172: ‘Architects in Airports Talking AI and AEC’, with Phil Read

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there's a podcast, there's a Tesla guy in Singapore. And I have a habit of, if I watch a documentary or see something interesting on YouTube, I'll just try to connect with that person on LinkedIn. And, uh, I connected and then. He said, Yeah, I'm interested. I'll be coming to Singapore and happy to buy a lunch. Would like to learn about what you do. Well, he ended up putting a podcast together and I ended up, it's out on YouTube somewhere.

Nice. So you've been on a podcast before.

yes, before yours, I'm sorry. And, uh, yeah, but he talked about the cars and then, uh, we talked about investing in Tesla and, Well, I thought it was a good investment. And, um, and then we went out and met the president of the Tesla club in Singapore. It's not a very big place. You could drive around the Island in about an hour. Um, but he had severely modified his car with electric openers and his screen would swivel and all this kind of stuff that they had prepared light shows and it

Nice. My son bought Tesla stock and it's up 200 a share from when he bought it. He's pretty, pretty thrilled. He's like, he bought 10 shares or something. He's very

Perfect. And, um, yeah, when I bought, So the Model Y, and I've never had a new car. We bought a new minivan, I think around 2004. But never had a new car. Bought a, bought a new Model Y Performance, and it's, you know, when you buy a used car, you just pay for it. So I've never had a car payment. And, um, so I thought, nope, the car's gonna devalue, but the stock might go up.

Yeah.

And so that ecosystem of we were, as we were chatting before, instead of hiring just a bunch of developers to try to figure out full self driving, he's effectively crowdsourced full self driving with how people behave when they

able to

And, uh, that's pretty interesting ecosystem. So the car that you don't drive, Probably talked about this last time. The TV you don't watch, the phone you don't answer, Those are usually orders of magnitude very successful technologies. We started, I think. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Little did we know.

We're back where we were last time.

That's right. Yeah. What? Yeah. Where are we?

we? Gate 44, Concourse B, Denver.

Denver airport. That's right.

Yeah, but this way we get breakfast and lunch and we get to chat about all kinds of things. Yeah, in person. That's,

Well, thank you for

an important part of it. Otherwise it feels transactional or something.

So you talked about that in terms of leverage, right? And I just think that's kind of interesting when you put that in the context of our industry, too, right?

Oh, it looks obvious now. Yeah,

right, and it's like, well, no, it wasn't obvious back then, it was a bet, and It paid off. But there's lots of bets that didn't pay off too.

No, the idea that in the future we'll just use everybody to program our technologies. Like, that just sounds too

absurd. That's an absurd idea. Right.

But in a way that's what they did. They built the infrastructure that trained the system. So the infrastructure in terms of physical electrification, you got to be able to charge. So I think that's why they've been successful. And yesterday was when, yesterday was GM's announcement that they're going to get out of the commercial automation driving business. So Tesla stock has shot up a bit more today, right? It's like 415 a share. And I think in April it was 450 a share.

mm-hmm

And so it's that, it's the sum of the parts. So they've crowdsourced behavior of how people behave when they drive. and in edge conditions of weird turning constraints. And like right now three 13. 2 is out and I don't have it yet, but apparently you can, you don't have to put the car into drive and then start full self driving. You put in your destination and select go and it'll back itself out of a parking lot or out of a constrained parking space.

But it took a while for you to get there,

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

just didn't start out

No, it's like getting a teenager to drive and you're trying to

I'm right there with

wanna fall asleep and you're just like, every time there's another car you're kind of ready to

I'm, I feel so weird not having a parking brake in the middle of the car that we're using for driver's training, like that I had, my parents had when I was a kid, it was like ripped that they could just rip that thing up at any moment because they don't have their own set of pedals on their side. They can grab the wheel. But, Now with the push button park brake, it's like I'm not just going to push that button when we're full driving. Right. And so like that level of trust, you have to build up

It's so smooth now. Early on, like in December with the system that they had, when it would go around a corner, sometimes it would hesitate and it would take, it wasn't smooth. It was a little, it was like a teenager, like an experienced teenager like, turn straight, turn straight, turn

Yeah.

Yeah, overcorrect on and um, but now I've had to, it got so good and there's different modes under self driving. There's like a hurry mode, a regular mode and a chill mode because the acceleration, even a regular mode, I find too aggressive. So if a teenager was driving and you go, Whoa, slow down, don't, when the light turns green, you don't have to be right off the line. It's

way. Deactivate

So it's in chill mode, but it still accelerates in a very confident fashion. I'm. At the point where if I was doing a trip where you might actually sleep and confidently, you know, get on the road, Put your seat back a little bit, like getting on a plane today, right? I drive, I'm flying in from Charlotte, took off and pulled my hat over my eyes, leaned the seat back and went to sleep for 45 minutes. But in a car, you just, you know, sometimes you're driving, you're not paying attention,

Yeah, never

right? And that's scary when you get noddy and your heads, your eyes are kind of dropping, your head's dropping down. You're like, I should just pull over. I think in this case, it'll be, it'll be better than having a teenager drive and you'll be confident. You're just kind of put your seat back for five, 10 minutes and then wake up.

you're seeing the future. Like you can already see where this is going, right? The next steps are.

I mean, that's where I think it's going to go. It's just. that's what people will enjoy.

Yeah.

Like we were, when we were talking before about the time it takes to travel somewhere, there's really no competition, at least in the US with air travel for, let's say 500 mile distances that you just got to get the trains aren't. Maybe in the Northeast Corridor, they're predictable enough,

go to the location you want to

no, it's not point to point, right? So when you get there, you still have to get in a, so you're two hours before the airport, but I think with driving that that's confident. One of the constraints, and I was chatting with Brock Howard, actually we were texting, as I was flying, we're texting back and forth over the internet and the plane, Brock's in Athens, Georgia, and only one of the constraints of private vehicles is they take up so much space.

travel in packs,

you travel in, you know, nose to tail, three feet apart, and they're all communicating with each other. And that special lane goes a hundred plus miles an hour. Well, that starts to compete with air travel and trains and it's point to point. Cause I tell you it's so quiet and I have conference calls in the car, you know, self driving's on and I'm paying attention to the road, but I'm also paying attention to the conversation. It's very relaxing.

Your, your entertainment was the jester, right?

Yeah, and the, um, the king that would have, the advisor. And now this is coming down to common people. Like, I mean, down to a common person.

democratization. Yeah.

Oh, in an extraordinary way. Like, I wouldn't feel comfortable personally driving 100 miles an hour.

you would gain that comfort over time. That might be

You know, over time, but things happen fast. And, um, I, I went fast once in the Tesla for the first time to pass a car. And it was just one lane in each direction, but I made the mistake of doing what I would normally do in a regular car, which is mash the gas and then indicate and get in the other, you know, get in the passing lane and then pull back over. but when I went to pull over in the passing lane, I almost went off the road because it was happening. So things were happening so

vector, yeah, like physics, whoosh, just

It's not the zero to 60. That's fast. It's the 40 to 100. It's the same three seconds. And so you have to learn to go slow and in a regular aspirated car. Yeah. Cause things happen so

yeah. Things

Um, but these kinds of, uh, these kinds of tools that the very wealthy have had, like the kinds of things that kings have had, let's say, in the last thousand, two thousand years. You know, the Roman emperor didn't drive his own chariot, okay? He had someone drive his chariot.

right. Momentum kills.

That's right, right, right, right,

you stop it too quickly.

That's right. Right. So if it, if it was confident and you're in, and you've overcome the artifact of having to have the separation because of the speed, because you're driving, you know, manually, no, it's making the adjustments and cars are five feet apart and they're communicating to each other. Then you could travel very quickly from point to point. but the, Taking that into what we're talking about in, in AI is, is, I know it's an over discussed, at least in architecture, right?

full release, that's a

Yeah, so I'm driving back from the coast yesterday, and I came through a small town that all of a sudden had these artifacts of, at one time in history, it was a very affluent town. location, but it was in the middle of nowhere. So I just said, Hey, Siri, tell me about this town. And it went to this long soliloquy about the history of this town and when it was established in the early 1700s. And it was like, in the moment, knowledge that

It was like your own personal tour guide, like when you rent, you go to Alcatraz, and you get the headset, and you go to the stops, and it tells you as you're there, just in time, kind of an idea of,

Yeah, while

access to information while you're looking at it, not, oh, I'm gonna go look that up later, I better put a bookmark on this, or save it to my notes

Yeah. I need to go look that up in a library. so that's where I think it, I've kind of been interested in the AI piece here and there, but mostly it seems to be automating bad processes. It's automating inefficiency. This next generation seems to just be giving you orders of magnitude more useful information with very little input. So there's some tools out there that would automate documentation with AI. Like here's my document set, tag and dimension things.

it's the coordination is insane, right? But to really

do it, it coordinates it, but you have to set it up so

still need an expert, though, to review it and actually coordinate the hinges and the lock sets. And the door schedule is one thing, openings, locations, right? What kind of door? Is it a one hour door? Whatever those things are, 90 minute, right? Does it have fire glass in it? But then there's like the whole hardware end of things. And it's. a dedicated consultant typically for that kind of a thing, So I tell the story about, about what you did with GROK that, that kind of led to that

yeah, that led to it. So Brock Howard and I, Brock and Grok, Brock's texting me and I'm on this airplane and I thought, well, this is kind of an obscure thing, but, and it's, and it's on Twitter. I took a photo at this beach show that was this week in South Carolina of one of the vendors and they had a table full of, preserved alligator heads. Alligator jerky. It was like one of the things they're trying to sell to beach shops, right?

That is, it's basically, you experience like a magic moment right there. It's like, what? It can do that? Because that, that then leads back to this door schedule example,

Well, yeah. What if we're not making schedules? Like that was the leap of going from that was, okay, wait a minute. I've got a set of drawings and I'm going to submit a set of drawings to AI and say, can you just give me a bill of materials and pricing, from Home Depot for everything in this project? Like, you don't even have to make schedules for that.

You just send it a, an image or a series of images or a model. I, I, it would be amazing if you can actually have a fully tagged BIM

And that's a whole leapfrog to me. That's the part that, you know, on the way here this morning, as you kind of have time to ideate, you're just sitting on a plane doing nothing. But the idea that you could take a photo of a chair And I, I actually, I did this last week in Wilmington. I was going through a tour of a distillery that had cool leather furniture. I took a photo of one of the chairs and using a Google image search, it said, Oh, here's the chair. Here's how much it costs.

in their quote unquote showroom, right? But they're online.

but normally the step would be, Oh, we're going to start a company to build a tool that connects your Revit file with Lowe's or Home Depot. And

With your pro account,

yeah, with, and then you're going to buy this thing. So it's gone to a price point of almost zero and no one's built a tool in between it. It's not like they built the manual version, certainly there, but they didn't build a better manual version. And now it's been usurped by some other agent, AI. It's just leapfrog. It just went straight there. And, um, so for me, that's, that's kind of like a, a really important and interesting inflection point. It's trivial.

so, so I was in, at AU, um, on my way back from AU, I rented a car and my first stop was at a, a photo shoot for a architectural project that my friend was the designer of, and the photographer was there, and he, we, we had, we had seen each other recently, but not that recently, and he said, have you ever had a conversation with ChatGPT? And I'm like, well, I've asked it questions. Yeah.

I never needed.

So, so question and answer, is that what you mean? And he's like, no, like, like he goes on the way down here, which is about an hour and a half drive, he said, I had a full on conversation with ChatGPT. And he said, it blew my mind. He said, you have to try it. And I had an hour long drive coming up to Palm Springs from there. And so, in my car, in the car, rental car, through CarPlay, Um, I fired up and I think you have to have a plus account for ChatGPT to do this. It's 20 bucks a month.

conversation. Could you have a conversation with another person and the agent? Do you think that would work with two people?

That's a good question. I would think so. I don't see why not.

And does it gives you responses in audio?

Audio and, in real time, yeah.

We should do another one of these where

Oh, a full podcast,

Yeah.

We would probably want a quieter

I wouldn't have, I didn't think about that this morning when I woke

Right.

let's do a podcast with an

With an agent. Yeah. So, so It asked me questions and it forced me to think about things. And you don't even feel confident in your answer, right? Because it's spur of the moment. It's just whatever is there you have to work with. And of course you could say, you know, let me think about that for a little bit and I'll get back to you. I, I assume you could do that. But, I tried to just stay in the moment and I tried to do the best I could with what it was asking of me.

it hard to be present when you were having this conversation?

it was a normal conversation. It would, it would be

You didn't have to suspend disbelief. You were just like,

would be like being on this podcast and I went into it with the expectation that it was going to blow my mind, right? Because my friend had kind of prompted me with that. And I thought, okay, I'm, I'm here for this. And so I did that and I I didn't think twice about it. I just thought, you know, there were several times where I thought, oh, this, this answer is going to suck, but I'm going to say it anyway. And it forced me to think about, think through things I'll say. And then at the end.

that.

Right. And, and, and because of the way ChatGPT works, right, it's got every query that you've asked it is a separate entry. And so you can go back and pick up on any one of those threads and continue it on. And this is no different. This is just one of those threads. And so they're each in their own little buckets. Um, and so you really could have as many of these different threads and they're not really going to cross pollinate with each other. I don't, maybe you, maybe you want it

is not like a Google image. This is not like a Google search, right, from 20 years

not at all.

And, um, I've only started playing with this probably at, uh, since the fall retreat, because I realized, you Uh, I'm using the public, I was using the private version of the Apple beta, and then there's, it was getting too squirrely, I went back and dropped back to a, to the public beta, and realized that you could upload images and ask questions. And I think, I don't know if it was somebody at the leadership retreat, or maybe, I think it was Craig Barbieri.

personality. So

sent it to a friend of mine, who's a contractor. He was an architect turned contractor. And he's like, Oh my gosh, I would hate for this to happen, uh, to review my design work. And he sent me a photo of a mountain house that he'd worked on in North Carolina. And it was fully dressed out and a project. And the table had a very colorful and. Uh, sort of festive place settings on it, and I guess they had set everything up and then taken photos of the finished mountain house.

Martha was complimentary. Martha

thought the colors and the place settings was lovely and complimentary to the rustic, you know, and then Steve Jobs was like, busy, busy, busy, this is terrible. You know, how much noise, clutter, yeah. So I sent it to an architectural friend of mine and, uh, in Charlotte, and he said, man, this would have been great in architecture school to be able to take photos of your design and then ask for feedback. of the design, you know, without waiting until a Monday morning crit.

their framework

if you could really talk to him now, you're. I think in, in a simplification, you're talking to a carbon based version of AI, that's Viktor Frankl, well, he's passed, you can't, and he certainly doesn't scale. Viktor, if he were alive, he could talk to one person at a time for 55 minutes, and, you know, so, imagine any modern day psychologist that you would have an affinity for, what would this person say about this particular issue, or I would like to talk to, a persona of this person.

you might have to wait, like you said, until next Wednesday at

yeah, next Thursday and it's 300 an hour. And, and I think generally speaking, men don't like to talk about, we like to solve problems. And so we tend not to talk about the things that are troubling us because they're maybe they're unsolvable in the moment. There's not one right answer. So being able to talk to someone or something in a way that it's reflective, it's in the moment, so it's very needs based, and the cost, the price point is zero.

do you think this impacts, that sounds stupid to even say, how does this impact AEC? Like, so, so one of the things that I, mean, I, I do want to bring it back to that, Context for the podcast, but at the same time, it's, um,

is it too constrained?

trite, right? It just sounds like, oh, really? We're going to talk about this? But the ideas are, you're talking about schedules, right? You're talking about mundane stuff that we're still, like, literally showing up to fight with every single day. And getting wrong, making a lot of mistakes. Um, and I think about how long it took to even transition from Drafts people to CAD managers, to BIM managers, or technicians.

I'm so ready to sleep in the car.

It's yeah. It's so obvious that this is going to happen in some timeframe that you can't not expect it to happen. And yet. I mean, the same thing goes for a lot of things, right, in AEC and in tech, and we are, you know, we are so slow to adopt this stuff.

So I think, yeah, I think some of it is. so a lot of times working with customers. or just other people. You don't know, there's so many good ways to do things. There's so many products of function as you design. Like you can, you can say, the stairs can't go here because of a functional reason, but there's so many great places to put the stairs. But the client, the customer is going to have a particular affinity towards how things are arranged.

Two steps forward, one step

yeah, and then you meet with the customer and, and you have to change direction again or there's You want to work with confidence and the customer can't meet with you every afternoon at, you know, it's their, their time is constrained.

or maybe they want to and you can't

So, and the persona could be not just, you know, one customer, but say you're designing a residence for an entire family. How will the family respond to You know, you're going to get a very, how much will it cost and what does it look like? those kinds of impacts to AI I think will be profound, like just being able to interact with a persona of someone with some confidence.

Entertaining, if nothing

yeah, yeah, Evan, write, Write a description of this space and critique it as if you were Martha Stewart.

It's a fun, it's

It's a, yeah, it's a, yeah, yeah. And, um, so that part of it, I think from an education standpoint, from a business standpoint, being able to interact with, uh, a persona, a client's persona, or even a, man, if you knew the, the people that were going to be on a jury, and you could take all of their personas of, and

You create a feedback loop that's totally proactive,

Hmm.

Because you're not waiting for that event to actually happen, and you might go in there in a better position. I would hope you would go into it. when it really

firms employ psychologists to try to predict how the jury is going to respond to a design. Certainly it happens in the legal space where you try to predict how jury members, right, when they're going through the process of selecting jury members, they employ psychologists to try to pick the jurors that will have an affinity towards their approach to the, to

case. Yeah. To, yeah.

Do we do that in our, do we know, I don't know any architecture firms that employ

The example I can think of is employing psychologists to use research as a foundation for why they make decisions the way that they do. You know, when it comes to like healthcare space design, co uses of color theory in design, things like that, where. They do have psychological effects on healing, for example, right?

Yeah, like, create personas of everyone that's gonna be on the jury, and what subtle, sociological, psychological,

You're making a business case, right, for, I mean, you're talking about winning work. Yeah, yeah.

Yep. Yeah. So check out Humantic AI and then use it on yourself. I think the free version, you could do a couple of, uh, uh, test runs and then it's like trivially expensive. It's not expensive at all.

So you did that, you did that on yourself and you

Like if I, if someone was trying to sell something to me or if they were trying to employ me and some of the edge conditions for around employment were, um, Whether or not the person would, if they would respond to a job opening that was aspirational and ill defined, or did they need to have very specific definitions with their, with what would be the metrics to, um, for their success in the job. And some people you can say, hey, just come on board, it's going to be great, we'll figure it out.

in, it's then in your, your approach to talk to them, knowing what ways will connect with them. You can modify your approach to meet them where they're

you're trying to sell to this type of personality, don't go into story mode. deal with facts and figures and how their competition is using it to get ahead. And they'll want to know data. And even it will, it will tell you, uh, in, in sort of a, if you're pitching, if you're sales pitching to someone, um, don't expect a decision, that person's not going to make a decision. They're going to have to go back to their company and build consensus.

So let's go back to the leadership retreat and, and your

Oh, you went to it. How was

Well, well, before, before we talk about what it was like, we, we did, we did that already on the podcast when Adam and you were here. But, but the. Here's, here's what I want to talk about. We, we talked about BIM managers, not being that they're really technically oriented, right? Not, not just BIM managers, but people on the tech side of architecture being really technically oriented, maybe not used to leading teams. Right. And that's a big transition. That's a huge threshold of change

You're dealing with emotions instead of facts,

and, and, but, but, but then plugging this context in with this, this humanized tool that you're talking about, right, and knowing your audience, right, using, because this is about communication style and approach to get the desired outcome that you're looking for. So there's a business case for that. But there's also, you know, to me, this is about like internal projects as it is about winning outside work.

finding

You are innovating in your firm or you're coming up with a new workflow or you want to make a different tool purchase. I'm just trying to, I want to give people tools to think are different ways to think about these kinds of tools that you're talking about, because I think there's a personal aspect to this too, that it can be leveraged for to, Communicate in the right style that it will land with the person who is your audience to move this goal forward, right?

So the It's not uncommon for BIM managers, self included, to live in the potential and to be inside that bubble a lot. And things are, technology is so obviously advantageous to us. Oh, we shouldn't spend money to do this thing, but you have to convince higher ups. And one of the more recent conversations I had with the technology director, almost out of the blue, can I talk to you about something? And yes, pick up the phone and we're chatting and they're, Completely frustrated.

an open

And, um, well, what are you trying to do? Have you run the numbers? Have you figured out that the cost of the technology is trivial, but now you're going to have to train people, and you're going to have to change behavior, and what if it doesn't work out? Um, and I'm trying to go through the conversation. I said, have you offered to resign if this doesn't work out?

would I do that? I'm

Why would I

die on this sword.

a lot of money. And if it doesn't work out, what's your trajectory? Like they don't, you're, you're, you're, I think the problem is, I think what I mentioned to this person, I said, you're trying, you haven't built trust. They trust you to manage the technology, but not to manage the business for a BIM manager. Who's, you know, I think we're also a little bit all on spectrum to have a conversation with the chat GPT.

How, yeah, well, and I would ask you, and you would come back with your experience, right? But, but, at the same time, like, you're saying that this, this thing exists where you

They're on the way to the office, 30 minute drive, in traffic, frustrated because they were just told yesterday, no, you're not going to, we're not going to do that.

Right.

And so you want to vent. you just want to know why. And having something go, oh, have you thought about this? Have you thought about this other It's not even a tool that helps you design better buildings, it's just a tool to help you deal with,

Or whatever problems or challenges you're

with people. Yeah, the emotions of that, because I think we get locked in our heads, this is the right way to do it.

to do it. There's that, and everybody's like me. And I, we, we speak my language, but, but it really to me is about speaking their language and finding the way to communicate best with them. And I love this idea of the persona and kind of prototyping these conversations ahead of time. You know, role playing is what we're talking about, right? So

even before you have that meeting with the boss and go, look, I've got to have this conversation. I want to invest this money into doing this thing and training these people. What are, yeah, what are the roadblocks? What are the likely

grill me, pre grill me, right? Yeah. I mean, Steve jobs, roasting the design, right? It makes me think of like you grill me with questions. I want to get this thing through all the red tape that I have to get it through.

through. Does chat, does this chat GPT that you're using, does it work with video or is it?

You can put images up there. I don't know that it'll work

You can't walk around a design model or something like that and ask it to interact. I think it just, it, it prepare, it could prepare you, and we have a family friend, Harvard trained psychologist, and a couple of years ago I, I, we were having a chat about, uh. You know, obviously he does counseling and I said, I think the AI is going to have a profound impact on this. And he's like, Oh no, you can never replace people.

A mediator.

yeah, it's the mediator.

the

Okay, dad, you need to be quiet now. You're not, you're, yeah, you're talking too much. Let

You're talking

right, right, right. I could have Viktor Frankl in there listening in. I think those kinds of conversations will be profound and not just in monetary terms, but just in like human relationship terms because we see things through our own

When was BiLT north America in St. Louis. What year was that? 2018 or 2019? 2017?

the next to the last one. So I think it was 18 because 19 was

Seattle, right? I think it was in, I did like one of those YouTube wrap up videos. I was doing, doing those at the time. And something that came up at that conference was what if you had, I think it was in the, um, the, Is it the DTS, which was like the pre conference for the Digital Technology Summit?

you pay somebody 300 bucks an hour and,

And just not doing that because it's cost prohibitive

No, if you're stressed about money, you can't pay someone 300 bucks an hour.

And I think like working in an architectural office leads to a lot of situations where that would be extremely beneficial, right? So like it's a frustrating job. It's a challenging job Uh, and that's you know Lots of different roles in the office, not just technology roles. But I mean, we can definitely see that in technology roles. It's really challenging. Yeah,

I think, you know, we've used AI, the AEC space primarily to create beautifully seductive images of buildings and the lighting is perfect. The reflections are amazing. And, uh, you know, from text prompts and, and, and a little bit of graphics, little massing or sketching,

Some some kind of rudimentary underlay. Yeah.

images, but that's just, I think we're just scratching the surface. We're doing the thing that appeals to us as

it's the eye candy,

we're, well, we're visual people, you know, we're, we're, we've kept ourselves alive over millennia by being visual and listening. But, uh, that's just scratching the It's, um, it's far more

well, and that even, you know, scratching the surface, to me, it's like, it's the lure, it's the carrot, and it's not even the thing we should be. I really focused on. Right. It's just, it's a distraction.

Well, there's an enormity of execution that has to take place if you're talking about in terms of manufacturing and leverage. I think everything in a way is every, every job is kind of a manufacturing role. You're turning something of a lower value into a higher value. So you're turning raw materials into tennis shoes or tires. You're turning electricity into drawings, instructions to build a building.

It's called building information modeling, Phil, have you heard of it? but

But isn't, transactional.

Mm hmm.

It's not a conversation where you're just staring at the blank piece of paper and going, you know, this doesn't really work. Like, give me some ideas here. Which normally you'd call someone over who has a lot of experience.

say, Hey, I need some fresh eyes on this. Can you look, can you look at this and tell me if

lay down some trace and you kind of look at it a different way. Um, I think that kind of interaction what's going to be really profound. At school. at university, like having a minor in psychology and a master's degree in architecture, or maybe having an undergraduate degree in architecture and a master's degree in psychology. Because ultimately what you're, I think what we're trying to do in business is persuade.

Absolutely.

And how you persuade depends on the person that you're trying to persuade. It's not one

There's no one way to do it, yeah. Right.

Yeah. There's so many ways to do things. And what will appeal based on that person's understanding of how that space is going to be used. Commercial space or a private space. The aspiration of what that building and investment is going to, is, is how it's going to Like being able to interact with a persona at that level. I think is, is just, it's profound. We don't have

you feel like that's leverage to build those skills

Well, if you're building a

those

you don't have, you're not constrained by team size. Maybe, you know, what's, I don't know if it's, if, uh, I like things in threes. You know, a stool is, will hold, a stool won't wobble with three legs. Maybe you just have three people. What's the firm size now? And you have these intelligent agents that you can interact with, even with those other people on the team.

you become a specialist in that this is how large firms operate, right? You're specialists in, in all those roles.

But I think these agents will be the specialists that you need on, on

Or they can be If, if people are willing to

Look, even the conversation when the customer's not paying you, having a conversation first about this customer that's not paying me, how would you

Well, you would write your draft.

And some customers are going to be very transactional and you're going to say, I'm going to come and I need to be paid today. And others may, it may be a different appeal.

negotiation. Right.

Um, Because if you're impatient and you just escalate right away, get frustrated, go, Okay, look, well, if I have to get a lawyer,

Every, yeah, if you're a, if you're a hammer, every, every problem

yeah, that's not the win.

Right.

So using these kind of agent feedback loops, having the conversation before the conversation, I think that's the profound part. We haven't, we haven't touched the surface of that yet. We're just using it to make pictures right now. We're not using it to create personas.

I mean it, and the technology exists right now to do this.

You'll get more than you, that's the, that was the bit flip, is when you get more than out of it than you think you put into it. Like taking a photo from that, uh, beach retail show of a, of a, a vendor's tabletop and going, okay, what do I have in this picture? And how much would it cost retail? And it starts to give a very detailed accounting of everything on the table to the point that, um, I mean, the alligator heads were pretty obvious.

Oh, and by the way, the table costs you $25

Yeah, so now I'm finding myself walking around taking photos of things and asking, uh, asking Grok, um, who makes this chair and how much does it cost? Where is this light from? And, and it goes and finds it.

So the thing that this is. Bringing up for me is this whole idea of curiosity, right? Like you obviously have this curiosity now, like you, you've seen a bit of what it can do and, and now, oh man, I'm just going to keep asking it more and more questions, but curiosity is, um, let's just say it's not, really welcome in a lot of corporate situations, right? It's like, do the job with these tools like this.

Ooh, I don't know you'd want to Why would you ever want to work somewhere you weren't? being paid to be

well, and look what you can get out of it, right? Like, like look what the potential is with that. And that there's a, there's a leverage right there. Like, I always found it to be incredibly frustrating to work in places where it was like, this is how we do it. This is how we've always done it. This is how we're going to continue to do it. Don't do, don't go outside of these lines, right? Don't color outside the lines.

Inside the lines.

Stifling that curiosity happens early on in a lot of people, right? And then it continues. And so like there's, there's levels of curiosity that are allowed in air

of air and I, I suspect that business success leads to Pattern recognition of, oh, let's do more of that. Right? So you don't want to

Keep doing that. Yeah.

even to the detriment of the business, they'll follow it all the way down. But just keep doing the thing and particularly in stress mode, then people really look at pattern recognition and they don't want to try anything else because they're stressed. Yeah, they double but for architectural firms now, or students that are in school now, I suppose if your aspiration is to work for a company and be part of the milieu of a very recognizable high design firm, then that's one track.

I wish we could run a poll on the podcast right now, right? Like a real time poll of like, do you feel like you have that agency in your role to be curious? Like a lot of times there's like designated individuals who are like in an R and D kind of situation and that might be over glamorized, right? But it's like this, or I remember as a designer, right? I remember a project manager who was, you know, a principal and owner in the firm was like, You've got the, you've got the easy job.

I think

paid to come up with innovation.

can see the director going, okay, I like your idea, but that's not a good idea for today. Like that's a good idea for the next project. But to just say, Hey, I don't want you to have, stop thinking, you know,

Yeah, just

just do, ah, nah,

crushing for an artist, or for an architect,

even think it's artist and architect. I think anyone, like even if you dig a hole and someone goes, oh, is the hole there? Nah, let's put the hole over there. Or if you're digging a hole, right? Like literally digging a ditch and you go, you know, we're going to dig it this way, but that's a long way. We could dig it over this way and it's a better way to dig the ditch. Oh, I'm glad you thought of that. Like, know, to be, to be, uh, proud of your work, anything, be curious, anything.

So that the idea behind this kind of talking to this technology, talking to these agents. You know, why, why not just talk to a person about this stuff? And the answer is because they're not available.

they're not always available. Yeah, yeah. No, there's very smart

they cost money or whatever, whatever those things are. There's

they're in the middle of their thought, and now you're interrupting an important moment for them. Um, I don't think it'll be either or. I think it'll be both and. You'll use this other, you know, you mentioned that the, the agent was so optimistic about your idea, right? You do get, you do get that artifact sometimes. What a wonderful idea. Let's just, let's, let's think about that. Um, but you do need a way to bounce ideas. I think these tools, at least in my experience, are not being used.

things to the ground faster, right?

it's like, Oh, I didn't think about that. I was doing, uh, one of the posts for the Fall Leadership Retreat, or maybe it's the Spring Roundtable, like, we don't have alcohol at the event. And so I wanted to do a, a, a short article about why we don't have alcohol. And it wasn't meant, I don't want to do anything preachy, it's just like, in practical terms. So I asked ChatGBT, like, give me some practical reasons, we have this kind of event, here's what we're trying to do.

Phil.

We didn't see, we saw him on the river, but he's none in the

way. So,

So yeah, there's, you know, to be thoughtful, to be in the moment, uh, to be aware of what you're saying and thinking, okay, those are good reasons why we don't have alcohol. It just avoids complexity. I still had to kind of curate the final selection, but I asked the tool, like a room full of people, Hey, give me some ideas. Like, you're just ideating, and I think that part of the, of the, of

Don't you do that, don't you do that anyway? Don't you go through it at the, everything, even if you make it, right?

You do, but sometimes, you know, there's that mental block at first.

Oh, no, absolutely,

and um, it's very good at getting that initial vector, and then giving you ideas that you wouldn't have thought of. I think even for myself, if I had got myself in a quiet place and thought about it, I wouldn't have thought about that angle. Yep. So, those kinds of, I, I would Encourage someone to take some of these tools and take a photo of a chair and say where can I get this chair? Take a photo of a space and say I like this design. How much would this cost all the furnishings in this space?

You know, as an architect, I always found that you have different types of clients, but the best clients were the ones who were looking for ideas, searching for ideas.

using you as an AI. Yeah,

Yeah, they were using you to do the same thing, right, because they're not the experts and they recognize that and they hired you to do that job and you're the expert in that job and for you to look at it like that I think is a, is a good take, right, because like when you get those unexpected, whoa, I didn't think about that. That's really,

Yeah, they've, they've already biased themselves, they've flipped online through pictures, they've looked at designs, and, and they're still at the point where they go, you know, I don't know, just, here's what I like, but can you give me some ideas, we have this piece of property, here's what we want to do with it, here's what we want to, here's how we want the, the end product to perform, here's its function, but give me some ideas.

One of my favorite kind of surveys afterward with a client was when they said, I said, so, you know, just, Let's just talk about the overall process. And they said, you know what? I really, really, really the thing that really made a mark for me. And this was like a board member at this entity organization. And they said, you brought things to the table that we would have never, ever, ever thought of.

You're a very good carbon based AI.

But that,

But that's what, you wanted something unexpected.

the kind of jobs I want to work on. Right, and And you don't, I don't wanna work on the kinds of jobs where it's like I have all the answers. Number one, I, I want it to be interactive, but I also want it to go somewhere where ne, neither one of us thought it

that's what happens in the conversation so many times. I think I have an idea, and I chat with Adam about the idea, and at the end of the conversation, we end up with another idea that neither of us anticipated, that we're both interested in. And, I think that's, another important artifact of having these conversations as opposed to the transactions when you can re ask the question and okay why do you say that and dig deeper you end up

mean by that?

yeah you end up with a an idea that turns into a very interesting opportunity it's surprising

Yeah. And that, I mean, that it's, there's, there's something here about surprise that actually makes people pay attention to something. It's like what something is impactful to you. It's typically because it was surprising. So it's the twist in the movie. It's the, it's the bridge in the song. It's the key change. It's something that you didn't see coming. Right. And, and it's like, boom, it smacks you in the face. Right. And it's. That's what makes its mark on you,

right, right, right.

searching for that to happen.

And the restrictions of, uh, Don't just do anything you have to. And I think that's where AI suffers right now, particularly with regard to trying to come up with design ideas and creating renderings, it's really good at creating anything, anything, and it, it's hard at creating something. Um, I think that'll get better, but, uh, it's hard to iterate and have things sit still and then just kind of tweak it over here. I only recently found out that Keith Richards uses open tuning and five

Yeah.

Oh my gosh, the music sounds amazing. And I'm, and I

would know, nobody would know that, right?

and he said when they were starting out, like the, the heavy string, the bottom string is

when I, when I say that, nobody listening would know, like, Oh, Keith Richards plays with a completely modified setup from normal

So it's an old blues style, open tuning. So you can strum, so you can strum the strings without touching the strings. It also means you can just put one finger across five strings and get, and Go online and listen to Keith Richards playing the guitar. You're like, that's, that's the sound. That's the sound of his guitar playing and how he's able to create fills. The songs that they're known for would not have been possible without that, without the restriction of that tuning style.

but, yeah, it's

And even a guitar company created a five string guitar, which he played with for a number of years in the late 70s or 80s. But it was a five string guitar and he would open tune it.

it. Just for him. Yeah. I

listen to them play carefully. the concert in, um, it's called Shine a Light. It was a documentary film. Martin Scorsese filmed it in the, um, uh, it's at the Beacon Theater in New York. And if you listen to Keith playing, there's a lot of fumbling. Like there's a whole bunch of other musicians playing at the same time. He's just doing fills and little pieces, but it's amazing. It's like orchestrated music. There's these little pieces of magic happening.

Yeah. That, that is the beauty of constraints in any situation, right? It's like you figure out how to operate within them, and then you break a rule here or there, right? Yeah? But they actually provide you with, I keep saying the word vector, right? But that's what it

Oh, it's just like you're on it.

okay, now I can see where we're going because it's not just a wide open field of blank page.

Yeah. What's

What do we have to work

I only have one professor at architecture school that built this artificial restriction. This is a four hour task. This is an eight hour task.

You talked about him, I think, in, in one of our podcasts. Yeah.

And, uh, he's like, yeah, I don't

This is how much time you get to do

You get eight hours and, uh, if you come up with two ideas in eight hours, fine. One idea in eight hours. I want to see what you get by tomorrow morning. Give me four hours and then go do something else. And, um, I always felt a certain level of satisfaction of doing something well with a constraint, as opposed to just, oh, it doesn't matter, do anything.

or just keep Oh, you still have time left. Keep going. Even though you're, you feel done,

You feel burnt out.

feel out. Yeah.

Yeah.

yeah, there, there, there are definitely people who are wired. If there's more time, we're not done. We can do more.

The glue's got time to dry. Keep gluing.

Right.

So it's, uh, yeah, I think the technologies are interesting, certainly in the ability to interact in a conversational way with an agent that will critique a design for a student, for a would be architectural student. It will discuss ideas in a way that aren't emotionally, uh, threatening. Right? Because you're not in front of a jury of peers, your students are all there watching you get reamed on a Monday morning.

So, so this idea of curiosity but also flexing that muscle and actually playing, like I'd, I'd like to frame it under the, Play right you play with these things so that you learn what works What doesn't work how it's changing over time if you don't flex that muscle if you don't flex any muscle it they atrophy they go

Well, you mentioned that some of these tools will respond to things on your screen.

Yeah, yeah Claude

And it will respond in architectural terms? I mean, could you have a, a model or a plan of a

I believe so. I, yeah, and so, so, so, yeah, so the, the company's Anthropic and their model is called Claude and they have different versions of Claude for different, you know, different structures and stuff, but one, one of the modes of their app will, will look at your screen.

Yeah. I would look at a mode that does the thing that when you go, could I have another set of eyes? And they take out the trace and lay it over and start doing sketching. But this mode

Well, this'll actually No,

have you thought about what if you move this over here and move that

It's looking at what you're doing on your screen. So, I think, I think the idea is like, it will actually act like an agent on your behalf at some point. Maybe it does that now. But it's like, I'm clicking this button. in this interface. It means this, right? And it could walk you through things. It could be like a helper, but it could also potentially, I think, do things for you.

There's a lot of, I think there's a lot of empathy that occurs in good design where you're in that mode of sort of plan view, but you're, you know, analytically, but you're also trying to imagine how it will be experienced. And, um, getting feedback in terms of the emotional quality of a design as well as does it satisfy the analytic needs of the design.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think it will take the stress away of doing work and then having to untangle it later and going, Oh, I spent all day yesterday on that. So I worked 16 hours and I have to roll it backwards as opposed to in the moment being

Well, there's that, but there's also how much you can actually compress time, and so you don't waste as much time having to redo something, right? Because, ideas, like, okay, so real time rendering, you know, you're connected with Enscape, I love the idea of, Making using it as a rendering as a decision making tool now, right? That wasn't a thing back in the day and back in the day. It was an a

Oh, you push your button and wait. Yeah. Yeah. It was a thing you did at the

And well, you better not screw it up because you don't want to have to do it again, right? And we learned how to fix things in Photoshop because it was way faster

Yeah. Instead of push the button and wait four

So so this idea of like moving that technology closer to the audience to the metal, right? It's like, I'm now using it to make decisions because of the visualization quality. I can actually, I can use it right as a tool throughout the process. And I think this is kind of the same thing, right? This is, this is another thing where we're using it as a tool along the way to help us.

the moment, right? It's not the thing where you push the button at the end and render. It's the questions and interaction in the moment. Otherwise it's too disruptive. You have to, you have to do these big cycles where you go back and start over and go back and start over. So that's where I'm kind of, yeah, there was so much, there's so much about AI this and AI that, and I was like, oh, it's getting overwhelmed with AI.

Now, everything's a five star recipe, first of all. Like, you, you

through, you get the thing, and then you get the backstory of the

And finally, at the end, you get

and finally at the end you get the recipe, and then you get the instructions. But if you ask, chat

No nonsense.

It's like, Oh, you want to make fajitas? Here's your list of ingredients. Here's what you do. And I was like, okay, and, and these are options. If you want to do this, you might do that. And I'm like, okay, that's what I want with, then there's no advertisers. There's no noise. I'm not scrolling down four pages. Um,

That's a really interesting, uh, door, to, for me to get back into this part where, you know, this idea of, of, Using or, or, or leveraging curiosity of your employees to play with these tools and create fluency with them so that that leverage can be amplified, right? Like if you, if you have zero fluency with these, then someday you're going to say, Oh, you know, we should be using these tools, right? They've finally proven themselves. Now, okay, we're at the laggard end of the adoption curve.

No, some of it's, uh, It's still a little transactional. It's very, you know, the ideation that creates an image that sort of convinces a

customer. We use this tool

Yeah, so I was talking with an architect, and I think it was at AU, and they're winning work by doing simple sketches or massing models of lobby atrium spaces, and then they're asking, uh, I think it's mid journey to They're describing a text prompt and then in the style of a particular well known

And then using

and they're using that to generate an image and then they're using those images to win work and then they execute the work. But they're, they're naming, they're naming other firms by name, um, which might, I don't know, it might, you know, Upset some people, but to me it's no different than going to the library and pulling out the latest architectural record or some other magazine and going, Oh, I like that work, that's by

Putting a little tab on that

Yeah, yeah, and just go, it's that firm, because if

this is what Pinterest was for everybody, right? Like, it's just, just create all these

So it's part of their text

stairs and rails

transactional, I think, in that way of going, here's the massing model, and we want it in the style of this, and you get an image. But the idea, if you're doing lunch and learns on AI, and you have young staff, asking people, what are you using AI firm for? Let's go around the table at the Lunch and Learn and talk about what you're using. AI firm, but has nothing to do directly with

no one's gonna get in trouble here.

Right, right, right, right.

just an open conversation

and it might not be anything to do with images, but the idea of someone saying, Oh, I'm using it, I'm using AI to have conversations that are in lieu of a psychologist, or I'm having a discussion in lieu of, of, uh, trying to understand a difficult relationship with a coworker or roommate, all of these kinds of human conflicts. You know, imagine a roommate that just doesn't keep the apartment clean Right. To your standard. It's like, oh, I use chat GT Plus to

formulate that conversation.

Yeah. Right, right. Because

Give me some

art artists may not be, we're, we're kind of a, we're kind of conflict averse. Yeah, we don't like chasing money. We don't like chasing arguments. That's why we have somebody else do that. No, I don't like selling. So now you have that conversation with an agent to help you frame a discussion around why it's important for me that you do your dishes and do your part to keep the apartment clean.

That's a different conversation. That's like, here are the, here's the business goals. Once you've defined those, you can figure out which technology it's probably, it may be AI, it may not be, right? Plugs into solving that business goal, right? That could be any number of tools to do that. You're talking about approaching it from more of a grassroots effort, which, Hey,

we, what do we, what obscure things are you using this for?

that'll just spark ideas, right?

Yeah, I think you take a bigger picture. You don't just step in going, How are we going to use this for rendering? It's kind of, that's so transactional. You can do much bigger things with it. And then you might get to rendering as well.

Well, I want to use this now as a segue to transition into the upcoming round table discussions that you're gonna be

End of April.

at the end of April of

So this will be the second year. Um, and the, we have the, we have the fall leadership retreat, which is more leadership, self-leadership, other leadership, leadership of others. And then the spring event is more technology focused. So this will be the second year. And our approach is that. Good answers are not transactional. They come from discussions.

Here,

How would you do it?

add my me

Yeah. How would you, how would you do it for this kind of thing? And they go, oh yeah, that won't work. Yeah. You probably want to do it this other way. So we thought, you know what, we should just have the conversations after the presentation. So, like, Carl Storms did a presentation last year that was based on his, uh, self interest in the, he did a hundred days of AI, and we talked, we went around the table, what other people were using AI for, in some cases, trivial kind of things.

See, this is, this is exactly the conversation we just had about finding out what young people are doing with AI, like, flexing that muscle. And so Carl did that for a hundred days. Kevin Kelly, you know, one of the internet, early internet pioneers, mid journey, every single day would Just to play with it, just to figure out what it could do to find out what worked, find out what different didn't work.

No, and it's not, and we're all high performing technologists, so we're not really concerned about someone coming up with an idea and then shooting it full of arrows, well that's not going to work. What we really want is, this is a hard problem, and it's costing me stress and time and money.

But, but what's so cool about these events is like, you can totally be safe and vulnerable and, and like it really isn't a target, right? It's like, if it was at AU and you were presenting that, it absolutely, it's just, it's a different, it's a different

Yeah at light at Autodesk University is a very kind of um, It's a very lecture environment where hold your questions to the end or maybe ask questions as you go along Where I

But there's also a spotlight and a stage and a screen and a PowerPoint and a video.

There's a uh, there's a power

stakes. Right? Yeah.

Um, there's an adult child kind of relationship. I am the speaker and you are the listener. Um, and so you don't want to ask questions that might put the speaker on the spot. What Scott showed me was a sit back, drop my napkin, gobsmacked moment going, Oh my gosh, I can't believe that works. And it's, and, and without, I don't want to give it away because I want Scott to really present this, but it is a return to first practices using new technology.

Interesting. and, they, these, these are not recorded and they're not shared afterward. Like, you, you have

No, you got to be there. Yeah, and we think that's important. We've had people ask, oh, will these be recorded? Can I download it later? And I think that's just. It's not worth the investment. That's just so transactional. You really want to be there to interact and to understand at the moment. And, uh, I think if Scott goes forward with this and opens it up and shows people what he's doing, he's going to end up creating a template that people will be able to use to document their projects.

world. Wow.

And, um, it's, it enormously simplifies the documentation process. And because I think it's part of the artifact is because, uh, the reason this has evolved is because Beck is accountable from the design through the construction. So he's trying to simplify the communication process as well. Um, so I think what we've used technology for was to create a more efficient way of making drawings.

with politics, with country, like there's, there's so much else kind of muddying that right. Create, making it what it's become.

Yeah, so what he did, it just, it just so surprised me and even the name, the, the name or the metaphor he's come up for this process is even beautiful as well. So yeah, so good on you, Scott. Yeah, he's a, he's a curious guy. So that's what, so that's what we'll do.

We gotta do this next thing. 10 38. Yeah. No, it's

like, wow, okay, let's talk about

where this goes.

Yeah, okay, now we're going to go out to the campfire out by the lake and we'll keep talking about it, you know, after he's, so we don't have PowerPoint presentations, but I think for this we might end up having a projector and a screen

so you can

TV and a, you

something to look at.

TV and a screen and Scott's going to say, it's what I've been thinking about. So, the, um, the other thing about the event is, We, we, I don't know if Adam and I have been too clever about this, but we got excited about the idea of theming the event, and we're looking for submissions of, uh, facilitated discussions around the theme of better storytelling through technology. But I don't know if that's And Adam and I are going to talk about it again this week.

I mean, the thing about this audience, I think, is that they are the people who tinker. Right? We, we, we tinker with stuff, because we build tools, we, we design things, like, you, you chase your curiosities, you know, you, in the 90s it was like everybody learned how to code a website by hand, right, because, and there was no, you couldn't do a course back then, it was like,

You just had to figure it

you view source, and you'd copy and paste, and you would figure it out, right? And, but, but, there's new versions of that, like what, what you're saying Scott's doing, right? It was like, right. Something led to something else, and it led him down this path, and, and, I'm sure he never saw that coming, but everybody's got something, everybody has that story, and the, and it's like, what's, what's the current version of that story for you?

Oh, there'll be more

even put into it, right? And, and so there's, so, so yeah, like labeling it under the idea of storytelling. People may not think that they have a good enough story, but everybody definitely has

Like if you say, if we said better communication through technology, because sometimes as technologists we get excited about the artifact of the technology and really what is the implication of it or how, how do you use it well? You can use technology to do lazy things, right? but what I. Well, I think Scott has done, and I could even be in my own bubble right now, because I mean it was, I don't, I tend not to get surprised a lot.

Cool.

Yeah, he's, he's a great guy. Yeah. So if anyone's out there, you know, that the topic is better storytelling through technology, or that's a theme. Yeah, if we've been too clever about that, just ignore it, and just propose a really great discussion,

Yeah.

something that's, uh, led by your curiosity.

And what, what's the, so, so you, I mean there's a date coming up, but what are the, what, how does it work with proposing these?

I think, you know, well, okay, so we have to have a, you have to have a date, a deadline somewhere, so we're looking around the 27th of December is the deadline for submissions, and then registration will start the first week of January. You know, there's only over three days. It's nine to 12 discussion sessions. So we can go through those pretty quickly. We don't have to create a big committee.

To me, this is an event where, like, it really is worth investing in yourself in. Even if you can't get corporate to pay for it, or, I don't know. You know, like, coming away from this. This is the best event in AEC that I've ever attended. And so I'm not just saying that cause I'm sitting here with you in Denver airport face to face. It really is. I mean, it was super, super impactful. And so I feel like, like it's worth submitting an idea, but it's also worth just attending.

In practical terms, the reason we announced this top, the call for submission topics or session topics in, after Autodesk University, is because the dust has finally settled for people having, you know, they've got to get to AU. And it also gives people I'll give credit to Nick Kramer. He said, you need to tell people how much this is going to cost and when it's going to be, uh, in the third quarter or fourth quarter of, I'm like, why? He goes, well, we have to ask for budget.

Cause it is in Florida.

Yeah, and if you look at the bell curve of when hurricanes rough weather happens in Florida, it's all right at the second half of September

And people who don't know hurricane weather like me, or, you know, others from Canada and, you know, the West coast,

this year one the week the week before and the week after the event we had Uh, Hurricanes pass. We didn't get impacted, but it was just like, okay, it messes with travel, and I thought, this

there was a lot of worry about it.

Oh yeah, it creates

Should I even go? Because,

Yep, yep. No, we were going to go on the Chautauqua Springs, and it turned out that the, uh, the river Ended up full of trees. And so we ended up going to Silver Springs and that was the Thursday or the Wednesday before the event, that river is still not clear. So we, yeah, months later, they're having to pull trees out of it. So we'll do that event at the end of April or sorry, at the end of October for the fall event and stay out of the storm, The peak of the bell curve.

But it's an amazing location. Uh, it's really quiet. You actually can unplug the wifi is not great,

It's, it's good

is fine, which is actually I think a bonus because then you're less distracted and you're more grounded, I think, in the people and in the place of the event. So all of that I think adds up to

We haven't figured out how to make this. If we should scale it, like, I don't think more than the number of people that fit on one motor coach should ever attend because we don't want the artifact of, of having to print lanyards and having to, like, we don't have exhibitors, we don't have lanyards, we don't have sponsors. I don't want to turn into the event location and say, brought to you by XYZ software company. Just like the moment you get there, you're there. It's everything is authentic.

But people from the Southern Hemisphere come to this event

event, too.

it's a stretch, but they do it.

a stretch. It is. No, Carrie, uh, Carrie Thompson attended. Right. Uh, yeah, Callum Freeman from, uh, Assemble in New Zealand. attended. And they're both on, they're like, Hey, we should do this in New Zealand or Australia. And like, yeah, we have to find a place. But we have an interesting Venn diagram at the camp that we go to because we have a chef, private chef. We have a commercial kitchen. He gets to run the kitchen for the week. So we have, I think meals are very important.

Think about the food that you're consuming and who it was made by at this versus a production

Yeah, you're not standing in a line getting your food. He brings it out. It's all, it's all set, like a family, like here's your plates of platters of food and a couple of

explains it all. Yep.

So that kind of attention to detail and, um, and it's a camp. So the accommodations are I would say austere. They're not uncomfortable, but it's either like a motel style room or a cabin style room where it's, you know, there's no campers. It's just you're in the counselor's accommodation. Questions

that came up from, so some people heard that I went, I think I was at AU, and they're like, you went to that, right? And I said, yeah. And they said, is it true that you can bring your family?

Oh,

Because they heard that on the podcast and they said, is that true? Like, like, like

Could you really do

were just making that up. So, so talk about that

Yeah, so the idea is that, um, we wanted to have counselor led activities for, you know, for kids during the day, and then in the afternoons everybody can get together. Um, Sylvia, who's a wonderful technologist around scanning, BIM scanning services, modeling services of historic buildings. Um, Mia came, and I think Mia's seven. Very precocious, self motivated, and she was great the whole week. And it worked.

they don't have to sit in the conference

no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Me as an edge condition, still sit in a conference room and listen to discussions and, and draw on color all week. And, uh, but no, it should be like, yeah, kids want to go off. And, and, and the things they do is like teach kids to, uh, build fires or build forts or the kinds of stuff that I used to do growing up in Florida. Yeah, you go feral and you go build a fort in the woods. So the idea is that they councilor led activities during the day for kids.

opportunities for, like, off site, you know, things that can happen for, for, depending on who shows up.

yeah. If, if, if you had. partners show up and they want to go off. There's, there's an enormity of interesting historic and beautiful things in Florida to do. Go off to St. Augustine for the day and go shopping or old historic village. But, um, yeah, it's legitimately like we had, uh, someone asking about driving. They wanted to bring the whole family. I think it was like three kids, mom and dad and like, yeah, go.

on the inner tube on behind the boat. Go, go down the water slide. Yeah. There's a

wrap up video that Peter did shows Sylvia and Mia on the, uh, getting pulled around on the big inflatable thing. Yeah, yeah, so it's meant to be time to definitely think hard, but also relax, try to disconnect a little bit. It's an investment in, it should be an investment in future revenue, um, but I think the best way to get there is by having conversations, not by sitting in a room and just being fed presentations all the time in a, in a transactional way. And

I think you

things And you can have both, I'm not saying the other one, like the Autodesk University kind of, kind of approach, where you do have, you know You know, sort of audience and presenter kind of format that's legitimate.

This is very participatory and, and contributory, right? And in the, just the natural way that it works. And to me, like, again, just reinforcing It was impactful. It was professionally impactful. It was personally impactful. I built relationships with people who I'd never met before there. There's a network because it's intentionally small that gets built up. And I can see this being kind of a homecoming event that happens, but, but there's room for new people. I mean, it's, it's not exclusive.

but it's, I think, I think authentic. You know, having the offsite on Monday helps people to de posture a bit

Yeah,

and kind of just

Get to know each other.

and have conversations that aren't

ease into it. It's lovely. We

thought about doing it at the end, like it as a wrap up event. Oh, okay. We've all done this thing for the week now let's do an offsite, and I think it was Henry. Uh, give him credit with this idea of de posturing and doing it at the beginning to help people kind of relax and feel more, uh, open and feel authentic and then go into the event. And that's proved itself out a better, better structure.

All right. Well, Phil, I will endeavor to get this episode out before your deadline.

27th of December. Look, I think the main thing is people, people now, if they have to ask for budget to do it and what do they want to attend and what do they want to events do they want to contribute to next year? Now, at least it could be, you know, they, they have, uh, they have advanced. which we, to our detriment, we haven't done that in the past. We should have. So now we're letting people know in, yeah, we're letting people know in quarter four instead of quarter one.

Cool. Yeah.

Thanks, Evan.

Well, it's gonna be fun and uh, I wish you the best 'cause I won't be able to attend that one, but I'm

The spring event, you can't, you've got obligations, but maybe in the fall, get you back on the E Foil? Yeah. That's Evan doing the, uh, the lasso. Was that you on, in the, in the, uh, wrap up video? And you'd never done that before? No. And you got up? Yeah. Oh, great. Thanks, Evan. All right.

right. Talk to you next time.