[00:00:00] Foreign. [00:00:05] You're listening to casual talk radio where common sense is still the norm whether you're a new or long time listener. We appreciate you joining us today. Visit [email protected] and now here's your host, Ler. [00:00:21] What a chaotic day, folks. The chaos, absolute chaos. [00:00:27] Personal note, I had to check some people at the door. I had to check them. This is throwback me, mind you. And what frustrates me, what really frustrates me, there are times like aging, right? And I'm dirt old aging. The one frustrating thing, the primary frustrating thing about aging, you get to a point where you think I have it so clear now. And I wish I was able to express what is obvious back then. [00:01:02] Like say back when I was working, I used to work at what you currently know of as realtor.com I used to actually work for the company who at the time supported realtor.com before it was realtor.com and then later after the acquisition, this same company was managing. I'm pretty sure they're dead now because turns out, I think, I think the main CEO guy was turned out to be a scammer or something later. But the point is I worked for that company, first job I ever had. And this was a nightmare of a job. It paid good for the time, right? Eight bucks an hour. And nobody else was making this kind of money. [00:01:41] But I go through the interview process. It seemed pretty cool. Now, of course, back in that day, you know, you just sit, see the newspaper, you email a resume or you call them, they call you for an interview and that's it. There's no second, third interviews. There was no star. They asked very basic things. I think I interviewed like two people or maybe three get the job. And it's a nightmare that they didn't have their act together. Everything's a pain. I turns out I was up, you know, because this was essentially a white collar job. [00:02:11] But I was paid hourly. [00:02:13] So because I was paid hourly, I was actually entitled to overtime on quite a few occasions. But I was not paid overtime. I was too young to understand that I was being ripped off in this overtime business, right? [00:02:27] Left there, I get a job at cable, cable company what you now know of as Cox Cable. [00:02:35] Worked there not that long. That was the big nightmare where I bought the Mustang, the notorious black Mustang that I couldn't stand. [00:02:43] Met that one girl that was my first ever kiss, was that girl. And I don't regret it because she was a great kisser. But the point is didn't last very Long. And then I. I got. I think. I think. Let's see. So I'm trying to think of the order operations. I'm pretty sure, yeah, I'm pretty sure that the. I worked for two weeks at Staples and yeah, it was a nightmare. I was a nightmare. And then I went to a phone company after that. Then I went to cable or, excuse me, credit agency. Then I went to loan company after loan company. Then I got into this that I do now, but I was working for another company. And then I went to insurance. That's when I started going to Washington State. That's when I first moved is after I went to insurance. [00:03:30] And then of course, I bounced around. Now, from the moment I joined, I think I started with the technology journey. If I'm thinking back, like, I started in technology at a point and from that moment I literally couldn't stand the people I worked for. And I could barely stand most of the people I worked with. There were some standout, really good people. [00:03:53] I would say mostly women. But the point is that it was a slim few. You know, I could count them on two hands. [00:04:01] But I knew that it was difficult to express what was going on. And I had a real big problem with being a little bit too. I would just tell people, you know, because you're told, don't burn bridges and all this other kind of stuff. And it's like, it's not about burning bridges. If they're wrong, they're wrong. If they're ethically, morally wrong, you call them out. I didn't have them courage to do that at the time. So I was nicer than when I should have been in the insurance company. This is 2013. I think it was 2013 when it happened. Insurance company. I'm in a meeting. And of course meetings are stupid because all you're doing is a bunch of group think and everybody's agreeing. But I'm in a meeting and I'm essentially the lead developer guy at this point, the other guy had left. He was a nightmare. They hired him over me first. [00:04:55] This is how bad this was. They hired him over me first. Then they scrambled because the other guy that interviewed, he left. He got poached by because other company. So they called me back in a panic and wasted money. Fly me up there a couple times. I think I told the story. They already had an offer letter written up. They told a sob story. You know, the only reason we passed you the first time is he had industry experience. I said, in my mind, that's a waste of your energy. But whatever. [00:05:21] So they give me an offer letter, okay, I accept. So now I got to relocate up there to Washington State. [00:05:27] I don't regret the journey. I don't regret the experience. I don't regret the learning. I don't regret most of this. What I regret, though, is how I handled that situation. I don't say regret. I wish. I wished I didn't have to do what I did. I should better state it. So the long and short of it is I'm in that meeting after this guy left. And I had warned people leading up, this guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, okay? He's an idiot. He's gonna tank your business and he's gonna cause you a lot of problems. So now I take this over. We have to clean it up. Now, the other guy that was prior, he was a different role. I think he was like an architect role or something, but he was a different role. [00:06:07] He has to take over, do the development when this other guy left prior to me taking over lead developer. So now he doesn't know how to do it because he was never hands on. And I got to help mentor him up and eventually he would become the manager later. But the point is, at the time, he didn't know anything. He had to be in the trenches to learn how to do this. But I have to be in these meetings to help on the other side development. [00:06:32] And I'll never forget when they are telling me, okay, we need to do this, that, and the other. And I'm telling you, no, that's not going to work. That's the wrong answer. You need to do it this way. And they're not listening to me, but I repeatedly am trying to tell them, this is what you need to do. I'm not going to accept anything else. [00:06:47] Okay, There. And she's trying to. This one gal, she's trying to get me to go to these other meetings that's talking about a waste of time. And I have been. I'm pushing her off, and then she finally says, quote, I need your butt in that chair. That was the moment I said, all right, time for me to try to deal with this another way. [00:07:08] So I forget exactly what I said. But in a different mixed forum, I basically said, look, you guys are going to do this wrong. You're free to go to the training and do it yourself. But you're doing it wrong. And I'm trying to help you not do it wrong if you either listen or you don't, okay? And if you do it this way, the way I'm proposing, you save a lot of time, you save a lot of energy, and we all can move on. [00:07:33] This got back to the CIO somehow, because the CIO in another meeting with all of us, where apparently somebody went and whined to him about what I said, and he called back and said, well, that's my vision, is to do it this way and that we're not going to do it that way. And. And I straight said in that room, I said, if you want to do what you're going to do, you need to send somebody to the training to figure out how to do it. But I will not be writing that code because that's not my role. Your role is to take what I'm giving you and write the code according to what I'm telling you. Because we have. We have limitations, right? The licensing of the software, the management, the maintenance, the server, the security, the performances, all these things that they didn't understand, it didn't want to because they were trying to treat like a dumping ground. So I straight said, there's other tools that let you write all the code that you want. We can buy one of those. And they would want to do that. Okay. Then the manager suddenly retired. And that was right after. Or right. Yeah, right after I bought the house up there. So now we're in 2014. [00:08:34] When he retired. Well, I didn't want to stay there because he was the only reason I stayed. I like the guy who reminded me of Dick Cavett. I didn't. He was the only reason I stayed. And I knew, if he's gone, I'm not going to be here. Screw that right now. The other guy, the one that I trained up, became the manager. So working with him was fine because we had at least that relationship on the surface. But I didn't want to deal with all these mistakes and all these issues and everything. I'd get tired of telling people, you're doing it wrong. Well, from Washington, this is when I started working from home for the first time. I worked for a company. This is where they lied and told me, yeah, you got a corporate card and all this other stuff. And that wasn't true. And I was burning money. That was the whole Boston. $250 a night, where they didn't book the room right and almost didn't have a place to stay. It was a whole chaotic nightmare. And they were shipping me all over the country, but I was. You had to wait for reimbursement. It took like two weeks to get reimbursed. But meanwhile, I'm getting shipped every week and I got to foot it out of pocket. Nightmare. I told them this has to change. You lied. You told me it was going to be a corporate card. You didn't give me a corporate card. That's probably one day. I was up for over 18 hours straight with a bank thing. That was my supervisor that had screwed it up before I came in. That's how bad this was. [00:09:51] I leave there, go to another company. This is a full time. I'm still working from home. [00:09:56] They issue a corporate card. Amex, no credit limit. I'm like, all right, cool. They signed a contract with the client that said where the client was allowed to limit how much you could spend to basically force it to where you have to stay at a certain hotel and you could not do a rental car and all these limits to how you could use it. So it's a waste of time. I got a great corporate card that makes it comfortable for me to do. It's not out of pocket, but you're doing this nonsense. And I can't work from home, so I didn't really even get anything done because I couldn't. So I ended up leaving there. [00:10:28] Now, this is when everything started to hit fever pitch. And I eventually got the role in Colorado, which is full time. I do the Colorado thing. It was fine at first, and then they hired a new director, and this guy didn't know what he was doing. And I. I told him things got to change or I'm out of here. He laughed in my face. That was the moment. I was like, okay, we'll see. Okay. And I wrote up a. A three week notice. I gave three weeks and told him, you're the problem here and I'm gonna leave because of you. And I want to make sure HR understands that. And I CC'd HR because I wanted them to understand. I'm leaving because of this guy. I'm not leaving because I don't want to be here. I'm leaving because of him. I was fine with everything else. He's the reason that he calls me in and he's complaining. What are you talking about, dude? You laughed in my face, bro. You. You tried to pull my punk card and I caught. Caught you out. I have. I have it on good authority he was fired. I can't prove it. I didn't want that. I wanted things to change. I wanted him to understand this would have been fine, but you and that other numb nut screwed it up and you caused us to Go south. And now you saddled my team with nonsense. And I'm not going to stay here to watch you jack it up. [00:11:37] Go to get the opportunity in Oregon. Another nightmare because the soup said, this is how it is, this is how it works. Turns out that's not what it is. So I'm sitting there for four months doing nothing. And then they tried to put me on basically a PIP performance improvement plan because I'm calling out these issues. I talked to leadership and they basically did an end run around me. But the bottom line is everybody was a trap. It was a total trap. And they tried to saddle me with a tool I wasn't familiar with and give the tool I was familiar with with newbies and rookies who are going to screw it up and then have me fix it. Absolutely not. No. So after four months of doing nothing but collecting a check, I left these idiots. They gave me a signing bonus. Now, this was right at the time Trump had signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The Tax Cuts and Jobs act changed the taxable status. When they give you, you know, new hire bonus for something to kind of recruit you. [00:12:35] They made it to where it's fully taxable. They had to withhold tax from it. So they took like half of it because that's how it was. That's how the Tax Cuts and Jobs act was written, was to essentially write. So I didn't get the full amount is the point. And the amount of money I was making, I, I was not going to get a refund on this business. They tried to come after me initially and they wrote a letter, I should say, to try to get the money back because they had written in the front saying, yeah, we can get this back deep, deep as I screw you. Absolutely. I didn't respond. I wasn't getting the money back. It's their reason I'm leaving. You forced me out. You forced me out. It might as well be a firing because when you drive people out, when you harass them, when you verbally abuse, you do all these things to a person, it might as well be firing. It's treated as a form of forced termination. So I knew I'm within my rights, but the point is, I didn't want to leave. I wanted to try to work it. I want to try to work these people. But they just, it was crazy, just so then, okay, now I've got to take my, the money I've accumulated, try to find another opportunity. It's not happening. I'm in Oregon at this point. It's not Happening. I get. Then I find in May that year, find this. It's work from home. The clients in California, you know, you can set up and set up. I set up a business. I did all this stuff. Finally, right when I ran out of money, I need to go on site to meet the client and pick up hardware and all that. So I take the train. I do everything I can to save money because I'm near broke at this point. [00:14:03] Get down there. Turns out I was looking at the hotels. The hotel screwed me. I was on the verge of possibly pawning stuff. That's how broke I was. [00:14:11] But the client was like, yeah, you can leave early. It's not a problem. So I was able to get a cheaper flight, get out, and get back home. And then it was fine. So then, because the client's in California, they want me to come on site once a month to just put a face to it. There was a guy there, one of the project managers, and he was a blatant idiot. He would straight insult me and mix meetings. And then they started doing the unconscious bias training and all that. I'm like, dude, I'm a contractor. I'm like a plumber. Do you put your plumbers to unconscious bias training? There's no way I'm doing that. Started finding them fees and everything. Still didn't want to stop. I told the contact, you need to get them to stop. I'm not doing this. I don't work for them. I'm a contractor. I'm not doing this crap. He wouldn't do it. He had no balls. Okay, fine. So I now, at this point, I had moved to Nevada because it was close, so I could just drive it instead of taking the train to save some money. So I'd already moved to Nevada. That was a nightmare. Because Nevada, anybody that's been there, they're only seeing the bright lights. Nevada, living there is terrible. The bright lights are whatever. Living there is horrible. Only good thing about it was the tax situation. That was great. And the city of Las Vegas and North Las Vegas and all, and the state did decent good for me during the pandemic. But it's a terrible place to live is the point. So then I can't. There's nothing I can do here. Then Mr. Rat shows up, and this house, the place I was renting from, they're a bunch of scammers. So between the scammers and the rats showing up, and then my brother passed away, and then I had the car fiasco. Everything was just kind of this term and Then, you know, COVID pandemic impacts. Everything was a nightmare that wasn't job related. But it meant that I lost those two clients I wasn't able to keep. I had two clients signed, I was making crazy amounts of money and I lost both of them because they had, they had to lock down the budgets. [00:16:00] Later, when I ran out of money again, I got the client I'm currently working with, the one that I just had to chew out. And I've been working with them now for, you know, close to three years or a little bit over three years. Close to three years. Been working with them and it's been different management, different leadership, but the same things is there's always this mantra of I gotta just kind of call them out on nonsense and chew them out. And I don't like to do that. But there's so much where they just kind of get out of line, they step out. This is why I don't want to be full time. Because they don't seem to understand. It's like you have to let people be who they are. If they're specialists in the craft, you have to respect the craft. You have to respect them being specialists. If you disrespect that, and I told my staff this in Colorado, you, you cannot do what you're doing. You got to respect, they know what you don't know. And you have to get rid of stupidity, you have to get rid of waste and just focus on getting work done. And there's always an all star. Let him be an all star. If he's a star, celebrate him being star. Don't try to hold him to the same standard. And as your lesser performing people, that doesn't make sense. They should be looking at my standard of excellence and they should be up on my level. It's not bragging, it's the truth. Because your client deserves the best out of everybody, not just one person on the team. That in reflect. That's what's been the problem at every, every situation I've had. I come in, I have a level expertise in a craft and I'm telling them this is the way we need to do it. And this is easy, it's not that hard. And let me do what I need to do. Here's the tools I need. Back when I worked at the loan company, way back, she was great at that. The boss, the director I talked about, she was great at making sure I had what I needed to excel and be a star. And she let me be that star to the point I was One of the last people standing when they did major layoffs. See, that's the culture I'm used to. But back then and all the way through, I didn't have that same level of being able to explain to people and call them out. This is not right. This is how you need to do it. This is what being an expert means. And these people are not on my level. You got to get to my level. I was always taking it the political way, and I should not have. And I. I wish in reflection that I had that wherewithal of how so easy it is. It's easy. You have people who are excellent at certain things, not excellent in other things. I would never tell somebody else that. I don't know what I'm talking about, try to tell them how to do their job, and they should not tell me how to do my job. How easy is that? But it's never been the pattern for what I was doing. So I just wanted to tell that story of how frustrating it is when you get to that point of excellence later in age and you become somebody who is an expert in something and you now can explain it to people in a way they cannot refute, but early on, when you're young, you cannot. That's the frustration of our young folks. They don't have and were never taught how to really protect themselves and defend themselves. It's always a fight. Sun Tzu's Art of War is one of my biggest inspirations. I actually got attacked. I got chewed out for, for proposing such a thing. But that's. That's bubble. The truth is it's always a war. It's a war that should not be. But it's always a war because there's people that don't understand there's excellence and there's levels to excellence. You have to respect the excellence and everybody should strive to be excellent. If you're not striving to be excellent, what good are you? What value? What purpose? It doesn't mean you have to be perfect. You have to strive for excellence. [00:19:22] Now, you might be wondering why I told that whole story, right? I told that whole story about striving for excellence because it basically explains my topic, which is this concept talked about from Elon Musk a little while ago about, quote, magic, money, computers. Magic, money, computers. The reason he made that statement is because of course, Doge is going around to different agencies trying to identify ways to eliminate. And of course, he's got liberal judges attacking him along the way. But he's made some significant progress in Identifying obvious waste things. I don't agree with everything that he proposes. The idea that all government workers should rush back into the office I believe is wasteful. I believe that remote work can be efficient, but you need to better manage how people are getting stuff done regardless of whether they're in the office or not. As long as you do it task based and not time based, everything is much easier. That's the chew out I just had with my client. They want everything tracked at times. The problem with time tracking is it does not correlate to true productivity. Productivity is around tasks that are done and being able to explain the task and the value that it means to the business. In some cases, after it's done, you can quantify. It took me this long to do the task and as a result of me doing that, it should be less time to do this task. Over here, the whole magic money computer conversation is around the idea that there are these phantom computers and really their servers or something else that are issuing payments of some kind to potentially unknown sources or untracked sources or unmanaged sources. And nobody had any idea that it's happening, nor can we possibly account for every single dollar. Well, what, how can that happen? People speculated that's blatant fraud. I want to explain how that can happen from a business owner's perspective, because I am a business owner in government sense. You have this idea of a budget. The budget is established by way of the expected expenses, expected intake of funds. So let's say the credit, the treasury intake of funds, expected expenses, and it creates a budget. So we need a budget to operate. We need money to run buildings, we need money to manage staff. We need money to pay people. We need money, money for outbounds, right? Contractors that we work with, we need money for all these different ins and outs. When we identify how much money we need for outbounds, we have to create payment facilities or payment mechanisms to make sure they get their payments. And then we want those automated. Here's my beef with a lot of these automated payment things. On the personal side, they want you to set up bill pay on their site, right? You go to your credit card, they want you to say, yeah, we'll just pull money out of your account to do your car payment. Yeah, want to pull money out of your account. So they want to just pull. All of them want to pull. The reason they want to pull is so they can lock you in. By locking you in. What happens if you lose your job? If you lose your job, you're going to Go overdraft, right? Overdraft for the vast majority of banks results in charges and fees. The charges and fees you're still owed because you agree that your account can be overdrafted. If you turn off overdraft, the check bounces. Then that service, whatever card, car, whatever, can charge you a fee for the bounce check. It's a trap. They want to do that because they know it locks you in and they know it's probably going to be a trap if you lose that job. What I prefer to do is on my bill pay. I don't schedule it, but I go in on whatever day of the month I go in, I see what's due. I manually issue payments for each one of them because it lets me see how much money is in the account to make sure that I can pay them. If I could not pay them for whatever reason, let's say something happened with the bank, this happened before. If I could not pay them, it lets me make an alternate arrangement to make sure the money keeps flowing. The point is, I am in the mix. I'm not trusting the tool to do it for me. I'm not trusting my bank to do it. I'm not trusting those services to do it. I don't even do for those subscriptions, like I don't have, like Netflix or I don't have cable. I don't have any streaming services. I have none of it because I don't want. The only service I have that's a recurrent service is Amazon prime. And Amazon prime is not on auto renew. I have to manually go. They tell me an email and I go in there and I decide whether I'm going to renew it or not. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I wait, right? Because I'll say I'm not going to order anything for another month. Why pay the 4 bucks or 7 bucks or 10 bucks or whatever it is for a month when I'm not going to really use it? Because the only reason I use prime is for the shipping. I don't use Amazon Music. I'll buy through it, but I don't use the service. I'm talking for unlimited streaming. I don't use it. I don't do the. I might do prime video like for boxing, but it's rare because most of them are pay per view and I will not do that. I don't do the games. I don't do any of the other Amazon prime stuff. So the subscription is simply for what I use, which is the shipping. Even that's turned garbage because they're starting to use usps. The point is, I don't like delegating my payment to all these different services because I understand how it can get away from you. You lose track of it. I dealt with that in Covid. During the pandemic, you have all these things auto scheduled and everything's smooth until it's not. Companies start playing dumb with your money. The government doesn't know what they're doing. It's hard to get aid, it's hard to get any assistance. The unemployment, the unemployment was a chaotic nightmare during the pandemic where they did everything in their power to make sure you could not get paid. Then after the pandemic left and all of a sudden you have to show this pattern of applying for jobs, quote, unquote. It's like, yep, we're ready to go. No, screw you, bro. It should have been because during that time you were not required to show that you worked for a job because you're locked down. [00:25:11] The point is, if you don't have the money, you cannot do these auto schedule services. You're going to put yourself in the red. I know how that is. I've been there three times over. At that point. The third time, which is post Covid, I decided I'm not doing any of these auto bill services because it can get away from you. And in some cases you may not even have the money to substantiate. So this magic money computer concept is this, that they have set up these auto payment things. It could be payment to an individual, payment to a business, payment to a contractor, payment to your utilities, whatever they are, they set up these auto pay things that are just booking payments out, but nobody's overseeing it, nobody's keeping track of it. Well, what happens if, let's say, contractor X, they're just steadily increasing their amount of money and nobody's really checking them at the door when they request money from the feds, the feds are just upping the amount because it's part of the budget. Right. It's just kind of accepted that this is what I need. I mean, that's what we spend, so that's what we need. Nobody's challenging, why do you need that? Why can't you use that? The whole story about a $10,000 toilet, the idea that you're spending willy nilly, nobody's checking it at the door to make sure it's an appropriate spend, is an appropriate amount of spend, and that you're properly checking across multiple sources to get that same item, you might have heard about the idea of sole source or not. Sole source says is something only available from this one provider. If it's only available for that one provider. There's usually exemptions to a thing, but something like a toilet seat is all over the place. You can get one from menards or something for the dirt cheap. But the government doesn't shop that way. The government wants to go to these contractors. Do you know why? Because the government has been coded in their mind that they want to support businesses, they want to help the businesses thrive. And so they're trying to, they're trying to say that they're giving back to all these businesses so they can thrive. What's really happening is those contractors, they have it in their mind to rip off the government because they believe it's a blank check. Because they just print and print and print to print money. And it becomes this downstream effect because in order for the government to support those bills, what do they do? They come out to you for your tax money to pay this, when reality is they could print more money. They don't want to because of the debt. See, it's all tied together. The magic money computer is essentially servers. Computers issuing payments not checked, not balanced, not accounted for, not audited, not reviewed and not controlled. And they're just endlessly printing money. And nobody really has any sort of justification why they have to book the amount of money that they're booking to the destinations that they do and why they're automated with no checks and balances. That's what he's talking about. I'm simply suggesting it's not about fraud, it's about incompetence. Because people have, we have rushed towards technology for these things. We want to get away from people. But having people in the mix is how you make sure that everything's appropriate because you hold those people accountable for every single payment that goes out the door. I'm not suggesting you never automate. I'm saying that you have to have somebody overseeing the automation to make sure it doesn't get out of control. And if you don't, that's what happens. Blatant incompetence. And if you drive those people away because they're fighting with their boss, guess what? It gets out of control and nobody catches it because they didn't know that person was doing it. That's the reality of our world. That's the problem with our issues. And I don't like it, but it is what it is. [00:28:48] O.