Member Profile: “I couldn’t live without Shawarma”

Hi! I’m Evan Wilson. I’m a young entrepreneur spending my summer as an intern at Indy Hall. Meeting new people is something I love to do — and in my time here, I’ve gotten to meet so many creative people who always have exciting stories to tell. After hearing so many amazing things from the Indy Hall community, I realized that I want to document the people of Indy Hall and their stories in the series: #PeopleOfIndyHall.

To me, the beauty of Indy Hall is that I can sit down and chat with anybody here about anything. I want to give you an up close and personal look at those conversations.

This week I got the chance to sit down with Jag Talon to chat about his life, Indy Hall, and I got his answers to some out of the box questions. In his work life Jag does web development and design, but in his spare time he is a podcaster and an avid powerlifter.

I was particularly interested in hearing Jag’s story before he came to Indy Hall because like me, he’s Filipino! (well I’m half) We kicked off the conversation talking about his path to Indy Hall:

“I grew up in the Philippines and moved here around 5 years ago after studying computer science in college. For the past 5 years I’ve been doing web development and design here in the states.”

It’s natural to assume that Jag found out about Indy Hall when he moved to Philly a couple years ago, but he knew about Indy Hall long before that:

“When I was still in the Philippines back in 2012 I stumbled upon a New York Times article about Indy Hall, and I was like: “Shit, this is awesome!” For some reason it just stayed in the back of my mind and when I actually moved to Philly I looked Indy Hall up.

I did try other coworking spaces in Philly, but I didn’t like the ones I tried, not because one is better than the other or anything — the other ones just seemed closed off and it was hard to get into the community. At Indy Hall it was different, I just started coming in and talking to people.”

Jag is an adventurous guy who seems like he has a new “thing” every week, so I wanted to know what about Indy Hall made him want to stay and commit to being a part of the community.

“Indy Hall has a lot of web developers and designers here and I could always talk to them and ask what they’re doing. I basically learned from them not by anything formal, but just by sitting around the lunch table.

Outside of work I used to hike with a bunch of Indy Hall members, Adam taught me how to podcast, and I even participated in an art show way back — I still have an unsold painting in here somewhere. Indy Hall is how I get started with new things.”

Click the link to hear Jag’s podcast, Friends Talk Frontend. I’m not a developer, but I still gave it a shot and couldn’t stop listening! As you may know already, at a certain point in the conversation I like to start asking some out of the box questions for out of the box people to answer. I asked Jag what animal he would like to be and his answer was pretty unexpected:

“I think I’d want to be a cuttlefish because their colors are so pretty with their bio-fluorescence. I saw one video of a cuttlefish pretending to be a hermit crab and I feel like they’re just so smart, but I don’t want to be eaten.”

I watched the video. If you don’t mind getting your mind blown, I’d give it a watch too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgwWJEA67Ls

To wrap up the conversation, I like to talk food. I asked Jag what food he couldn’t live without and his answer sent me for a spin:

“I couldn’t live without Shawarma…because damn that thing’s good.”

Thanks, Jag.