Ray Martin started his IT career in a basement cage, setting up Blackberries behind a locked door. Ten years later, he's the CTO at Dimeo Construction—and he's survived two ransomware attacks.

The first one fractured trust between IT and operations. The second one? Conti demanded $1.2 million in Bitcoin. Ray counter-offered $10K "so I don't have to go through the trouble." They said no. He recovered everything anyway.

In this episode, Ray breaks down exactly how his isolated Azure tenant backup strategy saved the company, why your 200+ subcontractors running Gmail are your biggest security vulnerability, and what it took to convince leadership to migrate to the cloud when the Exchange server was down 80% of the time.

We also get into real AI use cases in construction—why Procore flipped their agent strategy from 80% vendor-built to 80% customer-built, how to survey your team before rolling out AI policy, and Simon Sinek's take on why blue collar jobs are safe while white collar jobs aren't.

Plus: the conspiracy corner, NJ drones, and why every Flat Earth experiment proves the Earth is round.