Making Technology Useful with Adam Bahret, Reliability Engineering Consultant

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Adam Bahret, an expert reliability engineering consultant and the owner of Apex Ridge Reliability. And they discuss how the CTO is often alone as the bridge between the technology and business sides of an organization, the value of being able to make great infographics, and the importance of getting constant feedback from your team. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Adam Bahret at 00:00:49) The thing that gets me jazzed more than anything, always since day one of my life, is technology, to make it into something useful. Right? And so I've been lucky enough to make my career about that. Alright, we have this invention. How do we make it really useful and really valuable, being, you know, that it's very robust, good product that has the features we want? So I don't think I want to walk away from that or ever walk away from that. What's occurring is I'm seeing, or I have all this other value, you know, that I have from having been in that arena for so long. I've observed the arena around that, you know, the leadership arena and how it works. And now because of so much exposure to that, I've created all these other methods and ways to help, and there's no reason I can't do it in parallel. You know? And that's where, because if you talk to me a year ago, I would be more like what you're saying, leave one thing to go to the other, because I get brought in to help teams, you know, tech, leadership brings me in to help their technical teams. And then what always happens is sooner or later, the CTO is like, "Hey, can we meet every week too? Because I kind of like what you're saying about whatever." Or just, you know, yesterday, I was with a director. It was late at night. We're still sitting on talking. And, you know, he was like, "You speak so concisely." He's like, "You so concisely just put in plain language, you know, these things." And, you know, and I know he's gonna be reaching out to me next week, like, "Hey, can we talk about this again?" So I was almost in my mind like, "Oh, I should promote myself, like what you're saying, and leave back my old thing and go do this new thing." But I think it's not that. I think I'm always gonna help people on both levels and at the same time. I'm not sure. I'm trying to—yeah, it's hard. It's hard to figure out how to navigate that kind of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:28) Oh, for sure. Some people I've seen do this thing that we're kind of talking about is they'll find a protege or the next generation of them that's really going after it and sort of bring them in to help free up their time. There's—I've seen it happen a number of different ways from bringing them in as business partners, just bringing them on as full-time, you know, executives, to all sorts of ways to set yourself up so that you're working on your business versus in your business type deal.

(Adam Bahret at 00:03:01) Yeah. No, absolutely. It's tricky, and I've been experimenting with that a lot. I go through a lot of people. They don't last long if they don't perform right. I fire even marketing people. I'm like, "No, it's not what I wanted. Next." Yeah. But it is tricky. That really is a whole interesting journey that I've gone through. Owning a business is, you know, you have the core thing of the business that is of such interest to you and spending your time. But then once you're becoming somebody who runs a business, you have to wear five other hats every day, all day. It is interesting to figure out how do you weave people into that in a way that you want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:40) Yeah. Well, that's the challenge, but there's also awesome reward. How is your book coming along?

(Adam Bahret at 00:03:46) Oh, yeah, great. I've—well, well, I've—so what you're referencing is I was picking your brain a few weeks ago. I called you up and I was like, "Hey, you got a second?" Because I spent a week—I was very lucky. I spent a week down in Manhattan, and a lot of some other leaders, CEOs, CTOs, and some other people kind of in the consulting world, we were together. And I kind of had this interesting moment of realization. And all this casual conversation was—I would say, previous to that week, I was thinking that the CEO is very aware of what's going on in the technology development side and how it affects their decisions. And the CTO is just a deeper version of that where they're one step deeper in the technical side than the business side. When I came away from that weekend, I just had this realization of like, "Holy cow. The CTO is the front line between the technology and business side." The CEO doesn't even think about that stuff at all. It's not even—you know, they aren't digging—they aren't—I don't know, what's the right wording? But, effectively, if you were to ask the CEO, "Hey, you know," or try to talk with them about anything kind of in the more technological way of what's going on, what's advancing, what are the challenges, what's gonna make even the business part work or not work if this—you know, let's say you're developing Bluetooth. Right? You know, what stage do we have to be at to launch? Do we wanna incorporate this in this product? I was surprised how much they defer to, "Not my thing, not my problem." You know? I was really shocked to how shallow their interest and, you know, knowledge was on it. Not that they're not, but from my perspective and how much I came away with this image that the CTO is—they're standing between, almost like in a doorway if one room's technical and the other, and they're the front line. They're the last line of connecting the business and the technology side. And, you know, the crazy way those are entangled when you're developing stuff, you know, on a timeline, not knowing what's gonna happen with the technology or how it translates into a product. And you're providing input to, you know, everybody else about the business side and managing all that and, actually, what I call the product factor balance in a program and just kind of how alone they were in that. You know, they really were at the front line. So I thought about that, and I was like, you know, I kind of feel like there's something here where if, you know, I could—there's a lot there to talk about and do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:20) What were they focused on? What did you find the CEOs were more focused on, or did you just notice that they were kind of—

(Adam Bahret at 00:06:26) The funny thing is, and I don't—I wanna say this in a good way—but the CEOs in some way, it felt like they were a puppet to the shareholders. Like, you know, the CEO navigates the ship, but there's something, a bigger force out there, which is the market, you know, which is the bottom line, the dollar, the board, the investors that they have to respond to and complete compliance at the times that there needs. So if, you know, the CEO can be—could be an ex-engineer, right, who's now a CEO, and they love the technology—getting that—they get a phone call saying, "Hey, we're gonna do another round of fundraising. Guess what, buddy? You're on stage. You better, you know?" That's all they're gonna do is be on the phone with Wall Street and articles and going through numbers and trying to get everybody to organize what they need to organize to impress the investors. That's it. That's all they're gonna be focused on at that point. And then a few weeks later, it'll be something else. So I think that's kind of what some of it is. As a CEO, you know, we talk about wearing—actually, that's kind of funny. There's a full loop in our conversation. You and I were talking about we wear a lot of hats. Right? And if something's blowing up in our business, that gets all our attention because we wear all those hats. That's the CEO. Right? So the CTO, they don't wear all those different hats. They have a hat. They are the link, the last link, the front line between the technology and the business. Right? So I actually—yeah, I'm glad you asked that question. That kind of crystallized it a little bit, is that the CEO has so many roles as the captain of the ship that they—or things they could be focusing on—that whatever they need to focus on that moment they're focusing on, and they really, you know, everything else they have to defer to their second in commands, right, to the roles they have. I'm kind of picturing now a World War II movie and a captain of a ship. Of course, Tom Hanks will be in that movie, but he was in World War II stuff. But, you know, that's kind of it. Right? You see, you know, in a battle situation, you know, a ship, you know, that's what you see. "This is on fire," and the captain's trying to figure out to get it on fire. "Okay, the submarines are coming. How do we deal with that? Okay, the aircraft. How do we deal with that? Okay, navigation. What's happening? Oh my god, an iceberg." And, you know, like, ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:41) Controllers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's—now there was a time when I thought that all CEOs were founders. So, for some reason in my mind, you know, you went through the market at some point—you're a kid and you're having fun and then you get into business. And then, you know, because I was a co-founder and our founder of, you know, my businesses, I just assumed, "Oh, when I reach out to a CEO, we're gonna have all this in common." And then I started to find out that they are not in control. There's a lot of them that are not the founders. Right? And typically, that's why I started to notice that the founders will actually put "founder slash CTO" or just "founder" or something like that. And I realized that there's a whole level of people that are just CEOs, and they often have a core responsibility of executing the board's vision. Yeah. And so then you've got these very wealthy people that sit on these boards and investments and own multiple companies and things that manage lots of money. And then they sort of give down to the CEO what they want to happen, and then that CEO executes on that vision, and then they get compensated a lot because those really wealthy people don't wanna have to touch it.

(Adam Bahret at 00:09:57) That—you just very—that was very articulate what I stumbled upon saying there for five minutes. But yeah. Exactly. They just—to some degree, I don't wanna use the word "servant" or, you know, but, yeah, they're serving somebody else's—whatever they want at that time. Exactly. And it is kind of funny you say that about the business. They're professional in that role. Right? And that's why—and the controls are the same company to company, which is why they can so easily go from company to company because, yeah, the roles of the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:26) Of accounting, whether it's a food product or a technology product, they have accounting. And the P&Ls are the same everywhere you go. And balance sheets are—I mean, there's some differences in industries on how you do the accounting. But, yeah, it's—but I will give it, there are awesome CEOs out there who I've met. I've met some people who you could tell that they should be a founder, but for some reason they're not. But one of the things that I really enjoy about the founders and the board is often when the founder is the CEO or is in control, whatever their title is, when they're in control and running the company, it's a shorter distance to the marketplace because while there often is a board, the board's listening to the founder. Right? And their opinion weighs much heavier. Right? So I—that's why I think companies that have founders running them, founders that are capable and want to run them, running them, that they tend to be some of the best companies in the world. And case in point, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos.

(Adam Bahret at 00:11:34) Right. Right. And the founder thing too is kind of funny. That's also why there's so many founders that get booted by the board. Right? Because it's either what you said, where the founder has held this tremendous value to deep connection to it, or the person who creates it is not also gonna be the same person that has the right skill set to run it. Right? If they're looking at—the board's looking for that person who's just gonna do what they say, that's not a founder. A founder's a trailblazer. They're not gonna just do what you tell them. So that dynamic has to either go one way or the other. The board respects them as having, like Elon Musk, just a knowledge that, you know, and the ability to visionary that you can't match and you would lose. But there might be a point where the right thing to do for Tesla is that Elon Musk just go off and do something else. Right? Because he is an innovator. And, I mean, you know, this week, he's trying to buy Twitter. Like, what are you—were you bored again? You know? And he has so many plates spinning that at some point, that could be a detriment to where Tesla is at the point where it's at because the machine is already made that makes the machines. Right? Just let it keep running. You know? So yeah. Yeah. That is really neat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:43) Yeah. Have you listened to long form interviews with him, with Elon?

(Adam Bahret at 00:12:47) On occasion. Not recently. I haven't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:50) Yeah. He sort of will go into detail on how he thinks about these things. And he does step down from some things. I can't remember—I don't have the exact one now—but I remember more than once I've seen him back out of something because he didn't have the attention to give to it. But you're right, man. He's got Neuralink. He's got SpaceX. He's got Tesla. He's got the Boring Company. I mean, he's got—he's got a lot going on. Starlink.

(Adam Bahret at 00:13:18) He does these things like people pick up hobbies. It's crazy, and they're successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:22) Well, I mean, if you were the richest man in the world, come on. Like, you just have—

(Adam Bahret at 00:13:26) Not even that. I mean, well, compare Jeff Bezos. Right? Jeff Bezos, you know, we compare those two because they're both billionaires. What Jeff Bezos has done: one thing, e-commerce. His space program is—he just hired a bunch of SpaceX engineers and made an amusement park ride. You know? So it's not just the money. He's just an unbelievable innovator. You know? He's an unbelievable innovator. He just—I mean, like you said, Hyperloop. He came up with Hyperloop, and he's like, "I don't have time for this. Just here, everybody. Here's the idea." You know? That thing alone is unbelievable. Yeah. He's on a different level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:58) I know. He's a super cool guy. I hope one day that I get to meet him. I think it'll be kind of cool. The problem is with me wanting to do that is I don't know what I'd say to him. I'd walk up to him and be like, "Thank you. I don't wanna waste any more of your time. Go do more cool stuff for us."

(Adam Bahret at 00:14:12) Yeah. There's—don't meet your hero. Yeah. Two things. Don't meet your heroes. And what do you—that's almost like you and I talking to that artificial intelligence we were talking about that's a thousand times smarter than you. Like, what am I possibly gonna say that's interesting to him? I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:28) But we are gonna have the creator of that Sophia, like, robot on the show. Have you heard of that Sophia robot? It's the most humanoid robot or whatever, and she's been on the news and stuff. So I'm gonna see if he'll actually bring Sophia on the show.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:42) I know he's coming on as the creator, but I'm going to see if he can bring Sophia on and maybe ask her some questions or crowdsource some questions we should ask her.

(Adam Bahret at 00:14:51) Oh, that'd be so cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:53) Right? Hey, in your notes, you had Minard or Minard infographics. What is it?

(Adam Bahret at 00:14:59) So it's that. If you can see it, I have it on the wall behind me, the poster, and I put it there because I think it's so significant. Other people who know it, I want to pull them out of a conversation if they see it. So Minard is kind of recognized as one of the first really significant infographics.

(Adam Bahret at 00:15:19) And what you see in that image there, and maybe you'll put it up somewhere in your notes in your podcast, is Napoleon's march on Russia. And what infographics are, and one of the people who I got to hear speak very fortunately is Tufte, who does a lot on infographics, is can you create a graphic that can communicate information at multiple levels at the same time? So in other words, can a single graphic—this is my definition of a good infographic—can it provide a single piece of information to you within a thirty second glance? Can it also support a two hour debate?

(Adam Bahret at 00:15:55) And that by far is one of my favorites. Oh yeah, I see you're pulling it up. Is this it? That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:01) This was done in 1812?

(Adam Bahret at 00:16:03) 1812. And it's basically, for people that can't see it, first of all, go subscribe to our YouTube. Secondly, it's this crazy graph that looks like a line chart, right? But there's multiple lines and it's got a lot of different things going on. It's actually surprisingly a cool infographic. If somebody showed me that and told me that was created in 1812 to 1813, I would say you're lying.

(Adam Bahret at 00:16:30) Yeah. So here's the thing. Now I'm going to begin to describe it to you and also show you how we can take something out of it within thirty seconds and also support a two hour debate. Wait, I'm going to bring it up on my screen bigger. Or actually, I'll just make yours larger.

(Adam Bahret at 00:16:45) So there's really just three main lines here. There's that tan line that changes width. There's a black line that changes width. And on the bottom, there is a single width line that goes up and down. So what this does is it communicates in amazing detail what went wrong in the tragedy of Napoleon's march on Russia.

(Adam Bahret at 00:17:08) So this was—it's the 1800s. Yeah. So what you realize when you look at it, because it's in French, but even though it's in French, you still can get a tremendous amount of information. So what you realize is the width of the lines are how many troops there were, and the color is the direction. So the tan is marching towards Moscow, and the black is marching back. And so you get to see the unbelievable devastation of going, I think, from like 400,000 troops coming back with only 10,000. And that alone right there shows this was an unbelievable disaster. So, you know, there's your thirty seconds. Wow. Napoleon went to march on Moscow, went in with 422,000 troops, and came back with 10,000 troops.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:59) I mean, they could be partying in Moscow.

(Adam Bahret at 00:18:01) Oh yeah. You're right. I didn't think of that. They got great views. Yeah. You're right. You're right. So here we go. So now we go into the debate part, like I said. So there's my thirty second thing. Now we're debating. You think that they just liked Moscow and stayed. But here's my response to that. Why did they show the temperatures on the bottom there? That line that's a consistent width is showing temperatures, degrees Celsius. So why did they add that? And then you realize, okay. So the population dwindled. Why would you add temperature as something else? Well, temperature clearly had something to do with it, and you're like, oh, the biggest part of this disaster was the temperature. That's what Napoleon—the mistake he made was not accounting for the Russian winter. So then, let's—I'm just going to accelerate where this conversation would go. Yeah. Yeah. Unless we're going to do a Joe Rogan four hour podcast. But then you see how Russia used that as a weapon. Temperature is a weapon. So what you'll see is in some parts, there's steps in the width. Like, it's this wide, then it steps down, steps down, without moving in geography. So that's a battle, right? If you have a lot of people die in one spot, that's a battle. And what you notice is there's a bunch of battles, and then there's not, and you just see it dwindle down more linearly. So Russians decided they couldn't stop Napoleon, so they said, we'll just let the Russian winter take care of them. And they just retreated all the way back to Moscow, burning and destroying all resources along the way, and there was no more stepped fights. And they just let winter decimate his military. When they got to Moscow, in Moscow, they had taken out all the supplies, food, everything, and evacuated it. So Napoleon's army got there exhausted, frozen to death, in a mess, and there was nothing to eat or do or take over, and they just left. And then it got really ugly because coming back, it was—they were just getting picked off every night by the winter. And so anyway, so that's a good infographic. It basically is a picture with three lines on it for all practical purposes that easily could be used in reference if you and I wanted to debate what happened in Napoleon's march.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:15) Pretty much. Fun, though.

(Adam Bahret at 00:20:17) I like it. It's cool. And the reason why—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:19) I think that they're partying in Moscow.

(Adam Bahret at 00:20:22) Or they're partying in Moscow. But I did a whole seminar called Data is Beautiful because I think this is very important in engineering. And I think it's very important because engineers have their own language in their own world. But if we don't connect to business, the CTO, right? Again, the CTO is stuck in that line between the two, and the infographic is a really great way to pass that information through that doorway that he has one hand in both. If you can learn how to do really good infographics as a technical person, it is unbelievable the power you can have in influencing leadership and not influencing them in a way of getting what you want, but in helping them make good decisions. So I make a really big deal when I'm involved with teams of having them make infographics that use input from everybody to become a standardized way to see something. Because if that Napoleon's march was on a hallway—you know, pretend Napoleon had his headquarters out in Seattle or whatever, right? And they had their big offices with glass windows, and you had that poster on the wall that was getting updated every week. How are my troops doing? Right? That's a great infographic. You'd be able to see, go past it and be like, oh, things are going really bad, worse than last week. Or if Napoleon had his Friday afternoon steering meeting with his other guys, you could put that up and use it to discuss what's going on and not have the slide or information drive the conversation, but support it because that single graphic can help support wherever the conversation happens to go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:49) Yeah. And that's the root communication and influence and all those things are necessary. I don't think they're so magical anymore. When I first started this podcast, they were very mystical or magical to me. I'd had no understanding of influence. I kind of thought it was like a negative word. And then I came to realize that we can't run up to somebody and say, you know, I'm going to be influential to you. The way it happens is you bring them value consistently, you bring them value. And that's one of the ways to gain influence. And so I was like, oh, okay. So you just have to be really useful to other people and you'll gain influence. And, you know, I think it's really hard to get ahead with nefarious intentions. That's just—I'm the exact opposite of that.

(Adam Bahret at 00:22:39) Yeah. No. But I mean, you know, your point's well taken. I mean, think about—you say add value. I mean, we just spent a good amount of time talking about a sketch somebody did two hundred years ago. Like, it's that valuable, right? Even though we don't care about Napoleon, his thing's so valuable. His method of how he did it, you know, is so valuable to us. And oh, I agree with that without a doubt. I think a lot of really great sustained success comes from how do I add value. Well, again, going back to Elon Musk, that's his thing, right? It's not to make money. He's never been to make money. It's how do I improve humanity. Like, he's even going beyond just general value. He says that's what guides him, and his actions seem to be consistent with that. I'm not a fanboy. If I found out he was nefarious or horrible, I'd be like, alright. Well, there you go. He's another billionaire. But yeah. So no, it's business.

(Adam Bahret at 00:23:26) YouTube. What?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:27) Like, the only way you can get money is by being useful to other people, and then we look at billionaires as evil. And by that definition, they're the most useful people.

(Adam Bahret at 00:23:38) Well, I think it's more dynamic than that. I think that the first part's right. I mean, so look at—I mean, you could take Jeff Bezos, right? He almost looks like a character from a Bond movie who went from being the nice dorky guy to now, you know, this evil, the enemy of the people, right? So if you start off, he was very much that, you know, how do I help and create advanced ecommerce and all that, and added unbelievable value. He's changed the landscape of our lives. I mean, if there's something I want and I don't have it in two days, I'm just pissed. And then I'm like, oh my God. What? I'm mad because I can't get this random thing in two days? Like, he's changed the way I see my interface with products and people. But if you look at the business the way it is today and what he does with his time and everything is maximizing profit at the expense of his workers, right? His workers are miserable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:30) I don't think he's—he's not involved, is he?

(Adam Bahret at 00:24:33) Well, he recently left, but while he was still CEO, you know, and we were started at saying he's evil, at the same time, he shaved his head, which kind of just really fit into the role. All he needed was a white cat on his lap that he's just stroking as he's talking. But, I mean, yeah, I mean, his whole thing was just these workers are in these horrible conditions. And he's just like, if that's what they'll—if that's the lowest dollar value I can get them to come in and work for, that's what I'm paying them. You know? And you're just kind of like, really? Like, what? So that's a different thing. He added a lot of value, but I think that I don't know if the human mindscape really can healthily operate at that level of power and wealth, right? We seem to kind of come undone as a general thing. I mean, look at most leaders, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:25) Alright. What else do we want to touch on?

(Adam Bahret at 00:25:28) So the split lock washer is—I was laughing because it's embarrassing, but I was looking at a NASA paper from 1990, you know, because Saturday. And it was the best practices for bolts, nuts and bolts, basically, you know, and how to have them stay together because that's fun. And my jaw dropped when I was looking at it. And you know what you know what a split lock washer is?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:57) No. You've seen it in a minute. Well, a split lock—

(Adam Bahret at 00:26:02) It's a washer that has a cut in it, right? And it's a little bit—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:03) I know what it is. Yeah.

(Adam Bahret at 00:26:03) Yeah. I mean, it's basically if you go to the hardware store, it's the thing that's next to all the nuts and bolts in the biggest quantity. You have nyloc nuts and star washers and stuff, but they're in small packages up on the wall in a quantity of five. So clearly, the other—you know, clearly, split lock washer is the one you want, and it's what my dad used and his dad used and his dad used, right, kind of thing. And wait a match. I've actually—wait. I'm going to read to you because I just was writing an article about it, but they wrote about it. Okay. So they wrote—this is what they—so they were ranking all these different ways to fasten stuff. Everything from, you know, tapered threads to nyloc to different patterns and bevels and teeth and all this stuff and scoring them. They didn't give a score to the split lock washer. Instead, they made this statement. Now keep in mind, most of the world we know is held together with split lock washers. "The lock washer serves as a spring while the bolt is being tightened. However, the washer is normally flat by the time the bolt is fully torqued. At this time, it is equivalent to a solid flat washer, and its locking ability is nonexistent. In summary, a lock washer of this type is useless for locking." What? Wait. Wait. What? Like, everything's held together with that. So what I think is interesting with that is, you know, so why is it the thing that's the most prevalent in the hardware store or what we always use or everything that you buy has that? Why aren't we seeing failures? We do. I mean, when you buy furniture, it comes with an extra wrench to tighten it every couple—whatever, a couple months. You know? Bicycles need tune ups every spring. You know? Your washing—your lawnmower makes a rattling noise. You know? They don't work, and they do fail, and we are okay with it. And the thing is that how many times do we take the old standby as the default? And it immediately made me think about when I'm working with teams how many times the specs they're testing to or the guidelines they designed to or stuff. I challenge it. I'm like, why? Why, you know, why are you saying that this failed this test? I'm like, where does this value come from? Oh, I don't—my boss gave it to me. Where'd he get it? His boss. Where'd he get it? You know? And you dig into it, and it came from nowhere. You know? It's the emperor's new clothes. So then the question is, how many things are you developing that, A, are far more expensive than they need to be? They're far—you know, it's five times stronger than it needs to be, which cuts out of your bottom line, or have very low margin on failing, you know, with stresses and variabilities. And you find these failures in the field, and you kind of quickly bucket them in other things like, oh, that was a quality defect. Oh, it's whatever. But it's kind of constantly happening in the background every time the stress gets over a certain level that's acceptable. You know, it's an acceptable stress for the use case, but causes failure. So, you know, and how much is that costing you? And I kind of made this exercise or this little thing I'm saying, next time you have time, take your technical team, buy them lunch, get them in a room, and just say, you know what? Write down five standards that you go by or best practices that you don't know the origin of. Just write down five. And, you know, if you have five people in that room, you're going to have 25 of them very quick on that board. Now imagine two of those are costing you some percentage failure rate or some percentage of overcost in your product. Those two could be costing you $10,000,000 a year. You know? And so taking a little time to dig into these things that we say, oh yeah. The split lock washer is next to the nut and bolt. I'll just use that in our—you know, how you operate your company and your product development. I think asking that question, you'll get a good return. I'll put it this way. You'll get a great return on investment on those sandwiches you bought the team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:39) That's awesome. Man, this is great. I'm so glad you came back on and hung out with us for a little bit. Anything we want to get out there into the world? What's your book? Where can people buy your book?

(Adam Bahret at 00:29:48) Well, so the book that you talked about, it's kind of in the works. I submitted proposals to some publishers. I'm kind of playing around with it a little bit. So it might be called The CEO's Trinity. But yeah. No, but Reliability Culture, you know, which just came out last year, is really what I'm very excited about, and it's about how leaders can build organizations that create amazing products. And that can be bought—and Jeff Bezos sells it. You can buy it on Amazon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:18) Jeff Bezos himself, out of the back of one of his cars.

(Adam Bahret at 00:30:22) At the back of his yacht. Yeah. He has a—yeah. But yeah. So, no, Reliability Culture is really where a lot—you know, been able to help a lot of advancement right now, and I think there's a lot of great stuff in there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:37) Yes. Alright. So buy that on Amazon, Reliability Culture. And you have a podcast too, Adam, right?

(Adam Bahret at 00:30:43) Yeah. Yeah. Reliability Leader. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:45) Tell me a little bit about your podcast.

(Adam Bahret at 00:30:47) Yeah. Reliability Leader. It's in its third season now. And the focus is to help leadership and people who are involved in product development better understand reliability practices. And I bring a lot of great guests on there, some really interesting people from industry and even from just business, you know, and kind of from their perspective. So yeah, Reliability Leader with Adam Bahret. Third season now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:12) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.