 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering LiveWorks 18, brought to you by PTC. Welcome back to Boston, everybody, to the LiveWorks show. Hashtag LiveWorks with an X at the end. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host Stu Miniman. Mario Armstrong is here. He's a two-time Emmy winner, contributor to NBC today. He's the creator of the Never Settle Show. He's an NPR contributor. And the host of LiveWorks. Thanks so much for coming on the YouTube. Yeah, it's a pleasure to see both of you. Good to see you too, Stu. Thanks for having me on the show. So yeah, this morning, a lot of action. Yes. First of all, I tweeted out, that was like an Olympic opening. That open was phenomenal. I mean, that the, an LED lit troop, full LED uniforms on, being acrobatic. What you can't see behind the scenes, by the way, because you think it's kind of like Cirque du Soleil type of thing with like tech, but what you don't see are like these three other people that are way in the back behind the scenes, going up, scaling up and down like this truss that's like dropping them or raising them. It's just, the performance was phenomenal. Yeah, it was really great. And you kicked it off saying about 6,000 plus people here. Yes. You said the largest digital transformation conference on the planet, which of course, we were joking. Everybody says they're digital transformation, but this really is digital transformation, isn't it? It's a lot that's taking place. I mean, when you think about manufacturing, smart manufacturing, when you think about how you're trying to accelerate processes and you start looking at where things were like 20 or 30 years ago and how physical things had to be and how you actually had to like maybe even work on a thing, then leave it, go to another place, report on it, come back to it, tweak it. And so now when you start seeing the merging of like AI and VR and so you're taking the physical and the human and you're putting these and the virtual and you're putting these things together, you're seeing things like what PTC is showing us today. I mean, some of the demonstrations that I saw were absolutely mind blowing in terms of the acceleration of the process that you can actually get things done with how they're merging the different technologies and integrating them together. Yes, Stu and I were talking earlier. It's hard to get your head around this whole IoT, industrial IoT, there's just so many segments. It's so fragmented and it's enormous. It's almost impossible to size. I mean, it's a trillion dollars. It's like this whole economy of its own. What are your takeaways on just that whole space? I mean, you know, a lot of what I focus on too when I'm doing everything from NBC or NPR and stuff like that is on the consumer impact. So I'm looking at the consumer side, but I'm also an entrepreneur. So I'm thinking about what's happening on the business side. And when I see you on both ends, you're absolutely right. The field is enormous when you really think about it. Whether you want to look at how we can replace old school manufacturing and how this is going to, that's a whole sector just in and of itself. We haven't even now talked about AI for children or for kids or for the health and wellness sector, whole other sector that's looking at IoT and the power of that. I mean, being able to look at, I was just in one of the other books in the Deluxe Lounge and I was checking out one of my fun games. It's called Sphero. It's a consumer game, but it's a small ball that you control through VR and AR on your phone, but you can actually use the phone to program things in real time, to make it respond in real time. So all of these things together to me start to paint this large ecosystem because now you have kids that are growing up using devices and using technologies that we're just starting to get our hands on, but this is how they're solving problems and thinking about things already. So when this economy and this ecosystem starts to mature, you're going to have a ready-made audience that's already been exposed to 90% of this. Well, Stu, I wonder if you could chime in too. It makes me think that these worlds, even though consumer and industrial are so seemingly different, it seems like parts of them anyway, adjacencies are coming together. Absolutely. I mean, and there's always going to be that, there's always going to be, look, when I talk about innovation and whether you look at Dr. Hill, who's speaking here today, Dr. Linda Hill from Harvard and others, when I look at it, she calls it creative abrasion, like the difference between brainstorming and actually utilizing new ideas to create new concepts. I call it hybrid design. Normally, it's taking something that you know exists and then taking two things that don't seem that they should go together, that's normally where you find creation. I don't like to say disruption, I like to say creation. Yeah, actually, there's a good friend of mine that I worked with and I worked at EMC. He called it Venn diagram innovation. Oh, that's it. I take a few things and I put it together and as we were talking about the consumer side, we've looked, so many technologies, you get the scale usually from the consumer. When we look at things like flash and all of our devices really enabled the enterprise to do things, the VR and AR is something that, we've actually got some folks on the team that are heavy gamers that they're the ones that I go to when I want to learn, okay, what's the cutting edge? Because they've already been in it. Oh, they're on their steam, they're doing everything, they sort everything out. You leverage a lot of technology in how you really get your message out there, talk a little bit about how you think of media these days. Oh, it's completely different. I mean, when we're looking at how media is even utilizing these new technologies, you know, our talk show is a talk show that we shoot in NASDAQ studios. So it's shot in New York City. It's called the Never Settle show. It's a weekly one hour live stream talk show. So we get and appreciate what you have to go through. These guys are pros, by the way. I don't know what you're saying. Yeah, they're pros because this is not easy to do. It's a minor miracle every time. It's not easy to do at all. And so a lot of kudos to you and the team behind the scenes that make that happen. With that being said, it's a great time if you have an expertise or if you have content to share, especially in a live scenario, because now you can start to really utilize other technologies within that. For example, we kind of claim ourselves to be one of the most interactive talk shows out there. What we do in our show is we're using other technologies, bringing them together to create real time conversations. So how that practically plays out is I'll have a guest on the show, we'll be talking. I'll put up a screen of three options and people can vote right then and there while they're watching in stream and you'll see what they want me to do next. I'll say something like, which thing is most appealing? What's topic do you want us to talk about next? And they'll actually vote in real time and then the control room and everyone doesn't know what the answer's gonna be, but we're all waiting for the answer and then when the popular vote comes out a few seconds later, we scramble and adjust to that. That's real time television giving viewers what they really want in real time, using different technologies. So that's this hybrid approach. We could be a standard show and just do talk and have that format or we could really be looking at things that we could integrate in other technologies that would enhance the viewing experience and make it much more productive. Well, you're actually affecting the, you call the creation as opposed to disruption of this new media industry. I mean, you've seen, I saw a stat the other day that cost the New York Times $200 million to run a news desk. You're seeing billionaires buy up the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and that industry is transforming in a huge way. You're seeing Facebook backlash with fake news. What's your sense as to what's going on in the media business? Obviously, you're creating, disrupting, whatever you like to call it. Sure. What do you see as the future of the media business? Well, I mean, I think it's going to become something where the end reader, the end viewer has more control. Ultimately, the problem with most systems and most structures is when people want to hold the control and not share. If, because whether that's ego, whether they're worried about intellectual property loss, or whether they really think that the market's going to swallow them up. Now, I'm not saying, obviously you give away all your secret sauce, but what I am saying is, is when you start thinking from that small limiting position, you've already lost the game. And so what I think is going to happen, yes, you have big people buying a lot of media, and there's a lot of discussion in politics about whether or not, you know, billionaires buying media are problems, and what that's going to mean in terms of the message that's going to be reported to people, that's going to always be an issue. But I think even with that, that's why it's even more empowering that the individuals are taking more control over their own narrative. And that's why I think you've seen social media, Instagram video, Instagram talking about going to 60 minutes in its video, not just a minute for publishers. I think the power is now more in the person's hand to really pick and choose. And so they vote with their eyeballs, they vote with their engagement, they vote with their interactivity. And so I think no matter what happens on the big end, people are going to be able to create and get the stories that they want to be able to get. Well, we're big believers of that, Stu. I mean, we're decentralized media, and we really believe that there's got to be an incentive system to put the power back in the hands of the users, control their own data. This is why it works. Yeah, and Mario, so we've talked about the tech, and your show never settled actually one in Emmy for the interactivity of it, it did. Talk to us about people and passion, how that fits into Never Settle. Yeah, so it's a blending. So what we try to do on our show is blend how you can leverage technology to move forward on your passion. But you can't use technology to move forward on your passion if you don't know what your passion is. So a lot of our discussions really work more around how do we get you to think differently? How do we, you know, our vision for our company is to motivate people across the globe to never settle. How we do that through our mission is that we, you know, we inspire the human spirit, we want to teach lessons that matter, and we want to uncover new perspectives. What that means tangibly is that when you watch our show, you should be having notes. You should be, like, our show is meant for you to want to take notes, so that you actually know the process. What people are missing from the most part today is they see how to maybe start something, or they see how someone else did, and how they succeeded, or how they failed, but they don't get the in-between, the recipe. And so the more we can be sharing about the process of someone's success, or even better, someone's failure, because that's where you learn more, and you get more uncomfortable, it makes you more comfortable, it's a blending of those two things, of getting your mental positioned and getting you stronger mentally, and building up your resilience so that you can actually go find your purpose, be happier in your life, but then use technology to accelerate it. Like that's the, as Jim puts, like, you know, put gasoline on it, like make it faster, make it go quicker. And so I think the blending of the two, again, a hybrid, even how we approach our content is that. So we'll have everyone from tech luminaries on the show, but also we'll just have everyday folks that have really proven success, like these people deserve attention, but they're not maybe quote-unquote like big names. And this idea of combinatorial innovation, you certainly heard Jim Hepleman talking about that today with machines that are powerful, with computers that are fast, and can do things repetitively, and then humans, which are creative, I like that theme. It's because you can't do it any other way. I mean, this is why, you know, it's determination and direction. Your team needs to be determined, but also have the direction. You need to have what I call the three P's. You need to have your passion in place. Like, what are you ultimately passionate about as a team, as an organization? What are you driving towards? What's your why? And then once you have that, then you can start to really push through on the perseverance. You're going to bump your head. You're going to fail fast. Great tech term. I love flipping that tech term because we learn in programming to fail quick so that we can find the bugs fast and correct our course really quick so that persistence happens. And then the hardest part is you got to have some patience because then you have to kind of sit back, let the market also play, let the universe come around. Sometimes we're ahead. Sometimes we're behind, but we need to have a little bit of that patience to have some reflection to see where we are. So I think, you know, now is really just a great time for a lot of people that are looking to really figure out where they can make their moves. The opportunities that keep creating themselves in IoT are endless. I don't care if you're talking from someone that's a graphic designer all the way up to an engineer and coder to marketing and sales. Like there's so many different facets of this ecosystem and opportunity now. I love that Mario. Passion, persistence, patience, the three P's, kind of start with why. The old Simon Sannick, that's right. People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. That's right. Break stuff. I love that. Break stuff. Don't give up. No, it's, you know, because what we're trying to do, if you really wanted to have action, you want to take complex things and you want to pull them together in a hybrid scenario and start to bang upon them. As opposed to the other idea of planning, planning, planning, planning, you actually want to practice, practice, practice, practice. That's what's going to get you there faster. So I just think that with a lot of the technologies it can be overwhelming to people because they start to hear so much. So that's why I say it comes back to what's your purpose. If you can stay focused on why you're doing what it is you're doing, you'll know which technologies to pay more attention to. You'll know where your curiosity should be severe more into. You'll study the things that you need to really study. And then you'll accelerate faster because you've identified your niche. It's like having a, you know, an Italian restaurant. You're not just, you know, somebody's going to come by and present to you some sales rep who's going to come by and present to you like beer that's not a fit for like Italian restaurant. They're like, I know that's not for me instantly. As opposed to being pulled in so many directions, which is what the danger of all this technology can do is it can overwhelm us and pull us into so many directions that we want to go and pursue the hottest new trend or the hot thing. If we come back to our why, we're always going to be secure. That's a great point. I mean, there are infinite opportunities of purposes in this world. I mean, it's just, it's sometimes hard to get a grasp on things and really, really focus, but you're seeing some of the successful projects really do start with a mainspring and a focus and a purpose and a mission. It does. I mean, that's where it all becomes. I mean, it has to start there in order to get other people on board with your dream, whether you're the leader of the organization or a leader of a project. And, you know, I just feel that if we can, for some, for many people, they are at an age where they have been in this business for quite some time. They've seen a lot of things evolve. Accepting change, and like Jim had said today, preparing to change is one of the best keys of information that you can take away because we all have the skill, the talent, the ability. It's just a matter of not, are we willing to adjust or we do want to do status quo? Awesome. Hey, you're a clear thinker, articulate. You look great. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. Oh man, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on theCUBE. It's been awesome. All right, keep it right there, but we'll be back from LiveWorks with our next guest right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back.