Humanity-Centric Innovation: Where Purpose, Business and Technology Intersect - Pete Dulcamara, Author of High-Tech Heroes

Exponential technologies, humanity-centric innovation, ethics in AI, passion and purpose, and the intersection of business and technology all point to one urgent question: How do we prepare the next generation to build solutions that are both economically viable and good for humanity?

This is a question we explore with Pete Dulcamara - scientist, former VP of Research at Kimberly-Clark and author of High-Tech Heroes.

We may be entering a new renaissance of innovation, driven by the convergence of human need, business model disruption and fast-moving technology. Global companies are rethinking how products create real human value, exponential technologies are advancing faster than institutions can adapt, and a new generation is entering the workforce with different expectations for purpose, impact and responsibility.

For Dulcamara, the opportunity is not technology for technology’s sake. AI, robotics, biotechnology, autonomous systems and additive manufacturing could help solve some of the world’s hardest problems, but only if they are paired with ethical judgment and economic viability. That's where education has to adapt. Students must learn exponential technologies and also how to apply their skills to these humanity-centric questions.

In this episode:

• Redefining "billionaire" and how you can become one
• The difference between consumer-centric, business-centric and humanity-centric innovation
• What we mean by “data is the new oil, AI is the new electricity, and robotics is the new steel”
• Moving technical education from STEM to “STEM to the power of E”
• EQ, AQ and the skills the next generation may need more than IQ in the age of AI

3 Big Takeaways from this Episode:

1. Humanity-centric innovation requires purpose and profit to work together.
Pete Dulcamara defines humanity-centric innovation as solving major human problems through viable business models and exponential technologies. The point is not charity, but scalable solutions that create competitive advantage while improving people’s lives.

2. The next era of technology will be built on data, AI and robotics.
Dulcamara compares data to the new oil, AI to the new electricity and robotics to the new steel. As these technologies converge, companies and schools will need to prepare people for a world where intelligent systems reshape products, industries and work itself.

3. Technical education has to teach more than technical skill.
As AI makes answers easier to access, students will need stronger curiosity, ethical judgment and adaptability. Dulcamara argues that STEM should be raised to the “power of E,” with ethics embedded into how students learn, build and apply technology.

Resources in this Episode:

Get Pete's book High-Tech Heroes: Why Gen Z is our Last and Best Chance to Save the Planet

Tons of other books, podcasts and shows mentioned in this episode can be found on the show notes page: https://techedpodcast.com/dulcamara/

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Transcript

TechEd Podcast Introduction: 0:09

This is the TechEd Podcast, where we feature leaders who are shaping, innovating, and disrupting technical education and the workforce. These are the stories of organizations leading the charge to change education to rethink the workforce and to embrace emerging technology. You'll find us here every Tuesday on our mission to secure the American dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. And now here's your host, Matt Kirchner.

Matt Kirchner: 0:38

Welcome into the TechEd Podcast. I am your host Matt Kirchner. We are here in the studio where we do the great work of securing the American dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent here on what has become the number one podcast in all of STEM and technical education. Because we're so focused on that next generation of the workforce, we talk a lot on this podcast about how this next generation is a little bit different than generations before. It's certainly my generation, different, maybe values in terms of what they want to get out of work, why they do the work that we do, or that they do. They talk about purpose, and we hear a lot that this generation, whether it's the alpha generation, whether it's Gen Z, they want this purpose in the work that they are doing, but what does that really mean, and is purpose enough? And is it enough for businesses and organizations that have their own missions and their own goals as they try to get ahead? Is it enough just to have purpose, especially in this age of advancing and emerging technologies. We have a terrific guest this week to talk with us about exactly those topics, and what does it mean when we talk about purpose? What does it mean when we talk about the future of the American workforce? His name is Pete Dalka Mera, and he is a former researcher, a former senior executive at Kimberly Clark. A lot of us know that from the consumer goods. He spent time at Dow Chemical, as well. He wrote a book called High Tech Heroes, and we're looking forward to learning about that book as well. So, Pete, so awesome to have you with us on the TechEd Podcast.

Pete Dulcamara: 2:08

Thank you so much, Matt. Real pleasure to be here, and I really look forward to it. And I love your mission, and it's very consistent with what I'm trying to do as well.

Matt Kirchner: 2:16

Awesome, I love the work you're doing. I love the energy that you put into it. So, let's start with this. You know, Kimberly Clark, if people don't know the company, they definitely know the products, and feel free to mention some of those. We got was, we talked through this. I spent a good part of your career at Dow Chemical. Certainly, lots of people know that organization as well. All of these are products that are used by millions and millions of people. Talk to us about your career, and not just your career, but what you learned along the way about creating products, researching products, developing products for real world impact.

Pete Dulcamara: 2:47

Yeah, no, happy to. Yeah, so yeah, I was I was with the Dow Chemical for 18 years in research and development, new business development, sustainable development, and then with Kimberly Clark for 17 years. And what's interesting about Kimberly Clark,

Matt Kirchner: 3:00

yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 3:01

in the next 24 hours, more than 2 billion people will use a Kimberly Clark product.

Matt Kirchner: 3:07

Yeah, on the planet now, seven or 8 billion,

Pete Dulcamara: 3:10

quarter, quarter of the world's population uses a Kimberly Clark product. Wow, and you know, when I first got there, you know, I always thought, you know, Kimberly Clark always talks about their core competencies being the intersection of non-wovens, super absorbents, and fiber, but what was really interesting working at Kimberly Clark. What I found was their real core competency was the ability to make a product that was socially taboo, that gave people control of their life, you know. So, so think of it this way, when, when a 1213, year old girl enters puberty, she's lost control of her life,

Matt Kirchner: 3:45

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 3:45

When parents come home with a baby for the first time, they've lost control

Matt Kirchner: 3:48

of their life. Tell that for sure.

Pete Dulcamara: 3:50

Somebody has incontinence and they sneeze at a party, they've lost control of their life.

Matt Kirchner: 3:54

Interesting.

Pete Dulcamara: 3:55

And every single time Kimberly Clark was there with this product, yeah, it uses non-woven super absorbance and fiber, but really, what it did was gave people control of their life in an area that's socially taboo or has some type of stigma associated with it.

Matt Kirchner: 4:10

Did you come up with that on your own, or is that kind of submission,

Pete Dulcamara: 4:13

or is that just my thinking? You know, if you ask somebody at KC, what is our core competency, right? It's, you know, fiber, super absorbent, it's that kind of stuff, maybe even marketing, but it's so much more than that, and that's so important to understand what a company's true core competencies are, and that's really what I learned in research and development was this idea of empathetic understanding, not only of your customer, but of your colleagues, and really everybody you come in contact with, is to really understand what is their true need that they're trying to solve. Everybody has a problem,

Matt Kirchner: 4:49

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 4:50

And so, if you can provide a solution to that problem, and then where research and development comes in is they research really provides what I'll call a reason to believe. That the solution is actually going to work

Matt Kirchner: 5:02

right,

Pete Dulcamara: 5:02

and for the business it's, it's a reason to believe at a price I can afford.

Matt Kirchner: 5:08

Okay,

Pete Dulcamara: 5:09

you know, and so that was the biggest insight for me,

Matt Kirchner: 5:12

right.

Pete Dulcamara: 5:12

And I used to tell researchers all this time, don't go into the laboratory to understand three things: what's the consumer insight, what's the brand promise, and what's the claim going to be on the side of the box at the end of the day, right? And if you can't tell me those three things, you really don't have a project.

Matt Kirchner: 5:28

Yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 5:29

and so it was really this idea of becoming much more business centric in my thinking, much more consumer centric, sure, rather than technology centric.

Matt Kirchner: 5:38

You know, I remember sitting in a meeting with a board chair of a company that I was helping to run, there were several of us, I guess two or three of us in the leadership team that were leading a company in the RFID and technology space, and this goes all the way back to the early part of the mid 1990s early to mid 1990s so it goes back quite a ways, and our board chair was a guy named Bayla Marotti, Bayla passed away just a couple of short years ago, well into his 90s, in fact, I think closing in on 100 had a really long productive life, but we sat down in a meeting, and this was a company that built RFID security systems, or our radio frequency security systems, for the healthcare market, and he asked us what we did as a company, and you know, what were we selling is his question, and you know, a couple of us said, well, we sell radio frequency identification security systems, and and it was really the products we were selling were preventing babies from being abducted from hospitals and Alzheimer's patients or dementia people suffering from dementia from wandering out of a long-term care facility, and so going through this, we all described the product, right, and he helped us understand that we're not really selling that hardware or that software. What we're selling is peace of mind, and we're selling, you know, the safety of people's, of people's lives, which is totally, totally different, taking it in the same way that you did, from selling paper products or being a marketing company to saying this is how we fundamentally impact the lives of the people that we're serving, and I think whether you're in research and development, marketing, operations, senior leadership, whatever, understanding how whatever organization you're involved in changes people's lives, certainly, certainly important, and I would say that, you know, looking back at that period in my life had a certain criteria, if you will, of what I meant by success, and what I viewed as a success in my career. You know, here I am now, you know, some 3040 years later, whatever it is, 30, you know, 30 years later, that definition is way, way different for me than it was back then, and I'd be curious on that, just reflecting on that definition of success. What was it for you? What is it? What should it be? And has that evolved over the course of your career?

Pete Dulcamara: 7:47

Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, you know that I believe there's these 4s curves in life, and I'll only talk to talk about two, maybe we can go into the other, the other two if you want, but you know, it seems like the first S curve is what I call struggle to success.

Matt Kirchner: 8:02

Okay,

Pete Dulcamara: 8:02

and doesn't matter what you start in life, starting a podcast, starting algebra, becoming a dad, whatever it might be. I

Matt Kirchner: 8:07

was better at some of those than others. I'll tell you, I'll let you guess which

Pete Dulcamara: 8:11

one. But you know, you struggle at first, but with some persistence, you finally hit an inflection point. With a little bit of effort, you become successful. Sure, but what I found, and so early in my career, success was climbing the ladder, titles, more responsibility. I remember thinking to myself, when somebody sees this, I'm just gonna knock their socks off. It was all about trying to impress other people with about how smart I was, how competent I was, how capable I was. That's what drove me, and that's that first S curve, which is struggle to success, which is all about, in my opinion, adding value to yourself. The second S curve is service over self to gain greater significance in life.

Matt Kirchner: 8:54

Got it?

Pete Dulcamara: 8:55

And that's really the transition that I've gone on through my career, and where it all started was in 1997 My wife became pregnant for our first child,

Unknown: 9:04

Rachel,

Pete Dulcamara: 9:06

and that Christmas I remember sitting there asking myself, what had I accomplished in life, what did I want to accomplish in life, and what I want my legacy to be.

Matt Kirchner: 9:14

Sure,

Pete Dulcamara: 9:14

and I developed this personal mission statement, which is to help raise children that live a life fulfilled,

Matt Kirchner: 9:19

awesome,

Pete Dulcamara: 9:19

and help create businesses that improve people's lives, and that's been my north star since 1997 It's the reason I left Dow to come to Kimberly Clark. It's the reason I left management to become chief scientist for the company. Sure, it's the reason I left Kimberly Clark to start my own business and write my book,

Matt Kirchner: 9:36

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 9:36

Was this idea of how do I help others create businesses that improve people's lives, and so for me success used to be about waking up in the morning asking myself, How do I make Pete Dal Camara as successful as possible? But as my career went on, and as I've aged, and you know, in life, it really, it's really about waking up in the morning asking. Myself, how can I make Matt Kirchner as successful as possible? How can I make every single person that I interact with as sucks as successful as possible? And I really do believe by doing that I'll gain greater significance in life, no question. That's that's really what I'm looking for, significance over success.

Matt Kirchner: 10:17

Love that. What are the other 2s's Just while we're at it, you don't have to take,

Pete Dulcamara: 10:20

yeah, the other 2s curves. The next S curve is what I call surrender to salvation. It's about surrendering your ego, it's about surrendering yourself, and not only gain your salvation, but the salvation for others.

Matt Kirchner: 10:30

Is that in the book, by the way? It is

Pete Dulcamara: 10:32

in the book. Okay. And then the fourth S curve is what I call sacrifice to sanctification. I've got, without getting too religious, my real belief is that God's will for us is our sanctification to become saint-like, and so the fourth S curve is to sacrifice yourself to gain sanctification.

Matt Kirchner: 10:50

Awesome,

Pete Dulcamara: 10:51

in achieving God's will. So those are the

four 4s curves: 10:52

struggle to success, service to significance, surrender to salvation, and finally sacrifice to sanctification,

Matt Kirchner: 11:02

awesome, and we wander in the spiritual average every once in a while here on the TechEd podcast. So I know not you're certainly comfortable talking about that, and so am I. So don't, don't feel like we can't, can't explore that as well. So I appreciate you bringing up those, those second too, because it's a really key part of who we are as human beings, right? And probably the most key part of who we are as human beings, and then one

Pete Dulcamara: 11:21

last thing on those S curves is, is those S curves are on a the axes, the y axis, if you will, is really what I call purpose or fulfillment, but really it's a purpose, and then the X curve isn't effort or time, it's passion, so it's about finding your purpose and passion, and then each S curve is a persistence curve. So I think that combination of purpose, passion, and persistence is what moves us along through life, from success to significance to hopefully salvation and sanctification.

Matt Kirchner: 11:57

Awesome, and you'll find all that in High Tech Heroes, and we'll link it up and make sure people know how to get a hold of the book, when after they're done listening to the podcast, we'll put that in the show notes. So, so appreciate you sharing all that. Really, really fascinating view of kind of how we look at the world. We started out kind of how we look at a at a company or an organization, and how it helps its its customers, how it changes lives. Talk about people and how they change lives. I know you have this whole idea along that, along that same path of human humanity centric, is that right? Is this humanity centric innovation in that differentiates itself from customer consumer centric innovation or business centric innovation? So, what is humanity centric innovation? How does it differ?

Pete Dulcamara: 12:40

Yeah, yeah. So it's first to understand what's consumer centric innovation, and I think consumer centric innovation happens at the creative collision of what's needed by the customer, what's required by the business, and what's possible through science and technology. And when those three things come together, that's a creative collision that creates innovation, innovation, and you can start with any one of them. You can start with a customer need,

Matt Kirchner: 13:06

sure, but

Pete Dulcamara: 13:07

if you don't have a business model where you're going to make money,

Matt Kirchner: 13:09

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 13:09

Right, or you can start with

Matt Kirchner: 13:10

sustainable, right?

Pete Dulcamara: 13:11

You can even have a business model where you're going to make money, and you have a customer need, but if you don't have a science and technology to actually make it possible,

Matt Kirchner: 13:18

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 13:19

You know, and so it's really bringing those three things together to create an innovation. Well, humanity-centric innovation happens at the creative collision of what are the needs of humanity. Okay, what are the business models of the 20-first century, and what are the exponential technologies that can accelerate that, so that we can solve the world's biggest problems in an economically viable way, and so when I talk about the needs of humanity, these are really captured well in the UN's 17 sustainable development goals.

Matt Kirchner: 13:50

Okay,

Pete Dulcamara: 13:50

you know, goals like achieving gender equality, taking climate action, you know, responsible consumption of materials, that's there's seven

Matt Kirchner: 14:00

teams gonna argue with those, right? Yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 14:02

they're all the stuff that we, you know, fresh water, all those things, yep. And then the business models of the 21st century are captured really well in the book, The Future is Faster Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, and he talks about six of these business models, things like the smartness economy of Siri, Alexa, Chat GPT, the crowd economy of Uber and Airbnb. Sure, you know the data economy of Google and Facebook, and then the exponential technologies, that's artificial intelligence, that's robotics, that's quantum computing, that's, you know, biotechnology, sure, it's blockchain, it's printing, but it's the idea is to bring those three things together to solve the world's biggest problems in an economically viable way, and it's different from human-centered innovation that's focused really on us as individual humans, it's really focused on humanity and the collect. Of impact that science and technology can make, coupled with a business model that makes it self-sufficient.

Matt Kirchner: 15:07

Got it. And

Pete Dulcamara: 15:07

it's different than charity, you know. I mean, charity, charity is.. you know, I always think purpose without profit is charity.

Matt Kirchner: 15:15

Purpose without profit is charity. Okay. Yeah. Well, and I think it's not sustainable. I mean, you can, you can do things for them being the right reason, and not necessarily enrich yourself or make money doing them, but it's really hard to sustain that model over time.

Pete Dulcamara: 15:28

Yeah, so if you have a business model that's profitable, right, if you can do well by doing good, you know, and really focus on that,

Matt Kirchner: 15:35

for sure.

Pete Dulcamara: 15:35

I think that that's the driving force, and, and what's so powerful about that is it brings clarity to a company to have purpose to be able to communicate that to Gen Z to attract talent.

Matt Kirchner: 15:46

Sure, yeah, and we'll get into that in some more detail. So, it's exponential technologies, it's 20-first century business models, and what was the third one? The

Pete Dulcamara: 15:53

needs of humanity,

Matt Kirchner: 15:54

needs of humanity. Got it. Very, very cool. You know, as you were, as you were chatting about that, there were, there were a few different things going through through my minds and I want in my mind I want to get in, we'll get into a little bit more detail about some of these exponential technologies, and you mentioned, I mean, whether it's blockchain, whether it's, you know, additive manufacturing, whether it's biotechnology, I mean, super, super fascinated by that, I want to go deeper on the 20-first century business model side of it as well, but I really do like that whole focus of not just doing charity for charity's sake, but have a, you know, having a model that sustains itself, that enables us to, you know, whether a lot of people make a lot of money, and then they, you know, they give it away, and they call that charity, and there's a version of that, right, certainly there's something to be said for that, but to be able to create the sustainable model over time, where you are, you have a business organization that's doing right by its employees, doing right by its, by its customers, and its market, doing right by the rest of humanity, and being able to reinvest in that over and over and over again. Super, super important. Creates a different kind of billionaire. Now, you're.. I don't.. we've had plenty of billionaires, or at least several of them, here on the podcast, believe it or not, over the course of five and a half years, so we should mention to the audience, you're also a billionaire, but maybe in a little bit different way than a lot of us think when we, when we think about billionaires. So you're talking about the idea that we should redefine what a billionaire is, and it's not just somebody who's managed to accumulate a net worth of a billion dollars, it's somebody that's been able to do what,

Pete Dulcamara: 17:22

help a billion people,

Matt Kirchner: 17:23

awesome,

Pete Dulcamara: 17:24

and it's not, they're not mutually exclusive, of

Matt Kirchner: 17:25

course not,

Pete Dulcamara: 17:26

but the focus is on helping a billion people, you know, and so I would really like to redefine billionaire from somebody who accumulates a billion dollars to somebody who helps a billion people, and I think we can each help a billion people through humanity-centric innovation, I think there's three ways that you can, that this can manifest itself. One is, I mean, you can be like an Elon Musk, who actually does help a billion people, right? Or through a geometric progression, right? I make an impact on you, Matt, and you make an impact on two people, and they make an impact on four people, and through that geometric progression, you actually impact a billion lives, but there's a third way that I think is really important for us to think about, which is multi-generational. So, the United Nations estimates over the last 50,000 years, 100 billion people have been born, lived, and died on this planet,

Matt Kirchner: 18:19

100 billion,

Pete Dulcamara: 18:19

100 billion in the last 50,000 years,

Matt Kirchner: 18:22

that surprises me. Just because of the way that we've seen kind of the growth over time, right? I mean, even adding what, 3 billion people to the planet, probably in my lifetime. I think we went from five to eight, so that 50,000 years covers quite a few, quite a few people before that.

Pete Dulcamara: 18:37

Yes, and today there's about 8 billion people on the planet, maybe 8.2 billion people on the planet. I think they.. we don't really know how to count other people, but we won't get into that,

Matt Kirchner: 18:47

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 18:47

But the United Nations estimates that over the next 50,000 years, 6.7 5 trillion people are yet to be born and live on this planet.

Matt Kirchner: 18:59

Yep,

Pete Dulcamara: 19:00

and the question becomes, are we going to leave them enough resources to not only survive but to thrive,

Matt Kirchner: 19:06

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 19:07

Or ask differently when they write their history books about us. Well, they talk about us creating the next dark ages or the next renaissance. I mean, the choice is up to

Matt Kirchner: 19:17

us.

Pete Dulcamara: 19:17

And so, not only being a billionaire, you have a chance to be a trillionaire,

Matt Kirchner: 19:21

right,

Pete Dulcamara: 19:21

you know, by actually planting trees whose shade you'll never enjoy, and creating systems and solutions that not only people today can flourish from,

Matt Kirchner: 19:31

right,

Pete Dulcamara: 19:32

but people in the future, multi-generational, and so when I think about billionaire, those are three ways that I think about billionaires, one person impacting a billion, geometric progression by actually impacting people around you who impact others to really thinking about this at a multi-generational level.

Matt Kirchner: 19:48

Fascinating, you know, you mentioned you mentioned the Renaissance, the last Renaissance, of course, happening hundreds of years ago. Have you read the book, The Medici Effect? Are you familiar with that?

Pete Dulcamara: 19:58

Yeah, so sure, yeah, I mean they find. It's the, yeah, sure.

Matt Kirchner: 20:01

I was, go ahead,

Pete Dulcamara: 20:03

yeah, no, no, yeah. I mean, it's just that whole idea of, I mean, they actually financed the Renaissance.

Matt Kirchner: 20:07

They did well, and what they did was, and I got interested in this. I was preparing for a presentation to the National Center for Next Gen Manufacturing, and was doing research about in that particular presentation, and this actually gets into some of the exponential technology stuff that I want to talk about with you. In that particular conversation, or that presentation, I was talking about the convergence of technologies and how it's driving all these opportunities in the marketplace, and the technologies we were talking about were things like humanoid robotics, and certainly artificial intelligence, and advanced materials was in there, and autonomous systems, and smart sensor technology actually had 11 of them. And then I turned back to the Medici effect, and the thing that was interesting is, yes, the Medici family in the, I guess, was the 15th century, was a very, very successful family, tremendously, tremendously wealthy family. And what they did was they pulled individuals from different disciplines, so it wasn't like it's just going to be the scientists are going to advance humanity, it's the scientists, it's the financial people, it's people from the arts, it's people from, you know, from religion, people from, you know, from whether it's whether it's authors or I mentioned arts already, artists, and it's going to be the convergence of these different disciplines, and they brought all these people together, and in the whole idea is again going back to the idea of exponential growth, is that they got so much more growth and change and innovation out of bringing people from different disciplines together and advancing, advancing the world in the way that they did through the Renaissance, it was just interesting when you start talking about what's the next generation or what's the next Renaissance going to look like, and speaking of bringing ideas together, the one thought I thought when you said, are we going to have enough resources to be able to support these trillions of people, what was the number again, 6.7

Pete Dulcamara: 21:55

5,000,000,000,006.7 5 trillion, yeah,

Matt Kirchner: 21:57

6.7 trillion, according to the UN, and then the answer to the question is, will that person you mentioned earlier, Elon, must be able to put us on other planets, in which case we probably will have those resources, but I think it really is an important question, and it kind of speaks to as some of these technologies converges, as the world of work changes, as the next generation of the workforce advances, it's going to be a really interesting world to live in. Let's touch on before we get into more of those technologies, which I really want to do, and I can geek out on to in a big way here on the podcast. Let's talk about that next generation. Let's talk about, let's use Gen Z as an example, right? And we've all heard the stories about how they're looking for something different in their work. A lot of them are so driven by this idea of purpose, but you know, if we can have a purpose, but if we don't have to, your earlier point, a business model that kind of also kind of, in a circular way, supports the purpose, and the purpose supports the financial model, and so on, we can get ourselves into trouble. What are you hearing or thinking about when it comes to this next generation of employee of worker, is it all about purpose, and how does all that converge?

Pete Dulcamara: 23:06

Yeah, well, you know what's different about Gen Z is, I mean, they're the first digital native generation, right? That's one, two, is they are globally connected, and three, they are scared to death of the existential threat of climate change or pandemic, but I think you know Gen Z, you know, is really not only interested in purpose but interested in making a significant difference in the world, you know, and they want to work for a company that has purpose, and so I think there's really two audiences that we probably should talk to here, one are companies made up of largely baby boomers, right, probably with some generational guilt. Yeah, right, but, but they want to track the gen, they

Matt Kirchner: 23:50

should probably have, by the way, in some cases, that's another, another discussion,

Pete Dulcamara: 23:54

you know, but they, you know, want to track Gen Z talent, and the way to attract Gen Z talent is by clarifying the purpose and passion of your organization, and Gen Z, you know, I think I think they, they want to be a part of a company that has that clarity of purpose, but at the same time, I don't know if they necessarily want the same type of career that I had,

Matt Kirchner: 24:19

yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 24:19

you know, 35 years in industry, you know, you know,

Matt Kirchner: 24:22

and 70 hour weeks, probably a lot of them along the way, right?

Pete Dulcamara: 24:25

You know, trying to have an impact in a collective way, in a non, non conventional way, is really important to Gen Z.

Matt Kirchner: 24:34

Okay,

Pete Dulcamara: 24:34

and so, well, my, my book, entire book is about the title is High Tech Heroes: Why Gen Z is our last and best chance to save the planet.

Matt Kirchner: 24:43

Wow,

Pete Dulcamara: 24:44

you know, and so it's this idea of really enabling Gen Z, and one of the, one of the challenges I would have for everybody out there that is a baby boomer or an X or a millennial is to actually mentor and coach a Gen Z or Gen Alpha as they come up as well. Your school and really help them find their purpose, help them find their passion, and help to implement that. Go from idea to execution is what's really important.

Matt Kirchner: 25:10

You think about the interest in purpose, and that's absolutely something that we see in a number of our businesses, where you know we can talk about everybody wants to be, you know, paid fairly, they want to make decent money, and there's, you know, in our day and age, or at least in mine, and I'm sure I'm guessing maybe your experience was similar, you know, money motivated in a lot of cases, maybe, maybe more so than I should have been, and and just you came of age when, like, the movie Wall Street came out, and you're like watching Gordon Gekko, and just good, yeah. Charlie Sheen, what's that?

Pete Dulcamara: 25:42

Greed is good.

Matt Kirchner: 25:43

Greed is good, exactly. In fact, I'll tell you, we actually had a poster of that on the wall in my dorm room when I was at Marquette University back in the, in the late 80s, and there's actually some, some, some truths in that, even though that, that antagonist, Gordon Gekko, was certainly a decent person. There's some interesting aspects to that, but you know, but, but the point being that you know we were so wired around Wall Street, money, success, the car you drove, the boat you own, the size of your house, all these kind of things, and, and you listen to people, you know, the later versions of the millennials and Gen Zs, and that's just not how so many of some of them are like that, but it's not how so many of them think, and I was at, you know, literally doing business turnarounds early in my career, 80 to 100 hour weeks, I mean, my first year and a half at a company that I, my first CEO job, which was in 1998 we worked 80 to 100 hours a week, every single week, for a year and a half, and didn't think anything of it, and you know, we, it was that business ended up being super successful, and we loved what we did. I don't necessarily see that same mix among Gen Z today. Are you seeing it the same way?

Pete Dulcamara: 26:53

Well, you know, it's interesting, you know, I talked about my personal purpose, you know, to help create businesses that improve people's lives, and what's really interesting is the whole time I was at Dow, and the whole time I was at Kimberly Clark, I never thought of myself as an employee. I really thought of it as Kimberly Clark works for me, and it's not that I'm a megalomaniac, right, but I used to wake

Matt Kirchner: 27:16

up, but you're a billionaire, yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 27:18

but I used to wake up in the morning thinking to myself, how do I use the, you know, I want to, I want to create businesses that improve people's lives, but I don't have the financial or technical wherewithal to pull it off. Dow does, Kimberly Clark does. How do I use the resources of Kimberly Clark to help create businesses that improve people's lives, and the beauty of that was it was consistent with their own vision, which is better care for a better world. So it was very consistent. So I was in this delusional mindset of I'm not an employee of KC, KC works for me to achieve this mission. Yeah, and I think that's what Gen Z is looking for as well,

Matt Kirchner: 27:57

delusional in a good way, though.

Pete Dulcamara: 27:58

Delusional in good way, because because it was a win-win. I was actually had one big client who was called Kimberly Clark, and what I was really trying to push KC to do, and I won't go too deep in this, but but it was this idea of in the next 24 hours, 2 billion people use a Kimberly Clark product, they put every biological fluid known to man in those products and simply throw them away, and the question I was asking is, could we access that bio material and bio data to make a used product worth more than a new product, because if a used product was worth more than a new product, you could give these products away for free,

Matt Kirchner: 28:34

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 28:34

Right, and not only generate income for the company, but generate income for the consumer. I'll give you one example.

Matt Kirchner: 28:41

Is

Pete Dulcamara: 28:42

imagine a woman in her 20s harvesting the stem cells from her menses when she's 20 years old, banking those stem cells, and then curing her own cancer when she's 80 years old with the stem cells that she harvested from a Kotex fem pad when she was 20 years old. It's that kind of a, that's, that's humanity centric innovation in a nutshell. And I think that's what Gen Z is looking for, is they want to not only have purpose and passion, but they want to make a dent in the world, right, in a good way.

Matt Kirchner: 29:14

Yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 29:15

you know, and have that delusional mindset of really, these companies work for me to achieve my purpose and passion,

Matt Kirchner: 29:23

right,

Pete Dulcamara: 29:24

in a way that improves people's lives, and that's really, that's where my whole mindset is about.

Matt Kirchner: 29:29

And you know what's interesting, and I have a really good friend who listens to the podcast regularly, and he's going to recognize the example when I give it here, it's this whole idea of finding blue sky opportunities in businesses, and you know, just going back on it, we're going on a little bit of a tangent here, but going back to how here in the state of Wisconsin, we have tons and tons of paper companies, right, all kinds of paper converting companies, and I would say if you ask most people, you know, what are the describe Kimberly Clark two. Ways they would say, well, number one, here are the Casey products that I'm familiar with that I use, and the number two thing they would say is that I'm, you know, it's a paper converting company, and here you are talking about, you know, advancing biotechnology, bio analytics, and so on, you know, using a using a product that somebody is utilizing, and how do I take the waste of that product and turn it into something positive to me, that is like at the core of finding blue sky markets as well, right? And looking at your at your standard business model and looking at it one way, and I was guilty of this for a long time early in my career, looking at our businesses really, really narrowly rather than finding all right, here's where everybody else is playing, and here's how we can beat them, and here's how we can get an edge, and there's, there's minimal purpose in that. There is minimal excitement in that, because it's just really, really hard work, just to beat, you know, do something better, faster, cheaper, which there's nothing wrong with that, but that's a hard way to make a buck, and it's really hard to find margin in that model as well, when you're just competing with everybody else, whereas you find a blue sky market for your business, or for your product, or way of looking at the product, or a way of bringing it to market, or a way of impacting your customer that nobody else is playing in, and you get the jump on them. There's all kinds of margin there. It's really, really fun. It's a great way to make a difference in, in the world. Are those two thoughts what you just said and what I said? Are those coherent and consistent?

Pete Dulcamara: 31:28

Oh, yeah. Really, you know what it brings to my mind is something I always talk about, is finding the primary colors of your business. Okay, you know, I find it really interesting that we have three types of cones in our eyes, so we perceive three what we call primary colors, but did the intersection of those three primary colors is the entire spectrum of visible light,

Matt Kirchner: 31:47

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 31:47

And so that's one of the things that I did at KC. Again, was what are the primary colors at Kimberly Clark? You know, if it's non-woven, super absorbent, and fiber, every single product is a combination of those three things. Sure, and what else can you make with that combination of those primary colors, and so really taking some time to figure out what are the primary colors of your business, what are those core competencies that now you can put together in new combinations, and maybe we'll get to this in the combinatorial aspect of exponential technologies, because that's really where the blue sky or blue ocean comes from is is at those intersections of disparate technologies to solve problems that people care about.

Matt Kirchner: 32:30

Yep,

Pete Dulcamara: 32:30

you know, and you know, early in my career at KC, I went to Google Garage, and you know, I mean, a really great experience, but one of the things that Google did that I brought to Kimberly Clark, was this idea of 7020 10, 70% of all their research is invested in search, 20% are adjacencies like maps, and 10% are wild and crazy things like self-driving cars. Sure, and so in research and development, it's really important that 70% of what you do is just for the existing

Matt Kirchner: 33:00

business, our business, right,

Pete Dulcamara: 33:01

and making that as successful as possible. 20% should be for adjacencies that you can move into with your primary colors into these blue oceans or blue sky, and then the 10% should be really for completely transformational opportunities, but those are the highest risk, and so you got to make sure that the 70 and 20 give you card launch to pay for the 10,

Matt Kirchner: 33:23

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 33:24

You can't focus all your effort on the 10, and so you know finding that right combination of the portfolio of 7020 10,

Matt Kirchner: 33:31

sure,

Pete Dulcamara: 33:31

and your primary colors based on your core competencies, you can evop your way into these adjacencies that be really become transformative.

Matt Kirchner: 33:40

Yeah, no question. And you think about, you mentioned interesting, you mentioned Google, for anybody who's been in Atlanta, I think San Francisco, now Phoenix, and ridden in a self-driving car, have you had that experience too? Yeah, I mean, it's just absolutely fascinating. More and more, I know, I had my first experience, probably three years ago, where literally we dialed up an Uber, and it said, "Well, you accepted a ride from a self-driving vehicle, and got in it, and it drove us, you know, three miles in downtown Phoenix. And it was just.. I'd heard about him, I'd seen videos to sit in the back seat of a car in traffic that's steering itself with no driver. I think it's kind of hard to really get a good sense for how transformative that technology is. Of course, it was a Waymo car, and you know, Waymo was a product of Google, and in Waymo was a product of that 10% that you talked about, the self-driving vehicles, which is, I think, a really good opportunity to segue into some of these emerging technologies, and I mentioned some of them that we have our eyes on, autonomous vehicles, and not just cars, right, autonomous mobile robots, Mars rovers, autonomous drones. I mean, that's a huge, huge advancing technology that we're keeping our eyes on. Advancing materials, another, another huge one. Critical minerals had had Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on the podcast not too long ago, talking all about critical minerals. And then, so these technologies that are advancing and chain. In converging for years, I spent time talking about what we call the exponential economy, which is, you know, you're familiar with this, Gordon Moore products doubling in price performance every 12 to 18 months, based upon Moore's Law, which is that we can, our ability to process information at that speed doubles every 12 to 18 months,

Pete Dulcamara: 35:17

and AI is advancing every seven months, and maybe even three months,

Matt Kirchner: 35:20

exactly. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, it's crazy. In fact, it's funny you bring that up, because there was a conversation that I listened to about six or seven years ago, and actually somebody brought me a video they had seen where they said, you know what, Moore's Law is dead, you know, our ability to advance this technology and the realities of chip technology and microprocessing have gotten to the point where that we won't see any more advancement like that. This was six or seven years ago. And then you think about what you just said.

Pete Dulcamara: 35:50

Well, we're at our infancy, because I think about it, we've got a 1.1 exaflop computer in our skull using only 40 watts of energy.

Matt Kirchner: 35:59

Yeah, right.

Pete Dulcamara: 36:00

I mean, think about how far we have to. I mean, 1.1 exaflop computer today probably uses 1.1 million watts of these, actually, you know. And so we've got a long way to go, and that's that's what these exponential technologies, you know, growing exponentially, right? It's hard for us, you know, we have a linear mindset. It's hard for us to conceive exactly. So true.

Matt Kirchner: 36:21

Yeah, and I love the fact that you use linear mindset. The other thing that I was thinking about, again, not to get off on too much of a tangent, was thinking back in the 1970s and 80s, and into the early 90s, I just remember like these growth curves of the availability of oil, and you know, certainly fossil fuels have their downside, and there's no question about it, but the, you know, this curve that just said we're going to run out of oil by 2001 right? Yeah, and then you had, you know, some really well-known economists talking about how you'll never really run out of oil because it'll become so expensive on a, you know, on a per barrel basis, that we'll just find alternatives, and here we are, you know, the latest, you know, challenges in the Strait of Homoos, not withstanding, you know, the cheapest, some of the cheapest oil we've had, and cheapest, cheapest oil-based products we've had in our lifetimes. So, we think about things on a linear scale, the point being, and this is not how the world works, right? It is exponential, especially when it comes to these emerging technologies. You mentioned blockchain, you mentioned autonomous vehicles. What are the ones you have your eyes on?

Pete Dulcamara: 37:22

Well, you know, it's interesting. You know, we're getting ready to celebrate our 250th anniversary as the United States of America. Awesome. And you know, I think back to our 100 year anniversary. Just imagine it's 1876

Matt Kirchner: 37:36

Yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 37:37

there's no electricity,

Matt Kirchner: 37:38

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 37:39

There's no automobiles, there's no airplanes, there's no air conditioning, hardly anybody's taking a hot shower, there's no internal plumbing. You know, you know, Einstein hasn't even written his papers yet on that'll lay the foundation for solid state physics and quantum physics and the atomic bomb. And you think about 18, just think of all those technologies that came together that completely transformed the 20th century,

Matt Kirchner: 38:04

not on their own, but

Pete Dulcamara: 38:05

the collaboration of electricity and automobiles. You know, I always think the 20th century, every industry was based on oil, electricity, and steel,

Matt Kirchner: 38:18

right.

Pete Dulcamara: 38:19

And as I look at the 20-first century, I think that data is the new oil, artificial intelligence is the new electricity, and robotics is the new steel.

Matt Kirchner: 38:29

Interesting,

Pete Dulcamara: 38:30

and it's that convergence of data, AI, and robotics, and I really do believe by 2030-five there's only gonna be two types of companies, those companies built on data, AI, and robotics, and those companies that are completely out of business.

Matt Kirchner: 38:44

Yeah, they will be, there's no doubt. And so it'll be sooner than that.

Pete Dulcamara: 38:48

So you know, so now you look at today, and you know, you know, you've got AI, you've got robotics, you've got biotechnology, you got quantum computing that's coming, additive manufacturing, you know, even atomically precise manufacturing, right, right, and it's those, those combinations that are the new, you know, primary colors, if you will, and how they're going to intersect, but, but, but I think we're thinking about, you know, I think you know, people think about humanoid robots, and I think there will be humanoid robots,

Matt Kirchner: 39:21

but as somebody who spent a week in China last August and visited eight humanoid robot companies, oh, there will be, yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 39:27

but what I keep thinking about is the car is the robot, you know, there's not, there's not a humanoid robot behind the wheel,

Matt Kirchner: 39:34

right,

Pete Dulcamara: 39:34

the car is the robot, for sure, you know, so I think we see a manifest state, you know, I think robots are where AI was about five years ago, and I think over the next five years we're going to see an explosion of robotics and autonomous systems in every aspect of our life.

Matt Kirchner: 39:48

There's no question. Yeah, I 100% agree with you, and it's just kind of going back to some of the things that we saw in China. 20-six tech companies in six days was there with the CEO of Ashley Furniture. Todd Wanack, and had him on the podcast last November, ish, I think we, I think that episode dropped in mid December to talk about that trip, and it was just fascinating to see it. I mean, the China part of it was fascinating, how quickly they're moving, how they built their economy around innovation, how coherent all of their innovation and all their companies were, how focused they were, how entrepreneurial they were. It was equal parts fascinating and scary, but I think the other part of it was the fact that we saw 26 of them in less than a week, right? So you just see all of this stuff spinning through your head, and then getting in the in the van and talking about we just saw and what we were going to see, just absolutely, absolutely fascinating. How quickly some of these technologies are moving. I agree with you. Right now, we are - we're making - we want robots to do things that humans can do, everything from cooking, folding the laundry, sweeping the floor, I mean, whatever. And so we're creating humanoid robots that look like people, because that's our model for it. You're absolutely right. We're going to find different applications and different technologies that allow a humanoid robot not necessarily to look like a person, but to perform the same things, maybe even better in the same with the same way that we've done in manufacturing, in a lot of cases, more precise, faster, needing less rest, less energy, you know, whatever you want to say, you'll see those same things in the, in the evolution of human rights robots.

Pete Dulcamara: 41:23

Well, you know, one of my biggest concerns, you know, of course, Trump's coming back from China, but, and you probably read the book Breakneck. Yeah, absolutely. Dan

Matt Kirchner: 41:31

Wong, yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 41:32

yeah. So, you know, you think about, you know, he's

Matt Kirchner: 41:34

got an open invitation to join us on the on the

Pete Dulcamara: 41:36

podcast. Well, he should come on, because I mean that, you know, the American dream, I think, is risked by this idea that you know, China, all their leaders are engineers, and in our country, they're all attorneys, exactly. And you know, China's trying to figure out what they can build. Yes, and we try to keep figuring out what we can stop building, because of the real story. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and it's like, God, we've got to get over ourselves. We've got, we've got to start building things again as the United States of America.

Matt Kirchner: 42:03

Let me give you another example, because it's really fresh in my mind. I spent the last two weeks today, as we record this, it's a Friday afternoon. I was Sunday, Monday night, I got back from Europe, and we spent 1112, days in the Netherlands and in Belgium, and I was absolutely amazed at the absence of not always in a good way, but I think a lot of times in a good way, like some of the safety things that we are so bent over here in the United States. I visited a castle, it was an 11th or 12th century castle, maybe a little bit later than that, man, not too much later, 12th and 15th century in Ghent, you can look it up in Belgium, and you're walking along this wall that is 3540 feet above the ground next to you, and it's as wide as the studio we're sitting in. So, the wall, the wall is probably eight feet wide, there's no fencing, and there's like three year old kids running around up there with their parents. It was crazy. We were driving. We spent, if you ever been to Amsterdam, yeah, bikes everywhere, right? 12,000 bikes a year are pulled out of the canals in Amsterdam, right? That's how many bikes are there, that's how many they pull out of the canals, because they got lost. Bikes are everywhere,

Pete Dulcamara: 43:15

they're probably tourists,

Matt Kirchner: 43:16

yeah, right, yeah, exactly, seven or eight cars a year, too, by the way. And they said they just, as a quick aside, they said they had a rash of cars falling into the canals when they introduced Teslas to Amsterdam, because they were using the self-parking car feature, and the cars didn't know how to park next to a wall that was next to, you know, 12 feet of water, so everybody, these cars were backing themselves into the canals, which is kind of funny. They've since solved for that, but the point of this was you have people driving around with three and four year old, two and three year old kids in these gigantic baskets on the front of their bikes, driving through traffic, you know, whatever, no helmets, no no safety anything, and it was as a cyclist it was a little bit unnerving, but just the attitude there around safety, totally different than what we're accustomed to, not to mention what I saw in China, which is, you know,

Pete Dulcamara: 44:07

yeah, and I don't want to diminish the importance of safety, but at the same time I think,

TechEd Podcast Introduction: 44:14

but it

Pete Dulcamara: 44:14

creates kind of a culture of victimitis, somebody somewhere has got to take care of me versus taking personal accountability, right, and, and I think that's, that's kind of what we're missing, is we're losing that, that culture of accountability and trading it for a culture of victimitis, right? Yeah, you know, you know, I always get in these, and I want to go down the political track, but I always get in these conversations with people about what's happening in the United States, and I always say to them, you know what the problem is. The problem is me.

Matt Kirchner: 44:44

Yeah, go ahead.

Pete Dulcamara: 44:44

The problem is you,

Matt Kirchner: 44:45

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 44:46

The problem is everybody out there. It says we the people, right? And we, we, we seem to abdicate our responsibility for taking action, right? And just expect somebody somewhere to do something.

Matt Kirchner: 44:58

Absolutely. Have you read the, the most. Was the the greatest sentence ever written. Walter Isaacson. No, that is such a good buddy Andy Burial suggested. Actually, asked me if I'd read the book. Read the book. He, he brought it to me. He brought me a copy. It's quick read. I read it on a on a plane flying from, I think, the East Coast back to back to Wisconsin. So it took me an hour, and but it talks about I'm not going to give it away, greatest sentence ever written, and really talks about the founding principles of our country, you know, speaking to the 250th anniversary of the country and the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and that's what the book is based on, it is a really, really good book, and it speaks to exactly what you're talking about, is how our, how our, how our mindset and how our society has changed over the course of that, and I think there's some things that we can learn, certainly from China, there's things that we can learn from, you know, from the time that we spend in Europe, and in, and in the, I think is one of the one of the important aspects of traveling is seeing how other other cultures are adopting some of this stuff, but on the topic of learning, on the topic of learning from other cultures, on the topic of learning from subject matter experts, you know, we spend a lot of time here on the tech ed podcast, it's right in our name, Technical Education, let's focus on that a little bit, you think about these emerging technologies, what should we be teaching in technical education, you think about humanity-centric innovation. What should we be teaching in technical education or STEM education? You know, wax on that a bit.

Pete Dulcamara: 46:27

Yeah, two things I would say there. One is that I really firmly believe that once artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, which it will,

Matt Kirchner: 46:38

yep,

Pete Dulcamara: 46:38

we're going to find out that EQ is more important than IQ. Yeah, and when I talk about EQ, it's not just emotional intelligence, it's ethical intelligence, empathetic intelligence, entrepreneurial intelligence, envisioning intelligence, evangelistic intelligence. But EQ is going to be more important than IQ, and I think even more important than EQ is EQ, which is the adaptive intelligence, our ability to adapt to change, our ability to be resilient, and that's what we need to be teaching our kids, is how to think, how to critically think, how to be curious, you know? I think curiosity beats memorization every day of the week, right? And our whole school system was built for what I talked about before, is oil, electricity, and steel, and we need a school system built on data, AI, and robotics, and that, that's that's the shift that we've got to make is from IQ to EQ to AQ. That's beautiful. And the other thing I would say is I would challenge us a little bit on STEM as well, so you know, I mean, we talk about STEM to STEAM, you know, introduced in the arts, whether you say stem or steam, I'd like to see it raised to the power of e,

Matt Kirchner: 47:47

okay?

Pete Dulcamara: 47:48

And that e is ethics,

Matt Kirchner: 47:49

yep,

Pete Dulcamara: 47:49

because we shouldn't be just asking can we build it, we should be asking should we build

Matt Kirchner: 47:55

it, right?

Pete Dulcamara: 47:56

And who we building it for?

Matt Kirchner: 47:58

Yep,

Pete Dulcamara: 47:59

and I think that's what needs to be taught in schools, you know. I always think culture is basically values and behavior consistently displayed, and so what values and behaviors are we teaching? And I think if we can focus on values and behaviors consistently over time, that lays the foundation for a new society,

Matt Kirchner: 48:21

absolutely,

Pete Dulcamara: 48:22

you know, and that that's really what schools should be teaching, is what I call steamy, and an EQ and AQ.

Matt Kirchner: 48:28

Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Dulcamara: 48:29

And really fostering curiosity in, in the mind, you know. One of the things I'm concerned about is, you know, I saw this thing that 50% of our day is spent staring at a screen,

Matt Kirchner: 48:40

yeah. For sure,

Pete Dulcamara: 48:40

whether it's whether it's your iPhone, your iPad, your Kindle, your computer at work, your TV at home, this program you're watching right now on YouTube,

Matt Kirchner: 48:50

starting out, don't make it this one, start somewhere else.

Pete Dulcamara: 48:53

But you know, we're losing the art of what you and I are doing right now, is just having a conversation, looking eyeball to eyeball, right, and having a discussion, or having a debate, or even disagreeing, but still being friends, and that's the other thing that we've got to teach in school, is how to connect and communicate and collaborate. I'll just go on a real side note, just for a second, I won't go too deep on this, but humans, human beings, been around for 200,000 years, the first 130,000 years we lived basically like animals. There was no progress at all in the fossil record.

Matt Kirchner: 49:27

I have some friends that still live like animals, but nothing else. Sorry, yeah. My

Pete Dulcamara: 49:31

wife says I live like an animal, but you know, 70,000 years ago something happened. It's known as the cognitive revolution of the Great Leap, and what archeologists tell us is there was an explosion of art and tools and human migration, and what anthropologists tell us is we learned to talk, we discovered speech, we invented language, and every time we've changed how we connect, communicate, and collaborate, our world has changed, whether it was learning to talk or to write or mathematics or the printing press. Radio, TV, internet, world wide web, social media, large language models. Every time we've changed how we connect, communicate, and collaborate, our world has fundamentally changed. And with AI, we are going to see a step change,

Matt Kirchner: 50:18

absolutely,

Pete Dulcamara: 50:18

in all three of those things,

Matt Kirchner: 50:20

no question,

Pete Dulcamara: 50:22

and it'll largely be like what it was like 70,000 years ago, going from, you know, nothing to an explosion of creativity and curiosity.

Matt Kirchner: 50:33

Yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 50:33

and that's what we need to prepare our children for,

Matt Kirchner: 50:35

for sure. Lots there. The did you see the article, by the way, that they determined that Neanderthals were able to do root canals. Do you see this? So, literally, I just read this, I can't remember where I saw it, but the.. and it was just this week that they found evidence, and it was true that they found a tooth in some cave where they knew that the Neanderthals had lived, and they found a tooth, and it was clear that the truth had tooth had been drilled into, and they did the research and figured out what kind of, they actually mimicked or repeated how they used a stone that was available to Neanderthals. This was 45,000 years ago, right? 45,000 years ago. So they were doing dental work on each other, literally 45,000 years ago, using this stone that they could use to drill into a tooth, so somebody had a, you know, had a tooth that had an infection, they were doing, they figured out how to do a root canal, which just baffled me.

Pete Dulcamara: 51:30

Well, you know, that, you know, we always focus on the conflict that people have, but, but I think compassion and empathy, I mean, think about your day, most of your day is spent being compassionate and caring and empathetic for others. Yep, it's only till you turn on the news or

Matt Kirchner: 51:48

jump on TikTok or YouTube Shorts or whatever, you know, algorithm is driving you out to the fringe.

Pete Dulcamara: 51:52

Absolutely, dopamine addiction, right? Totally true.

Matt Kirchner: 51:55

So, a couple of the things that you mentioned, the first thing, and this was just again, having spent two weeks on two weeks in Europe, I won't give you the numbers because they're embarrassing, but I get a report every Monday morning, every Sunday morning about my previous week's screen time on my iPhone, not everything, not my computer, not my, you know, just on the iPhone, and that number was cut by two thirds the week, the two weeks I spent in Europe, and I was like, wow, that's interesting. I'm like, what was I not doing? What I was not doing was spending excess time on x. What I was not doing was, you know, playing a game of internet backgammon, which I have a have a propensity to do from time to time. I wasn't scrolling on YouTube Shorts, I was spending less time on going through emails, and so on, and what was I doing more of? Having dinner with friends, spending time on my bike, learning about windmills, visiting a castle, you know, spending time on a boat on the canal, and we can't do that every week, obviously. We've got to work to be able to, in order to be able to do those kind of things once or twice a year, but there's a lot of leisure time that gets blown just doom scrolling and waste.

Pete Dulcamara: 53:07

Well, you know, I think one of the things we're robbing children of is daydreaming.

Matt Kirchner: 53:10

Yeah, for sure. I

Pete Dulcamara: 53:11

mean, I remember that mind-numbing boredness in the back seat of my car, my parents' car, staring out the way, just just daydreaming. I think you know, who has time, who does that anymore? You know, and that's something we need. We need time to dream.

Matt Kirchner: 53:28

Yeah, another.. I'll throw out a couple things. The, if you haven't seen it, the 60 minutes interview with Ben Sasse, who's former senator from the state of Nebraska, now suffering from stage four pancreatic cancer, he doesn't have much time left, you know, he in, he's at himself, he's not going to see the end of the year, super sad young guy, in relatively speaking, but one of the most impactful interviews I've watched in the last five years, we'll ask Melissa to link that up in the show notes, because it's worth, I passed it along to bunches of people, it's just really, really good, one of the things that he says in that interview, he said the average 3515 to 35 year old male this year is more likely to have current gambling online gambling debt than to read a book. Think about that, and I think about, I love to read, and I read probably two thirds fewer books. I still read a ton of books, but I spend two thirds, probably less time reading than I did 10 years ago, which is a shame. So that's another thing that I'm, I'm working on getting better at. You talk about the ethics and the power of E and the power of A. The Jen, we've brought it up a bunch of times on the podcast, Genesis, the book by Henry Kissinger. I don't know if you've read that, you mentioned Google before, he co-wrote it within Kissinger, passed away a year and a half ago. Oh, on AI, yeah, exactly, yeah, sure, yeah, it is. He has a whole.. there's a whole sentence in there, I use it all the time, and when you talk about artificial, not just artificial general intelligence, where we are now, but super intelligence, where literally AI can reason at a rate better. Faster than a, than a human being can, and we are going to get there

Pete Dulcamara: 55:02

of humanity.

Matt Kirchner: 55:03

Yeah, right, exactly. We're going to get there relatively quickly. And his whole, his line in that book was, we would prefer no, no intelligence to even one AI that, that had intelligence that was inconsistent with human values. I'm paraphrasing, but it's about that same thing, there's a whole section in there. The last probably quarter of the book is around ethics in the age of artificial intelligence.

Pete Dulcamara: 55:26

Well, I just recently read a book that the title is "If Anyone Invents It We All Die. Yeah, it's about AGI. Yeah,

Matt Kirchner: 55:33

exactly. And it, and it will, if we don't use it properly, it certainly will. I don't know that we will. I think there's a, there's a possibility, a strong possibility that we're going to figure this out, and we're going to do it right, but it isn't going to happen on accident. And you know, a lot of times we talk a lot about the importance of educating students around physical AI, applied artificial intelligence, ethical artificial intelligence. In the reason is that, you know, people of conscience need to be able to control these technologies, or the people that don't have conscience are going to, and in that case, we will.

Pete Dulcamara: 56:04

I think of AI as augmented intelligence. Yeah, you know, I mean, it's augmenting our intelligence and helping us to ask better questions. It's not, you know, you know, that's what I always think is the difference between science and technology. Technology is the answers, science is coming up with the right questions.

Matt Kirchner: 56:20

Yeah, good.

Pete Dulcamara: 56:21

And we need to come up with the right questions, because AI is going to help us with the answers.

Matt Kirchner: 56:25

Yep, absolutely. There's no question. I love that. Love that. Talking about education, any, any, any schools that you've been involved with that you think are figuring out this, this whole idea of technology, human-centric innovation,

Pete Dulcamara: 56:38

been really fortunate. So, when I, when I left industry in 2023 I decided to seek my renaissance, not my retirement. The book was part of the renaissance, and so forth. And part of that renaissance, the last three years I've been on the executive advisory board for Stanford University's Impact Technology Fund.

Matt Kirchner: 56:55

Okay,

Pete Dulcamara: 56:55

and every project I'm under an NDA, but what I'm sharing is, would be covered by that. Every every single project I would describe as humanity-centric innovation. Cool, it's solving an important problem for society at the intersection of business and technology.

Matt Kirchner: 57:14

Awesome,

Pete Dulcamara: 57:14

and advanced technology. Yes. And

Matt Kirchner: 57:16

so, venture capital funder, what's the model?

Pete Dulcamara: 57:18

Yeah, so well, what they're looking at, what we're doing in the executive advisory board is helping them to prioritize their projects, and then helping to decide which projects should go out to get funding. Okay, which ones are the most fundable projects?

Matt Kirchner: 57:32

Got it?

Pete Dulcamara: 57:32

That Stanford can then launch. Okay, and it's been a great experience, but Stanford is really at the top of the list for me in companies that are really following what I'll call humanity-centric innovation. Awesome, you know, I also had a real opportunity to work with the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, as well, when I was at KC. Yeah, and I would say the Haas School of Business, especially around sustainable development, they're another leading edge educational institution in the area of what are these just innovation excuses to go to California. Yeah,

Matt Kirchner: 58:05

it's funny. Every advisory board is like between December and March.

Pete Dulcamara: 58:09

Yeah, right. Exactly.

Matt Kirchner: 58:10

No, that's cool. Those are some obvious, but those are great examples, institutions. So appreciate you sharing that as well. So, let's.. I could have this conversation for another three hours. I'm not sure the audience would listen that long. We're kind of got to manage to a window. Let's, although I bet they probably would, because this has been a really interesting conversation. If I'm an employer and running an organization, recruiting talent, you know, with all of these things that we're talking about, converging technologies, exponential technologies, artificial intelligence, ethics, and AI, human centric innovation. What should I be thinking about in terms of recruiting that next generation of talent?

Pete Dulcamara: 58:48

Yeah, well, you know, I think that one is again it gets back to being clear on your purpose as an organization, and then being able to communicate it, but it's more than that. You know, when I look at sustainable development, there's kind of three levels of sustainability. The lowest level is what's the minimum I have to do to just keep my license to operate, not be thrown in jail, and quite frankly, that's where a lot of companies operate, is what's the minimum I have to do.

Matt Kirchner: 59:16

Yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 59:16

and the more sophisticated ones wrap that with maybe a sustainability report, so that their shareholders and customers and talent can see what they're doing.

Matt Kirchner: 59:24

Got it.

Pete Dulcamara: 59:25

At the other end of the spectrum are NGOs, which are like, don't you just understand, we got to do this for our children's children,

Matt Kirchner: 59:32

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 59:32

Don't really care about the business model person,

Matt Kirchner: 59:34

non-governmental organization.

Pete Dulcamara: 59:35

Yeah, yeah, non-governmental organization. But in the middle is what I call humanity-centric innovation,

Matt Kirchner: 59:41

okay,

Pete Dulcamara: 59:41

which is doing sustainability in a way that creates competitive advantage. Because once you create competitive advantage, you actually achieve all three. You keep your license to operate, and you do what's right for the planet, and that's what companies need to be able to communicate to young people, is that they're actually doing all. All three, because they're seeing sustainability as a business model that creates competitive advantage, you know. Philip Crosby wrote a book in 1989 called Quality Is Free.

Matt Kirchner: 1:00:11

Okay,

Pete Dulcamara: 1:00:11

at the time everybody said quality is expensive.

Matt Kirchner: 1:00:14

Yeah,

Pete Dulcamara: 1:00:14

what he said is, if you do it right the first time, quality is free.

Matt Kirchner: 1:00:17

Yep.

Pete Dulcamara: 1:00:18

Well, I believe sustainability is free if you can do it with less water, less energy, less materials, less waste, less harm.

Matt Kirchner: 1:00:25

Sure,

Pete Dulcamara: 1:00:25

sustainability actually becomes free, and that's what humanity-centric innovation is all about. And that's what you need to be able to communicate to Gen Z, is that you're creating businesses that improve people's lives in an economically viable way, and helping them to become a billionaire,

Matt Kirchner: 1:00:42

there you go,

Pete Dulcamara: 1:00:43

by helping a billion people,

Matt Kirchner: 1:00:44

helping a billion people, that's that's absolutely perfect, and, and I think you think about, you know, first of all, this idea of sustainability, and a lot of times people tie that directly to environmental sustainability, it's certainly super, super important, but it's also about creating a sustainable business model at the same time, oh yeah, people,

Pete Dulcamara: 1:00:58

planet, and prosperity, and it's prosperity for the business as well as others,

Matt Kirchner: 1:01:02

which is exactly what, exactly what you just described, so super, super fascinating on that front. Time for two more questions.

Pete Dulcamara: 1:01:08

Okay,

Matt Kirchner: 1:01:08

if you have it, and they're questions we love asking all of our guests here on the on the TechEd podcast. We all have our own educational journey, our own path through through education. I have mine. I just had somebody ask me earlier today, how do you learn, and we talked all about kind of my educational journey, and how I learned, and what, and what didn't work for me as well. And so, through that journey, we end up with these understandings and perspectives on education that may be a little bit less than conventional. Do you have anything that you think about that when it comes to education in our audience?

Pete Dulcamara: 1:01:40

You know, what I always think about is, you know, if this is this circle is everything I know in the world, everything outside that circle to the edges of the universe is everything I don't know.

Matt Kirchner: 1:01:53

Sure,

Pete Dulcamara: 1:01:54

right. And Einstein said it best, is that when the area of your knowledge increases, the perimeter of your ignorance increases as well,

Matt Kirchner: 1:02:03

yeah.

Pete Dulcamara: 1:02:04

And so that, that's the, that's the thing that we need to help people understand, is that the bigger your area of knowledge is, the bigger the perimeter of ignorance becomes, and to stay curious, to stay humble, and to always be learning, you know. And that, that would be the biggest message I would have for somebody coming up through school is, is to really be curious and to realize that it's a, you're not going to get out of school and stop learning, it's a lifelong learning event. So it's just like from from zero to third grade you learn to read, from third grade on you read to learn. Well, school is teaching you how to learn, and and you need to be able to use that through the rest of your life to continue to learn, to continue to grow, and to really broaden your perimeter of ignorance, if you will, so that you always stay humble and want to learn. That, to me, is the key.

Matt Kirchner: 1:02:55

I love that focus on curiosity. When, when Todd Wanick, the CEO of Ashley Furniture Industries, is on the podcast, he's been on, I think, three times, but the last time that he was on, he talked about second to last time he was on, and we talked about, you know, when you're looking for people in your organization to drive your, your AI innovation, you know, how do you pick the right people? He said, you just find people who are curious, he said that's that's the number one, more so than education background, more so than you know, than any of the work experience they have. If you find people that are curious, those are the people that are going to lead AI innovation. Barbara Humpton, at the time, was the Chief Executive Officer of Siemens USA, asked her a similar question, and she, her answer was, if you have curiosity and initiative, the world is yours, which we just.. I love that,

Pete Dulcamara: 1:03:40

you know. When I was about 12 years old, I went to Greenfield Village outside Detroit, and Menlo Park had been moved there, and they had this guy dressed up as Thomas Edison, and he told this story, and it's stuck with me my whole life. And what he said was, when Thomas Edison was looking to hire a new engineer, he would pull out a light bulb, and he would ask them, How much water does this light bulb hold? And the first type of engineer would take all these precise measurements and do a calculation and tell them what the volume was, and he wouldn't hire those engineers. The second type of engineer would take the light bulb, pour it into a graduated cylinder, and say, 'Here's the volume of the light bulb. He wouldn't hire those engineers. He would hire the engineer that would say,'Why do you want to put water in a perfectly that's always stuck with me, and that is the curiosity. I mean, it's like, for sure, why do you want to do that? Yeah, you know, I work with companies on AI all the time, and they ask me, well, hey, where do we use AI, and I'm like, that's the wrong question. What business problem you're trying to solve, and what value does it create once you solve the problem, and you have the data to actually solve the problem. Now we can talk about AI. Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Kirchner: 1:04:45

No, that's that's fantastic. And so the second question, and it actually goes back to that same age that you were, for roughly when you, when you met the version of Thomas Edison there at Menlo Park, and that is this, you know, if you go back in time to that age. When you're a sophomore in high school, you're a 15 year old young person, right? And yeah, every year that goes by that case, that's a little further away from me. Yeah, let's say you could go back in time and give that individual one piece of advice with their whole life in front of them. What would you tell

Pete Dulcamara: 1:05:14

them? That's really good, I guess. What I would tell them is, don't be afraid, everything's gonna work out. Have the courage to be yourself and always tell the truth. I think you know, my dad gave me that advice when I was about to hire into Dow Chemical.

Matt Kirchner: 1:05:34

The

Pete Dulcamara: 1:05:35

Sunday before I went to Dow, scared to death, gonna go work in epoxy resins. I didn't know anything about epoxy resins, and I remember calling my dad, and just saying, you know, it's that whole imposter syndrome, right? It's just like, and I was like, "Dad, you know what? Do I? And my dad said,"All you ever have to do is to always be yourself and always tell the truth, and I was like,"What is that? It, yeah, that is.. I mean, he was like, "That is it always have the courage to be your authentic self, and always tell the truth, no matter what is going on,

Matt Kirchner: 1:06:08

right?

Pete Dulcamara: 1:06:09

And when I walked in that first day at Dow Chemical, I felt like I had a suit of armor,

Matt Kirchner: 1:06:15

yeah, right, exactly.

Pete Dulcamara: 1:06:15

My dad says all I have to do is just be myself and tell the truth,

Matt Kirchner: 1:06:20

right,

Pete Dulcamara: 1:06:21

and and I think I'd go and give that 15 year old

self that advice: 1:06:24

don't be afraid, everything's gonna work out, be your authentic self, and just always tell the truth.

Matt Kirchner: 1:06:32

Yep, absolutely. One, it seems like you've done that your entire career, and actually it did work out, and pretty worked out pretty well, and continues to work out as you, as you, as you continue to live out this incredible mission that you have going on, and certainly some people retire to go spend time fishing, and you know, hang out with the grandkids. Nothing wrong with that, but certainly you're showing that you can have this whole second opportunity to impact the world and change the world, maybe even ways that were greater than when you were in the workforce, and really, really impressive.

Pete Dulcamara: 1:07:02

Well, thank you for this opportunity to get the message out, Matt. I really appreciate

Matt Kirchner: 1:07:06

it. Yeah, you've got a great message, and the fact that I now also mentioned that, you know, we love every guest here on the podcast. Some come with a whole stack of notes based upon the topics that they think they might hear, and, and you, you sat down here, your notebooks behind you. All this was, you know, off the top of your head, which is beautiful, genuine, always telling the truth, as you said you would. Pete Dolkomera, scientist, former vice president of corporate research at Kimberly Clark, and the author of High Tech Heroes, which we are going to link up in the show notes. Awesome conversation, you're a fascinating person. Appreciate you coming on.

Pete Dulcamara: 1:07:35

Thank you so much, Matt. Really appreciate

Matt Kirchner: 1:07:37

it. And we are going to link up the show notes for this episode. Lots of resources we brought up. We'll put those at TechEd podcast.com/delka Mera, that is D U L C A M A R A. So, check out the show notes there when you're done. Check us out on social. Don't spend too much time doing it, because we're talking about limiting our screen time on this particular episode. But go and check us out on social media. We are on TikTok, we are on Instagram, we are on Facebook, we are on LinkedIn. Wherever you go to consume your social media, including YouTube, we're getting lots and lots of traction on the YouTube channel these days. Wherever you go to consume your social media, you will find the TechEd Podcast. When you do, reach out and say hello, and say hello to us again next week on The TechEd Podcast, we'll be right back here as we are each and every week. Until then, my name is Matt Kirkner. Thanks so much for being around you.