Speaker 0 | 00:00.852
Anyone, everyone out there listening to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we’re talking with Doug. You have Van Beek in parentheses, Vuxen Van Beek. Am I pronouncing this correct?
Speaker 1 | 00:11.079
Go with the Van Beek part. The Vuxen part is going away soon. I was a sensitive new age guy when I got married, and now it has to go back to just my name.
Speaker 0 | 00:22.246
Now I’m no longer sensitive. Now I’m hardened.
Speaker 1 | 00:28.390
I’m far beyond new age.
Speaker 0 | 00:32.117
love it you know hey you know that’s your life uh that’s our life but um the you know we got connected when i asked you what your first computer was and it’s a fond memory you know that
Speaker 1 | 00:45.264
there’s a lot of fond memories that come from radio shack there is and the idea of getting a tandy 1000 with a four color screen oh my god four colors i went with the upgrade to get dual floppies
Speaker 0 | 01:00.364
yes who could ever use more storage space than that oh the e-machine the e-machine used to have a sticker on the back of it that was like it said like you’ll never need a computer again or like never upgradable again or or what did it say it was it was so funny i don’t remember that but the exact phrase but yeah that idea that we never have to upgrade oh well that’s gone yeah I’m looking this up because we have to have it. So tell me a story. Let’s go back in time. I want to hear about, I want to hear, let’s tell a Radio Shack story for, I don’t know. The majority of the people that listen to this show are going to, oh, here it is. Here’s the sticker. This computer, dot, dot, dot, never, never, never obsolete. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
Speaker 1 | 01:59.047
ha. Correct.
Speaker 0 | 02:01.336
Unlimited internet access for $19.95 per month. E-machines network, fast, reliable internet access powered by MCI. They’re gone. World’s richest internet content provider. Oh, they were rich. All right. By Netscape, surf, email, invest, shop, chat, travel, and more. Plus upgrade your PC to the fastest model on the market. every two years for only $99. I wonder if that’s still available.
Speaker 1 | 02:36.741
Oh,
Speaker 0 | 02:37.202
that would be a nice program. I would like to upgrade for the fastest computer for $99. And America Online, of course, there’s a sticker on the front. Version 5.0 included. Sign on today. I like that. Intel Inside, Celeron. Microsoft Windows Me. I don’t know if I ever used Microsoft Windows Me. M-E.
Speaker 1 | 02:58.764
A millennial edition. Yeah, that was shortly short-lived and should have been short-lived.
Speaker 0 | 03:06.206
633 megahertz Intel Celeron processor. This is a beaut. This is a beaut.
Speaker 1 | 03:14.728
Oh, and Celeron, that was kind of a mistake too. No processing power whatsoever.
Speaker 0 | 03:24.470
One DVD coffee cup holder and one three and a quarter. floppy am i getting this right sure it would have been yeah yes oh the back is this is the back is great we’ve got um so anyways back to radio shack uh first first thing that comes to mind radio shack i was never a huge radio shack person neither was i but but
Speaker 1 | 03:45.716
i would be now if they brought it back yeah maybe the first the when you ask for a story i really thought about my first programming project go First contract programming project in 1983, working with an HP 3000 mini computer, writing in basic, having 16K of usable space.
Speaker 0 | 04:15.365
It’s not bad.
Speaker 1 | 04:16.566
No, no. And had to analyze a collection of pot shirts, 5,000 of them.
Speaker 0 | 04:23.490
I don’t know what that is. You have to educate me that I’m ignorant.
Speaker 1 | 04:27.080
Got a degree in anthropology.
Speaker 0 | 04:29.181
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 04:29.821
So pot sherds are what archaeologists dig up and they catalog. They’ll catalog things like what’s the diameter of the pot? How is it decorated? What color is it?
Speaker 0 | 04:42.650
What kind of clay?
Speaker 1 | 04:44.832
Just a whole bunch of stuff. And so I had to run a crosstab on 5,000 rows in what would be about 20-ish columns.
Speaker 0 | 04:56.564
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 04:57.447
Today’s world. Do all those comparisons in about 12 seconds. Writing it in basic for the HP 3000 ran an entire weekend. The first time it ran over the weekend, the computer operators killed it on Monday morning shortly before it was done. Because they thought it was an infinite loop. Next time, I had to do output every so many rows. so that they would see that it was changing. And finally, after the third weekend of running, we got the answers. Got a case of beer for the deal, box deluxe, $6 worth of beer. No, not even, $2.95. It was an amazing, amazing, really slow process at that time.
Speaker 0 | 05:48.753
I thought you were going to say, it was amazing that we made it do this after all of that, and did it save someone time? So what is this an example of? This is an example of technology, kind of. It’s kind of an example of technology efficiency. What did that do for the organization or anthropology department inside a college or something or wherever it was at the time?
Speaker 1 | 06:15.395
So what they were trying to do was find out what the relationships were between all of these pieces of pottery. What it ultimately gave them was a small statistical idea of what that collection looked like. So 27 of them were large pots. Three of them were small pots. This type of decoration was commonly applied with that clay body. So does it really do anything ultimately? Probably not.
Speaker 0 | 06:51.319
we probably wouldn’t know until now and then when they’ve actually put a model together some kind of data analytics model around all kinds of archaeological finds and and and anthropological anthropological um data uh collected from all over the world in various different um societies and things like this and even after we did crunch all this down and come up with whatever theory it’s probably wrong and someone will dig up some skull somewhere and realize that they’re wrong
Speaker 1 | 07:21.019
Yeah, most likely. I’ve gotten, since, gotten into making pottery myself and realized that most of the assumptions that archaeologists come out with from their analysis is probably just a bunch of stuff. I love having an archaeology degree, but when people don’t understand what they’re really working with. Does that have to do with technology?
Speaker 0 | 07:52.247
I’m not looking at clues. We’re looking at clues. Maybe technology will, you know, maybe a technology will help. But I’m still wondering if BlackRock really exists up there in the North Pole. And that’s why all the magnetic stuff points to that and all the, you know, secret whatever stuff. I have a creative writing degree. Okay. So you have an archaeology degree. And here we are in technology. Right. So there’s actually there. That actually does make a lot of sense somehow. Because everyone that failed out of some other thing or couldn’t make it somewhere else ended up in a field where they actually did pay, which was technology, right?
Speaker 1 | 08:30.319
Well, and those degrees in liberal arts gave us the ability to have, one, conversations with anybody, any topic, as well as an ability to look at problems in different ways. If someone comes through school and only does technology, the only hammer they have is a straight technology hammer. But when you think about what creative writing or the study of humans brings to technology should be a better, more useful system for the user.
Speaker 0 | 09:09.648
By the way, favorite meme of all time is the Jurassic Park meme where he says, spares no expense, hires one IT guy. Are you seeing that one?
Speaker 1 | 09:21.656
I haven’t seen that one.
Speaker 0 | 09:23.197
It has a good picture of him spared no expense whatsoever, hires one IT guy. And that was what ended up being the weak point of the entire fall of the entire IT systems going down at the end, dinosaurs escaping. The IT guy was a disgruntled dude stealing from the… I was like, it was perfect. And that… the whole idea of that concept is just insane and i don’t and i think they did it probably by mistake i don’t even realize they what they are doing in that movie but it was so
Speaker 1 | 09:58.137
there it’s actually quite deep when when you dig into that um i did my master’s um thesis on the internal threat which is exactly that issue of people who are not happy at work are
Speaker 0 | 10:14.026
really the big danger for organizations true yeah because so i’m listening i’m if you did the master’s on it or you did the dissertation or whatever we call that i’m listening and
Speaker 1 | 10:26.885
The people with the keys to the kingdom have the ability to most easily distribute information that we don’t want released.
Speaker 0 | 10:37.989
True.
Speaker 1 | 10:38.850
And by not paying attention, by not working with people, but rather to be highly hierarchical, that can lead to some problems inside of technology stacks.
Speaker 0 | 10:53.356
It’s definitely happened in… Where have I seen this in my career? Oh, the stories. Oh, the stories. Yes. One IT director that holds the keys to the castle for 356 hospitals. No one will touch my network. You know what I mean? Yeah. So what does that mean? No one can share the network. Okay. No one can have access to the network. If I die, then good luck with passwords and trying to get things. It’s actually quite problematic. So story one was that this guy had like a 10 gig network, you know, support 10 gig, like MPLS network supporting like 356 hospitals. Right. But no one was going to touch that. So telecom person had no communication with them and was left controlling. Like it was ridiculous. It was like 600 disparate various different PBXs all with a spreadsheet of various different outages when they could have just made a real simple change. turned up some kind of like vlan or something and throwing some sip trunking in there and saved the saved the whole hospital network like you know millions of dollars but no one was going to touch his network and due to the the politics and a board of directors and the way that hospitals massive massive groups like this make decisions it was just like he was just like you know i’m just clocking in and clocking out every day no one would ever notice probably still that way i’d say i’ve had a knock just a disgruntled employee just decide i’m gonna send a worm through a knock and shut down like a whole entire isp or just unplug something and walk out the door i’ve had um vendors that had sensitive information sharing it all over the internet things getting leaked and it’s so it is always the humans for sure worked
Speaker 1 | 12:37.664
with a fellow who uh worked for a big car rental company and back when there was a lot of programming that had to be at very low levels he put He had a coworker who put in a bit of code that caused a right-hand to write in a specific sector of a hard disk when he left. It just kept writing and writing and writing to that specific sector. Enough to wear through that sector. Brought down the system for like three or four days. in the company figuring out what had happened. And this was long enough ago that programmers would have any idea how to write code to make that happen.
Speaker 0 | 13:29.455
That’s pretty cool. What else we got? The rest of them, they’d have to kill us. Tell me, what do you do now? What’s your day job?
Speaker 1 | 13:39.920
Right now, I’m the IT director for Ask Me Council 5 in Minnesota. the American Federation of State, County, Municipal Employees. So we are the union for like 43,000 workers in Minnesota. We have an office of about 50, 60 people. And-When you say 50,
Speaker 0 | 14:03.943
60 people, are you saying total employees or IT staff?
Speaker 1 | 14:09.027
Total employees. IT staff, two data specialists, and IT-Thank you. help desk person, and myself.
Speaker 0 | 14:19.233
That’s actually really good for 50 people.
Speaker 1 | 14:21.874
Oh, it is really good.
Speaker 0 | 14:23.955
You’re like the cream of the crop. And you know why? It’s probably because it deals with the union and the people of Minnesota, the good people of Minnesota.
Speaker 1 | 14:34.738
It probably does. I’ve spent most of my career being a sole IT office, sole person IT office. Yeah. And- actually having staff again is a great thing.
Speaker 0 | 14:49.225
Yeah, the average end user to staff ratio that we see here on the show when we survey people. is one to a hundred. So that means for every end user, of course, customers, we call them customers, human beings with souls, is one to a hundred. So you’re like four to 50. You’re in like a dream role.
Speaker 1 | 15:14.093
And the data staff…
Speaker 0 | 15:15.534
They’re dating. We can’t count them. You’re right. So there’s two to 50.
Speaker 1 | 15:20.455
And it’s amazing. It really is allowing to go in. and dig into projects that we don’t have time in a lot of other places. And let’s also add to this the expectation, because it’s working for a union, that the job should be, for the most part, a 40-hour-a-week gig.
Speaker 0 | 15:43.021
No more, no less.
Speaker 1 | 15:44.181
No, as the norm, the expectation. It’s going to be weeks, of course, that are more, but an IT gig that’s a 40-hour-a-week job. Not a bad gig.
Speaker 0 | 15:57.145
Working for the union, where people probably appreciate you. What does that look like? What does IT in the union look like?
Speaker 1 | 16:06.567
Really no different than IT inside of any other organization. You’ve got an application that is your primary workhorse for the organization.
Speaker 0 | 16:18.751
What is it in the union? It’s called unionware. Unionware. I know nothing about union stuff, and now we’ve got unionware. Okay, good. I understand CAD. I mean, I understand, obviously, the usual suspects like Salesforce and, you know, SAP and stuff like that. But Unionware.
Speaker 1 | 16:36.085
No different than Salesforce.
Speaker 0 | 16:38.187
Pull up in Unionware. Let’s do it.
Speaker 1 | 16:42.590
I don’t know if I…
Speaker 0 | 16:44.692
I’m joking. Yeah. But okay, go ahead. So Unionware.
Speaker 1 | 16:48.856
It tracks people.
Speaker 0 | 16:50.497
Uh-huh.
Speaker 1 | 16:50.937
Tracks activities, training opportunities. But then it gets into some special stuff like contracts, tracking issues. So it’s just a standard CRM with a couple of extra features.
Speaker 0 | 17:10.033
Does Unionware have a competitor?
Speaker 1 | 17:12.573
There’s a few other players in that market space.
Speaker 0 | 17:18.735
I’ll bet you the Unionware sales rep guy, he’s had to have been there forever. It must be like one dude.
Speaker 1 | 17:25.185
Oh, and they’re out of Winnipeg.
Speaker 0 | 17:29.707
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 17:30.567
So, I mean, you employ people in Winnipeg. What else are you going to do but work? You know, it’s Winnipeg. There’s not that much going on.
Speaker 0 | 17:40.072
Well, you got Unionware.
Speaker 1 | 17:41.712
You got Unionware.
Speaker 0 | 17:42.753
That’s like the sign coming into town. That’s like, we are Unionware. That’s pretty cool. I just, I don’t know anything about, about, uh, it and the union. So this is, I mean, this is it, this is the first show. So we’re going to, you’re going to be tagged as the guy you’re, you are the, you are the guy when it comes to it, uh, surrounding the union. And you’re, I don’t know, do you guys have like a, is there like an it support group for people that are in unions and other States that the, I remember other, other heavy union States, uh, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I mean, Pennsylvania. Always fun. I used to work in fixed wireless back in the day, and we used to have to get on top of really tall buildings in Philly and do line of sight testing and stuff like this. And if we needed to do like a big microwave, like backhaul link for somebody, it was like the union will not allow you to drill through that roof. First of all, you must pay us for roof rights. It’s a $5,000 to just even bring in a union guy to allow you to run a cable. We have to run the cable through every floor. I remember trying to get stuff done like that in Philly was always a circus act and fun. So I guess more power to the union there.
Speaker 1 | 18:58.388
Well, and there’s no secrets to doing technology inside of a union because it’s the same as really any other organization, for the most part. What gets interesting… And I think this could be an interesting topic of conversation is, what role do unions have in the rollout of AI the next few years? Because we’re looking at a technology that is going to be a bigger disruptor than the internet was. So all of a sudden, there’s going to be these jobs that are, for the most part, destroyed. Because of AI, what are those workers going to do? And the writers and Hollywood has attempted to put language in, but the writers haven’t all gone back to work yet.
Speaker 0 | 19:59.194
How so? What do you mean? You got to explain this to me.
Speaker 1 | 20:01.735
Okay. So the-I want the fear,
Speaker 0 | 20:03.496
the doom and gloom and the fear, uncertainty and desire around this.
Speaker 1 | 20:07.518
Well, last year, Hollywood went on strike.
Speaker 0 | 20:11.480
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 20:12.101
The writers and production companies went on strike primarily because of the concern of AI coming in and taking over jobs.
Speaker 0 | 20:24.467
Copywriting? I mean, I use a lot of AI to help write stuff. but we have to really, it has to start with real humans.
Speaker 1 | 20:32.353
And that’s one of the good questions, if it does have to start with the real humans. Right now, my understanding is we have AI that has intellectual capacity of about a mouse.
Speaker 0 | 20:44.223
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 20:45.204
People are talking seriously about, by the end of 2025, having human level cognition.
Speaker 0 | 20:53.491
That means this conversation doesn’t even need to happen then. We’re just going to say, AI guy, you are a technology podcaster. And AI guy number two, you’re an IT director at a union company based out of Minnesota. And I want you to produce a podcast. And his hobbies are pottery. And Phil’s hobbies are, or AI guy number one’s hobbies are jujitsu and surfing, who is also an ex-pottery guy who would love to get another pottery wheel again and have a kiln in his house. I would. I really would. yeah um uh go start and then what we listen to that show who would listen to that show how would anyone know that this wasn’t that show we don’t know exactly
Speaker 1 | 21:42.870
the scariest movie of all times i don’t know if you’ve seen it the truman show love it that’s frightening because we would never know if we were the person that the TV show was about.
Speaker 0 | 21:57.396
It won’t matter because we’ll be plugged in the matrix. And I said, one of the scariest things, and I tell my kids this and I say, I’m old, but I’ll be dead by then. Or I’ll be, I’ll be too old. It won’t matter. Like it won’t be mattered by them. But going back to the, what did you say at the beginning of the show? I used to be a more free spirited mind and you know, whatever it was at the beginning of the show before, you know, remove the hyphen, right?
Speaker 1 | 22:22.277
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 22:23.498
sensitive new age guy yeah yeah like we won’t even that the problem is the reason why i predict that we don’t need any eugenics people or anything like that is because i won’t care about finding a significant other because i will just program into whatever machine i want the exact significant other that i want she will talk the way that i want she will not argue with me She will do whatever. I’m sorry, people. Maybe there’s going to be a bunch of people out there going to firebomb me for this. You know what I mean? Like, yo, you chauvinist. You know what I mean? But let’s be realistic here. You know what I mean? And then when I get tired of that one, I’ll just program another one. And maybe I don’t even need one. Maybe I need five, six, seven, eight, and then I’ll say, if you don’t think that that’s not problematic, when we already have a problem with people’s level of motivation. um sitting in their house in front of an xbox and getting up and actually doing something with their life if you think it’s bad now it’s going to be real bad so i think there was some psycho psychological study that was done that’s like you know 10 years from now you will either be a person that uses social media or you will be a person that does not and the people that do not will have a much higher level of i don’t know whatever it is you know mental
Speaker 1 | 23:49.194
stability or something like that so i am i am highly contemplating um unplugging and going off grid well and adding on there i kind of have been thinking lately about we’re at a decision point as far as futures go going towards a more star trek version a more utopian version of what the world can look like
Speaker 0 | 24:17.046
people doing jobs because they want to do the jobs not necessarily because of financial need i kind of like how you said that i kind of like how you said that i like how you said when you picked utopia you picked star trek so that tells me that tells me a lot of what like you know what version
Speaker 1 | 24:33.019
of star trek you what series you liked the most and then it’s not wrath of khan but well i’m kind of comparing that to star wars which is a more dystopian future, power differentials, sorts of things happening. And my concern, going back to that anthropology idea, is as humans we’re not good at picking utopia versus dystopia we can why do you think that is why do you think that is i’m just curious i know my answer but why do you think that is i think we like greed greed is a big motivator greed’s
Speaker 0 | 25:13.823
one thing i think it’s more broad than that but okay what do you think i think it’s desire i think it’s human desire in general rules the majority of people’s base self you And I also think that humans are, from a starting point, before we load any software onto the system, right, coming out of the womb, so to speak, are ignorant by default, right? And it is only the search of knowledge that removes said ignorance. And the majority of people, kind of the foundation. of mankind is ignorance and the foundation of mankind is also um this need to fulfill desires but those will not be without discipline and without a higher i guess purpose or understanding of why you’re here whether you’re depending on you know how screwed up you’ve been then um yeah you will you you will default to the ignorance and and pursuit of desires and i was and i’m a firm believer in like the 80 20 rule that the majority of people are ignorant and the the foundation is is ignorance and going after one’s desires which is ultimately why i think and i never talk politics on this show and this isn’t political this is just you know like an idea why i think democracy is failed will fail us because if it’s ruled by the majority And the majority are ignorant. We’re screwed.
Speaker 1 | 26:54.282
There was a very interesting discussion I heard yesterday.
Speaker 0 | 26:59.106
AI is going to come in. Maybe AI will fix itself. Maybe AI will take this conversation and put it into its database, right? And they’ll realize.
Speaker 1 | 27:07.833
Well, okay. First, the other. So, interesting discussion on countries with monarchies.
Speaker 0 | 27:16.040
Yes.
Speaker 1 | 27:17.281
Tend to have more social justice than…
Speaker 0 | 27:21.368
countries that are democratic which is so true it depends on the modern it depends on the people so i’m a big i i believe that uh the leaders are a reflection of the people yeah the leaders are a reflection of the people so i have spent a lot of time in morocco over the last year oh excellent and i never thought that i would love this place never i mean when i say love i mean i want to cry right now that’s how much i love this country And I never thought it, and how I found this country is I was, it’s, it’s AI, believe it or not, it’s AI. And I was, because we have a lot of work to do behind the scenes of dissecting popular IT nerds. I never thought that this show would grow to over 300 episodes and that we’d be sitting around here and people would tell me, Hey, I actually liked the show. I’m like, Oh really? Because, you know, so any, so what happened was, is I was searching in a WhatsApp AI group one day on how to like, I don’t know, a solution to. to produce shows easier and faster and not have to pay some guy I found on Fiverr, you know, to produce my shows and then do the video content. And then, you know, all this stuff and I’m in this AI group and one guy’s like, Oh yeah, that’s kind of cool. And like, I’d, I’d love to just get on a call and we’ll talk about it. Right. And then I get on the call with this French dude and he’s got a French accent, Greg Liddell. He’s, he’s my French mastermind. He’s, he’s like the other half of me. Right. And I get on a call with him and he’s, Oh, that’s really cool what you’re doing. I think. you know, here’s, here’s an idea. Let’s do this. Let’s do this. Yeah. I’ll play around with that. He’s like, I’m, you know, teaching French in Morocco right now. And that’s when I’m, how I’m, you know, making my money and it’s easy to live here. And I was like, oh, I’ve never been to Morocco. That sounds cool. He’s like, yeah, you should come on and visit. So I was like, what, you know, I got off the call with him and I was like, you know, like I love doing whatever I want to do. So I just said, screw it. And I got on kayak and I bought a ticket and I was like, Hey, I’m going to be there Monday. And he was like, what? He was like, you know, I found like a little Airbnb and he’s in this like. you know, small town in Morocco called Tetouan, which is in Northern Morocco near the Mediterranean 20 minutes from this little province in Spain. That’s part of Northern Africa. Yep. And I get there and I’m thinking I’ve been to Egypt before. I’m thinking this is going to be like a Northern African kind of like third world kind of like dirty, you know, like, like, um, and I’m not trying to offend Egypt or anyone or like that. It’s just, that’s Cairo’s nine million people, you know, and there’s like little tuk-tuks and those little three-wheeled vehicles and crazy horns and it’s dirty and you know it’s like there’s trash everywhere and it’s insane it’s you know and uh i get there it’s not like that at all pristine streets Police officers in uniforms on every corner, smiling. They’re friends with people. They make friends with you. They’re talking. They speak like five different languages. They speak French, Spanish, Daraja, Arabic, and Berber, like, which is like another crazy, like symbolic, like, you know, and, and they speak English too. Yeah. And they’re, they’re like welcoming and it’s a monarchy. And one guy asked me just because when you’re American, they want to. And everyone like, you know, they’re like, everyone has this idea of this American dream when you’re in another country that’s, you know, and they’re talking to me like, oh, tell me about America. Tell me about this. And then one guy asked me, he’s like, you know, and I’m in outside of Hartford, Connecticut right now, which we have a very like a concentrated level of crime that’s very, very high. And he’s like, is it, is it, I want your opinion. Like, is it more dangerous here or in America? And I kind of laughed. I was like, are you kidding me? And he asked me and. I had been, you know, I was in a community event the week before and like some gunshots went off and a bullet ricocheted off like the building and knocked down like a plastic thing. And I was like, do you feel safe with your family like in any building here? Or do you worry about like, you know, like bullets like firing off stuff? He’s like, what? He’s like, if you get caught with a gun here, you get automatically like 25 years in jail. Nobody carries a gun there. No. And they don’t they don’t mess around it’s not like a jail in america you know it’s like we throw the throw you in throw away the key and there’s no like you know this person’s rights have been you know you know oppressed and we need to you know none of that there’s no like you know we’re gonna appeal or maybe there is i don’t know i’m just i just know it’s a different level of whatever but kidnapping rape violent crime all of that stuff is statistically night and day lower yeah yeah but what but what but what you’ll think in america is that oh my god like why are you going to morocco isn’t that dangerous are you gonna be like kidnapped or something like i’m thinking like you know take you and like run off into the hills or something and you know like that’s like africa like what are you doing like oh you know i mean i can understand if it was like me and where’s the other most dangerous countries in africa like south south africa okay you which has been colonized and you know and like who knows what it is like what’s going on there i don’t know but what i do know is that i’m going back i absolutely love it and also very difficult to not eat unhealthy i mean i’m like olive oil it’s like mediterranean i’m like fresh like stuff that just came right out of the ground everything’s a farmer’s market there’s nothing that was like sprayed with a chemical to make it look ripe and you know mass produced it’s all like you see a dude with his like beat up pickup truck and it’s filled full of oranges and you walk away with two trash bags full of oranges for like two bucks yeah and now going back to pottery though i’d be concerned about pottery being produced there just because of choices for chemicals glazes arsenic or something like there’s probably stuff like that yeah plastic leaching or something you know little things you You know what they do produce a lot of though? A lot of teak products. I went down South cause I’m a surfer. So, and I love surfing and my, my son does too. And, and, um, Agadir is just Southern in the more desert region is known for like top 10, like one of the best places in the world to go surf. Oh. And we went down South there and it’s totally different, just different, you know, the whole country that you can go travel all over and it’s different things, but did a ton of teak products and leather teak and leather. So. And I’m thinking like, Hey, look, this leather is like high quality leather. And this is cheap. I’m like, we should load this up on a container ship and sell it in New York or something. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 33:51.265
So have you read, uh, West of Jesus?
Speaker 0 | 33:54.486
Nope.
Speaker 1 | 33:55.647
Surfing book about cognition and surfing. Starts out with a fellow who’s going to commit suicide the next day, but decide because he’s so sick, but he wants to go surfing one more time. So he goes out and goes surfing. loves it. He’s just wiped out for about a week. He says, I’m not going to kill myself. I’m going to go out and surf again.
Speaker 0 | 34:22.088
Sounds like a surfing book.
Speaker 1 | 34:23.989
To come up with health, but then got into this question of the search for the perfect wave, which got him to also think about philosophy and meditation. Incredible book. Incredible book.
Speaker 0 | 34:37.993
Surfing will do that.
Speaker 1 | 34:39.670
That’s what I’m told. Someday I’m going to have to try this.
Speaker 0 | 34:43.872
There’s been many a time where I’ve just been, I don’t know what it is and just screw it. And there’s the waves and you just, you throw, there’s guys out there that are like, yeah, I’ve definitely lost many jobs due to surfing. Like, no, these waves are rolling in six foot head high for two weeks. There was absolutely no way I was going into work and who cares? And it’s like, you know, no way. And this guy go, and I’ve been out there sitting, sun’s going down setting. You can just feel the water going underneath your board. And it’s a different, it’s a very, very, it is a very spiritual, it is a very spiritual moment. And there’s moments where your heart is beating so fast and these waves rolling in and you’re like, please don’t kill me on this wave. And I’ve been out there in moments where I’ve prayed that I would make it back in. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 35:29.478
Okay. Want to jump one more time to
Speaker 0 | 35:31.640
back to pottery. Yeah. Forget it. Screw this. Here’s the, but no, but there is a, there is a correlation. So here’s the correlation. What do it people do? That’s the correlation. What do we actually do outside of work? Cause some people, I just, I call them some days and they’re like, I thanks Phil. I just, I needed that. I’m just, I’m dead. I’m beat up. I’m being used. I’m like, I’m overworked. There’s too much going on. It’s a thankless job. that type of thing.
Speaker 1 | 36:02.356
And we never get to see the beginning, middle, and end of any project. We come in at some point, projects never conclude. It’s just stringing on forever. But when we get to sit down at the pottery wheel, we see the beginning, that lump of clay. We’ve got the middle, the process of creating that vessel. And then maybe we get to see the end, assuming it survives to come out of the kiln. I teach pottery classes as well, and I have a substantial number of students that are also IT people because they need something that isn’t that day-to-day grind. It’s being able to sit down and have everything else go away.
Speaker 0 | 36:49.892
Yes. It’s very difficult. This is really crazy that we’re talking about this right now because I was thinking about it the other day. And it inspired one of my quote cards. on LinkedIn, which was about finding balance. And it was when you have it as an entrepreneur, when you have a dream worth failing for, it’s very hard to find balance because you go to bed thinking about it, you wake up thinking about it and it engulfs you throughout the day. And I’ve been experiencing that a lot lately and it creates imbalance. Yeah. So what is in a, in a good life has to have balance. Um, I don’t know how else to really say that. And, and I was thinking about hobbies that I have that allow me to shut down, completely shut down and go into the zone, so to speak, and be completely out of it. And I don’t think that surfing is one of them, but I do believe that jujitsu is one. because it’s like human chess and in the moment like you know one-on-one with another sweaty man or whatever it is you know what i mean like like you are really kind of just like executing and a lot of it takes if you’re new then you might be overthinking you might be thinking too much and other points you might be more muscle memory and start but there’s this like i don’t know what it is it’s just very very it’s like And you see memes where someone’s having a bad day at work, and they’re like, screw it, I’m going to jiu-jitsu. So I’m assuming pottery is like that for you.
Speaker 1 | 38:34.970
Pottery is very much like that. Before pottery, I was doing armored medieval combat.
Speaker 0 | 38:42.995
That’s classic. Yes, okay.
Speaker 1 | 38:46.958
Very much like jiu-jitsu.
Speaker 0 | 38:49.480
Love it. Couldn’t have been better. Couldn’t have been better. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 38:53.182
Jiu-jitsu. you know, medieval fighting, you get out there and just exactly that. At first you’re overthinking all of these moves, but when you become good, it becomes a dance. You are reading the other person, reacting to the other person and trying not to get bruised.
Speaker 0 | 39:15.877
That’s going to happen, but yes, I get it. No, actually we probably don’t even think about that. I’ve dislocated joints and had things happen and you don’t even.
Speaker 1 | 39:23.624
feel it in the moment and you’re like oh wow look at that that finger’s at 90 degrees i should probably pop that back in but then bringing this back how does that then come back to ai and how do we have balance inside of a society that is pushing us to not have balance when we all know that a 32-hour work week is what a knowledge worker should have can find reams of studies that say 32 hours is the right amount of time for knowledge workers why do we why do we push people to work 60 hour weeks 70 hour weeks doing boring tasks and i don’t have a good answer for that the i i mean i think that’s just capitalism driving things that’s all yeah
Speaker 0 | 40:15.892
i believe i can get a lot of work done monday through thursday and i’ve been telling my staff lately do not request me on meetings on friday i’ll do a friday morning meeting and i’ve contemplated the other day like no there’s no reason for me to to work past 12 o’clock on Friday. There’s absolutely no reason. And I’m contemplating 12 o’clock on Wednesday as well. What’s the point?
Speaker 1 | 40:38.835
Yeah. Spend time that is concentrated work time. Spend time that is concentrated not work time. And allow the brain to recharge.
Speaker 0 | 40:50.225
32 hours. I wonder how they came up with that. I’m willing to push that to lower. I’m willing to push that to 16 hours. Tim Ferriss loves four hours. Tim Ferriss says four-hour work week. And we all knew that that was just an exaggeration. It was just a really good title. Four hours a day. I believe you can do four hours a day, for sure. Four to five hours a day, as I think, is a good time frame.
Speaker 1 | 41:13.785
That’d be 20 to 25 hours a week. Imagine all of the work that you could really get done inside of that time period.
Speaker 0 | 41:23.356
And you said 32. So between four to five a day, so five hours, seven days a week would be 35. Yeah. And four hours times, would you rather work four hours a day, seven days a week, or would you rather work 10 hours, you know, four days a week? I think realistically, if you’re like an entrepreneur like me or something, you’re going to be doing some type of work on Saturday and Sunday, whether it’s answering an email. whether it’s because this is a podcast thing and we reach out to people on LinkedIn and people have their day jobs. And then, you know, Sunday night before bed, they’re looking at their LinkedIn stream or they’re zoning out and they’re like, Oh, this guy wants to do a podcast. Hey, what’s up, Phil? You know? So, so me to him, it’s not work to me. It is work. And I’m working at, you know, whatever, 10 30 on a Sunday night. Who cares? Yeah. It’s before I go to bed, I might be sitting in bed and answering, you know, LinkedIn messages or something, but it’s still work knowledge work.
Speaker 1 | 42:18.707
Yeah. But If a person does have four, five hours a day, I think I would rather do four or five hours a day than four 10 hour days.
Speaker 0 | 42:29.434
Yeah. Just banging out. And you don’t even need to do it whenever you want. Today, I think I’m going to drink a lot of coffee and work in the morning. I’m going to sleep in today. I’m going to sleep in today. Or I’m going to go to the gym and work out a little bit. And then I’ll go to the office if I have to go into the office and really, here’s a good subject. We’ll get to an actual IT subject here at the end of the show. Let’s talk about something actually real. Is there any reason why? One of the things that I’ve, how do we get IT directors to convince people that they don’t need to work in the office all the time? I’ve got a lot of guys that are like, oh my gosh, Phil, please help me find a job that’s work from home, please. During COVID, we all worked from home. Now we’ve got to come in. We’ve got to work in the office again. It’s killing me. Why do I have to be here all the time? I don’t know what the answer is. What’s your thoughts on just the IT staffing and- People being laid off and I don’t even know what’s going on right now. Maybe you don’t have your thumb on the pulse of that or anything, but I get various different ebbs and flows of it’s so easy to find an IT job. Now they’re hiring everyone to then suddenly all of a sudden everyone’s being laid off to now it’s kind of a weird, unstable thing. But I would imagine that of all the industries, I would think. Information technology should be one of the best industries to be in. So what are we complaining about? I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 43:52.956
Well, to go back to that first part of that question, how do we get people to understand that a hybrid work environment is really the optimal one? And I’m going to say partly a union can be an answer to that because inside of inside of contracts, the union has written in the jobs are going to be hybrid. And once it’s in the contract, that’s the environment that people have to work with. It’s no longer a question of this IT director wants everyone in every day. This one doesn’t care, that one, whatever. It’s across the board. We have an environment that is consistent for everyone. It’s a hybrid work environment.
Speaker 0 | 44:41.514
So are you suggesting we start an IT union and get… everybody to join?
Speaker 1 | 44:46.619
I’ve always been a bit of a laborer, you know, fanatic, and I’m finally in the place where I get to explore more of those thoughts. And there are places where unions are good and there are places where there are challenges. But I think the IT world is a place where people deserve to have lives. And if we think about what the core thought behind union activity was, was a living wage, 40-hour week, time with the family, time away from work. Would productivity go down? if people actually lived a 40-hour work week. And my thought is, no, going back to that idea of a 32-hour week, a 25-hour week is enough to get all of the work done. And so if we took a certain number of overly controlling directors and other leadership out of that equation and said, this is what the work rules are. There’s advantage there.
Speaker 0 | 45:59.808
It’s true. And I don’t know what we solved today, but here’s what, we can kind of end with this. And I’ve tested this before. I forced him and it’s back to Morocco again. And other times where I’ve taken, I have, I wanted really badly to be this like digital nomad, but I was afraid and I didn’t really know if it could happen. But I kind of baby stepped myself into it. So I used to be in corporate America, getting up every morning at six o’clock, driving an hour and a half in traffic in Northern Virginia through to McLean, Virginia from Leesburg and going down whatever it is, Route 7, just sitting in traffic forever for what? An hour and a half to go a whole something that should take you 20 minutes. And. Go to an office, standing meetings, water cooler, coffee, next standing meeting, go all the way out, Cisco startup company, end of the day, check out all your people, make sure everything gets entered into SQL, leave at, let’s see, people get 5.30, 45 minutes back to the office, 6.15, check all your people out, half hour, leave at 6.45, get home at 7.30. Eat, go to bed, do the same thing again and again and again. And so I was like, it really was four hour work week that I read. And I was like, okay. So he says, ask your boss if I can come in for two hours, just two days a week and tell him you’re going to produce, you know, 10% more. So I did all the math, figured it out. And I did, I produced 10% more. And I was like, oh, holy crap. I’m working from home now. So then eventually it was like, do I really need this weird corporate manager job? Why don’t I just take one of these different, more kind of like, you know, business development role jobs or something, you know, and just say, hey. apply for that. And then I worked from home the whole time. And then eventually fast forward all the way to now, I figured, you know, let’s just go work in another country for three months, see what happens. And what I found was the time zones are different. The society is different. And just due to the nature of that, I worked less and nothing happened. Nothing crashed. The business didn’t sink. Nothing happened. I’m still here. Yeah. And I did that for three months. And you know what I did notice when I landed back in JFK in New York?
Speaker 1 | 48:27.015
Anxiety.
Speaker 0 | 48:27.855
Stress. Immediate stress. Yeah. Immediate division into different groups and sex and everyone hating each other and fighting against each other. And then immediately I’m getting up in the morning and I’m drinking coffee and I’m working all day long. And at the end of the day, I’m. exhausted and i’m like you know and then what did i accomplish what yeah what was i i clicked a bunch of emails and read a bunch of extra emails and and made 50 more phone calls that probably didn’t need to be made to just whatever you know bird dog a bunch of things that probably would have gotten done if i just ignored it anyways it’s like well and we think about warren buffett um talking
Speaker 1 | 49:15.491
about how to make the United States the most entrepreneurial country on the planet. Okay. And his one statement is, provide publicly funded healthcare. The number of people that work jobs that they hate just for healthcare is a challenge in the world.
Speaker 0 | 49:39.050
Yeah, they’ll get a bunch of people killed. See, here’s my problem with that. Insurance is stupid. but it runs the healthcare, the whole healthcare process. It’s just, insurance is like, it’s crazy because the whole model of it itself is that they have to make money taking money for stuff that’s not going to happen. to pay for stuff that does happen to a smaller percentage of people. Maybe this sounds stupid and archaic to you, but to me, it’s like, I like the, how like, you know, the Koreans have like this circle K thing where we take a bunch of money and we put it together. And then, you know, there’s other versions of that, right? Yeah. So people think I’m insane. People think I’m insane. They, I’ve literally had people refuse to talk to me, refuse to talk to me because I said, I don’t have insurance. I pay for everything with cash. House insurance. Nope. car insurance whatever the minimum i need to have by law yep and then i work my life around so that it they literally like i literally no life insurance what do you mean what happens if you die like you’re crazy you’re crazy you know what i have though i had like two grand two to three thousand dollars extra money in my pocket every month that i reinvested and built something and when i look back at it now if i had not done that My house wouldn’t be paid off. All my cars wouldn’t be paid off. And I’m sitting in a place where I can actually live within my means versus the opposite, which is completely like, you know, kind of in debt and living, you know, paycheck to paycheck and month to month, kind of like that.
Speaker 1 | 51:13.200
Something that drives people to live paycheck to paycheck. Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 51:20.486
But you’re right about the healthcare thing. It is absolutely why a lot of people that… that’s a fear that’s like a big kind of like one of those things yeah it’s not even good and whatever you get to it’s probably not that great there’s money yeah i should be i just i’m only saying that because my dad i’ve had everyone in my family’s a doctor by the way so i understand the system i’m not you know i’m not criticizing or not criticizing i’m not i’m just saying there’s i’m not the expert there so everyone’s cramped joke yet happened whatever that looks anyways let’s end with the e-machine Never obsolete. It’s never obsolete. And I don’t know. And you being IT director, been around for a long time and starting out with crazy programming lines that would take forever over the weekend and what you’ve seen over the years. And back then, IT wasn’t even a thing back then. And now it’s like such a thing. It’s such a thing now. Having seen how things are going and whether we’re going… AI Star Trek or whether we’re going AI Star Wars and, um, um, or, or, you know, Terminator, Terminator two, three judgment day, whatever we want to call it. Skynet. I have a feeling we might, we might have a lot of, a lot of my friends are data, data guys and Python people. And they’re like, no, we’re going Skynet. It’s it’s full on Skynet. I’m more of like a, not probably more like the matrix and, but you’re already in it anyways. What’s your advice? What’s your, your words of wisdom to. to the IT directors out there that are, I don’t know, 20 to 30, 40 years old?
Speaker 1 | 52:54.472
I think they have the world by the tail. It is the best time to be doing what we do. The opportunities for change and advancement are better than they have ever been before. And the thing is, never fall behind. Don’t need to be on the bleeding edge, but always staying up. means that there’s always going to be another exciting day.
Speaker 0 | 53:23.079
That’s very optimistic.
Speaker 1 | 53:26.140
Yeah, I am. I wake up in the morning happy to be on this side of the grass.
Speaker 0 | 53:31.223
Yes, me too. Or pavement, however you want to say that.
Speaker 1 | 53:34.744
Exactly. And thinking about what we’ve seen. When I teach intro to technology classes, I always start with, this is where I was in college. This is the computer I had going back to my Tandy 1000. This is my car, the 76 AMC Pacer. There was no internet. There was no email. And now we’ve gotten to where we are now. You all sitting out there in those chairs are starting with the equivalent of a 76 AMC Pacer. And in 20 to 30 years, 40 years maybe, yeah, probably 40 years. Where is that world going to be? And you get to drive that bus.
Speaker 0 | 54:21.425
Might be a living computer by then. Might literally be like a living piece of flesh.
Speaker 1 | 54:27.029
I understand IBM has been working for a long time to use proteins as data storage.
Speaker 0 | 54:33.714
We could go down that. I mean, we could definitely go down the conspiracy theory thing with the whole like, you know, computer chips, microchips that were on microchips now. The.
Speaker 1 | 54:45.122
Yeah. And how far away are we really from that? They’re in our pets.
Speaker 0 | 54:52.104
Yes. Yes. I definitely want to microchip my kids. No, for sure. I definitely want to, like, I would love to have a tracking device, like somehow under the skin, you know, like, I don’t know. I would, you know. i would definitely do that but do you really want to know if it was affordable you can’t unknow i know i just have little kids i have little kids oh okay like kidnapped or something like that no no it’s like yeah once they’re like big enough to kind of like fend for themselves and screw up their own lives yeah okay we’ll remove the chip yeah i’m talking more like i don’t want my like five-year-old or three-year-old to disappear you know in a foreign country type of thing that’s more what i was thinking um like that that’s That’s more of that. No, the older kids, like, no, uh, I’m hoping by the time that you’re mature enough, you know, to have children that I’ve, I’ve imparted enough responsibility into you, that you know, that you can make one decision that screws up your life, um, drastically forever. And that you cannot turn that decision around, uh, cause life is a series of either good or bad decisions or in a bunch of mix of other ones in between. So, um, Doug, thank you. Oh, I know. No, no, I can’t go yet. We can’t go yet. The teaching. And so we’re going to leave, we’re going to end on this. So you say when you teach classes, when you start off basic computing, yeah. Um, I’m a big fan of, of, um, I like hiring people that, um, may have not always had the same chances that maybe you or I have had in life. Um, I am definitely a, a, a proponent of, you know, second chance for the right people. And where, if you teach where to start out in technology, any suggestions there on where someone should start out? Any good resources or like what would be the best resource if I wanted to learn, I don’t know, networking, for example, my son’s 17. He’s on as an intern right now. So he’s learning as we go along. I tell him, I listen to one podcast a day, ask all these questions that you don’t know. If you don’t know what this means, ask it, you know, and he’ll have like a bunch of different questions like, you know, then we’ll throw out, you know, I’ll throw out, you know, random, uh, what’s ERP, you know, I’ll throw something out like that. um what’s fortinet what’s maraki who owns maraki you know you know things like this you know but where would you suggest people start out i would suggest getting an internship with a non-profit because they have to solve all of the issues that major corporations do but without a budget yes that is actually an outstanding example however what if they don’t know how to send a calendar invite
Speaker 1 | 57:26.270
That means that internship is going to be making a huge difference in that organization’s life because they’re not going to know how to send a calendar invite. People in major corporations don’t know how to send a calendar invite. But as far as networking, I’ve gone into multiple, multiple nonprofits where everything was 10 years past end of life.
Speaker 0 | 57:52.177
Definitely on Windows XP still, for sure. Well, sure.
Speaker 1 | 57:55.042
Why not? It’s a great operating system. Definitely. Other than the dangers.
Speaker 0 | 57:58.763
Peachtree being hosted on a server with no box around it and a fan pointing at it.
Speaker 1 | 58:03.324
Yeah. And ACT, what was that? CRM, ACT. Yes,
Speaker 0 | 58:08.485
ACT. Yeah, ACT, Sugar, Sugar CRM, Sugar. Oh, yeah. Sugar, there you go. These are real stories. You don’t think I make this stuff up off the top of my head, you know? You can’t because-Meridian sitting on the wall. Three washing machines stapled to the wall with- you know massive those cables coming off i’m going to punch down blocks and a three ring binders worth of like hey sally’s voicemail needs to be reset huh not long ago i came across a bay network switch oh those are definitely still out there yeah
Speaker 1 | 58:39.340
but i think bay networks went out of business in 98 10 100 switches yeah
Speaker 0 | 58:46.145
50 of them all all all networked together with weird loops and and crazy problems Ran into that.
Speaker 1 | 58:55.458
Just recycled. Six,
Speaker 0 | 58:57.278
56, 10, 100 switches all up in the ceilings and everything. And just weird loops and people working on CAD.
Speaker 1 | 59:08.321
Yeah. I just recycled a machine that still had a token ring card in it. Yeah. So things just go around in circles in conversations.
Speaker 0 | 59:18.984
I knew I should have kept all this stuff. I knew I should have kept some Texas instruments.
Speaker 1 | 59:23.246
should have kept it apple to see should have kept it candy should have kept it sir it’s been a pleasure it’s been a pleasure have a great day thank you much for the conversation thank you
