172: ‘Architects in Airports Talking AI and AEC’, with Phil Read

172: ‘Architects in Airports Talking AI and AEC’, with Phil Read

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. Phil Read is back on today's show to share his insights from his unique career at the intersection of architecture and technology, which has spanned his history with Autodesk, his role in reshaping, digital practice, through Revit and Enscape and his leadership in fostering collaborative innovation through events like the AEC Acoustics un-conferences.

Today's conversation, which was once again recorded live and in-person with Phil in the United Lounge at the Denver airport, just like we did last year, dives into leveraging AI for meaningful work, the importance of curiosity and play in professional development, building personas for better communication and storytelling, rethinking architectural documentation workflows, the evolving role of BIM managers, integrating [00:01:00] empathy into design processes, the transformative power of constraints, and how AI is reshaping client engagement, education, and personal creativity in architecture.

Recording this in person with Phil reminded me of our first discussions back in episodes 145 and 146, which I've linked to in the show notes if you want to catch up and hear Phil's fascinating story in AEC tech. And before we get into today's conversation, I would very much appreciate your support of this podcast if it's one of your favorites by subscribing wherever you watch or listen, and please leave a review either on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also support the mission by becoming a paid member at trxl.co, just click the join button in the lower right hand corner. And if you'd like to receive emails, when episodes are published with all of the links and other information, as they come out, sign up for that by becoming either a free or paid member at trxl.co. This was a great conversation with Phil and I've [00:02:00] got a bunch of follow-up links in the show notes to hold you over until the next episode of the podcast comes out, which will start up again in January of 2025, so be sure to check those out. They are in your podcast app if you're a paid member or if you're a free member, you can find them at trxl.co. So now without further ado, I bring you my wide ranging conversation with the one and only Phil Read to close out the TRXL podcast for 2024.

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Phil Read: there's a podcast, there's a Tesla guy in Singapore.

And I have a habit of, if I watch a documentary or see something interesting on YouTube, I'll just try to connect with that person on LinkedIn. And, uh, I connected and then. He said, Yeah, I'm interested. I'll be coming to Singapore and happy to buy a lunch. Would like to learn about what you do. Well, he ended up [00:03:00] putting a podcast together and I ended up, it's out on YouTube somewhere.

Evan Troxel: Nice. So you've been on a podcast before.

Phil Read: yes, before yours, I'm sorry. And, uh, yeah, but he talked about the cars and then, uh, we talked about investing in Tesla and, Well, I thought it was a good investment. And, um, and then we went out and met the president of the Tesla club in Singapore. It's not a very big place. You could drive around the Island in about an hour.

Um, but he had severely modified his car with electric openers and his screen would swivel and all this kind of stuff that they had prepared light shows and it

Evan Troxel: Nice.

My

son bought Tesla stock and it's up 200 a share from when he bought it. He's pretty, pretty thrilled. He's like, he bought 10 shares or something. He's very

Phil Read: Perfect. And, um, yeah, when I bought, So the Model Y, and I've never had a new car. We bought a new minivan, I think around [00:04:00] 2004. But never had a new car. Bought a, bought a new Model Y Performance, and it's, you know, when you buy a used car, you just pay for it. So I've never had a car payment. And, um, so I thought, nope, the car's gonna devalue, but the stock might go up.

So I took the money that I would have paid for the car in cash and just put into Tesla stock, and that was in around the middle of April, which just was fortuitous. And I think it's because of the ecosystem that they have. It's not just the, um, it's not a car, it's an iPad with wheels.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Phil Read: And so that ecosystem of we were, as we were chatting before, instead of hiring just a bunch of developers to try to figure out full self driving, he's effectively crowdsourced full self driving with how people behave when they

Evan Troxel: able to

Phil Read: And, uh, that's pretty interesting ecosystem. So the car that you don't drive, Probably talked about this last time. The TV you don't watch, the phone you don't answer, Those are

usually orders of magnitude very successful [00:05:00] technologies.

We started, I think.

Yeah. Okay.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Little did we know.

Phil Read: We're back where we were last time.

Evan Troxel: That's right. Yeah. What? Yeah. Where are we?

Phil Read: we? Gate 44, Concourse B, Denver.

Evan Troxel: Denver airport. That's right.

Phil Read: Yeah, but this way we get breakfast and lunch and we get to chat about all kinds of things. Yeah, in person. That's,

Evan Troxel: Well, thank you for

Phil Read: an important part of it.

Otherwise it feels transactional or something.

Evan Troxel: So you talked about that in terms of leverage, right? And I just think that's kind of interesting when you put that in the context of our industry, too, right?

Like looking for places where there's opportunities to use that leverage that were maybe unforeseen or, Do you think that was all planned out in advance, this whole idea of crowdsourcing training, and then being able to use that to help build this infrastructure that really has It's, to me, like the analogy I think of is like the overnight ten year long success, right?

It's like the overnight success that actually

Phil Read: Oh, it looks obvious now. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: right, and it's like, well, no, it wasn't obvious back then, it was a [00:06:00] bet, and It paid off. But there's lots of bets that didn't pay off too.

Phil Read: No, the idea that in the future we'll just use everybody to program our technologies.

Like, that just sounds too

Evan Troxel: absurd. That's an absurd idea.

Right.

Phil Read: But in a way that's what they did. They built the infrastructure that trained the system. So the infrastructure in terms of physical electrification, you got to be able to charge. So I think that's why they've been successful. And yesterday was when, yesterday was GM's announcement that they're going to get out of the commercial automation driving business.

So Tesla stock has shot up a bit more today, right? It's like 415 a share. And I think in April it was 450 a share. Um, but I don't think it's because he's making cars, I think it's because they're creating an ecosystem for people that don't want to or don't have to drive.

Evan Troxel: mm-hmm

Phil Read: And so it's that, it's the sum of the parts.

So they've crowdsourced behavior of how people behave when they drive. and in edge [00:07:00] conditions of weird turning constraints. And like right now three 13. 2 is out and I don't have it yet, but apparently you can, you don't have to put the car into drive and then start full self driving.

You put in your destination and select go and it'll back itself out of a parking lot or out of a constrained parking space. And then it will start to go where it wants to go. And

I found it. Even on short trips from the, from Charlotte to the coast, enormously relaxing. To let the car do its

Evan Troxel: But it took a while for you to get there,

Phil Read: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: just didn't start out

Phil Read: No, it's like getting a teenager to drive and you're trying to

Evan Troxel: I'm right there with

Phil Read: wanna fall asleep and you're just like, every time there's another car you're kind of ready to

Evan Troxel: I'm, I feel so weird not having a parking brake in the middle of the car that we're using for driver's training, like that I had, my parents had when I was a kid, it was like ripped that they could just rip that thing up at any moment because they don't have their own set of pedals on their side. They can grab the wheel.

But, Now with the push button park brake, it's like I'm not just going to [00:08:00] push that button when we're full driving. Right. And so like that level of trust, you have to build up

Phil Read: It's so smooth now. Early on, like in December with the system that they had, when it would go around a corner, sometimes it would hesitate and it would take, it wasn't smooth. It was a little, it was like a teenager, like an experienced teenager like, turn straight, turn straight, turn

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Phil Read: Yeah, overcorrect on and um, but now I've had to, it got so good and there's different modes under self driving. There's like a hurry mode, a regular mode and a chill mode because the acceleration, even a regular mode, I find too aggressive. So if a teenager was driving and you go, Whoa, slow down, don't, when the light turns green, you don't have to be right off the line.

It's

Evan Troxel: way.

Deactivate

Phil Read: So it's in chill mode, but it still accelerates in a very confident fashion.

I'm. At the point where if I was doing a trip where you might actually sleep and confidently, you know, get on the road,

Put your [00:09:00] seat back a little bit, like getting on a plane today, right?

I drive, I'm flying in from Charlotte, took off and pulled my hat over my eyes, leaned the seat back and went to sleep for 45 minutes. But in a car, you just, you know, sometimes you're driving, you're not paying attention,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, never

Phil Read: right? And that's scary when you get noddy and your heads, your eyes are kind of dropping, your head's dropping down.

You're like, I should just pull over. I think in this case, it'll be, it'll be better than having a teenager drive and you'll be confident. You're just kind of put your seat back for five, 10 minutes and then wake up.

Evan Troxel: you're seeing the future. Like you can already see where this is going, right?

The next steps are.

Phil Read: I mean, that's where I think it's going to go. It's just. that's what people will enjoy.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Phil Read: Like we were, when we were talking before about the time it takes to travel somewhere, there's really no competition, at least in the US with air travel for, let's say 500 mile distances that you just got to get the trains aren't.

Maybe in the Northeast Corridor, they're predictable enough,

Evan Troxel: go to [00:10:00] the location you want to

Phil Read: no, it's not point to point, right? So when you get there, you still have to get in a, so you're two hours before the airport, but I think

with driving that that's confident. One of the constraints, and I was chatting with Brock Howard, actually we were texting, as I was flying, we're texting back and forth over the internet and the plane, Brock's in Athens, Georgia, and only one of the constraints of private vehicles is they take up so much space.

Because of the distance you have to maintain when you're driving on the highway, right? You're sort of a hundred feet between cars. What is it? 10 car lengths or something like that. You're going 60, 70 miles an hour. Um, but not a NASCAR. In NASCAR, they drive nose to tail at 200 miles an hour. And I could see if, if you could get into a convoy mode, like full self driving, that's the next step.

And you

Evan Troxel: travel in packs,

Phil Read: you travel in, you know, nose to tail, three feet apart, and they're all communicating with each other. And that special lane goes a hundred plus miles an hour. Well, that starts to compete with air travel [00:11:00] and trains and it's point to point. Cause I tell you it's so quiet and I have conference calls in the car, you know, self driving's on and I'm paying attention to the road, but I'm also paying attention to the conversation.

It's very relaxing.

So, yeah, I think he's, uh, I think that,

that,

it's not the car, it's not a car, it's, I keep referring to it as an iPad with, an iPad with wheels. It's a, um, It's not a car. I don't know what to call it yet. Well, maybe it's an automobile. We've always called them automobiles, but they weren't auto.

Well, that's right. Rich people have always, and we've talked about that before, very wealthy people have always had these kinds of things. The car that drives itself, but it was a chauffeur, or the person that wrote things down for you, which was the stenographer, or the scribe,

Evan Troxel: Your, your entertainment was the jester, right?

Phil Read: Yeah, and the, um, the king that would have, the advisor.

And [00:12:00] now this is coming down to common people. Like, I mean, down to a common person.

Evan Troxel: democratization. Yeah.

Phil Read: Oh, in an extraordinary way. Like, I wouldn't feel comfortable personally driving 100 miles an hour.

Evan Troxel: you would gain that comfort over time.

That might be

Phil Read: You know, over time, but things happen fast. And, um, I, I went fast once in the Tesla for the first time to pass a car. And it was just one lane in each direction, but I made the mistake of doing what I would normally do in a regular car, which is mash the gas and then indicate and get in the other, you know, get in the passing lane and then pull back over.

but when I went to pull over in the passing lane, I almost went off the road because it was happening. So things were happening so

Evan Troxel: vector, yeah, like physics, whoosh, just

Phil Read: It's not the zero to 60. That's fast. It's the 40 to 100.

It's the same three seconds. And so you have to learn to go slow and in a regular aspirated car. Yeah. Cause things [00:13:00] happen so

Evan Troxel: yeah. Things

Phil Read: Um, but these kinds of, uh, these kinds of tools that the very wealthy have had, like the kinds of things that kings have had, let's say, in the last thousand, two thousand years. You know, the Roman emperor didn't drive his own chariot, okay? He had someone drive his chariot. Now it's coming down to, I think, common people, and we were talking about AI before in terms of being conversational, or the car that drives itself, or

I think in, um Well, certainly in transportation, in personal transportation, the idea of getting in a car, getting up early, relaxing.

I don't have to be at the airport and fight elbows in traffic.

You get in the car and you drink your coffee and you open the newspaper or you open the internet on your phone. You start reading the day's news and the car is doing itself. I'd feel very comfortable. I've been in cars where, um, I was with, uh, Christian Lange, who is the former CEO of Enscape, and we were in Germany, and we were driving to the airport, and on the Autobahn, and he was confidently driving well over 100 miles an hour.

He has an electric Porsche. I felt completely [00:14:00] raxed. So, if I could have that kind of confidence in a personal vehicle, okay, 100 miles, it's not the speed, it's the abrupt starts and stops that'll get you there. Hurt you.

Evan Troxel: right. Momentum kills.

Phil Read: That's right, right, right, right,

Evan Troxel: you stop it too quickly.

Phil Read: That's right. Right. So if it, if it was confident and you're in, and you've overcome the artifact of having to have the separation because of the speed, because you're driving, you know, manually, no, it's making the adjustments and cars are five feet apart and they're communicating to each other.

Then you could travel very quickly from point to point. but the, Taking that into what we're talking about in, in AI is, is, I know it's an over discussed, at least in architecture, right? You can't open LinkedIn without seeing another rendering tool that some kind of AI tool, but it's not been that lately. Lately, it's the most trivial things. You're asking it questions that, normally, if you had a very learned person next to you in the car, and [00:15:00] you'd ask a question, Well, tell me about this, and it would give you all this information.

in the latest iOS, it will answer your initial question with Siri, and then it will go, Would you like me to answer that with, uh, what is it, ChatGPT? now it stopped, or in the early versions, it would call it ChatGPT, but they've gotten rid of that, and it's like, Would you like me to answer that with

Evan Troxel: full release, that's a

Phil Read: Yeah, so I'm driving back from the coast yesterday, and I came through a small town that all of a sudden had these artifacts of, at one time in history, it was a very affluent town. location, but it was in the middle of nowhere. So I just said, Hey, Siri, tell me about this town. And it went to this long soliloquy about the history of this town and when it was established in the early 1700s.

And it was like, in the moment, knowledge that

Evan Troxel: It was like your own personal tour guide, like when you rent, you go to Alcatraz, and you get the headset, and you go to the stops, and it tells you as you're there, just in time, kind of an idea of,

Phil Read: Yeah, while

Evan Troxel: access to information while you're looking at it, not, oh, I'm gonna go look that up [00:16:00] later, I better put a bookmark on this, or save it to my notes

Phil Read: Yeah. I need to go look that up in a library. so that's where I think it, I've kind of been interested in the AI piece here and there, but mostly it seems to be automating bad processes. It's automating inefficiency. This next generation seems to just be giving you orders of magnitude more useful information with very little input.

So there's some tools out there that would automate documentation with AI. Like here's my document set, tag and dimension things. And I think that's kind of a, that's kind of an example of automating inefficiency because otherwise you have to have somebody do it.

So one of the,

one of the, things we were talking about before was, um, schedules.

Okay, so Revit will

continually count things as you work, but you have to create this schedule and you have to order the fields and you have to,

there's a lot of curation that goes into that.

Evan Troxel: it's the coordination is insane, right?

But to really

Phil Read: do [00:17:00] it, it coordinates it, but you have to set it up so

Evan Troxel: still need an expert, though, to review it and actually coordinate the hinges and the lock sets. And the door schedule is one thing, openings, locations, right? What kind of door? Is it a one hour door? Whatever those things are, 90 minute, right? Does it have fire glass in it? But then there's like the whole hardware end of things.

And it's. a dedicated consultant typically for that kind of a thing, So I tell the story about, about what you did with GROK that, that kind of led to that

Phil Read: yeah, that led to it. So Brock Howard and I, Brock and Grok, Brock's texting me and I'm on this airplane and I thought, well, this is kind of an obscure thing, but, and it's, and it's on Twitter. I took a photo at this beach show that was this week in South Carolina of one of the vendors and they had a table full of, preserved alligator heads.

Alligator jerky. It was like one of the things they're trying to sell to beach shops, right? So, and I took a photo and I thought, I wonder if Grok would know what this is. So I asked Grok to estimate the retail [00:18:00] cost of everything in the photo and I'm on the internet in a plane and in about five seconds it started giving me responses and estimate like counting things, quantifying things.

I was just dumbstruck by that, like that's a very common question and it cost me nothing to get an answer. Well, I suppose I subscribe to the, whatever, premium. X or something like that. So

Evan Troxel: That is, it's basically, you experience like a magic moment right there. It's like, what? It can do that? Because that, that then leads back to this door schedule example,

Phil Read: Well, yeah. What if we're not making schedules? Like that was the leap of going from that was, okay, wait a minute. I've got a set of drawings and I'm

going to submit a set of drawings to AI and say, can you just give me a bill of materials and pricing, from Home Depot for everything in this project?

Like,

you don't even have to make schedules for that.

Evan Troxel: You just send it a, an image or a series of images or a model. I, I, it would be amazing if you can actually have a fully tagged BIM

Phil Read: And that's a whole leapfrog to me. [00:19:00] That's the part that, you know, on the way here this morning, as you kind of have time to ideate, you're just sitting on a plane doing nothing.

But the idea that you could take a photo of a chair And I, I actually, I did this last week in Wilmington. I was going through a tour of a distillery that had cool leather furniture. I took a photo of one of the chairs and using a Google image search, it said, Oh, here's the chair. Here's how much it costs.

And you can buy it at Home Depot. And it's like, what Home Depot doesn't sell this furniture. Well, they sell lots of things that you can't buy in the

Evan Troxel: in their quote unquote showroom, right?

But they're online.

Phil Read: but normally the step would be, Oh, we're going to start a company to build a tool that connects your Revit file with Lowe's or Home Depot.

And

Evan Troxel: With your pro account,

Phil Read: yeah, with, and then you're going to buy this thing. So it's gone to a price point of almost zero and no one's built a tool in between it. It's not like they built

the manual version, certainly there, but they didn't build a better manual version. And now it's been usurped by some other [00:20:00] agent, AI.

It's just leapfrog. It just went straight there. And, um, so for me, that's, that's kind of like a, a really important and interesting inflection point.

It's trivial. And you were talking about having a conversation.

Evan Troxel: so, so I was in, at AU, um, on my way back from AU, I rented a car and my first stop was at a, a photo shoot for a architectural project that my friend was the designer of, and the photographer was there, and he, we, we had, we had seen each other recently, but not that recently, and he said, have you ever had a conversation with ChatGPT?

And I'm like, well, I've asked it questions. Yeah.

Phil Read: I never needed.

Evan Troxel: So, so question and answer, is that what you mean? And he's like, no, like, like he goes on the way down here, which is about an hour and a half drive, he said, I had a full on conversation with ChatGPT. And he said, it blew my mind. He said, you have to try it. And I had an hour long drive coming up to Palm [00:21:00] Springs from there.

And so, in my car, in the car, rental car, through CarPlay, Um, I fired up and I think you have to have a plus account for ChatGPT to do this. It's 20 bucks a month. so you get the advanced voice mode that they teased, you know, months ago, it finally came out, it took a while for it to finally come out, but now that it's out, uh, it is very conversational and it will interrupt you and you can interrupt it and it will, if you get disconnected along the way, when you get a signal back again, it'll say, it looks like we got disconnected.

Let's pick up where we left off. So it, it just. maintains continuity with this conversation. And I was throwing this idea at it. And I had just been tumbling this idea around in my own head, not really coming to any conclusions, but I thought, Oh, I'll try this out with it. And so I asked it some, I told it what I was thinking about doing.

And it was, of course, it was very excited about this idea. Um, but, but, you know, this is, let's explore this. I said, okay, well, where should we start? And it [00:22:00] said, well, let's start with, and then it, it basically took me through this whole process and it asked me questions that everybody who's thinking about pursuing an idea would eventually, it would come across your plate.

All of these questions would, but in the span of 45 minutes, it sparked ideas that would not have been sparked otherwise, because I didn't do this with a person. I think this could lead us to other interesting places in the

Phil Read: conversation. Could you have a conversation with another person and the agent?

Do you think that would work with two people?

Evan Troxel: That's a good question. I would think so. I don't see why not.

Phil Read: And does it gives you responses in audio?

Evan Troxel: Audio and, in real time, yeah.

Phil Read: We should do another one of these where

Evan Troxel: Oh, a full podcast,

Phil Read: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: We would probably want a quieter

Phil Read: I wouldn't have, I didn't think about that this morning when I woke

Evan Troxel: Right.

Phil Read: let's do a podcast with an

Evan Troxel: With an agent. Yeah. So, so It asked me questions and it forced me to think about things. And you don't even [00:23:00] feel confident in your answer, right? Because it's spur of the moment.

It's just whatever is there you have to work with. And of course you could say, you know, let me think about that for a little bit and I'll get back to you. I, I assume you could do that. But, I tried to just stay in the moment and I tried to do the best I could with what it was asking of me.

Phil Read: it hard to be present when you were having this conversation?

Evan Troxel: it was a normal conversation.

It would, it would be

Phil Read: You didn't have to suspend disbelief. You were just like,

Evan Troxel: would be like being on this podcast and I went into it with the expectation that it was going to blow my mind, right? Because my friend had kind of prompted me with that. And I thought, okay, I'm, I'm here for this. And so I did that and I I didn't think twice about it.

I just thought, you know, there were several times where I thought, oh, this, this answer is going to suck, but I'm going to say it anyway. And it forced me to think about, think through things I'll say. And then at the end. I said, okay, now can you give me a summary of this conversation and give me some action items to pursue next?

And it said, yep. And it said, anytime you want to come back and pursue this conversation further, [00:24:00] I'm here and ready for

Phil Read: that.

Evan Troxel: Right. And, and, and because of the way ChatGPT works, right, it's got every query that you've asked it is a separate entry. And so you can go back and pick up on any one of those threads and continue it on.

And this is no different. This is just one of those threads. And so they're each in their own little buckets. Um, and so you really could have as many of these different threads and they're not really going to cross pollinate with each other. I don't, maybe you, maybe you want it

Phil Read: is not like a Google image. This is not like a Google search, right, from 20 years

Evan Troxel: not at all.

Phil Read: And, um, I've only started playing with this probably at, uh, since the fall retreat, because I realized, you Uh, I'm using the public, I was using the private version of the Apple beta, and then there's, it was getting too squirrely, I went back and dropped back to a, to the public beta, and realized that you could upload images and ask questions.

And I think, I don't know if it was somebody at the leadership [00:25:00] retreat, or maybe, I think it was Craig Barbieri. took a photo and then asked, oh, it was how to create a text prompt. So sometimes you can create a text prompt by, okay, how do I describe this thing in my head? Or if you take a photo of something, ask it to describe the material and then use that material as a text prompt and then say, okay, I want a seamless texture from that description.

works better than taking the photograph and trying to massage it in Photoshop so it looks like a seamless texture.

So I was like, Oh, you can submit a photo and ask it to describe it. So I, I took a photo of the kitchen at the cottage and, and, uh, ask it to, describe the design as, uh, you know, sort of pro and con terms.

And, uh, I, I got a description sort of a modern kitchen design. And then I asked it to describe the design and the persona of Steve Jobs. And it said some pretty nice things about the design and the utility of it and the clean lines. But then it also said there was nothing really innovative about it.[00:26:00]

Evan Troxel: personality.

So

Phil Read: sent it to a friend of mine, who's a contractor.

He was an architect turned contractor. And he's like, Oh my gosh, I would hate for this to happen, uh, to review my design work. And he sent me a photo of a mountain house that he'd worked on in North Carolina. And it was fully dressed out and a project. And the table had a very colorful and.

Uh, sort of festive place settings on it, and I guess they had set everything up and then taken photos of the finished mountain house. And I asked, I submitted that picture to ChatGPT, and asked for a pro and con of the design, and the pros would come in the persona of Martha Stewart, and the cons would come in the persona of Steve Jobs.

And boy, did Steve Jobs savage the design, and then, and I, I sent

Evan Troxel: Martha was complimentary.

Martha

Phil Read: thought the colors and the place settings was lovely and complimentary to the rustic, you know, and then Steve Jobs was like, busy, busy, busy, this is terrible. You know, how much noise, clutter, yeah. So I sent it to an [00:27:00] architectural friend of mine and, uh, in Charlotte, and he said, man, this would have been great in architecture school to be able to take photos of your design and then ask for feedback.

of the design, you know, without waiting until a Monday morning crit. but getting kind of experienced feedback from personas. and then it's not like a Google search. It's not transactional. It's interactive. And I think this is going to have profound implications around healthcare. Certainly, I think in, in terms of psychology, of someone who's going through grief or a difficult time to be able to have a conversation.

And, and certainly in psychology, there's a broad range of quote unquote, right answers. Um, I like. An psychologist, author named Viktor Frankl. He, if you want to look up a book called Man's Search for Meaning, he was a psychologist and ended up not fleeing Germany when he could have before the war and then ended up in Auschwitz and survived and then wrote about [00:28:00] what kept him wanting to live.

And then later on he created a, uh, style of counseling called Logotherapy, so I have an a, sort of an affection to that style of, of, of, uh, I don't know what you call it, psychologist. So to be able to have a conversation in the moment when you're troubled by something, but you want the responses to be in the persona of Viktor or St.

Augustine.

Evan Troxel: their framework

Phil Read: if you could really talk to him now, you're. I think in, in a simplification, you're talking to a carbon based version of AI, that's Viktor Frankl, well, he's passed, you can't, and he certainly doesn't scale. Viktor, if he were alive, he could talk to one person at a time for 55 minutes, and, you know, so, imagine any modern day psychologist that you would have an affinity for, what would this person say about this particular issue, or I would like to talk to, a [00:29:00] persona of this person.

And, um, cause history is certainly full of, of, of philosophers, you know, to be able to talk about a modern stressful issue in the, with the persona of Marcus Aurelius in context with his meditations, like to me, that's profound. And you can still talk to other people. But how it's going to impact

Evan Troxel: you might have to wait, like you said, until next Wednesday at

Phil Read: yeah, next Thursday and it's 300 an hour.

And,

and I think generally speaking, men don't like to talk about, we like to solve problems. And so we tend not to talk about the things that are troubling us because they're maybe they're unsolvable in the moment. There's not one right answer. So being able to

talk

to someone or something in a way that it's reflective, it's in the moment, so it's very needs based, and the cost, the price point is zero.

Evan Troxel: do you think this impacts, that sounds stupid to even say, how does this impact AEC? Like, so, [00:30:00] so one of the things that I, mean, I, I do want to bring it back to that, Context for the podcast, but at the same time, it's, um,

Phil Read: is it too constrained?

Evan Troxel: trite, right?

It just sounds like, oh, really? We're going to talk about this? But the ideas are, you're talking about schedules, right? You're talking about mundane stuff that we're still, like, literally showing up to fight with every single day. And getting wrong, making a lot of mistakes. Um, and I think about how long it took to even transition from

Drafts people to CAD managers, to BIM managers, or technicians.

And, and now, like, to me it seems like, well, we don't, we, BIM managers is old, like that's tired. What's wired, right? AI managers. Like, why don't we, why don't firms have, why aren't they like, you're seeing, going back to the Tesla example, like you see the future, you can, you can taste it. Right. It's right [00:31:00] there.

And it's so

Phil Read: I'm so ready to sleep in the car.

Evan Troxel: It's yeah. It's so obvious that this is going to happen in some timeframe that you can't not expect it to happen. And yet. I mean, the same thing goes for a lot of things, right, in AEC and in tech, and we are, you know, we are so slow to adopt this stuff.

Phil Read: So I think, yeah, I think some of it is.

so a lot of times working with customers.

or just other people. You don't know, there's so many good ways to do things. There's so many products of function as you design. Like you can, you can say, the stairs can't go here because of a functional reason, but there's so many great places to put the stairs. But the client, the customer is going to have a particular affinity towards how things are arranged.

And I think one of the areas AI is this client, the idea of this client's persona, of using your client's persona as you're designing in the moment. To kind of reflect and interact [00:32:00] with the design

with, with some confidence that when you do meet every other week, you're going to be on a vector that's correct.

And, um, there's a couple of tools. Not that create, they don't create client personas, but they'll, uh, they create, uh, potentially customer or employer, employee personas. And I mentioned it to you before, it's called Humantic AI. And it plugs into Twitter, and it plugs into, the same subscription plugs into Twitter, and it plugs into LinkedIn.

And it will scrape someone's profile, and based on their profile, LinkedIn profile, it will give you a vector based upon how they will respond if you're trying to sell them something or if you're trying to employ them. So basically you're trying to convince them to change their behavior or to behave in a certain way.

Right, I want you to spend money and, and uh, So, I've used that with great success, Humantic AI, now the, the bigger step of, of talking with a [00:33:00] persona to critique or to give feedback or to have a conversation in the moment about a certain design, a design direction that you could go, it's how many times have we worked for a couple of weeks and you have to come up with options

Evan Troxel: Two steps forward, one step

Phil Read: yeah, and then you meet with the customer and, and you have to change direction again or there's

You want to work with confidence and the customer can't meet with you every afternoon at, you know, it's their, their time is constrained.

Evan Troxel: or maybe they want to and you can't

Phil Read: So, and the persona could be not just, you know, one customer, but say you're designing a residence for an entire family. How will the family respond to You know, you're going to get a very, how much will it cost and what does it look like? those kinds of impacts to AI I think will be profound, like just being able to interact with a persona of someone with some confidence.

Try it sometime, take a photo of a space and ask it to describe the space and critique the space in the persona of someone alive or dead. [00:34:00] And, I don't know if the answers are completely correct, uh, but they seem to be on vector. And it's just curious, if you had, if I gave you an assignment

Evan Troxel: Entertaining, if nothing

Phil Read: yeah, yeah, Evan, write, Write a description of this space and critique it as if you were Martha Stewart.

Evan Troxel: It's a fun, it's

Phil Read: It's a, yeah, it's a, yeah, yeah. And, um, so that part of it, I think from an education standpoint, from a business standpoint, being able to interact with, uh, a persona, a client's persona, or even a, man, if you knew the, the people that were going to be on a jury, and you could take all of their personas of, and

Evan Troxel: You create a feedback loop that's totally proactive,

Phil Read: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: Because you're not waiting for that event to actually happen, and you might go in there in a better position. I would hope you would go into it.

when it really

Phil Read: firms employ psychologists to try to predict how the jury is going to respond to a design. Certainly it happens in [00:35:00] the legal space where you try to predict how jury members, right, when they're going through the process of selecting jury members, they employ psychologists to try to pick the jurors that will have an affinity towards their approach to the, to

Evan Troxel: case.

Yeah. To, yeah.

Phil Read: Do we do that in our, do we know, I don't know any architecture firms that employ

Evan Troxel: The example I can think of is employing psychologists to use research as a foundation for why they make decisions the way that they do. You know, when it comes to like healthcare space design, co uses of color theory in design, things like that, where.

They do have psychological effects on healing, for example, right? So, um, and then, and then they can point at their researcher and say, like, this is our expert, this is our subject matter expert, and here's, and, and here's why we're making these decisions like this, and here's why you should go along with it, or choose us, even, as an example.

So, they, they do things like that, but I don't think in the way that you're talking about it, not that I know of.[00:36:00]

Phil Read: Yeah, like, create personas of everyone that's gonna be on the jury, and what subtle, sociological, psychological,

Evan Troxel: You're making a business case, right, for, I mean, you're talking about winning work.

Yeah, yeah.

Phil Read: Yep. Yeah. So check out Humantic AI and then use it on yourself. I think the free version, you could do a couple of, uh, uh, test runs and then it's like trivially expensive.

It's not expensive at all.

Evan Troxel: So you did that, you did that on yourself and you

Phil Read: Like if I, if someone was trying to sell something to me or if they were trying to employ me and some of the edge conditions for around employment were, um, Whether or not the person would, if they would respond to a job opening that was aspirational and ill defined, or did they need to have very specific definitions with their, with what would be the metrics to, um, for their success in the job.

And some people you can say, hey, just come on board, it's going to be great, we'll figure it out. [00:37:00] We don't know what we're going to do, you're going to help us figure it out. And that's very aspirational and some people haven't They will have an affinity to that ambiguity and others will run, you know, screaming the other direction.

Evan Troxel: in, it's then in your, your approach to talk to them, knowing what ways will connect with them. You can modify your

approach to meet them where they're

Phil Read: you're trying to sell to this type of personality, don't go into story mode. deal with facts and figures and how their competition is using it to get ahead. And they'll want to know data. And even it will, it will tell you, uh, in, in sort of a, if you're pitching, if you're sales pitching to someone, um, don't expect a decision, that person's not going to make a decision.

They're going to have to go back to their company and build consensus. It'll be a long sales cycle and it's scraping this from their LinkedIn

Evan Troxel: So let's go back to the leadership retreat and, and your

Phil Read: Oh, you went to it. How was

Evan Troxel: [00:38:00] Well, well, before, before we talk about what it was like, we, we did, we did that already on the podcast when Adam and you were here. But, but the. Here's, here's what I want to talk about. We, we talked about BIM managers, not being that they're really technically oriented, right?

Not, not just BIM managers, but people on the tech side of architecture being really technically oriented, maybe not used to leading teams. Right. And that's a big transition. That's a huge threshold of change

Phil Read: You're dealing with emotions instead of facts,

Evan Troxel: and, and, but, but, but then plugging this context in with this, this humanized tool that you're talking about, right, and knowing your audience, right, using, because this is about communication style and approach to get the desired outcome that you're looking for.

So there's a business case for that. But there's also, you know, to me, this is about like internal projects as it is about winning outside work.

Phil Read: finding

Evan Troxel: You are innovating in your firm or you're coming up with a new workflow [00:39:00] or you want to make a different tool purchase. I'm just trying to, I want to give people tools to think are different ways to think about these kinds of tools that you're talking about, because I think there's a personal aspect to this too, that it can be leveraged for to, Communicate in the right style that it will land with the person who is your audience to move this goal forward, right?

I think that there's something there,

Phil Read: So the

It's not uncommon for BIM managers, self included, to live in the potential and to be inside that bubble a lot. And things are, technology is so obviously advantageous to us. Oh, we shouldn't spend money to do this thing, but you have to convince higher ups. And one of the more recent conversations I had with the technology director, almost out of the blue, can I talk to you about something?

And yes, pick up the phone and we're chatting and they're, Completely frustrated. They want to do this certain thing, and his question, [00:40:00] uh, was, How do I convince my boss that I'm right? Jesus, what an open

Evan Troxel: an open

Phil Read: And, um, well, what are you trying to do? Have you run the numbers? Have you figured out that the cost of the technology is trivial, but now you're going to have to train people, and you're going to have to change behavior, and what if it doesn't work out?

Um, and I'm trying to go through the conversation. I said, have you offered to resign if this doesn't work out?

Evan Troxel: would I do that?

I'm

Phil Read: Why would I

Evan Troxel: die on this sword.

Phil Read: a lot of money. And if it doesn't work out, what's your trajectory? Like they don't, you're, you're, you're, I think the problem is, I think what I mentioned to this person, I said, you're trying, you haven't built trust.

They trust you to manage the technology, but not to manage the business for a BIM manager. Who's, you know, I think we're also a little bit all on spectrum to have a conversation with the chat GPT. and go, hey, I'm trying to talk to my director about doing this thing and [00:41:00] they're just not listening to I wouldn't spend 300 an hour with a psychologist to this. I might buy lunch or breakfast for someone and go, how would you manage this?

Evan Troxel: How, yeah, well, and I would ask you, and you would come back with your experience, right? But, but, at the same time, like, you're saying that this, this thing exists where you

Phil Read: They're on the way to the office, 30 minute drive, in traffic, frustrated because they were just told yesterday, no, you're not going to, we're not going to do that.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Phil Read: And so you want to vent. you just want to know why. And having something go, oh, have you thought about this? Have you thought about this other It's not even a tool that helps you design better buildings, it's just a tool to help you deal with,

Evan Troxel: Or whatever problems or challenges you're

Phil Read: with people.

Yeah, the emotions of that, because I think we get locked in our heads, this is the right way to do it.

Evan Troxel: to do it. There's that, and everybody's like me. And I, we, we speak my language, but, but it really to me is about speaking their language and finding the way to communicate best with them.

And I love this idea of the [00:42:00] persona and kind of prototyping these conversations ahead of time. You know, role playing is what we're talking about, right? So

Phil Read: even before you have that meeting with the boss and go, look, I've got to have this conversation. I want to invest this money into doing this thing and training these people. What are, yeah, what are the roadblocks? What are the likely

Evan Troxel: grill me, pre grill me, right? Yeah. I mean, Steve jobs, roasting the design, right? It makes me think of like you grill me with questions. I want to get this thing through all the red tape that I have to get it through.

Phil Read: through. Does chat, does this chat GPT that you're using, does it work with video or is it?

Evan Troxel: You can put images up there.

I don't know that it'll work

Phil Read: You can't walk around a design model or something like that and ask it to interact. I think it just, it, it prepare, it could prepare you, and we have a family friend, Harvard trained psychologist, and a couple of years ago I, I, we were having a chat about, uh.

You know, obviously he does counseling [00:43:00] and I said, I think the AI is going to have a profound impact on this. And he's like, Oh no, you can never replace people. And now I look at it like the father, that's going to have to have a difficult conversation with a son, you know, grades at school or anything.

It's like, how do I want to approach this to build a bridge to not, you know, to not sever relationship, any difficult conversation, whether it's the boss at work, a partner, um, um, a child. The thing that I was thinking about when you mentioned that it's being conversational, and can you have a third person as the agent?

man, if I could have gone through teenagers and had the, the agent in there so that,

Evan Troxel: A mediator.

Phil Read: yeah, it's the mediator.

Evan Troxel: the

Phil Read: Okay, dad, you need to be quiet now. You're not, you're, yeah, you're talking too much. Let

Evan Troxel: You're talking

Phil Read: right, right, right. I could have Viktor Frankl in there listening in. I think those kinds of conversations will be profound and not just in monetary terms, but just in like human relationship terms because we see things [00:44:00] through our own

Evan Troxel: When was BiLT north America in St. Louis. What year was that? 2018 or 2019? 2017?

Phil Read: the next to the last one. So I think it was 18 because 19 was

Evan Troxel: Seattle, right?

I think it was in, I did like one of those YouTube wrap up videos. I was doing, doing those at the time. And something that came up at that conference was what if you had, I think it was in the, um, the, Is it the DTS, which was like the pre conference for the Digital Technology Summit? And, you know, Rob Yori and, and, uh, Robert Manna and people like that were, were there, it was a group discussion with people from large firms all over the, the US would come in and be there for a few days before the actual BiLT Conference and then stay through the BiLT Conference.

But the, one of the things that came up at that was what if you had one of those echo dots or something on your desk at work, what would you ask it? and I think you mentioned like there are certain things [00:45:00] that I just wouldn't feel comfortable talking about it in public, right? But this whole idea of using it You know, you've got your, you've got your AirPods now, like, I don't even think those were a thing back then, at least, you know, the wireless ones, and, and you go on a walk, you go out of the office and go on a walk, or you're in the car on your drive home, or to work, and you're having these conversations, there may be things that it's fine to, to do in the office at your desk, right, and, and to prompt something, and have it, have this conversation going with what, what it's seeing on your screen.

I think Claude recently, their latest model, Sonnet, can look at your screen and interact with you as you're interacting with your screen. And now there's this new layer of interaction with these models. But there's voice, there's screen, so maybe there are a lot of things that you could do that you'd be fine with saying out loud or showing on your screen at work.

And then there's a lot of things that aren't, right? And [00:46:00] it's interesting that you kind of tied that back into psychology and like, especially men who are not. as open with their emotions and their feelings and expressing those or talking to others about them

Phil Read: you pay somebody 300 bucks an hour and,

Evan Troxel: And just not doing that because it's cost prohibitive

Phil Read: No, if you're stressed about money, you can't pay someone 300 bucks an hour.

Evan Troxel: And I think like working in an architectural office leads to a lot of situations where that would be extremely beneficial, right? So like it's a frustrating job. It's a challenging job Uh, and that's you know

Lots of different roles in the office, not just technology roles. But I mean, we can definitely see that in technology roles.

It's really challenging. Yeah,

Phil Read: I think, you know, we've used AI, the AEC space primarily to create beautifully seductive images of buildings and the lighting is perfect. The reflections are amazing. And, uh, you know, from text prompts and, and, and a little bit of graphics, little massing or sketching,

Evan Troxel: Some some kind of rudimentary underlay. Yeah. [00:47:00]

Phil Read: images,

but that's just, I think we're just scratching the surface.

We're doing the thing that appeals to us as

Evan Troxel: it's the eye candy,

Phil Read: we're, well, we're visual people, you know, we're, we're, we've kept ourselves alive over millennia by being visual and listening. But, uh, that's just scratching the It's, um, it's far more

Evan Troxel: well, and that even, you know, scratching the surface, to me, it's like, it's the lure, it's the carrot, and it's not even the thing we should be.

I really focused on. Right. It's just, it's a distraction.

Phil Read: Well, there's an enormity of execution that has to take place if you're talking about in terms of manufacturing and leverage. I think everything in a way is every, every job is kind of a manufacturing role. You're turning something

of a lower value

into a higher value. So you're turning raw materials into tennis shoes or tires.

You're turning electricity into drawings, instructions to build a building. And. We are still doing, [00:48:00] so there's a lot of automation that occurs, that, that occurs and has developed in the last 20, 25 years, where you can move a door in a plan and it moves in the elevation and it moves in the schedule.

Evan Troxel: It's called building information modeling, Phil, have you heard of it?

but

Phil Read: But

isn't, transactional.

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Phil Read: It's not a conversation where you're just staring at the blank piece of paper and going, you know, this doesn't really work. Like, give me some ideas here. Which normally you'd call someone over who has a lot of experience.

Evan Troxel: say, Hey, I need some fresh eyes on this. Can you look, can you look at this and tell me if

Phil Read: lay down some trace and you kind of look at it a different way.

Um, I think that kind of interaction what's going to be really profound. At school. at university, like having a minor in psychology and a master's degree in architecture, or maybe having an undergraduate degree in architecture and a [00:49:00] master's degree in psychology. Because ultimately what you're, I think what we're trying to do in business is persuade.

Evan Troxel: Absolutely.

Phil Read: And how you persuade depends on the person that you're trying to persuade. It's not one

Evan Troxel: There's no one way to do it, yeah. Right.

Phil Read: Yeah. There's so many ways to do things. And what will appeal based on that person's understanding of how that space is going to be used. Commercial space or a private space. The aspiration of what that building and investment is going to, is, is how it's going to Like being able to interact with a persona at that level. I think is, is just, it's profound. We don't have

Evan Troxel: you feel like that's leverage to build those skills

Phil Read: Well, if you're building a

Evan Troxel: those

Phil Read: you don't have,

you're not constrained by team size. Maybe, you know, what's, I don't know if [00:50:00] it's, if, uh, I like things in threes.

You know, a stool is, will hold, a stool won't wobble with three legs. Maybe you just have three people. What's the firm size now? And you have these intelligent agents that you can interact with, even with those other people on the team. Um, but how you will pursue work, propose work, win work, execute work, bill for These are, these are tasks that people have to manually do, and to be honest, they're not always interesting all the time. Like chasing money is not interesting

Evan Troxel: you become a specialist in that this is how large firms operate, right?

You're specialists in, in all those roles.

Phil Read: But I think these agents will be the specialists that you need on, on

Evan Troxel: Or they can be If, if people are willing to

Phil Read: Look, even the conversation when the customer's not paying you, having a conversation first about this customer that's not paying me, how would you

Evan Troxel: Well, you would write your draft.

Phil Read: And some customers are going to be very transactional and you're going to say, I'm going to come and I need to be paid [00:51:00] today. And others may, it may be a different appeal.

Evan Troxel: negotiation. Right.

Phil Read: Um, Because if you're impatient and you just escalate right away, get frustrated, go, Okay, look, well, if I have to get a lawyer,

Evan Troxel: Every, yeah, if you're a, if you're a hammer, every, every problem

Phil Read: yeah, that's not the win.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Phil Read: So using these kind of agent feedback loops, having the conversation before the conversation, I think that's the profound part. We haven't, we haven't touched the surface of that yet.

We're just using it to make pictures right now. We're not using it to create personas.

Evan Troxel: I

mean it, and the technology exists right now to do this.

Phil Read: You'll get more than you, that's the, that was the bit flip, is when you get more than out of it than you think you put into it. Like taking a photo from that, uh, beach retail show of a, of a, a vendor's tabletop and going, okay, what do I have in this picture?

And how much would it cost retail? And it starts to give a very [00:52:00] detailed accounting of everything on the table to the point that, um, I mean, the alligator heads were pretty obvious. You could get back scratchers and alligator heads, right? but then it had alligator jerky and it recognized, alligator jerky from this photo at probably 10 15 feet away and it gave me an accounting of what that would probably cost retail terms.

Like this is the most obscure thing. Like no one would build a tool for

Evan Troxel: Oh, and by the way, the table costs you $25

Phil Read: Yeah, so now I'm finding myself walking around taking photos of things and asking, uh, asking Grok, um, who makes this chair and how much does it cost? Where is this light from? And, and it goes and finds it.

Evan Troxel: So the thing that this is. Bringing up for me is this whole idea of curiosity, right? Like you obviously have this curiosity now, like you, you've seen a bit of what it can do and, and now, oh man, I'm just going to keep asking it more and more questions, but curiosity is, um, let's just say it's not, really welcome in a lot of corporate situations, right?

It's like, do the job with these tools like [00:53:00] this.

Phil Read: Ooh, I don't know you'd want to Why would you ever want to work somewhere you weren't? being paid to be

Evan Troxel: well, and look what you can get out of it, right? Like, like look what the potential is with that. And that there's a, there's a leverage right there. Like, I always found it to be incredibly frustrating to work in places where it was like, this is how we do it. This is how we've always done it. This is how we're going to continue to do it. Don't do, don't go outside of these lines, right? Don't color outside the lines. And I remember first year of architecture school, my professor, who was a wild and crazy individual, he said, the worst thing you ever learned was in kindergarten when they taught you to color inside the

Phil Read: Inside the lines.

Evan Troxel: Stifling that curiosity happens early on in a lot of people, right?

And then it continues. And so like there's, there's levels of curiosity that are allowed in air

Phil Read: of air and I, I suspect that business success leads to Pattern recognition of, [00:54:00] oh, let's do more of that. Right? So you don't want to

Evan Troxel: Keep doing that. Yeah.

Phil Read: even to the detriment of the business, they'll follow it all the way down. But just keep doing the thing and particularly in stress mode, then people really look at pattern recognition and they don't want to try anything else because they're stressed. Yeah, they double but for architectural firms now, or students that are in school now, I suppose if your aspiration is to work for a company and be part of the milieu of a very recognizable high design firm,

then that's one track.

But, you don't have to follow that path. Like having all of these agents work for you, and to be able to ask it questions on demand when the, when the question is, is forefront, you know, front. The cost of that, if you had to do it in human terms, would be, you would have to hire all of these people to do all of these kinds of tasks for you.

I don't know, if you're not curious, I don't know that I would want to employ people that were not [00:55:00] curious or want to be employed. Isn't that kind of, isn't that kind of what we're, we're not just paid to do a thing, we're paid to pay attention to the thing we're doing and to try to improve the thing? Yeah. mean, anyone, I don't know what you, isn't everything improvable?

So while you're doing it, you're also in this other mind of going, I wonder if this could be, like, this could be

Evan Troxel: I wish we could run a poll on the podcast right now, right? Like a real time poll of like, do you feel like you have that agency in your role to be curious? Like a lot of times there's like designated individuals who are like in an R and D kind of situation and that might be over glamorized, right?

But it's like this, or I remember as a designer, right? I remember a project manager who was, you know, a principal and owner in the firm was like, You've got the, you've got the easy job. You get to design things. And I'm like, are you serious? Like I get to put my heart up on the wall and watch people rip it off the wall, [00:56:00] right?

It's not what you think it is. And, and so anyway, tangent that the idea of this, this R and D, you know, those people get paid to be curious or they

Phil Read: I think

Evan Troxel: paid to come up with innovation.

Phil Read: can see the director going, okay, I like your idea, but that's not a good idea for today. Like that's a good idea for the next project. But to just say, Hey, I don't want you to have, stop thinking, you know,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, just

Phil Read: just do, ah, nah,

Evan Troxel: crushing for an artist, or for an architect,

Phil Read: even think it's artist and architect. I think anyone, like even if you dig a hole and someone goes, oh, is the hole there? Nah, let's put the hole over there. Or if you're digging a hole, right? Like literally digging a ditch and you go, you know, we're going to dig it this way, but that's a long way.

We could dig it over this way and it's a better way to dig the ditch. Oh, I'm glad you thought of that. Like, know, to be, to be, uh, proud of your work, anything, be curious, anything. I can't think of what you could do that you wouldn't be curious.

Evan Troxel: So that the idea [00:57:00] behind this kind of talking to this technology, talking to these agents.

You know, why, why not just talk to a person about this stuff?

And the answer is because they're not available.

Phil Read: they're not always available. Yeah, yeah. No, there's very smart

Evan Troxel: they cost money or whatever, whatever those things are. There's

Phil Read: they're in the middle of their thought, and now you're interrupting an important moment for them. Um, I don't think it'll be either or. I think it'll be both and. You'll use this other, you know, you mentioned that the, the agent was so optimistic about your idea, right?

You do get, you do get that artifact sometimes. What a wonderful idea. Let's just, let's, let's think about that. Um, but you do need a way to bounce ideas. I think these tools, at least in my experience, are not being used. To do lazy things, you're doing them to be more rigorous about them, to be curious, to be asked questions, uh, to be responded to in

Evan Troxel: things to the [00:58:00] ground faster, right?

Phil Read: it's like, Oh, I didn't think about that.

I was doing, uh, one of the posts for the Fall Leadership Retreat, or maybe it's the Spring Roundtable, like, we don't have alcohol at the event. And so I wanted to do a, a, a short article about why we don't have alcohol. And it wasn't meant, I don't want to do anything preachy, it's just like, in practical terms.

So I asked ChatGBT, like, give me some practical reasons, we have this kind of event, here's what we're trying to do. What are some practical reasons you wouldn't, give me five practical reasons you wouldn't have alcohol. And out of those five, I've got three good ones. I think I ended up combining two into one.

It was like, oh, these are good reasons. You know, they're nothing to do with moral authority. It's just like, okay, we have water sports and we have ski boats and e foils and yeah, you don't want to risk people drinking and being drunk.

You know, involved in water sports.

Evan Troxel: Phil.

Phil Read: We didn't see, we saw him on the river, but he's none in the

Evan Troxel: way. So,

Phil Read: So yeah, there's, you know, to be thoughtful, to be in the moment, uh, to be aware of what you're saying and thinking, okay, those are good reasons why we don't have alcohol. It just [00:59:00] avoids complexity. I still had to kind of curate the final selection, but I asked the tool, like a room full of people, Hey, give me some ideas.

Like, you're just ideating, and I think that part of the, of the, of

Evan Troxel: Don't you do that, don't you do that anyway? Don't you go through it at the, everything, even if you make it, right?

Phil Read: You do, but sometimes, you know, there's that mental block at first.

Evan Troxel: Oh, no, absolutely,

Phil Read: and um, it's very good at getting that initial vector, and then giving you ideas that you wouldn't have thought of.

I think even for myself, if I had got myself in a quiet place and thought about it, I wouldn't have thought about that angle. Yep. So, those kinds of, I, I would Encourage someone to take some of these tools and take a photo of a chair and say where can I get this chair? Take a photo of a space and say I like this design.

How much would this cost all the furnishings in this space? What would they cost like it will recognize brands of? Tables and chairs and soft furnishings and even wall fixtures. It will recognize all of that and give you [01:00:00] a list So it a lot of time to design to get to the point where the customer might say I don't like it But if we can do that quicker and have these quicker iterative steps, and we're confident that we're on vector, I think the clients will be happier.

The customer will be more satisfied with the end

Evan Troxel: You know, as an architect, I always found that you have different types of clients, but the best clients were the ones who were looking for ideas, searching for ideas.

Phil Read: using you as an AI. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, they were using you to do the same thing, right, because they're not the experts and they recognize that and they hired you to do that job and you're the expert in that job and for you to look at it like that I think is a, is a good take, right, because like when you get those unexpected, whoa, I didn't think about that.

That's really,

Phil Read: Yeah, they've, they've already biased themselves, they've flipped online through pictures, they've looked at designs, and, and they're still at the point where they go, you know, I don't know, just, here's what I like, but can you give me some ideas, we have this piece of property, here's what we want to do [01:01:00] with it, here's what we want to, here's how we want the, the end product to perform, here's its function, but give me some ideas.

Evan Troxel: One of my favorite kind of surveys afterward with a client was when they said, I said, so, you know, just, Let's just talk about the overall process. And they said, you know what? I really, really, really the thing that really made a mark for me.

And this was like a board member at this entity organization. And they said, you brought things to the table that we would have never, ever, ever thought of.

Phil Read: You're a very good carbon based AI.

Evan Troxel: But that,

Phil Read: But that's what, you wanted something unexpected.

Evan Troxel: the kind

of jobs I want to work on. Right, and And you don't, I don't wanna work on the kinds of jobs where it's like I have all the answers. Number one, I, I want it to be interactive, but I also want it to go somewhere where ne, neither one of us thought it

Phil Read: that's what happens in the conversation so many times. I think I have an idea, and I chat with Adam about the idea, and at the end of the conversation, we end up with [01:02:00] another idea that neither of us anticipated, that we're both interested in. And, I think that's, another important artifact of having these conversations as opposed to the transactions when you can re ask the question and okay why do you say that and dig deeper you end up

Evan Troxel: mean by that?

Phil Read: yeah you end up with a an idea that turns into a very interesting opportunity it's surprising

Evan Troxel: Yeah. And that, I mean, that it's, there's, there's something here about surprise that actually makes people pay attention to something. It's like what something is impactful to you. It's typically because it was surprising. So it's the twist in the movie. It's the, it's the bridge in the song. It's the key change.

It's something that you didn't see coming. Right. And, and it's like, boom, it smacks you in the face. Right. And it's. That's what makes its mark on you,

Phil Read: right, right, right.

Evan Troxel: searching for that to happen.

Phil Read: And the [01:03:00] restrictions of, uh, Don't just do anything you have to.

And I think that's where AI suffers right now, particularly with regard to trying to come up with design ideas and creating renderings, it's really good at creating anything, anything, and it, it's hard at creating something. Um, I think that'll get better, but, uh, it's hard to iterate and have things sit still and then just kind of tweak it over here.

I only recently found out that Keith Richards uses open tuning and five

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Phil Read: Oh my gosh, the music sounds amazing. And I'm, and I

Evan Troxel: would know, nobody would know that, right?

Phil Read: and he said when they were starting out, like the, the heavy string, the bottom string is

Evan Troxel: when I, when I say that, nobody listening would know, like, Oh, Keith Richards plays with a completely modified setup from normal

Phil Read: So it's an old blues style, open tuning. So you can strum, so you can strum the strings without touching the strings. It also means you can just put one finger across five strings and get, and Go online and listen to Keith Richards playing the guitar. You're [01:04:00] like, that's, that's the sound. That's the sound of his guitar playing and how he's able to create fills.

The songs that they're known for would not have been possible without that, without the restriction of that tuning style. And I think he said it, um, it was an artifact of, uh, you can do open tuning with six strings, but, um, They were broke and the bottom strings at Spence's, so he's like, yeah, forget it.

We'll just play without that one. And

Evan Troxel: but, yeah, it's

Phil Read: And even a guitar company created a five string guitar, which he played with for a number of years in the late 70s or 80s. But it was a five string guitar and he would open tune it.

Evan Troxel: it. Just for him. Yeah. I

Phil Read: listen to them play carefully.

the concert in, um, it's called Shine a Light. It was a documentary film. Martin Scorsese filmed it in the, um, uh, it's at the Beacon Theater in New York.

And if you listen to Keith playing, there's a lot of fumbling. Like there's a whole bunch of [01:05:00] other musicians playing at the same time. He's just doing fills and little pieces, but it's amazing. It's like orchestrated music. There's these little pieces of magic happening. I don't know that that, uh,

it's,

It's, it's, a completely recognizable sound once you hear it.

And it was, it was the product of restriction and function.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. That, that is the beauty of constraints in any situation, right? It's like you figure out how to operate within them, and then you break a rule here or there, right? Yeah? But they actually provide you with, I keep saying the word vector, right?

But that's what it

Phil Read: Oh, it's just like you're on it.

Evan Troxel: okay, now I can see where we're going because it's not just a wide open field of blank page.

Phil Read: Yeah. What's

Evan Troxel: What do we have to work

Phil Read: I only have one professor at architecture school that built this artificial restriction. This is a four hour task. This is an eight hour task.

Evan Troxel: You talked about him, I think, in, in one of our podcasts. Yeah.

Phil Read: And, uh, he's like, yeah, I don't

Evan Troxel: This is how much time you get to do

Phil Read: You get eight hours and, uh, if you come up [01:06:00] with two ideas in eight hours, fine.

One idea in eight hours. I want to see what you get by tomorrow morning. Give me four hours and then go do something else. And, um, I always felt a certain level of satisfaction of doing something well with a constraint, as opposed to just, oh, it doesn't matter, do anything.

Evan Troxel: or just keep Oh, you still have time left. Keep going. Even though you're, you feel done,

Phil Read: You feel burnt out.

Evan Troxel: feel out. Yeah.

Phil Read: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: yeah, there, there, there are definitely people who are wired.

If there's more time, we're not done. We can do more.

Phil Read: The glue's got time to dry. Keep gluing.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Phil Read: So it's, uh, yeah, I think the technologies are interesting, certainly in the ability to interact in a conversational way with an agent that will critique a design for a student, for a would be architectural student.

It will discuss ideas in a way that aren't emotionally, uh, threatening. Right? Because you're not in front of a jury of peers, your students are all there watching you [01:07:00] get reamed on a Monday morning. You're having conversations with, you know, with, uh, a tool that looks at a design and goes, Well, have you thought about this?

Or have you thought about that? Or certainly, from this persona, it's a wonderful design, but the other persona might say, Oh no, it's, it's too busy, what were you thinking?

Evan Troxel: So, so this idea of curiosity but also flexing that muscle and actually playing, like I'd, I'd like to frame it under the, Play right you play with these things so that you learn what works What doesn't work how it's changing over time if you don't flex that muscle if you don't flex any muscle it they atrophy they go

Phil Read: Well, you mentioned that some of these tools will respond to things on your screen.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, yeah Claude

Phil Read: And it will respond in architectural terms? I mean, could you have a, a model or a plan of a

Evan Troxel: I believe so. I, yeah, and so, so, so, yeah, so the, the company's Anthropic and their model is called Claude and they have different versions of Claude for different, you know, different structures and stuff, but one, one of the [01:08:00] modes of their app will, will look at your screen.

Phil Read: Yeah. I would look at a mode that does the thing that when you go, could I have another set of eyes? And they take out the trace and lay it over and start doing sketching.

But this mode

Evan Troxel: Well, this'll actually No,

Phil Read: have you thought about what if you move this over here and move that

Evan Troxel: It's looking at what you're doing on your screen. So, I think, I think the idea is like, it will actually act like an agent on your behalf at some point. Maybe it does that now. But it's like, I'm clicking this button. in this interface. It means this, right?

And it could walk you through things. It could be like a helper, but it could also potentially, I think, do things for you.

Phil Read: There's a lot of, I think there's a lot of empathy that occurs in good design where you're in that mode of sort of plan view, but you're, you know, analytically, but you're also trying to imagine how it will be experienced.

And, um, getting feedback in terms of the emotional quality of a design as well as does it satisfy the analytic needs of the design. [01:09:00] and in stress mode and time constraints of real life, just being able to have that other person there that are, that's always available just to ask a

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah.

Phil Read: I think it will take the stress away of doing work and then having to untangle it later and going, Oh, I spent all day yesterday on that. So I worked 16 hours and I have to roll it backwards as opposed to in the moment being

Evan Troxel: Well, there's that, but there's also how much you can actually compress time, and so you don't waste as much time having to redo something, right? Because, ideas, like, okay, so real time rendering, you know, you're connected with Enscape, I love the idea of, Making using it as a rendering as a decision making tool now, right?

That wasn't a thing back in the day and back in the day. It was an a

Phil Read: Oh, you push your button and wait.

Yeah. Yeah. It was a thing you did at the

Evan Troxel: And well, you better not screw it up because you don't want to have to do it again, right? And we learned how to fix things in Photoshop because it was way faster

Phil Read: Yeah. Instead of push the button and wait four

Evan Troxel: So so this idea of like moving that technology closer to the audience to the metal, right?

It's like, [01:10:00] I'm now using it to make decisions because of the visualization quality. I can actually, I can use it right as a tool throughout the process. And I think this is kind of the same thing, right? This is, this is another thing where we're using it as a tool along the way to help us.

Phil Read: the moment, right?

It's not the thing where you push the button at the end and render. It's the questions and interaction in the moment. Otherwise it's too disruptive. You have to, you have to do these big cycles where you go back and start over and go back and start over.

So that's where I'm kind of, yeah, there was so much, there's so much about AI this and AI that, and I was like, oh, it's getting overwhelmed with AI.

But, but recently finding these sort of conversational vectors, that's got me really interested in it, in, in the impact of, of not just in, uh, in business, but just in trivial things. Trivial things. It's faster to, it's faster to ask AI to give me a recipe for [01:11:00] fajitas or burritos than it is to try to find it online now.

Because when you search online, and I've started doing

Evan Troxel: Now, everything's a five star recipe, first of all. Like, you, you

Phil Read: through, you get the thing, and then you get the backstory of the

Evan Troxel: And finally, at the end, you get

Phil Read: and finally at the end you get the recipe, and then you get the instructions. But if you ask, chat

Evan Troxel: No nonsense.

Phil Read: It's like, Oh, you want to make fajitas? Here's your list of ingredients. Here's what you do. And I was like, okay, and, and these are options. If you want to do this, you might do that. And I'm like, okay, that's what I want with, then there's no advertisers. There's no noise. I'm not scrolling down four pages. Um,

Evan Troxel: That's a really interesting, uh, door, to, for me to get back into this part where, you know, this idea of, of, Using or, or, or leveraging curiosity of your employees to play with these tools and create fluency with them so that that leverage can be amplified, right? Like if you, if you have zero fluency with these, [01:12:00] then someday you're going to say, Oh, you know, we should be using these tools, right?

They've finally proven themselves. Now, okay, we're at the laggard end of the adoption curve. We're going to now. Jump in on this, right? And, and you're late. You're super late. You can't leverage it as much. Now you're playing catch up. And so with your, your clients, with people that you're talking to out there, are you seeing this kind of attitude of leverage and playfulness and fluency, or is it very much stand back and watch?

Phil Read: No, some of it's, uh, It's still a little transactional.

It's very, you know, the ideation that creates an image that sort of convinces a

Evan Troxel: customer. We use this tool

Phil Read: Yeah, so I was talking with an architect, and I think it was at AU, and they're winning work by doing simple sketches or massing models of lobby atrium spaces, and then they're asking, uh, I think it's mid journey to [01:13:00] They're describing a text prompt and then in the style of a particular well known

Evan Troxel: And then using

Phil Read: and they're using that to generate an image and then they're using those images to win work and then they execute the work.

But they're, they're naming, they're naming other firms by name, um, which might, I don't know, it might, you know, Upset some people, but to me it's no different than going to the library and pulling out the latest architectural record or some other magazine and going, Oh, I like that work, that's by

Evan Troxel: Putting a little tab on that

Phil Read: Yeah, yeah, and just go, it's that firm, because if

Evan Troxel: this is what Pinterest was for everybody, right? Like, it's just, just create all these

Phil Read: So it's part of their text

Evan Troxel: stairs and rails

Phil Read: transactional, I think, in that way of going, here's the massing model, and we want it in the style of this, and you get an image. But the idea, if you're doing lunch and learns on AI, and you have young staff, asking people, what are you using AI firm for?

Let's go around the table at the Lunch and Learn and talk about what you're using. AI firm, but has nothing to do directly [01:14:00] with

Evan Troxel: no one's gonna get in trouble here.

Phil Read: Right, right, right, right.

Evan Troxel: just an open conversation

Phil Read: and it might not be anything to do with images, but the idea of someone saying, Oh, I'm using it, I'm using AI to have conversations that are in lieu of a psychologist, or I'm having a discussion in lieu of, of, uh, trying to understand a difficult relationship with a coworker or roommate, all of these kinds of human conflicts. You know, imagine a roommate that just doesn't keep the apartment clean Right. To your standard. It's like, oh, I use chat GT Plus to

Evan Troxel: formulate that conversation.

Phil Read: Yeah. Right, right. Because

Evan Troxel: Give me some

Phil Read: art artists may not be, we're, we're kind of a, we're kind of conflict averse.

Yeah, we don't like chasing money. We don't like chasing arguments. That's why we have somebody else do that. No, I don't like selling. So now you have that conversation with an agent to help you frame a discussion around why it's important for me that you do your [01:15:00] dishes and do your part to keep the apartment clean.

Like just go around the room and find out what young people are using, you know, uh, I don't know, young people, but the people that are younger in the firm, What are they using these tools to do that you might not expect? And I think you'll come up with an idea that will fold itself into something business related to solve a problem. But it's, um, it's, it's not, I wouldn't, I wouldn't just say, okay, how are we going to use this to build better buildings? Right. You might want to take a bigger step back and look at the big

Evan Troxel: That's a different conversation. That's like, here are the, here's the business goals. Once you've defined those, you can figure out which technology it's probably, it may be AI, it may not be, right? Plugs into solving that business goal, right? That could be any number of tools to do that. You're talking about approaching it from more of a grassroots effort, which, Hey,

Phil Read: we, what do we, what obscure things are you using this for?

Evan Troxel: that'll just spark ideas, right?

Phil Read: Yeah, I think you take a bigger picture.

You [01:16:00] don't just step in going, How are we going to use this for rendering? It's kind of, that's so transactional. You can do much bigger things with it. And then you might get to rendering as well.

Evan Troxel: Well, I want to use this now as a segue to transition into the upcoming round table discussions that you're gonna be

Phil Read: End of April.

Evan Troxel: at the end of April of

Phil Read: So this will be the second year. Um, and the, we have the, we have the fall leadership retreat, which is more leadership, self-leadership, other leadership, leadership of others. And then the spring event is more technology focused. So this will be the second year. And our approach is that. Good answers are not transactional. They come from discussions. And we, I, we add both Adam and I've experienced watching really good presenters at conferences present something, and then you get them after the conference, you go, okay, so look, here's the thing on my

Evan Troxel: Here,

Phil Read: How would you do it?

Evan Troxel: add my me

Phil Read: Yeah. How would you, how would you do it for this kind of thing?

And they go, oh yeah, that won't work. Yeah. You probably want to do it this other way. So we thought, [01:17:00] you know what, we should just have the conversations after the presentation. So, like, Carl Storms did a presentation last year that was based on his, uh, self interest in the, he did a hundred days of AI, and we talked, we went around the table, what other people were using AI for, in some cases, trivial kind of things.

I learned things that never realized that even could exist.

Evan Troxel: See, this is, this is exactly the conversation we just had about finding out what young people are doing with AI, like, flexing that muscle. And so Carl did that for a hundred days.

Kevin Kelly, you know, one of the internet, early internet pioneers, mid journey, every single day would Just to play with it, just to figure out what it could do to find out what worked, find out what different didn't work. And that, that to me is really about like kind of flexing this muscle and just playing with it.

Like there's no, there's nothing on the line here, right?

Phil Read: No, and it's not, and we're all high performing technologists, so we're not really concerned about someone [01:18:00] coming up with an idea and then shooting it full of arrows, well that's not going to work.

What we really want is, this is a hard problem, and it's costing me stress and time and money. How are you guys approaching this, because they're not presentations, they're, you know, Discussions and we just go around the table and then eventually the, you know, the discussions go back and forth and from different angles and talk about a number of, of business related topics.

Harlan Brum, who's a product manager for Revit, led a discussion or facilitated a discussion on the future of documentation and we all realize it's a really hard problem. You just can't, and maybe what we're also trying to do is automate.

an

inefficient process, and maybe that's not the best thing to do.

So to the, one of the submissions this year, and I expect he's going to come along, is a guy named Scott Brown, who's the National BIM Manager for BECC. And BECC is a design build firm. And Scott showed me a documentation method at Autodesk University. In [01:19:00] a trivial way, we were just at dinner and he opened his iPad like, Hey, Scott, what's interesting.

He's like, well, I'm working on this thing. You want to see this thing? And I dreamt about the conversation we had at dinner that night. And I was going, well, Scott, how would you do this? And what about that? And we were still having the conversation. So he must've really got into my head a bit. And I said, Scott, this is profound.

I think you should present this one evening at the round table event and just show a room of 30 or 40 technologists. This is how I'm doing documentation. And we have, and by we, I mean, Beck, Beck has to be accountable from the design through the implementation of the construction. And he's like, Oh yeah, I'll do that.

Paint a target on his chest and present it in front of a bunch of high performing technology

Evan Troxel: But, but what's so cool about these events is like, you can totally be safe and vulnerable and, and like it really isn't a target, right?

It's like, if it was at AU and you were presenting that, it absolutely, it's just, it's a different, it's a different

Phil Read: Yeah at light at [01:20:00] Autodesk University is a very kind of um, It's a very lecture environment where hold your questions to the end or maybe ask questions as you go along Where I

Evan Troxel: But there's also a spotlight and a stage and a screen and a PowerPoint and a video.

Phil Read: There's a uh, there's a power

Evan Troxel: stakes. Right? Yeah.

Phil Read: Um, there's an adult child kind of relationship. I am the speaker and you are the listener. Um, and so you don't want to ask questions that might put the speaker on the spot. What Scott showed me was a sit back, drop my napkin, gobsmacked moment going, Oh my gosh, I can't believe that works.

And it's, and, and without, I don't want to give it away because I want Scott to really present this, but it is a return to first practices using new technology. And, um, I would say it orders, orders of magnitude simplifies the instruction, the process of creating instructions to build buildings

Evan Troxel: Interesting. and,

they, these, these are not recorded and they're not shared afterward. [01:21:00] Like, you, you have

Phil Read: No, you got to be there. Yeah, and we think that's important. We've had people ask, oh, will these be recorded? Can I download it later? And I think that's just. It's not worth the investment. That's just so transactional. You really want to be there to interact and to understand at the moment. And, uh, I think if Scott goes forward with this and opens it up and shows people what he's doing, he's going to end up creating a template that people will be able to use to document their projects.

And this is a, in Revit terms, you know, the Warb template, like project template.

I think this template will scale To a residence all the way up to the largest, most complex projects in the world.

Evan Troxel: world. Wow.

Phil Read: And, um,

it's, it enormously simplifies the documentation process. And because I think it's part of the artifact is because, uh, the reason this has evolved is because Beck is accountable from the design through the construction.

So he's trying to simplify the communication process as well. Um, so I think what we've used technology for was to create a more [01:22:00] efficient way of making

drawings. which has resulted in this incredibly complex method of naming and enumerating sheets and where the sheets go in the set and, you know, hundreds and hundreds of sheets of drawings for not complex buildings, but it's an artifact of how drawings have evolved.

And Scott's just gone right back to

Evan Troxel: with politics, with country, like there's, there's so much else kind of muddying that right. Create, making it what it's become.

Phil Read: Yeah, so what he did, it just, it just so surprised me and even the name, the, the name or the metaphor he's come up for this process is even beautiful as well.

So yeah, so good on you, Scott.

Yeah, he's a, he's a curious guy. So that's what, so that's what we'll do. We'll have the same kind of, you went to the, uh, leadership retreat, so you'll know it'll be the same, uh, we intend to have the same kind of process where people arrive Sunday, try to start to detach, get in the moment of talking, catching up with people, um, and [01:23:00] then Monday will be the off site event, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Roundtable to best practice discussions 9 a. m. 1030 a. m. 1 p. m. from 2 30 until 5 o'clock afternoons open So go down to the lake learn how to e foil We'll have the ski boats out go for a paddle board and or talk just talk with you know Fellow peers ask questions come up end up having a discussion about something You didn't think you were gonna have a discussion about that turns out to be really important and then we'll probably have an evening you So dinner is usually six and then seven o'clock, kind of just have a, uh, uh, um, it's all informal, but have an informal discussion about an idea.

And that's where I would like Scott to present this, um, because I think it's going to take a longer discussion. We don't want to be constrained by, okay, this is the

Evan Troxel: We gotta do this next thing. 10 38. Yeah. No, it's

Phil Read: like, wow, okay, let's talk about

Evan Troxel: where this goes.

Phil Read: Yeah, okay, now we're going to go out to the campfire [01:24:00] out by the lake and we'll keep talking about it, you know, after he's, so we don't have PowerPoint presentations, but I think for this we might end up having a projector and a screen

Evan Troxel: so you can

Phil Read: TV and a, you

Evan Troxel: something to look at.

Phil Read: TV and a screen and Scott's going to say, it's what I've been thinking about.

So, the, um, the other thing about the event is, We, we, I don't know if Adam and I have been too clever about this, but we got excited about the idea of theming the event, and we're looking for submissions of, uh, facilitated discussions around the theme of better storytelling through technology. But I don't know if that's And Adam and I are going to talk about it again this week.

Have we constrained it too much or, or, or put a form around it that people go, Oh, I don't know if my idea about this topic or discussion is really about better storytelling, maybe I shouldn't submit it. So maybe we need to pull back from that and go, no, no, no. If you're, if you have, something that you want to discuss with a room of other, you know, best practice leaders and people who think [01:25:00] deeply about the technology and how it's implemented about any topic.

That is important. Curiosity. It. It's curiosity. Then you should submit that topic.

Evan Troxel: I mean, the thing about this audience, I think, is that they are the people who tinker.

Right? We, we, we tinker with stuff, because we build tools, we, we design things, like, you, you chase your curiosities, you know, you, in the 90s it was like everybody learned how to code a website by hand, right, because, and there was no, you couldn't do a course back then, it was like,

Phil Read: You just had to figure it

Evan Troxel: you view source, and you'd copy and paste, and you would figure it out, right?

And, but, but, there's new versions of that, like what, what you're saying Scott's doing, right? It was like, right. Something led to something else, and it led him down this path, and, and, I'm sure he never saw that coming, but everybody's got something, everybody has that story, and the, and it's like, what's, what's the current version of that story for you?

Do you think a group of 20 to 40 people [01:26:00] would

the right audience for you to throw it out there and then see what comes back like To me it is it is it is not transactional. It is not it's not that one way Here's my idea take forth and like go forth and prosper. It's not that it's like oh, well, what about this?

Oh, have you thought about it like this and you're gonna get it Out of it

Phil Read: Oh, there'll be more

Evan Troxel: even put into it, right? And, and so there's, so, so yeah, like labeling it under the idea of storytelling. People may not think that they have a good enough story, but everybody definitely has

Phil Read: Like if you say, if we said better communication through technology, because sometimes as technologists we get excited about the artifact of the technology and really what is the implication of it or how, how do you use it well? You can use technology to do lazy things, right? but what I. Well, I think Scott has done, and I could even be in my own bubble right now, because I mean it was, I don't, I tend not to get surprised a lot.

I think I got surprised at Revit, I got surprised at SketchUp, I got surprised at Enscape, um, [01:27:00] I got surprised at cars that drive themselves, right? That's, and that's over a 20 year period, like four or five things surprised me, technology wise. When I saw what Scott was working on, I was really, I'm like, this is beautiful.

And I, and I really want him to, to show this to a group of 30, 40 people and just have them go, Oh my gosh, like, could we do this? Could we do that? And if, and that could be a spark that I think does profoundly improve the process of creating instructions to build buildings.

Evan Troxel: Cool.

Phil Read: Yeah, he's, he's a great guy.

Yeah. So if anyone's out there, you know, that the topic is better storytelling through technology, or that's a theme. Yeah, if we've been too clever about that, just ignore it, and just propose a really great discussion,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Phil Read: something that's, uh, led by your curiosity.

Evan Troxel: And what, what's the, so, so you, I mean there's a date coming up, but what are the, what, how does it work with proposing these?

Phil Read: I think, you know, well, okay, so we have to have a, you have to have a date, [01:28:00] a deadline somewhere, so we're looking around the 27th of December is the deadline for submissions, and then registration will start the first week of January. You know, there's only over three days. It's nine to 12 discussion sessions.

So we can go through those pretty quickly. We don't have to create a big committee. Um, it'll be Adam, me, and maybe a couple of others just go through them and discuss them and pick, pick them. And, uh, and then open up registration probably first week of January. And then the event I believe is the 27th of April through the 2nd of May, Sunday to Friday.

Yeah. That gets everybody on site for the offsite. Monday. Otherwise, you can't show up Monday. We're already gone.

Evan Troxel: To me,

this is an event where, like, it really is worth investing in yourself in. Even if you can't get corporate to pay for it, or, I don't know. You know, like, coming away from this. This is the best event in AEC that I've [01:29:00] ever attended. And so I'm not just saying that cause I'm sitting here with you in Denver airport face to face.

It really is. I mean, it was super, super impactful. And so I feel like, like it's worth submitting an idea, but it's also worth just attending.

Phil Read: In practical terms, the reason we announced this top, the call for submission topics or session topics in, after Autodesk University, is because the dust has finally settled for people having, you know, they've got to get to AU.

And it also gives people I'll give credit to Nick Kramer. He said, you need to tell people how much this is going to cost and when it's going to be, uh, in the third quarter or fourth quarter of, I'm like, why? He goes, well, we have to ask for budget. And it never occurred to me, you know, my own business owner and Adam and I have a lot of leeway with what we do.

Not everybody gets to do that. So they have to ask for budget and planning before the end of the year. Don't surprise them in January or February and say, Oh, we're having this event. You should come. Cause then. They've got to ask for a budget they didn't ask for, and it [01:30:00] looks like they don't know how to plan their time and money.

So that's why we put it out this fall. Um, and actually we've announced the dates for both events, the spring events, the end of April, and the fall event, the leadership retreat, will be the end of October. We're going to get out of the hurricane path for a change and stop doing it at the end of

Evan Troxel: Cause it is in Florida.

Phil Read: Yeah, and if you look at the bell curve of when hurricanes rough weather happens in Florida, it's all right at the second half of September

Evan Troxel: And people who don't know hurricane weather like me, or, you know, others from Canada and, you know, the West coast,

Phil Read: this year one the week the week before and the week after the event we had Uh, Hurricanes pass. We didn't get impacted, but it was just like, okay, it messes with travel, and I thought, this

Evan Troxel: there was a lot of worry about it.

Phil Read: Oh yeah, it creates

Evan Troxel: Should I even go? Because,

Phil Read: Yep, yep. No, we were going to go on the Chautauqua Springs, and it turned out that the, uh, the river Ended up full of trees.

And so we ended up going to Silver Springs and that was the Thursday or the Wednesday before the [01:31:00] event, that river is still not clear. So we, yeah, months later, they're having to pull trees out of it. So we'll do that event at the end of April or sorry, at the end of October for the fall event and stay out of the storm,

The

peak of the bell curve.

Evan Troxel: But it's an amazing location. Uh, it's really quiet. You actually can unplug the wifi is not great,

Phil Read: It's, it's good

Evan Troxel: is fine, which is actually I think a bonus because then you're less distracted and you're more grounded, I think, in the people and in the place of the event.

So all of that I think adds up to

Phil Read: We haven't figured out how to make this.

If we should scale it, like, I don't think more than the number of people that fit on one motor coach should ever attend because we don't want the artifact of, of having to print lanyards and having to, like, we don't have exhibitors, we don't have lanyards, we don't have sponsors. I don't want to turn into the event location and say, brought to you by XYZ software company.[01:32:00]

Just like the moment you get there, you're there. It's everything is authentic. So from the standpoint of it scaling as a, money making hand, you know, hand over fist money making venture, I don't think we aspire to that or we've even figured that out. We, we would like to, I, I would like to try to take this concept of technical round table, And six months later, Leadership Roundtable, and go to the other hemisphere, like try to do Australia or New Zealand or somewhere else, but again, no more than 50

Evan Troxel: But people from the Southern Hemisphere come to this event

Phil Read: event, too.

Evan Troxel: it's a stretch, but they do it.

Phil Read: a stretch. It is. No, Carrie, uh, Carrie Thompson attended. Right. Uh, yeah, Callum Freeman from, uh, Assemble in New Zealand. attended. And they're both on, they're like, Hey, we should do this in New Zealand or Australia. And like, yeah, we have to find a place.

But we have an interesting Venn diagram at the camp that we go to because we have a chef, private chef. We have a commercial kitchen. He gets to run the kitchen for the week. So we have, I think meals are very important. Conversations that [01:33:00] happen around meals are important. Chef Charles has just a joyful attitude to what he does.

And so having a legitimate French chef,

Evan Troxel: Think about the food that you're consuming and who it was made by at this versus a production

Phil Read: Yeah, you're not standing in a line getting your food. He brings it out. It's all, it's all set, like a family, like here's your plates of platters of food and a couple of

Evan Troxel: explains it all. Yep.

Phil Read: So that kind of attention to detail and, um, and it's a camp. So the accommodations are I would say austere. They're not uncomfortable, but it's either like a motel style room or a cabin style room where it's, you know, there's no campers. It's just you're in the counselor's accommodation. Questions

Evan Troxel: that came up from, so some people heard that I went, I think I was at AU, and they're like, you went to that, right? And I said, yeah. And they said, is it true that you can bring your family?

Phil Read: Oh,

Evan Troxel: Because they heard that on the [01:34:00] podcast and they said, is that true? Like, like, like

Phil Read: Could you really do

Evan Troxel: were just making that up.

So, so talk about that

Phil Read: Yeah, so the idea is that, um, we wanted to have counselor led activities for, you know, for kids during the day, and then in the afternoons everybody can get together.

Um, Sylvia, who's a wonderful technologist around scanning, BIM scanning services, modeling services of historic buildings. Um, Mia came, and I think Mia's seven. Very precocious, self motivated, and she was great the whole week. And it worked. So she's already, she was a little bit nervous about attending at first, like she was going to be the only kid.

She's already said, Dad, I want to go back next year. And, um, so we're trying to do it in such a way where, yeah, people bring their kids, they're doing nature things during the day. We don't, we just,

Evan Troxel: they don't have to sit in the conference

Phil Read: no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Me as an edge condition, still sit in a conference room and listen to discussions and, and draw on color all [01:35:00] week.

And, uh, but no, it should be like, yeah, kids want to go off. And, and, and the things they do is like teach kids to, uh, build fires or build forts or the kinds of stuff that I used to do growing up in Florida. Yeah, you go feral and you go build a fort in the woods. So the idea is that they councilor led activities during the day for kids.

And it's just a nominal cost for the meals. It's not, you know, much more at all. yeah.

Evan Troxel: opportunities for, like, off site, you know, things that can happen for, for, depending on who shows up.

Phil Read: yeah. If, if, if you had. partners show up and they want to go off. There's, there's an enormity of interesting historic and beautiful things in Florida to do. Go off to St. Augustine for the day and go shopping or old historic village. But, um, yeah, it's legitimately like we had, uh, someone asking about driving.

They wanted to bring the whole family. I think it was like three kids, mom and dad and like, yeah, go. Mom and dad are both architects and they just wanted to know that they could Legitimately bring the family. Yeah. We just haven't been, it's just that [01:36:00] kind of new thing where no one's really done it because it's not been done. I don't know that people bring their families to au, I don't even think you can get into the conference area at au under a certain age. You have to be like 18 or older. Uh, we had families that built,

because it was just kind of a, easy, relaxed atmosphere and people would bring their families and, but yeah, definitely at Lake Swan, uh, you could bring families and the kids could go on a paddleboard, do councilor led activities, and then

Evan Troxel: on the inner tube on behind the boat. Go, go down the water slide. Yeah. There's a

Phil Read: wrap up video that Peter did shows Sylvia and Mia on the, uh, getting pulled around on the big inflatable thing.

Yeah, yeah, so it's meant to be time to definitely think hard, but also relax, try to disconnect a little bit. It's an investment in, it should be an investment in future revenue, um, but I think the best way to get there is by having conversations, not by sitting in a room and just being fed presentations all the time in a, in a transactional way.

And

Evan Troxel: I think you

Phil Read: things And you can have both, I'm not saying the other one, [01:37:00] like the Autodesk University kind of, kind of approach, where you do have, you know You know, sort of audience and presenter kind of format that's legitimate.

Evan Troxel: This is very participatory and, and contributory, right? And in the, just the natural way that it works. And to me, like, again, just reinforcing It was impactful.

It was professionally impactful. It was personally impactful. I built relationships with people who I'd never met before there. There's a network because it's intentionally small that gets built up. And I can see this being kind of a homecoming event that happens, but, but there's room for new people. I mean, it's, it's not exclusive.

And so, yeah. Uh,

Phil Read: but it's, I think, I think authentic. You know, having the offsite on Monday helps people to de posture a bit

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Phil Read: and kind of just

Evan Troxel: Get to know each other.

Phil Read: and have conversations that aren't

Evan Troxel: ease into it. It's lovely. We

Phil Read: thought about doing it at the end, like it as a wrap up event. Oh, okay. We've all done this thing for the week now let's do [01:38:00] an offsite, and I think it was Henry. Uh, give him credit with this idea of de posturing and doing it at the beginning to help people kind of relax and feel more, uh, open and feel authentic and then go into the event.

And that's proved itself out a better, better structure.

Evan Troxel: All right. Well, Phil, I will endeavor to get this episode out before your deadline.

Phil Read: 27th of December. Look, I think the main thing is people, people now, if they have to ask for budget to do it and what do they want to attend and what do they want to events do they want to contribute to next year?

Now, at least it could be, you know, they, they have, uh, they have advanced.

which we, to our detriment, we haven't done that in the past. We should have. So now we're letting people know in, yeah, we're letting people know in quarter four instead of quarter one.

Evan Troxel: Cool. Yeah.

Phil Read: Thanks, Evan.

Evan Troxel: Well, it's gonna be fun and uh, I wish you the best 'cause I won't be able to attend that one, but I'm

Phil Read: The spring event, you can't, you've got obligations, but maybe in the fall, [01:39:00] get you back on the E Foil? Yeah.

That's Evan doing the, uh, the lasso. Was that you on, in the, in the, uh, wrap up video?

And you'd never done that before? No. And you got up? Yeah. Oh, great. Thanks, Evan. All right.

Evan Troxel: right. Talk to you next time.