Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Eric, welcome aboard to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thanks Ari. I'm happy to be here. Very exciting.
Speaker 1:I have never heard of a endurance trail. What is that?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a 100 mile trail race through the mountains. They're all over the world. It's a whole subculture of running that people really haven't heard of called ultra running. And ultra running, the definition of ultra running is literally anything over a marathon distance.
Speaker 1:So so just
Speaker 2:get mile, 100 k, 100 mile.
Speaker 1:Just to give perspective, a marathon is about 25 miles.
Speaker 2:It is literally 26.2 miles. It used to be 26 miles, but the London Olympics, the Kings reviewing stand was point two miles away from the finish line, so they decided to extend it to make room for so the king could see the finishers. That's why every time you run-in a marathon, you thank the king for those extra two.
Speaker 1:I did not did not know that story.
Speaker 2:The 26 miles is the distance between Athens and Marathon Greece would That's where the word, the name comes from Marathon Greece.
Speaker 1:So this is four times a marathon. What brings you to run these endurance trails? What, how did you, when did you learn about it? When did you say like, oh sure I'll do that?
Speaker 2:I was living in Northern Cal, I'd moved to Northern California. I had been, I was a runner at the time. I had run a couple of marathons and while I was out in Northern California I discovered this world of trail running and it was rapturous. I don't know any other way to put it. It was you know, after years of pounding pavement and running road races where you see mile markers and then mile markers and then mile markers and you just want to finish.
Speaker 2:Suddenly you're spending six hours going up and down narrow single track trails and woods with wild animals around you and lakes off in the distance and it's just something amazing about it. But why you do it is always an interesting question because the answer is even more interesting. The answer is actually pain. You actually look to get to this point where you are in pain and when I say pain it's rarely physical although you're certainly physically worn out or whatever but this mental pain of there's not a chance I can continue to do this. There's no way I'm gonna be able to finish and it's an amazing, talk about runners high, this is a different world.
Speaker 2:This is a common answer by the way. In the ultra running community pain will be the frequent answer you hear because when you take yourself through that pain and you get on the other side of it, it's transcendent as well as the surroundings are transcendent. So the whole thing is really quite quite an amazing experience.
Speaker 1:Is that is the this I'm going to call it shared experience of of pain. Does that create camaraderie inside of the teams doing these these these trail runs?
Speaker 2:Well there are no teams, it's
Speaker 1:all It's groups, you're not alone, right?
Speaker 2:Well yeah, but there's no teams like everybody's an individual competitor in that. The camaraderie is with the support system. Now that's the great question that you asked. You have friends and family who are waiting like four hours for you to come to an aid station to refill your water bottles and do whatever and they see you for like three minutes. Like you come in, you kiss your wife, you complain about your knee, whatever you do and then you're gone because you don't wanna spend a lot of time in there, the clock's running.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And then they pick up and drive oftentimes on mountainous roads in the middle of the night to wait for you So another four really appreciate this phenomenal support system, not only your friends and family but the people that are doing the aid stations because they're all out there for you. And I think that's a really rewarding part of the sport.
Speaker 1:Anybody get hurt?
Speaker 2:You know, you have this and that you fall you know, not typically. That's not really the thing. It's interesting. So many people because it depends on how fast you are, of course. But, you know, I was typically in a twenty four, twenty five hour range for a 100 mile race.
Speaker 2:Some people were like, well
Speaker 1:Wait.
Speaker 2:Hold on.
Speaker 1:Hold on. So twenty four, twenty five hour, that means you're running more or less straight for twenty five hours. Is that what I'm understanding?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Get it.
Speaker 2:You get it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Why not?
Speaker 2:I mean, you have to finish. Yeah. I mean, you're not you know, you certainly walk, you know, very steep mountain uphills and things like that. And maybe you walk at the end because you can't run anymore. There's all that but so many people will say, well, what about the sleep?
Speaker 2:Like how do you get through that? I tell you it is the last thing you care about. It is not what you care about. Rarely Sleep the problem for you. It's just there's so much adrenaline and so many emotions that are happening, sleep's not the problem.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it's physical problems, it's oftentimes mental problems, very much mental. You know?
Speaker 1:I I just wanna I just wanna put this on a scale for our audience. So so my family and I were working towards a fourteener, which is like a six, seven hour thing. It's eight miles. Right? Here we're talking a 100 miles, and it's like 3,000 feet gain.
Speaker 1:This is a whole different scale, and people like fourteeners are considered hard, difficult, people can't do them. It's a huge achievement and challenge. This is on a scale that is 10x, right? Just number to number. So this is way beyond batched crazy.
Speaker 1:It's not close. It's gone beyond. I don't know what to call it.
Speaker 2:Which which 14 are you gonna
Speaker 1:So so we're we're working towards one of the easier fourteeners because we have a a six year old. So this summer, we're basically last summer, we tried to do this. We didn't get close enough on our our skill. This summer, we're gonna try. We're doing a different strategy this summer.
Speaker 1:We're gonna start the fourteener. And the second we hit 11:11AM, we're gonna turn back. And then we're gonna do that again and again and again until we basically feel like, yep, we can do it.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's good.
Speaker 1:As you probably know, if you if you go over a certain hour on a fourteen year, you die. Like, you die. There's no there's no two ways about it, so it's a safety issue. So you you really have to be fit in for a back then, a five year old and this year, a six year old to do that with his older brother and sister.
Speaker 2:And a six year old are gonna you're not carrying them. You're telling me
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:Oh, they're doing it.
Speaker 1:I'm not strong enough to carry him.
Speaker 2:A 100 one of the 100 milers I did Ari was the Leadville 100. That was the hardest one. So that's kind of that's a little bit in your physical backyard Leadville, Colorado. Leadville, Colorado is the highest point in the Continental United States is 10,002 at the start.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That's a that's a fun race. So you you do you don't do fourteeners. You do a couple of thirteeners during that race. That's So
Speaker 1:that's the problem. Right? People don't understand. You're starting the race. If you're doing a fourteener, you're and you're doing, right, 3,000 feet gain.
Speaker 1:You're starting the race at high altitude, right? You can barely breathe at the beginning of altitude. By the time you're done, you're so it's it's I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly, but it's a beer stand, is the name of the fourteener that we're planning on doing. It's considered one of the easier Fortuners because, you
Speaker 2:know, we
Speaker 1:got to start somewhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's What a cool experience. You'll love it. I mean, if you haven't done it yet, it's it's really quite amazing.
Speaker 1:It's we're really looking forward to it. We're walking every day four miles to to kinda get in in shape. And then on the weekends, we're doing six to eight miles. And I'm thinking if we can do, like, six if we can do eight miles, 10 miles with 3,000 gain on, like, just a regular mountain, there's a chance that we can finish a fourteener because then you're not experiencing that elevation. There's a chance you can do it.
Speaker 2:Big key, big key is nutrition. You got to get that dialed in. It's not just conditioning. It's the same with ultra running that we were just talking about. It's about eating.
Speaker 2:It's about hydrating. It's about electrolytes. There's there's a lot of there's a lot of things that go into making all of that work. So make sure you're doing that.
Speaker 1:So, Eric, I we you know, this show is the art of going down the rabbit hole. We never know what to expect. That's what I think that's why people it's been called addictive, I think, for for amongst other that reason.
Speaker 2:I like that. That's great.
Speaker 1:I I wanna ask you this. Right? Early in your career, did you know what was in front of you? Did you know that it was, you know, m, you know, acquisitions and mergers and CEO ing and and finance and, obviously, you didn't know it was AI, but technology. Or what was that point when you were 18 and you're like, well, where am I where am I going with this?
Speaker 1:What did that feel like? What did that sound like? How did you even make a decision?
Speaker 2:I like that phrase CEO ing. I like that. Yeah. What are you doing? I'm CEO Yeah.
Speaker 2:Here's the real answer. I got into this business because of typing. That's the answer. I was in the eighth grade of school. I took a typing class.
Speaker 2:I was the fastest typer in the class I and I was the only boy in the class. So two things happened that gave me a remarkable skill for my life and I met my wife.
Speaker 1:And eight years old, sorry, put it hold on.
Speaker 2:Eighth grade.
Speaker 1:Oh, eighth grade. Okay. Still, that's that's that's pretty young.
Speaker 2:I met the woman, the young lady, the the girl, if you will, who is my wife still today, some many years later. And so two things great. I always say that two things great happened in typing. I got a skill that led me where I am and I met my wife ultimately met my wife. And the reason I say that is at a very young part point in my career, I used that skill to land a job as a data entry clerk at
Speaker 1:a So people people like, unless you're my age and older, people don't know what a data entry clerk is.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You gotta explain that.
Speaker 2:You gotta explain. Well, yeah. I mean, was literally, you know, keyboarding information that would be fed into the computer. That's what it was, right? So in the earlier days of computing, you didn't speak, you know and it went into the computer and you didn't touch a screen but you had to feed it and if we did it by literally typing information in you know could be reports or you know sales or whatever.
Speaker 2:This was for a store that I was working for and I got it because I was an exceptional typist and I could type very fast. I had very few errors so that was it. The job though was physically next to the computer room like physically. So people talk about getting their foot in the door. I literally put my foot in there.
Speaker 2:I was like, I'm sorry, I really wanna work in there. Like, yeah, we hear you, we hear you. And then a job came open. I was you know, my early twenties. A job came open for a nighttime computer operator and I took that job and it
Speaker 1:was we need to explain this. What does a nighttime computer operator do? Yeah, I'm
Speaker 2:gonna guess this means you work the night shift
Speaker 1:because it was '24. 50s, sixties. Right? What what years was this? No.
Speaker 2:The fifties, sixties.
Speaker 1:When was this?
Speaker 2:This is the eighties. This is the Okay. The eighties. Okay.
Speaker 1:I'm just aligning myself what type of
Speaker 2:computers is Sixties, boy. We'd to do an age calculation.
Speaker 1:Punch punch cards.
Speaker 2:I'm not I thought even you were
Speaker 1:doing punch cards.
Speaker 2:No, wasn't punch cards. We were into diskettes at that time. Punch cards were gone. Punch cards were gone. We were I was it it was a diskette that IBM had.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Fair enough. So back then, for our listeners who don't know, there were only mainframes. That was really the only kind of computers that existed. There was no such thing as Windows or Linux or certainly no mobile phones or cell phones of any kind at that time, right? I mean, it was mainframes and they were very large computers that companies spent millions to that don't have one hundred thousandth of the power that your MacBook has on your desk now.
Speaker 2:And but they ran critical systems, payroll systems, inventory systems, sales systems, all of those kinds of things. And so an op a computer operator was somebody that would go in and make certain that the data went into the computer and the reports came out and made everything run smoothly, right? That kind of But that was a haven and the fact that it was a night, the night shift was important because it meant I was the only person there. The entire company was gone. It was just me, only me.
Speaker 2:I love that because it was like an incubator. I suddenly had this really powerful at the time computer at my at my disposal. I had to get a job done, but if I got the job done, I had time to do lots of other things. And I started writing software. I started
Speaker 1:writing this. The compute time was so valuable that they wanted to use the computer basically twenty four seven as much as they could.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yes. That's exactly right. Yep. Now that's why it was a night shift because during the day people were using it, you know, to run the run the store and to process reports during the day and write programs and do things like that.
Speaker 2:But at night you had work at the time it was called batch
Speaker 1:work. Back end. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Where you were running updates of files and processing today's sales. So you could produce new financials and produce the reports so that people would come back in the morning and they'd read the report. Yeah, that's right. But I would see that as a fortunate thing.
Speaker 2:Like I could have got a daytime computer operator job and I would have been in there with eight other people doing things. I'm not sure I would have had the same freedom. I was given this unbelievable gift of freedom. And I started, this is really what started a thread that runs through today in 2025, 100% And that is the fascination with automation. I loved writing something that I could then just type a one word command and watch everything start.
Speaker 1:But what did you what did you do with it? Were you playing did you program Pong? Were you
Speaker 2:No. No. No. I was I was automating the work I was doing.
Speaker 1:No. But when you were done with the oh, so
Speaker 2:you done the code to do what I was doing manually automatically.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Was that's a thread that runs through my entire life still today.
Speaker 1:Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Where so you you started with a very hardcore tech software developer, so to speak. When did the, let's say shift or expansion is really what it was?
Speaker 1:When did that expansion towards the business and the finance world happen?
Speaker 2:So the the company that I was working for at the time was a it was a, you know, a a catalog showroom is what they called it. It was, you know, it was a store, a network of stores. They ended up selling to another company. I was living in South Carolina at the time and besides that job, there were no IT jobs whatsoever. Whatsoever.
Speaker 2:It It was was very much a military town. It was Charleston, South Carolina and we had family that lived in Dallas, Texas. In Dallas, Texas, this was a boom time for IT jobs. So the company sold, they made an opportunity for people to take jobs. I don't even remember where the company that they sold to moved to.
Speaker 2:But we decided to pick up and move to Dallas and came to Dallas, got here on a Thursday, got a haircut on a Saturday, went to two interviews on Monday and I had two job offers by Thursday of that week. So 100% true story, not making. Nice. And again, this is fortunate. This is luck.
Speaker 2:This is not I picked right. Like just I got the nighttime job. I explained why that was great. I had two jobs, similar computer operator, this one and then this other one that I ended up taking, was at a bank, it was a financial firm. What I didn't know and would come to learn over the next couple of years working there was it was full of the still to this day some of the smartest people I've ever been around, they didn't have a lot of money.
Speaker 2:So instead of buying things from vendors, they wrote everything themselves. They wrote their own operating systems. They wrote their own compilers for software development. They built their own hardware. They program their own motherboards.
Speaker 2:I mean, it was it was remarkable. And I was then surrounded by these phenomenal people who taught me really this thing that I've said the rest of my career to a lot of people. They made me realize that everything is just code. Well, how does that work? It's just code that operating system that seems so mysterious.
Speaker 2:It's just code like somebody just wrote the codes. Maybe it's IBM that wrote it, but so what? They're just people that came to work every day and sat there and wrote code. How hard can it be? Just go look at the code.
Speaker 2:You mean the operating system? Oh yeah, yeah, sure. What are we gonna do to it? Well, we're gonna change it. We're gonna change IBM's operating system?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, they're not gonna change it for us, we're gonna change it. We've got the source code, but at the time you still had source code available for operating systems. And so that shifted me to a completely different gear of deep internal systems and I became a particular expert in telecommunications and networks, networking between computers. That was kind of my affinity and that turned into becoming very acquainted with a small software company that was based in Boston. Really understood this man's product really well and one day he said to me, Well, I wanna sell the business.
Speaker 2:He's just a little one man firm, one product he had, I don't know, 1,200,000 of revenue that he had built over the time and I ended up putting together a deal to buy his company and I left this bank data processing company that I was working for which by the way, that story is a great one because this was at the dawn of the ATM, the Automatic Teller Network. And I still remember the meetings. It's like, you know, what if this takes off and we actually end up with like a 100 ATMs? Are we gonna be able to handle that? Can you imagine that story?
Speaker 1:It's such a great story.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because no one knew, like, are you gonna trust a machine or people are going to get money out of that? Like Right. Don't they prefer their tellers? Doesn't that sound familiar, Art?
Speaker 1:Right. My dad, when we we were building basically a a store, and this was in the during the bubble, the dot net bubble, we were building basically the equivalent of MSN stores. Right? And he was like, nobody will pay money over the Internet. Nobody will give their credit card over the Internet.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and we we were concerned about this. So we had the store when you checked out, you had to call a number to give your your, like, your credit card number to actually finish the purchase. Can you imagine that?
Speaker 2:I So that's I can Well, let me do this again. I mean, we we are I I don't want to type anything into an in the chat GPT because I don't know what it's doing with it. Right? It's it's just the same evolution.
Speaker 1:Look. This the humanity goes through cycles Yes. And every generation has to learn its lessons the hard way, I would argue. So we're going through that once more. I we unfortunately, we're almost at time.
Speaker 1:Believe it or not, this has been so much fun, but I I want to catch a few more topics. Okay. What are the what are what do you think are the biggest challenges with AI adoption nowadays? What are when people are like, hell no. What what are they saying?
Speaker 1:What are they afraid of?
Speaker 2:Well, my company, let me answer that in two ways, both what I experienced at my companies and what I am experiencing externally. Internally, we we led a transformation of our company. When I say transformation, it was has been called by many radical and extreme where we made it a critical part of our going forward plan. And we spent a year investing in time, tools, people bringing in outside experts to teach them. And I started referring to it quite, I think, credibly as a gift.
Speaker 2:We were giving them a gift. We were spending time and money to teach them what I think is gonna be one of the most important skills for the rest of their lives, not just in what job they were doing for us. And I used to say that even if you don't stay with us, it's still a gift like you're and gonna you're going to bring that with you. And what I found was a cultural resistance that I didn't expect. I just didn't expect it.
Speaker 2:And here's the funny thing, Ari, I'm CEO of a software company. The technical people were the most resistant.
Speaker 1:This was
Speaker 2:a surprise. Yes. Why? Marketing, sales, finance, they're like, oh my gosh, tools. Tools at my fingertips.
Speaker 2:This is great. Oh, they'd fold their arms and say, that thing doesn't know how to code. It can't code as well as I do. It hasn't spent fifteen years caring for this product. And I thought, oh, no, I didn't get that.
Speaker 2:Like, oh, like I didn't get that. And so I kept trying. I tried really hard. No, no, no, come on, let's just try it. And so we ended up with some people that just flat out refused, they had to leave.
Speaker 2:We had some people that tried but they didn't really try because they never believed and to me that was the difference, they didn't believe. And if you don't believe in anything it just shoots the chances of success in the foot, right? And then we had others that tried and just weren't really good at it, like didn't have the aptitude. But my conscience is clear because I spent a year of time, effort and money to make that right? So culturally, internally, externally we're dealing with and I mean this in the literal sense, not in the pejorative sense, ignorance.
Speaker 2:We're just dealing with ignorance. People don't know what it is, they don't know what it means. They hear a lot of scary stories. And because of that, they're afraid to touch it.
Speaker 1:The machine uprising.
Speaker 2:Like, some of them are like, I'm not gonna touch that, you know. I said,
Speaker 1:well, let me help. Impossible to have a company meeting about AI and for somebody somewhere, not to mention, you know, the machine uprising and, it's just, you know, what's the one from the Terminator? Terminator. Every time. Every time.
Speaker 2:So One my presentations that I did at a in an AI conference, I started off with excerpts from three videos and one of them was Terminator. And the last one was 2,001, A Space Odyssey. Remember? When it was like, open the bay doors. How?
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. I can't do that. What seems to be the problem? Do you realize when that movie was made?
Speaker 1:Here here's my that was that was the sixties or the seventies.
Speaker 2:It was the sixties. Yeah. It's 50 years old. We've been telling people for fifty years that the AI is coming for us. Oh my god.
Speaker 2:And now it's here.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What do what do we expect? I mean, this has been, like, one of our arc narratives. Like, it's right there in the, so, I mean, if you look at any movie ever made, there's, five or six arc narratives. Like, it's it's always the same. I digress.
Speaker 1:If you had to give so I have two last questions to you. If you had to give one piece of advice to your kids or your young employees, I don't know at this stage to say what jobs will exist in ten, twenty years. But what's the advice that you would give to your kids to succeed in this new world and we don't know what's coming?
Speaker 2:You know, I just have a broader answer to that question. A lot of people have asked me this question. Why do you think you were able to succeed at work that you did? And I always attribute it to one quality, one main quality, it's the same advice I'd give to my kids. Always ask why, not how.
Speaker 2:Always, if it comes to technology, somebody says, well, if you just do it like this, this happens. You gotta say, but why? Like, don't like, you gotta help me understand why. That's always been my advantage.
Speaker 1:Let let me let me stop you there. Everybody's seen Simon Sinek. Everybody's heard about the golden circle. And yet on a day to day basis, nobody almost nobody does it. Like, it's it's it seems to be there's a gap between the understanding that this is valuable to the practicing of actually doing this on an everyday basis.
Speaker 1:Have you any idea what the issue is here? Because I can't figure it out.
Speaker 2:In terms of AI?
Speaker 1:No. In terms of human beings.
Speaker 2:Oh, to Right.
Speaker 1:Just because I completely agree with you. Right? Golden circle, Simon's in it. Fight focus on the on the why, but that's not what people do. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Even though there's an awareness towards this this kind of goal and value.
Speaker 2:Why is that? There's all kinds of answers I think. It starts from people are embarrassed to ask the same question three times because the first two times just sounded like Greek and that's it. It's like, I'm sorry, I'm teaching a technical class right now. Everybody, please I beg of you.
Speaker 2:I will explain it seven different ways because if I blew the first six, that's on me. That's not on you. I'm here to help you learn. You're supposed to get this concept so you can use it, right? And so there's I think there's a lot of that.
Speaker 2:There's certainly peer pressure. They don't wanna look bad in front of people or yeah, maybe they don't care as much to go that deep and they really just wanna use it. They don't wanna know it, right? I wanna know it like I always that and I think that just has been helpful for me always. I wanna know why, like how does that work, but why?
Speaker 2:That's just the way the software works. Well, what were they thinking when they did that? Like I don't really get the thought because it's super clunky, it doesn't make sense. I'm just talking, you know, in abstract, but
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Software.
Speaker 1:Ego and curiosity, right? Those are the two the two answers. I I like that. I think it
Speaker 2:makes Well, insisting insisting on learning it though. Insist is like, I'm sorry. I know you've told me four times. I'm dense. I'm so sorry but like I still don't get it.
Speaker 2:I don't get it. But once I get it, that's the difference that everybody should understand that once you get the why, the how simple. In fact, you can always figure out how if you understand the why. That's the that's the fundamental. And it certainly helped me in technology.
Speaker 2:That's for sure.
Speaker 1:One last question. We're completely over time. If you had to and this is a difficult question. It's the only scripted question in the show. The reason it's difficult is because it's personal.
Speaker 1:If you had to go back to, you know, 20 year old Eric, what advice would you give him?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is a personal question and I've got the right personal answer. The personal answer is sometimes I am too focused on the task and not enough on the person and I lose that sometimes. Very focused on a result and there are times where that's a 100% appropriate, safety of your family or a medical condition. There are other times where that's not appropriate and I really should like, wait a minute, kind of back down a little bit, right? Yeah, that's it served me well overall but there I've you know, I've left some wreckage in that wake and you know, a lot of it I regret.
Speaker 2:So that's probably, it's a nice introspective question but that would be my answer.
Speaker 1:Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show today. This has been an absolute delight.
Speaker 2:My pleasure, Ari. I've enjoyed the conversation. It's not like any other podcast I've ever done, so thank you for that.
Speaker 1:That's very kind of you to say thank you.