Speaker 0 | 00:00.060

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, oh, we’re going to have a lot of fun today. Mike Yeh is on the show. He doesn’t even know how much fun that we’re going to have yet. I haven’t told him this, that my father is a urologist and he’s going to know very much why this is going to link to some of the things that we may or may not talk about on this show, because we might actually have… When I produce the show, I click, at least on the little YouTube videos, I click like, you know, I’m not supposed to click appropriate for children or something like that, but I would, this, you never know where this show could go today, but why this is so important. Hey, first of all, CTO, Chief Technology Officer, and underneath your title, and I’ve had, we’ve had numerous debates about this, people are arguing this, all this stuff, like, no, no, technology is a cost center, IT doesn’t make money, we keep the blinking lights on, all this type of stuff, but. You literally put it right on your profile. I make technology accelerate revenue, not hold it back. So, I mean, that’s just, that’s really the whole point of this entire show. I’ll be honest with you. It’s the mission statement of the show. It’s the whole point of the show. It’s helping IT directors crawl out of the, you know, server room closet, you know, where people used to slide things under the door to you. It’s not going into a meeting and glazing everyone over talking about. I don’t know, Python and all kinds of other things. And it’s showing the business how to make money. And so I don’t know, how do you feel about that?

Speaker 1 | 01:36.467

So it’s funny because you’re right, traditionally, right? We’ve been a cost center. We have been kind of the nerds in the room talking about just stuff that just goes over everyone else’s heads. And I think that the paradigm is shifting. I think that the way that technology, you know, a lot of people used to say that, you’ve heard before, right? How do we, as technology professionals, how do we get a seat at the table? Well, nowadays, I think that having, you know, basic levels of technology, I think that’s table stakes. I think that you can’t even play if you don’t have that ironed out, right? So especially as we go into AI, as we go into… you know, the content wars, which are by the way on, um, you know, and,

Speaker 0 | 02:26.029

uh, help me with that. Help me keep going.

Speaker 1 | 02:30.350

Okay. So, so let’s talk, let’s, let’s talk about, I guess the hot topic of the moment, which is AI, uh, generative AI, LLMs, you know, all this other stuff. And I’m not going to go into any of the technical details, but what does this mean for business? Well, it means that if you’re, if you’re in the business of generating content, that means that. that content is becoming watered down. It means that the amount of content that’s being generated is increasing exponentially. It means that if you’re not using the current tools, modern tools to keep up, you’re being left behind by an insurmountable gap every day that you’re not keeping up.

Speaker 0 | 03:10.625

So interesting, because I put a task out to my AI guy, which is we were just talking earlier about why I went to Morocco, which is most people are like, oh yeah, it must be nice. You’re in Morocco, hanging out, surfing, you know, doing that. I really went to Morocco because I hired an AI guy and he’s really good. And, um, you know, me being in the other, the main reason why I hired him too, was to slow me down because I’m very, uh, a million like ideas a second. and I’m very ADD and it’ll be like, I need to stay on track. Like we have this one project that we must finish, Phil. No, we can’t go off this round, right? But then when you add AI to it, it’s kind of like, well, what do we do with this? How about the SEO? What do we do about this? Can we do this thing? Can we do that? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He’s like, yeah, yeah. And here’s how we do it. I’m like, you forgot why I hired you, which I hired you was to not have me do that. But you bring up a good point when you said the content wars. And if you use AI for content, you’re going to get all of the content that’s out there. But what are you going to do with that? Are you going to use it to find the top topics and then you’re going to try and create something new to stand out? Is that where we’re going with that?

Speaker 1 | 04:16.223

Yeah. So, I mean, there’s a couple of different ways that you take it from a business perspective, right? I mean, there is in this day and age content for the sake of creating content, which generates domain authority, which generates clicks, which generates conversion.

Speaker 0 | 04:30.295

Louder, right? Like the person that screams louder and more often gets the attention.

Speaker 1 | 04:34.458

Yes. But… That is a very sledgehammer type approach, right? There are other approaches where you basically look into, you know, SEMrush and other tools, and you find areas that you can kind of infiltrate all the gray spaces. You can kind of seep in, right? So let’s take Giddy as an example.

Speaker 0 | 04:56.303

all right um just so you guys know the reason why i said we might have to like you know like um it’s not like you have like the hardest business in the world to generate content for i mean sexual health erections i mean prostate cancer i mean you have like the you have the like creme de la creme as far and we could even we could even accuse you of of showing up in my my text messages and my in my email inbox on for ed medications and all kinds of things and every every middle-aged man out there knows what i’m talking about you are literally hammered with ed prostate sexual health you’re not you’re not you know worthy enough of this woman you’re don’t you you don’t want to lose your woman blah blah it goes on and on and on so anyways continue yeah

Speaker 1 | 05:48.265

i mean i want the one point on that is that the dick jokes around here are unending

Speaker 0 | 05:54.847

So, you know, it’s, oh my gosh, you know,

Speaker 1 | 05:57.128

you’ve got to learn to live with it.

Speaker 0 | 06:00.949

You have a wonderful job. Where’s HR? How does HR get involved in your company?

Speaker 1 | 06:04.510

You know, it’s, it’s funny because the line between dick jokes and so the, the really, and again,

Speaker 0 | 06:11.732

my father’s urologist. Okay. So it’s like, you know what it was like growing up in my family and like fourth grade and sitting at the table, you’re just like, oh, help me.

Speaker 1 | 06:22.103

The really ironic thing here is that the women do it more than the men do, and it gets super uncomfortable sometimes. So, I mean, just imagine that for a second. Well,

Speaker 0 | 06:33.413

if anyone that’s worked in the hospital too or has worked in healthcare knows that the line between, like, what we would call HR and, like, a bureaucratic, large enterprise-level company, like, is… just, it’s just not there. I mean, the hospital, the way that you speak in a hospital is just so frank sometimes. Um, and, and, and having my father who’s 87 now, he is a retired urologist, right. But he’s been in, he’s had a few hospital stays, he had sepsis and he was in there for a while. And like, just the way that he and the nurses interact too is, you know, it would be completely inappropriate, which would get you fired instantly in any other company.

Speaker 1 | 07:11.623

Continue. I mean, yeah, it is, it is what it is. Right. But, uh, but giddy, I mean, So we’re in the sexual health space, right? We have a, you know, class two FDA registered medical device for erectile dysfunction. And so, okay, we can’t target the term ED. Like, we’re not going to compete with Cialis and, you know, with all of the other terms that are out there, right? Viagra.

Speaker 0 | 07:39.899

You’re going to be paying a ton. It’s like a little small telecom shop trying to compete with Vonage on pay-per-clicks for voice over IP. They’re literally throwing millions and millions and millions of dollars at it, probably daily or monthly. And just, there’s no point in doing it. Like you said, you’ve got to operate in the gray space.

Speaker 1 | 07:59.075

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 07:59.675

And the gray space is-Let’s just do the general overview real quick. Sorry. So for all other tech- nerds out there, how many end users do you have? Real quick technology stack rundown or anything like that that you’re allowed to say? Just give me the brief rundown real quick.

Speaker 1 | 08:11.322

Yeah. So on the tech stack, we’re on the typical Shopify, headless CMS, Sanity, Purcell, Next.js, that framework. As far as articles, we’re at 7,000, 8,000 articles. So there’s three sides of the business, right? So it is the subscription e-commerce business. It is also the media business where we’re generating all the content that’s driving the conversions. And then it’s kind of the data and the strategic partnerships, right? So we have a partnership with the DOD and the VA. So yeah, your dad definitely knows there are links between ETSD and erectile dysfunction. There are links between veteran and military suicide rates and ED. There are links between just general psychology. And so there’s all these different, and not to mention cardiovascular health, overall fitness level, any sort of medical conflicts. There’s an infinite number of ways that you can develop this condition. So with that being the case, one of my jobs is to figure out how do we slot in the right message at the right time to deliver that dynamic content to convert the customers? That’s what I focus on. That’s what I think about day in and day out. Right? What technology enables me to best talk to you on your customer journey? Because that’s one of the things about sexual health. It’s a very, very personal thing. It’s not like if you have a condition, you are hyper focused on that condition. You don’t care about any of the rest of the crap that I have. You want to know. Like, what are your symptoms? What are your, you know, what are the solutions? What are the medications you can be taking? You know, so on and so forth, right? As much information as you can get on that.

Speaker 0 | 10:02.157

And just to give you an idea, I went down that rabbit hole a month ago because I get routine blood work. I’m like, kind of like obsessed with like biohacking and stuff like this. And my PSA has always been one. It’s like one, one, one, one, every six months. I get it back. I’m thinking, I’m looking through my blood work. Okay. Normal. Great. Good. This improved. Getting all the way down. I’m ready to close out the report. PSA four. like jumped up four points, which is like, I, you know, so I’m immediately like, oh crap, like do I have prostate cancer? Like, what does this mean? It jumps up fast. I’m immediately looking at all kinds of articles. What does it mean? Has anyone gotten any fake PSA tests? Has anyone got this? Has anyone got this? Okay. Prostate cancer, how do you avoid it? What do you do with this? Could it just be inflamed prostate? Could it be this? Could it be that? So yes, hyper-focused.

Speaker 1 | 10:44.233

Well, you know, there’s that. And then the other thing too, is that in today’s day and age, where do you go to look for that kind of information? You’re not going to go to, you’re not going to go to Giddy. You’re not going to like go down to my taxonomy. You’re not going to go and like search for you. No, you’re going to go to Google. You’re going to go to YouTube. You’re going to, you know, do searches and you’re going to ask questions. Hey, my PSA is four. It was one. What’s happening? Or, you know, what does it mean for elevated PSA level or, you know, things like that. Right. So we can’t own the terms around PSA. But what if we could own terms around elevated PSA or. PSA lower than average? Or,

Speaker 0 | 11:22.968

you know,

Speaker 1 | 11:26.370

is there a link between exercise and PSA? You know, so that’s what I mean by filtering into that gray space. You don’t own the main terms, you own all of the terms around it, or you own the term plus some sort of like conditional factor, right? And that’s how you start to generate additional domain authority. That’s how you start to generate additional…

Speaker 0 | 11:49.179

uh seo right that’s how you start to kind of play the game with the bigger dogs that i obviously can’t compete with by the way that was a very hard term to find false positive psa test results it was hard to find i was like going in reddit and everything so there you go there’s a term you guys can own yeah how often do p do men get false psa tests and there’s like a lot of like kind of like general stuff that pops up like a couple things but there’s not really like there wasn’t um And there was no sign, like all the signs that are like, why would you have a false PSA? Like you had sex the night before. I was like, okay, that didn’t happen. Crap. And then I was like, you know, you rode a bike, like, because the bike seat presses on your prostate. I was like, I hate, I hate riding bikes. It was like, you know, excessive exercise. I was like, well, I was running around the day before trying to like get a bunch of stuff ready to go before I got on the plane. I was like, oh man. And I was like, and how much could it really jump by? Could it really jump from one to four? And like that. short period of time you know so like there really wasn’t a lot of info and i had to go like down some deep reddit you know like link and i never even found the answer i just found a bunch of guys that were like yeah i ended up having prostate cancer and it was like you know i was like a crap you know uh and then we got back and ended up being a false positive so and

Speaker 1 | 13:01.230

i get and then when i spoke with my dog he’s yeah it happens all the time like what yeah all of that worry all that all that stress and research all for nothing and i got the result as i got off a plane where i was going to be in a country for a month you

Speaker 0 | 13:15.416

but it helped because all that month i was like doing all these other articles you have on your website like eating healthy changing diet all that type of stuff so from that standpoint it was life-altering but anyways um as an it director you’re okay so you’re doing this but let’s talk like okay so how how do we enter that gray space how can some it directors that might be just the technical nerd running the network that might just be you know keeping the blinky lights on maybe he doesn’t have the space inside the company maybe he’s not how can he help operator or a tips, ideas, things that he can do to make the company more money?

Speaker 1 | 13:45.381

So I think that that kind of speaks to an even deeper question. And, you know, just humor me on this one for a second, right? Traditionally, we’re the nerds that sit in the closet there, right? We’re the developers that kind of sit there, translate things all day, translate business requirements into code, translate, you know, some sort of outcome that we want to see happen, right? Now, that’s all well and good. And that’s what we’ve done for the past, you know. 20 years, 30 years, but AI is in the picture now. And what is AI really good at? AI is really good at translating, right? So as it stands today, you can get basically a novice level of an engineer out of, you know, out of a LLM with just some basic prompting. If you really get into the prompting and you do a good job with prompting, you can get, you know, like intermediate level. In five years, that’s going to shift. You’re going to start getting high level engineer, like intermediate is going to be kind of the buy in, right? And you’re with some good prompting, you’re going to be able to get high level engineer. So what does that mean for us? And this goes back to your question. That means that being good at coding, being good at developing being good at, you know, this language. is no longer good enough for us long term, right? So that means that we need to start branching out into marketing, into paid ad, into retention, into operations, into finance. And that is how we really position ourselves. So, you know, OK, going back to the question at hand, how do you as an IT director or as someone that’s kind of working in the space today, like how do you position yourself? Well. I think that the first step is to really start, you know, interacting and working with some of those cross-functional teams and start looking at the business requirements. Not, you know, not the tech requirements, the business requirements for what it is that the company is trying to achieve through those teams and through the union of tech and paid ad or tech and retention as an example. Right. So, you know, we can think about tech and retention as, OK, well, we can talk about. Klaviyo, you can talk about email and MMS marketing campaigns, you can talk about like all these other types of things, right? They all have kind of a tech centric background, but they’re not fundamentally tech, there are things that, you know, other departments, other cross functional teams are doing that interrelate with what we do. And that’s what I really think that we need to start positioning towards, you know, as experts in a language, again, the days are numbered, my personal opinion.

Speaker 0 | 16:23.039

So It’s not necessarily like, do I need to know how to code? It’s do I need to know how to use these AI tools?

Speaker 1 | 16:28.722

Do I need to know how to strategize for the business, make meaningful connections and networks that allow me to always represent the best in class solutions? Right. And yes, I think to a certain extent, too, there is definitely learn how to be a prompt engineer. I mean, we’re think about how. Google changed the way that we do business. The same kind of shift is on the way. Pre-Google and post-Google, think about the ways that you used to gather information for your job or for whatever else prior to Google.

Speaker 0 | 17:05.567

That same paradigm shifts. That’s a great question. We’re going to pause there for a second for this part of the show, which was, what did you do? What did you do? I should have a little sound effect here. Prior to the internet, and you’re 40 years old and I’m 47, so you had to… So when I was seven, you were zero. Okay. So you had to have been around. You must have remembered. What was your first computer?

Speaker 1 | 17:27.464

Oh man. Uh, it was, it was one of those. I don’t even remember the, like the, the Commodore. Was that it?

Speaker 0 | 17:34.549

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well then, yeah, yes. That dates you well. So Commodore 64 or something like that. But yeah. What do you remember doing stuff? Like, I don’t know, probably college for you. Um, what’d it be? College high school. It was me college high school for you. without the internet or dial-up it was a lot of remember bibliographies yes there was a lot of books there were a lot of magazines around the house uh there were a lot of uh game guides it was like it was like what how did how like our research back then must have been pretty bogus and then when you started using the internet the teacher’s like you can’t use the internet for your research because it’s not accurate it’s not accurate it’s not good enough now it’s kind of like if you go to the library you’d be like well we only have access to

Speaker 1 | 18:20.320

this we only have access to this so how could my research be even good enough well and that’s one of the interesting things about ai just in general right so ai does a couple things number one is it it brings everyone towards the median so you start to gain uh so let me just give you an example right let’s say i have 10 customer service guys okay and of those 10 two of them are really really great three of them are okay right and five of them are kind of crappy

Speaker 0 | 18:49.368

ABC players.

Speaker 1 | 18:50.648

Yeah, ABC players. And broken down into the 80-50-50,

Speaker 0 | 18:55.690

right? We’ll keep the B guys, the A guys are good, and the C guys, we’ll just recycle them out. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 19:01.992

So in that scenario, now imagine I introduce AI, okay? And that AI is learning off of, I have it set to learn off of what those two really awesome guys are doing. It starts to be able to predict my conversations. It starts to be able to look into my customer and user profiles, pull out all the relevant information, have that on the screen as a conversation is happening in real time, which is by the way, what technology can do today, right? That suddenly elevates my five guys that are kind of substandard that elevates them at least the level of the three guys that are doing pretty well. It elevates the level of the guys, three guys that are doing really well to, you know, they’re probably doing a little bit better. And the two guys that are outstanding, they’re still probably outstanding, right? So basically, it brings everyone towards a mean, right? So that’s one thing. Another thing that it does is AI erodes trust, fundamentally. Imagine a situation five years from now, right? I told you that the content war is on. And in that content war, you’re using AI to generate more content. Well, eventually, the content that was generated using AI is now being referenced to generate additional content, right? So we’re kind of in one of these situations now where it’s like turtles all the way down, right? Like 10 years from now, 20 years from now, if this goes unchecked, how accurate are your Google searches going to be? So…

Speaker 0 | 20:22.373

I don’t know. I mean, it’s going to be… fairly predictable, I would think.

Speaker 1 | 20:27.717

Exactly. To the first point, everything moves towards the mean. I say that to basically say that AI is a very, very interesting tool in that it is going to completely, just like Google, just like search did, it’s going to completely shift the way we do business. It’s going to shift the way that we think about how we do research, how we find answers to questions. how much we trust those answers, all of those things are now up in the air.

Speaker 0 | 20:58.913

The way that I think of it from a very simplistic standpoint, I was talking about this the other day with just some friends, is it can only know everything that’s out there, right? It can only know everything that we feed into it, right? And if the foundation of humans is ignorance in general, I believe that the foundation of humans is ignorance. right we are we’re born idiots right and then we learned things right and if the foundation is is ignorance and and um selfish desires and right and you know from at a very base like standpoint then um it’s kind of like ai is going to be the majority of it’s going to be a everything that everyone thinks and feeds into it all the time but it’s not going to be any it it cannot can it be any new thoughts unless it generates those new thoughts itself and if it generates those new thoughts it’s only generating these

Speaker 1 | 21:51.412

thoughts on like the biggest database that’s ever been built in the ever right but can it really be creative well so there’s two things there uh number one is that it can be creative but not factual because at the end of the day ai all it’s doing is it’s drawing conclusions based on probability right so you know that’s what that’s what’s called in the industry hallucination when you ask so there’s an example of uh What mammal, like, so you ask an AI the question, what mammal lays the largest egg? And then AI will come back to you and tell you, and you can try this, something along the lines of elephants would lay the largest eggs because they’re the largest land mammals and blah, blah, blah. Well, that makes logical sense until you think about the fact that, well, mammals don’t lay eggs. So that’s, and it will, AI will tell you that in a very factual way, right? So that’s what’s called. in the industry of hallucination. So, you know, that’s, that’s one part of it. Another thing is that, you know, I think that fundamentally AI, it’s always regressive, like it, it, it always is reactive, and it’s always backward looking, right? So it’s, it’s not, you can code it, and you can prompt it in ways that, you know, have it look forward, but it’s always using data, and it’s always using probability. So, you know, as an example, we all have invested and probably lost money in the stock market at some point. And any good, any, you know, any program that you use will always tell you that, that, you know, past performance does not equate to, you know, future predictions, right? But that’s essentially what AI does. So AI is basically saying, yes, my Apple stock has gone up every year, year after year for the past 10 years, that means that next year, it will also go up by X amount. That’s not true.

Speaker 0 | 23:45.756

True. Yes. Yes. It is not true. Um, so, uh, but now in a sense, we’ve, we’ve basically talked in a circle and we’ve, we’ve basically stated what I think everyone knows to be, I would, I would hope self-evident or, or somewhat obvious the, with the exception of the hallucination thing. That’s very nice. Did not know that. Um, you are, I think in an online retail space or a business that’s it generates a lot of its income from online and paid advertising and everything all this makes a lot of sense what about a business to business manufacturing business so like for example years ago you worked for cummins i’m a fan i’m a fan uh inside my dad’s bow we had two cummins diesel um massive massive engines i’m a big fan i love diesel um All the electric people are like, how can, what about in the manufacturing space or something that might not be, that might be more wholesale or something that might be more business to business, less business to consumer type space that isn’t health relationships and how can we use AI in that space? What would your suggestion be to IT directors in a space like that?

Speaker 1 | 25:01.477

So it’s not always about generating-It doesn’t need to be AI either.

Speaker 0 | 25:05.620

It could just be like, you know, hey, like- we, IT is in the business of helping, we’re here to help, you know, make more money, be more efficient, you know, cut costs, like work across all departments, nothing in the entire company gets done better without technology. So, you know, what’s your, what are your thoughts there?

Speaker 1 | 25:21.291

So I think that’s, let’s talk about like the biggest picture here, just technology in general and the framework in which it operates, right? So, you know, we dated ourselves a little bit ago. So we kind of grew up when computers had just started. you know coming into prevalence and there was no internet cell phones i mean even cell phones yeah even right so it was like dude you have a cd-rom like you have a cd-rom yeah i i still remember uh listening to boys to men um on my cd player on repeats uh you

Speaker 0 | 25:53.271

know back when i was a kid and it was like a big yeah it was a walkman cd player like maybe yeah i mean it’s insane there was no such thing as a a um you know like a usb or thumb drive or like there was no ssd ssd drive oh yeah like you know mechanical hard drives that you would purchase you know from a mail order catalog that would you know you know for like 500 to give you i don’t i don’t remember what size that the drives were back then but it was obviously like 250k or something something stupid you know well and remember that there were a lot of iterations before we went from floppy disks to cd-roms right there was like a bunch of

Speaker 1 | 26:33.422

kind of in between stages just like there was a bunch of in between stages going from cd-roms to blu-ray uh that was not that was not an immediate thing and just like uh similarly there were a lot of iterations between blu-ray to you know like hard drives and data and ssds that we have today there was people that had a whole collections of dvds and then and then blu-ray came out yeah and then you could fit that entire collection on one like one uh

Speaker 0 | 27:01.994

Hurry up, sell, sell, sell. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 27:04.435

But so the point that I’m trying to make with this, right, is that back then everything was decentralized. It was the wild, wild west. Everyone was doing whatever they wanted. You fast forward into the 90s, early 2000s, we moved towards this era of centralization, right? So we moved into this era where like the oracles and the SAP started really rising to prominence. Through the 2010s, we… The pendulum swung the other direction and we started going into this decentralized model with apps and with Shopify and NetSuite and companies like that. As we got into the 2020s, you saw this swung even further in the decentralized direction where you’re picking and choosing off the shelf. Everything is just a… a SaaS model now, and you’re just picking and choosing best in class. Well, now with AI, I think that the paradigm is swinging back in the other direction. Why? Because AI is more powerful the more layers of your business it runs through. The more data it has, the more predictive it can become, and the more relevant the information that it can provide on any given layer.

Speaker 0 | 28:19.199

So on the customer-Everyone’s complaining about simplicity as well. Most IT departments, CTOs, CTOs, it’s a layer of complexity and an ocean of crap that a lot of people have to sift through. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 28:31.823

Yeah, for sure. So-Go ahead. So what I’m seeing over the next three to five years, basically, is I think that the pendulum is moving from a decentralized model back to a centralized model, right? And the reason for that is going to be AI. And the more you can take advantage of it, the more benefits that’s going to have overall to the efficiency of your business. So going back to give me some examples,

Speaker 0 | 28:56.231

give me some examples of, of, of how you see that and how that’s, how you think that is going to manifest itself. Okay. And can we, and can we get ahead of the curve? Can we get ahead of the curve somehow?

Speaker 1 | 29:07.857

Yeah. So great question. So it’s just a very easy example. Okay. I have a, an email list that goes out to all of my customers. So, you know, my CRM, my CRM is connected to my CMS content management. and my content management is connected to my customer database, where all like my Zendesk or customer or whatever the case may be, right?

Speaker 0 | 29:31.732

So as-All your other apps, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 29:36.912

Yeah. So as that information is coming in, right, I can see not only who, like, what campaigns has a customer been, you know, has been interacting with, what promotions they’ve been using, what orders are all associated with their accounts, right? And what kind of conversation I’m having with them right now. And given all of that information with AI, I can generate a probability of where this conversation is going to go and what kind of… promotion or offer I can give to them to sway them. Maybe they’re thinking about cancer, or maybe they’re thinking about, yeah, your price is too high or whatever else. And using AI, I can pull in all of my competitors’information as well. I know what the most likely ship they’re going to jump to is, and I can preemptively beat that jump. That’s something that is possible with today’s technology now, including AI.

Speaker 0 | 30:33.298

Are we gathering all the customer info? Speaker 1

Speaker 1 | 30:35.804

snowflake something what are we doing for that yeah so there’s a couple different ways i mean you know typically the lake is something like aws you’re just throwing everything into aws’s lake and then yeah for um for the warehouse typically using something like snowflake i think that putting in a relational layer is going to become more and more important as uh as the so basically what i mean by the relational layer right is i see phil as a customer and feel like these four things and these are the things that he interacts that looks a lot like this subset of customers that i have up here i group him with those customers and these customers tend to respond well to these types of emotions this type of messaging this type of content you know and i’m running basically uh an infinite number of sub businesses um within my business catering and and targeting specific messaging and specific promotions and items and products and all of that stuff to you and that cohort of customers.

Speaker 0 | 31:38.331

That’s marketing 101. It’s just how does the IT department help marketing do that?

Speaker 1 | 31:44.375

Exactly. Yeah. And the way that we help them do that is with those relational databases, building in as much information as we can to generate what that looks like.

Speaker 0 | 31:55.642

How would a conversation with you in marketing look? How would you… how would you sell them on AI? Because how many people have had that conversation where we need to use AI, we need to use this thing. Yeah, get the heck out of here. You know what I mean? Like, how, like, how can you have that conversation as an IT director with your marketing department and kind of really, I guess, bring something home to them?

Speaker 1 | 32:16.073

So I think that, okay, so what is marketing most interested in at any given time? It’s always about revenue, right? It’s about, you know, you have your organic versus paid, you have your… And then you have your attention numbers that are built into that as well. Right. So that’s fundamentally like those are the numbers that they’re always targeting. And then they’re looking at things like, you know, conversions, click through rates, bounce rates, you know, kind of all that type of stuff. The way that you start to build rapport with them and you start to get them, you know, marching in the same direction is, hey, these are the tools out there that can increase conversions by X percent, decrease bounces by X. Right. Ultimately lead to.

Speaker 0 | 32:56.948

a greater top line of let’s call it a conservative number right i mean the the conversion rates on pay-per-click if ai can help do that i mean obviously you know their ears are going to be open and this may be going over some people’s heads but from someone that’s played around and gone down the marketing hole for for years you know i i can i can understand that and appreciate it so it’s you know how would we do that by you different keywords, different cooperating skills? How is AI going to open up a whole group, like you said, kind of like a whole vertical of gray area topics that maybe we’re not hitting on? How is it analyzing everything that they’re doing right now?

Speaker 1 | 33:36.084

So AI can and can do that specifically, but it’s really not meant to do that as it stands right now. So right now, AI is really kind of in a generative phase. There’s not enough… data, there’s not enough LLMs, maybe in three years, we talk about this again, and I would have a different answer for you, right? But what AI can do is it can accelerate. So once I understand, so let me take a step back. AI can help group individuals. AI can help understand what the, you know, what are the most important topics to them. And then AI can help generate information, content around those. important keywords or those important topics right and then using you know next.js for sell sanity contentful or you know you know you can use shopify like hydrogen you know whatever whatever you want to use you can slot in that content as you understand you know so Going back to the erectile dysfunction discussion that we were having earlier, right? Yes. If I knew that you have ED because of PTSD, I could message that a lot differently than if I didn’t know that, right? Yes. I think that is the power. That is the power of AI. That is the power of search relational databases. That’s the power of really being able to build an authentic conversation. Because that’s ultimately what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to sell you a product, right? But in trying to sell you that product, the first thing that I’m trying to do is I’m trying to establish trust and rapport with you. That’s the goal, right? And in delivering to you the information that you need to have in order to make a decision and having that information be unbiased and trustworthy, I’ve now, I’ve accomplished that initial goal. So now, you may or may not. To me, it doesn’t really matter. But what matters is that when you have this conversation with somebody else, or when you think about, you know, something that is in the same vertical, or you have another health question, you know, that’s kind of in the same vein, I’m probably going to be the first name that comes up, you’re going to be like, yeah, I had a good experience, they gave me exactly what I needed in order to make, you know, my purchasing decisions, or just, you know, to be further educated. And as a result, that increases my ultimate domain authority, right? Which is, at the end of the day, that’s my goal.

Speaker 0 | 36:04.848

So in the, in the air of increasing education, any great tips or advice, uh, that people should, should be using and or doing, because from a theoretical standpoint of marketing, that’s always what marketing is trying to do. It’s always what they’ve been trying to do forever is speak directly and as niche as possible directly to their person to deliver messaging to them. That’s why marketing for years has been doing, you know, um, surveys. Take this survey, right? And then take the survey and you answer all these questions. And then like, you know, a year later, you’re getting, you’re not even a year later, you’re getting messages that you’re like, how are they speaking directly to me? How are they in my mind? How do they know me? Right. Because you’ve already given them all of the information, right. To speak to you. Right. So that’s not like, that’s nothing new, but being able to gain more. more of these kind of vertical markets or find these like very unique gray spaces and being able to speak to people very individualistically, right? Like, you know, like I’m a guy with eight kids. How many people have eight kids? I mean, there’s a lot of them. There’s a lot of people that probably have eight kids or more, not many, but if you had that list of those people with eight kids and you knew what their… you know, struggles are like, you can’t buy a, you know, you’re shopping for a van. You can’t buy a Honda Odyssey as much as you would freaking love that car because it’s like the best mini van out there, but it doesn’t work for you because you’ve got eight kids, right? Because that little center seat doesn’t do anything and you’d be all cramming in there and it’d be like a death trap. And you know,

Speaker 1 | 37:35.087

like, you need like a limo to bring this.

Speaker 0 | 37:39.289

Yeah. So like, I know that you’re struggling right now, searching the internet for Ford. uh you know like you know whatever 12 passenger vans with like a rubber flooring not a carpet flooring because your kids throw french fries and ketchup on the floor all the time and you know a carpet’s bad i think you know and it’s endless right but so what’s your suggestion and or tip or give give give the audience something that’s like a secret weapon or something that you do that you’re like look this is what i do this is my secret sauce this is how i walk into every organization and absolutely you know kick butt and um you can do the same by simply doing this and of course we all wish that there was that real like kind of like i don’t know yeah there’s there’s no secret sauce but i mean let me let me take a step back and say a couple of things on this right it could just be like hey i’m just easy to talk to and it’s like i’m a cool dude you know it could be that like don’t be a loser you know it could be and you know and tell a lot of dick jokes you’re like yeah yeah

Speaker 1 | 38:43.300

No,

Speaker 0 | 38:44.101

don’t do that. Don’t do that. That is, do not do that. That does not work in your organization. That’s not the advice. Do not do that. Anyways, go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 38:52.326

So I think that there’s a couple of things. Number one is, fundamentally, what is it about technology that sets us apart? So number one is it’s a very thought intensive type of business. One thing that I would say that really sets me apart personally is that I’m always curious. I’m willing to talk to anyone, Phil, that’s how we got connected. I’m willing to talk to anyone, learn anything at any time. I have an open mind. And I’m always willing to think about what are the best ways of doing things. If I’m doing things that are just like, I start talking to my network, and they’re like, yeah, why are you doing it that way? I’m like, why am I doing it this way? And if I don’t have really good reasons for it. you know, I’m willing to change my mind. So I think that being curious, being open minded, it’s one thing. I think that, you know, other things are like, at the end of the day, technology is changing faster than any one person or even any team of people can ever keep up with it’s just impossible. You should find areas that you can specialize in that you’re interested in that you’ve learned you want to learn as much about as possible. And then take that and leverage it, like, you know, trade it with other people find, you know, like minded individuals. and chat with them and take away learnings of theirs for yourself and give your own learnings to them as kind of an exchange. I think that that sort of decentralized… I don’t really suggest going to YouTube or going to Skillshare or whatever and like, yeah, you can do that and learn how to code in Python like we were kind of joking about earlier. And that’s fine and well and good. And if you do that and spend all your time doing that, you’re going to be obsolete in three to five years. Again, my opinion. Right.

Speaker 0 | 40:40.741

Okay. So what can you do?

Speaker 1 | 40:41.922

So I think that you should really be focused on networking, learning other areas of the business. One other thing that I typically do is as I go through technical requirements, as I look at platforms, as I look at implementation partners, as I look at agencies, I always ask, who can I talk to that can? that can speak to why they chose to use you, your platform, the agency, you know, a consultant, a framework over something else. And I’ve tried to learn about like, what are the, you know, what are the differentiating factors here, from a business standpoint, not from a technical standpoint, I think that I need to make that very clear. At the end of the day, technology is a tool, right? And it’s just a means to an end. And I think that a lot of times, you know, through the last 10-20 years, we’ve kind of been caught up in the whole You know, it is it is like end all be all. And it’s not at the end of the day, technology is meant to enable businesses to succeed and succeed better than others and thereby stave off the extinction. Right. So fundamentally, if you’re not thinking about the business as you’re as you’re in that, you know, that there’s technical discussions, then you’re putting the cart before the horse. So that’s kind of one of the things that I do as I’m. as I’m in these discussions, as I’m working with my peers, as I’m chatting with vendors, customers, collaborators, people in my company, people outside of my company, I’m always thinking about the business before I’m thinking about the technology. And I always have a reason for, if I make a decision, here are the business justifications for why I’m making that decision. So I think that what I’m basically saying is that we need to evolve from code monkeys to business people, to entrepreneurs. And that’s the way that I position myself. And that’s the way I position my brand these days.

Speaker 0 | 42:33.202

Yes. Code monkeys. It’s just, it’s interesting. Because I talk with a lot of technology people, right? I talk with code monkeys. I talk with just IT directors that used to be the guy that worked in like the, like he was, he worked in the cafeteria, but now he’s the CTO. Like literally worked in the cafeteria and had like a failed band. And like now he’s the CTO because he like talked to the people and then he was like, Hey, I kind of like technology and computers. Can I work on the help desk for a little bit? And then the next thing you know, he’s the CTO. That says a lot to like, you know, your ability to like connect, be curious, ask questions and stuff. And then you talk like some coding guy and he’s just still like a miserable person because he’s, I don’t know, just, you know, arrogant and smarter than everybody else. There’s that mentality too. The people that I find that are the happiest in technology, you’re pretty happy, but I mean like. I’m just like, it at least seems like, you know, you could be screaming inside right now. The joints are too much. I can’t handle this.

Speaker 1 | 43:32.198

Many of them.

Speaker 0 | 43:33.879

But you know who loves their job a lot? I’ve yet to find, there’s always some people are like, you know, like people from this country that always seem really happy. These people always seem really miserable. You know, like the data center guys seem really happy to me. I think it’s just because they’re constantly racking and stacking and dealing with power and running cords and stuff. I don’t know what it is. And they’re just like compute power. You know, like I just think for some reason, the data center guys, like I rarely run into a data center guy that’s not happy. But I run into a lot of IT directors that are unhappy. I run into a lot of mid-market IT directors that are unhappy. And it might be because they’re not appreciated at their business. They come from a business that’s run by a bunch of good old boys. I mean, it might be, you know, you’re in a business that fully thrives and like is make or break based on technology and marketing. But what about those guys that… work for Cummins or John Deere or any of these other, you know, or like any of these other companies that might be manufacturers that might not be heavily, might not have, you know, the advantage of 51% of the, I don’t know what the population of men versus women is now, 49% of the world, you know, needing you at some point in their life. Right. And you guys have women products too. So you literally, you literally have the benefit of 100% of the world in the sexual function industry. So congratulations. and so on, on being that, you know, being in IT in that industry, right? But what about the guys that have it a little bit harder? So,

Speaker 1 | 44:57.138

I mean, what I would say for the guys that have it a little bit harder is, I think that the advice still holds true. And that is that At the end of the day, a lot of people that get to director of IT or director of technology or whatever, you’ve gone through the progression, right? So you’ve been a developer, then you’ve been front-end or back-end, so you’ve kind of specialized. Then maybe you’re an engineering manager. Maybe you’re a system architect at that point, right? Maybe you’re a senior developer.

Speaker 0 | 45:23.863

What about SAP guys? There’s SAP guys. Don’t forget that. There are SAP guys. That can be a miserable existence as well.

Speaker 1 | 45:31.325

Okay. implemented oracle i implemented netsuite so i remember those days we’re not fine you know what i’m basically saying is that uh there are two there are two paths open to to you right you can be a specialist or you can be a generalist um i know i know i know some specialists that make you know five hundred thousand dollars seven hundred thousand dollars a year with like google and facebook and you know like fan companies um they are very few and far between they typically have a lot of seniority um but i It happens. And I know plenty of those people. I don’t know of many specialists that become CTOs though. So let me just, that one thing.

Speaker 0 | 46:11.172

So be a generalist.

Speaker 1 | 46:13.193

So I’m not saying be necessarily.

Speaker 0 | 46:15.495

It’s advice that comes up a lot. Honestly, people say that they’re like, don’t specialize in something. Just be like a jack of all trades type of thing in IT, which is kind of counterintuitive to a lot of advice that you get in life. Because a lot of people say like, the know it all doesn’t really, you know, doesn’t really go anywhere, but that’s not the case. And technology.

Speaker 1 | 46:33.847

What’s the goal? If your goal is to advance in your career, to move up, to ultimately be in the room with the CEO, the board of directors, the investors, that sort of thing, is your specialized knowledge going to be useful to you in those conversations? I would answer no. You need to know enough to be dangerous. You need to know more than them, for sure. But anything above and beyond that is a waste of your intellectual prowess.

Speaker 0 | 47:01.202

right that’s why a lot of these that’s why shadow it happens sometimes because some sales dude comes in and sold your ceo that he’s got to migrate to the cloud and then you got the new sap upgrades handed down to you uh could you and could you implement this today mike because uh someone so told me we’re going to increase uh sales by three percent and if you had been in that conversation with that ceo if

Speaker 1 | 47:26.019

you had been like kind of loop so this that’s the thing right a lot of senior executives They don’t like to talk to us, right? Because we’re boring. We don’t make any sense to them. They don’t see things the way that we do.

Speaker 0 | 47:37.931

Trying to get to the golf course, darn it. Or nowadays, jujitsu practice.

Speaker 1 | 47:44.776

If you want to be in the room, you got to learn how to speak the language. That’s what it comes down to.

Speaker 0 | 47:48.238

It’s cool. I’ve got the book, How to Speak the Language of Business IT coming out very soon. If I can just get my producer to hurry up and do it. I’m not ready to just produce it myself.

Speaker 1 | 47:57.584

I just got an unknowing…

Speaker 0 | 47:59.826

uh you just said it you just and you said the keywords i wonder where i’ve got those keywords where maybe it was ai but um maybe it was hundreds of interviews that i transcribed into one sentence the i totally went blank on the on the on the follow-up question which was i i can’t remember so um oh i know what it was you said so if the ultimate goal if the ultimate goal is to get the seat at the executive round table to grow your career and blah bitty blah i guess my question would be is should that be the goal? Because it’s kind of like, it’s like the Mike Tyson thing, right? Like there’s like certain people, it’s like, like the goal is to become the world champion. And then I became the world champion. And then, and I’m a huge Mike Tyson fan, by the way, and I don’t mean in like the negative ways, like I’m just, it’s like, you look at the climb to the top, right? So a lot of times people are like, the goal is this, the goal is this, the goal is this. And now I’m the world champion and everything, my life just melted away and fell apart. You know what I mean? I love Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, by the way, one of the best NES games ever.

Speaker 1 | 49:00.056

No, I agree.

Speaker 0 | 49:03.900

Totally agree. Should that be the goal? Like, what is the end game for IT people? And no one, I’m still, no one has given me that answer yet. Hundreds of interviews later, what is the end goal, Phil? It’s to grow. erectile dysfunction, this erectile dysfunction company, no pun intended to grow this erectile and this, you know, a company to, uh, billions of dollars in cash out and, um, uh, get out of here. Um, cause some people, I think some of the IT directors, eventually they just say, nope, screw it. I’m done. I quit. I’m going, I’m just, I’m doing this instead. I’ve had people just like, now I’m in the rainforest now and I’m a horticultural guy or, you know, what’s, what is the end game and what is it? So, you know,

Speaker 1 | 49:52.340

I can’t speak to everyone else, but I’ll tell you what my goal is. My goal is to have the resources to do whatever the hell I want, whenever the hell I want. Damn everyone else. That’s my goal.

Speaker 0 | 50:05.227

Why haven’t you done it yet?

Speaker 1 | 50:06.408

Because that is step 1 billion and I’m on step 500 right now.

Speaker 0 | 50:13.091

Okay. So I just, I had someone say that to me years ago. And my answer was, I have eight mouths to feed and I must keep the electricity on in the house.

Speaker 1 | 50:23.779

Yeah, you know…

Speaker 0 | 50:25.208

But if the idea is big enough, and this is the idea is big enough, the person will say, okay, we’ll give it to you.

Speaker 1 | 50:30.672

Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that I think about these days is I don’t put all of my eggs in one basket. I, so in addition to being CTO, I’m co-founder of a consultancy. You know, I run a real estate business with my wife. We run a drop shipping business as well.

Speaker 0 | 50:48.807

That’s what I’m talking about.

Speaker 1 | 50:50.268

And yeah, I also, I also run a, just a personal consulting business. Um. So look, you need to diversify your income streams. At the end of the day, look, work is work. It’s a means to an end. Some people, you can find fulfillment in it or not. It’s up to you. I personally don’t. I would much rather spend time with my family, my cats.

Speaker 0 | 51:12.544

How many cats do you have?

Speaker 1 | 51:14.025

I have one. He’s really cute.

Speaker 0 | 51:16.106

Okay. I have two cats right now. I was trying to grow to like 50. Yeah. I think so. I have like, I have like a, like we had cats for years. Like I had cats that lived to like 17 years. Like I had like cats. I was like, these cats are older than all my kids. And then, um, you know, it was like, it was just crazy, you know? And, um, then the cats eventually they, they, you know, kidney problems and passed away. And, uh, I know we’re coming up on an hour. So we won’t, we won’t go much longer, but now that we have two new cats, I was like, this time they’re only going to be outside. We’re going to build shelters for them. We’re gonna have all this cool stuff. Maybe it’ll be like, you know, the, the, uh, What’s the guy down in the Florida Keys, a famous author that has all the cats? What’s wrong with me? Hemingway. We’ll make it like Hemingway. We’ll have it a Hemingway thing. Anyways. So yes, we have to work to live, not necessarily live to work, so to speak.

Speaker 1 | 52:04.951

Yeah. And look, at the end of the day, you get the meaning out of your job or life or whatever it is as you kind of see fit. For me, my meaning is… spending time with the people I love and spending as much time with them as possible and enjoying, you know, the crazy, I don’t hope to have eight kids, but I do, you know, I am, we are working on maybe two, maybe three. So, you know, with that, with that being the case, right, I work for their future. You know, that’s kind of what it means to me. Just like, you know, my parents worked for my future. They were immigrants, came over here from Taiwan. Mom couldn’t speak English. Her first job was stringing guitars in Nashville. And from there, she built like a real estate and restaurant empire. So, you know, at the end of the day, I view it as an end. Some people don’t. That’s totally up to you. And I don’t judge one way or another. You do you, right? But I think fundamentally, if the goal is, at least in the short term, to move your way up, then my tip for you is don’t have the… the vision narrow to technology only. I think that you need to look at all the other aspects of the business and how technology intertwines with them and really leverage that and use that as your means for growth. Because again, at the end of the day, I think that specialization leads you to a dead end.

Speaker 0 | 53:33.245

Mike, yeah. Thank you very much for being on the show. It has been a pleasure. And I would say that you’re one of the first people to… to honestly answer the question of what’s the end game, at least how I expect people to answer it. So congratulations.

Speaker 1 | 53:47.450

Oh, thanks. One of, yeah, Phil, it was great chatting with you, obviously. This was a lot of fun. We’ll have to do it again sometime. But yeah, look forward to seeing this and hope everyone got something out of it.

Speaker 0 | 54:00.235

Yes, thank you, sir.