Facing Ourselves

Jose Leal (00:07):

We're so good. We do it twice. Yeah. Welcome to rhatchery Live. I'm Jose Leal with my partner Matt Perez. I'm sitting here, I just arrived. I'm starving and tired from flying. My boy, do my arms hurt. Landed in Lisbon just an hour or so ago, and today we've got Timothy Kaczynsko. Welcome, Timothy. So, tell us a little bit about yourself first, about you and then we'll get into OxtailLabs and what you're doing and facing ourselves and what that means. Welcome.

Timothy Kaczynski (00:45):

Good to go. Thank you for having me. So yeah, diving straight into it I started out a career in it straight out of high school when I joined the Marine Corps. Served there for about five years and found myself into defense contracting. And working through various IT challenges. That's, you know, culminated in the founding of Oxtail Labs. We've found that there are a series of different issues within the DOD primarily when it comes to culture, procedures, and then technical processes for carrying out missions as a whole. So I think that, that actually has a lot of you know, what I mean with facing ourselves. I could jump right into that if you'd like.

Jose Leal (01:45):

No, I want to know a little bit more about you, because what you said sounds interesting. So, what got you into the military, number one and two, it sounds like maybe you're more on the technical side of things of military operations. Tell me a little bit about that.

Timothy Kaczynski (02:07):

Yeah, I'd say that's true. The largest like deciding factor for me to go into the military and Marine Corps. One was that… it seems like that was the beginning of many people going to college and not necessarily getting a guarantee of a job afterward. And also when a lot of the debt for college started to really grow, if you did want to pursue that period. And the military seems like a viable alternative. And you know, I would consider myself very patriotic as well. So it kind of went hand in hand. I had a problem, there was a solution, I could, you know, find my calling and went right after that.

Jose Leal (03:00):

Awesome. And the technical stuff, like what was your, what was your thing?

Timothy Kaczynski (03:07):

When I entered into the Marine Corps, I was a 2651, which is a systems integrator and communicator. We span the gambit on the TSSEI side, like the classified side for communications and intelligence based communications. So it was working with radios and satcom and crypto logic gear and servers and networking and equipment. The whole nine yards, a real jack of all trades, master of some.

Jose Leal (03:40):

Awesome. Okay. So I'm getting it. I'm getting it. That's, it sounds like a from your personal perspective, you were like, I want to do this stuff and the best place to do it, not having to go to college and pay for it, and all of that is the Marines. And then you started thinking more about, well, how are we organized over here? How do we do all of this stuff? And maybe that leads us t our topic today, is that your way to put it.

Timothy Kaczynski (04:14):

Oh, yeah. I, I think you nailed it. My time in the Marine Corps was very technical facing, and that was kind of like the start of noticing many of these challenges. And it wasn't until pretty well into my time as a contractor where I really noticed many of the technical problems that we had were systemic right. And the result of, you know, many different… you know, problems

Matt Perez (04:39):

And did you go through the training for Marine Corps?

Timothy Kaczynski (04:46):

Oh, yeah. The general way it works is you aren't assigned a job as soon as you enlist. You're assigned like a grouping of jobs, like you may fall into, I don't know, a certain cluster of jobs. And it's the same for everyone. You do bootcamp, you do MCT marine combat training or the infantry equivalent, which is escaping my mind right now. And then you have follow-on training for your, for the job itself, whatever it is that, that you've been assigned.

Matt Perez (05:22):

Great. Awesome.

Timothy Kaczynski (05:28):

No… I'm a warrior in a garden.

Jose Leal (05:33):

So now you're finding some problems. You're seeing that they're systemic in nature, and that leads you to start thinking about what?

Timothy Kaczynski (05:45):

Well, there… as a whole…  in IT right now many different organizations are looking to implement Agile and DevOps or DevSecOps, if that's the word people choose to use. And, you know, both of those things have three qualities to them. You have the cultural side, the procedural side, and then the technical side. If you're missing one of those, you're going to have an extremely difficult time implementing Agile and DevOps. And ultimately, you know, the whole reason for implementing those things is to be able to deliver value. And that value may be like mission accomplishment, or it may be you know, ensuring things move smoothly in a certain regard with the military or one of those things, right? And far, far, far, far too often you find contracts where they focus purely on the technical and completely eshoo the cultural and procedural, and then you end up with a failed program or a program that, you know, leads to embarrassment or, you know, any other range of negatives that, you know, result from a contract not performing well.

Jose Leal (07:06):

Yeah. And so your focus on the cultural and procedural led you to understanding that really all about the people.

Timothy Kaczynski (07:15):

Absolutely. Its very interesting. I heard this adage from my leadership when I was in the Marine Corps where the longer you are a systems engineer the more likely it is you'll become a developer. And that ended up being prophetic for me. I went from, you know, systems engineering into doing systems engineering as code. And then I'd say that there's a second part to that. The longer that you are a developer, the more likely it is you're going to become a psychologist, whether it's armchair or whatever. But yeah, it is very, very much you know, people-centric in order to, you know, have objectives go well and deliver value.

Jose Leal (08:02):

And so, what's your lesson there? Like how, you know, Agile itself? And Matt and I, you've probably heard maybe some of our interviews, but you know, agile as we see it, is the idea is great. The implementation is either non-existent or in some cases the opposite of what it should be. What's your sense of it?

Timothy Kaczynski (08:37):

So as a whole, you know, like, where can I, like, start with that? And I think, and answering myself, I'm sorry. I you know, think, think about an organization that's brand new, you know, fresh, right, right out the box. You, you just happen to have, have like a team of 10 people or what have you. The first thing that you really want to establish is like, how are you going to get that work done day to day? And that's kind of like my definition of culture as a whole. It's not ping pong tables in the office, although that is, that is nice. It is very much about the smooth flow of work. So coming together with that group of people and setting like you know, different ideas and tenets and practices that you know, you would like to have, I feel like that's vital when you start doing this and, and having a discussion behind, like, what would you like from work every day? How would you like the work to be done? How would you like to be treated at work? Things of that nature. And also some to some degree you may have to be very you know, open and aware of the people that you are talking to. One of the primary things that I've seen and kind of getting, you know, into more of a sense of you know, what I, you know, wanted to speak to specifically you find a lot of developers and engineers and other people that are high performers have a significant amount of trauma. And there was a study published not too long ago where it was something to the tune of 75% of high performers, high achievers, regardless of industry have experienced some form of trauma in their past. And, you know if your people who were doing the best work, the most work are, you know, in this state how do you support them? How do you really support them? You know, if just sending them off to a mindfulness lesson may not be great. But, you know, opening up the floor and having better communication, more frequent communication, more candid communication, dropping some of the I don't know drop dropping some of the platitudes and you know, cultural things that don't necessarily make sense.

Jose Leal (11:08):

Would it be fair to say digging deeper?

Timothy Kaczynski (11:11):

Yeah. Yeah. Like avoiding being passive aggressive. You know that there are some companies that are going for like a no drama approach to their communication. And you know, like defining that word for word what that means. I think GitLab is an excellent example of that. They have a entire handbook that's free online for anyone to read over how to do like communication and collaboration and digging deeper like that.

Matt Perez (11:40):

What was the name of the orientation? You said? Handbook?

Timothy Kaczynski (11:46):

That is GitLab

Matt Perez (11:48):

Oh, GitLab. Okay.

Timothy Kaczynski (11:49):

Yeah… overall GI GitLab has been amazing for figuring out a really good place to start with culture and communication. And, you know, there's the technical side as well, but you know, as far as the culture, culture and process goes I've been hard pressed to find another that has information available like that, and then digging into, you know, psychology articles showing like, why these certain things, why this certain thing works, why this other thing doesn't work. You know, I, the one that comes to mind right now is the concept of having short toes where people say like, oh, I don't want to step on your toes. It's a reference to, to that, you know, keep short toes. If somebody is doing a piece of work …let them, you know, why, why is it such a, a problem if someone is, you know, trying to add value and collaborate and it just happens to like, do some of your work. Isn't that a bonus or is there like an ego component, you know, tied to that and you know, that person, you know, quote unquote stepping on your toes is making you feel bad or insecure. And that's where we have to get deeper, you know? A lot of people walk through life with different insecurities that they haven't faced. Many people aren't ready to face them, and that's totally fine, and it's not a judgment call on that particular human being but it's still there. And, you know, we need to work with those people and around those people in the sense of like, you know I don't know, working with them, not trying to like subvert them or something gross like that.

Jose Leal (13:34):

Or manage them.

Timothy Kaczynski (13:37):

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Jose Leal (13:40):

Which often that's the goal of - management is not to actually work with people, but to actually manage people.

Timothy Kaczynski (13:48):

Exactly.

Jose Leal (13:49):

I know that I've certainly played a role in that in my past career. So Timothy, one of the things that we've dealt with, you know, Matt and I wrote a book called Radical Companies. And in, in part what we were trying to explore was how do we understand this from the root of work, which is really people. And I've come to realize that it's actually a little deeper. It's actually back to life. There's a neuroscience researcher in the University of Southern California by the name of Antonio Damacio, and Damacio discovered that we can't make decisions without involving our feeling systems. You know, we, we thought that, that when we were making rational decisions that they were purely rational in reality, the rational sits on top of the felt sense of the, of things of the world. And so when we decide to make organizational decisions, we're not doing them dispassionately, though we think we are. Right. Right. And we say that we are, but in, in reality, we're not. And so part of what we've learned is that life itself requires that there is meaning and belonging in our environments. And so often we get managed out of both. We get managed out of meaning by the fact that it's just a job, come and do it. We don't have time to tell you all about it because, you know, other layers of management knows what's going on. You're just going to get some basic details here and just get it done. Right. You don't need to be intimately familiar with what's going on. That's somebody else's job.

Matt Perez (16:00):

Your manager may not even know.

Jose Leal (16:04):

Manager may not even know.

Matt Perez (16:05):

It's saying, Hey, move that oxygen to here to there, or else. And that's it. So, it's a narrow of information and the results when you go back up, they go, oh, we didn't want to blue. We wanted a bread. And it's a kind of pinging pong. Have you run into that, by the way, in, in your job?

Timothy Kaczynski (16:33):

Yeah, absolutely. You know, that, that's almost constant. One of the, one of the things that's nice about being a site reliability engineer is you are frequently able to be both the source of information and then the fixer of information. So if you're able to notice user behavior through like logs or something you can go ahead yourself and improve the user experience, you know, by yourself. But what you're describing where you have this very long process through multiple people and information being lost and, you know maybe, maybe not the right implementation being rolled out or something that doesn't provide user value being rolled out. Like yes, it's, I see that very, very frequently.

Matt Perez (17:21):

Yeah. Have, have you read dear Marque Marque's books? He's got two books.

Timothy Kaczynski (17:28):

No, but they, they sound like great recommendations.

Matt Perez (17:31):

Yeah. One is called “Turning the Ship Around” where he was designed to a submarine that was the crappiest crew, the crappiest, everything in the Navy when he was expecting to get the most modern, you know, latest and things… And he turned it around, he turned it around by expressing his intent, you know, so he would say, Hey, we want to go, you know, what do you call it when they come out of the water we well surface. And then the details were left to everybody else. And that made a huge difference. And the communications, like you mentioned made a huge, huge difference. So it was, rather than telling people what to do, he would say, Hey, I need to get this thing to surface. And why, because we're, we need fresh air or whatever. And that seemed to make a big difference. His latest book is called “Language, it's Leadershi” or “Leadership of Language”, I don't know, one of those two. And it's also very good in terms of practices and stuff like that, so I'd recommend de marque highly. So, but you run into that. So, what kind of problems, not problems what kind of areas did you run into that are problematic that, oh, this is an obvious fix, so how do I fix it? What kind, what kinds of those kinds of problems are you running into?

Timothy Kaczynski (19:29):

Right. I, I think I could do a really good loop of, you know, the technical that led into the cultural. So one of the best ways that you can manage an IT environment is to be able to make small meaningful changes that are well tested that can be version controlled and deployed frequently. You know, kind of like summarizing DevOps right there. And in order to do that, there's a lot of bureaucracy that goes into the, the DOD in many areas. Some are still using control review boards and you know, documents in order to submit a change request to do anything. And it takes a very long time, could take, you know, a week or two in order to make a, a very simple change. And it's the opposite of resiliency as opposed to you know… on one hand you have a very manual process that takes a long time. And on the other hand, you have a automated process that is more secure because everything is being version controlled through Git and your deployment methodologies. And it can take a lot of… it could take a lot of work on the people level to get something like that rolled out. It's allowed within the government, but many times you may run into leaders, or you know, security offices that may see that and just right off the bat, forbid it… it's a knee jerk reaction just going, no, we can't do that. We won't do that. And, you know, it, it ends up harming the mission period, you can, you can achieve all of those results you know, in, in a modern way. It's just there, there's this person level, and then it gets into you know, why is there a knee-jerk reaction? What's going on there? And in many ways, people within the DOD will get indoctrinated into a certain like, form of fear culture, essentially, where there's no psychological safety. Everything you say is politicized, and if you say the wrong thing, I mean, someone will, you know, like either, you know, passive, passive aggressively kind of attack you or try and make you look less intelligent in front of a group of people or you know, try and say, this is impossible, this is going to harm mission. And you know, like… where, what's the root of that? And, you know, it's not like these people are, are, you know, bad. They are trying to do what they think is right. However, with this fear culture you know, it, it can hinder progress and slow things down. So with that, it can be wise for leadership to step in, and make it very clear that, you know, there's something wrong there and they should probably seek help. And that is such a difficult problem to navigate if you tell someone you need to go to therapy, that is like a punch in the face most of the time, you know, from a social context. And from there, it's also like why, I mean, we see a doctor once a year for a checkup. We see a dentist once a year for checkup. We're not seeing a therapist once a year for checkup. We only see therapists if, know not my, not my idea if you're, you know, crazy or if like, you know, your life is falling apart, but that's not true. It very much can be preventative maintenance, and especially in the, you know, very fast paced, high stakes, you know, arena of the DOD. It's an excellent idea. If you have the ability to go and do that, go do that. And you can help yourself escape from that fear culture regardless of what the rest of your leadership may be doing.

Jose Leal (23:56):

Sorry, go ahead.

Matt Perez (23:59):

Do they want to escape that fear culture? I mean the Navy, anything, anybody with weapons supposed to be always on the lookout, always looking around, you know, for that threat. And so would you want to, and would I want to and do they want to?

Timothy Kaczynski (24:22):

I think that's a really, really excellent point. I the this was several years back when I was serving in Okinawa. My sergeant at the time he may be a warrant officer now Jarrell Dennis had you know, sat me down and you know, we were having a good mentorship session, and he told me the enemy is out there, not in here. You know, I had a confrontation with a peer, and it's not like we were like brawling or anything, you know, just you know, difference in ideas. And that applies here as well. When you are doing IT, you are going to be surrounded by your teammates. They may be different companies and organizations, and there may be a political barrier to navigate there. You know, but in the end where Americans we're trying to protect and defend the Nation, we're trying to give taxpayers, you know, their, their money's worth. You know, most of the time, I won't get into the upper side 'cause that'll get hairy, but I, I think a lot of people don't even necessarily know they are in that fear culture or that might, can be different. Many times people will just kind of get into that fear culture, and it's like, I need to take care of myself. I need to hunker down. I need to cover my butt. And you know, they won't even see that there's an issue. And it, it's totally, it's totally logical and reasonable, and it's something that human beings will do and expose to that systemic, you know, problem.

Matt Perez (26:08):

Systemic is the key word.

Timothy Kaczynski (26:10):

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Jose Leal (26:11):

Timothy, I wonder, do you think, because another thing that we talk about that's critical, we believe is that of transparency, which transparency at the human level, not just transparency about the data information, right? The business or the mission, or the product, or, you know, the data, the actual tangible thing, but about me, about you, about us, and having that conversation about fear, having that conversation about what's happening in my life, what's happening in your life, what's happening to us as a community, as a group? Do you think that's something that would work in the environment that you're describing?

Timothy Kaczynski (27:02):

Yes. You do have to be, you have to be careful in engagement in how you deliver the message. One of my favorite books, thinking in Betts within one of the first few paragraphs they discuss when you lose a hand of poker and you're a professional poker player, you are going to want to know how and why that hand didn't go your way. If you want to be better at it, at the same time, it's a very emotional game. You're playing with money, you're losing money. You may just want to rant and rave. Some people just aren't ready. They're absolutely not in a space to have those kinds of conversations. And they may never be. And you know, that's just how life goes. We can, we can just try and be supportive and you know, protect ourselves first in the sense of like, if someone is being truly negative and toxic, take care of you. And then as best as you can, try and take care of that other person, whether it's a leader, you know, or a teammate or whatever have you. But the more we can have these candid conversations and break down this fear culture, the better result we're going to get within the DOD.

Jose Leal (28:20):

Absolutely. Do you think that applies just as well and private industry?

Timothy Kaczynski (28:30):

Absolutely. The one caveat that I will have with either industry is that sometimes in, you know, being the person to kind of broker this idea you will trigger other people's shadow where they will see you behaving in a way that you know, they would like to, but feels threatening and they may retaliate in a negative way. So, you know, some, with some people, like having that conversation can, you know, make a conflict even if you have the, a perfect delivery. So long, long answer. Yes. Both work.

Jose Leal (29:12):

Yeah. No, no, it's a good answer. I think that's true. I wonder, because is, to me, this is getting to the meaty part of the conversation Because the, the reality is, for me at least, that when we're dealing with individuals and an environment that traditionally does not deal with individuals as human beings, but as roles, as positions, as titles that we are talking about a totally different paradigm. We're talking about dealing with people for the first time in an, or in many organizations, and most organizations, I believe we are dealing with roles, positions, titles and we never actually talk about the person, right? I mean, we might as individuals with one another, you know, have our coffee chat or our lunch chat or our getting into the office chat, but we never actually as a community within these organizations, talk about ourselves in that way. Right? That's private stuff. We leave that outside the door, right? The feelings, the emotions, what's happening to us in our daily lives. So, how do we transition talk, you said one of those, the first thing you said of those three things was culture. How do we change that culture from ignoring the human being, to focusing on the human being? Is that a fair question? Is that a fair… is that what we should be doing? And if so, how do we do it?

Timothy Kaczynski (31:02):

Yeah absolutely.  I will take a page from, you know, the armed forces as a whole and, you know, specifically like high performing teams and groups, little, little bit writing on the, the coattails of Simon Sinek who does an excellent, you know, presentation over you know, like what makes a team of navy seals, navy seals, and it, it does come down to culture. There's a you know, there's a quad chart that he goes over where there's, you know, high trust and, you know, high performance, and you would rather have someone who has high trust and mid performance over someone who has low trust and high performance. So in many ways it is you know, teaching leadership in management how to you know, greater foster trust in those environments. Because, we are like, you know, a call back to what you were saying earlier, we are, you know, making rational decisions that are layered over emotional decisions. If there's a lack of trust, you're, you're going to have a hard time making a rational decision. So, it's a leadership driven effort using best practice, you know, psychology and business management techniques. It's just, prioritizing those things. And then living them culture is a lagging indicator of what we do day to day. So, taking these concepts and, and living them is, the way you could start at any time. It's just starting.

Jose Leal (32:45):

I wonder you said teaching.

Matt Perez (32:49):

Go ahead. Go ahead.

Jose Leal (32:50):

Go ahead, Matt. Just going to say that

Timothy Kaczynski (32:58):

Gentleman's shuffle.

Jose Leal (32:59):

No, he's doing this on purpose. I know he's pulling.

Matt Perez (33:02):

Okay. So, you indicated, as you were talking about it, you indicated a two by two where trust on one side and performance on the other. I think.

Speaker 2 (33:14):

Yes.

Matt Perez (33:15):

You said I'd rather have high one or the other. And what you really want is high trust, high performance. And what Jose was talking about is, trust comes from knowing that the other guy has two kids, and… but he has the pain on the right side, doesn't refuse to go away. And instead of grass, it's the sand, it's going to replace it. That's where trust comes from… is knowing who you're dealing with as the who. That's why Jose kind of pushed you to who are you, who are you at the beginning? And so… that's where meaning comes from. That's where belonging comes from. So, I may be dealing with a guy that has two kids and this and that… a lot similar, very similar to me, and says, I like to kill chickens with my bare hands and go, oh, I don't want to belong to that group. And… so, but how do you bring the, I think the question was how do you bring that one way or the other into this triangle of culture technology and now trust?

Jose Leal (34:44):

I'm going to jump in Timothy, because what I heard you say was teaching. And one of our guests a few episodes ago was from Seoul, Columbia, and Seoul stands for self-organized learning experiences. And one of the things that I loved about that conversation on that topic was that when we take the approach that we're going to learn together, but not teach That we are going to take the approach of there's something we want to do, and if one of us comes in and tells us what it is that we're going to do, then I'm not really learning anymore. I'm being taught. And that automatically sets us on a different path of me saying, in my mind, going, well, what is it you want me to do now? what is it? You know, why are you telling me this? There's got to be a point of advantage for you if you are the one that wants me to do something. And so this level of trust, I think is diminished in an environment of teaching.

Timothy Kaczynski (36:04):

That's fair. I think that makes sense. I you know… I can empathize with that really heavily. I am, I'm an autodidact. I teach myself, I have no college to speak of, but you know, I've been in the DOD IT realm for 16 years, still relevant. And minimum training just to check boxes. So, I get the autodidact part where people are teaching themselves. The doing it within a group is very interesting. I had never considered that before. Most of the time what I see is people will be teaching themselves, but it will be very isolated and there won't be a community around it.

Jose Leal (36:44):

Exactly.

Timothy Kaczynski (36:45):

Which… that's very interesting.

Jose Leal (36:48):

That's been my experience as well. So when Sanjay said this and described it to us, I thought, because what, where the experience comes from is, I don't remember the, the professor, but I'll, I'll tell you this quick story because I think Timothy what your, what got your gears just spinning right now would, will be helped by what I'm about to describe, which is professors doing research on teaching and learning, takes a touchscreen computer, knocks out a hole in the back of their school and puts it out into a poor neighborhood in India. Walks around the building a couple of days later, sees kids touching that and asks them, what are you doing? What is that thing? We don't know. It just showed up one day. And he says, oh, interesting. What do you do with it? He says, we don't know. Comes back a week later, they're figuring some stuff out. He says, what are you guys doing? Well, we figured out we could ask questions. We figured out we could do this. We could figure, we figured out we could be doing that. And these kids were excited as hell.

Timothy Kaczynski (37:56):

Yeah, that's wonderful.

Jose Leal (37:57):

And, and what he realized is that they were supporting each other and teaching each other with stuff, not from, I need to teach you this, but guess what I just found out.

Timothy Kaczynski (38:09):

Yeah, yeah. No, that’s a really good point. You know, fostering communities is a pattern that, you know, I've noticed, you know, exists throughout areas that, you know, perform really, really well. You know, software development itself, we are, we are trying to solve problems for human beings. So there's a community aspect there. There's you know, teams of people that are working together in order to write that software and then teams of, teams of people that are getting that software out to people to solve problems. It's all communal in the end. The macro really mimics the micro, and that's really awesome with teaching and hearing that.

Matt Perez (38:54):

I guess it's a typical in the sense that it's more communal based. And I worked at a company that self-learning was a big thing, but not self-learning for me. So, self-fulfill for a group. Sometimes we would ask the question, knowing the answer that you came up with, to see what other answers came out. And that's very powerful.

Timothy Kaczynski (39:30):

I if it's okay, there's one thing that I wanted to just loop on that I didn't know where it fit well into the conversation, but it, if I may there, there's another part with getting you know, over getting through fear culture, especially communally. And that's flat-out courage. Having courage to be vulnerable within a group of people, which is absolutely terrifying for I think the vast majority of people. Because, when you are, you are vulnerable, I mean, you can be, there's the potential for you to be hurt. And that's the, that's in my head, one of the only ways to really get people to have trust is by trust be getting trust.

Jose Leal (40:23):

Exactly. Yeah. And I think, I think you said it right there. It's, it's really about someone opening up and saying, I'm going to be vulnerable. And someone else goes, well, if he can be vulnerable, I'm going to be vulnerable. And it starts the chain, right? It is about somebody stepping up, and it doesn't have to a traditional leader.

Timothy Kaczynski (40:45):

It can be bottom up

Jose Leal (40:47):

Does it can be bottom up. It can just be anyone who's willing to step up and, and do that. We said we were going to keep this one short. It's already 41 minutes

Matt Perez (40:58):

Let me add one more thing. The painter, Henry Matisse said, creativity takes courage. And that's what you just said.  That's a good cause it makes you vulnerable. And what you learn your whole life is don't say that. Don't say that. Because people can use sit against you. And I imagine in the military, that's, that's way,

Timothy Kaczynski (41:24):

Yeah. Yeah. It falls back to fear culture. If, if you like say, you know, why are we doing this? You can get you know, someone will say like, oh, you're dumb. Don't ask that. And then, then there that goes.

Jose Leal (41:37):

Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Perez (41:39):

By the way, what's the first language you learned?

Timothy Kaczynski (41:46):

If you count it, I would say PowerShell. The DOD is very Windows heavy. So PowerShell was my first, and then I think I did Ansible after that. And then Terraform, Python and then like bits and pieces of different like, you know, database-oriented languages, like you know, SQL and whatever…

Matt Perez (42:10):

So we got a guy that knows Python.

Jose Leal (42:14):

Let's, there you go.

Matt Perez (42:18):

Yeah, both. Jose and I… are nerds, I guess.

Timothy Kaczynski (42:25):

Hell yeah. I'm about it.

Jose Leal (42:27):

Don't be so vulnerable. Matt. Matt, do you want to introduce our next guest.

Matt Perez (42:40):

Next week we have Neils… I think it's Brown Pfleaging. And I say I think because it starts with a P but it's German, so I can pronounce it any way I want, and I'm going to be wrong. In any case, we're going to talk about “Overcoming command and controlled management for good”. And Neil has been at this for a long time. We did a lot of research when we, on his work, when we were writing a first book. And by the way, that's our first book right there, “Radical Companies”. And if you want to buy it, we won't have anything against it. And this is the, this is the one that's coming up is “In detail”. But it's thick too. It's, it's a lot of pages. But anyways we know what Neil is doing, me, we know his work and stuff like that.

Jose Leal (43:46):

So looking forward to talking,

Matt Perez (43:48):

Looking forward to it.

Jose Leal (43:51):

Well, Timothy, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I thought that was nice getting into the details, understanding where, what makes you tick and understanding the work that you are doing and have done, and the direction that you think both, the DOD and private industry needs to go. And certainly, those of us who are radical sounds to me like are in alignment with what you're talking about. Thank you for your time.

Timothy Kaczynski (44:25):

Thank you for having me.

Matt Perez (44:26):

I enjoyed it as well, very much.

Jose Leal (44:30):

Awesome. Have a good one, guys. See you next week.