Dave Isbitski Chief Evangelist for Alexa at Amazon

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Today, we are talking to Dave Isbitski, the Chief Evangelist of Amazon's Alexa. And we discuss leading through influence rather than authority, using technology to make a meaningful impact, and how passion, curiosity, and continuous learning fit together. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Okay. I think the levels are pretty good. How am I sounding? Do I sound alive?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:00:41) Yeah. You sound good. I use the same tool for my podcast. I use Zencastr. And since they added those health checks,

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:49) Oh, it's the worst.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:00:52) Well, it was bad before because you didn't know what was going on, but I always it freaks me out because my guests always get the warning to use permanent storage versus temporary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:04) Yeah.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:01:04) And I'm like, what is this? It just doesn't make sense. And then I've been on a couple podcasts where they're using, oh gosh. I can't think of the name of it now. It's like everybody's using it.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:01:18) It's called alright. Now Skype? No. They don't use Skype. Nobody has used Skype, which I guess is old school. Hold on. I'll tell you one second because they spam me all the time when I Zoom. Zoom video. So it's like I think the URL is zoom. Let me see. Zoom. If you want to check. Zoom.us. Yes. And I had somebody oh, it was Bradley with the Voice First. He did Zoom, and then he did Zencastr or or maybe it was somebody did both. Like, they had Zoom and Zencastr as backups.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:53) Yeah. I've guest on a couple podcasts, and sometimes the backups get a little bit crazy. Like, some people do triple backups.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:02:00) And then they're like, send me like, you record it and send it to me, and I'm like, seriously, dude? Yeah. Don't rely on me. I'm sure I'll screw it up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:10) Right. It's like, you're come over to my house. Oh, and can you make dinner?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:02:15) Exactly. But that's what I love about podcasting. It's just scrappy. It's just people talking. You know? The more formal it comes, it's more like a show or a broadcast television than it is a podcast. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:30) You lose the cool underground quality of just hanging out.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:02:33) Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:36) Yeah. So I've actually when I've guest on podcasts, sometimes it throws me for a loop because, you know, when I started out to do a podcast, it happened by accident. Right? So I was recording these calls. I was having conversations about the books with other CTOs.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:02:49) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:49) Right? And then it turned into a podcast. And so I never knew I had never listened to a podcast before, and so I didn't have any idea of what they were like or anything like that. So I didn't realize that when I went on other people's podcasts, sometimes they will record the intro in front of you.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:03:07) Have you

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:07) ever had this happen?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:03:08) Yeah. I always do everything in post. So it's just a conversation, and then I stitch it all together because I don't know. I also have to have PR review my podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:19) So

(Dave Isbitski at 00:03:19) I don't know the timing of the episode numbers and stuff like that. So I always do that in post so that I can be a little more flexible with guest schedules and things like that. Yeah. And I've had people that do the full thing. Like, you hear the intro music go, and and then that actually I rarely get nervous. But when you hear it all together, then I'm like, I just hope I don't screw it up for them versus just having a conversation. You know? It's funny.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:46) That's what it did. So the first time I go in, I'm my first guest on someone else's podcast. I'm 30 episodes into my podcast. Right? And I go guest on someone else's, and they do this whole we're talking five, ten minutes go by. I'm like, cool. Cool, man. This is a great podcast. And they're like, alright. We're ready to do the intro. I'm like, what? We haven't started the podcast yet? They're like, no. And and then they go and do this big intro, this massive build up, and then ask me this really heavy question. And I'm like, dude. I have never been nervous before, but congratulations. You found the formula.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:04:18) Yeah. I think that's what I'm wired the same way. There's this switch where I just don't want to let other people down. And when it's that formal, you're like, okay. Now if I screw up, it's going to be worse because it's like they've already set it all up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) Yeah. Yeah. So, hey, I've got a couple questions I'm really, really interested to hear from you on. The first one is, how did you fall in love with technology, man? I want to know the story. There's always a story.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:04:48) So, man, how did I fall in love with technology? So I was one of those kids in school that was shy, didn't have a lot of friends, and kind of got picked on. This is grade school. And I found myself just I think, because I've thought about this a lot. Like, why I was always into sci fi and all this, but why computers? And I think it was a control thing for me back then, and that it was something where I could create my own worlds. Because I started out literally when I got a Commodore Vic 20. The first thing I did was try to make a Zork adventure. And when I looked back yeah. I'm like, why am I doing this? And I'm like, because it's like I'm just creating, and it's an environment. It's almost like a journal. When you write into your diary and I still do this, by the way. I still journal my feelings out. I'm almost like my own social media network. And it does help because nobody can they nobody can touch that. Nobody can judge that. And I think what happened was because I was kind of in that headspace, I had a lot of time alone. And so I was sucked into this world of computer programming and computers. And then right around that same age is when Star Wars came out, all of the stuff like the Black Hole movie came out. All the Star Trek movies came out. And sci fi to me was just this huge part of my life. And I started reading Isaac Asimov. And then, I remember gosh. What grade was it? It was probably seventh or eighth grade. It's like the trifecta of geekery. Right? So seventh or eighth grade. So I had already been I think I picked up my first computer probably around fourth grade. So I had been coding and doing all this. Right? And then seventh grade, I had a best friend who introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons. And from that, I started reading all these Dragonlance novels and just really dreaming of worlds and how like, I was attracted to cyberpunk worlds too, where technology is magic. Right? The quote of technology is indistinguishable from magic, you know, when it's so far advanced. I think that was Asimov that said that. And so that happened. And then eighth grade, I had a friend that I met someone who introduced me to comic books. I was just talking to my brother the other day about when I got into comic books. Because he's like, you got me into comic books, and I remember starting off with Marvel. And then before all the, Todd McFarlane had just started doing Spider Man and so it's like, it's really, if your listeners if this sounds familiar, you have to check out one of my favorite podcasts. It's nontechnical. It's called the Instance by Scott Johnson. It's on Frog Pants Network. And he does an interview with this guy, Chris Metzen, who was one of the original founders of Blizzard. And he's very much grew up around the same age as me. And he's created the World of Warcraft background stories and all of this lore, and it was fascinating. He did this hour long episode growing up geek and seeing how that's gone mainstream now with all the movies and how it's cool to game now and how that was different in childhood and it affected him. That's a really if you ever want to listen to that, that put things into perspective to me because I was like, gosh. The same thing. I had this trifecta of technology had no limits. Right? It was like people were so blown away by computers in the eighties that they were like and my father was always like, this is the future. You know, you could make a career out of this. And I'm like, yeah. You're right. There was no ceiling on it. It was this one thing in my life as a kid that there wasn't anybody that said you can't do that. Right? I was the one doing stuff nobody saw before. I remember this just came back to me. I remember in high school, I was teaching the course because it was the math teachers that assigned computer science. And my teacher was like, Dave, if you code at home, can you start doing lessons plans? So I was like, sure. So we all wrote code. Maybe that's my early evangelism and teaching thing. Right? Is that I fell in love with technology, and then suddenly at an age of 14 year old kid, I was teaching classes. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:29) Well, if technology is magic, then you're like a magician.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:09:33) Yeah. Look.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:34) I mean, that's how my experience with technology was too. My father is a programmer and was programming microchips and taught me how to program.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:09:45) No worries. NAND Gates and all that kind of stuff. I had some of that in college, and I was like, woah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:50) Yeah. He was in the Air Force in a special program where they installed the first GPS systems into the B-2 Stealth Bombers.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:09:58) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:59) Yeah. So he went right out of high school in the Air Force and then got his technology education while in the Air Force. And then he taught me when I was very young because my mom didn't want three kids in the house, so I got chosen to go to work with my dad. So he sent me with some computer books in a cubicle. I was like, hey. You know, do some of this. And I thought it was really cool because I had seen the war movie or whatever the movie is. What is it?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:10:25) WarGames with Matthew Broderick? Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:27) Yeah. And I was like, oh, I can make the computer talk. And he taught me how to echo something or wall some message. And I was like, oh, man. And then I started looking at my first programs were looking through the commands, running configuration just to output configuration. And then I built a little script that would pull up a menu and let me run which configuration I wanted to output just so I could press one and the code the command would run instead of me actually having to run the command. And that was my very first programming, and I just became addicted to it because I could go to people that look what I look at this. It's like I was the magician. Look at this trick.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:11:02) Yeah. Exactly. And it's you know, it's the other part of it because I was just talking to somebody the other day, and they were asking for advice, career advice. They were just starting out. They were at a college. And I was like, you know, it's so important when you're just starting out to get actual hands on experience. Because to me, technology is more vocation than it is theory. Unless you're doing artificial intelligence, real research into, you know, how computers can think or something like that. If you're going to go out there and get paid for a living, it's so vocational. It's like the apprentice days of if you were a blacksmith and you took on an apprentice, you learned from a master. Right? And what happens is you learn those skills. You learn how computer programs are written. You learn how technology works. It's like that's how I always figure out. I could figure out any interface because you know how computer programs are and how developers think. Right? And so you build those up. And so the best thing you could do as you're starting your career is to try all these different things, work with all these different people, find people who can be mentors, and learn all about the different languages, but then you'll start to see, you know, similarities. And because it's a vocation like, my background, I was the first person in my family to go to college. Right? I am from a family of butchers. My it was my great grandfather who came from Poland. They were up in the coal mines in Bethlehem. Right? And so it was like, I'm the first person who's ever even looked at tech.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:45) No pressure. Yeah.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:12:46) Yeah. And what was cool for it when I remember early days looking at this is it was like, I'll never starve because you're like, I'm at Amazon today. Right? But if I ever decided to leave, I could go and I could take like, I could go back into just coding. I could take on a three month consulting job to code, or I could lead a team of devs, or I could go do the BDM side of it. Right? Like, there's just I don't know of any other field where it's that employ it's all willing like, what you're willing to take on. But once you have those skills, that's huge for quality of life. And there's another podcaster, Ryan Carson. He does Educate Yourself. If you haven't checked that out, you should check it out. And he he's created his own company, and he is this real believer in everyone should have access to being able to code. And he started this company called Treehouse. And just

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:46) Oh, Treehouse.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:13:47) Yeah. And just some of the stories he's told me of people like, he had a guy that was just homeless on the street, and then he learned to code, and he's making 6 figures. Right? And that's, to me, what's exciting about technology is if you've got a passion for it like, that's how I recruit people. And it's always bewildered companies that I'm at because everybody's kind of got this flow. You know, every company's got their way to hiring. Yeah. And I'm like, it's not about that because I've been doing this long enough. If I see somebody with passion and they're at night and they're learning and they're tinkering, then that's the person that two months from now when the entire industry changes because of some disruption, is the person that's going to be like, heck. Yeah. This is awesome. I'm going to go learn it and create something. And that's how you're successful. Right? Not because you learned from some API 100 page. It used to be when I started at, you had these 100 page APIs on the Windows Win32 APIs. Right? And it was like you could get a job because you knew the Win32 APIs. And look where desktop computing is now. Right? And so it's that passion. And I think that's what's made me where I am today is that I've always assumed whatever I knew was going to be useless. And so I was never afraid to kind of start over again, and I naturally get bored very quickly. So I'm fine starting over again and learning something new. It's like that, it's like what reminds me of being that little kid. Right? The first time I opened that book, I still have my Commodore Vic 20 manual with the first program I wrote. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:28) That's awesome.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:15:29) Yeah. And I open that sometimes and read it. It's old pieces of paper and stuff from decades ago, but it's like, I try to focus on those feelings I got. The first time I opened that, I'm like, oh, wait. I'm empowered to make this do this.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:15:44) Right? And nobody's ever seen it before, and I've created—I think it's like how artists feel sometimes when they create stuff too. Right? You've brought something into existence that wasn't there before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:54) I love—so a couple of things. I like to say my superpower is curiosity.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:16:01) That's great. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:01) Right? Like, I used to think I was really stupid, and then I realized that the way I was taught for the first twelve years of my life was not the way people learn.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:16:10) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:10) So I had to—through my computer education of reading, having to understand, playing, taking it very slowly, very patiently, step by step, and wanting—having a desire to, like, make the computer do something—I ended up learning how to teach myself, and then I found myself explaining it to other people. And I actually found that when I explained to other people, it created a deeper understanding for myself. Right?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:16:35) Absolutely. Yeah. You can't explain it to somebody else unless you understand it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:39) Right. And then I found things like the Feynman technique, which Feynman is saying basically, if you can't explain it to a three-year-old, you don't understand it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:49) So then I—and then I have this curiosity with that tool is unstoppable because that means I'm naturally curious. I go into—you could put me in a room right now with physicists. I'm going to be like, oh, who's got knowledge? Who's going to teach me something? Right? Like, I'm going to find—I'm going to make them explain physics to me like as if it were, you know, a herd of animals. You know, I'm just going to find the thing that I can latch onto so I can achieve a level of understanding so I can build upon it and then ask them more questions. So, yeah, I feel exactly like you when you were saying that you have—it's this overwhelming sense of security that you can go into any situation, and the market can change as much as it would like. I don't know. Maybe clay manufacturing all of a sudden becomes the only thing the world is interested in tomorrow, and I could go learn clay manufacturing and then rise up in that world as far as I wanted to go. Right?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:17:40) Right. Right. And it's, you know, it's like the curiosity—so I was giving advice to somebody the other day too. They found—and this is not uncommon. Like, I assured them, you're going to find—because they were out of work. Right? And they knew they had three months before their next gig. And I'm like, you know what? That's super common. Like, you could be—you could be in school and you've got, like, the summer. Right? Or I said, you may still have work, but mentally, I've been at points in this where I've been in positions where I'm brain dead. The job is so easy that I start to get these feelings of, like, worthlessness. And to everybody else, they're like, oh, yeah. You're doing such a great job. And it's like—and I'm like, why is that? And I'm like, it's because my curiosity got killed off. Yeah. And so the advice I gave them was like, look, you know, because they're like, I don't know which programming language. And I said, forget that. I said, you're in this age where there's so much access to different things. I'm like, go on YouTube and, like, type in, like, how to play a guitar or type in, you know, like, how to build a Raspberry Pi robot or, you know, flying a drone, like, any topic and go learn that. Because what I found for me is that'll build out my curiosity and my excitement again, so then that will spill into all other areas of my life. And if you are, you know, if you're listening to this podcast and you're finding yourself maybe you're in a company where it's a large organization. The organization's doing really well. You're doing really well. And so things are mechanical because you figured it out. There's not a lot of disruption or innovation going on. You could do that by going out and learning in other areas of your life. And I think that curiosity, that's what's important to be really, really serious and focus on yourself and be like, am I a—because you may not be a curious person. You know? But once you know if you are, you have to feed it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:40) I think you can kill it off a little bit by ignoring it, but I think as humans, every human has the capacity to spark it up and then strengthen it.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:19:49) Yeah. And the problem is you can get in—in career, I've seen this pattern over and over again. When people talk to me, they get into this obsession over what's the—what's the money. Right? So, like, you may have seen this too where people are like, well, what language should I make so that I can bill out at a higher rate or I can make money or I can—and it's like, no. No. No. It's not about that because you could be bored out of your mind making money. You have to realize if you're a curious person, where are the challenges? Right? And that's very hard to figure out. You have to be real with yourself with that. And that's what I mean by killing off your curiosity is, like, you get into this area of, like, paralysis. It's like you don't know which thing to pick moving forward, but if you really take a hard look, you're just—because you're focused so on the money instead of what's exciting you. Right? Like, I've told people, go start looking at machine learning. Right? Like, go build some models. There's tons of free courses out there on stuff. Right? Go look at, like, TensorFlow and, like, there's a great tutorial, like, a beginning TensorFlow one on, like, it's just flowers, and you're feeding it data on flowers, and then your mobile app can, like—you could take a picture of a flower, and it knows what it is. Yeah. And I'm like, that'll get you—that will get the wheels, like, turning, and that'll give you other ideas. Right? And that's great. That's great to hear that you've realized that. I realized that about myself a long time ago too. I used to think it was burnout. In fact, when I was growing up, my friends and some of my friends still call it—they would call it Isbitski burnout. And they'd be like, man, you were so passionate about this. You got us all to do this, or you got us all to play this game, and now you're on to something else. And I used to think there was something wrong with me, and then I'm like, no. It's like, I just obsessed about it, and I got to the point where I felt like I figured everything out that I needed to find something else to be curious about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:43) Well, we gotta chase those neural firings, man. We build these neural structures, right? Our neurons fire. Right? When we're learning, we—you know what really interested me, Dave? Is I started—I got into, like, the physics of the brain and stuff for a little bit just as, like, a little area that I consumed all the information on. And then I was like, alright. I understand this field of study. Next.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:22:04) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:05) And I watched how the synapses build on top of each other as they fire and strengthen. And then your brain has this thing called a pruning process where it goes through and the neurons that aren't firing, it actually prunes them out to make way for new neurons. And so we forget at the rate of one bit per neuron per second, and it's called the forgetting curve. So the way you consume information is directly tied to the rate at which you forget it. And I was like—

(Dave Isbitski at 00:22:28) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:28) Yeah. So I was wondering, you know, everyone says, oh, I'm this type of learner or I'm that type of learner. Well, for me, when I watch something, when I see something, boom, like I'm there. When I hear something, I'm there. When I read something, oh, not so much. Like it doesn't retain super well. So I just found that—and that's just something I knew about myself. Then when I found the forgetting curve, I'm like, oh man. This explains why I learn the way I learned.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:22:56) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's—I had—I need to do that. I need to, like, get into the science of that because I had learned—I had read up on, like, personality types.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:06) Yes. Right?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:23:07) Because I, as I was going through self-analysis and just trying to understand, like, how people handle stress and ideas and juggling multiple ideas in their head at the same time and how everybody's different. And a lot of that applies to conversational interfaces too because I feel like right now—I mean, we're so early in day one—while, you know, you can have a conversation with an AI, it still doesn't know your personality, and people do. And so that was a fascinating read, but haven't gotten into, like, the actual brain chemistry of stuff. I'm sure I'd find that fascinating. It's funny because I start to obsess about it and, like, you'll find Reddit. Like, every little area has lingo. Right? Yes. And so because I obsessed over fitness, this is just a funny thing. Like, I felt embarrassed. But when I was flying back from, gosh. Where was I? I was at a Yelp partner forum in San Francisco, and I'm on the plane back to Philly. And there's an older gentleman next to me, and we just start talking. And he wound up being a retired cardiac surgeon. But he asked me if I was an MD because I was talking about my BPM and all different technical terms and TDEs and BMRs because of the Fitbit and the fitness and trying to understand how my heart reacted and what low intensity cardio does and high. And I was like, no. I just read a lot. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:32) I kind of said that.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:24:34) And I'm like, I did not take—I'm sorry. I didn't get a real degree. You know? You're like, I didn't go to college for, like, eight thousand years. Like, you had to. Right? Like, I'm just a computer science guy. You know? And but it was like, I was like, you know what? That's kind of, in a way, I think, describes the personality type is that you do learn the lingo of every—if you're going to truly understand it, you need to understand the acronyms and everything. And then once you define the terms, I think every field is like that. It's almost like a diction. It's like a lexicon for looking up information within a specific domain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:07) Yeah. So I have a—my brother and stepmom are both physicians. So—

(Dave Isbitski at 00:25:12) Oh, so you probably have some of that lingo going around. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:15) Oh, you hear it. Yeah. For sure. You grow up around it. But it is really interesting because my brother finished med school about five or six years ago or maybe ten. I don't—time is going by, Dave. It goes by so fast. But when he was going through it, I remember he went to, like, one of the best med schools in the whole United States. People fly in from all over the world to go there. And 80% of the school is them just being in the office with a doctor. They're not sitting in, like, lectures, and they're not doing that type of stuff.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:25:42) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:43) And they—because that's what will prepare them for what the real world will be. And then in, like, the last chunk of it, they study all the technical stuff. They get all the reviews and stuff for what they'll need to pass the boards. Right?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:25:55) Oh, wow. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:56) And so I was interested in that, and so they have this thing called, like, watch one, do one, teach one—or it sounds better than that, but basically, you watch someone perform a procedure, you do the procedure yourself, and then you teach someone to do the procedure. And that is the best way that they can come up with to develop a full complete understanding of it. And I thought to myself, well, this is one of the most complicated things in the world. Everybody specializes in, like, one area because there's so much complexity in any given area. So I said to myself, I'm going to copy the way that they learn and apply it to myself. And what that meant for me was, you know, at the time, I was like, I'm not qualified to teach anyone. I've only been writing code for, like, twelve, thirteen years. But then you realize that there's people that don't know how to do hello world and install Ruby. Like—

(Dave Isbitski at 00:26:34) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:34) So when I found that ability to reach out and start mentoring, and it wasn't for the money, it was for the experience. So I found the site, and I went on it, and they have students, and you get paid to teach them remotely. And so I said, alright. Well, I'll jump in some entry level students. I started teaching, and then they were like, oh, you're doing well. We want you to teach class. And so I started teaching class, and I started teaching kids coming out of code school all over the world. Yeah. It, like, really grew, and I'm, like, I'm very excited because I still maintain, like, a perfect five-star rating on there. So—but right? Because you get people that get angry. But through the—I found that that act of teaching someone that knows less than you to help them up really does a number of benefits. It motivates you.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:27:34) Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:36) It gives you a deeper understanding of the basics. So I suggest to anybody, like, if you've been programming for two or three years, find the person that doesn't know how to install—that doesn't know what GitHub is, like, or that doesn't know what Git is. Right? Like, teach them how to make a commit. Like, there's—there's billions of people on this earth, and new people are coming every day, Dave.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:27:54) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:54) So you always have to learn what you don't know.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:27:57) And for me, you know, it's like for me, I feel like I'm almost helping myself. Like, that little boy that was so excited, saw no limit to technology, and then I have all these years of people telling me and judging me and telling me what my potential is and who I am and what I'm worth. Right? Because the world does that to you. But I didn't have that when I was a kid. I thought I was smarter than everybody, better than anybody, and there was no limit. And so when you teach someone, I feel like it eliminates those feelings they have. Like, I've seen the light bulbs go off where people are like, I can do this. And it doesn't matter. It could have been—it could be—this has happened with Alexa Skills. This has happened with stuff I've done prior to that with Fire TV and Amazon, but I also worked at Microsoft for years. And so Windows and Windows Phone and Visual Studio and Xbox and, like, all these enterprise apps through the years. It's the same thing I see with people is they—when the light bulb goes off, there's a sense of empowerment. And it's like, oh, I've just unlocked some potential I didn't know I have, and what those people told me and said that I was worth is no longer valid. It's funny how that works as a human being. I'm not immune to it either. You know? And so when I learn, I feel like it taps into that. So to be able to give that, like, I feel like I'm giving a gift to somebody, you know, when you do that in that way because it does. It's empowering.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:28) And when I was younger, you know, the whole telling the computer what to do and it not yelling back at you, it just obeying your command. That can—if you do that for a decade alone, it gets—you gotta work on your people skills a little bit coming out of that. But I found that teaching someone else is more rewarding than being right. Like—

(Dave Isbitski at 00:29:50) Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, because being right—I mean, gosh, I can't tell you. This was—I just did a podcast. It's not—it's not out yet. You'll—it'll be—it's Developer on Fire, but it'll be out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:02) Oh, Dave Rael's podcast?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:30:03) Oh, okay. Awesome. There's tons of names on there, and I liked how he was asking about, like, values and success and all of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:10) He's great.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:30:12) Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's like, for me—oh, gosh. Now I'm losing my train of thought. What were we just talking about? Well, first off—

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:24) Oh, sorry.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:30:26) No, no, that's fine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:27) We'll definitely not cut this part, though. This is a couple of things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:31) Yeah.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:30:33) I'm an idiot. But what were we saying? What was the question before?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:37) It's more rewarding than being right.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:30:41) Yes. So I talked a little bit about it on that podcast. When I was early on in my career, I was right a lot, and I spent 90% of my time trying to show people how right I was. And, man, did I piss a lot of people off.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:30:57) Yeah, and I was right. And that's when I realized at the end of the day, it doesn't matter who's right when you're dealing with people. It matters how they feel when they're interacting with you. And as I've gotten older, I mean, this just happened this week. There was something that wasn't my fault, but I just covered for somebody else, and I took ownership of it because, you know what, it doesn't matter because of who I am in my role if I messed up. And it squashed the conversation, and we just moved on versus having a debate of why this would happen and making that person totally obsess over what they did wrong. And then, you know, it's the wrong thing. Human beings are messy, and we all make mistakes.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:31:41) And I felt like early on in my career, I spent too much time trying to prove to people how perfect and how right I was. And I start to see that in my kids as they're growing up. I'm like, oh, boy. This is gonna be a problem.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:31:55) And I shut my teen daughter down when I say things like, "Oh, why am I arguing? I forgot you know everything when you turn 13." And then she doesn't know what to say. So I'm like, "Yeah, I felt the same way when I was your age."

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:09) You have a couple kids?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:32:11) Yeah. Yeah. I have two girls.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:13) Oh, nice.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:32:14) And they're amazing. Yeah. I have a 10-year-old and an almost 14-year-old, and they're gamers like dad. And they share a lot of the same interests.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:32:23) Yeah. Yeah. And they teach me more than I teach them. You know? It's great to see the world through through their eyes. And it's funny how—and you may find this too—it's funny how the lessons I've learned being a dad are very valuable lessons in mentoring other people because it's the same personalities, you know. You see it. How do you feel if you feel like you're not in the right place? Right? That happens with my kids in school.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:32:56) Whether they're in the right friendships or not. How do you think about the future? Right? We all deal with that kind of the same way. Understanding, like—since my girls were little, I called it bucket fillers. I wanted them, I'm like, it's more important that you fill somebody else's bucket up and you make them feel good.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:33:15) And then I said, you'll never ever have to worry about making friends. My oldest daughter didn't listen to that, and she's always struggled. My youngest daughter is like—she is a true bucket filler. She fills my bucket up. She really does. Nothing but compliments. She helps other people. She rarely draws attention to herself. And because of that, she's like—kids in the neighborhood knocking on doors, wanna hang out with her. She's invited to every birthday party, and she doesn't think anything of it either. It's just life to her.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:33:44) But I'm like, that's because what I told you. People will wanna hang out with you more when you make them feel better when they're around you. You know? It's just the way we're wired. And I think you could take those kind of lessons in life too, not just when you're a kid. But my kids, like everybody else, they can choose to take the advice or not to take the advice, and they're both very different with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:07) Oh, man. Dude, this is like—I love this podcast. This is like the life podcast with Joel and Dave. I love that learning. It's like, is this a technology leadership talk? No. No. No.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:34:19) But see, that's what I think real leadership is about. Because I've always been in these positions. Right? Here's my take on it. Because I struggled a while. The last time I did a manager job was, oh gosh, when was...

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:39) A while ago.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:34:41) 2000, yeah. Twelve years ago. Um, and what I realized at the time was what mattered to me was leading. And what I'm not judging on anybody, right, because this is different for everybody. What was fake for me when I was leading through authority—I always had people second-guessing because I'm your boss or I'm somebody else's boss. And what I found, again, for me, what I found more authentic, more valuable, and what actually helped people in the long run was leading through influence. And so since that time, and I've had plenty of opportunities to have people report into me, I would much rather have them dotted line or mentor them or work on projects with them because then I don't get a pass.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:35:31) It's all about me helping them and putting them first, and then you're a leader. Right? And I've tried to always approach it that way. And so I've just been thinking a lot about that lately. That's why you're hearing all this side of me because I think it's so important.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:35:50) And I talk to so many different companies. I see it time and time again, and I think people have forgotten that. It's like, I think that's why people obsess over levels too. It's like, I want the next level so that I can tell all these people and have these people do things. And it's like, no. You don't understand. You just gave yourself more work because nobody's gonna do anything for you because they don't trust you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:12) Yeah. People buy you before they follow you.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:36:16) Yes. Exactly. And it's—I think that's a philosophy. I think CTOs, same type of philosophy is that you need to focus on the culture. Right? If yours is a type of culture where your employees have lost confidence in upper management, then anything you institute is gonna fall apart as it works its way down. And so then you have to really start thinking about what are we as a company, what can technology do to better empower these people? Because that's the thing that's also super cool is that—yeah. I saw this. I mean, this is going back a couple years, but I saw morale and NSAT improved at companies that just went out and bought all the developers new computers and dual screen monitors.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:37:06) And, you know, some people are like, why would it do that? And I'm like, you don't understand. You know, coders are around every day. If you went and you spent $6,000 on each coder, you gave them a top-of-the-line MacBook and two monitors, that is nothing compared to what you just did on your marketing budget, but that says you care about those people. You know? And it's a big deal. It's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:29) The environment change is important too. I mean, shift the desk around. Watch what a great day you'll have.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:37:35) Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:36) Yeah. Whenever I'm a little down, like, you know, you just ebb and flow. But one of the—I have built up, Dave, and I'm sure you have too, especially when I was reading some of your motivational posts, which by the way, love those on LinkedIn. Okay?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:37:51) Oh, thanks. I gotta do more. I've run out of what I've told myself, so I need to think about them. I was trying not to—I was like, I could start quoting people and do one every day because there are ones that are quotable, but I'm like, these need to be a little bit more insightful of me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:04) Right.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:38:04) So I gotta do more of them. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:06) Yeah. But what I've done is I've—throughout my ebbs and flows of struggle and success and happiness and ups and downs, I've developed this library or this suite of tools on how to change my state when I'm down. So like—

(Dave Isbitski at 00:38:20) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:20) Yeah. One of my favorite things is rearranging the house. And, uh, but one of the things we do is we go move our furniture around. Boom. Move our furniture around. Everything just feels—your whole house opens up. You feel clean because your eyes and your brain solidify the patterns and they just ignore it. Yeah.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:38:37) It's associating it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:38) Yeah. Yeah. And you just flip it around and then boom. I'm telling you what, you move your couch around. Like, Dave, if you go home—if you and your wife, you guys move—

(Dave Isbitski at 00:38:46) Just flip the small one and the big one. Her mom is an interior designer, and she's got it. There's a gene. So she is mixing things up, so maybe this is happening naturally for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:59) Yes.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:38:59) And I would—yeah, and so it's like, I have kind of a say on things, but I trust her because every time I've—I mean, I've been married over 20 years. So every time I've ever argued when it comes to a design thing, I've learned over that time, she's right. Because when she does her thing and then I realized what she had in mind, it's great. Because I can't visualize it, and she can. You know?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:39:23) But, yeah, I think you're right. I think I've told people sometimes you just need to get out of the office. You know, even if you have the ability to work remote or you can even take a day off or even if you work from home one day or even if you just take a sick day, don't spend it at home. Go out, and you would be surprised that I think people forget you don't have to be at the company that you're at now. You know?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:39:49) We get into these traps, and a lot of people have bills to pay. I know. But you have to sometimes get to the point of your mental health and say, when you get out and you walk around like that, you're like, you know what? If I wanted to, I could take my family, and we could just go somewhere right now. Everybody could sell their house where they are now and buy a house for a third of what they would sell that house for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) Oh, yeah.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:40:14) It would be in a different part of the country or the world, but you could do that. Like, we have such freedom, and we're empowered to do that. So it's—don't start creating these mind prisons. You know, you are—and it's empowering when you realize, you know what? I'm where I am because I'm choosing to be where I am. Nobody has that control over you.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:40:30) And that makes—you know, that I'm kinda getting into what helps me too when I feel down is that, you know, it's those type of things. I change. I go out because I always have—and that's what I love the job that I have now too is travel. I need to go see other cultures, see other parts of the world, see the living history. Yeah.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:40:49) And just see when you travel too, you see people going all phases of life. So I see young families with little kids. I see retired couples. I see teens. I see college age. I see my age. I see—and you just see all these different stages of life, and it makes—it always, at least, it's a forcing function for me to take myself out of where I am currently and start thinking about where I've been and where I'm going to. And I think that's super important to get you out of your current day funk. That's why some of those inspirational quotes I was talking about were the 24 hours. Because when you feel paralysis around making a decision, you need to hone back in to just what am I doing today.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:41:34) Forget about the mistakes I made yesterday and forget about tomorrow. I need to reward myself for what I do today. And sometimes for me, that's learning something new. It's getting on the treadmill or doing weights. Yeah.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:41:47) It's spending time with my kids. It's a decision you make every day because, ultimately, that's what we are is a culmination of all the decisions we've made before. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:57) That is 100% true. Like, so since we're talking about these two—by the way, I'm actually in a hotel room right now on the other side of the United States from where I live.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:42:07) You've got a good connection for hotel Wi-Fi.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:09) Right? No, Dave. I rolled out the red carpet. I paid for the Wi-Fi for you. This isn't a phone call. I'm a—my friend.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:42:14) I am a—thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:17) Yeah. So every time, you know, I was on—Jackie's traveling with me today. She's our PR person for the show and helps with booking and everything. And—

(Dave Isbitski at 00:42:25) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:26) And Jake's our producer. But when we're on the plane headed out here to RSA, I was saying, I was like, "Look, every time we get on one of these planes and we go to a conference and we meet people or whatever," I was like, "it's just so—it reminds me that the world is so big."

(Dave Isbitski at 00:42:41) Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:43) Like every time we're thinking about the show, it's interesting when I see 40,000 people at RSA, right? It's the biggest conference I've ever been to, Dave. I don't go—and so I think to myself, we have 72,000 listeners. I was like, all the people here that I saw today is half of our audience.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:43:02) I was—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:02) It just blew my mind how many people actually listen.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:43:07) Oh, yeah. It's so—numbers are so hard as a human. You have to visually see it. Yeah. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:13) We have to get some Alexa stuff though, because I have about 15 minutes before I have to go. Dude, get this—FBI director of cybersecurity. Like, I gotta go meet with them.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:43:25) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:25) Yeah. And that's cool. Like, talk about super geek.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:43:29) Oh, yeah. That's how I—my career choices. Right? So when I was at school, we're about to graduate, I started looking at different jobs. Right? What I ultimately decided on was a Microsoft solutions prep provider in central Jersey at the time. But I was interviewing with IBM Global Services up in Fishkill, New York. And one of the other things I did was actually interview at the CIA. And this is going back to, um, yeah, this is going back to—gosh. When did I graduate? So around '97. And I wrote this whole essay on how cyberterrorism was going to be the way that organizations waged—how they combat it versus waging war. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, that you know, it was early on.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:44:17) And I still have the offer letter and all the information and stuff. And my kids were like, "Dad, were you a spy?" And I was like, "No. I would have been one of those geeky guys, you know, looking at satellites." But what happened was you have to do a background check, which takes a year. And this is why when you brought up FBI, it's the FBI that was doing the background check.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:44:39) And what happened is I met my wife during that time period. And so it got to this point of, you know what? My life has started six months in, and we both felt like this was gonna be serious. And so I made the choice not to move down to Virginia. But it was the idea again, and I think because we were talking about this. I think it was the idea of using technology to help other people too. Like, having meaningful impact. I just, you know, grateful for the folks that are doing those jobs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:14)
Now are you mentoring anyone in voice right now? Like, because you're a rock star in voice. Right? Because to them, they see Amazon Alexa, and they see Dave. And then they hear Dave talking. So whether you like it or not, I mean, you're the face of it for them. So do you mentor anybody right now?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:45:32)
Yeah. It's like an informal thing because, again, I don't like to even make formal programs because then I feel like it's a forced thing. I'll always like when people come up to me because it even happens at Amazon. Amazon has, like, a formal mentoring program, and then there's all these people that just hit me up in the hallway or want to put time on my calendar and talk. And I find that's more valuable because those aren't any kind of forced company thing.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:46:03)
So I do that. There are people—a lot of what I do on stage is mentoring. So I'm a firm believer in that everything I've learned and I've shared, like, people have shared with me, I kind of process all that together, and then I want to share like the cliff notes to that when I go out on stage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:21)
Oh, that's so good.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:46:23)
Yeah. And that's kind of my way of presenting. Right? Like, in the early days, because, you know, for Alexa Dev Marketing, I was employee one. This is going back to 2014. Right? And so I had to do everything. I had to do the webinars. I created this thing called office hours where it was every week we were doing—I felt like I wanted to put a face to a company versus people being like, oh, Amazon doesn't listen. I just turned a webcam on. I was like, alright. Come holler at me and tell me what's wrong, and I'm gonna go fix it. And so I did all that in the beginning. And then, you know, as organizations grow, you have teams that can do that kind of stuff. And so what I found is because of my view in the industry right now of all the things that I'm seeing, the stuff that was super valuable to people was for me to come and give them my ideas on what's going on now, where this is all headed, what's Amazon doing, but what's also, you know, industry doing, and then help spark the ideas, especially brands, because I think brands are kind of confused about what does this all mean and, you know, how can I get started? And so it's almost like besides the mentoring one on one that I do, and I also do it in my personal life too, just kind of like life coach stuff, not anything technical.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:47:38)
But my presentation style, I think, and people can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think my presentation style is that. It's not like it's technical anymore. It's like mentoring around what this stuff is all about and what you should be thinking about. And I think that's been valuable for people. I've gotten emails or people that come up and they'll be like, you know what? Like, you inspired me what you said, and I went back and we talked about this, and we came up with this cool idea and check this out. And it's like, that's the stuff. I mean, I had nothing to do. That's all that person. I had nothing to do except just state the obvious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:10)
And that's—we all have our roles in life, and they're all equal. Like, this is important. The spark plug is the most important part of the car at some point. Right?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:48:25)
Yeah. Yeah. That's true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:26)
So I have CTOs on every day, and I've personally been excited because I've been kind of spying your posts and stuff and interacting here and there with you on LinkedIn. So it's been like, usually, I meet the guests for the first time when I talk to them. So I've had a little interaction digitally with you. So I was excited talking to guests as the show is coming up about it, asking questions. One, I got a really good question, good topic conversation that we want to know behind the scenes with Alexa. And it was, do you consider social engineering when developing Alexa or Alexa skills?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:49:06)
Social engineering as in—

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:09)
So here was the back conversation. Because that was the best way I could word the question. But it's ambiguous.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:49:17)
I feel you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just tell me, like, where it's coming from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:19)
Yeah. The guy had seen his kids talking to Alexa like a human, and then his friends, you know, in their forties, fifties, almost commanding Alexa. And then the question was, you know, are the developers—how are they dealing with the differences and inputs and the banter and the conversation?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:49:36)
I got you. How do people interact with it? And then—

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:39)
Do you steer it in a certain direction?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:49:42)
Yeah. So absolutely. I mean, so there are so many people working on this way smarter than me. The way to think about it is there are Alexa skills, which is using an API, right, of which there are over 30,000. And, like, you and I can create an Alexa skill. And so there's going to be certain interactions like what Alexa says and what she displays on the screen or view. That's all determined by that developer doing that skill, and Amazon does look at all that and certifies it. Right? And our certification process also includes design guidance, which is—it's even happened to me, by the way. Like, I got design guidance of, like, this thing isn't so good. You should think about this. And you're like, who are you to tell me how to design my skill? Right? But it does—it's so that it's a better overall experience. So there's that. But all of that is based on the natural language processing. Right? So the NLU and ASR and all of that of who Alexa is. Okay? That's created by computer scientists. And the way that that field works, you have to understand language has phonemes in it. Right? And so there's certain sounds. Words sound a certain way.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:50:54)
And that's the beginning of it. Like, when you talk to Alexa, is there a certain sound to things? And then you have to understand the context of those sounds within the language. And by language, I also mean the culture. So it's very different from somebody speaking English in the US than somebody speaking English in the UK. And it's also going to be different somebody speaking in Japan. You know, the jokes are going to be different. The order of words are going to be different. And so it's really understanding that of, like, what words are more likely to appear after other words and what are people really getting at. And what happens is you have what's called a model. So you have a language model for that culture. So let's just say US English. Right? Then when you have—if you've had an Echo, you can go into the Alexa apps and you can do voice training, or it just happens naturally over time the more that you talk to Alexa. So what happens over time is what you're talking about is there's a language model that's built based on the way that you ask for things so that over time, you don't have to be as formal. Alexa kind of gets you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:02)
Nice.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:52:02)
Right? And so that language model is combined with the model of that culture and the language, and that's how she understands context. And then when a developer creates a skill, if you've ever created a skill or you talk to a developer who's created a skill, they'll tell you it's compiled. It's not a real time thing. And what happens is it's building a model. It even says that in our IDE. You'll see it's building a model. And so that model is based on the type of conversations that that skill might have so that when you're having a conversation with that skill, it can be even more accurate because it knows you're not going to have a conversation about a different topic. Now it's still able to have the conversation about everything Alexa knows. Right? But it's not like you're suddenly going to be playing a game on one thing and then switch to another game. Right? Unless you asked for that, then it would move out of that model. So it's a combination of those models.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:52:57)
Now on top of that, we also released—oh, gosh. I want to say it's got to be at least six months now. I forget the timing of stuff, but we released voice profiles where you can turn that on, and then Alexa will know me just by my voice. And so what's great about that is if you do training and you turn on voice profiles, then your Alexa will be much more accurate for you than your significant other versus having Alexa kind of be this amalgamation of all the members of your family talking to her at the same time, and she can't distinguish how people ask for things. Right? It's kind of like your recommendations when you go to Amazon. I have tons of gamer stuff for me, and then there's all of the girl clothes for my kids. And then there's, like, my kids collect Pops. So there's Pop stuff. There's makeup for my teens. So it's like the recommendations I get are crazy. So I started creating profiles where it was Dad, Mom, and kids, and we can switch based on profiles. And then the recommendations are great because they're based on those individual taste. Same thing with, like, you know, you may do it with Netflix or other kind of services. So you should think of Alexa like that.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:54:03)
In order for her to truly know you, you should, one, make sure that you've set up those profiles so that she has the ability to understand who she's talking to. Two, make sure you're using the language that's most specific to you. And the reason I do say that—you're like, well, of course, I'm going to use the language. You know, I travel a lot. So when I'm in London, it's very funny. Like, my kids like using the UK one because it's Harry Potter-ish. Right? But I found, like, there are people in the UK who like the American US. But when they do that, she's thinking like US English. She's not thinking UK English. And so when they go in culturally and make references or speak a certain way, that model is different. So that's what I'm saying is figure out the language based on where you are and your culture. And then last, set up the ability to recognize by your voice. And so that way, things automatically happen. So when I go ask for a certain song, then she knows it's me asking for that song. Right? And with the music, the recommendations, when I go and say, Alexa, play something new. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:11)
I love that. I guessed that command once, and she did it. Like, I didn't know that it existed. I was just like, come on.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:55:19)
Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:19)
So I want to do a lightning round. Right?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:55:22)
Yeah. Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:23)
Like, a number of these questions about Alexa and voice and stuff in, like, twenty, thirty seconds per question before I have to go run over to RSA.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:55:32)
Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:32)
So—

(Dave Isbitski at 00:55:33)
Okay. Happy to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:34)
What do you do if your name is Alexa?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:55:37)
You have to change—we do give the ability to have different names so you can have Computer. Most people I know do Echo. You could do Amazon or Computer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:47)
Okay. Would we be able to change the utterance in the future so I can be like, yo, Shelley or something?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:55:54)
That—it's a computer science problem. Yeah. Yeah. So that is a customer request we have heard of, but it's, you know, it's not something that you can currently do. It's Alexa, Computer, or Echo, Amazon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:07)
Perfect. Do you—right now with the feedback, do you regularly communicate feedback with the developers? If so, how are you doing that? Just are you in the office with them? Do you have special meetings? How do you—

(Dave Isbitski at 00:56:17)
Developers as in our community or as in Amazon specifically or partners?

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:22)
As in people you're out as the face. People are telling you things. How do you communicate that effectively back to the people?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:56:28)
Oh, yeah. So I—it's funny. I shared this at a talk. Eric Olson has a group. He's a great Alexa dev. He's been doing it for years. He's got a group out in Seattle. So I went out there and I had this—I'm sorry. This might suffice. Yes. I'm seeing her name a lot now. And so I did this talk called "An Evangelist's Tale: There and Back Again." And one of the things I had never shared before was I created this Voice of the Developer Wiki, and it was the first eighteen months. It's eighty pages long. I still have it, and it was every single question I ever got asked. It was the entire Q&A from office hours. And so the entire engineering team had access to that. And in fact, the head of the engineering team is this really great guy, Bob. And he basically would have the onboarding process. Anytime they would hire somebody into that team, they'd have to go through my Wiki. And the devs loved it because they felt like they talked to the people they were coding for. Like, they had never seen anything like it. Like, there's forums. There's social media. But the fact that I had eighteen months of, like, emails and questions, and then I categorized it. So I would say, here are the top asks and the themes. And so our roadmap was built around that. And then what I do is, because of where I sat in the org and still sit in the org, I would meet with the senior leaders of the engineering orgs, and I would—it was kind of like ideas that I would hear. So I'd be like, why can't we do this? And they'd be like, well, we need to get here, here, and here first. And I'm like, okay. Well, if you're doing these three things, you realize if you just work on this fourth thing, you kind of eliminate the need for that. Right? And a lot of that in the early days was, like, why are we writing everything? Why isn't there an API to do this? Like, let somebody else build an amazing IDE. Why can't I sit there on my Mac and just be able to push a skill? And so that's all built now too. That's all our skill management API interface. You have the ability to—

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:25)
I messed around with doing one for the podcast to be able to install the Modern CTO skill and play episodes from the podcast. It was a GUI interface. And I got to tell you, you know, I used to hate GUI interfaces when I was, like, super geeked. It was like, it's not real. You know? But I'll tell you what, the fact that I could sit down and just do it, I'm like, this is unbelievably accessible.

(Dave Isbitski at 00:58:46)
Yeah. And I think the way that you do it is you make the best possible tool you can for people who want to use that and people who are just starting out. And then you make the tool for people who just want to sit in the command line and already have their own tooling. And then you open it up with an API so that others can build even better tools. And I think right now, where we are in 2018, I feel like we've got all that, and we're in a good place. And that's where you'll see the innovation around that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:11)
So speaking of 2018, what do you think the biggest awesome breakthrough in voice is going to be this year?

(Dave Isbitski at 00:59:20)
Oh, gosh. I think—and this isn't me saying roadmaps or anything Amazon specific. I think across the industry, I think what's going to happen is there's this groundswell of people using stuff. And this is what I tell brands too is that if you created something in 2015, you could kick the tires and failed and no one would have noticed. But now there's skills within the same category that you would be as a brand with thousands of four or five star ratings from Amazon customers. And so I think what we're going to start seeing this year is the iteration of that. It's no longer like a simple back and forth skill, but it's stuff that becomes very valuable. Like, it's a go-to. And I think we've seen some of that already with Alexa, like, the music being there. Like, it's become my go-to for being able to listen to music, weather, you know, those kind of things. I think smart home is becoming—

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:25) Oh yeah, that way for people big too.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:00:27) Yeah, but what I want is to see that for brands and third parties as well. I want them to be successful with conversation and voice. And so I feel like we're going to see, and maybe it's like an Angry Birds kind of thing where it's like we see a new form of gameplay. Actually, I did a blog post.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:00:46) You'll see it on our blog where it's my thoughts for brands, and I call it conversational gaming too, because what I think is—and you're starting to see some skills like this, right—is that if everybody has an Alexa device, right, then why can't I just suddenly decide to play a game with anybody in the world? That community that you don't get on mobile.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:12) Can't you do that already?

(Dave Isbitski at 01:01:14) Some of the skills are starting to do that. I just played a trivia one, and it's like you're playing with so and so, and it's anonymous. So you don't hear anybody's voice, but they just say where they are. And I thought that was the closest thing.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:26) Friends with Alexa.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:01:28) Exactly. And so I think that's what's different here. It's really because it can be so quick, you could be doing something else. So I could be writing a long email, and maybe I just need some inspiration. I'm just throwing ideas out there, right? And I'm like, "You know, all right, world, inspire me." And there's somebody who just was going through the same thing, and they're saying something and you're communally sharing. And I think that will really be the breakthrough because you started to reach a saturation point where people are familiar with how to do this.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:02:00) You know, we've announced that there are tens of millions of Alexa devices out there already, right? And so when you start looking at that kind of community and people getting used to it, I think that's what we'll see. Oh, you know what?

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:15) You know what? You know what? You know what's going through my head right now? The early 2000s, late nineties chat room, like AIM, like style AOL chat rooms where you go into a topic and everyone's just blasting off about the topic. But it was actually, now that I think about it, it would be extraordinarily suited for voice. Because I could see my wife, like, doing something with our baby going through a new stage and her just being like, "Hey, moms, what's up with this?" And then moms reply.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:02:42) Exactly. And that's why Facebook was popular with groups, all that. But it's anonymous and it's sharing of data. And because the AI has the ability to understand the context of what you're asking, because this is what I tell people: voice isn't built for everything. If you don't know what you want, it's better—let's say shopping. Shopping is great if you know exactly what you want. But if you're like, "I feel like buying a new pair of shoes," right, that is so generic. You're better at having a visual drill down. But if you know exactly what you want, like you just said, like a mom question, the ability to tap into that conversational instantaneously wherever you are without having—I mean, you could even be in the kitchen doing something. This happens all the time for me. It seems to be in the kitchen. If we're cooking dinner together, a lot of times my oldest daughter, she loves—we'll cook stuff together. We'll just ask Alexa for things.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:35) Yeah.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:03:35) So we could ask for, and she's asked for recipes and I do think that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:40) She does conversions.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:03:41) Yeah, yeah, you could do conversions too.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:43) Yep. You can do all that.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:03:44) And Alexa, stop.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:47) Now, do you have a special behind the scenes version of Alexa?

(Dave Isbitski at 01:03:52) No. And this is a Dave thing. So I've been in this type of role—I started an evangelist role at Microsoft in 2007, right? So 11 years. And what happened was in the beginning, because I'm such a geek, I wanted to have every early device and I wanted to be part of every beta. And what I found would happen over time is things change so much. When you see the behind the scenes factory, sometimes it's the same way at every company. Some—you're literally, you know, things are being built while you're using it. And so I realized I could still give feedback, but the more that I used it, the harder it got to live in the world of release. And you see this. I think it's common in our industry where you'll see people slip up. They'll give code names or they'll be like, "Oh, that's right. We changed that feature in X, Y, Z." And so what I always try to do is live in the tooling that people have, because I think that's the biggest mistake you can make, and it's a disservice to the community, is if you know something's coming and being built and you're using those tools every day or those devices every day, you forget what people have to deal with every day.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:06) That's right.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:05:06) And I want to feel the pain that people feel every day, even if I know something's coming. And so that's why I'm just weird like that. Even the swag, I don't have Alexa t-shirts and hoodies and socks. I send that out to devs. I want them to all have that stuff, right? It's all about them. And so I feel the same way about early access to things. And I do—I just—

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:24) Great perspective.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:05:35) Yeah. And granted, I do, you know, I have input into it and I know you'll see me doing the blog posts and things like that. But my day to day, I want to live in the world in which everybody else is living in so that if there's pain there, I can make sure we fix it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:48) That is, yeah, that is—why—I'm not, if I'm not—I have zero experience as a product evangelist. But that is kind of something I'm sure I'd find out real quick, right? Because you're running around like, "Oh, don't worry. Don't worry. It's on its way. It's on its way." And then that person kind of hates you because you've got the solution already. And you're like, "Why isn't it to me yet?" Right? So last two real quick. Gary Vee, huge fan of voice. I'm a fan of Gary Vee's message about bringing value, an overwhelming sense of value to individuals, and then they'll naturally give back because that has worked very well for me in business. So I'm a fan of that message of his. But he's a big fan of voice. Do you ever get to hang out, talk to Gary about voice?

(Dave Isbitski at 01:06:29) So he—I'm invited. I'll be speaking with him at the VoiceCon in New York next month.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:36) Oh, nice.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:06:37) I've interacted with him a little bit over Twitter. I thanked him for the Crushing It book, which I've been going through, his new book. I'm a big fan.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:47) Up on my Audible right now.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:06:48) Yeah, yeah. I loved what I loved about that book is it's kind of like what we're talking about. It's not all about him. It's all about the people that he's inspired and what they've done because I just love hearing people's stories, right? And that's what that book is like. So yeah, I will have time with Gary next month, and so I'm really looking forward to that. He's been doing a lot of stuff around voice. He sees trends. He's the type of person that can see what's coming and understand what that means for today, which is huge because most people, especially if you're successfully servicing customers, you've got great revenue, you don't want to change anything. And so there's this tidal wave coming and you've got to grab a surfboard and be able to ride that wave.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:39) Or drown. You know, I was—I always find I myself latch onto things, and so I was anti-voice. I was like, "I don't like talking to my devices. Don't like it. Don't like it. Don't like it." I'm in my early thirties. And then this December at Christmastime, I'm sitting there getting my haircut. I don't have any voice technology, period. Never talk to it, don't use it, period. And my hairdresser is doing my hair, telling me about how her 10-year-old daughter, or 11-year-old daughter, and her best friend, their favorite thing to do in life is to come home from school and ask Alexa to do things, play songs, and that all she wants for Christmas is a Dot. And then the next day I hear someone telling me, "Oh man, my wife really wants this Alexa thing." And then I said to myself, "All right, done." The next generation is obsessed with it, falling in love with it. And so I go home to Michelle and I said, "Michelle, the most important thing in my life right now—" I've heard Gary talk about it once or twice. I've heard so and so and then the hairdresser. I said, "I'm going to purchase an Alexa right now." I flip open my phone to Amazon it and there's an Amazon package sitting on my—because it's middle of December, sitting on my kitchen counter, and it's an Alexa because it was my Christmas present, she just didn't give it to me.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:08:50) Oh! She listens to you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:50) She listens to me listen to Gary. So right. You know, I binge. I'll binge Tony, I'll binge Gary, I'll binge different thought leaders to keep in.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:08:59) Yeah, and you could play your Audible books, you could play podcasts on there. Oh yeah. It's, you know what? It's the idea of ambient computing. I don't even try and use the word "voice" when I'm talking to people anymore because I agree with you. I think voice is like we remember just talking to our phones. I say conversational UI because that's really what it is. It's just I forget where the Echos are in my house even. I just have a question and I ask to the air. It's interesting which ones answer because the way that my house is set up upstairs, because of the acoustics as it goes to the upstairs, sometimes the upstairs will answer when I'm in the kitchen. The mics are that good. But that, I think, says a lot about what's different. If anything, that I think—

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:45) There's your book.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:09:47) The convenience. This is—

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:47) This is your book. This is, you know, the title is called Ask to the Air by Dave Isbitski. There you go.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:09:54) I need to be a better writer in order to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:00) No. You take your talks and then turn them into writings and then release a book. I'm telling you, people are going to love it.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:10:06) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could be right. That's one of the interesting things, because I do so many talks, is a lot of the people I've talked at will make a minute and a half clip. You may have seen me post this on LinkedIn where it's like a quote from me. And I'm like, "I should actually be doing that because it'll be more helpful for people," because there's all these things I've said. And Gary does that too where he's—it's very documenting where it's like he's talking all day long, and I'm doing the same thing. I'm talking all day long, but I don't document it enough. And then it's funny because I look at myself and I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's pretty smart. I should listen to that guy." And it's like, "Oh wait, that was me. I just forgot what I said."

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:42) Yep. That's how I did my book, is they were recurring talks I would give to entrepreneurs, and I realized that I was giving the same 12, 15 talks over—I'd be like, "Oh, this person needs to hear this," and I gave it. And I would just, I just unintentionally through a large volume, I was working with private equity seeing number of deals come through.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:11:02) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:02) So I just unintentionally just kept giving these speeches over and over. And finally I'm like, "Oh, you need to hear these three speeches, but I only have five minutes." And that would take a half hour. So I need to write these down. And then eventually I just hired somebody to sit with me and have me tell them and record them and go over them and turn them into writings for an hour, like twice a week, and then that turned into my book. And we had number one for technology leadership.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:11:27) Good for you, man. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:29) The last thing real quick: if people want to find out more about you, what would be the best way to do that? Twitter, LinkedIn, how do you want people to reach out?

(Dave Isbitski at 01:11:36) Just one URL: thedavedev.com.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:39) Thedavedev.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:11:41) Yeah. And then the podcast, if they're interested in my Alexa podcast—

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:45) I could not be.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:11:46) It's alexadevchat.com, but you'll get that off the thedavedev.com too. So either works.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:52) We got a little Alexa in here at the end, which I love.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:11:55) Yeah, right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:55) Yeah. But this is—I love the life and learning. There's life and learning with Dave and Joel.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:12:00) That's the most important thing, right? It is. Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:04) Awesome. So I can't wait. I'm going to stalk your schedule because I go to the conferences and stuff too. I'm going to make an excuse to find a conference that aligns with both of us so I can get you a high five and a selfie or something like that.

(Dave Isbitski at 01:12:16) Yeah. Would love it. More than happy to.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:23) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.