SPEAKER_01 0:00

And I believe everybody's got a superpower. Somebody is there 15 years, there is something that they do remarkably well. So harness it. It's like a coach getting the best out of a player. It's moneyball all over again.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, good day, whichever it is for you. Welcome to the show. This is the before obvious podcast, but you already know that because otherwise you would not have clicked on this video. My friend Chris Neto is our guest today. Chris, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Hopefully as well. All is well. I'm actually been very much looking forward to this, as you said yourself, you do have lots of words to say, and I think we're going to hear many of them during the next however long we make this conversation today. So before we um before we get into your past and how you got to where you are today, why don't we start with where are you today? What are you up to? What does work look like? What do you think of the world as we stand in late 2026?

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Today I happen to be in Freehold, New Jersey, physically. That is a rarity these days. I have been on the road consistently every week since I would say since the end of July. I've been consistently every week on the road. My my role or my title with Midwitch Group is head of emerging markets, Midwitch US. So I'm part of the Midwitch Midwitch companies, uh US ARM, and head of emerging markets, which means I am a little bit of marketing, a little bit of sales, a little bit of business development, a little bit of everything. In the financial world, I guess that that title kind of says that I'm off in Far East Asia or in South America working on financial emerging markets. That's not the case. In the world of AV, uh, literally translates into uh verticals and opportunities with verticals, where the next emerging market is that we should be looking at, uh, as far as like uh should we be, you know, I would work with our business management team and say, you know what, if we're gonna step into the world of enterprise broadcast, let's start looking at these shows and let's start looking at these technologies. And it's not just let's get a USB camera and say we're a broadcast team. That's not the way it works. So I work uh to kind of explore the new territories and new areas that uh we're gonna be, you know, moving into and uh then help launch that because then sales jumps in and so does business management, full you know, full speed ahead into uh you know acquiring the brands and acquiring the products that we need to as a distributor support those verticals. So yeah, that's a very simple version of what I do.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

My guess is that you didn't come out of the egg deciding that that's the role you wanted to have. You probably wanted to be a fireman or an astronaut or something at some point. So let's do what we always do with this show and go all the way back to the beginning. Where did you start life? What was early life like? What was education like, all of those things.

unknown 3:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Alright, so the one thing that I usually tell people when they ask, you know, if I'm spe have a speaking engagement or somebody asks me, what's the one thing that I wouldn't know about you? And it usually throws people off because of uh the way I speak, but I did not speak English when I went to school. My first language is Portuguese. My mom and dad emigrated from Portugal in the late 60s. Uh they came over uh during the time of Salazar, who was kind of like a ruler thing, kind of the bad guy running a country type thing over in Portugal. So my dad and my mom uh came with their family over to the US. And then I showed up a few years later, not in the sixties obviously, but uh I showed up later in life and uh born and raised here, but a part of bringing the family over and going through the the the immigration process is that eventually you can bring the rest of your family. So my dad brought brought his mom and grandma lived with me and helped raise me, because mom and dad worked. Uh we were blue-collar, you know, blue collar family was not they didn't come with you know silver spoon in my mouth. So mom and dad worked and grandma was home with me. So up until the time I went to kindergarten, I only spoke Portuguese. And if it wasn't for Sesame Street and kindergarten, I wouldn't have learned how to speak English. So that was that's probably my most interesting thing. That's going way back, and you asked me to take the time machine back. At some point in my uh youth uh I wasn't destined to become a a professional hockey player or a professional soccer player or baseball player and make the millions that they were making. Though I love playing sports, I was very much into the arts. I loved uh music and art. And I had a knack for drawing. And uh throughout I would say, you know, middle school all the way through high school, um, I felt I was destined to become some sort of graphic artist or artist. That's what I wanted to do. Any art program I could take, I took. I won New New Jersey State art competitions for paintings and for artwork. Really good with black and white design specifically. I was very good at shading. So a lot of my black and whites did really well. I did some acrylic painting and stuff like that. I loved it. But around that time in the when I graduated high school in like ninety two, the computer was starting to become a a thorn in my side. I was not literate in Mac or any of that. I didn't have a computer at home. And a lot of the artwork was starting to move that way, and I was a very much a hands-on manual type of person. I loved pen and ink, I loved uh, you know, the the most m the most technical thing that I did was photography, and I liked that. I learned how to process uh film and stuff like that. So yeah, that was what I thought I was gonna be, somewhere in the art and creative space. Uh went to college. When I when I went to college, I was actually pursuing an art degree. So I did portfolio reviews as I went in. Uh didn't get into any of the major art schools, which I thought I would. My grades were good, but here in the US we kind of have the the the thing called the SATs back in the day. And I was not a test taker. And uh so my SATs were okay at best. My grades are great. Graduated 25th in my class out of three hundred and something kids. So National Honor Society, all the awards, you know, head of the art club, all the things that I needed. Then I went to college and I met my first semester, I met a teacher that gave me a run for my money. She was an older teacher who was very spaced out. She really enjoyed the 60s to the point where my interpretation of art and hers were two different planets. And one assignment killed it. Was she asked me to she asked a class to draw a hand an interpretation. So I took that and I am down to the details that my h hand design you could have put her on a fingerprint scanner and knew it was it could be identified as a fingerprint. She didn't want that. She wanted Lucy Goosey interpretation as the I don't know what she was looking for, but yeah, me and her did not see eye to eye, and it really killed my my my my my forward progress in art because here I am this whole time I had been awarded I you know applauded for doing great work. If the school wanted something done for some commemorative thing, they'd call me in and I'd help with the art work for it, or I would help with set design, whatever and here I am in school fighting this lady who did not like anything I was putting out because everything I did was very graphic and she wanted less that she wanted more just free-flowing work and that was not my style. And I didn't understand that there is that that I have to be open to more style, right? Or be open to different things. And it's actually a lesson that I learned in life early. I was very bullheaded about that. I was like, if it isn't black and white, you know, I don't want nothing to do with it. If it wasn't in a grayscale, I don't want nothing to do with it. I started to have, you know, I I understood color theory, I understood all that, but it wasn't my my favorite. So anytime that a project would come in, I would lean towards what I was what I felt I was strong at. And in life, sometimes you don't get to do that. So um I got really down on art. And um it was one of the reasons why I quickly pivoted out of art and into communications because a buddy of mine, I had a really good friend of mine, and I'd say had because uh he's no longer with us. Uh he was an on-air DJ at at on campus. And he he was also my fraternity brother, and he calls me over, he's like, Hey man, can you come with me to the radio station? I said, Why, what's up? And he goes, Yeah, I have a radio show on Thursday nights. I really like doing it, but I I can't stay awake. I said, What? He goes, Well, um well it's Thursday, so I may have a couple drinks, and next thing you know, I I can't make it through the show. I'm like, So you need a a partner to help you out. And he said, Yeah. So a radio show was born. I went in and he would pass out in midstream and I would just play music. And it was crazy because he'd wake up in the middle of like me talking or switching songs. Next thing you know, he hears that I'm playing Pearl Jam and starts singing Jeremy. And eventually the audience that w the the four people that may have listened to us caught on to it and thought it was hysterical, and then they started calling in. They're like, Can you wake him up and see what songs he'll sing? And eventually the radio show that shouldn't have happened turned into a talk show, call-in talk show no less. And we were doing really, really well because he actually and started enjoying it because he wasn't just spinning music. I was spinning music of all different types of stuff, and I I found creativity in communications. So a couple months into doing this radio thing, I went in and I talked to my friend my advisor and I said, I think uh I want to be a r a radio DJ. Like, well, we have a program for radio and broadcast, television and radio production. Would you like to do that? So there goes my start. And I learned how to splace and do audio cut and reel and stuff like that. Video was was fun. Video is actually where I got my internship, which after I when I graduated college, uh I went to a small state school, which is now bigger and obviously better than what it was back then. But the school's really known for its communications program, so I was kind of blessed that I went to a place that had a reputation for a good school and being in proximity of New York City, there was always the opportunity, right? A lot of people were doing internships for ESPN or MTV, those are the big ones. I landed a good one. Um I was fortunate enough to be selected uh my junior year in college to be an intern with the New York Giants football team. And it was part of the video department. So an in-house video department is uh what was filming not what you would see on TV, but it was the game footage that they used to break down and study film. So things that uh the coaches wanted to see. During practice, I would have a camera and I would be filming people, you know, the linemen, and they wanted to see their nuances. What were they doing? So then they would break down that tape and say, Oh, look at this guy, he's giving away what where we're running because he leans too much to the right. And you could tell that you're gonna go to the right because he was white knuckling. So his hands were on the ground, they said focus on their hands. And where you saw that they were putting too much weight to the right side, they were like, dude, you gotta you gotta fix your stance. So little things like that. It was in in it was the footage that was used in-house. Nothing I ever shot went out to the major networks or was on Monday Night Football or any of that. But to be part of that experience, got my first, like, you know, my feet wet in the corporate world, right? You you I was told by by video directors, like our our one video director sat us down day one and said what you are going we expect you to be perfect in how you act, and you better act accordingly, because there's gonna be people here that are gonna be famous people, there's people here with money, there's whatever it is, you'll recognize these people from a mile away. Do not do anything to embarrass us, specifically, or yourself. So learning to control the fact that here was a legend, New York Giants legend walking by, and I get to open the door for him and say, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, that's it. Don't have conversations, that's basically what the deputy director said.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

It's interesting, isn't it? That that that kind of role, I suspect a lot of people never even realize that that sort of role existed. There's one of the things I think I've noticed a lot of careers is that people fell into doing things that they didn't even know existed before they started doing it. Correct. I mean, I suppose in the modern era it would be logical that you would record every single player and check if their knuckles were white, but not 30 something years ago.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

No, well, you did it then. So what what the irony of this was the New York Giants played at Giant Stadium, which was a shared stadium with the New York Jets. A fun fact that a lot of people that are really know is the New York Jets Video Department, same thing I was doing, but the New York Jets Video Department, I think the original guys that were there were two guys from the band called the Turtles that had turned into video guys and found that second life after touring and being a recording artist with being video guys. Yeah. I did not know uh the way I got in was one of the video assistant video directors was the was a former um student at William Patterson, that's where I went to school, and then he had hired one of my friends who got in. He is the one that took my resume and submitted it and got me the red, got me the interview. And uh so he was video director to my my friend Dave. He went on after the end of the season. I left, I finished up my internship, went back to school because I had taken already way too long to to get to that point. I had about a semester left of college left and I would get my degree. So I did not stick around to see if there was a job opening. There was. I went back to school and finished my last semester. Uh my friend who was there as the number two video guy or video three video guy, because there was the video director, then there was number one and number two. And the reason why is the video director shot the game footage from the end zone from the 50 yard line. Fifty yard line. The other video director was in the end zone, and the third guy was down on the field, and he ran the he was basically running the interns, which were us. During a game, we were using thermographic printers at the time, and as they got to into position, they would snap a picture, and we'd take that and compile a uh a folio and then run it to either the offense or defensive coach at the time so that they can review on paper the pictures and see first down, second down, third down, fourth down, so on so forth. All the formations. That's what they wanted. And there was two clips on every picture, right? At the snap, uh before the snap, and then five uh he would count one, two, three, three seconds into the snap where they would break off too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

I'm not a sports guy, but it is remarkable the science behind sports. Uh and clearly, was this before this must have been before Moneyball and all of that stuff. But without what you did, they couldn't have done what they did with Moneyball because you needed the data to be able to start. I mean, clearly money ball was baseball, but it ended up affecting every sport.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

We so those people that were doing that, we they had employed statisticians back then. And they used our we were like the keepers of the library, right? So the game footage that was shot during a game that didn't go out to the networks, that's what all the scouts and statisticians used. From that, they would basically sit down, they'd come, they'd come into our office and they'd ask us, I need the last six games. And these are the and the the last six games that this quarterback played in, and we've done the homework, he's been on two different teams, these are the last six games, and they can go back two, three years, four years. We would go into the archives, find those betacam tapes, bring them up, take them to the office. They would sit with uh a little clicker and go through every play and break down how many times he went. He said hike and went to the right, went to the left. How many times on first down would he hand off? All those things were getting broken down back in in 97 when I was with the team. And uh yeah, that was before Moneyball, but there was a formula there. That kind of strategy was already in play. The prior to me to me being there in the 80s, the Giants, New York Giants teams that won the in the 80s and 90s won Super Bowls, had a very famous coach in Bill Parcells. And Bill Parcells was, you know, he's a legend, right? He was the guy that every once in a while he'd be in the building and we were we were on lockdown because Bill Parcell is in the building. He's like, you know, he he's won championships. But at the time he was with either New England or with the Jets. I think he was with New England. But he'd stop by and see the video guys because he was friends with them. He was big on that. He was big on the taping. He was actually so worried about spies. And that came up recently within the last 10-15 years when one of his proteges in Bill Belichick, who coached for the New England Patriots, was big on spying and stuff like that. There was a whole spy gate thing about, you know, opposing players stealing signs and opposing players filming practices. He went ahead and uh you know, from what I understand, they actually built the practice bubble, this big dome bubble structure to bring practice inside. Now that was supposed to be for foul weather. But it was also to keep the onlookers from with long lenses from a nearby hotel from because he was paranoid about that. So we've heard stories about that, but I can't say whether that's true or let's just say that allegedly.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

Allegedly, yeah. A lot of allegedly gets used in this particular podcast, and I think it was going to continue to be. Alright, so you did that for a while, but you're clearly not still with the Giants, so then what happened?

SPEAKER_01 19:49

So I went back to school. Uh my friend Dave went on to another team. Uh, he actually won a Super Bowl. Going back to that real quick, cool thing that people don't realize video guys happen to video guys. My friend Dave, who was with the New York Giants video department, moved on, went to one other team, and then eventually he ended up playing, uh excuse me, being the video director, the number one guy, for the New Orleans Saints. And he was with the team when the Saints won the Super Bowl. And when the Saints won the Super Bowl, like post-Katrina many years ago, about 25 years ago. One of the things that the video directors actually are part of the team, they're considered staff and part of the team, they get a Super Bowl ring. Which is pretty cool, because who would have thought that a video audiovisual person would go down in a record book and be part of that? But yeah, he's part of the team. The same as uh most of the staff, when they win a Super Bowl, the staff members win something. If uh for the ladies, I think they get the the top, which is the important part of the ring, they get that as a pendant, while the gentlemen get the the actual ring, if that's what they choose to have. Uh or the if if you were a staffer and you wanted the a pendant instead of the ring, you can get that. That was a that was a thing. And that was just a cool, like, wow man, that's that's like winning a Grammy, that's like winning an Oscar, I guess, for sound production or doing any kind of cool stuff like that. So that would be the the that would be some peak, you know, top of the line stuff. So anyway, so I went back to school and I graduate, and a fraternity brother of mine was looking for some help. And this is where me and you now start crossing paths for the first time, is that I was actually uh brought on to a company. The only job that I had with a communications degree that was kind of out there was an offer to, and it wasn't even a communications job. Uh, we had a career fair and there was like a car rental company touting management program, and that was like the best that was out there. Like, well, you could take your communications up. Like no, I'm a video guy. Like, I'm not PR guy. I didn't write, though I did did take journalism classes and all that. That's not where I wanted to go with my my career. So they wanted to bring me into a management program until a buddy of mine calls me up and said, Hey, I got this opportunity. I work for this company and we're looking for a technician. I'm like, technician doing what? They're like, uh, well, we sell video conferencing equipment. Come work with me. So I went to the interview and I sat down and I've told this story before where I walk in and there's two or three guys sitting at the table and they're looking at my resume and there's a cable on the table. And I just couldn't help myself, and I'm like, I don't know if this is a test, but do you want me to coil that BNC cable that's on the table? And they literally looked at me and said, You're hired. And I'm like, I'm hired. I just sat down, they're like, Well, A, you identified that that is a BNC cable. And then B, you know that that thing was not properly coiled and you wanted to coil it. So obviously, you know more than the car audio installers that we've been interviewing. So uh when can you start? And I started with a company called All Communications that eventually grew into a company called Wire One. And Wire One was a huge polycom distributor. We were at the time pulling out, that was the days of polycom really upsetting Picture Tell at the this is late 90s, that 2000, that sort of time scale. Absolutely. So the the Concords and the $150,000 legacy systems were starting to take a backseat, and the 512s and the 128K view stations were were were were coming up. Appliance-based systems versus what the picture tells were. So I was one of three technicians uh that would basically fly around the country, rip out picture tells, and install these things. The only thing I had to learn about was I understood the the wiring, the cable, RCA cables, all that was second nature. I just didn't understand the telcom part. NT1s were new, iMux was new, dealing with the the mob bells and the baby bells and provisioning of ISDN lines at the time and hearing terms like PRI and I didn't understand what the heck that was. And I'm like, listen, can we just make it look good on video? Like these were 36-inch, you know, CRTs with the biggest TVs you can get. They were, you know, going in via S video or RCA at the time, not even BNC. But yeah, this is what I started at, and I I did it for about a year and a half too, till they realized that I was very good at uh it's at talking. So they got me training and then it moved me into inside sales because I was able to upsell by accident. So yeah, that led to my integration because integration of things, because as soon as we installed a video conferencing system, then we were using these little boxes from a company called CTG that would put a little microphone in the ceiling and a two speakers because they wanted this the sound better by the table. So we started playing with that, and at the time Gettner was doing, you know, it was before Clear One Days Gettner dialers and you would dial a phone with a phone connected to a Gettner box in the back and you would allow audio conferencing to come in and just that was the early days of of video conferencing integration as I started in in that and uh yeah, quickly moved into sales and then I got um then I was on my way. I I I I started doing two, three and out of companies early on in my career uh because I'd hit a I hit a wall, right? Early career wise I was technical but I had a degree. So my degree said you can be you should be or should could be moving up and doing things but uh practicality was nobody cared about my degree because you know, the guy who was the roadie for the for the for Guns N' Roses knew how to mount a TV or knew how to, you know, run cable better than I did. So by default he was the boss. So um I I got into sales because I wasn't gonna compete with uh the former roadies and sales was good, it was clean versus leaving a place covered in in sheetrock dust and and and and pink insulation. Uh but yeah, uh got into sales, did a little bit of that, hated it. God did I hate it. The early days of my anxiety started there because I couldn't understand, you know, everything hinged on the end of the quarter, the end of the month, the end of the week. Uh it just was maddening. I I couldn't live like that. So 9-11 happens, and I was out in the field. And uh what a lot of people don't remember about that was is you know, when that tragedy hit, all the airports shut down. And there was a period of about 30 days where video conferencing and telecommunications companies went absolutely bonkers. We couldn't have enough demos, we couldn't get product out quick enough because with everything shut down, business needed to take place, and companies that pushed off video conferencing as an option all of a sudden became priority. And there was a 30-day period where we were just demoing two, three times, four times a day, if absolutely not, you know, whatever we could do. Purchase orders start coming in, it was hot. Then all of a sudden, airports reopened, and business went back to usual. But it really put into demand for you know, is airline travel the way of the future? And I think it was the onset of there needs to be some sort of contingency going forward. So I stopped sell after that because everything just went real hot and then got real cold all of a sudden because of financial crisis and internet bubbles and all these sort of things happened in the in that time frame. Uh I became a project manager. I was good with the schedules, I understood how things went. So I got offered to go into an integration company and start running the projects that I once sold. And uh I liked it. Uh I thought it was great. Uh hung out and did project management for about two, three years, and then and then the call came for me to become something else. And I took a contract, which was a gamble because I was fairly young with a young with a young kid and another one possibly coming on the uh you know on the way. I took contract work for the first time in my career, and I was very shaky. You can make money, but at the time you were only guaranteed not even six months at best. So I took a contract to go work internally for a pharmaceutical company, and I ended up spending 13 years in the f pharmaceutical business. Which one did you work for? I worked for three contract. Uh I went into sharing plow for two and a half years. Uh then I went to uh Merck pharmaceutical, uh which eventually bought Sharing Plow, so the two eventually merged. So the people that I left work ended up I ended up working for them again. Uh and then I was uh retired along with the rest of A V from Merck after six years there. But I was an internal Merck person, so I took a package and uh was told they don't uh they don't need A V. Six months later they ended up rehiring everybody in A V, which is funny. Uh but I had moved on. Uh I took another role as an on-site designer for Novartis pharmaceutical. So 13 years with those three, uh two at sharing, six at Merck, five at uh five at Navartis. And uh I left Navartis at one point and went to my first and only manufacturer, went to work for Barco. I was at Barco because I also knew the ClickShare very well. When the ClickShare came out, I was one of the first to get it over at into Novartis and get it shown. So I understood and knew the product. So a friend of mine called me up in Barco. I was like, hey man, uh I heard you're you're looking. I said, Yeah, things aren't looking so hot right now. There's a lot of change. The IT where at one point I was being chased out by the roadies. Now I IT was coming into the conversation, and the IT conversation is not something that I was super strong in at the time. Uh, but he offered me an opportunity to interview a Barco and I went to go talk to Barco and they hired me as their consultant liaison. So I spent about two years with Barco as a consultant liaison, and I had spent 13 years dealing with consultant specs, so I kind of understood how consultants worked. Uh, we did a lot of bid work in for the for the three companies that I worked at internally as an end user. And I got to get really good with understanding how system design and spaces work. And at the time everybody was trying to go for that open space Google look. Uh so no wires work. You know, I had all the right the right tools to talk about click share, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:14

Um interest.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

A lot of people I've spoken to on the show talk about m kind of upgrading from a reseller to a vendor to a manufacturer. They see that, and I think a lot of people do, see that as an upgrade. Uh one could argue that it's sometimes it's an upgrade, sometimes it's not, right? If you've got a hot product, then being with a vendor can be great. If you've got a really lousy product, or somebody else has got a better one, it can be really problematic. Working for a retailer can be better, you can sell whatever you like. But you move from being end user to working for a vendor, which is I don't know, that unusual, but it's not a wildly common experience. Did you perceive it as an upgrade or just different?

SPEAKER_01 32:06

It wasn't the downgrade. So for me, the downgrade was yeah, it it I don't know, I don't know what the so when you work for in-house for an end user, what people don't understand, and I kind of hinted at it with the Giants, my guy that worked with the Giants got a ring as part of a championship. If they went to the Super Bowl or whatever, you know, players get bonuses, staff does all right too if they get Super Bowl, right? One of the things that worked, and you know, the perks of working with the Giants uh back then was that our lunches were taken care of. You don't necessarily have to buy clothes because they provide you officially licensed uniforms that have to be used. Like you, I if the Giants were signed by Reebok, I couldn't walk in wearing Adidas. I had to wear Reebok. If I had a black Reebok hat and that wasn't an on-field approved hat, they would give me a new hat. Like you can't wear black, it has to be blue and red. So there were benefits. The benefits of working on the end user side when I was in the pharmaceutical business was I had incredible benefits from a pharmaceutical side. I had great health benefits. I had obviously prescription drugs, right? For when my my my kid was born, uh, that was excellent. Like if a kid got sick and he had to get a nebulizer, I paid like three dollars for it, where everybody else had to pay a lot more. We had there's benefits. There's benefits to it. It wasn't necessarily just the pay. One of the things also that that came really good with being an end user was I had a nine to five. You went in and you went out to the point where I actually took a commuter van into work. A bunch of us would get together, jump in a van, and every day we'd be there before work started because we all had to get there early. So where everybody else was starting at nine, I started at eight, but I left because I was on a a commuter van that was actually part of like a green initiative. So I left while everybody else stayed till four because I started at I started at eight. I got to leave at four o'clock as opposed to five. My cell phone's on me. If you need me, call me, I'll be on the road. But I was part, I was on a van. So I had a very normal schedule and having young kids at the time, it was perfect. I got to make it to the karate tournaments, to the dance recitals, and do that thing that people like to call a work-life balance, right? You're working for corporate, there is these advantages. Prior to that, most of the companies that I worked with were very moms and pops oriented. You know, Aunt Sue was the HR person and doubled as the you know, order entry. You know what I'm saying? Like multiple hats, multiple people running the businesses. By the time I got to the manufacturer, it felt very normal to me because it was corporate. It was legit corporate. It wasn't we have corporate in our name, but this was legitimately corporate. Like you had to sit down and sit with HR and watch HR videos, right? Like there was a process, there was an onboarding. My aunt there was no such thing as onboarding. Onboarding was 24 hours, you're in and you're on the road with some dude, you know, when you're working for the moms and pops companies, right? And next thing you know, you're in the middle of uh Toledo, Ohio, and you know, you're finding out that that guy snores and he's next door in the room next to you, snoring it up, and you you can't sleep. Like, welcome, welcome to the company, right? And you're sharing uh rooms or you're you're driving because it's within a mile a radius. We don't fly, we drive. So getting into corporate was you know, moving into the manufacturer from the end user was very very normal for me. I wouldn't say it was a shock. It would have been a bigger shock if I come from smaller integrators. And at the time, before the big conglomerates, bigger companies, the big nationals, there was a lot of pockets of you know small companies. So that's where I was um when I moved into that. Did I feel like it was an upgrade? Going to the manufacturers, kind of. Uh, as a consultant liaison, I got to call on the consultants that I had worked a lot with because I was a northeast consultant liaison. My co-worker, uh, the guy who was actually there as a consultant in liaison before, stayed but handled the rest of the country. Consultants are so packed in the Northeast from Boston down to DC, that was my run. So I was on the Amtrak or up and down the coast as much as possible. And that was my that was my gig. And I did that for about 18 months, 24 months, two years. Got good got a good view of things, got to go to a show. For example, Infocom, my first Infocom was when I was with the pharmaceutical company. I got to fly out to Anaheim. It was my first and Anaheim's last Infocom, as I put it. Um, very memorable, but I didn't know nobody. I was an end user, and the experience of being an end user at an infocom was jarring. Like, I'd sit at a booth or walk into a booth and who were you with? And I wasn't with an integrator. I wasn't a consultant. As an end user, they didn't, you know, booth attendees did not know how to talk to me. They couldn't sell to me. So it was me asking a lot of questions. Can I see behind the TV? They're like, Well, why do you want to see behind the TV? I need to know the inputs. You're not telling me what I need to know. Show me the how many HDMI inputs? Do you have HDMI inputs? Like, what tell me about this product? I have to dig for information. So I really understand the groups like the higher ed tech managers and stuff like that, because I was running campuses. The pharmaceuticals were campuses. I'd have 30, 40 buildings and four or five technicians. I ran my own service department, essentially. We would be preventative maintenance. We couldn't be reactive, we had to be proactive. We'd have to have parts and supplies, and some of my guys had to be, you know, very good with programming because we'd have to make some quick changes to a crestron touch panel or program a polycom sound structure or do something like that. So the ad when you when I moved to the manufacture side, the conversation was very normal for me. There was nothing bizarre. Like, you wanted me to swap apart, I could do that. I can talk about integration, integrating projectors and control systems and sound systems, and I did auditoriums, I did divisible spaces, I've argued with people, uh integrators that were doing spec jobs where they weren't following the the what we had put in as standards, standard hardware, right, that we could easily swap in and out. So moving into that space wasn't as jarring as I guess maybe for some people, because it was very corporate. And I came from corporate at the time. So I I spoke corporate. I also spoke campus wide, like I understood bigger picture. What I did in the rawway campus of Merck, you know, could affect something at the White House head at headquarters at White House Station, for example. And there was I had counterparts. It wasn't I wasn't just by myself on an island. So it was a bit was much bigger, it showed A V to me in a much bigger role. So yeah. My first job working at Sharing Plough was to decommission some old MCUs and put them over to MCI WorldCom that was doing it at the time. And they were outsourcing that. It was the first understanding or me understanding what outsourcing meant. Like we were not gonna own the bridges anymore, we were just gonna put it in somebody else, and you were gonna call them and say you need to book a conference call for X amount of people to be connected, and they would handle all that. It wasn't somebody working the bridge, which for many years and throughout most of my video conferencing career, that was a that was a big thing. That was wire wire one was one of the people that went out and bought like vSpan or whatever it was out in Pennsylvania at the time. And they were nothing that's what they did. They were a bridging company that big bridges and just connected people all day, and that was their business. I didn't understand that. I just thought point-to-point ISDN was a thing and multi-point, uh, but then eventually it became more common to have 15-20 sites, and people today don't realize that. Remember walking in with my first cell phone that had like a PDA attached to it, and I said, one day, man, this is gonna have a camera on it, and like you think we're ever gonna be able to take like what we do with this video conferencing stuff and do it right on the phone? I mean, it kind of makes sense. It goes, there's no way we'd ever have the cell network powerful enough to do that.

SPEAKER_00 40:38

I I remember the first 3G video conference call done on a flip phone by Radvision of all people, in Morgan Stanley's office in Canary Wharf in London, and uh the screen was about an inch, maybe an inch and a half, and we got at least four frames a second. I'm trying to think what year that was. One oh two, something like that.

SPEAKER_01 41:04

Yeah, not enough credit is actually given to one of the history pieces of it, where the first video conferencing system ever debuted at the World's Fair either in Chicago or New York.

SPEAKER_00 41:17

Chicago.

SPEAKER_01 41:18

Chicago, yeah. And to hear that it was the eight the size of an 18-wheeler in order to get a video call out.

SPEAKER_00 41:25

Well, to be fair, a pigeon concor wasn't that much smaller than an 18-wheeler.

SPEAKER_01 41:29

It's a mini fridge, man. My god, that thing was huge.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rather heavier than a mini fridge, a mini fridge full of beer.

SPEAKER_01 41:36

A lot of yeah, a lot of beer. A lot of heavy beer.

SPEAKER_00 41:38

So let's bring us forward a bit. Last 10 years, now what there's been a few changes in the market in the last 10 years. Small pandemic in the middle of it, among other things. What did you uh what were you doing then?

SPEAKER_01 41:55

So after Barco, I took an offer to come work for a distributor. Because I figured if I'm gonna complete my my mixed martial arts degree in A V, because I have told people I have my MMA in A V at this point. I've been to a lot of different places. I've been an integrator, I've been a consultant, I've been an end user, I've worked in sales, I've been a tech, I've done a little bit of everything, and I've think I've earned my MMA. Right? If you want to come at me with with tech, I can answer it. Sales to an extent, I can answer it. I I've project managed, I have done a little bit of everything. Um, distribution was interesting because I had never been to a distributor or a manufacturer's rep firm. So I said, you know what, that sounds good because at a distribution level, I get to work with the integrators that I've been working with anyway, so I know them. To an extent, I can still have conversations with consultants. And the difference between working for a manufacturer and working on distribution is I have different products and different brands. So it's not just hey, use our projector or B, use our screen. Now it's hey, we have this, that, and the other thing, and they all connect together, and you can buy it all in one place.

SPEAKER_00 43:08

Yeah, lots of flexibility. You you you don't you don't have to sell your book. You can find what the right thing is and then sell that to the client. It's uh there's downsides of that, but there's lots of upsides.

SPEAKER_01 43:20

Yes. Solution selling was starting to enter the vernacular of A V, right? For many years, A V led with a brand and sold on a brand, not the solution. You just you just took a control panel. You didn't sit and say, you know, how many devices you have, whether it was three or a hundred, the control system was a control system and that's what you were gonna get. And it came with a name brand, and that's what you took. So that was a very much the sell, and that's what I was told, you know, as an end user, like, oh, you can't have this. Without this, and this is what you have to have because this is this is the best. So spending 13 years with an end user side of the business, I really got a good understanding of what manufacturers did right, wrong, integrators did right and wrong, and consultants did right and wrong. And as an and even as the end user, I tested the limits of what we can do as end users. And when we started moving outside our lane and getting way too involved in the install, we had to pull that back because we had other responsibilities that were going to be more important than you know having a TV installed. And when we did the installations on our end, if it was a TV, we had in-house services. We had carpenters that worked internally. So I had to hire the electricians to do the wiring, and then I just hired a carpenter that was internal, worked for Merck, or worked for one of the companies to put the bracket up and hang the TV. Uh, but there was more to it that we really didn't want to play with. And we were very good at like understanding that, you know, sometimes you just don't want to, you don't want to stray too far from what you're good at. So yeah, that was that was my that was my foray into the in into the you know, going into being a dis from a distribution side, manufacture side, coming from the end user side. And you've been doing this for how long? Seven years. But in that in that time that I've been doing it, things have changed. When the world stopped for a brief period, getting in front of clients, doing the demonstrations had to change. If I hadn't sat for two years back in 1998 and 99, doing nothing but video upgrades and training via video at the time, I would have not been prepared. If I had not gone to school and had to learn how to sit in front of a camera and read scripts because somebody always got behind the camera, but there was always somebody in front of the camera. So when we turned on our cameras on ourselves during that uh pandemic, we quickly made some adjustments. The approach changed. How do you engage with people on video? We never worried about that before. How do you engage? So I had I I believe I had an unfair advantage in that I had already been doing podcasts, I'd already been appearing on on uh on video podcasts uh with AV Nation at the time and a couple other shows that were kind of up and coming. So I felt good, comfortable in front of a camera. So I just made some minor tweaks. I I looked and I and I and I look my ego of being a professional A V person, I dropped that. And I had to almost go into like if you ever seen Rocky 4, Rocky had to go to Ru had to go to Russia and had to go old school training. It's pretty much the mentality. I had to lower my my standards and I turned on YouTube and I had to see what the 18-year-old podcaster in his mom's basement was doing to grab attention. And I quickly learned that it wasn't just a PTZ camera. It was now getting a 35, you know, millimeter camera, you know, or not or of the sense, interchangeable lenses. So I star started devouring all the information I could about DSLRs and interchangeable lenses, came really quick to the conclusion that I want a 16 millimeter signal lens with depth of field and bokeh. And these were terms I'd never used before, but now they made sense because I want a cinematic look at the time. So during the pandemic, I built my little studio. And in there was a DSLR camera. My friends over at Elgato sent me a stream deck and a couple mounting brackets for me to position the camera in a way that it allowed me to look straight at it as opposed to the traditional, you know, top-down look or you know, some weird angles. Big monitor, dual monitor setup so I can see if I'm reading scripts or whatever, uh, and then deliver something different. And then all of a sudden I realized that as great of an improvement I did with the video and the audio in front of me in this office studio setup that I built in my house, my background was garbage. And I couldn't get anything because everything was part supply, everything was kind of down. So I started ordering outdoor or party lights, like LED lights. And they weren't the greatest, but where I ordered one, I'm like, okay, I need two. Now all of a sudden I'm I'm I'm connecting six lights, and I'm doing things that I did back in high school and in college, blending colors, right? How do I get a cool effect of blue and you know, red and blue, and I get a purple light on the back out of it, right? And oh that's cool, because you can see the red and the the the you see red and green of red and blue on one side, but then in the middle you get this weird funky purple light, and I change the intensity. All of a sudden, my background, I'm in a studio, and I'm doing this on a shoestring budget just to make my video stand out. And the first day I turned on my system and I sat there and it wasn't on a laptop like you see today, and I was on my computer and I had my my cameras. People are like, dude, where are you? I'm like, I'm home. They're like, Did you up your bandwidth? I'm like, it has nothing to do with the bandwidth. It you're looking at proper lighting, proper sound, a camera that we're not used to speaking in terms of, right? Because we typically on the video side it's on a video conferencing side, it's whatever camera came with the system or whatever camera you added on. Yeah. People at the time weren't paying for, unless you were an executive in a very high-end boardroom where you're paying for some camera that had interchangeable lenses, right? Very few customers, very few.

SPEAKER_00 50:05

I don't think people even thought it was a thing. It's interesting, and you've done a very good job. Credit where it's you know, due here, and you're famous for this. You've become a personality within the industry. It's not just your technical or your business skills, which there are many. I don't want to suggest that they're not important, but you're known. I mean, you you've had a pathological hatred of pineapple on pizzas for how long?

SPEAKER_01 50:34

That really came to light during the pandemic, and I credit where credit is due. It all came from a food network chef that I befriended during pandemic, and I I I would I DM'd him, and I'm like, listen, you have to explain to me what's this fascination that you have. Like god-awful pineapple and pizza. He goes, That's exactly it. He goes, I've been a rust restaurateur, I've opened up restaurants, I've I've been head chef, I've cooked for for famous people, but when the internet's quiet, all I need to do is say that I'm gonna have a slice of pizza and just hold up a slice of pineapple, and the internet will lose its mind because it's a strong thing. So I I I digged into that and it it it helped me shape some things. So during the time of the pandemic and pre-pandemic, I had already started playing with what I didn't tell you was that during the time I left Merck, I wrote that I lost my job and that I was that I was um part of a workforce reduction. And and and and one of the inner one of the integration magazines, the trade magazines, saw that I had lost my job on a Friday and I announced that, hey, I lost my job, part of 25,000 people that lost worldwide. But I I start my new job on Monday. This is the time where, you know, it was like the housing crisis, right? That everything was in the toilet. And I wrote, she messaged me and said, Hey, what do you how how how does a a technician, because that's what she referred to, how was a technician on a on an as an end user, how does it how do you lose a job and start to find a job that quickly during this horrible you know, depression? I said, Well, I use social media, I use LinkedIn. Prior to that, I used my art skill. My art skill was I had a portfolio. So when I interviewed and I wanted a job, the reason why I was able to get jobs was that I was always well prepared for an interview. In that I had a resume and then I just started beefing up the resume. I hated walking out of there and not knowing what the next step was. So I would come with all the steps. Here is good guy emails, here is letters of recommendation, here's a list of my contacts that are ready to answer the call. If you say you want to hire me, you want my references, there they are. Here's pictures of my work with all the you know things blurred out to protect the innocent. Like these are rooms that I've done, these are projects that I've worked on. I was a project manager, I was an engineer, I've done all this, I've sold this project. I was here. Here's me, you know, doing work at, you know, in in a uh in a in a round table boardroom. Nobody has ever seen this one. This one was done by ex, you know, um whatever uh consultant did this project, and I was in charge of making sure it all happened. That was in the physical carrying a leather-bound book with all my stuff in it. And I would sometimes get accused of being a professional interviewer. I said, no, I just want the job more than the person behind me. So the idea of a portfolio was always there. And then I discovered LinkedIn. I didn't make LinkedIn, I just discovered that there was this website where you can kind of add all this stuff. So I I started putting in my certifications, which I had a bunch of, because when you're an end user and you're sitting outside a boardroom because they want the head guy sitting there in case the call would go down, I'd used my time wisely. I got certified. I got my CTS, I got my Clear One cert, I got certified, and anything that I can take online that I was able to do, I did racked up the certifications. And from there, um, that made my resume really appealing to people. And that's kind of like where, you know, like the manufacturers were like, oh, that's awesome. You understand, you understand audio, you understand video, I could see it. You have the paperwork to do it. You're not just end users at the time, end user reps or people that worked for the end user were homegrown. They came from the mailroom. They were somebody who was, you know, I I still had a lot of people on my team that were given to me because they were they were telephone people who now needed something different. So they got the video conferencing system because there was ISDN, so they became part of the A V team. I got people from Food Service because they would deliver a sandwich and a projector. That was the qualifications. I wasn't the sandwich and projector guy. I again I'm with my degree, now certifications, and I'm still trying to wave and say, I'm here. So the move into the online with LinkedIn, putting my stuff out, and then getting noticed by an editor and then writing my first article. In that article, I told people how I use social media or LinkedIn to find a job, and it really did well. So much so that the editor came back and said, Can you do something else, write something else? So I wrote a second thing about how I compiled a portfolio for when I do have to go into places. And that did really well. So they locked me in for another three articles, and all of a sudden now I'm a I'm a personality. A person, not necessarily a personality. I didn't become a personality until one of my buddies called me up and said, dude, you're a published writer. And I'm like, Yeah, I don't see myself like that. They're like, Yeah, but you are. So get on Twitter because this is what's gonna happen. They're gonna read your article and they want to ask you questions. And what people want is to talk to the person who wrote it. They want to either challenge you or they want to ask you questions of how you came about this. It's a good thing, Chris. This is how they were talking to me. I said, Well, I didn't know nothing about social. All I know is that I had LinkedIn, and the only other thing I knew is I didn't want anything to do with Facebook. Like my wife was playing with that at the time, and it was my aunts are on there, and I don't need to see half the stuff that that was being posted. I I don't have an interesting life, like I don't I don't have things to post on Facebook. This was the early days of that stuff. I got in on Twitter early. Uh, there was a small A V community, and it just started growing. And I first spent about a year, and all I was doing was just sharing articles, things that I found that were interesting. Till somebody said, Dude, are you real or like are you some sort of bot? Because I never posted anything of mine. So that led me to open up an Instagram, and Instagram was where now I'm showing my my food, and that's with a my my background in pizza, because I was a pizza guy for many years growing up. My my my cousin owned a spot. A couple members of my family were in the pizza business. So I always had these side jobs of working in pizzeria. I I worked at it through high school and through college, and I even picked up some some hours when I first was working at Merck because a buddy of mine needed some help and he was kind of sick, so I kind of just I I helped him out so he would have a night or two off. And it was therapeutic. It was just getting back to the routine. Like there was no there was no spreadsheet for the end of the day that I had to re send in that said how many pepperoni pizzas I made. It was either you you you it was either pepperoni or it wasn't, and it was very simple. Right? It was so therapeutic in that I just cooked. And I'm I love that. I think it was it was fun. It was it was it was fun to do it, and I always have it in me. I have a pizza oven and I and I still mess around and try to perfect the dough and sauce and stuff like that. One day you never know, I may end up with a pizza. I would not do that. So but so yes, the the the pineapple and pizza thing kind of just went full circle. And and the the the food network chef that told me that, I I got to think about it, and I said, you know what, that you're 100% right. And it was also a good thing because it was polarizing, but yet it did not upset or harm or get anybody else.

SPEAKER_00 58:29

It wasn't politics or religion or some other thing, you know, which people have very firm opinions on. This is you can agree or disagree, and let's be honest, you're not gonna have a blood feud with someone who does or does not. Well, maybe you are, but most of us are not gonna have a blood feud with someone who does or does not have pineapple on pizza.

SPEAKER_01 58:52

So all that stuff really came around and it helped build when I first started in the in the world of playing around with so with uh technology and I mean with social media, I made very hard fast rules because I didn't understand it. Like I didn't want to talk about race, politics, sex, and and all this type of different things. I I was just gonna straight be business. And it was too hard line on the business side, and then uh some of my personality started coming out, and once it did, you know, I I I still try, you know, I I still stick to my rules of not talking about certain things and I stay very neutral. But one of the things that I learned is that people quickly took sides, even in the early days of social media, where you either loved it or you hated it, you were for it, you were against it. I s just try to see the good in both sides. And for me, my my everything I did because I'm a nerd at h at at heart, I would go back to books, and everything I I I learned about I need to learn how to use Twitter, I need to learn how to use TikTok or in the early days reading a book was my only way to even start anything. But you know, a chapter into the three or four books I bought on Twitter all came to the in by chapter one, they were all saying the same word. And personal branding was easily identifiable to me as that's what I need to look at, not so much the program of how to tweet. Because I don't look at Twitter as the source, I used it as a vehicle, but everything else it's me, whether I am on LinkedIn, whether I'm on Twitter, whether I am on Instagram, it's always has to center around me and my brand, not the device or what I'm what I'm posting. And what separates me from these, you know, megastars that are out there is in the world of of social media, you have these million, you know, million plus multi-million followers. I'm not that, never will be that. But I'm great at understanding that I can be a micro influencer or a nano influencer, which actually over time has proven to be equally as important. If you can be a voice in a very, you know, be a if I can be a big voice in a small pond, it matters and I can make a difference for good. I also understand there's responsibilities with that, like Spider-Man was told, with great power comes responsibility. So I choose very carefully what I attach my brand to. And that's about as much thought as I put into it. And I don't like to attach myself to any one thing just because brands come and go, right? This is part of me, this is my resume, this is part of my life. And I just accept it. And when I work and and and work with companies or work within companies, there are companies that do not understand how to use me. And I've been down that road internally with Midwitch and with the the the folks here. I entered to become a marketing person, first time in my career. I was pulled out of marketing very, very early on and brought over to sales simply because marketing used me one way, but sales gave me the ability to get in front of customers. Where marketing was very much a behind-the-scenes thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:31

And they're like, dude, if I my own experience with marketing is always that, and they're good people. I don't want to suggest I'm anti-marketing. My my wife is in marketing, but the problem with marketing is that not the problem, the reality of marketing is that they spend a lot of time making certain they don't upset anyone. And the English phrase of marmite, right? Marmite is the spread that you either love it or you hate it. As a salesperson, you can be uh polarizing. A marketing department, perhaps, unless you're marmite, can't be. They they have to appeal to a very broad range, and as a result, they always revert to the mean. I remember one of my old bosses when I work for a marketing department said to me, You've got to stand out, but but fit in. And I'm like, No, no, I can't do both. Do you want me to do you want me to stand out or do you want me to paint it beige? And and her response was well, you could change the shade of beige. And it's like, no, that's not that's not how it works, and it clearly doesn't for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:32

No, it's it's fine, it's finding your your strengths, and you it also really comes down to working with people that understand your power. And I believe everybody's got a superpower. Somebody is there 15 years, there is something that they do remarkably well, right? So harness it, right? It's like a soccer, uh, it's like a coach getting the best out of a player, right? It's money ball all over again. You don't necessarily have to have, you know, home run hitters on the entire team, but you if you have the the people that know how to get people into scoring into the to score, yeah, it works the same. It's just a different mindset. And I've been fortunate in that when I moved over to sales and moved into more the biz dev side, it allows me to, as the in in I guess in the world of of rap, it would be allows me to freestyle a little bit more. I don't have to necessarily go uh buy, you know, a set playlist. I can do and say what I think, and a lot of it is because I have my own rules of what I want to say, and it's very, very I have my own because I worry about my brand, my brand is not gonna hurt me and it will not hurt my my employer. Because what I try to do is, you know, push industry forward more so than anything else.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:59

Well, that also in the role that you have, that they're buying the audience is buying you, they're buying Chris Neto. They're not if you're in marketing, you have to represent the whole brand, which is a different personality ultimately. So I get it. So, what does the future look like for you?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:18

I don't know. The reason why is if you would have told me 10 years ago I'd be doing what I'm doing today, not gonna that wouldn't be the thing. 20 years ago, no, I didn't know my place, and it seems like the cyclical nature of it of you know, it's consistently like technology changes, and that's where we are at. So you have a choice in our world of technology, not just A V. You either go with the flow and change with the technology as it changes, or you find what you're good at that is a sidecar to the Technology. Had I gone in and got all my IT certs A plus certification, what would I be doing with that today? I admire the engineers and technicians that evolve, right? But there are some that are so classically trained in audio and video, and to watch them work in LED now because they understand the inner workings of what good picture. Like when you hear the term audiophile, that's usually reserved for like the end user who likes to brag about having, you know, a an audio system and a listening room, right? But there are some people in this industry who can tune a room with just their ears. You know, no medical, you know, no no devices, nothing. They just they're good, right? They're great if you add the right tools in their pocket and they know how to to add the the proper sound gauges and all that. And that just reconfirms that what they're hearing is 100% right. There are people that can understand video. Like I've I've heard the color calibration, it's so you know, it it it it's such a a per it's a perception, it's what you think it is. But we are based and rooted in science. A V is a s is based in in science. Viewing distance is scientific metric, color is light, which is measurable. Everything we do is based on science. We need nerds, don't get me wrong. But in that same token, we need the creatives and the people that ride shotgun with those those people because the folks that build and understand that I've met some ri brilliant people that can start with a napkin drawing and six months later have a working model to show you. That's amazing. To physically build something from a dream, that's amazing. But that person can't market that thing. And those people sometimes that's their baby and can't see that yes, you set out to discover this, but you actually solve two things at the same time. And your vision doesn't see that because all you were thinking was to build it to do this. So we are very much from two worlds. We we we're rooted in science, but the creatives and all that. So when you ask me what I want to do in the future, I'm not a nerd in that sense. I I won't build, I can't build a thing. But man, I'm I I've learned and I've evolved into you know seeing what the needs are and going past that and then understanding, you know, how to market something. Because sometimes, you know, the vision of a of a product is so focused on we're gonna solve this one problem, they're not realizing that it could actually fit into five different things. Kind of where my role is today. Because what what I do a lot of times is you know, I look at our current portfolio at Midwitch and go, We have PTZ cameras. We have the high-end, we have some of the entry-level ones. Where can they fit in? Some of those high-end ones can definitely work on the broadcast side, right? So let's move them into broadcast. And, you know, the the other stuff works better in conference rooms, right? You don't necessarily need voice tracking in the broadcast space. So it's kind of figuring out where that that stuff is is is playing. And now with AI, I'm just gonna let AI kind of do its thing because AI is just it's grown so much in the past year, and and the conversation has gotten so deafening inside of our space of of AV. Um I just don't think we're looking at AI the right way yet. You got people that are, you know, telling you it's it's gonna turn into the Terminator, you got people that are telling you that all they're concerned about is it tracking you and a AI helping to track a camera. You know, my thing is, man, you know, I'll sit and listen to Microsoft talk about the good things that that that Copilot can do. But I'm peeling away all the stuff that Microsoft is talking about, and what they're really getting at is, and I've said this in in conversation, is that man, AI really depends on audio for what our end users truly want. And I've had conversations where people are like, ah, dude, end users want so much. I'm like, no, when you look at it, if you're in a conference room with a person and they want to use AI, there's really really two things they want AI to do. One is to take their notes, because they don't want to take notes, and B, they want it to translate what, you know, the Lithuanian guy said on in the meeting. You know what I'm saying? So those two are like, it's almost like uh a basic needs, right? Those are the two things they want. Everything else is gravy. All the cool things that Microsoft is kind of putting together with Copilot is awesome for business needs. But if you were to pull people, I think it just comes down to two basic things. Take my notes and tell me what that person said in Italian, because I don't speak Italian, right? And if you get those two things done and done right, the world opens up now, they become more accepting of other things. Camera tracking, I don't even know if people are realizing that that's if that's AI or if that's machine learning.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:23

And to be honest with you, it's I think I think there's an argument to say that the word AI has lost all meaning. Without a doubt, it covers everything now.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:31

Yes, it's all encompassing. You're 100% right.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:34

In the same way, I had a pair of sunglasses in about 1988 with the word turbo written down the side, because everything in 1988 was turbo, and then everything in the early 2000s was HD. And I mean when I think Polycom came out with HD audio, it's like, so that's 1920 by 1080 pixels at 30 frames. What how is that anything to do with audio?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:59

Yeah, TV uh commercials for HD glasses, yeah, glasses that were in high defense.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:05

All it means is the latest. I don't think AI has got there. Chris, we have taken far longer than I expected we would. Actually, that's not true. Far longer than I suggested we should. But this has been a fascinating conversation. I'm sorry. We will put all of your contact details and other things that you want in the in the descriptions. Quickly tell us what's your what's your preferred method for being got in touch with?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:36

Probably LinkedIn. Um it's my it's Christopher Neto, CTS. You'll you'll see me there. I now have dropped for bar two years now, possibly. I moved AV and the AM from just solely being a Twitter conversation into now I post the five questions inside Twitter. Uh from Twitter, linked I bring it over to LinkedIn and to another social platform called Blue Sky because that's where when I polled the audience, they said we'll be there too. So I do it across those three on Sunday mornings. Uh, but I'm consistently posting. I recently wrote an article about, you know, Cristiano Ronaldo and his change in his status and you know where he is in his career, and I think it resonates with a lot of people that reach a certain point in their career where are you the top dog, or can you have do you have something to offer that is not just scoring at this point? You know, what where can you evolve from? And your question about the future is it's weird because I'm at an age where, you know, I'm I'm still progressing and still I believe discovering new things and and and and evolving, but I'm gonna get to a point where I think my what I have to offer is to offer other people, right? Maybe I can open some doors for some folks, maybe I can uh give, you know, a a stage to somebody who needs to be heard. Again, wielding that power, right? The Spider-Man power of having responsibility. How do I do that? How I wield that power. Um, and you know, it's funny because I've said that I've you know it's power, it's this, that, and the other thing. Man, I get up every morning, I put my pants on just like anybody else. I just want to confirm that I am no different than the other person. The only difference that I have is that I've been doing this maybe 28 years and the social media stuff for a good part of about 10, 15 years. Has it opened doors for me? A hundred percent. Has it changed me? Yeah, when I go into shows, things are different. I I'm I'm not that guy who walked in as an end user and and not get talked to at a booth anymore. People want to talk to me. And I do take, you know, the selfies and the pictures and all that, and I post that on social and that's what I think social's for. What y'all don't see is that I'm not just a a Twitter guy or a marketing guy. My reports go back, my reports get looked at, I have opinions, I have you know, I do my homework. What goes into me going into a show is more than what I portray online, put you that way. I study, I look at things, I map out things, I am very methodical in how I go to a show, but when it turns around and you see it on on LinkedIn, it's it's smiles and link, you know, selfies and all that because I without the people without those people that are in those pictures, without my my my my close friends, people that don't even know me personally but no feel like they know me. And that's happened. I walked into places where you know, people are like, dude, I I feel like I know you and this is the first time I met you met you. Then my job on social has been done. I've if as long as I'm the same person on social media that I am in real life, then I feel like my that's I've achieved I've achieved a a level of of greatness in that sense because I have put my best self forward. And that's it. That that's what I do. I I I like work, I do what I do 'cause I love our industry. I love the technology, I'm a nerd at heart. And I, you know, like I said, I come from an art background. So there's this side of me that absolutely loves the the loud, the the wow factor, the bright lights and color and all that. 'Cause to me that's that's a part of me that still is there from those days of high school where I would put together a painting or a piece of art and watch the reaction. It was no different. Just that now I'm doing it with circuit boards and and wires and RJ forty fives and cables and connections. That's it's just a different form of it. So I at one point I at one point I'll call it quits, and when I call it quits, I've done some cool things, and a lot of it has to do with I got a lot of cool wows out of the end user when they see it, and they don't even know what my part was in it, and then I'm okay with that because I know that LED wall or that content that I brought in, a buddy of mine who did the content for that LED wall that we worked on together, that made that made somebody go wow. And that that's you know, ultimately that's some some really cool things.