Morgan Kurk - CTO at CommScope

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Morgan Kirk, the CTO at CommScope, and we discussed the exponential progression of technology, the incredible future of home automation, and how to handle people who want change but don't want to change themselves. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) Hello, Mister Morgan.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:00:35) Hey, Joel. How are you doing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Good, buddy. I got a hat on because I can't get a haircut.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:00:40) There you go. There you go. I bought my clippers myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:44) You know what? I've got a little underground going on on Monday. So I'm convinced to be—I know.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:00:53) I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) I was like, what would you do when you couldn't have alcohol? Right? Yep. Yep. Underground operations.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:01:00) I heard the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:02) I heard the girls doing it. Like, I heard my wife and her friends, and they're like, "Oh, we're going over to so-and-so's house to get a haircut." I was like, let me get in on that.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:01:14) Well, you know, for guys, it's a little bit easier at the very least. I don't know what my wife is now in—what, week six or week seven?—and she actually had her haircut by pure coincidence a week before. But she's now looking around going, "So how much longer is this going to happen for?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) I know, man. But do you at least have, like, an office to go into, or are you stuck at the house?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:01:40) I'm stuck at the house. We closed our offices six weeks ago on Monday. Just sent everybody home, everybody who wasn't essential. You can go in if you have to, and we have letters for it. But really, for non-factory workers, we're working entirely out of the home across engineering, across finance, across HR. I mean, everybody is at home, except for our factories. And believe it or not, it's working pretty well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) I didn't know you guys had factories.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:02:16) Oh, yeah. We make a significant amount of the gear that we sell. We have factories—four in North Carolina, five in Mexico, a couple in India, a couple in Czech Republic, UK, Belgium, China, couple in China. Yeah. We make a lot of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:36) That is pretty cool. See, I didn't pick up on that from the research. I thought you guys were doing, like, software and communication, like firmware and stuff like that. But you build the physical devices too.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:02:48) We do, yeah. We do the whole gamut. We start off—we're historically from the physical layer. And the history of the company was just actually making coaxial cable, that cable that came in for cable TV. And from there, we moved on to things like twisted pair cabling that's used on Ethernet and fiber optic cabling, coaxial and fiber cabling that are used in cell networks. And then we moved on to the active electronics and other—I'll call it RF equipment—things that go on the top of the tower, all the antennas that you have. And finally moved into a lot of the active electronics, things that would be, like, your set-top boxes—that's what puts video on your television—your Wi-Fi access points, remote radio heads in some cases, all sorts of things like that. I like to tell people, we make a significant amount of the gear. We contract manufacture some of it. But if you use the internet, talked on your cell phone, or watched television today, you undoubtedly used some of CommScope's gear.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:55) That's amazing. Kind of cool. Yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:03:57) Yes. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:58) I have a good question for you, and you might not know the answer. I don't expect you to know every piece of equipment. But about a year or two ago, I started seeing these new devices start to exist around, like, my neighborhoods and, you know, even the city next to me too. So I realized at that point it wasn't just a "my city" thing. But they're about—they're black and they're about half the height of a telephone pole, and they—it's just something new. Like, I'm used to seeing the normal towers with the big rectangular white things and cell phone towers. But I started seeing these, and they didn't improve the cell phone signal for my carrier in my area. That's what I thought they were at first because there's, like, a couple dead spots I noticed them coming up in. Do you know what these things are?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:04:47) Yeah. So I'm not positive, but you're saying they're black. About how high are they? And are they half the height of a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:53) They're about half the height of a telephone pole. And they almost have this, like, mesh metal on them that was, like, a distinctive feature, but they have, like, some box. It's like a pole. There's some box, but I noticed there's some, like, mesh metal that looked pretty different.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:05:08) Yep. Yeah. So, undoubtedly, they're a communication system of some sort. What's going on a lot now is cellular companies are densifying behind those macro towers that you just described. So the big cell towers with the white boxes on the edges of them—those are antennas, and behind them are radios, and that's how you get your cell phone signal today. But because of the capacity that's needed in the networks now, they're putting in a new layer that we call a metrocell layer or a layer that's sort of in the metro area. It could be in the suburban area too. And these are far more dense. They're far lower to the ground. Sometimes they're put on existing poles, but oftentimes they're being built on new poles. That's very well what it could be. That's my guess what it is. It also might be, at a significantly higher frequency at millimeter wave frequencies, might be part of Verizon's new 5G network, depending on where you are. And that is—your current cell phone, if you just had a regular cell phone, wouldn't be speaking to. So you might not have a particular benefit to that. But if you got the right cell phone or the right devices, you would have a benefit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:16) Do the iPhones have 5G yet?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:06:19) They don't. It's expected to come out at the next release of the iPhone. It will come in likely two flavors. One will be a sub-six gigahertz unit. That's what most of the signals that exist today work in. And another version will have both sub-six likely as well as this millimeter wave, which gives really, really high data rates, but at very, very short distances.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:48) That's pretty neat. The future is progressing.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:06:52) Let me tell you. Look. When the clock turns—I like to say, when it goes to 00, so 2010, 2020, that type of thing, when it flips over, it's the beginning of a new decade in wireless. And I've been fortunate enough to be around this industry since the nineties. So I've been through—you know, this is my fourth cycle of G's. And you get a bunch of hype, and then you get a bunch of buildout. And the buildout really goes into a major swing when you hit the 0s. And then by the middle of the decade, we see all of just the enormous impact this has on our lives. I ask all of the people to listen. Can you imagine existing without a smartphone today? It's almost incomprehensible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:35) You can't.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:07:36) Like, what would you do? And it's to the point that first thing you look at in the morning is your smartphone. The last thing you look at at night is your smartphone. Kind of tells you how it's coming to our life, but it's only been a decade. Didn't exist a decade ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:55) I mean, I remember standing in line to buy my Razr, you know?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:07:59) Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. Motorola Razr, man. 1997, state-of-the-art technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:07) Yeah. Before that, I remember when having a light-up battery was cool.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:08:11) Oh, there you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:12) Remember in the phone stores, you could buy—or in the malls, the kiosk—you'd buy the light-up battery, that big hunk of a battery for that Nokia so you could play some Snake on there.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:08:22) That's right. That's exactly right. No, it was—what a change. I worked for Motorola in the early days of cellular in the early nineties as a design engineer. And I was working on the infrastructure side, but you could already see how much this was changing the world at that point. But I don't think anybody could tell how exactly this whole layer of connectivity that we have is changing absolutely everything. And looking forward, I just see such opportunity for the world as a whole. I mean, look at the situation we're in today. So we're having a podcast. We happen to be on Zoom, but there are lots of different ways that we're communicating. What would life be if we went back to audio only for everything?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:08) Yeah. We switched to video because we did it once, and the conversation's so much better because so much is said without, you know, through our behavior.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:09:20) Exactly. Exactly. So and that video takes more connectivity. And you go through a time like today. Two decades ago, a video conference call was basically a series of stuck frames. A decade ago, a video conference call required a ton of very expensive equipment. Today, a video conference call requires nothing that you already don't have. I mean, it's part of your computer. It's part of your phone. It's just what you do. And the way that—and you just said it. You know, we communicate not just orally. We communicate in our inflection. We communicate in our looks, in when we smile, when we don't smile. And so you get a whole different level of communication. You come to a period of today, like with COVID where we're all stuck in the house. It would be fundamentally different if we didn't have this type of communication. And I just—I'm fortunate that we've been in an industry that just has made the world better, and that's just fundamental to why it still excites me even today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:20) What are you thinking about—and just to be direct with you, I don't know a whole lot about the comms industry. I'm not, like, an expert in this space. But I am curious to know, like, how do you view the satellite advancements? I know Elon is putting up a bunch of satellites. I know a bunch of other companies are too, but how do you view that?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:10:39) Yeah. So a lot of people ask about communication, you know, competitive threats, who wins, how do you win, what wins, and a lot of that question has often come down between cellular and Wi-Fi. And my position has always been that we're all searching for the most efficient way to move bits. So it's sort of an equation that goes the cost per bit per square area. And so when you take each one of these technologies, you say, how are you going to end up with the smallest cost per bit per area? If you look at a satellite, or I look at a satellite and I say, well, you know, where you don't need a great deal of capacity, satellites actually make a tremendous amount of sense. So pick Alaska. Population is really small, very discrete places. Satellites are going to work great. Take New York City. Not a chance in the world. Not enough capacity could be generated from a satellite to try to service these areas. So I think there's a play for both of these in this. I think most of people are putting up satellites today are hoping to actually bring the second half of the world online. And while people—you know, there's six or almost 7 billion cell phones that people have and are using, still a good portion of the world is well underserved, whether they don't have LTE yet or they don't even have smartphones yet or their smartphones are really used for texting and messaging, but not really for being online. Satellites could really help that in areas and kind of bring up society as a whole to bridge that digital divide. I don't see it as a threat to the industry that I'm in, quite frankly. I see it as an opportunity to bring more people. And as you have more people that are online that need more capacity, it will make sense to put in more physical infrastructure to be able to service that greater capacity. So it's—I think it's interesting. It's not the first time it's been tried either, but it's the first time it's been tried with LEO satellites, which are these low orbital satellites versus geo satellites. So back in the late nineties, Iridium, that was a Motorola's project to put up satellites for telecommunication. I think the satellites are still operating today. They're geolocation satellites, so they're way away from Earth, stationary, so they stay over a spot. And but this is very extensive communication. The idea with LEOs is they're much closer to Earth, so you can put up a lot more of them. They're a lot cheaper, so you can add and increase the capacity of this and, therefore, reduce the cost. So we'll see how it goes. It's interesting. We watch it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:23) Yeah. Well, I didn't know. You could have said, "Well, we have a whole division, and we supply half their satellites." I don't know.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:13:28) No. We don't. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:32) So I'm curious. Like, do you know how they launch the rockets without—have you ever seen that website where it shows all the debris in space?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:13:43) I haven't, but I'm aware of the debris in space. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:46) So there's a website you can go to, and it'll show you all the debris in space. And it looks just like a trash junkyard completely surrounding the Earth, which is—it's an unbelievable visual. But I was wondering, like, how they launch the rockets or they just, like, know the debris, but you're not in the satellite rocket space.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:14:02) I'm not in that, but I'm sure there's a lot of debris up there. And my understanding is the bigger problem with debris is that satellites that are in—as debris continues to fall, because it does fall, it eventually gets trapped in gravity and eventually comes down to the ground, usually burns up in the atmosphere. But as it's doing that, it's at a different speed than other things. So you can imagine that there's just a bunch of trash out there, but it's all stationary relative to each other. It isn't causing a problem. But as these decay, they're all moving around at different rates, and so they'll eventually—if you have enough of it, they'll start crashing into each other. It's a problem. I don't know how you go and sweep it because think of it. You're now up a certain number of miles away from the Earth, and so the area that you're having to cover is now, you know, factors many, many multiples of the size of the Earth, and we can't even clean up oceans. So I don't know how we clean up space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:59) So I was curious. As far as growth goes, I have been talking to people in different countries, things like that. I know some countries like Africa, they're coming online essentially, right? As far as their economies, their multiplication of people, all of that good stuff. So, you know, eventually—I mean, I think it's safe to say humans, we tend to cluster in the cities, right? And earlier, we were talking about cities. Earlier, we're talking about cities and satellites. Is that, like, a physics problem with the—like, is that, like, a limitation of our—that, like, technology wouldn't be able to overcome the satellites and the cities?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:15:36) So really, you've got to imagine that you can think of it like a laser pointer. Okay? If you could create RF energy so that it was just like a laser, then you could target the energy anywhere you want. That's not really the way the lower electromagnetic spectrum where RF energy is. You can think of it more as a cone that expands out over distance.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:16:00) So the further you are away, the harder it is to contain that energy. So a satellite would be more like rather than a laser, it would be more like a flashlight. The further away you go, the more the light gets dispersed. And so the closer you are, the more you can contain this energy. The more you can contain the energy, the more you can reuse the energy because there's only a certain amount of spectrum that can be used that has to be reused over and over and over again.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:16:24) And so that's sort of the limitations being put on this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:28) Yeah. I don't mean to grill you so hard about it. I just I'm a nerd. I'm curious.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:16:32) I'm happy to talk about anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:35) Well, because I'm trying to build a mental model, you know, to wrap my mind around it. And what I was thinking is it reminds me when you talk about as we're opening up this discussion about satellites versus, you know, other types of infrastructure, it's kind of reminding me of like water filtration plants. There's lots of different methods and different, there's different ones for different environments, and they all try to calculate on a similar cost, you know, filtrating the water. But so that's what kind of, it doesn't mean that like one's obsolete because a new one comes out. There's just different tools for different cases.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:17:12) Absolutely agreed. And in fact, even on the land, you can use that same analogy. So typically, as you go up in frequency, your RF energy decays faster, which means that you cover a smaller area. So lowest frequencies in the cellular industry today are around 600 megahertz, and they go up in frequency to the newest band, which is around three and a half gigahertz. So 600 megahertz, that's 3,500 megahertz.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:17:44) And then it jumps for a while, and it goes up to millimeter wave, which is 26, 28, 39 gigahertz. So quite a bit higher, about 10 times higher than the low band. And so the 600 megahertz signals get put on cell towers, and they cover huge swaths of area. You know, kilometers, tens of kilometers of coverage. You can go away from the cell site and still get a cell signal.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:18:07) Whereas millimeter wave, it might be 100 or a couple hundred meters best case. So tens of kilometers versus hundreds of meters. It doesn't mean one is bad and one is good. It means that one serves one purpose and another serves another purpose. So if you just want to have cell phone coverage, basic coverage, and you don't have or you have a very low population density, then being able to cover larger areas is of huge advantage.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:18:36) Right? You go out to Iowa and you're going into farming country. There are only a certain number of farmers out there. There's nobody that's out there, but you still need to cover the area because the farmer or the people are still going to be there some of the time. There's just not much that's going to use that capacity.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:18:52) Versus New York, where you might have, you know, tens of thousands of people per square kilometer where you'd have to have much, much smaller cell sites. So these higher frequencies are very valuable there. The lower frequencies are valuable in the more rural areas. You put the system together so that you create something that the user doesn't know or care and gives them the appropriate amount of capacity and coverage for the cheapest price for their entire area wherever they're going to be, which is why that equation about, you know, the cost per bit per area is what everybody is going after. How can we reduce that? How can we make that as inexpensive as possible? And to that, actually, it's interesting because that's where, that's where it starts enabling other things. So do you remember back when cell phones first came out how you paid for them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:42) Oh, yeah. By the minute.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:19:44) You were charged by the minute. Exactly. And then one of the cell phone carriers had this brilliant idea. For $150 a month, you could talk as much as you wanted. Exactly.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:19:57) It's amazing. Woohoo. But what had happened was that they had continued to drive down the cost per area or per bit per area to the point where that was possible. And, of course, today, we look back on that and go, well, it's crazy that we had to pay per minute. It's even crazier that you'd pay such a large amount of money per minute.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:20:19) We would have used our devices very differently. So, you know, today, we're starting to be in the world of unlimited anythings because the cost has been driven down enough. And in the future, to enable the so-called Internet of Things, the cost per bit per area has to be driven down even lower because you have a lot of value. Right? You would pay $50 a month for a cell phone.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:20:42) Fine. For you. How much would you have for your security system in your house? Like, connectivity is worth about $10 per month. How about your car?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:20:52) It's worth about $3 per month. So you, your biggest asset, and your second biggest asset is an order of magnitude down. Now how much do you pay for your toaster to be online?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:05) Nothing.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:21:06) A penny a month? Nothing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:07) I don't know.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:21:08) Do you have to get it through advertising? Do I, does it have to be—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:10) Well, it's probably going to be like, it's going to, it's going to Bluetooth to my local home.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:21:16) So, effectively, you're saying that it has to be included in the cost of the thing that I'm using for myself, or it has to be a feature I'm willing to pay $10 for, the equipment more because it then has a Bluetooth module in it, but I'm not willing to pay anything on a monthly basis. Basically, very, very little. But what if I told you you could bring your entire house online, every single device, and you'd pay 10 cents more a month? Every device.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) I mean, I would say I would say I already have it online now. And I, I mean—

(Morgan Kirk at 00:21:46) How about your pillowcase?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:48) I don't want my pillowcase online.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:21:50) You think you don't want your pillowcase online. What if your pillowcase could reconform itself so as you're sleeping, you sleep better?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:57) Oh, come on now. Or if it would just be cool. Those pillows always lie. They're like, cool the whole night. $100 for the pillow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:03) I buy it. I'm like, lies.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:22:07) Exactly. But my point is that these other things have less value today and probably won't have a tremendous amount of value until so many things are hooked up together that things happen for you, that we have to drive down this cost per bit. I'll give you the perfect example. Do you know what an Amazon Alexa, Google device or an Apple device, what these things really are to today's generation?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:32) Oh, I have kids. I have kids. They think they're like people. They think they're like things. Yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:22:38) What do they use them for? What do you get from them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:41) Well, my daughter says, Alexa, play Baby Doo Doo, which means play Baby Shark. But I use them for music. Okay. We, my family, 99% music.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:22:52) Absolutely. Do you know what that was called in 1980? A clock radio. Today, it is just a version of a clock radio. But when this becomes really valuable is when all these devices are hooked up to a whole bunch of other devices, and they understand your needs before you tell them you need it.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:23:10) And we're just seeing the beginning of this. And this is where you add real value in the Internet of Things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:13) Alexa does that. She asked me if I want to reorder stuff, like my protein bars.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:23:17) Yeah. Okay. So so they're asking you to buy things at the moment. But imagine this: you wake up in the morning, and based on where you are and your sleep cycle, something knows that you like your floors to be warmer. So your floors heat up, but only when you're going to walk on them.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:23:35) Your lighting changes to the amount of light you like versus your wife when you go into the bathroom. Your shower turns on just before you hit the shower so that it's warm by the time you get to the door. Your radio turns on so you can listen to it in the shower and tunes to the station that you like because you like morning news when you get in in the morning. And if you ever took a shower at night, you like music. Turns to the right station.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:24:00) All these things happen because it's learned about you, and it's doing things. You never asked it to do a thing. That's what a lot of the future, I think, needs to look like. Today, we're just replacing the things, and it's very normal. Whenever this type of technology starts off, we replace our phone with a phone that doesn't have wires.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:24:17) That was called a cordless telephone. We replaced the cordless telephone with mobility. We replaced a computer, a fixed computer, with a mobile computer. It's after you get past this direct replacement, we start using it for many, many other different reasons. And we sometimes then go back and go, how did we live with it being like that?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:24:37) How could we have possibly lived with a record player? You couldn't get music that you wanted immediately. Today, Alexa will give you absolutely anything you want just by asking. So big changes are coming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:48) I actually asked her, my wife and I, when we were making hamburgers last night, we said, Alexa, can you watch the kids? And she didn't have like a quippy response. She tried to do like a Google search for it. I was like, oh, somebody needs to go program a funny response into that. Yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:25:06) Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yep.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:25:09) Yeah. It's, it's going to be very interesting. And just to tie that in, so we in homes, make, make not just the modems that attach your home to the Internet, either via wireless or via cable or by fiber.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:23) That's where I know your logo from. You're on there on the barcode, like, on the back of the routers of the devices.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:25:30) That's exactly correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:32) Yeah. I knew I saw it somewhere. Yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:25:34) There you go. So we make a lot of those, and we also make the Wi-Fi access points, a lot of those Wi-Fi access points that are in your house. And so we're trying to find different ways of making the set-top boxes and the routers and the access points all work together so that you never think about it. Because today, the number one complaint in the home is, I don't get my Wi-Fi. I don't get fast Wi-Fi in my bedroom.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:25:56) I don't get fast Wi-Fi in the corner of my office. I don't have good cell phone coverage in pick a room. And those are all problems that we need to absolutely eliminate so that people they don't think of how they get cell phone coverage. They don't think about how they get internet access. It just works.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:26:14) And there are lots of great things that are going on. You may have heard just recently, but the government just allocated a ton of additional spectrum for Wi-Fi in the six gigahertz band. That's going to really help coverage in a house for Wi-Fi. We expect over the next couple of years that the government will also give a whole bunch of new spectrum to the cellular carriers. That's going to improve cell phone coverage everywhere.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:26:36) That will be in the upper 3-gigahertz span.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:26:40) What's the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) We're—

(Morgan Kirk at 00:26:40) Seeing lots of changes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:42) What's the, and I'm sorry. I'm really curious to know this. I am slightly familiar with the spectrums, but how much of the total spectrum is currently allocated?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:26:54) Well, the electromagnetic spectrum starts at DC, which is zero, and goes up to, well, sort of infinity. Right? Just it's a continuum. You just keep on going up. There are the lower pieces of spectrum, easiest to use in terms of they go the furthest. A good deal of that is allocated out.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:27:15) So we used to have public safety in the 400 megahertz spectrum. Give you an idea, you have AM radio. That's the lowest part or that's a low portion of the spectrum. We move up to FM radio. You know? So when you get to 90 megahertz, that's FM radio. 450 megahertz used to be public safety. That's now been moved up to 800 megahertz. We have cellular starting at 600.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:27:38) There's, I don't know, a total of about, 700, about 900 megahertz of total spectrum being used for cellular between 600, 700, 800, 900, 1900, 2100, 2500 megahertz today. You have Wi-Fi that's in the 2.4. That's 2,400. Also the 5,800 and now six gigahertz or 6,000 range. There's still a lot of spectrum.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:28:05) There's spectrum used for satellite coverage, for point-to-point radio coverage. But as you go up into the band, as you get above 10 or 20 gigahertz, you've got lots of spectrum, which is really unused. That's the millimeter wave spectrum I spoke of, 24, 28, 39, that type of spectrum. But the problem with the spectrum is it doesn't go very far. And so that remember that cost per bit per area, the per area becomes an economic problem.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:28:38) So it can only be used for certain things. It would make little to no sense to put millimeter wave in the countryside because it just simply can't go far enough. As a point-to-multipoint system, it can still be used as it has been. Microwave radios have been used to connect two points together. You have a very directional antenna, and you can think of it like a laser pointer.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:28:58) You make that RF energy. You contain the RF energy, and you shoot it in one direction to a receiver that's looking for that exact same frequencies. And those two things can communicate over long distances. But for most of us, we want this one point to communicate to lots of people over lots of area, and that's harder to do as you go up in spectrum. Where the spectrum is really available, there are those problems to overcome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:21) When you're talking about the high-powered laser beams, that reminded me of, you know, what, 10 years ago when they were talking about doing the New York, California high-frequency trading related beam.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:29:31) Do you

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:32) remember that conversation? Yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:29:34) Yeah. Um, do you know, so a little aside on that. So they do that New York, Chicago. They have microwave systems, which are point-to-point microwave systems that hop between New York and Chicago. Do you know why they don't use fiber in that case?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:29:53) Because you can also send those same signals over fiber.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:56) I know.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:29:58) Because fiber is, it's glass that you're going through, and glass slows down the signal. And so in that type of a distance with these high-speed trades, you have an advantage if you go over the air rather than through glass. I love that. That's why they build those systems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:16) Fun fact, I've actually had microwave internet before.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:30:19) Have you really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:20) Yeah. I lived out in a, like, out in country area.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:30:25) Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:25) And there was this post, and at the top, it had a receiver. And I had to put a microwave thing on my roof and point it, like, exactly at the receiver,

(Morgan Kirk at 00:30:35) to get that. You were using a CommScope antenna. We make those antennas as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:40) Probably. Yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:30:41) There you go. Okay. They have a little flash on the side of it, a little slash.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:46) Yeah. Yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:30:47) Okay. There you go. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:49) Yeah, it was either that or like, I could pay the county $5,000 to like dig something up. And I was like, nope. I'm just going to use one of these.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:30:57) There you go. Yep. Yep. See? And everybody's just trying to reduce that cost per bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:02) When you're talking about cost per bit, right, obviously it's going to vary based on location and density and all of that. But when the numbers get really small, what words do you use? Because if you're talking like fractions of a penny, does it ever get that small? Like, how do you refer to—are there special words there?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:31:22) No, there's no special word that says how much you should—you know, what's the minimal of a femto penny, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:29) Yeah. Yeah. There's no femto pennies or bit nibbles or anything like that.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:31:33) Haven't come up with it. Maybe the two of us can figure that out. No, I don't think we're really happy having a description of that yet, but it really is a driver. And I'll give you an example of something that you could imagine on just an enormous scale.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:31:49) So the developments that have gone on with respect to agriculture are amazing. Where seeds are, how many seeds are being planted, the way these are going on, how you do remote sensing from, let's say, satellites to determine weather patterns and whether things need to be watered or how crops will yield. But the cost of these things needs to be really low as well. Someday, it will probably be worthwhile. So today, you don't—you have a sensor that says, I know I've stuck a seed here, but you don't have a sensor on the seed itself.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:32:24) Someday, we may have a sensor on the seed itself because that will help us improve the yield even more. But to do that, you can imagine what's a seed worth. It's sold in the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:36) Words. Yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:32:37) The trillions. I mean, it's just this massive number, and so you need things that are even smaller. What we work on a lot of the time is not just to enable that, but to drive other things to happen. And I'll give you my favorite example of trying to think differently, and I'll use television. So we've seen television progress from analog television to SD to HD to 4K.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:33:04) Okay. So we've seen this go on. Now what happens after 4K? What do you do after 4K? Well, most people would act very linearly and would say, well, 8K.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:33:17) Right? Because that's twice four. So, you know, we keep on doubling this. And I encourage everybody to think differently. To say perhaps we have to think differently about the way television is consumed tomorrow versus today. So some people think differently, and they start thinking, well, you can get higher resolution of the screen.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:33:43) That's the case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:44) I was going to say we're going to go into the TV, but I didn't want to be like too far out there.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:33:47) No. No. So that's a good one. So 3D. Right? So, hey, how can I feel like I'm more on the set? I actually encourage people to think that we're going to think about television very differently. And you can look at it already in the gaming industry, but it's to become part of what you're watching, not to be an observer of what you're watching or at least be able to change the views. So if you have a show that's having doctors, you could put yourself in the position where you are the doctor and you're observing from the doctor's point of view or from the patient's point of view or from an observer point of view.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:34:26) So your experience is going to be completely different. It's not going to be about the resolution of the screen. It's going to be about where, how, and where that content is. And if you look at any of these services like Twitch, right, where you can be—you can see things from the point of view of a player or of a different player or observing the whole thing. And that's the way I think a lot of things are going to change.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:34:50) We need to stop thinking linearly about things just progressing and think, okay, well, you have all this technology. What's that going to do? And from CommScope's perspective, you know, we see these things coming and we see the type of bandwidths that are going to be required when people do this. Not just in the downlink, but also in the uplink because now you're going to want to participate.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:35:09) Maybe the television series is actually rendering in real time, kind of like a game. Maybe you're creating the television series as you act like the doctor. And to do that, you need to be patient up and down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:22) Yeah. Or it's watching your responses and adjusting the future of the storyline based on how you're like responding.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:35:31) Absolutely. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:33) I'm shaking my head like, oh, I can't believe that happened. Like, it would actually—

(Morgan Kirk at 00:35:36) The story line changes. Exactly. You disapprove of where it is, and you go someplace else. Yeah. I know.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:35:42) These are all the sorts of things that I think are likely to happen in the future, and it's very exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:48) So I hadn't played video games in about five years. And then when this whole thing happened, I booted up the Xbox, and it didn't work, so I went and got a new Xbox. Luckily, they're very inexpensive now. And it was like an online only Xbox. Like, it didn't have a disk drive.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:36:06) And so—

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:06) I was like, okay. So usually, I like to play the Call of Duty games. So I was like, what's the latest Call of Duty? Made a couple years ago or whatever. So I got that game, and I was legitimately blown away by the characters.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:22) And I'm like, we must be two years away from not needing actors into film movies. Like, we don't—we just don't need that anymore. Like, look at it. Like, there are scenes where I can't tell if I'm 10 feet away from the TV. I cannot tell that that's a rendered character. And this game I was playing, I think it was like made two years ago, which means it started getting made five years ago. Right?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:36:43) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:44) Or three years ago.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:36:44) No, it's absolutely incredible what can be rendered today. It's interesting, actually. One of the hardest things for these games to do is hair. Believe it or not, explosions are trivial. People's motions have gotten really great. Still, if you watch the hair, you've got a little bit of an issue, but you're exactly right. I mean, that type of, I'll call it rendering, you can still have actors doing things, but you can render almost anything around them if you wish, or you could create them entirely in real time as we're just discussing. Create your own story as you're going along because you can render anything you want, any scene you want, anywhere you want. And it's only going to get better.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:37:23) I mean, I know I used to say, in the early days when I was at Motorola, you know, the Razr, which we discussed earlier, or the StarTAC, which was the predecessor to that, was really a 1969 communicator from Star Trek. Yeah. It's a flip phone. Just look at it. Looks exactly the same.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:41) Had that battery on the back.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:37:42) Yeah. You got it. Yep. Looked exactly like that.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:37:46) The holodeck from the next generation Star Trek is within our lifetime.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:55) I hope so.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:37:56) Yeah. So do I. Yeah. Yeah. It's—and that's incredible because to be able to render almost anything sort of in a way that you can experience things without actually traveling there and experiencing them and experiencing them with others, which is really one of the keys to a lot of this is, how do I experience with others?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:38:15) We're very social creatures. It's going to, again, change the world. You know? And it's all enabled by this whole communication, which, you know, your Xbox being it's only online. Well, of course, it's only online.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:38:28) Not because, of course, it is, but because you can't get a lot of things. You can't have it do a lot of these things if you're only by yourself. And so much of this requires interaction with others that the value of being online for everything we do is just incredible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:43) I love it. And, honestly, you know, I tend to be optimistic about the future, and I'm actually pretty excited about it. Like, to get weird, I hope I watch—Aubrey de Grey. Have you ever heard of that guy?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:39:00) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:00) He is like a brilliant mind in like the regenerative biological space, I guess you would say.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:39:07) Mhmm. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:09) But, man, the advancements that he has seen or that—there was a good Joe Rogan podcast where he came on and talked about it. But the advancements of age therapy, and he was talking about how, you know, we just imagine the default state is that we die. Like, he's like, that's maybe a false assumption. And—

(Morgan Kirk at 00:39:31) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:31) He was—because we can regenerate different things. And so he was just going through basically, he laid out an entire map of all the investment and all the small problems as they'll incrementally get solved. And the interesting thing is the money is flowing there. Like, people are spending money on that. Right? You know, it makes sense too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:49) You get rich. You build up your whole life, and people when you—I think life is good when you learn how to live it. Like, it's not an easy task. I'd say you come out and the odds are against you. But if you can—right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:02) But if—

(Morgan Kirk at 00:40:03) Rather than wealthy—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:05) Or not, it doesn't really matter if your financial state when you come out because it really is like a one on one mental game in life. But once you figure that out, you can really, like, I wish I had enough time to live 20 different lives. There would be different things I would—because I keep learning, like, I do new things, and I overcome challenges, and it's just like I'm always learning, and it's very motivating. It's like I would love to redo this again.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:40:34) Yeah. Yeah. No. With especially with the knowledge that you have now. Yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:40:37) I mean, one of the advancements that just recently came out in technology that I believe is fundamentally like the Internet, like GPS, is going to change the world is actually CRISPR. That's the gene editing tools.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:50) Yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:40:51) That's fundamental, and it's because we have—we're just about out of antibiotics. This whole age for the last 50 years of surgeries—we're getting close to having real problems with doing any of this. We've created such a problem. But if you can have your own body solve your own problems, you start a whole new element of how do you have humans live or develop or survive. And so I give a lot of hope to that. As another area that's just an exciting technological area that I look at and I say, you know, I've been fortunate to be in telecommunications, which I think has had an enormous positive benefit on society.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:41:43) And I look at some of these other fields, which I think are coming of age in terms of having, again, an enormous positive benefit on society, and one like that is going to be very exciting for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:53) I actually talk about this quite a bit with my family. So my brother is a physician and so is my stepmom. And she's actually in like the—she did ER for 20 years and then opened up for the past, you know, 10 years. She's been growing a private practice—

(Morgan Kirk at 00:42:06) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:06) With health wellness. And it is amazing, the personalized medicine that when I see them talk about the personalized medicine and watch what's going on over there, that is the Internet—

(Morgan Kirk at 00:42:19) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:19) For today. That is today's Internet. Everyone would be saying no. No. No. No. No. That's a long way away, but that is, like, you know, Bezos starting Amazon. Right? Like—

(Morgan Kirk at 00:42:29) Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:42:30) Yeah. Exactly. And it's always interesting to see that I can remember back to when I was in college and email was just starting. And this wasn't email—this is email for college students. That was it. That was the only thing you had online. Now I'm old enough to actually remember first getting online with the 300 baud modem, so I'm telling a little bit about my age. But I don't think anybody, inclusive of myself, saw the potential in those days of connecting things. And it typically is a long time afterwards in any particular field that you see the absolute value of it. We get wowed by the sizzle, but oftentimes, we don't understand the steak.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:43:12) We didn't understand the beginning of the Internet. We didn't understand how GPS would fundamentally change the world. Do you know how many trillions of dollars of value is in a GPS? You couldn't have it without that. You talk about something simple like even a USB.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:43:27) When USB first came out, it was a consumer electronics show in a little corner that nobody noticed. It's every device on the planet today. Something like CRISPR coming out. You don't see it until all of a sudden, hey. Your medicine is about you.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:43:41) Exactly what you said. Personalized medicine. Everything is being done for you specifically because we mapped your genome, which was easy to do nowadays. And we know where you have deficiencies and where you don't, and your therapies help match those deficiencies. So, yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:43:56) It's another interesting technological fact. Do you know how long it took to map the first half of the human genome?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:03) Oh, like 10 years?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:44:06) Seven years. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:07) Seven years.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:44:07) How long did it—yeah. How long did it take to map the second half of the human genome?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:13) I don't know.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:44:16) Less than a year, about seven months. Because—and we think about it linearly. Most people would say, well, seven years do half, seven years do the second half. But we are advancing at such a rate—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:26) No. That's actually—

(Morgan Kirk at 00:44:28) We think the wrong way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:29) That's my favorite type of conversations. Humans are designed to think linearly and progress happens exponentially and it's counterintuitive and it just—I'll understand it today and I'll wake up tomorrow and I'll just have to keep reminding myself you have to keep keep doing it.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:44:45) Absolutely. That's exactly right. It's so interesting to watch, and I do that same thing myself. Frequently, I say, okay. This happened, so that wouldn't happen.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:44:54) I'll give you my favorite example since I'm in this industry. Cell phone cameras come out. The time is 2000 or 2001. Cell phone cameras come out. They're terrible.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:45:06) I mean, you can see basically a blob on them. They're no resolution. They're worthless. And I make a statement. I don't think cell phone cameras will really have a lot of value because they don't have good lenses, and the form factor doesn't allow you to put a lens on a phone.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:45:24) I was thinking very linearly because the way lenses had always been made was for a form factor that allowed a tunnel to occur. That problem has been solved six different ways. Cell phone cameras now take better pictures than everything other than the most professional, really great lens cameras. And they get better every single year. And the idea of a point and click camera is ridiculous.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:45:51) I was thinking linearly because I had thought of cameras as something where you needed great optics. The problem was it had nothing to do with the optics. It had all to do with the digital signal processing and the way that you would actually add light into the digital process. And so, yeah, we get—even those people like ourselves who tend to remind ourselves that we have a problem still get trapped in it all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:15) I put recurring events in my calendar, and I say, like, they say, revisit first principles. I was like, that's one of my favorite recurring ones. I'll just get it, you know, oh, I got to revisit first principles thinking. Because there's things that I find there's so much value, but I'm also acutely aware of—we forget at the rate of one bit per neuron per second. It's called the forgetting curve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:38)
And I'm like, okay, I'm a machine that forgets. I will put this in. I'll put a system in place that'll remind me that I've forgotten and to go find, refine, rediscover these new things.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:46:49)
That's great. Yeah, the human memory is terrible. I mean, not only is it lossy, as you point out, but it also recreates. Your memory is absolutely terrible.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:47:02)
You have few things that remain static over time, and they've done lots of studies on how that is a real challenge, which, you know, nowadays with the way that we record and keep things, we find out how poor our memory is because almost everything, because we're all connected, all this telecommunication here allows us to have access to virtually everything that humanity has done instantly, allows us to realize exactly how bad we are at it, which is terrible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:31)
I think it's why we're all spending so much money to build technology to compensate for it.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:47:35)
Yep. You could be absolutely right. I actually thought it was just, I figured all this technology was made so that my wife could tell me that I was wrong and have proof of it. That's been my thesis for a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:50)
You know, I ask myself, you know, I get into big moments of big thought. I like to ask myself, like, what are the humans building? Like, if you were to step back and be an alien civilization and look at it as, you know, from the outside, from another planet, and watch them build. I mean, clearly we're building something at a massive rate, and we're all working really hard towards one thing. And I'm always interested, like, what's that thing gonna be or what's that going to look like?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:48:18)
Mm-hmm. No, I absolutely. And what the scary thing is, you're saying we're working a massive rate today. You would have said the same thing ten years ago, but the rate that we're working at today is an order of magnitude more than it was a decade ago.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:48:33)
And so whenever I look backwards, it's just shocking how could we have not gotten to that point faster. And whenever you look forward, it's like, I almost can't conceive of what will happen. And I look at things like, I remember when I was growing up about air pollution, how terrible it was in good portions of the United States. And then we put in a catalytic converter, and all of a sudden, changed from leaded to unleaded gasoline, and all of a sudden, that changed. We moved off of a lot of coal plants and we made huge strides in, say, thirty, forty years.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:49:12)
And then you look where we will be thirty or forty years from now, and we will look back on today and go, my God, how dirty we were, or how bad we were, or how poorly we communicated, or how, you know, use whatever adjective you want, but it will be what a lot of neophytes then, they do nothing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:28)
Yeah. Whenever I like to ground myself, I think of, you know, we've only had electricity for, like, a hundred and thirty years. Like, that is pretty crazy.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:49:39)
It is. And when you lose power, what do you do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:42)
You freak out. Yeah.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:49:44)
So you have kids. I'll give you a little story about the cell phone industry. So a lot of people ask me, you know, how do I control my kids in the internet? How do I punish them, et cetera or whatever? And I figured out the perfect cure.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:49:57)
Actually, trying to prevent your kids from getting online or doing things is almost impossible. They're a lot smarter than you'll ever be, and their kids will be smarter than them. They will figure out passwords or ways around things. But the one thing that seemed to work the best is removing their power supply. You would be surprised what sort of angst you cause when you do not have an ability to charge your cell phone or tablet or whatever, because all of a sudden you get metered.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:50:20)
And we did a lot of surveys on this. So it's great. You wanna punish your kids? You don't take away their phone. You take away the charger.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:28)
That's nice.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:50:29)
Then they have to decide whether they should use it or whether they shouldn't use it. But what's very interesting with this is that when we've asked people what would they give up, would you give up your best friend or your cell phone? A preponderance, more than a majority, would give up their best friend forever than their cell phone forever. And if you rank priority, it's only electricity that's above communication systems.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:50:57)
And I believe that the only reason why it's above that is because without electricity, people recognize they wouldn't have the device itself. The device wouldn't operate. But it's above water. It's above toiletry. It's above food in their home because they say I can go out to eat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:15)
Well, because with communication, I have a higher likelihood of reacquiring those necessities. Like, I have a better chance of, I would choose communication with a group of people over the water because with that group of people, I have a higher probability of getting the water.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:51:33)
Totally and completely agreed. But it's just, it's amazing because that's only been the last twenty years. Maybe not even the last twenty years. Maybe last—

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:42)
You gotta speak at the investor meetings, buddy. You make me really excited to spend money in the industry. I'm like, man.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:51:49)
No, it really is. Yeah. And we're at the beginning. We are just at the beginning of all these things going together.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:51:56)
Where we will be ten, twenty, thirty years from now, we're gonna look back, and we're gonna look back on this as we do on an old fashion record player. A few people will long for those days, but everybody will go, how did we even exist? How do we move around? How did we work? How do we do anything if we didn't have this constant communication, this constant intelligence that's gonna be working in the background to make our life easier? It's just mind-boggling.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:25)
It's interesting too because if we take, like, a step back and look at humans in different age groups, I would, I'm just gonna make a couple statements here. We can rip it apart if it's not true. But I would say if you looked at the fifty to sixty year old age range of twenty years ago, those individuals start very differently as far as, like, change than the fifty to sixty year olds today. It seems like we're all more comfortable. And as we get more comfortable, we'll allow the rate of, I think as much as it's changing faster, we're also actively hindering the change.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:53:03)
Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:05)
Yeah. We're gonna unleash it more.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:53:08)
Yeah. So you're absolutely right. And actually, the default state of everybody is they want change to happen around them, but they themselves don't wanna change. Okay? That's true of everybody.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:53:19)
We're some lesser, some more. But everybody says, you know, the books, don't move my cheese or, you know, those types of books are all about how we like it where we are because we're comfortable with where we are. So we have this inertia that says, hey, we wanna change. But what we find over time is the things that we thought needed to change become easier. And the more change you do, the easier it becomes to change. Sort of like things in motion tend to stay in motion. It's the same thing with change. Once you start changing, it becomes easier to make more changes and make more changes. And so as these changes become faster and faster, we get more equipped as people to accept them and move on to them and adapt to them.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:54:03)
And you're right. If you look at somebody who grew up on a typewriter, moving to a word processor was a big change. But somebody who started on a computer, moving to a tablet was sort of trivial.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:18)
And we're getting more comfortable with change. Like, as a species of humans, like, we are getting more comfortable with change as time goes on.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:54:28)
I completely agree. And again, I think it's because the rate of change is happening that if you actually tried to be a Luddite and just stay as you are, you would be blown past in such a short period of time versus perhaps a century ago, you could just isolate yourself and survive perfectly fine. So yeah, we are adaptive if nothing else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:53)
And I love it. I don't know. I really do like the way that the world is going. I recently found this guy named Joel Salatin. Have you ever heard of him? He's in the agriculture space. He does this concept of regenerative farming. Basically, you know, being able to set up a farm so that you don't need antibiotics, so you don't need these things by just doing farming the way, recreating natural animal cycles, but on your property. And I thought it was fascinating. I started learning about food because the antibiotics conversation comes up a lot, especially, you know, my brother, I told you he was a physician.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:55:30)
Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:31)
And I had seen this small documentary about antibiotics. I kicked it over to him. I said, hey, dude, is this, like, actually something to pay attention to? He goes, I wish people had the mental bandwidth to care about this because this is going, it's gonna smack us and it's gonna be a horrible thing, but you can't get anyone to pay attention to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:48)
And so I'm always trying to predict, you know, the way to look like a genius is to figure out which way it's going and then say it's going to go that way. Right?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:55:56)
Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:57)
So I'm always trying to play around with that. And one of the big white spaces I see right now is, like, in our DNA and in our biology, there's just, when we try to model them, and I was talking about this with some IBM researchers and some other people too that are into quantum computing. But when you try to model, like, a peptide or you try to model some microscopic organism, you're only creating this, like, very rough digital version of it with a few points of it. The actual amount of points it would take to model that would be so great, it's, like, near impossible to do with a modern computing system. You'd have to have, like, a quantum computing system. So I think the quantum computing is going to be really good for, like, a niche area or, like, a specific tool, like we're talking about, like, the satellites and the other infrastructure. But I think that tool that the quantum computing will be useful for is related to organic things like personalized medicine, genetics, CRISPR advancements.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:56)
I think that that's going to be useful there because, as, like, you know, Friday night, what I'm doing as a nerd is I'm reading out the latest white paper on quantum computing to figure out how I can make a hundred million dollars. Right?

(Morgan Kirk at 00:57:11)
Right. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:12)
Like, where's that white space? Because it'll jump out to me at one point, but it's gonna take a lifetime for me to figure it out. But they, quantum computing happens to be exceptional at, and you probably experienced this because one of the examples was, like, if I were to take a map and try to predict the appropriate route, the way that those algorithms work, quantum computing happens to be really good at looking at every possible scenario and picking the right one. And that's going to be really important when we're doing stuff with personalized medicine because our genetics are so different, but you need to have precise data.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:57:53)
Yeah. It's very interesting as we, as we gain, and it's not just from quantum computing. I mean, we went to supercomputers that got blown away. Now your personal computer is an actual supercomputer as originally defined. And we went to, like, Cray machines, which had loops that you could unloop things. I actually used that in grad school, so you could run dual recursive loops in parallel to parallel computing. I think quantum computers, as you say, are yet another tool in the tool chest. But just the ability to do more compute over time continues to unlock huge amounts of value because for computers, it's the cost per, again, per bit processed, if you like, or per flop or however you wanna do it, that gets driven down so that you can do more and more calculations. And you were actually asking at one point, you know, how do you get to this femtosecond, as you were putting it, to enable things? It's actually what drives all this.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:59:02)
You end up at femtosecond, but it's always because you're driving to be able to do a calculation or provide an amount of bandwidth, in the case of telecommunications, for a much larger amount of bandwidth for a much cheaper price to enable something to go on. A quantum computer is a good example of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:20)
No, that's actually really brilliant way of stating that. Like, it's, like, let's take those workloads that cost us lots of money to run on modern computing systems and then run them on a quantum computer for one millionth of the price.

(Morgan Kirk at 00:59:36)
That's exactly right. And that's, you know, I always bring it back to what I look at, but it's always going and seeing how can we optimize, how can we end up at a solution that makes things less expensive for what we're doing so we can do more of it, and that more of it can open up and enable another portion of the industry to work and grow and thrive. If you remember going back to the cellular industry again, it was originally done for whom? It's done for business people to capture an hour of their time on commute. And then it became cheap enough so that the average person got it for pleasure.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:00:12)
And then it became cheap enough so you could give it to every single person in your company, and again, capture their time when they weren't working. So it became sort of self-fulfilling to everything. And that's kinda where we go with all sorts of technologies. It just opens up. Everybody today can be a photographer because everybody has a camera, because everybody has a phone. Because everybody got a phone, because everybody needs to be connected. Everybody needs to be connected because it was cheap enough to connect people. It's incredible.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:41)
But it also, at the same time, it doesn't kill photography. What it does is it lets the best photographers, and it drives the market even harder. Now it's even harder to be a photographer. You have, your shots have to be so good. It has to, they have to have, they have to be multiple dimensions of emotion and light. Like, it just drives the craft, like, to its best, which then inspires the doers that are in other parts. Like, if I see this photography and maybe I'm making these video games, now I'm seeing the best photographer, and those people wouldn't have been driven that far without it, without the market being that way. It is kinda really beautiful how this, however this machine was designed, it's pretty fun.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:01:25)
You're absolutely right. It is incredible. And, you know, some people look at these things and they say, it's gonna put people out of work or it's gonna remove people from an ecosystem. I always look at it the opposite way.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:01:40)
When computers came out, they said, well, what will you do with secretaries? Well, the data input industry was an order of magnitude larger than the secretarial industry. So we actually didn't remove the need for these people. We changed the need for these people. Photography is another example.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:02:00)
You open it up to the masses, you became better at photography. There are more photographers today than there were. You talk about the Internet. You talk about journalism on the Internet. You have a lot more journalism.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:02:10) It's just very different than it was when you only had print media or when you only had video media. I have huge hope for the future because we continue to reinvent it. And every time we come to one of these points where we say, "Oh, things could go bad or things could go good," we've continued with some disruption to get on that path that ultimately ends up being good.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:36) Yes. Life is definitely an active player game.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:02:41) Well put.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:43) And, you know, as you were talking about photography, you know, now it's interesting. The need increased too, because now a local ice cream shop will pay their intern to take pictures of the ice cream every day and post on social media. Like, no one would have been paying photographers to do that.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:03:04) That was not a job. That did not add any value a decade ago. Now it does to a lot of different people, and maybe different people than were a decade ago, but absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:13) Yeah. Dude, how did you end up joining that company? Was it a recruiter, a friend? Like, how did you meet the people there, and how did you join?

(Morgan Kirk at 01:03:22) Yeah. So I came in through an acquisition. So I started off my career at Motorola and stayed with them for a while, both as a design engineer and then moved into product line management. And then switched over to a much smaller company. That was an experience that I wanted. And ever since then, I've been in a company that's been acquired by a company that's been acquired by another company. So I ended up at CommScope about a little over ten years ago through an acquisition. They acquired Andrew Corporation, which in turn had acquired Allen Telecom, which had acquired Meacom, which is where I came from. So yeah, through acquisition. But I've been in telecommunication because, like I said this at the beginning, there are few industries I can think of that have both done well financially and also helped humanity as much as communication. And I've been fortunate to see it through the last thirty years of change. And it's a neat place and an exciting place to be because what I see as the future is even more radically shifting than what the past has been.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:37) Communication gives me—it makes me happy. It makes me feel like people are smarter than they are. Like, our default state, the default processes running in the back of our mind are really smart because I started studying story, the concept of story through this guy Robert McKee. He's just a writer of screenplays, movies. You've watched some of his stuff for sure. But I got into him through this videographer I knew. And when I looked at, like, I took like a basic script writing class, and it's amazing how little you need to say and how much can be filled in. Like, if you read the script of a movie and you start hyper paying attention, first of all, it'll ruin movies a little bit for you if you really get into it because there's only so many stories. It's just how you get from A to B that's interesting. But it's so amazing how much your mind can fill in the blanks, and you don't need to explain every little detail. And that gives me a lot of hope that the average individual can process this amount of information.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:05:47) Yeah. Yeah. Well, and there's more and more information out there every single day that people have to process. If you were to take someone from a hundred years ago and bring them forward in any period of time ever in human history, they would think it was all magic, because so much has changed over that period of time. But I also believe that given a period of adjustment, they would also adapt to it. And I see this with a grandparent or when you deal with people in their eighties and nineties. They don't—they're in wonder of some things, and they certainly take—as you get older, you take longer to adapt to it. But they're adapting as well as people that are younger, which means it's really just a matter of training or being exposed to change. And, look, you said earlier, you left gaming for about five years.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:06:44) Enormous change in gaming. How long did it take for you to start, you know, replaying and be able to be an active participant and be able to be decent enough that you could—you know, you could be, I don't want to call it good, but you could be good again?

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:00) Yeah. Hold my own? Yeah. Ninety minutes.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:07:03) Yeah. Exactly. You skipped forward five years. Things had changed, but a lot of things had stayed the same. And if you actually look, I mean, a game is still the same thing that we did years ago. It has an up, down, left, right as its major functions. It has a kill button or a throw something with one hand, a throw something with the other hand, you know, and that's all that it is. And stories are basically the same. You just set it in movies. There's an object to the game. It's always to get to a certain goal. How you get to that goal is what changes. And what makes it really exciting in games is you deal with people now rather than with the machine, which is fixed. The people that are playing the game help create different ways of getting to that end goal that change continuously, and that's why it's exciting for a multiplayer game. That's why being connected to other people is exciting, because machines do the same thing over and over again.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:00) Oh, yeah. I love playing online with other people versus machines because they're always doing something you wouldn't expect, and then these behaviors and trends emerge, and then that creates styles. But do you have to jump off real quick? I know—

(Morgan Kirk at 01:08:14) No. No. I'm okay. I was just getting rid of that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:18) Yeah. So, yeah. I don't know. The future is amazing.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:08:22) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:22) And I'm very excited. And I want to give you a compliment too.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:08:25) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:25) And that compliment is, you know, I get to talk to a lot of people. And one of the things I get really excited—and I just get excited by this stuff. But I don't meet a lot of people who still get really excited. And so to see you really excited and be as far as you are in your career and to still be really excited makes me feel like I can—I don't have to hide that as much. Like, I can still be excited. I don't have to, like, curb that down for other people. I can still be pumped up.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:08:57) I appreciate that. I thank you for it. And if I give you this advice: don't. It's—if I wish that more people would wake up in the morning and say, "You know, there is something great that's going to happen today. And my job is actually to figure out what that thing is and to do it every single day of your life." You know, we get—too often, we get tied down with what can't happen, what shouldn't happen, what other people are doing to us. We can get trapped in that sort of negativeness, and it's completely unnecessary. The ability for humans in general to solve problems and create a better space is almost unlimited in my opinion. And so every day, I look at, like, you get this opportunity. You go away for—for me, it's five hours. For other people, it's eight. But you go away for five hours, and you wake up, and you get a blank sheet to work on, and there is no constraint of what you do. And then you just make sure that you're doing something that you really enjoy on average every day of your life. And mine happens to be in the space that I've chosen, which is in telecommunications, but it could be in farming. People can get excited and interested about any one of these things. And so, yeah. I mean, what you see is what you get with me.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:19) That's amazing. Where are you physically located?

(Morgan Kirk at 01:10:22) So I'm physically in North Carolina. We're officed out of Hickory, North Carolina. You may know of Hickory. That used to be the furniture capital of the world, but what you didn't probably know is this is also the area where fiber optics in the United States actually took off, and it's still its major home. Both CommScope and Corning, two big names in fiber optics, are located out of Hickory, North Carolina.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:48) Where is that? Like, is it northwest? Like, what corner is it?

(Morgan Kirk at 01:10:51) So it's north of, basically north of Charlotte by about forty, fifty minutes, depending on how quickly you go. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:02) I just pulled it up on Google Maps.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:11:04) Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:04) Yeah. Because I spent a lot of time up in the Cherokee National Forest, Nantahala, however you say it.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:11:12) Yep. Yep. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:13) So I've hiked like all up—

(Morgan Kirk at 01:11:16) I've gone hiking there. Yeah. It's gorgeous.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:18) Beautiful. Yeah. And so we actually did so many of those mountains, and then my sister used to live over in Boone.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:11:26) Mhmm. That's gorgeous area too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you do come back out this way, you should swing by. We'll show you what the inside of a plant building a lot of this stuff looks like. It's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:38) That would be pretty amazing. I've got some cool pictures on my phone too. Dad is in the Air Force and some of the first GPS units that they had that were like the size of a small building, you know?

(Morgan Kirk at 01:11:50) Okay. So, again, I'll date myself a little bit, but I was working for Motorola and we were making base stations at the time. These were CDMA base stations. Well, actually, they were analog base stations. They needed to have timing. And for timing, you need to get timing from somewhere, and this is before the GPS satellites were allowed to go to the public. So we had a backup system with the LORAN system that was a broadcasting system used for ships, and we had these crystal oscillators that we would use. The crystal oscillators would have to be temperature compensated, and they would hold your timing. They cost thousands of dollars to do. And then GPS modules came around, and they were, you know, four or five thousand dollars. And then you had chips that were doing it for hundreds of dollars. And now you get GPS in a, you know, I don't know, in a box of cornflakes. It's basically free. That's over a span of thirty-five or forty years. We've gone down five orders of magnitude in cost on something that's just fundamental. And so yeah. I mean, the old boxes and the old antennas that you needed to make these work, it's incredible what has happened. It's incredible.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:00) So back in the nineties, my dad, he was the second or third hire at this company that invented these screens, like, eight, ten inch screens that went inside of golf carts. And it would communicate back to the pro shops, and you could order stuff, and they would track their carts. And so they were putting these GPS chips that were like this big into them. So he would have me, like, soldering and screwing these into, like, all weekend, putting these GPS chips that were like that big into them. And I just remember doing that. I mean, growing up, my house smelled like electronics because—

(Morgan Kirk at 01:13:38) Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:39) Because we would have to—they were a startup. They ended up getting publicly traded and doing really, really well, hundreds of employees and—

(Morgan Kirk at 01:13:46) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:46) But they shipped their first batch out to, like, Tempe, Arizona, I think it was. And they melted because we live in Florida, and it's hot, but it's humid.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:13:57) And it's better. Cooler than it was in Tempe.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:00) Yeah. So we had these ovens in our garage, and we'd be baking electronics. And so my house smelled like baked electronics growing up. And so that solder smell is something that, like, when I smell it, it takes me back to childhood.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:14:15) Absolutely. Yep. Yep. Fantastic. Well, you know, that's another thing we don't think about, but today, we're using virtually two of our senses, right? When we communicate, we're using vision and we're using sound. So eyes and ears. We have five senses. Who's to say that tomorrow, we won't be more immersive? You won't have smell, you won't have taste, you know, you won't have touch.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:43) We need Neuralink.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:14:45) There you go. Exactly. I mean, and I'm serious. Those are—we started off with audio, which is just hearing, and we changed to audio and visual, but that's only two of five. I think there's a long way to go for communicating.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:00) Let's take some bets here. So obviously, video is higher bandwidth than audio. Yes. All right. Is smell higher or lower than video?

(Morgan Kirk at 01:15:11) I'm going to go with smell is lower than video, and I'm going to go with touch being higher than video. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:17) All right. I'll just take the opposite bets just so we can have a conversation in a few years.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:15:22) I'll meet you in a decade when it's available.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:26) Dude, we're doing it too. This is amazing. Yeah. Because those advancements with the haptic feedback suits and stuff, I was hearing from people that they have, like, zombies will hit you on the chest. You can feel the hand and, like, oh, it's so interesting.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:15:40) Yeah. And what will be amazing is, and you've sort of seen it a little bit with controllers. You know, I think Microsoft had one out with a gaming machine where you didn't actually need a controller. So you get controllers on the Xbox, right? And they have some feedback to you, some feedback in it. Then you get some, you know, sensors that are just watching your hands move. But they're starting to work on sensors that will—not sensors, but devices that will allow you to give feedback through air motion, so you don't need anything in your hands. So you get that feel back not by having a suit, but by things that are around you. So you're unconstrained from a suit.

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:16) That's unbelievable.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:16:18) Yeah. You're—again, you know, we're going to see things like we couldn't believe. And the question will be, when can your entire body be fooled into thinking that you're actually doing something that you're not doing?

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:30) Unless it already is.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:16:32) Well, maybe. Maybe this is all a dream. No. But, you know, we've gone from roller coasters to now you can do roller coasters indoors and your body thinks you're in great motion. I mean, you've seen those. But then if you just look off-site slightly, you realize you're just being rattled around. But what happens if your entire environment is being pushed and pulled and all of your senses are being confused? You won't be able to know the difference.

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:58) Have you done the Void yet?

(Morgan Kirk at 01:17:00) I have not.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:03) Oh, I encourage you to do it. Have you heard of it yet? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh, so we live, like, two hours south of Orlando, which is—

(Morgan Kirk at 01:17:11) Yep. Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:11) Huge tourist area. So they have one of them there. And we did it. And it's like a fifteen minute experience, but I'll tell you what. The entire time, I was kind of like wanting to take the goggles off, like how are they doing this?

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:23) This is so cool. They're doing like fireballs. You're feeling the heat. It is something else that they do a great job at tricking your senses.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:17:32) Yep, exactly. And that's really, you know, to gain the sort of experience that we're gonna have in the future. You know, right now it's pretty good because I can see you, you can see me, you can see how I'm feeling. You said, hey, you're excited about things. You can see things like that. That would have been harder just with audio. But it will not be that long before we actually are sitting at a table virtually, and I won't be able to differentiate between that and actually sitting next to the person in reality.

(Joel Beasley at 01:18:00) I keep up actively on watching the YouTube videos trying to figure out is that a rendering of the future, or do they have that product? Did they just get money because they have it and they wanna multiply the product, or do they just get money to make the rendering of it? You know?

(Morgan Kirk at 01:18:15) Yep, exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 01:18:16) Because I want it. I want it so bad. So as we start to wrap up here, I gotta know, what are your thoughts on how, because we're talking about the future and everything, how will we look at privacy? How's privacy gonna change? Have you thought about that at all?

(Morgan Kirk at 01:18:34) Yeah. So it is one of the bigger issues that we have, and we've, to a certain extent, lost track of that in our rush for not paying for things. And I think ultimately, it will end up being a currency that you will decide. Do I wish to pay for it with information? It's sort of the ultimate currency. Or do I decide to pay for it with some other type of currency? I'll call it dollars for lack of a better thing. Because today, you are paying for it unless you're very careful with information. And I think one of the big changes that will go on is people are starting to recognize this. People don't get a job because of things they posted on Facebook is sort of a perfect example of how that can directly affect you. But imagine your medical records were to be open to everybody. Maybe you don't get a job because you're too expensive to insure. Okay? Maybe nobody will take you into a hospital because you're predisposed to cost the hospital more money than they can recover, even if you were insured. And those make things very personal. And the irony, of course, is people take a DNA test at 23andMe, which keeps a database of what everybody does, and they actually pay money to do this. So you're paying money to have somebody else find out lots of information about you. Seems pretty strange to me. So I think what's gonna happen in relative short order, next twenty years, is that the information will be metered. You will continually have choices. Do I wanna pay $23 and get my DNA done? Or do I wanna spend a thousand dollars and get my DNA done? One, they keep my DNA information. Two, they don't. And so it'll be lots and lots of choices you have, and people will have to decide whether their information is worth something or not, long term and short term. And I think it's one of the bigger problems that we're gonna face because their business is built on it. I mean, Google as a business is built on mining eyes. Facebook is mining eyes. That's how they make their money.

(Joel Beasley at 01:21:07) That's interesting. I like what you said about the idea that we're already paying for it. You know, I'm a big fan of like, I pay for Pandora. It's weird. My wife, she doesn't. She does the ads. It doesn't bother her. She listens to radio. She does Pandora for free. I'm like, what? I can't. I don't wanna be influenced by the ads. I don't want that because they can affect your emotional state. They're designed to actually affect your emotional state, and I don't like that.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:21:43) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:21:43) So I would have no problem. I actually kinda wish Instagram or one of these services would just open up a paid option. Let me pay you $20 a month so I don't see ads. I'm so sick of these people coming through my feeds trying new ways to grab my attention. Even if they said, okay, I pay $10 a month, whatever, no ads. And then maybe another option where when I'm going to purchase something, if I purchase it through your directory—

(Morgan Kirk at 01:22:12) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 01:22:12) We both save money or you get money. I think there's better, more mature monetization models that everybody could agree on.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:22:19) So you're gonna end up, I don't think there will be one, you're gonna end up with a whole bunch of different models, and people are gonna choose. You're gonna choose to pay for it. Other people are gonna go through advertising. And in the case of a Pandora, it's very overt. In other words, you know you are paying for ad-free, and you know that you are getting the service through listening to ads. Those services are very overt. Where I think you get far more covert is not that you have ads when you do a Google search, but that those ads are targeted at you and are using all the information they've collected from you. And most people don't understand how to limit that amount of collection if they desire that so that people know something about you. Interesting thing that happened. You use these cards when you're in stores, and I don't remember which one did this, but they have these reward cards. And the reward cards, the reason you get a discount is because they're using that information to sell things to you. They're monetizing it, so it's not free either. And they really freaked out expectant mothers and really had a backlash because they were suggesting people buy prenatal care things or things for children before women knew they were pregnant based on other habits that they had. And people took that as very invasive. And so you see these occasional backlashes that go on. I think ultimately, it's all going to be about choice. You're gonna have to opt into things. You're gonna have to agree that, hey, my privacy is okay to be disturbed in this spot. Somebody like myself, you would see very little on. Somebody like my sister, you might see a lot. And that's okay if it's all overt, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 01:24:17) Because where I find happiness, right, or a lot of things come from is expectation, right? And I believe we should approach everything, and this is just the American in me, with the right that we have an expectation to privacy. Yep. And everything else should be overt. It should be very clear that we are giving up this, like, I don't think the end user licensing agreements are enough because it just needs to be really clear what we're giving up, and we need to be able to make an exchange. I should be able to say no and pay you money. You know. But right now, the way it's set up is you get locked out of the ecosystem if you don't give it up.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:25:02) Well, that's exactly right. And so this overt opting in is terribly important. But we've been really late to the privacy game as a society. I'll give you my favorite one of these. Until 2011, here's what you would have to do to know somebody else's Social Security number. Number one, lots of businesses asked for it and everybody gave it away, the last four digits of your Social Security number. They would just give that up instantly. Okay? If you went on a bus, you could hear someone on the telephone actually say what the last four digits were. Okay. Now Social Security number is made up of three digits plus two digits plus four digits. So you're giving up four. Leaves you five left. Okay? But do you know what the first three were?

(Joel Beasley at 01:25:54) It had to do with location, didn't it?

(Morgan Kirk at 01:25:55) It was location. It was where you were born because typically it was given away. So you go to somebody's social media account and you just got, of the nine numbers, you just got the last four and the first three. Now, zero-zero was never used and 99 was never used. And they were assigned odd, even, odd, even, odd, even. And a one in 50 chance of knowing your entire number with no effort whatsoever. And yet you gave that away, and you didn't think that was private, but everything in your life is tied to this, if you weren't very careful about it. So we've been really late to this game. And I think it's really important that people recognize, yeah, you got a problem if it's all laid out there even if you're a good person because other bad actors can come in and make huge serious damage to you because all this information is just sort of, I'll call it trusted. And the smaller a footprint out there, the less damage they can do to you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:27:00) It's amazing. And then with the deep fake stuff, I could actually make a video, copy, steal your voice, steal your face, and show you coming in, sitting down with me, and signing a contract—

(Morgan Kirk at 01:27:10) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 01:27:10) For something you never came in and signed a contract for.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:27:12) Absolutely. Yep. It is. It's a societal problem because without this, you end up without trust, and without trust, you can't have commerce, and without commerce, gosh, we got a huge problem. Actually, you go to things that are challenged. We were in the information age. I think we've blown right past that. We're in the misinformation age. And the people that are going to actually capitalize on this is, if somebody can figure out how to truly disseminate misinformation from fact-based information, they will make an absolute fortune because most of us don't take the time to go and look through three independent sources to try to figure out, is the information real or is it made up? So that's another problem that needs to be solved. Maybe that quantum computer can do it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:28:02) I'm hoping. Yeah, right? It's gonna have to take energetic and biological samples of me at the time of signing. I'm not kidding.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:28:11) Maybe. Carbon date the signature because the signature isn't worth anything. It's gonna be faked.

(Joel Beasley at 01:28:17) Yeah. But like I said, you know, we wake up in the morning with silver lining and we say, where can we contribute to help move this society forward because we're moving forward. Like, it's going to move forward and there's pain along the way and pain creates growth and resilience and we'll keep going forward, but I'm excited. I'm excited about the future.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:28:41) You and me both. Gets me up every morning and, yeah, I wouldn't wanna be in the world in any other time or place.

(Joel Beasley at 01:28:50) This is great, my friend. I lost track of time. We made a podcast.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:28:54) There you go. Well, I appreciate you having me on. It's been a great discussion.

(Joel Beasley at 01:28:59) Yeah. I'm definitely gonna mark you on the list, and we'll have you on next year and in the future because I really enjoyed talking to you. And then when all this social distancing stuff's over and I'm around the North Carolina area, I'll make sure to stop by and say hello.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:29:13) Please do. You're always welcome, and yeah, thanks for having me on. I appreciate the conversation. It gave me some new things to think about.

(Joel Beasley at 01:29:22) Thank you so much. Talk soon, Morgan.

(Morgan Kirk at 01:29:24) Take it easy. Bye now. Bye.