LIMITLESS imagination with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) w/ Steven Stout

And I look at it the same, right? We're in this world now where we're using the computers to do stuff for us. Right? And I'm very much a big proponent. That's why I love scripting, as if I can make the computer do something for me so I don't have to do it. That's awesome. And I look at the the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and I look at that as that's the next step. Right?

And we have a lot of people that are stuck in this world of like me looking at my kids going, well, that's not fair. You're how are you able to use a, you know, something that does this for you and you don't understand what's really going on behind the scenes?

And you don't you don't know how how you know, we did this pure, right, whether that's writing stories, writing code portraits, everything else, where people are now leveraging computers to get those answers or to do that or to give you that head start on it. I look at it as the next advent. I'll steve, how is Africa? Africa was awesome. Yeah, but where were you exactly? In Djibouti. So Camp Lemonnier. Djibouti. So just outside Djibouti City. Djibouti City. Yeah. But 11. Funny name.

Yeah. Djibouti City. Yeah. So 1111 degrees north. So it's dang near equatorial. Okay. A super, super humid right off the coast. Yeah. What's. What's the latest happenings in Djibouti City? Not much for Djibouti. So we're they're doing force protection and a lot of other other missions for AFRICOM and Special Operations Command, Africa. So I gotcha. Djibouti City also sounds like a club that we used to go to when I was in my twenties. Yeah, I think it's down in Ybor.

There's a second location down in New York City. Ybor City? We used to go to Djibouti City. Generally, you know, Africa has just been a disaster in terms of conflict or ever since I've been alive. What's kind of what are the most recent updates to what's happening in Africa? Yeah, so I mean, the main thing that's going on is Somalia got a new president, which he was actually the president before the last one, uh, Hassan Sheikh Mohammed.

And they're just, they're, they're fighting and trying to counter al-Shabab's influence. So al-Shabab is the wealthiest arm of Al Qaida, of the al Qaeda terrorist network. And so al-Shabab has heavy presence in Somalia. And there's this new president, Hassan Sheikh Mohammed. He's very keen on getting back to establishing the sovereignty of of Somalia and no influence from al-Shabab. And so we're we're they're helping in his efforts as well. So a lot of Horn of Africa activities.

So al-Shabab, Ethiopia had a lot of unrest not last year, year before, where we had some pretty high level, you know, Department of State events where we were a lot of turmoil in Ethiopia and a lot of a lot of turmoil across the entire continent. It's just clans, families that are fighting against. Yeah, a lot of corruption, fighting against governments. Who's in control? Who wants to be in control? And it's just been it's been going on for years and years.

A lot of it is remnants of, you know, colonial era into this post-colonial era. And, you know, these these colonial powers withdrawing from Africa after years and years of of ruling with with a heavy first and then the people then trying to figure out how do they govern? How do they govern themselves when someone's not forcibly governing them. And then just that power vacuum of who? Who takes over. Right.

One of the things I really like about you, Steve, that not only are you militarily an expert on the intelligence front, but on a systems front, when you get into geographic information systems, you're absolutely one of the top experts in the field. So that's why I want to talk about today was some some nerdy GIS stuff. So geographic information systems, there's some debate out there, whether it's geospatial information systems or geographic information science. At the end of the day, it's G.I.s.

So I was hoping maybe we could just start at a very I want to start at maybe level one and we'll ramp it up to level ten. Yeah, we can maybe. How would you describe what GIS is for somebody that maybe doesn't understand what? I think the simple answer for what GIS is it's computer computerized data with a spatial component that you can overlay and extract, meaning relationships, trends, patterns from the data. Right.

But it has that geographic or that geospatial component to it that lets you see patterns and things that emerge that may not otherwise be evident. Right. So they go back to, you know, like mid 1800s by 1854. Dr. John Snow. John Snow. John Snow, yeah. Yeah, but not this is the one that knew something, right? Not the John Snow that doesn't know anything. You know nothing. John Snow. Yeah. So Dr. John Snow in London. Right.

They had a big cholera outbreak trying to figure out what's going on with the cholera outbreak. And then he has the idea that he's going to basically overlay data and so he overlays a lot of different things for the city of London. And what he sees is a pattern emerge with cholera outbreaks, where the water lines are, that where the water lines are, they have these these bad cholera outbreaks. Right.

And so he's able to identify a spatial pattern of, hey, wait a minute, I think that cholera may be linked to the water and the water lines within London. Right. And he identifies that indeed cholera is caused by the contaminated water in London. And that's what's caused this big cholera outbreak. Right. So consider that like the founding of GIs and since then.

Right, it's just collecting the data spatially, you know, referencing or go rectifying that data, getting it to its accurate real world location and then identifying patterns, trends and everything else. So John Snow not only helped defeat the white walkers, correct? He went on to found GIs. That's awesome. So if on a on a basic level, just basic level, it's overlaying data on a map and relating it to other pieces of data to form analysis. Is that is that a good way of putting it?

It's a good. Way of putting it right. Everything happens somewhere in the world, right? Nothing is happening on this earth, not on this earth. Right. So everything's happening somewhere. Everything that's happening has a geographic location to it, some sort of phenomenon component, whatever. But everything is happening somewhere. We can ignore that and pretend that there's no geographic relationship to that. But in reality, things things are related with, you know, with respect to location.

And so ignoring that location, we tend to do that at or at our own detriment. Okay. So it's always said this is kind of like it's kind of like the music in the background at a restaurant, right? It's it's everywhere you go, however, you don't really notice it right? But if it's not there, you'd be like, huh, that's interesting. What's going on? So so here's an interesting question for you. If there was no GIs, how would that impact the everyday person?

Well, GIS has its application in multiple things, you know, delivery of packages, FedEx routes, UPS routes, the United States Postal Service, school bus pick UPS optimization of school bus routes, planning of schools where you have concentrations of of children for elementary schools, middle schools, high schools. When do you figure out that you need another high school? How do you decide when you need more teachers, etc.?

A lot of that all comes into play because there's a geographic component to it and GIS helps with those decision and making those decisions. So it empowers decision makers to be able to, you know, figure out what's best. Right. We guess no GIS. We get. No packages. Well, we get very, very poor delivery schedules because we can't optimize. Right. We can't optimize stops. We can't optimize that delivery route. Same thing with your mail, right?

It's everything becomes delayed because, you know, mail would come in, right. And we would do like a first in first out that that letter or that package comes in. And then we go deliver that across town. Then the next one is all the way across town again, and then you drive back across town, right? And so we have this optimization that just comes inherent with GIS for things that we just that we take for granted. Right.

How do you decide right when we've got a, like a food desert, that we have lack of grocery stores in an area? And how do we decide, okay, hey, we need to plan another grocery store here. And so that. Was actually a problem around this area. And Wilmington, North Carolina and several parts of town. So maybe if we have a super powered GIS analyst and we do have some really good GIS people in the county and and so we built locate some of those those places and and make recommendations.

Yeah. And it's a it's a hard thing that they're tasked with with city planning and city maintenance, because you're trying to you're trying to weigh the costs and the benefit of having more housing and then areas where you dedicate that, there will be no development so that we can keep a green space or some green area. Where do we put a park? Right. And so you're you're trying to weigh that, you know, parks don't bring in revenue, right? You can't you can't tax the park.

You can tax people off of their property tax and everything else. But so it's that that constant battle that they're trying to figure out what's the best use of the land and how do we how do we make the best use of the resources that we've got? You know, how do we zone something? How do we balance too much commercial, too much residential, right. Too much industrial and trying to come up with that unique balance.

And it's a it's a very hard thing doing city planning, but jazz is absolutely integral in that where they can figure out those balances. So you mentioned mapping route analysis deliveries, city planning, you're talking about urban utilization. Yeah. I mean, this is just a it's massive technology. One of the things and one of the goals of this podcast is to just put some good information out there about this stuff, because no one's really evangelizing the power of GIS and geospatial intelligence.

So hopefully we can do that. Okay. So you mentioned some some maybe governmental uses of it. What are some ways that maybe the average everyday person might leverage a GIS and and why isn't everyone doing this? Well, I think people are okay.

Waze, Google Maps, Apple Maps. Right that the location component of here's where I'm at here's where I need to get to what's the best way to get me there right behind the scenes in that that you don't think about is there is a GIs powering that right figuring out what's the best way to get you there, what's the fastest way to get you there? What's the way that gets you there without any toll roads? Right.

And so all these different ways that you can ask that question, if you're asking that technically to a GIs saying I want you to get me there in the cheapest route and the cost could be anything from time distance, dollar cost, right? So avoid toll roads, whatever the case may be. People are asking GIs, you know, or GIS questions throughout the day. They just may not realize that they're asking a GI ask these questions. Right? They just see it as an app on their phone.

See it as an app on their phone. There's Google Maps, all these. But behind the scenes, we had to do all the data collection. We have to figure out what's the speed limit on each of these each of these roads. Right. So that it doesn't route you through residential neighborhoods and it keeps you on a thoroughfare or a highway to get you there faster. But it's all attributes of that road that you can figure out, you know, and then the open source piece comes into play.

Waze is really good with the open source piece where you get traffic reports, locations of police, roads that are closed, slowdowns in traffic where it may route you around when there's an accident. Right. And so they open source and that crowdsourced reporting piece comes into play as well. And again, that's got a geospatial component to it. There is a policeman here in the median, right? There is a car stranded on the side of the road. Be careful, I'm sure. Look around. This for cops love is.

Yeah. So my my son in law is is a state trooper but they they use Waze as well. So when someone reports a policeman, like. They just move. They move, they go to another location. So but yeah, they. We need a cold report. And then somehow they. They've got, they've got Waze as well. So Yeah. They use it. They use it too. That's, that's funny. Well, that's cool. So to me, what stands out is that you mentioned something about attributes.

You may be just just basic rundown of what is an attribute and why why did you use that word as a gas professional as opposed to data about this road? Yeah, so it's that's exactly what it is, right? An attribute is, is a characteristic about the road or some sort of property. And when we're talking roads, right, we may talk about different things. What's it surface type, right? Is that asphalt? Is it dirt? Is it concrete?

Because when you're talking about planning and road maintenance, that comes into play, right? How many lanes are in that road? Is that divided, undivided highway? All these different things, speed limit. When was the last time it was reserved, fixed? All these different things about the road, they matter to some people. They may not matter to everybody, but they matter to some people. Right. The general public tends to care about things like, is it closed or is it open? Can I use it?

How fast can I go on it? How fast can I go without being detected? Right. So are the police around. But you know, all these different things about the road that they care about, you know, is this a main thoroughfare in areas up north or where we have very inclement weather? Does this road get plowed first, second, third, fourth, fifth. Right. And so when there's inclement weather, you may vary your route to work based off of which roads get plowed first. And all that comes down to inside of the.

And strategies. There's a data point assigned to that road and it has all of this information on it. Yeah. And the city planners may also take into account, right, like average traffic flow on it where they may designate like this isn't a main highway, but this road gets used more. So if we're talking about plowing, we've got to plow that one. And then you get into, you know, state and local governments and who's responsible for the road maintenance and the upkeep and everything else.

And so that also comes into play where the average person doesn't think about it. But if something is a state highway versus a national highway versus an interstate, all that, you know, stewardship of the road comes into play. But that's again, that's another attribute of the road is who owns it, who's responsible for its maintenance. Right, right. So on the city, state, local front, they're using geographic information systems for a bevy of things that we spoke about.

Also open, you can maybe enlighten people on the way that the military and particularly special operations forces use a GIS obviously don't reveal anything classified or anything like that, but maybe some some interesting knowledge on that. Yeah. So I guess I'll, I'll say, you know, I guess I'll caveat it with a quote from Jack Dangerman, who said that the application of GIS is limited only by the imagination of those who use it. So how we can use a GIS, what we can make it do?

And you know, I've built my career off of trying to make the GIs do things that maybe it wasn't intended to do. Right. You know, the the tools, the data sets and everything else, tweaking those, whether that's with code or different tools or different applications to make it do what a customer needs it to do. And maybe not necessarily what the tool was intended to do. And so that comes from getting to know the tools really well.

And our military and the analysts and the, you know, the geospatial analysts, the imagery analysts are all source analysts and analysts. Everybody that we have is really good at what they do. They're very they're very highly. Cut out to the 35 golfs of the world. And the 12. Marketing is. And the entire 020 200 series in the Marine Corps, the, you know. 0 to 4 one zero. Two four one's 3160 ones. Right. Everybody, you know. Air Force Two, one and one. Never forget the Air Force.

Are one and zeros are one. And one's everybody. Right. Our whole. Series, you and Guy. Space Force. I don't I don't know yet. If they have a go, I. Wouldn't be zero. It would have be moon end in the space. Force space in. Space. And yeah well it comes down so there's going to have to be a or I'm sure it already exists some type of GIs for space. Well they're absolutely they're absolutely right. And that's that's. That's part of it is, you know, understanding where things are.

We talk about it with regard to the earth and where where they are and their location on the earth. Our military is very highly trained and very knowledgeable in using GIs to know and understand things. They use GIs for, you know, base maintenance, right? Understanding all the buildings where they're at, how old the buildings are, you know, when were the last refurbish? What's the square footage of it? Right.

If you have flooding in a military base, they can instantly calculate, you know, knowing where the flood was and which buildings were affected. Like, okay, this square footage of buildings, we need to order this much new flooring. We're going to have to redo the flooring in this in this area. Right. And so the GIS helps them in in a lot of different areas from just, you know, things like base base maintenance operations, sustainment to transportation.

You know, and we talk about the movement of material personnel when we're having a mobilization or just a regular movement. Right? When the 82nd Airborne gets mobilized, you know, or the 101st, when they when they get mobilized, like there's a component in in Eastern Europe right now. Right. What does that look like? And how do we move all those people, the gear, the computers, the vehicles, everything they need? Right. The GIS is is super helpful in that because we can figure all that out.

We can figure out capacity of airplanes, ships. Right. And so there's an entire command for the military, the U.S. Transportation Command, that helps figure all that out, that when we need to move people, materials, and then each of the component commands and the geographic commands have geospatial analysts as well that help decision makers and policymakers when they're doing their planning. And that can be down to the tactical or mission level. And that and that aspect of it.

So, so geospatial on the military side, it's kind of broken down into two components. I might be I might be wrong about this, but you can correct me if I'm wrong. You have the the the planning of things like talked about like facilities, engineering, new bases, things like that. And then you have the intelligence side, the geospatial intelligence. Is that is that pretty accurate? Yeah, I think it's. Probably a good way to think of it. The Army kind of does that distinction between. Right.

So you have like the 35 series, right? So more Intel based and then you have like the 12 Yankee, which is on the engineering side, right? So in the in the Corps of Engineers. Right. And so they're very much kind of split between intel and engineering. The Marine Corps tends to blend those. And so you get a little bit of a blend between them. But it is probably a good distinction between, you know, like extracting information. Intel, right.

And and taking data, raw data, adding the context to it, the information piece to it, to where it becomes intelligence and whether that's actionable or informative or whatever the case may be still exists on the like engineering and maintenance and sustainment side as well.

But maybe there's not that, you know, operational and tactical piece to it where we're looking at, you know, making some time, time based and time dominant decisions where we're very constrained with what we're doing, need to make decisions quickly, either for the protection or sustainment of life. Gotcha. So on the geo inside the intelligence side, right. They rely on the US for what, what are the types of things that they're leveraging the guys for generally in general.

I mean it's, it's the decision making piece, right. So the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is one of our combat support agencies that the United States government has to help with extracting the geographic information, the context, the patterns, the trends for what's going on. And that's, you know, that comes into play with safety of navigation, right? So then sugar helps with safety of navigation, whether that's the NGO, the National Geospatial Intelligence.

I noticed that a lot of like most people just say NGO. But you're right is it is better English to say the NCAA. Yeah. So kind of like. Shout out to the NGOs. To the NGOs, very much like the Ohio State University. Right. So the Buckeyes. The Buckeyes. So they they have an entire combat support entity that's in charge of those things. Like I said, safety of navigation, whether that's aeronautical or nautical.

Um, so they produce the charts that basically ensure safe navigation in the skies on the waterways of the world. They have a key piece in the intelligence process and in the decision making process and feeding critical, timely information to our policymakers and our national decision makers. Okay. So that kind of Segways into an interesting question I want to ask you about not necessarily the question, but I posted this video on my Instagram.

I think it's at and the show and it's just a video of Joe Rogan and Tim Dillon. And they're learning about what NGOs for the first time, they're on the Internet and they're looking at intelligence agencies and they're like, what is that? Right. So I posted this on my Instagram. Go to my Instagram if you want to see the video. But some of the comments that people have over here are they're so enlightening to me.

They really describe what people actually know or think about this the space, this geospatial intelligence space. And I don't blame people for not knowing what this stuff is. I don't blame people for for being naive and tangentially hearing something and forming an opinion that's probably on the intelligence community, just do a better job of communicating what they do, who they are, where they're at, who are the people involved. But some of these comments are hilarious.

I wanted to just read some of these comments. All right. This is from. I won't put their name out there. Sorry. Instagrammer random instagrammer six. So in the in the video describes the fact that there are 16,000 employees at NJEA when the comments was 16,000 friends and family of our senators collecting 90 K your salary to do almost nothing. It's like government welfare for rich people a.k.a corruption. I mean, come on, dude.

Yeah. That's a I mean, that's a blatant misunderstanding of of the agency what it does, the value it provides for our nation. Right, right, right. Well I did reply to that with like you might want to look into that a little bit. The fact that NJ as far as intelligence agency goes, they're one of the good ones. They support the military, they support all of the other agencies with some of the things that you're talking about with from logistics to just straight intelligence.

How about like DHS supporting natural disaster recovery? I mean, NGOs, fantastic agencies. So it's not I could see people kind of be in conspiracy with with like NSA and CIA. But yeah, I just don't I don't view engine that like all right. Here's here's another here's another geospatial is basically mapping the world with light our technology like Google maps 3D feature so close close that's. A component of it. Right. So that's that's one part of it.

You know, I think one of the great things about about GIs, about the geo and and geospatial world is you can specialize in in one niche of it and you can make a whole entire career on that niche and become an expert in it and not touch any of the other pieces. Right. So you can become a lead our expert and be an absolute expert on LIDAR and know absolutely nothing about. Right bathymetry. Right. Which is a very similar technology. But it's underwater. Right? But, but you know nothing about it.

You know, concepts, principles of how it works. But you're not an expert on it. You're an expert on, like, LiDAR. Right. And so, again, you can you know, and then, you know absolutely nothing about maintenance, about road maintenance and the way that you use a GIS and city planning. And so you can you can develop an entire career based off of one niche of GIs. Right, right.

And and one of the things that I will, you know, shout out to our to our military and the and the way that we train our geospatial professionals in the military is we give them good exposure to the breadth of GIs and all the different things we can do. And again, you know, going back to that quote from Jack Dangerman. Right, it's just limited by the imagination of those who use it.

And once you know and understand how this works, you know what it is, what it what it can do, really, you're just limited by your understanding and of the tools, applications, processes that can help you either manipulate or extract that information to answer questions. And and to your point, in the military, I was a geospatial intelligence analyst. Geospatial is what they call it. And I didn't really fully understand what a genius was until after two years later, after I got out.

And then once you understand what it is, right, it's it applies to everything. It's about understanding, location and all those things. Once you understand what it what its capabilities are, you start to notice areas like they could use GIs over there or men. If there was some some of this data here, we could get to a better a better answer here. Like if you ever if you've ever been to.

I don't know, a football game and you I remember one time I went to a Bucs game and shot out Tampa Bay box even though they they aren't going to make the Super Bowl this year. Tom Brady, please, please stay just one more year. But it but I remember entering the stadium and it was just packed full people like just getting in the gate. It was packed full of people. And I remember thinking, hmm, well, this could have been planned better, right?

Where the parking lots were, how people were funneling into the into Raymond James Stadium. But once you understand what a genius is, you start to notice that we do have the capability to plan things better. If more people understood what it is and what it can do, all those things.

So yeah, you see that, you know, so the Cardinals, Saint Louis Cardinals on their tickets and I would I would hope that the Bucs do something very similar where they know what section you're in right on the ticket and it will tell you which you know, which gates are the best ones to use right now. That's that's a geospatial component, too. You're sitting at a dedicated geographic location within the stadium and they know, hey, based off of that section.

ROWSEY It's best for you to use gate one, gate to North Gate, South Gate, whatever the case may be. But yeah, it comes down to using location, information and very simple things like I'm going to see a Bucs game, right? I'm going to see a Cardinals game. And so, yeah, GIS absolutely comes into play in that. And then it gets into the whole, you know, where is the best place for a parking structure, right?

You know, growing up we had season tickets to the Dodgers and oddly enough, our our parking location. So they were on the third base line right above the Dodger dugout. Our dedicated parking location where we parked was basically on the opposite end of where we were sitting. It was just outside the right field pavilion there at Dodger Stadium.

And so where we parked, where the dedicated spot was or, you know, section was where we could park was completely opposite for where we were, where we were going to sit. And it gets into that like this could have been better planned out. Like, why couldn't we park over in this section that's closer to where our tickets are, right? Especially since they were, you know, they were expensive tickets that were. Right, right. There at. Dodger side, third base line.

But yeah, it's it's one of those things where it comes into play and you think of those things and you ask yourself this question like, Well, this is silly, why are we parking all the way over here? This is nowhere near where our section is, and you don't really think about that component to it. But yeah, 100% the location comes into play. And like I said, it's music in the background, music. In the back. Music in the background.

But if it works and everything's fine, you don't even think about it. But when it's done poorly, you absolutely notice. Yeah. Yeah. Um, let's go. I'm glad that you're. You're a sports fan, even though I would like to recruit you to be a Tampa Bay Rays fan, because we need all the fans we can get. They can't get anybody in that stadium. And that's actually a fun geospatial challenge right there is where do you put the Tampa Bay Rays Stadium?

Their stadium is located in Saint Pete across the problem. The problem with the Tampa Bay Rays Stadium in Saint Pete is that people from Tampa don't want to drive across the Gandy Bridge. They don't want to they don't want to drive across the Howard Franklin. They want to stay in Tampa. So, you know, there's always bickering about, you know, where that stadium should go because they can't get anybody in the stadium. But I think that's always a fun, interesting spatial challenge. All right.

So along that line of challenges, what are some some common challenges that a gas person faces on a day to day basis? So I think probably the most common one that most GIS professionals tend to face is either access to data or access to current relevant data. Right. One of the biggest things that you spend your time doing as a GIS professional is trying to find the data that you need to help you answer the question.

And so whether that's behind some sort of paid access, because you have people that are collecting it for business reasons. Right. You know, but people that want that timely, accurate information to make decisions, you know, just simple things that you you're trying to find that information. And then where do you get that data, downloading that data? Is it in the right format that I can use?

Do I have the right software that I can then use this data to, to answer the questions that I need to answer? Right. So so data, data. Data and data access, I think is probably the biggest, biggest challenge that most professionals face. And we're making leaps and bounds improvements. Um, you know, year over year for access to data, open portals, you know, open data portals, cities, municipalities, state governments, county governments, they're making data more and more available every day.

And, and they're doing it as a service to the public and making that data available so people can make those decisions or use that data to make decisions. That's one of the things I love about is if you go in there, there's so many datasets that you can use. And yeah, you have all these tapestries and things like that that you can you can look at. So there's there's a good question for you. Yeah, there's the ultimate genius question. This is this is Steve Stoute, hip expert and genius.

He's been doing this for how long? Long. Older than my kids. I don't know. Yeah, decades. A few decades now. A few. Decades. Jazz The question is art. Yes, yeah. Or Q. Jazz. I use both. Right. And I guess I'll say lot of art. Yes, a lot of the libraries, the back end libraries are very similar or the same that they use. I'm certified in and using both got certifications in both where you are. Yeah. But I've you know I worked ten years for Asbury and then worked a couple of years.

As Asbury, which is the company that makes art. Makes ArcGIS. Yeah. Environmental Systems Research Institute, originally founded as now just goes by Asbury after fighting it for years where everybody was calling them Ezra and they kept saying, no, we're not as we were. ESR i it stands for something, right? Then finally just capitulated and said, All right, we're ezri. But yeah, so I use, I use art. Yes, I've used ArcGIS since it was created from multiple components of software.

And so I've used ArcGIS for a couple of decades now, use qgis now for a decade and a half where I've just been using, I use both. I use for different, different components, different reasons. What are some of those reasons why you might use. Q Just over. ArcGIS When I'm dealing with geo packages. Q Just can open in and. Work a package. So a geo package is a specific file package, file format that kind of contains multiple layers. Okay. And data.

Q Just is able to kind of open it and play with it a little easier than art. Yes. Which would tend to want to convert it to a different file format in order to use it, exploit it so I can play with the the geo packages that are available for my county. They make a lot of those available via the geo package file format.

I can download those, extract the information or use what you use the information and kind of play around, look for parcels, look for look for land, etc. that I'm you know, whatever my interest is. Okay, now what about an instance that you would use ArcGIS over? Kudus So I guess I would say there's probably more often that I'm leaning into the ArcGIS realm, having used it for for years and years, I would train people on it, you know, as Re and Enger NGO would pay for my travel to fly me around.

They would, you know, hire as re to to train their users. And so as re enger would would pay for me to fly around the world to train users on it. So including to their affiliates in the UK, Australia etc.. So I, you know, part of my career has been training users on how to use the software.

You know, one of the best things that that I've been able to do is help people learn and understand the software so that they're there as fast as they can be with answering the questions that they're that their managers, bosses, decisionmakers are asking them. So when they need to ask a question like, hey, where is the best place to put something, you know, or, Hey, what does this new geopolitical development, what does that mean? Are we going to have to evacuate an embassy? How do we do that?

What are we looking at? Where's the best place we can land a plane? Where is the best place we can land helicopters? Right. So whatever the question is, helping people become as fast as they can to get those answers as quickly as I can. So years and years, decades of using arches, I'm a lot better in that. So I tend to default right to using arches and using as re tools and software because I know how to use it really well.

And so I can answer questions probably quicker using that than I can other ones. So that's your hammer. Yeah. All the guys nails. For all for all the gas nails. That's my favorite hammer. Right. But there's a lot of different kinds of hammers. Okay, as well. Right. So it's a very utilitarian that I'm a I'm able to know and understand the software, the tool sets, the data models so that I can you know, it's a little easier for me to use and rely on the ezri suite of tools and to answer questions.

I gotcha makes that makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. Go with what you want. So you mentioned you worked as re for a few years. You worked at some other geospatial companies, just companies. What would you say is your most interesting, most interesting project that you've worked on or maybe a story from one of your projects?

Or there's a lot, but I think probably one of the the the more fun projects, you know, one of the ones that I worked on that I still love that I still look back on with a lot of fondness. Was working with South Carolina the government state of South Carolina on their the infrastructure and critical facilities. Right. And so it was a lot of critical facility analysis you know, where they have critical vulnerabilities.

So a lot of these different you know, whether that's universities, power plants, etc., there was a whole statewide model for all these different facilities, their vulnerabilities, their their assets, how they're protecting them and everything else. So it was a whole analysis for the state of South Carolina. It was a fun project. It was a great project to work on. And then we delivered like all these. Different interfaces, the level of complexity or.

It was understanding all the different things that go into managing a state, you know, all the energy places, all the water treatment plants and everything, prisons, you know, all the different things that go into a state where it really opened my eyes for how a GIs can be used for doing vulnerability assessments, you know, those critical vulnerability assessments, how they're going to mitigate those, you know, and all the different ways that they can use a GIS to know and understand

the state of South Carolina, their vulnerabilities, you know, whether that's from hurricanes. SNOW It's like whatever it is, they were trying to help understand how do we you know, where are we vulnerable? What do we need to protect? How can we protect that and how do we protect that? As a good steward of state resources, finance is taxpayer money, etc.. And so it was really it opened my eyes for how a GIs can get used to basically help protect the public. Right.

And how do we provide services without being, you know, reckless with with the resources, with the infrastructure and and everything else that you have. What was your role in that project? So part data analyst, part programmer. We, you know, we had to come up with like a viewing thing and an ability for them to just like pick a facility and it would instantly tell them, like, what, what are their vulnerabilities?

What are the, you know, what's the critical assessment of this particular facility, you know, where it falls in its ranking in the state and everything? So I was the lead analyst, you know, working with my manager on that project, basically understanding all the data, collecting all the data and then packaging it all up in in a good viewer for the state of South Carolina to do that.

So if I'm a entry level jazz person or I'm just learning about jazz, there are some things I can do to become Steve Stoute. Yeah. So besides work at these places for 20 years and decades of decades of experience. Yeah. So I mean, as I look back on my career and you know, how did I, how did I get to where I am today, you know, what is it that I learned? I had a I had a manager who took a chance on me.

You know, I had the schooling, you know, I went to school and I learned the foundational concepts principles. But then I had a manager at Azeri who took a chance on me for a brand new team that he was starting up. And I just I tried to learn as much as I could about that project we were working on. And luckily we were in charge of building a brand new piece of the Azeri software that didn't exist at the time. And so we were. What is that piece called now?

Now it's the aeronautical solution, right? So at the time it was the production line tool set for pelts, which then became part of the, you know, aeronautical solution, which then became part I think there's like an ports piece to it, you know, for airport maintenance. And then there's a whole piece for planning out, you know, aeronautical routes and navigation, aids and everything else. But we were trying to do database driven cartography, right?

And so it was a project where they had been doing manual cartography and hand-drawn on maps for years. And we were trying to prove that you could use a GIS to do this very high quality cartography. And so my career started by making the software do what it had never been designed to do before because we didn't have the tools to do it right. And we were we were trying to create them. And so we were trying to figure out.

I had to learn really quickly, Well, what tools do we have that can that could actually help us do this? And then where do we need new tools and what do we need the tools to do? Right. And so it was really knowing and understanding the software very in depth to see, you know, does a tool do 80% of what we need it to? Does it do 90% of what we need it to?

And then if there's some sort of deficiency there, can we either change the tool to to do what we needed to do or do we need a whole new tool to be written and if we need a whole new tool to be written, then we start doing, you know, that type of programing and development where we're defining the data that's going to come into it, right? So this is the data that's coming in. This is what I need the tool to do in these scenarios. And then this is what I need the output to be.

And so we got really good, our team got really good at knowing and understanding all the different tools that were available and then what we needed written for us. And so we had some developers on our team, what we needed written for us to be able to get out what we, what we had promised to deliver to the customer. And so, you know, we joke about things like, you know, building the plane in flight, right? So but that's kind of what we were doing.

Like we had we had promised the customer something. And so we were trying to make it do what we needed it to do. So if you're if you're a young guy, young guys. Professional, I would say no and understand the tools that you have available to you get to be an expert in that little niche of what you're asked to do. Don't just become a button pusher where you know, they can we can train button pushers.

But what really helps and the people that I ended up training and the ones that stayed in the guys world and have also made careers of it, I taught them what the tool was doing, why it's doing, what it's doing. How do you recognize if it gives you an answer that you're not expecting? Right. And so, you know, very much like a calculator where, you know, I can train you to input numbers and to do calculations on a calculator.

But when you press, you know, two plus two and it says 565 for two plus two, and you write five, six, five, right? A trained professional looks at that and goes, well, hold on a sec. Right. That's probably not the right answer. Right. And you go, well, but the calculator said five, six, five, and you go, Well, let's back that up and look at it. Right. Is it possible that you maybe had something else stored in there? Right. Something that gave you an unexpected value.

So very similar to that people that are starting in their GIS world, know and understand the tools, what they're doing, what you expect out of it. And then is what you're getting out of that tool, what you expected so that you know and understand how it works. And then once you know and understand how the tool works, then you're able to do things like this wasn't exactly what the tool was written for, but you asked me a question about something else.

I know this tool can do like 95% of what you just asked me to do, even though that's not what it was written for. But I can use it to do that right, or knowing how to use the different tools and kind of chain them together to be able to answer a question. Right. And if people are able to do that as they start their careers, they become very utilitarian and they're able to provide more value then, you know, you ask me to push the button, I push the button and it gives an output, right?

And so you don't want to be that person that just, you know, I push button and I get an answer. You want to be the person where they can come to that. You know, where the question then come to you with that question say, hey, this is what we're thinking. How can we how can we get there? Right. And that that comes into play with things like, you know, we need to we need to site a new stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays. What's the best location? How do we get you know, these are candidate locations.

What would be the best location and what are the you know, what are the the side effects of it? What are the positives and the negatives for each location for doing like site survey and site analysis? When you have people that know and understand that yes tools, they can start doing fun projects like that versus just, hey, digitize these roads right? I mean, everybody starts out their career doing things like that. That's what I, you know, started doing digitization as well.

I can college, right, digitizing maps but eventually you get to the point where you get asked those questions. Now you're getting paid not just for like your manual labor, but you're getting paid to think. And because I can ask you questions, right. Um, that's a good segway to my next question, which is what, what is the best book and or piece of advice you've ever received about this profession? About this profession. Could be a book, a piece of advice.

Yeah. I mean, the history of GIs by Dr. Tomlinson's a good one, right? That's a good one for Tomlinson. Roger Tomlinson. Roger Tomlinson. Yeah. So that's a great book, really understanding GIS Geospatial, where. You got your cholera story. From. No, I am. I caught that cholera story that actually came from a very early GI like GIS 101 class. And I took. It you still about. Decades in debt. Well I mean it was fresh, right? Like I'm old. So it was like, you know, you're not that old doctor, Dr.

Snow. It just figured this out. And then they told us about it. And then, you know, decades later, Jack Dangerman founds. Ajayi Right, right. So it was real fresh in all of our minds that, you know, Dr. Snow would figure it out. Cholera and yes, now. But I guess that's probably a really good book.

The History of Jazz. Some of the other ones, you know, I tend to nerd out on a lot of programing analysis and Python years ago I was I was lucky enough I was blessed to be at Asbury when we were making the decision to implement Python as a as a scripting language. And we as we paid to bring in Mark Lutz, who has written books on books on books on Python and Python programing and was trained by Mark Lutz in Python and Learning Python.

And so I learned from, you know, one of the key guys in the Python world scripting and the Python language and that's been like super beneficial and influential in my career. Why was Python chosen as the language of guys versus C Plus or any of these other languages? I think mainly the simplicity of it. So the library, the libraries are very easy to write, very easy to to override things to, you know, create your own modules, variables, right?

So Python just becomes super easy and it just becomes a very common denominator for a lot of people in a, in a few lines of code, you can do phenomenal things, whether that's, you know, scripting analysis, extraction of data, manipulation of data, just, you know, but I got I got really good at using Python again to like make the software do what I needed it to do. So, yeah.

This is definitely one area we're going to you're going to make me look so naive any time we're talking about coding, get in there. Quick question. Yeah. What is go pandas. Someone explain this to me. Please go pandas. All right. So Python and you know, there's a whole whole section of Python and pandas is a way of of using what are called data frames. So if you think of a table based table type structure, you're probably most familiar with something like Excel, right?

Where you have got, you know, rows, columns, etc.. So pandas, a dataframe that you can execute in code and you're able to manipulate data very quickly. Go, pandas is the geospatial enabled component of of a PANDAS data frame. So go pandas is a way where we can manipulate and extract information, you know, geospatial information.

So if you think of pandas as like the attribute table of like we used the example a while ago on roads, right road type, you know, road surface number of lanes, speed limit, you know, who owns it, who's responsible for the maintenance and then the geospatial component would be all the coordinates that make up that particular road segment, you know, what's the road's name, etc.. So the Japan is, is a way of executing that code in.

We tend to use like Jupiter Jupiter Labs, but it started as something called Iron Python, which is why the the file extensions are, you know, I pi you know, i r python. Okay, that's good. Thank you. I've always wondered what Japan is. As I always said, you know, you know something? Somebody bringing in Japan is like, I don't even know what that is. You got you got pandas, red pandas and go pandas, of course. Yes. Okay. We could sit here and talk for hours about pandas. Should pandas are awesome.

Okay. Nothing wrong with that. But kind of along that same lines recently we've seen this explosion of the use of A.I. So if you look at things like mid journey, which you're able to go in and type in a prompt and it will pop out basically whatever you think of know, if you say, I want to write a dinosaur riding a tricycle on the moon, it will make something

that looks like that. Yeah. If you use dolly to which is open the eyes are kind of similar to mid journey where it's where it's a text prompt and you can create imagery from there. And then there's another application called Lenzen where you just upload some photos and it, it manipulates and uses extracts training data in order to pop out new, new portraits.

So there's, there's probably a week and I guess it was a very quick, quick trending topic where everyone was putting up these portraits like, oh, these ports where they come from. There's often that lens app. Yep. What I'm getting at is that I feel like today we're entering the age of artificial intelligence. I think it's mainly pushed by a couple of things, which is the explosion of these applications.

But Chad JPT, in my opinion, is really where, where when people are able to access that for the first time is when people start to go, Oh, okay, this is what the future could look like because Chad Beatty has a large scale language model. You can go in there and it will all write code for you. One of the first things I did was ask it to build some geo referencing code and then it pulled in geo pandas. And that's where I was like, What is this, Japan?

This. But the point is, these new tools that are coming up, these AI tools, what is interesting about them, what do you think about them as a just a professional in the space and where do you see it going? Yeah. So, you know, it's a great question. I liken it very much to I guess, you know, I use the calculator analogy before, but I liken it to a calculator. So my dad, his degree was in mathematics. You know, my dad learned on a slide rule, right?

And then Texas Instruments basically started making calculators ubiquitous where people are just using calculators all the time. So he started, you know, he learned on a slide rule, was doing calculus on slide rule. And then calculators started becoming more and more ubiquitous. When I was in high school, you know, calculators were awesome. We had graphing calculators and everything else. We weren't allowed to use them on standardized exams. Right. Advanced Placement, you know, College Board of

Advanced Placement Exams. As our finals, we weren't allowed to use calculators. You had to learn the concepts and principles, how to do it manually. You could use a calculator, you know, when you're doing homework and everything else, but we had to learn how to do it all manually. All my kids were able to use calculators on all their standardized exams. Right. And you look at that and you go, Well, that's not very fair. We had to learn how to do it the old way. And I look at it the same, right?

We're in this world now where we're using the computers to do stuff for us. Right? And I'm very much a big proponent. That's why I love scripting, is if I can make the computer do something for me so I don't have to do it right. That's awesome. And I look at the the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and I look at that as that's the next step, right? And we have a lot of people that are stuck in this world of like me looking at my kids going, well, that's not fair.

You're how are you able to use a, you know, something that does this for you and you don't understand what's really going on behind the scenes? And you don't you don't know how how you know, we did this pure, right, whether that's writing stories, writing code portraits, everything else, where people are now leveraging computers to get those answers or to do that or to give you that head start on it. I look at it as the next advent and we have to learn how to leverage that for for our benefit.

I don't think we're looking at some sort of Skynet. Right. Some, you know, artificial intelligence is going to take over the world. Skynet is going to become sentient and. Right. So I don't think we're there. But I do think. This becomes if the. Giant if the gas becomes self-aware, hopefully the roads get plowed quicker. Yeah, we potholes get fixed quicker. As soon as a pothole gets developed it, dispatches a team to go fix the bottle. That'd be awesome, right? Awesome.

But I think, you know, with this advent of of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it's something we have to learn how to work with and to leverage it. College professors are in that world right now where they're trying to figure out like, how do you ban students from using AI to write their papers? You can write like an AI just passed, you know, as MBA exam from Wharton. Right. Wasn't Professor gave an AI I think. Right. Just passed an MBA exam from a warrant. Professors.

So how do you stop it from doing that? Well, you're probably not going to stop it. The question is you can have the AI kick you out things, but you understand what it's giving you. Do you understand what you're getting? Right. And so I had a colleague now just yesterday he asked GPT three to write him some python code, you know, hey, write me some python code to query all the users in this guy's portal and print out all the users in the gas portal. And so it kick them out a code snippet.

And I said, Hey, that's good to make it better. You could have asked Chad GPT these different questions. Hey, I want you to give me some code. Write me a python code that will query a portal for all the gas users in the portal. And give it a few other criteria. Parameter ise the portal url parameter ise the username and password. I also want to obfuscate the password when I pass you that username and password I want to use maybe an encrypted file. Right? So a lot of different things

that you can ask. Right. And so it gives you a starting point. But if you don't know what you're what you're dealing with, the output from the API doesn't mean anything. Right? So when it tells you here's some geo panda's code and you got I have no clue what geo Panda is. Right. So you ask the AI to do something for you, but if you don't know, like understand about it, it gives you an answer, right.

And I think we're very much in that kind of like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the answer is 42. The problem is we didn't understand the question, right? So it gives you the answer. But if you don't understand what it is you were really asking, you go, what does that even mean? Oh, maybe we have a little more to learn, right? So we can ask these questions of, of eyes and of VML. But, you know, I think one of the one of the things about it is understand that answer.

One of the funnier stories about I write is the Marines who just defeated the image detection. Right, the object detection. So it was trained to pick up humans walking right. So they train this machine learning for like identifying human characteristics, you know, gait, arm, swing, leg swing to be able to pick them up. And then the goal was to make it to this machine without getting detected.

And so the way that these Marines were able to defeat detection was they hit on cardboard boxes because the machine was trained to pick up on humans walking. Right. Not a cardboard box moving within its field of view. Right. It didn't understand what it was looking at. So, I mean, that's the big thing with machine learning as we're we're training it based off what we want it to be able to identify.

And so if you give it something that you didn't train it on, it doesn't know what to do with it, like a cardboard box moving across its field of view, it thinks, oh, that's not important, right? I don't I don't need to worry about that. Whereas if a human was walking across, it would have flagged it and said, Hey, I identified a human walking. And so I think it's one of the funnier stories.

Anecdotes about AI and ML is you can train it, but the people that trained it were those Marines and they knew 100% how to defeat it, which is we trained it to identify people walking, right? So you said a few interesting things in that. The first interesting thing was that you mentioned the Marines did something smart. So hey, hey, now, as an Army guy, I'm flabbergasted. No, but you mentioned that GPT three passed the MBA exam. Yeah. Which is amazing. Well, guess what?

It's also passed the law school exam. So this is from CBS News. Jonathan Choi, a professor at Minnesota University Law School, gave Chad Djibouti the same test faced by students consisting of 95 multiple choice questions and 12 essay questions. Chad in a white paper titled Chad Beatty Goes to Law School. So look that up. If you're curious to what this is published on Monday, he and his coauthors reported the bot scored a C-plus overall.

So, hey, it didn't get an A-plus, but these get degrees a C, a c, a c plus a chad. GPT has passed the law school exam at Minnesota University, which is probably better than anything I would ever do. Yeah, it's our it's already got me beat, right. So, but I think, you know, a very interesting thing about it, right, is it's drawing on the collective knowledge that we have and that we've recorded and that we've made available in all these different databases and repositories and everything else.

One of the funnier things I've ever heard about, you know, what would you tell somebody if you travel to the past and it's, you know, Hey, I've got a device in my pocket that contains the entirety of human thought and existence, right? That I have access to. And I use it to argue with strangers and look at cat videos. Right. So the the A.I. has access to that entirety of human thought that we've recorded, that we've got available via repositories, databases and everything else.

Computers are really good at finding, you know, looking for that information and finding relevant pieces. And that's exactly what it does. I mean, if you were to write a research paper, that's what you're doing, right? You're going out and you're doing the research. You're manually doing the research. The key is the computers can do that very quickly. Right. They can do that research figure out what's relevant, what's not relevant. Okay. That's more relevant than this, right?

When we do that with things like ranking scores and everything else. Right. Whether that's when you're looking for something, you know, in a search engine. And how does it identify the page one results versus the page two results? Right. And kind of the joke about, man, if you have to go to page two. You know, you're looking for something. Yes. You're you're really. Looking. Right. But that's what the AI is doing. Right, is it? It knows and understands. Hey, this is what I'm looking for.

So when it needs to answer questions, whether that's on an MBA exam, whether that's a bar exam, you know, or a law school thing, we ask it the questions it has access to that entirety of of human existence via the, you know, databases and repositories. And it can pull back that information and regurgitate back to you. And you're like, does that answer your question? Right. And apparently in this instance, it's like, yeah, to a C plus level.

I mean, right, the computer got it right to a C plus level. You know, we kind of jokingly said, right, C's get degrees, but it was able to do it. So, you know, same way with the with the MBA exam that the Wharton professor administered. Right. It was able to answer those questions and kind of regurgitate back, you know, the way you asked this question. I think I understand it enough to give you this information.

And the professors go, yeah, that's that's pretty much mostly that's what I was looking for. So it's no different than what a student would do in research and, you know, Internet research and library research and everything else. They would do the same thing. The computers does it a whole lot faster. I know a lot of researchers have started to actually add chat GPT as coauthor on their on their paper. So that's pretty interesting.

And you mentioned that, you know, a lot of college professors are freaking out about this and rightfully so. I'll give a shout out to my wife who has started to integrate it into her curriculum and in fact encourage the students to use it so long. That same lines. What you're saying is, you know, she's encouraging the students to use the tools now because they're all going to get better.

And the ones that can master at this point are going to be the ones that drive drive the future of our economy. Really. Yeah. So I mean, very, very similar to how I talked about the GIS tools and you know, they're written to do this particular thing, you know, but I made a career on how do I, how do I tweak them? How do I make them do what I need it to do to answer questions for customers, right.

Very similar to the people that know and understand A.I., things like Chad Lanza, etc., that can use them and leverage them. Maybe not necessarily in the way that someone thought of, but use them and leverage them to be able to answer the correct questions. Right.

And so whether that's in gives, you know, gives you a head start, like, you know, we joke about things like, you know, stacks, yields and stack exchange rate as a as a developer and as someone that uses Python and does a lot of coding work, I use Stack Exchange a ton right, where you're trying to figure out how to do something, how do I do this? Right. So I need code that's going to enable me to do, you know, take in x, manipulate it with y, get Z out.

But if I can just ask Chad, GPT, hey, can you just give me a code snippet that's going to do this? And it's like, here you go. Well, that saves me a ton of time I don't have to then tweet code because Chad GPT knows and understands and has access to things like stack exchanging goes oh hey, I found this code snippet. I can change it for you to be able to get out exactly what you need. So I think, you know, professors and students that know, know that and understand how to leverage it. Mm hmm.

To be able to train people to be better thinkers. Right. Let the machines, you know, let the computer do what the computer can do. And then you become a more useful asset and resource because you understand and you can you can do things that the computer can't. Right. But you can leverage the computer to do all the, you know, the mundane things and the, you know, manual processing and batch processing.

And I can let the computer churn away at something while I go do something else, maybe go go to the gym. I don't know. But you know something. But that's I think that's one of the good, good aspects of of AI and knowing and understanding. If you know and understand those tools, you can make them do what you need it to do.

What are some areas in the GI space, geospatial intelligence space, where air is going to either have the largest impact already is having a large impact, or you could kind of see it in the future as being the the main use case. Uh, so I think, you know, I aspect, I think one of the, one of the ways I think back to the, the ghost world, right?

Because that's where a lot of my skills, experience and knowledge set is looking at things like GOP unrest, picking up sentiment off of tweets and other, you know, social media things where you're starting to see you, know something happens, there's a triggering event and something happens.

Now people are getting upset and now you're getting more phones in an area where people are tweeting and, it can start to extract sentiment from their tweets and you start seeing like, hey, something's happening here. Do we need to take a look at this? Do we need to call in, you know, first responders? You know, is this is this potentially going to get violent? Is this something that's going to become a larger geopolitical unrest event where.

What you're really talking about and this is super interesting, what you're really talking about is mapping out people's emotions. Yeah, I think that's one of the one of the key things, right, where I think and I can very quickly take a look at a lot of that and start to figure out like, is this a significant thing we should pay attention to or an insignificant thing we should pay attention to? You know, when you see a amassing of phones in the Tampa area and then a lot of negative sentiment.

But Tom Brady has retired. Tom Brady's retired or because Dak Prescott figured out how to throw a ball. Right, like whatever the case may be. Along that same lines, what is how did you watch the game between Dallas? Everybody. I was in Dallas for that game. So you had no choice. Okay. No. So you watch this game, Stockholm Syndrome. What was up with that kicker? I've never seen a field goal kicker.

Missed four straight extra points, four short extra points and I don't know if you saw the one he took after that. It got. Blocked. Yeah. But that one wasn't going to make it in either. And that was it. The next game? Yeah. What kind of stuff is going through these people's minds. Well I think he made the he made the first one. Right. But they did. Yeah. I think he missed four and then he made the fifth one. But one got blocked and but the thing about that one they got blocked.

If you look at the replay. It wasn't going it. Wasn't going in. It was blocked. But like an outside lineman, which should not be blocking a field goal. So I mean, you know, having played sports growing up, right, you get in your own head, you become you're you become your own worst enemy. You know, after that first one, you mess and you're like, okay, now I really have to make sure that I and then he's in his own head, you know, and then you mess up the second one.

Now he's really thinking about now he's concentrating too much and now he's not focusing on the fundamentals of, you know, laces out. Dan Right. So he's not focusing on those fundamentals. You know, he starts getting in his own head and then just everything starts compounding. And now you've missed three and now you've missed four. And you know, you start getting. Yeah. You become your own worst enemy and, that instance. So I think it's it's sadly in that realm. It's on a national stage now.

Everybody can see you failing, right where instead of kind of maybe that's happening on a little league field or on a, you know, middle school or high school field, it's now happening televised globally, right to everybody to see your failures and and understand just how difficult it is. Like, it's not it's not easy to do that. And these guys that are able to do it time after time after time, you know, and they asked Jerry Jones, like, hey, are you going to get a new kicker?

And he's no, absolutely not. Right. Like he's like he's made plenty of us for us during the season. If you look at if you look at his record during the season, I mean, he was he was money throughout the season and, you know, he was a lock every time he came up. Pretty much this one game. Man, are you. Are you a fan? No, a Cowboys fan. I, I grew up. Bengals. Browns now. I grew up in L.A. You know, when I joined the military, people were like, hey, what's your team? Yeah, okay.

And like, I don't one, they're like, Yeah, what? Everybody's got a tier, he's got an NFL team. But I grew up in L.A. during the years when both the Raiders and the Rams took off right. Like so Raiders went up north and the Rams went out to Saint Louis. And I joke about and I say, and no one noticed because we had we the L.A.

Kings during the Wayne Gretzky and Luc Robitaille was oh yeah, we had the Dodgers during those Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson years where and we had the Lakers during the Magic Johnson, you know, and the back to back to back championships were so I joke about and I say the NFL teams laughed and no one noticed because we had, you know, L.A. was still a championship city, that they were still winning, you know, the Stanley Cup and in other things, you know, not the Lombardi, but that was okay.

And so grew up, you know, more of a fan of basketball, baseball and hockey because you're there and and they're winning and you just kind of learn and love that. And just there was no NFL to learn and love. But, you know, now the couple teams are back, right? They've got the they got the Rams back and they got the Chargers now. And so, you know, people are able to to know and understand. But I moved to Saint Louis and I would joke about, you know, people like you live in Saint Louis now.

And I said, yeah, it's going to be good when I live in a city that has an NFL team and they're like, Oh, that's cold. But yeah, I just never really got into into NFL, got into college football during, you know, the high, you know, the heightened time in the heydays of like UCLA, USC rivalries. I just came to love college football a lot more than than NFL.

Okay. Well, that's interesting because I've always been an NFL and NFL fan, a college fan, because I just feel like if I'm going to spend my time watching football, I want to watch the best of the best, not some which is exploited. 20 year old. But you were you were in the area. I think there was just a recent posting of, you know, the last 15 years of college championships have come from this oval. Right.

And it and it was an oval that circled, you know, Alabama, South Carolina, northern Florida, where it's like other than like an other than an odd year of Ohio State winning. Right. Or the Ohio State for the Ohio State fans. Right. Other than that one odd year of Ohio State winning the bulk of college football championships has been in that south. Right. LSU, Alabama, Clemson, Florida, Georgia. Right. It's just been just a massive college football area.

So you grew up right there at the cusp of college football greatness. And I didn't like it. What I love about this, Steve, is it brings it all back to what we were talking about before. Geospatial. Yeah, the spatial pattern. Spatial pattern has emerged in the southeastern United States where football are bred and raised in mass, and that's caused them to go to universities which are nearby or at least. Or recruit people that are really good to come over there. Right. And and there you have it.

Now, that's where all the college championships are coming from. So the fast track. The genius in the air. Yeah. All everything happens in a location. That's right. Everything happens somewhere. So, you know, you're a reservist in the Navy, right? Yep. An intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve. Okay. So the officer in the Navy, you're the director of Geospatial Solutions? Yep. What about your leadership philosophy? You know, how what is your general philosophy on leadership?

How would you describe your own thought patterns? My thought patterns. My approach to leadership is, you know, I, I either will train or make sure that my people get the training that they need to know and understand what's being asked of them. And then I leave them alone to do to do their jobs.

Micromanage. Don't micromanage them. And then if because if you can train them and give them the knowledge, skills and abilities that they need to do what you're asking them to do. 99 times out of 100, I've I've been amazed and surprised by the innovation, by the approach and the things that the people that work for me have come up with that end up surpassing maybe what I had intended.

And then there's, you know, there's always circumstances where they start to get off off track a little and I try to be more like more bumper, right? If they start to drift a little left or right, I kind of bump them back in the way. But for the most part, I try to leave, leave the people alone that are that are doing, you know, that work that I've asked them to do as long as I've either trained them or enabled them to get the training that they need, entrusting them to do so to trust.

Right. Trust. You know, I'll give them, you know, vision, intent. You know, here's what we need here are the here are the timelines that we're working with. Right? Give them that information. I don't like withholding information from people. So that trust also goes two ways. I've done that, both in the Navy, both the Navy side and in my civilian career, where I tell people, you know, I'm not going to bother you outside of office hours type thing or, you know, work hours.

If I ping you outside of these hours, it's because it's important, right? And if it needs an immediate response, I'll let you know. But I'm not just going to be spamming you with a bunch of stuff, right? And that goes two, which is if you respect our respect your time, if you respect my time, because if you ping me outside of office hours, if you call me at 9 p.m., I know it's important. Right? Right.

So whether that's, you know, my my sailors pinging me for something that, you know, if I get a call at 11 p.m., I know it's probably really important. Poorly answer the phone. Right, because I respect their time. They respect my time. And we're not just sending emails and texts and chat that are, you know, oh hey, this could have waited till morning, but I just want to let you know now.

Yeah. So if you're one of those people out there that's sending emails all hours of the night or slack messages or chat or whatever here's here's what I want you to know. All of these tools have a send later feature. If you can hit that send later button it, quit inundating people's email, things like that because they are checking them instinctively. Yeah. Anyways, just use those dang things. That's what they're for and you know, I just want to put that out to the universe.

The other thing I want to put out to the universe, when you're taking when you're okay, you're taking a left turn, you're an intersection and you're taking a left turn. Okay? You can pull out into the middle of the intersection. This is just a public service announcement, I've noticed. Yeah, I've noticed. North Carolina is an odd one.

So in Southern California, you know, where I learned to drive, which that may say something about me, but we do that right at a left turn, pull up into the intersection and wait for the spot. Wait for the timing to go right. It's the light turns yellow. Red, right. You're watching to make sure that the person oncoming isn't going to run the lights. But then you go, right, you're you're more apt to do that. When I got to North Carolina, it's like they don't cross the line.

And so I you know, when my when my kids learn to drive. My. Brother. Yeah, when my kids learned to drive, I was like, let me see your your driving handbook. I got to see if that's a rule. Like, are you not supposed to cross a line left turns and it's nowhere in there. It's just a it's just a habit, right? A very, very much a human characteristic where because everyone else does it this way, then everybody in North Carolina also stays behind the line when you're making a left turn.

So I apologize for getting us off course there a little bit. I just just popped in my head. I thought I'd put out that the PSA pull up. Pull up when you're making your left turn. We were talking about leadership, though. And I want and I want to get I want to get back on leadership. Sure. What Would be one quality in a leader that you would look for, like someone you know, if you're maybe maybe someone you admire or, just look to for guidance.

As a leader, what would be your top 1 to 3 qualities? I'd say, you know, top one would I'd say probably communication, right. I think 100% of the situations that I've seen where, you know, people are upset, people are mad about something. It all comes down to communication that something wasn't conveyed. You know, somebody had some information that they didn't share. Um. Mm hmm.

Where just letting people know, you know, just communicating whether that's intent, whether that's purpose, whatever the case may be, that communication would solve, you know, mistrust distrust. You know, a lot of the issues that you tend to have in organizations where people are like, man, why are they doing that?

I don't understand why they well, if they would just share that intent or the reasoning, you know, to the extent possible that they can do that, it can alleviate a lot of the the bickering, the backbiting, misunderstandings that happen within any organization, a lot of that's just resolved by communication. So I think communication is the number one thing. And I think, you know, tied into that heavily and we talked about earlier was trust right.

If you if you trust your people you can share that information knowing they're not going to go share that with your competitors or, you know, blab that out on the Internet or whatever the case may be, that whatever the reason is, why you didn't want to share that information with them, part of that is because you don't trust them and because you don't trust them, you're not going to share that information with them.

And then as workers, because they don't their bosses, then they start looking at things and they look for nefarious intent and they go, well, the only reason why we yeah. The only why we haven't gotten a raise is because, you know, they're keeping all that money for themselves. Mm hmm. Right. Yeah, because there's no other reason why, right? Like there's hundreds of reasons why.

But you look for that nefarious intent or you assume nefarious intent, and that's all just based off of trust and communication, where things being communicated.

And then there's that lack of trust between employees, managers, etc.. Isn't it interesting that in this day and age with all of our tools for communication, with all the chats and the emails and the Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, I mean, I could probably sit here and list 5 million different applications that are meant to assist in our communication face time. I don't know a million of them Skype or whatever, if that still exists.

The Skype to the point is, with all of our tools, all of our technology, I still just see I think you're right, man. I think I think communication is so critical. I mean, not just from a leadership perspective, but just, um, putting information out to universe. You look at the news, you look at the, what's happening on social media, the way information spreads so quickly. We're taking in a lot of information, you know, reading headlines and regurgitating on this.

I see you see that a lot with all of our tools and technology. It just seems that communication is still lacking in a lot of respects. Like, we're just not we're not we haven't figured that out as humans yet, in my opinion. A lot of talking, not a lot of communicating. Right. So there's a lot of information still being put out. Not a lot of listening, not a lot of understanding. Um, so, you know, some of those key components of communication, understanding, intent, right?

That's what email, uh, you know, text messages, Facebook. It's horrible to try to convey intent and, and tone and meaning and nuance so understanding nuance of communication that you, you can get and you can understand when it's face to face, but it doesn't come through in text messages and email.

And, you know, that's why we tend to use things, you know, a lot of exclamation points and um, you know, using ellipses to pause in conversation, in sentences, to try to get people to understand the way I'm typing is the way I'm trying to talk to you right now. And, you know, using emojis in conversation everything else to try to, you know, either lessen the blow of something by putting, you know, a smiling face or a laughing emoji.

And we try to do that to try to convey what we're really trying to say in that communication. But yeah, 100% where we're not really communicating was a lot of talking, a lot of dissemination of information, but not a whole lot of communication happening. To bring it back, to go full circle. Full circle. Right. We're talking about leadership. I'm about communication.

Yep. What are some areas within the GES space that you see as a leader in the GI space that need to be improved as a as a as an industry, as a professional, just understanding those those gaps. Where do you think the major improvements need to come? That's a great question. I think, you know, some of the recent developments in in technology really help drive some of the pieces about getting information, getting answers quicker. Right.

I think some of the great things that happen with GIs are some of the, you know, tipping and queuing piece. So from GIS engagement that, tipping and cueing piece, the messaging piece about, hey. Can you explain tipping and queuing?

Yeah. So, you know, we talked about like the the social geopolitical unrest piece, right, where if you start to see some sort of pattern or something happening, some event that's happening, the, you know, that that can like tip or cue that, hey, maybe we need to collect or send something. Alerts, notification. Alerts, notifications, right? And it can be something it doesn't have to be something like a geopolitical event. It could be something like, you know, a weather storm.

You know, a storm is coming to an area. Right. And sending out notifications, hey, you are in the intended path of this tornado. You are in the intended path of this hurricane. You are probably going to see the effects of this significant weather event. You should beware if you are not in a position or or a location where you can withstand this significant weather event, you might need to move, you might need to take shelter. We tend to do that a lot after the fact or when things are too late.

And, you know, then we have, you know, weather channel shows up and, you know, then you're doing these cool broadcasts where, you know, the wind's blowing really heavily and whatnot. But if we can, what's. That guy's name from the Weather Channel? I forget his name, but yeah, it's one of the things. Or if he's around here a lot. Yeah. If he shows up. You're in trouble. Right. But that guy. Yeah. So if you. Yeah. You can look him. I'm totally good. Yeah. Look him up.

But if we can get people in again this goes into if we can do that tipping cueing piece ahead of time where we can know we can know a little more lead time or we can get people safe. We can we can save lives by doing it right. It's not so much, you know, that that geopolitical event, but it could be a weather event where, you know, if we can we can save people's lives.

We can get that information out quicker, you know, and we say things colloquially and, you know, maybe with some nuance where we say things like, oh, if it saves just one life, well, it's worth it. I mean, if that's your grandmother, not your grandfather, that whose life gets saved because we got an answer 5 minutes earlier than we would have. We can get a boat crew out to them 5 minutes earlier. Saved your life. You probably pretty grateful for that.

So it's something we kind of say dismissively a lot or people tend to dismiss. But I think it's very key, you know, public safety, saving lives and using GIS. And if we can do that and get those answers out right. So I think that's one of the great things is if we can leverage things like, you know, A.I.M. and everything else where we can get answers, our maybe if the system is looking and monitoring and it sends us that information before I ask it for that information.

Right minutes matter in some of these instances. I think that's where this is going, where if it's got access to a lot of this information, we can those answers quicker because the machines know what I'm you know, the machine knows what I'm going to ask it because I've asked it that question multiple times. So now it knows what to look for and it can give me the answer before I ask it. And I can say, Hey, there's a storm developing over the Atlantic Ocean and it's heading toward the Caribbean.

Mm hmm. You should probably be aware of this, right? So. So you think safety is a big area, that it's kind of under utilized and you don't want to wait for Jim? Can Tory and Tory have Googled it to be at your your grandmother's funeral? Right. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the things where I think if we can if we can figure that out and we can get those those answers, those alerts a lot quicker. Right. What's the harm in knowing, uh, a hurricane or a tornado is coming hours before. Right.

Knowing that it's coming right. Could give people enough time. Right. And we don't see things like runs on storms, right. Where we can have distribution centers, you know, Publix, Winn-Dixie, all these stores that are normally then get raided for supplies that their warehouses can, you know, start sending more material instead of just waiting for the shelves to get emptied more. To be. More. TWP Why why did people go after the tape first? I don't know. I don't expect, you know.

Human nature. I guess it's sort of. All the things worried about running out of. You know, it's, you know, God forbid you have to use one plot. You know, that's always final. Everyone everyone in the military will tell you you don't want to use one fly. The military, yes. Always going full bore on the quality of their TV. Any military person can tell you that. Great. So along the same lines of, you know, identifying gaps in some areas where we could improve as as the gas industry can improve.

Um, you think safety is a, is a key area to that? I think that's the one where it's very easy to get the public to rally behind. Mm hmm. Sure. And to understand the real impact, it's a it's a tangible, quantifiable, measurable thing that that people can get behind. Right. Is saving lives and public safety, knowing that you can back it up further and further to go. Okay, well, if we're going to get you the answer quicker, we need this. We need that. We need better data.

We need better alert systems, we need better, you know, whatever the case may be, better predictive models, whatever the case is, it, you know, you start backing it up into how to drive to get to where you want, which is you you want us to use this to save more lives so that we don't have a Hurricane Katrina level event. Right. How do we keep it from being a Hurricane Katrina level event? Right. And so, you know, there's there's things that we you know, that we aren't able to control.

Right. 100%. There's things we can't control. But then there are things that are within our control. And if we can leverage GIS and systems that we have to be able to help us in that regard, I think that's something that that the public can get behind. Okay. That's a that's a great point. I believe a lot of legacy systems are they're more on premises. Is is that pretty safe to say? And what I mean by on premises is that they're run out of a local machine.

Right. Or server. Lately, there's been a push to move a lot of things to the cloud. Why would why would a city government, a company, why would they be interested in moving a GIS architecture to the cloud? Yeah. So it's, you know, it's funny seeing this right before my dad passed away, we talked a lot about computers. Right? His whole background was, you know, mathematics and computers. And, you know, we used to have like mainframe and then terminals that you would connect to the mainframe.

And then we went to like personal computers and we kind of moved away from that mainframe. And then now we're back to the cloud and it goes we're just we're back to what we had before, which is lightweight terminals, you know, lightweight machines that connect to a cloud or connect to a server. He's like, we just we've done a 360 from, you know, where we were, where we kind of where we started.

I think one of the main reasons why shifting to the cloud, where that becomes important is, you know, access to that information is, you know, timely and critical where you can access that information on whatever device you're on, you're not worried about, oh, that's on. So, you know, that's on Nick's computer that's powered off.

And the information we need is on Nick's computer and so we need someone to go into the office to turn Nick's computer on so that we can get that information, so that we can make decisions moving to the cloud. It makes that information available. It makes that information ubiquitous to where everybody has access to it. Everyone can use it. You know, you have a know street, you know, Roads Maintenance Department that is responsible for taking care of the roads.

If they can make that information available to the rest of the city, the rest of the county, the rest of the state, then everybody's able to make those decisions. And I think one of the neat things about kind of this tiered model with GIs, you know, governments up to county governments, up to state governments, up to national government, is you can have the people responsible for the things that they are responsible for that they know the most.

Right. Right. Let them the experts you know, the experts in New Brunswick County tell you all about New Brunswick. Right. The experts in Moore County can tell you all about more county. And don't expect people in, you know, in in Wake County to be an expert on things happening down in New Brunswick County. Right. Ask the people in New Brunswick what's going on in their county. Right.

I think that's a key piece of GIs that comes into play where you're asking those local experts to be the experts on their data. They put it in, they make it available to everybody, and then it becomes a trusted source. Right. So where would you go to get the best data on New Brunswick County? The New Brunswick County website. Right. Like ask them, don't ask the state of North Carolina. What's the best data for New Brunswick? Just ask New Brunswick.

And so I think that's one of the great things about making this data ubiquitous and available. And then a state government can look at and go, Well, hey, I've got data from Wake County and Person County and more county, you know, in Lee County. And I can combine it all together to make one great state statewide data set. If they were all in the cloud. If they were all in the cloud.

Whereas otherwise, if you wanted that information, know if you were a state employee, you're going to every county's website to get that information, you know, or if you were the county, you're going to every city's website or you're going to every city trying to get that information level. And at the federal level, you're trying to go to every single state to get that information.

Whereas if people are making it a, you know, available, open and available, then it just makes it whole lot easier for people to to know and understand what's going on. The trust piece comes into play because you can trust that that it came from that state government. And the state government got it from the county governments. Right. And the county government got it from either the cities or from in areas where it's you know not a incorporated area that they're responsible for it.

So I think that all comes into play where just that, you know, making data free, open and available, it just helps everyone out. It's interesting you say that because it seems like in a lot of respects it's 23. A lot of a lot of our normal applications have been moved to the cloud or things we use on our phones every day or to the cloud.

But the city, state, local governments, all you know, they haven't made that that transition yet, maybe because of funding, but maybe because of the complexity of their systems and things like that. But it just seems like men how much better are we going to be in the future? Because we've we've done all these things. We pushed off to the cloud. We're leveraging A.I., we're using all these these new technologies that are available. We're really squeezing the juice

out of that orange. You know, I think that's always I always like to think about that which is, are we actually using the tools that are already available or are we actually getting the most out of what we can do right now? As fun as it is and as much as I like to talk about the future. It seems that even today we're just not we still don't get everything that we we could out of our systems and tools.

Yeah. So, you know, I think it's an interesting thing with, you know, these with local governments and why haven't they moved to, you know, why haven't they put their data out, you know, up on the cloud? Why haven't they moved to, you know, a portal system or why haven't they put their data up in this open, open data portal and whatnot? But a lot of it, they look at it as, you know, hey, we're in a boat, right? And we're we're moving along and.

A lot of times they may look at it as you're asking me to like abandon my ship, abandon ship and tread water while you either build a boat back on shore and, then you're going to come up to me. But you're asking me to tread water until you get your your boat up to me when I'm in a boat that's working right now. Right. And I'm a little safer.

And so they don't see a lot of times the value of the benefit until you can bring that newer boat right up alongside them and say, hey, you know, if you if you come over in this boat, you know, we can go faster, better, we can get some information out to you.

And so I've done I've done a lot of GIs migrations with a lot of different customers, and that keeps comes into play, you know, the trust piece showing them that, hey, this can do what you need it to do for your mission and we can do it without any loss of mission, without any you huge downtime that you might be fearing to make that switch or to make that jump.

And so, you know, a lot of a lot of governments, you know, whether that's county, state, national, you know, they're they may be hesitant to make some of those switches, but as long as you can show them that, hey, there's we're not going to lose any functionality and we're not going to lose any access, then we can we can make these jumps, make these switches, make these technology shifts, and then we can accelerate further. But we got to get them over into that that other piece or do that.

Some of them do it on their own, right, because they've got the funding, the personnel, the ability to do it. And some of them, you know, it's a one man, one man shop, you know, one woman shop for for that county. They just don't have the funding, availability, resources you know, their knowledge. One person, they're mapping out their whole county. They're doing the whole county by themselves. Right. And they might just be in maintenance mode.

They they can't to jump into innovation mode and improvement mode because they've got so much work that they're doing. And so that's where a lot of, you know, boutique gas firms and come into play. Mm hmm. Or they can help people with that migration. You only need that guy's firm, you know, for the surge piece, and then they're able to help you stand up the new system, move your data over, you know, and then get you off and running and that new system and then they can step back.

And so guys migrations a great way for a lot of, you know, boutique firms to help out local governments. One of the reasons that I always tell younger people why they should consider this geospatial career is because of the community. From my perspective, whenever I've needed help on something or just couldn't figure something out, I was either able to find it online pretty easily or. Ask a few people at a conference or something and they come up with the answer.

What are your general thoughts on the GIS Geospatial and community? For as large as it is, it's I still considered a very small community. When I look back on my career, every single one of the jobs I've ever gotten was because of knowing someone who knows someone, right? You know, knowing someone. And then they say, Hey, we've got an opening, or, hey, they're hiring or Hey, you should talk to so-and-so, right? Or someone reaching out and saying, Hey, I've worked with you before.

Would you consider coming to work with me again? It's just it's a small community for as large as it is. People move around between companies, but those relationships are are everlasting and endearing. So, you know, over the course of a few decades, I've crossed paths with a lot of the same people over and over again, where I'm working for one company, they're working for another, and then it switches and then now they're working for the company. I used to work for.

And, you know, it's it's just the nature of the business. But those relationships are everlasting between and right. You know, bridges burned last for a long time. You know, friendships burned, can can still come back to haunt people where, you know, people ask a lot of times, you know, hey, this person has something on their resume, like, oh, I was at that this, you know, the 512 G.P.S. Oh, you were there, weren't you? Or, you know, someone that was there.

And then they ask, you know, Oh, hey, you know, well, I would I didn't serve with them, but I was, you know, in the 66 G.P.S. And, you know, they worked with them there. So this world, you know, in this community is very, very small and very networked and very nuanced that, you know, people a six degrees of Kevin Bacon type thing. Right. It's like if you don't if you don't know them, you know someone that knows someone that knows them kind of thing.

And so it's very easy to get people's, you know, take understanding thoughts on candidates, you know, work ethic, you know, past relationships and whatnot. But over couple of decades, I've seen that over and over again is it's really the relationships that that tend to come. When I think about Grant and NGO, I would say the NGOs is the largest government organization that no one's ever heard of.

It kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier with just maybe poor communication or lack of understanding from the general public. Yeah, but I would say that NGO is the largest intelligence agency, a government agency, whatever you want to call it, that no one's ever heard of. A lot of people don't even know that NGO in the intelligence community, one of the 18 members of the intelligence community, shout out to the new member space force.

You know, we crack at crack a cold one in the Space Force, I guess. What are your general thoughts on the state of the intelligence community in 2023? I think, you know, we do tend to joke about that.

I think part of that is the kind of that reluctance in being part of the intelligence community and being entrusted with a lot of, you know, the nation's information and the nation's sensitive and most sensitive information and having the stewardship over that and having the charge to protect that, I think it's very difficult to then also have a very public face where you're you're actively telling the public, hey, this is who we are and this is what we're doing, right?

And so there's that weird dichotomy between, you know, how do I protect information and how do I also, as a public entity or as a government, you know, a piece of our government where we're beholden and we have to answer back to the public. This is what we're doing with your money. This is what we're doing with your resources. And so it is hard to like, you know, kind of want to say like, yeah, no one's ever heard of them or, you know, they're very secretive.

And this agency, you know, the shadow agency where it's really not it's just they have a charge to to protect a lot of information and and procure a lot of information and provide as much of it as they can back out to the public. You know, you talked about in the case of natural disasters, where NGOs then helps out in in a lot of, you know, natural disasters and response, where they provide assistance to agencies like DHS. Right. But they have that charge as a national intelligence agency where,

you know, they're part of the. I see. They're a combat support agency where they help the DOD. And then they also have a piece where they help out, you know, Homeland Security and, you know, DHS and FEMA and they kind of all tie together and NGOs across the breadth of that, where they're part of the key intelligence agency. To answer your question about, you know, the state of the I see, you know, where they're at in 2023. I think it's stronger than ever.

I think a lot of that, you know, the cloud based systems and a lot of this information sharing where we're seeing information not be siloed between agencies, you know, and as you look back to some of the critical events of the last couple of decades, you know, with with 911, where we had a lot of siloing of information, you know, we had mentioned, you know, special operations before. And you look back to one of the key founding events of, you know, so com Right.

And understanding special operations command and then even joint special operations command is how do we work together and how do we not have that information siloed? I, I think the I see is making leaps and bounds. And as far as sharing information across agencies, across federal civilian type agencies like the FBI and sharing information with the DOD and sharing information with some of the key larger agencies that people think of like DIA, CIA, NJ, NRO. Right.

So all these different agencies and how do we share that information and who's responsible for this piece? Who's responsible for that piece? It's a whole lot easier now. And I, I think I'm I'm encouraged what I'm seeing, you know, from from what I've seen over the last couple of decades to what I see currently and what I what are where I see the I see going, I'm encouraged by, you know, I'm seeing a lot more interagency work.

I'm seeing a lot more collaboration between I see partners, not a whole lot of, you know, this is my fiefdom, this is my kingdom, you know, don't you know, I take my ball and I'm going home type thing, right? I don't see a lot of that anymore where I think, you know that there was there tended to be a lot of that especially when you're you're asking people to share and they're they get a little defensive and like, well, why why do I have to share that with them? Right, right.

And they want to know. But, you know, as we break down a lot of those those barriers and get the information out and getting that information out and ubiquitous and getting into, you know, more decision makers hands so that they can make the best decision with what data we have available.

I think, you know, we we enable our our decision makers to be able to make better decisions by getting them that information instead of hoarding it, and only allowing certain people, you know, to have access to that. So again, protected though, within, you know, authorization, access need to know and everything else. But you know, we're getting that that shared piece across across the I see. So somebody with a security clearance a high security clearance, I would I would.

Know. Of know how to comment. I don't know. What are your thoughts then? You mentioned trust. You mentioned how agencies have a responsibility. This is a great term. They have a responsibility. Um, what are your thoughts on the recent just debacle with these politicians? And this isn't a political question. This is, this isn't an intelligence community question. This is a security question. What are your thoughts on files being kept at Donald Trump's hotel? Mar a Lago?

Yeah, Joe Biden files all over the place and cars and garages. Mike Pence, I believe, just got busted keeping these classified files places. We know Hillary Clinton's whole thing with her email server. Yeah. What does that say about I mean, I have so many questions here. I can't sit here and talk forever. What does it say about the leadership in that realm?

But more importantly, just how does the average person with a security clearance in the intelligence community, what are they thinking when they see stuff like this? I think there's just an inherent level of frustration when you see, you know, some of our national leaders making what would what appears to be reckless decisions on the face of it. Right. That appears to be reckless and. We can criticize and say like, oh, you know, how how if that was me, I'd get busted down.

You know, they would you know, they would. Absolutely not, you know, allow me to do that, you know, and I've done these, you know, cyber awareness every year. And I have to do these gifts every year. Why don't they, you know, how could they be so reckless with this? But I think it goes back to as someone in the intelligence profession, in the intelligence community, yes. You get that training, you know, year after year after year of safeguarding information, you know.

Not corrective to the correct computer animated. Did we lose Sir Jeff? Yeah. So he's like trying to hand you a file something. Oh, do you answer the door? Yeah, that's Tina. Tina's the bad one. Just the good one that we're trying to help out, right? Yeah, not today, Tina, but, you know, we joke about that and we say, like, geez, how could you how could you be so reckless with that?

But I think one of the key pieces is we get trained and that's, you know, drilled into us, you know, safeguarding of information, proper handling of classified information, where that's a key piece, you know, part and parcel to our job as intelligence professionals or people with security clearances, where we then expect decision makers and policymakers who are, you know, they get security clearances so that we can tell them, you know, when they say, hey, we should do this

or we shouldn't do this, and we say, well, actually, hang on, we need to do this because and and here's how we know this. And it's sensitive this information. You know, what we have is sensitive or how we got it is sensitive. And so we need to tell you this piece. Right. And we tell them that behind closed doors. But they have to be read into that.

You know, I think it's it's difficult for us to then look at it through a lens and expect them to have that same level of, you know, understanding and nuance to it and understand why this is so important, like why you don't keep this in your house, why you don't keep this on your own personal server where they don't they don't think anything of it because they just think like, oh, yeah, that's secret because, you know, the military told me that answer, right?

Or that it's it's top secret because this came from here and they don't really understand a lot of the nuance behind what we're protecting. You know, whether that sources, methods, you know, or tactics, techniques, procedures where they don't understand that piece of it. And so when we see it as cleared intelligence professionals, when that information is mishandled or when it's leaked, we get upset about it. Right.

And rightfully so, because we're doing our part to make sure we're doing everything we can to make sure we're doing the right thing and protecting information, protecting sources and methods. And then to see it what looks like just flouted that. You're just keeping information wherever you want. Right? Right. And we get like you can't bring information home. Documents have to stay within the secured facility. You need to secure them appropriately.

And then we see things happening that looks like that's flaunting it. It's a little frustrating, but I think there's also a key piece of understand they're like, that's not what they do day to day, right? And so it's it's hard. You're letting them off kind of easy. Steve, I have to say, I think you're quite well. Let them all. I won't say I'm letting them off easy. I'm I'm trying to understand. Somebody like how. They do. Something, trying to walk a mile in their shoes. That's empathy.

That's a great quality of a leader that you have. Steve In my opinion, you know, look at somebody like Trump, okay? This is a guy who yeah, I can look at him and say, okay, he hasn't spent any time in the intelligence community. He kind of, you know, went hot and heavy as a politician and kind of really got lucky if you think about how he became president. And then he was kind of, you know, all of a sudden he's the president of United States.

And I could understand that for him to be, you know, mishandling documents, things like that. Well, I'll look at somebody like Joe Biden who's been in government forever. I mean, the guy's been in government forever. I just I don't see it. Mike Pence, same thing. He's been around forever. Know Hillary Clinton. I mean, come on. She's she's been around forever as well. I just to me, it seems like there's two sets of rules.

There's the rules for politicians and then there's the rules for the rest of the intelligence community. And I'm okay with that, actually. If they just say, you know what, don't have to follow the rules for this for these reasons here. Right. There might be some good reasons, which is, you know, they need to have files because they're important. Right. These are important people that are making big, big decisions.

They need to have files at their house because, you know, they're living they're living that life where they need to have that stuff. But I think that just needs news. Either just be published or be like, okay, you know, as an intelligence professional, you're under this set of rules as a politician, you're falling under these set of rules. But to suggest that, you know, we're we're under the same with the same guidance is just it's just not true.

Because if you or I had classified files, if we mishandled information, if we did some of the things that these politicians have done, I'm pretty sure that we'd be in jail. I'm pretty sure that we'd be in trouble. You'd be court martialed on the military side.

Lose your clearance and everything else, but, you know, that actually goes into, you know, some other key pieces where things like the Hatch Act that govern, you know, from a certain level down right, that people will behave in a certain way, that you will not use, you know, your government status to promote, you know, political parties, stances, candidates, etc.. But the Hatch Act is very clear. And like from this level up, it's okay for them to do it right.

I think if we had something like that, people, people would know and understand and you know that, yes, from this level up because of what we're asking them to do, they need. Right, you know, instant access to classified foods. But there should be some. Well, there's some some of. Them do have handlers. That like just the vacuum. You know, he's got a vacuum is going around. He's like, what do you got there, Hillary? You know, what do you what do you hold in there, Donald?

He's vacuuming up the classified. Yeah, I think I think part of it is, you know, we're expecting them to have that the access to that information without providing them with the ability to safeguard it. Right. So I think, you know, that's that's one of the key pieces where you have things like, you know, like Trump taking files and storing them in Mar a Lago lets you know I don't necessarily think in our pants or Biden or Hillary Clinton, they needed that information.

They need access to information. Part of the problem is, you know, with the authorization piece of it, you know, an accreditation of a secured facility, how do you how do you still give them that ability to have access to that information and provide it in a accredited area? Right. You know, where where they're able to get that that instant access to it that they need to make decisions. Let's not have. Policies. I don't see Trump's actions. If all I'm saying. Right.

And so how do we you know, how do we provide that for residences, for, you know, high level national leaders where, you know, there residence is also able to have an accredited location where they can have access to that information.

And then you and that's why we get things like their own servers and, you know, boxes of documents and garages and other silly things that like blow your mind as a as a cleared professional, you know, as someone you, you know, if it was me, I'd be in jail at this point, you know, which is is probably true, right? If I had boxes of classified information in my garage.

Yeah. You know, if people came and raided my garage and they're like, yeah, he's got boxes of classified information I would expect to be in jail for for taking that information. But yeah, it's a difficult thing. I kind of along that same lines recently the Republicans have booted two Democrats from the Intelligence Committee. I don't know much about the other one, but I know a little bit about one. His name is Eric Swalwell.

He is he is a Democrat, but His I kind of understand, you know, he was sleeping with a Chinese spy. I don't care what your political affiliation is, this person cannot be on the Intelligence Committee anymore than the guy that's been lying his teeth out. I think George Soros I don't know how this guy gets elected, but, um, what are your thoughts on, on these moves to kind of boot people like Eric Swalwell from the Intelligence Committee? You know, so the old joke, Mel Brooks joke

from History of the world. Right. It's good to be the king, right. So that that ruling party and being able to make decisions of who's on what committees and being, you know, in in that majority rule. Right. And it it keeps flipping back and forth and people get kicked off committees and somebody is a chairperson.

Now, that's the ruling, you know, whoever's the ruling party at the time, I mean, that's the government that we've entrusted as we've we elect individuals to govern on our behalf, right. As a republic. And so we we give them that trust. And so whoever's got that ruling power at that time can make those decisions, the decisions to kick like people off. Yeah, there's, there's some interpersonal peace to some of it, right. Where it's a lot of, you know, quid pro quo, tit for tat. You know what?

You said this and and I didn't like it. So now you're not going to get to serve on my committee because. Now I'm in charge and it's my committee, so you don't get to be on it. I think there's that piece of it. And that's just that's a part of our government, a lot of, you know, bickering and whatnot. I think some of the key pieces of, you know, things like they can serve on other committees, maybe not just maybe not this one. Right.

I've seen that over my career where people, you know, people that have lost their clearance for, you know, whether that's personal decisions, whether that's financial decisions, whether, you know, they're just it's a risk piece. And, you know, they they lose their clearance. And again, it's not saying, like, you're a horrible person, you're a bad worker. You know, I mean, could have been a bankruptcy, could have been some poor financial decisions.

They, you know, alcoholism, whatever the case may be that caused, you know, these very tragic events in their life that then become flags for, hey, you're kind of at risk. You're a risk factor for us at this point, but you're still a very useful analyst, person, manager and you still value it's just not right here. Right. And so being able to. You don't have to go home. You don't have to you can't stay. You can't stay right here.

And I had I had a colleague that, you know, he had started dating a Chinese national and we had talked to him and say, hey, if you continue down this path, you will likely lose your top secret, top secret clearance. What is it you want to do? And he's like, okay, I'm like, okay, you're breaking up, okay? And he's like, No, I'm staying together with, you know, we're going to stay together. Like, Okay, well, you know, you.

Have to report that. Yeah. And so it's like, okay, well, you may not have job here in the Navy. You may have a job over here in the Navy. Right. And so knowing you understand that and it's just it's one of those things, I think, with Eric Swalwell, that's one of those things where it's like, that's fine, you can do some of these things. But, you know, you're free to choose your behavior and whatnot, who you date or whatever, but you can't. You're not free to choose the consequences.

So I think in that regard, with respect to him, like you want to date a CCP party member national as a you know, elected official for the United States government, for somebody that's in our national defense strategy that we we identify as a key competitor in the global space. And they say that we are their competitor as well. Right. So you got this. We are competing mutually with each other. And you want to date somebody that's a key member of their party.

Okay. You can, but you don't get to choose the consequences of your behavior at that point. So you're free to do it, but you then can't dictate to us what the consequences are of your behavior. I think that's probably one of the key pieces as you're free to choose, what you want to choose is you're not free to choose. That is. Yet again. Steve, you're a lot nicer than I am. You just like you're letting them off a lot easier than I am in my opinion.

This whole Eric Swalwell thing, um, there's, there's, there's a macro problem in the micro problem. The micro problem what, what do you do doing sleeping with Fang Fang. I don't know who this Feng Fang person is, but is her name actually Fang Fang. Sign number one If someone has two names, stay away. All right. The macro problem that I see is that regardless of political affiliation, who's policing the politicians there? They're supposed to police themselves, which is ridiculous.

This guy continued to serve in the Intelligence Committee after this was a known fact that he was sleeping with a Chinese spy. And he can put out all that, you know, but politicians on both sides will play the game. Right. But the facts are, this guy was sleeping with the Chinese, a known Chinese spy. Where's the responsibility at? You know, like where is the responsible person that can say, hey, you know, you're a member of Congress, this is a big problem. China is a big problem.

Yeah, they've infiltrated our schools, the universities throughout the country. They've infiltrated our minds via tick tock. Right. And they have all this information that they've on us. And now they've infiltrated our government at the highest levels from what from what we can tell. And it just seems like the politicians are scratching their head. There's no there's nobody assigned to police. The politicians. And that's my problem. Well, that's the macro policy problem that I have with it.

I think I think there are some you know, that that the are willing to call each out on some things. Right. You know, Dan Crenshaw comes to mind, you know, off the top of my head. So they call each other out and stuff. That's nonsense, though. Yeah. And it gets. It gets lost in the noise. Right. Is becomes very much a boy who cried wolf. Right.

When you're you're constantly calling out your colleagues across the aisle where it just then becomes noise, where you you can't pick up what the relevant time when, you know, you say, hey, bad Nick, you're doing this bad Nick, you're doing this bad Nick, you're doing this. Well, then when it's really important, I say, Hey, bad Nick, you're doing this. And because he's always saying Bad Nick Right. I'm Tired of listening to him saying bad nick and they just ignore it, right?

Because there's a lot of constant bickering that when they do have something that's key and relevant and they say, Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Nick, you're doing something really bad, right? It gets lost in the noise. Boy who cried wolf. Yeah, boy who cried wolf syndrome. The lot of it, right? It's just every looks. And they go ask us politics and they just ignore it.

I think one of the other key pieces is, you know, who who's when you have politicians that are willing to call each other out on it, it gets lost. Right. But then as a general public as well, we're really the ones that are electing these people to go to Washington to govern on our behalf. And it's it's beholden on us to make responsible decisions. And I think that's probably one of the bad things about modern politics, is when you say things like, whoa, that person dated a spy and you go, Yeah.

Yeah, right. You're just trying to get them out. You're just trying. You're just saying things. You're trying to smear them. It's a smear campaign. Or they go, Yeah, but it's better than that person, right? I'm okay. Like, I'm willing to overlook this because they're not a Democrat or they're not a Republican. At least they're not a Republican, or at least they're not a Democrat.

So yeah, they're bombastic or they date spies or they can't they can't handle classified information correctly, but at least they're not, you know, whoever. And I think that's part of the part of the issue is when we when we say things like that, we then excuse behaviors that would that interpersonally you'd say, I wouldn't associate with this person in my day to day life, but they're off in Washington and at least they're not so and so. And I'm okay with that. And we start to excuse things.

We start to excuse behavior. And then that's how people continue to stay in office, despite scandals, despite events where, you know, you know, dismissive of normal human foibles. Mm hmm. Where they're, like, really big things that we just we excuse them and dismiss them as well, because it's, you know, the evil, you know, versus the evil you don't know. What you're really talking about is, you know, the media's responsibility.

And I always hate to point to ominous things in a distance and say, oh, this, you know, it's the system. Like, I hate doing that. At least show me one particular thing that can change. But it's definitely an area where the media in general has has just failed. They don't just don't report things that are, you know, against their side of the fence or something like that, as opposed to just being trust and saying, hey, forget the side of the fence that I'm on is the United States.

That's the side of fence I'm on. And if this is something that could harm our country, then we need to report on this as a media outlet. You know, I just I don't even know if that means is there a media outlet that exists that is just the United States media outlet that is pro United States and says, hey, this is this is something that can be harmful to our country or harmful to our intelligence community.

This could get people killed, you know, leaking sources and things like that, operations that that the United States takes on around the world. I don't even think I don't think that that company exists I could be wrong and maybe somebody will let me know in the comments. But I don't think it exists. I don't I don't think there's a national one.

And I think that's one of the sad things with the state, you know, of modern media is, you know, a lot of them are own, you know, you back up, you know, who owns this and who well, who owns that, right? You say you have this this local news station and you say, well, who owns that? And then you back it up and go, well, who who owns that studio and who owns that? Who owns that?

And you start backing up further and further and you say things jokingly like five people run, all of you know, five companies run all of the entire media for global. And, you know, we can make statements like

that and joke about it. But, you know, when they have different bosses and different priorities, you know what you just raised in these things of who who is the one that's willing to step up and who's the one that's willing to put their reputation on the line or put their profits on the line and say, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, profits be damned. This is the right thing. And we have to tell people this and we have to tell them what's going on, or this information needs to get out there.

A lot of times it's because we're worried about things like ratings, profit. Right? Right. Viewership. Am I going to am I still going to be able to stay in my job? Right. I want to stay from year to year to year. And here's I get my contract renewed. Right? Here's how we continue to grow our viewership. Here's how we grow our ad revenue. Who's willing to advertise with us? We can't say things that upset advertisers. Right. Because then they're not going to be willing to put ads on our network.

And so there's so many different loyalties that truth right. Becomes something that's not very positive. One of the things I like about a lot about doing this podcast is that we don't have sponsors. No sponsors, no loyalty. I don't have somebody try to say, Hey, you need to push this product and I'm not doing that. I'm just not I'm not doing that unless there's a really good reason to do. It and reach out to us.

You know, I'm not going to sit here and like think about what I'm saying because some sponsor is going to be upset at something. You know, I'm financially free. I can sit here and talk about whatever I want and I'll face the consequences for that. If people disagree or if I say something stupid, which happens often. Um, but you brought up something that I think was interesting that happened recently. So Elon Musk bought Twitter, right?

Not soon after that, he starts releasing this information about Twitter's dealings with the presidential election and COVID. All these all these things that Twitter was highly involved with called the Twitter files. This was via Matt Taibbi. And I think it's funny because that's kind of what drew me back to Twitter. I'd not really use Twitter that much for of Elon Musk is running it's probably going to be pretty damn good soon. So I started going on Twitter a little bit more.

One of the things I noticed once the Twitter files started being released. Are you on Twitter. By the way? I have a Twitter. You have a Twitter. Okay. Not very active. All right. No, I mean, me neither. And that's all recently. But so so Elon Musk starts releasing these these Twitter files. Right. And I thought it was hilarious.

There was journalists going through and responding, you know, on their on these Twitter file threads and saying, you know, at Matt Taibbi, he's just he's just doing the bidding of a billionaire. Right. And these are these are journalists at The Washington Post. Yeah. Which is owned by Jeff Bezos. The New York Times, which is owned by, I'm sure, another billionaire. You know, all these these media outlets.

I just I think there's a lot of a lot of issues with traditional media and and hypocrisy and things like that. And I just thought that that was just like that. That is the state of our media in 2023, in a nutshell. Right there, right? Yeah. A journalist calling someone, you know, saying that they're essentially licking the boots of a billionaire while they're licking the boots of billionaire. You know, like it it's it says Colorado house.

Is saying go those in glass houses and throw stones right like that so be cognizant of you know who you are who you working for type thing but yeah it's becomes hilariously obvious when people say hypocritical, hypocritical things like that whether you know you have one journalist that like is being told what stories to do and what stories to report on, what not to report on.

Calling out another journalist who's willing to do that and saying, oh, you're just doing here's doing what someone's telling you to do. I mean, that's been the state of journalism for years, right? Where you have a reporter comes to their boss with a story. Right. And yeah, the adage, you know, if it bleeds, it leads kind of thing and saying, you know, hey, drop that story, go do this instead. You know, where they they want it.

They want to say something or they want to do a story or they want to do an investigative piece, something, and they get told, leave it alone or drop it by their boss. Right. And I mean, that's been journalism for years where they tried to do that, where you have somebody that's willing to do real exposes on things, it becomes like earth shattering. Mm hmm. Yeah, that's that's really interesting.

And Tyler Cannon, our audio video, Tucker right now, he sent me something saying check out Ground Dot News. So he said, yeah, this might be a site worth looking at. So definitely check that out if you're out there. Ground dot news. I just brought it up really quickly. It looks pretty straightforward. It looks just from looking at the headlines I haven't read into it might be something worth exploring, but from the headlines, you know, it's it doesn't it looks pretty unbiased.

It says, you know, the top headline is U.S. Economy Grew To End of 2022 Defying Recession Fears. Okay Boeing to be arraigned in court over two max jet crashes. I don't see any spin that. No emotion. A lot of facts. Right. And that's actually you know, that's sadly one of the things where we talk about, you know, getting back to like truth and understanding, right. As we always joke about, you know, there's there's three sides to every story his hers and the truth right.

You know, jokingly saying things like that. But I know a lot of people that, you know, for years and years will watch multiple news channels because they're like, I'll watch CNN, Fox, Al-Jazeera, BBC, you know, oh, and they'll watch a bunch so they can pull in all that information, kind of get, you know, what's. The strip. Away, the nuance and the emotion right to it and and get to the key facts.

And it sounds like this this news source is a good one for like we're going to strip away the emotion and the inflammatory statements and a lot of that, you know, key pieces that are going to get people hyped up on something and elicit emotion. They're not trying to elicit emotion. They're trying to inform. Right.

And, you know, all the social media apps, obviously, they like that when they're when news is being put out there and people are engaging with the content because that drives the algorithms drives and the push. That's exactly they're looking for is engagement, right? Engagement is what we. Know we need. You're engaged. Here's what I found interesting.

This is on ground out news and I haven't seen a headline like like written straightly This Better to restore Donald Trump's Facebook Instagram accounts. I've not seen a headline written about that guy that hasn't been spun one way or the other. If you look at a Fox News headline is going to spin it to the right heavily biased. You look at CNN, it's going to spin it way left, heavily biased.

MSNBC, same way so yeah that's interesting appreciate that Tyler will definitely will definitely do some research on that ground out news. Um very cool. Very cool. So I'm hoping that you'll do us a separate little segment with me, a little bit of fun, a little bit of overtime. Are you willing to stick around? For sure. All right. Awesome. Well, I hope everybody else, too. So stick around for overtime. We'll we'll do that as a separate clip on YouTube and then on the podcast.

I don't know if I'll put down audio yet. We'll see. But definitely, if you're listening on audio, also check us out on YouTube and go ahead and subscribe while you're there. This is the end the show.