Calculus of IT - Season 3 Episode 5 - Who Speaks for IT Anyway?

The new episode is live. As usual, we were topical af.

The question: In an industry flooded with analysts, vendors, and LinkedIn thought leaders, who actually speaks for IT versus speaking to IT?

Short answer: Gartner speaks TO IT (specifically to CIOs with budgets). The Register speaks FOR IT (with appropriate cynicism). Your Discord/Slack communities speak WITH IT (peer-to-peer, no bullshit).

Longer answer: IT spent decades being invisible. Now everyone’s asking what to do about AI, and suddenly we need spokespeople. Problem is, most IT people weren’t trained to articulate value or push back on bad ideas. We were trained to keep things running quietly.

The shift from order-taker to value generator requires having a voice. And your voice is directly connected to your autonomy. If you can’t explain what you do, you won’t get authority to make decisions.

Our Hot Takes

Nate: “If you put all your chips in the Microsoft basket, you’re in for a rude awakening. Diversify or enjoy your web-only future.”

Mike: “AI won’t kill all jobs. Companies will invest heavily, realize they need humans to verify everything, and create a whole verification economy. It’s regulatory job creation all over again.”

Also Nate: “99% of enterprise data is garbage. Stop putting ‘confidential’ in document titles, you’re literally giving attackers the bread crumbs trail.”

What We Actually Covered

• Why analyst firms talk to budget holders, not practitioners
• How IT communities (like our Slack board) are the REAL peer support network
• The uncomfortable truth that nobody QCs anything anymore
• Why younger IT professionals will push transparency and voice further
• Mike’s unused Vision Pro (eBay value: $2,500, bids: 0)
• Nate’s fantasy honeypot containing 200,000 PowerPoint decks with a hidden cipher

Next week: Slack as an Operating System (e.g., when did your chat tool become your company’s nervous system?)

Join our Slack board (vendor-free, occasionally unhinged): links in the footer.

Leave five stars. We said we don’t care but we definitely care.

And remember: 99% of your data is garbage. Focus on the 1%.

—Nate & Mike

P.S. We’re better than Gartner and we’ll let you in our Slack for free.

Transcript

Calculus of IT - Season 3 - Episode 5 - Final - Audio Only
===

Mike Crispin: [00:00:00] Uh, no. At least, at least there's, I don't know. I don't know what there is actually. I can, trying to think of something. 

Nate McBride: There is the fact that you can still, you can still turn off AI on most things. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: Where it's not 

Mike Crispin: so on, so on Zoom, for example, what we, what we've had to do to, uh, eliminate that issue is, you know how the top button always turns back on.

Because we've got all of the locks on, on all the ones that underneath, so they can't come back on. So individually we've had to turn each line off so they won't get re-enabled. Even though the top one does get enabled, everything else will stay off. So we've had to go in and 

Nate McBride: yeah, we did the same thing.

But it's still, then I, I, I remember like the other day, I just opened up my Zoom. It's like, you gotta update, I'm gonna update it. And it's like, AI companion, it's ready to work for you. I'm like, 

Mike Crispin: yeah, they still can't, [00:01:00] still can't use it. At least if you've got those locks turned on. 'cause we've had people, uh, you'll have people like request it, it'll send request to the admin.

If someone clicks, Hey, please turn it back on for me. Um, uh, you know, it's people that want to take, I need 

Nate McBride: this function to be better at my work. 

Mike Crispin: I, I, it's interesting 'cause understanding the discoverability and the legal implications of it all, people can just. Put a pin on and record everything or just set their phone down even though they're not supposed to.

Right. But they could, or they didn't read their acceptable use policy or their code of conduct or anything and they just do it anyway. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: it's '

Nate McBride: cause they're wearing that little hidden lapel mic and they're recording their whole world so they can be more, more clever than they already were before.

Mike Crispin: Just a, I don't have to listen, I just have to think. So, no, I get it. I get it. But at the same time, [00:02:00] 

Nate McBride: there's a lot listeners of this, listeners of this podcast, you gotta go back to when we first started talking about generative ai, which was a long time ago. But go back to those episodes. You're trying to decipher beyond clever what its purpose was going to be.

And here we are two years later. I still, 

Mike Crispin: I, I think a lot of it on the coding and development side has been pretty interesting. I mean, some people are, they are writing applications with it now and. Bringing some things to market a little bit faster, but yeah, you're right. There's not a, a huge uptake. I think a lot of it is also just kind of been baked in.

So the question to your point is just has it been really a force multiplier? And I don't think there's been a lot of good press if there, there has been or any big stories that are really trumpeting it. It's mostly things that are, uh, you know, concern or risk that's coming up. [00:03:00] Um, and I also think that sells too better, more than the successes.

There's certainly, there is a lot of concern about it and rightfully so, but I think more people are interested in hearing the doom than the, any of the benefits that might be coming down the line. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, I think what we need is more, um, more trans music generators. 

Mike Crispin: I'm fine 

Nate McBride: with that man. So needs capture.

Yeah, that's all we need. We don't need, um, we don't need to like, make DeepFakes just like, make more trance. The role will be happier. 

Mike Crispin: Hey, I agree with that. I agree with that. 

Nate McBride: Oh, 

Mike Crispin: you gotta listen to Micros spin, man. MicroPen micro spin's got a new track just dropped. 

Nate McBride: Oh. Oh. How I thought, how do we not know this?

Mike Crispin: Well, I, I, uh, this is incredible news. I have two, I have two tracks out now. I I [00:04:00] micro spin been 

Nate McBride: I know. Remember where you're, you're gonna play at my end of the World Party. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, that's right. I, uh, yeah, I'll get my, it's like, gimme guess my laptop out and I push the space bar so the track starts playing.

Nate McBride: Mm-hmm. 

Mike Crispin: And then, uh, let the auto cross fade happen, you know? And 

Nate McBride: beautiful man. Beautiful. 

Mike Crispin: Amazing. It's amazing. Time travel, man. That's where we're headed. Time travel. 

Nate McBride: That's where we're headed. Yeah. We're gonna skip over quantum and just go right to time travel. We're gonna skip over process improvement and using PowerPoint and we're gonna go right to time travel.

Mike Crispin: I love it. Let's go right to time travel. That would be awesome. 

Nate McBride: We could, we could go, we could invent time, travel, and then every single time we make a PowerPoint deck, instead of it being 400 versions, we keep going back to version one and just keep fixing version one until it's better like Groundhog Day until you've learned the [00:05:00] entire, entire like symphony, but everyone thinks you did it in the first try.

Imagine if you could do that. Like every single time you bring on a deck, it's the best deck anyone's ever seen in their life because you've used a time machine to go back and continuously edit it until it's perfect. You've gotten every single person's feedback 10,000 times. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: And you're like, you literally said everything in that deck that I would've ever said.

Best deck ever. Like, no, no, no. Wait, I have 15 more. Don't, don't sit down. I got more to come. 

Mike Crispin: Just create, just keep creating decks. Use Opus 4.5 and just create as many decks as you can. 

Nate McBride: I wonder how many decks you could create in Opus 4.5. Like literally, I want you to create decks for me for a company, a biotech company.

Mm-hmm. As many as you can create, just create decks and it a 

Mike Crispin: lot. But yes. 

Nate McBride: What do you want? What do you [00:06:00] want? Decks for everything. I want every kind of possible deck. Just make it for me. If you're running outta tokens, just start a new thread and keep going. 

Mike Crispin: Just drag as many documents as you can into each project, so you have thousands of projects and run Opus 4.5 against each project, uh, until you've spent $50,000 in a day.

Nate McBride: It basically be like another credential stuffing sort of DNS, um, attack from the exte extent of, uh, okay, go on to poe, buy the maximum number of credits you can buy. I don't know what it's, but let's say it's like a hundred million credits or tokens, and then you just give it a command, start generating decks and don't stop until run outta tokens.

When it stops, you just, here's another a hundred million credits. Do it to keep going day and night. It's just creating decks. 

Mike Crispin: Do you think that's a form of s sabotage or payback? Some [00:07:00] exiting employee might take advantage of someday where they're sitting in a, that would be 

Nate McBride: fantastic 

Mike Crispin: cloud code and they're, they're blasting away at tokens for just write a script that just keeps, keeps using up tokens.

Nate McBride: Oh, 

Mike Crispin: that would be 

Nate McBride: epic. 

Mike Crispin: I mean really, if I really 

Nate McBride: don't use that word. So that's definitely epic. 

Mike Crispin: But more and more these enterprise companies are taking a. You, you, you're just gonna pay, uh, on demand. So just like if you went onto AWS and opened up, uh, you know, a couple petabytes worth of S3 and started, started uploading, and I just running, uh, 

Nate McBride: make, make me a deck for every possible biotech scenario that's ever happened in the last 20 years, from every single viewpoint of every employee in a company.

Don't stop until you're bleeding. I'm I at the, at the minimum I want [00:08:00] 100,000 decks made. Oh. And they should all be high resolution graphics. At least 600 600 DPI on all Turbo 

Mike Crispin: Graphics. 

Nate McBride: Turbo Make. Turbo 

Mike Crispin: Turbo Graphics. Yep. 

Nate McBride: Every single image that's a company logo needs to be 600 DPI and 48 megabytes.

Slide every slide.

Trance Bot: The calculus of it.

Season three,

verifying this identity.

Sometimes you just have to take it.

Sometimes you just have to take it[00:09:00] 

because it's season three 

divided autonomy,

verifying identities.

The calculus of it.

Nate McBride: Ugh. So well, Mike, welcome back. Calculus of It, season three, episode five of 40. Tripping Away. 

Mike Crispin: We, we, yep. Just, we we got a bit, just a few [00:10:00] through. That's it. 

Nate McBride: A little bit of, a little bit of a break there we had with, uh, the whole Thanksgiving thing and then, uh, the Christmas, uh, parties and the Christmas stuff and, uh, the New Year's and all that.

But, um, now we're back at it. We're just gonna push through to the fall. 

Mike Crispin: Let's do it. 

Nate McBride: No, leaving your chair. We're just gonna go all in. 

Mike Crispin: Just go. We're just going for all-nighters here. Just gonna keep it, keep it going. 

Nate McBride: Just keep it going. Just take it as it comes. Um, but, uh, sounds 

Mike Crispin: good. 

Nate McBride: Yep. Yep. And, um, to our sponsors or potential sponsors out there, we have roughly about 1.2 million listeners every episode.

So, you know, it's plus or minus, say, a hundred thousand. So if you want to become a, um, a supporter of our show, if you wanna give us, you know, some money to keep this high production, [00:11:00] um, enterprise running. We're always looking for a new, um, looking for new people to promote. I mean, we've had some, we've had some real big companies come through here in the last, 

Mike Crispin: it's just gone viral.

It's, we're going viral. 

Nate McBride: It's actually not viral. It's hyper viral. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, hyper viral. Yeah. My, my bad. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, it's no cap or all cap. I, I don't know which one, but it's definitely the better one between those two. 

Mike Crispin: That's right. Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Are we No cap or all cap? You have a young kid. 

Mike Crispin: Uh, I think it's, I don't know. All cap.

No cap. Or cap. I don't know. 

Nate McBride: We cap 

Mike Crispin: all, all cap versus no cap. I mean, I don't even 

think 

Nate McBride: we're, we're definitely, we're definitely the cap that's like the better one. So I would assume it's all cap. Like all cap is, you know, you're like out there. No [00:12:00] cap is, you've just got nothing. You're diminutive. You're just this sole thing.

Mike Crispin: So I mean, I think no cap, no cap is like real, but cap is exaggeration or a lie. 

Nate McBride: Oh, oh. So we're then, we're no cap. 

Mike Crispin: We're no cap. 

Nate McBride: We're definitely no cap. We're all lower cap. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: We're just the 

Mike Crispin: periods. This, this is gonna be the, this gonna be the best episode yet. No cap. 

Nate McBride: We're just periods and underscores.

That's all we are. We're the bottom of the cap. We we're, we're lower than letters. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. We 

Nate McBride: don't wanna be, we're not even, we're not even the keys. We have to hold down the shift key to type the key. We're just, but we're just like normal characters. But the, that are low cap. You know what, tonight, you know what tonight's episode's about 

Mike Crispin: ponies and bubble gum.

Nate McBride: Ponies and bubble gum. Exactly. It's also about who speaks for it. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. '[00:13:00] 

Nate McBride: cause when we sat down, what seems to be ages ago now at that bar, I came up with the podcast list we talked about. Um, and it was actually kind of me doing a Gartner rant, but we talked about who, who's actually speaking for it these days.

And 

Mike Crispin: yeah. 

Nate McBride: The irony of course is that here we are, we're doing an episode about who speaks for it while we're literally speaking for it. So it's not lost on me the irony behind that point. But the question I think I had written down was, do does the analyst, do the analyst does the news, do people speak, um, or it or to it?

That's what I had written down in my little bar notes there. Sure. Four it or two it. And Gartner Forrester, IDC. You know, no one's not in the cross hairs of this, [00:14:00] but I'm not thinking that anyone's speaking for it anymore except people that are in it speaking about their own. It that make sense? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, yeah.

I hear you. I think,

Nate McBride: I mean, 

Mike Crispin: yeah, 

Nate McBride: the register. Ours, Technica The Verge. What's the other one that's out there? Um, 

Mike Crispin: I think a lot of the cybersecurity publications seem to be pretty in line with some of the IT concerns that are out there still. And even though they're largely cybersecurity. 

Nate McBride: Definitely, I think their emphasis for, of course, where they make their money is on cons covering big tech, consumer tech, uh, et cetera.

Yeah. They're not covering sort of, um, boots on the ground daily reality of [00:15:00] enterprise. It, not that we're necessarily doing the most world's, world's most bang up job of that, but like, no one's just sitting out there talking about how much it sucks to reinstall a printer. They're talking about what the next 10 best printers are for, for car printers.

Mike Crispin: Yes. Like, yeah, how can I, how can I get car play in my car? 

Nate McBride: Right. So I think, I think also too, and what I'd written down was that I think back to when I was, uh, paying for Gartner and the CIO. I'm not sure these firms are talking to anybody, but the tops of it. So even, let's, let's talk about the ones that are talking, uh, to it.

Not the ones talking for, or sorry. 

Mike Crispin: Okay. 

Nate McBride: Or it not talking to it. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. 

Nate McBride: Even the ones talking [00:16:00] for it are still only talking to the top level of it. They're not talking to the bottom worker boat. 

Mike Crispin: What about the smaller sort of help desk community, cybersecurity community? It seems like the, the subject matter experts that are out there, sort of some of the discords and the forum groups that are out there, it seems like there's some that are emerged on like Facebook and smaller social media where it seems to be smaller cohorts of boots on the ground in the IT space.

Oh, for sure. Certainly, but not, but not large publications. You know, as many as, you know, as we probably saw before. And maybe it's, you know, it's not as, uh, enticing now that YouTube is around and others, you know, other kind of self-made platforms and news organization, not even news organizations, just mediums, um, that people can consume at, [00:17:00] at will.

But in terms of people speaking for it, you know, I look at those bigger firms and they usually have subsets within them that are focused on different areas of it. And they're trying to keep people engaged in their marketing firm or organization or research organization. So they do talk to, I think, subject matter experts and and advocate for them.

'cause they want you to buy seats in there. 

Nate McBride: Well, they, they start off 

Mike Crispin: on their program. 

Nate McBride: Like, see even the vendors, the, the Gardner rights of the world, I mean, they start off. When they're, I mean, I imagine that when these are smaller companies, they're starting out trying to be as neutral as possible, and the day comes, they gotta pay people, they gotta pay for infrastructure, they gotta pay wages and stuff, and now all of a sudden they have to start sort of selling opinion to keep the lights on, keep the [00:18:00] companies running.

And so there's a limited amount of, um, objectivity that can be applied to, to, um, these firms. And so therefore, I think it's more of a two IT approach. You talk about the Discords and the Reddit, you know, groups and these things. Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Reddits, yeah, sure. 

Nate McBride: Those groups, while there's probably vendors trolling in there, and we don't allow vendors on our Slack board.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Uh, there's a shameless plug for the calculus of it Slack board by the way. Um, we.

We're trying to be objective. And I think a lot of the discussion that goes on on our Slack board is definitely, Hey, who you know, is everybody thinking about this vendor? Everyone throws in their 2 cents. No one feels really too afraid to say what they wanna say. And then that person's who's asking has to make their best decision off that information.

Um, you couldn't do that with a vendor. A vendor's going to say, and our latest analyst [00:19:00] report this vendor was number one, this vendor was number two. And that's not done from a boots assessment level. That's done from a surveys and feedback and talking to CIOs. And so it's not really, it's not really representative of the whole, I think, and it doesn't help that it is fragmented, of course, across not only geographies, but from just look at the industry perspective.

We've talked about this before, but we represent biotech. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: And what I do in biotech isn't like when I go to these dinners and I meet people from say, aerospace or government or finance or insurance, their world, like these people talk about it. And I'm like, what fucking world are you talking about Where it's like that?

And then I realized, oh wait, they're not in [00:20:00] biotech. They're living in like the gulag version of it where you know they need, they rely on that, that speaking too. Two. So they can take the two and go to their bosses and say, well, the analyst firm's done it again. They've predicted the future for us. We have to pivot to this direction.

Uh, and then you have a. The roles. So I mentioned, you know, like the CIOs and the VPs of it, right? Mm-hmm. They're getting told one thing, strategy and nexus of forces, and you gotta go all in on digital and blah, blah, blah. The people below them, their CIS admins, their developers, their security people, they're hearing from their own respective sub industries definitely, definitely do not go all digital or you know, do something entirely different.[00:21:00] 

And so they're, I think that's more like the further you go down the line, maybe perhaps you find greater strength and people that are speaking for as opposed to two. That makes sense. 

Mike Crispin: Exactly. I think, I think in those, yes, it absolutely makes sense. I think in those, those dinners and those get togethers, they can be very valuable to just.

Like you said, get an understanding of what the people sort of pushing back against what they're being told or what they're hearing in their small, small communities gives you an opportunity to socialize with them and hear that. I think when you're at a lot of those things, they're, they're obviously selling us things.

They're selling us products or they're trying to get us to think in a different way that puts their product in a, in a good light or in a kind of, I need to get that, I guess, you know, type mindset. But I find it, you know, sitting with different people from different companies. Yes. Sometimes you look at it and go, oh man, I'm surprised that's the way it is at that certain place.

Or, I haven't experienced something like that. Or, or maybe you find things in [00:22:00] common, but the more of those you go to, the more I think you can build those connections with different, different companies and different groups. Some you'll stay in touch with, some you won't, but there's just a large, I think a large amount of free dinners out there.

Yes. But also. It, it, it would be, I guess it would be exciting to see. It's usually kind of the, the same, I guess, cross section of people. And I think, I think some of what you were saying a little bit earlier is it'd be great if there was a little more of a, I don't know, sort of the SMEs, the, the yeah, the people who are turning the knobs a little bit more, uh, that, that, that were there and having some of those discussions, I sometimes they're, they're there and sometimes they're not.

But I find a lot of times you're, like you said, you're talking to the, to, to our peers, to people who are kind of heads of it or their CIOs or, and those [00:23:00] can be wildly different companies, different industries, different challenges, and it's good to get that context, but it's. They may not be experiencing kind of the, some of the pains that some of our listeners are, you know, maybe, you know, that are kind of yeah, maybe a one or two person IT organization, you know, who's doing a lot of other things.

Some, some of the things they should be sort of outsourcing or they don't have the option to do so. Um, so it's, I think, I think they're out there, the communities, it's just plugging into them, getting into one and being, uh, and I think there are plenty of them because I think there is a, I mean, even, even the Slack board that we have has, has grown a good amount and there's a lot of banter and discussion and there are other slack boards and forums and social media groups that are out there that are extremely noisy.

So I think that, you know, there's definitely a discussion that's [00:24:00] happening, especially cybersecurity and ai. That's definitely happening, that's concerned and was trying to figure out what to do and how to handle these things. Um, 

Nate McBride: but do you think, do you think though that um, I mean forget the platform itself?

'cause certain platforms I think hold a certain and more. 

Mike Crispin: Sure, sure. 

Nate McBride: Certain amount of cache versus others, but I mean, people are making decisions based on what they hear. But the people that are offering those opinions need to, I think, be transparent about the limitations of their perspective. Like, I'm not gonna go on our Slack board and start talking about bedrock this or Lambda that, because my experience operationally is minimal.

I mean, I can get by, but I'm not mm-hmm. I'm not gonna weigh in on something that's sort of infrastructure, um, potentially impacting, because someone may take my advice seriously. So I'm gonna pick and choose only because I'm gonna, when there's something that I'm knowledgeable about, certainly I'll provide my experience about it.

And people should [00:25:00] acknowledge that my limitations are, um, X, y, Z and I'm gonna be upfront about that. You go into a lot of these other channels, people are having these screaming matches and they're pissing contests about who's better at this and why this platform is better than that platform, et cetera.

Mike Crispin: Sure. Yeah. Very passionate. 

Nate McBride: Very passionate, but without a whole lot of basis. Generally. In fact, like I belong to another Slack board that's operated outta the west coast. It's for CIOs and there are people that routinely go on there and shit, talk about Google having, having no real basis in anything they're saying, sure.

And how 365 is better, blah, blah, blah. I gave up a long time ago, years ago in trying to, I mean, I'm not defending anybody, but to even try to make a, a valid point. Um, but, and again, that's the, the marketplace of, of ideas, I think hopefully corrects the bad takes. 'cause there are so many good ideas out there.

It's just, again, [00:26:00] thinking about who's making the opinion. 

Mike Crispin: That's right. And it's hard to discern that on the internet. And that's, I mean, that's why I think some of these, you know, meetups that exist are good, but you can run into the same things. Uh, at, at, at those types of meetings. So I, you know, I do think there's still a lot to be said about just being there.

Yes. You know, being able, and that's, uh, you know, we do, we laugh about that sometimes about, but when we, when we do go and it's kinda like, there's good debate right at some of these things that we, I can think of a couple that you and I have been to, and that's no different than being on the Slack board, you know?

So I just think it's less, it happens less when you're sitting together and having a discussion, but there's always someone who's the, you know, the smartest person in the room type [00:27:00] that we've all had to deal with, right. I mean, so 

Nate McBride: yeah. 

Mike Crispin: It's, I guess it's just the way, the way it is. Um. 

Nate McBride: I think, I think ultimately, like we think about speaking for it and to it, I always hope that I'm speaking to it 

Mike Crispin: Yeah.

Nate McBride: Um, about things that are for it. And I know that's sort of semantics, but when I'm talking to folks either that I work with or directly or am colleagues with, I'm saying, Hey, listen, lemme tell you about my recent experience that I had. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: So I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna tell you about it and then I'm gonna say, my hope is that whatever it is you decide to do, whether you do the same thing I did or something different, that you take these things into, into account as you do them.

So it's kind of a combination of both. I'm sort of trying to provide my expertise of failure or success along [00:28:00] with a strong recommendation and endorsement, but I think that. Our, and our, you know, again, the podcast is, is interesting because as a medium we've chosen, we're not speaking for any companies.

We have our obvious biases and predilections towards people that we like and don't like. Sure. Um, I mean, I don't think it's a secret that people know I, I'm not a big fan of Microsoft. Um, I fucking hate 'em. In fact, to put it, put it that another way, but, uh, I mean, copilot, fucking kidding me.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. Microsoft copilot 365. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Okay. Okay. You might have over, you might have overshot that one a little bit. Microsoft, but as I've been telling people for the last three years. Three years now, mind you, I've been banging this drum. Get on web mail, get off the fucking client 'cause it's all going to the web.[00:29:00] 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And. I hate to be validated, in my opinion, but 

Mike Crispin: it's taking them longer than they said, though. 

Nate McBride: It's taking them longer. But, but how long now until the three core office apps are also web only and there's no more fat clients. I mean, we have to wait for Windows 12 for this to happen. Like how long until that happens and the world erupts in a fireball.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. I that's, that is a wa a ways off because of all the OLE and all the fricking plugins and just so much legacy in those applications. Yeah, but you're gonna 

Nate McBride: pay, you're gonna pay to have the fat apps, like pay extra, extra. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Keep the fat 

Mike Crispin: out around and, and, and, I mean, take that in the Windows Explorer, the file manager.

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Uh, good luck getting rid of those things. I mean, that's, that has been the struggle for me for a long time. You cannot get people out of the file manager or the finder. [00:30:00] Uh, and that is a major risk. 

Nate McBride: Oh, it's huge risk. It's the number one reason why I can't get a hundred percent on my pen test every year because of box drive.

Mike Crispin: And it's just, and it's just a, it's, it's more of a change management component and one extra click versus, oops, I dragged that folder into the wrong folder and now it's gone and I don't know where it went and, or, oops, I deleted that folder and I don't, I didn't, I actually didn't do that. I know I didn't delete it.

Yes, you did, but you don't realize it because your finger stuck to the touch pad on your, on your laptop and you accidentally dragged it into the trash or you, or dragged it into another folder. Um, I can't see where, who the folder is shared with. Uh, I'm limited with how many my path, I'm limited. So there's just a number of things that in 20 25, 26, we.

We cannot get out of our [00:31:00] own way with some of these older technologies and, and Word, PowerPoint and Excel are an example of that. A huge amount of vulnerability. Uh, a total lack of reliability and capability in some respects because of the, the UN troubleshooter, it's not able to be trouble shot. A lot of these issues and trouble.

Um, trouble shot, trouble shot. I mean these in our, in our industry, this is a major deal. I mean, I, I, well, that was a major deal was the last time D Docs, D Cs being sent around, like, when was the last 

Nate McBride: time anyone in your company was trained on an office app? Seriously. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, but they know, they already, that's the thing.

They, they do know to some extent for their particular job role, how to use Word or Excel. There's no way they are gonna use anything else, and they're not gonna use a webinar interface. Certainly. [00:32:00] Um, and I mean, unless Microsoft gets it to parity, which they weren't able to do with Outlook, um, that that will, that I don't think it's gonna happen.

Uh, in our generation. I think it'll be maybe the people coming out from school that are used to Google that will be able to use the web applications in a, in a different way. But I've kind of given up on the whole, uh, get rid of the File Explorer and when Outlook gets shut down, it gets shut down and that's it.

Okay. It's not my problem, my fault. This is Microsoft and we're moving. What in fairness, we've, we've moved most of our people to the new Outlook, um, app and, uh, that's gone. Okay. It's not perfect, obviously. Um, 

Nate McBride: well, you use a lot of your, um, like when you have a new computer and it resets itself to edge as a default browser Yep.

After you install [00:33:00] office, and then it becomes a cluster fuck, getting it back, um, that becomes nearly impossible with, with new Outlook. Classic outlook. No problem. Two clicks, you're done. Yep. But it, it, I know we would, we, we shifted gears here for a second, which is good rabbit hole to go down because do you think that there's just a cycle where office begets office ultimately?

I think, um, 

Mike Crispin: well, you've seen that in the name change. I mean, that's, they, they offices yesterday's news think it'll be a more genically driven in the next 10 years, and that's more likely to happen than to transition 'em to the web than, than just flat out expecting a word to work in the cloud.

Compatibility will be a key, but. As things are generated and created, uh, they'll only be available standard on the web standard. 

Nate McBride: There's no standards. I 

Mike Crispin: mean, yeah, yeah, sure. 

Nate McBride: It'll just be, it'll be a free for all [00:34:00] for data creation. 

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: With unstructured data being put so far low on the priority list, the mirror as assumption that anything that you create will be automatically perfect.

I mean, it's astonishing 

Mike Crispin: that, that, that, yes, that and I mean, you and I have worked with a number of these tools and maybe tried to create artifacts and presentations with, with Claude or with other tools, like 25 copies of the same presentation. 'cause I'm just trying to work something out with a number of different props.

Where are those getting saved? Right. I mean that, that at the other, and that's us trying to be good about, you know. Prompting and having, I mean, normal people are just gonna take it and save that one, save this one, save that one. Yeah. Which one did I use? Which one was good? Which, and so I, I think that's where there's sort of a middle tier for, for these AI tools, at least in our enterprise and our industry, where if you [00:35:00] can put a, a solution in that's maybe more of a laggard almost, that just gets you some capability.

And then for specific business use cases, you pick them, whatever, LLM tool of choice as needed, and you manage a shopping cart full of models or interfaces for specific uses and handle, handle them just like you want any IT project. Like, okay, this is no different than you wanting to put in a new contract lifecycle management system.

You're gonna use this model for this. Automation you're gonna do, and we're gonna use this platform, this tool that we swipe the credit card we're on. And that's, and we will just, and just for those five people, they'll use this. But you'll have some bedrock platform in which I think a lot of people expect to use a, you know, use copilot out of the box or Gemini out of the box, you know, whatever they get with their [00:36:00] system that they're using.

And they'll put these little piecemeals on top. That's why I think there, there's room for the search engine AI model, and I think that's low hanging fruit for a lot of companies just to get people in the door and, uh, can be more agnostic to Microsoft or Google or Oracle or whoever. So, 

Nate McBride: so 

Mike Crispin: it's gonna be interesting.

I think there's ways to pull it back so we can still get value, but, but not end up creating a ton of crap, you know, and that's. That's the, 

Nate McBride: yeah, it's gonna be a challenge. It's the greatest, greatest challenges that any IT leader will face in the next 10 years. An upcoming sort of newish IT leader who say starts at a company in 2030 is going to have incredibly difficult challenges in that transition, you know, three year transition [00:37:00] period that we haven't even considered yet.

I mean, for sure people will need to, still need to create things. We'll still need to file AKs with the SEC. We'll still need to do. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: These human things submit, you know? 

Mike Crispin: Yes, you are. I think, uh, 

Nate McBride: yeah, I mean, 

Mike Crispin: yeah, I think there's a lot of jobs I think, that come out of this and like we were talking about a few weeks ago, I think things are gonna be largely reactive and how good are you at responding to this?

But pretending that you have a big plan and a strategy around this, I think is a somewhat naive, stuff's changing so fast and you've gotta be able to react and it's backwards from how we were taught and the things that you and I certainly have aspired and, and, and done in our past, right? It's like you try to have a plan, you try to have a strategy, you're trying to think ahead and it's very, I, I don't know how [00:38:00] effective that's gonna be when so much is changing that you've gotta have a number of scenarios in which you are going to react to as opposed to thinking of it like, I'm gonna put this in place to protect us from this and this in place to maybe enable that.

And this, it's gonna be more of like, it's a tidal wave coming. How are we going to respond in the respect that we're getting the value out? Some things are gonna wa wash over us and we're gonna let those things go. We, 

Nate McBride: we covered, I mean we certainly covered that in detail last season about, um. Multiple angles on from the autonomy perspective, but we have to,

what's the best way to put this? We have to think about like the problem, the problems we have today are starting to think about the transition itself. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Like that's the problem we have. So you and I are way ahead of that [00:39:00] curve. No problem. But you're right, things are changing pretty dramatically and so we're on a very flexible path.

In order to get flexible, we had to go, we had to go way back in our histories to figure out how we both became capable of being so flexible. Uh, we, you know, you and I both practice zero and one decisions all the time and we, we have a very good sort of, um, ability to detect when it's a zero decision moment versus a one, but never get caught into some something that makes us so dependent we can't get out.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And we have, so we have an, I think we, you and I have an advantage over a lot of people. Those that are sort of in the same boat are recognizing this right now. Those that are not though, those that are stuck in Yes. Mode or in zero mode or in, um, some [00:40:00] inescapable, you know, toilet bowl are I think an incredible danger of not only fucking their companies, but of.

Not, not being able to see a way out because they're, they're thinking about, you know, very, sort of limited infrastructures, very limited ecosystems. They're thinking only Microsoft, for instance, and I'll tell you in my opinion, if you're the kind of person that put all their chips in the Microsoft basket, you are in for a rude awakening, like the RST awakening.

Instead of diversifying your, your portfolio, and again, we talked about this last season, but, and I put it in the book, but diversifying your portfolio. So you never have any single independent, single dependency you can't get out of. Mm-hmm. I think this is simply the best strategy you can have. 

Mike Crispin: I think that is why, and it's still too early to tell, but I think the aggregators of these tools and models are gonna be the ones who end up being the safer [00:41:00] choice in a, yeah, in a lot of ways it could be.

If you wanna say Amazon Bedrock or you wanna say, um. Apple, or you wanna say perplexity? Someone who's like the, the or, or a poe for example. Like people who they're companies are saying, how can I put a chooser in front of this, uh, a good experience in front of this to get people to a certain place and hand them off to the right.

Nate McBride: Sure. 

Mike Crispin: Or recommend the right model to buy, you know, to get agentic AI or whatnot. But it's sort of a, right now is, even if you, like you said, you put all the eggs in the Google or the Microsoft basket, these, they're safe bets in a lot of ways. Um, but a lot of people have put their early eggs in the open AI basket and, you know, I think that there's been some early excitement about that, but largely, uh, a lot of disillusionment and, and, and, [00:42:00] and disappointment.

Um, from, from that you work 

Nate McBride: for it. 

Mike Crispin: That's, I think that's what everyone still wants though, that that's sort of the Xerox Kleenex of ai. And one of the challenges I see, at least for us in the shorter term is to avoid the shadow AI issue that is open AI is, unless that's gonna be enterprise platform. And certainly that's valid in some cases, and in many cases it's like still 60% of the enterprise.

Or actually it isn't Philanthropics eating their lunch now that's Anthropic 

Nate McBride: has got 55%. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. They're, they're taking take and, and largely open I is consumer, um, footprint. Yeah. From the revenue perspective, but it's, when I started looking at some of that, it's like, it, it doesn't really matter as much what you choose as long as you're not building personas or true assistance because that's where they get too sticky to remove or impossible to remove.

Not, not so much, but. Um, [00:43:00] I think that's, 

Nate McBride: um, I think only though in embedded in twins. And so we're, we're going through the persona phase. Now. We have some ethical hurdles to cover over the next few months with our Skynet committee, but ultimately we're going through the persona phase. Now. We have a couple hundred personas created in a library, and they're internal only.

And the way I've tried to design these personas is so they are portable, um, and usually, and, and, and to be used only in MPA perspectives and so not to be used in anything other than an MPA situation. Um, yeah, that, that makes sure that we can move them from A to B. The B'S are of course, getting smaller and smaller in terms of optionality, but they're still a's they're still B'S and.

We're keeping these things in mind. So 2026 for us is the year where we do two major things. One, we go as far as we can while [00:44:00] still retaining, uh, our autonomy and independence. And two, we introduce the idea of QCing data. And you know, it's a simple concept if on paper 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Um, write something, get someone else to verify that it's correct.

And then that's, it's been qcd in practice, however, it's way, way different. And for so long now, I was trying to think of the last time in a non-quality function, anyone actually qcd anything ever? I. And short of, like I said, the quality function and those specific functions that have actual doc review lifecycles.

Nobody is QC anything. People are just generating shit by the truckloads. So, 

Mike Crispin: so they're not q you're seeing like reviews, they're not really QCing, they're just blasting through it. 

Nate McBride: Right, right. So before we start allowing these little x [00:45:00] LMS to be created, uh, what we're calling pods around the company, we're going to be introducing a new idea of having to self curate and introducing curation life cycles, which is actually a 20.

10, 20 2008 idea. Even a little bit before that, when we were transitioning over to the cloud, it was like, well, what do we put in the cloud and what do we keep on premise? And there was this QC moment people were actually reading stuff again, like, oh, we can't put that. That's too secure. Oh, oh we, we can, we can put all this stuff though.

You know, it was like, we did it and we haven't done it since, and now we're reintroducing this idea. I mean, at least I'm alio of saying, hold on, put the brakes before that document goes into that XLM before it becomes part of the corpus for that agent. It must be QCD through a process. And so we have to develop a [00:46:00] process.

Um, and I'm excited to do it actually, because I feel, I feel like it's something that's pretty easily achievable and is very, very transformative and honestly. Generative ai or not generative ai, it's a fucking good thing to do anyway. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. Agree, agree. 

Nate McBride: Stop making shitty decks. Um, and this is how we're gonna prevent you from doing that.

This is the, uh, this is that, uh, conundrum we've brought up multiple times about who should be a creator versus who should be a viewer. And, uh, we're gonna find out, I think this year, who our actual good creators are and who our terrible creators are, and maybe we can draw a line in the sand between them.

Um, but again, the point of this episode was because we were talking about, uh, who speaks for it. And very clearly, if you think about the last few minutes for our competition, you and I speak [00:47:00] for it heavily. We, we also speak for the business, and we're speaking to it about the business and to the business about it.

And I think that I, I no longer feel like I'm a marginalized, uh, overpaid help desk worker. And for years and years I did that. But because I had to find my voice and, and my ability to speak out, but my role in what I do and how important it's, 

Mike Crispin: yep. 

Nate McBride: I don't think that the vendors are doing a great job here.

I think the vendors with the ai, and depending on what news article you're reading, which magazine you read it in, either it is going to be, is going to go away 'cause they're useless or it is gonna be essential to this transformation or something in between. But this of course sends it people's heads spinning.

Mike Crispin: Well, I, I, I, I, I guess I, I agree that they're not doing a great job in some, maybe making it clear that it's, [00:48:00] they're speaking for us, but I think their businesses depend on speaking for us, in a lot of instances, at least in the AI space, you hear more and more. It's almost bringing it back Before it was like, ah, get a SaaS application.

You won't need it to implement it. But I feel more, more of the discussion on AI is being hovering back into the IT organizations. At least this short experience I'm having now is, you know, a lot of AI discussion comes right through it. Every, everything gets, uh, gets asked now. Now do people want to use their own thing?

Are they going rogue on using their own tools? Absolutely. It's, that does happen and it is happening. But this, when it comes to how are we gonna handle this? How are we gonna get value out of this? Um, just like cybersecurity. I put the two kind of in this even keel here, is that they, um, they're both things that are coming right through.

It is sort of the, the risk side of it [00:49:00] is. Pretty much still focused on cybersecurity, which has an AI component and the productivity and automation and efficiency component, which is really the AI stuff and the automation and questions about better data management, magenta type work that could potentially be coming is all coming through it.

At least in small companies like we're at, I mean, I think you, your larger research organizations, they're taking some of this stuff on on their own and they're, you're lucky if they're talking to you. Um, I definitely hear that as well, but it's, I think it's also that a lot of these research organizations have their own skills from an IT and AI perspective.

They may not understand some of the risks, but they're seeing the results and the results coming out of the tool sets are driving the need for the packages and the need for the models. So I think that's. Research organizations, maybe it's [00:50:00] more of a challenge, uh, where that that stuff is happening a little more in, in the shadows.

But I, I feel like vendors, especially on the AI side, and when they mention AI in their products, a lot of times it's, we need to have it involved. So it's doesn't just like, I'm just going to think of it as cha GBT and not talk to anyone. And, and it, at least I think if we're doing a good job from an acceptable use perspective or educating the organizations on the risks, they're gonna come to speak.

They want a, uh, it in the conversation about how, how to use it and where it needs to be, then that they would want it. They wanna learn it too. They wanna be trained, they want to use it at their next job, and they come to it for that as well. So the vendors will get better at that, I think. Um. As long as we're not talking to bots, that could be the flip side of the argument is that you and [00:51:00] I are talking to bots now on AI sales teams and that would prove some of your point.

They're not doing a great job speaking for us 'cause they're not, they're giving us a digital twin to speak to. So it's definitely, I think, 

Nate McBride: okay. 

Mike Crispin: Well, so that's wild. Let's, 

Nate McBride: let's back up for one step, which is, um, you know, it was only I think a few years ago that, except from the CIO, most people in it were more than happy to just be thought of the people that were behind the scenes keeping the business running.

Sure it didn't take, not everyone was looking for the glory. I mean, they were looking for cash, of course, and stock options and, you know, moving up the career ladder towards their, um, dream job. But, you know, there wasn't a whole lot where it wanted to have a voice necessarily. They just didn't wanna be so disregarded as second class citizens.

[00:52:00] Um,

and, 

Mike Crispin: and I think you won't be second class citizens if you do a lot of what you, we've spoke about in season one, which was really the front wheel, the partnership, the, you know, having employee ex at the front of the game. You do that, you're, you're gonna be part of the conversation just from a personal perspective as long as you're making those inroads as a leader.

Um, so sorry to interrupt, but I think that that's, that engagement should be happening. Put you're the front of the line for the AI discussion. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. I, these people, well. The IT folks that have now UPS and now been quiet, I think we'll need to now that they're being asked, Hey, what's your opinion on ai? And so what are you saying?

They're becoming internal spokespeople for this thing and this is an opportunity for them to finally have that, uh, speak for speak to Yeah. Within the business [00:53:00] opportunity. Um, that's long since been missing. I always get the extreme pleasure of watching folks come in to where the IT office and asking, um, my staff members their opinions on things.

And that wouldn't have happened five years ago. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: They would've been like, Hey, Nate, what do you think? And just not even acknowledge the people in my office. Now it's. Totally different. I'm almost like I don't need to be here, actually. I do. But um, I want, I want the business to be able to look at those people and say, Hey, wow, they are super knowledgeable and they're speaking to me for it and giving me the message and it's perfect.

It's what I want them to deliver. And it's, it's beyond bedside manner and eq, it's a matter of just shifting the tides so that people can talk about it openly and willing and willingly. And even if they don't have the right words in the right language, they can at least articulate to a degree what it [00:54:00] is they're hoping to achieve.

And it is right there with an answer. Yeah. Oh, you're talking about the widget izer? Yeah. Yeah. No, we got that. Let me install it for you. Um, I think that's gonna be, 

Mike Crispin: I love the widget izer. 

Nate McBride: The widget izer, yeah. Um, all right. Well, I mean, this wasn't like the world's most meaty topic, but it was something that we had.

I think it started with the genesis, the idea that I was tired of being talked to and I wanted to see what we thought about whether or not there were people that were talking for. Um, and I think it's gonna come down to those that, like us that are starting Slack boards, those that started doing podcasts.

I mean, we do have the best podcast on the internet, so that helps a little bit. But those that are doing sort of that it outreach from it that are going to shift the tide, it could take a little while. I don't think [00:55:00] it's gonna be an AI revolution necessarily. I think it'll be more of a, um, you know, we talked about autonomy at length for a year, but it will require some of that too, which is you have to be willing to extend your still obtained autonomy.

In decision making to let others around, you know, that you're a, an expert on a thing, and B, you've made all these decisions based on not being influenced by those speaking to you, but you've been influenced by those speaking for you. Um, honestly, if you think about the Slack board, people are walking away from those discussions having talked to their peers or talked with their peers who are speaking for them.

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: Which I think is way, way more valuable. And I'm not saying that we should charge 60 grand a year per person to be on our Slack board. I [00:56:00] am just saying we're better than Gartner. And so if you wanna be on our Slack board and get pure advice that's spoken for you, we'll, we'll let you on for free.

Mike Crispin: Come on in, 

Nate McBride: come on in. Share your problems. We're here. We'll, we'll, we'll just, we'll hug and then we'll talk. It'll be cool, right? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. We'll, we'll all hang out. 

Nate McBride: We'll hang out. It's all good. Have a good time. Maybe have a couple beers, whatever. Speaking of which, we should go on the road for an episode. 

Mike Crispin: We should.

We definitely should. 

Um, 

Mike Crispin: I was just thinking about that, uh, before the holidays. Like, oh, we should, we should go somewhere and do, do an uh, we do a live one too, 

Nate McBride: but we need it. We need it. We need like working equipment. 

Mike Crispin: We do, we definitely do 

Nate McBride: like a way to speak into a microphone that doesn't sound like we're underneath the water.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. [00:57:00] To get, get those little box shaped ones that I see all the, uh, the podcasters use and I saved them my obsidian somewhere. Gotta find that. 

Nate McBride: We should get, um, rabbits, like rabbit R ones and we should do Just kidding.

No, seriously. We should go. Like when, when it's not a night that's, uh, sleeting rain or freezing ice. Uh, we should go to a place and do a live podcast. We have some great episodes coming up. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Did you see what we have coming up? 

Mike Crispin: I saw the list from last week, uh, from, uh, the big long list we have on, uh, Google, but I don't know what's coming up next week.

Nate McBride: Well, next week you're talking about Slack as an operating system. 

Mike Crispin: That's Slack. It's an operating system. Yep. Yep. 

Nate McBride: We're talking about what has become a chat, why it works and doesn't work. This will be good 'cause I have some, I have some [00:58:00] potentially controversial thoughts on that. Um, it, it is an anthropologist and I'll be able to relate to you a very wonderful anecdote about what I just did to restructure for the third time our HR unstructured data and what I unearthed.

Um, episode nine, PowerPoint Incorporated. I cannot wait for this one. I've been, I've decided I'm not writing a book about it because I can't write any more books right now. Last I get divorced, so I'm just gonna talk about it and then training our elders. Ooh. And I'll have, I'll have a perfect ending just as this episode's coming out, episode 10, which will be like around the end of February, I'll be able to relate a perfect story about the training of the elders.

To come into generative AI and it'll be, be good. [00:59:00] I'm looking 

Mike Crispin: forward to that. 

Nate McBride: It'll be good. How, how is, are you training, training up at, uh, cardian between senior staff? 

Mike Crispin: We have a, a plan to do a once a month, uh, training around AI this year. And we're gonna have a two tier approach. We're gonna have one and a tool set that'll go out that's a base level, you kind of set of tools that's can't hurt yourself, can't hurt anyone else.

And then a tier two, which will be those power users. And we'll, we're gonna do training for that, that base level group of people and sort of selectively build a champions network of sort of AI users and AI leaders within the company. Um, but we'll have more of a knowledge base AI bedrock in place first that people largely will just get on ramped.

Using it like search or knowledge, knowledge search. And then, you know, a tier two where you're, [01:00:00] you're doing the true prompting training and having people get value in that respect, but on a volunteer basis. And then they'll be the champions to help train the rest of the organization over the course of the year.

But it'll be every month there'll be a, uh, a, a session around, uh, AI at the company with specific use cases and whatnot, so they can actually see the, the value of the prompt, the value of how you're getting an artifact or your, or your output. Um, to also talk a little bit about some of the risk and the, um, best practices, you know, about discoverability, those types of things.

Um, cool. So it's, it's gonna be a monthly thing, but I think it's also being able to give people who are largely using go, uh, Chacha pt, like Google. Uh, right, like Google search. Yeah. Ultimately, like giving them sort of [01:01:00] that baseline type capability and going from there so that they can't, they can get a feel for some of what the output is like and what we can do with the tools and we can monitor the usage.

So it's like, okay, you know, we're not seeing, you know, much, much usage here. So we can, we can determine who the real power users are before we go into a heavy, heavy duty solution for the whole company. So starting, starting small and I think it's also good timing because there is a lot of sort of backlash and concern around ai, rightfully so.

Nate McBride: Yeah. So 

Mike Crispin: finding that, I think good middle tier solution gets us, gets us started in the right direction for 2026.

Nate McBride: Yeah, we have a lot of training. This year we went from four classes. Now we have nine, um, that run [01:02:00] on schedules ranging from two weeks to four weeks. And the goal is to have every employee at Intermediate plus by year end. Um, nice. So that they're, uh, that's not, that's not Claude code sort of MCP level, but that is, they are using templating personas, MPA on the reg.

Um, and we're still very, very, uh, hold, we're holding back pretty hard on releasing it for any of our platforms, but we're gonna continue to assess the ability maybe to even enable it for Benchling or um, Airtable for next year or box. But, uh. All, all decisions that we're making, we just, it's gotta be more than clever.

It's gotta provide like extreme utility to do this. Yes. And so 

Mike Crispin: I think, I think it's, it's even with [01:03:00] the best prompt in the world, it takes patience. Yeah. It's not, it's not magic. And I, I think that there, there still is a perception from a number of people who think, once I get this AI thing, I'm gonna be able to do all these magical things.

It's work. And that's why I, you know, I do think that, I don't think it's gonna wipe out all these jobs. It might wipe out a few jobs, but I, I think there's gonna be a lot, there's a lot more effort that goes into really leveraging these tools in a, in a way, the first time through the first artifact, the first output, the first verification, it's building a process that's repeatable over and over again to get the force multiplier effect.

It doesn't just happen. So there's, there's gonna be a, it's gonna be a lot of work. Like you said, you, you, you've got a whole syllabus worth of trainings you, you've had to put together and your organization. So, to go to those trainings, it doesn't replace [01:04:00] anything. Right. I mean, I, it's, it's, it's gonna help going forward.

It'll be more efficient and to be able to leverage the tools efficiently, but it's not magic and Right. I remember I was at a dinner last year and it was like, yeah, we're gonna implement this thing, and it's there all this disappointment, like it's really not doing anything for us. It's like, well, nobody really knows how to use it, and you're using co-pilot or, you know, open ai.

You know, just giving, handing people open AI enterprise and saying, why isn't this working for us? It's, that's, there's more to it. There's training, there's a lot of trial and error. There's verification that needs to happen and then you've gotta. Figure out whether or not that's worth it for you? Is all that verification worth it or should you just do it yourself?

Um, so I do think, you know, we, like last week and the week before that we, not last week, but last episode in the episode before that we spoke about the verification economy. And I [01:05:00] just think that that is as, as there will be such a big investment in this AI space by a number of companies, they'll have no, they'll have no, um, recourse but to verify everything they've done.

Which, just like when we create new regulations, we create a lot of new jobs as this kind of similar thing where we're gonna invest in all this AI and go, oh shit, we gotta verify everything. So we're gonna hire or rehire and create new roles to verify everything that we're doing and to make sure that we can document and prove what we just invested in is working.

Uh, and we'll need, or need, some human humans will be replaced at doing that too eventually. And then we'll have another thing that'll come up that isn't even invented yet. So I just think there's the prolonged excitement. The excitement, and then like a crash. And then [01:06:00] there'll be more excitement and a crash like there always is.

And we'll, uh, we'll get there. But 

Nate McBride: what if, what if AI doesn't let us have a crash, Mike? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, I know there's some that will say that, right? It won't let us back down. I don't think it's there. I don't think it's going to move as quickly. I mean, remember how excited I was in year one of our podcasts? We thought by now we'd be so much farther.

I certainly did that. I'd be so much farther along and we, you know, we're getting some exciting things that are happening. But, and this was with no regulation. We haven't moved that fast. Just my opinion, I would expect, I was like, oh my goodness, look at all these things we can do in 2023. Imagine where we'll be in 2027 or 2026 and we're moving.

It's great, but it's not as magic as it was perceived to be. Certainly. Um, so, so I think that a lot of companies making these big investments, a whole econ economy is running on it right now. The investments are being [01:07:00] done, like you said earlier, like these data centers are being built. There's all this capital going in.

So inevitably people are going to use it and they're gonna go, oh shit. Now we've gotta verify everything. Or, oh, we've gotta make this more efficient, or, and it's gonna require humans to do that. So we, um, I think there'll be more jobs in some respects that'll be created and probably more one person companies as well that'll come out of this.

So that's Mr. Optimism. I know, but we're just getting to a point where, oh, Mike, you're just so. 

Nate McBride: Perky. 

Mike Crispin: I just, I just think that we, it's not, it's not gonna be glorious by any means. It's gonna, there's gonna be a lot of suck points here. There's no question about it, but, uh, we'll, we'll get to this. There's another t-shirt for you suck points.com.

I wonder if that's available. There you go. But yeah, I [01:08:00] think when we start, uh, you, you talk about sort of the, the, the, the elder training component there. The other, the other important thing, just even outside of work, uh, is showing people a sort of how to use AI to know that the bad guys can use it to do these things too.

And that's why it's important for us to invest in certain levels of governance or certain levels of security. Not just how do I use the tool, which is gonna be important and productivity, but once they're in the tool, they go, oh crap, I can do all these things. Imagine if this was in the hands of someone bad.

Um, yeah. And they'll understand when you we're trying to talk about, you know, why we need maybe a process around something or we need a cybersecurity component, or we need to invest in a certain area to make it so they can use these tools safely. Um, by actually being in there and thinking down the dystopian point of view.

Be able to see it for real. [01:09:00] Um, so 

Nate McBride: we actually cut, we actually cut our cybersecurity budget. We're just opening up everything. It's just saving, it's tons, tons of money that's being saved already. 

Mike Crispin: Just opening it up. 

Nate McBride: We just opening it up. We don't even use passwords anymore. We're just like, fuck it. Um, and like, we're saving, we're saving millions of dollars.

Mike Crispin: Hundreds of millions. 

Nate McBride: Just millions, but 

Mike Crispin: Oh, okay. 

Nate McBride: Saving like so much cash. It's not even funny. 

Mike Crispin: Just to create a really, really long username. 

Nate McBride: Well, 'cause I want people, I want people to break into our company and find my treasure trove in, called the confidential folder, which has 200,000 PowerPoint decks in it.

Mike Crispin: And one passwords XLS file 

Nate McBride: and one passwords XLS file. And in those 200,000 decks, they're all variations of the same deck that has the word confidential throughout. 

Mike Crispin: Super secret. [01:10:00] Do not read, 

Nate McBride: do not read from this file. Super secret, secret recipe. Uh, mayonnaise and ketchup. Uh, mixed in proportion. 

Mike Crispin: Fancy 

Nate McBride: sauce.

Mike Crispin: Sauce. 

Nate McBride: Fancy sauce. Fancy sauce. Do not release this to the public.

Mike Crispin: If he wants fancy sauce, he can make his own batch. 

Nate McBride: Listen, if anyone's hiring a honey pot developer, I am looking for honey pot development work. I'll build you the most epic honey pot ever. Uh, it will have at least 200,000 PowerPoint decks in it full of confidential information that will stymie even the most, like you have to go through every single deck, slide by slide to put the puzzle together to get the password to get into the company.

But you can do it.[01:11:00] 

It's, uh, it's a 800,000 string cipher you gotta put together from reading all the PowerPoint decks. I mean, it's pretty cool. It's, uh, it makes it difficult to authenticate to our company, but, um, you know, I like it. Top 

Mike Crispin: secret. 

Do 

Mike Crispin: not open. Do not read

Nate McBride: nothing. Nothing tickles me more. Mike, besides a feather, nothing tickles me more than when someone puts the word confidential in the title of a document, because I sit there and say, I really don't know what I'm looking for in this unstructured data environment I've just stumbled upon. But let me Google the word confi.

Let me structure the word confidential and see what hits. Oh, look, here's 50 documents that have the word confidential in them. Hmm. [01:12:00] I wonder what I should do. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. It's 

Nate McBride: basically like giving away half of your user ID password combo for free. 

Mike Crispin: Anyway, that's a good question. Like maybe for another day, obviously for another day, is just what is confidential.

Everything con, is everything confidential or not? 

Nate McBride: No. Not a hundred per. 99% of it is not confidential. No. 99% is garbage. 1% of the data. Remember the 1% model? Yeah. 1% is not garbage. It matters. 99% of it does not matter. So why have security? Who cares? Focus on the 1%. Be a one percenter. Be a one percenter. Mike, I've heard nothing but great.

Nothing but great things about one percenters. 

Mike Crispin: Just have a key pass and, uh, an encrypted folder somewhere. 

Nate McBride: No, what you do is on your pa, on [01:13:00] your, on your keyboard, you type, uh, eight k, eight letters. Yeah. Make one of them. One of them. Capital. You don't tell anybody which one though.

Mike Crispin: That's good. Just, 

Nate McBride: just eight. Just eight. I make one of them capital. Good discussion. 

Mike Crispin: Absolutely, absolutely. 

Nate McBride: As always, don't forget that if you listen to the podcast and you like it or don't like it, we really don't care. Honestly, just leave us five stars anyway. Um, we won't be offended if you left us four, but really seriously, five is better and have your participator neutered.

Be nice to old people and to it people. Um, join our slack board by going to 

Mike Crispin: absolutely. 

Nate McBride: Um, the calculus of it, [01:14:00] do substack.com or the C oit t us, TH eco OI t.us. And in there you'll be bounced to our sub substack board and in the footers of all of our episodes, you can find the links to our slack board, our merchandise store, and secret codes that you can use to decode your secret decoder ring.

And every time that you decode your secret decoder ring, Mike's basement fund for his ceiling ceiling, $1 donated to it. So if enough people donate, oh, you're 

Mike Crispin: too funny. 

Nate McBride: Mike can fix the ceiling in his basement. 

Mike Crispin: Come on. I love it. 

Nate McBride: It's got a certain charact, you have to fix it up. So, so the next time the narco is coming rated again, they, at least it'll look, they won't have right direct access to the Coke bags.

They'll be able to, [01:15:00] like, right now, I can see right in there and see all the, the drug bags, 

Mike Crispin: all the stuff that's hidden. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. So give yourself a fighting chance, Mike. 

Mike Crispin: So it's, I think it's pretty good up there. It's all good. Thank goodness we're no longer on YouTube. 

Nate McBride: Why aren't you wearing your VR headset?

Mike Crispin: I am. You can't see it? 

Nate McBride: No. Well, that's pretty good technology. When was the last time you used it? 

Mike Crispin: Uh, I used it in, uh, before Thanksgiving, like two weeks. 

Nate McBride: Oh shoot. How much could you get for on eBay? Hold on, lemme look at real quick. 

Mike Crispin: I gotta sell that thing. You're right. I gotta do it. 

Nate McBride: Let's see what you could get.

Hold on Apple. Vr, is it Vision Pro or v vr? Headset 

Mike Crispin: V. Vision Pro. 

Nate McBride: Okay. Let's see. There are 254 [01:16:00] results for Vision Pro on eBay and sort by price. Highest first. Ooh, unopened. Five grand. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Uh, 11 terabyte or no? One terabyte. 21 WI 

Mike Crispin: think when they go vintage then they'll, they'll go up in price. There's 

Nate McBride: a collectible seven 50.

There's a guy here who's got one that's 3,100. Um, yeah, it's basically like somewhere between 37 50 and about. 2,500 seems to be your range. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: But none of these have a single bid on them, so you know, I should just go bid and retract, retract my bid. 

Mike Crispin: [01:17:00] They'll so excited. You're just buzz killing them. 

Nate McBride: An offer $1.

Mike Crispin: There you go. A dollar 45 a 

Nate McBride: dollar. What do you find? 

Mike Crispin: Do that. You and I went to a, we got a big same thing, 

Nate McBride: like 

Mike Crispin: let's get everyone on the slack board to, to, we'll just crowdsource this thing and we'll just keep going up by like five or 6 cents until we get to 50 bucks and then we'll stop. 

Nate McBride: That'd pretty funny actually.

Mike Crispin: Oh boy. 

Nate McBride: All right. I will be good. I will not be good, but um, you could be good. We'll sort it out. But next week, next Wednesday, we'll be back. Uh, can't wait to see you then. Mike. 

Mike Crispin: Can't wait to see you, man. Happy New Year to you. 

Nate McBride: Happy. Yes. You back. You back. Be good. [01:18:00] Stay out of stay outta harm's way. 

Mike Crispin: I will Try my best.

You do the same. 

Nate McBride: All right later. 

Mike Crispin: All right, man, bye.

Trance Bot: The calculus of it,

season three,

verifying this identity.

Sometimes you just have to take it.

Sometimes you just have to take it

because it's season three 

divided autonomy,

verifying.[01:19:00] 

The calculus of it.