From Tech to Political Campaigns: A Journey of Self-Taught Success with Bentley Hensel (DF#168)

Bentley Hensel [00:00:00]:
Every kid's different, except that their life's an ideal life. Just encourage them, give them the resources, whatever you can to help them own their journey. They're gonna mess it out. Like, I did. I had more than my fair share of failures. The reason I became an MDF for Ambit is because my parents had put me in a box. They allowed me to go and find out, and because of that, I've ended up in a pretty good place.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:22]:
Aloha, and welcome back to the degree free podcast. It's Hannah. I'm spilling in for Ryan and myself this week. I had just had a great call with Bentley Hensel, who is a senior data and DevOps engineer at a company called Civic Action. He has a lot of interesting things to say about his journey. 1, what he was able to do. He walked from Mexico to Canada. Instead of buying a culture, he worked for various political consulting firms, learned a ton about marketing, digital marketing, and client relations.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:51]:
And after that, because he had so much experience in analytics and campaign work, one of the most interesting things he said was that political campaigns are essentially fortune 500 companies that are designed to go bankrupt in 90 days. And so because of that, it's very evident throughout his story that he learned a ton working in that environment. His view on tech and the tech stack and how to learn is really useful, and that he was able to teach himself a wide variety of skills that helped him get into his current role as a senior data and DevOps engineer. He also gives some really valuable advice to parents and young adults at the end, and we may definitely be having Bentley back on soon. He's also running for congress, which he does mention at the end, as an independent. And it's interesting to hear his platform as he's running on government transparency. And once you hear his story, you'll understand why he comes from that angle, and I think that it's a really good interview. He has a great story that goes all over the place and has many twists and turns.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:42]:
And he really talks about how your twenties are such a valuable time to experiment and try things and learn really, really hard things and then find your fit. So I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did, Bentley Hensel. Welcome back to the degree free podcast. I have Bentley Hensel here. He is a senior data and DevOps engineer at a big company. He is here to talk about his degree free experience, how he got to his current role in tech via self teaching, self education through a path that people always told him he would not be able to take. So, Bentley, excited to have you here to share your wisdom, to share your experience.

Bentley Hensel [00:02:27]:
Thanks for having me, Inar. I appreciate it. And I'm a senior data and DevOps engineer at a awesome company called Civic Actions, where we do things like medicare.gov and va.gov and a lot of other systems that matter, which is a great feeling, but I've built my career on practical skills and real world solutions all without a college degree. I've been in tech, politics, briefed in the navy, and I've navigated a lot of roles that have emphasized innovation and actual problem solving as opposed to just the perception of problem solving. So passionate about technology and using efficient systems to solve actual real world impact on meaningful problems. So I'm excited to talk about how I got here and provide guidance to anyone else who's kinda interested in solving some of that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:14]:
Before we got online, we were actually having a good discussion where you mentioned some of your past, and I think I'd like to loop back to that so everybody can understand where you came from and how we got here to the point where your degree is senior data and DevOps engineer. So what happened when you were 17 right before you graduated high school? What was your trajectory? What did you think you were gonna do? How are you feeling?

Bentley Hensel [00:03:34]:
I started high school thinking that I wanted to be a research pathologist. I had a little benign ish cancer thing when I was a kid and that was something I was like, okay, that is an admirable job. Then I was like, okay, maybe general surgeon. And then my kind of late junior, early senior year, this was 2010 when I graduated core tenant, the world of accounting had just tanked and a few things. So I was inspired by a guy named, he's passed away now, but Tevan Pickens, where he was an oil guy who basically got rid of all that and built and put in wind farms. And it was an innovative thing at the time. He was basically I was like, okay. I'm gonna go become an electrical engineer, and I'm gonna live off, I was Alexandria, Louisiana, and I'm gonna live off the coast of Texas at Corpus Christi.

Bentley Hensel [00:04:21]:
And I'm gonna put in big offshore wind farms. That's what I thought I wanted to do. And I was always the kind of person, especially in high school, who I was kind of petty, still am a little bit. Still to this day, I have never responded well to when people say, oh, you can't do that, or, oh, you have to have a certain thing to achieve this goal. My guidance counselor told me that I would never achieve anything in my life, and there is no way that I would achieve this goal. Pretty much right when I graduated, I still thought I was gonna go into electrical engineering.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:59]:
Hey there. I hope that you're loving today's conversation. At degree free, we wanna help as many people as we can thrive and succeed without needing a college degree. Having these guests on that share their experiences so that you can learn from their stories and their mistakes is one of the ways that we do that. Genuinely, I'm just grateful that these guests take the time to come on and share their wisdom. And if you're getting value out of this conversation or you've listened to 2, 3, or 4 plus episodes, I have one quick ask. Please take a moment right now to review this podcast on whatever platform you're tuning in on. With your review, you're not just supporting us, but you're amplifying the voices of every guest we bring on and, ultimately, helping more people thrive degree free.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:44]:
Thank you for doing that right now and for being such an important part of degree free. But I realized that to get into Louisiana Technical University, eventually I did a year there, but then realized that was not what I wanted to do. But I realized that I didn't need certain courses.

Bentley Hensel [00:06:01]:
So I went to Catholic High School in Louisiana. You don't need religion class to get your diploma. They say you do, but you actually don't because I'm trying to do the guidelines. So I decided, no, I'm not gonna get so intentionally failed in class. Just to spite some other leaders in the school who did my little stand up, always in tech, and that was not for me. One thing in particular, which has gotten easier these past few years, but back then, it was not something you could openly talk about. The fun way I like to say it is I'm pretty severe on the ADHD spectrum, but then also have a sprinkling of the tism. And that was not something you could really broadcast in the 20 tens.

Bentley Hensel [00:06:42]:
Not the case today, thankfully. But when I went, so that was just not for me. I was in Goa and Soya, and then I jumped and gone. I had a whole other shift, but that's not who I am today.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:54]:
I don't wanna interrupt, but I do have a question I wanna ask you about that because I had such an interesting time trying to explain to parents that just because your child is on an IEP or something like that or struggled with academic schooling does not mean they cannot learn really specific or very tough skills, even complex mathematics. And as we know from you, data and DevOps, it's something that I really wanna make clear to the audience that just because your child is not fitting into a specific box of learning, that for most people is actually not a good way to learn. It does not mean that your child is not smart. It doesn't even mean that your child is not academic, actually. What it means is that they don't learn well in that version of academics. And so that's something that I feel is really important because it's so interesting for you to say that you struggled in college, but clearly, you don't struggle to learn complex concepts. So what I wanna know now is that, 1, how did your family feel about you breaking out of college? And then, 2, what did you do afterwards?

Bentley Hensel [00:07:56]:
So my sophomore, I decided to do cross country. It was also my math teacher, and it didn't end well for that math course. So I technically failed 1 year of high school math. We took it again and it was fine, I got past all that. But now I spend way more time than I would like to admit on AI models and things, and my math's never real to a lot of parents just because they're not necessarily doing great in school and something. I mean, this is a big problem in college. Why? If if someone wants me to do something, don't ask me, oh, you have to do this. Tell me why you learned it done.

Bentley Hensel [00:08:28]:
Because if I don't see a motivation, why do I need to learn, like, block rhythms? I know why it's important now, but at the time, they never told me. And they're soft and motivated. So just because they're not necessarily doing great in their teenage years does not mean they can't find the motivation in life once they tend to figure out who they are. But also on how my parents respond, I was very fortunate that my parents were kind of realized from an early age that it's best to don't ever call Bentley and make him try to force him to do something that he's not motivated because that is never gonna end well. The best thing is they're like an energizer. You just point him where he needs to go and he'll figure out how to get there. Especially with just the way my personality and the way I see the world is sitting me into a box is the best way for me to fail at something. So I was fortunate, they were not super stoked.

Bentley Hensel [00:09:20]:
I mean, my dad, he's a dentist and he had a Ford, went to Ford SMU for swimming and then went to UT Fadel School and had a whole bunch of other badass degrees for funsies. My mom was a landscape architect from LSU, so she was on the 7 year plan. She actually picked real ops as she liked to say. Ag mechanization was hers pretty much all the way back to early 1900s. Men and women like grandparents, grandmas, all that both had college degrees. And I am a first one out to both my sisters, they've passed the bar in law school, but not me. They weren't successful at the same time. I think they realized early on, just let that lady be that way.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:58]:
Well, how do they feel now with where you're at and your job? And I'm sure they're very proud of you. Are they surprised?

Bentley Hensel [00:10:04]:
Early on, yes. So one of the first big job I had, I was working in Boston for a presidential campaign. I was 19 when I got that job, and technically it had turned shut, and then it turned into a job where I was paid no money. So my dad was questioning, like, Okay, is this real? Is he just putting me on here? But him and my sister flew up to Boston, and they saw me, oh, okay. Here's the secret service checkpoint, and here's all of these barricades that he can go through, and introducing me to all my coworkers and stuff. They trusted me, but at the same time, this kid's, like, barely 20 years old. Is he putting this on? College didn't work out for him. And ever since then, they're like, is this the right? Like, are you okay? But they've never not been supportive.

Bentley Hensel [00:10:51]:
And honestly, that's a big reason why I got to where I am today because I have that baseline support, someone that I can go to. And even though they may not have understood what I was doing, they still encouraged me to find out for myself.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:05]:
So you graduated, and then you ended up working for the presidential campaign. So how did you get from that to data and DevOps engineering?

Bentley Hensel [00:11:16]:
Best piece of advice I ever got is you're 20 through your time to mess up. You really can't unremake yourself. So graduated high school, went to Louisiana Tech for electrical engineering. After a year, that was not what I wanted to do. So I left and then got guilt tripped to take some local classes at Louisiana Tech, Alexandria. I felt so stifle. But then at the time, I got a job for a governor's race, knocking on doors and walking miles every day. Loved it.

Bentley Hensel [00:11:42]:
Then did another local race after that, and then I was persistent and said, godly amount of emails to this presidential campaign thing out of work.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:51]:
Persistence is an underrated skill, though. I say that all the time. I've done that where I've applied to a job 17 times. And the end of it, though, was they hired me. You gotta give in at some point. Or they'll tell you, stop. We're not gonna hire you. They'll just tell you eventually.

Bentley Hensel [00:12:06]:
They did. I still didn't care.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:07]:
Yeah. And you just keep going.

Bentley Hensel [00:12:08]:
I just kept how much and motivated and just give a try. I moved up to Boston in fairly January. I'm from Louisiana. I did not know what cold was.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:19]:
It's freezing up there. The only way they stay warm is to go in Dunkin' Donuts. That's the only way.

Bentley Hensel [00:12:25]:
But, yeah, I was making no money in Boston, but I figured out a way. Did that, left the campaign. I wanted to still serve my country, so I took a few months off and did a lot of work. I helped with a little medical device startup for a year. Prepping, did the Navy for a bit. Loved it, but then they found out a half a dozen decided thanks, but no thanks after I got in, which is frustrating.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:48]:
Oh, so you got in and then they said, no. I'm sorry. You didn't pass the health screening. Oh, no.

Bentley Hensel [00:12:53]:
With one day short of the 6 months active duty mark, which is super frustrating because that's officially when you get veteran status. But it's a Navy.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:02]:
Sure. That's the that's the rules.

Bentley Hensel [00:13:04]:
Yep. So left there. I went back into politics. I was a campaign manager for the attorney's race, won a race that shouldn't have been winnable with Pandora Internet Radio, audio ads for local political campaigns. I'll I'll be the 1st one ever do it. In 2014, spoke at a panel in New Orleans for the American Association of Political. Super niche trait, but incredibly fun about it. And another, lady on the panel, she was Becky Donatelli, who was the president of a company called Camphead Solutions.

Bentley Hensel [00:13:34]:
And after that panel, she was like, you're gonna come work for me because of what I said. And I was like, oh my gosh, I would love to. But she's like, go on your mountain man hike first. Because as a thank you pretty much for what MFVAs are in, I was given some money and he's like, go do something you'll do again. So I walk from Mexico to Canada.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:52]:
What? Or roll this back a minute. There's so much going on here. Okay. So first of all, political consultants. Right? I want to zoom in on this a little bit because it's kind of foreshadowing to later in your story when you get into data. And this is my perception. So, obviously, you can correct me because you know. But political consulting, from an objective standpoint, not a right versus left, all these kind of things, But just as a job, it's all marketing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:13]:
It's all data. Image consulting, brand representation, it's PR, it's crisis management. And so there's a lot underneath that umbrella. When you were starting to be in that crowd, did you start to see threads that you were eventually gonna pull on that were gonna lead you to the job you're in now?

Bentley Hensel [00:14:29]:
Yeah. Big reason that my wife went the way it did is whenever I was getting that first big political job, they said, which department do you wanna be in? Digital, advanced, or, war room, which is like media monitor. I was like, oh, digital sounds cool. I was 19. I had no idea. And it was kinda like happenstance and I probably would've fallen in there, but it's also a little bit terrifying when you're 19 years old and tweeting out for some of the most visible people in the country, and they trust you with that. And there's the industry, I have my own problems with it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:02]:
Yeah. But like I said, I do as well. But I was trying to be objective because it is an interesting sphere of work, and there's a lot there because it's a complex system and there's a lot of money involved, and there's obviously a lot of power at stake. And so because of that, there's all these different jobs in it that teach transferable skills, which, obviously, it did because you ended up transferring your skills. So you were given some money, and then you walked from Mexico to Canada.

Bentley Hensel [00:15:23]:
Pacific Crest Trail.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:24]:
And how old were you when you did this?

Bentley Hensel [00:15:26]:
I was still pretty young, and it was amazing. I had always been a big fan of the outdoors, but he kinda gave me the option to go do that as a thank you for helping him achieve his life goal. Then the movie Wild came out, Reese Witherspoon. I was like, that sounds and I was a a megal scout and a few other big fan of the outdoors. Within a month of deciding, I was dropped off on the Mexican Canadian border and started walking.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:50]:
Well, what's cool about that though is I think one of the things that I speak about a lot that I see very clearly evident right there is the fact that you had the freedom to do that because you didn't immediately have to turn around and get a job to service a student loan debt burden that you didn't have. And that's something that I'm trying to explain to you. Oh, what about the life experience? I'm sorry. But what about the life experience of doing that? That's crazy. That's so cool that you did that.

Bentley Hensel [00:16:11]:
One of the things I say is memories are, like, things that you're kinda uncomfortable with. You don't really get to hide from that. And I'm not saying this to everyone, but, like, all those awkward moments and things that you're like, wow, this was hard, that comes up a lot. You kinda think about it so much, you just bury it off. You're like, okay. I've thought about this for 6 days straight. There's I'm good. Even to now, it's a great mental technique I can do where something is, you know, a little bit of adversity.

Bentley Hensel [00:16:35]:
I've figured out how to emotional health, so I put that on the side, but I can take that critique, put it in a box, and just burn it, and move on. But, yeah, like, the life skills, it's a great conversation starter if it's like a very weird fact about yourself. I walked across America, took a 153 days. I did it by myself, and my dad actually was, like, support. I paid for it, but, like, he got into helping ship me my food on the trail and all that. But, yeah, that life changing experience.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:02]:
I would imagine so. And then so you come back from this this vision quest as I'll call it. And then after you get back from your vision quest, you were a different person, obviously, than you when you started. So after the trail, what brings us to where you are now? What did you do?

Bentley Hensel [00:17:17]:
Took that job with a company in Old Town, Alexandria. So I was moving from Alexandria, Louisiana to Alexandria, like Virginia's version. But then, yes, I did that, and I came on as a officially, in titles there were director of social media and client management. There was a lot there. I did not know what HTML and CSS was, but they did a lot of email marketing. So messages, donate today or the world's gonna catch on fire. Writing that email and making sure they get in that inbox. So the company said, here's some courses on learning HTML and CSS.

Bentley Hensel [00:17:50]:
Had no idea. I was like, okay. Great. From the political campaign before, I did more marketing and social media and advertising analytics, not writing. I say the word code loosely there for HTML, but more or less, and learned PHP a little bit with the landing pages. So, you know, click here to sign a petition. Well those pages were PHP. And then started to get into a little bit of data.

Bentley Hensel [00:18:12]:
I was at a company that supported finding out. And if you have an idea, go and try to do it because plumb campaigns, especially presidentials, it's a fortune 500 company run by 20 something. They're designed to go bankrupt in 90 days.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:27]:
I've never heard anyone phrase it like that, but that's so true.

Bentley Hensel [00:18:31]:
Yeah. So money, it's weird concept, but ask for more.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:35]:
Yeah. They have an expiration date. That's so wild.

Bentley Hensel [00:18:38]:
If you have money in your account on election day and you lost, that's even worse than losing. That's wow. You've held back. Weird concept to think about.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:48]:
Super strange. Wow. I never really thought about it.

Bentley Hensel [00:18:50]:
In that industry too, 70% of your money over the course of 4 months every 2 years. It's the ultimate feast and famine. So budgeting here, beyond incredibly important. So I learned a decent bit there and then I took another job with another kind of advocacy group almost 2 years later. Did ish well there, but I found out that there was some corruption and things going on, and I brought it up to my boss who I did not realize was involved. Walked out of that job, and that was the first time I was ever fired, which was interesting. I was a digital strategist there, so a lot of marketing and figuring out how to get brands built.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:27]:
Company politics is a real thing.

Bentley Hensel [00:19:29]:
Yeah. It's a skill that if you're not careful, you can make a breakthrough for your Earth. So then after that, I started my own company, first one, and we did political merchandise in stores. So, basically, buy this bumper sticker today or the world's gonna catch on fire. So I was the guy that managed the store.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:45]:
I'm sensing a recurring theme.

Bentley Hensel [00:19:47]:
Yeah. It's hellfire and brimstone is what brings in to look. It works. Shipped a whole bunch of yard signs and had my company made a million, lost a million there, and did great and have some fantastic stories around that. But then shifted that company a little bit and started another one when I was kind of tired of politics, and that was I bought a new warehouse in actually Waynesboro, Virginia in February of 2020 for shipping and importing items from overseas for commercial companies, and that all pretty much went up in smoke with COVID. Found some investors, shifted, rebuilt the warehouse, bought a semi truck full of ethanol to make hand sanitizer.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:24]:
What?

Bentley Hensel [00:20:25]:
Yeah. I got an official FDA pharmaceutical manufacturing facility at a legal drug lab to make that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:33]:
That's crazy. How long did you do that for? How long was that able to be profitable?

Bentley Hensel [00:20:38]:
About a year, and then I just realized that if I kept going at that, I wasn't gonna make I was always hustling for it and do well, but, like, it was just not what I wanted to do. I figured my dad told me about a year. You're more excited about building inventory system than you are actually of doing manufacturing and things. So job out of that company, and then a few months later, went back to a political marketing firm, in Georgia. But then leadership and I didn't quite agree on things. Company ended up going bankrupt a few months after I left. It was very unfortunate that y'all went y'all's own direction and then failed. Took my time off, about 9 months, learned to sail, then got a job at my fantastic company, Analysis at Auctions, and hired as a senior technical product manager.

Bentley Hensel [00:21:25]:
And then this past March, transitioned over to the internal IT and tools for senior data and DevOps engineer. And I told you, it was a lot.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:33]:
Honestly, there's a lot of parallels between your experience and mine. I also had a ton of adventures. Not as cool as yours, though. Yours are something else. But that's how you learn. I completely agree with what you said earlier about this is the time to mess up. This is the time to try things. Maybe you look at people that typically fall into something they really like.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:51]:
It happens later in their life because when you're young, you really just don't know. And that's why not buying a college degree right off the bat derisks situation because I can see multiple points in your story where you were actually able to take breathing room to reexamine things and then go another direction because you didn't have debt weighing you down. That is very present throughout your story that you had the freedom, the willingness to move, and the freedom of not having a lot of debt. That's so interesting. But what I'd like to know now is what did you learn to go from product management into data engineering? It sounds like you collected a stack of some of those things over the years. You had the digital marketing, which is all analytics, so that base was there. But then what did you learn to get the official switch?

Bentley Hensel [00:22:33]:
I am self taught. I haven't had a bunch of training there. Google was my best friend. For the tentacle people, Google's great, but you wanna pay for your searches with a company called Kagi, k a g I. I'm just a huge Kagi fan, and it's the best thing in the world for searches. Stack Exchange, going on there and asking questions and getting told I'm a complete idiot like every other question on there. Whenever I had my company, it's like I needed some cloud infrastructure or when I was working in politics, it's all fun and games until the AWS cloud bill comes. But there was a need to solve a problem, and I figured out how to do the skills.

Bentley Hensel [00:23:06]:
And in particular, we were talking a little bit before about some of the tools and things to learn, and everyone's different. But the way I figure out a new system when there's a weird problem, what are we trying to accomplish here? They're like, let's ask Bentley. My kind of gift is taking chaos and figuring out a creative way to solve that problem. I learned by breaking it. I wanna see your code, and I am an adamant opponent against anything that is not open source. If you're not supportive of an open source software, I don't support you. I try not to use you because the reason I got to where I am today is because I was able to go and use these tools when I couldn't afford it. I can't afford an Oracle license for learning data.

Bentley Hensel [00:23:49]:
I can't afford to go pay for Salesforce when I'm in my early twenties online. I mean, I couldn't have, but I would have struggled to pay that. So wanted some of the things, Portainer, that's how I learned Docker, which is super kind of confusing abstract concept especially when you're starting, but as a DevOps engineer, right, if it's not Docker, I don't take it seriously. If it's not in a container, it doesn't really exist because I'm not deploying it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:12]:
The technical stuff is super complicated for a lot of people, and we're getting close to time. So what I wanna do is I would like to ask you a few different things. 1, what would you advise young people who are 16 to 20 years old to start learning now if they want to get to the type of job that you're in? If they wanna go into DevOps, if they wanna go into Dev, how would you advise them to interview? What do they need to learn? And then how would you advise them to interview to showcase their skills? Those would be super actionable.

Bentley Hensel [00:24:40]:
I will share with you a link to the slide deck that I made for the my job at Civic Actions. Tell us about projects you did. I'll share that slide deck and you can share it out with people.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:51]:
We'll link it in the show notes, everybody.

Bentley Hensel [00:24:52]:
My advice big reason that I've learned how to use a lot of systems is by trying it out. If you ever want a fun rabbit hole, the Google term is home lab, which my home lab this is not such a humble brag I am about to cross the 500 terabyte mark at my home lab. When there's data, I probably have it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:14]:
For those of you listening, that's a lot of storage for data.

Bentley Hensel [00:25:18]:
In my basement, I have a stack of computers about 4 feet tall, but they're not great. $300 Dell Micros. But for anyone getting started, go buy a couple Raspberry Pis and go online and look at a company called Portainer. The CEO is super nice and the company is great. Basically what that is is a visual interface for a lot of your coding tools. I could not figure out Docker with the command line. When I started out, the command line was very intimidating. Now I love it.

Bentley Hensel [00:25:47]:
I'm like, I don't want your web interface. I want it's command line. But when I was starting out, I needed a visual representation of it. But portainers are visual Docker who can do everything with it and deploy clusters, break it. And when the thing stops working, just reflash it and figure out what you're doing in your own life. Go deploy Ghost's website and have your own blog. That's what I did for my website. I learned a lot there.

Bentley Hensel [00:26:11]:
Another one for data is another great company called Deep Beaver. It's an open source tool. They have a free word for that. I'd say for enterprise, I made it as even with its work and just more database support, but that's how I learned Postgres. That's how I learned MySQL. But it's another visual interface of databases. I still use that today. My day to day job is pinned on my taskbar because it's such a great tool to learn and break SQLite and all these other database engines, at least for me.

Bentley Hensel [00:26:42]:
It really helped get the concept of what a relational database is, which is it's like spaghetti pretty much.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:50]:
It's tough to understand.

Bentley Hensel [00:26:51]:
Yeah. But those are the things that helped me in particular. Awesome Open Source is another one. It's a fake I'll give send you links to some of these too. Fantastic. Hub thing where it's a bunch of awesome self hosts actually. But it's a bunch of free open source self hosted tools that you might need in your life. Run them and break them.

Bentley Hensel [00:27:10]:
Send them to your friends and family. That is a great way to motivate you to have a good back end because when your grandmother texts you says this thing that she loves is not working anymore, you figure out real quick how to automate deployments and things.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:24]:
That's a really practical idea. So, basically, build stuff and then send it to your elderly relatives or your mom and your dad and see if they can break it because they are users. They will break it, and then you'll go, oh, shoot. I gotta fix this. So if you could give one piece of advice to young adults 16 to 20 years old about how to self educate and then also one piece of advice to their parents to support them, what would you tell them?

Bentley Hensel [00:27:48]:
Figure owl, what do you enjoy spending your time on? I'm a huge nerd. I enjoy tech and data. I do that for fun. You don't need a degree to go into it. If it's talking to people, go into product management. Figure out what you genuinely enjoy and go and break it. Go in and find ways to interact and make that into your daily life and use that as a an interesting story with these big companies. The worst I can do is not hire you.

Hannah Maruyama [00:28:15]:
I feel like I should give you a degree free hat because everybody's listening going, yeah, I know. You guys say that all the time. So that's perfect.

Bentley Hensel [00:28:22]:
Every kid's different except that their life's an ideal life. Just encourage them, give them the resources, whatever you can to help them on their journey. They're gonna mess it out. Like I did, I had more than my fair share of failures. The reason I became an MPF for AmbitA is because my parents put me in a box. They allowed me to go and find out and because of that I've ended up in a pretty good place.

Hannah Maruyama [00:28:44]:
I'll say so. And then to wrap up, do you wanna tell folks what you're doing today?

Bentley Hensel [00:28:49]:
Still working my full time job, fully my beloved, but I got quite frustrated this past March. I wasn't super stoked about the way the country was and how things weren't happening. So I've been out of politics for a hot minute, and I'd saved up some money. I was gonna go buy a sailboat and circumnavigate the world while working remote. In March, I decided that I'm frustrated, and I need to do something. So I decided to run for you as house of representatives in Northern Virginia. I'm running as an independent, and my whole vibe is government transparency and revitalizing the entire government technology stack. And I feel like a lot of my life's kinda led me to this point.

Bentley Hensel [00:29:32]:
We'll see what happens in November. No college degree and running for congress, and I'm already the first to instantly disclose all my donations. The little tech platform I built, no one did it before because I wasn't in a box. No one said, oh, you can't do that. I fought with the FEC on a little bit and they agreed that I could do it. But I think not having a lot of my horizons chopped off by going in and having a college professor say this is not the way allowed me to get DevOps engineer running for congress and, yeah, where most of my issues either people love it or they wanna throw me in a burning pit of sulfur. You know, they appreciate the thought put into it. So if you don't limit yourself with Verizon, then you don't push yourself into a box and, like I said, commit yourself to tens, 100, in some cases, 100 of 1,000 of dollars at student loans, gives you kind of the flexibility to figure out who you are.

Bentley Hensel [00:30:24]:
And then once you figure that out, go into something you love.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:28]:
Yeah. I think I can't see a better place to end on than that. This is a great episode, folks. If you like this, Bentley, where can people find you if they wanna follow you or support your campaign as you're running for government transparency as an independent and working while you do so, which they should all do anyway?

Bentley Hensel [00:30:47]:
I've regrettably not been as active on social as I should be, but, yeah, my personal website is bentleyhensell.com and then the campaign is hensellforcongress.com. And, yeah, if there's anyone who has questions or I'm also on LinkedIn and all the other sites, but I'm also glad to talk to people if they have questions. I'm glad to help or provide. I've got a lot of connections with especially the open source community and things. So people are curious about how I got here and questions, I'm glad to help them however I can.

Hannah Maruyama [00:31:14]:
Well, that's awesome, and thank you so much. So folks, like you said, Bentley said, if you have any questions for your young adults, he's happy to help and advise with all of his wealth of experience. And, Bentley, it was awesome to have you on the degree free podcast in honor. Very excited to see how you do in November. Fingers crossed. There should be more people like you in the government. And if there were, then maybe we wouldn't be in this position. So thank you so much, though, for coming on and just sharing your amazing life story and then also just giving really sound inspiring advice to young adults and their parents for how they can navigate their journey of self education and career.

Bentley Hensel [00:31:49]:
Awesome. Thanks, Shari. I appreciate it. Thanks for having