Simon J Dudley (00:00)
And the looks on people's faces was there were a few I think the phrase is

Beau Chimene (00:01)
that was there were a few

Simon J Dudley (00:05)
bulldog licking piss off thistles. it was not a not a happy shit.

Beau Chimene (00:08)
Yeah. It didn't go down well.

Beau Chimene (00:11)
Your your comment wa had reverberations as far as No,

Simon J Dudley (00:14)
But I was right, I felt.

Beau Chimene (00:16)
you were absolutely right. And and and that was, I would consider, a very good, honest assessment that we weren't done yet, and we weren't ready for our product, and that we had run too many risks on a high performance design that wasn't working.

Simon J Dudley (00:36)
welcome everyone. Simon Dudley, Before It Was Obvious podcast. today is an old friend of mine, Beau Chimene We were just talking about how long we've known each other. I think it's twenty two and a half years or some ridiculous

Beau Chimene (00:50)
Twenty two and a half.

Simon J Dudley (00:51)
thing. And there's a whole bunch of stuff we were talking about, which I'm not allowed to put onto the actual recording. So

Beau Chimene (00:58)
Thank you.

Simon J Dudley (00:59)
Beau it's great to have you on the show. Welcome.

Beau Chimene (01:02)
Thank you, Simon. I've been looking forward to this. You know, I've known you for so long that you're just at at at first a a coworker and then a great coworker and then a friend. And and that's a great transition.

Simon J Dudley (01:13)
Yeah, and now

Simon J Dudley (01:15)
and now whatever this is. So it

Beau Chimene (01:17)
Whatever this is.

Simon J Dudley (01:18)
it's gonna be a laugh, if nothing else. so Beau I was a small boy when we first started working together. You were obviously middle aged at that point, but what what are you doing now, now in late 2026?

Beau Chimene (01:33)
2026, I'm having a great time. I'm loving retirement. Retirement is this thing that I really recommend. Someone pays you, and you do whatever the hell you want. I love farming, I love exercise, I love exploration, and I'm really passionate about democracy.

Beau Chimene (01:57)
and trying to preserve American democracy.

Simon J Dudley (02:00)
Beau, as you we've already discussed, you and I go back a long way. but you go back even further than than us. So the

Beau Chimene (02:08)
Then then yeah.

Simon J Dudley (02:11)
than you and I, right? You didn't come out of the egg 22 years ago, clearly. So what where did you start? What was school?

Simon J Dudley (02:19)
All of those things. Let's start there.

Beau Chimene (02:21)
Grew up in Houston, Texas. Something that is a little scary is that I'm actually a fifth generation native Texan. My relatives arrived here, Simon, when this was Mexico. They arrived in Galveston and in Houston in eighteen thirty. And Texas didn't break away from Mexico till eighteen thirty six, which means that I am a Mexican American.

Beau Chimene (02:49)
I grew up in Houston, went to high school there, learned to fly a plane early, early, like at sixteen, got my pilot's license, flew planes all over Texas, and that that was to

Simon J Dudley (03:00)
W Can I assume you either

Simon J Dudley (03:02)
had a wealthy benefactor or wealthy parents if you could afford to fly at a young age?

Beau Chimene (03:07)
Well, I would I would put it that my dad was in the oil industry My dad could afford it. I I wouldn't call him rich, but I would say that was that was something he

Simon J Dudley (03:16)
If you st

Simon J Dudley (03:16)
for the for the audience, if your dad can afford to buy you as a sixteen year old a plane, let's have a vote. Who thinks Spo came from money?

Beau Chimene (03:22)
sorry. no,

Beau Chimene (03:26)
It's a rented plane, twenty dollars an hour at the time. Twenty dollars an hour you rent a plane and you rent a instructor. But a lot of studying and it it gave me a focus, Simon, at 16, to study, and that happened to be not just my interest, but a strength of mine.

Beau Chimene (03:47)
Which was the mechanics of flying, the studying, the certifications, the testing. I I was good at it. So I loved flying. I loved flying and I c I'd fly friends around and do errands for different people flying something to different places. it was fun. It was fun. So

Simon J Dudley (04:06)
Yeah, I bet it.

Beau Chimene (04:07)
so when I was signing up for university, and by the way, I I noticed there was kind of a trend in some of the other

Beau Chimene (04:15)
People that you've talked to, some of them are really brilliant, smart people that are really successful, but not all of them enjoyed I was different. I I loved it. It was where my brain wanted to be first good and bad, good and bad of going to uni, as you would call it.

Simon J Dudley (04:35)
What did you do at uni?

Beau Chimene (04:38)
I knew exactly what I wanted to be. I signed up to do that, and that's exactly what I did. So I never switched majors, aerospace engineering. As a pilot and strong in math, it was a perfect mix.

Simon J Dudley (04:52)
and Houston, so you were right next door to NASA.

Beau Chimene (04:55)
Austin.

Beau Chimene (04:56)
Yeah. So why I got to go to NASA, I was all on I just knew a lot of what was going on at the time in the NASA defense department world. It was my interest. It was my love. And it happened to work for me. I know a lot of people go to university, switch majors three times and say, Why am I here? For me it was different.

Simon J Dudley (05:18)
aerospace engineering, what does that mean? Is that aerodynamics or is that avionics or is that something else?

Beau Chimene (05:25)
And space. So a lot about a lot about fluid dynamics, a lot of calculus, a lot of physics, but a lot of flight dynamics. How do airfoils work? What is the purpose of an airfoil? But then also a lot of orbital mechanics. How do you get to the moon? What is an orbit? How do you maneuver when you're in orbit? Space. So arrow, aerodynamics.

Beau Chimene (05:53)
Space. it was perfect for my interest at the time. So

Simon J Dudley (05:57)
Quite

Simon J Dudley (05:58)
so you were quite clever then?

Beau Chimene (06:00)
I wouldn't call myself clever. I would say there was people there much smarter than me. But I found that I could outwork them. But really I No

Simon J Dudley (06:08)
Well that that that's interesting.

Beau Chimene (06:10)
really there were people there that were just brilliant, these type of people that you think about in some NASA film. That's not me. But but I found that I wouldn't give up and I wouldn't quit and I would study my ass off until I could do it.

Simon J Dudley (06:25)
Yeah, to be fair, you

Simon J Dudley (06:27)
Einstein said the same thing, and I think most people would treat him as fairly clever. He said he would not he w he just wouldn't let go of an idea. He would just keep working on it long after everyone else had given up, I thought was

Beau Chimene (06:36)
Yeah. But I'm not Einstein,

Beau Chimene (06:39)
Simon. But thank you for the analogy.

Simon J Dudley (06:42)
Well, you were about the same year.

Beau Chimene (06:44)
And and probably with the same hair.

Simon J Dudley (06:47)
Well not no. No, he had lots of hair for those of you listening. All right. So, left university. you're in a great place for aerospace, clearly. NASA is just down the road from you after all. Then what?

Beau Chimene (07:00)
So graduated in eighty-three, eighty-four, I stepped into Singer Link flight simulation, down at NASA, but not doing NASA work, doing Department of Defense work, which is F-16. And it was a perfect place for me to use what I'd been learning and studying for four

Simon J Dudley (07:19)
So

Beau Chimene (07:19)
years.

Simon J Dudley (07:20)
so a lot of people won't know who Singer are. So they're one of the big, one of the two, very large flight simulator manufacturers, correct?

Beau Chimene (07:28)
It used to be link flight simulation, strong during World War II, the 50s, 60s, and on. Exactly, building flight simulators. The sewing machine company, Singer, bought them because they had money and wanted to diversify. So the Singer part was only a name for 10.

Simon J Dudley (07:46)
And is

Simon J Dudley (07:48)
is this an era when they were moving away from analog flight simulators to digital systems?

Beau Chimene (07:54)
All digital. We had a mainframe. This is early, 1984 and on. The computer we used, and I've heard some of your fellow fellow partners on on this podcast talking about their different computers, but I've never heard of the computer I was using. The Norska data from Norway. It was a Norwegian mainframe computer. As part of NATO, that's what they could contribute.

Beau Chimene (08:22)
was their mainframe computer. So

Simon J Dudley (08:24)
I've never

Simon J Dudley (08:24)
heard of such a thing. Have you any idea how much compute this thing?

Beau Chimene (08:28)
practically nothing, right? At the time we had these 300 megabyte platter trays with 10 platters, each with 30 megabytes on them, and they'd weigh about 40 pounds and you'd put it in and screw it into the hard drive. It was it was old technology, but at the time we were so excited. That's where I met Casey King, right? And some other great people. It was like it was like a party atmosphere.

Beau Chimene (08:54)
They hired a bunch of 22, 23 year olds, fresh out of college, gave us a job, let us do great fun work, and the parties afterwards? You get 60, 22, 23 year olds. There was a lot of a lot of good times, a lot of fun friends made. A lot of partying. I loved

Simon J Dudley (09:16)
Mm.

Beau Chimene (09:16)
it. We all loved it. After four or five, six years, people start going their own way.

Beau Chimene (09:21)
There was a solid time and it was a great time to meet friends and and and and and enjoy life while working hard. We all thought we were doing the right thing at the time.

Simon J Dudley (09:34)
Well, do you not think that you were doing the right thing now?

Beau Chimene (09:36)
We were training F sixteen pilots to go eventually bomb our Iraq. I don't know.

Simon J Dudley (09:42)
Well,

Simon J Dudley (09:43)
yeah, but you're also protecting them against the Russians, so

Beau Chimene (09:45)
That's

Beau Chimene (09:46)
that was our motivation back then, right? That was the

Simon J Dudley (09:48)
Yeah, yeah.

Beau Chimene (09:49)
evil empire, Ronald Reagan, the arms build up and we were doing what we needed to do. And at the time

Simon J Dudley (09:55)
yes,

Simon J Dudley (09:55)
because this also would have been an era of SDI, the whole Star Wars era, wouldn't it?

Beau Chimene (10:00)
Yeah,

Beau Chimene (10:00)
yeah, yeah. Reagan was funneling billions into the DOD. And so from a technical point of view, I was in charge of the F-16 aerodynamics, unstable aerodynamics, doing all the equations, all the data, and the flight control computer that was trying to manage the aircraft through these unst unstability regions. It was fun. Simon, I I I could get in the simulator when you're a little

Beau Chimene (10:28)
When you wanted to test your software, you would go get in an F-16 cockpit, close the canopy. Now, of course it's the visuals weren't great, but you were flying a real F-16. The altimeter, the side stick, the throttle, all those were real. Just instead of hooked to an engine, it was hooked to a mainframe. Instead of the side stick being coupled to rudders and ailerons, it's connected to a mainframe. But the real system was was real. The cockpit was real.

Simon J Dudley (10:58)
You know, you think I don't know if you know I didn't know if you heard this, the US is actually gonna start building F sixteens again.

Beau Chimene (11:03)
For who? For us?

Simon J Dudley (11:05)
Yeah, for the US. Yeah. Yeah. There's a new production

Beau Chimene (11:07)
Tschi.

Simon J Dudley (11:08)
line going in. They haven't built any for twenty years and they're now gonna start building them again, which is very interesting. But but this podcast isn't primarily about aerodynamics. It's about histories.

Beau Chimene (11:17)
I know.

Simon J Dudley (11:19)
It's not about any particular topic though. So I don't want to suggest I don't want to suggest that we can't talk about this. Did you consider that you were you considered you're in the in the

Simon J Dudley (11:30)
What's the word I'm looking for? You were in the simulation business, not in the A V business. But in some ways, you were in the A V business because you're projecting onto things like canopies, right?

Beau Chimene (11:40)
And what I consider is that my real skill and love and thread that goes through every different position is taking equations and math and a computer and hardware and tying them all together to get the right answer at the end. I think of audio video, I think of satellites, I think of aircraft simulation, all the same way.

Beau Chimene (12:07)
It's it's the same thing. Now maybe it's a different equation. Maybe instead of a codec or an echo canceller, it's F-16 flight control or a satellite control. But it's all going through hardware, fast processors, how to design software that runs on multiple processors at hard time stops, hard real time, 10 millisecond increments that all have to get done in a certain frame and and then pass the data to another thread to get its part done.

Beau Chimene (12:37)
Those are the skills that I I I was working on in 84 to 89 that go through my whole career. Audio, that's to me why I didn't feel like I was audio so much as software engineering with a flavor. And the flavor the last 20 years was audio. But I always felt like that was one of my strengths, not being this acoustic golden ear that could hear 20 kilohertz.

Beau Chimene (13:05)
But to know how the guts really works and how to make it work.

Simon J Dudley (13:08)
No, by the way, no one can

Simon J Dudley (13:09)
hear 20 kilohertz. It's all bullshit. I've never met anyone who can hear that high.

Beau Chimene (13:11)
Not not me. Not me.

Simon J Dudley (13:14)
all right. So we with there's some gaps here. So you were

Beau Chimene (13:18)
Bush.

Simon J Dudley (13:18)
at Singer for five years.

Beau Chimene (13:21)
Seven, five, seven years.

Simon J Dudley (13:23)
Some whatever, back in the old days, black and white era. you then left. Now there's Apple in here somewhere. Was that where you went next?

Beau Chimene (13:28)
Never,

Beau Chimene (13:30)
never, never went to Apple. Casey and some of my other friends bumped, no problem, bump

Simon J Dudley (13:33)
Casey went to Apple. I'm sorry, so did Steve and a few others.

Beau Chimene (13:36)
bumped up to Apple. Steve, Will, they were all at Apple. And I, being my adventure aside, just went across the street to McDonnell Douglas. Because McDonnell Douglas had won the work package to space station contract. And they were going to build space station.

Beau Chimene (13:55)
And that sucked up a lot of great engineers, but I didn't want to go there. I instead moved over to McDonnell Douglas and worked on the X thirty. Do you remember something called the National Aerospace Plane? Ronald Reagan called it the Tokyo Express. We wanted to fly from New York to Tokyo in two hours. How do you do that? Hypersonics. Now we all hear a lot about hypersonics due to the Ukraine, Russians, Chinese.

Beau Chimene (14:24)
hypersonics is in, but in 1990 there was only one hypersonic game going, and that was the National Nero Space Plane. So I worked on that for two or three years with McDonnell Douglas. And I learned things that I had never studied in school. You know, the the idea of how do you build an engine that can work at Mach 5, Mach 8, and keep keep the y you don't you no longer need a compressor.

Beau Chimene (14:52)
in your jet engine anymore. The compressor's gone. The shock waves do that work for you. But how do you hold a flame inside of supersonic airflow? Scramjet. Supersonic ramjet. And that's the that that's the work. That was the RD. And how do you keep the aircraft cool? How do you keep the metals cool? How do you harvest oxygen from the upper atmosphere to feed into your aircraft? It was a fun time.

Simon J Dudley (15:20)
But didn't on the grounds that you can't fly from New York to Tokyo in two hours, it didn't work.

Beau Chimene (15:27)
That's it works.

Simon J Dudley (15:28)
What so talk me through that. So you joined them to be part of that program. You worked there for a few years, it didn't succeed. When did you w well one, why didn't it succeed? And two, did you see it not succeeding coming?

Beau Chimene (15:43)
Yes. Most of the engineers knew that to be able to build a scram jet at that time, to build a craft that big and that high risk, you had a very low chance of it working, and the cost would be astronomical. It would never be commercial to fly it. But what it did, thus I mean, although a product didn't come out, and many of the tasks, projects I've worked on didn't turn into product.

Beau Chimene (16:09)
But it pushed all the RD labs, NASA Ames, Marshall, JSC. We all coordinated RD toward this one project to see if it could work. Find out what we didn't know. And we found out that atmospheric pockets of density can knock out a spramjet. We learned that to be able to control an aircraft at that altitude is very hard.

Beau Chimene (16:38)
We learned what we didn't know. But the final answer was it's way too expensive to build this. You can't build it. Not then.

Simon J Dudley (16:46)
Yeah.

Beau Chimene (16:46)
Maybe now. Maybe in twenty years. And I would say NASA was pretty good about after a year and a half, two years, going, okay, thank you guys. It's not gonna work. The the risk is too high, the schedule's too long, the the money is too great. But it

Simon J Dudley (17:01)
Yeah yeah. But you didn't

Simon J Dudley (17:02)
know that. You can't tell that from a whiteboard. You actually have to

Beau Chimene (17:07)
No, but

Simon J Dudley (17:07)
get some part into the building of it before

Beau Chimene (17:09)
You have to

Simon J Dudley (17:10)
you go, No, this isn't possible rather than deciding in advance that this isn't possible. That's an interesting angle.

Beau Chimene (17:15)
This wasn't

Beau Chimene (17:17)
this wasn't a small step change. It wasn't make a new audio codec and paint it blue, then paint it green. This was a huge leap in technology, and we found out that a huge leap wasn't gonna work. But a lot of the papers and a lot of the analysis from those days is what is driving the hypersonic research now that suddenly is so important again.

Simon J Dudley (17:38)
Pretty impressive that you were doing this thirty six years ago.

Beau Chimene (17:42)
But yeah. Yeah. And of course and of course I wasn't the lead engineer in any of it. I was a young kid at the time. But it was a it was my first real work in what I'd consider R and D. It's a which is non product. No one's watching, you know, we need this milestone by this date. You were doing real research

Simon J Dudley (18:02)
let's talk about RD, right? Because you've done this is a very interesting angle. You were doing early stage RD, where commercial organizations rarely do stuff that early, right? They will have a university or NASA or

Simon J Dudley (18:19)
McDonnell Douglas, go and do the really early research, and then someone will go, that's good enough that it's been proven it can be done, and now we'll commercialize it, right? And you did that later in your career, and we'll get to that later. But what's the difference in the mindset in your experience of the way that or of organizations that do research to go, well, we don't know if this is possible or not.

Simon J Dudley (18:46)
Let's try it and then two years later go, No, we spent a hundred million dollars, it can't be done, and then just pack it up, right? I don't know any commercial I've never worked for a commercial organization that could make that kind of

Beau Chimene (18:57)
They could do that.

Simon J Dudley (18:58)
long term investment. So is the culture different within organizations that think in those terms?

Beau Chimene (19:04)
Very different.

Beau Chimene (19:05)
Very different. There's no program managers and and weekly did you fill out your TPS form and and we're shipping this product in a month and a half, even though we know that the software won't really work for another six months. There's none of that. There's a lot more what do we not know? Assign smart people to work on each one of them.

Beau Chimene (19:28)
And then come back in three months, six months, and a lot of the product is a paper or prototype or a here's the maturation schedule that it would take to get to a working prototype. So there's a lot more, I would say less, hey, I've got to get this working by the end of tonight. There's also fewer crises in general. You can take a longer view.

Beau Chimene (19:55)
So I gotta tell you this, there was another thing that I worked on that of course got canceled. Do you remember when George H.W. Bush, 1989, said, we're going back to the moon and we're going to Mars? Okay. So I got a chance to work for the NASA Level 2 office. Level 2 means Washington. To plan out the next 30 years of NASA.

Beau Chimene (20:21)
The risk management plan, something called system effectiveness, which is basically a simulation of the entire 30 years. We need new rockets, new landers, new crawlers, the crawler that brings brings the rocket to the launch pad. We need a new vertical assembly building. Now, this was a day of NASA was a little bit looking for its next home. Space Shuttle was flying, space station wasn't up yet.

Beau Chimene (20:47)
And where are we going? Where are we going long term? And that was a project that was so different than the work at 3M or LifeSize or Logitech. There's no product due in three months or six months. It's long term looking for what technologies we need, what contracts need to be let out to universities to start doing some of this work. How can we leverage from commercial?

Beau Chimene (21:15)
And how can we influence commercial to build the next state-of-the-art product that we're going to need? So, of course, when Congress found out what we were really doing, they shut us down. Because they said, you can't even get the space station up. Why are you planning the next 30 years? The space station is behind schedule. Get to work. I'm sure NASA was siphoning off space station money to look at Mars, but they looked at space station as a

Beau Chimene (21:43)
As a halfway point, not halfway, but a staging location where you get up to low Earth orbit, you get there, maybe you put five rockets up, you refuel, and then you go to Mars. So what is the right orbit for space station? What is the right cargo cape capability? Someone needs to be looking at the future, not just building a dead end. But now we got a dead end.

Simon J Dudley (22:03)
y and or

Simon J Dudley (22:04)
not building next year's product. They're talking about a I mean how do you how do you even begin to start solving engineering problems that you know are gonna come up in thirty years, but you couldn't possibly have the technology for.

Beau Chimene (22:19)
No, but you gotta

Beau Chimene (22:20)
start looking, right? Imagine you're the lookout guy on a whaling ship and somebody's gotta be looking out. Somebody's gotta be rowing, somebody's gotta be cooking, but somebody's gotta be the guide. Someone's gotta be at the tip of the spear looking and saying, Here's where we need to be ten years from now. We need nuclear electric propulsion. We need these type of

Beau Chimene (22:42)
radiation barriers for going to Mars. What do we do when someone has an appendicitis and they're on an eight-month flight to Mars? How do you handle that? So a lot of thinking, a lot of money, a lot of planning, and trying to get NASA to accept a new element of risk, which is when you send 10 people to Mars, not all of them are coming back.

Beau Chimene (23:06)
They need to accept that early and not already start thinking about grand parades and naming a building after a dead astronaut. People are gonna die. Live with it. But how do you get Congress to handle that? How do you get the people to accept that? And that's something Elon Musk and the private world, I think, can conquer. When they get when they get going to Mars, people are gonna die and there's not gonna be a congressional investigation. Because it's a private company.

Beau Chimene (23:33)
Some

Simon J Dudley (23:33)
Interesting.

Simon J Dudley (23:34)
Did did you find so the culture was quite different. Did you find the sorts of people who were attracted to projects like that? My assumption is they were also a very different type of of engineer.

Beau Chimene (23:44)
Yes.

Beau Chimene (23:46)
A little more egghead, but also I would say that they're smart.

Beau Chimene (23:52)
God, Simon, that's a tough question. Because there's good people all around, right? They go out and drink a beer and have fun and go off and work hard during the day and raise their family during the evening. But they also weren't interested in what I would call commercial products. They would consider what we did at Logic pieces of plastic that we built.

Beau Chimene (24:16)
Whereas they're working on something to get mankind off of the rock. So, and and and and because it's not a product that's gotta be out in three months or six months, there's a whole different level of working to get extra nines in the reliability. You don't want your rocket blowing up, you don't want your astronauts dying.

Beau Chimene (24:37)
And I would say a lot more time spent testing and making sure it will work every time. Whereas I know a lot of the products I've built since then are shove the software in, it seems to fire up, get it going, bring in income stream, and use that sale to invest more, to make the product better, and quickly start working on the next one. We're already late on the next one. I didn't feel the

Simon J Dudley (25:01)
Yeah, yeah.

Beau Chimene (25:02)
rush to produce.

Beau Chimene (25:04)
The rush to do a good job, true. The emphasis on doing a great job and understanding the theory behind it was dreadfully important. Getting a product out in three months and quickly getting this quarter's results, that that's different.

Beau Chimene (25:20)
And that's a different world that I I found I can exist in just fine. I understood the Logitech life size world of quarterly quarterly results. Remember that? God, you gotta package empty boxes and ship That's a story you told me years ago.

Simon J Dudley (25:36)
No, no, we never I no company I have ever worked for has ever done that.

Beau Chimene (25:40)
You told me that story twenty years ago.

Simon J Dudley (25:42)
Allegedly. Let's let's let's move on. I don't remember. I have no

Beau Chimene (25:44)
Allegedly. Who were you working for? It started with a P, but I can't remember.

Simon J Dudley (25:50)
I have no recollection of that. I'm Oliver North for the purposes of this conversation. So

Beau Chimene (25:56)
And I'm the potted plant.

Simon J Dudley (25:58)
so you did you did this this work for NASA, that's really interesting. now that took you to what the mid nineties?

Beau Chimene (26:07)
Mid nineties.

Beau Chimene (26:08)
Okay, Simon, I'm just having fun. You you're gonna tell me a and and and you can cut everything out. I'm just having a great time. mid nineties. There's a big fight going on. Cell phone towers are popping up all over. Cell phones are super in popularity. But Motorola's got a great idea. Forget cell towers. Go with low earth orbiting satellites. The first big satellite constellation.

Beau Chimene (26:38)
Iridium. Motorola knew how to build handsets, knew all about the right radio frequencies, knew everything they needed to know about cell phones. They built the razor, they knew all that. What they didn't know were orbits. They didn't know onboard software. So they hired McDonnell Douglas, and it's my one year out of Texas. I went to the only place hotter than Texas. Phoenix. And we went and I moved the whole family to Phoenix and we worked.

Beau Chimene (27:05)
On the Iridium onboard guidance and control and launch algorithms. So that was fun. We got 66 satellites up in their orbit and got the Iridium program up and working very successfully from a technical point of view. Now,

Simon J Dudley (27:24)
Mm-hmm.

Beau Chimene (27:25)
business-wise, it sunk Motorola. They spent five billion dollars on that and lost their butt.

Beau Chimene (27:31)
But Iridium's still up and working. Rocket Labs just is in the process of buying them right now. And the Iridium satellite constellation is still up and working. You could arguably say from a business point of view, it was a complete failure, but from a technical point of view, a raging success. It was the first time people mass-produced satellites. One per day. They needed to be able to produce one per day of a satellite. No one had ever done that.

Beau Chimene (27:57)
Now you look at Starlink, et cetera, and they've taken a lot of that and and perfected it, done a much better job. But to do the onboard software.

Simon J Dudley (28:05)
And a very different

Simon J Dudley (28:06)
type of satellite. Yours were clearly much higher, much heavier.

Beau Chimene (28:09)
but no, no,

Beau Chimene (28:12)
no. bigger than Starlinks, but none these weren't geostationary, massive twenty-two thousand miles up in space. These were LEO, low low Earth orbit, go around for ten years and burn up and pump up new ones. It's very similar to Starlink, but thirty years before, technology was a little more raw, and we didn't own the launch vehicles, right? Elon owns the launch vehicles and the satellites.

Beau Chimene (28:38)
We had to rent space on Delta and the Russians and the

Simon J Dudley (28:42)
Yeah.

Beau Chimene (28:42)
Chinese back then. But we got it up. We got the orbits right. We got the flight software right. No problems. You want to talk about hard work, Simon. This was eighty hours minimum. Every week. Every week. The the pressure was there. We had to make our schedules. We had to get up. We had to get up off off the earth.

Simon J Dudley (29:04)
So why didn't it work from a commercial perspective?

Beau Chimene (29:06)
that's

Beau Chimene (29:08)
well by then cell phone towers were up and working. And remember the original Iridium phones were huge, big, they ate batteries, they didn't work if you were inside a building. The you only had two or three satellites over you at any one time, you could get behind a building and it would stop working. A lot of technical problems.

Beau Chimene (29:31)
And and

Simon J Dudley (29:31)
And I'm assuming

Simon J Dudley (29:32)
the co Iridium was not I mean, I know that what it was, but I never knew the commercials. w were they I assume they were a lot more money to run as well, were they, these things?

Beau Chimene (29:43)
Course now.

Simon J Dudley (29:43)
But if you're

Simon J Dudley (29:44)
if you're the post guard or an oil

Beau Chimene (29:48)
Okay.

Simon J Dudley (29:48)
company, they must have been perfect.

Beau Chimene (29:50)
Perfect. You want to go on a big hike. Okay, well the phone's too big for a hiker, probably. But I wanted to use one when I was canoeing off in Arkansas in the middle of nowhere with no cell phone coverage. But that's not a big enough that's not a big enough market. Now you know who loved Iridium? It was the CIA. The CIA became the biggest customer of Iridium. Because they were such a dominant customer, they could control them.

Beau Chimene (30:17)
In a secretive way. They could say, you know, no tapping in, this is, you know, CIA data crossing your crossing your constellation. They were the biggest customer. They kept them afloat for 15 years. And from the CIE's point of view, they get their own own tel own telecommunication constellation for practically free. I mean, I'm sure it costs some money, but nothing like the five billion that Motorola put up.

Beau Chimene (30:45)
To launch it. I would consider Motorola made a huge business mistake. But from an engineer point of view, wow, what fun. The rush was on, the schedules were different than NASA. It was push, push, push, work, work, take some risks, get it up. If a satellite explodes in space, that's bad, but not terrible. It's not like a space shuttle. It's not, it's not man rated software. We had to get it up and working. Rapid prototyping.

Beau Chimene (31:14)
Now the constellation's still up, the satellites have all been replaced. I'm sure my software's been replaced. But it was an adventure and it got me moving much more away from R and D, away from NASA, and into telecommunication, which I redeem was really telecommunication.

Simon J Dudley (31:32)
I mean you could argue R and D is a funny thing, isn't it? It sounds like one because of everyone concatenates the term. Research and development are actually kind of different skill sets. You a lot

Beau Chimene (31:43)
Exactly.

Simon J Dudley (31:44)
of the work you did at NASA was truly research. by the time you were at Motorola, it was primarily development.

Beau Chimene (31:50)
We weren't inventing new launch algorithms. We were developing them, getting them working. All on a PowerPC, PowerPC 603 processor, which is, I think, what Casey was actually working on at Apple. Completely different teams using the same processor. But this was

Simon J Dudley (32:09)
Yeah.

Beau Chimene (32:10)
C, hard real time, every 10 milliseconds, you had to have an answer.

Beau Chimene (32:16)
It can't crash even with even with space radiation hitting your processor, which can get into memory and flip a one to a zero or a zero to a one, your software had to be very fault tolerant. It had to always work. It had to detect its own problems and reset when it needed to or clean it up, check sums, etc., that basically could detect an error and keep keep working.

Simon J Dudley (32:40)
And there was no ability to go up and fix it.

Beau Chimene (32:43)
No. No. So when one dies, which iridiums have died before, they just deorbit them. They've got a small hydrazine hydrazine rocket engine. Just burn it, burn it against the against the velocity vector, you come down, hit the atmosphere and burn up. I think most, if not all, of the satellites, the original sixty-six have all done that. They've all burned up.

Simon J Dudley (33:05)
As Leo

Simon J Dudley (33:06)
as Leo satellites they almost certainly would have done i whether you de orbited them or not by now.

Beau Chimene (33:11)
They're

Beau Chimene (33:11)
gonna deorbit. But they were disposable, I guess is a way to look at it. They're disposable satellites.

Simon J Dudley (33:17)
Just in a different scale. You had sixty-six. And I think Starlink's now got forty thousand or want forty thousand or some number.

Beau Chimene (33:25)
something crazy.

Simon J Dudley (33:27)
Clear clearly interesting a a commercialisation of an idea that you were building twenty-five years earlier.

Beau Chimene (33:32)
Did you know there's an area in the Pacific Ocean where NASA and all the other space agencies aim their satellites for when they're deorbiting, as best they can control it, which there's always lots of randomness in any real life thing, but there's an area in the Pacific where they target all spacecraft to land. It's kind of the junkyard of spacecraft.

Simon J Dudley (33:57)
I assume it's a fairly big area, is it? It's

Beau Chimene (33:59)
it's

Beau Chimene (33:59)
a big area, it's off by Australia, but even more east. Big area with very s you know, low shipping, no people, no islands. An interesting concept of a junkyard for spacecraft. Poi poison gases and all.

Simon J Dudley (34:13)
Yes. that's interesting.

Simon J Dudley (34:16)
I might pull up a picture and we'll shove it into the into the stream for those of you watching this on video. Okay, so you did that. I'm guessing 80 hours a week and Arizona perhaps weren't your favourites. So then what happened?

Beau Chimene (34:29)
Came back to Austin. It's where my wife is from, her family's from. We always wanted to get out of Houston and move to Austin. It's the right place to be. If you're gonna be in Texas, you wanna be in Austin. So we came to Austin. I was I was a a what would you call that? A Mr. Mom for a while, taking care of kids while Grace was working, earning money and providing insurance. And then I found a a three-month contract.

Beau Chimene (34:56)
Do telephony work at 3M. And it was paying really great money, but it's a short-term contract, only three months. I took the job and milked it into seven years of really great money for seven years. So that was a good deal from a family financial point of view. And it was again C electrical engineering. It was media testing. Think of

Beau Chimene (35:23)
Think of a seven foot copper cable for telephony for pots, PSTN. And suddenly it doesn't work anymore. Someone hit it with a shovel. A squirrel chewed through it. Where's the problem? Where do you start digging? You don't want to dig up a seven mile cable. You want to run electrical engineering equations on the copper pair and shoot telemetry, shoot radar signals.

Beau Chimene (35:50)
Down the copper pair and look for the short, look for the open, look for the problem. So you know where to dig. So we were selling these test equipment to Bell South, every Bell there was, and internationally. So 3M not only does chemical things and builds post-it notes, but they were doing telephony diagnostic equipment that quickly morphed into.

Beau Chimene (36:19)
ISDN, ADSL, bandwidth, error counts, modems. And I would say that was a big jump into telecommunications was learning how ISDN and ADSL and and packets worked, which I had never done before. Suddenly here I am in the late nineties, early two thousands, learning how telecommunication really works.

Simon J Dudley (36:42)
This is an aside which depends. I probably's not going to make the video, frankly, but it

Beau Chimene (36:47)
After cars.

Simon J Dudley (36:48)
might. My father worked, he was an electronics engineer. He worked on a system, built a system for the US Navy, which tested the wiring looms of aircraft. And you could plug his device in at one end of a wire, and it could tell you where it had shorted.

Simon J Dudley (37:10)
without necess without plugging in at the other end of the wire. And

Beau Chimene (37:14)
Was there anything

Beau Chimene (37:15)
at the far end of the wire, or was it sending a pulse?

Simon J Dudley (37:18)
I don't I I can't tell you how it worked. I don't know that he ever bothered explaining to me. I I have no qualification. I I'm not an engineer. although I have some patterns, I suppose, somehow. But anyway, they went to see the the navy about it, and they said his firm said to the my father said to the navy guy, he said, We think you've got a problem that the wiring loons on your jets

Beau Chimene (37:42)
Summit.

Simon J Dudley (37:43)
are shorting out.

Simon J Dudley (37:45)
And the fella said to him, one of the colonels they were talking to, said, Well, why do you think that? That w the the MTBF, the mean time between failure and these wiring

Beau Chimene (37:53)
Fazer.

Simon J Dudley (37:54)
looms is a million hours. And my dad looked at him and said, Well, I th you're probably right, it's a million hours, but that does mean with the number of cables you've got in these planes, that you lose a you lose a plane every four hours or some crazy number. Because one of the problems is that if you don't know you've got a short,

Simon J Dudley (38:14)
And you're sending data from your aircraft to let's say a munition, just say fire at the thing. Well, you may not it may not release, it may not get the information to send to the device, it may not drop the tank or know that the tank's there. You know, it became an incredibly important piece of test and measurement year, doing very similar

Beau Chimene (38:34)
So your dad was over there?

Simon J Dudley (38:35)
things to what you were, but you were doing it on a macro scale. My father's work was doing it on on fighter aircraft or aircraft.

Beau Chimene (38:41)
Both both, both

Beau Chimene (38:43)
but both very important and both trying to understand where a problem is when you can't physically go out and just look, right? You you could look

Simon J Dudley (38:52)
Yes.

Beau Chimene (38:53)
at a wrench and say, here's the problem. But seven miles of cable going through the all these telephone poles, how do you find it? And your dad had the same problem. How do you go through a wing and find that a little wire has scraped against a screw?

Beau Chimene (39:08)
And is shorting and now the bomb doesn't release and people get mad.

Simon J Dudley (39:12)
And my father, being typical of my father, and I feel I've probably caught the same aversion to authority figures. they went to see the R they went to see the the Air Force. And the Air Force says, Yeah, we want the same thing as the Navy, but it has to be ten times more accurate. And my father turned around to the general that they were talking to, said, You're an idiot. It can't be done. It's not physically possible.

Simon J Dudley (39:37)
At which point they're going to a s shouting match and they ended up not selling any to the air force.

Beau Chimene (39:42)
But then the Air Force doesn't know where their problems are. And so they spend all day getting getting enlisted

Simon J Dudley (39:48)
I'm assuming they

Simon J Dudley (39:49)
bought something else, but the physics of the universe dictated that what they were asking for wasn't possible. They just wanted to be one up on the navy.

Beau Chimene (39:56)
Yeah, they just wanted to say, Well see, ours is better. And it's blue.

Simon J Dudley (40:01)
Yes, rather than well the navy I guess would be blue, wouldn't it, rather than the air force?

Beau Chimene (40:03)
I guess an AVB. Yeah,

Beau Chimene (40:05)
maybe they're both blue. Who knows? Simon

Simon J Dudley (40:08)
Who knows?

Beau Chimene (40:09)
Simon and I had a great time at 3M. But I got invited to a dinner. My friend Casey had moved to Austin, and it was a little Christmas dinner. Our wives came in, and I'm sitting with Casey and Lana. And Will Oxford is there with Beth. And Steve Smith is there with Debbie.

Beau Chimene (40:29)
And I'm there with Grace, and we're all having a great time talking. But but I noticed that Casey and Will and Steve, they all work together now in some little startup. And they're arguing and passionate and talking about the stress of working with these people and this crazy stuff. And they're talking about KMV, two thousand and three.

Beau Chimene (40:52)
And I'm listening to them and I'm going, I miss that. I miss that camaraderie and that passion and the high-stress startup world. I want to jump to there. So I said, Casey, tell me more about this KMV video thingy. And he told me, and I sent him my resume, he sent it to Elise. Got a went in and interviewed, got a job offer that day.

Beau Chimene (41:18)
Took it. And I jumped from 3M to what's eventually LifeSize. And it

Simon J Dudley (41:23)
Now

Beau Chimene (41:23)
all started with a fun, friendly Christmas dinner.

Simon J Dudley (41:26)
Now, the funny thing about that particular story, and I genuinely try not to make these events about me, they're about my guests, but I remember you and I meeting for the first time, and you had been brought into Life Size to look at building a whiteboard camera of some description.

Beau Chimene (41:45)
The di the

Beau Chimene (41:46)
digital whiteboard, isn't it the most important product we ever produced?

Simon J Dudley (41:49)
We didn't make it.

Beau Chimene (41:51)
I know.

Simon J Dudley (41:52)
because you and I talked, and I remember saying to you, but we now do high definition video, or we were in the process of building it at the time, for those of us or those of you watching this who don't remember or aware of this. We were trying to build the world's first high definition video system. And just as an example today, it's hard to imagine this 20 years later, but at the time.

Simon J Dudley (42:17)
Video collaboration was mainly on ISDN so very low bandwidths. 128K was a pretty standard bandwidth. If you really push the boat out, it was a whole 384K of bandwidth. your typical Zoom call today, by the way, is probably one and a half to two megs of bandwidth. So so it's true for Zoom or Google. at the time, video was 352 pixels by 288 pixels at

Simon J Dudley (42:45)
15 frames a second, it the quality of the experience was so bad that when we launched LifeSize, yeah, when we launched LifeSize in 2005, we actually had a magician in Austin doing a video call to Vegas, and we were holding up playing cards because in the old systems, not only could you not tell what

Simon J Dudley (43:11)
Playing card you were holding up, you couldn't even tell what suit it was. You couldn't tell

Beau Chimene (43:16)
Okay.

Simon J Dudley (43:17)
if it was a a heart or a club because you couldn't tell the difference on a white background between red and black text. That's how poor the quality of the experience was. It's hard to imagine that now. But at the time, the quality was a completely different universe. So we felt we needed an interactive or or a

Simon J Dudley (43:38)
a way of displaying a whiteboard. And I remember saying to you, I just point the camera at the whiteboard and you can read it. And

Beau Chimene (43:45)
Exactly.

Simon J Dudley (43:46)
and now that seems obvious, but it just s so the audience

Beau Chimene (43:49)
But

Simon J Dudley (43:49)
understands, twenty something years ago that was not obvious and it was not possible.

Beau Chimene (43:54)
And we didn't have the HD experience to know that.

Simon J Dudley (43:59)
Yes.

Beau Chimene (43:59)
We have the low resolution experience. You need something to be able to get crystal clear whiteboard images across.

Simon J Dudley (44:07)
Yes,

Simon J Dudley (44:07)
because even television was NTSC in the US, which is my father used to call it never the same color twice. I mean, which doesn't really work on that acronym, but either way, it was terrible quality. And we were all used to that being really poor. So you came on board. We we moved you from doing the whiteboard thing that we never built, but was it your first day? To

Beau Chimene (44:27)
First day. First day. First day.

Simon J Dudley (44:30)
say we. I don't know, I was overly involved, but I do remember having some input on it.

Beau Chimene (44:35)
Yes.

Simon J Dudley (44:35)
And

Simon J Dudley (44:35)
and then you moved into audio and you've never done audio before. So you

Beau Chimene (44:37)
Yes. Never, never.

Simon J Dudley (44:40)
just treated this as another maths problem. Is that would that be a reasonable

Beau Chimene (44:43)
That's the way I look at

Beau Chimene (44:44)
it. I look at it as it's a software problem, it's a processor problem, it's cache RAM algorithms, real-time threading. The numbers may represent audio or a flight control computer or are or an orbit. But the structure's gotta be right anyway. So believe me, there's people that are way better at audio than I ever was. Will Oxford.

Beau Chimene (45:08)
mister Audio. He understood audio much better than I did. My particular skill was getting software and hardware to sing and dance together. So it was so I remember I remember Michael Kanoyer saying, Hey, Beau, you know how to do one of these over here? And I said, Sure. And it was the next period DSP fifteen hundred on the inside of that phone that we can talk about, the sixteen mic phone.

Beau Chimene (45:36)
And how to get that up and working. We had just gotten a board. We didn't know we didn't even know how to fire it up. And I started working on that. And and yes, once I learned how the Nexperia worked, the DSP part of the Nexperia, get it up and working, then you just start demoing. I remember the demos, remember the demos once a month, the investors or someone, sign them, would come in. And I remember the first few demos, all I had was a whiteboard design, really on my whiteboard.

Beau Chimene (46:04)
Just here's how it could work if I could ever get it to work. And they went, Great, great. But we did.

Simon J Dudley (46:10)
Now, one of the things,

Simon J Dudley (46:12)
so I for those of you in the audience who aren't aware, I was at Life Science very early, even earlier than you were, Beau, and

Beau Chimene (46:19)
Yes.

Simon J Dudley (46:19)
you were pretty early. one of the things that was decided before we even had the company, and it's a sort of a topic I'd like to examine with you because it's example of how the decision was made, and I genuinely don't know who made the decision, that we would have a conference phone.

Simon J Dudley (46:37)
That would make perfect sense. The technology needed a conference phone at the time. And that we would not use the speakers in the television primarily. We'd use the speaker in a conference phone, and we would have 16 microphones around this speaker. Now, one of the problems that everyone has with with a two-way audio is extracting the audio from the far end so it doesn't get looped back into your system.

Simon J Dudley (47:04)
In hindsight, the idea of having a little speaker, a little one-inch speaker on a dinner plate-sized device surrounded by microphones is, from an engineering point of view, a horrible idea. Because why would you you don't want you want the microphones and the speakers as far apart as possible? I'm interested because that decision was made before any engineering was done. And I was

Simon J Dudley (47:30)
I'm always been called curious as to what did you think of why would we do 16 microphones? Was it just a whim? You know, why not 17 or 12 or 4 or 1? Or why not not have a speaker in the middle of the device at all? Because you don't really want a speaker in the middle of the table. So what was your thinking about all of that? Or did you just work on the principle of this is a decision that was made before I arrived?

Simon J Dudley (47:59)
I don't have any control on it. I'll live within it and do my maths. I mean, how did you think

Beau Chimene (48:03)
Well

Simon J Dudley (48:04)
of those problems?

Beau Chimene (48:05)
Well, first of all, I probably worked on six different phones over my career, and we followed some of the same principles as that original phone, but with great improvements each step as I learned and learned what to do and what not to do. But remember Polycom and other people had had the concept of speakerphones before. Life size was just a pickup of that with those used cardioid mics.

Beau Chimene (48:30)
And the mics looked away from the centralized speaker. Whereas Life Sciences was using OmniMics, which means they can see the speaker too well. They pick up the speaker perfectly. It really pushed the algorithms and the hardware design hard to do exactly what you're saying.

Beau Chimene (48:49)
to be able to subtract what's coming out of the speaker from the microphone signal. Do you do it in hardware? Can you do it in software? So many things have to be perfect in order to remove that signal correctly. I would say we got it right later. But those that

Simon J Dudley (49:07)
I would say we I I

Simon J Dudley (49:08)
think it was a fine product. That's not really where but there were a lot of compromises. And all

Beau Chimene (49:14)
yeah.

Simon J Dudley (49:15)
of engineering is compromises, right? Science, I suppose, is technically non-compromise. That's the difference between a scientist and an engineer, in my experience, right? But

Beau Chimene (49:23)
Compromise.

Simon J Dudley (49:24)
but one of the things we had to do is we had to build a an aluminum, aluminium, alumumin, whatever word you want to use, base for this thing to make certain that there wasn't any reverberation, because

Simon J Dudley (49:35)
You could say, cut this sound out of what the microphones is picking up. But if it distorted, which it will do at light, louder volumes, then you're going to be screwed, for example. So was this an

Beau Chimene (49:47)
So so can I can I

Simon J Dudley (49:49)
example? Let me let me ask this question. Was this an example of it's a co everything is a compromise, but it was pretty compromised from the beginning as an idea. Anything with microphones that are four inches away from the speaker is a compromise.

Simon J Dudley (50:04)
Would you have started from there if you had a gr a clean slate? Andor how did you work through that compromise set?

Beau Chimene (50:13)
So, what what I'm uncomfortable with is the idea of jumping from we're not building any phones to we're gonna build this brand new RD phone with very few prototypes or abilities to change paths as we learn. So, did we really need that aluminum base? My thought is no. Did we really need 32 mics or even 16? No.

Beau Chimene (50:40)
Later in hindsight, I can look back and go, I wish we had been allowed to come up with some great ideas, prove them, test them, learn, and then build a better phone, the second iteration, third iteration, and maybe the product is the fourth iteration. But really, what we released to the public with that original Lightning phone, 16 mics, that didn't sound very good, was what came out of Michael Kanoyer's head.

Beau Chimene (51:09)
And Will and other very bright people coming up with good ideas, but where's the proof? Where's the iteration? Where's the improvement? You put a great idea on a tight schedule. Well, guess what? It's not a hundred percent. Maybe their ideas were seventy, eighty percent, and all of us saw the risk. Wait, you're doing this? yeah, there's a paper that says that will work. What about this? I prototyped it in mini scale, and it seems like that might work. And then we're gonna scale it up.

Beau Chimene (51:39)
Shove it in and sell it as a product. And we all know that it didn't work the first few times. And I'm much more comfortable with iteration. Learn. But I understand we had schedules. We're living on oxygen from investments, from investors.

Simon J Dudley (51:55)
Yeah.

Beau Chimene (51:56)
We didn't have the luxury of a NASA or a DOD saying, prototype four times and then let's look at lessons learned. Hey, we had to get money going. That's our oxygen that we all live and breathe on.

Simon J Dudley (52:07)
Sure. Yeah, it's like a runway

Beau Chimene (52:08)
But

Simon J Dudley (52:09)
for an aircraft, right? You but but

Beau Chimene (52:11)
Well run.

Simon J Dudley (52:11)
we decided, I felt as a particular instance there. We we LifeSize made a very early decision was we are gonna build a jet-powered triplane. It's like, why don't we decide we're gonna build a plane and then worry about what engine or how many wings it's gonna have? And I don't think we did that in that particular instance. So

Beau Chimene (52:34)
I I

Beau Chimene (52:34)
I think you're right. We went high risk, high performance, and got burned. And got burned several places where we were.

Simon J Dudley (52:41)
I do remember

Simon J Dudley (52:41)
when there there was a little mic later on, a couple of years later, we

Beau Chimene (52:45)
yeah.

Simon J Dudley (52:45)
built a little mic puck, which had one of those things the sixteen microphones in it. And you called the team, yeah, I think you were in the room, called me. I was back in the UK at the time visiting my house, which I occasionally got to do, and you

Beau Chimene (52:59)
I remember.

Simon J Dudley (53:00)
called me on it and said, What do you think of the quality? And I said, this is better than the phone. Why do we put sixteen microphones in the phone when we've only got one in this? It sounds better.

Simon J Dudley (53:09)
And the looks on people's faces was there were a few I think the phrase is

Beau Chimene (53:11)
that was there were a few

Simon J Dudley (53:15)
bulldog licking piss off thistles. it was not a not a happy shit.

Beau Chimene (53:18)
Yeah. It didn't go down well.

Beau Chimene (53:21)
Your your comment wa had reverberations as far as No,

Simon J Dudley (53:24)
But I was right, I felt.

Beau Chimene (53:26)
you were absolutely right. And and and that was, I would consider, a very good, honest assessment that we weren't done yet, and we weren't ready for our product, and that we had run too many risks on a high performance design that wasn't working. Guess what? Later iterations only used four microphones.

Beau Chimene (53:46)
Not sixteen, not thirty-two. It wasn't the number of microphones. A few microphones in the right geometry is the right way to do it. Not a circle, but more of a cross. I didn't know that in 2004. I learned it quickly, but not quick enough to save lightning, to save that original phone. And so lessons learned. Did I see a train wreck coming? I saw a train wreck coming. We all saw the train wreck coming when

Beau Chimene (54:13)
It didn't sound very good. The echo cancellor wasn't working well. The beam former wasn't working well. The beams that we all thought of this wonderful, beautiful pencil thin beam that was gonna reach out and grab Simon's voice and ignore the other 97% of the room. That's not real. That's not real. Microphones have variability. There's noise in the room, there's precision in the digital domain. Nothing is perfect. And that pencil thin beam.

Beau Chimene (54:43)
Turned into a multi-frequency fat cactus leaf with with low frequencies being wide and no frequencies being narrow. So if you moved your head, you sounded your your your whole tone would change as you walked around the 360 degrees. When you went with one mic, it was clean. It wasn't perfect, but it was very clean, very beautiful audio.

Simon J Dudley (55:06)
Well, there's never

Simon J Dudley (55:08)
as an engineer you know better than me, there's no perfect. Everything is a compromise. So you did up

Beau Chimene (55:12)
But that original

Beau Chimene (55:13)
phone was driven by poor I don't want to say poor engineering designs, I would say designs that were risky and needed to be proven and lessons learned. We didn't get that opportunity.

Simon J Dudley (55:24)
I I would argue

Simon J Dudley (55:25)
that they were they were made that it it was compromised by unreasonable or unproven assumptions at the very beginning. And those assumptions should have been proven before you it it

Beau Chimene (55:37)
Very good.

Simon J Dudley (55:37)
started with it has to be circular and have 16 microphones, which may or may not have been true, but they were that was the thing that was set in stone, and then everything else had to build around that. And I think that's an example of poor

Simon J Dudley (55:52)
Specification building ultimately.

Beau Chimene (55:54)
I

Beau Chimene (55:54)
I would say very powerful personalities that are very driven and forceful and and and and they have great knowledge, but how to turn that into a real product? I I I think that's one of my skills is turning some good ideas and my own good ideas into real shippable products. And I think that other people can read

Beau Chimene (56:20)
Great papers have great ideas, but is it really a product? Let's prove it first. Let's prove it first before we put concrete around it and put schedules and money and customer expectations and hiring sales team and marketing and then to find out, wait, the central core nugget isn't really gold.

Simon J Dudley (56:40)
Yeah, yeah, that's fair. So you did a whole bunch of different audio products for Life Size.

Beau Chimene (56:45)
Many, many.

Simon J Dudley (56:46)
And then what was the last product you worked on at Life Size?

Beau Chimene (56:50)
Well, there was there was the phones, there was the codecs, the new codecs, smaller codecs, bigger codecs, two hundreds, two twenties. There was the little small one. Do you remember the little small one that was gonna

Simon J Dudley (57:02)
Possible.

Beau Chimene (57:03)
passport? Each one was unique, each one had its challenges, but the one I'm most proud of is the second generation phone. That was, we finally had the ability to do a clean slate, all the new lessons learned.

Beau Chimene (57:17)
Four mics instead of 16, a much better processor, a much cleaner speaker, a much better grill pattern, no more aluminum on the bottom. That was a waste of money. We went with plastic with rubber feet on the bottom. But we knew what we were doing because we had had a little bit of time to prototype and learn and go, this is important, this isn't. This one we can design around, this one we can't. We learned.

Beau Chimene (57:46)
And we did a much cleaner design, much simpler, cheaper to build, beautiful beams that sounded great 360 degrees, but ignored a lot of noise in the room. And then we finally started to build enough headroom in the processor so that we could do a real job of noise cancellation. Now, we weren't AI yet, but we finally had the amount of horsepower to learn how to get rid of HVAC noise.

Beau Chimene (58:13)
Work on noise on paper shuffling, door slams. We finally had the headroom in the in the processor to get to do those things. And the echo cancellor was perfect, by the way.

Simon J Dudley (58:24)
And this was what early twenty teens, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, that sort of era.

Beau Chimene (58:29)
Yeah, yeah, ten, eleven,

Beau Chimene (58:31)
twelve, thirteen, fourteen. And that one sold really well. As far as I know, you would know better. But I thought the customers loved that one.

Simon J Dudley (58:38)
I think so. It's it's a it's a long time ago now. I don't remember the numbers. but but yes, I mean certainly Mustang, which was the the second generation phone, I believe,

Beau Chimene (58:47)
Fantastic.

Simon J Dudley (58:47)
model number.

Beau Chimene (58:48)
And and can I bring up the mic pods were now mini. The same microphone array that was on the phone was dropped onto the microarray. so it's doing beamforming. Easier because it doesn't have the speaker right next to it, but it's got a speaker four, five, or six feet away from it. But the exact same beamformer could be developed once for the phone and dropped into the mic pods with a digital bus connection. These are no longer analog. It's a digital bus. And then being able to

Beau Chimene (59:15)
Echo cancel two mic pods and the phone with the same beamformer that's tested and working, so not throwing around risk just for fun. And then people could walk around a whole conference room with two mic pods and microphones and the speaker phone, one speaker. It sounded great. I liked the sound.

Simon J Dudley (59:37)
Now it's interesting again from 2026, that all sounds pretty obvious, but it wasn't obvious at the time. Sort of part of the point in the whole

Beau Chimene (59:43)
Digital bus? No.

Simon J Dudley (59:44)
podcast is it all looks like a straight line from here,

Beau Chimene (59:48)
yes.

Simon J Dudley (59:49)
but it certainly wasn't at the time, was it? I remember a lot of machinations. Now, one of the things that LifeSize did, and I want to talk about transitions a bit. So LifeSize had the

Simon J Dudley (01:00:01)
the the high definition rune systems like the 220 and the passport and these. And then it moved to a new architecture with this platform called icon. And

Beau Chimene (01:00:09)
Yes.

Simon J Dudley (01:00:11)
LifeSize yeah LifeSize really struggled with that and ultimately failed. I mean it it it it died as a result of I don't I I don't want to say a result of icon because it was after my time. But it did have a successful business in in the large 2000

Simon J Dudley (01:00:27)
Or $10,000 meeting room solutions in that era. And then it tried to pivot to another thing, which was brave. Most companies don't, if they're being relatively successful, they don't want to pivot, right? They want to stick to what they know. But the icon, which was a much less expensive device and bundled with a service offering, sort of tried to compete with people like Zoom, although Zoom was very early in those days, and therefore.

Simon J Dudley (01:00:54)
you know, people didn't know Zoom were. Now you were still there at that point and it and it sort of started going wrong. So

Beau Chimene (01:00:58)
Yes.

Simon J Dudley (01:01:01)
what in your experience was the problem? What why did it start to go wrong? Was that more competition? Or was that they couldn't work out the transition? Or they were holding on to old ideas? What was your opinion then?

Beau Chimene (01:01:13)
Ooh.

Beau Chimene (01:01:14)
Well f when we started going to more soft phone, the the idea that we were going to do a Zoom, a Skype type service, we we started working with this company called Muriel, as I recall, an Italian organization. Very good, really smart guys. We bought their company and used that as a leverage.

Beau Chimene (01:01:37)
To jump into how can we build soft technology, no longer putting a piece of hardware in a room, but how can I call into a bridge, call into a meeting, call each other just with a voI-Murial approach. To me, it's very similar to what Skype and Zoom ended up. And I wish we had pursued that much harder. It took more investment. We should have

Beau Chimene (01:02:02)
Picked that whole Italian team up and brought them to Austin or done a much better job of integration. We always kept them at an arm's length, didn't infuse their technology properly, as happens to many different things. And I would say 90% of our engineers were faced or focused with working on icon and hardware-based platforms. We were picking up the Italian work.

Beau Chimene (01:02:28)
And trying to shove it in and integrate it and never doing a great job. When you look at it, what would our what would our market value have been if we had picked up Muriel, done the done the best job possible, and built a Zoom in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, doing great in twenty eighteen, and here comes COVID.

Simon J Dudley (01:02:48)
Well, you and I would be calling each other from a what am I saying? We would never have made this call because we'll both be on our own islands.

Beau Chimene (01:02:56)
looking good, Simon

Simon J Dudley (01:02:58)
Indeed, it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, I would argue that that the transition there was partly from a a primarily hardware company with a software element to a software company, but ultimately what companies like Zoom and

Simon J Dudley (01:03:17)
Skype, I suppose, i it's really a services business because a customer doesn't touch software in any meaningful way. They touch the Zoom service or the Team's service. And I think that culturally that was something that Lifestyles couldn't cope with. Would you agree with that?

Beau Chimene (01:03:34)
Yes, and and it it it's the reason that startups have such an important role to play, because existing companies, when they see new technologies, they often look and say, what about my current install base? What about my sales team? My sales team is, you know, much more about the sales rewards than I do, but if your sales team isn't motivated to go out and sell a hundred seats of of your new soft phone, then then they're not gonna sell it.

Beau Chimene (01:04:02)
you can do 10 10 seats of icon 50 of the old 220s and some phones, and we've got some seats of what did we call it? Muriel, we probably called it some some code name at w when we were trying to sell it. The the sales team doesn't want to touch it. There's almost no money in it. It's not hardware based. how do you price it? Where's the motivation? Where's the money for sales to to go off and do it? You almost need a completely different sales team.

Simon J Dudley (01:04:30)
Yeah, I think you do. I think there's an argument that says that culturally companies, engineering departments, but also commercial organisations, my experience, you're they're either good at services or hardware or software. It's rare and clearly a company like Apple has worked it out, but at a scale which I've never worked at. But there is that sense of a sales organisation that's good at hardware, very rarely good at software, and vice versa.

Beau Chimene (01:05:00)
You need you

Simon J Dudley (01:05:00)
And services

Simon J Dudley (01:05:01)
organisations have a completely different mindset. It's just a n none of them are right or wrong, fundamentally. They're just different.

Beau Chimene (01:05:08)
No, they're just different, different paradigm,

Beau Chimene (01:05:10)
different paradigms. And and if we would have had the leadership to go off and say this is a big bright future, which of course, as you know, the straight line wasn't obvious then. There were many straight lines from where we were. But to go after that soft phone approach that is eventually Skype and Zoom, we had it. We had it up and working. We had wonderful bridges, we knew about the cloud, we could spin up new new cloud servers.

Beau Chimene (01:05:37)
And roll out a thousand soft phone clients, and it could have been another Zoom or Skype. But as a company, you're right. We we came from a hardware focus. Software was just the thing that made hardware work. How do you price a software-only product? It it it wasn't interesting. And and think of the multiples that we would use at LifeSize, based on, here's a a $500 piece of hardware, but we're gonna sell it for $2000. But that's because

Beau Chimene (01:06:05)
Many, many months of RD flow in there. Wait, how are you gonna do that with a soft phone that has no hardware or no hardware that the customer is used to? I feel like it was a big lesson learned. Maybe that no one learned the lesson, but I think that it was also a big opportunity lost that we didn't see, but we were right there next to it, and we should have seen it somehow.

Simon J Dudley (01:06:27)
Yeah, I mean it's hindsight, it's an exact science, isn't it? As this whole podcast talks about endlessly. I think one of the ways to have done it would have been an overlay. so that you have an organization. If you if you take a salesperson, you have a million dollars to do, they are gonna fill themselves up with the thing that that retires that number as quickly as possible. Not the thing that is a little egg that will generate something massively

Simon J Dudley (01:06:54)
Later on, when they probably moved on. So let's move on because we've got twenty minutes now to talk about Logitech. So

Beau Chimene (01:07:04)
launch attack.

Simon J Dudley (01:07:05)
you left LifeSize in

Beau Chimene (01:07:07)
2014 crypto startup with Will Oxford and Steve Smith and a few other people, a few other ex-life sizers. Crypto startup called Rubicon. I would say this was Will Oxford's baby. he's a very smart man. He doesn't just know audio, he knows a lot of different things. And we went after the crypto market.

Beau Chimene (01:07:31)
I would say that I found out really quickly that it wasn't my love. I enjoyed the work there, I enjoyed the people, but it wasn't my love. It wasn't my strength. this is some great technology, but it it didn't personally work well for me and my style. but the company struggled. They were trying to produce some hardware and some software and trying to get it to fit into.

Beau Chimene (01:07:57)
Perhaps the web servers of the future and to provide excellent cryptography and excellent security. I I I decided it was time to leave. And why did I decide it's time to leave? My friend Simon Dudley got in con got got in contact with me and said, Beau, Logitech is having some audio problems. And the story I heard, Simon, was that.

Beau Chimene (01:08:22)
Logitech had gotten kicked out of Tesla because of poor audio. That was the story I heard. I don't know if it's true. But that we had gotten kicked out of the Tesla account because the audio was so poor from the new products. The group phone. So you put me in touch with Scott Wharton at Logitech 2016. I talked to him three or four or five times. We had a great, great communication.

Beau Chimene (01:08:46)
And and I knew they were going through some personnel changes there. And I I I loved it. Remember, I'd already worked with the Logitech people while we were building the Mustang phone at at Life Size. Logitech was working on group and trying to learn how to build a hardware speaker phone. And at my level, we had great communication, great teamwork. We had weekly meetings where we shared everything. Here's our beamforming approach, here's our echo canceller, here's our microphones we're using.

Beau Chimene (01:09:13)
Logic, you're already buying them. You wanna jump in on this microphone? We got a great deal. We worked really well with those guys. I I know there was friction at other levels, that's okay.

Simon J Dudley (01:09:24)
I mean, for the for those of you watching this who don't understand, Logitech had actually bought Life Size in 2009. and no one at Life Size, all to my knowledge, at Logitech noticed. I mean, they they were held as completely separate organizations for a variety of reasons, primarily to do with senior leadership on life size's side, I think it's fair to say, who

Beau Chimene (01:09:49)
what I believe.

Simon J Dudley (01:09:49)
just didn't want

Simon J Dudley (01:09:50)
They they like the money, but they just didn't want to interact with the Logitech people. It never made any sense to me. But it's an interesting conversation about culture. Okay, so

Beau Chimene (01:09:59)
But but

Beau Chimene (01:10:00)
but to know that at my level, audio team to audio team, we worked very well. We knew we were owned by Logitech, but we were technically ahead of Logitech, but we shared. We didn't look at them as competition, we looked at them as team as teammates and as people that we were supposed to share with. But we never got any direction from upper management on this. So we shared. That's one reason why group

Beau Chimene (01:10:27)
Had the same microphones as the life-size Mustang. It had the same speaker as the Life Size Mustang. I shared all that. Because one, that's who I am. I I I I wasn't into any some power politics between us and Logitech. To me, there were teammates. So when Scott said, Beau, I'd like you to meet the team, I already knew most of those people. Alexander, Ken.

Beau Chimene (01:10:52)
I I already knew them, I'd already worked with them, I'd already worked with Ali. Now we weren't the but we we we hadn't worked super close, but I'd met them every week for a year. So it was a natural

Simon J Dudley (01:11:02)
Sure. So

Beau Chimene (01:11:04)
fit.

Simon J Dudley (01:11:05)
so you ended up working on a ton of audio products for Logitech. Do you want to list off what some of them were?

Beau Chimene (01:11:13)
Webcams.

Beau Chimene (01:11:15)
We refurbished the group phone. Group phone had already been released, but with a very weak DSP processor, not enough processing to be able to do a great job of echo cancellation and beamforming. They had the right micro ray, but were misusing it. They were doing a completely different type of beamforming echo cancellation that made no sense to me and didn't work well. So we came in and ripped out the whole board, put in a new board.

Beau Chimene (01:11:41)
was basically the same board that would eventually go into the rally system. And we put in new algorithms, a new processor board, the audio was great, and we re-released it. Customers didn't know. They just knew that suddenly group, the new groups coming out of the factory, sounded much better. We designed nope, nothing.

Simon J Dudley (01:12:01)
Yeah, we didn't change the model number or the serial

Simon J Dudley (01:12:04)
number or the packaging or anything. We just made the decision 'cause

Beau Chimene (01:12:06)
It was a silent,

Beau Chimene (01:12:08)
silent, silent rollout.

Simon J Dudley (01:12:10)
We did that with a number of products. So what else did you work on? Did you work on Rally Bar, Rally Bar Mini, Meetup?

Beau Chimene (01:12:16)
Every

Beau Chimene (01:12:17)
one of them, every one of them. I feel like Rally with its multiple mic pods, seven mic pods, seven splitters. That was a little crazy. I I remember being in Amsterdam, I think you were there, and we were demoing it to Zoom. And we showed them all how beautiful the audio was, and I thought it was a great demo. And the guy at Zoom said, This is nothing like what I want.

Beau Chimene (01:12:41)
It's an installation nightmare. We don't want to see all these cables all over the place. The fact your audio is perfect is not the problem. We're never going to get there. You've got wires going all under the table, splitters, it was an engineering marvel. But it was complex, hard to assemble. It worked. It worked in many different environments, but to me, the complete flip was what they wanted. They wanted the

Beau Chimene (01:13:08)
They wanted an all-in-one. And Rally was the exact opposite of that. That was an all-in-20. Rally bar, Rally Bar Mini. I can't remember all the different versions we cranked out. Each one was a brand new audio product. Different microphones, different microphone arrays, different speakers, different porting of the speakers, different fabrics. Each one was its own challenge. Even though you might look and go, well, they all look kind of similar. They all look kind of similar. But each one was a different layout.

Beau Chimene (01:13:36)
In different optimizations as we were learning and getting better each time. Each time the audio was better. Sometimes people would say, wait, Rally Bar is huge and costs a lot, but the audio is better from the Rally Bar Mini, and even better from this one. Better algorithms, better lessons learned, better ways to hold the microphones, better ways to cushion the speaker vibrations. All good things.

Simon J Dudley (01:13:59)
So you did a lot of great products at that time and then Logitech became I mean, during its heyday, we were half of all installed rooms for Logitech. I mean, we were 50% market share from the number of rooms equipped, right, with with

Beau Chimene (01:14:13)
Yeah.

Simon J Dudley (01:14:14)
video gear. So wildly successful products. What's your favorite? Have you got a have you got your, you know, prettiest child i within that range?

Beau Chimene (01:14:25)
The prettiest child is always right.

Beau Chimene (01:14:27)
And you would say, but it's the ugliest from the from the millions of wires. But to get seven microphones, each with a beam former, each one forming eight beams. So seven mic pods, eight beams, that's fifty-six beams looking around the room. And as you would walk around the room, I had a special version of micpods that had LEDs that showed where which beam it was selecting.

Beau Chimene (01:14:55)
And you could walk around the room and you'd see Mic Pod one following you up, Mic Pod two jumping, Mic Pod three, Mic Pod four, Mic Pod five, a and each beam just locking on to you like a laser. And I would show that at demonstrations and people.

Beau Chimene (01:15:09)
Excellent. Now there were problems, not everything was perfect. But to walk around and demo that in Amsterdam, I thought was really classic. People loved it. Especially the engineering folks. Yeah. Yeah, I I I promise I I really took to heart what Zoom said when they said this is not at all what we want. And I realized, yeah. And that's a reason to get engineers up and out and into the installation world. Because engineers will

Simon J Dudley (01:15:35)
Which we

Beau Chimene (01:15:36)
build something

Simon J Dudley (01:15:37)
Yeah, yeah. We did that, I felt at LifeSize a bit more. Remember, I used have clients

Beau Chimene (01:15:40)
Yes.

Simon J Dudley (01:15:41)
come in, and you and Casey and Will and others would do the dog and pony for each department.

Beau Chimene (01:15:46)
Yes.

Simon J Dudley (01:15:47)
And every one of those clients who ever came to that would say it was the highlight of their visit to Austin. I mean, truly every one of them. What we didn't do that very much at Lodgy. And I always used to argue that the problem with engineers, all due respect to engineers, is

Beau Chimene (01:16:04)
No.

Simon J Dudley (01:16:04)
Given the option, you will build the coolest coat hanger cigar lighter. Technically brilliant, but is there actually a market for for a for a coat hanger you can light your cigar with?

Beau Chimene (01:16:18)
But is it an engineer is built that way? I don't think so. I think you get someone and you isolate them down at a desk in a cubicle and never let them talk to customers. Now whose fault is it? So I loved going to Tesla. I loved going to Zoom. I loved going to Amsterdam and meeting the customers. We should be doing much more of that. It's a way to get them to go, I don't need a coat hanger with a cigar lighter, but wait, if I

Beau Chimene (01:16:44)
Had it do it this other way, just like this customer said, hey, that would be fun too. Engineers want to build useful things. They don't want to build something silly. But if you give them no information and feed them, feed them darkness and horseshit, they're gonna grow mushrooms. It's not their fault. They're very smart people, but if you hide the data from them, don't be surprised

Simon J Dudley (01:17:05)
Yeah.

Beau Chimene (01:17:05)
with what they build. And and Logitech purposefully sectioned that off in the last few years, where no, you stay focused, we got schedules.

Beau Chimene (01:17:14)
missing the point. Going and meeting customers that are down the road is so valuable. But then you get the, no, no, no, no, no, engineers aren't going to design things anymore. You just build upper people we know.

Simon J Dudley (01:17:27)
Well, that's part of the that's always the dichotomy, isn't it, between a product team and engineering team. The product team, at least in theory, know all about what the product should do that the customer wants, but they don't really understand engineering and compromise. And the engineering team often can burn a lot of cycles, end up talking to clients, and they never speak to enough because they can't, because if they

Simon J Dudley (01:17:54)
And then they end up building the thing that the client that they the one client they met asked for. And that sort of ends up with a Henry Ford, if I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. it's a it

Beau Chimene (01:18:06)
Yeah, no. So so you gotta

Beau Chimene (01:18:09)
be careful. No, but but then you're saying is knowledge a bad thing? And I would go with knowledge is a good thing. For engineers to learn more is a good thing. You don't want them distracted and doing that all day, every day. Once a month, once a quarter, and then to get into good discussions with with product people. Again, is good. You don't want to build the faster horse, there's only so fast a horse is gonna run. But

Beau Chimene (01:18:35)
To have the engineers in the meeting is not a bad thing. It it it it allows buy in, it allows some better decisions, or at least it gets the I'm building this and now I know why. Which is a good thing.

Simon J Dudley (01:18:49)
Yeah, I think that's a very interesting point. And I I I of course clearly agree with you. I've always felt that we need to organizations need to leverage engineers more than they do. They keep as you suggest, they keep them in the dark and they feed them what they require or what they think they require and they don't necessarily. They they need to be in the conversation.

Beau Chimene (01:19:10)
You know, a as a as appropriate, obviously not every day, but but zero you get y you get some strange things coming out when when you feed zero.

Simon J Dudley (01:19:20)
Yes, I think that's fair. All right, my friend, look, let's wrap up because we've been at this for a while and this has been a fantastic conversation, but

Beau Chimene (01:19:27)
Hello.

Simon J Dudley (01:19:28)
all conversations need to come to an end. So

Beau Chimene (01:19:30)
I hope so.

Simon J Dudley (01:19:30)
a couple of questions I ask everyone. If you were if you could ask your if you were talking to young people, I mean your your own kids are in the world and they're doing their thing. So let's talk about an 18-year-old. If you were talking to an 18-year-old today,

Simon J Dudley (01:19:47)
What would you recommend they do?

Beau Chimene (01:19:49)
Everything. Everything. Everything. They need to go flip burgers. They need to dig a trench. They need to plant a tree. They need to go be a plumber. Simon, I really wish that we had a program in America where high schoolers would go off and do something different for a week and that it's gotta be coordinated with industry. It's got to be coordinated with craftsmen. It's got to be coordinated with everyone. But imagine

Beau Chimene (01:20:15)
Imagine a 18-year-old going and emptying the trash, or mopping the floor, or planting a tree, or working with a telephone line repairman. Of course, there's safety issues, there's insurance issues. But I was very lucky in that what I chose at 17 with very little information turned out to be the love of my life, as far as aerospace engineering. Many people are not so lucky. That's not their fault, it just didn't work out.

Beau Chimene (01:20:43)
Many people are 17 making life choices with 0.1% of information. Give them a lot of information. Go be in the military for a year. Go be a, I don't know, a a singer. Okay, that's getting stupid. But but more and more and more experiences I think will allow you to make a better choice and be a better, more rounded person. So I I try to encourage my kids to do everything.

Simon J Dudley (01:21:09)
What about education?

Beau Chimene (01:21:10)
Ooh, that's a touchy subject. I'm a big fan of higher education. But that doesn't mean for everyone. It should be free. And if you don't want to go to upper education, you should go on to another education. You should go become a licensed plumber or a telephone repairment. sorry, line repair. Do something.

Beau Chimene (01:21:34)
And enhance your future. Being an unskilled 18-year-old, 22-year-old is a tough place to be. Unless you're a brilliant person or lucky or have a big inheritance, you're gonna be swimming against the current your whole life. And decisions are made at 17, 18, 22 that lock people in for the rest of their life. Because next thing you know, they're 35 and 45 with a family and a house note, and they're digging trenches.

Beau Chimene (01:22:02)
And getting replaced by a steam shovel or AI. Upper education is excellent, but not for everyone. But I would say 40%, 60%, 30%, I don't know, but it's not zero. And it's not a hundred. And I feel like we've kind of had ebbs and flows, but I'm not in favor of this modern upper education is bad. Upper education is good and it's got us what we're d we're doing. And if we as a country don't do it.

Beau Chimene (01:22:31)
Other countries are still educating their masses and trying to educate more and more and they'll take over. E education's not bad at all, but it's like anything else. The right way.

Simon J Dudley (01:22:41)
What do you want to leave our audience with?

Beau Chimene (01:22:43)
Happiness. I am an extremely happy person. I love being retired, but I loved working. And I found that some of my friends or acquaintances are not as happy as they could be. And I want them to be. How to get people to be more engaged with life and more happy and more joyful is a challenge.

Beau Chimene (01:23:09)
By the way, it it i it's it's a challenge I I work on too. I'm not gifted in this, but all of us need to just enjoy and work work with other people. That's what I find and thank you, Simon, for this invitation. Because just human interaction is where it's at.

Beau Chimene (01:23:25)
That's my thoughts.

Simon J Dudley (01:23:25)
Yeah.

Beau Chimene (01:23:26)
That's my thought.

Simon J Dudley (01:23:27)
I would say that having looked back at forty years in industry, I always thought it was about the technology and I've come to realise it's all about the people, really.

Beau Chimene (01:23:33)
No. It's

Beau Chimene (01:23:35)
all about the people. Sometimes I've been on vacations and I go, I want to see this mountain. I want to see this lake. But when you look back on it, it was no that other camper that we bumped into and shared a glass of wine with. Turns out he's really inch that's the highlight. Not the lake, not the mountain. And the same thing with work. I think of all the friends I've got from from working when you didn't think you were making friends, you thought you were working.

Beau Chimene (01:24:01)
But you produced a piece of plastic, and here's a friendship. Isn't that much more valuable? The company made money. I made a friend. And some money.

Simon J Dudley (01:24:10)
On that note, Beau Chimene you've been an absolute joy. I'd love to see you, my friend. Thank you very much for being on the show.