SPEAKER_01 1:13

We need to come up with an animation for that.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Switching the audience that it'll be up for the guitar to your.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Oh my god, look. That sounded familiar. It sounded kind of familiar. War pigs by uh Black Sabbath. Black Sabbath, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Remember that devil worshiping uh crazy guy?

SPEAKER_02 1:38

Yeah. You know, yeah. A lot of people, that's how a lot of people I hear like to kick off their Fridays is with War Pigs by Black Sabbath, you know? We get that a lot. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

I think they should rename it kinetic pigs. Kinetic pigs. What do you think? Kinetic pigs.

SPEAKER_02 1:59

You don't get in line, you know.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

We'll we'll start minting kinetic tokens against your country. I don't know. I don't know what how that that's all gonna be. They come flying at you, they come kinetic tokens being shot out by uh, you know, GB200, you know, 300 MBL stuff. Yeah, yeah. I mean, those really when you were a kid.

SPEAKER_02 2:22

Did you ever have some little gun? It was like a little disc gun that could shoot discs.

SPEAKER_04 2:27

Yeah, I remember having now they make them out of foam so that you don't hurt the kids anymore. But I remember that I remember having one of the hard plastic discs. Well, I'm surprised we still have our vision.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Okay. You know, the odd thing is over the years, um, I think they discovered that if you just make them out of foam, you don't get that velocity and accuracy. So they started capping those little foam bullets with plastic. And so now they hurt when you get hit by them. I know because I've recently been hurt, they do. Especially when your kid comes up to you behind your head and like you know, yeah. Mr. Switzerland in the house. Wow. What's up? Good to see you, man. Oh my god. Hey, do you know Devin?

SPEAKER_00 3:21

Uh, I don't think so.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Oh my god. Everyone knows Devin. Devin had the pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Uh, you know, if if you knew me, there is no pleasure, but you're too kind. You're very convinced.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

That goes for all of us. Well, you know, he insulted by calling us a gentleman just a little while ago. So, David, you missed out on that. At least you missed out on that.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Yeah, yeah. Gentleman and David. Hello.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_04 3:46

Um, my my my AI agent wasn't working to kind of filter out how I address each and every one of you.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

Yeah, you're still a new David is one of the OG people from this group, and he was Mr. Verizon forever.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Yeah. Long time.

unknown 4:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Actually, he was our original uh FDE, like active FDE, Ford Deployed Engineer. No, I mean, seriously, right? I mean, I remember I went to what was it? You're like pinging me before MWC America's, what was it, in Los Angeles, telling me uh, hey, you know, I have like a really cool demo. Come by, show it to me. And then he would tell me all the yeah, stories about how they stuck the solutions together and or you know, the demo. Yes, did it ever become a solution, David?

SPEAKER_00 4:38

No, there's something to be. I know uh we like to talk about financial engineering nowadays, but I think we we did it, we did it at Telco. I mean they've uh they've learned they they've learned lessons that we laid out, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 4:55

Wow, you know, whenever I hear MWC Los Angeles, it makes me want to throw up in my mouth. It's you know those were pretty bad.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Yeah, you know, um it got funky before it went on like sort of this precipitous uh decline.

SPEAKER_02 5:14

But uh that's a pretty awful convention center downtown LA if they got there. Yeah, it's terrible.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

LA is number one, it's hard to get to, right? It's hard to get to the hotels are buttass expensive. Trans just uh transportation uh is there is no trans.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

There is no transport. There is none. It's downtown LA, man.

SPEAKER_03 5:39

Uh right.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

I remember that uh I forget the year, but whatever the year for the first two uh MWCLA, uh, we still had um a lot of social issues down in uh downtown LA with um what was the name? Um something uh something row.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Anyway, lots of uh not not the Santana Row or Skid Row, Skid Row Santana Rose and San Jose, bro.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Yes, Santana Row is really nice in San Jose.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

There's no problems there, except for the press.

SPEAKER_02 6:15

They'll still steal your computer out of the trunk of your car on Santana Row, but uh it's pretty nice. You're right.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

You're right. What's really hard to do is to know which Tesla to break into a Santana row because they're all Teslas. Yeah, it's true. That's true.

SPEAKER_02 6:30

That's a good point.

SPEAKER_04 6:31

I will say, you know, if if you look like so MWCLA or CTIA 2.0. Yeah, yeah. You know, we actually went to dinner and then we decided to walk back to the hotel. And as we were walking, it didn't seem like this was, you know, r really a place we should be walking. I went back on my Google timeline and found out we were walking through Skid Row, but we were all dressed in business clothing and just looked like we knew where we were going, and probably everybody just looked at us like, you know, we're not gonna mess with those guys. But having spent a lot of time in downtown LA, it's not as bad as it looks. I will say that. Yeah, you're right. You're right. West Coast vagrants or you know, the homeless people in the West Coast are not as aggressive as the ones on the East Coast. In fact, the only time I was ever scared in LA was actually in Westwood. Um, when I walked by a homeless person and they were spraying axe body spray into their face and huffing or something into it, and I would just basically just okay, I'm just gonna pretend this is a normal thing. And I walked by him and I was fine.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes we uh we we we have these discussions that have little to do with IoT, but we we reveal a lot of of the side geist that that we're going through. Because when I went through Skid Row, we didn't have the drug problems or or the perception of it, but this is pre-meth skid row. We did not have the old period issues. I so you know, just so you know, uh, Devin, so I uh I lived for a long time through LA County, and I was all over you know, up and down Ventura County and downtown LA, uh sunset east to west. So I know the area.

SPEAKER_04 8:19

You know it very well.

SPEAKER_00 8:20

Yeah, but because you know the the folks that we had to worry about were um random, you know, folks with with me. Like those those were the problems. And that has shifted now because our uh house on house population has a lot of these crazy uh issues because of uh of methamphenamines and and and other crap, which now we can talk about IoT. Uh all of those sensors that we drop for water quality, that's how we know who's doing the most drugs in which county in America.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

That's right. Just like we know um COVID. That's how you did um, you know, COVID um yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

That's how they detected it through the pipes in Wuhan. And they could see it going through through into the sewage system. Yeah, you're right. That's a good point. And also I just loved hearing CTIA, man. That's a blast from the past. I love they're still around. They're still around, they're still doing their thing.

SPEAKER_04 9:25

But the butt GSMA bought the show and rebranded MWC America or North America. But you know, go going back to, you know, I you know, going back to IoT. What's that? What's that? Right, but I mean, you know, aside from sensors in the water, you know, your wearables can start predicting, and I know you know the World Economic Forum was working on this, as you can start predicting pockets of malays and things because people start moving less and temperatures and things. So, how do you predict you know, pockets of these pandemics? And as we start thinking about IoT solutions and talking about the priorities of healthcare. Yeah, um you know, I started talking to some, and they said, you know, really we're focused on you know aging in place as the age as a population gets elder. Mental health is a huge, huge issue in this country, and then you know, prenatal health. So, you know, those are a lot of priorities, especially for the rural areas. Um, but I think aging and health, and we have a mental health crisis, you know, that we're we're dealing with. So, how does technology with AI IoT help address some of these things?

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Well, that's where I suppose that's not a priority.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

That's not a priority. Flock cameras, that's what we need. I got it. I was just about to say that's what we need. We need them everywhere. I want to know where cars are and swimming pools surrounded by HOA rules. We need flock today, folks. That's our priority.

SPEAKER_02 10:54

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, my biggest moment from CTIA, I'm gonna say it was in 2010, maybe. I got to launch Windows Phone. Windows Phone 7. Yeah, yeah, that was great. That was a great feeling. There it was with my little congrats.

SPEAKER_04 11:14

I did all the books. I love that OS. Yeah, with all the tiles. Yeah, right, and you could group things together. Now I think Android, you can put things together, but it's not as easy to see.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

Right, right. Yeah, yeah. That was a great Were you at that last CTIA?

SPEAKER_04 11:31

One of the last CTIAs can't remember where it was, and they had the hoverboards for some reason. I don't know how it became a hoverboard show, and people were falling, you know, they were everyone's trying to hoverboards. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know how what hoverboard had to do with connectivity, but it became a big area full of hoverboards.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

That was that was a robotic dog of the time, I think. You know, some of these shows they're cheap, right?

SPEAKER_02 12:00

They're much are about one thing, and then they realize they need to get they're like kind of running out of gas, and so they bring in this other sexy stuff to make people under, you know, kind of like if you I notice every time there's two different stores I'm gonna comment here. Nothing negative. Barnes and Noble is a bookstore and Best Buy. I notice that every time I go into any of those places, they've been rearranged, and they have more different stuff. Like Barnes Noble is really noticeable. All of a sudden, you know, all the bookstores were going out of business, and Barnes Noble is barely hanging on, and then they started selling records, and I started doing all this. And so they're I think it's just rapid pivoting. And I think Best Buy is staying alive. I gotta believe they must be doing like a weekly or monthly pivot at every single store. They're like, what's hot? What do we got to change? Stop selling this stuff, start stuff. It's it's crazy, but I I think it's almost how we joke about you know AI, how it's like every week there's something new. Um, I think some of these brick and mortar retailers that used to be were all about this, and now it's like and I you know, I don't know. I I just it's I observe it when I walk in there. It's in which yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

But Rob, you you are um the business, I think the business model, I'll stick to Best Buy. Um also changing the way that and and I know we have young listeners starting at two years old and and higher because of the algorithm on your parents' phone. So this is for you kids. We uh we lived at a time that you can go to a place like Best Buy, and you know they had uh electronics, you know, it was TVs, bunch of stuff. But something really, really important to the experience is that the people that worked there knew the stuff that was in there. If you go to the um to 900 years before before uh our Lord Jesus Christ, we had uh TVs that were gigantic. I mean, you want to talk about your Apple TV on 4K? Let me talk to you about 720. 720p. And Best Buy was such a place that whatever product category, um you have experts there, Home Depot, Lowe's, and that is uh gone. Because these businesses are still alive, but they are being managed with an eye to optimize a spreadsheet, and they have to because it's a business, but um expertise in store, staff in store, uh uh, it stopped being a priority years ago. And sometimes I want and here and here's my point to give it back to you is what if you were not in these stores 15 years ago? What if that's not your experience? I think it's a problem because I think I had a better experience. But if you go in now and your expectation is I did my research online, I know what I want, I just want to touch the thing, and I know that no one is gonna help me, and if they do, they don't know what I'm talking about, and you have a great experience, you know. Man, that's that's that that's that's that's my that's my rant. We had your back then.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Have you not watched Idiocracy? Oh, it blows up, man. What are you talking about? Welcome to Costco. I love you. Oh my god. But I think the Costco.

SPEAKER_04 15:45

Right. No, I I I totally agree, but I think the issue, you know, we took the complexity out of the role and put it in the process of where now I can slot anyone there because the turnover is so high. But not too, but really, can you make a living wage doing that? If you have technical skills and you really understand interlacing and 720p versus 4K and whatever, you're gonna take those skills and market yourself for something that probably gives you more money. So, again, this is a great segue because this whole week it has I've been focused a lot on what are the skills for the future and what is that future of work? We had a hackathon, you know, with NVIDIA and Dell this week, and you know, lots of great ideas, and it was very apparent of where the skill sets are going. You know, mechtronics is a skill I'm trying to have a hard time finding. I have a 17-year-old that's now a senior in high school that's applying to college. And what do I guide him on? What do you focus on? What skills are gonna be there five years from now? I sat down with Dr. Steve and Rick at NVIDIA for dinner, and we talked about well, you still need, you know, comp size of a engineering amazing skill because it structures problem solving.

SPEAKER_03 17:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 17:01

Whether AI takes that away, what are the skills that our listeners, our kids, our friends, how do we reskill ourselves or guide people on what are the skills of tomorrow with IoT, AI, the physical AI, you know, the mechanical world, the electronic world, etc., that will not make you irrelevant.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Yeah, well, you know, I I think it's uh it's a missed opportunity. I I think if you you uh assume that AI is going to take away all the jobs, which I think is becoming the top track these days, then and you're an organization that subscribes to that and then starts you're shaping your future business strategy on that, I think you're gonna be in trouble. And you know, case in point, like you go to a Home Depot man back in the day, right? Talking about back in the day, you had people who knew knew their stuff. They knew they didn't have to, you know, bring up their smartphone or their little homer app to figure out which aisle a product was in. And if you had any question about how do I do this, or hey, look, I have this uh thing happening in the wall of my house, one of the walls of my house. What do you think it is? What do I do? These people actually knew what you should do, what you should buy, and then point you to the solution uh based on their own experience, right? And many of them have experience, they're like a four-deployed engineer.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

And what a miss what uh because you know, uh everything uh hindsight is 2020, but what a great opportunity if 10-15 years ago Home Depot had created a YouTube channel where the drywall guy, the the the drill comparison, the waterproofing, the DIY stuff, yeah, and they would just had a library.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

People don't so here's the thing what what ends up happening is you go there, you're looking for a solution, you're wondering what you need to buy, and there's no one there to help you. And uh you loiter for a long time searching for the solution, and then they don't have people to help you because they're came to the city. Yeah, so the whole experience is turned terrible, and um but again terrible because we we know we we we think we had it better.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

I know I'm just I'm just playing both sides both sides of the coin that if you if you don't know that that's how it was, you just kind of know like okay, it it is what it is. But here's uh uh sorry, sorry, Devin.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

Before this, my point is this Costco will still survive according to idiocracy, so you're wrong. There you go.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Uh-huh. A hundred percent. Well, here's here's another thing, Leonard. Back to your example. I can go to Home Depot, ask someone, hey, how do I do this? And they would help me and you know, send me on my way with everything I needed. Now there's so there's so there's so much text on the internet that has been created by a bot, an agent, whatever, and then it's getting scrapped by another bot agent, uh, whatever, that the first uh 150,000 hits were not from an experienced person that has done drywall before. Yeah, and it's like, yes, take a two by four with um with uh wood screws for an indoor application on concrete, and it it's it sucks.

SPEAKER_03 20:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

So the this is um anyway, I'm just you know, I just came really negative today. I apologize, people.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

No, no, it's the past is better.

SPEAKER_04 21:06

But the the but this gets us to the point is is this are those skills relevant anymore? Because I have all the answers here. You know, if I want to uh if I have a project, I can get the recipe book of all the things I need. The only thing I go to Home Depot is where do I find this particular thing? And you know, you go into a Best Buy and I already have all the pricing of all the products, I have all the reviews of, you know, is it a OLED versus you know um whatever the newest technology is um for my environment, and then I can do a virtual you know view of what that TV would look like in my room. These are things that you know has technology advanced to where we don't need that expertise in the skills because we have expertise of almost everything in the palm of our hands.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

Here's the issue: you you are a decoupler. The the necessity of information for again, I want to buy a product, you know, all these things that I used to ask someone, now it's just you know on a smartphone from the very factual issue that a lot of the information that we get automatically, we used to go ask a person in a store. And what we're saying is we're going to get rid of all these jobs and we don't need any of these skills because we have this, but we're not doing anything to replace all the people that we're displacing. So it so and that's the thing, and and and and I think that's the issue that we cannot we cannot have just one side of the of the conversation. Um I think AI is an um um it's a great tool and I think we should continue to invest in it, but not enough is plenty is discussed about what will happen if the jobs disappear on Monday morning. That's always top of mind. But when it comes to uh regulation and laws and implementing you know processes so that if that happens, things don't fall away, side, very little is being done there. And I and I think uh I I think that's the that's the issue. We, not us, but we we are we are afraid. Now not that I'm not gonna know the difference between 720p and 4K and LEDs and Samsung and not that is what happens to Costco if if it's all automated. If I go to Morro Costco and it's all self-checkout, and they don't have the lady that checks my receipts and I I think she got it, but you know, I never steal anything.

SPEAKER_04 23:50

Yeah, and it's the evolution of work and it's a shift to a different skill set, and that I think that's a found foundational thing of what do we replace it with? What are the new skill set areas that we focus on? So let's give an example, you know, robot dogs, you know, let's bring it back to IoT. So if I, you know, so going back and replacing, let's just say, you know, you're replacing security guards with a robot dog, and we had this discussion with our data centers. And so they said, well, if we use drones and robots, and you know, let's say what does a security guard make, 60 to 80 bucks an hour, let's say, I may reduce that workforce, but then now I have to hire a whole bunch of different, you know, electronic engineers to go maintain to program them. Those skills are hard to find right now. It costs more. Um, am I gonna find an ROI for replacing bringing in physical AI when you know Bob, who's been loyal to me for all these years, does a good enough job. And so it's a shift in the skills. Are we gonna get there to where we're gonna need these people that you know drone pilots and people that can analyze vision systems and create and integrate the process with mechanics, or are we just gonna continue to do it the old-fashioned way with you know flesh and blood?

SPEAKER_02 25:09

Wow. Yeah, that's a good point. The cost. You're right. But the dog and the maintenance and everything probably cost more than Bob. Um yeah, who was loyal? Not that loyalty seems to mean anything anymore. Right. You know, that's it. Except in Jerry Maguire, she was loyal. You gotta go to disc on that one, guys.

SPEAKER_00 25:32

Oh, at the time. You need to go to Blu-ray. But does she have the quan? By the time we get rid, we get rid of all the jobs, and the data center guys, they're gonna need lots of dogs to keep regular people from going into there and just setting the whole place on fire.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

But yeah, one thing I just want to uh uh add here, I mean, I so Devin, I don't think it's necessarily expertise that you have on your phone or in these LLMs because they don't have experience. And you know, to your point, uh you know, David, uh how uh I mean these things drift uh and uh the the consensus can become wrong. Uh there's are there are certain you know common facts or information or um knowledge that uh will persist, but the thing about um uh that I think practitioners out there need to be cautious about is assuming that you know they do have human expertise and experience and they don't. That's completely different. And I recently had a conversation with a uh forward deployed engineering company that does all this AI stuff. Right, right. One of the difficulties that actually a lot of practitioners have is helping their clients understand that these things can't do magical stuff that you're expecting because they'll get this RFP with all this ridiculous shit in it, and they have to try to convince them, hey, look, these are these are not reasonable things, and maybe you need to adjust uh some of your requirements here because no one should be able to deliver on any of this, right? And so it puts people that are in an open bid situation in a difficult bind because they have to somehow uh up the net you know uh up the next guy in order to win the business, and that there's this incentive to exaggerate and over prompts, and that's when you get into problems. But then the downside of it is if you don't exaggerate, you could lose the business. And we've seen this happen time and time again. It's just now it's very, very exaggerated. So, this is another reason why hype is so bad. It it sets these ridiculous expectations in the buyer's mind about what can be done, uh you know, possible when most of it is impossible. And then it puts the practitioner who actually knows what they're doing at a disadvantage. And so that's the difference between knowledge and uh you know expertise.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Expertise I I will take you I would take your example and bring back Devin's point of transferable skills and what are the skills that matter. Um if uh for practitioners, for people with expertise in pick your category of RFIs and RFPs, uh one of the things that we would always look for is what's the language that reads like the other person's product. Right? And if you've done enough of these, you know exactly what I'm talking about. All of a sudden, out of 33 pages, there's like four things that this does that I'm like, wait a minute, I know I know who wrote this.

unknown 29:07

Right?

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Do you support PLSQL? So if you're a practitioner, I think if you are an expert at something, maybe it's just that. Maybe I'm an expert at RFIs and right RFPs and proposals for the federal government in the category of defense. Like that's your thing, that's what you need to be shouting from the rooftops because you will catch, you have the expertise to be able to catch something like that and then act accordingly. What do I want to do? Do I want to win this bid? How do I do it? Do I have a human conversation and tell Devin, hey man, here's the thing. I want a bid on this, but these four things, they don't exist. So here's what I here, you know, here's my counter offer. Do you really um so it's really, really true demonstrable human expertise is what's going to save us. The problem is, it's not gonna save all of us. If I'm an expert at uh brew, I don't know, sweeping floors, uh, which I am by the way, uh that's not gonna be.

SPEAKER_04 30:18

But you're AI proofed. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 30:22

Yes, I am AI proof.

SPEAKER_03 30:25

Yeah, I'm gonna do it.

SPEAKER_02 30:27

Yeah, all right. I just want to stir the plot and go back a few segments here. Home Depot. I was in I I go to Home Depot all the time, and there's a lot of people there, and they're brilliant, and they actually do answer the questions that you guys said they don't do anymore. So that that's my experience. It's probably not universal, but the one by us, they're like, yep, it's on aisle 26, section A, and there, and there's where the quarter-inch screw is. There's people that are studs, which is great. I also remember the first thing that started hurting, let's just say Home Depot kind of people or auto repair people. Before AI came along to replace them, YouTube came along to replace them. And I can't tell you how many people have learned how to do all kinds of crazy shit because of YouTube. There are people who opened their own car repair stores, body, you know, and 100% based on YouTube. Um, I've been to, I remember one time going to an oil change place, and they say they do some other stuff, and the woman like pulled out her smartphone and found the YouTube video that showed how to fix this for that particular model of farm. That is a huge real thing, and it's actually been going on for a long time. YouTube has because it's because of humans. Obviously, there's some good in the world. A lot of people with a lot of skills, for whatever reason, make videos to tell you how to fix this certain thing. I need to change the fan above my shower. Somebody made a video, and then to your point or earlier, then AI has scraped it off and done it 300 more times, and it's like, I'm the expert now. Um, back to the best buy having a change around and all that kind of stuff. Remember the first threat, the internet was the threat. If you remember, did you remember? Obviously, we used to have this wonderful place called Fry's Electronics all over the place. Yes. And of course I'm going there.

SPEAKER_01 32:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know, I know.

SPEAKER_02 32:22

Why did you start seeing after a while a big banner on the front of all the Fry's Electronics that says internet prices will beat Amazon? And that was the stress. And then in the end, they went out of business because they couldn't compete on price. And the only place I know that's still a computer store that I think had it's kind of a chain that they have super experts. Have you ever heard of Micro Center? Yeah, yeah. All right, it's not as big as a fries, but it's hardcore computer, and those guys are on it. They they know their stuff. I love Micro Center. Thank God there's a few of those left. There you go, that's all I got. And what's good to see there's still a micro center near me.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

One one of the reasons that fries went under, um, there was some financial engineering. Uh the return policy.

SPEAKER_01 33:16

The return policy was too liberal.

SPEAKER_00 33:18

You you I'll let you look it up, but it involves uh I'll leave you the cookies. There was financial engineering by an executive who loved Vegas. I'm gonna let you guys do your own research there. But I have fond memories of Frice Electronics, Bourbon, California. We had an UFO that had crashed through the ceiling right above the and you can get motherboard and up and put together your own thing, then have the friend that had copied that uh Microsoft OS like 900,000 times with the code that still worked, and that's how I put together my first rig.

SPEAKER_02 33:56

You missed that? Don't you miss it? That might and there used to be in the 90s for sure, there used to be tons of like I would call mom and pop computer stores everywhere where you build your own computer, you know, or they're building it, and because building a PC became something that was approachable, like you could do it. It's like, oh, this motherboard, we're gonna pop in this RAM. I've got this new Vesa local bus video card with two meg of VRAM, and I'm gonna do whatever, and I've got the ultimate 486.66, you know.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

Those are the things I had two CD ROM slots.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

Hey, so remember, we will beat internet prices, is because internet companies for the longest time had an exemption on sales tax. On sales tax, right? So remember that they it the technology didn't win out, policy killed killed uh and that's why you know these these you know I'm gonna call them dumb shits because they really are dumb shits on CNBC. One particular person who was like touting the what an a Amazon Death Star, retail Death Star, guess what e-commerce is still only like 14% of all retail, so brick and mortar is still important, and what what um is ironic is all the efforts that Amazon and others, including their Chinese counterparts, have tried to figure out the physical part of their business, remember? Because back then they were saying, well, you know, there's gonna be asset light, there's gonna be no assets in these businesses, and then you know, these analysts discover, oh shit, these guys have a lot of uh warehouses, and oh shit, they're investing it a lot in logistics and oh shit, you know, they're buying planes and you know uh delivery trucks, and hey, wait a minute. I thought this was supposed to be some magical, you know, software-based company with 90% gross margins. It's not. And if you look at the you know, the cost structure and the financial structure of Amazon, it was it, it's really not that much better than Walmart. And so these are, I mean, and we need to remember this because people forget. They forget where their heads were at with e-commerce. And there's a lot of people out there who don't understand business models and industry structures. And I encounter this all the time in my own consulting, is helping people think through what the what the industry is in terms of its current structure and where it's going, right? And it it's uh this is where one of the fundamental issues because your market definition is based on your understanding of industry structures and and the players, the business models of the players that are in that industry. And um, once you get that disconnected, everything else is wrong, right? And it becomes exponential.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

This conveniently at all times, huh? With something no, this convenient your comment conveniently aligns with something I was reading uh regarding um a lot of startups that are failing. This is this is a cross-category, but a lot of startups that are failing because the founder had no expertise into the market that they were trying to solve a problem that they thought was valuable, yeah, but that it's a it's a lot of that. And I and I think I mean that's another pendulum shift because I I think we can come up with examples with a a company whose founding team was not the expert in that category, but solved the problem in an elegant way and and it worked. But I think now because it's easier to uh I mean, there's not as much uh startup cash as there was five, six years ago, but remember it was some crazy days like I have a napkin connected to satellites, boom, 10 million.

SPEAKER_01 38:21

You're good. Oh, okay, shit, that was easy. Let me come up with another dumb idea. Hey, here's a rock. I put a global romance on it.

SPEAKER_00 38:33

So I clicked out the promise of easy money. Uh back to uh the comment that uh you triggered from my headliner, it's just that that um a lot of the failures that I'm following is just folks that had, I mean, no offense, but they had no business trying to create a business to solve something in a market or a sector that they just do nothing about. If Rob and I, tomorrow we start the latest and greatest pacemaker technology, folks, don't do it. Don't do it. It will look great, it will work, it will turn on battery life for a long time. It's just not gonna help your heart beat.

SPEAKER_02 39:16

You know, I was said, I got this hypothetical I want to throw out there because you know, Leonard bringing up business models of people not knowing how to run their business or a PL or things like that, right? Let's hypothetically say you had this company um and it was $40 trillion in debt. Would you would you say that it it doesn't have a good business model or doesn't know how to run a PL or maybe didn't have the expertise to run a PL for a large company?

SPEAKER_00 39:45

I'm just gonna say I would say that the executive team, they've been kicking the can down the road and they're gonna sell more bonds next week. It'll be fine. It'll get to 80 trillion.

SPEAKER_01 39:57

Yeah, it's it's the free cash flow. Oh, what is our what is it? That company's free cash flow look like. Is it positive or negative?

SPEAKER_04 40:06

Yeah, it sounds like it's been run by a bunch of government people.

SPEAKER_02 40:10

Yeah, yeah. How did those government people get into a good, healthy company? Wow. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:20

That's a good hypothetical.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

But you know, um uh yeah, don't don't don't don't don't end this thing on a super depressing.

SPEAKER_02 40:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:33

We just kind of saw in the news this week, you know. Well that but that that that's the thing. The tricky thing is uh the business of government isn't a business at all. And the last thing you want is to have business people, people with business backgrounds, running a government. Because it's a it's a public benefit organization, it's not a corporation in the sense of business. You know, that's why government accounting is so different, right?

SPEAKER_02 41:05

I want people to know what the fuck they're doing and have run a PL at giant corporations mixed in with Congress. I absolutely do that. No, the but this is this is what you get.

SPEAKER_04 41:16

But no, but we have a master businessman billionaire running our country now. Are we better off? Well, that's uh maybe we don't go there.

SPEAKER_02 41:25

Be nice, be nice, be nice at them. To get to this amount of debt, and so a whole lot of people get their fingers pointed at them. So I'm not gonna make it nobody, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:36

Don't make fingers.

SPEAKER_02 41:38

No, but we oh gosh, this weird zoom in, zoom out, auto. That's weird. Um is that AI enabled? Yes, AI enabled. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:47

Rob, if we bring it to first principles and we think of this break as an operating system, people that understand the system are operating within the bounds of that system to benefit a handful of folks while abandoning the majority of folks. We keep talking about the operators, and we don't focus on the business rules that are enabling the operators to uh have us where they have us today. There, I just wanted to bring like peace because we're getting the temperature was rising in my CPU here.

SPEAKER_02 42:34

Yeah. You need the new Ross Perot co-processor. Yeah, Ross. I'm not gonna run for re-election and I'm gonna show you how to fix this problem that we've found ourselves. Can you imagine? Remember how bad it seemed? Like, oh my god, we're early 90s and we've got the most biggest debt we've ever seen. So thank God Ross Perot's gonna come fix it. And showing charts and graphs because he's a businessman. Yeah, I'm sure he had no idea where we would end up decades later.

SPEAKER_00 43:05

But was he better than an actor? Was he better than a reality TV star? What I I mean, we now we can have the argument because it's years later. No, you're right. You don't know, yeah. I don't know. That's I don't know, man.

SPEAKER_01 43:19

I like yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:22

Um, I'm not trying to get political here. I'm just trying to talk about dollars and cents, because while you can say government is a public benefit company or something like that, I can't tell you how many countries we've seen go down this path and they default and they have hyperinflation, you know, 3,000% inflation, and it just destroys the whole country. And, you know, and then they they're become a backwater on the planet.

SPEAKER_01 43:47

Oh, I mean uh it it it you know, I mean, there's people who don't uh understand that uh um you know uh corporate taxes are applied to income, not revenue. And they think that income, because they're only familiar with personal income, they think that for a corporation it's the same thing, which is revenue. And that's not the case. So you you know, you have it's also uh uh the the quality of uh intellect of the general populace, how uh how educated are they? And if they're given the power to vote and dictate uh the course of the government, you know, the actions and the policy of the government and the course of the country, it's on them. You know, it's like what they say, you know, you get the government you deserve. So you know, I'm gonna claim ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 44:47

I dissent here, Leonard. There's one premise that you're not covering. Uh we, generally speaking, we as citizens cannot be experts at policymaking. Not all the time, not about every topic. So we elect people who get to represent us and they say, hey, I am an expert, and I am from your area, from your neighborhood, and I care about the issues in our area and our neighborhood, and I'm an expert in policy, and I'm gonna I'm gonna help things between you people and the government. It's just that the majority of them have not kept their promises. Well, and it's accountability. It's like AI, yeah, it's compounding. And then we get into well, he's from this party and she's from this party. Well, I'm like, no, no, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Did not deliver. If we were talking about an AE quota right now, it's like Vasquez, you didn't hit quote in three months, you're in a pip. Next month you're out. Because that's what it is. I did not deliver what I told you I was going to deliver. Fire me. Yeah, fire me. And then when I go to the next sales gig, they're gonna go, hey man, why are you changing companies? And I get to tell them, well, they put me in a pip and I couldn't deliver. Don't hire me.

SPEAKER_01 46:08

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:10

That's the real world.

SPEAKER_01 46:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. But that's why accountability is so important, and uh, and you know, anyway, uh, so going back to like the retail stuff, uh, it is interesting that you know, this whole idea of having autonomous AI uh you know driven retail stuff uh, you know, models like uh what was it, Amazon Go? And I mean, have you seen have any of these succeeded?

SPEAKER_00 46:39

Have you seen all of the most of the automated stores, as far as I know, only exist uh within you know like a bigger shopping mole sort of thing. I don't know that there's any standalone Amazon Go. Um that got that got that got folded back into Whole Foods or something.

SPEAKER_01 46:55

Yeah, because you know, think about how much effort Amazon put into uh some of these physical stores. There was like, what was it? The the Amazon.

SPEAKER_02 47:04

Yeah, they put on the top-rated products from Amazon website into a store. Yeah. Five stars or five, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

Yeah, those disappeared. They failed. Um and so going back, and you know, the reason why I'm bringing this up is uh I'm going back to that comment that you made, uh uh Rob, about the Best Buys and how they're cycling through uh all the inventory and trying to figure out or you know, like whatever they're offering, the whole experience, what's available, cycling through all that stuff. So, anyways, that's um why I'm bringing it back up. But anyways, I hear you.

SPEAKER_02 47:40

Yeah, well, yeah, well, I guess we learned we have to pivot quickly these days and react more quickly and whatever, and and Best Buy is you know the reason they're not Circuit City or some of the other companies that were great retailers of electronics that went out of business is because they're like this is the new world, this is the new model. We can't just say, Well, we're gonna operate this way for the next 10 years. Yeah, I guess those days are gone.

SPEAKER_01 48:08

You know, they they move, they still move a lot of product, you know. Um, and so a lot of these physical retail uh businesses still do pretty well. I I think they've done a good job of blending like uh e-commerce approaches and channel strategies to um to continue to be uh competitive.

SPEAKER_04 48:32

So what's the experience that draws you in? Is it product expertise? Is it tactile that I want to hold the product? Is it I just want to browse? Because right now we live in an age of convenience, and drones and things will make it faster. Where if I just want something, I ordered a drone, will drop it within an hour. I mean, I get things within a day of what I want. So, what draws me into a store or what draws you into a store?

SPEAKER_01 48:56

Availability. Availability, availability, yeah, and and so that's what makes this whole uh point that Rob brought up interesting. And it's the challenge for retail uh, you know, retail businesses, physical retail businesses to stock uh stuff based on preference and having a forecast on demand so that you don't have things I sitting on the shelves, right? Um uh and you have uh inventory turnover. You have you're turning over your inventory.

SPEAKER_00 49:31

And it's got well and it's gotten way better because of IoT. Um not even not even being sarcastic about it. The the the mashup of inventory visibility of today is leaps and bounds from that of 10 years ago. Uh the ability to have I mean the systems of record, yeah. The archive records haven't really changed much, but the ability to gain uh real-time information from in-store inventory and what's moving, what's not, down to the nuances. Like I have this inventory, but three of these items are in open box, so the price is different. And five of these items are in store, but they were ordered through e-commerce, so someone's gonna come in and pick up in store, so they're not really available. That is incredibly, incredibly better than just a couple of years ago, thanks to um thanks to the Internet of Things. Right. Yeah, chapter 10, people. Oh, there you go.

SPEAKER_04 50:31

Well, I have a clear right. So so, for example, you know, this is some a solution we we built, um, but you know, it it's for a manufacturer, but uh they did had no visibility into how the inventory was moving at their customers. So they would get orders just out of the blue. And what happens? Then you have to buy the raw materials, you have to run extra shifts on your production line to meet the demand, to scramble for this order. Now that you know your inventory, you know, you could just spend millions of dollars on an ERP system. How do you do enterprise resource planning when most of the inventory that's being done is you know, some guy with a clipboard reporting every week or you know, just once a month, oh, we're about this, I think we'll need this. If you know, so real-time visibility into everything, the condition of your inventory, what's outdated, what has been returned, you know, that changes everything for us to be more efficient. You need to carry less inventory in your warehouse. You get more real time, you get more insights. You know, you go in, buy something, it's not all triple XLs left. You know what the demand's gonna be, but more or less on your back end, you know, I can ramp up production for what's needed. You know, industry 4.0 was all about the lot size of one. You know, I can go and custom make this lot size based off of what the demand is. So we're starting to get more into from, you know, obviously we now we're proactive versus reactive, and that's the beauty of our IoT. So, how does that help us tying everything back together to the Home Depot, the Best Buy to make them more competitive, you know, for the needs of the future?

SPEAKER_02 52:16

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

SPEAKER_04 52:23

Well said, wise man.

SPEAKER_00 52:26

Buddha.

SPEAKER_01 52:28

Yeah, you know, it's funny that it always boils down to I I I mean inventory management and the inbound, outbound, you know, logistics and uh you know planning. Um and uh yeah, I and that I um I don't know, but you know, these are pretty mature areas. I mean people have been working on this stuff for a long time. It's not like I mean, like you guys have been working on it for a long time. I I I think it the question is is um how how much more is there to um improve beyond the physical structural changes you might have to make, you know? Um like what e-commerce did, I think we mentioned it, we've mentioned this before. It's dropship they used to call it dropship, you know, and uh um still new.

SPEAKER_02 53:27

Yeah, it's still one come check out my TikTok store, rubbing and drop ship stuff to you that I just told you about.

SPEAKER_04 53:34

Yeah, yeah. It's all about it, you know. We go back, you know, as I guide my son into okay, you want to be an engineer, take finance courses. It all comes circle. You know, we kind of talk about understanding how money flows, it's all about ROI. What makes ROI sense? How do you create trust? So we can, you know, all of we can build anything that's possible for you know, but are are people willing to pay for it? Given unlimited budget, unlimited time, I could probably solve almost any pro, you know. Take your recipe book, Rob, of your book. We can solve anything. The key question is does it make ROI sense? Does it make sense? You know, hear about the stories of the IoT enabled flip-flops with you know, location. Who is gonna buy that? There's IoT hairbrushes that measure there. You go. So there's great ideas, but if you're a technology person, this is cool. But then you start thinking about okay, in real-life application, and it's just not the cost of the purchase, it's that total operating cost. What's the total cost of ownership? Um I'm gonna have to change the batteries in five years of a thousand devices, you know, or am I changing them every few minutes? You know, I I have clients, okay, we're gonna do real-time asset tracking, though. Who's gonna sit in my warehouse and assign you know each product to the tracker? I don't have the I don't have the manpower to do that. So again, you look at the total cost and does it make sense? And then second is do I trust the data coming off of you know this technology?

SPEAKER_02 55:10

Wow. Yeah. And that's why all the stuff that's in my book hasn't been done, is because there's no business ROI to any of it. Well, right. But that's just reality. People are like, yeah, people aren't worth enough. Or, you know, trees or wildlife or the oceans. Um, you know, it's not gonna help me meet my numbers for this quarter.

SPEAKER_01 55:39

You know what it is? The the sad thing is it's like what you know, like what you and I were talking about like eight years ago, Rob. There there literally has to be an insurance layer. Remember? A relayer.

SPEAKER_02 55:53

Like a relayer, yeah, right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:56

An insurance layer, and it's all catastrophe, whether it's personal or a societal or economic catastrophe-driven demand. And then it it it surfaces way, it you know, that demand is then translated through an insurance layer. And maybe you know, actually, that the name of that company was pretty cool if you think about relayer. We are relaying catastrophic shit that can happen in your home, like a water leak that can cost tens of hundreds, or if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we're gonna make you give a shit and pay us money so you know we can mitigate the damage.

SPEAKER_04 56:38

You know, my my favorite of the my favorite use case that they had was they had an auditory sensor on a bottling plant making beer, and they could tell, you know, the the plant would jam up, and it was because the knife on the label cutting would go dull, and they tuned it to where they could understand the sound that a knife made when it started going dull, so they could replace the blade before it jammed the production line. But using video and auditory sensors, you know, is where where we're going.

SPEAKER_01 57:10

And that's where and that's where AI is cool, right? ML AI is really cool. Um and um it but it's not the process. And I think the problem is people keep trying to drum up and imagine these deterministic applications for AI and deterministic roles for AI, where it just simply doesn't do that stuff. But you're you're highlighting a really great uh benefit case for AI is yeah, it can help you um determine or at least detect um uh some kind of anomaly that's about to uh occur, or uh, you know, uh that's good stuff that before it happens. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 58:00

You know, I tried to keep I purposely tried to keep machine learning out of the book, but I there were two use cases where I had to have it, and it was for, you know, and you know these use cases. Deforestation, sound of a chainsaw in the Amazon. You had to have an ML model to understand what that sounds like, and then the other one was uh gunshots, and it wasn't a typical gunshot detection for crime, it had to do with uh poaching and biodiversity and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, you know, some of them you really need it, you know, and computer vision is amazing. Yeah, no doubt about it. No doubt about it.

SPEAKER_01 58:39

As long as it doesn't mistake in a 60-year-old bald guy for uh uh two-year-old baby or a there's that.

SPEAKER_02 58:47

You know, um I gotta bring up uh before we leave sports problem. You got your Raider, you got your Raiders hat on there, dude. I saw the I went to the game last night, I saw the Raiders play the Texans, and I guess the most notable thing, we were just Kathy, I were excited just to see Mendoza, you know, the new quarterback uh for the Raiders, and I got to see and capture him throwing his first pick six interception. And so it's like, congratulations, bro. Oh my gosh. Rip the band. Welcome to the NFL. Yeah, I saw some guys, you know, after he's probably wondering why are people just beating the hell out of me after I've already thrown the ball? And it's like, welcome to the NFL.

SPEAKER_01 59:38

Oh, that's too funny. All right. Uh hey, that's an episode. So uh you want to take us out or you want me to do it, or should Devin do it? I think Devin should do it. You should do it. I've I got you guys gotta help me with the script.

SPEAKER_02 59:54

Um it's goodbye.

SPEAKER_04 59:58

Right, but we've got our plugs, right? We gotta do our plugs. Uh yeah, yeah, do our plugs. Yeah, Rob, you who wants to do the plugs, and then I I'll take us out. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:09

All right. Well, just remember the reason we're here, it may not seem that way. This actually whole thing is actually a charity. I know it seems like some crazy guys talking about tech or whatever. Yeah, pretty much. But it's elevate communities, and we're gonna use a lot of tech, a lot of IoT and some devices and analytics and things, and we're gonna apply that to some. It seems like it's just a book, but actually, we we're making sure we're bringing it in all that stuff into action, not all of them. Um, but we're gonna be the ones when you see natural disasters, when you're gonna see all kinds of problems happening in different communities of different types from all the weird things that can happen in this world, we're gonna use some tech to help folks with that. We're gonna help them with preparedness, knowing in advance, we're gonna help them with recovery. Are there Red Cross and first responders that are gonna do their thing? Absolutely. We're not that, but we're gonna be being in the tech to a lot of that stuff. And so a lot of these use cases in there, we're gonna bring it to life. Uh, and I know part of that, you know, was really inspired by the floods last summer in the Texas Hill Country, right by where Stephanie Atkinson lives. So she's the one who put that together, and she's one of our co-founders from the get-go for Coffee Talk. And so, yeah, all those use cases, we're gonna be making them real for sure. And and hopefully we'll lead by example, and other people will hopefully jump in and do some stuff like that. So that's what this is about. So please give, go to elevatecommunities.org, give, or buy some merch, you know.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:42

Yeah, yeah, it's all it's all about using technology for good. So I hope everyone had as much fun as we did, and have a great weekend and have a great week ahead. Sounds great. Adios.

unknown 1:01:56

Thanks.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:00

See y'all later. Take care of the