busy is a 4 letter word w/ gant laborde, cio of infinite red

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I think that's it. Gamp, let's give the people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do at a super high level? And then let's talk about Render for a second. Yeah, sounds good. So first off, I've been in tech for way too long. I took that path that everybody thought was the one you had to take, because I grew up in New Orleans, which is fantastic. Did New Orleans is a great city. If you ever come down there. You've never been in New Orleans? Never been in New Orleans. What are you doing with your life? I know. We do have more festivals than we have weeks in the year.

Like right now while I'm here hanging out with you, it's French Quarterfest. Oh my god, French, you want French Quarterfest. So good. All right. I might have to like leave early and go there. It's actually wonderful. So New Orleans is a beautiful place. It's like French food or that. But as far as like when you get to the engineering here, there's just no good engineering here. So being a nerd in New Orleans was kind of hard. Sure. Just kind of growing up, building websites, doing kind of nerdy stuff. And you know, so if you go play football, you're like, look at this website I built.

And it's just like, I didn't connect with anybody. Fortunately, the world opens up, connects the internet, helps us bring all these people together. I find my business partners in San Francisco, now in Nevada. And in Portland, we start forming this company together, just nerd now, having a good old time. I went through a computer science degree, that's somewhere gathering dust that was useless. But the truth is I've been doing this for a really long time coming up on 25 years actually just doing computer stuff explaining it to people having a good old time as it kind of goes through. And one of the things that happens is man I just love like kind of getting into it with like ideas and concepts and now, things like that.

And that brought me, of course, to like explaining complex concepts to people. Like I did it render. So like, we're talking about render. So I speak at tons and tons of conferences all over the world. Been to all the lens. Not a big deal. Not a big deal. Inland, England, Disneyland, you know, the classics. But Atlanta's right to hop away from New Orleans, right? So that's fantastic. And then so they said, hey, come do this AI and JavaScript workshop. And we did it last year and I'm not supposed to tell anybody how successful it was, but I will tell you this. There was standing room only and there were people who snuck in to go ahead and get that workshop.

It was super cool. Jamin Holmgren, RCTO of Infant Red, And then me, we did that workshop. You know, we run a React Native consultancy. Just basically if you need US React Native developers or US people to go ahead and do mobile apps, we're like the main people. Just do any Google search will find us. But, you know, we also are these sort of like technological nerd onlookers. So we did that workshop and went fantastic. a talk there. That was another one standing room only. It was just really people are hungry for how can this affect my life. And the funny part is developers have been really hungry for it.

And now I've got two or three talks where I'm going to be speaking to company owners and startups. Nice. And it's kind of cool because now they're like, all right, can't tell me how are we going to I had, you know, add this to our products. How we're going to add this to our services, how we're going to make our lives and our companies like a little bit easier. Yeah. And so that's a cool aspect as well. That brings me to just traveling around, meeting amazing people like you and then getting on their podcasts. Yeah, I mean, I think, so I came and gave you and Jamie and a hug before y'all started the render talk, but I did see it was packed.

It was packed. So I mean, it was, it was packed. You were at the end of the time. So yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but no, so render, yeah, render is gonna be great. Please be there. It's gonna be a great time. And you, yeah, you just need to be there. So, all right. Let's talk about, we're gonna start. Let's start by AI. Yeah, so, here we go. You got people interested in it right now anyway. A lot of people are like, hey, what's going on? I've got, you know, how much of this can I use? And, you know, honestly, because we're running a consultancy, run the agency, we've got it in every aspect humanly possible right now.

Just applied all the way from our sales process to our coding process, as long as it's allowed in our contracts. I love it. So, man, what are you seeing? Let's just start high level, right? What are you seeing? I mean, you know, again, I just feel like there's, it's just, it's highly conceptual right now. Everyone's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but like, no one's like actually put in a practice. So like give general thoughts on the state of it. Are you still early? I still feel like we're super early. Super early, super early. So here's the great part about it, right? Technology started making like universities feel weird because the jobs that were coming out were like jobs that, you know, weren't the same old jobs.

I just like to use the analogy of a plumber, right? The plumbers got their tools. They've got the way pipes have worked. Those are the same way that they've worked for, and it redicates my time. They might change in a plumber's job, small. Like you might move from lead pipes to copper pipes to some kind of like plastic or something like that. But honestly, they all have to be the same size. The tools don't hinge that much. The concepts are all there. But we sort of hit this hyperplane idea. And the hyperplane here isn't like what we learned in schools. Like how much could you memorize?

Wow. How much could you memorize? We had the world at our fingertips now. It's like how fast can you use computers? Well, now we've got all kinds of new tools coming up. Computers have changed for the first time. And you get your old school like plumbers, right? I've been in tech for a long time and it shouldn't change. And I don't want to do anything different. But the truth is, man, there's a bunch of new people who are going to grab all the cool stuff that's coming out. and then frog leap right over those companies and those people. And they're going to 10x themselves by actually just utilizing all the different tools that are coming available.

And the truth is, there are some people who think this is a flash in a pan. I want to add- Literally Brady, Brady goes here, my friends told me that AI, literally my friend saw AI as a fad. Yeah, it's absolutely that there are people, and I understand why they would say that, right? Because people who didn't see what was happening, crypto turned into NFTs and everybody got angry and dispersed for a while. And crypto is dead, but people like to compare crypto to AI. It's so different. AI is a new battery. It's a new power source. It doesn't care about all the different things we can put it in.

We haven't even conceptualized all that. And the truth is, when I do workshops with people, one of the things that I like to do with the business owners now is I like to let them conceptualize, hey, let's make up a product today. Let's find a world's problem, and then let's use AI to solve it. And guess what? Everybody walks away with 15 great ideas. Nobody has the time to build it. You know, if you think about, there's an app for that. How many of you are old enough to remember 2009, where there's like, you know what, what if there was an app for this or what if there's not already?

Yeah. I mean, if you remember, I think one of the one of the most downloaded apps on the iPhone early on was the one that was like the lighter or like one of the tier. It was one of the two. Or a tier like the one that just accessed it. It's like the ideas were so stupid. But like everybody had it, you know, it's a sign of sort of like what I'll call like the technical plumbers. Today, you'll get in an Uber and they'll be like, oh, you know what, have this app idea and I'm gonna give you 2% of it if you build it.

And it's just like, man, you missed it by a decade. Like, you're doing, we've got a really high level. Right? Right? But there was this whole phase where nobody could have the ideas or you had all the ideas and just anything was interesting and anything was exciting. That's where we are with AI. And we've got a whole decade ahead of us where the concepts that people have come up with haven't even been applied yet. And sure everybody could think of the one simple thing, like, oh, you know what? Oh yeah, chat GPD chats. Well, I could add chat to my website. Like, oh, that's as far as you go.

That's as far as you see. Like, it's going way further than that. Yeah, 100%. Chris comes in here, goes, I remember 1996 on last on a writing code. Yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and write me something for AOL so I can kick everybody out with my little VV5 script. Exactly, Jordan comes in right now, mainly he's AI the same way. Older people thought Google works, I know I had a chat bot with my small questions rather than the senior developer. I don't, yeah, I think it's great. Yeah, I remember the latter at 2009, I was like two years ago, Chris, don't even, I don't wanna talk about it, yeah, 100%.

So, how can, you know, so I like I want to give a shout to Jerome Hardaway. Jerome is doing a lot of stuff at Microsoft with AI. He talks about a lot. I mean, and talks about being being prepared for it and stuff. I mean, how if you're a developer right now, and even as an IC, right? I mean, people can kind of view you as this leader. You need to know it. Yada, yada, yada. It's not for me right now. Even as an IC, an organization, how can you start to work things in or how can you start to be mindful of this stuff.

Yeah. Well, you know, if you guys stop looking at the technology and trying to memorize all the models, you guys start looking at the needs and sort of the higher level, what is the quality of life increase that people want, right? People don't want you to shove the technology into a spot and say that this solves their needs when it doesn't. How pissed off are you when you go to the little chat box down there and you're like, Hey, I need this problem. It sounds like you need a problem. You need solution with this. You're like, no, I don't. It's like puts you in like a little circle and you just go representative, representative, representative, like you're just like cursing out this bot because it's in the second, you know, somebody shimmed some kind of technology into a place to cut a cost rather than to increase the quality of living.

And here's the trick, right? Here's where all the jobs don't get taken away from us, is that humans have a near-instrumentable quality of living vacuum that they can take in. If you can raise the ships for everybody, if you can make everybody's life a little bit better, that's the technology that stays around to today. Anytime something has made everybody happier, It beat out the old system it stays today. Take a look at Uber, right? People, I remember calling, I used to memorize cab numbers. And that's a lot of time to call them, you know? Like that's back in the day, right? And so I might even still remember.

So what happens is you call it and then you're like waiting for somebody randomly, you're looking for a giant yellow car to hopefully show up. It's some point in the near future. And if it doesn't show up, you have to call that number again. Right? You just, you have this very simple quality of life increase that made everybody happier, that told you how much it was going to cost before you got in the car, allowed you to pay electronically, which allowed all those things, and those things made better. When you come to NFTs and you're trying to like, so am I trying to get rich quick, but nobody's really getting your quality of life increase, screw that.

But, you know, the thing that's not going to take people's jobs away is the fact that every time we create something better, that creates a whole new layer of things for humans to do to try to build that next thing for us. Jevin's paradox is that, you know, when they thought that steam technology came along, we were gonna lose all these jobs. Truth is, we got a bunch more jobs that were just more advanced. That's where we're at right now. We're at an inflection point where every app's gonna have some form of AI, they're all gonna have these other parts. So when you want to do it, spend your time seeing that AI string.

And the string is how do you increase the quality of the product or life using all these cool things that come out every day? Yeah. Man. Yeah. Agreed. I think also as really useful for translate organizing the info when a framework has poor documentation. I love that. Yeah. I think just, I think, I think even as a non-technical guy. All right, let me ask you this, is AI the same thing as automation? You know, here's another thing. Yeah, automation. You can always have had in a certain way of like sort of like a root Goldberg machine. Here's a good way to look at AI, right?

So you can have all these sort of like detectors and things that kind of go off automatically. AI is just an intelligent, especially with machine learning and deep learning. It is a unblinking camera that looks for a gun inside of a bank. It is a tireless multi-monitoring like system that's doing stuff. It doesn't mean that like that should ever be the automation to a certain point. Like if you did see a gun in a bank, I don't want AI going ahead and trying to handle it because it might be a toy gun or something like that. But what it should do is have like, remember those old shows where like the guys, security guards like fall on the sleeve and he's got like 15 monitors in front of them?

You know, what I think is like way more valuable is that AI is watching 15 cameras then says ain't ain't wake up dude. And you know room five, we've detected this. So we've done that. So in that sense, it is sort of like that was an automated process. But I wouldn't simplify it. I think it's almost like a different scheme or a different bucket to sort of like say that it is automation. It is more of the fact that it is this trained person that doesn't like expire to sleep or have any kind of difficulty that we could use to go ahead and have connected in moments with automation.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Jerome heard me. He's chomping in. I love it. I love it. Brady, how far are we from AI takeover? Is it south of where already imploding? Can't see this? Is AI in the room with us? It will see that. Yeah. But it's a while away. If we even have to worry about general AI, it's like kind of thing is definitely not anytime soon. Right. starts to look more and more human-like, the more I can do human-like traits, and the more it can do things that are in a way like better than humans. For instance, you could teach a computer tic-tac-toe, right?

It's never going to take over. We've been having that for a long time, but it looks very and that's the semblance of intelligence. Generalized intelligence are actually handling unorganized data are still two major pieces that have not even gotten close yet. If you know all the training, the millions of dollars to make CHAP's, UBT, things like that, the real key, when you start to have to worry about it, is that when it's like, we don't have to structure and teach. If it actually can handle unorganized data, we're getting way closer to what would be closer to general intelligence. know we're near that solid narrow AI, just impressive narrow AI.

Yep. Yep. All right. Let's move on from the AI talk again. Any more questions on that? Please throw them up and we're going to move on about. Yeah. We're going to talk forever about it. Yeah. Yeah. That's the next one, man. Busy is a four letter word, right? And I'm kind of curious. I think, you know, I catch myself saying I'm busy all the time. Yeah, that's a poison, man. Yeah. So talk about what prompted you because I'm always curious because again, I propped all my speakers that come up with stuff on the spot for them. What prompted you to send this over? So you know what, here's one thing I've really noticed.

We have not healed from the pandemic. We are all still sick. Conferences in the US are suffering. People's days are suffering. People's energy levels, they're not properly like handling it. And the truth is, we're not built to run this kind of way and I know way too many people that I see myself in now that we're just filled up constantly doing things being stuck with every single second of every single day having being filled. You know the problem is the pandemic gave us this right so this feels weird and the problem is we are constantly looking for this again and I look around and you can see it left and right and I had it really bad man.

I had it really bad. I worked till like I passed out during the pandemic. Really? Everything. And you were just stuck in this one spot like cabin fevered up working yourself to death. And I wasn't the only one tons of people who were listening did the same thing. I mean, I I I I I'm gonna be totally vulnerable and transparent here. I have I've taken on more work than ever at the start of pandemic, and I have not slowed down since. You didn't stop. You didn't go. Because I think we got to a comfortable, because I think the way all of humans work is like, we kind of level up.

Now, leveling up could be a bad thing in this case, and that you leveled up and you took on more work in this instance. And I feel like as humans, the world we live in is very much of do more, how much you do, and you're only good as your last sale. I mean, you're in sales-ish and running a company, right? Like you understand. And so I understand. I feel like especially as very motivated, high achievers, we kind of notch it up, 16 notches. Yeah. And some of us haven't come down yet. And I'm one of those that haven't come down yet. And I'll just say this, this beach trip I'm going on tomorrow is coming out a really good time.

Good. And here's the thing, throw your phone in the ocean. Yeah. you know, we're seeing so much research. So I love technology. I'll talk technology, I'll talk about it to the nth degree, but I'll find that we have to be cognizant of ourselves. And this is a dangerous portion of our time. We have too many doom scrollers, right? So many great things that we've gotten are tied in too much to the same things. And we've We've allowed too many people to grab their attention. Oh, this pop-ups happening. Oh, this is happening. If you don't work in focus mode, if you don't go heads down and actually disconnect, if you can't disconnect, then you can't ever come up for air.

And, you know, it's funny as I had our CEO Todd Worth, he's really, he gave me the imperative in 2023. He's like, start saying, no, just start saying no, no, Every time you say yes, it's 20 no's. If you say yes to something, you just said 20 no's to other things. So you actually have fewer choices on how to move forward. Every time you say yes, you have to say your yeses are guarded. Be careful when you say it. Say no more. You can almost always go back. You know, it's not usually like, hey man, you know what, I will take that trip with you.

And you're like, oh, well, you know, it'll be difficult, but I'll get you into it or something like that. It's almost the door is never really closed. Right. But the truth is I find like the phones and the connections and the pieces that we have here from the pandemic, the habits that we have, oh, I'll just order some food and eat at my desk. Oh, God, feel how gross that is. Don't eat at your desk. Go take a walk. Go take a break. If you know, if you learned how to remote work, remote work the right way the way it was done before the pandemic do not work like you did during the pandemic.

And the truth is that as I look around people aren't going out of the house, they're not going to conferences, they're not supporting events, they're not doing all these things because they've never gotten rid of all those yeses they said during the pandemic. And they're just gonna say there and we respect consistency. You say, again, I want you to be on this podcast. You tell me what time it is. And I always show up. You respect that. As human beings, we have to be consistent with one. Right. Right. Yeah. What does this need to expire now? So I'm so I'm big on these like, you know, not hacks.

I hate to hacks, but like productivity tips, let's just say, you know, one of the things that I've started to do is is I've started to schedule in lunch times, like people laugh at me, but I'm like, block it out. Do you have certain days we just do meetings? I'm trying to tinkle with that now. Oh, no, no, no. We're like three Gants. Yeah, you got first of all, a day that you don't have meetings. And if it read, nobody's allowed to have meetings on Fridays. Yeah, Fridays for me. I have no meetings on Fridays. Good. No meetings on Friday, except for like this. You try to count as a meeting?

No, I don't either. Because like, you know, you're not like a client or you're not anything like that. Just hang it down. No particle interactions left happen. So you have a whole day that you defend. Now one thing that that'll do is it'll wake you up. If you say no meetings on Friday, Thursday is going to start looking crazy. But that's great. But Thursday was crazy. That's great. That's it. Let me show you. This is going to be one second. I want to show you. So I have the same mentality with chords that I keep. And so I'm going to go grab my chord cable box real quick.

OK, and maybe we have some questions. But the truth is, you have a certain number of slots. Those are your guesses. That's right. When it comes in, something has to go out. Just think about all the clients who say, oh, I need this button. And I need this. And I need that. At some point, you have to go to them and say, OK, here's two coins. Right? What two coins would you like? Yeah, exactly. Oh no, looks like we're out of coins. Are we going to be sad? Let's go have our big emotions in the corner. Like you've got to deal with that. Truth is, I like to make fun of that all I can.

We have the same problem. We say yes, you say yes, we say yes. And then you've got to have somebody in your brain come in and say, oh no, we're out of time. We're out of spots. Let me go get my court table. Right, yeah, do that. Do that. Do that. I love this. I love Chris. So Chris comes in here. It looks like Gant got pissed and like ran off stage. My so Chris comes and goes my disconnected jujitsu. I'm not thinking about anything but being but not being choked out. I heard that dude. It is both visually, mentally, refreshing for me. It's ice hockey.

Like when I step out on the ice on Mondays, the only thing I can think about is not letting goals being scored on me and hitting people. Jackie and I talk about this. My wife and I talk about us a lot like doing things that really disconnect you. And well, when we say we talk about things mainly for me is doing things that disconnect me from work. Working out of the gym, like today, I'll have a heavy leg day, deadlifts, push presses, heavy stuff. You can't, you can't think about work while you're doing that. You're going to get hurt. Like all your focus has got to be on that.

So I'm a big fan. So go ahead and show your box. Just so you say like, uh, so, um, there's a little core cable boxes for USB C cables only. And then what I have here is you see there's some empty spots. Right. When, you know, USB C is newer. But when it happens is when I fill this up, what's gonna happen is I'm gonna take the shorter ones, the crappier ones, and start throwing those away. And then when this is full, it'll be full of USB-C, but that's it. After this is full, I don't need those little box of cables to keep in the garage anymore.

This is it. This is all the USB-C cables I should ever have. And the same thing happens is there needs to be some kind of parameter. And then when something new comes in, You have to go through, take a look at whatever is the crappiest one that really you've outgrown and don't need and throw that in a way. And so you get to choose what size is boxes without that. You just got that cardboard box that's just getting more and more and more full. And then you're just getting more and more tight. Yeah. And I will tell you this. I am a, I get like my counter.

I'm trying to figure out words here. my calendar is everything. And so like, I'm always like, even talking to you, full transparency, I have my calendar up and I'm like, I'm like, what meetings when I get back from the beach, can I go ahead and cancel, right? Like the list already looked at that. So the giant lunch block in the middle, make sure, you know, that's something that took us a while to learn. I have to put my lunch block in there because you know, we're located across, but we're doing back native across the entire US, right? So we have people East Coast and West Coast.

Sure, sure. And almost all of our leadership is on the West Coast. So they start kind of like getting their morning rolling. And then like, all right, you already have a good morning meeting. And like, that's my lunch time, you know? And it sucks. But I have to sort of like kind of say, look, if you want me, don't book within these times. Yeah, I have to charge you. Oh, and check. I'm going to check that out, Brady. No, it's never breaks. So the gym is also good. But yeah, yeah, again, you got to find what works for you. This is a lie. No one throws away cords.

It's really hard to me throw away cords. Throw them away. You don't need them. Throw them away. That's what I'm saying. I feel like meetings do that. Like I'm constantly looking. Does this meeting have value if it doesn't have value? I'm not afraid of you. I'm not afraid of you. You know what's really great is when there's this thing that used to happen. I'm gonna tell you some old people stuff. This is another thing I learned from Todd, is that before the internet, you just had this boredom sort of like land on you and you had to sort of think differently. And it was a different skill that you always had to have in like the 90s.

Then there became this sense of hyper-connectivity and there's no boring moment. People like kids today, I'm so sorry to be like this, but like my nephew's 22, he owns a car, he's never used. He doesn't even have a driver's license. He doesn't leave the house. Why would he? He doesn't leave the house. I couldn't wait to drive. I couldn't wait to get out the house. You need to have a little bit of this balance between like the boredom and that part. And so what kind of happens is negative spaces are where inspiration and creativity and connectivity happen. It's in the hallway track at the conference.

You can't get that virtually. You have to go there and you have to talk to somebody next to you at the lunch table. We're going to see somebody after their talk. These negative spaces are important. Take a look at anybody who does design, right? Behind you. Like, great. You don't need more stuff. That's perfect. You have like something framing you on either side. Stop. Yeah, exactly. The truth is if you don't have negative space, you can't build certain things. So our meetings, funny enough, sometimes we'll have, hey, we're done, let's, you know, I have the time blocked out, let's do a little chat. Let's have a few jokes.

And it really strengthens the connection between a lot of people who work remotely, who need connection and communication. Yep, absolutely, absolutely. All right, so I really, any other tips real quick, any other productivity tips that you kind of stand by, if not, we're gonna go to that last section for you. I've talked about remote work for a million years too. I could talk about sort of trying to clear schedule, which by the way, like I said, I'm still healing from. I started my journey in January 2023, and I'm still working on it, but it's- Do you have, okay, let me ask you this. And this is why we started 10 minutes early, and we're probably gonna go 10 minutes late, that's fine.

What, how many meetings do you try to have in a day? Do you have a set limit? contiguous meetings are dangerous. What do you mean like, you mean like reoccurring? No, no. Anytime one meeting immediately goes to the meeting, we're next. So here's what happens. Let's say you're my third meeting. Okay. And I've been in two meetings before then. I'm not going to be good in your meeting because I did one hour, this person, gave him probably my fresh brain, second brain like connected just like did what we had to do. And I get to my third meeting and I haven't had a chance. Like the only thing I've had is like a bio break, but I didn't reset.

I haven't like walked around for a second. Basically I'm running into my third hour of a meeting. Right? I'm gonna act like you do in a three hour meeting, even though that's their 30 minute meeting, their first meeting, their first interaction with me. When you put meetings touching each other, ooh, yeah, I mean you should. You don't like you're just getting it done. I'm toughen it out. But anybody who codes knows that your 2 AM code is shit. I'm gonna show you something. You're gonna be highly disappointed with me. It's not. I'm gonna see how can I share my screen? Hold on, I think it's true.

Hold on, we're gonna do this right now. Oh no. How can I do this? Oh no. If you show me- I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. You're all touching. They are they I I'll send you a text. They're all touching literally yesterday's meeting from 11 until 4 30 was all touching meetings. So just a minute. The last meeting in there is is you hate that person. Like you're not worn. Yeah. So my buddy Warren. My but Warren is a CTO and co founder here Nashville of a mental health startup called verify highly recommend looking into them if anybody in the mental if from a corporate perspective.

And he called me and I was I apologize, I said, Warren, I said, I'm not giving you my best in this call right now. I said, I'm so tanked. So I got to figure this out. This is good for me going on this trip. I got it. And you don't, in that moment, you're like, oh, I didn't know this was coming. I'm telling you, from now on, anytime your meetings are touching, you might as well think of that as a multi-hour meeting. And guess what? Getting better at multi-hour meetings is only a small improvement that's never going to like top out. What you need to do is you can get better at multi hour meetings, but also make sure you have fewer of them.

And then you're going to be the best that you can be for everybody you talked to. Absolutely. Yeah. Taylor's like, yeah, 100% called out read. My guy read who's also doing his own thing now 100% again, giving yourself permission to have space so tough when the constant refrain is grind and especially somebody in read who's doing his own thing right now. But you got to every day I'm hustling. I believe that do, you know, but like if you take a look the people to the advice. What was the guy that did that song every day I'm hustling? Do you remember? I love his Google real great.

That's great. You don't know his name. Oh, Rick Ross. Oh, yeah, Rick Ross. Okay. Yeah, I do remember that. Everyone's like, he's like a nice problem like the movers and the shakers and people who have become presidents and stuff. They talk about burning focus when you are actually doing something, moving it, moving that needle. You can do mindless actions and you don't build new neurons. You don't grow by doing those moments. You have to have this intense laser-like focus when you're growing and doing those kinds of things. If you've missed lots of good quotes about that. So take a look at the advice of the people who've actually influenced the world instead of dancing around to Rick Ross when your brain's completely gone after hour five of a meeting.

Absolutely. All right. Uh, we're technically at time. I do want to get to leading without a title real quick. Obviously all of these segments could have been a whole show. Yeah. So, uh, talk, talk about what, what prompted you to, to, to send this to me. So I thought about, I've thought a lot about leadership recently. Um, that's another prompt that I've had from my business owners, uh, and Todd talking about the idea of leadership. And one of the great things that kind of happened was, I felt like I hit another gear. And I take a look back in the day of when I didn't have a title to be a leader.

And the biggest thing that we realized in sort of all of our conversations is that a leader leads with or without a title. Todd likes to say this one quote that, you know, you get the lunch table and then the boss like is kind of like boss like it's kind of like does something or ever. But then you've got that one person who stands up to go and then everybody stands up to go. From the body language, not the title. You know who the leader is, right? And the truth is like a lot of people wait till they get the title to start influencing things.

And the biggest improvement moments that I've seen are people who don't have the title and start acting like the leader that actually get the followers, that actually grow, that that actually make the thing, the title follows afterward. There's a difference between a manager and a leader. And a lot of people forget that managers aren't leaders and leaders sometimes aren't managers. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. But the most important part is anytime someone's leaned into a role, but without having it, they've tested their metal and then inevitably it falls. No, don't get me wrong, there are some companies that are just like, cool. We don't have to pay that person.

They're basically doing their boss's job, for this or that, anything like it's up. So if you're doing leadership for a pay raise, I'm not gonna say that it will follow automatically. But I'm also gonna say this, that's probably the wrong reason to go ahead and be a leader. You should be a leader because you want to actually have the influence in the environment. You want the agency that comes with something like that. And so we have some new leaders. We have a whole layer underneath us called the directors, we have directors of like communication, ops, like we have all these different kinds of people who are actually helping.

And one of our most recent leaders, Robin, she just started leading. She just started taking on roles. She started saying yes to the right things and no to the other things. And then that just kind of put her in a place where she wound up leading discussions. She wound up leading value conversations. she wound up telling us like letters that she had collected from the team to go ahead and reference how they felt about a particular event. Those weren't assigned to her. She did that and you know what? The title followed. And she wore interest and her pressure into that kind of came after it.

And the truth is it's very rewarding to watch a person who leads well then get the title. And I think that the title doesn't matter to a real leader. And so don't wait for that. Yeah, agree. And I mean, you're obviously a C-suite. And I feel like there is this trend in whether you like it or not, it doesn't matter. It just is what it is. Before you get promoted, you have to embody the role before you get promoted. Yeah. I'll ring my own bell for you for a second. I wasn't a founder of Infinite Red. I was an employee. Now I'm in the street and part owner.

So I'm one of the three owners there. I bought in. That, I'd like to say that they didn't have a choice but to go ahead and bring me in because of the actions and the things that I did. You know? I like to think that they said like, how are we not gonna work with this guy? And we have a fantastic partnership today. I absolutely love my business partners. I absolutely love our meetings. I love the fact that we get to interact, communicate, and grow. And then I get to push myself as a leader. And I get to watch them grow at the same time that I'm like, man, I could be better at that.

Let me work on how to become better at that. It's so much fun when it doesn't have, like the titles have run out. But what I'll say is this, The ambition survives the goal, is that I care about this. There's no title you can give me to make me stop. This is in my bones. And this is going to be something that I'm going to do because I know the agency that comes from that is the value that I'm going to get. Yeah, absolutely. Me, Chief, you know, trash officer, you could call me whatever. Like, you give me any title you want. I'll just have fun with it and I'll be happy to go ahead and do what I do anyway.

Yep, absolutely, absolutely. All right, man, last four questions about fire again. For those of you tuning in, thank you so much. The chat has popped off this afternoon. It was wonderful to see everybody. Gant last four questions to wrap up here. One, if money was the same, or like money was not an issue, what would you do outside of tech? Oh, good question. I guess, you know, I guess what I'm talking about here is it probably help people with their communication leadership, just like we were talking about right there. If I couldn't be in tech, I would do not in tech. Not in tech. I could lead people to communicate in leadership in any company.

OK, so just more of a, OK, like a consulting leadership person thingy. Yeah, I guess so. I would help people with their public speaking, help people with their careers. That's really fun. And it's kind of like what I do inside of tech anyway. So I know. I know. All right. So I'm going to challenge you on this next question. You can't say, what do you like to do outside of work? Oh hell yeah. All right. So I am learning the guitar and Spanish. I do it every single day. At the same time, do you play guitar and sing in Spanish? That's really hard to do.

I try. I try. But I have a 560 day thing in Duolingo. started it in 2023. The the streaks continued. Pracico Cara Día, Beto Enochtango, Parfonos comparacicar con Migo. Maybe somebody can help me a little bit on Twitter. I'd love to speak some Spanish with somebody, but my goal is to become bilingual before I die. And then the other thing is, I practice guitar every day now, and my family loves it. We wake up, we have coffee, I just start playing the guitar, I play different songs, I learn new songs, It's a lot of fun. And I went to react India and they brought a guitar out and we had an amazing time because apparently all speakers like to play guitar and scenes, there's just so many people.

And we played and people sang and just sort of like this re-disconnection from society is just like getting the acoustic guitar out just let us all have fun, play our Taylor Swift and then play Metallica, like just do your crazy stuff and everybody enjoys it. I love it. Anyways, here's Wonderwall. And then... I know it's a very requested every time. I love it. Third question. Any... I know we talked about AI, but any specific tools tech frameworks that you're tinkering with right now that someone should look at? Ooh. Yeah, that's a good question. Well, of course, tools and tech, I would say, like, yeah, I...

Now, one thing I'm trying to do is figure out the difference between Claude, Chat, JPT, and Gemini. Gemini. Okay. And as of right now, I hate to say that the Gemini is falling flat on its face so hard. Yeah, yeah, dick with Claude and Chad Jeepiti. There you go. Love it. Last question. Maybe Gemini will be good eventually. We'll see. We'll see. Last question as we wrap up here again. Thank you for everybody tuning this morning. This show is called Guidance Council 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and college, but now as adults, we don't really have somebody to turn to to ask just for career life advice.

What would be your biggest piece of career advice to a younger Gantt? Oh to a younger version of myself, right? I would say believing yourself and don't go school The truth is if I had traveled more if I had about this because this is something I'm you know I stayed in New Orleans, which I love New Orleans, right? Um, but I think like that was a huge limiting factor for myself I thought I had to go ahead and get take all the calculus classes and get a computer science degree. I didn't have to do any of that. What I really should have done is just probably flown out to Silicon Valley, shown everybody what my chops were there, traveled the world a little bit more and joined my life as a young single person at that point.

You know, like you can't travel once you have kids. It's just like, it's impossible. It's not impossible but it's kind of difficult for sure. Yeah. So the truth is I would say like let go of all the expectations that people tell you is what you need nor to succeed and double down on yourself. Yeah. I love it. I love it. All right, y'all. Gance, sounds like somebody back stage, but y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us today. I'm off for next week. Gonna go throw my phone in the ocean per Gance request. On any question. Yeah, and you guys have a good one.

We'll see you on two weeks. Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful. Because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finished an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now. Unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again if you need to reach out to me at Tdaston on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.