Eric (00:00)
Welcome back to Boiler Wild. My name is Eric Johnson. And if you are new to this podcast, Boiler Wild, wild is an acronym, it stands for work hard, invest in yourself, lead others, and develop yourself into a person of excellence. I am a big believer of personal development, getting better every day in your personal life, in your fitness, in your mental health, and in work.
Work is hopefully a career for you. It is a career for me in the boiler industry. If you are listening to this, I hope you are also in the boiler industry. If you aren't, I wonder what brought you in, but I am all about boilers and education. How do we train the next generation of people? And what does that look like? And...
There are all kinds of answers online or theoretical answers as to what we actually need to do in order to train people.
And nobody has the answers. And there's no one answer, which is frustrating because we were all like one answer and one way to do things so that we could easily just do it that way and get it done and over with. And humans, man, are they frustrating. They just don't learn the stuff that we want them to learn. And I tell them stuff.
and they don't absorb it, and that is just frustrating. And that's how most employers think. yeah, learning, I mean, there's a reason why we spend from age four to age 18 in mandatory education in the United States. If we could just have kids.
learn in a shorter period of time all that information and develop themselves faster we would but who knows on that end but for employer training a hot topic
is virtual reality. And this has been around for a while. It's not anything new, but it is becoming more accessible cost-wise as far as the gear. more people are looking into it. The older gear, as in like goggles,
Let me back up first of all virtual reality is
Essentially what it sounds like, it is you are wearing goggles or looking at a screen and you...
most likely are holding two controllers in your hands. And you can like see your hands in this virtual environment that is built. And that environment is supposed to simulate some kind of scenario and some kind of.
in the workplace training some kind of event that you want to get trained on. Virtual reality has been used on for games. It's being used in games. Now there's VR games. I mean, I remember in middle school we had a
semi virtual reality thing that I Was able to test it was like a soccer game So like it's it's nothing new. It's just hasn't been accessible But now that a lot of the tech companies are making the goggles
virtual reality is more accessible for everybody and you can get goggles I believe five six hundred dollars which pretty cheap but
does it actually train people better? And if you go on the internet.
There are a lot of virtual reality companies and those companies, obviously, put out blog posts, put out articles about how amazing virtual reality is and all the benefits of it and studies show this, studies show that.
And that's the same thing as asking a pharmaceutical company, does their drug work? Well, of course they're going to say their drug works. Of course these virtual reality companies are going to justify their existence by saying that you get so much benefit from virtual reality and
It simulates scenarios in environments that you just couldn't do otherwise and it's better than being in the real thing. you know, there's a big lot of VR is in oil and gas and
It's how we create this environment and you can do all these decisions and run all these scenarios for oil and gas industry, which is great.
But when we think about training.
Let's go back to what is the end goal. It is to change behavior as fast as possible.
for as cheap as possible.
and nothing else matters. So just because a tool exists does not mean that that tool is better than another tool. And I would relate this back to the notebook on your phone. Why do people still buy notebooks and still buy physical calendars and planners when all that can be done on their phone?
Why do people still write stuff down? You can have voice notes. You can type that into your phone. You can type that on your computer. There's sticky notes on your computer screen that you can put on your background. Why do people have physical sticky notes? They're obsolete.
Or so you think.
The actual act of writing triggers different parts of your brain than typing. And studies have shown that when you write stuff out, you actually remember things better instead of typing. And not everybody types well. And some people prefer to hold their notes in front of them and not see them on a screen. Same thing with
books theoretically with audio books and kindles and you know books on a tablet why would we why would we still print books why would we spend all this money shipping books books are heavy books are expensive why would we do all that that's obsolete well people like to hold a physical book in their hands and they have physical pages
And a lot of people love looking at a physical page and not a electronic page and say the electronic pages hurt their eyes and they don't enjoy holding a tablet and they don't want to listen to an audiobook. So there's reasons. So just because audiobooks and electronic books exist and it's theoretically a better technology, people still prefer
Books. Which is fine.
So going to training, just because virtual reality exists,
as a tool doesn't mean we have to use it and doesn't mean it's better. virtual reality, when people describe it, uses the big C word, the dreaded C word that will sink ships and derail training. Now what is that C word? Cool. C.
OOL. So when people have virtual reality training and they describe it as it's cool.
That doesn't matter because cool is not a behavior change in the end. If we were going for cool, we would just have people play video games like Call of Duty all day. That's cool. That's what virtual reality is actually competing against is professional game makers.
and professional movie makers and all that stuff.
Training for it if it's cool, is it effective and My Humble opinion is
No for the amount of money it cost. I demoed Virtual Reality for probably the most well-known HVAC virtual reality company. They're a large
Company that raises a bunch of money their training is questionable. I've heard Very questionable things about it, but I've demoed it and yes it's cool it is a novelty a lot of people have never used virtual reality, so you put on the goggles and It can be Very immersive however
Does that actually teach somebody how to do something in a way that they couldn't do it before? And what you really miss out currently with virtual reality is...
the tactile function of actually doing something. So in the virtual reality that I did, and in all of them, but in this one that I did, you know, it's, okay, remove the front of the furnace. So then you just go up and you press a button on your controller and the whole front of the furnace gets removed. It's like, okay.
That doesn't actually teach us though, like how to remove the front of the furnace. And some furnaces can have fronts that are split and you got to slide the up one panel up where you got to pull the panel out. Like there's different ways to do it. And if we train somebody on virtual reality, everything is just a button. So at the core, we're teaching our brain, well, we just, in order to do this task, it's a button.
All right, now braise in this refrigerant line. And you just use a button and everything works. It's a very, very controlled environment. You can't mess up. Now virtual reality people will say, well, it's just to teach the process. Okay, so you're saying that we can't teach the process of installing a furnace.
any other way than a virtual reality. And that is simply not true. We don't have to have a real furnace in front of us, but there are ways to install a furnace.
and practice the procedure without using virtual reality or without being in a real world environment.
The other thing with virtual reality is a lot of people have motion sickness from the goggles and a lot of people's eyes hurt. So I was using the goggles for probably 20 minutes and I took them off and my eyes hurt.
I'm not sure exactly what causes that. I don't know if it's the dish being disoriented because you can't see anything else. Like you're literally immersed in an environment and your brain is trying to figure out what's going on. I did not get motion sickness, but a lot of people, especially it seems to be older people, but a lot of people will get motion sickness from the goggles and can't even wear the goggles five minutes.
I mean, there's videos online of people like standing on ledges of buildings in VR goggles and like trying to jump off and like crashing into walls because they're so ingrained in the VR environment that they forget that, you know, they're actually not jumping off a building. I mean, it's tricking your brain.
But if the goggles hurt people's eyes and if people get motion sickness and you don't know who gets motion sickness, that is a huge hurdle. It doesn't matter how good the VR programming is, if the tools are hit and miss with people and you can only use them for so much time. And from what I've read online is,
A lot of VR seems to be supported through education, so schools, and we all know how schools get money. Lower education schools and even colleges get a lot of tax money and grants. So if you get a grant for a hundred grand or something to do.
to develop something, and you buy a bunch of virtual reality headsets. I was reading about one where they spent.
The person said I believe 60 grand on headsets and a system and it got used for one day and they didn't see the purpose of it after that and all the headsets sat in a box after that because they found it ineffective. Now it's not their money and they
Got a grant to do it. So it is what it is. But that money supports the virtual reality companies. So they're moving headsets. They're selling licenses. And they'll think, ⁓ that's ⁓ positive. Of course, people want this. But does it actually make business sense? The businesses that are not just printing cash. And people say, well, the oil and gas use it. OK, well.
know, BP's revenue is 200 billion a year. They have a million dollars to just light on fire and throw at virtual reality. Goggles, creating immersive environments, and even more than a million dollars. But they can just burn cash and not even think about it. But for a contractor, HVAC, boilers, who are not
printing cash
Is virtual reality worth it? I'm going to say no.
And that's just, I guess my opinion, and it's no at this time. It's cool, capital C cool, but is it the best way to change behavior and learn? And when I think of training, or what I know about training is,
We either have to teach people to be.
lab rats and you know if they see a red light push this button and anytime the red light comes on push this button that is a seemingly mindless task and that works if you want to be a factory worker all right these jars are going to come across the line and you're going to make sure that all the jars are pointed the same way and make sure that they are
not flipped upside down and stop the line if there's a problem. That's a pretty simple task. You do this, this is your job. However, when you're in the boiler room, You can't just memorize things because every single boiler room is different. Even two boilers that are built identically will be slightly different.
on their combustion curve and how they run. And you can't just take boiler one, copy the curve, the combustion curve, dump it into boiler two and have the exact same readings. There's gonna be differences. They're gonna be minor, but there's gonna be differences. And then span that across all boilers and all buildings and all situations. Everything is the same. The principles are the same, but all the situations are different.
And if people get into the mindset of, well, I'm going to memorize this. I'm going to memorize that. In this situation, I'm going to memorize what to do. And if they focus on memorization without actually understanding the why behind what they are doing or why something is the way it is, you are creating very, very shallow people with
no skills to actually solve problems by themselves and they have to have their hands held and they are the ones that are dialing the phone the second they get on site and they are dialing somebody else to say, I have no idea what's going on. And the person on the other side of the phone goes, all right, you know, like what's your electrical meter saying? Oh, I don't even have that pulled out.
Alright, well, you what's the combustion say? Well, I didn't even get my analyzer out.
So what are you doing? ⁓ I just walked in and the customer described the problem and I have no idea what's going on. Because they haven't heard the problem in a way before that rings a bell in their mind that goes, ⁓ it's this problem so it must be this solution. If somebody says, ⁓ we don't have any flow in our hydronic system.
A person would go, typically would go, ⁓ well, the pump's bad. Of course, we need to change the pump. It's like, okay, it could be bad. There are 10 other ways that we could not have flow in our hydronic system that we need to check, but a bad pump is not the first thing that I'm going to go towards. So.
It's a different way of thinking and virtual reality from what I have seen are highly controlled situations and environments that do not allow you to make mistakes and oversimplify processes. Like if you're putting piping together or if you're, I just watched a video of a demonstration of one and it was about fall protection and you walk up to your locker and it's like, you you click the button.
You open the door to the locker, there's a harness, you click the harness and like the harness levitates in the air. And then it says like, click this button to put the harness on. And you click the button and boom, you're wearing the harness. It's like, well, I've watched people struggle to put a fall protection harness on. You don't just take it out of the locker, click a button and whoop, I'm wearing the harness.
Do people really have to see that in virtual reality in order to learn that? Or do you just say, hey, you're going to take your harness out of your locker because we want them hanging up? Like, that's not that hard to grasp.
harnesses are not super expensive. You could have those in a classroom, put the harnesses on and there's ways to teach fall protection without having virtual reality. just think I saw it and I would like to take credit for this, but I saw I was reading it. Somebody said VR is a solution in search of a problem.
And so far, nobody has found a problem widespread enough to make VR useful. And that sums it up perfectly. Once again, VR is cool. And people are making it the solution for problems that don't really exist. However, if you have money to light on fire, one, breaks them off for me.
I can show you some very cool ways to light money on fire. But two, go for it. Spend money on VR, but I don't think the payback is there. But there is a slightly cheaper rendition of it, which is called AR, which is augmented reality.
And that is a more...
scalable cheaper way of doing it and augmented reality uses your environment around you and can digitally put in
tools. is furniture companies are using it. I don't know if you've been on a website, but you can go on a website on your phone and there'll be like a selection. You you can scroll through the photos, but then I'll say see it in your space and that's augmented reality where you know, I'll say, hey, we need access to your camera and it will superimpose it.
on your phone screen. So your phone opens up the camera and it sees the space, but then their software will put the couch in the space and you can see how it looks in your space. And it works pretty good. But another way I've seen augmented reality is books.
You can scan something in a book and a 2D picture becomes a...
model that you can view on your phone and you can like move it around in the environment. But that is a like in the levels of complication AR augmented reality is way, way less complicated than virtual reality. And it doesn't require goggles. You can just use your phone and it is
helpful, you're not trying to simulate an entire environment and simulate tasks,
you can pull apart a model. So instead of having like a physical model of a cutaway of something, of like a valve, you can have an augmented reality valve.
and access it and look at it. And I would say that's pretty useful. You can also just do that on a screen. I don't know if there is a learning difference between having a model that you can see in your own environment, like see on the table that's in front of you.
through your phone. I don't know if that's a better learning than just playing with a model on a touch screen tablet or a computer. Like I'm not sure on that, but augmented reality, it's different than virtual reality, but it's much more accessible and it is being rolled out and has been rolled out. I mean, it's pretty common now as a learning tool. However,
Once again, going back, does this change behavior? Are we using this tool purposely because it solves a problem? Or are we using it because we think it's cool? And sticking things that are cool into training people will argue, well, we need to make training interesting. We need to make it cool. How are we going to get the young kids involved? Well, the young kids like their video games and...
They want to see technology in the training and all this stuff. It's like, okay, well, young kids are not dumb. And instead of, when you make training and you implement virtual reality and augmented reality into the training, you're not competing against Joe Schmo and his PowerPoint standing in front of the classroom, reading off words. You are competing against
Call of Duty, Battlefield, and every other video game. When you have those levels of video games, when kids can play GTA, Grand Theft Auto, and be immersed in a fictional world and basically do anything they want, they're going to look at your education tool and be
highly unimpressed at what it is. And you may think it's cool, but they have seen way cooler and they're not interested no matter how cool you think it is because you are competing against the top level of cool of what they have experienced. And I don't think a lot of people realize that.
Same thing with virtual reality. Like if the environment is very clunky and the graphics are just very fake.
Like it has a cool factor of just like most people just haven't used virtual reality and it's kind of weird to be like your, you know, your brain is tricked into thinking that you're in a different environment and it's kind of weird. But once that novelty wears off and it can wear off pretty quick, the cool factor is gone. And then they're like, all right.
Whatever, and then they go back to playing their video games. you're not gonna ever have an educational tool that is going to be able to have a larger budget than
Hollywood or the big game makers who make entertainment and I also see this this is a little side note but there is a thing called gamification in learning and People think ⁓ well. We just need to gamify every learning task and that has different values and has meant different things in e-learning and
Gamification has become a buzzword, but that looks like, you know, awarding badges if they complete certain tasks and virtual badges and awarding, you know, statuses. you reach gold status. you reach platinum status and showing tracking bars and making games.
And the games is the clunkiest part. The games are very manipulative and they are created by people who lie to themselves. Most e-learning games are made by people who lie to themselves. I demoed in HVAC training of supposedly the leading HVAC training company. I demoed one of their courses and one, it was just blocks of text that had a terrible
computer.
Narration voice it was the most awful voice and it's just reading off text to you I'm like, well, this is not training but to at the like middle of the course there was like a game and they're like and it was a carnival game and they're like pop the balloons of the words that don't relate to this word and It's like, okay, are we
Seriously treating adults like little kids and thinking that this terribly programmed game that's super clunky and super tacky is somehow training people better than a more normal task of like
just matching, just normal matching or I don't know, select all the above, but it was like, and it was playing this like weird carnival music and it had like a little clown in the background and balloons with the words inside of them. And you know, you had to pop the balloons. I'm like, this is so dumb. We're expecting adults to take this seriously and.
be excited about these tacky games. And that's where people, especially like learning and design people, have just lied to themselves and think, well, know, this tool is available, so I'm going to add it because it's cool. And it's like, OK, that's fine. But does that actually change behavior? And why are we adding it? What addition?
does it add to the education experience that actually moves the person forward and is not just this manipulative tool that we want them to think is for something, they can see, people are smart, they can see through stuff. And you know, I see a lot of LMSs, if you don't know what an LMS is, go listen to the previous episode, but I see a lot of LMSs.
They'll say, hey, you know, we have badging systems and you can award badges for your employees based on how many hours of training they do. It's like, okay, do employees really care about made up badges for training on an LMS system that most of the training probably they suck and hate and are forced to do?
No, nobody cares. Like the badges don't have any credibility and it's manipulative. Like the only way the badges would maybe work is if you could like achieve a badge and like get actually something physical like a hat or something for it. Like some kind of actual reward, but thinking somebody is gonna be like, yeah, I have this badge on my internal.
Company LMS system. I'm better than other people like it's it's manipulative. But Anyways, that is gamification if you haven't heard that Once again, it is a thing and tool that exists but just because it exists doesn't mean we have to use it and There are lots of terrible uses for it So going back to the VR if you have money to burn
One, I can show you how to burn that money, probably better than VR. But two,
Save your cash but I looked up a It wasn't an HVAC one. It was more of a Industrial VR company. It was a thousand dollars a month for the first license
and you could get unlimited licenses for five grand a month. So in order to train 10 service techs, you would have to spend five grand a month for licensing for this VR system. That is a lot of money bet on the fact that are we going to get 60 grand worth of value in the year?
from this VR system in a way that we couldn't spend that money in another way and get the same result. That is the question. They wanna wow you with the cool factor, but if you look at it from an analytical and you stay grounded and training is all about, is there behavior change and can they solve more problems doing this? If they can't,
It doesn't matter no matter how cool it is. We are all in the business of being purposeful and making money and solving problems. And we in the boiler industry don't have time to fool around with things that are cool, but actually don't move the line. Another thing that is very cool right now is AI. AI has a lot of cool uses.
but uses that actually move.
and solve real problems and integrate into businesses that really solve a task and problem is very, very slim to none right now. Not saying it's not gonna happen, it absolutely will, but the hype around AI is a lot of cool right now, but don't disregard that. Absolutely learn how to use AI and implement it.
It can save a ton of time. It's great for file retrieval and data retrieval and all this stuff. But a lot of companies are just tacky on, oh, we have this software plus AI and then adding an extra $30 a month to their subscription because now we have an AI chatbot and customer service. That was the first thing to get.
all AI chatbot. Every corporation now has AI chatbots for customer service.
Stay grounded, don't let cool things throw you off course. Stay focused. The shiny object syndrome is save that for the fun parts of life. Save that for the hobbies.
And you can invest in them if you want, but just know there are cheaper ways to do things and to chase the shiny objects. And that could change, but the cost to get a virtual reality environment that actually is semi workable is has Ms after it, after the number. So we are looking at million.
base rate. So if you want to just shove a million dollars into the middle of a fire, go for it. But everybody else that wants to spend the money correctly and properly, use virtual reality for a cool, keep up with it, but don't think that it is the missing piece that is going to solve your problems. If you found this episode interesting,
please rate it five stars on your podcast app. Tell somebody about it. If you wanna be on this podcast or you know somebody that should be a guest that has some knowledge that they could drop that the boiler industry or another industry bringing in another industry that would find helpful, let me know. DM me on LinkedIn or email me eric.johnson at Boilearn.com I appreciate you all listening to this.
See the download numbers and I get the one to two messages about people listening how much they Love the podcast. So I appreciate those messages. Every single one means a lot. I Don't even know how to describe how much a message means about people listening to this podcast because Really this podcast when I record it, it's just me
talking to myself and I don't even imagine that anybody listens to it. So the fact that people listen to this podcast is mind blowing to me. anyways, that's my opinions on VR as of right now. That could change, but right now it is cool. It doesn't actually move the line for companies that are not just printing cash and have money to burn. Thank you for listening and stay wild.
