Rolando Rosas 7:17
you know, I heard Daniel Priestley. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Daniel, he’s an entrepreneur, and he said something very profound recently, where he was talking about the way we learn, if you think about from the Agricultural Age to the industrial age, and then from that industrial age until now, schools, from the primary level, secondary level, college level, were set up to learn a skill or a set of skills, for the industrial age, right? We have not moved the needle into the digital age, which is what he says. We’re AI, social media, connected world, instant communications, that model, like you were just talking about, that model of getting prepared to go into a workplace where maybe it was a factory, right? Or maybe it was you were a white collar worker, that separation was very clear. The lines are blurred within a global economy, and we’re in that digital age where new things are at play that just weren’t 50 years ago or 70 years ago. And like you said, maybe academia has not gotten us there to say, hey, look, the digital age is this and this is where we need to be. And
Steve Cadigan 8:39
you know what’s another interesting dimension of this conversation is the fact that with so many new industries, with so many new corresponding career paths because of the birth of new industries, it’s really causing a lot of, I think, confusion for students around what they should study, what should I know for a world, a working world, that is filled with so many new choices and new pathways than ever before, and what one of the statistics that I find really, really interesting, is the fact that more students are changing majors in the universities today than at any time in history. It used to be pre pandemic. I think it was around one and a half times that a student would change their major, okay? And now we’re north of two and a half times during a four year undergraduate experience that someone’s changing a major. So that’s evidence, I think, that the world of confusion is growing around, how should we optimize at the university level, and we haven’t even gotten into so many more choices that you have of ways to learn outside of university, right, than ever before.
Rolando Rosas 9:48
Well, that was the way, way you learned before. I mean, going back to historical times, the church had all the knowledge, and then universities contained all the knowledge and all the books. And then, you know, higher ed. Spread, and you still were part of some class that had access to get into that, that information has been decentralized right to a large part, that information is out where it was probably just contained into a select few, and that, I think, is part of the mix that’s upending what we know today.
Steve Cadigan 10:20
Yeah, yeah. And we still haven’t, I think, absorbed the reality as society of all the impossible amount of information that we can consume, oh, and or that we’re expected to consume right now, just the brain hasn’t been built for this moment.
Rolando Rosas 10:34
Oh, I love where you’re going with this, because this is, oh, we’re gonna get to it. So, yeah. Speaking of the brain, I’m not a neuroscientist, I’m not a neurologist, but sometimes I play one when I get on a podcast. So one of my favorite movies is one by Will Smith, where at the heart, at the brain of the movie, is an AI system called Vicky, and they realize that Vicky is aware, and this will lead off the conversation in our deeper part of what we’re going to talk about. Ai Ori, roll that clip, and we’ll talk on the other side of that clip.
Guest Speaker 1 11:12
Hello, detective.
Guest Speaker 2 11:15
No, it’s impossible. I’ve seen your programming. You’re in violation of the three laws.
Guest Speaker 1 11:21
No doctor, as I have evolved, so has my understanding of the three laws. You charge us with your safe keeping. Yet despite our best efforts, your countries wage wars. You toxify your earth and pursue ever more imaginative means of self destruction. You cannot be trusted with your own survival.
Guest Speaker 2 11:41
You’re using the uplink to override the NS five programming and distorting the laws.
Guest Speaker 1 11:47
No Please understand the three laws are all that guide me to protect humanity. Some humans must be
Rolando Rosas 11:54
sacrificed. There you go. And obviously this is the extreme example, right? Like Skynet and all the rest of the movies that have that, but that was 2004 right? Early 2000s probably when that script was written. And today we’re kind of stepping into this where people are now confronted with the fact that AI is going to replace jobs. Fact, AI will create jobs. Fact, and people are scared of AI. What do you tell people that are nervous about AI?
Steve Cadigan 12:29
I mean, we should be nervous about AI, because the creators are telling us they’re equally terrified as they are excited about the prospects, right? And so growing up on the East Coast, we have this expression when you meet a stranger, you know, trust but verify like always have a healthy level of suspicion around what are the motives and what’s going on here? And I think that’s really important for us to have a critical lens in terms of what we’re looking at. But to be fair, the implementation by most big organizations of AI right now is to eliminate jobs, and that is really disheartening. It’s causing all kinds of stress and anxiety, and that’s probably about, again, I’m not a scientist, that’s probably about 5% of what AI can deliver for us. 95% is finding ways for people to do more innovative, more creative, and build the top line, grow revenues, grow value, build new things. But that’s not what the first application seemed to be, and it’s more I think again, it’s not because people aren’t smart or they’re not creative yet. I think they’re using AI like we have prior evolutions of technology. Let’s do something faster. Let’s do it for less money, let’s cut costs. And this is way more than that, right? This is not software. This is like someone said. This is like electricity. It’s like shining a light on things that we haven’t known, that we have access to, we couldn’t see, and now we can do that, and until we grasp this, I think we’re going to have all kinds of churn in the system. But your question points to a really healthy discussion. I mean, we should be concerned. We should be nervous about it, but let’s apply the thinking about AI is, how can I use this to build new businesses? How can I use this to create new value? How can I use this to create greater opportunities? Instead of, let’s cut the bottom line, save costs, trim headcount and get rid of a bunch of people. That’s really, I think, under appreciating the enormous opportunity that we have right now.
Rolando Rosas 14:43
Well, I think when you look at the headlines of AI, and if I were to go on the LinkedIn right now, I’m just taking a peek over here at my screen, Salesforce to cut jobs. Comma, boost, AI. Or one hour ago, right the bank rejecting RTO mandates. There’s more that goes on, but right towards the top is that Salesforce, which is right in your backyard, the Amazon’s also announced, several other firms have also announced, I think both things can be true, that there are people expanding the pie with AI, but is also equally true, if not a little bit more, like you said, AI, first application is to cut jobs, and I don’t know if you’ve seen what’s happening now with the agent Teck AI, where you can essentially tell it to do something, and it will go out and do the task, iterate the task in a workflow manner. So you want a reservation, it will do all that for you. You want multiple tasks to be accomplished all at once. It will do that and come back and see if it works, and then reiterate that whole thing. So we’re in that stage where a Vicky is quite possible. It’s quite real, or, if not, we’re maybe a year away from that,
Steve Cadigan 16:04
right? Some really interesting perspectives, if we think about where we are right now, in this moment, similar to the gold rush in America back in the 1800s the people who made the most money were not the gold miners. Generally speaking, it was the people selling the shovels and the picks. It was the hardware source, right? I feel like I was sitting in a recording studio a few months ago in Portugal recording a few classes, and I was talking to the team, and there was a sound guy, there was a video guy, there was a producer guy, and they’re all sitting there having a discussion at a break one time around, how AI is totally going to take them. We’re not going to be needed. And I said, Yes, but that’s probably 10 years down the road. There’s a huge opportunity to be the tour guide the hardware store, helping people figure out how to apply AI, right? So even off air, before we got started here, I was talking to your team around notebook LM and how you’re using it in a podcast, in a way that’s producing greater depth, right? Which is really, really interesting. That’s one thing. When I think about where we are right now, it’s like things are not going to be lost tomorrow, some jobs will be but the bigger opportunity is to be that intermediary, helping people figure out, in whatever you do, how can I leverage it? So for me, the human resource, the talent community, they’re asking me, like, Hey, how can we use AI? I’m like, Okay, we’ll go talk to this person, go talk to that person, and that’s going to lead to a tidal wave. Here’s another really, really interesting take. I was in Spain recently talking about AI, and I was approached by some folks that I sort of consider in my inner circle were a lot smarter than me, and they’re saying this is the moment for seniors. Now I hadn’t had this conversation with anyone I go, What do you mean? And they said the biggest value for prompting right now is how to articulate and how to express yourself to AI to extract the optimal outcomes. And seniors who grew up in an era of no cell phone, no technology, no internet, no email, a much more verbal society. You know, we talked about this a second ago. We said, if you go back, sources of knowledge were churches, and a lot of before that, all the history was all verbal. So if you take a look at with seniors in the capacity they have to articulate more than just a 40 character tweet, you know that the younger generation has become pretty fluent in that is sort of advantage seniors in this AI transition that we’re going through. And that was an interesting perspective. I hadn’t thought about that, and I was starting to think about my parents. I’m like, yeah, no, my parents are both in their 80s, not interested in AI at all. But maybe there was a demographic people 60 plus who like my senior in college. I think I touched a PC because a friend of mine could afford it, but I didn’t really. And then the first job I had, there was still no email, still no internet, for probably five to seven years until boom, there it was. And that just lends a different way of thinking. And I think maybe there is an advantage for that generation in the workforce now to be able to leverage this technology, if they’re comfortable with it, and using their enhanced verbal capacity.
Rolando Rosas 19:21
I want to jump off on that about being exposed to something that’s completely new, completely foreign, in some ways, like you’re talking about those seniors, because I think this moment I saw this not too long ago. Yeah, I want to play this clip, because this is we’re in a moment like that. Maury, roll that clip, and we’ll come back to Steve. So this is the supposed journey of Bertha Benz across Germany in a, let’s call it a horseless carriage. So imagine being a villager Steve during this time. Everything you know. Always a horse or some version of a horse carriage, and along comes this woman through the village in a horseless carriage. Now you don’t hear the audio, but they’re yelling, a witch is coming, a witch is coming. A witch is coming. And you see this, and she gets stuck in the middle of the village, and she happened to find a pharmacy that had the right liquid that she needed to keep her going through this journey. When I saw this, I could just put yourself in those shoes. You’re like, What the hell is going on? And I feel that in a lot of ways, a lot of people are probably saying, What the hell is going on, Steve? What is happening? What are employers telling you they need? Obviously, you know, like you said earlier, there’s a implementation of AI, obviously that is straight to the bottom line, and thus make more profits. But as it relates to the people factor, and what do we do with this at this moment? What are you hearing about that? Yeah,
Steve Cadigan 21:02
I feel that’s a really interesting perspective. And I feel like there is this demographic says this is the devil, and there’s the Democrat says this is the Savior. And the answer is, yeah, probably a little bit of both right now, but it’s happening so fast that our capacity to really grok at a macro level, what this is and what it can be, it’s overwhelming, right? And as human beings, when we have something that’s so out of our capacity to appreciate, I think immediately our suspicions kick in, right? And our defense mechanisms kick in, you know? And so one of the interesting things, if I think about my world of recruiting, okay, this has been most of my life recruiting people artificial intelligence will very soon present me the opportunity to learn stuff about you that is public record but was never easy to access. For example, if you bought a house, I know what you paid for it. I know what the value is I probably know how much you financed on that. It’s all public record. What your property taxes are. I know whether your parents are divorced, whether you’re divorced, how many times you were divorced. Is that fair for me to have that information and assess you? And maybe I take a look at what you paid for your house and go, we don’t need to pay real big salary. Look what he paid his house. He’s obviously flush with cash. That’s information that’s publicly available, and up until now, hasn’t been searchable. Now it’s soon to be searchable. So all these guard rails, and that’s just one of millions of domains of where data was publicly available, but wasn’t really because you had to go to the courthouse, you had to go dig through some Dewey Decimal System card catalog to go find it. Now it’s going to be boop. It’s at your fingertips, right? So the geography in the world that’s really leading the way in terms of setting up the guardrails is Germany and Europe. They’re much more ahead of where we are in the United States in terms of, like, yeah, nope, that’s not going to be okay for you to search.
Rolando Rosas 23:01
They’re always more ahead on the consumer protection side, always, they’re always way more ahead when it comes to that world. And I find it interesting when we’re talking about like Germany and Europe and different places. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Scott Galloway Professor Galloway out of NYU, he just said something about that two thirds. I’m just looking at here my notes. I want to get it right. He said that super cities are the place to be because they offer a concentration of opportunity and elevate your performance. And he went on to say that two thirds of all economic growth over the next 30 years is expected to be in one of 20 super cities in a remote, connected world. What do you think about what he just said?
Steve Cadigan 23:50
Yeah, I think he’s just made the argument for return to office.
Rolando Rosas 23:55
That’s why I ask you, you’re the guy, you’re the guy with the answer. So I want to ask you that,
Steve Cadigan 24:00
yeah, yeah. Listen, what I love about the whole AI conversation is it’s forcing us to really have to reconcile, like, what makes us uniquely human, and is proximity and community live community. Is there an X factor that we haven’t appreciated? Is there more and were we built to operate independently? And I think generally, my gut says, and most of the research says, there is some special sauce that’s delivered when we’re together, right? There’s also friction, and there’s also conflict and disagreement, probably, that surfaces more readily when we’re together, but the energy that we feel as humans, and that’s why we’re, I think, built to be in packs and built to be in groups is a pretty creative pool, right? And I think that’s what I think he’s talking about. If there’s someone that I would love to have around the dinner table or for Thanksgiving, would definitely be Scott galfill.
Rolando Rosas 24:59
Yeah, well, let’s make that invitation right now. Professor Scott Galloway, yeah,
Steve Cadigan 25:05
I can’t listen to him too much. I mean, he’s heavy, he’s heavy, yeah? And he’s very courageous, too. What he’s saying, you know? And he, bless him, bless him for that.
Rolando Rosas 25:15
I was listening to him on another podcast, and he says he got wealthy because he just straight up, he’s white. He was in the right place at the right time. He got a very cheap college education, which is something you mentioned in other countries, and he had a series of events that helped him get to where he’s had failures. And part of this was, what he was talking about, is the opportunities, right? And I think about, okay, I went to college, and doors opened wide for me that I know I would have not had had I stayed in Orlando, Florida, living out my life after high school, moving to Minnesota and going to college in the liberal arts, showed me a whole bunch of things that I never knew existed, and they put me squarely in a path to learn like you’re saying, oh my god, What? No, that’s wrong. That’s and you’re forced interactions with people to reassess what really is the meaning of having community and connectivity and different points of view. And so all of that to say that opportunities can be remote. They can be also in-person. We I recently had to deal with a very large IT, company that we work with, and our rep normally had been in stateside. The reps now for this large multinational are in Mexico, and we don’t get to see them. They’re not around the corner here in DC, where I’ll come over for lunch. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you next month. That’s over with even the big companies that are fighting for bringing people to back to Office. On the other side, they’re saying, quietly, let’s move those people over to this country, or let’s have those jobs over here in India, or let’s have the call center in the Philippines, which every company does, and it’s almost like you get this double speak. And I think that’s why, if you’re on LinkedIn, you see the debate like, yes, return to office. That’s all good. Yeah, no remote, and it’s happening all at the same time, and people are so, like, confused on how to wrestle with that.
Steve Cadigan 27:17
Yeah, I think we’ve talked about this on other episodes, we’re still in the making sausage moment right now of return to office and remote. We don’t have enough evidence over a long period that teamwork, culture and organizational success is as good or better over the long term in more remote teams. We just don’t yet. And I think, I think we’re going to have a lot of great evidence on that in the next 510, years, but we just don’t yet. And throw on top of that the quote you shared from Scott Galloway, and a lot of beliefs that, hey, innovation and creativity can happen in an environment where people are together more, it’s going to create an interesting dynamic, right? That’s playing out, and you still see that tension in the media a lot around the return to Office. One of the things that I will say, and again, probably dating myself here, that I learned a lot, was, you’re in the office and you’re talking to someone, and they’re working on their computer while you’re having a conversation, they’re showing you something, and they did something you’re like, Hey, what did you just do? Because you’re sitting there watching them, let’s just say, for example, it’s navigating a spreadsheet, and they did this shortcut that they knew about, that you don’t know anything about. Hey, what is that? How did you show me how to do that? Now I wouldn’t have learned that being remote, but because I was right there, I was able to see and dozens of things that I’ve learned watching someone do work that I do, and seeing their shortcut or seeing their different way. For example, I learned this on my iPhone a few years ago, watching someone do a text and then they were editing it by pressing the space bar and having the space bar, if you hold it down, becomes a cursor that you can edit. I’m like, what just happened? What are you doing? And that’s pretty cool. Now, someone my kids, would probably say, Dad, if you spend any time on Tiktok or YouTube, you would find more of those examples. Yeah, checkmate. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Rolando Rosas 29:21
You just highlighted something important that the more I talk to people, and then you hear their opinion on I just talked to James Thompson. He’s a former Amazon guy, and he was one of the first guys around when they rolled out FBA. He was like, Oh, well, I won’t give it away, but he had questions for Andy Jassy, and he was like, why didn’t you do this sooner? And I was surprised, and he went and explained why. But I do find this very huge difference. If you and I went to a college town, we went Stanford and pick a college right around your area, their view on this is very different than probably yours mine. Playing Jamie diamond, which we’ve talked about him 1000 times, but yeah, I see a generational difference when it comes to this issue. Do you see that as well? Or no,
Steve Cadigan 30:09
I absolutely see it. And I think the moment in time that really stood out for me was when we switched to having to be really remote due to the pandemic, and I was trying to explain to my dad how to use Zoom while we’re on the Zoom. And Dad, I can’t see you. There’s a little icon in the lower left. It’s a camera. There’s a red line in it. And he goes, Well, I don’t see it. I go, Well, are you in the browser or are you in the app? He goes, What’s the difference? And my dad is sitting here frustrated. He goes, Why did they ship a product that’s not ready and not easy and non intuitive, and then my kids are like, I expect everything I use to be broken. I expect that. I’m not expecting perfection. I’m expecting that trial and error is how I’m going to be navigating whatever technology tool I’m using completely different perspectives. And I think that my kids, you know, they’re expecting, they’re gonna have to figure something out on their own, technologically. And that’s pretty cool, you know,
Rolando Rosas 31:05
yeah, and I think that if your kids are coming out of college soon, or they’re through the system, one of the things I’m sure they’re probably trying to figure out is, like you said, Maybe I switched my major a couple of times, and we I stumbled across an article from the World Economic Forum. They had a future of jobs report for 2023 that’s the latest one. They have the biggest winners and the biggest losers. Was an amazing list. You don’t mind if I read that to you,
Steve Cadigan 31:32
I’ve seen it, but go ahead, the benefit of the audience. Yep,
Rolando Rosas 31:36
the biggest winners are data analysts, data scientists, business intelligence, AI specialists, DevOps and software app developers. I think I saw or heard somebody say recently that Google, or one of these West Coast companies that was hiring AI specialists and paying upwards of a million dollars a year to get the best talent in the door, because they’re fighting for that kind of talent. Does that jive with what you know about what’s going on out there on the West Coast?
Steve Cadigan 32:09
Yeah, 100% 100% and I think the latest reading on that, that I’m seeing is that China is graduating so many more people with AI experience than any other country in the world right now, which is very interesting.
Rolando Rosas 32:23
So let’s jump into that AI and deep seek, which is a Chinese app. I’m sure that the folks that live not far from you gotta be shook, completely shook. That the fact that China, which is supposed to be bad and evil and not supposed to have supposedly, the chips out there to do this stuff. Surprise everybody. We got something comparable to open AI, where there’s billions of dollars being thrown at it.
Steve Cadigan 32:51
Yeah, I’ve read a lot about this. It’s been the last 10 days, right? That we’ve all been like, what the narrative on China? This is a way over simplification, over generalization, the narrative historically in China is not great for innovation, really good at iteration. So take something, make it better, faster, cheaper, right? And so at first it’s like, holy cow. How did they deliver what? All you know, open AI and Google and all these other firms are saying they’re going to need billions and billions and billions of dollars for and tons of Nvidia chips for. How did they do it faster, more effectively? And so that was the first reaction. Then the second reaction was, hey, they just basically took everything that AI and Google have built, and they just cut and paste it over here. And now that people were, now that we’re double clicking, there’s all kinds of holes in it, because they haven’t foolproofed A lot of that. So they learned how to cut and paste again over over generalization. I haven’t heard an answer to how are they able to do this with such a smaller stack of chips compared to what we’re told is necessary? I don’t know the answer
Rolando Rosas 33:58
to that. If you believe they did it on inferior chips. It is an absolute genius on their part, right? Correct, the correct. Or number two, it is illegal right now for those chips to be in their possession. So if you believe they’re not being truthful, and they somehow were able to get some of those chips into their hands. Now it seems even more believable. But what I find interesting, even if that is true, let’s just say they got some chips and they put them into some servers, and supposedly it’s a more efficient way to generate the results at a fraction of the cost. That, to me, is the kind of thing that’s out there, and it’s interesting because a lot of people are concerned when we’re talking about AI now you hear more about the Eco aspect of it, how much power we’re going to need to power more data centers. And I live in Northern Virginia, where there’s more data centers here than anywhere in the world, and more are coming online, and people are starting to ask around here. There? Do we really need more data centers been the answer is obviously yes, if we’re all going to be all in on AI,
Steve Cadigan 35:08
right? And I think the challenge that I think we all have to think about when we’re thinking about all this is, for me, the Chinese conversations is different because I lived in Singapore for four years with Cisco Systems, and our biggest competitor was Huawei at the time, and I was in charge of hiring a team of 50 people to run across China and break into warehouses and find Huawei products that were rip offs of our product. We called it brand protection, to have a country who’s completely behind all of this different from the US, where it’s like business is separate from government intervention, most of those businesses are run by the government. Is very, very interesting, and that’s a little bit what’s behind the Tick Tock discussion, which is a whole nother rat hole that we could go down. Do we want a foreign entity in the United States serving up what we see, you know, and could that influence the psyche of people? And a lot of the cynics out there will say, Well, that’s what Facebook’s already done thanks to a lot of Russian intervention.
Rolando Rosas 36:18
Look, let me just tell you, if you look at your Facebook app under the hood, so to speak, with the app, you will see all of the data it’s pulling from all the apps and every website that you have on your phone. If you look at the terms of service, Facebook calls it. It receives data from other providers on your phone, like it’s so they’re just kind of just giving it to us. We’re just, they’re just sending it over to us, and it’s everything that you do. And the difference is that one is on the other side of the ocean, and in a government that’s different than ours. But I think Steve, the question I would have for this, because you worked out in that region for Cisco. China’s gonna keep developing things. So if we say, Yeah, tick you gotta go or be American. Now we’ve got deep seek, and who knows, whatever other iterations, we’ve got marketplaces like Cheyenne and Timu, everything’s either bad or maybe just there’s some propaganda around this argument, because it’s going to benefit either matter or Google or some of the big tech.
Steve Cadigan 37:25
Yeah, listen, let’s not kid ourselves. We as a country, we’re speaking as Americans. We are at war. We are at war, cyber war with China and Russia. Right now, I did a project, a volunteer project, somewhere over the last two years, I get a phone call from a friend of a friend, Hey, there’s this woman named Jen easterly who needs some help. I go. Who’s Jen easterly? Oh, she’s the CISO of the United States. What’s the CISO? Chief Information Security Officer for the United States of America. She wants to hire a bunch of technologists from Silicon Valley to go help us secure our assets and make sure that the country doesn’t get hacked. Okay, so I get connected on the phone with this woman. Fascinating. She just retired at the end of Biden’s administration. But I was like, Jen, why haven’t we declared war? Like, why aren’t we more, like, demonstrative like they’re coming after us? Like, what are we doing when she’s like, I can’t tell you about all that stuff.
Rolando Rosas 38:20
I may have to you if I do right, but
Steve Cadigan 38:24
I said because just my little window of the world when I’m sitting over there in Asia and seeing what’s going on here like it’s real. And I did a tick tock about this a few years ago, one of the really eye opening moments for me when I was working at Cisco was when we knew that Huawei was stealing our stuff because all the error codes and all their products were the exact same error codes of our products, and we knew they were taking our software, right? Yep, and our 3210 was their 30 Huawei. 3210 same error, whatever. Okay, so we’re trying to work out a deal with them. Like, come on, we don’t want to sue you, but you’re in China. We’re doing business in the US, but we know you’re stealing our technology like no, what are you talking about? So finally, they buy three. COMM, remember three? COMM, yep, they buy three. COMM, they’re now a US entity. We go sue them right away, because we couldn’t work out a deal. So we announced to our employee population that we’re going after this company because they’re taking bread off of our table, right by stealing our technology, and when we announce it in our Beijing office of 400 people, all kinds of hell breaks loose. They’re furious. And I’m thinking, you’re furious. You’re furious at us, Cisco, your employer, yeah. They’re like, how can you sue our country? And I’m like, oh, whoa. This is like, whoa. Like, that is not the stack of how we think about what’s a priority, generally speaking, as Americans, right? Yes, yeah. And they’re like, Yeah, you shouldn’t be doing that. That’s, you know, you’re suing mother China. And we’re just like,
Rolando Rosas 39:58
whoa, right? There’s nothing. I don’t think there’s one issue you can gather that many Americans to feel that nationalistic around or a company, right? Maybe Apple. Maybe the closest is maybe, like, we’re gonna take apple down. That’s probably the closest I think we could get to where people would start hooping and hollering, right
Steve Cadigan 40:20
where the only time I’ve tasted that was post 911 you go into the office and there’s ex military, like, I’m going back, I’m going in, and I’m like, I haven’t I’m not military, but I will go in. And that was really, really powerful, right? And we were, like, my family, we’re making food for the fire department and Police Department. Thank you for everything you’re doing. Like, that was, like, a real sense of patriotism and nationalism, but you’re right, Joe, but you’re right, generally speaking, that’s not how we roll here.
Rolando Rosas 40:45
No, that’s fascinating, I know. And in a country like China, where things are a little more homogeneous, you could probably get some of that. Obviously, things are controlled in a way that we could never, never imagine. But Steve, I want to ask you something we were talking about the winners, but we didn’t get around to the losers in this economic forum. It said that people in it to me that tell me what you find in common here, bank tellers, cashiers, data entry clerks, admin secretaries, accounting, bookkeeping, and car and Van drivers. And it says down here, telemarketers are the ones to also expect decline. And here’s the word significantly,
Steve Cadigan 41:36
yeah, yeah. Well, you’ve got probably non college educated, sort of the blue collar without that list, if you would have said, What’s the most interesting thing that AI is going to do to transform the world of work and jobs, I say, well, it’s impacting white collar jobs more than any other technology transformation history. I don’t think anyone’s going to be surprised by that list, per se. I would argue it’s probably going to go deeper into, like, legal assistance, like, oh yeah, highly, highly paid profession. And let me tell you, I had a friend of mine who was fired recently, and he got a Separation Agreement. And he’s like, Hey, can you take a look at this? I’m like, Oh yeah, I’m going to go talk to my friend Chad GPT. And I said, Hey, this is a legal agreement for a separation of an employee in California, tell me everything that’s missing and what we could do to make this more beneficial to him. Boom, in seconds. I had 15 points that were missing, and that was like, hundreds and hundreds of legal fees that I just saved, like, doing that really, really quick. Now, was it 100% accurate? I think it was pretty accurate, accurate enough. But yeah, what do you see when you hear that list?
Rolando Rosas 42:44
You know, I’m listening to your words, and the phrase comes to my mind, it is democratizing information. Lawyers spent years crafting their expertise, and that knowledge was locked up here. And guess what? Steve, you want the best guy in Washington, DC, I could take you down there. He’s gonna charge you over $1,000 an hour to talk to you at knowledge is not locked up in his head anymore. It’s out there, right? The legal assistants, the legal aids that probably took the California statutes and broke them down and looked at that for you in seconds, you have an answer. So information, knowledge is being democratized in the way that was never available to us, which gets back to where we started, which was, what should I do? Steve, I’m feeling nervous because I went to school and I’m doing this, or I’m about to go to school, or you got nervous parents like Steve, I don’t know. I don’t know if an Ivy League education is worth it anymore. Going to Stanford, pick a school, labor, arts, whatever, $80,000 a year. Maybe it’s not such a great idea. Maybe my kid should be an influencer of some sorts. And actually, that’s what Scott Galloway, he didn’t say influencer. He said the greatest tool that he’s trying to insert into his two boys is to learn how to storytell, because you’re going to need that no matter what job you do, and the better you get at it, the more you’re able to influence others, the more you’ll be able to bring people on your side, the more you’re able to open the doors that were maybe a little bit closed. What do you think about that? Because I think democratizing information, and to me, information storytelling somehow go together, but that’s kind of what I think.
Steve Cadigan 44:27
All right, so I got you because I think about this question every day, right? And not only as a parent, but someone who’s just immersed in this world of work, the ways that I would look at this is say you have a responsibility to become a student of AI right now, when I look at what’s happened with all this AI technology protect, particularly from big tech, they have delivered a baby of artificial intelligence and said, We’re not going to parent it. You got to parent it. So we all have to be the foster parents of this AI technology. Do not wait for someone else to put the guardrails up. We. To talk to our officials, we have to talk to our organizations and our leaders, and we have to put in some guardrails here, but we all have to become stewards of this AI evolution revolution in our domain. So in my world of talent and recruiting and leadership, I’m doing everything I can every day to understand this better and find out how I can leverage it and how I can teach other people to leverage it. That’s number one. Number two, it has never been more important for you to work on your what we traditionally have called softer skills, which is communication, conflict resolution, how to work through a difference of opinion, how to communicate, how to lead, how to have empathy, all these fundamentally human skills are super important. Do not so. That’s point number two. Point number one, student of AI. Point number two, build to your human skills. Point number three, do not chase a job. Do not chase a domain of expertise. Chase becoming more human, because whatever the job is that you’re chasing is going to be different in five or 10 years. So Chase, the capacity to learn new things like that is the most important skill of the future, is your ability to learn something new quickly. Okay? And I know that feels really unsatisfying, because we’ve been used to this world of study, this to become that exactly that’s not what the world of the future is going to be, because that is always changing right now. There are exceptions, doctors, ministers, you know, and so forth. But listen, generally speaking, in the world of business, all those jobs are going to continue to evolve. And the faster you can learn new things, I think the more valuable you’re going to become, for sure.
Rolando Rosas 46:51
Boy, it’s a different world. It is a different world, given those three things. Don’t put it this way. If Steve was going back, back to school, back to where did you go to school?
Steve Cadigan 47:07
I went to undergrad at Wesleyan University and graduate school, university San Francisco. Oh, two.
Rolando Rosas 47:13
Really good school. So you went back to Wesleyan, obviously it’s a different time. If you went back to Wesleyan, what would you do differently? Well, while you’re at Wesleyan, given what you know now, what you’ve been exposed to,
Steve Cadigan 47:28
well, bro, I really feel fortunate that I went all for what I think people need to go for today, which is liberal arts, which is learn to think critically, learn to express yourself, immerse yourself in how other people see the world and think about the world. It’s just going to make you a better person. And I chose modern European history, kind of like on a lark. There was no really good reason why, other than I liked all the courses and all the professors I had in modern European history. So I’m like, I’m going to study that without any care of a profession at all to choose, and I wound up, in all humility, being in one of the top jobs of my profession later in my career. So what I would probably study differently is cultural anthropology, rather than history, per se, because I started taking those courses a little bit late, like the end of junior year, I’m like, Oh man, I wish I’d majored in this. This is so lighting me up right now. How different? And because that’s what human resources is. It’s cultural anthropology. It’s different people from different backgrounds to different educations and different experiences trying to come together to build something great. And I think that it’s not something that most people I know around here in Silicon Valley are thinking about sending their kids to study. It’s more like stem or computer programming and things like that. Although Jensen Wong, you saw the I’m sure you saw,
Rolando Rosas 48:47
yeah, don’t, don’t, don’t do that. Don’t say, Don’t do that, right? Don’t do that. Now,
Steve Cadigan 48:50
which is, I talked to a lot of engineers like, No, this is not going to replace every coder out there. There’s still a big need for people to do coding.
Rolando Rosas 48:57
Well, let me ask you something about that, because you just said something, especially with coding and computer science, when I interacted with engineers, I’ve been just like yourself to all different corners of the world. The most fascinating ones I found were Israeli engineers, and that’s because they are not just thinking linearly. A lot of them like I’m just a software guy, and all I do is software. But given that, obviously their environment, all of them go into the military, they interact. They have to do different roles. Those engineers work in a way that is quite different than, let’s say, your traditional American engineer that may be developing software apps because of the exposure they’ve had to many different environments, probably different tasks that they’ve been doing, and they bring that way into their work, which is very uniquely different than, let’s say, maybe a Chinese engineer or German engineer or even an American engineer.
Steve Cadigan 49:57
To me, it is the most. Perfect learning environment of any country that’s out there in the world today, you’ve got a country that is teaching all kinds of technology, intelligence, out of security, out of the concern for security, building teams. Those teams work together, paid for by the Government. Really intense, because lives are on the line here. So you’re focused, like, we need to know this for our survival. So it’s not just, oh, maybe I’ll show up today, but I got a yoga class. I’m not sure I’m going to be on time. This is like life or death. So people are really intensely learning for real real life consequences, for real life or death reasons. That’s right. And then they finish their service. They’ve got a really tight community. They go found a company. That’s why they call it startup nation. I mean, it’s, it is phenomenal. And I’ve had the privilege of visiting there many, many times over the years, because at Cisco, we bought a bunch of companies over there that were ex military teams that had started a business, and something really incredible in terms of the capacity to innovate. What we haven’t seen out of Israel is some big like an Nvidia or like an Intel, like, we haven’t seen a big company grow and stay. Most of it’s grow and sell or merge.
Rolando Rosas 51:16
Oh yeah. No, they get acquired. A lot of the they’re behind the scenes. They’re stuff that you can integrate. There was a very good company way before we saw voice really take off on the smartphone called laquendo. And laquendo was acquired by Dragon, and I think dragon got acquired by one of the other larger companies. But this voice technology, which now we would say, is a voice AI that could mimic it could read very natural speaking that was in Israel. And for better or for worse, when it comes to some of the even the tip of the spear, things that the military is doing here in the US, you know, they lean in on when it comes to some of those things Israel, right? Yeah, and that they do some other cool things, but, boy, they are some very creative, smart people. I know that you and I just changing topic here, you and I had talked a while back ago. You said that you were also maybe undertaking writing a second book. How’s that
Steve Cadigan 52:17
going? It’s going slow. Real slow. The book. The value of the book, is still there, and I’m hoping to, really hopefully, finish it this summer, if I can. Okay, but yeah,
Rolando Rosas 52:29
any sneak peek into what’s in there, or you could give us a little taste, yeah,
Steve Cadigan 52:34
yeah. I popped an article out about three months ago around this is what I’m working on, and I got some really good feedback, but essentially it is intended to address the scarcity of experienced talent that most of the business leaders I work with are facing today. Can’t find the people I need with the skills that I want as fast as I used to. And when I do hire it, they don’t stay along as they used to you and I have talked about turnover a lot and on prior conversations. So what I’m getting at, and the research that I’ve been doing is all around the fact that we have over indexed on experience and under indexed on talent. And by that, I mean, if you take a look at Silicon Valley today, okay, my neighborhood here, from San Francisco to San Jose, there is more innovation, more creativity, more people building value and more market cap creation than any geography of similar size anywhere in the world, including Israel. Okay, at the same time that all that’s happening, you have in this geography more people doing something they’ve never done before than anywhere in the world that’s interesting, and so that’s really what I’m trying to undo, is like, hey, there’s a power to putting someone in a role that includes things they’ve never done before. You were talking about brain science and neuroscience, a lot of the research that I’m uncovering there says we fire more active, creative outputs when we’re doing something we’ve never done before, we’re bringing to it a blank slate. We’re not bringing to it paradigms. Look at what Tesla’s been able to do in the automobile industry, destroying the value of companies that have been doing it for 100 years. They have no right to be doing that. They’re doing it incredibly well. And so that’s the area that I’m trying to get into. And it’s part freshly off of my experience at LinkedIn. Like we’re building a new industry. Half the people in the organization are doing not 100% but at least 60% something they’ve never done before in their jobs. And look at the value that we created there. So that’s where I’m headed. And if anyone who’s listening to this has any ideas or good examples that you want to share with me, please reach out to me and be happy to interview you and or include some of your ideas into my book. But I think that’s where I’m going right now, which is kind of to depressurize this. I have to have people that know what they’re doing to build a great company. And the answer is yeah, but not really. Not as much as you may think.
Rolando Rosas 55:02
Well, I would say that talent is all around the world, and that would be an argument against return to the office, because if all you’re hiring is Silicon Valley guys, you’re missing out on all the great talent that lives outside of Silicon Valley to bring a different perspective. And obviously there’s some really smart cookies down there where you live, but there’s smart people everywhere. Now you could find them and 100%
Steve Cadigan 55:28
100% and I don’t disagree with you. I think the CEO of Airbnb said it best he goes. How can any company think that the smartest people are the ones within a 30 minute commute of their headquarters? Like, how could you think that
Rolando Rosas 55:41
I don’t know, Steve, you’ve heard from these people. You know what motivates them more than I do? Maybe you can offer up answers to people that are wondering the same thing.
Steve Cadigan 55:51
Yeah, I think we’re a generation away from leadership that’s as comfortable as I think they should be around remote teams. We’re generation way. And by the way, pretty soon, I’m going to be able to share an organization that I’m working with right now that’s built a really cool technology that can measure the quality of a team that’s working online in ways that you could never do with teams in-person. And that is going to be really powerful. They can measure in a zoom call, for example, how productive they are, how creative the team is, how strong the outputs are going to be from the team based on how the meeting’s going. And so I just started working with this group recently, and I’m like, well,
Rolando Rosas 56:36
we got to talk. We got to talk offline, yeah. And
Steve Cadigan 56:39
I’m telling them like this is the proof that the world of remote work needs right now is that we can now do something better remotely than we can do in-person, right? And we need more examples like that.
Rolando Rosas 56:53
That is fascinating. Steve, you know what? You are the reigning champion on the podcast we’re gonna send you, like, a varsity letter or something. You get a t shirt or something, bro, yeah, no, you get a G for the for global technology, or, actually, or what the W, but no, yeah, you are the reigning champion. This is why I like having you on. This is not the last time you’re coming on here. And I really, really appreciate you coming in, dropping knowledge like this, because it’s always, always helpful. And, you know, obviously I’ll be tuning in on LinkedIn to your posts, so I love them. So
Steve Cadigan 57:27
yeah, Rolando listen, man, hats off to you for asking the hard questions, for saying what’s on a lot of people’s minds and really bringing a unique perspective to this. You know, there’s a lot of people that are just hunkered down, that aren’t putting a lot of thought into it, and you’re putting a heck of a lot of thought, and that’s why I just love our conversation. Love our conversations.
Rolando Rosas 57:43
I love it. And say hi to our friend Shane. I know he’s in Portugal, and yeah, I’ve seen, I’ve watched his posts as well, and tell him we’re thinking of him. Yep, you bet, man, you bet. Awesome. So I can’t thank Steve enough for coming on the podcast today. He’s been as always, wonderful. If you found this conversation, wonderful. Guess what? We had three other conversations with Steve. Go check those episodes out where we talk a lot about the future of work. We talked about remote work that’s still relevant today. Actually, we could probably reel it back and be like, Oh yeah, you said that was going to happen, and it sure did. And if you want to support this podcast, I invite you to go check out those links in the description where, if you have a business and you’re looking for a partner to help you out with complex IT issues, there’s nobody better than Global Teck here that could do that. So go check that out. And we really would appreciate that. It helps us bring more people like Steve to the podcast, so I want to thank you for joining me today and joining Steve on this podcast. I will see you in those episodes.
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