Podcasts about gpus

In this episode, Chris talks to Derek Dicker, CEO at Nyriad about the UltraIO storage array. Nyriad has developed a new storage architecture using GPUs that accelerate the calculations needed to store data using erasure coding. This enables UltraIO to implement system-wide data protection using erasure coding at the block level. In contrast to most storage vendors in the market today, the UltraIO platform uses hard disk drives, with a GPU to process data ingested by the system, while data is presented back through the CPU route. This dual processor architecture enables Nyriad to deliver a product with 20GB/s of throughput, scale to multiple petabytes of capacity and provide dynamic data protection defined by the customer. Nyriad sees UltraIO being used across four industries - HPC, Media & Entertainment, Backup and Recovery, and Active Archive. Essentially the solution excels at handling large volumes of unstructured data that needs high throughput processing. Learn more about Nyriad, the origins of the solution with the Square Kilometre Array and customer examples at https://www.nyriad.io/ Elapsed Time: 00:32:28 Timeline 00:00:00 - Intros 00:01:40 - UltraIO was introduced in 2022 00:02:25 - Why is UltraIO different to traditional storage systems? 00:03:30 - GPUs can be used within data storage systems 00:04:10 - The Square Kilometre Array was an early customer 00:06:15 - UltraIO fits a specific set of requirements around data ingestion throughput 00:06:55 - UltraIO uses hard disk drives and erasure coding 00:08:00 - Ingested data is processed via GPU, then accessed by CPU 00:10:00 - Erasure coding allows customer-based resiliency settings 00:12:00 - The hardware for UltraIO uses standardised off the shelf hardware 00:14:50 - What markets does UltraIO fit? (HPC, M&E, Backup/Recovery & Active Archive) 00:16:15 - The UltraIO architecture has strong sustainability characteristics 00:18:45 - Most vendors have moved away from HDDs 00:23:00 - Digital Image replaced three systems with an UltraIO 00:24:20 - Don't keep data forever! 00:26:35 - UltraIO helped Digital Glue deliver a media asset management solution 00:27:30 - System capacities are from one to three petabytes raw 00:29:15 - Nyriad works through the channel 00:31:00 - Wrap Up Copyright (c) 2016-2023 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #3erd

Market Proof Marketing · Ep 302: The Measure of SuccessIn this episode, Kevin Oakly, Andrew Peek and Jen Barkan! The team is currently participating in fantasy football and Jen shares her stats so far. Together, they consider how to measure the success of an ad if it doesn't become a lead and talk about how everything is hanging on interest rates right now. Spicy Kevin makes several appearances and keeps the conversation interesting!Story Time (06:34)Andrew is trying to figure out how you measure the success of a phone call or ad if it doesn't end up becoming a lead? Or can it be considered successful at all?Jen's daughter is going through the vet school application process and it's made her compare that process to people applying for The Nationals this year.Kevin says that managers and senior leaders who have zero desire to unpack why things are working are insecure in their own ability with what would be revealed. News (31:26)New sustainability tools help businesses and cities map environmental information (https://blog-google.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/blog.google/products/maps/google-maps-apis-environment-sustainability/amp/)In Its First Monopoly Trial of Modern Internet Era, U.S. Sets Sights on Google (https://dnyuz.com/2023/09/06/in-its-first-monopoly-trial-of-modern-internet-era-u-s-sets-sights-on-google/)Mortgage demand drops to 27-year low as interest rates pull back (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/06/mortgage-demand-drops-to-27-year-low-as-interest-rates-pull-back.html)ONE+ By Rocket Mortgage® Is A 1% Down Payment Option (https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/one-plus?qls=QNS_20180523.0123456789)Favorites/Hates (59:50)Andrew watched a documentary film called “The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia” on Amazon. Jen loves that college football is back!Kevin's favorite is a sports jacket and a youtube video by Kyla Scanlon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdBSaG2cujM Questions? Comments? Email show@doyouconvert.com or call 404-369-2595 and we'll address them on the next episode. More insights, discussions, and opportunities can be found at Do You Convert All Access or on the Market Proof Marketing Facebook group.Subscribe on iTunesFollow on SpotifyListen On StitcherA weekly new home marketing podcast for home builders and developers. Each week Kevin Oakley, Andrew Peek, Jackie Lipinski, Julie Jarnagin, and other team members from Do You Convert will break down the headlines, share best practices and stories from the front line, and perform a deep dive on a relevant marketing topic. We're here to help you – not to sell you!Transcript:KevinJen do you know who you want to trade?JenWell, I tried to pull one over on Jackie Lipinski and tried to get Justin Jefferson from her, as if she didn't know who that was. But I did. I did try to offer her a couple of really good legit players, but she denied me.KevinOh.JenYes, I have not.KevinYou're a fantasy football professional, so can you talk right now who's like, if you had to call it right now, who has the best team? Do you think?JenUm, I mean, Jackie has a pretty good team. Mike has a pretty good team. I have a pretty decent team. I mean, I'm really not a professional. I just like to pretend that I know what you want.KevinRight. You won that unicorn trophy.AndrewIt's great.JenYeah, I won.AndrewIt's gold.JenI won once. Yes, but it's really just. It's really just luck. Plus, the way that we do it, guys, is this auto draft. So it's not even like you, you just, just auto automatically picks your players. You don't really have any say in what's.AndrewGoing to have the winners decided with the auto draft.JenSort of yeah.AndrewWell if you don't like such a.JenLineup it says projected standings with Mike Ryan and first place.AndrewSo happens every year somehow.JenTrying to.KevinRAZ Even though he's the commissioner right? Yeah.JenYeah. Like Jalen hurts or your quarterback.KevinLet's see. Here's here's what makes me mad is I had to make myself like math again. Like I failed the honors pre-calculus. And I took it twice. And then I never had to take math again. And I was like, I'm never. I chose a different like, I was like, I'm going to go Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science because I'm not taking anything close to math.KevinAnd then I had to make myself like math when I became a marketer, became important. Yeah. So it drives me nuts. Like I'm going up against Lipinski and it says projected score of 124 and a half for me, this is 122 and a half for her. Okay. How is it possible that what's going to happen is going to happen?KevinI'm going to get 65 and she's going to have 172. I mean, that's just gambling. That's just randomness.JenThey're just taking average projections. But what happens is somebody could get hurt. They might not even play. Hey, I mean, like, you never know.KevinI just think if we have, you know, I that can take us to Mars and back. Can it give us better projections at this? Like, come on, ESPN, get some GPUs fired up And.JenThen but there is.KevinMachine learning.AndrewHuman.JenTo human factor.AndrewAre reliable, unreliable.JenHuman factor.KevinBut they're all being paid off to like take a fall and stuff anyway. Right. Like it's it's all statistically for sure. Oh, it's all over.AndrewIf there is no drama in the game, no.JenOne wants to think.AndrewIt's like people think all the housewife shows are real. Like if there's no drama, there'd be no show. It's all manufactured.KevinI just think it should show around. You should be like, Here's. Here's that. Every year I am like, okay, I'll give Fantasy another shot. And then after the first two or three weeks of the same thing happening every time, or it's like I should have 180 points and I get 30.JenLike, there's no no, you just have to make sure that your players don't have a bye.KevinI don't. I do believe that never happens the first two or three weeks before I get.JenOkay.KevinSo that's why I was wondering, besides you and Mike, who is most likely to win so I can just trade them my best players now.JenBut now you're playing that game we're not in. Oh, man.AndrewI just opted out this year because now we have enough people. I do convert, you know, I don't feel like I'm like.JenNo pressure.AndrewNo pressure because I was not adding to it. I would I would set my thing, but I was just like, Oh, there's another person playing. I don't watch football. I watched some college football, but professional. But they said on.JenUsually guys, I went to the Virginia Tech Old Dominion game this past weekend. It was freaking electric. I was pretty sure Old Dominion was going to get pummeled, but they played pretty good. You know, that's my alma mater.AndrewSince that's where you went.JenThat's where I went to school, right? I'm a die hard fan. I go, Every time you have a home game, I'm there. But when they started playing Enter Sandman at the beginning, I mean, it was like it. In fact, they when everybody's jumping like that, it registers on the text size. Yeah, my grandma, I don't know what the type, but I registers as an earthquake.JenIt was crazy. Like, I was like, almost. I was so overcome with emotion. I was, I was like, it's not even I mean, look, I pay Virginia Tech a lot of money because my child goes there. So I like either way, whoever won it was fine. But I was like, Oh my gosh. Like, I brought me back to Meredith Oliver's fanatical selling and like, we have to our customers need to be fans of, you know, our our business and our brand and our company.JenAnd yeah, I mean, it was it was a thing, man. I was like, I'm all in on these Hokies.AndrewSo you can't replace you cannot replace humans, I guess is what it is.KevinYeah. It's not human to happening this year, but sometimes soon I'm going to have to get my kids to the summit just for like the first 30 minutes and then tell them to leave, because I think that's the only atmosphere that work. And I understand like, Oh, okay, Dad, you do you do real work outside of just talking to your computer upstairs.AndrewOr they might be like, wait, So you go on stage and talk for like a couple of minutes and all these people give you give you money, they listen to you. I don't know. That sounds like a scam. I feel like that's what you promise.KevinNo more sports talk for the rest of the podcast.AndrewNo more sports.KevinLet's start. Walk on to marketers marketing the podcast from the industry leaders. How do you convert where we talk about the current and future state of marketing and online sales for builders and developers across the globe? We're not here to sell you. We're here to help you and to try and elevate the conversation. Is there a topic you'd like us to cover or a question you'd like us to answer?KevinWe'll do it. Simply send an email to show at. Do you convert? Dot com. Welcome to episode 302. I'm Kevin. Okay. And with me today is Andrew Peek and Jen Barkin.AndrewWe're here. It's so exciting.KevinIt's a chat. Are we allowed to announce what's happening?JenOh, my gosh. What's happening?KevinSee, the thing that you're doing?JenAm I doing.KevinFast with the ends with podcast? Oh, are you kidding me? Talking about that? And we're not talking.JenAbout that yet.KevinOkay, we'll talk about it.AndrewI think you just talked about it like it's like, what do you know?KevinWe didn't.JenWe are pretty sure you didn't mind people talking.KevinOh, all right. Well, that's funny. What do you got?AndrewOh, what I got This is a fun question. And I talked about yesterday and this morning, so my. Oh, this could be open discussion. Maybe we make it a parallel to the online sales world. But at the same time, how do you measure a successful ad or how do you measure a successful phone call if it doesn't end up with a lead or an appointment?AndrewCan it still be successful? It's kind of like a gay like principle or like theory. Question This is like the long essay question at the end of an SAT. I don't know if they still do that or not. It's been quite a few years, so sort of open ended discussion. So let's talk about this with Beth, a coach convert and Bryce, a marketing strategist.AndrewAnd it really went down to this rabbit hole of like, oh, you kind of need to be rooted in some type of principles before you decide what is success or not success, because it could be like, Hey, it's really efficient. Was that successful or not? We need every single click out there. Like maybe that's actually the opposite. It's unsuccessful or maybe a very, very limited budget.AndrewSo having a really low or very efficient cost per click is success. Or maybe it's a coming soon community. You need as many leads as you can and you just need to spend as much as can. It doesn't matter what the cost per lead is because the urgency of more leads is significantly more important than trying to save some of the marketing budget.AndrewSo I kind of just gave the answer. It really depends. It really depends. There's no there's no good.JenAnswer, but the right answer as to your.KevinQuestion, it's a hard question. Salespeople leads.AndrewWell, that's it's online sales. People talk.JenAnd I was going to say I was going to say I don't know what the right answer is, but I would think it would be a good ad, would get leads and appointments and sales.AndrewYeah, sounds good to me.KevinYou know. Yeah.JenIf it's a it's.KevinIt's you know, I other maybe maybe land I don't know of a longer purchase cycle for most people to deal with and then homes.AndrewYeah.KevinMaybe mega yachts or airplanes I mean but like if you're shopping for an airplane, is that comparable to shopping for a car? I don't know. Like.AndrewYeah, yeah, yeah. Boats, boats and car boats and there's lots of personalized ocean.KevinLike I've seen lots of visualization tools for customizing your own private jet. Being advertised is like the new way to sell expensive stuff to people.JenI mean, ads are the need though just that really any.KevinWell right but I mean is like the number of decisions and trade offs to consider and you know but at that that's just what makes it all more complicated and.AndrewVery complicated. It's a hard question. Like it's well, it's I think it's.KevinIt's it's the question in advertising. But for us, it's important. Remember that there are multiple parts of the funnel. Different ads serve different purposes for different customers in different stages. You know, you can't I think about this way if you think about a pie pizza and everyone inside of that pie, it doesn't matter if you spend $2 million or $2,000 a month on search, if it's only within that pie, there is always a tradeoff of like if you spend all $2 million and the pie doesn't expand and it's not really pie, it's Rubik's Cube because it's like seven dimensional.KevinBut you you can't have any one tactic that you can just never max out.JenNow.KevinNot just in terms of I guess what I'm trying to convey is it's not just that the ads will get more expensive, but it will not raise the number of people that it reaches if it's defined by a certain radius or shape or audience already and so can't.AndrewYeah, we can't really create a market sort of.KevinWell, yes, but I guess my point is each channel is by definition we don't think about this way. It's own market. Like only the people who are searching can be reached by search marketing. It makes sense. Yeah. If people who aren't searching or they're not searching at every moment of their decision making process. Right.JenAnd so if they're searching, we want to capture them with your.KevinYeah, if they are search, you want to capture them. But you also have to realize that every every line goes back to Steve Schumacher's joke, which you repeat all the time, is if you've got five different things that are viable reasons why someone ends up being a purchaser or they have a realtor, they're referred by a friend, they saw you on a social ad, they did a search, they went on an event and then they purchase who gets credit.KevinBut it's just the acknowledgment that you have to have that every customer becomes a member of multiple channels, advertising channels all the time. And so, like there is this well-rounded ness that I don't think I understood early in my career that now that everyone's I mean, it's everyone's I'm data driven, dated or data driven, and it's like that curve that we get a name Dunning, Kruger data or whatever.AndrewGreater than.KevinFeeling data over.AndrewThat data.KevinYeah, but I would say to your point, what's the word you used to start with a piece that we need.AndrewPeople we.KevinKnow we need. Well, anyway, it's a good ad we need. We need what?AndrewBefore to me is as context we need I don't even know. I don't know where it's just come out my mouth is what usually happens.JenIt's a struggle and.AndrewEventually it forms a sentence that makes sense.KevinYeah, but anyway, the whole world has gone so over onto the data side that for sure there is a serious lack of around principles of thinking principle.AndrewThat we have principles.KevinHere that we will.AndrewLive by principles. That's what we need and building principles come from.KevinThis is the LinkedIn post that I made a little while ago. The principles come from having an ultra deep understanding of what your consumer's experiencing and doing and thinking That's not defined by just asking them, What are you doing? What are you thinking? Because they can't, they can't articulate. They do what's called preference falsification, where they just say what they feel like they're supposed to say to appear good.KevinAnd so you have to have that deep understanding. Just know like, well, of course they're doing these other things. And I don't actually I need data to continually prove to me that they're doing that because I'm constantly watching consumers do what they do and interacting with them and talking to them anyway.AndrewYeah, it's a loaded question. Yeah, we talked about it probably like an hour and a half until yesterday and today. Beth and Bryce. Well, not that single question, but it was a series of question. Yeah, from a very intelligent builder partner of ours. And it was like, Oh, this is actually like, this gets deep. Like you can't that's not a surface level question.AndrewIt's not like, Hey, just check on that. Click the rate, the CPC and conversion rate, and it is your answer because you could have amazing conversion rate.KevinAnd I think.AndrewI just asked.KevinMy sister, here's our episode and she doesn't listen anyway, but she's a CMO now at a at a university, I guess. I mean, sorry, Kristen, but, you know, remember all those bad things she did to me when I was a kid? There's no payback. She she read like a Harvard Business Review magazine article and then, you know, reached out to me and was like, how do I get my team to do this?KevinLike, I read this in an article and it's like, I mean, okay. But I think that's where our prints were. The principles come from Your principles either come from just things you like, observed from afar, or someone else just told you that's a terrible way to develop or principle you can shortcut by getting a coach right? Jenn My coaches help you shortcut to the best principles, but if you're going to your coach and you're like, Hey, I think maybe we should do, you know, squats this way.KevinAndrew Instead of this other way. Why I someone on TikTok said so you're like, Well, I've been in a couple competition. Like, that's, that's not good, right? So I think that's, that's where the friction comes from, is people who have strong principles without strong experience of testing those principles. They just decided it were good principles. Like that's and I it's just important for me to articulate, I guess, to everyone else.KevinAnd our principles don't come from our feelings. Back to your T-shirt. Andrew Yeah, the principles come from the data, but the data combined with experience and observation, not just data on its own. Yeah.AndrewAnd then kind of testing against those principles reinforces the.JenPrinciple, the direction this conversation was going about ads, successful ads.KevinThere. Again.AndrewI think moving it towards online sales world is like a principle on a phone call. Here's the intent of this.JenSo this this kind of plays into yeah, let's just just well, it just plays into the whole coaching and being coachable and wanting to do things the right way and the like. You said, the experience that like our coaching team, do you convert as like thousands upon thousands of hours in the seat. But, but then also coaching and training, I mean, just thousands.JenI don't even know what that might be.KevinHundreds of years. I think if you add up the whole. Yes.JenYeah, hundreds of years. And so it's like when we are speaking from like experience and relevance in the market because we work with, you know, over a couple of hundred online sales specials a month. So we know like what's happening in real time. It's a few, it's like this is yeah, like this is we're not this is not just, are we?JenWe're not is like pulling this out of thin air. What we think like this is what we know, you know, because of what we see on a daily basis. So and you got to be coachable. You got to be open to listening and learning. And I was actually on a podcast yesterday with the homes for Hope program. Yeah, it's awesome.JenDerek And he asked me something came up about coach ability and I was like, Yeah, you know, as a coach you can, you can be like, we're totally invested in that online sales specialist, right? But they have to be invested back in us. We can train, we can coach, we can lead them to the water. We can't make them drink.JenIt can't make them do that. They got to be invested back. And so, yeah.KevinThat's well, and I'm going to get I mean, you use a spice emoji so I'm, I don't know if you've chilled out since then, but I'm going to bring some spice back. So I feel, I think it's not the right word. I don't want use that word. There are absolutely managers and senior leaders out there who have zero desire to unpack why things work are working, and that it seems to be my hunch would be my hunch would be managers told me my wife, that I should never use that word.KevinDo people not use the word hunch anymore?JenI just know. Yeah, I use that hunch.KevinOkay. She's like, when you use that word, stop it.AndrewIs it like, quote, a word? I don't know if like that. That phrase.JenLike moist.KevinYou know, my hunch is that they are insecure in their own ability with whatever it is that would be unpacked.JenAbsolutely.KevinAnd that leads them to be like, nope, don't want to like results are good, don't care about. And I'll give you the tangible example here. There is a builder we were speaking with who it looked like the online salesperson was averaging like 30 to 40 leads a month for the last six months. Okay. And we were on a quarterly leadership call and our online sales coach, working with that person has been talking about things a certain way based upon an understanding that that lead volume, by the way, that lead volume is given by the LSC in the reporting that we use, it comes from the CRM, but he's always have the availability to make sureKevinthe numbers are accurate and consistent. So our leadership and the leadership sales manager, VP of Sales Marketing is like, Oh no, no, no. That only gets like way more than that. We're talking like a hundred plus more leads a month than what that is showing. But it's in this other system that doesn't talk to our CRM and, and I was like, well, that's why for about an issue, I don't know, two years we've recommended to stop using that thing and sorry the answer came back was but it's working really well for us.KevinLike how do you know?JenDo you know.KevinBecause you're your online salesperson doesn't know. Apparently because they don't, they don't count those things. There's no tracking of of how those people are followed up with. And what it boils down to is it's just someone who's highly uncomfortable with the use of technology themselves, someone somewhere told them or whatever, like this is a good thing to use and things are going fine enough, but that's just a that's a huge blind spot that is going to cause massive panic at some point that could be avoided if you just.JenHear.KevinMore about how you how you got to that end result.JenThere is definitely a.KevinKnow.JenYou know, listen online sales contribution is so high. I mean, 45 to 50%.KevinOf.JenSales are coming from this program. But there's still this disconnect of the resources, the support, the time spent understanding, learning the tools, the systems, the reporting.KevinFor this role.JenAnd so there's a lot of like just wild, Wild West happening out there with some of the online sales specialist because there's management is not is not getting in there and taking the time to understand it's it's like you said, Kevin, maybe a lack of understanding or technology but there's also bandwidth issues to feel like everybody is spread so thin and when push comes to shove, we need sales to keep everything running, right?JenSo I'm going to take my efforts and focus on the the sale, the end of the funnel here. But really, we're not going to get sales unless we have a point difference. And if we don't have a point, we got to manage it. So it's really the shift perspective that needs to happen. And I was talking with somebody earlier today that there's still there's still broken parts of the CRM, there's still broken parts of how the leads are managed and things like that.JenAnd it's like, Hey, we've been talking about this for like a year that's still broken.KevinLike, isn't that funny? Like serums As a broader topic, I feel like, you know, there was a time where it was like, are you using Outlook Express or Outlook or like, what's your email client? I haven't heard maybe once in the last two years someone talk about email or questions are around email and how to write their own email client, right?KevinMm hmm. Why the heck aren't serums the same way? It's 2023.Andrew2023. That would stress me out like I won Lead, lost or won. Lee That you lose. I'm like, that could be X amount of profit from one sale of the home that they just ignore that to someone else.KevinAgain.AndrewAnd that just like.KevinAll this.AndrewThat makes me feel.KevinOlder. We're on the call and I'm looking through their CRM system and there were months at a time where not a single prospect was ever entered into the CRM by the onsite sales team. That's like millions more months in a row, not a single lead.AndrewMy that could have been like, that's like, I get weird. I'm like, we could it's like they could have just like, paid someone to pay the whole company notification.JenI mean.AndrewAnywhere.KevinThey were always the lost revenue or. Ms..JenMs. Yeah. Or, you know, just looking at even when we could go on and on about this. I mean, you just looking at like, you know, average appointment to sale number right now is 21%. That's a, that's, that's strong 21%. Right. The average walk in traffic conversion is historically like 10 to 12%. Right. So we go, okay, we're still 21%, like one out of five keep appointments are going to write a contract, but we're still not focusing on that.JenDuring the handoff or making sure that this connection with on site and online is at the forefront of our training and our our discussions. I had some math this episode is all about now. I did some math on Friday where they're right, right now they're at 11% conversion of appointment to sale. And I'm like, if you did these four steps and you were able to increase your conversion to 21%, that's an additional $19 million of revenue.JenYeah, sales revenue, 19 million, 50 million, which equated to like an additional because we did this math in front of the sales team, that's an additional 400 and something thousand dollars in commission or whatever. That's like being left on the table as like when you put it in that perspective, like, well, oh, you know, like just, you know, like these.JenAnd again, this goes back to what we were just talking about, Like we're not just coming up with like, yeah, we think you should do it this way. Like, we know this works. We have the data to support it. We have the conversion metrics to show that this is what the averages are.KevinOkay, What do you think.JenThese four things.KevinOne more thing. Let's just say just for fun.AndrewOkay, fancy.KevinBecause no one else is listening. Right? Lower left lead to employment ratio. Yeah. Is currently.AndrewCan brighten 18.KevinPercent and our and our average benchmark currently is.Jen40.Kevin40. Okay lead to of women.JenWill get to women. Yeah.KevinMy favorite is when the person who has an 18% lead to appointment currently is again the one suggesting that they have found a better way something comes out. I mean and this is where this is where our approaches differ because we're all different humans that do convert, as I'm kind of like I mean, I'm going to explain to you why there's that.KevinThat's a bad idea. But you don't I would say to everyone, like, you don't pay me enough to make your decision for you. So, I mean, try it for a week or two, but not longer because you can't afford to go to five. Like 18 is bad enough. Let's get you to 35 with these proven things right first.KevinOh, yeah.JenYeah. Now, I just say that.KevinJohn, about that school application, I.JenOh, man, I feel like I you go back to school just by now. You know, I did apply to vet school and I if you guys knew that I did at one time want to be a veterinarian.AndrewSent a telegram I.KevinThink like, yes.JenI didn't get in. There's only 30 vet schools in the world.KevinOhio State is one of the best I hear like, yes, there goes a.AndrewLot of things.JenMy daughter is in her senior year, Virginia Tech, and is going through the vet school application process right now. She's applying and like I think 15 schools out of the 30. Oh oh yeah.KevinIs she going to live here or something?JenI so I said if you if you get into Ohio State you can go to Kevin's for dinner. So you know he'll take care of things every sale, you know, they'll feed you, make sure you're okay. But as she's going through this, you know, she's super stressed out. She's having to, like, go back through the last ten years of her life and basically and think about all these things and these prompts.JenIt's like, what's the defining moment of when you wanted to be a veterinarian, Right? So she's having to go through this. And I said.AndrewThese questions are terrible.JenWell, and listen, the vet schools, they only accept it's like the hardest one of the hardest things to get into. They only accept like a 100 out of thousands and thousands of applications. Wow. So I'm like, you've got to do something in this essay to make like to stand out. Like the first sentence has got to be some catchy thing, you know?JenBut it made me think about a couple a different think it's a one. If you are thinking about applying to the Nationals, you should because it's a great way to go through and like you go back into the archives, you just document all of this awesome stuff that you've done in your career and put it on paper. And if you're thinking about doing it, you should go for it.JenBut also make sure you tell this, tell a story that is what is going to help you stand out All in all of those applications that come in. So tell a story, be specific how you overcame something or whatever. But also maybe think about like when we're communicating with our customers and we're sending follow up and we're sending and we're leaving phone messages and we're communicating like you got a you got to spice it up a little bit.JenLike you got to be personal. You got to you got to put something in the subject line that's going to break through the clutter. It's going to make you stand out instead of touching base, checking in. How's it going? Because people's inboxes are inundated, like and they just get so many, you know, especially if if they're looking at your builder, they're looking at ten other builders that are all sending emails that are all sitting to these letters of.KevinWe are.JenAll doing all the things.KevinWe have.JenWe hope. We think, who knows? But you've got us. We've got to break through the digital pollution, right, and cut through the clutter. So that's good luck to Mia. Little Mia.KevinShe's like, Our.JenLocations are due September 18th.AndrewSo 15 of them, But I'd be paying someone to do that, I think.JenYeah, Yeah. That's what I would like to donate to the MIA application fund. But you've got to, like, pay like zillion dollars for all these different applications. So I'm really excited for. So put out some deposit invites.AndrewTo the universe.JenYes.KevinTo see what's her favorite animal is a dogs.JenYes. She's actually doing the research study on cows right now. So she gets to go hang out with cows and draw blood and do little like feeds. She had to, like, pile up on a big, like, green machine and, like, feed them. And I don't know, she's she likes horses, too. She's done some stuff with the horses, but mainly small animals.KevinNot a horse fan. Human kryptonite, those things.JenYou're not a horse.KevinThey can be really good. Yeah. It's not safe. Yeah, that'll.JenOh, they're so beautiful too.AndrewAbout, like, the miniature horses. Those are fun.KevinLittle tiny, maybe. Yeah. Yeah.AndrewWas just to see.KevinWhat would you rather be? Fight one giant hundred foot horse or 101 foot tiny horses?AndrewIt's like running around a little baby horses.KevinSorry, everyone. I'm in some kind of strange, strange minute here. On to the news multiverse.AndrewThis is Earth four.JenHey, online sales specialist, your D convert, Coach Jen Barkin here. Are you looking for guidance, structure and proven methods to help you set more appointments and create more sales? Then join online sales coach Jesse Suggs and myself. We are offering an intense two day virtual training experience, followed by eight weeks of training and coaching through our online sales academy.JenThis fall. Jesse and I have been in your shoes and we teach from our direct experience and years of coaching online sales specialists. Just like you. This will be hands on and real world no theory here. If you're interested, don't miss this incredible opportunity to reserve your spot today by visiting. Do you convert dot.com.KevinMan first up from D and Y use as I stand for, I need to know the news. The news. It's like.AndrewOkay, so two syllables that has generated.KevinThis one wasn't me.AndrewHow about this?KevinSo we're we're using the link and its first monopoly trial of modern Internet era. The US sets its sights on Google. So for those of you old enough to remember, I think the last big Monopoly trial breakup that happened was AT&T.; That was then split up into seven different regional companies in 1984, the article says. But effectively, the United States government is saying that Google is preventing any new opportunity for search to occur.KevinGoogle basically does what Facebook did back in the day. It was like any popular social app. We'll just go out and buy them. I mean, if you guys spend $1,000,000,000, going to spend $1,000,000,000 to Instagram, but it just prevents anyone from getting to the point where they could be a rival. And the charge here is that they're doing that with search and what's going to be so one, it's a big deal.KevinThe other thing is it's hard for monopolies. Monopolies are not illegal monopolies that harm consumers are illegal. And Android Android is was one really smart move by Google of saying we're going to make an operating system that's basically free. I mean, the catch is it has Google search built in as the default option, but it's hard to prove monopoly like consumers don't pay for ads on Google.KevinConsumers don't pay for Google sheets for Google Docs. They don't pay for it. I guess you're getting a lot of, you know, in quotes, free as are straight resources.JenYeah.KevinYou're getting a lot of resources as a consumer that you don't directly pay for. But they're going after it. And I think it's it's not I don't want to say this, it's just a distraction, but it's a really big distraction because this is like a very low percentage chance. But if it does like you, you just imagine working at Google in the senior leadership and you're like, we should be working on AI and we should be making this better and this better and YouTube and oh crap, we are.AndrewThere like we have Mitch McConnell reason out over here telling us what or how to run the business. I agree.KevinIt seems like Google is a monopoly.AndrewI think their monopoly in that they own their own search. Like you Google something, it's the verb, it's what you do versus what you do. I think they're trying to prove, right. Did they do things that were like the competitive nature? Of course they did. They wanted to get rid of the competition. So there's times where I'm like, I don't make any sense this.AndrewI can't stand this type of thing. But then I'm like, we kind of need more regulation over here and like zero regulation and stuff like this. So I feel like, you know, like there's contradictions there with government involvement in business and stuff like that. But this is like, come on, like, this is so dumb. Like everyone that.JenLike it.AndrewOn this thing against Google uses Google likely for their search engine and they're not on asked Jeeves or or Amazon.com or Bain. They're using Google to do it so and there's a reason it's still the better product. And they kind of prove that if even if they did all these, I think that's where the cases is. Probably even if we did not do these things, people would still use Google.AndrewThey're not using Bing. They're not switching to another search platform at all.JenThey're going all use being anymore.KevinYeah, they don't.AndrewEven have points. You can get the search stuff.KevinOn pay, please. Bing.AndrewThey try to pay you. Yeah. You give pretty.KevinLittle coupons or. Yeah. I mean, this is just one line builder here in Texas as an example. But year to date, they have 330,000 unique sessions from Google Search, and they have 13,000 from Bing, 4000 from Yahoo! 2000 from DuckDuckGo Technical.AndrewAnd those are the people, the tin foil hats, but the DuckDuckGo. So yeah, like the conversions, they're like, well, those are the crazy ones, so you don't want those people.KevinSo next from Google itself, new sustainability tools help businesses and cities map environmental information. This is again interesting one to me because Zillow's kind of led the charge of adding all this additional information around property. You know, like safety scores. And I think they also they do have it was started by Brad, Adam and I forget the name of the company where they give like a climate score rating.KevinBut now this is being built into Google Maps platform. They're going to let you see solar energy potential. So it'll identify roofs and talk about the amount of information that likelihood that it will produce a certain amount of power, air quality information and common allergens. That's and so everyone who has a Google map built into their site, you wouldn't, in essence, if you thought that this was important enough to be able to opt for offer a toggle on your own site or experience with access to this same information.AndrewLike it's pretty cool. The solar one is a little bit interesting because our you know, our electricity rates here expensive. We have a moderately large our home 3300 feet so we and I'm home all day so there's no saving of power during the day by turn AC down and we run the AC 23 to 60 days of the year for the most part.AndrewSo we've considered solar. So Project sunroof in our home is newer. Like for some reason, like our house is not in there yet, which is really bizarre. Sort of imagine even like a brand new home. It's obviously not going to be in there, but being that we have no trees because they tore everything down to make it easier and more efficient to develop.AndrewWe have some trees growing, but I'm like, man, solar is like ripe for most new home builds, especially in the South. Like, I think we did do a private survey with our property at one point and like the amount of power we can produce is insane. So I think that's like, oh, that could be that could be a really cool selling tool to go new home construction.AndrewIt's more efficient. Oh, and then now you have solar, the ROI on that. The payback is extremely quick because like you, the efficiency of it for a new home compared to an existing home, an older established neighborhood would be there. So be nice if they I would imagine as it gets use more often the how it refreshes the map and how that would be a little bit quicker.AndrewYeah, just fast for like two, three, five years from now. Pretty cool. All the tools we have.KevinI don't have the exact number, but whoever originally shared this article in my social network also included a stat that I, if I remember it was either close to 50% or like 60% of people who were surveyed had considered at least one environmental factor as part of their search for a home. I imagine both of you living near water in Virginia Beach and near Tampa, that like that's a but even in Ohio, like you can't build homes in a certain level of a floodplain.KevinLet's say 100 year flood, I think is you just can't build in here. So it's kind of surprising in one sense that that number sounded like a good number to use as a stat because I would think like 100% of people are considering like possession of the sun and amount of shade. Yeah, it seems like people who, you know, still quote like, did you know that 94.9% of people use the Internet to shop for a house?KevinAnd like we stop talking about this, it's everyone is like everyone.AndrewJust remember that.KevinAre we doing this? Yeah. Well, like, of course, the environment's a big like, that's what location is. It's all those things wrapped up together. But I mean, do you remember doing, like, a specific thing that you were?AndrewI'm a for me, definitely with hurricane evacuate like we just had a hurricane one week ago that passed by us. So we still had, you know, work zones. I think it's part of the same records and it's like ABCD and then X non evacuate or like a is like you're on the beach or you're a mobile home. The trailer home, manufactured home, no such a wind, wind and water and then B and then we're C, we're actually like B and a half.AndrewLike our kitchen is a B, the rest of the house is a C for whatever reason. So we, we stick with C, we're like, okay, if that gets wet over there, it's fine. We're staying like we're 13. You're yeah, you're gone. You're thinking.JenI'm underwater.AndrewYou're under water. So we're like 13 feet above sea level. You're below sea, you're like a bowl. You're like, you know.JenTraffic is is.AndrewYou have tunnels.KevinSinking. Oh, yeah. Yeah.JenSo you're saying bought a house in the flood zone. And I knew that. So this I'm not a good candidate.KevinIt's gone. But you still porous. I mean, if it was bad, it's.JenOkay to tension Lake. Yeah. Yeah.AndrewIf you need insurance, if you don't like, that's a huge factor.JenFlood insurance required.KevinIt's just a good thing that it's me. It goes in the category of if this place your advantage, you should be talking about it. If you're a builder in Albuquerque, New Mexico, or Southern California or the center of California, and you have now the ability availability to show the potential of solar usage on a on a home like you should be.KevinYou should be talking about that. Definitely. Yeah. All right. Next up from CNBC dot com, we're going to start with the scary and then get to someone trying to offer a solution. Mortgage demand drops to a 27 year low as interest rates pull back the average contract interest rate for 30 year fixed mortgages was $726,000 or less, decreased to 7.2% from 7.3%.KevinApplications for a mortgage to purchase a home fell 2% or 28% lower than the same week. One year ago. So affordability matters, huh? Who would have thought who.AndrewWould have thought of that? You were going to think there's some really smart builders that are offering some bite out of mortgages and I think the show 5.45 or any number less than seven is really attractive.KevinYeah, rates are I mean, again, I think it's catching people off guard. And I don't want to go into an economics lesson, but what's happening right now is that the government has to sell so many more treasuries to fund the government that investors are demanding a higher rate of return. And so, again, people just keep getting confused. It's worth at this point, it's it's kind of like, again, it's September of 20, 23.KevinInterest rates have been kind of a big deal for a while now. So if when I say interest rate, Treasury bonds, Treasury bills, tenure and you're like, whatever, just shut up and move on to the next topic, you should go watch a couple YouTube videos. Well, I'll give yeah, something like this. You know, it's a bit like you have at some point you have to be like, Huh, I guess this is big deal.KevinYou you don't have to understand it to solve it. You again, you can't empathize with your customers, say can't communicate, you can't educate, you cannot build trust. If you're not making any content about this at all because you're scared of it. Like just, you know, so people are like, I don't understand. We didn't raise interest rates or interest rates only went up by X when the Fed.KevinWell, the Fed's not the only factor here. You know, and and so rates are still sliding higher and the government's going to need more money for a while.AndrewSo I mean I think you would say. Kevin and to end interest rates is the I'm trying to think of the right word to phrase it at principal. That's a strong word. I think we all can feel that word. What it means like interest rates, that is the single biggest factor right now, above all everything else, like you could have a purple house with backwards doors and windows upside down, sideways, all this stuff.AndrewAnd the interest rate is right on that single home. Somehow, who cares? Nothing is selling, right? Yeah. Like it overrides the most amazing campaign, the most amazing website, the most amazing content. Yeah. Location. All that stuff is the rate right now. Shoot, we had a home just list in our neighborhood, and it's one that's like, closest to our our size home and like, Oh, what's something listed for?AndrewIt's like seven something. And then I see that's not the Zestimate, the Zillow's I've heard the call their, their mortgage calculator. I'm like, Oh gosh. I'm like, that's a whole different type of person income job life wise compared to, say myself.KevinI mean.AndrewWhen we got it and at this house now we're at two points, you know, like that's a whole different ballgame as far.KevinAs ask your parents for money. I don't know if you saw that Barbara Corcoran video. So. Barbara Corcoran, she's had a couple of these viral comments. I don't know if she just doesn't have anything going on with her real life.AndrewCPR form.KevinStatements that are compelling. But the first one was, of course, like if rates go, go down, prices will go up. So you better buy now. It's like, okay, we just want to look at one way and that could happen. It also could be their rates go down because the economy is terrible and people that have to sell their house and then there's more supply, then demand, and then prices go down.KevinSo either one could happen, but now she's come out and she just her it was one of these like dude bro podcast about like how to get rich quick. She's like, you just got to get into real estate and like if you can't afford it, no big deal. Just ask your parents for the money. Like the boomers have money, just get their money.KevinAnd so then she's just getting trolled. Get the boom so hard by people who are screenshotted that and they're like, you know, in their clearly not rich surroundings. And these are like teenagers even. They're like, yeah, thanks, Barbara. I'll definitely just ask my parents for, you know, a couple million to buy that apartment in Manhattan. And I'm like.AndrewI can imagine the reactions on that would be hilarious.JenWell, you know, just despite the Straits, it's not like, you know, you can easily slip into this, like, dude, I'm like, oh, my gosh, this sucks, right? But when we look at I mean, I just talked to a builders like we had our best month. August was our best month than ever, you know, at their best, Like it was.KevinThe best.JenMonth ever, ever. And, you know, conversion rates are still really strong, even more so than they were first quarter. Like.KevinYeah.JenSo it's like, yes, it's there and it's harder, but there's still a lot of positives happening justifying.KevinWay more there. There are actually way more positives than the negatives. I'm telling you I would rather have rates where they are or higher than I would like to have the same number of existing homes available on the market today as there were in 2018. If that happens, I'm telling you it's not that that is bad. I will find it.KevinA whole bunch of other things. More fire will take an extra couple million homes, you're saying?JenBecause you're saying because the existing inventory is so low. That's yes, it's so good for us. Yeah.KevinThe only common factor, not not the only the main common factor that unites individual markets that are struggling right now are builders are not hitting or exceeding their goals is where existing home supply get This has returned to like normal normal. And it's not like poems are sitting around forever, but they're like this is the same month supply that was like considered healthy is violently unhealthy now because.KevinBecause why? Because if you get the same healthy supply as is normal and demand is still down here, that's not good like you. Yeah. And so anything that reduces supply and this is why people get into housing experiences of like builders don't want to build that. People truly think this is hilarious. They think home builders are like Louis Vuitton and they're thinking of like, you know what?KevinWe'll do here's we'll do Jen. We'll just build homes a little bit slower or we'll make them a little less available just to protect the prices of our homes. Right. They've never met D.R. Horton. They've never met else, you know, Century Jimmy, like some of these builders that just focus on volume like that. It's hilarious. But your point is again, Andrew, 100% correct.KevinWe would not be in this House now when rates went down to three and a half and then kept going lower. I was like, Melanie, I mean, we own this property since 2015 that we built on and we had a loan and still the we were paying off on the land. But the loan on land was like seven and a half percent.KevinYour land aside, you realize that if we build a that's basically the same size as the house we're in now on the seven acres versus a three quarter acre, we all have a lower payment than what we are paying right now, paying the land and.JenThe spray money. Basically.AndrewShe was like, Shut the front door. Kevin, are you serious? This real interest rate, principally.KevinWhat she said like, well, then why.JenAre not doing that will ever see is that low.AndrewYeah. I don't I don't ever want to see that low.KevinBut that's.AndrewThat's.KevinConspiracy. That's what I wish more people would just honestly talk about if it went back to that guess what would happen like there's there is my friend Rob John says that you know there's just that these are the five these are four days and we added a fifth I think. But deaths, diamonds, diapers, divorce, divorce and displacement like physical, those are the reasons people move.KevinYeah, those reasons haven't stopped.JenRight.KevinWhat has stopped is the availability to easily move around.JenRight.KevinAnd transact. And so that means that I think it's very likely that when rates do go down, there's going to be a whole bunch of people just like the the race was on and people realized that there are still going to make money During the factors. Half of the world was shut down. The race was on to buy things and do things and get things.KevinI think there's a whole bunch of people who the minute rates get below 500 are like, Oh, this is our chance. We got we've got to say this. Yes, we made the dumbest decision ever to move to Nowhere Vermont and work remotely and try to raise yak wool on the side. We need to get back home to Chicago.KevinYeah, You know, put their house up 400%. Yeah. And that is. I'm just telling you, whatever keeps inventory low as what I'm in favor of for our industry now as a human being and wanting people to be able to have access to housing, I think it's terrible. Absolutely terrible. Yeah. But it it is it makes the market work right now.AndrewI think there's a lot of people that regret not doing something with the massive amount of equity they have. So they're like this. This might be like, who knows what's going to happen? Like, this is our chance. We have half million or whatever, number two, three, 400,000 inequity. I want to do something with it. I want to move.AndrewSo there's there's a lot of reasons, I guess.KevinYeah. Now, you can't really touch that equity because there's.JenA lot of people.AndrewLook expensive.JenWebsites and looking and lots of traffic to get you know people are looking.AndrewPeople love new.JenHomes. It's just waiting.KevinBut it's to the rescue, maybe.AndrewRescue.KevinTo the rescue, maybe.AndrewLike a rocket is.KevinIs one. Plus buy rocket mortgage, a 1% down payment option. Andrew, you found this?AndrewI did find this. I was actually. So we reified with Rocket. I logged in, we revived like 20, 20, 20, 21 or whatever, whenever it was. And then I saw this as like an ad something like, Oh, they got me. They got me enough to share this with, with the team. Like, this is interesting and it just read the fine detail.AndrewSo it, it essentially it is targeting it's first time buyers or if you're a repeat buyer, but you do have to fit certain income requirements they give you. You could put down 1%. That's all they're asking for, 1% down payment. They'll give a 2% grant as part of that down payment. So you're at three and you could only give up to 3%.AndrewSo there's max down, payment is 5%. So they're making sure that like, okay, they they'll make more money with less down payment. They have more principle to have interest attached, attached to, but then there's no PMI on it. So that's really interesting. But the and the credit requirements to you looking at this, I'm not a mortgage broker. I'm not a finance person, but you're like, okay, 620 or better.AndrewThat's pretty low. I feel like for like what seems in my brain like this seems to be like a higher risk product or, you know. Beth our team was like, This feels really familiar to VR alone in terms of requirements. Like it's it's kind of what the VA offers for military. But there are you know, there's that every mean something I'm not educated enough in this as far as like what does qualified income mean versus income on it.AndrewBut it seems like it is targeting kind of like the middle ish class income levels and that kind of like in number, we're not probably a lot of people that are very great renters. They pay on time. They have no issue with that yet. They're stuck. They're kind of like, I can't get a down payment, I can't get a down payment on houses, keep going up.AndrewInterest rates are higher. I want to get out of renting. This seems to be the perfect thing for them.KevinSo, yeah, my niece, this seems like a product product for and it's not it's not just I'm almost positive this is a government for Fannie and Freddie have kind of somehow this has been devised and rocket does always a really good job of packaging things up. They do easily and simply for people but I'm pretty sure this option exists for from a lot of different sources.KevinBut my nieces, I think she's 24. She's made good money for a couple of years. She's lived with her her mom. She's getting married and she's like, I really want to buy a house, but I can only afford to put down or only want to put down X. Even though she has more money, she just doesn't want to put it on one.JenOf the.KevinMedia.AndrewYou want to have backup? Yeah. You're like, Cool. That which makes sense. Yeah. You think that'd be like, rewarded somehow? Maybe it is like less down payment.KevinBy banks because they know that's more risk for.AndrewThem. It is risk. But another thing I think a take on this too, is if you read it, I think most builders I'll be meaning for a second any incentives, they're usually not great at explaining them on their website. Intentional, not intentional. To me, I think clear is kind of the more direct you are with it, the better conversions you'll have.AndrewSo I don't know if there's any like, Hey, just leave a little bit info out. People want to call. Well, that's not good because it's in the cards you get or confused. People like, Hey, I'm trying to read this thing, you know, online salesperson. Like, well, they didn't tell me either, so I don't really know. I don't really know.AndrewSo I think I.JenRead that deceptive. What itself what are you talking about?AndrewI think it's like 90% clear and at the bottom there are some like really? Well, that number does make sense. You know, about 6000 there but that's not reference in I was little details I think might not be the best.JenAnswer but it's just written the word incentive. Okay. We're like.AndrewIncentive.JenBuying options.KevinHome buying like.JenNew home options.AndrewOkay, I'm buying.KevinI don't know if.AndrewI can tell if you're messing with me or not, because.JenOptions.AndrewFeels like a really weird word. Really? Oh, we should talk about that. And options versus incentives and do a Did you watch the story on Netflix? I'm really distracting this right now, but it's about words choosing words. It's about when oxycodone content was created and they did a group what's a focus group on naming the drug? Like what is morphine mean to you?AndrewThey're like cancer death, my grandmother passing. What does this word mean to you? Oh, headache. What does this word mean to you? OxyContin, Breathing like oxygen and as all positive words. And they're sitting there and you're like, oh, well, this is terrible. Like, if you if you watch another person affected by it, you're.JenSitting there like, so and so and so it's it makes a big.KevinDifference.JenAnd will mean something rid of the word appointment of somebody is like thinking like I blow.AndrewMy mind. I'm stuck in nerd corner only know what's happening.JenAnd now we we were like don't even say appointment because that means that's transactional and the last more stressful. Like if you get an appointment like you're, you're going to go to contract basically what.AndrewWord to be like.JenSo like we don't even say that we were to discovery tours this Discovery tour community visit. If there's somebody who's really like, I don't know, like, Hey, how about let's just touch up with an informational session to get you started? Like, I.AndrewHope they're not like, so, like an appointment. I feel like I'm Jerry Seinfeld, right?JenBut I guess softening that verbiage, that's when like, you know, anyway, I don't know how we.AndrewGot my language is.KevinMy grandma.AndrewMeans something while.KevinShe's still alive. She's 104. So there might be something to this. But her and my grandfather used to take vitamin. Oh, Andrew.AndrewThat sounds made up too.KevinAnd it like had oxygen in it. And I, like, I was, I don't know, five at a time.AndrewI see it now.KevinBut I was so like, I'm pretty sure you can't put oxygen into powder form and shove it inside of a capsule.AndrewLike it's just hydrogen.KevinAnd I think they're probably that's one of the jokers got away with that is they're like, well you're breathing, you know, you're breathing while you're taking it. So you're taking it out.AndrewI guess I need to know what's in this. I found.JenIt. It's like.AndrewWell, I found the Amazon thing, which is terrible. It's it's like a white he gets like a white and blue bottle vitamin. Know about it, But no ingredients. Ingredients aren't even.KevinYeah, well, my father in law also sells total shyster thing. He sells saltwater. It's a cure all. He's from West Virginia. Okay. Okay. And then my mom used to take Queen Bee Rock Royal Honey, It was. It was special honey in gel tabs that only came from Queen Bees because Queen bees have some ideas. Like, why do we all want to live for?KevinOh, wait, I guess that's insane.AndrewSay I'm quality over quantity. I don't know.KevinIf on.AndrewAny given time.KevinI'll just be paying way more attention to cosmetics and vitamin companies. Yeah, because I know more and that's just make up more stuff. It's getting.AndrewLet's make it as.KevinWe have plenty to talk about. That's interesting to them that we don't have to.AndrewMake it and we have discovery tours. We could tell them about this information.KevinOh, it's I like this. I don't know. Do you like this, Kevin? Or do you hate this? Kevin, This Kevin could never appear another episode again. It's just too much cost me.JenHave you heard today? Maybe. Is it too much or not enough?KevinNo, I think I think it's just the knowing that this is my last thing of today. And I get that you.AndrewSo every Thursday for the month of September, I think it's month to September, Starbucks is doing buy one, get one fall drinks after 12:00. Oh they.KevinShould be Stanley.AndrewThey should be sponsoring me. Right. And that's why I went and got one before. Like this little thing doesn't look so little. I don't I'm not a big dude. I'm like, five, eight. But that's in this cup look so dainty. Like, that's a top, but it's the pumpkin cream cold brew.KevinPeople always think this stuff is contrived and made up, but I will add a Starbucks card and all access you all can scan.AndrewAnd they better post a picture using it.KevinBut I'm just kidding. Ha ha ha ha.AndrewYou better use.KevinAll right, let's move on to our favorites or things we hate either in either one. Oh gosh. What are your favorite shows? Books, Things you've watched. I'm going to give away one of my secret favorite thing I like. You know, I share a lot, but then I'm always like, Ooh, that person's got really good stuff. I can't share it with anyone, but I will.KevinI will share it today. You want I start inter Yeah.AndrewYou talk about West Virginia. So we were recommended. I'm not recommending this.KevinI'm just West Virginia. You're you wonderful people. My home.AndrewCountry roads. Shenandoah River. Right. It's a great place. So there's this documentary. I think Johnny, Johnny Knoxville made it so someone from East, right? But it's the wild and wonderful whites of West Virginia. Just watch on the Amazon. It seems like it's a high school project. Someone made an I'm movie and it's about this family the house and West Virginia and Boone County, Boone County, West Virginia.AndrewAnd it's just a train wreck of I mean, you don't watch it and try to figure out who the father is of any of these children. I think it's one person, the great grandfather or the grandfather. It's the craziest thing. But it's about this family that's they're all related interbred. So it's it's it's insane. I'm like, what are we watching right now?AndrewBut someone recommended it to us. So sure enough, we watched it. I'm not advising to watch it or to not watch it, but if you need something that's a change of pace.KevinYou're doing this with, you're like, Hey, watch this thing.JenYou don't need to be. You don't need to justify your favorite. Oh, you're very handsome.AndrewThis is definitely not I mean, this is about a ancestral family that's inbred. It's a little.JenWeird. Are you favoring favor?AndrewI don't know. This is just.JenWild. It's.AndrewIt's interesting when we finish this whole thing, if that says anything. So we didn't turn it off. I've heard people left.JenIt was like the train movie.AndrewNobody watching it was a train wreck. You're like, Wow, this is real. Everybody. When I said West Virginia, so am I, my boom mic. But the boom, my boom arm that I got, the new one, it's perfect. It doesn't.KevinMove.AndrewThe other one's on the ground. I need to throw it away.JenSo not 2

In today's episode, I will take you on a journey through the frontiers of quantum computing, a technology surrounded by an aura of scientific intrigue and commercial promise. Yuval Boger, Chief Marketing Officer at QuEra, joins us to cut through the fog surrounding this emerging field. QuEra, a visionary Boston-based company founded by luminaries from MIT, has set out to transform quantum computing from a theoretical wonder to a practical tool for solving real-world problems. The crux of our conversation orbits around the timeline of quantum computing's contributions to real-world business applications. While the technology has been enveloped in a whirlpool of hype over the years, Yuval provides a sober perspective on when quantum solutions might genuinely disrupt industries like finance, oil and gas, and government research.  Yuval offers a nuanced view of how quantum processors will coexist with traditional CPUs and GPUs. The key takeaway is that rather than upending the computational apple cart, quantum will supercharge certain calculations and unlock problems beyond the reach of classical computing systems. By the end of our conversation, it becomes apparent that while quantum computing is undoubtedly a revolution in the making, it's a revolution that will integrate with, rather than overthrow, existing technological infrastructures. For companies and individuals willing to grasp its complexities and nuances, quantum computing offers opportunities that could redefine problem-solving in the 21st century.

Dive into the tech world's top stories!

GPUs are rare and expensive right now. Every company doing AI model training needs more, and NVIDIA can't build enough, especially of the NVIDIA H100 GPU. Run.ai CEO and co-founder Omri Geller says he has a software solution to this hardware problem. The key: GPUs are mostly idle, even in high-demand settings. According to Geller, his software 2X to 4Xs your GPU capacity on existing hardware, simply by streamlining workloads and maximizing GPU usage time. In this TechFirst, we chat about: - the GPU shortage - how many GPUs we need - what Open AI is using right now - whether OpenAI is getting dumber or not - and much more As always, get a full transcript and subscribe to the audio podcast at my website: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

As enterprises try to deploy infrastructure to support AI applications they generally discover that the demands of this application can disrupt their architecture plans. This episode of On-Premise IT, sponsored by Pure Storage, discusses the disruptive impact of AI on the enterprise with Justin Emerson, Allyson Klein, Keith Townsend, and Stephen Foskett. Heavy duty AI processing requires specialized hardware that more resembles High-Performance Computing (HPC) than conventional enterprise IT architecture. But as more enterprise applications leverage accelerators like GPUs and DPUs, and become more disaggregated, AI starts to make more sense. Power is one key consideration, since companies are more aware of sustainability and are impacted by limited power availability in the datacenter, and efficient external storage can be a real benefit here. This is still general-purpose infrastructure but it increasingly incorporates accelerators to improve power efficiency. One issue for general purpose infrastructure is the concern over security, and enterprise AI applications will certainly benefit from broad access to a variety of enterprise data. Enterprise use of AI will require a new data infrastructure that supports the demands of AI applications but also enables data sharing and integration with AI applications. © Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: AI Infrastructure Disrupts Enterprise IT with Justin Emerson from Pure Storage

Nvidia, a name synonymous with cutting-edge technology, has a compelling story that spans from its early focus on gaming graphics to its current role as a leader in artificial intelligence. In this episode of Down to Business English, Skip Montreux and Samantha Vega take you through the company's fascinating history, groundbreaking technologies, and its meteoric rise in the tech industry. You'll learn about the company's unique naming story, its game-changing technologies like GPUs and CUDA, and its strategic moves that have made it a trillion-dollar enterprise. Join Skip and Samantha and learn the answers to these questions: Who are the key figures behind Nvidia's founding, and what motivated them to start Nvidia? What is the story behind Nvidia's unique name? How did Nvidia transition from a company focused on gaming graphics to become the dominant player in the field of artificial intelligence? Become a D2B Member today and get a 25% discount!! Choose the D2B Executive Plan (recurring or 1 year only plan) and use this discount code at checkout D2B252023 Visit Apple Podcasts to subscribe to Down to Business English, rate the show, and leave a comment. Contact Skip, Dez, and Samantha at downtobusinessenglish@gmail.com Follow Skip & Dez Skip Montreux on Linkedin Skip Montreux on Instagram Skip Montreux on Twitter Skip Montreux on Facebook Dez Morgan on Twitter RSS Feed

Semiconductor Stock Investor, Jose Najarro dives deep into the looming war between GPUs and CPUs, focusing on Nvidia Stock, AMD Stock, and Intel Stock. Discover why the big players in Artificial Intelligence are shifting their investments toward GPUs. If you're a Semiconductor Investor looking to understand how AI is revolutionizing the tech landscape, this is a must-watch. We'll decode whether Nvidia's market surge is a fleeting trend or a game-changer in computing. Stay ahead in the AI race.A portion of this video is sponsored by The Motley Fool. Visit https://fool.com/jose to get access to my special offer. The Motley Fool Stock Advisor returns are 512% as of 8/2/2023 and measured against the S&P 500 returns of 135% as of 8/2/2023. Past performance is not an indicator of future results. All investing involves a risk of loss. Individual investment results may vary, not all Motley Fool Stock Advisor picks have performed as well. I have a position in $AMD $NVDASemiconductor Podcasthttps://www.fool.com/josenajarroDISCORD GROUP!! https://discord.gg/wbp2Z9STwitter: https://twitter.com/_JoseNajarroDISCLAIMER: I am not a financial advisor.  All content provided on this channel, and my other social media channels/videos/podcasts/posts, is for entertainment purposes only and reflects my personal opinions.  Please do your own research and talk with a financial advisor before making any investing decisions.

Chip War: How semiconductors became the new oil with Chris MillerSemi-conductors, microchips, are the new oil - the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. This has only accelerated with the emergence of AI. Yet, the supply chain is incredibly concentrated with just a handful of countries and companies dominating.  As with oil in the previous century, chips sit at the center of geopolitics, great-power rivalry and trade, especially between the US and China. How did chips become some crucial and their supply chains so concentrated and what does it mean for all our futures? Our guest is economic historian Chris Miller, author of Chip War - The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, the New York Times best seller.

In this episode, we discuss: Exploring the secrets of the TPM Running Radeon and NVIDIA GPUs in one PC. Getting ongoing data from an EV. You can send your feedback via show@linuxmatters.sh or the Contact Form. If you’d like to hang out with other listeners and share your feedback with the community you can join: The Linux Matters Chatters on Telegram. The #linux-matters channel on the Late Night Linux Discord server. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us using Patreon or PayPal. For $5 a month on Patreon, you can enjoy an ad-free feed of Linux Matters, or for $10, get access to all the Late Night Linux family of podcasts ad-free.

In this episode, we discuss: Exploring the secrets of the TPM Running Radeon and NVIDIA GPUs in one PC. Getting ongoing data from an EV.   You can send your feedback via show@linuxmatters.sh or the Contact Form. If you'd like to hang out with other listeners and share your feedback with the community you can... Read More

Trimming profits, delaying launches, begging friends. Companies are going to extreme lengths to make do with shortages of GPUs, the chips at the heart of generative AI programs. Read this story here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On This Week in Google, Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Ant Pruitt discuss Nvidia's record profits this quarter that were largely driven by high demand for its graphics chips used in AI and gaming applications. For the full episode, visit twit.tv/twig/731 #Nvidia #AI #GPU Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Ant Pruitt You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our podcasts at https://podcasts.twit.tv/ Sponsor: GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT

On This Week in Google, Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Ant Pruitt discuss Nvidia's record profits this quarter that were largely driven by high demand for its graphics chips used in AI and gaming applications. For the full episode, visit twit.tv/twig/731 #Nvidia #AI #GPU Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Ant Pruitt You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our podcasts at https://podcasts.twit.tv/ Sponsor: GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT

Try Notion AI for free at https://www.Notion.com/wan Check out Volcanica Coffee's over 150 different coffees at https://lmg.gg/volcanica and use code LINUS15 for 15% off! Save time and automate your social media marketing! Check out Tailwind at https://lmg.gg/tailwindapp Timestamps (Courtesy of NoKi1119) Note: Timing may be off due to sponsor change: (00:00:00) Chapters (00:01:18) Intro (00:01:56) Topic #1 - Lack of WAN Show last week (00:02:44) Working & figuring things out (00:03:54) Steven's FP post, content break (00:05:28) dBrand's broken glass, Linus's pool kills his tech (00:11:41) Linus on fixing his Z Fold ft. Bread Cam (00:12:44) Luke on baking tech, Android's photo back up (00:14:48) LTT's Radeon pt. 2 video, supposed to release sooner (00:16:09) Topic #2 - Disney ditches physical disks sales (00:19:12) Past writer strikes up to 153 day (00:19:42) U.S. judge rules A.I. art cannot be copyrighted (00:20:16) Lack of strikers' compensation, "tax write off" (00:22:31) Constantly dropping shows, what will happen to industries? (00:25:39) Discussing global film industries (00:27:35) Linus on Disney withdrawing content (00:29:38) Luke on archiving, Linus on piracy (00:33:02) Linus on Superchats (00:35:06) Merch Messages #1 ft. Bread Cam (00:35:43) Bread in resin FP exclusive? (00:36:57) Would wireless GPUs take off? (00:38:35) LMG's car channel update, style of video? (00:40:03) Topic #3 - Illinois allows child influencers to sue parents (00:48:22) Topic #4 - GTA VI leaked by a teen hacker (00:58:36) Topic #5 - Best Monopoly spots ft. Bread Cam (01:01:41) Luke's history with timestamping WAN Show (01:02:43) Result of FP poll, "inflation" in Monopoly (01:04:26) Luke confronts Bread deity about the number of topics (01:04:49) Sponsors (01:08:46) Monopoly's wiki on railroads ft. "Rush for Bread!" (01:10:05) Linus on Monopoly purchase & auction rules (01:13:04) Linus's screenshare button, Monopoly Tycoon (01:17:02) Discussing "Tycoon," past games, "better Anno" (01:20:02) Luke discuss Sawyer & Steam reviews, Linus recalls Anno (01:21:48) Starfield, Yukon Trail, Linus learns about FP polls (01:23:57) Jadeon's new FP player & features (01:26:47) Twitch's take on React (01:27:58) Merch Messages #2 (01:32:22) Topic #6 - Luke plays Baldur's Gate 3 (01:34:12) Luke mutes Linus the Bear Enthusiast (01:35:31) BG3's multiplayer & campaigns (01:36:20) Chained Echoes, Linus's & Luke's hours (01:37:20) Linus recalls Valve changing TF2's stats (01:38:24) StS's Ascension, Linus on overwriting saves (01:40:36) Rocket league ranks (01:41:08) Update on Ludwig V.S. Linus game-off (01:42:22) This Was NOT a Video (01:43:24) Dan wasted paper, Linus on iGPU (01:47:38) Topic #7 - Microsoft pulls A.I. article writer (01:49:32) Microsoft's response (01:50:03) Fully machined artwork is ineligible for copyright (01:50:24) Microsoft's A.I.'s sea life suggestion (01:51:50) Topic #8 - Meta blocks Canadian news (01:54:52) Topic #9 - Experian fined $650K for violating spam law (01:55:29) Topic #10 - Rockstar acquires Cfx.re (01:57:02) Linus on goal changes, Luke on modders being hired (01:58:25) Merch Messages #3 ft. Bread Cam (01:59:08) Ever experienced "if I do this, there's no going back?" (02:01:51) Favorite stories from LTX & Whale LAN (02:02:55) Did you think the screwdriver would be as widely used as it is? (02:04:12) Ever played racquetball or squash? How does it compare to badminton? (02:05:41) Favorite split screen Co-Op games? (02:11:24) Stubby screwdriver launch date on LTTStore? (02:12:09) Favorite smart home upgrades (02:13:40) Biggest culture shock during your travels? (02:15:01) Any other sponsors who were weird like dBrand? (02:16:27) Choose between old wireless internet & rechargeable batteries (02:18:23) Release of Atari 2600+ (02:19:21) Thoughts on DLSS being a necessity (02:22:29) Would you do a video about FP tech? (02:23:33) Outro

Brandon Powers is a creative director and choreographer who is creating experiences across physical and virtual space at the intersection of performance and technology. He was showing a dance performance at ONX Studios during Tribeca Immersive that was titled Kinetic Diffusion. It was created in collaboration with Aaron Santiago, and featured three screens that were being filled with delayed generative AI footage in near real-time and 30 frames per second, which required eleven 4090 GPUs in the cloud to achieve. Powers was recording his dance with a mirrorless camera, and then was applying a depth map AI model to extrapolate his embodied movements so that it could be input as a real-time feed into Stable Diffusion with a set of prompts that were precisely timed out. The AI generated images ended up having a 2-8 second delay, which gave the effect of Powers dancing in a duet with himself, but modulated through a series of style transfer prompts. Overall, it was a hypnotically impressive display of generative AI at the intersection of XR and dance. I had a chance to catch up with Powers after his performance to get more context for how it came about, and the long evolution from his previous explorations at the intersections of AI and dance with Frankenstein AI that premiered at Sundance 2019 (see our previous conversation about it in episode #728). You can see a brief explainer video of Kinetic Diffusion within from Powers' TikTok channel. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

Do you like piña coladas, and getting caught in protracted discussions about DLSS 3.5 and NVIDIA quarterly financials? And that's just the FIRST HALF HOUR. You won't want to miss a single second of this episode. Also, there weren't any piña coladas. Sorry.  But there would have been if you had brought your own.  There is quite a lot of monitor discussion, right down to the Picks-of-the-Week(tm).  Also, there was only the one 737 plane.Recorded August 23, 2023.Timestamps:00:00 Intro01:22 Food with Josh03:24 DLSS 3.5 announced (with extended discussion)16:33 NVIDIA earned so much money last quarter28:17 Microsoft brings some PC Game Pass games to GeForce Now30:00 The reviews are in - Ryzen 9 7945HX3D is the fastest gaming CPU33:28 Samsung's dual-UHD 57-inch monitor38:14 A trio of new OLED displays in the ASUS ROG Swift lineup39:33 Minisforum Project DRFXI puts the GPU on top of the case43:35 Podcast sponsor - DeleteMe45:11 The status of the Windows 11 OOBE49:24 Microsoft's Secure Time Seeding "feature"53:11 Security Corner1:00:04 Gaming Quick Hits1:11:25 Picks of the Week1:25:20 Outro ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Are New York City's new rules for short-term rentals like Airbnb effectively a ban? And will they accomplish what proponents want them to? Then, The New York Times tech reporter Erin Griffith on Silicon Valley's mad dash for GPUs. And finally, we take stock of the A.I. songs of the summer and discuss YouTube and Universal Music Group's plan to make synthetic voices profitable.On Today's Episode:Erin Griffith is a New York Times journalist based in the San Francisco bureau, where she reports on technology start-ups and venture capital.Additional Information:New York City's new regulations for short-term rentals go into effect soon.Start-ups are on a “desperate hunt” for GPUs. (There's even a song about it.)Creators are using A.I. voices to imitate Freddie Mercury, Johnny Cash, Eric Cartman from “South Park,” and others.Google and YouTube have different approaches to compensating creators whose work is used to train A.I. tools.

Kendall Miller is the Co-Founder and COO of CTO Lunches, a network of engineering leaders to get trusted advice and connections. The first half of the conversation with host Victoria Guido and special guest host, Joe Ferris, CTO of thoughtbot revolves around the use, adoption, and growth of Kubernetes within the technology industry. The discussion explores Kubernetes' history, influence, and its comparison with other platforms like Heroku and WordPress, emphasizing its adaptability and potential. The second half focuses on more practical aspects of Kubernetes, including its adoption and scalability. It centers on the appropriateness of adopting Kubernetes for different projects and how it can future-proof infrastructure. The importance of translating technical language into business speak is emphasized to influence executives and others in the decision-making process and Kendall also discuss communication and empathy in tech, particularly the skill of framing questions and understanding others' emotional states. __ CTO Lunches (http://ctolunches.com/) Follow CTO Lunches on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/ctolunches/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/cto_lunches). Follow Kendall Miller on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendallamiller/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Kendall Miller, Co-Founder and COO of CTO Lunches, a network of engineering leaders to get trusted advice and connections. Kendall, thank you for joining me. KENDALL: Thanks for having me. I'm excited. VICTORIA: And today, we have a special guest host, Joe Ferris, CTO of thoughtbot. Joe, thank you for joining us. JOE: Hello there. Thank you for having me. KENDALL: Hi, Joe. Thanks for being here. It's exciting. VICTORIA: Yes. It's so exciting. I think this is going to be a great episode. So, Kendall, I met you at a San Diego CTO lunch recently, and I know that's not the only thing that you do. So, you're also an advisor, a board member, and CXO. So, maybe tell us a little bit more about your background. KENDALL: Gosh, my background is complicated. I've been involved in tech for a very long time. In college, I worked for a company that started Twitter about five years too soon, and then worked in the nonprofit space in China for ten years, then came back, got back involved in tech. Today, I'm usually the business guy. So, when technical founders start technical products and want help turning them into successful technical businesses, that's when they call me. So, I have the technical background. I have never been paid to write code, which is probably a good thing. But I can hang in the technical conversations for the most part, but I'm much more interested in the business side and the people leadership side of business. So that tends to be where I play. Every organization hires me to do something different. VICTORIA: Thank you for that. And I'm just curious about the CTO Lunches. Just tell me a little bit more about that. And what's the idea behind it that led you to co-found it? KENDALL: CTO Lunches has actually been around for about eight years. And I didn't start the initial incarnation of it. It was two people that got us started, and I was trying to hire one of them; one thing led to another. Actually, originally, they did not want me to join. I think, at the time, my title was COO at a company that I was working with. About six months later, I took over engineering as VP of engineering, and then they're like, you can join the group now. We're less strict about that [laughs] now. Although it is highly focused on senior engineering leaders, it's not exclusively CTOs. But the group's been in place for a very long time, just intended as a place to network, have conversation with people who are in that senior-most technical position at technical organization. So, the CTO role is a lonely role. CTOs get fired all the time. There's not a technical person at the company that doesn't think they can do the job better than them. So, the CTO is always getting feedback. You're doing this wrong. The trade-offs you're making are wrong. This isn't going where it should be going. We should automate that. Why haven't we automated that? We should switch to this other tool. I've used it before; it's 100 times better. Joe, let me know if I'm getting any of this wrong. But that's the experience that I've had. Having a place where people can get together and, you know, half the time just complain to each other, hey, this is hard, is really why the networking group exists. So, it's a listserv. And there are local lunches that started in Boulder, Colorado. It's gotten pretty global. About a year ago, a little over a year ago, I was talking with one of the people who'd gotten it started. I've been involved in the Denver chapter for most of those eight years. And I was suggesting to him that he change a few things about it, to monetize it so that he could invest in it further. And he came back a few months later and said, "I want to take your advice and do this, but I want you to come do it with me." So, we founded the company officially...I think in December is when paperwork went into place. And we started investing in it a little bit more heavily. I was living in Europe last year, so we went and put on lunches in Paris, and Lisbon, and London, and, gosh, all over the place. I'm sure I'm missing some, Amsterdam. But there's been chapters all over the U.S. and a couple of other parts of the world for a long time. VICTORIA: That reflects my experience attending a CTO lunch. It's just very casual, like, just get together and eat food and talk about what you've worked on recently, issues you're having, just get ideas and make some friends. So, I really appreciated the group, and I'm going to personally plug the San Diego Chapter has picked up again. And we're meeting next Friday down in Del Mar. And we're going to be meeting on the last Friday of every month through October. So, I'm super excited to be a part of the group. And Joe, yeah, I'm curious about your perspective. As a CTO with thoughtbot, just what are your thoughts about that kind of thing? KENDALL: Yeah. How right am I about how lonely you are, Joe? JOE: [laughs] You know, I've been lonelier since we went remote. I used to work in the office, and I was a CTO, but also, I had lunch with people, which was nice. So, I'm lonelier. But yeah, I think everybody needs a group like that, like, senior developer therapy just to talk about your woes together, drown your sorrows. KENDALL: Well, I think years ago, I heard that CTOs are the most fired C-level executive. JOE: You're making me nervous now. KENDALL: [laughs] You've been there a long time, Joe. I know you've been there a long time. If you haven't been fired yet, you probably got a little while longer in you. This will be really awkward if it's published and you've already been fired. VICTORIA: We can always edit that out afterwards. [laughter] KENDALL: Yeah, no, I think it is a particularly lonely position. And, again, I think a lot of it is the average engineer in a technical company doesn't look at the COO or the CFO or even the CEO and think I could do that. But they're all looking at the CTO and thinking, what does that person do that I can't do? It's ridiculous because most of them would make terrible CTOs because it does require some of the business sense. Or, you know, right out of the gate, they might make terrible CTOs. It actually is quite a skill to be the most technical person and speak the business language. I mean, am I right about that, Joe? Like, was that hard for you to learn? JOE: Yeah, I definitely think...so, my background is also technical. I have a background in consulting. So, I always did a lot of metaprogramming, if you will. But making that transition to thinking about organizations that way, thinking about how all the other pieces play into it, was a pretty big step for me, even before I became a CTO as a consultant. KENDALL: Well, because you can't just chase the newest, hottest technology. You have to make business trade-offs. And not everything can be resume-driven development, right? Even if that technology over there is newer or hotter, it doesn't mean you have a business model that supports it. And it doesn't mean that migrating to it can be done, right? JOE: Yeah. I mean, even beyond choosing technologies, just choosing where to invest in your software stack, like, what needs to be reworked, what doesn't, and trying to explain those trade-offs, I think, is a rare skill. Being able to explain why something would be harder than something else when you're working with the leadership to prioritize a backlog it's a puzzle. KENDALL: Well, and I think when I'm in an executive conversation, and the CTO says, "Here's the thing that I think is the best decision technically, and I think it's the wrong decision for the business because of X, Y, or Z," I'm always super impressed, right? Like, this is the right technical solution for what we want. However, we shouldn't pursue that for business reasons right now. Maybe we can in six months, but right now, we need to prioritize this other thing. I don't know, that's always when I feel like, oh, this person knows what they're doing. JOE: There's nothing more dangerous to software than a bored developer. [laughs] One nice thing about being a consultant is that I don't have to invent problems to solve with technology at my company because sooner or later, I'll run across a company that has those problems, and I'll get to use that technology. But I think a lot of people are mostly happy...they might be happy in their role. They might be happy with our team. But they're very interested in whatever is hot right now, like machine learning, AI. And so, suddenly, that surreptitiously makes its way into the tech stack. And then, years later, it's somebody's problem to maintain. KENDALL: [laughs] Well, I have a specific memory of a firm in New York City that was, you know, this is relevant to y'all as thoughtbot is that, you know, at least historically, it was, to me, the premier Ruby on Rails consulting shop. I think that's still largely y'alls focus. Am I right about that? JOE: We still do a ton of Rails, yeah. KENDALL: Okay. Well, so this organization was all Ruby on Rails. It was a big organization. They had a very large customer base. And they hired a new CTO who came in, told everybody in the company they were stupid, laid off 70% of the engineering organization, and told the CEO he was going to completely rewrite the product from scratch in .NET, and he could do it in three weeks. And I'm pretty sure the business went under about three months later [laughs] because that was just so outrageously nuts to me. JOE: It's too bad he laid everybody off beforehand. I've been in that situation where somebody tells me, "I'm going to rewrite this. It'll be ready in three weeks." And I could fight with them and try and convince them they're wrong. But I feel like somebody who's approaching that with that attitude they're missing all of the nuance and context that would make it possible to explain to them why it's not going to work. And so, it's easier to just say, "You know, take the three weeks. I'll talk to you in three weeks." But if you've already laid off your development team, that's hard [laughs] to recover from. KENDALL: That's exactly right. VICTORIA: There's got to be a name for that kind of CTO who just wants to come in and blow everything up [laughs]. Yeah, so you spend a lot of time talking to different CTOs and doing this social networking aspect. I'm wondering if there's, like, patterns that you see. You've mentioned already one about just, like, the most often getting fired. [laughs] But what are the patterns you see, like, in challenges, and then what makes someone successful in that CTO role? KENDALL: Well, oh gosh, I have so many thoughts about this. First of all, I run into a couple of different categories of CTOs. There's a lot of people who come to CTO Lunches who are small company CTOs. I mean, it makes sense that there's a lot more small company CTOs than there are big company CTOs. But the small company CTO who maybe it's their first gig in the role or they're a serial CTO. There's the fractional CTOs that come that are doing it across several different organizations at the same time, and then there's the big company CTO who shows up. And honestly, all of their problems are very different. The thing that they have in common is even at a very large organization, in that position, they can make a decision that causes the company to go under. So, there is a significant amount of volatility in the amount of power that they wield. So, what's interesting about that is not everybody understands that. And so, first of all, there's the kind of CTO that just doesn't get that, and that doesn't matter if they're fractional, or a small company CTO, or a big company CTO. If they don't understand that, they're going to cause significant problems, right? Like the person I just mentioned who said, "I can just re-platform this in three weeks in .NET." There's that. I mean, I think, as with any senior leadership position, the comfort with volatility, the ability to know what to communicate down versus across and versus up, and then the ability to speak the business language. For everybody, the CFO's job is to communicate the financial needs alongside of the business leads, right? If the CFO's sole goal is to cut costs or make sure we're running as lean as possible, they're a bad CFO. But they're not as good of a CFO as the CFO who can say, "Hey, we're underspending right here. And I can look at the numbers and know we should invest more there. How can we invest more there and invest it well?" And it's the same thing for a technology executive to be able to look at the business context and communicate it back. And there are so many CTOs that I've worked with who they're the most technical person in the room, and they know it. And as a result, they're just a jerk to everyone around them, like, everything you did here was wrong. You know, that's where they fail. And so, if they can communicate the business needs, navigate the volatility, and support a team that's going to make decisions that aren't always the same decision they're going to make, they're going to be successful. Honestly, there's very, very few CTOs that I've met like that. People who are excited to meet you at work, excited to see you succeed, excited to see that you went and built a thing is great. I mean, the reason I was VP of engineering is the CTO that I was working with at the time...it's a terrible story. There was an engineer who had seen something that we were doing on repeat all the time and, in his spare time, spent about 40 hours outside of work, not during work hours, automating this task that we were doing regularly. And it was related to standing up a whole bunch of things in our standard infrastructure. He brings it to the CTO and says, "Look what I built." And the CTO, instead of saying, "Hey, this is incredible. Thank you. This is going to save us a bunch of time. Let's iterate on it. Here's some things I'd like to tweak. Can we bring it in this direction? Can we..." you know, whatever, said, "Why is this in Python? It should be in Ansible," something like that. I can't remember. And the engineer literally burst into tears. [laughs] JOE: Oh my God. KENDALL: [laughs] Well, I mean, yeah, it was like; literally, that's why the CTO stopped managing people that day. There's a lot of examples that I have like that. Joe, I appreciate that your response is, "Oh my God." Because I think there's a lot of people who'd be like, wait, what was wrong with that? Shouldn't it have been in Ansible? JOE: [laughs] Yeah, I've seen CTOs come into primarily two groups. One is the CTO who just tells, you know, like, they make the decisions, and they tell everybody what to do. They obviously don't have all of the information because you can't be in every room all the time. And the other is the CTO, who just wants to be one of the team members and doesn't make any decisions and tries to get people to make decisions collectively on their own without any particular guidance or structure. And finding that middle spot of, like, not just saying, "Hey, everything's in Ansible," allowing for the creativity and initiative, but also coalescing the group into a single direction, I think, is what makes a good CTO. KENDALL: Well, yeah, because the CTO does have to say no, sometimes, right? Like, the best product, people say, "No." Good CTOs say, "No." There is some amount of, hey, I need you to come to me with trade-offs about this. Why are you going to make that decision? And I'm sorry, you still didn't convince me, right? Like, I mean, those are appropriate things to say. But yeah, I'm with you on that. You said they fall into two categories. But you really mean the third and that middle ground. Is it easy for you to walk that middle ground, Joe? JOE: I wouldn't say it's easy. [laughs] KENDALL: Yeah. Well, I'm always nervous to say something. I'm doing well because I know there's a report out there that can point at every time I failed at it, right? So... MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you're tight on time and investment, which is why we've created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product's next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneurs. VICTORIA: Yeah, what I'm getting from what you're saying, too, is this communication ability and not just, like, to communicate clearly but with a high level of empathy. So, if you say like, "Well, why is it in Python and not Ansible?" is different than being like, "What makes Python the best solution here?" Like, it's a different way to frame the question that could put someone on the defensive that just really requires, like, a high level of emotional intelligence. And also, if they've just worked, like, an 80-hour week, [laughs] I probably would maybe choose a different time to bring those questions up and notice that they have been burning the candle at both ends and prioritize getting them some rest. So, speaking of, like, communication and getting prioritization for [inaudible 15:34], especially on, like, infrastructure teams, maybe we could talk a little bit about Kubernetes, like, when that comes up as an appropriate solution, and how you talk about it with the business. KENDALL: My background with Kubernetes is long because a company that I still work with, Fairwinds, used to be called ReactiveOps, has been in the Kubernetes space for a very long time. I think we were one of the very first companies working with Kubernetes. It was coming up that people were running into the limits of something like Heroku, right? And I think it's Kelsey Hightower who said every company wants a PaaS. They just want the Paas that they built themselves. And that's really accurate. And I think Kubernetes isn't quite a framework for building your own PaaS or isn't quite a foundation where I think of a foundation for a house. Instead, it's more like rebar and cement and somebody saying, "Good luck, buddy." You know, you still have to know how to put the rebar and cement together to even make the foundation, but it is the building blocks that help get you to a custom-built PaaS. And it's become something that a lot of people have landed on as, you know, the broadly accepted way to build cloud-native infrastructure. The reason I've been in the Kubernetes space and the space that I see Kubernetes still filling is we need to standardize on something. We can choose a cloud provider's PaaS. We can choose a third-party PaaS, or we can standardize on something like Kubernetes. And even though we're not going to migrate from AWS to Azure, the flexibility that Kubernetes gives us as a broadly adopted pattern is going to give us some ability to be future-proofed in our infrastructure in a way that previous stacks were not, you know, it was Puppet, and it was Ansible. And it was SaltStack. And it was all Terraform all the time. I'm not saying those things don't exist anymore. I'm saying Kubernetes kind of has won that battle. Joe, since you're here and I know y'all are doing some Kubernetes work now at thoughtbot, I'm curious if you agree with that characterization. JOE: Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's the center for people to coalesce around. Like, for an effort in the industry to move forward, there needs to be some common language, some common ground. And I think Kubernetes struck the right balance of being abstract. So, you can use it in different environments but still making some decisions, so you don't have to make them all. And so, like, all of the things you had to do with containers like figuring out what your data solution is going to be, what your networking solution is going to be, Kubernetes didn't even really make those decisions. [laughs] They just made a platform where those decisions can be made in a common way. And that allowed the community and the ecosystem to grow. KENDALL: I mean, I think of it a lot like WordPress; you know, WordPress is hated by many. When WordPress came out, it was hot, right? And it was PHP, which everybody was super excited about at the time. Kubernetes is going to reach a point where it's as long in the tooth and terrible as people think WordPress is, but it has become the standard. And the advantage of the standard is you can use the not standard. You can go build a website in Jekyll instead of WordPress, and there's going to be some things that are nicer about Jekyll. But because WordPress is so broadly adopted, there's a plugin for everything. And I think that's where Kubernetes sits is because it's become so widely adopted everybody's building for it. Everybody's adapting for it. If you run into a problem, you're going to find somebody else out there who has that problem. In fact, I think of one organization that I know that was on HashiCorp's Nomad. And they said, "Actually, we think Nomad has better technology through and through. But we think we're the only company at this size and scale using Nomad. And so, when we run into a problem, we can't Google for it. There's no such thing as a plugin that exists to solve this. Nobody has ever run into this before on Nomad. But there's 100 companies dealing with the same problem in Kubernetes, and there's ten solutions." And I think that's the power that it brings. VICTORIA: So, it's not just a trend that CTOs are moving towards, you think. KENDALL: I mean, I think it's already won the battle and the hockey stick of adoption. We're still right at the very bottom of that tick-up because it takes people a long time to adapt new technology like this, especially in their infrastructure. It's a big migration, to move. So, I don't think it's the widely adopted infrastructure technology even yet. I think a lot of the biggest organizations are still running on things that predate Kubernetes. But I think it has won the battle, and it is winning the battle and is going to be the thing going forward, so yeah. JOE: I think it also has a lot of room to grow still. Like, there are other technologies that I used previously, like Docker, and they were a big step up from some of the things I was doing at the time. But you quickly hit the ceiling, or it was, like, I don't know where to go with this next. I don't know what else is going to happen. Whereas with Kubernetes, there are so many directions it can go in. Like, the serverless Kubernetes offerings that are starting to pop up are extremely interesting, where, you know, you don't actually maintain a cluster or anything. You just deploy things to this ethereal cluster that always exists. And so, that sort of combination of platform as a service, function as a service, Kubernetes, as that evolves, I think there are a lot of exciting things that have yet to come in the Kubernetes space. KENDALL: Well, so say more about that, Joe, because I've been going to KubeCon for a very long time, maybe...I don't know if it's 2016 or so when I first went. And it felt for a number of years...maybe those first four-ish years it was always the people at KubeCon were the, like, big dreamers and thinkers and, like, we're here to change the future of cloud infrastructure. And this is going places, and we're excited to be here and be a part of it. And here's what I'm going to do that changes the next thing. And I feel like now if I go to KubeCon, it's a lot of people from, you know, IBM and some big bank that are, like, deep sigh, well, I have to adopt Kubernetes. I need to know what the vendors are. What do you guys do, and how does this work? Can you please teach it to me? Because I'm being told by my boss, I have to do it. I don't see that excitement around Kubernetes anymore. The excitement I see is all around further up the stack, you know, things like Wasm, WebAssembly, or eBPF, the networking things and tracing things that are possible. Maybe that's further down the stack. I guess it depends on how you think about it, but different part of the stack. So, I'm curious, touching on the serverless components of Kubernetes; sure, I get that. And I do think, increasingly, the PaaSs of the future are all going to be Kubernetes-based, whether that's exposed or not. But where are the places that you think it's still going to go? Because I feel like it's already gotten boring, maybe in a positive way. But I don't see the excitement around it like I saw a few years back. And I'm curious what else you think is going to happen. JOE: Yeah, I mean, I don't think I disagree. I think Kubernetes itself, the core concept, is, like, it's still changing. But you're right that the excitement about Kubernetes existing has gone down because it's been there for a while. But I feel like the ecosystem is still growing pretty rapidly. Like, the things you mentioned, like Wasm and Istio, and all the tools in that ecosystem that continue to grow, is where I think the interesting things will happen. Like, it's created this new lower-level layer of abstraction that makes it possible to build concepts and technology that could not have existed before. KENDALL: Yeah, well, and I'm, you know, talking to people who are working really hard at making short-run ephemeral workloads work better on things like GPUs for the sake of AI, right? Like, I mean, there is some really interesting things happening, and people are doing this in Kubernetes. So, I get that. I agree with that. It is interesting that Kubernetes has become sort of the stable thing, and now it's about who can build the interesting add-ons. It's almost like, okay, we've built Half-Life. What is Counter-Strike going to look like? You know. That's a terrible (I'm aging myself.) example. But still. VICTORIA: I think it's interesting, I mean, to look at the size of the market for platform engineering right now. In 2022, was 4.8 billion, and it's estimated to be in 10 years $41 billion. So, there is this emerging trend of different platform engineering products, different abstractions on top of Kubernetes. And I wonder what advice you would have for a technical founder who's looking to build and solve some of these interesting issues in Kubernetes and create a business around it. KENDALL: Well, okay, let me clarify that question. Are you thinking, I'm a startup, and I need to build my infrastructure, and I'm going to choose Kubernetes. What advice do I need? Or are you thinking, I am founder, and I want to go build on the Kubernetes ecosystem. What advice do you have? VICTORIA: Now I want to know the answer to both. But my question was the second one to start. KENDALL: One of the things that is hard about the Kubernetes ecosystem is there's not a ton of companies that have made a whole bunch of money in Kubernetes because, as I said, I still think we're actually really early in the adoption curve. The kinds of companies that have adopted Kubernetes are the kinds of companies that don't spend lots and lots of money on an infrastructure. [laughs] They're the kinds of companies that are fast-moving, early adopters, or, you know, those first followers, and so they're under $100 million companies for the most part. Where the JP Morgans and Chase are running Kubernetes somewhere in their stack, but they haven't adopted it across the stack to need the biggest, best tools about it. So, the first piece of advice that I'd give is, be a little wary. It's still very early to the market. Maybe now is the time to build the thing. When ReactiveOps pivoted to Kubernetes, I think it was six months of having conversations with companies who were just, like, so excited about it, and this is definitely what we want to do. But nobody was doing it yet. You know, it was, we have, like, six solid months of just excitement and nobody actually pulling the trigger. And, you know, we were a little too early to that market. And that was just the people adopting it. So, I think there is some nervousness that cloud-native solutions the only people who are really making money in Kubernetes are named Amazon, Google, and Microsoft because it's the cloud providers that are making a ton off of it. Now, there's Rancher. There is StackPointCloud. There's a few others that have had big exits in this space. But I don't think it's actually as big of a booming economy as a lot of people think, in part because EKS is an incredibly amazing product. Like, eight years ago, the thing people paid us the most to do at ReactiveOps was just stand up Kubernetes because it was so stinking hard to just get it up and working. And now you click some buttons. Anybody can go do that. So, it's changed a lot, right? And I think be wary when you're entering that ecosystem. And then, my advice to the founder that's not building on the ecosystem but just looking to adopt a technology that's going to be a future-proofed infrastructure is just adopt one of the cloud-native platforms. And there are a whole bunch of sort of default best-in-class add-ons out there that you need to throw in. Don't adopt too many because then you have to maintain them forever. That's the easiest way to get started. You can figure out all the rest of it later. But if you go use EKS, or GKE, AKS, you can get started pretty easily and build something that is going to be future-proofed. I don't know, Joe; I'm curious if you disagree with any of that. JOE: Well, I think it's interesting to think about who's making money in Kubernetes. Like, I think there might not be as many companies who are doing only Kubernetes and Kubernetes-focused products that are massively successful. But I think because it has had a good amount of adoption and because it's easier to work with something that's standardized, it has helped companies sell things that they wanted to sell anyway. Like, all the Datadog, all the Scalas, the logging companies, they all have Kubernetes add-ons. And now everybody is paying Datadog [laughs] to have a dashboard for their Kubernetes cluster. I think they're making more money than they would have been without targeting the market. And so, I think that's really...if you want to get into the market, it's not, like, I'm going to build a Kubernetes product. It's if I'm building operations and an infrastructure product, I should definitely have it work with Kubernetes, and people will want to click and install it. KENDALL: So, to be clear, you know, one of the companies that I work with is called Axiom, and they play in the same, you know, monitoring, observability space as Datadog does. And part of what makes Kubernetes interesting in that space is in a microservice environment; there's so much happening. Where are problems being caused? We don't live in a day where I can just run my code, and it tells me that there's an unexpected semicolon on line 23, right? Like, that still happens. You're still doing those things. But this microservice talking to that microservice is where things tend to break down. Did I communicate this correctly? What was sent? What was received? Where did it break down? What was the latency? And if you were doing things in the old way back when you were standing it up with, say, Ansible, or Puppet, or something like that, and you were orchestrating all of these cloud virtual machines, you had to really work hard to instrument the tracing and logging and everything involved in order to track what was going on. Whereas that's one of the magic things about Kubernetes is with a few of the add-ons or some of the things out of the box with Kubernetes, it's a couple of clicks to get so, so much of the data and have insight into where things are going and what's going wrong. And so, I 100% agree with that. Kubernetes is generating a tremendous amount of data. And if you're a data company, it's really nice to have all that come in, and it helps them make money, helps the user of Kubernetes in that situation understand where problems are happening and breaking down. Yeah, there's definitely some network effects of what Kubernetes is doing in that. I completely agree. JOE: I think there are also some interesting companies, like, where they make...Emissary, Ambassador, and they have that sort of dual -- KENDALL: Komodor, is that -- JOE: Yeah, maybe. They have open source, but then they have a product. KENDALL: You're thinking of Ambassador Labs. JOE: Yeah. Ambassador Labs, yeah. I guess I don't really know how much money they're making. But I think that's a really interesting concept as people who make open-source things then make a well-supported product built around it. KENDALL: Sure. What's interesting is, I think in the VC world, at least right now, and it may pick up again, but post-Silicon Valley Bank nearly caving in, I think that the VC tolerance for, yeah, just go get a billion open-source adopters, and we'll figure out how to monetize later I think that the tolerance for that is a lot lower than it was even six months ago. JOE: Yeah, I think you have to have a dual model right from the beginning now. KENDALL: Yeah. Agreed. VICTORIA: You got to figure out how to make money on Kubernetes before you can. [laughs] KENDALL: You know, minor detail. That's why I think services companies in this space still have a lot going for it. Because in order to even be able to sell software to a company using Kubernetes, you half the time have to go stand up Kubernetes for them because it is still that hard for so many people to really adopt it. VICTORIA: Yeah. And maybe, like, talking more about, like, when it is the right decision to start on Kubernetes because I think the question I get sometimes is just, is it overkill? Is it too much for what we're building? Especially, like, if you're building a brand-new product, you're not even sure if it's going to get adopted that widely. KENDALL: I mean, and I'm [laughs] curious your thought on this, Joe, but there's a good argument to be made that Heroku was enough for the vast majority of founders early on. But the thing is, Kubernetes isn't as hard as it used to be. Going and clicking a couple of buttons on GKE and deploying something into Kubernetes with GKE Autopilot running it's not as easy as Heroku, but it's not wildly far off. And it does substantially future-proof you. So, when is it too early? I'm not sure it's ever too early if you have an intention of scaling if you're planning on running some kind of legacy workload, like, things that are going to be stateful. Or maybe WordPress, for example, you don't probably need to deploy your WordPress blog onto Kubernetes. You can do that in your cPanel on Bluehost. I don't actually know if Bluehost even exists anymore, but I assume it's still a thing. I don't know, what would you say, Joe? JOE: I agree with that. I think it's a hard first pill to swallow. But I think the reality is that it's very easy to underestimate the infrastructure needs of even an early product. Like, it doesn't really matter what you're building. You're still going to have things like secrets management. You're still going to have to worry about networking. They just don't go away. There's no way you have a product without them. And so, rather than slowly solving all those problems from scratch on a platform that isn't designed for it, I think it's easier to just bite the bullet and use one of the managed solutions, especially, as you said, I think it's getting easier and easier. The activation energy from going from credit card to Kubernetes cluster is just getting lower. KENDALL: And so, the role of the CTO is just getting easier and easier because they can just adopt the one technology, and it's obviously Kubernetes. And it's obviously Rust, right? [laughter] Yeah, no, I'm with you. And I think if you find somebody who knows Kubernetes inside and out, it's really not going to take them long to get started. VICTORIA: Yeah, once again, change management is the biggest challenge for any new innovation coming into adoption. So, I'm curious to talk more about the influence that you need and how you influence others to come around to these types of ideas, like, in the executive suite and with the leadership of a company, especially on these types of topics, which can feel maybe a little abstract for people. KENDALL: How you influence them specifically to use Kubernetes, or just how you talk with them about technology adoption in general? Or what are you asking? VICTORIA: Yeah, like, how do I get people to not just turn their ears off when I say the word Kubernetes? [laughs] KENDALL: Yeah, I mean, I think...so I think that's where it's the technologist's job and the role of the CTO to translate these things into business speak. And that's why I'm using words like future-proofing your infrastructure is because there are companies that...I know one company that made a conscious decision that they were going to try to re-platform every single year, and that is not a good idea or sustainable for the vast majority [laughs] of companies. In fact, I can't think of a single situation where that makes sense. But if you can say to the CFO, "Hey, it's going to cost us a little bit more right now. It's going to save us substantially in the long term because this is the thing that's winning. And if we go standardize on Heroku right now, every company does eventually have to migrate off of Heroku. They either go out of business, or they get too big for it." That's the kind of thing that needs to be communicated in order to get people to adopt it. They don't care what the word is. They don't care if you're saying Kubernetes; you know, most CFOs understand it about as well as my mom does. My mom tries to bring it up in conversation because she's heard me use it. And she thinks it makes her sound smart, which maybe it does in the right climate. VICTORIA: My partner does the same thing. He says DevOps and Kubernetes all the time. I'm like; you don't know what you're talking about. [laughter] JOE: Those words do not come up in my house. KENDALL: One of my kids asked me to explain Kubernetes. And I do a whole talk, particularly at organizations where understanding Kubernetes is essential to the salespeople's role. And I give a whole talk about the background of how we got here from deploying on some servers in our back room. And, you know, what's different about the cloud, what containerization did, et cetera. And I have this long explanation. And I remember taking a deep breath and saying to my kids, "Do you really want to hear this?" And I had one son say, "Yes, absolutely." And my wife and three of the other kids all stood up and said, "No way," and left the room. So, when somebody asks me, "What do you do?" Actually, one of the key relationships I built with some of the early people at GCP when we were partnering closely with them was a person that I met, and I asked, "What do you do for a living?" And he said, "I can tell you, but it's not going to mean anything to you." And I was like, "That's what I say to people." And it turned out he was in charge of, you know, Kubernetes partnerships for Google. I can explain to you what it means and why it's important. But you're not going to be happy that I spent that time explaining it to you. VICTORIA: [laughs] That sounds awesome, though. It sounds like you built a server rack just to demo to your children what it was. KENDALL: No, no. I just talked back through the history of...that company that I mentioned that built Twitter about five years too early; we had a, you know, we had a server rack in the...literally physically in our closet that was serving up our product at the time. VICTORIA: Probably the best demo I ever saw was at Google headquarters in Herndon, and someone had built...They had 3D-printed a little mini server rack that they had put Raspberry Pis onto, and then they had Kubernetes deployed on it. And they did an automatic failover of a node to just demo how it works and had little lights that went with it. It was pretty fun. So maybe you should get one for yourself. [laughter] It's a fun project. KENDALL: They remember the things that it enables. They don't remember what it does. And so, when I say so, and so is a client that's using this technology, then they get real excited because they're like, "My dad makes that work." And I'm like, well, okay, that's kind of a stretch, but you get the idea. VICTORIA: Yeah, you got to lean into that kind of reputation in your house. KENDALL: That's right. VICTORIA: And you're like, yes, that's correct. KENDALL: That's right. [laughs] VICTORIA: I do make Kubernetes. I make all the clouds work, yeah. KENDALL: Actually, my most common explanation is Kubernetes is the plumbing of the internet. Unless you're a plumber, you don't care about the pipes. You just want your shit to flush when you use the toilet. You want the things to load when you click your buttons. You don't actually care what's going on behind the scenes, but this is what's orchestrating it increasingly across the internet. VICTORIA: So far, we've called Kubernetes WordPress or the toilet. [laughs] KENDALL: The plumbing. [laughter] VICTORIA: You are really good at selling it. [laughter] KENDALL: Hey, if you want to build a nice, clean city, you need good plumbing. You might not care what the pipes are made of, but you need good plumbing. [laughs] VICTORIA: Works for me. On that note -- [laughs] KENDALL: Yeah. Right? Right? VICTORIA: That's [inaudible 36:41] on a high note. Is there anything else that you'd like to promote? KENDALL: With regards to CTO Lunches, we have a free listserv. There are local lunches. If there isn't a local lunch where you are, it's very lightweight to start up a chapter. We often have folks who are willing to sponsor that first lunch to get you going. We do have a paid tier of CTO Lunches. If you want a small back room Slack channel of people to discuss, I think it's $99 a month. Yeah, if you're a CTO and/or a senior engineering leader and you want a community of people to process with, be it our free tier or our paid tier, we've got something for you. We're trying to invest in this to build community around it. And it's something we enjoy doing more than almost anything. Come take part. VICTORIA: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Kendall Miller.

TobinSmith.io  AI Investing Primer https://truemarketinsiders.io/learning/articles/an-artificial-intelligence-primer-Join Badlands Media for The Great Rest with host Sean Morgan. Each week Sean will discuss all the important financial news you need to know._What happens when the AI mania meets the transformative force of change wave investing? Prepare for an enlightening journey with Tobin Smith, the renowned author of Change Wave Investing and Change Wave Investing 2.0, and former Fox News commentator. We traverse the landscape of the tech stack, spotting winners and losers in every 15-year transformative cycle, and delve into the heart of the current AI explosion. Hear Tobin's take on Mera's Law, the NVIDIA GPU revolution, and the dramatic impact of the Fed's trillion-dollar injection on the digital image market.Every revolution promises casualties and opportunities. We probe into the world of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), its potential to overturn businesses, and its power to unlock a staggering global opportunity worth trillions. Discussions meander through the treacherous terrain of the EU's upcoming Artificial Intelligence Act, its implications on companies, and the potential tremors it could cause in the world of work through job automation. The future of labor and productivity is poised on the edge of a radical shift. We explore how machine learning, GPUs, and AGI are transforming the workplace and making real-time answers a reality. We also examine the rise of revolutionary software like Wayfinder, altering the very fabric of logistics and reducing the need for manual labor. To wrap up our journey, Tobin offers an insightful look into the mechanics of the stock market and shares pearls of wisdom from his investment newsletter. Strap in for a deep dive into the tumultuous, thrilling wave of AI with Tobin Smith.-• Secure your financial future! GOLD AND SILVERhttps://BadlandsGold.com• MyPillowhttps://www.mypillow.com/Promo Code: BADLANDSOr call 800-795-5154• Benson Honey Farmshttps://bensonhoneyfarms.comUse REP Code: BADLANDS• Bootleg Productshttps://BootlegProducts.comCoupon Code: BADLANDS for any order over $40• No Bugs Beefhttps://NoBugsBeef.comPromo Code: BADLANDS for an additional 10% off• Flying Gang Rum Companyhttps://flyinggang.com/shoprumPromo Code: BADLANDS - For FREE SHIPPING OVER $100• The Wellness Companyhttps://spikedefend.com10% off with Promo Code BADLANDS_https://BadlandsMedia.TV_Check out our Badlands Marketplace made up of America-First businesses: https://marketplace.badlandsmedia.tv/home_Interested in promoting your business? Email Matt Byram atads.badlandsmedia@proton.me_Breaking History isSean Morgan:Website:https://SeanMorganReport.comTwitter:https://twitter.com/seanmreportTruthSocial:https://truthsocial.com/@seanmorganreport_Follow Badlands Media at:Substack: https://badlands.substack.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/BadlandsMedia_Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/badlandsmedia22Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/BadlandsMediaTruth social:#SeanMorganSupport the show

This week's episode brought to you by Slice on Broadway, and Sidekick Media Services and listeners like you at www.patreon.com/awesomecast Wrestlequest from Pittsburgh's Mega Cat ! https://www.wrestlequest.com/en Katie is using the Movo Mic for her DSLR https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0723D3FVL?psc=1&ref=ppxyo2ovdtbproduct_details Desktop Meta Threads coming for some of us… https://mashable.com/article/meta-threads-desktop-version-launches Intel CPUs and GPUs come with a free copy of Assassin's Creed: Mirage https://www.pcworld.com/article/2035620/intel-cpus-and-gpus-come-with-a-free-copy-of-assassins-creed-mirage.html Sega completes purchase of Rovio for $776 million https://www.engadget.com/sega-completes-purchase-of-rovio-for-776-million-191525883.html?guccounter=1 Transformers on Calm https://www.facebook.com/calm/videos/4291035690997912 High School NASA Rover Programs https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/design/stem/nasa-invites-students-to-rise-to-2024-human-exploration-rover-challenge-2023-08/ Netflix will send 10 extra movies to DVD customers, but you can't keep them (*wink) https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/08/21/netflix-dvds-free-giveaway/ Subscribe to the Podcast: awesomecast.com Sorgatron Media Podcast Network Feed: sorgatronmedia.fireside.fm Join our AwesomeCast Facebook Group to see what we're sharing and to join the discussion! You can support the show at Patreon.com/awesomecast! Join our live show Tuesdays around 7:00 PM EST on AwesomeCast Facebook, Youtube and Sorgatron Media Twitch!

El sistema inmune nos ata al smartphone / Reanudan negociaciones de Tesla en Valencia / Terremoto de copyright para las IA / Un inodoro imposible de manchar Patrocinador: El 23 de agosto llega a Disney Plus la nueva serie original de Star Wars: Ahsoka (tráiler). Volvemos a ver en pantalla a la rebelde Ahsoka Tano en una épica aventura llena de acción, intriga y emociones desbordantes, que solo podrás disfrutar en Disney Plus. El sistema inmune nos ata al smartphone / Reanudan negociaciones de Tesla en Valencia / Terremoto de copyright para las IA / Un inodoro imposible de manchar

Chuck Joiner, Guy Serle, David Ginsburg, Ben Roethig, Eric Bolden, Kelly Guimont, Web Bixby, and Mark Fuccio finish off a conversation about computer generated images and graphics in this MacVoices Live! session. Concerns about the quality and repetitiveness of generated content are raised, as well as the importance of unique perspectives and ideas. The role of historians, librarians, and copyright issues in preserving accurate data is explored. The panel then delves into the recent changes to Zoom's terms of service and their intentions to use conversations for AI training. Confusion and concern surround the changing policy statements and the need for clearer explanations from Zoom is demanded. The episode concludes with a mention of location tracking as another example of the importance of transparency and communication in evolving technologies. (Part 2) This edition of MacVoices is supported by The MacVoices Slack. Available all Patrons of MacVoices. Sign up at Patreon.com/macvoices. Show Notes: Chapters: 0:01:52 Unique ideas and the importance of human creativity in art 0:04:12 Zoom's Controversial Terms of Service Change 0:06:12 Balancing Privacy and Personalized Services 0:07:14 Suspicion of Profit Motive in Data Training Process 0:07:58 Communications Nightmare Unveiled 0:08:12 Zoom's lack of communication skill and contradictory statements 0:10:56 Opt-out feature and lack of prompt for data sharing 0:14:10 Concerns about Terms of Service and AI Models 0:15:44 The Overreaching License in Perpetuity 0:18:01 The Loophole of Service-Generated Data 0:21:32 Privacy Concerns and Re-evaluating Usage of Zoom 0:24:18 Implications of Data Usage in Different Industries 0:27:50 Technology's Impact on Information Exchange and Privacy Concerns 0:29:32 The Rise of GPUs and the Potential of Matrix Algebra in Technology 0:30:28 Unforeseen Consequences of DNA Testing and Forensic DNA Chain Links: Zoom revises service terms so it could train AI on user data https://cybernews.com/privacy/zoom-revises-ai-service-terms/ Is Zoom Really Using Your Video Calls to Train AI? https://lifehacker.com/is-zoom-really-using-your-video-calls-to-train-ai-1850713532 Guests: Web Bixby has been in the insurance business for 40 years and has been an Apple user for longer than that.You can catch up with him on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Eric Bolden is into macOS, plants, sci-fi, food, and is a rural internet supporter. You can connect with him on Twitter, by email at embolden@mac.com, on Mastodon at @eabolden@techhub.social, and on his blog, Trending At Work. Mark Fuccio is actively involved in high tech startup companies, both as a principle at piqsure.com, or as a marketing advisor through his consulting practice Tactics Sells High Tech, Inc. Mark was a proud investor in Microsoft from the mid-1990's selling in mid 2000, and hopes one day that MSFT will be again an attractive investment. You can contact Mark through Twitter, LinkedIn, or on Mastodon. David Ginsburg is the host of the weekly podcast In Touch With iOS where he discusses all things iOS, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and related technologies. He is an IT professional supporting Mac, iOS and Windows users. Visit his YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/daveg65 and find and follow him on Twitter @daveg65 and on Mastodon at @daveg65@mastodon.cloud Kelly Guimont is a podcaster and friend of the Rebel Alliance. You can also hear her on The Aftershow with Mike Rose, and she still has more to say which she saves for Twitter and Mastodon.  Ben Roethig has been in the Apple Ecosystem since the System 7 Days. He is the a former Associate Editor with Geek Beat, Co-Founder of The Tech Hangout and Deconstruct and currently shares his thoughts on RoethigTech. Contact him on  Twitter and Mastodon. Guy Serle, best known for being one of the co-hosts of the MyMac Podcast, sincerely apologizes for anything he has done or caused to have happened while in possession of dangerous podcasting equipment. He should know better but being a blonde from Florida means he's probably incapable of understanding the damage he has wrought. Guy is also the author of the novel, The Maltese Cube. You can follow his exploits on Twitter, catch him on Mac to the Future on Facebook, at @Macparrot@mastodon.social, and find everything at VertShark.com.   Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon      http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:      http://macvoices.com      Twitter:      http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner      http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:      https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes      Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss 00:01:51 Unique ideas and the importance of human creativity in art 00:04:12 Zoom's Controversial Terms of Service Change 00:06:12 Balancing Privacy and Personalized Services 00:07:14 Suspicion of Profit Motive in Data Training Process 00:07:57 Communications Nightmare Unveiled 00:08:11 Zoom's lack of communication skill and contradictory statements 00:10:56 Opt-out feature and lack of prompt for data sharing 00:14:10 Concerns about Terms of Service and AI Models 00:15:44 The Overreaching License in Perpetuity 00:18:00 The Loophole of Service-Generated Data 00:21:32 Privacy Concerns and Re-evaluating Usage of Zoom 00:24:18 Implications of Data Usage in Different Industries 00:27:49 Technology's Impact on Information Exchange and Privacy Concerns 00:29:31 The Rise of GPUs and the Potential of Matrix Algebra in Technology 00:30:28 Unforeseen Consequences of DNA Testing and Forensic DNA Chain

Chuck Joiner, Guy Serle, David Ginsburg, Ben Roethig, Eric Bolden, Kelly Guimont, Web Bixby, and Mark Fuccio finish off a conversation about computer generated images and graphics in this MacVoices Live! session. Concerns about the quality and repetitiveness of generated content are raised, as well as the importance of unique perspectives and ideas. The role of historians, librarians, and copyright issues in preserving accurate data is explored. The panel then delves into the recent changes to Zoom's terms of service and their intentions to use conversations for AI training. Confusion and concern surround the changing policy statements and the need for clearer explanations from Zoom is demanded. The episode concludes with a mention of location tracking as another example of the importance of transparency and communication in evolving technologies. (Part 2)  This edition of MacVoices is supported by The MacVoices Slack. Available all Patrons of MacVoices. Sign up at Patreon.com/macvoices. Show Notes: Chapters: 0:01:52 Unique ideas and the importance of human creativity in art0:04:12 Zoom's Controversial Terms of Service Change0:06:12 Balancing Privacy and Personalized Services0:07:14 Suspicion of Profit Motive in Data Training Process0:07:58 Communications Nightmare Unveiled0:08:12 Zoom's lack of communication skill and contradictory statements0:10:56 Opt-out feature and lack of prompt for data sharing0:14:10 Concerns about Terms of Service and AI Models0:15:44 The Overreaching License in Perpetuity0:18:01 The Loophole of Service-Generated Data0:21:32 Privacy Concerns and Re-evaluating Usage of Zoom0:24:18 Implications of Data Usage in Different Industries0:27:50 Technology's Impact on Information Exchange and Privacy Concerns0:29:32 The Rise of GPUs and the Potential of Matrix Algebra in Technology0:30:28 Unforeseen Consequences of DNA Testing and Forensic DNA Chain Links: Zoom revises service terms so it could train AI on user datahttps://cybernews.com/privacy/zoom-revises-ai-service-terms/ Is Zoom Really Using Your Video Calls to Train AI?https://lifehacker.com/is-zoom-really-using-your-video-calls-to-train-ai-1850713532 Guests: Web Bixby has been in the insurance business for 40 years and has been an Apple user for longer than that.You can catch up with him on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Eric Bolden is into macOS, plants, sci-fi, food, and is a rural internet supporter. You can connect with him on Twitter, by email at embolden@mac.com, on Mastodon at @eabolden@techhub.social, and on his blog, Trending At Work. Mark Fuccio is actively involved in high tech startup companies, both as a principle at piqsure.com, or as a marketing advisor through his consulting practice Tactics Sells High Tech, Inc. Mark was a proud investor in Microsoft from the mid-1990's selling in mid 2000, and hopes one day that MSFT will be again an attractive investment. You can contact Mark through Twitter, LinkedIn, or on Mastodon. David Ginsburg is the host of the weekly podcast In Touch With iOS where he discusses all things iOS, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and related technologies. He is an IT professional supporting Mac, iOS and Windows users. Visit his YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/daveg65 and find and follow him on Twitter @daveg65 and on Mastodon at @daveg65@mastodon.cloud Kelly Guimont is a podcaster and friend of the Rebel Alliance. You can also hear her on The Aftershow with Mike Rose, and she still has more to say which she saves for Twitter and Mastodon.  Ben Roethig has been in the Apple Ecosystem since the System 7 Days. He is the a former Associate Editor with Geek Beat, Co-Founder of The Tech Hangout and Deconstruct and currently shares his thoughts on RoethigTech. Contact him on  Twitter and Mastodon. Guy Serle, best known for being one of the co-hosts of the MyMac Podcast, sincerely apologizes for anything he has done or caused to have happened while in possession of dangerous podcasting equipment. He should know better but being a blonde from Florida means he's probably incapable of understanding the damage he has wrought. Guy is also the author of the novel, The Maltese Cube. You can follow his exploits on Twitter, catch him on Mac to the Future on Facebook, at @Macparrot@mastodon.social, and find everything at VertShark.com.   Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon     http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:     http://macvoices.com      Twitter:     http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner     http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:     https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:     https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes     Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

As the competitive cloud landscape is shifting, let's take a look at some possibilities of what AWS might look like after they cross the chasm. SHOW: 746CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:Find "Breaking Analysis Podcast with Dave Vellante" on Apple, Google and SpotifyKeep up to data with Enterprise Tech with theCUBEAWS Insiders is an edgy, entertaining podcast about the services and future of cloud computing at AWS. Listen to AWS Insiders in your favorite podcast player. Cloudfix HomepageDatadog Application Monitoring: Modern Application Performance MonitoringGet started monitoring service dependencies to eliminate latency and errors and enhance your users app experience with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.SHOW NOTES:3 Steps into a 10k race (Episode 428 on Software Defined Talk)There's no AI without the cloud (AWS CEO Adam Selipsky - Decoder podcastWhat comes after Zoom? (Benedict Evans)Looking at Cloud hyperscaler CAPEX spending in Q2 2023 (Charles Fitzgerald)Amazon has over half of all ARM servers (The Register)IF ONLY 10-15% OF APPS ARE IN THE CLOUD, HAVE WE CROSSED THE CHASM?AWS is $85B/yr business, after 17 yearsAWS claims that 10-15% of IT is in the cloudAWS has attracted startups, and mostly competes against legacy IT companiesAWS MOATS AND WHAT MIGHT COME NEXT?Amazon/AWS has always made large CAPEX investmentsAWS claims to have the largest farm of GPUs, and ARM serversOpen source projects are moving to licensing that reduces competition from AWSAWS growth rate has been slowing since Q4 2021Innovation? Application Portfolio? Pricing vs. Profitability?AWS has done limited acquisitions and partners are kept at arms-length (vs. OpenAI / MSFT)AWS seems to be behind in the AI race, although still very early in the market maturityAWS doesn't have a large set of “owned/branded” applicationsWhat does a future AWS look like that is mostly infrastructure? FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Forrest Brazeal, Head of Developer Media at Google Cloud, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how AI, current job markets, and more are impacting software engineers. Forrest and Corey explore whether AI helps or hurts developers, and what impact it has on the role of a junior developer and the rest of the development team. Forrest also shares his viewpoints on how he feels AI affects people in creative roles. Corey and Forrest discuss the pitfalls of a long career as a software developer, and how people can break into a career in cloud as well as the necessary pivots you may need to make along the way. Forrest then describes why he feels workers are currently staying put where they work, and how he predicts a major shift will happen when the markets shift.About ForrestForrest is a cloud educator, cartoonist, author, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. He currently leads the content marketing team at Google Cloud. You can buy his book, The Read Aloud Cloud, from Wiley Publishing or attend his talks at public and private events around the world.Links Referenced: Personal Website: https://goodtechthings.com Newsletter signup: https://cloud.google.com/innovators TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn and I am thrilled to have a returning guest on, who has been some would almost say suspiciously quiet over the past year or so. Forrest Brazeal is the Head of Developer Media over at Google Cloud, and everyone sort of sits there and cocks their head, like, “What does that mean?” And then he says, “Oh, I'm the cloud bard.” And everyone's, “Oh, right. Get it: the song guy.” Forrest, welcome back.Forrest: Thanks, Corey. As always, it's great to be here.Corey: So, what have you been up to over the past, oh let's call it, I don't know, a year, since I think, is probably the last time you're on the show.Forrest: Well, gosh, I mean, for one thing, it seems like I can't call myself the cloud bard anymore because Google rolled out this thing called Bard and I've started to get some DMs from people asking for, you know, tech support on Bard. So, I need to make that a little bit clearer that I do not work on Bard. I am a lowercase bard, but I was here first, so if anything, you know, Google has deprecated me.Corey: Honestly, this feels on some level like it's more cloudy if we define cloudy as what, you know, Amazon does because they launched a quantum computing service about six months after they launched some unrelated nonsense that they called [QuantumDB 00:01:44], which you'd think if you're launching quantum stuff, you'd reserve the word quantum for that. But no, they're going to launch things that stomp all over other service names as well internally, so customers just wind up remarkably confused. So, if you find a good name, just we're going to slap it on everything, seems to be the way of cloud.Forrest: Yeah, naming things has proven to be harder than either quantum computing or generative AI at this point, I think.Corey: And in fairness, I will point out that naming things is super hard; making fun of names is not. So, that is—everyone's like, “Wow, you're so good at making fun of names. Can you name something well?” [laugh]. Absolutely not.Forrest: Yeah, well, one of the things you know, that I have been up to over the past year or so is just, you know, getting to learn more about what it's like to have an impact in a very, very large organizational context, right? I mean, I've worked in large companies before, but Google is a different size and scale of things and it takes some time honestly, to, you know, figure out how you can do the best for the community in an environment like that. And sometimes that comes down to the level of, like, what are things called? How do we express things in a way that makes sense to everyone and takes into account people's different communication styles and different preferences, different geographies, regions? And that's something that I'm still learning.But you know, hopefully, we're getting to a point where you're going to start hearing some things come out of Google Cloud that answer your questions and makes sense to you. That's supposed to be part of my job, anyway.Corey: So, I want to talk a bit about the idea of generative AI because there has been an awful lot of hype in the space, but you have never given me a bum steer. You have always been a level-headed, reasonable voice. You are not—to my understanding—a VC trying desperately to prop up an industry that you may or may not believe in, but you are financially invested into. What is your take on the last, let's call it, year of generative AI enhancements?Forrest: So, to be clear, while I do have a master's degree in interactive intelligence, which is kind of AI adjacent, this is not something that I build with day-to-day professionally. But I have spent a lot of time over the last year working with the people who do that and trying to understand what is the value that gen AI can bring to the domains that I do care about and have a lot of interest in, which of course, are cloud developers and folks trying to build meaningful enterprise applications, take established workloads and make them better, and as well work with folks who are new to their careers and trying to figure out, you know, what's the most appropriate technology for me to bet on? What's going to help me versus what's going to hurt me?And I think one of the things that I have been telling people most frequently—because I talk to a lot of, like, new cloud learners, and they're saying, “Should I just drop what I'm doing? Should I stop building the projects I'm working on and should I instead just go and get really good at generating code through something like a Bard or a ChatGPT or what have you?” And I went down a rabbit hole with this, Corey, for a long time and spent time building with these tools. And I see the value there. I don't think there's any question.But what has come very, very clearly to the forefront is, the better you already are at writing code, the more help a generative AI coding assistant is going to give you, like a Bard or a ChatGPT, what have you. So, that means the way to get better at using these tools is to get better at not using these tools, right? The more time you spend learning to code without AI input, the better you'll be at coding with AI input.Corey: I'm not sure I entirely agree because for me, the wake-up call that I had was a singular moment using I want to say it was either Chat-Gippity—yes, that's how it's pronounced—or else it was Gif-Ub Copilot—yes, also how it's pronounced—and the problem that I was having was, I wanted to query probably the worst API in the known universe—which is, of course, the AWS pricing API: it returns JSON, that kind of isn't, it returns really weird structures where you have to correlate between a bunch of different random strings to get actual data out of it, and it was nightmarish and of course, it's not consistent. So, I asked it to write me a Python script that would contrast the hourly cost of a Managed NAT gateway in all AWS regions and return a table sorted by the most to least expensive. And it worked.Now, this is something that I could have done myself in probably half a day because my two programming languages of choice remain brute force and enthusiasm, but it wound up taking away so much of the iterative stuff that doesn't work of oh, that's not quite how you'd handle that data structure. Oh, you think it's a dict, but no, it just looks like one. It's a string first; now you have to convert it, or all kinds of other weird stuff like that. Like, this is not senior engineering work, but it really wound up as a massive accelerator to get the answer I was after. It was almost an interface to a bad API. Or rather, an interface to a program—to a small script that became an interface itself to a bad API.Forrest: Well, that's right. But think for a minute, Corey, about what's implicit in that statement though. Think about all the things you had to know to get that value out of ChatGPT, right? You had to know, A, what you were looking for: how these prices worked, what the right price [style 00:06:52] was to look for, right, why NAT gateway is something you needed to be caring about in the first place. There's a pretty deep stack of things—actually, it's what we call a context window, right, that you needed to know to make this query take a half-day of work away from you.And all that stuff that you've built up through years and years of being very hands-on with this technology, you put that same sentence-level task in the hands of someone who doesn't have that background and they're not going to have the same results. So, I think there's still tremendous value in expanding your personal mental context window. The more of that you have, the better and faster results you're going to get.Corey: Oh, absolutely. I do want to steer away from this idea that there needs to be this massive level of subject matter expertise because I don't disagree with it, but you're right, the question I asked was highly contextual to the area of expertise that I have. But everyone tends to have something like that. If you're a marketer for example, and you wind up with an enormous pile of entrants on a feedback form, great. Can you just dump it all in and say, can you give me a sentiment analysis on this?I don't know how to run a sentiment analysis myself, but I'm betting that a lot of these generative AI models do, or being able to direct me in the right area on this. The question I have is—it can even be distilled down into simple language of, “Here's a bunch of comments. Do people love the thing or hate the thing?” There are ways to get there that apply, even if you don't have familiarity with the computer science aspects of it, you definitely have aspect to the problem in which you are trying to solve.Forrest: Oh, yeah, I don't think we're disagreeing at all. Domain expertise seems to produce great results when you apply it to something that's tangential to your domain expertise. But you know, I was at an event a month or two ago, and I was talking to a bunch of IT executives about ChatGPT and these other services, and it was interesting. I heard two responses when we were talking about this. The first thing that was very common was I did not hear any one of these extremely, let's say, a little bit skeptical—I don't want to say jaded—technical leaders—like, they've been around a long time; they've seen a lot of technologies come and go—I didn't hear a single person say, “This is something that's not useful to me.”Every single one of them immediately was grasping the value of having a service that can connect some of those dots, can in-between a little bit, if you will. But the second thing that all of them said was, “I can't use this inside my company right now because I don't have legal approval.” Right? And then that's the second round of challenges is, what does it look like to actually take these services and make them safe and effective to use in a business context where they're load-bearing?Corey: Depending upon what is being done with them, I am either sympathetic or dismissive of that concern. For example, yesterday, I wound up having fun with it, and—because I saw a query, a prompt that someone had put in of, “Create a table of the US presidents ranked by years that they were in office.” And it's like, “Okay, that's great.” Like, I understand the value here. But if you have a magic robot voice from the future in a box that you can ask it any question and as basically a person, why not have more fun with it?So, I put to it the question of, “Rank the US presidents by absorbency.” And it's like, “Well, that's not a valid way of rating presidential performance.” I said, “It is if I have a spill and I'm attempting to select the US president with which to mop up the spill.” Like, “Oh, in that case, here you go.” And it spat out a bunch of stuff.That was fun and exciting. But one example he gave was it ranked Theodore Roosevelt very highly. Teddy Roosevelt was famous for having a mustache. That might be useful to mop up a spill. Now, I never would have come up in isolation with the idea of using a president's mustache to mop something up explicitly, but that's a perfect writer's room style Yes, And approach that I could then springboard off of to continue iterating on if I'm using that as part of something larger. That is a far cry from copying and pasting whatever it is to say into an email, whacking send before realizing it makes no sense.Forrest: Yeah, that's right. And of course, you can play with what we call the temperatures on these models, right, to get those very creative, off-the-wall kind of answers, or to make them very, kind of, dry and factual on the other end. And Google Cloud has been doing some interesting things there with Generative AI Studio and some of the new features that have come to Vertex AI. But it's just—it's going to be a delicate dance, honestly, to figure out how you tune those things to work in the enterprise.Corey: Oh, absolutely. I feel like the temperature dial should instead be instead relabeled as ‘corporate voice.' Like, do you want a lot of it or a little of it? And of course, they have to invert it. But yeah, the idea is that, for some things, yeah, you definitely just want a just-the-facts style of approach.Another demo that I saw, for example, that I thought showed a lack of imagination was, “Here's a transcript of a meeting. Extract all the to-do items.” Okay. Yeah, I suppose that works, but what about, here's a transcript of the meeting. Identify who the most unpleasant, passive-aggressive person in this meeting is to work with.And to its credit—because of course this came from something corporate, none of the systems that I wound up running that particular query through could identify anyone because of course the transcript was very bland and dry and not actually how human beings talk, other than in imagined corporate training videos.Forrest: Yes, well again, I think that gets us into the realm of just because you can doesn't mean you should use it for this.Corey: Oh, I honestly, most of what I use this stuff for—or use anything for—should be considered a cautionary tale as opposed to guidance for the future. You write parody songs a fair bit. So do I, and I've had an attempt to write versions of, like, write parody lyrics for some random song about this theme. And it's not bad, but for a lot of that stuff, it's not great, either. It is a starting point.Forrest: Now, hang on, Corey. You know, as well as I do that I don't write parody songs. We've had this conversation before. A parody is using existing music and adding new lyrics to it. I write my own music and my own lyrics and I'll have you know, that's an important distinction. But—Corey: True.Forrest: I think you're right on that, you know, having these services give you creative output. What you're getting is an average of a lot of other creative output, right, which is—could give you a perfectly average result, but it's difficult to get a first pass that gives you something that really stands out. I do also find, as a creative, that starting with something that's very average oftentimes locks me into a place where I don't really want to be. In other words, I'm not going to potentially come up with something as interesting if I'm starting with a baseline like that. It's almost a little bit polluting to the creative process.I know there's a lot of other creatives that feel that way as well, but you've also got people that have found ways to use generative AI to stimulate some really interesting creative things. And I think maybe the example you gave of the president's rank by absorbency is a great way to do that. Now, in that case, the initial creativity, a lot of it resided in the prompt, Corey. I mean, you're giving it a fantastically creative, unusual, off-the-wall place to start from. And just about any average of five presidents that come out of that is going to be pretty funny and weird because of just how funny and weird the idea was to begin with. That's where I think AI can give you that great writer's room feel.Corey: It really does. It's a Yes, And approach where there's a significant way that it can build on top of stuff. I've been looking for a, I guess, a writer's room style of approach for a while, but it's hard to find the right people who don't already have their own platform and voice to do this. And again, it's not a matter of payment. I'm thrilled to basically pay any reasonable out of money to build a writer's room here of people who get the cloud industry to work with me and workshops on some of the bigger jokes.The challenge is that those people are very hard to find and/or are conflicted out. Having just a robot who, with infinite patience for tomfoolery—because the writing process can look kind of dull and crappy until you find the right thing—has been awesome. There's also a sense of psychological safety in not poisoning people. Like, “I thought you were supposed to be funny, but this stuff is all terrible. What's the deal here?” I've already poisoned that well with my business partner, for example.Forrest: Yeah, there's only so many chances you get to make that first impression, so why not go with AI that never remembers you or any of your past mistakes?Corey: Exactly. Although the weird thing is that I found out that when they first launched Chat-Gippity, it already knew who I was. So, it is in fact familiar, so at least my early work of my entire—I guess my entire life. So that's—Forrest: Yes.Corey: —kind of worrisome.Forrest: Well, I know it credited to me books I hadn't written and universities I hadn't attended and all kinds of good stuff, so it made me look better than I was.Corey: So, what have you been up to lately in the context of, well I said generative AI is a good way to start, but I guess we can also call it at Google Cloud. Because I have it on good authority that, marketing to the contrary, all of the cloud providers do other things in addition to AI and ML work. It's just that's what's getting in the headline these days. But I have noticed a disturbing number of virtual machines living in a bunch of customer environments relative to the amount of AI workloads that are actually running. So, there might be one or two other things afoot.Forrest: That's right. And when you go and talk to folks that are actively building on cloud services right now, and you ask them, “Hey, what is the business telling you right now? What is the thing that you have to fix? What's the thing that you have to improve?” AI isn't always in the conversation.Sometimes it is, but very often, those modernization conversations are about, “Hey, we've got to port some of these services to a language that the people that work here now actually know how to write code in. We've got to find a way to make this thing a little faster. Or maybe more specifically, we've got to figure out how to make it run at the same speed while using less or less expensive resources.” Which is a big conversation right now. And those are things that they are conversations as old as time. They're not going away, and so it's up to the cloud providers to continue to provide services and features that help make that possible.And so, you're seeing that, like, with Cloud Run, where they've just announced this CPU Boost feature, right, that gives you kind of an additional—it's like a boost going downhill or a push on the swing as you're getting started to help you get over that cold-start penalty. Where you're seeing the session affinity features for Cloud Run now where you have the sticky session ability that might allow you to use something like, you know, a container-backed service like that, instead of a more traditional load balancer service that you'd be using in the past. So, you know, just, you take your eye off the ball for a minute, as you know, and 10 or 20, more of these feature releases come out, but they're all kind of in service of making that experience better, broadening the surface area of applications and workloads that are able to be moved to cloud and able to be run more effectively on cloud than anywhere else.Corey: There's been a lot of talk lately about how the idea of generative AI might wind up causing problems for people, taking jobs away, et cetera, et cetera. You almost certainly have a borderline unique perspective on this because of your work with, honestly, one of the most laudable things I've ever seen come out of anywhere which is The Cloud Resume Challenge, which is a build a portfolio site, then go ahead and roll that out into how you interview. And it teaches people how to use cloud, step-by-step, you have multi-cloud versions, you have them for specific clouds. It's nothing short of astonishing. So, you find yourself talking to an awful lot of very early career folks, folks who are transitioning into tech from other places, and you're seeing an awful lot of these different perspectives and AI plays come to the forefront. How do you wind up, I guess, making sense of all this? What guidance are you giving people who are worried about that?Forrest: Yeah, I mean, I, you know—look, for years now, when I get questions from these, let's call them career changers, non-traditional learners who tend to be a large percentage, if not a plurality, of the people that are working on The Cloud Resume Challenge, for years now, the questions that they've come to me with are always, like, you know, “What is the one thing I need to know that will be the magic technology, the magic thing that will unlock the doors and give me the inside track to a junior position?” And what I've always told them—and it continues to be true—is, there is no magic thing to know other than magically going and getting two years of experience, right? The way we hire juniors in this industry is broken, it's been broken for a long time, it's broken not because of any one person's choice, but because of this sort of tragedy of the commons situation where everybody's competing over a dwindling pool of senior staff level talent and hopes that the next person will, you know, train the next generation for them so they don't have to expend their energy and interview cycles and everything else on it. And as long as that remains true, it's just going to be a challenge to stand out.Now, you'll hear a lot of people saying that, “Well, I mean, if I have generative AI, I'm not going to need to hire a junior developer.” But if you're saying that as a hiring manager, as a team member, then I think you always had the wrong expectation for what a junior developer should be doing. A junior developer is not your mini me who sits there and takes the little challenges, you know, the little scripts and things like that are beneath you to write. And if that's how you treat your junior engineers, then you're not creating an environment for them to thrive, right? A junior engineer is someone who comes in who, in a perfect world, is someone who should be able to come in almost in more of an apprentice context, and somebody should be able to sit alongside you learning what you know, right, and having education integrated into their actual job experience so that at the end of that time, they're able to step back and actually be a full-fledged member of your team rather than just someone that you kind of throw tasks over the wall to, and they don't have any career advancement potential out of that.So, if anything, I think the advancement of generative AI, in a just world, ought to give people a wake-up call that, hey, training the next generation of engineers is something that we're actually going to have to actively create programs around, now. It's not something that we can just, you know, give them the scraps that fall off of our desks. Unfortunately, I do think that in some cases, the gen AI narrative more than the reality is being used to help people put off the idea of trying to do that. And I don't believe that that's going to be true long-term. I think that if anything, generative AI is going to open up more need for developers.I mean, it's generating a lot of code, right, and as we know, Jevons paradox says that when you make it easier to use something and there's elastic demand for that thing, the amount of creation of that thing goes up. And that's going to be true for code just like it was for electricity and for code and for GPUs and who knows what all else. So, you're going to have all this code that has a much lower barrier of entry to creating it, right, and you're going to need people to harden that stuff and operate it in production, be on call for it at three in the morning, debug it. Someone's going to have to do all that, you know? And what I tell these junior developers is, “It could be you, and probably the best thing for you to do right now is to, like I said before, get good at coding on your own. Build as much of that personal strength around development as you can so that when you do have the opportunity to use generative AI tools on the job, that you have the maximum amount of mental context to put around them to be successful.”Corey: I want to further point out that there are a number of folks whose initial reaction to a lot of this is defensiveness. I showed that script that wound up spitting out the Managed NAT gateway ranked-by-region table to one of our contract engineers, who's very senior. And the initial response I got from them was almost defensive, were, “Okay, yeah. That'll wind up taking over, like, a $20 an hour Upwork coder, but it's not going to replace a senior engineer.” And I felt like that was an interesting response psychologically because it felt defensive for one, and two, not for nothing, but senior developers don't generally spring fully formed from the forehead of some ancient God. They start off as—dare I say it—junior developers who learn and improve as they go.So, I wonder what this means. If we want to get into a point where generative AI takes care of all the quote-unquote, “Easy programming problems,” and getting the easy scripts out, what does that mean for the evolution and development of future developers?Forrest: Well, keep in mind—Corey: And that might be a far future question.Forrest: Right. That's an argument as old as time, right, or a concern is old as time and we hear it anew with each new level of automation. So, people were saying this a few years ago about the cloud or about virtual machines, right? Well, how are people going to, you know, learn how to do the things that sit on top of that if they haven't taken the time to configure what's below the surface? And I'm sympathetic to that argument to some extent, but at the same time, I think it's more important to deal with the reality we have now than try to create an artificial version of realities' past.So, here's the reality right now: a lot of these simple programming tasks can be done by AI. Okay, that's not likely to change anytime soon. That's the new reality. So now, what does it look like to bring on juniors in that context? And again, I think that comes down to don't look at them as someone who's there just to, you know, be a pair of hands on a keyboard, spitting out tiny bits of low-level code.You need to look at them as someone who needs to be, you know, an effective user of general AI services, but also someone who is being trained and given access to the things they'll need to do on top of that, so the architectural decisions, the operational decisions that they'll need to make in order to be effective as a senior. And again, that takes buy-in from a team, right, to make that happen. That is not going to happen automatically. So, we'll see. That's one of those things that's very hard to automate the interactions between people and the growth of people. It takes people that are willing to be mentors.Corey: I'm also curious as to how you see the guidance shifting as computers get better. Because right now, one of my biggest problems that I see is that if I have an idea for a company I want to start or a product I want to build that involves software, step one is, learn to write a bunch of code. And I feel like there's a massive opportunity for skipping aspects of that, whereas effectively have the robot build me the MVP that I describe. Think drag-and-drop to build a web app style of approach.And the obvious response to that is, well, that's not going to go to hyperscale. That's going to break in a bunch of different ways. Well, sure, but I can get an MVP out the door to show someone without having to spend a year building it myself by learning the programming languages first, just to throw away as soon as I hire someone who can actually write code. It cuts down that cycle time massively, and I can't shake the feeling that needs to happen.Forrest: I think it does. And I think, you know, you were talking about your senior engineer that had this kind of default defensive reaction to the idea that something like that could meaningfully intrude on their responsibilities. And I think if you're listening to this and you are that senior engineer, you're five or more years into the industry and you've built your employability on the fact that you're the only person who can rough out these stacks, I would take a very, very hard look at yourself and the value that you're providing. And you say, you know—let's say that I joined a startup and the POC was built out by this technical—or possibly the not-that-technical co-founder, right—they made it work and that thing went from, you know, not existing to having users in the span of a week, which we're seeing more now and we're going to see more and more of. Okay, what does my job look like in that world? What am I actually coming on to help with?Am I—I'm coming on probably to figure out how to scale that thing and make it maintainable, right, operate it in a way that is not going to cause significant legal and financial problems for the company down the road. So, your role becomes less about being the person that comes in and does this totally greenfield thing from scratch and becomes more about being the person who comes in as the adult in the room, technically speaking. And I think that role is not going away. Like I said, there's going to be more of those opportunities rather than less. But it might change your conception of yourself a little bit, how you think about yourself, the value that you provide, now's the time to get ahead of that.Corey: I think that it is myopic and dangerous to view what you do as an engineer purely through the lens of writing code because it is a near certainty that if you are learning to write code today and build systems involving technology today, that you will have multiple careers between now and retirement. And in fact, if you're entering the workforce now, the job that you have today will not exist in anything remotely approaching the same way by the time you leave the field. And the job you have then looks borderline unrecognizable, if it even exists at all today. That is the overwhelming theme that I've got on this ar—the tech industry moves quickly and is not solidified like a number of other industries have. Like, accountants: they existed a generation ago and will exist in largely the same form a generation from now.But software engineering in particular—and cloud, of course, as well, tied to that—have been iterating so rapidly, with such sweepingly vast changes, that that is something that I think we're going to have a lot of challenge with, just wrestling with. If you want a job that doesn't involve change, this is the wrong field.Forrest: Is it the wrong field. And honestly, software engineering is, has been, and will continue to be a difficult business to make a 40-year career in. And this came home to me really strongly. I was talking to somebody a couple of months ago who, if I were to say the name—which I won't—you and I would both know it, and a lot of people listening to this would know as well. This is someone who's very senior, very well respected is, by name, identified in large part with the creation of a significant movement in technology. So, someone who you would never think of would be having a problem getting a job.Corey: Is it me? And is it Route 53 as a database, as the movement?Forrest: No, but good guess.Corey: Excellent.Forrest: This is someone I was talking to because I had just given a talk where I was pleading with IT leaders to take more responsibility for building on-ramps for non-traditional learners, career changers, people that are doing something a little different with their career. And I was mainly thinking of it as people that had come from a completely non-technical background or maybe people that were you know, like, I don't know, IT service managers with skills 20 years out of date, something like that. But this is a person who you and I would think of as someone at the forefront, the cutting edge, an incredibly employable person. And this person was a little bit farther on in their career and they came up to me and said, “Thank you so much for giving that talk because this is the problem I have. Every interview that I go into, I get told, ‘Oh, we probably can't afford you,' or, ‘Oh well, you say you want to do AI stuff now, but we see that all your experience is doing this other thing, and we're just not interested in taking a chance on someone like that at the salary you need to be at.'” and this person's, like, “What am I going to do? I don't see the roadmap in front of me anymore like I did 10, 15, or 20 years ago.”And I was so sobered to hear that coming from, again, someone who you and I would consider to be a luminary, a leading light at the top of the, let's just broadly say IT field. And I had to go back and sit with that. And all I could come up with was, if you're looking ahead and you say I want to be in this industry for 30 years, you may reach a point where you have to take a tremendous amount of personal control over where you end up. You may reach a point where there is not going to be a job out there for you, right, that has the salary and the options that you need. You may need to look at building your own path at some point. It's just it gets really rough out there unless you want to continue to stagnate and stay in the same place. And I don't have a good piece of advice for that other than just you're going to have to find a path that's unique to you. There is not a blueprint once you get beyond that stage.Corey: I get asked questions around this periodically. The problem that I have with it is that I can't take my own advice anymore. I wish I could. But what I used to love doing was, every quarter or so, I'd make it a point to go on at least one job interview somewhere else. This wound up having a few great features.One, interviewing is a skill that atrophies if you don't use it. Two, it gives me a finger on the pulse of what the market is doing, what the industry cares about. I dismissed Docker the first time I heard about it, but after the fourth interview where people were asking about Docker, okay, this is clearly a thing. And it forced me to keep my resume current because I've known too many people who spend seven years at a company and then wind up forgetting what they did years three, four, and five, where okay, then what was the value of being there? It also forces you to keep an eye on how you're evolving and growing or whether you're getting stagnant.I don't ever want to find myself in the position of the person who's been at a company for 20 years and gets laid off and discovers to their chagrin that they don't have 20 years of experience; they have one year of experience repeated 20 times. Because that is a horrifying and scary position to be in.Forrest: It is horrifying and scary. And I think people broadly understand that that's not a position they want to be in, hence why we do see people that are seeking out this continuing education, they're trying to find—you know, trying to reinvent themselves. I see a lot of great initiative from people that are doing that. But it tends to be more on the company side where, you know, they get pigeonholed into a position and the company that they're at says, “Yeah, no. We're not going to give you this opportunity to do something else.”So, we say, “Okay. Well, I'm going to go and interview other places.” And then other companies say, “No, I'm not going to take a chance on someone that's mid-career to learn something brand new. I'm going to go get someone that's fresh out of school.” And so again, that comes back to, you know, where are we as an industry on making space for non-traditional learners and career changers to take the maturity that they have, right, even if it's not specific familiarity with this technology right now, and let them do their thing, let them get untracked.You know, there's tremendous potential being untapped there and wasted, I would say. So, if you're listening to this and you have the opportunity to hire people, I would just strongly encourage you to think outside the box and consider people that are farther on in their careers, even if their technical skill set doesn't exactly line up with the five pieces of technology that are on your job req, look for people that have demonstrated success and ability to learn at whatever [laugh] the things are that they've done in the past, people that are tremendously highly motivated to succeed, and let them go win on your behalf. There's—you have no idea the amount of talent that you're leaving on the table if you don't do that.Corey: I'd also encourage people to remember that job descriptions are inherently aspirational. If you take a job where you know how to do every single item on the list because you've done it before, how is that not going to be boring? I love being given problems. And maybe I'm weird like this, but I love being given a problem where people say, “Okay, so how are you going to solve this?” And the answer is, “I have no idea yet, but I can't wait to find out.” Because at some level, being able to figure out what the right answer is, pick up the skill sets I don't need, the best way to learn something that I've ever found, at least for me.Forrest: Oh, I hear that. And what I found, you know, working with a lot of new learners that I've given that advice to is, typically the ones that advice works best for, unfortunately, are the ones who have a little bit of baked-in privilege, people that tend to skate by more on the benefit of the doubt. That is a tough piece of advice to fulfill if you're, you know, someone who's historically underrepresented or doesn't often get the chance to prove that you can do things that you don't already have a testament to doing successfully. So again, takes it back to the hiring side. Be willing to bet on people, right, and not just to kind of look at their resume and go from there.Corey: So, I'm curious to see what you've noticed in the community because I have a certain perspective on these things, and a year ago, everyone was constantly grousing about dissatisfaction with their employers in a bunch of ways. And that seems to have largely vanished. I know, there have been a bunch of layoffs and those are tragic on both sides, let's be very clear. No one is happy when a layoff hits. But I'm also seeing a lot more of people keeping their concerns to either private channels or to themselves, and I'm seeing what seems to be less mobility between companies than I saw previously. Is that because people are just now grateful to have a job and don't want to rock the boat, or is it still happening and I'm just not seeing it in the same way?Forrest: No, I think the vibe has shifted, for sure. You've got, you know, less opportunities that are available, you know that if you do lose your job that you're potentially going to have fewer places to go to. I liken it to like if you bought a house with a sub-3% mortgage and 2021, let's say, and now you want to move. Even though the housing market may have gone down a little bit, those interest rates are so high that you're going to be paying more, so you kind of are stuck where you are until the market stabilizes a little bit. And I think there's a lot of people in that situation with their jobs, too.They locked in salaries at '21, '22 prices and now here we are in 2023 and those [laugh] those opportunities are just not open. So, I think you're seeing a lot of people staying put—rationally, I would say—and waiting for the market to shift. But I think that at the point that you do see that shift, then yes, you're going to see an exodus; you're going to see a wave and there will be a whole bunch of new think pieces about the great resignation or something, but all it is just that pent up demand as people that are unhappy in their roles finally feel like they have the mobility to shift.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Forrest: You can always find me at goodtechthings.com. I have a newsletter there, and I like to post cartoons and videos and other fun things there as well. If you want to hear my weekly take on Google Cloud, go to cloud.google.com/innovators and sign up there. You will get my weekly newsletter The Overwhelmed Person's Guide to Google Cloud where I try to share just the Google Cloud news and community links that are most interesting and relevant in a given week. So, I would love to connect with you there.Corey: I have known you for years, Forrest, and both of those links are new to me. So, this is the problem with being active in a bunch of different places. It's always difficult to—“Where should I find you?” “Here's a list of 15 places,” and some slipped through the cracks. I'll be signing up for both of those, so thank you.Forrest: Yeah. I used to say just follow my Twitter, but now there's, like, five Twitters, so I don't even know what to tell you.Corey: Yes. The balkanization of this is becoming very interesting. Thanks [laugh] again for taking the time to chat with me and I look forward to the next time.Forrest: All right. As always, Corey, thanks.Corey: Forrest Brazeal, Head of Developer Media at Google Cloud, and of course the Cloud Bard. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment that you undoubtedly had a generative AI model write for you and then failed to proofread it.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. 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In one of the faster swings of the technology pendulum, semiconductors are back in a very bright spotlight. John Abbott returns to discuss the phoenix-like rise of high-performance silicon devices, like GPUs, with host Eric Hanselman. New architectures aim at challenges presented by generative AI and large language models (LLM). Performant access to larger volumes of data is pushing levels of integration and chipset approaches. The ecosystems to support them are ever more critical.

In the latest DF Direct Weekly, John, Rich and Alex discuss the controversy surrounding the Red Dead Redemption conversions, Mark Cerny gets in touch to reveal more about PlayStation 5's Dolby Atmos support, a brace of leaks look set to confirm a new PlayStation 5 model with detachable optical drive - but it's not looking particularly slim. Meanwhile, RDNA4 rumours are discussed, while John shares impressions on the Quake 2 Remaster and new 4K retro scaler, RetroTink 4K. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:36 News 01: Red Dead Redemption ports announced 00:20:04 News 02: Mark Cerny on PS5 Dolby Atmos 00:34:00 News 03: Revised PS5 model appears in apparent leaks 00:48:53 News 04: RDNA 4 to skip high-end GPUs? 01:11:35 News 05: Sony starts testing PS5 cloud streaming 01:20:16 News 06: Quake 2 remaster released! 01:30:56 News 07: RetroTink 4K: John's impressions 01:42:41 Supporter Q1: Has John recovered from Sonic 2006 yet? 01:47:27 Supporter Q2: With limited competition and a lucrative server market, will Nvidia GPUs become a worse gaming value in the future? 01:54:48 Supporter Q3: Why are PC game frame-rate limiters often so poor? 02:04:38 Supporter Q4: Could older 3D games prove unsuitable for ray tracing upgrades? 02:11:40 Supporter Q5: Given that DLSS 3 works best at high frame-rates, might it prove unsuitable for a hypothetical Switch 2? 02:15:47 Supporter Q6: Rich is in the credits for Panzer Dragoon Saga! Is anyone else at DF in a game's credits? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices