297- Brandon Hansen on Instilling a Sense of Ownership Part 1: From AOL Days to Modern Challenges
297- Brandon Hansen on Instilling a Sense of Ownership Part 1: From AOL Days to Modern Challenges
ON THIS EPISODE
Brandon Hansen
Currently a director in IT, Brandon Hanson brings a wealth of experience from his time at AOL and other tech companies.
With a background that spans from early computing to modern virtualization, Brandon offers unique insights into the evolving landscape of technology and IT management.
Brandon Hansen on Instilling a Sense of Ownership Part 1: From AOL Days to Modern Challenges
Are we shooting ourselves in the foot with modern technology investments? Brandon Hanson, a director with a rich background in IT, dives into his experiences at AOL and other tech giants, shedding light on lessons learned and the evolution of IT. From discussing ‘nerd neck’ to the pitfalls of private equity in tech, this episode is packed with insights for any IT professional.
Episode Show Notes
Navigate through key moments in this episode with timestamped highlights, from initial introductions to deep dives into real-world use cases and implementation strategies.
Introducing new IT roles humorously [00:00:01] Discussion on steroids and ‘nerd neck’ [00:00:28] Jeff Bezos and misuse of medicine [00:01:07] Casual podcast intro and guest shirt description [00:01:51] Guest self-introduction and daily routines [00:02:28] Fixing computers in high school [00:04:23] Early days at AOL [00:06:34] Private equity’s impact on tech [00:09:46] Evolution of virtualization technology [00:10:49] Potential impact of Broadcom on VMware [00:12:27] Employee-owned versus traditionally-owned companies [00:18:11] The AOL experience and fun at work [00:21:08]
KEY TAKEAWAYS
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 0 | 00:06.517 I was just joking around with like, we were talking on the last episode. How do you, um, you're in a new role. How do you go around and introduce yourself to everyone? If they, yes, exactly. Speaker 1 | 00:17.080 How do you go around and introduce yourself to everybody? Speaker 0 | 00:20.041 If you're new in IT, I'm like, I just go in and just, you know, say, Hey, you know, I'm the new IT dude, um, that was hiding in the server room. And, uh, Speaker 1 | 00:27.523 I just came out of the lair for a moment. Speaker 0 | 00:29.383 I do speak. cling on if you need a translator yeah like how do you you know how do we um how do we uh you know introduce ourselves in in it as that person as i can see that that i think along with i've been talking about steroids a lot lately i just think that we should take more steroids i'm being dead serious i think that it is i mean that i Speaker 1 | 00:53.444 think because i'm dealing with this like neck issue we have this thing called nerd neck because we sit in seats all day and i'm dealing with yeah Speaker 0 | 00:59.584 a cervical spined uh issue and i just figured let's hit it with some anabolic steroids i'm old enough now the doctor will prescribe it you know have you seen jeff bezos have you seen him lately the guy alone latest crap he doesn't miss he's not in it though you know he just Speaker 2 | 01:23.703 shows the abuse of the medicine no i think he's pretty good he's like what is he is he almost Speaker 0 | 01:29.088 80 i don't know if he's not 90 i can't even i think he's in good i think he's fairly healthy i think he is like you know and if he's not i'm willing to sacrifice his you know um Speaker 1 | 01:44.919 brandon hansen welcome to dissecting popular it nerds we're doing this uh yeah i don't know slow intro today i don't even know if we're supposed to be talking first about if we're doing a show or not i'm just going with it i hope you're okay with that you Speaker 2 | 01:58.308 I'm okay. I'm happy. Speaker 1 | 01:58.929 Great shirt on. This is an audio show, Speaker 0 | 02:01.211 so I have to describe this a little bit. He has a great shirt on, never forget. Speaker 1 | 02:04.634 I actually happen to own this shirt myself. Speaker 0 | 02:06.535 It's got a VHS tape for anyone that doesn't. There's probably going, what's VHS? Speaker 1 | 02:13.881 A floppy disc that's a, Speaker 0 | 02:16.903 what size? Speaker 1 | 02:17.764 Why am I forgetting? It's 3.5, 3.5 inch floppy? Speaker 2 | 02:20.847 Yeah, 3.5 inch floppy. Speaker 0 | 02:22.708 And what we would call an LP, what we would call LP for the rest. Speaker 2 | 02:27.292 um yeah you know remember remember uh high speed dubbing yes yeah so tell me man just i don't know introduce yourself what's what's going on what do we do on a daily basis well i i uh i'm a director now uh do you want to start from the beginning or do you want to start to from where i'm at now that's a good question it's a good question if you can take the holodeck off in the background for a second it might spark some more i want to see your real life like real life you Speaker 0 | 02:55.116 what you really live in, you know, not, it's like one of those quads, you know, where people are like what my family thinks I do, what I actually do. Speaker 1 | 03:03.280 You know what I mean? Speaker 0 | 03:04.421 It's like one of those things we should have that. Speaker 1 | 03:07.163 Um, Speaker 2 | 03:08.483 I'm turning off the background. I'm just looking for, Speaker 1 | 03:10.444 I love reminiscing. And I think most people want to, Speaker 0 | 03:13.266 I think most people that listen to this show don't actually want to talk about anything that's real because that's what they're stuck in, in the daytime. You know what I mean? you have a very good clicky keyboard. You probably, you probably had an IBM keyboard at one point in your life that made that click sound. Yeah. Speaker 2 | 03:30.514 Yeah. We got this. See, Speaker 1 | 03:32.434 yeah. See, there's, if you're ever a heavy typer, Speaker 0 | 03:36.255 like people here in the back of the night, you're a heavy typer film. Speaker 1 | 03:38.416 Like, yeah, Speaker 0 | 03:38.816 it's because I miss, I miss the old keyboards. Speaker 1 | 03:41.817 Let's go back in time where we'll start wherever you want. How far back? Okay. Speaker 2 | 03:44.998 So, uh, in high school, I found out, I, I really loved, uh, um, I love tech. And so it came naturally easy. Um, I wasn't, I wasn't, uh, you know, antisocial or, you know, a dungeon nerd. I was more of the, you know, had a group of friends, but I did my thing and they did their thing. But there's the, what stem from that is a lot of people, they didn't understand how to fix their computer. And a lot of it was self-inflicted crap, like, you know, shutting it off without, uh, closing out your programs or, or, you know, things like that. So I'd go to people's houses and make a quick 50 bucks. Speaker 1 | 04:28.573 And let me ask you this. Why did, Speaker 0 | 04:31.095 because most people just probably still do that and it doesn't do anything. They're probably fine. Speaker 1 | 04:37.259 Why was that? We have to explain to some of the, Speaker 0 | 04:39.761 some of the younger generation, why was that a problem? Speaker 2 | 04:42.683 Well, back in the day on the older computers, like the three 86s, two 86s, the old hard drives. I think IDE was just starting to come out. Hard drives didn't park. You shut the power down. Some of them, they developed technologies where when the power was cut, it would automatically create a... I can't remember if it was a draw or the heads wanted to automatically get off the discs. So basically the heads would just land right there because they ran with the Benulli effect. It's like an air wing effect where the drives are spinning fast enough, the heads just lift off the top. So people would be done and they just hit the power. And then be like, man, this thing's just not working right. I can't find my files. There's these weird file names on my hard drive I can't do anything with. And I just come over with either PC tools or normal utilities and do a check disk, a deeper check disk out in like DOS 3.0 or whatever. And then I explain to them, I'm like, dude, you got to shut down your computer properly. You got to get out of your programs. You got to, if this. Depending on what model you got, you got to park your drives and then turn it off. Because what you're doing is you're getting into the file cabinet, you're pulling out the manila folders, you're laying out all your paperwork, and you're like, hey, I'm done. And then you slam on the filing cabinet without putting it all away and sorting it back up. And this is causing you a problem. Speaker 0 | 06:09.785 So you did a bunch of things very well there. Yeah, you used metaphors. Yeah. Yeah, to describe a technological problem. Speaker 1 | 06:20.866 At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never-ending, from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service, and hidden fees. It's like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try one's patience even on the best of days. So, whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you. How we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes, and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate. the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you're not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short... We are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So, we're still human, but we are some of the best, and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what's on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier. and we'll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day. Speaker 0 | 08:40.778 Yeah, Speaker 1 | 08:40.978 so it was fun back then, Speaker 0 | 08:42.600 though. Speaker 1 | 08:43.300 What was the most fun thing about TikTok? Speaker 2 | 08:44.542 It was actually fun. Yeah, it was. And then America Online came into town. I applied, and I got like, this is like 1995. I was getting paid $13 an hour. Speaker 1 | 08:58.716 Yeah, baby, I'm rich. Speaker 2 | 09:00.646 That was big money. Speaker 1 | 09:02.586 Anything over 10 bucks an hour was like, Speaker 2 | 09:04.927 yeah. Speaker 1 | 09:06.108 I remember the first job I had over 10 bucks an hour and I was like, yes. Speaker 2 | 09:10.170 Yeah. And they were handing out stock. Like it was candy, you know, and, and this is 95 and I met Steve case and I got an AOL Letterman jacket. And yeah. Speaker 1 | 09:20.974 Does you have that within reach? We might have to, Speaker 0 | 09:23.075 you might have to show that to me. Speaker 2 | 09:25.376 I sent it to goodwill. I was, and now they send me money. And, you know, I got kids that work for me now and I'm like, Hey, I worked at AOL. And they're like, what the hell is that? And I'm like, you know, like literally don't know. And I'm like, Oh yeah, you were born in like after the year 1999. Yeah. You wouldn't know. Speaker 1 | 09:42.039 Were you in Utah at the time or down in Virginia where the headquarters was? Speaker 2 | 09:45.442 Utah. Okay. They opened up the Ogden call center in 95 and I was employee number 31 or 32. Speaker 0 | 09:54.629 That is, it's pretty sweet. And, uh, Yeah. Speaker 2 | 10:00.792 I mean, we had so much. Speaker 1 | 10:02.813 You're like Tom Hanks was in a movie about us. Speaker 2 | 10:05.815 Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was so much fun. We, we'd seen things we'd, we'd saw how, you know, hacking was starting to, well, we were watching it start, right. Cause people were creating malware for AOL to, to just get scraped the username and password. We were. seeing social engineering over the phone calls, you know, to try to get that user password. And, and, and then we saw, you know, like we saw AOL run out of, you know, resources. Like we can't hire anybody that knows anything about computers anymore. So they bring people in, uh, we joke in our inner circles that, you know, they bring people into a meeting room and be like, okay, they put a microwave on the table and they put a computer on the table and like pick which one's a computer. And And people will be scratching their heads and they throw a burrito in and start to wave up. All right. And then they bring those employees to the floor. And I witnessed that. And I witnessed, you know, when they went from hourly to unlimited time on the net. And I watched people just lose their minds over not being able to sign in. And then I moved on because when they joined with Time Warner, I was like, this is like. technology company. This is a marketing company that doesn't care about the technology and it was no longer fun. Speaker 0 | 11:31.210 Yeah, that always sucks when another company buys a company that you loved and then they quickly ruin everything. Speaker 2 | 11:42.855 Oh, it's how I choose tech today. I mean, I'm looking for an ERP for my organization. And when somebody says private equities, I get sick. Like what, what, what's the, what's in it for me if it's private equities, you know, cause they just want to make money and they're, they're looking at for short-term dividend gains and reinvesting. Are you kidding me? I mean, some of the stuff that we're running now is, was private equities held and, and had no growth for 20 years. And, and so it's, Speaker 0 | 12:12.085 you've already given such a wealth of knowledge. It's unbelievable. Speaker 1 | 12:16.066 Most people don't know that most people don't know for real. Like when you're evaluating vendors. Speaker 2 | 12:21.547 Yeah. Speaker 0 | 12:22.532 Private equity. Yeah, we're just purchased by, yeah, we've got this great, you know, bank company that's like, this is so great. They've injected all this funds into like, you know, paying all these other people. And then we're going to mash it all together. And we're going to have this like really bad customer service with like a 20 different products. Speaker 2 | 12:42.119 You're talking about computer associates or software? Speaker 1 | 12:44.861 No, no, no. Which is not my Broadcom. Speaker 2 | 12:49.022 I mean like. Speaker 1 | 12:50.383 Oh, yeah, maybe. Speaker 2 | 12:53.004 maybe i was just talking about the last i was just talking about that in the last call well i mean i got trained in that novell network in now and novell's headquartered in utah so i have some roots and i was like and then i got i got spun on to vmware in like 2005 2006 went to work for the power company and and back to work we have uh i have a um i have a very um Speaker 0 | 13:21.564 detestable background in my corporate life because I come from telecom and data. And I firmly believe that they fully follow the 80-20 rule that 80% of the industry is complete scum and 20% of the industry is, you know, the cream rises to the top. Speaker 1 | 13:41.362 Yeah. Speaker 0 | 13:41.742 And Speaker 1 | 13:43.083 I mean, Speaker 0 | 13:43.864 I'm really not a fan of a Jordan Belfort type of guy. I really hate... the Wolf of Wall Street movie. I have like, I really, I do not, every time I see that someone use a Wolf of Wall Street meme on LinkedIn, Speaker 1 | 13:54.995 I think I might lose my mind because you are championing a guy that robs old people and you're saying, yeah, this is great, freaking awesome. Let's have him talk at our event, right? VMware 2024, Broadcom, guest lead speaker, you know, like, you know, uh, yeah, run away. Run away. Speaker 0 | 14:22.439 Um, I don't know. That's just, I have a lot of, Speaker 1 | 14:26.060 so yeah, so I do. So it's interesting, the Broadcom thing, Speaker 0 | 14:29.741 because I know a lot of people that are, you know, using, um, uh, well, you have VMware. What are we talking about? Oh, my brain just went, you know, like. The whole orchestrator, the whole SD-WAN orchestrator and everything is going to be, is going to affect a lot of networks. And I don't know what that's going to mean for support and security. And it's a, it's a fairly, that, that was a fairly big, I'm just, that was a fairly big disruption in the space or it might be. Speaker 2 | 15:01.170 It's Novell all over again. It's NetWare is dead and all over again. For me, because I was a big fan of NetWare and I cut my teeth with VMware and I was a virtualization architect for the power company, for Berkshire Hathaway Energy Holdings. And I did 3,700 VMs at eight data centers, over 60 hosts. I was using Cisco UCS. I could do so many cool things with command line. And I did it all because VMware made this really cool product. Speaker 1 | 15:32.799 What do you think is going to happen now? Speaker 2 | 15:34.640 Well, I read things that just blow my mind, like Broadcom's selling the VMware workstation off of the, from VMware. Like, they're like, oh yeah, we'll just move that over here. Speaker 1 | 15:47.565 You should buy it. Go ahead and buy it. Speaker 2 | 15:49.866 Yeah, yeah. Someone else is going to sell that. I'm like, dude, it's like the same patented technology of how hypervisors should work. And... How do you cut that up and divide and conquer and be successful? Because all the innovation from a hypervisor applies to all the products. Speaker 1 | 16:08.601 If anyone does not understand, everyone out there listening right now, if you do not understand this conversation, if you do not understand this conversation and you are an IT director, you are an IT manager, you are an IT in the ad, if you are on the help desk and you can understand this conversation and you can understand where we're going with this. That right there will differentiate you from a lot. The sad thing is a lot of executive management does not understand this conversation. Speaker 2 | 16:35.622 No, Speaker 1 | 16:35.783 they don't. They do not understand this conversation and they do not understand the value of an IT director, IT manager, VP of IT, CIO, CTO, CISO. Speaker 2 | 16:48.649 Yeah. How many titles do we need? Speaker 1 | 16:52.271 They do not understand how to differentiate, to even care, whether their IT management or IT leadership does understand this. And that can be make or break for your business. Speaker 2 | 17:05.819 Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Speaker 1 | 17:07.380 You're blowing my mind. I mean, I have not had this much fun in the first, Speaker 0 | 17:11.322 I don't know, what is it? Have we really been talking for 20 minutes already? Speaker 1 | 17:15.344 16. Speaker 2 | 17:15.985 I don't know. Speaker 0 | 17:18.038 Oh man, it's just, Speaker 1 | 17:19.539 I don't even know where to go. I don't even know where to go. So, but what does this say about, here's what we can go. Speaker 0 | 17:26.825 And I don't talk politics. Speaker 1 | 17:28.226 I really don't. I really don't. But what does this say about what could happen to businesses in this country and how it could affect things, this continuing to go from this capitalistic and I'm not, I'm all for capitalism. Okay. What does this say from the system? all the security, the great migration to security. I'm going into security. Speaker 0 | 17:50.963 I'm going into security. I'm going into security. I just find that to be the great migration. Speaker 1 | 17:54.845 What does this say about all that? Are we shooting ourselves in the foot? Are we, are we just creating, Speaker 0 | 18:01.428 is it like the Microsoft thing? Well, we're going to, we're going to make the operating system and we're also going to make the malware and we're also going to make, Speaker 1 | 18:09.231 and then we're going to, the irony of the, like, you know, Speaker 0 | 18:12.492 you know, where, Speaker 2 | 18:13.533 where are the great creators going? Where are the people that created network? Where'd they go? Where are the great people that created VMware? Hey, let's, let's talk games. Blizzard is not the same company. Where, where did the great people that created the great Blizzard title? Speaker 1 | 18:28.065 Well, you tell me what did happen to that? Speaker 0 | 18:29.805 Because all I remember about Blizzard was that it was a work hard, play hard, total like egomaniac type of like internal company, which is like really all of these, right? Speaker 2 | 18:40.648 Well, they, they turned into that. Speaker 0 | 18:42.509 Okay. Then good. So you tell me. Speaker 2 | 18:46.734 I don't know. I think what happens is like right now I work for a hundred percent employee owned company. Great. It's a construction company. So we dig in the dirt, right? And we have big backhoes, big motors, big construction equipment. Now most construction companies are owned by like one guy or a couple or family. Speaker 0 | 19:08.760 Sure. Speaker 2 | 19:09.941 And they make a lot of money, right? They bring that money in and they did really well. So then they roll up to the job site and they're brand new Ford. It's all decked out. Speaker 0 | 19:20.722 Yeah. Denali. Let's throw GMC in there too. Speaker 2 | 19:23.544 Yeah. Maybe something from GMC. Speaker 1 | 19:24.844 I was looking at a, Speaker 0 | 19:25.825 I was looking at a dually diesel the other day. I'm like, Speaker 1 | 19:28.686 I need a hundred and three. I need a hundred and thirty thousand. Speaker 2 | 19:31.748 So, so they roll up brand new truck because the job did good. Hey, thanks. Thanks guys. Here's pizza. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks. let's do that again you know and then how do you think our construction equipment looks do you think that the guy operating this equipment's not my equipment uh you know f him you know they're operating and beating the hell out of it and you get down and you look at that company b you know that's not the hundred percent employee owned and their equipment looks like it's got a thousand a million hours on it and it's not even two years old then you roll over to the employee-owned company where everybody's working for themselves everybody wins together um we're profitable we all pay each other back through incentives our employee stock goes up our equipment looks guy gets out of it he's wiping it down it's his it's true so one true you you asked me about like what happened to blizzard what happened to vmware well yeah guys got money and then they sold sold their interests and They're probably living the life. Speaker 0 | 20:36.458 Love it. I love everything that you just said. I do. I really do believe, I really do believe that if you, if you can be, teamwork makes the dream work. I say that a lot. It really does. But do people really get it? Do they really embrace that? Speaker 2 | 21:00.736 Honestly, I think it comes down to ownership and accountability. So if I'm rolling the dice and I'm just punching in and punching out 40 hours a week and I'm not owning it, it's not mine. Speaker 0 | 21:13.403 The other thing about it is what the employee owned. The other thing about employee owned, everyone holds each other accountable. Speaker 1 | 21:18.606 If someone's not picking up the slack, like, dude, Speaker 0 | 21:21.507 get the hell out of here. Speaker 2 | 21:22.868 That's soap and sock. That'll get on board. Soap and sock. I got to get out of here. I just don't fit in. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 | 21:33.309 Soap and sock manager. Speaker 2 | 21:34.089 Show up and work. Speaker 1 | 21:37.010 Yeah, yeah. I always tell my guys to come on. I'm like, Speaker 0 | 21:38.710 they're like, well, I'm like, you don't ever have to worry about getting fired here because you'll just fire yourself. Speaker 1 | 21:44.512 You'll just fire yourself. Soap and sock. Every time. Speaker 0 | 21:48.313 We have a Speaker 1 | 21:49.633 Greg the Frenchman. We need to get on this. I know it's not the number one priority. Speaker 0 | 21:53.074 Greg the Frenchman's my integrator. He's really the smart guy behind the scenes that does all our AI stuff and everything. He keeps me in check because I have these wild ideas that come up all the time. Soap and sock. We need to have that added to the, uh, uh, it urban dictionary. Speaker 1 | 22:07.938 So we have, we already have AI scraping every episode coming up with every terminology that, Speaker 0 | 22:13.800 that an it director or someone uses, and we're going to put it into an urban dictionary and I won't sell it on Amazon or give it away or something. But it was like, you know, the other one was like, you know, herding cats, you know, like a term used by it actors to talk about end users and like, you know, Speaker 2 | 22:26.352 I got three little girls at home. Herding cats is a full-time job. Speaker 0 | 22:30.615 Yeah, I got four girls. Four boys. Beat that. I got holes in the wall. I got holes in the wall and emotions going on. Speaker 2 | 22:36.779 Yeah. Speaker 0 | 22:39.080 I got broken windows. Speaker 1 | 22:40.481 I got broken windows and broken hearts. Speaker 2 | 22:41.822 You can put a dollar value to and girls is emotional damage. Speaker 1 | 22:45.965 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 0 | 22:46.545 Broken hearts, broken windows. Yeah. Speaker 2 | 22:48.487 Oh, yeah. Literally. Speaker 0 | 22:49.727 Yeah. And the boys are the ones with the broken hearts and the girls are breaking windows now. I don't know. It's really not that wild over here. We do get along well. I do love my family. We have great family time. That's why I try to do the job that I do so I can be in front of them. I don't even know. Okay, so let's reset now. Speaker 1 | 23:10.336 We've already hit Broadcom. Speaker 0 | 23:11.776 That's a sinking ship. Speaker 1 | 23:14.557 Run for the hills. Run for the hills. Speaker 0 | 23:19.278 We've not really talked. We didn't talk enough. Speaker 1 | 23:21.779 We talked about AOL. You have the best AOL story. Speaker 0 | 23:25.140 I've had other AOL people. I actually want to know why was it so fun? Speaker 1 | 23:29.961 What were you actually doing there? What were you actually doing in AOL? Speaker 2 | 23:34.763 I started off talking to customers that would call in. We called them members for the first two months. That's what I did. Speaker 1 | 23:43.825 What were we paying for AOL back then? Speaker 0 | 23:46.046 Was it as much as $50? I don't even remember. Speaker 2 | 23:47.966 Was it $12? $10 for five hours a month. It was 10 bucks for five hours of online time. Speaker 1 | 23:55.705 It was hours. How did we even measure hours? Did we, did we, would we tell them like, Speaker 0 | 24:00.606 Hey, you got to get a modem? Like, what do you, how do you convince someone? Like, how do we tell them like what was trouble? Speaker 2 | 24:05.507 They were given the floppy disks out in the middle. Speaker 0 | 24:09.068 I remember that we threw those like Frisbees. Speaker 2 | 24:11.749 Yeah. And so they would, uh, people will get those floppy disks and like free software at the time was unheard of. So, and shareware just getting started. Right. So People will get this free software like, well, crap, I gotta be able to use this software. It's like, you know, it's like us old men, we can't throw away our cords. You know, we're going to buy some of these with this cord. So they have the cord box. Speaker 1 | 24:33.393 Yeah. Speaker 0 | 24:35.113 I got the cord box. Speaker 2 | 24:36.674 So AOL probably made the modem sales go up because people get the software and they're like, well, I need a modem. Well, I've got a computer. So they just make that make it happen. But a lot of those phone calls when I was working for that. two months with people that would have a word processor that they could fit that disk into. And I was like, no, dude, you got to have a real computer. Speaker 0 | 24:58.172 I can't remember what ultimately happened with all the AOL users right now. So like my dad still has. you know, like his email address. I had to take his computer away, so everyone, if you want to email him, it doesn't matter. It's capangel at AOL.com. It's not going to go anywhere. It's going to go into the abyss. But, yeah, you know, because he's captain of the Blue Angel, capangel at AOL.com, still using it. I might have the password so I can log in and check his emails for him because he's beyond the time where I can allow him to touch a computer anymore. It's way too dangerous. Speaker 2 | 25:28.299 Oh, you probably ought to check. Like, have I been pwned to make sure that password hasn't been surfaced somewhere else? Speaker 0 | 25:34.621 It's probably, probably. What broke the camel's back, so to speak, metaphorically, so to speak, was one of his friends emailing me like, hey, is everything okay with whatever? Because I sent the gift cards. And I was like, Speaker 2 | 25:51.586 gosh. No, Speaker 1 | 25:54.707 no. That's dead serious. I called Debbie. He's like, yeah, well, Jim from Microsoft called me and said he was going to clean my computer. Speaker 0 | 26:02.654 And I was like, oh, gosh. Speaker 2 | 26:05.736 Oh, no. Speaker 1 | 26:06.156 I started going down this, Speaker 0 | 26:07.056 like, you know what's crazy when you talk about social engineering? Speaker 1 | 26:12.940 So I had to go so far to, Speaker 0 | 26:14.301 like, just destroy everything, like, get rid of all computers, try to just, like, erase all traces of everything. Just don't let, like, my dad get his hands on anything because there's no point anymore. And the guy went, Speaker 1 | 26:30.368 so for the Microsoft guy, Speaker 0 | 26:32.029 the Jim from Microsoft who needs to clean your computers, I'm calling from Microsoft because there's a security warning. And if you don't help me log in, some remote log me in thing, then I was like, okay. So I tried to do a sting operation, eventually found out he was in India. And then he wanted me to help with some SIP trunking so that he could make 1-800 calls via Seattle, via Dallas, Texas to... people. And the whole thing was quite wild. This guy had a whole ring of like elderly people that were helping him open a bank accounts and transfer money. And he was going to pay him $500 a month. And I know this sounds crazy, Speaker 1 | 27:07.886 but he eventually got to the point where he sent my dad a letter, a certified piece of mail from Microsoft that said, we can't get ahold of you. Speaker 0 | 27:15.753 We need you to call this 1-800 number right now. Speaker 1 | 27:18.776 And, and I got an alert from my dad's like, Speaker 0 | 27:22.279 you know, UPS alert or something and it said it was coming from like MicroStore which was this guy MicroStore by the way everyone if you google it's MicroStore or something out of like Texas but and I got the alert I was like I called like the home like the we have like 24-7 care for my dad at his house I'm like you need to like you Speaker 1 | 27:40.649 need to check the mail now get this mail before they're like oh we found it it's already opened he had called it he called the number he called it I was like no you Speaker 2 | 27:50.232 I can't believe it. Speaker 1 | 27:52.372 It's amazing. It's amazing that this, the stuff that, Speaker 0 | 27:55.573 that people do. And I don't know where we're supposed to go with that. Speaker 2 | 27:59.954 Yeah. There's a lot of YouTube. Speaker 0 | 28:01.575 Goal came from AOL. Speaker 2 | 28:02.555 Yeah. Speaker 1 | 28:03.815 Yeah. Speaker 0 | 28:04.575 You can't protect the old people. You cannot. Speaker 1 | 28:06.876 They're going to think you can try, you can try, Speaker 0 | 28:09.277 but the best way to do it is to erase all digital access to anything. Speaker 1 | 28:14.178 At dissecting popular IT nerds. We expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never-ending, from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It's like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try one's patience even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes, and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure. You get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you're not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short, we are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So we're still human, but we are some of the best, and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what's on your roadmap. All you need to do is email. internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier and we'll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day. Speaker 2 | 30:33.949 Yeah. Well, the scams just keep coming. I mean, from the Medicare, Medicaid, robo-dialers. The other thing that I've gotten is some elderly in my close family. And as if they have a... POTS line still, or the original number they had for the last 50 years, their data is out there and that's what they're farming to contact them. So I'm going to start over with a new identity, a new digital identity, which is email and telephone number to avoid being harvested from those lists. Speaker 0 | 31:10.481 I did all of that. I did all of that. Changed the POTS line that everyone knew forever, right? Yeah. Like send out a family email. Hey, by the way, here's what's going on. Speaker 1 | 31:21.726 You know, Speaker 0 | 31:22.527 here's the new phone number. Do not give this out to anyone. Speaker 1 | 31:25.048 Change the phone number twice. Change the email twice. Speaker 0 | 31:28.671 That's why I said I don't care about AOL anymore. Speaker 1 | 31:30.732 Change like literally everything, you know, Speaker 0 | 31:32.934 like I changed everything. Didn't work. Had to send them a first class piece of mail. Speaker 1 | 31:37.797 Please call to make an outbound call to them to get the information was crazy. Speaker 0 | 31:43.781 Anyhow, Speaker 2 | 31:44.482 that's enough. Let's have to change it to a PO box. Speaker 0 | 31:47.712 Yeah. Speaker 2 | 31:49.632 Then you do a redirect on what's going to that address. I don't know. There's got to be a way around this because I'm wondering what happens when we become elderly? I mean, are we going to be hacked? What are we going to be blind to? Speaker 1 | 32:03.696 This is what I'm thinking. Speaker 0 | 32:04.917 This is what I'm thinking. Set up a family trust, divide it amongst the kids that are all fighting amongst each other right now anyways. Yeah. Immediately now. take all of my money and start sifting it into various different LLCs that get deposited in various different kids' bank accounts. Speaker 1 | 32:23.144 So make the kids swear and write a piece of like, Speaker 0 | 32:25.665 you know, write something that like this much money I will be transferring to my father a month and be, I will be buying the food and like literally own nothing. Speaker 1 | 32:33.270 So my goal is to like own everything, Speaker 0 | 32:34.890 but own nothing and be prepared to not care if you are like, um, yeah, be prepared to, to own nothing. And be okay being poor, I guess. Speaker 2 | 32:47.118 I've, I've known some pretty, uh, successful people that aren't here with us anymore. And, and, uh, I think for them, they just kept their, their lines of communication closed. Um, they just kept them open with who they knew and did not allow anything in. But I think, I think for some, the, the ones that we're getting, uh, infiltrated, I think, uh, for the ones that I knew, I think they were. Speaker 0 | 33:13.576 um possibly had something to do with a level of loneliness even though they were surrounded with people yes i don't know it's going to be a psychology thing uh no there's like the eight ways that that people get hacked right there's like the eight there's like the eight social like ways that people get hacked and yeah the love the love triangle like the loneliness one is one of them yeah um yeah Speaker 2 | 33:36.911 if you don't have instagram get instagram you'll get an idea what that looks like Speaker 0 | 33:43.316 No, staying away. Speaker 1 | 33:44.737 Every time I log in, Speaker 0 | 33:45.398 I'm like, no, Speaker 1 | 33:46.599 look away. Speaker 2 | 33:48.682 Yeah, really? I have like 10 people that I follow and they follow me, but I get like all these, like, I'm like, this isn't a real person. Speaker 0 | 33:59.274 No. Speaker 2 | 33:59.554 And they're texting me like, hey, let's be friends.
Speaker 0 | 00:06.517 I was just joking around with like, we were talking on the last episode. How do you, um, you're in a new role. How do you go around and introduce yourself to everyone? If they, yes, exactly. Speaker 1 | 00:17.080 How do you go around and introduce yourself to everybody? Speaker 0 | 00:20.041 If you're new in IT, I'm like, I just go in and just, you know, say, Hey, you know, I'm the new IT dude, um, that was hiding in the server room. And, uh, Speaker 1 | 00:27.523 I just came out of the lair for a moment. Speaker 0 | 00:29.383 I do speak. cling on if you need a translator yeah like how do you you know how do we um how do we uh you know introduce ourselves in in it as that person as i can see that that i think along with i've been talking about steroids a lot lately i just think that we should take more steroids i'm being dead serious i think that it is i mean that i Speaker 1 | 00:53.444 think because i'm dealing with this like neck issue we have this thing called nerd neck because we sit in seats all day and i'm dealing with yeah Speaker 0 | 00:59.584 a cervical spined uh issue and i just figured let's hit it with some anabolic steroids i'm old enough now the doctor will prescribe it you know have you seen jeff bezos have you seen him lately the guy alone latest crap he doesn't miss he's not in it though you know he just Speaker 2 | 01:23.703 shows the abuse of the medicine no i think he's pretty good he's like what is he is he almost Speaker 0 | 01:29.088 80 i don't know if he's not 90 i can't even i think he's in good i think he's fairly healthy i think he is like you know and if he's not i'm willing to sacrifice his you know um Speaker 1 | 01:44.919 brandon hansen welcome to dissecting popular it nerds we're doing this uh yeah i don't know slow intro today i don't even know if we're supposed to be talking first about if we're doing a show or not i'm just going with it i hope you're okay with that you Speaker 2 | 01:58.308 I'm okay. I'm happy. Speaker 1 | 01:58.929 Great shirt on. This is an audio show, Speaker 0 | 02:01.211 so I have to describe this a little bit. He has a great shirt on, never forget. Speaker 1 | 02:04.634 I actually happen to own this shirt myself. Speaker 0 | 02:06.535 It's got a VHS tape for anyone that doesn't. There's probably going, what's VHS? Speaker 1 | 02:13.881 A floppy disc that's a, Speaker 0 | 02:16.903 what size? Speaker 1 | 02:17.764 Why am I forgetting? It's 3.5, 3.5 inch floppy? Speaker 2 | 02:20.847 Yeah, 3.5 inch floppy. Speaker 0 | 02:22.708 And what we would call an LP, what we would call LP for the rest. Speaker 2 | 02:27.292 um yeah you know remember remember uh high speed dubbing yes yeah so tell me man just i don't know introduce yourself what's what's going on what do we do on a daily basis well i i uh i'm a director now uh do you want to start from the beginning or do you want to start to from where i'm at now that's a good question it's a good question if you can take the holodeck off in the background for a second it might spark some more i want to see your real life like real life you Speaker 0 | 02:55.116 what you really live in, you know, not, it's like one of those quads, you know, where people are like what my family thinks I do, what I actually do. Speaker 1 | 03:03.280 You know what I mean? Speaker 0 | 03:04.421 It's like one of those things we should have that. Speaker 1 | 03:07.163 Um, Speaker 2 | 03:08.483 I'm turning off the background. I'm just looking for, Speaker 1 | 03:10.444 I love reminiscing. And I think most people want to, Speaker 0 | 03:13.266 I think most people that listen to this show don't actually want to talk about anything that's real because that's what they're stuck in, in the daytime. You know what I mean? you have a very good clicky keyboard. You probably, you probably had an IBM keyboard at one point in your life that made that click sound. Yeah. Speaker 2 | 03:30.514 Yeah. We got this. See, Speaker 1 | 03:32.434 yeah. See, there's, if you're ever a heavy typer, Speaker 0 | 03:36.255 like people here in the back of the night, you're a heavy typer film. Speaker 1 | 03:38.416 Like, yeah, Speaker 0 | 03:38.816 it's because I miss, I miss the old keyboards. Speaker 1 | 03:41.817 Let's go back in time where we'll start wherever you want. How far back? Okay. Speaker 2 | 03:44.998 So, uh, in high school, I found out, I, I really loved, uh, um, I love tech. And so it came naturally easy. Um, I wasn't, I wasn't, uh, you know, antisocial or, you know, a dungeon nerd. I was more of the, you know, had a group of friends, but I did my thing and they did their thing. But there's the, what stem from that is a lot of people, they didn't understand how to fix their computer. And a lot of it was self-inflicted crap, like, you know, shutting it off without, uh, closing out your programs or, or, you know, things like that. So I'd go to people's houses and make a quick 50 bucks. Speaker 1 | 04:28.573 And let me ask you this. Why did, Speaker 0 | 04:31.095 because most people just probably still do that and it doesn't do anything. They're probably fine. Speaker 1 | 04:37.259 Why was that? We have to explain to some of the, Speaker 0 | 04:39.761 some of the younger generation, why was that a problem? Speaker 2 | 04:42.683 Well, back in the day on the older computers, like the three 86s, two 86s, the old hard drives. I think IDE was just starting to come out. Hard drives didn't park. You shut the power down. Some of them, they developed technologies where when the power was cut, it would automatically create a... I can't remember if it was a draw or the heads wanted to automatically get off the discs. So basically the heads would just land right there because they ran with the Benulli effect. It's like an air wing effect where the drives are spinning fast enough, the heads just lift off the top. So people would be done and they just hit the power. And then be like, man, this thing's just not working right. I can't find my files. There's these weird file names on my hard drive I can't do anything with. And I just come over with either PC tools or normal utilities and do a check disk, a deeper check disk out in like DOS 3.0 or whatever. And then I explain to them, I'm like, dude, you got to shut down your computer properly. You got to get out of your programs. You got to, if this. Depending on what model you got, you got to park your drives and then turn it off. Because what you're doing is you're getting into the file cabinet, you're pulling out the manila folders, you're laying out all your paperwork, and you're like, hey, I'm done. And then you slam on the filing cabinet without putting it all away and sorting it back up. And this is causing you a problem. Speaker 0 | 06:09.785 So you did a bunch of things very well there. Yeah, you used metaphors. Yeah. Yeah, to describe a technological problem. Speaker 1 | 06:20.866 At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never-ending, from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service, and hidden fees. It's like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try one's patience even on the best of days. So, whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you. How we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes, and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate. the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you're not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short... We are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So, we're still human, but we are some of the best, and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what's on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier. and we'll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day. Speaker 0 | 08:40.778 Yeah, Speaker 1 | 08:40.978 so it was fun back then, Speaker 0 | 08:42.600 though. Speaker 1 | 08:43.300 What was the most fun thing about TikTok? Speaker 2 | 08:44.542 It was actually fun. Yeah, it was. And then America Online came into town. I applied, and I got like, this is like 1995. I was getting paid $13 an hour. Speaker 1 | 08:58.716 Yeah, baby, I'm rich. Speaker 2 | 09:00.646 That was big money. Speaker 1 | 09:02.586 Anything over 10 bucks an hour was like, Speaker 2 | 09:04.927 yeah. Speaker 1 | 09:06.108 I remember the first job I had over 10 bucks an hour and I was like, yes. Speaker 2 | 09:10.170 Yeah. And they were handing out stock. Like it was candy, you know, and, and this is 95 and I met Steve case and I got an AOL Letterman jacket. And yeah. Speaker 1 | 09:20.974 Does you have that within reach? We might have to, Speaker 0 | 09:23.075 you might have to show that to me. Speaker 2 | 09:25.376 I sent it to goodwill. I was, and now they send me money. And, you know, I got kids that work for me now and I'm like, Hey, I worked at AOL. And they're like, what the hell is that? And I'm like, you know, like literally don't know. And I'm like, Oh yeah, you were born in like after the year 1999. Yeah. You wouldn't know. Speaker 1 | 09:42.039 Were you in Utah at the time or down in Virginia where the headquarters was? Speaker 2 | 09:45.442 Utah. Okay. They opened up the Ogden call center in 95 and I was employee number 31 or 32. Speaker 0 | 09:54.629 That is, it's pretty sweet. And, uh, Yeah. Speaker 2 | 10:00.792 I mean, we had so much. Speaker 1 | 10:02.813 You're like Tom Hanks was in a movie about us. Speaker 2 | 10:05.815 Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was so much fun. We, we'd seen things we'd, we'd saw how, you know, hacking was starting to, well, we were watching it start, right. Cause people were creating malware for AOL to, to just get scraped the username and password. We were. seeing social engineering over the phone calls, you know, to try to get that user password. And, and, and then we saw, you know, like we saw AOL run out of, you know, resources. Like we can't hire anybody that knows anything about computers anymore. So they bring people in, uh, we joke in our inner circles that, you know, they bring people into a meeting room and be like, okay, they put a microwave on the table and they put a computer on the table and like pick which one's a computer. And And people will be scratching their heads and they throw a burrito in and start to wave up. All right. And then they bring those employees to the floor. And I witnessed that. And I witnessed, you know, when they went from hourly to unlimited time on the net. And I watched people just lose their minds over not being able to sign in. And then I moved on because when they joined with Time Warner, I was like, this is like. technology company. This is a marketing company that doesn't care about the technology and it was no longer fun. Speaker 0 | 11:31.210 Yeah, that always sucks when another company buys a company that you loved and then they quickly ruin everything. Speaker 2 | 11:42.855 Oh, it's how I choose tech today. I mean, I'm looking for an ERP for my organization. And when somebody says private equities, I get sick. Like what, what, what's the, what's in it for me if it's private equities, you know, cause they just want to make money and they're, they're looking at for short-term dividend gains and reinvesting. Are you kidding me? I mean, some of the stuff that we're running now is, was private equities held and, and had no growth for 20 years. And, and so it's, Speaker 0 | 12:12.085 you've already given such a wealth of knowledge. It's unbelievable. Speaker 1 | 12:16.066 Most people don't know that most people don't know for real. Like when you're evaluating vendors. Speaker 2 | 12:21.547 Yeah. Speaker 0 | 12:22.532 Private equity. Yeah, we're just purchased by, yeah, we've got this great, you know, bank company that's like, this is so great. They've injected all this funds into like, you know, paying all these other people. And then we're going to mash it all together. And we're going to have this like really bad customer service with like a 20 different products. Speaker 2 | 12:42.119 You're talking about computer associates or software? Speaker 1 | 12:44.861 No, no, no. Which is not my Broadcom. Speaker 2 | 12:49.022 I mean like. Speaker 1 | 12:50.383 Oh, yeah, maybe. Speaker 2 | 12:53.004 maybe i was just talking about the last i was just talking about that in the last call well i mean i got trained in that novell network in now and novell's headquartered in utah so i have some roots and i was like and then i got i got spun on to vmware in like 2005 2006 went to work for the power company and and back to work we have uh i have a um i have a very um Speaker 0 | 13:21.564 detestable background in my corporate life because I come from telecom and data. And I firmly believe that they fully follow the 80-20 rule that 80% of the industry is complete scum and 20% of the industry is, you know, the cream rises to the top. Speaker 1 | 13:41.362 Yeah. Speaker 0 | 13:41.742 And Speaker 1 | 13:43.083 I mean, Speaker 0 | 13:43.864 I'm really not a fan of a Jordan Belfort type of guy. I really hate... the Wolf of Wall Street movie. I have like, I really, I do not, every time I see that someone use a Wolf of Wall Street meme on LinkedIn, Speaker 1 | 13:54.995 I think I might lose my mind because you are championing a guy that robs old people and you're saying, yeah, this is great, freaking awesome. Let's have him talk at our event, right? VMware 2024, Broadcom, guest lead speaker, you know, like, you know, uh, yeah, run away. Run away. Speaker 0 | 14:22.439 Um, I don't know. That's just, I have a lot of, Speaker 1 | 14:26.060 so yeah, so I do. So it's interesting, the Broadcom thing, Speaker 0 | 14:29.741 because I know a lot of people that are, you know, using, um, uh, well, you have VMware. What are we talking about? Oh, my brain just went, you know, like. The whole orchestrator, the whole SD-WAN orchestrator and everything is going to be, is going to affect a lot of networks. And I don't know what that's going to mean for support and security. And it's a, it's a fairly, that, that was a fairly big, I'm just, that was a fairly big disruption in the space or it might be. Speaker 2 | 15:01.170 It's Novell all over again. It's NetWare is dead and all over again. For me, because I was a big fan of NetWare and I cut my teeth with VMware and I was a virtualization architect for the power company, for Berkshire Hathaway Energy Holdings. And I did 3,700 VMs at eight data centers, over 60 hosts. I was using Cisco UCS. I could do so many cool things with command line. And I did it all because VMware made this really cool product. Speaker 1 | 15:32.799 What do you think is going to happen now? Speaker 2 | 15:34.640 Well, I read things that just blow my mind, like Broadcom's selling the VMware workstation off of the, from VMware. Like, they're like, oh yeah, we'll just move that over here. Speaker 1 | 15:47.565 You should buy it. Go ahead and buy it. Speaker 2 | 15:49.866 Yeah, yeah. Someone else is going to sell that. I'm like, dude, it's like the same patented technology of how hypervisors should work. And... How do you cut that up and divide and conquer and be successful? Because all the innovation from a hypervisor applies to all the products. Speaker 1 | 16:08.601 If anyone does not understand, everyone out there listening right now, if you do not understand this conversation, if you do not understand this conversation and you are an IT director, you are an IT manager, you are an IT in the ad, if you are on the help desk and you can understand this conversation and you can understand where we're going with this. That right there will differentiate you from a lot. The sad thing is a lot of executive management does not understand this conversation. Speaker 2 | 16:35.622 No, Speaker 1 | 16:35.783 they don't. They do not understand this conversation and they do not understand the value of an IT director, IT manager, VP of IT, CIO, CTO, CISO. Speaker 2 | 16:48.649 Yeah. How many titles do we need? Speaker 1 | 16:52.271 They do not understand how to differentiate, to even care, whether their IT management or IT leadership does understand this. And that can be make or break for your business. Speaker 2 | 17:05.819 Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Speaker 1 | 17:07.380 You're blowing my mind. I mean, I have not had this much fun in the first, Speaker 0 | 17:11.322 I don't know, what is it? Have we really been talking for 20 minutes already? Speaker 1 | 17:15.344 16. Speaker 2 | 17:15.985 I don't know. Speaker 0 | 17:18.038 Oh man, it's just, Speaker 1 | 17:19.539 I don't even know where to go. I don't even know where to go. So, but what does this say about, here's what we can go. Speaker 0 | 17:26.825 And I don't talk politics. Speaker 1 | 17:28.226 I really don't. I really don't. But what does this say about what could happen to businesses in this country and how it could affect things, this continuing to go from this capitalistic and I'm not, I'm all for capitalism. Okay. What does this say from the system? all the security, the great migration to security. I'm going into security. Speaker 0 | 17:50.963 I'm going into security. I'm going into security. I just find that to be the great migration. Speaker 1 | 17:54.845 What does this say about all that? Are we shooting ourselves in the foot? Are we, are we just creating, Speaker 0 | 18:01.428 is it like the Microsoft thing? Well, we're going to, we're going to make the operating system and we're also going to make the malware and we're also going to make, Speaker 1 | 18:09.231 and then we're going to, the irony of the, like, you know, Speaker 0 | 18:12.492 you know, where, Speaker 2 | 18:13.533 where are the great creators going? Where are the people that created network? Where'd they go? Where are the great people that created VMware? Hey, let's, let's talk games. Blizzard is not the same company. Where, where did the great people that created the great Blizzard title? Speaker 1 | 18:28.065 Well, you tell me what did happen to that? Speaker 0 | 18:29.805 Because all I remember about Blizzard was that it was a work hard, play hard, total like egomaniac type of like internal company, which is like really all of these, right? Speaker 2 | 18:40.648 Well, they, they turned into that. Speaker 0 | 18:42.509 Okay. Then good. So you tell me. Speaker 2 | 18:46.734 I don't know. I think what happens is like right now I work for a hundred percent employee owned company. Great. It's a construction company. So we dig in the dirt, right? And we have big backhoes, big motors, big construction equipment. Now most construction companies are owned by like one guy or a couple or family. Speaker 0 | 19:08.760 Sure. Speaker 2 | 19:09.941 And they make a lot of money, right? They bring that money in and they did really well. So then they roll up to the job site and they're brand new Ford. It's all decked out. Speaker 0 | 19:20.722 Yeah. Denali. Let's throw GMC in there too. Speaker 2 | 19:23.544 Yeah. Maybe something from GMC. Speaker 1 | 19:24.844 I was looking at a, Speaker 0 | 19:25.825 I was looking at a dually diesel the other day. I'm like, Speaker 1 | 19:28.686 I need a hundred and three. I need a hundred and thirty thousand. Speaker 2 | 19:31.748 So, so they roll up brand new truck because the job did good. Hey, thanks. Thanks guys. Here's pizza. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks. let's do that again you know and then how do you think our construction equipment looks do you think that the guy operating this equipment's not my equipment uh you know f him you know they're operating and beating the hell out of it and you get down and you look at that company b you know that's not the hundred percent employee owned and their equipment looks like it's got a thousand a million hours on it and it's not even two years old then you roll over to the employee-owned company where everybody's working for themselves everybody wins together um we're profitable we all pay each other back through incentives our employee stock goes up our equipment looks guy gets out of it he's wiping it down it's his it's true so one true you you asked me about like what happened to blizzard what happened to vmware well yeah guys got money and then they sold sold their interests and They're probably living the life. Speaker 0 | 20:36.458 Love it. I love everything that you just said. I do. I really do believe, I really do believe that if you, if you can be, teamwork makes the dream work. I say that a lot. It really does. But do people really get it? Do they really embrace that? Speaker 2 | 21:00.736 Honestly, I think it comes down to ownership and accountability. So if I'm rolling the dice and I'm just punching in and punching out 40 hours a week and I'm not owning it, it's not mine. Speaker 0 | 21:13.403 The other thing about it is what the employee owned. The other thing about employee owned, everyone holds each other accountable. Speaker 1 | 21:18.606 If someone's not picking up the slack, like, dude, Speaker 0 | 21:21.507 get the hell out of here. Speaker 2 | 21:22.868 That's soap and sock. That'll get on board. Soap and sock. I got to get out of here. I just don't fit in. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 | 21:33.309 Soap and sock manager. Speaker 2 | 21:34.089 Show up and work. Speaker 1 | 21:37.010 Yeah, yeah. I always tell my guys to come on. I'm like, Speaker 0 | 21:38.710 they're like, well, I'm like, you don't ever have to worry about getting fired here because you'll just fire yourself. Speaker 1 | 21:44.512 You'll just fire yourself. Soap and sock. Every time. Speaker 0 | 21:48.313 We have a Speaker 1 | 21:49.633 Greg the Frenchman. We need to get on this. I know it's not the number one priority. Speaker 0 | 21:53.074 Greg the Frenchman's my integrator. He's really the smart guy behind the scenes that does all our AI stuff and everything. He keeps me in check because I have these wild ideas that come up all the time. Soap and sock. We need to have that added to the, uh, uh, it urban dictionary. Speaker 1 | 22:07.938 So we have, we already have AI scraping every episode coming up with every terminology that, Speaker 0 | 22:13.800 that an it director or someone uses, and we're going to put it into an urban dictionary and I won't sell it on Amazon or give it away or something. But it was like, you know, the other one was like, you know, herding cats, you know, like a term used by it actors to talk about end users and like, you know, Speaker 2 | 22:26.352 I got three little girls at home. Herding cats is a full-time job. Speaker 0 | 22:30.615 Yeah, I got four girls. Four boys. Beat that. I got holes in the wall. I got holes in the wall and emotions going on. Speaker 2 | 22:36.779 Yeah. Speaker 0 | 22:39.080 I got broken windows. Speaker 1 | 22:40.481 I got broken windows and broken hearts. Speaker 2 | 22:41.822 You can put a dollar value to and girls is emotional damage. Speaker 1 | 22:45.965 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 0 | 22:46.545 Broken hearts, broken windows. Yeah. Speaker 2 | 22:48.487 Oh, yeah. Literally. Speaker 0 | 22:49.727 Yeah. And the boys are the ones with the broken hearts and the girls are breaking windows now. I don't know. It's really not that wild over here. We do get along well. I do love my family. We have great family time. That's why I try to do the job that I do so I can be in front of them. I don't even know. Okay, so let's reset now. Speaker 1 | 23:10.336 We've already hit Broadcom. Speaker 0 | 23:11.776 That's a sinking ship. Speaker 1 | 23:14.557 Run for the hills. Run for the hills. Speaker 0 | 23:19.278 We've not really talked. We didn't talk enough. Speaker 1 | 23:21.779 We talked about AOL. You have the best AOL story. Speaker 0 | 23:25.140 I've had other AOL people. I actually want to know why was it so fun? Speaker 1 | 23:29.961 What were you actually doing there? What were you actually doing in AOL? Speaker 2 | 23:34.763 I started off talking to customers that would call in. We called them members for the first two months. That's what I did. Speaker 1 | 23:43.825 What were we paying for AOL back then? Speaker 0 | 23:46.046 Was it as much as $50? I don't even remember. Speaker 2 | 23:47.966 Was it $12? $10 for five hours a month. It was 10 bucks for five hours of online time. Speaker 1 | 23:55.705 It was hours. How did we even measure hours? Did we, did we, would we tell them like, Speaker 0 | 24:00.606 Hey, you got to get a modem? Like, what do you, how do you convince someone? Like, how do we tell them like what was trouble? Speaker 2 | 24:05.507 They were given the floppy disks out in the middle. Speaker 0 | 24:09.068 I remember that we threw those like Frisbees. Speaker 2 | 24:11.749 Yeah. And so they would, uh, people will get those floppy disks and like free software at the time was unheard of. So, and shareware just getting started. Right. So People will get this free software like, well, crap, I gotta be able to use this software. It's like, you know, it's like us old men, we can't throw away our cords. You know, we're going to buy some of these with this cord. So they have the cord box. Speaker 1 | 24:33.393 Yeah. Speaker 0 | 24:35.113 I got the cord box. Speaker 2 | 24:36.674 So AOL probably made the modem sales go up because people get the software and they're like, well, I need a modem. Well, I've got a computer. So they just make that make it happen. But a lot of those phone calls when I was working for that. two months with people that would have a word processor that they could fit that disk into. And I was like, no, dude, you got to have a real computer. Speaker 0 | 24:58.172 I can't remember what ultimately happened with all the AOL users right now. So like my dad still has. you know, like his email address. I had to take his computer away, so everyone, if you want to email him, it doesn't matter. It's capangel at AOL.com. It's not going to go anywhere. It's going to go into the abyss. But, yeah, you know, because he's captain of the Blue Angel, capangel at AOL.com, still using it. I might have the password so I can log in and check his emails for him because he's beyond the time where I can allow him to touch a computer anymore. It's way too dangerous. Speaker 2 | 25:28.299 Oh, you probably ought to check. Like, have I been pwned to make sure that password hasn't been surfaced somewhere else? Speaker 0 | 25:34.621 It's probably, probably. What broke the camel's back, so to speak, metaphorically, so to speak, was one of his friends emailing me like, hey, is everything okay with whatever? Because I sent the gift cards. And I was like, Speaker 2 | 25:51.586 gosh. No, Speaker 1 | 25:54.707 no. That's dead serious. I called Debbie. He's like, yeah, well, Jim from Microsoft called me and said he was going to clean my computer. Speaker 0 | 26:02.654 And I was like, oh, gosh. Speaker 2 | 26:05.736 Oh, no. Speaker 1 | 26:06.156 I started going down this, Speaker 0 | 26:07.056 like, you know what's crazy when you talk about social engineering? Speaker 1 | 26:12.940 So I had to go so far to, Speaker 0 | 26:14.301 like, just destroy everything, like, get rid of all computers, try to just, like, erase all traces of everything. Just don't let, like, my dad get his hands on anything because there's no point anymore. And the guy went, Speaker 1 | 26:30.368 so for the Microsoft guy, Speaker 0 | 26:32.029 the Jim from Microsoft who needs to clean your computers, I'm calling from Microsoft because there's a security warning. And if you don't help me log in, some remote log me in thing, then I was like, okay. So I tried to do a sting operation, eventually found out he was in India. And then he wanted me to help with some SIP trunking so that he could make 1-800 calls via Seattle, via Dallas, Texas to... people. And the whole thing was quite wild. This guy had a whole ring of like elderly people that were helping him open a bank accounts and transfer money. And he was going to pay him $500 a month. And I know this sounds crazy, Speaker 1 | 27:07.886 but he eventually got to the point where he sent my dad a letter, a certified piece of mail from Microsoft that said, we can't get ahold of you. Speaker 0 | 27:15.753 We need you to call this 1-800 number right now. Speaker 1 | 27:18.776 And, and I got an alert from my dad's like, Speaker 0 | 27:22.279 you know, UPS alert or something and it said it was coming from like MicroStore which was this guy MicroStore by the way everyone if you google it's MicroStore or something out of like Texas but and I got the alert I was like I called like the home like the we have like 24-7 care for my dad at his house I'm like you need to like you Speaker 1 | 27:40.649 need to check the mail now get this mail before they're like oh we found it it's already opened he had called it he called the number he called it I was like no you Speaker 2 | 27:50.232 I can't believe it. Speaker 1 | 27:52.372 It's amazing. It's amazing that this, the stuff that, Speaker 0 | 27:55.573 that people do. And I don't know where we're supposed to go with that. Speaker 2 | 27:59.954 Yeah. There's a lot of YouTube. Speaker 0 | 28:01.575 Goal came from AOL. Speaker 2 | 28:02.555 Yeah. Speaker 1 | 28:03.815 Yeah. Speaker 0 | 28:04.575 You can't protect the old people. You cannot. Speaker 1 | 28:06.876 They're going to think you can try, you can try, Speaker 0 | 28:09.277 but the best way to do it is to erase all digital access to anything. Speaker 1 | 28:14.178 At dissecting popular IT nerds. We expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. 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This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what's on your roadmap. All you need to do is email. internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier and we'll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day. Speaker 2 | 30:33.949 Yeah. Well, the scams just keep coming. I mean, from the Medicare, Medicaid, robo-dialers. The other thing that I've gotten is some elderly in my close family. And as if they have a... POTS line still, or the original number they had for the last 50 years, their data is out there and that's what they're farming to contact them. So I'm going to start over with a new identity, a new digital identity, which is email and telephone number to avoid being harvested from those lists. Speaker 0 | 31:10.481 I did all of that. I did all of that. Changed the POTS line that everyone knew forever, right? Yeah. Like send out a family email. Hey, by the way, here's what's going on. Speaker 1 | 31:21.726 You know, Speaker 0 | 31:22.527 here's the new phone number. Do not give this out to anyone. Speaker 1 | 31:25.048 Change the phone number twice. Change the email twice. Speaker 0 | 31:28.671 That's why I said I don't care about AOL anymore. Speaker 1 | 31:30.732 Change like literally everything, you know, Speaker 0 | 31:32.934 like I changed everything. Didn't work. Had to send them a first class piece of mail. Speaker 1 | 31:37.797 Please call to make an outbound call to them to get the information was crazy. Speaker 0 | 31:43.781 Anyhow, Speaker 2 | 31:44.482 that's enough. Let's have to change it to a PO box. Speaker 0 | 31:47.712 Yeah. Speaker 2 | 31:49.632 Then you do a redirect on what's going to that address. I don't know. There's got to be a way around this because I'm wondering what happens when we become elderly? I mean, are we going to be hacked? What are we going to be blind to? Speaker 1 | 32:03.696 This is what I'm thinking. Speaker 0 | 32:04.917 This is what I'm thinking. Set up a family trust, divide it amongst the kids that are all fighting amongst each other right now anyways. Yeah. Immediately now. take all of my money and start sifting it into various different LLCs that get deposited in various different kids' bank accounts. Speaker 1 | 32:23.144 So make the kids swear and write a piece of like, Speaker 0 | 32:25.665 you know, write something that like this much money I will be transferring to my father a month and be, I will be buying the food and like literally own nothing. Speaker 1 | 32:33.270 So my goal is to like own everything, Speaker 0 | 32:34.890 but own nothing and be prepared to not care if you are like, um, yeah, be prepared to, to own nothing. And be okay being poor, I guess. Speaker 2 | 32:47.118 I've, I've known some pretty, uh, successful people that aren't here with us anymore. And, and, uh, I think for them, they just kept their, their lines of communication closed. Um, they just kept them open with who they knew and did not allow anything in. But I think, I think for some, the, the ones that we're getting, uh, infiltrated, I think, uh, for the ones that I knew, I think they were. Speaker 0 | 33:13.576 um possibly had something to do with a level of loneliness even though they were surrounded with people yes i don't know it's going to be a psychology thing uh no there's like the eight ways that that people get hacked right there's like the eight there's like the eight social like ways that people get hacked and yeah the love the love triangle like the loneliness one is one of them yeah um yeah Speaker 2 | 33:36.911 if you don't have instagram get instagram you'll get an idea what that looks like Speaker 0 | 33:43.316 No, staying away. Speaker 1 | 33:44.737 Every time I log in, Speaker 0 | 33:45.398 I'm like, no, Speaker 1 | 33:46.599 look away. Speaker 2 | 33:48.682 Yeah, really? I have like 10 people that I follow and they follow me, but I get like all these, like, I'm like, this isn't a real person. Speaker 0 | 33:59.274 No. Speaker 2 | 33:59.554 And they're texting me like, hey, let's be friends.
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