Becoming a Leader that Crushes Technical Debt with Juan Orlandini, CTO at Insight

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Juan Orlandini, CTO at Insight, about dealing with tech debt, how to lead by influence, sci-fi novels, and more. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) The main theme, which I actually thought was stated so well—I very much enjoyed this main theme—regardless of the choice that you make today, it will become technical debt, and you need to be ready for that. And I think that's refreshing because so often there's been five or ten really main popular areas to talk about technical debt and how to manage it and all of that. But when I read that, I was like, that's true. Are you writing content? Was that a quote from you?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:00:48) It is, because it's absolutely true. So I've been at this for a very long time. I'm losing most of my hair. What I have left is gray. My kids make fun of me, all that good stuff, right? Through my career, I have watched the rise, amazing success, and then ultimate demise of a number of technologies and companies that you would have never thought, when you're in the middle of it, are gonna go away. A good example of that is Sun Microsystems. So early in my career, I rode the wave of them rising to a dominant position in the segment that they covered. I actually based a lot of my early career on their success. And if you told me in the mid-nineties that Sun was gonna disappear essentially from the market, I would've laughed in your face because I was young and naive, right? Now that I've seen a few of these happen, yeah, it's gonna happen to all of them. They all have a birth, a life—hopefully a long, happy life—but every company at some point ends up, or any technology ends up, becoming something that you retire, and you have to plan for that.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:02:08) The other thing that comes from it too, another way to look at it, is the product view of it. We make a choice as an organization when we're developing products and services on what technologies those are gonna be based on, with hopefully near-perfect clarity because we're students of the market. But what we don't have is perfect clarity of future events, right? So we analyze, we make sure that, hey, based on what we know today, this is what we're going to put our bets on. Move five years into the future, or nowadays a year into the future, and some bombshell drops on your lap—like the next generative AI thing, or AGI might even come out—and then all of a sudden every tech stack that you built all of your stuff on becomes obsolete immediately. It has become technical debt, right? So you just have to account for that and make sure that, hey, over time, these things are going to evolve. Most of them are gonna evolve without your direct input because most of us are not in a position to dictate the evolution of the technology. We're consumers of the technology. And then at some point, it's gonna take a turn that you were not expecting and could have not forecasted. And that does become technical debt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:29) Tell me about some of those times you've seen turns that were unexpected happen in your career.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:03:36) Oh, well, that's a good example of that one that will resonate without making me sound really old.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:43) It's alright. Sound as old as you need to. Old is just experience. It's just a time function for experience. So you're basically saying I'm very experienced.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:03:52) You know, there's an old saying: I'll take age and wisdom over youth and enthusiasm any day, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:58) Every day I make that trade. I'm like, you know what? I would never wanna go back—I'm 36—I would never wanna go back to 20. I'm like, no. I'm good.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:04:09) Oh, that's funny. Well, since I brought it up, I'm gonna use the Unix wars, right? So for a long time, the prevailing wisdom was that there was gonna be one of the Unix major players—so there used to be IBM with AIX, HP with HP-UX, Sun with Solaris. There were a few other dominant ones that were out there—that one of those guys was going to be the winner. And this upstart toy thing called Linux was not going to be anything but a toy or relegated to minor functions inside of the IT world. And what ended up actually happening, very contrary to public wisdom, is that, hey, Linux is dominating pretty much every area. If you look at Microsoft's Azure, they actually run more workloads on Linux than they do on Windows, which is an amazing thing, right? And if you told me that, you know, even ten, fifteen years ago, I would have said, no way. There's no way that'll ever happen, right? But that's one of those left-hand twists that most of us would have never predicted.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:05:41) You can go further up in the stack and take a look at development frameworks or even simpler than that, programming languages. Early in the web history, Perl was your programming language and all of the frameworks associated with Perl were the thing, right? And then all of a sudden it became Ruby, or it became Python, or it became whatever, right? And now there's WebAssembly and WASM—that's the new hotness or hotness-ish, right? So there's all these things that have all popped up, and Python's—not Python, Perl—is basically dropped off the face of the Earth, relegated to old stacks and just maintenance code. Unfortunate, because it's super powerful, super cool thing. But those other things have caught up and surpassed it in most areas. So who would have met that when you were developing the first set of stacks? And that's what I'm talking about. So if you take a longer horizon view, all of these things have that kind of a life cycle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:21) It's interesting to watch the communities form around the technologies. So for example, I got really into Ruby for a while, and the core reason why I was into Ruby is there was a certain type of person who was using Ruby, and they were typically higher-quality engineers, and then they made high-quality learning materials from it. And so for me, when I looked at all the spaces of the different languages and my different options for whatever my situation was at the time, Ruby had the highest quality of people, relationships, and content to learn. And so I just said, I'm gonna make my life easier and learn that. And then I spent—that became my primary language until the podcast took off and I stopped developing systems as like a nine-to-five type deal.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:07:06) Yeah. Well, you know, culture matters, and culture around anything matters. And something around either the dev stack or the community of AI practitioners that you happen to be associated with, or the community of pool players if you're a pool player, whatever it is, that matters. And that culture is actually what drives a lot of the behaviors that we ultimately end up sharing ourselves. So, yeah, absolutely. We have to take a look and consider that as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:38) So we recently had a conversation on the podcast about the moment you decided to become a leader, right, rather than staying an individual contributor. And I was hoping you could share with me what that moment was like for you.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:07:55) You know, that's a really interesting question because there's different kinds of leadership, right? And there's styles and kinds of leadership. So for me, I don't know that it was ever a conscious decision to become a leader. It was a fact that I naturally want to help others—it's part of my makeup. And that put me into a leadership position because I was able to, either through influence or through knowledge or a combination of both, be able to help others. And that ultimately led me to a position of formal leadership, right? So initially it started off as an informal leadership thing, and then you end up becoming a formal leader where you have people and HR responsibilities. And it's actually something that if I'm working with a younger teammate and they're trying to decide how they're gonna grow their careers—if they wanna go down the leadership path or not—I have to remind them that leaders lead, flat out, period, right? The structure under which you lead might be formal or informal, but you still lead. And influence matters almost as much as the formal structure, if not more. And so for me, it happened to be that I didn't make a conscious decision to become a leader and take a leadership position because that's what I wanted to do. I started leading by influence, and then that turned into a formal leadership role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:24) You know, I find that when we sell into companies, we're always identifying who in that group—we know who has the title, who has the highest-ranking title—but we're always trying to figure out who's the person that everyone's listening to.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:09:40) Yeah. Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:41) Who's that influencer person in this specific deal? And yeah.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:09:47) Oh, yeah. So if you look at any of the sales methodologies that are out there, and there's lots of them, they all have an element of that, because you do have to understand how the informal relationship structure works as much as the formal relationship structure. And you're absolutely right. I've been in many sales situations where I walk into a room and there's this one guy that's in the corner—he's kind of quiet, doesn't have a very fancy title—but you ask a hard question or a hard question comes, and it comes from them, everybody shuts up, right? And then you know, okay, that's the dude. That is the dude right there, and I better make sure that I address his concerns or this is gonna go nowhere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:31) I try to often make sure that it's not me. When I'm building teams and trying to grow things, I want to be able to look at the team and pay attention to who's who, even within my own company, right? And I'd rather be the person who books the tour rather than the speaker on stage. I like to organize. And it's so funny because I spent seventeen years behind the keyboard just writing code. But what I found is more interesting to me than that is organizing people to achieve an outcome. To me, that was the most addictive thing I had ever experienced because you can achieve something greater than you can achieve as an individual. And the only way to achieve something greater than an individual is to get a group of people to achieve an outcome. And then it's a whole different world. It's completely different from, you know, software engineering. And so that's why when I hear people talk about moving to leadership, I'm like, you realize that's basically saying you're gonna become a chef? It's an entirely different skill set.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:11:36) It's a whole different thing. It is a whole different thing. But think about what you just said, right? It ties very directly to what I was talking about with my career growth: you started off by just organizing. You're probably organizing them maybe around some fun activity—the dart league in your office or the foosball league in your office or something. I don't know, probably, right? Or cafeteria something, whatever it was. And then naturally you became kind of an organizer, which made you into a leadership role without everybody looking at you like a leader, but you were by the organizational structure that you were setting up. You were leading people to have this fun time or whatever it was, or this outcome that you were helping organize, right? And that is a completely different thing. And most really good leaders recognize that, hey, there's a portion of me that as a leader I need to do that organizational chefery, cookery. But some of it has to be thought leadership. Some of it has to be forward-thinking, visionary kind of a thing, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:39) So here's a fun question from Josh, actually, the producer of our show. If an alien approached you—an off-world alien approached you—and asked you for your single most important lesson on leading technology teams, what would you tell them?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:12:56) Single most. That's a really good question. And you know, you could parse that one in so many ways because an alien might have a completely different context. So how about we call it not an alien, but a foreigner that's learning American culture, right? Because they still have human context, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:18) Okay. Alright. We'll give it to you. Yeah.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:13:20) Alright. Alright. I'm a nerd. I read probably somewhere between 80 and 100 books a year, and most of them are science fiction. Oh, nice. Oh, yeah. So we could nerd out on that one. But I'll tell you—and you touched on it—the wisdom of the crowd is usually right. And spending time to understand what the real wisdom of the crowd is, not what the loudest voice is, not who the most colorful character is, not one of those things, but understanding that the group as a whole is coinciding around this concept tends to generally be the right thing. And then if you can get consensus around that, you actually end up doing many great things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:15) Do you have an example of a time where that actually played out in detail that you're allowed to share?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:14:23) Yeah. That's actually what I'm thinking. Alright. So here's—I'll give it to you in this context without going into very many specifics. Alright? The natural tendency for humans is to have "or" statements in what we do. It's cloud or data center. Python or Ruby. I don't know, AI or not AI. And that is actually a battle that is very divisive. And it's also typically wrong because it's typically an "and" statement that you end up having. So it's cloud and the edge, cloud and the data center, Python and, I don't know, Swift, because you have to do development natively to an iOS environment, right? Or C# and Swift. Whenever I see "or" statements, that's a good indicator to me that I haven't received consensus, and I need to find an "and" statement. And when I get to that "and" statement, that tends to be a wisdom-of-the-crowds kind of a thing, and then I coalesce teams around that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:44) That's actually pretty good. I mean, I've done a thousand episodes here, and I've never gotten that insight. I like that. Who are you? Tell me about your—you're obviously a CTO, you're at a big company—tell me about how many people are on the tech side of the business, what the business is, and what your role is.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:16:03) Alright. So I'm at Insight Enterprises—actually, the North America division of it. So it's called Insight Direct USA, is the North America division. Actually, no, that would be just the US. Insight Direct Canada would be the Canadian team that I work with. We're a fairly large organization. There's about 14,000 of us globally. Most of those are actually in technical roles. And what we do is we call ourselves the solutions integrator, which is a slight variation on the common theme. Our typical competitors fall into one of two categories. Category number one is the systems integrators. And there we have people like the Deloittes and Kendrels and those kinds of folks, where you have humongous arms of people that are really smart, that can strategize, you know, write code, do all those other kinds of things. On the other side of the house, we have the typical VAR kind of approach, where you are selling product, whether it's cloud-based product or physical product—it doesn't really matter—it's product sales.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:17:16) And we have some very amazing competitors in that side of the house. So CDWs, SHIs, a lot of smaller regional players, those kinds of folks. What we are positioning ourselves with is a unique combination of having scale at the consultative side of the house, but also scale on the product side of the house and landing on one as category of one, where we can actually execute strategy, drive code, new value streams for our clients, and then also include as part of that the product motion to make sure that it's implemented the best way possible. Right. To support that, just here in North America, there's about 6,000 technical teammates.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:18:03) If I include our India based folks and our Manila based folks, that would be probably another 1,500 folks that would participate in just the North America business as a technologist.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:16) And so how do you build relationship and community across, let's just say, 10,000? About 10,000 people? Like, how do you think about that? Do you have a comms person? Do you plan out how you communicate publicly? What do you do?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:18:31) Yeah. Very much so. So part of it is, I sit in the office of the CTO. So I have peers of mine that sit in the MEA and APAC, right? I also have a peer of mine that—So I'm the outward facing CTO is a good way to think about it. I'm the one that's engaging with our partner community, that's engaging with our clients on sales and transformation engagements. One of my other peers is our inward facing CTO. He's the one that builds the systems that make us awesome. Right? So he's the one that's in charge of our technology and road mapping and all that.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:19:09) And we collaborate very closely. So he and I spend a lot of time deciding, hey, what are the things that are upcoming that we should be patient zero or client zero on? And I'll give you a good example of that in a second. And then we make sure that we've learned a lot of those things and then push when we go and talk to clients to do it for them. We have not only just experienced it before, but we've done it for ourselves. So we actually have deep experience there.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:19:33) So the comms part of it comes from making sure that you're out there and building community. So we do it through Slack, through Teams, just through a lot of other kinds of social-ish engagements kind of things, right? We also, as part of the office of the CTO, do a video recording that we send out on a regular basis, goes out to our technical teammates.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:20:03) And in there, we include our distinguished engineers. That's a whole other topic we should probably spend some time on. We include some of our other thought leaders in there as guest speakers and we talk about, hey, what are the current trends and technologies and things and open the line of dialogue so that anybody is welcome to interface with us or me directly. My door is always wide open and build that trust that way and share and communicate that way. The other thing that we do that's actually fairly unique is we run a very large internal conference.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:20:36) We call it Mastery. And it is just for us to teach ourselves the amazing things that we can do. Because one of the things that you'll find when you have a large organization like this, is that people are busy delivering the value that they're chartered with delivering, and they don't know that the person right next to them has an adjacency that combined makes them better. So you're going to actually learn about what all of our other capabilities are and that's what we do in mastery. We bring them together.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:21:08) And it's a three day conference. We do it in Phoenix in August, which is always awesome. Let me tell you, 114 degrees in the sun is just peachy keen. But it's, we bring anywhere from 700 to a thousand teammates from all over the world, and we spend three days on probably something like 114 different sessions that we end up running on everything from creating landing zones with the new best practices to AI in the future or new dev practices or the state of the art and data protection. If that's the thing that we're talking about.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:21:49) And it's our smartest teaching our smartest how to be smarter. And the cool thing about that is because we have so many smart people, we can do that. One of the side things that happens as part of that is that you build community through that as well. And as the organizer of all of this, I'm building relationships through that as well. And so me as the leader and I'm trying to help people get better, that gives me the exposure and access to them so that I can get the collective wisdom from them, again, the wisdom of the crowds so I can understand what's happening. And that's how I go about building communities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:25) That's interesting. So when I ask you about communication and communicating with such a large number of people, one of the strategies is bringing these people together to build stronger relationships amongst themselves.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:22:36) Either virtually or in person. Absolutely. A hundred percent. I've even hosted, especially during the pandemic, you had to get a little bit creative. Right? But we had slider eating contest. You're from the South, so you know Krystal's. So it was a number of Krystal's that you could eat in a certain amount of time. Or the people in the Northeast were eating White Castle just fine. It's actually tasty as well.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:23:02) Right? Then we had hot pepper eating contest. We had all these other things. And any of these non work related things help you build trust, community, connective tissue and all those. So I try to participate in as many of those as possible. The other thing I do is, at Insight, we have a formal mentorship program where you can help mentor teammates that are younger in their career or trying to change the angle of their career or whatever it is. And we do that through our diversity and inclusion team, which is actually very purposeful so that we can make sure that those voices are heard as well. And I participate as much as I can in that. And that actually helps me also understand a different viewpoint wisdom, again, from the crowd, but also give back to the community, because I came up through all sorts of fun things that we haven't talked about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:59) Is anybody allowed to participate in the mentorship program?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:24:03) Yeah. Both as a mentor or a mentee. Yeah. Absolutely. You just apply. And there's only so many mentors that are willing to give time, you know, and only so many mentees that are willing to take the guidance. Right? But, yeah, it's open to anybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:19) So when you said earlier that your door's always open. Right? It's like, okay. I believe it. But there's close to 10,000 people. How big is the queue? Do people take you up on the offer?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:24:35) Not that often.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:36) Not that often.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:24:38) I'll tell you. And I'd love to have the problem where it's too much, and I tell people, alright. Enough. But I don't have that problem. Alright? It's actually—and it kind of makes you wonder. Like, dude, I told you. Just call me. I'm totally open to you. Right? But they're like, mate, you're our CTO. I don't want to. It's like, dude, whatever. Alright?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:24:59) But I'll tell you, I was just at, the reason I was in Nashville. Was it Nashville? No. I was in Vegas for this, for the Intel event that they had. Was that in Vegas? I forget where I—I'm on a plane every week. Intel just had their event. And Pat Gelsinger, who runs, you know, top five companies in the world. He's on main stage and he's talking about some of the stuff he's going to do. And he says, if you ever have a customer that has this problem, call me.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:25:30) I will call them. And here's the thing, Pat will. If you call him, Pat will absolutely do it. Guess how many people are going to call Pat Gelsinger? And I'm by no means comparing myself with Pat, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:39) We're comparing you today. You heard it first, Modern CTO, the next Pat.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:25:43) But I mean, it's kind of the extreme example of what I'm talking about. That dude is also very much a hundred percent, hey, my door's wide open, and he means it. And his people know that he means it by their respect. Right? And I have a much smaller version of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:02) Well, I can validate you right now in that because when I first started the show, I was like, you know, what are—I wanted to talk to the CTO of Verizon. I was like, that'd be cool. I was like, he's never going to do it. So I just sent him an email. Within five minutes, he called my cell phone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:23) I was like, did he look up my number? And does he know I'm a Verizon customer? So he called within five minutes and he goes, Joel. His name was Hans. He goes, Joel, you don't want me on. And I was like, why? And he's like, because in two weeks—it's private right now, but in two weeks, I'm going to be the CEO. And Kyle, he's going to be promoted. He's going to be the CTO. You need to have Kyle on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:42) And I said, okay. Can you introduce me to Kyle? He's like, yeah. So he introduced me to Kyle. And this is seven years ago. Kyle's been on a handful of times since, and now he went from CTO to the CEO of Verizon Business now. But the idea that I just sent a cold email just on a idea to this guy, and he was literally the CTO of all of Verizon, and he called me within five minutes. And so I started doing that more and more, and we got amazing guests. But what I found that the tricks are—and you said you read, so I'm going to share one of my personal tricks or tactics that I use is I'll read somebody's book to the point where I can come up with an interesting question that shows that I'm involved in the subject matter and that I identified two points that they were talking about where there was uncertainty or a question arose. And then I'll email them about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:35) And I have a 70% response rate on that. Like, top authors in any space. And it's, it's—I probably shouldn't share that. Everyone's going to GPT that now.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:27:47) It's going to crush it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:48) It's going to ruin it. But I've built the show. I've built up the show by just really caring about people and reaching out to them. So when you sit here and you're like, yeah, they say that and that's possible and people don't take me up on it, I a hundred percent believe you.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:28:04) It's just the way it works. It's human nature. Right? And I respect that in them. So when I was—I was kidding when I said, dude, just call me. I mean it, but I know that what I'm asking them to do, and I respect that they respect it. So that's just part of the situation. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:21) Yeah. Do you ever hear them say that they thought about calling you, but then they just thought about what you would say anyways and did that?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:28:29) So one of my mentees today, he didn't—I'm actually not mentoring him through the official program, but we were at a client event. I think it was in Vegas. And we were talking and happy hour we're having after our presentation or whatever it was. And he goes, hey, Juan, I really wanted to be your mentee for this cohort of mentorship. I applied, but you were already taken by somebody else.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:29:01) And I was like, dude, I'll mentor you. If anybody want me to mentor you, I'll mentor you. And he and I spend about an hour every month just talking through the things that he's working through and all that other stuff. And all he had to do was ask. And he didn't think that that was going to do it because when I said yes, he's like, you mean it? I'm like, yeah, dude. I'm a hundred percent happy to help you. And so, yeah, it's a hundred percent open to anybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:29) Yeah. And I have actually had, obviously, mentee, mentor programs being official are very important, especially for people that have no experience learning how to ask or where to start. Right? It's a great door and a door to walk through. But I've also found by happenstance that some of the people who are the most important mentors in my life, I've never actually asked them to mentor me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:52) Like, I just identified them as competent and then brought them the problem set and use them for processing and then just keep doing that. Yeah. And so I tell people all the time, like, you can just have really good questions and go to competent people and ask them. You don't have to, like, can you be my mentor? You don't have to do it that way. You can, but I'm shy about that.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:30:12) Yeah. You know, I'll tell you, it's actually one of the big pluses and big minuses of the formal mentorship programs. The formal one forces structure and makes sure that it is happening. And I like that portion of it. And the formal part of it also puts it in the structure that's not very flexible in some ways. And that portion of it, I don't like. Because I wouldn't mind if my mentee just came up to me and said, hey, I just have a five minute question. And it truly be a five minute question. And they just needed a little bit of angle setting or dot on the i kind of on the thought process kind of a thing.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:30:52) And those—You're right, a hundred percent. I've done that in my past. Some of my most important mentors were either leaders or formal leaders or informal leaders that I associated with. And I just asked them, like, what do you think? And they gave me amazing thoughts and guidance, and I wouldn't be here without those interactions.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:31:15) And in fact, that's actually one of the things that, if you think about what we have lost through the pandemic, is the ability to have those very quick hit kind of mentorship discussions around the water cooler. So this return to the office thing, right? Mandating return to the office is probably not going to work because we're now used to being able to sit in our home offices or on a plane or a coffee shop or whatever and be productive, right? But you're losing some of that natural connection that happens without the formal, I am going to talk to you from two to 02:50 or whatever the time frame is, right? Because a lot of the amazing things that I've learned, are just because I was getting a cup of coffee, or we gathered together and had a beer after work, or whatever it was, and just happened to have a good chat.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:32:05) And it twisted things around for me in a very productive way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:09) A hundred percent. There's—I think as we rise with the AI and the digital twins—did you see Reid—I think his name is Reid Hoffman. Who, Reid somebody.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:32:20) The Netflix guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:21) Yeah. Did you see his digital twin thing he posted on LinkedIn this week?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:32:25) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:26) He interviewed himself. Like, he made a digital twin that actually was one of the most believable twins I've ever seen, although you could still tell it was GPT responses. But it train—he trained him on all those books, and then interviewed himself through the twin. And I just thought to myself, wow. This technology is growing so fast. Within the next three years, we're not gonna be able to tell if you're talking to me or my digital twin.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:32:52) Now for a five year old—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:53) There it is, Joshua. There it is.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:32:55) Power super fast before anyone else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:57) Even if—So the left is the twin. The right is him.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:33:01) Oh, you're kidding. Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:02) Now, you see how smooth that was when he was talking?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:33:05) Yeah. That's pretty amazing. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:07) Now, if you watch it from the very beginning and everything, your ears can tune in to it's not being real. But if you just take a little clip of it, like him saying something like that, it feels very good.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:33:22) Yeah. It's actually—So we've actually done some projects with some clients because there's a number of startups, by the way, that are doing that digital twinning stuff.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:33:30) And there's some interesting use cases that we're doing because some of our clients, especially in EMEA and even down in APAC, you have to produce content in multiple languages. We're fortunate here in North America, we basically need two, maybe three. So English, French, and Spanish, that's it. And that covers most of North America. And EMEA, I mean, there's dozens. In APAC, there's dozens.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:33:55) And what they wanted to do is be able to have video shot one time in whatever the natural language is for that presenter, and then have an AI version of that that is lip synced to the natural rhythms of a different, completely different language. And we're doing that. We're training, we're having video shot in English, and then it's being presented in Chinese and Japanese. I mean, all these amazing things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:22) Did you follow Mr. Beast's work on that?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:34:25) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:26) Do you know who Mr. Beast is?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:34:27) I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29) He has a massive company that just dubs, and it builds all this dubbing technology where it'll take like, we could take our interview right here and just pay a couple cents or maybe a couple dollars, and it'll make us sound like native speakers in basically any language. And it moves our lips. It changes our lips.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:50) So you've seen this then?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:34:51) Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And in fact, there was actually an amazing conference I went to at the very end of last year. It was in San Francisco. It was the Fortune magazine—it's called the Fortune AI Conference—and all the luminaries were there. And there was, it was an amazing set of presenters. One of them, I forget the name of the company he was at, what he does, he does it in real time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:18) Real time?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:35:19) Face swaps, real time. And when he was on stage, he was talking, and I was looking at the guy. His face is his face, and you look to the left, and then in the video, it was a completely different face. And then when the moderator for the thing got up, and they swapped faces in real time on the video. And it was being done off of basically a laptop with a high-end GPU.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:44) Oh, come on. Are you bilingual, by the way?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:35:52) I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:52) Now was it good? Did you hear the output in both languages, and was it decent?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:35:52) So the demo wasn't the translation portion of it, which they said they could do, but they were doing the face swap.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:59) Oh, they were just doing face swaps. So it wasn't like—oh, okay. I get it. I get it. I got it.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:36:04) Yeah. Yeah. But there was another lady that was on stage that actually did the translation, and it was coming out. She was translating it to Japanese or Chinese, which I'm very much not even dimly aware of. And she was doing that real time. It was amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:23) We just got to hope these AIs don't get minds of their own and decide to manipulate the translations to achieve some higher level objective.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:36:30) Well, if you're a nerdy reader, and it sounds like you are, there's a great book called Superintelligence. I'll have to look up who the author is. The premise of this book is that this AI thing is going to more than likely create a superintelligence, but there's different paths that superintelligence can take, and it's up to us to decide how to go through it. And this is a little bit of an academic study on it because he references a whole bunch of academic kind of stuff. But it was really, really good. And there's things in there that I have not considered. And it was everything from the Terminator kind of view to just a better version of yourself to all these other cool things. And so, it's a good book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:23) What's your favorite sci-fi book?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:37:26) There's so many genres. So we're sticking to pure sci-fi. I might go with the David Brin Uplift series. I love that whole series. David Brin was amazing. I wish he'd produced more content, but it's been a while since he's done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:47) We can just AI him now.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:37:49) Yeah. There you go. Dune, obviously, I mean, top of mind because of the movies, which were amazing. That whole universe that's built around Dune is fascinating. It's amazing. Alright. So the Superintelligence book is by Nick Bostrom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:07) Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nick Bostrom. Yep.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:38:09) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:10) I heard an interview with him on, I think, Joe Rogan.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:38:13) Very cool. What about you? Alright. So what's your favorite sci-fi book?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:20) Artemis, I think, by Andy Weir.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:38:23) Yeah. That was a good one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:24) It was good.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:38:25) That was a good one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:25) I identified with the kid, you know, and the space, aliens coming, and I thought that was good. I also like, I went through an Andy Weir phase, and, honestly, you know, The Martian was probably my least favorite book. But Hail Mary—it was called Project Hail Mary. That was really good. And then Artemis, I liked those two quite a bit.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:38:52) What about any of the Sprawl series? The father of cyberpunk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:02) Oh, Neuromancer.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:39:03) Neuromancer and all of those. Right? Yeah. Those are amazing books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:09) You're the second person this week who has told me about that book.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:39:13) Have you not read it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:14) I've not read it.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:39:15) Dude, your nerd credentials are diminishing by the second.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:18) They're weak. Hey, look. Here's my excuse. My dad was an engineer. My mom was a cheerleader. So I got like 50/50. I get real excited about technology, but don't expect too much.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:39:32) Yeah. You got to read Neuromancer because if you read that, you're going to go, oh my God, how was this written in 1980? Right? Because it's like, it's that old, and it predicted a lot of what we're going through right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:47) Yes. Yes. No. I'm excited. I'm making a list over here—Uplift, Sprawl.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:39:56) The Uplift series starts with—it's a series, by the way. Yeah. It starts with Startide Rising, and then it goes on from there. There's a whole series, though. David Brin's amazing. It's completely different than—so that one's a space opera kind of science fiction, where Neuromancer is a lot more inward facing because it's all about virtual reality before it was virtual reality, kind of a thing. So it's very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:27) I got into the Audibles and the books after I burned through all—so I started out really liking sci-fi movies. Right? And then the different series that come out and things like that. And then after I burned through all that, I was like, what next? And then I found—somebody told me, like, books. Have you thought about books? I was like, no. And so I went on Audible and just looked in that category and just started consuming all the books, and I really enjoyed them. So I'll check that out.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:40:53) Yeah. There's a lot of good stuff out there. And I'm a big Audible, audiobook reader kind of guy myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:02) Okay.

(Juan Orlandini at 00:41:02) There's a great hack. It's a mind hack, is I read them about two and a half to three X speed. But you can't just jump into two and a half X because it sounds like squirrels talking when you do that, right? So you start off at one—one and a half X is typically pretty digestible—and then slowly over time, you build up your speed. And that's how I plow through all these books is because I can do it when I'm cooking, doing the dishes, playing pool, driving down the road, being on an airplane. I'll blow through books that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:38) Wow. That's a good, interesting strategy. So does everything to you sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:41:46) No. It's actually the opposite. Talking to regular humans sounds to me like we're cocked out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:56) Really. Oh, man. Well, this is great. I hope the conversation was fast enough for you. But we did it. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Juan Orlandini at 00:42:06) I like it. I like it. This is fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:08) 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 would 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.