The ThinkND Podcast
The ThinkND Podcast
Ten Years Hence: Innovation, Part 4: A Brief History of the Future
What will the process of creation and renewal look like by 2035? How will we leverage innovation to meet the challenges of the future in areas from our power grid and collaborative intelligence to community health and resilience building? Explore questions, ideas, and trends likely to affect business and society over the next decade. Let these ideas serve as a springboard for structured speculation about emerging issues and the next ten years.
Join Mike Bechtel ’98, Managing Director and Chief Futurist at Deloitte Consulting LLP and adjunct professor of corporate innovation at the University of Notre Dame, for a discussion about the novel and exponential technologies most likely to affect the future of business; how a wide angle lens, not clairvoyance, is the key to looking into the future; and why the sweet spot for innovation adoption isn’t acorns or oak trees—it’s saplings.
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Good morning and welcome. This is 10 years, hence our focus moves this morning from resilience to a brief history of time. So today what I would like to do is introduce someone I think you're going to find absolutely fascinating. Our speaker this morning is Mike Tel, who comes to us from Chicago, where he serves as managing director and the chief futurist with Deloitte Consulting. He team researches the novel and exponential technologies most likely to affect the future of business and builds relationships with startups and incumbent. And academic institutions creating them. Prior to joining Deloitte Tel led Ringleader Ventures, an early state venture capital firm, he co-founded in 2013. Before ringleader, he served as CTO of start early, a national not-for-profit, focused on a early childhood education or at risk. Young. Mike began his career in technology in RMD at a global professional services firm where his dozen US patents, resulted in his being named as firm's Global Innovation Director. He currently serves as an adjunct professor, corporate innovation at the University of Notre Dame. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Chief Futurist. Thanks,
13:Jim.
15:That guy sounds a lot higher energy than I am. How's everybody? Good. Happy Friday and, happy sunny Friday. That groundhog's really gotten the better of us this season. I was telling Jim and Morgan, who set us up, with the room today, that it's been one of these four cities in four days, sort of a week for me. I was in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania for their state government data summit yesterday and getting a sense of their sort of preliminary, preparations for Doge coming their way. it's like a PCO game. It starts with the feds and moves to the states. I was in Hermitage, Tennessee, outside of Nashville on Tuesday where, we were putting together some perspectives on, how artificial intelligence figures to, affect the tourism and hospitality industries. And I share all of this not as some sort of a boast or as a fatigued call for help. It's to say that, it helps shine a little light on what in my view, futurism and foresight work is all about. Because the number one question I tend to get is, what the hell's a futurist? And that was asked with that specific accent by the CEO of Exelon, the energy utility. She said, what do you got? A crystal ball? Is something she got time machine? Is it a DeLorean? I said, well, no. she says, well then what do you do? How do you do it? Well, here's how I like to say we do it. how many of y'all, How many of y'all have your phone on you right now? Right? Odds are, unless you are like rigorously anti-progress, you've got at least two cameras on your phone. One is the telephoto lens, the far distance, right? The zoom. The other is the wide angle, right? The broad, the breadth. One of the things that we found is that it's not about prophecy. It's not about clairvoyance, right? Our brand with Deloitte, it's about profitability. It's about merely very useful innovations that are more, as I like to say, anchored in the art of the profitable than the art of the possible, and to camera lenses. Turns out maybe kind of contradictory to what you might imagine. We use the wide angle lens. Since there is no time travel, we figure out what's coming By looking all around the fricking planet for little faces of the future being cooked up today, that figure to become our tomorrow. There's this great quote, it's kind of nerdy and it's a little cliche if you've heard it 30 times, but a lot of people haven't. William Gibson Neuromancer, 1982. He says, the future's already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. I got geeky goosebumps the first time I heard that. I still do. And so why do I open with Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Hermitage, Tennessee, right? It's because that's the field research. It stands to reason that there's stuff going on at NASA that could melt mines at Nationwide Insurance. But here's the rub. There's stuff going on at Nationwide Insurance that I've seen melt mines at nasa, the most state-of-the-art ai, computer vision, facial recognition technology that I've ever seen. And I see some nerdy stuff. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Tourism Authority. I was visiting with those cats and they were showing me how when you get off the plane, a series of cameras figures out that your, you mashes up your public data profile with their private itinerary data and gives you a bespoke tour plan for your time in the kingdom. And I'm thinking like, sounds exactly like George Orwell said, but their retort is well. It's data managed, it's privacy managed, and the service of a better experience. And we can debate that later, but the point is, how do you make futures work wide angle lens, not clairvoyance. Two, why do you do futures work? I don't know that I need to tell the 10 year hence gang, the business case for foresight, for futures, and for scenarios. But I will tell you my favorite quote is from Paul Graham. How many of y'all just show of hands capturing the demographic here? How many of y'all know, what Y Combinator is on half of the room? Third, why Combinator is the leading startup incubator in Silicon Valley. They're the self-described Harvard for startups. They're very humble people. I. But their founder, he said, listen, when you're dealing with exponentials, the best time to act is when it still feels too early. And the argument is, by the time it quote unquote moves the needle, you've missed it. And so my corporate clients, they're forever telling me like, I don't want acorns, I want oak trees. And I'm daily reminding them at which you actually want our saplings that have gotten through the tough early part, and that have a first mover advantage to the later. So maybe the third question that I tend to get is, how in the hell do you get into the futures business? Well, my, my story starts here at the University of Notre Dame, not in Mendoza, not in science or engineering. Can anybody guess from that picture? My undergraduate major
16:Philoso trends.
15:Close
10:anthropology? Yes.
15:Are you an anthropology student?
10:no. I have friends who want to be though. Okay, right on. Right
15:on. I recommend it. I studied anthropology, having done the three little, the three, or what is it, the Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Right. I'm confusing my bears and pigs. engineering was too cold. 300 people, a professor reading a book. I wasn't having it. I went to a small high school with the Socratic method and discussions. I wasn't down with the orations. I switched to pre-law and that was like too hot. Those people like liked to argue for a living and that was not my bag. Anthropology was just right, partly because they could tolerate long-haired hippies like me. I. I look like the illegitimate stepson of David Spade. it's not a strong look, but it was an accepting culture. But my bride of nearly 25 years, she wore it better. and when I say she had similar hair, I mean we had similar hair. This was, this is real. I don't know if that's a feature or a bug, but I'll take your laughter. Here's the thing, why do I bring up anthro? My professor, my favorite professor in anthro here at Notre Dame, his name was Dr. James Beis. Anybody know Jim?
3:Oh, good friend. Oh man. Referred to himself as a pale, logical dumpster diver.
15:Permission to use that. Do my go forward remarks. Thank you for that, Jim. Jim. Wow. Jim. Anybody else know Jim Fellas? he was a great dude. I remember my first class with him. It was a physical archeology. He said, you know, technology is just a puffy chested, four syllable synonym for tool. And he said, we humans have been tool builders from the jump. Two and a half million years ago, homo Habilis handyman built the first tool on record. It was a sharpened stone that sped up the time it took to sort of procure and prepare your dinner. And I remember Jim would say, why? Why? He said it was a hack to free our precious human cycles for higher order pursuits. What got us thinking? Well, like what? Well, I remember in my freshman seminar we talked about the sum. Who about 5,000 years ago cooked up the first written language. Why? It was a hack. So you didn't have to memorize every darn thing. I remember in high school being told that the Home Mary and Epics were so, so impressive'cause they memorized it all. And I'm thinking, no, they had to because they didn't really have the ability to offload that onto the writing. And that freed their time for higher order pursuits. Like what? Well, about 500 years ago, 600 Johann Gutenberg and the gang, right? They mashed up crazy story. You don't hear a lot about the how here it was a coin. Press it, a wine press. And they realized that the mashup of the two could make a WordPress. And what did that do? That stopped us from having to repeat ourselves all the freaking time. Whereas I like to say the OG copy paste. Here's the deal. In the nineties, I'm studying all this anthro and I'm loving my life. And then I hear this right here.
18:I remember, reading at article when I was about 12 years old. I think it might have been Scientific American, where measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planets. how many kilo calories did they expend to get from point A to point B? And then the, came in with the top of the list, surpassed everything up, and humans came in about a third little down the list, which was not such a great show for the crowd of creation. And, but somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. Human lighting a bicycle blew away the condor all the way out in Totalism. And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders and we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, the computer has always been a bicycle of the mind. something that takes us far beyond our in inherit abilities. And, I think we're just in the early stages of this tool.
15:It's 1998. I've got my anthropology degree, but I had a superpower. And the superpower was, I could spell www. And I remember talking to employers at that time about how computers were in fact tools. And it was early days, you know. That this bicycle for the mind was giving way to a motorcycle for the mind. I ended up doing this stuff for a living. And what's wild is that I see clients, I see academics, I see students. I see my family reacting over the last two, three years to AI saying, it's unprecedented. It's an alien life form. It's here to get us feared or revered. And I'm like, oh no, it's the next page in a two and a half million year book that we've been writing. It's a rocket ship for the mind. And people say, this time it's different. And I will say, every time it's different. And here's the story. Oh, and I'll share all these slides with you too
17:if anybody's interested.
15:I was taught this. Jim taught us this. He ain't wrong, but I would argue that it's always been this. And for people of a certain age, there was a show called Star Trek, the Next Generation, and the enemy in that one was the board. Just like humans and machines symbiotically linked. I don't want that future. It's a terrible future. With respect to our younger attendees today. Try to take a phone away from my teenager. I'll show you that we're already cyborgs, right? Because there's a presumption that the technology's already upon us and it's very soon to be in us. Now That's an interesting sort of seminar level. Look. Let's double click and let's kind of get into the mix, into the muck, into the work. In 2021, my team and I wanted to pressure test this hypothesis. We partnered up with the World Economic Forum. We wrote a flagship report. It was surprisingly well circulated and well read. Part of it was'cause everybody was stuck inside. that tried to understand the future of tech by looking in a principled way at the past. And where we started the party was with Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. So Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage made the first computer in London in 1842. And I got to see this thing at that Y Combinator I talked about at their demo day. I remember I was stand, Joe Montana was there, and I don't say that in a name droppy way, it's just a Notre Dame community. Factoid.'cause he's an investor. He's an investor now. And so he and I are like, we have our Mountain Dew and our plastic solo cups and our cheese and crackers. and Joe Montana literally says, what's this? And I said, it's a model of the first computer. He goes. It's big. I get right, but I imagine tried to explain computer science to Joe Montana. Anyway, they had notes like the liner notes of the original Vantage Lovelace sort of description of the three subsystems that made this thing go. Y'all ready for a questionable David Attenborough impression? should we get our nature show energy going? Okay. Said we propose a store which will hold the arithmetic units like a silo might hold grain. And I go, well, that, that's an adorable agrarian way to talk about a database. Said we further propose a mill, which will process the arithmetic. Not unlike a reaper would render wheat into flour. That's a CPU. Then they talked about a reader across the top that made sense of all the wizard. Bless you. Made sense of all the wizardry for us, us muggles as regular folk. And I got to thinking, I was taught in the eighties that the first computer was eac New Jersey. 1946. Yeah. Right? Yeah. You, say you, say but it was the first digital computer, right? PhDs feeding punch cards to a machine even bigger than the one that impressed Joe Montana. And that was the end of history. So thanks for coming to my talk. No, it gets to my dad's generation right now. It's 1985. My dad works at a taxi company in Calumet City, Illinois. He's cleaning up one day after work, right? We're supposed to be watching Cheers'cause it's Thursday. He says, no, I'm going to night school. I go, why? Four? He says, learn how to work computers. He says, how come he goes,'cause it's for accountants now. Something called Lotus like. Okay, well then you jump ahead to me. Right? My, my computer science education here at the University of Notre Dame consisted of a business classic called Windows 95 for dummies. And what am I doing? I'm not doing PhD grade arithmetic, I'm not doing rows and columns and decision support systems. I'm doing descriptive analytics. Why did this stuff happen? Data science, data mining, and where am I doing it? I've got a small machine on my desk, but the big machines are in the computer cluster.'cause we've got an intranet and an internet. Cool. Well here's a rub. Most people, maybe not the 10 years, hence people, most people think we live at the end of history. Francis Fukiama, the end of history. and you carry that illusion until you hire a young person. And I remember this lady on my team, Raquel, she shows up, it's her third day at work. She goes, can you do me a solid? You seem like a cool boss. Can we have a email? Go, excuse me. She goes, I'm more of a touch and swipe kind of person. I'm not like a click and type kind of person. Can we text? And I go, I'm not sure you're a Deloitte kind of person. But what she was speaking to was this recognition and getting, here's the punchline, that by studying the history of technology, we can meaningfully treasure map the subset of Futurama. That is more likely than not. We can look at directionality on the interface. Layer simple always wins from PhDs to night School to Dummies. Book to Raquel. Like I don't do books so much. Simple is undefeated on the information layer. Smarter is undefeated right from unstructured data to structured data to patterns in the past to predictions of what's next to digital discernment and decision making. Intelligence always wins. And then on the number crunching side, the engine side, the compute side stronger always wins from big slow computers to medium computers to little fast computers, to half the computers in the basement to cloud. I was so glad this chair's here because I can do a little bit of a story. I had a client who was in. Odessa, Permian, Texas. Has anybody ever been to that part of Texas? The oil? Texas? Yes, sir. Are you originally from there? No. Okay, good. Because you'd clobber me for this story, but this guy's name was Randy and he had full on cowboy boots and his thing in meetings was he would always have'em up on the desk in front of you.
17:And he says to me, and he is my client, like he pays my bills, right? He goes, young man, I've finally figured out what the hell this cloud thing is all about. This is about five years
15:ago, right? I go, Randy, tell me. He goes, it turns out
17:it's not a cloud. It's oh boy, here we go. Says, turns out it's just some other organization with a substantially bigger basement and it's full of computers like our basement, which is a smaller basement.
15:And I, and I laugh'cause on one hand I'm like, that's the most technically apt description of cloud I've ever heard. And then on the other hand, I said, you're right Randy, you know, sign here. we'll help. but the thing is this simpler, smarter, stronger. Those are the golden tickets. And they're more knowable than they feel.
3:What, you know, the reason people don't see that if I'm just Please
15:Oh, by all means.
3:Yeah. He said, it occurs to me that when they see it, they're looking at the past. Right. So an automobile is not, an automobile goes away, it's a horseless carriage. Right, right. And this isn't the cinema, this, these are talking pictures. Talkies,
15:yeah.
3:And the reason is that the terminology, the applications all come from the rear view mirror. this is a carriage that will take me anywhere and I don't even need a horse.
15:And it, and Jim to. yes, the linguistics limit, the, the business case, the use case, the possibility, yeah. Profoundly. The first TV shows were these super sad recordings of radio shows, and people were like, this sucks. It's no, you Right. And then somebody came up with the idea of let's film it in Utah and we'll make it about cowboys. And then it was great. And so I'm with you, the, we call it the RA radio on TV problem, but I, it's a platform problem. So again, it's through this lens that we can begin to vet and audition the snake oil and hyperbole coming out of Silicon Valley or Saudi Arabia, and determine the degree to which they're interesting and might have legs, for example. Who remembers? A summer cycle ago when Steve Jobs and Company dropped the$3,500 Apple Vision Pro on the market. did you buy one? Did anybody buy one? No. I get around and I'm here to tell you, nobody's ever bought one, or at least admitted to it. I had a colleague, I still do, but I had one then too. Mitch Hedberg. Anyway, this colleague, his name's Mark Lilly, he's in our uk Deloitte office. He goes, he puts one on, we're testing him out. He goes, mark, the problem is there's no way I'd ever like to wear a toaster on my face to the office. And I go, mark, I, yeah, I get it. But what's Mark saying, Jim, to invoke sort of your thesis? he is, he's focused on the limitations of the current kit, not the move towards simplicity. When that moves to that, and that moves to that, and that moves to a contact that paints the pixels on your retina or less invasively. This company Humane, which has built an equally panned V one product that paints pixels on your hand or your wall, or your buddy, their use case kills me. Egg timer. That's the best you can do. But who can afford
3:an
15:egg? I mean, yeah. Right? Yeah. Timely. timely. Yeah. That's suddenly a high value use case, right? but the reason I share this story team is we wanna throw the baby out with the bath water and wave off augmented and virtual reality because it's been promised for 20 years and it's 3,500 bucks and it's a toaster on your face. But in truth, it's a gateway towards a post screen future. Our kids are gonna look at the fact that we all have two of these and a laptop, a tablet, screen. They're gonna, that's the tell. That's the anachronism. It's the future anachronism of oh my gosh, look at all the rectangles. It was so clumsy because painting pixels and digital info where you need it, that will win. Why? Because simple is undefeated. Now, on the computation front, the story is decentralized and distributed platforms, which is a four syllable puffy chested synonym for blockchain, and in polite society. Blockchain kind of went away 18 months ago, right? There was this string of what I call the three letter acronyms. That all sounded like jail time, right? NFTs, S-B-F-F-T-X. oh, we don't wanna touch that. It's toxic, it's radioactive. And then six months ago it became political oh, crypto, that's a Trump thing. No, the story worth knowing through this lens is that the only thing cloudier than a cloud, the only thing bigger than the biggest basement full of computers is the reimagining of every computer on the entire internet as a singular contributor to a master data management infrastructure. That's nerdy tech guy speak for blockchain is thinking of the whole internet as a singular supercomputer. And so the reason Bitcoin is interesting, despite its highs and its lows, and it's in and it's out, and I think this week it's out and then in three months it'll be in and the FOMO will be back and through the long lens. It's the idea that none of us is as trustworthy as all of us. In a world where, I don't know what I think about the Fed or Russia or Ukraine or any counterparty, God, it's chaos. Bitcoin feeds off the gods of entropy and says, yeah, in math, we trust. Let's go. Now, it's not just finance. One of my clients, this is a wild story. Their boss comes into a Zoom call and says, Jim, I lost the password to the PowerPoint presentation and I'm getting with the board in 20 minutes. Help me out. And he says, well, here you go, boss. Who here's ever gotten an email from a Nigerian prince? Yeah. It's a, is that still a thing?
3:they started as letters with actual Nigerian stamps. True story. Oh, yeah.
15:Oh my God. Yeah. Dude, this is, I, you've given me two nuggets for
3:Thank you,
15:Jim.
3:The stamps are cool.
15:I bet they weren't from Nigeria, though. I'm
3:Yes, they were.
15:The original Nigerian princes were so much classier. Yeah. Yeah. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. Scams are scams and what used to be a handwritten letter.
1:Yeah.
15:And then became a poorly spelled aol.com. Email is now a 4K deep fake, realtime video of your boss asking to bum a password. In this case, they found 25 million bucks missing from their treasury at the end of the week because the password worked for that too. Which is, anyway, what does that have to do with blockchain? I was talking to the leading newspaper in Scandinavia called Ship Dead. They're outta Oslo, and they said, we are so tired of the fake news, the alternate of facts, everyone, pardon my language, but this is what he said. Everyone is bitching about everything every day that they put a chip in their photographer's cameras that writes a SHA 2 56 hash, which is geek speak for a code into the picture so that as that picture moves through the journalist's supply chain and comes out on a piece of paper or a web screen, discerning eyes can say, is that thing real? Oh, yeah. Look, it's from that camera at that latitude and longitude in that day. Why? Because in a world where nobody can trust anybody anymore. you don't throw your hands up in a, and I say this as a liberal arts guy, you don't throw your hands up in a woe for humanity. Malaise. You fight math. With math, you say trust the blockchain.
3:We used to talk about chain of custody. that's in the intel community. Yep. To know whether a photograph is real. And it had all this documentation with it and ways to check on that. But that's pretty cumbersome.
15:Well, and so the idea is the same thing that works for, like digital gold couldn't work for digital assets like pictures and movies and chain of custody for pictures saying, don't trust me. Trust the chain gang. This is all the preamble to the 800 pound gorilla in society's room. So how many of you find yourself talking about AI once a week at least. How about like once a day? How about all the time and you're sick of it. that's just me. That's the students. You're all like, I know. How many emails do you get a week about the honor code in ai? I have to imagine. It's wild. Yeah. Anyway, catch me after class. I wanna learn. You guys could teach me how this works. when I was here at school, one of my professors was electrical engineer. and I'll never forget, it was the day before Gary Casper off the Russian grandmaster got licked by IBM, deep blue in chess. And I remember the prof. He's up here in a, we weren't now, we weren't in this, we weren't into Barlow either. I think it was like Fitzpatrick. But he's writing all this math. He's there is no way a ground master can lose to a computer. It's impossible. It's Casper off. Okay, next day, two to one. Right. Here's the notable thing. Professor comes in, he goes like that. If you remember, in Empire Strikes back when Han Solo comes in, the first thing he does is he shushes three po. He's he comes into class before any of us can say anything. He's this game was rigged. And he starts showing all these equations about how and why it was an expert system masquerading as a learning system, and it had codified rules and dur drip, durp, QED. Humanity is still special. And we're all like, that's good to know. Prof. Thanks. And then we went on our work. Well, well here's the scoop. Anybody remember this?
16:Yeah,
15:it's 2011. I've got my son Brady, like on my knee watching it with my better half barb, the same haircut and. I'm seeing it all over again. what is it with IBM picking fights with people this time Watson. Then I look to my phone and I see there's an article from the New York Times that night saying, turns out this game was rigged and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and QED humans are still special. Thanks. New York Times. It happened in Korea a few years ago. Go right, it was Google's DeepMind versus Lisa Dole five to one. Well, here's the thing. AI isn't new AI per Larry Tessler at Xerox Park, one of my favorite mentors, he said, AI is whatever the hell computers can't do yet. And that sounds pithy, but it's genius because this has always been ai. It's always been a steady march of artificial intelligence. What's more constructive is to think of it as what's new in ai. And what's new in AI right now is digital discernment and decision making. It's the emulation of cognitive faculties. Now, one of my clients in Denmark, you can figure them out, they make toy bricks and they're open about it. So it's Lego group. Their CTO tells me over at Carlsburg, he goes, we have found this tool which has scan every brick in your child's pile and show you every conceivable toy you can make. It's awesome. And I asked him again, I said, what? And he goes, gunning the bricks and making the toys. I said, are you gonna lawyer up? Is this an intellectual property concern? He goes, no, we love it. Why do you love it? So we get a second beer and he walks me through the following. How many of you, have kids or have ever been a kid? That's good. It's called a mutually exclusive, completely exhaustive set. That's good. This is my son Bennett. He's 20, 5% older and 15% less cute now. But the story holds When I sit down to build with Bennett per yesper, we think we're there to build cool stuff. In truth, we're there to make memories. That's the North Star. Now, you haven't lived until you've heard a senior executive at the Lego Group say the following over a pin of beer. He goes, the problem is these pain in the ass little pieces. And I go, yes, bur you make the pieces, bro. Like what? And then he goes, hear me out. Too much time on the muck steals from the magic. And if you've ever done Lego for an extended period, like there's 35 flavors of gray rectangle and it's enraging and you give up, well, somewhere around our third beer, he says there's more. He said, this memory making stands on the shoulders of these other externalities. Somebody's gotta make the bricks. Somebody's gotta drill the oil that goes into the bricks. And I said, dude, you're losing me, right? You're cut off. He says, no. What I mean is that stuff's below the not my problem line. We don't think about that stuff because we don't have to, because it's done for us. And his argument was, here comes tools like that tool which raise the waterline. Ergo free our mental cycles to spend less time unlocking more time on magic. And that's when it hit me. It's the Stone Flake Sumerian text printing press thing all over again. Now, this might feel a little squishy. I brought it to the largest bank in the United States, and these guys don't want me to say their name, but you can Google that building. I start telling the story to these cats and the guy goes, listen, kid, our North Star is not quite as poetic as memory making. We're here to make money and we make money with differentiated products and services. And you know what slows us down? Admin back office, crap. And if you're telling me that in the same way that you solved my blinking light in the basement, problem with your cloud business. You solved the headache hairball application integration mess with the E-R-P-C-R-M Salesforce stuff that you can do that with back office here. With this robot brain I'm in, folks, what we're seeing is that generative AI is just the next level. Generative AI brings robot brains up to the point of differentiation. In 2019, I showed a different Texan client, an early generative pre-train transformer that could write Shakespearean poetry is granted six years ago, right? Like before November 22, when you know it all got into gen pop and I remember his actual quote. He looked at it, he is like, son, we make hydraulic lifts. We do not make poems. I was like, shoot. So I put it away for a couple years. Who cares? By 2022, I was bringing this guy stuff like this. It says, help me figure out and rank according to value prop, right? Exciting strategic moves for a manufacturer like yourself and I remember I showed him this list, predictive maintenance, supply chain ops, and the rest. And he goes, well, it's not as good as my best people could do,
17:but between you and me, it's better than the rest of them. I can do oh, that's
1:savage. But
15:two weeks ago I used the$200 a month chat, GBT, deep Research, frontier Reasoner mixture of experts model to revisit that deliverable as a 27 page cited sourced research report. And before I kicked off, it asked me questions like, tell me how you wanna measure value prop. Gimme a little more intel on scope. Tell me your preferred citation style. What. I'm sharing it there with you. If you guys wanna take a look, and again, as some of your fellow, fellow academics and students, everybody download that thing and take a look. I'm here to tell you that while that thing might not be world class peer reviewed gold standard stuff, I am here to tell you that Deloitte used to charge our clients a half million dollars for that kind of book report. And the question now is, can
1:we still, I like to
15:bring this more personally, more to home. Every year I get together for a lunch with our family's financial planner. His name's John Sani. Highly recommend him. Great guy. But what does John do? John sits us down. Buys the lobster lunch. And then he says, continue to invest in s and p 500 funds. Stay the course. AKA, it doesn't feel like much. Okay, well I'm preparing. I wanna have a higher effectiveness 30 minutes with this guy. So I'm getting my notes ready and I'm putting it all together and I keep writing it and I keep writing it. I keep writing and then it hits me. What if I put all of this stuff into an LLM? So I wrote a custom LLM, I named him John. I said, John, here's 20 pages of health wealth goals, ambitions, dreams, worries, concerns, da dah. And it comes back to me. It goes, you're doing pretty good guy. Right? High net worth individual and da. And all the rest. A minus. You go Minus, what are you talking about? Minus, he says, well, yeah, you know something, you know, college. Well, what do you mean? It says, well, we've done the math and you're like 180 grand short. And I said, I don't believe you. And it said, well, here's the Python code it. You're 180 grand short guy. And so I said, oh God, what? Can you soften the blow by turning this into a jaunty Irish limerick? To which the machine said there once was a savings plan. Fine. Your college costs climb like a Vine, Brady Bell and Young Ben, they'll need more by year 10. Adjust your plans. All should align. So esteem colleagues
13:better know how
15:and future, future captains of industry. I'm kidding. That's actually my LinkedIn. That'd be a, I was, again, Philadelphia, that I showed a bunch of government officials that they're like, we can't do that. I'm like, it's a joke. Shutterstock's. One of my clients, you guys know these guys, they like stock photography. Their CTO, Mike Ello told me a year ago. He goes, who in the hell's gonna pay$5 for a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge when you can conjure one up from the Genie lamp, the Gen ai? I go, yeah, you're in trouble. Three months later, he calls me, he goes, Eureka, we realize we're sitting on 20 years of the best stock photos in history. We trained up our own model. It's the fastest growing, highest margin business we've ever had. He said, and we're paying the photographers a monthly annuity, a stipend as a thank you for training our model. I said, clever and ethical, Eastman Chemical, Kingsport, Tennessee. One of my clients, he says.
17:He says, you ever been on a phone call and they tell you're being recorded for quality customer service?
15:I said, yeah. He says, lemme tell you, nobody listens to that crap. We've got 10 years of that stuff and we've never done anything with it until last March. So tell me more. They put a speech to text API next to the recordings, and then they put an LLM next to that. I said, why four? Check this out. We walk into their sales room, their B2B like boiler room. There's like a 26-year-old business development rep, right? Like a smile and dial kind of young professional. This guy's in his chair, he's talking to a customer. He says, Mr. Johnson, I'm grateful for your investment in our window tin products, and can I interest you in our mud flaps at half off? And I said, what just happened? He said, we call it Project Obiwan Kenobi. I said, tell me more. He says, for those who know the movie or have a passing familiarity, right, obiwan dies. He is a ghost, but he is over Luke Skywalker's shoulder telling him, turn off your targeting computer. Use the force Luke. They have the ghost of 10 years of sales. Pros, whispering to the young sales pros, what they might consider to say next. He said, is it working? He says, we've got 15% quarter over quarter lift. He said, do you think it has anything to do with it? He's I don't think it's hurting. A lot of my clients want this stuff, but per those two stories, the magic only works if you've got the data at the great business strategist, pink. you can't eat your pudding until you eat your meat. You can't do the fun stuff until you have your data in order. And what I'm finding is fully two thirds of my clients who think they wanna do top shelf ai, what they really wanna do is a big data cleaning, data governance, data integration project. I gotta imagine you track 10 Guys see this all time, right? gi, gimme the Ferrari. You need a minivan, right? The very bleeding edge on this team right now, the buzzword du jour is something called agents agentic ai. Here's all you need to know. I think of it as gen AI plus. I think of it as digital. Downton Abbey. Who here's ever seen the TV show Downton Abbey? If you haven't, that's fine. The idea is this is the staff they support. This guy in 1910 called Lord Gran Great. there's really not that much more to it than that. But when Lord Grantham goes into the city, he doesn't say, shine my shoes. Right? Go the car, make my lunch ham sandwich, no pickles, mayo, please. No. He says, I'm going to town. And the staff figures it out'cause they have jobs and they have roles and they can orchestrate and federate between and betwixt each other. That's what we're seeing with agents is it's the move from a single chat box that's smarter than all of the humans into dozens and then hundreds and then thousands of little chat boxes that know their job and that you know who to go to. That's really the very latest thing, right, in AI land, but kind of turning the corner towards, pardon me, towards what I think is a more important piece. This stuff can't all be automated because people matter more, not less. In this age of ai, who here seen this classic of American cinema? Tony Stark, genius, billionaire, Playboy, right? Depending on your value system, some of those are virtues. The only thing cooler than a genius billionaire Playboy, is a genius billionaire Playboy, who can fly and shoot laser beams out of his palms because he's got a super suit. But the super suit don't do nothing unless you got Tony Stark in it. And what we're seeing and what we're saying in market is like, Hey, y'all, stop fetishizing the tech and start celebrating the people. I'm gonna give you my best example of this. We're at our Deloitte University. It's our executive training learning development center in Westlake. I've got 10 CEOs in a room kinda like this. And imagine it's the five of you and it's five of you. And we're all talking about ai. It's two years ago, and I'm showing them an image diffusion model. I go, gang, this thing can paint any picture you want anything. You're literally limited by your imagination. And that's it. These dudes, you can tell, and they tragically, they were all dudes, like all of them. They were like central casting, like 55-year-old dudes. You could tell they hadn't had to imagine anything in their whole career. They're like, this one guy steps forward, he goes, paint me a sunset. We're all looking at him like, that's all you got folks. Behold the internet's least interesting. Generative sunset. His buddy looks at him. I'll never forget, Jim, he comes right up to him like they've known each other, right? For years. He goes, Jesus, Phil, did you ever hear it? Garbage in, garbage out. And the guy's like frustrated. And he is I don't see how this technology could help my business. His chief of staff, this woman, about 20 years, his junior, she walks into the circle, she cracks her freaking knuckles, right? She goes, can I try? She's by all means, I wanna see potato chips versus pretzels in a fight. And team. It was exactly like that in the circle. It was an awkward pause followed by like a joke grenade where they all start laughing. what? She goes, that's not the half of it. The potato chips get squirt guns, the pretzels get numb. Chucks whole flipping things on the planet Mars, these same grumpy dudes are now leaning in let's see it. I'd like to see that. And what they saw was this modern Michelangelo, right, this digital Donatello and they start, and I'll never forget it, my whole career, I'll never forget this. They start clapping and the guy Phil, who asked for the sunset says, I do believe this technology has the fu. He goes, I do believe this technology has the potential to change our business for the better. dude, you just said it didn't, here's the thing. They shouldn't be clapping for the tech, they should be clapping for this young woman who had the ingenuity and the moxie and the courage and the charm to conjure such a thing. and what we're seeing is that it's worse than garbage in garbage out. We're entering this moment of garbage in garbage squared. But on the flip side, it's garbage in our genius in genius squared. And to get a little pseudo researched, quasi academic with everybody, what we're seeing is that our future is and has always been about us to the exponent of the tech, not the other way around. Right? Consider fire, you mindfully use fire. You can cook your dinner, you maliciously use fire. You can burn your enemy's house down. You mindlessly use fire. It's oh my thumb. Now substitute fire for fission, right? You mindfully use fission. You can cook every dinner in town. You mindlessly use fission. You call that three mile island, right? You maliciously use fission. You call that ion. Now, jump forward one more, right? Generative ai, right? You create some indistinguishable for magic. Amazing. On the flip side, you could have mustache twisting villains, incinerating democracy with fleets of chatbots on social networks, which is kind of happening. Or you can just get what I call knucklehead at scale, that orange line, which is just like stupid breed, stupid squared, and so. I love my kids to pieces, but like when I see the, like Bennett on the couch with YouTube and I'm like, why does the next video come? He is I don't know. And that's the problem because you're just being fed like the signal to noise ratio is so abysmal, right? Seen, wrapping up. And then we're gonna, we're gonna have some space to talk if you'll have me. we don't live at the end of history. And so as wacky as that sounds, there's more coming. The furthest train stop we can see in Interaction Track is brain computer interfaces. And yes, Elon Musk has a company called Neuralink that's doing it, but so do another 37 Series B, series C series D startups. And what it's all about is reading your mind not in a creepy or well way. I mean, right now it's pretty dumb. Anybody ever watch this show on YouTube called Good Mythical Morning? It's pretty legit. Used to be. Anyway, my son Brady showed me this. These two guys are wearing FMRI hats, magnetic Resonance Imaging like an MRI tube. They're tiny, little cheap versions from this, from a towel. You buy this for 40 bucks and whoever thinks harder can bop their buddy in the face with that blue pink bong ball business case zero. There's no utility here at all. But that same exact tech allows these folks in France to tell this guy who's a paraplegic, think about how you used to walk, not gory sutures up and down his spine. Rather, a wizard hat for the brain that says, think about how you used to walk. And he goes. I have multiple sclerosis personally, and I know that my walking days might be numbered ish. And so when I see that tech, I think to myself, I've read plenty of Orwell and I'm excited about it because if you can do surgery from an expert in the US on a patient who needs it in Brazil, then game on. Right? Because why? Because we control the green versus the red curve on the computation front. The last stop on that train line that we can see is quantum computing. I love quantum computing'cause of the symmetry. It takes us back to PhDs in white lab coats in New Jersey, right? Except now it's 2046. And my hero, Richard Feinman, the Greek explainer, he said, listen. Quantum physicists barely understand quantum mechanics. Not much. I can tell you. He would always tell people that. Right. Well, that certainly doesn't leave a lot of room for me, so I choose to use a video. My family and I, we like to look at all the Christmas lights in Naperville, Illinois every Christmas. Anybody else drive around? like to look at other people's Christmas sites? Yeah, because I'm a big nerd. I wanted to optimize the route because this lady in Naperville makes the map. She's here it is, it's 36 houses. And so I put it into a, I write, I literally wrote a program and it said it was gonna take 16 months to complete. I go, what? So I go online and what's going on? He's yeah. This is called the traveling salesman problem. It's an NP hard computer science problem. Anything more than about 12 stops is logistically incalculable. So how about gimme eight houses? What? Keep that in mind while you look at this. Imagine those four screws are houses with Christmas lights. Those soap bubbles just know the shortest path between the screws. Not because they're mathematical savants, but because they're soap bubbles. Surface tension says, oh, you want the clearest path between four screws. Here it is. Turns out if you dip 15 screws in the water, it does the same thing. There are classes of problems that are better fits for physics than for mathematics. This is why quantum computers are gonna be a big deal, because it turns out every password in the world could be cracked, like that child's play with a quantum computer. But every cancer fighting drug in the world could be discovered like that with a quantum computer. Again, the good and the bad. Wrapping up. People ask me, they go with all of this hockey stick freak out. What are we gonna do right as students, I'm sure you guys are. Maybe, I would like to learn from you. Do you guys feel low key, fatigued by like the existential dread problem of like, where are the jobs, where is the value? is that a big thing or are you guys just working hard and you'll figure it out? That's a spirit. any dissenting opinions you feel like you got the tools you need to figure it out?
3:Well, there's serendipity too. Yeah, I didn't, I could not write, I was at a full stop, could not write my first Master's thesis until I met a guy sitting next to me in the theater, Philadelphia. He said, oh, I work at RCAI, I supervise all these guys who invented television. And I said, I don't have a prepared DO card, pure serendipity.
15:and Jim, what I love about that, and that's actually gonna be it. I got goosebumps when you said that because my talk at South by Southwest in a week and a half is all about how breadth is going to be the new depth and un unexpected collisions between unusable suspects, domains, and disciplines. That's the stuff the models can't beat us at.'cause they don't exist yet. Right. it's a license for novelty entrepreneurship, fresh perspective, polymaths. and what it's not is this. Briefly, I, this is just a silly joke, but I saw this online and the Buddha, what makes us human? To which the Buddha responds, selecting all the pictures that have traffic lights, right? Like sometimes it feels like that. Like, why am I having to apologize to you? Robot overlord, right? and so Jim, I think serendipity is a big piece of it. I think ingenuity is a big piece of it. like the potato chip, pretzel lady. it's the asking different questions and then approaching problem solving differently.
3:Did you ever know Neil Postman
15:don't? I
3:met him, he was at NYU Neil wrote a book in the 1970s called Amusing Ourselves to Death.
17:That's, that sounds like it. Yeah.
3:And I had, well, I had written about how color television got out of the LA and into the marketplace. Yeah. That was a very convoluted journey.
17:I gotta imagine.
3:But when I read Postman, he said, we've invested all this money and we invest all of this time. And the families, you know, Nielsen tell you, sit there and stare at it, and the outcome is what, you know, wound clown. So he said, really, we've invested all this in amusing ourselves to death. To death. This will get us nowhere. Right. We need to apply this curiosity somewhere else.
15:Problems worth solving me. Yes. Yeah. and, you know, That's a big focus in the VC community right now. it's coming up as a politicized thing about H one Bs and foreign born talent, but under it is exactly what you're saying, which is the percentage of our vast analytical prowess devoted to Travis Kelsey's over under on receptions is dubious. And there's people in Bangalore who are really excited to solve more interesting problems. So I'm with you. Ingenuity. Einstein was Einstein. I read a biography on him after Oppenheimer came out. It said Einstein's IQ was middle of the road compared to the other Manhattan Project people,
6:which is wild.
15:Could you imagine Einstein being like mid at anything? But what he had was that right? Like he was wired up cleverly, not classically. Two empathy. Who better to know people than people, right. There's a dystopian version of this where I have an LLM revise my script and I say, sorry, I'm goof entertaining myself to death. Yeah, read my thing. But there's something about this, and I don't say that for job security. I say that because I believe it. People wanna connect, people, wanna people we've talked to 50,000 of our clients in the overwhelming sense is that understanding human needs continues to be a human needs specialty. And then finally, initiative picking oneself up by one's bootstraps the Horatio ager bias towards action and self-starter, dumb. I asked an LLM, I said, Hey buddy, what is initiative? It said, self-starting behavior without needing to be prompted. And I was like, prompted. You say you guys totally need to be prompted, right? To which this thing comes back. It goes, yeah, I guess it's fair to say you're better at that thing than me.
3:General Eisenhower said, leadership is getting people to do what they know ought to be done without having to ask them.
15:Oh, man. and Jim, and the general theory on that is I think the jobs, and that's why I kind of awkwardly asked you guys about your employment prospects. If you can create new ways to help other people without having to be asked for Jim, you're gonna do better than, okay. You're gonna freaking lead the future. and I shared this with my mom. This was three months before she passed away in, in 23, year two. I know it, it's, I might, but she, we would go out for gelato. Every, every Sunday towards the end. and I said, mom, I've got this thesis that it's ingenuity and empathy and initiative and blah, blah, blah. and South side Irish, Chicago. She goes, why the hell do you gotta make it so complicated? I said, what do you mean? She says, I could have told you this in 1939. And I said, well, what do you mean? She says, you are just using puffy chested, four syllable synonyms for brain's heart courage. And it got me thinking, damn, listen to your mother people, right? Listen to your mother. Right? And it's right. it's intelligence, but of a sort. It's caring for others and it's the wherewithal to get off the couch to Jim's point and find problems worth solving. So, gang, thanks for hanging. as my son would say, and subscribe. that's my LinkedIn, but, you know, just both an invitation to serve as a resource and to share little bits of fun every day. But, here for the fun part, which it's always better to talk with and talk at. Okay, great. Yes, sir.
16:we had a debate in our, God in a good life course this week about AI robots taking care of, people in nursing homes. and is that a good thing or a bad thing or something we aspire to? I'm just interested in your thoughts about something. Talk about empathy. Yeah.
15:what, I'm not weaseling out, but I'm curious. did you have a, an immediate principled reaction or did you have to noodle on it before
16:you got to yours? For me, I had a personal one'cause my mother had a stroke and she was. Totally out of it for four months. And she was an award. Other people like her. Yeah. So if there was something kind of motoring around saying, hi, good morning. How are you today? And so great to see you. And then this whole idea, do they really hear you and understand you? That probably would've provided some comfort to her. But then, you know, the flip side was, well, that's all the wrong thing. And
1:yeah,
16:you see people in homes that are holding dolls or stuffed animals and so on. so we got into a pretty heated discussion about it. I was just interested where you see this going. So,
15:so my mind per personally, I live and die by tortured analogies, so bear with me. But, there's this meme or going around or an article where this woman had written into a, like a local newspaper, like Des Moines Register or something, and said, I want robots that help with laundry and dishes, not art and poetry. Right? and she said it more elegantly than that, but the idea was like, why are we giving the fun stuff away? help me with the muck. Here's why I bring that up. When I think about our higher order pursuits, one of the things that's freed from all this time, I think that the robot overlord dystopia is overblown. I don't think they're coming to get us, nor do I think it's gonna be George Jetson one hour workdays in a chair where you press a button. I, I think our human nature is we wanna spend a certain percent of our time doing things that we feel matter, but not too much, not too little. And so what I'd prefer to believe is that precious time with our elders and with people we care about would be the kind of thing we could spend more time doing. If the robots get busy with the laundry and the dishes and some of the rest of it.
3:Well, I put my father in a managed care, billings. They had automated carts that came up down the hall and he could get us a snack or something, but I gave him
1:our goldener.
3:She did more good than anybody on the employment of that house. She would stop in the morning, wait to be invited in. Goldens have this sense of empathy. They can read you in a way that I'm not sure AI can
1:Yeah.
3:Well yet. you know, there's some people in the administration in here I think could take lessons from our dog. But you know, it, it was interesting because I left the. And, you know, I did, I had to go and I said, well, you know, we'll clean this up later. So my dad had his apartment and I got a call from, Sharon McKenzie, who was the manager, and she said, you know, someone left an animal in your father's apartment. And I said, what? Like a raccoon, right? Yeah, but no, I think it's a dog. And I said, oh, that's Kelly. And so she said, well, you have to come get it. I said, I'm sure happy to do so. Thanks for the call. Click. So about two weeks later, another call, and I said, oh, I had a friend in Missoula might be able to come down and pick up the dog. Thanks. Really appreciate it. Click. So I just left it finally, two weeks later she said, the residents all said, no, we cannot take the dog away.
15:Oh, good.
3:So, you know, she did that on her own. And it's a remarkable achievement for a dog that was never trained, never purposely housebroken. Right. You know, she just taught herself and in many ways what she brings, the AI doesn't have. AI isn't even a thing. Right. Right. It's just a kind of a concept and an outcome. The dog is a thing. She'll get up in your laugh and she'll lick her ear and you know, that's pretty cool.
15:Authenticity is definitionally not artificial. Right? Yeah. And that, yeah. Ho hopefully more time spent on, on more human pursuits. Yes, sir.
20:Those picture, one thing I take away is that really in a profit driven organization, like the lawyer, you're actually turning your job over futurist into some prophecy. Not by invention, but by selecting the future that already exists and how big you pick the right ones from the wrong ones. Yeah. I'm surprised that you didn't mention I formed anything about externalities. You could think that, you know, climate, the risk of war, changing world order, it was even demographics, how they know about changing demographic, South Korea, all of these things have the potential to change our future in a manner as radical as they are. How do you bring that list?
15:Yeah. Thank you for the, for the thank you and for the righteous question. in choosing which path to go today, I went down, for lack of better words, the tech road. I agree with you that the future is multidimensional and our team actually works on, specifically six. So we have six of this, and I, and I don't say that as like a courtroom defense. Rather as a, acknowledgement that, there's a framework that we use and many do called pestle, political, economic, social tech. Okay. Legal, which includes regulatory, right. And then, environmental. And what we'll do typically with our clients is we look at everything that's trending on all six. And we used to get to this part where we were stuck, where you'd look at all of it and say, oh God, right? too many variables. I don't wanna sound cheeky or saccharine, artificial, but we are finding that these AI tools are useful to sort of divine probable first order, second order, third order outcomes of all those ingredients. So, so I'd be thrilled to, to, you know, follow up with any of you, but you especially sir. Afterwards and maybe share some of those early tools with you.'cause it's fun. Like you, you pour in some tariffs, add some xenophobia, and then click go. Not only will it make pithy sort of projections, but it can write some speculative fiction stories, even picture books that show you the white mirror and the black mirror. Thank you for the question. yes ma'am.
13:I'm Lily. I'm a sophomore here at Notre Dame. Thank you so much for being here. This was really awesome. Thanks. so I'm looking to go into real estate asset management and so what I've been looking at with the markets and like the indu or the sector, I've been most concerned with this office. as I'm sure everyone knows, the office sector has been doing really poorly since COVID the introduction of hybrid formats. And it's still not at those levels of pre COVID profits. And like obviously Jamie Diamond from JP Morgan just came out a few days ago. Very aggressive cursing people out. Yeah, that recording was wild. It was wild. Yeah. Mandating that JP Morgan workers are coming back five days in person and there's people, there's, I think there was like 2000 people who signed some petition that they didn't wanna go back and work. So I question, do you, obviously there are people like Ja, Jamie Diamond who were first saying that it hurts creativity, it hurts productivity, it hurts efficiency. You lose that ability to be surrounded by knowledge that you wouldn't be exposed to. And I completely agree with that. But then you have those 2000 people pushing against it. I question, do you think that humanity is strong enough to realize the negative impacts that technology are having on them when they only look towards that personal gain that they feel of, you know, having a hybrid format? Huh.
15:That's impressive question. I mean, that was like I know really, I mean there those, I was. Curious where you were going to take it, and I think it's very nuanced. check out a company called Atlassian. they're a software company from Australia. you know, these guys, your face, you did a pitch on them. Cool. Yeah. And what'd you think? You think they have it together? Yeah. They seem like a great soft fountain. They're super cool. They, there's a woman there named Annie Dean, who is their head of, workforce Workplace. And she, in my view, has the most principled arguments for when co-location matters. When it's nonsense, why? And for her, it all comes down to nature of work and flexibility. And so in my experience, Jamie Diamond is wound up because there's a certain boiler room, peer pressure, Glengarry Glen Ross thing. Check out the movie. Where, winning winners need to be feeling the presence of other, you know, arena gladiators to that's their thing, and it doesn't work with reflective coffee at a retreat, right? There's other kinds of work where it does. And so what I'm seeing in the real estate space is that individual workspaces, there's proportionally less office real estate, but that stuff that's there is being built for intentional acts of communion. not Roman Catholic communion, but like coming together, AKA let's go into the office every other Wednesday to have lunch, hang out, spend time and do a lunch and learn. But let's get back home because we get more of the usual work done there. That's what I'm seeing. yes sir. I think you were next in the queue.
14:Thank you. This has been exciting and illuminating.
15:Thank you.
14:You started your career working for a nonprofit. What have you brought to your current work based off of what you learned in your nonprofit?
15:Yeah. You know, thank you for that. I've never been asked that before and that's, I guess I've never been asked yours either, but that the heartstrings. Thank you. I think here's the biggest, I think that big business tends to be this race to the top, right? How do we take the 98th percentile telco provider and get'em squarely up to 99 and there's a certain algorithm. There around, spare no expense and pursuit of that incremental, marginal sort of gain. what I learned working with at risk Youth on the south side of Chicago for two years was that, it's a completely different playbook, taking the 20th percentile to the 51st, and it's a more fulfilling lift. I mean, I don't think that's a shocker. I don't think it's a shocker to say doing good feels good, but what I found was that you get more outcome.