Speaker 0 | 00:06.178
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have Vic. I don’t want to butcher your last name. Bakta?
Speaker 1 | 00:16.704
Yep.
Speaker 0 | 00:17.605
I did it. I did it right. Soon off’s rarity for me, but welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Head of Information Technology at Hayes Locums. Just a kind of a small, not a big deal recruiting firm. Really, really kind of a big deal, actually. As you guys recruit for, is it mostly healthcare?
Speaker 1 | 00:40.598
Yep. Yeah. Primarily physicians.
Speaker 0 | 00:43.700
Oh, which is a big deal. And I have, I’m the third. So I’m actually Philip J. Howard III. I don’t tell many people that. I got made fun of that for that a lot. But you should be proud of this. You should be proud of this, right? Because my father, Philip J. Howard, is… a retired urologist. So your guys do such a good job that they have found my cell phone number and recruit me to do partial locums tenens work as a urologist at various different places that you guys are looking for doctors for. So I should just take them up on that offer someday and just become a urologist maybe for a couple months. What do you think? Would that work out?
Speaker 1 | 01:23.868
It’s not too late for a career change. Plus, you get to travel and help out people.
Speaker 0 | 01:31.071
I asked my dad how hard it is to do a kidney transplant. And he said, it’s really not that easy. It’s just like, it’s pretty easy. It’s like plumbing. You clamp here, you clamp here, you take it out, you put the new one in, clamp here. I was like, oh, okay.
Speaker 1 | 01:44.756
It’s just like everything. There’s probably a YouTube video on it.
Speaker 0 | 01:47.357
Yeah. There is a YouTube video. They’re probably there. They’re. I mean, you know there is. In fact, now you’ve made me want to go down this dark hole of YouTubing, which brings up a good point. You are head of information technology. How many end users do you guys have?
Speaker 1 | 02:04.608
Roughly 300.
Speaker 0 | 02:05.989
Roughly 300. So do you have a staff of more than three?
Speaker 1 | 02:12.933
My total team is roughly about nine people.
Speaker 0 | 02:15.956
How many?
Speaker 1 | 02:16.836
Nine people total.
Speaker 0 | 02:18.597
This is a very… Congratulations. I would like to… Can I… I had this great idea in the last show that we want to start sending awards out to presidents of companies and CEOs that value IT. So if you come on the show and you have any ratio greater than 1 to 100, so the average IT staff to end user ratio in the mid-market space, which you guys are in the mid-market space, is 1 to 100. You guys are 1 to 300. Am I doing that math right? So that’s… No, no. One to 30. Sorry. I don’t know whatever this math. I stayed back in first grade. Whatever it is. You’ve got nine people and 300 unused. Whatever that ratio is, okay? It’s really, really good. So I would like to congratulate whoever approves the IT budget there. We need to send them an award. We should send them a dissecting pop their IT words word that you appreciate your IT people. Good job. And it shows because clearly you guys are a successful company. But to transition. Back to the YouTube, there’s a YouTube video on it. I did have an IT guy say once, you know, I’m a good IT director just because I’m a better Googler. I’m a better Googler than everybody else. So is there any truth to that?
Speaker 1 | 03:35.111
I’d say Google is the bread and butter of IT. I mean, now that’s outside of, you know, artificial intelligence and chat GPT and all those tools.
Speaker 0 | 03:46.355
Are you guys using any AI in the business?
Speaker 1 | 03:48.972
Uh, we are planning on leveraging AI. We are piloting co-pilot on the, uh, just for a few internal users.
Speaker 0 | 03:55.457
Okay. And what, what, what’s AI going to do? Are we going to, can we eliminate all the recruiters?
Speaker 1 | 04:02.002
No, it’s more of an enrichment tool, but I know that’s the end game for every, uh, CEO. It’s like, how many head counts can I, can I remove using AI?
Speaker 0 | 04:11.870
How many heads can I cut? That’s messed up. Um, employee number 520. You’re done. Um, so what, what’s, uh, what, what’s it planning to, to do for you guys or what, what can we expect?
Speaker 1 | 04:27.728
Uh, well, there’s a couple of cool tools actually. Uh, so my, uh, another, uh, director on my team, uh, mentioned a help desk, uh, a service desk, uh, AI tool where it’ll help, uh, automate a tier one ticket. So if it’s something that’s in a knowledge base, it’s like a chat bot. Right. So it’ll go through the knowledge portal. And if it can assist without having to burden a physical body, it’ll go out and these are the instructions you need and guide them through the process as if it was a real person. So really those self-service tools is where I see chat GPT helping on the service side of IT.
Speaker 0 | 05:03.619
Wow, you just gave me a great idea. Well, I did have this idea because we’re rebuilding the website right now, which I would, maybe you can give me some insight in because you would think website and IT go hand in hand. I don’t think it does. I’m going to hold that thought for a moment if you have any. I want to put some kind of AI chatbot on the new website. Not a lame chatbot, like a chatbot that’s like, tell me your IT problems, like an IT psychologist or something like that. Let it go out to the universe and search and use all of our, you know, and find the right people to connect with that will help you solve said IT issue or problem. Kind of like, kind of like what you were just saying, like this knowledge base. But then what you really made me think is you’re like, just like a real person. You said just like a real person. We should be able to choose for fun. Do you want the, do you want the condescending IT guy? Or do you? You know what I mean? Do you want the condescending IT guy or do you want the polite IT guy that, or do you want, you know, this type of guy? What are you some kind of idiot? Don’t you know that it’s just, you click here and you click there and you do this like that. Should it be that type of IT guy or should it be a different type of IT bot?
Speaker 1 | 06:15.192
That would just be just maybe give someone boys, grandmas, boy vibes.
Speaker 0 | 06:20.635
Oh, that movie is so inappropriate. Oh, I’m going to cry. Oh, yes, we need some kind of bot like that. What else can we do? Gamification stuff. We need to make, we should make all these things. We should really bridge the gap. This is a business show, but that’s just, that’s fun. You guys, I feel like the heart of America is like three different businesses. Like banks, recruiters. Banks, recruiters, credit card falls under bank, financial planners fall under banks. Yeah, banks recruiting and then, you know, manufacturing, I guess. I don’t know. But manufacturers, there’s so many different things. Like, what else is there?
Speaker 1 | 07:14.604
The service industry.
Speaker 0 | 07:16.265
What’s that?
Speaker 1 | 07:17.326
I mean, how would you classify it? Like a haircut in there?
Speaker 0 | 07:20.989
Oh, yeah. SMB guys, like just scraping by the heart of America. You know, it all got destroyed during COVID. Yeah. Which is just randomly, uh, how did, how did COVID was probably great for you guys. Uh, we need to recruit nurses. We need to recruit nurses like crazy.
Speaker 1 | 07:38.733
Uh, at that time, no, we had a bit of, uh, there was a lot of electric, uh, elective surgeries and elective procedures that were, uh, put on hold by many hospitals because they focused on COVID treatment. Um, so certain aspects of our business stayed steady, but others dropped off. Um, but post COVID, um, we had that V-shaped recovery because everything was open for business and they had to catch up on time, especially for all those elective procedures. So, uh, post COVID was, was very, uh, we were fortunate to be in a good spot.
Speaker 2 | 08:11.628
At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, Few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never ending from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try once patients even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team. and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes, and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power and massive economy of scale to map. all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts. so that you’re not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short, we are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So, we’re still human, but we are some of the best, and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what’s on your roadmap. All you need to do is email. visit internet at popular it.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier and we’ll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day right now.
Speaker 0 | 10:32.352
If I were to ask you when it comes to it leadership and business, you don’t have to answer this. You can answer the opposite of this. You can give like the, you can give like the fake interview question. That’s like, you know, what, what. what are your weaknesses, Phil? And you’re like, well, my weaknesses are I’m really a workaholic. I really get involved in my job and I work too hard. That’s my weakness. When it comes to IT and business and bridging the gap between the business world and IT, what do you find is, I’m going to say our, IT directors in general, biggest, single, single biggest struggle, frustration, problem? or concern?
Speaker 1 | 11:18.033
I’d say context and conveying the context of an idea between two different parties is everything’s open to interpretation. And just like anything you put in writing, it’s all based on the experiences and the role that you’re in when you’re relaying that information. So an IT goal, what’s important to me may not be important to someone else. So the context around it may not be weighted as heavily so cyber security um is very very important to me but it might not be as important to someone in accounting right when they want to build out a process and why do we need these controls around everything why why does everything have to have mfa why does everything have to have um all this additional weight as they would see it for us it’s reducing weight because we’re less likely to get hacked and we’re less likely to have issues down the road so you I’d say context and interpretation are, you know, top of mind and being able to kind of reframe things is a valuable skill to have, especially when you get to the leadership level.
Speaker 0 | 12:29.971
Oh, it’s just another use case for the condescending IT bot. It really is. You know, I don’t know. We have a bot for that. Ask them, hey, why do we need a multi-factor authentication? Why do we need this? Listen up, you idiot. You want to get hacked?
Speaker 1 | 12:49.321
The Models Times co-pilot says, do you want to rephrase this or do you want me to rewrite it for you in an email? I’m like, oh, are my bullet points not getting through? Like try writing something more warmer.
Speaker 0 | 13:02.191
Mine’s always the slow down. Try writing something more warmer. I’m sorry. I’m sure that the rest of this world loves numbers secretly as much as you do. Um, we love to, we want to just, we want to sit around and talk about EBITDA all day, but we can’t, we can’t. So we’ve got this other thing that I, you know, thank man, we’re, we’re so thankful that got approved. It’s called, um, security. Um, no, but all jokes aside, security, is it hard? Would you say that’s the hardest thing to get approved for the budget security spend? Or what’s the hardest it thing to get approved for? for spent and, and to just, and very, very scatterbrained person is me. That that’s me. Okay. The, to, to finish your point on the translation, when we did some data analytics years ago, when we had like a couple, a hundred shows, we took all the data and we, we, and some other things I did some, um, um, well, God, what’s it called when you’re surveying? There you go. Surveying of other IT directors. And we asked, you know, kind of like what all the biggest problems are. And one of the top four was translating technology to end users, which I think is, they all said it in a different way. Like you just said it one way too, but would you say that that’s the same thing? Like translating and like trying to train end users that. Basically training end users and translating to end users that this is important and this is how the technology should work?
Speaker 1 | 14:45.136
Yeah, I 100% agree with that. So we partner a lot with our training team to help us take. I’m a big proponent of the self-service model, right? Teach a man to fish, essentially. So teaching our end users to be more self-sufficient, to be more security conscious and teaching them best practices. It reduces the burden on us. It makes them more confident in their abilities to do things themselves as well before reaching out to IT. So translating all that to the end user for something operational versus maybe…
Speaker 0 | 15:21.195
um like something more project related there are two different animals yes before reaching out to the the bot first then reaching out to it the what is the hardest thing you find to get approved for it uh right
Speaker 1 | 15:37.824
now uh i’m fortunate to be in an organization that actually values uh cyber security and technology so but in a past life um yeah it was trying Any security tool, because the top dollar amount that comes with them, that’s generally hard to get approved, especially when it’s not just enough to keep the lights on. Cybersecurity doesn’t fall under that umbrella. You don’t need it to keep the lights on. Now, if you don’t have it, your lights will turn off based on a malware or a piece of PDF that comes through. And then the checkbook opens magically. to one repair and to insulate the environment so um i’m thankful this organization that from uh the get-go uh cyber security has been a major focus right we need good firewalls we need uh identity uh control we need uh really good endpoint management we need good endpoint protection we need monitoring all these things are are um all these tools are available to us right now so i can at least sleep at night
Speaker 0 | 16:46.079
the i’m guilty i’m guilty i’m a guilty i’m a guilty person in that in that realm because we had a vicious malware attack on the podcast and i’m thinking like ah just this rinky dinky podcast and you know and now but all of a sudden now you’ve got you know however many i don’t know 50 000 downloads or whatever and you’ve got so many episodes and everything and we’re just this little wordpress site and uh you
Speaker 1 | 17:14.999
WordPress hacks were pretty common back in the day, if I remember right.
Speaker 0 | 17:18.421
Yeah, like just someone got in through a backdoor through like one, you know, one whatever application or widget or app or something on the back of WordPress. Yeah, plug-in. Thank you. Thank you. Really sounding stupid. Yeah, one plug-in that just wasn’t updated. Just one, just takes one plug-in of the thousands of plug-ins that you can have behind WordPress to not be updated for this. crazy thing that just came and shut us down and then so it was like this trickle effect of like a trickle effect of comedy of errors of of all of all sorts from vendors and everything so malware took it down okay so whatever call up the host like hey what the heck’s going on you know like the automatic backups were no of course not of course so like so whatever there was backups but they were like old backups that was like you know maybe like 12 shows back and i want to go rebuild 12 share pages and and you know it’s just kind of like you know so then web developer guy’s like well i can start removing the code and as he’s removing code and as fast as he can remove code new codes coming in so then there’s for this you know like you know uh okay we’ll update the this and it was just it was kind of a nightmare so then finally got everything cleaned up we have to make the backup make the backup You know, I made the backup. And so then call the host and host is like, well, let’s, you know, like you said, open your wallet. And then when something happens, you open your wallet. He’s like, oh, we got this, like, you know, security product. And we’ve got this great, I don’t care. Go here. How much is it? Yes. Here, here’s the credit card, you know, go, go, go. And then, so, okay. And we can migrate you to this more secure, faster hosting platform while you’re at it. Let’s upsell you like, like now, now we’re at it. Hey, by the way, we noticed the page loads are pretty slow. Would you like to get? Yes. Do it. Do it. Yeah. Okay. Great. Yeah, yes, I want that too. Yeah, I want that too. So, okay, here’s what they did. These morons. We got the backup. We get everything. So now we get the new security product. They’re going in, they’re going to clean all the malware off, get all the weird code off, everything. Okay, great, great. They’re doing their job in parallel, supposedly, with the migrating to the new server platform, right? So you get it all cleaned up, get it all fixed, and make the backup. I’m like, yes. Like, I can breathe again. Like, you know, everything’s good. You know, we’re all doing great. Oh, let’s migrate to the new server now. So they migrate to the new server. And the backup that they used to upload to the new server was the old backup. It’s all like…
Speaker 1 | 19:56.561
With the malware?
Speaker 0 | 19:57.462
With the malware. So immediately, like, all the work that the other company had done, like, in an emergency, like, was done. So then I’m like… You got to do it again. You got to do it again. They’re like, we’re sorry. Like we put you in the top of the queue and like fixed everything. Now you got to wait in line. I got to wait in line for like us to get back around to you. And. Yeah, so there’s like a typical… So that was a comedy of errors. It was a weird security thing based on plugins and a WordPress site coupled with poor vendor support management and orchestration along with a security vendor. So there’s one of my heartaches. But the reason why I bring all this is… We don’t ever really talk about website. I’ve never talked about website, web development, who’s in charge of that. Where does that play in your wheelhouse? Web hosting?
Speaker 1 | 20:58.938
So we use a third party, same to host our website. So we don’t host it internally in an entirely separated island. That’s a joint venture between marketing and IT. We’ll handle the infrastructure, the backup, and we do external scanning, external vulnerability scanning on them. on a routine basis. Right. But the actual management of the website is still done through marketing or a third-party marketing firm.
Speaker 0 | 21:26.901
Okay. Development, all that type of stuff? Yep.
Speaker 1 | 21:30.484
Development, that’s all.
Speaker 0 | 21:32.305
I find web development so difficult. I find it to be one of these really weird things to find because we’re trying to rebuild our website and now we want all these AI tools and things to go into it. We cannot find a good firm. We cannot find a good firm that’s not like, you know, give us $20,000 to get started, to get it started. And then there’s just no in between. I want, so this is an advertisement right now. Anyone that is like really good at web development or you have a kid that’s wicked good at it that wants to come on and get involved and get somehow, we’re still trying to do that. Still trying to do that.
Speaker 1 | 22:09.236
We’ve gone through a few web development firms ourselves until we finally found one that.
Speaker 0 | 22:14.600
resonated with like our brand and our style and you know put out really good quality work as well so you’re you’re free to plug them if you want i have no i mean i would love people to to be vendor sponsors and pay us money over here but you’re free to plug them if you want to oh sure uh shout out to grin and it now how do you spell that uh it now no no or did you say grant though grin g-r-i-n okay okay it now web developers what’s their website what’s their url uh i only have their emails okay well uh we need good customers too um so okay so translating is one of the most difficult things uh as in as a it leader’s job what’s the second most difficult thing uh people management right you’re where you’re working with the um highly
Speaker 1 | 23:12.528
skilled individuals but every individual in tech has their own you know disparate personality type uh distinctive personality type so um commingling i guess a group of people that think they you know know it all at some sense right we are the de facto tech nerds of everything um and then working together is is
Speaker 0 | 23:34.427
you there’s a there’s a nuance to that okay what is that what’s the what’s the nuance
Speaker 1 | 23:40.648
The nuance is just making them work cohesively together. So finding that happy medium, keeping everyone more or less happy, both personally and professionally. I found that as long as you can be approachable and level set with them on a routine basis, you can get a team that functions together. We’re all growing in the same direction.
Speaker 0 | 24:05.415
What does that look like literally? Like example?
Speaker 1 | 24:09.388
I’m very transparent with my team on what’s going on. They have a lot of curiosity. A lot of time IT is in the back of room and they don’t understand kind of what’s happening with the business. So bringing in that external visibility to them and say, hey, this is what’s happening. Or let’s work with other departments that’s become more part of the business is not something you find traditionally in IT before. Right. We’re our own siloed group. and us being able to interact with the rest of the company gives them a sense of belonging with the rest of the organization. So they’re working towards something greater.
Speaker 0 | 24:48.009
Yeah, it is important because I’ve, every company that I ever worked at in corporate America, thinking back right now, no clue who IT was. Absolutely zero clue. Cannot name a single one.
Speaker 1 | 25:00.281
I come from a hospitality background, so. My family’s in hospitality, like hotels and motels and those types of things. I grew up in that type of environment. So I love the idea of IT being more of a customer service, happy, like a more, instead of a dark room, we’re that, you know, that cool restaurant that you want to go to and have great service.
Speaker 2 | 25:21.718
At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never-ending. From… unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try once patients even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have. behind the scenes of dissecting popular IT nerds. Let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes and we use our 1.2 billion in combined customer buying power in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, and to negotiate… the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you’re not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short. We are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So we’re still human, but we are some of the best and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what’s on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier. and we’ll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day.
Speaker 0 | 27:42.905
Do you encourage outreach from your team members to, I guess, the rest of the company, or how do you do that? Kind of what’s a, give me a, maybe just like a day in the life or like a feel for it.
Speaker 1 | 27:54.013
Yeah, I mean, if we’re getting, if we’re interacting with users through tickets anyway, they’ll go out on the floor and help them out if needed. It builds a connection, right? So a lot of… times people look at it when you have an issue so it has a very negative connotation to it but if they look at us and say hey you know what these guys are going to fix my problem and i look forward to working with it because i know whatever ailment i have will get resolved it shines us in a better light so um letting them go on the floor and and participating uh corporate events uh my my uh my guys actually were at the uh corporate run uh yesterday right they were participating with the rest of the company running you know four or five miles whatever it was uh with the rest of the company so they’re they’re participating in these events uh i’m t guys exercise my guys are all fitness uh like like heavy on the fitness so um they have weights in the area too we we just built the gym on our floors so uh it’s it i mean they like little push-up competitions and stuff as well so that’s actually pretty that’s that’s pretty sweet well you are
Speaker 0 | 29:05.046
a healthcare kind of organization recruiting people. So it’s probably important. Uh, you mentioned, uh, you came from hospitality, your family owns all owns hotels and stuff. Usually, um, I would say 80% of the, of the hospitality people that I work with, their last name is Patel. There’s so you probably know a few.
Speaker 1 | 29:28.378
Oh no, plenty. Yeah. Uh, I think there’s a couple in my family as well. And I think at some point we used to be.
Speaker 0 | 29:34.642
patels or something along those lines but we’re from the same region that’s like every best western in the united states i just asked for mr patel and you will get the manager the the what so how did you get into it uh uh so
Speaker 1 | 29:50.646
i went to school for hospitality and um one of my classes was hospitality technology uh so where they go over their gds’s and whatnot and my professor um you short version that was working on a little home server projects. I asked him like, Hey, do you have, I forgot what I was asking. I think I was asking for a SCSI card or something like that. Do you have an extra one that I can, you know, be a broker from the university or whatnot if they had to use one. And he’s like, why do you need that? And it kind of opened up this conversation about tech. And he’s like, I need a lab assistant. So I worked in the IT lab for a while and kind of worked my way up to being a sysadmin. um, there, or an IT generalist is what they, they renamed it to. So.
Speaker 0 | 30:33.420
We’ll always say IT lab. They make it sound like this, like this, like mad scientist, like, um, science thing. What was it? Can you describe that IT lab? Let’s go back in time. Just give us a little picture. I want to like, uh, tell us a story about the IT lab and what, and what went on inside, inside this lab.
Speaker 1 | 30:50.187
Well, this IT lab was the student, uh, computer center essentially. So it was, uh, you know, 100 or a couple hundred machines just out on the floor that any user could use. And then in the back was our storage area where we had this automated machine that would duplicate DVDs to send out. So that was the IT lab.
Speaker 0 | 31:12.732
Okay. What was the most fun? What’s the best part about IT? What’s the most fun part about it?
Speaker 1 | 31:22.756
I get excited over fixing problems. That’s my thing. And then being able to just mess with new tech and kind of be at the forefront of all this. That’s my favorite part of IT. I also like tinkering. Even at home, I tinker with… I have an unread server. I’m running Docker containers and stuff. So problem solving and building new things I can’t do at work. I think that’s the fun part of IT.
Speaker 0 | 31:50.331
Okay, sweet. I ask a lot of people this. Well, first of all, did you have any mentors?
Speaker 1 | 31:57.875
I’ve had, I guess every one of my leaders has been a mentor in some sense of the word. So that professor, Dale Gomez, he was instrumental in who I am today. So he taught me how does tech work and the basics of enterprise tech. And then from there, I went to a different company and I was on the project management side of things. So as a systems analyst. So I got to learn not just the tech part, but the… tech to business translation portion of it from there went to um a different company and i had an engineer lead and who taught me you know like the the deep inner workings of tech and then eventually um to where i am now and uh the the you’re i think a previous guest on your show john santee who’s uh been
Speaker 0 | 32:42.862
a mentor like uh as well so john’s gonna he better come back on the show we’ve got we’re um we’re uh mapping out um we’re gonna do a whole show john you have to do it now and you better set when this show comes out, you’re going to have to, I’m going to email you. You have to do it. You have to do the show, John, now, because we’re going to talk about, um, salespeople, relationships, referrals, face-to-face cold outreach events, how everyone’s in sales. Even it is in sales, John, John Santee. We’re talking about you.
Speaker 1 | 33:13.156
There’s a ball of permanent for you.
Speaker 0 | 33:14.997
Yeah. He’s, um, he’s been giving a lot of advice to, uh, sales reps and vendors lately. So, um, we’re going to, we’re going to focus on that. um for the show the what’s the um what do you think the end game is for what’s going to happen over the next 20 years is terminator 2 going to happen um is ai going to take over sky net’s definitely happening like if the algorithm can do if
Speaker 1 | 33:41.042
the algorithm can do so much over the last 10 years imagine the ai powered algorithm right i think i would have a lot of fun just hanging out with you
Speaker 0 | 33:52.650
Skynet’s real. What other movies are real that are going to happen? Skynet’s real. Hack. What was that old 80s movie? That already happened. Tron. What about Tron? Is that going to happen?
Speaker 1 | 34:04.056
Tron. I mean, let’s see what the third version of the Apple headset is like.
Speaker 0 | 34:11.180
That one’s a little out there. He’s like, I don’t know. He’s like, Terminator 2 is legit real, but Tron.
Speaker 1 | 34:17.004
The Matrix is.
Speaker 0 | 34:19.625
Matrix. I’m surprised I haven’t had a Matrix attack yet. I’m surprised I have. Which Matrix? Or which Matrix? The first one was the best. What was all these other weird ones that came after? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 34:33.056
It just kind of went downhill as it went. Like, I love the action scenes of the second one, but the first one is just so good at world building.
Speaker 0 | 34:40.202
What? Is there one that wasn’t good in the third? Is there? No, I mean, that was better. Is there any movie that the third one got better than the first?
Speaker 1 | 34:48.088
Oceans.
Speaker 0 | 34:49.169
Hmm.
Speaker 1 | 34:50.110
If you’re into movies. The second one.
Speaker 0 | 34:54.992
I wasn’t a fan. I really wasn’t. So, but yeah, but I thought the first one was bad. So that, so I guess you’re probably right. So by default, the third one has to be good. Hmm. Any other old school ones? Hmm. Oh, well, I guess you could call video games. I think like Super Mario Brothers 3 might have been better. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 35:14.299
I just replayed that. Like I had an emulator on my TV, just playing it on with a 8-bit dough controller.
Speaker 0 | 35:19.822
My kids, we had to go on a long plane ride, so I bought all these $35 emulator Game Boys that have 300 games on them. It was like $35. You had them all. It had Super Mario 7. Like what? There’s all these versions that came out. Yeah. These are like weird versions in other countries that came out that are like just really odd versions of it that they were on there. But, uh, I, I went into the living room the other day cause I took, I, I killed the TV in my house as much as I’m, as much as I’m in technology, I’m, I’m like really like kind of secretly want to go off the grid, you know, and live in a yurt or something like that. You know, uh, there’s some days where I just want to probably leave and scream, run outside and scream into the air. container home in the forest yes yes two shipping containers i probably need two um connected together in an l shape somehow with the second one no maybe three we’re gonna stack them in a weird way the definitely thought of all of that burying one i used to think of burying a ship back in the day too i’ve changed a lot over times i used to be like an old hippie and i used to think of like you know what if we bury like a shipping container underground no one will ever know it’s there and there’ll be like a pipe coming out of the ground dude like uh what if movie uh resident evil where like they have the whole building underneath the ground something like that this is we’re derailing this show but this all has to do this is how this is the part of the show where it’s like how do you connect with people this is talking to people this is how you talk to people again um in it how do you connect with it people i don’t talk about like hey terminator 2 really everyone advice out there if any end users ever listen to a show that’s not in it Or maybe for IT directors, if you want, you could have like a sticker on your shirt that’s like how to talk to me. Ask me about Terminator 2. Is Skynet real? Yes.
Speaker 1 | 37:05.741
It’s coming.
Speaker 0 | 37:09.044
Vic, it has been a pleasure, an absolute pleasure having you on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Any words of advice for, I don’t know, floundering or non-floundering IT directors out there?
Speaker 1 | 37:23.113
Just learn to take everything in with an open mind. Remember, the most expensive phrase in business is that’s the way we’ve always done it.
Speaker 0 | 37:30.492
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1 | 37:34.081
Bye, Clay.
