In the first episode of their interview series on distributed systems engineers' experiences and challenges, Plushcap explores hidden scaling issues with Paul Nordstrom, an entrepreneur and former Systems Architect at Google, Amazon, and OfferUp, and Paddy Byers, Co-Founder & CTO at Ably Realtime. The discussion covers unexpected problems, limits of scale, microservices, the CAP theorem, fault tolerance, team structure, and tips for building scalable distributed systems.