Rob Hirschfeld, hello. I'm Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co founder of RackN and your host for the cloud 2030 podcast. This episode is one of our special treats. It is our book club episode with John Walpole, who wrote the two but rule which is very tongue in cheek, but very serious about momentum thinking and using a negative bouncy discussion pattern, I like to think of it as bouncy discussion pattern to really explore ideas and really drive ideation in a very positive way, by asking, but a lot by really challenging people's ideas in a constructive way. I'll let him set up and define this very interesting conversation with the author of the two but rule,
yeah, I wrote a book called The Two butt rule because I'm I'm an older fellow with a young, seven year old son, and so I'm uniquely qualified to talk to write a book full of butt jokes, which I did. It's a serious subject, and so I thought, I better make it a funny one. You know, we really are in a world of, I'm a I'm a Gen Xer, right? So in the boomers, you know, I grew up and had a career where we were kind of afraid of the boss coming in with the with the hard one, but, right? But that won't work well. My dad was like, he was, I come from a long line of one butters, right, you know. But that won't work. Negative, negative, negative, right? And that's a bit of a momentum killer, and we didn't like it. So we were, our children created a world of of no buts, right, where it's not safe to present your butt to anyone. And that's also a momentum killer, because you know, whether it's you're afraid of telling a superior or a peer, or if you're a manager and an employee comes up with a not great idea and you what's the safest thing to do? Oh, that's a great idea. And pat him on the head, and got to the room as fast as possible. So we're all afraid of our butts. We're running from our butts. It's kind of a hard thing to do. So I thought, well, you know, in my experience as a executive in enterprises and a three time startup person, and I've run, you know, consortia of lots of different companies trying to collaboratively innovate together, which is a really hard thing to do, as I'm sure you'd agree. It's hard enough to innovate your own company. It's really hard to do growth ecosystems where the plethora of competing and unseen intentions lurking in, you know, between companies that are not telling each other everything is is quite challenging, and it's my favorite problem. I've been interested in that problem. I talk a lot about it that in the
book. So you did you do it? You do a really nice job explaining intention versus ideation in the book, which I think is helpful.
Yeah, yeah. Invention. There's a lot of I words, right? There's idea, invention, intention, innovation, I kind of take issue with clay. Christensen, you know, no nice about him. I mean, he was a great man, but I his one of his colleagues. I didn't know clay that well. I've met him a few times, but one of his closer associates, Hank Chesbrough, is a dear friend and open innovation right? He kind of coined that term, and I've been working with him on open innovation projects for years, and I had him down to Australia when we were doing that thing in Australia, and in one day, he said, and he's the nicest guy, so it's funny, he said it because he's not a confrontational person. But he said, Well, I was like, I'd like to write a book. This is years ago when I didn't write the book. And he said, you know, if you're gonna write a book, you gotta pick a fight. Well, well, hang Okay, I'm gonna pick a fight with you and clay, you know, open innovation is great, but there are things that we can't be open about. So we talked a lot about that. But, yeah, innovation improvement, I'd love, I'm thinking about a book now called radical improvement where, you know, kind of a repudiation of disruptive innovation, right? You know, we've been doing a little, I kind of helped with this, but I think we've done a little too much disruptive innovation, thoughtless disruptive innovation, which has led to, I think, a lot of industry spaces being overrun by what I'll call regulatory arbitrage.
Oh, interesting. That's not where I go, okay? No, I
mean. You know, I was, you know, I started one of the first ride share company for taxis. And we were very much Boy Scouts about regulation. We were like, hey, you know, there's, there are reasons why, you know, there's overregulation, but then there's, you know, and there's, maybe we need smart regulation. But throwing out regulation entirely usually leads you back to the reasons why you needed to regulate so it's just a cycle that would be nice to break the cycle, but we didn't do that with right the day that Uber drives all of the taxis out of business is the day that cities will regulate Uber in the same way they regulated taxis, and you'll be back to the same problem. You'll just replace a whole bunch of bad fleet owners with one giant, bad fleet owner. I'm
thinking about the scooter scooter Apocalypse that happened. He's just showed up with scooters dumped on the sidewalks, and the cities were like, What? What?
Yeah, well, yeah, that's, that's a good example of just, you know, a no, but society, right? It's like, hey, let's do this. Wouldn't this be cool? Oh, but, but there's all these problems, but don't worry about that. We'll just do it like, you know, yes, keep doing it. The problem. So this is the problem that I'm trying to address. This, your
Volvo, your Vovo example was really good, your VW, VW example of the well, but we can't meet these rules. But we should cheat. We can
cheat. Yeah, exactly. We can cheat. Yeah, no, I think that we do need momentum. That's why it's called Momentum thinking. But a No buts culture leads to really bad ideas percolating up and taking, gaining a foothold and then causing mayhem, which makes it so much harder for good innovators to get something done, because people, it builds up resistance, right? You know, nothing I hate. Do you think part of this?
I mean, because I, most people, I you know that I've come in contact, usually think in opposition, which is where the butts come from, right? So the they have a David, we have a tendency to think first about things that how it won't work, or how what the problems are. And it's a, it's a, it's an attribute for us. But you're right. When you shoot down the ideas, you're like, but, but, but, but, but, you know, all these, all these issues you have, you do have a tendency to stifle the idea stifle, stifle the answer, but it is our first, usually our first knee jerk response. Is this tapping into that, basically allowing people to say, Yeah, I have concerns, and then give them us and you, I always, I usually think of this, not as butts, but, and it's like, but is, you're back, back to your thinking here, but it's the negative thing, right? And so a lot of times I'll turn but, instead of saying but, I'll say and, and it's actually a very good substitute. So I'll say, well, that. And we could also whatever. Go ahead you're you like that? Oh
no. Well, yeah, I get this one a lot yes and is it kind of like yes and and think of it this way, if Hitler comes to you and says and tells you his plans, right? You say, yes and no, you say, but what you really want is your mommy to love you, but this will make all the mommies hate you, but we can get you some help. You know, it's not, yeah, same thing, right? Yeah, and it's not a, of course, if you just say, but that's terrible idea. He's just gonna roll past you, right, right there. So what you want is to, is to, as you said of the book, it's not just about that. It's about listening for what's behind somebody's intentions, right? So if somebody, you know, intentions are the action verbs of innovation, right? And you know, an invention is, you know, here's a pencil. I can write something with it, but if I'm going to stick it in your eye, that's an intention, that's a disruptive innovation. I can't tell you about that before I do it. Intentions are tricky, and they're very delicate, they're very sensitive, and they're hard to share. And when you share them, you have really exposed yourself and underneath that intention, if you really have a strong urge for that intention, that plan, it's important if I'm going to resist, if I say I don't want to do that or but it's too expensive, but I don't like it, but it will be horrible. But, but, but, but, but I better understand why you want to do it, why somebody wants to do something is never so interesting as what they want to do, right? And why I don't want to do it is interesting, too. And if and in that space, it opens up a space to be able to say, Okay, can we get what we need together and square our needs in some innovative way? Right? So instead of compromising and we say, well, you know, I. I'm up, if you're down, here's a teeter totter, right? Say, Well, we both want to go up, but we both want to do it together. We're on a teeter totter. We're playing we want to do something together, so we could turn it into an airplane wing and go up together, right? So that's, that's the that, and doing that rule is a good way of getting into that. You're
making me think about another book we talked about, which is Chris FOSS is never split the difference if you, if you're if you haven't, if you, you should definitely, considering what you just said, you should definitely review that the he has a script that's different than your two bot script, but goes to intention. And his script would be, instead of saying, but he would say, it seems like you you have this intention, or you have this issue or this problem, like, back to your your Hitler thing, right? You wouldn't yes and an idea you don't agree with, you would. And Chris Voss script, you would say it seems like you have an idea that murder a whole bunch of people, right? Or you have unresolved issues with childhood that are driving you towards violence. How you know, you know, I really can't help you until you've resolved that issue.
Yeah, there's another book by script that's right. Go ahead.
Sorry.
There's a book by Marshall Rosenberg that called non violent communication. He's passed, but it's actually really good on audiobook. And I think I've heard that Satya Nadella has his people read it, and it's all about a language of needs, right? You know that you know my needs? If I if I say hey, you know what you just said makes me I doesn't make me angry. I feel angry because my need for something is not being met. In what you said, that opens up a way of having a conversation about it that is more reasonable,
and that my, one of my main questions for you in in the book, is having so the nice, the nice thing about the Chris Voss strategy, and in practice, I found this, is that you don't have to have both parties participate in it, right? You can. You can own it from your side and the the party you're you're negotiating with isn't subscribing. When you look at the two butt rule, does that become a collaborative process where both people are playing? Or do you do find ways where you know the you can, you can exercise the exercise your butt. Then you see, I've been reading the book exercise your butt in order to, you know, without having the other person,
sure, yeah, playing along, yeah. In fact, yes. And, you know, yeah, if, if somebody's kind of presented a plan, and you don't have to confront them. You could just take it away and then go say, Oh, well, I don't like it, but what if we did this and then bring it back to them later. But you know, I'll sit right in that chair, my thinking chair over there, and I'll run for my own butts, right? I'll say, hey, what if we did this? What if I did this, and I'm I, if I don't get myself under control. I'm running away from all of the butts that immediately appear the second I have that idea. And that just wastes a lot of time instead of saying, Hey buddy, come over here. But let's talk about that, right? Oh yeah, okay, if you're confident that you can always come up with a second, but then you don't have to run from the first but if you have a culture and a team culture, where people expect you to bring the second element, that's leadership, well, internal and external. I mean, if you have a culture, a team culture, that's what I'm I've been doing with Team rotary a lot is, you know, these teams are some really good one that I did today was just fantastic. They were so fun, you know, they were, and we went through this experience together and, and, yeah, I said, Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna embrace our butts. And they just dove right in. So somebody would start off with, you know, but we can't solve this problem, but we could if, and then I'm like, Okay, well, who's gonna tackle that beautiful, wonderful, terrible idea. And they're like, okay, but we can't do that either, because and then so, but we could do this. And then somebody else would say, but we can't do that, but we could do this. You get, if you know that this is something we do as a game to kind of build up the rhythm. But if you do that for real, in teams, in my experience, you know, running, you know, some research labs and some other organizations, you'll get some pretty important and powerful inventions or new business ideas around five butts in right? Five sets of butts, right? So, but that won't work. But if you're, if you're serious about, if you're not just playing a game, you'll get, you'll get to something interesting. Singing about five rounds of the two butt rule
it. The thing that's that's fascinating, the way you're describing it, I think that adds a degree of depth, and I'm a visual thinker, is that it, it feels the butts are driving a ricochet around a space. So what, what you the way you described it, the way I was, I'm hearing it, is this zigzaggy, like you're trying to find a solution inside of a space, and the butts are bouncing off all the walls, finding out where the holes are or where the space you're covering. The space really fast, because you're zipping back and forth, and the butts drive you to the extremes of that space, whereas the ands are sort of like trying to circle around a solution space and you end up bounded right from the start, is the
Yeah, it's just not in we're just even as a manager, not that long ago, maybe this is something that prompt me. Prompted me with the book was because we don't have a two bucks culture, we don't have this expectation that the negative can become positive. That's why it's called, you know, turn negative thinking into positive solutions, right? How many people do we know that are at at risk of being the pariah, the Cassandra, the person voted off the island simply because they're thought of as being too negative. I'm like, they're often smart. They're sometimes the smartest people on the team. They have a lot to contribute. We got to save those guys, right? And also,
my my co founder, had a reputation as being the we call them the VP of doom and gloom for this reason, but if you
can turn that guy into the designated butt head, and you can teach him to be a two butter, even a silly set, that's why you say exactly right. But it would work if gravity was different. This is a true story. I was at IBM and a team was working on a problem. New Hire stepped up with a what if we did this. And an engineer said, but that won't work. And I said, but it would work if and and he said, Well, worry of gravity was different. And not a minute later, another guy, another engineer, came up, what if we did this, and they that led to a couple patents, if I remember correctly, and a project that got in front of the CEO of IBM, Luke Gerstner, and, you know, it was great. And we didn't solve gravity that day, but we, what we did, you know, maintain that momentum, and it generated a completely different thought. That's the point, right? And, and I think we kind of saved that relationship too, because you could tell that the new hire and the engineer were about to be not happy with each other, right? But then it got somewhere.
It's an interesting right? Because disagreement usually ends up feeling like a relationship problem. One of my dearest friends, rich knows really well, Dave McCrory and I, you know, when we have an ideation session, it's entirely us, you know, but, but, but, no, this won't work. This won't work right bound, but it's you're exploring the space really quickly. From that perspective, it's one thing I in talking with you, I didn't pick up from the book as much as as your explanation of chaining butts together is about exploring a space really quickly, right? That that rapidity is important.
In my experience, you can't do less than an hour and a half of the two Buck game, and you shouldn't do more than three hours. It can be exhausting. I mean, I think the reason why we just at some point go off and do something sometimes kind of stupid, is that we're just like, I'm too tired of keeping of thinking about this anymore. Let's just go. Let's just go. Do it right?
How do you know? What does that? How do you know? What
does I say about three, three hours is about right? And if you bound it, you have to play, does not is not. Play requires a boundary, right? Zimmerman, I think you know not the art of play. You know you have to have a boundary for for play. So you have to know when it's going to stop, right? Right? So that and so if people see that endpoint coming, but you got to have it, give it enough space, otherwise you're just skimming over the surface. And then, of course, what's going to happen is that you're not going to get the idea the thing you'll start to you'll feel the team start to triangulate on something right, that they're coming to consensus on, right? Right? But often it'll be days later when somebody you know has a shower moment and goes right. So you have to give it that kind of space. But sometimes, to go fast, you need to go slow enough, right? Yeah, just say
I'm a. Big fan of of the benefit of time in solving art problems, right? You don't always have a luxury on that, but you definitely need space, you need rest, you need to get away from it.
And it is frustrating because we're in an age of I've been calling this the age of entropy, where where innovation has been replaced with basically lazy regulatory arbitrage, basically rich people who can buy out an industry like the tech, you know, like ground transit and that sort of thing. I have front row seat to that, and then I had a front row seat to the crypto thing too. Again, Lazy, Lazy innovation, right? Blockchain is not a good technology or a good design pattern for anything other than laundering money. I spent eight years trying to find a way to use it for anything other than crypto, and got nowhere. But one thing a public blockchain, especially if we could figure out a way of doing one without supporting a drift token, is actually have come up with an idea for that, using stocks, right? You can stake, you could stake with legal securities and have the same attributes as a crypto token, right? Because that's what makes staking possible, like ether Ethereum,
that's actually a bank, and it's
a non taxable event, right? And you say, well, it's non taxable, I'm going to stake it. Well, you can do that if with your Apple stock, you know, and put it into a mutual fund, and then say, Okay, well, and you're going to get transaction fees if you So, you could have a kind of a blockchain that was somewhat
that's actually, that's actually
being being implemented in a few, few situations.
Knows, knows quite a bit more about it than I do. I'm
sort of at a blockchain at the state at this point, but I'd love, but I'm always looking for that second but, but it doesn't work, but it doesn't scale, but the laws of physics. But I, man, do I hate, and I was part of this. I sold a lot of snake oil on the, you know, like, oh, it's early. I remember, you know, 2016 you know, big evangelist was that we were in a an event in DC, you know, trying to get the right, you know, get the government. Folks around blockchain, crypto and blockchain, I was more on the blockchain side, and even even when I moved over to Ethereum from IBM hyper ledger, or IBM blockchain,
the biggest second but with blockchains for securities trading is just a technical one, and the blockchain doesn't forget and you can't cut it off at some point, because you have to have the full transactional history on your root notes,
yeah, and it's a replicated Singleton, so it gives up every other attribute for the maximizing the attribute of tamper resistance. So and people miss this, right? You know, in technology, we really should. We should have some kind of a Hippocratic oath that says we will, we will use the negative as the negative space of what a thing can't do or can't do. Well, that's whenever I'm presented with some new technology or emerging piece of work these days, I always ask, tell me what it isn't good at. And that's hard, because if you're in love with your new thing, it's really hard to say what it doesn't do. But that paints the negative just like a painter will paint the negative space of an object. This is a it's a good technique for saying, Okay, well, what? It's not good. So we would say, Oh, well, this is a more secure ledger. It's not security involves surveillance resistance, and it's very bad at that. Don't buy a pregnancy kit with crypto in Texas, because a vigilante kid is going to use AI to find you and sell out you. Sell you out to Greg Abbott. It's just don't do crimes on blockchain kids, they will find you. So, yeah. So there's a lot of problems with blockchain and and, but it's really good for people who want to move large fistfuls of money across borders without taxes or government oversight. Again, I think that the joke will ultimately be on them, because governments are going to get really good at figuring out who's who. I used to, I used to joke that maybe, maybe at the whole thing, maybe Satoshi was really three kids in the basement and at the NSA going, you know, it'll be really funny, because if we got all the bad guys doing crimes on this,
and then we can trace where they're going,
actually, I would argue that the biggest advantage of blockchain is not doing it without oversight. Is, in fact, the opposite is doing it atomically with. It with consensus across two jurisdictions that may not otherwise agree.
Yeah, you know, there is a really great big decentralized ledger. It's called banking. Yeah, each bank has its own GL and those GLS have to find a way of maintaining some consistent state at times, right? It is a big distributed system. Distributed systems, the problem is distributed as Leslie Lamport, you know, the great father of distributed systems, will say, is that, you know, it's really about the laws of physics, right? So we kind of threw that out. We ignored it for years. You know, I spent eight years deliberately, willfully ignoring the laws of physics to see if there was something here. But at some point you got to set up, stand up and say, Yeah, I couldn't find Yeah. Every exit from the labyrinth is an entrance back into the labyrinth. You don't change the trilemmas, multiple trilemmas, not just the CAP theorem with Blockchain, it just doesn't solve it doesn't really solve anything. It's a tool. It can be used for things. I think it would be an interesting thing to put hashes and proofs on. So say, I need to prove rich and I'm going to lend rich some money. I need to prove my debit and his credit are the same, and I need to prove to rob that we have the same information and that the rules by which we did that activity followed some set of rules, like I didn't overcharge him the usury law in Texas, right? But I want to do that in such a way, but zero trust security. Would say, Don't copy the data over to raw because that's bad security, right? Well, we don't need blockchains to solve that. What we need is zero knowledge, cryptography, no blockchain required to be able to say, Yes, I can claim that that Rich and I have the same record that the record follow the set of rules, and that Rob can insure my loan without having the actual data. So that would be really good. Well, actually,
what you want to do is go ahead rich deal.
I'm just going to say that's very close to what the World Bank is promoting right now, among
a variety of developing countries and major country bank systems, and they are, in fact, building on the back of of blockchain, and E and y is building it up for them and their
world. And why has got something to sell. So that's why I know I know those guys. I'm
sure you do. I know him as well. The point being that it's, it is a stretch and but they don't need your point. Of course, what you can use, what you can use and blockchain for, is not so much.
It's basically to make things tamper evident, as opposed to tamper proof. And quite frankly, most people are not willing to pay that amount of money to have tamper evidence. There are other way, other ways to do it.
I do like what I do like what Scott Stornetta was doing since 1995 putting hashes head ends of Merkel trees on the in the New York Times classified section every Sunday. Right? That, to me, makes sense. So I can imagine the internet could use, sort of the ultimate ordering and hash management machine, right? So that I could, we could prove that this thing happened before that thing and that things. But you want to put data on that thing, right? Or, God love him, Vitalik, Buterin, is a lovely guy. But the idea of putting stored procedures on a on an already fat pig of a system, you've
just said the word you use, the phrase stored procedures, which you know immediately smart contractor paroxysms of fear.
Yeah, we didn't like store procedures back in the 90s. Right now and now, the smart contracts are basically stored procedures on a really, really inefficient, slow, expensive state machine.
Exactly.
Yes, the Terrible idea not,
not going to object. No,
I disagree. But
actually what I'd like to ask you, though, if I may, just to kind of re redirect the conversation a little bit when you are in a situation where everyone isn't quite agreed to the rules of engagement in a tuba meeting, and you do have a guy that's looks like it's my age, it probably is maybe a little older. Um, and is basically saying, No, this is what I want. This is what you will do. Saying, I guess the the question I ask is, how do you turn that or what techniques
do you have at your disposal to turn that conversation into something that is closer to, if not actually getting to a kind of a two, but environment, for
example, really interesting.
This is, this is kind of going back to Chris Voss that,
oh, by the way, I should say, I know, I know of Chris Voss very well. I did a show. He's super cool. Yeah, I love this. I didn't know Look, but, yeah. But
he, you know, one of the things that I remember vividly, it was his approach to say, when faced with a, you know, an ultimatum, you're going to do this. And so his response
was of, okay, how do you propose that I do that? He was actually quite expert at kind of saying, placing the onus back on the demanding party and
and putting them on the spot. It basically is a different means of getting into that ping pong match that you were just describing as being the turns with the butt,
if, if you're dealing with a person who is at a point where they are in a No buts allowed state, that's hard. It's easier on the other side of it to say, I, there's a great scientist that I worked with, and it was kind of the their their whisper, I guess, because I would, I would constantly, would always be, like, very well informed about why a plan will work. And I'd be like, okay, so how would you solve it? You know, that would basically prompt them to two brought themselves, and they would come up with amazing they just considered that a puzzle to solve, and they would come up with some pretty good stuff. And you're
asking exactly the same in in a slightly different fashion. You're putting that that person on
not a defensive so much as all right, you know, you've made a demand, but your demand has to come across at least with some rationality. There's got to be some underpinnings to this.
Explain this to me, you know, tell me, you know, flesh this out and that that is one of the best approaches I've ever come across. I've used it
plays into the challenge that there's an ego challenge that comes with that. On the other side is that you're, you're engaging the other person's ego to solve a problem, but you have to put your own ego down to say, I'm not even going to pretend to solve this problem. I'm going to let them solve it for me. I mean, a lot of ways, that's what Chris Voss is. One of Chris Voss techniques come down to is like, you're not, you know, don't let force other don't solve problems for other people. Let them solve them for you. Yeah, so you're, there's a two but variant, where what you're really doing is you're, you're asking the person like, oh, okay, well, if you know, if you, if you, if you have a, if you have a but for me, then you know, I'm going to ask you to solve the but yourself, but you have to put your ego down to do it, right?
But some, some people really, somebody's got to come up with a solution, right? And somebody does have to have that inventive moment, whether it's you or somebody else. I think you know, one of the best quotes that are blurbs that I got was from NPRs Jack Speer, and, you know, he wrote a lovely thing on the back of the book that said, you know, this is something that we really need to consider in in politics and journalism, because the failure to embrace Our butts has led to a lot of the impasses, I think, that we're seeing in in society and in politics, where people are just sick of, you know, they just, they're just going to do the thing they want to Do. They're not in a receptive place to explore any you know, opposition, right? So we have authoritarianism more we have cancel culture on the other side, right? So one's passive aggressive and one's aggressive, but they're both basically reactions to, yeah, decades long process. Of creating a No buts culture. So if we you know, but if we can have, if we can re energize at the playfulness. I Yeah, this, this team I was working with this morning. They were so playful. They just they they were playing with their butts as a chapter in the book that's my my favorite chapter is playing with your butt, followed by playing too much with your butt, which is quite good. Important to spell that correctly when you're doing that at work. But man, they just they you could see how fun, how much fun they were having. Once it became allowed to tell the other person about how terrible their idea was, right? That idea that, you know, the old brainstorming trope, you know, there are no bad idea. We have to love our bad ideas and, you know, and just enjoy them and then and then, and then go on the journey. Yeah, I never liked that brainstorming game using bad ideas
as entertainment is, is actually something that I, I believe in a lot. You take them and, you know, somebody turning it into, into into a game, into a fun, fun play is, is the right, is absolutely the right way to go about that, are there, are there other do people recognize the fact, or at what point do people engaged in these does everybody come to the realization that this is a group problem solving activity, as opposed to a negotiation or, I mean, that has always kind of struck me as you know, when does that happen? How do you make that happen more quickly? Or can you even make it happen more quickly?
I don't know. It seems to me that, like a lot of things, you know, this is not a panacea for everything. There are times when Win, lose is the game. I have always been a win, win. In fact, what I did in Australia with multi party, collaborative innovation, work that we were doing there, or bringing together all these different companies, trying to find an interesting experience. It's a two but experience it was, but we need to share, but we can't share, but we could, if was the game that we did in Australia, spent millions of dollars the Prime Minister of Australia and the Australian Government and the State governments of Victoria, New South Wales and Brisbane and Queensland. We, we, we all. We funded this. I think it was eight years the UK government got in the act and some other governments funded the hiring of intermediaries who dropped, basically polymaths down into the bench level research labs of companies and research institutes and universities and government research even like the nuclear facility of Australia, as I recall ANSTO and didn't scale, but they could, we found I checked last I checked with the guy that was running it after I came back to the States. They generate about a $500 million like half a billion dollars, in trackable deal flow between companies that never would have thought to work together. This has always been. This has been for 25 years. A real passion of mine is the how do we overcome that we need to share but can't share? Problem. It shows up everywhere from Hey, you're in love with this person in high school, and you your buddies, dating their their their, their best friend, and you could get, you know, and if you could get them to put you in the movie theater next to them, that would be great. So you need some help, but you know that your buddy's a big mouth. So you know, can you really share your intentions? Right? It all the way through to supply chain, right? I've got a friend who's working on supply chain issues too. In fact, that different areas where, again, the companies and what we did at IBM blockchain, you know, we thought, Oh, well, we'll use this magic blockchain technology to get to have food safety, and we'll be able to know where all the food product, the salmonella occurrences happen. Well, that's called God Mode, and there's a reason why nobody wants to do that. You know, Tyson Foods doesn't want Walmart knowing where all their chicken farms are. It's just, I remember talking to the head of that project, you know, some years later, his name was actually Wolpert, no relation. And I was like, why are you doing this, man, you know? And I was like, poo, pooing my own thing, because I built the thing. You. I was the head of the product, and he's like, well, for transparency, what really you want all the bad guys to know where our food is? He's like, you know, I made the point. No, I think, in fact, what we need to do is replace the word transparency in these problems with integrity. There was a story just the other day on Wall Street Journal. I'm trusting synapse. You know, this company that in FinTech and just has collapsed and caused a mess. Great example of we need to share, but we can't share. You know, they were sitting in the middle of fintechs and depositors of those fintechs and banks, right? And they were doing omnibus accounts, and you say, oh, let's put that on a blockchain. No, terrible idea, right? The banks don't want their general ledgers on a public blockchain. And you know, you don't want your
transactions out. Yeah, no, I did already out enough to the companies, the companies that you're having the transactions with. It's
so weird. Crypto is so stupid. I mean, I transacted with a, really, like a billionaire crypto holder to do this test once, and their wallet now I can, I can go and look at every transaction. Do you really want everybody that's ever that's that you've bought a coke from to know what's in your bank account? I mean, literally, they should. The slogan should be what's in your wallet, don't you don't need to tell me, I already know.
You know, right,
right? Stupid, stupid, stupid, you know. The another stupid thing is, again, these are, you know, so two bues, we tried for years. Another really dumb idea was, so somebody, after I left this company, somebody from the company called me up and they said, Hey, where's the keys for these tokens that so and so gave us? And I'm like, you know, I didn't like touching crypto to begin with, and I definitely don't have the keys. I don't know, but it's occurred to me that I couldn't prove that I didn't, oh, I couldn't prove that, right? I couldn't prove that I don't have those tokens. The negative another just terrible idea for crypto is just the dumbest idea. I mean, it's just a bad design pattern for running a commerce or or currency system on. And of course, you know a variable cost, not you know where every transaction has a non zero and sometimes significant marginal cost is. Mean, you know, as bad as the banking system is, let's just radically improve the banking system. Right? We could do that, but we're lazy, so we say, Oh no, let's just blow it all up and do something even dumber, right? No, I'd love to, I'd love to fix the graft and Grafton inside finance, but this ain't or the graft inside
of ticket ticketing systems and venues. Yeah,
yeah, no, yeah. The goals are right. The implementation was rough
in tensor. I had a question for you based on there was one thing that I saw that really stood out way, way back in the in the chapter 12. It's not exactly a part of the two Bob rule, but I think it is, which is this idea of platform hammer or hammer builders versus, you know, people who are who are sort of more mission focused. Yeah, you did a really nice job articulating this idea of people who build hammers and like to build hammers versus, you know, not, you know, actually solving problems, you know, using hammers. And I'm curious about sort of your experience, you know, navigating this like, All right, wait, you're building the hammer again, because tools are very easy to define. Back towards this more, you know, vague. I'm solving a solving a problem.
Some of the hardest thing I ever went through was also one of the was, was running, you know, being the founder of a, you know, that ground Transit Company, my wheel was the first ride, ride sharing, ride sharing, cars on a map app. Had lunch with Travis Kalanick and and the first CEO, Ryan Graves, who's a pretty good guy, by the way. Ryan Graves was really sharp, curious about the industry. Was interested in, I would take him to tlpa, like limo, taxi, limo commission events, and they would beat up on him, and he would just take it. He was a really good guy. I think his name was Ryan Graves, so, but yeah, I mean, the the for me, the Well, that was a great experience of being focused on human problems, right? Drivers, lives sucked, and I would be, I would, I would drive right along. And. In taxis in the middle of the night, I discovered, like, you know, the fact that these guys are often the protection, like they kept nighttime workers safe. There's a lot of things I learned about that just the humanity of it all, and it was wonderful in that regard, right? And, you know, and just sitting down in the at dispatches, dispatch centers in the worst part of the city, you know, like just these burnt out area, they're like warehouse areas, you know, down south of San Francisco, and learning that business, right? And because I was trying to solve a problem for drivers, our focus was make drivers lives suck less. That was now. Uber's was more powerful. It was let douchebag in the Castro pick up a date with a limo and an iPhone in 2010
I loved your definition of that. That was eye opening. Yeah.
I mean, no, and it was brilliant, right? What a brilliant make products for rich people and they will fund you, is what turns out. So I learned a lot from that. And no slam on Uber, and I think the new CEO is really focused on drivers, so let's see what they can do. I also just found out that flywheel is in a, I guess, a deal now with Uber to put taxis on the Uber map, which is awesome. That'd
be nice, okay, if that was my best still around. And, you know, I interact with finding all the time. So, yeah,
those cars, right? So, you know, we didn't win and I didn't get rich off it. You know, I'd love to fail like Travis did. But, you know, they're like, Oh, aren't you happy that I'm like No actually, and not for nothing. I heard this may be apocryphal, but I heard that he lived out of a car to keep a company alive. I mean, you got to give him that respect for that. We all, we're all flawed, but, and he's definitely flawed, but, you know, I'm not better than him and I, you know, yeah, I think that there's, yeah, I don't think he was that focused on the supply side as I was. But that was a great example for me of not being that was one of those times in my life where I wasn't a tool maker, yeah, at IBM, we make hammers, right? So a lot of my life has been one step away from the person that's actually like, you don't want to just be about the person building the house. You want to be about the person figuring out you know how to change, you know how to, how to how to serve the person that needs a house
and that, I think this the interesting thing with what you're describing. I think in both scenarios, the whether you're the mission or the tool, we actually don't necessarily do a good job understanding what the person needs, because we're not very good about, you know, asking questions and exploring their space. You know, the that, that classic, that classic Henry Ford, you know, if I ask people what they wanted, type of, type of proposals, yeah, the the, you know, we don't, we don't explore the space that of what they're asking for very well. And I think you're giving us an interesting way to explore the space effectively of what they're asking for. Yeah, rich, is
it asking for? Well, isn't it both asking for and intention? Because it's not just what they're asking for, it's what's, what's behind the questions, what's, what are the variations on in and the motivations and the worst, the most difficult thing for for Most people, when kind of being asked for their intentions is the fact that they're holding mutually inconsistent ideas at the same time. The most the most difficult admission to make is I intend to do this, and my intention is also to do that. And on their face, they're not compatible, don't they don't fit. They're not compatible. And you, you know it's, it's almost an a situation where you've put the other into a but basically a state of embarrassment for having multiple intentions that aren't already nicely consistent, and if you can do it without endangering them with the you know. Threat of embarrassment, or that is a, that's a that's an arc,
yeah, they can be the sources of great the greatest innovation can be this is, this is where, in you could spend a lifetime doing it right? I mean, that's what AI has been that, and quantum has been that. I mean, I was adjacent to quantum lab and IBM many years ago, back in like, 2000 or 99 maybe. And it's taken, you know, 25 more years to even get to where we're at now. And by many accounts, it's quite far in the future still. So there people have devoted their whole lives to, hey, we don't even, not only, but that don't work, but we don't even know how to make that work, right? We, but we don't even know, even know if that's possible, but we, but we're going to keep working at it, right? But we're going to keep, you know, looking at ways of because the intention is so strong, right? And the, you know, we're going to keep trying to lick cancer because we don't like it, right? It's a strong intention. And so the all the butts in the world will not stand up to our our intention to fix it.
I Wow. What a great conversation. I really enjoy the fact that we have these structured conversations around leading business topics business books. It really is a fantastic way to drive a great conversation. And I love when we're able to have the authors come in and really be part of answering those conversations, because it adds so much depth to these books that we're reading. We will likely pick up the book that John recommended, which is nonviolent communication as our next book. As always, if you're listening at this point, we know you're enjoying the conversations. Please feel free to join us. We want to hear your comments and perspectives, your ideas. Bring your two bots into these conversations. You can find out our schedule at the 2030 dot cloud. I'll see you there. Thank you for listening to the cloud. 2030, podcast. It is sponsored by RackN, where we are really working to build a community of people who are using and thinking about infrastructure differently, because that's what RackN does. We write software that helps put operators back in control of distributed infrastructure, really thinking about how things should be run and building software that makes that possible. If this is interesting to you, please try out the software. We would love to get your opinion and hear how you think this could transform infrastructure more broadly, or just keep enjoying the podcast and coming to the discussions and laying out your thoughts and how you see the future unfolding, it's all part of building a better infrastructure, operations community. Thank you.
