anywhere.

I think one inspiration is from Sam, our co-founder actually, because he always been traveling. Every time I had a one-on-one with him, he’s in a different location. Also, he doesn’t seem to be bothered to be productive, even though he’s a true digital nomad himself, which I think provides me some level of confidence that I probably can do it too. Because I feel like if I grab my laptop and as long as I have internet access, I can go back to work if I was needed. But likely during my trip, I’m not that important for the features we are doing at that moment.

09:50 – The journey to the mainland

Hao started his journey in Victoria, which requires ferry travel to get to the mainland.

That’s the only way you can get out of Victoria other than flying. So we are pretty used to it. Every time we want to go to Vancouver or Seattle, we have to take the ferry and the ferry service is pretty good. There are some issues, but in general, they are pretty good and reliable and it’s not that long. It’s an hour and a half sailing. So the only thing we need to be aware is because of the pandemic and the craziness of traveling, we often need to book ahead. So we have to schedule the sailing beforehand, otherwise we could wait at the terminal for couple of hours or even longer and the weather sometimes will cancel the sailing as well but we got lucky and it was summertime so it is not the issue. That’s probably the easy part. Just to get on the ferry and wait hour and a half and you are landed on the mainland.

11:08 – Keeping connected across Canada

For Hao, long driving hours was the easy part. The challenge for work was finding reliable internet along the way.

Actually in my mind, because I can enjoy driving so it’s not that bad. Driving six, five hours at the beginning of the trip is pretty easy to handle. I think the hardest part come to finding internet connection if you want connect back. But luckily, Levels didn’t require me to connect back often because the workload is already scheduled and planned that out ahead. I actually couldn’t think of any hard part because I think this kind of cross-Canada trip is quite common for Canadians. So that’s another reason we are comfortable to do it. Crossing Canada, so many people did it before so it’s not really—as long as you are cautious while driving and not fall asleep behind the steering wheel, it’s a easy task.

16:04 – The vicious cycle of physical and mental clutter

There were things that you learned about yourself when you’re driving, where sometimes when you have time to reflect and learned something thing new about yourself.

I think downsizing, minimalism lifestyle, probably worth to try. I know Sam is practicing that and it’s a really interesting concept and I feel like we are just acquiring too much stuff around our living space and that’s probably not really helping for our life and for, I think, the world itself and I really into exploring that…I have no good answer but my little understanding points me to the entire consumerism and then capitalism stuff. That’s the foundation of why we tend to acquire things. It’s more like human nature so that’s why human came up with all those phenomenons and the ideas. As a human, you are built in to acquire things sometime and if you can actually conquer that, as you said, “Accumulating physical things will definitely affect your mind.” You having so many physical things around you so your mind can be easily distracted or moved to other things, hard to focus. So if we can conquer that, truly downsizing to only have what you need, probably your mind will get a huge improvement as well, because you can so easy to get focus on things without the disruptions from the things around you.

19:46 – Keeping the itinerary flexible

Hao quickly learned that with such a long trip, you can’t plan everything out in advance. You need to leave room for schedule changes and detours.

One thing is if you have such a long trip, you cannot plan everything ahead completely. You can only plan one day or two days ahead. So you get less stress on the road and more flexible when some other emergency came up but luckily we didn’t get any emergency, other than a breakdown car. So when planning for within the B.C., we are traveling from, the first stop is Revelstoke. It’s a town close to Rocky mountain in B.C. and we planned to camp there for one night and then move to Lake Louise, which is the Banff National Park, to camp another two nights. So for the first three nights, it’s more like a small camping trip we usually do during the summer so it’s not a big deal. Next stop, I have to keep in mind, Sam and you guys’ schedule so I can make it to meet with you guys. So I think the momentum of not planning too far ahead really helps so I can just be flexible and I can drive more hours if I have short time between the meet or I can just plan one more stop if I got too many days ahead. So that’s first biggest thing I learned for the trip is, “Don’t plan too far ahead, otherwise you will get anxiety on catching up the schedule.”

41:58 – The missing team dynamic

Hao said that he had very little interaction with the Levels team while he was on the trip, which was the biggest downside.

I think I just missed [the] feeling of working with my team. On the road trip, it’s fine and not really feel like you’re missing friends, but for colleagues, really enjoyable to work with. And I guess the most part I’m missing is the energy from the whole team because I’m completely offline. So I didn’t check Threads, or I occasionally deleted some emails. Just check them and if it’s not important, I just delete them. But other than that, I pretty much had zero interaction with the team and I think the energy of the team is the most part I’m missing.

42:55 – A close look at different cities

Traveling across Canada allowed Hao to see the unique elements of different cities, that would otherwise blend together when you don’t look closely.

I would say visiting different city itself is the most interesting part of the road trip. You can see how similar each city got with each other. They’re just standard North American cities. If you don’t go to the city core, you can’t differentiate if this is in Ontario, this is in Alberta. They just look like a big city. That’s it. But if you pay attention, you will see they are a lot different, like how the streets got laid out and how the city core looks different from 100 years ago, all the leftover historic buildings. It’s a really twisted, interesting feeling. You feel you are in the same city, but you are not, if you look close, and if I do it over again, I will definitely choose a different route, but I won’t get hesitated to do it again. Just cross Canada for fun.

Hao Li (00:06):

One thing is, if you have such a long trip, you cannot plan everything ahead. The car actually broke down right after we exited the city of Ottawa on the highway so we have to pull off the highway and we couldn’t figure out where the noise comes from. Now, I got the experience, it’s the transmission and unfortunately, it was also a long weekend. We had to call the tow truck to tow it to a Subaru dealership but because of the pandemic there’s no new car available at all. That’s even crazier.

Ben Grynol (00:45):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Ben Grynol (01:17):

When building a product, you want to have a roadmap. You want to know directionally where you’re going. Plan a little bit ahead, but you don’t want to get too far down the path because you don’t know what’s going to come up. Well, it’s analogous to a road trip. In this episode, well, it doesn’t have much to do with metabolic health. Doesn’t even have much to do with the way that we work as a Levels team. What it has to do with is the way that we live our cultural values, things like asynchronous work, remote mindset, unlimited time off and some of the things that we live day in, day out, being an entirely remote team.

Ben Grynol (01:58):

Hao was the second developer, second engineer, that joined Levels in July of 2020 and so, for Hao, when he decided to take a cross country road trip, he didn’t even think twice when he decided to take four weeks off in a row. He decided to get in his car and go. Here’s where we kick things off.

Ben Grynol (02:16):

Man, we got to get into this wild cross Canada road trip that you decided to take, where it came from, how it came about, what went on with it?

Hao Li (02:34):

Yeah. I think it’s all started with a wildlife Slack channel we had in our old Slack workspace last year. I think Shin Lu post her Honda Element. She actually modified it so she can live in there, and some other people posted some wildlife pictures as well, so it got me interested. Also at the time, we were looking for a car just to get commute done after we moved from Victoria to Sooke. We had two cars before, but we downsized to one and now we need another car again. So I started looking at used market and found this beautiful 2001 Outback and I always been a Subaru fan.

Hao Li (03:31):

So I know if you want to go with all wheel drive, Subaru is still only one you can trust so I pulled the trigger. It’s pretty cheap and need some fix up but overall it’s a pretty reliable car after we acquired it. And then I joked about, “I will go across Canada with this car,” and I post a picture in our Slack channel and then it actually a got me thinking and got my partner excited. So we actually decided to just go ahead and plan for a trip.

Ben Grynol (04:08):

Yeah. That was a year ago. Well, let’s rewind all the way back to you being the second, I believe, second engineer. Correct?

Hao Li (04:19):

After John and Andrew-

Ben Grynol (04:22):

Not including Andrew. After John.

Hao Li (04:25):

We also have couple of contractors but full time, yes.

Ben Grynol (04:29):

Second full time because you joined in July of ’19.

Hao Li (04:32):

July of ’20.

Ben Grynol (04:34):

That’s what I meant. Sorry. The company started in July of ’20. Gosh. Years are flying by. In July of ’20, you joined. That was around the time when Tom joined and we had a number of team members come on board over that period, but-

Hao Li (04:51):

Yep.

Ben Grynol (04:52):

So you’ve been with the team for quite a while-

Hao Li (04:56):

Exactly.

Ben Grynol (04:57):

… the Subaru came about in the winter of… I think it winter. Sometime around then. Seems like it was winter of last year, a year ago.

Hao Li (05:04):

Yeah. I think I got the car in March so around February, end of March, last year.

Ben Grynol (05:14):

Wild. And then we all joked that, “Hey, you have to take that thing on a real road trip,” and you ended up doing it.

Hao Li (05:20):

Yeah. Actually you were the one pushing it.

Ben Grynol (05:25):

Probably. Not too strongly. [crosstalk 00:05:29] What was it? So you worked for… Because you didn’t take much time off and you did this cross-country road trip where you completely unplugged, which in most companies would seem like an absurd thing to do but I think you were head down crushing it for so long that you were like, “Yeah, I’m going to go offline,” and you just went off the grid and went nomadic and came back and got back into it. But it was a matter of, whatever it was, three or four weeks, I think, that you were offline and that was it and everyone was so stoked and so supportive and you would pop up in these different cities across Canada and say, “Hey, I’m connecting with whomever in whichever city.”

Hao Li (06:09):

Yep. That’s pretty much 100% accurate. So I planned for three weeks and end up using four weeks because we had a little car issue actually on the way back so that extend the time a week longer.

Ben Grynol (06:28):

So aside from committing in Slack that you were going to do it, which is a bit arbitrary and maybe some positive team encouragement, if you want to call it that, what was it that made you feel, not just that you wanted to explore the country, but that you felt empowered enough to be like, “Yeah, I’m out. I’m going”? I think in doing that, there has to be a certain level of comfort or trust with the team and part of us being entirely remote, but you know, “Yeah, no. I can go. It’s entirely fine.” What was it that didn’t even make you think twice about doing it?

Hao Li (07:06):

Yeah. I think one inspiration is from Sam, our co-founder actually, because he always been traveling. Every time I had a one-on-one with him, he’s in a different location. Also, he doesn’t seem to be bothered to be productive, even though he’s a true digital nomad himself, which I think provides me some level of confidence that I probably can do it too because I feel like if I grab my laptop and as long as I have internet access, I can go back to work if I was needed but likely during my trip, I’m not that important for the features we are doing at that moment.

Hao Li (07:57):

So team didn’t require my attendance to do anything which I was really appreciate and as you mentioned, we are starting with a full remote team so your location doesn’t really matter, as long as you have good communications within your team. I think that’s all I need to complete this road trip. One is I got all the things I need with me. As long as I got internet, I can just go back to work anytime and two, we built a pretty good team infrastructure so we can all communicate in a async manner. So there are not many occasions we need to be synced to solve things, other than some real high priority outage. That’s how I built my confidence to just go offline and feel pretty good about it.

Ben Grynol (09:08):

So you hopped in the car. You started out in Victoria. You’re on the island. You hopped in the car. You packed up your two Shiba Inus, Hacker and Keto, and your partner and packed the car full. It was quite full when we ended up connecting in Kenora, Ontario, with Justin and Sam. Getting from Victoria, you drove all the way to the East Coast. That’s no small feat. That’s a pretty significant undertaking, given the size of the country and given how spread out everything is. So walk through and let’s rewind, let’s paint the picture. Leaving Victoria, it’s not just driving. You are putting your car on a ferry to get to the mainland.

Hao Li (09:50):

Yep. That’s the only way you can get out of Victoria other than flying. So we are pretty used to it. Every time we want to go to Vancouver or Seattle, we have to take the ferry and the ferry service is pretty good. There are some issues, but in general, they are pretty good and reliable and it’s not that long. It’s an hour and a half sailing. So the only thing we need to be aware is because of the pandemic and the craziness of traveling, we often need to book ahead. So we have to schedule the sailing beforehand, otherwise we could wait at the terminal for couple of hours or even longer and the weather sometimes will cancel the sailing as well but we got lucky and it was summertime so it is not the issue. That’s probably the easy part. Just to get on the ferry and wait hour and a half and you are landed on the mainland.

Ben Grynol (11:00):

And so then what ends up being the hard part, as soon as you have to start actually driving and making the road trip happen?

Hao Li (11:08):

Actually in my mind, because I can enjoy driving so it’s not that bad. Driving six, five hours at the beginning of the trip is pretty easy to handle. I think the hardest part come to finding internet connection if you want connect back but luckily, Levels didn’t require me to connect back often because the workload is already scheduled and planned that out ahead. I actually couldn’t think of any hard part because I think this kind of cross-Canada trip is quite common for Canadians. So that’s another reason we are comfortable to do it. Crossing Canada, so many people did it before so it’s not really… As long as you be cautious while driving and not fall asleep behind the steering wheel, it’s a easy task.

Ben Grynol (12:18):

No crashes. Well, not physical crashes but glucose crashes while driving.

Hao Li (12:24):

Right.

Ben Grynol (12:24):

Now you know what to avoid. When you’re driving, there’s this very introspective thing about driving sometimes when you take these deep road trips. It doesn’t matter where a person’s going but did you ever get to this point where you had time to really reflect and sort of look inwards and just think. That’s the thing about driving. Driving in especially in Canada, if you’re going across the country, it’s pretty expansive. Those roads go forever and they can be somewhat isolated for long periods of time but it allows you to really start thinking and reflecting. Were there periods when you were driving and you just had time to think about what you’re working on or what you’re doing or philosophically, the things that interest you? Did that come about? I would imagine in the length of time that you drove, there had to have been some period of time when that might have occurred.

Hao Li (13:23):

Yeah. Actually I would say it occurred quite a lot of times because you have nothing else to do during the driving other than staring at the road and probably listening to music and actually it helps me to clear up my mind and sometime I actually get back to thinking about the work I’m doing right now. I mean the tasks on engineering side and also think about Levels as a fully remote company. That’s really surprisingly worked out well to my understanding because, well, I don’t have decades of years of working experience in big corporations, but I did experience the big corporation culture before and I don’t think any other company could provide me an opportunity to do this wild trip and also it’s a pandemic.

Hao Li (14:28):

It’s during the pandemic and you can’t stop thinking about “What if there’s no pandemic?,” what a fully remote work would look like because the pandemic actually forced a lot company get into a fully remote setup, even though Levels pre-exist before the pandemic. There are a lot interesting thoughts around how roads built up in Canada so differently across province and some other random interesting thoughts I probably can’t remember right now.

Ben Grynol (15:08):

Were there things that you learned about yourself where sometimes when you have time to reflect, it’s like you start to think, “Maybe I’m interested in this thing,” or some new hobby you want to tackle or something that you’ve been doing for years that you’re like, “I don’t need that thing anymore. What am I doing?” Did that ever happen where you learned something thing new about yourself that was somewhat unexpected?

Hao Li (15:35):

I want to say, “Yes,” but I don’t recall anything specific to reflect myself, probably because I focus too much on planning ahead, the next stop. We had to stop multiple times during the drive for dogs but I guess one thing I did get another thought is about the lifestyle we are having right now. I think downsizing, minimalism lifestyle, probably worth to try. I know Sam is practicing that and it’s a really interesting concept and I feel like we are just acquiring too much stuff around our living space and that’s probably not really helping for our life and for, I think, the world itself and I really into exploring that.

Ben Grynol (16:38):

Yeah, it’s funny because physical clutter can become mental clutter and then people don’t know why they’re mentally cluttered so they go acquire more physical clutter, which clutters their mental clarity even further and it’s a very vicious cycle. It’s one of those things where comedian podcaster that I follow named Duncan Trussell and he always uses this analogy that we have this heuristic that we should go find a cave and then we fill the cave with sticks and stones.

Ben Grynol (17:09):

We decorate it and then as soon as it gets so filled up with sticks and stones that we don’t have anywhere else to sleep or sit in our cave, then we have to go find a bigger cave to fill with more sticks and stones and when that gets too full of sticks and stones, then you go find an even bigger cave and it just becomes this thing where it’s like, “Well, why are you acquiring all these sticks and stones? You actually don’t need them in your cave. There’s nowhere to think. There’s nowhere to sit. There’s nowhere to sleep,” and it’s an interesting thought, because it’s like, “Why do we end up doing this if the cave is a big enough living space to begin with?”

Hao Li (17:41):

Yeah, I have no good answer but my little understanding point me to the entire consumerism and then capitalism stuff. That’s the foundation of why we tend to acquire things. It’s more like human nature so that’s why human came up with all those phenomenons and the ideas. As a human, you are built in to acquire things sometime and if you can actually conquer that, as you said, “Accumulating physical things will definitely affect your mind.” You having so many physical things around you so your mind can be easily distracted or moved to other things, hard to focus. So if we can conquer that, truly downsizing to only have what you need, probably your mind will get a huge improvement as well, because you can so easy to get focus on things without the disruptions from the things around you.

Ben Grynol (18:55):

That’s exactly it. Mental acquisition gives us cognitive clutter. It’s just a bunch of clutter at the end of the day.

Hao Li (19:02):

Yep.

Ben Grynol (19:03):

So you ended up taking this trip. You leave. You’re in Vancouver. What was the most surprising thing? Walk us through that journey because it’s not one of those things where you just end up in some city. It is far to get to Calgary. It is far to get to Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto. Keep going down the list. Walk through, “What was that linear journey that you did?”

Hao Li (19:28):

Yeah. So before the journey actually begins, already started learning about traveling planning. So the biggest thing I learned, or probably I figured out itself… I wouldn’t say that because I definitely get some influence from others. One thing is if you have such a long trip, you cannot plan everything ahead completely. You can only plan one day or two days ahead. So you get less stress on the road and more flexible when some other emergency came up but luckily we didn’t get any emergency, other than a breakdown car. So when planning for within the B.C., we are traveling from… The first stop is Revelstoke. It’s a town close to Rocky mountain in B.C. and we planned to camp there for one night and then move to Lake Louise, which is the Banff National Park, to camp another two nights.

Hao Li (20:36):

So for the first three nights, it’s more like a small camping trip we usually do during the summer so it’s not a big deal. Next stop, I have to keep in mind, Sam and you guys’ schedule so I can make it to meet with you guys. So I think the momentum of not planning too far ahead really helps so I can just be flexible and I can drive more hours if I have short time between the meet or I can just plan one more stop if I got too many days ahead. So that’s first biggest thing I learned for the trip is, “Don’t plan too far ahead, otherwise you will get anxiety on catching up the schedule.” It’s probably also reflect to how engineers probably doing their jobs. You cannot plan the entire thing right away without actually make yourself too anxious about if you can’t make it on time. Just a proper amount of planning will definitely the key to achieve a task successfully.

Ben Grynol (21:59):

Yeah. Directionally, you know where you’re going. Directionally, you know you’re heading, as an engineer, directionally, you know you’re building against whichever initiative, but you’re not trying to build for something that’s nine months out on the roadmap where you’re like, “Well, I don’t even know what’s going to break before we get to that point. Why am I worried about that?” And the same thing goes with driving. It’s like, “Why are you planning where you’re going to stay in Montreal if you’re in Revelstoke B.C., and you’re weeks away from even getting there.

Hao Li (22:29):

Exactly.

Ben Grynol (22:31):

When going through the Rockies, there’s a ton of wildlife. You must have seen elk and everything when you went through Banff. Was there any other encounters that you had along the way? I know the Shield gets pretty dense with wildlife too.

Hao Li (22:44):

Actually not really. The only route you will encounter or see a lot wildlife is from Jasper, the north part of the national park, to Banff, the south part. That horizontal road, you will see a lot wildlife, but for us, the busy interior highway, they are pretty busy, very busy, I would say. So last chance you can see a wildlife. But we did saw some wildlife at the campsite and there are bears, wolves and, of course, elk around the campsite but again, it’s a quite popular site. So the wildlife, not that easy to spot, unless you just go for a hike into the woods.

Ben Grynol (23:39):

Yeah. That’s the thing is when you go through there, you end up seeing quite a few things. Then it starts to open up so you get past, at the edge of Alberta, we’ll say that, and all of a sudden it turns into this flat weird space that goes on forever, or what seems like ever, and the roads are perfectly straight and they don’t even make sense. There isn’t even a curve in the highway and you’re in the open plains or the prairies and it’s a very different thing to see that, especially at that time of year when all the agriculture is being harvested, the different farmers fields, where it’s just everywhere you look, it’s different crops that are being harvested. It’s interesting to see that and then you get into Canadian Shield but what was that like when you… Because I’d imagine that’s your first time seeing the prairies and seeing how wide open they are and then getting into the Canadian Shield and seeing what this Precambrian rock looks like and how wild and different it is.

Hao Li (24:38):

Yeah. I don’t think Prairie actually surprised me too much because I did have experience driving inside Saskatchewan because my partner used to work at North Battleford. She lived there for two years so I used to have to drive from Saskatchewan to North Battleford, even in the winter. But one thing I did notice driving through Alberta, Saskatchewan, and even Manitoba is sometimes it’s like deja vu. “Oh wait, did I just drive past here? That just looks so similar.” And one thing I didn’t know before is there are quite a large area. There are several saltwater lake there. We are wondering, “What are those white things around the lake? Are they salt?” and turns out they are. We Googled it up and from Wikipedia, there is a largest salt lake in Saskatchewan, I think. Anyway, so that’s quite surprising.

Ben Grynol (25:49):

That is news to me. I didn’t even know that.

Hao Li (25:52):

You should check it out.

Ben Grynol (25:54):

I’m going to have to going to. Going to have to. So then you made it… You went all the way across the monotonous prairies that seemed to go on forever and seemed to repeat themselves day after day and then you ended up in this small pocket of basically the middle of Canada, from a longitudinal perspective, Kenora, Ontario, and it’s on the lake that bridges Minnesota and Ontario.

Hao Li (26:20):

Oh, exactly. Yeah, there’s a huge change between Manitoba and Ontario border. You will got noticed immediately. The road gets narrower from multiple lanes to the single lanes and you got more mountain terrain right after the border of Manitoba, the way ahead to the Lake Nora. It’s really interesting. That’s, I think, the most surprising part of the driving from Prairie to getting to east mountains. It’s really beautiful.

Ben Grynol (26:59):

Yeah. It’s weird because you think about this road and you’re like, “Okay, this is the road,” literally the road that goes across the country and you expect there to be giant highways or a freeway and all of a sudden, it narrows to a point where it is two lanes of traffic going either way and you’re like, “Wait a minute. This is the road? This is how everybody gets across the country,” and it’s just that the infrastructure is so different here because the population is smaller. It gets used by many people for many reasons, but it’s primarily a transportation route for logging and natural resources and trucking and shipping and all these things. That’s not the sole purpose, but there’s not enough density and not enough traffic to warrant creating these super wide and long roads and, the other challenge is that there are so many lakes that are peppered throughout that it becomes a little bit harder. You’d have to start building bridges and start doing things that really would change the way the roads are laid out right now.

Hao Li (28:02):

Yes, super interesting. Also, one interesting point I noticed through the trip is you can actually notice difference between different part of the roads, because they’ve been constructed by different set of road crews. So the pavement itself actually vary so much. You can feel it immediately after you’re moving from one part to the other part and that’s really interesting.

Ben Grynol (28:29):

That is an academic lens on paving roads there, Hao. So you went into Kenora, ended up meeting up with Sam, Justin and I. We had a ton of fun around a camp fire and then it was onwards for the rest of the trip.

Hao Li (28:46):

Yeah. So actually I think I said Prairie is kind of boring for driving but more boring part is actually within Ontario, before Toronto, between Kenora and Toronto. It is just endless mountain driving and it’s just so long and so far in between. Ontario is too wide.

Ben Grynol (29:12):

It gets monotonous.

Hao Li (29:14):

Yeah. But I did enjoy the big lakes along the road in Ontario. We even found a sand beach, which looks crazy. It feels like a sea beach if you don’t know it’s a big lake, so that’s amazing.

Ben Grynol (29:31):

And you got to Toronto, which is an amazing city. Very cool. It’s as analogous, I guess, the closest you would get to New York as far as a Canadian city goes. Very diverse, very multicultural. And you ended up meeting up with our good pal [crosstalk 00:29:47].

Hao Li (29:48):

Yeah. Cammo actually showed me around downtown Toronto, which really enjoyable and he bought me a cup of his favorite coffee and that’s amazing day.

Ben Grynol (30:02):

“Was it up to your coffee standards?” is the question.

Hao Li (30:06):

I will not disclose that.

Ben Grynol (30:09):

Hesitation. There was hesitation.

Hao Li (30:13):

I think for the place, it is pretty good. Their roast level is questionable, but still tastes good for their standard, I think.

Ben Grynol (30:24):

Oh, love it. And then what happened after Toronto? What did the rest of the road trip look like?

Hao Li (30:31):

Yeah. After Toronto, we actually visited my partner’s relatives in Toronto. She got a cousin living there and we went to Niagara Fall because we are in the region, so had to. One thing is, actually in Toronto, I didn’t pay too much attention around the city because the driver is crazy. So I have to 100% focus on my driving in the city. I was really tired compared just drive on the highway.

Ben Grynol (31:03):

Yeah. It’s very congested. The population’s increased in the GTA, the Greater Toronto Area, so much faster than the infrastructure has been built around it. It’s like any major city that develops really quickly. It’s just what happens.

Hao Li (31:21):

But Toronto is not the worst. I’ll say that. So after Toronto, we headed to Quebec province, Quebec City itself, which I find is the second most beautiful little historic town, other than Victoria. I still love Victoria. Quebec City is really, really beautiful and we had some good food because we are in Quebec. We have to and from there, we headed to the three Atlantic provinces. We never actually looked into it. That’s the most interesting adventure for the trip, I’d say.

Hao Li (32:09):

I think the first one is New Brunswick, which I’d say is underrated province in Canada. I don’t hear much from the news about them, but they’re pretty beautiful. I feel like they’re really close to, I think, New England in States. So the landscape and the buildings looks pretty much like what David used to rent or the new house he got. The architecture is Eastern Colonial style. It’s really interesting to see.

Ben Grynol (32:46):

Yeah. It’s very historic when you get out that way and you can see there’s a lot more East Coast influence. It’s very different. Everything difference greatly.

Hao Li (32:56):

Yeah, exactly. And the funny thing is, we try to stop at the capital of each province and I think we did it, other than Alberta. We stopped at the capital of Saskatchewan. No, we passed Saskatchewan because our final destination for the east side is the big island Newfoundland. We headed there and we also passed PEI, Prince Edward Island, which is a really tiny province. We just crossed bridge and took a ferry back, which only used three hours in total, just crossed the entire province.

Ben Grynol (33:44):

Wild.

Hao Li (33:45):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (33:46):

Very wild and then that was the end of it and then you turned around and you came back? Was that basically it?

Hao Li (33:51):

No. That’s before the end. The end is St. John’s, with S, of Newfoundland, which is the most eastern part of Northmark, I think. That’s from their statues. We took a ferry, actually it’s an overnight ferry, again, which is 14 or 12 hours sitting from New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, I can’t remember, I have the check the map, from the mainland to Newfoundland island, which was a pretty interesting trip as well. The [inaudible 00:34:30] and plants are totally different from the mainland and also, interestingly, after we get off the ferry, we have to go through a border and there will be a CBSA officer checking if we bring any plants or vegetables from the mainland, which apparently not allowed, which is interesting.

Ben Grynol (34:53):

Wild. I’ve never even heard of that.

Hao Li (34:56):

We drove nine hours from the south part of the Newfoundland Island to St. John’s, which is their capital. I really enjoyed the view of the east coast and that Atlantic ocean is totally different compared to Pacific. It’s really heavy wind and waves.

Ben Grynol (35:21):

The landscape is very different. Geographically, it’s very different. Culturally, it’s very different, even though it’s the same country. It’s no different than any country, I’d imagine, where if you are in different pockets of a country, you are going to get different cultural norms and different looking landscape, depending on the size of the country, but for the most part, I think that’s a pretty common thread globally in the way that we think about how things differ.

Hao Li (35:47):

True.

Ben Grynol (35:48):

So you go to the East Coast and then you started heading back home.

Hao Li (35:52):

Mm-hmm (affirmative). So after visiting Newfoundland, we headed back and we went to the last province we want to mark for the road trip, which is Nova Scotia. So we headed to Halifax after we got off the ferry from Newfoundland. Halifax is pretty beautiful as well. I think during the pandemic, that’s an interesting phenomenon, a lot of people like me can work remotely that just cannot afford a big city like Vancouver or Toronto. They start looking for other places. There were a lot people move to Nova Scotia and Halifax specifically because of the property price. It’s a pretty interesting city and then we start heading back. Next stop, actually, across New Brunswick. We didn’t stop and we headed straight back to Montreal.

Ben Grynol (36:48):

Interesting. So you got there. You go through Montreal and did you start making your way back through all the same cities again or what did that look like?

Hao Li (36:59):

I mentioned Toronto is not the worst traffic I experienced. Actually Montreal, I believe people in Montreal driving like crazy. I witnessed a guy driving probably 70 kilometers per hour on a 50 limited road and there is a cop right behind him or her and they got pulled over and I think they tried to escape by just did a illegal U-turn right away so that’s super crazy. Also, I have to complain. The road, well in Quebec and in general, there are so many potholes. That’s how I got my Subaru retired because I think we hit the pothole and the transmission got screwed.

Ben Grynol (37:50):

Oh no. That is not a good thing to have happen.

Hao Li (37:54):

No, that happened when we head back from Montreal to Ottawa. So that’s the last famous destination we have to cover in Ontario and we stayed there and in the morning, just visiting around like the capital Hill and everything seems fine and on our way from Ottawa to, I think it’s Sudbury, the car actually broke down right after we exited the city of Ottawa on the highway. So we hear a lot noise so we have to pull off the highway and go check and we couldn’t figure out where the noise comes from. Now, I got the experience, it’s the transmission and then the car just broke down and unfortunately, it was also a long weekend. So we had to call the tow truck to tow it to a Subaru dealership. Luckily they still have sales working before it closed, but also again, because of the pandemic, there’s no new car available at all. That’s even crazier. So we have to stuck at Ottawa for three days just to find the car we want and then we just headed back, try our best to catch up time so we drove 10, 11 hours every day.

Ben Grynol (39:27):

So wait, you’re in Sudbury?

Hao Li (39:29):

No. Not in Sudbury. In Ottawa.

Ben Grynol (39:31):

Sorry, just outside Ottawa and your car breaks down and then what did you do? You had to buy a new car or you got it fixed?

Hao Li (39:38):

We have options like fix it or just buy another car and the best we figured for us is just to get a new car so we don’t have to worry about break down again and then we can also get back home on time because my partner also need to work in a week, I think. It’s in a week. She got the schedule so we had to get back home on time. If it’s just me, I probably is fine to wait because I can just go find the Airbnb and start work.

Ben Grynol (40:15):

That’s wild. So you had to take the longest road trip possible to go to a car dealership, meaning you drove all the way from Victoria to Ottawa just to buy a new car to come back home.

Hao Li (40:25):

Yep.

Ben Grynol (40:27):

That is how scarce cars are in the pandemic right now.

Hao Li (40:30):

Yeah, I know.

Ben Grynol (40:32):

Long destination.

Hao Li (40:33):

Yeah. It’s not just for new cars. Used car prices, crazy.

Ben Grynol (40:38):

Everything is.

Hao Li (40:39):

You probably need to add two grands on top of what they’re selling.

Ben Grynol (40:44):

Everything is. And so you got all the way back, you ended up getting back to Victoria and then what was the most surprising thing when you came back and you started working? Over the period that you were gone, that month, we had enough team growth that it was significant, meaning that I think that was around the time that Jackie and Tony and Matt, Lauren, probably Taylor, there were a number of people who started. What was surprising when you came back? Were you like, “Whoa, we’re double the size.” Not actually, but we’ve got more people.

Hao Li (41:19):

Yeah. That’s exactly the surprise. When I got back, three, four new names appeared in our [inaudible 00:41:29]. Before, I got a chance to have one-on-one for each new hire, like probably you got the same experience, but for this time, suddenly we got so many new people, I have to catch up. That’s the biggest surprise. We are just keep growing full speed.

Ben Grynol (41:48):

When you started working, what did you miss the most about Levels when you’re away and then you came back to work?

Hao Li (41:58):

I think I just missed feeling of working with my team. On the road trip, it’s fine and not really feel like you’re missing friends, but for colleagues, really enjoyable to work with. And I guess the most part I’m missing is the energy from the whole team because I’m completely offline. So I didn’t check Threads, or I occasionally delete some emails. Just check them and if it’s not important, I just delete them but other than that, I pretty much have zero interaction with the team and I think the energy of the team is the most part I’m missing.

Ben Grynol (42:45):

So if you were summing it up, you had this great life experience. What was your favorite part of the trip and then were there parts that you wouldn’t do again?

Hao Li (42:55):

I would say visiting different city itself is the most interesting part of the road trip. You can see how similar each city got with each other. They’re just standard North American cities. If you don’t go to the city core, you can’t differentiate if this is in Ontario, this is in Alberta. They just look like a big city. That’s it. But, if you pay attention, you will see they are a lot different, like how the streets got laid out and how the city core looks different from 100 years ago, all the leftover historic buildings. It’s a really twisted, interesting feeling. You feel you are in the same city, but you are not, if you look close, and if I do it over again, I will definitely choose a different route, but I won’t get hesitated to do it again. Just cross Canada for fun.

Ben Grynol (44:11):

So there’s not another cross-Canada road trip in store or for you?

Hao Li (44:18):

Well, probably we are going to north, if we were planning to. I know the road could be much, much worse but you have to, if you want to experience Canada.

Ben Grynol (44:33):

You have to see the whole thing.

Hao Li (44:34):

Yeah.