Zack Scriven 0:00
One live
Walker Reynolds 0:05
and welcome to the industry for community podcast, I'm your host with the most Walker D Reynolds co host Zachary Scriven is here this week. This podcast is sponsored by who's our sponsor, Zack, who's our sponsor right now this month is maintain X. Hey, this podcast right here is sponsored by maintain X, and actually, we'll talk a little bit about more of that later. Actually, it's kind of funny. When I said who the sponsor is, I totally forgot we have a sponsor this month, even though we're going to be shooting all this content, dude, what's been up? We have, we have a lot of a lot to cover in that we may we could run for quite a while on this one, because we haven't done a podcast in a couple of weeks. I want to kind of tell you where I've been, like, Why is it you haven't been seeing me shooting a lot of content, kind of what's going on? We have a bunch of announcements, important announcements, that you guys are going to going to want to hear, and then we're going to have a conversation about what we're currently seeing in the market. And then big announcements. Yeah, two big announcements. And then we'll, we'll talk about what we're currently seeing in the market, some big moves, some big transitions in the market right now, I'm gonna kind of warn some people about some of them, and then we're gonna have a conversation about unified namespace, because, you know, since prove it, people have been running with the ball. And, you know, it's kind of, it's we want to make sure we align on the definition. Okay? And then we're going to go over some LinkedIn posts, and I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, respond to a couple of LinkedIn posts, but with that, Zack, real quick. You know, how you been, brother, what do we got going on? Good, good. You know? How do you enjoy this, all this new content that you've been you know, obviously I haven't been filming, and I'm gonna explain why it is I haven't been in front of the camera lately. It's just because I'm so busy. And those of you who have sent me DMS just real quick before Zack chimes in here, I'm gonna have to delete all the DMS I have right now. Right now, I got about 4000 messages that are unread. I, you know, people who normally reach out to me. I just can't, I don't, I just don't have the time to respond to anybody. I've been inundated with speaking requests. You know, big companies asking me to architect their their digital transformation, right to help write their strategies, help write their minimal technical requirements, peer review, unified namespace architectures. I've just been overwhelmed. I just we've been overwhelmed where so what I'm going to have to do, part of what I wanted to do with this podcast today, was, if you have sent me a message in the last two months that I have not responded to, I'm not going to be responding to it. What we're going to do is we're going to delete every message anyone has sent to me. We're going to start clean today. And if you're a mastermind student and you have a question that you need me to answer, please ask that question in the mastermind channel in discord, and the team will make sure that question gets to me. If you are not in mastermind, then you can ask the best place to ask any question is to go to the 4.0 solution. Either you can email contact and 40 solutions. Obviously you could do that. You could go into discord and ask the question, but the best place to go is to go to the 4.0 solutions LinkedIn page, and on the latest post, ask the question in the comments, and the team, if it's if I need to answer it, the team will bring it to me. You can also do the same thing in a YouTube video, all right, because what, what we've decided is there are just too many messages for me to get to. I mean, there are people who I normally talk to all the time, you know, they'll message me on WhatsApp, or they'll message me. You know, they'll DM me because they have my private information and I'm not even able to respond to them. Okay, I there. I mean, I literally have 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of messages I can't answer. And you know, honestly, it's, it's really getting to me. So part of what I wanted to do is come on here and let you guys know I just, I can't respond. I can't respond to everything. So we're gonna, we're gonna nuke every one of those messages. We're gonna start clean today. But if you have a question, best place, if you're in mastermind, is to go to the mastermind channel and discord, go to LinkedIn, comment on the 4.0 solutions LinkedIn page. You'll notice I haven't been posting on LinkedIn, although I will have a post going up tomorrow, which I'll talk about today. It's something I've actually been working on. But kind of where have I been? We have been planning prove it 2026 we've been planning prove it 2027 we have another announcement about prove it coming on late, coming up later in the podcast that I've been working on, I've been, we've, we've launched a new initiative kind of help vendors overcome three of their primary problems. So you know vendors who have products that you. The industry, for professionals should be using they and no one if they don't know about that product, and that's a brand awareness issue. Most organizations, most vendors, have a problem with brand perception. Like this is a Siemens issue, right? If you ask the average person, what win see CoA is, they're going to say it's SCADA plus it's just the new iteration of win CC, it's not it is an IIoT platform. It's a rapid application development environment. That's a brand perception issue, okay? And then the third problem that they have is they have a product that people need, but they can't, they don't get in front of the people who need it. And so we've tried to figure out, how do we connect? Because this is an issue we have where people will come and go a walker. What product should I use? X, Y or Z? So much of what we've been doing is like being the middle person between, here is here's an end user's problem, and here. And we're connecting them with the arc, you know, we're designing the architecture, and then connecting them with the products they should be
Zack Scriven 6:00
using solutions is always supposed to be, though, is the place where you go to find the right technology, to find the right integrators, to find the right training and correct, you know, the hardware, the software, all the vendors, basically like correct. But in 4.0 solutions is the one stop shop for all things IoT
Walker Reynolds 6:17
and so in this part here, it's like, you know, maintenance is, is the sponsor for 4.4 4.0 solutions, all the content for this month. So I all, I'm pretty sure all of our content will be sponsored. Content sponsored, yeah, maintenance is, like, the sponsor and what maintenance wants to overcome, the issue they want to overcome. You know, when we were doing prove it, um, do you know there was, there were four cmmses that we looked at that, that there were four companies that had a CMMS platform who wanted to maintenance management system. So it is, it's, you know, opening, it's where you manage PMS, and it's where you manage break fixes, okay? And it generally bolts into inventory management and then it normally bolts into mes so that you can pick up, you know, a downtime event in mes, and then open a work order in your maintenance management system. So we looked at four CMMS systems that there were four different companies that reached out who wanted to come to prove it and do a prove it session. Maintenance was the only one that even qualified. They were the only one that met the minimum technical requirements to even be able to integrate to the virtual factory. None of none of the other, none of the other three could maintain, consume and produce, correct which was a requirement you had to consume and produce. And so any, any new data and information you generated, you had to publish it back into the UNs Well, maintain x was the only one that qualified. The market doesn't know that, like, their problem is, is, you know, they don't. They didn't. They don't know that. The market doesn't know why maintenance is different. You know, is maintenance even actually limited to CMMS? No, that's another thing the market doesn't know. You could build others, a lot of other solutions in maintenance that are not maintenance management system functions, right? So anyway, we've been doing this, this thing with, with vendors as well. I have been asked to speak. I'm going to give it a bunch of announcements. I'm doing a bunch of speeches here, just in the next four weeks, and then, and then we've I've been building an internal platform. Oh, it's not an internal it's going to be for the community. I've been building a platform that's going to solve a problem a lot of people have when it comes to designing and understanding unified namespace. How do I sell unified namespace? How do I design it? How do I build it, and how do I sell it internally or externally? Where we've been building the internal platform to do that. So with that, that's kind of where I've been, all right. In addition, how's the ranch? Yeah. In addition, my youngest son is graduating from high school and college in two weeks, and then my oldest son is getting married in three weeks, and we have a bunch of family coming in for a whole week. And we've been, you know, we bought a ranch out in East Texas, and we've been doing a bunch of development out there. And so I've just been swamped, literally, just buried. I mean, I have, you know, buried. So anyway, that's, that's kind of where I've been. And Zack has really been picking up the slack, shooting this new content, which actually I love. I've been watching, I listened to the videos on the drive out to the ranch and back. And I love, I love this stuff. So anyway, Zack, how do you how do you like the new, the new content you've been producing? Well,
Zack Scriven 9:38
I mean, it doesn't really matter if I like it, right? I used to produce content for the sake of I liking it, but that didn't get me very far in my career. You know, what matters is if the audience likes it and I like that. There's a lot of comments that people are saying, hey, this was valuable. Okay, this was a useful example. We're trying to reach a broader audience. You know? Do.
Walker Reynolds 10:00
You know, to have a bigger impact. So that's where the building that's where the building automation. We get that question all the time, yeah, and we and we stay away from it. In fact, there are two industries that we are getting involved in that we have generally stayed away from, and I'm going to talk about two of those today. One of them is building automation. Um, building automation is something we haven't you know, we've integrated with climate control systems, a lot of like Honeywell climate control systems and with uns, but we've kind of stayed away from building automation. But the digital fluency in the market, the lines that separate between operational infrastructure and building infrastructure, operational automation and building automation. Those lines are becoming blurred as the market gets more and more mature. The other industry that we're getting much more involved in is in the Department of Defense, and I'm going to talk about one of the major shifts we are seeing in the industry right now, like, for example, if you are an integrator who, if you're, if you're an engineering firm who is working exclusively with the Department of Defense, I'm talking to you. Raytheon, I am talking to you. Lockheed Martin, okay, you guys are fucked. Let me, let me say something perfectly clear. We are about to see a massive democratization of the vendors who will be working in DOD. Okay, all of those barriers that have been put up so that it be. You know, it's really hard to work in the DOD, because you have to meet all these regulatory requirements. And then, you know, you have these incestuous relationships between the vendors who are working in the DOD and the Department of Defense, where the DoD is basically protecting their vendors from competition. That shit is going away, and and and it is, and it is happening at the speed of light, okay? And the reason why is because it's coming down from the administration that, you know, they are fucking terrified at how far behind manufacturing and project Product Lifecycle Management is in the Department of Defense. They're fucking terrified. It is, it is a national security issue and and I don't, I don't know this part. I know for sure based on my conversations, all the things that I'm saying right here, with multiple contractors with DOD, and with people who work in the DoD Okay, who have reached out since prove it. There were people from the DoD who are at prove it okay, and and have reached out. And we've had internal conversations about kind of where, where's the direction going, okay? And the answer is, away from the military industrial complex and towards the doge thing, I you know, and this is where I'm gonna speculate. Okay, I believe, I believe what probably happened, based on my experience, is Elon looked at how the Department of Defense was contracting products, services and solutions, and was like, What in the actual fuck here? Like, do you realize that you're not working with the best? Yeah. Like, you know, think about it. Do you know who you're working with in the Department of Defense, the people who have the relationships, not the best? And I guarantee what he did was he said, Hey, listen, you know, there's something wrong here. And I can tell you this, I don't know that part, that part, I'm speculating. But what I do know is that internally, the DOD and their partners have all been put on notice. The DoD has put all their partners on notice. Okay, digital is coming, and we're not limiting our solutions. Just to y'all,
Zack Scriven 14:04
what about the D O T?
Walker Reynolds 14:08
Haven't talked to I mean, I have, I haven't. I think, come on.
Zack Scriven 14:11
D O T is so underrepresented in digital transformation. There's so much data that we could be gathering that we're just not
Walker Reynolds 14:18
Well, I mean, you are in some I mean, we've, I've talked about this, you know, obviously one of the I talked about this, one privileged thing that we can't talk about publicly, cars that gather data using that data, a car, yeah, car. Cars that gather data and municipalities and cities are contracting them to to use their data for traffic studies, instead of paying smart city infrastructure, paying, yeah, instead of paying civil engineering firms to do a traffic study on their behalf, there are several major cities now. The first pilot was in the Northeast, where they're contracting these car manufacturers who are in to use the data off these cars to do the traffic study to No. Do manual traffic studies. So what you have is a continuous traffic study, and I think it's kind of in the vein of what Waze was supposed to be. The problem with Waze is that you kind of had to do it was community traffic management based on opt in. Well, you're not opting in when, if you're driving one of the cars that can collect this data, you're not opting in. That car is collecting the data. Okay, now, whether it's plugged in real time into the infrastructure, you opt into that, but the data is still used, whether it's used in real time or whether it's buffered and and transacted to the cloud after, you know, at the end of the day
Zack Scriven 15:36
is someone said in that smart infrastructure video that uns wouldn't scale to like a city wide infrastructure. Yeah,
Walker Reynolds 15:44
and it, you know, it's funny. I laugh at that. I really do. You know, it's a, that's a common, it's a, it's a common, um, it's a common statement, and it's always made by someone who's never built anything at scale. It, that's the thing I find interesting. You know, the what's one of the first questions I'll ask? I'll say, Okay, well, give me the specific technical reason. This isn't gonna, you know, tell me what the objection is. Ask, ask me a question, and I'll give you the answer.
Zack Scriven 16:16
I mean, any broker can scale to millions of connections,
Walker Reynolds 16:20
10s of 101st. Off, with hive MQ, there's no limit to the number of connections that you could actually have depending upon your horizontal and vertical scale.
Zack Scriven 16:31
So, okay, right?
Walker Reynolds 16:33
I mean, they're Unlimited, yeah. I mean, okay, here's how we know, here's how we know it's unlimited because we haven't hit the limit yet. All we do is add a new node to the cluster. Facebook add a new node to the cluster and and now the queue is no longer filling up. You know, you you put all you do is expand the load balancer. You know? How do you avoid TCP exhaustion, load balancing? Like, I mean, the people who make these objections, they've never built anything at scale. You know if, if, if I and the and the person who has built it at scale who makes an objection, it literally is the difference. It's me having a conversation with them and correcting the way they're thinking about it. And they're like, oh, okay, now I see that.
Zack Scriven 17:24
So it's like, easier for them to find a flaw in it than it is for them to go disprove it wrong or something, or,
Walker Reynolds 17:30
well, nobody's I mean, first off, everybody's entitled to their opinion. And I want the objection, I encourage. I want people to challenge. Okay? Um, the anybody who has come to me and said that their architecture, they're having trouble with their architecture scaling. It's because, it's because of the way they're architecting, not the architecture.
Zack Scriven 17:57
You know, it's like, come on, okay, what about Paul Boris? Because he
Walker Reynolds 18:01
let's get let me we'll get to Paul here. And, yeah, let me get through. We're going to talk about a comment Rajiv Adan made, and then a comment Paul Boris made on Aaron se post from a week ago. We'll go over those. Those are LinkedIn posts. They're all centered around uns. We're going to go over those here in a minute. Let me run through these announcements, because they're all, like, really important. So next week, on Monday and Tuesday, I'm going out to Santa Clara, California, to litmus headquarters for two days. Okay, the if you guys have any questions that you want me to ask litmus, please put them in the comments of this podcast or in the or in the chat right now, I'm gonna, or Me too. I'm gonna tell you, uh, basically, the topics of discussion while we're out there. So when I'm out there, I'm gonna talk to, I'm gonna be meeting with vats on the development team, and Adam Kennedy and all the whole gang. And I want to ask him, How was the announcement at Pruvit received, and what traction has come from it, that is, they made a fairly large announcement centered around agentic AI and and litmus and litmus Edge platform that um was, it was probably the, it was the second most important announcement at that show, honestly the most important, no question was hive MQ pulse. I mean it that's a game changer, all right? I mean hive MQ pulse is a game changer. What litmus interview with them too, right? What litmus is announcing is was just as a big a game changer. Why? Because it was a place where we could take administrative controls. This is what my statement was. It was like, Oh, my goodness. This is a, you know, there's three types of engineering controls in operations, right? You have administrative and engineering are the two primary that you care about, right? And you want to take administrative controls, which are human beings, policies and procedures, and you want to make those engineering controls where you. There's, you know, you don't have a human being making the decision in the center, right? You want them executing the the amount the agentic AI component inside litmus edge native platform gives us the ability to turn administrative controls, that is, things from SOPs and policies and procedures into engineering controls. So now, rather than, well, okay, I see I see x i see X problem on the floor, we see the X event. Okay, a standard operating procedure may say, if I see this event, look at these four things and make a determination between these two outcomes. Okay, these two options, a human being does that. If you pick option A, then go to page 46 and do the intervention at page 46 if you pick option B, go to page 51 and do that intervention. Or it may go to page 51 and now go through the similar steps to get to your final intervention, what steps you'll stay. That's an administrative control. Engineering controls is, is up, is automating that process. Here's the here's the RE here's one of the things that you can't automate. You can't automate things that require advanced reasoning to come to the conclusion the output generally you're automating binary, basic logic. Yeah, right, simple logic, okay. What? What the game changer in litmus edge with agent with agentic AI just being embedded in the platform.
Zack Scriven 21:36
I need to go. I need to go, re watch the prove it session. Because what I took away was actually a little bit different. Well, I took away from their presentation. Hold
Walker Reynolds 21:46
on, they, they weren't, they weren't showing how to convert an administrative control into an engineering control. You okay, my implication when I looked at that, you know, the the use case they gave was a simple fucking use case. I'm like, Okay, I mean, I could do that in open tools. I'm like, wait, oh, no. The real implication here is that I can take administrative controls that are supposed to apply to an entire organization, and I can automate them as engineering controls through this platform. And so now I can go and when you use a standard operating procedure in the military. In the fucking military, okay, they just use these huge binary binders. Do you know what the the the accuracy is, the core they it's a quality measurement they use how often as a human being, do the thing SOP tells them they're supposed to do based on a specific intervention. The answer is, in the military, 60% six out of 10 times. Now, the value for an organization is getting that to 10 out of 10 times, if you turn it into an engineering control so that's part, that's part of what I'm going to be talking to them about. Number two, obviously, Microsoft's investment. That's a huge fucking red flag. Obviously, it's a huge red flag. So does this mean i a i want to hear from Vatsal, Hey, what is, what is this relationship? Okay? Because if you take money open AI, yeah, if you take money from Microsoft, Microsoft owns, you make and listen, Microsoft is a great American brand, okay, I fucking they're an American company. They employ a lot of people. But make no mistake about it, when you take just if you take money from Rockwell Automation, Rockwell's thought is, we own you. If you take money from Microsoft, Microsoft. Their thought is, we own you. You answer to us. Now, fuck all your other partners. We don't give a shit about them. You answer to us, by the way, this was the argument about open AI, the mistake open AI was making with the partnership. Guess what? It was fucking valid. It was valid. So one of the things I want to ask, because I don't know the extent of that Microsoft investment. I saw the press release, or I saw the announcement, and I heard about the announcement afterwards, I'm going to talk about that. Hey, what is the Microsoft investment? Because what I think it is based on my conversations, credits or something, yeah, what I think it is, is probably Microsoft is investing in litmus because maybe they want litmus edge to be the edge component of Microsoft fabric. That'd be sweet. And if that's the case, then it is a similar investment to what Google has made. And it's not doom and gloom. It's a really positive thing. I just want to make sure that that's, that's what it actually is, because, make no mistake about it. You know, Microsoft telling litmus what to do would be bad fucking news for everybody. No mistake about it. No mistake about it. Okay, think about it. Microsoft's ad. Azure. The Azure architect for Microsoft is Eric barnsted, okay, the global architect. Yeah, he's the, he's the Azure architect for and then Clemens vaster and those guys, they, you know, they kind of work under, work under Eric. And, you know what? I mean, Eric's a brilliant architect, don't get me wrong. But um, there's no there is no evidence. There is absolutely no evidence that that group legitimately cares about what happens in the industry at all. There is no evidence whatsoever that they care at all what happens in the industry, okay? And all I got to do is point to OPC, UA and I got and all I got to do is is look, is point to the previous iteration of Azure IoT that they had the fucking Nuke, okay? And yet, all the way up until the moment they nuked it, they insisted this was the platform for industry, okay, even though and Rob Tiffany will be here, even though people like me were saying, No, it's not No, it's not okay. All right. Question number three for litmus I want to talk to them about what's in their roadmap, because I know they had a bunch of cool features that are coming in. And I want to see kind of where you the UNs tools. They have a really, really powerful uns tool. I want to talk to them about, prove it 2026 the details, kind of where things stand. I announce it here today. And then I want to go over what are they doing with agentic AI, and specifically, are they going to add in MCP support, model context, protocol support. We
Zack Scriven 26:38
got to make sure there's enough ceiling space for that, like double decker booth, you know, with the executive meeting room up top. So
Walker Reynolds 26:45
what I expect when I have the conversation about the Microsoft investment is that it's probably more like what their Google relationship is. But I haven't spoken to them yet, but a lot of you have asked me, Hey Walker, what you know you said? You said litmus or that's what promised you that there would be no, no sale. Isn't this just as good of sale? If you take money from Microsoft, they own you. And I'm like, let me talk to them about it. I mean, yeah. I mean, I suspect hold that it's a it's a strategic partnership that's limited to using litmus edge to help augment Microsoft fabric. That's what I suspect it is, but until I ask them, I won't know for sure later this month. So I then I have graduation from so that's Monday and Tuesday of next week. If you have questions that you want me to ask, litmus I will ask those questions. So please put them in the comments. I'm speaking at the Siemens Developer Days in Prague on May 27 and 28th okay, I'm actually speaking twice there, so I'm gonna be giving the keynote on May 27 and my keynote is digital transformation. Why Does anyone care? Okay, and then that one too. What's that Vaughn and I are coming to that one too? I don't know. I mean, I think so. I know there's, I think there's, like four people from our team going and I know we're filming it and all, you know,
Zack Scriven 28:07
and if my passport gets in here in time, yeah. And
Walker Reynolds 28:11
then on day two, on May 28 teaching a mastermind at Siemens Developer Days, which it's going to be 275 minute sessions, I think. And it's architecting a unified namespace for digital transformation, utilizing wincy CoA and then my last speaking engagement that's booked, booked going before going into the summer, June, 12 and 13th. Critical manufacturing, they make a pretty incredible mes, actually, I want to talk about this a little a little bit here in a second, critical manufacturing is doing their mes and industry for international summit on June 12 and 13th in Porto. You can go to Jeff winters LinkedIn. He posted about it the other day, and there's a link in there if you want to, if you want to go to that show, okay, I'm going to be giving the keynote address on day one after their CEO Francisco does the introduction. I think they I think there's gonna be about 600 people, 600 attendees. I'll be giving the keynote, and my keynote is going to be enabling digital transformation with unified namespace. We actually just finalized what I'm going to be going over, and I actually changed what I was going to be going over because I had a chance to meet with critical manufacturing yesterday and see get a peek under the hood. They got to they I got to see the reference architecture for the platform, how it's bifurcated, and how intellectual property and and and the open architecture work, interact, work in with, with one another. And I have to tell you, I've seen lots and lots of architectures, of platforms and critical manufacturing. Did it right? I actually told them. I said, I'm very impressed with how this has been architected like you can tell that the the choices made. I. In the development of this architecture were with a focus on open while also protecting the intellectual property that's in some in their modules. For example, in order you know they have an IoT connect the Connect IoT module right that that connects to the edge. And then from there you can take, you could take a tag from a data point inside of a PLC, for example, and then map that directly to a Kafka topic. And then you can fire, you can trigger transactions and events off of the changes on those Kafka topics, topics, and the way that they historize events they historize Those events is the same way we historize uns using Kafka to s3 to turn transactions into time series. So very it was really brilliant. And then the way their use of canonical database, which is the master data model, which they can then expose to a unified namespace, is pretty brilliant. And actually, they show me a really cool demo of it yesterday, and then they have an extended database that is, you know, more functional, but that isn't, it's more function focused. So I was actually really impressed with the architecture. All right, with that, any any comments about any of those things in the chat vault? Interested to hear your opinions about the products with brand marketing issues that are leading to misconceptions about their capabilities. And uses maybe a topic for a mastermind session. Yes, it's actually a great I would say the companies that suffer the most, we're
Zack Scriven 31:39
gonna do a mastermind session with maintain X, yes,
Walker Reynolds 31:43
yeah, where I would say brand, brand perception
Zack Scriven 31:48
issue, not that, not that they have a brand perception issue, but
Walker Reynolds 31:50
they, they, well, they do because their, their entry point is CMMS, right? They, they market maintenance as a CMMS, but is maintenance actually a CMMS. It's more than that, right? It's a platform, right? You can build non CMMS solutions plus plus plus. It CMMS plus plus, plus. That's what I call it. Okay? Here's a really, here's one that I think will surprise a lot of people. Aspect of it is tulip. So tulip is in the process of like, rebranding. But if you ask the average person in the market what tulip is, they're going to tell you that it is a mes. They're going to say tulip is mes. No, it isn't mes. Happens to be the primary solutions that people are mes functions are what people are building using tulip, but tulip is really a composable operations platform. They and composable is their their term, but it's an appropriate term. It's a composable operations platform. What does that mean? It means that the solutions you build using tulip are designed to be built by citizen developers. It is operator focused. It it's designed to be the platform where it's the the entry point is the operator, the person that it is. Tulip is the interface for the human being. But what makes it unique is how that is that entry point that I don't know what they call they call it a station. That station is the operator's entry point into the infrastructure. Not just the entry point to the screens and functions, but it's the entry point into the infrastructure. So tool stuff,
Zack Scriven 33:34
too. What's that like? Their voice?
Walker Reynolds 33:37
No, what I mean is it's, it's, it's not your video camera feed, yeah, but tulip, tulip, the the station that the operator is interacting with using tulip, okay, is not just the application that someone built for them. It is the toolkit for augmenting that application. It is the toolkit for building their own application. It is the toolkit for accessing the raw data that's basically in, like the smart tables behind the the interface for the operator. You know, you'll trust an operator with an Excel spreadsheet, right? Well, you know what's in, you know what's in the background of an operations panel in tulip. It's essentially an Excel spreadsheet. Each application has a smart table running in the background, so they kind of have a brand perception here's another one, flows. Got a big brand perception problem. Ask people what flow is. I mean, I've talked I've talked to them about about this a lot, but ask them, What flow? Is flow of fuse, no flow software. What is flow? I
Zack Scriven 34:47
did that on purpose. It's an analytics platform.
Walker Reynolds 34:53
Is it? That's their entry point. But is it really an analytics platform? Them, is it just an analytics platform? I guess, is the that's their entry point, has some
Zack Scriven 35:05
data modeling capabilities.
Walker Reynolds 35:05
But what? What is flows? What is flows primary, like? What is it? What makes it so valuable? Why is flow so valuable?
Zack Scriven 35:20
Because that you can connect to any data source, and you can create time series Insights from all of those external data sources and merge them together. Here's the
Walker Reynolds 35:31
here's the fucking kicker. This is the shit that'll blow you away with flow. It For Me with flow. What all what always stood out to me with flow from the first time I ever got a presentation like in 2018 or whatever it was. And believe me, the platform today is way different than it was back then. It there was been, there's been a whole rebuild, you know, I mean, all the core features are still there. But the thing that always stood out to me was that you could tell that the people who built the platform were the ones who solved the problems for the actual manufacturers on the plant floor. Like it was obvious. It's just like, you know, mechanics talk about this all the time. When a mechanic works on a car or works on a piece of equipment, they can tell right away whether or not the engineer who designed that vehicle had ever worked on a car before, because only an engineer who's never worked on a car, we'll put the oil filter in a place where no one can get to it right, where you've got to fucking pull the engine out to, you know, it's, or, you know, they'll, they'll design torque specifications at 128 foot pounds, rather than 86 you know what I mean. So you got to really reef on it to get it. It's, this is a common thing. When I looked at flow, I was like, Oh, this was just like, with inductive, with ignition. It's obvious. Ignition was built, you know, it's so appropriate. It was built by an integrator. You know what? I mean, they're the ones who were solving the fucking problem. So they built the platform the integrator needed. You know what I mean, it's it, that's what flow was, it was, it was like, oh, I need. Why is it? Analytics platforms don't have standard linear regression just baked in to every single line chart that has an x, y axis in one line. Why is it that's just not baked in? So if I'm plotting in in flow, it is be why? Because the people who built it, the people who built it were people who were solving the problems for the actual manufacturer. But what is the
Zack Scriven 37:25
first thing you would do once you've created a data set correct
Walker Reynolds 37:29
and but look at what but, but flow has a brand perception. In fact, I've even talked to marketing companies about this. I think they had a marketing company call me and they were they asked me to describe the platform and but here Where is flow really stand out. It's the only analytics platform that is designed to quickly bolt into current state infrastructure, UNF unified namespace, and create relationships to the history. So connect to the history and the current state and then do together and merges the two together to do analysis. And then when they added in the ability to do data modeling and contextualization, which they didn't have before, you weren't able to contextualize and create new information models. Now you can that's unified analytics framework. It's like but the average, the average person in the market, doesn't know that they don't know if you ask them to describe flow. Here's another one to answer your question, Ian. I think it's Ian. Ian. That's how you spell Ian and Ireland, right? Okay, if I'm wrong, Ian, please say that. Tell me to shut up the portaner. Portaner has a tool, yeah. Portainer has a huge brand potential perception problem. Sadalo. Sadalo and mosquito Pro, huge brand perception problem. Why? When do you when do I need to move from mosquito to mosquito Pro, which is sadalo? When do I need to? Nobody can tell you that's that's a brand perception issue. There are a lot of organizations out there that have brand perception problems. Oh, it's Owen. Thank you, brother. Sorry. So that's Owen in Ireland. I got it. All right, perfect. All right. I want to go over. I want to do I just want to finish the announcements real quick. They're all like, really important ones. So Pruvit 2026, we signed the contracts today. So I want to talk about two things. So our original plan was to go to 50 vendors and 1000 attendees for next year. Okay, um, that's still the plan, but we may go up to 1200 50 attendees based on the venue we got, and we may go higher with the vendors. However, I'm going to talk about kind of what you guys can expect at Pruvit next year, and then I'm going to talk about a little mid year. Prove it. Teaser thing. Okay, we signed the contracts today. Most of you may know this, but FIFA is in the United States next year, and Arlington, the city of Arlington, wants prove it to become like Hanover Messi, so it'll be like prove it at Arlington Convention Center starting in 2027 we'll be using the E Sports Arena and the Arlington Convention Center in 2027 we can't use it in 2026 because FIFA is, you know, the AT T Stadium where the Cowboys play. That's one of the stadiums where the World Cup is going to be taking place. And FIFA has reserved the Arlington Convention Center Thursday, Friday and Saturday of every single week, starting January 1, until World Cup is done. And our show is going to run from Sunday to Friday with a with a travel day on on Saturday, so you'll have a setup day Sunday. The show will one Monday through Thursday, Friday is going to be workshops, and then breakdown will be Friday night and Saturday. So the show is going to be at the Hyatt Regency Dallas at Reunion Tower. So if you guys ever look at the Dallas skyline, we have that iconic skyline. There's two things that stand out there, right the old Prudential building, and then the the green ball. That's Reunion Tower. Our conference is going to be there the Hyatt Regency at Reunion Tower. We will be holding a VIP event in the in the ball one of the nights. We are definitely stepping up our game. The financial commitment here is enormous. We are literally doubling our budget. Okay? I am on the hook for well over seven figures now. Well, personally, contracts are signed. We have 36 of the 50 vendors spots that we have available. Yeah. So our show is going to be where that ball is the the reunion tower that is actually the Hyatt Regency. The Hyatt Regency is below that ball. So you in the Hyatt Regency, you get into the elevator, and then you you go up the elevator. Yeah, there you go, and then you go up the elevator. Hotel. Yes, it's a big convention center, so we have two whole floors, any two enormous ballrooms up in this ball
Zack Scriven 42:13
up here.
Walker Reynolds 42:14
Yeah, that's where the VIP event will be. And that actually spins, so the floor actually spins really slowly. So there's a restaurant. You will think Wolfgang Puck used to be up there, but we're going to have a VIP event held in there one of the nights. So we have 36 of the 50 vendors who will be participating in prove it, we may end up going higher than 50, but 36 have been committed. So we we gave first dibs to the people who participated last year, and then we've added some new ones, and we haven't announced widely yet we're getting ready to do so. We've set aside some spots for companies we know want to participate. We'll have between 1012 150 event attendees. It's the show is going to be from February 16 to February 20. That's a Monday through Friday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday will be, prove it. Friday is going to be reserved for workshops that the vendors will put on. Okay, we're still finalizing kind of what the structure is going to be and all that kind of stuff. We know that the cost per attendee is, we think it's going to be right around $750 per attendee. So end users, we're pretty sure that your ticket cost is going to be in that range. So if you're an end user, a manufacturer, we're still going to keep it at the 60% end users. So we will not allow non end users to buy tickets. So like we have to have greater than you know, if we have 61% end users that releases other tickets for like, say, vent OEMs and and integrators to buy it to attend the show, but we we want the attendees to be 60% end users. We want this to be focused on the people with the actual problems. Okay, so that means that this year we're gonna, this next year, we're gonna have between 607 150 end users at the show, whereas we had 400 and something this year. Um, here's what we're kind of throwing around. So there's a big, huge ballroom upstairs, and that's where the main event is going to be. It's bigger than the the venue that we had last year, okay, where there's going to be two stages, just like there was last year. Here's what's going to change. The title sponsors are still going to do a prove it session, and they're going to do a keynote. The gold sponsors are going to do a prove it session to everyone. So the entire 1200 attendees, there will be one prove it session happening at any given time when the golds are going. The silvers, however, there's going to be a partition closed, and there will be two presentations. So if you're a silver sponsor, you're going to be going, you're going to be presenting at the same time someone else is presenting on the other stage. Page, and the partition will be closed, and so the attendees will decide which prove it session they want to watch. Okay, so if it splits 5050, you'll be presenting to half the audience. We will not have, say, two cloud providers presenting at the same time. What we'll do is we'll move to a different layer of the stack. So we may have, like an edge provider presenting, if they're a silver sponsor on stage one and a cloud provider on stage two, and the partition will be closed, and people will go,
Zack Scriven 45:28
are we going just one big, giant title sponsor? Are we going to do multiple title sponsors? It's
Walker Reynolds 45:35
really, that's really for Travis. So structurally, last year, prove it was put on by 4.0 solutions. Intellic integration played a huge role. Yeah, title sponsor,
Zack Scriven 45:46
not, I know. I don't know you know me. I don't really spend 250,000 for labor.
Walker Reynolds 45:53
I know that. I know that I had to approve $1.4 million that's it. All I know is that? Yeah, last last year I this last show, I was on the hook for, I had to have a million dollar bond, but I was really on the hook for $800,000 this year, I'm on the hook for 1.4 million. I had to, I had a 1.4 million bond, but I'm but it's a $1.2 million budget. So it's, it's a, a huge step up in the show. HUGE step up. We're adding additional days and, you know? And so what we're going to test is, I'm stoked, yeah, we're going to test this dual track. I think
Zack Scriven 46:32
that makes sense, because the gold sponsors then get a bigger stage,
Walker Reynolds 46:37
and they're, they're presenting to everybody, and
Zack Scriven 46:40
then the summer sponsors, we can fit more of them in correct
Unknown Speaker 46:46
here's the other thing, and there'll
Zack Scriven 46:49
be multiple sponsors. They're just kind of like the expo hall, kind of there will be multiple virtual
Walker Reynolds 46:53
factories. So there are going to be three virtual factories, and the vendors will decide which one they want to integrate to. So we're going to have a single site example, virtual factory. We're going to have a multi site example, virtual factory. We believe that the single site is going to be in food and beverage. The multi site is going to be some type of discrete, we don't know what vertical yet. And then there's going to be a life sciences virtual factory. And we are partnering with Skellig to to do the
Zack Scriven 47:24
life sciences, a real factory. Why go virtual? Why don't have a real factory hooked up to this thing? Legality,
Walker Reynolds 47:31
risk. I mean, there's nobody's gonna, no one is gonna agree to that. Well,
Zack Scriven 47:38
maybe they make something simple, you know, like they make pencils, or, I don't know, you know, like,
Walker Reynolds 47:42
so we, we should be announcing, we should be announcing, prove it, and tickets should go on sale for the show next year. Yeah. I think in the next month, everything will get announced. And but go ahead. But go ahead and save the date, alright, February 16 to February 20, and we may do an event the weekend before, so Bay, that's during hockey and basketball season, based on the way the schedules work out. So if, if the stars or the Mavericks are in town, we may, we may end up doing an event, um, we may end up doing an event at at the American Airlines center. Okay, so if you want to come to prove it next year, I think in your brain, you should really be thinking, I'm going to go Friday to Friday. Okay? Because we would probably do an event on Saturday. We would probably do a thing, and we'd have people sign up for it, and then we go to this event at the American Airlines center, or whatever, if the Mavericks or the stars are there, but we'll have to wait until the schedules get released before we would know that. But set it aside. February 16 to the 20th prove it 2026. Is Happening three virtual factories, up to 12 150 attendees, and 50 to maybe 75 vendors we may end up with with where the vendor the exhibit hall is much bigger this year, and so we may allow a lot more bronze sponsors who have booths set up and but the rules will still be the same. Here's the other thing greater in an integrator area, we're we're not doing a proof of concept next year. Next year, all, all prove it sessions will be phase one sessions. So these, this means you're going to be assuming the the proof of concept was already completed. All right, uh, mid year. Prove it teaser. This is kind of very excited about this. All right, so sure I can't tell you the details yet. It's gonna be two more weeks. Ish, okay, but we, we're committed for this. It's gonna happen. Okay, what can you tell us? Here's what I can tell you, you guys are gonna love this. I mean, I'm so fucking excited about it's crazy. All right, so. A couple weeks after prove it, the CEO of a large company reached out, and, you know, we caught up real quick and and he proposed. He said, Hey, man, what you guys did approve? It was awesome. I was wondering if you'd be interested in partnering with us on our conference. So the idea would be that you would do prove it in our exhibit hall at our conference this year. Okay? And and he said, what would that look like? And so we went back and we said, Okay, what would this look like if we were going to do this? What would it look like? And we we said, You know what we would do is we do a stripped down virtual factory. We wouldn't go to the level that we do at the Pruvit conference, obviously, because the amount of work that takes we would do a stripped down virtual factory. We would give the vendors eight weeks to build their solutions. But the kicker is this, the company that puts on this show they have their own products. Okay, they have their own products that that they're that they want the vendors who are at their show to use. So the deal is, for this prove it session, they will have to use the OEMs products in their prove it session in conjunction with theirs.
Zack Scriven 51:26
So platform X prove it.
Walker Reynolds 51:30
Well, no, I don't it. What I don't know not it's going to be product. It's not product. It's, yeah, it's product X prove it. So whatever, you know, you'll have to use one of their products, plus your product, to solve a customer problem. And then you're going to do prove it sessions at your booths. And the rules are the same, you know, what was the problem? What problem did you How did you solve it? How long did it take? How much does it cost? We are going to be basically the exhibit hall is going to be proven, and we'll have a huge booth there with the touch screen showing the virtual factory in the UNs. And then attendees will come in and they'll get to walk through, and they'll get to see how each of the individual vendors used this organization's products, plus their products. So the continuity thing is, is everyone is using this OEMs product in addition to theirs, okay? And we should be able to announce it in the next couple of weeks, like, there's still, we're still, it is a done deal. We're doing it. Okay? It's the commitments there. We are doing it. The announcement will come out in the next couple of weeks, and I suspect their show will sell out like that as soon as everybody finds out. For people find out what show it is, so
Zack Scriven 52:53
And then, last but not least, prove it. I like the prove it, prove it.
Walker Reynolds 52:58
I'm going to come back to the edge connectivity, and let's talk about what we're seeing in the market. Yes, mines will definitely be blown all right. What are we seeing in the market? Okay, first and foremost, Department of Defense. I have been, I cannot tell you the number of companies that are reaching out to me and asking me to architect for them. That's partly where I've been. I've been doing a ton of architectural designs and consulting for organizations around uns, and I've been vetting a lot of companies. Like, I don't know if you guys know this, but like, there's a firm out of New York City that hires me, and I do these blind consulting calls on M A I consult on mergers and acquisitions for other companies, and there's been, I've the same company has hired me, like, four times now to consult around a certain sector of the market, and then a bunch of like, four different DoD companies have reached I don't work in Department of Defense at all because it's such a pain in the ass. And four different companies have reached out to have me consult on their infrastructure and and they're all saying the exact same things. Everything is changing. At DOD, everything is changing. Um, do you think that's international or just in America? Do I think what's international or just in America, the change in DOD, the how DoD now in the West, everyone figures out that they're really far behind and they need to speed up the rate of increase in digital fluency.
I'll say this DoD is changing big time, um, and, and everything that's being communicated to me is, um, the what's coming from the Pentagon is, hey partners, hey defense contractors. Get your fucking act together, and also we're going to be opening up this market to competition. So that is, I cannot tell you how big of a fucking deal that is, okay, so I've already been done. That's the well, I'm going to say this, if you're working for a traditional DoD contractor, I'd be, I'd be looking I'd I'd be paying very close attention to the tea leaves. Okay, because those organizations are not going to be poised to compete with anyone
Zack Scriven 55:36
because their digital, their digital
Walker Reynolds 55:38
fluency, is it's the combination of two things, hubris. Go ahead and talk to anybody who works at her Atheon, seriously. They're hubris. They believe that it's their blind spot. They don't believe, you know, they they just, they can't see it. They've been king of the hill way too long. And it's cognitive dissonance, yes, and and that's number one and number two. Talk to them about anything architecture related, anything, everything is a silo, everything, and they believe it should be that way. Yeah,
Zack Scriven 56:18
it's so ingrained in their culture, they don't understand how it could be any other way.
Walker Reynolds 56:23
And so what was the outcome? The outcome is this, and I got to be careful on this part, because I can't share anything that's i don't i Please don't make me edit this when we're done. Yeah, okay, let me. Let me just say it this way. In in the defense world, the United States is far behind in capabilities than our enemies are. Let's put it that way, very far behind. And when and when the Pentagon did an analysis, you're just leaking National Intelligence, no, no, and when the Pentagon did an analysis, no, because this part, this part's public, there have been public statements around this. The the I'm trying to limit it to just what the public statements were. So the when the Pentagon took a look, they said, Hey, our our enemies. They are, they are much faster from concept to delivery, and they are much more efficient in quality testing. What we get, what they get from their contractors, is of higher quality than what we get from our contractors,
Zack Scriven 57:34
just on any given vehicle or something, anything.
Walker Reynolds 57:37
Yeah, and so and then, and the question is, why? What about services for government? IT consulting, training? Yes, I suspect Chris is a great question. I suspect we are going to see this across the federal agencies. I don't think this is going to be limited to just the DOD. I think a really big one, a really big one department of energy. So think about how hard it is to work with the DOE right now, or how hard it is to work with the DOD. You're going to see that get a lot easier, because there is a philosophical policy belief that we we need to increase competition now. And that part I know is fact, because it's come from multiple people who have told me from their conversations with you know, their people, their point of contacts at the Pentagon. Okay, I know that's fact. What I speculate is that Elon and Doge played a huge role in that, that Elon looked and said, What in the fuck you know, like What in the fuck you know. So that's a big deal, okay? And so if you're an integrator, for example, you're a consultant. There are, there are industries a lot of us stay away from. Like, for example, you either do life sciences and nothing else, or you do everything else but life sciences. Okay? You either do defense, DOE or nothing else, or you do No, do no DOD and everything else. And the same thing with the Department of Energy. And what I do see as a trend is that government agencies are going to be leaning on the consultants and the service providers who have been transforming the private sector, okay, that is absolutely the trend. And if you're an integrator, if you're a service provider, if you're software provider, it doesn't matter which vendors I'm talking to, they're seeing the same shit. There are. Are a lot of vendors out there, software vendors who are now bringing their software into compliance so it can be used in DOD, because they're seeing these trends. So you better have a strategy. Even if you don't want to work with the DOD, even if you don't want to work with the Department of Energy, you better have a strategy to incorporate how you would all right, I'm gonna do two other things. I'm gonna, let's go to a genetic respond to the Paul Boris comment that one is so good, man, yeah, I want to do this. Let's do a genetic. Ai here. This is another big trend that
Zack Scriven 1:00:31
ties into the Paul Boris comment on yes and Emily's post. So
Walker Reynolds 1:00:35
I am going, I have been working over the last few weeks on building a demo. Okay, actually, we're building a platform, and I've been working with our software developers to build a platform that I really would like to open source, if I can. We may have to commoditize part of it, because I do have a board of directors and bills to pay. We'll try to figure out how to do it, but we are building a platform that is going to help people, design, architect, test and simulate, monitor and interact with their unified namespaces. Okay? So that's what the platform is going to be. It's kind of, it's going to be kind of a development tool and a simulation tool, right? Um, I, we're well beyond. When you
Zack Scriven 1:01:27
say design, you mean I want to build out. My is a 95 model, yep. Okay, that's on the road map,
Walker Reynolds 1:01:35
yeah? And I, no, it's not. I already have. I already have a, you didn't show me that part. Hey, yeah, I already have, I'll show you. You know, I already have one that will do that simulation for you. Okay, so it's pretty slick. I know for me, it's very useful. When someone asks me a question about uns, I just go to this tool that we've built,
Zack Scriven 1:01:56
was there something that you kind of built for? Prove it, they're like, hey, I want to turn this into a product.
Walker Reynolds 1:02:01
I built it after. I built it after, prove it. It came from all these it came from all these questions that I got it. Prove It, about something that's missing in the market. And I'm like, Well, no one would build this. You know what I mean? Because it's like, why is there no better MQ TT explorer? Why is it go ahead and try to find a better MTT client, you know? You know what the better MTT client is that MTT explorer, ignition, ignition. Okay, and what's cool about ignition is ignition turns MTT topics into ignition tag objects, which makes it very unique, whereas an MQTT explorer turns a topic into root and leaf nodes in a tree structure. But why is it no one's built a better MTT explorer. Why is it we don't have five choices MTT Explorer is the only one out there that gives you all the stuff we need, right? But what's missing is a tool for designing uns, simulating uns, architecting uns, testing uns, and interacting with one. That tool is missing, and so we've built it here. Part of what I built in there is a simulator for agentic AI. I want to caution the industry here. I love all the stuff that people are doing around the art of the possible. Aaron semle is doing a lot of great content around agentic AI, so is Mark Friedman from tulip. I'm getting a lot of questions, hey, Walker, what am I supposed to be doing with agentic? AI? And the answer is, I don't know if you should be using it at all yet. Okay, we are in the right now. What Aaron and Mark are doing is the art of the possible. It is. They are reframing the way you think so you know kind of the direction you're going. You're gonna be using AI agents to interact with data infrastructure to make decisions and there and those agents are going to interact with one another. Okay, so it goes far beyond a chat bot, okay, all right. But here, if there's anything I could communicate all everyone's making the same mistake with agentic AI. I'm gonna shoot a video tomorrow. I will publish and I'll show you what that mistake is. I'll show you the solution to that mistake. But there, everyone's making the same mistake. Okay? They are turning their AI agents into black boxes. Little hint. Okay, so the the reasoning that the agent is using is hidden from the infrastructure. So therefore the reasoning can't be stored if it's not being published into the UNs, it's not going to be stored in context and normalized to other data points. Therefore it can't be used for finding patterns and data we can't see with the naked eye that would be like the parameter values correct. It may be the prompt. It may be which models being is it's using at that time. It may be, uh, it may be the same prompt from an operator. To get you know you want. You want to make sure that the when the when a prompt is passed into an agent, you want to, you want to know what that prompt was, okay, and that's actually an attribute of an agent. You'll oftentimes see that in a JSON there will be, like, a key value pair of what the prompt was. You want to be able to can tie that prompt to what the reasoning was. Guess what artificial intelligence hallucinates in three days in a row? Three days in a row. I want you to ask a large language model the same question three days in a row, and you will not get the same answer three times in a row, you won't give the same answer two times in a row, you're gonna get a different answer. So part of what we have to do is we have to track the reasoning itself. And everyone is missing it. All these brilliant people are missing it. They're not they're not going, hey, the decision. You know, this is part of the reason Claude is so powerful as a large language model. Claude by default, their API reports back to you the decision making process open. Ai, doesn't do that, really? Yeah, Claude by default, does it? It's part of their API. So what I'm going to be, I have a video that's coming tomorrow where I'm going to be showing a demo, and I'm going to be and I'll be talking about this, but for those you who are getting with agentic, AI, here's my message to you, you gotta stand before you walk. You gotta walk before you run. Okay, most of you are not ready for agentic. Ai, why? Because most of you don't have the data infrastructure. Why? Because not very few of you have mastered the art of Connect, collect, store in your organization. Yeah. So to that end, to that end, we are doing. Trent, Christopher, what is Trent's company's name? Please pop that up here. I can't remember his. It's 4.0 hero. That him, okay, Trent, Christopher, formerly of Omron, okay. He's, he's, he's an edge guy, instrumentation guy, fucking brilliant, great software developer. Yes, UNH has a great uns integrated Alex, absolutely huge fans of Umh, by the way. So is Trent, Christopher and at 4.0 hero and Brian private mock controls. They did a they they used umh in their their prove it session at prove it, prove it. This year, Trent Christopher is gonna be doing and correct me if I'm wrong here. But it's two day workshop,
Zack Scriven 1:07:35
three day, three day workshop, edge. It's edge integration into unified namespace.
Unknown Speaker 1:07:43
I hold on. He sent it to me here. Here we go. All right, so
Zack Scriven 1:07:50
June, our training, June 17,
Walker Reynolds 1:07:52
18 and 19. For those of you in mastermind, okay, there is no um mastermind session in June. There's a workshop that month, June, 17, 18 and 19, starting at 9am each day. Trent Christopher is going to be doing edge connectivity and the UNs workshop, okay? It's four hours per day interactive exercises. It's primarily for engineers, solutions, architects, controls, engineers, digital transformation leaders and anyone who's building or supporting a units in industrial environments. This is primarily going to focus on Connect, collect, store, okay, that is a prerequisite. It is the it is the stand part. It is the stand part that you have to have before you can walk with agentic AI, okay, it is the stand part, okay, connect, collect, store is standing. All right. This is going to be for an intermediate to advanced technical professionals. All right. And I want to read why we're doing this, because many people. My biggest fear with agentic AI is that people who are at the bottom of the Technology S Curve, they have not finished becoming a smart business, connect, collect, store, analyze, visualize, find patterns, report, solve, iterate, iterate, iterate, and now I've got this big, expansive data infrastructure, contextualized, normalized, semantically organized. Okay, that's what your AI agents are going to interact with. Okay, they're not going to just interact with model, context, protocol, MCP, to go get historical data. What, what you're going to be doing is using AI agents to look at current state, to trigger decisions to go get old data to make decisions about what to do, about current state, to mitigate the future. That's the connection, right there, right? Everyone is missing this human being would do, right? Everyone is missing this. Everyone is missing. Everyone who's talking about agentica, what's my boiler
Zack Scriven 1:09:56
is not performing well. Let me go look at the trend of the temperature.
Walker Reynolds 1:09:59
Here Correct. What you're going to do is agents are going to monitor the data for what you are going to say is the abnormal event, if abnormal event. Now I want you to go through this sequence.
Zack Scriven 1:10:14
This is where flow software plugs in really nicely with their exposing those endpoints for an MCP agent.
Walker Reynolds 1:10:20
And I think Aaron seble at high bite is doing the best job right now of demonstrating the art, demonstrating the art of the possible. Okay, now I in mastermind, I showed, hey, here's some things he's not doing that are going to be kind of important, but it's but that's not his focus. His focus is the art of the possible right now. Okay, so I'm going to be, I'm going to be shooting a video tomorrow to kind of go over this all right, but let me, let's do, let's read this guy's comment here. So Aaron semle, he posted a week ago. He said, uns does not connect with AI agents. Okay. MCP, it actually does AI. Agents can monitor the UNs in real time, and we actually do that through data caches. Okay, so how do you do that? I have an agent that has a data cache running. It's basically, um, it's temporal. It, it is it all the last events are stored in a data cache. When the next set of events comes in, the cache is cleared, and the only thing that the large language model sees is the latest data cache. It is it is interpreting the latest data cache for it's looking for a pattern that makes it want to take action. Okay? We're triggering it based on some event. Okay? And Aaron has, Aaron has showed how to do this using high byte, where model context protocol comes in, is once I pick up the event, either in the data cache, or whether I pick up that event, like, say, I'm using a platform like hi byte that is looking for an alarm that will then trigger the agent, okay, which we can also just have the agent running in a loop, monitoring a data cache, okay, a data stream, the stream of the current state running right underneath it, and it picks up the event. So it can monitor for more than one event at a time. It can monitor for one of 100 events. The prompt can be, if any of these 100 conditions, then what happens is, it does advanced reasoning. It says, Okay, I've seen this issue. Okay. Interpret this for me. It sends a uses a prompt, hits the end point of the large language model. The large language model then goes through some advanced reasoning. It has the documentation for the model, context protocol, the large language model will respond with, okay, go hit these three methods. Okay, go hit these three methods from our historical data, and based on those results, we will interpret those results, and then we will reason what our steps should be. Okay, two things are missing. Number one, yes, AI, you and AI agents do interact with a uns, but model context protocol doesn't model complex model. MCP is not an agent. MCP is a tool that agents use. Okay, all right, so he said MCP is a request, response server, uns, at least the classic definition is report by exception, MQ, tt, however, current state is all of the lat the latest values for all of the topics in the namespace. Okay, you can't stream data into chat GPT. No, you can't, but you can cache it and then send it to chat GPT as one cache. You can do that chat GPT decides when to request data from a given source, given a prompter instructions absolutely when it comes to the MCP component, this is nuanced, but important. Any demo you see of uns to AI agents is done one of the following feeding snapshots of the UNs into a chat context. Yes, like taking a cache and sending it Okay, or putting an API around the UNs to make it queryable? Yeah, I see that less, but I you know, that's a good example. Share this. Share the screen you're looking at. I think I pulled up the wrong comment. No, you have to. It's his. It's his comment. Under he his comment is on Aaron's post. I'm reading Aaron's post first I was reading his share, right? This isn't an attack on uns. Everything we do to contextualize factory data in a uns is valuable. I just don't want people to think that the two can be instantly connected. They can be but, but you MCP like for example, I can store the list of MCP, the model, context, protocol methods. I can store that list, those lists of methods in a uns, and I can. And a chat bot can consume that context from the data cache. Now, why you would do that? I would just use high byte to do it, because Hi byte is has implemented it incredibly well. Um, going one step further, I'd, uh, argue that although current state of the factory is useful and a good starting point, you need all the other data history, mes quality systems to really get value out of agentic AI. No question there. Should the definition of uns expand and will AI drive this? The definition of uns will not expand, okay? Uns unified namespace is the structure of a business and all the events. It is an architecture, okay? So the event is not the data stores that you need, that an agent needs to go retrieve, but here is an event, okay, an event is when I've instantiated the list of MCP methods that my agents can use. Here's another event when an agent is taking action. Okay? So in fact, I will, I will share my my screen here. Zack,
Zack Scriven 1:16:07
you need to understand what an event is, and when you consider the context of every event, you can use the standard definition of a unified namespace, which is the structure and the events Correct. Let me, yeah, let me, let me. I'm going to share my screen here, bolting onto it and interfacing with other applications. Say that again, MCP is bolting onto it and interfacing with other APIs.
Walker Reynolds 1:16:34
Correct? Yes, absolutely. All right, let me move this over here, and
Zack Scriven 1:16:41
I would saying every text message that employees want to, you know, sends to another, should be part of the UNs. Like, why is it that we have context that's in? Well,
Walker Reynolds 1:16:52
be because, again, people, people have to expand. People have to expand their minds. If I send
Zack Scriven 1:16:58
you an email saying, hey, we need to turn on this, this chiller, and we need to change the set point. And then you go do that, both events should be tracked the email, and you changing the set point recurrently, only you changing the set point is tracked.
Walker Reynolds 1:17:12
All right. So what I want you to do go ahead and show my screen with the Explore it's showing it's right, all right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and run. So this is my simulator manager, by the way. This is part of the platform that we've been working on. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and just run an agent demo. And so what's happened is, I've got a couple of production agents running. Okay, so production agent two. This is a this is using it. This is using MCP. I have a production agent that's running in the press area. Okay, the supervisor put in an input. Why is line one rejecting so many parts today? Okay, we're using Cloud three, sonnet, okay, the model status is healthy. We're using a chat NLP interface. All right. Here are the calls that were executed based on that chat. Why is line one rejecting so many parts today? Okay, we're in the press area. We passed in this data source and we got the the we we called, get rejection data for line one, get the shift report for line one and get the set points for line one so that we could answer this question. This piece is missing in all of these examples, by the way, line Why is line one rejecting so many parts today can be driven from data that we see in line one. That is the agent monitoring the current state from the data cache. And then this is an example of we're predicting cycle time at a production agent at the production line. This is agentic AI. This is a demo of agentic AI and how it interacts with a unified namespace in real time. And so if I wanted to show you what that looks like relative to a bunch of other, you know, you know, data in a uns. So now what I've got is my agents living right alongside all of the live data, and I'm going to show, I'll show that video more completely, or that demo more completely in the video tomorrow. But the thing that I want to stress to you is, if you don't have a mature, unified namespace, okay, you are, you are, you won't even be able to scratch the surface on the value of agentic. Ai, okay? And if you don't have a plan for integrating the decision making process from your agents into your Uranus, which your uns is current state, then you don't have uns any. More. Okay. All right, let me, let's finish. Let's finish. What his, uh, Paul's, yeah, Paul. All right, so Paul Boris says, Aaron, here's where I get stuck. All of this is intended to reconstitute context that has been stripped from the data during its collection. I'm here to learn, so educate me. Well, I, I would say, No, it's not reconstituting. It is generating, and the context was never stripped during its collection. The context sometimes we there's an important concept in context. So I'm assuming Paul is probably a, a it, yeah, he's got to be on the IT side, it. So in manufacturing, you have additive context. So I mean people, this is why digital thread always failed, because that an event that happens on the edge 60 times per second needs to be contextualized and normalized against events that happen at l3 60 seconds later, and only at every 60 seconds that uns contextualizes, normalizes, nices them together. This is why object oriented programming can't be universal. In digital transformation, there is no object you can throw down on the edge that's going to encapsulate full context of data and information in your business. It's additive. As it moves around, as transaction takes place, the context changes you have uns gives you the ability to add that context as it's being in real time, as an event. Right nearly every move of data away from its source, strips it of some sort of context by definition, or it is replication, and for the vast majority of shops, full replication is impossible or unjustifiable. Think of a summary of a machine repair. It has all sorts of compression loss, unless it's a full motion video of the activity and a narration by the actors that is driven by a QA to expose the reasoning behind looking at pneumatics versus hydraulics first, or something like that. I don't I disagree with, yeah. I disagree with his premise. Yeah, I disagree with the premise there. The effort to contextualize factory data exists because, well, we stripped context from the root data via compression or missing? No, we didn't they. So missing Association, there was no association there to begin with, for whatever your workers on your PLC, correct? The the the it's not what you're doing is you're you're piecing the context together as it moves up your infrastructure based on how your business runs, which functions your businesses utilize, and which transactions you fire and and the rate at which you collect the events and you're piecing them together. Uns is where all that coalesces together at the same time. It is the infrastructure upon which things communicate with one another, and then we semantically organize it so that context is native, right? One of the things that he's missing, and this is, I think this is a thing that most people miss, a data point doesn't live in just one place in the UNs, like the same temperature, the value off of the same temperature sensor could be in 20 different places, right? Because we're we're organizing it, we're contextualizing it based on where that temperature is used in functions of the business. This is the fundamental it's a fundamental architecture. Example,
Zack Scriven 1:23:34
ambient, ambient, ambient temperature. You may only have one ambient temperature sensor, but every production line that you're producing equipment off of may want to know what the ambient temperature was, and you would need to add further up the stack
Walker Reynolds 1:23:48
Correct. You may have a preventative maintenance function. Okay, you have a you may have a preventative maintenance function on each of your printing presses, for example. Okay, so I have one ambient air temperature on the ceiling of the building. So when I get to the site, Enterprise site, under site, I would have ambient air temperature sensor. It would say edge, and then an ambient air temperature that would be the sensor. You may also have line one, but you may have it in line one under preventative maintenance function, one of the inputs that it is using may be the ambient air temperature. We may change the rate of preventative maintenance, triggering our PMS based on what the ambient air temperature has been over time. You may see ambient air temperature in many places in the US because it's wrapped in functional wrappers. It ingresses through an edge namespace, but then it is wrapped in functional wrappers. In many places, in the US, in simple terms, you're referencing that namespace topic in other places of the name, correct, correct. Yeah, you're, I think you're talking all over people's head right there. I understand what you're saying, but yeah, as in all. Alternative, people are gonna be like, What the fuck is? Yeah. See, look at what Paul is saying here. This is yeah as an alternate. If we could access the route reliably and deterministically, then we can inherit context. He's talking about object oriented data modeling. So no, this is digital thread where he's literally, yeah. It's all backwards, right? So the issue is, is, and I commented here, I'm not going to read the rest
Zack Scriven 1:25:25
of it. What is his diet coke? What is the Diet Coke test? I don't understand that. What's that? What is this his diet coke test? The Diet
Walker Reynolds 1:25:32
Coke test is, we'll read his explanation. But Fred and I are on third shift Sunday, a couple of rookies. The machine is beginning to get wonky. My grandpa always used to dump Diet Coke in the gears in his shop. Said something about it thinning the grease. And Fred said, to give it a shot. Will the super whammy dine next gen? Ai monitoring all the data that I can catch know about the diet coke. Is that data captured anywhere, ever? Yes, it's captured in the CMMS. Or is an AI concluded that the most likely reason is the combination product thickness divided by the square of the humidity in the shop. No, the if, if the event of the event of dumping Coca Cola on the gears, must be captured in a uns. And oftentimes, the way it is captured is through CMMS. So the machine is to wrap up this podcast, the rising event. The rising edge of the event is, machine is wonky. That rising event triggers a work order, a work a work order in the CMMS in say, maintenance, okay, maintenance. That that work order gets assigned to a maintenance person who goes and talks to the operator. The operator says, Hey, uh, you know my grandpa said I used to be able to be able to dump Diet Coke on the gears and would fix everything. Okay? So then the the what is the mechanic say? He says, Let's do it. So he goes to inventory and he checks out a bottle of Diet Coke. Okay, he checks out a bottle of Diet Coke. That event gets picked up in the UNs. Coke retrieved, and now he goes and he dumps it. And then when he's done, he inputs into the his notes, hey, the solution here is we dump Diet Coke on there. All thing as well, where work order completed, machine restarts. We pick up the rising edge of the restart. And now what's been stored is an event of from this rising edge to this falling edge of our this rising edge of our downtime, to this falling edge of our downtime and this rising edge of our restart. The the intervention of this downtime was we dumped Coca Cola on the gears.
Zack Scriven 1:27:37
That's why maintain X is so important, because it can track that full life cycle of that maintenance. And
Walker Reynolds 1:27:44
not only that, it can publish it into the UNs as a as an event with that downtime. So while state is zero, question Paul,
Zack Scriven 1:27:52
yes, if you're using maintain X, yes, it can pick that up.
Walker Reynolds 1:27:56
And I'm not picking on Paul here. What I'm saying is, is that Paul is definitely coming from this. I don't know what his background is. Is he a software developer? He's an eye. He's got to be an IT guy. Yeah, he's well, he says, manufacturing.
Zack Scriven 1:28:10
What's his factor? Mansion,
Speaker 1 1:28:14
strategic accounts, manufacturing, um.
Zack Scriven 1:28:17
He's, he looks like, well, UI, path, he looks
Walker Reynolds 1:28:21
like he's been a it kind of guy, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Operating Officer GE. He was at GE Digital So, yeah, he speak, he's thinking, he's thinking digital thread SAP over nine years. Yeah, he's thinking, he's thinking digital thread. So here, here's the issue. Let's talk about what the issue would be there. And then I want to do regime's thing, and then we're done. I want to answer. Rajeev, okay, I just shot this video earlier, and I'm not going to publish it. You want to know what the number one of the number one problems we have with digital transformation. Our industry. Software developers and engineers aren't nearly as fucking smart as they think they are, and they don't know it okay. Here, here, let me. Let me say this, if you are solving problems for manufacturers and you have no manufacturing experience at all, you have never worked on the plant floor, go back and let me see then you do not know manufacturing. Okay? So I want you, all of you, software developers, engineers, consultants, I want you to ask yourself, how much manufacturing experience do you have? It is no mistake. Okay, it's not accidental that I have 12 years working in manufacturing. Starting shoveling belts to, you know, driving a pickup truck around a mine, trying to find a tripped flagged e stop on, you know, 100 miles of conveyor to troubleshooting. You know, out of phase 4160, You know, the impact of a sweat, a swapped l2 l3 leg on a 4160 feed midway through our power distribution system to our in its in, its impact on Power Factor coming at the transformer out of, you know, out in the face box that is driving the roof bolters and the drills all the way to the, you know, the the implication of pneumatic control, the reliability of pneumatic control when fired by electric control. So electric over pneumatic control and stitching machines here, if you don't have, if you don't know how manufacturing works, like if you disagree with this statement, okay, there is only one thing that matters in a manufacturing environment, and anyone who tells you otherwise is fucking lying to you. The only thing that matters is production. Okay? For 12 years in my career, not one time did an organization when they truly had to choose between safety and production. Did they choose safety? They always chose to turn a blind eye because the safety is something they do when they can afford to do it. Quality is something they focus on when they can afford to focus on it. I have literally seen operations managers ship product that they knew was garbage didn't meet our quality standards. They shipped it anyway, because that manager made a calculation. They were doing calculus in their head. They were looking and they were going this procedure says, don't ship this however, we have this enormous penalty on this contract with this client, and what is the likelihood that this quality issue is going to come back to haunt us? It's pretty low, but what is the likelihood that we're gonna have to pay out $500,000 for the Miss shipment if we're late, it's 100% they will weigh Okay, we're gonna break the rules, and it happens all the fucking time. They'll make the decision, you, Mr. Process Engineer, you will go, we're only when we're only going to use these approved raw materials for this sub assembly going into manufacturing, this finished good guess what? That goes out the fucking window the moment they don't have that raw material, and they got one that's good enough, comes on online, they got a good enough one. Okay, that's the way manufacturing works. So you want to know why unified namespace has worked so well as an architecture because it operate. It operates in reality. It doesn't operate in theory. This is the reason it's adoption theory. Yeah, it's the reason it is its adoption has exploded. It doesn't paint anyone in a fucking corner. And you have all these architects all over the world undergoing well unified namespace seems so simple to me. Why? Why is it? And it seems so pedantic and it seems so provincial. Well, guess what? You're not that fucking important dude. You want to know who's important. You want to know who the most important people in any manufacturing operation are? It's the people who do the actual fucking work and though. And you know why? Because they are tasked with producing the shit that pays the fucking bills up. No Process Engineer. Let me say this, there isn't a process engineer on the planet who is more valuable than a press operator who's been operating a printing press for 30 years that he you are not more valuable, even if you've been a process engineer for 30 years, you're not more fucking valuable. You are not more valuable than the the front end loader, who's been running front end loaders for 30 years. Back when they didn't have hydrostatic transmissions. They were electrical. They were hydraulic over hydraulic control, originally the original generation, then they were hydraulic or pneumatic over hydraulic control, then they were electric over hydraulic control, and then they were electric over hydraulic via remote control, that operator, 30 years of running a front end loader across four generations of technology, is 100 times more valuable than the fucking Process Engineer. What about the data that came from here is, here's the problem in digital transformation. You know where the data is. It's in that operator's head. Well,
Zack Scriven 1:34:46
but if you had the data from all of that, 30 years of operating that, plus all of every other operator you're you're getting
Walker Reynolds 1:34:52
right. You're getting right. To my point, you know the best time to do anything was five years ago. The second best time is fucking today. Yeah. Yeah, okay. What is digital transformation supposed to be about? It's about unlocking the potential in your frontline employee, and what is the biggest potential in your legacy employee, all that fucking knowledge in their head. But what do you do the Diet Coke? It's, it's, uh, you know, Jared, Jared, my son, Jared, was talking to me about a thing that was going on at one of his clients, and he was going, Hey, we're having this issue with, you know, basically, they have this material definition thing they want to enforce these lot, you know, the the software guy wants to or the operations guy wants to make the operators only use the materials that the he pre, he pre selects when they when they do this, so they have to be limited to and he, it's called the checklist, materials checklist. He goes, but then they override it all the time anyway. And I go, Well, of course, like 100% of the time is to do something that you just can't do, right? He, what he wants to do, something that he can't do your it's your job to tell him, uh, did you talk to the operators about this? The operators are going to tell you whether or not that's fucking possible, whether or not, whether or not you listen to him. That's a completely different story. Also the scrap category I know he was talking about. Make Make no mistake about it. Make no mistake about it. Okay, software developers and engineers, of which I am one, you are not that fucking important. Get it through your head. You must. The most important people in the organization are the people who do the actual work. And if your focus is not on solving their problems, then you are wasting your time. You are wasting their time, and you're wasting the organization's time. Okay? Digital thread came from people who thought they knew better. They were fucking wrong. If they had worked on the edge at all, if they had ever actually worked in manufacturing, they would have known it is impossible to create a digital object that applies across two assets, let alone 2000
Zack Scriven 1:37:12
but again, namespace is a reflection of what's actually on the plant floor.
Walker Reynolds 1:37:16
Uns is an architecture that is designed to collect the reality as it is. Rather than trying to enforce a theory on reality, you can never enforce we
Zack Scriven 1:37:28
have to hit Nats. So we still have to hit the NATs IO thing. But I have a question. Oh, yeah, I'll do next. This is a I've never asked you this question.
Walker Reynolds 1:37:39
Let me, let me answer the nets thing. Let me answer the NATs thing. Okay, all right. You'd like to know more why I held back on Nats. I A lot of people have asked me about Nats. Okay, over the last year, year and a half, I've had an opinion on nats for a year, year and a half, I've talked about it privately. Here's what I suspected. The demand for one of the things there's, my father used to tell me all the time is, you have to understand, Walker, there's always going to be lots of noise out there. There's always going to be lots of noise, okay? And most of it's just marketing. Most of it's people creating demand. I mean, do you know that there are, you know, look at McAfee. Look at where McAfee antivirus came from. Okay, look at, look at where antivirus software came from. It was the people who wrote the viruses who then wrote software that you needed to buy from them to save you from the viruses they wrote. Okay? They what they did was they created demand where no demand existed. They created the problem that they would then solve and sell the solution to Okay, one of the things that my father used to say was, you have you must understand the incentive, and who's incentivized. The demand for nats came from nowhere. When people started asking me about NATs, I tried to figure out where that was coming from. Like no one's done anything great with it. There's no there is no like gold standard example, like on paper, nats looks impressive. It looks impressive, but there's no achievement. So where was that demand coming from. So you have to go to who is incentivized to create it. So I went back and I looked at sanadia, and I looked at kind of how they, you know, they basically, it's Nats. Is their protocol, okay? They made it open, but they reserved to write, to close it. Most people didn't know that they reserved the right to close it. And now that's a common clause in the licensing. And I I just said, You know what? I'm gonna wait and see, and if I see a big achievement with Nat. Some architecture that just blows my fucking mind. Okay, you know, say Boeing turns it around, using nats for their digital infrastructure. Then I'll look a little deeper, and we'll start talking about it. Is this actually open edge driven report by exception of lightweight, because at face value, it looks like it checks off the boxes. But the fact is, it's not really open. It's not open for the same reasons. OPC, way is not open, okay? And the press releases that came out, look at, look at what's happened. NATS, the the CEO of sanadia nearly destroyed, right? Sanadia is an I'm saying the name right. Vaughn, I'm saying the name right. Put that up in the chat. Yes or no, sanadia, yes. Okay. Thank you. So a press release came out earlier this week saying that sanadia had essentially announced that they were going to close nets, that it was their intellectual property. They were the ones who were doing all the work, and they were going to close it, and they were going to wrap it back into their proto. They basically were going to take an an open standard, or rapid and closed IP. Okay, the backlash was swift and huge. Literally, two days after Vaughn did the post, or whoever did the post about NATs, two days later, that press release came out, then the CEO of sanadia came out with his own press release the next day, going, Oh, wait, wait, wait, and he was trying to explain it. They're getting fucking blasted from every side. And then a new press release came out today trying to clarify. No, in fact, they're trying to walk back the statement that it was going to get closed. And so now you know why I wasn't talking about it. It's, you know, it's, there are many companies that come to me and they're like, Hey, look at my tech. Okay, you know, look, at my look at this awesome tech we have here. And I'm like, great. What are your values? What are your mission? What's your goal with this tech? Like, you know, with litmus. Litmus wanted me to promote their product, like, in 2019 but when I asked them the question about, it really looks like you guys are, like, you know, getting your you're looking for an exit. It really looks like you're building this company to sell it to a major player. And I don't want to, I'm not going to promote a product that ends up in the hands of Rockwell or Schneider or Microsoft or whatever. And it wasn't until I met with Vatsal and he said, Listen, no, our plan is to, you know, he gave me his word. I guarantee you, we are not selling this company in the next five years. He guaranteed it. And I take the man at his word, okay, and his values are lined up with mine. So then I said, okay, yeah, it's great tech. From the very beginning, I thought it was great tech, but the tech alone isn't enough. The values of the people who created and control that tech are just as important, or, if not more important, than the tech itself.
Zack Scriven 1:43:14
Okay, how do you calculate that?
Walker Reynolds 1:43:18
Well, I mean, I think it's part of my value in the market, if I'm being honest, you part of my like, it's like an emotional thing, and you're trying to put a it. My brain. My brain operate here, here's here's a my brain operates looking for the incentive. Like, when, when Arlen Nipper and Andy Stanford Clark, who are the CO inventors of MQ TT, okay. When, when they decided that they were going to give the MQ TT standard to the Eclipse Foundation and make it open, okay? And yet, Arlen's company, Cirrus Link was going to be the primary contributor to the standard. And then he has a company that is using this technology, serious link where he had Alexis. He was owner of Alexis that made gateways that used MTT, so it converted proprietary protocols into the open MTT, standard, lightweight for like, serial networks and stuff, right? You know, over V sat and cellular. He he was making his money taking open to the world, so he had no incentive to close MTT, because the more people who are using MTT created an incentive, created an incentive for for people to use his products. So that was a scenario where the incentive structure was set up, where MQTT remained incentivized to be open. And then once Facebook adopted it for Facebook Messenger, now you know it's not going anywhere once, once it's the backbone of Facebook Messenger, then you. No, it's gonna remain open forever. So I when I and I did that same homework when I was introduced to MQ, tt, but it was obvious that the incentive structure was, there's no way this is ever getting closed. The incentive structure is for it to remain open. That is not the same incentive structure for nets. First off, the demand for nats came from nowhere. It was being promoted by sanadia, and then this week now, just as it gains traction, just as it start gain traction, hey, we get this press release, you know, hey, no, they're going to take back ownership of it. It's going to be it's not going to be closed. We're no longer going to support open because we're doing all the work. This is our intellectual property. That's, yeah, dude, his fucking dude. Let me Vaughn, what's the name of that CEO at San Diego, that motherfuckers career is over. It's over. Derek Collison, no one will ever let no one is because I'm Derek. No one is ever going to listen to him, ever again. Anybody who knows this story will never listen to him ever again, and he knows it. He's fine. He knows it so. But I'll say this as always, if I mentioned your name on this podcast and I said something that you disagree with, you can come on the podcast and I will give you a form to defend yourself. It is only right about Nats. Honestly, yeah, I would love to talk about Nats. And I would love to hear from Derek, because right now, there's zero chance nats will not be included in the list of protocols that you can use for uns. There is no way I will fucking promote it that way. None. There's no way, none. And what I said to Vaughn, when Vaughn sent me that press release, Vaughn's want to send me the press release? I said, I fucking knew it. We had this whole conversation, and I'm like, Vaughn. I said, Vaughn, this situation, he'll tell you right now. I said, this situation right here is why. It's just one reason why I've been so successful in my career, I've made these decisions. They've come from inside my gut, and I was right. I fucking knew it. All right, I want to do one last thing, and then we'll sorry. I know we've gone forever, but probably nobody left, but the people. People listen to it on Apple podcast. All right, Rajeev Anand did a post. He did a comment on a 4.0 solutions post. Rajeev is a very active member of the community, follows all our content, and very valued member of the community. So he says uns is more than the edge. Yes, it is. No one's ever said uns is the edge. You guys need to stop imposing your in quotes minimum requirements you are not the buyer or the user. Please stop conflating a data architecture construct uns with communications protocols. Okay, we're not conflating what we are doing is we are talking about the relationship between data architecture and protocols. Can you have a protocol without a unified namespace? Yes or no, yeah. Can you have a unified namespace without a protocol? Yes or no, it would exist only in theory. It would exist in your fucking mind. It wouldn't exist anywhere. All right, so we are not conflating. We are not conflating communication protocols in uns. We are simply, yeah, you need. We are simply pointing out the relationship between the two. What are the minimum technical requirements for those communications protocols? They must be what for a uns,
Zack Scriven 1:48:37
open architecture, lightweight, Edge driven and report by exception.
Walker Reynolds 1:48:42
Thank you. Those are parameter those are descriptions. Parameters, requirements, technical requirements of a protocol. A protocol could be open, edge, driven, report by exception and lightweight, or it could be one, a couple of those things, and not the others. Okay, all we're doing is we're talking about the relationship between the two, and we make it very clear the difference between April, I have said a million times that the most common protocol that we use for uns is MQ, TT.
Zack Scriven 1:49:12
What if we were to design our own protocol like from scratch? How we don't need to? We, we've
Walker Reynolds 1:49:17
got great protocols. We, we've got, if you take, let me, let me say this, if you take, you would fix about it, or if you would take, extended, if you take, um, MQ, TTT, HTTP, HTTP, OPC, UA, and says, Me, profiles with the spark plug specification, those six things you have, everything you need. You gotta what? What other
Zack Scriven 1:49:49
you would need? A structured query language? What's that you would need? Structure? Query Language?
Walker Reynolds 1:49:55
No, I don't need that as a protocol. I. To digitally transform a factory, yeah, but that's not a protocol.
Zack Scriven 1:50:05
It's a programming language. What's that?
Walker Reynolds 1:50:09
It's a it's a standard, it's a standard, but it's not a communications protocol. Okay? You're communicating over, you're, you're you're communicating over a protocol to execute that connection. Yeah, you're rapper. You're wrapping it in a TCP transport. So he says, You've done a fine job of educating a certain audience. Please don't confuse them. We are confusing them by I think what he's saying is we're saying uns is edge. We do not say that. We say that uns is a function of where you enter an architecture. We also say that uns is the structure of your business and all the events. We do not say its edge, in fact extends, we say extends to the edge. Yes, in fact, we say it originates on the edge, honestly. So a user has an MES system, an actual case running in the cloud. Data from it is being shared in the UNs, along with ot data from the edge, you want them to bring the MES data to the edge, convert it to MTT, so it can meet edge driven requirements? Really? No, we do not want to do that. So we is right, is regime and mastermind. I
Zack Scriven 1:51:22
don't believe so no, no. Von says no. Okay.
Walker Reynolds 1:51:25
So Rajeev in in mastermind, we teach a I show the architecture that you generally deploy uns, and it's generally a three tiered architecture. So you'll have an edge you'll have an edge broker. You'll have a site level broker, generally in the DMZ, and then you'll have a cloud level broker. And then we go, so that's the vertical integration, that's the vertical scale. And then you go horizontally at each of those layers. Okay, no matter where I go in my uns, no matter which broker I'm hitting, okay, I potentially can see everything in the UNs. So what would happen is the MQ, the MES system that's living in the cloud, okay, is going to publish into the broker, probably through a load balancer, because it's going to be horizontally scaled, it's going to hit the load balancer endpoint, and it is going to publish into a space, a namespace. It's functional data, data model, than information model. Okay, that is going to be copied to all the brokers. So if I at the edge, if I have permission to subscribe to the namespace that the MES published to in the cloud, I will be able to see it on the edge. In the edge broker, the run edge generally is going to be like, it's in an area. There might be a broker running in the area, like where all the presses are. It might be running on each individual asset. But no, we are not suggesting what you put there. I mean, first off, I mean, it's riddled with in corrections. We do not say uns is more than the edge. We say it is the structure of the business and the all the events. In fact, let me say this, what is unified namespace? And go to virtual factory. Dot online, you can see a sample uns, a very basic one, and you can see the definition I've posted this a million fucking times.
Zack Scriven 1:53:19
Is this your definition of unified namespace? Walker, I created
Walker Reynolds 1:53:24
the architecture. What do you want me? What do you want me to do? I created the architecture. You want me to just go, sorry, guys, it's not writing me to have a definition. I mean, what do you want me to do? Man, did you
Zack Scriven 1:53:36
create unified namespace? Or did you discover unified namespace? I
Walker Reynolds 1:53:41
think, I think if I, I think if I hadn't. I mean, I've certainly, I've coined the term, right, right, right. But,
Zack Scriven 1:53:54
like architecture itself, did you create it, or did you discover it? Was that the only thing that was going to work, and you discovered it? No,
Walker Reynolds 1:54:00
no. There were other. I mean, point to point is how everybody, everyone was doing domain driven design. So they didn't call it domain driven design back then, but they were doing domain driven design, but point to point design, so you would have your your the way that you modeled data, the way you connected and collect. You know, collected, connected and collected was not a function of building a data infrastructure. In fact, you didn't care about the data infrastructure. You cared about this is why they called it data acquisition. You cared about acquiring the data point I need for a very specific reason, and you would connect it, you would immediately map it to where it was going to be consumed. So it would be consumed in a function, but it wouldn't live in an infrastructure. And I said, Wait a minute, that's ridiculous. Why? Why would I? Why is it that I'm having to map the same temperature? Sense? Or to six different functions in wonder where, for example, grabs each one of them correct. That's the whole thing. Of the beauty of MTT was you're not connecting devices to applications, you're connecting devices to infrastructure, correct. And, and when I built, when I built the first uns, and, oh, you know, from 2003 to 2000 it took two years to build the whole thing because I was using dynamic data exchange, data highway, plus the data dynamic data exchange, and then I was putting Excel spreadsheets on each of the supervisors laptops, and then our workstation in the and so as long as they were on the the intranet in the mine, then essentially each of the spreadsheets were subscribing to the same dde topics in our workstation, in our in our office, and so when they would open their spreadsheet, they would actually be it was a hub and spoke architecture. We had built the UNs, and the UNs was actually living in a desktop running on an Excel spreadsheet running, you know, in a in this office, and the Excel spreadsheets running on the supervisors laptops were connected to our Excel spreadsheet. They were subscribing to the the DDE topic over the network. Interesting, so, but here the, let me, um, let me finish the UNs definition, because this is coming up, and everybody's like, Walker definition. This is the definition. Okay, guys, this is the definition every uns I build. This is the fucking definition, the structure of your business and all the events. It's a single source of truth for all data and information of the business. So current state right now, single source of truth. It's not system of ownership. It's single source of truth. It's the current state of the business. All the events, data and information models contextualized and normalized. That is what, exactly what Paul was talking about, about, you know, all the stripped context, no, you're everything is fully contextualized in us. That is, there are relationships where from with every between every data point, by default, because they're semantically organized, okay, the place where the current state of the business lives. If I take a snapshot of uns at any given moment and take a slice of it, that's the current state right now, okay, the hub through which the smart things in your business communicate with one another, including people, the architectural foundation of your industry, four and digital transformation initiative, how you execute your digital strategy as uns why do we need it? We need it for scale. We need it for normalization of data, especially around AI and ML applications. We need it so that we have short time to value. What does that mean? It means that we have to be able to solve problems quickly. Therefore, we never use the length of time to solve a problem as a reason not to solve it. We need short time to value, okay? We just extend stand on the shoulders of yesterday's solution, security. It's inherently secure because one of the minimum technical requirements is edge driven, okay, like, I mean, I hate to break the news to you. You know why the produce security model exists because of the inferiority of the server, the the client server architecture. It because of the inferiority of serial networks.
Zack Scriven 1:58:18
They had to compensate. If you know, yes,
Walker Reynolds 1:58:21
uns is omnipresent and omniscient. It is everywhere and it knows everything, okay, and agility. You can, you can create, I can have permanent descriptive topics, something like the serial number on a motor, the install date, the OEM things that never change. They can be living aside, right alongside an ethereal topic that is a data point that gets published one time. And if someone's listening, they get it. If no one's listening, you don't even know it was ever published. Could
Zack Scriven 1:58:56
the location of that permanent topic be changed?
Unknown Speaker 1:59:01
Yes, of course,
Zack Scriven 1:59:03
absolutely have to be published again, yes, but you could tie it back to where it was previously correct using like, a tag this. This
Walker Reynolds 1:59:13
is how you use unified namespace. One of the biggest things is, like, end of line tester. This was a problem I wanted to solve you. Got in the printing industry, it is very common to have, oh, actually, let's do it in the molding. Injection molding. This is really common to use an end of line tester with a vision system shared across three assets. So I have three different injection molding machines. They all make different products. One operator runs all three. So one mission, only one machines ever running at any given time. So what we do is we buy one end of line tester, or we move the end of line tester to the machine that he's running. Okay, because I don't want to have three vision systems. I want one because I'm only ever using one at any given time. I. Okay, how do I collect the data? How do I know which machine the end align tester is running on, if I don't have that context uns gave that does that context is the location in the namespace correct? So what we did was very simple. Is you had three switches that that fucking end align tester could get plugged into, a switch on line one, a switch on line two, a switch on line three. Okay, each of those switches had a unique MAC ID. So on plug in, we just read the Mac ID, oh, I'm on line one, therefore I am publishing my data into the line one. Name space, that's three. Select line I plug into line two, read the Mac ID, oh, I'm on line two. I'm publishing my data into line two.
Zack Scriven 2:00:44
Doing it edge driven like that is so much better than having the operator enter it, because, you know, the second you leave the plant after training, they're going to forget to do it, and then you're going to think you're collecting line one data when it was really on line two, and it's going to be all fucked up. And right, all
Walker Reynolds 2:01:02
right. Any questions in there, I can only went two hours. Any questions in here, Vaughn that we need to answer. Better option is getting the protocol added to another like open telemetry. Yeah, it's true. So tomorrow I'm going to be publishing a video. I'm doing a demo on agentic. Ai, I showed you, I gave you a little bit of insight into it. I have a bunch of sketches I'm going to go through, but the message that I really want to communicate to people is a I'm I'm not, I didn't fall off the face of the earth. I'm just really, really, really, really, really, really, like, crazy busy. And it'll go until mid June, and then you'll see me back doing regular content. I will shoot some videos between now and then. But that's number one. Number two, you guys will see the announcement for Pruvit 2026 coming out in the next couple of weeks. You've been given the sneak peek into what to expect. If there's anything you'd like to see us do or cover at Pruvit in 2026 you know, include it in the comments down below. But other than that, if there's no other questions and Oh, huh, are data spaces being spoken about in the US yet? Or is it just for us here in Europe? No, there. There's no data spaces are discussed here the the question is, is, how will they be applied? Actually? What? What is their actual value? And how will they be applied data
Zack Scriven 2:02:54
spaces?
Walker Reynolds 2:02:57
We should shoot a separate video on it. What are data spaces, Vaughn, anything else. I shouldn't say better option, but I say wider adoption Avenue. I've always thought the UNs is complimentary to the Palantir ontology layer from the other end, agreed when, when someone asks me about palantir's ontology layer, which is basically the semantic hierarchy of their their you could argue that Palantir has a Palantir has a a proprietary, unified namespace sitting underneath their platform, and their ontology layer is how they expose it, right? They ontology layer is the semantic hierarchy with Palantir solutions. Why is it I don't promote Palantir solutions? It's the same reason I don't promote nets. I mean, I'm not a, I'm not an open source Nazi. What I what I don't want, what I am, though, is I am Peter. Peter till is a big guy in Palantir, right? Yeah, Peter Thiel. He's, he's the, he was the big investor, and I think he, he still sits on the floor. He totally
Zack Scriven 2:04:03
chose that guy, right?
Walker Reynolds 2:04:06
No, at a million fucking years, man, that's what I'm joking, yeah. All right, this is a really good question. Does Arduino and finder have a chance in industrial controls? The answer is absolutely, from a technical perspective, however, brand recognition, yeah, I've worked very closely with Arduino in the last couple years. We've promoted the Opta, Wi Fi, we've, in fact, I got a bunch of Arduino devices back there. Excuse me, very powerful stuff, absolutely lot and in you know, the their industrial grade hardware is really impressive. The. Portentous series. I'm a huge fan of the in fact, I have an h3 sitting here somewhere. Um, I absolutely love their stuff. The problem is, is that no one at Arduino really knows manufacturing. They know like in they know embedded control for hobbyists, and they've really struggled with going to market like they should have never called it Arduino to begin with. They should have called it portent of by Arduino. So they have a they have a brand recognition The name itself, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, think about their price point. I mean, you I find Arduino documentation frustrating, yeah, no, shit. What did Dylan defrain
Zack Scriven 2:05:54
said,
Walker Reynolds 2:05:58
yes, if you haven't read it, unit X is a great book about the transition we're seeing in DOD Yeah, it is drastic. I mean, I, you know, since prove it, Dylan, I mean, I'm stunned, if I'm being honest with you how, I mean, it's not really prove it. It's really the Trump administration coming in and, you know, just the administration's priorities are different. Very interesting thing. I Let's, uh, let's talk about this real quick, and then we'll call it a day. So, um, says me, right, says me, gets dollars from the federal government. Okay, under the Biden administration, all of sesame's language was around sustainability. It was around reducing energy costs. It was around green initiatives, like, that's all what all their like language around reshoring. Yeah, now it's about reshoring manufacturing. Okay, look, let me ask you, and I'm okay, and I'm okay with that. It's just my decision. That's part of the reason I don't want to work. I don't I wouldn't want to work in those environments. Here's another thing I want you to take a look something. Oh my god, this. I saw this the other day. I don't want to shit on Sesame because I actually love those guys. But let me, let me be a hair critical.
Zack Scriven 2:07:18
Am I delusional? If I say I believe that tariffs will help reassure manufacturing like it might do. Of course not.
Walker Reynolds 2:07:25
Of course not. Yeah, that's not delusional. It's not delusional. Today, we don't have the capabilities to manufacture a lot good it's not delusional in any way, shape or form. Why? Because the pattern is, if you look the you're what you're looking for on after a policy change, is, what is the initial tick? Is the initial tick up, or is it down? So is it there's a tick up in reshoring, or is there a tick down in reshoring, or does it lay flat? And what was the first thing that happened? Amazon, Apple, like all these major manufacturers, announced these huge initiatives to reshore and, you know, open up, obviously a good thing. Those are obviously those. Those are good things. Good because people will say, it's not, well, those are stupid people. They're not going to come on here and debate, I mean, that it's going to be somebody who's never worked in Maine. They're going to like, no one wants to work in Maine. That's not true. No one wants to work for that. No one wants to that's the point. No one wants to work for a legacy manufacturer. If the the data doesn't support the claim that no one wants to work for Amazon on their manufacturing side, okay, there the the data doesn't support the claim that no one wants to work for Tesla on their manufacturing. And what's the difference? They're very, very smart companies. Okay, they're very smart companies. I was looking at this the other day. Let me, let me look at this is the sesme smart manufacturing Executive Council. I think that's who we're talking about here. Is this the council I want to look at here real quick.
Vaughn, is this the one I want to know? What's the what's the council with? Hold on second, I uh, governance board. There you go. All right, let's take a look at sesame's governance board. This made me laugh out loud. Okay, seriously. Um, here is sesame's governance board. And this is me. This is just me, given, given. Um, share the screen. This is me, just given, you know, this is just a little tongue in cheek, because I love Jonathan wise, and I love Jonathan dyke and the guy, the the folks that says me, especially the stuff that Matt, Paris and Jonathan those guys are doing on the working group, incredibly valuable. Okay, so take this for what you will. But let's just you. Just real quick. Let's look at the what is it the governance board, right? He said, here we go. Here is the governance board for says me, this is a, this will make you laugh out loud. Okay, first and foremost, a Maria Ara, who, who's the director and fellow technology and transformation at Johnson and Johnson, that's actually a good selection, okay. Mark besser, who's the vice president at some industrial AI company. David brucell, who's the founder and vice president, Executive Director at the manufacturing Leadership Council, which, as far as I know, has never really, I think it's an important initiative, but they haven't really achieved anything like there. What is the, what's the impact that they've had? Honestly, okay, you got Catherine cahaleen, who's the CEO at Bennett. I don't know her. Greg, Greg Colvin, who's a technical Fellow at Honeywell this I don't know Greg Gregory, but that he may or may not be a good option for the governance board. Ken Creasy, who's the Corporate Vice President of Operations at Nvo automation. I've never heard of them. So how is he on the governance board? Like, if, if, if, if, says me is about promoting and investing in smart manufacturing in the United States. Why would you have somebody manufacturing? Yeah, he there. What is he? What is Ken Creasy achieved in in Smart Manufacturing? You know what? I mean? Um, Dr Huan Dai, who's a program manager at some energy company. Jim Davis, PhD at UCLA, Vice Provost Emeritus, sesme, program oversight and Principal Investigator UCLA. A lot of words there. John dyke, CEO. It says me, John dyke belongs there. I mean, John dyke absolutely belongs on that governance board. You know, John has been as close to automation in this industry as anyone I could possibly think of. You have Andrew Ellis, Vice President global portfolio engineering, Rockwell Automation. No one from Rockwell should be on the governance board.
Zack Scriven 2:12:13
But John no longer from Rockwell. But he's
Walker Reynolds 2:12:15
no longer he was no longer at Rockwell and but no one from Rockwell should be on that governance board. Seriously. You know here, here's why, here's why. Everywhere Rockwell participates. It's not that there aren't good people at Rockwell. It's the culture at Rockwell. The culture at Rockwell is not manufacturer first. It's Rockwell. First, it's Rockwell partner. Second, it is Rockwell channel. Partner. Third, okay, it is, it is the end user, the customer. It is the point of contact at the end user, the person in purchasing fourth or fifth and the actual manufacturer. The best interest, the best interest of the operator, the best interest of the electrician or the mechanic, is fucking dead last they put the interest of the purchaser before the company. Oh, no question. No question. Vacation Home. The most important person to Rockwell Automation is the purchaser in any manufacturer. And by the way, I hate picking Rockwell is a great American company. Microsoft is a great American company. They should be awesome. The reason I'm hard on them is because they fucking know better. They should know better, okay, but why is Rockwell rep? Why is Rockwell on the governance board? It says me, what is right to give me. Give me do do me a favor. Gang. Do me a favor. Anybody listen to this? If you work at Rockwell, I want you to give me one achievement Rockwell has in Smart Manufacturing, something that's going to make me, or someone in the industry for community go, Wow, that's impressive. Just one achievement. That's all I want. You're picking on Rockwell. But is any major PLC manufacturer, yeah, any different that's, yeah,
Zack Scriven 2:14:25
absolutely. I said. I said, I want one of the big three to come out. Prove it. I want just one
Walker Reynolds 2:14:31
and two three came. Do you want me? Like, do you know how hard it is for me to admit it's not hard because I, I'd like to tell like it is. But do you know how much it pains me to admit that Siemens gets it much more than Rockwell does. Phoenix Contact gets it. Phoenix Contact gets it Wago gets Lago gets it. Opto 20 Opto 22 they're probably more mid sized. But, but, but is what you You tell me. You tell me what is the best PLC on the market? That is your, your Swiss Army Knife PLC, 10, $10,000 you know, your $10,000 unit, Opto, 22 groove, epic, there's no, there's not even a fucking debate. It didn't even, it ain't even close. RIP,
Zack Scriven 2:15:17
RIP. Bed, rock, automation,
Walker Reynolds 2:15:20
yeah, but yeah, but yeah, what was the problem with bedrock? They they believe people cared more about security than they actually did. And by the way, and their guy, their their vice or president, or whatever he he and I got in a huge argument at ICC about it, and I'm like, listen, dude, your price point's too high. No, people care about security, but they don't care about it that much. No one is clamoring for air gaps in their fucking back planes on the PLCs. I'm not hearing anyone clamoring for that.
Zack Scriven 2:15:53
I mean, the thing was bulletproof too. So if you're trying to
Walker Reynolds 2:15:56
Jesus Flores, associate director and Lindy Kevin Jones, CEO ECM. Simon Jacobson, Vice President and Gartner. Robert Graybill, yeah. I mean, all right, here's a good one. Louis Grice, Vice President of Phoenix Contact, that's a good choice. Howard Harare, PhD, Director at NIST. I don't know him. Tom Heckman, founder and CTO at Cepi soft. Scott Whitlock, CEO at flex wear. I'll say this, I know Scott Whitlock fairly well. I'm the one. I introduced him to inductive automation, and we had a couple of zoom calls, and I taught their I can't remember what their engineer was, but we I invited them to work with me on a tier one automotive project so I could teach them how to do unified namespace. That's a good one of the best architects I've ever met is a guy named Jason toshlock Who is, I think he's the CTO at flexor innovation. He's one of those top five guys. Scott Whitlock would be a good choice there. Doug Lawson CEO at think IQ. Think IQ was originally, like the incestuous relationship, you know, it was originally supposed to be the platform that says me was using, you know, in no longer. Tyler Soderstrom from Exxon Mobil, good choice. Prasad satyavo at Accenture. Like, I look at this governance board and I'm like, there are very few people in here who have achieved anything in Smart Manufacturing, very few, right? I mean, granted, I don't know everybody on this list, I but I know 80% of these people. I mean, that's what I was saying. If you want to see something funny, look at the governance board. It says me, that is not a list of people that I would put on any governance board there. Now, there are people there who belong there, by the way, like but I mean, how is Louis Grice? Like Phoenix Contact has a completely different philosophy than most of these folks here. I think Whitlock belongs there. From from flex wear. Flex wear innovation has has done a lot of really cool shit. They're an innovative company, and they've been on the products too. Yeah, they've been on the bleeding edge flex. Where belong? I mean, Whitlock belongs on there. He I would definitely put him there. Actually, I wouldn't, I don't know if I would put Scott there. I probably would put Jason Tosh log there. Scott's a great engineer in his own right. You know, Purdue engineer, all that kind of stuff. So, I mean, I don't have any issue with that spark
Zack Scriven 2:18:55
mes. They also have, like, a GV type of integration platform
Walker Reynolds 2:19:02
now flex wear. Flex wear is a good company. I mean, we don't see eye to eye on
Zack Scriven 2:19:07
Oh, but aren't they owned by like they're,
Walker Reynolds 2:19:11
yeah, no, Hitachi. Yeah. Hitachi bought them. But anyway, it doesn't. That doesn't make sense to me, that doesn't make sense to me. Nice. You know, who belongs on there? Um
Zack Scriven 2:19:30
Jeffrey Schrader,
Walker Reynolds 2:19:33
well, I would have said, um Matt Tony Payne. I would have said Tony Tony Payne, but Yeah, Matt Paris from GE higher, that's you need. You want. Matt Paris, you want the Jeff schraders of the world. You want? Um, you know, Tony Payne comes to mind. You. You know, it's, this is this is legacy. They don't know anything these. There's not these are not people who know anything about smart manufacturing. And by the way, again, right? No one that functions like the mafia should be on that governance board. Oh, I mean, there's a guy, there's a guy on here, there's a guy on here, who, if you, if he disagree, if you disagree with him, he doesn't give a fuck about your customers. He will not sell you licenses at all. And I would never do that like there are company there are people out there, like, you know, Alex Marcy, from, what company is he with again?
Zack Scriven 2:20:41
She's gonna make me edit this podcast. There
Walker Reynolds 2:20:47
you go. I mean, he takes shots at me all the time, yeah. But if he wanted, if he wanted to come, to prove it, I would have invited him. If Rockwell automate, Rockwell Automation wanted to come, I would have invited them, as long as they met the minimum technical requirements, and they buy you by the rules.
Zack Scriven 2:21:03
You know someone, someone gave you a hard time for calling out that company that was like, extorting a manufacturer for their pricing and talking shit in the discord and behind your back platform, reformally known as libre. Oh, yeah, yeah. Someone came up. They're like, they're like, Oh, that's a bad look. It's like, we, did you actually listen to the did you? What
Walker Reynolds 2:21:26
do you what do you mean? It's a bad look? Like, if you if you object, if you object, like, if you have an objection to like, if what you say is, you know, this is the thing, like, um,
Zack Scriven 2:21:40
well, they're like, hey, it's a it's a bad look to put a company down like that. And I'm like, Well, I didn't
Walker Reynolds 2:21:44
put I didn't put a company down. What I did was I come, I communicated the facts of an interaction with that company, and I gave them, and I gave them an opportunity to come on and defend themselves. I did not you. Let me, let me. Let me, let me put something let me make something perfectly clear, I don't punch down if you attack me, if you come at me, if you do something shady to me, I will fucking destroy you. I will destroy you. I will destroy you. Yeah, and if you come to me and you and you object to something I did, or you disagree with something I said, and you are right. I will acknowledge your right and I will apologize, and anybody who works with me will tell you, that's how I do it.
Zack Scriven 2:22:30
We need to have integrity within the community, and we only can accomplish that through transparency and holding each other accountable correct. So if you can't hold someone accountable,
Walker Reynolds 2:22:40
this is why people's values matter. You know, it's like, I don't work with companies whose primary value is the bottom line. It's okay if money is the most important thing to you, but that's not my value. I want to stay in business. I'll spend every fucking penny I have delivering on my mission, I'll spend every penny it the all I tell my team is, it's your job to keep us in business. I am not looking at the bottom line every day and never so. So if you're if you're a person who's treating the market like a zero sum game. You know what I mean? If you're poaching people's employees, like, if I if somebody, if, if an engineer works for another company, and I have a relationship with that company, and one of their engineers comes to me and says, Hey, I want to come work with you. I'll say, Yeah, that's great. As long as me, you and your current employer. We're all good with it, but I'm not I'm not stealing you from somebody, but go ahead and fucking cross me. Go ahead and take a shot at me and be wrong, and I'll fucking treat you the way you treat me.
Speaker 1 2:23:57
Got no problem with that. You will end up on our YouTube channel. Yeah, not only that shit to not use it well,
Walker Reynolds 2:24:04
you know. And I had this, I had this, I had this, this lunch today. I had a lunch with some business partners today, and they were telling me this story about this guy in the industry. They met, they saw him at a conference or something, and he's a, he's a real douche. The guy's an, he is an absolute douche. And that's okay. He's, you know, I don't think he's a very good engineer, either, but that's beside the point. He's also a terrible human being, probably one of the worst human beings I've ever met my entire life. There are two people in our industry who I think are real pieces of shit, like bad people, not good human beings at all, only two I've ever met, and privately, everybody knows exactly who they are. You know, my team knows exactly who I think they are, but I'm not going to take shots at them publicly, because that's not fair. But they were telling me a story about this one, one of these guys, and about how, you know, hey, I walked up to him and he and he basically, like, grabbed. My badge, and he was, you know, he looked at my badge at the conference, and he's like, Oh, I know your company. And he's like, but I don't know you. And then he, like, threw the badge off of him,
Zack Scriven 2:25:12
and someone did that to me. I would fucking and I said,
Walker Reynolds 2:25:16
Listen. I said, Let me, let me say something real quick. There is zero fucking chance he would do that to me, 00, pop his head like a pivot. But that's not the point. The point is is that there, there are. The thing that matters is values, like what people care about, what their core values are. That's what matters, because that's what drives our decision making all this other stuff. Like, when people say to me, Hey, Walker, you dropped too many F bombs. Well, I dropped too many F bombs for you. You know, it's there's an entire audience of people out there who are really valuable in this industry, who have no problem with it. Like, think about it, you know, I read this thing the other day. It was an op ed in New York Post. And I don't want to get into politics, but I want to draw a correlation here. There was a guy who wrote a thing saying, I was wrong about Donald Trump. He's like, he apparently, he's a Republican who hated Trump. And he's like, you know, Trump is this psycho, blah, blah, blah, whatever. He goes. I was wrong about him. He goes. I never understood what his appeal was, and when I listened to the bombast and stuff, I never took him seriously, and I didn't think anyone else would he goes. And I just didn't get him he goes. But now I understand he was never talking to me. I was never his audience. You know, he was like, as a as an op ed writer, he goes, I'm a part of the establishment. I'm a part of the elite, and so we conduct ourselves a certain way. And all the presidents, all the politicians that have come up, they were always speaking to us because they needed our favor. He's like he they needed me to write nice things about them in the opinion pages he goes, but Donald Trump didn't, never cared about what I thought about him. So he was never talking to me. So all of us who were talking about the I don't like the way he talks, and I, he was never talking to me, Donald Trump. And I even I said, I said it took me years to figure it out. Donald Trump wasn't talking to me, and my objections to him with his behavior was irrelevant, because he was talking to a different audience. You know what I mean? I worked on the plant floor for 12 years. Let me tell you, man, that's like working in a fucking locker room. It's like working in a locker room. It they they say shit to each other all day long. That would get you fired from any job all day, all day. That's who he was talking to. He was talking to Americans who love America, the people who build this country. That's who Donald Trump was always talking to. All right, I don't want to make it a political thing, but I want to you want to know who I talk to. I'm talking to the people who were like me when I was coming up through my career. It's the moth to a flame. I'm not talking to all the people on this governance board. They listen to me, and you want to know why they listen to me. You want to know why they listen to me. Because of all of you, because of this community, what we have done as a community, as we have won the results award, and believe me, there, there were people who were at prove it, who who fucking hated the fact that they had to sit through a keynote that I was giving, and they were and those are people who are members of the elite who didn't want this community to be right.
Zack Scriven 2:28:53
That's crazy.
Walker Reynolds 2:28:55
You know, the at the end of the day, I know that when I'm talking about stuff, I am talking to the people who get it, you know. And at the end of the day, the thing that brings us all together, it's not the way we talk, it's what we care about, what we believe, it's what we value, it's what our missions are. That's what brings us all together and and I and what I just said right here is something I've tried to communicate to people over and over and over again when they ask, how did you guys do this?
Zack Scriven 2:29:41
I got a quick call to action. Yeah, man, we're, we're talking about doing an integrator program. Walker, you said, hey, I want to do this training for integrators who either starting an integrator or they're trying to scale their integration business. This won't be something that's like. Right, just to the mastermind students, you would actually have to apply. Tell us who you are, and then we will approve you. So we're trying to create, like, a really tight knit group of integrators for, like an integrator workshop or an integrator training program. So if you guys are interested in that, we're not sure if we're going to do it. Yet. We've been talking about doing an integrator program. We want to, we are going to do an integrator certification. But this integrator workshop that Walker has been talking about, you know, giving you guys, like, kind of the inside, you know, the actual KPIs, the actual metrics of how, how to run an integration business, reach out to us if that's something that you'd be interested in. Again, it's going to be by application only, so not everyone's going to be able to qualify, but we would. If you're interested in that, let us know.
Walker Reynolds 2:30:50
All right, and with that, thank you, everybody for sticking to this is Joe Rogan, length right here. Man, it's a good one. It was a good one. I'm glad we had a chance to do it. I've been I needed to communicate this stuff to the community. Really, 26 is in the in the ink. Yes, 2026 so we'll, we'll do another podcast before the wedding, so probably in the next 10 days or so. But, uh, thank you guys for joining us. Like Subscribe, comment down below, and we'll see y'all in the next one. Guys,
Unknown Speaker 2:31:17
you.
