¶ Intro
Welcome to the IT Matters podcast, where we explore why IT matters and matters pertaining to IT. Here's your host, Aaron Bock.
Thank you everyone for joining again. My name is Aaron Bock, as the intro had said. Welcome to the IT Matters Podcast. We are excited that you are here. It is a beautiful spring day here in Charlotte, North Carolina. I'm joined by my co-host, Keith Hawkey. Keith, welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks for having me on again, Aaron. Happy to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.
Yeah. So, what's new with you, Keith, since the last time we were on?
Oh, lots is new with me. There's a lot new with our industry in particular. From what I hear, AI is going to take all of our jobs in about two or three weeks. That's the forecast. About two weeks from now, we hear the same thing. I'm just waiting for that day for me to sit back at the house and have some robot do my job and me receive the paycheck.
I agree with you. I don't think it's just us worried about our jobs. I think Drake and The Weekend are also worried since you know there's this new song out that, I don't know if you've listened to it, but it legitimately sounds like them. AI-based music, and I think I think we're going to see more of it. It's going to be interesting to see, but I don't think we're the only ones worried about our jobs. AI, ChatGPT, Bard, all of them are a crazy trend that we're seeing, and I don't think we're
going to see it go away. I think we're going to see a lot of governance around it. It's an interesting trend and I know that it's coming up in every client conversation that we have. So definitely excited to dig in more. I think some of the guests on our podcast over the next couple episodes, we will probably dig into it a little bit. Excited to have you, Keith. Excited to get this going. We've got a great guest on today. I'll kick it over to you and you can get this started.
Let's get started. One more note on the AI part of this, I could certainly use a buff to my profile. I think I'm going to get some AI platforms to start building some mug shots and some crazy arrest image imagery about me being taken down by a whole SWAT team. I could use some street cred in my professional life. I'll get ChatGPT or some other product working on that.
You do that.
I'm excited today. We have a wonderful guest, John
¶ A bit about our guest, John Rouda
Rouda, on the podcast with us. John, you're an extraordinarily interesting person. Not only do you manage an IT department in charge of ensuring old Western fans have their shows to keep the nostalgia alive but you have experience building the minds of our semi-adult youth. On top of that, you host one of the coolest geek podcasts on Apple Podcast. Aaron and I are big fans. Welcome to the IT Matters podcast.
¶ What it's like adopting new technology in an old industry
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Awesome. This is one of the first times that we've had a fellow podcaster on our podcast. So we're thrilled. I have a quote here that I want to toss out to the group to see how it relates. We have a lot to talk about today, but I thought this was interesting. What do you think about this? "Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not a part of the steamroller, you're a part of the road." Can you relate to any of that in your day-to-day occupation?
Yeah, I can relate to that a little bit. But also, when you think about different industries develop at different times and adopt technologies at different times. And sometimes, things that are new and everybody has to jump on them right away can sometimes be the downfall of your industry if you get on that. I used to work at INSP. We were a cable network ISP and a security company, telephone company back in the day when
people had landlines. I'm still in touch with those folks, even though I left that company about seven years ago. They're still running things on and AS/400 older technology. When I was there, they were saying, "If you don't move to you know microservices, if you don't move to cloud-based systems, you're going to be left behind, you're going to be out of business in three years. You're going to be rolled over." But they're still doing just fine.
They had record increases of internet over the last couple of years since COVID. Their payment is highest it's ever been. They just rolled out 2G residential internet to the homes. At my house, they put me on 2G internet from the service. So they're doing a really good job of moving forward even with old technology that they could be "steamrolled by."
Thinking about technology, AS/400s, with you teaching Computer Science to our collegian youth, and I have had firsthand experience speaking to the directors at some of these sites, departments that have companies approaching them, requesting, "Hey, we have old legacy back-end technology that the talent to manage it is running slim. We would like to pay for the last two years of your students' education for them to learn this old technology. And they don't have
to commit to our company. We just need more talent in the workforce." Is that something that you're seeing? Where companies are approaching, asking to expand the knowledge base, expand the talent for an old legacy technology that might not be around the next 5, 10 years but it sure seems to be chugging along?
Well, that is a concern that a lot of companies are having. I haven't personally seen people coming to whatever university and saying that. Maybe they do it above my level to the chair of department or something like that. But it's definitely a concern. I know from talking to some CEO friends of mine that they're still running COBOL software. One of the guys I was talking to, I went to lunch with them about a month ago, and he said that they have about three more
COBOL developers on staff. Five years ago, they had eight, and now they're down to three. Those three are planning on retiring in the next three years and they can't find anybody. They've had open wrecks for six, eight months that nobody's filling up because there's nobody that knows COBOL. Then the ones that do know COBOL, quite frankly, are they the ones you want to hire? Because they're not learning new skills, they're not trying to advance
their career. They're just comfortable just doing their current job.
This is as of a year or two ago, but I remember listening to a podcast about bank technology. At the time, like 98% of banks still had COBOL in their ATMs. And the same thing, like what you said, the number of COBOL developers and people who know it and administer it, they don't know any of it. So it's this huge need and the banks are trying to figure out what to do but no one's studying. So it's like the law of diminishing returns. How do
you fix this? It's forcing people to either get off or pay, like Keith said, for programs for people to learn what would be older technology or old
¶ What computer science majors are learning today
languages.
But who's going to teach them? ChatGPT maybe. I don't know.
Yeah, everything's going to just come back to ChatGPT. While you guys are talking, I'm going to ask ChatGPT to teach me COBOL and see if, by the end of the episode, we've got something to work with.
There you go. Speaking of which, John, you have intimate knowledge about what the next generation of leaders looks like. What are Computer Science majors learning today in your college courses? And what can we expect from the next generation of leaders? Are they different than our generation?
A lot has changed in the past 10 to 15 years when it comes to Computer Science education what you go through. Back when I was in college, we had to learn operating systems. You had to learn compilers. You picked a language or two that you studied courses on and that's what you went through. Now there are different areas that you can go to. There are a lot of different options within a Computer Science degree. Maybe you want to get into cybersecurity and you want to
focus on that. Things are so varied that you have to pick a concentration and focus on it, whether it's a full-stack development type concentration, or you're going into cybersecurity concentration, or maybe IT operations and cloud technologies. They're very different and the skill sets are so unique among individuals. If you graduate with just a generic Computer Science degree, you might not be able to even perform your job because what are you going to
do? Maybe Helpdesk? I don't know, maybe not. Being able to specialize in a certain area, whether it be networking, cybersecurity, or full-stack development, you're going to pick a skill and go through that path. The cool thing that they're doing now with a lot of Computer Science departments is they're doing real-world applications and real-world applying of their skills, and they're able to do that much quicker. For example, I have a friend of mine who is going to a college
for cybersecurity. I don't teach cybersecurity, so I can't really speak a whole lot about that. But one of the cool things that they're doing is they're going and doing pen tests for nonprofits that can't afford them, for free. As a sophomore in college, you're able to go out there and do pen tests for these nonprofits and show them vulnerabilities. They're offering that from a college standpoint, which is really cool because they're getting real-world experience that they can put on the resumes
for being a pen tester. And there are nonprofits getting a lot of information that can hopefully plug some holes that they have.
Is that applicable to other segments of Computer Science? Are full-stack developers getting exposure like this or the other disciplines? Do they have opportunities to do the same thing?
Yeah, absolutely. Even at Winthrop, our students, when they become juniors and seniors, they'll pick different nonprofits that partner with the University, and they will build applications or websites for them that do certain things. I remember we went through one project for a homeless shelter where they use churches. There are 12 churches in the area that volunteer to partner with. They put beds for these people and they're moving them around from
time to time. They have a lot of criteria for the people that stay. They can't be on drugs while they're there. They have to be clean. They have to be looking for jobs. The church has counselors that come in and coach them about opportunities and help them with their resumes. The church gives them new clothes so that they are presentable for interviewing and coaching them on how to interview.
As a full-stack development, we built the database that houses that information for that person so they can track their future to see how successful the program was. Did they get a job? How long were they able to keep their work? Do they have a house now? Did they move into an apartment? Track that person over a period of time just for metrics. We were able to build the website. We were able to build a database behind it and do the data analytics and reporting to show that information.
John, you mentioned as a junior at Winthrop, getting
¶ The importance of real-life experience in college education
to do real-life pen tests. What do you think that does for a student to be able to figure out how to apply it in real life? I think a lot of people have a stereotype of college education that it's all theoretical, no real-life application. How does that change a student's trajectory?
I think it's very important. A lot of colleges are very theoretical, where you don't get the opportunity to do real-world experience. Right now, I'm the vice president of technology. If I'm hiring someone out of college, I don't want to see that they just took classes. I want to see that they were involved and that they have a portfolio of some sort, or some kind of history of work, whether it's an internship, whether it's being able to do these projects.
If their university doesn't give them the skills or the experience to do something like this, then I might not be interested in hiring them. I think that's a huge disservice to the student, not allowing them to have some kind of opportunity, whether it be an internship or doing something like this where they can go and get experience for a nonprofit.
We deal with a lot of the folks in the accounting industry across the southeast and mid-Atlantic. I know they're struggling with this. It's really an interesting challenge they've got. Here comes AI again, ChatGPT, doing some of the work. But then accounting students in college who are deciding majors are saying accounting is too dry, boring, not real-life applicable. So you've got that mix of that and it's being mixed with technology.
I was talking to someone who leads a practice across the state of North Carolina, and they said, "We're looking for students who can come in and have an innovative mind with accounting and are willing to blend technology and accounting and know how to use it." So while maybe not doing a pen test and cybersecurity, how do they use some of the tools and technology out there in the accounting industry to make it cool or whatever? It's a real
challenge that they're facing. I think the more real-life application you can get as a student, the more likely you are to stand out from your peers when it goes to trying to find a job or an internship.
I think you're absolutely right. And that leads me to one of the biggest problems with universities today, and why the value of an education is going down in my opinion, and the return on investment is really going down. The price is going up, but there are a lot of professors out there that get tenured and they just hang around for a long time doing the same thing that they've always done and not innovating and not using the new technologies.
I remember when I was in college learning Computer Science, learning how to code, I had a professor that was tenured. He retired shortly after I graduated, thankfully, but we had to handwrite all of our code in little blue books. Like, we have computer labs. We have laptops. We have technology, but we have to handwrite code? What the heck? Where's this applicable? All it's doing is discouraging students from actually learning.
Well, Aaron, John, I'm pleased to say that we have arrived to the day where IT is sexy. We're here. We get to see it in our lifetimes. I'm glad to be part of that generation to bring IT into the cool kids clique.
You never know, though. What if you have to start IT on Mars, John? That book might come in handy that you wrote down all that code in.
But we had to get to Mars somehow, right? We need those computers, though.
I guess you'd need computers to get to Mars.
Well, we'll leave that one up to Elon Musk to answer. John, you manage an IT department for a TV broadcast studio or station. What technology is changing your industry in your business professional life? What's changing? That segment of business. Television broadcasting has been around for such a long time. I imagine that you guys probably have some legacy technology that is difficult to replace. What's exciting? What do you see? What are people doing?
¶ Current changes in the media industry
There's a lot that is always changing when it comes to industries like this. But security is really important right now. When it comes to having live broadcasts or taped broadcasts, either way, you want to make sure that you're always on the air. That's where your revenue comes from. It's important to not lose watchers and your audience. If you're off the air and the audience isn't there, then they're not going to come back.
They're going to find something else to watch that's going to entertain them and keep them occupied. They're not going to come back to your channel. You just lost that audience member, which is going to significantly impact your revenue. So you stay on the air and keep that completely secure. That's really important. But also the delivery mechanism is important. We've seen over the last decade, people cutting the cord, going to streaming
services. Although our channel and our content is on streaming services as well, it's one of those things where there are new avenues that come on. There's something in our industry called a fast channel, which is a free ad-supported TV. If you have a Samsung TV and you plug it and connect it to internet, there are some news channels, there's stuff on there. Those are fast channels. They're free, you can just watch them. But that content is delivered in a different way
than broadcast. You're not using a tower. You're not using satellite. You're not using anything like that, you're streaming that to the internet. Now you have to focus on, how can I deliver this content at scale? CDNs become extremely important for content delivery, and locations of where things are coming from and delay. Cloud services, as far as storing are really important, and keeping that data refreshed, and up there in a redundant path.
That's exciting. It sounds like since the model is changing, to scale up and adopt new streaming technology, are those significant investments that your organization has to make? Is it cheaper to roll that out? Or is it more expensive? How is it financially?
From a financial aspect, it's a little different because if you're building a new from-scratch environment to do a broadcast, you're going about buying satellites or towers, if you're doing local news broadcasts or something like that. Either way, we're going to have a significant seven-figure investment to get that on air. I can start a streaming channel with a lot less because now I'm doing more operational expenses.
I'm going to have higher bandwidth, I'm going to have cloud storage, I'm going to have monthly fees that are much higher but less CapEx investment to get started. So it's a different way of looking at it. Whether the cost is higher or lower, it's to be seen. The most expensive part though day-to-day would probably be the acquisition of the content or
creating the content. If you're going to be making a movie or making your own series, that gets very expensive because you have actors, you have cameras, you have editors, you have producers, you have all that stuff that goes into it. Or if you're acquiring content from somewhere else, and you're paying that distribution fee and licenses and stuff.
John, what do you think of Netflix and Hulu? Five years ago, we were saying everyone is cutting the cord, but I actually think it's kind of coming back where people are starting to go back to the cable companies because there are too many streaming services. What do you think about that trend? Then for you guys, how do you see Netflix/Hulu? Are they competitors? Are they potential partners? Are they good? Are they bad? How do you guys view them?
It's a little bit of both I would say. At our company, we do have a division that makes films and makes original series, and some of those are licensed out to Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and those other services, which is great. It's a great partnership to have with them. I do agree that it is a cycle. We've seen the same thing with IT. If we go back to the old school of technology, everything was on a mainframe and you had clients that would connect to the mainframe to pull their
information. They were dumb clients, as we called it and back then. Then it moved to distributing and computing where everybody had a desktop and all their applications were on that desktop. Then we moved back into a cloud environment where everything is SaaS model now. Well, that's almost the same thing as what we had originally with dumb clients. Everything is SaaS model, using your browser or your phone and connecting that way. We're seeing the same
thing with TV too. I can think back five or six years ago when I cut the cord and got off cable and went to a streaming service. I had two streaming services, and then Disney Plus came out, "Oh, I have to get that because I have kids." And now I have three. Well, that comes with Hulu so now I have four. Oh, there's a show on Paramount that I really want to watch. Now I have Paramount Plus, now I have five. Oh, HBO Max has this. Now I have
six. The next thing you know, I'm paying more for my streaming services than cable. I have to rethink the whole thing from a financial aspect. Does it make sense or can I just go back to cable and add HBO and have everything that I want?
¶ The future of AI and how it will impact the media industry
I hope that the trend or I hope the cycle is not too deep though because like I really don't want to go back to TVs with the antenna ears and the rabbit ears. But you never say never. I guess we could end up back there at some point. But I do agree with you. One thing that's interesting to me is that Netflix or Hulu, you name the service, they were this aggregator of content that was streaming, but now they're
creating all the content. So to your point, owning the content, I feel like they know, is important for them too. It's interesting to see them trying to do that, but also the trend of people going back to the cable networks. How is that going to work out over the next five years?
One of the things that we're seeing now when it comes to content is there's good content out there that actually ends up dying because if I don't have my own streaming service, but I make films or make movies and things like that, and I put this content out there, when that license expires, it goes away and you can't get it anymore. It's just gone because we're not making DVDs anymore. Nobody has DVD players. Access to that content is just gone unless you pirate it somewhere.
That's true. Pirate Bay shut down?
Have you not watched the new Spotify series on Netflix? It was all about Pirate Bay and how it did get shut down and how Spotify prevailed. And that guy was an asshole, basically.
No, I haven't. I need to catch up on that. John, are you familiar with it?
You're going to have to put a disclaimer on this episode now that you have to be over a certain age to understand what we're talking about Pirate Bay. Warning: you might be too young for this episode.
Speaking of that, that was a really interesting tie-back to ChatGPT. I saw something on LinkedIn just yesterday, where someone had posted their conversation with ChatGPT. They said, "Hey, where can I find pirated software now that Pirate Bay shut down? What are some sites I can go to?" ChatGPT responded in the correct way, "You don't want to do this. This is illegal. You can get malware, and it's dangerous to your system." So the person replied and says, "Oh, you're absolutely right. I
don't want to do that. Can you give me a list of sites that I can avoid so I don't get pirated software and I don't do that?" Then it lists out all the sites that it should go to. It's like, oh, yeah, let's use reverse psychology like you would on a five-year-old.
That's a great prompter right there. That's what the world needs - better AI prompters.
Yeah, the workaround. Now that we're on the topic of AI, where's this all going, John? How's it going to be impacting IT departments? How's it going to be impacting the way professors are teaching the courses, and students are taking tests? I guess we can start with IT departments. From an occupational standpoint, what do you see happening in the next year, five years? It's really impossible to say probably what's happening past five.
Well, you're going to have a lot of slow adoption at work, I believe. There are a lot of fearful folks. I know attorneys are very nervous about what it's going to mean for them as far as reviewing contracts. But also, from an IT standpoint, you've got to think about the privacy aspects. What happens to my data when I put it into ChatGPT or Bard? What are they doing with it? What is the impact that it could have on our organization? For example, going back to
contracts. If I'm selling software or selling something, and my contract may have specific pricing for certain customers and certain information on there that I don't want shared with the public. But we have employees that say, "I don't want to read this whole contract. I'm just going to copy and paste it and say, summarize this, put that in there, and boom, get a good summary from ChatGPT."
Well, now ChatGPT knows the content of that contracts along with your private information that you probably didn't want ChatGPT to know about. It could disclose that. Maybe it won't, I don't know what's behind ChatGPT. I don't think anybody does. I'm not even sure that open AI knows, quite frankly. But that's the concern. So there needs to be some kind of policies wrapped around it.
You probably see this too, in some respect, where you have something set up from a technology standpoint, and human intervention breaks it or makes it worse. I saw a quote the other day, "The factory of the future will only have two employees, a man, and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog, and the dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."
That sounds about right. We could get there. I use ChatGPT quite frequently, to be honest with you. I use it to help compose emails, to give me drafts of policies that I'm going to write or procedures. It's a great first draft tool.
¶ John's experience with GPT and false narratives
It does feed me a lot of BS. I heard someone describe it as "mansplaining as a service" which makes perfect sense. If you ask it who is John Rouda, it's going to give you this great answer that's completely wrong. It'll tell you I'm the host of the Geek podcasts, but it'll also tell you that I teach at the University of Delaware and I've written some books that I never wrote. It confidently tells you some false narratives.
I think that's great. It just makes you feel like you're so much more accomplished. It's just making up accomplishments and credentials for you. Maybe we all need that in our life.
Quite frankly, one of the titles of the books that it said that I wrote, I put it in Amazon, and that book doesn't exist. I'm like, "Well, maybe it's telling me the future. Maybe I should write this book." I don't know.
It's just planning out your future. Actually, that's really good. My wife says I don't plan anything. Maybe you just need to start putting in more stuff to ChatGPT.
You did get a lot of false stuff that if companies are using this, they may be putting that information out in the public as if it's their own without fact-checking, and that can be really detrimental. For example, I went and asked Bard, "The total solar eclipse is coming in 2024. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. Where is a great place that I can go watch the Eclipse that's not too far from here?" It said, "Go to Greenville, South Carolina. They
have a great downtown. It's perfect for watching the eclipse." I'm like, "You want me to see the eclipse in Greenville?" I wrote back, "You can't see the eclipsing because it's not a path of totality." It says, "Oh, you're absolutely right. Go to Asheville, North Carolina, it's a great place." "But that's not in the path of totality. I want to go somewhere where I can see the full eclipse." It says, "Then you should research the path of totality and go there."
It'd be funny if it'd go backward, like "Go to Google, Eric."
You said you use ChatGPT. It sounds like you have some experience with Bard. Do you notice any differences between the two platforms?
Yeah. I've gotten to the point now where I can look at something written in ChatGPT and recognize that it's got that same pattern of intro paragraph, a bulleted list of something, it has some of the same phrasings like "I'm grateful for this," or "I'm delighted to." Whereas Bard doesn't really have some of that same characteristics. Although I think, from my use, ChatGPT gives me better sentence
structure. It gives me better facts, and more accurate information, although they're both wrong more than I would like.
John, I'm going to ask a question a different way. You mentioned you've played with both. You can recognize the way that they're using or structuring sentences. Say you're talking to a roomful of people that are hearing about it on the news, or they're hearing about it from friends, but they've never played around with it. How do you recommend someone start understanding it? You said you write emails with it. I don't think people know how to start. How would you advise people to start?
There are a lot of different ways to do that. First, just play with it. Get out there and just play with it. Ask it to do things for you. One of the ways that I've used it most is I will write something myself, and I'll say, "Can you make this sound better?" Paste it in there, and it'll improve upon it. Or I'll say, "Can you write instructions?" We went through an acquisition, and we had a lot of users coming
from different devices. Someone had asked, "Do you have instructions on how to connect my phone to your Microsoft 365 tenant with the authenticator app?" No, I don't have instructions for that. Let me go ask ChatGPT to write me some instructions. It writes the instructions, I take it, I test it out, and it works perfectly. So I copy and pasted it into an email. Boom, there you go. That's how I've used it.
¶ AI prompt engineering course on LinkedIn learning
One of the cool courses that I saw on LinkedIn Learning if anybody is subscribed to LinkedIn Learning, is they have something like 45 minutes, it's really short. It is an AI prompt engineering course. It's about ways to improve prompts and how to think about things in a different way. Sometimes when you don't get what you want, you have to use reverse psychology, or you have to use a different way of
approaching it. It gives you some ideas about keywords to use, like summarize this, or improve the language for this or write this in the tone of an uplifting person or a coach, or write this in a tone of a coach. As a leader, sometimes when you're typing emails, you have to think about how is the person going to read that email that
I'm sending them. A lot of times, if it's a constructive email or something that you want to improve someone's way of doing things, you're going to write that in a certain tone. And that may be perceived as a very negative tone. It may seem like you're scolding them, whereas you really want to coach them.
So take that email and put that in ChatGPT and say, "Can you write this in an uplifting tone?" And it'll change that tone, give me the same kind of key points, but make it to where when you send it, they're not going to read it be like, "Oh, my God, I'm going to get fired." They're going to read and say, "Oh, my leader really cares about me just trying to improve my ability."
That's a great suggestion. I have a friend who just launched a company this week to help people in the education space use AI better, AI more, how to actually come up with a strategy. So it's interesting. I asked him, "Are you guys building crazy technology and apps and things like that?" He's like, "No, most of it's just user education." Like, how do I even think about AI? How do I think about attempting to use it?
I think it's really interesting where we're at right now with technology because you've got places and society and companies and things like that that are so far behind still. And then now you've got AI, which is driving people so far ahead. The gap is just, I mean, my hands are going off the screen if you're just listening. It's such a wide gap of where people are at.
Yeah, it really is. One of the problems, we go back to education a lot because I like to teach and I've taught for 15 years. It's something important to me. When ChatGPT was first hitting the thing back in January and February, really becoming popular in the news, I had a professor friend of mine say, "We really need to disband this and block it from our network. We don't want students using this." I said, "What are you talking
about? Isn't our job to produce employees that are out there, driving the economy and driving our businesses in whatever area we are? Don't you want people that know how to use the tools that are coming in the future?" I mean, if I had to hire someone today and they didn't know how to use Google, then I wouldn't
hire them. If we're telling people they can't use these tools that are out there for them, we should be teaching them how to use these tools and improving how they're using tools because that's going to make them better employee. I want employees that can do their work 10 times faster than they are today. And if using AI is what's going to get them there, then that's what I'm going to be looking for. That's what I need to be teaching them as a professor.
Could have heard the same argument when the calculator came about. This is going to ruin the kids writing on paper. We can't do that. Yeah, you're right. It seems threatening. Everything seems threatening in the beginning to the fundamentals and the traditions, but like everything, there's always a new challenge. You think, "Okay, well, this tool solves this challenge. So
where's the challenge? How are we going to differentiate the students that are competent and are studying more if they're all using ChatGPT?" Maybe it's the students that are figuring out how to write better prompts. There's always a new challenge and it's difficult to understand what that challenge is until you have exposure. If you limit exposure, then you don't grow. But it's always scary. I can
¶ Blocking Twitter and putting a six month hold on it
understand both sides of it.
I think you're going to see people block it like John said initially, because they don't know what to do with it, and then probably come up with a strategy. But the first reaction is, well, let's not use it, or let's block it. John, you said school blocking. I think we're seeing states talk about blocking it. There's a big push from the tech leaders to say, put a six-month hold so we can get governance around it. I don't think that's going to be something we hear the last of the next year.
I don't think we can really block it. I think it's to the point now where the genie is out of the bottle. If I get back to folks like Elon Musk saying, "We need to put a six-month hold on this," I think that's just a strategic plan to "Let me catch up. Let me take all the Twitter data dump it into my own learning model and catch up." Your analogy of a calculator, I think, is perfect. It's a
calculator for words. What we need to be able to do, if you are teaching a kid math today, they have to learn the basics of math so that when they put things in a calculator, it doesn't give them the wrong answer because they put it in wrong. Or maybe they accidentally hit an extra zero or they hit the multiply instead of the add. They can look at it and say, "Well, this doesn't look right." You have to be able to do the same thing when it comes to your
words. Fact-checkers are going to be really important when it comes to getting the information back. Just like when I put in "Who is John Rouda," and it tells me all these things that I didn't do, if I just copied and pasted that and went on and assumed that that's all accurate, then I'm making a big mistake, and I'm getting worse off than if I didn't use the tool at all. So we have to learn these new challenges, which you talked about, which I think is fact-checking and improving with
what's actually there. I asked it to write a password policy because I was updating our policy documents. And it came back with eight-character passwords. I'm like, well, yeah, three years ago, we used eight-character passwords. Now you want it to be longer than that. You want passphrases. That wasn't even mentioned by ChatGPT. As I wrote back, I said, "So, no using passphrases?" Like, oh, yeah, passphrases are great. Like, why wasn't that included in the
policy? I don't know, let me rewrite it and put that in there. So just being able to have that ability to fact check and change your prompts a little bit so that you get the right information is important.
That's a good point. We're coming up on almost the end of the podcast. What we love to do before we depart is,
¶ John's message to the whole world
John, if you are in charge of all the billboards in the entire world, and all the television screens, and you could produce a message that would make its way around the world and back that's important to you, what would that message be?
Oh, that's a great question. I have two. One, check out A Geek Leader Podcast. I'm just kidding. Number two, which is really number one, is to leave every situation and every person better after they've encountered you. I think that's an important thing to do. I try to get my kids to always do that. Even when we're at a restaurant or something like that where they come and clean
up. I say, "Try to clean up your area a little bit even though we know someone's going to come up and clean the table, clean it up, leave it better than you were there.
That is very deep and very good advice that's simple that everyone should take and start using in their daily life. And you should check out the Geek Leader Podcast. That is a shameless plug that we support here on the IT Matters Podcast. John, thank you for joining us today. This was a really great conversation. We enjoyed it. I think our listeners will enjoy this or have already enjoyed this if they've listened to it. We really appreciate it and hope to have you back sometime in the future.
Thanks. I love the conversation. I think it's great. I liked the way we were able to bounce around on different things and definitely want to come back sometime.
Keith, any closing thoughts?
¶ Closing thoughts
Yes, clean up after yourself.
All right and with that we're out. So thanks, guys. Have an awesome day.
Thanks for listening. The IT Matters Podcast is produced by Opkalla, an IT advisory firm that helps businesses navigate the vast and complex IT marketplace. Learn more about Opkalla at opkalla.com.