Join us as we gather around the hedge,
where we dig into technology, business, and culture
with the finest minds in computer networking.
Hello, Tom.
Hey, Russ. The plant is getting lots of
sunlight. I'm happy to see that. That's that's
a good thing. Yes. It's happy? It's happy.
Yes.
You're you have empty space on your bookshelf
that that's that can't stand. You need to
buy books.
Okay.
I'll do it.
So I used to watch this this radio
guy. He was a radio guy. He did
a TV show at one point. And he
in one of his first very first TV
shows,
some listener of his wrote in well, they
wrote in questions or whatever. And one of
his listeners said,
this is such an impressive offer share. Look
at all those books behind you. I wanna
know what those books are and if you've
read them.
So on air, he pulled one of the
box. It was a box that had books
printed on the front of it. And he,
like, folded it up and said, here, ship
this to that listener so they can have
the books.
Oh, yeah.
Nice.
It was like, okay.
And we have Yvonne with us who is
looking kind of concerned and overwhelmed
and and
Oh, Yvonne's okay. It's just a busy day,
and so I'm trying to sort through things
in my head.
But the good news is
it's Friday here, so we got a couple
days to take a breath. Yes. It's Friday
everywhere.
So we're gonna start today by talking about
architecture versus process.
This is a particular frustration of mine for
various reasons.
I think it is true throughout my career
that I have been in perhaps two or
three places where they have a proper architecture,
And most of the time, they have a
process that they call an architecture.
So I don't know. Any thoughts on that
before I start rambling on my
Well, I I guess my question is when
when you say, like, to me, an architecture
is one thing and a process is another.
Mhmm. They are
integrated and they do overlap. Yes.
Are are you arguing that one is more
important than the other? Like, what's what's what's
what's your when you say architecture versus process,
what do you mean? So not particularly.
You need both. And I would say the
better your architecture is, the less process you
need
to some degree. There's always gonna be some
minimum amount of process.
But if you have an architecture, which I
would define as a set of goals,
I know where the company's going. I know
what the network needs to do or look
like in five years.
I know how the network is layered. I
know
both
vertically and horizontally.
I know, like,
what our theory and and our
philosophy, if you will, it's not necessarily a
good word for it, but anyway, what why
we divide things the way we divide them.
I know why, you know, we've chosen
this transport mechanism because it is flexible. It
can support lots of use cases,
whatever it is.
And so
all of those things,
the more you know those things, the lighter
weight your process can be because somebody can
come with come to you and say, I
wanna develop this new application on the network.
And you're like, okay.
It fits this way.
Right? Because I already know what I'm trying
to make the network
look like over the next five years.
If I don't have an architecture,
everything becomes the process.
Everything
is the process.
And everything is a one off. Everything is
a one off process.
And so
I think we do a lot more process
than we do architecture
in our world. That's my experience
with with
being in networking for a long time.
I don't know. Does that answer your question,
Yvonne?
Yeah. One of my one of my colleagues
shared a quote with me. He he attributed
it to Churchill and said, you know, first
we make our buildings and then our buildings
make us. Yep. And I think that that
happens often too. Like, you you build your
infrastructure
based on an architecture, and then that architecture
may drive your process.
But then you need to make changes to
your architecture,
but the process doesn't always follow.
Yeah. The the the reverse can also happen
that instead of
asking the question, what problem are we trying
to solve and build your architecture based on
that,
you're building it based on either your organizational
structure or the processes that you have in
place,
and those drive technology
in ways that
are minimally
inefficient
or, you know, worst case, just flat non
functional.
So it's I mean, it's an important thing
to think about, like what, you know,
is the tail wagging the dog
from a process versus an architecture standpoint.
Yeah. Right. Right. I mean, I think probably
most of us have seen,
if you start out with a network,
like there is an architecture, right? Whether or
not it is an intentional thing, or whether
or not it is understood the same by
everybody else, architecture always exists.
I think it gets, it gets,
becomes
very expensive for the business to maintain if
it's not intentional, but it remains nevertheless.
And sometimes it morphs and grows organically, and
I've worked on networks like this. There was
one service provider network, it was kind of
what's our latest revenue opportunity, go do that.
And we've never done that before, we've never
built X, Y, X product, doesn't matter, just
figure out how to do it, what boxes
do we need, just plug them in, wire
them up, and then pretty soon you get
to where the next big revenue opportunity
is at odds with the last big revenue
opportunity or the revenue opportunity from a year
ago.
And,
and then you're looking at massive costs to
make it serve both. And so you have
to say either say no to somebody or
say yes to everybody and deliver poorly for
everybody. Like, it's just it's kind of a
cascading set of
of things that happen, when architecture is not
intentional has been my experience. Yeah. Yeah. And
in fact, I think it's even worse in
the overlay world
because it's very easy to build orthogonal,
non interoperable
overlays
and say, oh, it's okay. We'll just throw
another overlay on there.
Yeah.
You know, then you get 15 different overlays
and then somebody says, oh, I wanna connect
the two overlays. Oh, no.
Oh, how is that gonna work? Or you
come back to the not network operations center
or the TAC or whatever, and you say,
oh, it's broken.
Yeah. How do I even know what the
state is supposed to look like on this
particular
piece of hardware?
Like, there is no way for me to
know what the state's supposed to look like.
Because the state's one thing in this overlay,
it's another thing in that overlay,
another thing over there in that third overlay,
and it's different for the hardware.
Like, it it just becomes
a combinatorial explosion,
and it becomes impossible to maintain.
The thing that I think is interesting when
that happens, what you're describing, Russ, is, how
the different personalities respond when that become when
it sort of
metastasizes
into that case,
almost always you'll get at least a few
responses.
Someone's just like, well, you need to have
a smarter ops center. Yeah. Oh, yes. Or
you need to have you need to have
smarter managers that aren't so dumb and know
how to make better technical decisions or smarter,
smarter, smarter is always some people's answer. And
then other people are like, you need to
make it simpler. And, but very few of
these people say, let's look at
we need to the architecture is the problem
here, and we need to we need to
work there. I've I've found very few people,
say that as a as an alternative.
Yeah. Well and once it's instantiated,
like,
architecture is hard to fix. Like, it's it's
hard to change once it exists.
Right? Which is why you get overlays
in some cases. Some you know? And and
I'm not I'm not anti overlay. Sometimes they
solve a real problem
and provide a layer of abstraction
that's helpful and necessary.
But I I think a lot of times,
like, we we end up in a position
for business reasons or or otherwise
that we have an architecture that's suboptimal,
but it's really expensive
or nearly impossible to change.
Yeah. And and that that creates its own
set of challenges, a lot of,
a lot of which are fixed
by
extra process.
Yep. That's exactly right. That that's that's my
thesis is that if you don't have sufficient
architecture,
you end up replacing the architecture
with a process. For instance, you have two
or three
disjoint,
overlays.
Again, overlays, like you said, Yvonne, there's nothing
wrong with overlays. Overlays are great. They solve
problems. It's a layer of abstraction. It's a
way of modularizing
your network
vertically rather than horizontally. That's all great. But
if you have two overlays that are doing
different things in different places and their purposes
are at odds with one another, what ends
up happening is instead of trying to fix
the architecture,
you create a process that says go check
both overlays
before I go install this new thing.
Right? Oh, now I have a I gotta
I gotta buy a router to replace that
router. Well, now I have to check both
overlays.
Now I've replaced a good architecture
with a process,
and that is a failing game. That's you're
never going to make that work.
Well and the the problem too is that
many processes can be automated, but typically if
you're you're
fixing,
an architectural problem with the process, there has
to be a human in the loop. Yeah.
And we all all know,
there there are a few problems with that.
One is scale because
people are expensive and there's a limited number
of them.
And but the other is,
people in general have a higher failure rate.
Rate. You know, they make mistakes, right? So
you've got both of those problems.
And even if you do try to to
automate it,
now you've got a whole another layer of
abstraction or a whole another interaction surface that
you have to manage. Yeah.
And again,
automation is a great thing. We love it.
It's super important. It's the only way to
scale beyond a certain point in your network.
But,
you know, you you end up with an
automation system that's more business logic to work
around your architecture
or flaws in your architecture
than to actually
update, maintain, support your network. Yeah. Mean time
between failures or mean time between mistakes,
that's the big one. Mean time between mistakes.
So, you know, you talk about I'm glad
I don't have that metric for myself.
Me too. So,
you know, you talk about you talk about,
like, people using tools and stuff like this
and and trying to automate things. So I
remember
one time many years ago, and I owned
this house, and there were a set of
stairs in the garage going up to a
room above the garage.
And I decided to cut a hole in
the wall, build a dormer, and incorporate the
space above the garage into the house instead
of making it storage space,
which means that I went to rip the
the the stairs
out and make it into
shelving space on the side of the garage.
I know that all sounds crazy, but it
it actually wasn't necessarily that hard. But, anyway,
and when I got to the bottom stair,
there must have been
a hundred
nails
in the corners of that platform.
And I'm pretty convinced that what happened was
was that it was easier
to empty the nail gun
by pulling the trigger
than it was to empty the nail gun
by releasing all the little doodads you gotta
do
to get the nails out.
That's what I that's what I think.
So you think they were done and needed
to umother nail gun and they just did
it by nailing the nails into the board?
Yep. Just bam bam bam bam bam bam
bam. And, you know It's gonna be wasteful,
but It is.
But but, you know,
they they had a process. They have to
empty the nail gun before they leave the
job. And, like,
you know,
they hit the limit of the architecture. They
didn't need any of the nails for anything
else. So let's get rid of the nails.
You know? That's what it's And they didn't
have a have a
a loss prevention OKR.
That was the problem.
They just need a new OKR. Yeah. Yeah.
But see, that's right. You've fixed the problem.
You can tell the world I've been operating
in lately, can't you? And everyone has firmly
moved into manager
architecture. And rather than thinking about the architecture,
we say, oh, look. There's a process that'll
fix it.
And then before long, you have
years long processes to deploy new applications.
And everybody says, why don't we have feature
velocity?
Well, I I don't know.
I can't imagine why we don't have feature
velocity.
You know? And then they'll go in and
they'll start, and they'll redo the whole process.
They'll streamline it. They'll simplify the forms, and
they'll create weekly meetings to talk about the
process and to make sure everybody sees everything.
And you're like, you're just putting Band Aids
on this thing at this point.
Just stop already.
Is it the CS Lewis quote where he
says there's no no use running down the
running the opposite direction down the corridor of
a train that's going the wrong way? Yeah.
You know, it's it's a lot of that
is and, you know, just another metaphor is,
you know, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Right? I mean, this, you know, the and
and and maybe you do get
some minor performance improvements by, you know, optimizing
the form or,
you know, automating a couple steps or reducing
some interaction surfaces. But, ultimately,
those
that kind of improvement
is very incremental.
Yeah.
Exactly. Yeah. I actually like that you I
I actually love that metaphor of running backwards
down the train. You know? The train's going
west. I need to go east, so I'm
gonna run down the corridor of the train
till I get to the back, and then
what are you gonna do? Right.
Yeah. At some point, you have to get
off the wrong turn.
Exactly.
Right. You know?
He also said go ahead. Go ahead. Tom.
Now you
Well, he said at one point too that
the fastest if you make the wrong turn
at a fork,
the fastest way to go the right
way is not to keep going down the
road you're on twice as fast. It's to
turn around and go back to the fork.
Right. Man, that that sunk cost fallacy gets
us every time. It really does. Well, Well,
and we get into that with architecture because
it is, it's hard to change, it's expensive
to change.
The people who would be good at working
at it,
it's not, I wouldn't say it's a rare
skill set, but it's one that's not generally
rewarded in the industry. And so you've got
kind of a,
a little bit of a dearth of talent,
and I've seen what happens when you pull
a bunch of senior engineers into a room
to do a job an architect should be
doing. It's not pretty, usually.
And
I don't know, I think the big challenge
though, something that I don't think I've seen
done well very many places at all, is
attaching business value to
architecture. It's just saying, here is why
you should hire
a person or people
to to really do it. Not not like
this title enterprise architect, which I've seen, which
means somebody walking around in meetings, PowerPoint decks,
and docu you know, working on projects that
never complete or never get funded. Like, I'm
talking about the people that actually do real
architecture.
Yeah. Tell us how you really feel about
enterprise architects, Tom. Enterprise architects are great. But
but being able to articulate this is the
business value. Like, here's
here's what you're spending on process,
which you wouldn't have to spend if you
had, if you had a correct architecture. And
here's what you're spending to build a correct
architecture. And here's the dollars on the other
side of the ledger if you choose not
to do that.
Yeah. I feel like that's the thing that
is pretty hard to quantify.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
So, I I just thought that was an
interesting topic,
just because,
like, I hit it all the time. It's
like a continuous thing. I'm always hitting it.
It's not one company or another company. It's
I think it's pretty much,
in some degree or another, every place I've
ever worked.
I've seen this to one degree or another.
Some places are worse than others, and so
I don't know.
So
the second thing we're gonna talk about
is from a new book called Unintentional.
I should probably actually try to get Doug
Smith on a a hedge episode. I didn't
realize until I read this that this is
actually from
not really from, but,
the book, but
it's
called the tool trope.
The destructive lies of the tool to trope.
And this applies so well to actually what
we were just talking about,
automation.
And
you can do
yeah.
Technology isn't good or bad. It's just a
tool. It's how you use the tool that
matters.
And, Yvonne, you know, you said your architecture
you you shape your architecture and then your
architecture shapes the world.
That's exactly what this is talking about. Right?
We build houses the way we build houses
today because
we created tools that cut wood and nails
or hammers that would that match nails.
If we would have been a different tools,
we wouldn't build houses the way we build
houses.
That's a pretty Well,
another analogy for that or statement is, you
know, the medium is the message. Right? When
you're talking about marketing or communicating
Yeah. McLennan. How you communicate and the audience
you target
is very dependent on the medium that you're
using, whether you're using radio
or television
or
newspaper
or,
Internet or video
or social media.
The medium
shapes the message, and I think that's kind
of the same thing that you're saying here
about tools, any tool. Yeah. But explicitly many
of our technology tools. Yeah. Marshall McLuhan actually
has a book called The Medium is the
Message. And and he talks about this that
every type of medium has a resonance.
And so
his argument was reading books is narrative.
If you're even in the most technical case,
no matter what type of material you're trying
to cover, the most technical material in the
world is best presented as a narrative
on a book in a book.
And he says, now television
the the the resonance of television is entertainment.
And this is why everything that's on television
eventually becomes entertainment.
The weather report, the news,
online preaching,
whatever it is,
it all ends up being entertainment because that's
what it resonates as.
So that's actually a very interesting
way of seeing it. Now I think that
what
is,
being said here by Doug Smith
is that it goes further than this in
that
tools
can make you more or less human.
Would you Tom, is that your reading as
well? Am I, like, totally Yeah. No. No.
I I that's my read of the article.
I'm still trying to digest what I think
of it,
because
we have something tools don't have, which is
agency.
But you can, it is possible, obviously, for
your agency to be co opted by someone
or something else, and I think that's probably
his thesis is that,
you're,
you, you are, you are selling,
slash giving your agency to something else and
the focus of his article
is AI, but I think tools isn't,
tools of any type,
fit in here. But, yeah, I I think
I think we sell we definitely sell our
we sell for convenience many things,
and AI just makes it easier for us
to sell more things,
for convenience, and it's pretty treacherous to Yeah.
To sell things for convenience.
Yeah. There there is about, like
so
if you really wanna learn how to build
a house,
you literally use a hammer and nails
and a compound miter saw, and you cut
all
the you cut all the the bird's nest
and
everything yourself for all the joists and all
the rafters and, you know, you you cut
everything.
And you'll learn every corner of that house
and you'll know how to build it. You
run all the wiring and everything yourself.
Now,
we turn a lot of that stuff over
to tools
via air guns, and, you know, there's lots
of things that we use
to make that process easier. So there's always
some degree with the tool of,
by making my life easier, I'm actually
learning less.
That's that's just always,
I learned to use the tool, and the
tool shapes the way I think about things
to some degree, one way or the other.
The question becomes,
when does that become
harmful to the human person
instead of helpful?
To me, the the dividing line is I
don't know a better way to say this
than cognition. Like, if you're using,
a hammer and nail versus a nail gun,
there's no thinking or nothing that looks like
thinking going on between the two. No one
would ever say that the nail suddenly has
consciousness if you use a nail gun. No.
It's just a different way to drive a
nail. It's just a more efficient way to
drive a nail.
But when when to me, when you cross
into,
something else can make decisions for me, if
the nail good can decide where to put
the nails, if it was a thing that
you just kinda strap on to the end
of the stud and and push the button
and say do the right thing, then then
that would be different. That would be but
even then, it's really just algorithmic.
It's not it's not doing anything that would
that you couldn't direct necessarily.
So so then this is yeah. This is
the question. Right? Can
everything
be can everything be reduced to algorithms?
Can I can I reduce
yeah? Go ahead, Yvonne.
Well, no. I you know, it's it's funny
because there was a series of novels that
were written in the eighties and nineties that
really kind of explored some of these questions,
right? As as computers were coming to the
fore and,
you know, is
is is everything that we think,
is it is it just like a mind
virus?
Is it, you know, can we as people
be reduced to
a set of algorithms? Are our brains really
computers?
And I think,
you know, I think we've kind of come
through that,
that particular time period in thinking and like
so many discoveries
that are happening now in neuroscience
are really stitching together like the mind and
the body and talking about how those two
things together
really make us holistic people. It's not, we
are not,
you know, our bodies aren't just ambulatory. They're
not just there to move our brains around,
right? And, and I think that the interesting
thing that's happening now is we
have a new technology
in AI
that is
doing things that we once
thought
only a human could do,
and it's making us ask that question, what
does it really mean to be human?
And I think it's gonna take us some
time to figure that out. But I mean,
I think there was you look back at
Copernicus
and all the
does the earth revolve around the sun? Or
no. Yes. Does the earth revolve around the
sun? And what does that mean if we
are not actually the center of the universe?
I I think it's we're just asking those
kinds of questions again on a different level.
And, you know, I think we'll have to
figure out, like, what is the difference between
the machine and the human? And now this
thing is really replicating something that I thought
was
exclusively human. What what does that mean? And
I don't think we we have those answers
yet. I think we'll get there. I mean,
there'll be
benefits and then there'll be
losses,
like there has been with everything.
Yeah. I do worry, Yvonne, though, that we
are losing our humanness
in this. I really do. It's a big
it's a big if for me
about what's going on
with,
with the way we
look at these tools and say, it's just
a tool. It's okay.
You know, we've we've faced this before.
You can go back and read Greek philosophers
about when they first started talking about writing.
And, oh, don't write things down. You won't
have to memorize them anymore. It makes you
less human.
Well, it does it really.
But on the other hand,
there is a point where
you say,
I never decide what I'm gonna make for
dinner. I never decide what recipe I'm gonna
use. I never decide where I'm going out
if I'm going out.
I have an AI bot that I ask
what I'm gonna eat for dinner every night,
and the AI bot figures out what I've
eaten over the last week and what I
need nutrients
and everything else. It sounds really cool when
you think about it, but, like, you are
utterly
in obedience to the AI bot at this
point.
You have no agency.
And,
like, is that really cool?
Is that really a place we want to
be
as as people?
And I think that's a very
that's a very hard,
question to answer,
much harder
to answer than
One of the things that I think about
and and and I especially think about it
if, you know, I'm visiting Europe and looking
at that old architecture
where, you know, it took a hundred, two
hundred years to build this incredible edifice. Sometimes,
you know,
a building is
the result of a thousand years of human
effort, right?
And
you know, we build our buildings much faster
now, but there is a thing that has
been lost in that and it's the craftsmanship.
There's a degree of artistry and
patience
that
that edifice represents
that does not exist in society anymore.
And I could make an argument that I
think in a lot of ways that's a
net loss.
I don't know, net loss. That's a loss.
Yes, it's a loss. Now,
do I think
that,
you know, I think we would struggle to
house all of humanity if we still built
every single building that way, right? Maybe. Possibly.
Yeah.
I don't I don't think there's anything wrong
with acknowledging that
as, you know, as these technologies emerge, there
is a loss and we need to figure
out
what that loss is and if it's something
that we should mitigate. I think my biggest
concerns are what does this do to the
nature of learning and thinking? If we have
a thing that writes for us,
then
how do we learn to think? Because for
me,
I know what I think because I write.
Yeah, oh yeah. But see, this goes back
to virtue. And I think that's what my
thinking is. Yeah, this goes back to the
virtue ethic and the idea that you become
what you practice
in essence.
Right?
And if we never practice agency,
if we go through our entire lives, if
I turn if I were 16 years old
and I started out saying, I'm never gonna
decide what I'm eating for dinner for the
rest of my life.
This chatbot, whatever it is, knows my finances,
knows my fine knows my my,
my nutritional needs,
knows how old I am, knows all the
vitamins I have, it has access to my
blood work. It knows everything. So I'm just
gonna let it decide for dinner for me.
I I don't know. That feels like we're
losing a bit of humanity,
like we're losing a bit of our
agency, our ability to make decisions
and and negotiate with people in our lives.
Like, you know, imagine even further, you have
an AI bot that says, I'm gonna take
everybody in your family,
everybody who goes to dinner on a regular
basis, and I'm gonna decide what goes for
dinner every night. If it's a recipe, I
spit it out
for you. Just make what I tell you.
And I know what's in your fridge, and
I make your grocery list for you. There's
like for some people, that's like a huge
relief. Oh, I don't have to think about
what I'm making for. I don't have to
negotiate.
I don't have to worry about buying groceries.
I don't need to make your everything's taken
care of for me.
But there's a there's there's a there's an
element there of just completely losing
the practice of negotiating with the people in
your family
and thinking
about
your finances, your nutrition,
making intentional decisions, like, you're losing
the practice of doing those things.
That's My, my favorite example to mirror what
you're saying, Russ, is the, GPS that everybody
has in their room.
Recently, I started not using GPS to navigate
around this. I live in Austin, but I'm
not from here, so I've lived here for
about six years,
and I found myself just every time it
was someplace not on my daily route, oh,
just put it in the GPS, why not?
Like, it'll get me there, I don't have
to think about it, I just do what
it says, and it's all, it has always
gotten me to the where I need to
go always.
And,
but then I, but I start thinking, well,
what about, what if something comes up? What
if the, what if the data and the
map is wrong? What if, you know, yeah,
eventually I'll figure it out, like I get
there and the road's closed or whatever, but
my ability
to to improvise is probably pretty well reduced
because I'm not practicing that. I'm not thinking
about the route. I'm not there's so many
there's so many points along the way that
I'm not that I'm not really thinking about
what should I be doing here. And,
it's been interesting to try to come back
from that, because it's right there. It's like,
I don't wanna think about this, I'll just
put it in,
but I wanna be able to make decisions,
I wanna be able to improvise. Yeah, there
was a time when I was down on
the coast of North Carolina and a hurricane
blew through, and I need to get home
for some reason. I need to get back
to Raleigh for some reason.
And the GPS was fine, but a lot
of roads were being closed dynamically by police
and cities, and you didn't know. And there's
no way the GPS knew.
So I actually still keep
a physical road map in my car, which,
like, papers. Like, people are like, that's so
weird. You keep paper road map. The original
way to route.
And, you know, every time I came up
to a closed road that was closed,
I'd stop,
take the road map out, put it out
on my hood because it's big, you know.
You don't wanna do it in the car
most of the time. It's makes for a
great comedy machine. It doesn't make for much
else than that. And, like,
okay.
If we go to the fourth
if we turn around and go back to
the fourth left turn and make a left
and then we go up five miles,
you know, then we can start figuring out
how to get back towards where we need
to go.
And, like, the GPS would have been totally
useless for me
in that perspective.
I've had it in snowstorms
where the GPS is fine again, but they
close roads.
And so I had to know six different
ways to get home and how to get
between those ways.
And, like,
yeah. There but even beyond all that, there's
some, to me, loss of agency.
It's not just that you get caught in
situations
where, oh my gosh. What if it doesn't
work? It's just
your ability to think.
Like,
the more you work yourself out of hard
problems
on your own,
the better you're able to do it.
And it just seems like sometimes we're losing
that
in what what this guy calls the the
tool trope,
and Doug Smith
calls the tool trope.
So I don't know. I it's it's an
interesting topic. It's something I don't think a
lot of people think about. They think more
about the
convenience,
you know,
efficiency.
Yeah. But there's more to life than convenience
and efficiency. So I don't know.
Any other comments on that?
I was just thinking about all of the
different civilizations
that that we know about now
that we have no idea how they did
and made and built what they did, whether
it's, you know, the pyramids or the Aztecs
or the Assyrians. We cover uncover these civilizations,
and and they did incredible things
without the same tools that we are familiar
with,
and yet
their methods have been lost to antiquity. And
I think, you know, some of this is
how that happens. You know, there's some innovation,
And interestingly enough though, I think that process
is also remarkably human
because it's we've seen it play out in
civilizations across the globe.
But,
I think it's something good to think about.
I'm not
a big believer that we can necessarily stem
the tide other than to be aware of
it personally and try and use that to
guide and shape how we,
you know, choose to live.
Yeah. Yeah. And that is
yes. To some degree, it is a matter
of
just,
how you choose to live your life.
Right?
It's up to you as a person to
make those kinds of choices.
You can't,
you know, you're not gonna change society
regardless.
So I don't know.
Okay. Well, cool.
Alright.
Any other comments before we wrap up?
Any vine goes back to sorting?
Oh, gosh. It's unbelievable.
It'll be okay, though. It's it's good. It's
good. Just pull your little bins out. Write
everything they're thinking down on a piece of
paper.
I've gone back to physical to do lists,
and I've got a few different ones in
different categories. Oh, no. So No. Oh, yeah.
I'm I'm gonna upgrade my notebook game, and
maybe I'll be more consistent in my level
of notebook. That's my plan. I used to
have no so many to do lists. I
had a to do list
that said, go to to do list 14
and do something from that list today.
Sounds like you need an AI assistant, Russ.
Yeah. It does. Absolutely.
Perfect way to round out this conversation. Yeah.
Yeah. Alright. Cool. Alright. Well, Yvonne, where can
people get in touch with you if they
want to or, you know, whatever? Follow your
Yeah. Work.
Yeah. I'm on LinkedIn at, Yvonne Sharp. You
can also find me on Substack these days.
I'm trying to post an article every couple
weeks.
And then on,
x and blue sky.
And Tom?
LinkedIn.
He said it faster than I could even
say and Tom.
I'm working on it.
I was I was on a short flight
yesterday, and the,
the announcement was
please don't take longer to board the flight
than it will take your flight to arrive.
And I thought that's fine. No. That's yeah.
It's a good rule. That's a really good
rule.
Alright. Well, I'm Russ White. You can find
me here at The Hedge. You can find
me on rule11.tech.
You can find me
on
x knee, Twitter as routing geek. You can
find me on LinkedIn, whatever whatever.
Look around. You'll find me.
Thank you for listening to this episode of
The Hedge. We know that we live in
an attention driven economy, and your attention is
perhaps
the well, I don't know. It's the the
thing that everybody's trading money on now. So
thanks for taking the time. People pay for
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so thanks for taking the time, and we
will catch you next time.