Building the Future: Paul Doherty on the Intersection of Architecture and Technology in Smart Cities

Embark on a transformative exploration of architecture and technology with Paul Doherty, the visionary at the helm of the Digit Group. Our latest episode of Future Construct showcases Paul's fascinating shift from an architecture enthusiast to a tech entrepreneur, illuminating the untold stories behind the evolution of smart cities. As we converse, Paul unveils the intricate dance between brick-and-mortar structures and digital innovation, from the early use of modems on construction sites to the creation of interconnected urban landscapes.

Woven throughout this episode is the narrative of digital tools reshaping the architectural world, with Paul Doherty as our guide. The journey begins with the birth of parametric CAD and continues through the rise of Building Information Modeling, the foretelling of the metaverse, and the implementation of smart city technologies. Paul regales us with tales of software pioneering that led to the realization of futuristic cities in China, reminding us that at the core of urban design lies a deep, humanistic intent. His experiences serve as a testament to how embracing technological advancements can transform not just the skyline but the very fabric of urban living.

As the episode unfolds, Paul and I turn our gaze to the horizon, pondering the future of technology and its potential to enhance the human experience. In this thought-provoking exchange, we discuss the importance of attracting new talent to industries poised for innovation, the role of AI in bridging generational knowledge gaps, and the ways in which technology could enrich our collective intellect. Paul's forward-thinking vision suggests a world where technology serves as a catalyst for societal growth, and his voice is an inspiring call to action for those ready to build the smart cities of tomorrow. Join us for this compelling narrative and envision the boundless opportunities that technology holds for us all.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:28

Welcome to Future Construct. I'm Mark Odin, the CEO of BIM Design Zinc and guest host of Future Construct. Today I'm hosting Paul Doherty, president and CEO at the Digit Group, also known as TGG. Welcome, Paul. Thank you for making the time to join me.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Thank you, mark.

Speaker 1: 0:43

Absolutely so. As a registered recovering architect, as you mentioned earlier in the pre-call, a thought leader and strategist, you have founded and are the CEO of the Digit Group TGG, a leading smart cities design, build, operating and solutions company headquartered in Memphis, tennessee. You also have published work as an author, while being an educator, analyst and consultant to Fortune 500 organizations, government agencies and prominent institutions, as well as the most prestigious AC firms in the world. You've done all of this over the past 30 plus years in the industry. Thank you, paul, for your profound contributions in the AC space.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Well, thank you, mark. It's never about the one person, but it is about the people that you need, like yourself.

Speaker 1: 1:25

Well, that's very kind of you to say. I'd love, in addition to the background I gave, I'd love to hear a little bit more background and, in fact, the story and the path that took you to the Digit Group and enabled all that success over the past 30 years.

Speaker 2: 1:37

Yeah I would say it'd be a good night of drinking, but that wouldn't be the truth. Well, maybe a little bit. So in architectural school I did work, study because I had good grades. They said you could take off a semester, go for your internship while you're at school, so when you come out you can get to your licensing faster. So instead of going, I went to school in New York City and instead of going to like one of the big architectural firms and doing bathroom details which is really what you do as an intern I just I decided to go to IBM at the heyday, back in the late 80s and into the 90s, where we were responsible for creating all the trade show booths for IBM.

Speaker 2: 2:20

Now, ibm was the only game in town. There was no Apple, there was no nothing. And there were these startup companies called Adobe and Microsoft that wanted their software to work on IBM tools because now they're validated. So I had to learn how to rip apart computers, how to put them together again, do networks in order to showcase these new pieces of software that we're going to change the world. So I was always fascinated about how come other equipment manufacturers or OEMs were really the guts behind these machines. You know everything from graphics cards to hard drives, to chips and all these things. So as I was learning how to build computers everything from AS 400s to RS 6000s to the PS2 architecture, where there was no Ethernet, was called Token Ring Networking. I'm dating myself, but that's where I really cut my teeth right, because I had to learn how it went together so I could showcase it best as a designer. So PC expo, comdex, things like that Fast forwarding.

Speaker 2: 3:16

I was always fascinated how come the building industry did not take a similar model to the computer industry? Because it's all about OEM. You have Anderson Windows, you got this type of garage door, you have this type of roof shingle. They're all OEMs, and all we do is builders is actually then put it all together just like compact, just like IBM, just like all of these different computing companies. They just put their brand on it. So that has given me the drive, even to this day, about buildings becoming computers and when you would light those up and you then can connect those different elements. Isn't it interesting that cities then become the Internet of Buildings? Now, what do you do?

Speaker 2: 3:55

So with the advent of all of that, I got involved with technology in a big way to network, as I became an architect and became a design builder and I was working on a Long Island. Now, if you know Long Island, there's just way too many people in on enough land so there's always a traffic jam still to this day. So for me to go to all the different projects that we had going on, it could be that I wouldn't get to every project, just because of time I couldn't get there. So I had this really cool idea about using this thing called a modem and compact computer, logable portable laptops. Now, this was really cutting edge back then, because this was 2400 Baud and I was able to put that into my different projects and teach each one of the supers on the site how do we start to communicate like a telephone call. But I could actually see it, so I didn't have to go all the way around, so it was out of necessity. So I was using a thing called Lotus Notes, which was a great tool, because they had this thing called dock link that I could actually put a graphic up on the screen, click it and it would go to like, let's say, an AutoCAD drawing or Microsoft Word specification or something like that. Well, what happened was my friends at IBM, after I quote unquote retired and went to work in the real world. They said listen, why don't you tell net, which was a function of the internet back then, over to the server and download this thing called mosaic at the University of Illinois company? I did and I said what is this thing? And he said listen, you also have to go to Australia and download this thing called a windsock what? And suddenly when I put the two together I had a graphic user interface and a browser and I dropped Lotus Notes two weeks later because it was a thing called hyperlinks that were the dock link of Lotus Notes and we were a web based organization in the beginning part of 1994.

Speaker 2: 5:41

So way early on, because the internet back then was AOL on CompuServe. But I saw something here because I was using it in the field and I'm like there's a lot here. So I wanted to write a book about it and John Wiley and Sons turned me down because I said I just want to write a book, I want to have a companion website to keep it updated because things are changing so quick. So if I want to write a book on the internet, I want it on the internet. And they said no, and I was complaining at a trade show, at a private dinner, and I was sitting next to this guy and we got along. I didn't know what he did. He was a publisher. He ran RS Means Construction Cost publications. He said I'll publish a book and everything took off from there. What happened then and this actually ties into you know where we are today with the things like Metaverse and digital twins and BIM was extraordinary, because I got on this public speaking circuit to describe what the internet was to the industry worldwide and because of that I then had a book right which was called cyber places the internet guide for our industry Pretty thick.

Speaker 2: 6:47

But I then started to take a lot of what the world was giving me. At the time there was a lot of these things called dot coms, which was pretty cool, except that this one group came over to me and they were a desktop based algorithm. That was what they called 3D parametric CAD and I went what the hell is this? And they said listen, we have no money. I'm like great. And they said we can give you equity. So I said all right, and what we did was it was called Charles River Software and I went out and, on behalf of the sales team, I was like this special agent you know this advisor that would go into my friends. That were all the CIOs and CTOs of all the major architectural engineering firms in the country and I pleaded with them just try it, one seat right. But we made enough money about $800,000, where Autodesk got so scared of us that we renamed our technology Revit and we were bought for $133 million. That was a good day, a really good day. But what happened was when we were then involved with the creation of Building Information Modeling.

Speaker 2: 7:52

At the same time, I wanted to showcase it, meaning that it isn't just a production tool. I wanted to show that this thing had a digital twin type of feel to it Because we were using it for marketing. We're using it for fly throughs, for sales, all these different things around the world. But my favorite project was in 1996, we were advisors to a group called Screenpoint in San Francisco and they were advisors to a group called Planet Nine. Planet Nine had a contract with the San Francisco Giants baseball team to take the new model of their new downtown stadium after moving from Candlestick Park and they wanted to showcase it to different stakeholders the mayor, city council, things like this, and they didn't want to buy an expensive piece of engineering software just to view the model.

Speaker 2: 8:41

So I knew a guy down in Silicon Valley named Tony Parisi and he knew some people and we put our heads together with a brand new type of markup language, because up until then HTML was the 2D way of doing graphics in a browser. He figured out 3D and he called it VRML virtual reality markup language and I decided in my book I think we should talk about this because we're able now to take a browser and actually showcase what this new world could look like that we called the metaverse 1996. So when I start seeing people like Mark Zuckerberg and others saying, hey, you know, we're going to create the metaverse, it's like why don't you take a look at my book? Because we wrote the book on this stuff and what you're going to hear are stories like this, and that's that's the majority of the background, because through that we were able to sell Revit. We were able to sell a lot of copies of the book. That not that authors make money on the book they don't but it's getting the word out about this 3D graphic communication way of how now, as an architect, I can. I can have a better way of of detailing what I want to the constructors, both the general contractor and the subcontractors, in a more meaningful way.

Speaker 2: 9:52

So that led us to taking a web based approach to doing some project management. So we created this tool called buzz saw that got bought by Odadesk. Then, with you know, having two successes with major venture capitalists out of Silicon Valley on Sandhill Road, they introduced us to another group that was doing this thing for facility management in Las Vegas for a brand new resort called the Rio Suites, and they were complaining about how, with facility management, they were spending a lot of money and redundancy on linens and paper goods and things like that. So we created tri rega, which was bought by IBM for close to half a billion dollars. So I'm thinking I'm working on water like I'm an architect that makes money. That's impossible, right. And suddenly now we're in this world of half tech. But I really wanted to still have my feet back on the ground in this in the field, because I've been getting too many requests for these cool tools, but they were unproven. So I was introduced by a bunch of different VCs to a bunch of people. One of them is a guy named Remy Arnaud who's still my friend today.

Speaker 2: 11:00

We put our heads together and he became my CTO because he was upset with Google, because he was the creator of Google Earth, right and he and the development was actually a roll up by Google. It was a group called Intrinsic, which then was rolled up into Keyhole, which became Google Earth, and he was frustrated saying that you know, these images are dumb. You have to attach data to them, like Street View and all these other things, to actually make it worth anything. But wouldn't be interesting if we could actually have the data drive, the geometry? So we created our own gaming engine. We put things like BIM different forms of BIM into this gaming engine and we created this viewer within the browser that allowed us not just to take a look at one building, but maybe a neighborhood, maybe a district or an entire city.

Speaker 2: 11:51

Ibm saw this and they wanted to buy it and we went through a process of being introduced to leadership in China that was going through this thing called the revitalization of urban environments. Ibm had coined this marketing thing called the Smarter Planets, smarter Cities, smarter Building Program and I said, well, isn't this interesting because I can take a look at an entire city through a browser, and that's where the term smart cities came from. So it was through IBM's marketing and our implementation on a massive scale in China, where we were doing tens of millions of square kilometers worth of build out both infrastructure and, more importantly, how do you start to talk to people? In other words, what do the people want? You just don't build a city and people go there because it's built. You have to start to take a look at it from the humanistic standpoint. So from there, I decided not to sell my software and TDG became a real estate development company.

Speaker 2: 12:51

Fast forward to today, we're now considered the world leader when it comes to the humanistic side. That takes into account the sustainability of both an economy, the sustainability of community and the sustainability of the environment. So in a few weeks I'm headed to Dubai to be a speaker at COP28 to start to describe how the built environment is not just about putting carbon out there. That's not our job. But there are people out there that are taking a very strong look at large projects like my project in Saudi Arabia called Niyam the world's largest project and being able to at least start the process of thinking through our processes. And how did tools like the Digital Twins and BIM start to be valued beyond just being construction documents, that they can actually be simulations and start rethinking how we build things so that we are lowering carbon footprints and we are doing the right thing. So that's a little bit of a background mind. I know I went a little over there, but by 30 second elevator speech, I'm a New Yorker, that's Irish. I can't help myself.

Speaker 1: 13:55

That's awesome, Paul. Well, thank you so much for that background. I'm extremely honored to be speaking with you, considering and to use the word architect on another layer, to for you to be the architect of multiple of these different technologies and digital transformations that the world has undergone over the last 30 years and to document and record your knowledge and share. That is just an outstanding accomplishment and really respect and treasure what you've been able to do with this industry.

Speaker 2: 14:30

Well, thank you, and with that, I think that I'll just need to take a break here.

Speaker 1: 14:37

Welcome back to Future Construct. I'm Mark Oden, the guest host. I'm also here with Paul Doherty, who just introduced a little bit of his background and how he ended up founding the Digital Group and TDG. We'd love to hear more, paul, after your founding of TDG. Where did that take you and what do you see in current technology and what do you see for the future in technology? Well, thanks for that.

Speaker 2: 14:59

Mark, when we were going through this process sometimes there's that phrase you got to stop and smell the roses every once in a while, because I mean, as you know, through digital transformation, the work that you guys do, you're running and gunning right, because there's always new things that come in, and what does that mean? How does that provide value, not just to your customers, but also then, how do you raise the industry right when we know where the pain points are? But the problem has been that we've never really gotten into a movement. People talk about community all the time, but communities are communities. Movements move, and what I saw just about 10 years ago was I needed to repatriate myself.

Speaker 2: 15:45

I was living in China. I had some great success there. I lived in India for a bit, moved down to Australia and New Zealand, and it was time to come home because I needed to really take all that great stuff that we were doing overseas not just with the technology, but also with supply chains right. We were able to take American goods, products and services under the watchful eye of the Department of Commerce and see how these innovations would thrive or fail in foreign projects. One really good thing about China is that if it went sideways. There's no lawyers we're pretty good, right. But what was cool was we called it the boomerang program, in that innovations in water, innovations in energy, education, healthcare, all these things that make up an urban environment now have a place to have a sandbox and start to grow. So I wanted to bring it back to the US only because a lot of the boomerangs they were not really being positioned properly in this term of smart cities, because smart cities, people, it's a big elephant. Some people are touching the trunk and they're like this is a smart city. It's like me, I'm touching the butt, you know. That's why I call smart cities, but it really is about human centric and data driven environments and that's where the promise is, because when you think like that, it's called a systems approach, meaning that from Leonardo da Vinci I was going to say Leonardo da Caprio, leonardo da Vinci, he had a great quote saying that everything is connected to everything. You just have to see it Right. So I'm still learning how to see how all of this stuff intertwines.

Speaker 2: 17:18

Where you know, when we deal with projects. I was on a team as a subject matter expert with McKinsey and company that had this project in Riyadh to reposition the entire country of Saudi Arabia. So I was part of the team that created Vision 2030. It's being used to this day and I was responsible for being on the team that was describing the city of the future. It's now called Neon. It's the world's largest project and I'm pleased with how much they're adhering to what that overall conceptual plan is. They have a couple of things where you know I may not agree with it, but the bottom line is they're doing it Right.

Speaker 2: 17:58

So when you get into that type of responsibility, it really comes into, you know, the world of showing your best and I think that's one big message. I'd love your audience to know that don't be afraid, because we got one shot at this Right and you may fail, but with failure there's always learning, and that's what I find about the tech community and the tech movement within the AEC market right now. There's so many smart kids that are coming in that have different types of skill sets from the you know from my generation and they're pushing the envelope, which is what I love. You know where the monolithic world of you know you must buy from this publisher and it's this type of license and that's it. That's kind of going out the door, which I love. I love.

Speaker 2: 18:44

I love these startup type of things because they're creating gems. The key is, how do you create these gems and string them together so it becomes a beautiful necklace? And that's where we come in. We have been very, very fortunate in life. I am called the walking living version of forest gump because there's certain things that I do and I get introduced to that the normal person should never do it, but I'm into. I just I'm very lucky, okay, but the energy I think of why we do things is really based upon higher level of visions, such as impact. So one of the things that allows us to do this large scale work is that I'm in with the financial industry, have gained their trust over the years. So that 10 years ago approach where we started this conversation, imagine 10 years of success with payback, except that it's not under normal financial conditions.

Speaker 2: 19:37

With impact investing, you're either impacting an individual, a couple of family, a neighborhood, a district, a community, a society and the environment, and it's in that pecking order that we take a very healthy responsibility about learning how to design properly, because right now, with the advent of things like autonomous vehicles right and that certain jurisdictions now are looking at them as being not just for individuals, but as part of a public transportation system. Well, that does one big thing you no longer need a street grid. Now you can place buildings where they're supposed to be, on that position on planet Earth. And maybe it's about making buildings closer to each other in one part of the city because they know there's a wind event that happens going from the sea back up into the mountains. And when you create that funnel, we're able to put different types of capturing mechanisms, like tree bill electric, which is a friction type of thing, on the outside of the building, which generates power, right. So we're thinking through things where it's not about a solar panel, it's not about a windmill, you know, type of thing. It's not about that anymore. We don't know, we don't need to be discreet, we need to be integrated, and that's really where the power.

Speaker 2: 20:54

I think of the technologies that we're seeing, specifically things like the digital twin, and when you put it on to a gaming engine, suddenly we have a new tool, because the lifecycle of them is really what's important, right? It's always been seen as the 3D CAD, right, and it's been very frustrating, quite frankly, for the majority of people. The nomenclature is different. Someone coined the term families, like what? But we've had to deal with all of that. But I think what I'm seeing is light at the end of the tunnel, because when you can emancipate that 3D construction document and then put it onto other tools like gaming engines, now all of a sudden, we have this emancipation providing extra value into facilities management operations, into city management, into utility management, in ways like we haven't even thought of yet. So when I start to see these geometries moving, suddenly, I start to see all the different technologies out there that are being used in the financial sector, in supply chains and all this. I'm going wait a second. If we've created a beautiful body, right now BIM is a mannequin, but if we start putting tools in behind it, we're now creating vessels, we're creating organs that are going to be living within this way of communicating better, which is in 3D. So when I take it as an example, with blockchain, we now have a number of different projects that we can point to that are using what's called smart contracts.

Speaker 2: 22:27

The smart contracts are not just like PDFs that everyone agrees. In those digital signatures, the actual agreement is written into the code so that the data becomes immutable. Now all of a sudden we got something, because our entire industry is based on contracts. That's why they're called general contractors. So when we have that opportunity to start to say I trust this piece of data, I trust that piece of data, we can have a transaction. Now all of a sudden we've finally hit the truth button, because the big problem in every industry, but particularly in ours, is no one really trusts where that comes from. Sometimes we're building on a house of cards just because people say it's something.

Speaker 2: 23:07

A reference is a record document. Record documents are supposed to be handed off to the owner so the facility manager knows where stuff is. There's never been a perfect set of construction documents up until now. The VAV box up in the plenum and it's got to be repaired. I can't tell you how many facility managers send their crew out there. The guy goes up on the ladder and goes there's no VAV box. They don't trust what's in there. But now with smart contracts, we have a verification system that these people agreed. We know where it's at. You put smart contracts now into the flow of BIM.

Speaker 2: 23:39

Now things get very interesting, because you can have a schedule that is now tied to work and that work can be then taken with things like GPS and other types of geolocation devices that we require in our jobs. Now, every piece of equipment, material, appliance that comes onto our site, the manufacturer has to say I'm a GM refrigerator, I'm a GAF roof product and it's costly, just saying that we tune that and we understand where everything is on the site. Number one. Number two we can geolocate when those things are put into place but say it's a trust. The trust is telling us because the model is constantly monitoring that the BIM is actually monitoring that this thing is now put in place. We then give 24 hours for the site superintendent to go out to see was it put in place in a quality manner. He hits a button and payment is made right away.

Speaker 2: 24:38

Now, all of a sudden, we have workflow. Everything's connected to everything and guess what we're getting at the end of the day? A digital asset that's accurate. We're no longer asking someone around at the field going did they install the light switch in the proper place? We know where everything's located because in real time, we're capturing the play by play of the installation of the building and at the end, we know exactly where everything is. These are just simple examples of when you put that into a world that you can have.

Speaker 2: 25:09

In the same way that the San Francisco Giants do not want to have a proprietary piece of software just to show their 3D model their baseball stadium and we used a browser to do it we're now, 35 years later, in the same place. We're no longer worried about 3D BIM when you put it onto that gaming engine. You're now creating a virtual world, and that virtual world resides in this place called the Metaverse. The Metaverse doesn't exist yet. It's starting.

Speaker 2: 25:36

But if you consider that outer space is there, but it's not there, there you can't touch it. There's nothing physical about it, but you know it's outer space, that's the Metaverse. Once people understand that, that you have to have galaxies and solar systems and planets that then give a human being the idea that there is places to go. That's exactly where we're at at this point in the Metaverse, and that means that digital twins are a mirror of reality. Virtual worlds reside in the Metaverse and it's a better communications device Once you stick things like Web3 technologies, things like AI, smart contracts, blockchain into the mix. So this is the way that we're seeing the future of construction and we're doing it.

Speaker 1: 26:37

That's fantastic. Thank you, paul, for the overview and that actually takes us into. You shared with us earlier your second book and I understand that you're publishing your ninth book called Unlocking the Metaverse a Guide for the Built Environment. Would you share with the audience a high-level sneak peek into the book?

Speaker 2: 26:52

Actually, this past April we talked about Smart Cities and it's up on Amazon right now. It's doing very well and again it's to give the message out there. This book gave the opening for the Unlocking the Metaverse book. It's published by John Wiley Sons, the famous publishing house in New York. It is available up on Amazon. It's rated number one new release, which is really cool, but it'll be available on December 12th, so just a little over a month away.

Speaker 2: 27:20

The book itself is meant to provide a strategic guide for the future of our built environment, meaning that descriptions, like I just said, that one use case of how all these things come together is also giving life to different types of valuations. Here's a for instance. We have at the moment going up in Qingdao, china, a virtual reality theme park, and that virtual reality theme park is going to be online in about two more quarters, so I would say by June of next year. The theme park is not meant to open up until June of 2025. So what we're doing is we're taking construction documents, we're putting it on to a gaming engine and now we're creating rules about how you can go visit the latest games from Epic Games, from groups like Tencent, who are in charge of the League of Legends gaming, activision, blizzard All these different groups almost have pavilions physically that are going to be there. But we're going to be there. But we're opening it up a year ahead of time and charging people certain premiums that to play the latest game of Fortnite, do this, do that, and the idea is that we're going to be generating so much revenue online before the physical place opens up that it will reduce our construction loan by 8% on a $1.6 billion build out. That's huge. Now we're starting to show best practices about this is what it means. This is what it means for practicality and also how you build community.

Speaker 2: 28:57

So I'm learning a lot from my son. He's 13, and there's a pecking order. When he grew up, it was all about Minecraft. Then he went to Roblox. Now he's into Fortnite and that pecking order.

Speaker 2: 29:08

I'm asking questions all the time because he's the native with his friends. They are seamless about their relationship as friends. If they're digital or they're physical, they're still the same people. But because of that, we have to learn as the immigrants. How does that work? Because all of the work that we're doing right now is not meant for the right now. It's meant for the generations coming up, and then also for a big thing in our industry is how do we start to attract the younger generation into the industry? Because in the old days it was the place where guidance counselors in high schools and stuff were like, listen, you're not going to cut it in college, and they dumped people into the construction industry become a plumber, become a man and it was always kind of looked down upon.

Speaker 2: 29:54

But, mark, we're in a world right now where we're worried about the existence of human race. A lot more people are more keen about that, climate change, all this other stuff. There's only three things that the human race needs for existence and that's food, water and shelter. We have a very noble cause Everyone listening to this podcast. You have a noble cause that you should wake up every day with your head held high Because we are helping protect the human existence on this planet with the work that we do. No matter if you're a plumber, soul practitioner, architect, you are a corporate leader in our industry. You should all hold your heads up high. And that's really where we're starting to come from, where, when we deal with our customers and those customers are in the tens of millions, because those customers are citizens of the places that we design, which means that we have to have a higher calling, a higher idea about why we do what we do.

Speaker 2: 30:53

One thing is to look at the nobility of what we do.

Speaker 2: 30:56

Another way of looking at it is our industry has been famous for years of taking a scarcity mindset, meaning that there's a finite amount of pie and I want to take as much pie as I can, and it's almost like a doggy dog world.

Speaker 2: 31:10

We're coming at it differently and I really enjoy when people get it all over the world when they work on a project in Saudi or in China or in Australia and they're like we've been waiting for this and it's called abundance. If you come from a mindset of abundance, things start to get easier because we now have the technologies that can measure success. Up until now, it's always been well. We'll see the result at the end. And did we make money? Did we do it on time? I think there's going to be more micro metrics about how we start to improve and learn and have these communications with each other. So I'm really, really pleased to be on this podcast, particularly because of the work that you guys do as a core business. You guys are enablers, and having that type of mindset, I think, can change the world.

Speaker 1: 31:54

Well, thank you for your kind words, paul. We'd love to, as we wrap up the show, ask you the final question of the show and as a tradition of future Constructor podcast if you could project yourself out 25 years and wanted to have any device, a technology that would benefit you personally, what would it be and what would it do?

Speaker 2: 32:16

I think that when we take a look at the constructed futures of everything that we are doing now, the ultimate goal and it's something that I sold to the Chinese government and it's about capturing the essence of people I don't know if this kind of sounds like a dark mirror episode, but hear me out on this With the use of AI, not the chatbot stuff, that's easy, the GPT. Chatgpt that's like 1.0. It's not that difficult. It's magical in certain places, but chatbots are not the end, all but agents are.

Speaker 2: 32:58

Back in 2017, when we pitched the idea of this theme park in China, I was meeting with a whole bunch of Chinese party leaders and they wanted to know this pitch from this American and I started talking and I was hosted by Huawei, by the way, the big tech company over there, and it was a joint presentation and they wanted to know what was the ultimate goal and the best value of immersive technologies like VR and augmented technologies like AR, and I said death. And they were taken aback. They said well, what do you mean? And I said, after I'm gone physically, what the promise is is that there would be an essence of learned machine learning that would know my mannerisms, know what I was going to say, sort of get into that intelligence agent way of getting the nomenclature in place, the repeatability and understanding how well that works, so that maybe my great grandson could actually have a person that he can have a conversation with, that's trusted. And I said for all of you you're in the Chinese Communist Party, there's a ladder system, you can't trust each other A lot of you can't have friends. But what would be really interesting is to recreate Chairman Mao and you could ask what would Mao do? So they were blown away. They signed off on it immediately.

Speaker 2: 34:18

And that's really where, in 25 years, I think that we're going to be able to capture certain essence so that not from a standpoint of ego that I want to live forever no, not that. But I think sometimes in the generational handoffs there are certain things that have never been said that you wish you had that extra moment to be able to say to your son, to your grandson, great grandson, whoever. Wouldn't it be interesting to have, even just even if it's one way in 25 years and in 100 years it becomes two way, where we can actually build upon the shoulders of giants and be able to ask those questions so that it helps the human condition, so it helps mental health, so it helps these things. So that's kind of a vision about where I'd love to see things go. It's not quite as egotistical as Walt Disney trying to be frozen forever and he's going to wake up in the future.

Speaker 2: 35:09

I think. Good luck with that. I'm going to be gone, but the idea is and I think visions, things like that. I think people can either take it or leave it, but the bottom line is at least explore it, because I think there's a lot of smart people out there that I wish I could go back in time and be able to plug in and get that instinctual knowledge, just so I didn't have to make it so hard and pushing a boulder up the hill. So yeah, that's kind of where I'm seeing where tech can go that can help the human condition.

Speaker 1: 35:37

That's an incredible vision, paul, and I'm consistently impressed with your impact, your positive impact society on a global level. It's an outstanding career that you've had and, again, I'm honored that you would share this space with us today and thank you so much for your time.

Speaker 2: 35:54

Mark just continued success with the podcast of Huesh Construct and very, very much wish you great success with them. Designs.

Speaker 1: 36:02

Thank you very much, Paul.