There is a small ritual at the end of every Root Cause episode. The guest doesn’t get to leave until they ask a question. They don’t ask me. They ask the next guest, whoever that turns out to be. And the next guest has to answer it on air before they get to ask their own.
I started it as just a fun idea. It turned into the most honest five minutes of every episode, because nobody prepares for it, not even me. The guest has spent an hour being the expert. Then a stranger’s question lands and they have to just be a person for a minute.
So I cut the whole chain together. Nine guests, in the order the questions actually travelled. Marc Babin opened it without knowing where it would go.
If you’d rather read than watch, here is the whole chain: every question, and what the next person did with it.
“What did you learn this week that you didn’t share with others?”
Marc Babin asks. Adrian Hornsby answers.
Adrian spent nine years at AWS as a principal engineer on the team that built its chaos engineering service. Then he left, founded Resilium Labs, a consultancy helping organizations build genuine resilience - both technical and cultural. He’s also the author of a book called Why We Still Suck at Resilience. Helping organizations survive the things nobody plans for is his field.
What he said was that he is still scared. On the day we recorded, he had open sourced a project he built together with Claude - resilience companion. Every other repository he has published was written entirely by him, without AI, and it took him quite some time to feel comfortable putting this one out. What he learned that week was about himself: the fear of exposing your work never fully goes away.
Even after 20 something years in IT, you can still be scared of posting something online.
He extended it to everything that involves showing up in public. Being on a podcast, sharing ideas, writing a book. All of it is exposure, and all of it is scary. He does it anyway.
Full conversation with Adrian: The Root Cause of Never Learning
“What surprised you the most in the discipline you were the most comfortable with?”
Adrian Hornsby asks. Ia Mg answers.
Ia is an engineer and a former computer science teacher, so she has watched a lot of people meet engineering for the first time. Her answer: the surprise is how different engineering is from what it looks or sounds like from the outside.
The stereotype says you sit down, write a lot of code, and that’s the fun. The real thing takes social skills, cooperation, and a good amount of humility. Real projects come with barriers that have nothing to do with syntax. And she doesn’t describe those as the tax you pay to get to the fun part. Learning to work with those barriers, and to confront them, is its own kind of fun.
Full conversation with Ia: The Root Cause of Wanting to Learn
“If you had to start your career or pick a major right now, would it be different? What would it be, and why?”
Ia Mg asks. Orel Zilberman answers.
Orel is a solo builder who has lived the before, during and after of AI tooling. If anyone had a reason to say “skip the degree”, it would be him.
He wouldn’t change a thing. Yes, you can build a lot with AI now. But in his view AI is not taking over the whole sector, not yet and not anywhere in the near future, and he has heard enough confident predictions from very famous people about the end of software development jobs to stop being impressed by them.
I wouldn’t change my major and I would do exactly what I did.
Full conversation with Orel: Root Cause of Solopreneur Success: Before, During, and After AI
“What is the one thing you would tell yourself at the start, that you know now?”
Orel Zilberman asks. Eric Lubow answers.
Eric has more than twenty years of technology leadership behind him, and he did not reach for career advice.
He said that when he was younger he did not spend nearly enough time understanding himself through the lens of other people. That gap was a small problem in his professional life and a huge one in his personal life. He wishes emotions, emotional communication and self-awareness had simply been part of growing up. For him they weren’t.
I’ve had to learn that the hard way, through many lost relationships that I wish I did not lose.
Full conversation with Eric: Root Cause of a Healthy Team
“What is the most benign thing you’re proud of and never get to talk about?”
Eric Lubow asks. Barry O’Reilly answers.
Barry thinks about software architecture at a level where mathematics and philosophy show up. His answer showed us his human side for a second.
When he decides to do something, he goes all in. He lives in Sweden, where the water freezes in winter and you can’t fish, so he spends the cold months on a football pitch in the snow, practising distance casting. He currently throws just over 34 meters of fly line. The world champion, by his estimate, throws somewhere between 37 and 44. Getting there cost him a visit to the physiotherapist, a shoulder and a terrible tennis elbow. He plans to spend the whole summer doing it on lakes in northern Sweden and Norway.
And the reward, in his words: when you can cast like that, a collection of old men gathers on the bridge to watch you and go “Ooh!”.
Full conversation with Barry: Root Cause of Architectural Thinking
“Sent back to 1822, into a room with Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace: could you help them build a computer?”
Barry O’Reilly asks. Evan Marshall answers.
Barry announced this one as “a really cruel one”, and it is. Evan’s honest answer was: not really. He could probably solve a few problems by pulling on his undergrad education. But he had a more urgent priority.
My first goal would be to not be burned as a witch. Just blend in a little bit, survive.
Then he made the point that stayed with me. Even if you remembered enough of the details to hand them the correct answer, coherently, you would still be stuck. Getting people to accept knowledge, and building consensus around that acceptance, is the tricky part. Knowing the answer was never the whole job. (Anyone who has tried to push a correct idea through an organisation in 2026 already knows this.)
Full conversation with Evan: Root Cause of Where You Are on the AI Spectrum
“When are we going to get a robot?”
Evan Marshall asks. Fraser Merrifield answers.
Evan wanted to look forward instead of back. Everyone has a phone, everyone has a car, so if humanity keeps going, surely everyone gets a robot friend. When?
Fraser gave him a number, five years, and then spent the rest of his answer explaining why he doesn’t want one. He finds the idea of anyone living in his house weird enough, and he is selective about the people he spends time with. Then there is trust. People already assume their phones listen to every conversation and report back. Would they accept a robot walking around the house, with the kids, hearing everything?
Just so they can do your laundry, probably quite badly.
His prediction: in five years companies will be shipping commercial robots. His personal limit stays at the robot vacuum cleaner. As he put it, what if you didn’t get on?
Full conversation with Fraser: Root Cause of Not Getting Hired
“Your top five movies of all time?”
Fraser Merrifield asks. Tamanna Haque answers.
Fraser is a recruiter who talks about pop culture a lot, so of course this was his question. After fear, lost relationships and witch trials, the chain got a movie night.
Tamanna went straight to James Bond. Casino Royale, which she calls one of the last really good Bond films (I agree). Then the guilty pleasure: Tom Cruise, and the Mission Impossible films in particular. She doesn’t claim they are the best cinema from a critic’s point of view. She just really enjoys the action.
She never made it to five. Her own summary: no five films, but two really good sagas.
Full conversation with Tamanna: Root Cause of Visibility in the Age of AI
To be continued
Tamanna left her own question for the next guest. That one is still open, and I’m keeping it for the next round. The chain continues.
I love how the questions find their way to the right person. You’ll appreciate it in the next chain, it’s starting hilariously.
Root Cause will continue with the episodes starting next week and I am continuously amazed how these people agreed to share their time and knowledge with us.
Thanks for reading, watching, sending me your feedback - I get wings when someone says “I watched your episode, …” no matter what comes next :D
Take care aaaand let’s keep root causing.
The full conversations, in chain order
Marc Babin: Who’s Speaking for the Experts?
Adrian Hornsby: The Root Cause of Never Learning
Orel Zilberman: Root Cause of Solopreneur Success: Before, During, and After AI
Eric Lubow: Root Cause of a Healthy Team
Barry O’Reilly: Root Cause of Architectural Thinking
Evan Marshall: Root Cause of Where You Are on the AI Spectrum
Fraser Merrifield: Root Cause of Not Getting Hired
Tamanna Haque: Root Cause of Visibility in the Age of AI