Episode 15; Renowned Business Executive Scott McNealy, Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems

Informing your decisions with intelligence analysis and insight brought to you by the team@oodaloop.com all right, this is Matt DeVoe. I'm the CEO of OODA, and this is the Oodacast. We have Scott McNeely joining us today. So, Scott, thanks for joining us.

Thrilled to be here.

So, just by way of background, can you fill in for the folks that are watching, kind of your background and how you got involved in the technology space. I know you're kind of an early pioneer.

Yeah, I grew up in the auto industry. Grew up in Detroit eventually, and went to business school at Stanford after being a major in golf at Harvard and a minor in economics and worked in the auto industry and ended up out at the tank plant in San Jose building Bradley Fighting Vehicles back in the day. And actually, yeah, I think they were called Bradley Fighting Vehicles, armored personnel carriers and stuff. And a professor of mine got me into the computer industry and I worked for 10 months for the first company to put Unix on a microprocessor called Onyx Systems. They didn't last, but it was a fun 10 months. And then I started Sun Microsystems with a business school buddy and a couple of really bright engineers. And 30 some years later it was over. Oracle bought it. And I've been doing advisory work and working on Kuriki and in the.org world and helping out people like you guys. So that's my deal.

Excellent. I appreciate it. So going back to the Sundays and it's a great kind of origin, early, early days in the computer industry. What was the vision? I mean, what did you, when you founded the company? Kind of. What did you see as the vision for what you were trying to build?

Vision. That wasn't the word. We just wanted to go make computers, so we made engineering workstations. We started off doing that. That was our deal. And then we saw customers taking the top off of them and using them as NFS servers and TCP IP servers. So that became a new business for us. And then we invented Java and we got into the Internet space and then we started pushing the whole cloud computing. The network is the computer is what we said. And eventually that led to Google and Amazon and Twitter and all of the other things that you see out there today.

Well, great. Well, I owe you some thanks. You know, when I was a hacker working on DoD systems back in the mid-90s, a primary platform we were on was Solaris on Sun machines, so. Spent a lot of time with your boxes.

Yeah, our machines ended up in a lot of funny places. Like Norman Schwarzkopf's tent during Desert Storm. And we had sun rays that used to track Air Force One because they were stateless data less the most secure workstation you can have and all kinds of places inside of the DOD and the government. So we have a long history there.

I can attest that I did hack systems on sun systems, on aircraft carriers and in nuclear submarines as well. So they were everywhere as you mentioned. Excellent. So you also had a long tenure as a CEO, one of the largest, most successful companies in the world. So you had a lot of great experience kind of managing through different crises and risk. What's your perspective on kind of the current global crisis?

Well, you know, I always. And Matt, you're in it right now. I call it the pinata. That's what the CEO job is. It's life in the pinata. You wake up in the morning, it's dark, you're kind of trying to find your way and everything seems all right. And then a two by four comes winging in from some draw direction or from somebody or in some way that you had and boom, it hits you and you go, wow, I didn't see that coming. And then you go react. And hopefully you react before they absolutely empty your belly out of all the candy. But this COVID pandemic thing, I call it a pandemic, I call it a panic demic and I call it an infodemic. And it is something the likes of which I never saw in my business career in the pinata. And it's quite unique. We've shut down just huge chunks of our economy voluntarily or involuntarily, which is actually another conversation. And we did it based on really false models, very little data about disease. And I think in ways where, you know, we're all trying to figure out how to deal with this from a government perspective, a policy perspective, individual rights and liberties perspective, from an information perspective. And it's a poop show, that's all I got to say. It's a poop show across the board and it's, it's going to have far reaching effects way beyond the disease for decades.

Is there any advice you might give a CEO with a new startup or a couple years into it that's trying to navigate the current climate?

Well, you know, a little late now, right? The comment I always make is no company ever went out of business for having too much cash. And that's cash is king right now in terms of if you can get enough cash to fight through this, a lot of your competitors won't and you're going to come out stronger. And the herd is getting called very aggressively right now. So, you know, cash is king. And getting through this is king. And the ability to be remote is something everybody thought was important, but nobody had any idea how important that was. Go back to Sunray. That was the killer technology. Dataless, stateless, remote access to everything is so key now.

Yeah, absolutely. You think it also creates some opportunities. You mentioned cash is king. Is there going to be a opportunistic kind of investment period here as well where there's a lot of companies who are, are in a tough position but have good intellectual property or good technology that there'll be some big entities stepping up to kind of acquire that ip?

Yeah, there might be acqui hires just to hire a few of the people. There might be some IP buyouts, but that's going to just. I mean, there's no way you'll get a return for the investors in those companies for all that. But it might be for. For those of you out there who are well financed, there's gotta be some really great bargain hunting going on right now.

Yeah, I would imagine so. Any prediction as to what sectors of the economy will recover first or will be the best to sustain this?

Well, what's interesting is we've already picked that the government sort of picked winners here. They decided what was essential, what wasn't essential. I'm not so sure that we shouldn't have left that decision to the consumers because I think they tend to pick. But you know, we decided that churches weren't essential. We decided that liquor and marijuana dispensaries are absolutely essential. We decided that all of the sports teams. My son's a pro golfer on the PGA Tour. He's been unemployed for a while. That was deemed non essential. And the winners and losers have already been picked. And certainly all of the delivery companies, all of the networking companies, all of the retail environments that had really good online web presence are doing a lot better than the ones who relied on bricks and mortar. You know, malls and Carnival cruise lines and other things like that are kind of struggling. So in terms of who recovers, the real question is how soon does the consumer recover? Because their nest eggs, especially for retired folks, are going to get absolutely destroyed by the quantitative easing and the printing of money that's devaluing the dollar. Inflation's going to shrink those nest eggs. How does somebody who's 65 or 70 retired and when they see their nest egg by all of this, shut the economy down and then Spend like drunken sailors with startup money being misallocated here, there and everywhere. You know, the Congress is just, you know, basically taxing anybody who has a nest egg. They are. They've eliminated 30 million jobs out of the system. And they're not all coming back because not everybody feels comfortable going back into a restaurant or whatever because we've been, you know, wear a mask, you know, don't go out, you know, you could die. And so there's an enormous amount of hesitancy to. The small business owners out there are. I don't know when they come back and I don't know if they come back and a bunch of them won't. The scariest part of I hope they come back soon is the healthcare system that bending the curve was supposed to save. I was stunned when I heard 30,000 employees have been furloughed from the Mayo Clinic. Are you kidding me? Really? And you look at hospitals all over the place that are on the brink and running out of money. The other thing that's got to come back are all of these states who are losing all of this tax revenue and paying out all of this unemployment insurance and all the rest of it. Their tax revenues are plummeting. And the pensions of the government sector unions. I don't know why our nation allows government sector unions. It is just. There's absolutely. It's wrong. It's just dead wrong. And that's another conversation. But all of these pensions and these union pensions and all the rest of it are going to go bankrupt. The states are going to go. Cities are going to go bankrupt. Those are the ones I'm worried about. Yeah, it's horrible. All of the small business owners that have lost their business. Horrible. But I mean, the cascade effect of this is going to be unbelievable. And let me tell you, we're already at amazingly high tax rates with massive deficits and now we're spending even more. Trillions. 3.7 trillion is the current budget deficit for the federal government. Really 3.7 trillion just this year. Congress just can't wait to go spend more. And tax revenues are plummeting because people aren't making money. This is not going to be pretty. So you know what, industries I'm worried about our health care system. I'm worried about the governments are out of control and overextended. And I'm worried about all of the folks who have assets in dollars who are facing an amazingly disastrous inflation and devaluation of the dollar for all the spending we're doing. How's that Anybody want a beer?

Need a shot of whiskey? It's on the bar behind me. How about from an innovation perspective? Do you think that we'll see any innovation that comes out of this? Are there any technologies that you're excited about that are not associated with the pandemic that you think hold a lot of promise over the next five to 10 years?

Well, you know, I'll give you the answer I gave before the pandemic in terms of, you know, obviously everybody knows about AI and machine learning. Everybody knows about drones, land, sea and air drones, autonomous vehicles. Everybody sees, you know, all of the disintermediation that the Internet is offering and that cloud services are offering. But they go, where are the new jobs going to come from? I mean, what if we have self driving trucks, what if we have AIs, chat bots, all of these other things? Well, there's two areas I think that are going to have huge amounts of increased spending and employment. One is security. And that's both physical, from Paul Blart Mall Cop to Navy seals, and virtual, from everything from, you know, your home consumer firewall or a password you put on your phone to absolute hackers and espionage and warfare, virtual warfare out there all the way up to the satellites and, you know, with our space force. So security, just that whole concept, physical and virtual security, cybersecurity are going to be absorbing ever as more and more commerce and more and more activity and more and more law enforcement and defense goes online. That can suck up every bit of brain power and every bit of physical manpower. I mean, just think how many people are in the security guard business now compared to pre 9, 11, let's say. The other place is obviously in the healthcare space and we're gonna be spending from caregivers all the way through to monoclonal antibody genius, DNA, all of the AI, machine learning and supercomputing power that we want to throw at attacking and maintaining our quality of life, things that are attacking our quality of life and things we're doing to maintain that quality of life for people. So I think a lot of innovation is going to happen in those two areas and people will generate a lot of return if they do some good things.

Do you think we'll see a little bit of a blending of the cyber and the physical with some of the AI and automation taking on some of the physical security role over time?

Absolutely. No question about that. It already is happening. And even Paul Blart Mall Cop is going to be armed with sensors and electronics and AI and cameras and all the rest of it. So it's, everything is getting automated and everything's ending up on the cloud. We move from the network as a computer to it's all about the data. And I've got more than a couple of my sons becoming big data scientists in effect, as opposed to just computer scientists. Because if you got the computers but you don't know how to handle the data, you're sort of like a one armed paper hanger.

Yeah, absolutely. So you famously had some quotes early on around data privacy issues as your perspective changed with regards to the role that privacy will play for business and for end consumers.

So the quote was, you have no privacy, get over it. And I was right, absolutely. But I was really targeting that in a conversation to a bunch of business people and to people who consume business activities. If you listen to me talk about that, I figured I switched away from Facebook. I just don't use it and I don't put things on Twitter that I don't assume will be a digital tattoo and that will be there for everyone and everybody to see. And you know What? I use AT&T as my phone provider. And if they start giving my stuff away that I don't want them to, I'm going to switch. I'm going to switch to Sprint or Verizon or somebody else. So there's some choice you have. If you have a free service, you understand that you're not the customer, you are the product and your data and all about you is pretty much out there. So that's the world we live in. And I, I was just calling it as I saw it. The thing that scares me to death is when your government knows everything about you. That's horribly scary. It wouldn't be scary if all of the government was doing was protecting your rights, liberties and freedoms and therefore was doing judicial defense, law enforcement, state and those kinds of things that are there to protect your liberties, freedoms and rights. And a right is something you can give to everyone without taking from anyone. Unfortunately, that's a very small percentage of the spending budget of the federal government, the state governments and the local. Well all of a sudden we have scope creep in these governments. This is the libertarian in me coming out and they're to going hate me for this. All of a sudden the government is doing health care, financial services, loans, student loans, it's doing insurance, it's doing all of these jobs that are properly and ethically belong in the private sector because then you can switch if they're not doing a good job. You can't Switch from the federal government. You just can't. It's very, very hard. And on the way, they take everything you have. Right? So this is what's scary, is all of a sudden, and I'll tell you, Fisa warrants the General Flynn investigation. 30,000. The only person I've ever known that's been able to hide 30,000 emails is former Secretary of State. Are you kidding me? I tell my boys it's a digital tattoo. Unless we should make her head of security, because she's the only one that can hide 30,000 emails on this planet. And so it scares me to death when they can know so much about you, how you vote, where you're going, and with all of the interesting new innovations of how the government can track you, whether you actually. I feel like we're all wearing ankle bracelets now, and the government knows where those ankle bracelets are. That's fundamentally what this thing has become in the hands of the government. And it's scary. And the only way we're going to solve the security problems is to shrink the scope of government and make America all about personal responsibility, personal liberties, personal freedoms, personal choices. And if you're 65 with morbidities and you decide you want to go to a San Jose Sharks game, you're swimming at your own risk, and you could get sick and you could get to the hospital, and they may not have enough ventilators for you, and you could die. Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be encouraging you to stay home, but at what point do you encourage and give them all the data you have? And then, you know what, Matt? You could die. If you drive a car, I want you to know that at 65 miles an hour, you could hit something and you could be a goner. Do we want to all of a sudden say, all right, you're 65 years old, you can't drive? I mean, this is a whole set. I don't. People are going to send me a lot of hate mail. I'm telling you. These are conversations that we need to have. There was three very interesting circles of Venn diagram as we've gone through this. Covid is a serious issue, and we need to do something about it. I'm in that circle. Our economy is incredibly important to the health and welfare and lifestyle of everybody in the United States. And in fact, on the planet. I'm in that Venn diagram circle also. Our rights, liberties, and freedoms are absolutely critical to our way of life. I'm also in that Venn diagram. I'M in a very small set of people. It seems that is in all three of those and in the overlap of those three Venn diagram circles. I'm in the middle. I care about all of those and I want to make sure we think about and do the best and make all of the trade offs for all of those. It seems like everybody's in one camp or the other and not understanding that there are lots of trade offs that have to be made here. But I believe the only way we're going to have privacy that matters is if we have small government.

Do you worry at all from a privacy perspective about kind of the corporate aggregation? Because I feel like the large companies have more information about me than the government does in many details.

I don't think they do because the government can always get the information from the businesses and you don't know what they have on us and where they're tapping in all the rest of it. But I do believe there is a wart in capitalism. It's called monopoly power. It's called market power that is stronger than and monopoly by definition is strong enough that competitive startups and other companies are not strong enough to overcome your barriers to entry into the market. And I believe in it. I actually wrote an honors thesis at Harvard in economics on antitrust. I've read the Sherman Antitrust Act. I've been involved in the largest antitrust settlement I know of at Sun Microsystems and I've studied the issue. Well, I believe that at some point we have companies that have too much market power and they stifle innovation. They can get corrupt, they lead to high prices and they need to be addressed. Now. The question is if they got there and they got there legally just because they were smarter, the market tipped. You don't punish their shareholders and you don't arrest the CEO. That's what I think is wrong with our antitrust laws. We could have just bought Microsoft, bronzed Bill Gates on the Department of Commerce steps, made him Secretary of Commerce and, and bought the company from all the shareholders and then given all of the IP open source to every US company and maybe that would have been a great way to resolve any antitrust issues. I'm not saying it is. I'm just offering this out as a different way to think about antitrust. But I love the fact that we have all these banks that are too big to fail by definition. Too big to fail says we need to break them up. What do we do? We prop them up. We don't break them up. We prop them Up. Break them up. Don't arrest anybody. Jamie Dimon shouldn't be arrested. His shareholders shouldn't be wrecked because he's done a great job of talking the government into giving him lots of money and propping his business up. We should probably re elect no one. I'm all for term limits like one, but, you know, we have to understand that competition is the core to giving us the byproduct. It's like corporate warfare where the byproduct is goods and services and weak companies are eliminated. But once you get somebody, I call it the greyhound at the dog races, that catches the bunny, hops in the cart and drives the bunny around the corner so far that the other dogs can't see the. The race stops. You don't shoot the dog. Turn that dog into secretariat, put him out to pasture and clone them. You know, that's how we need to think about antitrust and monopoly power. It was a good thing and the shareholders did quite well when they broke up AT and T. That was a proper way to go do that. Now it's sort of consolidated back, hasn't it? But there's lots of other people doing telecommunications, including Google without the beauty. Google does it, without all of the rules and regulations that AT&T has. So we sort of are hamstringing or tying up the traditional Telcos, Verizon and AT&T, while giving the new ones a freer reign. Yeah.

There does seem to be a disparity there, Right, between telecommunications over the Internet and telecommunications over the airwaves with one being regulated and one not being regulated.

Yeah. And there's sort of a disparity between the U.S. postal Service and the regulations they operate under and FedEx and UPS and, you know, we need to elect people who are a little smarter, who aren't just all lawyers or, you know, I don't know what they are excited about their positions of power. I've just been fascinated to see how many little town mayors are just drunk on their authority now. Absolutely drunk with absolutely no data or experience or understanding of what they're doing. It's fascinating.

So switch gears a little bit and talk about education. Can you tell us a little bit about Krikey and kind of what you're doing there and how you feel education is evolving or needs to evolve.

Yeah. So Krikey has been around for a long time working on the whole concept of online distance learning on demand. So if I can say it again, we were right on this one. And I didn't realize how quickly we would be considered right on this. But we need, I mean just. There isn't a parent out there who doesn't wish there was a really great homeschooling remote K12 environment. And that's what we're all about trying to solve. First thing we've done is we put the largest repository of free and open source curriculum out there on Krikey. 250,000 learning assets. Every parent ought to go there and just search on whatever they're looking for and there's something downloadable. The problem with them is that they're all different. They've all been created like they're from a different Lego block set of specifications. So they don't interoperate, they don't share that and most of them are quite inert. They don't have the active learning experience that the new world of AI, machine learning, AR VR, all of these things. You know, it's just. It doesn't have a recommendation engine, it doesn't have register once ability to run everywhere. It's all fragmented. So what we're doing at Krikey, now in phase two is creating a authoring environment that allows you to very simply and easily create these new active learning experiences. Things. Think games of calculus. Bingeable like Tiger King, Dopamine, addictive like Fortnite, but full on content. Think, you know, a 15 part miniseries, games of calculus put together by a great gamer, a great studio producer, independent studio producer and a great calculus professor with a great celebrity emceeing and sharing it sponsored by Oracle Corporation that runs. So we have a great authoring tool to create that. Think of it as a production. It's more Time Warner production environment or Fortnite production environment than it is a Microsoft Office development tool or iOS development tool. It's more about producing an epic event. The kids just, you can't tear them away from the screen. And then we need a runtime that executes that. So we're building that all on the HTML5 Environment and Building a bundle of microservices. Think of it as the Java virtual machine and the Java Developer Kit. We're doing the equivalent of the Java Developer Kit for authoring curriculum. And then we have the Java runtime, the vm, which is a set of microservices that we're bundling that work with that. So we're going to make that free open. We're looking for donors, benefactors, donors of technology, people who want to help us as open source contributors. We're going to make it free and open to everybody and hopefully over the next few years, everybody writes to this platform because it's free and open, and we extend and scale and make it better than anything else out there. And everything interoperates. It's a real passion. A whole bunch of Ex sun folks are involved in it. We get all open and sharing and we get remote learning and all of a sudden the network is the school.

Yeah, the timing is definitely good. I love the gamification angle as well. And the references to Fortnite. I mean, we had last week, 11 million kids all tune into Fortnite for a live concert at the same time, which was the equivalent of your average Monday Night Football attendance. I've often wondered whether there shouldn't be some sort of calculus quiz within Fortnite that unlocks some special skin or some special feature for the kids, and whether you can't even further blend the entertainment with the learning as well.

That's exactly what we're doing. Leaderboards are everywhere. And real time scoring is everywhere except at school. Shame on us. Can you imagine going to a baseball game and not knowing what the score is? Or going to any event where we don't know what the score is? And what we want to do is gamify it that way. And what we also want to do is we're building out a personal achievement portfolio for every student. So as you take any class that uses this, you can dump the results, your score, your badges, your achievements into this secret, proprietary, confidential, blockchain, immutable achievement portfolio that you and your parents own. And you can make it available to anybody you want to, when you want to. So if you took a calculus class and you failed it, yeah, it's in there. But you don't have to share that with anybody. And if you go become President of the United States, you don't have to share any of it. But if you do want to get into a company and get a job, or you want to go to Stanford or something else, you can share that along with your high school diploma. And our goal is that someday your achievement portfolio will be far more influential about who you are, what you are, what you enjoy, what your passions are and what your skills are than even your high school diploma. Yeah.

Excellent. Well, I love the idea. And we'll definitely link to the site in the YouTube show notes for this and on our site as well, so.

And if you hate my politics, at least love my Karike thing. You know, I get it. People have different views about what works in politics. I get that. But this nobody should be upset about. Nobody should be worried about, nobody should be concerned about. This is all about the kids and all about providing them a chance. And if. Because we're going to. We're going to get trapped at home again. And we need an environment that allows those kids to stay productive, excited, motivated and addicted to learning.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's a great, great concept. I love it. Did you see an uptick in usership within Krikey when the pandemic started?

Absolutely. It's been going on for 10, 12 years. We've got tens of millions of users, We've gotten hundreds of millions of students out there. And it's free. Did I mention it's free? Just go there, use it, abuse it. It's all there for you.

Great. So we talked about multiple successes where you called the ball.

Right.

From a management perspective, were there any failures that stood out over time or directions that you thought a market was going that you weren't correct about and you learned from?

I would say we were almost always correct about the market, usually 5, 10, 15 years early. And I'm a failure. I didn't execute. Bezos executed on it. The Google boys have executed on it. Facebook executed on it. A lot of people are executing on it. The gaming Minecraft, all written in Java. A lot of people have done a lot of great stuff with our technology. Am I disappointed? You know, I stepped down when the boys were 2, 4, 6 and 8 and wanted to spend some time and help raise them. And Oracle eventually bought us. It was a great run. Our technologies and our business practices are still being used everywhere. Hundreds of former sun execs became CEOs. It was a huge success. But bottom line is we did really well, provided a great return for a lot of shareholders. But we aren't one of the Four Horsemen anymore. We were back in the 80s. It was us and EMC and Oracle and I can't remember who the other one was.

Was there something about the size of the company that didn't allow for you to kind of execute against that vision of the market or what do you think was the root cause there?

We thought we could be the ARM supplier to all of the cloud manufacturers. And it turns out the cloud manufacturers got big and became their own engineering teams. So that was, you know, we, we should have been a cloud. We should have started doing cloud 20 years earlier. But we said, oh, we don't want to compete against our customers. So then our customers ended up competing against us and they stopped buying and they did their own stuff. But you know what? Capitalism has a great way of, you know, it's the Lion King. It's, you know, the circle of life for companies, and it's all good. The problem with the DMV is it never dies. It never gets better, but it never dies. So that's why you want to put as much of your economy into. So we can have horrible failures like Sun Microsystems. And I couldn't be more proud of every one of the 235,000 former sun employees. We did great stuff, but it's not around anymore. But that's okay because that's all about regeneration and the circle of life. We're still stuck with the dmv.

So it's a creation and destruction aspect of it.

It's wonderful.

Yeah. Do you. Are there some kind of the early markets, or do you think there are some of the big companies, the Four Horsemen now that might be disrupted or are ripe for disruption? How might that happen?

Nobody ever thinks. Remember when AOL said, you've got mail, you have to be kind of old, or we thought that was it. That was email. Look at how much disruption is. Remember the StarTAC? Motorola came out with a StarTAC. That was, that was the thing. And what was Black story. Right. You know, it's all, in fact, the higher up you come, the farther you're going to fall. It just happens. I, I was there with Jack Welch at ge. Remember that? When was the last time you, like, nobody brings up GE anymore. It happens. It will happen, and it should happen. And the problem is the bigger you get and the more monopoly power you have, ultimately, either you're going to get broken up or you'll get regulated to the point where everybody else will catch up or you just don't see the next thing coming. Cab companies never saw Uber company coming. So it's just stuff happen, sneaks up from behind.

I quote Jack Welch all the time when people are trying to determine why their security program is ineffective and you get the behavior that you measure in reward. I think that's a great summation of why a lot of these programs fail internally, from a cybersecurity perspective at least.

I like to quote country western Singer. Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug. Go hard, go fast, be the windshield. Yeah.

So you get, you have your hands in a lot of things and still very well informed. What source of information are you using that kind of inform your decision cycle now in this stage in your career?

Well, I'm just, I read on the net voraciously, I read comments more than I read the articles.

Interesting.

I spend probably three minutes on an article and maybe five or seven or ten minutes on the comments because I want to hear all sides. And, you know, it's just. It's just very different. And I think people who think that an article is the explanation are missing it by not looking at the comments. I learned so much from that. I don't trust anything I read anymore. I mean, I think it's almost all fake news. And you really have to use your own logic and experience and people you trust explicitly to build your belief system. I have probably 30 or so companies that I'm advising, so I get a lot of input and understanding of what's going on in all kinds of markets and spaces and places by advising them. And then I've got a pretty good network of buddies that I've worked with over the years that, that are also very informative. And I got more time than most people because I'm not doing performance reviews or recruiting or this, that and the other thing. So I actually get a chance to spend more time. I wish I'd had this kind of time to just think and look and investigate than I do now.

Do you wish you had made more time? I know there's some executives that try to be a little bit deliberate about that, but it gets very hard, even myself, to. To find the time to kind of reflect and do that.

Thinking urgent drives out the important all the time. And, you know, I spent a lot of time selling, which I thought was, like I said, no company ever goes out of business for having too much business. So I always thought that making sure we understood what the customer was saying, but that tended to be, you know, kind of tunnel vision in terms of what's going on in the rest of the world sometimes.

Yeah, that's what I've always said as well, that the CEO usually needs to be your top salesperson. It's just the reality.

The hardest part about being CEO, though, is as you'll find as you get, you're always the last one to know or to be told. It's just sort of the way it works. And you have to spend. I mean, if I had some advice for any CEO out there, it is spend a good portion of every exchange you have with any employee, any customer, any shareholder, any stakeholder in your company. Make sure at some point you ask them, by the way, if you were me, what would you be doing differently than what we are doing? I'd love to hear your advice. I'd love your wisdom, I'd love your insight. And that is the most powerful, the most empowering, and the most productive question that you can ask of everybody you run into. I don't care if they're on the shipping dock, a former employee, a shareholder, even somebody out of the fake news or whatever, just ask them the question. And one, they will appreciate the time you're taking to hear what they have to say. But two, you might actually learn something. And people say, how'd you figure that out? Somebody told me because I asked them and I was sincerely interested. You don't have to take everybody's advice, but, you know, asking them is a very valuable thing to do.

Excellent. We always like to ask as well, any books that you're currently reading that you might recommend or have recently read.

I'm not quite a Millie, a millennial, but I don't have time to read books. I read the cliff Notes or I ask somebody who read it. Tell me about it. What did you learn? And that's my cliff Notes. Because if I spend all of my time reading them, I will tell you. Crenshaw's book, Dan Crenshaw's book. I am hearing just unbelievable things. I guess it's just flat sold out. And my son was the one who got me onto that one, and he just loves it. It's a topic that is very big in our family. Personal responsibility. No, Victimhood. And is kind of built on. I mean, think about the frontier. The frontier in America. You know, there wasn't a lot of people who survived if they didn't take personal responsibility back in those days. So I think that's. That's something that I think ought to be required reading for Everybody in the K12 space? Excellent. Great.

Any. We're almost out of time. Any last advice that you might provide to the folks that are. That are tuning in and watching this, knowing that they tend to be executives or folks looking to inform their own decisions as they go about the work world.

Well, I think for leaders, these are really tough times. And the goal for you is to attenuate, not amplify. People don't need. I mean, we got enough amplification going on, whether it's on Fox or Ms. NBC or, you know, they're loving it. The media is loving it because there's no sports to watch. Everybody's stuck at home, and they're what? And so the amplification of the issues, that's why I call it a panic demic and an infodemic. The amplification is just off the charts. And a lot of people, I gotta believe, are Being paid to write amplification stuff, even though they don't even know what they're writing or saying or believing it and are just creating unbelievable amounts of fake bot news out there to get out, to get us all amped up and amplified. And I think the media is all for it because it raises ratings. You, as a leader need to step in and say, hey, wait, let's. Let's look at some facts. Let's figure out, does that matter? Let's figure out. What can we. What can I always tell my boys and my family? If you. If you can do something about it, do it. If you can't, don't worry about it. So there's no reason to worry. Let's stop worrying. If there's something, do I do it? If there's not, let's just move on and understand that's a way of life, a fact of life, and all the rest of it. So, you know, amplifying is the wrong thing to do. Attenuate. People come in all the time to my office, the sky's falling, the house is on fire, there's an earthquake, we're out of money, and everybody left. And I would have to hopefully come up with a clever little disarming quip about whatever. So I guess maybe we should do this, or maybe we can go on and go in this direction, but just in a calm manner. Say, we'll get through this. We'll figure our way out. We've done it before and we'll do it again. And that's the important role of a leader. Now you can go home, go into the woods and start screaming bloody murder and bash your head against the bark of a tree when nobody's looking. But you can't do it when they're looking. And they will see the terror in your eyes. So you better be a very good actor or they will see the terror in your eyes. And then that won't help. Terror is a very. Most people in movies, when they're terrorized, end up dying if you notice red.

Shirts or terror in their eyes. Right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

All right, cool. Thanks for having me.

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