Transcript for Futurist Amy Webb on What's Coming (and What's Here)

So welcome to broadcast. Thank you. This is very, very exciting. You know what? Let me tell you why because secretly I would love to time travel and I feel like I'm now in a way like doing that by appearing in two places at once.

Yeah, I love Pheneas and for it. That's a great show. It's great show.

Well, um, I have been called crazy before, but from you, I take that as a, it's a good compliment.

Who was a little Amy? So I typically tell people I'm from Chicago, but that's a total lie. I'm from Northwest, Indiana in a tiny sliver of Lake County. that was blue in a state full of red and my parents moved there because it was affordable. My dad's family were his parents were subsistence farmers and so there just wasn't a lot of money. My mom's family immigrated so education was strong on that side of the family but generally speaking everybody was sort of a first. So I grew up in very, very, very modest circumstances. My mom was a teacher. fourth grade teacher. My dad managed retail outlets, stores and things. He was brilliant and graduated from high school. I think when he was 15 and wow, probably could have gotten a full ride to a very prestigious college if that had been an option in his family. He had to go to work. So that's where I started and I think the thing with my parents who were very supportive of my sister and I was really like, put your head down and just work hard and hard work and education will get you through. So what were you like in high school? I was voted by the faculty. I went to a public school. There were 600 kids in my class. So it was enormous. I was voted most likely to succeed by the faculty. and voted most likely to be assassinated as president by my fellow students.

I can see it. I was on the speech and debate team. Yeah, I yeah, of course. Speech and debate was was basically my life. I also had the separate track, which was music, which I didn't want to do anything with professionally, but I enjoyed it night was good at it. That's how I got into college, but speech and debate was really my my life. What kind of music? So I started piano when I was four. Actually I started classical guitar when I was four or five. My dad's whole family is very musical. Then piano then I picked up clarinet and sixth grade and basically all woodwinds but double reeds in high school. I just was really good at it and I had a full ride to a very good music school and given my circumstances. did not matter that I wanted to go to Georgetown. My parents said, look, you're going to go where we can afford. And that means you're going to go study music. So I enrolled, I actually got into the graduate studio for clarinet.

As a friend. And on the side, started taking classes in game theory and economics, which is really what I wanted to study and try to make it all work. And it all came crashing down by the end of that year. I was miserable and Everything was horrible and I dropped out and then re-enrolled and put myself through school.

Well, I mean, you studied so much and no research so much about behaviors and thinking and how our brains work. And I think you're right. The things that I tend to be good at. all relate back to pattern recognition. And I kind of we were joking at the beginning about the craziness. I really had a hard time in school because teachers didn't know what to do with me. I was a kid who had interests in several different things. And I happened, you know, I was like good enough in several different things. And I remember I wasn't like disruptive in class, but there was some amount of like, hey, pick a thing. And I didn't want to pick a thing. I like doing a lot of different things because I saw the connections between them. And I think you're right, music, math, languages that type of thinking requires pattern recognition. The dark side of pattern recognition is that it can also cause a lot of mental distress because you start seeing things that maybe aren't as catastrophic as they really are.

Well, that could be a pretty lonely place to occupy though. And I mean, the end of my 40s now, when I was in middle school in high school, mental health was not a thing that anybody talked about. And so what I learned much later in life is that I have obsessive compulsive disorder that I've been managing for a long time. The same part of my brain that lights up and helps me see patterns and helps me make all those do all the stuff that I do is the same part of my brain that when I'm under Dores I tend to see like I'm very very good at seeing. absolute worst possible scenarios. I'm great on risk in forecasting. But when you're 14 years old and you're still developing, you don't have the tools to cope with that. So there were a couple of times that I remember the first time I got a D. I was a straight A student. I would I work an out study, everybody, but I got a D once and I had a breakdown. And I just remember being in the kind of counselor's office. She was just trying to help nobody knew what to do with me. She was trying to help. She brought my parents in for a conference, gave me a special light bulb and was like, this light bulb will somehow help you. And somebody in the room might have been like, hey, maybe this kids needs to see, need to see somebody because maybe this is something else. But we, you know, that that wasn't talked about, I guess, 30 years ago. And thankfully, it is now.

I would probably make you very good candidate for a strategic foresight, the field that I'm in, but it can be very, very challenging, especially if you don't understand why you're able to do those things.

Oh, there are very much, that's the old way of doing what's called horizon, which I guess, you already know this, but for people who don't, the sort of older version of strategic foresight, which is because this is the field that I occupy. it was called horizon scanning. So this is like looking at new stories, talking to people sort of scanning the stuff that's out there in a broad way and trying to extrapolate from that insights.

So I am a futurist, which is a term that I really, really dislike because it sounds like a silly made up job title and it to be fair. I get it, but also to be fair, like at some point, a accountant was a silly stupid, you know, made up sounding job title. For sure. My field is strategic foresight. So the purpose of strategic foresight is to use data and build models to look for patterns to see change and plausible outcomes. And most of my work is with The world's largest companies and governments, I do a little work in Hollywood. But for the most part, this is where do we play? How do we win? And is it going to take to be resilient? There are a lot of people who work in the space that say there is no way to predict the future. I have a quantitative background. Eventually, it's where I got to in college. I disagree with that. I think you can very much predict plausible futures. But that's really not the point of the work. The work is not to be prepared for everything. It is to be prepared for anything. And that's a tricky distinction for leaders to understand. So really what I do and what my organization does is you know work with companies to help them figure out where they make their billion dollar investment. AI is happening. What are they supposed to do? What's the strategy? What's the long-term play? So it's a lot of that. So we can get to tangible outcomes. But along the way, it is also helping leaders reframe their positioning and how they think about change and being comfortable sitting with ambiguity, which is a challenging thing for most people to do to sort of sit with uncertainty. Oh, yeah. And to be able to have a very clear vision of what their future should look like, but be agile in how they get there. So that's it. And there was a third question about CEO. What is, was the question like, what does it mean to be a CEO?

So we are. physically based in New York City. I'm the chief executive officer. We're tiny. We're tiny but mighty. There's only 20 of us and we really only do one thing. But we do this thing I think better than everybody else. And we also care deeply about helping others learn more about it because from our point of view, the more companies, the more governments, the more individual people that learn the core concepts of strategic foresight, the better it's going to be for everybody because it'll mean we all stop making stupid short-term decisions.

Without a squad, I guess I have a tiny squad.

It is a lot. I have been going to South by for I think 20 years. I have a wonderful relationship with South by Southwest and it's my it really is my favorite time of the year and I think over the years I have become part of what happens there and Yeah, a lot of people show up. I felt really bad this year. People waited. I think the lines started for hours early. So I think there were people there at 6 a.m. because I started at 10. Oh, yeah, there were.

Right, every year for many, many years, we launch our annual tech trends report, but it's really more than just specific tech trends or science, it's society, it's like basically the year ahead or the year.

Yeah. Do you see that? Absolutely. We work with enormous companies, big part of the Fortune 50 world leaders. And I mostly now is the CEO. I'm not doing hands-on client work, but I do work with a handful of CEOs every year directly. But we have this horizontal view into what's happening and to all organizations across different industries and you're absolutely right. I think there's this perception that everything is happening and changing quickly. AI is yesterday and we've somehow got to get caught up. And there's a general sense of anxiety, not just about technology, but we've got economic uncertainty. There's geopolitical instability for real for the first time in a while. And people are concerned rightfully so. And so leaders are sort of at this point making decisions based out of fear or phomo, which is the fear of missing out. And both of those cases are really, really bad. I guess you're one quick story with you. So I think you and I are both out there speaking quite a bit. I was at an event at the end of the summer in the Hamptons, which is not a place that I usually hang out. But I'm there. And there was an event that was happening where I was speaking after that. There was a party at a beautiful home and I get cornered by a venture capitalist who comes up to me and wants to talk to me about AI. And because he's a venture capitalist, he didn't have any actual questions about AI. He just wanted to tell me what he thought about AI. And his big deep thought was that AI is going to become more powerful than humans. We're going to become like slaves. You know, and he was like exuberant telling me this dystopian future. Yeah. Our overlords or AI systems, which I thought was incredibly bizarre. And then I get away from him. There's a CEO of a bank, large bank, who wants to also ask me questions about AI. But in his case, he was like, how quickly can we get AI working to eliminate staff? So basically, reduce head count. Fast, fast, fast, right? Oh, Jesus. To improve our bottom line. And the reason that I bring this up is because the conversations could not have been more surreal. The problem is that the situation is very real. So let me say this. Yes, we are dealing with heightened volatility on certainty, complexity and ambiguity. Those are collectively known as vuka forces. They're always present, but they are all heightened right now in a way that they haven't been before. So if you're feeling uncertain, that is a correct and normal feeling to have. It's also the most complex operational environment that I've seen for two decades. If you're, if you're an executive, if you're part of the sea staff, you got there because you're a great manager and now suddenly you're supposed to be an expert in blockchain or metaverse or this year it's AI, which is unfair. I mean, these are complex technologies. So what's needed is a longer term perspective and some sense of like, Things are not happening as fast as everybody thinks that they're happening. AI is a technology that has been in some form of development for a century. That's for real. It's a long horizon technology. I know that it feels like suddenly everything changed overnight and it didn't. What changed is your perception of what's been happening all along. But there's this collective realization that kind of all snowballed and happened at once when open AI introduced its chatbot. And that's really what set the ball in motion. So at Southby, I was trying to make everybody feel a little bit better that that collective anxiety, they're all feeling and that Renee, you're sensing when you're Having these fire side chats with CEOs, it is palpable, it is pervasive. I think it's normal and it's okay to have those feelings, but at some point we have to set the feelings aside and like get back to logic and reason.

No, and again, I think this, we have this sensation that novelty is the new normal. And so, wow, say that again. novelty is the new normal. Yeah. And that was true pre-COVID because we were in a different area of tech acceleration. And at that point, it was social media and video and moving to streaming and things like that. But especially post-COVID, it just feels like everything is new all the time. And so it does weigh on you pretty heavily, and it can lead to indecision, it can lead to entropy. So the way around that is, and you, unfortunately, you may not get this metaphor. Where you're at in Texas does, do you get ice and snow and probably not? No. Okay. I need to get it to me because I get it. Okay. Okay. So where I grew up, we had terrible wind, terrible cold. And when you learn how to drive, you have to learn how to drive on ice. I mean, I'm assuming you still have to, but you had to be able to prove that you could drive an ice when I was a kid. So what you learn how to do is to do the opposite of what it feels like you should do. So if you're driving along and you hit an icy patch, Everything in your body is telling you. slam on the break. And that is your instinct. And if you break down why what's happening is you're instinctively drawn to if A then B. If I slam my foot on the break right now, I will stop and this sensation of spinning out of control will cease. But physics, of course, tells us that that is not what you can do because when you slam your foot on the break, You don't stop the car. In order for that equation, if A then B to work out, you would somehow have to know the exact gradient of the road, the tread on your tires. You would have to know exactly how much ice there is. You would have to have a omniscient viewpoint on every single data point around you. So what you learn how to do is steer into the slide, which is another way of saying like embrace the uncertainty. So you whip your steering wheel into the direction that you're sliding and then as you start to move in a different direction, you whip it again. And basically, you are slowing down time and you are reducing uncertainty by making a ton of tiny decisions. while remaining as calm as you possibly can. That's what everybody needs to be doing right now, whether we're talking about artificial intelligence and Gen AI or the thing that's coming next, which is going to make everybody even more concerned and that's generative biology. And that also will impact every single industry sector, every business, every CEO, you have to learn how to steer into the slide because there is no if a than be or if this then that equation that works out. At this stage in human history, there are too many codependencies and too many variables that you're never going to have total control over.

But I think that's kind of what's happening. Again, my point of view on this is that there's a 50-car pile-up right now happening in business. I'm really concerned about the amount of capital flowing into AI, the amount of capital flowing into startups that have yet to prove out long-term profitability and commercialization potential. And the reason that I get worried is because we've already been through one AI winter, and that was between 1974 and 1980 when a bunch of AI pioneers made these huge promises, none of which were technically feasible, but the promise was so exciting. And they painted these really wonderful concrete images for people and everything collapsed. We can't afford a 50 car pile up where we are right now, not just with AI and technology, but just where we are generally speaking in terms of our politics and society and the decisions that we're making for the future, we've got to be willing to steer into the slide and to be comfortable with uncertainty.

So I can sort of zoom in and then zoom out on this. I'll zoom in first. I would love that. So I have a 13 year old and people are very surprised when they find out that she does not have a phone. And she's she's in a wonderful school founded by five feminists 100 and you'll appreciate this. She's in a school founded 175 years ago. by five women who were pissed off that they couldn't get into Hopkins because it was on all men's and so when they showed up trying to enroll they were told you can't come in because of our dress code and they were like cool cool cool so they went out they had men's suits made they show back up and then they had them arrested for indecency and they were like go fuck yourselves Am I allowed to say fuck on that? I would assume so.

So long story short, they wound up going out and getting advanced degrees in other countries that would have them. They got PhDs, came back, started in all women's school that they specifically designed to be significantly harder than Hopkins because their thought was By the time these women get out, they're going to have to put their heads down and out work and out thinking everybody else in order to make them home. So that's where my kid goes to school. today. And that's amazing. It is amazing. The other thing that's amazing is that she's in seventh grade and she's one of four kids right now that does not have a phone. And in this school that is full of high performing families at the beginning of the year, the advisory teacher asked the group, you know, what does everybody want to be when they grow up? My daughter came home that day and was telling me the story and she's like, half of the kids said TikTok influencer. She wants to be a lunar architect. She may change her mind a few times, but like she couldn't. And it's been a little bit of a challenge. We did get her a watch because we need to be able to find out when to pick her up from school, but she doesn't feel like she's missing out. by not knowing the latest TikTok dance, not knowing the latest, whatever. We've also shielded her. So there's no pictures of her online. She's a very unique person because everybody else has submitted pictures of their kids. It's a tricky thing to talk about. Everybody makes different choices for different reasons. But I think that there is probably a lot of people out there now wishing that their parents hadn't spent the first 15 years at their lives posting pictures of them. Because there's no way to take that back. And going forward, again, I think we're moving into a place where better choices can and should have been made at the dawn of AI. AI requires data. And everybody's been pretty loosey goosey about what data they submit. And it's going to be hard to roll all that back now. So I don't have a rosy outlook. Got it. So things can be bleak, but also things can be pretty great. So if we zoom out the thing that I talked at South by about one of the themes of the report and just our ton of the research that we've been doing shows that we've entered a technology super cycle. So old school economics, super cycles are these events that can last a few years or decade. And it's an era of unprecedented productivity and usually economic development. And usually there's good outcomes on the other end, although it does require a transformation. And typically that gets started by some type of big innovation or development. So the steam engine results in the industrial revolution, right? That's the catalyst, then that's the super cycle. What's happening right now is that there's not just one technology, there's three. So there's artificial intelligence. They're all of these different wearable devices that are coming, and then there's biotechnology. They don't seem to be related, but they are. And each one of them plays off of the other, which means that we've entered this technology super cycle. So the good part of this, and there's good and bad to that, but the good part is, I think there's a lot of kids out there who probably have varied interests or who have been told they have to focus just on one thing and that's it. I think we're entering this era of varied interests is a good thing. And if you're somebody who's interested in biology and robotics, you are going to have a bright career ahead of you because there's going to be a ton of opportunity. and lots of new types of jobs and lots of new types of work. So there's risk as well, but the positive note is that it's going to be a cool time to enter the workforce because there's going to be a lot of new types of jobs out there that we haven't had before.

Is that true? That's true. And I wear a garment watch because I'm a competitive cyclist and I need the data. So I think the trade off here is being smart and savvy about how you're sharing and what you're cloaking. So having some amount of data literacy is good for teenagers and families. Yes. But businesses need data literacy, too. It's amazing how many leaders we work with who are just not aware of what data their company are creating or whatever else. I know this all feels confusing and challenging. I wrote a book in 2019 called The Big Nine and it's all about what I thought at that point was going to be the future of AI and it turns out most of what's in there turned out to be true for good and for bad. But the second chapter of that book is a quick and dirty history of AI and why it matters. So if you're somebody who's like, I wish I could do the thing like Hannah Reeves and the Matrix were like, I know you did suit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you give yourself, it's a dense chapter, but that chapter is, it's actually a book about the future, but that chapter won that book several history awards. So if you just read that, it like, Hannah Reeves, you will know you did suit, but for AI.

health. So you want to hear a really funny story? I do always. I mean, you may not think it's funny. I, it's not like funny ha ha. It's like funny. Seriously. So the term artificial intelligence was first coined in 1956. And that's when some academics got together at Dartmouth University for two months. So guy named Marvin Minsky, another guy named John McCarthy, we're getting, they were like, You know, everybody that they had been talking to had been teetering around these ideas about machines that could think, Alan Turring had written a couple of very influential papers. They were like, let's get everybody together for two months and just they made this list. this list of all the best and brightest that they could imagine. So in addition to tech people, they kind of the same thing. Let's get an anthropologist. Let's get a linguist. Let's get a psychologist. Let's get all these amazing people together. And so for two months, they gathered, coined the term artificial intelligence, and for the first time described This future in which machines might think just like humans do. Now, what's interesting about this group of people, Renee, is that as they made this exhaustive list, everybody that they could imagine, the smartest people around, ask me how many women there were. I don't want to. There was one. It was Minsky's wife. Her job was to come and walk the dog and generally take care of men as not yet. So there were no women. There were no people of color. And I bring that up because you would think that whatever 2024 minus 1956, we've been at this for a long time. You would think that things would be different today. In the room, I'm still one of the only women, if not the only woman in the room when conversations about the future of AI are happening. So again, I think that there is this new interest, I think that people are aware and they're willing to talk about this more. But when it comes down to it, Ambition isn't the same thing as action. Ambition has to translate to action and action requires courage and sometimes making decisions and doing things that are politically unsavory inside of organizations.

Yeah. I think that's great. I think it's a good point. Become covered. You don't have to be an expert. No. You have to be conversant, which means you have to have like a minimum amount of knowledge and then feel comfortable enough to be able to talk about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Yeah, I mean, that is not how I set it, but you're not off. So each one of those examples is the other GPT, GPT outside of AI stands for general purpose technology. And that's the type of technology that has, again, has the ability to totally transform how we live and work. So you're right, steam engine, electricity, internet, all of those are general purpose technologies. And what's happening right now is they're converging. So again, not a terrible thing, but it will increase this sort of complex operating environment for leaders. And so to your point earlier, we cannot afford ostriches with their heads in the ground, you know, or gamblers or scrambleers. This is not a good time for that. We need leaders who are expansive thinkers, who are open-minded, who will allow their cherished beliefs to be challenged and who are comfortable leading through uncertainty.

So there's AI. There's the sort of connected ecosystem of things. So generally speaking, that means wearable devices. So you're or a ring, sure, smartwatches. Pretty soon face computers. So that's what I would call Apple's vision pro. You know, these things that are coming to market meta has some stuff. They're wearable face computers much more than they are smart glasses. So it's all that stuff, but it's also connected cars. I sleep in an AI powered bed. That's true. There's factory warehouses that are full of sensors. So it's all of these physical devices that are collecting enormous amounts of data for good purposes to help us do whatever. So that's a second set. And then the third set is biotechnology.

Yeah, I would say that's kind of true writ large. So beyond playing with it and asking it to write a high coup in the style of mobier something. Moby probably writes her coups anyways, so it's probably wasn't a good example. I bet, Moby does. Yeah, that's so good. But yeah, it's a tool. It's a tool just like Microsoft Excel is a tool and most people don't know this, but Excel has more than 500 functions. I think fewer than 10, probably get used with any regularity by the vast majority of people. So either that means Microsoft significantly over-engineered this software product, which there's some of that, or you just have to know how to use the tool in order to exploit the tool. So chatGPT and Cloud and perplexity, and there's like Gemini, they're all tools. And they themselves are not All of AI is this umbrella term that encompasses many different technologies. But you have to know how to write a prompt, which is basically a little request in a window in order to make the best use of it. And people are learning how to do that. I've also seen some companies listing jobs for prompt engineers that would make you rethink your own education because the prompt engineers are like 200 grand a year. or more.

So right now, you have to know what to ask in order to get something out in return. That's not nonsensical. What we are evolving toward is, and there's a lot of technical reasons for this that I won't bog the conversation down with. But what's coming next is requiring fewer specific prompts in order to get great results on the other end, which means you can start with a concept. You can start with a concept, brainstorm along an AI. And at the end of it, get a concrete answer or a concrete framework or design or whatever it is that you might need, which is a huge difference from where we are today.

So yes, and that's good and bad.

Well, here's what's good about it. It's hard to shut my brain off. It's not hard. I like I understand how to do it. I just choose not to because I keep thinking new things and I I was talking to some bankers. I promise you I spend time with other people than bankers and feasts. Not that there's anything wrong with bankers. But I don't know, I was starting to get worried that I'm hearing people talk about something that sounds a whole lot like a credit to fault swap. And that's making me give me the PBGBs, but the housing market could collapse again because everybody's trying to make a quick buck. So I was like, okay, isn't there some other way to get investors money fast on something that feels like you're distributing risk? Like what could be an alternative? So I actually started with this general concept and I was thinking through different pulls of something that has value, like what's a pool of a thing that has value? And I wound up with genomes. And so I'm like, okay, genomes, if you have a whole bunch of people's genomes, that's actually very valuable as is the individual genome, because There's a lot of customers for that, pharmaceuticals, company would want that, university would want that, a beauty company might want that so they could test things out and develop new things and whatever. And I start going through all these different permutations and what I come up with is a genome back security. I have a whole plan for that. I know how it would work. I have yet to sell any bank on it. It's a crazy idea. I just more think it's awesome and I want somebody to do it. I don't think I personally would make money on it at any rate. It's viable, it's plausible, and I never would have been able to come up with that on my own, because I needed somebody, I needed something to stretch me. And usually that's my husband who is not a futurist, he's an eye doctor, but he's really great at asking crazy questions. And so sometimes he'll just keep digging and digging and digging and it just keeps getting my brain to open more and more. You know, he's seeing patients at two o'clock in the afternoon and sometimes that's when I want to have this discussion. So AI can be super beneficial for that and starting with this concept get to a concrete framework on the other end. The flip side, which is the bad part of this, is that I guess technically you could use the same process to invent new bioweapons or new ways to cause a political collapse. The other thing I just found out, and I'm sure you're vigilant for this also. So somebody has made a GPT out of me, and I didn't give my consent. And right now, it's in Italian. There's a couple of others in English. I don't love the fact that I'm dispensing advice because they took all of this I've written for books. I've written all these articles for Harvard Business Review. So there's quite a bit out there. Lots of speeches. You know, I don't have the ability to control that. And it's not just about commercialization. I don't want somebody to think that the AI version of me is dispensing. bad advice or it was a bad AI thought partner.

Yeah. Oh, I haven't said that's that sucks.

Yeah, one of the databases that trained GPT for is a database of, I think, 140,000 books, something like that that have ever been written ever. All of my books are in it. All of your books are in it. Yeah. There's millions of books published years. So it's a select few relatively speaking. But nobody asked, I'm assuming nobody was like, hey, Bride, is it cool with you if we train AI on how you think?

Sure. I feel like people listen to you because they want to feel good about that. They want to feel confident about the future. feel like I can't give them that right now. Can you give me an accountability chain? I cannot. There is no accountability chain right now and there hasn't been and there continues not to be not in this country, not in any country.

So to be fair, Europe has recently passed a sweeping set of regulations and policies. that have yet to go into enforcement and when they if and how and when they do Europe is a collection of different countries. AI isn't geographically bound. So I'm not entirely sure what this is going to look like. I think they have the best intentions, but ultimately regulation is a look backwards. It's a reaction to something that's already happened. My feeling on this is very controversial, but I don't think regulation works for AI. I don't think the way that most governments deal with trying to guide or control technology and science works when it comes to AI. because AI is new, new ish and the way that we use artificial intelligence is not the way that people thought we would. So I think we need a totally different plan. And that is to incentivize companies to make better choices. And I think the way we do that is to make it so that they can make enormous sums of money. So this is the part that rubbs people the wrong way. But if it's regulation, then that's a punitive response and in almost every country, the legal system is going to take over and they're going to try and fight it. Like the check companies will sue, right? Or they will not sue or they'll fight it through policy. everything will wind up in litigation. But nothing will be effective.

Yes, that's right. Because this is about speed. It's about getting to market as fast as possible. And we're talking about AI, and I think most people are translating that to like chatGPT, but all of these AI systems that most of you are familiar with, connect to the cloud that they require specialized hardware systems that most companies don't have sitting in a back office somewhere, which means that they're all tethering themselves to AWS and Azure and Google. I'm not saying any of this is inherently bad. I'm just saying that our current system incentivizes the wrong choices. So if we want to incentivize the right choices, then we have to just acknowledge where we're at and the thing that will make people make different decisions is by making it so they earn more revenue.

It's not popular, but I think if we create a pathway to have companies make boatloads of money in a way that doesn't have negative consequences on the other end, like a potential market crash. And the only way to do that is through transparency, and making that black box transparent, and all of making the data traceable protecting IP while making the decision making process open, revealing what got used to train the AI through audit trails. There are lots and lots and lots of things that can be done. that will protect competition, but will incentivize everybody to make smarter decisions. I believe that is the only way forward. And for me to say that, given what I do for a living, that's a pretty strong statement. Normally there's several paths forward, but I really think this is the one.

I'm just saying that there just isn't one structurally.

I think given what I'm seeing, what I have been seeing and what I'm starting to see happening more right now is that with all of this disruption and change happening so fast, there's this sense that there's no use thinking about the future in any concrete way. I'm not bullshitting when I say, I think 50 years from now, possibly less. People are going to look back at us and everybody alive today has the group of people that live through the great transition. Gen T. Gen T. I write everybody talks about Gen Z and Gen Alpha and we are collectively Gen T and to me that's more important. It's us, and I don't know how long this transition is going to last, but in a way, this is mind-bending and exciting, but it also means everybody alive today is going to go through an unprecedented amount of change faster than we are probably capable of managing. So now the reaction is going to be to think very short-term and to not be a futurist, but to be a now-wist, to make decisions that feel comfortable right now. That is going to turn out to be a mistake. So the trick is, I guess, to be like Connemen and engage both sides of the mind. Think fast and slow. Yes. But you got to do both at the same time, so you have to be willing to think through the next order impacts of your decisions and what things might look like even when those things are scary and also tie that future back to today. Every company right now is shortening their planning cycles to the two extremes. This is the absolute worst time to be doing that. So you have to be willing to do three or long-term, five-year corporate planning cycles. You have to do long-term scenarios. You have to do that visioning work. And you have to recalibrate it as the super cycle spins up, or I can assure you you will get left behind. So if I can encourage everybody to do one thing, it's to just recognize and acknowledge this is the situation that we are all in together. And everybody is every leader, every HR department, every C staff, every company, every individual. So we're all in the same boat. It is not an excuse not to do long-term planning and there's a lot of resources out there to do that. I've got books that explain it. You've got books to help people think about it, but but you got to do it. You can't put it off anymore.

I'm all she faceted.

Vulnerability is authenticity.

Oh, I've got so many thoughts. And I think I originally got this from Julie Sweet, who's the CEO of Accenture when we were talking, year ago, half a year ago. There are companies that have a learn it all culture and companies that have a know it all culture. And the know it all cultures tend to be the ones that have, you know, they, they always recognize it, but they're always problematic. And the learn it all cultures, it's harder to get that going, but once you're there and it takes very courageous leadership, I want your in a learn it all culture, everything changes and you sort of become more resilient.

Yeah, I mean, the sort of leading by example thing, I value hard work. productive, not like working for the sake of working. I just, I really value hard, good work. And I am willing to do it. I'm the chief executive of my company now. I guess I don't have to do that in certain ways. But we have a very strong company culture. And I think that is partially, I would hope, because I lead by example. And my example is like, let's get down to work. But I don't know. Maybe you talked to my staff and they. I would assume I would hope that that's the case. I think that's I. I love that.

that nothing is ever going to go as fast as I want it to go. I'm constantly frustrated that everything is going more slowly than I want it to. But again, like these were going to things take time when you've got a lot of people involved and we all have a lot of people involved in everything. But I'm just I'm really impatient and that can be a good thing because it means my drive will keep that engine moving forward, but it can also lead to sometimes bad decisions as we all know.

I was gonna say the same thing. I think that's right. In my world without a sense of urgency, no action gets taken on the future. It's hard to feel a sense of urgency about the future, right? And it's very, you deal with leaders who either get it and they can either cultivate that in their staff or they can't, but at least they understand from a fundamental level why that's important or they don't. Yeah.

Last TV show you binge didn't love. I watch as much TV as humanly possible. So I would say bodies. I thought bodies was amazing to sci-fi series on. I honestly don't remember which streaming channel it was at this point, but it was about a series of crimes that were interconnected involves time travel. It was cool story.

Well, I was like, do I say bodies or do I say Vanderpump rules? Which I also very much watch religiously. Favorite movie of all time. Dr. Strangeliff. Uh, Fred. It's great. I actually have an annual viewing. I watch it once a year. Okay. A concert you'll never forget. So the concert that I will never forget is George Michael on his, the last tour. And it was amazing. It was the one with the giant colorful stage. He was incredible. And I think most people who know me know that I mostly listen to metal, sound garden and stuff like that. But my first and true love is George Michael.

A family dinner. We didn't do it before COVID and COVID happened. Nobody was traveling and we started having family dinner every night and it is the thing that I look forward to every day. One of us cooks and even if we don't cook, we get food somewhere, but the three of us sit, no devices. We just talk to each other about what happened or more often than not like what's happening in the world and it's awesome.

I mean, it's kind of a big thing that I'm grateful for my health and my mental health and the fact that I have choices. And I have agency. And I have a strong will. And I've got people around me who are supportive. I just feel so lucky for all of that. Some of that's cultivated, but I think it's also just, I'm just grateful. Great for all of that.

Thank you. And thank you for all the work and then that you do in all of your conversations. We all learn from you every day. So that's what it's all about, right? Yeah.

That's right.

Thank you. All right, what a job thank you.