Speaker 0 | 00:07.757
All right, well, welcome to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, I’m proud to introduce Howard Holton. Howard is the CTO of GigaOM, an industry analyst firm, and has been in the CIO, CTO, CISO seat for the last 17 years, and has spent 35 years in IT overall. And Howard, I… I hear you wrote your first piece of commercial software at 11?
Speaker 1 | 00:33.687
I did. I did. My dad owned a law office, the only law office in the little town that I was in. And he was struggling with, it’s called pleading papers. It was a special format at the time. And basically, a paralegal or an attorney would write a plead, which is something you’re going to file with the court, then put it on a floppy disk and hand it to a legal secretary who would bring it up on one screen while she typed on pleading. pre-printed pleading paper on an IBM Selectric typewriter. So it was completely duplicative work. And so I developed a piece of software called Plead Perfect that ran on top of Word Perfect that gave legal specific templates and watermarking so you didn’t have to duplicate the work.
Speaker 0 | 01:13.415
Nice. And you did this at 11?
Speaker 1 | 01:15.956
I did.
Speaker 0 | 01:16.916
Just for the heck of it, right?
Speaker 1 | 01:19.678
I had built a little piece of software for tracking my baseball card collection. My parents thought… Like my parents were both into sports and they thought if they got me baseball cards that I’d get into sports. No, I just got into statistics. And so I built a little piece of software to keep track of it and kind of track the values of my cards. So I knew kind of what went up and what went down every month. And that got me started in computers. And then when my dad said this, I built this piece of software. And he started telling all his law office buddies who were then like, ooh, can we buy it? This seems amazing. So he closed the law office, started a computer company. We went around selling it to all his law office buddies. And then I built Lantastic Networks over ArcNet to do simple file and print sharing. And then never left IT. When I was a sophomore in high school, I was presenting to my school board and was the largest non-construction contractor that my school district had.
Speaker 0 | 02:10.441
And all of this while you’re still a kid before. So, wow. That’s such a different experience than I had, man. I didn’t even start in IT until I was in my mid-20s.
Speaker 1 | 02:23.372
Yeah, I mean, I did. I was right place, right time. Yeah. We were we were growing up. We were poor. My dad never made any money at the law office. My dad was a very much a hippie. And so he’d always trade people for legal services, which doesn’t actually work because legal services, you need those right now. You’re trading. You don’t need right now. You know what I mean? So my dad would be like, oh, sure. I’ll trade you services in kind. And the guy to be like, oh, I’m a contractor. I like I do. I’m a carpenter. I’m a. master tile layer whatever and then my dad would go back and go okay cool i’m ready for your thing and they’re like i don’t know what you’re talking about yeah oh you know what i mean a legal document right right so so he never we never made any money um but the cool thing was my dad always said like if you have an idea try it what’s the worst that happens you end up back where you were when you before you started so so yeah so i did that um never went to college right i i i worked all the way through when people were going to university because i was making good money why not
Speaker 0 | 03:20.508
Yeah. So did you run into any barriers because of that? Because I know my CFO was, as soon as somebody got that piece of paper, they got a 20 to 30% raise.
Speaker 1 | 03:30.433
So yeah. So I, I, yes, I absolutely did. Um, however, uh, when everybody else was graduating college, uh, I already had 10 years of experience. Right. Right. So that helped a lot. Um, it slowed my acceleration for sure. And there were jobs I simply didn’t get because I didn’t have a degree. Now in my 40s, it makes no difference whatsoever.
Speaker 0 | 03:55.315
Yeah, by now the degrees are just a piece of paper from when we were younger, or you’ve got all of the experience and you’ve got the resume to show it.
Speaker 1 | 04:04.381
Right, and that’s what makes the difference, right? The other thing that really made a difference is I’m a big fan of being a lifelong learner. And I learned how to do that when I was really young. I learned how to learn when I was really young. I’ve continued to explore new techniques to learning for my whole life. And the one thing that I was able to show really early on was I don’t care that I don’t have a degree. I can learn as fast or faster than anybody else you can find. And then I can apply that. And now that I’m in my 40s, I’m still really, really, really quick with new concepts because I was forced to learn to learn things to a depth and breadth to cover for the fact that I didn’t have a degree. I had to I had to prove myself twice as hard. And so it’s really worked out long term for me. I wouldn’t advise it. It’s far more work than just getting a degree.
Speaker 0 | 04:53.668
Yeah, well, but I mean, I don’t know. I kind of consider myself the same along the same threads. I went and got the degrees, but I would pick up concepts so much faster than those around me and could see a little bit further. So that ability to learn and understand and see things, I think that I was given that gift also.
Speaker 2 | 05:16.194
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Speaker 0 | 07:35.768
You know, one of the things that we talked about in our pre-call, you wanted to talk about the power of language and being thoughtful. And I think the experience that you had growing up and learning that way and being that continuous learner leans into that or why this is an important topic to you.
Speaker 1 | 07:56.798
Yeah, without a doubt. Again, my dad was a law professor and owned a law office. And so language was really important in my house. My weekend activity was we redlined the LA Times, right? So we went through and picked out all the… And that was… That was my homework from my dad every weekend.
Speaker 0 | 08:14.166
And he’s a hippie.
Speaker 1 | 08:15.667
And he’s a hippie. It’s the weirdest thing. But he was very particular. He was a theater major for his undergrad. Okay. And that gives you, the combination of law and theater give you a real appreciation for language. And one of the things that I learned real young and one of the things that I say and I firmly believe, right? Language creates thoughts. Thoughts create actions. Okay. So if you… speak in a positive way, if you speak in a correct way, you create the right image in someone’s mind, then the output that you get is also going to be correct. As soon as we start muddling language, as soon as we start allowing literally to mean both literally and figuratively, we now no longer are in control of the thoughts that are created by our language and thus the actions that come from those thoughts, right? So it’s really important that when we use language, we use the proper language. That’s why marketecture in our field is so dangerous. Marketing, getting a hold of a term and turning it into mean a hundred different things where you no longer know what it means.
Speaker 0 | 09:16.598
Right. Well, and so that makes me wonder what your personal philosophy and thoughts are around the social media and the 30 second bites that people are consuming and learning off of today.
Speaker 1 | 09:29.021
Well, it’s not learning. They may be gaining knowledge, but knowledge isn’t learning. Okay. Right. I have an infinite amount of information about world history, as an example. I don’t know anything about world history. I know very little about world history. Like if you take every piece of information that’s bouncing around in my head about world history and say, Howard, what do you actually know? It’s going to be relatively small in comparison. Right. And that’s part of that whole language thing, right? Knowledge, the ability to know something means I can teach it means I can explain it means I can go fairly deep into it. Information isn’t knowledge. Information is just pieces of data bouncing around in my head, right? Knowledge means I know why a thing occurs, or at least a lot of the why information just means I can recite crap and social media gives you the ability to recite crap, but But let’s be honest, in 30 seconds, you have no idea what the qualifications are of the person who’s writing.
Speaker 0 | 10:29.725
Yeah. And to be honest, my kids don’t care. Jordan. If it’s online, it must be real.
Speaker 1 | 10:37.087
Right. Right. And I think there was a time when that was a reasonable thing to say. Not with the Internet. It was never true with the Internet. Right. But if you go back to when we only had broadcast television and the fairness doctrine was law, there were penalties for lying on news broadcasts.
Speaker 0 | 10:54.031
Right.
Speaker 1 | 10:54.984
Right. It’s important for people to understand that, again, as we’ve allowed language to be manipulated, we’ve allowed thoughts to be manipulated. Thus, we’ve allowed actions to be manipulated.
Speaker 0 | 11:06.008
Man, this this could be such a deep conversation. I enjoy the thoughts that you’re bringing to me and the definition, because, you know, for the most part, most everybody I deal with, everybody I talk to, it’s. It’s an exercise in trying to explain things to them using the language that they understand or they know, but trying to stay in the basis of factual and speaking in metaphors. Half the time I speak in metaphors just to try to make it easier for them to understand, but now I can see how that’s dangerous too.
Speaker 1 | 11:46.286
No, metaphors are hugely helpful as long as you’re not using a metaphor as an official definition for a thing. trying to understand a concept we should use all the tools that are available to us and metaphors work really well because again we’re painting a picture in someone’s mind and a metaphor is a way the a good metaphor is always a well understood picture that then allows you to associate it with a new concept and it and it speeds up someone’s recognition of a of a concept um one of the things i learned years ago years and years ago so so i do have to say tell your audience um uh you you kind of set yourself up for this conversation when you said We’ve done like 200 of these. And I immediately went, oh, well, then I have to really bring something new so that it doesn’t feel like it’s been repeated. Right.
Speaker 0 | 12:30.750
Yeah. Speaking business to the business side of the house, we got that. We know that.
Speaker 1 | 12:37.154
For sure. Sure. So I learned years ago the most valuable skill I can have is my ability to present. Right. Especially within IT people, a lot of whom are shy. They don’t like to be in front of people. Well, I was also a theater kid. Right. And so standing up in front of a crowd and delivering information is was was no problem for me. And one of the things that I always did and I still do to this day was I present definitions. And so this is 2018, 2019, 2020. I’m CTO for Hitachi Ventara. I’m standing up on stage. I’m going to be standing up on stage and someone wants to review my deck. And so I show my deck and they’re like, yeah, you need to cut these definition slides out. Everybody knows what that means. And I said, no, no, no. I’ll cut the rest of it out. I’m not cutting the definitions out. And they’re like, why? And I’m like, because if we don’t define what we’re talking about, so we’re all on the same page, then I have no way to know, do they know what I mean when I say these things? Or are we all just going to make an assumption? So they’re like, okay, fine, whatever. I’m not going to outvote you, so just go for it. And so every single time I presented the deck, people take pictures of slides. Any presentation anybody does, there’s pictures. Do you know what the slides are that everyone took a picture of?
Speaker 0 | 13:47.093
All of the definition.
Speaker 1 | 13:48.434
Absolutely. Every single time. because they’re like, oh my God, somebody actually wrote it down in a way that I can understand, in a way that makes sense, and in a way that makes the differentiation clear. I’m definitely taking a picture of this because I’m just going to use that.
Speaker 0 | 14:01.080
And they remember that definition and start using it. Okay. And it becomes common language.
Speaker 1 | 14:06.803
And now that becomes the way they’re going to talk about that thing inside their organization, which means it’s the way they think about that thing. And it drives the actions that come out of that thing.
Speaker 0 | 14:17.980
Wow. Very interesting tie. I’m so glad that you wanted to bring something unique and new and solid to this. So thank you. So expand more. Tell me more. Give me some other examples of like, what’s one of the things that, what’s one of the pet peeves that you have of a misdefined term that is in common usage?
Speaker 1 | 14:43.254
Digital transformation.
Speaker 0 | 14:46.756
I always think of that one like, okay, what do you mean?
Speaker 1 | 14:49.999
So now the whole audience is just nodding because we’ve all heard bad definitions of digital transformation.
Speaker 0 | 14:56.384
I swear that’s in your LinkedIn, that you’re a digital transformation.
Speaker 1 | 15:00.125
It is. It is. And I get a lot of people that are like, I’m so burned out of digital transformation. And I go, I’m not because it’s necessary. Yeah. Right. Digital transformation is changing your company to deliver its products in the way your customers wish they could receive them. And the wish is the important part.
Speaker 0 | 15:17.632
And in the way they want them. I think that’s part of it too.
Speaker 1 | 15:21.574
That’s, that’s, that is without a doubt. Well, well, it’s, it’s wish. It is for sure wish. And I’ll explain the difference. So let’s take Uber. Anyone that says Uber is not disruptive hasn’t been paying attention.
Speaker 0 | 15:34.122
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 15:34.983
Right. So if you had interviewed a thousand people as they exit a New York City taxi cab and you can replace New York with any other place and said, what what did you want when you hired a taxi cab? Like, what would you want to change about the taxi experience? They would have said three things. They would have said, I couldn’t understand the driver and the driver couldn’t understand me. Every time they hit a bump, I thought I was going to die. And I pretty sure I sat in vomit.
Speaker 0 | 16:01.586
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 16:01.946
Those are the three things that you would get because the cars were terrible. I can never understand the driver. I’m hard of hearing anyways. And that, you know, you always get into a cab on a Monday morning after Sunday night, or God forbid you get in on a Saturday morning or Sunday morning after a Saturday night. And they always have that smell of a little too much bleach and a little too much other stuff. And you’re like, hmm, this is not going to be a pleasant experience. Well, had Uber set out to deliver on the want, they would have delivered clean cars with native speaking drivers. That’s not what anyone wanted. The wish is, why did I get a cab in the first place? I got a cab because I had to be at a specific location. Right. I have to be there at a specific time. And really, I’m paying. It’s a hired service. So where am I? Tell me where am I going and how long it’s going to get there. Give me the price, what it’s going to cost to get there since you know the source and the destination. And I don’t like feeling like an idiot waving on the side of the road. So tell me where you’re going to pick me up. That’s the wish I had when I got a cab. The fact that it was clean was the side effect of the gig economy and needing to keep your ratings high. No one was going to give them $10 billion, going to give Uber $10 billion to buy a fleet of cars and hire drivers. So they just made a gig economy out of it. right that’s the reason the want and the wish sometimes we don’t know what we really want we don’t really like we’re not introspective humans aren’t not naturally and so when you ask people what do you want you tend to get the thing that’s three inches in front of the ask what you really want to know is what’s the thing that drives the ask from its origination that’s
Speaker 0 | 17:36.529
the wish okay and i see so many times how however you’re right everybody gets focused on that that you So what’s the definition of the thing that’s three inches in front?
Speaker 1 | 17:50.933
Digitizing. You’re just digitizing. If all you’re doing is three inches in front, you’re just digitizing. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 17:57.756
Digital transformation is when you…
Speaker 1 | 18:00.938
Digital transformation is becoming data-driven in how you deliver your products to make sure that you’re always aiming for the wish that your customer has and the channel that they’re trying to execute that wish through. Right? If all that you’re doing is changing your processes to become digital and automated, that’s just digitizing. You’re just further digitizing. There’s no transformation. That’s not transformative. Transformative is we’re going to restructure our organization to focus on delivering to a customer that we don’t even know we have. Digital transformation requires things like customer segmentation and customer identification to be key points within the room.
Speaker 0 | 18:39.718
Yeah. You’re winking so many different neurons inside of my head because it’s like I’ve had conversations with people and they wanted to use the term Uberization. And all they’re talking about is creating some kind of as a service, you know, taking this thing and turning it into as a service versus. And what I was always trying to aim for is more along the lines of what you’re talking about with the digital transformation and the disruption. Because it’s got to be a transformative change to this thing. And the other aspect of it that I always looked at was how they just radically changed that market. And it’s like streaming video, streaming music compared to what we used to have when we used to go buy albums or CDs or things like that. And now we just stream it. And I… don’t necessarily purchase the song, but I can call it up anytime I want to and listen to it because I pay for a streaming service.
Speaker 1 | 19:51.113
Well, I mean, look at Netflix. Netflix is the ultimate digital transformation company. More so even than Uber, because what Netflix has done is continue to transform themselves. Now, every company eventually gets to a size where they kind of start to bloat and become too heavy and kind of betray the thing that they started at. It’s just there’s no way to manage the number of people that you have and the number of decisions that have to be made without bureaucracy. And it’s unfortunate. But look at Netflix at the early days. The main competitor was Blockbuster. And so the Blockbuster experience was basically. You go to Blockbuster on Friday night to pick up some movies to take home to the family, right? For family movie night. Heats in, born in a movie. And you go, oh, cool. Let’s go see what’s new. Oh, that one’s out and that one’s out and that one’s out and that one’s out. Okay, cool. So now we’re stuck with Princess Bride or Die Hard, which do we want to watch for the 50th time? Yeah. You bring a movie home. The next day, you didn’t watch it that night because you’ve already seen it. The next day, you don’t watch it and you forgot to take it back. By Tuesday, it’s still sitting on the counter and you go, oh, well, I guess I own another copy of Die Hard.
Speaker 0 | 20:52.686
Yeah, because that’s how much you had to pay in late fees.
Speaker 1 | 20:54.967
Correct. Correct. Right. So then Netflix comes along and they go, OK, well, if no one likes late fees and late fees are the thing that everyone wishes they didn’t have to deal with, let’s just get rid of late fees. Let’s give you a website where you can create a queue of all the movies that you want to watch. Then it doesn’t matter if it’s in or not. We’re just going to send you the next one that’s available in your queue. Take as much time as you want. When you’re done, drop it right back in the mail and we’ll send you the next thing in your queue. And if a movie is coming out in six months, you can still add it to your queue. The second it becomes available, we’ll send it to you. It’s not a problem because that was the disruption they needed at the time. Right. Something like Blockbuster. Then streaming comes out and Netflix goes, yeah, we’re just going to leave that because that’s actually better for us and cheaper for us than shipping an infinite number of DVDs all around the world or all around the US.
Speaker 0 | 21:42.826
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 21:43.767
And then they start getting data analytics and they start creating shows like House of Cards. These big, deep, involved dramas. And they sent a 13-picture deal with Adam Sandler. Has anyone ever wondered why they create House of Cards, which couldn’t be further away from Adam Sandler, and yet they sent a 13-picture deal with Adam Sandler?
Speaker 0 | 22:04.591
They’re trying to hit multiple audiences.
Speaker 1 | 22:06.912
No, the data actually said when someone watches a movie, they’re really just looking for popcorn. They’re just looking for something that they can enjoy popcorn for 90 minutes. That that was the ideal dwell time. However, when you watch a series, right, something that’s got length to it, especially because Netflix allows you to binge, you’re looking to get deeply involved in these really interesting, really serious character stories, right? And so I want House of Cards, which gives me 10 to 15 hours of content per season. But for popcorn, I only need 90 minutes. And Adam Sandler does popcorn better than anybody else. Okay. They were so successful at it for so many years that the movie critic industry changed the rules. The Academy of Motion Picture changed the rules to stop Netflix from winning everything by forcing them to do a theatrical release for every movie that would be entered for Academy consideration. That’s disruption. That’s digital transformation.
Speaker 0 | 23:10.579
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 23:10.899
Okay. Or something like Amazon, right? Yeah. So. So everybody’s learning. I mean, they started out with books right in a garage. And eventually they got to the point where they were so transformative and they were so agile that they’d have these big meetings where it was basically throw an idea against the wall. Let’s see if anything’s interesting kind of thing. And so somebody says, hey, what if we can give everybody free shipping and two day free two day shipping on everything? And they just said it in a meeting and they went, OK, cool, let’s try it. OK, so think about the Amazon catalog. in circa 2008. It’s a massive catalog. Hundreds of thousands, millions of items. All of a sudden, you’re tasked with someone came up with the idea to give everyone free two-day shipping. How long is that going to take you to implement?
Speaker 0 | 24:00.660
It depends on the systems and all of the different things.
Speaker 1 | 24:03.422
It does, but it’s also the bureaucracy. It’s how long it takes the company to make a decision. It’s legal’s got to get involved, procurement’s got to get involved, logistics has got to get involved, right? Took Amazon six weeks.
Speaker 0 | 24:14.791
Yeah. Or do they? You just say, okay, just ship it and zero out the price.
Speaker 1 | 24:22.137
I mean, in any other company I’ve been at, it would take a year. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 24:26.001
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 24:26.321
To get through all the politics. Just to get through all the politics. No, Amazon delivered Prime in six weeks.
Speaker 0 | 24:33.067
Wow. I did not know that from the concept to the delivery of it was six weeks. I know it took a while for it to really ramp up.
Speaker 1 | 24:41.662
It did well initially. It was only warehoused Amazon products, right? Shipped and sold by Amazon was all that was available for Prime initially, right? But the ability to get there in six weeks is insane. And again, almost from digital transformation. Why? Because we’re trying to get to where our customers want to be they truly want to be what their wish is and their wish is i don’t have to leave to find these things well if if shipping is is anywhere from three days to nine days and home depot has it now best buy has it now or target has it now i’m just gonna leave my house and get it right
Speaker 0 | 25:16.957
yeah shipping in two days i don’t need to leave my house i don’t need it that fast yeah i’m willing to sit around for that right And then they started throwing in some of the streaming services and some of the other services with it. And suddenly now they’re one of the main channels for that consumption. And now they’re reselling other streaming services.
Speaker 1 | 25:41.436
Yeah, I mean, Amazon is an amazing logistics company, right? And logistics comes in many forms. And, you know, them understanding what their customers are looking for, what their customers want.
Speaker 0 | 25:54.574
and their willingness to go find it and make it available is is an insane kind of situation kind of kind of tr it’s very very very transformative okay so what are some of the transformative things that you’ve done that you’ve helped instantiate and build and and
Speaker 1 | 26:13.007
bring forth what’s what’s one of your crown jewels um my things are a little different um Some of the transformative things that I look at are, you know, how do I reduce maintenance costs to improve customer experience at a theme park?
Speaker 0 | 26:33.425
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 26:34.386
Right. How do I help a foreign country support the rollout of electric vehicles in a city that hasn’t seen an electric grid upgrade since it was bombed in World War II? Right. Now, think about that one for a second.
Speaker 0 | 26:48.635
Yeah. I’m like, okay, how quickly this would happen?
Speaker 1 | 26:52.218
Yeah. Now think about that for a second. Okay. You have 6,000 electric vehicles that need to be plugged into the grid and charged and used within a city center. And your electric grid utilization goes anywhere from 93% to 107%.
Speaker 0 | 27:08.049
And normally it runs at?
Speaker 1 | 27:10.630
That’s normally what it runs at. Between 93% and 107% without the electric cars.
Speaker 0 | 27:14.253
Oh, without the electric. Okay. I thought you threw the electric in.
Speaker 1 | 27:19.356
Now you’re going to add electric cars to that. and go, yeah,
Speaker 0 | 27:21.778
this is what we want to do.
Speaker 1 | 27:24.741
You need to balance charging times. You need to balance utilization. You need to know how far is the car going to travel on its route. No electric vehicle is designed to use 100% of its available battery capacity on it in every day. So if you’ve got one that uses 60% and one that uses 40%, you can balance the charging. to make sure that they’re not all charging at the same time to make sure that they have the capacity and you may never charge back up to 100 right you may you may charge up to 80 you may also say during the day hey if i’ve got 2500 of these 6 000 cars plugged into the grid at during peak hours right maybe those become batteries that start to feed back into the grid and maybe i reclaim that maybe i refill that capacity at night right because If the maximum I’m going to go is 60%, then I have at least 30% of the battery capacity that I can use as a capacitor on the grid. So these things start to become really interesting mathematical conversations when you start looking into the potential of what we can do when we’re talking scale.
Speaker 0 | 28:33.438
Yeah. Right? More interesting thoughts. Okay.
Speaker 1 | 28:37.720
So this is some of the interesting stuff that I have been lucky enough to be part of. party of right um you know there’s some interesting things in manufacturing like um everyone who works in manufacturing familiar with the three m’s man machine and material okay okay um here’s a neat question for your audience and we’ll we’ll wait about 10 seconds before i give the answer so one one field of artificial intelligence is computer vision right using ai to do to do object recognition motion recognition recognition over video at some point Computer vision is going to be more accurate than human vision. The computer is going to be better at recognizing objects than humans. Can you take a guess at what year that will happen?
Speaker 0 | 29:22.772
No clue. Was it before 2050?
Speaker 1 | 29:25.973
Absolutely before 2050. 2028? 2015. It’s already happened. Yeah. So. Okay. So.
Speaker 0 | 29:37.660
How many of you got that right?
Speaker 1 | 29:40.582
So we can use computer vision to analyze machine. There’s a bunch of things we can do to analyze machine, right? Vibration sensors actually tend to be the most valuable thing we can do, analyzing the quality of the machine on a production line. Okay, so let’s say we analyze the machine. So now we know if the machine’s operating 100%. Great. Now we can also use computer vision to analyze material. Among other things, computer vision, we can use millimeter wave, LIDAR, those sort of things, right, to analyze the material. So now we know the machine’s working properly. Now we don’t know all of the materials within spec, right? But now the problem comes down to the man. And in the past, what we’ve done is we’ve created these really extensive computer models to look at man, right? And so we take kind of the ideal person. We have them go through the station exactly as you’re supposed to go through the station. And then we put the person that is actually running the station and the computer model fails completely because the person they chose to do the demo that they based the model off of was left handed and five foot eleven. And now the person running the station is right handed and five foot two. Right. So the physiology of that of that other person is going to be totally different. The person they had doing the model was twenty two. The person running the station is fifty seven.
Speaker 0 | 30:57.345
And I just assume it’s like work ethic.
Speaker 1 | 31:00.062
differences not differences no there’s can easy kinetic differences between the people right what happens if you get injured on a saturday and you come into work on on monday right you hurt your hurt your dominant hand now you get to switch to your non-dominant hand and so what we did was we developed computer models that used white that they used wire frames and the wire frame was built off the person themselves running the station so no model the model was built off the person who’s actually working the station right So we don’t care if they follow the instructions perfectly. What we care is that they do something repeated roughly the same way each time. Okay. Right? Why do we go through all of this? We go through all of this because the most expensive thing you can have happen on a manufacturing line is a recall. Right. And we looked at recalls. We went, okay, well, if the machine’s out of spec, that’s going to lead to a recall. Great. We can now monitor for that. If the material is out of spec, like think about the airbag recall. We can… you know that causes a recall cool so we fix that then what we found was there’s this big question mark around the man around the person that stands at the station and over and over and over again we came back to we really don’t know how to do that until we we created a wire frame for each individual worker at the factory line and then we just watch for when they do something different than they should and what happens is we don’t stop anything we just flag that product for additional quality control at the end So when you get to the quality control stage and you’re doing random picks for quality control, you always pick the one where the person did something out of character for the person.
Speaker 0 | 32:33.364
Okay, so it’s not so random.
Speaker 1 | 32:36.607
Correct. Correct. It’s not random, but it catches that product each and every time. And then we’re able to validate, okay, like they switched to their left hand, so they’re not torquing the screws down quite as hard as they used to. Or they’re stripping two of the screws because the angle is now weird for them. Cool. We just pull the product out. It’s way cheaper. We don’t have to worry about a recall. Now everything else goes out. Correct. And those products that we pulled for extra quality control, they either passed or they didn’t, but we’re always looking at the right ones. Now, no more recall. Now your cost goes down.
Speaker 0 | 33:06.565
Right. Yeah. Because now you’ve stopped the product from entering into the…
Speaker 1 | 33:11.586
Correct.
Speaker 0 | 33:11.866
You stopped it. You stopped that added expense.
Speaker 1 | 33:15.207
Correct. And the expense, I don’t care about the individual item. The expense is I have to pull the whole lot back. I don’t have to pull the whole lot back if I know the individual item is bad. And I know where that quality control issue is.
Speaker 0 | 33:26.627
And why? Okay.
Speaker 1 | 33:28.369
Right.
Speaker 0 | 33:29.230
How pervasive is this?
Speaker 1 | 33:30.951
It’s not.
Speaker 0 | 33:31.712
It’s not. Yeah. This sounds like we’re on the edge of this. You understand it. I’ve never heard of it, but I’ve never had to deal with the manufacturing line yet. So, okay.
Speaker 1 | 33:43.143
Yeah. It’s super interesting.
Speaker 0 | 33:44.764
Yeah, it is. It is. And then how soon is it going to become that?
Speaker 1 | 33:50.858
the variance thrown in by the man in there they’re going to want to remove that yeah there’s a lot of things where it’s almost impossible to remove the man especially delicate things um humans humans have the ability to operate with a delicacy that machines simply don’t at this stage right today today today um and then there’s some um degrees of freedom right motion that that machines have a problem with angles that machines have a problem with that man that humans just don’t um i think we’re I think we’re a long way from humans being removed from the manufacturing process completely. Lights out manufacturing, which is no humans involved, is, I still think, a long ways away for most things. There are some things where we’ll absolutely get there. Where delicacy is just simply not required. Where the product being manufactured is simple enough that you can have a fully automated manufacturing line. That being said, those are… likely part creation rather than product creation.
Speaker 0 | 34:52.342
Okay. Yeah, I see that because those things are so uniform and just don’t require that. All of the different things that you brought up.
Speaker 1 | 35:02.595
Yeah. Yeah. But I think this is where we’re going to start to see some interesting things. You layer additive manufacturing on top of that, right? Things like 3D printers that can print in any number of materials.
Speaker 0 | 35:14.303
Right.
Speaker 1 | 35:15.324
Then you layer on top of that generative AI, which I know everybody’s tired of hearing of, but does have the ability to be transformative. And you can actually get to the point where, like using generative AI, you could design a house by describing the house. and have it end up architecturally sound like think about how valuable that would be right do you know like the the the code for your area around how a king stud has to be built in a doorway to to yeah no the computer does and if you were able to describe this is where i want the door this is how i want the door to be right i want a 36 inch wide eight foot tall solid door at this spot in the house, the computer would already know, okay, cool. The King stud King studs required there to make this work, or this is how you properly frame in a window, right? Because if you ever looked at the framing for a window, it’s, it’s insane. The amount of support that’s put into a window, right? We, what if you didn’t have to know any of that? What if you didn’t have to be a partial materials engineer and overcompensate with materials because the computer simply knew it all of us. your spans start to get a far more interesting because you don’t need the beams that are there because you didn’t have a materials engineer on, on hand to certify the material load. Instead, the computer can do it automatically. And all you have to do is describe what you’re looking for. Okay. Right. The potential for the future, I think is going to be, it’s just going to be incredible.
Speaker 0 | 36:47.107
So now you just take and create that, that application that it’s almost like ordering Uber to pick me up and take me where I want to go. Now I just start moving things around in the house the way I want. I design the stairway the way that I want, get the drop-down bed frame and all of these interesting thoughts around the house. And I just throw them together in the app and it suddenly comes up with the full design that is sent over to the construction company that doesn’t have to have the highly skilled laborers that they used to have. that would have to draft everything up and and put together and go oh no you can’t do that the computer just figures out okay this is what we have to do to achieve that yeah so do you know what the number one um use what
Speaker 1 | 37:38.346
most the the the top square footage usage in a city is do you know the purpose of the number one square footage of of a city is dedicated to this in the us i don’t know the right way to phrase it
Speaker 0 | 37:51.582
Yeah, I’m guessing it’s either the roadways or parking.
Speaker 1 | 37:54.344
It’s parking lots. Da-da-da, it’s parking lots. So we’re right on the precipice of self-driving cars.
Speaker 0 | 38:01.390
Right.
Speaker 1 | 38:02.250
Do I need parking lots when I have self-driving cars?
Speaker 0 | 38:05.413
I would assume you need charging lots.
Speaker 1 | 38:10.157
I do need charging infrastructure. But what if you drove your car to work, your car drove you to work, right? Let you out, and then you fire up the app, and you just hit Uber, and it goes into Uber mode. You don’t park your car. You just turn your car right away and goes and picks somebody up. If your car is working all day, and when it’s not working, it’s just charging, and it knows exactly what the charge is, it needs to get you home. So it’s only charging what’s necessary to get you home with a little buffer. I don’t need parking lots anymore. Certainly not to the degree that I have them. Think about what that would mean for the cities we all live in. If those parking lots were able to go away effectively, what does that mean? How does that change residential housing? How does it change the number of apartments you can build, the number of multi-tenant houses you can build if these giant parking lots went away?
Speaker 0 | 39:03.493
Right. The buildings. Well, and storefronts are changing, are in the process of a change too. More and more brick and mortar disappearing because Amazon.
Speaker 1 | 39:15.576
Sure. And how can you change shopping experience when… I don’t need to go to the store anymore because I can literally have an automated car show up, open its trunk, advertise who it’s doing a pickup for. Someone can come out and drop the groceries in the trunk and it drops them off.
Speaker 0 | 39:36.040
And it doesn’t even have to be full size. So you could have like five of these things abreast in what used to be a lane for a driving car. Not to mention the fact that all of those cars and the mini delivery vehicles are working. in tandem together to handle flow.
Speaker 1 | 39:52.973
Sure.
Speaker 0 | 39:53.595
And all kinds of things around that. Interesting. The city of tomorrow.
Speaker 1 | 39:59.212
It starts to become really interesting. Do you actually need traffic signals?
Speaker 0 | 40:04.294
So do you think we’re going to run into these kinds of transformations first, or are we going to see things like the smart traffic signals that allow for green lights that suddenly shift to green lights going the other way so that two vehicles can maintain speed when the system recognizes that they’re not going to hit each other, but there’s no need to just stop everybody so this guy can go?
Speaker 1 | 40:28.444
Yeah, we’re already seeing cities try to use smart traffic lights. The challenge with smart infrastructure ultimately is to make it really effective, you have to kind of do the whole city. I say kind of because if you look at the city, if you look at traffic patterns, traffic patterns are like veins and arteries inside your body. Right. Right. So veins and arteries don’t work if the flow stops every 15 centimeters inside your body. Right. So what you really want to do is you really want to have some streets that are designed to never stop if you’re going east to west. Some designed to never stop if you’re going west to east. And then same for north and south. In order to do that, you kind of have to make all the lights on that street smart. Right. If you do that, then it works. The problem that most cities have is they’re like, well, we’re going to take this intersection and this intersection and this intersection to make them smart. And then they go, well, I don’t know why we’re not getting the value out of this that we thought we’d get. Well, because, cool, you’ve made it easier for a bunch of people to go left because you’re using smart signals to recognize when the traffic gets backed up. But you’ve not improved the next light or the light after that. And so they just back up there and stop. And so now what you’ve done is you’ve made this left turn longer. So you’ve got more people in the intersection now when the light turns red.
Speaker 0 | 41:50.380
Ouch. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 41:52.460
And so what we really need to do is start thinking about these things as more like the organisms that they, how they operate. Traffic, the traffic signal is not the important part. The organism, the flow is the important part, but we tend to think about them as the traffic signal and the intersection. That’s not the important part. The important part is the flow overall. So how do we manage the flow for 12 signals at the same time? Well, the computer can absolutely do it. We just have to have the willingness. to make the investment in the 12 intersections at the same time.
Speaker 0 | 42:23.129
So let me throw a wrench into this conversation, or let me try to take that left turn at Albuquerque. And I really enjoyed all of the things, and I love the stuff that you’re bringing up. What’s the dark side of this? If not the dark side, what are the things within the lack of common agreeance on language that Just are your pet peeves or, you know, what are those things like generative AI or, you know, I want to talk about AI in general, but I’m interested in what are your pet peeves? Either in the language or digital transformation or, you know, what are the things that the rest of the world are doing that just like cause you to cringe?
Speaker 1 | 43:14.453
Let’s say there’s five things. So the first is legislation is too rigid and too slow. Okay. We’re trying to move at a million miles an hour and legislators are easily five years behind and will always be five years behind.
Speaker 0 | 43:26.613
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 43:27.273
Right. There are companies today trying to build autonomous personal air transport. So flying cars. Right. Okay. We can’t legislate autonomous vehicles in two dimensions and they want to add a third dimension. And somehow they think they’re going to be able to take that to market. Right. So there’s a point at which you can’t move faster than legislators. Additionally, I’ve been a commenter for lobbying orgs on some legislation, and the lack of understanding of technology by legislators is insane, and the lack of understanding of law by technologists is insane. So there’s a gulf that’s roughly the size of the Grand Canyon where you have one group standing on one side and the other group standing on the other side, and they’re both screaming over the Grand Canyon with no one there to build the bridge. And so we need to better understand what someone else’s job is. We need to be empathetic to the point of someone else’s job, the purpose, the reason they exist, and empathetic, which means we have to acknowledge that they should exist and they have a valid reason to be here, right? And it’s not really just between technology and legislation, although that’s my pet peeve, but within your organization itself, right? When you’re trying to interface with the business, don’t try to just interface with the business. Try to empathize with the person on the other side of the table. and understand what they’re trying to get done and then phrase the thing you’re doing in a way that helps them understand that you’re trying to help them get the same thing done, right? So it’s that lack of empathy, but specifically my pet peeve is the lack of empathy between technologists and legislators. They’re just too slow. And they don’t understand what we do. And we refuse to understand what they do. We’re not good at understanding what anybody does that’s not a technologist. We’re somewhat dismissive.
Speaker 0 | 45:10.257
Yeah, it’s almost, you know, in my world, one of the ways that I saw this happening or a version of this, it’s not exactly what you’re talking about, but like mechanics, mechanics and the IT team. And both of them looked at each other going, wow, you know, I can’t work on a vehicle like you can. And those guys know technology because they’re dealing with tech. newer levels of technology, but they’re dealing with that physical aspect of it. And here we are dealing with technology, but we’re dealing with that, the code and the electronics and, and those pieces of it, the metal aspects of it. And, and they’re both sides were just really good at what they did, but they’d look at each other and go, I can’t do that.
Speaker 1 | 45:55.938
More so they’d look at each other and go, I don’t understand that. And I’m not going to learn it.
Speaker 0 | 45:59.340
Yeah. I’m not even going to try to learn it.
Speaker 1 | 46:01.361
Correct. right and you don’t need to learn it but you do need to understand it you do need to empathize with it yeah right um my second one i i’ll leave it at two because because otherwise this one forever um my second one and i may have just forgotten what it was but but it’s oh yeah so i’m a big fan of douglas adams wrote hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy okay yeah and in one of his books he talks about um the mountain problem so there’s a small village They’re very proud of their village. Everything is perfectly laid out, perfectly manicured, and they continue to win the best village of the year. However, they also live next to what they consider the ugliest mountain in the entire universe. And that spoils the view from their otherwise perfect village. And so they hire magicians and wizards from all around that claim they can make the mountain disappear. And all these magicians and all these wizards, they’re casting spells and praying to gods. And… and lighting fires and sacrificing virgins, and the mountain, no matter what they do, never disappears. Finally, one guy says, I guarantee I can make it disappear. And they say, okay, look, we’re pretty fed up. If you don’t make it disappear, we’re going to kill you. Nope, I guarantee I can make it disappear. Just give me 90 days. And he tries everything he can think of. And finally, on the last day, he gets everybody he knows together, gets the ugliest pink paint he can think of, and they go paint the mountain pink. The next morning, the villagers wake up. They see a pink mountain determined, oh, that’s definitely someone else’s problem. Declare the mountain disappeared and pay the man because it’s someone else’s problem. And Douglas Adams then coined a phrase I love, which is someone else’s problem. And that is something where it’s so obviously not your problem that you just ignore that it exists to begin with. And SEPs or someone else’s problems are my other pet peeve. Security. kind of became an SEP, right? Which has led us down this path that we find ourselves in, right? I only take it to this point and someone really should take it to the next step. And then somebody else goes, well, I only take it to this point, leaving that gulf in between. And that gulf in between is things like interns hard coding simple passwords, right? Leaving APIs open, right? For random amounts of corporate data to be sliced and stolen. right? Sharing passwords. All the security things that we read are all SEPs. It’s someone else’s job to secure the IoT network. It’s someone else’s job to make sure the fire control systems are not connected to the core network.
Speaker 0 | 48:40.106
It’s someone else’s job to make sure that people clock in and clock out or put in, use the password rules that we wrote.
Speaker 1 | 48:48.891
Right. 100%. SEPs? Yeah, big pet peeve of mine, right? It’s someone else’s job to understand the definition. It’s someone else’s job. It’s someone else’s job. It’s someone else’s job.
Speaker 0 | 48:57.816
Okay. So I’ve seen that in life way too often. And being a person who hates that myself, but I’ve also found that I can drown myself in someone else’s problem and never accomplish what I’m actually being paid for. Got a solution to that or thoughts around that?
Speaker 1 | 49:25.323
Yeah, you still drown yourself.
Speaker 0 | 49:27.103
You just drown.
Speaker 1 | 49:29.704
Honestly, if we all had the attitude that we were, if 15% more of us had the willingness to tilt at windmills, we’d be able to make so much progress, right? The problem ultimately is if you’re the only one tilting at windmills inside your organization, you’re the crazy person.
Speaker 0 | 49:46.088
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 49:47.069
If 15% of people are tilting at windmills inside your organization. then tilting at windmills is supported and promoted. And then everybody else feels like, well, I mean, this thing’s bothered me too, but I didn’t want to step out of my lane. Okay, now I can step out of my lane.
Speaker 0 | 50:00.968
And now I can fix it. I just need a fix for it. Let’s get it done.
Speaker 1 | 50:04.867
Correct. Yes, this would make my life easier, right? This would make it better. I’m happy to do that. But currently we act with fear because people who tilt at windmills, they’re not necessarily protected inside an organization.
Speaker 0 | 50:18.232
Yeah. They need to change. All too often they’re not. All too often, I’ve seen both sides of it because typically I was the one that they would call in and say, look, I’ve got this problem. Find a solution. Go. whatever it is. And so other people would learn to go up, somebody else’s problem or not my job. And suddenly, hey, Mike.
Speaker 1 | 50:42.697
Yeah. Yeah. And we’re far too risk adverse. Right. Right. The few times I’ve worked for consulting organizations, I’d go talk to customers and I’d be like, hey, we could do this X, Y, and Z. Like, okay, cool. Where has another healthcare company done that? Well, manufacturing does this all the time. Yeah, but they’re not a healthcare company. Right. Technology is just technology, guys. It’s still going to work fine. We don’t trust it because not another healthcare company has done it. And so what you’re telling me is you don’t ever want to be a leader in the space. You just want to be a follower. That’s the weirdest attitude I’ve ever heard of. And yet every organization does it to some degree.
Speaker 0 | 51:20.773
Yeah, because they don’t want to pay for the recall.
Speaker 1 | 51:24.835
Because they’re just terrified.
Speaker 0 | 51:27.757
Yeah. They’re terrified of creating recalls, to use some of the examples from earlier.
Speaker 1 | 51:34.201
Yeah. We’re told all day long, every day, be agile, which means fail fast. Does not mean succeed fast. It means fail fast. Right. And yet we’re so risk adverse, we miss the value of failing fast.
Speaker 2 | 51:46.210
Hey guys, this is Phil Howard, founder of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I just want to take a few minutes to address something. It has become fairly apparent. I’m sure all of you will agree over the years. that slow vendor response, vendor response times, vendors in general, the average is mediocre. Support is mediocre. Mediocrity is the name of the game. Not only is this a risk to your network security, because I’ve seen vendors on numerous occasions share sensitive information, but there’s also a direct correlation to your budget and your company’s bottom line. Not to mention the sales reps that are trying to sell you and your CEO and your CFO on a daily basis. That causes a whole nother realm of problems that we don’t have time to address. Our back office program at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we’ve put together specifically for IT leadership, and it’s on a mission to eliminate this mediocrity. And the best part is that we’re doing this in a way that will not cost your IT department a dime. So. If you’d like us to help you out, get better pricing, better support, and jump on pressing issues in minutes, not days, then contact us now so we can get on a call with you and conduct a value discovery session where we find out what you have, why you have it, and where you want to go and how we can improve your life, your IT department, and your company’s bottom line. What you’re going to end up with is, number one, just faster support from partners. who care about your organization’s uptime and bottom line. And because you’re going to be able to access our $1.2 billion in combined buying power, you’ll be able to benefit significantly from historical data. And on top of that, you’ll also benefit from the skills of hundreds of on-demand experts that we have working behind the scenes that are all attached to our back office support program. So if you’d like, again, none of this is ever going to cost you a dime. At the very least, it’s going to open your eyes to what’s possible. Let our back office team provide you the high touch solutions and support that your IT team deserves so that you can stop calling 1-800-GOLD-POUND-STAND for support. Now, if you’re wondering, what does this apply to? This applies to your ISPs, your telecom providers, all your application providers, whether you’re a Microsoft shop or a Google shop, what you might be paying for AWS. even Azure, co-location space, any of those vendors that you’re paying a monthly bill to, we can help you with. Hey, it’s Greg, the Frenchman secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain. To request your one-on-one call, contact us at internet at popularit.net. And remember,
Speaker 0 | 54:39.591
it will never cost you a dime. So I have another interesting thought for you because some of the things that we’ve talked about or questioned, question and or thought. I haven’t formulated it well enough to know whether it’s which one of the two it is. Shared experience. When I was growing up, We had a lot of shared experiences because, you know, there was only the local movie theater. There were only three channels on TV. There was only, you know, so many different things that we could do. So we all had those shared experiences. Saturday mornings were the only time that we got to watch cartoons.
Speaker 1 | 55:17.447
Sure.
Speaker 0 | 55:18.248
And now with that huge divergence of… information that’s out there in those 30 second bites that everybody’s going through now a shared experience is so diversified and and it’s it’s almost become hard to find people with a shared experience and when i find somebody that has a shared experience then it’s almost a bonding event over oh you watched that series too or you binged on that series too so now you know i i can’t find as many of my cohorts in the world. Does that bring any thoughts to your head?
Speaker 1 | 56:00.705
I mean, the worst thing that we could have done was, I’m going to say this in a way that I don’t actually mean, but it’s expedient.
Speaker 0 | 56:09.010
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 56:09.410
We did a terrible thing by shutting society down during COVID. We also did the necessary thing by shutting society down during COVID. So I don’t want people to misconstrue what I’m saying. COVID was awful. Half a million people died. Shutting society down helped slow the death. But what shutting society down did was it pushed us further into echo chambers. The whole of the internet is designed to be an echo chamber.
Speaker 0 | 56:37.255
Yeah, I go listen to what I want to hear.
Speaker 1 | 56:39.156
Correct. Society is not designed to be an echo chamber. Going into the office, not designed to be an echo chamber. I don’t choose who I work with. People of all different personalities show up to the office. People of all different… Different. backgrounds and diversity show up to the office. Sure, they may not be as diverse as we want them to be. And that’s a whole nother podcast that we could do.
Speaker 0 | 57:01.364
Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 | 57:02.464
for sure. But they’re more diverse than just us. And yet when you get online, what you get is just you. You get an echo chamber of the one thing that you’re looking for. That’s not reality, right? That’s a dangerous slice of reality.
Speaker 0 | 57:19.029
Sounds like another. Dislike for the marketeering or would you call it marketeer?
Speaker 1 | 57:25.701
Marketeer. Marketeer. Marketeer. Right? So, so, so the problem that we have is we’re, we’ve now, we’re now in a situation where we do this all day long, right? We stare at screens, right? And all I know about you is with it contained tightly within the conversations that we’ve had.
Speaker 0 | 57:43.235
Right.
Speaker 1 | 57:44.236
Right? We’re, I feel like we’re getting along great. We could be great friends. The reality of the situation is that may not be true at all.
Speaker 0 | 57:51.298
Yeah, we haven’t talked about our politics, our faith, any of those important topics.
Speaker 1 | 57:55.160
Nothing. Nothing. Things that may or may not let us get along.
Speaker 0 | 58:00.564
Or Android.
Speaker 1 | 58:02.265
Right. Apple. We’ve spent so much time in the last decade picking our sides, none of which matter. Not one. There’s not one of them that actually matters. We’re just convinced by the people turning the screws that those things matter. There’s a lot of money to be made if you’re Apple diehard versus Android diehard. There’s a lot of money to be made if you pick one political party or the other. There’s a lot of money to be made on any side to an argument. You know where there’s no money to be made? If you’re in the middle.
Speaker 0 | 58:37.588
If you’re willing to take on all of those other people’s jobs.
Speaker 1 | 58:42.192
There’s no money to be made off of you if you’re willing to listen. No money to be made off of you if you are thoughtful. If you’re considering.
Speaker 0 | 58:52.211
That’s got to be untrue. There’s got to be ways to do it. But the easy money is where all those other places you’re talking about. There’s got to. I mean, those of us that are, and I’m throwing myself in there, whether I am or not, those of us thoughtful and thinking about that and trying to be of service. We have money and we’re trying to spend it and we’re trying to spend it in the right ways. So there’s got to be ways to capitalize.
Speaker 1 | 59:23.925
But we’re also the people that are the most likely to peel back the label.
Speaker 0 | 59:27.048
And go, wait, there’s two labels.
Speaker 1 | 59:30.972
Hey, you know that fair trade chocolate label that is on all the chocolate you like to buy and makes you feel good? It doesn’t actually mean anything. Not a damn thing. They still use slave labor to make all that chocolate. We’re the people that are likely to peel back that label and go, oh. That’s just designed to make you feel better. It’s not actually designed to make you do better.
Speaker 0 | 59:52.660
And now I can’t have my favorite chocolate.
Speaker 1 | 59:56.224
Well, now you have to make the decision, right? Yeah. Do I cut out chocolate or do I deal with the fact that…
Speaker 0 | 60:01.586
these these big mega corporations aren’t acting in the best interest of the world and and and suffer through it right like like you know i don’t want to get off on a rant i could easily i could start a new rant i’ve i’ve stopped you from too many rants as it is already and not even really and it has been a wonderful conversation i think we’re about it at that time so you know i i truly enjoyed this conversation howard this has been great um you have you
Speaker 1 | 60:31.310
opened my eyes and helped me understand and and define quite a few things for me um and it definitely was not the typical talk uh great so i guess you set the bar kind of hard saying you had 200 episodes i was like oh no i gotta bring i gotta bring something new and interesting here so yeah i had it easy i was at episode number 89 so you
Speaker 0 | 60:52.539
know i i gotta talk about growing up in los alamos where you know i glow in the dark so you Oh, but, you know, in all honesty, there were aspects of I heard some of the same message that I’ve heard across most of these, but you stated it in a much clearer and concise way and hopefully a way that those those out there listening can be more empathetic to the person across the table and understand what and why. Because it’s one of the most important messages that helps helped me succeed at what I do. It’s being able to listen to the other person, understand what and why. Because there’s so many times that I’d see people come in asking for help from the help desk, and we’d look at it and go, well, they’re wrong. And just stop, because we can’t see or we’re not willing to dig in any deeper and trust the person when they say, this isn’t working. No, it’s working. You’re wrong. And just stopping right there. And then. Having that contention and no longer having empathy and going, okay, there’s a reason this person’s telling me this.
Speaker 1 | 62:05.191
And they’re frustrated. No one shows up because they’re happy and their day is going great. Yeah. They do. They bring cookies and that’s great. I love it when they bring cookies. Yeah. But the rest of the time they’re frustrated. Right. So empathize. Just have some empathy and go, this person’s really frustrated. Sure, they’re wrong. That’s fine. They’re allowed to be wrong. Empathize with their frustration. Fix their frustration. Don’t worry about fixing the thing they say is wrong. Because again, if you’d asked a thousand people when they stepped out of a cab, they’d have given you the wrong answer.
Speaker 0 | 62:33.140
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 62:34.040
The right answer was still there, though.
Speaker 0 | 62:36.121
Yep. It was just hidden in there. And trying to get to that hidden answer or that wish, trying to get them to verbalize that wish is a skill in itself.
Speaker 1 | 62:48.646
That it is. That it is.
Speaker 0 | 62:49.967
That’s for sure. All right. Well, thank you very much for taking some time out of your day and spending it with us. and sharing with the audience of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’d invite all of our listeners to comment, rate the podcast, let us know what you thought on the iTunes or Spotify stores, and wherever you’re getting the copy of the podcast from. We really appreciate the support of the program and the time you invested into nerding out with us geeks. So thank you, everybody.
Speaker 1 | 63:22.768
Thanks for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.
Speaker 0 | 63:24.548
Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1 | 63:26.498
Oh
