Michael Beckley - CTO at Appian

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Michael Beckley, the CTO and co-founder at Appian, and we discuss his collection of vintage technology, space elevators and moon bases, and how Appian's low-code platform is helping enable companies to move faster during COVID-19. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) It's Michael.

(Michael Beckley at 00:00:36) Hello, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) How are you doing?

(Michael Beckley at 00:00:38) Good to talk to you again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) Is that an Apple, like old school Apple? What is that back there?

(Michael Beckley at 00:00:44) Yeah, that's an old Mac Plus. That thing's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:49) Look how small that is.

(Michael Beckley at 00:00:53) The old nine-inch monitor.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:55) And then next to it you've got the big modern screen. It's just unbelievable what twenty years will do.

(Michael Beckley at 00:01:02) Yeah. I mean, if you were to see more around, you'd see I've got the whole museum here. I just taught my niece and nephew to code on Apple IIc's, code in BASIC, and it's remarkable to see how low-code as a concept really isn't new. The idea that business people are going to be able to build applications isn't new, but the tools we have are considerably more advanced today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:28) What other cool old technology do you have there?

(Michael Beckley at 00:01:31) Oh, I've got some of everything. I mean, I've got the original iPad, the original iPhone, some older stuff, whole bevy of old Apples, Apple IIc's, Apple IIe's, the original PowerBook, the original Mac Portable pre-PowerBook days. More of a luggable, has a big carrying handle, weighs about 17 pounds, I think. Yeah, just anything cool like that. I've got even much older technology as well, an old walkie-talkies from the 1940s.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) Really?

(Michael Beckley at 00:02:07) You know, some fun old radio tech. Things that have been passed down. Not to mention, of course, the old classic gaming consoles. You've got to have the original Atari 2600 and original Visions and things back from the 8-bit era.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:22) So where do you keep all of this stuff? Do you keep it at your house and you bring friends over and show them, or do you keep it at the office?

(Michael Beckley at 00:02:29) It's both. It's both in the office and at home. Well, the bigger collection is definitely at home. There's no room for it all at the office. Of course, my wife would complain there's no room for it at home either.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:41) You know, I listen to this one podcast, Joe Rogan, and he's got this warehouse that's like a man cave where the people they fly in, they come in to him. And have you ever heard that before? You ever heard his podcast?

(Michael Beckley at 00:02:55) I've heard his podcast. I haven't heard about his collection, but I've definitely seen a number of people who built, you know, filled barns full of classic equipment of one kind or another. I'm not at that stage yet, but it's getting there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:08) Yeah. I don't think he has a lot of technology, but he's got the fitness stuff and the cars, and I was thinking about doing a version of that for technology. I was actually just thinking about that last night as I was falling asleep. I was like, what is the next level for the podcast? And I said, you know, maybe we rent a warehouse, because we rent an office right now, but I was like, if we just rented a big warehouse, you know, we could put some cool old technology stuff there, and then we could have people we could, you know, pay to fly them in for the shows, and then it would just take it to that next level.

(Michael Beckley at 00:03:43) Yeah, certainly. And, you know, fill in whatever '80s techno vibe you want, get some old arcade consoles in there, get an Ultron machine or an old Space Invaders if you want to go back from the '70s.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:54) Yeah. I was thinking some older stuff, but then also we get one of those robotic dogs that you see from that company that spun out of MIT, Boston Dynamics. Get one of those.

(Michael Beckley at 00:04:06) Right. The serious dogs that are going to kill us all. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:10) Those dogs.

(Michael Beckley at 00:04:11) I was thinking more like a Sony Aibo, the old little cutesy pet dog.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:17) That would be cool too, and we could put them next to each other. Right?

(Michael Beckley at 00:04:22) They'd make a good pair. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:24) Yeah. They actually, I looked into this in 2017 or '18 to try to buy one of those. Jake, if you can remember, just chatted in the thing here. But to buy one of those robotic dog things that Boston Dynamics is building, and they were saying they weren't selling them. There was one person that they would let take them to tech shows and things like that. But I went and checked two weeks ago, and now you can buy them for development purposes, and they have an SDK for it, and they've gotten way more accessible. So I was thinking, oh, I'll probably buy one of those and program it like a Raspberry Pi.

(Michael Beckley at 00:05:01) Yeah. Yeah. I saw that they were getting more, they were attempting more outreach to developers, and that they gave one to the Mythbusters guy to do a little TV episode about and showcasing the programmability. You can find that online.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:17) Oh, really? I love the Mythbusters. Are they still doing that show?

(Michael Beckley at 00:05:21) Well, I don't know what the current production schedule's like, but the two guys, Jamie and, I forget the other gentleman's name, Adam. Yeah. And so one of them has got his own show that he does where he does fun things, and he was playing with the Boston Dynamics dog and having it try to climb over rocks and try to program it and teach it stuff. So you can find that on YouTube.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:49) I would definitely check that out.

(Michael Beckley at 00:05:51) Yeah. So we like to experiment with robotics too. We have a robot in the office called Baxter, which is one of those that's designed to be, it's basically a Linux box with arms and legs, and you can teach it to do things just by basically moving the arms around. And it's safe to work side by side with humans. Now it's incredibly slow, and it's already obsolete the way robotics changes every six months. But we're a software company. That's what we do, software. And we, just like everyone else though, we'd like to see more of the fusion between the Internet we see online and the real world around us. And so with sensors, we can create digital twins. And with Internet of Things, we can begin controlling the universe instead of just modeling representing it. And so yeah, there's definitely a convergence coming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:46) I like the way you said that. Now, have you guys gotten back into your office? Because at first it looked like you were in your office, and then when you moved around a little bit, I'm like, oh, that's a Zoom background, a custom Zoom background you must have made.

(Michael Beckley at 00:06:57) That's right. That's the custom Zoom background of my office, which is so, no, I'm not back in my office. This is my way of being back in the office. As of the end of June, we'll have about 10% of our workforce back in headquarters.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:12) And where is that located?

(Michael Beckley at 00:07:14) In Tysons, Virginia. So just outside of Washington, D.C. Yeah. The local Virginia, Virginia just entered phase two reopening, so we'll start with low-density access.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:26) I was thinking about you a lot when the whole COVID thing happened because, you know, that PPP stuff came out, and I was talking and thinking a lot about how these companies are going to spin up PPP applications. And I was like, that sounds like a perfect use case for low-code. Did you guys get to do any of that?

(Michael Beckley at 00:07:46) We did. We did. And in fact, many of our clients went ahead and used us. They already owned our software to build PPP apps in the twenty-four hours right after. So the government announced the legislation finally passed and was signed into law on, I think it was a Thursday. And so there was no warning as to what was actually going to be in it and no real knowledge as to what regulations were going to be required for the banks to implement. So what they did was they used Appian to overlay their existing loan origination systems and created that custom application process and did it in hours rather than, you know, days, weeks, months. And then they also frequently called us up for help, and so we got involved in helping them scale out those programs. But they were able to use low-code to do that work in hours. And that was really a clear use case for why low-code makes so much sense in the modern world in terms of not just being able to respond to a crisis, but just being able to move fast, just being able to get to market faster. And more importantly, as those regulations continue to change, as their interpretation changes, as the Small Business Administration puts out new guidance, as Congress gets more involved and puts in place their own priorities, the banks are able to respond in real time. It's not an onerous process to rethink those business tools. And to give you another example, you know, with Appian, we always talk about automation in the context of what we call full-stack automation. So when you model work in Appian to automate it, and that's what Appian does. So as a low-code automation platform, we help people automate their work. You model it as if humans are going to do it. We don't assume that we're going to be replaced by robots anytime soon. Instead, what we do is we use technology to augment human potential and human decision making and accelerate human decisions. And so you model what the human would do if they were handling an application for a loan for a small business through the PPP, that Payroll Protection Plan program from the government under the CARES Act. And then we allow tasks to be delegated to RPA bots or to AI algorithms or to APIs, to application programming interfaces as desired. But if one of those automations fails, if your robot dog falls over, the work is already modeled to flow automatically to be escalated to the next type of automation technology or to a human. And so you don't lose a step there. Everything continues to flow. And this turned out to be pretty crucial because before too long, the Small Business Administration came out and banned RPA bots from submitting to their website. Their site was overwhelmed, and they said you have to use either human workflow or our API. And of course, Appian customers, that was not a problem at all. They were easily able to either not adjust because they were already using one of those other automation methods or just the workflow to somewhere else, to another Appian automation. And at the same time, I was getting phone calls from consultants working with other banks using other technologies. They were frantic that day. That afternoon was crazy. And people were losing their minds, calling me up saying, what are you guys doing? How are you adapting to this? You know, how is this possible? How are you going to join us in calling up the SBA and complaining? And I was like, no, everything's fine. You know, if you were depending on a bot to do all your work for you and thought that was going to work, it didn't matter if the SBA banned you. You were going to run into problems anyway. You know, as soon as the rule changed, as soon as the process changed, as soon as the system changed somewhere, your bot was going to need to be reprogrammed. So, you know, it's just obvious in today's world that you want to augment human potential, not replace humans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:27) Yeah. And I was right in there, right, as a business owner. So I submitted, and you submitted there, and then you get an email a couple days later saying, oh, we cannot accept this because people started accepting prior to the, I forget the exact words, but they didn't release, they'd passed a law and then they have to release guidance to the banks. And it's interesting to actually go through this process in real time because I never experienced anything like it. But now just by living through this period of time, I understand how all the SBA stuff works, but just on a much longer process. Because they first create it, and then the banks start to implement it, but it's not perfect. So then they come back with a bunch more questions, and then they have to go have meetings and make adjustments. And then it's basically like product development happening in real time between the government and the private sector. And it was really kind of interesting to watch.

(Michael Beckley at 00:12:21) Yeah. And, you know, and not just intellectually interesting. Right? It has a real impact on people's lives. And so being able to build an agile system that can be changed by the business owners, this is not an academic problem. This is the way you build resiliency into a modern society, into a technologically advanced civilization. And, you know, while we experienced it now with COVID, this isn't the last time society is going to be challenged and civilization is going to be challenged, whether it's by a pandemic or murder hornets or hurricane or whatever. Right? You know, we have to build resiliency into our systems and agility and not depend on traditional waterfall development. You know, I was anticipating floods, I guess. It's the next stage that's going to come.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:07) Yeah.

(Michael Beckley at 00:13:09) So yeah, it's, sorry you have to go through that. But, you know, the next stage, of course, will be the forbearance processes as small businesses ask for forgiveness of loans. And we're right there. Our banks are already working to implement those. As we learn more about the rules and guidance that will come from the government at the last minute, we'll be there to make those adjustments in real time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:30) Yeah. That's the whole next step, but I was pretty excited about the updates that got passed. I think, I don't know if they got signed into law. I think they did because I got an email from my attorney, but they extended it to twenty-four weeks coverage period, and they did a couple of other things too to help with the forbearance.

(Michael Beckley at 00:13:49) Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the CARES Act touches a lot of different other parts of life, but COVID, you know, challenged us at Appian to respond like it challenged everyone. And so not only did we do the PPP applications you're talking about, but we introduced a workplace safety application, which is now being used by some of the largest companies in the world to track the health and safety of their workers as well as the contact tracing manually if someone reports that they've tested positive for COVID. And the follow-up case management is all managed in Appian because Appian is typically used to pull together data and automate the processes for resolving a case.

(Michael Beckley at 00:14:28) And, of course, the facilities management to ensure that your facilities have sufficient personal protection equipment, PPE, and are cleaned after an incident so that people can return to the workplace safely. And so, you know, working with large global manufacturers, Appian, of course, being a large global public company, has that ability to have this multilingual solution working internationally, securely, HIPAA compliant here. Europeans don't care about HIPAA. They care about GDPR, GDPR compliant there. You know, high trust certified cloud solution that can be configured in a day by HR staff without needing coders.

(Michael Beckley at 00:15:08) And that's allowed us to reach a whole new audience of people who are not traditional Appian clients and help them in their time of urgent crisis to get up and running more quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:19) That is really exciting. So have you seen what they're doing with the workplace safety solution? Like, I don't understand. I can imagine if you're a large—I'm a small business. I can imagine if you're a large company, you're going to have some guidelines or thing. But what are they using the low code stuff for?

(Michael Beckley at 00:15:34) Yeah. So what Appian allows them to do is tailor the guidelines for every facility in its local regulations and regions as well as that facility's unique requirements for health and safety. So you can imagine an office is different from a manufacturing site. And if you think about it, a typical manufacturer these days will also have its own retail. It will also have its own distribution centers.

(Michael Beckley at 00:15:53) It has to track visitors, and it has to track contractors, and it has to think about the unique challenges of those different types of environments and have specific guidelines. But rather than having to code those, you know, an HR person can simply go in, pick the facility, create a questionnaire that's tailored to that facility, and give guidelines in response to the answers that people give to those questions. So, depending on the local situation, that may be reporting to a local government authority, might mean it might require an OSHA, Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration report, because these days now the government's decided that if you get a COVID infection at the workplace, that would be treated like any other workplace injury. And, you know, things that weren't even known what the policies would be four weeks ago, well, Appian's able to make that quick update to the solution and push it out to all of our clients. And so, you know, keeping everyone going in this time.

(Michael Beckley at 00:16:44) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:45) It's definitely interesting. It's interesting to see an—it's interesting to see this happen because it amplifies these core principles of human behavior. So from just an observationist standpoint, it's a lot of fun. And, you know, there's obviously a lot of leeway given and understanding, but it was definitely cool to see everybody respond so quickly. And, you know, this idea of building an app from scratch for everything is just so not possible for situations like this when you need a low code infrastructure.

(Michael Beckley at 00:17:27) Yeah. It wasn't possible without low code, and now it is. You know, we all were shut out of the workplace when Virginia shut down, for example, in March. And within a few days, we had the first workplace safety application up and available. And, you know, today, we actually just launched a specific version for universities called Campus Pass and higher education.

(Michael Beckley at 00:17:49) You know? So, again, think about the unique needs of a student population, trying to figure out who's coming back to campus in the fall and, you know, the way the different generations are responding and giving them—giving faculty and students, administrators all the interfaces they need. You know, that's something that we're pretty excited to do, and it just took, you know, another week's worth of work on top of what we'd already done. So, yeah, it's incredible what low code can enable. And it's obviously not just us anymore.

(Michael Beckley at 00:18:18) It's the whole ecosystem of Appian partners who are doing incredible things for their clients.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:23) So I was curious about—I was doing some research, right, about the top topics for 2020 and technology. And one that I've seen rising up is the RPA. And so I'm curious, how does low code and RPA interface with each other?

(Michael Beckley at 00:18:42) Yeah. So we've been interfacing the two for years now, and I think people are just starting to realize how intricately connected they should be. You know, if you think about on the one hand, traditionally, RPA was just used to automate a repetitive cut and paste task into a system that didn't have an API. So if you want to scrape a website, web scrape a web page, or you want to interface with a legacy green screen mainframe. So RPA would be fine for that.

(Michael Beckley at 00:19:13) But if

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:14) you need to build a

(Michael Beckley at 00:19:14) new system that doesn't exist, RPA can't help you. You know, that's really where low code shines. But in reality, what you need is the best of both worlds. You know? So you want to build a new system to handle PPP loans.

(Michael Beckley at 00:19:29) Well, you're going to need to build that new, so you need some low code. But you're going to need to work with your existing finance system. You're going to need to work with your existing loan origination system. And you may be able to do that with an API, but inevitably, there's going to be something that doesn't work elegantly. And now you've got your RPA bot who can help you marshal the right paperwork, and low code can help you then, you know, finish the work and give you a total solution.

(Michael Beckley at 00:19:53) So it really is low code platforms allowing you to build context and intelligence and state management and really that whole picture that an RPA bot doesn't have because RPA bots, they're really kind of stupid. I mean, let's be clear. They do only exactly what you teach them. They don't have persistent memory. They don't have that overall process context of end to end what is the goal you're trying to accomplish.

(Michael Beckley at 00:20:22) That's what you build in an app. That's what you model in a low code platform, in a low code automation platform. And so by combining that human work with the ability to task an RPA bot from within a low code platform, then you get the true value. And so that's what we've done with Appian. Whether it's an Appian bot, we provide our own RPA bots, which are great.

(Michael Beckley at 00:20:45) They're cloud bots. They can scale them up really cost effectively, have a large bot farm processing a lot of paperwork for you. Or we work elegantly with our partners. You know, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, all work seamlessly out of the box with Appian and our robotic workforce manager. You know, and that's our approach to things.

(Michael Beckley at 00:21:02) It's like in the modern world, systems are becoming more distributed. There's more participants and specialists. And this idea that we're all going to be using IBM computers running IBM software and, you know, that's all you'll ever need. Like, that the seventies mentality of the mainframe is dead. You know?

(Michael Beckley at 00:21:17) So we give you everything we think you need, but most importantly, we give you the ability to swap out any of our pieces with your favorite vendor, your favorite choice, and keep that integration, keep that holistic control.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:31) You get pretty excited about this stuff.

(Michael Beckley at 00:21:35) Well, it's, you know, it to me, it's what I think I've said to you in the past. I grew up with this notion, like, that Macintosh computer behind me on the screen. I grew up with Apple IIs. I grew up with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak promising that we would all be creators of technology and that we wouldn't have to be computer scientists to do it, that we could be biologists. We could be astrophysicists.

(Michael Beckley at 00:21:59) We could be economists. We could be political scientists. We could look at the world through what we're passionate about and use technology to get our work done faster so we could think about changing the world and not think about syntax errors. And so, yeah, I think what we're doing is really important to unlocking the entire human potential. And it was something that was promised to me as a kid, and it wasn't delivered.

(Michael Beckley at 00:22:25) You know, it turned out to be so much harder than just coding in BASIC. And that's a shame. Right? You know, technology is so much more sophisticated than it used to be, and yet it's still so much harder than it should be, than it needs to be, to actually empower people to be creators and to design a better future. So, yeah, that's what we're trying to accomplish.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:48) Preach, Michael. Dude, I love it. I feel the same way. And it's these type of people, you know, that see it and they get this desire to push it forward that actually end up as a collective. We all—there's enough of us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:02) We reach critical mass, and then we push things forward. And that's how we get to the next stage. And, you know, I keep—when I first started having this topic of conversation about Elon Musk's Neuralink and persistence of consciousness, I kind of was awkwardly going into it saying, this the general sentiment that I hope he achieves the goal and we reach the ability to capture a state of consciousness and persist it prior to me expiring. Right? And so but now I'm like, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:35) There's no reason to be shy about that. That's not that science fiction-y. I mean, with, you know, things that give me hope, the lady that made the discovery of CRISPR gene editing. Right? Prior to her doing that, she said they were, like, three to ten years out, and then she did it, and then she was blown away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:53) Like, there are really just, like, a few little massive changes that need to take place in our understanding of physiology and our psychology, and then that could actually be possible.

(Michael Beckley at 00:24:08) Yeah. It's funny you mentioned that. That specific example, I was just started reading, John Scalzi's science fiction work called Old Man's War yesterday, and the concept is built—that book is built around transferring consciousness into a new body. And so, that's science fiction. You know, Elon Musk is working on science reality, and it will be three to ten years off until the day they invent it.

(Michael Beckley at 00:24:33) So, you know, I think that there's a great deal of progress that can be made and improvements that can be made without us even solving the entire problem. You know, you think about it with prolonging quality of life. I mean, for me, I'm a living example of that. I had a heart transplant ten years ago, and that was, you know, first attempted back in, I think, the nineteen fifties by Blakely and, like, '56 or something like that. Maybe a little after that was the first attempt.

(Michael Beckley at 00:25:05) And yet it took some unlocking of the immune system, right, to actually make that system work. We don't know what we're going to have to unlock to make it possible to, you know, interface better with machine and consciousness in the human. But we do know that it's fundamentally going to behave according to the laws of physics and biology that we already know. So it's well worth exploring. And along the way, along that journey, you know, who knows what kinds of advancements in human quality of life and human potential we'll unlock.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:37) No. You make a good point. Because we also don't have to—it's not like we have to unlock it all at once. Like, if we just got everyone to live a hundred and fifty years through a few advancements, and then that just buys us more time. Because I'd say that the area where we lose the most productivity is in death because all these lessons have to be, you know, you got—we first wait twenty years for maturity, then you have to learn all of these lessons and then you get into maturity with knowledge, and then you have a small portion of the career left, and then you're in retirement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:08) So you just had that sliver. Right? And so if we can expand that by improving our length of life, that would just help it grow even faster and get us these amazing advancements sooner.

(Michael Beckley at 00:26:22) Yeah. Quite possibly. I mean, obviously, every new technology advance has to be thought of in terms of its holistic impact on society. What will it mean when, if we do achieve, you know, greater longevity for opportunities for young people? You know, I think that, ultimately, we have to understand and find our place in the universe and grasp what does it mean to be finite in our lifespan and, you know, to all have the same amount of time, whether it's, you know, twenty years or two hundred years or two thousand years.

(Michael Beckley at 00:26:53) It's one lifetime. So, you know, how do we make that meaningful and take care of what needs to be taken care of around us. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:00) Yeah. Because, I mean, even if we get persistent consciousness, we still have the heat death of the universe. So

(Michael Beckley at 00:27:08) That's a little longer perspective problem. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:11) But the time will fly by.

(Michael Beckley at 00:27:14) So

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:15) I like thinking big. I like that you like to think big, and I like that there's also a realistic path because, you know, Musk isn't saying, you know, we're going to invest billions to persist consciousness. He's just saying that's the end result. We're going to start by, you know, making better technology to solve things that are very solvable through current implants. And so I love that the path to where we want to go is laid with legitimate business reasons along the way because that makes it all the more possible.

(Michael Beckley at 00:27:42) Yeah. So the smartest thing that Musk ever did was realizing that the entire game of getting to orbit was about price per pound. It was just economics. Brilliant. So as cool as it is watching those Falcon 9 rockets land or Falcon Heavy break apart and land in pieces individually, it's really all serving one very basic economics principle.

(Michael Beckley at 00:28:06) Can you lower the price per pound to orbit? Because until you do that, talking about moon, Mars, talking about Starlink, talking about anything you want to do outside of the influence of Earth's gravity is academic. That's totally irrelevant. And when we look at the history of human space flight or any space flight for that matter, robotic or human, it comes down to that basic economics. And just like the personal computer was supposed to allow us all to just become creators, the space shuttle was promised to my generation in nineteen seventy-eight, seventy-nine as being something that was going to unlock human space travel, and anyone was going to be able to go to space.

(Michael Beckley at 00:28:47) Why? Because it was supposed to be reusable. It was supposed to be 10 times cheaper per pound to take anyone and anything that they need, like water and air, with them to space. Now the shuttle turned out to be 10 times more expensive than a disposable rocket in the end. And it never achieved the 60 or 70 flights it was supposed to be taking a year.

(Michael Beckley at 00:29:10) Instead, we got 60, you know, about 60 flights the entire life of the program from, you know, nineteen eighty-ish to, you know, 2000—what was that? 2012, 2013 last shuttle flight. Right? 2012? 2011 maybe?

(Michael Beckley at 00:29:24) Who knows? Right? So, early two thousands. Yeah. Yeah.

(Michael Beckley at 00:29:27) So, I mean, I saw that last shuttle orbiter when it was down. I was down at The Cape for the Juno mission to Jupiter, and they were still servicing the last shuttle before it was sent off to the museum. And that was moving. It was quite emotional because the shuttle program to me represents all of this American potential and this belief in progress and science, and it was going to make our lives better. And it did tremendously cool and valuable things like putting Hubble up and repairing Hubble and building the International Space Station and many other things.

(Michael Beckley at 00:29:58) But it was also a colossal disaster. The shuttle program not only resulted in multiple deaths tragically, but also tragically set us back in our quest to lower the price per pound to orbit. And it's so strange to talk about, but that's what it was for. It was supposed to make it cheap and affordable for you to take a vacation to space, go stay in a low Earth orbit hotel.

(Michael Beckley at 00:30:23) That's fun, but that allows the money to push science ahead. We should have radio telescopes on the far side of the moon already that are helping us not only unlock the mysteries of the universe and figure out is the universe expanding or contracting and what do we see beyond the observable universe and answer fundamental questions about physics and matter and who we are, but also setting up a useful way for us to detect and deflect asteroids long before they can wipe us out the way they wiped out the dinosaurs. So this stuff matters.

(Michael Beckley at 00:30:53) It really does. And it comes down to understanding simple incremental progress based on fundamental principles. What are we trying to achieve? And so with low code automation, we are trying to make it 20 times faster to build a new application, to automate some work. And if we can achieve that kind of economies of scale, then anyone will be able to create what they want to create.

(Michael Beckley at 00:31:15) And we will allow so much value in human creativity to be unlocked that just like getting to space cheaply and getting access to space, we'll get access to cyberspace for everyone. And so that's what we're about. And I love to see inventors who get it, who see right away what is the missing piece and how they can chip away at that and get incremental value to fund their continued revolutionary progress.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:45) I like that you have that model because I have a model in my head that I ask myself what are the humans building constantly. If I'm standing on another planet and I'm looking down and I see them all going to work and doing their things, they're all building something as a collective organism. What are they doing? Where are they going?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:03) And then how can I help remove resistance on that path? Because if you can, that's solving a legitimate problem for the species, and you will be able to generate revenue so that you can—people that want to help and be useful, the byproduct has revenue. I'm sorry. It just is. It's just the result of it, and you can tell how useful things are service-wise based off of the revenue that's generated from them because we just keep building on top of things and having new problems and then doing that on and on and on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:36) But I didn't get that idea, that concept until about two years ago on a flight. I was just flying, I was just thinking, and I was like, how is what I'm doing today helping remove resistance from the species to go forward? And how can I tie that back to what I'm doing? And you did the same thing when you were talking about price per pound and connected all the way back to what you're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:58) So I like that you have that model in your head. Was I kind of getting close to how you see it?

(Michael Beckley at 00:33:04) Yeah. That's exactly how I see it. Couldn't have said it better myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:08) Nice. We're best friends now, Michael. Hey. Would you ever do one of those low Earth orbit type air flights where you can go—it's padded and you can kind of go—would you ever do one of those?

(Michael Beckley at 00:33:22) No. So I had the pleasure of spending a weekend with Richard Garriott, private astronaut, creator of Origin Systems, pretty much invented Dungeons and Dragons on the computer back when I was a kid. And he is an investor in Space Adventures who owns the Vomit Comet, it's called, colloquially.

(Michael Beckley at 00:33:42) The airliner that is padded and goes up and runs the parabola flights. And in the middle of that weekend, he showed up for one of the events—this is it was organized by his new company, Portalarium, which is making a new video game. And he showed up late because they had an extra seat unsold on the flight that morning, and so, of course, he went out and took it.

(Michael Beckley at 00:34:07) This is what he does. He's taken countless flights on that thing, taking advantage of his investment. And so I've definitely had plenty of time to think about it and some access and certainly could have spent the money for one of those tickets. But no. I do know my limitations and my body, perhaps better than most people having had it surgically enhanced significantly just to stay alive.

(Michael Beckley at 00:34:35) So yeah. No. I am not fit for extreme sports and events. You won't find me diving to the bottom of Challenger Deep. You won't find me flying into low Earth orbit or flying parabola flights.

(Michael Beckley at 00:34:49) No. I am stuck here on the ground trying to invent things so that other people can take flight. And that's okay with me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:55) Yeah. It's all about knowing yourself and knowing what you want. And I always encourage people to do that—figure out who you are and what you want, and then go after it.

(Michael Beckley at 00:35:07) The flip side of that, of course, is if we can just get things moving a little better with the material science, we can get the space elevator built. And then I can go to orbit and take a look at the—get my overview effect experience and see the curvature of the earth and all of that. But until we get that space elevator, probably too high g an experience for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:27) So you're pro space elevator?

(Michael Beckley at 00:35:29) Oh, totally pro space elevator. Definitely. Yeah. Although I will say my cardiologist who did my heart transplant insists that his sutures are stronger than the natural, and that I could probably be fine. But because I—that was the first thing I did ask him after the heart transplant.

(Michael Beckley at 00:35:45) I said, you know, is it alright if I go skydiving? Is it alright if I buy a ticket on Virgin Galactic and do a suborbital flight? And he was like, he just paused for just a moment. He was like, no one's ever asked me that before, which seems strange. I mean, you get a second chance at life.

(Michael Beckley at 00:36:01) Wouldn't you ask that question at least?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:03) Yeah. Or roller coasters.

(Michael Beckley at 00:36:08) So, uh, but yeah. We'll see. It's not impossible, but I've got plenty of other exciting things to do right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:16) I have not looked into the space elevator. I've seen it. I've seen drawings of it, and I've skimmed an article. But there's that skimming knowledge that people have, and then there's a I went down the rabbit hole on this one. I have not gone down the rabbit hole on the space elevator.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:31) But there are enough smart people talking about it that it's kind of encouraging me to do so.

(Michael Beckley at 00:36:36) Yeah. I mean, it's worth looking at. You can see, obviously, carbon nanotubes are nowhere near advanced enough for us to build it yet. We could build a few inches of space elevator, and we need to build, obviously, a few hundred miles. The principles are all sound.

(Michael Beckley at 00:36:52) I think that the question is, as a society, can we be organized enough to do it and commit enough of our wealth and resources to have the vision to see that it would ultimately resolve that question of price per pound to orbit in a dramatically new way that you can never really get to with reusable rockets. And for anyone who doesn't understand the space elevator, it's just putting a big counterweight out in geosynchronous orbit and building down a cable to Earth and as you build up and eventually they meet. And so there's a lot of different ways you propel the elevator cars up and down, but a lot of different proposals for that. Everything from lasers to onboard nuclear power to transmitting electricity up and down the tether. But yeah, it should work.

(Michael Beckley at 00:37:34) Should work as long as we can agree not to try and knock it over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:42) We don't want to knock it over. I did go deep on carbon nanotubes a few years ago. I did go down that rabbit hole. I was so excited, and then I found out that they could only build millimeters or feet. It was a very low amount.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:52) Yeah. Very low amount. Dude, this is good. You like a lot of different technology stuff.

(Michael Beckley at 00:37:58) Well, they don't call me chief technology officer for nothing. And the other thing we're looking at right now—what's old is new. Now that we're talking about boots on the moon in 2024 and the new space race is obviously going on and whether you watch the Steve Carell Netflix version or you watch the headlines and tweet version between China, the US, and Russia and others—India, Japan, all its space programs, all aiming at the moon and Mars. Heck, even the UAE is launching space missions these days.

(Michael Beckley at 00:38:32) But the idea of how do you build a moon base and how do you live long term on the moon, there are so many fascinating engineering questions and studies that were done back in the fifties and sixties and then shelved when Apollo ended and we went for the shuttle program and focused on orbit. And it was primarily because the original plans all were predicated on the idea that the military needed to be on the moon to drop nuclear bombs on Earth, which never made any sense in the first place. But once people figured out that just shooting a missile up and down again was a lot cheaper, basically, we haven't thought deeply about how to live and work on the moon in decades, and yet a lot of really good science was done on it back in the Apollo program and before the Apollo program.

(Michael Beckley at 00:39:20) And so now we need to figure out again because we want to go to the moon and we want to stay. We want to be able to do science there. We want to be able to do zero g manufacturing there. We want to be able to mine, get helium-3 for fusion reactors of the future. There's a lot of great reasons to be on the moon that have nothing to do with dropping nuclear weapons on people.

(Michael Beckley at 00:39:35) But you might require a RTG or radiothermal generator, basically, a plutonium-powered reactor to stay on the moon for a long time. So it's a fascinating set of problems, and we'll see how they get worked out. But until we get there, until you start actually having people experimenting, all that theory is only going to get us so far.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:02) I like, though, that I think humans are getting smarter with each generation. And I feel like that's a pattern as far as even if you go back and you look at history and things we used to do, whether it's on the ten years or the fifty year or the hundred year increments, it seems like we are just getting smarter as a people. And that gives me hope.

(Michael Beckley at 00:40:20) Well, that I would disagree with, Joel. You know, I find the more I study history, the more I am impressed with how brilliant our ancients were and how stupid we are. Just the basic stuff. How did they build the pyramids without computers? How did philosophers understand that the Earth was round, that the Earth went around the sun before we even had direct observation to prove it?

(Michael Beckley at 00:40:35) That kind of genius to me has always been rare, but I think that it becomes increasingly rare in a world where there's a ton of knowledge but not a lot of wisdom. And our overreliance on machines and technology and the Internet can perhaps allow more of us to get by being stupid. And so, yeah, when I used to be able to travel overseas before COVID and look at ancient architecture, it was so tempting to look at it all as primitive because you were looking at ruins. And one of the things I really love about augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality is how it's being used by archaeologists and anthropologists to bring the beauty and sophistication of ancient civilizations and ancient architecture to life so that a new generation can see and respect the wisdom of the ancients for what it was in its glory as it was, rather than seeing the rotted decrepit ruins of generation after generations wrecking those castles and wrecking those cathedrals and wrecking those machines that they had built.

(Michael Beckley at 00:41:56) I think one of my favorite archaeological finds is the ancient Greek combination astrolabe found in the Mediterranean. And once they finally started imaging it correctly, they realized that you could calculate all kinds of things—your latitude and the orbits of different planets and all this craziness thousands of years ago that they were managing to figure out how to do and then making mechanical entities to express those calculations because, of course, they didn't have digital computers. So I'm not convinced that evolution is working to our advantage right now in terms of making us smarter. I am thinking, though, that certainly by building on the inventions of the past, as long as we're smart enough to keep them and not burn down our libraries of Alexandria too regularly, as long as we continue to not let superstition hold us back, as long as we allow free ideas and free thinking as opposed to dictatorial regimes repressing scientific discourse and repressing collaboration between teams, then we can meet the world's challenges.

(Michael Beckley at 00:43:07) We can detect and identify and immunize society against pandemics. We can invent better seed stocks so we can feed more people. It's obvious that we're stuck together, so we've got to figure out a way to use technology to get along and prosper together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:30) Yeah. That was a lot of good stuff that I agree. I don't know where I want to jump in and respond. But I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think I want to talk a little bit about the ancient stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:43) They had a lot of time, like signal versus noise, I guess, where it's very noisy now. So I think if you removed the noise today of the advancements, the amount of philosophical thoughts would be explosive. I think there's a lot of that going on—a lot of people thinking deeply, but we're in such a distracted world now. We have all the tools to communicate the deep thoughts, but we're too distracted to really do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:10) But I do think overall, from some of the TED Talks I've watched about the decrease in violence, I think that's padded. I think equally on the other side, there's problems too. When you make a society so padded and so easy to survive, you're going to have the weak part of the society grow just by definition. I don't know the point I'm trying to make, but I was trying to come to a good thought there based off what you were saying. But I do think that there are a lot of smart people having deep thoughts. There's just a lot of noise out there too, and I think that the premium people, the people that you'll pay a premium for, are the people that can weed out the noise.

(Michael Beckley at 00:44:52) Well, certainly that's always been the case, and there is a lot more noise out there from which we have to derive a signal. And if you think about that in pure low code platform terms to bring it back to what Appian does, you're able to instrument so much more now. You're able to monitor Internet of Things devices. You're able to instrument a business process. You're able to collect a ton of data, and it still costs money to store all that data.

(Michael Beckley at 00:45:17) Maybe cost a lot less than it used to, but you have exponentially more data. So you have to be thoughtful about what you keep and have good filters to focus on what's valuable. But there was something you said that I do want to comment on about the ancients again, and you talk about distraction becoming more of a problem today than it was, how they had more time back then. I don't know how you measure that, but I know and I enjoy reading old material where generation after generation complains about something, you know?

(Michael Beckley at 00:45:48) It was television was a big distraction. Before that, radio was going to corrupt our morals and be a distraction, and no one was going to do anything. So we're going to sit around listening to the radio all the time. Before that, the newspaper and the printing press were these new distractions that were going to overwhelm us with noise instead of signal. And before that, you know, before we had iPad tablets, I'm sure they had wax tablets, and I'm sure that was a big drama.

(Michael Beckley at 00:46:10) Oh my gosh, the kids these days writing everything down on wax tablets. But before that, you know, obviously, life spans were much shorter and your distractions were you needed to actually hike miles to get water that was fresh if you were lucky, and you had to barter for food and you had to be constantly repairing your house and putting new fresh straw on the rooftop so you didn't get all washed away or something, and you didn't have that nighttime because you didn't have electric lighting. So your amount of time to actually think as opposed to just survive was probably minimal. And then, of course, you probably had 12 children because you couldn't count on many of them surviving childhood, so you were constantly dealing with sick and disease and all kinds of other horrible things.

(Michael Beckley at 00:46:55) So I don't know that it's very helpful to think about us as having any special advantage or disadvantage. I think we have to look at what we have today and diagnose it accurately for what it is and what are our challenges and what are our opportunities. And right now, our challenges are still pretty prosaic. We have a ton of paperwork even though we live in a digital world. Now they're just PDFs.

(Michael Beckley at 00:47:18) We've got to find a way to scan them more efficiently. We've got to find a way to use RPA and artificial intelligence to efficiently get our work done faster, but to do that to empower humans to think big about what problems they want to solve. And that's all we're trying to do at Appian is give people the better tools to do that, you know, a sharper stick, a better hammer. And so that's the way I like to think about it.

(Michael Beckley at 00:47:44) In the same way that I like to not assume that every new generation of employees at Appian is somehow fundamentally different than I was as a kid coming out of school. Of course, there are differences, and of course, they've had different experiences. But, you know, it was Cicero who railed against kids these days in his writing and how this—you know, that to me was the obvious reality that every generation complains about the next generation after it and with some good reason. But also every young generation, it's their job to rail and rebel against the old because we need to get out of their way. And so to bring it back to your idea, technology can make us all live longer, that may create even more intergenerational friction.

(Michael Beckley at 00:48:25) You know? Because there'll be more opportunity for us to have this greater conflict of experiences. And imagine if you have trouble learning Snapchat, you know, how much trouble you're going to have learning these new implanted machines of the future unless you were raised with them. It's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:45) I think you make some amazing points. I mean, I know you make some amazing points. I really like—you opened my mind up a lot when you talked about the distractibility of previous people. I don't know why I have it painted in my head that it was, you know, quiet and you were making bread all day or whatever. But you're right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:02) Sourdough starter. Yeah. But what it's where it's pulling me as far as a thought is that it's the people who choose to make time for these things to be reflective or for the people who have those capabilities and those gifts to use them. Some people control their time, and some people are controlled by time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:27) You know? And I mean, for the first—I didn't have self-awareness. I mean, I was a late bloomer. I didn't have real self-awareness until 25-ish. I didn't realize I was a person on Earth with options.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:39) I mean, I already built my own house and I had gone through, you know, sold companies and then all of a sudden, I just woke up one day and I get—it's like I physically felt, you know, how they talk about the brain maturing at certain ages. I felt the process going and continuing to go into my early thirties. And it's just a really interesting realization because I could never explain it to my past self. But making the time to think about that stuff, to be reflective, to understand, to achieve new levels of understanding, and be comfortable with the world and understand how it's going through these changes and how you obviously are very well versed on the past, and you look a lot into history and how things repeat themselves and how you can develop in order to deal with timeless things. And so I think that there will be this maturity people will be able to reach that should be persisted because it'll help us go farther in the long term.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:41) Yeah. I really like the way your mind thinks. I think it's really sharp. You even picked up on this concept, belief structures. And when you're talking to the next generation, usually, those people are bothered because they're causing issues with their mental model of the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:59) Right? That's usually why I see one generation point down to the next generation. It's like, I had a fixed model. I figured out life, and now you're disrupting it and the kids these days.

(Michael Beckley at 00:51:08) That's right. That's right. You know, if technology can help us adapt to change, then maybe we'll make some progress on that front. And I like how you talk about time. You know, time is its own construct, obviously.

(Michael Beckley at 00:51:19) And, you know, as a social scientist—my cofounders are social scientists. We think about how to design software that helps us overcome the tyranny of time and also overcome the human mind's limitations around how many things it can keep on its mind at once. Right? So you can only handle four or five things cognitively simultaneously. But software can help you, prompt you with reminders, keep you organized, and keep you focused on long-term goals that may have hundreds of things required to obtain them.

(Michael Beckley at 00:51:53) And so, you know, we give humans an ability through software to actually achieve greater things by rewarding the brain's pleasure cycles with instant accomplishment before a deferred gratification of a long-term goal. So, you know, by modeling all these subsidiary tasks, we can keep you excited and engaged and keep things moving. And it may not be pure gamification. It's really just a simple cognitive design with an understanding of the human mind. To do that at a macro level as a society is much more challenging.

(Michael Beckley at 00:52:31) You know, I'm trying to solve one problem at a time, but what you're talking about is solving an entire generation's problems and their model of the world and all of those different challenges they face. You know, how can we get people organized and aligned? You know, that's what democracy is—is the best model we've come up with for trying to achieve consensus, and we know how imperfect that is. So there's certainly room for improvement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:57) Yeah. And money is a big driver too. That's a really good one.

(Michael Beckley at 00:53:01) It is. Right? But even that has its own limitations clearly and market failures. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:07) And everything, regardless of what method you choose, can be, for lack of a better word, I'll use manipulated nefariously. So it's not necessarily, you know, the—I think you can almost manipulate any model negatively if you have enough energy and will to do so. But nothing's perfect, but that's when I get into these conversations or states of mind, I remember Bill Nye. In one of his books, he talked about this concept of good enough. And so that helps me back down from my natural perfectionism style.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:40) I was like, okay. If it's good enough to pass on to the next generation, if it's good enough for the organic structure of life, then I can use that concept good enough to back down from some of the things I'm being over-perfectionist about.

(Michael Beckley at 00:53:55) Yeah. That's a great construct, and I love Bill. I had a chance to meet him at the Juno launch as well down at Cape Canaveral. And, you know, what a genuine guy in person. He is just like he is on TV.

(Michael Beckley at 00:54:09) He's thoughtful. He's engaged, and he really cares about people and was really giving with his time. But to your point, it's accepting our own failures and compromises, you know, to make it possible for us to go forward. You know, I am a perfectionist. I don't want to let anything out early, but we have to get into this reality of, yeah, most of what you're doing is good enough.

(Michael Beckley at 00:54:34) It is helping move things forward. And fundamentally, you know, that's at its best, that's what capitalism encourages, right, is to recognize that you don't have to wait for—we don't have to wait for the perfect car. We can ship what we have now and incrementally make it better. So as we—

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:50) start to wrap up, because I want to be respectful of your time, you have a—can you go a few minutes over? Can you go five minutes over? Or do you have a hard—

(Michael Beckley at 00:54:57) stop? I can. Yes. Yeah. That should—

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:59) be alright. Because I just wanted to get one last thought from you on your leadership style and how you approach that.

(Michael Beckley at 00:55:06) Well, I mean, I think that my approach to leadership is like everything else I do. I try to be hands-on. I try to be engaged. I try to plan and be organized so that when the mission is presented, people understand it, and they know where we're going so they can work independently and not need to be micromanaged by me because they understand what we're doing and where we're going. They know why we want to build what we build.

(Michael Beckley at 00:55:37) And then they're empowered to make the thousand decisions with local information that they don't need to come back to me for because they, you know, I can trust that they have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to make those decisions right there at the point of action without waiting, without hesitating, without having to call another meeting and consume lots of other people's time, including mine. So I do like to delegate, but only after I've explained what we're really doing and why. And I think that as well, I want people to trust that I know what I'm doing because I've done it. And so I try to stay hands-on and involved with as much of the business as I can and, you know, really experience just enough of the different jobs and roles so that I can understand and empathize with the frontline who is encountering those challenges and resistance. Whether that's sales or recruiting or engineering or even finance, it's all important to understand what is it really like to do that role, to do that job, and encounter whatever resistance you encounter in your daily life.

(Michael Beckley at 00:56:48) So, you know, as a leader, I think it's important to know what your people are feeling and be connected to it, but also have time in your day to think, you know, to take that step back and contemplate where all this is going, what are the existential threats to the business, what is changing around you that could disrupt what so many people are working so hard on. I think that's your obligation as a leader, is to respect the hard work of so many people who make it possible for you to be a leader, and therefore to trust, you know, the trust they put in you to be taking the organization the right direction, you owe it to them to be thinking night and day about is that really still the right path? Is that still really the right place to go?

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:33) Boom. You're amazing, my friend. And after all this COVID stuff's up, maybe next year, do an in-person podcast. I'll come out and visit you, or we'll meet up somewhere or do something like that. I really genuinely like the way you think.

(Michael Beckley at 00:57:45) Well, thank you, Joel, and maybe I'll get out to that warehouse you build someday with the dog and we'll see how the cows come in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:53) Yes. Yeah.

(Michael Beckley at 00:57:54) So look forward to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:55) Anything else we didn't get out or are we good to go?

(Michael Beckley at 00:57:58) I think that's terrific. I would just add to anyone who's interested in learning more about the Appian low-code platform, just go to appian.com, and you can get a free trial and start building, you know, your first application and automate your first workflow in minutes. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:10) Amazing. So it's self-service. I could go on and try it right now?

(Michael Beckley at 00:58:13) You can go on and sign up for a trial right now. We'll get you approved and get you going. Yeah. Awesome. To do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:19) Thank you. Have a great day, my friend.

(Michael Beckley at 00:58:21) Alright. You too. Take care.