S3:E1 - Solving problems with technology instead of creating them, with Joe Baguley

Technology should come into your life and enhance it and solve a problem that you've got. Not make you go and find a problem that you didn't need to dissolve. Welcome to Don't Break the Bank, Run It and Change It, our podcast for curious minds in the financial services industry. I'm Matthew O'Neill and together with my co-host Brian Hayes, we've both worked for over 30 years in banking and bank and IT before joining VMware. In this episode we welcome back Joe Bagley. As our field CTO, Joe gets to talk with a lot of customers, all sorts of sizes, all sorts of industries, so he asked him what he's seeing and hearing as top of mind concerns and challenges. He talks a lot about the resurgence of cost being a top issue, one that's always been there, but now is back on top. The ever-changing attitude towards cloud and whether it's a destination, a journey or a distraction. We explored his passion on the topic of sustainability and a great conversation on how AI has become a talking point. You're going to have to listen to his amusing story about the gadgets we can't live without at home. Yeah, and the tech for the sake of tech. Finally, we talked with Joe about mission motorsport and why it's such an important activity that he's getting involved personally and professionally. So let's get on with it. Welcome Joe, great to have you back with us. Hi, it's called to be back. Oh, there we go. It's been a long time and we've been quite the journey. I think of this quick intro about you and what you do. Yeah, so for those who don't know, I'm the vice president and chief technology officer for Europe, Middle East and Africa here at VMware. It's a very long title, but a short way to put it is I'm the connection between R&D and the field and our customers and partners and drive all things around that in terms of where we're going, what we're doing, what's next and leading the tech and community, I suppose within VMware. That's probably a short way to describe it. All right, super then. So from a career perspective, how did you get started and how did you end up here? The short version, the really short version, because that's a two-hour podcast in itself, the short version is after a brief career in the army, a two-year stint at Imperial College and in which left in disillusionment, I ended up at Hula Packard. After various short, weird jobs, I ended up at Hula Packard working in their finance and remarking division as a bilingual secretary to the head of finance and remarketing for Europe, which is quite an interesting one. So I started my career talking in English and French about FASB 13, which is very odd for someone who now works on IT. But I was a computer scientist, a technologist, et cetera. And I was the first person there to say, "Hey, wouldn't it be a really good idea if I plug this laptop into a projector and we kind of did things together as a team?" No kidding, it really was, because overhead projectors were still a thing back then at HP. And I then ended up at working for IT at HP, leading the help desk at HP and various consulting jobs, blah, blah, blah. Interesting highlights include being involved in the rollout for Enron, which was fun. I knew what best to buy at the FASL afterwards as well from the kit that was in IT. That was interesting. Very so that bits in there and then ultimately was part of the team that built Quest Software. So as you remember, Quest Software, here at Quest Software, we played in the Oracle World around Foglight or Windows World around active roles, et cetera. Up through the first part of this century for 10 years, there's the CTO there for Europe and then now for 12 years I've been at VMware as the CTO for Europe and Eastern Africa. And I joined here with a sort of two to three-year vision to see, would be fun, probably interesting, see where they're going and it's still fun and interesting and here I am. So what is it you wanted to do when you left school? I wanted to join the Army and be a soldier, which is kind of what I did when I was going to carry it on doing as a reserve for a very long time. So I always had a passion around that. But I think I was really stick and pragmatic in that it wouldn't be a career. I saw a lot of sort of 40-year-old men who weren't doing so well after having spent their first part of their career in the Army. So I thought, I better have some fun and move on, but I did it in the reserve. So I think that's one way. I really want to be a helicopter pilot, but that's a whole separate story. I ended up sort of getting some hours in a helicopter and getting my pilot's license. And yeah, I suppose it was then sort of, I never really knew what I wanted to do in IT. I always knew I enjoyed IT. I enjoyed computers. I enjoyed technology. I was an absolute geek when it came to anything to do a technology and always had been. When I was a kid at school, there was no such thing as a chief technology officer. It wasn't even a thing. So you couldn't exactly sit there in the mid 80s. You go, I want to be a chief technology officer. I've run around me. You were going, what? No, it's not even a thing. But I just knew that there was something really exciting in my computer. My father was at IBM and ended up retiring a few 20 years ago now, I think, after 34 years at IBM. So I grew up as an IBM child as well. And he used to work at Banking Branch in the city and spent, you know, I was regaled as a child of stories, which I've been forced into a blog, which I'll take a link out for you of fixing mainframes for Lloyds and God knows what else. And he was based in Basin Wall Street and all the exciting time in the city in the 70s, building up things like that. So I think there was a sort of an excitement put into me around technology and computers from the start with weirdly a banking link, because that's where it came from. And then, yeah, I suppose that I didn't really what I wanted to be. I just knew I wanted to be involved in tech. And then I kind of found through doing it and I suppose through the way I am, I suppose I found that I had a couple of things in that. I was involved in technology, but could also talk to humans. And that was fairly unique at some points in my career. And that's really helped me move on, I think, because it's the answer there. So, yeah, I don't know. But yeah, as if you'd look back to 10, 12, 14 year old me, it would have been, what can I do that involves playing with Lego, which I still do. So I think of one, really. Nice. So, also looking back then, what would you say to be in your career defining moment? I can come back to this one, I suppose. The career defining moment is in the 90s I was doing various consulting jobs, like, you're normal thing, going out and doing rollouts of Windows 95 and all that kind of stuff and Windows NT and all the early versions we can talk for hours around old versions of no valence. Did all that. And then, actually, the tipping point was I was hired into Quest Software, actually not as the CTO, I was hired in to be the lead PS consultant, the lead professional services consultant in Europe. So, I was out there doing it. I joined and I was out there doing actually NC4 to Active Directory migrations, the first thing. So, I was out there doing all that, literally in the trenches, day in, day out doing that. And then, I got asked to do a presentation at Microsoft about my kind of, you know, tails from the trenches. And I'd done presentations before in my, obviously in the military, I'd sit up in front of people lots of times and done presentations, but that was not about what hill we were going to attack and how to strip this weapon down. It wasn't necessarily about computers. And I found myself standing up in front of a whole bunch of probably 150 people at Microsoft in the UK in terms of Ali. And doing a sort of 45 minute talk about all the stuff that goes wrong in doing migrations. But I threw a few jokes in there that were in jokes in the industry. If you understood NT and you understood AED, you'd get the joke. It was really sad. But I really, really liked it. I got a really strong vibe off it. I really enjoyed it. I found I started to get a bit and I started to sort of hone the craft then around presenting. And I think that was the tipping point for me. Until then I was sort of just another techie. But at that point once I realised that by sharing what I could do with other people, I found that I got a real buzz, I suppose, from the engagement of an audience and an engagement of others. And not in a narcissistic way. It just felt sort of energy from it, I suppose, really. And that was the tipping point for me. You know, over 20 years ago, that sort of took me out from being the consultant literally under the tables into being the one that was still up in front of people. And I suppose the rest of it all follows on from there, really. And then culminates in presenting in front of over 20,000 people in Vegas. And it's all that combined, I suppose. So yeah, that was my tipping point. Wow. It was really kind of cool. That's good. That's good. So what's been your proudest moment then from a professional perspective? Oh, that's an interesting one. I don't think I've ever had. You know, a lot of people thought there was that project I did. I was involved in so many projects and bits and pieces over the years. I couldn't pick one that was like, okay, that was my proudest moment. I think actually some of my proudest moments come from people that I've worked with and seen them succeed. And I don't mean that in a really naff way. It literally is just some people that I've mentored, particularly in the last sort of 10 years of my life. I'm watching their careers progress and watching them get promoted and watching them become successful, I suppose. Those are probably. There's a few of those. None that I'd like to call out individually for the sake of the individual's concern. But I think that's probably the proudest bit for me is that, you know, it's not necessarily any particular project I was involved in or something I personally did or my biggest presentation is standing on stage or so and so was the best bit. I think actually if someone asked me in 20 years' time and I'm more retired and sat somewhere and what was the best bit, it'll be still being in touch with those people. Great answer. All right, so let's move on to our deep dive. Ben and I did a real deep dive. All right, let's get into it. We'll find out everything there is to know. So, Joe, as we say, come a long way since you helped kick off this series of podcasts while back. Can you, you know, as I feel to CTO, you get to talk with a lot of customers, all sorts of sizes, all sorts of industries. What are you seeing and hearing as kind of top of mind concerns and challenges right now? One is cost, you know, and the funny thing is, if you look back in, it's always cost, right? It's definitely not being cost. It's always cost, right? Well, I think it was brought home to me. There was the CIO of one of our largest sort of customers in Europe, sat opposite me and he went, look, here's the reality. He was actually from a public sector and he went, you know, I know my budget for the next five years. It's been laid out for me. I know it goes up 2% a year. It's all planned out. He says, but I'm staring in the face of hardware cost going up by 20%, 30% software cost going up by 10% staff cost going up by, you know, whatever based on cost of living, et cetera. So that's a math problem I've got to sort out, I think, is the answer. And I think that's the interesting thing is there's always been up until now, it's always been, budgets have been fairly flat and but they kind of kept pace with inflation, you know what I mean? it's the fact that there's an inversion there, and there's a real pressure, and people are starting to say, "Well, I need to look." And so it's interesting to talk to people about how they're approaching those challenges by looking at consolidation, looking at getting much better efficiency at what they've already got. They're being much more careful about what they are investing in, a bit less speculative, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It moves the risk profile for people and IT as well. So I think, yeah, that's probably the primary one tends to be around cost. And then the next one is the whole cloud story. And are we in the cloud? Are we out the cloud? Are we multi-cloud? Are we not in all that kind of stuff, I suppose, really? Those are the two big talking points, I suppose. And do you see cloud still being linked to cost or something different? It's really funny because I don't think people never really knew what cloud was, and I don't think they do today. When you ask a lot of people why they're doing cloud, most people can't answer it. They think they're doing it because it's cheaper, or they think they're doing it because it's faster, or more scalable, or whatever, but they don't tend on the whole. They've always odd people that do. They don't tend on the whole to have those proof points to bank that up. And so, mostly I find myself walking into IT leaders, one level down from CIO. Well, maybe even CIO that is sat there going, we're all in on hyperscaler X, and you go, why? And they go, well, I don't know, it wasn't really our decision. And you find that decision was taken much above them at a financial level, as opposed to a technology or a strategic level, that someone said, oh, we've done this really good deal with Microsoft, or with Amazon, or with Google, or whatever. And I'm not sure people actually go back and revisit those soon enough or sit down and look into those in enough details. When you actually look out across the cloud landscape, now you're looking at a lot of people that are adjaded by, from a technology perspective, that it's not as easy to get in there as they possibly thought it was, it's complicated, and so on and so forth. And at the same time, those people sat there again, well, actually, we've not really seen the cost savings that we wanted, and because we've not got enough in there to get the cost savings that we want, because it's too difficult to do that, and so on and so on and so forth. So you actually end up looking around at, there's pockets of fabulous success of individual projects, people who have done something amazing in the cloud. But in terms of a wholehearted, like we've gone all in on X or all in on Y, and it's been successful, they're very, very, very few and far between. Often you talk about the pendulum within IT, and where do you think we are on the cloud pendulum? There's the pendulum where she put this into the keynote for VMware one year as well, this pendulum, and this sort of decentralized centralized, we talked about this years ago, is that there is this definite trend of centralizing, decentralizing, et cetera. We've got back to mainframes and through to mini computers, all the way through desktops, windows and blah, blah, blah. It's all been about, it's all coming out, it's all going back in, et cetera, et cetera. I think the answer is we end up never ending at one end or the other with a pendulum, but hovering kind of around the middle, moving one side to the other, and slowly edging our way one way or the other. Right now, the general feeling is that we are, the pendulum didn't swing far enough towards the cloud as people wanted, and it's definitely on its way back. The conversations I'm now having are much more around distributed application architectures. I think people are realizing that you're going to have some stuff is going to be on premises, some stuff is going to be in the public cloud, some stuff is going to be at the edge, and so thinking that you're going to follow that pendulum all the way to being all cloud, or all the way to being on premises, is not the right way to do it. I think realizing that you're going to have to do all of them is the pragmatic view. And then the fun thing there is, I think we always knew that. I think the mistake came from when, if you look back on history, and the history I've discussed at the beginning of my career, I spent a lot of my early part of my career doing migrations, and when you actually get into it, that's all we tend to do in IT is migrate. You're typically migrating from one platform to the next. If you go back in your history, every major IT project you ever did was deploying a new thing and migrating off the old thing, that's basically what's very rare. You're building and creating something amazing and brand new. My first ever project at HP was working on a system called RLS, which was the replacement leasing system for ILS, which was the international leasing system that we have then, both running on HP 3000. And so what that means is, in our psyche as IT people, we do migration stuff. So we normally assume that when something comes along, it's going to be replacing the thing that we've got, and we're going to migrate from what we've got to that. And so that's going to be our next thing. And so if you look back in history, we never really finished any of those migrations. It's very rarely. If you go back and look across the IT estate, there's remnants of stuff still left from all these bits and pieces. So we sort of move most of it or some of it and then find that it's not all going to work and stays behind. So you're in it with this smorgasbord of tech. I remember taking a young salesperson into the UKMOD many years ago and he asked this strange question, do you never should have asked, but we've trained from this range. So what sort of systems have you got here? And the answer came back with the worst. It's been available since 1960, we're still running it somewhere. (laughing) So to cut to the point on that one, people thought Cloud was the next thing. So we went, okay, fine, well, what we're doing now, we're going to replace with Cloud. When in fact, what they didn't realize was, Cloud's just the next thing that we're going to add to the things we've already got. And it's that simple. It's not the next thing. You're not going to, it's not suddenly, oh, how far are you down your Cloud journey? There's no Cloud journey to go on. We're not going to the Cloud. No one is going to the Cloud. We're just saying, okay, fine, you're going to add this way of doing stuff to the way you're doing things now and you'll find the best bits over there to replace the bits you're doing on premises and then you should think a bit more intelligently about why and is it cast, is it availability, is it speed, is it all these different things, legislation that will suit what runs where. So how far along is that Cloud pendulum? I think we need to take the pendulum off and go, it's not swinging, sorry. We're just, it's another thing to add to the things we've already got. - Just to reiterate what Joe's just said. So I had a meeting internally with a load of financial services account teams recently and I asked the question in the room, who thinks their customer has got more than 20% of their applications in the Cloud. Now, on a show of hands, I saw absolutely zero. All right, so I think it really does reinforce what Joe said, it's just another option. I think people, arguably for good reason, drunk load of call load that says, let's shift everything to the, you know, let's all go Cloud because it's going to make me to go faster, it's going to enable me to reduce cost. It's going to make me coffee in the morning, it's going to do all these wonderful things, right? And the truth is the experiment has not necessarily delivered at scale what people hoped. And now they're finding out actually what's really important. And Joe mentioned distributed application architectures, you're now seeing that manifest itself in terms of workload architecture. How am I pragmatically, practically gonna do things? And the Cloud is a great answer for the right question. It's not the answer for every question that you will have. As companies do now look at cost, and they're starting to understand the cost and implications of Cloud. Most financial services organizations predominantly still run on what would be considered non-cloud based technology, or their own private version of Clouds. But the challenge around cost, the challenge around capabilities, can I really drive my applications in the manner that I want in the pace that I've got? I've, what we've set on calls, and you've probably done the same Joe, where customers are really ambitious, but practically they're not going to be able to execute. And I think that's all part of that conversation now where there's a mature thinking around this stuff. - Well, and you look at it, right? If you look back to history, it's always been the new thing is the cheaper, more commoditized thing, right? So we go to mainframe. Oh, we've got these AS-400s. They're a bit cheaper, they're a bit more commoditized. They're a bit more easy to use than the big, hunky mainframe, so you can do that. Oh, Unix has come along. Oh, that's fantastic. That's massively commoditized. There's loads of different options. You can get it from all these different vendors. It's really, really cool. It's interoperable. It's commodity, blah, blah, blah. And then Windows comes along, which is cheaper and more commoditized than Unix, because it's on x86 and you can blah, blah, blah. And you're so on and so on and so forth. It just keeps going. And then Cloud comes along, and that's cheaper and more commoditized. And it's kind of like, people get over excited about each of these things, and don't realize that we don't just move everything to the next platform. So yeah, you're right. And if I, oh, God, the number of people I set up as it, who've gone, oh, yeah, we're all done on the Cloud. We're going to get 50% of our applications there within two years. It's frankly laughable in this industry. And I said it in the Cloud documentary with HP. It's actually laughable because no one's done it. And, okay, I say no one's going to comment, yeah, this particular company's, but they're all very, very, very, very few that have actually gone beyond that point. And they do said it. I had a company on a call, said they were going to do the 70% in three years. And I unfortunately chuckled because I have no constraint over my sits a few months. And I asked, how are you going to do that based upon the fact with the best intention in the world, you have moved the easiest, most agile things to the Cloud already, not the difficult stuff. That's not regulated. And I reckon you're, we're 18%. And I said, yeah, but half of that says, so we could, I understand why you're reporting it up. I understand why you're telling your CIO is telling you CIO, we're on this path. I said, but do you really think you can do 70% in the period? Well, if we don't say that, we won't get the funded. That was what we said. (laughing) And it is, I feel sad because you sometimes go and sit with these people and some of them are not believers at all. Like I said at the beginning, they've just been told that this is what's happening to them. And they're almost resigned to the fact that it's not going to work or it's not going to happen. And I think without this, here's the ultimate cynic in me. But I've said this publicly a few times, is that the average tenure of an IT leader, and I'm talking CIO are very high, is very short relatively. It's a couple of years, right? Two or three years. So someone can make a statement like this. So we're going to be 70% in the Cloud within three years. It's going to be fantastic. And then leave before they get held account for it. But they set that strategy up. and they're the person that built the Cloud strategy at BankX. And isn't it great they built the Cloud strategy at BankX? And look at these strategies. You know, it's on course, isn't it brilliant? It's fantastic. Would you like me to come to your company and you know, come do the Cloud strategy for you and get you on the same course over the next two years? You know, it's that kind of thing. And so it's, and but that was, you can say that with any technology, right? Well, look at poor jaded old men. I've put a wind swept an interesting, but you know, I'm so, I'll even quit saying, I've got this off of Joe. I'm, I'm, I'm, wind swept and interesting. The comment that you made there is absolutely true. The longevity of a CIO is very, very short in reality. And most CIOs are bought in to create change. So they create a whirlwind of change with, with all the right intention. But they run out of runway for a variety of different reasons. And then the next CIO comes in and says, we're going to adjust this. And there are some great strategies, but they just can't be implemented at the pace and scale that people have promised. So the tenia things really important, because there are some customers that I go to, not banking, actually believe it or not, because banking suits you very volatile in that way. But there's another customer that we've got that I went to and everyone in our IT department has been there for about 20 plus years. All the senior management have been at that company for 20 plus years. They're invested in that organization. As such, their IT strategy is absolutely rock solid. It's not particularly like bleeding edge, because that's not what they, it isn't, because they, they are plan carefully. They roll out, they do things, they make strategic decisions, they realize they're going to be accountable for them in three or four or five years time. And that's part of the history. So they've got fabulous rock solid, IT, which is exemplary. And then again, I hate to say this, but it happens in governments too. A lot of public sector IT, actually, is not that bad when you get down to it, because of the long tenure of those people involved in it. And they care because they're building their own future as well. So I think there's a lot to be said for that, right? Well, but I think, I think with what you've just said, the thread is through the whole of that around tenure is a, is a big focus. There isn't really ever a green field. And, and, what, unless you're going to start up, but, you know, there isn't really ever a green field, and you're either migrating or fixing the perceived mess of the previous incumbent. I did a thing with BAE Systems recently. There's a video where we're going to be showing on that, where I went and visited the MISC, which is basically an important myth. They've got a, a ship on land. Basically, if you imagine a ship from sort of waste tie up, built on top of a hill. And in there, they build the entire mock system for new platforms for ships. So like the Queen Elizabeth, they built the entire IT systems for that in there. It's got radar domes and everything. It's not just IT, it's the all the electrical systems, everything. It's really quite cool. And they were showing the new, whatever it is, type, bloody, blar, frigate that's coming out. And I went to the guy, so there must be really exciting to work on a green field project like that. He said, no, this is the most brown field stuff he was seeing. They're dragging stuff that's 30, 40 years old onto this new ship. But, you know, it's not a green field at all. There's still, so no one has this green field. You look at these fantastic new things, they're never green fields. They're like, oh, yeah, they're dragging that old system from there and whatever, whatever. So no one has green fields. Let's just nudge it on a little further, then. What's your take on where we are around sustainability, then? You know, we've talked about cloud a lot. And I will do sustainability rather than the full ESG. Yeah. But sustainability in IT, you know, I think you know, shutting your data centers, moving to the cloud, that was all seen as a very, you know, air quotes, sustainable thing to do. What's your take on where we are on the sustainability journey? Well, I think what's nice is that we're now seeing sustainability becoming an economic requirement, I think is the best way to put it. I mean that people are becoming sustainable because they have to, because the economics are forcing them to. What I mean by that is we're all becoming accidentally a little bit more sustainable, even individuals. So if you look at ourselves, if I sat down with anyone in Britain about 80 months ago and go, "Do you know what? What are we need to do to see if you can half the energy usage in your house?" They'd look at me and laugh and they're, "What are you on about? Half in now, you go where you're weird person with your greenness." And now, when suddenly the prices have tripled, everyone's trying to half the energy usage in their house because it's an economic reality. And I now sit there and I said this coming on one and four out of the six people of the cooler was on, lifted up the water bottles they had on their, what was the product they had on their lap? It's like, "Wow, you know." So if you extrapolate that up, again, everyone I talk to, going back to that CIO's talking to about their cost, their energy costs are going up, dramatically going up. So if your energy cost are dramatically going up, you've got to look at how you reduce energy cost and you reduce energy cost by cutting down the amount of stuff you're running in your data centers or running it more efficiently or whatever, right? It's a primary thing because a lot of people data centers is a large part of their energy consumption. Or will full stop their IT estate wherever it is. And so we're seeing people becoming accidentally sustainable, as opposed to being as a conscious thing. And so the interesting thing is people always looked at sustainability as something that was going to cost them money. And now it's the point that if you don't do it in a sustainable way, you're not going to save money. It's going to be more expensive. So I think that's really exciting to me as someone who's been pushing sustainability for a long, long time to see the economic reality forcing people's hands. Do you see a paradox between people that want to invest in being sustainable? But I challenged on where that investment goes, as you mentioned before. So maybe sustainability is coming down the order in terms of corporates. I like deferring the ESG investments because in cost constraint environments, they're having to invest or look at different types of investment. Yeah, so I can see that. But that comes down to CapEx versus OPEX, right? And in that context. And so yeah, if you knew that on a personal perspective, we all know it makes sense to put solar panels on your house. But actually, that's a huge CapEx expenditure as a person. But you know the OPEX production is there on a 20-year basis. So actually, it would make sense, but it's a large CapEx burden initially. And so I think you are seeing people now, and they're looking at OPEX energy savings for obvious cost reasons. But yeah, there may be there is a reticence there to go and invest money. And again, that comes down to the fact that people tend to have a very short-term vision on expenditure. People tend to be very focused on this quarter, this year's OPEX, as opposed to the OPEX over the next three to five years in terms of what they're doing. And watching people, it's very rare that I come across an organization that has a five-year vision around their OPEX in anything that they're doing. Yeah, I've worked in a software sales organization now for over 20 years. And I always remember if you can go into a company and save an OPEX in the next 12 months, you're going to be on a winner, right? But if you're going in there to tell them you're going to save OPEX over the next five years, it's a much harder sale. Because there's other people are going to walk in and save OPEX this week, right? So, and that again comes to this sort of longevity, this view of people being able to make longer-term plans, which ultimately hurts people. So changing their subject again, then, just a little, there is a time in the news right now about generative AI. Mm-hmm. Now, I don't know. You and I have talked about AI in the past. And how you train ML models. And the unintended consequences of that. But this generative AI thing seems to have kind of like come out of nowhere. So what's your take on on that? And the conversation you're having about that. Well, it's 100% not come out of nowhere. So the GPT and the GPT-3 plus, you know, we've gone beyond that. So it's been around for a while, right? So this generated model has been around for a long time. What suddenly people have noticed it for us, because finally, normal people have been allowed to touch it. And that's what's happened with ChatGPT. So up until now, it's been very much the remit of data scientists and interested technologists and geeks and hackers that can go and play with some AI, right? With ChatGPT and other, the generative art AI and other things that are now suddenly hitting the news. And that's because people have finally put interfaces on them that mean they're accessible by the general public. And I think that's what's really exciting to me in this whole context of AI is that until now, you know, it's very much been the preserve of technologists. And so the possibilities have been explored, have been limited by the biases of those people. Now we're allowing ChatGPT to be accessed by the masses. You're enabling it to be viewed by people with a whole different set of biases, right? Or a whole different set of understandings of how things work, what's normal, what's not normal, what's legal, what's not legal, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's where it gets exciting to me. And so it's like, if you look back at anything in history, you know, it's when you get that particular piece of technology and you put it in the hands of the normal person, that when things happen in really cool ways with technology, because they get used in ways that people don't expect don't think about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And so I think that's it. And that's why it's suddenly hit the news. And my mum's asking about it. That's always a good bell weather for me as much as I'm asking about it. And I know we've hit the mainstream. Those are the kind of things where it gets to, and that's for me why we're going to enter an age of wonder, I think now, around AI, that we've had the promise of it for, oh, I always remember, it's going to be the game changing thing since the '90s, in the early '90s. I had an Imperial College. I had lectures in AI, which was hilarious, because we didn't have the brain power or compute power or the data storage to even go near what we were talking about possibly doing. Now that's come to reality. Put that in touch with some humans. And I mean, I'm normal humans, not people like me. And suddenly, the amazing things that are going to happen, I think. And that's really it. So the great thing about chat GPD is it's going to end up already, it has, in the hands of the wrong people. And even if OpenAI restrict the usage of their model, and particular turn on, she's just not going to stop other people who aren't particularly as ethical going and building their own and doing things like that. And that's where it gets a bit more exciting, I think, in a scary way as to what people are going to do with that. Well, and I think it feels like it's that on that borderline between science fiction and science fact and the potential for tech for bad seems to currently outweigh the thinking versus it being tech for good. Yeah, I think, but it's always that way, though. Whenever a new technology comes out, people always think about it as tech for bad more than tech for good. Whether it's people running dark webs or whatever it is, there's always that undercurrent out there. I think we've got to get a little bit ahead of ourselves in what we're doing around AI and understanding how we can combat that. When you've got the fact that you can use one of these models to code, which has been very eloquently displayed, either they even someone actually managed to essentially get chat GPT to pretend to be a virtual machine and then talk to us such as kind of cool. It's an amazing thing you can do. You start to think of the possibilities that go beyond that, of telling it to hack things for you or find the weaknesses in this code or find the vulnerabilities over here. When you start to do that at scale, it gets very exciting. We should already be using that in the other way. We are as an industry. We are doing that. But we're not doing it necessarily with generative AI. When you start to look at how we can do that with generative AI, it's going to get really exciting. When we start to look at how we look at the security of systems, look at cyber as a topic with generative AI, in the how would you make this better kind of fix? What should I be doing with this? We've done ourselves with tweaking and tuning stuff and we've run various AI models that are now in our products in RIA and other bits and pieces we've got at VMware that we've done. Look at this thing and optimize it to run as fast as possible or as most efficient as possible by twiddling all the knobs and finding which one wins. AI can twiddle a lot more knobs a lot faster than any human can. I think it just relies on the imagination of humans now. I think that's the really fun thing about this is that the AI doesn't have the imagination yet. So you need to get the imagination of the human brain and add that to the power of generative AI. You're going to get some wonderful stuff or both good and bad. You got me thinking a lot about the enterprise benefits that you could have of just getting a ton of work done and identifying issues areas of vulnerabilities and challenges that you would never even go anywhere close to previously. A lot of positives there. As I say, still in that science fiction ebit, where does that then go in the robot debate? I think robots always are perceived as replacing humans. So it's always going to replace humans. In fact, I don't think a lot of the human replacement actually is being done by software. If you look into the banking world particularly, look what we do with most graduates in the banking world. You make them sit there and play with models in Excel spreadsheets for three years. I can get AI to do that overnight. Thanks very much. Now what do we do with the graduates? That's the first thing. When we look at the robots more generally in our industry and in the wider world, you're looking at again, we're getting to the point where robots are meeting humans properly. Up until now, there's been robots for years. You go to any car factory, there's robots everywhere. The thing about this robot is they're very prescribed in what they do and they're behind a big-perspect shield. And no humans are allowed near the mother operating because it's quite dangerous. And now we're starting to see, okay, fine, well let's put some robots in with the humans. It's starting out with little buggy type things that are driving around delivering food in milking keens and things like that. But what we're doing there is we're normalizing the interaction of autonomous things in the human world with humans, I think, is the way to think about that. So we're getting people used to these little things driving around and eventually it's going to be whole buses and cars etc. Driving around in an autonomous fashion is probably the leading way we're seeing that. The other thing you're sort of seeing actually is when you look at robots, what again you're looking at, I suppose, is the replace on the humans and technology, look at things like Amazon fresh or Amazon go in the US, which is the stores. I mean, if you've been in them in London where you just walk in and scan your Amazon app and you just pick stuff up off the store and walk out with it. My wife was a ghast when I took her into one, I was just picking sweets up off the shelf and put them in my pocket. She's like, what are you doing? That's fine, that's how it works. And all of that stuff is replacing human interaction with computers, whether there's no checkout person anymore. I mean, we've been through the unexpected item in the backing area thingies already, but the next step from that is we don't even have one of those. We don't have a lot of people who come out with it, there's no human interaction whatsoever. Yeah, so it's exciting to me when I think about the possibilities, but again, it's the same as AI, what we're doing now is you're seeing humans and robots interacting and learning how to interact with each other, like you're seeing humans and AI learning how to interact with each other. And I think that for me, that intersection is the exciting bit. And that's all the problems going to happen. That's where you know, there's going to be crashes, there's going to be accidents, there's going to be things that go wrong. And there's going to be shock reactions and there's going to be bad stuff in the press and all this other kind of stuff, but it's that unstoppable progression of technology is really exciting to me. Joe, on a similar thing, can I have you or a penon metaversum where we're going to go with that whole virtual world and the value of it? I'm famous for saying I'm fed up for solutions looking for problems, you know, blockchain being one of them. And now you've got the metaverse. I think the metaverse is a solution looking for a problem very much. So we've had multi user online things for very, very, very, very, very, very long time. Got a if I go back one of the first things I wrote at school in my A level for computer science. My friend wrote a multi user dungeon, I call Paul Oram and we ran it on all 13 computers on our computer network at school. It was very exciting. We've gone from there through things like second life and Elder Scrolls online and others as well and all that kind of stuff. So it's there. We already know how to do this, but what I'm not seeing is a bunch of human beings out there desperate to jump online and do that. And I've not seen ultimately the killer app that's going to draw them into doing that. I think that's really the point here is there's no we talk about the metaverse. I think the metaverse is a really good way for people in social media companies to talk to their investors about they're still being a bright future for them. Right, it's a really good way to do that, but I don't necessarily think it's old. This is an answer because what we haven't told what we've not seen is this is this is the problem that this thing solves for us. Now granted social media wasn't solving it was kind of solving a problem, but not really it's that kind of thing. And sometimes it's not quite obvious what's probably problem solving. So again, maybe I'm missing something, but I'm waiting to see what it is the problem that the metaverse solves for me. And I think that's really it. I think we got to think about technology very much in those terms. I was sort of grounded in that a bit this week and a very unrelated thing is in those NFC tags you can get the little NFC stickers you can literally buy for 20 20 pens each and packs of 100 on Amazon. And my door to bought one has started raining to me out this cool thing like I can put this NFC tag here dad and if I just wipe my phone on it, it does this automation or whatever. And I was kind of like, yeah, but are we are you just finding places to put these NFC tag in your life or have you got this NFC tag is solving a specific problem that you have. It's that kind of thing right technology should come into your life and enhance it and solve a problem that you've got not make you go and find a problem that you didn't need to dissolve. That's what starts to get annoying is that I sit around with my my friends and they were my I was fun enough. I was went to pick up my wife. We'd been out with a bunch of her friends to a pub and I sat there for the last half an hour her and her friends and most of them are complaining about the automation that have been put into their house by their husbands. Most importantly, they couldn't turn the lights on properly and why can I not have a light switch and why can't I do this and why you want to have to do this to have to why can't I just turn the eating up and why can't I again. When you sit down and sit back and look at it, you think how much of this technology we put in because we could not because it needed to be done because it solved a problem or something better. I think you get generally back of everything we've talked about whether it's AI whether it's robots whether it's all these things. I think we put in there they're going to be successful like the metaverse when they solve a problem or they fill a hole that we've got in our lives. Can I just offer a parallel on that right so the my neighbor who's a who works in the building industry. He has flooded his house with technology to the point where his wife doesn't know how to put the lights on. So literally we were they were there over Christmas and she said I'm trying to put the light on in the room next door. She said all the lights are coming on outside the house. They're all coming on in the garden and he said he said to me said you work in technology what have you done. I mean I've just got an old fashioned rocker switch. I said you know literally I said I've apart from having speakers every week. I'm a nerd but everything else is as basic as basic can be because that way everyone can use it. I think that's it. I know there was a point in me I've been collecting gadgets my whole life I sit here in an office absolutely rammed with them. And a lot of them I just bought that that'd be fun but not necessarily and look back on them. It's nice. You're solving a problem in my life. It's an interesting thing to look at and play with. So I think yeah it's interesting once when you think about metaverse and stuff I think we have to think about is. There's words that gonna what for me deal or problem is that going to solve in people's lives and I've not seen that so it's that killer app right. It needs something killer. It needs something major to make it happen and it's just not I've just not seen it yet and trust me. V.R. and A.R. isn't it right that's not I think what what people are going to desperately be crying out for on mass until something dramatic happens to change that technology to the next level because I think it's still got a generational to to go. I'm excited to see what Apple do with their AR headset and where they go with that because you know we've got the. What was originally Oculus and now the Facebook then the meta quest and quest to I've got a quest to say here next week that we occasionally use some meetings internally and stuff but I think that's still got another another level of technology to go at least if not to. And it may be the killer. use case was how do you work during a pandemic, which I think we've gone through now, right? And everyone's found different ways of doing that. So it may well be that it's missed its time. It might have done, I think, yeah, maybe if it had been 10 years earlier, we probably would have all switched to operating that and been much more effective than we were fighting with Zoom and other bits and pieces trying to make a human connection. So it might be that it does get to the point where you feel that you can make a human connection with someone over the distance, because if you now look at what we're looking at, right? So here's the interesting one about the world of work, is that there's this whole conversation now about hybrid working, all in the office, all work from home, et cetera, et cetera. And we know that hybrid working is painful. In that, you all been in those Zoom meetings where half of you were in the room and half of you aren't in the room and there's definitely a two-tier social hierarchy in that meeting. And so you either all got to be online, if you're all going to be in the meeting room and then massive debates and organisations about whether we should all physically be together or whether we should all be distributed. And that's because when you're all together in an office, there's a human interaction level that we've not quite managed to meet yet in technology, whatever that is, right? And even if people always talk about it, it's bumping into someone in the coffee room or it's chatting with someone over lunch and things like that. Those can be, they're slightly forced, but it's kind of in that way. So maybe there's a way from a technology perspective, not meta-verse because meta-verse is about VR and AR. It's just about some great big online world. But if you get that great big online world combined with some hugely broad technology that means that we truly feel like we're interacting on a human level with each other to the same level as being physically there, that's when it could get really, really interesting. But I think we've got a lot of a long way to go before we get there. It's interesting because I read an article, I guess, probably as we were coming to the end of lockdown. And they were talking about dopamine. And they were effectively saying, with the reason we, as human beings, like to get to work together, like to speak to each other is we released dopamine, which is a good thing. And it creates this bond, et cetera. And it then talked about the impact of Zoom because you just don't get it. They've measured it, they've done it. You just don't get that same level of stimulation that you do when you're in the same room or at a coffee point with someone. So maybe we just have a little button on the size and says, which says, I don't have a little bit of dopamine to kick off the day. I'll have me 11's is. That's what I'll do. I'll have my 11's is dopamine dose. That's what I'll do. Well, I think it's been proven that computer games specifically do raise dopamine levels, right? For excitement, fear, all the other kind of stuff. And so there's potentially a lot to be learned from the games industry there in terms of how to engage and make humans feel engaged and want to be interacting with whatever that thing is that they're interacting with. There's a lot of studying gone on there and how to make people play their games for longer, stay more engaged in their lanes. Keep getting that dopamine hit, keep pressing that button, whatever it is. So maybe there's a crossover there that we've yet to find. Before we move on, you're very much involved in mission motorsport. It would be remitts not to ask you a question about, is that just a petrilehead thing? Is your take on that and why should we be interested? Yeah, well, so petrilehead, as you know, I'm a petrilehead, I'm an EV head, I'm an everything, put four wheels on it and drive around the head, I think is better to put it rather than anything. Under the propulsion bits, actually, one of the interesting diverse facts about that, you can have different versions. Mission motorsport, so mission motorsport specifically was founded by a guy called Jim Cameron, Major or an ex-major, as he now is in the Royal Tank Regiment over 10 years ago, last year was at 10th anniversary. And it was a way of, I suppose, engaging with initially wounded injured and sick, but then all veterans, people transitioning, etc, into the world of motorsports and motoring generally and therapy through motorsport. And it's got various strings under its boat from something that started by making people feel better, by getting them involved in driving round tracks and being driven round tracks, which is kind of fun in itself and making people that necessarily maybe are not finding good reasons to get out the house or get off the sofa or do whatever it is and coming to that day to get driven round good wood by Chris Harrison of 9/11 is pretty cool. Those kind of things is very special. Through to engaging with and getting people into work, they've got some people to work at Jaguar Land Rover Lotus, Tesla, you name it, and engaging with those people as well. I think it's about, it's a way of engaging the motorsport and the motoring industry more widely with the veterans community and the military community as well. And that's really the summary of it. And I got involved because I've got a strong connection clearly to the military. I've got a love of cars and track cars. I've been racing, rallying and doing all those kind of things all of my life and it just kind of came together in a perfect way. The funny thing was actually it was based on electricity. I was using my Tesla to give rides to people at the fully charged event at Silverstone a few years ago. And the management team of Mission Motorsport got in the back of my car and we got chatting. You will never get to the back of my cab kind of thing, literally was. And the partnership went on from there and I now work very closely with a Matrusty board member and we do a lot of fun things. And it's really the highlights of the year are a couple of things. One of them, if you've not heard about it, is on the 27th of February is the National Transition event, which is a big event at Silverstone. And that's where we have loads and loads of employers all exhibiting at Silverstone. And for across the board, there's housebuilders. There's VMware is going to be there and others. Meeting with currently serving and veterans and trying to match those communities together and making sure that we're getting people into jobs and getting people making the best next step in their lives. And whilst at the same time downstairs we've got a bunch of people driving people around the track, including a bunch of VMware employees, so they're going to be driving people around the track as part of their charitable foundation work. And the other big event that we have in the year, which is great, which I love, is the race of remembrance, which is just something to behold and just Google race of remembrance. But basically, at Anglesey, we have a 12 hour endurance race, which stops for a remembrance day parade in the middle of it, which is kind of weird. I was actually driving the car last year when you get to stop and get out your car and walk over, put a berry on with your race suit and stand there and do a remembrance day parade. And it's possibly, I've been to a remembrance day parade since I was a kid every year. It's been the thing. And to be honest, this one was the most moving one I've ever been to last year because you stood there amongst people that literally is what it's all about. And yeah, it's unbelievably moving and you sort of, you get through it and then we had the national anthem, which was, God save the king, which I first of all, I'm out of a song that. And then at the end of it, there's this total silence and you all stand hundreds of you stood on this racetrack and you're like, what next? And then Jim comes out, shout, shout, let's go racing. And the whole thing goes back up again. You'll get back in your car. And I think you just to see the engagement with employers, the engagement with the beneficiaries is just beautiful. So yeah, that's really it. So yeah, the Mishemot sport has become over the years a passionate mind to the point now, yes, I would say I'm a trustee in a board member and I'm vested very much in a success. Let's move on to Crystal Ball. I see the future. Really? What do you have, a crystal ball? What's going to happen? Listen, if you know something, you've got to tell me. So we have covered lots of topics about the future. But what do you think will be one of the most significant game changing technologies for 2023 and beyond? And how do you think that will help or hinder financial services? Oh, I think honestly, and we've talked about lots of technologies in this podcast today, possibly the one that's going to transform and/or revolutionize financial services over the next five plus years has got to be machine learning and AI. As we talked about, you know, I'm not going to be the first person to say that. I'm not going to be the last person to say that. And I'm not particularly off-trendy either, you know. But like I said, the exciting thing now is we're getting normal people playing with AI. You're going to have normal people using AI to play markets. You're going to have normal people using AI to manage their own investment for follow-ups. You're going to have normal people using AI to do a manner of interesting things. Customers of financial institutions are going to get more intelligent. And if you think about it, what do a lot of people come to large investment organizations and large banks for is they come to them for their investment advice. They come to someone to come and do that management for them to be that insight. So if I give you my money, you're going to be better at making money on it than I am. And so this arms race around technology is going to get harder and faster. But up until now, the arms race was between banks. Now the arms race is going to be between everyone. And it's very, very exciting. Yeah, we're all going to be living it, right? Yeah, I think it's exciting. How could you not be excited about that? I think it's scary because you don't want to be left behind. You're not only the one that missed the boat on that one, but equally, it's also very exciting to be part of that. Yeah, well, you also don't want to be the one that the case studies are written about going first and screw it up. Yeah, so yeah, no one got a gold watch at retirement for being the biggest risk taker, right? You know, that's the kind of it. Okay, let's move on and let's have some fun in the lightning round. We usually call it the lightning round. Okay, welcome to SuperRacing Ballast Lating Round. The lightning round begins. The favourite book on movie? I don't really read books, so it's got to be movie. I've got hundreds of movies that I'll pick as favourites. I can't really tell you. I'll tell you the last movie I watched, which was Catch Me If You Can, which is an old film, but my daughter, who's 22, had never seen it, we sat down on the weekend and watched it, and it just, I love that. I know it's, I'm not saying it just because it's got a banking thing because it involves checks, but it was absolute, I love watching that film. It's fascinating to see how a kid that young just managed to do all of those things and it just blows your mind towards this day. So that's kind of things. So there you go. Last film I watched. And that's uncanny because I was just, I think I was talking to my daughter. about how when I started in the bank one of my first jobs was adding the MICR amounts of ink by encoding checks. So it's absolutely uncanny. Sorry Brian over to you. Well there'll be the people listening to this in 10 years time saying what a check. So let's just move on. I had to tie my daughter to our check was because she's a really interaction with one. I asked for an LP for my Christmas present. My daughter looked at me and scratched her head. What's an LP dead. Right. If you had a time machine would you go back in time or go into the future? Oh that's a good question. I go into the future. I'd want to see what happens next definitely. Who's been your mentor or have you been most inspired by? I don't think I've got one if I'm honest with you. Again there's not one particular individual that I look up to and go oh yeah so no I don't know. There's a short answer that question. There's a very long answer that question. Short answer is I don't really think I've got one. If you weren't on this call what would you be doing right now? It's Monday morning at 1040 so I'd be on another Zoom of some form talking to a customer about their cloud strategy and what they were doing and where they were going next or something very similar and if I wasn't I'd probably be on my peloton. What's your favourite place of all the places you've travelled to? I'll give you a favourite place in England and favourite place outside. My favourite place of all the places to travel to Cape Town is absolutely. I'm going back there in April with my wife for a holiday. Absolutely. Love it. Just the diversity, the life, the people, the food, the scenery, the wildlife. It's just phenomenal. I just love it. So yeah for all the places and I've travelled to a lot of countries in my life definitely. The Cape Town's the one that's always stood out. It's been the one that I would love to go back to again and again. And in the UK it's South Devon. Kind of grew up down there, have a place down there, go there when I can. It's just for me it's a place of complete relaxation and everything sort of gets better down there. When was the last time you used cash and what did you use it for? Oh that's a tough question. What was the last time I used cash? I can't remember. I literally can't, I'm now trying to think back when was the last time I used cash. Oh I think I used it to, yeah I know I remember it was a long time ago I owed someone 20 quid because they bought some food. We were out for food and I owed it and 20 quid and I gave them a 20 pound. That was it. So it was a human, you know, not me to another institution but me to another consumer. Okay so we talked about your love of gadgets tech and and all things technological. So what would be your favourite gadget or piece of technology? Oh god that's a really horrible question for me. My favourite gadget. Let me tell you my favourite gadget. My favourite gadget is my electric mountain bike I think really and I've been through several of them and my latest one. I was actually out yesterday because I'm going out riding on it next week and this is the funniest thing. I've got an electric mountain bike and I now spend most of my time updating the firmware on my electric mountain bike before I ride it. I'm no kidding so the bike I've now got has it's got let's go through it so you've got the main battery for the bike itself and so there's the bike itself with the motor so there's a firmware update for that. It's got electric wireless gear change so you've got both the firmware for the controller on the on the on the handlebars and for the derailleur at the back they both need batteries and they need updating. I've got an electric dropper seat post and so I know yes I actually have to update the firmware in my seat as well as updating the firmware on the button over there. I've got two different types of suspension monitoring in it so that's four batteries and four and two different sets of firmware there and my latest one which I didn't want but it just came with the bike because actually got tire pressure monitoring so yesterday I found myself changing the batteries on the tire pressure monitors on my bike which is just the funniest thing so it's a bike with pedals. It does have pedals yeah but I'm just I'm just stunned that literally I was sat the other guy I can't believe I'm spending so much time here and it seems quite a considerable amount of time changing the batteries and checking all the firm was up today on my pedal bike. To try saying that 20 years ago okay so we sort of went bikes boat train or plane train definitely train yeah yeah all right all right um what's the weirdest food you've ever eaten? Oh yeah weirdest food I've ever eaten um I it's not particularly weird but just again I take to get back to South Africa but I remember the first time being there in someone saying would you like to eat some crocodile and it was just like being passed around as a bit of meat and it's just bit odd really that's you know what's normal to some others is very weird to them and then yeah it's being asked around to eat crocodile I mean I've eaten a worm but that was in the military and I don't think I particularly you know you were kind of forced to eat worms and just in case you'd have to one day I've never in the rest of my life ever had to eat a worm but yeah but I suppose in terms of weirdest food yeah I suppose yeah um crocodile very odd. You have to sing karaoke what song do you pick? We didn't start the fire by Billy Joel because I know every word because I'm just one of those things and I'm like oh in fact I'm really intrigued by that there's something about human minds that I have trouble remembering stuff but I remember the lyrics to songs and so the you know I'm sure this research study's got into that but I'm really bad at remembering names and faces I'm really bad at remembering a whole bunch of weird stuff but lyrics will come back to me from years ago. Oh wow okay well we've not had that one before so that's a very good one it's a very good one and what is your most used emoji? The winky smile thing you know the I know because I type it as semi-co-dash smile right you know because I've typed that since I used to use net back in the 90s so you know I was using emojis before they were caught you know back in in in yeah use net back in late 80s early 90s so yeah yeah so it's that it's that winking one which is kind of the sort of cheeky don't you know kind of thing whatever yeah that's that's it. What piece of career advice do you wish you had given to your younger self? Oh yeah I've written a whole thing on this. I suppose that you know there's a whole list of them right but if I pick the major one it would be stop caring about what other people think about you that would be it I think really is it or don't care so much about what other people think about you and just get on with your life. Have you ever been told you look like someone famous and who was it? Yeah I went through a phase where my my nieces thought I look like Chandler from friends at one point I you can't see it now but yeah so yeah there was there was a point where I was called Chandler by them and all their friends are for a whole period probably about 10-15 years ago I suppose. I've had quite the gig all on it. Yeah yeah yeah so I was called Chandler. Is it a comfortable journey? Well yeah really yeah yeah he sees the neighbor of mine but yeah I wouldn't go for that yeah I know the Chandler one was quite funny because also they all none of them knew what I did for a job and they could never I can never explain it to them properly so it matched up really well because you know in friends no one ever knows what Chandler would do just for a job and if you need to can't tell you and so it's kind of like the same for me because you imagine it's kind of explaining my job to a to a 12 year old girl it's very hard. The first concert you ever went to? Oh the first concert I ever went to believe it or not was status quo with my mum and dad there you go the first concert I've always had status quo my mum and dad and yeah most interesting other than my non-today I think very soon after that when CD Rhythmix and a couple others DM status quo. This is probably apt. Should a car have a name and if so what have you named yours? Yeah of course definitely should have names. My Tesla Model X is called Red 5 as it should be because you know it's an X-wing. I've got a Tesla Model 3 that's called Peter and the reason for that is because it's red and when you look in the app it says parked and so my daughter who's a big you know comic book fan said all Peter parked red Peter Parker Spider-Man kind of thing so there's a link with that. The power walls on the side of my house are called SNAP because I've got the power so that's pretty cool. A lot of people won't get that. They're just not gonna get it. They're not gonna get it. The comedy joke is that every other car in my house is called Dave and it's because when my I don't my kids were younger the girls. There was this thing they was used to get like a new toy and they can say daddy what should I call it and I just I got so bored of such Dave. So it became this standard thing that everything in the house got called Dave and so I did actually have several cars over the years have been called Dave just because it was like what do we call it? You've got to call it Dave okay it's called Dave so there you go. I am a dog which is a female dog I wasn't allowed to do it but I wanted to call it Dave and James said why are you gonna call it Dave or so so when people ask they go but it's a girl and we can have a constructive conversation now. But I'm doing the mess but I want you to call it Dave. I wasn't even allowed to call the cat Dave honestly we went for Doris in just a Doris thing. My my my Dave is a direct reference to only Fools and Horses. Well I'm fine. I don't call you Dave. Right last question before we do down the rabbit hole of 1970s music and TV if you have to be an ice cream what ice cream would you be? Oh I don't know that's that's the oldest question I think I've been asked for a very long time. I couldn't name my favourite ice cream really on that one, which is Magnum's, but I don't know why I'd be a Magnum, but I quite like them. We can go with that. We can go with that. Joe, thank you so much. Being fabulous conversation covering so many topics. How can our listeners learn more about you and what you get up to? Well, so there's, I've just done a, I don't do predictions, I hate doing predictions, so because I knew someone would come along in ten years and look back and get a look at that idea, it said none of that was true. But I have been tricked into writing sort of my ten things I think are important to think about for 2023 and beyond. So there's a blog for that that's been recently published, which I'm sure will get the link for there. Or just come and follow the odd and twisted stream of consciousness that is me on Twitter, which is @JoeBachily, joeb, b-a-g-u-l-e-y. And that's the best place to come and see what's going on in my brain or not. Fabulous, fabulous. To keep up with Joe, please follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter, we'll have links in our show notes. And as always, if we can help you in any way, please talk with your VMware account team, or connect with us on LinkedIn, just search for Brian Hayes or Matthew O'Neal at VMware. You can also follow me on Twitter @Matthewoen or our podcast on Twitter @dbtbpod. And if you have any ideas for future episodes or would wish to appear as a future guest, please do get in touch. We hope you can join us again next time. Please do take care.