Is AI a Gift to Humanity? Part 2 with Jim Harris, Keynote Speaker, and International Bestselling Author

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Jim Harris about the Mobile World Congress and the benefits of AI. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:14) I kind of selfishly want you to start at what you learned at the—what is it?—MWC conference?

(Jim Harris at 00:00:20) Mobile World Congress.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:21) What happened there?

(Jim Harris at 00:00:22) So MWC is the largest connectivity event in the world. So mobile phones, the network operators, and even the big consulting firms like McKinsey and PwC and Deloitte are now going there. It's in Barcelona, Spain. It's such a beautiful city, and Gaudí, an architect and designer, his work is all throughout the city. It's just so beautiful.

(Jim Harris at 00:00:50) So it's an amazing place. There were 88,000 people this year. It is a huge event. It goes on for four or five days. And I love to go because mobile phones have become central to our lives.

(Jim Harris at 00:01:06) In fact, there are more page views globally on smartphones than there are on desktops. And if you look demographically, millennials and Gen Zs watch more video content on their smartphones than they do on televisions. So it's become the central computing device for us. And when you actually look at the power of today's smartphones, it's head-spinning. So in 1997, IBM spent $100 million on Deep Blue.

(Jim Harris at 00:01:38) It was a computer that went up against Garry Kasparov, who was the world chess champion at the time, and it beat him. And that was a profound turning point, an inflection point, for the world. That $100 million project for Deep Blue—my smartphone has more raw power than a $100 million mainframe supercomputer from IBM in '97. And this is in my hip pocket for a thousand bucks. So our devices are so powerful.

(Jim Harris at 00:02:16) I'm staying here in Nashville, and the chambermaid spoke Spanish and I speak English. My Spanish, other than "gracias" or "cerveza," is very limited. But we were talking to each other through, I presume it was Google Translate. It was on her smartphone, where I'd say something in English and she'd hear Spanish. So I've been talking about universal real-time translation that you have in Star Trek for about 30 years.

(Jim Harris at 00:02:51) And of course, our smartphones and the technology are so advanced that we have universal real-time translation at our fingertips right now. So the whole point about this is to say that mobile smartphones are central to our lives today. And that's why MWC is such an important conference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:15) Have you ever gotten to wear one of the in-ear real-time translators?

(Jim Harris at 00:03:20) So I have seen them. Yeah. I go to the Consumer Electronics Show every year, and I've seen them over the years. But here's my take on this. That's a proprietary system, and they have language built in.

(Jim Harris at 00:03:33) And some of them connect through your smartphone through Bluetooth and use processing power somewhere else. But it's extra hardware I have to buy and haul around. Whereas when it's embedded in the smartphone, I have it with me at all times. So I believe the translation functions of a smartphone will be the ones that get the far greater adoption than specialized software. It's the same thing with, for instance, AR. You know, if I have Oculus, it's a $1,000 VR headset. But if my AR application is through my smartphone, it's something I have with me at all times.

(Jim Harris at 00:04:21) And so I believe more and more functionality is getting sucked into the smartphone. I don't know if you ever bought a Garmin or a TomTom or a Magellan. We were really cool. It was $750 and we had a GPS thing. You had to download new maps and whatever.

(Jim Harris at 00:04:40) But now with Waze or Google Maps, I have this embedded in my smartphone for free. And I use it all the time. In fact, when I'm in a new city, I use it to walk to a Starbucks in the morning that's six blocks away because I don't know where it is. And it guides me because I choose the walking option. So literally everything I do gets embedded in my smartphone, and more and more of this functionality gets sucked in.

(Jim Harris at 00:05:15) So it's disruptive to the poor people who used to sell Magellan or TomTom. You know, think about all the poor map people, the people who used to sell maps. I've never bought a map.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:27) Now they just license their data where they can. Exactly.

(Jim Harris at 00:05:31) So this is perhaps the most disruptive technology in my lifetime. Maybe ChatGPT will be more disruptive. I see its potential as huge. But so I love going to MWC. It's just so much—I'm like a kid in a candy store at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:52) Do you think we'll see bipedal robots at MWC?

(Jim Harris at 00:05:56) I don't remember if I saw any of them. Oh, yeah. Well, there were quadrupeds. There were—it wasn't Spot from Boston Dynamics, but there were quite a few of them there. They're great fun.

(Jim Harris at 00:06:15) They always—they dance. They have routines, you know. And here's something that's interesting around healthcare and because you're talking about two-legged ones. In Japan, the Japanese are kind of xenophobic and they're an aging population.

(Jim Harris at 00:06:33) So they have a problem about healthcare workers. They don't have enough of them. So if you have a 60-year-old nurse, that 60-year-old nurse will have a problem lifting a 75-year-old patient who's bedridden. But they have these robots that can lift 200 pounds. Japanese are very light people, smaller, lighter people than us. So these robots in the healthcare system will help.

(Jim Harris at 00:07:02) They're actually assistants and allow you to have a better functioning healthcare system when you have a shortage of workers or an aging population who can't lift what they used to be able to lift.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:16) Oh, it makes sense we had to automate things like that because, one, they're difficult jobs, and two, there's money in healthcare.

(Jim Harris at 00:07:24) Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's an interesting way of looking at AI and robotics. Anything that is dirty, dangerous, or dull will get automated. So if I have some super boring, repetitive job that we could automate with AI, any form of AI, it will be the very first thing that gets automated.

(Jim Harris at 00:07:47) And when I was coming back from MWC, I was in the airport in Barcelona. We were in the lounge, and we were looking down on McDonald's. And there, they have these humongous screens where you go up and you order what you want. There's no people to take any orders. There are people fulfilling the orders, but it takes you about two minutes to go through all the permutations and it probably is better at upselling people on, "Hey, do you want some hash browns with that as well?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:23) Yes, I do.

(Jim Harris at 00:08:24) Yeah. I love those little crispy things. It's probably better at upselling, but those order kiosk screens—they're just at head height and they're humongous. But there were 24 of them, and they're working 24/7/365, and they never get COVID, and they don't complain, and boom, there's still people assembling the food in the back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:55) And assembling those machines.

(Jim Harris at 00:08:56) And assembling the machines. But I think we're going to see more of that. So the AI or technology is going to automate the entry-level jobs. And right now there's a major problem in North America about finding staff for jobs that historically have been low-paying. I think we'll see the automation start in there.

(Jim Harris at 00:09:21) So we were talking about Mobile World Congress, and there's one thing that blew me away about it. The very first keynote was the CEO of Orange, which is a big network operator, saying she was complaining that five companies were soaking up 55% of her bandwidth. And they're spending billions of dollars building out their networks for 5G because people want faster service. So huge CapEx, huge capital expenditures. And customers are more demanding, and yet they want lower bills.

(Jim Harris at 00:10:03) And when surveyed, 46% of CEOs from PwC said they don't believe their network—these are mobile companies—could exist in 10 years if something doesn't change. So that's just a survey, so I don't discount that, you know, they're just complaining. But the next CEO on for his keynote was the CEO of Deutsche Telekom in Germany, the largest mobile provider in that country. And he was saying six companies are soaking up 60% of my bandwidth. So the first thing that occurred to me is, did they coordinate on their speaking points?

(Jim Harris at 00:10:45) And the answer is obviously. And they were complaining about OTTs—over the top. So that would be companies like YouTube and Netflix and Facebook. 70% of the traffic is about video, and that's very bandwidth-consuming. Surprisingly, TikTok, you know, consuming a lot of bandwidth.

(Jim Harris at 00:11:12) So these just handful are consuming all this bandwidth, and yet the telcos are required to spend billions on expanding their networks. So the next day, the co-CEO of Netflix gets up and says—and this just killed me—he says, "We spend more money developing content than the network operators do on developing infrastructure. And we have lower margins as a percentage of our total revenue than they do. So we shouldn't be paying them. They should be paying us because it's our content that's driving the adoption of 5Gs and people sign up."

(Jim Harris at 00:11:58) When you look demographically, Gen Zs and millennials can consume more video content on their smartphones than they do on televisions. And if you think about it, you know, if I'm on a train or a bus, I'm watching video probably to pass the hour that I'm commuting to work. Right? Hopefully, if you're not doing that if you're the driver. So we're consuming more content on the smartphone than on television, which really shows the importance of mobile.

(Jim Harris at 00:12:34) It's become central to our lives. So how do we square this circle? The CEO of Orange said, "I don't want to challenge net neutrality. I'm not proposing that there be new taxes." I don't know what she was proposing.

(Jim Harris at 00:12:50) It was really about defining the problem. And so I was thinking about this on the way here, and what would some solutions be. And if you look way back when, when Netflix came out, at some times in the evenings here in the US, it was responsible for 35% of all bandwidth consumption as people watch Netflix at night. But the compression algorithms got better, the codecs, and that has continually been going down. So how will we square the circle?

(Jim Harris at 00:13:26) And if there is pressure, those six OTTs will look at ways to—how do we have a codec on our side that shrinks the package and on the other side expands it? I don't know all the technology solutions, but it's an interesting problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:44) Where do you think the disconnect is? I don't want to say necessarily entitlement, but you've got the Orange and the Deutsche Telekom, and then you've got the Netflix, and they have these very clearly, very clear different perspectives. It definitely seems more like the Netflix was a volley back to that. But why do you think the conversation inside of the telecoms was negative towards the thing that's driving their demand?

(Jim Harris at 00:14:12) So this is really interesting. That's a really interesting question. I talked about it. Like, where is the money in the mobile ecosystem? And the real money is in developing use cases, business use cases that provide real value for businesses.

(Jim Harris at 00:14:34) And the mobile world, their business model is, "Hey, we have thousands of kiosks and stores, and our job is to sell 20 million new SIMs every year, and somebody comes in and we plug a SIM into a phone, and we sell phones from either Samsung or Apple or Huawei or Oppo or Xiaomi, whatever brand, OnePlus, we sell these phones. That's our business." They're not in there saying, "Hey, the real value-add is going to be developing an app that helps mining companies optimize their energy use and reduces dangerous situations like carbon monoxide levels in deep mines and ends up saving lives." That's really app development, and that's not in our purview, but the real money is in developing these apps.

(Jim Harris at 00:15:39) And so, you know, the telcos are basically saying, "Hey, you know, we want to keep to our business model and not change, and we object to everybody making money off the ecosystem we've built." Well, you need to think about your ecosystem. How do we change our business model? You know, I think about in Kenya, I was at the World Economic Forum 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, and you never know at WEF who you're going to sit beside or who you're going to meet. I'm sitting beside this guy at a luncheon. It's David Cameron, who was the prime minister at the time of the UK speaking, and we're just talking.

(Jim Harris at 00:16:22) And he tells me all about this thing from Kenya called M-Pesa. M stands for mobile, and Pesa stands for money in Swahili. So it's about mobile money. And 75% of the people in Kenya did not have a bank account. So it's a real problem.

(Jim Harris at 00:16:43) So the mobile company there, it's called Safaricom, develops this system called M-Pesa, which works on Nokia phones, not even a smartphone. It's what we'd call a feature phone. Right? You remember those old Nokias?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:58) My first phone. I had the light-up battery, man.

(Jim Harris at 00:17:00) Oh my god. Antenna.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:02) Had little LEDs on it. I was the cool—I was the only kid in school, man. I was the coolest guy.

(Jim Harris at 00:17:06) And these phones were great. I loved my Nokias. Like, you could drop them. You never broke a screen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:11) Had Snake.

(Jim Harris at 00:17:12) Oh, yeah. I played Snake all the time. It was great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:16) I remember playing Snake at Chili's, and there used to be a smoking section and a nonsmoking section. Sit there, wait for the table, play Snake all day.

(Jim Harris at 00:17:24) So Safaricom brings out this thing, M-Pesa. And it's basically you can go to any one of the 20,000 kiosks in the country and give them physical currency, and they'll put that on your—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:40) Oh, they'll load it onto the phone.

(Jim Harris at 00:17:41) They'll load it onto the phone. And then in the market, you can just, in essence, text somebody local Kenyan currency. I could buy fruit and veg, or if my kid's studying at university in the same country, I can send them money at university. So all of a sudden, it became a big thing. And it facilitated eventually more than 25% of the GDP of Kenya.

(Jim Harris at 00:18:08) So think about this. 75% of people are unbanked. They have no bank. They have no way of transacting commerce other than physical cash. And the telco comes up with Nokia feature phones—we call these smartphones.

(Jim Harris at 00:18:25) I'd call them dumb phones. Like, they can't do anything compared to what our smartphones can—and facilitates more than 25% of the country's GDP. This is the kind of innovation and business value I'm talking about for Orange and Deutsche Telekom, who are complaining, "We have to change our business model." Well, what new services, what new value could you layer onto your platform so you're not complaining that we're not making enough money despite the billions of CapEx we're going to have to spend for the 5Gs rollout for other people to suck up our bandwidth, like these six OTTs, like Netflix and TikTok?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:08) Well, I find it odd that it's not enough motivation to make a faster network for the sake of competing against the other networks. Like, wouldn't that be enough of a driver for me to invest and create newer technologies and, as you were mentioning, data compression or figuring out, you know, how to make more use of your existing fiber infrastructure and things of that nature?

(Jim Harris at 00:19:28) Here's the thing. Like, it is simple not to change my business model. You know, "This is the way we've always done things," or to innovate. And I'd like to use an example. You know, here, if I was making a phone call from Nashville to Paris in 1980, the cost was $2.95, adjusted for inflation to $20.23—that's $10 a minute.

(Jim Harris at 00:19:53) Okay? Now today, we can have 30 people in a global company having a three-hour strategic planning session with whiteboarding and everything on Zoom for free. If you were to use the old long-distance model from 1980, that would be a $10,000 phone call. And it's free because we're on Zoom. Now the point I'm trying to make here is that technology and innovation are hugely deflationary, and we're in the highest inflationary period in 40 years.

(Jim Harris at 00:20:30) There's a reason for this, the huge deficit spending due to the pandemic that we've just come out of. There's a reason for inflation. Thankfully, the inflation has peaked at about 9.1%, and now in March is about 6%. So it's now—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:45) Is that a global or a Canada?

(Jim Harris at 00:20:46)
This is a US figure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:47)
Okay.

(Jim Harris at 00:20:48)
So it's coming down. The Fed's interest rate policies are working, so it's coming down. That's good. All good news. But the really important point is companies have to use technology and innovation because they're hugely deflationary. We need to continue to innovate, and that's why the work you do, Joel, will always be in demand with Modern CTO, and the work I do working with executives around innovation and disruption will always be in demand. These are the keys to fight inflation in the environment we're currently in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:24)
Let's dig a little deeper into that. You were kind enough—you're out in Nashville to come out in person, bring us lunch. You're the first guest to ever come bring us lunch. Usually, we host lunch. But you sent that message over right when we booked it, and you were like, what can we bring? And so very grateful for that. But I think it is worth digging a little bit into what you actually do. I know some people heard you on the show before, but what were you doing here in Nashville? What part of your business model is this?

(Jim Harris at 00:21:51)
So I was working with an executive team of an IT company that's in IT consulting. They work with financial institutions around innovation and technology. How are we going to use the new tools that are available? You see, our business models are created from optimizing our businesses from historical conditions. But when those conditions change, for instance, with the introduction of ChatGPT—

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:22)
Right?

(Jim Harris at 00:22:23)
ChatGPT has been around for a while, but we're really seeing the power of large language models. It's really this conversational interface that has exploded it. And when I look at ChatGPT, the numbers just came in for March. It had 1.6 billion unique visits in March, up from 1 billion in February. So that's like 60% growth. That's not year over year. That's month over month growth. This is the fastest-growing consumer app adoption in the history of the world. So we really need to pay attention to it. Netflix took three and a half years to hit 1 million users. ChatGPT took five days. So there's a signal here.

(Jim Harris at 00:23:19)
And how are we going to start using AI in our organizations? It's not either/or. It's not people or AI. It's people and AI. Cathie Wood runs an investment firm called ARK Invest out of New York. I love her. She's brilliant. She focuses on disruption, and her team has come up and said companies that use AI in coding will outperform those that don't by a factor of 10 by 2030. It's a factor of two today, and it'll be 10 by there. So you think, wow, we have to use this for coding. Now, I have seen this most amazing presentation around Python. Python's a language, a computer language, and many people will take courses to learn how to program in Python. I saw somebody use ChatGPT as a real-time, on-demand, customized to my level of understanding training tool. So what do I first need to learn to use Python? Okay, do this. And then I get an error message. Okay, you need to add in this plugin. Okay, add it in. Okay, what's the second thing? This is using it interactively. Think about universities. You go for four years. We have a 72-hour use it or lose it principle. Why do I learn stuff for four years and then go out into the workforce? What about real-time training? What about the whole concept of time to competence? If you can get me to be a competent Python programmer in half the time of going to some one-year course or whatever, what's that worth in terms of salary and opportunity costs for the organization?

(Jim Harris at 00:25:13)
So I never really thought about ChatGPT as a training tool, but it can be. Now we need to maybe put some guardrails on this thing because you've heard about the Samsung problem, where some Samsung DevOps people were saying, hey, let's tune our code, and they slapped it into ChatGPT, and now it's out in the public and their secret sauce proprietary code's out. So then we get to a whole notion of, hey, can we license a sandbox on Azure where we play and our code never gets out to the real world? So we're going to need some guardrails on this. I love there was a story about Microsoft telling all its own people never put secret proprietary data into ChatGPT. So we need to learn how to use this tool. But rather than freaking out and looking at all the downsides, I'm an optimist. I like to look at the upsides. Obviously, we need cautionary tales like Samsung's. But how can we use this thing intelligently?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:25)
I got a lot to say. So that Cathie, the ARK, Cathie Wood. Yeah, yeah. I don't follow her in detail. I'll see headlines, and I've seen her give—I've seen some sound bites of her. So my experience with her is very low, but it's the following. I think it's amazing how confident she is when things are really bad for her fund, because I admire that. I've had huge ups and huge downs. And so when I can see someone that's in the face of huge difficulty still have a focus and a confidence, I respect that person, right? But I had not heard about the factor of 10 outperformance, but I've been running my own unofficial messaging to people that I know that run development teams, anywhere from 2 to 10,000 people. And I'll ask them—and this is both internal within companies and companies that are agency where they'll be pairing up—what percentage of their workforce is using something like Copilot? What percentage of the engineers? It was always sub-15%. Sub-15%. Now everyone says ChatGPT, January. Copilot's been out for much longer than that.

(Jim Harris at 00:27:36)
So there's a saying. There are a couple of sayings that are interesting. One is the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And what do I mean by that? I talk about autonomous fleets of vehicles, and Cathie Wood talks about this too, that the price of a car per mile, ownership adjusted for inflation per mile, has remained constant for 100 years at about 70 cents US per mile. But once we have autonomous fleets—so just think about Uber and Lyft, but no driver—the cost drops by two-thirds to 25 cents per mile. So the question is, who's going to buy a car if you can get around for two-thirds less without actually owning a car? It's like a SaaS model, software as a service. It's transportation as a service. So you might think, oh, Jim, that's kind of weird. That's too futuristic. There's no way. That's not going to happen. There's this amazing thing called the Google. I've been using it lately. And if you Google Waymo Phoenix, which is—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:47)
Look, look. Do you see this right here? Look at this. About to tell you that story. As Jim was talking, I'm writing on the screen, "Tell him about Phoenix."

(Jim Harris at 00:28:59)
Jim, this is going to blow you away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:02)
One of my sales guys, my best sales guy, David, he just relocated from Tampa to Phoenix three months ago. And when he joined the team call—it was Feel Good Thursday. What are you feeling good about? Something we do amongst our team members. He said, guys, I went out last night, and they have these Jaguars. They're Jaguar SUVs. I think it's Waymo. And, man, he was getting around for $2 a night. It was a crazy low amount, but they only map a specific area, and they only provide service to certain areas at certain times. It's not always.

(Jim Harris at 00:29:36)
So this is a philosophical difference in AI for autonomous systems between Waymo and Tesla. Tesla has gone the camera route. Waymo goes the map and lidar and radar route. So they're different implementations. You need maps for Waymo's implementation. You don't need maps for Tesla's implementation. So they've been working really hard in Phoenix perfecting it, and that's been going on for five years. So the future is already here with autonomous vehicles. It's just nobody knows about it unless you've visited Phoenix or you live in Phoenix or you know how to Google Waymo and Phoenix. So the future's already here. It's just not evenly distributed. So I believe Cathie's model that we will have autonomous fleets of vehicles like Uber and Lyft by 2030, and the cost per mile will drop by two-thirds to 25 cents a mile. And one of the things that's really challenging for the industry as it exists right now is autonomy is very much tied to EVs because it's all about electronics and programming. And I'd like to argue that Tesla isn't a car company. It's a bunch of computer coders and engineers, and one of their products just happens to have four wheels, or in the case of the semi, 18 wheels, right? So the skill sets for the traditional car companies aren't in AI. They aren't in computing. They're very stable platforms that haven't changed in 100 years. So this is where disruption really comes in. The skill sets are entirely different for an AI-based transportation company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:30)
Yeah. I like that you say that because I'd met a couple people from Walmart, the technology teams over there. And I'd say about the third or fourth person I met, I noticed one trend. They were all incredibly brilliant technologists. When I was talking with them, I was like, wow, this person, not only are they a good leader, but they really know their stuff. And so after several conversations, I asked one of them, and they explained to me that what Walmart has become is Walmart is a technology company that happens to have stores, just like as you were describing, Tesla's a technology company that also happens to have the cars. That's the end result of all the tech. That's just the output. But 99% of the things that they do is technology. How do they negotiate the right prices? How do they move items geographically in a cost-efficient way?

(Jim Harris at 00:32:16)
So one of the innovations that Walmart had was called VMI, vendor-managed inventory. So if I go into Walmart and I buy a pair of jeans, the vendor is only paid when I walk out the door with the jeans, which means the vendor doesn't stuff a whole bunch of jeans, styles into Walmart that don't sell, or sizes. And the VMI means that they replace just that pair of jeans within 72 hours. There's a 72-hour shelf replacement requirement for their big vendors around VMI. So it's not just any old pair of jeans that get shipped to that Walmart in Nashville. It's a pair of 36-32 stonewashed that I just bought. So it's really, how do we create a real-time organization? That's a fundamental principle that changes everything. So think about this, Joel. Imagine you were in university and you didn't get any tests back. You didn't get any essays back with a mark. You didn't ever find out how you did on your midterms. You didn't get your final essay or exam marks. You didn't, at the end of the year, even get marks by the subjects. You just got one aggregate number, 77.2%. How much value would that number have?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:52)
I didn't go to college.

(Jim Harris at 00:33:53)
But I mean—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:56)
If you—

(Jim Harris at 00:33:57)
If you had—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:57)
You can't do much with it.

(Jim Harris at 00:33:58)
You can't do anything with it. It's totally useless. You don't know what essays you did well on, which you didn't do well on, what midterms—if studying worked—

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:07)
Action.

(Jim Harris at 00:34:08)
You can't improve at all. And yet how in organizations do we evaluate people? An annual performance appraisal, if you're lucky. One of the profound insights is when you move to real-time measurement systems, you can radically improve performance. It's a function of the system. So there's something called the Prius effect. In 2004, I bought a Prius, and my wife tells me that I began driving like a grandmother because I would accelerate slowly because I had real-time instant feedback on my gas consumption. And then I coast to a stop for either a red light or a stop sign. It's called hypermiling. You would have way better gas performance if you hypermiled, but the feedback system is what drives the hypermiling. And so just by giving people real-time instant feedback, you can improve performance by 5 to 15%. It's called the Prius effect. So take that principle. That's what Walmart did with VMI. We're going to teach our suppliers what is moving, what styles are hot right now, because that's all we want. We don't want inventory that's going to sit on our shelves for three years and never sell, and the only way we get rid of it is discounting. We want a technology, a logistics supply chain system that creates a real-time mentality with every one of our suppliers. And that is a competitive advantage that you just can't beat because we have fewer sell-offs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:57)
Josh, you guys send this episode to the person I talked to from GE, the aerospace people. So we had this conversation, and they were the artificial intelligence research. They were building the engines and doing fuel efficiency on the jets. And so they would put these sensors on and monitor them, and the ultimate goal was for failure, replacement parts, things like that. But what they found is that there was vastly different responses and data from the different pilots. So the ultimate takeaway was certain pilots accelerate harder. They drive the plane harder. And then it was a whole ethics conversation about, do we include that and run that up to change? Would that be included in their performance review and things of that nature? They decided no. It was ultimately a no. But what they should do is they should put some little sensor, some window on their computer system, maybe that gives them a bonus if they don't drive it so hard or something.

(Jim Harris at 00:36:55)
So if the ones who drive it hard reduce the life of the engine by 30%, what's the CapEx requirements on the airline, right? So the simple principle is if you don't measure stuff, you can't manage it. And if you don't measure it, you don't know what are the correlations or the causation relationship with other things, like CapEx for replacing engines. You're flying blind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:23)
There we go.

(Jim Harris at 00:37:24)
Literally, you're flying blind on the cost of your operations. And this simple principle of real-time information, real-time feedback, real-time data changes performance and allows for performance improvement is an essential business principle. And we talked about it with Python and time to competence on coding. We're talking about it with Walmart, with VMI and logistics. Now we're talking about it with airlines. In other words, the applicability of this principle is across all industries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:00)
So I met you, and in my head, you were this guy that you researched innovation. You gave these good talks, and that's how I sort of packaged you up. But then I find that you're actually out there working with companies, doing consulting and intelligence and planning. Now it's very clear to me. I go to the speakers bureau or I go to a website or come up after a talk and ask you to speak at my event. How do people find you, and how do you transition that relationship to where you're actually consulting with companies about how the innovation is going to impact their company?

(Jim Harris at 00:38:34)
So let me tell a story because everything I do is about stories. I was speaking at an event with 300 CEOs. It was in the mountains, a beautiful place, and we had so much fun. They invited me back the next year. And the night before the event began, at the sponsor's dinner, one of the CEOs came up to me and he said, Jim, I just have to tell you what happened in the last year. I said, I'm all ears. He said, you told us to think differently. We have to think differently with all the challenges in our environment. You told us about assetless expansion. If you think about Airbnb, how much do they have to spend to add one more room to rent?

(Jim Harris at 00:39:23) Nothing. It's marketing to get somebody. But Marriott has to spend billions of dollars to build new facilities, right? So that's assetless expansion. You told me about reverse mentoring that to really get to the future, I should have some 20 or 30 year old who mentors me on how technology they're using is gonna change the business world.

(Jim Harris at 00:39:47) So I wanted to expand. I wanted to build. The way I would have historically done it is by building a $15 million custom design build manufacturing facility. But you told me to consult those millennials, so I created a shadow board, like my board of directors, and I went to them and said, I want to expand. Here's how I'm gonna do it. And they said, that's brain dead.

(Jim Harris at 00:40:12) Why don't you do this? Why don't you find a manufacturing facility that has just been built and they don't need a lot of space in it and let's rent it. And so that's what I did. I found a brand new facility just built. The owners had overbuilt by more than 100% to allow for future expansion.

(Jim Harris at 00:40:31) I got to rent that spare space for three years, pennies to the dollar. So look at what happened. I totally derisked my expansion. I'm cash flow positive from day one. I've been profitable from day one.

(Jim Harris at 00:40:47) And then when the pandemic hit and manufacturing was shut down in many states, I wasn't left servicing $15 million of debt. And I said, Jeff, what you're really saying is coming to this conference and hearing these ideas was worth $15 million to you. And he says, yeah, I guess you could say that, Jim. I said, you're buying my dinner.

(Jim Harris at 00:41:09) Yeah. And I'm thinking to myself, I have to change my business model to take part of the upside of when I work with companies and as a result of our work together, it's worth $15 million to them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:25) Also, when it's really tangible in the business strategy. That was one of the hard things with leadership training. When we were selling leadership training, they would go into Coca-Cola and they'd say, we're gonna do leadership training on your leaders. They take your stock price before you do the training, do the training, take the stock price after you do the training. Look at what we did. And I'm like, I mean, I get it. That's the best you can do with what you have. But when you're talking about these very hard strategy things of, you know, rental versus building or putting these things in place, those are a lot more tangible.

(Jim Harris at 00:41:59) Yeah. Well, in this case, the CEO, Jeff, admitted the ideas were worth $15 million. So real.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:09) Send them an invoice. Or pay for my dinner. I'll send you the invoice.

(Jim Harris at 00:42:13) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you mind if I send you an invoice?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:16) Yeah. Last two things I wanna talk about. I wanna talk about NextMed and then technology addiction. Which one do you wanna tackle first?

(Jim Harris at 00:42:22) Let's do NextMed. Okay. So I go to 50 conferences a year. I've done this for more than thirty years, so thousands of conferences. And this is the best conference I've ever been to in my life. It's just mind blowing. So it's all the best thinkers from the medical profession who deeply care about how do we provide better care to people, and they come together. It's in San Diego at the Hotel Del Coronado, which is this beautiful old hotel, wooden hotel, where Some Like It Hot was shot with Marilyn Monroe sixty years ago. It's an amazing hotel as well. And really it's about the future of medicine. So NextMed Health. And there were a couple things that blew me away, but one was this young doctor who has focused on AI. He's from the UK, and the NHS, the National Health Service in the UK, during COVID, 25 million people every single year missed their appointments.

(Jim Harris at 00:43:30) And this is a problem for a couple reasons. First, there's millions of people waiting to see doctors, and so when people miss appointments, that's a problem. Secondly, if you're a woman and you miss two appointments that are mammograms, it increases your chance of stage three or four breast cancer by 100%. Or if you're diabetic and miss three appointments for your eyes, that increases the chance of you going blind by 5,000% around retinal apathy. So there are serious health consequences to missing these appointments.

(Jim Harris at 00:44:08) So then he used AI to aggressively look at all these missed appointments and predict when people would miss appointments, and then you can dig into the data and figure out why. So it might be a single mom who works nine to five and can't afford to take time off work because she's providing for her kids, and so she can't afford to leave work for a doctor's appointment. Or it might be an elderly gentleman whose sight is bad and he's afraid to go on the tube, the transit system, late at night because he doesn't see so well. Or it may be somebody whose language is not English, their first language, and they don't understand.

(Jim Harris at 00:44:52) So his AI now predicts when people will miss their appointment, and staff at the NHS get busy in mitigating those risks. And the trial studies at just three hospitals have shown a 6% increase in utilization of the NHS. Now the NHS is the largest single payer healthcare system in the world, and they spend £156 billion every single year. So when you do the math—

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:29) It's a lot.

(Jim Harris at 00:45:30) Increasing the capacity of the whole system, when he scales it up and saving 6%, is worth—this is a Doctor Evil moment—£9 billion a year, which is, you know, I haven't done the currency conversion, but it's probably more than $10 billion US dollars. So that is a huge amount. And his AI is not using any medical data. It's not using the name of the patient or the type of problem they have. It's using demographic data, it's using GI postal code data, or zip code data you'd call it. It's using all public data and predicting who's gonna miss.

(Jim Harris at 00:46:16) And so he doesn't get into any privacy issues. In Europe there's something called GDPR. He's not getting into any of that. And this approach is saving 6% and resulting in better outcomes. Now they're gonna overlay an equity issue on top of this.

(Jim Harris at 00:46:35) If you're a single mom and can't afford to take time off work, what you really need is an evening or a weekend appointment, but those are the most popular appointments. So what the system is now doing is saying the people at most at risk of missing appointments and having bad medical outcomes, we're gonna give them those slots first, the weekends and the evenings.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:01) This is the UK medical system.

(Jim Harris at 00:47:03) UK medical system. So this is an equity issue, you know? So it's a beautiful story. We often think, hey, if we have a way better system, way better outcomes, we need to spend more. Well, how about way better outcomes and spend nothing?

(Jim Harris at 00:47:21) Yeah. So 6% blows me away, and I got that at this conference. So this is such a great example of how technology and AI can improve healthcare. And there's an estimate that there's $360 billion of waste and inefficiency and unnecessary admin in the US healthcare system.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:46) Oh, I think you could probably triple that.

(Jim Harris at 00:47:50) So here's just one example. If you're a doctor here and you want your patient to have a test, but their insurance company denies the test, you have to write an appeal letter to justify doing this. So this urologist has to write five of these a week on average. These all take twenty to thirty minutes. So he's now using ChatGPT to write the letter without the patient's condition or the name in it, and it writes the letter, and then he adds in the name of the insurance company and the patient, whatever, and it's going to one minute.

(Jim Harris at 00:48:32) So what's 150 minutes of every single week of a $250,000 a year salary urologist work worth? I mean, it's a big freaking number. So there are so many interesting applications for new technologies to increase efficiency in our healthcare system.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:54) I talked to one of the companies that build software that the insurance companies use. The insurance companies buy the software that then goes and kicks it back and, you know, will do the intelligence on accepting, rejecting, or denying. It's largely AI driven. Right? They have human in the loop to help train it, but they've reduced the size of those teams, the medical billing and coding teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:16) Right? But over at the, so my stepmom and my brother are both physicians, practicing physicians. And so at their offices, they've got the teams, you know, the girls that sit back there, do the medical billing and coding and all the files and everything and call and write the urologist letters and do all of that type of stuff. Right? And depending on the type of letter and the thing, sometimes the doctor's writing it, sometimes the assistant's writing it. It's highly dependent. But I thought it was this funny thought in my head to think, okay, well, eventually, someone's gonna come out and provide an AI software for the independent physicians to reduce their medical billing and coding staff. And then, essentially, what it's going to be, it's going to be two AIs just arguing with each other. Right?

(Jim Harris at 00:50:00) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:00) It's weird. It's weird to think about that.

(Jim Harris at 00:50:02) There are AIs in accounts payable. You know, there's a lot of back and forth between companies. Like, you said you were gonna ship us 10,000 widgets, and we only got 8,000, and two were missing. And AIs can reduce the disputes between accounts payable and receivable of two different companies by 80%. How do we take 80% of the problems off the table and have the AIs resolve it? And the really hairy complex ones, you know, we get people in there.

(Jim Harris at 00:50:35) So I never see it as people or AI. It's like I have this dull, dirty, dangerous philosophy. Anything that's dull, dirty, or dangerous—so the dull, highly repetitive, brain dead stuff—we're gonna automate it with the AI.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:53) How do—

(Jim Harris at 00:50:54) How do we use AI intelligently? And this blows me away. Okay. So you can have a PhD. This is back to NextMed Health and this mind blowing medical conference.

(Jim Harris at 00:51:08) You have to study protein interactions to understand cancer and what's going to cause cancer or what's an early sign of cancer. And it will take a PhD one full year to fully study, you know, all the interactions of these proteins. They applied AI to this discipline, and the AIs did all this work. The AIs did 660 million person years of PhD work, and they give this to humanity. You know, people think the AI is gonna steal our jobs.

(Jim Harris at 00:51:51) Well, here's 660 million years worth of medical research that we've been given, and they haven't stolen our jobs. We get to stand on the shoulders of giants. They have advanced our knowledge. So I have a very different framing on this AI, that it is gonna enrich our lives. Sure.

(Jim Harris at 00:52:14) We need guardrails and, you know, their ethical—okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yada yada yada. But I just look at the incredible benefits. So I learned this at this NextMed conference about humanity being gifted. Yeah, 660 million years of PhD work in terms of advancement of understanding of proteins and human health.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:37) It's brilliant. I saw them do that with the reading the radiographs. They took the outcomes of—they took tons of radiographs, and the doctors had—they had years and years and years of them, and the doctors had already diagnosed them. And so you had the radiograph diagnosis, and they just processed that through. And now it helps them. Well, it can do it way more accurately than a doctor can, but the doctors use the technology. It's not like you don't need them anymore.

(Jim Harris at 00:53:04) Yeah. We still need doctors. So same thing with oncology boards. You know, these are doctors who used to meet to decide if you have cancer or not. They run a bunch of tests, they meet, they make a decision. The AIs can read all the tests just as well as the human doctors, 100% overlap, but they can also read under the signals things that we aren't looking at as humans yet and say, this person doesn't have cancer, but they have precursor signs that might lead us to believe they will develop cancer. And then that frees up all the time from the oncology board for those doctors to be actually doing research or spending more time with patients, you know. Who really wants seven and a half minutes consult when you have cancer? I mean, I wanna have fifteen minutes or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:59) Forgetting about the twenty minutes you get to wait for them to come into the room.

(Jim Harris at 00:54:03) Oh, yes. And stress about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:05) Yeah. The one thing as we're talking about being optimist, I am an optimist. Just put that out there. There's only one area of—there's one main area of concern that I have that I think is going to be a very real thing that we're going to face. And I don't know how it's going to pan out, but I'm curious to see it. And that is we're very comfortable with this idea, or at least I am. Things come and go. Right? Industries come and go. Revolution, industrial revolutions happen, and their jobs go away. Right? My kids, we pay to go do horse training with them once a week. That is, we're not riding around horses all day, you know, for transportation. So but when those things happen, they happen compared to what we experienced today, they happened slower. Right? It took a while for that to happen. But now you can literally automate an industry overnight. Right? And so the speed at which you can crush an industry is greater than it's ever been before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:05) And so I'm just interested to see how the systems we put in place and to think about, and obviously in an optimistic way, but I think a very real thing—keeping the optimism—a very real thing that we should be thinking about is what's going to happen when you wake up and in one day, let's use an extreme example, 99% of the engineering jobs are rendered useless because of some new breakthrough.

(Jim Harris at 00:55:27) So I'd go back to that comment. The future's already here. It's just not evenly distributed. Executives in car companies have been dismissive about EVs and about autonomous systems for a very long time. Now that Tesla's worth more than 17 traditional car companies combined, they've got religion on this.

(Jim Harris at 00:55:50) But the signs were there all the way along. It's just with exponential growth in any technology, it's below the radar for the first number of years, depending on what the doubling rate is. So the signs were there the entire time, but they chose to ignore them or they didn't understand exponential change. When I work with clients, I'm really trying to get them to see the small signals. So I'll give you an example.

(Jim Harris at 00:56:23) Leanne and I were in Nepal in 1998. It's this beautiful country nestled in next to the Himalayas. And I wanted to make a phone call back to North America. It was 300 Nepalese rupees. But instead, I went into an Internet cafe and I put on a headset with a little microphone, and I made what we now call a VoIP call, voice over internet protocol, for 10 rupees.

(Jim Harris at 00:56:48) So think about that, 300 rupees, 10 rupees. I predicted all long distance would be free by 2005, okay, based on my experience. At the time, some of my clients were telcos. So imagine you've hired this external consultant, a futurist who comes in, and 70% of your profit right now is in long distance. And this consultant comes in, this futurist, and says all long distance is gonna be free.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:21) Did you show them though? Could you show them how?

(Jim Harris at 00:57:24) I told them. Yeah. You know, and they go, who's this idiot? Yeah. So if we actually look at it, Skype came out in '03. So my prediction, if you benchmark against Skype, you could say it was incorrect. But when you look at billions of minutes of international long distance, you don't even see VoIP until low '05 on the graph. And then by 2016, VoIP overtakes all telcos combined, all international long distance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:56) It took that long?

(Jim Harris at 00:57:57) Yeah. So the point is that the growth of an exponential growing technology can be below the radar, and that will be justification for ignoring it. Right? Yeah. And then it overwhelms the incumbent industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:15) To your point of the shadow board, right? Like, it's under the radar for them. But if you were to ask me in 2005 or 2006 or whenever Skype came out, I'd be like, I don't know, probably six months. Like, it'd probably be gone in six. Like, who would not just use Skype? Like, why would I not just call the people through the Internet?

(Jim Harris at 00:58:33) Yeah. So I've been over in Davos before at WEF, and I've had a three-way conference call on WhatsApp at zero long distance calls. Like people in three different countries, all talking for however long you want at zero cost because all of a sudden voice is data. It's not voices over a voice network. So people who use the technology get it. People who don't don't get it. So here's a couple of fun questions. Who is closest to the future? The 65-year-old CEO who has his assistant print out all his emails or the 18-year-old who's on Tinder? Who does all the strategic planning? Who is most disenfranchised from strategic planning? Is it any wonder we only get incremental change? And so the shadow board is a structural response to the 65-year-old boomer CEOs not understanding the central nature of this to the Gen Z. And I'll give you one example. I was working with a high net worth wealth management firm. So these are people who have millions or hundreds of millions or in some cases billions of dollars to invest and they have investment advisors, okay? And the IAs say nobody wants to trade on this. Like, none of our clients. Like, they're 94 years old. They don't own a smartphone. They don't care if their portfolio, they can track it daily or by the minute on a smartphone. We don't need a smartphone app. Okay. Fine. I show them some data. What is the percentage retention of your assets when 94-year-old granddad dies and Gen Z millennial gets the inheritance? What percentage of assets do you retain with the IA and your high net worth firm? And do you know what the answer is? 6%.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:42) Yeah. They go to the—

(Jim Harris at 01:00:43) 6%. Yeah. They say, hey, I'm on Robinhood or wealth management.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:47) It's like transfer grandpa's billions to Robinhood.

(Jim Harris at 01:00:49) Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna do so. Yeah. Right? And then, but they go, but we asked our customers. All our 94-year-old customers did not—not a single 94-year-old customer wanted to track their portfolio by the minute on a smartphone, so we didn't ever develop an app.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:08) That's—

(Jim Harris at 01:01:09) And we're justified because we're customer-centric. That's your current customer who happens to be 94 and wants—you know, go to some actuarial tables and figure out how long your 94-year-old's gonna be around. You need to look at the ones who are—what do they want? The ones who are gonna inherit it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:30) Well, so before I started the podcast, I built—it's been about five years building a financial software company with a financial advisor. So he—we knew each other, and he asked me to come help him make some software, custom software to help make his agency more efficient. What you said to me is the thing he said to me, like, one of—in the first month of us working together. So we formed a business. We were business partners, and we built this software. And so the problem was with fixed index annuities and all of these things, there were no APIs. There was no—none of these modern technology Plaids and things like that where you can connect your bank account. It was all screen scraping. Right? So you had to build all these integrations and all these hacked screen scraping imperfect things, downloading PDFs from the insurance providers and all of that. But we—we pulled their collective from all the different products because there was no software to do it. We pulled the collective financial picture because what was happening was they were taking the assets because they didn't have the more advanced technology, the kids, and they were just taking them all, liquidating everything, and just throwing it into, like, their Bank of America because they so they could use their app. Because they just—if it doesn't exist on the screen, it doesn't exist. Right? And so that was one of the retention strategies because they were a wealth management firm. They weren't huge. I think, ultimately, by the time we finished the product, they had—they went from one location to six, and they had probably close to a billion under management. So, like, not crazy because a lot of the places have a lot more than that. But the retention of them being the managers of that money, and these are—their average customer had, you know, two to $5 million portfolio. They just had a lot of them. Right? So those are the types of families, and they weren't, you know, $100 million people. But that was one of his—luckily, he was very forward-thinking, and that was one of his strategies to keep people involved in the wealth transfer, and it worked. It worked for him really well.

(Jim Harris at 01:03:26) So it's very hard if you're a 65-year-old CEO of a major bank and you've never done anything digitally to understand this real threat that exists to you. There's a whole category called neobanks, N-E-O, neobanks. And I'm blanking on the name of it, but it's in Brazil. And it went from 100,000 customers to 20 million customers over four or five years. For me, the proof in the pudding is the exponential growth. Like 100,000 to 20 million is telling me something. It's like a very strong signal that we need to pay attention to. It's not a signal that you can ignore at the moment, but yet it still will be ignored. We talked in the last podcast we did about Rosabeth Moss Kanter's five stages of death and dying, you know, denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. And those first four stages prevent companies from actually responding to challenges in a constructive way. Now people will find reasons to dismiss it. It's called confirmation bias. Well, these 20 million customers are all kids who don't have very much in the way of assets compared to our high net worth individuals, so we really don't need to worry about this. Or with M-Pesa in Kenya, the average transaction is one-fiftieth of the transaction size we're doing, and their cut is not the 3% of a credit card. It's a tiny 0.25% cut. So, you know, our business model can't thrive on that. But when you're facilitating 25% of a country's entire GDP, a lot of small transactions at a small cut ends up being a very big number. But this confirmation bias, you know, that you only find data to reaffirm what you already believe is a very human trait. And how do we fight confirmation bias? How do executive teams begin to see that which exists right now, but they just couldn't see it before?

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:53) You call Jim.

(Jim Harris at 01:05:57) Yeah. 1-800—

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:00) There's only one person that dials that, so thank you.

(Jim Harris at 01:06:06) Yeah. So this is—this is the work I do. It's so much fun, though. I mean, we all love what we do, and it's just such fun work.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:16) One of the things I admire about you is that—how—well, how old are you?

(Jim Harris at 01:06:23) 62. 62.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:25) You've gotten far in your career, farther than me, and you have managed to maintain curiosity and joy as, like, these core parts of your personality. Now I can tell you after interviewing 650 people that that is a rare thing. Now there are brilliant people. There are happy people, but that aspect of, like, very curious joy—when I look in your eyes, I see, like, kid in the candy shop doing what you're doing, and you've been doing it for 30 years, 50 conferences a year. That to me is the person that I wanna be. Like, I want to make it and still retain that joy and curiosity. So when I see you, that's one of the things I really admire about you. Woo-hoo!

(Jim Harris at 01:07:05) I love that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:05) Yeah. Addiction. Oh. Hard transitions. Tech—I wanted—I just wanted to briefly talk about technology, addiction, and what's going on. Do we have any good talking points there?

(Jim Harris at 01:07:20) Well, there is an elephant in the room. There's some dark sides to technology, and one of them I think about is anxiety and depression in young people, in teens who are heavy social media users. On social media, you see this portrayal of the world—wow, my life is not as good as what I see on this social media. Like, I know how I feel internally and I see nothing but glorious things out there. And so anxiety and depression in teens and other people, and the addictive nature of social media platforms. Like, I know somebody who's deleted TikTok because it was so addictive. I don't have TikTok. I've seen TikToks. Like, I don't have an account.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:17) Me either. Yeah.

(Jim Harris at 01:08:18) Nah. And there's some great TikToks. There's like, you can pack a very powerful message in a very short video. I've seen some hilarious ones, but some people can be addicted to the—the algorithm is so finely tuned that they kind of come conscious four hours later and go, where is my life gone? I've been watching four hours of TikTok videos. I mean, we can have that critique about television as well. Netflix has finely tuned its algorithm to, you know, for instance, start the next episode just as the credits are rolling on and then you think, oh my god, it's like—

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:59) I get mad. It's 15 seconds. I'm like—

(Jim Harris at 01:09:01) Switching in three. Yeah. Like, hit—

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:04) the button. The button. You've been there.

(Jim Harris at 01:09:06) I don't wanna wait until it goes across. I don't care—

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:09) about who made it. Just get it rolling.

(Jim Harris at 01:09:12) So, I mean, these companies are working very hard to make their products as addictive as possible because the way they monetize is on eyeballs and how long the eyeballs are on their platform. Yeah. So it's an attention economy issue. So how do we square that circle? You know, as a parent, how do we make sure our kids understand what's really important?

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:39) Haul them into the woods. No tech. Bury it. No. But you can't because you gotta prepare for the future.

(Jim Harris at 01:09:45) Yeah. Well, it's a bit of both. Like, I grew up with my great aunt who just loved nature, and she would take me for walks in the woods and teach me about fungus. And you'd see a tree that was fallen and she'd say, that's a very important tree. Like, you might think it's dead, but it's habitat for certain bugs and mosses and, you know, I studied the life cycle of the monarch butterfly and she was just a naturalist and had this natural joy and wonder about the world we live in. And we need to understand, we live on the garden planet of the universe. Like we live in such an amazing place. And in some senses, we don't realize how magical this world is where we live.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:40) One of the people I talked to about technology and addiction and attention, I told him about how much better I was feeling now that I moved out here, and then he cited some—you know, the smart people, they always can cite the information quickly. But there's some studies about you going out and looking at nature and it having to deal with, like, your anxiety level reducing and things like that. So when I walk from this building to that building and I get to look at the woods, every once in a while, I just, like, stop and take 15 seconds and just, like, stare at it. I'm like, this is so much better than the, you know, the retirement community that is Sarasota and the cookie-cutter neighborhoods that are there. Right? It's just—you just see this beautiful nature, and it's so important to monitor, you know, screen time and nature time and family time and community time. We do this—I've done it, I think, once, maybe once or twice. But on a team call, every once in a while, I'll surprise everybody. I'll say, okay, you've got one minute to screenshot your screen time screen and post it in the team chat. And so I'll have everybody queue it up, you know, and then I'll say, okay, now hit enter, and everybody has to hit enter at the same time. So nobody's, like, embarrassed. Oh my goodness. We have a TikTok epidemic, my friend. I was like, you operate TikTok, like, almost greater than a full-time job. But I was just surprised, like, there is a lot of this. And for me to have zero TikTok consumption, you know, I have—I consume. Like, I prefer YouTube Shorts. So the—my first experience with TikTok was I got to interview the CISO who happened to live in Saint Petersburg, which is right above Sarasota. And I realized, like, the Friday before the interview that I had never used TikTok before. And so I got my team on a call. We got, like, seven of us on a call here. And I said, okay, show me how to use TikTok. And so they showed me how to, like, create a pro—because, like, obviously, I know how to create a profile and, you know, that. But I wanted to know from experienced TikTok users, like, how to use it.

(Jim Harris at 01:12:34) Is that the word? TikTokies?

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:36) TikTok users. Sorry. TikTokies. I thought—

(Jim Harris at 01:12:39) it was TikTokies.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:40) There we go. We did it here at Modern CTO Podcast. It's TikTokies.

(Jim Harris at 01:12:43) TM. TM.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:46) So I start trying to use it. Well, here was the problem. Okay. So the first problem was I was trying to train the algorithm. It clearly somehow knew I was male. I don't know how, but it just tended to—because it was showing me a bunch of guy stuff, like, right off the bat. And I was trying to teach it, like, okay, I wanted—what I wanted to see was I was like, I wanna see, like, some science stuff, some tech stuff, like, show me some interesting, you know, those type of engineering videos and all of that good stuff that I know exists because I have an Instagram and I have YouTube. And I—so I was trying to prioritize that and teach the algorithm. It would not stop showing me adult content for, like, 15 minutes, like, every fifth one. And I was like, okay, because at first, the team was like, oh, we'll just—just ignore it and don't engage with it and, like, bypass it and then instead engage with the other stuff and search it out. And so we sat there, like, as a team, all of us for, like, 15, 20 minutes, and I still couldn't—and it didn't stop. So I kinda cut it at 30 minutes, and I was like, alright, well, it's not for me. There was some cool videos on it, but I just don't want that coming up as, like, every fifth image I see. Right? I can't be sitting in my house with my kids and have that come up or have a respectful relationship with my wife. We're sitting on the couch together and have that come up, and that's just not acceptable for me and my lifestyle. So I put it down. Well, then I did the interview, and, you know, that went great. It was mainly focused on security and all of that, but I went and attempted on two other separate occasions. So I have a total of 90 minutes into TikTok to get it to show me content that I want. And so, no. It still shows me the adult content. I don't engage with it. I down-thumb it, or whatever you do. And I'm like, why is it showing me this stuff now? YouTube Shorts knows me really well. I actually love YouTube Shorts. It's something I check out from time to time. I mean, maybe an hour a week I'm on it, but because when you have kids, you don't have, like, any time. But I like it. I'll watch it. There's, you know, I like music stuff comes up on there. Different, uh, philosopher-type, modern philosopher-type people stuff come up on there that I like that have comments on the state of the world today. And so I do that. It knows me pretty well, but it doesn't try to inject adult stuff into my feed constantly. And so that's one of the reasons why I am a—I'm a YouTubey versus a TikToky.

(Jim Harris at 01:15:04) Yeah. Well, I can't comment on the YouTube algorithms since I don't use it. I mean, I use LinkedIn. My primary social is Twitter.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:19) You crush it on Twitter, by the way. Go follow Jim Harris on Twitter.

(Jim Harris at 01:15:22) I've been on the platform since '08, and I use it a lot for business reasons. It's a very powerful tool when you figure it out. And then Facebook, I've left as a personal page and I use it less and less all the time. So I've seen these as tools that can be helpful, but I do understand the addictive nature and the algorithm getting so finely tuned that you lose time. And so the question, I think the question that we're kind of posing is how do you get the best out of these tools and not have the downside of either anxiety or depression of younger people or it can be older, or the addictive nature.

(Jim Harris at 01:16:13) And so that's really the challenge.

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:17) It's like every other thing in our life from anything that can get you in trouble, whether it's alcohol, food, or anything you can have in excess, you have to figure out that balance for yourself. And I just hope that the next generation, we gotta figure out a way to make this sound more positive. But I just, so the next generation figures it out. Right? Well, hopefully, my ideal listener is out running in nature right now listening.

(Jim Harris at 01:16:45) Yeah, absolutely. I have this bias about loving nature. I'm an environmentalist.

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:53) You brought me maple syrup, man.

(Jim Harris at 01:16:54) Yeah. Woo hoo.

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:56) And then I found out you were Canadian. I thought you used to live in Canada or something, but you told me you currently live in Canada. Apparently live in Canada. Brought me maple syrup.

(Jim Harris at 01:17:04) Yes. It's magical stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:07) Well, we solved the world's problems today.

(Jim Harris at 01:17:09) We were busy.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:10) Yeah. There we go. We made a podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:20) And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.