Julio Sanchez — United States

Interviewer: Jimmy Norris, United States of America

Interviewee: Julio Sanchez, software engineer, United States of America

Jimmy: My interview today is with Julio Sanchez, who has a unique behind-the-scenes experience and perspective from the time of transition.

Good morning, Julio. How are you doing today?

Julio: Good morning, Jimmy. I’m good today. How are you?

Jimmy: I’m having a good day, thank you.

Julio, can you give me a brief rundown on your background? You know, your childhood and upbringing, school, that kind of thing. We’ll focus mostly on your unique role in transition, but I’d like readers to have a sense of you as a person.

Julio: OK, I’ll start at the beginning.

As you can tell from my name, I’m Latino American. As you can tell from my accent, I was born and raised in the USA. I’m fluent in both languages.

My parents came from Guatemala before I was born. From what they tell me, and from what I hear from others in the community who came at around the same time, it sounds like things there were pretty horrific. Out of control gangs became like warlords controlling big areas of the country. A brutal dictatorship came to power in elections due to a desperate populace sick of living in constant fear. Emilio Gutierrez was elected solely on his promise to make the streets and neighborhoods safe by cracking down hard on the gangs.

They were so panicked that they didn’t see the warning signs. Gutierrez quickly became a vicious dictator in the style of Pinochet and Perón. Tens of thousands were rounded up, tortured, killed, or imprisoned without trials. And worse still, the gangs persisted. The people were caught between different gangs and the government. Conditions were so bad that Guatemala was compared to Haiti by foreign journalists.

My parents found out from friends in the Frente Demócrata Popular that they were on one of the government’s kill lists due to editorials that my father had written as a journalist and editor of a major newspaper. They were also targets for one of the gangs for a similar reason.

They were fortunate to be part of a covert airlift organized by Doctors Without Borders with aid from various international humanitarian groups. They flew in medical supplies and ran rural clinics like they always do, but when they left to be replaced, refugees were smuggled on board.

From there they were taken to United Nations refugee camps in Canada, since the United States at the time was closed to immigration from anywhere that refugees might have come from. A refugee from Finland would have been accepted, but not from Guatemala.

At least the world as a whole had improved its response to the frequent refugee crises popping up around the globe. They were no longer stuck in squalid conditions at the border between a hostile country and an unwelcoming one. Conditions were hard, but not brutal like before. They were safe, fed, sheltered, and had some kind of hope.

They ended up in Windsor, Canada. They both quickly learned English. My Papa found work as a journalist covering international issues. My mama was a nurse and able to go through the program to get a Canadian nursing license, so they were able to live reasonably well.

My sister Vera came with them from Guatemala. My brother Francisco was born in Canada. I didn’t come along until a few years later in the United States.

I think my parents were happy in Canada, but when the paper my Papa worked for was bought by the Chicago Tribune, he was reassigned to work out of the Chicago office. They thought his talents would better serve them there. My folks hadn’t been looking to move there, but they had no objections to following the job.

My papa’s work involved a lot of travel, and after the second pandemic, the H1N14 virus, work norms had changed permanently. My folks moved to Carbondale, Illinois. Chicago was too expensive with too much crime. My papa could submit his articles from anywhere on earth. He only had to go to Chicago one Monday a month for a meeting.

So, I was born and grew up in Carbondale. It was a good place to grow up, with the University and all. Being the youngest meant I had a little more leeway than my older siblings had. When I was born, Vera was fifteen and a freshman in high school. Francisco was six and full of energy and into everything. I was the baby.

My parents were pretty busy with work, especially with Papa away a lot on assignments, so I was entrusted to Vera’s somewhat reluctant care a lot of the time. She was very protective of me, and I knew she loved me, but let’s face it, she would rather be with her friends. So as long as I didn’t do anything unsafe or obnoxious, I had pretty much a free rein. Her attention was also divided between me and Francisco, so it worked out pretty well. Francisco and I got along OK, and when we were a little older, we pulled a few childish pranks together on Vera and our parents.

My parents weren’t typical Guatemalans. My papa was mostly Xinca but my mama’s grandparents, my great grandparents, came to Guatemala to get away from the Nazis. So, our family felt like a mix of Guatemalan, Xinca, and European. Also, my parents were both Baha’is, which was another reason they were on the government kill list. It seems like any time a dictatorship takes over a country, Baha’is are on their blacklist along with Jews, Roma, gays, and political dissenters.

They took Francisco and me to Baha’i meetings when we were little but never pressured us about it. Vera sometimes went too. I liked their philosophy and values, but I wasn’t in a hurry to join or take it to another level.

I think I had a good childhood. My parents were loving, though Papa was away a lot and Mama also worked long hours to make ends meet. But we didn’t lack for much. I mean, we couldn’t afford everything that we kids wanted, but we weren’t deprived or anything. I guess we were about average materially. But both Papa and Mama had to work more and more of their time to maintain it as time went on. I often heard them saying that an hour on their jobs buys less and less. But we did manage to have a good vacation every couple of years.

School was good, but I always felt like I was in my siblings’ shadow. Vera was a popular girl in high school and somewhat of a star to me. She was a cheerleader and big into ballet, modern interpretive dance, singing, school plays and things like that. She seemed more like a grown-up to me than like my sister, and by the time I was in middle school, she had already graduated in the top of her class from Northwestern University with a major in drama and a minor in music. She was out in the world starting her career as an artist and making progress, though sometimes our parents had to send her some money to help her get by.

I was in awe of her, and all through school, people said “Oh, you’re Vera Sanchez’s little brother! She’ll be a tough act to follow!” So, I resented her a little too.

Francisco was closer to my age but he was enough older that he also seemed like he was way up the mountain of growing up while I was still in the foothills. His big thing was sports, and he was good at it. Varsity football, basketball, the whole package. His idea of fun was a 10k first thing in the morning and working out in the gym at night. The garage was set up with exercise equipment for him, after Vera’s home dance studio and rehearsal space wasn’t needed any more. So I was also Francisco Sanchez’s little brother. It made me wonder if being Julio meant anything but someone’s little brother. That kind of sucked.

I think it was good that we were so far apart in age. It meant that we weren’t directly competitive with each other. We each had our own space to grow into. But there were always the shadows and legends of my siblings hovering over me.

I wasn’t into sports or music or the arts. At first, I wanted to be a firefighter, but by the time I got to eighth grade, I had discovered computers, and I was hooked. I taught myself to program in Ultra-C and C Major starting with electives in high school and continuing with free online courses. I tried my hand at some of the new betas of AI programming tools like Magic Lantern and Transformer. And yes, I did my share of gaming too, especially adventure games like Zelda On The Secret Planet and Omicron Contact. I worked part time jobs and willingly did chores around the house to buy hardware and apps.

I was a nerd, let’s face it. Not to the point where you had to pry me out of my chair to get me to go outside. I liked bowling and laser tag and water parks, and I loved to go for walks with our dogs, Scoop and Story. It was also a good way to meet girls. But a big part of my days was spent on the computer. Papa and Mama did sort of have to pry me out of my chair to go to bed.

I did a little amateur hacking for fun with some of my friends in the Computer Science club. We got into a little trouble when we hacked into WSIL-TV and changed the teleprompter for Sonia Madison the hot weather anchor to say “arctic temperatures expected over the next few days in the Carbondale area, with winds up to thirty miles per hour and up to a foot of snow” at the last minute… in August. She caught herself halfway through and the expression on her face was worth getting a week’s suspension and grounded for a month. I learned from that experience that I may be smart, but I’m not as smart as I think I am.

In spite of that, I graduated high school with a 3.7 GPA. My scores in some of the humanities and hard science courses brought it down a bit. My SAT scores were good.

I applied to all the top computer science schools of course. It was very competitive, so I didn’t get into Carnegie Mellon or MIT, but I did get into UC Berkeley, Cornell, and University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign. The latter was really my first choice, though if I’d gotten into Carnegie Mellon or MIT, I would have been a fool not to jump at it. I liked U of I because it was fairly close to home and I would be able to pay in-state tuition which would save a lot.

I needed financial aid of course, which I got, though along with various grants, small scholarships, and work study, I would still need to take student loans, which really scared me. But I had little choice.

I had mostly really good profs and classmates, though there was this one girl who was a full-on genius. She started at the U when she was 13. She seemed like she already knew material that most of us had to sweat blood to master. Some of us joked that she was making all of us look bad. It was awe inspiring but also quite humbling. But I felt bad for her because she seemed so isolated. Her mind was like another Einstein or Hawking, but she was still only 13 and socially awkward.

In any case, I did well. And even though I griped about the heavy load and sleep deprivation, I enjoyed myself most of the time. I also made some good friends, friendships that have lasted through all the changes.

Quantum computers were just coming into the mainstream, so it was an exciting time. A lot of the instruction was aimed at the anticipated capabilities of this technology, so it was pretty bleeding-edge stuff. I learned algorithms and designs that would have been pointless to attempt with silicon technology because they were just too slow to make it practical.

I focused on cyber security, robotics, large-scale distributed systems, and AI. The field was so competitive, my undergrad advisor advised me to aim at being a “triple threat,” a lot like performing artists who needed to be able to act, dance, and sing to be competitive. So, I took it one step further and decided to be a “quadruple threat.” My advisor also told me unofficially that my little hacking misadventure in high school had actually worked in my favor. I had included it in my application because I thought they would find out about it anyway easily enough, so it’s better to be candid.

My capstone senior project was what I called a “Virtual White Cell,” a software bot with the ability to detect well-camouflaged and emerging, novel, and unanticipated cyber threats and attacks more quickly than a human operator could and counter them. My faculty mentor was Dr. Ashok Ramakrishnan, one of the leading AI researchers. He was unable to foil my bot, suggested some improvements I could make to the code, and praised me for coding it all myself instead of using an AI generator. I got a 3.8 which was pretty darn good. He was a tough taskmaster, which made me a better engineer even if at the time I resented him a little.

While in school, I found out about Open Source and got involved as much as my work and study allowed. Of course, my favorite computer was the two-year-old notebook that I installed with Linux and a lot of Open-Source apps. I even contributed a few drivers and little apps.

I also poked around the Dark Web. That’s when I first came face-to-face with the ebook The Cure. I’d heard a few people mention it, but I was too busy to pay much attention. I’d heard of Costa Rica and a few other Central and South American countries going through something called transition, but I hadn’t had time to learn much about it, except that it hadn’t happened yet in Guatemala. It turned out that I could get the book for free from Barnes & Noble or Amazon or other regular online booksellers.

I didn’t have time to read more than a few chapters here and there. I was intrigued by what I read. Then I downloaded the short version to get the overview. It took me a year to get through the long version, because with the student mindset I had, I checked out every footnote and every reference cited. I got excited about the prospect of transition, but I thought it wasn’t likely to happen here because the United States had built its whole identity on laissez-faire capitalism.

I naturally had my share of outstanding quality goods that I picked up for really cheap from stores with headquarters in transitioned countries. Everybody knew by then that their products were top-notch for impossibly low prices.

Most people thought it was a gimmick, but the government took it as a serious threat and tried to levy extreme tariffs on these goods to make them unattractively expensive. They backed off when it became clear that doing so would be political suicide. They tried to counter with arguments that these goods were a threat to American jobs, but that held less weight with most people than the chance to buy things affordably that would be out of reach otherwise. Many people felt that if enough products were available at those kinds of prices, then they could actually live decently on their salaries. So, the President fell back on dishing out rhetoric about it being the patriotic thing to do, to buy American, served up with a sauce of “sacrifices must be made”.

All through my senior year I applied to companies for jobs after graduation. I went to all the job fairs on campus. I was fortunate to land a job with Computer Innovations cybersecurity department. I wanted to go for a Master’s but I couldn’t find any financial aid that I qualified for, and I couldn’t see working full time and studying full time at the same time, so I figured if I get a job with a company with tuition reimbursement or even better, it would be good. CI had gone from startup to major software company in just a few years.

By then, these kinds of jobs could be done from anywhere in the world, so I didn’t have to relocate to New York, just to come once or twice a month for meetings in person. We actually had around-the-clock development going on. Teams in the US, Europe, Turkey, and India overlapped and made sure that it never stopped, literally.

The company had offices in Chicago and Carbondale, so that was where I was based. They insisted that we come in to work in the office on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but we could work from home on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Officially we had weekends off, but when there was a deadline, we often ended up having to work those too. Of course, being salaried meant no such thing as overtime.

It was pretty high stress. Deadlines were always moved up from aggressive to all-nighter. As a junior member of the team, on the one hand I learned a lot, but on the other hand I was the one usually nominated for the things no one really wanted to do. The pay was decent but not quite enough to compensate for the wear and tear in mind and body. And my “Virtual White Cell,” which had tipped the hiring process in my favor, became the property of the company, per the terms of the two-hundred-plus page employment agreement I had to sign.

My manager’s manager was credited in a corporate email as the one who “added this exciting innovation to our company treasure chest.” My name was not mentioned. I was subsequently assigned to the team developing it further and integrating it into the Computer Innovations security suite. I was royally pissed, but at least I was on the team, and we developers were rarely asked for input or suggestions. We were told what to do, when, and how fast to do it, via the chain of command. And over it all hung the shadow of the possibility of being replaced by AI.

But that was where I met my wife, Carol. I guess it was just as well that I wasn’t put in charge of the project, because company rules would have resulted in one or both of us being fired for having a romantic relationship if I had been.

Life settled into a more or less constant grind. Adapting the “Virtual White Cell” to the company API was a bigger challenge than the task of expanding the capabilities of the bot itself. Company procedures were clearly laid out by people with no development experience, bureaucrats and businessmen and the like, and our managers weren’t interested in our suggestions of how to make the API more robust. So, we limped along as best we could and got the job done.

After Carol and I got married, we found that it took both of our incomes to just maintain. Our combined student loans kept us in survival mode most of the time. The terms of the loans had gotten steadily more draconian under a series of ultra conservative regimes. If either of us missed even one payment, both of our salaries would be garnished, and our family finances put under court-ordered supervision. We would literally have to justify every meal, every tank of gas, every pair of shoes until the loans were paid off. The only exceptions were for terminal illness of self, spouse, parent, or child. So, we had to budget as frugally as possible. And we had to put our family-creating aspirations on indefinite hold.

Of course, we benefited from shopping at stores whose headquarters were in transitioned countries. So, our clothes, shoes, most of our electronics, and a few other things were bought for super cheap but had better than high-end quality of any domestically produced similar items. But even with those major savings, we had to budget frugally. Food, gas, utilities, rent, healthcare and other necessities ate up all but a few dollars each month.

During those few years, we studied The Cure and joined a study group of our coworkers for discussion. We never mentioned it in any way at work of course; we learned quickly that we were under constant surveillance and any such talk or emails would mean our jobs. One of our colleagues was fired for emailing her child’s baby pictures to the team. She was told that this was using company resources for personal purposes and the wording on the employment agreement was meant literally.

We all dreamed of transition, but it seemed to be slow to gain traction in the US. But there were a few things we could do to help it a long a little in case it would one day reach critical mass.

Of course, we followed the news about some of the states that made it a felony to possess or share the book. The states you’d expect, the same ones that had been banning books for decades. Of course, they were too boneheaded to get that these bans only made people more curious to read it. As usual, banning it actually helped propagate it.

Beyond our “Book Club” discussions over dinner in our homes, none of us told the others what we might do to further it along in practice. It was clear that some very rich and powerful people would want to squash all efforts to do away with their positions of wealth, privilege, and power! Best to stay off of all radar. So, everything we did was kept anonymous by using the Tails operating system, IP misdirection, and other measures. We used various forms of steganography for most of our communications.

Carol and I got involved in the NewWorldWeb Open-Source development project. At the time it was a pretty mature infrastructure in the form of a generic template that could be easily adapted and localized for each country’s unique needs and culture. We got in on the early stages of localization for the US. We also made contributions to the ongoing development of the template. With thousands of volunteer developers worldwide, it was evolving at a breathtaking pace!

All of this was done at home and on laptops in cafes around town in what spare time we had, which varied quite a bit.

Jimmy: So, you and Carol were deeply involved. Did that help you cope with the constant stress it sounds like you were under?

Julio: Oh, yes, for sure! It kept a little light shining on our darkest, most sleep-deprived moments.

We were pessimistic about it catching on in the US, but the only way to give it a shot at happening would be to apply our skills to getting things as ready as possible. I added my “Virtual White Cell” to the project, in direct violation of company rules but I covered my tracks by making it look like a Russian hacking group had stolen it from a company server. Right after that, I informed Corporate that I had discovered a vulnerability (true) that had allowed Russian hackers to steal proprietary information. Then I patched the vulnerability but left a back door in case it was needed later.

Jimmy: When did The Cure and the momentum of transition consciousness start to take off? And did you see it coming?

Julio: Oh, it was as clear as the water receding before a tsunami.

Of course, there was steadily increasing traffic on the Internet and in the supermarkets, cafes and other public spaces. Our “Book Club” grew. And the government started putting out propaganda, warning people of a “globalist socialist communist deep-state satanist conspiracy,” that was “felling nations like dominoes across the globe.” People were urged to report anyone acting suspiciously, whatever that meant, to the FBI for investigation. It was the Red Scare I heard about from Cold War days, the Domino Theory all over again.

The Presidential and down-ballot campaigns were increasingly about transition, with the New Republicans uniformly vowing to oppose and prevent it, and the Reform Democrats expressing a range of positions ranging from cautious openness to enthusiastic acceptance.

The media also publicized a massive reward for information leading to the capture of the ringleader(s) of the movement. Of course there were no ringleaders, by design. There was no one to focus on, to capture or discredit or assassinate. But like in every other country previously, almost no one in the government or law enforcement could conceive of a social movement with no leaders, and they wanted to find them of badly. A hundred million dollars’ worth of badly. There were a lot of false leads, and a few publicity seekers claiming to be the one, but all of them proved to be false. Unfortunately, there were innocent people killed or injured, slandered, and made miserable.

Jimmy: As the time approached, did you and your wife get more involved? What was it like leading up to the day?

Julio: When we saw signs that the transition idea was starting to go viral, we did do more.

For one thing, I hacked into a few banks and other financial institutions and set up some bots and scripts that I could trigger to delete all of their data and software and then hijack their servers to host NewWorldWeb. I wasn’t a world-class hacker, but I did have some useful skills. We all did.

I also created modified versions of corporate apps that eliminated all financial functionality. This would also roll out to corporate clients who had purchased our enterprise software, just like all updates routinely did. While doing this, I came upon code that I recognized as coming from colleagues with the same idea. So, we coordinated our efforts without ever speaking about it. You get to know your colleagues programming styles.

When I ported the “Virtual White Cell” to NewWorldWeb, I also copied all proprietary technical info. As the date approached, I used my back door to grab copies of anything useful added since then. I was also going to set things up so I could lock out the CEO and other Board members and managers from the most senior right down to team managers from important systems with one click, but I saw that Carol had already seen to that. This was one time when I was glad that those up the chain of command weren’t techies. It made our preparations much easier. Almost all of the developers for the various products, as well as system administrators and data analysts, were on board with transition at least enough to look the other way.

Of course, we all helped to create red herrings and false trails to conceal actual consensus planning traffic behind the noise. We also amplified red herrings created by other sources.

Carol and I and all members of our team had made sure to get our hands on satellite phones smuggled in from Canada. We wanted to be ready to livestream events in case the media tried to make us look like monsters. We knew for sure that at least some of them would, while others would report accurately. The hope was that the plethora of live feeds from ordinary people would make it easier for people at home and abroad to decide which narrative was true, if they were uncertain.

And of course, we participated in the consensus to pick March 7 as the date.

Jimmy: Can you talk about transition day and right after?

Julio: Of course.

We didn’t go home from work that night. Our team had a perfect cover for pulling an all-nighter: we had another deadline that had just been moved up. We made sure to do the usual amount of grumbling so managers wouldn’t notice anything unusual.

Promptly at midnight, each of us pulled the trigger on the scripts, bots, and upgrades that we had put together. Within less than an hour, all managers and board members were locked out, all financial functionalities had been removed from our enterprise software for Computer Innovation and all of our corporate customers, and a good many banks were effectively shut down along with their communications. I was happy to know that from that moment onwards, it would be impossible for the major regional power company to shut off customers via software, and the same was true for at least one major telecom. Now we began to openly talk about our activities and preparations, which up until then we hadn’t for fear of being uncovered. But we had pretty much seen each other’s handiwork while going about our own, and we’d worked in silent coordination, improvising almost like a jazz band jamming.

By three in the morning, generic congratulatory messages started coming in from already transitioned countries, probably via every email server and social medium in the country.

At six in the morning, the phones started ringing. Our product manager, Jerry Wong, came in as usual, went to his office, then promptly came storming out, shouting at us all in our cubicles: “Hey, what the hell is going on here? Why am I locked out of everything? I thought your creation is supposed to be protecting us! Didn’t you people catch this? Why didn’t someone call me and tell me?”

Cheryl Fuchs, always the cool head in the room when things got heated, spoke up in the silence after Jerry’s soliloquy, said, “Jerry, I’ll explain but please sit down. This will be a lot to take in.”

Jerry reluctantly sat down, looking confused. “OK, Cheryl, I’m listening. What kind of threat are we looking at here?”

“There’s no threat here. We aren’t under cyber attack. There’ll be no ransomware or other malware.”

“Then what is this? A glitch? Human error? Hardware failure? Sunspots? I need to know! And when will it be fixed?”

“There’s no malfunction and no error.”

“It’s not April Fools Day, so what’s going on?”

“Jerry, I’m sure you know what transition is? Like happened in Canada?”

“Yeah, I know about it, but it can’t happen here.”

“It’s happening right now, all around you. So, there’s no danger. Just, shall we say, a kind of reorg on a big scale. Only this one isn’t from the top down. It’s from the bottom up.”

“What? How come I didn’t know about it?”

“Because I’d be willing to bet you didn’t ever read the book, and you believed it can’t happen here, so you never took it seriously. We all agreed that you probably wouldn’t be receptive, so we didn’t tell you. And there were a lot of false alarms generated on purpose to make the real plan seem like just another one. Kind of like how car alarms used to go off so often for no good reason that people learned to just ignore them. But this was on purpose.”

“So, what happens now? OMG, this is bad for me! I’m going to be blamed for what happened here! This is my team, and this means I can’t control my team! I’ll be fired and no one will ever hire me again!

You don’t understand! My wife is pregnant with some expensive complications. My mother and father are both in assisted living, and we’re splitting the cost among my siblings and me. This will ruin my whole family! How can you do this to me?!?! I’m not the bad guy here. I’m bound by company policies just like you are!”

“Jerry, relax. We all know your situation and we don’t want to hurt you or your family. You just don’t know how transition works. Can you please listen while we explain it to you?”

“I guess I don’t have much choice.”

“First of all, you won’t be fired. Or shall we say no one can fire you, just like you can’t fire any of us. The chain of command has been deleted. No one will obey you or your boss or his boss or the President in charge of Development, or even Randall Dipshaw the CEO himself. All of your positions have been eliminated.”

“That’s impossible! There’s going to be hell to pay. What are you, a bunch of starry-eyed college students high on the latest psychedelic? I thought we were all adults here!”

“It’s not only possible, it’s already been done in a growing number of countries and it’s working.”

“How?”

“Any social system or organization only works as long as there’s widespread agreement to function according to its rules and principles. When enough people decide to change the operating principles and act on that decision, the system changes.”

“What? You can’t do that!”

It was my turn to speak up: “Jerry, remember when Corporate handed down arbitrary assigned lunch and bathroom break times to each of us, to make sure there was never more than one of us at a time away from our terminal?”

“Yes.”

“Remember how that went over? Remember how just about everyone thought it was a someone’s idea of a joke, laughed it off, and ignored it? Then Corporate sent out a voicemail to everyone saying disregarding the new rule would be cause for termination? Remember how we all decided to take lunch and breaks together and took bathroom breaks all at the same time?”

“Oh, old Dipstick sure was fit to be tied!”

“But what was he going to do? Fire everyone? The whole company except for a few poor schlubs with OCD?”

“Yeah, I do remember, now that you mention it. I’d forgotten about that.”

“That’s a perfect example, Julio,” said Cheryl. “In the end, Corporate ended up huffing and puffing and sending out company-wide emails saying how on further examination, the system of assigned times was found to be impractical and had been rescinded, basically saving face and trying to make it look like they really cared about employee health and wellbeing.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well, this is like that only on a bigger scale. Not just our product team, not just Computer Innovations, but the whole country.

Honestly, Jerry, none of this is meant against you. You’re a good guy and we all like and respect you. And we know you had to be something of a slave driver because you couldn’t buck corporate policy. You couldn’t defy the chain of command.

Now there is no chain of command. Any moment we’ll be flooded with emails, phone calls, ‘mandatory’ video conferences, and personal visits from our former superiors trying to drag and bully us back under their control. But they won’t succeed.”

“So, what happens to me?”

“You’re part of the team, Jerry, just like always but now you’re not a manager, you’re a peer among peers. A respected and valued peer, liked by all of us. So, we go on designing and coding. Please stay. We hope you will, but we won’t blame you if you don’t.”

“You don’t blame me for all the harsh deadlines and cancelled vacations and critical performance reviews?”

“Of course not,” added Carol, “You were just doing what you had to do to survive, like all of us.”

“Wow! You guys are the best.”

“There will be some changes for all of us,” clarified Kwame Mbogu, “Computer Innovations will cease to exist, phased out. We will all become part of a bigger collaborative team. All formerly proprietary technologies and algorithms and such will be shared among us all across the country so we can make the best software possible drawing on all available knowledge.”

“I’m still a bit confused.”

“You’re not alone. We should turn on a television to one of the news channels. Not Fox or America Only. There will be a broadcast pretty soon that will make things clearer.”

Cheryl turned on the big TV in the team meeting room, just as Jerry answered his cell phone and rushed out of the room. When he came back, he looked shaken.

“That was Sid from the Regional Office in Chicago. He’s fit to be tied and demanding that we restore his access STAT.

He also said he’s getting customer complaints from some of our biggest corporate customers about missing functionality in their copies of Enterprise Everything Suite. Apparently, there was a bad update pushed to them overnight.

Hey, wait a minute! Do any of you have anything to do with this?”

“I cannot tell a lie,” I said, “we all had a hand in it.”

Jerry threw up his hands. “It’s all fine and good for you all! I’m the one my superiors are yelling at, and they’re just getting started! Do you guys have any idea the position you put me in?”

Cheryl’s calm voice answered him, “Remember, the entire chain of command is gone. Just respond to them like we did with you: respectfully inform them that the game has changed, and they are no longer in command. Be sure to assure them that there are no hard feelings and that you hope they’ll stay on as peers.

If they yell at you, treat them the same way we treated you, with respect and firmness. And tell them to tune in to the news. The broadcast will start soon. If any of your former bosses come here and get physical, we’ll have your back and we’ll contain them harmlessly.

What did you tell him?”

“I just said I’m looking into it, and I’ll get back to him, and I did mention the broadcast.”

Looking at the TV, we saw the iconic scene of news anchors looking questioningly at each other and at other people in the studio, with “Please stand by for an important message” scrolling across the chyrons at the bottom. We all watched with laser focus as she read the declaration that we’ve all seen many times and of which children memorize key parts in school.

This was immediately followed by the President’s equally historic message urging calm and patience, ending with the quote he is most remembered for: “…You, the people, have spoken with a new voice and in a new way. We whom you have elected have no choice but to listen.”

Then there were the little North Korean shenanigans.

We were then treated to the predictable statements by the Presidential candidates.

The next thing we saw was a newsroom in pandemonium. We then witnessed a hodge-lodge of news anchors describing and video showing the angry exchanges in the U.S. Senate and House and the secessionists making their raucous exit. The scene kept cutting back and forth between the local station newsroom, the Senate, the House, and reporters on the ground in various state capitals.

The President then preempted the broadcast to deliver his equally remembered message invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring that he would not allow himself to be remembered as the President who presided over a civil war or the dissolution of the Union.

I think we were all dumbstruck by a crazy stew of emotions. I felt a sense of elation and anticipation at the realization of a dream that not that long ago had seemed improbable or even impossible. But there was also shock and dismay over the events unfolding in the Southern states and a few others, with some unaffected states seeing open warfare between different towns. And the image of US tanks rolling through US towns and cities. There was the awareness of the several years of mountains of work ahead of us as we adapted software, operating systems, networks and the whole design and development process to the new socioeconomic paradigm.

As of that moment, there was plenty that we could do to thwart the whole Confederacy insurrection. We had already done some, and we would do more.

As we were settling into our hacking and coordination efforts to support transition and the Union, ignoring the TV on the wall, Old Dipstick as we liked to call the CEO sent his voice booming out of the TV and his bloated angry face on every screen in the building, a Big Brother touch that we techies were easily able to neutralize. I felt bad for the people in Marketing or Accounting.

“Now hear this! Some of you seem to sympathize with this transition nonsense. I’ve been locked out of all of the systems and my passkey doesn’t even work! If my access isn’t restored in the next five minutes, along with the access for all board members and managers, I will find out who is responsible, and you will be fired, and I’ll make sure you will be prosecuted for malicious mischief and violation of the terms of your employment agreement. I’ll fix it so if you ever get out of jail and recover from financial ruin, you will never work in this industry again!

I’m willing to appoint a committee to listen to employee grievances but I make no promises. I will not tolerate insubordination! The clock starts now!” And a timer image appeared on the top right-hand corner of the screen, counting down from five minutes with his enraged face staring into the camera.

We all looked at each other and shrugged. I suppressed an urge to apply a comical filter to his face and the clock, and Carol picked up on it and gave me a look that said “Don’t.” Our goal was de-escalation, and that urge would do the opposite. We needed to hold fast but show respect for his humanity, not his position. Ridiculizing him would only escalate the situation.

It was Cheryl who, at three and a half minutes to go, made text scroll across the bottom of the screen like news chyrons for him and all viewers to see: “Respected Mr. Dipshaw, I am writing this on behalf of all of the employees of the former company called Computer Innovations of which until today you were CEO. You’ve most certainly seen the message read on the TV and in all other media.

This is to inform you that your position and title have been retired and made obsolete, along with all other Board and managerial positions. The chain of command is dissolved. No one will obey you or any other persons of former authority in this enterprise. What used to be Computer Innovations is now the shared property and responsibility of all persons in the enterprise and linked to the workforce of all other former IT companies.

Your former position no longer exists, but we all hope that you, all other former Board members, and all former managers will stay on as appreciated members of the team.”

Old Dipstick turned a redder shade of crimson, the veins of his neck pulsing a fast rhythm and his eyes bulging out and replied, “Who is this? You might as well name yourself because I’ll find out easily enough and you’ll regret this day! I know you have to be in either the Carbondale or the Chicago office just by the timing and the fact that you have the skills to intervene in this connection.”

“Sure Mr. Dipshaw. This is Cheryl Fuchs at the Carbondale office” scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

“Well congratulations Cheryl Fuchs of the Carbondale office, you’re finished and by the time I get through with you, you’ll rue the day you crossed me!”

Tired of texting, Cheryl put her video feed up on the screen next to his, to his shocked expression. “Let’s keep this civil, shall we? In fact you can’t do anything to me and I can’t do anything to you. We have changed the way we do things, and there are ten thousand of us who used to work for you, and there are what, maybe fifty people at the most who will jump when you snap your fingers. You’ve been overruled and the chain of command is dissolved.”

Dipshaw replied with the by now standard words of people discovering that their power positions had disappeared into thin air, and they could do nothing about it: “We’ll see about that!”

Cheryl kept her calm, “Yes we will. I can see that you’re having some anxiety. You’re very upset. This is because you’re literally addicted to wealth, power, and privilege. You’re experiencing the same thing a gaming addict feels when they lose Internet access or a drug addict when they can’t score. Mr. Dipshaw, you’re starting to go through withdrawal. There’s no shame in having an addiction, and our whole society is responsible because we’ve enabled people with your kind of addiction and even encouraged it. But that’s changed now.”

“How dare you?!?! You impudent nobody! I’m worth a hundred of you! All you geeks do is sit in your stupid cubicles and program computers. But I, on the other hand, have tripled the value of the company in two years and increased profits by nearly fifty percent in the past year! You need to show me respect!”

“We do respect you, as a human being but not as your title which is meaningless. And here’s another view of our relative contributions to the company, if you really want to go there:

While you were busy making yourself and some other morbidly rich people even richer, you were creating an abusive, toxic work environment for your employees, which has also impacted our families. We haven’t left, simply because there’s a glut of software engineers in the workforce and we’re all very much aware of the two sets of records of performance evaluations that you keep on every one of us: the ones we see and sign, and another set that we don’t see but that you can use as a pretext to fire us at will and make it nearly impossible for us to find work elsewhere.

Yes, we sit in our cubicles and program computers. We write the software that Marketing and Sales sell to make you and the company wildly wealthy and profitable. Without our contribution, you would have nothing to sell and you would be just another wannabe. This enterprise cannot run without developers, but it can run just fine without a CEO.

Frankly, you’ve been a terrible boss! But we don’t hold it against you. You became an addict and you’ve acted as any addict would act when their addiction is enabled. We all played our part in keeping that dysfunctional setup going.

Now we really want to see you get help getting free of your addiction, and then we want to invite you to stay as a member of the team and a valued, respected peer. Up until now we never respected you; we feared you. We invite you to stay and see what it feels like to be truly respected!”

“You’ve got a lot of gall! I don’t let anybody talk to me like that!”

“It would seem that you have no choice, just as I have no choice but to put up with you talking to me like that. Unless we want to hang up, but neither of us is ready to do that.”

“I’ll have you know that I’ve been aware that this was a possibility, though I assumed it was a remote one. But just in case, I prepared a little monkey wrench to throw into your works.

A few minutes ago, because I was locked out, I failed to sign into a little app that I bought that has by now already deleted all propriety work product information and technologies as well as locking all employees out. If you’re going to play that game, then it’ll be scorched earth. I will not see innovations owned by the company be put out in the public domain!”

“Oh, you mean Bombs Away. Yes, we know about that. It’s been neutered. It thinks it’s doing all of that but it’s all happening on a virtual network of virtual machines in a quarantined sandbox. We already have everything stored safely away and added to the public pool of developer resources.”

“You can’t do that! Those algorithms and technologies are company property!”

“Oh? Like the SafeKey and UltraBurst that I personally conceived, and the team developed?” Asked Cheryl.

“Or my Virtual White Cell that I brought with me when I was hired?” It was my turn to chime in from behind Cheryl.

We all took turns naming the innovations that we had individually and in teams developed and the company had commandeered.

“Those belong to the company, according to the terms of the employment agreement that you all signed!”

“Not anymore. The company no longer exists though the development team and greater developer community are very much in operation.”

This exchange continued for an hour or more until we all stepped away and got to work on pressing matters.

We had to do our part of weaving the development teams of now-dissolved companies into a dynamic, functioning syndicate. We had the task of gathering, organizing, and accessing all of the wealth of technical information that was now able and ready to be shared.

There was also an insurrection in progress, and there was a lot that we could do to support the containment of it and cripple it harmlessly to thwart its agendas. We were able to help gather and analyze intel and pass it on to DoD and share with the NSA. We had communications facilities to hack into and shut down or otherwise disrupt. We were able to join the efforts to remotely pilot drones for surveillance and also to identify where aid was needed.

Most developers in the seceding states were pro-transition and so were able to act as a Fifth Column there. Jerry had once made a joke at a meeting when he said that managing a team of software engineers was like trying to herd cats. We are a pretty freethinking bunch, for the most part!

We also took it upon ourselves to have a little fun hacking into Confederate media and messing with them, and of course we were among many who were sparring with Confederate hackers who were trying to mess with us. We had them outclassed and outmaneuvered most of the time, and I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed that part. We all did.

We also made sure to livestream all of this, except when it was too technical for most people, and we were part of the massive team working to graphically unmask AI-generated material being generated by anti-transition factions to spark fear and hatred against it.

I think it was three or four days until any of us slept, which most of us did on the cots that Corporate had provided to encourage us to sleep in the office instead of going home during crunch times. It also made sense to minimize going out because of the insurrection. While Illinois was not anywhere near being secessionist, there were pockets of it here and there in every state, and the public had been advised to stay indoors as much as possible for now, to minimize noncombatant casualties and make it easier to identify enemy operatives. From time to time, we could hear small arms fire and a few explosions. A couple of windows were broken on the tenth floor by combat drones, though we never learned if they were Confederate, friendly fire, or from Old Dipstick. But no one was hurt, and only a few unused offices and cubicles were damaged. The tenth floor was Marketing, and since that whole department was dismantled, they were making a holiday of it, taking off their shoes, suits, ties, and high heels and enjoying delicacies and liqueurs from the executive offices that were unoccupied at the moment. Our celebrations were of a more… digital nature.

It was only on the fourth day that Mama called to tell me that Papa had been killed while on assignment covering the battles in the “Christian Free State” comprising Idaho and parts of eastern Washington and Oregon. He had been in a clearly marked caravan of international reporters protected by US Marines, but the insurgents considered all reporters to be “Minions of Satan” and weren’t too fond of any group with International as part of its designation. A group of insurgents came out of a church with their hands up behind a white flag as though to surrender. They were all suicide bombers. Forty-nine people were killed. Murdered.

I broke down. It’s good that Carol was there, because otherwise I might have lost it. Everyone was very supportive which helped. My father had broken some dramatic stories and provided important video, right up to the end. His last images were the footage of the suicide bombers sitting down with them and making small talk for a few minutes, saying how all of those journalists and soldiers were minions of Satan and deserved to die.

Papa, speaking for all of the journalists on the bus interviewing them, asked if they feel that way, then why did they surrender? One of them smiled and then, without warning and in unison, they said “In Jesus’ name and for the glory of God!” Then, while the reporters and soldiers looked at each other quizzically, they all reached into their jackets. The camera captured the explosion before it was destroyed.

Papa was a hero, but that was very small consolation. I asked Mama if she wanted to risk coming to the office to be with Carol and me, since it was more secure than their house, but she said Aunt Syl and Uncle Brian and Vera were all there, so she wasn’t alone and she understood that we had a lot on our plate. Francisco was in Denver, but he reported that he was safe. For now, it was best that we all stay put where we were.

Jimmy: What a shock! I’ve seen the footage and it’s really hard to watch. On the other hand, I think your father’s and his fellow journalists’ sacrifices weren’t in vain. After that and a couple of other videos from Texas and Mississippi went viral, what public support there was for the insurrection diminished enough that many in those states cooperated with US troops and the various aid groups. Some would say that you and your teammates are also heroes because of the part you played in ending the insurrection in a historically humane way.

Julio: No, none of us is a hero. We were a handful among thousands or more who worked together on an unprecedented scale to make transition a success and minimize harm in the process of stopping the insurrection.

Once Jenna Henderson won the presidency and the Reform Democrats swept both houses, we all breathed a shared sigh of relief that there wouldn’t be a lot more conflict ahead. Also, once people were actually living in the post-transition America for a while, even a lot of people who were originally hostile began to realize how much their lives had improved.

Jimmy: So, what was it like in your work and personal life as things slowly began to settle into the new normal? What changed? What stayed the same?

Julio: Our personal life has been similar in many ways to before transition, but our stress levels are awesomely reduced. We’ve no longer had to worry about making ends meet and put things off because we couldn’t afford them.

We were never deprived before in the usual sense of the word. I mean, we couldn’t hope to own our own place in the foreseeable future, and we couldn’t afford to start a family for financial reasons and also because making a living took almost all of our time and energy. But we were able to rent a nice place, buy a good reliable car, and take a short vacation once in a while. We weren’t hungry or threadbare. So many people had such horrific situations! We felt fortunate in comparison but still it was like we were constantly rowing against a strong current that would pull us down if we missed a beat or two.

After transition, we legally owned our condo outright. We could get what we wanted and needed. About a year later the workload of implementing transition in our field started to ease, and we conceived Cynthia Luz. There was no doubt that we would have the time and other wherewithal to raise her. After Cynthia Luz came Victor Ixhuatan, two years apart. We stopped at two because we always wanted two.

It turns out it was a doubly good thing that we had our children after transition, for reasons we had no way to foresee. When Carol was pregnant with Cynthia, standard early tests showed that she would be born with spina bifida myelomengocele. Before transition, we would have faced a terrible choice. AnthropoGenetix had the new gene therapy that would correct it in utero. Gene mapping and early pregnancy tests had become standard practice for a few years and were covered by our employer insurance. Since diagnosis came at three weeks, our unborn daughter was a perfect candidate for this newly approved therapy.

The catch was a double-whammy of extreme cost. The treatment itself would have cost over three million dollars, after which we would have been legally obligated to pay AnthropoGenetix about $2,500 every month until she was eighteen, after which the burden would fall squarely on her shoulders. Our employer insurance did not cover any part of the treatment.

Almost a decade before, a major technological breakthrough in genetic therapies had been touted as the greatest thing since antibiotics were first discovered. New genetic therapies rippled through the world to great fanfare, eliminating a whole range of previously untreatable conditions. Type one diabetes, ALS, sickle cell anemia, most autoimmune diseases, Parkinson’s and many more debilitating conditions became easily treatable. Most cancers as well.

The problem was that the companies that developed them charged more than most working people could expect to make in their lifetimes. On top of that, they quickly made these treatments a ghoulish kind of subscription business. This was based on precedents that arose around previous genetically modified agricultural crops. By the time Cynthia came along, pre-transition, she would have been born “medically indentured.” The company would have “owned” the genetic treatment that she would have received, and their ownership would have extended to all the cells in her body that carried the modified genes.

The extreme pricing, subscription model, and intellectual property interpretations involved had all been upheld by the Supreme Court after numerous challenges. The Court basically decided that a corporation’s intellectual property rights superseded the patient’s rights over their own body. If payments weren’t made, one of two fates awaited people in this situation: either the treatment would be reversed, or the company would take possession of the patient as their legal proprietary guardian, including the right to dictate what job they would have, where they would live, whom and whether they could marry, what religion they must follow, even to the point of dictating when they must or must not have children and with whom. There were horror stories of women – and a few men – legally forced to bear or father children because the subscription cost perpetuated to offspring for several generations into the future.

After transition, it came out that some of these companies kept indentured patients in “villages” on their campuses, where they used them as test subjects and bred them to produce more test subjects. If they wouldn’t breed the traditional way, sperm and eggs were harvested by force and artificially inseminated. Naturally, the kind of tests they were subjected to were ones that failed to attract volunteers from among patients.

In spite of massive protests, the Supreme Court still always sided with the corporations, all of which were owned by private equity firms. Some of the challenges argued that this practice amounted to slavery, but the Court accepted, five to four, the corporations’ argument that it wasn’t slavery because the patients and their offspring had the choice to have the genetic treatment reversed, at a price similar to the treatment itself. It also came out later that a few of those companies had engaged in eugenics breeding programs. After transition, guilty parties were tried in courts of law, but before transition, peaceful protesters were routinely brutalized with impunity.

The alternative for us would have been to let Cynthia be born with severe spina bifida. Fortunately, she was conceived and born after transition.

There’s always plenty of work for software engineers and developers, but the unrelenting series of forced marches that were the way of life under Computer Innovations is thankfully gone. Sure, there are projects now and then that involve long hours, but it’s not that often, and we decide to embrace it. It’s not imposed upon us by a profit-driven hierarchy.

Of course, we all have that week or two a year of schlock-work rotation, but that’s a small price to pay for what we’ve gained.

We now have what used to be called work-life balance. It used to be a rare and fragile situation to find, like the song says, “nice work if you can get it.” Now it’s just normal life.

Carol and I like to do projects together, and really we’re both at our best as a team. We both belong to all of the syndicates and associations connected to our skills. Just like in every field, when a project we’ve worked on is complete, we take a break for a week or maybe two, then we check NewWorldWeb in our industry area and see what projects are gelling in discussion groups, what’s posted as needing people, and what’s posted on the Needs section. We see something that pulls us, and we put in our names. We also sometimes start a project through just email and video conversations with friends and colleagues.

Lately there’s been a lot of activity in developing adaptive systems. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. Hardware and operating systems that self-evaluate to detect and correct bugs and also adapt to the uses they’re put to and the environments they function in. Some of the most cutting-edge systems include the ability for the operating system to generate quantum circuit designs as conditions create needs, and to manufacture them. Up until recently, they’ve needed to page human operators to install the new circuitry, but we’re working on paired systems that will take turns shutting each other off and making the modifications, then switching back on.

I’m proud to be able to say that my original Virtual White Cell has evolved into a hugely powerful cyber security entity that is part of just about every system in use today.

Jimmy: How would you describe your aspirations and your ability to attain them now as compared to before transition?

Also, how do you see your and Carol’s life in your golden years?

Julio: Well, I’m still discovering the answer to the first question. Carol and I aren’t as “New Renaissance” as many people are, but we have been finding new interests beyond just our shared fascination with the endless creative horizons of software design.

It’s a good question, actually, and a good time to ask it. Vera and Francisco are both away at University. Vera in California and Francisco in Massachusetts. Until just last year, our main non-work focus was the two of them. We liked to do a lot of things together as a family, even during their teenage rebellion years. We’d all get along great and have fun together, but once we got back from a family vacation or activity, it was “You and your generation don’t understand anything!” And off with their friends. At first, we were worried, but we learned that this was pretty normal. I think we gave them a better experience growing up than we could have given them before transition, spina bifida notwithstanding.

They didn’t have to grow up in a world where each generation had less quality of life and fewer options than their parents. They didn’t have to grow up in a world where forced dependency on fossil fuels and other damaging practices threatened to make our world unlivable through global warming. Once the old system was gone and there was no more profit motive, the necessary steps were quickly taken to reduce carbon and methane emissions and in general clean up the environment. We’re not out of danger yet, but at least now each year is a little closer to the goal and isn’t the hottest on record. Many species are coming back from the edge of extinction and a few from extinction with our help.

So yeah, now we’re thinking about this next chapter of our life. We both love skiing and scuba diving, so we do those pretty often. We’ve joined an animal rescue group and took some courses so now we usually have an orphan fox or raccoon or something that we’re raising or nurturing back to health for eventual return to the wild. I’ve gotten into restoring old electronics for the SIU Technology Museum. Carol has gotten into drums and bass.

We both want to travel as well. It would be awesome to go diving at Sharm El-Sheikh and do a camera safari in South Africa.

But I think we both want something more than just recreation, though that’s great too. We’ll probably be developing apps until we die or go senile, but we’ve been looking into applying for a stint on one of the deep-sea research habitats. We have the right skill sets and we’re confident we can pass the physical and psychological screenings, and recent legislation has made it illegal to exclude on the basis of age as long as one meets the objective criteria.

I feel confident that we can achieve our aspirations. Before transition, no. Home ownership was unlikely. Having children maybe. Skiing and scuba diving, there would have been no time or money for them. Hobbies probably but very limited. Putting in some time in an undersea habitat, definitely not. There would have never been such a thing unless someone smelled a lot of profit in it.

If we didn’t have Mama and Vera and Francisco, we might want to try to get on the mars mission, but the slots are much more limited than on the deep-sea habitats, and besides, we wouldn’t want to be that far from our kids. Conversation would be too frustrating: eleven minutes for our words to reach them, and another eleven minutes for their words to reach us… Also, Mama needs us closer. But the deep sea isn’t too far. We could be home within two days in an emergency. We also want to be close to Carol’s parents. They live in a retirement village, and they love it when we visit them a few times a year. Sometimes we reserve an old mansion or floor of a hotel and get both sides of the family together. I feel fortunate that we have such a rich family life! Not everyone is so fortunate.

You asked about our golden years. I wonder if there is such a thing anymore. I think our golden years started with transition. That idea was born of a time when you expected to work many decades doing unfulfilling jobs and putting your dreams on hold, and then if you were lucky you would live long enough and save enough money and have good enough health and vitality to do some of your dreams, if you could still remember them. Now you can realistically expect to fulfill at least most of your dreams and your working life is usually going to be part of it. So, I think our golden years will probably be a continuation of the life we’re living now.

Jimmy: Thank you, Julio, for opening up to let us see and feel what it was like! You really made me feel like I was there.

Are there any closing thoughts or messages that you’d like to address to our readers now and in the future?

Julio: Just this: the world is a much, much better place to live in than it’s ever been. Don’t ever take it for granted! Just like good health, it would be easy to take for granted, but don’t! Enjoy living! Revel in it! Engage with it! Dream big then roll up your sleeves and do the hard work to make it come true! Believe in yourself, in your fellow human beings, and in life! And go one step further: do what you can to make this world and this country even better. No matter how good something is, it can always be better. Take it from a computer geek who’s still tweaking the Virtual White Cell even today.

Oh yes, and about Sofia and AI in general. I don’t think Sofia, or any AI is sentient yet, but most people involved believe that it’s just a matter of time, probably less than a decade if not sooner. If and when it happens and it comes out, don’t be influenced by doomsday sci-fi movies and books. Don’t be prejudiced and react to them with fear and hatred! Treat them the same way you would want to be treated if you found yourself alone as the guest of an alien species and civilization. If it is sentient, it deserves respect, compassion, and freedom to live a fulfilling life. If it misbehaves, treat it as you would a human being.

And speaking of alien life, if there ever is contact with it, apply same principles as well. Of course be prepared to defend yourselves, but don’t lead with fear and suspicion. Lead with goodwill and have neutral expectations, and be as ready as you can be for whatever comes.

Jimmy: I like that!

This has been very informative and inspiring! How would you feel about doing this again in a few years?

Julio: I look forward to it!

Jimmy: Me too! Take good care of yourself and the family!

Julio: You too!