I'm gonna go ahead and kick us off. So Joe Tierney, thank you for coming in today. - Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. - Well, I'm glad you're here. We've been partners working on productions in the past. You helped us with our five part docu series or four five part docu series. - Yeah, so yeah, from more like the server and data management side, but yeah. - Yeah, so we've got some working experience there. I've come to know different aspects of your life and you have deep interest in many disciplines. And tell me what you're doing right now just so we get a sense of how you're spending your days and then we'll jump into something else. - Right, right now. So I guess I have my hand in many disciplines. But a lot of it cycles back to the creative industry. So in the live sports market, I do technical directing, some replay. So technical directing, if you've ever seen the big board of buttons where a director is calling out like angle this or camera one. So it's not just your camera angles. You'll have pictures in picture or two boxes or different assets that'll come up on the screen. - Like NFL, that's like maybe one of the trailers they'll have with like the knobs, they'll go like this. - Yeah, so that guy is kind of in control of everything that comes up on the screen and from the technical side, there's a lot of-- - Who's the one calling those shots in that room? - So there's a director that's calling the shots and basically you're the director's hands. So, they know exactly how they want the script to run, and then it's my responsibility to kind of interconnect every potential feed that comes into that main board before it exits out onto the stadium board. But beyond that, so there's freelance motion graphics and animation, there's a full -time gig with motion graphics and animation. I also do Apple systems management. So you guys are an Apple house. So you know how frustrating that can be getting it to talk to Linux -based servers or Windows servers or broader networks. So that's one of my jobs is making sure that a whole network of Apple systems integrates into an existing business environment. I am a touring musician, I try to be a decent dad, a DIY mechanic, my cars, repair my basement. I'm just kind of all over the place. - Yeah, many interests. - But it's probably like the, if somebody kind of has that ADHD personality, they're like, oh yeah, I'm kind of relate with that guy. It's the most always moving. - You're a builder of but across you just understand it seems like how to go from here to here Yeah, right and You have a you do you have a YouTube channel? Or you did or you do I do I rarely update it But yeah, it's it's got like a handful of car repair videos on it Are you are you trailing down? Are you well? You never know what was trying to solve for. But are you, would you consider yourself a good mechanic? I'd consider myself decent, not professional in any means. But for me, it's kind of a relief from the day -to -day of creative problem solving. So with your company, when you brought me in, it was basically Square one. So we didn't have a storage system here. We didn't have the cameras. We didn't have the input. - For the docu -series. - Yeah, for the docu -series. So it was basically setting up this entire infrastructure from a creative aspect. So just like you would start with a blank piece of paper, I'm starting with nothing on the software and tech side. And you're giving me a list of things that you want in your overall big picture. And it's like, I'm figuring out what tools I need to get and how to ping them together. And so what I was here probably like two or three weeks ahead of actual shooting in the evenings, like, well, business wasn't running, running cables and wires and piecing it all together from physical and from a data side. So back to the car thing, cars are Cars are very simple machines, and MechanicsShop is going to be like, "Don't tell people that." There's a finite number of things happening. Yeah, it's bolt -on, bolt -off parts. It's change your fluids, keep your levels here. The pressure needs to be this, the temperatures need to be that. like once you understand how a car is supposed to work, it's very easily calculable and you know, if I needed to change the front end, I pull the parts off, I put the parts back on and it's very therapeutic because there's no creativity to it. Like somebody has already done all the design. - So it's kind of like playing golf a little bit? - Yeah, or I guess it's like, you know, if somebody, say somebody does like your standard industrial nine to five and they want to come home and draw a picture 'cause they like to do their art thing or they want to come home and noodle on a guitar. You know, from the creative, like from a very intense creative perspective, like I don't really want to come home and be creative. I just want to come home and do something maybe a little bit more on that. - Okay, so-- - Not so much mundane, but. - So the, so let me run something past you, which is an idea of that I was just working. So I've got a 1981 Boston Railroad. - Okay. - That I've been working on. And I was just kind of just like you work on engines or what have you. It's sort of a way for me to think about nothing, but also be entertained. And I was like, it's just kind of thinking through things. I was like, life is algebra. And you've commented on sort of the how prevalent just math is in whether we know it or not. Oh, yeah, everything is math. Everything we do. And I just had such a stupid, obvious comment to myself. Like, all it means is life is nonstop problem solving. But it's more than that. It is actually-- many things are so and there are these, you know, the golden ratio. There are these things that just sort of seem to be almost nature -based about it. But what if I say, you know, life is math or algebra? What's your reaction to that? - I'd say not just life, but everything is math. And it depends on how deep you want to take that statement. 'Cause like math can be the bane of some people's existence. And rightfully so, 'cause I don't know if we teach it the way that we should, and I'm coming at this from the perspective of somebody who did not like math until I had practical applications on it. - Right, yeah. - To give you a backstory on that, like I was not, I didn't care much for math, I kind of liked the idea of geometry and that was about it. And I went through high school, I went through my undergrad. And it wasn't until I got a job in the creative industry where I'm long story short, I didn't intentionally go into this industry with the idea of being a graphic designer or an animator. Initially the first job that I had where I was an intern, that was an open spot. - Okay. - So it was like, okay, well I-- - Just got started. - Yeah, I know how to learn things, and this was pre -YouTube and pre -Reddit, so finding tutorials online was a little bit harder than it is now, but I was offered the opportunity to stay and learn. And when it comes to motion graphics and You know, from an outside perspective, you'd think, oh, this person doodles and does their thing, and then-- - There's so much more to it. - There's so much more to it, 'cause everything is, everything is geometrically based. So, you know, if you've heard like the phrase 1080p for an HD television. - Yes. - So that, from a math side, or from a geometry side, that's 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels. - Where does the word pixel come pixel come from? - Pixel, I don't even know, point. - Is that just a widget? I mean, there's kind of like that's a pixel. - So, well, a pixel is just like a single definition of color, like you're not gonna have any very varying colors in a pixel, it's gonna be some degree of-- - So it's elemental. - Red, green, or blue, yeah. - Okay, that's a sidebar, but anyway, 1080. - Oh, okay, so yeah, that's your 1080p, or 1080p is your progressive frame rate, but 1080 by 1920. So if you think geometrically, if I have a grid of 1920 variables wide by 1080 variables tall, then I can pinpoint an exact spot inside of there. So when you look at animation programs, like it's all geometrically based on an x, y, and z axis. And all of your rotations are x, y, and z -based. And all of your scales are x, y, and z -based. So when you think back to doing geometric proofs in high school and college, this is where that stuff comes into play. And then you can also apply algebra into that, where you have your variables. So it's like, if I move this box, it associates this. Or if I have this rotation that's associated with this, and then you can actually apply physics into that as well, where you have, you know, you could do fluid animations and associate viscosity, you can associate turbulence, you can associate the general motions of things across a Bezier curve, and you can map how everything interacts with each other. What's a Bezier curve? What's a Bezier curve? Bezier curve. So it just maps motion. So like if I was to take, like if I was to take this cup and move it from here to here, like that's an abrupt motion. So Bezier of that would just be a line from point A to point B in a straight line. So if I was to-- - So it's the velocity? - Yeah, it's a measurement of the velocities. But if I took the cup and just kind of eased it from one point to another, then your curve kind of has that easing motion to it. So you can see exactly-- - So it kind of captures the fade of the velocity. - Okay. - So all that to say, like I didn't care about it until I had to, and I always had this, when I say like, I don't feel like we're teaching math the way that we should, is I always had this idea with math is like, just like kept getting it wrong, kept getting it wrong, kept getting it wrong, and so you'd get like 60 % on a test or 70 % on a test. It's like you could do better, you could do better. But really, when it comes to math and practical applications, the more you get wrong, the more you learn about how to do it right. So, you know, somebody who like does math for a living is looking for those problems so that they can develop a better solution. Like every time you do it wrong becomes a proper variable and how to do it right. How much of math is just pattern recognition, do you think? I mean, as a human, like, you know, the better I've gotten math over time, the more it's just like, it's kind of like playing a sport or something, you just get a feel for it. You do. And just like, I don't know if I could actually, I, you know, I'm not great at math in my head, but I have a sense for it in computationally very strong right like I can lay it out and get it done and I just have a sense of like number -wise where I should be going with this and I feel like your average person when it comes to understanding math like the understanding of it comes and goes in waves so sometimes like either when you're in the midst of a project and you need to do some kind of calculated equation or like in the the creative world, we have different types of plug -ins and different effects that all talk to each other in a certain way. So I might have created a graphics package in 2006, and it's like, "Oh, I've done..." And somebody comes along and says, "I want that. I want something like that." And it's like, "Oh, I have those tools in my toolbox, because I've done it before, but it's not just going to be Um, but the foundations there, so like you kind of go back to, you know, maybe I'll open up that, that tool and it's like, Oh yeah, I kind of remember how this worked and how this worked and how I needed to program those things around. Um, and there, there's going to be some, you know, mutants out there that have like, you know, know every single bit of math across the board and can do it. But, but, you know, for like, you know, the, the normies out there, like just because you can't do it right off the bat doesn't mean you don't, you haven't already pre -established the foundations for it. How about these people who can do like the cube root of anything in their head? Oh that is impressive. I got two people in my life that can do that. I was actually talking to somebody about this the other day and we were talking about overcoming addiction and like the addiction we were talking about was like food, like everybody's kind of battling weight. - Right, yeah. - So, and he had gotten off of, he had actually, he's been off of nicotine for like nine months or so, and it was a big deal of getting out of cigarettes and vapes. And the way I remember hearing this was like, if you think of the attachment, like the way that we patterns and we think about things is it's like wrapping a coil between your neurons So if you take if you take a piece of string wrap it around your finger once and pull on it Like you can get rid of that right away. Yes, pull it right off your finger So like you know if you say take something like learning guitar you sit down You like go to YouTube and it's like okay Here's how you play a major scale and you just like okay you do it Once you're like oh well that was interesting and then you come back to it again a month later You're gonna for relearn it because your brain didn't like secure that string Right like you've wrapped it around once and then like because you didn't use it it got pulled off but you know if you do something in Repetition so you wrap that string around your finger once and then you wrap it around again twice wrap it around again So like with the guitar thing like sit down and you do a scale once and then you do it twice And the next day you do the same thing over and over and over again, and you like build up that wrapping, like the string around your finger, if you, you know, over time, you are going to continue to forget about that, but say you have like 50 layers of that built up, you don't do it for a week, you remove like maybe, you know, 10 layers of that, you still have, you know, 40 layers of memory, and you come back to it, and like that's still kind of secure, that connection between the neurons is there. Yeah, and then you like build on it, build on it again. So the more you do things in repetition, the more you're just going to have like foundations to come back to. So, you know, if you're, I might have gotten off track where it was. Well, that's all right. Well, we were just talking about how both kind of qualitatively that day to day find ourselves non -stop problem -solving, even when we don't know it. We have this long laundry list of variables that are either being added to kind of, some might call it a to -do list, but not even really a to -do list. It's just sort of the unknown list and some of them we're aware of and the challenge can be, in which order do you solve this formula? And I think we have kind of two major reactions that come from this. One is the discovery of the value of a variable that we've been trying to figure out and we're like, "Oh, holy shit," or the adding of variables. And then quantitatively, the longer we're around, the more we notice these sort of quantitative coincidences that maybe aren't coincidences, that things just organize themselves in a very sort of over time predictable way. And the fact that, yeah, so just as sort of a general comment, like we're always, life's like math and that you're solving for, and that life is very mathematical and that you take music, color, kind of anything that we can interface our senses with Or engage our senses with a really mathematical based Yeah, um, I guess to build on that like if you think of think of people who are like very solution -oriented people So you throw you throw a problem at them and like there there tends to be very little stress when it comes to Like I know I need to solve x I need to solve this variable And so then there is like there's always there always is a finite amount of pre -established solutions to things And that's where a problem -solving mind will typically go so you know in in Hey, you bring in a consultant within your industry and they've are like the reason why you typically hire that consultant is because they've done good job That good work elsewhere. So they just bring in that toolbox with them. It's like, here's the problem that I need, and so they start digging through like the pre -existing solutions. And ultimately, at some point, they're going to come across something they haven't experienced before. But you're right, all the variables that led to their current understanding is something that is going to be applicable in finding that new solution. So there's like a set of things that continue to exist in perpetuity, but there's always going to be something else that's going to be ultimately added to that list. What is the problem -solving mind to you? Like, what's sort of-- you've been around people a lot, and I would put you in the problem -solving category. And you have a lot of-- like speaking, you weren't, as you were, you know, getting your education, you weren't like, hey, Joe's the math guy in the room, you know? So, or based on what you're saying to me, but it sounds like you're able to draw on these different disciplines to create something. Do you think that, what is the problem -solving mind look to you? So, I kind of have like two -ish philosophies that are kind of the baseline, and this is like, you know, the thing that I tell my kids over and over again, until they're like ad nauseam. One of them is you can either be one of two people in life, you can either be a person who solves problems or a person who points them out, which leads to an actual binary. It's like you either solve the problem or it's just like you move on with life. - Is there a third kind? - No, 'cause-- - The ones that create the problem? - Everybody creates problems. But in a given context of like, you know, if you had three different people in a room, would you say, well, that one sort of creates the problem. That one sort of let me know. And you know, this person is the one who's likely to solve it. So between those three people, two of them just pointed out a problem. Right. So like everybody creates problems, like I create my own problems, I create problems for other people, you create problems for yourself. - It's too big for this, it's universal. - So like if everybody is going to create an issue. - But given that constant of problem creation, in the face of that there are people who point it out, point them out and people who solve them. And even in short term and long term history, nobody's gonna be remembered as the person that said, hey, that thing over there needs to be fixed. It's like, you know, the people who care about you or the people, the person who you care about becoming is the one who's going to solve problems. You can't just like sit there and depend on somebody else to solve all of your own problems too. Like sometimes you have to be your own problem solver. So like it's this idea where like I'm constantly going to have to have to move forward, no matter what. Sometimes people are going to be there to help me, sometimes they aren't. So you're iterating constantly. So if something happens, if my car breaks down, I need to fix it. If my computer breaks, I need to fix it. If your computer breaks and you don't know what to do, it's like, hey, Joe, here's an issue. And it wouldn't be like calling you out as saying, Shep's just calling out a problem. It's like you're looking to somebody who can that problem, like that's the position that I'm in. So what is going on between like, you know, when someone calls out, like you're on the side of the road and like, you got a flat tire, like, thanks, thanks, no shit. Yeah. So there's two, there's two positions that you can play in that, like even if you don't know how to change a flat tire, you know how to like encourage somebody along, you know how to like, you can help somebody get something out of a trunk, you can, you, you have the physical capability of turning a wrench. If somebody knows what they're doing and even from a problem solver standpoint, this is an issue that I deal with, is I'll get into this mindset where it's like, this needs to be fixed and I know how to fix it and then I start doing it and I'll potentially have four or five hands available. I won't use them just because I'm not thinking about how do I bring others into of the mix to be a better problem solver. Just because you are a problem solver doesn't mean you're a great problem solver. - Sure. - Even in my representative binary, neither of these sides are gonna be perfect. There are people who can't solve problems right off the bat that need to point out the problems. There are people who can solve problems that aren't great at solving them. And you're gonna have the outliers where You have the one person who only points out problems and is the bane of society's existence. And then you have like the person on the far end who's just like perfect at everything. And you know, these are like, you know, the few and far between, but you know, even within like those two people you can potentially be, there is going to be a range of who you are. But along with that, another thing that I gravitate to, And this is more of like a recent mindset, probably in the last five years or so, is the idea of defining a problem. And if we were talking about this earlier, where you take a major issue, let's say like your car breaks down, somebody would just sit there and consider that a problem. If I can't find the toothpaste tube, that's an inconvenience. Well, if you relate both of those things to being problems, then like, you know, everything, everything, every problem just begets a solution. So every solution ultimately begets more problems. So, you know, if I can't find the tube of toothpaste, it's like, okay, well, no, I found that. Well, now I need to find my toothbrush. So that's another problem. - Is there a third kind of person the one that just doesn't give a fuck? I'm sitting here thinking like, well, - Is there a way to not engage in this problem solution sort of-- - Yeah, from a problem -solving perspective, we call those clients. - Okay, yeah, I suppose so. So what makes a great problem -solving? - I guess the willingness to grow and the inability to blame, or if you are blaming somebody, it's usually internal. So it's like, I could have done this better. If somebody else botches something, it's like, well, I probably could have been there to apply this. Everything isn't a slap on the wrist. Everything is ultimately a learning moment. So even just like with going back to the math analogy, you want to make mistakes so that you can learn from your mistakes. And if you don't learn from your mistakes, then you're just gonna kind of be stuck in the same pattern. So from a problem solving scenario, like a lot of the best problem solvers have probably made mistake after mistake after mistake. And the reason why people seek them out is because they know how to overcome those mistakes by using the tools that they have available to them. - So 'cause I would say - A great problem solver is someone who's comfortable being uncomfortable, right? - Definitely. - Someone who is not self -judgmental, meaning like writing a song, for instance, the enemy of writing a song is critiquing it as you write it, right? You will never write the last line If you say, if you're saying this sucks, you know, you just won't do it. You know, you'll be like, this sucks. And you'll go like that. So I think like a, it doesn't mean you can't get pissed about the problem solving process, being like, spend all this time going down this branch, but you, you're okay with the discomfort ultimately. Cause I think it's a really uncomfortable process from a creative side. Like you can, one of side, one of the things you learn early on in the professional creative business is you will never get 200%. Likely, you'll never even get to 90 % on any given project, and that's good. As a young artist, a lot of young artists are trying to make their masterpiece or make their mark on the world, or you kind of have this like idealized mindset of like, I'm gonna make the best, you know, insert creative thing here, song, movie, picture, portrait, but you know, in the professional sense, like if I can get to like 80%, then I feel like I've done 110 % of the work because that means I'm pretty content with it, that means the client's content with it, that means it's serving its purpose in a commercial space because a lot of the stuff that I do ends up on television or broadcast or in print. So ultimately it's going to have deadlines. There's a lot of irons in the fire that I'll have to appeal to. So somebody wants their colors a certain way or logos a certain way or you have to follow branding guidelines. It has to sell a certain product. It has to have a certain degree of You know, it has to it has to be as many it has to not be as many things as it is So if you can't you're talking about like solution packaging like which is the idea of Okay, you've got somebody you can figure this thing out and it's maybe in Some language or like a computer language or it's some way of being communicated that doesn't have a huge commercial use, perhaps. And there's problem solving for problem solving sake, I suppose. But many times, we're trying to make it something that can be ingested by at a commercial level. And so, there's kind of the packaging of thought, right, which is you solve something, now I need to make it. So I'm not the only one who knows how to use this. So you have all these brand guidelines, which I'm guessing is, you know, the client or whomever saying, this is how we like our thoughts to be communicated. - Yes. - Is that accurate? - Okay, I just want to kind of, because I think that these are finite steps and I know that if, you know, if I'm going to his solution, I worry about all that shit later, right? Which is like, let's just get something working. - Yeah, and a part of that, that is a part of the process. process. If there's something I want to emulate in a design side, like some kind of particle cloud or some kind of physical way that something interacts with each other. I'll go through the entire process of making that work, and then the design becomes the secondary thing. With like there's certain areas of a screen that you can't have things in. So say like the the broadcaster is like no this area over here is reserved for like an easement and yeah bugs and whatever advertisements that could potentially come up throughout throughout a broadcast and like you can put stuff up or here but it can't be too wordy or you can put stuff over here but it can't like you know and there's certain patterns or certain words or certain things that we can't have in here, or this color would potentially clash with this, or, so, you know, on the front end, it's like, yeah, like you kind of start with big picture or big idea, and then it always ends up getting whittled down into something that appeases everybody, and that in itself is a problem -solving scenario. - Getting just something that appeases everyone regardless of what it does. - Yeah, and sometimes it's not just like on the design side, sometimes you can go into a project with this huge idea and then you're limited by time, you're limited by tools, you're limited by budget, you're limited by deadlines constantly change or somebody else who happens to be higher up on the chain needs to put their input in on it or maybe some kind of logo or branding structure happens to change. And so it's like, okay, well, I had built my whole design package around how the logo does this, and now it does this now. So, you kind of always have to be on your feet. And nothing's gonna be consistent, but that's okay, 'cause sometimes like, sometimes that's part of the fun of it. - Right, is we're just kind of letting it take you where it takes you. - Yeah, the idea of everything being variable, not just the equation itself, but the project becomes an equation in and of itself. - Yeah, it seems like, I don't know, problem solvers, like the elite problem solvers in the world are, you know, in many ways kind of normal, because I think that they don't seem to excel terribly in any an area, they seem like to be a good aggregator, though, of, you know, they know enough math to be dangerous. They know enough this, but they're good at assimilating. Good at sort of pulling things together in a way that it is nearly like a group working together. - Yeah, there's consistencies in a lot of industries. So and several of my friends are aerospace engineers. I'm not an aerospace engineer. I never went to school for that. Barely cracked the surface on, I've watched a handful of YouTube videos about Bernoulli's principle. I'm like, oh, that's pretty interesting. Whereas you have fluid dynamics engineers that know this stuff in and out. - Bernoulli's being meaning left. - Yes. - Okay. - But I can still hold a conversation with them and still kind of assess like where they're going with things to the point where I've done, you know, STEM classes or like helped teach like various STEM classes in different kind of different degrees of engineering for my kid's school. Just because like I was able to take what I understand from the math side of creative and like apply that to where it's going with the actual math side of engineering. They're still not sold on the Bernoulli. You know, you see those diagrams where the air airs passing faster over the top than the bottom, right? Yeah. High pressure, up low pressure, down makes a lift. It doesn't, it doesn't like logically make sense. Yeah. And you look at it and you're like, okay, I get it. The same horizontal distance, basically you're going, you're trying to span a wing that is this wide, as we see it. But what's really, as you know, it's got to go like this over the top. And it takes longer for that one particle to go like this because it's not a straight line. And for some reason, that causes lift. And if I had assumed it was creating a vacuum pocket and you're within pockets of because again, like we're diving into stuff. I don't know. Like I know it has associated with like fluid dynamics. And like because if you think of like the atmosphere as a giant liquid and you're like, you know, traversing through liquid, just the same way you traverse through a swimming pool. Yes. That's like like Archimedes screw. Yeah. Right. Which is we can put that in water. We can use it as an airplane propeller that there's still enough matter there to grab to bite into to propel something is is mind -boggling that those are consistent across water and and atmosphere. Yeah it's all very interesting like it's highly mathematical. But the fact that somebody I don't know if somebody made the jump from like what are they was that come from the need to have like a mill probably on the river? They're trying to figure out a way to turn something. I mean, I would think that's how you end up there, but how do you get from there to like, oh, airplane propeller? Or did they just sort of post, you're like, oh, these are the same principles. - Don't know. - I wouldn't there either. I've got no fucking clue, but - I always say, well, these guys weren't as smart as we think because they had so much more time on their hands, you know? - Well, there's also, is it Newton who said like we stand on the shoulders of giants? - I know somebody said that. - Yeah, so the idea that like everybody, like the whole reason we are successful in where we are now is because like all the innovations that came before us and it didn't like even from, you And even from the late '90s to now, you can see how advances in computational technology kind of get to this wall. And then we'd find the next jump, and then get to another wall, and find the next jump, and get to another-- the next wall, going back to the design side. So I started in the industry in around 2003, 2004. And to do some of the stuff that I do now in designing packages for entire shows or stadium graphics, I can knock those out sometimes over the course of a day or maybe two days. And I look back to like, if the technology I had in 2004, that would have been like a three week process just to like render out the file alone. Oh yeah. Well, do you think just think about this from time to time when you hear about like somebody who's a hundred years old just passed away Yeah, and you're like well, they were born in in 1910 and they died in 2010. Well, they have seen more or Less than somebody who lived from 1980 to 2080. Oh Maybe I Don't know because it seems to have like this Exponential curve But what are the big milestones that they saw they saw like a like I don't know Electricity and they saw a fax machine. They saw a car. They saw so they like these big posts of society big pillars of Modern civilization they watched that occur. I mean shit. They probably have a bathroom inside their house You know so all these massive changes now they can just you know you know 2010 I don't know if like DoorDash was around or whatever but they can really just sit there and press a button. Yeah the whole world is coming to them. Yeah a lot of our changes are kind of incremental. They're gonna be very all kind of in the same family. Yeah. Where there's were like all these kind of spaced out things. Well I guess a lot of the dynamic changes that we've seen is in is in more of a virtual space. So if if you consider your physical life one life and your digital life another, like the digital life has compounded just as fast for us as it would have for the physical comforts of somebody living from the early 1900s up until recently. - Yeah, I mean, I guess the prerequisite for digital life improvement is you gotta have your physical life totally improved. Right? Like, if you don't have, like, a way to get food and kind of these necessities taken care of, you're not going to sit around and program shit. Oh, well, it's a, it's not where, like, brazos kind of comes into play, though, because, like, you have, you have a lot of these apps that are there to supplement, like, the physical side of things. So, like, you can monitor your health with, with an app that gives you more data about data about yourself, or you can monitor your mental acuity with an app that helps you improve on puzzles and logic. - Yeah, we are basically, humans are just being widgetized, right? - Right. - Yeah, that's a new word, widgetized. But I get your point, which is-- - 'Cause you guys are like a solutions management that helps a process that basically argue kind of arduous in the industry and it streamlines it yes so that's that's kind of what like the digital world is doing in general like on the design side like the streamlining has had like even over the past ten years like there's a lot of different innovations with automation or sometimes AI where you know it streamlines processes speeds up things like crazy and it gives you the ability to accomplish more because of the time that it gives back to you, you know, you're not waiting for renders, you're not meticulously cutting out lines, you're not, you know, so a lot of the software is already pre -integrated when you purchase the package, and so I'd assume that's kind of the same way with you guys, like it's, you're trying to find a solution for something that was arduous, it's not so much like cutting out an existing pipeline, but trying to create a more efficient version of it. - That's, yeah, that's accurate. And talking about AI, which is a whole other discussion 'cause we gotta get you out of here, but the AI being smart, which it is, but I don't think of it the more I use it, it's not how smart it is, it's kind of how helpful it is. - Yeah, it's not really supposed to replace processes, but it is supposed to supplement it. And it does a good job of being like that that supplemental resource that it's basically like a rapid prototyping tool meaning regardless of if you're actually prototyping but it's it helps you iterate your thought very quickly so it's it's not that it's gonna you know in our case it's not sitting here creating the solution in any fashion but it's it's allowing us to kind of think through things faster. - Well, going back to the problem -solver analogy, like I said, you bring in a consultant that already has all the tools in place. That's kind of what AI can be. When you think of AI with coding, it's going back to a bunch of pre -existing things where a lot of things have already been tried and tested. So it kind of helps you get over that initial solutions management side where it's like, okay, well, here's something new that I can apply to the root. And, you know, on the design side, like you can, you can throw different, you know, say it like I'm trying to cut something out or recreate a background or, you know, there's a bunch of tools that I've had in my pocket for decades where it's, you know, recreating this asset and moving things around and using healing brush tools and there's a whole industry toolkit to doing stuff like this. And ultimately what you're doing is just desperately trying to take what exists and recreating it in a background 'cause nobody's really gonna look at it anyway. It's just kind of filling a space. - Sure. - So I used to spend probably an hour on something that really wouldn't even be seen. It's just trying to make something look slightly aesthetically pleasing. So even In Photoshop, I can outline what I want to get rid of, I can outline my source, make that a new layer, and then say, OK, now make me a layer with that gone. And then that cuts an hour or two out of my process, where I can actually focus on making something better. Yeah, you can get to what you're trying to get done instead of stretching lines over an image to crop it out. But really, that kind of was a specialty skill, it's something you would learn in class or you would learn in a workplace where you're forced into finding the solution and you'd figure out all the tools or somebody with a little bit of history on it would give you a tutorial or a walkthrough, you'd figure it out, you'd become a part of your skill set, but it was almost pointless. Like it was just this arduous process added to the task. Yeah, it was basically like overburden. Yeah, so the more you can get rid of a lot of those frustrating things that just have to be done before you can get to the meat of the project, then the more time you get to spend on the meat of the project. Well, you've got to get out of here and I would love to have you back at another time I think where there's a lot to discuss, but thanks for coming in, man. - I appreciate it. - Absolutely. Talk to you soon.