Speaker 0 | 00:06.859
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. A beautiful afternoon right outside of Hartford, Connecticut, which I wish I could say is as beautiful a place. Talking with Alex Pettit-Estelle, who is, if you could see, he’s sitting in this wonderful environment with all kinds of essential oils burning in the background. Because he works at a… manufacturer of cosmetics and essential oils and things like this who knows how ai gets involved in any of that you are the it director and well first of all welcome to the show thank you and you’re welcome i would love to know how you got started in it because as of recent many people have been saying phil you should just do an an amalgamation or something i think that is the correct word of different it directors and how they got into it because i would say that 90 to 95 percent of the people that ever come on this show when they grew up they weren’t saying i’m going to be an it director someday they have all vast um backgrounds of things and someone was like hey you know you’re pretty good with technology uh and you fix the printer guy you want to be the vp so
Speaker 1 | 01:21.417
how did it happen uh you know it’s kind of sad but it’s somewhat like that um i went to school for you bioengineering initially so when i graduated i was working in protein engineering we’re doing cancer research and cardiovascular engineering and i was the dude on my lab where i’d go in and fix equipment or if we had a broken computer i would go over and fix that or build new equipment for us i had my own research i was working on at that time as well um then kovit hit the scene a girl and she was like i’ll come down to utah where i’m at um because i was laid off and Ended up coming to Utah and started working for Dynamic Blending, and I started in their QA department. Okay. QA shop floor.
Speaker 0 | 02:05.435
What do you guys do there?
Speaker 1 | 02:07.135
So Dynamic Blending, we’re a turnkey manufacturer. We’ll do everything from OTCs to CBD, as you said, essential oils. We’ve got balms, creams, toothpaste. If it gets put in a tube or a bottle, we can do it. We’re getting into powders now, too, for some. drink supplements it’s a whole gambit so you guys could make my own if i wanted to could you make my own fragrance yeah we could you could show up and we can take you from r&d marketing get you your certs whether you want your fragrance to be um certified organic or anything along those lines to formulating it putting it in bottles and shipping out your first run for you we should do that we should do and
Speaker 0 | 02:57.308
um, we would do like an, an information technology nerds fragrance and we would call it, I don’t know what would we, what would we call it? Um, artificially. Um, and, um, I don’t know, we need something that’s like really, I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 03:13.734
I don’t know.
Speaker 0 | 03:16.135
I’m going to think of the word is going, the correct word is going to come to me for this fragrance, but I’m thinking we’re going to need a lot of male models. Um, we’re going to, this fragrance is going to have to is gonna have to be wrapped up in like a like some kind of felt silk box it’s going to have to be brought out onto a stage on like some kind of uh i don’t know stretcher with poles being brought out by all the male models chained up with chains around it and we’re gonna have to do like a huge massive um it nerds reveal of this uh fragrance and everyone is all all um 600 people that listen to the show are going to want it. Okay, so that’s cool. So you were in R&D or what was it again? Quality assurance? Quality? I’m screwing this up. What were you doing?
Speaker 2 | 04:09.633
What were you doing that someone was like,
Speaker 0 | 04:10.853
you know what? You’re in the wrong department. We need to put you in charge of all the computers or something.
Speaker 1 | 04:15.656
I was in QA. And from there, it was just kind of a work my way up there. Like, hey, I want to take over Qualt. or want to take over IT for us and started doing more and more with them and just kind of looked at, hey, where could we save costs? Where can we make stuff better? And that was like, oh, well, let’s go build a server. That’s going to speed up things. And why not just build a couple of servers? And then there’s other things that I’ve done that were responses, like LinkedIn, not LinkedIn. Oh, wow, I’m forgetting the name. They were the password company that got hacked a while ago. Um,
Speaker 0 | 04:52.207
last pass?
Speaker 1 | 04:53.509
Last pass, thank you. The one with the elf.
Speaker 0 | 04:56.172
Last pass. Yeah, we all use them. They got hacked. But yes, keep going. but you know going over and looking at passing sometimes ignorance is sometimes ignorance is bliss um coming into like a new role like that so and i think it can be revealing for people that might want to get into it people that are already in it maybe they haven’t thought of it in a while maybe it’s like let’s get back to some of the things that we used to do what was your how did you go about looking at things so you know, sometimes you come in, you take over a role and you’re like, oh, wow, this place is a mess. Where do I begin? You know? Um, or wow, there’s just, and I don’t mean it like a mess. I mean like, wow, there’s so much opportunity here. The, um, what was some of the low hanging fruit or the quick wins? Because I think anytime for it person to be, to do well or look good at least, or at least look good is like, Hey, let’s just get some quick wins.
Speaker 1 | 05:53.052
Um, I’d say looking at contracts that we had with people where it’s just like, we can just go do it ourselves. I mean, the big one was all of our security cameras. We moved into a new building and it cost the company $10,000 to get it wired. Versus, you know, kind of looking at it, your camera’s a Cat5 cable and then you’re just plugging it into your NVR. From there, you just got to set the NVR to top to it and give it a static IP if you’re using switches to get across the building. Because, you know, sometimes you need more than 300 feet. Yes. So,
Speaker 2 | 06:24.097
yeah.
Speaker 0 | 06:24.257
And you were paying a vendor for that. I’m assuming you were paying a vendor some massive monthly cost.
Speaker 1 | 06:29.265
Matt, monthly costs, yeah, to come in, do maintenance, fix all that stuff. And it’s like, nah, let’s just do that ourselves. Or just comparing email services, seeing what we need on those versus how hard would it be for you to learn some quick HTML to get taglines on so we can drop our signature and automate that away.
Speaker 0 | 06:50.678
How hard is that to learn?
Speaker 1 | 06:52.559
Obviously not that hard. There are rough. Sites out there that will help you do at least the basic layout of all of it. And then from there, it’s…
Speaker 0 | 06:59.412
ChatGPT.
Speaker 1 | 07:01.734
ChatGPT is great for coding. I’m actually, before we were talking, I’m currently building an app for the company that just does everything from our fill volumes, keep it FDA, to pack out validations for box sizes, to pricing and costing.
Speaker 0 | 07:18.768
That sounds kind of crazy. So for being somewhat… you’ve led, you’ve led yourself. You’ve led me to believe that you were, that you’re kind of like green in, in it, but you’re saying things that are not green. You’re saying things that are, and again, maybe this is the ignorance is bliss thing. You’re saying things that make a lot of sense. Like how do we use technology to make more money, be more efficient and, um, yeah, make more money and be more efficient and cut costs. That’s, I think that’s kind of what IT should be doing.
Speaker 1 | 07:55.785
I would completely agree. One caveat, make things user-friendly, because you can put out stuff that’s really… Yes.
Speaker 0 | 08:04.568
Yes. Yes. Make… Help other people do their job better. Yes, yes. End-user training. Okay. So, what wasn’t user-friendly? Lotus Notes or something? I mean, what was it?
Speaker 1 | 08:19.612
Half the stuff I made first started. I came from an academic or academia environment and engineers where it’s like, hey, it’s a bunch of engineers stuff is.
Speaker 0 | 08:28.958
Like common sense, some common sense. Okay.
Speaker 1 | 08:32.060
And then it’s like, wait, no, I got to make it so that people who’ve never really liked math get things or passwords make sense. And it’s so easy that they can use it. So when evaluating systems, like finding a share, I may think it’s cool.
Speaker 0 | 08:49.405
Please share something that was so ridiculously easy, that you made so easy.
Speaker 1 | 08:55.088
A big one. When we shifted password managers, we jumped over and we’re using Vault Warden right now. It’s a container you can download. It runs on the back. It’s Bitwarden’s free if you can host it. That is simple enough. You make a random password. Control-Shift-9 generates a password. Just Control-V, Control-V, save in your folder. And that is… about as simple as it can when first rolled out sat down with at least all the big wigs in the company and all of the departments are like okay we’re gonna change your hot keys around and everything to get this as easy as possible so people can use it and did they say go to hell i
Speaker 0 | 09:35.217
got about a 50 success rate it’s got some great ads give him a chance this is his first thing this is his first thing give him a chance okay so anyways And?
Speaker 1 | 09:49.733
And it’s something now that’s been great for us. It’s gone over. We’ve got password generated. It’s made password sharing easy, organized. That was an issue we had with last passes. We didn’t have organization in it versus this. We’re able to do quite a bit of nesting folders, which always bugged me. I couldn’t do that on our last pass. And so it’s all kind of worked out fairly well. And it’s still working on the increased usage.
Speaker 2 | 10:18.134
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Speaker 0 | 12:44.177
quite eye-opening for me i’ll be honest with you how long have you been in this role um so title wise i’ve had this for about six months
Speaker 1 | 12:54.871
role-wise, whereas doing what I’m currently doing, about two, two and a half years.
Speaker 0 | 13:02.373
Are we look, are recruiters looking for it directors in the wrong area? Should we be going to research analysts and like weird biopharmaceutical engineer guys to turn them into it directors? Cause you seem to have taken over pretty well.
Speaker 1 | 13:16.697
Um, no, I think there’s,
Speaker 0 | 13:21.178
I used to tell it as recruiters. I used to tell sales recruiters, you need to go recruit people from coffee shops. Just go to Starbucks to recruit your people because they talk with everyone all day long. They should be the people you go recruit from.
Speaker 1 | 13:33.230
I like that.
Speaker 0 | 13:34.111
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 13:37.372
Okay. Yeah, no, I don’t think, I think you definitely could find talent there. It kind of depends on what the person was doing there, what the person’s interests were. I was kind of on a more technical side. A lot of what our labs were working on was protein engineering. So we’re sequencing.
Speaker 0 | 13:53.359
call them chromatography um and doing things along those lines where she pulled someone who’s got that chemical background and there would be that sounds super nerdy can you give me an example can you give me an example of something super nerdy that was you know protein engineering like what what’s the what’s the what’s the most common thing that everyone that would be like oh yeah that like what what is protein engineering like what would i know that has been made recently that i need to know about it’s been made recently i mean just what is it like Why would you want to be in protein engineering?
Speaker 1 | 14:26.924
Well, so proteins are kind of the building or Legos of humans. So they’re what make up cells. They go over, come together. Proteins are, if you’re looking for things like it’s damaged in cells, things on those lines, where you want to initially address. Because if you take a design aspect, if you’ve got a motor that’s supposed to have six cylinders. firing and one of the cylinders breaks, you just would swap out the cylinder. Proteins are kind of in the same way that if you can go over and make the cell itself swap out that cylinder, you’re going to… fix it. CRISPR, which is a pretty big one, everyone’s kind of heard of it, where it’s going over and doing DNA or RNA swap outs and cells, heart cuts, that’s to generate proteins. So the protein then leads form to function. What we were specifically looking at was the troponin C complex, which is what lets your heart contract. Troponin in general lets your muscles contract. But the thing with that complex is that if you have a heart attack, stroke, anything along those lines, that is what gets damaged. That’s what leads people to need heart transplants, heart valve replacements. All of those are generally due to your troponin C complex. It’s actually one of the tests they do at a hospital. They’ll check your troponin C levels in your blood. And there’s three proteins within that complex. But there, they’ll check and go over and be like, oh, hey, you know, you’ve gone and had a heart attack. Let’s go over and take you and put you on antibiotics for it. on the antibiotics, but let’s put you on an EKG and, you know, let’s monitor and see if we need to do anything more invasive. So we were looking at us in a sense, building a protein that could come in, sit on top of that broken complex and still allow movement. So instead of, you know, heart transplanted, it’s like, well, hey, let’s give you a shot.
Speaker 0 | 16:19.490
That would be great. Okay. So instead of a hip replacement, it’d be great if you could regrow my cartilage too. I’m still waiting for that one.
Speaker 1 | 16:27.096
Cartilage is really fascinating.
Speaker 0 | 16:30.279
If they could… let’s talk about it i we don’t have to talk about it i mean you just happen to be an it guy that knows about this stuff but if they could do it they’d probably kill the person that could regrow it maybe they’ve already been killed three times because uh they make so much money doing bionic hip replacements whatever we want to call it uh carbon on poly whatever these different joints are which is what i need and i’ve been putting it off for a long time and i’m just really kind of waiting for the day where they’re like oh we figured out cartilage
Speaker 1 | 17:01.212
And they’re currently in research, they’re like 3D printers. I think they’re one of the things that everyone should get into. But 3D printing cartilage is something that it’s been around. I remember going to symposiums on that. And one of the cool things with cartilage that went over in their big results that they pulled out is you can 3D print the perfect lattice out for your cartilage and print it onto your lattice and have this perfect replacement. But if you don’t subject that cartilage to the same stresses and same pressures that it would experience in its place, well, where it’s going to be replaced in, it’s anywhere from 50 to 75% worse at that time. So not just being able to produce the cartilage lattice where after you get that lattice and you’ve got your cartilage on it, you do need it to grow a little bit. And that’s where you get into.
Speaker 0 | 17:50.301
So we need something like a machine to hit it with a hammer or something as it’s growing or something crazy like this. Is that what we need? Put pressure on it or something? and something to pull on it too but yeah pretty much okay pull okay yeah the other thing i heard is that the artificial cartilage is like very like not as smooth or something like that it’s like uh rough or it’s just not quite perfect or something like that that
Speaker 1 | 18:13.312
gets into more of the like you need to subject it to where it’s the stress factors that it’s under it’s kind of this weird thing where like the cells that are building out that cartilage aren’t going to respond and just give it like hey grow here It needs to be under that same, and that helps smooth it out and let it know, oh, no, that place isn’t as great environment to be in. Because I need to be in here, and I need to strengthen for this.
Speaker 0 | 18:36.148
You know any test labs where I can go be a test bunny in or something like that, and they can just practice on me, and that way, maybe I don’t need a hip replacement, and I’ll just come out new?
Speaker 1 | 18:45.652
None that are on human trials.
Speaker 0 | 18:49.974
Darn it. Bye. Alright, what’d you do as a kid? I just need to know, how’d you get involved in this technology stuff as a kid? Did you play outside or were you a video game guy or something? Because most kind of, I don’t know, C-level CTOs, CIOs, or anyone that gets to a certain age limit, we were all around when the computers were invented prior to the internet. So I’m assuming the internet was pretty much around, because you look fairly young. And I’m assuming the internet was around your entire life. Can you even imagine a time without the internet?
Speaker 1 | 19:26.687
Um, I never met, remember dial up and that was always kind of rough.
Speaker 0 | 19:31.270
That way. Okay. So we’ll, yeah, that counts. That definitely counts as not really being around because what do you really do? You go to messaging boards or something. The, um, it’s, it’s quite, quite amazing. The, even the thought of like Google and like the, the start of it is amazing. So, so yes. How’d you get, how’d you get into this thing? What was your first computer?
Speaker 1 | 19:52.786
First computer was like a Windows 2001 family computer. Kind of hated it because I pretty much just used it to write papers. I’ve been really good at getting into computers, playing Empire Earth and Heroes of Might and Magic 3.
Speaker 0 | 20:08.108
with uh the group of guys that i run around with because i want to have a hot seat like a land like a land party like a land party or like actually online no this is three dudes sitting in the same room waiting for the other person to take their turn yeah basically a land party but with one computer now hey yeah your turn go that’s
Speaker 1 | 20:29.704
cool oh that was a lot of fun but no i did stuff outside i ski raced um i ran i did a lot of biking ski race utah or what where uh washington on mount hood like slalom poles or yeah that’s pretty cool gs uh the knees holding up you got good knees and everything still uh they hurt a little bit when i go out and run and but i okay don’t run as much i used to run a lot i don’t run anymore
Speaker 0 | 21:04.400
I found, I basically figured out that that was a boring and why am I running for two hours every day? And, um, yeah, then I got into jujitsu and that was a very addictive and took over my life. So, so running, skiing, excellent. What’s the, um, you’re too young to ask what the end game is. Do people think about the end game at your age in, in it right now? What’s the, any mentors, any it mentors, anything like that? No, it just seems like you’re.
Speaker 1 | 21:33.600
yeah one of you’re one okay go um so we’ve got a company we do hosting out of and then we pay for their i get an assistant to come in from them to help me out with stuff um so their owner has been just a great help with kind of being like hey well look at this go check this out um his name’s chris works our own system networks out of utah uh-huh um but yeah he’s been a great help for me to be He’ll give me direction so I can then pursue that direction. Or if I’m really, really lost, he’ll sometimes be like, hey, you know, check out this or this is where I go to get information.
Speaker 0 | 22:12.952
Where does he go to get information? I need to know. We need to provide some value here somehow. Where do we like Reddit column 59? Where where is the place to go? I want to know where people are hanging out. Where are people hanging out to get information?
Speaker 1 | 22:31.039
It depends.
Speaker 0 | 22:32.120
depends on what you want so lying you are not you are not wanting to tell us what the secret the secret treasure trove of place like phil if i tell you it’s either going to be seem really basic and dumb or it’s just such a secret i can’t tell you it’s um you’ll find out that you we never landed on the moon or something like that um
Speaker 1 | 22:53.565
so it’s a generally it’s like a combination of a so using chat gpt bang um
Speaker 0 | 23:01.048
because do keep their ai people do keep their ai secret i have i have i have a treasure trove of ai bots and stuff like this that i definitely keep secret i do think poe.com is very very helpful have you been to poe i haven’t been to poe go p and anyone listening this episode if you’ve listened to this episode a lot please tell us this stuff is valuable i want to know so poe.com is a treasure trove it is treasure you can thank me later Um, it’s literally like everything from your personal psychologist to, um, all different Claude versions to quite a few things. And, um, yes, that’s my wife opening a box in the background. Everyone, if you can hear boxes opening right now, cause she wants the new hip flexor. Um, I don’t know, some kind of thing is supposed to fix our hips and mine’s already blown. So I figured I’d use it,
Speaker 1 | 23:48.209
but it’s IT pro TV is a good one for me.
Speaker 0 | 23:51.490
IT pro TV that we were going to have them on the show years ago. I forgot all about those guys. They are cool. ITProTV is good. They’re very good. We need to reach out to them. We’re going to give you guys free advertising right now. And yes, we should collaborate. We should collaborate. ITProTV is great.
Speaker 1 | 24:08.908
And they’re wonderful. You’ve got virtual machines you can log on to and mess around with. That’s why you’ve got a membership to trainings to just base documents if you’re not trying to sit there and watch a video on it. And they’ve got all your CompTIA exams to study there too with flashcards and things.
Speaker 0 | 24:25.948
Having been like a protein, like what’d you go to school for?
Speaker 1 | 24:31.172
Biological engineering, minored in electrical engineering and math.
Speaker 0 | 24:34.775
Yo, you’re such a nerd. It’s amazing. My son-in-law is a electrical engineer. Now he works for like ABB, like designing, like, I don’t know, circuit or no, the just massive. Oh gosh, we just blew a fuse. Whatever that thing is in the board in the basement where you flip the little switch and, you know, what’s the problem with me? Yeah, I’m so stupid right now. I have not drank enough coffee today. I’m just not one with the words today. Yeah, they manufacture those and blow them up in labs and behind big things of glass and everything like that. So this is like… This is why you’re good at what you do, because you’re like a super nerd that went from that to like IT. Is this like a cakewalk compared to that stuff?
Speaker 1 | 25:19.861
I definitely think I have applied knowledge that I can do across. And I started off programming in high school because I didn’t like doing exams. So I figured out how to do my calculator, do them for me.
Speaker 0 | 25:31.468
Oh, good answer.
Speaker 1 | 25:32.989
And then, yeah. So from there. In college, just with the E stuff, I was looking over at circuit boards, microprocessors, assembly languages as part of my degree, and that’s kind of what I’ve been able to apply for. Once you get that Boolean logic down, it’s like, oh, hey, well, that’s why I have to do an if statement and then from there, it’s just picking up new languages and applying knowledge of how the different systems can work from there. So that’s been the biggest help for me is that I can shift and apply those there. Even before that, I went to an art magnet school for middle school and high school. Did photography. It was my first theater.
Speaker 0 | 26:14.885
Did you say art magnet? Yeah. I’ve never heard those two. Like magnet, like polarity, like north-south magnet. I don’t even know what that means. What’s art magnet school? Again, I’m looking at something really stupid today. I couldn’t even think of breaker box. I couldn’t even think of the breaker box downstairs or upstairs or wherever it is in relation to your house. But, um… please tell me art magnet school. It’s just, it sounds like very special. You are a very special creature. This is great. This is how they make ornaments.
Speaker 2 | 26:45.707
I mean that in a very,
Speaker 0 | 26:46.648
and I mean that in, in a very, in a very, um, complimentary way because I’m crazy and people know that. Uh, so yeah, so go on. I went from art magnet school to managing proteins and like being in electrical engineering to a it director. This is great. It doesn’t get any better.
Speaker 1 | 27:05.303
Um, it, was a school that’s you’re meant to go there kind of focus on creativity art and you still have all your normal coursework um they still let you go over and do additional stem classes i took other classes at other schools just because we didn’t offer any of the higher level stem
Speaker 0 | 27:24.811
beyond calculus and but you teach you teach here’s here’s a serious question can you teach creativity you can foster it i like that encourage it Foster something in me. We just, let’s, let’s practice right now. Will you foster me? Foster my creativity right now.
Speaker 1 | 27:41.800
So your creativity, uh,
Speaker 0 | 27:45.282
and I asked that just because sometimes, and this is important. This is actually, this is, this is like a actually really important thing because sometimes we really need people to be creative. We really need people to not just like, you are not a robot answer tickets and fixed. the computer we need people to be creative sometimes we need people to look at the organization we need them to understand we’re using technology as a business force multiplier to make more money to save money to cut back on cost to do all these things that you just did kind of naturally and under and you’ve massively downplayed yourself and I don’t think you realize that because before I got you on the show you’re like I don’t know Phil I’m not really like qualified I’m like no what are you talking about you’re crazy and I’m already telling and now that I’m actually talking with you I’m realizing how much you downplayed yourself So I don’t know who your boss is. And if you ever listened to this show, give the guy, give him a raise now because I’m not, I’m, I’m being completely serious because it’s very hard sometimes to get people. Well, first of all, step one is like you said, be able to use tools that engineers and like sometimes basic human beings need to be able to use. I know like Excel is not just like first name, last name, address, and phone number. Like that’s not, you can do so much more in Excel, for example. And some people are like, what’s that program you’re using? It’s called Excel. It’s called like,
Speaker 2 | 29:08.944
I mean, that happens.
Speaker 0 | 29:11.025
Like, how did you do that? I built it in PowerPoint. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 | 29:15.528
Like some of these things are like.
Speaker 1 | 29:16.869
It’s a whole other thing there. It’s VBA. You can program in that.
Speaker 0 | 29:20.892
So
Speaker 2 | 29:23.634
I’m just like, how?
Speaker 0 | 29:25.635
And so sometimes things that seem like common sense, and this is why I’ve been wanting to do a common sense course for a long time. You know, there’s like all those things they don’t teach you in school growing up, which is probably really great that you went to art magnet school. Is that the name of the school or is this a, is this a cat school? I don’t even know what this is, but whatever it is, they did a good job on you. Unless you were already naturally creative, but they foster, they fostered it. I would just love to be able if we could, I would love to be able to turn on the creativity engine in people. And maybe you have an idea for that. Like, how do you, how do you foster? Let’s foster.
Speaker 1 | 29:58.767
Let’s foster. Well. Give a shout out to the school. It was Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, PSAA. So Vancouver, Washington, I guess everyone here now knows where I grew up.
Speaker 0 | 30:10.761
But now, now we can stereotype you. Oh, you’re one of those guys. Anyways, skier.
Speaker 1 | 30:17.584
You put Portland stereotype on and you’ve got a lot of me.
Speaker 0 | 30:22.567
I was like, all I can think of is like, I don’t know why I think of grunge just popped to my mind for some reason, this upper left kind of like, you know, I don’t know. I just thought of like, I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 30:34.710
I’m actually going to a grunge show tomorrow night.
Speaker 0 | 30:38.392
Some old bad MTV videos or something. You know what I mean? Hell yeah. So without stereotyping you and taking you down a notch from where you’ve already reached so high in the world of IT, how do we foster IT in our team? Because I think it’s very important. People need to think creatively. And what’s so, which is also more ironic is that you’re an engineer so engineers are usually very one-track minded like i can fix something then they’re not usually able to kind of like step out of the box a lot of times they get they get a bad rap as well um like i will completely agree like i noticed this for my 200 level classes especially in school where i came in and i had all like um
Speaker 1 | 31:23.034
cohort and we’re like oh yeah and it’s you’ve got to do a b c d to get your answer and it’s not until you really get to 3 400 where they’re like hey now go figure out how to do an answer around go along those lines and that’s where i was realizing like hey i’m excelling here versus with those classes i’m mid-pack for the 200 and below where i’ve got to be told exactly this is how you do it and how can you regurgitate it so put those together so yeah link those two together somehow i think those two together i’d say we’ve the arts programs especially in just our grade schools they shouldn’t be the first ones to be cut you know there’s something that we should look at going over and a incorporating general classes um and b just you know keeping in schools i think something very cool that my school did is we had this whole class that was called core so in that class you’re supposed to go over and take an actual subject or something going on and then make some art related to it and you know some core projects were very much so like oh yeah this is a tree so i drew a picture of a tree and there’s not much for me in life or meaning of life and whatnot but there’s other ones where it’s like you get to really think deep um i here’s some tin cans here’s some tin cans some sand and grass and another here’s some thoughts put it together yeah you know come up with those metaphorical things i’m like yeah you got some oh hanging fruit like ah there’s a chair the chair is representing life and you’re getting up through it or you know it’s how you go from being old or young to middle-aged to old and you’re always in that chair and the chair it gets a glimpse of everything that you’ve done or there’s this uh circle so i’m doing circle yeah you get interpretive stuff like that which you know on that it’s you just have to think creative you’re trying to have to make those jumps you’re trying to make those metaphorical leaps yes
Speaker 0 | 33:24.476
training to do those from might have come to me from just like you It’s like, so I was an English major, so I had to read a ton of Shakespeare and Chaucer and Old English and then went to creative writing. So you have to analyze all these things. What was Shakespeare really thinking? No, you’re wrong. It was this. Yeah, but I thought that was pretty cool. So, yes. And shout out to David Herring with critical thinking. Because he just likes to use that word critical thinking all the time. I’m like, that has nothing to do with critical thinking. Mr. Herring. Mr. Herring, we’re critical thinking right now. Critical thinking. Everything’s critical thinking, Phil. We need to do critical thinking. We’re just answering an email. It’s not just critical thinking. Mr. Herring, I miss you. I really do. Yeah. Critical thinking. Okay, so conspiracy section of the show. And you’re a nerd. So you’re like, I mean, and I mean that in a very good way. Like, you know math. You know things. Do you look at anything in our world without just taking it for granted without just taking it as a grain of salt like hey? Look, this is always what they’ve they’ve shoved down our throat. This is what they’ve shown to us on TV This is real. Do you look at anything? You’re like no way. It’s not possible. That’s a lie Oh, and I’m speaking specifically about looking out the window at the moon That’s two hundred twenty thousand miles away And you tell me back in 1969 that we actually flew to the moon and back and we did that by looking at the window of a little rocket ship After only doing like nine test flights and knowing the computer systems that we had back then and that we had to use like probably like some kind of makeshift uh sextant uh to take a three-day journey to the moon land perfectly and come back not only that launch off the moon walk around on it bring back rocks and a spaceship that’s a different weight now enter in the atmosphere at over 33 000 feet per second slow that little tube down throw out three parachutes and land in the ocean yeah we did that without a gun to your head we did that oh hell yeah okay yeah not a doubt um looked at i don’t think you’ve looked at all the evidence enough yet are you good at rocket science though can we do rocket science can we do some rocket science that is real one that i’ve i’ve taken my physics classes but it’s not something i specialized in um
Speaker 1 | 35:43.033
i will say i’m a little biased here on your moon one um my grandfather led one of the labs that did chemoglyphics
Speaker 0 | 35:49.262
hemoglobin research for astronauts coming back and forth okay so he’d tell us about you know their quarantine procedures and all the quarantine for like a month or whatever who cares about hemoglobin though who cares so their hemoglobin was what high low i mean whatever my hemoglobin could change on anything i could drink some water probably and change my hemoglobin well
Speaker 1 | 36:10.248
they’re also looking for viruses and you know they’re looking for things within your body that’s telling them to like hey you are somehow dead
Speaker 0 | 36:17.282
There’s life in a sterile environment. We have to quarantine them. Okay. I think that’s all part of the lie. That’s just me. I’m just, after I read about, after I started actually getting into the rocket science and realizing the lift capacity and how much we had to lift, like however many tons we had to lift into the air, it’s just insane to me. And I’m still wondering why we have not gone back. We should have like a whole, we should have like a whole colony of like little things on the moon right now, sheds and… all kind of people walking around like hey we’re just doing it because we can because we’re america and you know like whatever like you we never got back about how we lost all the information huh oh america’s looking at putting a train on the moon do it i’ve seen the air train thing yes we’re gonna have this crazy air train that’s gonna shoot out into space and go to the moon and back bring it i’m ready like i’ll be on that train put me on the train then it’ll blow up in the like see and we screwed up and phil’s dead that’s dead try again uh i’m ready i’m ready to see people walking around on the moon i’m just just putting it out there i just want people to question it there’s a lot of books out there on the actual rocket science and lift capacities when you look at the actual numbers it’s mind-blowing 33 000 feet per second do you have any idea how fast that is i mean i know you do but it’s like it’s like however many football fields like literally per second it’s insane that’s how fast that little that little triangular
Speaker 1 | 37:45.002
re-entry thing came in not to mention the who cares about the the burn off speed and all that other stuff it’s just it’s insane it’s insane mass so i entirely agree i think everything you look at can be kind of mental till you really start to dive in and kind of talk to the experts and you get there with it that it’s hard to i’m
Speaker 0 | 38:04.313
giving that your head that’s why i’m asking you experts anything else is there anything in this environment any conspiracy theories that you that you subscribe to or are we just Everyone’s super smart and these other guys are just a bunch of idiots.
Speaker 1 | 38:15.635
Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 38:17.897
I don’t really have any. I didn’t say idiots. There is a lot of- Crockpots,
Speaker 1 | 38:24.640
idiots.
Speaker 0 | 38:25.861
Oh,
Speaker 1 | 38:26.121
I was listening to this thing the other day and I forgot the term of it, but there’s that psychological effect where you’ve done something down so much that you lose how it initially actually happened and you become wrong because you’ve had to oversimplify it.
Speaker 0 | 38:40.629
It is.
Speaker 1 | 38:41.758
Their example was like how we tell little kids that, hey, rainbows are photons reflecting off of raindrops. And it’s like, well, no, then it’s how those photons, their energy length gets changed when they pass through that. And that energy length, when it hits your eye, then has a different.
Speaker 0 | 38:58.642
Right. And they’re like, have you ever seen a prism? You know, like a prism, like a triangle thing and light comes through and okay.
Speaker 1 | 39:05.144
So it gets something like that energy exchange there. But it’s like, you can’t go over and tell a little kid. But hey, there’s all these particles running around with energy in them and getting it on.
Speaker 0 | 39:14.248
I was a science kid growing up. I mean, I took physics. I loved physics. I loved inorganic chemistry. I just, you know, whatever, valence electrons and all this stuff. And now I think in my old age, I’m just getting very skeptical of all this. Remember the valence electron mass? I’m assuming you did inorganic chemistry. You have to. You’re a protein dude. I just remember doing these.
Speaker 1 | 39:32.697
Is that true?
Speaker 0 | 39:34.337
Ah. just the valence electron math and all these like balancing of i don’t know it’s just wild so you’re an organic but you took organic chemistry so i all i had to go up in this three i didn’t have to do organic i just had to get through the normal chem then we got into chemical engineering so we’re looking at a bunch of transport classes um
Speaker 1 | 39:54.428
i think the best way to summarize my degree is like we focused in on being able to build human technology interfaces um building prosthetics and then looking at artificial so i had a lot of biology classes i had to take
Speaker 2 | 40:11.352
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Speaker 0 | 42:31.390
You got any crazy memory techniques? Acronym.
Speaker 1 | 42:34.872
Sit down in the library for 15 hours at a time and hate yourself. Oh, yes. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 42:42.116
yes. Props to you. Props to you. Mad props guy for doing all that memorization.
Speaker 1 | 42:49.039
I am very dyslexic. So memorization was always one that was like, I can try, but I’ll screw up an acronym if I do it.
Speaker 0 | 42:56.816
Hmm. So, well, actually you might, if you’re, if you’re crazy dyslexic, I would think memory would help then, no? Versus writing things down, you’d have to memorize it. I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 43:09.222
It helps. Like I, how I, something I realized or something I think is that I’ve seen some stuff on is I’ll think about things differently, more in a three-dimensional space instead of a two-dimensional space. So that can help. And I’ve heard that sort of well, why people swap stuff around, but it’s like. If you’re looking at letters or if I’m trying to write down an acronym, I need a couple. I can remember several. And I can remember groups of things.
Speaker 0 | 43:34.174
What’s this three-dimensional space thing? What’s this? What are you talking about? What is this? With the amount of people that have dimension nowadays. And I really want to strengthen my memory. I would love to turn the key and figure out the key to memory.
Speaker 1 | 43:46.737
I like being. If you do that, I mean, you’ll be a millionaire.
Speaker 2 | 43:50.298
Well, you know,
Speaker 0 | 43:50.638
I would love to figure out. If some people have photogenic memory. can I turn mine on? Is there a way to do that? Can I figure that out? I would love to have that. You know what I mean? How do they do that? So I’m really into following all these memory guys on YouTube and stuff and memory palaces and acronyms and different ways of memorizing things. And it just always seems to come back to, no, repeat it 5,000 times and it’ll stick.
Speaker 1 | 44:18.800
Yeah, that works because you’re building up your neural pathway of like, hey, When you have that electrical impulse, it’s going to blow that way.
Speaker 0 | 44:27.069
Or have it happen in conjunction with an event. You know what I mean? It’s like learning a language. You know, you want to learn a language. Like, it’s always better when you’re there in the environment, in the country, practicing it with people. There’s a person. You remembered that word because this thing happened because you were locked up in jail and they said this word. And then you’re like, oh, I’ll never forget that word now because I was locked up in jail. So, anyways.
Speaker 1 | 44:50.842
I might say, like, how I view stuff. and how is kind of it’s a you can interchange things they flip around you can kind of interact and look at it on a sort of 3d where you’re looking instead of just having that direct up and down like i’ve noticed that especially has been useful so i’ll do design things when we need a part specially made for the line i can go over and jump on some 3d software make some then go over and we can get it 3d printed out for okay that’s a valuable it guy that’s crazy keep going but i’ve noticed that that’s just something new so like letters that share a lot of shapes i have a lot of issues with so like if i have to write down an a or a b or d you’ll see me under the table doing this because if you go left to right it’s a b c d and i know it’s reversed on the camera right now but i’m making a thumbs up and facing it towards me that makes the shape of the b other one makes the shape of a d i just doing stuff like that is how you know p and q those ones are rough nine and six i’ve gone i had exams in school where i went back through and was like i flopped my nine and my six they’re like my math is all right and everything there’s correct and like a professor would be like you did it all right but i had to document
Speaker 0 | 46:08.434
two points because you messed that part up now i’d be like come on guy you can see i’m just lexic a computer program in the future would fix that give me an uh wow okay wow the that no but that would help regardless of whether you’re dyslexic or not imagining things putting yourself in situations like that getting under the desk and um yes
Speaker 1 | 46:35.810
3D printing, I think, is something. You can do it for hobbies, blow off steam. I mean, I print stuff off all the time. I’ll play Warhammer with a couple of friends, D&D, to print models for my group, paint them. It’s great for just blowing steam off and relaxing. But then you can also go in and you can build stuff. I had a phone holder over there, and that’s all 3D printed, just a design I made one day. When I’m like, I’m tired of putting these on my desk, I’m knocking them over. I don’t want to go spend 20 bucks on something and hold it. So I’ll make a thing that I can run a wire through and set it there.
Speaker 0 | 47:07.612
Yes. I think my son-in-law, you would get along well, because he’s got his, he probably has more than one 3D printer now. And I remember the first one that you had bought on like Facebook marketplace or something. Hey, check out what I, what I made for my coffee machine. Because I think he needed to make, I don’t know. It’s like something that you like poke out the like espresso, like cubes with or something to clean out something. But he. yeah just like no i’m not gonna do that i’m just gonna 3d print this and i was like oh that’s cool um but yes it it has been a pleasure having you on the show i don’t know how much how much we’ve here here’s my summary we need to somehow well you’ve creativity and engineering side by side is is important do you have any advice for people out there in similar roles it roles is there because it sounds like people just trust you you Oh, it sounds like, look, we, we, we just need this to be fixed. Can you figure it out? And you’re like, yeah, I got it. Don’t worry. We’ll, we’ll three B three D print something. We’ll get creative. And, um, with, with engineering, anything can happen. So the answer is be creative, um, having to have an advanced engineering background. And, um, yeah, no, but in all seriousness, what, uh, any advice to provide to listeners out there, things that have been like, uh, tricks of the trade made your life easier. Um, I don’t know. talking with people? We haven’t really talked about that, but is there anything?
Speaker 1 | 48:34.045
I would highly recommend finding someone that you know you can call and be like, hey, I need some help with this. And they’ll at least be able to give you a direction to go into. Kind of learning where your resources are that are reliable resources to go with and figuring out your learning method. For me, it’s I’ve got to break stuff. So I’ve got, you know, for every server that I’ve built for my company, I’ve got a second one that’s on a backup somewhere else that I can access. So before I do an update or before I’m even trying to get a server and figure out how to set up domains or something, I can go and mess around with it all there. So I’m not bringing other things down. So figuring out how to do that. And when you have an idea, just in general, write it down, start playing around with it, figure out how to model it. You don’t need to go out and spend the… If you’re going to NASA, it’s like they didn’t start with
Speaker 0 | 49:26.370
building the rocket ships and spending millions to do it it’s like they started with wood models and mock-ups trying to figure out things suicide squad that was the name of it suicide squad they’re like the rocket guys they’re like one of those groups that were building rockets were called the suicide squad because people thought they’re going to kill themselves because they’re always like blowing up rockets and stuff like that and explosions were happening out in california whatever um that’s the real name you can look it up um i think that’s great advice And it’s advice that seems, again, like common sense, but not necessarily because a lot of people, one of their problems, they say in IT is it gets very lonely at the top. I don’t have anyone in. in my department that’s like on my level to bounce ideas off of or anything and if i did it would be like the ceo and then he’d be questioning me like do you sure you know what you’re doing like that type of thing so having a peer group or having um like a good mentor to call and
Speaker 1 | 50:26.809
then a test lab test lab to blow things up and yeah i know it doesn’t have to be a mentor it can be as you said peer group guys you go get beers with and you sit down and play some board game They’ve got a base knowledge of IT. You can expand what you know. We’ll expand what they know. Like it’s a good group. You can all kind of lift each other up and share knowledge.
Speaker 0 | 50:47.706
Gotcha. Thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Been an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1 | 50:53.990
Thanks for having me, Phil.
Speaker 0 | 50:55.471
Yes, sir.
