182: ‘Imagining Where We Want to Go’, with Dan Chuparkoff

Episode Transcript
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Evan Troxel (00:07):
Welcome to the TRXL Podcast.
I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episodeI am joined by Dan Chuparkoff, who is
one of the world's leading experts onAI innovation in the future of work as
a technology leader at Google, McKinseyand others, Dan led transformations for
teams in every industry as the worldnavigated three decades of technological

(00:30):
change, he knows firsthand that the peoplewho leverage the power of technology
will outperform the people who don't.
Something I think that this audienceprobably knows a thing or two about,
and today he shares about change.
Creativity and how leaders can preparetheir teams and organizations for a
future powered by AI and innovation.

(00:52):
He draws from decades of experiencein software and product development
and shares valuable insights intowhy traditional industries like
architecture need to embrace reinvention.
We also talked about how topractically foster innovation in the
face of resistance, the dual natureof technology innovation through

(01:12):
separation, AI's true potentialdiversity as a catalyst for innovation.
Reframing learning the importanceof cross pollinating ideas and
talents from different industriesto drive innovation and more.
One of the main themes of thisepisode is about change agents.
I'll put out a challenge to you,dear listener, and it is that

(01:34):
change agents must lead theirteams through technological change.
Can you identify who the changeagents are in your organization?
Maybe it's you.
Anyways, stick around to the endof the episode because I'll wrap
things up and tell you why I thinkthis theme is a really important
takeaway from today's conversation.

(01:55):
Lastly, you can really help out thepodcast by sharing these episodes
with your colleagues and by commentingon and sharing my LinkedIn posts.
And you can leave a comment over onYouTube to chat with the other listeners.
As usual, there's an extensive amountof additional information on the show
notes, so be sure to check them out.
You can find them in your podcastapp if you're a paid member and if

(02:16):
you're a free member, you can findthem at the website, which is TRXL.Co.
So now without further ado, I bring youmy conversation with Dan Chuparkoff.
Dan, welcome to the podcast.

(02:36):
It's great to have you here.
I.

Dan Chuparkoff (02:37):
Thanks Evan.
Uh, it's great to be here.
I'm looking forward tothe discussion today.
Um, I, architecture goes deep backinto my, uh, personal history and
I'm looking forward to talking abouthow, you know, architects are seeing
change, how non architects, otherdesigners are seeing change and, and
the technology progress in the world.
Uh, it's impacting us all.
So I'm looking forward to theconversation and, uh, thanks for.

Yeah.
You're, you're, I, I love that you'rehere and, and I've had your other brother
half on this show before and I love Tom's,uh, stance that architecture is his hobby
and he shows up every day to his hobby.
I think that's a reallycool attitude to have.
And his, you know, it's,it is pretty infectious.

(03:19):
His.
he's a, he's just a great guy.
And so I'll put a link to thatepisode in the show notes so people
get the full familial effect here.
But Dan, you're in a different industryand you, I mean, I know that there are
obviously crossovers, but maybe youcan tell us a bit of your backstory
and, and so that we know kind ofhow you got to where you are today.

Yeah, for sure.
Um, so I've, I've been a technologistfor 30 years, I guess professionally.
Uh, I was a product manager for mostof that and a software engineer for
a tiny bit of it at the beginning.
Um, but I sort of stumbledinto technology accidentally.
I actually had originallyintended to be an architect.

(04:02):
And I got an internship my senior yearof high school for the Hillsborough
County, uh, school board in Florida.
We were designing schools allover the, all over the county.
And, uh, as an intern, I, you know,pretty much all they would let me
do was draw parking lots lines likethey, they would draw this whole plan
and I'd get the site plan and I'dtry to figure out how many parking

(04:24):
spaces would fit in the parking lot.
And, um, you know, so I spent a goodchunk of a semester drawing parking lot
lines, and I was filing plans away in, youknow, those architecture plan cabinets,
you know, the big long, flat files.
Um, I'm, I'm like in a, in our storageroom, like filing plans away one day and

(04:44):
I meet this guy that I hadn't met before.
Uh, his name was Mr.
Pock.
Um, and I introduced myself.
I told him I was getting to knowall the people around and, and I'm
like, how come I haven't seen you?
And he said, that's 'causemy office is down here.
We're like on another level,practically in the basement.
And he shows me where he works.
And, and the first thing I see is he'sgot a computer sitting on his desk.

(05:06):
He also has one of those old styledrafting boards on the slant.
Uh, but he's got a computer and a plotterthat was like plotting at the time.
It's making all this noise.
And that's why they shovedhim in the basement.
'cause his plotter wasmaking so much racket,

Yep.

right?
And I'm like, what does this,how do you, what does it do?
And he's like, oh, it's just for cad.
And I had never heardthe acronym CAD before.
And, um, uh, he showed me what he's doing.
And it was AutoCAD revision nine,which back then was the first one
that let you spin the design around.
You could, um, you could look atit in three dimensions and, uh.

(05:43):
And he showed me how to work it.
I spent a week with him and then,you know, he showed me I could
copy paste parking lot spaces.
Um, and now we say the words copypaste all the time now, but like
in 1986, that was like magic.

It still is if you actually think about it.
Right?
Yeah.
We do take it for granted though.

So I go back upstairs to where my normal desk is and I
finish my project in Ink and Mylar,if I make a mistake, I gotta tear
the whole thing up and start over.
And I'm looking around andall these architects are
drawing on, on Mylar and Ink.
I'm like, Hey, does anyone know about Mr.
Pock in the basement?
Like, why, when are wegetting more computers?

(06:27):
And the architects at the time,they weren't ready for that.
They didn't understand thatthe drawings that came outta
that thing would get better.
They didn't understand that like theability to share digital designs, you
know, across stakeholders and, and citieswould, would be dramatically better.
And so they, they for the most part,rejected that thing and resisted it.

(06:49):
I saw that that was gonna changethe future of architecture, and I, I
changed my major in, aligned with that.
Like, I, I want, I wanna makesoftware that can do that
to all the other industries.
Um, and so that became, you know,a, a 30 5-year-old, you know, love
with, with technology way back then.

Wow.
That that's, uh, it's interesting.
And then you even make me think of like.
A basic tool that we have today,which is to, for me, not a basic
tool, which is a clipboard managereven where you can copy of stuff and

Yay.

here and then pick which one you want to paste and where, and
like just the amount of like, howlong did it even take us to get from
a single paste to multiple copy pasteand, and what a big jump that was.
There's still so many people that don'teven use a basic tool like that, right?
Because

Yeah.

know it exists.
But I, and I think that's part of it too,is right, you, you don't see the potential
because you don't know it exists.
But then once you know that itexists, you're also kind of up
against this existential threat ofwho's gonna replace me with this?
Will it replace me?
And there's all of those kindsof, and, and so a lot of things
haven't changed in that regard,

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's the same problem happeningover and over again, regardless of
what role you have or what industryyou're in, like we're all facing that
constant, um, uh, tool that helps usand threatens us at the same time.
Uh, and that's, that can be terrifying.
I.

Well let, let's expand on your credibility.
Where, where did you go from there?

Yeah.
So, uh, I started as a softwareengineer at a small, a small
marketing services company thatmost people have never heard of.
Uh, gradually, you know, I then triedsome startups and then a digital agency.
And then I worked at a companycalled Atlassian that makes
software for developers.
And then I ended up at McKinseyand Company, and then at Google,

(08:33):
uh, finally at Google I worked onAndroid operating system things.
If you're, if you make mobile apps,you probably used a bunch of my tools,
uh, Android Studio and Crash Lyticsand Firebase and things like that.
So that's, uh, the, the 32 year, uh,abbreviated version, but, um, ended up
at Google actually wearing my Google vestright now, today for the video listeners.

(08:56):
Um, but, uh, yeah, itwas, it's, it was fun.
I saw some big companies and someold companies and some startups and
some, you know, massive enterprises.
And, uh, it was a, itwas an amazing journey.
So,

And, and your brother's an architect.
And so I'm sure you guys talk aboutkind of the, the pro, let's just
say the contrast between what you'veseen in the technology industry.
Obviously your brother Tom is verytechnologically oriented in the

right.

of architecture and leveraging those kinds of tools that we
talk about on this show all the time.
But,

Mm-hmm.

um, I'm curious, like from your perspective, when you're
working at a company like Google, and

Mm-hmm.

from my point of view, having never stepped foot in a Google
office, I mean, I'm sure that there'ssome of the same issues that we're
probably gonna talk about today, even.
Call it plaguing, callit whatever you want.
But, but these, these largeincumbent, you know, Google's
been around for how long now?
When did Google start?
It's, it's got

Yeah, it's, uh, yeah.
Yeah, almost 30 at this point.

Right.

So.

it's like this, this idea of disruption and, but also spend a
lot of money on r and d, a lot of moneyon innovation and things like that.
And they're constantly trying tocome up with the next best thing.
they've had some big moonshots andthey've also, you know, I'm sure
just thrown a bunch of stuff away.
Right.
Um, but, but, so there's likethis, it's all happening.

(10:17):
It's, it's everythingeverywhere, all at once, right?
All of

right, right, right.

are going on in the soup pot.
And then I, I think about likethe contrast of, and I'm just
gonna generalize and say most

Yeah.
Yeah.

are just kind of like, oh, how can we do what
we do a little bit better,

Mm-hmm.

how we do it?
Or, or.

Right, right, right.

and, and I, I think that there's probably, you know, you probably
share a lot of stories with, with himabout that, and I'm sure that there's
some of, you know, oh yeah, I see that.
But then there's probably a lot of,you know, there are some differences
in the way technology companies operatecompared to especially really established
architecture firms, even though they,

Yeah.

have a lot of resources, and I could probably at the same time
say that they're the ones spending themost money on the r and d when it comes

Yeah.

you know, not disrupting themselves or, you know, being the
ones who disrupt themselves insteadof somebody else doing it to them.

Right, right.

Google's point of view, and just being like this technology
company that has even put its toein the water of a ECA few times,

Yeah.

what do you, what's been your experience with just
kind of seeing how this has playedout over the last two decades?

I think so the first thing I'll say to just try, try to,
uh, uh, normalize what Google islike a little bit more for people.
Some people look at Google and they'relike, you know, they have a trillion
dollars, they have hundreds of thousandsof really smart people, like they
can do things there that I can't do.
Um, but to, once you're on the inside,you see that they're, they're actually

(11:40):
just a normal, big enterprise likemany others inside, they have small
teams that have like no budget towork with and they're scrounging for,
you know, people and headcount, youknow, then they have big legacy things
that have been running for 20 yearsand they're afraid to touch anything.
'cause they don't want the, like, youknow, the, the, the revenue to dip at all.

(12:00):
'cause that could be, youknow, devastating for them.
So first, Google has a lot of the samethings going on that many other small and
medium and big enterprises have as well.
Um, the second thing I'll say isfundamentally, as part of Google's
life, I think because they sort of wereborn out of the internet, and also at

(12:22):
that moment the way we searched forthings on the internet shifted from
the, the a OL Yahoo portal style thingto a consumer driven search, right?
It, it was, it was very guided before,like there were, you know, 15 categories
and you could click on finance oryou could click on travel and, and

(12:42):
you would see the travel portal.
Um, and, and suddenly users had control togo anywhere on the internet they wanted.
And so Google saw thateven brand new things.
Could get completely disruptedif you're not constantly making
them better and better and better.

(13:03):
Um, you know, at the time AltaVista was the dominant search
engine and um, you know, it hadonly been around for four years and
it, they just got left in the dust.
And so the Google saw this sort ofexistential, um, de need for change
that a lot of people don't see.

(13:23):
Or maybe in their industries it's notquite as fast as four years, right?
Maybe of 20 years or maybe 40 yearsbefore you're just left in the dust.
But at some point you will get leftin the dust if you like, aim for.
Stasis, right?
If you just try to like, hold thingswhere they are so that you don't

(13:44):
take risks, minimize risks, minimize,you know, disruption and, and bad
choices, then you'll probably be finefor a while in technology, that for
a while is maybe only five years.
Um, and in, you know, in architecturemaybe it's 25 years, I, I don't
know what the, what the number isexactly, but it's, it's not forever.

Yeah.

so, you know, people that try to hold the, the line, uh, and
keep things stable and risk free for toolong will get left behind eventually.

Yeah, I mean, one of the main topics I wanted to discuss
with you today is change, right?
The, a

Yeah.
Yeah.

but, but just really how we deal with it as a, as
an industry, as individuals,

Mm-hmm.

then other, how other industries, like you're, you're
talking about kind of a, just adifferent perspective completely,
which is like, if we're notchanging, we're gonna die, kind of a

Yeah.

industries like ours where, where it's maybe not as urgent of a,
of like, I don't, we're not gonna die.
We're gonna be fine.
And, and then it kind of leads tolike, oh, you kind of forget that you
needed to look outside and, and youknow, const continually kind of survey
what's going on because you're busy,you're doing, you got deadlines, right?
You've got all these thingsthat you've gotta do today.

(14:57):
And, and so I mean.
Well, I'm curious before we startreally getting into the topic of
change, um, because I think, you know,this goes way beyond architecture.
This, I mean, we're, look, we're seeing it

Oh yeah.

We're seeing like there's people, like it was literally freaking
out, but, but, but there's, there'salso kind of this idea, like something
actually can't get better until the onethat's there is completely broken or
dismantled or burned to the ground, right?
It's like, so, so there's all of thiskind of floating around in my head
too, but, but maybe you can kind oftell us your new focus since Google
and, and so we can kind of frame theconversation around your expertise.

Yeah.
Yeah, that's, that sounds good.
Um, what, what I started to notice abouttwo years ago at Google is, first of
all, I liked going to conferences andspeaking on a stage to an audience about
stuff that I thought about the world.
Uh, and so I started doingthat a little bit more.
And, you know, meanwhile back atGoogle, I was helping my team.

(15:52):
I, I led a team that hadabout 150 people on it.
Um, and so I was helping my teamnavigate, change and figure out
what new stuff to do and, and figureout what bad stuff to stop doing.
And I sort of realized, hey,the, the rest of the world needs
some of that leadership too.
And so if I could combine my love forspeaking at conferences with my desire

(16:14):
to be a leader of teams in a worldof constant change, um, then I could,
I could do my most fun thing in thething I was best at at the same time.
And so I quit Google a year and a halfago, and now I just helped teams all over
the world to navigate new technology.
Changes.
And right now that means AI a lotof the time to a lot of the people.

(16:37):
So we're talking a lot about ai, butyou know, in six more years we'll be
talking about how robots are helping todo stuff, take our trash out, or bring
us our medicine or, or whatever they do.
And so that, you know, so thatthat, uh, constant technology,
uh, revolving door of, of helpersassistance, uh, is never going away.

(16:57):
And so I just do that now.
I'm independent.
I have a company called Re ReinventionLabs and we're just doing research
on, you know, how change is happeningin each industry and what that's
gonna mean for the people thatare trying to be successful there.
And uh, so that's what I do.
And uh, that's what we're kindof gonna talk about mostly today.
'cause that's what I do every day.

Yeah.
I mean this, this idea of change anddisruption, I mean, these are all kind of
words that for a lot of people are superuncomfortable, and then there's others
who are, are super comfortable with it

Yeah.
Yeah.

I mean, like you, your, your job is to help people get comfortable with
it so that they can do something about it.
Right.

You are right, right, right.

kind of the pace of innovation, and maybe you, maybe we
can start here, is just what have younoticed with the pace of, of innovation
and change just in the last couple years?

Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So it, it definitely, there's on oneside of the argument that the potential
changes available to us is growingexponentially in that speeding up.
But at the same time, the uh,amount of change accepted into
organizations is actually throttledbecause of leadership change out.

(18:15):
Right.
Like the, a person who is whatever,my, I'm 55, I'm, you know, my age.
I'm a leader at Google orany other organization.
I have maybe eight or nineyears of leadership left in
me, and then I'm gonna retire.
I don't need to change thatmuch if I'm the leader.
Right.
So I'm just gonna ride it out.

you don't have to enable it either,

I can just, I'm just coasting onwhatever, whatever laurels we like,
you know, we built up in the meantime.
Then 10 years from now I retire, andthen the person that I've been grooming
to take my spot takes over and they'reprobably 15, 20 years younger than me.
They're more comfortable with the digitalage, they're more comfortable with risks.

(18:59):
They have like 900 iPhone apps ontheir phone, so they don't care about
new tool fatigue and stuff like that.
So they lead my company ina completely different way.
And so that generational flip inleadership actually is the thing
that drives change more than theavailability of new technology.

(19:20):
And generational leadership isthrottled by, you know, age and.
Generation size and, and stuff like that.
So, so what you'll probably seeis in any 22 year span, most
organizations aren't forced to change.
But then outside of that span, whenthey get to 25 or 30 years, they

(19:42):
start to see that they're competingnow against organizations that are
led by people that have a differenttechnology adoption attitude, mindset.
And when you start competing againstthose people, you start drifting back
unless you start making those changes too.
So that, that's kind of the, the duedual dichotomy of, um, of change,

(20:05):
both speeding up and, and stock at the22 year, uh, point at the same time.

This, this idea of like being almost entitled to be in business is

Hmm.

me, right?
Because I mean, there's, you're competingin architecture where I'm coming from.
You know, you're competing againstother firms who are roughly doing
the same things that you are,

Mm-hmm.

it's like.
We're hitting these revenue goals, we'rehitting our, you know, our teams are, are,
you know, trying to balance fees versus,

Yeah.
Yeah.

know, billable hours and all these

Right.

And, and it's, it's difficult to actually, you gotta
change everything if you wanna change.
I mean, I actually, I'd be curious tohear what you, what you kind of advise
people there because, because it's,it is really difficult to change it
all, and it's hard to change little

Yeah.

of it in the machine as it's moving and

Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I, I've been, I, I've been fortunateenough to be part of, um, some sort
of like dramatic shift in a, in abusiness's, uh, business model and.
And technology adoption, uh, two times.
Um, the first time I was part of a startupthat got acquired, um, we had 35 people

(21:25):
or so, and we were doing our thing and itwas kind of new and cool, and then we got
bought by this much larger organization.
And so naturally we got folded intothat organization and we started to
look for efficiencies and we tooksome of our things that had been
working that enabled us to takerisks and reinvent in the market.
And we lost some of thosethings because now we are

(21:46):
folded into this bigger machine.
And now any risks that we took impactedthe risks of the much bigger organization.
Right?
And so that actually slowedus down a little bit.
And the, the, the new cool stuff thatwe were doing when I first started there
started to become harder and harder.
On the other end of the spectrum,maybe 12 years later, I was working

(22:06):
at a big company that wanted toreinvent itself, but was struggling
to because of the mothership andour legacy products and customers.
And so instead of just trying to doit anyway, in spite of all these risks
and, and challenges, we created alittle, a little team that was separate.
We took about 20 of us andgot a different office.

(22:29):
We worked in a different building,not too far away, just down the
street, but we had our own culture,our own mindset, like we were shielded
both legally and and financially.
Like by creating this new entity thathad better risk taking practices because,
you know, we, we had legally separated.

(22:50):
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And, and we knew that we weren'tresting on the, the revenue of
the, of the mothership, right?
We, we had to make or breakwhat we were trying to do there.
And so, you know, we were hungryand we took more risks and we
reinvented things and it, it wasactually dramatically successful.
Um, so, you know, thinking aboutthat is like when you are trying

(23:13):
to draft some dramatic change,first just create a pilot team.
Give them a little more freedomthan you're normally used
to in your normal culture.
And if it works, graduallygrow that team, right?
Send some more people over there,start doing a little bit more,
start begging bigger customers.

(23:33):
Little by little that new team justbecomes the organization, right?
And that's a, that's amuch better way to start.
Try to just gradually create,uh, create change in a much
bigger risk adverse organization.

When I was leading our digital practice team at the firm
that I was at, you know, I, we, wetalked a lot about digital practice,

Yeah,

I always would reinforce, it's like someday we're
just gonna call it practice again.
Right?
Like,

yeah, yeah.

it's,

Right,

at calling it something so that everybody knows
what you're talking about, but you

right,

be so influential and like you're saying like the, the
balance tips at some point where itbecomes the bigger thing, because the
way you used to do things is fallingoff the back, back of the conveyor

right, right.
Right.
And, and it, and the boththings coexisting is super
normal and it shouldn't feelweird to people on either side.
Right?
Like the, the existing product stillhas customers that expect those existing
things, and it, and those, those customerswill want to be customers for a long time.
It's okay that that starts shrinkingas long as people have, you know,

(24:36):
another, another place to go.
As you know, as the new world or thenew digital world, the new AI powered
world, you know, starts to become abigger and bigger part of the business.
Mm-hmm.

(24:58):

were out there

Yeah.

do the same thing that you, you said they had to move into a different
building because there was, there's a lotof naysayers in the existing organization
and there's a lot of influence about,well, we're going this direction,
why are you doing that over there?
And, and

Yeah.

have to create that separation at some level
that you're talking about.
Or because it's unlikely that everybody'sgonna be on the same page, that this
is a good idea and there's no guaranteethat it's gonna be successful anyway.
Right.
And


that separation, I think is a, is a key component
of what you're talking about.

Yeah.
Co Completely agree.
'cause, 'cause yeah, there are noguarantees that it's gonna work.
In fact, most of thetime it does not work.
Right.
Like most new things that theorganizations try aren't successful.
And so, you know, it, that takes adifferent appetite for, for risk.
Personally, a different,like family situation.
Like all those things can be different.
So, you know, while you're in thoseintense moments of risk, let the

(25:57):
people that are comfortable in that,in that world, like inhabit it by
themselves for a little while, whilethey're trying to figure it out.
Um,

and that fear is so real that it keeps a lot of people from trying it.
Right.
And, and,

yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.

you know, I just wanna reinforce here that it's like, either
way you're gonna learn something.

Right.
Right, right, right, right.

it might not be, no matter what.

Yeah.

will get made.
It's not like, if it doesn'twork, that is a complete failure.
We don't get anything out of it.
Right.

Figuring out some things thatdon't work is an important thing
that more organizations should do.

Yeah.
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And now let's get backto the conversation.
How would, how would an architecturefirm, I mean, there, there definitely

(27:36):
are examples of, and I've interviewedpeople on this show who've done this.
Like I, I think of like, there'sa structural engineering firm, a
Thornton Thomasetti, who started whatthey call Core Studio, which grew
out of their advanced modeling group.
And,

Yep.

um, I mean, so it, it really was kind of like they incubated
this thing, but, but kinds of.
Advice would you say like helps getpeople in the mindset of, of okay, I
think we've kind of established whythat could be important, but then

Right, right.

you, how do you do it?
and architecture firms arenot set up to be incubators.
They're

Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.

know, like some, some of them think like that.
They think hackathons and they thinkincubate ideas and they think turn

Hmm.

and they, you know, they, they think about it that
way, maybe through experience,but a lot of them haven't.
So I mean, is there anything thatjust comes out from you that when,
when you talk to firms like this.

Yeah.
I think the first thing is, um,even before there's any kind of a
formal practice, whether you have anincubator, whether you have like a, a
a a next generation, you know, projectteam or, or anything that's, that's
formal and getting resources just.
Supporting the notion of learningsome new things or trying some

(28:49):
new experiments is the first thingculturally that's important before
you can do it procedurally and, and,and formally with, with a whole new,
you know, division of your company.
First you have to like, getpeople comfortable just trying
new things for no reason, right?
Like getting a software subscription thatyou're not sure you need yet just to start

(29:10):
kicking the tires and see like, if you hadthis new thing, what would you do with it?
And, um, most people flip the,uh, flip the learning until
after the decision was made.
They're like, okay, we're going to decideto get Revit, and nobody's used it yet,
but we, we had this big committee andthey decided that it's worth the $5

(29:33):
million or however much Revit costs.
I don't know.

A lot

Right.
But, um, but like, they, they makethis formal declaration first, and
then they give everyone the newtool, and then everybody's thinking
there, shit, now I have to learn it.
Now it's part of my job.
Now I,

other job.
Yeah.

And so way before that, you needlike a, a sandbox to play in, right?
Like, like get some new toolsfor a week, just get the trial
and say like, Hey, next week isplaying around with new tools week.
And just let people explore a littlebit or give them, you know, at, at the

(30:13):
company Atlassian that I worked at.
We had, um, we had a $500 a yearbudget to just buy some software
that we thought might be helpful,like we could get a new trial, single
person account of whatever we wanted.
There was no approval process aslong as we were under that cap.
And that allowed us to playaround with new tools like

(30:33):
HubSpot before they were big.
Um, the, just, just kick the tires and seelike, could this help me do my job better?
Um, and the people on the ground,they're the ones that usually know if
it can actually do their jobs better.
Um, and, and we sometimes pulled,

to them.

yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.

I also think about like the Google example of 20%.
I don't know that they stilldo still do this, right?
But this idea of 20% of yourtime was used for side projects.
Some of those reallypaid off for them, right?
Gmail was an example of, of one ofthose projects that somebody was coding.
You know, what is it, oneday a week or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Um, there, there, uh, therethat practice still exists.
For those listeners that don't know,Google's 20% time is an informal,
uh, project or process that, thatjust says one day a week, you're
allowed to work on anything you want.
It doesn't have to be your formal team.
It doesn't have to be theproduct that you're assigned to.

(31:28):
What, what actually happens is sometimesa person will just take a training
class and they're just gonna disappearevery Wednesday afternoons for a while.
Um, sometimes four or five people will gettogether every Friday and say like, Hey,
we could maybe create a new project here.
Do you want to try it?
And they'll do that for awhile, and you can, you can
spend some amount of your time.

(31:50):
It's not always 20%, it's notuniversally applied, but what it is,
is a, an awareness that learning newthings is maybe not just as important
as your day job, but more important.
Than your day job.
And so it's not a distractionfrom the work your, your work is

(32:11):
a distraction from the r and d

Interesting.

um, 'cause the r and d stuff that you're doing, that's the
next 25 years of your company's revenue.
Like, that's dramatically impactful time.
And a, a lot of people think ofthat in the opposite way where it's,
you know, it's getting in the way.
We don't have time for that.
We have customer deliverables and youhave to keep your utilization up and,
you know, all those things are hard.

That, that's the first time I've ever heard that being mentioned, so
I'm really glad that you mentioned it.
And, and I'm also curious if you couldkind of expand on expectations around
these side projects, because I thinka lot of times it's like, well, if, if
this, if every single person who participarticipates doesn't bring something back

(32:55):
to us that was quote unquote worth it,

Mm-hmm.

they get cut off and somebody else ne needs to.
But I don't think it was like that.
I mean, tell, tell me how,

Yeah.
Yeah, it's, it is certainly if you're,if you're spending, um, like if you're
spending money that isn't time atGoogle on a 20% project, for instance,
you and me, we start a new startupand we have servers running now and we
have users logging into some productthat we're not even charging for.
We're starting to consumeorganization money at that point.

(33:25):
And so that's fine as long as we havea monetization plan and as long as
our user adoption is growing and thosepeople are referring new people in and
we have organic, um, adoption, and thatdemonstrates that the product that we
built has value Outside of that, if it'sjust me and you spending some of our own

(33:45):
time, that's just education and there'snot a great way of measuring that.
Education made you smarter or didn't so.
Yeah, right.
Uh, but Google has a sort of,you know, empowering trust,
uh, approach to measuring that.
And if you're doing stuff that you feellike is making you better, and you always

(34:06):
have to explain it to your boss and, youknow, talk to your boss about what you're
doing and what you're getting out of it.
And so as long as you can confidentlyhave that conversation, then you
can, you can get a little autonomyto, to try and learn new things.
Um, so that's, I, I think the twosides of that, if you're spending
money, there has to be real, likedemonstratable customer growth.
If you're not, if it's just foreducational purposes, then you,

(34:29):
then you have a normal leadershipconversation with your normal boss
like you do about other, other things.
You try.

Yeah,

Right,

it's, it's interesting to think about it also from the, the
context of like, it could become a thing

right.

the company gets the thing, they get the benefit of the thing,

Yeah.
Yeah.

not gonna get snatched up by somebody else outside.

Right, right, right, right, right.

it's

Yeah.

at that point, right?
You've, you've basically

Yeah.

r and d of it.

And, and now imagine, imagine your Googleand, right, and Evan and Dan, we started
to create this side project, and Googledidn't actually believe in it, but we did.
And they wouldn't letus work on it anymore.
So you and I quit and we startour own startup and we get, you
know, $8 million of investmentand then we build our own product.

(35:17):
And one day Google wakesup and we're competitors.
Right.
And so, you know, investin your own people.
'cause um, you know, they'll,they'll invest in themselves.

if they, if

Yeah.

chance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I, I just don't see that kindof idea is really taking hold in
the architect or a EC industry.
Right.
And, and I, I, a lot of it comesfrom where we've come from and, and

Mm-hmm.

operated, but also.
it's just not like the way that we'retaught to think about our companies
as design problems or, or even, or

Right, right.
Right.

a, an employee about how you would think about contributing
to, to your company and, and makingthat the argument to do that.

Yeah, it's, it's, I think one of the things, we'll talk a
little bit more about like creativityand, you know, technology and the AI
revolution and what that's gonna do.
Uh, but like, one of the thingsthat makes me optimistic about the
problem that you just observed isas we start using technology to.

(36:21):
Propagate our design productivityto help us do more things, help
us do things faster, help us makemore complex designs, more, more
levels of detail for those designs.
Like we, we start using technology as a,as a dramatic productivity accelerator.
Then we actually start becomingtechnology companies and the, and the

(36:46):
things that you're doing that, thattake, you know, new tool adoption and
take, you know, experimentation and,and educational, uh, experiments.
Those things all start to look just likeit looked inside of Google or inside of
any other software startup I've worked.
The more, the more we sort oftechnology empower the world, the more.

(37:10):
Companies that traditionally don'tfeel like they're technology companies
are actually becoming technologycompanies, and they'll start to benefit
from hackathons and, and softwareacquisitions just like all the others.
I think

So to get ahead of that curve, or if that's like of super
interest to somebody, do you feel likethey really need to hire people from
outside of the architectural training andbackground and kind of typical structure
of a firm get that expertise in, tohelp them get to that point faster?
Or, or is that something thatcan be done from, from inside?

I, I think it, it should probably be done both ways, right?
I think you should crosspollinate with technologists or
scientists or mathematicians or,you know, artists from other.
Other industries because thosepeople will have done some
experiments that you haven't done.
Um, but you also shouldn'tlet them come in and take over

(38:05):
completely because they don't knowyour industry as well as you do.
So from the inside, you should also, youknow, merge those two streams together
so you get, you know, industry validatedthinking and, and vision, right?
Because you know where yourarchitecture industry is trying to go.
And then these other people will giveyou new tools and practices that maybe,

(38:26):
uh, maybe unblock some things that areblocking, uh, the road to that place.

There's an example that came to my mind when you
were saying that, which was therewas like a healthcare studio.
the healthcare studio really, really,really wanted to only hire healthcare.
Architects

Mm-hmm.

right?
Like there's an efficiency there, um,there's experience there, and so therefore
you can maybe get a better product thanyou're used to producing maybe faster.
and at the same time, I think what,what you're actually talking about
here is you're talking about the crosspollination of ideas and experiences.
Because as a designer ofarchitecture, I wanted my team

(39:05):
to be extremely diverse and not

Right.

on one project typology because they're gonna
bring something to the tablethat I would've never thought of.
And there's kind of a, a bit of a battlein those two different ways of thinking.
And I think that, that, that'sprobably on all over the place.

Yeah.
I, I a hundred percent agree thatit is, I think if, if you're doing,
um, if you're doing work that's.
Really close to the same everytime, and you're trying to get
it done faster and cheaper.
Um, and maybe, maybe incrementallybetter than getting people that
have done that thing over and overagain is the best way to do that.

(39:42):
But if, if you're trying to dosomething brand new, some of your like
legacy experience gets in the way ofreinventing the way you do those things.
Um, and so, you know, bringing somebodyin that's only worked on, I don't know,
schools instead of hospitals or the otherways either for me to imagine, right?
Somebody that's designed emergencyrooms thinks about efficiency of room

(40:07):
movement and moving patients in andout and cleanliness in, in, in ways
that like other architects don't know.
And so, you know, you bringhospital architects into.
Uh, um, auto mechanic architecture, right?
They, they would, they would createa body shop that was magical, right?

(40:29):
And that, and that wouldbe, that would be amazing.
Um, and I don't think peopleare doing that enough.
And, um, I think, uh, that, that crosspollinization can, can breed some
new invention, some re rethinkingof, of old ways of doing stuff.

I think it applies, you know, way beyond design and,
I mean, I'm not, I'm not tryingto con what you're saying at all.
It's like, and um, I feel like anarchitect should be on the board of every
different kind of community group there isout there because the way architects think
is so different than the way everybodyelse got their training and the way

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.

me is a huge advantage that architects have.
And it's a beautiful serviceto these other organizations.
Like if there's somebody on, youknow, it's not, it's not even just
like city planning, which is stillkind of in your wheelhouse, right.
But it's like something elsecompletely like the way your
church operates, for example, or

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

the Girl Scouts or anything like that.
It's like you would, youhave just a different.
Approach to problem solving.
and I think we could, as architectcould, could do the same.
Right.
We could

yeah, yeah, yeah,

out of that as we could give to it in another context by
bringing in the kinds of people thatyou're talking about who have just this
very big difference in, in experience.

yeah, yeah, yeah.
To totally agree.
I, you know, generally, uh, I.
Diverse thinking.
It often un unlocks new ideas thatwouldn't have been there before.
And that diversity can be, um, you know,the kind of d cross industry diversity.
It can also sometimesjust be age diversity.
Like bring a brand new personin, like letting an intern sit

(42:12):
in your board meeting for awhile and just talk, like, talk.
What do you think, right, as aperson that's grew up with an iPhone
in your pocket as a, you know,22-year-old, what do you think about
how you navigate spaces, how yousolve problems that unlocks whole
new ways of thinking sometimes.
And so, um, you know, there's a lotof, you know, a lot of use of the word

(42:36):
diversity a lot of the time right now.
But, um, most people don't think aboutit in the way of cross industry diversity
or cross generational diversity.
We're not, we're not doing thatas much as I think we could.

The typical mindset is like that we're gonna, the young people are
gonna learn from the old people, but it's

Right.

that is bi-directional in this right?
It's

Yeah.
Yeah.

I, I'm sure I've brought this up on the podcast before, but
there's a thing I've heard of, andI, somebody can fact check me on
this, but it's like this Japanesecorporate meeting culture, which is.
The youngest people, so the interns,for example, get to do all the
speaking in the meeting first,

Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's,

then they're not, they're not going to go against
what an somebody who's been

hmm.

a long time is going to say, because they don't
know what they're gonna say.

Right, right,

there's, as long as they have the, they feel safe enough to share
and, and not get stepped on by doing it.
Right.
This is used as a tool by theolder generations who run these
companies to get new ideas andmake it a safe place to do that.
And, and so you kind ofneed all that for that to

Yeah.

right?
Because

Right.

only gonna work the first time and then somebody's gonna get stepped
on and they're like, I'm never gonna talkagain in these meetings because Right.

Yeah.
That didn't, that didn'twork out very well for me.

I thought that was a really interesting kind of strategy and how to

Mm-hmm.

those kinds of interactions in those, in those meetings.

Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Completely agree.
I hadn't actually heard that before,but, uh, I, but I love that analogy.
Uh, that,

again, but, but if it, if it isn't, they should, we should all do that.

yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I totally agree.

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(45:01):
com.
My thanks to Confluence for supportingthis episode of the TRXL podcast.
And now, let's get backto the conversation.
one thing I wanted to talk aboutwith you is just kind of the reason I
wanted to go into kind of the pace ofchange was because, you know, I think
that we're seeing that behaviors,workflows, skills that were relevant

(45:24):
just a few years ago maybe aren't asrelevant or just aren't as needed now.
And I mean, you have a huge focus onwhat's going on with AI and you're really
keeping your fingers on the pulse in that.
And that's where we're seeinga lot of this disruption.
And I, I just think again, about this ideaof entitlement to like our, our business
is, should we be here in the future?

(45:46):
Of course the answer is yes.
Right?

Yeah.
Right, right, right,

Like, I don't think it's a guarantee people aren't.
Participating in the act of change.
And

right,

from, from, from your point of view, like of forced adaptation, um,
things that people might do to disruptthemselves or not be disrupted right.
In the future.


around for something's gradual and comfortable to happen.
Um, and so just from, from yourpoint of view and, and I mean
maybe we start to transitionreally to talking about AI here.
Like what are,

Yeah.

are you seeing with this kind of skills being uprooted and not needing
people to do things and, and the waythat it's radically changing industries.

Right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so first I'll, I'll say I, I'm, I'mvery optimistic that there are some things
that AI is never going to be able to do.
Um, a AI is very constrained bythe training data that we feed it.
And there are, um, that because of that,it, it kind of only knows the commodity

(46:56):
kinds of things about the world, thethings that lots and lots of people
know and talk about publicly, or atleast in places that have been scraped.
Um.
That's a small set of the stuff thatwe actually use to make decisions.
Um, so I think that AI will alwaysstruggle to, to do real problem solving.

(47:17):
Um, when you decide on the rightsolution to a problem, you're doing
that with context in your head,what you saw yesterday, you know,
the conversation that you have withyour wife or your, your partner.
The, the, the, you know, all the thingsthat you imagine about the world.
Those things help you make decisionsand AI won't ever know those things.

(47:37):
And so problem solving and decisionmaking, and even just pulling the world to
a new place that we're imagining we wantto go, those are things that AI can't see.
Um, and so the kinds of things that wedo as people are first process stuff.

(47:58):
We do things over and over again.
We get tasks done, we communicateabout that work, we look for issues.
Those three things AI isgonna be really good at.
But the other three things, makingdecisions, solving problems,
imagining a better world.
AI won't ever do those things.
So if you can sort of take your workand, and tease apart those first three

(48:21):
things, and the second three thingsyou'll start to see that your job just
becomes problem solving over time.
Your job is to like look at the weirdstuff that a, I can't figure out
what to do and figure out what to do.
Right?
That's what, that's what yourjob over time will become.
And I think that will exist forever.
I think we'll, we'll always have safe,secure places as people in any industry,

(48:47):
as long as we like, adapt what we doand give away some of the commodity
stuff that AI is better at than us.
Does that make sense so far before.

Yep.
Yep.

Um, I think the, the second thing I will say about it is in, in
most cases when, when we look at some ofthe big technology things, we, we got it.
Phones were, were mostly,were mostly mobile and app
driven or, or mobile browsing.
Uh, now in the world, it's only beenreally 10, 12 years since we started

(49:26):
that transition and all of us becamelike mobile capable fairly quickly.
The internet right, completely changed theway we looked for and shared information.
After 10 years or so, we allbecame great at internet stuff.
Um, that will also happen with ai.
We'll probably just gradually startembracing it and 10 years from now

(49:47):
we will, we'll say, okay, well, yeah.
Inter AI stuff is just, that's just howwe get information Now, I don't read.
Long papers anymore.
I just read the digestfrom my AI assistant.
Um, so that that change will happensort of slowly and gradually, so it
shouldn't freak people out becauseyou will have some, you know, ramp

(50:09):
toward, toward that happening.
But now if you resist it, right, andyou, you try to say, but yeah, but
the, the, um, the CAD machine in thebasement of Dan's first job, the drawings
that come outta that are garbage.
I'm not gonna use CAD because thegarbage designs that come out are
not things that I would want to use.

(50:30):
If you resist it completely and completelyignore it, and don't expect that it
will constantly get better, then youwill become one of those draftsmen
that I worked with in 1986 that neverlearned cad, and that would've been,
that would've been bad for them, right?

Yeah.
Yeah.
It, the, this idea though, Ithink is, is exacerbated by the
constant fire hose of news, right?
Of you've

Mm.

this right now.
And so I'm curious


like do, how, how can you get by without having to really
like, dive in and, and become adeep, deep, deep committer to this

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

what do you

there.

like is the best way to kind of that ramp that you're talking about?

Well, so first there's a, there's a pretty hard line in time.
November, 2022, that's whenchat UPT first came out, right?
And, um, if you were in school in Novemberof 2022, all of a sudden everyone said,
Hey, just put your homework in Chate.

(51:37):
You'll be amazed,

Yeah, students

everyone

are always looking for the shortcut too, right?
Like

right.

there's so much incentive to do, so, yeah.

Right?
Yes, exactly.
So, so if you were, if you are, uh,what I, I don't know what age that
may be, makes you 24 or younger.
So you were in schoolon the chat, UPT day.
All of a sudden you, youused chat UPT for everything.
There's no going back.
Like you put every email in there,every social post, every, every article

(52:10):
you write for the blog, every book youwrite, like you just, you just use it.
And so that, that age is, is,you know, entering the workforce.
Those people are your coworkers,they're your competitors.
And, and those people are AIpowered already full stop.
And so first you don't have togo all that all the way there.

(52:34):
You don't have to put every, Idon't know, design into, into some
AI powered design assessment tool.
But start dabbling with it becauseone day you're gonna wake up and your
customers will choose not to awardyou an RFP, and you're gonna find out
it's because they went with this otherteam and that other team is using

(52:57):
some AI thing that you're not using.
Um, and so, you know, you don'treally need to change until your
customers are picking the other people.
Um, that's when you have to,

Yeah.

and so anticipate that that's coming and start dabbling,
start playing around with it.
Start figuring out, you know,what it could do for you, what you
trust and what you don't trust.
Uh, you know, start hiring some peoplethat are 24 or younger and asking them
what they think, what they do withit, and, and start the exploration.
Uh, the next five years is gonna, it'sgonna be an interesting, uh, uh, flip.

(53:32):
It'll be the fastest technology adoption,um, I think that we've ever seen.

Yeah, that, that's an interesting graph to track, right?
Because it

Hmm.

if you, I, I think that there was a graph that showed
like the telephone, an adoption ofthe telephones in houses, right?
Landline

Right.

versus like the cell phone.
And I think the cell phone was like a10th of the time because it was like
50 years of adoption for landline.
Telephony, and then you've gotcell phones and I mean, this is
before smartphones, quote unquote

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nokia, right?
Everybody had a Nokia pretty fast.
And, and so, and that was,that was 2000, I don't know.
That was a long time ago.
Right?
Probably


I, the Matrix 1999 had the cool slide out Nokia, you know, Neo had

Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

cutting edge tech at that point.
Right.
And,

Right.

you think about how fast AI since you said 2022, right?
November

Mm-hmm.

2022 is when Chachi PT rolled out.
And now look at where it is.
And it's the beginning of 2025, right?

Yeah.
And, and you know, also I want, I wantto, I want to be clear, what AI can do
right now is mostly language processing.
So if you're, if you're taking, if you'rehaving a meeting with a bunch of people
and you say a bunch of stuff, havingan AI note taker in the room with you
to log what was said in the meeting,what decisions were made, what action

(54:59):
items were there, that's a great idea.
Um, it will transform the efficiencyof communication across your team.
Um, if you're writing content andit's gonna be read by people that
are maybe outside of the US maybe nowyou can publish content in five or
10 or 25 different languages, right?

(55:22):
So you can reach your whole globalaudience instead of just the, the
one you've speak to in English.
Those are things that already are workingreally, really great and global teams
should be doing those things already,um, in a EC, you know, to, to have
a, a structural engineering drawingand put it somewhere and say like,

(55:45):
what are the flaws in this drawing?
That technology is reallyin its infancy right now.
Like, we don't have the, that kind ofstuff just isn't in the training data.
And so when we say ai, I wannamake sure I, I distinguish
between language processing stuff.
And graphical image processing stuff.

(56:07):
'cause uh, a lot of the design stuffthat requires precision in images is
still a long way off because that stuffwasn't enough in the training data.
Now companies like Autodesk and,and the others are going to make
great things, but, but that, thatroad there is a little bit slower.

And, and just to kind of throw in some other ideas about what
I've seen going on in this space is, islike, uh, very small teams developing.
Language based interfaces to producecode, to build geometry in real time
in your modeling application like


right?
But it's still language drivento code something that would

Yep.

take somebody a lot of trial and error or a lot of experience, right?
You gotta

Yep.

for that time to create this stuff either way, versus, oh, I wanted
to, you know, round off the corners onthe 15 floors at the same time, and, and
it creates the code that lets you executethat and then you can use it again and
again and again and again, and all ofa sudden, like you have to find ways.
To leverage the existing toolsto do little things in the bigger


It's not just

Right.

it's not just for project managers and people
processing a lot of email.
It can be for designers too, orwithout going full on down the IP
role of like it generating designideas that that Then there's like
questions over where that came fromand ownership and all that kind of

Yeah.
Right, right, right,

Yeah.

right.
Yeah, exactly.
Or even just the structural integrityof, of, of the shape that your

Right.

journey, uh, design came from or whatever.

Yeah.

Um, but yeah, that, that's a great example.
And, and that's, I think another,another place where we could bring that
cross pollenization of industry back.
Um, if, if you hired a randomnon-architect software engineer to come
in and just like look over the shoulder,

Right.
Yeah,

uh, they would find.
Amazing efficiency thingsthat you're gonna overlook.
Uh, if you're not a software engineer.
One of the things we always sayabout great, great software engineers
are the laziest ones, right?
They wanna, they wanna do the least amountof work possible, and so they'll find ways

(58:27):
of like automating some of that stuff.
And that that willdefinitely help in the a, EC.

The question then is, how can a EC afford those people?
Right.
Because,

Yeah.

but, but you, you get what you pay for on some level when,

Yeah, yeah,

Yeah.
Right.

yeah.

let's talk more about creativity, because this idea you,
you posted on LinkedIn and you talkedabout how ai, um, it what creativity
is, and then what you thought.
You've already got into thisa little bit, what, what CRE
creativity will never do, when

Yeah.

to.
Caring like that.
That's a big one, right?
You, you talked about that AI won't care.
Um,

Mm-hmm.

and so the, the thing that really interests me about this topic or
this, this, this framework of, of whatAI can do as a tool and where do humans
fit into that process, especially asarchitects, which is, it's about, it's
actually about the human experience.
And then there's all this other stuffwe have to do to make it actually
physically work in the real world as


Midjourney doesn't do that, right?
It's, it's images and okay, maybe itthought us, you know, it, it drew a
picture that, oh, I'm going to pursuethat, go down that road, and then we
can actually reverse engineer and then,you know, so take it a few steps back.
Interject some other clientideas and then move forward and
actually come up with something.
But then there's this whole like, okay,we have to produce these drawings.

(59:47):
We have to produce these details, we haveto get it through the permitting process.
We have to go through the bidding pro, allthese things that architects have to do.
And so there's like, there's not a lotof threat there, but, but this idea of

Right.

the, what I like about this is that it actually brings us
closer back to our true value aswhat architects can do, which is not
just commodity stuff anymore, right?
The,

Dan Chuparkoff (01:00:07):
right, right,

Evan Troxel (01:00:08):
of design and tools, uh, uh, like it's, it's gross, right?
Like it's

right, right.

we don't need more of that.
We actually need architects to actuallyrealize their true value and be able to
apply their time and energy into that.
And maybe this is a wayto start doing that.

I, I think it is, uh, right.
I think the, um, there, there, becauseour, because some of our processes
are so heavy, there's so much stuffwe have to do just to get the thing
to the point at which it's built.
You know, there's, there's one day atthe beginning of the project that's super
fun where you're like, just sketchingon a, on a napkin or a STA notebook

(01:00:45):
and you're like, I can imagine thisamazing building, this amazing space.
It's gonna be so cool.
And then the fun ends for like, I.
A year and a half, and you haveto do all that other crap to
get your napkin sketch to life.
Um, you know, what should happen orwhat I'm optimistic that will happen
is that the painful stuff that, thatshouldn't take as much human creativity

(01:01:11):
and, and, um, and imagination and uniqueperspective and all that stuff, all the
processing stuff should get automatedso that you spend more time, you know,
doing the fun part at the beginning.
And, um, I, that makes me reallyexcited about the AI future, not just
in a EC, but like that's, that I thinkwill be true in, in medicine and in,

(01:01:34):
in, uh, uh, software engineering and,and all the other industries too.

Yeah.
Th this idea of like youngergenerations and change, right?

Mm-hmm.

catalyst of change is the, when the bit flips and
it's like, oh, there's some new

Mm-hmm.

charge now.
And because I think a lot of peoplethink, okay, well yeah, you can
spend more time on the project.
And we'll, of course, we'llalways that that's the, that's
actually what BIM did, right?
It just allowed

Right,

cram even more into the same.
as we had before


you know, more metadata, whatever it is, and, and all of
the, that can be leveraged for good.
Um, and at the same time,like, I like to think of it is
like quality of life, right?
Like you can

Yeah.

wanna spend that time.
You

Right.

it into the project, you could put it back into yourself.
You could work less hours, youcould go on that trip and get
those experiences that then bring,you, bring back to your projects

Mm-hmm.

can build better architecture because you've had those experiences.
And like,

Right, right.

actually feeds other, right?
It's, it's

Right.

in, in a positive way.
And I, my hope is that.
We can actually use these toolsas leverage so that we can have
better experiences so that we canprovide better experiences so that
we can provide better products andnot just work more or work longer.

Yeah.

because

right, right,

we've done that.
And I think that that's aninteresting perspective from
the younger generations as well.
It's like, I'm not gonna do it like that.
Like I, I see

right.

do it, and I'm not interested in doing it like that.
And a lot of people are leaving or notgoing into the industry because of that.
But I think I'm hopeful that theones that do actually will have a, a
different way of, of approaching the way

Yeah.
I.
Yeah, I, I completely agree with that.
I, I'm the parent of three sons.
Uh, I have a 30-year-oldand then 2 23 year olds.
And they're, you know, as they come intothe workforce now, they're, they have
a completely different mindset, right?
They're, they're not trying to work,you know, they're butt off for 50 years
to get a gold watch and a pension.

(01:03:38):
Like, that's not, that's nottheir view of the world anymore.
And, and they're, um, they're gonnaapproach work in a different way.
They're gonna find efficiencies in theirown work and then, and then split the
dividend with their organization, right?
Where they've got some efficiencies.
So now I get a little bit more vacationtime, and I can also do a little

(01:03:58):
bit more work for your stakeholders.
Um, but then the, it's the, the, um, thedynamic has flipped for, for sure, for,
for some people younger in the workforce.

Yeah.
I'm hopeful in that way for sure.
I, I, I'm just curious, maybewrapping up here, what you are most
excited about or what you thinkmaybe the biggest takeaways are.
I'm sure even in the time in the year anda half, since you haven't been in Google,
things have changed pretty radically so.
What I'm, what I'm not lookingfor here is like, like you've
even experienced this, right?

(01:04:29):
With a year and a half of like how

Mm-hmm.

are moving and so there's a lot of stuff that you probably
even told people a year and a halfago that doesn't apply anymore.
And so I'm trying to

Yay.

a little bit of that, but like bigger picture, what do
you, what do you think some ofthe takeaways are from this kind

I think,

yeah.

I think one of the things that excites me the most
is, um, the ability for AI to helpus communicate across language
barriers more than we can right now.

Hmm.

Um, you know, a lot of the global economy transacts in
English right now because it's theone language that lots of people know.
And, um, and that's a little bit broken.
There are 6 billion people thatdon't speak English at all,
and those people can't read.
Most textbooks that were written,they can't watch most YouTube videos.

(01:05:18):
They can't like, join most enterprisesbecause they don't, they don't
know how to understand, uh, the,the words that are being spoken.
Um, I think AI translation is going todemocratize access to information in the
world in ways that are super interesting.

Kinda like

enable.
Yeah, yeah,

Yeah.

yeah.
Um, you know, we, we will probablyin the next year have a toggle on our
computer that lets us just flip thelanguage that we hear and, and read when
we get messages or we join meetings.
You know, if, if we wanna speak Mandarin,we're gonna speak Mandarin and everyone
else will get English or Spanish orGerman or whatever they like in real time.

(01:05:57):
Yeah.
Like, those things alreadywork in, in, um, in teams.
That functionality is already there.
It's not widely used.
Um, but, but I think that's thething that excites me the most.
'cause I, I think this is a big world andlots of our organizations aspire to be
global, but, um, our definition of globalright now is, is a little bit broken.

(01:06:19):
Um, and it could be a lot moreglobal than it actually is.
And that, that's a, that's an exciting,like human, um, step change that
makes me, um, makes me really, reallyex excited about the next decade.

So do you think then, based on that alone, that corporations and
teams should be thinking about businessvery differently and who their customers
could be and what their footprintis and, and those kinds of things?
Because it's, you kind offramed it in this idea of
sharing information, but like.
If you can speak Mandarin in realtime and all you can actually speak

(01:06:55):
is English in real time, actuallychanges things pretty structurally to
what's possible with your business.

I, yeah, I, I think that is, um, exactly, uh, my, my advice for
organizations, I think people are thinkingabout their, um, their customer market
as a way narrower than it actually is.
You know, there, there's a wholecontinent of Africa, you know, that's
growing rapidly, like skipped over thenon-digital ways of doing things right.

(01:07:23):
They jumped right to digital money.
They, they jumped right to cellphones and never even installed,
uh, telephone lines and cables and.
Um, you know, there's a middle class inAfrica that needs all the services that
we all make every day here in the us.
Um, there's a billion people overthere, um, another billion people
in, you know, India, uh, you know,billion and a half people in China.

(01:07:46):
That's just three of thecountries, uh, Africa,

Yeah.

uh, continent.
But, um, you know, there's a, there'sa lot of, uh, opportunity I think
out, out there in the world that, um,that this new, new way of exchanging
information, uh, will enable.
And I think that could, you know, thatwill be opportunity on both sides for
us servicing them and for them joining,you know, the, the global economy.

You've played with that a little bit, and I'm just, my question,
my guess, my final question is how, howmuch did you trust it not knowing the
Mandarin that you've had it translate to?

Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So, so a, a couple things.
Uh, all the translations that I've doneso far with it, I've, I've given to
a native speaker and they said therewas one exception, uh, in Spanish.
I said the word team and the wordteam that it changed was more
like family then co coworkers.

(01:08:40):
And so that one word is theonly flaw that I've ever found.
It's, it's pretty close to accurateall the time, and it's certainly
better than just not speaking tothem in their language at all.

Interesting.

Right?
Yeah.

I mean, I think I, a final thought just thinking about like
using multiple tools to check, likeI, I know a lot of people use Chat
g PT to check its own work, right?
But,

Yeah.
Yeah.

ones too, and it's like, okay, this tool did this,
now let's have this tool check itswork, and then maybe a third one.
And, and like between that and,and still the amount of time saved
is just absolutely incredible.

Yeah, I think it's, it's an exciting time.
There's a lot of new stuffavailable to all of us.
It can be scary 'cause that'ssometimes overwhelming.
Um, but also some of the things that itwill drive will be amazingly empowering.
It should give you more time in yourown day for things like personal growth.
It should allow you to reachbigger customers with better

(01:09:41):
services and, and products.
And you know, I think thesethings have the ability to
change the world if we let them.
Um, so that's, uh, an ex,it's an exciting time.

Thanks, Dan.
It's been a fun conversation.
I've definitely learned a lot,and I'll put links to everywhere.
People can get in touch with you,but if you wanna mention it here in
the audio portion, still go for it.

Yeah, I'm pretty easy to find on the internet.
I have a unique last name.
It's Chu Park off, C-H-U-P-A-R-K-O-F-F.
Uh, you can find me on LinkedIn.
That's where I'm most active,but also all the other places,
Instagram, uh, x or uh, or my ownwebsite, uh, dan chu park off.com.
So, uh, here I am.
I'd love to start aconversation with any of you.

(01:10:25):
Uh, it's fun stuff for me to talk about.
So, uh, I, I appreciateyou having me on Evan.
It's been fun.

Thanks, Dan.
Okay, so let's wrap thisup before you take off.
At the beginning of this episode, I saidthat change agents must lead their teams
through technological change, and thatwas validated throughout our conversation.
Dan emphasized that technologicalchange is inevitable, accelerating,
and can be deeply disruptivewithout proactive leadership.

(01:10:54):
So here are seven examples fromthe conversation that back this up.
Example, number one, changeis constant and accelerating.
He described how technologicaladvancement, especially with AI, is
progressing faster than ever before.
The tools available today weren'teven possible just two years ago, and
the pace of adoption is increasing.

(01:11:14):
He said the next five years isgoing to be an interesting flip.
It'll be the fastest technologyadoption that we've ever seen.
Change agents must lead here or theirorganizations risk being left behind.
Example number two, resistanceis common without leadership.
Dan recalled his early experience in anarchitecture firm where CAD was initially

(01:11:37):
rejected by architects despite its clearadvantages without someone advocating
for the long-term benefits of change,organizations tend to default to the
status quo, even when it's less efficient.
Example number three, culturemust ship before processes can.
He emphasized that embracing new toolsstarts culturally, not procedurally,

(01:11:59):
and that leadership has to createa safe, experimental environment.
Change agents cultivate a growthmindset and empower their team to
explore before formal adoption.
Example number four,legacy thinking stalls.
Progress.
Dan explained how older leadersnearing retirement often avoid
change because they don't seethe payoff within their timeline.
In contrast change agents areessential because they bridge the

(01:12:23):
generational gap and prepare theorganization for a sustainable future.
Example number five,isolation enables innovation.
He discussed how creating aseparate innovation group, free
from organizational inertia, cansucceed under proper leadership.
Dan said we created a littleteam that was separate.
We had our own culture, our ownmindset We reinvented things and

(01:12:46):
it was dramatically successful.
Change agents lead by shieldinginnovation from internal resistance
and giving it room to grow.
I'll say that again.
Change agents lead by shieldinginnovation from internal resistance
and giving it room to grow.
Example number six, AI isalready transforming workflows.
Dan highlighted how younger generationsare already natively using AI tools.

(01:13:10):
and if change agents don't leadadoption, they risk becoming obsolete
as clients and competitors move forward.
And lastly, example number seven,
without leadership, fear wins, fear ofthe unknown or failure can paralyze teams.
Dan and I both acknowledge that thefear is so real that it keeps a lot
of people from trying new things,Change agents are the antidote to

(01:13:33):
this fear, and they provide vision,permission, and momentum to move forward.
So in conclusion, change agentsare not optional in this era.
They are mission critical fornavigating rapid technological shifts,
fostering curiosity, overcoming fear,and ensuring their organizations
thrive rather than stagnate.

(01:13:54):
That's it.
Thanks for listening, and I'llsee you in the next episode.

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