What’s Good for the Business? Revisiting My Raw Data Interview
My interview on the Raw Data with P3 Adaptive podcast
In 2023, I was at Oracle, after Cerner Healthcare had just been acquired. I sat down with Rob Collie and Thomas LaRock to discuss my journey from BASIC programming in high school, studying English and writing in college, learning Microsoft Power BI and DAX, consulting, and working for Oracle. The full podcast is below, but now that I have moved beyond Oracle, I reviewed it and decided to put a transcript out there. I used Word text-to-speech for the heavy lifting, but then I also edited for clarity and have added some editorial clarifications. Below Rob’s Summary, I have made some quick links for easy navigation to interesting points. I also added section headers and quick links to get to the interesting bits quickly and bold to highlight key ideas. Clicking on (←) returns to Quick Links.
After using DAX for a project in 2014, I learned the fundamentals of DAX from Rob’s original video course in 2015. I helped crowdfund the color edition of Rob’s DAX book. I consulted on P3’s DAX Help Desk for a year. I ran social media for P3 for over a year part time. I did marketing full time for P3 for several months before realizing I missed working more on the business side of analytics and leaving to work for Cerner/Oracle.
Summary
Rob Collie: In The Hunt for Red October, which happens to be the last time that Alec Baldwin ever played a good guy, there's a scene where they’re like recording sound, [the] Red October submarine— and they're like Oh my gosh this doesn't match anything in the database must be a new submarine we've gotta get up to periscope depth and radio this back into base. Well you know you reach a certain age in life you start to notice similarities between the people that you meet people that you know— people are never identical but people remind you of each other after a while, don't they? you know you've got a bunch of different archetypes in your head.
Well today's guest, Fred Kaffenberger, the first time that my sonar equipment picked up Fred we had to immediately dash to periscope depth and radio this back into base because this was a new pattern very much unlike I think anyone I've ever known. Fred and I have known each other for seven plus years at this point. We've worked together twice maybe three times depending on how you count it, and like so many people on this show so many of our guests very zig-zaggy path to where he is today you know the usual English major becomes a SCSI hard drive salesman (when I say scuzzy I’m not talking about Fred). Then finds his way into analytics just a little bit, just dipping his toe.
In 2014 did not know VLOOKUP, did not know what pivot tables really were, but by early 2016 was so incredibly adept at Power BI, he was one of the first handful of people to pass our interview at P3 which to this day has about a 2% pass rate.
We talk about a lot of things: of course we cover his history, his life story, at least from the data perspective. We talk about the OG days of Power Pivot— yeah kids you don't know how good you have it. We talked about playing Zork on mainframes, another OG nerd cred. We talk about the power, the power of live EDM live electronic dance music, talk about what it's like to be Power BI expert at a company that's recently been acquired by Oracle and what might be like sort of like the spirit animal tone of our podcast we also talk about ADHD— what was I talking about? Nah it doesn't matter let's get into it.
Voice over: This is the Raw Data with P3 Adaptive podcast with your host Rob Collie and your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 adaptive can do for your business just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element.
Quick Links
Interview (←)
Rob: Welcome to the show, Fred Kaffenberger. Alright let's do this! Great to have you here! Tom’s chomping at the bit. Let's talk about the thing that we were talking about a little bit backstage so dear listeners: Fred and I have worked together twice which also means Fred and I have stopped working together twice [laughter] and we're still doing a podcast together 'cause still like each other.
Rob: Tom's curious.
Tom: I am.
Rob: What’s the story here? Fred you said you had a maybe a way to describe it that was gentle.
Fred: yeah you know I was doing marketing you know after doing Power BI for many years after consulting and working directly with customers. Then, I was doing marketing [for P3 Adaptive].
[Doing marketing for a consulting firm made me feel disconnected from the business need]
Fred: [At P3 Adaptive,] I was writing whitepapers for Microsoft that never got used, but one of the feedbacks that I got from that [from Microsoft] was that I didn't have the voice of the customer and I'm like how can I not have the voice to the customer. I thought about it and I thought it's true: as soon as I start working in marketing or sales (I come from sales), there's a slight focus on presenting things in a way that is beneficial to the company more so than to the customer and that's what I really love because I love working with people.
Fred: I love helping people get value out of technology and there's a lot of BS with the vendors, there's a lot of BS in consulting. P3 Adaptive has much less BS, I’ll say that…
Rob: That should be our new tagline: we have less BS. [laughter] I like it. So you did some marketing work with us
Fred: yes
Rob: Tom, Fred is — other than me so far and like a branding firm that we hired to help us for a while — no one has had the P3 voice down quite like Fred did, and that’s a difficult thing to get. It's rare. We have people that write content for us now and I'm not trying to besmirch them. It's just that at one point in time having Fred writing a lot of copy for us made everyone else's lives much more difficult that came after him. We definitely miss Fred. We miss you, Fred, but I understand that you're doing some good stuff these days, you're you're happy where you are. You have doing a lot of great stuff.
From Cerner to Oracle (←)
Fred: after [returning to] P3, I went to Cerner, which was a big healthcare company Kansas City, one of the major providers of the electronic health record. I started at the same time as the CEO of Cerner at the time, [Dr.] David Feinberg. I started at the exact same time as he did. He showed up at my orientation. He said: hey all you went to orientation [with me], come to my house for Christmas. And then we're rubbing elbows with board of directors, and Christmas was about the time that it hit all the papers that Cerner was going to be acquired by Oracle.
Fred: I'm just wandering around the party talking to different folks and went up to David— he likes to be called David — he said hey what do you do for Cerner? and I said well I help people move from Oracle reporting to Microsoft Power BI and he blinked twice I think and this is before you could say anything he said: well you might be flipping that soon. You might want to flip that. He's a straight shooter. He's a great guy, CEO. I think Cerner was 14,000 people. As the CEO of a organization that large to be as down to earth accessible as he was you know he's still around, and now we are part of Oracle which is 148,000 people and we're going through that process. You know the story of every company I've ever been at— even before I was working with data— even before I was working with technology a whole lot.
The story of every company I've worked with is OK we need to migrate from this system to this system. So, if you do that you're never going to have trouble finding a job because that's a constant process. People are always moving from one system to another and there's always hiccups along the way and all kinds of exciting opportunities.
Rob: So as the order come down since the Oracle acquisition that thou shalt not DAX?
Fred: Oh yeah. Well you know Oracle is a data company and they’re a competitor with other big tech companies like Microsoft and they're proud of their tools and Microsoft doesn't use their competitor’s stuff. You know everybody uses their own stuff, so yeah eventually that will happen but who knows how it'll be.
I've been learning the Oracle analytics cloud and it is different but you know it's all cloud: it's all in the cloud already because it's no secret that Oracle went to the cloud later than other people so they have a different take on it. They have different strengths in the cloud than some of the other organizations out there but yeah, Oracle, looking at it I'm like OK I see there's a physical layer, there's a logical layer, and there's a presentation layer. Yep, Power BI has all that but Microsoft did a really slick job of making it feel painless, making you not feel the different layers and at the same time there's Power Query which gives you all kinds of control over the queries that you're using for your report. You know with Power Query, the queries are actually in the hands of the business user and you don't have to learn SQL or anything else.
Rob: so it's interesting Microsoft's ecosystem for customers is certainly much more open to the idea that other systems exist than it was back in the Bill and Steve era. Microsoft's tools play nice with other platforms to a much greater degree and frequency than they used to but you're right internally at Microsoft I don't think you're going to find Oracle analytics being used too frequently, probably shouldn't expect an Oracle subsidiary to be slinging that Power BI super aggressively long term.
Fred: all of these companies work with each other. Apple and Microsoft worked with each other for a long time and they went back and forth about different ideas and so forth but when you're at that level you just have to work with everybody some degree
Rob: Speaking of [that:] Microsoft kept Apple alive for a very long time by continuing to make Office for Mac and it was widely talked about that Microsoft is like it's almost like a favor that was being done. I also heard that it was like it helps the whole antitrust perception to keep this completely harmless little pet Apple company alive. I wonder in hindsight if Bill and Steve regret having kept this competitor alive long enough for them to them to have their resurgence. Microsoft still got hit for antitrust. The Apple thing didn't save them.
Fred: No.
Rob: Now what, is Apple's market cap bigger than Microsoft's? I forget they're up there. Maybe Windows Phone would have been a thing without the iPhone, who knows?
Fred: Apple and Microsoft, they've really differentiated themselves, they're not fighting over the same exact piece of pie anymore.
Rob: yeah to a certain extent that's because neither of them could actually successfully build and market products in the other’s niche. If Microsoft could do the consumer space as well as Apple especially like peak Apple with Jobs still around.
Fred: Oh yeah
Rob: Microsoft would have absolutely not ceded that ground. They would have kept the fight up. They held on to Windows Phone— cold dead fingers— you know a long time. And Apple can't build the Vertipaq engine or SSAS Tabular. That's beyond Apple's capabilities in a similar way so no they don't fight over the same thing really that's because their weapons don't work in each other’s corners of the world it's coopetition to an extent.
Rob: So as of today, the last time I looked at your LinkedIn I think it said Power BI Evangelist. is that still your title on LinkedIn?
Fred: Lead Business Intelligence Analyst
Rob: yeah, a little diversification
Fred: yeah absolutely.
Rob: do you still do some Power BI on a day-to-day basis?
Coaching Power BI (←)
Fred: you know we haven't officially moved so there's a lot of people still using Power BI. A lot of what I do is I consult with different people who are using Power BI and so I'm doing a lot of internal consulting. I have a lot of different things that I do, and so I was working with somebody who was at the early levels of Power BI and I was working with him and I said OK let's go to Power BI desktop. Let's go to the data view, let's filter the data let's follow the filters through the different tables. So we're going to filter this table according to name then we get the ID. We'll go to the fact table and filter by that ID.
[This is the method in] Rob's book, for which I helped to crowdfund the color version.
[Up until my layoff by Oracle in April 2026, I was the key expert for Power BI and Fabric and administrator for both Power BI and Fabric as well]
Crowdfunding the DAX Book (←)
Rob: which perks did you get when you crowdfunded do you remember?
Fred: what were the perks?
Rob: OK so there was there was the T-shirt the I'm warning you all I have no filter
Fred: no, I didn't get that. I think I got stickers
Rob: there was DAX the way I like it, uh huh, un huh.
Fred: I have that I have a couple of those around.
There was the keep calm and calculate poster
Fred: no I did get the poster. I was pretty low level.
Rob: so but still that means that the Collie logistics hub of me, Jocelyn, and the two kids packed something up in our our living room. It was physically touched by a colleague, multiple colleagues, hands. Yes it was quite the scene: I've actually showed up at the post office I've got like 200 plus packages: you want just like bring them around back? you know what do you want to do with these things I'll walk into the door
Fred:that book is still the best thing for learning DAX. It's really the best one for learning DAX, the power of DAX. I still recommend it all the time
Rob: aw, thank you
Fred: even though all the screenshots are from Excel
Rob: I know
Fred: because it took forever for Microsoft to add the filter buttons to the data view
Rob: that's right it's been a couple of years for several years we've had it now but Oh my God was that just impossible to use that tool without it
Fred: it's hard to teach people the Collie method of filtering the data view if you don't have a way to do that
Rob: it's also incredibly hard to debug even if you know what you're doing debugging something that wasn't working right in Power BI without the ability to filter the data view was just— Oh my God like you could sort and sort but you didn't have filter or did you have sort ?
Fred: I think so. It still doesn't give you models like Excel does but…
Rob: oh right right
Fred: I mean if you have 5 records so you can count them but yeah
Rob: how did you get into all this in the 1st place what's the origin story what's your first collision with data and then we'll talk about your earliest collision with Power Pivot
Fred: right so you know to go way back in high school I was in a programming class I had a TI-99 and I learned BASIC programming I played Zork on the mainframe
Rob: oh that's a T-shirt
Fred: I've played Zork on the mainframe
Rob: exactly, that's the nerd cred
Fred: we would dial into that district's mainframe and play Zork on the work for Ed school so we did that at school we had TRS Model IIs. I mean they had like a hoagie keyboard. It was giant and the keybounce on those things, it was crazy you would hit L and it would just be run it down the line [LLLLLLLLLLLLLL]. I was learning BASIC at that time. I got to college and as you know at that time computer science was a math degree. I mean I didn't not like math. It's just that I had skipped around a lot. I skipped over fractions to pre algebra that kind of stuff so in college kind of Discrete Structures class. My memory is that we were solving quadratic equations using Boolean substitution
Rob: wow
Fred: I said I don't know, and I dropped out for a while came back and said you know I'm gonna do English this time
Rob: yeah it sounds like a wise choice
Fred: in English the goal was to become a professor so I went to grad school did all that in English but then our teachers were all like whatever you do get out of this field, get out! unless there's a strong voice of God telling you to do this, something in you that's really going to make you fight, get out so I got out.
Rob: it's like the average sci-fi horror story, like you're like this idyllic community and people will start passing you notes saying: run, run!
Fred: yeah or even the movie, Get Out
Rob: which I haven't seen
Fred: oh you haven't seen it yet?
Rob: no
Fred: Oh my gosh. It's pretty fantastic
Rob: so a horror story or horror movie, right?
Fred: it is, yes
Rob: we're not good with the scary stuff. Our particular flavor of sensitive neurology doesn't mix well with scary. I think it's been never that Jocelyn and I have watched anything remotely like a horror movie together
Fred: so funny thing we also watched Nope, which is more of a science fiction
Rob: haven’t seen that either
Fred: there are parts of it that are quite shocking because of things that happen but I heard Jordan Peele on something recently said that he looks at horror as just the other side of comedy. For him, it’s the exact same thing as doing comedy you know with a slight change in your point of view it becomes horror. It was ridiculous situations that would be funny in one context but in another context they're quite scary
Rob: yeah there's something like incongruous or unexpected about a joke
Fred: yeah
Rob: there's something kind of wrong there that makes us laugh
Fred: or if you’re observational, if you're looking at situations in life they're funny yes but there’s also a strangeness to them that if things were just slightly different it could go the other way
Rob: sometimes even as it intensifies in degree it can go from one to the other and back
From English to SCSI Hard Drives (←)
Fred: yeah so English degree. I'm out of grad school with the English degree I'm like what am I going to do? So I went to sales because that's where everybody goes, technical sales. I sold SCSI hard drives. I did all kinds of stuff
Rob: so SCSI hard drives?
Fred: yeah
Rob: B to C or B to B? [to consumers or to other businesses]
Fred: it was a little bit both because at that point in time that's so crazy too because you would have a .5 gig hard drive or something on the cover and anything you saw on the cover you knew it wasn't be available for you know three to six months and so you'd have a media person in New York City calling you up and said oh I got to have this now could you be like OK let me show you this other stuff. Let me tell you two of these instead
Rob: this was the thing right this was like a hipsterism type of thing within computing at the time. It was IDE right that was the the thing that everyone's hard drive used that was the protocol or whatever that was used to transfer data off of hard drives primarily IDE
Fred: right and then the SCSI hard drives were you take 4 drives you bundle them up together and you put the data across all of them and it's able to read and write from that
Rob: stripe it parallel maybe get a parity bits if you want to be wasteful but yeah I had friends be like yeah man, we need to get out of this IDE you know I'm making SCSI, it's like talk about their cars you know. I'm gonna give like more exhaust and some more overhead cam-a-bobbers or whatever you know. some nitrous it's like we're gonna get the SCSI
Fred: right SCSI yes it sounds really cool though
Rob: it's like Oh yeah I got SCSI drives I got a hemi.
[Fred: The business case of SCSI was that it enabled those working in the early days of video development and imaging to have faster access to data than the physical hard drives could deliver. The SCSI arrangement could be a bit fiddly so we often had to troubleshoot why something wasn’t working right.]
Triaging Bugs at a SaaS Company (←)
Fred: yeah so doing sales I ended up at a small software company selling facility management [software]. I'm doing the sales. I'm calling people, cold-calling people. I'm the only person there doing it and then they say oh can you take over the the backlog for enhancements and bugs and all that. I'm like sure I can do that. So I’m logging the bugs and doing all that. I learned a lot about troubleshooting because it was a matter of the owner would come and say: Oh no, someone pointed out this problem and would be all in a panic, panic, and I’d say, you gotta calm down. I said let's look and see what the scope of this actually is let’s see if it’s a user error or if it's something that it's on our side, and eventually I end up seeing that you know the software itself is pretty good already but there were some ways that security worked and had this complicated security arrangement within each company, and I said oh everybody thinks this works one way but it doesn't, it works in completely different way so I'm using my Venn diagrams in my head just trying to see what you know what everybody should see and so I prioritize about like 5 or 6 bugs and got those out to the developer.
Referential Integrity for Systems of Record (←)
A developer taught me so much about how to communicate such as be very specific full screenshots of things not just little tiny screenshots. Understanding how databases works. That's where I start understanding how databases work.
I learned that delete is the worst thing in the world because when you delete a record it's connected to all these other records and it just tears everything up so soft delete is great but delete itself does not—
Rob: for the benefit of worked and the two of you explain the difference between delete and soft delete and why delete is bad we've got the people here to explain this I'm not a database person do you know Tom?
Tom: no I'm looking forward to Fred's explanation here 'cause I'm not sure what he means either
Fred: Oh my explanation for soft delete is you just mark it as deleted. You put a flag on there that says it's it's deleted so nobody ever sees it again.
Tom: There's a column in the table that just basically says delete or not
Fred: yeah
Tom: OK gotcha but why doesn't that wreck things whereas the other one does
Fred: well I think it still does I mean it's wrecked some things
Tom: I think Fred what he was talking about was in the database that actually has referential integrity if you delete data from here that can cascade to other tables so all of a sudden there's data missing in in the variety of places at one point in human history databases with referential integrity existed. I believe that, but it's kind of like finding a dinosaur fossil. Never seen a dinosaur, I’ve just seen the bones of the footprints. So this referential integrity of course this used to be done back in the day with triggers so you had this whole layer of business logic that was just triggered so if you went to a table, you just did an update, 17 other things might happen. You would never even know and then you'd be like Oh my God what's going on? So then yeah foreign keys became a thing, primary keys, foreign keys. So the technology tried to get a little bit better so people could be understand then if you tried to delete it'd be like whoa I can't do that for you because there's a relationship here I can't just remove this row because that's something else depends on it. But these days I know people declare primary and foreign keys somewhat but most databases really don't have that. Good databases do. A lot of databases are really just you know some of they have the spreadsheet somebody just took this Excel or Access thing and just shoved it to SQL Server and there's no there's no nothing
[Fred: Really, referential integrity is still critical for transactional databases, especially if the system needs to be auditable. This is less of a technical issue than a business requirement. But deleting a customer will create holes in a transactional fact table. In addition, soft deletes are even commonly used in BI systems.]
Rob: it just sounds like kids these days
Tom: yeah it's all JSON it's all XML it's all hipster stuff eventually you'll be consistent you don't have to worry about it. We could just recreate the data. It's fine. I'll just go get it again load it again so that page is down for a couple of hours while I rebuild it whatever
Rob: no big deal
Tom: no big deal, nothing
Working with Developers, Reproducibility (←)
Fred: as a person delivering requirements to a developer you always think if I spell things out more they'll understand it more and he said the more words there are the more room there is for interpretation and I said uh-oh. So learn to be concise
Tom: what about the lesson of show me the error
Rob: so like the Jerry Maguire thing?
Tom: no yeah show me the so somebody's like this thing isn't working. Fred had mentioned you know get the screenshot which is close what I think is it's like show me what you're seeing because you're not likely gonna give me a reproduction of it or tell me how to reproduce it but at least let me see what you're seeing that was the thing I would tell customers all the time
Fred: reproducibility is another aspect. How I learned reproducibility was working with another developer who was more blunt and she would just send back an image that said with a stamp on it that said works for me! and I said OK
Tom: that's awesome, love it!
Fred: let me show you these conditions
Rob: roughly what year was this?
Fred: Oh my gosh. I can't do years without LinkedIn
Rob: that's OK we're a slow cooked podcast the time for this the crockpot of data
Tom: yeah I have to tweet that
Fred: so 2014
Rob: 2014 you're learning to write effective bug reports
Fred: yeah exactly
Rob: OK we met not long after 2014
Business Analysis, Pivot Tables & DAX (←)
Fred: Oh yeah yeah yeah that's true. so this was— years before that we're very rough I was doing these different sales jobs. Once I started doing that [customer support for a SaaS company] and I did that for over six years that's the longest job I had in my life. Once I got in there I said I’m going to stay here a while. I learned as much as I possible but and then I said what do I do next? I guess I could be a business analyst so elicit the requirements deliver them to the developers I can interface between business people and the tech people
Fred: so in that job I had also learned Salesforce. I learned Salesforce [administration and use]. I learned Salesforce reporting and that was pretty cool. I was still doing sales at that time when I got tired of that [implementations, customer management, bugs & enhancements]. What I did then was I took on a contract for facilities management at Sprint. My [new] manager had hired me just because he wanted somebody smart enough to figure out this tool that somebody in the organization had built and so that tool was an Excel application. It was an application built on Excel
Rob: it sounds dangerous
Fred: it leveraged Power Map.
Rob: Oh yeah, I remember Power Map
Fred: and it had kind of an intimidating front end because it wanted parameter values so that it could do K-means clustering and I said K-means clustering. OK I googled and I went and I found a white paper on K-means clustering and I read about 15 times and I said OK I know what the parameters should be. The thing about this application was it was owned by somebody in the organization who would come in and it was their tool. They let people use it but they would come in for two weeks and they would assess something and then they would bill and then they would leave. And so my manager, he wanted to do it for a year he wanted to run what-ifs for a year. And so we're plugging in different parameters to this thing and getting routes.
Fred: So what we're looking at is we're looking at work order data which is dirty nasty data
Rob: yes it is, yep
Fred: because there's a flag say if it's HVAC if it's air conditioning heating that kind of stuff but nobody uses it they just put “too cold”, “too hot”
Rob: yeah
Fred: you know then we have to analyze this and and we have to make sure we're counting all of these items because facilities wanted to take over it from the external vendor.
Rob: So what was the goal of the app? What's the app do like for the business?
Fred: it would do clustering, clustering including drive time, so that we could identify where the different routes should be where there should be an internal person who would run that route
Rob: so the classic traveling salesperson problem to computer science that is not actually like efficiently solvable but we try anyway
Fred: exactly that was a place where I learned two things they said oh you need to learn two things. In my job interview, he said you know VLOOKUP? and I said no. He said ah you'll learn
Rob: this is like 2014 right?
Fred: yes, yeah 2014
Rob: Fred Kaffenberger didn't know VLOOKUP yet
Fred: I didn't know VLOOKUPs!
Rob: watch what happens next it's unbelievable. It's like what happens next is like water thrown on gremlins
Fred: I had no idea what what VLOOKUPs were. The other thing I didn't know was: what's a pivot table. I had no idea
Rob: totally not surprised because those two go hand-in-hand
Fred: right
Rob: but I am very surprised what's going on a year later in your life.
Fred: so I'm bringing the same it's exact same stuff all the same time and I'm like oh this is such a waste of time, and while I'm out there googling pivot tables I come across Power Pivot and I'm like is that something to do with pivot tables? I don't know I did that and I found Power Pivot and then found Power Pivot Pro which is P3 Adaptive.com now and I starting reading Rob’s stuff, and like wow this guy's really got the voice of the customer.
Fred: He understands what it's like solve problems in the real world. He's not just one of these tech guys that is gonna BS you and then charge you and then you know run away with your money
Rob: quite the opposite
Fred: so here I was I was learning all this stuff [and I made] a Power Pivot model. I couldn't figure out how to do it in Power Query. I had to clean the data, had to take all of these different business rules that we accumulated over time and apply them to the notes field and the other fields so I had about 10 calculated columns that did this for me
Rob: yeah like contains because everyone's just jamming all the all the data that you wish were structured columns which is jamming it into the notes field: too hot, too cold
Fred: absolutely so that's what I did. Nobody else knew what I was doing because they didn't need to know. Whenever I get the CSV export from this tool every several times a week I would refresh my model and it just worked and I could say here's the report and copy the values and paste and send it out to people so they could look at it and all that.
Learning DAX Before Microsoft Learn (←)
Fred: And then they said we like you, we love you, you’re great. We never do this but you're coming up on your last month and we're taking everything that you're doing away from you no big deal just hang out come into work just hang out and I said oh wow I said that's cool I'm going to spend some money so I bought the video course
Rob: The Power Pivot Pro video course?
Fred: I did
Rob: The one I produced in 2013 while laid up with my destroyed knee. I'd forgotten that you'd taken that
Fred: I did take that that. That was what I could afford and that's what I did so
Tom: was that the 20 hour course?
Rob: yes 20-22 hour course that took me the better part of like four months to make, pretty ambitious
Fred: it was great course but you know the heart of it really is understanding the [P3 Adaptive] Reference Card. It's the rules of DAX. It's thinking in tables. It's tracing values to fact tables, all that stuff. Also just understanding how a pivot table works that was huge and so I did that. I learned it. That was end of 2015
Interview of Doom: 2% Pass Rate (←)
Rob: that's right. The thing that I know is that in 2015 is the first time that I had more work coming into our consulting company that I could personally address so that is when I designed [what] we now know as the interview of doom— called the interview of death— trying to soften it to doom and then after we rebranded doom we're gonna rebrand it further softer down from there. But you gotta slow step this. You know can't go all at once. And by the way that's still in large part the same test we used today. It's one of the single most important things in the sort of the formation of our company is how effective that test has been. It still rejects about 98% of candidates so it's mean and Fred was one of like the first half dozen to pass it and he passed it so I'm pretty sure that in 2015 at some point 2015 like friends like sitting in my living room in Indianapolis so this happened
Fred: 2016
Rob: 2016, you think?
Fred: I started in 2016
Rob: 2016 OK all right so still very very early and in 2014 Fred didn't VLOOKUPs. Friends, the data career trajectory comes with its own woosh sound. There's a little commercial where like I think it shows like an NBA star supposedly as a baby.
Fred: Oh yeah
Rob: it was like Allen Iverson or something right like: Even as a baby Allen Iverson had a really quick first step: the mom was outside with baby and he's standing there like in his diaper, cocked one leg up and next thing, oh he's gone, he's just like he's all the way down the street. That's kind of the vision I have in my head it's like hey hey Fred here why don't you try this DAX and see what you— boom, gone!
DAX Help Desk: Solving Complex Problems in 2 Hours (←)
Fred: You say interview of death and I'm not downplaying it at all. It was tough. You say test of death— what it really is is can you do something moderately difficult in DAX? here it is: can you do it? and I think the biggest thing I've learned as a consultant and it started probably with that test is that when you're a consultant it's kind of different from being an employee I think at least for me it was different. You've changed my life because for the first time I realized oh wow if I don't figure this out nobody's gonna do it for me. I can't just pass it to another department. I have to solve it myself and that's what the test was for me. It was this moment of saying oh if you're gonna be a consultant you have to be able to get to the answer so that's what I did and then I had a great time!
Rob: The Calvary isn't coming
Fred: no
Rob: because you are the cavalry
Fred: and the consulting at that time was totally bananas. It was crazy because you had these Excel people who were some of the smarter people at their companies and they're very smart in the world and they would say oh I hit something I don't understand and they would get out their credit card and they would call P3 and they would say let me schedule 2 hours and so so much of what I did was just meeting with people
Rob: help desk
Fred: it was two-hour help desk and I did this just yesterday at work but I would dig into the problem and I would say OK let's follow it and along the way. I'm thinking OK, two hours, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to figure this out in two hours. So along the way I would say oh here's how you troubleshoot and I would just show them all things along the way and so they always felt like they got their money’s worth but there was only like 1 case where I couldn't do it in two hours because it had a lot of measures. It had like 5,000 measures or something, and it was slow
Rob: and Help Desk: it's very hard to sustain a business that way. It was back when everybody was 1099 but we ran out of people who were willing and able to work 1099. We had to switch to a full time W2 hiring model in 2017 so the Help Desk model becomes very difficult to sustain when you have people's full-time salaries that you're responsible for but ooh, the Help Desk model, that is the deep end of the pool.
Fred: yeah, it’s the deep end
Rob:got piranha and don't get to see what's in the pool until the moment you plunge into it. It's like The Hunger Games right but then no one knows what they're gonna be popping out into yeah. Every two hour session is like that you have no idea it's just gonna be a layup it's just someone who just doesn't know where the setting is or is this someone trying to do essentially recursion in DAX which is not really possible and they're trying to push the envelope. You gotta help them like convert like into some sort of logarithmic method you know that case. You've no idea what's coming.
Fred: I remember a couple of times it was it just came down to the last 15 minutes add something clicked in my brain and I said oh I got it, very useful skill and just amazing
Fred: I remember I came up for a training in Indianapolis with Gil, we were both there at the same time
Rob: Gil Raviv.
Fred: and we were at the cafe and you said hey you want to come work for me full time and I'm like 40 plus hours of this I said yeah but inside I was like I can't do this 8 hours a day. I mean of course I didn't understand again that nobody does that
Rob: 40 hours of help desk, if it was sustainable maybe we would do that.
Fred: but I would feel like why these mathematicians that just goes crazy
Rob: or the chess master right that goes around and is playing like 40 different chess games at the same time in a in a room right? that's kind of what it feels like right like these people have all the time in the world to generate the problems you've got to like quickly bounce, bounce, bounce.
Rob: And it's it's like cross training. You don't train all the time— you can't just can’t
Fred: all different industries financial, real estate, education, advertising you know [also, supply chain, inventory, airline]. The thing is to you it's that these were really smart people. They knew their business. They knew the business logic of what they were trying to do. They just couldn't cross over into thinking in tables in that way so you use their intelligence as you're going because you know you're solving the problems but at the end of the day they're the ones who’re going to have to live with it.
Revolution vs Evolution with Power BI (←)
Rob: There’s been a bit of it's been a really interesting a number of really interesting evolutions. One thing that's pretty different, Fred, and I think you saw this in your second stint with us. This is one of my favorite ongoing jokes there's this business book that I haven’t read but I know what it says essentially, which is Crossing the Chasm, which talks about how businesses struggle to navigate the transition from the early adopters to the early majority. There's a big difference between that mindset of customer and so the early adopters are essentially revolutionaries. They're looking for revolution right and so the old Power Pivot Pro tagline accidentally or not accidentally used to be leading the data revolution we dropped that somewhere along the way because the early majority isn't looking for revolution, they're looking for evolution
Fred: yeah
Rob: they're not as hard charging, like looking to differentiate. They're not looking to stand out in the same way that that first crowd is it's almost like part of the first crowd's personal brand that they zig where everyone else zags, right? That's part of who they are. Some of the people that we've worked with in those early years they were making the right decision using this technology, they were making the right decision hiring us but at the same time if you look at the information that's available to them you can kind of come to the conclusion that some of those people were a little bit crazy
Fred: I know personally at least one of those guys
Rob: yeah I bet you do yeah super smart people and they were right it's hard to imagine if the tables were turned be behaving the same way. It's weird to say like me the founder of this company if the tables were turned I might not have hired. You know we’re definitely running out of those people… I had a like a case study kick off call with one of our clients this week and I was like Oh my gosh this is just like the early days just crazy ambitious I love it
Rob: but most of the time we're doing the really really really good solid thing which I think is kind of what I envisioned when I started the company. The customers we have now are more along the lines of what I was expecting. The early group was the group that I didn't expect to meet, so some of my absolute favorite people in the whole world
Fred: Oh yeah I love them
Rob: the people that you met in the consulting role here Fred that's not the usual. That's not the norm. The world just doesn't have that many of those people
Fred: you know and the other things happen with Power BI it's that there are so many organizations that moved to Power BI because it was at the right price point
Rob: Yep
Fred: and they just want to visualize their data using something that has a lower cost than whatever else they're using before
Rob: I got a a LinkedIn message the other day someone that I that I don't really know basically saying: IT has hired one of the Big 4 firms to come in and they built us a one-table Power BI model and I'm like oh I've heard this before… and he’s like what would it cost for y'all to come in and like audit that
Fred: [laughter]
Rob: and so I'm I'm talking about that but like it's pretty clear that like he's navigating these political waters— he's gotta tread pretty lightly and yeah it's a visualization tool isn't it? Power BI is a cheap visualization tool and it just that's the perception of it and that perception gets it adopted. It just gets it adopted really poorly, and then they need someone like us
Fred: yeah absolutely. You know a couple of those Big 4 were trained by P3
Rob: parts of them yeah we did train some departments right at some Big 4. That doesn't mean that we broadly infected those organizations with the proper skills
Fred: you know I think that Power BI has created a lot of opportunities, Power BI and other tools that are very accessible, have created a lot of opportunity. At the same time you're never going to have an organization where people just think in data. You know most people are just looking for their reports and that's what they want
Rob: that's where I was headed when I brought up the Crossing the Chasm and the early adopters and all that kind of stuff is that there was a higher percentage of the good kind of crazy people who were both amazing business thinkers but were also already very good at Excel. And so they wanted to be deeply involved in the writing of the formulas and everything. I had a lot of collaborative face to face jam sessions where we wrote formulas together, had a president of a large company in a private training at their company's headquarters where I interrupted him to ask him a question, he’s sitting at his keyboard in this conference room and he goes hold on just a second Rob. I'm just debugging this ODBC driver on this server I'll I'll get right back to you. So there was a higher percentage of those people in that early cohort whereas in the later cohorts of customers we're seeing really smart business thinkers still but a lower level of enthusiasm for the tools themselves.
Rob: That's the distinction. They want the magic results and some of them still do want to know how the formulas work etcetera. It’s just that the dial has been turned in terms of intensity and percentage.
Fred: I don't think it's enthusiasm for the tool as enthusiasm for what they're going to be able to do with the tool. I think there's a slight difference there. They're looking for the thing that's gonna get them what they have in their head they're looking for that thing that's gonna let them take it to the next level and they say Oh yeah this tool has room. I can do it here. And that's why they're enthusiastic about the tool: It enables them to take off in the 21st century jet instead of a biplane
Rob: Right, full start by plane powered by a lawn mower engine exactly.
Early Gen AI: Before Code Assist, Copilot (←)
Rob: Have you been dabbling in AI? Have you been screwing around with our new overlords, Fred?
Fred: you know a little bit .I did some imaging stuff and I'm like OK that's fine and I've done some stuff with ChatGPT and looked at that and said OK, can you do this and having taught writing. I can tell you that maybe ChatGPT might be a way to say hey put this in ChatGPT to get your first draft and then we'll bring it to class and work on it. And you can give directions to ChatGPT that says increase the variability of the sentences. Use complex sentences, you can do that and if you do those kinds of things you can make it so that the AI can't detect that it's AI but I think with certain things English teachers pretend to teach and students pretend to learn.
Fred: I think all teachers do this to some degree. Part of the problem is you've got teachers teaching students to write things that nobody wants to read. Not even the teacher wants to read it. There's a certain part in basic writing that's not going to be real exciting to read but your goal is to kind of get people to put more of themselves into the writing and it's to think more and to personalize more so yeah if you want a boring essay yes you can put it into ChatGPT and get a boring essay out.
Fred: it's also kind of fun because I said let me play with this. I thought of an obscure academic topic and I said OK write an essay on this and include citations, Works Cited, and so what it did was it generated a really convincing list of Works Cited for all of the points it made and it had names of prominent scholars and real journals and real volumes and real volumes and issues of these journals and it was all fake
Rob: so none of those articles existed
Fred: it was so convincing I went and I looked one up and I was like oh wow this doesn't exist at all
Rob: wow that is terrifying. Yeah we've seen this. A friend of mine who has decided to over the years that he hates DAX, used to like it, now he hates it. He’s so over it. He posted on Facebook: so I I just told it to write me a DAX measure it was a complicated DAX measure that he asked to write and it spits out this DAX code and I'm like wow. I'm looking at this DAX going that's pretty awesome, terrifying, really scary, so I just took a screenshot of it, shared it internally on our Slack and and Ed Hansberry looks at it goes: yeah that code doesn't work. But like I didn't bother to check and I couldn't tell. All I've done is write a best selling book on DAX and I'm looking at DAX and I'm like that looks like it works to me. It's an amazing bullshit engine. It's like Will Hunting and his mentor in the movie right? There's only like 12 people in the world who can tell the difference between those two people and he's one of them that's that's who it it requires to call bullshit on ChatGPT.
Fred: Yeah so I imagine we're gonna see… people have said this. I imagine we’re going to see AI take over a lot of stuff, and it’s going to be really pervasive. We’re going to see it in advertising. We're gonna see that and all kinds of stuff just like we saw with the Internet— sure we're gonna see that but you have to ask yourself: are we using the technology or what we get from it or are we using it because it's the technology, it’s the cool thing?
Fred: and so we're we're doing that. We get a lot of benefits from the Internet, but I'd rather go to a a live lecture if I can. I'd rather go to a a live reading of a fiction or poetry or a play. I'll stream that stuff too but there's something about being in a place and taking part in it that's always going to be better
Rob: are you into an electronic dance music?
Fred: not at all
Rob: because I was going to ask you. This is where we discover the frontier of this preference. I got dragged one time to see Diplo, live. I went into it as a cynic; I came out of it as a cynic. Everyone had a great time. I was the only one that was sitting there going like yeah you're right you haven't lived till you've seen live Diplo.
Rob: It was all just a performance. You don't even know if he's actually doing anything up there. You have no idea what buttons is he pushing. He's not pushing enough buttons to make all of that sound OK.
Fred: Right, I can see you know you wanna go to New York opera but you don't wanna fly there right and you stream it on your TV. I think that's OK
Rob: man I don't know there's something about physically being there, there's something about a collective experience of all these people being in one place, right, so even at live Diplo where there's nothing about the live performance itself that’s in any way different from a recorded performance as far as I'm concerned but everybody else there people there who are believe that it’s significant, then it kind of makes it significant. And it's only curmudgeons like me that just stand up my arms folded across my chest saying nah this sucks. You would go listen to a live reading of even like fiction
Fred: yes
Rob: that's kind of analogous to the Diplo thing
Fred: right well it depends on if they're actually doing something up there or they're just playing a a CD
Rob: OK well here's the thing: you go to a live reading, yeah, they're not writing it right then, they're not making it up on the spot they're following essentially a prerecorded script whereas like people who are playing instruments are actually like making it it's a subtle distinction
Fred: well sort of yeah. Wo I just saw a poetry reading by Naomi Shehab Nai and she had such a presence. she was looking at people in the room she was responding to everybody in the room like a master teacher and she said oh by the way one of the poets she admired would always be backstage before the poetry reading revising the poetry
Rob: that sounds like me, my slide deck
Fred: and then he would come out and he would read it and [say] I'm gonna read this poem and every you know and everybody knew the poem or whatever it would be different than what was published
Rob: yeah that's live to me that's live poetry in the moment
Fred: yeah exactly so it's a moment in time it's a human connection
Rob: well listen even Diplo live I mean he interacted with the crowd too when I say ho you say ha, and when I say this you put your hand in the air like this and everyone goes along with it. And I’m like, you robots
Fred: I like a lot of different kinds of music I like a lot of different kinds of books and things but you know some things I've tried like a lot of different foods some foods I don't like the whole lot but most of them I do
Rob: I don't think I disliked the concert that we were at but I just I couldn't handle the irony of it all. The irony of the whole thing bothered me so badly, I left.
Fred: Oh yeah you know EDM is, it's club music, right? So you go to a concert and it's already a lot like going to a club and that's not where I hang out
Rob: me either that also had something to do with it I was with very shiny people of like how do I even make it into this group I don't belong here
Rob: anyway so we talked about live Diplo which is important.
Early Gen AI Continued (←)
Rob: We were talking about AI, right? Maybe I saw you posting about some things on LinkedIn but I had this impression that you'd be playing with these tools. You know the reason I'm using these tools a little bit is because of the healthy paranoia that hey Microsoft injected it to me. Microsoft knew that they had stolen sort of the industry from IBM, and so it was kind of ingrained in the Microsoft culture that someone was always coming for them and this kind of came back to bite them a little bit that they kind of over villainized their competitors and played a little too rough at times and it hurt them
Fred: I watched pirates of Silicon Valley so that has the broad strokes
Rob: maybe the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows might have been a bridge too far so I had that whole culture instilled in me growing up with Microsoft and then our whole company is a disruptor and so we're coming along stealing an industry from the traditional players. That's our business model. And so of course I've got my head on the swivel for who's me. Like if I'm a meteorite coming for the dinosaurs, what's coming for me? At the moment I'm looking at AI going like OK maybe this can supplement what we do. It isn’t even 100% clear to me how yet. It isn’t reliable enough to really like paint a very clear road map for that but I think that's gonna happen we're gonna end up using it in certain ways so we want to be paying attention, we want to to be like kicking the tires. At least this generation of tools isn’t going to be completely wiping this business model off the map, but things change, right?
Fred: Things change. AI is here and anomaly detection, and the ability to generate text insights based on what’s on a page, that’s fine, and probably will help to bridge the gap a bit.
Rob: So I’m not going to make the mistake though of looking at where AI is at today, taking a snapshot and going ok, it’s bunk, and just throwing that away and not paying attention to how it changes. It all depends upon how much this stuff exponentially can build on itself. We don't know that yet.
Fred: yeah it's very impressive now and I think we're gonna see a lot of innovations. I don't know where it is. My default towards any new technology is always skepticism. I'm always critical of it because whoever I'm involved with I want to make sure that the decisions being made are based upon what's good for the business and not just being that early adopter. You know if there's a clear benefit for their [business], yes. But I think especially when the excitement gets so ramped up then you start to wonder you say OK let's make sure we're getting the benefit from this and we're not just jumping on a bandwagon because everybody's doing now.
Rob: you hear that folks that's a very responsible attitude towards new technology
Rob: Now I wanna take you back in time a little bit and say remember in 2014 Fred didn't know VLOOKUP. In 2016 he's sitting in Indianapolis in the House of like the high priest of the time of the Power Pivot DAX cult so in less than two years time Fred with this responsible skepticism, critical eye towards new technology went from no VLOOKUP to DAX god in less than two years. Imagine if he weren’t so careful he would have learned Power Pivot before VLOOKUP. That is a seriously a very meteoric learning curve. It's a strong endorsement of Power BI. It's a strong endorsement of DAX, right? It’s value must have been backed clearly apparent right it didn't require looking that gift horse in the mouth too long
Fred: it was very easy at that point to see the value because all of the other stuff, all of the other features had not yet clouded the view because it was pure value. There were no bells and whistles, it was ugly
Rob: I like this a lot there was something really honest and fundamental about it back in those days
Troubleshooting a Complicated Visual in Power BI (←)
Fred: I think what you do now is great but you know I helped someone with bookmarks the other day and I just you know bookmarks for me are so tedious because there's this whole complex infrastructure there in Power BI: you've got the bookmark itself; you've got buttons; you're grouping things and it's very hard to see what's actually going on somebody was using this pop-up filter. You know the Power BI filter pane isn't good enough [for them]. They want to add their own and this person didn't build this— she inherited this model this report and the pop up filter pane is there. When it goes away, you click off the filter pane and I said OK but Power BI doesn't support clicking off of something and I said oh there's a button the size of the whole page
Rob: wow, holy shit
Fred: and it wasn’t clear, [there’s not] a button that says close filter pain. So you think you're clicking off of it you're not. You're just clicking on this button.
Rob: You're clicking on the whole page button. Well, that’s some very precisely manipulated Z order. Was there anything else? Was the button like invisible, are there things hiding behind it that you can't interact with as a result?
Fred: Yeah, you can't interact with anything until you click it which then closes it
Rob: so you said tedious and bookmarks? I agree this is almost like punch card level programming when you get into really complicated bookmark shit in Power BI. It's not my favorite.
Fred: you always used to say that there's the data people and there's a visual people and I'm a totally data person. I want that. I don't want to fiddle with building an application in a sense where you're closing windows and opening windows and all those. I want to show the data, make it look clear, take off the axes. Do everything that makes it look clean. I don't want to fiddle with all that stuff [the really fine details of an application-like experience of business intelligence]
Rob: two things that you said I think they intersect really well one of them was the observation which many of us share which is that Power BI has one mindshare and one adoption by default more often than on its true merits. It is a magical, magical machine. We [P3 Adaptive] created the software Hall of Fame to put Power BI in it it but it's being adopted so many times because it's the cheapest visualization tool. And then you take that and you combine it with the thing you were just saying which I hadn't really thought about just the purity of the Power Pivot experience. Now it was as pure experiences goes a little impure right? It’s you know, an add in and everything was pretty janky in a lot of ways but you knew what you were getting— so clear if you were using it you knew why you were using it. You were using it to get to DAX. You were using it to get to the compression engine that can eat that much data and still perform. You were using it for relationships, for star schema models, multi fact table models and it was just mind-blowing whereas now you can use it 'cause you think it looks good
Fred: and if you're using Power BI to show direct query maybe you're better off in another tool. Maybe another tool's gonna perform better than Power BI. Power BI was really made for import mode and hybrid is great and maybe hybrid gets you to some of that better performance but…
Rob: I remember actually no that you mention it like — we're you're still trying to get this guy on the show— but Alan Faulting who reported to me on Excel and he did the pivot table much more than I did and you know. I like maybe it was 95% him and 5% be looking over his shoulder saying if you explain that to me I'll tell you whether I think I agree. You know like he knew the industry and I was still very much learning the industry of BI at the time he left Microsoft to go to Tableau. He's left tableau since then and I asked him you know sort of like what was driving it this is just a snapshot memory that I took like somebody said was that at the time the analysis services team was so focused on cached mode which is still like what 95 plus percent of Power BI models are like. It actually imports the data into the Vertipaq engine and stores it, right? And he's like but that's not how the world's going, Rob. There's physics involved in this. The data's sitting over there. Pulling all of it across the wire into this model. That's not the trend things are going in right so I think he was struggling to get them to agree to do something like direct query and it's kind of funny all these years later to [see that] great, you've had it like seemingly forever now.
Fred's Career Trajectory (←)
Fred:
So when I did consulting for P3 I learned DAX intensely.
When I was at the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, I built Power BI there the ground up and I got really good at Power Query.
When I started at Cerner I got really good at figuring out how does direct query work and you have to forget everything that you know about how to make a good data model in Power BI.
I'm exaggerating a little bit but you have to forget a lot of what you learned if you're just using direct query itself. If you're using hybrid it gets a little bit more complicated but direct query is its own thing
[Fred: OneLake and the Directlake mode in Fabric address caching now, which shifts much of the burden off the analyst to decide whether to cache data or not. In addition, analyzing realtime data with KQL makes Microsoft into a leader with IoT.]
Rob: reminds me of an old Mitch Hedberg joke: the ad comes on TV and said forget everything you know about truck bed liners so I did and they tried to sell me truck bed liners and I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. [laughter] Forget everything you know about Power BI, so I did. And then they tried to talk to me about tables and star schemas, I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. I think I have one model that we use now that has direct query in it and it's actually like sort of feature that we've not taken advantage of. We have like this one direct query table in this model and we're not really using it but every time I open it in Desktop I have to deal with the prompt that pops up it often pops up behind Power BI saying hey do you know there's a table in here that's a security concern and we decided to be such an important message we decided to put it behind.
Rob: Microsoft has the highest count of windows popped behind other windows
Fred: z order is hard
Rob: they are paving the world with windows popped behind other windows and I'm not sure that I really get windows popped behind other the windows. Microsoft can't get enough of it.
Neurodiversity in Professional Life (←)
Rob: So we're talking a little bit backstage there was a series of posts that you I think you shared on LinkedIn about the intersection of ADD and Asperger's [aka ADHD & autism]
Fred: Oh yeah
Rob: I watched the video and I'm like oh, man, this might be so right about me that it's exhausting to think about what this implies and what I would have to do to come to terms with it. It was like someone had just given me like a quest and I'm like ah but I don't want to go to the lonely mountain then back today like that sounds like a lot of work you know so I kind of like shelved it but I remember recognizing like OK this sounds like me
Rob: you talk about this sort of stuff a lot and relatively openly so where are you at on your own sort of journey?
Fred: said oh OK so for years I thought you know I had certain autistic traits and and you know neurodivergence was the term that came out and I said oh that's really attractive. I had a couple of classes in my graduate education classwork, a couple classes in Special Ed and they really focused on autism. We read Temple Grandin and we've read all of these books. I don't remember them talking too much about ADHD. I was already kind of soft into the idea that neurodivergence is a good thing, autism. So my daughter shows me this video and I say oh OK because I thought Asperger's didn’t quite fit, I said maybe I've got “Kaffenbergers.” My dad was told in fifth grade to drop out of school and he did. They said you’ve gone as far as you can go, drop out. In his small town of Missouri, and then he hung out for a year and then went back to public school and and he was OK, fine. [I] notice this. My wife has had some of these [traits] also but I watch that I'm like oh I didn't know what ADHD was.
Fred: It really took me off guard because when I was in fifth grade I listened to a cassette tape and I'd count tones or something while somebody read a story and I like oh I'm just gonna listen to the story and they said oh you can't concentrate and I said I'm just concentrating on different stuff man but that's not what ADHD is. It's actually— you have to want to do it you have to have something that motivates you to do it and then you can do it I learned that I got diagnosed ADHD, started on stimulants and I'm like wow there was a lot of stuff I wasn't doing because it was just kind of difficult. So I want to read a lot of books I've always read big novels didn't always read the short books in college but I always read the big ones and so I said oh wow now that I’ve started medicine. It's like I've got this—I always had hyperfocus which is what we call this ability that's what you need when you're working DAX help desk. You need hyperfocus. You need to go into that zone and all of a sudden it's like directable hyperfocus. I could hyperfocus on work. I can hyper focus on— it's kind of dangerous because you have to say OK what am I going to focus on? You have to be conscious about what you're focused on because otherwise I can get distracted and focus on something else but yeah I can focus on tedious things.
Rob: it sounds too good to be true. Let me react to the something that you said, which is that ADHD is you have to want to do something to do it. Isn't that just the way it is?
Fred: yes, [laughter], I agree. That's the default. For me desire is what makes us go. It's this engine. It really gives us the power to do anything. If you're interested in something yeah you can do anything you want to, just the way the world works and then you find out that no it's not the way the world works I had a roommate in grad school who was from Sri Lanka and he really liked music. He really wanted to be in a band but his father was like no you got to be a lawyer so he was being a lawyer and he was doing it. He was actually being a lawyer. He was studying all that and I'm like I just don't understand how you do that.
Rob: I've often said if I'm neither excited nor scared, I'm stationary
Fred: there's a lot of people out there talking about positive ways of looking at ADHD and there's a lot of different things going on with it one of the ones I like the best is there's a Dr. William Dodson. He has something called the ICNU framework which is interest or fascination, challenge, novelty, and urgency. And are you a deadline person? yes yeah me too. So these are the things that that really motivate us. Sometimes he also talks about passion but passion is really hard for doctors to talk about because it has to do with meaning. You know that goes out of the medical field and it takes you into the humanities
Rob: we don't want to cross that line
Fred: well I mean it's a kind of thing where I read a book one time and this woman was having a lot of deep problems and the doctor said well you know as a doctor I can't tell you this but it may help you to go work with people who need a lot of help then you'll get better
Rob: it's like the scene in Fight Club where the he tells the doctor he won't give him the sleep meds. “I'm in pain here” he said Oh yeah you wanna see pain, go to you know this church on Tuesday nights and see the guys with testicular cancer right and that's what kicks off the whole crazy movie right? That's the doctor breaking character. Now we're outside the doctor's field now he's just a human saying oh you want to see pain
Fred: so yeah I'm thinking a lot about this I'm thinking a lot about over the course of many years I developed strategies. I learned how to carry a notebook or anytime I meet somebody new I write down their names and then when their in a conversation, like a teacher does, kind of practice their names in my head, this kind of stuff
Rob: do you have like face blindness? I have a little bit of face blindness to go with my ADHD.
Tom: So what’s face blindness? You can’t remember peoples faces?
Rob: It’s very hard to describe. My resolution on remembering facial features and mapping them to a personality isn't as good now. With lots and lots and lots of exposure, lots of interaction I get great resolution. In shorter increments — I play roller hockey now once a week and there's like basically the same 50 people every week but there's enough of them and I'm being moved around from team to team every couple of seasons or whatever and like Oh my God like people that I used to know their name barely, now I change teams and I see them in the hall and I'm like shit is that person Cruiseman or is it Lee? and I don't know
Fred: for me I have to be really intentional about it. I do know that a lot of facial memory is very situational so I sat down at this poetry reading and the person behind me somebody I had been singing with in the choir and I was just like [huh? until she mentioned choir].
Fred: Oh yeah OK it's interesting to me because a lot of the ADHD stuff out there is written from a medical perspective you know I was put on Ritalin when I was 10 years old and after two weeks I said I don't know what this is doing for me so I I stopped it right but you know it was this medical approach what we call the medical approach to disability where you say OK here's a pill and you're good right? but I didn't know why and the explanation they gave was really not very good. It was like an answer to a question that that I had never asked. But now there's YouTube. There's all of these people making videos talking about their own experiences, a lot of doctors who have ADHD and and autism or both what you call AuDHD AuDHD. It's autism and ADHD together they often happen together. There's a lot of conditions that can occur with it. I don't have dyslexia but that's one, dysgraphia which is bad handwriting. That was a bane of my grade school and this makes diagnosis. That video is a woman that was talking about this stuff right and she's sharing her own experiences having both of these conditions simultaneously makes it very difficult to understand if you have either of them because they pull in different directions and they confuse you but as soon as you start to feel like oh I think I'm getting closer to understanding one of the things that's wrong with me you get all these counter examples about yourself that tell you don’t fit that diagnosis. It's actually because you're trying to hit 2 targets when you think you're trying to hit one when. You're trying to hit 2 and it's very very very confusing it's—
Fred: at some points they they balance each other out but other times they gang up on you
Rob: they’re like finish him!
Fred: Exactly. So like I say the meds don't help with most things all they do is give that stable dopamine that everybody gets. Yeah, everybody else is born with it, and it just kind of comes in norepinephrine and dopamine whatever.
Fred: But [here’s] a good thing actually. One of my best friends in grade school told me recently that he really likes science when he was a kid. The fact that I liked science also made it possible for him to pursue what he wanted to do the whole time but if he had just stayed within his lane if you had just done what the people around him were interested in what his parents were interested in, if he had just done that then he would have missed his career working for a big chemical company, 30 year career or something with a big chemical company, and that would never have happened if he didn't have somebody in his life that said hey yeah it's OK to like science.
Rob: You need some peer validation for sure
Fred: as far as I'm concerned it is true that everybody has desire, you know Aristotle said it: everybody has a desire for happiness and it's just some of us can't operate without following that in some way. The rest of us just kind of get roped along to supporting the institution, the community, whatever, and we need both, but it's great to have community. It's great to have people reflect on their own experience with these conditions and not just see it as a problem to be fixed with a pill
Rob: especially in the world of social media where everything's so heavily curated you're getting this picture of humanity all these perfect humans out there just performing at high levels and there's nothing wrong with them at all, again because they're not showing you they're filtering that out. LinkedIn has like metastasized to the same sort of thing that Facebook is in terms of like creating FOMO or feelings of inadequacy but now it's not just much personal life. LinkedIn now brings it to your career it brings deep feelings of anxiety to the safety of your career. If you're not using AI right now you're just you're falling behind, you're gonna be obsolete
Fred: but if you do that and so far as you do that you're missing what's a really gonna be of value to your company, you're missing what's valuable to you personally, and you're just going along with this. ADHD people— we’re not immune from that. We think that just as much as everybody else to some degree but we also have a little bit more of an internal thing where we're like you know what that might be good but I need something else right now.
Rob: all right I know that we're a little bit over time here but let me ask you what do you see yourself doing in five years?
Fred: I have no idea. I've never been able to answer that question
[Fred: The discussion of Gen AI and what’s next along with this five year question must have struck me, because the following month in April 2023, I dug in and started to learn Kusto Query Language (KQL), used in Microsoft Fabric for analysis of large volumes of realtime data]
Rob: honest answer OK hey OK we're talking about ADHD. What do you see yourself doing in 5 minutes, Fred?
Tom: so the proper answer the proper answer somebody says where do you see yourself in five years it's in the mirror unless I'm a vampire—
Rob: that's a dad joke par excellence
Fred: in five years I'm sure I'm going to be helping people get value from technology, don't know exactly what that's going to look like but that's what I you know
Tom: that's pretty vague
Rob: judges? I'll allow it
Fred: I was talking with someone yesterday who reached out to me. She's in school for data analysys and she reached out she said OK So what kind of things have you done and I told her I worked at this and then [she said] Oh my gosh you did all kinds of different things. There's a story about the woman that brought tents to China something like that in the different parts of her life she learned how to make poles and she learned how to make cloth and she learned all of these things and so by learning all these things she ended up knowing how to you know how to make tents.
Rob: it’s the decathlete metaphor. She might not have been the best person at making cloth, the best at making poles. She was the best tent maker.
Rob: I’d drop the mic but it's on the stand.
Conclusion (←)
Rob: Well, Fred, it's a pleasure
Fred: It’s great! Thanks, Rob!
Rob: a pleasure as always to catch up. I don't think I've ever known anyone that I would put in the same category as Fred Kaffenberger. You are one-of-a-kind. and I'm really glad that we've we've crossed paths and I'm really glad that we've stayed in touch. You’re a gem, man. I love you.
Fred: thank you so much. It means so much. For years like I said you were the guy who was really getting people excited about what they could do about who they were as a person already and what they could do if they just got in touch with the right tools so thank you, Rob
Rob: very welcome
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