So Doug and I had a really interesting conversation offline that we wanted to continue today.

And that was it kind of started off with, and first of all, I'd love to hear your story about how you got involved in all of this.

No problem.

And I'd love to first hear how you got involved in all of this, no problem. And I'd love to first hear how you got

involved in in IT, and then we're going to move into what has really changed in this environment

over the years and what have you seen as of recently because I think there's the same old narrative that plays over and over and over again in IT,

which is we earn our seat at the executive roundtable.

Maybe we learn to speak the language of business,

but then we have to continue to re-earn that seat, which we like to call the loniest seat at the C-suite.

In the executive C-suite room, the loneliest seat is typically the C-TO because they're the

only ones to understand the language they're speaking.

But there tends to be a really big shift as of recent with the onslaught of AI and probably

some changes in the economy as well and I think I just felt

like you had some really really good input on that the other day and I'd love to hear your thoughts on

that but before we even get there there was a time there was a time not too long ago when we

used punch cards to communicate and we used floppy disks.

So how did you get started in this? What's your story? Tell us your story.

Oh, gosh. Yeah. So I think we mentioned when we met, I have a master's in Russian history,

political science. So you can see how I went right into IT right after school. So I spent some

time working with the government, spent some time overseas. About all I could really talk about

that is I did a lot of Apple import exports and I'll put the quotes around that and let you figure

it out from there and spend some time time in Moscow and over in Germany.

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