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Problem Solver in Chief: Building Companies that Last
9 Plays1 month ago
Jeff Lang went from TI engineer to building a global manufacturing platform serving 230 Fortune 500 customers. His playbook: assemble the right team, design humane systems (free meals, on-site clinic), manage concentration risk, and make quality your moat—down to a lifetime warranty after sub-0.01% returns. We also dig into AI guardrails and how to stay effective in a polarized world.
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Transcript
Jeffrey Lang's Leadership Journey
00:00:04
Speaker
The voice of growth, mastering the mind and market.
00:00:10
Speaker
I always was, i believe, destined to be a leader.
00:00:17
Speaker
In my heart, I am a problem solver. We changed the way business was done. Why don't we just warranty what we do forever?
00:00:29
Speaker
Why do we do any of what we do other than for family?
00:00:35
Speaker
If you can't do it, don't build it.
00:00:40
Speaker
You mean my biggest exit? awesome
00:00:44
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Jeffrey Lang, you have a pretty amazing a story.
Ambitions and Career Choices
00:00:49
Speaker
I've known you for a couple of years and you've had COO, CFO, all the damn C's in your title. give us a sense of, did you always want to be a CXO?
00:01:06
Speaker
um Yes. I always was, I believe, destined to be a leader, which is essentially the C-level role in any company.
00:01:17
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And the genesis of all of that is in my heart, I am a problem solver. And if I see a problem, my immediate take on that is to find the solution.
00:01:33
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And part of that means you better be prepared to present and lead to achieve that solution. Hence, you need to be C-level in the industrial and business environment that we've both matured in.
00:01:49
Speaker
Exactly. Now, in your in your path, in your journey, was there a moment where you, i don't know, if for yourself, for your family, for whatever reason,
00:02:03
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wanted to go in a completely different direction or did you always like the business domain?
Entrepreneurial Ventures and Business Growth
00:02:12
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I've always liked the business domain in terms of being the creator and bringing to reality the solutions that were necessary for the problems encountered.
00:02:25
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But if there was a moment in time where I wanted to break free of what might have captured me as it does the majority of people in business and in their professional lives, and that's to work for the big company.
00:02:41
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When I was graduating from Cornell, I actually held an auction between Boeing and Texas Instruments for my services. I graduated at the top of my class.
00:02:52
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And as a result, everybody was soliciting Jeff. um Long story short, I had a girlfriend in New England. Texas Instruments was in New England.
00:03:04
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I still held the auction and Texas Instruments ended up paying me about 30% more than the average rate okay for graduates at that point in time. And I got to stay close to the girlfriend.
00:03:16
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Didn't end up marrying her, but that was the motivation at the time. Interesting. And the change in direction was act after working for Texas Instruments for two and a half years, I was pitched an opportunity by my new girlfriend's father to take on a business that he had formed that was a manufacturing company, high-tech manufacturing company.
00:03:39
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um He was the best salesman I ever knew. Very organized, very good at presenting facts, but he didn't know about manufacturing.
00:03:50
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I did. I was an industrial engineer. And i took over that business. And over the next three years, took it from a quarter of a million dollars a year in turnover when I took it over to $4 million. dollars and it was acquired by a public company and i became an officer of that public company really okay so was that the launch pad for your illustrious career which we'll get to here for being an independent but businessman even though even there i was an officer of a public company it still was within the confines of a very independent
00:04:29
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subsidiary or division of that company and I had almost no oversight. It was whatever you want to do Jeff just keep building the business. I built it to 20 million dollars in the next two years and at that point had the opportunity to step out and with a partner form an adjunct a similar business to that and then move forward from there. and From that point forward I've never been anything but an entrepreneur.
Team Dynamics and Leadership Challenges
00:04:56
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So what is it about problem solving that is so captivating for you? I know I'm able to do it. So if it's a problem and it's worthy of solving, will it be of benefit to many others if I solve this problem? If the answer to that is yes, then work on solving the problem.
00:05:18
Speaker
And if you don't have the knowledge and the independent wherewithal to do it on your own, find the people that can help you get there. And that seems like a pretty simple formula to me.
00:05:29
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It's not always easy to find those individuals, but the formula is not complicated. Now, obviously, you've had this career. We we met because we were part of ah an angel um investing organization, yeah which which you remained at, and then you became the chairman and all that. We'll we'll get to that as well, because i'm I'm very interested in some of those things.
00:05:50
Speaker
But... What do you, you see lots of companies, you see entrepreneurs, what do you see is the biggest mistake that entrepreneurs make that will lead to the demise of their startup or their, even their career?
00:06:07
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If it's small organization and many startups are, the biggest mistake or opportunity loss that they'll make in the early going is not having the,
00:06:22
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well-constructed team go back to my comment previously about if there's a problem to be solved you don't know everything find the right members of the team in order to solve the problem that's a common problem among startups probably 80 or 90 percent of them um many startups have very good ideas and they probably have an individual leading that idea that can see the future relative to what would happen if i was really able to pull this off.
00:06:53
Speaker
But what they get lost in is believing that they can do it alone. huh And that's almost never true. Yeah. Even Bill Gates would tell you that.
00:07:05
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Um, the, and it's examining that team is a very important part of what angel investors do when they're interviewing, when they're doing due diligence on an early stage startup?
00:07:20
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Do they have the right players, the right team in place in order to realize their objective? Secondary to that is, are their goals realistic? Can they achieve them on the budget that they've presented?
00:07:35
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Yeah, what's interesting is, especially with the advent of social media and all these things, people think that they can charge forward alone. I mean, my generation, I'm Gen X, we're sometimes even described as a nomad generation because we feel like we can do it all alone.
00:07:53
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But one of the things that I've learned in my 52 years is you can't do it alone and you need to bring in the right people. And the whole adage of a rotten apple will you know ruin the whole bunch.
00:08:07
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There's some truth to that. Do you have any examples where where you maybe had to let somebody go that was kind of ruining the the bunch? Several, actually.
00:08:19
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And you're right. That's actually one of the most difficult lessons for a business owner or business high-level manager to have to deal with. And people might take this the wrong way, but those individuals responsible for the company need to appreciate the fact that their employees are not their friends.
00:08:42
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They're employees of the business whose responsibility is to do their job and to do it to the best of their ability. What the management needs to understand is that when someone fails to do that, they're not your friend.
00:08:58
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They need to be replaced. And yes, that's happened multiple times in the various businesses that I've been responsible for. And you simply confront them, indicate that there's a problem here, that they need to improve, and these are the objectives they need to achieve.
00:09:16
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And failing that, you find a replacement. Because otherwise, the business and everyone associated with it suffers. And the individual is probably better suited for some other position at another company.
00:09:29
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Yeah, i I had to do, i had to fire a good friend of mine. You know, this is the, of course, they say don't hire family and friends. This individual I did trust and I sort of leaned in and thought, you know what, we'll figure it out. We'll make it work.
00:09:45
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Well, the way that he saw the way things should be done, the way that they needed to be done were not coherent. he was He came from an aerospace background. Everything was very structured.
00:09:58
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It requires every single I to be dotted, every single T to be crossed, perfect everything. But you've got the budgets to satisfy that. We were a scrappy engineering company and we had to move quickly through, you know, take,
00:10:13
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corners um on a dime. And so it didn't work out. And after two years, I had to let him go. And it was brutal. I mean, I was just, it was not easy to do. i was sweating bullets and i had to, I sat him down and said, Hey, it's not working out.
00:10:29
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And he just couldn't believe it. And he felt betrayed. Having said that, A year later, he found his dream job. I mean, he's still doing it now. He couldn't be happier.
00:10:41
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And that would not have been possible unless you had done the right thing. Yeah, exactly.
Business Expansion and Employee Retention Strategies
00:10:48
Speaker
Now, regarding your um most recent, we'll say, company that you were at,
00:10:56
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You had a cable wire business. Give us a genesis of that, how that kind of transpired from the onset and then eventually you did exit, correct? You mean my biggest exit?
00:11:07
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um That was actually, came out of, step by step, the first independent job I had working for my then girlfriend's father um to run a business that did had a lot to do with wire and cable assembly, but also was at the genesis of the networking business. So we got into actually designing local area networks and becoming masters of the equipment that made those networks run.
00:11:39
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And that was precipitated the growth there. That was sold to the company whose equipment we were installing. Okay. Because they were jealous of the fact that we were selling $10 million dollars a year accessories essentially to their equipment um and wanted to do it and we ended up doing it on an international scale out of that moved to the business that ultimately became the contract manufacturing firm of which you're speaking that firm started 19 late 1979
00:12:13
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nineteen late nineteen seventy nine October 79 and the it grew from its single location in Massachusetts to having facilities in Tucson Arizona, Nogales Sonora, Mexico and Taiwan and ultimately Gaonju China.
00:12:31
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Wow. and that business grew to 40 million plus in turnover a year and was subsequently acquired.
00:12:43
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by ah company that was trying to do a roll up and actually successfully did the roll up, which was built around the fact that we were no longer just making wire harnesses and cable assemblies.
00:12:56
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We were making everything that they plugged into. okay And had evolved to the point where we would make 40% of what we did was healthcare care equipment.
00:13:08
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The facility, ah every one of our facilities was certified to every quality standard in the world. Everyone had exactly the same equipment. Everyone as a result could build any of the products we built for our customers at any facility around the world.
00:13:26
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And that was a very attractive feature to the company that ultimately acquired us. Because we had 230 of the Fortune 500 companies were our customers.
00:13:40
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And they were our customers because we could build their product anywhere in the world with the same quality standards. Nice. And so is that what brought you to Tucson or was it more other way around buying the We had the business in China, in Taiwan and then China before we had the business that brought us to Tucson in Nogales, Sonora.
00:14:03
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And it was buying the business in Nogales, which was that point in time was called nearshoring rather than offshoring. yeah and We changed the way business was done in the maquiladoras.
00:14:18
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Number one, we owned the maquiladoras. It was not a contract facility, um which meant that we could apply our methodology, our operational mantra, our quality standards and methodology for interacting with customers on a real-time basis.
00:14:37
Speaker
And that was very unusual in Mexico. the At that time, facilities in Mexico suffered from, and they still do to a certain extent today, very rapid turnover.
00:14:50
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The average time on the job expectancy for an employee was about nine months. By the time we were done stabilizing employment, and I'll talk about the things we did to do that, ours had become six years.
00:15:10
Speaker
well <unk> pretty significant and when we sold the business 60 of our employees had been our employees for 12 years so i guess we created a better environment right i mean i'm sure you they were paid well the culture was was solid yeah give us some ideas of what that was it it actually turned out to be pretty simple things the We interviewed our employees, asked them, you know, why would you move to a different job? What makes this job special to you?
00:15:40
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And they were very simple things to do. um When we built our second facility in Mexico, we intentionally built it with a kitchen, a cafeteria, medical facilities.
00:15:52
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um And we had obviously a full-time kitchen staff. Our employees didn't pay for their food. They and their families could come and eat breakfast and the kids go off to school.
00:16:05
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The employees got fed at lunchtime. If there was leftovers at lunchtime, they got to take it home because we didn't want to store today's food for tomorrow. We made fresh the following day.
00:16:17
Speaker
And then the most distinctive thing I think that we did was that we had a full-time nurse and a full-time doctor. in house for the benefit of our employees. Because while social medicine to a large extent does work in Mexico, the ability to get it when you need it is not ever present.
00:16:38
Speaker
So we solve that problem. And not only could our employees use those medical facilities, their families could as well. Now, you might say that well, isn't that expensive to do?
00:16:50
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Feeding our employees on average cost about $1.60 a day per person. Staffing the medical facility on an annualized basis was less than $40,000 a year.
00:17:03
Speaker
We had 500 employees. Wow. Tell me that that's money foolishly. No, that's really good. I mean, if you think about the the cost of training a new employee, onboarding a new employee,
00:17:16
Speaker
I mean, you're you're saving money. Particularly when you're building products or assemblies or finished product where quality is an absolute requirement.
00:17:28
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If I'm building something that's going to go into a medical facility that may influence whether or not a patient survives or does well, it better work every time. We actually, applying those standards...
00:17:42
Speaker
We ultimately reached a point where my partner came to me and said, why don't we just warranty what we do forever? We did. well Our return rate was less than 0.01%.
00:17:55
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not Very expensive to warranty it forever. Yeah, it's crazy. Wow. um That actually led me to think about a question here. Are there any business leaders or entrepreneurs that you look up to or you respect in the decisions they've made or how they've made them or the businesses that they've built?
00:18:18
Speaker
Well, the obvious one is ah I admire Bill Gates. I've actually had the opportunity to meet him several times. I think he historically made very solid decisions. um And i also knew Steve Jobs and ah little bit
00:18:37
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Different from Bill, but um his thought processes very much are in line with mine in relation to quality being everything.
Influential Leaders and Market Adaptation
00:18:50
Speaker
And if you can't do it, don't build it. So yes, those are two examples of individuals I've looked up to. I have met others along the way, particularly in startup organizations that the angel group has funded, where One of the things that angel investors look for, and I talked about teams earlier, is are the members of the team for the company that you're about to invest in coachable?
00:19:19
Speaker
Will they learn from their mistakes? Do they know what they don't know and know enough to say, I need help here? Those are actually management or founding individuals that you can admire.
00:19:33
Speaker
because their head is in the game sufficiently to understand, I don't know everything I need to know to achieve my objectives, but my objective is well defined enough that I know the questions to say, i need help with this, or I'm thinking of doing these two things, which one is the better one? I think this one's better.
00:19:54
Speaker
Do you agree? um So those are also individuals in management positions that you can admire. because they're achieving something because they've actually understood what it will take to be successful without simply being blinded by the fact that this is the best idea anyone's ever had and it has to succeed just because of that.
00:20:18
Speaker
Yeah. It's actually a really good segue. My next question is, what lesson have you learned? Maybe it could be more than one in your career that that was like,
00:20:32
Speaker
game changing. Like for me, to give you an example, I ran um a business and I was growing very quickly and the market shifted and I was sort of didn't know what to do.
00:20:48
Speaker
And my advisors told me to stick with what made me successful. And that eventually made me unsuccessful because by then the market had shifted. So then I realized that the lesson is that follow the market, follow trends, follow the customer.
00:21:06
Speaker
I didn't do that in time. So i I learned that so well that everything I do now going forward needs to have that applied to it. So there's something like that in your domain where you've actually had a big aha moment um
Financial Challenges and Strategic Solutions
00:21:22
Speaker
A couple of things. one one The earliest one was a fiscal challenge.
00:21:27
Speaker
um And it's also a business lesson, don't let this happen. We had customer, this is very early on in owning the business that did the great growth, who for whatever reason had become 29% our business. And with very little warning,
00:21:47
Speaker
and with very little warning They filed for bankruptcy. They were our largest receivable. We also happened to be their largest payable.
00:22:01
Speaker
So multiple lessons there. Don't allow any customer to ever become close to 30% of your business. That's just foolish. Too big a risk. um And the second one was when you're put back in a position where you can take control of this, learn quickly and be ready to step up to force people the issue in your favor, which is what we did. We actually took possession of their assets um and became part of the bankruptcy committee.
00:22:30
Speaker
And as a result of that, the company survived because we were wise enough to lead them in the changing market conditions, which had forced their bankruptcy in the first place, to cause them to change which river they were going to row down.
00:22:47
Speaker
And at the same time, because of that, we ended up recovering every dollar of the receivable. But was it frightening? Yes, it was.
00:22:58
Speaker
Because those receivables were our collateral against the banking relationship that we had. And in addition to that collateral, my partner and I's homes were also pledged So I had to go home and tell my partner at that point in time that we may lose the house.
00:23:20
Speaker
And that's a very sobering moment. And all of a sudden you're doing, reading all the business case studies, everything you can possibly learn about, here's the situation I'm in what's the right way to work it to get out of it whole and have the greatest number of survivors, if you will.
00:23:39
Speaker
oh The second, that was a challenging situation because it was physical, monetary in nature. The second one was recognizing two opportunities. One was historically we had built very simple to very complicated wire harnesses and cable assemblies.
00:24:00
Speaker
Wire harnesses that had thousands of attachment points to them um that went into military equipment. which meant that we were DOD certified. the
00:24:16
Speaker
We gained an appreciation for the fact that those things are pretty complicated. Why don't we offer to build the things they attach to? Because they require the same quality standards, they require the same manual or machine oriented assembly capabilities that we already own,
00:24:38
Speaker
And that was a complete shift in business direction to add another channel to our business. And ultimately, the things that attached became 65 70% of the total revenue value that we generated.
00:24:53
Speaker
And as those devices became more complicated, this is evolutionary that became more complicated, we got invited to build things that were going to show up in hospital rooms. and discovered that, hey, we're really good at that. And this is about the same time we came up with the idea that we'll warranty whatever we build forever.
00:25:12
Speaker
um I built a clean room in Nogales to build ever more complicated and um hygienic requirement devices and became accepted by our customers.
00:25:26
Speaker
And the customers, Medical business tends to be one where the players, the key individuals within companies, move from one company to the next by being a good producer and focusing on only delivering quality.
00:25:44
Speaker
Well, when those individuals went to their next company, they called us. Can you do this for us as well, the new company? So that's a very form basic form of business networking with the purpose of growing revenue to the benefit of both us, the company, and the companies that we do work for.
00:26:05
Speaker
That's fascinating. What do you think about AI?
AI and Future Business Landscape
00:26:10
Speaker
ah AI has a place in the world. i don't think Adel is going to be showing up anytime soon. um But there are very definite risks associated with it.
00:26:20
Speaker
um Taking the human hand completely off the wheel would be a complete mistake in if it was done ad hoc and in general.
00:26:31
Speaker
There are places where it's perfectly acceptable. um If there are well-defined rules and you can ah mechanically and otherwise ensure that they will be carried out exactly for those rules, then let the machine intelligence deal with um If it's something that can be arbitrary in terms of its execution or the results, random results that can occur and the need to deal with those randomized results, we're a long way yet from having AI having the ability to do that.
00:27:07
Speaker
One of the things that we have to be ever aware of when it comes to the use of AI today is that most of the AI that you read about are built against large language models. Well, those large language models are using yesterday's knowledge to make their decisions.
00:27:24
Speaker
um We're now beginning to see with some of the new um thought engines or AI engines, the ability to first fish in the large language model historic pond, and they then going the step further and say, okay, now I'm going to pause and I'm going to look at everything that's available right this instant and see if I can refine the answer.
00:27:47
Speaker
That's a very critical and important step relative to the use of AI, um because we gain more information all the time. yeah And it may alter the decisions that you make or change the weight of this choice versus that choice.
00:28:03
Speaker
Whereas making a decision based on information that may be one or two or more years old, fails to consider that. yeah That's a big risk that we don't need to take. I had a conversation with somebody yesterday regarding Right now, ai is used on a very short jaunt, meaning that you type something into ChatGPT, it responds. And so, and then you've got to take that copy paste, maybe drop it into your email.
00:28:31
Speaker
And so the connective tissue isn't that strong just yet, but it will become stronger to the point where the AI, you're going to have an AI employee, these agents, you're going to be in a Zoom room.
00:28:44
Speaker
There'll be Jeff, there'll be Sam, there'll be others around, including Mike 2.0, which is gonna be the the agent. And you're gonna ask Mike, hey, can you go get me the the report that we did last week on this and email it to Sam?
00:29:00
Speaker
And that agent's gonna say, you're gonna have an avatar, ah person. I'd be happy to do that, Manny. And there it is. So think about your, your role at this at these high-level companies.
00:29:14
Speaker
How would you feel having agentic AI employee? I'd probably like it. um I'm technically oriented.
00:29:27
Speaker
I don't object to particularly that concept, but I can tell you where there are potential holes in what you just outlined. please do I just gave my avatar permission to share company information using email to a targeted individual.
00:29:45
Speaker
There better be rules built into that avatar, that ai robot, if you will, um that say, and unless I specifically give you permission to do something similar to this, you will never, ever do it.
00:30:00
Speaker
Because otherwise, it could if it starts thinking for itself, which is going to happen, um subject to some set of rules, which, again, can become self-fulfilling, self-defining,
00:30:15
Speaker
it could decide to, oh, well, this company over here is doing something very similar to this. Maybe we should share our latest research with them. And Jeff gave me permission to use email, so I'm just going to send it to them and maybe we'll all benefit.
00:30:30
Speaker
Yeah. Scary. Very scary. Have you heard of the example of an AI Skynet kind of situation where AI gives is given the instruction to be the best and most prolific paperclip manufacturer.
00:30:51
Speaker
And period, that's it. No other rules. That's it. And so this Skynet goes out and eliminates the human race because they're in the way of making paperclips.
00:31:05
Speaker
And then it creates these rocket ships and goes to other planets to mine more material to make paper clips. And basically it takes over the universe by... To make paper clips.
00:31:17
Speaker
Paper clips.
00:31:20
Speaker
It's a little crazy, but it's kind of an interesting thought. We need Asimov's primary rules of robotics. You will never do anything that adversely affects a human.
00:31:32
Speaker
Rule number one. Yeah. And as long as the rules similar to that are in place, and I don't know how you force them to always be incorporated.
00:31:44
Speaker
Because right now it's humans that create the agentic agents, the AI, and they can do that. They can intentionally do it, or they could skip it.
00:31:57
Speaker
They could say, oh, that rule just gets in the way. I actually need to be able to achieve these objectives without obstacle. Okay, as soon as that happens, we have a real problem. um Because eventually, the AI model is going to be able to come up with its own queries, ask its own questions, and then act on the answers.
Global Citizenship and Personal Growth
00:32:19
Speaker
There have to be control mechanisms in place that allow it that process to be either monitored, managed, or controlled. um so that it doesn't get out of control. Because otherwise, ai is going to represent the megalomaniac who thinks he or she is the best possible agent in the world.
00:32:38
Speaker
And if I think it, it must be true. And I never make mistakes. So here's what I'm going to do today. Yeah. Here's a question I ask all of my guests. That is, if I had a magic telephone that I could hand to you and you could reach across time and basically give your 18 year old self a message or two.
00:33:10
Speaker
What would you tell Jeffrey back in when you were 18 years old?
00:33:23
Speaker
That's a really good question. um I thought you were going to ask me, who would I call i' back in history? um the
00:33:37
Speaker
The message would be, continue your language studies. Because one of the things that historically, educationally, that I'm very pleased that my parents required me to do was to not let English be my only language.
00:33:57
Speaker
And as a result of that, I ended up taking French and that was mostly because a girl I liked took French too. um the And for many years, for a number of years, I was extraordinarily fluent in French. the Not so today, I can understand it when I hear it spoken, but I'm not confident enough to respond back as fluently as I used to.
00:34:23
Speaker
would, i would tell my 18 year old self, learn at least two other languages in addition.
00:34:35
Speaker
And my advice looking backwards in time is I would tell them to learn Spanish, although I was able to learn Spanish because it's similar enough to French. But if I had done it much earlier in life, it would have made running the business in Mexico even easier. um And I'd probably also advocate learning People are going to hate this answer, learning Russian or German um because, or maybe Mandarin, because then i would have been a citizen of the world.
00:35:06
Speaker
There'd be no place in the world where I could go that someone didn't speak the languages I had learned. Yeah, is language is so interesting. I mean, I grew up with Spanish as my first language, and i am fluent.
00:35:21
Speaker
um But im I'm fluent at the grandmother level, like Nana level. And I understand all the high level stuff as well. But for me to command, i mean, I couldn't stand it for the United Nations and give a speech.
00:35:33
Speaker
In Spanish, I would struggle. And it would be a lot of of ah baer you know words from English that i sort of bastardize. But even having that ability, it just exposes ah cultural angle.
00:35:47
Speaker
to food to literature to movies to conversations to my own family being able to talk to my grandmother and it's just it's a very beautiful thing to have and so i definitely respect that question well it all of that is absolutely true and i agree with you the in my head makes you more of a citizen of the world I am not simply an American.
00:36:13
Speaker
I'm an American who is a citizen of the world. If I can speak more than one language. All right. We're going to take that question. We're going to do a part B of it. but Okay. I have that same magic phone here and you're able to call 95 year old Jeff and basically ask Jeff a few questions.
00:36:36
Speaker
what would you ask yourself? How many grandchildren do you have?
00:36:43
Speaker
Because if I got the answer to that question, I now would have something to truly look forward to. um And at the end of the day, why do we do any of what we do other than for family?
00:36:55
Speaker
And be that our own, our relatives or friends, um
00:37:02
Speaker
nothing of what we do is worth anything. unless there are other people to appreciate it and benefit from it. um So that would be the first question that I'd ask my ancient self at that point.
00:37:17
Speaker
Although in today's environment, living to 95 is probably the 30 years ago, 65. sixty five Yeah. No, science and medicine has definitely jumped by leaps and bounds.
00:37:31
Speaker
And so... um Any final thoughts you want to share with our audience regarding some of your your wisdom, advice for people in the thick of things right now with running their own business, high-level managers that are dealing with stuff? And and you know the world seems to be so precarious at times. The markets are precarious at times.
00:37:59
Speaker
Anything you want to share with our audience in that domain? Yes, don't allow yourself to be the victim of polarization. um Our world in general, right at the moment, is far too polarized. It's lost the ability to negotiate, to find beneficial compromise.
00:38:16
Speaker
So don't get lost in the ramblings of the far whatever side, um because personally, those individuals are idiots because they've stopped being citizens of the world.
00:38:31
Speaker
They are citizens of themselves in a very narrow point of view. Don't ever allow yourself to be trapped by a singular point of view. Always see the world as a whole.
00:38:44
Speaker
Because if you do that, then it will become much easier to properly, well-defined, and find the most effective solutions to those problems. Which takes us back to your original thing about solving problems.
00:38:56
Speaker
That's what we do every day. Full circle. Thanks for your time, Jeff. Appreciate it. My great pleasure. was really good.