Okay, Ne-Shamot and Ne-Shamim. Look it up. Today we are going to discuss a new approach to how narcissism is formed and why narcissists are the way they are. Infuriating! My name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignance of Love, Narcissism Revisited. I form a visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of C-UPS. And we'll start with your favorite part, which is the bullet points, the bullet points summary. And then feel free to break my heart and sign off and leave me all alone with the camera. Otherwise, those of you who choose to stay to the very end, bitter end, shall I say, are going to be exposed to Freud's thinking, language theorists, neuroscientists, and a host of other titillating, exciting, amazing people. Let's start as promised with the bullet points. I suggest in this video that the flaw in spatial processing, the ability to process space and language processing, the ability to process language. I suggest that these two flaws are responsible for the emergence of narcissistic defenses, including the false self and ultimately narcissistic personality disorder or pathological narcissism, including narcissistic style. Now why would a baby, an infant, experience these dual flaws? The flaw in processing space, the flaw in processing language, because of trauma and abuse. The trauma and abuse force the child to hide, to minimize itself, in short, to withdraw from the world, from reality, thereby ignoring or denying or repressing the dimensions of reality, the most evident of which, the most ubiquitous of which is space. Similarly, and training by abusive parents, brainwashing, shall we say, being entrained causes the child to misidentify language with negative affectivity and also to be inhibited in processing language. I can put it otherwise. The abusive parents language takes over and does not allow the child to develop his or her own linguistic capabilities, language comprehension, and ultimately language usage. So the abused and traumatized child withdraws from the world and loses access to space, to space and spatial processing and is exposed to the misuse of language, the egregious misuse of language in order to induce in the child fear, trauma, negative effects, negative emotions such as anger and so on and so forth. So the child kind of renounces language and takes on the parents language, a process known as identification, interjection, incorporation. Now, these two flaws which are induced in the child by the dead mother or the dead parent, the dead mother, the parent parental figure who is a primary caregiver but is absent, depressive, hateful, selfish, instrumentalizing, parentifying, pedestalizing, idolizing, pampering, smothering, etc. All these are forms of abuse. This kind of parent induces the dual flaws, the twin flaws that are described. Now, when you're not integrated with reality, when you have no conception of space, you cannot tell the external from the internal. Space is about the external, obviously, you are embedded in space. So space is not you, space is outside to you. It's an outside phenomenon. So these children whose spatial processing capacity has been hampered or obstructed, these children are unable to tell external from internal and this is a great definition of psychosis and of narcissism. The psychotic confuses his internal world with the external. He believes that his internal world is external. The narcissist confuses the external world with the internal. He believes, erroneously, that the external world is actually happening inside his mind, inside his head. He internalizes external objects and continues to interact with the interjected representations of these external objects. Hyper reflexivity both ways. So this is the first consequence of inability to process space. Second consequence, impaired ability to form memories. In the absence of space or the capacity to somehow relate to space and in the absence of language or functioning language. Of course, we cannot form memories. This is grounded in neuroscience. The part of the brain that processes memories, the hippocampus is also responsible for spatial orientation, spatial perception and functioning in space. So this is amazing. Memory and space in the human brain are one and the same. So this kind of trial is unable to form memories. He has an impaired ability to form memories. In short, he dissociates the main relational mode, the main way the child interacts with his own life, his own autobiography. He dissociates. He cuts them off. He represses them. He denies them. He buries them. And he has no access to these memories, which forces him later on in life to confabulate the child attempts to hide the memory gaps, the lost time. The child does this by confabulating, inventing narratives, inventing, coming up, conjuring stories that are plausible, probable, likely. And then affording these stories and narratives with truth value, insisting that the confabulation is true. Although technically, of course, it's a lie. The third impact, the third outcome of abusive traumatic childhoods is impaired reality testing. If you are not able to process space, if you are not able to use language properly, if language is associated with negative emotions, if space is associated with fear and the need to hide and therefore the need to renounce reality, if you have impaired reality testing, if you can't form memories and so on and so forth, if you leave a lie, you have a false self, you confabulate, then of course you can't have a grasp on reality. You have impaired reality testing. And then depending on the path of etiology, depending on the path that you take as a child, you begin to use other people for reality testing and the processing of reality. Other people become the gauges of reality and this is known as external, this is part of external regulation. Next, another outcome of the devastation wrought on the child by abuse and trauma is grandiose magical thinking. The child develops magical defenses against an environment which is perceived as arbitrary, cruel, capricious, threatening, terrifying and so on and so forth. Magic and primitive religions were the reactions of humanity to similar environments when we didn't have science. So the child becomes a magician, he adopts magic as a defense, magical thinking and magical thinking survives into adulthood, referential ideation, the belief of everyone is talking about you, everyone is mocking you, that's magical thinking. Paranoia is magical thinking. You are at the center of malign, malicious, malevolent conspiracies against you. So you're important, you are grandiose, but at the same time this is magical thinking. Megalomania, the belief that everything that's happening is happening because of you and that you have the capacity to induce change in the external environment just by thinking about something. Just by imagining something and of course just by wishing something very hard. Now, megalomania, megalomenical magical thinking is at the heart of many of the modern day phenomena of business coaching, dating coaching and so on and so forth.   This is of course magical thinking. Finally, this erotomanic delusions is to believe that other people are in love with you, attracted to you. Even if they are not aware of this, they are in love with you, they are attracted to you. And so the magical thinking in this case is that everything the other person does is a form of signalling and that actually the other person unconsciously sometimes is just attempting to be close to you because you are the center of love, your eros rave fight. So this is grandiose magical thinking, another outcome. The next outcome is identity diffusion and disturbance. Of course abuse and trauma, induce and inability to process space, inability to process language, inability to form memories, inability to gauge reality, grandiose magical thinking and without memories and without emotions attendant on memories. There's no identity, there's no core identity and we have something that Ericsson called identity diffusion and today we call identity disturbance. It fits well with my theory of self-states founded on Philip Bromberg's work, where actually in the case of borderline and narcissism, the mechanism for alternating between self-states is broken and the self-states alternate autonomously triggered by cues from the environment like a kaleidoscope gun or eye or kaleidoscope gun bed. So this is identity diffusion and disturbance and finally arrested development, infantilism, the inability to become an adult. Of course there's no separation in individuation from an abusive parent, a dead mother. There's no separation in individuation, therefore there's no individual and there is an inability to perceive the separateness of other people, boundaries for example. There's no experience of separateness, that's why narcissists borderline psychotics, paranoics to Ericsson, that's why they can't tell the difference between themselves and the world. There's no out there and in here, there's no external and internal as I said before. So this kind of person remains emotionally stuck in very early childhood, let's say very early, I mean very early, like two years old, three years old, something like that. So we have infantilism. Now, these were the bullet points, you're free to go, dismissed, report to duty tomorrow and those of you who are of masochistic band or have nothing better to do on a Wednesday morning, here I am with filling in some of the details of what I just said. Let's start with a, with Zygmunt Freud. Zygmunt Freud coined the term, who else, I mean I, there's nothing in human, in the human mind or human psychology that Zygmunt Freud didn't have something to say or was not somehow involved in. Amazing genius, amazing genius discarded idiotically by the new establishment in academic psychology, which plays an establishment which places emphasis on statistics because they are grandiose and they want to appear to be scientists.  Anyhow, coming back to Zygmunt Freud, forget my rant. Zygmunt Freud was the one who coined the term infant amnesia. At the time, he explained it as a form of repression. The brain, said Zygmunt Freud, was hiding the desires and emotions of infancy from the adult, from the adult psyche. And only psychotherapy would allow access to these repressed memories and emotions and desires and urges and drives and so on and so forth. So this was infant amnesia. And I'm quoting, allow me to quote Freud. He said to, it has not occurred to us to feel any astonishment at the fact of this amnesia, though we might have had good grounds for doing so. He wrote it in 1910. For we learn from other people that during these years, of which at a later date we retain nothing but a few unintelligible and fragmentary recollections. During this period, we reacted as children in a lively manner to impressions. We were capable of expressing pain and joy in human fashion. We gave evidence of love, jealousy and other passionate feelings by which we were strongly moved at a time. And even we gave utterance to remarks which were regarded by adults as good evidence of our possessing insight and the beginnings of a capacity for judgment. And yet we remembered none of this. And of all these, we, when we are grown up, have no knowledge on our own. We forget all of this. We deleted, erased all of this. First few years of life, three, four. Why should our memory asks Freud? Why should our memory lag so far behind the other activities of our minds? Freud conceived of memory as a permanent storage system that then acts a lasting influence over behavior in adulthood, in adulthood. And he said, it doesn't matter if the memory is conscious or unconscious. It's there. It has an energy of its own. And it uses this energy to influence behavioral choices and other things like emotions and so on and so forth in adulthood. But Freud, of course, was writing in 1910. There has been some progress since then in our understanding of both the brain, neuroscience and psychology. And what Freud didn't know is that this period of infant amnesia, usually until age two, but it could go up to age three. This period of infant amnesia and then childhood amnesia, by the way, there's something called childhood amnesia which lasts until age six, where we have only filtered memories, extremely specific and extremely few memories. Now, till age two, we have no memory. No one remembers anything that happened before age two. And if they claim to remember something that happened before age two years, they were probably told about it and forgot that they were told about it. So there's infant amnesia followed by childhood amnesia until age six. So Freud didn't know that this is common not only among humans, but among all mammals. Now that's interesting because we tend to connect memory, identity and so on and so forth to upbringing, to the environment, to parental figures, to abuse, to trauma, to good parenting, good enough mother and so on and so forth. But it seems that amnesia to some extent is biological. There is some biological reason for it, perhaps. Brain structures are not sufficiently evolved, but it's a fact that even mammals have infant and childhood amnesia. All altricial species, these are species who raised their young, including rats, including monkeys, experience a period of amnesia. And then it seems that there is some kind of evolutionary necessity for this amnesiac dissociative developmental period. I am not disputing this. I am not saying that abusive, traumatizing, dead parents induce infant amnesia. That's not what I'm saying. Infant amnesia is independent. Even if you have the best parents in the world, you would still not remember anything prior to age two and very little prior to age six. But what I am saying is that traumatizing abusive parents fixate infant amnesia, make it impossible for the child to exit the period of infant amnesia and to begin to develop memories and identity founded on memories. Now this corresponds perfectly with separation individuation. Separation individuation takes place between 18 months and 36 months of life. It seems that abusive, traumatizing, instrumentalizing, parentifying parents do not allow the child to separate and therefore the child cannot become an individual and cannot transition from infant amnesia to childhood amnesia and then to memory. This kind of parenting somehow damages the circuitry, the ability to develop memories and to recall them, the recall ability. And we are finding out that this is done, this is mediated, this damage is mediated via some kind of obstruction to spatial processing capacities, the ability to process space and language processing capacities. And all these are linked to later life effects in adolescence and adulthood, which I mentioned in the bullet points. Okay, time has passed, Freud has died, like the best of us, and between the 1970s and the late 1990s there was another school. And they suggested that infant amnesia was a child's, was owing to a child's lack of language. They said that early memories become inaccessible because babies transition from nonverbal to verbal communication. So early memories are nonverbal. When language becomes the main mediator between the child and the environment, the world, and the child and itself, the emerging self, the constellated integrated self. So language is a bridge, it's a bridge between the child and his newly emerging nascent self, and it's a bridge between the child and the universe and reality. And this new bridge, or if you wish, the glue that holds everything together, if this new bridge, when this new bridge emerges, it eradicates, it buries, represses, destroys, whatever you wish to call it, nonverbal, nonverbal memories, because there's no way to access them. Language monopolizes access. The only way to access our memories, our identity, our emotions, yes, our emotions too, our cognitions, the environment, reality, other people, object relations, the only way is language. So if your memories at age one are nonverbal, they're dead, they're gone, because language is a monopoly, it doesn't allow any other forms of communication. Now of course, people who have mystical experiences, religious experiences, they claim to have gained access to various aspects of reality and of themselves via non-language means. That is wrong, and we'll deal with it perhaps in another video, that is absolutely wrong. There is no other way except language, and anything that preceded language is dead and gone, that's a theory. Okay, so around the age of 18 months, there is an explosion of language in infants, which is a precondition for separating from mommy, separation, and then becoming an individual, and shortly thereafter infant amnesia dissipates and disappears. Nora Nukon, the founder of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center Temple University, said the following. They believed that the advent of memories has to do with both language acquisition and is then tied up with cultural norms about the importance of remembering unique events. These are obviously not unimportant. We speak, we live in social groups. But that idea wasn't going to be enough. It wasn't going to be the only explanation. Language was needed. But how to explain animal species that never developed language and do seem to remember events in their lives? There here neuroscience has a contribution. It's a concept of space. It seems that all of us, even the most lowly forms of life, we have a conception of space. We somehow relate to space. And space is a language. Any physicist would tell you. Any physicist would tell you. Space and time are language elements. So even mammals who don't use English or Arabic or Hebrew, what did I just say? Okay, even mammals who don't use language, they use language. It's a very primitive language, rudimentary language. It's a language of space. And so the human brain uses the same neural circuits for navigating space and episodic memory. That's a fact. So Kate Jeffery is a neuroscientist. She works in university college in London. And she published an article, an intriguing article, in current biology. It's an academic job. And she wrote, why would nature have used the same structure for both space and memory, which seems so different? An intriguing possibility is that the cognitive map provides, in a manner of speaking, the stage upon which the drama of recollected life events is played out. By this account it serves as the mind's eye, not only for remembering spaces, but also the events that happened there in that space. And even according to recent human neuroimaging evidence, imagination itself. Now I recommend that you read the book. There's a book called The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World. It was written by M.R. O'Connor. Don't ask me what is M.R., published by St. Martin's Press in 2019. And it deals with many of these issues at length, if you want to go deeper. Suffice it to say that the abused and traumatized child suffers multiple blows. It's not a double whammy. It's like a quintuple whammy. The child feels the need to hide and to conceal itself, to minimize itself, to disappear in order to not be traumatized. So the child rejects space. Space is where bad things happen. Space is where abuse happens. Space is where trauma happens. So no space for me. Thank you. Child rejects space. The parent's language is so dominant and so terrifying and so inducive of negative emotions that the child also rejects language itself and adopts the parent's language, interjects it and this remains with the child for life. And so in the absence of language and in the absence of space as a language, there's no ability to develop reality testing and everything I've mentioned in the bullet points. Okay, what about animals? What can we learn from animals? I mean we can't experiment on human babies, unfortunately. So what about animals? One of the studies has shown that when animals are raised in a space which is without features, featureless space or in confinement, in a box, they are unable to successfully engage in spatial tasks. If they are blindfolded, they don't see sharp angles and so on and so forth. So the exposure to space, big space, varied space, space with features is very important. And if you as a child minimize yourself, put yourself in a corner, literally put yourself in a corner and refuse to venture out because you're afraid of being beaten or being expropriated or being exposed to breach of boundaries. And I repeat again, smothering, pampering, idolizing, pedestalizing, these are breaches of boundaries. They don't allow the child to separate and individuate, they are abusing.   You know the very stories about invisibility cloaks and so on? These are childhood imaginations. This is an escape route. And so you don't explore space as you should and that is disastrous consequences of the ability to form memories because it's the same circuitry, use it or lose it. There is a phenomenon in infancy and beyond. And Kate Jeffrey says when she talks about studies in animals, experiments with animals and so on and so forth there is a phenomenon, this period of time in infancy and beyond during which we don't have lasting episodic memories. We don't seem to be laying down these memories. Young infants don't form cognitive maps in the way adults do. Their spatial organization of information is a lot less rich. It's possible that memories you form is an infant because the hippocampus is still developing may get overwritten or disturbed by the new circuitry that is still developing. And as an adult you cannot retrieve those early life memories the way you can later ones. And so no one knows what is the exact process by which the hippocampus perceives and creates representations of space and stores long-term memories and whether one is the condition to the other. Although it would seem based on design principles that if the same circuitry is used for spatial processing and memory formation then these two have something to do with each other. So we're just speculating at this stage but it seems that this is what's happening. The entorhinal cortex is split into five layers and they represent different cell types. Entorhinal cortex is the interface between the neocortex, the part where intelligence resides. So most people have neocortex with exception of course of YouTube viewers. So neocortex is the seat of intelligence and there's the hippocampus. And the mediator, the facilitator, the interface whatever you wish to call it is the entorhinal or entorhinal depending on the professor, entorhinal cortex. This interface, this bridge, entorhinal cortex is divided into five as I said, vision, primary sensory areas. Vision or faction, audition, touch. A little bit of this, a little bit of that as Geoffrey puts it. And all these feed into the entorhinal cortex. And from the entorhinal cortex, the arrows, there's kind of channels of communication into the hippocampus. The hippocampus is divided. There are many circuits in the hippocampus. Each one is fed by various layers of the entorhinal cortex. But the connection is clear. Geoffrey says, by the time you get to the hippocampus, quite a lot of stuff has happened. These senses are very highly processed. But it turns out that layer two goes here, layer three goes there, and so on and so forth. So it's all highly specialized. The channels of communication are not diffuse. Are not diffuse. There's a lot of backward and forward flow of information, but along dedicated channels. And she says, in recent years, some of the most stunning images of the hippocampus have emerged from Harvard University Center for Brain Science. There's a neuroscientist there. His name is Geoff Lichtmann. He uses microscopes to map neural connections in the brains of mice. And he plays with genes, and he causes mice to express different fluorescent proteins in individual neurons. It's a stunning light show. And there are these beautiful bursts of pink and blue and green. These are known as brainbow photographs. And he shows how the cells in the hippocampus are condensed into single orderly layers. If you go to the cortex, the neurons look like a galaxy who has exploded, a kind of supernova, like a galaxy which has exploded. A galaxy which came across an improvised explosive device. All the neurons are strewn totally randomly. It's like a big mess. It's like someone spilled neurons and you can't make head or tails. There's no sense in any of this. Nothing is organized. But the hippocampus is elegant. Everything is aligned in curving our arcs. It is structured. Hypocampus is the seat of order and structure. While the cortex thrives on randomness, it seems that randomness gives rise among other things to intelligence. The ability to synoptically connect things because they are adjacent by mistake. So the cortex is randomized and it's built on coincidences, but not so the hippocampus. The hippocampus resembles a library. The cortex resembles a carnival or a rave and the hippocampus resembles a library. There are cells called pyramidal neurons, pyramidal pyramids. Many neuroscientists are very fascinated by these cells. It seems that all is converging there that these cells are the key to infantamnesia. But I won't go in any further. I'm not a neuroscientist. My area, my field is the meta-phenomena. The phenomena that emerge from neuroscience, also known as mind. And the connections are unequivocal. Early childhood abuse and talk prevent the child from developing an ability to process space. Prevent the child from processing language appropriately because this language is hijacked by the parental edicts, the entraining parental voice, trauma and abuse. Because they hamper the ability to process space and they hamper the ability to relate to the world via language, they make it impossible for the child and later on the adult to tell the difference between external and internal, hyperreflexivity and psychosis and narcissism, make it impossible to form memories, to test for reality, and the child compensates with grandiose magical thinking. Identity, diffusion, because there's no memories. Memories are the glue that holds it in. Memories make up identity. Identity is just another name for the library of memories. So there's no identity. There's identity, diffusion and disturbance. And finally, there's no separation, no individuation. And the person remains stuck at around age two. And these are known as narcissists.


So what do we have so far? It's not much of a hierarchy. We have a convolution, a reload, a pooling, giving us the results that you can see on the right-hand side. But now, how do we build actual networks out of this? Well, we can chain that, of course. We take a convolution, a reload, another convolution, another reload, a pooling, a convolution, a reload, a pooling. Here you see the strategy. Here, we build convolution, reload, convolution, reload. Instead of convolution, reload, pooling, convolution, reload, pooling. Why? Because this leads to fewer parameters, which is in a lot of ways desirable. So what would the output of that be? Well, in this case, it might be that for one feature, we would get this, for another, we'd get this, for the third one, we'd get this. And now, ultimately, we can have a fully connected part that converts these outputs of the conf layers into, that flattens these, and that ultimately then does the readout and tells us which class that is. Now, we want to predict both, of course, how likely the X is and how likely the O is. And we'd be getting activations for that. Now, we might want that the probabilities for the two of them add up to one, and we are already hot about cross entropy. And now, of course, it usually helps to have multiple layers of fully connected. You can say, I want to take the output of the conf layers, I want to flatten it, and then I want to apply multiple fully connected layers to that. And now, we can stake all of that, convolution, reload, convolution, reload, pooling, convolution, reload, pooling, fully connected, fully connected, and then we have the output. Now, why are we doing that? Well, because it's a good way of building that. So what I want you to do is understand the full X versus O network that we built and construct it, and really grok how we construct such networks. Play with various ways how it can run, and we will train it. But ignore the training part of that. Not like we will, in the next tutorial, we will hear about how we actually train such networks. So while this is the network that's being trained, I just want you to be able to construct the conf net, because next week we will be talking a lot about how we can train conf nets. So now, go and understand the typical conf net and construct it.


Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's virtual roundtable, Mission Possible, Getting Veterans Into Your Data Centers, hosted by Salute Mission Critical. I'm Amy Chavanic with JSA, and I'm happy to kick off today's virtual event. For the next hour, this roundtable will uncover how different programs are working to transition and develop veterans to fulfill the talent gap in our industry. We are honored to have a fantastic lineup leading today's conversation. Before getting started, I have a few housekeeping notes to share. If you have any questions throughout the roundtable, feel free to add them to the question box at the right-hand side of your screen. We will do our best to get through them in our allotted time. Or if you have any comments, there is a comment box as well. If we don't have time to get to your questions, we invite you to join us on our LinkedIn page on Salute Mission Critical's LinkedIn page after the event, and we will address any outstanding questions there. I will actually be creating a post that's dedicated to this post-event LinkedIn chat and into the group chat here on the right-hand side of your screen. And so we can continue the conversation there. So be on the lookout for that. And we're happy to get to your questions as they come up. OK, so let's get started. It is my pleasure to introduce the wonderful, fantastic digital sociologist and author Dr. Julie Albright to moderate this discussion for us. Welcome, Julie. Thank you so much for having me. Can you hear me OK? Perfect. Thank you so much for everyone for being here. Such a pleasure. I am Dr. Julie Albright. I'm a digital sociologist at the University of Southern California, where I teach classes on the psychology of interactive media and sustainable infrastructure in the engineering school. I am on the board of Infrastructure Masons. And I am now the freshly minted ambassador for Salute Mission Critical. Thanks, everyone, for being here. I'm going to hand it over to Tim to introduce him. So who's going to? Folks, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you're joining us from. First of all, since this is a focus on veterans, I will say I am a former Navy VP-47 stationed out of Moppet Build for many years, the hangar that Google is currently in the process of doing over. Currently, I am CEO and president of Evoke Data Center Solutions. We are actually the newest global infrastructure company in the sector. We were launched on January 1, 2019, and we're actually carved out from the AT&T data centers with 31 data centers around the world. Personally, I've been in the industry. I probably know many of you that are on the call today. I've been in the industry for well over 20 years and have seen a lot evolve during that period of time. So looking forward to sharing some of my insights with the group today. Thank you. And how about Lee? Do you want to kick off a little intro there? You bet. I'm Lee Kirby. I'm the Chairman of Salute Mission Critical. And I serve on the Infrastructure Mason's Advisory Council and lead the military programs there. So there's a lot of synergy between the two organizations. And I'm excited about this panel today because Salute's been a great success. And I think there's a variety of lessons to learn from that, where we've brought veterans into the workforce and we've developed them and got them onto sites to get experience into the industry. The real key was the workforce development strategy that we adopted. And we started with the end in mind as far as the marketplace goes and then work from there as to what we wanted to deliver with a better model with more efficient services that can reduce costs and risk. And to do that, we had to have an effective workforce development model that from the very beginning of recruiting and transitioning to training from day one to the very last thing that there was. And that ongoing training and I think is key. And I think our panel have some great expert advice on how to set those programs up because they're the key to our success. That's it. Thank you, Lee. Joe, do you want to take it away and give an introduction? No introduction probably needed, but still. Thank you, Julie. Can you hear me OK? Everything all right? Very great. Great. So thank you, everyone. My name is Joe Kava. I lead the data center organization for Google. I've been at Google now 12 years and during the entire time that I've been there, I've made it one of my priorities to reach out to our veterans and to try and hire veterans that are separating from their military duty into our data center program, starting with the head of my global operations team. He is a veteran himself. And many of his direct staff, the leadership team that run all of global operations are veterans. And so it's been kind of near and dear to my heart. My father served in the military. My father-in-law is a retired colonel in the Army. And after three tours through Vietnam, I've learned a lot about leadership and a lot about building team from him and many others in the military. So this is kind of very personal for me. I love it. Thank you so much. David, would you mind introducing yourself briefly? Thanks. Good. Hi, I'm Dave Foss. I'm head of operations for EdgeConnex. So I've run operations globally for us. Been here since about 2013 when we launched our first data center. We currently run about 35 operational data centers around the world and always in need of good talent. I myself came fairly round about from my Marine Corps days all the way through to getting out, getting an engineering degree, working in power systems. And then I moved on to several engineering companies and eventually worked in the operations world at various operations firms and joined, like I said, I joined EdgeConnex in 2013. Since that, we've grown dramatically, always looking for new people to bring into the organization. We've got both employees who are veterans and then we work a lot with Salute and are very supportive of them bringing in veterans into our data centers. We think the kind of qualities that we see in veterans. And again, just personally, my time as a Marine was a very proud episode for me. And I learned a lot of things that are still relevant to the work I do today. And that's why I really encourage my company and other companies to hire veterans. I love it. Well, we're going to hear more about that.  Billy, can you take us into a brief introduction of yourself? Again, thanks for having me and inviting to this forum. My name is Billy Haggard. I'm the Senior Vice President of Operations for Aligned Energy. And we operate data centers throughout the US. And 14 years in the military, who knew that after operating nuclear reactors and certifying nuclear plant operators and providing quality control around the maintenance programs for submarines and surface ships, I get to spend the next 20 years of my life doing everything in data centers from data center design, construction, security, and facilities and operations and network, and even taking two companies public within the data center field. And I have to say the high point in my career has always been transitioning people out of military as technicians and seeing them grow all the way from directors to BPs and even to sea level positions from other organizations. And hopefully through this discussion, I'll be able to provide some support and insight for those transitioning and anyone who wishes to hire military people to support their own data centers. And thanks again for having me. I love it. This is just so great. Well, behind me, you can see a background, I think, that I just put up. And I come from a proud military family. On this side, this is my dad, Alan. He's a proud Marine. And this is his father, Carson, who is a proud Navy man and his brother as well. My other grandfather was also a Navy guy. So second generation. So super glad to be here with you guys. And it's just wonderful. As I thought about this topic about hiring vets and why you want to do it, it occurs to me there's a lot of skills that are learned in military service, in the training that you all go through that are transferable to the business world, to the data center industry, and all that. I remember my dad used to come over. This is a funny example. But in visit me, he'd stay at my house in LA. He was living back in Hilton Head, South Carolina at the end of his life. And when I would wake up in the morning, he was long gone out to get coffee and the paper. But the bed was perfectly smooth and flat, like the perfectly made bed. And I thought, how does he do that? And I've never mastered that. But for his whole life, these qualities of making that bed, I know where that came from. And not just that little example, but qualities of organization, qualities of critical thinking, qualities of leadership, and thinking through things. All these are skills that you learn through your training and your experience in the military that are directly transferable to the business world and the world of the data center and IT industries. These are skills that last a lifetime, as you can see. So that's what I was hoping we could think through today is what those skills are, how to make that transition into the data center industry. As all of you know, and I'm sure our audience knows as well, we talk about this that I made since all the time, there's a critical talent shortage going on in the industry. And we're looking for ways to get young people, get them aware of this industry, and bring them in and onboard them. And another thing that we were talking about is the growth of the government and using IT, data center resources, and the need for classified security clearances, which some military people have. So that's another bonus there. So I thought we could get started kicking off by looking at talking to Lee real quick about salute and what is this organization and how have you been successful bringing our veterans, our wonderful veterans into this industry? Give us a little overview, Lee. You bet. So when we started this, we wanted to solve an unemployment problem in veterans and solve the shortage in the industry. And it seemed like the right combination, but we had to come up with a service model that would be attractive to the market. And I think we have with our model where we put people on site that got the dedication and the training and the commitment to be able to be there and do what they need to do to follow the procedures. What I wanted to prove, because I think it's a key lesson for the industry is it's not just the veterans with technical skills that are obvious, all veterans have things they do following procedures. An infantryman takes care of his equipment, his vehicle, his weapons systems, his communication gear, and he follows procedures to do that, very similar to a data center technician. So all we have to do is teach them the technology side and our training program starts out where we assess them for what they do know and then inject them into the process at where they're at with everybody going through safety training first and then going through technical training to adapt them to their position. And then the ongoing training to continually develop them as they move through in their career. So we were really leveraging the best of both worlds with military discipline and the technology that we have in the industry to be able to teach people and train them very quickly. And that's worked out real well for us. I know that the scope of what we were doing doing is much smaller than the scope of some of the other companies on the phone. And I'd love to hear from Joe specifically because they dealt with such a wide array of skills that they're looking for. I was looking for E4s and 7s that wanted to work with their hands and turn them into technicians, but they're software developers, they're cyber technologists, there's everything. And some of the least obvious skills that you'll see is being able to turn cooks into project managers. And I think an effective workforce is important to the program and do all of that. So yeah, maybe Joe wants to comment because I kind of set him up there on what they do and this breadth and scope of what they do because I think it's a great program. Sure, thanks, Lee. We found that many of the different skills available from military veterans that are separating from duty are directly applicable. And the problem has really been kind of one of awareness that generally these veterans are not aware of what types of opportunities are available in the data center industry and maybe how their skills are applicable. It's not obvious. So we've been many years working on kind of an awareness program. We go to various different military bases and we have career days and we have career fairs there and we give them examples. So it's not just the hands-on technicians but it's also logistics. Imagine the transferable skills from a forward deployed Marine or Army platoon that is in a foreign, often hostile environment and they have to get the supply chain running to keep the military, the entire unit working, keep them fed, keep them armed, keep them refueled, getting water to places that is often very challenging. So those types of skills come kind of natural because they've dealt with that, their career in the military. And while our challenges are much less, honestly, it's very transferable skills. The same way in terms of health and safety, many of our EHS technicians and engineers have a military background because this is what they were trained in. And then of course there's the mission critical operations, which is I think pretty obvious. But to me, it really comes down to in data centers and especially in cloud computing, it comes down to a matter of trust. Our users and our customers are counting on us and they're trusting us to be there at utility level availability and performance. So you need people that understand mission. You need people that understand mission critical. You need people that understand procedure and understand the value of teamwork. And you need people that have a sense of service and commitment to something that's bigger than just themselves. And if you take that definition, that is exactly what the military trains and what they develop in people. So what better pool than that to help staff a mission critical operation? I love that show. Let's dive in a little deeper and take a look at some of our great talent that we have here that have risen the ranks and are running the show now. I'm gonna start with Billy. Billy, you mentioned a moment ago, your background with submarines and all that. Can you talk a little bit about how those experience have transferred and helped you in the data center industry? Well, just getting into the data center industry was kind of haphazard for me. 20 years ago, I went to a hiring conference and the job description said data centers and it's like, I don't know anything about data centers, that job description went to the bottom. And an individual got up and started talking about the services that were provided to the data centers, electrical mechanical services and the infrastructure. And after hearing that individual talk, they said, I don't know what that company does, but if I have to sweep floors, I'm gonna go work for that company. And I did. And what I found was the foot in the door is always your technical capabilities, either understanding electrical mechanical systems, but the other things that the intangibles that military people bring to the data center is an eye for the detail, the quality assurance side, being able to do technical writing. You can train somebody how to operate a piece of equipment to start it up and shut it down.  Taking the situation, assessing what is critical that has to be done as far as immediate actions. You may say, you know what customer, I'm glad you're here, can you step outside and I'll address your concerns as soon as the fire is out. And just having that skill set and the poise, military people are really just great at doing that. So I said I accidentally got into this field and what I found was everything that I worried about getting out of the military was, I didn't want to sit behind a desk 100% of times. And I didn't want to strap on a tool belt 100% of time. How do I engage everything about me, my mental capabilities, being physically worn out at times and even dealing with the psychological and emotional side of running a data center and knowing that every day you come to work and everything you do is critical to the internet, but it's also commerce and the government and the whole economy is centered around what goes on the internet. And individuals that do the wrong thing or operate the wrong breaker or make the wrong decisions can have a huge impact and that weighs with you day in and day out. And it's sort of an excitement that I think military having been in drills and having been in those situations upfront, they thrive on it. I love that idea of grace under pressure, you know?  He goes, it's important not to get excited. You know, when everything gets crazy and that's a really great quality. I'm glad you brought that out. Hey, Tim, you're also a Navy fellow. I understand. Can we hear your story about how you got into the industry and the skills and the things that you think are transferable from your experience? Yeah, absolutely.  In fact, similar to Billy, I had never even heard, you know, of the data center industry.  I transitioned out into Silicon Valley during the first boom, you know, in the valley, so to speak.   It spent about 10 years with Digital Equipment Corporation, which was, you know, you know, one of the innovators, you know, at the time. There are many of the folks I'm going to call that. And then I got a call in the late, I think it was about 1999 from a friend of mine who wanted me to join this company called Exodus, which again, was really one of the, one of the first real service providers in the sector. And I'll always remember when, when I had worked for him before, when he asked me to join him, he said, you know, the company right now is growing 20%, you know, quarter over quarter. But he goes, I'm not really sure, you know, what I can tell you that either one or two things are going to happen. Either this is going to be the easiest job you've ever had.  And anyway, so I went over and I joined him. It seemed like, you know, a good place to be. And, you know, got in about 90 days later, he called me in his office and he said, well, I got good news and I got bad news. And said, okay, well, what's the, what's the good news? He said, well, you sell the job. And I said, okay, well, what's, what's the bad news? He said, well, we're about ready a file for chapter 11. The whole management team is being let go. They're bringing in a new CEO. And he goes, I'm not sure where, you know, where the industry is going to be, you know.   They were built to, you know, a lot of different standards that were out there. You know, the folks that were operating, the data center, the folks that we know as the, you know, the mission critical infrastructure guys, they often were the same people that were operating buildings. And not to take anything away from people who were operating buildings, but it's a very different skill set to, you know, keep a data center up, you know, 24 by seven with a 100% availability, as Joe said, with the utility grade than it is to operate an office building. And let's just say we had our share of challenges at the time. And I had my share of uncomfortable discussions with very large clients in the industry wanting to basically know what I was gonna do to fix it. At the time I was running, you know, all of operations.   Tom Furlough from Facebook, he's on the call. You know, Tom was on our staff we started looking around. And, you know, one of the things that we identified really quickly was that, you know, we had a few folks on the team that were former vets at the time. And those folks were the ones that were doing it right. You know, we didn't have issues with their centers. And we started to look at, you know, basically a lot of the same things, you know, we know about today, the process and the procedures and so forth that folks were operating, whether you were, you know, operating a nuclear power plant on a stub or whether you were operating a checklist for, you know, for flying a plane. And we identified, you know, those attributes and we started hiring quickly those skill sets. And again, some of those folks are still in the industry today and, you know, we really started to use that to build, you know, the foundation of, you know, how we were operating data centers at that time.  And, you know, frankly, I probably learned as much from many of those individuals that came in and the attitude and the discipline that they brought to the job, as well as, you know, their expertise. And by the way, their expertise to Lee's point wasn't always the expertise walking in and knowing the equipment and technology on day one. You know, it was their approach to the position and how they were doing the work.  And, you know, again, I've been very successful. I have, you know, a number of veterans in my organizations today. We work with salute on a number of projects to augment, you know, the folks in our data centers and, you know, got a lot of really good stories about that, so with the years being part of the team. That's amazing.  And he said to me over the course of time, he says, I'll take a great attitude over skills any day, you know, because you can teach the skills, but you can't teach the great attitude. And that's what you're talking about there and the discipline and these qualities. I love that too. Great story. Hey, Dave, our proud Marine. Can you talk about your pathway into this wonderful industry? How did you get here? Oh, sure, yeah. So as I said earlier, you know, I was in the Marines back in the, joined in the ancient days of the 70s, probably not as old as Joe there, but many years ago and got out. I was an enlisted man. I was an infantry man in the Marine Corps.  And I still use those today, as I said. So got out in the mid-80s. I also ended up getting recalled for active duty in the 90s, go for. But I went to Virginia Tech, got engineering degrees, went to work for a couple of power systems. Companies did a lot of work there, design engineering work, project management, stuff. And then later I became a consultant. And actually, though I don't think I know Tim, I worked as a consultant at Exodus back in the early days as well, trying to help them with their customer service process, installing new customers, because they were having that huge growth back then in those early days. So that was kind of my first introduction to the data center world. And then I did a lot of different jobs as a consultant, mostly operations-based and eventually worked for a couple of companies, where I met a lot of great people and again, some veterans as well. And they always, you have the, when you run into veterans, it's always good to share the war stories and fun stories and sad stories that you had back then. And it kind of gives you that camaraderie is what, I think a lot of us miss from being in the military from the early days, but it's good to see that in the business world. And I think sometimes there's too much of trying to compare combat to business and things like that. I don't think that's really appropriate, but some of the things we've spoken about about again, the transferable skills that are more general skills versus having a specific skill. Having a specific skill, you've run fire in the military for communications networks. That's great. That's perfectly applicable to what we're doing if you've run generators. I've got a bunch of ex-generator military folks that they get into it right away, but it's that attitude to have a can-do attitude. I've got a real young Marine down in Miami. He's a reservist with an Anglico company down there. He started out as a security guard and working with, he's a salute guy. So working with Lee's team, we've trained him up and he's taken on more responsibility as we've gone on. And that's a guy, that's a kid that I can trust.  We rely on him to do the right thing, follow procedures, be calm in the face of adversity and those kinds of things. So all the things that Joe and Tim and Billy and Lee have talked about, I've seen that on the ground with the folks I have. And not just here in the US as well, we've got several data centers over in Europe and I've got some Dutch Navy, Dutch Army guys that they exhibit the same kinds of things that I get out of the US military folks as well. I love that. That's a great story, Dave. Well, I think the audience can see why you wanna hire great guys like these. You were getting a lot of sense of the qualities, the grace under pressure, the focus and discipline and that the skills can be more trained. Joe, I was wondering if you could talk about with your experience for the audience here, now we know how great these guys are and gals and we wanna know how do we do this now? What are the planning steps and what are some of the sort of unexpected things that you've learned for the audience that wants to bring these great veterans on board? Can you talk about the planning for that and what the audience needs to be thinking about? In other words, how do we do this? Sure, thanks Julie. I think that some of this was maybe kind of obvious to us at the start about life in the military is gonna be quite different than life at Google. And so the first thing we did is as I mentioned, my leader of global operations is an ex-Navy nuclear submariner himself. And I asked him, I said, could you write like a couple page, like how to on what it was like for you transitioning out of the military into the civilian world and then moving into the data center industry. So he did that and that's the first thing that is required reading because there's a lot of insight there, a lot of things that are normal, like the part and parcel of daily military life are very different than life at Google. Depending on the role that you have at Google, you're expected to take a lot more initiative and not wait to be told what to do, but to look around and see a problem and figure out how you can make it better. And so helping to bring that culture and bring that freedom and frankly give them the empowerment and permission to do things without being, without waiting for their commanding officer to tell them what to do. And so a lot of that was kind of easily trainable. A lot of it was just cultural things that are maybe Google specific, but the big aha moment for us was frankly had nothing to do with the employee, but had to do with their family and had to do with their spouses in particular because the military has a great support network. When a person is moved to a different assignment and maybe the family is living on base somewhere, the spouses have a built in network of all the other military spouses and all of the other people that can help them get integrated into the community, learn where to, you know, where's the best place to, you know, get your, you know, I don't know if you need some clothing repaired, you know, where should we go to get a seamstress? Where should we, you know, do that? And imagine now that you're a, you know, a person transitioning from the military, your spouse is coming with you to take a new job like Google somewhere in the world you've never been, maybe where your first language, maybe English is not the language spoken in that country and there is no support network for the spouses. And we learned kind of through some hard knocks along the way that that makes for a very unhappy situation when the spouse's experience is poor, then it reflects on the employee's experience at work as well. And so we built a program that kind of brings the spouses into the local support network of that data center, you know, our data centers are often in rural communities and but there's a lot of other Googlers there and there's a lot of other Google spouses there as well. And so we've got this Google, you know, kind of network that helps bring the man, helps indoctrinate them, helps take them like on grocery shopping trips. When you're in a store where all the products in the grocery store in a different language that you have no idea how to read or speak, it's just tough. So having that built-in support network really helps them get kind of stuck in and feeling much more comfortable. And then that makes for an overall better experience for the Google employee as well. So that wasn't entirely obvious at the start. And like I said, you know, we kind of learned through some hard knocks, but that's now part of, you know, the indoctrination and the support that we give to military veterans. I love that idea. And to take what we call a systems approach, you know, to see the person in their context. And as you said, if the context is unhappy, you're gonna have an unhappy employee. As you and I have been in some conversations about young employees coming in and they want from my university's point of view, they want a little bit more structure than maybe prior generations in terms of integrating. So what you're talking about here with the spouse and also with the young employees, they want a little bit more of a roadmap or how to integrate better instead of just sort of go-getters on their own. So that's really good. Lee, can you kind of, thank you so much, Joe. That's so insightful. And I'm sure the audience may have some more questions as we go. Lee, can you kind of follow up on that with your workforce development strategy at Salute and how you're helping the companies to sort of on board and the thoughts you have about that? You bet. We intentionally built Salute to be able to have about a 30% attrition rate, which is counterintuitive to most companies. But what we hope to do is engage with our customers and have our workforce there that we've trained and they're getting the experience grow. And at some point, they'll outgrow us and there'll be opportunities within the customer. We do this with a lot. We've got a great example that Dave brought up about Miami and had a guy that rose through our ranks was with us for three or four years. There was an opportunity for him at Edge Connects. He got hired on and we back-filled him. To us, that's success. So building our company to have that kind of attrition is just a successful model for how we engage with our customers to help solve the personnel shortage problem. We can be that farm league and drive people up through the development process to a point that then they take over and everybody wins from it. The other thing kind of capitalizing on Joe's mentioning of military spouses is it's a very disadvantaged group of people. When you look at active duty and how often they move that military spouses find themselves without jobs. And with some of the silly things in the systems where they have to recertify or get rewarded on different things. If there's military spouses out there that like to do data center work we've started hiring military spouses as well because we're across the US now and if their service member gets transferred to the other coast, there'll be opportunities for them to pick up and continue their employment rather than be disrupted. So I think it's a hidden jewel that a lot of people overlook the military spouse. Any spouse that can take over while their better half is deployed for a year and do all of the responsibilities of both parents and typically have another job. That's a great multi-tasking project manager to me that can be adapted to our industry. So there's a lot of kind of hidden benefits to focusing on workforce development because if you have the ability to plug them into a training process to assess them, plug them where they belong and then grow them from there. I think it's a key to success. I like that.  So it's kind of a proven way to get that top talent and universities have been doing that for years. So I think that's very smart. Tim, I wondered if I might come back to you for a moment. You have another perspective that I'd love to bring in for our audience to hear about and that is to do with vendors and working with veterans and vendors and things like that. Can you talk a little bit about that? Absolutely. One of the things, and I guess maybe for all the veterans on the call today to think about is, I think you've heard certainly from an evoked standpoint and actually through my career, how supportive I have been about identifying and bringing military folks into the fold, if you will. What I haven't spoke about though is basically the challenge of finding those people and attracting them to the company because often there's a gap between the company wanting the hire and the veterans knowing that they should apply and get connected with the company. And even, I'll go back a few years ago, I recently relocated from San Diego to Dallas, but you would think in San Diego, one of the largest military communities in the US, that it would be very easy to plug in to candidates coming out of the military, whether it was Navy or Marines or any of the other services and get connected with them and get them plugged in. And there were certainly groups to do so, even in a city like that that's so focused on the military, that was difficult to do. But I think one of the things that we have been successful with and we've partnered with Salute, I'll usually in Salute as an example, as Salute has been a good partner in helping us to identify the veteran talent that we need. So we've been successful in sitting down and saying, okay, this is what we need in the organization. These are the skills that we're trying to fill. This is where the company is going long term and then partnering with Salute as a both a vendor in the near term, as well as a sourcing provider, similar to what it sounds like they've done with David Edge Connect, to bring that talent into the organization. So it's really become the pipeline for us, if you will. So I guess what I would encourage to any of the veterans on the phone is to seek out whether it's companies like Salute, infrastructure maitans or other organizations that can be that conduit into the industry. Because often, you would think in today's day and age that that gulf would be easy to close, but it's not, that gap still exists. But being able to work with groups like Salute to be able to do that makes my job, as a service provider, a lot easier. I think that's a great point. Hey, Dave, can you speak to that point as well about the idea of sort of identifying, transitioning veterans and training veterans of the chief experience? Is that for me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, so we're also working with, I work with Lee on infrastructure maitans in the veterans community and we're trying to, and I gotta say my day job is interfering with my effectiveness and this, but they've created liaisons for major military bases. So I'm here in Denver, Colorado and we've got a bunch of bases down my Colorado Springs and we're working on making contact with the transitional offices there at those bases and kind of getting the word out because as a lot of people have pointed out, data center, it may be more top of mind than the public right now, but there's a lot of people that really don't know what goes on in a data center, how big it is, industry it is, how much it's growing, that kind of thing. So getting them to understand that and then also understanding, you may not have the exact skillset needed to be, a power, a UPS engineer or a computer installer or a rack installer or something like that, but there's programs out there for training and we're looking for the people that have kind of that background discipline, self-discipline that we talked about that will kind of make the transition into this industry a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable and a lot more effective. So. I think that's great Dave. I love this idea of the transition offices and maybe that's something that with iMasons we can coordinate more outreach to those and maybe some data center tours and things to boost awareness, because I think it's a win-win again, it's a matter like you said of closing, you guys are talking about closing that gap between the awareness gap if you will between the military and the data center industry. So that's a really great point there that those are available. Let's see if we have some questions from the audience. I think Amy, do you wanna take that? Yeah, absolutely. I've actually been overwhelmed with the questions that we've had via email or in the question box or the chat box. So there has been a lot that are coming in. So I know we have a short time here for these questions, but again, I did share the LinkedIn chat or the LinkedIn link for the post event chat into the chat window here. So we're happy to get to all of those questions in that, but in the meantime, let's get to these questions. So the first one I have is, how are the veterans made aware of the opportunities in mission critical careers data center? So this is a three-part question. Is this before or after they transition out of the military and what can we do to increase this awareness? Well, if you don't mind, I'll jump in on that one because I've got a million dollar question. With infrastructure masons, like Dave mentioned, we've got the military liaison program that we're staffing. We've got about 25% of the transition assistance program sites mapped to an infrastructure masons member. And what they do is engage with those transition points and make them aware of our industry. We've run almost 2,000 folks into the industry through Salud. We've got 350 full-time people, but I could probably count on both hands how many people knew about the data center industry before they met us. So we're an invisible industry and infrastructure masons is looking to change that and this military liaison program is going forward with that. We're partnering with different people from 724 and their membership to not get announced but Orion and their contacts that they have at the base is trying to get the widest net possible to distribute information about our industry. So the veterans know that there's an option they can choose from where there's thousands of jobs available for every specialty. So we're trying to raise that awareness and making proactive pushes. I know that folks like Google and different companies are reaching out to those tap sites as well to have extensive programs. So little by little, I think we're gonna raise the awareness over the next year to where we'll start seeing veterans that are intentionally making a choice to come to an industry that I think is perfect for their skill sets. Yeah, thank you so much, Lee. And actually to piggyback off of that because another question that we received and I know you kind of talked about infrastructure masons here. So one of the questions is what is the relationship between SLU and infrastructure masons? We established a strategic partnership with IEM about a year and a half ago and that's when I joined the advisory council and started running their military program and that's worked real well. We've been able to get people joining IEM and getting out engaged with the military sites. And so our relationship is kind of symbiotic. SLU delivers services. We are a commercial company and we have to compete on commercial basis. But the more projects we win, the more veterans we get to work and the more chance they'll be hired at your company. Infrastructure masons is a non-profit and we work just as diligently with them but it's focused on raising awareness in the military of our industry. So I think we're hitting both the supply and the demand side of the equation and going to start seeing the impact of that over the next year or two in a very positive way. Awesome. Nicely said Lee. Great, thank you so much. Another question is getting veterans into data centers is one thing, but how much focus is placed on helping them with the transition from military to civilian life? I would jump in on that but maybe I should yield the floor to somebody else I know Billy had the exact experience of walking across and having the transition but also does that today with a lot of his training programs. Yeah, you wanna take that one, Billy? Well, I will say how I got into the field initially kind of shaped how I treat veterans now. I started at a service company in 2000 and my day two job, my day two on the job I was flown to Atlanta to sit with the owner of the construction project and people were saying RPPs and PDUs and UPSs and it was only my second day on the job and I had no clue on what they were talking about but what they told me was in a lot of the civilian industry there is no training program, there's no development. You're hitting the road running and being part of the data center before you even figure out what a data center is. So since then I would say day one, assessing the individual, making sure what skills and talents they have. Something as simple as correlating the military jargon that has a lot of acronyms throughout the military with acronyms that run very deep in the data center world and showing them how their skills that they currently have correlates to data center skills and then giving them a program such as the qualification program that strengthens those skills plus everything else we expect them to know. So we hire somebody that's mechanically trained and we expect them to know process and procedures, electrical, building management systems, casualty control, everything about a data center and day one we're hiring them to be a mechanic. So it's putting those programs in place to make sure we guide them along their careers and I would like to kind of piggyback a little bit on what I think Tim was talking about. There's a high turnover rate in the data center industry and if it takes you two years to get a data center technician up to the minimum capability of really being a great data center operator and you lose them at year three, you've invested quite heavily in that person only to have them leave. So getting a really good training program up initially where you can qualify individuals when six to nine months and then have the continuous training program, you really speed up the capabilities of everyone transitioning from the military into the data center. So hopefully that answered your question. Yeah, I'm gonna piggyback on that just real quickly. Another binding from a lot of the surveys of young people and young employees is they wanna see a road or pathway up, a quick pathway up. So that idea of like saying, hey, we're gonna have these programs if you wanna continue up with your career, that's a retention strategy that's gonna really appeal to young, particularly millennial and following workers coming in. You know, if I can add on a little bit, Julie, in that regard, one of the things that was kind of a happy coincidence is when we were establishing our overall operations program, I think partly because it was built by people that had a military background, a lot of our standards are very similar to what the military does in terms of our operations qualification standards, in terms of our operational assessments, which look very much like anyone that is in the nuclear submarine force when the oars board comes on and does a kind of an operational assessment of your boat, it looks very much like that. So a lot of these things are very familiar to our military veterans that have transitioned into our program and so it makes it comfortable and they're like, okay, if I wanna go from this qualification to this qualification, here are the standards and here are the testing that I have to do and the on-the-job learning that I have to do to get there. And so they can see a little bit of that progression that you were just mentioning, Julie, about what is my career path? Where can I go? And eventually if they wanna transition more into a leadership role, we have an associate facility manager in training program where our senior technicians can apply for that program, join the program, there's an 18 month, on-the-job training program and as they graduate from that, they are now in the facility manager candidate pool and the next critical facility manager role that comes open, they are tapped for those roles or they can apply to them. So it's a pretty clear progression of where they can go if that's what they want to do. And many other types of, it's not just on the operation side, but also on the engineering side, we've spent time building a learning and development data center academy. So depending on which track you are and where you are in your career, there's a different learning and development progression for that. So I think to your point, exactly you want to give people that, where can I go and what does it take to get their type of a view? Yeah, early on as opposed to later. I mean, these kids, because they live in this digital environment, they want things to happen really quickly. I mean, almost ridiculously quickly, but just to be aware of that, they think that they're gonna move up within one year. That's the expectation now. So what are the steps? Hey, if you wanna go through this training program, we have this and the other, that's gonna help with retention. So that's perfect, Joe. Great. Okay, so another question is, as companies slash clients are operating, growing globally, how do you standardize the human supply chain for delivery? On a massive scale, Joe could probably talk to that, but with salute, we always focus on the end. And we do look at, we've got veterans from nine different countries working with us. And we look at the resource pools that you can tap into in the US, there's the unemployment offices, there's the tap stations. In other countries, there's different ways to get at those personnel, but you do need to look at your supply chain and how you're gonna resource that, what type of special training you may need, also the language and cultural requirements of that spot. But we've been able to do that by working in partnership with Edge. And as we move into different countries, understanding what it is we need to provide and what role we're gonna fulfill, then we work backwards from there and make sure we have the processes in place to not just train them, but operate effectively as well. Was the question more focused on the personnel supply chain, or was it on kind of the rest of the technology supply chain? Well, it says human supply chain as a part of the question here, so. Yeah, then I would echo a lot of what Lee said. We've done, like when we are starting a new data center somewhere in the world, one of the first things we do is try and reach out to the local schools, community colleges, technical colleges, universities, and try and let them know about what types of opportunities we have. We will generally hold career fairs or kind of a mobile route well back in the days when we used to be able to go out into public. Hopefully we can get there again soon, one of these days. But we would go in and literally have kind of a rolling classroom to bring to the middle of whatever the town square is and have people come in and see with and talk to different people from the data center, what their jobs are, what is day-to-day life in a data center look like. And then frankly, a lot of it is just even on our website. I think that if a person that is considering a new career, or especially a person that is transitioning from military to civilian life, if they can look at some information, whether it's a website or go to one of these rolling kind of a career fair days and see people that look like themselves and have similar backgrounds and can explain what it was like transitioning into civilian life, I think it really helps give them a comfort and a confidence level that they can do that as well. The biggest comment I get when I visit is many of our data centers is from new people coming in, it's oftentimes it's like, I had no idea that a person like me could get a job at Google. Because they think frankly that if you need to work, if you wanna work at Google, you have to be a computer scientist. And we have a lot of those. We have a lot of software engineers, but we have tons of other jobs that people are like, wow, I'm a wireman electrician and have been for 20 years as a journeyman. I had no idea that you hired people like that. I'm like, yeah, every day we hire people like that. I love that. And that idea, Joe, that you said to highlight, seeing people like myself, having diversity, different kind of faces, different kind of men and women, my students say they will look on the websites and see if they see faces like theirs. And if they don't see faces like theirs, they don't even apply. So that idea is very important for young people coming up because there's a heightened awareness around that. Well, Amy, I think we just about ran out of time here. Are you able to drop the link again to everybody into the chat? And... We didn't get to your questions. We definitely hope that you join us on our LinkedIn chat. I just hit send again on that. First of all, I wanna thank you so much, Dr. Julie Albright for leading this conversation. And thank you panelists for your insights. There was a lot of positive feedback that we received from the viewers today. Really happy about this panel and really the different perspectives that you all provided today. So thank you so much for your time and contributing to this. And before we wrap things up, I'm gonna pass it over to Lee to close us out today. Well, I just wanted to thank the panelists for participating and those that are listening in. And the lesson I'd like to take away from this is it takes a workforce development strategy that spans from the very beginning of a person's career to the end to change your HR processes, your training process, and your operational procedures to really effectively capitalize on new resource pools like veterans. If you put that in place, it goes beyond veterans and you can expand it to military spouses or any demographic group that you see value in bringing into the workforce. But my passion is veterans and I think veterans are a perfect fit for our industry. And that if you need help getting that workforce development strategy together, I'd be happy to talk with you. There's no one size fits all. It's based on your business requirements. What do you need and adapt it to that and work backwards? So I appreciate everybody's participation today on this. Thank you, everyone. Thank you to all our veterans, Joe. Everyone gave some really amazing on the ground experience that I hope our listeners and our watchers can take away and apply in their companies. And I hope it's answered the question of mission possible today, why we wanna bring veterans in. It's a great mission. I, Mason's is supportive. Salute is supportive. All of us are supportive. So hopefully you'll join us in this as well. Thank you so much, everyone, for participating into our wonderful panelists. Really, thank you both for organizing and moderating today. Great job. Thank you guys so much. Take care. Take care. All right, bye everyone. Thanks, everybody.


What's happening guys, today we're doing a highly requested video. It's going to be the skills tier list. These are going to be the skills that are going to be the most valuable when it comes to employment, right? So we're going to be talking about employable skills. Now, some of these skills are going to be skills that teach you how to directly make a lot more money. Some of them are going to be a little bit more indirect, and I'm going to kind of go over which ones for which. And I'm loosely basing this off of two things. One of them is the zip recruiter skills index that I've referenced many times on this channel. Great resource. That's an index that basically talks about different skills and how much you can expect to make from them. Then also my own personal experience with thousands of hours of doing research and consulting with people. We're going to be ranking these from S tier, which is the best to F tier, which is the worst. And most of these I got from suggestions in the comment section. So if there's some that I missed on this video, let me know. I'll make a follow up video that has a ton more skills. All right, so let's jump right into this one. First one on the list is going to be technology related skills. All right, so on the zip recruiter skills index, if you look at the top 30 different types of skills, you're just going to see it's littered with technology. All different types of programming languages and frameworks, information technology skills, being able to just solve issues. And not only are you going to be able to directly make money from this, aka it's an employable skill, aka you can get a job from it, but also indirectly, a lot of people who end up becoming millionaires and even billionaires early on in life do it because they have technology related skills. So technology via programming is one of the few ways in the world where you can leverage a, you know, maybe one person or a small group of people, the work that they do to get to millions of people. You can create a program or a website that millions of people can interact with. So an insane amount of leverage. You can make a lot of money both directly and indirectly from this. I suggest that everybody learn at least like some of the basics of computer programming languages because it's really going to help you out in life. This one clearly goes into S tier. Next on the list is going to be health related skills. Now on the zip recruiter skills index, this is probably the second most common one that you see at the top. I'd say that it's up there with business related skills, but I would say when it comes to employability and having like a stable job that's pretty much never going to go away, health related skills is probably the best when it comes to directly making money. Now indirectly, I would say technology and business related skills do have an edge over health. But if you're someone who really just wants a stable job where you're pretty much always going to have employment options, health is a fantastic way to go. So this one is also going to go into S tier. Okay, I realized looking at this list, I feel like a lot of them are going to go into S tier. So I might have to kind of reorganize it at the end because yeah, a lot of these are actually really good. You guys came up with really good suggestions. Next on the list is going to be sales related skills. Now this is something where I honestly think the best thing you could ever do for yourself. If you're in high school or college right now watching this video, get a part-time sales job. It is going to help you out just immensely, even if it's just an over the phone. Okay, even if it's just an over the phone sales job, right, maybe you're introverted, you're too afraid to talk to people in real life. Okay, get a phone sales job. This was probably one of the best decisions I ever made in my entire life. It's going to change the way that you interact with people and it's not like some kind of scammy, you know, used car salesman type of skills that you're learning. It's literally just having the emotional intelligence to know, okay, this is what this person wants. It's a lot harder said than done. And this is how we can come to an agreement where both parties are going to be happy, right? Sales skills, super, super important. I'm going to put sales into S tier as well. Sales is not only directly can you make money from it, but also indirectly. It's the most common skill that millionaires and billionaires have. So if you look at past jobs that millionaires and billionaires have, they've actually done studies on this. The most common thing, the one that they notice over and over again, is that they had sales jobs early on in their careers. Next on the list is similar to sales. It's going to be marketing. Now, marketing is kind of like sales. You're going to be learning a lot of similar skills. However, you can use those and leverage it to more people. In my opinion, marketing is a little bit more about understanding kind of broad trends, whereas sales is more about kind of figuring out, you know, specific situations. Like, okay, this person wants this and this specific situation, whereas marketing is just like, okay, we have to show this to like a million people. So what are some broad trends that we can understand? But both of these are incredibly important. And it's something where in my opinion, if you have experience in this, it's going to help you in pretty much every area of your life as well. I would say this one, I'm going to put it slightly under sales just because I mean, I want to put it in S tier, but I'm putting everything in S tier at this point. So I'm going to put it in A tier. Next on the list is going to be leadership and management. Now these are technically separate, but I decided to kind of just put them together. There are not that many good leaders out there in the world and you know, companies, this is something that they try to vet people with, right? Even if you're just going into like an entry level position, HR, hiring managers, people that are, you know, potentially going to hire you are trying to look to see if you're open to becoming a leader in the future. That's one of the main things that they're looking for a lot of the time and managers make way more than the average employee. Yes, thank you. You will get rich quick. We all will. And a lot of the time, you know, getting some experience as a manager within a company is going to help you to start your own business later on down the line. A shipping merchant who raises fancy dogs. That's the life. So this is another one that is just super, super good. I want to put this one in S tier as well. I'm going to go ahead and put it into A tier. You know, management leadership isn't for everyone. Some people just want to, you know, show up, do their job and get their paycheck and that's totally cool. They just want to do their own thing. They don't want to have to like, you know, worry about all the other stuff. And I totally understand that as a manager, you're probably going to have to work a lot more and you're never really off because anybody can just text you or call you at any time. And a lot of the time you're basically on the clock. Next on the list is going to be trade skills. Now this is something where in my opinion, you know, maybe if you asked me this 20 or 30 years ago, wouldn't be as good. But just because of supply and demand, there's not that many people who have trade skills and there's a lot of demand out there for people who have these types of skills. So you can make a lot of money going into the trades. Now generally speaking, I recommend starting your own business. If you go into the trades, there's a lot more advantages to that. But there's just a ton of opportunity out there just because of supply and demand. There's not that many people with these skills anymore. But there's also a lot of downside to going into the trades. It's not for everybody. It can be very tough on your body. A lot of the time, you're not going to be able to work past like 50 or 60 just because it can cause a lot of wear and tear. So this one again, I gosh, I think it's really good, but I'm going to go ahead and put it in B tier. Next on the list is mathematics related skills. Now this is something where again, supply and demand, not very many people are good at math. Even less people I would say like math. And so if you're somebody who's good at it and you like it, it's just supply and demand. There's a lot of jobs out there that require you to be really good at mathematics, not that many people to fill the jobs. One thing I will say about getting a degree in mathematics specifically is sometimes it can be a little bit abstract. It doesn't necessarily teach you skills that you need to use in the real world, like employable skills. So you're going to have to figure out kind of how to supplement that with more employable skills. So for instance, maybe learning some programming, but yeah, mathematics can be great just because sometimes it seems a little bit too abstract. I'm going to go ahead and put this one into B tier, but I almost want to put it into A tier. Next on the list is going to be the skill of learning. Now this is kind of a weird one, but it's really good for you to learn how to get good at learning, right? The faster you can learn how to quickly get good at learning new skills, the better. And there really is a method to this. Like whenever you're trying to learn a new skill, there's a series of steps that you can go through to learn that skill extremely fast. And I'm not going to go into it in this video, but if you can learn how to get good at learning things really quickly, that's going to help you in every single area of your life, no matter what, you know, career or what, you know, maybe you decide to start a business or anything like that.  So this one is definitely S tier. Next on the list is going to be interpersonal skills. So this is going to be just like kind of like sales, I guess, very similar to that, just learning how to get good at interacting with other people. And this is all about, you know, being a good teammate, being a good leader, if you're in a management position, being good at following. If you're somebody who's in a room and you're, you know, not the most knowledgeable one in the room, then of course, you know, you don't need to always try to be the leader. Sometimes you need to be good at following. So yeah, extremely important. I'm going to go ahead and put this one into A tier. Communication, very similar. I would say this also includes like being able to give speeches and just effectively communicate with other people. For instance, what I'm doing right now, making videos, there's so many different ways for you to communicate with people. Super, super important for you to get good at this. It's just something that it's totally worth it for you to practice.  Communication is still going to be important. All right, so this one is definitely S tier. Next one on the list is going to be problem solving. So this is especially important if you decide to either become like a manager or a leader or an entrepreneur. But even if you don't decide to go down that route, being a good problem solver is going to make you incredibly valuable as an employee as well.  So problem solving, fantastic skill to learn. You know, if you're an entrepreneur, I'd say this is definitely S tier. But if you're an employee, maybe a tier, I'd say. Being professional, you know, this one's underrated. Things like just being early, for instance, like not being late to meetings, not being late to work. Being professional is super easy. It doesn't take that long to learn how to be professional. It's really basic.  So that's a pretty important one. I'll put it in A tier, I guess. It's kind of easy. So I don't think it deserves to be S tier. All right, learning about the history of 17th century French political artwork.  But the truth is it's not, it's F tier. When it comes to employable skills, this is definitely F tier. Now, if this is your passion, if 17th century French political artwork is your passion, then that's awesome, okay? I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. What I'm saying is when it comes to employable skills, it's not going to help you out that much. If you want to do 17th century French political artwork as a profession, you're going to need to get pretty creative and like start, you know, some kind of online business or something along those lines. So I realized there's nothing in C tier or D tier. Yeah, I did not plan this one out very well, guys. So honestly, all of these are so important. It's ridiculous. So I guess I'm going to kind of move these around a little bit. Health, I guess I'm going to put that one in A tier just because of the fact that it's really solid, but there's not a very high ceiling to it. So like business and technology, for instance, like the ceiling is making millions easily, right? Whereas health, the ceiling is usually a little bit lower than that, unless you become like a very specialized doctor or something, then you can probably make millions. But honestly, it kind of comes down to like what you're trying to do and what your goals are. Sales, I really love this one. I think it's fantastic, but you don't need this one to be successful. I just think it's a great option for you. And even if you're not trying to go into a sales type career, it just really helps you out. So I guess I'll move that one down to A tier as well. And then communication is important, but you don't necessarily need to be good at like giving speeches or making videos or anything like that. But it is a great way for you to kind of like leverage yourself again. There's only certain skills you can use to leverage like one person or a small group of people to get to millions of people, right? And the only skills I can think of, it really off the top of my head are three. And those are, you know, technology related skills like computer programming, making a website, making a program, sales slash marketing skills. You can use that to leverage yourself to get to millions of people. And then also communication skills. So I'm like making videos, you know, making a podcast, something along those lines is another way that you can leverage yourself to get to, you know, millions of people. So I'm actually going to put sales and marketing into S tier. And these are really the only ones you can use to leverage yourself into getting to millions of people. And then learning, I'm going to keep that there too just because it just helps everything else. Like learning is so important for everything else. Oh, wait, I got that wrong. So I guess I'll put marketing up there. Yeah. Okay. That was the marketing one. This is the leadership one. And I guess I'll put trade skills down into C tier. Not because it's bad. It's just because the ceiling is not as high as a lot of these other ones. Trade skills are still like super good, especially, you know, depending on what your goals are. And just to be able to fill out all of them, I'm going to go ahead and bump this one down, bump math down, and then bump professionalism just because it's so easy. I mean, like it shouldn't take you long to just, it's just basic, like show up early, show up five minutes early to the meetings. I show up 15 minutes early usually. So yeah, there we go. So that's kind of, that's kind of what I did. I bumped professionalism down to B, math down to C, trade skills down to D, and then history of 17th century French political artwork down to F. Let me know down in the comments below what skills I should include next time. This was loosely based on what you guys recommended, my own experience, and then zip recruiter skills index, which you should definitely check out. Fantastic resource. If you haven't done it already, go ahead, gently boot that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, etc. that you have on the video. And I'll see you guys next time.