Easing the Pain of Automation with Glenn Hopper, CFO of Sandline

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Glenn, CFO at Sandline, and they discuss how the economy will be affected as robotic process automation becomes more robust, action we can take today to ease the pain as automation takes jobs, and how CFOs can work more collaboratively with CTOs. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. You have so much to talk about, which is why I'm so excited. You are by far the most interesting CFO I think I've ever met. Your personality type doesn't usually lend itself to CFO based off of your accomplishments. Can you tell me a little bit of background of you and how you've gotten to where you are today?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:01:06) Yeah, so I came to finance through operations, and I think that's really informed the way that I go about finance. My first finance role, I was the finance guy for the chief operating officer of a telecommunications company. And the reason the COO wanted his own finance guy is because he was constantly at loggerheads with the finance group. They would do a top-down budget, try to dictate to him what he could do and what he could spend, and he didn't have someone that could speak the finance language to talk back to make the argument. So I spent several years in that position, and really every CFO job I've had since then, I've had people tell me—I think I said the other day, "Let's not be penny wise and pound foolish."

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:01:57) And someone said, "I've never heard a CFO say that before." But I think that because I came from operations, and before that I was in marketing, I've got a better handle on the needs of the rest of the business. So I speak the language a little more, and maybe because of that, I came to the role differently from the beginning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:19) Oh, very nice. Yeah, you've got that sort of hybrid experience. I get that a little bit. So I tell people the best way to explain me is my mom was a cheerleader and my dad was an engineer, and I just kind of came out like I'm a very excited engineer and I love technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:34) So how did you go—alright, so you went from marketing, sort of CFO business stuff, or at least the CFO side of business. And then how did you get into writing about AI and the fourth industrial revolution and all of that?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:02:49) I think I've always been a geek for technology. So I started in marketing, and I knew a little bit of HTML, a little bit of JavaScript, a little bit of PHP back when I was on the marketing side. And I've always been interested in it, but I always say I'm not smart enough to actually do programming and developing. I mean, I can write SQL queries, but it'll take me a good afternoon to write one. I've always had an appreciation and an affinity for technology, and it's influenced the way that I've approached my job as a finance guy.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:03:23) So I guess I started seeing the writing on the wall with finance, just like every other aspect of business. There are more and more aspects of what we do that are being automated, and I thought, we used to think white-collar jobs weren't going anywhere because you can't be replaced by a robot. But now it's not robots. It's robotic process automation and AI and ML and all that. So I thought you better get out ahead of this, and it really became—I was able to blend two things I was passionate about in the finance world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:00) And then what company were you working at when you were doing that?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:04:05) I guess my approach to finance has always been technology-based. I've always wanted to find ways to automate things. And as a finance guy, going back to my days in telecom, I've been responsible for KPIs across multiple departments. And to get KPIs—basically just the metrics of how the departments are measuring each other—to get that information, I would have to sort of understand the systems and what data was in there and how to get to it. So I would do that because I wanted to find correlations between something that, you know, a marketing program and its impact on revenue, or an operations problem and its impact on customer churn.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:04:55) So I always wanted to find these different variables that I could use in my financial models. So by going after those, I started to expand my interest in technology. And as the technology changed and got better, I started realizing, well, I've got to understand more. It's not just, you know, as data increased, it's not just, "Oh, you have to write SQL queries." You have to now understand the drinking from the fire hose of data, the JSON, and graph, and the bigger databases that are out there and how to use those. So I've been able to use my sideline interest to help my finance career, to help me move with the times. So all that is, I guess, prerequisite to what I was doing when I started really getting focused on AI and ML. I'd come from a retail business where we had fully automated reporting from all of our point-of-sale systems that were not web-based. And we brought all this information into the web, and I was just starting to work with more and more data.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:06:01) So that got me thinking more about big data. But then we sold that business and I moved on to an industry called e-discovery, which is legal technology. And basically the quick way to describe that is, if there's a lawsuit, both the plaintiff and the defendant in the discovery phase, they have to turn over documents. And it used to be if you're suing somebody, some paralegals show up at your place of work and they get bankers boxes full of files and they get paper files and they bring them home, and lawyers or paralegals, you know, go through the documents to see what it is. But of course, with all the data that's out there digitally now, I mean, there's so much more than that and it's more data than individuals can go through.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:06:45) So there's a lot of machine learning and natural language processing algorithms. So while that was front-of-the-house technology, I was very interested and had opportunity to speak to the developers and understand it better. And that sort of just sent me on. And then, you know, my interest in analytics because I'm a finance guy led me down the road of understanding the technology more as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:07) So you always find ways to keep it interesting for yourself then?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:07:10) Exactly. Yeah. I really think—and maybe I don't know, it's the field that I know more than others—but I feel like if you are not, regardless of what you're doing, blue-collar, white-collar, whatever role you're in, if you're not keeping up with the technology and trying to stay ahead of it or at least understand it, then you're going to get passed by it, and it's going to be hard to justify your position. And that really, that understanding and seeing the writing on the wall is what led me to write the book Deep Finance, which is, you know, looking at it now, it feels like it's a survival guide for what to do to keep yourself from being replaced by automation, how to add additional value when all the fundamental parts of your job can be replaced by RPA or machine learning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:57) How do you do it? Tell me.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:08:00) So it's going to get increasingly harder, but what I'm saying right now is—you hear this a lot. This is the optimist side, and anyone who's selling RPA software says this: "Well, we're not talking about replacing jobs. We're talking about finding more meaningful work for people. We're going to do away with this mindless data entry kind of work and we're going to find them something more meaningful to do."

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:08:24) And that's great. And I think that people who pursue white-collar jobs, you know, no one goes and gets a finance or accounting degree because they want to do data entry, but that's a reality of the profession. When you first get out of school, you know, you may be doing a lot of just manual journal entries, or you would have been in the past. So if you can take those manual journal entries away, you can say, "Well, now people are providing greater value." But the level of work that is being done by software now, every day it's something new.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:08:56) Just yesterday I was reading that MIT has this new time series algorithm that they've come up with. It's basically any time series data, whether it's weather forecasts or stock predictions, or my world in corporate finance of doing financial planning and budgeting for the future. You can just plug in time series data, and it could be multivariate time series data. And this new tool from MIT, it's basically just drag-and-drop ML. And the favorite part and the most comprehensive part of my job has been replaced by a computer software system that can do what I did in seconds, you know. Like that, or I have to go load in data and seasonalize and de-seasonalize and trend and de-trend and do all the linear regression and stuff that I do that I'm proud of, because it's this geeky thing that only, you know, finance people know how to do. Well, now anyone can just drag and drop it over. So one thing that I'm doing is—and I didn't realize this until after I wrote the book—but the whole new field of data science and business intelligence, finance guys and gals, we've been doing this forever. We haven't had as much data, but we've been doing linear regression.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:10:17) And we've been trying to find the why to find the numbers and trends and all that, but we didn't have the tools that are out there now. So new tools come out there, and with the new GPUs and everything, and the technology that's out there, whether it's computer speed or the amount of data that's out there or better algorithms, whatever the case is, then you get this whole industry of data science. And then as finance people see what the data science people are doing, and we think, "Well, I've taken a bunch of statistics classes. I know this too. You guys are coming in and you're going to try to replace my job."

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:10:53) I've been doing this for twenty years. So what I am trying to do in the book, what I do is I say the first step is to embrace automation, because if you don't, the CEO or somebody else in the C-suite is going to say, "Hey, half the finance guy's team can be replaced by automated software." So get out ahead of it, embrace it, automate everything you can, but then take your team and repurpose them, give them a new direction in a way that they can add value to the business. And the way they add value to the business is to become those data scientists. So that may mean upskilling a little bit.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:11:32) Maybe, you know, you're not turning a financial analyst into an engineer—that isn't going to happen—but you add a couple of, you know, you add some engineers and some architects to your team, and they work with the finance people. But what I'm realizing now is if you're at a company that's large enough that has a finance group and they're building out a data science group, that finance needs to say, "We're your group," because we're already the referee of the whole company. We're reporting on finances and KPIs in a lot of places. And a lot of times IT and HR roll up anyway. So yeah.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:12:06) So that's really what I say is you need to understand what data science is and how to use AI, machine learning, RPA, whatever it is, and how to get a handle on this data to provide value to the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:19) So just like what you were saying earlier, just always being interested, always being curious, being on top of the new technologies entering your space and making sure—wait, so you're telling me as a professional I have some sort of individual responsibility to keep myself upskilled and updated on what's going on in the industry?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:12:36) You know, some people could probably make the argument that they don't, but I'd like to see where their job is in the next five years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:44) So I'm going to be gone.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:12:46) I say that because I'm one of these lifelong learners. I've got two master's degrees and I can't seem to go more than two weeks without doing another Coursera or edX class or whatever. I just—it's a hobby for me, but it's let me kind of not get caught flat-footed by this. And it's great. I mean, degrees are great, but I love—I mean, it could be a Coursera course or even just YouTube videos, just that intellectual curiosity and keeping up with it.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:13:17) I just think if you're a finance guy right now that is just doing the old school—well, "I report the EBITDA number every month and how we're doing compared to budget and how we did compared to last year"—well, you're of no value to anyone because there are software programs that can do that. That's like a CTO trying to sell—you know, how you can change technology with... I can't think of a good example of that. We can edit that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:49) Well, we'll insert a good example. Tell me about—so you're part of Mensa. How did you do that?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:13:56) Like a test you take?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:57) How do you become a part of it?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:14:00) So in the nineteen-nineties I was in the Navy and I was in Pensacola, Florida. And at the time I was about to apply to business school, and I was worried that my undergrad school didn't have pedigree. So I thought, "Well, how can I show that I'm smart?" And I'd heard about Mensa. I don't know where. Back then, you know, the early days of the internet, you know, probably heard somebody talk about it.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:14:27) So I didn't even remember where I got the information. I guess it was after '95, so it was probably—I found the Mensa website and filled out a thing online. You had to take a sample test online, I guess. And then I went to some crazy old lady's house in Pensacola, Florida, and she proctored me taking an IQ exam and just sat—you know, it smelled like mothballs. I just sat at her dining room table and took the IQ test and they sent it off to be graded or whatever.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:14:56) And a couple of weeks later I got a note that said I was in. I don't know that it actually ever helped me in any way to be a member of—that sounds cool. I've got a cool T-shirt that says Mensa on it. You know, that's about the benefit. And I get emails every day, and I get their monthly publications and all that. But I've—and there's all kinds of social things too that—it's funny having a bunch of high IQ dorks like me trying to go be social.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:15:25) It's nice. It's usually just an awkward bunch of introverts staring at each other, twiddling their thumbs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:32) I have no idea what you're talking about. CTOs are known for being incredibly social, life-of-the-party type people. Alright, so I want to talk about something else real quick. Now we were doing our research on you because we have a whole team and everything. Did you write a movie called The Hanged Man?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:15:51) I did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:53) You did. How did you—why did you write that movie? How did that come about?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:15:57) So it's sort of related to the reason that I wrote the book Deep Finance. When I was young, I wanted to be a fiction writer. And I got to college, and I thought I was going to be Hunter Thompson back then. I was going to be, just I was going to do all this crazy stuff. And then I realized, "Well, you probably need to do something to pay the bills while you're writing your fiction."

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:16:28) So I switched my major to journalism and went into journalism. I was actually a journalist in the Navy, and that was actually good. I mean, the journalism training was actually better than English classes as far as teaching you how to write and communicate in a more clear way. So took the journalism background and followed my career.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:16:49) But back then, my hobby was I was writing fiction all the time. And weird series of events, the reason I decided to do a movie instead of another novel attempt — my cousin was in LA, and he'd been on a bunch of reality TV shows. He was on something called Mister Romance back in the day. And he'd made a bunch of connections with people at different networks. And he was able to get me some pitch meetings with a couple of different networks.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:17:23) And when he told me about it, I wrote treatments for six or seven different shows, and we pitched them. And every one of them got rejected. And I thought, man, I hated we had that opportunity and we didn't do anything. So we decided — well, he said, "Well, I know a bunch of actors. I want to introduce you to this director. Let's just make an independent film." And so he introduced me to the director, and I talked about my idea of what I wanted to do. And just in my spare time started writing, and it started to get momentum of its own. And I had a director, and we started casting it. And next thing I know, I'm taking two weeks off work to shoot a feature motion picture.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:18:03) And yeah, it came out. We got distribution. It was on Netflix for a while. There were something like 30,000 people rated the movie.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:18:11) Not very well. It wasn't a very good movie. But if 30,000 people rated it, I don't know how many people saw it. We never saw a nickel from it, but it was an incredible experience just to go through and do all that. And I kept doing it while I had my day job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:29) I like that you think of things that sound cool and then you go do them. Because that is one of my favorite things. I typically work backwards. I'll think what sounds really cool, and then what do I have to do to make that reality?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:43) And often in the least amount of steps possible. So I like that you're constantly moving. You're trying new things. You're stepping outside of your comfort zone from writing movies, CFO, being a JAG in the Navy, all of that stuff. Now, there is one comment that I want to get to that I made a note about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:01) You said K-pop is proof that we live in a simulation, and I want you to expand upon that.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:19:09) So anything I say on Twitter, you can't hold me accountable for it. Probably some passing thought that I had. I don't really —

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:21) I'm getting deep rooted.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:19:23) No. It was somebody was trying to explain to me the virtues of K-pop, and I do not know that I've ever heard a single K-pop song. And I just thought this is the strangest thing to me, that that's the whole wave of — I don't — do they sing in English, or do they sing in Korean? I don't — are we listening to —

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:44) Dude, I don't know much about — here's my extent of knowledge on K-pop. I'm watching a movie at some point in time a few years ago, and this person shows up and everyone was like, "Oh!" And I was like, why is that a thing? They're like, "Well, it's K-pop." They're in the background at a mall or something doing some show. But it was in the movie, so they shouldn't be at a mall doing a show.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:03) Right? They should be on stage with millions of people. And they're like, "That's K-pop." And I was like, "Oh, what's K-pop?" Apparently some band.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:13) And then I've heard here and there, I'll hear references to it, but I don't think I've sat down and listened to a whole song before.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:20:22) Yeah. So maybe they're this generation's, you know, Boyz II Men or *NSYNC.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:27) There you go.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:20:28) New Kids on the Block or whatever, which is, you know, not my cup of tea, any of that. But I guess there's gotta be something for middle school girls to be excited about. I don't know. But I think the reason I was thinking that was that a grown man was trying to tell me the virtues of K-pop. And I was like, I don't — if you're talking about Blue Öyster Cult or something, maybe I'll listen. Yeah.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:20:50) I don't know about this. We're too old to be talking about this. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:55) Stay away from that person. Okay. So one of the reasons I was really excited to talk with you — as you can see, there were many, many reasons. So I'm super pumped that you're here hanging out with me. But you have a great amount of knowledge in finance, and you have a great amount of knowledge in technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:16) And one of the conversations that keeps coming up — I'll sort of explain it out to you and then maybe you can make some sense of it. So a lot of people ask, you know, when will everything be automated? Right? Is it 20 years, 50 years, 100 years? When can they make an algorithm that can be taught like a human?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:34) Right? Anyone that has kids can understand this. Right? It just takes a long time with humans. If you could shorten that down and — right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) So we were talking about the time from today until we have that sort of technology, because then the knowledge workers will be gone overnight, essentially. Right? If you can teach that human, and they'll teach that model, and that model will be available. And then a couple questions happen. Like, well, what do we do with those people when they all lose their jobs rapidly? That's one question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:03) Another question is, you know, where's the responsibility? Or I guess it would be an observation is — I'm an entrepreneur, and I have always had this sense of I have to go out there and I have to do something. And it's my responsibility to do it. Probably because I had a lot of freedom at a young age from my parents' divorce. Right? So I could self-govern at the age of 12, 13 to make my own decisions for myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:30) And luckily, thank God that I chose good decisions for the most part, and I'm here. But how do you handle this concept of individual ownership for having to stay relevant, as you were mentioning, and be in place? But also the fact that maybe one day, you know, we get these announcements from Google randomly. Right? That, oh, GPT-3. There's GPT-4 or 5.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:55) Whatever it is comes out and boom, open source model now, and I can just teach it to do some job like a child. I sort of instruct it with some sort of maybe abstracted programming language or something. And now it can — or maybe I just talk to it. Right? And now it can just do that job at scale.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:15) Right? And how do you see those two things? I mean, they're kind of separate, but they're kind of together.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:23:24) Yeah. So a lot to unpack there. So maybe we take it just kind of step by step. First off is — and I'll speak to the field that I know best, but I think that all of your listeners could probably find a similar story in their area of the business. So for me, in finance, I genuinely cannot think of a single component of my job that there is not some existing off-the-shelf software out there that will automate it.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:24:01) So in finance, you've got — what are things that members of the finance team do? So expense tracking, expense reports. That's super low-hanging fruit. There are two dozen expense report tracking things now that you just take a — the people in the company take a picture of their receipt with a cell phone, upload it into the software. It immediately creates the ledger entry that goes straight in — well, you know, you can have an approval process in there and everything, but all the stuff you were doing to track where somebody was having to gather up all the receipts and reimburse people.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:24:36) I mean, there's software that is very inexpensive that does that. Paying bills, that is another function of finance. There's tools that you just enter an invoice in, and it creates the check to be cut. And there's, you know, not even checks anymore. You just click a button and it wire transfers money to the vendor.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:24:57) And there's — I mean, I could go through the monthly close process, bank reconciliations. Everything in finance is automated right now. So, and even — and so that's all the sort of the low-hanging fruit, and I think that's very easy to be replaced with RPA. And I think, truthfully, in finance right now, RPA is the state of the art. So to your question on a computer that you can, or piece of software that you can just teach and expose them to something, and then they figure it out and do it — I mean, RPA is kind of that.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:25:32) It's not that it's training on the data, but in a typical robotic process automation software for a company, if you're scanning in invoices, you know, it uses OCR, and then it knows look in the top left corner. That's gonna be the address. Look for this word, and it's gonna mean this is the invoice number. Look at the payment date.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:25:55) And rather than a person keying all that in, you've just taught a machine how to do it, and it's gonna do the same thing over and over and over, way faster. It's not gonna fat-finger things. I mean, I guess OCR could have an error, but it's not 1997 anymore. OCR has come a long way since then. So it's pretty foolproof.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:26:14) You're not gonna transpose numbers as long as the invoice is legible. And that's even if you have a paper invoice. You can do it much simpler digitally, obviously, that way. So all the low-hanging fruit in finance is already automated. And when I was talking about that MIT program, I mean, the time series multivariate forecasting is a huge part of finance. And it's — you used to be able to say, "Well, yeah, we've got all this data. I'm gonna take it, but it takes a person to run it through all this."

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:26:48) And now it's like those — I'm sure you've seen DataRobot out there, which is just drag-and-drop machine learning. It's priced at, I think, $50 a year for a license for DataRobot. But I mean, as the technology improves, it's going to be more accessible. So everything that we're doing, even the high-end part of our stuff — I mean, to me, it's already there. So, and maybe there are jobs that are more complicated, but I'm not talking about artificial general intelligence right now. But for very specific things, I mean, I feel like if you named any function in an organization, you could probably find ways to automate the majority of it. I mean, you know, maybe creative positions are not quite as, you know, maybe they've got a lot of —

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:27:41) Tools, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:42) They're very specific tools. Like you have a toolbox, you know. Different contractors will have different types of tool sets. I'm interested in the moment we wake up one day and it's the worker that can organize, make decisions, swap the tools in and out, solve new problems. When we get to that point — and, you know, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think the government's just — like, let's say all the jobs go out, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:09) It probably won't happen overnight. I mean, it'll probably happen over the course of a year or two. Like, there'll be less and less and less jobs. That'll be in the news. Do you think the government's gonna step in with some sort of, like, stimulus or universal basic income? How do you think they're gonna handle that?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:28:21) It's gonna be dependent on what type of government is in place. I will say the interesting thing right now is the whole machine learning, artificial intelligence movement — a lot of people call that the Industrial Revolution 4.0. The first three were, you know, the steam engine and gas, and then electricity, and everything we've done with computers and the internet. In every preceding industrial revolution, it just changed the nature of work. So when, you know, 120 years ago, 80% of the U.S. economy worked in agriculture. Well, technology came along, made it that 80% of the country didn't need to work in agriculture anymore. So they moved into cities and they took factory jobs. And the nature of work shifted, but there was plenty more work to do.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:29:22) And then similarly with the subsequent revolutions in technology, there was work to do. But to your point, when there's artificial general intelligence and every job we can think of, every conceivable job is taken or can be done by software, where's the human value? And how are we going to address that? So there's a couple of things. There are several people — they talk about how we need to plan for the future.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:29:55) I mean, several prominent people. So there's a lot of talk about ethics in AI, and that's a big consideration. And that's different than the question you just asked me. But there's Max Tegmark and Elon Musk has talked about this and all have talked about — we need to, before artificial intelligence goes too far, we need to set some boundaries and figure out how we're going to set these ethics. I'm sure you've heard the paperclip problem, where if you have an AI and you tell it, make paperclips and make as many as you can, that, you know, it will take every piece of metal in the universe and make it.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:30:25) And, you know, it's a mental exercise to think about when you think about ethics with machine learning. But then the other part of it is how it impacts society. And what I worry about, and what I say is, there is no one in government — when you're talking about a bunch of septuagenarian senators who think of the internet as a series of connected pipes, you know, like plumbing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:54) It's crazy.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:30:55) Yeah. So they're not the kind of people — they don't understand this, and they can't make rules for the long term. So there's a lot of nonprofit groups that are trying to figure out ethics and then what to do in the future. And there is talk, and Andrew Yang in 2020 had a big UBI proposal. But here's what's going on.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:31:14) And there was a very significant book to me that's probably not really well known. It's called Deaths of Despair, and it's two — it's a husband and wife. They're Yale professors, and they talk about what's happened to society since around the year 2000. So, and then how you end up in this sort of populist world that is — you know, there's a lot of anger about manufacturing jobs going away, that have already gone away, about, you know, coal mining, the kind of old jobs that have gone away that people could earn a good living on. Those jobs aren't there. So these people are reacting angrily, and they don't want — because, and this is gonna be a bigger problem.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:31:57) It's why I go back to 2000. The people don't want handouts. They want to define themselves by the work they do. And if what they knew as their work is gone, then they're angry. And so they try to find — you know, "Well, we need to add the coal mining jobs back." And that's not the way forward. But these people just want to know how to make a living.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:32:20) So there's a lot of anger towards that. And nobody wants a handout. And I think that's — I mean, it's how we define ourselves as humans. Nobody wants to — in our wiring right now that I can think of wants to sit back and do nothing and just have a government check come every month.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:32:38) I mean, it's easy to describe that in political world. Yeah. But there's gotta be something to define our value. So that is one of the biggest challenges we have to face. And it used to be, I push for whenever I talk about this, about the importance of education. And I don't mean everybody needs to learn how to use AI and ML.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:33:02) I mean, educate people in something that society needs. And I think about vo-tech education. There is none of that anymore, but that is a need right now that's out there. But somehow it's been stigmatized in a lot of ways. "Well, if you're young and you don't go on the college track, then you haven't really made it."

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:33:20) But meanwhile, you know, plumbers, electricians make a good living, and there's so much —

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:25) much for

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:33:26) Yeah. So I think that there's one change has to happen in our education system, but even then, you know, so that opens up some new job opportunities that people are trained to be skilled craftsmen, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, mechanics. You know, there is a need for that. And then there's need for other higher level white collar positions, but those are gonna go away as well.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:33:55) So you do have to start thinking about a universal basic income. But then the big question there is, well, yeah, that sounds great. How are you gonna pay for it? And I don't know the — I mean, there have been several proposals on how you would pay for it, and you've seen, you know, different sources of government revenue for a value added tax being added in the US or, you know, we don't need to get into all the politics of how it might happen. But the talk about how we're gonna pay for it.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:34:27) It's amazing to see, and I'm not advocating for this, but the reality is since the great recession, the US and world governments have just been printing money based on nothing, just this whole quantitative easing of just printing trillions of dollars, you know, year over year and running up the deficit. And you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. But amazingly, now fifteen years on, I mean, the stock market's still going up. There's still aid going out around the world when it's needed, and there's all these bailout programs. So I think repurposing and redefining the spending.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:35:12) There's enough ingenuity within the human spirit. I don't know about in elected officials today, but to find a way to pay for this. But we've got to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:21) We're incredibly creative as humans. We figure things out. We tend to be procrastinators as a whole. So we tend to figure things out. I mean, the whole entire government system does policy on arrears.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:33) Right? Once there's been enough deaths in this category, then they do policy there. And so I was actually pretty surprised at how quickly the government entity reacted regardless of whether you agree with how they reacted. I was pretty surprised with how quickly they reacted during the pandemic. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:50) That was, I was like, woah. And that just reminded me that when humans come together and they want to get something done, they can. We can harness the collective power of ourselves and just make it happen. One thing I wanted to get from you though, I'm taking bets for the future alien-type people who'll be watching this. Okay, we are in 2022.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:13) I'm curious. Do you think to the time we get to a system where I could talk to it, like how we're having a conversation now, and I could train it to do something not with a physical body in the physical world, but just it might be a digital body. Right? But I can train it to do some sort of knowledge work. Are we talking ten, twenty, fifty, five hundred?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:32) How many years till we get there?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:36:36) I just listened to your podcast with Martin Ford, and he referenced what my normal answer to this would be. He referenced Ray Kurzweil, who I've loved reading for years. He's my favorite. And he actually had a very good history of being right on so many of his predictions because his big thing is that technology — the human mind thinks technology moves linearly, but actually it moves exponentially. So his forecast for machine intelligence to be greater than human intelligence was 2029.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:37:08) That's super soon. And he may still believe that. I haven't seen that he's revised it. I think that's too soon to expect that we're gonna get to true AGI. But I do think that in fifty years, and I think it's gonna be less than fifty years, but if I had to give an over under, I would put fifty years from today.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:37:31) So by 2072, that there is — the Turing test, that computers are fully passing that and you can't tell the difference in a digital space of whether you're talking to a human or a computer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:45) Okay, cool. Yeah. I haven't heard anybody really — of all the arguments I've heard, I don't think I've heard anything under two or anything over two hundred years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:54) Even the most skeptical people, I haven't heard go over two hundred years. So most of the people that I've talked to — because I talked with Martin Ford, but I've also talked with several other people on this topic — and most of the people are under — I think 80 plus percent are under 50 years. So yeah.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:38:16) Well, I'll tell you where I think we're gonna run into it and what may make it take a little longer is all the technology advancements, Moore's Law has just continued and continued to be true and true and true. But in recent years, it has slowed down, and it's because we're reaching maximum capacity for what a silicon chip can do. So I think that — I don't know. I mean, same thing with quantum computing. It's like, well, when are we finally gonna get it?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:38:44) And they're getting closer, but if you think about — I mean, quantum computers right now are as big as the old UNIVAC and ENIAC systems, but aren't even as capable as those were. But in the past ten years, there's been an accelerated rate of progress in that. And I wonder, you know, how much we're gonna be able to do with sort of traditional ones and zeros and silicon based chips and programming. And if we max out, truly max out what we can do, I mean — you say, I say max it out, but the big jump in machine learning technology in the past decade has been because they figured out that these graphics processors, the GPUs, are perfect because they can run multiple processes simultaneously versus the direct, you know, in order processing.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:39:36) So I don't know, they're going to have to come up with something 'cause we're gonna — technology could really slow down. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:46) So what you're saying, we're going to need more compute than Silicon and the physical constraints can provide.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:39:51) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:51) And if we can't...

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:39:53) Yeah. And if we can't get technology ahead of that, I think we're gonna stagnate at some point. So that could push it a little longer. But the crazy thing is I feel like it's sort of a self fulfilling and it feeds itself. So if you have AI that is figuring out better ways to do things, like, you know, I think about AlphaFold and all the stuff that Google has done and that other companies too.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:40:18) But the advancements they've made in artificial intelligence in recent years, I see artificial intelligence potentially coming up with a problem that we can't solve. So maybe it just, you know, feeds on itself and then we use artificial intelligence to come up with what the next wave of technology is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:36) Yeah. That's one of the things that keeps me optimistic. Well, two things keep me optimistic. The technology will get to the point where it can help us solve our problems at the same point it's causing us a ton of problems. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:48) So it's like, oh, we got this huge issue. We just lost 80% of our workforce, but we have this technology that can now tell us the best way to move forward. Right. That's a positive. Another positive is let's say it wipes out 80 per — all my scenarios start with wiping out like 80%.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:03) 'Cause I just — it's a matter of when not if. So let's say we get to the 80% mark. Everything's wiped out. Well, humans store and transmit value between each other. That's what currency is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:14) Right? So I think we'll find other things. Like, for example, yes, there will still be a lot of pain and a lot of job loss. So I'm always trying to figure out how do you handle that curve between the time when the job loss happens and the time where humans have sort of figured out how to revalue things in society so that they can start transacting commerce with each other again and getting that sort of new economy going. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:40) Because, I mean, look, there's NFTs. It's like, who's paying $2,000,000 for a picture of a monkey or something? I'm like, that's a weird economy that's going on. But there's all sorts of things people value that I don't. I am not an art person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:53) Like, okay. I'll go to a museum. I'll look at it. But I am not — all the art in my house is something my wife either drew or some graphics that we've done or it's all stuff that we've done that I'll go get printed. I don't spend a lot of money on the art stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:08) It just doesn't interest me. But other things do interest me. Right? Like microphones. Like, I'll buy a super nice microphone because this is really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:15) To other people that have no interest in that, the microphone's a stupid purchase. Right? So as we value things amongst each other, I'm interested in how we're gonna handle that curve, and then I'm really excited to see what will happen. I think a couple of things will happen. One of them is people will pay a premium for the human variation of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:34) Right? So you can have K-pop for real or you can have K-pop's competitor. Right? Like Y2K pop. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:42) And that thing is just all sense and whatever it is. But it's completely like some AI system trying to, you know, or successfully making music. Right? But so what do you think — I guess I've got a couple questions here, so I don't wanna bombard you, but I'll list them out. The first one is how are we gonna handle that transition, that curvature point from the time we lose a bunch of stuff till we figure out how to revalue? Do you agree with my concept of how we transmit value with each other?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:15) And we'll start with those two things.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:43:17) Yeah. And I'll answer those in reverse order if you don't mind. Cool. So first off, I love your supposition and your reference to NFTs and even, you know, cryptocurrency. If you think historically there've been all kinds of bubbles that have popped and things have gone really far south, but then there's things that have consistently been part of the human economy since before there was money. So the bubble things that people put value behind — I think of various, the tulip bulbs that everybody knows the story where the tulip bulbs are costing as much as houses, people speculating just like they do on stocks or the Mississippi bubble that happened in the US in early days.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:44:11) And just all these bubbles that have happened where people overvalue something, because they're trying to be the lesser of two fools. They want to get in on something as it's going up, they want to buy here and sell here. And then, you know, that sort of timing never works. However, there are things that don't have an inherent value in that they're not needed for our day to day life. So diamonds, gold, you know, precious metals, things that have historically had value for no real reason other than as a means of currency or something that you want or something to show.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:44:49) But to your point on that, I mean, NFTs don't have value to me. Cryptocurrency doesn't have value to me now, but if crypto is —

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:02) Not value to you. No, I'm just at home. You're a technology person.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:45:07) I know, but I don't like things that are so speculative. And, honestly, I mean, I understand. We could get into a whole conversation of countries being on, you know, the gold currency versus just fiat money that is just not really based on anything other than the faith of the government. But at least in the dollar, you do have the US government saying, I guarantee this. The whole idea of a blockchain adding value and just all these different types of currency out there that just the value fluctuates like crazy.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:45:40) I don't touch it. I mean, even in my — well, I have a small fund that I call my poker fund that I do crazy stuff with. It wouldn't be a long term investment. I don't even touch — I don't touch any cryptocurrency with it or any NFTs or anything like that. I just — if I don't understand the fundamental value of something, I'm not gonna invest in it.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:46:01) And that's — and I guess to the — you know? Well, we could put this with the bubble too. Stock prices forever. I mean, stock prices should be based on the value of a business. So you can use ratios, you know, the price to earnings ratio.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:46:16) There are things that you use to value a business. And when Elon Musk buys 9% of Twitter, so Dogecoin, or I don't know how you pronounce it, Dogecoin, whatever, shoot down the value of it because Elon — I mean, that's just, that's not — I don't — that's just based on human psychology of value of something. And that scares me a little bit. However, all that said, I may be a relic of the past and this kind of talk may, you know, I may be the guy that said rock and roll is a fad, you know, twenty years from, because I just don't get it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:51) Well, I mean, if you group all cryptocurrencies together, I would say, and you're doing it for investment purposes, I'd say that's stupid. If you look at what some of the individual technologies are providing, like for me, for example, one of the ones that I like — I have a very small amount of my total assets in these currencies. But I hold some nonetheless, mostly to your point earlier about staying relevant and making sure that I don't get crushed by the kids these days, you know, type deal. So I started looking into which ones I wanted to buy just to put some money in there and just to have experience transacting it and things of that nature. And they're all very, very different.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:35) And the ones that I ended up going with were things that I believe are the future in the sense of technology. So, for example, they have the Interplanetary File System. This is a decentralized file storage, which is, you know, how we sort of imagine the Internet to begin with. And you would use these coins to transact with, like, bandwidth on that network. So it's a network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:58) It exists today. You can see how much storage it has. People are using it to host things. And it's got a really innovative way for how it accesses and serves the content. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:11) For a very — I'm trying to make it like a super high level explanation. But you can learn more by searching for the Interplanetary File System, and Filecoin is the name of the coin. So I said, okay. There's two or three of those projects out there that are all doing the same thing and they're all growing and they're all, you know, gaining. So I was like, I will buy some of those because a, I'll be incentivized to follow their progress and, b, it's because I think that's the future, but I could be off by a hundred years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:42) But I do believe we'll get there someday. We'll get back to that concept of the Internet being open and decentralized and, like, a store of data versus moderated by the political or moral whims of ISPs and backbones and, you know, different type DNS providers, things like that. I do believe we'll get to a, back to that original idea of it.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:49:05) Yeah. I love that you're — I love everything you just said because I think about, and when I said I could be the person in twenty years who says that rock and roll is a fad, and I'm willing to accept that. I'm almost 50 years old and, you know, this will be — my kids will figure it out. But think about pre capitalism in a mercantile society where everything is just traded. This number of furs gets you this number, you know, this much wheat or whatever you're trading for, and that is very clearly understood. You're handing me a thing of value.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:49:40) I'm giving you a thing of value, and we've come up with what that means. And then trying to explain this piece of currency, this coin is — it represents value. And if it's a gold coin, you can say, well, it's as much gold. Gold's valued at this, whatever. But then the idea of, you know, paper coins and it — you know, this is representing that there is money somewhere and that it is guaranteed by someone.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:50:02) That had to be a very strange transition. So this gets to your part of the question of when the current economy and society really doesn't work anymore. And there's this period of disillusionment and just whatever chaos that means, how do we come out of that on the other side? And then to our earlier point in the conversation, you'd love it if policymakers, if society on the whole, were planning for that and could smoothly guide us to that. I don't think that's happening on any level, certainly not at the government level.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:50:36) There are think tanks and nonprofits that are following that. But that is, I think, what's going to come out on the outside because when all the jobs are gone, I mean, capitalism is broken at that point when you don't have the working class and you don't need to pay people. And I think a real one thing that I think is going to happen, and I always think of this. So wages are suppressed and have been for a long time. So a worker cannot support a family on minimum wage.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:51:04) So the idea, you know, you raise the minimum wage up to $15 an hour or whatever it is, and you make this keep going up so that it's a livable wage. Well, businesses, their response to that is going to be, if the business's only goal, and regardless of what else they say, I think that this is why most businesses exist, it's to create the maximum value for their shareholders. So if at $15 an hour, you then come up. Robotics progresses to a point. You already see now there's all kinds of YouTube videos of this robot making a cup of coffee or making a burger or whatever.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:51:43) If it makes more sense for a business, once you've brought the employee wages up to a point where, okay, I can either pay these 10 workers $15 an hour all year, or I can make this one capital investment of however much it is for the coffee making robot. Then you don't have baristas anymore. And the company figures out their payback and their ROI and they say, okay, well, we don't need people. So there's a whole swath of jobs gone. And that's, you know, that's going to happen.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:52:10) Before, I think, what we talked about with the artificial general intelligence, that kind of stuff's going to happen. So, and right now—

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:16) Yeah.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:52:17) I mean, you think about where unemployment is. I mean, restaurants around the country cannot find people to staff. So businesses are going to find ways to, you know, in air quotes, staff that may be with more robotics in the future. It may be, you know, instead of having a waiter at your table, you've got an iPad at the table that you're placing your order and, you know, maybe there is a person that runs it out to you or maybe there's a remote control robot that brings your food out to you.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:52:43) You know, I think business is going to find a way and that's going to be some of the low hanging fruit for automation and more jobs disappearing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:54) Let's see. What else do we have to talk about? Is there anything that we didn't get to that you wanted to bring up? I mean, do you have a book coming out, like a non-science fiction book?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:53:05) That is shelved right now because I've been so busy focused on the one that's out. So I have a 200,000 word space opera that is gathering digital dust on my hard drive that I don't know. Maybe once, sort of, all these podcasts I'm doing right now are my virtual book tour to promote the current book. But I've, I don't know. This is—

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:28) What's the current book? Share. What's the current book? Where can I buy it?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:53:33) Yeah. The current book is Deep Finance: Corporate Finance in the Information Age, and it talks about finance automation and data science. And it gives some case studies and a kind of high level overview of what is AI/ML. And it, the idea is if someone hasn't been keeping up with the technology the way that we talked about, and it just comes from a very base level, and I try to make it really accessible. And it says, you know, this is where finance and accounting have been.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:54:03) This is how it's changed. And this is why if you don't change, you're going to get left behind. And then the second half of the book is basically how you lead that change. So, Deep Finance is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, basically anywhere you can buy books. There's a Kindle version and a paper version.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:54:24) And not Audible yet. And the words I got from the publisher was if we got enough sales that we would get the Audible recording. And we haven't got enough sales.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:38) Counterintuitive.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:54:39) Yeah. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:40) That doesn't make sense.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:54:41) All right. So I guess to offset the expense of doing the Audible version, which a lot of authors, you know, read their own book. But since my voice sounds like a mix between, like, Billy Bob Thornton and, I don't know, whatever Southern accent I have, I don't think people want to hear me read it. I need someone to—

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:03) I disagree. They do want to hear you. They want your voice, your articulation, your words. I promise you. You know, and you can always do anything like expensively if that's a word. But you can always do anything moderately too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:18) I could point you in the right direction if you want. But yeah, you can get your Audible book recorded very reasonably priced.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:55:29) I should probably do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:31) You should do it. Like, you should do it. Yeah. Because I'm telling you, what I know, so often what I do is I buy the physical copy and the Audible copy. So I keep the physical copy around my place so that I remember it when I see the cover, but I listen to everything on Audible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:47) I'm a huge fan of it and I think it would do amazing things for your sales. But we'll put links in the show notes. So for people to buy it, they can go onto Amazon and purchase it. And what do they type in? Just deep finance?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:55:59) Yeah. And if you need me to, or if you want to have one of your producers reach out, I can just send the direct link to it. But if you type deep finance, it'll come up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:08) Oh, cool. Is that a play on DeepMind?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:56:11) It was actually, the publisher came up with that, and I'm pretty happy with it. I think my working title was something like Always Be Closing, which is the line from Glengarry Glen Ross, but people think about that from a sales perspective. And there's already, you might imagine, a couple of dozen books out there called Always Be Closing. But my the inside joke I had that wasn't very funny, but it's an inside joke between me and myself, was always be closing. The financial close process is something that all finance people have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:42) Oh, goodness. Yeah. So, Gerald, are you with that?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:56:45) Yeah. So that was, I mean, it's already the book's already written for a niche audience, and that title would have even made it more niche. So I appreciated the publisher coming up with a better title than what I had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:58) That's funny. No, it's a great title. Yeah. So what else do we have? We got, we're going to push out the book, let people know, we'll put the links when we post about it and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:09) Do we have, like, what is the reason a CTO should read Deep Finance?

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:57:18) Historically, CFOs have sort of been in this ivory tower of, I don't have a department. I'm just here. I'm reporting on what you're doing. And I've experienced this when I wanted development help, for example, as a CFO. Well, finance is back office, and nobody starts a business so that you can have finance operations. You have finance because it's a necessary requirement of having a business.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:57:47) So whatever widget the business is creating, that's what gets the attention, and rightfully so. That's why the business is there to begin with. But as a finance guy who's wanted to kind of push the limits of the technology that's been available to me, I've done the thing where I've tried to do the citizen coding, citizen development, run it by myself on, you know, I've got a SQL database on my laptop that I'm trying to pull information into, or I'm trying to write some weird little thing in PHP, because it's the last language that I learned that is of no value to anyone, but I'm just trying to figure out how to do that. So I think that CFOs in general need to learn, kind of going to the jokes we were talking about earlier, to branch out and to be less of that CFO introvert that is most at home staring at your Excel spreadsheet or your reports or whatever and work collaboratively across the organization. And I think that if you have what I refer to in the book as a new age CFO, if you have a CFO who is trying to increase automation and to increase the technology that the company is using in the back office, they're not engineers.

(Glenn (CFO at Sandline) at 00:59:04) They are finance people. No matter how well they understand the technology, they need help. So when the CFO comes to you as CTO and asks for resources of something to help them achieve it, what I'd like to see is the CFO working more directly with the CTO for a common goal, which is to give the company, the back office of the company, better data and better automation and better information so that the company can become more of a data driven organization. And to do that, I think the CFO and the CTO of technology and finance have to work together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:40) 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.