Hey, everybody, Mike Kelly, and Stuart Smith.

And we're interviewing Stuart Smith today for dissecting popular IT nerds.

And Stuart, why don't you go ahead and give us a little introduction? Who are you?

And what are you doing? I, Mike, great. Thanks for having me and talk with me today. So, yeah,

so I'm, I'm Stu Smith. I'm currently an IT director at Medtronic. And I work in the quality space

primarily. So I deal with the product lifecycle management or PLM systems,

Kappa audit, document management, and have been a metronic 22 years and recently going through

a restructure right now and a good opportunity to kind of reassess where I'm at, where I'm going,

and kind of what's next to my career. So I appreciate the time today.

Yeah, not a problem. We appreciate your time. So a quick fundamental question here. And I know we talked about it just a tiny bit beforehand, but nerd or geek? I would probably go on the nerd side. I don't know that I could qualify as a geek. I'm not

that technically astute in some areas. As folks that know me, I actually have a background in my

degree is in I have a BA in economics and Norwegian. I went to St. Olive College and spent a year in Norway.

It's my family heritage and really enjoyed that opportunity to explore that while I was in school.

And a great place to travel and go to. And I think what I've leveraged from that, though, is I actually took my first job after college.

I went to Japan and I taught English as a second language over there. And you've got to go Japanese, Norwegian,

and how does that work with IT? And really what I've done with that since then is it's been the

translation person, right? So you come and you learn about how to talk different languages,

different cultures, how to meet people where they are.

And when you're the only white person in the town of 20,000 other people and they're all Japanese,

and then you're the one person that looks different, you learn what it's like to be on the other side of the fence on things.

And so you go forward and you figure out,

okay, how do I, how do I operate here? And then you, when you come back to the United States,

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