I Feel You, A Fortify Wellness Production
Bettina Mahoney the Founder/CEO of @atfortifywellness is a rape survivor who started her brand after struggling to not only find a therapist, but multiple mediums to heal through her trauma. Fortify Wellness is a 360 holistic platform offering therapy, coaching, fitness, and meditation on one subscription platform. We dive deep with our trailblazing guests about overcoming adversity.
I Feel You, A Fortify Wellness Production
Question Everything: How I Found Myself in a World Obsessed with Validation
Andrew shares his journey of self-discovery through asking difficult questions and finding authentic connections in a world full of superficial relationships.
• Explorer and tinkerer at heart who has always loved building and understanding how things work
• Grew up as a middle child among nine siblings and as a pastor's kid with high expectations
• Started building computers at age nine, developing a lifelong passion for technology
• Began asking deeper questions about himself and his purpose around age 25-26
• Emphasizes the importance of separating self-worth from societal metrics and expectations
• Discusses how authentic friendships require mutual growth, support, and meaningful conversations
• Navigated a winding career path from networking to project management to software development
• Believes good developers can succeed in any codebase because they know what questions to ask
• Cautions against AI misconceptions, describing them as "token guessing machines" not truly intelligent systems
• Advocates for ethical AI implementation in healthcare with proper safeguards and limitations
• Values personal connections over technology, supporting Fortify because of belief in the founder's vision
If today's episode inspired you, subscribe, share your thoughts in the comments and come back next week for more insights to elevate your journey.
More about Andrew: Product Manager + Technology Developer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-moore-037a3573/
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**This information is not to be misconstrued as medical or psychological advice. Please contact your medical team if you have questions or concerns pertaining to your medical or psychological well-being. All of the linked products are independently selected, and curated by the fab Fortify team. If you love and buy something we link to, we may earn a commission.**
You're listening to the Fortify Wellness Podcast. I'm Bettina, founder and survivor, and this season we're not holding back. This is for anyone who's been through the fire, sat in the dark, questioned everything and still chose to get up. We talk healing that hits mind, body and soul raw stories, expert gems and the real stuff that helps you rebuild. Just so you know, this podcast isn't therapy or medical advice. It's real talk, lived experience and tools to help you find your way back. Season eight starts now. Subscribe, lock in and let's get fortified. All right, andrew, I'm so excited that you're here. Thank you for coming on today. It's my pleasure. So I'm excited to have you on because I feel like we've had some of these conversations unofficially and you're good at challenging me to kind of rethink my own belief systems about life and about just different things in my life. So I'm going to kind of put you to the test today and when you take away all of your titles partner, developer, son, brother, et cetera who are you at your core?
Speaker 2:Who are you at your core? At the core, I'd probably consider myself just an explorer, a tinkerer in life. Most of what I do, what I've always done when I was a little kid, I used to love playing with Legos. I used to love playing with. My mom used to have a big box of Popsicle sticks. I would take those, cut them up and make little shapes.
Speaker 2:I was always trying to build something, but really what I was doing was exploring my world, asking questions and figuring out what the answers are. To the best of my ability and I still do that to this day I try to ask difficult questions and find the answer to them. And since I've turned around 25, 26, I started asking more internal questions, more difficult internal questions, and trying to find answers to those and trying to find answers to those. One thing that I've noticed about people is they cannot ask themselves honest questions and because they can't do that, they can't get the answers that they need to actually progress themselves. And I've spent I'm now 39, and I've spent the last 15 or so years asking those questions and trying to answer them and tinkering with my own life in order to try, and you know, find a better place.
Speaker 1:Why do you think it's so hard for people to be in a place where they can ask themselves really tough questions?
Speaker 2:uh, because people don't like the answers that people don't like to think of them. Look at themselves critically and because and it's because they don't want everyone likes to look at themselves through rose, rose colored glasses and to ask yourself some difficult questions and try and get an honest answer. You kind of have to be look at yourself objectively, which is very difficult for most people to do. Obviously there are exceptions to that, but most people that's a very, very difficult prospect. It people to do. Obviously there are exceptions to that, but most people that's a very, very difficult prospect. It was for me when I first started, because I had to answer some really poignant questions about myself and, yeah, it's vulnerable.
Speaker 2:What do I want? Who am I? Who, uh, what? What is my place in the world? Um, uh, uh, are the things that I'm doing actually good for me? Um, are the people that I surround myself actually good for me? Do they bring fruit in my life, to my life, like those kinds of questions, asking them honestly and then, when you come up with an answer, actually acting on them. That was extremely difficult and that's hard for most people to do. I'm still doing it to this day. Obviously, it's a lifelong adventure. It's a journey without an end. I'll be doing it to the day I die.
Speaker 1:And I remember we sat in our apartment because we were housemates with your girlfriend Fiona and we had like a three hour conversation about just that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And we talked about what truths we wanted, at least in my life, and you were my unofficial coach, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think what's interesting about you is people are going to think well, you're a developer. Like, how does this kind of correlate and make any sense? And I think I'd love for you to talk about how you your, how you grew up, um, with you know, it sounds like you were like a you like you were very involved in your church and maybe that played a huge role in giving feedback and asking yourself important questions, living an authentic life. Maybe it's a combination of having many siblings. Maybe it's also a combination of your curiosity, so maybe it's like nature versus nurture. But can you talk a little bit about the way you grew up and maybe how that played a role in who you are today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm the middle child of nine kids six biological, three adopted child of nine kids six biological, three adopted. I'm also the son of a pastor, so I grew up as a PK. Anyone who is a pastor's kid knows what that's like. There's kind of a when you walk into a room there's kind of this set of expectations of you and I always have had that growing up. Well, throughout my youth. As you get older, right, less and less people know that about you. So you kind of get this neutral introduction to people. But when you're young you're always introduced through your parents or through your family. So there's this higher level of expectations. They expect you to be kinder, more generous. They expect you to be more open. They expect you to know more answers. Because you're a pastor's kid you should know the Bible inside and out. I mean, yeah, we did because, yeah, my parents were that way. But that level of pressure when you're that young, it didn't really bother me because I just kind of saw the world that way, right you, when you're raised in it, it doesn't really like weigh on you. It's not until later when you start looking back like yeah, there were a lot more expectations on me than I probably should have had, just because I was the son of a pastor, um, uh, and that, yeah, and and also being the middle child, like, don't know if anyone, if you've ever heard of the studies. But middle children are like the redheaded stepchilds of the children of the family. They rarely fit in and I was just like that. I had my baby sister and then four older siblings that were all biological, and then three younger siblings, and so basically I was like right in the middle of the family, all by myself, had very different interests than everyone else, except for my older brother, but he had already moved out by the time I came along, um, or at least by the time I started, uh, maturing and gathering my interests. So I was kind of like by myself, all the time in the middle of a family, so I wasn't alone, but I was by myself. My interests were very different from everyone else. My passions were.
Speaker 2:Computers was an early passion for me, as you mentioned. I was nine years old when I built my first computer. My brother came in and said, hey, I want you to put this together and I'm just like what? Like I'm nine, like what, what do you mean? And he worked with me and showed me how to put the computer together. And I was hooked from then on and still am. So I'm 39 now, so 30 years been hooked on computers.
Speaker 2:And when I learned how to build computers it changed from wanting to build like buildings to wanting to build computers and work with computers and work with software and things like that, set up systems and make networks and get them talking to each other. So it actually completely flipped that interest. But it still fulfilled that need for construction and whatnot and my parents always nurtured it. We weren't super wealthy so they did the best that they could. They let me tinker with their computers whenever I wasn't going to break something or whenever I would get an okay from my older brother. It's like, yeah, let them try that.
Speaker 2:But mostly I had to just like kind of scavenge my way through this new interest that I had and, being in the middle of the family, no one really understood like why is he always alone in his room doing? What is he doing in there? It's like I'm playing with my, my, my toys, my things and and and and learning new things about myself and learning new things about this really interesting field, because at that time it was, uh, 1995, uh, yeah, 1995, 1996 at that time. So there was no internet really. I mean, it was, there was, but there was really the internet as we think of it didn't really exist. It was just computers and software and isolated systems that do something very specific. And that was just systems that do something very specific and that was just interesting to me. And then I learned about computer games and I was my whole life changed. I was just like, oh wow, what is this whole world? So I've been a computer geek gamer my whole life, pretty much.
Speaker 2:But back to the original question being the son of a pastor's kid, one of the interesting things was, like I said, they had always encouraged me. But they always encouraged me to try and approach it not just from an exploratory way but try to approach it from a way where I can look at how I can make this something useful in my life. And that was specifically with my interest in computers. But my dad especially, and especially my mom, they would always ask me to try and like, well, what else can these things do for you? And they would always challenge me to think of the things that I'm doing in that light. So whenever I picked up something new. I would always think like, okay, how many ways can this help me? How many ways is this useful? If it's just fun, that's fine, but don't focus too much time on it.
Speaker 2:And I would always try to approach new things that way and it wasn't until I was 25 that I actually took those skills 25, 26, that I actually took those skills and started looking at myself more introspectively and trying to figure out, like, what am I doing to make myself better? What am I doing and what can I do to make myself better? Yeah, I grew up in a hard nose. My dad was very, very rigid. I wasn't allowed to be out like at all most of the time. Like, basically, if you're not in school or playing a sport, you need to be at home. You could go and do your bike riding and all those things to be at home. You could go and do your bike riding and all those things. But as soon as the streetlights come on because it's the 90s as soon as the streetlights come on, you better be on before they're on, so you know exactly when they come on every night. If you want to go hang out with your friends, no, can't really do that. Your friends can all. But it was interesting. I could never do that, but my friends were always allowed to come over, so I could have as many friends over as I wanted and basically for as long as I wanted, but like I couldn't go anywhere. But the thing is like my friends all had like the newest video games. We wanted to go to their house.
Speaker 2:So yeah, there was that conflict growing up which I learned to appreciate later when I was younger. Obviously, when you're a kid you don't appreciate that at all. You're like why can't I do the things that everyone else is doing? And you just do not understand why they're so rigid. But then, as I grew up and started understanding what the world was about, I definitely appreciate it and I told him so. I definitely appreciated the rigid structure that he imposed. But you know, like we said, when you're a kid you don't get it and you can't appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Do you think it was because he wanted you in an environment that held his values? Because that makes sense Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yes, because so this the mid-90s-ish right, because I was too young. In the early 90s, mid to late 90s, the world was changing a lot and was changing very rapidly. So your kids if you're letting them out or whatnot, they would be exposed to a lot more than when he was a kid, and so he was basically just trying to protect all of us from those things Well, mainly me and my sister, because by that point my elder siblings were old enough to where they could be out. But yeah, we, he was trying to keep us from being exposed to all of the new things that were going on in the world. We could talk nineties, geopolitics and social changes, but yeah, he was absolutely he was right to looking back. I know he was absolutely right to because if you look at the change in social households in the early 2000s and now, yeah, he saw something coming. That was. That was basically it was the end of an era for us.
Speaker 2:I did get to go, like I guess, like I said, I got to go. I got to go rollerblading. I love to go rollerblading, got to go bike riding and skateboarding and playing on the plant. We used to live near a Mount, so go play in the hills and whatnot. I got to do that, but not as much as I probably would have liked to and probably not as much as you would expect, given the community that I actually grew up in, because of how rigid he was.
Speaker 2:But, like I said, as later on, I got to appreciate it and it's definitely because we're a very conservative Christian family, because we're a very conservative Christian family, conservative in the old sense, as in you know, family is the most important thing. God is. Family is second only to God. Those sorts of rigid values not like conservative, republican or anything like that, but like the old term of what conservative meant and keep away from the things of the flesh that will tempt you to the, to the devil Like that was the life that I grew up in, in church, three times a week, sunday school church on Sundays, bible study on Wednesday, prayer meeting on Fridays.
Speaker 2:It was rigid. That was the life that I grew up in and I look back on it now and I appreciate it because I look at the world that people are. I look at the people that are in the world now and I look at how lost they feel these days. Just a human or a flesh context. That will. That allowed me to kind of just keep myself separated from the things that would have brought me down, and there were plenty of them out there.
Speaker 1:I think it's interesting because I started asking myself hard questions at 25, 26. So what's your advice for that age group, because I feel like that's the magic number to go. Yeah, I need to to change my life. What are your tips to starting to have those really intrinsic, honest conversations with yourself?
Speaker 2:The first advice I would give is stop trying to keep up with the Joneses Mm-hmm, keep up with the Joneses. When you judge yourself based on a metric that is created by the world, you're always going to be lacking and you'll never really be able to look at yourself honestly. If you're looking at yourself through that lens Because the world is one one it's extremely varied. There are especially in this country. There are many different cultures out there, and so what is acceptable or progressive or advancement to one group of people may not be for you. And so if you're looking at it that way and you're seeing that your neighbor has this X, y and Z and is doing X, y and Z and you think that you're not getting better, you're not improving because of that, then you're destined for failure because you're not measuring yourself fairly. That would be the first thing. And then, if you can achieve that by just saying, okay, I am where I am because of how I was raised and because of the decisions that I've made, then you can actually start asking yourself who am I? Why do I enjoy the things that I do? What do I want out of my life? What are the goals that I ultimate goals that I want to achieve. Then you can start answering those questions, and the thing is that you have to actually answer those. You have to ask those questions honestly and you have to answer them honestly and they're not quick questions. It took me years to answer those questions. There's not a quick answer to that. You may ask who am I? And it'll take you six, seven, eight months to reason your way through who you actually are, because you're going to have to go back and look at all the decisions that you've made throughout your life and ask yourself if you regret them or if you support them, if you've done anything that actually would hinder who you think you should be. And if you have, then you need to learn how to forgive yourself and or ask for forgiveness, depending on what it is.
Speaker 2:Obviously those are really tough things to do and they're not quick. This is not something you can just. You know, chat GPT, give me a list of questions to ask myself and you answer them in one night and like oh yeah, I found enlightenment. That's not how it works. It's a long ongoing process. Like I said, I've been in it for about 15, 16 years now, doing that particular thing honestly for about 15, 16 years now and I'm still working on it.
Speaker 2:I may be a little bit further than some others, but I'm not nowhere near the end and I don't even think there is one. So those are going to be the primary two primary things, because after that it's really like a personal thing, right? So the first two things, like, are pretty universal Separate who you, who you are, from the world, so you can actually look at yourself objectively and then ask yourself and try to answer honest questions. Those are going to be your primary two tips and they're like it's not easy but it I definitely think everyone can do it. Everyone of sound mind can absolutely do it.
Speaker 1:So I know this about you that you are not interested in having just mundane, what's your favorite color? Just casual conversations, not what you're into. You want to have real in-depth, deep conversations, meaningful conversations. How did you get to that point where you're like, no, I will cut this person off if it means it's not an authentic relationship? I know you have very strong relationships with people, so how did you get to that point? Was it through asking yourself really honest questions about what you wanted out of life and how can other people that are coming up do the same?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, yeah, I cannot stand platitude conversations how you're doing, how's your day I ask them, but I don't actually expect you to answer them, because the answer to how's your day is oh well, today I woke up and I was feeling ill and it's a long answer. So that's why I don't like them, because you never. Actually, if you do ask it and you genuinely want that answer, you're never going to get it. So I'm like I don't even like those kind of those top, those types of questions somewhat past the who am I and what do I want? And I started asking myself who am I surrounding myself with? And that's when I started looking objectively at the people that I was endeavoring to spend my time with and what are they bringing to my life and what am I bringing to their life and when I started to essentially checklist in my mind that I was giving more than I was getting, which is perfectly fine, but it's not in a long-term friendship.
Speaker 2:If you're the one who's always giving in a friendship and you're basically never getting anything, that's lopsided. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's not okay, because there are definitely people out there who can use our help and you should absolutely give a helping hand when and where you can. As long as you don't give so much of yourself that you are not liking, that is absolutely okay. Then that's not what I'm describing. I'm talking about those mutual friendships where you guys are essentially at the same place, you guys are financially stable at the same, you know, you, you, you guys don't have major issues that are like tipping the scales, are on to to one side of the friendship or another, and one one side is giving less than they're getting. Um, and that's when I started to and what they're giving is not really beneficial. We're not having conversations about philosophical conversations like why is the world the way that it is? Why is humanity the way that they are? Why do we live the way that we do? Why have we built our society the way that we have? If you're not even curious about those types of things and those tend to be things that I am very curious about because it tells us a lot about ourselves and it tells us a lot about where we came from and those can actually tell you a lot about where you're going Not nobody, but a lot of people really didn't want to ask those questions and explore them with you, because after you explore yourself. You want to explore yourself, but through others, and that's where the friendship comes in. When you get to that point and you're trying to do that and you get essentially no reciprocation, then you start to see like, okay, well, is this friendship really meaningful? Is it really bringing fruit? To see like, okay, well, is this friendship really meaningful? Is it really bringing fruit? Am I just?
Speaker 2:Like I said, I used to be a party animal from like 18 to like 27 ish, 28 is I used to be. I used to bring the party, like we used to do it real, real, big, um and so like. It ended up being that, like, a lot of my friends were from that era and it turned out that that's all we had in common was that we just like to have fun and party together. We didn't actually like, we didn't endeavor to actually uplift each other. And once I got to the age of 25, 26, 27, and started asking myself those questions, that became a problem, because I'm trying to actually get better One, I'm too old to be doing this partying thing now. So, like I'm actually, you know, moving out of that and moving into like the let's try. And, you know, become an adult, let's start doing the adulting thing, and in doing that, you have to look at where you're meant to be going by looking at where you came from, looking at where we came from.
Speaker 2:What are my political views? Because I wasn't that political until around this time, when I started looking at who I wanted to be, what are the values that I have, what are the morals that I want to aspire to? I have, what are the morals that I want to aspire to? And then that's when I start exploring what are the political parties or political ideologies out there that I lean towards, and that's when I started realizing that I was very conservative in the political sense. I was very, very conservative. I associated myself with their values, more so than the other side, and I actually, learning the history, I realized that the other side actually had a lot of those values.
Speaker 2:When I was younger which is why my parents are like I call them old school Democrats. Old school Democrats there used to be such a thing as a conservative Democrat, a conservative Christian Democrat that held many of the same values as conservative Republicans that you would see today, and now you have this massive divide of what I call hedonism and spirituality. That's essentially what the two sides have come to. That's essentially what the two sides have come to, and I was asking myself those kinds of questions and my friends weren't, or my acquaintances, as I come to realize what they were. They weren't asking themselves those questions, they weren't trying to figure out. You know, what do I actually want to be doing 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 50 years from now? Do I want a family? Do I want to be a father from now, 20 years from now, 50 years from now? Do I want a family? Do I want to be a father? Should I be settling down? They weren't doing those types of things and so I started to pull back and I've seen this said before try not texting first and see who messages you. It was kind of like that.
Speaker 2:And obviously you know my buddy, my best buddy V, he and I. He noticed right away. Funny thing is, I started doing this for like a week and he noticed immediately. And then we had a conversation about it and we still have. And then I had another buddy, ryan. It took him a little longer. He noticed as well. We all got together, had a conversation about this and now those are my two boys still.
Speaker 2:The rest have just kind of floated away, and it's because we realized that we wanted more than just to be drinking buddies. We wanted to be like uh, we wanted to have a. We wanted to be there in a, in a more tangible way and a more spiritual way, uplift you and keep you going for the long haul, not just, you know, while you're on this next bender and that's yeah, that that's. That's how I ended up not liking the platitude type conversations, because that's what it ended up being. After a while it's like oh, how was your week? How's this? Okay, great, now let's go play beer pong or let's go do the beer bong or whatever.
Speaker 2:Right, let's go smoke some weed or whatever. Like that was it. It was never anything more, and so I just kind of slowly floated away as I started analyzing myself and the people around me.
Speaker 1:Okay, I love that Because you challenged me a lot about who I have around, who I'm dating at the time and you were a mirror for a lot of those scenarios, situations. We don't want to go back there, but I want to talk about what you're doing now. Where do you focus yourself now in development and can you tell us a little bit about, like a quick synopsis about, your background in development and what work you're doing?
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah. So I graduated high school in 04 and I went to DeVry until 2006. It was a two-year like grinded-out CS degree back then, but I went for networking, did not realize that the world in tech, the landscape was changing and by the time I got out, cloud was like coming on the scene. It wasn't there yet. There was still like, but most companies were kind of looking at this cloud thing. Um, uh, uh, and I was not about cloud. I still am not really about cloud um, so I actually went and worked uh, uh, actually at the time I was working for GameStop and Bed Bath Beyond and I just continued to work there until like 2008. And then I got a job at like EVGA, which was like the most amazing job ever, because if you're a gamer from the 2010s, you know who EVGA are. They were the enthusiast grade graphics card and motherboard company. Like that was where like the best stuff came out of, and I got to work there during like the height of that period. It was awesome, got to see all of the stuff they were making and I got to influence the development of things, of those things. It was. It was so fun. Um, I worked there for like two years, two and a half years or so, and by that point technology had changed. Networking was going largely into the cloud. So when I went to move on from EVGA, my field, everything that I had learned was just like completely irrelevant. So I kind of bounced around for a few years, a couple of years I did some. I sold labor law posters, you know, like OSHA and all that HIPAA posters and whatnot insurance, I modeled things like that. And then I finally found a an interesting uh gig working at an android company. Um, they made android tablets and phones and whatnot. And this was 2012, 2013, um, and I found that really interesting because, you know, by that point smartphones were getting really big and I still liked the hardware side of things. So I worked there for about a year and then I saw where Android was going. Google had sold I'm sorry, google had bought Android, so it was changing. It was more like open source and whatnot.
Speaker 2:My old boss from Baja Tech that's when I fell into project management and I wasn't a project manager. I knew nothing about it at all. I was just a hardware guy and I knew how to learn things and I knew how software should be work. I knew how software should work. But I had no idea how to do it, and he took me and taught me everything that I learned initially about project management how do you take software from an idea through the development phase out into production. He taught me all of those things and I worked there for about six years six and a half years and just learned so much, and it renewed my passion for tech in a new way and also made me feel kind of lacking because I couldn't express myself in the way that I wanted to.
Speaker 2:And so after I left there, the first thing that I did was actually I started a company doing almost exactly the same thing that I was doing there doing project management for software and then I decided no, I don't want to do this, I'm going to learn how to code. And so I sat down and started teaching myself how to code, and I spent five years teaching myself how to code and doing odd, odd jobs on the side until that became just what I do. So now that's all I do. I just wake up, write code. If I'm not writing code, I'm probably watching something. I'm not watching something, I'm playing a video game or something like that, or reading about more code, that's just it. It's because I, like I said when I was a kid, I loved to tinker and code. Right now is a place where I can just try things, build things, test things, learn things, explore my own ideas and explore different concepts and, thank God, I can get paid doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's interesting. I've heard you say a lot that if you're new in development, you should be doing side jobs in terms of, like, building your own product or whatever. Why do you think today there's not as much of that happening with up and coming developers, like having those side projects to really be creative and be innovative in that way?
Speaker 2:I think it's because the pipeline to becoming everyone wants to be a Fang developer or a manga developer, whatever the new name is. They want to be at the Google, the Amazon, the Microsoft, the Facebook, the Netflix, right, they want to be one of those types of developers. And the pipeline for that is very straightforward right, get your CS degree, do a bunch of leak code and then do a million interviews and try and get into the FANG, into one of these FANG companies, and you're going to get paid. And because of that, they don't really think about their development as like a skill or as like a trade. I should say they think of it as a skill but they don't think of it as like a trade.
Speaker 2:Where most tradesmen I know, like craftsmen, they tend to cultivate that skill outside of just their profession. They'll tinker with different things on the side. And I've learned I had a buddy whose dad who was a welder and he would just build stuff outside of work and he would learn new techniques and learn new things and that was something that, like that, always made sense, right, If you're passionate about something, right, you should be cultivating that skill on the side, and that's something that I've noticed isn't there in the new generation of developers coming up. That's why I always say you should be doing something on the side. If you see development as just a job, you can do that, but you're never going to be a very good developer. So I always recommend having something on the side. But you're never going to be a very good developer. So I always recommend having something on the side that you're doing.
Speaker 2:Build your own tools, build your own CLI. If you have something that you do normally over and over and over again on your system, try and build a tool for that. Solve your own problems. Maybe you'll solve a problem that other developers have and you can actually sell that, which is where a lot of tools come from, where a lot of products come from. Is developers solving their own problems or just tinker, like I do?
Speaker 2:I like to play tinker with game development. Right, I'm not a game developer. I've never released a single game but I can tell you a lot about the industry and a lot about how the sort, how the code works and the different design patterns and paradigms that they use in the industry. Because that's my side thing. I like to play around with game development and I always recommend that because it'll one, it'll keep you interested and it'll keep things fresh, but two, it'll also keep you learning. You'll always be learning something new. You might see something in one industry that they're doing that you can use in your own. I can give an example, a specific example, but it'll take a long time.
Speaker 2:But there's something that game developers do with how they handle message systems sending messages back and forth from client to server that I really, really love, but that's generally unnecessary in most enterprise applications, which is where I mostly focus. I usually focus on making internal applications for small businesses, small to medium-sized businesses. That's pretty much what I do. So the use cases and the number of clients and the number of users tends to be small. So to have a high-speed messaging system isn't really necessary, but I just love the way it works, that I learned how it works in and out and I tend to implement that and it. It works really well. It's overkill but it's not hard because I know how to do it and it's like okay, so I can actually give someone the ability. If they got 10 million users, they could totally handle it. They never will, but they could and you get to learn those different things and you get to implement them in different ways.
Speaker 2:If you're doing stuff on the side like, you can actually play with and and and see these different aspects of your field come together. If you just you know, try to do some, do other things. Look, look. Look at how HTTP requests work. Look at how um, udp socket systems work. Look at, look at, go and look at how they work on underline, uh, on the uh, um, uh, uh at the base level.
Speaker 2:Don't use a library or a framework. Try and figure it out for yourself. How do you do OAuth right? How could I roll my own OAuth? You don't have to do it. You know in production, but it's good to know how it works, and I always recommend that they go and expand themselves that way, because if you're not, you don't understand how 90% of applications actually work. Most people they'll go get a job at, like Amazon or something like that. They'll work on one tiny part of a large application and so they don't get an idea of the scope of the system that they're actually working within. So that's why I said they know how to code, but they're not going to be very good developers.
Speaker 1:What makes a good developer?
Speaker 2:Yeah um, I think, someone who you could put in any system, any code base, legacy or greenfield, and they will succeed. It's not about speed of development. It's not even about quality, because quality is subjective. If it works, I've considered that good quality. But you can just put them in any role, essentially with the exception of like architects or whatever, because those are like super high level people and like doing crazy stuff. But you can put them in any role and they will be successful at it because they have set a set of uh uh uh behaviors within themselves that will allow them to be successful. They know what questions to ask and they know how to find the answers to those questions. That's a good developer. It's not like how many languages do you know or anything like that. It's can you be successful in virtually any code base.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious we talk a lot about this, but what are the misconceptions of AI? We see it everywhere in tech VCs are talking a lot about AI and wanting to invest in the next AI company. So, in very layman speak, what are the misconceptions around AI and the ways that people are kind of misunderstanding the way that we're going to see the development within, like the next five to 10 years?
Speaker 2:In tech, the biggest misconception is that AI can write large scale systems. It just they just can't. The short and the long and short is they just can't right Because they don't. They can't hold a context window big enough, and by context window I mean. So probably we should define what AIs are which they aren't actually AI, first of all.
Speaker 2:First problem with AI is calling it an AI. It's not AI. It's not intelligent at all. It's a large language model, but essentially what that is is a token. An AI? It's not AI. It's not intelligent at all. It's a large language model, but essentially what that is is a token guessing machine. It takes words, breaks them down into different parts and then it guesses what's the most logical next word in the sequence. That's all they are and because of that, that means they're essentially a probability engine and they tend to hallucinate, because when you have a percentage, that means that some percentage of the time it's going to hit outside of the expected range that you're looking for. So you get hallucinations. The biggest thing is that it's because it can't hold that many tokens, essentially, which would constitute its context window.
Speaker 2:It can't think creatively. None of them are creative, none of them are unique. They try to take solutions that exist already and fit them into the framework that you laid out with your prompt, and that's not really feasible at this point because, first of all, with regards to code, most of the code that's out there is garbage, like every developer will tell you. Most go, most code that you see on GitHub and and stack overflow and all these places where the LLM is parsing, you know, scraping data to get the answers right Most of the code is garbage. And it's garbage because it's usually meant to be learning or, if it's in a production environment, who's to say that they use the best practices? So you're getting answers from code that's garbage and then you're getting answer from code that's garbage in a context where that garbage code doesn't necessarily fit. And then you have this token guessing machine. Try and break it up and put it back together so that it's such that it works. It just doesn't work Because of that. It just does not work. Now, that's the misconception is that AI is going to take developers jobs. It won't.
Speaker 2:What it is great at and what I use it for is parsing documents right. So I do, like I said, I do, a lot of reading about technical topics and whatnot, and a lot of reference documents for code base or languages or frameworks. It is amazing at looking at those documents and giving you a summary of some specific thing from within those documents, because the context window is not huge with that, it's very limited and so it's amazing at that. So if you want to learn how in go to handle channels, you can go and ask it to give me a summary about how the channels. You can go and ask it to give me a summary about how Go channels work compared to threads in C or Python or whatever, and it is amazing at that. And then when you use it in that way, you're actually letting it do what it does best in the best way possible, and it actually will give you a lot of information that you may not have. It would have taken you a long time to get. That is where they excel.
Speaker 2:Having it try to be because there's so many implementations of AI right now like having it try to. Well, like I said, write code but do legal work. I know a lawyer who's trying to have it do legal work. Do statistical analysis work? I know a guy who does analytics on large sets of data having to do those things, and they all say that they spend most of their time trying to fix the prompts to get it to do the thing instead of just doing the thing. And I'm just like that's a waste, because even if we make the context window big, it'll never be big enough to actually hold enough data to answer these questions. And that's the biggest problem with AI is that we're using it in the wrong ways. It has its place, but its place isn't everywhere, and that's the problem is, everyone thinks it should be everywhere. I don't agree with that.
Speaker 2:And it's proving not to be true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I think it's. It's definitely not going to take. I see certain apps in healthcare and medicine and you know psychology and I don't think that it has a place there because it does make so many errors and it makes me nervous and, again, I don't think it's ever going to go away. I see left and right, day to day, another AI app is coming out. People are using lovable and AI developer software to create it and it makes me nervous because I see, using ChatGPT on just like an administrative level and sometimes it tells me the wrong answer and I can only imagine in a legal sense what wrong answers it could come up with. Mathematically it comes up with wrong answers and then we've seen it comes up with wrong answers and then we've seen, you know historically, the way that AI reacts to humans, using it or chat GPT as a form of advice or like a pen pal or a friend, and we've seen that can be really dangerous.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:What are ways? Because it's never going to go away. It's like there's no use in raging against the machine. So what are ways? Because I think that way too, I just have to hop on the train and utilize it in an integral way, like with Fortify, having those LLMs questionnaires that connect with a professional in the future AI journals in a way that's safe and helpful. But what are ways to lean into it in a way that is ethical? Because I think we're running away from that. We're thinking how can we get this quick, quick, quick and everything's moving fast pace on social media, but we're kind of stepping away from the morality of the way that we're working with people. So what's the way because it's never going to go away that we can utilize AI, or we can rethink the way that we're looking at AI for advancements in making people's lives better and specifically the wellness world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so specifically for healthcare, I think the only real ethical way to use LLMs AI LLMs is you host it yourself, because there's so much personal information that is associated with healthcare.
Speaker 2:Even if it's just like therapy and not necessarily you know some medical doctors, there's so much personal information associated with that. The fact that you're even seeing a therapist right, that's considered health information. If you are at any point even considering sticking that into an LLM which will then potentially be training on that information, which is no longer private at that point, it's crazy how unethical that seems to me and as far as I know, I don't know all of the laws surrounding, as far as I know, you can't do that. So, with regards to how you would go about doing it in an ethical way, do that. So, with regards to how you would go about doing it in an ethical way, training not necessarily training, but hosting your own LLM that parses information from a closed database would be the only ethical way of going about it. That way, you know 100% for certain that it is separated from the world at large. It is enclosed. That means you'll never have any kind of health records leaks or anything like that. That's the only way going forward to do it and then to actually implement it. The second thing would be to not rely on the AI for any diagnosis at all. None, you can't just stick the medical dictionary into an AI and then ask it what is this person's condition? That just does not work and it will not work. And I know that there are people who are trying to work on getting that to work and it's not. And even if it did work, the fact that there is a chance that it could fail, you know, misdiagnose should mean that you should absolutely not do it. I get, like, human therapists and doctors can be misdiagnosed, but at least there's someone who's culpable at that point, right, and they do their best, they put in all the effort not to have that happen. And then they also have malpractice insurance for those situations, right.
Speaker 2:None of that would be available for an LLM. It's like oh well, you know it hallucinated that you have cancer now. Or it hallucinated that you know you have ADHD now, like. And now you're getting prescribed these medications because of a recommended like. No, we can't go down that road. So you have to limit it, and I'm not even sure what it would look like. You have to limit what it's actually doing. What are you analyzing and what? What is it like? You have to limit that and, like I said, I don't know what that looks like because Cause that's a that's a question for, like major, major medical healthcare companies who have these types of records collecting systems, like they would have to really ask themselves, but I would tell, I would suggest that they really look at, like, what are you exposing it to? Is it exposed to the outside world? Because, if it is, frankly, you're crazy and make sure that you limit the scope such that these potential instances can't happen realm.
Speaker 2:There are elements out there that are supposed to be like friend bots and I just heard about this story a few months ago where this friend, ella friend chat bot convinced this person to to to off themselves. Yeah, that's crazy to me. So I'm just like that kind of power should not be exist with, especially within a health care system like the. That Like that kind of potential should not exist, especially in a healthcare system Like the. Liability is crazy.
Speaker 2:But to me, the ethical like I don't trust computers. I'm a developer, I don't trust computers at all, I love them to death but I don't trust them. So why would I trust this tokenizer to give me something that's actually meaningful with regards to questions about my health or outside of that, philosophy or spiritualism? Now there's a worry that people young people, gen Zers will be learning about spiritualism through LLMs and the LLM could just like hallucinate like a God and the desires of this God and convince them to do all kinds of things Like. That's a worry, that's going that I just heard about. Yeah, I would say limiting it as much as possible is the is is the best course of action.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I think we need to make healthcare more personalized. I can't tell you how many times we've had on different guests, medical doctors, coos of medical companies and practices that want healthcare more personalized again, and that's why I built Fortify. It is on tech, but we can't rage against the machine there. We have to lean into it and give people a part of platforms that want to see the advancement of the person and care about people. I've heard of so many apps where professionals are late, don't care or there's a lack of transparency and trust, and that's not what. That's not what I care about or something that I want attached to my name.
Speaker 1:So, I learned all about LLMs and what the heck an LLM is from you. But I'm curious, like because you're now one of Fortify's advisors and the development side and you've been helping a ton to help us hit certain milestones. So I'll put you on the spot and why did you want to join us at Fortify?
Speaker 2:Oh, the answer to that is is you, I got to know you and you needed, you needed technical expertise that you weren't getting and I had specific skills that you needed project management for six years, six and a half years, which where the development of the application was at the time. That was really what you needed and that was it. Like I got to know you and, like I said, I, when I, like I was saying earlier, we've we were able to have those non-platitude type conversations, so we were closer and I, and so your success became personal to me and so it was really about you, like I. I I hope you don't take this the wrong way but I honestly don't care about the application. I care about your success and because of that, I care about the application and so but that's bigger right Cause that the application. If it was only about the application, that feeling could wane at some point. But wanting to see you succeed means that that will never go away. That's why I'm here, that's why and that's why I put the effort that I have in and that's why I will continue to put in the effort that I have is because I want to see you succeed, because I do believe in your vision. I believe in you. I believe that you genuinely want people to be better and you want to give them a useful tool that they can use to actually be better. I do believe that it will actually be that as well. It's not that I don't care about the application. I do think it actually would be a good tool for people to use to be better.
Speaker 2:Meditation, personal coaching, therapy these are things that a lot of people should have but don't necessarily have ready access to. Or even if they do, they don't realize that they have ready access to it because there's no forum, no easy forum for them to go to to say hey, can I, how do I find a therapist? I know they exist, but it's not like. Google is everywhere, everyone knows. Just go search and there you go, the information's there. There's nothing like that for meditation and coaching and therapy like that. There are some things for therapy, but for the other things there's not really anything like that. And so I see a use for this and I see your passion for it and I am happy to put out as much effort as necessary to make your passion come to life. Thank, you.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, Thank you. You're such a good person like a genuinely, really, really good person and you've changed my life in so many ways. Forget about the app, but personally I don't think I'd be in this stage without you. So thank you for believing in the app and for supporting me. I appreciate you. So, in closing, what in one word? This is always really hard for people to do. In one word, what is in one word? What legacy do you want to leave behind?
Speaker 2:what uh diligence?
Speaker 1:I wasn't expecting that. I love that. What do you mean by diligence?
Speaker 2:A lot of people. They get dissuaded by things that happen, they something they'll. Basically, life is essentially a series of mountains and hills that you have to climb and sometimes they get halfway up the hill or halfway up the mountain and they get dissuaded by the difficulty and diligence and perseverance. Keep you going.
Speaker 1:And that's fortitude. Yeah, so thank you for joining me, andrew no problem, it was my pleasure thank you for listening to the fortify wellness pod, where we empower mind, body and soul to reach new heights. Your well-being is your greatest strength. Nurture it, honor it and watch yourself thrive. If today's episode inspired you, subscribe, share your thoughts in the comments and come back next week for more insights to elevate your journey. Stay empowered, stay true and remember you're not alone. This is a Fortify Wellness production. All rights reserved 2025.