Tech are the ones with the advanced ideas.

Yeah.

Uh, and, and actually, I should have mentioned this before.

So, you know, for people who haven't heard of The Phoenix Project, uh, there is a book I suspect you've heard of, uh, called The Goal, uh, by... written by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt.

And so, uh, and especially in plant manufacturing, uh, you know, across every industry, uh, you know, it's taught in almost every MBA curriculum.

It's taught in almost every operations research curriculum.

And, uh, it was, uh...

Mm-hmm.

Over to you, Gene.

Yeah.

[laughs] Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction, Tim.

It was such a privilege and an honor to be a part of the Foo Camp experience, and it was a mind-expanding, uh, j- it was just a revelatory experience.

And so, uh, as, uh, Tim mentioned, uh, I've been spending 27 years studying high-performing technology organizations, and, uh, so much of that was studying how organizations are rewiring, uh, with AI, just like they did in the DevOps revolution, you know, 10, 15 years ago, but probably 100 times larger.

Um, but I wanted to-- What I shared in the, uh, in the lightning talk at the, uh, at Foo Camp was the strangest experience I've ever had, [laughs] which was, um, around agents, um, and when Fable went away.

It was like the most, uh, terrifying, uh, riveting, scary, heroic save [laughs] that I felt like I made in my career, and I just wanna share, uh, with that.

Vernor Vinge.

What actually pulled you into that study? I mean, what was the moment that you realized, hey, man, this is where I want to spend the next couple years of my decades of my life on?

Oh, boy.

Yeah, so I think many technologists now, they might not remember the days when organizations only deployed once a year.

I mean, they weren't great experiences.

They were very dramatic, very exciting in the worst possible way.

Many things would go wrong.

They would cause chaos and disruption downstream.

So if vibe coding and citizen development, if this is 100 times bigger, what specifically are we going to break first when the building stops being

Actually, can

I share kind of an exhilarating moment I had like literally probably four weeks ago? So this has been 15 years in the making.

You know, every time I listen to a podcast or a YouTube video, I take a screenshot and, you know, in the hopes that, you know, I can go recall it sometime.

And so, you know, my entry, kind of my life-changing moment was in June 2025.

No, June 2024.

That was almost two years ago where I meet Stephen Yagy.

And that was a And so basically we pair program together and, you know, he's like, what do you want to work on? I'm like, it's obvious.

If there's something that I didn't bring up, just let me know.

Actually, can

I share kind of an exhilarating moment I had like literally probably four weeks ago? So this has been 15 years in the making.

You know, every time I listen to a podcast or a YouTube video, I take a screenshot and, you know, in the hopes that, you know, I can go recall it sometime.

And so, you know, my entry, kind of my life-changing moment was in June 2025.

No, June 2024.

That was almost two years ago where I meet Stephen Yagy.

And that was a And so basically we pair program together and, you know, he's like, what do you want to work on? I'm like, it's obvious.

If there's something that I didn't bring up, just let me know.

Any hiccups that we as MSPs present to you?

I think that if I were to say the biggest challenge is to get MSPs to think about security differently.

Because traditionally, MSPs have been very much focused on the preventative aspects of security, right? It's the risk mitigation.

It's the EDRs, the MDR services.

It's the encryption.

It's the patch and vulnerability management.

But when you look at it today... with AI and the tools that are available to really make any moderately skilled cyber criminal incredibly powerful in terms of the capability that they have, in terms of the scale that they have.

you know,

And so I'd love it if you could talk to us a little bit about One Last Monster, and then maybe about how your own background plays into that story.

Yeah.

So One Last Monster is a short pilot that sort of I created it and then I animated it with a, another good friend of mine, Elmer Barcenas, uh, who's an incredibly talented animator.

So it was a really indie production, and it's the story of a, uh, the empress of a distant world that's based on, um, Joseon-era Korea, which was, I think, 14th century to 19th century Korea before modern, uh, the modern era.

Uh, so it's a...

I suppose it's a historical sci-fi fantasy fiction piece, not really historically accurate.

But in that world, the planet of Aden, which stands in for Korea, has been attacked by aliens over and over again through its history, just like real-life Korea was attacked by, uh, foreign powers repeatedly throughout its history, like the Mongols or the Japanese or, um, the, the various dynasties of, uh, China that they had complex relationships with.

As we wrap up our conversation, talk to me about the importance of story and why you feel like storytelling is a calling and maybe how that plays into the arts as a vehicle of story.

So what's the trick to then, besides the visibility area, move into that MSP motion at scale?

Well, you're absolutely correct in that Absolute, over the last 30 years, has worked with strategic OEM partners to be embedded in the BIOS and the firmware of over 600 million devices that are already deployed in the world.

So all the devices that MSPs are currently deploying in their fleets from Dell, Lenovo, HP, and 25 other manufacturers are have our technology built in as a standard component, right? And it's just about activating that and utilizing that to its potential that it's all about.

So for us, you know, that awareness is absolutely key in the knowledge of the capabilities that we have around technology.

Mm-hmm.

But I think we've all seen with the acceleration of AI adoption and especially with that actors and what they're doing with it.

It's not a question of if it's a question of when, and when that does occur and customers don't ask how much malware has been dropped, you know, blocked or how many email attachments were, you know, flagged.

So when you look at what you offer and the evolution of MSPs to managed intelligence providers, how do you envision MIPs in an ideal world and what do you need to do to get there?