Why Are The Biggest Tech Companies So Dominant? | Alex Kantrowitz | Modern Wisdom Podcast 174

Alex Kantrowitz is a Senior Tech Reporter at Buzzfeed and an author. The biggest tech companies on the planet are incredibly dominant and today we discover what is inside each of them that drives their competitive edge. Expect to learn why powerpoint is banned from Amazon, what a one-to-one meeting with Mark Zuckerberg is like, why Apple might need systemic change if they're not going to fall behind, how Microsoft was turned around by a single man, why CeeLo Green is a good spokesperson and much more... Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/Kantrowitz Buy Always Day One - https://amzn.to/2LM6tNe Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #tech #amazon #buzzfeed - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So Jeff Bezos goes in front of this audience and there's probably more than 10,000 people in the stadium and you go, what does day two look like? And he says something like, day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by slow, painful decline, followed by death. In front of the whole company. And he looks out and he goes, and that's why it's always day one.

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  Alex Kantrowitz in the building. How are you doing, man?

• 0:27Speaker 00

  I'm doing great. Really glad to be on with you, Chris. Thanks for having me today.

• 0:31Chris Williamson?

  It's timely for me to have someone that reports on tech, given that an hour ago from when we're recording this, Elon Musk just tweeted Tesla stock price is too high IMO and they're now down 11%.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  That's right, Chris. But to be honest, anytime you have recorded this podcast, whether it was today, a couple of weeks ago, or a few weeks from now, Elon would definitely tweet something absolutely ridiculous that would send his company in some sort of tailspin. So it's not very surprising that he tried to tank his stack about five minutes before we hopped on here. So Elon's just gonna keep being Elon. That's just how he does things.

• 1:08Chris Williamson?

  Elon did an Elon, didn't he?

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Yes, he did. Yes, he did.

• 1:12Chris Williamson?

  Went and did.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  I mean, his Twitter is definitely fun to follow. I mean, you just, just mostly because of the unpredictability about it. Like, he's got this valuable thing in Tesla and he keeps playing with its future every time he hits that tweet button. Like, for him especially, maybe he should just, you know, have someone where he has to read the tweets aloud and then they type it into the box and then they send it and that might prevent some of this stuff from happening. But it doesn't seem like he's really interested in that. So.

• 1:38Chris Williamson?

  No, yeah, I think a guardian of his Twitter, you know, like you get when you've got your kids and your kids aren't allowed to use the iPad for more than an hour a day or whatever. You're like, look, Elon, this, this, this tweet's got the word stock price in it. This means that it needs to go through five layers of security first.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Maybe you don't want to send that. But until, until he does, his Twitter account's gonna be a lot of fun to watch.

• 2:01Chris Williamson?

  And you're right. You're right as well. Despite the fact he's done that today, whenever this gets published, whenever this episode goes live, he'll have probably done something that day too. So just go and have a look at Elon Musk's Twitter right now and see what he's done. I'd love to find out.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  You'd have the same reaction. Yeah.

• 2:15Chris Williamson?

  I believe he's tweeted that. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, we're not talking about Elon Musk today. We're talking about your new book, Always Day One. Why is it called Always Day One?

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great question. So Jeff Bezos gets in front of Amazon's employees a couple of years ago, and he's got this note card with him, and it's at the end of this all-hands meeting. And it's a question submitted from one of his employees, and it says, "What does day two look like?" This is sort of not the thing that you want to ask Jeff Bezos, because he's been preaching this always-day-one mentality inside Amazon. And I always thought that always-day-one just sort of meant you want to work as hard as you possibly can. You work nights, you work weekends, you work holidays, and if you take your foot off the gas pedal, you're done. And so Jeff Bezos goes in front of this audience, and there's 10, I mean, yeah, probably more than 10,000 people in the stadium in Seattle, and you

• 3:11Speaker 00

  go, "What does day two look like?" And he says something like, "Day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by slow, painful decline, followed by death," in front of the whole company. And he looks out, and he goes, "And that's why it's always day one." And, you know, I saw this clip when I was getting deep into my reporting on Amazon, and my first view of it was, "Oh, he is doing this hustle porn thing, working so hard, you know, work 80, 90 hours, otherwise you're out of Amazon." And if that was the case, I definitely would have had it, would not have had it as the title of the book, because I, you know, I do think that it's important to work hard, but I'm kind of skeptical of these people that say, "You need to work 100 hours a week, or you're not going to

• 3:53Speaker 00

  make it." I think it's possible to have a healthy work-life balance and still do okay. What I found out that always-day-one means inside Amazon is that they're always inventing the next business line without any regard for what they have today and what they had in the past. So for them, it's about reinvention. It's about, "Let's keep building new products. We won't sit on our flagship products and wait for them to take us, you know, all the way." Because, you know, right now, it's just impossible to do that. In the 1920s, the average company would sit on the Fortune 500 for 67 years. Today, it's 15 years. So that's why Amazon and the rest of the tech giants live in this always-day-one mentality. They're constantly reinventing, because they know if they get too precious about the present

• 4:37Speaker 00

  and the past, they're going to miss the future. So there's this mentality that they have to continually be inventing themselves into the future, or else they're done. And there's a culture that underpins it. It's not enough to have this mentality and say, "We want to live in day one." And just go about your business as a traditional company. What they've done, the real ingenuity inside these companies is building the culture, technology and process that's allowed them to keep reinventing. And that's helped them stay on top.

• 5:05Chris Williamson?

  How did you get such access to all of these companies? Like, who are you? Why, why should you be the person that's able to peer into the most exciting, biggest, most innovative companies on the planet?

• 5:17Speaker 00

  You know, that is a great question. And sometimes I've been a bit surprised, but I will say that I'm a tech reporter here in Silicon Valley, live in San Francisco. So I've spent the last five years here and I was reporting on tech in New York before that. And so I have spent a lot of time meeting with these companies in Silicon Valley. And my reporting has, has been out there. People, people recognize it. So I think there might have been a sense that this book was going to have an impact. And then one thing that I have that most tech reporters don't is a background in industrial and labor relations, meaning that I've studied the nature of work and organizational behavior, human resources, how companies are run, how people are motivated. And I brought that with me here. So by having

• 5:59Speaker 00

  that background and then looking at the tech companies and saying, I want to write a book about how they, how they work and what it means for the future of the way that we work and the way we lead companies. To me, that must have resonated.

• 6:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think so. As opposed to, I imagine some tech reporters must armchair philosophize about how the world might be as opposed to perhaps someone like yourself who's got more real world experience of what actually happens within these companies, what a culture like this means to the people who live it and breathe it and work it.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah. And I also worked in sales and marketing for three years before becoming a reporter. So I have an idea of how like companies that sell products work. So it's potentially that, you know, that, that background helps. But yeah, my main philosophy as a reporter is don't get lost in narratives. You know, don't try to make someone look good or try to make someone look bad. Just tell the truth. And, you know, I think that, I think that's, that's helped me out in my career for sure.

• 6:56Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. So high level, what's, what's the book? You've covering different companies and looking at different cultures within them?

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's all about how they put this always day one mentality into action inside their companies. And so they've done this in two, well, actually really three ways. One is have the mentality, right? If you have the mentality that you're going to try to milk your asset, your flagship business, and not worry about building another business, you're going to be, you're going to be screwed. So they have the mentality. The second thing is they do, they do is they view work differently than most of us do. Right? So I think that we need to separate work, the work we do into two buckets. One is idea work. That's anything that's involved in coming up with new ideas and bringing it to life. And the other is execution work. You know, and that's anything that's involved in supporting the existing products that you have.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  So we've gone through three major transformation, or two major transformations, but three eras in our work life since the factory era. You know, people forget the factory was only 100 years ago. That was dominating our economy 100 years ago. Uh, human existence is much longer than 100 years. So we've had radical transformations in the way that we work in just a century. And our systems, like our cultural systems, our leadership systems are always a little bit slow to catch up, and they certainly have in this point. So let's start with the factory. In the industrial era, almost all the work that we did was execution work. There would be like one little bit of idea work, which came from like the owner of the factory. Right? Who said, let's make widgets. And what do they hire employees to do? All execution work, just being in the factory, making widgets.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Okay, then in the middle of the 1900s, we transitioned to what's called the knowledge economy, which all of a sudden employee ideas actually mattered. But because we were so process heavy, we would have a teeny tiny bit of our time, and this is what exists in most companies now, a teeny tiny bit of our time on idea work. And still, most of it was on execution work. Now, we weren't pushing buttons and hitting levers like we were in the factory, but we were doing similar work that, that wasn't really involved in creating anything new. So that could be anything from moving numbers from one spreadsheet to another, or putting the same invoice in to, to buy the same product at the same amount every week, or writing the same letters to the same people every week. I mean, anyone who's been in the job knows this, right?

• 9:13Speaker 00

  And because there's been, there was so much execution work in the knowledge economy, our ideas really haven't been taken into consideration by management. So, you know, I think that anyone who's, you know, people come into companies, they're creative and they're filled with energy and they want to change the way the company works. And they see all this opportunity because all this opportunity is there. And they know we can do this and launch this product line and we can change this process. And hey, well, have you thought about connecting these two groups? And that energy usually lasts for the first six months or so until they're told, actually, you know, we don't, you're not really here for your ideas. You're here just to like do this one little task. And it doesn't matter how much you can contribute to making this company better. We're not actually really concerned with it. That's the message that gets sent because anyone who's brought these ideas inside the company knows.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Generally, people say, oh, you know, not really time for that. Or you know, you were hired to do this. Why are you saying that? And that's a factor of the fact that we're living in this execution work economy. Because even in the knowledge economy, most companies don't have the capability to take those employee ideas and turn them into into life because they are spending all of their time supporting their existing products. Okay, so this brings me into what the tech giants do. What they've done is use technology, process automation and process optimization to take the amount of execution work they have in their companies down and then make room for idea work. And then, once they have their employees, you know, thinking of new ideas and having permission to actually come up with ideas, because that's a big part of it.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  They build a system to take those ideas to decision makers and bring them to reality. And everyone's saying, why are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft so strong? You know, what are they doing that's illegal? And they definitely have some nefarious behavior. But to me, the most important thing is culture. It starts with culture. It begins with taking down execution work, making room for idea work, building the systems to turn those ideas into life. And that's why they're lapping the economy more than anything. It's just not something anyone talks about. And I think if the rest of us start paying attention to these systems, we're going to have a much better chance of competing in their world, competing with them, carving out. Our own niches to be able to make this happen today. And that's sort of that's the point of the book is I said enough of this, right?

• 11:25Chris Williamson?

  I want another secret sauce. Yeah. Teach me the secret sauce.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  That's right. So I was just like, yeah, enough of this. I'm in Silicon Valley. Might as well let people know what's going on. So the rest of us can start to come and, and you know, act the way they do in our own companies and you know, start to make some progress in evening this economy out.

• 11:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's fascinating that the the friction of taking idea from in someone's head to the market is one of the major barriers that people need to get over. So you've got to have the capacity within the company operationally, innovatively, in order to be able to deliver that, right? But then you also need to give have the talent and the time for that talent to come up with the right amount of ideas and then probably iterate on them and get rid of the bad ones and get rid of the bad ones and get rid of the bad ones. And then finally you come up with this super left field thing. And that's how you end up with companies, you know, going through the book, it's mad. All of the different stuff, specifically Amazon, but all of the companies have their fingers in little different pies like

• 12:30Chris Williamson?

  and you think, well, why, why are they, it doesn't really seem to make so much sense. It's not part of their core business, but then you actually realize when you're constantly innovating and iterating on these different things, you, these ideas are going to come to the forefront and you're the person that's able to bring it to the market is, it's mad.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  That's right. And it sounds so simple, right? Give people more time for ideas and bring them to life. It's actually fairly complex and that's what these companies do so well. And I can give you an example if you're interested. So you mentioned Amazon. Amazon to me does this in the, in the most wild way that I had no idea about. And actually hasn't really been reported about too much. And I got to see it firsthand when I was out in Seattle, spent a good chunk of two summers in Seattle, hanging out, reporting on Amazon and cat sitting my friend mother's cat, Lady the Cat, who was a, was a good friend of the process and you know, really, yeah, it was fun. Lady really kept me, kept me going and you know, those days I didn't know many people in Seattle. So it was nice to have that cat friend in that time.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  But I will say that, okay, so Amazon, so one of the things I really wanted to know is how does Amazon use automation? Not just in the factories and the, sorry, the warehouses. But in their headquarters as well, because I heard some rumblings that like, hey, people are getting their jobs automated in Amazon's headquarters. And you don't hear that too often. So what I found out is that they have a program called Hands Off The Wheel. And Hands Off The Wheel automates a lot of the traditional retail tasks for employees in Amazon's retail division. So I'll explain. So typically, when you, your company like Amazon, you have these people called vendor managers. And vendor managers are on the phone all day with suppliers, saying, we need this many units and this, these many fulfillment centers at this time at this price. So you got a vendor manager, they're on the phone proctor and gamble, and they say, we

• 14:19Speaker 00

  want detergent, give us like X number of units of detergent, you know, in these locations, we want it at like 650 a unit, and we want it there, you know, in installments of every other week, or something like that. And Amazon built an army of people who are working with vendor, working with vendors to stock their fulfillment centers. And all of a sudden, in the mid 2010s, Amazon's like, wait a second. We have all this data that shows us what people want. Actually, our data probably knows better than the vendor managers what they want, because it's precise. And what if we decide that we could have our machine learning team work on this? And they figure out how to use computers to do all this stuff instead of people. And that's what they did.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  They started a project that was called Project Yoda, which is, instead of the vendor managers doing this, they would use the force, and the force being machine learning.

• 15:10Chris Williamson?

  Right?

• 15:11Speaker 00

  That's so good. And, yeah, it's a funny name. And, you know, it's obviously like, when you got nerds running the company, you're gonna get good jokes like that.

• 15:18Chris Williamson?

  Lots of Star Wars references, yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  That's right, yeah. And then they moved, so they worked on this a bit, they worked, they moved, moved it further. The program changed from Project Yoda to Hands Off The Wheel, essentially telling their vendor managers, you've been driving the car, now we're gonna let the machine learning do it on its own. And a good portion of tasks inside Amazon right now are all being handled by machine learning. So, things like ordering, inventory management, even when a vendor wants to negotiate with Amazon, they, instead of picking up the phone now, start to like suggest prices in a computer portal. And Amazon says, yeah, okay, cool. Or no, that's all being done by machine learning today.

• 15:58Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  I mean, in some, in some cases, there's human intervention, but very little. And actually, just citing like a figure to talk about the magnitude, one of Amazon's machine learning heads said that- Vendor managers used to go, uh, used to be able to handle 1,000 products, products. Now they can handle somewhere around 100,000. And later clarified saying it was just ballparking. It's not really, but come on, like that's, that must be the, um, you know, in the range of the type of mag, orders of magnitude more they're able to handle. Okay. So what happens now when all these tasks are being taken over by, uh, machine learning? A dumb company would say, great, let's fire the vendor managers, right? But that's not what happens inside Amazon. So these vendor managers are now all on product and program manager jobs where they're basically professional inventors

• 16:44Speaker 00

  inside the company, working the shepherd, new ideas along. Um, and they have a, a process inside Amazon called the six pager where instead of starting projects, uh, with a PowerPoint, they start it where you write everything down in six pages, single spaced, 11 point font, no pictures. And it's supposed to be like, okay, you're going to write the entire way that the project's going to look like. And we can get that to a decision maker pretty quickly. And it doesn't matter which level you're in, right? Just a couple of forwards can get that thing to Bezos or his top lieutenants. So that's the system to get ideas to decision makers. Okay. I'll just finish with a example to bring this all to life. Uh, there's a guy named Dilip Kumar in Apple, in, in Amazon's pricing and promotions division.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  And, um, Kumar spends a couple of years under Bezos as his technical advisor, uh, meaning that he's shadowing Bezos, uh, all of Bezos's meetings and learning how to do the Amazon, uh, culture pretty well. Uh, and, and sort of how, um, how does Amazon work inside? What is, what businesses is it, does it excel at? Typically after someone finishes that, so he moves from pricing promotions to a technical advisor, advisor job. Typically when someone finishes that, they can take a big swing. Um, and when he finishes with Bezos as this technical advisor, pricing and promotions is almost all automated. So he's not going to go back and do that. So he gets together with a bunch of people from the retail division and says, we need to, uh,

• 18:07Speaker 00

  figure out a way to solve the most annoying part of shopping in real life with technology. And they decide the most annoying part of shopping in real life is checkout. People don't like waiting on lines and, you know, scanning and all that stuff. Um, takes a lot of time. They just rather pick their items and get the hell out. So they started thinking, okay, maybe we were gonna do a big vending machine, but they're like, okay, that kind of kicks the can down the curb. So they say, instead, what if we use computer vision and sensors and created a store where people could just scan it with a QR code, take whatever they want off the shelves and then leave. And that is what became Amazon's Go Store, which exists now in a bunch of cities. It's still kind of experimental, but I've used it in San Francisco and Seattle.

• 18:48Chris Williamson?

  What's it like?

• 18:49Speaker 00

  I've tried it. Oh, it feels like you're shoplifting. It's unbelievable. You go and you take the stuff and you're like, I'm out, I'm free. I just got like nine Cliff bars on the house. Thanks, Bezos. And then two minutes later, they're like, nine Cliff bars. Here's your receipt. And you're like, dang it, Amazon. You know, it's really this wild, just wild experience. And Amazon, if you read the, between the lines of Jeff Bezos's annual shareholder letters, like they're going to make this a more prominent part of their retail operation. And so because, so it's just all the parts coming together, right? It's like you, they've taken the technology, minimized execution work, made room for idea work, build a system to get ideas from people to decision makers.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  And when that system works as well as it does, you get another new invention from Amazon, which is Go. And this is sort of how they've been able to do so many different things from like a first party marketplace to a third party marketplace, to a logistics and fulfillment center, uh, sorry, logistics and fulfillment operation, to a cloud services division, to a voice computing platform, and a hardware manufacturer that does things like the Kindle and all of their speakers. And then not to mention an Academy Award winning movie studio and a grocer. All of this is, it's, yeah, this is a product of culture. And that's people think, you know, there's this, when you don't see inside, there's this vision. Oh, Bezos is the guy doing this. He presses a button and that's how it happens. Actually, what he's done is built the culture to harness other people's ingenuity and bring it to decision makers.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  And that's how Amazon's been able to be so inventive.

• 20:20Chris Williamson?

  It's no surprise that they're so dominant, man. Like, how are you supposed to compete with that? It's a company who has the most innovation, the most resources to bring that innovation to market. So even if you have the idea, they can probably execute the same idea as you've had, but quicker and better and deploy it more through a wider geographic range and all the rest of it. You mentioned about Jeff Bezos and PowerPoint. He banned PowerPoint by sending an email with just a subject line. And it just said, like, no more PowerPoint presentations allowed in meetings or something.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:00Chris Williamson?

  I'd never heard of UiPath before. Can you tell us what UiPath is, please?

• 21:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's an automation company. So a lot of times people say, well, the tech giants are doing this, so I could never do it. But it's really not the case. And when we talk about minimizing execution work, making room for idea work, there are off-the-shelf solutions that any company can use. So in the introduction of the book, I talk about this company called UiPath. And what UiPath does, its software will watch your screen as you work. So you sort of open up a session. And let's say you're like filling out a form. It can watch your screen as you work. And each button you click and each keystroke you make, you just label it to the machine learning system. And it will remember how to do it on its own. And so it can do, it can fill out forms, it can send letters, it can move data from one spreadsheet to another.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  It can take over all this execution work that we do all day long and take it over via automation. So I went to this conference in Miami and it was crazy. And CeeLo Green was the opening singer, which was hilarious. He's going to the audience, "All right, if you've got someone you need to say fuck you to, now is the time." And they're all like, "Fuck you." And I'm like, "You guys are like automating people's jobs." Like, is that, it's kind of weird. But, but, and it was amazing to see how many people, how many different industries were represented at this conference, let alone the stuff that it can do. But it was like you saw automotive, you saw insurance, you saw health, you saw technology companies there, you saw banks. And, you know, one of the things that was striking to me was that...

• 22:34Speaker 00

  This technology is available to people. Clearly, there's interest inside companies to put it into place, but it's almost as if they're like driving blind. They're like, yeah, we want to automate. But I heard very little about the broader strategy of why to automate. So I do think that like, if they're able to do this and put some of the lessons from the tech giants in place, then they'll be in much better shape.

• 22:56Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you say that it's able to do hiring, it can sort hiring people? And then when it comes time to get rid of them as well, that this UI path thing can send them their letter?

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's able, I know, it's wild, but it's able to write letters. So if you, you know, new hire letters are pretty formulaic. So when you have a new hire letter, your IP path can handle that. And so of course you can have a termination letter that it can do as well.

• 23:21Chris Williamson?

  There's just something about it. Oh, man. And so upon kind of seeing this big overview, obviously, we've touched on Amazon, but there's Google, Microsoft, and Apple and stuff as well. And it sounds dumb, but I, I kind of presumed that these big companies just operate the same way, you know, like when you get to the sort of size of these companies, you'll have optimized everything and the size of the operation will have whittled away any ability to actually enact real change, cultural or operational. And you just kind of, they were all, they were all going to be super homogeneous. But again, upon reading and having a look at the different ways that companies are deploying, now the end result's still the same, which is we need to be able to

• 24:02Chris Williamson?

  innovate quickly. We need to have a lack of friction from idea to deployment. And we need to keep resources and blah, blah, blah, and look cool and wear hoodies. But

• 24:14Speaker 00

  Hoodies are important.

• 24:14Chris Williamson?

  Hoodies are very, very important. You know, I mean, like, I was surprised. I would have thought it would have been much more homogeneous.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah. So I would say in Always Day One, I talk about how each one of these companies has, has their own flavor to build it, putting these systems into place. So we talk about Amazon, it's the six pager, it's the use of machine learning. Inside Facebook, it's a feedback culture, which is something that a lot of people might be surprised by. You know, Facebook isn't exactly the company that you think is one that takes feedback very well, given that people from the outside have protested almost every product decision that they've made and they've said basically like, "F off, like, I'm gonna do this on our own." Yes, exactly. But inside the company, there is this feedback culture. And in the book, I actually sit in on a day-long feedback training, where people inside Facebook are taught to give and receive feedback. Major meetings then with requests for it.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  There are posters around Facebook's Menlo Park offices that say, "Feedback is a gift." And actually, the first time I met Zuckerberg, I was surprised because typically, your typical CEO briefing is the CEO will tell you, "Okay, sit down, here's 25 minutes of me selling our new product." Then the PR person will sort of watch your facial expressions, maybe allow you to ask one question. Oftentimes, just say, "Okay, and that's it. Have a good day." Is that what it's like being a tech reporter with the big dogs? That's right. Yeah, that's usually what it's like. But with Zuckerberg, it was totally different because we walked in there and he's like, "I want your feedback on this." It's like, "Okay." He cares. He cares what you think. More interested, yeah, he seemed more interested in listening to what was going on than selling. And that's when I started asking people in Facebook's orbit, "What's going on?"

• 25:49Speaker 00

  And that's how I learned that there's this feedback culture inside Facebook, where people are encouraged to bring ideas, not only to their boss, but to their skip-level manager, and all the way up to Zuckerberg himself. And so, feedback, a lot of people say, "Feedback is about putting people in their place, letting them know what's going to happen before the review, right? So they're not surprised when they sit in there and you get like a "meets" or, you know, "You're not meeting your expectations." Okay, you should know." I think that's a totally wrong way to look at feedback. I mean, it's good to not have your people surprised. But what feedback functions for inside Facebook is that it makes sure that people feel comfortable sharing ideas with anybody inside the company, and then people inside the company feel comfortable receiving other ideas. And when Facebook has been told, hey, from people inside, "Actually, we're not approaching this right,"

• 26:33Speaker 00

  it has shown an ability to change and shift direction. And that's why it's gone from an online directory to a broadcast platform that operates largely on desktop to a mobile app that's still in doing this sort of broadcast to all your friends. And now it's changing again, moving to more intimate networks like groups and messaging. So this is all because of feedback. These aren't Zuckerberg's brilliant ideas on his own. And if people, when they read the book, they'll see it's other people inside the organization pulling him aside and being like, hey, Mark, we're missing this important thing. We got to make a change. And when he's listened, it's actually worked out pretty well for them.

• 27:09Chris Williamson?

  The CEOs are made to look like just these bottomless pits of innovation, aren't they? But it's actually the, it's the coalition of everything that's happened below that. So before we get on a couple of the other companies, I want to see if you can, if you can do this. I want to see if you can try and personify each of the companies that you looked at into a character. So for instance, I think Amazon would be kind of the jock in school, super clean coat, dates the prom queen. Apple might be like the arty philosophy student who all the girls fancy, but he keeps himself to himself and spends lunchtime sketching trees. How would you sort of personify some of the companies that you looked at?

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, Amazon would be the MBA that's brilliant, but doesn't have very much empathy for other people.

• 27:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, on the spectrum somewhere.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's put them there.

• 28:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  So Facebook, who, Facebook is, is almost like the kid in high school that everyone thought was perfect, you know, that was good at sports and good at talking to people and, you know, was attractive, but also sort of missed part of what living is all about because everything was so easy for them.

• 28:28Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, yeah. No challenge.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, no challenge. Yes. So that's kind of what I think. Google might be, Google's just your classic nerd, nerd with a tattoo.

• 28:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  You know?

• 28:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, nerd, nerd with a half sleeve tattoo.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  That's right. Nerdy kid. And you're like, oh, okay. But not like, you know, a nerd you feel bad about, just like.

• 28:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  A nerd that, you know, okay, this person's going to be very successful. Uh, Apple. Apple is like one of those high society people that, you know, speaks their own language and, you know, feels very comfortable around people like them. Uh, but most of this is, but when they try to get out to most of society, they can't really relate.

• 29:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Microsoft, okay. And then Microsoft is, um, someone who's had a glow up, you know, they were like an ugly teen and they became the hottest person that, you know?

• 29:18Chris Williamson?

  That's it. You've nailed, you've nailed Microsoft there. I, I absolutely agree. Um, so yeah, we've talked about Amazon. We've talked about the feedback and stuff in, in, um, in Facebook. What characterized Microsoft for you?

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Well, Microsoft is this amazing case study because they were in this day two mentality under Steve Ballmer, their former CEO. And back in the day, all they cared about was Windows, their desktop operating system. And in the age where we were not doing any computing on the browser and using desktop computers instead of mobile phones, they were the king, right? And they knew it and Congress knew it and they ended up, you know, bringing antitrust action against them. Uh, and then everything shifted. And this is sort of why time is generally more potent than, um, government regulation or, um, you know, your competitors because, uh, Microsoft could sit on this, um, on this, uh, desktop operating system for as long as it wanted, but the world changed and we started doing computing on the browser and we started

• 30:15Speaker 00

  using our phones, uh, instead of our desktops. And then what use is Windows? It's much more, I mean, it is exactly how Bezos described that day one, day two mentality, right? Stasis, yes. Irrelevance, uh huh. You know, slow, painful decline, check. Okay. Death. It was heading that way until they had to change their, their course. Um, and so after Ballmer, a guy named Satya Nadella came in and took over and became the CEO. And Satya had been a 20-year veteran of Microsoft and worked on, uh, Bing, which is kind of funny. Everyone makes fun of Bing like, oh, that's just the shitty search engine.

• 30:50Chris Williamson?

  It's the special needs version of Google, isn't it? Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  I wouldn't go that far, but yeah, it's somewhere in that range. Um, and so, uh, the, so the thing with, with Bing is that, um, it's a cloud computing system. And, uh, because it works on, it's a powerful program that works on the internet that has to make sense of all of these different, uh, links coming in and spit something out to people that work. So because Satya had worked on that, he had been able to see where the future of computing was going, basically saying, we're not going to work on programs that we install, like come in the mail and we install on our computers anymore, you know, put it on Windows. We're going to be working on our browser and that's cloud computing and there's going to need to be an infrastructure that's going to support cloud computing.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  And the funny thing about that is when you enable cloud computing, you actually hasten Windows decline because if you can access a program on the browser, you can use it on a Windows machine or an Apple machine or a Chromebook and you don't really need Microsoft anymore, or at least in the Windows component. So it's actually a pretty gutsy move to say we're going to go support cloud first. And the other thing he says is, we're going to make sure that our services are available everywhere. So Microsoft Office, you know, you used to only really be able to get on a Windows machine. You couldn't really get on the internet and that ended and they made an app for the iPhone, which is sort of unbelievable, given Microsoft's history, you know, back in the bomber days, you weren't even allowed to, or yeah, you're basically not allowed to have an iPhone or an Apple product inside.

• 32:17Chris Williamson?

  Is that true?

• 32:18Speaker 00

  And, oh yeah, totally. People like would get scorned and Bomber even pretended to smash an iPhone when he saw it in a meeting.

• 32:25Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  So and then Satya was like, oh, we gotta move past this. So what he did was he reoriented this company, which wasn't a day two mentality, brought it to day one. And then, once he figured out, we're gonna, the company was going to structure itself in a way that supports cloud, collaboration, the internet, then the tough job started, which was to change Microsoft's culture, which had been, you know, alpha male, largest, I mean, loudest person in the room, yell at each other to a culture where they had to start using technology. And again, I'm gonna sound like a broken record, but it's really what happened, minimizing execution work, making room for idea work, channeling ideas to decision makers. And that's how Microsoft turned it around and is now the most valuable tech company again, which is unbelievable.

• 33:06Chris Williamson?

  Have they really turned it around? Because to me, as someone who doesn't really know, I'm not watching this share price, I don't know what's going on, who's got what amount of market and this, that and the other. But to me, Microsoft still now feels like just the granddad at the party type thing, this sort of older guy who used to kind of maybe have it, but now is playing second string to these other companies. But it sounds like the work that the new CEO has done has actually given them a resurgence.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah, they're the most valuable of all the five big tech companies.

• 33:40Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  Which is because I do think that investors see the value in what they're doing, which is moving towards the future. So the products that they work on are not as sexy, like cloud computing backend is not as sexy as an iPhone, but it has, you know, a very bright future. And you look at now, like, we're all sitting at home right now and Microsoft's collaboration technology with things like Teams, the usage is going through the roof. So they are really moving to where the enterprise, like where, I mean, they're definitely B two B enterprise technology, but they're crushing it there. And there's a bright future for them.

• 34:13Chris Williamson?

  I mean, businesses have far more money to spend than consumers do on these sort of high, high ticket, low volume kind of apps and services, I suppose. But yeah, that's interesting. That is interesting that, um, that one person, obviously he'll have brought, the CEO will have brought a team with him and other people have had to have get on board to deploy his ideas. But the business, the size of Microsoft's can be changed by the fundamental ideas and the vision of just some bloke. He's just some guy, you know? I mean, he's a very capable guy, obviously, who understands what he's talking about. But he's just some fella that's gone like, I think we should try and do this. And then

• 34:56Chris Williamson?

  the entire shape and direction of a company changes. It's so mad.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is amazing. And by the way, it's sort of that, that characterization sort of underscores how difficult it is to do what he did. Because it is one person that's pushing this change. And it's like, pretty remarkable that he was able to do it. Most people that try, uh, end up failing. But he was able to make it happen.

• 35:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay, Google. Let's talk to us about Google. What was Google's signature special move?

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Their, uh, their special move, like, I feel like this is like

• 35:27Chris Williamson?

  Mortal Kombat. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, exactly.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  They're like that Mortal Kombat character that can go across the screen, you know, shoot across the screen.

• 35:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what you mean.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Because they're, you know, Facebook, if ideas go up and down, from the bottom to Zuckerberg, inside Google, ideas go side to side, you know, across divisions very well. And that's because Google's interconnected in the series of their own social networks. They have email listservs that span the whole company. They have their own meme board, like almost like a Reddit or an imager, where people make memes about the company and vote them up and vote them down. They have Q and As where people can ask the leadership any questions they want, although that's been pared back a little bit. And most importantly, they work in an open drive. Meaning they use Google Docs, Slides and Sheets, and the sharing on almost all those docs is set to open.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  So anybody in the company can go look into anyone else's documents. And at first, you know, people say, that's kind of weird. But what it does is it allows people to get caught up to speed on projects incredibly fast. And they can, you know, when you're in a Google Doc, you can also add your ideas and comments, and people do that. Right? So just like the six pager got ideas to Bezos quickly, and the feedback culture gets ideas to Zuckerberg quickly, ideas inside Google can move side to side incredibly fast. And the example to show how this has worked really well is the Google Assistant, right? Which is their voice assistant. And the Google Assistant combines so many different products. It combines search and Android and mail and calendar and maps and YouTube. And in order to build an effective assistant, you need everybody working together.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Otherwise, you know, it's going to be pretty dysfunctional and people won't use it. And people don't have a lot of patience for a voice assistant. Like if you say, hey, Google enough, and it doesn't respond, you're not going to keep saying it. You're just going to type this shit in. So, you know, so because they were able to collaborate, they're able to build this pretty effective assistant. And the assistant, again, is this evolution of search. It's another reinvention. Right? Because when you speak with a voice assistant, you say, what's the weather going to be? Right? How would you find that otherwise? Type it into search. You say, when's my package coming? How would you find that out? Type it into search or type it into Gmail. So if Amazon was able to get the lead because... Got a muter because Alexa started answering those questions instead of Google.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Google's domination search was really, would really be challenged. But because Google was able to reinvent this way through collaboration, now it has a real foothold in the voice assistant space and is able to hold its own in its most important product.

• 38:05Chris Williamson?

  Is that going to be, is the voice assistant space going to be as big as some of my friends think it is? Because I've got a couple of buddies who are addicted to Siri, like absolutely addicted. They won't do anything. They refuse to touch their phones. For me, other than controlling music and stuff when I'm listening to it, I tend to not use it that much. But moving forward, can you see voice assist, is it the next big thing? One of the next big things?

• 38:29Speaker 00

  I think it very well could be. And the reason why I say that is because we're still at like the pretty early moments of artificial intelligence technology. And what we're doing by talking to these things is training them. And every conversation they have helps them get a little bit better. So I think that it's amazing there. There's already tens of millions of these things in people's homes. And as that grows, they'll get better at figuring out what we want from them. They'll get better at talking back to us. Like I even see that the Alexa starts to get more conversational with time. Like I say, set an alarm and she goes, all right, I'm setting your alarm for 8 a.m. tomorrow. You want me to set that for every day this week? And I'm like, how the hell did you know that? Right?

• 39:12Speaker 00

  So I do think, yeah, this is going to be big. It will be big. And they'll also start plugging in with other people's products. And, you know, I can, I have an idea why your friends like Siri so much, right? Because we're, I mean, especially now, we're all on our screens all the, you know, all this time. We're tapping, we're looking, watching. And it's like, you know, if we can do any computing by not having to deal with a screen, some people love that. And I think especially as that gets better, you know, people will really embrace it. So I'm bullish on it.

• 39:41Chris Williamson?

  Nice, bullish. That's it. Alex Cantor, it's bullish on voice, voice commands. I love it. That's an interesting point about how a voice controller, other non-physical versions of input will affect our tech use, you know? Because if you can do a ton of the things on your phone, let's say it's 100 years further on and we're able to, we've got microchips that can detect the correct neurons that are firing in our brain and we can just control stuff with our brains. Or we've got some sort of wearable or whatever it is. The line between screen time and not screen time could either diverge or could completely come together.

• 40:23Chris Williamson?

  So that either there's barely any screen time or the all time is screen time. You know what I mean?

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I would bet that we're heading towards a world where almost all time is screen time. But the cool thing about voice is it enables screen time to not be screen time, right? Like you can be plugged in, but it can be ambient, sort of in the background.

• 40:42Chris Williamson?

  It's a great word.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  Versus something requiring your full attention.

• 40:46Chris Williamson?

  That's a brilliant way to put it. I've never thought of it like that, but it is, it's part of the environment. When you use, hey Siri or, or, or hey, hey Siri, is it, hey, Google? Okay, Google.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Okay, Google, hey, Google. I think both work.

• 40:58Chris Williamson?

  Got you. And then what's the?

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, Amazon.

• 41:00Chris Williamson?

  What's the Alexa one? It's just Alexa. Imagine if someone's, if someone's kid's been called Alexa, what a nightmare.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  I know, man. I'm Alex. I'm like one letter away from a nightmare, man.

• 41:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Chris, you don't use any of these voice assistants at all?

• 41:15Chris Williamson?

  Not really. So I use, I use Siri for controlling music and podcasts and stuff like that. I know there's tons of things that I can do with it, but I don't know. I don't know. And this is someone who's trying to down-regulate his screen time and, you know, is into new tips and tricks and things like that. But it's just not like, I feel like trying to do it will end up creating more work than if I just put it in myself. I'm like, hey, Siri, direct me home using this, like this route. And then it'll open up Google Maps instead of Apple Maps or Apple Maps instead of Google Maps or something. So I think maybe, maybe there's just another, you know, 10 or 20% of progress that needs to be made.

• 41:56Chris Williamson?

  And then I'll probably just be all over it and I'll just be talking, talking to my phone all, all across the day.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's probably because you're talking to Siri. That's why you're frustrated. The other two are much better.

• 42:06Chris Williamson?

  Are they? That's interesting. So I had Stephen Wolfram on. You know, Stephen, the guy that created Wolfram Language, Wolfram, Wolfram Mathematica. And I'm talking to him about like those answer engines and the ways that for the people that don't know, Stephen Wolfram is, his company is the company that created the answer engine that's able to take words that you say, convert that into code and then re give you back whatever the answer is. So it's actually super complex to take the noise that comes out of your mouth, work out what you meant, turn that into something the computer or the phone can read and then give it back out. And the fact that even, we take it so much for granted, man, but the fact that you can just make a sound with your face and then your phone does a thing is like.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  Totally unbelievable.

• 42:52Chris Williamson?

  It's unreal, man. And the fact that innovation just continues to pump away, you know? And then you've got, oh, well, a couple of like 10 years ago, maybe you'd watch like some 3D film with like, you know, crap like red and blue things, the cardboard things you used to get over your face. You'd be like, wow, this is amazing. You'd be at Disneyland. And then now you've got like an Oculus Go headset, all in one, no extra stuff required. You just slip this thing on and now you're in like Jurassic Park, fighting dinosaurs and stuff. It's, it's wild, man. I spoke to a lady as well who has the world's first PhD in immersive storytelling. So this is like cutting edge VR stuff.

• 43:34Chris Williamson?

  And she recommended that I go to Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds immersive VR experience down in London. And I went to go and do it. Dude, it is the wildest thing I have.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 43:47Chris Williamson?

  Oh, like combination of VR, AR, holographics and real life actors.

• 43:54Chris Williamson?

  Dude, it was just like the craziest two hours ever. You just feel like, I don't know. I don't know what the entertainment industry is going to be like in sort of 30 or 40 years' time, when that sort of stuff gets scaled out, but you're not even going to watch movies anymore. You'll be living movies, you know?

• 44:09Speaker 00

  I'm into it. I'm ready for that. That sounds great.

• 44:11Chris Williamson?

  It was so good. And then you go back and you're like, I'll watch a YouTube video of a trailer and you realize just how much less impact that has. So yeah, like when your iPhone's able to throw smells at you and stuff like that, that's when we're going to be, that's when we're going to be killing it. So, okay, Apple, my favorite one out of the lot. Everybody here is an Apple fan. What's going on with Apple? Tell us.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Well, I'm sorry to disappoint your listeners, but it is a company with a culture that needs a transformation. And I think that's because inside Apple, they've been very good. I call it a culture of refinement. They've been very good at refining the iPhone, which is their flagship product, right? And they do that by keeping people in silos and keeping everything secret. And what that does is it allows people to concentrate on their one task. So the people that make the battery life live longer, that's what they're focused on. The people that make the screen better, that's what they're focused on. The people that make the iPhone thinner, that's what they're focused on. The computing power, that's what they're focused on. And they don't spend a lot of time distracted speaking to other people.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  And that's helped make the iPhone the best phone on the market. I don't think there's any doubt about that. I have one. But for Apple, it's made it difficult for the company to reinvent itself. And I think we can go back to the voice assistant example. And while your friends might be using Siri only, be using Siri as the only way they use their phones, they're probably the only two people on the planet to do that because Siri's terrible. And the reason why Siri is terrible is because it was thought about as, not as a voice platform, but as a feature on the iPhone. So just sort of like this fun thing that, like a fun magical assistant you could talk to, not something that could connect you via your voice to the rest of the internet. And because of that, Apple said, okay, well Siri, folks, why don't you sit in your own room?

• 46:00Speaker 00

  And that's not how it works. Like, we talked about the Google Assistant. Google needed, you know, people across search and Android and YouTube and Maps and Calendar, all these different divisions. And yeah, and music to be able to integrate with each other and be able to talk to each other to be able to build this thing without any barriers at all. And inside Apple, these silos have prevented the Assistant folks from actually getting out there in a way that would be meaningful and helping Siri, you know, become something that can overtake the Google Assistant and the Echo. And the one example that I give is that, you know, the Google, I mean, Apple gave Amazon a multi-year head start. It gave Google like a five-year head start on Google Assistant.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Like Siri came out in 2012. These other things came out in 2016, 2017, 2018. And then Apple said, okay, finally, they're going to build a speaker to put Siri inside of. Great. So they build the HomePod. The HomePod is not selling at all. It's a total embarrassment. And the Echo and Google Home are in tens of millions of homes. And it's, again, it's funny because like for Apple, Apple's so interested in design, right? So they think about the, they think about the sound of the speaker and the look of the speaker and the feel of the speaker. Whereas the Echo is the ugliest appliance I have in my whole life. It's disgusting to look at. I'm looking at it now and I want to throw it out the window. But it's not about the speaker, the way it looks. It's

• 47:25Speaker 00

  about the Assistant inside. And so that's something that Apple's going to have to change because it's not going to be a visual or physical design first. It's going to be computer design, and that requires collaboration. And it's struck out on the HomePod. It's also struck out, I mean, yeah, I think it's fair to say it's really struggled to build its own car. It's trying to build a self-driving car. And the way they think about this, yeah, yeah, the way they think about this is sort of like the iPhone, right? The iPhone had beautiful hardware, great software, put it together, best phone on the market. Car, self-driving car is similar, right? Beautiful hardware, the, that, the way that it looks, and then, you know, functional software, which is the self-driving software. Bam, Apple should have the, a lead on the market there.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  But it's had put this old iPhone style mentality into into building this car. So they don't let the machine learning engineers talk to each other that are working on different projects. So you'd have people working on the car, people working on Face ID. One of them is locating like lanes and markers and stuff like that. The other one is locating facial features and it's been difficult for them to talk to each other, which means their technology develops slower. Then also, there's been the influence of design, right? So design inside Apple is the is the most important division. First, they figure out how it's going to look, then they figure out what's going on inside.

• 48:44Chris Williamson?

  So backwards engineering something pretty.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, well, it's worked very well for a lot of products, but for the car it just hasn't worked well. Because, and I spoke with some people who had worked on this, the design team asked them to take the sensors that are out there to figure out what's going on in the road and embed them in the car. Because typically with a self-driving car, it looks like this horrific, you know, rolling submarine with all these different, you know, knobs and.

• 49:09Chris Williamson?

  It's like dish that was around and it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  It looks almost as bad as the Echo. And so of course, Apple isn't going to be done with that. So they said, OK, take the sensors, put it in the car. So it looks much nicer, but for the machine learning engineers, it's much more difficult to figure out what they're trying to do, because it's like putting blinders on your eyes, right? Now you can only see this, you know, this much and your peripheral vision is cut in a certain way. And then how do you make a machine learn how to do self-driving if it can't get the full range of vision? And so that's one of the reasons why the product has struggled. So look, yeah, sorry, sorry, go ahead.

• 49:43Chris Williamson?

  I just think that my seduction into Apple is probably very common amongst like just normal consumers. You know, you think all of their products are super slick. I'm speaking to you on a MacBook Pro that I upgraded to, even though I didn't need to, just because the new one looked good. Got an iPhone, I got AirPods, I bought my mom and dad's AirPods for like last Christmas and the Christmas before and blah, blah, you know, like, but because the design is so seductive and so visceral and so easy to see, right, you know, like Microsoft. Microsoft, perfect example. Like, I do not think sexy when I think Microsoft, but

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  Money talks, you know, the numbers don't lie and they're the biggest, the biggest company of all the ones that we've spoken about. And they're doing like some of the least sexy shit, but I guess it all depends on what the vision is. The other thing as well that I've noticed when you're talking about Apple is it seems like a very old style approach to management and also careers within a company in that you've got specialization, you know, this is Henry Ford shit. You know, this is like 1910 shit, the guy that that turns the knob, he's the knob turner. And the guy that pulls the lever, he's the lever puller and the, you know what I mean?

• 51:06Chris Williamson?

  And it seems like that siloing could go one of two ways, but given the fact that all of your competitors are being super effective with this super transparent, free flow of information, it seems surprising that Amazon have done that. Do you think that they're gonna be forced to make a change or start really losing, losing ground?

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I do think that this sort of goes to show how difficult it is for a lot of companies to get away from the factory mentality. Right? And Apple's definitely still in it, like Ford is a good example of specialization, right? Like, that's what happens inside the company. So I think Apple's gonna be okay. I think that like the things that you're talking about, like I'm also, I have an iPhone, I have AirPods. I'm talking to you through an Apple computer. So I do think that they're gonna be doing fine. But to go back to where we were in the beginning of the conversation, if the average company on the Fortune 500 lasts for 15 years now instead of 67, that means there's gonna be shifts that will come along that they won't be prepared for unless they're ready to adapt.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  And to me, the main question is, is Apple gonna be ready to adapt when those shifts come for it? Like, maybe it is voice computing, maybe it's some other shift that we're not aware of. And are they gonna lose their lead because of that? And I think it's quite possible. So. I do still have hope that there will be a culture change there and they'll be able, I think they'd be as effective as they are today, even if they opened up a bit. And yeah, I think that they, if there's not a culture change, they'll be, they'll still make good phones, but they'll struggle to navigate the, the next change. So they're, they'll kind of be like Microsoft if Microsoft stuck with Windows and didn't get into new businesses.

• 52:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I get it. Look, Alex, man, it's been really, really awesome. Finishing up, final question. What is your vision for tech? Or what are your predictions for the big things happening in tech over the next five to 10 years? What should we be on the lookout for?

• 53:00Speaker 00

  I mean, I would say be, be on the lookout. So right now we've had like tech change our consumer lives in a big way, meaning that like we're now, we use Netflix to watch TV, to watch yet TV and movies. And we all have phones and apps. And it's really changed our experience living life outside of the office. And it's funny because in the office, it feels like we're still living in the 1990s sometimes, given like the programs that we use. So I, my first big prediction is that we're going to start to see technology change our work lives in the same way that it changed our consumer lives. And I think work is always a little bit slower to adapt. And I think that that's really going to make a difference for, in terms of the way that we work. So I would look out for that. I think AI is going to be way more

• 53:45Speaker 00

  advanced and change the way that we live in ways that I'm not even sure how to predict. Like one thing I've thought about-

• 53:52Chris Williamson?

  You're the guy, Alex. It has to be you. If it's not you, who's it gonna be?

• 53:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I guess like it sort of goes to the point of, of the book, right? There can't be just one person with the vision. It's everybody's ideas that come together that actually, you know, push forward the change. But it's gonna happen in so many different industries. You know, my dad is a podiatrist. And so in, in the US, when, when you're a doctor, you spend, you know, some of your time working with patients and almost all of your time filling out charts. And my dad, every time I come home, he's just filling out charts. I'm like, Dad, do you do anything else but fill out charts? He's like, nope. So- I mean, it'll be amazing when we start to see this technology start to gain, you know, if, if, if a UiPath technology can write an HR letter, right? Why can't there be other technology that starts filling out the paperwork for doctors?

• 54:42Speaker 00

  I mean, of course, you'd have to have it at a pretty high, you know, specification and have to, you know, understand privacy, but a lot of this stuff is, is just like, you know, write down and spit back. It's not so complex. It's just, you have to key it into all these different systems. So there needs to be technology to be able to do that. That might change the medical field because instead of having doctors spend their time doing paperwork, you might actually have doctors spending their time taking care of patients. And wouldn't that be cool? So, and I think it changed government as well. Like I expect us to see if we have the political will to see leaner, more effective governments. You know, our governments are the ultimate

• 55:17Chris Williamson?

  Bloated creek.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  Groups, bloated groups. I mean, talk about execution work. All the government does is execution work. Imagine those people had some time to come up with ideas to figure out problems like climate and poverty and health. That would be amazing.

• 55:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, the fact of the matter is, within a government, you have to use the word think tank, you know? In that

• 55:35Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 55:35Chris Williamson?

  The think tank

• 55:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:37Chris Williamson?

  is the exception because everybody else

• 55:40Speaker 00

  Exactly right.

• 55:40Chris Williamson?

  is busy doing the ops.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  That's exactly right, Chris, and that's a freaking big problem. So we need to work to solve that.

• 55:46Chris Williamson?

  Hey, it looks like, it looks like we've got a good handle on, on what we're talking about. Alex, your link, the link to your book will be in the show notes below. Always Day One, highly recommended. Where can people go to check out your stuff online?

• 56:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I appreciate it, Chris. So you can, um, yeah, they check the show notes for the book. Also, you can Google Always Day One and read some of the reviews. I think people have been happy with it so far. And then if you want to connect with me, uh, I'm a pretty online person. You could just type my last name into Twitter, K A N T R O W I T Z. My DMs are open and I check my mentions, so I'd love to hear from you there.

• 56:20Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Everything that we've spoken about will be linked in the show notes below. You already know what to do. If you enjoyed the episode, go and give Alex a follow, let him know what you think. Dude, I, uh, I really enjoyed that. I'm, I'm looking forward to seeing what the next few years has got in store now. I'm excited.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  Thank you. Yeah, me too. It's gonna be a wild few years, that's for sure. I hope it becomes calmer and less trapped in our houses than it is now.

• 56:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. We'll see, we'll see. Dude, thank you so much for your time.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  Thank you, Chris. This was really great.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. So y'all keep the blame on me.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 57:23Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 57:28Speaker 03

  With great power, comes great deniability.

• 57:31Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.