[00:00:00] Michael Claire: the adoption rate of AI will be, strongly correlated to the accuracy of ai. if AI starts giving wrong answers and causing errors and doing crazy things, people won’t trust it, then people won’t buy into it as much.

[00:00:12] Michael: That’s why I think, while it’s important to focus on ai, and I’m gonna sound like a contrarian here for a minute. My perspective is if I was on the side of the road in 1901 talking about automobiles and I was looking around and I’d be hearing all kinds of things, some people would be excited, some would be scared, and I’m sure a couple of horseshoe guys would be like, you know what, I’m gonna start putting auto on my sign.

[00:00:32] Michael: You know, it says horseshoe right now, but I’m putting auto up there because I, that’s, that’s the hot thing.

[00:00:37] Intro: The Digital Banking Podcast is powered by Tyfone is the creator of Infiniti, a ally better digital banking platform for community financial institutions, as well as several platform agnostic revenue generating point solutions. Our highly configurable platform and broad ecosystem of third party partners ensure our entire suite is scalable and extensible to meet the needs of any FI.

[00:01:05] Intro: On our podcast, you will hear host Josh DeTar, discuss today’s most pressing financial technology topics with seasoned industry experts from every possible discipline.

[00:02:23] Josh DeTar: Welcome to another episode of the Digital Banking Podcast. My guest today is Michael Clare, founder and CEO of loan, serious limited philosophical. Futurist. You’ll find this self prescribed title on Michael’s LinkedIn page. What does it mean and why was it important enough to Michael to put that out there for the world to see?

[00:02:45] Josh: We’re gonna get to that here in a second, but I’ve been really excited to have Michael on as a guest, here from the very first time we spoke. The reason is I just, I really love people with genuine energy, and Michael is chock full of it. Plus he’s got a beautiful accent vocabulary and way of communicating that just makes him mesmerizing to listen to.

[00:03:07] Josh: So, back to this whole philosophical futurist thing. What’s that all about? Well, Michael believes that in life you have two ways of acquiring intelligence. Taught intelligence, which comes from other people, life experiences, school books, et cetera, and what he calls native intelligence. Now, native intelligence is that foundational way you think and perceive the world.

[00:03:31] Josh: For Michael, that native intelligence brought forward kind of three core pillars in how he views himself and how he interacts with the world around him. One, a deep tie to and sense of pride in being true, not just truthful but true, which manifests itself in integrity and always striving to be the best version of himself that he can be, which then turns to how he hopes to be perceived by others.

[00:04:00] Josh: In today’s day and age, we tend to start with the notion that people don’t have integrity until you prove to them that you do. And Michael’s really passionate about people being able to trust his integrity from second. Two, a bias towards facts and science in a world full of information at our fingertips.

[00:04:18] Josh: True. Again, not just truth is being distorted. Being well-grounded in reality and facts and data helps us make better decisions and understand more intelligently what’s going on. And three, a focus on creating value. This is kind of funny. When I asked him what he does for fun, he answered, you know, your listeners may laugh at me or say, I need to seek help when I say this out loud.

[00:04:45] Josh: But what do I do for fun? Work to find ways to evolve, innovate, and most importantly, create value Well, and play the saxophone. Now, when you combine these three things, Michael becomes the person he is today. A tirelessly dedicated entrepreneur with a single track focused to create value and leave the world a better place than he found it.

[00:05:09] Josh: He also has a piece of advice for anyone out there who is listening today that asks the question, why does it have to be this way? Oftentimes, you’ll get laughed at or labeled different for asking that question. Good. That question is the seed of entrepreneurship. Plant it, cultivate it, watch it grow, and be different, and change the world for the better.

[00:05:32] Josh: today we will talk about how these core values that have made Michael, who he is, makes him this philosophical futurist and how it influences his desire to change the way that we build value creating software that help relationships and people thrive.

[00:05:52] Josh: Michael, man, I’m stoked to have you on the show.

[00:05:55] Josh: Thanks for joining me today, sir.

[00:05:57] Michael: Josh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[00:06:00] Josh: alright. So, you know, I, I feel like I kind of like teased everybody with this whole, you know. Futurist concept, but I never really addressed it because I want you to.

[00:06:11] Michael: Sure.

[00:06:12] Josh: what is a philosophical futurist, why is that important to you, and why did you feel like that needed to be kind of one of the defining titles of what makes you you?

[00:06:22] Michael: Yeah, great question. So sometimes if you are, if you’re like at sea and you’re in a big wave and you, you feel yourself rising and falling, and you may not necessarily understand that you’re part of a storm or you’re part of something much larger. And so one of the things that being a philosophical futurist does it, it says, give me the, gimme the binoculars.

[00:06:47] Michael: Let me look over the horizon. Let me see what’s happening. Let me make sure that I’m not just bouncing around because. I’m at a spot in time where the waves may be a bit bumpy, but let me see what the conditions of the overall landscape looks like. And more importantly, let me see a little bit over the horizon.

[00:07:06] Michael: Not too far away, but a little bit over the, over the horizon and say what’s happening and what’s coming our way now, that’s the futurist part, but all of that, both the philosophical and the futurist, it’s really part of something that’s bigger. It’s part of something that’s also, as you talked about, native intelligence.

[00:07:25] Michael: It is part of something that’s really native to me, which is this natural proclivity to want to see things, big picture, wanna see macro issues, want to talk about and look at and understand the large forces that are moving. People, especially at this time where I I, I call it a tipping point, really using the word tip, a technological.

[00:07:53] Michael: Inflection point, a tip point, and we’re, we’re going through one of those tip points right now, I think. And it’s not just because of ai, but part of all of that is, is what I do naturally, what I bring, part of who I am, which is a person who enjoys and naturally has a view of things that most people probably don’t really care to even look at because it’s not part of their day-to-day existence.

[00:08:20] Michael: It’s not happening right now. But I like to think about the things that are happening now. Are they part of something larger? Right? Is it just random things happening or are they patronistic? Does it represent a bigger set of waves that are happening? Or are you just stuck on a boat in one place, bumping around thinking that, hey, there’s a storm, but really there’s no storm, you know?

[00:08:41] Michael: And so that, that change of perspective is what being a philosophical futurist is really all about.

[00:08:47] Josh: Hmm. You know, one of the other things, if I may be so bold, you might consider adding to that title is I, I feel like just in the very short time that we’ve been able to get to know each other, you’re also incredibly optimistic about all of that. Even if the, what you see over the horizon doesn’t look good.

[00:09:08] Josh: Like you seem to always find a way. Where you’re like, yeah, that big old storm that’s coming, like, here’s the positive that’s in it. And I, I think, you know, especially for people who’ve listened to this show are probably, you know, no stranger to know. I, I love bringing CEOs and founders on because I think they just provide such unique perspective into, you know, the way somebody who’s willing to like, take the risk to jump out and start something thinks.

[00:09:32] Josh: But as you know, you think about just your role as a founder and a CEO, you know, that’s kind of a part of it. You, you kind of have to think a little bit further ahead. You have to plan, you have to strategize, but you’re talking about even kind of looking at things a little further and a little bit different.

[00:09:49] Josh: And I think when that happens, there’s almost two paths that you see people go down. And I’m probably overgeneralizing, but you know, if you are looking super far ahead and you’re looking at the things that are coming, people either take a very pessimistic or optimistic view of that. You seem to take a very optimistic one.

[00:10:12] Michael: And you’d like to know why.

[00:10:13] Josh: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:17] Michael: so I’ll give you a few reasons. it’s more fun to be optimistic than to be pessimistic.

[00:10:24] Josh: Okay. That’s, honestly, look, we’re what, like eight minutes and 14 seconds in. If you take nothing else away from this podcast, please just take that away, dude. It’s just way more fun. Okay.

[00:10:37] Michael: a lot more fun to live on this planet assuming positive things will happen.

[00:10:42] Josh: Yeah,

[00:10:43] Michael: Than it is being neurotic about all the negative things that can happen. And so I start there, right? It’s not a fake optimism. It’s not because I read something or I even, I listened to a podcast. It’s, it’s really just a perception on life that I’m really happy to be here.

[00:11:05] Josh: Hmm.

[00:11:06] Michael: I’m filled with gratitude about being in this space time with you and everybody else,

[00:11:11] Josh: That’s a cool way of thinking of it.

[00:11:13] Michael: and I’m really happy that I’m here now because my understanding of the world and the history of the world is that there’s actually no time in the past that I would want to be here over now. Hmm. Think about that. We didn’t have hot water, we didn’t have sanitation, we didn’t have good science that we would allow us to live a healthy, long life.

[00:11:36] Michael: There are lots of things that weren’t really cool in the past. So for me to be pessimistic would mean not only a fear of the future, but a reminiscent affection for the past,

[00:11:52] Josh: Hmm.

[00:11:52] Michael: which I don’t have. I’m, I’m all in on the future because every time I look at the past, I, I see, I see horror shows.

[00:12:00] Josh: Yeah.

[00:12:01] Michael: Every time I look at the past, I see things that humans have done to other people, to ourselves, other humans that are horrific.

[00:12:08] Michael: Every time I look at the past, I see that we were barbarians at some points, and every time I see us now and I see us in the future, I say, there is hope we can be better. And so, I dunno, optimism is natural for me. You see that, you see from, from that, genesis. It’s, it just, it comes naturally. Now, I also can’t think of how I could ever be an entrepreneur without being an optimist because. I mean, it’s the hardest thing anyone can do is to believe that they can take their idea and turn it into a viable business. Very, very difficult. And, to make that journey even possible before we even get to successful, just to make it a possible journey, requires optimism of a, of a kind that most people don’t have.

[00:13:00] Josh: You know, I, that is an interesting, An interesting point. And I, you know, I, I think, again, I probably oversay this on the podcast, but, you know, one of the things that I really, really love about hosting this podcast that I didn’t realize that I would love as much as I do when I started it, is, you know, the, the beauty of being able to meet so many different people that I may not have, I mean, there’s a very good chance you and I never would’ve met without this podcast, right?

[00:13:24] Josh: And like you, I, I genuinely feel fortunate and blessed that this silly podcast brought about the opportunity for me to connect with this just other beautiful and optimistic human that my day is gonna be better after talking to. Like, that’s pretty cool. You know what I mean? And so, but, but this podcast has given me the opportunity to just experience so many different unique ideas and perspectives, and, and just so many different, you know, thought processes that people bring to it.

[00:13:51] Josh: And. One of the things that I find is, is even looking at the type of person who’s willing and wants to be a guest on a podcast and something like that is probably a little bit unique, but even within that, like the, the span of guests that we’ve had are so unique. Right. And, and I would agree, and I don’t think, I, I, I think you would agree with me.

[00:14:11] Josh: I, I don’t think you’re saying this in a negative connotation, but that is the truth. Like the vast majority of people are not the type of people that are gonna start a company, right. That have that entrepreneurial mindset. I’ll be the first one to tell you, I am not, I’ve never been that way. That’s just not, that was not my native intelligence, Michael.

[00:14:29] Josh: Like I always say, I love being a good number two, I will come help and I’ll come operationalize your crazy ideas, but I’m not gonna be the dude leading the charge with the crazy ideas. And so it’s cool when you have kind of that balance. But I’m really curious, like for you, you know, as you interact with other entrepreneurs and other CEOs and other founders and people who are not.

[00:14:51] Josh: I think, what do you see in just kind of the common traits of what makes somebody willing to start something and, and I would agree with you, not just start something but see it through the highs and lows. To eventually be able to look back and say, I did something cool that changed whatever.

[00:15:10] Michael: Mm-hmm. Well, I don’t know all the, the reasons that make somebody want to walk on broken glass and eat fire and starve their kids and make all these crazy sacrifices and, you know, maybe not even make it a reality anyways. It’s a, it’s a mindset that I, don’t know that I have the, the intellectual ability to fully understand why it happens across the world in, across different cultures, across different, histories of peoples.

[00:15:47] Michael: You find entrepreneurism in every corner of the globe, and you, and it’s always existed as far as our records tell us people, there’ve always been people who said, let’s do this thing. Let’s try this thing. Let’s sell this thing. Let’s make this thing right. And what would, what causes that? What, what, what is the, what is the, the genesis of it?

[00:16:10] Michael: What is the impetus behind it? I think certain, a, a founding dissatisfaction with your current condition is one of the germ, one of the seeds that, that requires. You must be dissatisfied with the current situation. If you’re happy with the current situation, there is no desire to change anything, and there’s no desire to solve any problem because you don’t see a problem.

[00:16:39] Michael: So the first thing is to see that something could be made better. Now what, what causes that? I, I really don’t know. I think that comes. Our genetic makeup. Somehow it comes in our, in, in our, in, in who we are as people. You know, as it’s just like some people are born to be number ones in everything they do.

[00:16:58] Michael: They have to be the, the first, they have to be the leader. They have to win. And some people are fine not being the leader. They’re fine supporting the leader to win, right? And that’s just how people are wired. But I do think environmentally and, and in terms of our attributes and our habits, I do think there are markers, there are things that you do see when you look at successful people across the board, across almost any facet of life.

[00:17:27] Michael: If you look at people who have achieved any kind of success in an empirical way, not just somebody saying, I’m successful, but they, you can look at their life and say, yeah, they, they, they, they, they’ve achieved something. What you’ll find are the following things. Number one, they were persistent. That’s the first thing you’ll find.

[00:17:46] Michael: They had many reasons when they could have quit. They have many reasons when things went bad, but they were persistent at whatever it is they were doing. Whether it was going to school, taking night courses, whether it was your business idea, whether it was your business planning, whatever it was, you, you, you stuck with it.

[00:18:02] Michael: Alright? No one who is successful ever says, I quit on it.

[00:18:06] Josh: Yeah.

[00:18:07] Michael: Right? So persistence is key. The second thing is that’s connected to persistence. And we were just talking about this is optimism

[00:18:15] Josh: Yeah.

[00:18:16] Michael: because pessimistic people aren’t persistent. Shockingly,

[00:18:22] Josh: Kind of go hand in hand. I can see that.

[00:18:24] Michael: right? So the persistence requires some optimism. It’s why you don’t give up.

[00:18:29] Josh: Yeah.

[00:18:30] Michael: Right. And so we can look at, at, at successful people and go down the list of the attributes and the the key markers that, that we see. And it’s, it’s a pretty long list. There, there, there are a number of things on it, but the, the, the main things I think, as I said, persistence, optimism, and integrity.

[00:18:49] Michael: And the reason integrity is important is because no one gets to build anything alone on the planet. We all require the support of some other human being. And humans have a choice not to do business, not to work with people if they don’t believe they have integrity. Like, is we, we all have that choice.

[00:19:09] Michael: Yeah. So it, it’s, it’s the only way, it’s a key ingredient in building anything. You have to have personal integrity. Anyone who tries to build anything without personal integrity quickly finds that the thing is not gonna be very durable.

[00:19:23] Josh: You know, I, I, I appreciate that you brought up that point, and here’s why

[00:19:28] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:29] Josh: I would disagree with you to some point about the ability to, to do things without integrity and without, you know, the support of the genuine love and support of others, right? I mean, we look at it, we, we’ve seen, you know, plenty of people who’ve made lots of money, built big companies with zero integrity, right?

[00:19:51] Josh: But I think if I might put words in your mouth, what you’re saying is, is that you may have done that, but you did not meet the definition of success. Because I would argue that even though you’ve built a big company, you’ve made lots of money, you drive the fancy car. If you did it without integrity in my book, you’re not success.

[00:20:11] Josh: Asshole.

[00:20:13] Michael: You’re absolutely correct, and that’s a, that’s a great perspective. It marginalizes the very definition of success for sure. But the other thing, we can expand this idea of integrity to look at more than just personal integrity. So in business you have to keep integrity with your customers. The products and services you deliver must meet some modicum of integrity in terms of what you said you were going to do and what you actually did.

[00:20:40] Michael: Businesses that don’t have integrity at its core aren’t sustainable. They may make some success in the short term, but if you are a business model, rest upon violating integrity with your customers, with your employees, with your partners, then you don’t have, not only have you not met the definition of success, but I also think in practical terms, Josh, you are deleterious to the success that you seek in your business.

[00:21:05] Michael: You, you’re taking away success from your business. So it’s not integrity in a sort of a, you know, sort of a pollyannish way in sort of a highbrow way. It’s practical integrity. I think the thing that I’m a part of, the thing you are a part of as business people, as entrepreneurs, it’s all about integrity.

[00:21:25] Michael: You see, it’s, it is about integrity with your staff. It’s about integrity with your customers. As I mentioned, it’s about keeping integrity with the people who you partner with. It’s about keeping integrity with your financiers. It’s all about integrity. And I think if you’re going to be durable and sustainable, I think it goes along as a core part of the mix for businesses to be viable and for the entrepreneurial journey to be successful.

[00:21:58] Josh: It makes

[00:21:58] Michael: that doesn’t mean that doesn’t, and and I just wanna say it quickly, that does not mean that what you said is incorrect, which is that absolutely. If your, if your measure of success is to make money, you do not need integrity to make money. Absolutely not. You can make money in the world without integrity. The question is, can you turn that making of money into something that’s really sustainable, something that inspires people, something that makes you a lead, a leader in a business. Well, that’s a different thing. You know, that’s not just making money now that’s making business. So, one of the things I tell mentees is that making money and making business and not the same things.

[00:22:37] Josh: Huh?

[00:22:38] Michael: You can make money, but that’s not making business.

[00:22:42] Josh: Yeah.

[00:22:43] Michael: And a lot of, a lot of young people, I find, especially, especially from social media, they’re, they’re distorting those two things,

[00:22:50] Josh: They struggle

[00:22:50] Michael: making money and making business. And those are very, very different things. Making good business will ultimately allow you to make money, but you can short circuit the process and do all kinds of things to make money that are not good businesses at all.

[00:23:06] Michael: Yeah. And I think that’s something that needs to be amplified more in our. And our steering of young people these days and, and how we try to help young people these days is to help them to see the, the clear lines of demarcation between making money and making business.

[00:23:25] Josh: You know, I, I, I think I’m a lot like you in the optimism of that too, that sometimes it’s, it’s hard to see when you, when you do see the negative side of it. and a lot of times that gets amplified more than the positive side of it, which is unfortunate. Right. But I mean, I would argue that if, if you do business right, truly do it right.

[00:23:50] Josh: Really care about the value that you create about the people that you support both in and out of your organization. You do things the right way. You uphold honesty and integrity and transparency. I fundamentally believe at my core, that will also make you money because it’ll be successful. Right? But the problem is, is that sometimes that road is a lot longer, it’s a lot harder.

[00:24:14] Josh: It’s got a lot more ups and downs than the path without integrity, right? And sometimes you do, you see quicker paths to success and riches and you know, this kind of comes back to what we were talking about, about just, you know, we as humans are fundamentally so incredibly different. And I think what’s important for us all to do is, is have our own definition of success, right?

[00:24:36] Josh: And for some. Like you, that may mean like success as a definition to you may be, Hey, I wanna start a company. I wanna create value. I wanna build jobs with people that want to come to work. I want customers to wanna work with me. Not because they have to, but because they want to. Right. That may be your definition of success.

[00:24:58] Josh: Somebody else’s definition of success may be that they want the lakefront house, somebody else’s definition of success may just be comfortability in mediocrity and just being able to kind of coast through and not having the highs and lows. And that’s okay. Everybody can have their own definition of success, but kind of like we were talking about, it’s, it’s important for you to have your own definition and then not to judge others by your definition of success versus their own, right.

[00:25:29] Josh: I mean, there’s even layers to that. I’m hyper competitive. I like to be first. I like to win.

[00:25:36] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:37] Josh: But I’m also not an Olympic athlete, right? Like, that wasn’t my definition of success. I didn’t want to, like, I didn’t need to win literally the world, right? To define success. But maybe in this thing, I, I, I just wanna be really good in this division or this thing, and, and that is my definition of success in winning, right?

[00:25:58] Josh: So, I mean, there’s so many layers of complexity to this, but I think that’s, I mean, this is gonna sound kind of silly, but like, I feel like that’s kind of what makes the world tick, right? And like you said, that’s, that’s not based on geography. It’s not based on, you know, race. It’s not based on anything like we, we all, as humans kind of have this definition of success and this desire to achieve whatever that success may look like for us.

[00:26:25] Josh: And then, yeah, for a lot of people, a small handful of them though. Around the globe that looks like my definition of success is I, I wanna start something that improves X, Y, Z. Right? And I, I thought that was really cool, honestly, the way that you put it of, you know, a lot of times people who look at something and say, why does it have to be that way?

[00:26:47] Josh: Can it be different? You know, again, if we, if we use our own definition of, of success or what the status quo should be, that may put that person down and label them as different or as being a disruptor to the system or whatever. It may even, you’re like, good, bring it on. Like, that’s, you know, that’s the mother of an invention baby.

[00:27:10] Josh: Let’s go. I, I loved that attitude, man.

[00:27:13] Michael: Yeah. You know, it’s, it’s, we, we have to remember sort of how most of us people, humans, how we get our marching orders. We get our marching orders starting in kindergarten. We get our marching orders, learning our alphabet, learning the basics about life, and then we get our marching orders as we go through what is a very predictable.

[00:27:42] Michael: And a very controversial educational curriculum that most of us in the western world for sure, and really globally over the last maybe a hundred years, have sort of believed this works for developing proper human beings with the right mix of curiosity and industry. And this is the game we’ve been playing.

[00:28:02] Michael: And, and, and, and then most humans come up through that system and they have a view of themselves and a view of the world that they have. Yep. And most times that view of the world and the view of themselves that they have is actually not a view of themselves that says, I can go and do something. Because they weren’t really trained and conditioned for that thinking.

[00:28:28] Michael: They were conditioned and trained for a different role, a role to. Work in the system and be employed, get a job. Right. That’s how the system works. So, so, so most people don’t end up even discovering that they maybe have entrepreneurial inklings until some point later in their life after going through the work part of their life first and recognizing the dissatisfaction with that part of their life, and they’re pushed into entrepreneurism, usually through economic necessity.

[00:29:04] Josh: Yeah. What I, I always get the saying wrong, man. One of these days I’m gonna commit it to memory. But wasn’t it an, an Einstein saying something to the effect of, you know, necessity is the mother of

[00:29:14] Michael: Mother of all invention.

[00:29:15] Josh: right? Or Yeah.

[00:29:16] Michael: Mother of all invention.

[00:29:17] Josh: Something, right? Yeah.

[00:29:18] Michael: Yeah.

[00:29:19] Josh: You know, one of the things I, I, I don’t actually watch it very often, but it, it always fascinates me to watch the Shark Tank show, right?

[00:29:29] Josh: ’cause it is always super interesting to see these people that have decided to start something. And, you know, what tends to come onto those shows are more of like widgets and gadgets, types of things. I would say. Right. But it is, it’s always super fascinating to see. They’re like, oh, you know, I was a stay at home mom homeschooling my kids and, you know, whatever this was happening.

[00:29:53] Josh: And I was, you know, watching the, the water pour off of my gutters when it would rain and it was destroying my garden and I had to do something different. So I invented this brand new super cool gutter system, and you’re like, wow, that’s trippy. Like, how did you get there? Like, but that makes sense, right?

[00:30:09] Josh: So it, it is curious to see, like, I feel like there is a, a blend of kind of what you were talking about, right? Like just that natural intelligence. Like some kids are just very clearly born to ask why.

[00:30:22] Michael: Yes,

[00:30:23] Josh: Right? And then sometimes I think we as a society, to your exact point, like we stifle that, right? And we’re like, because I said so.

[00:30:31] Michael: Yes,

[00:30:32] Josh: and, but at the same time, sometimes we cultivate that and then sometimes people really aren’t born with that. Or maybe it was stifled, but then later in life, you know, necessity cultivates a need or desire to evolve or innovate, and it’s just, I don’t know. It’s fascinating to watch that process happen in humans.

[00:30:53] Josh: And to your point, I mean, this is why, while I think we would both argue that we’re definitely not perfect as humans in a society, in a planet, yet, you know, we’re getting, we’re getting better.

[00:31:03] Michael: We’re getting better. And, and it’s, that’s a very important perspective for us to have. We’re getting better. Yeah. We’re not getting worse. If you think we’re getting worse, just read some history books.

[00:31:18] Josh: no kidding. Seriously.

[00:31:21] Michael: worse. We’re getting better with all the problems that we think we are having and, and, and let’s not.

[00:31:26] Michael: Diminish some of these problems. They’re real okay, but we’re getting better. We are on a clear trajectory of massive improvement in human conditions on this planet. I’m happy to be alive today. The only other time I’d want to be alive is in the future,

[00:31:45] Josh: Well, especially if we get to shape it, right? So, all right, so I, people are probably sitting here wondering like, all right, how, why is this like conversation happening on a podcast called the Digital Banking Podcast? Right? But I think it’s really important, like this one, I mean, you’ve probably seen in the last 30 minutes why I was so fascinated to talk to Michael in the first place.

[00:32:06] Josh: But one of the reasons why and why I, I think we both felt it was important to even just have this part of the free, free flowing conversation be about philosophy and future and thought process and entrepreneurship is, you know, one of the things that we really wanted to, to talk about. And discuss in long form for our listeners to hear us kind of talk through was, you know, this idea that the software development world is changing has changed, right?

[00:32:42] Josh: And if you think about, put yourself in the shoes of lots of credit union community bank executives, leaders, you know, technology owners that are probably listeners of this show, I bet you a lot of them are struggling with legacy technology. And what do we do about that and where do we go from there?

[00:33:05] Josh: And the question is why? And we wanted to take it back to how software was originally thought about and kind of created. And Michael, what I thought was really interesting was you brought it all the way back to even just like the core three things that a business. Kind of starts life with, right, which is you have to make it better, faster or cheaper.

[00:33:31] Josh: And I say, or now you were saying, you know, there, there used to be a time where we got and, but now we’re in a little bit more of an or state. But, so your business has to make things better, faster, or cheaper, right? We’re going through a big evolutionary cycle in software development and value creation.

[00:33:48] Josh: But if you look at kind of the genesis of the first software solutions that were brought to market and what represents especially a lot of the legacy technology for financial services, you know, it absolutely came and made things faster, better, and cheaper. Probably all three when we went from completely manual processes to software and automated processes and things like that.

[00:34:14] Josh: But the way software was originally created was kind of this to solve a point in time. Right. Like, this is my problem today, right? Today, whatever. Let’s just use, you know, no offense to my friends in remote deposit capture, it was just the first thing that came to my mind, right? But like I used to have to go into a branch and hand them a check.

[00:34:32] Josh: Now I can take a picture of a check, right? So that made something significantly faster, easier, cheaper, right? Did all of those things for us, and it solved that one point in time problem of, you know, today I have to drive into a branch. Now I don’t have to. But what happens with that and, and what’s interesting about the software world that I think is a little bit unique to even other major times in, you know, human history, like the industrial revolution is software was built and sold and then kind of came with these maintenance fees, which would be similar to if I, I don’t know, sold you a commercial coffee maker for your coffee shop.

[00:35:14] Josh: And then I came in to maintain the coffee maker for you, right? I would charge you a maintenance fee for that. So we kind of had that model and then we kind of realized we could turn that into a recurring revenue type of model. And so now you have this SaaS world, but a lot of legacy tech is still built to just solve a point in time.

[00:35:36] Josh: But you’re paying kind of this SaaS model where maybe there may be some boltons to the legacy software. But you know, is it really and truly still just solving the problem of yesterday when you bought it? Or is it solving today’s problem? Or back to where we started this whole conversation with our, you know, philosophical futurist, even better and more important yet, is it going to solve tomorrow’s problems?

[00:36:04] Josh: And I think that is the big change that we’re seeing in software. And yeah, I mean, we kind of teased it a little bit, you know, yes, there’s another big element happening here and AI is accelerating that significantly, but, but even if you just take that out of the equation, there’s a big change happening, right?

[00:36:20] Josh: So what are your thoughts?

[00:36:24] Michael: Yeah, so the headline is that automation has been commoditized. The automation has been commoditized. So if you think about the trajectory that we’ve been on for the last 30, 40 years in technology, technology initially was not on the consumer side. It was on the corporate, on the business side. And then we started getting glimpses of the consumer side of technology to this point up, not where we are now, where still the really, where the technology, the apex of it that touches everybody right now, everywhere in the world is really on the social media side.

[00:37:04] Michael: there’s still lots of people on the planet who are void of real technology in their lives that are helping them in their day to day, but they’re on Facebook. Are they on WhatsApp? Are they on

[00:37:13] Josh: what are you talking about? Facebook makes my life better, Michael.

[00:37:17] Michael: I love Facebook.

[00:37:18] Josh: I say that, probably now I’m getting to the point where I’m dating myself if I’m saying Facebook instead of like TikTok or something,

[00:37:24] Michael: TikTok is probably more like it, right? Josh? Right. So I mean, you know, our, our relationship with technology. Has been changing over the decades and I think now come where we are today, we have to start thinking of technology D very differently. And in the corporate space where you have a lot of these legacy systems you talked about, we also have a legacy executives, people who are still thinking in legacy terms about what technology needs to look like today in their environment, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:38:04] Michael: So I think part of the challenge that legacy software businesses have had is that there are no, in today’s software companies and businesses, we understand very well that there are no static software businesses, all software businesses. Are continuously developing their software. Part of that is not just because they’re SaaS businesses and because the model has changed from that perspective, it also, it is also a different appreciation for the value that software brings to the space.

[00:38:35] Michael: Like our businesses now, our technologies are not nice to haves in companies. The companies, as they digitize themselves, become the software. In other words, they can’t operate without the software.

[00:38:49] Josh: Yeah.

[00:38:50] Michael: The technology is no longer, the technology has become kind of like what real estate was before. If you’re gonna do the business, you needed a place, a physical place, and you had to have a physical place.

[00:39:02] Michael: There’s just no way. You could not have a physical place. And so now the physical place is your digital place. And so the software businesses that are providing digital infrastructure, they would have to see themselves differently. Because if you’re providing digital infrastructure to a living, breathing dynamic entity, like a business, the only options you have is to create, begin to create distance between you and that business, right?

[00:39:30] Michael: As time passes, you become less relevant to the business because your software becomes less dynamic. It doesn’t change, but the business does. Or the other option is your software changes with the business. It adapts, it moves with the business. So we’re in a new time, a new, a new paradigm of technology where the idea that you build it and you sell it and just reap the money and go away and on your yacht, those days are over.

[00:39:56] Michael: You have to keep building it. It’s, you’re always building it. That’s the difference today. And I, I don’t know, you know, part of the, part of the pressure points on software businesses today, these same SaaS companies is how to do that well. While keeping prices in check and being competitive and still delivering high quality outputs, you know, triangulating around all that can be, can, can be challenging.

[00:40:23] Michael: That’s for another discussion perhaps, but that can be a challenge all by itself, you know? Yeah.

[00:40:27] Josh: you know, I wanna, I wanna make a comment that is gonna sound negative and directed at you.

[00:40:33] Michael: Oh, wow.

[00:40:33] Josh: a little bit, but it’s gonna, it’s gonna get, it’s gonna end positive. So just bear with me. But you made a comment about, you know, as a part of Legacy Software, and I would argue, you know, you can take software outta the equation and just legacy business, right?

[00:40:45] Josh: You’re saying you have legacy executives. you know, you’re not 20 anymore, right? Michael, you’re, you’re a few years up there.

[00:40:53] Michael: Absolutely.

[00:40:53] Josh: But I think Legacy doesn’t equal age.

[00:40:56] Michael: No, absolutely not. I’m, I’m so glad you said

[00:40:59] Josh: young and be operating in legacy mentality, and you can be old and operating with an innovative, forward thinking, evolving mindset.

[00:41:12] Josh: Right?

[00:41:14] Michael: We have to disaggregate and untether our numeric age from our intellectual age. They’re not. They have nothing in common. We all have the ability, regardless of our numeric age, to be steeped intellectually in what’s happening today. We all have the ability to be steeped in things that are new. We all have the ability to, to overcome our fear that something that’s new that we heard about, that we think might affect our business, but we’re scared to ask for help to understand it.

[00:41:47] Michael: We all have the ability to overcome and to be in this time. What causes this, this distortion in the corporate. The echelons of corporate leadership is that we have people, some of them may be even young numerically, and some of them may be old numerically, but all of them are legacy in the way they’re approaching technology and how they see it in their businesses.

[00:42:18] Michael: And part of that, as I mentioned earlier, is that we’re stuck on automation and we can’t see that we are past automation and where we are now is intelligence. I don’t want to talk about the AI shiny thing just yet. Before we get to the ai, we are on this continuum where before we did anything, we had to get data, if we remember back in the seventies and eighties was about databases, remember?

[00:42:44] Michael: And so it was all about how do we get data in because we didn’t have anything called databases before. And so we started with databases and networks, and then finally we got to where we are today over time, but all of it requires that we move as the technology is moving. So executives need to understand that it’s no longer just about, you know, getting rid of paper.

[00:43:10] Josh: Yeah.

[00:43:11] Michael: It’s not just about, no, now it’s much, it’s much bigger than that. Now we have to make the organization an intelligent being

[00:43:21] Josh: Okay. I,

[00:43:22] Michael: that requires a different set of technological approaches. Sorry, go

[00:43:24] Josh: yeah, no, no, no. I think that that is a perfect segue to one of the things that I wanted to ask you about, you know, the first time that you and I talked, you know, you were talking about how you’ve just always thought this way about how you’ve built your businesses and how you came into the software world, right?

[00:43:41] Josh: I mean, you didn’t even start in software. You’re one of those guys. I’m very jealous of that. Just somehow like magically like figured it out and I’m still over here like, you know, many years in still trying to figure it out. But, the, I I guess the way you were kind of phrasing it is, is that for you, you don’t look at it as building something to solve a point in time.

[00:44:03] Josh: You think about building in a way that’s based on value creation and value, kind of like our definition of success from earlier changes from business to business and from time period to time period. And what may have provided your customer value, the day they bought your software may not be the same thing that provides them value six months, a year, two years, 10 years from them.

[00:44:28] Josh: And so for you, it’s, it’s really about designing around business processes. So talk me through that.

[00:44:37] Michael: Sure. So let’s begin. With a, with a baseline understanding of how businesses work. All businesses that we know of use processes, whether they’re big processes or small processes, whether they’re processes that are for a product or it’s a one process for all product. But we are really hard pressed to think of any real business that is process less.

[00:45:09] Michael: That may not be a real word, but we’re gonna use it here.

[00:45:11] Josh: Works for me.

[00:45:12] Michael: Right. That is without process. Right. So when I sat down and thought about building a solution, I couldn’t think of building any solution for a business that would hamstrung that business and allow them not to be able to use their process with the software.

[00:45:34] Michael: So another way of say, looking at that is that all software that you have really been using forever. Is not, is not process dependent, in other words, you’re using it in it, you’re using it in spite of your process.

[00:45:47] Josh: Yeah.

[00:45:49] Michael: Yeah. I mean,

[00:45:49] Josh: so, so if you don’t mind, I want, I wanna

[00:45:52] Michael: no, please go ahead. Yeah,

[00:45:53] Josh: important, right? because sometimes it were, I’m trying to think of a super simple example of this, right? But like, if your process is just a move from A to B, right? And I bring a piece of software that moves from A to B, then great, then, then we were perfectly directly aligned.

[00:46:12] Josh: And let’s just say I magically found some industry where every single business. Their process is to move A from B in exactly the same way. Then my software is gonna meet every single one of those businesses and users and processes where they are, and we’re gonna have perfect alignment. The reality is, is that that’s not the reality.

[00:46:31] Michael: That’s not the reality. Right. And so the solution that’s required, which we, which we, which I’ve created, is something that can ingest any process. Any number of steps, any number of pre, pre, pre dependencies, any number of conditionalities, any number of rules at any step, any number of persons connected to any step, measure.

[00:46:51] Michael: Any any step. For real. So, so understanding that, and this is what I mean when I say all software needs to evolve to be process oriented software. Because you see, the only way, and this is part of the reason why businesses have not realized all of the benefits that they had hoped to gain from software, is because the software that they have, all we’ve all been using has been completely void of process.

[00:47:21] Michael: Yeah. So the way I see it is that if you really want to make businesses more optimal in their performance, if you wanna optimize their performance, if you wanna make them truly more efficient, that’s a word that everybody uses, efficiency. Hmm. Everyone talks about it yet. Most businesses do not have any technology that measures how long.

[00:47:46] Michael: Think about this simple thing, how long things actually take at every step of their process. So how can you become more efficient? And this is a question out there for any business leaders that are listening. How do you become more efficient in your business from using technology that is void of your process, that can operate independently of your process?

[00:48:10] Michael: Then how do you measure, how do you optimize? How do you make it more efficient? That same process. You can’t do that through the technology. If you make it more efficient, then the technology becomes a big friction point because now you’ve created a gap, a distance between how the technology operates and your new, efficient, optimized process.

[00:48:30] Michael: Typically what happens, Josh, as you know, is the business ends up, ends up becoming a slave to the technology and so, so whatever things the technology can’t do, the business just doesn’t do it,

[00:48:43] Josh: Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, part of this challenge too, if you look at, again, you know, I’m not a technologist, so you gotta bear with me, right? But if you look at a lot of the way legacy technology was developed, right? Legacy technology was, it was built to solve. A specific process in a specific way.

[00:49:08] Josh: We’ve identified that a large percentage of people that could buy our software move from A to B in this way. If we build the configuration of our process to do that, we’ll meet the needs of enough of the market to sell a product to turn a profitable business. There’ll be some people that’ll be edge cases that’ll never use it.

[00:49:27] Josh: Some people that’ll be edge cases that’ll use it, but it won’t quite work for their process. And then as the businesses evolve, you know, hopefully they stay within our A to B process or it doesn’t work or we churn customers. But I think what we’re seeing in a lot more modern software and, and actually, sorry, let me back up.

[00:49:46] Josh: You know, one of the reasons why you have to do that is economies of scale, right? It’s, unless going back to your example from earlier, you gotta make it better, faster, or cheaper. Right. Like I can make it better and faster for you, but it’s likely not gonna be cheaper.

[00:50:00] Michael: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:50:02] Josh: you want this bespoke piece of software to perfectly work for all of your processes and solve all of your problems and meet your exact definition of success, regardless of it does for any of my other customers friends, it ain’t gonna be cheap.

[00:50:19] Josh: Nothing in this world is free. Right? But how do you balance that and say, well, in the world of software, when it’s built with configurability in mind, not customization, I think it’s such a crucial differentiation between customization and configuration, right? When it’s built with configuration in mind, done right, you can theoretically achieve a higher percentage of both being.

[00:50:53] Josh: Leveraging economies of scale, being cheaper, but also meeting the needs of the process of that unique business. Um, would you agree with that?

[00:51:06] Michael: Right, right. So, so, so that’s a great question. And the, the, the, the, the, the idea around how will the technology industry evolve to meeting the, the needs, the new needs, and evolving needs of businesses, and do that in a way that’s still cost effective, and do that in a way that provides configurability and customizations.

[00:51:29] Michael: You mentioned configurability and customization and the importance of the distinction between the two. And it’s very, very important because, and I’ll, I’ll just sort of speak to some of those business owners and, and executives who might be listening. So you absolutely want to have software that provides configurability to your business around the parameters that you think.

[00:51:53] Michael: Where you think configurability is important and flexibility around that configurability are important to you, whether that’s whatever that is in your domain, okay? But part of the differentiation stack that we talk about requires that every business finds ways to develop their secret sauce. Their secret sauce doesn’t really mean what KFC has necessarily our Coca-Cola, but it may mean that you have a certain way that you do your thing.

[00:52:24] Michael: You have developed a certain process that your people use to deliver that product or service, and that process is yours, only yours. It works within the construct of your organization. It is optimized for your business. Another company cannot just simply copy it, even if they’re using the same software.

[00:52:46] Josh: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:47] Michael: So what we are talking about here is evolving technologies and software to a place where the configurability is, is dynamic to a certain extent. Meaning one company can configure it a certain way, another company can configure it a different way. And matching that with some customization gives you the secret sauce, the differentiation that you really need to fight.

[00:53:20] Michael: The increasing and ever present pressures of commoditization. That is always hovering over technology, businesses always. Okay. And so I find, I don’t think it’s an either or, I think. It’s a combination of configurability that’s strategic, that’s well done, that’s properly implemented, along with a willingness, an openness, an acceptance of the necessity to have customizations as part of what we’re selling and delivering to the market.

[00:53:52] Michael: Because we cannot speak out of both sides of her mouths by saying, Hey, business differentiate. Please differentiate, but use these common software elements that will never let you differentiate. Hmm. They don’t match up in my head, so to me.

[00:54:10] Josh: piece of software as the credit union down the street, the same one down the street, the same one down the street, and. You know, somebody said this to me actually yesterday. my, my good buddy, Eric Fisher, our, our, SVP of sales made a comment to me and I can’t unsee it, Michael, and he was talking about how, you know, if in a sea of sameness where you buy the same technology stack through and through, like maybe from one specific vendor and then all of your community of, you know, businesses buy the same one, you’re just franchises of that software business.

[00:54:46] Michael: Correct,

[00:54:47] Josh: unsee it.

[00:54:48] Michael: correct. That’s exactly right. And, and I mean, it’s very, very, very important this, this, this tipping point, this inflection point that we’re at both in our understanding of what software should be doing for our businesses, and that also that market has as well, the market has more sophistication.

[00:55:08] Michael: It’s, we have to start to understand that the idea that we build something with some features and we push it down the throats of every customer and, and just copy and paste it across the market space. That is not the future of the technology market that I.

[00:55:24] Josh: Yes. I think that’s such an important point. I was just taking down a note to not forget this, and, but the, you know, you were kind of making this, going down this track a second ago too. Like, what’s innovation today is tomorrow’s table stakes. And sometimes we don’t wanna admit that. Like we’ve got the newest, coolest thing.

[00:55:45] Josh: you know, when, when Henry Ford brought the first car, it was innovation. It was radically different. It, you know, did all the things that we’ve talked about. It added value, it was faster, it was cheaper, it was better. It was all the things,

[00:56:00] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:01] Josh: dude. Now cars are a commodity. Like everybody’s gotta have a car.

[00:56:05] Josh: So now what’s the differentiating feature in the car? Well, you know, not that long ago, something like CarPlay was a differentiating feature. And the other day I was with my team, on a work trip and we got a rental car and it was a brand new car, no CarPlay. And we were like, minds blown. We were like, that’s table stakes now.

[00:56:28] Josh: But it’s just funny to think that how it was not that long ago where that was a really cool selling point and feature to have something like CarPlay and now it’s just table stakes.

[00:56:43] Josh: So, you know, as you are building software, as you’re building a company, how does this, you know, philosophical futurist play into how you think about kind of that topic of like, what we’re innovating today is gonna be table stakes tomorrow.

[00:57:04] Michael: Yeah. So, and this is gonna segue a little bit into the, the sort of shiny object of AI. A little bit. Just a little bit, even though you probably will get to it. But, but the thing is, this, this innovation word that we throw around, sometimes we confuse it with just nice shiny things, new things. We, we confuse new things with innovative things, and so we have a tendency to. Throw bells and whistles at customers and features that they may or may not find valuable, but hey, we have it and, and there’s another way we can approach this innovation thing, which is to have a more intimate relationship with the marketplace, with customers, for example, and really get to understanding what is it you need within the constructs, again, of differentiation. Like we have to get past this idea of software businesses that all customers are created equal. They’re not, and it’s not our job to equalize the marketplace. Our job is to promote differentiation to proper software design and development. Yeah, we should be promoting differentiation.

[00:58:22] Josh: I’m quoting that.

[00:58:23] Michael: Yeah. We need to be promoting differentiation at every step.

[00:58:26] Michael: Now I know that’s difficult, especially for those legacy companies that never created the infrastructural software. To have differentiation done that way. They didn’t have a software system that would allow for that kind of a EV evolution. So I understand they feel that pain. But for modern software companies, we must see that as, you know, our lighthouse.

[00:58:49] Josh: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:51] Michael: Otherwise, we’ll create more and I’m sorry.

[00:58:53] Josh: No, no. Go, go. Please, please.

[00:58:55] Michael: I was just gonna say otherwise we’ll create, we’ll create more distances from our customers from the moment as you, I like the term you said zero second. From second one, rather from second one, you begin to create distance. You have to see that very clearly.

[00:59:11] Michael: Right. So without a strategy like I just described from second one, from the moment you sign the contract with that customer, all that gets created is distance. Yeah. And more opportunity for some other company to come in and take that opportunity away.

[00:59:28] Josh: Yeah. You know, I make, I make the argument all the time, especially in the, the world of software. Right. and, and, and again, we haven’t even touched on the pace at which software development has been done and is going to be done is gonna be light years apart. It already is light years apart. Right. But I make the argument that.

[00:59:53] Josh: Even in the software development world of last year, for the most part, we can build what our competitors build. They can build what we build. It’s just software, man. It’s ones and zeros. We can replicate it basically barring patents. It’s nothing to say if you roll out this widget, I can’t roll out that widget pretty quickly behind you, right?

[01:00:19] Josh: So I always argue that the question should not be, what features do you have? It should be why do you have the features that you do and why did you build them the way that you built them? And the answer has got to come back to, because I sat at the table with my customer and I understood what would actually add value, and therefore I built this feature in this way to add that value.

[01:00:45] Josh: You’re doing anything other than that, you’re doing exactly what you were just saying. Right. And it’s like I solved the point in time when I sold you

[01:00:52] Michael: yes. I wanna just add something. I want to add something really important to that. Very important. Customers are sometimes always right about a lot of things, they’re rarely right about software specifications.

[01:01:13] Josh: Hmm.

[01:01:15] Michael: Over reliance on customers to direct the, the software evolution can be as problematic as ignoring the customers. So we have to find a middle ground. That middle ground looks like this in my view. You certainly want to take the customer’s pain. They usually have a great understanding of their pain,

[01:01:36] Josh: Yeah.

[01:01:38] Michael: that they can articulate with clarity. What they oftentimes cannot articulate with clarity is what the solution should be,

[01:01:47] Josh: Bingo. That is a super important point.

[01:01:50] Michael: Right. And so you’ve gotta come with some external intelligence. And this requires domain expertise.

[01:02:00] Michael: You must understand the domain that the customer’s world exists in, and a lack of understanding of the customer’s domain is the root of all evil. So once the customer expresses the pain, that’s really all you need from that customer. You need to take that inside and design the best in breed solution that solves the customer’s unique, specific problem, but also provides value across the spectrum.

[01:02:31] Josh: Yeah, no, that’s a good point. I mean, and that’s why. I think that’s why it’s so incredibly important, especially in a world like software for financial institutions, right? It does. It has to be a meeting of the minds with a mutual respect for each other’s position in that relationship, right? And why you were brought to the table and what expertise and value you add.

[01:02:55] Josh: And you know, I think that’s going back to, it’s like it’s why did you build the feature that you did? Well, it may not be because my customer said I need to move from point A to point B, right? What I need to understand is not how you want to move from point A to point B. What I need to understand is what is point B and what is the value of getting to point B for you?

[01:03:19] Josh: And then it’s my job as the software developer. To say, how can I do that in the best way for my customer? Right? It does. It’s gotta be, and sometimes they do, right? Sometimes they have great ideas on how to solve the problem. But I think sometimes too, if we, yeah, and if we, if we say, I’m gonna stick to a rigid, I know the solution, you actually miss out on a better solution.

[01:03:43] Josh: Right? So how do you do both? And, and I think that brings us back to something that you said that I really wanted to come back to, which was, you know, you were talking about differentiation. And it’s like, if we all have the same piece of software, there’s no differentiation. And I would argue like this, this may be an uncomfortable truth, but I’m sorry, credit unions and community banks.

[01:04:05] Josh: you live in a world of tremendous competition. Consumers have so many options for who they can do their banking with. So how do you differentiate. Right. And that is, I’m not trying to be prescriptive here. I’m literally just asking you, you sit down and understand how do you differentiate and then how do you find partners that enable that differentiation versus force you into their cookie cutter process that stifles your ability to provide your unique value and your differentiation. okay. I got, I gotta, I gotta pick your brain

[01:04:51] Michael: the last part of, I lost the last part of your question.

[01:04:54] Josh: Oh, there

[01:04:55] Michael: Yeah, I just lost the last part of your question. But, but I kinda know where, yeah. I kind of know where you were going with that. Yeah. It’s, it is, it is, it is the, it is a seminal issue of, of how do we bridge that, that divide, so to speak, and how do we find that, right?

[01:05:07] Michael: Balancing where we are giving the, the market, you know, things that work out the box. These things are good, but we know, and we understand that one size doesn’t fit all. That there has to be differentiation. You need a secret sauce. You need your way of doing it. And how do we make sure that the software, through a combination, as I mentioned earlier, off both configurability configuration and customizations, right?

[01:05:38] Michael: We still, Josh, as you know, we are still up against many companies who do not believe that their software should be customized. Okay. They, they’re against it. And when clients want customizations, they either say no or they provide. A economic reason for them to say no by just saying it’s gonna cost some exorbitant amount of money.

[01:05:58] Michael: But I, I think for the technology businesses that are going to be around five years from now who serve businesses, the posture has to be adjusted if the technology will allow it. The posture has to be one where you welcome customization and you welcome configurability of your software to meet the stated goal of differentiation for the business.

[01:06:24] Michael: If we are going to be enablers of differentiation for businesses, which I think should be the mission of software businesses today, we ought to be enablers of differentiation for companies.

[01:06:35] Josh: Yeah, I like that a lot. so, but, so now I gotta ask you right, like we’ve been talking about. You, you like to look out to the future, you’ve got your binoculars. We’ve been talking about how the world of software development has changed. How is AI gonna change that? Like, you know, you made a, a pretty big statement a second ago by saying if you’re gonna be in business five years from now, I also would almost challenge that to say that’s assuming old ways of building software, man in the new ways of building software.

[01:07:04] Josh: It may be if you wanna be around six months from now.

[01:07:08] Michael: Yeah, possibly. But I, I think, you know, one of the things that I think, and this, this will segue nicely into ai, so, you know, when you look at technology as a whole, I mentioned this earlier, and you look at where is it touching people, like where is it actually touching people? You realize that it’s the biggest stack of the technology stack isn’t really touching people. So AI. Where is it gonna touch people? We’re unsure about that right now.

[01:07:44] Michael: All we have where it’s touching people right now is represented through large, long language models that help us to complete some of the mundane things that we’ve been doing and help us to think through certain things. Very valuable, not diminishing it, but I am beyond that and I’m thinking, okay, where are the durable, practical applications of AI going to be?

[01:08:08] Michael: How is that going to happen? Who is marshaling that effort? Is it going to be that a bunch of tech guys create the next piece of AI for lawyers? Is it gonna be that the next some bunch of tech guys will create the next AI for the entire educational system? Like what’s the role of bringing in domain partners into understanding how AI can practically and safely and ethically actually help solve real problems within those domains?

[01:08:43] Michael: So I do not see AI as this sort of massive thing. I’m seeing AI as potentially domain, domain oriented solution sets, but I am not so sure that we have created, or even if we’re thinking about the proper way to do that, because think about this Josh, I don’t wanna be long-winded here, but this is an important point.

[01:09:08] Michael: The way we have thought about and the way we have built software in the past, as you’ve mentioned, is, is gonna change rapidly. But the way we have thought about software has, is gonna change as well in, in the new world that’s coming that I see the way we think about software will shift. And so. The idea that you have built a piece of software AI enabled that does some general things for people, just general things.

[01:09:35] Michael: That’s nice. And we are having fun with the LMS now, that’s nice. But what’s gonna be really impactful is when we start having software and AI that is specific to helping people in certain domains to do certain practical things. We see that happening, starting to happen in healthcare, but, but we’re not anywhere.

[01:09:55] Michael: The focus is not on that. As you, as you see, the focus is not on that aspect of ai. It’s not on how do we get doctors and nurses and people in the medical community and pharmacists and everybody together to figure out, okay, how does AI shape this industry? Yeah. Because without that kind of a. I don’t even consider that micro, right?

[01:10:18] Michael: ’cause those are big industries and so they’re macro within their own right. But within, without that sort of organized approach, what we’ll do is become basically slaves to LLMs that are so generalized in their understanding that they won’t work everywhere and they won’t provide the same value everywhere.

[01:10:36] Michael: For example. What about the cultural differences that we find around the world? Right? How are the, how does an LLM deal with, does it give this person in Southeast Asia the same answer as it gives the person in Kansas? Where are the biases and how biased are they? And so we’re gonna run into these massive problems because, you know, it’s one, one world, but we know from experience that it’s one world with significant differences in terms of how people live.

[01:11:04] Michael: For example, I’ll give you an example, a practical example, as we are both talking about financial services, the idea of money is not understood globally in the same way.

[01:11:14] Josh: That’s true.

[01:11:15] Michael: The idea of money and credit and debt is not, is not understood the same way. So how does AI deal with that? If we’re gonna deal with AI and talk about, for example, things like predicting default predictions, something that must be on everybody’s mind as we talk about ai.

[01:11:32] Michael: Certainly it’s on my mind, but how does that compute globally? It it doesn’t compute globally through some l and m. No, you’re gonna have to think of AI in domain context so that it can actually shape and apply itself in those particular, jurisdictions. Otherwise, it, it’ll have, it’ll be so skewed that you’ll have so many falsehoods that it just, it, it will undermine itself.

[01:11:57] Michael: That’s my view of it.

[01:11:59] Josh: Yeah, I think I, I think I have a fairly similar view in some regards that it’s gotta be very use case driven, right? And a lot of what we see is, is folks talking about

[01:12:13] Josh: pie in the sky. But to your point, like it’s gotta be very, very focused on like, we’re, this whole conversation, like a process that needs to be optimized, right? And how can we take, you know, the, the combined world’s knowledge and experience and data and quickly sift through it to make, to your point from, you know, your introduction, like better data-driven decisions and things.

[01:12:42] Josh: And, you know, I think we are seeing some really, really cool examples of, you know, use cases being solved. apologies. SVA and Monica, I know I’m gonna get this one wrong, but, our CEO his wife is a, is a PhD researcher at Oregon Health Science University. And she focuses on a very specific type of cancer and, And there’s some, some element of like a protein synthesis or breakdown that they’ve just never been able to like crack the nut on. Right? And, through our CEO, she got connected to one of the Google AI teams, and they actually came and met with her research group and, you know, they had a meeting of exactly what we were just talking about.

[01:13:29] Josh: She just told them the problem, right? And then a month later, Michael, they said, let’s have a follow up meeting. She was like, great. Come down to the office. She was fully expecting to say, okay, here’s kind of what we’re thinking about, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They came in and they go, we solved your problem.

[01:13:45] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[01:13:45] Josh: Here’s the answer. She’s like, holy smokes, that is that you, you cracked the thing, right? And so, but that was a very purpose built application to solve a very specific thing. And you can’t just say, okay, well now that’s gonna solve every medical, everything. No, it was, it was very specific, very purpose built.

[01:14:06] Josh: But if we identify very specific value add use cases, I think there’s a lot of practical application.

[01:14:14] Michael: Yes. And one of the challenges we’ll run into that we’ll have to think through. So the, the, the, the way we think about AI and the way we think about any kind of patronistic technology is always that it needs to be trained on a model. So the reason for that is sort of obvious to those who are in the know it needs the data and it needs to see the patterns and then make inferences from those patterns and so forth and so on.

[01:14:45] Michael: The, the challenge that you have as you get into domain is that you may not have always enough data where, where both is mathematically sufficient or you’re comfortable that you have sufficient amount of data. To derive the proper outputs. And so you may end up having deployments that are skewed from the get go and that end up doing bad things on the flip side.

[01:15:08] Michael: So we’ll have to solve that problem, which is minimizing the trainability or the minimizing the threshold for trainability on models.

[01:15:19] Josh: that’s a super good point. Dude. You know, we, it’s interesting. We, we literally just had a, a use case proof point. Our CTO showed us all on our leadership team and was walking through how he did something

[01:15:30] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:31] Josh: and he took something that would’ve normally taken a team, probably about six to seven months to do.

[01:15:40] Josh: And we’re talking a, a, a dedicated full stack team of developers to be able to do,

[01:15:45] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:45] Josh: and he built it by himself with a little bit of help from an intern in a couple of weeks. Using ai, but he actually walked us through his prompts and how he used, you know, the tool to be able to create this software and all the code.

[01:16:05] Josh: But what was interesting is he walked through it was, he showed us examples and it was hilarious. Like you’d have to know our CTO to, to like, to, to see his, like his communication style in these prompts. But it was hilarious. He was like scrolling through and you’d see sections of the prompts where he’s like, what are you doing?

[01:16:22] Josh: You are crazy. Like, no, no, no, no, no. That is not, I can read that in the code. That ain’t right. What are you doing? And then LLM would literally respond and be like, oh yeah, you’re right. I totally made that shit

[01:16:32] Michael: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. You have

[01:16:34] Josh: And you’re like, that’s why it’s so important to have an expert in the loop, right?

[01:16:38] Josh: Because to your point, like for him to do that, he spotted that error in the code. I’m not a coder, Michael. Like, I wouldn’t know. I’d be like, yeah, it looks good to me. Cool. Like, hit go baby. And then we deploy that thing and I’m gonna take Typhoon down.

[01:16:53] Michael: Right,

[01:16:54] Josh: Right? So this is why I don’t do that, that’s why I host a podcast.

[01:16:58] Josh: so it really is very, very important, especially at this stage that we have expert in the loop as a part of that process.

[01:17:05] Michael: very much so. Very much so. And, and not having it, not having expertise at that stage, I think will be, will be deleterious to the growth of AI and the adoption, because remember, the adoption rate of AI will be, will be strongly correlated to the accuracy of ai. If, if AI starts giving wrong answers and causing errors and doing crazy things, people won’t trust it, then people won’t buy into it as much.

[01:17:35] Michael: That’s why I think, you know, I think while it’s important to focus on ai, and I’m gonna sound like a contrarian here for a minute. My perspective is if I was on the side of the road in 1901 talking about automobiles and I was looking around and I’d be hearing all kinds of things, some people would be excited, some would be scared, and I’m, I’m sure a couple of horseshoe guys would be like, you know what, I’m gonna start putting auto on my sign.

[01:18:04] Michael: You know, it says horseshoe right now, but I’m putting auto up there because I, that’s, that’s the hot thing. Autos are coming and you find that we’re in that stage right now where everyone is at ai this, and everyone is at ai that, and everybody’s into ai and everybody’s selling it and everybody’s talking about it.

[01:18:20] Michael: But I think it’s very important, especially from business for businesses, that we don’t leap over all the still remaining inefficiencies, all the still remaining things that needs to be rectified and jump over to ai.

[01:18:36] Josh: Hmm.

[01:18:37] Michael: for businesses, for businesses, for organizations, there isn’t going to be a.

[01:18:43] Michael: Speedy displacement to ai. Okay? Because that would be too disruptive for businesses. It will take some time for businesses to adopt and, and, and replace and shift and shape. We’re going to be using much of the same technology stack for a while to come. And today that technology stack is still not serving businesses optimally.

[01:19:06] Michael: It still hasn’t allowed businesses to realize all of the gains that they had expected to get and that they are supposed to get from the technologies that they’ve invested in. And so we’re, I understand the consulting classes making a beehive to the next shiny thing, but businesses are still not being served with the technology stack that we currently have.

[01:19:29] Michael: Disjointed technologies. APIs that don’t work and aren’t secure. I mean, I could go down the list, brittle systems that are causing businesses to have downtime where you’re doing business with, with real brands in some cases, and you’re seeing signs, oh, our systems are down for maintenance. You know, all these crazy things are still happening.

[01:19:49] Michael: Mm-hmm. It’s still happening. So while we, while we march towards a new conversation, which I understand is gonna happen and should happen, we ought to still keep our eye on the ball, especially when we’re talking to business executives that, look, somebody still recognizes that you have real needs.

[01:20:09] Michael: Somebody still sees that you need help in certain critical areas of your business, that AI is not gonna magically solve for you overnight.

[01:20:16] Josh: Yeah,

[01:20:17] Michael: That’s my, I’m, I’m

[01:20:17] Josh: think that’s a really astute point, Michael, honestly,

[01:20:20] Michael: That was me and my soapbox for a minute.

[01:20:24] Josh: know, as you, as you look at, I think this change in. What we’re seeing in the pace of software development too, it puts us in a little different position than we’ve been in in the past. Right. Where I mean, yeah, you think about, you know, the speed at which cars evolved and became ubiquitous and stuff like people had kind of a lot of time to figure it out to adopt processes compared to the world of software.

[01:20:53] Josh: Right. But fast forward, the world of ai, the technology is far, the advancements that it’s having is far outpacing the ability for the businesses to keep up with even what’s available. Right. And I think that’s kind of the point that you’re making is, is like, even though, let’s say our AI could land a rocket on Mars and colonize it and all of these things, like we may not be ready for that for a while.

[01:21:21] Josh: So even though it’s advancing at two x, if we’re only advancing at one x. Because dude, we still gotta take care of like the day to day before we can really go to that 10 x.

[01:21:36] Michael: Yeah, I, I kinda lost you at the end, but, yeah, I mean, you’re exactly right. The, there, it’s not just the, the speed, the speed is tremendous, and the speed itself is, is, is, is a displacement, and the speed itself is distorting and, and, and is distorting people’s ability to cope with it and so forth and so on.

[01:21:56] Michael: But there’s also another aspect to this, the, the speed issue. I, I think with AI there is speed. But there’s also, we’re unsure exactly how that speed is going to result in practical life changing ways. Lemme give you an example of what I mean. So, most businesses, when they think of AI today, let’s talk very practically.

[01:22:28] Michael: AI is being used right away in call centers. You can hardly call any business now and get a human being.

[01:22:34] Josh: Yeah.

[01:22:35] Michael: You used to be able to call and, and even, even if you got dumped into a voice response unit, you could press a number and go speak to somebody. Now they’re pretending like you’re speaking to somebody from the get-go and it’s not a person, right?

[01:22:48] Michael: So the question now, so I want you to see what’s happening. So our usage of ai, our early adoptions of it is not, is not. Accruing to the benefit of the consumer. Really, it’s only accruing to the benefit of the business. Again, a a a focus on making the business more efficient. Right? Cutting costs, but is not yet red.

[01:23:11] Michael: Redoing to the benefit of the consumer. And I’m, I’m hard pressed right now to think of any industry today that is approaching applying AI in a way that is to the benefit of the consumer. Accept healthcare. Accept healthcare. That’s to the benefit of the consumer. Like most of the early adoptions of AI that I’ve seen is all about making the business more efficient.

[01:23:35] Michael: We had to get rid of the few call center staff we had, so we got rid of them. Now we have AI doing call centers. what’s gonna be next? It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be so, so, Josh, the, the perspective we have on AI today, the practical perspective that we see in the business world is one of deletion is one. Minus, it’s not a positive. We’re not adding value. We are taking away, we are, we are making things happen more efficient with fewer people. And I’m not so sure if that model is a sustainable model. When I think of AI and what it should be doing for us, I don’t really see it that way. We, we could probably have another conversation about, you know, sort of what the alternatives are, but if you think about that approach and where it, where it ends up taking us, I think you can see some big challenges that we’re gonna have.

[01:24:26] Josh: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think. You know, I wish I had some better examples off the top of my tongue, but I mean, I definitely think there are some, some good examples of it being addition, but I would agree. I mean, the, the, the overwhelming is subtraction, right? And,

[01:24:43] Michael: it’s, it’s subtraction and a lot of marketing. You know, AI is really good at marketing, at, at, at targeting people and so forth and so on, you know,

[01:24:50] Josh: Dude, I joke. I’m like, man, it’s so funny. You can literally go back in time and just watch all the booths at trade shows. Just start very quickly, like ai, ai, ai, ai. And it’s like, and then you go ask him, you’re like, what are you doing with ai? Like, well, you know, like there’s no real answer behind that.

[01:25:11] Josh: but yeah, I agree. I mean, so put on your, your, you know, your futurist lens. What else do you see coming down the pipe? Like what are some of the things that you’re paying attention to thinking about?

[01:25:28] Michael: I must apologize again. I think I lost you

[01:25:30] Josh: I saw the look on your face. I don’t know what’s going on today. Apparently our, our wifi is just fighting us. but, no, I was just saying, you know, as you, as you put on kind of your futurist, lens, like what do you see coming down the pipe? What kinds of things are you paying attention to?

[01:25:44] Josh: What are you looking out for?

[01:25:45] Michael: yeah. None of them are technological actually.

[01:25:48] Josh: How fascinating. That is not the answer I expected.

[01:25:51] Michael: Yeah, yeah. But they’re, but they’re the result of techno technology. So, many years ago, I, I, I wrote an essay about the rise of the rest and the decline of the west. And that’s all because of technology, believe it or not. it, it does come back to technology opening up, opening up of the world, the small, making the world smaller in terms of trade and so forth.

[01:26:16] Michael: But, what I see happening now as we move into the next phase of the technological revolution, the next tipping point, if you will, is an acceleration of displacement. It’s a negative, I’m not optimistic in that way because that’s a negative sort of perspective, but that’s really, I think, can be made into a positive thing.

[01:26:40] Michael: But first we have to recognize that it’s coming. We see it happening, by the way, in many of our cities. We see it, we see the displacement happening. We call it homelessness. We call it drug addiction, we call it whatever. But what we are seeing are different types of people being homeless, people that would not have been homeless before.

[01:27:01] Josh: Hmm.

[01:27:01] Michael: Right. And so it’s a, it’s a change in people’s lives that are happening because the economy is changing and has changed, the skill sets that people had that were allowing them to survive in the old economy, suddenly they can’t find that those skill sets can be used in the new economy. And so there’s a displacement happening and that displacement re downs to the economic displacement.

[01:27:24] Michael: They have no money. They can’t make the, make the same living they had. That’s going to accelerate around the world. And it’ll mean that all governments, all policy makers will have to start thinking differently about their societies and about. The issues that they’re all beginning to see in their societies.

[01:27:47] Michael: Everybody’s seeing it, and they’re gonna have to think differently about how societies work. For example, maybe we’ll need, everyone will need a basic income. Something that has been thrown around for before and laughed at in the paradigm that we exist in today, but in a paradigm where much of the productive capacities of the world would be done.

[01:28:10] Michael: By machines, I don’t mean machines that we have now. I mean, like ai, robot robots and, and, and software in general. Just machines, right? non, non maintainable machines. Let’s call ’em that. we’re gonna have a problem. We may not have enough consumer power to purchase the things that are produced. Major problem. We, again, we are seeing these things already, right? We’re seeing it in our, in our societies and we’re, they will accelerate and they will get worse, and nobody can show any picture where it gets better. There’s no picture where AI lives side simul, side by side rather with people getting more employment. And if somebody can give a show a picture where AI grows and employment grows, manual work grows as AI grows, then they need to start showing that picture so that people can understand what their futures are gonna look like. But the futures that we can see now is a future where as AI grows manual, the need for manual, not just manual labor, but manual work in general, will diminish.

[01:29:27] Michael: Manual thought will diminish. The need for manual intelligence will diminish. Think about that. The need for manual intelligence. In fact, the need for manual intelligence will almost go down to zero. It’ll be on par with what it was in the, probably in the 16, 15 hundreds, because we won’t need it. I mean, most people, you did a great job doing some amazing writing a few minutes ago, but for a lot of people, they haven’t written anything in a while. And you think five years from now, how many people are gonna tell you they’ve written anything in a while?

[01:30:01] Josh: Yeah.

[01:30:02] Michael: Right? So we’re moving through significant shifts that are going to really change everything. But when we say it, we typically are talking about it just in one way. But it’s gonna change everything.

[01:30:18] Michael: And some things are gonna have to be addressed urgently. Otherwise we’re gonna have massive problems. And, and again, I’m not being a pessimist because I do think that there’s an opportunity. Here’s the optimistic spin on it, Josh.

[01:30:32] Josh: Yeah, please.

[01:30:34] Michael: The world that we live in was created by men. It can be recreated by men.

[01:30:39] Michael: And when I say men, I don’t mean that in, in a gender way. I just mean from a human standpoint. Obviously we want women involved and they should be. They will be. But the world we live in was created by us human beings, all of it. That means that the systems that we have for compensating each other for work was created by us.

[01:30:59] Michael: The concepts of work that we have agreed to was created by us. The relationships we have in the world between people who employ people and who will work for people, and the nature of that was created by us. Like all of it is created by us, so we can rethink all of it. We will have to, you’re frozen a bit, but we’ll have to rethink it. And in the rethinking of it is where people like people with the skills that I have, philosophical futurists as I call myself and people, other people who think over the horizon and look at things from a certain perspective, they’ll be very needed as we try to reimagine the world that we live in.

[01:31:48] Michael: The world that we live in today cannot sustain.

[01:31:54] Josh: I

[01:31:54] Michael: have to choose between AI and the world we live in today. That’s it. Can’t have both.

[01:31:58] Josh: I agree, dude. I agree. And I, I’m with you. I think it’s one of those, I try to have a really optimistic view of it. I’d like to think that the good outweighs the bad in humans, and that ultimately we’ll navigate as we have done for thousands of years. We’ll navigate, not with perfection, but we will navigate difficult, challenging times to try to create better futures for humans.

[01:32:29] Josh: Like I would, I really, really want to believe that, man.

[01:32:32] Michael: Well, it’s, well, guess

[01:32:33] Josh: to your point, like the other perspective really sucks. It’s

[01:32:36] Michael: And not only, not, not only that, Josh, the evidence supports you, the evidence of history supports you that we have always been trying to get better and better and better. And so you’re not misplaced in, in that optimism. I, I support it a hundred percent.

[01:32:50] Josh: But I’m with you. I, I think this is, you know, it is, we are absolutely kind of like you were talking about earlier, right? Just the, the ups and downs and are we in a storm and we’ve gotta look out ahead and see what this actually looks like and means, and what are the things that are coming our way and the impacts and the implications.

[01:33:08] Josh: I absolutely think we’re in a season of a storm and it’s just, it’s a different one that we’ve experienced, but. It’s like many things we’ve been through, but it’s different than many things that we’ve been through. It’s a challenging time where humans have an opportunity to go left or go right, or probably a few other directions and, and which way are we gonna go, right?

[01:33:30] Josh: And, and what does that mean for humanity? And we’re probably gonna stumble a lot along the way because of humans, because of a lot of the things that we’ve talked about leading up to this. but I’m with you. I mean, I think, you know, there’s a, there’s a lot of optimistic elements to this of, I mean, you know, I’ve, I’ve overused the example probably, but, you know, my wife’s big like revelation of finding love in chat.

[01:33:55] Josh: GPT was, it helped her plant her garden. And she’s always wanted to, but she’s been afraid to take the step of, I always kill my house plants, can I really keep a full garden that’s growing food for our family going right? And so she was able to access a wealth of knowledge and information. That she didn’t feel she had access to understand and decipher the way that she did, and now she’s got a garden that’s making food for my kids that was

[01:34:23] Michael: There you go.

[01:34:24] Josh: Like that’s pretty cool. Right. So I see that as a positive element of that.

[01:34:29] Michael: abs. It it is. And I, I, I’ll just say this real quick. Part of, part of, part of this. Part of what your wife experienced. And this may sound pessimistic at first, but it’s positive. You see, we were never that special as humans in the first place, Josh. We weren’t, see, we, we, we had all this hubris that made us think that we knew so much that we were so good, but we don’t have that much knowledge.

[01:34:57] Michael: Really, Josh, think about it. We don’t know that much. The machines. And again, people, when I say the machines, I mean like the ai, I don’t mean, you know, a, a, a regular machine. The machines are gonna show us that we didn’t know anything.

[01:35:09] Josh: Yeah.

[01:35:11] Michael: Yes. And so it’s what we need to do is just adjust our mindset to the idea that these things are not only there to help us, they are there to make us better in every regard really.

[01:35:26] Michael: Because we weren’t that good in the first place. Our memory was not that good. We can only remember maybe five things and then we forget. Our ability to, there you go. Our ability to reason wasn’t that good anyways. We can only assimilate a certain amount of information and process it at the same time.

[01:35:43] Michael: Like we have so many deficiencies. This is our true ability to To To be free. Yes, to be free. Now that’s gonna take some convincing. We’re gonna have to, A lot of people are gonna need to be convinced that that’s true, but it is true. Mm-hmm. This will free us, but before we get completely free, we’re gonna have to deal with the pain that many persons will have to experience because we remember much of this will happen in another generation.

[01:36:12] Michael: In this generation, we have transitory problems. People are transitioning between how they used to live and this new way, how they used to earn in this new way, how they thought. And now you’re saying think differently. The things they learned in school and it has no value. Now the things they need to learn now.

[01:36:29] Michael: All these things that confusing and hurting people. And we need to get serious, very serious as a society, as societies about how we address these things.

[01:36:41] Josh: man, I think that’s a great point on this. Like, and I, I, I don’t know, it’s interesting. I feel like a lot of times our episodes kind of end with that like thought process

[01:36:53] Michael: Yeah,

[01:36:54] Josh: you know, none of us knows what tomorrow’s gonna hold. And there’s gonna be challenges. And ultimately I’d like to think that we’re just trying to be better every day.

[01:37:05] Josh: And so I’ve really appreciated your perspective, but before I let you go, I got two final questions for you, sir. So, where do you go to get information? Like what, what’s kind of your source of, you know, gathering intelligence?

[01:37:21] Michael: Great question. I’m gonna answer it, this way. So first of all, everyone listening should be very cautious in this time about where you’re getting your information. That’s the first thing. We live in a time now where there’s a, there’s a significant line of demarcation between information and knowledge.

[01:37:41] Josh: Hmm.

[01:37:43] Michael: And so we’ve gotta become very careful. We’ve gotta become stewards of managing the filters in our lives that allow you to keep certain things out and bring certain things in. So that’s the first framing I would give the audience around where do I get information? We all have to ask ourselves that question about where are we getting information and where are we getting knowledge and where are we getting entertainment.

[01:38:08] Michael: Much of the information we get today that we think is knowledge is just entertainment information and we are confusing it with knowledge. And so I am very because of that and other reasons, I’m very careful about where I get information and I’m very careful about the kinds of information I consume today.

[01:38:30] Michael: I do find that a publication called the Financial Brand. Which I have no affiliation with. It’s just a, a publication, especially for those folks who might be serving or affiliated with the financial services industry. I, I use the financial brand as a, a platform that gives me YouTube, a wide cross section of information.

[01:38:50] Michael: I find that articles usually take me down rabbit holes that are very productive. And so, and, and, and really I don’t, you know, I I, I could maybe, if I was trying to brag, I would give you a whole bunch of books and things I read. I don’t actually read a lot. And I know that might sound as a con another contrarian thing.

[01:39:08] Michael: as a native inte a person with native intelligence, I’m very careful about what’s shaping my, my thought process and my worldview. Is it being shaped by an author? Hmm. That’s interesting. Is it being shaped by an author’s perspective on something? Okay, well that’s interesting. If it is, that’s fine. But I need to be well aware that this viewpoint comes from an author’s perspective.

[01:39:36] Michael: And that’s not necessarily gonna be, it may, but it’s not necessarily going to align with my native intelligence about that thing. And so in my life, having lived the years I’ve lived on this Earth, I’ve come to rely on my native intelligence, which comes from a source that I’ve found to be superior to the source of other people on the planet.

[01:39:57] Michael: Frankly. I know this may sound a little wonky, but I really do believe that because most of the things you read is just recycled information. Yeah. You’re just reading what somebody has put out. Very few pieces of information is really original. So I do read medical journals. I do read, read technology journals.

[01:40:15] Michael: I, I like scientific journals generally, but things that are opinionated. I try to stay away from Josh because. my opinion is as good as your opinion, right? Or another person’s opinion. Anybody’s opinion is their opinion. and so I’m, I’m not trying to fill my mind with a lot of opinions. I’m trying to stay focused, stay true, stay fact-based and scientific based.

[01:40:36] Michael: be very clear about who I serve in my life and in my business and, and, and what I’m supposed to do. So I don’t read a lot, generally, for my business or my life. I do read things for entertainment, as we all do online for jokes, for having fun. But in terms of getting real information that that impacts my life, I I keep it very close.

[01:40:57] Josh: It’s interesting. I mean, it’s, I mean, if I could overgeneralize, it’s a very eloquent way of saying just trust your gut. And a lot of times with how much like garbage is out there sometimes, like your gut just is pretty darn good.

[01:41:11] Michael: Absolutely. Especially if you can make sure that your gut is the source of your gut, is a right, is a

[01:41:16] Josh: Is Yeah. It’s, it’s well founded, right?

[01:41:18] Michael: Yeah. and you’re here to do good things and you have a, you have the right con constitution within yourself, and you have the right connection with the things that are beyond you, and all that good stuff.

[01:41:28] Michael: You know, life is so, so much more when we understand that there’s a, and I say this word, spiritual, having nothing to do with religion, but that there’s a spiritual element to all of us as human beings. Yes. It’s not just the physical thing that we have here. And if we can connect into that, that eternal aspects of our lives and our beings, and this, this idea, these concepts have been echoed by other people before me, but I’m fully, fully convinced that, understanding that other side of ourselves, the spiritual parts of ourselves, and understanding that.

[01:42:02] Michael: There’s nothing that we need that isn’t yet created for us. Everything we need is already on the, on the planet Earth. So then it’s a matter of attraction, isn’t it? It’s not a matter of desire, it’s a matter of attraction. And so that’s, that’s, that’s for another time perhaps. But, I, I really believe that,having that kind of constitution within yourself is part of being, being the right kind of person to be successful and to live a good life on this planet.

[01:42:31] Michael: Yep.

[01:42:32] Josh: feel like you just started a new and whole totally different podcast episode.

[01:42:36] Michael: Probably, probably.

[01:42:38] Josh: well, but so to that point actually, so if people want to continue the conversation, if people want to connect with you or if they wanna learn more about Loan Sirius and what you guys are doing over there, how can they do that?

[01:42:48] Michael: That’s ones easy. Loan service.com. L-O-A-N-C-I-R-R-U s.com is, is a good place to start. I, I’m one of those leaders that I actually put my personal information out there. You can call me. my number is actually on my LinkedIn. My email is on my LinkedIn. I’m not hiding from anybody. I’m here to create value in the world.

[01:43:07] Michael: So if you’re a person who wants to create value in the world, I’m reachable

[01:43:11] Josh: You know where to find you. I love it. Well, we’ll have links to that. but seriously, Michael, this was an absolute blast, man. I knew it was gonna be, but I, I really appreciated just kind of the, the depth and the molding of the conversation throughout. I mean, it’s, again, it’s one of the reasons why I really love doing this.

[01:43:28] Josh: You know, just completely off the cuff, unscripted, like we kind of had a little bit of an idea where we might go and, I, I think we kind of went all over the place, but I really appreciated kind of that, literally that philosophical approach. I think it’s a lot of what I think makes life interesting to talk about.

[01:43:45] Josh: So this was just, it was a really fun conversation to have. And yeah, I just wanted to thank you again for coming and being a guest on the Digital Banking podcast.

[01:43:53] Michael: Josh, great interviews are not made by the, the intervie86dxdmh9r – Tyfone – Digital Banking Podcast – Michael Claire

[00:00:00] Michael: the adoption rate of AI will be, strongly correlated to the accuracy of ai. if AI starts giving wrong answers and causing errors and doing crazy things, people won’t trust it, then people won’t buy into it as much.

[00:00:12] Michael: That’s why I think, while it’s important to focus on ai, and I’m gonna sound like a contrarian here for a minute. My perspective is if I was on the side of the road in 1901 talking about automobiles and I was looking around and I’d be hearing all kinds of things, some people would be excited, some would be scared, and I’m sure a couple of horseshoe guys would be like, you know what, I’m gonna start putting auto on my sign.

[00:00:32] Michael: You know, it says horseshoe right now, but I’m putting auto up there because I, that’s, that’s the hot thing.

[00:00:37] Intro: The Digital Banking Podcast is powered by Tyfone is the creator of Infiniti, a ally better digital banking platform for community financial institutions, as well as several platform agnostic revenue generating point solutions. Our highly configurable platform and broad ecosystem of third party partners ensure our entire suite is scalable and extensible to meet the needs of any FI.

[00:01:05] Intro: On our podcast, you will hear host Josh DeTar, discuss today’s most pressing financial technology topics with seasoned industry experts from every possible discipline.

[00:02:23] Josh: Welcome to another episode of the Digital Banking Podcast. My guest today is Michael Clare, founder and CEO of loan, serious limited philosophical. Futurist. You’ll find this self prescribed title on Michael’s LinkedIn page. What does it mean and why was it important enough to Michael to put that out there for the world to see?

[00:02:45] Josh: We’re gonna get to that here in a second, but I’ve been really excited to have Michael on as a guest, here from the very first time we spoke. The reason is I just, I really love people with genuine energy, and Michael is chock full of it. Plus he’s got a beautiful accent vocabulary and way of communicating that just makes him mesmerizing to listen to.

[00:03:07] Josh: So, back to this whole philosophical futurist thing. What’s that all about? Well, Michael believes that in life you have two ways of acquiring intelligence. Taught intelligence, which comes from other people, life experiences, school books, et cetera, and what he calls native intelligence. Now, native intelligence is that foundational way you think and perceive the world.

[00:03:31] Josh: For Michael, that native intelligence brought forward kind of three core pillars in how he views himself and how he interacts with the world around him. One, a deep tie to and sense of pride in being true, not just truthful but true, which manifests itself in integrity and always striving to be the best version of himself that he can be, which then turns to how he hopes to be perceived by others.

[00:04:00] Josh: In today’s day and age, we tend to start with the notion that people don’t have integrity until you prove to them that you do. And Michael’s really passionate about people being able to trust his integrity from second. Two, a bias towards facts and science in a world full of information at our fingertips.

[00:04:18] Josh: True. Again, not just truth is being distorted. Being well-grounded in reality and facts and data helps us make better decisions and understand more intelligently what’s going on. And three, a focus on creating value. This is kind of funny. When I asked him what he does for fun, he answered, you know, your listeners may laugh at me or say, I need to seek help when I say this out loud.

[00:04:45] Josh: But what do I do for fun? Work to find ways to evolve, innovate, and most importantly, create value Well, and play the saxophone. Now, when you combine these three things, Michael becomes the person he is today. A tirelessly dedicated entrepreneur with a single track focused to create value and leave the world a better place than he found it.

[00:05:09] Josh: He also has a piece of advice for anyone out there who is listening today that asks the question, why does it have to be this way? Oftentimes, you’ll get laughed at or labeled different for asking that question. Good. That question is the seed of entrepreneurship. Plant it, cultivate it, watch it grow, and be different, and change the world for the better.

[00:05:32] Josh: today we will talk about how these core values that have made Michael, who he is, makes him this philosophical futurist and how it influences his desire to change the way that we build value creating software that help relationships and people thrive.

[00:05:52] Josh: Michael, man, I’m stoked to have you on the show.

[00:05:55] Josh: Thanks for joining me today, sir.

[00:05:57] Michael: Josh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[00:06:00] Josh: alright. So, you know, I, I feel like I kind of like teased everybody with this whole, you know. Futurist concept, but I never really addressed it because I want you to.

[00:06:11] Michael: Sure.

[00:06:12] Josh: what is a philosophical futurist, why is that important to you, and why did you feel like that needed to be kind of one of the defining titles of what makes you you?

[00:06:22] Michael: Yeah, great question. So sometimes if you are, if you’re like at sea and you’re in a big wave and you, you feel yourself rising and falling, and you may not necessarily understand that you’re part of a storm or you’re part of something much larger. And so one of the things that being a philosophical futurist does it, it says, give me the, gimme the binoculars.

[00:06:47] Michael: Let me look over the horizon. Let me see what’s happening. Let me make sure that I’m not just bouncing around because. I’m at a spot in time where the waves may be a bit bumpy, but let me see what the conditions of the overall landscape looks like. And more importantly, let me see a little bit over the horizon.

[00:07:06] Michael: Not too far away, but a little bit over the, over the horizon and say what’s happening and what’s coming our way now, that’s the futurist part, but all of that, both the philosophical and the futurist, it’s really part of something that’s bigger. It’s part of something that’s also, as you talked about, native intelligence.

[00:07:25] Michael: It is part of something that’s really native to me, which is this natural proclivity to want to see things, big picture, wanna see macro issues, want to talk about and look at and understand the large forces that are moving. People, especially at this time where I I, I call it a tipping point, really using the word tip, a technological.

[00:07:53] Michael: Inflection point, a tip point, and we’re, we’re going through one of those tip points right now, I think. And it’s not just because of ai, but part of all of that is, is what I do naturally, what I bring, part of who I am, which is a person who enjoys and naturally has a view of things that most people probably don’t really care to even look at because it’s not part of their day-to-day existence.

[00:08:20] Michael: It’s not happening right now. But I like to think about the things that are happening now. Are they part of something larger? Right? Is it just random things happening or are they patronistic? Does it represent a bigger set of waves that are happening? Or are you just stuck on a boat in one place, bumping around thinking that, hey, there’s a storm, but really there’s no storm, you know?

[00:08:41] Michael: And so that, that change of perspective is what being a philosophical futurist is really all about.

[00:08:47] Josh: Hmm. You know, one of the other things, if I may be so bold, you might consider adding to that title is I, I feel like just in the very short time that we’ve been able to get to know each other, you’re also incredibly optimistic about all of that. Even if the, what you see over the horizon doesn’t look good.

[00:09:08] Josh: Like you seem to always find a way. Where you’re like, yeah, that big old storm that’s coming, like, here’s the positive that’s in it. And I, I think, you know, especially for people who’ve listened to this show are probably, you know, no stranger to know. I, I love bringing CEOs and founders on because I think they just provide such unique perspective into, you know, the way somebody who’s willing to like, take the risk to jump out and start something thinks.

[00:09:32] Josh: But as you know, you think about just your role as a founder and a CEO, you know, that’s kind of a part of it. You, you kind of have to think a little bit further ahead. You have to plan, you have to strategize, but you’re talking about even kind of looking at things a little further and a little bit different.

[00:09:49] Josh: And I think when that happens, there’s almost two paths that you see people go down. And I’m probably overgeneralizing, but you know, if you are looking super far ahead and you’re looking at the things that are coming, people either take a very pessimistic or optimistic view of that. You seem to take a very optimistic one.

[00:10:12] Michael: And you’d like to know why.

[00:10:13] Josh: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:17] Michael: so I’ll give you a few reasons. it’s more fun to be optimistic than to be pessimistic.

[00:10:24] Josh: Okay. That’s, honestly, look, we’re what, like eight minutes and 14 seconds in. If you take nothing else away from this podcast, please just take that away, dude. It’s just way more fun. Okay.

[00:10:37] Michael: a lot more fun to live on this planet assuming positive things will happen.

[00:10:42] Josh: Yeah,

[00:10:43] Michael: Than it is being neurotic about all the negative things that can happen. And so I start there, right? It’s not a fake optimism. It’s not because I read something or I even, I listened to a podcast. It’s, it’s really just a perception on life that I’m really happy to be here.

[00:11:05] Josh: Hmm.

[00:11:06] Michael: I’m filled with gratitude about being in this space time with you and everybody else,

[00:11:11] Josh: That’s a cool way of thinking of it.

[00:11:13] Michael: and I’m really happy that I’m here now because my understanding of the world and the history of the world is that there’s actually no time in the past that I would want to be here over now. Hmm. Think about that. We didn’t have hot water, we didn’t have sanitation, we didn’t have good science that we would allow us to live a healthy, long life.

[00:11:36] Michael: There are lots of things that weren’t really cool in the past. So for me to be pessimistic would mean not only a fear of the future, but a reminiscent affection for the past,

[00:11:52] Josh: Hmm.

[00:11:52] Michael: which I don’t have. I’m, I’m all in on the future because every time I look at the past, I, I see, I see horror shows.

[00:12:00] Josh: Yeah.

[00:12:01] Michael: Every time I look at the past, I see things that humans have done to other people, to ourselves, other humans that are horrific.

[00:12:08] Michael: Every time I look at the past, I see that we were barbarians at some points, and every time I see us now and I see us in the future, I say, there is hope we can be better. And so, I dunno, optimism is natural for me. You see that, you see from, from that, genesis. It’s, it just, it comes naturally. Now, I also can’t think of how I could ever be an entrepreneur without being an optimist because. I mean, it’s the hardest thing anyone can do is to believe that they can take their idea and turn it into a viable business. Very, very difficult. And, to make that journey even possible before we even get to successful, just to make it a possible journey, requires optimism of a, of a kind that most people don’t have.

[00:13:00] Josh: You know, I, that is an interesting, An interesting point. And I, you know, I, I think, again, I probably oversay this on the podcast, but, you know, one of the things that I really, really love about hosting this podcast that I didn’t realize that I would love as much as I do when I started it, is, you know, the, the beauty of being able to meet so many different people that I may not have, I mean, there’s a very good chance you and I never would’ve met without this podcast, right?

[00:13:24] Josh: And like you, I, I genuinely feel fortunate and blessed that this silly podcast brought about the opportunity for me to connect with this just other beautiful and optimistic human that my day is gonna be better after talking to. Like, that’s pretty cool. You know what I mean? And so, but, but this podcast has given me the opportunity to just experience so many different unique ideas and perspectives, and, and just so many different, you know, thought processes that people bring to it.

[00:13:51] Josh: And. One of the things that I find is, is even looking at the type of person who’s willing and wants to be a guest on a podcast and something like that is probably a little bit unique, but even within that, like the, the span of guests that we’ve had are so unique. Right. And, and I would agree, and I don’t think, I, I, I think you would agree with me.

[00:14:11] Josh: I, I don’t think you’re saying this in a negative connotation, but that is the truth. Like the vast majority of people are not the type of people that are gonna start a company, right. That have that entrepreneurial mindset. I’ll be the first one to tell you, I am not, I’ve never been that way. That’s just not, that was not my native intelligence, Michael.

[00:14:29] Josh: Like I always say, I love being a good number two, I will come help and I’ll come operationalize your crazy ideas, but I’m not gonna be the dude leading the charge with the crazy ideas. And so it’s cool when you have kind of that balance. But I’m really curious, like for you, you know, as you interact with other entrepreneurs and other CEOs and other founders and people who are not.

[00:14:51] Josh: I think, what do you see in just kind of the common traits of what makes somebody willing to start something and, and I would agree with you, not just start something but see it through the highs and lows. To eventually be able to look back and say, I did something cool that changed whatever.

[00:15:10] Michael: Mm-hmm. Well, I don’t know all the, the reasons that make somebody want to walk on broken glass and eat fire and starve their kids and make all these crazy sacrifices and, you know, maybe not even make it a reality anyways. It’s a, it’s a mindset that I, don’t know that I have the, the intellectual ability to fully understand why it happens across the world in, across different cultures, across different, histories of peoples.

[00:15:47] Michael: You find entrepreneurism in every corner of the globe, and you, and it’s always existed as far as our records tell us people, there’ve always been people who said, let’s do this thing. Let’s try this thing. Let’s sell this thing. Let’s make this thing right. And what would, what causes that? What, what, what is the, what is the, the genesis of it?

[00:16:10] Michael: What is the impetus behind it? I think certain, a, a founding dissatisfaction with your current condition is one of the germ, one of the seeds that, that requires. You must be dissatisfied with the current situation. If you’re happy with the current situation, there is no desire to change anything, and there’s no desire to solve any problem because you don’t see a problem.

[00:16:39] Michael: So the first thing is to see that something could be made better. Now what, what causes that? I, I really don’t know. I think that comes. Our genetic makeup. Somehow it comes in our, in, in our, in, in who we are as people. You know, as it’s just like some people are born to be number ones in everything they do.

[00:16:58] Michael: They have to be the, the first, they have to be the leader. They have to win. And some people are fine not being the leader. They’re fine supporting the leader to win, right? And that’s just how people are wired. But I do think environmentally and, and in terms of our attributes and our habits, I do think there are markers, there are things that you do see when you look at successful people across the board, across almost any facet of life.

[00:17:27] Michael: If you look at people who have achieved any kind of success in an empirical way, not just somebody saying, I’m successful, but they, you can look at their life and say, yeah, they, they, they, they, they’ve achieved something. What you’ll find are the following things. Number one, they were persistent. That’s the first thing you’ll find.

[00:17:46] Michael: They had many reasons when they could have quit. They have many reasons when things went bad, but they were persistent at whatever it is they were doing. Whether it was going to school, taking night courses, whether it was your business idea, whether it was your business planning, whatever it was, you, you, you stuck with it.

[00:18:02] Michael: Alright? No one who is successful ever says, I quit on it.

[00:18:06] Josh: Yeah.

[00:18:07] Michael: Right? So persistence is key. The second thing is that’s connected to persistence. And we were just talking about this is optimism

[00:18:15] Josh: Yeah.

[00:18:16] Michael: because pessimistic people aren’t persistent. Shockingly,

[00:18:22] Josh: Kind of go hand in hand. I can see that.

[00:18:24] Michael: right? So the persistence requires some optimism. It’s why you don’t give up.

[00:18:29] Josh: Yeah.

[00:18:30] Michael: Right. And so we can look at, at, at successful people and go down the list of the attributes and the the key markers that, that we see. And it’s, it’s a pretty long list. There, there, there are a number of things on it, but the, the, the main things I think, as I said, persistence, optimism, and integrity.

[00:18:49] Michael: And the reason integrity is important is because no one gets to build anything alone on the planet. We all require the support of some other human being. And humans have a choice not to do business, not to work with people if they don’t believe they have integrity. Like, is we, we all have that choice.

[00:19:09] Michael: Yeah. So it, it’s, it’s the only way, it’s a key ingredient in building anything. You have to have personal integrity. Anyone who tries to build anything without personal integrity quickly finds that the thing is not gonna be very durable.

[00:19:23] Josh: You know, I, I, I appreciate that you brought up that point, and here’s why

[00:19:28] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:29] Josh: I would disagree with you to some point about the ability to, to do things without integrity and without, you know, the support of the genuine love and support of others, right? I mean, we look at it, we, we’ve seen, you know, plenty of people who’ve made lots of money, built big companies with zero integrity, right?

[00:19:51] Josh: But I think if I might put words in your mouth, what you’re saying is, is that you may have done that, but you did not meet the definition of success. Because I would argue that even though you’ve built a big company, you’ve made lots of money, you drive the fancy car. If you did it without integrity in my book, you’re not success.

[00:20:11] Josh: Asshole.

[00:20:13] Michael: You’re absolutely correct, and that’s a, that’s a great perspective. It marginalizes the very definition of success for sure. But the other thing, we can expand this idea of integrity to look at more than just personal integrity. So in business you have to keep integrity with your customers. The products and services you deliver must meet some modicum of integrity in terms of what you said you were going to do and what you actually did.

[00:20:40] Michael: Businesses that don’t have integrity at its core aren’t sustainable. They may make some success in the short term, but if you are a business model, rest upon violating integrity with your customers, with your employees, with your partners, then you don’t have, not only have you not met the definition of success, but I also think in practical terms, Josh, you are deleterious to the success that you seek in your business.

[00:21:05] Michael: You, you’re taking away success from your business. So it’s not integrity in a sort of a, you know, sort of a pollyannish way in sort of a highbrow way. It’s practical integrity. I think the thing that I’m a part of, the thing you are a part of as business people, as entrepreneurs, it’s all about integrity.

[00:21:25] Michael: You see, it’s, it is about integrity with your staff. It’s about integrity with your customers. As I mentioned, it’s about keeping integrity with the people who you partner with. It’s about keeping integrity with your financiers. It’s all about integrity. And I think if you’re going to be durable and sustainable, I think it goes along as a core part of the mix for businesses to be viable and for the entrepreneurial journey to be successful.

[00:21:58] Josh: It makes

[00:21:58] Michael: that doesn’t mean that doesn’t, and and I just wanna say it quickly, that does not mean that what you said is incorrect, which is that absolutely. If your, if your measure of success is to make money, you do not need integrity to make money. Absolutely not. You can make money in the world without integrity. The question is, can you turn that making of money into something that’s really sustainable, something that inspires people, something that makes you a lead, a leader in a business. Well, that’s a different thing. You know, that’s not just making money now that’s making business. So, one of the things I tell mentees is that making money and making business and not the same things.

[00:22:37] Josh: Huh?

[00:22:38] Michael: You can make money, but that’s not making business.

[00:22:42] Josh: Yeah.

[00:22:43] Michael: And a lot of, a lot of young people, I find, especially, especially from social media, they’re, they’re distorting those two things,

[00:22:50] Josh: They struggle

[00:22:50] Michael: making money and making business. And those are very, very different things. Making good business will ultimately allow you to make money, but you can short circuit the process and do all kinds of things to make money that are not good businesses at all.

[00:23:06] Michael: Yeah. And I think that’s something that needs to be amplified more in our. And our steering of young people these days and, and how we try to help young people these days is to help them to see the, the clear lines of demarcation between making money and making business.

[00:23:25] Josh: You know, I, I, I think I’m a lot like you in the optimism of that too, that sometimes it’s, it’s hard to see when you, when you do see the negative side of it. and a lot of times that gets amplified more than the positive side of it, which is unfortunate. Right. But I mean, I would argue that if, if you do business right, truly do it right.

[00:23:50] Josh: Really care about the value that you create about the people that you support both in and out of your organization. You do things the right way. You uphold honesty and integrity and transparency. I fundamentally believe at my core, that will also make you money because it’ll be successful. Right? But the problem is, is that sometimes that road is a lot longer, it’s a lot harder.

[00:24:14] Josh: It’s got a lot more ups and downs than the path without integrity, right? And sometimes you do, you see quicker paths to success and riches and you know, this kind of comes back to what we were talking about, about just, you know, we as humans are fundamentally so incredibly different. And I think what’s important for us all to do is, is have our own definition of success, right?

[00:24:36] Josh: And for some. Like you, that may mean like success as a definition to you may be, Hey, I wanna start a company. I wanna create value. I wanna build jobs with people that want to come to work. I want customers to wanna work with me. Not because they have to, but because they want to. Right. That may be your definition of success.

[00:24:58] Josh: Somebody else’s definition of success may be that they want the lakefront house, somebody else’s definition of success may just be comfortability in mediocrity and just being able to kind of coast through and not having the highs and lows. And that’s okay. Everybody can have their own definition of success, but kind of like we were talking about, it’s, it’s important for you to have your own definition and then not to judge others by your definition of success versus their own, right.

[00:25:29] Josh: I mean, there’s even layers to that. I’m hyper competitive. I like to be first. I like to win.

[00:25:36] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:37] Josh: But I’m also not an Olympic athlete, right? Like, that wasn’t my definition of success. I didn’t want to, like, I didn’t need to win literally the world, right? To define success. But maybe in this thing, I, I, I just wanna be really good in this division or this thing, and, and that is my definition of success in winning, right?

[00:25:58] Josh: So, I mean, there’s so many layers of complexity to this, but I think that’s, I mean, this is gonna sound kind of silly, but like, I feel like that’s kind of what makes the world tick, right? And like you said, that’s, that’s not based on geography. It’s not based on, you know, race. It’s not based on anything like we, we all, as humans kind of have this definition of success and this desire to achieve whatever that success may look like for us.

[00:26:25] Josh: And then, yeah, for a lot of people, a small handful of them though. Around the globe that looks like my definition of success is I, I wanna start something that improves X, Y, Z. Right? And I, I thought that was really cool, honestly, the way that you put it of, you know, a lot of times people who look at something and say, why does it have to be that way?

[00:26:47] Josh: Can it be different? You know, again, if we, if we use our own definition of, of success or what the status quo should be, that may put that person down and label them as different or as being a disruptor to the system or whatever. It may even, you’re like, good, bring it on. Like, that’s, you know, that’s the mother of an invention baby.

[00:27:10] Josh: Let’s go. I, I loved that attitude, man.

[00:27:13] Michael: Yeah. You know, it’s, it’s, we, we have to remember sort of how most of us people, humans, how we get our marching orders. We get our marching orders starting in kindergarten. We get our marching orders, learning our alphabet, learning the basics about life, and then we get our marching orders as we go through what is a very predictable.

[00:27:42] Michael: And a very controversial educational curriculum that most of us in the western world for sure, and really globally over the last maybe a hundred years, have sort of believed this works for developing proper human beings with the right mix of curiosity and industry. And this is the game we’ve been playing.

[00:28:02] Michael: And, and, and, and then most humans come up through that system and they have a view of themselves and a view of the world that they have. Yep. And most times that view of the world and the view of themselves that they have is actually not a view of themselves that says, I can go and do something. Because they weren’t really trained and conditioned for that thinking.

[00:28:28] Michael: They were conditioned and trained for a different role, a role to. Work in the system and be employed, get a job. Right. That’s how the system works. So, so, so most people don’t end up even discovering that they maybe have entrepreneurial inklings until some point later in their life after going through the work part of their life first and recognizing the dissatisfaction with that part of their life, and they’re pushed into entrepreneurism, usually through economic necessity.

[00:29:04] Josh: Yeah. What I, I always get the saying wrong, man. One of these days I’m gonna commit it to memory. But wasn’t it an, an Einstein saying something to the effect of, you know, necessity is the mother of

[00:29:14] Michael: Mother of all invention.

[00:29:15] Josh: right? Or Yeah.

[00:29:16] Michael: Mother of all invention.

[00:29:17] Josh: Something, right? Yeah.

[00:29:18] Michael: Yeah.

[00:29:19] Josh: You know, one of the things I, I, I don’t actually watch it very often, but it, it always fascinates me to watch the Shark Tank show, right?

[00:29:29] Josh: ’cause it is always super interesting to see these people that have decided to start something. And, you know, what tends to come onto those shows are more of like widgets and gadgets, types of things. I would say. Right. But it is, it’s always super fascinating to see. They’re like, oh, you know, I was a stay at home mom homeschooling my kids and, you know, whatever this was happening.

[00:29:53] Josh: And I was, you know, watching the, the water pour off of my gutters when it would rain and it was destroying my garden and I had to do something different. So I invented this brand new super cool gutter system, and you’re like, wow, that’s trippy. Like, how did you get there? Like, but that makes sense, right?

[00:30:09] Josh: So it, it is curious to see, like, I feel like there is a, a blend of kind of what you were talking about, right? Like just that natural intelligence. Like some kids are just very clearly born to ask why.

[00:30:22] Michael: Yes,

[00:30:23] Josh: Right? And then sometimes I think we as a society, to your exact point, like we stifle that, right? And we’re like, because I said so.

[00:30:31] Michael: Yes,

[00:30:32] Josh: and, but at the same time, sometimes we cultivate that and then sometimes people really aren’t born with that. Or maybe it was stifled, but then later in life, you know, necessity cultivates a need or desire to evolve or innovate, and it’s just, I don’t know. It’s fascinating to watch that process happen in humans.

[00:30:53] Josh: And to your point, I mean, this is why, while I think we would both argue that we’re definitely not perfect as humans in a society, in a planet, yet, you know, we’re getting, we’re getting better.

[00:31:03] Michael: We’re getting better. And, and it’s, that’s a very important perspective for us to have. We’re getting better. Yeah. We’re not getting worse. If you think we’re getting worse, just read some history books.

[00:31:18] Josh: no kidding. Seriously.

[00:31:21] Michael: worse. We’re getting better with all the problems that we think we are having and, and, and let’s not.

[00:31:26] Michael: Diminish some of these problems. They’re real okay, but we’re getting better. We are on a clear trajectory of massive improvement in human conditions on this planet. I’m happy to be alive today. The only other time I’d want to be alive is in the future,

[00:31:45] Josh: Well, especially if we get to shape it, right? So, all right, so I, people are probably sitting here wondering like, all right, how, why is this like conversation happening on a podcast called the Digital Banking Podcast? Right? But I think it’s really important, like this one, I mean, you’ve probably seen in the last 30 minutes why I was so fascinated to talk to Michael in the first place.

[00:32:06] Josh: But one of the reasons why and why I, I think we both felt it was important to even just have this part of the free, free flowing conversation be about philosophy and future and thought process and entrepreneurship is, you know, one of the things that we really wanted to, to talk about. And discuss in long form for our listeners to hear us kind of talk through was, you know, this idea that the software development world is changing has changed, right?

[00:32:42] Josh: And if you think about, put yourself in the shoes of lots of credit union community bank executives, leaders, you know, technology owners that are probably listeners of this show, I bet you a lot of them are struggling with legacy technology. And what do we do about that and where do we go from there?

[00:33:05] Josh: And the question is why? And we wanted to take it back to how software was originally thought about and kind of created. And Michael, what I thought was really interesting was you brought it all the way back to even just like the core three things that a business. Kind of starts life with, right, which is you have to make it better, faster or cheaper.

[00:33:31] Josh: And I say, or now you were saying, you know, there, there used to be a time where we got and, but now we’re in a little bit more of an or state. But, so your business has to make things better, faster, or cheaper, right? We’re going through a big evolutionary cycle in software development and value creation.

[00:33:48] Josh: But if you look at kind of the genesis of the first software solutions that were brought to market and what represents especially a lot of the legacy technology for financial services, you know, it absolutely came and made things faster, better, and cheaper. Probably all three when we went from completely manual processes to software and automated processes and things like that.

[00:34:14] Josh: But the way software was originally created was kind of this to solve a point in time. Right. Like, this is my problem today, right? Today, whatever. Let’s just use, you know, no offense to my friends in remote deposit capture, it was just the first thing that came to my mind, right? But like I used to have to go into a branch and hand them a check.

[00:34:32] Josh: Now I can take a picture of a check, right? So that made something significantly faster, easier, cheaper, right? Did all of those things for us, and it solved that one point in time problem of, you know, today I have to drive into a branch. Now I don’t have to. But what happens with that and, and what’s interesting about the software world that I think is a little bit unique to even other major times in, you know, human history, like the industrial revolution is software was built and sold and then kind of came with these maintenance fees, which would be similar to if I, I don’t know, sold you a commercial coffee maker for your coffee shop.

[00:35:14] Josh: And then I came in to maintain the coffee maker for you, right? I would charge you a maintenance fee for that. So we kind of had that model and then we kind of realized we could turn that into a recurring revenue type of model. And so now you have this SaaS world, but a lot of legacy tech is still built to just solve a point in time.

[00:35:36] Josh: But you’re paying kind of this SaaS model where maybe there may be some boltons to the legacy software. But you know, is it really and truly still just solving the problem of yesterday when you bought it? Or is it solving today’s problem? Or back to where we started this whole conversation with our, you know, philosophical futurist, even better and more important yet, is it going to solve tomorrow’s problems?

[00:36:04] Josh: And I think that is the big change that we’re seeing in software. And yeah, I mean, we kind of teased it a little bit, you know, yes, there’s another big element happening here and AI is accelerating that significantly, but, but even if you just take that out of the equation, there’s a big change happening, right?

[00:36:20] Josh: So what are your thoughts?

[00:36:24] Michael: Yeah, so the headline is that automation has been commoditized. The automation has been commoditized. So if you think about the trajectory that we’ve been on for the last 30, 40 years in technology, technology initially was not on the consumer side. It was on the corporate, on the business side. And then we started getting glimpses of the consumer side of technology to this point up, not where we are now, where still the really, where the technology, the apex of it that touches everybody right now, everywhere in the world is really on the social media side.

[00:37:04] Michael: there’s still lots of people on the planet who are void of real technology in their lives that are helping them in their day to day, but they’re on Facebook. Are they on WhatsApp? Are they on

[00:37:13] Josh: what are you talking about? Facebook makes my life better, Michael.

[00:37:17] Michael: I love Facebook.

[00:37:18] Josh: I say that, probably now I’m getting to the point where I’m dating myself if I’m saying Facebook instead of like TikTok or something,

[00:37:24] Michael: TikTok is probably more like it, right? Josh? Right. So I mean, you know, our, our relationship with technology. Has been changing over the decades and I think now come where we are today, we have to start thinking of technology D very differently. And in the corporate space where you have a lot of these legacy systems you talked about, we also have a legacy executives, people who are still thinking in legacy terms about what technology needs to look like today in their environment, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:38:04] Michael: So I think part of the challenge that legacy software businesses have had is that there are no, in today’s software companies and businesses, we understand very well that there are no static software businesses, all software businesses. Are continuously developing their software. Part of that is not just because they’re SaaS businesses and because the model has changed from that perspective, it also, it is also a different appreciation for the value that software brings to the space.

[00:38:35] Michael: Like our businesses now, our technologies are not nice to haves in companies. The companies, as they digitize themselves, become the software. In other words, they can’t operate without the software.

[00:38:49] Josh: Yeah.

[00:38:50] Michael: The technology is no longer, the technology has become kind of like what real estate was before. If you’re gonna do the business, you needed a place, a physical place, and you had to have a physical place.

[00:39:02] Michael: There’s just no way. You could not have a physical place. And so now the physical place is your digital place. And so the software businesses that are providing digital infrastructure, they would have to see themselves differently. Because if you’re providing digital infrastructure to a living, breathing dynamic entity, like a business, the only options you have is to create, begin to create distance between you and that business, right?

[00:39:30] Michael: As time passes, you become less relevant to the business because your software becomes less dynamic. It doesn’t change, but the business does. Or the other option is your software changes with the business. It adapts, it moves with the business. So we’re in a new time, a new, a new paradigm of technology where the idea that you build it and you sell it and just reap the money and go away and on your yacht, those days are over.

[00:39:56] Michael: You have to keep building it. It’s, you’re always building it. That’s the difference today. And I, I don’t know, you know, part of the, part of the pressure points on software businesses today, these same SaaS companies is how to do that well. While keeping prices in check and being competitive and still delivering high quality outputs, you know, triangulating around all that can be, can, can be challenging.

[00:40:23] Michael: That’s for another discussion perhaps, but that can be a challenge all by itself, you know? Yeah.

[00:40:27] Josh: you know, I wanna, I wanna make a comment that is gonna sound negative and directed at you.

[00:40:33] Michael: Oh, wow.

[00:40:33] Josh: a little bit, but it’s gonna, it’s gonna get, it’s gonna end positive. So just bear with me. But you made a comment about, you know, as a part of Legacy Software, and I would argue, you know, you can take software outta the equation and just legacy business, right?

[00:40:45] Josh: You’re saying you have legacy executives. you know, you’re not 20 anymore, right? Michael, you’re, you’re a few years up there.

[00:40:53] Michael: Absolutely.

[00:40:53] Josh: But I think Legacy doesn’t equal age.

[00:40:56] Michael: No, absolutely not. I’m, I’m so glad you said

[00:40:59] Josh: young and be operating in legacy mentality, and you can be old and operating with an innovative, forward thinking, evolving mindset.

[00:41:12] Josh: Right?

[00:41:14] Michael: We have to disaggregate and untether our numeric age from our intellectual age. They’re not. They have nothing in common. We all have the ability, regardless of our numeric age, to be steeped intellectually in what’s happening today. We all have the ability to be steeped in things that are new. We all have the ability to, to overcome our fear that something that’s new that we heard about, that we think might affect our business, but we’re scared to ask for help to understand it.

[00:41:47] Michael: We all have the ability to overcome and to be in this time. What causes this, this distortion in the corporate. The echelons of corporate leadership is that we have people, some of them may be even young numerically, and some of them may be old numerically, but all of them are legacy in the way they’re approaching technology and how they see it in their businesses.

[00:42:18] Michael: And part of that, as I mentioned earlier, is that we’re stuck on automation and we can’t see that we are past automation and where we are now is intelligence. I don’t want to talk about the AI shiny thing just yet. Before we get to the ai, we are on this continuum where before we did anything, we had to get data, if we remember back in the seventies and eighties was about databases, remember?

[00:42:44] Michael: And so it was all about how do we get data in because we didn’t have anything called databases before. And so we started with databases and networks, and then finally we got to where we are today over time, but all of it requires that we move as the technology is moving. So executives need to understand that it’s no longer just about, you know, getting rid of paper.

[00:43:10] Josh: Yeah.

[00:43:11] Michael: It’s not just about, no, now it’s much, it’s much bigger than that. Now we have to make the organization an intelligent being

[00:43:21] Josh: Okay. I,

[00:43:22] Michael: that requires a different set of technological approaches. Sorry, go

[00:43:24] Josh: yeah, no, no, no. I think that that is a perfect segue to one of the things that I wanted to ask you about, you know, the first time that you and I talked, you know, you were talking about how you’ve just always thought this way about how you’ve built your businesses and how you came into the software world, right?

[00:43:41] Josh: I mean, you didn’t even start in software. You’re one of those guys. I’m very jealous of that. Just somehow like magically like figured it out and I’m still over here like, you know, many years in still trying to figure it out. But, the, I I guess the way you were kind of phrasing it is, is that for you, you don’t look at it as building something to solve a point in time.

[00:44:03] Josh: You think about building in a way that’s based on value creation and value, kind of like our definition of success from earlier changes from business to business and from time period to time period. And what may have provided your customer value, the day they bought your software may not be the same thing that provides them value six months, a year, two years, 10 years from them.

[00:44:28] Josh: And so for you, it’s, it’s really about designing around business processes. So talk me through that.

[00:44:37] Michael: Sure. So let’s begin. With a, with a baseline understanding of how businesses work. All businesses that we know of use processes, whether they’re big processes or small processes, whether they’re processes that are for a product or it’s a one process for all product. But we are really hard pressed to think of any real business that is process less.

[00:45:09] Michael: That may not be a real word, but we’re gonna use it here.

[00:45:11] Josh: Works for me.

[00:45:12] Michael: Right. That is without process. Right. So when I sat down and thought about building a solution, I couldn’t think of building any solution for a business that would hamstrung that business and allow them not to be able to use their process with the software.

[00:45:34] Michael: So another way of say, looking at that is that all software that you have really been using forever. Is not, is not process dependent, in other words, you’re using it in it, you’re using it in spite of your process.

[00:45:47] Josh: Yeah.

[00:45:49] Michael: Yeah. I mean,

[00:45:49] Josh: so, so if you don’t mind, I want, I wanna

[00:45:52] Michael: no, please go ahead. Yeah,

[00:45:53] Josh: important, right? because sometimes it were, I’m trying to think of a super simple example of this, right? But like, if your process is just a move from A to B, right? And I bring a piece of software that moves from A to B, then great, then, then we were perfectly directly aligned.

[00:46:12] Josh: And let’s just say I magically found some industry where every single business. Their process is to move A from B in exactly the same way. Then my software is gonna meet every single one of those businesses and users and processes where they are, and we’re gonna have perfect alignment. The reality is, is that that’s not the reality.

[00:46:31] Michael: That’s not the reality. Right. And so the solution that’s required, which we, which we, which I’ve created, is something that can ingest any process. Any number of steps, any number of pre, pre, pre dependencies, any number of conditionalities, any number of rules at any step, any number of persons connected to any step, measure.

[00:46:51] Michael: Any any step. For real. So, so understanding that, and this is what I mean when I say all software needs to evolve to be process oriented software. Because you see, the only way, and this is part of the reason why businesses have not realized all of the benefits that they had hoped to gain from software, is because the software that they have, all we’ve all been using has been completely void of process.

[00:47:21] Michael: Yeah. So the way I see it is that if you really want to make businesses more optimal in their performance, if you wanna optimize their performance, if you wanna make them truly more efficient, that’s a word that everybody uses, efficiency. Hmm. Everyone talks about it yet. Most businesses do not have any technology that measures how long.

[00:47:46] Michael: Think about this simple thing, how long things actually take at every step of their process. So how can you become more efficient? And this is a question out there for any business leaders that are listening. How do you become more efficient in your business from using technology that is void of your process, that can operate independently of your process?

[00:48:10] Michael: Then how do you measure, how do you optimize? How do you make it more efficient? That same process. You can’t do that through the technology. If you make it more efficient, then the technology becomes a big friction point because now you’ve created a gap, a distance between how the technology operates and your new, efficient, optimized process.

[00:48:30] Michael: Typically what happens, Josh, as you know, is the business ends up, ends up becoming a slave to the technology and so, so whatever things the technology can’t do, the business just doesn’t do it,

[00:48:43] Josh: Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, part of this challenge too, if you look at, again, you know, I’m not a technologist, so you gotta bear with me, right? But if you look at a lot of the way legacy technology was developed, right? Legacy technology was, it was built to solve. A specific process in a specific way.

[00:49:08] Josh: We’ve identified that a large percentage of people that could buy our software move from A to B in this way. If we build the configuration of our process to do that, we’ll meet the needs of enough of the market to sell a product to turn a profitable business. There’ll be some people that’ll be edge cases that’ll never use it.

[00:49:27] Josh: Some people that’ll be edge cases that’ll use it, but it won’t quite work for their process. And then as the businesses evolve, you know, hopefully they stay within our A to B process or it doesn’t work or we churn customers. But I think what we’re seeing in a lot more modern software and, and actually, sorry, let me back up.

[00:49:46] Josh: You know, one of the reasons why you have to do that is economies of scale, right? It’s, unless going back to your example from earlier, you gotta make it better, faster, or cheaper. Right. Like I can make it better and faster for you, but it’s likely not gonna be cheaper.

[00:50:00] Michael: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:50:02] Josh: you want this bespoke piece of software to perfectly work for all of your processes and solve all of your problems and meet your exact definition of success, regardless of it does for any of my other customers friends, it ain’t gonna be cheap.

[00:50:19] Josh: Nothing in this world is free. Right? But how do you balance that and say, well, in the world of software, when it’s built with configurability in mind, not customization, I think it’s such a crucial differentiation between customization and configuration, right? When it’s built with configuration in mind, done right, you can theoretically achieve a higher percentage of both being.

[00:50:53] Josh: Leveraging economies of scale, being cheaper, but also meeting the needs of the process of that unique business. Um, would you agree with that?

[00:51:06] Michael: Right, right. So, so, so that’s a great question. And the, the, the, the, the, the idea around how will the technology industry evolve to meeting the, the needs, the new needs, and evolving needs of businesses, and do that in a way that’s still cost effective, and do that in a way that provides configurability and customizations.

[00:51:29] Michael: You mentioned configurability and customization and the importance of the distinction between the two. And it’s very, very important because, and I’ll, I’ll just sort of speak to some of those business owners and, and executives who might be listening. So you absolutely want to have software that provides configurability to your business around the parameters that you think.

[00:51:53] Michael: Where you think configurability is important and flexibility around that configurability are important to you, whether that’s whatever that is in your domain, okay? But part of the differentiation stack that we talk about requires that every business finds ways to develop their secret sauce. Their secret sauce doesn’t really mean what KFC has necessarily our Coca-Cola, but it may mean that you have a certain way that you do your thing.

[00:52:24] Michael: You have developed a certain process that your people use to deliver that product or service, and that process is yours, only yours. It works within the construct of your organization. It is optimized for your business. Another company cannot just simply copy it, even if they’re using the same software.

[00:52:46] Josh: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:47] Michael: So what we are talking about here is evolving technologies and software to a place where the configurability is, is dynamic to a certain extent. Meaning one company can configure it a certain way, another company can configure it a different way. And matching that with some customization gives you the secret sauce, the differentiation that you really need to fight.

[00:53:20] Michael: The increasing and ever present pressures of commoditization. That is always hovering over technology, businesses always. Okay. And so I find, I don’t think it’s an either or, I think. It’s a combination of configurability that’s strategic, that’s well done, that’s properly implemented, along with a willingness, an openness, an acceptance of the necessity to have customizations as part of what we’re selling and delivering to the market.

[00:53:52] Michael: Because we cannot speak out of both sides of her mouths by saying, Hey, business differentiate. Please differentiate, but use these common software elements that will never let you differentiate. Hmm. They don’t match up in my head, so to me.

[00:54:10] Josh: piece of software as the credit union down the street, the same one down the street, the same one down the street, and. You know, somebody said this to me actually yesterday. my, my good buddy, Eric Fisher, our, our, SVP of sales made a comment to me and I can’t unsee it, Michael, and he was talking about how, you know, if in a sea of sameness where you buy the same technology stack through and through, like maybe from one specific vendor and then all of your community of, you know, businesses buy the same one, you’re just franchises of that software business.

[00:54:46] Michael: Correct,

[00:54:47] Josh: unsee it.

[00:54:48] Michael: correct. That’s exactly right. And, and I mean, it’s very, very, very important this, this, this tipping point, this inflection point that we’re at both in our understanding of what software should be doing for our businesses, and that also that market has as well, the market has more sophistication.

[00:55:08] Michael: It’s, we have to start to understand that the idea that we build something with some features and we push it down the throats of every customer and, and just copy and paste it across the market space. That is not the future of the technology market that I.

[00:55:24] Josh: Yes. I think that’s such an important point. I was just taking down a note to not forget this, and, but the, you know, you were kind of making this, going down this track a second ago too. Like, what’s innovation today is tomorrow’s table stakes. And sometimes we don’t wanna admit that. Like we’ve got the newest, coolest thing.

[00:55:45] Josh: you know, when, when Henry Ford brought the first car, it was innovation. It was radically different. It, you know, did all the things that we’ve talked about. It added value, it was faster, it was cheaper, it was better. It was all the things,

[00:56:00] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:01] Josh: dude. Now cars are a commodity. Like everybody’s gotta have a car.

[00:56:05] Josh: So now what’s the differentiating feature in the car? Well, you know, not that long ago, something like CarPlay was a differentiating feature. And the other day I was with my team, on a work trip and we got a rental car and it was a brand new car, no CarPlay. And we were like, minds blown. We were like, that’s table stakes now.

[00:56:28] Josh: But it’s just funny to think that how it was not that long ago where that was a really cool selling point and feature to have something like CarPlay and now it’s just table stakes.

[00:56:43] Josh: So, you know, as you are building software, as you’re building a company, how does this, you know, philosophical futurist play into how you think about kind of that topic of like, what we’re innovating today is gonna be table stakes tomorrow.

[00:57:04] Michael: Yeah. So, and this is gonna segue a little bit into the, the sort of shiny object of AI. A little bit. Just a little bit, even though you probably will get to it. But, but the thing is, this, this innovation word that we throw around, sometimes we confuse it with just nice shiny things, new things. We, we confuse new things with innovative things, and so we have a tendency to. Throw bells and whistles at customers and features that they may or may not find valuable, but hey, we have it and, and there’s another way we can approach this innovation thing, which is to have a more intimate relationship with the marketplace, with customers, for example, and really get to understanding what is it you need within the constructs, again, of differentiation. Like we have to get past this idea of software businesses that all customers are created equal. They’re not, and it’s not our job to equalize the marketplace. Our job is to promote differentiation to proper software design and development. Yeah, we should be promoting differentiation.

[00:58:22] Josh: I’m quoting that.

[00:58:23] Michael: Yeah. We need to be promoting differentiation at every step.

[00:58:26] Michael: Now I know that’s difficult, especially for those legacy companies that never created the infrastructural software. To have differentiation done that way. They didn’t have a software system that would allow for that kind of a EV evolution. So I understand they feel that pain. But for modern software companies, we must see that as, you know, our lighthouse.

[00:58:49] Josh: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:51] Michael: Otherwise, we’ll create more and I’m sorry.

[00:58:53] Josh: No, no. Go, go. Please, please.

[00:58:55] Michael: I was just gonna say otherwise we’ll create, we’ll create more distances from our customers from the moment as you, I like the term you said zero second. From second one, rather from second one, you begin to create distance. You have to see that very clearly.

[00:59:11] Michael: Right. So without a strategy like I just described from second one, from the moment you sign the contract with that customer, all that gets created is distance. Yeah. And more opportunity for some other company to come in and take that opportunity away.

[00:59:28] Josh: Yeah. You know, I make, I make the argument all the time, especially in the, the world of software. Right. and, and, and again, we haven’t even touched on the pace at which software development has been done and is going to be done is gonna be light years apart. It already is light years apart. Right. But I make the argument that.

[00:59:53] Josh: Even in the software development world of last year, for the most part, we can build what our competitors build. They can build what we build. It’s just software, man. It’s ones and zeros. We can replicate it basically barring patents. It’s nothing to say if you roll out this widget, I can’t roll out that widget pretty quickly behind you, right?

[01:00:19] Josh: So I always argue that the question should not be, what features do you have? It should be why do you have the features that you do and why did you build them the way that you built them? And the answer has got to come back to, because I sat at the table with my customer and I understood what would actually add value, and therefore I built this feature in this way to add that value.

[01:00:45] Josh: You’re doing anything other than that, you’re doing exactly what you were just saying. Right. And it’s like I solved the point in time when I sold you

[01:00:52] Michael: yes. I wanna just add something. I want to add something really important to that. Very important. Customers are sometimes always right about a lot of things, they’re rarely right about software specifications.

[01:01:13] Josh: Hmm.

[01:01:15] Michael: Over reliance on customers to direct the, the software evolution can be as problematic as ignoring the customers. So we have to find a middle ground. That middle ground looks like this in my view. You certainly want to take the customer’s pain. They usually have a great understanding of their pain,

[01:01:36] Josh: Yeah.

[01:01:38] Michael: that they can articulate with clarity. What they oftentimes cannot articulate with clarity is what the solution should be,

[01:01:47] Josh: Bingo. That is a super important point.

[01:01:50] Michael: Right. And so you’ve gotta come with some external intelligence. And this requires domain expertise.

[01:02:00] Michael: You must understand the domain that the customer’s world exists in, and a lack of understanding of the customer’s domain is the root of all evil. So once the customer expresses the pain, that’s really all you need from that customer. You need to take that inside and design the best in breed solution that solves the customer’s unique, specific problem, but also provides value across the spectrum.

[01:02:31] Josh: Yeah, no, that’s a good point. I mean, and that’s why. I think that’s why it’s so incredibly important, especially in a world like software for financial institutions, right? It does. It has to be a meeting of the minds with a mutual respect for each other’s position in that relationship, right? And why you were brought to the table and what expertise and value you add.

[01:02:55] Josh: And you know, I think that’s going back to, it’s like it’s why did you build the feature that you did? Well, it may not be because my customer said I need to move from point A to point B, right? What I need to understand is not how you want to move from point A to point B. What I need to understand is what is point B and what is the value of getting to point B for you?

[01:03:19] Josh: And then it’s my job as the software developer. To say, how can I do that in the best way for my customer? Right? It does. It’s gotta be, and sometimes they do, right? Sometimes they have great ideas on how to solve the problem. But I think sometimes too, if we, yeah, and if we, if we say, I’m gonna stick to a rigid, I know the solution, you actually miss out on a better solution.

[01:03:43] Josh: Right? So how do you do both? And, and I think that brings us back to something that you said that I really wanted to come back to, which was, you know, you were talking about differentiation. And it’s like, if we all have the same piece of software, there’s no differentiation. And I would argue like this, this may be an uncomfortable truth, but I’m sorry, credit unions and community banks.

[01:04:05] Josh: you live in a world of tremendous competition. Consumers have so many options for who they can do their banking with. So how do you differentiate. Right. And that is, I’m not trying to be prescriptive here. I’m literally just asking you, you sit down and understand how do you differentiate and then how do you find partners that enable that differentiation versus force you into their cookie cutter process that stifles your ability to provide your unique value and your differentiation. okay. I got, I gotta, I gotta pick your brain

[01:04:51] Michael: the last part of, I lost the last part of your question.

[01:04:54] Josh: Oh, there

[01:04:55] Michael: Yeah, I just lost the last part of your question. But, but I kinda know where, yeah. I kind of know where you were going with that. Yeah. It’s, it is, it is, it is the, it is a seminal issue of, of how do we bridge that, that divide, so to speak, and how do we find that, right?

[01:05:07] Michael: Balancing where we are giving the, the market, you know, things that work out the box. These things are good, but we know, and we understand that one size doesn’t fit all. That there has to be differentiation. You need a secret sauce. You need your way of doing it. And how do we make sure that the software, through a combination, as I mentioned earlier, off both configurability configuration and customizations, right?

[01:05:38] Michael: We still, Josh, as you know, we are still up against many companies who do not believe that their software should be customized. Okay. They, they’re against it. And when clients want customizations, they either say no or they provide. A economic reason for them to say no by just saying it’s gonna cost some exorbitant amount of money.

[01:05:58] Michael: But I, I think for the technology businesses that are going to be around five years from now who serve businesses, the posture has to be adjusted if the technology will allow it. The posture has to be one where you welcome customization and you welcome configurability of your software to meet the stated goal of differentiation for the business.

[01:06:24] Michael: If we are going to be enablers of differentiation for businesses, which I think should be the mission of software businesses today, we ought to be enablers of differentiation for companies.

[01:06:35] Josh: Yeah, I like that a lot. so, but, so now I gotta ask you right, like we’ve been talking about. You, you like to look out to the future, you’ve got your binoculars. We’ve been talking about how the world of software development has changed. How is AI gonna change that? Like, you know, you made a, a pretty big statement a second ago by saying if you’re gonna be in business five years from now, I also would almost challenge that to say that’s assuming old ways of building software, man in the new ways of building software.

[01:07:04] Josh: It may be if you wanna be around six months from now.

[01:07:08] Michael: Yeah, possibly. But I, I think, you know, one of the things that I think, and this, this will segue nicely into ai, so, you know, when you look at technology as a whole, I mentioned this earlier, and you look at where is it touching people, like where is it actually touching people? You realize that it’s the biggest stack of the technology stack isn’t really touching people. So AI. Where is it gonna touch people? We’re unsure about that right now.

[01:07:44] Michael: All we have where it’s touching people right now is represented through large, long language models that help us to complete some of the mundane things that we’ve been doing and help us to think through certain things. Very valuable, not diminishing it, but I am beyond that and I’m thinking, okay, where are the durable, practical applications of AI going to be?

[01:08:08] Michael: How is that going to happen? Who is marshaling that effort? Is it going to be that a bunch of tech guys create the next piece of AI for lawyers? Is it gonna be that the next some bunch of tech guys will create the next AI for the entire educational system? Like what’s the role of bringing in domain partners into understanding how AI can practically and safely and ethically actually help solve real problems within those domains?

[01:08:43] Michael: So I do not see AI as this sort of massive thing. I’m seeing AI as potentially domain, domain oriented solution sets, but I am not so sure that we have created, or even if we’re thinking about the proper way to do that, because think about this Josh, I don’t wanna be long-winded here, but this is an important point.

[01:09:08] Michael: The way we have thought about and the way we have built software in the past, as you’ve mentioned, is, is gonna change rapidly. But the way we have thought about software has, is gonna change as well in, in the new world that’s coming that I see the way we think about software will shift. And so. The idea that you have built a piece of software AI enabled that does some general things for people, just general things.

[01:09:35] Michael: That’s nice. And we are having fun with the LMS now, that’s nice. But what’s gonna be really impactful is when we start having software and AI that is specific to helping people in certain domains to do certain practical things. We see that happening, starting to happen in healthcare, but, but we’re not anywhere.

[01:09:55] Michael: The focus is not on that. As you, as you see, the focus is not on that aspect of ai. It’s not on how do we get doctors and nurses and people in the medical community and pharmacists and everybody together to figure out, okay, how does AI shape this industry? Yeah. Because without that kind of a. I don’t even consider that micro, right?

[01:10:18] Michael: ’cause those are big industries and so they’re macro within their own right. But within, without that sort of organized approach, what we’ll do is become basically slaves to LLMs that are so generalized in their understanding that they won’t work everywhere and they won’t provide the same value everywhere.

[01:10:36] Michael: For example. What about the cultural differences that we find around the world? Right? How are the, how does an LLM deal with, does it give this person in Southeast Asia the same answer as it gives the person in Kansas? Where are the biases and how biased are they? And so we’re gonna run into these massive problems because, you know, it’s one, one world, but we know from experience that it’s one world with significant differences in terms of how people live.

[01:11:04] Michael: For example, I’ll give you an example, a practical example, as we are both talking about financial services, the idea of money is not understood globally in the same way.

[01:11:14] Josh: That’s true.

[01:11:15] Michael: The idea of money and credit and debt is not, is not understood the same way. So how does AI deal with that? If we’re gonna deal with AI and talk about, for example, things like predicting default predictions, something that must be on everybody’s mind as we talk about ai.

[01:11:32] Michael: Certainly it’s on my mind, but how does that compute globally? It it doesn’t compute globally through some l and m. No, you’re gonna have to think of AI in domain context so that it can actually shape and apply itself in those particular, jurisdictions. Otherwise, it, it’ll have, it’ll be so skewed that you’ll have so many falsehoods that it just, it, it will undermine itself.

[01:11:57] Michael: That’s my view of it.

[01:11:59] Josh: Yeah, I think I, I think I have a fairly similar view in some regards that it’s gotta be very use case driven, right? And a lot of what we see is, is folks talking about

[01:12:13] Josh: pie in the sky. But to your point, like it’s gotta be very, very focused on like, we’re, this whole conversation, like a process that needs to be optimized, right? And how can we take, you know, the, the combined world’s knowledge and experience and data and quickly sift through it to make, to your point from, you know, your introduction, like better data-driven decisions and things.

[01:12:42] Josh: And, you know, I think we are seeing some really, really cool examples of, you know, use cases being solved. apologies. SVA and Monica, I know I’m gonna get this one wrong, but, our CEO his wife is a, is a PhD researcher at Oregon Health Science University. And she focuses on a very specific type of cancer and, And there’s some, some element of like a protein synthesis or breakdown that they’ve just never been able to like crack the nut on. Right? And, through our CEO, she got connected to one of the Google AI teams, and they actually came and met with her research group and, you know, they had a meeting of exactly what we were just talking about.

[01:13:29] Josh: She just told them the problem, right? And then a month later, Michael, they said, let’s have a follow up meeting. She was like, great. Come down to the office. She was fully expecting to say, okay, here’s kind of what we’re thinking about, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They came in and they go, we solved your problem.

[01:13:45] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[01:13:45] Josh: Here’s the answer. She’s like, holy smokes, that is that you, you cracked the thing, right? And so, but that was a very purpose built application to solve a very specific thing. And you can’t just say, okay, well now that’s gonna solve every medical, everything. No, it was, it was very specific, very purpose built.

[01:14:06] Josh: But if we identify very specific value add use cases, I think there’s a lot of practical application.

[01:14:14] Michael: Yes. And one of the challenges we’ll run into that we’ll have to think through. So the, the, the, the way we think about AI and the way we think about any kind of patronistic technology is always that it needs to be trained on a model. So the reason for that is sort of obvious to those who are in the know it needs the data and it needs to see the patterns and then make inferences from those patterns and so forth and so on.

[01:14:45] Michael: The, the challenge that you have as you get into domain is that you may not have always enough data where, where both is mathematically sufficient or you’re comfortable that you have sufficient amount of data. To derive the proper outputs. And so you may end up having deployments that are skewed from the get go and that end up doing bad things on the flip side.

[01:15:08] Michael: So we’ll have to solve that problem, which is minimizing the trainability or the minimizing the threshold for trainability on models.

[01:15:19] Josh: that’s a super good point. Dude. You know, we, it’s interesting. We, we literally just had a, a use case proof point. Our CTO showed us all on our leadership team and was walking through how he did something

[01:15:30] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:31] Josh: and he took something that would’ve normally taken a team, probably about six to seven months to do.

[01:15:40] Josh: And we’re talking a, a, a dedicated full stack team of developers to be able to do,

[01:15:45] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:45] Josh: and he built it by himself with a little bit of help from an intern in a couple of weeks. Using ai, but he actually walked us through his prompts and how he used, you know, the tool to be able to create this software and all the code.

[01:16:05] Josh: But what was interesting is he walked through it was, he showed us examples and it was hilarious. Like you’d have to know our CTO to, to like, to, to see his, like his communication style in these prompts. But it was hilarious. He was like scrolling through and you’d see sections of the prompts where he’s like, what are you doing?

[01:16:22] Josh: You are crazy. Like, no, no, no, no, no. That is not, I can read that in the code. That ain’t right. What are you doing? And then LLM would literally respond and be like, oh yeah, you’re right. I totally made that shit

[01:16:32] Michael: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. You have

[01:16:34] Josh: And you’re like, that’s why it’s so important to have an expert in the loop, right?

[01:16:38] Josh: Because to your point, like for him to do that, he spotted that error in the code. I’m not a coder, Michael. Like, I wouldn’t know. I’d be like, yeah, it looks good to me. Cool. Like, hit go baby. And then we deploy that thing and I’m gonna take Typhoon down.

[01:16:53] Michael: Right,

[01:16:54] Josh: Right? So this is why I don’t do that, that’s why I host a podcast.

[01:16:58] Josh: so it really is very, very important, especially at this stage that we have expert in the loop as a part of that process.

[01:17:05] Michael: very much so. Very much so. And, and not having it, not having expertise at that stage, I think will be, will be deleterious to the growth of AI and the adoption, because remember, the adoption rate of AI will be, will be strongly correlated to the accuracy of ai. If, if AI starts giving wrong answers and causing errors and doing crazy things, people won’t trust it, then people won’t buy into it as much.

[01:17:35] Michael: That’s why I think, you know, I think while it’s important to focus on ai, and I’m gonna sound like a contrarian here for a minute. My perspective is if I was on the side of the road in 1901 talking about automobiles and I was looking around and I’d be hearing all kinds of things, some people would be excited, some would be scared, and I’m, I’m sure a couple of horseshoe guys would be like, you know what, I’m gonna start putting auto on my sign.

[01:18:04] Michael: You know, it says horseshoe right now, but I’m putting auto up there because I, that’s, that’s the hot thing. Autos are coming and you find that we’re in that stage right now where everyone is at ai this, and everyone is at ai that, and everybody’s into ai and everybody’s selling it and everybody’s talking about it.

[01:18:20] Michael: But I think it’s very important, especially from business for businesses, that we don’t leap over all the still remaining inefficiencies, all the still remaining things that needs to be rectified and jump over to ai.

[01:18:36] Josh: Hmm.

[01:18:37] Michael: for businesses, for businesses, for organizations, there isn’t going to be a.

[01:18:43] Michael: Speedy displacement to ai. Okay? Because that would be too disruptive for businesses. It will take some time for businesses to adopt and, and, and replace and shift and shape. We’re going to be using much of the same technology stack for a while to come. And today that technology stack is still not serving businesses optimally.

[01:19:06] Michael: It still hasn’t allowed businesses to realize all of the gains that they had expected to get and that they are supposed to get from the technologies that they’ve invested in. And so we’re, I understand the consulting classes making a beehive to the next shiny thing, but businesses are still not being served with the technology stack that we currently have.

[01:19:29] Michael: Disjointed technologies. APIs that don’t work and aren’t secure. I mean, I could go down the list, brittle systems that are causing businesses to have downtime where you’re doing business with, with real brands in some cases, and you’re seeing signs, oh, our systems are down for maintenance. You know, all these crazy things are still happening.

[01:19:49] Michael: Mm-hmm. It’s still happening. So while we, while we march towards a new conversation, which I understand is gonna happen and should happen, we ought to still keep our eye on the ball, especially when we’re talking to business executives that, look, somebody still recognizes that you have real needs.

[01:20:09] Michael: Somebody still sees that you need help in certain critical areas of your business, that AI is not gonna magically solve for you overnight.

[01:20:16] Josh: Yeah,

[01:20:17] Michael: That’s my, I’m, I’m

[01:20:17] Josh: think that’s a really astute point, Michael, honestly,

[01:20:20] Michael: That was me and my soapbox for a minute.

[01:20:24] Josh: know, as you, as you look at, I think this change in. What we’re seeing in the pace of software development too, it puts us in a little different position than we’ve been in in the past. Right. Where I mean, yeah, you think about, you know, the speed at which cars evolved and became ubiquitous and stuff like people had kind of a lot of time to figure it out to adopt processes compared to the world of software.

[01:20:53] Josh: Right. But fast forward, the world of ai, the technology is far, the advancements that it’s having is far outpacing the ability for the businesses to keep up with even what’s available. Right. And I think that’s kind of the point that you’re making is, is like, even though, let’s say our AI could land a rocket on Mars and colonize it and all of these things, like we may not be ready for that for a while.

[01:21:21] Josh: So even though it’s advancing at two x, if we’re only advancing at one x. Because dude, we still gotta take care of like the day to day before we can really go to that 10 x.

[01:21:36] Michael: Yeah, I, I kinda lost you at the end, but, yeah, I mean, you’re exactly right. The, there, it’s not just the, the speed, the speed is tremendous, and the speed itself is, is, is, is a displacement, and the speed itself is distorting and, and, and is distorting people’s ability to cope with it and so forth and so on.

[01:21:56] Michael: But there’s also another aspect to this, the, the speed issue. I, I think with AI there is speed. But there’s also, we’re unsure exactly how that speed is going to result in practical life changing ways. Lemme give you an example of what I mean. So, most businesses, when they think of AI today, let’s talk very practically.

[01:22:28] Michael: AI is being used right away in call centers. You can hardly call any business now and get a human being.

[01:22:34] Josh: Yeah.

[01:22:35] Michael: You used to be able to call and, and even, even if you got dumped into a voice response unit, you could press a number and go speak to somebody. Now they’re pretending like you’re speaking to somebody from the get-go and it’s not a person, right?

[01:22:48] Michael: So the question now, so I want you to see what’s happening. So our usage of ai, our early adoptions of it is not, is not. Accruing to the benefit of the consumer. Really, it’s only accruing to the benefit of the business. Again, a a a focus on making the business more efficient. Right? Cutting costs, but is not yet red.

[01:23:11] Michael: Redoing to the benefit of the consumer. And I’m, I’m hard pressed right now to think of any industry today that is approaching applying AI in a way that is to the benefit of the consumer. Accept healthcare. Accept healthcare. That’s to the benefit of the consumer. Like most of the early adoptions of AI that I’ve seen is all about making the business more efficient.

[01:23:35] Michael: We had to get rid of the few call center staff we had, so we got rid of them. Now we have AI doing call centers. what’s gonna be next? It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be so, so, Josh, the, the perspective we have on AI today, the practical perspective that we see in the business world is one of deletion is one. Minus, it’s not a positive. We’re not adding value. We are taking away, we are, we are making things happen more efficient with fewer people. And I’m not so sure if that model is a sustainable model. When I think of AI and what it should be doing for us, I don’t really see it that way. We, we could probably have another conversation about, you know, sort of what the alternatives are, but if you think about that approach and where it, where it ends up taking us, I think you can see some big challenges that we’re gonna have.

[01:24:26] Josh: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think. You know, I wish I had some better examples off the top of my tongue, but I mean, I definitely think there are some, some good examples of it being addition, but I would agree. I mean, the, the, the overwhelming is subtraction, right? And,

[01:24:43] Michael: it’s, it’s subtraction and a lot of marketing. You know, AI is really good at marketing, at, at, at targeting people and so forth and so on, you know,

[01:24:50] Josh: Dude, I joke. I’m like, man, it’s so funny. You can literally go back in time and just watch all the booths at trade shows. Just start very quickly, like ai, ai, ai, ai. And it’s like, and then you go ask him, you’re like, what are you doing with ai? Like, well, you know, like there’s no real answer behind that.

[01:25:11] Josh: but yeah, I agree. I mean, so put on your, your, you know, your futurist lens. What else do you see coming down the pipe? Like what are some of the things that you’re paying attention to thinking about?

[01:25:28] Michael: I must apologize again. I think I lost you

[01:25:30] Josh: I saw the look on your face. I don’t know what’s going on today. Apparently our, our wifi is just fighting us. but, no, I was just saying, you know, as you, as you put on kind of your futurist, lens, like what do you see coming down the pipe? What kinds of things are you paying attention to?

[01:25:44] Josh: What are you looking out for?

[01:25:45] Michael: yeah. None of them are technological actually.

[01:25:48] Josh: How fascinating. That is not the answer I expected.

[01:25:51] Michael: Yeah, yeah. But they’re, but they’re the result of techno technology. So, many years ago, I, I, I wrote an essay about the rise of the rest and the decline of the west. And that’s all because of technology, believe it or not. it, it does come back to technology opening up, opening up of the world, the small, making the world smaller in terms of trade and so forth.

[01:26:16] Michael: But, what I see happening now as we move into the next phase of the technological revolution, the next tipping point, if you will, is an acceleration of displacement. It’s a negative, I’m not optimistic in that way because that’s a negative sort of perspective, but that’s really, I think, can be made into a positive thing.

[01:26:40] Michael: But first we have to recognize that it’s coming. We see it happening, by the way, in many of our cities. We see it, we see the displacement happening. We call it homelessness. We call it drug addiction, we call it whatever. But what we are seeing are different types of people being homeless, people that would not have been homeless before.

[01:27:01] Josh: Hmm.

[01:27:01] Michael: Right. And so it’s a, it’s a change in people’s lives that are happening because the economy is changing and has changed, the skill sets that people had that were allowing them to survive in the old economy, suddenly they can’t find that those skill sets can be used in the new economy. And so there’s a displacement happening and that displacement re downs to the economic displacement.

[01:27:24] Michael: They have no money. They can’t make the, make the same living they had. That’s going to accelerate around the world. And it’ll mean that all governments, all policy makers will have to start thinking differently about their societies and about. The issues that they’re all beginning to see in their societies.

[01:27:47] Michael: Everybody’s seeing it, and they’re gonna have to think differently about how societies work. For example, maybe we’ll need, everyone will need a basic income. Something that has been thrown around for before and laughed at in the paradigm that we exist in today, but in a paradigm where much of the productive capacities of the world would be done.

[01:28:10] Michael: By machines, I don’t mean machines that we have now. I mean, like ai, robot robots and, and, and software in general. Just machines, right? non, non maintainable machines. Let’s call ’em that. we’re gonna have a problem. We may not have enough consumer power to purchase the things that are produced. Major problem. We, again, we are seeing these things already, right? We’re seeing it in our, in our societies and we’re, they will accelerate and they will get worse, and nobody can show any picture where it gets better. There’s no picture where AI lives side simul, side by side rather with people getting more employment. And if somebody can give a show a picture where AI grows and employment grows, manual work grows as AI grows, then they need to start showing that picture so that people can understand what their futures are gonna look like. But the futures that we can see now is a future where as AI grows manual, the need for manual, not just manual labor, but manual work in general, will diminish.

[01:29:27] Michael: Manual thought will diminish. The need for manual intelligence will diminish. Think about that. The need for manual intelligence. In fact, the need for manual intelligence will almost go down to zero. It’ll be on par with what it was in the, probably in the 16, 15 hundreds, because we won’t need it. I mean, most people, you did a great job doing some amazing writing a few minutes ago, but for a lot of people, they haven’t written anything in a while. And you think five years from now, how many people are gonna tell you they’ve written anything in a while?

[01:30:01] Josh: Yeah.

[01:30:02] Michael: Right? So we’re moving through significant shifts that are going to really change everything. But when we say it, we typically are talking about it just in one way. But it’s gonna change everything.

[01:30:18] Michael: And some things are gonna have to be addressed urgently. Otherwise we’re gonna have massive problems. And, and again, I’m not being a pessimist because I do think that there’s an opportunity. Here’s the optimistic spin on it, Josh.

[01:30:32] Josh: Yeah, please.

[01:30:34] Michael: The world that we live in was created by men. It can be recreated by men.

[01:30:39] Michael: And when I say men, I don’t mean that in, in a gender way. I just mean from a human standpoint. Obviously we want women involved and they should be. They will be. But the world we live in was created by us human beings, all of it. That means that the systems that we have for compensating each other for work was created by us.

[01:30:59] Michael: The concepts of work that we have agreed to was created by us. The relationships we have in the world between people who employ people and who will work for people, and the nature of that was created by us. Like all of it is created by us, so we can rethink all of it. We will have to, you’re frozen a bit, but we’ll have to rethink it. And in the rethinking of it is where people like people with the skills that I have, philosophical futurists as I call myself and people, other people who think over the horizon and look at things from a certain perspective, they’ll be very needed as we try to reimagine the world that we live in.

[01:31:48] Michael: The world that we live in today cannot sustain.

[01:31:54] Josh: I

[01:31:54] Michael: have to choose between AI and the world we live in today. That’s it. Can’t have both.

[01:31:58] Josh: I agree, dude. I agree. And I, I’m with you. I think it’s one of those, I try to have a really optimistic view of it. I’d like to think that the good outweighs the bad in humans, and that ultimately we’ll navigate as we have done for thousands of years. We’ll navigate, not with perfection, but we will navigate difficult, challenging times to try to create better futures for humans.

[01:32:29] Josh: Like I would, I really, really want to believe that, man.

[01:32:32] Michael: Well, it’s, well, guess

[01:32:33] Josh: to your point, like the other perspective really sucks. It’s

[01:32:36] Michael: And not only, not, not only that, Josh, the evidence supports you, the evidence of history supports you that we have always been trying to get better and better and better. And so you’re not misplaced in, in that optimism. I, I support it a hundred percent.

[01:32:50] Josh: But I’m with you. I, I think this is, you know, it is, we are absolutely kind of like you were talking about earlier, right? Just the, the ups and downs and are we in a storm and we’ve gotta look out ahead and see what this actually looks like and means, and what are the things that are coming our way and the impacts and the implications.

[01:33:08] Josh: I absolutely think we’re in a season of a storm and it’s just, it’s a different one that we’ve experienced, but. It’s like many things we’ve been through, but it’s different than many things that we’ve been through. It’s a challenging time where humans have an opportunity to go left or go right, or probably a few other directions and, and which way are we gonna go, right?

[01:33:30] Josh: And, and what does that mean for humanity? And we’re probably gonna stumble a lot along the way because of humans, because of a lot of the things that we’ve talked about leading up to this. but I’m with you. I mean, I think, you know, there’s a, there’s a lot of optimistic elements to this of, I mean, you know, I’ve, I’ve overused the example probably, but, you know, my wife’s big like revelation of finding love in chat.

[01:33:55] Josh: GPT was, it helped her plant her garden. And she’s always wanted to, but she’s been afraid to take the step of, I always kill my house plants, can I really keep a full garden that’s growing food for our family going right? And so she was able to access a wealth of knowledge and information. That she didn’t feel she had access to understand and decipher the way that she did, and now she’s got a garden that’s making food for my kids that was

[01:34:23] Michael: There you go.

[01:34:24] Josh: Like that’s pretty cool. Right. So I see that as a positive element of that.

[01:34:29] Michael: abs. It it is. And I, I, I’ll just say this real quick. Part of, part of, part of this. Part of what your wife experienced. And this may sound pessimistic at first, but it’s positive. You see, we were never that special as humans in the first place, Josh. We weren’t, see, we, we, we had all this hubris that made us think that we knew so much that we were so good, but we don’t have that much knowledge.

[01:34:57] Michael: Really, Josh, think about it. We don’t know that much. The machines. And again, people, when I say the machines, I mean like the ai, I don’t mean, you know, a, a, a regular machine. The machines are gonna show us that we didn’t know anything.

[01:35:09] Josh: Yeah.

[01:35:11] Michael: Yes. And so it’s what we need to do is just adjust our mindset to the idea that these things are not only there to help us, they are there to make us better in every regard really.

[01:35:26] Michael: Because we weren’t that good in the first place. Our memory was not that good. We can only remember maybe five things and then we forget. Our ability to, there you go. Our ability to reason wasn’t that good anyways. We can only assimilate a certain amount of information and process it at the same time.

[01:35:43] Michael: Like we have so many deficiencies. This is our true ability to To To be free. Yes, to be free. Now that’s gonna take some convincing. We’re gonna have to, A lot of people are gonna need to be convinced that that’s true, but it is true. Mm-hmm. This will free us, but before we get completely free, we’re gonna have to deal with the pain that many persons will have to experience because we remember much of this will happen in another generation.

[01:36:12] Michael: In this generation, we have transitory problems. People are transitioning between how they used to live and this new way, how they used to earn in this new way, how they thought. And now you’re saying think differently. The things they learned in school and it has no value. Now the things they need to learn now.

[01:36:29] Michael: All these things that confusing and hurting people. And we need to get serious, very serious as a society, as societies about how we address these things.

[01:36:41] Josh: man, I think that’s a great point on this. Like, and I, I, I don’t know, it’s interesting. I feel like a lot of times our episodes kind of end with that like thought process

[01:36:53] Michael: Yeah,

[01:36:54] Josh: you know, none of us knows what tomorrow’s gonna hold. And there’s gonna be challenges. And ultimately I’d like to think that we’re just trying to be better every day.

[01:37:05] Josh: And so I’ve really appreciated your perspective, but before I let you go, I got two final questions for you, sir. So, where do you go to get information? Like what, what’s kind of your source of, you know, gathering intelligence?

[01:37:21] Michael: Great question. I’m gonna answer it, this way. So first of all, everyone listening should be very cautious in this time about where you’re getting your information. That’s the first thing. We live in a time now where there’s a, there’s a significant line of demarcation between information and knowledge.

[01:37:41] Josh: Hmm.

[01:37:43] Michael: And so we’ve gotta become very careful. We’ve gotta become stewards of managing the filters in our lives that allow you to keep certain things out and bring certain things in. So that’s the first framing I would give the audience around where do I get information? We all have to ask ourselves that question about where are we getting information and where are we getting knowledge and where are we getting entertainment.

[01:38:08] Michael: Much of the information we get today that we think is knowledge is just entertainment information and we are confusing it with knowledge. And so I am very because of that and other reasons, I’m very careful about where I get information and I’m very careful about the kinds of information I consume today.

[01:38:30] Michael: I do find that a publication called the Financial Brand. Which I have no affiliation with. It’s just a, a publication, especially for those folks who might be serving or affiliated with the financial services industry. I, I use the financial brand as a, a platform that gives me YouTube, a wide cross section of information.

[01:38:50] Michael: I find that articles usually take me down rabbit holes that are very productive. And so, and, and, and really I don’t, you know, I I, I could maybe, if I was trying to brag, I would give you a whole bunch of books and things I read. I don’t actually read a lot. And I know that might sound as a con another contrarian thing.

[01:39:08] Michael: as a native inte a person with native intelligence, I’m very careful about what’s shaping my, my thought process and my worldview. Is it being shaped by an author? Hmm. That’s interesting. Is it being shaped by an author’s perspective on something? Okay, well that’s interesting. If it is, that’s fine. But I need to be well aware that this viewpoint comes from an author’s perspective.

[01:39:36] Michael: And that’s not necessarily gonna be, it may, but it’s not necessarily going to align with my native intelligence about that thing. And so in my life, having lived the years I’ve lived on this Earth, I’ve come to rely on my native intelligence, which comes from a source that I’ve found to be superior to the source of other people on the planet.

[01:39:57] Michael: Frankly. I know this may sound a little wonky, but I really do believe that because most of the things you read is just recycled information. Yeah. You’re just reading what somebody has put out. Very few pieces of information is really original. So I do read medical journals. I do read, read technology journals.

[01:40:15] Michael: I, I like scientific journals generally, but things that are opinionated. I try to stay away from Josh because. my opinion is as good as your opinion, right? Or another person’s opinion. Anybody’s opinion is their opinion. and so I’m, I’m not trying to fill my mind with a lot of opinions. I’m trying to stay focused, stay true, stay fact-based and scientific based.

[01:40:36] Michael: be very clear about who I serve in my life and in my business and, and, and what I’m supposed to do. So I don’t read a lot, generally, for my business or my life. I do read things for entertainment, as we all do online for jokes, for having fun. But in terms of getting real information that that impacts my life, I I keep it very close.

[01:40:57] Josh: It’s interesting. I mean, it’s, I mean, if I could overgeneralize, it’s a very eloquent way of saying just trust your gut. And a lot of times with how much like garbage is out there sometimes, like your gut just is pretty darn good.

[01:41:11] Michael: Absolutely. Especially if you can make sure that your gut is the source of your gut, is a right, is a

[01:41:16] Josh: Is Yeah. It’s, it’s well founded, right?

[01:41:18] Michael: Yeah. and you’re here to do good things and you have a, you have the right con constitution within yourself, and you have the right connection with the things that are beyond you, and all that good stuff.

[01:41:28] Michael: You know, life is so, so much more when we understand that there’s a, and I say this word, spiritual, having nothing to do with religion, but that there’s a spiritual element to all of us as human beings. Yes. It’s not just the physical thing that we have here. And if we can connect into that, that eternal aspects of our lives and our beings, and this, this idea, these concepts have been echoed by other people before me, but I’m fully, fully convinced that, understanding that other side of ourselves, the spiritual parts of ourselves, and understanding that.

[01:42:02] Michael: There’s nothing that we need that isn’t yet created for us. Everything we need is already on the, on the planet Earth. So then it’s a matter of attraction, isn’t it? It’s not a matter of desire, it’s a matter of attraction. And so that’s, that’s, that’s for another time perhaps. But, I, I really believe that,having that kind of constitution within yourself is part of being, being the right kind of person to be successful and to live a good life on this planet.

[01:42:31] Michael: Yep.

[01:42:32] Josh: feel like you just started a new and whole totally different podcast episode.

[01:42:36] Michael: Probably, probably.

[01:42:38] Josh: well, but so to that point actually, so if people want to continue the conversation, if people want to connect with you or if they wanna learn more about Loan Sirius and what you guys are doing over there, how can they do that?

[01:42:48] Michael: That’s ones easy. Loan service.com. L-O-A-N-C-I-R-R-U s.com is, is a good place to start. I, I’m one of those leaders that I actually put my personal information out there. You can call me. my number is actually on my LinkedIn. My email is on my LinkedIn. I’m not hiding from anybody. I’m here to create value in the world.

[01:43:07] Michael: So if you’re a person who wants to create value in the world, I’m reachable

[01:43:11] Josh: You know where to find you. I love it. Well, we’ll have links to that. but seriously, Michael, this was an absolute blast, man. I knew it was gonna be, but I, I really appreciated just kind of the, the depth and the molding of the conversation throughout. I mean, it’s, again, it’s one of the reasons why I really love doing this.

[01:43:28] Josh: You know, just completely off the cuff, unscripted, like we kind of had a little bit of an idea where we might go and, I, I think we kind of went all over the place, but I really appreciated kind of that, literally that philosophical approach. I think it’s a lot of what I think makes life interesting to talk about.

[01:43:45] Josh: So this was just, it was a really fun conversation to have. And yeah, I just wanted to thank you again for coming and being a guest on the Digital Banking podcast.

[01:43:53] Michael: Josh, great interviews are not made by the, the interviewees. I think they’re made by the interviewers, so

[01:44:00] Josh: See, I strongly disagree with that, sir, I just, I think I even made the joke to you before the start. I, the only reason I make a good podcast host is I’m a dummy, so I just ask all the dumb questions that nobody else is willing to ask.

[01:44:13] Michael: Only, only those dumb questions brought out my answer, so

[01:44:18] Josh: Nah, this has been a blast. I appreciate you.

[01:44:20] you very much. Thank you for listening to the Digital Banking Podcast, powered by Tyfone. Find more episodes on digital banking podcast.com or subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.