Ep 186 - Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work with Benjamin Pring

Decoding the AI Revolution: Insights from Leading Futurist Ben Pring
In this episode, we're excited to speak with acclaimed IT futurist Ben Pring about the rise of artificial intelligence and its impacts on business, technology, and society. Ben provides unique perspectives on:
👉How long it may take for AI to fully permeate society, drawing parallels to the evolution of cloud computing
👉The importance of human creativity, curiosity and judgement even in an AI-driven world
👉Practical ways organizations can start using AI to enhance work rather than replace workers
👉Why AI is a generational opportunity for younger professionals to ride the wave

Ben’s uncanny ability to anticipate technological change makes this a compelling listen for anyone interested in thriving in our increasingly intelligent machine world.

Connect with Benjamin thru the social link below and learn more about his business:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpring/

Unlock 3+1 degrees of freedom (time, location, financial + health) with our 5-Point Blueprint! https://elevateequity.org/podcastgift

If you really enjoyed this content and are looking for more, you can continue to learn more about us in several different places for free!

• on our website for blogs & other podcast interviews! elevateequity.org
• our YouTube channel! youtube.com/channel/derekclifford
• our book/audiobook! amazon.com/dp/ebook

If you'd like to have a FREE copy of our 7 Ways Commercial Real Estate Syndications Protect and Build Wealth, simply click the link below. We are here and vested in your long-term success! elevateequity.org/7waysEbook

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the three degrees of freedom podcast, where we explore lifestyle engineering with our expert guests to bring you in alignment with your own three degrees of freedom, location, time, and financial independence.

Derek: 0:14

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the show today. We are excited to welcome Mr. Ben Pring to the show. He's an acclaimed it futurist and thought leader. And Ben analyzes emerging trends in business and technology from cloud computing to AI, which is a hot topic. These days, his insights on automation and the future of work have been featured in top publications like the Harvard business review and the financial times he's named a leading management thinker by thinkers 50 and Ben excels at seeing around corners. Whether illuminating how digital is changing organizations and, or in award winning books, like what to do when machines do everything or advising global forums, like the Bilderberg, his uncanny ability to decode the next big thing makes him a sought after voice on navigating the opportunities and challenges ahead, Ben, hopefully that was a good enough intro for you. How is it? How are

Ben: 1:09

you today? I'm good. Thank you, Derek. How you doing?

Derek: 1:13

Very good. Very good. It's good to have you on the show today, sir. So As I mentioned to you right before we hit the record button There's always one question that we like to ask every one of our guests before we get going And that is which of the three degrees of freedom of location time and financial? Do you feel that you're the strongest in right now? And which one do you want to develop further?

Ben: 1:32

Yeah, it's a great question the three legs of that freedom still well, this is apropos in a way, because I've just broken away from corporate life to be in essence a sort of freelance, independent, a free radical in a way driven by that kind of three legged stool that you set up there, time, money, location I suppose time in a way is the freedom that I've sought by recently leaving Gartner where I've been for a couple of years in a second kind of go round there. And setting up my own shingle as a independent voice. Yeah, I think time is probably the value of time is probably a big part of that drive to try and being a free radical to be in charge of one's own kind of destiny rather than tied to the sort of corporate email. Probably of the three I broke away from a physical location 20 plus years ago, really. I've been working remotely from home long before the the future of work work at home kind of thing in the post COVID era. I had that notion to arbitrage a city salary and a remote location quite a few years ago. And you better not talk about the money side of things but time is certainly a big thing. And I'm already seeing the benefit of that. I've long been a proponent of the notion that you need to a vacuum to be able to. think within, you need a blank slate. And if your diary, if your schedule is back to back on calls all day, talking to clients and in a corporate role, sometimes that's really what gets compressed. And I think ultimately probably to your own personal dissatisfaction and probably not to the benefit of the organization that's paying you to think in the first place.

Derek: 3:15

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And I think we're going to talk about that a little bit more, but I just wanted to underscore once again that every time I talk with someone, the underlying degree of freedom that people feel that they're most attracted to or drawn to is time, because time is that ultimate leveler, right? It's, I don't want to say that it's completely easy to get wealth, right? Or to get financial freedom because it's not, there is definitely some hurdles there and there's things you have to do. But once you figure out the formula and you are able to repeat that and stick with it, it's something that more or less you can copy and paste over and over again. At least that's the way that I understand it and have seen it work. But time freedom is much different in the fact that You do have a finite amount of it, and there are things we can do with our health and some of our life choices that can make it attenuate a little bit more, but time is the ultimate currency, right? I know you wanted to say something about

Ben: 4:10

that. No, I think that's exactly right. I think you put it very well, Derek. And again, I think that was one of the drivers for me when I moved from the UK, from London to the States almost 25 years ago, was I was so tied into a kind of city based commute in London. Whereas when I came to the States and I managed to break away from the city, working remotely, spending a lot of time traveling, but killing that commute, I very much thought that was that time saving was incredibly valuable to me when I had a young family. Being around the family was the time that time was invaluable and then the time to work out the time to think the time not to be on a train or in a car in a commute that was extremely valuable. And I think more and more, as you say, more and more people have appreciated that. I've also observed in, in my. Corporate journey that as you get more senior and as your time becomes more valuable to the corporation, and as your diary is scheduled back to back. In fact, that time that you have for yourself as a person, people throw that time away. They throw, they, they don't value it in the way that you're trying to set up here, which I think is correct. They throw that away. And of course, that's one of the great regrets that many people have when they get to, the end of their journey, their end of their career. Did I really need to, work that Sunday morning shift? Did I really need to stay in the office till 11? Of course, many people get off on that and there's, rewards to that financially. Intellectually in terms of the ladder, but no, I think you're absolutely right. And I think, in fact, looking at a, a lot of the sort of younger generation coming into the workforce, I think they've got a better appreciation of that kind of balance between their own personal time and what that's really worth. And then their commitment to to, to the corporation. I think that's an interesting sea change that's going on at the moment.

Derek: 6:03

Yeah I definitely can feel it because, as I'm talking to you right now, I am just under 40 years old and me and my cohort of millennials is what you'd call them. They were always lambasted by some of the older generations Oh man, these people are lazy or they're looking. It's just a different way of thinking. And then Gen Z, which is behind us is even beyond that. So just out of curiosity, I know that you're looking at what AI is doing and what all of these technologies are doing, but there's also a demographic shift with the culture and the ability for younger people to adopt some of these technologies earlier on. And it's already starting to have an impact on kids and their parents. And, their parents even, the grandparents of the younger generation these days. So the question is. You have this book, What To Do When Machines Do Everything, and I want to try to understand what type of things you discover in that book, or what are some of the common themes that you're seeing for the younger working generations, and what do you think we should be ready for? What's out there for us?

Ben: 7:04

Yeah. No, it's a great question. It's a very interesting way to put it to frame it in that demographic shift context. I think that's very insightful of you to frame it in that way, because there's so much existential angst among the intelligentsia and the sort of talking head community. I've said this for a while. There are so many people forecasting the end of the world. And they typically tend to be people that skew older. And I've long said to them, it's not the end of the world, but it might be the end of your world. Because they're aging out and I've personally, I'm quite a bit older than you, I'm in my early 60s and I've personally been very conscious of not aging out, of not trying to fall, falling into that trap of of seeing all this new technology and these new kind of approaches, these new aesthetic, if you like as a disaster in the end of the world. Because it's not, it's just the world is changing. The world has always changed. Anybody with any familiarity with history at all and, what's come before them can see how different the world was 50 years ago, 100 years ago. There's nothing platonically right about that world. There's nothing platonically right. about the world that's coming. It's just the world is always changing and I think that existential fear that a lot of people have around AI and what it's going to do. I don't think young people, by and large are as freaked out as it, because they're the proverbial, frogs in the boiling pan of water. They've been getting used to this. They're using filters on their phone, all driven by AI. They're using TikTok, all driven by AI. AI is just a tool within that environment. And I think, smart people are going to figure out how to use these tools for their own advantage in the way that somebody my age, figured out how to use the tools available to me. Somebody of your age figured out how to use the tools of of your age. And I think young people Of course, there's challenges. There's a lot of issues in the world just as there's always have been, but I think young people have the means of production to put it in kind of economic theory terms, literally in the palm of their hands now. In a way that previous generations haven't had you don't need a big data center nowadays. You don't need a huge factory to produce anything. It's all here on your phone. It's all here on your computer. And a lot of the technology within that is going to enable young people, a creative imagination, to come up with all sorts of things which will take the world forward and solve a lot of the problems that my generation are going to leave behind. I think to summarize all of that and get back to your kind of key question of what to do when machines do everything, there's a great quote that we that we have in the book which is not our quote, but it's either a journalist called Kevin Kelly, who was the founding editor of Wired Magazine a long time ago. He said this very well, and we reference it in the book, which is that the future of your work, whatever it is you do, is X plus AI. X being what you do. You're a doctor, you're a teacher, you're a politician, you're a podcaster, you're a writer. It's X, that's your thing. Add AI to that and that's how you get to the next performance threshold of what it is you do. And it's a very simple kind of idea, very simple formula. But it's really saying don't fight the technology. Don't think that this is here to destroy you. That's the kind of science fiction trope that's lazy and not really very accurate. But use this technology to, to do the thing that you want to do. If you're a musician, an actor, a filmmaker, a An accountant, a lawyer, whatever it is, use the technology to do that work better. And I think if you do that, young people, people your age there's tremendous opportunity ahead.

Derek: 11:01

Yeah, no I completely agree with you. And I think that you said it very well. I love the X plus AI or the X. Plus whatever it is that you're doing. And the people that are embracing that right now have an unfair advantage over others because it's a very early type of space and we've been talking about this and there's clearly demand. Cause if you watched open AI, when they when they first started, the number of users was crashing the system and Microsoft had to come in with a bailout package to help supplant, supplant the technology and help them with legal and all of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. The scale. And so it's definitely there. And what I hear from this also is that whatever it is that you do as a human being. You're going to use AI to augment what you do, and maybe the output of what you perform is going to take less time, so it's going to be, it's going to lead to more productivity. But, at the same time, is there a point, you think, Ben, that we rely too much on some of these technologies? And if there is some sort of electrical failure or something like this where there's a truly great human crisis, I'm not sure if this is Do you think that we'd be able to lose the ability to, I don't know, take care of ourselves? Is there a danger of being over reliant on this type of technology in your eyes?

Ben: 12:16

Yeah, no, it's a great question and it's something that yeah, it does worry me. It's something that does concern me. We're becoming so reliant on technology particularly in this sort of cloud based model where everything is in the cloud and everything is, your passwords are all remotely on your device and and clearly cyber security continues to be an unfixed problem. We haven't solved cyber security. It's been an issue. As long as anyone can imagine, remember, but it's still a big problem. At the moment, you probably saw last week, there was a story around a CFO a fake CFO requesting a transfer of money within a corporation, and it all went through because. The the deep fake CFO was so good that the kind of the employee went through that process. So that's a real issue. And I've long said that we're building this future of work on very flimsy foundations. I think big corporations, governments need, although they spend quite a bit on cyber security, you'd be surprised how little relative to market capitalization relative their overall technology spending they spend on cyber. So that's that's a goldmine. In fact, relating that answer to the previous question, there's a great quote from a guy called Aaron Levy, who's the CEO of Box, the cloud security cloud storage company. He said a few years ago, if you want a job for the next five years work in tech, but if you wanted a job for life, work in cyber security yeah, I think that's that's a real issue. And of course there are many aspects of this sort of digital world that, again, a sort of alarming and scary. Some of your listeners may be familiar with, the book Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff from Harvard Business School. It's a real kind of critique of the way that our personal data is being monetized by big corporations at the moment. And I personally, again, I've aligned myself with that. thought. Yeah, so there is a, there is clearly a lot of kind of errors for concern, a lot of sort of negative aspects to this. But again, I've always posed this question in the context that, oftentimes the debate is between the utopians. And the dystopians, and now the modern parlance seems to be changing to between the accelerants and the de decelerators, if you if people are familiar with that debate that's going on in Silicon Valley at the moment. But I've always felt that's a kind of false dichotomy in a way, because we all know that in history it was the plague and war. But people fell in love, got drunk, had a good time. So it was bad and good. We all know today there's terrible things happening in the world today. But people fall in love, get drunk, have a good time. So if that's true of the past and the present, why is the future going to be either or? It's going to be both. It's going to be full of terrible things. But people are going to fall in love, get drunk and have a good time. And that's true. And so if you follow that metaphor, that's true in technology is going to begat wonderful things and it's going to begat terrible things. But, c'est la vie.

Derek: 15:29

Yeah. That's what happens because technology it, it's scale. And I remember an old chart in my business school when I was going to business school and there was a chart of the different systems. Historically in human kind, right? And it was a chart like this. I distinctly remember it. And there were like different colored lines. There was a yellow line for government growth, over a period of time. Then there was another line for cultural growth, meaning, number of people impacted and ability is, the ability for people to to. To change who they are to adapt to the times. And then there's economic growth, right? And then there was one curve, there was technological growth, that wasn't a straight line, but it was more like a hockey stick that was going up. And we've already gotten to this point, Ben, I think in my life, where technology is outpacing political systems, it's outpacing monetary systems, it's outpacing everything. And information is everywhere now. And when information is everywhere, it accelerates The ability for people to make decisions quicker. And when we make decisions quicker, the world changes faster. And one thing, I guess where I'm leading to with this is that this is just my basic understanding. I'd love you to jump in and say, if that's not right, but I am in the real estate sector. And what I used to use, I used to work in oil and gas. These two sectors are some of the most oldest and some of the most antiquated things that have not adopted with AI or have not embraced some of this technology. And they're even resistant to go to desktop machines and start doing remote work situations at all in this situation. My thought is because this is a real estate investor show where most of the people that listen to this isn't is real estate. How do you think artificial intelligence is going to help transform the game for real estate investors who want to find properties to buy or looking for or agents, for instance, that are looking, they're buying and selling properties more towards the investors, though, is what

Ben: 17:27

we're looking at. Obviously this is a, as I'm sure most of your guests and most of your audience talk about and think about this is clearly a tough time for commercial real estate. This whole work from home revolution has really changed the underlying fundamental, fundamentals of the business. And I think it's going to take, frankly, quite a bit of time for that to work its way out for valuations to reset, perhaps to actual physical spaces to be repurposed. So it's a tricky one. And I think that's probably a medium term. Dynamic. It's not going to be fixed in the next year or two. It's going to take take quite a long period of time. Again, I'm not one of those that think that the office is dead. I'm not one of those that thinks that the sort of central business district is dead. I do think there's clearly a reconfiguration of what that physical space looks like, how we use it. Again, I've long thought that the office is really for three things. The physical office, if you like, is for three things. It's it's a showroom, if you like. It's, where you bring your clients to impress them. It's an R& D facility. It's where people come together to cook the secret sauce of whatever it is you do. And then it's a clubhouse. It's a social space. And my observation, prior to Covid was that most offices in most kind of western business areas, London, New York wherever the office wa was not really optimized for any one of those three things. It was optimized for a sort of mishmash of that. It wasn't really very impressive for the client. It wasn't really a very nice space for people to be, and it wasn't really a very nice sort of social space to hang out in, and I think what the reconfiguration of the office in the next few years may be is to be much more precise in because it might not be in one physical office. You might have a. A, a small showroom, you might have a kind of r and d space out in the suburbs. You might have a party space, a social space where people would come together in a kind of cool part of town. So I think that reconfiguration is gonna take a long time. But in terms of how AI can help I think one of the obvious things to talk about, this week, the week after the Apple vr, I was just about to mention that. Yeah. Lenses to mention. People are talking about the Yes. The potential for that. To do physical virtual walkthroughs, physical space, to be able to design in the VR environment. I think there's a huge potential there, and I think that's gonna Clearly show up in commercial real estate. It'll probably show up in high end residential initially and then probably permeate down into sort of the more of the high end mid market, but no, that's going to be huge. And clearly already, there's quite a lot of that going on in terms of virtual representations of physical spaces, but that 2D experience, that flat experience you have on a computer when you walk through an office or a home, obviously done. In a completely immersed 3D environment, that could be huge and then think about that space again, I touched on this earlier when I talked about the sort of belief in the need for a vacuum to think you need time, space to think about what that vacuum of VR is going to create, that's a new kind of environment that the human imagination is going to fill, think about the overlay of information of all sorts of things, music, vibe one day we'll be buying houses in that kind of environment. Oh yeah. Selling, selling, real estate in those sorts of environments. So yeah, that's again, that's science fiction as of now, but I think it's going to be, reality sooner perhaps than some people imagine. Yeah.

Derek: 21:10

Like some of the things that I've been seeing some ideas out there is like, why even Go on vacation to Italy or go anywhere because you can sit in. And another reason, another thing I wanted to point out here, and I'm curious your thought on it is that obviously malls across the United States have been doing poorly because mainly, partly because of Amazon and because the ability to buy things online. So now you don't have to go to a physical mall. You have a virtual mall where you

Ben: 21:36

can buy stuff, right? Yeah, no, that's gonna be huge. And I think I still think there will be a significant role for the physical in person experience, both in tourism, in vacations and in retail as well. In fact, I think you could draw a parallel. Between this moment and the emergence of TV, mass market TV because, again, when TV started becoming more mass market, more people had TVs all of the big sports leagues around the world were very worried that if the games on the TV, nobody's going to come to the stadium to see the games. But if you fast forward 50 years and what actually happened was seeing the game on TV made you want to go to the game Increase the desire to be there in person and I think the same sort of You know surprise might happen in VR you might go to Florence VR Or you might go to the mall in VR but as, as long as that experience is cool and you really want to do it, then you're going to want to go there physically in the real world as well. I think the problem, for many of the malls, the collapsing malls in America is just those physical experiences have degraded so much over the last generation or two. Because. Again, there's been a short termism in terms of the investment profile for lots of the supermarkets, the retailers that, again, I've said this, there's a paradox or a contrast you can see if you go into, a local pharmacy and you walk up and down the aisles and you don't know what you're looking for something you don't know where it is. If you try and find somebody in that store to ask, good luck to you. There's nobody there. If you go into an Apple store you're overwhelmed by how many people are working there in the Apple store. And the reason for that is because the pharmacy didn't automate away. the elements of the transaction or the experience that they could and so they relied on people to do things that computers and automation could do much better and so if you go to an apple store all the transactional elements of it have been automated away you just have a human experience and it's a cool experience whereas if you go into that pharmacy You're not having a human experience because the people there are basically doing robotic work, acting as machines on DSO. I think within that sort of compare and contrast again is a story about the future. Automate away. The boring robotic elements where people are just bad robots and allow people to be people, good humans, giving people good human experiences. And that's the way I imagine a VR environment and an IRL environment ultimately continue to coexist.

Derek: 24:39

That's amazing. Just a small story here. When my wife and I, we went to Lisbon to do some, to kick off some of our digital nomadism back a couple of years ago and COVID, Japan was closed. So we decided to go to Europe. And when we went to Europe. There was we had never, I had never seen it before because we had never been to McDonald's. Like we usually never go there. But in, yeah, it's different in Europe and we were just curious like what the experience was like in Europe and so we

Ben: 25:04

went It's so much more automated there. Yes. Yeah.

Derek: 25:06

Yeah, that's exactly, so we went up there, there was like screens. There was like, there was really nice screens. It was clean and taken care of. And it smelled nice. Like it didn't smell like, someone had dropped a patty and let it rot on the floor like it does in the United States. Yeah. And so then when I came back to the U S I noticed the same thing there. And so I'm starting to see some of that there

Ben: 25:24

now. That's right. McDonald's and others are bringing that into the States, but certainly in Europe, that's, and in Japan, you mentioned Japan, that's been quite common for quite a while. The company that's doing best here, and again, there's a bridge between Japan and the U. S., is Uniqlo. people go into Uniqlo where, you basically pick out your shirt and your pants or whatever you're gonna buy, put them in a little basket and then you go to the checkout and you put the basket in a little reader and there's no human interaction involved. And I asked some of the people working there, do you feel put out? Do you feel that you're your job's been destroyed by this. And they didn't feel that at all. They didn't care that the transactional elements of it was taken away from them because it actually allowed them to deal with people, talk to people more. It made their jobs better.

Derek: 26:15

Yeah, absolutely. It's so great. Now this is a good segue into kind of. The future, obviously, we've been talking about the present and some of the things and I still want to talk a little bit about the past. I've got two more questions for you. But this first one is, what do you think gives you optimism about human potential in this age of intelligent machines that Quite frankly will become more intelligent than us, and they're already getting to that point. What's there to look forward to?? Ben: So much. I, one of my favorite quotes people will know the painter, the Spanish painter, Pablo Picasso. In 1967, he said Computers are useless. They only give us answers. And I think if you fast forward 50 years plus computers are a lot more powerful than they were in Picasso's day, but they're still useless because. We ask the questions. And I think as long as we ask the questions, then these things are just our tools. They're just here to help us. And the great genius of people, and it's been true for however many years we've been on this earth. And I think it's, I think it's true for the in Discernment Future is that every answer that's given to you by a teacher, by a podcaster, by a computer, just generates the next question. And that ability to ask the next question, that's really the route to commercial security to personal happiness, fulfillment. It's that ability to keep on asking questions. Curiosity, I think, is the fundamental, unquenchable, unfillable sort of aspect of humanity. That gives me hope because we'll always continue to want to know what's around the riverbend and even these incredible, powerful tools can give us, answers in a way that Picasso could never have imagined. I think I'm pretty convinced, pretty confident that humans will begin, will continue to be able to answer. Ask those questions that that give them, their route forward. Yeah, I love it. I think that it's maybe is the right way to say it is that the humans are supplying the art. It's the creativity and it's the humanism, right? That, and the machines are just executing on that, or is

Ben: 28:39

that, is that accurate? There's a great, if the musician producer music producer, Brian Eno, who worked with U2 and Coldplay and a bunch of other people. There's a lovely thing he said a few years ago, is that the the real impact of computer sequences in music is that they replace skill with judgment. And think about that for a moment. What he's saying is that, prior to computers, you'd have to learn to play the piano, and that would take you, 15 years. Tremendous skill to be able to do that, but now that's all just on a computer. But what now you have, the issue is if you go on to garage band or you go on to a pro tools or in the music creation devices, you've got so many choices, so many options, but your contribution, your real value add as the human in that environment is saying that's good and that's not good. And I like that. And that doesn't work. And I want those two things together, that judgment. I think that's again, judgment plus curiosity. That's the human quality. Even as these tools get more and more important, I think that's really what the premium, the valuation, the monetization for humans is. I don't really, the second music becomes exclusively produced by an ai. I think the value of that music will be, nothing, it'll be valueless. And I think the again the sort of paradox in all of this is that actually the value of the human. The monetization potential for the human and that very AI infused environment is actually higher. Because, you can go to a million elevators today and there's Muzak there. But that Muzak's worth very little, Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift is worth a fortune. That's the way I think about it. I

Derek: 30:30

love it. I love it. Man, this is so good. I have to add one more question before we start to head into the final part of the show, but I'm going to ask you the second to last question now, which is lessons from history, because obviously you've been doing this for quite some time you've had a lot of experience in these cycles because there's been, Rapid technological change since the 90s, right? And even before that, there's been a lot of change that just wasn't, openly visible. Yeah. Can you what perspective can history provide? Looking backward on navigating the current shifts that we're seeing going forward. You touched on television. Yeah, and promote work what type of things do you think we can infer going about the future?

Ben: 31:09

No, it's a great question Derek and I think that's again a very good way to think about the future is to map it to history and so things have happened before and I think in tech in This whole AI discussion, there is a very good historical model that we can apply, which is actually very relatively recent. I was the first technology analyst to write about what we now know as cloud computing back in 1997. The language was slightly different. People called these cloud and software as a service different things. But I started picking up on this and writing about this in Gartner in 97. And if you think about 97 to 2000, what we 2004 now, that's 20 what, 25, 26 years. Oh my gosh. Unbelievable. No, it's more than that. It's 20, 27 years now. But if you think about. Cloud in 1997 was this crazy idea, it was a, fringe idea, it was the complete antithesis of the way that computing was done then, and for many years it was ridiculed, and people thought it was rubbish, and I used to talk about cloud computing, and people would say, what are you smoking, and, walk the other way. And slowly the technology matured the technology changed and got better. The economics of it changed, got better. And, fast forward to today. The cloud is, is everywhere, it runs everything and the companies that really got behind that, Microsoft and Amazon, et cetera, et cetera, the biggest companies in the world, but the people might be familiar with the Gartner hype cycle, this notion that we get very excited and then we go off it and it goes down again, interest goes down and then slowly it becomes more and more mature. And it enters the era of Gartner called the plateau of productivity when it becomes a real thing, a real tool that people can use. And I think that model, which took sort of 25 years in with the cloud probably by about year 12, year 15, it was apparent this was going to happen. It wasn't just an idea that was going to be consigned to history was going to happen, but that way. 25 years really took to unfold from a tiny little kind of seed, tiny little acorn to being a huge oak tree. I think that wave, that curve is exactly what's going to happen with AI as well. And we're at the moment in this sort of Again, peak of inflated expectation has gone. He's using the phrase. We're all jazzed up about it. As you mentioned, the GPT 4 and GPT 3. 5 and chat GPT, that kind of everybody got everybody's attention and everybody's been excited about it. We're probably going to have a bit of a backlash against that in the next year or two. Where some of that initial hype doesn't play out, but then it's going to rise and I'm going to be completely foundational to the next stage of evolution of tech and business and of our world. And but I, I think a lot of people probably don't appreciate fully. from a time perspective, how long that's going to take. I think it's not going to be 25 years. It's going to happen more quickly because to your earlier point, technology compounds and we get into this hockey stick exponential curve. So I think it's arguable. It happens more quickly, but it doesn't happen overnight. It's not a black or white thing. And again, I think for the younger folks, potentially listening to this or even somebody in. Mid career, you have more time than you think, this isn't like something you've got to crack tomorrow morning or next quarter. But at the same time, if you think this is something, Oh, we can get to this next year or the year after, and we can be a fast follower and we can ignore it for the moment. That's a mistake as well. It's a judicious balance between realizing. This is going to take a while to play out as long as we're playing the game. That's the sort of combination. I think it makes sense.

Derek: 35:16

It makes sense. Cause I think it's because all those human systems, the political, the educational, the monetary, they all have to like line up for mass adoption to happen is really like the technology's there, but the. Human beings can only change and adopt so

Ben: 35:29

much. Yeah, and that's completely, that's very true in sort of corporate world where, again, the sunk cost of legacy IT prevents people moving to the next wave of IT and then, go to your local DMV to try and renew your, driver's license and you see how slowly big. Bureaucratic organizations really move and yeah, so it is going to take a longer time than some people imagine, but again, I think that's gives, somebody who's thinking about this now, what could we, how could we deploy this in the real estate world? How could we deploy this in management of a reach portfolio? Think of it. Yeah, absolutely. Be focused on that now. That it might not be material and a game changer next year But if in five years if you haven't done anything at all Then you're going to be you know, you're going to be sears rather than amazon, you know in that metaphor. I love

Derek: 36:21

it I love it You know, it's so funny I couldn't help but also think about cryptocurrency and how it started also back then and it was a fantastic idea and it was back in like I think it was founded around the crisis, right? Like 2010, I think, right around after the 2008 crash. Yeah. And I can't help but think about 25 years later that'll be 2035 or somewhere in that era. And that's about right. That's about where I think that I don't know, it's. You can say whatever you want about crypto. I don't want to put you on the spot about what your opinion is on that. But I do, I think the idea is solid. And I think as a younger person, the idea that we're trusting the Fed, which is just a group of guys getting together and saying, yeah, interest rates are too high. Let's do that. There's no algorithm, no rules, no way to hack the system like some people are doing right now I feel like some younger people are more willing to buy into that system Which will then take momentum and get there, but that's just my thought about

Ben: 37:18

Yeah, Bitcoin and crypto. It's a complicated one in a way It's more complicated than they are in some ways and I'm I wouldn't call myself a crypto evangelist I've I've been joking for a while. It's, NFTs really stands for non fungible tulips, if people know the tulip history. But I do think there's something interesting going on there and some people may be familiar with Chris Dixon. He's got a new book out last week called Read Write Own, which is about the next wave of what A blockchain model can do to to the internet. And there's something very interesting in that but you're right. The initial Satoshi idea of of Bitcoin was really a middle finger to the man, if you like. And of course the man isn't gonna, sit back and let. So yeah, things they can be taken away from it. And so there's been lots of initiatives by the big commercial banks by the Fed to have their own version of this to essentially, to co opt the idea. And of course, that's been the death of it. And then all of the all of the NFT stuff and that, that bubble again, I think that's turned a lot of people off. So I think that's a longer term trend. Again, it fits in this hype cycle model. It's an interesting one and I think it's going to be a kind of holy religious war. that continues to be fought for quite a long time between the evangelists and the skeptics. So I, my son's often said, I should have had more money in crypto. And I pointed out to him, we'd be We'd be living in in a shack probably if we'd done that. Yeah, that's right.

Derek: 38:52

It depends on when you bought and sold, but yeah, it's part of that deal with craze basically. But yeah, no I was just curious your thoughts on that and I had to ask. But I think, because we're rounding up towards the end of the show, I want to get to our last segment here, which is five questions. We ask every one of our guests and you've got 30 seconds to answer each question. Great. Does that work? Are you ready? Sounds good. All right, let's do the rapid round. First question, name any resource that was or is essential still in your journey to pursuing all this freedom.

Ben: 39:24

What a great question. I think the ultimate freedom comes from knowledge and the ultimate source of knowledge comes from books. Even in 2024. So you can see some of my books on the bookshelf there, but reading really for young people to read their history to understand that, but also to read about the future, trade magazines. I mentioned wired. There's so much information out there. Read everything you can as a young person. Try and absorb it. I think that's

Derek: 39:56

the key. Yeah. Love it. Love it. Number two, if you woke up and your business was gone and all you had was 500, a laptop, a place to live and some food, what do you think you would do first of everything to rebuild? Wow,

Ben: 40:11

gosh, what a great question. 500, gee, I'd probably go and have a really good meal somewhere and then jump off a cliff.

Derek: 40:21

I am assuming. that you still have your knowledge with you. So in order to rebuild everything, I'm sure that there would be something that you'd like to do, right?

Ben: 40:30

I guess, yeah. I don't know what I'd do. That's too scary at my grand old age to concentrate.

Derek: 40:36

I get it. I get it. Okay. Number three. What does, if you have one, what does your self reflection and any goal setting practice look like if you have one?

Ben: 40:46

I think embarking on a kind of next stage of my journey, being freelance, breaking away from the sort of corporate full time gig, I think it's making a success of that, really it's Being able to leverage all the relationships, all the knowledge, all the network that I've, built up over a long period of time and and develop that and and use that. So I think that's the next challenge. And it's a little scary. I've had a full time gig for 40 years.

Derek: 41:12

Congratulations. You've joined a cohort of entrepreneurs in this world.

Ben: 41:16

I haven't quite become a nomad like you, Derek, but maybe that's. I love it.

Derek: 41:21

Fantastic. Yeah. Get some location freedom out there. You already have it, all right. Number four, what are the longterm core work habits or personality traits that you attribute most of the success you have now?

Ben: 41:34

I talked about this earlier on. I think my greatest personal strength is curiosity. Just being interested in things wanting to know what's going on. And I think that can take you a long way if you align that with a decent work ethic. 90 percent of success is just showing up. You put those two things together, and I think, it's state has got me where I am, whether that's good or bad, but, I think ultimately it's, if you can find an intellectual niche, if you can find, to do something that you really like and you're passionate about and it turns you on. I've long said that I wrote a piece about this quite a few years ago called the wave is bigger than the board. I think if you can put your board, who you are, on a big wave, and AI is a big wave, Even if you're ordinary person, you're gonna do fine. Whereas if you're a brilliant person and you put your board on a dying wave, a crested wave, no matter how brilliant you are, you're not gonna have such a great ride. So I think for a young person, look for the big waves. What are the big waves? Maybe crypto's a big wave. I think the whole AI thing is a huge wave, a generational, a lifetime wave. For a 20 20-year-old, you'll still be doing this in 61, you're 60. Put your board on that big wave and that board is really curiosity, a decent work ethic. That'll take

Derek: 42:55

you a long way. I think. I love that. Absolutely. I think. Real estate's not going anywhere because we are human beings that need physical space around us, especially residential. My wife is in is in healthcare and there's plenty of people that are on that wave, of trying to learn. And she's doing virtual stuff now with using AI. And for me, I love tech tools and I love connecting things. And I love that analogy of picking the right wave, with your board. That's amazing. Love it. Okay. Last question. What tool or process would you say has become one of your most important time, money or energy saving ninja magic tricks that you use nearly every day?

Ben: 43:32

That's a great question. I think in my work life, I would say Actually, again, this is the source of tremendous opportunity for the next wave of people, because I think the sort of tools that somebody my age uses are pretty rudimentary, pretty simple. I think there's huge room to use better tools, a lot of AI infused tools to do a lot of things that I do more efficiently in corporate lands. And, maybe some of your listeners will live there and work there and this will be familiar to them. You'd be amazed how CRAP, pardon my French most corporate systems are. Getting your expenses done, getting procurement done, getting a website built. It's shocking to me how much people spend on these things and they're pretty underwhelming to be honest with you. So I think there's a lot of room for young people to develop new functionality. That's going to help work, be better and more efficient at a personal level. My favorite app is Shazam that always blows my mind. Oh yeah,

Derek: 44:34

I love that one too, no, to be honest, like just to add onto that point, I know exactly what you're talking about because there's a company that I used to work for. And have experience with that is multi billion dollar, but it's a run off of one Excel spreadsheet. All the accounting and all of the payroll and the, everything is one Excel spreadsheet that gets passed around in multiple copies and it's just, it's insane for me to see that. No, again,

Ben: 45:00

for young people coming into the workforce, I think, They shouldn't be intimidated by the thought, Oh, these are all these big corporate systems. They're great. I think a lot of young people coming in are going to make, it's a big way for them to be able to go into, big bank, big insurance companies say, these things are crap. These things are terrible. The things I do in my personal life are way better. Gartner's talk about the consumerization of I. T. for quite a few years. This notion that the things we use. On our phones are much better than the things that most big corporates have. And that's true to this day. Even the most prestigious big, blue chip Fortune 100 company. A lot of the technology is really underwhelming. No, again, that's in the in the sort of category of hope and opportunity the rewiring of all of that, the rebuilding a renaissance of all of that, taking that to the next level. There's tremendous opportunity for people in those sorts of areas.

Derek: 45:56

Unbelievable. Thank you so much. I was going to ask you what are great things for young people to consider? And this is, this exactly answers it. But we want to thank Ben for coming on the show. It's awesome to have him. He had such great insights. Unfortunately the tail end of his video got cut off, so we weren't able to do an outro with him, but I just want to thank you guys for listening all the way to the end of the show. Thank you guys for listening. Wherever you are listening to this or watching it, please subscribe, thumbs up and make sure you interact with us so that we can get more people to listen to the show and get some more amazing people like Ben on the show. Once again, thank you guys so much for listening. Have an awesome day and we will see you guys again next week. Take care. Yeah.