The following transcript is provided by YouTube, mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode click HERE.
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is proudly sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind each and every year the
rising tide Mastermind gets together in Atlanta for a live event this is one of
the most anticipated events within the rising tide Mastermind normally we have
a zoom call each and every week but this is where we all come together and we
become better friends we learn more about each other and we help each other
with their issues it is my favorite thing and I’m sure it is going to be
your favorite thing to look forward to if you were a member of the rising tide
Mastermind that could be a possibility to find out if the rising tide Mastermind is right for you and you are
right for the rising tide Mastermind go to scalingup h2o.com forward slash
Mastermind and you can schedule a 15-minute call with me to find out more
foreign up Nation Grace Blackmore here your host
for the scaling up H2O podcast and Nation happy former industrial water
week of course we said goodbye on Friday to our sixth installment of industrial
water week and it was so cool being able to celebrate in person with all of you
at the association of water Technologies conference thank you to all the people
that came up and introduced themselves to me thank you to all the people that I’ve met before that you came up to say
hi and of course thank you to everybody that gave me a show idea that gave me a
guess that they thought would be great for the scaling up H2O podcast we are
the scaling up nation and the scaling up nation is making sure that we have the
best podcast out there and that of course is scaling up H2O now for all of
you that are pre-planning and industrial water week for next year that’s going to
be October 7th through 11th in 2024
that’s going to be the seventh time we have celebrated industrial water week so
go to your favorite party supply store get all your industrial water week decorations on clearance right now
because of course industrial water week’s over they’re not going to sell those things so they’re probably 90
percent off so make sure you’re taking advantage of all those sales out there and put on your calendar for October 7th
through 11th industrial water week is always the first full week in the month
of October Nation something else you want to mark your calendars for is November 9th we
are having our next hang so many of you I have met on the hang and the Hang is
where we get together as an industrial Water Treatment Community over a zoom
call and I know what you’re thinking oh my gosh Zoom is so overdone I’m so bored with zoom well that’s not this call this
is a networking call you will meet people that you did not know before the
hang and the people you meet may be able to help you with the problem that you
have or the problem you haven’t even experienced yet but when you do experience it you’re gonna remember
somebody you met on the hang and you’re going to be able to get that answer so
mark your calendars for November 9th at 6 PM eastern time and you of course can
register for that by going to scalingup h2o.com forward slash hang once again
that’s scaling up h2o.com forward slash hang one of the things last week that people
kept coming up to me and thanking me for was creating our events web page because
people have been able to go to our events page and see everything that’s going on in the world of industrial
water well I take credit for it of course but that is the great team here
at scaling up H2O and if you haven’t been there that’s real easy to fix go to scalinguph2o.com go over to our events
page and everything you want to know about what’s coming up is going to be on
that page and you have a link that will take you straight to a register for whatever it is and you also have a link
that will put it directly in your calendar my team thought of everything
and of course they are thinking about you so go over to scalingup.com and then
go to our events page we’re going to have so much more than what I’m going to talk about right now but something I do
want to talk about because I am so incredibly excited about it is the International Water conference is taking
place November 12 through 16th at the San Antonio Marriott River Center so if
you are in San Antonio Texas I would love for you to come to the
International Water conference this year because I have the honor of being the
keynote speaker for the International Water conference and I am so excited
about this you know I love talking about this industry well now I get to do it as
a keynote speaker in front of the International Water conference and I’ve just had such a great time working with
the planning team for the International Water conference and how we can do things with the scaling up H2O podcast
to let people know what’s going on that week and within their organization so if
you want to learn more about that go to scaling up h2o.com go over to our events
page and we will have everything that you want to know and I hope I see you
there there’s going to be a lot of people there I hope one of them is you and I always enjoy talking with
listeners of the scaling up H2O podcast because we are the scaling up Nation
Nation one of the things that I have had the privilege to do over the last four
years is I started a group called The Rising tide Mastermind and it has just
been amazing to welcome all the people within the rising tide Mastermind we’re
well over 70 members strong we’ve got a waiting list for our next group that’s
getting ready to launch and so many people are joining the rising tide Mastermind because they’ve learned that
in this industry it can be difficult to do it by yourself they’ve also learned
that forget this industry life is just hard to do it by yourself so we’re
making sure that we have our own personal board of directors where we are
getting further faster while we’re having more fun and we’re doing that why
we are just knocking all sorts of goals out of the park so if this sounds like
something that you want to learn more about by all means you can go to
scalinguph2o.com forward slash Mastermind and we’ll have all that
information for you and perhaps you listen to episode 325 which was just a
few weeks ago where we gave you an Insider’s look of exactly what we did at
this year’s live event now one of the things we do with the rising tide Mastermind is we bring everybody
together here at Atlanta where we are based and we get together and we support
each other we normally have activities we do we have speakers come in we have
all sorts of workshops and we really fortify each one of our teams and we’ve
got over 70 members so that’s where members can meet other members and it is one of the best weeks of the Year well
this past year as you know if you’ve listened to episode 325 the assignment
was we read TED Talks by Chris Anderson the CEO of Ted and within that he taught
us how to do a Ted style talk now Nation I do not say this lightly and I do a
good amount of public speaking TED Talks by Chris Anderson is the best public
speaking book I have ever read and I have taken so many things after reading
that book and when I teach I use things from that book when I speak with people I use things from that book and it
really helps me get my message across a lot easier and the whole idea of a Ted
style talk is you are taking an idea that you have within your head and you
are syncing up everybody else’s head with that idea it’s just sharing ideas
and think about all the things that we know there’s no reason we can’t all do
Ted style talks and share the information we had well that was the assignment that we had back on episode
325 and you got to hear that and I got some great reviews where people really
enjoyed that episode it was very different from our normal scaling up episode but people really enjoyed and
they were inspired from episode 325. well something else we did at the live
event this year is we had somebody come on stage that had been on the Ted stage
they stood on the Red Dot for real and gave a TED talk and that’s who we’re
talking to today his name is Justin Daniels and I know you are going to
enjoy our interview you today just like the rising tide Mastermind did
my lab fighter today is Justin Daniels corporate attorney at Baker Donaldson
and best selling author and good friend how are you Justin I’m good trace it’s
nice to be with you today how are things shaking things are shaking well of course we’re both in Atlanta and we’re
enjoying some uh humid but cooler weather today yes we are well you know I
was I was thinking back and uh you and I met through a mutual public speaking
coach and I’m talking about Des Thornton and Dez has actually been on this show
before he was episode 60 one of my first shows so we’re going to talk a little
bit about what you do as an attorney how we met the fact that you’ve been on the
Ted stage before and a lot of stuff in between we’ve got a lot of things to cover today
I’m ready to go what’s up first well I thought uh you could probably do
a lot better job of explaining Justin Daniels to the scaling up Nation than I can so how would you tell the scaling up
Nation about who Justin Daniels is all right I’ll do that in 60 seconds or
less so Justin Daniels myself uh so I am a corporate M A and Tech transaction
attorney at the law firm Baker Donaldson so I work with a lot of technology companies to help them with their bottom
line I help them grow it by handling all their m a purchase kind of contracts but I also
where we’re going to focus today I help them with their bottom line managing risk particularly in the area of cyber
security and data privacy and that area in the last 10 years has become one of
the major Trends in Industry which is the proliferation of data privacy and
cyber security regulation but also data breaches
well why don’t we just go ahead and start there we’re speaking with a bunch of water treaters today of course uh
that’s the scaling up nation and we have controllers out there we have uh
internet connections possible cyber risks and of course we’re talking about
water some Municipal Water some other process water what do we need to know what should we
be concerned about well first things first is water treatment is a Capital C critical part
of critical infrastructure and we already saw what happened with water treatment with what happened in Oldsmar
where it appeared that someone was trying to get in and cause the levels of
sodium hydroxide to become toxic what was interesting about that case is it wasn’t quite clear as was it some
outside kind of actor or was it a disgruntled employee and so it really brings to the Forefront that as sleepy
as it may sound water treatment is on the Forefront of concern from a cyber
security perspective because it can have such widespread and significant consequences and the other thing that
makes it so challenging is it doesn’t always get the tender love and care from
a budgetarian resource perspective that make it an even more attractive opportunity to make a splash in the
worst way of the word not the pun we would intend I can’t remember the year but Target was
hacked into and they got into Target system by navigating through their HVAC
system that’s very close to the type of work that we do so if we’re working with
a company like Target or any customer what do we need to do collaboratively to
make sure that everyone is safe well let’s unpack that a little bit so
what we have to do collaboratively is one you need to think about how you vet
your vendors what will they be doing part of the challenge with the target hack is why didn’t HVAC vendor need
access to targets Network in Toto so one idea is just give your vendors
the minimal access to your network that they need to do their work a vendor
who’s handling your HVAC shouldn’t have access in your network to your point of sale system with all your credit card
data is but that requires some action that requires some intention
other things that you can do is require that your vendors use multi-factor authentication because
we’re also interconnected these days that your hack allows that threat actor
potentially to move on to my network onto your network and so people have to realize we’re all a bunch of Lego blocks
and we’re all classed together and how we do our security can have a ripple effect on the other Legos that we are
attached to obviously it can get into a far more technical level but to me it’s got to be
a mindset when we grew up Trace did you think about your parents and did they
use a seat belt actually I grew up in the time where I think they had to use a
seat belt very begrudgingly because the laws were changing so when my parents grew up they really didn’t do it but
when we you and I get in the car I don’t even think twice I put on my seat belt like it’s just part of what you do well
why is that one we were educated about why your seatbelt can help save lives
and two the laws changed and so my point is how do we get how people view cyber
security to be very similar to the way that we view our seat belt so that when we engage online we’re thinking about
password protection we’re thinking about how we expose ourselves to the internet
and how we secure ourselves but we’re not there yet but again it starts with education and to me the key discussion
point for your viewers today is you know how do I change my mindset and how I think about procuring this vendor
procuring this new system and putting security as part of the design and part of the procurement process
instead of saying ah we’ll worry about that when we have a hack I know a lot of people are moving off of
the the customers Network and they’re bringing their own cell phone modems so
they’re just able to tap into that and that’s the only thing I’m assuming that
that’s a better way to connect it can be because one of the biggest challenges you have and I’ll use Colonial pipeline
is another utility as an example of this public utility has two types of systems
there’s your OT your operational technology maybe it
opens and shuts the water pipes and then you have your it that maybe runs your
system and network and what happened a lot of times and especially in colonial pipeline is when the threat actor got in
it was unclear if they got access to the OT meaning remotely shutting pipelines
and things of that nature and so when the company didn’t know they had to shut things down and so again it’s another
example of how do you segment your network meaning if you’re going to have remote access how do you make sure that
remote access is very narrowly tailored to what that person needs to do and limit the access to things like if
I’m in Billing why am I accessing or have any access to the people who are able to open and shut valves to move
water or to move the kind of treatment for the water so those are some of the things that you now have to start to
think about and they require time effort and resources and a lot of times for
water treatment facilities they’re cash strapped so they have to do more with less and it just makes it difficult are
there regulations that we need to be aware of well unfortunately we don’t have an overarching cyber security rule
but what we do have is we have various privacy laws amongst the states and most
importantly the SEC in the last two weeks is passed to cyber security lawmaking publicly traded companies have
to report a data breach within four days of it being deemed a material breach so
now think about uh companies like a Walmart a t if you’re in their vendor ecosystem and you now have to be paying
a lot of attention to that but you know water treatment plants kind of operate
separately but where it comes into Focus for them is requirements that sisa has
through the Department of Homeland Security because again water treatment facilities are part of critical
infrastructure so they’re going to have very strict reporting guidelines because the government wants to know if a water
treatment facility is hacked so they have to be responsive in that particular respect to some of the cesa so C says
the critical infrastructure and security agency they’re the division of Department of Homeland Security that is
focused on cyber security critical infrastructure again that’s where water treatment Falls and what they have to
pay attention to is there a checklist that we can go through to make sure that we’re doing
all the things that we should be doing so is there a checklist I think the place that I might start is the National
Institute of Standards and technology has what’s called the cyber security framework CSF so you can Google that
but I think the better way to go is to get a gap analysis done by a vendor
and use some resources and budget for that to figure out okay what is missing
from the standpoint of water treatment plants are really industrial facilities and so industrial facilities have their
own very specific requirements a lot of them use scada type of technology to
help them manage pipes and whatnot and so to me it’s something that is a
recognized framework because it helps order your mind it helps take you through the different types of things that you want to be
thinking about but also getting it tailored to an industrial facility because industrial facilities have
previously thought well who wants to hack an industrial facility Well Heck if I can take down your water pipes so that
they don’t work or they don’t function and I just want to watch the world burn that can cause a lot of damage if the
city doesn’t have like if the city of Atlanta didn’t have access to the water treatment for a week what would happen
it’d be a riot yeah it’s it’s horrible to think about especially to think about there’s people
out there that’s just what they want to do what’s wrong with those people technology is only as good as the
motivations behind the people using it and we haven’t even talked about artificial intelligence because that weaponizes a lot of this stuff we’ll
move there in a second we’ll talk about when Skynet goes goes self-aware before
we get there you mentioned things like multi-factor authentication and that’s something that we do here at our company
and when we first started doing it everybody complained about what a pain
it was so it’s all about habits when we’re trying to create better habits
across the entire company what are some tips that you have so we can make it a
little less painless I’m glad you brought this up because Trace what you’re really talking about
is as a society with technology we have worship convenience and multi-factor
authentication and privacy and security are what they’re inconvenient just getting people to want to do that is
difficult and so this is where I wish I could be more exciting is where the education
part comes in is people need to be educated that that multi-factor authentication is like
getting in your car and putting on your seat belt it takes that extra 10 seconds but we all know seat belts really help
save lives and so to me it’s that repetitive education possibly providing
incentives and where necessary some disincentive so that people want to
maintain the right kind of to your point habits but habits don’t just get
ingrained by doing it once it’s like eating right good cyber hygiene is kind of like that so how do you instill in
people over time those habits I think you do it by incentivizing them like if you have
fishing and you notice that when you send the phishing emails less and less people click on it maybe
you do something like a party for the employees or something so that there’s a positive incentive to engaging in the
right kind of hygiene so that people scrutinize emails more they just think of oh I use multi-factor authentication
because it’s my digital seat belt that’s where I think we have to go it’s just really again changing that mindset about
how you think about security I need my digital seat belt on that’s multi-factor Authentication
well you brought up Ai and I think most of us are familiar with chat GPT and you
know we need to write a job description so we throw some things in there so it definitely does have some benefits but
you said now it becomes weaponizing to some of these hackers
I’m scared to ask this question but tell us about that so think about using AI to come up with
the best phishing email for the water treatment plant think about using AI to
figure out the best way to attack a particular water treatment plant now you have artificial intelligence that’s
ingesting data to help you do that so that’s scary on one level and then I
guess on another level AI hallucinates it it’s a very convincing liar
so you know if people want to go out and oh wait a minute I read online this Trace Blackboard did X Y and Z well
we’re going to fire him from his job and it’s just something AI created and it was false we’re already seeing things
like that my concern about AI is it will be the culmination of congressional
abdication of their role to put guard rails around our digital economy if you think about it that’s really what’s
happened with cyber security we get into all these different Industries so Zoom calls your phone all these different
technologies that don’t require cyber security be built into it because they want to get market share they want to
make it convenient so absent regulation or other reasons to put privacy or
security by Design companies just think it’s an afterthought and I think you’re going to see the same thing play out
with AI because the technology is so ahead of the laws I mean most people
don’t realize HIPAA for Health Care 1996 the Telecom act for Section 230 that we
read about 1997 and that was before we had cell phones the internet and we
really haven’t passed major legislation to really deal with these things and so what’s gone on
technology companies see the profit they’re not too worried about the requirements because there really aren’t
any and you’ve seen the results we’ve had some good things no doubt but we’ve also seen a lot of unintended not so
great consequences you mentioned cell phones and of course uh convenience there’s an app for
everything and you download an app and it wants all of these permissions to
access everything over your phone how should we be scrutinizing what it
can actually see so as an example like when I’m using Google Maps it says hey we want to have
your location all the time I was like no only when I’m using the app there’s even a function on there that says hey you
can stop using it but here’s the problem with that when you get in your car and you want to go somewhere
your car still has navigation that tracks you anyway and it’s really for a
lot of people inconvenient not to have Google Maps available when they want it how they want it because if you hit a
certain feature on your iPhone you can shut all of that geolocation kind of stuff down but it comes at the cost of
not being able to use the app and so most people when push comes to shove they want to use the app and that’s why
there needs to be more education around and we’re getting better about having people understand how much data is being
collected and choose when you want to unlock the doors to have someone come
into your digital house when do you give out your cell phone when do you give out your email I was at an outdoor mall up
in Alpharetta and I watched a family take a selfie at a digital kiosk and they wanted the picture the only way to
get the picture was you had to give them your cell phone but the kiosk doesn’t tell you what it’s doing with that information where it’s going how it’s
being protected could you imagine getting ads for all kinds of stuff you don’t want on your cell phone that makes
a lot of people mad are there certain things that everybody should do on their
cell phones to make things a little safer so you can go into and I’ll use iPhone as an example you can go into
general settings under privacy and there are things that you can click on to enhance privacy if you go all the way as
I said before you won’t have access to Google Maps when you want it but you can go into
your iPhone and toggle some of these things in privacy to give you privacy enhancing features on your phone it just
comes at a cost of access to things that people use like they are water
I remember I downloaded a timer so I could be on stage and know how much time
I had left and it said we want your camera we want your contacts we want your texting like it’s a timer what does
it need that for so you say no and they want all that because you know they want to Market to you and do these other
things and you should just say no just say no the Nancy Reagan approach I I’m
going back to good old Nancy and I don’t need my astrologer but I’m just going to say no to giving you access that
information so I interview as best-selling author tell us about your book so my book well I
co-authored the book with my wife Jody and it came out last October it’s called Data reimagined building trust one byte
b-y-t-e at a time and the whole premise of the book was to write something in a
style that was engaging that really spoke to business Executives who are not
technical cyber privacy Geeks and the point of the book was how can they think
differently about privacy and cyber security and look at it as a way to build customer Trust all the examples
you just gave me Trace about I just wanted to have a timer to work on my speeches and they want access to my
contacts and all that does that build trust with trace the consumer not at all it doesn’t so maybe
another way to approach it is to say okay how can we do other things with privacy to really enhance trust with
consumer trace or business executive Trace and so we got into a a lot of different
areas because in our society nowadays how you treat people’s data is now by
extension how you treat them and I think that’s just the reality of the way it is today
writing a book is something I have always aspired to doing I have not done
that yet it is on my list any advice well you have to be ready to really be
committed and to me there’s no good time to write a book because it takes a lot
of effort and so you just have to decide that you’re going to do it uh it was a wonderful experience being able to do
that with my wife and collaborate with her was a lot of fun but there’s no good time to do it if it’s on your bucket
list to do at some point you just gotta say I just got to get started and get the ball rolling we did it working with
a firm that helped us with a Ghost Rider and helped put a process in place because I think without those things if
you’re a busy executive the process can be very daunting well you recently were
our keynote speaker with the rising tide Mastermind we had our live events in Alpharetta Georgia just a few months ago
and you came and you spoke to us around being on the Ted stage so I was hoping
we could talk a little bit about that you’ve given a full-fledged Ted Talk you’ve been on the Red Dot how did that
happen so the way that happened again relating to cyber security is I was asked to do
it because I headlined a week in Atlanta called Atlanta cyber week and so the
tedx Atlanta people came to me and said hey would you come and do a Ted Talk on
cyber security and for about a nanosecond I thought I’m gonna emcee all these events and at the
end of the week do a TED talk and then after that nanosecond it was hell yeah I’m gonna do this
and so uh I went down that path and all I can say to any listener out there if
you ever have the opportunity or the inclination to do it you should because it is such a bucket list experience in
that I’ve never as an adult been in a room with 700 people who are absolutely
cheering you on to give like the best talk ever it’s such a room full of positive energy that you just gravitate
towards it it just fills you up and that was what made the experience so special I learned a ton about public speaking
and it made me a better speaker it made me Fearless like if I had to show up tomorrow to speak on cyber security in
front of a thousand people I could do it not feel intimidated at all can’t speak highly enough of the opportunity and I
know we had a long conversation elaborating at that the talk that I gave with with your Mastermind groups So
speaking of The Mastermind just to keep the scaling up Nation up to date on what we’re talking about we had an assignment
and the assignment was everybody came to the live event and they had to do a 10 minute Ted Talk and it could be on
absolutely any topic and what we did is so we started out with I gave my TED
talk and then we broke up into our individual groups and then the groups
listened to their TED talks and they nominated one person from each group to
come back to the big stage where we did have a red dot and they all gave their
TED talks and then you came in you gave a great Ted Talk on what you learned
from your Ted Talk and gave us some great tips as well I’m putting you on the spot here do you remember some of
those tips that you can share with the scaling up Nation I do remember some of those tips I think
number one was authenticity is really important everyone’s style is different
I can’t I shouldn’t be Trace Trace shouldn’t be Justin and so you have to really figure out
what style works for you another tip that I gave is when you feel confident
enough is every opportunity you get in a presentation where it makes sense is
inject humor into it humor is such a devastatingly effective public speaking
tool because everyone loves to laugh it makes you feel good to laugh and it
increases your connection to the audience and I think the last one is
don’t be afraid to push your boundaries so Trace since you and I last spoke I
have three presentations this fall on artificial intelligence I have yet to do
one on artificial intelligence and now I’m gonna have to figure out how to make a complicated topic accessible and it
will be a challenge but you know what I figured it out before so I’m gonna push the boundaries and and do it again I’m
sure I won’t be perfect the first few times but that’s okay well you and I definitely need to get
together because since we spoke last time I was selected as the keynote speaker for the International Water
conference and I’ve got a lot of questions for you to make sure I do my best job call me anytime and happy to be
a resource because remember in the run-up to mind you came and you gave me some really helpful feedback and so the
more effort you put into practicing and actually doing it in front of Select people to get feedback it will always
help you think about new things and connect in a better way with your audience when you do do the presentation
that’s why preparation is so important to have a successful talk I remember you mentioned that to our
group and you said you practice enough that you almost over practice and it
just becomes second nature how do you know when you’ve done that to that
effect ah well I think that’s different for everybody but I think I did it out
of I’m gonna go into a stage in front of 700 people and if I get up there and I’m
nervous which as you know as I told everyone at the event I was nervous
that’s what I fell back on the fact that I had so done it many times I had
committed it to the point where it was just part of me it’s like how I can go talk about cyber security it just
becomes part of you and it it can be very authentic because it’s just coming out of you very conversationally because
you just know it and when you feel that you gain The Confidence from it so when you go out on a stage like that you’re not familiar
with getting in front of a little red dot in front of 700 people I felt like I could always
rely on that I think I read a great quote where people fall to their highest
level of preparation and in that instance I wanted to make sure that I felt like I was prepared but I think
that’s different for everybody but that’s what I did and it worked for me now can you do that for every talk that
you give you cannot that’s why I tend to do a lot of my presentations in areas
that I’m already familiar and why this Venture I’m going to do into AI will be different I’ll have to do more practice
and whatnot because it is a newer area and I gotta figure out how to get comfortable with distilling that kind of
complicated stuff into something accessible to most business people a theme that you shared with us was you
use every day in your job things that you learn from your Ted Talk experience
can you tell us a little bit about that yes I think the number one thing
that I use in my job every day that’s always a work in progress is what I call
738 55 rule so what that means is
how people respond to you is seven percent what you say 38 how you say it
and 55 your body language and so what I use every day is I I’m a
professional negotiator so my tone is very important I can say the same thing but if my tone is different the way it
gets perceived is very different and so some people can be perfectly nice you
have to get to know them oh that’s just how they are which is another way of saying there may be something that is
off-putting about them but you choose to overlook it because you get to know them but in certain contexts if you’re trying
to make a sale you may not get the opportunity for that person to get to know you so how you conduct yourself
body language your tone are incredibly important because most people think oh
I’ve I’ve practiced and I can get up there and say it but no this whole universe of your tonal inflection how
you use your body language becomes as important or in most instances more
important than what you say I mentioned earlier you and I met by a
mutual friend our our public speaking coach Dez Thornton and he’s been on the
show episode 60. I wanted to ask you what was it like to have a public
speaking coach and what were some of the things that he took you through so I was
grateful that I had one because I didn’t know at the time they were worried about me because I had to talk about a
technical topic and how was I going to make it accessible so they gave me an actual public speaking coach and so it
was great because he opened my mind to
the two parts of the tone and more importantly your body language and so one of the cool things he did was he
videotaped me and he took away the sound and I just watched myself and he was able to show me how much you
were communicating and it was just really eye-opening and so I would tell the audience you know you’ve got an
iPhone you can always do that just to see how you motion and you see how much
your body language can communicate enthusiasm or lack thereof or other
things and how important um facial expressions are or when I want to say three things I hold up three
fingers and how that helps you connect with the audience so it was that and then the other thing is is
to to make a public speaking coach really be effective you have to be open to being coachable
and one thing that I take pride in is no matter how old I’ve gotten I’m open to
learning new things new ways of doing things and I think with public speaking that’s incredibly important because
the job of your coach is to identify as Des would say opportunities for
improvement that says something about his approach it’s not like you were bad but here’s some opportunities where you can get better the way you even couch
that sounds uh positive even though you’re trying to improve and if you’re
not willing to do that and you’re not open to that then your your experience is going to be really limited because if
you’re not willing to try something different or learn to do something a new way and put in the time to make it a
habit you’re not going to get the result you’re looking for it’ll be money spent that doesn’t get you the result
and working with Dez he also had me record myself and I sent it to him and
he asked me if I was trying to land planes and he said he said you you only use your gestures and I speak with my
hands I had to learn not to do that he said you use your hands to punctuate
what you were saying and when I spoke at our live event doing the Ted Talk I had
a couple people come up to me and said hey when you’ve presented at Association of water Technologies conference you
used your hands a lot and you’re not doing that how did you become aware of that and of course it was that
experience it sounds like he wasn’t as delicate with me as he was with you with that experience maybe just we had
different things to work on but it was really getting me to you know use things
in different ways like I learned how to you know hey I want you to focus and I would do this or
three I would do this just different ways and so now I go on stage I’m more comfortable walking around a little bit
I’m more comfortable with my tone but I can’t get there if I haven’t really
practiced doing the other things because you have to have the foundation to start really working on these nuances that
take you from good to being a fantastic public speaker because I’m sure like you I have pretty high expectations of
myself when I show up in Alpharetta I’m ready to go and you’re going to get a good experience because that’s the brand
that I wanna have but to get to that level you’ve got to work on those Basics
again again and again yeah I highly recommend that everybody
engage with somebody to help them speak publicly even if you’re not doing a
speech I mean we’re speaking with people all the time and if we’re able to get
less gray in our communication and use words that people understand and use
gestures that help people understand that just makes life better absolutely
adjusting something that’s going on in the Water Treatment Community is a lot of people are retiring they’re figuring
out what to do for their second chapter and who’s going to run their company are
they going to sell it are they going to work with a family member so there’s all
sorts of transitions going on in our industry I know you are an m a attorney I’m sure you have some advice for us
lot to unpack there so advice that I would have is before you’re gonna sell
you really want to get your ducks in a row and what I mean by that is if you’ve got you’re paying for personal cars
personal expenses all that needs to get dealt with you want to go through your own due diligence so that whatever
issues you uncover you uncover them and you fix them so that when the buyer goes through the diligence process it’s
relatively smooth now Trace if you or you’re assisting someone in buying a
company a lot of what I talked about before with some of these cyber risks really becomes important you’re going to
want to do due diligence because if you’re inheriting a water treatment plant or facility that has bad cyber
security you are potentially inheriting a really big liability that could be far
in excess what you paid for the business I have seen instances where people pay 2 million for a business and there was an
undetected cyber threat in the business and once the Network’s connected from the buyer to the Target
threat actor Waltz is right across to the buyer encrypts their Network and
ransoms them for 10 million dollars so now the 2 million you paid is nothing compared to the liability that you might
have I have seen some really interesting things with due diligence like buying a
water treatment plant that’s part of its Warehouse is sitting in a public utility right away because the seller when they
built it didn’t get a survey to Nowhere the easements were I had another instance where my client
decided hey we’re going to take care of the wire at closing and they wired about 750 000 to the threat actor so I got a
call on a Saturday morning what do we do and I was able to contact the Secret Service and have them initiate the kill
chain and freeze the funds over the weekend so the client didn’t lose the money so those are just a few of the
little things and as my client likes to say I’m a man with a certain set of skills is what they said if somebody
would like to talk to you more about those skills how can they contact you a great way to get a hold of me is you
can go on the baker Donaldson website
b-a-k-e-r-d-o-n-e-l-s-o-n.com and you can find my bio but you can also easily find me on LinkedIn I’m of regular uh
poster and commenter so feel free to connect with me there I write all kinds
of stuff but I’m always up for a good conversation particularly one in the technology or cyber security area
we will make sure to have all ways to contact you on our show notes page so
people can easily find that well this has been fun but I’m not quite done yet I’ve got a few lightning round questions
for you are you ready hit me all right if you could go back in time
and talk to your former self on your first day as an attorney what advice
would you give yourself I would tell them relax it’s not a destination it’s a journey
and focus on building really good relationships with people
and don’t Focus as much on the work what are the last few books that you’ve
read last few books that I’ve read so I’ve read a couple books one about
the Lakers when Phil Jackson coached them another one about the 1986 Mets and
then I read a series of three books about what would happen if some type of event happened in the U.S was out
without power or some of these kind of apocalyptic kind of events occurred and
so I read a series of books on that I’ve oscillated into different areas I love
to read so I’m always constantly reading something obviously Hollywood is going to hear
this podcast and they’re going to want to make a movie about your life who plays Justin in that movie who plays
Justin I don’t know Christian Bale probably could play me pretty well he’s such a versatile actor he’s bad man yeah
he is Batman that was a great movie or a series of movies by the way final question if you could talk to
anybody throughout history who to be with and why you know I I thought about that it would
be pretty interesting to talk to somebody like President Eisenhower because he was such an important
historical figure and I suspect the way the record has him is a little different than the way he was so he would be
somebody that would be interesting to talk to because I just love history and he comes to mind to somebody who is a
real important figure in the 20th century in presidential Politics as a general just as a person I’d be
interested to maybe have a round of golf with Augusta with Ike well Justin this has been very educational thank you for
coming on the scaling up H2O podcast thank you I enjoyed it
Nation Justin is like a Swiss army knife he has so many talents and he’s
definitely somebody that you want on your speed dial because if you’re having
any of the issues that he mentioned he is the expert and I am so glad that I
know him and I know him because I put myself in groups like The Rising tide
Mastermind like other groups because I don’t know what I don’t know and I’ve
said that phrase so many times on this podcast but I love that phrase and I did
not know that phrase until it was introduced to me by my mentor Tim Fulton
and Tim just asked me Trace how do you know what you don’t know and I thought about that question because I was a
pretty bold question to ask and I said I don’t know and ever since I heard that
phrase that has been the Catalyst for me to go out and learn but more importantly
it gave me permission to not know things we’re all embarrassed for the things
that we don’t know but let’s face it there’s so much information out there how could you possibly know everything
there’s no way so don’t get embarrassed if you don’t know something but if you
put yourself in different opportunities where people are that know things that
you don’t and I’ve been doing that for decades that is one of the single most
helpful pieces of advice that somebody gave me that I needed to join a group of
people that could teach me what I didn’t know I didn’t know and here’s the cool
thing when you find out what you don’t know you don’t know you now know you don’t know it and you can figure out how
you can learn it that whole idea was the spark behind this podcast and I I have
learned so much over the years doing this podcast just like I have met so
many people doing this podcast there was a quote by Henry Ford and he was
actually being deposed and the opposing Council was basically calling him a bad
businessman because he didn’t know everything about business and he said no
no that’s okay because I have a telephone on my desk and I have all these numbers of people that know the
things that I don’t know and I can call them that’s how we’re supposed to do life
there’s no way we can learn everything but we can get together with other
people and we can find that knowledge and let’s face it when we do something like that we get further faster while
we’re having more fun I’ll tell you a fun way to learn and that’s a brand new
periodic water table with James hello and welcome to the periodic water
table with James where we think and learn about water chemistry drop by drop please use your week to search online
ask your colleagues or even pick up a book to learn more about each week’s periodic water table topic if you do at
the end of the year you’ll be 52 water chemistry smarter so let’s raise the water table of
knowledge together and get started today’s topic is
ATP what do the letters ATP stand for how do cells use ATP how do you test for
ATP why would you want to test for ATP is it found only in living cells or can
it be found in dead cells too does this distinction matter can the concentration of ATP be
correlated to Plate counts on microorganisms when cleaning a system what do changes
in the ATP concentration tell you lastly I have a joke
a cell goes into a bar the bartender asks what can I get you the cell replies
now I have a pint of adenosine triphosphate the bartender says aha
that’ll be 80P get it 80P 80P 80 Pence ATP oh well I
won’t quit my day job I promise remember knowledge is power and taking the time to learn more about water
chemistry each week will help make you a force to be reckoned with be sure to post what you learn to social
media and tag it with hashtag watertable23 and hashtag scalingup H2O I
look forward to learning more from you Nation once again I want to thank
everybody that helped us celebrate our sixth industrial water week it was the
strongest yet thank you to everybody that sent a social media post to hashtag
iww.23 thank you to everybody that celebrated with me at the association of
water Technologies conference and folks I hope you start planning for industrial
water week next October 7th through 11th you don’t have to wait that long for a
brand new episode though I’m going to bring you a brand new one next Friday until then have a great week folks
Skyline nation of Youth signed up to take your certified water technologist designation exam if you have you’ve
received a mock exam copy and I have answered each one of the questions in
that mock exam letting you know which ones are the best answers I share tips
and tricks about the exam making sure that you sign up easily and confidently
and when you go in to take the examination you have got certain things working for you because you’re prepared
to find out more go to scalinguph2o.com forward slash cwt prep once again that’s
scaling up h2o.com forward slash cwt prep