#397 - Drafting Was Never the Job

0:00Evan Troxel: What has made you feel old recently?

0:04Cormac Phalen: Hmm. And could it be? That picture you sent me. That is true. We should, yeah. A 2019 photo of us podcasting from the RCAT booth. It was AIA-19, right? Yeah, it was AIA-19. That looks like a different era. I mean, it's so interesting. It does.

0:26Evan Troxel: It's not that long ago.

0:28Cormac Phalen: And at the same time, it was pre-COVID, which makes it forever ago. Exactly right.

0:34Evan Troxel: I mean, I'm surprised I actually found a picture that was in color.

0:43Cormac Phalen: There weren't as many megapixels for sure. That is true. That is true. But still, the photos were just fine way back then. I've got so many pictures and they are like you and me in the pictures, which means I'm not taking the pictures, which is odd. You know who it probably was? It was probably a friend of the show, Brett Levitt, because he tends to be the hired gun with the camera taking pictures of us in candid moments. That's true. When we're touring cities during AIA.

1:18Evan Troxel: It was funny because there's a couple of other friends of the show skulking around the booth as well.

1:26Cormac Phalen: The background and next to us. Yeah, yeah.

1:28Evan Troxel: And in fact, actually, this was pre them having a podcast.

1:32Cormac Phalen: Mm-hmm.

1:33Evan Troxel: So it was kind of interesting. But no. You want to feel a little old?

1:38Cormac Phalen: I want to know what has made you feel old lately.

1:42Evan Troxel: On this day, the 24th of September in 1991, Nirvana releases. Never mind. Okay. Ouch. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. I was just like, wait, no. And then I had to pull out the calculator. I'm like, crap. It is.

2:09Cormac Phalen: It can't be. I heard an interesting take on the 90s recently. It was just like yesterday. And I thought, because I, and it was somebody saying, like, I didn't care for the 90s. I was an 80s kid. I was an 80s kid, and I liked the 90s. But it was an interesting take. It made me kind of revisit the 90s because, I mean, it directly correlates to what you're talking about here with, like, Nirvana, the grunge movement, stuff like that. And it was that before that, everything was much more glammy and poppy. And I shouldn't say everything, but there was a lot more. Right. Remember the the I just I remember skater culture before grunge and then after grunge.

2:51Cormac Phalen: And it changed dramatically. It went from like Maui and sons and Pacific sun to Pacific Northwest. Like everybody wore flannel shirts and giant baggy pants and stuff like that. It totally went to Seattle from Southern California, right? And it was interesting because the basic gist of this commentary was that the 90s were not as fun as the 80s. And I was like, oh, interesting, interesting. but if you look back from the outside from the outside i mean you can see what what this person was talking about it was sure it was not the 80s surf and skate culture it was a very it was a

3:40Evan Troxel: reaction to so pop and surf culture my daughter's seen many pictures of me from that era And she said that I don't really dress any differently. I'm like, no, no, I've upscaled. And she's like, what do you mean? She's like, I don't wear Tevas anymore. I wear clothes. I wear closed-toed shoes. You know? And that's pretty much about it because, you know, I still. Everything else is, yeah. Well, I've switched from flannel to denim. You've still got your black flag shirts. And you've got your jeans. Yeah. I was today. Your army bag. Your saturn. I was flipping through just some reels. And these old dudes who have the most amazing record collection usually post something.

4:37Evan Troxel: And then they were playing a band. And I'm like, wait, you know, I haven't listened to them in a long time. So I was on a kick today of listening to The Descendants on repeat. You basically still live in the 90s. And it's funny, I still do. I still listen to all of the same stuff that I listened to then, now. Funny enough, probably more than I did then, really.

5:02Cormac Phalen: Well, because it's so much more available and basically free. It is. Remember back then, it was like you had to either own CDs or tapes, or you had to wait for your song that you liked to show up on the radio, because the DJ was programming it all. You couldn't just listen to whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to in the car.

5:21Evan Troxel: But remember, now we're talking 90s. We're not talking 80s. And in 90s, we did have the Napster.

5:29Cormac Phalen: Yeah, what year was the Napster? And how long did it take you to get a song off the Napster back on your dial-up modem?

5:40Evan Troxel: Oh, my God. The pains we went to. The pains. So much time and effort of downloading music and then burning it onto a CD. And then you could take that CD and copy it into what is now Apple Music. I don't even know what it was called back then. Yeah, right. It was like Sound Jam or something back then.

6:03Cormac Phalen: No, it was just iTunes. It was before iTunes. Oh, that's right. Apple bought something. I think it was called Sound Jam or something. That's right. They turned it into iTunes and then the whole rip mix burn campaign came out, right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. But, and you're right because I also, I remember, my God, this is what this episode is going to be, right? It's just, okay. So I remember being at Cal Poly in a computer lab, which was in the media building because they had good computers, not the architecture building. and I got to hang out with people who were using like cool apps like Adobe After Effects back then, like super early versions of After Effects making cool stuff and videos and stuff like that.

6:49Cormac Phalen: And they had a single speed CD burner that you could not breathe on or else it would fail, right? And the discs were hard to find. I had to drive into LA to buy discs that you could burn. and then half of them would become coasters because somebody touched the desk that the burner was sitting on while it was burning and it would fail. But then I would take those discs, I would put them into a portable disc player. This is what we had after Walkmans. After portable tape players, we had portable disc players that were slightly larger than the discs themselves. And if you were lucky, you could actually buy one, I guess at some point, that had like a vibration system in it so that it wouldn't skip when you were listening to it.

7:40Cormac Phalen: And I remember building a custom foam insert in this pocket in the dashboard of my car that it would go into and not skip because of this foam and this anti-vibration technology built into the Discman. And that went out through a tape cassette adapter so that I could listen to CDs in my car.

8:04Evan Troxel: Yeah, so you would, from the headphone jack in the CD player, you'd have like the little cassette adapter.

8:13Cormac Phalen: And you had to have the cigarette lighter adapter too, because we actually had cigarette lighters back there. They weren't called power ports back then or whatever they're called now. They were called cigarette lighter ports, right? And so you would store your cigarette lighter, the actual lighter mechanism, somewhere else in your glove compartment or whatever. because it would be in the ashtray. It would be in the ashtray. Because we had ashtrays. Right.

8:41Evan Troxel: Yeah. I was looking at a car today that has all of that accoutrement.

8:47Cormac Phalen: I own a car that has all of that accoutrement. My 2007 Lexus GX has a cigarette lighter, an ashtray. It has ashtrays in the back doors. Everybody got their own ashtray back then. And a cassette player.

9:08Evan Troxel: Yes.

9:09Cormac Phalen: I still have a cassette player. That was like high luxury then. I have a CD changer in the glove compartment as well. Ah, I remember the CD changer.

9:23Evan Troxel: I remember that. In fact, the car that I was looking at would be a replacement of the exact same car that I had ages ago that the stereo in the car was worth more than the car was.

9:38Cormac Phalen: Right. Oh, totally. Oh, man, this was totally a thing back in the day. We had sound systems worth three times more than the car itself was worth. And if you didn't install it yourself, you're a punk. Exactly. And build your own speaker cabinets. Yes. And rip out the carpeting so you could run the wiring underneath and make it all nice. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

10:06Evan Troxel: Totally. Totally. And then the same car that I was looking at today as, ooh, I could actually afford to just go ahead and buy this if I wanted to. So a car is what my favorite weird car is, even though it's not any. It's never the top one when anybody says, hey, what's your favorite car? And if anybody says it's a 1980 Triumph TR7, people look at it like, what? That's your favorite car?

10:36Cormac Phalen: You could literally pick any car, Cormac. Did you know you could pick any car for your favorite car? I know.

10:41Evan Troxel: I know. So, and, but the, in fifth, when I hit fifth gear, so as I'm like going through, cause it was, it was a manual. When it was running. When it was running. When it was running. And when I hit fifth gear, it would like, basically I would punch the dashboard, but it was in perfect alignment with my radio. That was the face-off radios. You remember the face-off? Oh yeah.

11:11Cormac Phalen: Yeah, because people would steal your radios, but they wouldn't steal it if the faceplate wasn't there. Right? That was the idea.

11:16Evan Troxel: So every time I would hit fifth gear, I would punch the face of my radio off. And it would fly off. And then I'd be driving down the road trying to reach around for the thing.

11:30Cormac Phalen: Okay, so for people who don't know what Cormac's talking about, let's talk about what preceded the face-off radio, which was the entire head unit had a handle on it and it slipped out. And then you did what with it? Lock it in your trunk? I don't even know. Yeah, carry it around with you. You carry it in with you. The whole single din, and this is because I've installed many radios. This was a single din unit, and the din was like, what, I don't know, six by two, two and a half inches, something like that, by about eight inches deep. and at some point the manufacturers started making a chassis with all the wires that just went to the chassis and then the unit itself would just plug and unplug.

12:14Cormac Phalen: This whole thing would slip in and slip out like a giant cartridge into your dashboard. And so that people wouldn't steal your radio out of your car, you would take your whole radio with you. You would take your whole radio out. Yeah. And then Cormac's version here is at some point

12:33Evan Troxel: after after no i after right i replace i replace the removable with a a face off yeah okay and so

12:43Cormac Phalen: that yeah so that was the the modern technology was just the face plate would pop off so that you

12:48Evan Troxel: could yeah again like just take that take it in your satchel in your army satchel exactly wrap it in the little little flannel cloth right because you have plenty of put it yeah

13:03Cormac Phalen: plenty of flannel around put it in a gym sock and throw it throw it in your drawer so okay so man what what architectural tools were you using back then were you were you still drawing by hand i assume you were what do you got there you got you got a scale i have a scale nice that's a fancy one

13:23Evan Troxel: that's like the fancy all yeah fancy all black and guess what it is wait hold on

13:33Evan Troxel: oh nice metal oh guess what else i was just tapping it with what i can't see it it's too small just tell me is it you can't see it it's an exacto blade what do you got an exacto for

13:48Cormac Phalen: you guys you're gonna cut your finger off are you building models or what are you doing over there you're not telling me what's going on what do you got all these analog tools on your desk available at your fingertips for just because just because you're a hoarder that's what it is because as i look over at my architectural tools because i needed to make myself a tape measure

14:11Evan Troxel: for just a certain thing that i needed to measure and so this is you know two two pieces of eight and a half by 11 piece of paper so that i could measure something that was 25 inches and I did, you know, I taped it together. Okay, but two eight and a half by 11,

14:29Cormac Phalen: that's only 22 inches. How did you get to 25? Come on, I can do math. Wait, did I say 22? Oh, it is.

14:36Evan Troxel: No, you said 25. I meant 22, sorry. Oh, okay. I said 25, I meant 22. See, wrote 22. Wrote 22 right on the end of it because, again, analog. You may be dyslexic, but only for half of the numbers. Yeah, exactly. two looks like a five upside down, right? I think it's just backwards. Exactly. Yeah, maybe upside down. Upside down, backwards.

15:03Cormac Phalen: Speaking of twos and fives, I think I sent you a photo. I didn't. I'm way out of the habit of posting photos anymore. But I hit, speaking of my 07 Lexus, I didn't hit a palindrome number. I hit a mirror number because my wife was driving it. And when it hit the palindrome at the 2-2-2-2-2-2 mark, my wife did not, number one, notice or, two, take a picture. Could not care less about that kind of thing. She's always baffled by my, I want a picture of this palindrome odometer. I got into the car one time.

15:45Evan Troxel: I noticed that, you know, I had like three miles passed a, you know, palindrome. you know a significant one in my opinion as this as this was that yours was was even more significant and um there was no photograph sent to me and yeah what's up with that wait what we just so everybody knows we have problems

16:14Cormac Phalen: so i hit 222 555 and i did get a picture and uh i was yeah that that might be better than a

16:22Evan Troxel: palindrome yeah yeah yeah well now we've sort of resorted to like you know sending like you know whatever um you know our background on our phone is but you know many a time we we wait around for certain times right 1001 yes 1001 333 yeah my my personal favorite is 808 because i listened to 808 state if anybody ever listened to that techno music back in the day 808 drum machines right and uh but um so with all of this looking back i wanted to ask you because you just happen to be

17:07Cormac Phalen: looking forward oh man nice segue wow huh huh you might even you might even look at this as like the twos are looking backwards and the fives are looking forward i don't know there you could Could we make it even worse?

17:28Cormac Phalen: So, yeah, I guess I was. I was in Vegas for a week at the Autodesk University, where you don't ever need to go outside. You never need to leave the indoors to go to the outdoors. I did once for their Thursday night party thing. But, yeah, you know, I haven't been in a couple years. I've missed all of the ones that have not been in Vegas over the last four years. So, or I guess three years, because they went to New Orleans. Did they do it? Oh, no, I did. I did. I went to San Diego. Never mind. But they had one in New Orleans. They had one in Nashville last year. So, two years ago, I was at the one in San Diego.

18:10Cormac Phalen: And they all, from what I can tell, you know, they're not as good as they are when they're in Vegas. when you go outside of Vegas. Because Vegas is basically built for conferences the way that they do these here, at least, because they're in the Venetian Palazzo kind of area. People stay in the same place. Lots of muscle memory for the attendees who just have been there for years and years and years doing this, which makes a huge difference when you go to a conference and you don't have to figure everything out. Like, where's that meeting I have to be at in five minutes that's three miles away and I've got to take public transportation.

18:45Cormac Phalen: That doesn't happen in Vegas. It's actually really nice that you don't have to worry about all that stuff because it's all just right there and stacked densely on top of a Vegas background, which is just a complete assault on your nervous system the entire time. It's literally lights flashing and bells ringing and cigarette smoke and alcohol and all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's like a 24-hour assault because Vegas never sleeps, right? So anyway, it was a great time for sure. It was great to hang out with all my people who are in the architecture and technology space that show up in Vegas for this event.

19:32Cormac Phalen: And I go for the people. I sent out an email to my people who are signed up on my website saying that. That was like the main thing. I go to AU for the people. I don't go for the technology. I don't go for the announcements. Because the overall thing is it's one giant commercial for Autodesk. And that's what it is. They're doing their keynotes for two days. They're doing their press releases. They save up a bunch of announcements to do there. And as a publicly traded company and a company that operates outside of AEC, They also have media and entertainment, and they've got manufacturing arms as well.

20:15Cormac Phalen: So software for all those things. And they do a lot of other stuff, too. They do R &D, and they've got really cool tech labs, and they're doing a lot of research and stuff like that as well. And they have partnerships. They're doing a huge partnership with L.A. for the 28 Games, right? So delivering technology for that. Anyway, they do a lot of other stuff, too. But this event is like when they tell the world what they're up to for at least this year and what's coming in the near future. And it's a lot. I'll just say it's a lot to take in. I think I probably average 15 ,000 or 16 ,000 steps a day there.

20:51Cormac Phalen: You're just go, go, go the whole time. I almost lost my voice, which is crazy. I haven't lost my voice ever. And I did actually, for the first time ever, give a talk. Like, I co-led a session with another person. That was good. And it was the last time slot on the last day of sessions. And I'm like, who's going to show up? It's right before the party. Nobody's going to show up. And the room was standing room only. And it was like 140 people could have had chairs, and there was more than that that showed up. So that was pretty incredible. That was pretty awesome. So there was a lot. I don't know.

21:30Cormac Phalen: What do you want to know? I can't keep going. What was your talk about? What did you talk about? Yeah, let me pull up some notes so that I can remember because as soon as I got back, I've been just going like crazy. So it was called Build Your Firm's AI Adoption Plan. It was a workshop. And I think that was kind of one of the big things about this was that this was about the people side of things. more than the technology side of things. And so we really engaged the audience. We had people sharing as fast as we could so that it was, I mean, it wasn't just a presentation. It wasn't a lecture. It was very interactive.

22:16Cormac Phalen: And we had a roaming mic and we were going around talking to people and having them share their stories because we knew going into it that we basically came up put this whole framework of the kind of the core pillars of what's included in adoption. And usually people aren't thinking about all three of these core pillars. So the main pillars are, I'm going to scroll down here so I can actually get back to remembering what we talked about. But we had capability, alignment, and accountability. So capability is like tools and data and skills and talent, right? So you've got people component to that and their skills and their talents.

22:57Cormac Phalen: And you could put training maybe into that as well. And then we have alignment. So what is leadership, culture, ethics, firm values? How does that play into adoption of technology? And then accountability. How do you measure it? What are the outcomes? What's the data governance, confidentiality with your clients, stuff like that. So all of that together is kind of the framework for this. And people are a big part of all of these core pillars. And so we knew going into it that there was going to be a huge range. There's going to be sole practitioners who have very little of that to worry about because they're the only ones.

23:37Cormac Phalen: And then you've got big firms that worry about all of that and then everything in between. And it was important for us to make that feel very real in the room because there were going going to be people coming in thinking, I'm going to get a plan that is tailored to me when it was very important for people to get other perspectives. And it's not just because we wanted people to get other perspectives. It's like, well, if you're in a firm and you're the BIM manager, or if you're in a firm and you're a leader, you're going to have two very different perspectives, same firm. And so it's very important for people to get the empathetic version of, well, how does this affect them?

24:22Cormac Phalen: What do they need? Where are they coming from? So it's all of those kinds of things that we wanted to really play out live in the room when we were doing it.

24:32Evan Troxel: Has there been conversations, because it seems to be a conversation that I've been having recently with friends in the profession, about AI as a crutch for or a replacement for experience and knowledge. And what has been the conversation around that? I know because with all of it. Yeah.

24:57Cormac Phalen: I don't know, man. It's just, again, you'll hear a whole spectrum from all sides of every one of those ideas, right? It's interesting to see how it is playing out because most firms don't have the, why did we do it like this codified into any kind of anything? Right. You know, all of our documents and our models are the results of decisions. They aren't the decisions. Right. And if you had the exact same building, just a site adapt, you would still have a different set of decisions that went into that. Yeah. And there's bad decisions in those too, right? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It's interesting to kind of think about how deep these problems go into the way that we practice.

25:51Cormac Phalen: So, for example, how many times have you redlined something, handed it to somebody to say, pick these red lines up, and never had to explain why you redlined it the way you did? I mean, it happens, right? It happens all the time. Right. Best case scenario is you explain it when you hand them over. here's why i had to do it like this here's what this line means not just cad monkey do what i say right right but here's what it means but then that's just a one-to-one transfer that's not making it available to everybody else and and the firm can't leverage that to have a self-improving machine working in the background right okay it's it's kind of an interesting it's an interesting concept so is is ai gonna is it a crutch if if you just trust it blindly absolutely and i think people are getting more and more dependent on it every single day because human nature is go with what's most convenient right it's very convenient i'll tell you today i was helping craft a spec

26:59Evan Troxel: that i had never written one in my entire career for this particular section and the spec itself was semi self-explanatory but as i was using i won't say a an ai crutch but i was using an ai kind of like i was using gemini and i was asking it questions you know very specific about certain things now i'm using it with the prompts of that's based off of my years of experience and I can ask it very, very specific questions. And as it was pulling additional information and things like that. And the thing that I like about some of the ways that you can use it is that it'll actually like pull in the sources.

27:44Evan Troxel: And so you can click on the source and go to and say, oh, okay. And you're like, let's say you're going to roofing is it wasn't roofing that I was working on today, but in roofing, and it'll pull up and say it'll go to like SICA or GAF or one of these other ones. And it'll actually have all of those links so that you can follow it and look it up yourself and kind of do that back check if you're, you know, exactly. And the thing that I found most helpful when I was using this was more the, oh, I didn't think of that. I'm glad they kind of like made mention of that because now I can go in and take a look at this and oh hey i think i need to kind of like realign some of my drawings to make sure that they're actually saying this kind of information as well because that's very necessary completely forgot that that you know that that was something again it was because you know something that i've

28:39Cormac Phalen: never done before so you know that that's the thing that i like about it you're using it as a tool like that's how that's what i'm using as a tool exactly absolutely for and and i think i mean And then I hear the horror stories of like software development companies where nobody's doing. This is a really I mean, this is like a touchy subject, right? Because I think things are fundamentally changing. And you have to be really careful, right? You have to be really intentional and really careful. And you have to vet this stuff. And you got to do your due diligence. And like the example I was going to cite there is just like there are some people who are doing none of that.

29:20Cormac Phalen: And they're just go, go, go, fast, fast, fast. And it's like because why? Because you can? And that's where I think things get scary because that's when people are really freaking out. It's like what are we even doing here?

29:35Evan Troxel: Right? What are we even doing here? Think about when we were coming up and you'd say, hey, you know, I'm working on this detail. Oh, you know, why don't you just go and go to like this project or that project? And we had a detail very similar to that one, bring it in. And if you just brought it in blindly and didn't look at it, didn't vet it, didn't say, okay, how does this actually fit my project? You know, yes, it worked for that one, but there needs to be some modification to it, some tweaking. You know, I need to kind of modify it to fit what I'm working on. And if you're in so we would do things like that.

30:10Evan Troxel: We would cut and paste something in there and say, okay, we're done. You know, and it is the same thing now with this tool, tool. I'm glad you use that tool, tool. We're just finding better tools. And if it's something like, oh, I forgot to ask about the dead loads or the wind loads or something like that on this particular thing that I was working on. Those are things that I need to go and find. And then I can research the documents and say, okay, here's what I need. And then as I'm developing it, I'm not developing it. It just reminded me, hey, you need to do that. and, you know, what's the difference?

30:43Evan Troxel: The difference is that if you just, like, take it at face value, like we've done with the cutting and pasting of details, as you've said often, garbage in, garbage out, right? Yeah.

30:56Cormac Phalen: Well, and I want to even provide more context right there because there's a lot of times where it'll be somebody's job to do what you just said. They'll go through five old projects that were similar but different, and they will pull a bunch of details that may or may not be exactly right. And they will put them into the set knowing they need to take a look at those. And either we can't or we don't need to address those right now that, okay, we're going to do wood instead of metal framing or this one's going to have carpet, not VCT or whatever. There's lots and lots of – or we've got a different ceiling than this one shows.

31:35Because how many times have we done that?

31:38Cormac Phalen: A lot, right? A lot. Thousands of times. And just being okay with that. But it is somebody's job to eventually go through and tune all that stuff to this project. But this is something that architects are really, really, really good at, right? It's like when you're laying out an administration building in a K-6 elementary school and you're doing bubble diagrams and stuff. and maybe you're doing it on trace, maybe you're doing it in CAD, it doesn't really matter. You know that there's things that are constraining the design, and there could be four things broken while I'm trying to figure this problem out, and it's totally fine.

32:23Cormac Phalen: And I think that's where there's people who are, there's going to be clients who show up to your first meeting with a photo, an AI-generated image. It could be a floor plan. It could be an exterior. It could be an interior. It could be whatever. It's like, I want this. And okay, I can see immediately there's four things broken there. And I, as the architect, am totally okay with that because I know how to work through problems like that. And that is where my value actually lies is in translating that idea into reality, which is what we do. That's the design process, right? It's like I've got 30 clients that are my stakeholders, and I've got to take all their ideas, all their hopes and dreams, and turn that into a real building.

33:16Cormac Phalen: And I think the existential crisis here is that the AI is going to solve that problem, and I don't think it is for quite a long time. Right, right. And that's fine because, okay, you've got some security there, but there are huge advantages to using this technology to do things we could have never done before, like things that were literally impossible to do. and I think what's so interesting about that is okay if it can do that and it can do it in a super small amount of time by the way like all all the tea leaves are are basically telling me you will be able to very easily replace drafting with AI within a year.

34:11Cormac Phalen: I think it's going to be like, oh, we don't need to be doing super detailed design anymore by hand. Like actually going in and modeling or placing every single component that goes into those plans. And I'm not just talking about annotations. I'm talking about layouts and I'm talking about windows and doors and the doors are all going to be four inches off the wall and the windows are all going to be scheduled correctly and it's going to do dimensions and annotations and ceiling plans and all that stuff. It's going to do all that stuff, which is going to give you more time to talk to your clients and figure it out at a way better level than you ever have been able to before, which is going to produce a better product in the end, which is going to be worth more, I think, than what you're doing now.

35:05Cormac Phalen: If they're going to get a better product, it's worth more. And if it's faster, that's worth more too. So I think we're figuring this stuff out as it comes out. But I think there's a lot of people who are scared that it's just going to do your job. And the fact is, it is going to do a lot of your job. And you need to find out better things to do with your time. And that's the thing.

35:25Evan Troxel: If you think about it, most of the time when you're bitching about your job, it's about the things that you don't want to do. And if you have something that can do it for you better so that you can actually spend more time, as we've talked about this on countless occasions, if you can, you know, our value isn't in sitting around for months and months at a time doing construction documents. That's not where our value is. Our value is the problem solving, is the ideating and all of these other things that we can be doing other than what we do. If you think about it, we started talking earlier about the 90s.

36:07Evan Troxel: Well, when I worked for a firm in the 90s, guess what we had? Draftsmen. We don't have draftsmen anymore. We have junior architects or architects or senior architects or just, you know, sometimes principals doing things that we had draftsmen to do. The funny thing was, is that I don't think that the documents got any better when we stopped using draftsmen because they were singularly focused on the quality of the document. That's all they had to think about and worry about. And so they did it better than we did. We're thinking about so many different things. And then as we're doing it, it's like, ooh, I think we should change the design and do it this way.

36:44Evan Troxel: Or, ooh, I think we should do that. Well, instead of doing, as you said, all of the drawings and stuff and spend more time doing the ooh, let's do this. I want a super cut of the oohs.

36:56Cormac Phalen: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's what we should be doing, right? I agree. And I think that that stuff, this is like productivity porn. People talk about it that way. It's like, oh, I checked 20 things off my list today. And it's like that it's actually just easier for your brain to just settle into getting things done. Right. It's like, yeah, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. Well, yeah. But what are those things actually matters? It's not quantity. It's quality. Right. And I think that that is that is what we're talking about here. And it is human nature, I think, not for everybody, but it's human nature to go back to or get atrophied to the getting things done.

37:42Cormac Phalen: And I think that the example here is just putting more crap into the drawings. More and more and more and more crap. More and more and more and more detail. More and more and more metadata. More and more parameters. Like all the stuff. and it's like that's actually making the situation worse not not better like how long do you have to wait for your model to open now how many additional shortcuts did you take to get the thing to look right on the sheet how it's it's like now you're actually looking for needles in the haystack because there's so much crap on the sheet right and and so is that a better situation than it used to be i don't think it is right so right why aren't we working on the profession why aren't working on the industry, you could be spending your time making things better for everybody instead of just your little pet project.

38:32Cormac Phalen: So it's interesting. It's definitely, I can see why people are scared. There's definitely people out there who are like, they're scared for multiple reasons. I'm not saying they're like not using it scared. I'm saying there's people who are seriously thinking if they don't do it, they're not going to exist in the near future. Right. And so there's like kind of this existential threat that we're going to be left behind as well.

38:59Evan Troxel: Right.

38:59Cormac Phalen: And maybe they don't have the capabilities or maybe they don't have the culture. Right. So that kind of goes back to the, some of the ideas we were talking about in our, in our talk. All, all of it's so interesting because we've had so many discussions on this podcast about what's the answer. The answer is do more. Do actually, I think it's just care more, care more about things. And it's like, well, I only have so much capacity for all the things before I keel over. There's just not, I can't fit more in. But it's like you actually, I think, are going to be able to prioritize what matters because there's going to be tools taking over things that you really don't need to be doing.

39:36Evan Troxel: So think about this. You said care more. And think about, you know, the people that you've worked with. Think about, like, you. there's times where you could give less than two bleepity bleeps i'll self-bleep myself out there but on certain things you get burned out when you're doing so much that you know it's like you know i don't care i just don't care and it's like if if you were less burdened by the minutia of things that take that take away from the passion the caring the morale killers yes the Morale killers. You would actually enjoy your profession far more. And again, you enjoy it more.

40:23Evan Troxel: You're bringing higher value to your clients. You're going to have a better impact. You're going to have a better impact. Exactly.

40:30Cormac Phalen: I agree. I agree. And so how do you get there? You need to freaking start. That's what you need to do.

40:38Evan Troxel: Yeah.

40:39Cormac Phalen: You're sitting around waiting for a couple of things. You could be waiting for permission. I don't know man don't wait for permission and I'm not saying like go out there and volley all your stuff over to these companies but be intentional and go intentionally into this and I don't mean like just make a decision to do it I mean like really think about what you could do what's possible because you do not have to be the person you were yesterday tomorrow you don't have to be at all so what do you want to be And in that way, I'm extremely optimistic about the potential here.

41:21Evan Troxel: And I think that's where people need to come into this and use that optimism. Use the optimism that gets you, that got you into architecture in the first place. Have that, remember the joy of what brought you here. And then let's have the conversation about, okay, so what do you like to do more? Well, I like doing this and this. What do you like to do least? well I really hate doing this and I really hate doing that okay then that's what you focus on being able to release that let go of that let some someone else something else do that for you so then again you can do yeah then you can bring the that passion back to why you're doing this in the first place I've I've I've resorted to asking students just randomly now instead of just like sitting there pointing one by one by one and putting them on the spot is i'll just periodically ask why architecture why architecture i mean i can answer why i chose architecture i can i can answer why i still enjoy and love architecture i can also answer why sometimes architecture bugs the living crap out of me and everything in between but i think about it all the time And I think, you know, and I want people to, like, what was the passion that drew you here?

42:43Evan Troxel: Like, did you know what you were getting into or did you stumble into it? Did you stumble into it and then you found out that you're just stuck and you're doing it? Maybe that might be a conversation that you should have with yourself. Or did you stumble into it and you found out, holy moly, I really like this. And then you get to do that. and so like these are the things that as you're like trying to embrace these new technologies i mean hell i mean think about how many pitchforks were uh sharpened and torches like lit during the time when we went from hand drafting to to cad and then from cad to revit and then revit to rendering 3d rendering and all of this other stuff and then the bim and then everything else and all of this other stuff.

43:27Evan Troxel: And we've, we've felt these crisis so many times. And if we think about them as the tool, as like the tool, rather than our overlord, which is what some people think it's going to be, oh, it's just going to replace me. Well, then maybe you were, you were replaceable.

43:48Cormac Phalen: Absolutely. And I think it's a totally legit thing to say, I'm going to have nothing to do with that and I'm going to build a practice that is completely custom and analog like that's a totally valid choice I'm not I'm not saying like you have to if you don't go down this path but I'm but but like be intentional about what I love your question why architecture it actually takes you back to first principles right and so you can decide this is what's your party diagram for your career, right? It's like, let me go back to the party diagram and say, oh, yeah, like, this is why I decided to go this direction.

44:31Cormac Phalen: You can maybe even map it out. How did I get here? I mean, you can't do that going forward. All you can do is set a vector, right? And say, okay, we're going to go in this direction and then course correct. But if you look back, you can connect all those dots and you can figure it out. Of course, it's going to be like weird and windy and nonlinear and all those things, but it's like, okay, my point still is, like, you get to decide who you want to be. Right. And you don't have to be on the tech side of this at all. Amazing. I bet that there is a niche group of clients who would super, super value that.

45:12Cormac Phalen: How do you find them? How do you attract them? Right? And you could totally do that. And I think there's also this incredible capacity to become the next version of practice right now as well and not just the same version of practice that everybody else is and we all share the same weird low morale DNA out there. So it's like I just think, man, there's so much opportunity here to really pick where you want to go and decide who you want to be.

45:43Evan Troxel: and what's interesting is you know me i love the analog i mean hell i just held up my exacto blade i right you know scale my fountain pen all these other things and one of the interesting things was like last week i was doing a lot of hand sketching for some details that i was working in and then i took a picture of the details and i sent them off to a couple of different people but then i'm like I've got it digitally. Let me just, I put it into, easy at the time, I just put it into Gemini and said, what am I missing? What was interesting is it actually looked at and analyzed my hand sketch. And first it gave me a couple of nice little compliments on my drawing abilities.

46:29Evan Troxel: Thank you. Thank you, Gemini. That was very nice.

46:31Cormac Phalen: It's so nice to you so that you will maybe use it again. Yeah.

46:34Evan Troxel: Exactly. But then it kind of it analyzed if it analyzed my sketch and I was trying to be so very detailed about what I was sketching so that if I pass it off to somebody else to draft it up or if I just did it myself or at least or I was just like, here's a quick sketch to show you what we're thinking. What do you think about this this direction before we start committing it to an actual detail? There's exactly right there.

46:59Cormac Phalen: Yeah.

46:59Evan Troxel: And it was great because then it gave me an opportunity and a time to just do what I like to do and yet still be able to.

47:10Cormac Phalen: Right there. That's perfect.

47:12Evan Troxel: Exactly.

47:13Cormac Phalen: That's perfect. Oh, I love that. I love that. And yeah, I mean, exactly. That's exactly it. And so you can do the thing that is the most valuable use of your time, right? Which is, oh, this is my favorite. This is my favorite kind of trace right there. It's like a, what color?

47:32Evan Troxel: What do you call that? So there's the, I've got all three. You've got all three. I'll take any of them. But I love the yellow trace. So the canary yellow. Yes. Then your standard white. and then I don't know why but I always just call it this butter paper I'm sure it is that's like margarine it's the margarine of butter I'm sure I've got more of those it's getting harder and harder to find this yeah

48:04Cormac Phalen: I think I only have white around here do you know why

48:08Evan Troxel: I literally like I covet the canary yellow you gotta be careful careful you pull that out in front of somebody might just start wasting it do you know who um like i was smitten by carlos scarpa's sketches in school and you know wonder why he he i mean you know just just look at him and just look at him exactly but he loved the canary yellow paper and i'm just like you know i start i started using the canary yellow paper i like carlos scarpa even more now. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

48:47Cormac Phalen: No, who cares? Who cares what color the trace was? Yeah. Amazing architecture. Nobody, nobody even asked what color the trace paper was. It's nobody.

48:57Evan Troxel: So, you know, we, we started this conversation, you know, kind of like looking backwards and then, you know, it just led us to the obvious that which is to look forward. Right. Okay. Let's do it. you know and uh and it's just interesting i've i've actually got that uh um so i don't really have a lot of experience with gfrc panels and we're using one for a decorative panel for actually a very large sundial yeah we're doing a sundial and and i actually needed i i didn't know how to merge the needs of like the embeds and things like that with all with everything else and just started asking questions, asking the questions that I would ask, that the client would ask, that the contractor would ask.

49:44Evan Troxel: And it led me down a path of, did it give me a complete and finished spec? No, I had to vet it, look at it, find out what was right, what was wrong, what we needed, what we shouldn't use, what we should use. But it also gave me questions to ask. And that was what I found the great value of that. Because, you know, and that's the thing that I think when we start fearing the things that are going to replace us, it's not. Unless you're replaceable, it's not going to replace you.

50:16Cormac Phalen: Yeah, there are definitely tasks and things that do go away, for sure. If you are totally not going to evolve. Yeah, right. That's it. I mean, if you are determined not to change, then okay. But that's a choice. That's a literal choice. The choice isn't to not do anything. The choice is you're just deciding to be irrelevant and go away, I think. Exactly. Exactly.

50:48Evan Troxel: Well, thank you for sharing. Are you going to do a recap on Troxel?

50:55Cormac Phalen: Maybe. Maybe. I put the word out, hey, would anybody like us to do the workshop as a live stream or make an episode about it? So I've heard back from a handful of people that they would find value in that. So, yes, maybe. We'll see. I'm pretty burnt out right now. Well, understandable.

51:17Evan Troxel: Understandable. You've been traveling a lot and going to these and stuff. So, yeah. We'll see. It would be very interesting because, obviously, this is a very valuable conversation that we not only need to have but have to have.

51:35Cormac Phalen: i i agree you can't ignore it so it's can't ignore it as we know it ain't going away i do ignore it you will be you are you are choosing to become irrelevant i believe so my yeah my favorite thing

51:50Evan Troxel: that you've been saying since day one of all of this is genie's out of the bottle yeah so it's not it's not going back you're not going back in you got to figure out how to work with it yeah so leverage that genie you gotta get your O's in oh

52:11Evan Troxel: alright see you next time yep