Speaker 0 | 00:08.642

Everyone out there listening to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we are talking with Thomas. I’m going to attempt this. Ostapiege?

Speaker 1 | 00:17.449

Ostapiege.

Speaker 0 | 00:18.610

Ostapiege. Way off. Way off. But what’s really cool is that IT Manager International delights with a constant supply of, I don’t know. croissant date maybe danishes do we have danishes in that room next yes we have we have danishes and other things like that that would kill me the cheese danish is like that that’s like a weakness for me and i think second would be like a raspberry danish just destroy me but um uh well i’m very thankful to have you um on our show and speak to me and uh as an it manager at a i mean how eight years five months at manufacturing of pastries. How is that?

Speaker 1 | 01:03.313

It’s great. I enjoy working here and being part of the team that gets to, you know.

Speaker 0 | 01:12.477

Anyone that hasn’t ever been on a manufacturing floor of any type of food, I’m assuming, I don’t want to assume, but you tell me, but I’ve been on manufacturing floors, having been in technology for a while and walked many manufacturing floors and in cakes, pastries, pies.

Speaker 1 | 01:28.264

numerous places do you guys have to do the whole white suit and be careful and no one walking around with cell phones and all that type of stuff or uh yeah yeah we’re we’re there in lap coats and hair nets and uh you know for some of us a couple weeks ago would have used a beard net oh

Speaker 0 | 01:46.116

well me i would yes i would have to be using that beard and that but what do you say a couple of me why did you just shave did you just yeah oh no clearly i did not but no one’s going to see that because it’s an audio only show. So international delights, a maker of pastries and from the basically capital of where everything in the world comes from New Jersey. Talk to me. What just give me the, how’d you end up in, you know, what was your first computer? Let’s just fire off with that one. What was your first computer and how did you end up in this world of technology? It hasn’t changed at all over the years. It’s pretty much been the same for the last 20 years.

Speaker 1 | 02:23.315

That’s true. My first computer, my first PC, if you could call it PC, was a Commodore 20, and it came with two five and a quarter inch floppy disks. And the first software I ever used was a piece of software called, it came from a company called Spinnaker, and it was eight in one. And it was a spreadsheet, you know, word processing, all of that, and an address book.

Speaker 0 | 02:53.824

Well, he’s got a spreadsheet. That’s advanced.

Speaker 1 | 02:57.925

It was for that point. And it came out of necessity because I was working not in IT at that time. I was actually working for a nonprofit and I needed to run the budget and everything for the nonprofit, for the division that I was in, for the program that I was running and I had to run budgets and stuff like that. Okay. Me and calculators are not friendly. I don’t know why, because there’s always some dyslexia of a digit somewhere. And at that time, when I worked for that organization, we had an accountant, an old school accountant, and I go up there with the old ledger pad, and he could find my three cents I missed. In like 2.2 seconds, I’m like, yeah, I can’t deal with this. I need something, you know. And, you know, and at that point, that was just when personal computers were coming out. And eventually, the organization I worked for had gotten me a couple of PS2s. One went to a couple of my assistants and stuff. And from there, I’m like, OK, we need to share information. We figured out how to set up a small network for my department and stuff. And that’s how I got kind of hooked into it. And when I left that organization, I started off as a volunteer. I did 20 years for them. I was in end up running besides doing the program, the nonprofit program I was doing. I was running all the computers for them and became that perpetual help desk in the morning. You know, you come in, you don’t even get to put your coat down. And somebody goes, OK, Tom, how do you, you know, bold? a letter or a word in word, you know, or at that time we were using WordPerfect. Amazing. The molting’s a WordPerfect, Lotus. And that got to be, you know, nonprofits always need help and stuff. So we were able to get a donation at that time from, now I’m really going to date myself, from the Novell company when they were producing Novell 3.3 and 4.1. And so our fundraiser said, hey, guess what? I got 25 licenses from Novell and it’s all donated. And. you know, it comes with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 and all that stuff and, well, we need a server, you know, and What’s that? What’s a server? I sort of knew what a server was. No,

Speaker 0 | 05:44.025

but everyone else is probably like, you know, it’s like, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 05:47.367

What’s a server? Well, you got to go get one of those donated and I was fortunate. I mean, my best friend was the bookstores at that time and you would go and pulled those books off the shelves and kind of learned it that way. We also did have a little bit of outside help. We found one or two consultants that would come by and help us and kind of keep it along. But the day-to-day management was sort of left up to me because Tom knows computers and I’m like, I don’t know that.

Speaker 0 | 06:17.049

It’s just, it’s so amazing how many people, that’s how they got started. And the what’s a server question mark goes both ways. Back then it was, what’s a server? Well, it’s this basically a big computer that everyone can access and we can share files and do all of that stuff. Well, what’s a network? Well, we connect them all, right? And then that’s how things work. But nowadays, someone might still ask, well, what’s a server? Well, it’s kind of this thing that we used back in the old days that we now put into the cloud. And Amazon, like, oh, Amazon. And guess what? Amazon wasn’t around forever either. And it really is mind-blowing, I think maybe for, I don’t know, X generation or whatever generation we call ourselves, that we’ve been around since the invention of the computer pretty much. I mean, pretty much. It was, you know, what was it? ARPANET or ARPANET. Why can’t I think of the, you know, the internet? wasn’t even around i mean supposedly we landed on the moon in you know 1969 so it’s not you know that what did they have what kind of computer systems did they have going to the moon it was you know it was you know if you’re dyslexic you know you we don’t want you operating the i guess the the lunar lander because it was like a one step above a calculator that was what was you know taking us through space at the time so yeah it’s unbelievable

Speaker 1 | 07:52.043

It is unbelievable. And I, oh, years ago, I went down to Kennedy Space Center and they would take you on a tour and they would show you the computer room that they had used. And it’s mind boggling to know that the size of what that was is now kind of sits on, you know,

Speaker 0 | 08:10.780

your watch. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 08:12.922

You know, and people don’t realize that.

Speaker 0 | 08:15.225

And it’s insane. It never gets old for me. It never gets old for me. And maybe that’s a sign of my age now because my kids, you know, I’m telling my kids, I remember when, you know, floppy disks and they’re like, why is the save icon this weird square thing? You know, I’ve never even used one to, you know, yeah, you needed it to boot up a computer, you know? So that conversation, it never gets old, which. You sparked an idea for me, which is like technology and dyslexia and how maybe technology has actually solved a lot of problems. And we have a lot of, I’ve had multiple people on the show that were even, you know, dyslexia is nothing because I’m dyslexic myself. And, but we have, you know, IT directors that are autistic and, you know, it’s amazing just how maybe technology and that kind of goes together. I wanted to ask you, what is the, oh, and, and. I’m very scatterbrained, clearly. What’s interesting is one of the problems that comes up a lot is IT and mentors. There’s really no, I think it’s more of a new thing. I think having an IT mentor now could actually be a real thing. But because technology is so new, just about everybody that could be a mentor now was a pioneer. was a pioneer. So it’s kind of like, well, I never had a mentor. Well, that’s because you were a pioneer because you were around when we were figuring out what a network was.

Speaker 1 | 09:53.163

Right. It’s not even being a mentor on the technical part of it and saying, hey, this is how you do this or this is how you go. I think part of the mentoring of people and it really comes down to, and even this was into my position prior to getting into IT, is basically you’re there as an educator and I think you’re an educator of processes and you’re trying to teach them how to think. I think that’s part of the mentoring. I had a great mentor when I was in that organization. And that person had taught me more about management of people in five years than I think I would have gotten anywhere in any course and out of any book. And that’s just that practical experience that you pass down from people.

Speaker 0 | 10:54.302

If you had to wrap that up into like… i don’t know a top three or top three things you learned or management of people because me i know that from managing people i learned everything the hard way from hard lessons and sleepless nights and then you know you finally learn to be empathetic um what what are the top three for you uh and managing people you know like tips tricks uh ideas i i think i i think the first thing is is

Speaker 1 | 11:26.192

teaching them ownership, ownership of their responsibilities, as well as ownership of helping other people. We’re in, you know, within IT, and I think, and I may be wrong, but this is my perception of IT, is that we’re here to help people. We’re here, whether, yes, we’re hired to do a job, but we’re here to provide a service. And, and I think the other part of that management is teaching people that we’re in a customer service position more than anything else. I mean, yes, our users are employees as well as, you know, all of us are employees, but we still have to, we as IT have to provide a service to them. We have to make sure that their stuff is running. We are out there to help educate them in so many different things. Um, not only to teach them or show them, I mean, because there’s always that question of how do I do this in something that never gets old, you know, and so part of that is relaying that and having the people that are under you have that same thought process because to me, that’s a reflection on me. If they’re not out there providing good customer service to the people that we do business with, And that’s our employees, our customers that we talk to. You know, I think that’s just, that’s probably the biggest one in there is that we’re, you know, and I’ve seen it. I’ve seen people who’ve like, okay, I’ll just do this and I’ll just go fix this and step aside, I’ll take care of it. Sometimes it’s actually standing there with the person, okay, let’s walk through this because, you know, we’ve kind of dealt with this. couple of times, you know, and you as a user should be able to have, to empower them to say, hey, look at, I know, I’ve seen this issue before, or I’ve seen this thing, and I know how to do it. And I just think we’re educators and customer service people when it comes down to the bottom line.

Speaker 0 | 13:45.226

And this is my… Absolutely. I mean… I mean… So what you’ve said has made me think in an age where technology is growing so fast, we have something called AI now and we have the fear mongerers and then we have the people that are glass half full. What do you do to stay ahead of the curve and provide people new and exciting tools? Is that part of it?

Speaker 1 | 14:14.391

I think that’s the other part of it is constantly looking at things, reading. You’re constantly doing the reading and the education of your own self. A lot of it, as an IT manager, we do get barrage of phone calls and say, hey, I got the greatest new tool for this and that. Sometimes you take those calls and sometimes you take those demos. And it’s not that you’re taking the demo to say, okay, I’m going to go buy this piece of technology. But it’s like, well, let me see what’s out there. Let me see how they do it. Maybe it’s something better. Maybe it’s not. But it’s constantly reading. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s posted anymore. I think the days of the bookstore pretty much… dried up when it comes to it i don’t find those solutions in there that much anymore so a lot of it is researching online and stuff and and also your favorite so where do you go what’s like one of your top places you go to i’ve just i’m a google addict um we’ll just go just a better google better google it is one time my dad had this old so my dad’s 87

Speaker 0 | 15:28.053

He got a huge laser printer donated to him. So he’s got these old Xerox. Like the laser printers, like the size of a washing machine sitting on his desk. And something broke on it. I don’t know. Or some weird error code. He calls me PJ. Hey, PJ, help me out with this thing. It’s not working. So now I’m at the help desk. I’m like, I have no clue. I’m like, again, Google. find some old Xerox YouTube channel, you know, pops up cause I take this part out, do this, do that, hit this button, hold this one down. And then like, boom, it was working again. And I was like, how’d you do that? Oh, you know, I’m in technology. It was Google. All right. So Google addicts. All right. Um, favorite tool, favorite vendor. Do you have a favorite tool or favorite vendor? Uh,

Speaker 1 | 16:23.450

not really, not really. Um, I’m not really a fan of Google. I mean, some of the tools that we use now are, are, are, that we use in this engagement, I think are, are some of the best I’ve, I’ve worked with. And, and.

Speaker 0 | 16:38.865

Give me an example.

Speaker 1 | 16:40.806

Oh, I, I, we, when I first came here, we had a, a, an underpowered, uh, firewall and stuff. And, uh, we, we, uh, we, we did, I had to do a, a security assessment. and figure out, you know, I mean, because security is always, you know, if anything, you know, that’s the biggest thing for us is security, whether we’re in a small to medium-sized business or a large corporation. We’ve all seen those reports and stuff and people getting hacked, and it doesn’t matter who you are anymore, you know. No.

Speaker 0 | 17:18.817

Ironically, it happened to me. We had the whole site shut down for a week. due to a malware attack through a weird small little um uh plug-in the back end of wordpress somewhere where you’ve got like a thousand you know widgets and different things working together and just one wasn’t updated and it was uh hate said was russia um you know i mean like And I love my Russian friends. I really do. But some Russian guy got in through somewhere, you know, and like, I just, I mean, maybe it wasn’t Russia, maybe to stereotype Nigeria, maybe they were just using the Russian language, but I’m pretty sure via some IP address or someone, someone tracked it back to Russia.

Speaker 1 | 18:09.137

But, you know, it is inevitable and it will happen. You know, your still biggest concern is stuff getting through. I mean, you know, we put up a new firewall and we did, you know, spam quarantining and things like that that, you know, that wasn’t here. And so we bolstered that up to where, you know, we’re okay, but, you know, it only takes one time and you’re screwed. So, you know. You put those things in place and I think it’s not, it’s just not one tool, but I think it’s, it’s a conglomeration of the tools you put together that helps make your, um, it’s the whole portfolio. It’s really just not one tool. And I don’t want to push one brand over the other. Just, just know that, you know, those little Gartner reports are help.

Speaker 0 | 19:09.965

Sometimes. See, I’m both a positive and a negative when it comes to Gartner, because I feel like Gartner is a snapshot in time.

Speaker 1 | 19:18.030

I agree.

Speaker 0 | 19:19.131

It depends on what you’re using it for. Because if it’s a technology that’s constantly changing, or it’s a company that you rely on heavily for support. So vendor, for example, vendor support really depends on… If it’s something that you have to call, I don’t know, like an ISP, I don’t know, internet service provider or, I don’t know, telecom people, someone that you might need to call on a regular basis to do moves, add changes, deletes, or, you know, you might need a request for an outage or something like that. They may show up once a year on Gartner. But anything can happen like COVID and that can create a massive influx in any type of company’s customer service department and how that vendor is then going to support you. So if you’re going to make a judgment from a regular customer service standpoint and how their customer service department is going to support you and you’re going to judge that on Gartner, I would say don’t do it. If you’re going to judge it based on best equipment or…

Speaker 1 | 20:26.330

i don’t know emerging technology some sort then it might be useful it was useful i mean i i don’t want to say i relied on that totally but it was like okay um since we’re going to start this point me in the right direction like who’s the players i mean you know and that’s what i mean and and so i kind of use it as okay here’s the players let’s go assess all these different equipments from different you know vendors and we

Speaker 0 | 20:56.490

eventually settled on one vendor and selfishly that’s why i ask because i want to scrub and get this community of like ongoing kind of live vendor management i think it’s it’s important to be able to have like a reliable community that we can call on that are of peers if that makes sense and get kind of like this real time well, I like Meraki and I like Fortinet and I like Cisco. Well, everyone loves one of them over the other. It’s kind of interesting. I’ve got people that are like, Meraki, I hate you because, and Meraki, I love you because, you know, and then it’s like.

Speaker 1 | 21:31.645

Well, it’s, you know, that’s, I think that’s with all of the people in IT. We like certain things and it’s because, you know, it’s just because they do something we truly. or they do it in a way that we like it. Like the firewall that we put in, I don’t think I probably was best because I’ve done or I’ve handled most of the major brands somewhere along my career. I’ve touched them. And this one, we just had that nice demo and interview and talk with… the people from that company and like it was like oh wow this is what we need and you know it’s a next generation firewall and stuff and um you know it’s done its job for the you know as

Speaker 0 | 22:32.476

well as it can be and and you it’s it would you want to share with you it sounds like you don’t want to share with our listeners but if you’d like to share what was the next gen and why it was so great for you we’d love to know But if we need to keep it a secret, then they can reach out to you on LinkedIn and talk privately about it.

Speaker 1 | 22:49.284

They can do that. I don’t want to sit here and promote one over the other because I may change my opinion at some point in time.

Speaker 0 | 22:57.509

We may hate you in the future. It all depends on how well you do over time. What would you say is the hardest part of your job or the hardest part of an IT director’s job?

Speaker 1 | 23:12.522

I think the hardest part of the IT director’s job is communication. And it’s that communication between not only your IT staff, and I’m lucky to have a small staff here. Usually in SMBs, it’s a one-man shop. When I first came here, it was a one-man shop. But it’s the communication that you have with the management, the ownership. You’ve got to have that communication with them. You have to keep them. informed of what’s going on all the time, that’s just better outcomes for you as a manager. And you need to communicate in terms that is not so technical because, you know, we can all go into those meetings and start doing technobabble and stuff and you can watch the eyeballs roll backwards and that’s not what we’re there for. We have to kind of boil it down to…

Speaker 0 | 24:11.494

to what’s relatable to that to those people so they understand you know where we’re coming from and what’s the necessity of why we have why we’re proposing to do certain things you know the um we do a lot of data crunching now because we’re up to we’re nearing 300 shows and multiply 300 by 60 minutes you’ve got a lot of techno babble in there and then we’ve got a lot of great expressions that come out of the shows do you want to share a few sure here’s here’s just from like a few shows oil the engine these are expressions that come out from from it guys oil the engine speak the business language or i have a book coming out it’s called speaking the language of business it but um strategic importance of it improve the speed to access information focus on the benefits that would be one that i say we were doing that we use when it’s executive management we have um weak it is like a ferrari with a small engine that that was pulled out of a show um let’s see here oh this is good which is brew and then what’s interesting is is that uh i don’t even want to give out where we how we pull all this but like I have a team putting together like a definition. I think we’re going to put together a Dissecting Popular IT Nerds Dictionary, Urban Dictionary, right, for IT people. In Witch’s Brew, next to Witch’s Brew, the definition would be a problematic mixture of multiple factors or applications. Let’s see here. Nexus coalescing. That was a nice one. Low-hanging fruit, of course. Duct tape and bailing wire.

Speaker 1 | 25:56.742

We all know that one.

Speaker 0 | 25:59.784

Bleeding edge. Walking the tightrope. Ooh, I love this one. Herding cats. Trying to manage challenging groups of people. That was the definition that came next to that one. Drinking from the fire hose. Turning the Titanic, which is trying to change direction of large, complex organizations. Plugging leaks. putting out fires it goes on and on it’s just so great what comes out of these shows it really is i’ll give you uh i’ll give you since you mentioned titanic i think i think uh it’s is is um there was an old uh harry

Speaker 1 | 26:41.762

chapin album that he had a song on there called the dance band on the titanic and there’s some days that you know when you’re in it it’s just just I could play that song and it’s just appropriate.

Speaker 0 | 26:57.115

You mentioned team. So if we, on average, because the show is primarily small to medium-sized enterprise manufacturing, logistics, construction, biopharmaceuticals, this is kind of like the heart of America, so to speak, what you would say, IT. And the reason why the show has… been successful which was it was just a a labor of love to begin with is because the ratio the it the it director it manager cto cio is really the hero of the company nowadays they have become almost the hero it’s all it’s it’s interesting how nothing gets done in the company anymore without it being involved but the ratio of when we crunch the numbers on all the shows and all the IT directors, and we look at their companies, we look at how many employees are in, the ratio of IT director to end user count, or the cat herd, we love our end users, we’re customer serviced, we’re customer focused, I’m not saying that, is one to a hundred. Would you say that’s about accurate?

Speaker 1 | 28:09.672

Yeah, I’d say that’s about accurate. We have about… Yeah. We have about 55 users here on this end.

Speaker 0 | 28:20.343

Okay. So that means that it’s the mid-market IT directors. We’re like the professor in a freshman in college at a large university. I went to Colorado State University, and I remember going to whatever. biology 101 or whatever it was. And I was like 200 people in the class and one professor sitting up front. That’s the IT director.

Speaker 1 | 28:50.771

Right. What I think a lot of people don’t get that are not in IT of how much that we need to be a jack of all trades. I mean, and we may be a master of one or two of those trades and not all of us know everything. And that’s where we come in to do our research. Sure. And we pull in the consultants and, and no, we, we don’t manage here in a vacuum. Like I said, I have two other people that work with me. I have a systems admin person and, and we just brought on, um, because we’re going through, uh, a software upgrade, uh, we brought in somebody to help us develop the, the customizations and stuff on that software that we’re, we’re upgrading. Um,

Speaker 0 | 29:38.355

integration of silos,

Speaker 1 | 29:40.216

integration of silos. And, uh, So, you know, it’s been, it’s still a learning experience. Even for us, this is a learning experience. Not everybody goes around and does this every day. And it’s like, wow, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. There we are. I just think it goes back to that whole thing is that we have to know a lot more. I think when you work in that bigger set, that humongous company, and you have that IT department of 50, 60 people or how much it is, I think you kind of get pigeonholed into what you’re doing.

Speaker 0 | 30:25.588

It can’t be as exciting.

Speaker 1 | 30:27.109

It can’t be. exciting. I mean, here, you know, we talk about small and medium businesses and we have to have a good idea of what the security is and what we should be doing these days. We need to know our networking. We need to know, you know, our active directory and some of the things, and we may not know everything. So you open yourself or you expand yourself by doing a couple of things. Like, you know, I have a… IT consulting company that is not too far from us that are great people that are my backup if something happens. The first thing is that they ask you is, okay, if you go down, who’s there to back you up? And okay, I have a systems administrator, but I also have a consulting company down there that has MSPs and stuff and that, okay, hey, look, I’m not sure about this. Let me bounce it off of you. And that’s how you work in IT in a small, medium-sized business. You can’t do it all yourself. And those who think that they can are mistaken.

Speaker 0 | 31:41.115

No, you need a community of experts.

Speaker 1 | 31:42.796

And you need that community of experts. And I think over the years, I’ve developed that. And even when I first started out with the nonprofit, and I’ve been doing it for a long time, and was learning IT. It was that little vest of knowledge that when we had the person who came in and helped us set up the network and stuff, that person wasn’t, well, get out of my way and I’ll just do this for you. He actually happened to be one of those, we talked about mentors before, just happened, well, this is how you do this, you know? And he was teaching me because, hey, you’re the guy that’s on site here and it’ll save me a trip here for some. something really stupid that I can walk you through. And that’s how you learn. And that’s how you learn. And that’s the thing that I try to get across to the people who work with me, as well as, you know, even till today, I said, okay, we put in a new firewall. Did I put that all up by myself? No, no, we had somebody help configure it for us, and I knew what… I wanted and stuff, but we walked through it and we did step-by-step together. And that’s the learning process. That’s the learning that you don’t get just by opening a book. That’s the practical experience.

Speaker 0 | 33:08.254

There really is. There’s no college course. I don’t think you could go to college and say, I’m going to major in IT directors, IT directorship. There should be. There should be. And they’ll just say, okay, yeah, here, run the help desk. First, we’re going to throw you on the help desk here in University of Colorado or wherever it is and learn by drinking from the fire hose. And I’ve said this before. I’ve had IT directors that were the head. They worked in the cafeteria. They’re now the IT director or they’re now actually the CTO. And then they went back and now they’re the CTO at another college, which is interesting. I mean, is there some, what would you say for people growing up in technology? What would you tell, I don’t know, kids nowadays, the youth?

Speaker 1 | 34:03.573

Oh, what would I tell the youth? It’s, you know, if you’re going to be in IT, it’s a nonstop. learning because you know and i know that it itself evolves and it involves evolves every minute of the day it changes and it’s changing so fast um i mean it’s like you know i i’m looking like will i ever use ai here but it’s something that we all read about and going okay let’s go up to chat gbt and see how this works you know it’s it’s actually a little wild that that

Speaker 0 | 34:44.018

So how did AI make a massive difference in our show over the past, since July? And it all started with a… WhatsApp group for me of all things, which is probably not the most secure thing in the world. But I was in a WhatsApp group with a friend that was part of an international group. And I met a French dude that was in an AI group that was talking about mid-journey and making all kinds of different AI artwork. And I was like, well, that’s boring. But the next thing I knew was I said, well, you know what? Maybe you can help me with the production of this podcast because it’s very manual right now. And yeah, it’s very manual and taking forever. And he’s like, yeah, well, let me throw this. Let’s try chat GPT for this and that. And then the next thing I know, now I’ve got a team of two AI guys producing the podcast and allowed us to grow the show and move to where we’ve got, I don’t know, at least producing three to four shows a week. And it cut our costs by, it cut the time down to a lot less. I should probably have a percentage to this, but it allowed us to increase production by at least 3X and cut the time in half by 2X and then cut the cost by a lot. It cut the cost by at least 75%. So then I was like, well, what else can this thing do? And I… Well, how about we pull out, and that’s where I was able to pull a lot of these keywords from that we were just talking about, herding cats, plugging leaks, putting out fires, bleeding edge, duct tape, and bailing wire. It’s just hilarious. And then now I can take all these different terms and we can just say, it’s easy to put together various different posts and take the words that all of our IT directors are actually using. Let’s put them into a dictionary and let’s actually speak to our audience the way that they speak to us. So that’s an AI thing right there. And I kind of thought it was more of a gimmick, you know, to begin with, like, ah, we’re not going to be able to use it right away, but no, it’s, it’s actually can be very powerful. So everyone out there listening, um, this is a gift to you and I hope not everyone steals this from me, but you can take this to your marketing department as an IT director, go to your marketing department and say, use, um, use Claude. That’s it. Uh. Claude, C-L-A-U-D-E, I believe. Let me double check. Yes, C-L-A-U-D-E-200-100K, if you really want to go to the next level. Why should you use it? It’s unbelievable. If you know how to write and you know how to speak to your audience, then, and I’m just… seeing how much amazon i believe amazon invested in them uh because this is four billion four billion dollars oh my god that is ridiculous and i guarantee you most people listening right now have no clue even what claude is i don’t have you heard of him no i didn’t this is the first time and i’m looking at what you’re telling me four you billion dollars. And this is a guy that I, you know, just some, my, my nerdy friend and French friend. And I love him, Greg, love you. Cause he’s going to listen to the show. He’s going to be the one producing this show made such a difference in my life. So that’s it. That’s a, um, there’s an example of, you know, partnering with other people and, and, and just give that to your marketing department and tell them to start using it and just throw some keywords in. Cause it’s so much better than it’s so much better than open AI or chat GPT. I mean, it blows them out of the water as far as writing. And if your marketing department’s trying to put together like some, let’s just use it right now. Let’s do it right on the show right now. Let’s see here. Give me something about, let’s just, I’m just going to use it as pastry. What’s your, what’s your number one pastry that you guys do or something? Let’s just do it for fun.

Speaker 1 | 39:12.216

Just butter croissant.

Speaker 0 | 39:13.957

Butter croissants. Write me a post, short post, about my love, about why I should love butter croissants. How do you spell croissant? C-R-O-I-S or something? Croissant. I should know this. I can probably misspell it. It’s probably still going to work. Butter croissants from New Jersey.

Speaker 1 | 39:45.526

C-R-O-I-S-S-A-N-T.

Speaker 0 | 39:48.890

S-A-N-T. I was an English major, too. That’s sad. I should love brother croissants from New Jersey over Paris. French for my French. He’s going to hate me. He’s going to hate me. Well, Parisian croissants are renowned worldwide for their flaky, buttery perfection. The humble New Jersey butter croissant deserves more appreciation with less pretense, but just as much heart. New Jersey’s croissants offer a taste of home. Their dough might not have the delicate layers of a French croissant, but their fillings bring a creativity Paris lacks. From chocolate chips to blueberries and everything in between, New Jersey bakeries show that croissants can be more than just butter and bread. And though they may not have the pedigree of their Parisian cousins, their accessibility and affordability make enjoying one a pleasure within reach. So next time you crave a croissant, don’t discount your local New Jersey bakery. The croissants may not come from the croissant’s birthplace, but they capture the spirit and comfort and community that makes this pastry a delight worth celebrating. can you this is i mean no this has come so far this is ridiculous it’s it’s give that to your marketing department because they will be like they will be like congratulations and then your ceo will be like hey we don’t even need marketing anymore we got it we got it we got it how many more guys you need how many more guys do you need i like i like the idea of marketing but

Speaker 1 | 41:24.724

I don’t want to take on anymore.

Speaker 0 | 41:26.505

No, no, no. You’re like, Phil, Phil, Phil, no, do not air this episode. You do not have permission.

Speaker 1 | 41:36.732

But, but that’s, that’s interesting. It’s the same thing. I, you know, when I first started hearing about, you know, AI and chat GBT, I just, I did something great. I went up to chat GBT and, you know, signed up and didn’t count and all that. Just on a whim, I go and I put it in there and say, give me one scene of like, people are going to laugh at this, but give me one scene of Star Trek, you know, Strange New Worlds, which is like brand new out. And I said, just give me a scene. And I gave him a little bit of a premise and it was amazing what it spit back. So you talk about some, just not that somebody would use that, but. when we talk about people who have writer’s blocks and stuff, and I don’t know where to go. I mean, if it’s used as that, that’s great. If it’s used to replace the writer, I don’t think so. I think there’s…

Speaker 0 | 42:36.788

Oh, yeah, there’s certain things that you can’t copy.

Speaker 1 | 42:39.030

You can’t copy. Because even up there, I did a couple other searches on topics and stuff, and I go, well, that’s not right.

Speaker 0 | 42:47.137

It gets you started.

Speaker 1 | 42:49.679

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 42:50.440

So since you said that, give me a short IT metaphor involving Star Trek Wrath of Khan.

Speaker 1 | 43:00.004

Wrath of Khan. Oh, my God.

Speaker 0 | 43:01.644

The IT department was like Khan filled with wrath. After being stranded on a remote system planet, the users were like Turk and the Enterprise crew trying to evade the attacks from the raging IT Khan. But in the end, just like in Wrath of Khan, the users hurting cats. Found a way to outsmart cons attacks and restore functionality to the ship through their technical skills and teamwork. You can have a lot of fun. Thomas, it has been a pleasure having you on the show. If you had one thing that you wanted to, I don’t know, if we don’t live another day tomorrow, what would you send out to your end users and people listening to you? What would that piece of advice be?

Speaker 1 | 43:45.221

Communicate. Seriously, communicate. I think. I think that goes along for anything we do right now in this world is communicate with each other. I think some of that’s been lost. I mean that in general. I think we all just need to communicate. And I don’t know if that’s because of the technology. You know, I see my kids are 25 and 17. And their world is texting and stuff like that. Yeah, it’s communicating, but it’s not communicating. It’s not sitting down having that verbal discussion with people. And I think that verbal face-to-face is probably the most important thing. I think we’ve all, yes, we’ve all dived behind, especially with the COVID, behind all the Zooms and the Teams meetings and stuff like that. But there’s still something to say about having that one-on-one contact, that handshake across the table, and that eye contact, and those discussions. That’s one part of IT that I would like to see come back a little bit more. I think we, and I’ll relay this story, is that I had talked to a company about some piece of software, and I did my due diligence, and I didn’t find so great of reviews for it. And we kind of like said, no, it’s not something we’re going to consider at this point. But… you know it’s just doing it over over the zoom it would have been nice if they did come in and we sat down and we talked and maybe went through all that um we should have done this in person because uh i could have ate some croissants and uh oh absolutely absolutely absolutely i’m only in connecticut i can drive down to new jersey you’re welcome anytime but

Speaker 0 | 45:53.528

i i think that’s discover respond i worked for starbucks for years and we used to have like you know you have all the different acronyms and stuff and it helps you know Connect, discover, respond. Make eye contact. Connect, discover, respond. Listen. Be an active listener. Don’t read your autobiography, as Stephen Covey used to say over top of people. Listen actively without responding in your head before they, you know, active listening. Yeah, important with the kids. Yeah, I was trying to think of one other piece of that too. Oh, so all the old forms of technology that are… that were old, that are no longer, there’s a comeback. There’s a comeback now. So what piece of technology is kind of dead that’s really hard to reach people on? Email. Email. It’s just, it’s difficult, you know? If you’re not inside the, you know, inside the company organization, email stuff, and then you have CC people, BCC a lot of people, and then it becomes impersonal, and you’re like, oh, I was even CCing everybody, you know? And then there’s the company chat, which is okay. That’s for getting stuff done quick. But what do people not do anymore? That was a new piece of technology that’s now old. Now it’s rare to get a phone call from someone. If someone calls me now, I’m actually kind of like, wow, the guy called me. I might actually have to listen to him. And some guy the other day was like, you know, when I connect with people and I want him to get them on the. when I get one, I get them on the podcast. Sometimes I eventually send them a picture of me like with a frozen beard. And I’m like, you know, you never responded to me. So I jumped into the Atlantic ocean attempting to end it all, but I survived. And so I’m going to give you one more try, you know, and they’re like, oh, wow, you sound desperate. Some guy said that to me that he’s like, you sound desperate. And I saw, I, and then I looked on his profile and he had a phone number. So I called him up and I was like, Hey, this is the desperate guy with the frozen beard. I actually do want to have you on the podcast because I thought you’d be interesting guy to have on the podcast. He’s like, you called me? He’s like, I can’t believe you called me. Like, you actually made a phone call? I’m like, yeah, I did. And writing a letter. Who writes a letter anymore? The other thing is, like, if you really want to get a hold of someone, write a letter to them and send it in the mail. They’re going to get something. Someone sent me a letter?

Speaker 1 | 48:02.554

Yeah. Yeah, that’s probably the other piece of technology that nobody does anymore is actually sit there and write a letter. Sit there and write a thank you.

Speaker 0 | 48:11.894

By hand.

Speaker 1 | 48:12.975

By hand. With very, very rare anymore, you know. Yeah. You know, it’s easy. You know, we set up our own mail list. And here’s my electronic Christmas card for the year.

Speaker 0 | 48:28.820

Man.

Speaker 1 | 48:30.920

So, things change, you know. but it’s really it comes down to communication i think that’s the biggest part of it is communicating communicating to your end users in in a way that they understand where you’re coming from i think communicating with with uh you know the people you you are responsible to uh and communicating with your your staff and and they’re all three different types of of communication um i think you know I think the one thing I’ve gotten across to people, especially in my engagements that I’ve been in, is trying to get them to understand. We still, no matter how many defenses we put up, we always get that one little piece of spam that comes through. And it’s like, oh, no. And lately, people actually end up calling and say, hey, look, I got something in my mailbox, and I don’t think it’s right. And I’m like.

Speaker 0 | 49:31.934

yeah you know it’s like we we we did a learning curve here we got we we got some some recognition that that this is you know if it’s the engineer then that’s an extra plus yeah i only said that because my my son-in-law is an engineer and he’s like yeah i’m always getting dinged by the like the it department because i click on something i shouldn’t click on or something you’re the engineer you should know we don’t you should know engineers we need all the firewalls taken down

Speaker 1 | 50:00.318

yeah um but but it’s it’s that kind of recognition and that makes your day and then that That way, you know, you’ve communicated correctly and they’re starting to understand. And that helps you because, you know, and I know that it only takes one wrong click and you’re screwed. So, yes.

Speaker 0 | 50:20.481

And with that being said, with all this positive communication, we have an opening on the show for a UCAS, Unified Communications as a Service provider. If they would like to sponsor and pay for advertising on the show. We will open that up to you knowing that we are vendor agnostic. Is that the term? Vendor agnostic, vendor neutral, and we will judge you and we’ll have people make fun of you and or like you or say anything about you on this show. But if you would like to advertise, we will accept that. So, Thomas, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much for coming on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds.

Speaker 1 | 51:03.647

No problem. Thanks a lot for the opportunity, Phil.

Speaker 0 | 51:06.159

Yes, sir.