Join us as we gather around the hedge, where we dig into technology, business, and culture with the finest minds in computer networking.

Well, hello, Tom.

How are you?

Hey, Russ.

I'm doing great.

How are you doing?

I'm fine.

I I I am examining the plant to see if there's any massive changes.

Nope.

It's pretty healthy right now.

Have you been turning it regularly?

I have not, but I think my wife probably has.

So Yeah.

Okay.

Good.

Because that would be that's the best thing to do.

It's a horticultural show, Rick was telling us, so.

Yeah, you need to turn your plants like you rotate your drinks and you're covered.

It's like a rotational thing.

And today we have Rick Graziani, So, Rick, you're out at, Cabriolet College, right, in California.

Is that the right Yeah.

Cabrio College.

Cabrio.

See?

No.

Forget it.

I'm just no good at this pronunciation thing.

I'm giving up.

You're doing okay.

Really.

Because most most people also over at, University of California Santa Cruz and, whoever else will have me.

Whoever else will have me.

That's about the way I feel right now.

So okay.

Cool.

So we started out talking before the show about theory and practice again.

I know this is like a hobby horse for me.

I know I'm, like, on it all the time and people think, could you just shut up about the theory thing?

So Tom's over here shaking his head.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I like it.

I mean, it's great.

We should talk about it more.

So, you were relating, Rick, that you that your students Rick teaches college if you haven't figured this out.

He's a professor.

So we have to, like he's very, you know, he's very fancy.

He's got the background with the, you know, like, the dark wood and the books and the cape and the hat, all that stuff there.

Yeah.

That's yes.

Yes.

I have my my little cap and gown on all the So when you walk down the path at the college, you get that billowing effect from the Oh, it always.

I carry a leather briefcase.

Nice.

And is it brown or black?

Oh, the brown.

It's a little dirty brown leather briefcase.

Yeah.

I I I know.

I have to look smart.

It's a book that's on.

It's funny I have the books in the background.

I'm not even allowed to keep them at home, and that's really the main reason.

Yeah.

I just you know, you know, we talked about the the the, you know The Internet yellow pages.

Internet yellow pages.

Yes.

I still have my copy of the Internet yellow pages.

You know, I wish I had some of the old old, Whole Earth catalogs I used to have, but I threw them around on some way.

I should have just kept them all.

Like, you you remember the whole the whole catalog, like, you know, Stewart Brand.

I I should have but anyway alright.

So we were talking about theory and practice and not really practice so much as configuration.

And you were saying before we started that you have some experiences from your students who talk about this because they're in the job market.

You many of many of us are, but anyway, you're in the job market.

And so what what are you hearing from the job market from your students about this thing?

You know, first of all, I and I I I mentioned this at the, you know, before we went, started recording, but I start every one of my courses.

Oh my gosh.

Yes.

I know you're not gonna like this.

But with this quote, that that from you, that that that reply that you made to Yvonne Peptimek.

Right?

Peptimek.

Yeah.

Yeah.

On LinkedIn.

And, that, you'll have to spend time in the theory and in the history.

And I think that's important too because far too many people become configuration experts and don't understand the first thing they are working on.

And that's true from both standpoints.

You know, quickly on the history, you know, students learn all these technologies and protocols.

And if you're kinda old like mostly me, since I'm the oldest out of the three of us here, you know, I I graduated college in '79.

I got my undergrad, and none of this existed.

I mean, there's a few things happening, but none of it was taught at school.

But anyway, understanding where we are today and the protocols and things we use today, it was all an evolution.

It was all Denish Dutt actually talks about this in his Cloud Native Data Center Networking book about, you know, it's it's a problem followed by a solution, then another problem followed by a solution.

But not just the history, but the the understanding, the theory of all this.

I mean, anybody can you know, it doesn't take much to to type in a few BGP commands.

Also, it doesn't take much to black hole, you know, you know, Google or YouTube or somebody like that either.

So, but, yeah, what I've been It's worse, by the way, if you do it that in your China.

Just saying.

Okay.

Which is exactly what happened when YouTube was completely black holed for several days.

It was a Chinese ISP that disaggregated YouTube's address space in order to do something, but it was a phone I don't know exactly what they were doing, but it was a fumble finger, and they ended up in YouTube's address space, and they disaggregated you advertising longer prefix matches for the entire YouTube address space and basically took YouTube down.

Like I remember Pakistan ISP doing that back in 1990.

It's Pakistan.

Yeah.

It's something like that.

Yeah.

I remember Pakistan.

Yeah.

It's like, unless you're a Pakistani ISP, then, you know, then you can blow up the entire world, not just your network.

There's a difference between what somebody does that's important in teaching.

That I I screw up.

Nobody nobody remembers.

You know?

I'm not gonna make I'm not gonna make the news.

But, yeah.

I'm just it's it's the the the like you like you've said for many years, you know, just understanding what this is working on.

And I've got to say, a lot of students are, I'm getting a lot of great feedback from both the students and the recruiters.

Talked to a couple of the last couple of weeks that is talking about they talk about, you know, they want they want to see do the do the students really understand?

Not that they have to memorize.

And if they don't know, don't BS.

They had an exposure of familiarity with how things actually work.

And, and if they can't remember, they can figure it out.

And and I think that's so important, especially what we're doing today.

So are the I'm curious.

Are the students and maybe don't know, but are the students enjoying this type of interaction or or would they rather answer different types of questions or?

You know, as far as, you know, as far as, like, understanding the concepts and that, I think what it does is it builds confidence.

You know, when you start doing, like, a packet walk, then you actually say, oh, okay.

You kind of pull back the curtains and you say, oh, okay.

It's not magic.

It's not hard.

It is tedious at times and, detailed.

And not that I'm gonna remember everything, but, you know, this isn't hard.

It's just, you know, what comes next and why.

You know, I one of the things I like to talk about in one of my classes with PacketBox is just something very simple.

Like, you're sending you have two devices, on, connected to, you know, a network.

And then there's a layer three switch in between.

And it's and is that and if the two devices are in the same VLAN, the same IP network, how does that layer three switch?

It works as layer two with the MAC address table.

But if it has to get routed between the two devices, it's gotta go through the layer three switch acting as a router.

How does that actually happen?

What's actually taking place each point along the way?

You know, it's easy to to kind of configure it and see generally what's happening, but what is it from the perspective of the frames and the packets and the layer three switch slash router that's happening?

So I I just know, like, when I pull that stuff back from the students, they go, oh, okay.

You're not as smart as we thought you were, Rick.

This isn't that bad.

And part of it too is just sniffing out garbage, just building your sense of what is plausible and what is not.

As an example, this last week, I saw multiple email messages on various mailing lists, and I saw it on LinkedIn and various other places.

Dijkstra's been beaten.

There's a better algorithm than Dijkstra for shortest path first, and everybody's point to this research paper.

Okay.

I'll bite.

Reality is Dijkstra is pretty pretty efficient.

Okay?

It was written for a six bit machine.

It's pretty efficient.

So what's gonna be Dijkstra?

So you go look and the paper explicitly says it's faster than Dijkstra for an ordered trees.

Okay.

The fine print.

The fine print.

Sorry.

But shortest path first is not an on unordered tree algorithm or heuristic.

It must have the metrics must be in there, and you must have an ordered tree.

Just has the way has to work that way.

So, no, Dijkstra has not been beaten.

So whatever with your hype.

Well, I'm glad you looked into it because I saw it everywhere.

And I'm like, and then I saw it in so many places.

The more I saw it, the more I didn't trust it.

Yeah.

Exactly.

But It just we're we're just reposting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But why?

Why don't you trust it?

Because you've worked with Dijkstra for a long time, and you know how efficient it is.

And you know how many times people have tried to beat Dijkstra in terms of speed.

And you know how optimized.

It's not just the algorithm or the heuristics pure.

It's how much if you go look at modern Dijkstra code, modern short pass first first code, there's nothing there.

It's been so optimized that there's nothing there.

It's like the list are sorted on, on, in, on, insertion rather than during the actual shortest path first.

So the, so when you run shortest path first, what you actually do in most implementations now is just pull the list off the off the array because everything's sorted when you put it on the list.

Like, there's so many efficiencies that they've put into this that people have thought of over the years.

It just seems impossible.

Like so that's why I'm suspicious.

That's why I go dig the paper up.

I'm like, what?

Listen.

I just learned how to finally spell his name.

So Oh, it's in alphabetical order.

Yeah.

There you go.

Oh my goodness.

Now now we got you're right.

Isn't that d I k j.

Yeah.

But there's an a at the end.

Right.

But the r and the a are not.

Right.

The r and the t are reversed and the a, so it's T r a, but it's I j k Oh my god.

That's so s tra.

So other thing I love about this stuff, that it's people.

You know, I I when I talk you know, I think students when they take other, you know, biology, chemistry, physics, you know, everything kind of has, like, a sense of order to it that there's one way of doing things and, you know, that's but with networking, it was these technologies were invented by people like Dijkstra.

Yeah.

And, there's, you know, there's there's, as you know, a lot of competing, protocols and technologies even today, but it's, you know, there's it's not a this is the only way.

It's And VHS always wins.

I'm sorry.

I know the end of the story, VHS always wins.

Oh, no.

Are we gonna talk about Ethernet versus whatever now?

Oh, actually, Ethernet was about the best.

Honestly, I worked on token ring and token bus and, what was the other one?

Tommy Conrad did their thing, and I worked on all of them.

And honestly, even it was about the best.

So I'm not too unhappy that either that one.

Now.

You know, now we're doing rocky, which just means basically we're trying to develop circuit based Ethernet, like, Ethernet one because it was stochastic.

Now we're doing circuit based Ethernet.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's I remember I had a college professor that said it was very memorable to me.

He said, Ethernet is just a frame format now.

That's all it is.

That's all it is.

Oh, okay.

Oh, CSMACD?

Is there any network currently existing on the face of the Earth that actually still uses CSMACD?

You haven't been in, an academic setting.

Libraries or but yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah.

We we got we used to get donated hubs.

Like, everybody was donating hubs for a while to schools because, you know, we're we're that that's their idea of helping schools.

I mean, the only reason I mentioned c CMSA CD is because of, Wi Fi and CMSA CA.

Yes.

Which is very similar.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's it's It's not not a not really a thing.

Yeah.

So you have you have recruiters who are actually saying we prefer people with theory.

So I find that astounding.

With theory.

I I just find that astounding.

Are you sure you're actually talking to recruiters and not, like, people who are pretending to be recruiters?

I'm sorry.

Russ Russ is dubious.

Yeah.

It's, these are actually people that are hiring.

And, you know, I I think what they're they're trying to what that tells them is that if somebody understands the theory, the concepts, that they that they can learn.

That they have the ability to understand and comprehend, these these diff sometimes complex and difficult topics, more than just, you know, it drives me kinda nuts about the world of cybersecurity and everybody wants to go into cybersecurity after take one or two courses and learn all these tools.

And all of a sudden, they can be they can they, you know, think that they can be, you know, get a job in cybersecurity where they don't really understand any of the underlying factors involved in this.

So, I think employers are seeing for the long run, if they wanna hire they wanna hire somebody that is gonna be, a long term asset to their company that they can, you know, that they can train, that they can learn, and they can grasp what they're doing today and what they're doing in the future.

They'll understand the basic foundations and concepts.

Gotta be able to have that ability to do it.

That's that go ahead.

That I'm also a little stand astounded and somewhat skeptical because because every time I don't know.

I like, who has the time, first of all, to screen for knowledge?

It's harder.

Like, it's it's it's more it's more time intensive, to see if someone has what it takes if if they understand things at a theory level.

It's a lot easier to be like, hey, what, what models of switches have you worked on?

Like, I've seen that in job requirements before.

It just makes me wanna yak.

Like, what what does it matter with the silk screen on the front of the stupid switches?

Why is this in a job description?

Like, and but but then it's pretty easy, like, okay.

Show me how to configure this, that, and the other.

And you can set them down at a at a keyboard and, you know, watch them type to to to and, oh, okay.

Well, they know.

And, like, that's so easy.

Yeah.

It's just I I think it's cool.

I'd like to interview at one of these places, actually.

Oh, one there's one company lately that, has hired a couple of my previous students, and one of the things they really liked, the students in their interview, had a, structured design topology that we're working on.

Now we they we use Packet Tracer, but it's it's basically use you know, they're adding in one of my classes where we do everything from VLANs to OSPF and, you know, FHRP and LAN security and and everything else, EtherChannel.

They they like to they they saw how the students were taking this brownfield network and adding to it and then adding all these technologies and understanding how they were all coming together.

And the students the students started this.

They they brought this to their interviewer, the two in particular.

And the company was just kind of like, wow.

I can see that you're doing it, but you also, you know, they were they could talk about it.

So so what do you mean you said the students brought this to the interviewer.

Did they were they just describing, like, here's what we did in class or what yeah.

Tell me more about that.

They, I I believe they brought one brought their packet of labs that that they were working on just to show.

And Cool.

You know, the the actually, the crew ended up, you know, reaching out to me and some others where at this is at UC Santa Cruz.

And, and and they ended up talking about, you know, I actually just had last week had them talking to my class.

But, they were just very impressed that the students are not just being able not just understanding all these different technologies and protocols, but, you know, putting them all together, and understanding the intricacies and these complex relationships that happen.

You know, they're not experts And and and the students, you know, they but they're beginning to see how complicated all this stuff is where you start adding different things and it just kind of it changes the, the dynamics of the entire network, what you're doing.

So they were very, very impressed by the that they were working on something like that they had been working on something like this, and they understood it.

That's really cool, actually.

Yeah.

So so this is probably one of the things I always tell people is that if you're building trying to build your career in network engineering is to have a public record of what you've worked on and it honestly or what you've spent time with, it honestly doesn't even matter if anyone else reads it.

Because a recruiter is never gonna know that only five people read your blog.

For them from their perspective, they're not gonna be able to tell.

Unless, I mean, there's possibly ways of telling, doing Google Analytics or whatever, but who cares?

What really matters is that you have a blog, Tom.

Anyway, what really matters is that you have a blog and that you're showing curiosity, and you're showing I've gone out and done this, and I've done that, and everything else.

And yet I know that I've I've had this discussion for a while too now going on, that one thing I really dislike about the IT world is that when a company says there are two things that a company can say to me that just drive me nuts.

The first is your family.

No, I'm not.

You can just stop right there.

Because you are full of stuff and fluff.

I'm sorry.

That is nonsense on stilts.

I am not your family.

You are not my family.

And all you're trying to do is to displace my relationships with my family, with a relationship with you.

And all you're trying to do is make you your company more important to me than my family is.

But when you're tired, or you don't have the money, you're gonna dump me faster than a than a box of old donuts.

So don't so don't play that game.

Because that's that's total nonsense with me.

The other one that always drives me nuts is, oh, we want you to be really smart, but we don't wanna spend any time or money training you.

Stop.

I don't know.

Just stop already.

Like, I anyway.

Do your I'm I'm curious, Rick.

Do your students come back from these, experiences, talking about training as a as an incentive or as a a fringe benefit or anything or the companies they're interviewing saying, yeah, we'll we'll help you learn, continue your education?

They're mostly looking for, companies that think of them as family.

No one can.

Yeah.

You know, it's, training is is important to them.

I think it's also just, you know, that at first, that first job out of the gate, they're just they're more worried about what am I you know, they're they feel a little intimidated, a little Right.

You know, they're not do not have any confidence, like, how is this what this company wants me?

You know, I've been speaking for over thirty years and I still feel that way.

But, you know, I mean, a few weeks ago, I was talking to another company that was had hired a couple of students.

And, one of the things that they said was that they what they really liked about the students was not that they that that everything that they were had learned or even, you know, and again, they had used this kind of this structured design, labs that they had been working on.

But not that they would be doing that, but they had the ability to that that showed their ability to learn and that that they were gonna put them through.

And that and we get back to your your your question about, you know, some training.

That they were that they can that, you know, they showed that, you know, like you said, curiosity, just that being interested in in this whole group of technologies, area, whatever you wanna call it, that students have really no idea what what's what's out there.

But just they're interested.

So do you discuss with your students the network engineering life cycle from excitement to, I can't believe people actually pay me to do this to cynicism.

Leave out the cynicism.

Yeah.

I was gonna say, let them find it on their own.

No.

You know.

But, you know, you mentioned about the family and stuff.

You know, one thing I do, I you know, one thing I I tell I talk to them at the end of every course, especially the the seniors is I, you know, I mentioned that.

So you you had a lot of you had a lot of hurt than I did.

You know, the whole idea that they think on social you see everything on social media.

They think every all their friends are getting the greatest jobs with these big companies living the life.

And, you know, because, you know, well, I I didn't even know, you know, I had to go find out if I want to see what somebody could have.

It's really only 10 out of the 100 friends who have a good job.

The rest of them are still working as baristas, but they're only paying attention to the 10 who are posting on LinkedIn.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And, you know, and the whole thing is, like, you you know, Russ, I I joined the Coast Guard after college, and that was the best thing I ever did.

I mean, they gave me opportunities that no no company would have given me at, you know, when I was 22 years old and and forged a path for me that I'm doing today that I had no idea I would be doing.

So it's a lot of it's, you know, who you work for and, you know, who's who's and they provided a lot of training.

Mhmm.

And, the other thing too that Russ you know, you mentioned family.

I also mentioned to them, I said, you know, remember that you gotta take care of yourself and your family while you are while you're working.

They're a priority because the company is not gonna care anything about you when you turn 60, 65, 70 years old.

And if you have health issues, family issues, or everything like that, that you gave up because you wanted to work eighty hours a week.

And, the company's not gonna care about what happens to you.

When they're when you're done, you're done they're done with you.

You gotta look out for yourself and your family.

That's the number number one thing.

Keep that in mind.

Yep.

Build your career around your family, not your family around your career.

It's just this is what you've got to do.

You have to do it as an engineer.

And you have to take care of your own learning.

You have to stay cur curious.

I mean, I joke about cynicism.

We all all get cynical after we've been I've been doing this for thirty years.

You're like, you get cynical after a while.

But on the other hand, that doesn't there's a blend of the cynicism with with continued wonder and and curiosity that you can still achieve.

I know that sounds really odd to some people, but, like, I like this whole thing with Dijkstra.

It's like, it's not just that I was cynical.

It's like, Billy.

Okay.

I wanna see the algorithm.

I wanna know how this works.

I wanna understand this.

This is a new construction in in graph theory.

I really wanna understand it.

I actually get still interested in new topologies.

Dragonfly is interesting to me.

And I sit down with a dragonfly, and I'm like, so how does that scale?

How would that converge?

And I map out convergence processes for BGP and and link state protocols.

And even the Edge European, I still do it mentally with the Edge European for those who think that's crazy.

But, yeah, I map these things out in my head because I'm still there's still a lot of curiosity and just, I don't know.

So so far it hasn't killed the cat, I suppose.

But that's what I love about this business too.

I I I also mentioned this to my students.

It's it's like the greatest mystery novel.

It's like a mystery novel that never ends.

And if you like this stuff, you yearn because you you're you're curious.

You're sincerely curious about all of this stuff.

I mean, I'm doing a book right now with somebody at Cisco on, it's for beginners.

It's Python using Python for automating networks.

It's for the beginner, for the simple minded like like me.

And, this didn't exist.

I mean, I started out on, you know, Prime seven fifty minuteicomputers, Ungerman Bass, went to Tandem.

You know, there was none of this.

Automating what?

And, but I truly enjoy this.

Truly enjoy pulling back the curtain, bringing back full circle is, you know, I I get excited when I do, you know, looking at VXLAN and doing and figuring out, okay, what is actually happening, and looking at everything from from point a to point z.

It's Yeah.

It's it's it's fun.

It's like the it's it's like, okay.

I figured this out.

I don't know.

You know, you're older than I am, Rick, but somehow when I started, we only had basic and assembler and Pascal.

Oh, Pascal.

Yes.

Now you're talking and Fortran.

I never learned Fortran.

So people are like, why'd you learn C of all the languages?

I'm like, because my choices were assembler, Pascal, and c.

How about because it's the foundation of all, all networking code?

Yeah.

It just didn't nothing else existed.

Well, you and if you they and COBOL wasn't a choice for you.

Who wants to learn COBOL?

Even back then, you knew you didn't wanna learn COBOL.

Yeah.

I I I've been doing COBOL.

And how many how many network protocol implementations are in COBOL?

I don't know.

There are people who would write COBOL implementations of BGP just because it could it could be done.

I mean, many years ago Google, right?

Yeah.

Daniel Walton wrote a wrote an implementation of BGP in Python because, well Nice.

It's there.

Nice.

Yeah.

So interesting.

So, yeah, so I am a little bit surprised to hear that recruiters are looking for talent in the realm of, theory, which is actually heartening to me.

I actually like that because it is a struggle in our world.

I was just talking to somebody couple of days.

Well, even yesterday, I think it was on LinkedIn, and they were asking me, so what are you teaching now?

So I started explaining this basics thing that I'm doing for, or on Egan Irgan's site.

And I'm like, and I tried to do this on my own, but I couldn't get subscriptions because nobody cares.

Nobody literally cares.

Like, it's so sad to me that no one cares about how Dykstra works, you know, down in the dirt and understanding it.

I think the other problem is too is that when people get into it, maybe you've seen this, Rick.

Maybe there's something you can think about or talk about a little bit, is that a lot of people think the basics should be more complex than they are, and they're more excited about doing advanced stuff.

Oh, it's advanced.

And you're like, if you can do Dijkstra in your head, that is pretty advanced.

Okay?

Like, that is more advanced than knowing how to configure blah dee da or knowing the latest protocol suite for for Ethernet or whatever it is.

That's advanced, but they think of advanced as having more, oh, I I I can I can put a thousand hours in the lab, so I'm advanced?

You can only put ten in the lab, so you're not advanced.

That's nothing to do with anything.

Yeah.

You see these people doing showing their con super complex, I don't even say complex, busy topologies with all kinds of devices, switches, routers, and just like it's making it more doesn't make a it means you know more.

You just have to duplicate with the same thing many times.

Yeah.

And, I can't say that, you know, it's a trend with companies.

I don't know if it's I would hope it is, but I don't know if it's a trend with companies looking for the underlying concepts, students or entry level people are knowing the concepts.

But I think it's important because there's so many companies out there that all they're looking for is those keywords.

You know, the cert keywords or they know, you know, you know, the protocol, all the, you know, the out protocol alphabet out there.

Throw it all in there and, you know, and I can do these things, but, I don't get really it's I think it's it's a I think these companies are doing a disservice to themselves because they're not gonna get the best.

So so we had a couple of people at Cisco when I was working there that would interview people in this way.

They would take their resume, and it would print out a physical copy.

And then they would bring a red pen to the interview, and they would start asking questions.

And you would see them writing and writing and writing and scratching things out.

And at the end of the rest, at the end of the interview, they would hand you back your resume and say, correct it to say this.

That is brutal.

If if I if I could, if anybody would would listen to me about this, here's what I would tell them.

These companies that that that you're talking about, Rick, I think what they stumbled on was actually an indicator of whether or not this employee, is gonna be able to stick with you and learn the new things that come along and be able to solve future problems that you have not yet encountered.

I don't think there's probably maybe there's other ways to screen for that, but and I don't even know if companies are screening for that.

But if you want in my opinion, if you wanna screen for the person who can be for the long haul and can figure out the next thing with you, it's the ones who understand the theory.

All the rest of them will either get disinterested and they'll quit and they'll leave, they'll get mad because the new thing changed, or they just won't be able to do it, then somebody else is gonna hold their hand.

Like, I I really think this is a screener for people who can stay for the long haul.

Yeah.

That's the perfect way to summarize everything I said for, like, forty minutes and all that.

And you know what?

We're all tired of being the person holding everybody else's hand.

That's true.

It's true.

You know, it gets talk about cynicism.

That'll get you cynical very quickly.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

I mean, it's it's one of those things.

But I also don't know that companies even at my level, not just beginning level, really a lot of times value the theoretical knowledge.

They're very focused on get this product out the door right now.

And by the way, the other thing that annoys me, I don't know if you have anything with this, Rick, but I'm very much a do the right thing.

Kind of an engineer.

I know it's gonna take longer.

I know it's gonna be harder.

I know it's gonna cost a little bit more money, but the reality is I have never ever been in a situation ever in my entire life from working on rebuilding cars through through working on radar systems, to working on networks and writing code that I've ever found that doing it the cheap, easy, quick way was a win.

It just never was.

I've never seen it happen.

So I I know in my work I do it's another work I do with somebody in writing curriculum and even trying to write some books.

No, Grace Hopper was one of my longtime hero of mine.

For those who don't know who she is, she, you know, developed the the COBOL language but way back, back goes way back to the Harvard Northwell.

I'm not not really sure why she's a hero, you know, with the whole cable COBOL thing.

Was it also Ada?

Did she do Ada?

No.

Ada was Ada no.

I don't think I think that was after her.

Yeah.

Might must have been, but yeah.

Yeah.

But, you know, she she once said, you know, we we only look at the cost of doing something.

We never look at the cost of not doing something.

And, you know, when you when you when you do try and scrape and save and get things do things as cheap and quick as possible, there's gonna be a cost to that in the long run.

You may not right away, but you're gonna you're gonna see it's gonna come back and bite you.

Yep.

And it it's in the really end up costing you more later.

Yeah.

An example I use all the well, I've been starting to use recently is look at any car company.

Just look at all their designs.

Now we fuss because all the cars look the same.

Blah blah blah.

I get that.

And that there's regulatory reasons for that.

How many car how many car models does Volvo, for instance, make?

It's at least 12 and probably more.

I don't even know.

I could go look at their website.

They literally make three cars.

Three cars.

Three models of cars.

Now they come with different sheet mod sheet sheet metal.

They come with different interiors.

They come with different wheels.

They come with, like, one is a sport utility and one's a station wagon and one's a coupe, but they're the same platform, and they call them platforms.

Another classic example of this is the Jeep Renegade and the Fiat 500 are actually the same platform.

They have different engines, and they have different sheet metal.

But everything else is fairly much identical between those two cars.

You'd never think that that could be true.

But what these but what these car companies have discovered or what they do is they build a platform and then they build variety on top of the platform.

And we don't do this.

You know?

It's part of doing the right thing to me is you think through what is my platform?

What's the part that moves and what's the part that doesn't move?

Right?

I used to have this old professional soccer player and he'd say, you always kick like, when you kick the ball, you don't kick towards the center of body, center of mass, you kick off from center of mass because all the other parts of the of your opponent are missing or moving.

If you're trying to pass the ball, you give it you you kick it to center of mass because that's the part that isn't moving.

Oh.

It's it's an interesting but, anyway, sorry.

That's what I was thinking most of my life.

I mean, you got me, rethinking everything.

I was just I was just thinking about interop when you were saying that.

You know?

One player kicking a ball to another.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It's true.

I will say the curriculum work I do, they do for some reason, they they, you know, people sometimes they, like, you know, at least they listen to me.

And they they really do.

They did.

The work I do on a curriculum team, is, it you know, hardworking and they wanna do the right thing.

And that, I think, is because they see the benefit to the learner, the student.

And I think that's really it's, it there's a passion there.

When you're working in especially when you're trying to help students, people tend to really will a little bit more.

Yeah.

Cool.

Awesome.

Well, I think we can wrap up there, actually.

I think we've captured enough of Rick's time.

So, Rick, we're gonna bring you back on sometime.

You know?

We just need to make you into another one of the regular guests to talk about stuff.

So I always wanna and to actually, you know, see the plant live.

There you go.

And so because that's what I I I tune in every episode is the plant.

And the whiteboard.

The whiteboard.

Yeah.

The whiteboard.

You know, you gotta look for what are Tom's kids studying this week.

Yep.

Yep.

Because that's what's on the whiteboard.

My background is boring.

It stays the same all the time.

You know, I might move things around, but It's like books you wrote and accomplishments you have, but now we're gonna talk about the plant.

Yeah.

I had a thing for a while that every country I went to, I tried to buy something I could put on my in my office.

But it it didn't it didn't actually work out very well.

What I did do is every country I went to, I bought my daughters both a pair of earrings.

So It's nice.

So so now they have these huge earring collections, and they can't remember what countries they all came from, but that's okay.

Yeah.

It's, it's still what it is.

All right.

Cool.

All right, Tom, say your word.

LinkedIn.

All right, Rick.

You like this LinkedIn.

Yes.

Virtual high five to Rick.

Wow.

You're outnumbered Russ.

Alright.

I guess that's it then.

Alright.

This is Russ White and I, you can always find me here at rule 11 at tech on the hedge on LinkedIn on x.

Sometimes I'd log in, not always, but sometimes I'm out there looking at that.

We know we live in an attention driven economy, and we thank you for listening all the way to the bitter end of this episode of The Hedge, and we will catch you next time.