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Free Form AI explores the landscape of machine learning and artificial intelligence with topics ranging from cutting-edge implementations to the philosophies of product development. Whether you're an engineer, researcher, or enthusiast, we cover career growth, real-world applications, and the evolving AI ecosystem in an open, free-flowing format. Join us for practical takeaways to navigate the ever-changing world of AI.
Michael Berk (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Freeform AI. name is Michael Burke and I do data engineering and machine learning at Databricks. I'm joined by my cohost. His name is Ben Wilson and he...
Ben (00:09)
He ⁓ collaborates with our AI overlords to make even better software.
Michael Berk (00:16)
Yeah, that's actually about right. We want to be more accurate descriptions. ⁓ So today we're going to be doing a weird one. It's going to be short, it's going to be sweet, and it's going to be spicy. ⁓ We are talking about, I can't fucking believe it. We're talking about applying ⁓ military principles to consulting and basically how to ⁓ leverage the five key principles that are taught. ⁓
Ben (00:36)
Yes.
Michael Berk (00:43)
in some school somewhere about military for breaking down enemies ⁓ and using the underlying first principles in the same fashion so that you can make change in the face of adversity.
Ben (00:56)
Yeah. And this all started because we're sitting there discussing like, what are we going to talk about this week? And I was like, you know what? Cause you know, Michael, you brought up like, I have to give this presentation to, my team about what I've learned over the past couple of years doing consulting work. And of course me being me, I was like, you know what? I actually use the, the training that, that we got about how do you properly
You know, it's kind of about how do you do like POW treatment when you're at war, but it's also about, yeah. And it's baked into that from a PsyOps psychological operations perspective is if you're in the face of like you've captured some baddies and these people want to fucking make you not alive anymore. And they've been like trying to do this for a long time.
Michael Berk (01:26)
⁓ Prisoner of War, right?
Mm-hmm.
Ben (01:48)
And your job is either to confront that with the full force of your own US military might.
The goal generally is not, let's see how big of a kill count we can get. This isn't Call of Duty, right? The real goal is how do we get these people to not only stop trying to end our lives and destroy our expensive taxpayer funded military hardware, but also how do we get them to not want to do that in the future?
and make it so that we're we're not setting the stage for poor treatment of people so that civilians, young kids who are in that community aren't going to look at us and be like, you know what I want to do when I grow up and get big and bad? I want to pick up that AK-47 when I turn 18 and start killing me some Americans. So we're trained on how to prevent that.
Morally, it's the right thing to do. You shouldn't want to just end human life. That's not the goal of armed conflict. What you really want to do is treat people as humans and make sure that, we're all not from exactly the same team or whatever, but we respect each other and we're going to try to do the right thing here.
Michael Berk (03:09)
So two points before we kick it off. First, Ben spent a lot of time in the military, so this is ⁓ tried and true. ⁓ second point is I think that there's a lot of interesting parallels that, ⁓ like this is purely a philosophical discussion and like techniques can be used, I guess. But there's a lot of interesting opportunity for cross pollination from different fields and the military is one of them. I'm reading a book right now called ⁓
negotiating like your life depends on it or something. And it's written by an FBI negotiator and applied to business rules of like, what is the true psychology of negotiations at a very human level? And when you work in extreme environments, like the military or the FBI, you can tend to get very deep into human psychology a lot more efficiently than like in your annual board meeting. But we're all the same. We're all operate under similar principles. And so
Ben (03:48)
Hmm.
Michael Berk (04:03)
A lot can be learned from these extreme environments and military just happens to be one of them.
Ben (04:07)
Yeah, in the military in particular, it's more out in the open that ⁓ it's like known, it's talked about, but it's also a direct representation of the human evolutionary condition of how we choose to organize ourselves. And that's why if you look at any combatant unit in any armed forces anywhere, unless you're talking about militia regulars or something, but
or partisans that are like freedom fighters, even they have organization, but any regular military organization you'll have, like, and for me in the Navy, we had, you know, a ship and that ship has a number of humans on it. It's broken down into departments for work specialization and for operational, you know, efficiency. But within each of those departments, you have divisions and then within those divisions, you have shops.
So shop unit is kind of like your immediate warband. It's the people that you're all doing kind of the same thing. You all specialize maybe in different things. Some people are really, really good at fixing galley equipment. Other people are really good at fixing the ship's distribution system. I was in electrical division. So a lot of, a lot of references to that today. But you also have another fighting unit, effectively another shop that specializes in a different part, like aircraft lighting systems or
the on an aircraft carrier, the first ship I was on, we had an electrical division that dealt with the ⁓ arresting gear and the launch gear for the catapults, like all the electrical systems with that. They're not coming to work on galley equipment, but we all work on, you know, together. And if shit is going very wrong, we can all help each other out and focus on it because we're all similarly trained on the core fundamentals of something. So you have these
these organizations and you can think of a department or like a division within the department. Those divisions are kind of like a tribe and there's a maximum amount of humans you can have in a tribe before it starts getting really inefficient and people don't really, there's not a cohesion. So divisions are intelligently designed such that you're always operating below that level of threshold that people have analyzed over many, many hundreds of years.
in militaries to understand how big can that be before it becomes a shit show. And it works. Is it perfect? No. But you have this like cohesion within that. And you start to understand that there's certain behaviors within all of us, but due to how we evolved as a species that is universal anywhere you go. It also applies to corporate America as well. It applies to engineering groups and stuff.
Michael Berk (06:33)
Yeah.
Ben (06:48)
where people will have certain behaviors and they'll band together in these little tribes in such a way that they're putting up palisade walls around their little village to kind of protect themselves against other tribes, even if you're all within one nation. And if you start understanding that stuff,
and understanding how the behavioral patterns are, you can apply it universally anywhere you go.
Michael Berk (07:15)
Well said. So there are five rules. They are used to basically infiltrate enemies and sway them to be less effective. So where did these rules come from?
Ben (07:28)
I mean, not so much like infiltration. This is more of like, let's say you and I are on a battlefield somewhere and we've shown up with overwhelming fuck you force that is like we're armed to the teeth and there's no possible way that this other group is going to have any chance in hell of surviving a full on frontal let's send it sort of engagement.
So they raise a flag up or you want to convince them to do that. There's ways to do that. And there's ways, there's certain things that you should think about and be very mindful of, of your conduct and the conduct of your tribe throughout that entire process of capturing them and then potentially releasing them one day. And how you behave during that time will dictate
how things are going to play out with that group and that organization and that other culture. And it's very important to be very mindful of that. And that's kind of the parallel that I thought of when you brought this up about like, what did I learn from like doing consulting? And I'm like, dude, this is like, these are the five principles that I've always used just applied in a completely different way, but the foundation is the same.
Michael Berk (08:41)
Well, let's get into the principles. I reordered them a bit. Does the order matter? Cool. Let's start off with the first one. Be good at fighting. What the hell does that mean in the context of corporate America or corporate world?
Ben (08:46)
Not really.
I mean in the context of military, that means you're never going to get somebody to surrender or want to just lay down arms if you suck at fighting. If you're incompetent and you can't do harm to them, they're going to be like, well, these guys suck. I'm just going to waste them all. I don't care that they come with all this like military hardware and stuff.
They can't hit us because they suck. So let's just wipe them out. So if you're not good at what you do at your core job, whatever your core mission is, so in the case of consulting, are you good at consulting? Are you good at software? Can you actually take their problem that they're struggling with and can you do it yourself? And if you can, and you can do it much better than they can, then you all of a sudden have street cred in their eyes.
It's almost like an intimidation factor. They're like, well, this person is more qualified or highly skilled than I am. They're more trained. ⁓ I'm at least susceptible to listening to them because they seem to know what the hell they're doing.
Michael Berk (09:58)
Right. Sorry, can we clarify how this would be used? Like, is it swaying an opinion or a decision in an organization? Is that the...
Ben (10:03)
This is more like
most of the times that I was doing consulting, was being brought in because they're not figuring something out or they've steered themselves into a path that basically just digging a hole straight into the earth and they're at the bottom of a 50 foot pit. They don't understand that they're the reason that they're down there. ⁓ They need help or somebody else was like, hey, my
Michael Berk (10:21)
Mm-hmm.
Ben (10:30)
My whole squad is like at the bottom of this pit. ⁓ They don't know that they shouldn't be down there. They think everything's good. They're just wondering like, is, why is the sun up only for two hours a day? They're unaware of how badly they have royally fucked up. So they hire in a professional to come in and like get them out of that pit. So because that's kind of the environment that you're in when you're brought in to help.
Michael Berk (10:48)
Yeah.
Ben (10:58)
You have to be able to sway them to basically get them to be like, Hey, we need help.
Michael Berk (11:02)
So this is more for escalated, like high importance, high politics types of projects. It's less about staff hog and like when the happy path is working, it's more about these really sensitive, really like high attention engagements.
Ben (11:16)
Even with Staff Ogg, the couple dozen of those that I did, I always found that they were actually below sea level. They didn't realize it. They thought, we just need more bodies. And it's like, nah, you could have done this with your crew if you had thought about this differently.
Michael Berk (11:23)
Mmm.
clear. Okay. This actually makes a lot of sense. So the first one is be good at fighting. And I completely agree. I've noticed how valuable some knowledge drops are. If you just seem slightly competent and it's also how you present the information that's really important too. But if you know what you're talking about and can basically match or exceed the technical competence or just competence period of your counterparts, it looks really, really good. And people do shut up and listen.
Ben (12:00)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Berk (12:00)
Okay. That seems like a solid baseline. So be good at fighting, be competent, build credibility immediately show. It's like power almost like potential for, or expertise. Quiet power. Yeah. Yeah.
Ben (12:11)
But quiet power, quiet power is the key.
You shouldn't have to say that you're good at something. In fact, the fact that you say that you're good at something, nobody's going to believe you. Prove it in a very subtle and humble way.
Michael Berk (12:17)
Right. You never say you're good at something. Yes.
Yeah. Okay, cool. That is tip number one. Let's get into the stuff that is questionable. Make them miserable. What does that mean?
Ben (12:34)
So you're never going to convince somebody that they're at the bottom of a 50 foot pit unless you bring a mirror. And what that means is you need to show them without blame the state of the world, the state of their existence, allow them to know that they're doing, they're engaging in something that is not going to end well for them. You may have seen it play out before, so show them, show them a metaphorical video clip of like,
Michael Berk (12:58)
Mm-hmm.
Ben (12:59)
this is what happens when you continue down this path. But don't blame them. This is not a blame game. This is not a, you guys just suck at everything on this earth and just get good. That's going to backfire in your face really fast. It's more of coming from a position of empathy and show, but also showing them how miserable they've made themselves or how miserable they will be if they continue down the path.
Michael Berk (13:15)
Mm-hmm.
Ben (13:25)
So an armed conflict that's like, you deprive them of things that are quality of life things. So it may not be, Hey, let's call in an airstrike on top of their head. It's more like, let's blow up their comms bunker that we know nobody's in right now. So disrupt their communications or like, Hey, we noticed there's a supply depot that they're using for all of their like ho-hos and Twinkies.
Michael Berk (13:36)
You
Yeah.
Ben (13:50)
lay waste to that. Let's not kill a bunch of people. Let's make it so that they're, they're miserable in a way. In the corporate world, it's more like, Hey, let's show you that your life is going to be, your working life is going to be more uncomfortable if you choose to continue doing this or pointing out like, Hey, how many trouble tickets have you had recently? Is it related to this? Like how stable is the code? How often do you have to keep on fixing it?
Michael Berk (13:53)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ben (14:16)
you know, that type of stuff. Show them how miserable they are as compared to what they should be or what they could be.
Michael Berk (14:17)
Yeah. Yeah.
God, this does not make
them miserable. Let's show them. OK. Yeah. So yeah, don't go blow up supply lines for your retail company X. Instead, just do an audit or a lit review of their current practices and how much time they could be saving if they do it a different way. I find that really effective. I actually stole the technique from Ben, which is when you enter and you're trying to sway
Ben (14:25)
Yeah. In corporate America. Yeah. Show them.
Michael Berk (14:46)
existing practices into a new practice and there's resistance. If you overanalyze their existing product and like conceptually go line by line in every single process that they do and make comments about why it's bad and what they should be doing instead. Usually people don't read the full doc. They're just like, ⁓ okay. What do you recommend? So it's an interesting line of work where like the actual deliverable doesn't matter.
Ben (15:07)
Yeah. ⁓
Michael Berk (15:13)
insofar that it shows competence and it shows thoroughness. I literally have done this like a few times in the past month and all the things in there are facts. So if someone does go look in and try to implement those things, they're legit. the comprehensiveness of the document is really what matters.
Ben (15:18)
Exactly.
Exactly. It is convincing somebody by tactical use of a red mark pen. So when somebody sees a sea of red, they realize, yeah, we done fucked up and we should listen to this person who pointed out that there's this many issues.
Michael Berk (15:37)
Yeah, exactly.
Like, shit.
Yeah.
Okay, cool. Don't bomb them though, typically. Not advised. ⁓ Next one, break internal trust. This also sounds pretty psychopathic. What does that mean?
Ben (15:49)
Not advised.
So that's the tribe thing that I was talking about before. It's that cohesion that you have within your tribe that you're building your palisade around to protect your people and keep the nasty invaders out. That exists at a team level in corporate America. So you have a team of people that are all working on a product. They may not all like each other. They may not all respect each other. You're not there to fix that.
But there is some amount of us versus them in any time that you get a certain number of humans together who are working on something that other people expect them to do. And what that translates into is that that little team might not care about the corporate mission. They'll sit and listen to the all hands. They'll hear their CEO or their board of directors talk about, here's all these great initiatives. Internally, their monologues might be like, I don't give a shit.
How much is my bonus going to be next quarter or why am I working 70 hour work weeks for this or man? Now we got to build this other new like huge feature stack. That's going to be just a complete shit show. That's what's going on in their head or they're going to be drinking the Kool-Aid and they're gonna be like, yeah, this place rocks. Like we're the best. Whether they align to the corporation's mission or whether they don't. The guarantee is if they're still there.
They are aligning to each other and they have a cohesive unit. Whether they like each other or not, they are still bonded. You have to break those bonds if you want people to listen to you from that individual level. Or else it's going to be an us versus them. The palisades are going to be up. You need to get invited into that wall.
Michael Berk (17:24)
Mmm.
Interesting. Okay. This one, how do you do it without being like, again, these are military tactics. So we probably don't want to be using like the most psychopathic angle of, of this, but the way that I would at least interpret this in a more like safe and healthy way is, ⁓ you want to show competence. You want to show that you will join them in the trenches. That's a great way to connect with low level engineers. Like if they're staying up late, maybe stay up late one night.
If they're working on production issues, maybe work on production issues as well. That's how you sort of enter. ⁓ And then in terms of like breaking trust, is that actually necessary? Or do you just, okay. If you get resistance.
Ben (18:04)
Mm-hmm.
yeah, for real. If you get resistance, if you have, if the
whole team is aligned to listening to what it is that you're, you're saying from a position of knowledge and authority, you don't need to do it. They're, they're already pliable. They're willing to work with you. The other 99 % of the time though, there are blocks and the way that you do that in the military is probably not what you think. ⁓ it actually is appeal to their humanity. Talk to them.
Michael Berk (18:21)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Ben (18:35)
Understand who they are. Where did they grow up? What's the names their kids like? Like what's What's their favorite food you get to know them on a human level and all of a sudden when you start building those those bonds of like hey I'm actually I'm not here just to do a job. I'm here to make you successful You start talking to them about like what do you want to get out of this? Like where do you want to go in five years? What do you want this company to be doing or what do you want your team to accomplish?
Michael Berk (18:55)
Mm-hmm.
Ben (19:01)
What's holding you back from doing that? That like people get excited to talking about that stuff. Even if they're the most bitter burnt out person when hearing that sort of thing, like, Hey, this person actually gives a shit and they want to like, they want to help. now reach them on it on that sort of individual level of listening to their thoughts and their desires, like who they are as a person that now breaks down that tribal boundary.
to the point where you're almost seen as like a safe outsider that they can confide in. And now they'll listen to you.
Michael Berk (19:31)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, sold. That makes a ton of sense. ⁓ Okay. Next one. Follow international law.
Ben (19:40)
Yeah, for the military, that's ⁓ don't commit war crimes. Don't do things. Like don't come in and carpet bomb places. Don't kill civilians. Don't go up to a dead body and double tap them just to make sure. Like these are all war crimes, right? Like you don't do stuff like that. And there's laws preventing.
Michael Berk (19:45)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
What does that look like for my consulting gig?
Right.
Ben (20:07)
stuff like that. You will spend a long time in a very dark hole if you choose to not listen to these rules. ⁓ In the civilian world, this is ⁓ don't do things that are going to erode trust from the organization and the team. So do not come in and be like, everything here sucks. Who's the idiot that did this? Like, why was this designed this way? Who made this decision? You come in,
with a blame-thrower strapped to your back and just open that shit on full and start spraying around, you've just alienated everybody that you're going to be working with. They're just going to be like,
Michael Berk (20:45)
Well, that's
the next that's the final topic. feel like international law is more about. Like. Is it more about like acting as if you were under scrutiny and everything was open to the public or open to your manager and their manager?
Ben (20:57)
Yeah, there's that as well. there's also the like, obviously don't do things that are immoral. Yeah. Or like don't prove that. Yeah. Don't come in and like prove your point by like breaking their shit. That is not advised like, hey, I'm going to show you how bad this is. I'm going to check in this shit code into production or
Michael Berk (21:05)
Mm-hmm. Like, don't put a bug in their code without telling them type of thing. Which is probably illegal, too.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Ben (21:23)
look, you have this glitch in this database that there's a security hole in this. Yeah, it's prod. I'll show you, I'll wipe the table right now. That's career ending move right there. It should be obvious to people. But there's other nuances about how you can behave within the confines of gray areas. And I find that that blaming people is a gray area.
Michael Berk (21:29)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ben (21:49)
It's not productive. It's not going to get you fired. But people are going to be like, man, it was not pleasant working with this person. Like they were right. Of course they were right. But the way they presented it was toxic.
Michael Berk (21:56)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Okay, well, I feel like we're touching on the last one, which is don't be a dick.
Ben (22:06)
Well, the military doctrine of that is like, be nice. And this is more of a generational thing with regards to, this is like the long vision. And this is how do you conduct yourself on a day-to-day basis when interacting with adversaries in such a way that you're not doing things that can be perceived as going against cultural norms or
Michael Berk (22:10)
Be nice.
Ben (22:32)
things that in their culture, not in your culture, that will be perceived as offensive to them or things that can be construed as wrong in their eyes to the point where you're inspiring the next generation to want to pick up arms. So don't build the next generation of people who want to put lead in your back. That's basically what it is.
be nice. And any interaction that you have, I mean, if you're nice to the people that you're like caring for, you want them out of the fight, but you also want them to go back to their, like a civilian status one day, and you want them to talk about how nicely they were treated by the Americans. So that's why
Michael Berk (22:59)
That's not being nice at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ben (23:19)
in the US in POW camps when you capture a bunch of soldiers, we don't put them behind barbed wire concertina wire, know, enclosures like the Nazis did during World War Two and beat prisoners. ⁓
Michael Berk (23:27)
Mm-hmm.
Usually.
Ben (23:34)
Abu Ghraib was messed up and that was definitely not how things are supposed to be done. ⁓ But the people that were being detained in that form, those were like terrorists that were just trying to kill whoever they could. And they were very dangerous people, but I'm not justifying those actions. Those people that were involved in that, I'm pretty sure are still in prison and they should stay there because those were war crimes.
⁓ but when you talking about capturing actual enemy combatant soldiers, people that are part of a regular army and their health, their, they now have POW status, they surrender during combat. They're, they're out of the fight. You don't dump them in a concentration camp and treat them like shit. You put them in a very safe and secure environment and you give them things that are nice and allow them to do leisure.
Like what do they like to do? They like to kick a soccer ball around, them like build them a soccer pitch. They like to eat, you know, this type of food, give them that food and make sure that they have as much as they want of that.
Michael Berk (24:33)
No.
So it's conceptually
deescalate their currently unstable and potentially anchored state to a more stable and less anchored state.
Ben (24:47)
Yeah, make sure they're well fed. They've got, they can get a good night's sleep. They're comfortable. They have clean clothes. They can take showers when they want to give them all of
Michael Berk (24:50)
Mm-hmm.
Right, but what does this mean
for a data engineer?
Ben (24:58)
Being nice means treat them with the respect that their position should have. Even if you think that they're completely stupid and bad at their job, that doesn't mean they're stupid as a human. Like they're probably intelligent people that really want to do the right thing. They just don't know that they're doing the wrong thing or that they're doing it a very inefficient way. It's usually a position of ignorance or culture problems at the company.
Michael Berk (25:04)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ben (25:24)
but the individuals are probably capable of much more provided that they get the right training and that they feel like people believe that they're capable. So being nice to them is believe in them. Even if that's not your core personality to be like, well, this guy's an idiot. I don't want to tell him that he's good. That's projecting ego, right? Like you're not, if you're a consultant, you're not there to do that. You're not there to make yourself feel like you're better than everybody else. And if you think that way,
you should probably find another thing to do. There's no, this is not an IQ measuring contest in any of tech. It's at least for anybody who's actually good. Nobody's doing that. What it is is working together and feeling like you have each other's backs and knowing that nobody knows everything and that if you all work together and
Michael Berk (26:04)
Hmm.
Ben (26:14)
have the right principles and the right tools to do your job, you're probably going to be more successful than if you're just floundering around in the dark. And giving them the insights into how you identified what they were doing was wrong. Let them see how the sausage is made and they'll be able to recognize it in the future. You're upscaling them. If you're successful consultants, that's what it is. It's upscaling teams, providing your wisdom and learnings based on
you having seen this hundreds of times at different organizations, you start recognizing patterns and can give them those tools as well.
Michael Berk (26:48)
Okay. I mean, I think we're, we made some progress, but we're going to keep this short and sweet. So let me quickly summarize. ⁓ first one was be good at fighting. This generally means show quiet competence and confidence. ⁓ people trust people who are good. So just be good. ⁓ second is show them basically the other side of the fence and show what it could look like by also showing why the current state is bad. The idea of
just putting a bunch of red marks through their existing code base really does work. ⁓ Third, break the trust wall. So this can be sort of entering that trust wall. can be sort of dismantling the existing like unified trust of that team. But when they're all pushing against your existing proposals as a unified unit, that's typically a lot harder to work against than if you're on their side or already embedded. Follow international law, so don't break.
laws, I think that's self-explanatory. And also the concept of be nice, which is truly look out for them and try to figure out what's the best for them. Like think later into the future stages beyond the engagement and try to set them up for success. Like what skills do they want? What do they like to do? All of these are great ways to sort of sway a potentially floundering organization towards a better direction.
Cool. Anything else?
Ben (28:06)
I mean, I have lots more on the topic,
Michael Berk (28:07)
Yeah, I was about to say, I wish we could keep going.
Maybe we'll do part two.
Ben (28:10)
We'll have to do some more
⁓ military parallels in the future.
Michael Berk (28:13)
Yeah. Cool.
All right. Well, until next time, it's been Michael Burke and my co-host and have a good day, everyone.
Ben (28:20)
Ben Wilson.
We'll catch you next time.