GTM14 - Preparing for the Future, with Steve Brown, Futurist, Author and previous Evangelist at Intel

Speaker A: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. You are listening to Notion Capital Podcast fm, um, the voice of European enterprise tech. Next up is our show, Go To Market Heroes, with Andy and his amazing guest. And talking of being a hero, Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I am Paul Pavadimitriu, your show host at large with Andilever, with, as you know, the one and and only true host, our precious. This is the Go To Market show for the last time. This is the last episode, Andy. This is our last episode of the season. I'm a bit sad because, frankly, this has been one of the most enjoyable series I've ever recorded, thanks to you and the extraordinary guests you've invited, like all of your friends, basically. So I want on the record to thank you so much because that was really great. How was your first stint as a show host for you?

Speaker B: I don't know, Paul, you tell me. What do you think? Has it been okay?

Speaker A: You've been great. I loved it. I mean, for the first episode, I thought you were a natural. I was like, you know, you don't need me.

Speaker B: I could be out of this show. You'd be great without me.

Speaker A: So I'm really happy to have done that with you. I hope we'll have chances to do others.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, Paul, the people listening here won't realize this, but when we record this, we can see each other's faces. And I can see your face. Your face is the barometer of. Is this going well? Okay, I always look at your face. If you're smiling, it's going well. If you're not smiling, I'm mine. Not going so good.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, he's been telling me that after each show because he was looking at my face. It's true I have a tendency to look elsewhere if it's not interesting, but honestly, they've all been very good, and that's thanks to all the people. We have one more today just before. Folks, as always, we do not announce the date of our next podcast season, so stay tuned by following us on your podcast app, uh, of choice. Note as well that there's much more content by Notion Capital on their website. That's Notion VC. And I also encourage you to follow Notion on LinkedIn as well. Simply search for Notion Capital. So back to today, as always. For the last time, though, this is the question for you, Andy. It's a very big question. If you had to do it all over again, where would you start and would you make other choices? And here I'm not talking about redoing the Podcast series. That was great. I'm talking about probably work wise, is there anything you would do differently? Or at least that's my opinion. You ended up at a great place. Maybe there's nothing that you would change.

Speaker B: It's a good question. So if you'd have asked me that when I was age 12, I would have said, I want to open a record store. But then kind of CDs came along and blew that up, so I couldn't do that. Yeah. And here's the little secret. So when I started my career, I was actually a software developer. So I was the guy sat there coding and there is actually still a little bit of my code working. It actually flies on United Airline Triple 7. So if you ever press those buttons, volume up, volume down, channel up, channel down. That's my. It doesn't sound very grand, does it? That's my software that actually, uh, sits in there.

Speaker A: No.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Sorry for interrupting you, Andy. I'm a huge AV geek, so I love planes to death. I will have to invite you in another show I host, which is the top global show about aviation, just because of what you just told me. Well, I, uh, had to wait until the last episode to learn about Paul.

Speaker B: If you, if you. Here you go. Here's a little secret. If I'd have gone that direction, I think I always wonder if I'd have carried on being a developer, you know. So I just did a product like growth session just before this where they went through all the top languages in the world. And I see like, Ruby's going down and Pythons going up in all these different languages. And I often think, oh, if I was still part of that world, where would I be right now? But just for you, here's a little tidbit. When you see the doors open at, uh, Boeing and the triple seven aircraft rolls out, if you look closely, it's dark. You'll see there's flashlights, torches going on in the cockpit, flashing around. Yeah, that's people like me crawling around on the floor, plugging cables in just to make sure the thing worked when they switched it up.

Speaker A: I have an even higher level of respect now for you, Andy. I don't know if it were even possible. And I had to wait for the last episode of the season to learn that. Well, thank you for that answer. So, back to today. This is recorded in advance. We're recording this. It's still the end of May. By the time this will be live, we'll be in the middle of the Tokyo Olympics. Or not. So you Will know, but we still don't know if they're gonna happen. As an ex resident of Tokyo myself, I'm not really in favor. But that's. But talking about looking at the future, I believe our last hero of the season is perfect because I believe he does look at the future. At least he has the crystal ball like me, the bald head on which you can actually see some of the future. So, Andy, who is our hero of the day?

Speaker B: Well, this is the season finale, so we need to bring the guy on. You can see the future. Yeah. So I have friends, you should say. And then I have good friends. And then I have really, really good friends. So I thought it was time to amp this up a little bit and bring the really, really good friend on the show. So. So I am delighted, uh, to be joined by Steve, Steve Brown, just to give people a bit of insight. I know Steve so well because we went to university together. Steve was my best man and Steve has been through a lot of life's journey with me. So we've been in contact for many, many years. Steve's lived in the US for quite a number of years now. In fact, we'll find out in a second. I think it's going to be 10 plus, maybe even 15. I don't know. And he had a great, he's doing the thumbs up now. He had a very, very long career with intel and ended up in some very, very interesting roles. And I think now he really, really specializes and double down on emerging trends, technologies, things happening in the future. And I thought he would be a perfect guest to come on because the one thing that those series A, Series B founders that we talk to are not very good at is predicting the future because they're too busy predicting today. So I thought it'd be great to have him on. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Speaker C: Thanks, Andy. Really nice to spend some time with you.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Hey, so just to get us going, I know this story, but the audience will be really interested in this story. So how did you get to where you are now? Give us a quick kind of potted history. And I always say, I know the answer to this. It's a bit weird asking the question, what was accident and what was designing this story?

Speaker C: There were a number of accidents. So I started. I was fascinated by science and technology when I was a kid because my dad was a physics lecturer and he hung around with interesting people. One of his good friends was Nick Phillips, who was one of the fathers of holography. So he would bring lasers home and glass Holograms. And he'd take me into his labs and he was a low temperature physicist, so he'd pour liquid nitrogen on the floor and make it look like Top of the Pops. So it was really magical for me. He would bring these computers home from work. So I got playing with computers probably in 1977, something like that. And I knew then I wanted to be part of it and that they were going to change the world, even when I was probably 10 then. So I just aged myself, you know, it was a magical experience and I knew I wanted to be part of that world. And so I went to university with you, Andy, and, you know, studied microelectronics because I thought to participate I had to build them. And so I learned how to build them, went to intel, was an engineer for a number of years, and then realized there were other ways to show up and be part of that world. So, you know, followed this odyssey of a career that took me through the worlds of marketing events. I ran Intel's worldwide events program for a number of years aimed at developers. So that took me all over the world, which was really fun. Went, uh, into communications, ran all of internal communications for intel for the webzine stuff we used to do. Was a video producer for a while. And I really like to dabble and just build different skills. I didn't want to be on a career trajectory where, you know, you're a junior salesperson, then you're a salesman, then you're a, uh, district sales manager and a regional. I didn't want that kind of linear path. I wanted something a bit more eclectic. So ended up in strategic planning and then moved into Intel Labs as one of Intel's two futurists. So looking at what the world would be like to live in seven to 13 years out was the time horizon we looked at that was sort of the entrance of the funnel of the research investments that Intel's making in Intel Labs and modeling the world and how technology might help solve people's problems in that timeframe. And I left intel in 2016 and now I'm an independent futurist. So I help companies big and small, lots of brands you'd be familiar with in many different industries, to figure out what technology will make possible in the future of their businesses and how they can embrace digital transformation to be able to slay their competition basically and create new value propositions for customers, for their employees and so on. So that's me.

Speaker B: How long were your intel for?

Speaker C: It depends. If you count my time as an intern, I think it was 31 years. I had a good head of hair when I moved in and a shiny head when I left.

Speaker B: So here's the thing I find fascinating. Intel is such a storied company. I mean, it's part of the history of the Valley. Yeah. It is, like, woven into the fabric of the whole Valley culture. What was it like working there? Because, you know, I never worked there. I used to kind of live it through the things that used to tell me. But what was it like being at intel during those days where, I mean, Microsoft and Intel felt kind of completely invincible for a while?

Speaker C: Yeah, it felt very different working there in the 90s than it did when I left in 2016, as you might expect. And it was magical working there. I know I've used that word a number of times now, but it really felt amazing to work at intel in the 90s when it felt like the world's innovators, the world's researchers, artists, were standing on our shoulders and they were all desperately waiting. There's a Pentium that's going to go at 133 megahertz. Oh, my God, that's going to change my world. And then you come out with 200 a year later, and then 350. And then it was just this amazing time of change. And that felt really good to be part of that. And there was a buzz at Intel. It was people who were on the younger side. The culture was vibrant. We were led by Andy Grove at the time, who suffered no fools. And it was just a really rich and vibrant culture over time, as intel matured, you know, it's still a very important company. The world runs on Intel. You're just not as aware of it because it's all in the servers that we use when we use the Internet. But, um, still a very important company, but it just lost that feel of vibrancy, I suppose. And m. I'm really interested that Pat Gelsinger, the new CEO, who I love to bits, I know well, I think if anybody can turn intel around and bring vibrancy back to that company, it's Pat.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I remember messaging you about that because people got excited about him coming back to the company. So obviously he means a big deal to the company. I recall one of my first PCs was a 286. And then I think I had a 386 SX, which I think was the kind of crippled version of the 386 from what I remember. And then I remember the first time you showed me a 486 on a machine. And I was like, wow. But I was going to ask what were the wow moments for you in that journey? You know, where technology almost felt magical?

Speaker C: The first time I used to build custom systems, that was my first job at intel. And they bought this company, I think, called Action Media. And I was building custom systems that could handle full screen video. And it was, you know, not very high resolution, but it was full screen video on a PC and it required a two set $3,000 boards that you plugged into a PC. And when I saw video on a PC for the first time, I just thought it was incredible. You'd never seen anything like that before. It was just all text and really lame graphics. So perhaps probably the biggest breakthrough moment. And then I suppose when I first saw video running in a window with software again, it was the collision of what at the time were separate technologies. You had TV and computers, and never the twain shall meet. To see those two come together was pretty amazing. And then I suppose the AI era just fascinates me. Being able to speak to computers, machine vision, cars that can drive themselves. You know, that's pretty stunning technology. And even 10 years ago there were very credible computer scientists who would tell you that cars would never be able to drive themselves. And yet here we are.

Speaker A: If I may, I do remember, Was it Windows 95 that came with a preloaded video? Music, uh, video, I think. Was it the Weezers?

Speaker C: It was Weezer, yeah.

Speaker A: Right. I must have played this 25 times when I first boot up that Windows 95, because I couldn't believe there was a video on the screen of my computer. So, yeah, I totally relate to what you just said.

Speaker B: I don't remember that. I must have missed that. And I remember because when we were at university together, we're all using Commodore Amigas, if you recall, it had a gui, it was multitasking and we thought that was wow, you know, the sound, the graphics, et cetera.

Speaker A: Workbench.

Speaker B: Yeah, Amiga Workbench 1.3. I remember the hand holding the desk on Boot up still. And I remember that when we built the mock up of the in Flight entertainment system many, many years ago, we couldn't get enough PC chips. So we mocked it up using an Amiga, but never told anybody. And every time we demoed it and one day it crashed and that hand came up when the guy looked in and went, are you sure that's a PC? And I thought, do I lie or not lie? And I had to completely say no. I took one of the Amiga. It was a kind of embarrassing moment. So fast forwarding now. Steve, you're in a pretty privileged position because you've seen a lot of this innovation. You get to work with a lot of startups. What do you think of the things now? And I'll kind of preface it with that. You know, I think we're an exciting time with B2B because consumer and work and B2B are all kind of blending together. And users really expect the same experience in their workplace as they do in terms of their home office, in terms of just mobile. And that whole experience is coming together where people's bar is just going up and up and up. And you talk about voice assistants and speaking to computers. You know, how do you sit down with a new startup and start to talk to them about planning for the kind of short, medium, long term technological hurdles that may come along, or even things that could disrupt their business completely? What's your kind of mental model for doing that?

Speaker C: Um, I don't know if I have a mental model, but I have to be very careful, right? I have to assess an audience's ability to hear what I'm saying. I mean, sometimes I'm talking to a C suite and the board, sometimes I'm talking to employee, uh, rank and file at a company, sometimes I'm speaking to an open public gathering at a big event with a few thousand people in the audience. So you have to be always thinking about what's their willingness to hear what I'm saying. And sometimes you have to ask a bunch of questions ahead of time to figure that out. Sometimes they're just not ready to hear it. And you have to give them the baby steps. Here's a few things you could do short term. And you look at their faces and you assess whether the stuff that's really simple baby steps seems wow to them. You know, I met with Pier 1 Imports. I met with their board and management team a few years back and they're out of business now. But I could tell that the things I was saying to them were just so mind blowing they couldn't get their heads around it. But you have to make that assessment. And then I walk them through and if I think they can take it, then I'll take them to the next level. Okay, so this is table stakes in the next three to five years. Then these are the things that will be differentiators in the next three to five years. And then beyond that, they'll become table stakes in sort of five to 10. And then, you know, the stuff that's 10 years out let me model what that might look for you, what the capabilities would be, the business capabilities that they would give you, and how could you accelerate those and bring those in to give you competitive advantage? So it's kind of the way I've looked at it, but it's all based on a client's ability to process what I'm going to tell them.

Speaker B: And we think that in the last year, 18 months, especially during the pandemic, it's just accelerated digital transformation, you know, so any business that doesn't have a full digital customer experience and a full digital support experience and a full digital employee experience is going to be at a huge disadvantage. How's that playing out in your world? You know, how are people coming to you saying, what do I do?

Speaker C: So the way I talk them through that story is to say, and there's no disagreement when I work tell a story this way is that, uh, there has always been a gap between companies that invested in technology and companies that were laggards with technology. And they all nod their heads and recognize that. And then I will point out that as these technologies become exponentially more powerful in the 2000s and I walk them through what those technologies are, that that gap is going to widen significantly. And therefore what they need to do is to create what I call a digital first culture. So when they're looking at solving business problems, they need to think about a digital solution first and not as an afterthought or a side project, maybe something that's it's responsibility and that digital innovation. So, uh, innovation that embraces digital transformation technologies is now the job of everybody in the company. It is not the job of the CTO, uh, the R&D department and the IT people. It is everybody's job. Which means that the whole business needs to get educated. Certainly the people who are making decisions, they need to get educated on how transformational these technologies are, um, and what's possible. They don't need to know how AI works or how distributed ledgers work. They just need to know what kind of business problems they can solve with them so they can ask the right questions of their suppliers and their IT departments.

Speaker B: And uh, we get asked a lot notion as investors about the big theme is work from anywhere. Yeah. So what's transpired now is, hey, guess what? What? Everyone's been at home for six, nine, 12 months. But the kind of tech economy is as vibrant as ever. In fact, it's probably overheating right now. So how do you see that kind of playing out? And I think that bleeds out into operations from anywhere. So I see now, like it help desks and ticketing systems and cyber solutions need to recognize that they're not built now in a typical org design of here's a building with an org structure and everyone sits at a desk. It's like everybody's distributed across multiple time zones and languages across the planner. Uh, how do we knit all that back together into what we used to call an org? How do you see that kind of playing out? Do you think we're going to revert back or do you see that as a kind of ongoing journey now?

Speaker C: So from all the research that I have seen and from all of the customers and clients that I talk to, I think we're going back to generally a hybrid model and that it's very situational. So it depends by company. Uh, if a company is a, say a heavy manufacturing company or a meatpacking company, you need people to be physically on site. If you're more towards the knowledge side, then you have much more flexibility to have remote employees. And they're most likely to adopt a hybrid model. But, you know, within that there are teams that will, some that can be distributed and some that will have benefit from being closer together for brainstorming sessions or whatever it might be, because the tools that we have are still limited. Video is great, Zoom is fantastic, all those types of tools, but they're still not the same as being in a physical space together. So I think you'll see a hybrid model emerge where rather than the default be that you go into the office and you stay home by exception, you'll stay home by default and you'll go into the office by exception. So when you need to strengthen your connections with co workers, when you need to work on a creative brainstorming session, when you need to meet with a client. So face to face still has its value. It's not gone away. But, uh, people are finding that they're pretty productive when they're at home and they like that flexibility. And I think we're moving from a world of work life balance to a world of work life fusion, where the two just merge and blend together in a way that works best for the employee. What I, uh, fully expect is going to happen is as companies start to demand that their employees come back to work, you're going to see a ton of turnover. And again, there's a lot of research that supports that there could be up to 30% of people who, if they're forced to go back into the office, are going to wave their middle finger and go find a job somewhere else. Flexibility is going to become a key differentiator, uh, for people who want to get the best talent certainly in the next few years.

Speaker B: Wow, 30%. Earlier on in this podcast, we had a very, very well known in the UK market and European market recruiter in tech. And he was just talking about how heated the market is. And when you look at that, I think that could be where the dam bursts in the tech market.

Speaker C: Well, the other big driver in tech is dei. They're all going after their diversity, equity, inclusion numbers and stats. And I was talking to a CEO of a company here in Portland, Oregon, and he opened a satellite office. He's embracing remote work. There's a corporate culture. He opened a satellite office down in Atlanta, hired the best talent he could. Many of them happened to be people of color. And guess what? He hit all of his dei, uh, stats overnight in two weeks. So that, I think is also going to be a driver for a lot of companies who are looking to build more diverse cultures, be more inclusive, is just to start opening facilities in places where people live rather than expecting them to move to white bread Silicon Valley.

Speaker B: So let's get to the exciting stuff.

Speaker C: Your bachelor party.

Speaker B: Oh, sorry, no, no, no, we're not,

Speaker C: let's not rehash that.

Speaker B: We're not, we agree not to talk about that on the podcast. Okay, uh, so what are you seeing? Tech. What's exciting? And let me tee this up in terms of, I think tech kind of comes in ways. You know, you had the desktop and you had client server, uh, then you had SaaS, then you had kind of true open cloud. Then we're kind of moving into the AI data kind of era. Uh, and they all kind of build on each other in a certain way. But as you look at this, what do you see? What do you think is out there in terms of the next waves? Because they seem to be getting more compressed, the rate of changes are speeding up.

Speaker C: So I'm not looking at it in terms of high level system corporate architecture the way you just described it. I'm looking more at what are the business capabilities that digital transformation gives you and then what are the underpinning, um, technologies that support those. So let me sort of walk you through what I mean. So digital transformation, I mean there are lots of things, lots of benefits it can bring you. You can digitize processes and things. I'll give you an example. There are companies working on the ability to change a Covid diagnostic from instead of jamming something up your nose and then sticking it in a tube, which is a very chemical, biological, physical process. Being able to listen to the sound of your voice and diagnose Covid based on vocal biomarkers in your voice. A couple of companies working on stuff like that. So digitizing a process that was formerly a very physical process. There's automation, which we're all very familiar with. And increasingly I'm seeing a shift in focus not just purely on automation, which is about replacing human labor, but augmentation where you are elevating the human labor that you have. And that may be something you're doing with physical augmentation. If you think about people, uh, working in a Ford plant, you know, they're using exoskeletons to get underneath the cars and put bolts in. Or more likely mental augmentation. Using AI to help people with their creativity, to boost their intuition, to improve their decision making skills, their judgment. There's loads of great examples of that. I mean there are AIs that are helping movie moguls to decide which projects to green light. They just ingest the script, they look at the metadata about what the talent is that's currently attached to the project and they will predict what the opening box office weekend of that movie is going to be. And they call it way more accurately than Hollywood movie moguls have done based on historical data. So augmenting human talent I think is a big trend that we're going to see continuation of Industry 4.0 and 5.0. Beyond that 4.0 tried to get the human out of the equation and really drive automation and cyber physical Systems into fact. 5.0, uh, brings the human back into that. Both by embracing a mass customization and personalization, but also bringing the human back into the manufacturing flow by using augmentation technologies to be able to add a level of sort of artisan craftsmanship on the end of the process. Platforms I think are going to continue to be a force more of an economic conversation than a technological one. Your Ubers and YouTube's and Airbnb type approach remote anyway, work we've already talked about. I think the final one that I think is going to be a huge force in business supported by digital transformation technology is transparency. Businesses driven by needs to become more efficient but also driven by consumer demands for more information about the products they buy, to provide more information and to have more transparency in their supply chains. As you know, that's something I'm m passionate about. I'm co founder of a startup that's working in that area, aside from all of that, even if I wasn't involved, that is a major trend I'm seeing that is supported by, uh, distributed ledger technologies, digital twins, IoT sensors, 5G and such, being able to help us understand what is happening in the complex supply chains that service. So that's the framework that I use. And then there's a bunch of technology underneath that, which we could talk about if you're interested in.

Speaker B: Yeah, let's talk about the technologies. No, seriously, because you threw in a whole bunch of words there, uh, that I was like, oh, that's interesting. And the Industry 5.0, you've got me really thinking about that now as well. The underlying tech is often the enabler, but sometimes can unlock whole new areas of value. And you've talked about AI, you've talked about IoT and 5G, you mentioned a few things there. Uh, anything else on the horizon or anything else you look at and think, oh, wow, that could really unlock new parts of the market. Because to me, I think tech, there are whole new markets being created that no one could have even foresaw like five years ago. So whole new markets being created and existing markets are just getting bigger because the ability to serve more parts of that, like the small medium enterprise or the mom and pop shop or whatever, it's of such a cost now that you can move all the way down to those kind of levels. So the markets are getting bigger, new bugs are being created and a lot of it is just enablement and the driving down of the kind of compute storage cost as well.

Speaker C: Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff in terms of. So I always think about, there's digital transformations, which is the business transformation I just walked you through. There's the digital capabilities that support those transformations and underneath that are the core technologies. So let's hit the core technologies first. These are the ones I wrote about in my book last year. Great time to launch a new book, by the way, during COVID Awesome. Um, so the six technologies are artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, sensors and IoT, all the flavors of VR, AR XR. So all of the augmented reality stuff, robotics, and then next generation networks, which I lump satellite networks and 5G together, because between the two of them, it's going to mean that you can connect everything and everyone everywhere by the end of the decade. So if you start to glue those technologies together in interesting ways, you get all sorts of interesting new capabilities. So the things I'm keeping m my eye on generative design using AI to enhance creative talents capabilities, whether they're uh, an engineer, an architect, someone that's creating engineering models or something like that. That's where that technology lies today. But I think that's going to expand into other fields. We'll probably expand into a category we maybe could imagine calling collaborative AI, which is AI that's designed to support us in our jobs. So I think that's a hot one to watch for. Natural language processing is starting to get much more capable. If, uh, you saw Google I O recently, I know this is going out in August, so it's not that recently. But you know, looking at the demos that they showed with Lambda for example, and the stuff that's coming out of OpenAI with GPT3, not just being able to speak to a computer, but have a conversation with a computer and have language models that allow us to start doing things like summarizing a complex technical research paper and creating a summary that an average normal human being could understand. So really starting to put AI to work using its understanding of language to do useful work for us and not just give us a new interface. Another one that I'm watching closely, I think is fascinating, is this idea of super sensing using a sensor and turbocharging it with AI to enable us to sort of lift the veil on the world and see things that we can't see alone. Our five senses, um, aren't able to see them, but an AI and a sensor can. So you know, there's some work going on at MIT where they're using a radio frequency sensor on a wall and it sprays out radio frequency waves. They tend to go through walls but bounce back off people. And so they look at the reflected waves and from that information they're able to train the AI so that it can not only tell if you're standing, sitting, walking, have fallen over. And um, they're imagining this for assisted living facilities to keep an eye on patients without using a camera, which would invade their privacy. But it's so sensitive, it can pick up, uh, their heartbeat and their breathing rate wirelessly and it can even read their sleep state. And that's important because if somebody has disruption in their REM sleep and they have repetitive patterns of motion around a room, that can be an indicator of early onset Alzheimer's. If they change their gait, that can be an indicator of early onset Parkinson's. If they have disruptions in their deep sleep, that's anxiety and depression. So suddenly with an AI charged wireless sensor on the wall now I can see all of these healthcare conditions and have interventions as a result. So that's an example of super sensors. I'm watching that space really carefully because I think every business can imagine, well, what if I could get eyes on my operations or eyes on my customers or whatever it might be in a different way so that I can make different business decisions or create a new value proposition out of that. So there's just a few examples I'm also looking at. Ah, digital twins, autonomous machines, prediction, hyper personalization, tokenization. Just a ton of stuff that I look at, but those are probably the big ones that I think are the most interesting. Interesting right now.

Speaker B: Fascinating. On that spread of tech, I see lots going on in AI and I see that kind of in action quite a bit in the kind of investment capacity. You see a lot of those people applying it to verticals or specific problems on the other end. The one that I've spent time with but never really see it come to fruition is IoT. That's the one that I'm a little bit frustrated with. The promise of the smart city and uh, the way that we could just basically turn everything into a mathematical problem in terms of just running cities, networks, et cetera. Is anyone really doing that yet? Do you think that's actually going to become a reality? I haven't seen it yet.

Speaker C: I think to some extent it needed some supporting technologies to make it happen. I mean you need to be able to create sensors at very low costs, compute and connectivity at low cost and small physical sizes. So as we're getting down to the 3 nanometer space, that becomes pretty viable to start putting. Thinking about computing as an ingredient, you can see stir into everything, whether it's a connected product or a piece of connected infrastructure. And also infrastructure takes a long time to roll out. So it is going to be a lengthy process. And you know, we've seen some failures with smart city efforts. But that doesn't mean that it's the wrong direction. It just means that we learn something on the way. So I fully anticipate that IoT is going to continue its rollout. 5G is a massive enabler of that because you have to have the ability to connect all this stuff. And until 5G. 5G is the first cellular platform that is designed for things other than cell phones. And that's one of the things people haven't really clocked is that 4G and before was really aimed at meeting the needs of cell phones and cell phones only. We frigged it to make other things work on it. But 5G is specifically designed for the scale and the low power needs that IoT has. So, uh, I would say wait on that a bit. In the next five years we're going to see some interesting stuff roll out.

Speaker B: So you mentioned in the middle of the last question as well, you're involved in the company now.

Speaker C: Yeah, the province chain network.

Speaker B: Yeah. Built around one of your, uh, passions and interests, which is, could I call it, supply chain visibility and integrity and knowing basically where things have come from. But before I ask you about that, so the startup scene in Portland, I know Seattle, I know San Francisco, Portland, how's that as a tech hub?

Speaker C: You know, it's not been known for that traditionally, but it's growing to be that. It is a hub of certainly creative types. There's a ton of marketing agencies that are focused on the tech world that are based here in Portland. And I think you're starting to see a number of these startups come here. They tend to be silicon focused because Intel's main facility is here in Portland. People think of it as a Silicon Valley company and it has, you know, maybe 8 or 9,000 people people down there, but there's probably 20,000 intel people up here in Portland, Oregon. So there's a lot of semiconductor, uh, activity here. This is known as the Silicon Forest up here in the Pacific Northwest. So it's getting there, but it's not nearly as vibrant, I would say, as Silicon Valley yet.

Speaker B: So tell me more about the new startup there because I know you're quite excited about it. So tell me a little bit more about the idea and, well, why you're passionate about it.

Speaker C: Well, it's predicated on the idea that people have the right to know about the products that they buy, use and consume. So to get that insight to help them make a better buying decision, I wrote a blog on this a couple of months ago and it basically said, consumers are the problem, but it's not our fault. And what I meant by that is that if you think about all of the things that we see on TV news that we think, oh, how awful, you know, climate change, pollution, deforestation, child labor, forced labor, all of it. Right. There's one thing that unifies all of that and it's consumer behavior. It's the decisions that we make day in, day out. When I have two T shirts in front of me and I can decide which white T shirt do I buy, Is it this one for $10 or $12 or £10 or £12 if you're listing in the U.K. right. Okay. They look the same to me. I'll buy the ten pound one and save myself a couple of quid. Or maybe you could look at the detail, the provenance of those and find that, uh, the $12 one, guaranteed not made by tiny fingers in a Vietnamese factory and guaranteed not made from cotton picked by forced labor in China, $10 T shirt, don't know, no provenance. Now, as a consumer, I'm empowered to make a decision, is it worth £2 to me to feel good about my purchase? For me, yes, it would be. So if people who can afford to make that decision now, you're empowering them with information. And I think what that does is. And the reason I'm attracted to this purpose project is it gives you the ability to start to slowly align supply chain behaviors against human values. Because as you expose that information, brands love it. Because, you know, if you're a brand manager, your biggest nightmare is opening the newspaper and seeing your brand's name in it associated with, you know, some awful thing that happened somewhere back down their supply chain. Something that they have no control over. But because these are very complex supply chains, they can't inspect everything all the time. And so, yep, there was child labor in a factory and now I'm on the front page. So brand managers want this capability to be able to ensure that they can keep their promises to consumers, but also because it gives them operational efficiency so they can start to put more requirements and get more compliance from their suppliers throughout the supply chain. But for consumers to be able to empower them at the point of purchase, the point of decision to decide, is this product consistent with my values? Can I guarantee that this product is safe for my family? That's a really important thing to be able to enable and if it helps us to move the world towards a better climate, less pollution, reducing child labor and forced labor, that's what makes me want to do this every day.

Speaker B: I can see that. And that, uh, complexity of supply chain and visibility of data is. And manipulation of data through the supply chain has always been an issue. Yeah, so I get that. So who are your heroes now? Who do you look out there and, you know, intel was once your hero. You know, in this kind of new world, who do you look at? People, companies, tech, whatever, and say, I admire that. I like that.

Speaker C: I don't want to give you company names. I'll tell you the types of companies that inspire me and they're companies that have a passion for, for a clear and inspiring purpose. A company that I think is doing something that I consider to be worthwhile. That's how I judge when I'm making my investments. Are they doing something interesting? Are, uh, they trying to change the world and make it better for people? So that's one of the things that I look for that inspires me. And you know, purpose driven companies, I've been shown from a financial perspective to outperform non, you know, fuzzy purpose companies, let's call them significantly. I think companies that have diverse talent and a culture, a foundation of trust and mutual respect so that that talent can work well together. And when I say diverse, I'm not talking just about race and gender and the things that get tracked by government people. What I'm talking about is the world's most intractable problems are only going to be solved by people with very diverse backgrounds and experience and knowledge coming together and collaborating. You're going to create a self driving car by having artificial intelligence people, philosophers and ethnographers and car mechanics all coming together. We're going to have breakthroughs in healthcare diagnostics by having doctors and artificial intelligence experts work well together. And you need people at that intersection. And to do that you have to have a culture of respect and trust. I watched it at intel with social scientists trying to work with engineers. They didn't speak the same language. The social scientists thought the engineers were knuckle draggers and the engineers thought the social scientists were fufu lala people who had no value and no business being at a company like Intel. And it took a number of years to build respect for each other's craft and knowledge. But once they figured out how to speak to each other and that they actually brought value, it created magic. So that's, I think, really important. I have respect for companies that can figure that out. And then companies that are just bold, they have a willingness to turn the status quo on its head. They don't ask the question, you know, how could we incrementally change something? But they ask this positive question of how could we? And then a bold declarative statement and then they break it down bit by bit. Elon M. Musk how could we save humanity from an asteroid hitting us? Well, we have to become a multi planetary species, therefore I have to create a rocket. How do I do that? I have to make it reusable. People who break problems down like that really inspire me because otherwise we wouldn't get anywhere.

Speaker B: So it's the season finale. I think we need to have two special questions at the end. Okay. Don't worry, they're nice questions. Number one is you were the first person I met that was all in on Apple, even when it wasn't cool to be all in on Apple. Why was that? You know, I used to visit you and you had all this Apple gear and I was like, apple, eh? You know, I was never the guy that I was like. I think I was all in on PC at that point. So what was it at that time? I remember you were like the early, early adopter that would buy it and go. But it doesn't quite work the way I intended. But I still love it.

Speaker C: Everything just worked nicely. I like the design ethic and at the time, you know, I still. Now I take a lot of video, I edit a lot of video. It was just the best place to do it. I would buy these expensive PCs with dual Pentium 3 and Adobe, uh, Premiere running on it with Windows XP and it would just crash and fall over and be useless. And then I bought, what was it, a power Mac G4 or something? Whatever. The first G4 laptop was super slim, gorgeous, and it edited video with no problems and it was easy to use. So that's why it was purely things I wanted to do on it. All the creative stuff just worked better on Apple and probably still does to this day.

Speaker B: Well, you converted me. Now my house is just full of Apple stuff, like kids. So, yeah, I might as well just open my wallet and go, there you go, take it.

Speaker A: Arguably, Apple is kind of the successor of the Amiga, because when you had an Amiga, you kind of naturally.

Speaker C: I agree with Apple.

Speaker A: That's what I did as well.

Speaker B: That's a good thing. So, last question. The theme of this show is go to market Heroes. And I've managed to source from Heidi's cousin the Johnny Hates Jazz, I don't want to be a hero. So when you hear it edited, that's the intro and outro to the show.

Speaker C: Oh, nice.

Speaker B: And it's circa 87. And I think at that time you were, uh, the resident DJ at, uh, our university union. I was, yeah. So just to finish us off, because Paul loves talking about 80s music. He just says to me, every show is like, please talk more about 80s music.

Speaker A: That's why I'm fascinated by you now.

Speaker B: It's gonna ask Steve to reminisce about what we used to play back in the day. What was on the decks. It was vinyl. Then, uh, maybe got into cd.

Speaker C: But what we were playing, oh, goodness. I mean, back then I would do the party night, which was promotion night on a Wednesday. And, you know, you think, think about going to a nightclub on a Wednesday now. But when you're a student, every day is a Saturday night. So was when the brewery would come in and do a promotion. So it'd be like Bacardi Night or Gordon's Gin Night. I remember when Gordon's gin was 25 pence a shot. It was when pound coins were new and people would go up to the bar with a shiny pound coin and get a quadruple gin. A lot of devastation on the dance floor that night. But because it was fueled by cheap alcohol, I would always play things that were party records. So, you know, there'd be the cool Sisters of Mercy and Depeche Mode and Cure and Colt and that sort of thing. But I'd also play Wham and Jackie Wilson and Bill Withers and anything to get people going because they were fueled with liquid courage.

Speaker B: And that was an interesting music time in Manchester, where we were. Because that whole Manchester scene was kind of coming alive with the Inspiral Carpets and obviously New Order and Smiths. The Smiths.

Speaker C: I played a lot of New Order.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah.

Speaker C: I had to play Bizarre Love Triangle every night.

Speaker B: That's my favorite. That is my favorite. That's the one I always pull out.

Speaker A: You must have been an amazing. And you still are probably an amazing dj. And I want to listen to that set once.

Speaker C: I still have some tapes of it somewhere because we did pirate radio as well one year. I've still got tapes of us doing pirate radio from Moss side in Manchester.

Speaker B: So on that note, Paul, we started with the 80s music, we're finishing with the 80s music. Steve, you've been a great guest. Thank you so much for sharing. Really appreciate the stories. You actually didn't say anything embarrassing about me, so for that, I am very grateful. Thank you very much.

Speaker C: You're welcome. Good to be here.

Speaker A: And as we've established that we are big fans of the Amiga, the last word of the season shall be, as it might bring you memories, gentlemen, guru meditation. And so, uh, for the last time, thank you again very much, Andy. Thank you, everyone, for having been with us for these 14 episodes of this epic season. Thank you, Steve, for having, closing wonderfully the season as well. For the last time, let's listen to the song that closes every episode and see you in the next season, whatever that is. Stay tuned. Enjoy the summer, everyone.