Calculus of IT - Season 3 Episode 7 - What Has Become of Chat?

The new episode is live, and we went deep into the nostalgia mines before emerging with some uncomfortable truths about how we communicate now.

Mike and I started by tracing our entire chat history from 1992 BBS systems (Nate had to mail his driver's license to Iowa to get approved for ISCA) through IRC, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, Office Communicator, BBM (RIP that little red blinking light), and eventually Slack. Turns out we've been through dozens of chat platforms, and somehow we're worse at communicating than ever. The thesis: chat is supposed to be synchronous but we use it asynchronously, creating this weird hybrid where Nate will hate you if you don't respond in 7 minutes but his kids won't respond for days and think that's fine. We realized you could theoretically recreate chat using just Box notes and @ mentions (terrible idea, technically possible), proved that the core requirements for chat are absurdly simple (two people, one box to type in, a return key), and discovered that 58 different platforms at Nate's company all have chat functions now—meaning communication is fragmented across everything. Mike pointed out that Blackberry's universal inbox solved this problem 15 years ago and nobody's figured it out since. We also covered: why LinkedIn is now just pasta photos and fake job announcements, whether chatting with your network switches counts as early AI, Nate's refusal to read email for years (all goes to trash, works fine), the anxiety of contributing in chat, and why the "instant" in instant messaging was always branding bullshit. Next week we're expanding this into IT as an Anthropologist—how we straddle old and new worlds while excavating ancient infrastructure with laser technology.

Listen at thecalculusofit.com • Join our Slack board at thecoit.us • Leave five stars • Smash any flock cameras you see • Don't travel abroad with a phone you care about.

—Nate & Mike

Transcript

Season 3 - Episode 6 - Final - Audio Only

Trance Bot: [00:00:00] 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 identity,

the calculus of it.[00:01:00] 

Nate McBride: This thing on. 

Trance Bot: Yes, you sound good. 

Nate McBride: Remember to put it in front of my face this time. After 102 episodes, you think I would've gotten this shit straightened out. Let's see. 

Trance Bot: I think you've got it all figured out. 

Nate McBride: You got it, Mike, 

Trance Bot: I think you have it. Absolutely. 

Nate McBride: Oh, 

Trance Bot: LFG, man. 

Nate McBride: So I said last week we would spend a little bit of time talking about the news.

Trance Bot: Yep. Yep. 

Nate McBride: [00:02:00] So where do you wanna start? Because I got some ideas. 

Trance Bot: Oh boy. Why don't you go ahead. 

Nate McBride: Well, so let's talk about the industry for a moment. JP Morgan was last week, or Yeah, last week. 

Trance Bot: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And like, you know, any biotech exec who's a biotech exec has to go to JP Morgan. It's a big deal, the whole nine.

Um, but what was interesting about it was the results of what kind of came out of JP Morgan. Um, namely that. Basically, yeah. From, uh, multiple people blogged on this, but Aaron Blotnick said JPM 2026, the year China surpassed the USA and biotech innovation deal value and clinical output. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. 

Nate McBride: Chinese, Chinese biotech firms closed the most deals.

The JP m totaling approximately 7.3 [00:03:00] billion dwarfing. The weeks combined, one and a half to 2 billion in AI infrastructure bets. While the industry discussed the potential of ai, it spent its actual capital on Chinese oriented originated assets, particularly ADCs and multi pacific specific antibodies. I love this, and you can go into this article, I mean, anyone can Google this, but basically, I love this because it speaks volumes about two things.

One, this, um, manufactured paranoia about the AI between the US and, and China, which is really manufactured. China is going a totally different direction than us. They're now trying to compete on a global level. Um, anyone who's even remotely intelligent understands this, but of course, the MAGA does not.

They think that I, us and China and some more we're not. Uh, China's going just way away from where we, where we'll be heading. But are 

Trance Bot: they, where, which direction are they taking? [00:04:00] 

Nate McBride: Uh, they're focused on themselves. They're not focused on like out innovating the US or out innovating other countries. They're focused on sort of turning AI to help China itself Exactly.

And make China stronger versus, versus the us, which is like, we gotta make more drones for Minnesota. And then, um, but the, the partnership effect and how many companies are willing to continue to double down on working with China. I mean, let's be honest, um, in the oncology space, if you want, uh, A CMO, you're going to China.

Uh, that's all there is to it. And, um, you want, you know, supply and substance made, you're going to China. So they, they're the best you. And that was wonderful to read that news at A JPM that everyone's kind of doubling down on those Chinese bets. Uh, I'm all for it to be quite honest. But that was one bit about JP Morgan.

JP Morgan news, you know, usually like the hobnobbing, [00:05:00] uh, event of the year for biotech leadership. 

Mike Crispin: Sure thing. 

Nate McBride: It has, uh, come to some recognitions in the SynBioBeta conference, which is effectively the JPM counterpart for synthetic bio. Um, has also seen a huge uptick in offshore partnerships.

Unfortunately, on the synthetic side, you have more of this sleazy scumbag types getting involved nowadays with Palantir and A 16 Z and these, these assholes. But, um. Still synthetic bio is also going the same trend, more outsourcing of, uh, the critical infrastructure we just don't have in the us. So that was, that was one bit of news.

Trance Bot: Yeah. There, there's a lot of, yeah. I was just taking a look at some of this stuff from JP Morgan then, now that you've mentioned it, and some of the big partnerships with, uh, sio working [00:06:00] with Silicom Medicine with TTAs, we're, we've looking at that. That's a really interesting product and it's been working really well, uh, just in terms of getting to know and understand their platform.

But everyone seems to be licensing these specific treatment-based AI models or just putting money up front to build them. Um, whether it's, you know, GSK or AstraZeneca or Sanofi or philanthropic as killing it right now with Quad for Healthcare, you know, trying to 

Nate McBride: build But hold on, hold on. The Quad for Healthcare, quad for Life Sciences is a smoke and mirrors gambit.

I mean, there's not a product, they're just coming up with the API connectors, much like a TetraScience or a Gmy did five years ago to connect to life science platforms. 

Trance Bot: Yeah. There 

Nate McBride: using, using MCP, I mean, it's not, it's not a new thing. 

Trance Bot: While they're using AWS Bedrock and they're building holistic [00:07:00] solutions that are HIPAA compliant and HIPAA ready, they're cloud for Enterprise is not HIPAA compliant and neither is Cloud for Life sciences, which is just Claude attached to Benchling.

Or like you said, MCP connections. I guess this Claude for Healthcare is kind of a, a, a package specifically for hospitals that have HIPAA requirements and they just, they just talked about it last week, I think this week as well. Um, so having that kind of complete solution is really interesting. 'cause really Google and models hosted on Amazon are the only, and, and on Azure are the only games in town in that space.

So that's, that's pretty cool. And it looks like all of the, uh, you know, AbbVie and Novo Nordi and, you know, other companies are, are signed up just on the HIPAA side, which, you know, in our space it's not as big of a deal. Um, but it's, uh, interesting to see that they're, they're taking steps there to compete.

They seem to be everywhere right [00:08:00] now. And I, I, I think, um, I heard last yesterday that, um, what's his name, uh, who's the, the CEO of, um, philanthropic, you know, I can see his face. I just can't remember his name right now. 

Nate McBride: Uh, I'm drawing a blank. 

Trance Bot: Basically, um, just said. All, you know, he gave the, the whole coding and, you know, engineers in six to 12 months or something is gonna be, we'll just be editing code in a year from now.

Yeah. Basically, I think was his message, which I thought was interesting and everyone's scared about it, I guess. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Everyone's missing some basic points, which is that it doesn't matter if you create tons and tons and tons of code. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: If it doesn't, if it doesn't run well, then who, who gives a shit? Um, yeah, 

Mike Crispin: you've gotta check it, you've gotta edit it just like anything else, right?

I mean, that's 

Nate McBride: the main I know, I mean, the main 

Mike Crispin: point, 

Nate McBride: it's just like, I, it always baffles me how if you go ahead and eliminate, say, a thousand [00:09:00] jobs because you can replace them with co code generators, uh, and you can make more of a thing. You haven't increased your customer base. All you've done is saved your operational expend.

So 

Mike Crispin: yeah, 

Nate McBride: you don't, you can't sell more of a things just because you built more of a thing. Um, if you're only equipped to sell one and you make a hundred, well, who gives a shit if you have nine, nine sitting on the shelf? 

Mike Crispin: I think what he, what he's saying is that, hey, I can, the actual initial code, code building components of creating an application will be largely automated and.

A developer will have to go in and tweak it at the end as opposed to have to write it from scratch. I think that's kind of what he's 

Nate McBride: Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: what he's saying. 

Nate McBride: It's funny to me that we're still talking about code when, you know, remember, was it 10 even 12 years ago, 15 years ago, we were talking about, um, mule and Informatica and how code would be never talked [00:10:00] about again.

We would just be plugging things together. Code was a thing of the past, but 

Mike Crispin: there was oriented architecture. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. And Boomie was like, oh my God, if you're not boomie, you're a shithead kind of stuff. Right? Like, um, we had this, this revolution, this middleware sort of zeitgeist effect end of code. 

Mike Crispin: But that wasn't the end of application development.

That was the end of code for integration. Right? I mean, I think that 

Nate McBride: Yeah, but it's the same. We're we're having the same exact zeitgeist effect, which is end of code. Just plug this shit to that shit and the code blocks will already be there for you to connect. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Okay. So what, 

Mike Crispin: well, I mean, I'm writing an application.

I've never written an application in my life and I've learned so much from it. I would never, I know, but. Before, 

Nate McBride: let's also, you're, you're creating sort of Denovo product if you have a company and York, were able to increase the efficiency of creation of more product. [00:11:00] You haven't created more customers.

It's still the same problem that goes back however many years. Uh, supply and demand doesn't matter if I make more of a thing. 

Mike Crispin: No, but I mean it ultimately it can add quality and you can do more with fewer people. And that's theory. That's where in you wanna get to In theory. 

Nate McBride: In theory, 

Mike Crispin: in theory. And I think some are already doing that.

You are already seeing smaller application development firms. You're seeing smaller startup companies, fewer developers, or even fewer, you know, and so, so let's, and they're, let's, they're rolling that over into marketing and into social. So they're hiring the same amount of people. They're not hiring fewer people.

Follow, 

Nate McBride: follow the thread, Mike, because you make, so what happens is you decommoditize a company into smaller companies, they all become very, very stealthy and fast to create new things that what happens is there's a, a glut in the market. Those companies then are reconsolidating back into single entities, which are then bought by larger entities.

And you just have this sort of cycle, it keeps going, [00:12:00] like, oh, hey, we need more smaller companies to be fast again. Um, and we see this in biotech all the time. Every single time that someone writes off 10 companies off their p and l to make these little individual startups for leftover assets, then they get consolidated again and spun out again.

And, um. No one's created a new model like you are from scratch white space doing a thing that's, that's new, that's wonderful. And that means that you need to be as efficient as you can on a go-to-market strategy for that development. But if I'm already existing as a company, I already have a product and I already have a process and all I'm trying to do is make that more efficient.

Even if I make more of a product. 

Mike Crispin: I, I think a little bit, that's where we're ex just sort of what, what I and some other people are probably doing, just dabbling in learning as much as they can. Um, I think there are a lot of companies just fuck it. Well, we write the product 'cause we can, and we can make it better from the [00:13:00] ground up.

And that's an option they would've never had before, right? Is, hey, I can, I can re, I can rebuild, I have technical debt and I have legacy, but I can throw this thing at the wall and try and build a completely new product and see what happens. Uh, that, that, that could help. Oh gee, I wish Microsoft could have done that 20 years ago.

It's just not, it's like, just throw that away. Build a new operating system. Um, no, that's what Apple did, right? I mean, they had a smaller customer base, but that's what I mean, like having the ability to start over. And I think some of the tools enable that. I, yeah. If you have an established product, maybe more of it is being able to do better code review or being able to squash bugs faster in an automated fashion.

A lot of things that it's being used for, whether it's just generative AI or it's separate sort of modular products that are being built. We'll see what happens. But it seems like there's a lot of, um, excitement [00:14:00] around it from some of the development community and, um, it's built. 

Nate McBride: Are you excited, Mike?

Mike Crispin: Yeah, yeah, sure. I, I'm learning so much stuff, man. I've never learned so much stuff so fast in a year. Um, so 

Nate McBride: lemme ask you a question, lemme ask you a question. This is, this is, uh, something I've seen on Substack a few times. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: If you started learning how to play an instrument tomorrow 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And you, you gave it five years.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: You would know how to play the instrument in five years. If you learned how to throw in how to paint tomorrow in 10 years, you'd be able to make good paintings. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: So why is it all of a sudden everyone is in such a rush to learn how to build code and platforms when nobody gives a shit about building anything else that's available to them.

I'm only asking this rhetorically, I'll tell you my, what my answer to the question is in a moment. But, um, why isn't anyone else in a rush to do anything else to build when they have all the available tools at their, at their hands? 

Mike Crispin: This is far easier [00:15:00] to learn from. You can ask. It's a two-way conversation.

You're not reading a book and having to decipher it and figure it out on your own. You can ask questions, you can get examples. Um, you know, initially I barely paid anything to do this. It's accessible. I don't need a 300, $3,000 computer to do it. Like I may have had to do that before to have a good IDE, um, accessibility, simplicity.

And it's all, it's all there and it actually helps me build it and then I can test it and go back and forth. Uh, still there are many people who learn to play piano and drums and other things. Sure. 'cause they have passion and they're interested in it. I think what what's happening now is maybe people are realizing that had ideas in the past, never had an opportunity, at least from a digital perspective to build anything.

Yeah. And they're putting their imagination and creative skill to it. And [00:16:00] it's hopefully gonna create some good things. Look, there's gonna be a lot of crap as we know. There is a ton of crap. But I think there's a whole new economy of small businesses that emerge with small little products. We would've laughed 10 years ago if we thought people would get rich off of YouTube.

I mean, we've got, or podcasts or anything. And the technology, the medium is accessible. It's just like any of those other things that the internet brought us. And it's just another evolution of that. But now it's just being able to build, read, write applications that can be deployed on any device with very little.

Very little overhead. Now it's just making sure you do it safely. And I think that's the next hurdle, is how people will build a lot of these applications and put themselves at liability risk. They didn't understand, you know, all the, all sorts of things. Oh yeah, I get my application, I'll put it up there and collect data, [00:17:00] and oh crap, I got hacked and now I'm getting sued.

You know, those are the things that maybe those one person companies don't, you know, be ready for. So look, I think, 

Nate McBride: I think, I think we've, I think we've been through this before. I just feel like I am reliving prior, oh, everyone learned how to write HTML 2.0. Good for you. Now all of a sudden we have 10 billing websites.

They're all shit with flash. And, um, 

Mike Crispin: there's a lot of crap. There's a lot of crap. But 

Nate McBride: anyway, yeah, 

Mike Crispin: there may be one, one in a million that changed the world and you wouldn't, would never have happened if 

Nate McBride: my, my, my, my favorite word for the last few months has been ification. Yeah. And the, the slop effect from Gen ai, which is allowing the super ification, that is a, a, a compound, um, denu, not denu ma compound, uh, port ment, but mm-hmm.

I love the fact that [00:18:00] so many people are generating so much shit. And my LinkedIn, I mean, I love reading some of these such shitty generated posts from, you know. Digital evangelists and pioneers of AI and AI natives. That stuff, 

Mike Crispin: God, LinkedIn drives me nuts. I can't, 

Nate McBride: can't, I just can't do it, man. I can't do it.

Mike Crispin: I love how many memes and stuff there are out there about, you know, about LinkedIn and all of the, you know, it's 

Nate McBride: such a joke. 

Mike Crispin: Pats in the back and, you know, look what I did. And it's, it's very, very old school Facebooky. 

Nate McBride: Like I managed to cook pasta tonight. It was awesome. Best pasta ever. Here's a picture and just start to over shit.

File LinkedIn. 

Mike Crispin: My my favorite are the of the little animated images. Whenever someone gets a new job or gets a new sort of, yeah, 

Nate McBride: yeah. 

Mike Crispin: It takes up like one quarter of the screen. [00:19:00] 

Nate McBride: That's right. I'm saying like, wouldn't be funny to add fake jobs. Like, uh, as of today, I'm now the, the CEO of bread. 

Mike Crispin: It's just a big advertising board.

Yeah. I mean, that's what it feels like. It's become, it's less of a collaborative community and more of a, you know, you know, look at me or I'm selling this and there's not like, I mean, there's not as much and maybe that's because that stuff is not as upfront anymore. Remember, remember the, I, they weren't great, but group groups were kind of a thing.

Uh, they were useful and they've, they just filled with ads and crap. 

Nate McBride: Nothing useful. 

Mike Crispin: It's nothing good. And, you know, we're gonna talk about chat tonight, right? And I think, so eventually, I think it's sort of like this, this battle going on between like synchronous and asynchronous communication and LinkedIn is asynchronous [00:20:00] and it could be like the, the center point for all of these conversations in a good way.

And it's so lost, it's so 

lost. 

Nate McBride: Well, on that note, welcome to the Calculus of IT podcast. This is episode seven. I'm Nate, I'm here with my, um, amazingly popular trans world, like Globally Famous Trance dj, uh, Mike Crispin. And thank you. 

Mike Crispin: I, I thank you for recognizing that there's been so many accolades. Uh, my 24 hour podcast is going on right now.

Nate McBride: He just got back from EDC, um, Uzbekistan and Yep. And played a three day set without, without stopping. I mean, I don't even know how you did that. I don't know how many methamphetamines you were able to ingest to unbelievable. Stay alive. Unbelievable. I'm, 

Mike Crispin: I'm, I'm still charged up from it right now. I am fired up.

Nate McBride: He's global. He's global, but he is local folks. Okay? So don't feel [00:21:00] like he's not, he's Massachusetts at heart. He's a boy from mass, but a man from the world. And he's, he's bringing his peace, love, and trance to, to all humankind. This episode is brought to you by, by Matches. You know what's great about matches?

I mean, 

Mike Crispin: they, they burn 

Nate McBride: the good people at matches. Gave me some copy to read, but I'm just gonna be honest with you. I'm gonna straight speak straight from the heart. If I didn't have this match, I couldn't light things. And boy, to me, to me, lighting something like this is, well, it's instrumental. Um, but if I just had a match and it was just sitting here in my hand and I couldn't light anything, well, it would still be more useful than not having a match.

And that's, I guess my whole point is that having a match is better than not having a match that's, that's matches for you. [00:22:00] 

Mike Crispin: It's great. You can see, you can light candles, you can burn your hand. There's so many things 

Nate McBride: you 

Mike Crispin: can do, 

Nate McBride: so many things you can do and matches. You know, they're not, they're not forever, they're finite, right?

You can, you can measure a heartbeat, you can measure the love of a human being in periods of time. You can measure a match in its brevity. It's a tragic end. It's tragic. 

Mike Crispin: It's 

Nate McBride: tragic. What it, it brings you all this power. And what do you do, Willie? What do you do? You shake it until it dies. 

Mike Crispin: Strangle 

Nate McBride: it. I 

Mike Crispin: like lighting a match for the smell is really the, 

Nate McBride: yeah.

Mike Crispin: To kill some other smell is 

Nate McBride: always to kill some other smells. Like, like match matches. Not only of course bring light and bring flame. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: They bring a special bouquet, uh, a fragrance, 

Mike Crispin: a special toasty [00:23:00] smell. 

Nate McBride: It's a toasty, it's almost buttery. It's like a, it's a buttery woody, heady. I don't know. Almost like a, you're almost like you're in the forest in Patagonia smell.

Um, to any occasion. 

Mike Crispin: I, I love, like, uh, I got a, it hasn't come yet, but I love these candles that smell like firewood. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: They're the best, 

Nate McBride: isn't it? And it's ironic. It's ironic because you're using fire to light something that's not firewood to evoke the sense of firewood. I mean, what's more poetic than that?

Mike Crispin: It's like a soy, soy based candle or something. I don't know. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. But therein lies the irony of man. So once again, to the good people, it matches. We fucking love you and you bring, you bring joy in unimaginable ways and, and you, your odor of killing [00:24:00] powers. Fantastic, fantastic. So, and the fact is, like the thing about the match evil, they make so many, you never have to go very far.

Like what? Okay. When was the last time you needed um, uh, a can of gas? You had to go to the gas station. You had to have a can. You had to go through the whole process, right? What a pain in the ass. Yeah. You need matches though. You open a drawer. I'm done. My fucking case is Point is approved. Great 

Mike Crispin: advertising platform as well.

Nate McBride: Yeah. Oh yeah. By the way, like go to like your favorite club in downtown Boston, uh, and get, get matches. And then the next morning you're like, where was I last night? Oh, let me look in my pocket. There's where I was. 

Mike Crispin: Very good reminder. 

Nate McBride: Better than your phone. 

Mike Crispin: It is 

Nate McBride: right? 

Mike Crispin: It's analog. 

Nate McBride: It's analog. 

Mike Crispin: Feels [00:25:00] good.

Nate McBride: It's, I wouldn't say it's waterproof, but it is pretty resilient. Like you can get these pretty wet. They still work. I know. I know. They're 

Mike Crispin: very, very nice. Matches are very nice. We like them. 

Nate McBride: Now I will say if I had to give some feedback to the good people matches, it would be. Wind resistance. It's a, it's kind of a problem.

But you know what, we've, we've got ways to handle it, but there's no instructions. Like you open the matchbook and you're like, where's the instructions? I dunno what to do. And the very first time I remember, I remember using a match the first time. I didn't know what to do. I was like striking it everywhere, like in my face and in my ankle and stuff.

And it wasn't doing anything. And then a very wise person said, put it on that little strip and it will make fire. And I was, I mean, I forever changed. 

Mike Crispin: Now do you just rub it across the strip really fast or do you fold the, the paper part back and, and trap the match between the strip and the, and the back of the cover, the matching?

Nate McBride: [00:26:00] That's a great question. So, so it was years before I would learned the, the back flip match light. But once I learned that skill, I learned that there are times you need a match. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And there were times you need the, the back flip light and That's right. Um, not to confuse the two. Right. So I became kind of a pro, I became kind of a pro at it.

I would just, you know, again from a feedback perspective, solve the win problem. And how about like an FAQ on the website with some basic directions. I mean, just to help people that don't know what to do with it would be great. 

Mike Crispin: Thank you. Matches you so 

Nate McBride: much, I think are gonna beat the lighter industry. So like lighters, I don't know if I would have them be a sponsor.

There's too many things to touch and there's too much going on. 

Mike Crispin: Too much machinery, just like the basic 

Nate McBride: machinery. And then they, they, they haven't solved the wind problem either. What the fuck? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, it's, yeah, I guess you're right. Do you like the match was gonna like [00:27:00] paper or the, or the wooden matchstick type things?

Nate McBride: E either one. Although I think wooden matchsticks were kind of like the older school matchstick. I think if I was in developing matchstick, it would have you, you would, you would take outta the package and it would have a wind guard went all the way around it. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: And then you would 

Mike Crispin: good LG invention.

That's a, that would be one that LD would come up with. 

Nate McBride: So, so thanks to the matches people and they're sponsoring episode seven, which is what has become a chat. Um, I'll tell you that the very first time I ever used chat, and I remember clearly I was in the n computer lab at Conn College. I was a freshman, this was 1992.

I was doing work study. So I was effectively a lab manager only 'cause I knew how to do computers, you know, the whole thing. And I very quickly became, [00:28:00] uh, cognizant of this app that was on this sort of like manager's mac, and it was called Telnet. I'm like, what the fuck does this thing do? So I'd never seen Telnet before.

I double click on Telnet. It says address and port and username. I was like, well, shit, I dunno what to do with this. And I didn't know what to do. So I went to somebody who was a senior at the time in the computer group and I asked him, he is like, oh, you type in iska bbbs.com and you type in the this address and you type in this username and it was like, guest or something, and you get in.

I was like, great, cool. I did it and all of a sudden this world opened up in front of me. Welcome to the Iska BBS, here's all these channels, all these things. I'm like, well, holy shit. So I read and read and read and I can create an account. I have to actually send a copy of my driver's license to [00:29:00] the Iowa student computer situation, BBS administrator.

A week later I get a, a ping. My accounts not approved. 

Trance Bot: Nice. 

Nate McBride: Now I member of the Iska BS and this is 1992 again. 

Okay. 

Nate McBride: And the first thing you do in Iska BS, they had hundreds of channels. You could be in a channel posting about, you know, whatever, like top 10 song lyrics or best serials or whatever the top 10 was, or, you know, whatever.

But you could also chat with people. Yep. And all you have to do is get their, their name from a channel and then you could ping them. And you would then hit the M button, our message and the screen was split in half. So the bottom half would be you, the top half would be them. And you would just start typing.

And it wasn't so much real time, although it kind of was uh, it was you type, I type back and forth, but really fast. [00:30:00] 

Trance Bot: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And I remember when I discovered this, and again all very, very clearly, I lost months in that computer lab because I met people electronic. And then I discovered that there were other BBSs all around the country.

'cause there was a channel of them. There were BBSs in New England, Holyoke College, Mount Holyoke had a BBS chat board. I went to Conn College. So I was like, Hey, what's going on? Uh, and not to be crude, but I could talk to women. I chat 

Mike Crispin: crude. That's so crude. 

Nate McBride: I know. And, but it was cool. 

Mike Crispin: Did you make it crude Nate?

Did you make it crude? 

Nate McBride: It wasn't crude like that. It was like, Hey, what are you doing tonight? Oh, studying. Oh my God. Cool. So am I. We didn't have emojis yet. They hadn't been developed. It wouldn't be till my junior year. [00:31:00] I was like, oh my God. Cool. What are you doing this weekend? You know, while we're having a party.

Okay, great. I'll drive over. We would drive to Holyoke for these parties that were organized over chat.

It was fun. It was fun as shit. You wanted to wake up in the morning. The first thing I did was I go to computer lab, log in, see what new messages I had add to some channels. Eventually I became a moderator of channels. 

Mike Crispin: You were a mod. 

Nate McBride: Which was, which was awesome, right? Being a mod 

Mike Crispin: kick people out. 

Nate McBride: I was am mod, to give you context, so I, the next three years at Kahan, I was a mod of multiple channels on the Iska BSI graduated Kahan and I was living in Rhode Island for the summer after Kahan.

I still kept going to Brown University every single day 'cause they had a computer lab that they didn't, they were very lax and checking badges for, and I was sitting in the computer lab all day for eight, maybe 10 hours on the [00:32:00] BBS. That was my introduction to chat and I was eventually kicked outta there and not, not allowed back in the lab.

And my relationship died. You know, over time the Iska BS still exists. 

Mike Crispin: Nice. Mine was Argus Argus in 91, 92 and it was actually, I found out later that it was hosted in Burlington of all places, Burlington, Massachusetts. And that was, uh, dialed into that thing, me and my friends who had modems and got into it and.

Yeah, great. Had the chat room, chat bulletin boards. But by the time I was in school in the, geez, late nineties, we had a computer lab. And what I learned then, what surprised me 'cause I was familiar with Windows, is that hundreds of people could be signed into the same [00:33:00] computer at once. That was my introduction to Unix and I was like, holy crap, I'm hooked.

So in Unix you can use the command finger and get a list of everybody 

Nate McBride: finger. Yes. 

Mike Crispin: Right. And then you could use talk, and then you could put the, the name of the username in and it would pop in and it would create a talk window and you could write back and forth. And then there was a VAX system, which were, the student information system lived and they had a tool called phone, which was similar.

So yeah, all all on the kinda little terminal window, just like the BBSs ran, you know, and that was, uh, it was great. You can, like you said, connecting with people in different schools, different places and files uploaded, and you'd wait a week for a photo to download, you know, it's crazy, man. But [00:34:00] it was, that was the, the first, that was even prior to really using.

Email. I think it, for me anyway, it was, I was on there. 

Nate McBride: I didn't, I had email my freshman year. 

Mike Crispin: I don't, 

Nate McBride: we all did. Yeah. So 1992 I was given an email account. It was the first year that Con had email and it was N-P-M-C-B, Nathan Patrick McBride. So first, first name, first initial of middle name, and then first few of your last name.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And this, this was how you were identified for intra uh, school chat. 'cause you could chat with anybody, professors or whoever, but this is also your email address at con call the edu. And that's how you logged into Telnet and how you did all these sort of your work. And not many people knew it. Like I taught my then girlfriend, now wife, Sarah, how to log into her account.

And we would chat all the time across dorms and she'd always had her window open. And I had my window open too for chatting. But yeah, the BBS [00:35:00] was always open in a second window and we had local talk until my, uh, junior year we switched to, um, no, my senior year we switched to ethernet. We was a local talk until then.

And uh, yeah, it just worked. And it was a quick way to organize parties. It was, and it was like, I wouldn't say the original Facebook, but it was a quick way to organize things like, Hey, who's doing this? Who's doing that? Oh, go over to your neighbor's door, knock on it, see if he's got beer, that kind of thing.

So it was very nice way across campus to do this kind of work. Now we have, I don't wanna fast forward to today 'cause I don't wanna skip over the middle part, but lemme go back to this real quick. 

Mike Crispin: Have you used Bit Chatt yet? It's on, I have not. It's, it's basically that it's local chat and it works all in your, in your proximity or your network.

So if you're all sitting in a dorm, I've read [00:36:00] some people started to use this, it does not require an inter internet access. So it uses the Bluetooth and ultra wideband and NFC on your device and it creates a, a local area. And anybody will, if they have Bit Chat open, will show up on there. So if you're at a stadium, for example, watching a game, you could open Bit chat and see pretty much anybody who's local.

It 

Nate McBride: sounds like a, a troll and, um, terrible person's paradise. I mean, I think you need moderation. We remember like, so we, we both used IRCI used IRC 'cause I learned about it from isca and IRC gave me access to like, oh my God, I can't believe they're talking about this kind of stuff. Yep. I remember a sort of, uh, what was it called?

It was the, um, what was the, the, the secret book everyone had to have about building bombs back in like the early nineties. It was the, uh, [00:37:00] something manifesto, what was it called? It was the, uh. Shit.

Trance Bot: Winkys Manifesto? 

Nate McBride: No. Um,

it was, oh man,

the Anarchist Cookbook. 

Mike Crispin: Oh 

Nate McBride: yes, that was what it was called, the Anarchist Cookbook. Anyway, you could, um, get that on IRC. You get like the Satan books, the Satanist handbook, you get all these things on IRC and I was like, this is the [00:38:00] coolest shit ever. You could just post whatever there would be huge, huge channels.

People writing stories and fan fiction and a lot of porn, but written porn and a lot of things about, um, people just being like frontier level weird shit. And it was super cool. Um, yeah. Where, where there was a meetup for like, at this time, uh, 2,600 was still sort of a fledgling, it is hard to get but 2,600 at IRC and you could figure out where to go for the next 2,600 meeting.

Um, and I went to a few of those early meetings too and that was really awesome. I was just like, you guys are so much smarter than me. I'm just gonna be a dork in the corner. No idea what you're talking about. But, um, that's where we started. Then we went to, so IRC

AOL Instant Messenger came out, let's see, I was using that in [00:39:00] 95. 95 for aim. Hold on.

Uh, 97. Oh, okay. So I was using AIM I the year after I graduated 'cause my wife was still a senior. That's when I got my first A OL cd and I started using Aim the Chat with her over that. And then after AIM came, MSN Messenger, right? Was next, is there a Wikipedia page about this? Hold on. Let's not just guess.

Oh yes. Here we go. Okay. No need to fucking guess. Let's go through this. So IRC was 88. Oh, ICQ was 96. Yes. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Iic QI was 

Mike Crispin: That's, you had a number on that one [00:40:00] too. 

Nate McBride: Yes. ICQ had a number then aim then Yahoo Messenger was 98. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: So I used, I used Yahoo Messenger only to have the account. I don't remember what I used it for.

Um, but then in 99, MSN Messenger came out. I just started at, uh, AMAG that summer. 

Mike Crispin: TKT, 

Nate McBride: no, sorry, TKT that summer. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And we were not using it. We were using other things, but I had just come off of first class. So the previous years I've been using the first class platform at the schools I was teaching at.

And first class had its own built in chat platform, um, which was awesome. But then 2003 came xFi. Ooh, I remember that. Just briefly. WhatsApp 99, kick 2010. This is very, very summarized. What about the other ones? Let's see.

Excite. 

Mike Crispin: Oh yeah. [00:41:00] Yep. 

Nate McBride: Net meeting. Net 

Mike Crispin: meeting. 

Nate McBride: The first zoom of the 

Mike Crispin: Microsoft. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Um,

Lotus, same time. Oh my God. This is fucking awesome. Hold on, I gotta go back a second.

All right. Here they are in order. Blackberry had BBM. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. Remember that?

Nate McBride: Odigo from Converse, windows Messenger. MSN iChat came out in 2002. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. That was using Jabber, right? 

Nate McBride: Yes. [00:42:00] Skype 20 2003, which was effectively at the time, the best way to talk overseas. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: For free. Um, 

Mike Crispin: I remember when that kid, how blown away we were by how it just, you could use that to connect with people and, uh, over voice at no cost.

And we're like, oh, the phone companies are gonna be shut down. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Well, Google then came after Blackberry came out, BBM, Google came out with Gizmo Five and Meebo at the same time. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Meebo would then go on to become Google Chat. I'm not mistaken. You have, uh, MySpace. I am MySpace. 2006 of course came out.

Uh. Communicator. That's what it was called. Microsoft Office Communicator. 2007. 

Trance Bot: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Which lasted three years. Atlas came out with Hip Chat in [00:43:00] 2009. I remember. Hip chat. Microsoft Link, LYNC. It was 2010. I don't remember ever using that. Uh, message me from Yahoo. Sure. Spot Google Hangouts matured in 2013. Fire Chat.

Skype. Skype for Business. Yahoo. Google, aloe. Remember Aloe? 

Mike Crispin: Yep. Um, they just returned that like the last year. 

Nate McBride: 2019 was all was retired. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, it was? I thought they, they were still bouncing around. 

Nate McBride: Microsoft had Kaizala. Jesus Christ. 

Mike Crispin: So there were a ton of IM platforms. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. I mean, oh my God. Look at this list.

Discord Element. Kick Lark, Mattermost. Oh, Mattermost. [00:44:00] 

Mike Crispin: Mattermost is still alive. 

Nate McBride: It is. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. It's open source. 

Nate McBride: Nice. A 

Mike Crispin: lot of security firms, cybersecurity firms use that. 

Nate McBride: Trillion Viber, WeChat, WhatsApp, Wicker. Um, 

Mike Crispin: huge. 

Nate McBride: Wow. Anyway. Anyway, okay. So all the things we went through, all this shit eventually made its way into the enterprise.

What would you say is the first Enterprise chat introduction event? 

Mike Crispin: Oh boy. 

Nate McBride: That, and I'm talking, I'm not talking about like, like, uh, office. 

Mike Crispin: Office Communicator was probably the one that I know. Yeah. I remember being Enterprise first. 

Nate McBride: Where, where, where were we when that happened? 

Mike Crispin: That was A TKT. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Yep.

We were slow to adopt it. Yeah. But we had it, um, we had it at Cuba. 

Nate McBride: I think [00:45:00] the majority of my chat with people at TKT up until 2005 was over the Blackberry. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. On 

Nate McBride: B-B-M-B-B-M, we were not using a desktop client. We were using, we were actually take that back. I was using Adio, but mostly I think for external, but internally, 

Mike Crispin: yeah.

We, we, 

Nate McBride: you might have been on my, on my adm, but 

Mike Crispin: we, we were on, uh, a IM together. 

Nate McBride: We were on a IM Yeah. But we didn't have a corporate client. We were using it personally. 

Mike Crispin: No, it, yeah. A lot of people were, it was like, just, I remember, it's funny. Mm-hmm. That stuff, uh. We did, we used, ICQ was bouncing around there too.

Nate McBride: ICQ hotline, which was a hotline, was the first, my favorite first hybrid chat file share client that worked the way it did. I mean, it was pre BitTorrent. [00:46:00] Um, it was just an ideal situation. 

Trance Bot: It was 

Nate McBride: awesome. Oh man, hotline. Gotta bring that back. Uh, so chat was supposed to reduce email. I think the original point about bringing it to the company was reducing the email point, right?

Like you didn't need to have email and chat. 

Trance Bot: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: We were gonna, we were gonna go this way. And I think that like for a long time, maybe it was like the mid, like the early 2000 OTs and up to 2010 there was this, some companies that were actually going all chat only, they weren't doing email anymore. I'm trying to think of, uh, there's a shoe company, Zappos maybe.

Was it somebody went all, all chat only, but that might have been early in the teens. That might have, might have been a little bit later. 

Trance Bot: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: But like all Slack only or only only chat. No more email in the company. 

Mike Crispin: Well, I think people are trying to curb email, like email [00:47:00] etiquette programs and don't send an email unless you have to.

And here's how you write a better email and. Trying to reduce the amount of noise. So what do we do? We, we go and put Im in instead. 

Nate McBride: Right? 

Mike Crispin: It's like, let's just create more noise and less signal and that. That'll do it. It's, it's, it's different. It's new expectation is that you'll respond faster. Faster, right?

Trance Bot: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Oh man. Yeah. In hindsight it was a bit silly, but it was what people were using outside of work too. So it was kinda like, oh, text messages were starting to become free in the US and were just part of your plan. And that became more popular. 

Nate McBride: But there was a point in time when you, when you could use a single platform to connect both external and internal.

And if it wasn't free, it was basically, you know, [00:48:00] shareware or something. But I remember adding, I paid for it. It cost nothing but allowed me talk to people outside the company and people inside the company at the same time. Nowadays you can, like with Slack, you can still invite external people into your environment, but it's much more administratively controlled with a Adio, there was no central home.

You just invite people in and you chatted to them regardless of their, and with ADM it made it even easier. It doesn't matter what you used. I was gonna chat with you, right. We don't. Do we have anything like that today where you can have, where I can set up an account and chat with anybody from any platform in one place.

Mike Crispin: They, they have tools, but they're just so, they're just not popular. And they try and pull together all the protocols, but they're missing features. And now there's all sorts. I mean, rightfully so, you're concerned about, okay, where's my chat going? Is it, is it secured? I mean, it's going through some middleman that's, that's connecting all my accounts.

[00:49:00] So I think now it's, and, and everyone's on, you know, iMessage or, you know, whatever. So it's very much the, the capabilities that are wrapped around the chat is what brings people into the different tools. That's why there's so many of them, because they do so they do like little ancillary things on the side that hook you in.

Yeah. And that's, you know, we talk about the, the sort of verification economy almost being a new thing. Right? And, and reality is that since we've implemented Slack and teams and so many companies, people are verifying stuff all the time. They've gotta go back and find that thread, go back and find that chat.

Um, and I think in, in that context, the asynchronous communication still wins because it's been. It's where everyone hoards everything. Yeah. Chat messages are getting harder to find the context of the [00:50:00] conversation. If it goes off the top of the screen, one of the, I use the page two of Google comparison.

You know, once this, the chat's gone off the top of the screen, you might as well um, kind of forget about it because no one's gonna see it. So it's like how that's the, the, it's interesting like how we're kind of coming back to some of this and now more and more AI crap being thrown at you. And so it's almost reversing back into, uh, you know, curate this info for me and put the stuff I need to see in front of me.

And I don't care if chat or an email or it's like, just digest it for me. Gimme a digest. And I think that's emerging gonna emerge more and more as we throw more and more stuff into the blender here. 

Nate McBride: I agree. I don't think we need to, I think, uh, universally we can agree what chat means, but chat is a synchronous by design, [00:51:00] but it's used asynchronously.

So you have to take a synchronous platform like chat use asynchronously, and you're going to get like weird hybrid behavior shit that's going on. I mean a voice video call. Is truly synchronous like that. Let's use that as our baseline for what synchronous means. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Like when should you escalate from a chat to a call?

That's a great question. Like I ask people all the time. Yeah. They're chatting with me and to a degree we're synchronous, but I'm like, well, let's huddle, let's see Slack. I'm like, let's quickly huddle to make it even more synchronous. 'cause there's too much delay. Okay. I send you a note, you wait a minute, you send it back to me.

So it's not behaving in a synchronous way. I would like it to behave. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna escalate it to the final synchronous level. 

Mike Crispin: It's in the, in the expectation of I, how I sort of define it. I mean, if I send you an email, I don't respe, uh, I do not expect a response right back.

But if I send you an [00:52:00] instant message, I hope you get me back. Get back to me in the next 25, 30 minutes. I mean 25 minutes. 

Nate McBride: If not, 

Mike Crispin: yeah, just, I mean that's now, today when we started, I gave you, 

Nate McBride: I gave you four minutes 

Mike Crispin: when we started with this, it was kinda like, you know, like instant, you, you're supposed to write back right away.

You know, why aren't you writing back to me? Do you not like me anymore? You know, like people I know freaking out about it. Right now it's more, like you said, it's sometimes asynchronous. We drop some like the Slack channel, like someone posts something and gets back to it when we can. And that's expected behavior.

And that's, I think you're gonna, moving back to this, if, if. If it's okay for someone to send a slack message now and for someone to get back on it in an hour or longer, then it, it loses something of its char uh, charm. If it's not threaded because their value, because it's gonna disappear quickly. People are gonna [00:53:00] miss it.

Sure. And I think that's the challenge that we have. You get discord, like if you take outside the enterprise room, you discord, which is constant firing back and forth, you know, a lot of, yeah. Even the extent where you can slow down the roll. It's like only let 15 messages through a minute so I can read everything.

Um, you know, they can well for, but then on, if you look at any of the, you know, if you even take what we were just looking at on LinkedIn for example, you know, the expectation is not that you're gonna respond to anything that's posted there maybe ever, but, but, um, that you're gonna res, someone's gonna respond or see it and the community is larger.

So it's the only way it can scale is if the expectation well is not instant. Well, what 

Nate McBride: I do is I wait until I have about a hundred messages or so in LinkedIn. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And then I'll go through, get everyone a thumbs up all the with messages, thumbs up the whole [00:54:00] way up. Right. Because it's the little button you can push and I don't respond.

I just give everyone a thumbs up the whole way up the chain. Next thing I log in, 

Mike Crispin: AI browser. 

Nate McBride: Exactly. Just 

Mike Crispin: like everyone on my, just do it every, every morning, 

Nate McBride: like every comment. Um, by the way, I'll mention that when you, when you slacked me at 6, 6 50 3:00 PM I waited until exactly 30 minutes later to respond to you.

Mike Crispin: You did 

Nate McBride: At 7:23 PM Exactly. 30 minutes later. Because I knew your threshold was 30 minutes. Now, when I sent you a message earlier at 3 28 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: To see if you were good to go. Sorry. Uh, I threw that back at three 10. Yep. And you responded 18 minutes later with Yes. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: I was, I was already writing death threats for you.

Mike Crispin: You, you were upset. I, it looks like I, uh, 

Nate McBride: you waited [00:55:00] 18 minutes to respond to me. 

Mike Crispin: I did. 

Nate McBride: And then, then you rapid fired me to like, make up for it. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And so then I responded right back within a millisecond. Took you another minute to respond to me on that. 

Mike Crispin: That's right. 

Nate McBride: So, so, but then you mentioned the water boys and so I was like, okay.

And once again, you faced the jaws of death and you knew what to say at the right moment to pull yourself back from the abyss. 

Mike Crispin: I'm a master, I'm a master of hybrid. 

Nate McBride: I knew your threshold. I waited 30 minutes because I knew that was precisely what you wanted. Not a minute more. I responded back. 

Mike Crispin: That's very good.

Nate McBride: But you're on notice, Michael. Four minutes. 

Mike Crispin: So here, here's, here's the thing that's, you were asking about the chat client that brings all these things together. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: And that is, I mean, that is what Blackberry had figured out, [00:56:00] the universal inbox. Yeah. And I, it just blows my mind that nobody has figured that out because frankly, I miss a ton of shit.

There's no way that CRE instant message that comes in, I think the best, the best 

Nate McBride: Blackberry had three icons right? In your inbox. Yeah. You had a message icon, an email icon and kind everything was 

Mike Crispin: icon, that work list? 

Nate McBride: It was just one list. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. That was it. So that was, yeah, I, 

Nate McBride: that shit, 

Mike Crispin: I, 

Nate McBride: I was super productive.

Mike Crispin: That's become the notification pane, you know, on the iPhone or on Android. It's just like the, the pull down from the top and you see everything. The difference is that the interface changes once you push, once you push one of those notifications, it doesn't go into the, this unified back and forth messaging, oh, it's gonna open an app.

Right. So, 

Nate McBride: you know, the best part about BBM was [00:57:00] my favorite part was I'd have my phone on my desk and then all of a sudden the little red light would start blinking. That a new message is waiting for me and I would get that adrenaline rush. You know, that endorphin like blow up. I'd flip it open and I'd be like, from Mike, yo.

I'd be like, fuck yeah, Mike sent me a yo 

Mike Crispin: LFG. 

Nate McBride: I'd be like, yo, what's up? You'd be like, okay, Asgard, 2:00 PM I'm like, I'm in. We would go. 

Mike Crispin: I remember that 

Nate McBride: that red light was everything. It was a life changing light. 

Mike Crispin: I remember the Austin Grill too. I mean, that place was like, what that, where am I working? This is amazing.

Nate McBride: We weren't working there. There was no need for us. We were just kind of like ancillary to say like we solved, like there were like four executives that were [00:58:00] idiots and we had to solve their problems. Everyone else was fine. 

Mike Crispin: We were totally like, uh, the z, the Steve Zsu crew. That's 

Nate McBride: right. 

Mike Crispin: We're a pack of strays.

Don't you get it? I'm not even that strong a swimmer.

Nate McBride: So you, all right, so let's talk about the time domain part because that's, I find it interesting in our norms and I think a lot of it has to do with when we were born, how we started using technology because uh, I can DM either of my kids, I've been in here back for days. I'm talking days, and that's fine by them.

Oh, dad, I, I saw, I saw your text or I saw your chat. What's up? I was like, I solved the problem four days ago. I don't need you anymore. Like, what was the problem? Okay, cool. Well just ping me back if you need something. Meanwhile, in our day, if I had sent you a [00:59:00] text on like a Monday morning, Mike Yeah. And you hadn't responded till Friday, we probably would've had a problem.

We probably would've had words to use a, to use a phrase. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: We probably would've had some words together. So like from an expectations perspective, let's talk about Slack. Okay. We're both Slack companies. I, I toyed with this idea last year, but a, not a policy so much, but as a document about response time expectations, should there be something that you have in your profile name, where your profile preferences, like I can, you can add this as a field in Slack.

You can add in like the extra fields, like how long people should expect to hear back from you. I was thinking about putting that into your, your Slack preferences profile or, or like a, like a channel hygiene effect. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: It's like when to create a new channel versus use a existing one. 

Mike Crispin: You're gonna [01:00:00] put rules, more rules around Slack.

Nate McBride: I'm just, I'm just throwing these out there like, no, no. I don't want rules. I'm saying like, if I am gonna chat with Mike, wouldn't it be better if Mike had a banner that said one week? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: You know, or Nate had a banner that said two hours. Who people are more likely to chat with. 

Mike Crispin: It's a cool thing that exists in a lot of chat programs that unfortunately I don't think Slack does very well.

It's called presence. I don't understand why it's not as out front, but like you could just put in your profile. Like, I'm not, I'm not here right now, but everyone needs to sync with their calendar and all this other crap. It's like, no, just go up to the status and type in there that you're going to take a dump and you'll be back in 15 minutes and that's it.

And then people [01:01:00] won't expect a response from you. 

Nate McBride: Why not? You get wifi in the bathroom. I mean, what the fuck, Mike? 

Mike Crispin: It's a big deal. Well, you'd want to, maybe you wanna play some, you know, orna paint brush or whatever, you know? Yeah. And uh, but anyway, so I think that's something that's underutilized and like.

A lot of places because they've, they're so bent, uh, they're so built into the Microsoft A, it's gonna auto update my profile when I'm busy. Uh, and people are gonna know I'm away or I'm out of the office. Whereas, uh, slack really wants a user to choose to do that. People don't do it. They do not do it. And it's not that they don't know how, it's an extra step they didn't have to do before.

So they, they're like, yeah, whatever. 

Nate McBride: What, alright, so, 

Mike Crispin: oh, 

Nate McBride: here's a, here's a controversial way of thinking. Um, after hours, [01:02:00] after hours chat. So, 

Mike Crispin: sounds great. 

Nate McBride: No after hours chat, Mike, after 7:00 PM you are not allowed to chat me. 

Mike Crispin: I can't chat you. 

Nate McBride: You can't chat me. 

Mike Crispin: Ah, shit. That's too bad. 

Nate McBride: And you can't chat me again until 9:00 AM I'm un ChatAble.

Mike Crispin: We, we set that up. I think it's after eight. It it, it puts everyone on silent mode. 

Nate McBride: Really? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. Do not disturb. We set it for the whole company. 

Nate McBride: Well, we, we, I, I'm right now looking at my list of people that are employees that are on my DM list. You know, for recent dms, half of them are green and it's what, eight 40?

I wonder if I just started chatting people like, Hey, what's up? They're like, what? What do you need? I'm like, nothing. Just saying hi. What's going on? Nobody can have a a, a [01:03:00] friendly convo. When was the last time, Mike, that? Well, you and I chat and goof around, but you chatted with somebody and just for like, Hey, what's up?

Mike Crispin: Just gotta get the whole company on Snapchat. That'll be, that'll be great. You know, put it on your own phone. Put it on your own device. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Here's a picture of me this weekend. Oh, it's gonna be, it's gonna be disappear in 10 seconds. 

Mike Crispin: It's, uh, 

Nate McBride: so yeah, the, the whole do not disturb thing. So there are people that on here that have changed their little tiny, uh, emoji thingy to do not disturb, which means nothing.

Um, like FOMO effect is extraordinary when it comes to chat. People are like, yeah, yeah. I tell people in training. Yeah, I know you should mute the channel. What happens? You mute it. [01:04:00] Well, it goes to the bottom of your list and it's grayed out, but things are still going on in there, but, well, how do you know?

I said, well, you don't, you have to go open the channel and read it. So nobody mutes anything. Nobody wants to miss that incredible. Avatar that Mike generated about himself and put on a post. So if they, if they had it muted, they wouldn't see that. 

Mike Crispin: That's right. 

Nate McBride: So FOMO is a big one. And then there's a, of course, the flip side to fomo, which is that, you know, you have the always on toxic effect.

Um, but one thing that I was thinking about in the, on the drive home today was what about like, performance related issues in terms of chat? Yeah. I noticed you're never, I noticed you're never on Slack. I noticed you're never chatting or contributing [01:05:00] in the channels. I noticed you're never giving people thumbs up.

Um, who's this? No, no. I'm you, Mike. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, 

Nate McBride: me. I'm saying, and, and, and in your, in your performance review this year, I'm just, I have some notes here that people generally tend to find you not participating in the chat. 

Mike Crispin: Oh. 

Nate McBride: And not available on chat. So I'm a little concerned that you're not of, I 

Mike Crispin: would've like the wrong thing and get in trouble.

Nate McBride: I'm concerned you don't have enough flare, you don't have 37 pieces of flare. 

Mike Crispin: I don't wanna get in any trouble. I don't want to say the wrong thing. I know everyone. 

Nate McBride: You what? I'm, you're not contributing to the culture. The fuck's wrong with you. 

Mike Crispin: I know. 

Nate McBride: Why do you hate the company? 

Mike Crispin: Is it, do you have these conversations with, uh, your people?

Nate McBride: I'm asking you right now, why do you hate the company? 

Mike Crispin: I love the company. 

Nate McBride: Then why don't you contribute? 

Mike Crispin: I'm just very introverted. That's all I, I need to kind of take 

Nate McBride: my, yeah, but this is a, this is a platform designed to make you [01:06:00] extroverted. 

Mike Crispin: But I like to write emails. 

Nate McBride: We don't. No, it's unacceptable. 

Mike Crispin: We don't use emails.

I I'm gonna send email instead. 'cause then I know everyone will get it. And, uh, you don't have to respond. I just, 

Nate McBride: I think among the other 

Mike Crispin: disruptive, I feel good about it when I send it to everyone. 

Nate McBride: Well, I think among the other disruptive things that we should do, if you were gonna contribute to continue to add to our list would be to do for one month only.

Shut off chat, shut off Slack. Like, yeah, like log out, be unavailable, and only communicate via email. And people started slacking you. They're like, Hey, I sent you a note this morning and then again this afternoon and tonight we didn't respond, so I'm stopping by your office. Oh. And you're like, oh, I didn't get the email.

Mike Crispin: I like the idea what we were talking about last week, which is you just create a Google doc and you send it to 'em and say, I just want to have a separate space for us to [01:07:00] chat. And you send 'em a Google doc or a, a collaborative Word document. Say, let's, let's just chat here if you're okay. I'm 

Nate McBride: just gonna chat here.

Not Slack or email only here. 

Mike Crispin: Only here. We're gonna start chatting within documents. It feels right. We can use all sorts of different formatting. We can insert images. 

Nate McBride: Yep. 

Mike Crispin: Um, and we can use track changes afterwards if we want. 

Nate McBride: Sure, sure. 

Mike Crispin: That's a good idea. Right? I 

Nate McBride: think it's a great idea. So not even email or chat.

You're talking about a meta chat? 

Mike Crispin: Yes. A collaborative canvas in which we can communicate with each other. 

Nate McBride: What's it called? It's called, um, hold on, don't tell me the name. I have it right here. It's the, it's the, no, not the verification vigilantes. It's the, um, 

Mike Crispin: the Chief Truth Officer. 

Nate McBride: The Chief [01:08:00] Truth Officer.

No, it's the dream. 

Mike Crispin: Dream stater. 

Nate McBride: Dream stream. 

Mike Crispin: The dream stream. 

Nate McBride: Yes. 

Mike Crispin: That's right, man. 

Nate McBride: So what you need do, Mike, is create a document. You create a box note called Mike's Dream Stream and invite. 

Mike Crispin: Absolutely. It's the only way to go, man. This is the way to go 

Nate McBride: so seriously. If, if, if, if Chad is a synchronous tool that then gets morphed into asynchronous tool, you could theoretically use anything that allows for two people to type words and you would achieve the same exact effect.

Mike Crispin: Correct. I think 

Nate McBride: you need a channel. Create a new document and invite those people to it. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: A new channel 

Mike Crispin: or, or you have a, I mean, you have a, a platform in which you, it's just so nineties in early two thousands. Like you have a platform in which [01:09:00] there's a space where people post stuff, 

Nate McBride: blame it on the 

Mike Crispin: rain, and then there's a little place where they can chat.

It's so innovative. I'm telling you. Like you, you post things and they come down in front of you. You can see them on your feet page. And then in the bottom right hand corner there's a little chat window that pops up. It could be known as, we can call it LinkedIn or Gmail or Facebook. And

never die, man. Stuff will never die. And look at Gmail. Right? Genius. What they did with Gmail. This chat built in. 

Trance Bot: Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: everything's right there, right? Your email's right in the middle. It's right there. Now Outlook looks like that. You're starting to see, you know, you break out a sidebar with teams that comes in.

It's all still centered around this mailbox thing and this like work list. [01:10:00] And if someone could figure out a better work list, I think that's, pull the chats in, pull the asynchronous, the synchronous. You know, use AI or whatever you want to do and curate it all so that Nate knows what he needs to look at.

Uh, I guess some of them you can kind of do this with the chat bots already to some extent, but you need the centralized platform that people can just plug into. And that's one point in the other direction. That's actually what teams has been, is like, oh yeah, I've got the post area, I've got the chat area, but I think it's too antiquated and heavy.

Yeah. And there's no way to, you know, the profiles in which someone, you know, exists in their identity is not forefront of the platform at all. None of them really exist like that. It just, like, there's a, some sort of maybe newer way to do it, but it's go in some step. It's taking some steps [01:11:00] backwards. Um, 

Nate McBride: I know, I'm telling you what we should do is, now hear me out 

Mike Crispin: a 

Nate McBride: second, 

Mike Crispin: I'm listening.

Nate McBride: Um, a platform that's like, like what we talked about last week, that has a place for you and I to chat and to add things to each other and tag each other and tag documents, et cetera. And then we make these things that are effectively like a note, uh, that we can share. We have most people that are in them and accessing them at the same time and, and adding 'em together.

And we call it exchange Agram. 

Mike Crispin: That's great. Let's do it. 

Nate McBride: We put it on the line. 

Mike Crispin: Love that. I love this 

Nate McBride: idea. We have Exchange Agram. 

Mike Crispin: I love this Idea. Exchange Agram, 

Nate McBride: um, exchange Agram. So, so what I'll do is, is I'll write a note and I'll want a note. Then I'll come over or I'll call you and I'll tell you that you have a new note waiting for you [01:12:00] and you'll go see the note and then you'll respond to the note.

Mike Crispin: Interesting. 

Nate McBride: I know. See, I 

like 

Mike Crispin: the 

Nate McBride: idea, idea doesn't, and, and, and it's because, we'll, we'll have an understanding of our response times. 'cause it will be, we already know, it'll be days. So like, here's what I've decided to do. I didn't just actually just decide this. I decided it back in 2020. Um, I don't read email anymore.

I have just one rule in my mailbox. All email goes to trash and it's been in my life infinitely better. The issue is that when people send me calendar invites, I don't ever accept them. They just sit there in my calendar. Now, if I can't do something, like I can't attend a meeting 'cause I have a block, I will just replicate and reject it and decline the meeting.

But I don't read email. But of course people will send me invites and they're always sending, asking me like, why didn't you accept the meeting? Are you coming? [01:13:00] I'm like, of course coming. And they're like, well, you didn't say anything. I'm like, well, did I reject your meeting? Well, no, but you didn't accept either.

I'm like, well, if I reject it, I'm not coming. Otherwise assume I'm coming. And I've told this now to nearly everyone in my company. They all kind of get this idea, but people are flabbergasted when I tell 'em I don't read an email. I'm like, you can send me emails. Just they're, they don't even get viewed.

Nothing happens to them. They get deleted right away. And I can do everything else through the other platforms. Like I, I can find out about pos by my weekly login to pio, our procure procurement system. I can find out about whatever I want to know about by logging into something else and finding out about it on regular intervals.

And I live now without, without email for a long time. Um, but I've had to make it up and chat. Didn't replace it by, by a long shot chat [01:14:00] replaced a lot of it. But what replaced it was face to face communication. 

Mike Crispin: That's right. 

Nate McBride: Um, so I got rid of email and I still have an account and people can email me and it goes weeks and weeks and weeks by, and they're like, why haven't you responded?

And then they get wise and they hit me on LinkedIn or they slack me, um, or text me or something. But I don't know how much stuff I've missed in the last few years. I honestly don't care. I feel like I've gotten everything done appropriately without email for work. I do use email in the regular world and for our consulting and stuff, but for work, email, no, haven't used it.

I live in a hybrid, synchronous, asynchronous world and it works perfectly fine for me anyway. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Not for everyone else. It came up again today, uh, for someone who was like, are you attending the meeting at four? I said, yeah, no problem. Well, [01:15:00] I didn't accept and I have to remind them. Yeah. I don't accept calendar invites.

Um, so it was kind of a weird thing, but this is a person who I, 25 years in the industry, very historical, technological basis, and it will be, I think, at least a full generation before we get to a point in time where people are able to not communicate every email. It won't happen in our, it won't happen in our careers.

Mike Crispin: I think it's, it, it's, it's here to stay on a bus. On the business side. It's, I think this, this did a, a need to cur curate the important things. I think we're getting there. I think there's a very good chance that, and I mean, look, a lot of new companies are in Slack and they're in workspace, and they, they're just moving fast.

They're getting stuff done and [01:16:00] I mean, outlook works fine for the most part. And teams is underutilized. I think a lot of companies don't use it to its fullest and it becomes a big SharePoint file repository and you know, whereas I think Slack becomes more of a central place where people, where a culture grows at a company, it's two very, 

Nate McBride: in theory.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. It gets you some of the way there. It's not the total package, but it gets, it 

Nate McBride: can also create, I think, culture isolation zones where people 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Are creating channels for cultural development that are inclusive of, 

Mike Crispin: they're private. Yep. Just 

Nate McBride: a, a smaller group. 

Mike Crispin: That's right. They're not as open. That's where I think the communities type stuff is exciting.

If there, if there was more interest, I, I don't see it right now, but if there was, like, I keep going back to discourse, like that platform to me is a, like, it's really, it could really [01:17:00] be useful for people if it's, if it was presented the right way, almost as a almost, it depends on the culture or company.

If it's, if the people like to chat, then Slack is just fine. But if it's more of a email culture company 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Um, you know, something like notion or discourse could be a really interesting thing to explore where, you know, people are more about commenting than having long threaded conversations. Uh, but I tell you that little slack summarization thing, um, whatever it's called, the freaking, uh, God recaps, those have been pretty cool.

I mean, to help like just, 

Nate McBride: uh, we disabled that. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, you did? Oh, okay. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Uh, they weren't accurate. Um, so here's a thought. So I saw this on Substack, and this is a couple weeks ago, but I made a note of it and [01:18:00] somebody had said, here's what nobody admits we use in this case chat. We use chat because it feels like we're doing something even when email would clearly be better.

Yeah. What do you think about that?

Mike Crispin: Well, I don't think, I mean, I, I think it's more of the, it depends what your use case is for chat. Like if chat is quick communication, it works great. You know, if you're working remotely and you need to collaborate with someone, chat works great. No, no, no, no problems at all. Email doesn't always work better.

The benefit to email is easy to file and organize the way you want. And I think that's where chat gets lost. 

Nate McBride: Well, hold on a second though. Has chat actually improved? Like, in your opinion, has chat improved communication or just accelerated it? I mean, improve it from a [01:19:00] quality. 

Mike Crispin: The answer is it, it depends on the situation.

I think some areas it has improved things. It has improved in the respect of, I think if done right, it it, it helps with onboarding someone to immediately jump into a project or something that if you can identify 

Nate McBride: them, 

Mike Crispin: they can immediately jump in. Well, that's, if you have a thousand cha channels, then forget it.

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: But if you have five channels, um, that's, that's fine. You know, in terms of your company and your programs and everything else, that works out great. And if you're gonna be brought into a project where there's been a lot of back and forth and you're actually using the tool, I think it's a good way to catch up with where things are at.

I think that works better than email. So email, let me forward you all the shit that I did my last year, and you can go through it all and figure it out. It's like, no, no, no, no. There's no [01:20:00] correspondence. I don't know who's on these conversations and who isn't or who should be on them. Um, all that. So there's all sorts of detective work that has to happen and in chat, it really helps you to, to your point, if you're using it more inclusively and as a transparent platform, it works great.

Now, if you get a bunch of people who are just doing direct messages all day, it's fucking useless. The whole goal to chat is to have chat rooms. If you don't have chat rooms. Instant messaging is as good as texting each other and asking where we're going for lunch today. There's not as much value in it in that respect.

It's when you bring the groups together and there's a history that you get more out of the tool, in my opinion. 

Nate McBride: I don't think, I don't think, I don't think so. You mentioned Im, IM, and DM became synonymous at some point. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: In [01:21:00] particular call out when, but now they're one in the same and, but it was the idea of in instant versus direct that I always found was fascinating, like instant messaging.

Is it me being able to send a message instantly? Is it you being able to receive it instantly or you being able to reply instantly? Like, which one of those was the instant where I was direct. Direct makes more sense. I'm typing a message. It goes directed to you. Mm-hmm. That's direct. 

Mike Crispin: Think 

Nate McBride: the time, the time domain has been abstracted from it.

Mike Crispin: I think it's instant messaging emerged in a time in which the expectation was that you were going to either get an email that, yeah, that was instant, but an instant message assumes an instant reply. And that was, that's, that was a OL instant messenger, right? Was if I'm instant messaging someone, they're gonna instantly get back to me.

That's always how I thought about it is. The difference is I'm not gonna wait for an email. Yeah. Or some [01:22:00] response in some other way, a phone call or something else. I'm gonna get an instant message back because I know they're sitting in front of their computer looking at what I just sent. And that, that's not true today.

But back then, if you were on a OL and there was a green light there, unless someone was going up to get a sandwich or something, they were there and you knew that if you wrote them, they're either gonna ghost you or they're gonna respond. And coasting wasn't even a thing back then. It was just, it's like, but that's, 

Trance Bot: well, 

Mike Crispin: that's what I delete, like direct messaging, what I was saying, what direct messaging is, it's a ultra exclusive, where it's more informal.

It's, it's based, it's just, I 

Nate McBride: think 

Mike Crispin: someone's name instead of organize any information in a channel, just, I'm just gonna type everyone that I need to talk tos name and it's gonna be about whatever the last five minutes needs to be about. It's not, there's no subject, there's no topic, there's no, [01:23:00] it's just free flowing.

And it's great for the l formal things, but it, it's, it's the lowest of the bar. I would put the, the group chat, organized, group chat at the top, email second, and little direct messages last because they don't think they generate any value. Facebook or Twitter or whatever would be nothing if everything was direct messaging.

I love that. I can't speak being written visible, 

Nate McBride: but in instant for a IM there was no such thing as instant messaging. A OL through crafty branding. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Came up with a OL instant messenger. The same way that bandaid has the market on bandaid, even though bandage is generic term. Instant messaging came of that.

There's no such thing anymore. I think of instant messaging more so as there is direct messaging. Instant messaging was an idea. Direct [01:24:00] me, direct messaging is the action. I'm not trying to be semantic about it, but to a degree, 

Mike Crispin: yeah. 

Nate McBride: We never really had instant messaging other than the fact that we had branding that said instant messaging.

Mike Crispin: Yep. Even the expectation of text messages has, you know, resulted in, look, get back to me when you get back to me, hopefully right back soon. But, you know, there's life to deal with and that's understood. But when texting emerged, it was like, I'm spending 20 cents on this text. You better freaking write back.

Nate McBride: Well, I mean, there's a whole commodity on, on that whole thing. Right. So like, let's say I, I slack you, Mike. And I'm like, I need this important information and you don't respond for six hours. But I also then go look at some other platform you're a member of and I see that you're posting happily Along as you go.

And then I'm like, what the fuck? He's posting over on that platform and DMing people, but he's not posting to my posts and this other platform and I [01:25:00] hate you for that. Um, and so even like, like outside of the platform, if I know that I dmd you and you went to the gym or you went to the store and you didn't respond to me when you could have, my perception of you is that you could have responded to me and you're walking from the car to the parking to the, to the store or getting outta the gym like you could have, but you did decline to That is a whole other big fucking problem that we apply people.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. '

Nate McBride: cause well, we're, we're people and we hate each other just by nature. But, um, we want everyone to pay attention to us. 

Mike Crispin: I think there's, there's, this is, you know, I struggle with messaging even iMessage and instant messaging to some extent because [01:26:00] I like to think about what I'm gonna say and I'm also extremely paranoid in the respect, you know, being.

Involved in other things, that stuff is discoverable and you say the wrong thing one day and or it's taken outta context. Sure. That stuff lives forever. And when I write something back, I want to think about it. And if I don't have time to think about it, I don't write back. And I think that that, that happens a lot for me now, even just in the last 10 years, let's say.

It's like, I want to think about my response. And I think sometimes it's, it's over, it doesn't fit with the cultural norms of the day. Like you, you expected to, you instantly respond and social with very 

Nate McBride: witty and relevant 

Mike Crispin: post, 

Nate McBride: by the way. 

Mike Crispin: Exactly. It's, to me, it's, um, you know, chat in general and sort of the theme that it's making us angry at each other.

I [01:27:00] think there's, it's the, it's only making people who are angry, who I think to some extent are, you know, they have a certain expectation and then that, that people are gonna respond. And then there's another set of people who are just waiting to you to respond so they can say that they're right. And that's social media.

So there's a whole other construct where people are just like, fuck this, I'm just not gonna be involved. And if I have something to say, I'm gonna say it and I'm gonna write what I need to say, but I'm gonna think about it first. Whereas I think it's, there's a number of, in social, I'd say you'll just type the first thing that comes to mind just for the exposure.

Just to be seen. Just to be heard. And I think that has created a lot of slop, you know, before AI lop, there's social media lop, and now you put the two things together and you get a lot of that. Similarly, in Slack, [01:28:00] you write, someone writes to you and you're not prepared to respond. Yeah. You see, you've gotta, you've gotta send some funny thing or, you know, emoji or what, you know, it's like, is that real?

Well, no. Is that worse than not responding at all? No, I guess not because people know you're there and you're listening, but it's just, um, I, I think, I don't know if it's the same for you, but I think because we talked about the mid nineties being, when we started in the, the messaging and how much fun it was back then.

It's such a difficult place to be in sometimes here that it's like, that's just the way it is. And if, um, Billy doesn't write back right away, you know, he is probably got something else going on, or he doesn't know what he wants to say or this and that, now find another way to b bug the crap out of him, [01:29:00] you know?

Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Well, I, there's, there's that whole point out. You say bugging. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Um, 

Mike Crispin: well, if they 

Nate McBride: didn't ask you, I, I slack Mike, he doesn't respond. I slack him again. I slack him again. Slack him again. Slack him again. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. And then there's anno people get annoyed, right? Yeah. 

Nate McBride: People get annoyed, um, when they're just maybe too busy.

They can't answer the first one. And here I am, barraging them with other requests. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Um, there's that element too. 

Mike Crispin: Very common. Very common. 

Nate McBride: That's basically the, the opposite of the intended spirit of the platform. Unless people have an unreasonable expectation for your response, 

Mike Crispin: and I think there's anxiety as well.

So take another column of this and Okay. Every, in these chat rooms or in social media, everyone else is responding. I, I, I, I need to respond. I need to make sure I respond. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: I need, I say something, I don't [01:30:00] wanna be left out. And people get anxious and they, and maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but like, I think there's some people really get anxious.

Okay. I'm not part of the conversation. I'm not participating, I'm not writing in there. So everyone knows that I'm here and that I'm present. And, and people get anxious about that, 

Nate McBride: right? 

Mike Crispin: They don't feel, they feel guilty. They're not contributing enough where they're not. Putting enough, uh, enough out there, and they may have something to share, but they don't know how to share it.

Um, some might say like, well boy, you better learn. You gotta learn how to do that. Yeah. But I do think there's this anxiety that comes with, and I keep bolting chat and social media together. 'cause it's largely what it's become is, um, you know, if you take aside the business context that's built into a lot of these, especially Slack, there's sort of this social aspect that's [01:31:00] built in and, um, often with pressure from IT or hr, like, yeah, post all your dog photos, post all your stuff.

Let's make this a fun place to work. Some people aren't comfortable with that. Right. And they, they won't and they won't do it. Or they don't do it and then they end up feeling like, oh gee, I do, you know, maybe they don't wanna share that, or they're very private people or whatnot. So, so it's definitely, uh, a a, you know, people might look at this and go, they talk about chat, but chat's become, like we talked about last week, in a lot of respects, this is becoming infrastructure.

Chat is becoming infrastructure. It needs to be built correctly, it needs to be verified, it needs to be, it's a question, it's part of our infrastructure. Um, and it's our operating system in so many places, just like email is 

Nate McBride: pause. 

Mike Crispin: I think smaller, more modern companies chat is, [01:32:00] that's how they run. Some people run on iMessage, that's what they run on.

Six people. That's, they're on iMessage all day. They're not on Slack, they're not on teams. They've got iPhones and they're running around doing different things and they've got their computers and that's what they use, you know, uh, WeChat in China ultimately running the economy. People are on chat and they're, they're running fast and they're, there's no rules.

There's no governance and it's working. So, I, 

Nate McBride: so, so, but hold on a second. So let's back up a minute. I was just trying to figure out what this, this, what was happening, but I remember going to an early Okta user group. Oh yeah. This was, um, this was in 2009. Um, let's see, hold on.[01:33:00] 

And. Oh, I can't, I can't find it. But I remember being at an, uh, like it was like 10 people in the room. Okta was nobody at the time. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And there were some guys there that were presenting from Ocean, ocean State Job Lot, the network guys. And they had this, 

Mike Crispin: I remember that. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. It was at like some little rinky dink hotel.

The Aloft Hotel in Bedford, mass. I think that was where it was. This is going back a ways, but Yep. They were talking about how they were using hashtags to chat with their switches. I don't know if it was SNMP or they were using, um, something else, but at the time you could actually chat with your switches using, [01:34:00] um, not natural language, but kind of quasi natural language.

And I remember thinking at the time, and the, the big chat was, the big discussion was about how do you secure those chats? You chatting with the switch. I remember being kind of cheeky about it and asking one of the guys, well, could you just ask the, the switch anything? And he was like, well, I guess if it has the dictionary.

I was like, couldn't somebody just amend the dictionary with crap? And we got into this big discussion about how you could turn a switch into a chat agent by simply populating the dictionary. Very, very, very. Early XLM development, I guess would, would be the, would be the case. But to your point about, about chatting, um, chatting with things.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Forget bots very much fuck bots. [01:35:00] But you could theoretically chat with an instrument and ask it basic questions about its health. 

Mike Crispin: Absolutely.

That's, that's what we're doing now. I mean, that's why it is eventually gonna surpass email. That's ai. The AI revolution, if you will, is going to kill the email. That will be the way that it will, the only way it will change because you need summarization or you need a way to, I don't know, 

Nate McBride: my fax fax is still here.

I'm 

Mike Crispin: not sure you, but, but I think that's, you're talking, we're, we're now talking to AWS to build servers. We're talking to, uh, lab equipment. Now we're able to search across a number of documents. That's a simple use case, but we're able to do that by chatting with our data. We're not sending them emails.

We're not using a webpage in a form to do that. 

Nate McBride: Is chatting with your data the same as search? [01:36:00] 

Mike Crispin: No. 

Nate McBride: Okay. 

Mike Crispin: Just because we can ask. We can change the data as well. We don't want to, but you can, right? You can change the data. You can build, you can automate, you can set off a set of tasks, just use it as a trigger if you want.

And we'd be able to do that for years. But now it's the, the Nate McBride user in the chat can go off and chat with other people with and report back to you. Or we can call it Nate Bot or whatever you wanna call him. And he goes up 

Nate McBride: Nate bot, there's an idea. 

Mike Crispin: He goes off and sets up servers and runs online trainings and does a number of other little things.

And, [01:37:00] uh, yeah. But that's all gonna, that's all, as people get more used to chatting, the little, little chat bot stuff, it's gonna continue to grow and voice. It's just a trend goes to voice and visuals and, but email is still structured and it's the equivalent of a document. So it's like you said, the Google Doc we're collaborating on is essentially, that's essentially email and chat is commands, 

Nate McBride: it's email even more so if you enable notifications and the person's adept at using your.

At your name to notify you. I mean, it's no different than using, you don't have folders the traditional way. You don't have labels as in a Gmail in inbox, but you can create box folders. I mean, again, we, the, the principle of chat is the same as a principle for [01:38:00] an operating system. You don't need a whole lot, just the most basic components.

Can I send you a message and you can respond to it? That would be essentially the, the two main requirements. Then you can add in features like, show me the date you responded. Sh uh, may gimme an alert when you send me an email or a note rather. Um, yeah. But the core requirements for chat are extraordinarily simple.

Mike Crispin: Yes. Very simple. Very 

Nate McBride: simple. We need a, we need a place where both of us can type. 

Mike Crispin: That's it. That's it. That's it. Just a box to type in and then a return key. 

Nate McBride: We've made it so over complicated because like with all things like Zakys law, which is the law that states eventually every single platform will have [01:39:00] email.

Um. There are certain things that become so required for no reason anyone can explain, but every single platform I have today. 

Trance Bot: Yep. 

Nate McBride: From a cloud perspective, we have 58 platforms at all, 58 platforms today, I have the ability to chat with you and because I have the ability to send you a message and you return that message to me through that platform, that creates a major problem.

'cause I'm not communicating to you in a single place anymore. I, we have email, we have Slack, and then I have that comment I left for you on a box note that comment I left for you. And in an Airtable field, the comment I left for you in a Zapier workflow. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And you're just like, fucking hell. What's wrong with this guy?

Why can't you just Slack me? That's, I think, where chat's [01:40:00] biggest problem is, and I don't see, I don't see a way to solve that because even if you told me, Nate, only chat me on Slack, it could be short. Cool. No problem, Mike. But I just made this big change in Airtable, so I need, and I need to alert you to that.

Mike Crispin: Well, where does that go? It goes to Slack or it goes to email. If there's an integration, right? 

Nate McBride: Or it happens within the platform and you get a, you get a notification next time you log into the platform that there's a message white waiting for you. Take your pick. But, 

Mike Crispin: but Essen, but essentially a lot of these tools, right?

You can, Airtable included, I believe you can just say anytime Nate's mentioned. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, no, you can have it ping, ping you in Slack when I send you a comment in Airtable. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Uh, so that would be a comment once removed. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: I'm not sure I've really solved the problem. 

Mike Crispin: So centralized, so someone goes to your application and finds the comment.

Yeah. Which, which gets eng engages in the conversation in the tool. But [01:41:00] yeah, I hear what you're saying. Like there's no central inbox or work list and I think that's, I think it was what Slack was trying to achieve a little bit is let's create this place where all this messaging goes. The new operating system for business.

So everything's coming right to you. And that's sort of the unified mailbox that Blackberry had. I keep going back to that 'cause I thought it was elegant and that's where, you know, now we've got a list of notifications. It's actually a, um, an app on Samsung devices called Notice Star. And what it does is it's, uh, essentially takes the notification pane that we have like on iPhones or on Android devices and it lets you create a uni box.

So anything that comes in as a notification. It puts in a list for you. It doesn't get [01:42:00] moved or removed. You can organize it how you want, you can tell what applications you want and it will put any notification that comes in, in a specific view and list for you. So all this stuff, you and a lot of times just so many notifications, you miss them or you just swipe 'em away to get rid of them.

This keeps only the notifications you want in, in the list so you don't miss things and important things stay there instead of like, I'm gonna use AI to bring the most important stuff to the top, like Apple's trying to do. It's like, okay, yeah, well you got it wrong. I missed something and I have nowhere to look.

Um, especially if you're on nine different messaging platforms. So as many people have one, they tried for five minutes and they still have them and they're getting notified, different spam and everything else, it's like having a way to manage that is, is great. Instead of missing, [01:43:00] uh, notifications on the bottom of your notification list and never taking action.

Uh, and that's what Blackberry had was everything was right there. You scroll down, it looked the same, there was no touch on it, and you get like pulled into some other application. You get, you stayed within the uni, your work list, and you were able to respond or do what you need to do. I think that's.

Something that's missing. I wish there was, that was, maybe that's a power user thing, but it would be great on iPhone if there was a way to organize notifications outside of the notification pane. And these are another one of the things that when you lived in sort of the walled garden world, you can't have.

Yeah. So it's, um,

it's something to be said about having some flexibility and be able to do, but you've gotta do it your, [01:44:00] like, the same thing in Linux. You've gotta do it yourself. You gotta build these little things yourself. No one's built a product, um, to, to bring these, the things that we talk about together. And it maybe there'd be a hundred people who'd buy it though.

That's why you open source it and, or shallow. Yeah. But that's why like, you get like, um, this, the open source app stores and stuff that are out there, it's like they, they have these type of products. 

Nate McBride: Well, but 

Mike Crispin: you can't, you can't run 'em on an iPhone. So you can't run 'em on a, on a, um, PC or a Mac anymore because they, they have the certificate requirements.

Nate McBride: Well, the beautiful part about this episode is that next week we get to chat about, um, it as an anthropologist. And so we, what we've covered in chat tonight, we're gonna actually expand [01:45:00] this for next week. We're gonna go into, um, how people work and why. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: So, we'll, we'll we can come back to the chat part, but I'm really interested in talking to you about, and forget the editor versus creator versus viewer roles.

We can study from all that for a minute, but I'm very interested in talking with you, um, over how we evolved in, in sharing 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Our definitions of sharing things. And this comes to the chat world because for years and years when even after chat was here, it was, well, what can you share over chat? 

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: And those two worlds came together.

And if I go into box and I share a file with you, I have an OP option to create a comment in my share event, but most likely I'm not going to use that 'cause it's not tracked anywhere. I'm rather, I'm [01:46:00] just going to Slack you first. Hey Mike, I'm about to share this file with you. I need you to review it then share it so you're not surprised.

Alternatively, I could just blind share it, which is I click and share it with you and I give you no context. But that in a way is a chat. I've chatted you something to do. It's a mystery. So we're gonna cover that next week. And then we gotta fast forward about, um, 26 episodes to episode 34, where we'll be covering synchronous versus asynchronous in detail.

And because it doesn't just apply to chat, it basically applies to, to every single thing. Communication. Yes. Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: communication in general, right? Yeah, 

Nate McBride: communication in general. And the only way, of course to achieve pure synchronous is to be in the same room looking at the person in the eyes. Um, and then from there it [01:47:00] all begins to degrade.

So, entropy aside, we will be talking about it then. So we have, we we're gonna cover this ground a few times. Um, I mean, I think this was, it's fantastic for me with this long of a career to think about the stupid shit we did to get by back in the way back, but it worked. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And for sure as anything, Mike, we were not in 2003 bitching about, um, too many notifications.

Mike Crispin: That's right. 

Nate McBride: We weren't, we weren't bitching about too many dms. Uh, that wasn't even a thought.

Mike Crispin: I think it felt good to be connected. [01:48:00] 

Nate McBride: It did. 

Mike Crispin: Right. And I, it did think that's getting back to the core of some of the issue is, you know, too much of a good thing almost. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Potentially. That is a, that's a very good, I'm gonna write that down. Too much of a good thing. 

Mike Crispin: We're completely, like I said, I think there's social anxiety.

We, social media, we're seeing this stuff all over the place, right. Instagram and now you can't, 

Nate McBride: that's the, you're talking about the FOMO effect though, or are you talking about too much of a good thing 

Mike Crispin: f fomo. Too much of a good thing is we're desensitized. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: That we're connecting in this new just 

Nate McBride: to waiting.

Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: In this new, new cool way. Like, I think there was also sort of this, wow, this is cool [01:49:00] that we can do this. And that got wore off quick. Right. It was like, oh geez. Yeah. And we were very, I was just unbelievably over the moon about Slack and I still am, I think there's a lot of value about it, uh, of, of using it.

Um, but it's also. Realizing that, but there's so much noise, you know, that, that it's hard to, it's hard to manage. So you got, 

Nate McBride: we went from, we went from the equivalent of getting a actual piece of mail, which had a thrill. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: I remember being a teenager and coming into college and getting a, you know, you go to your inbox, you go to your mailbox in the student center and there would be an envelope inside it, and you're like, holy shit.

It's a fucking letter. And you'd open it up and, and maybe it's from your mom or something else, but you read it and you're like, cool. Like the outside world still exists. I can talk to them, I can write something back. And then when I got my [01:50:00] email account at Con and I would tell that people, uh, using either Iska or something else, maybe they wouldn't respond right away 'cause they weren't at the computer.

But the next morning, I, my, my heart, my, not my heart, but my endorphins would be up, my expectations would be high. 'cause I would get into the com, the computer center, and I would log in even before I ate breakfast, and I'd see that one message pending and be like, holy shit, I got a new message from somebody and you respond to it.

And it was awesome. And maybe you had to wait a whole nother day. But you're right. Maybe too much of a good thing because back then it, it was so meaningful. To get a even a dumb message back from some of you didn't even know. 

Mike Crispin: I think it was, it was, it was a little spike, right. Little dopamine spike that you get.

Right. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: And I think too, [01:51:00] too, too much of a, a good thing. Absolutely. You know, in terms of now, now it's not that big of a deal to get an instant message or get 

Nate McBride: Yep. 

Mike Crispin: You know, uh, maybe if it's, you know, um, a family member or someone you haven't seen in a long time, or you're just at the edge of figuring out that problem and you're waiting for a message back, you get excited about it, fine.

But I also think that over the years that ch ch text in general is taken outta context and now there's more text than ever before because of chat. And then more and more messages being sent, more and more liability, a longer audit trail. All these things that we didn't think about when we were doing instant messaging.

It's like, you know, great, we're having a great time. Now it's 10 years ago you wrote something [01:52:00] that someone found and the rest of the conversation is redacted. 

Nate McBride: Right. 

Mike Crispin: And your paragraph is in the middle, and you've gotta remember. And explain why you wrote that These are things that ruined or ruined, ruined.

Just communication in general. I shouldn't say it ruins it, but what it's doing is it's creating accountability. And to some extent be careful what you write. So now there's an anxiety around, am I missing out? Am I gonna write the wrong thing? I still wanna be cool. I still wanna fit in and say something funny or be smart is something I write gonna be held against me someday?

And not to be dystopian about it, but I think there's a whole other side of risk that comes with any time you write [01:53:00] something, going back to your, who should be able to create data, it's like this whole other risk side, which unfortunately I think has turned people off from contributing. And I think that is a problem in which to back to the verification economy, is that when we're able to verify things, it'll be okay if things are discarded that can't be verified, right?

Like hu like humor, right? And those things people will joke about and laugh about, but it won't be. You made it the, the wrong decision or you said the absolute wrong thing? 'cause we verified that already. I, I like this kind of, the, the last point I'll make here on the verification stuff and chat is that there's the, whenever you mention that AI component [01:54:00] to people, it's like, well, it hallucinates, you know, how do you know they're getting it right?

And how do, how do we know that this stuff we're producing is any good? And how do you know the contractor you hired Right. Producing anything that's any good, you trust them right. To do what they're supposed to do. I mean, yeah, this is a technology that's been trained on way more than that contractor has maybe in some respects.

But this is just another verification scheme. We hire someone we need to verify. We have a chat that goes on threads and threads and threads of topics. There's tons of distortion and crap, and we gotta pick out the things that make sense, that'll help our business. It's all verification. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: And we go forward.

We're gonna have to deal with that more and [01:55:00] more and more. Uh, we're already doing it, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Uh, even though this, this whole other thing is coming at us like a tidal wave. We, 

Nate McBride: which in and of itself is the amalgamation of all things ever created related to chat. The fact that you can talk to a thing 

Mike Crispin: Yep.

Nate McBride: That appears to, appears to be anthropomorphic on all accounts. It's the ultimate end of chat. I mean, that's when I think about a generative AI agent talking to me, how too much 

Mike Crispin: of it Yes. 

Nate McBride: It's the fucking end of chat. 

Mike Crispin: It's the end of 

Nate McBride: chat and chat. Chat has lost its meaning. 

Mike Crispin: Correct. Yeah. Because it's, it's going to be, it already is only relevant.

The assumption is, as a user, this little chat, like our ins, like our iMessages, let's say it's only valid for right now. This is a point in [01:56:00] time discussion. I'm I'm talking about the football game today. We're talking about the Patriots game. That doesn't matter three months from now. 

Trance Bot: Yeah. Which 

Mike Crispin: is chat.

Right. So the usage is like, it doesn't really matter now add all those chats up over the last five years and the wrong thing was said or whatever and, and, and that, you know, that that can be a, that can be a problem. So to your point around chat being dead, is that largely whether people. Do it to de I think some de do it to de-risk themselves and others.

There's too much stuff. So they're just kinda like, I'm gonna go read a book. Which is good. Yeah. Um, they just, like, they're done, they're done with social media, they're done with chatting. They'll write you an email instead and, you know, or write a document and send it. And I, I just think there's sort of, we're, we're re [01:57:00] retreating back to let me create an object or knowledge object or a, an artifact, let's say, and let's discuss that.

And then instead of like, let's amorally like kind of organically figure all this stuff out and then we'll have to search through it later on to find out what actually has any value. Yeah. And that, that's where AI comes in and takes all of those chats and spits something out at you. And then you go, well, why do I need to chat now?

Right. 

Nate McBride: If, if you can sit, if you consider, that's your point, right. Chatting because it's, it's asynchronous chat. It's not synchronous, so, 

Mike Crispin: right. But that, but to your point, like why, why bother if all, all the data is there? You know, let's, let's just, let's, let's do, let's just not chat. You know, it essentially can take the decision out of it.

And the last, the very, very [01:58:00] last thing is, I don't know who I'm chatting with anymore. I don't know who you are. How do I know you're who you are? Well, because you're in my Slack instance, I'm assuming you are who you are. Um, once we get to the digital twinning and that type of stuff, and that's allowed at companies, you're not gonna have any idea who you're talking to.

So back your, there was a great eye to I dis, you know, value. You move away from that. We can't verify who we're talking to and maybe we don't care. You know, two, three years from 

Nate McBride: there, there was, there was a great 

Mike Crispin: piece, an answer, and it doesn't matter. 

Nate McBride: There was a great piece on Substack about one of, um, the musk Fox developers who recently quit working on their OS platform, who said he was being sent invitations by a bot to attend meetings and the bot was booking rooms and nobody was there, of course.

'cause the [01:59:00] bot scheduled it, um, for reviewing this person's performance. The bot had written notes about performance that were about a different employee and, and on and on and on. It was basically a horror story. Wr large. Yeah. And this bot kept chatting him, telling him his work was suffering. He wasn't doing great, but it was a bot.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: But he was being told it was a human by humans basically lying to him that it was a human telling him this. But all along it was a bot. Very dystopian, uh, on multiple levels, 

Mike Crispin: very, very real and gonna happen, 

Nate McBride: gonna happen. And I think going to fail. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: But, um, 

Mike Crispin: I think, 

Nate McBride: we'll, we'll see. 

Mike Crispin: I, I think, uh, we'll fail a few times before it succeeds.

I think it's a, I think we will get to a point where we we're just, we're we're many, [02:00:00] many, many things. We're just talking to some other, a bot. Maybe you'd be able to tell the difference, but 

Nate McBride: Yeah, maybe, but not as an, as an employee. I don't know. 

Mike Crispin: I that's it's gonna be very, there's a, there's a lot there, right?

There's a lot, there's a lot there. It's already people doing it to some extent. So it's just at a less, more manual process. Right. And not sure, not someone duplicating them as a persona, but they're using the tools to do that already. 

Nate McBride: So to, just gonna try and wrap this back up. Bring us back in. Oh. Um, 'cause that, that is a rabbit hole though.

We should we have, we sort of bear some responsibility to go down. Tonight is not tonight. I'm not drunk enough 

Trance Bot: Yep. 

Nate McBride: To do that one at the moment. But, um, I. Yeah. So next week we're gonna take this and expand out a [02:01:00] little bit. We're gonna go a little bit higher on the scope to the fact that you and I are acting anthropo, anthropologists we work with that are straddling the worlds between very, very old tropes and doing shit and new stuff.

Have to learn not only how to unearth a bone, but how to use the newest laser technology to sort of work with it. You know, like they're straddling these two worlds. We'll talk, we'll tackle that next week, and then we have some final parts about looking at this sort of world of tropes before we move back into the yay, yay today kind of world.

But anyway, so that's next week. Uh, any closing thoughts? 

Mike Crispin: No, I, there's a good discussion and I think this is one that I didn't expect us to go where we've gone just talking about chat, but it really is the foundation of all of our [02:02:00] communication across personal. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it, 

Nate McBride: I'll say, I'll say that as somebody who was a proficient chat user in the nineties, in early two thousands, I do miss the origin.

I do miss the thrill of sharing a joke and having to wait for a response. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Um. Or sometimes getting it right away. 'cause my friend was online. And being able to chat with somebody who's a friend, albeit someone I never met before, you know, thousands of miles away and forming a connection. And at the core of this all maybe is the fact that we're, we don't have that connection anymore.

Um, 

Mike Crispin: zoom. Zoom and, uh, COVID desensitized the digital connection. 

Nate McBride: They did. Very much so. Very, very precise statement. [02:03:00] Um, all right, well, good to be nostalgic. We can keep being nostalgic. We're, we've earned the right to do that. And, uh, those that listen to this podcast that are in nostalgia mode, you're welcome.

Uh, if you do listen to the podcast, as always, give us all the stars. We appreciate it. We also would love it if you could buy us some, but, oh my God, I'm so old. I just coughed while I was talking. We would appreciate it if you wanna buy some beers. Um, I'm drinking Tennessee whiskey with, uh, at least with honey and, um, it's very, very good.

But I'm in my last bottle and, uh, things are getting dire, so. Um, whatever you got would be helpful on the bias of beer, and you can find those links to buying us a beer or buying us or buying our merch in the footnotes of all of our podcasts. You can also join our Slack board or Kick ass Slack board, um, [02:04:00] at thus coit.us, which is also where our Substack world is.

But also, again, in the footnotes of all of our episodes is linked to our, our sub, our sort of our, sorry, our Slack channel. Um, even if you can't chat with them 'cause they don't know how to use it, be nice to old people and chat with them face to face. There's a concept. Um, be nice to it, it people because they're controlling your world and they may hate you because you take too long to respond to chats.

And so best to be on their good side. Um, have your pet spader neutered. Uh, if you see a camera on a light pole on a street nearby, you smash it. It's probably used for nefarious purposes by the government. And anything else I missed? I, no, 

Mike Crispin: I'm all [02:05:00] good. Thank you 

Nate McBride: very 

Mike Crispin: much. 

Nate McBride: Oh, and don't, don't, don't travel abroad with a phone that you care about anymore.

Those are my, those are my, my tidbits of departure for this episode. 

Mike Crispin: Samsung. A 17 baby. 

Nate McBride: A 17. Buy it in cash. You can go to international phones on Moody Street and Waltham. Uh, just 200 bucks. Gets you a burner. Make that your new travel phone. Uh, life will be good for you, especially when you're coming back to the US.

On that note, we will see you all next week. Michael, we should go out for dinner soon. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, I'm in 

Nate McBride: coming. You talking about it, but we're not doing it, so we should. Let's do it. Maybe that place in, uh, we went to before the tin roof or Tin alley. What was it called? 

Mike Crispin: The tin 

Nate McBride: in? No, in uh, the Train Stop. Train whistle.

Where was the place, where was that? That was near the train station in, uh, in the [02:06:00] Lincoln. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, the tack room. 

Nate McBride: Tack room. Thank you. Sorry. Yeah, that place was great. Yeah, that chili was amazing. We should go there. All right, we'll make a date. Mike, you dress up. I'll dress up. We'll go as a date. Otherwise, that sounds 

Mike Crispin: great, man.

Count me in. 

Nate McBride: See everybody next week. 

Mike Crispin: Peace out. 

Nate McBride: Peace. 

Mike Crispin: It is for the out,

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.[02:07:00] 

It's season three divided autonomy,

verifying identity,

the calculus of it.