Welcome back to Teaching the Unteachables, where we dive into methods for teaching and
learning for professionals like you.
This episode is sponsored by Professional HVACR Services, Incorporated.
Check out ProHVACR.com for more information.
Alright everyone, thank you so much for joining us today.
We're hanging out with Joe Kakanda.
Joe, how are you this morning?
Outstanding, beautiful in Ohio finally.
You know, we met at the 2023 National HVACR Education Conference and there are certain
people in life, when you're a storyteller, there are certain people that when you meet
them you know there's going to be some good conversations out of this.
I felt the same thing.
Howard, Howard, not to interject real quick, Howard, we gotta meet, we gotta meet, we gotta
meet.
You know, he emailed me three times and texted me, don't forget Clifton, we hooked up.
So it was a great experience, Clifton.
We have such an opportunity to talk about how life is sculpted where we are and the
ways that life turns out not exactly how we intended them to be.
And so we're going to talk about that a little bit today.
We have our perspectives of what HVAC refrigeration are going to look like when we jump into it,
but we never know until we get there and sometimes the journey is just as enjoyable or even more
enjoyable than the actual job itself.
So Joe, tell us a little bit about you getting into the industry and some of the tales from
the trenches that you encountered, especially in them first years.
Yeah, very good.
So talk about being coachable.
I was a typical jock and went in the Navy real quick after my first quarter in college
ended up being a disaster.
You know, the typical 1974, 75 era.
That being stated, going into the military, not only did it grow me up, it taught me a
lesson, the lesson that I'm still living from 48 years later.
And that lesson is how do you teach an unteachable?
I was uncultured.
I was a hard head.
I was a jock that had never won a high school football game.
I was Oh, and 40.
So success to me, it was back in those days of being able to perform right now.
We're trying to perform in the Navy.
They taught me how to use deadweight testers.
I hooked up capacitors.
Yeah.
I learned capacitance by using DC capacitors and believe this or not, electric refrigeration
made by the Japanese in the 1970s that was on board our ship, USS Independence.
My five year apprentice is apprenticeship, if you will, from 17 M 32s, you know, rod
and chillers rod and condensers.
We hooked up a carrier six cylinder refrigeration unit to one of the refridgerator decks and
had to pump out a flooded machinery room with a frickin carrier compressor folks.
Really?
Yes.
That's just a pump.
It didn't like, hey, it didn't last very long, but it didn't like liquid.
That's right.
So that was in my first five years and I didn't know what a pair of voice scripts were.
Yep.
So when I got out of the apprenticeship, the five years, the Navy, they went ahead and
sent me to an A school.
I ended up on an aircraft carrier and as a push button before I had to do five years
and I showed up on ship and kind of like a total little lie.
And you're going to love this.
The little lie that I told when I found out during the walk around tours being in engineering
and going up and down the eight machinery rooms and seeing all the boilers and 120 degree
temperature, I had quickly decided at the age of 18 being thespian in nature, that this
was not going to be a very good experience.
Yeah.
This is going to be work.
No.
So they called me in, they said, Hey, where do you want to go?
And in my mind, I'm in front of this guy with khakis on, I'm just an 18 year old kid still
hadn't turned 19.
And I said, my father had a bar across the street from the Ford plant and we were very
busy and I helped him take care of the refrigeration and air conditioning by changing filters and
poof, they signed me to the AC and our shop.
Yeah.
And all I could say walking out of that room.
I was an experienced dude.
Lo and behold, being teachable and coachable was a learned trait.
I found out very quickly that everyone on board that ship was smarter than me.
I'm talking every single person that had been there longer than me was smarter than me.
All right.
Because they already had the experience.
Not knowing what a pair of vice grips were at the age of 18, 48 years later, having worked
on anything that moves fluid or heat in any fashion, whether it be absorbers, cascades,
CO2, propane, it does not matter.
And I love working with chlorine tanks, rail cards, I've worked all the ammonia.
I choose refrigeration.
And basically, well, it's a beautiful thing.
I'm glad you asked.
In order for this process to work to us, for us to be able to entice the young to come
for us, with us.
We have to, we have to paint a picture.
The picture we need to paint to recruit these 20 somethings, my friend, needs to be able
to make them understand that you have the ability to change the world in refrigeration.
Oh my goodness.
That's it.
People don't understand that, do they?
No, we have to change the world.
Think about what, think about how much refrigeration is in a daily life.
You know, everywhere you go.
I mean, even, even when you open up your household refrigerator and you look at the condition
of the ice in the water filtration systems, and now all the smart devices, even in the
homes is mind boggling.
And so to get down to the basics in commercial refrigeration, industrial refrigeration, not
so much, but commercial refrigeration, we delve a little bit also into helping hospitals
preserve the blood.
It's a very important thing.
It's been in the news the last five years.
You've heard all the stories.
So that's going to track them because without that, we're back to hunting.
Okay.
And preserving everything in salt.
With salt.
That's all I understood.
You know, most people don't understand that we haven't, we haven't designed an emergency
generator system for a grocery store to handle the refrigeration since the 1980s.
Right?
There is not a grocery store in this country made in the last 40 years that is capable
of running the refrigeration off from the generator.
That big generator outside is just for lighting.
So if we lose electricity, we're out of food in three days.
No doubt.
So refrigeration is the heart of the sustainability of our entire civilization.
No doubt.
And so, you know, it comes down to this, you know, product loss is the bane of any society
and whether it's being shipped overseas and lost on the cargo ships or over land, the
food chain is broken and we can do our part here sustainability wise with what we do at
Pro Green and Pro and what the kids have started.
God bless them.
Going forward, it's important that we stem the problem of product loss in our markets.
And what I'm seeing going on with the technology, we love Rusty Walker, we love Hill Phoenix
Usman.
We learn from all of these people.
The problem that I see is again, the systemic product loss when there's failure in the markets
on the power supply.
And so there's lots of solutions out there, but the kids need to get together, the young
and come up with a plan.
And that's we want to tap those young minds.
We want to make sure, Clifton, that the young 28 year olds, 26 year olds, they've tried
things we need to figure out a way to entice them.
And that's going to be through social media.
Glassdoor, put your story on.
We went ahead and Glassdoor and got new marketing and just by putting the CEO story on, we went
from nine hits annually to 111 hits in a week.
And I did this just when I was at Southpoint.
I actually went ahead on Glassdoor and so we're going to go ahead and market the heck out
of these 20 somethings.
Excuse me, everybody says this and you got to agree.
You know, these kids, they don't know how to think.
That's the only thing that I'm going to agree with.
Everything else negative that they say about the 20 somethings and it's bantered about
our friend Ty.
He comes out and tells us all the stories.
It's just canned goods.
You can teach if the person's curious.
That's all that it takes.
That's it.
You can make them curious.
I was talking to a guy yesterday, Greg Castro.
He's actually going to be on one of our podcasts.
You should go back and take a look at it.
You know, 29 year old guys in the automotive industry, early twenties just by chance went
into a age fact apprenticeship as a install helper.
Seven years later, he's an educator because he said in those first few weeks, he caught
the bug.
Wow.
He had no idea how much air conditioning and refrigeration was around him until he went
to take this job to be an install helper and went, I have to absorb this and I have to
absorb everything I can because I had no clue.
And that is exactly what is going to change our industry.
When we start painting a better picture of what this industry can look like.
I mean, think about that.
Think about those ships that you were on.
We're talking a hundred million dollar ships, 18 year old, 19 year old walking into a machine
room that's got millions of dollars worth of equipment going, you want to work on this?
That's right.
And when you think about that too, Clifton, remembering now that it's 2023 versus 1975,
what I've learned from discussions like this with people that are much smarter than me,
I like to say, and it's not tongue in cheek.
I am not the brightest P in the pot.
And I do understand though and believe this is that there's so many smart people out there
that to get them to perform to their abilities is our task.
I mean, there's no doubt.
If we, if we browbeat, if we browbeat anyone, okay.
Now good natured browbeating, that's part of the trades.
I get it.
Oh yeah.
That just goes with it.
That's the fun part.
Everybody gets a nickname, right?
And we're in our interview process and we asked the 20 something, what do your friends call
you?
And they look at me, you know, wide eyed and I said, what's your nickname?
They says, well, they call me Popo.
I said, well, that may not work here.
You know what I'm saying?
So, but don't give me a tag.
I warned them when I hire them, I said, you know, you're going to get tagged.
Somebody's going to nickname you bumper the pump.
So starting right from the interview process, it's pop painting a picture.
It is, it's more involved, like you said, back with the analogy of all the equipment,
a wide eyed, I mean, we've got some things when we open up rack motor rooms that have
been converted to E3, E2, and they see all the blinking lights and everything automatically.
They already understand that something about, you know, with technology here.
Wow.
What is this?
This is not what I thought was going on inside this room.
I didn't even know this room was in here.
We had a plan at the Oberlin IGA to do a transcritical CO2.
They're one of the cities that was supposed to be carbon neutral by 2030, one of the 16
cities under Obama.
We've been very involved there.
That being stated, I almost bought an old Tops market in Sandusky.
It's a basement rack system.
It's a closed supermarket in Sandusky, Ohio.
I was going to put walkable glass over the floor where you can see the machinery room.
As the shoppers were going with their kids and their five year olds and everything, and
the kids would look down, just make sure, well, you have to put a sign up, make sure
you don't do things in the floor drain because you're being watched.
Right.
There you go.
These types of things are fun.
It's great analogy, but I had a vision.
I wanted to get the young involved in saying and pointing, mama, what's that?
Mama's saying, I don't know.
Automatically, that kid's going to be curious.
Oh, absolutely.
It is.
All right.
One out of 10, that's all we need.
One out of 10 kids going in the markets where you can see the equipment, somewhat similar
to the Walgreens that they built in Chicago that I visited, the first net zero pharmacy
in the country.
And I visited that place.
You know what I found out?
This is great.
Here's what I found out.
Number one, it's only as good as the person that puts it in.
Number two, 42 wells had increased in temperature five degrees in two years time.
And so what I learned is, is that if technology understands, okay, how to move heat, if technology
understands how to move heat, then where's the disconnect between the engineering and
the installers?
We have room for improvement in this whole industry of refrigeration.
Just that part of it.
So that's where I'm at.
And I'm very, very passionate.
Our team, we're fortunate enough to have some brilliant kids on board.
I call them kids, you know, 40, 35 year old, they're grown people.
But to me, they're kids.
And so I learned from them at the age of 67 almost on a daily basis by asking questions.
The kids always come back to me, Clifton, and you've probably heard this before.
They come back and says, well, dad's asking a question or the general manager or supervisor,
pops is asking a question.
He already has a good idea what the answer is.
They're thinking this before they answer because I've told them, yeah, I've told them.
I said, you know, when I ask a question, I got a good idea how you're going to answer.
It's the teaching process.
That's right.
They already know this.
And so going forward, we have a staff that is thinking cognitively every day.
And that's what's so important refrigeration.
What we're moving into now is so rewarding.
We're building widgets, sustainable type widgets.
We're working with Honeywell and other entities to have the global warming taken care of.
All these 20 somethings about teaching the unteachable.
All these 20 somethings are going to hear our message.
Absolutely.
But they want to make a difference in the world.
You know, I've got a 15 and an 18 year old daughter, stepdaughters here at home, one
getting her head off to college.
The other one is not really as interested in college.
She wants to make a difference in the world and she wants to go into the world and change
it.
And that is the thing that has grown so much in this generation.
And I think that you hit on that.
We say a lot of things about this generation because they have developed at a very different
pace and with a very different standard than many of us have in the past.
And so some of us are unfamiliar with the pace that they have grown into, but we forget
about the pace that they've grown, that they are very advanced, that they want to make
a difference, that they are very intellectual and they are a generation that actually speaks
about things.
Oh my gosh.
Ty Braneman, of course, did the podcast down with Brian or another friend of ours.
And then I listened to it on a Sunday morning three times, shared it with everyone, took
it, went actually and went on Amazon and bought Hannah's book and hooked up with her on LinkedIn.
And I'm 50-50 on it, but I'm in agreement a thousand percent with a lot of what she's
trying to do is let us, the different generations all the way up to my age, understand them
a little bit better.
So it did open my eyes and Ty, I sent him a message.
I will send him another message.
You don't have to drink all the Kool-Aid in everyone's book, but what you want to do is
pick and choose for your business model what's important that we put out there.
And so because of safety concerns, these kids can be walking around in a motor room, you
know, tick-tocking away unless it's produced and we can't force them to do that.
But what we can do in our policy manuals is say, hey, you know, personal cell use is now
allowed on the job sites as long as you get your work done.
If you put that small statement, some of the people that want to share what they do because
they want to be proud of what they do will then enhance, that's right.
They'll enhance to teach the unteachable.
All right.
That's exactly it.
Yes, sir.
I'll be doing a online class for us here in a couple of weeks for the online portion of
the conference.
And it'd be on the four generations of learners and just discussing how four generations learn
in slightly different ways.
So it's all about understanding the people around you.
Well, without people like Ty yourself and Brian or Mike, the HVAC guy, all the people
that we know, you know, the A.I. and LinkedIn has gotten so much better in the last 18 months.
Now I'm not getting I mean, if you look at one tearjerker, OK, like, you know, Amer,
all these people, because they tell a story because they're woo woo people from India.
They're also in your feed.
And so it's a well-balanced input that LinkedIn start putting together.
I remember listening to your podcast for an hour and a half driving, I think, to Kentucky
just recently.
One of the first ones that was on LinkedIn is an hour and a half long.
It's about the refrigerant transition.
OK, absolutely.
And you were you were managing it.
You were behind the booth.
And I listened that all hour and a half, OK, as I was driving.
And that's another story for another day.
Well, I got to learn.
If I can't if I shut down my mind because my body has shut down, my friend at this age,
I can't do what I want to do, which is be out there with the guys.
And so I've relegated myself to be the advocate.
Well, it's more of more of a sensei type thing.
OK, with the weedhoppers, with the weedhoppers, the method of creating an analogy to explain
thermodynamics, pressures, voltages, we're very heavy into what Dr. Silverstein is into.
We're very heavy into the electrical aspect.
And most of the educators do understand that 90 percent of our problems are the way it's
controlled.
And so we're very, very heavy in using an analogy.
You know, I learned from Dr. Silverstein just a month ago.
He says, hey, you know, a closed circuit means a closed door.
That means the goons can't get through.
And I said, hmm, that makes sense because an open circuit means you go through.
So it's backwards.
And so now I have an analogy to take to the youngsters and say, OK, a closed circuit is
a good thing.
An open circuit is a bad thing, regardless of whether an open door requires you to walk
through it or not.
Electricity and pumps, they don't work that way.
OK.
And so Dr. Silverstein is brilliant.
All you guys, I highly recommend ESCO.
We've done the RSC training through ESCO, our EPA through ESCO.
Howard and Renee and the team, everyone over there, including yourself, is a great experience
for our small company here in Cleveland.
Joe Kukenda, it's an honor to have you here with us and to get your perspective on life.
We got to come back for round two and round 10.
I hope we have some some comments relative to what you put out.
I look forward to working with all of you.
This is a good job.
Thank you.