Building Resilience in the Robotics Revolution

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• Transcript

  Sebastian Schieke (00:01.017)
  So, boom.
  
  John (00:04.847)
  So, you know, I knew that if I came back to York, started talking about robots, people just run me out of town. And you know, because York is like kind of a touch sea feel kind of place. I was like, all right, well, I got to do something to capitalize because the fact that they're still willing to fund me is a big deal. You know, I wanted to do something that was successful so that, you know, this next round I could raise even more money. So I got into real estate. Like they liked buildings, they liked seeing things being built. And so me and two former partners of mine started a company. We actually bought a city block to start.
  
  and then all of Main Street. I mean, we went from doing $100,000 projects to like, you know, $30 million projects in the matter of 18 months. I mean, we grew very fast. Just from the three of us, like, you know, 100 employees. It was great too, it was a lot of fun. We had all these different businesses. I took a lot of what I learned in the tech world and applied it to that. So it was a combination of us doing things like the lean startup combined with us not really knowing what we're doing. And so we just moved so quickly that we were, you know, outpacing every other developer. It was amazing.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (00:39.919)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (00:49.849)
  Hmm.
  
  John (01:01.674)
  Like our city block on a first Friday would draw more people than the whole city. I mean, it was, it was cool too. It was like, you know, bands living on the block and playing on the roof and cops would shut us down all the time. And I mean, it was just, it was a blast. There was a lot of fun. You know, fast forward though, you know, about 18 months, two years into this. So at the very beginning, we'd all committed to like, none of us sitting on any boards. You know, we wanted to remain outside of the hierarchy and something interesting happens. When you've been rocking the boat.
  
  and then you get asked to get in the boat, you've been rocking. It was one of those things where like, all of a sudden we were this unstoppable force and once that happened, the people that were trying to stop us wanted to start taking credit for it. And so all of a sudden we were all getting asked to sit on boards and be a part of different things. And I kept going, no, I don't wanna do that. We exist outside of that and that is the strength that we've got. So about 18 months into this,
  
  Still, things are growing. Like I said, we're doing $30 million projects about all of Main Street. Other cities were starting to come to us to say, hey, how did you do that? Which is kind of the goal for me is I wanted to create this fertile ground to be able to do all of the things that I wanted to do and then connect all of these different communities together. And around this time, unfortunately for me, I was not only the senior vice president of the construction company and some other stuff, I was also the chief communications officer.
  
  And right around this time, this was actually nine years ago to, I think, February 24th was right when this happened. I started to talk very heavily about robots and AI because I knew it was coming. I was like, oh man, it's starting to happen. Like the curve's coming. But yeah, yeah. So I was too early. I was too, so it was like, you know, I, so I've learned to temper things and now I'm at this place, like earlier we were talking about the, you know, the change is coming and now it's like, you know, I now I'm riding the wave before I was like dragging the train.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (02:38.913)
  That's a witch again, yeah?
  
  John (02:54.77)
  And so, you know, I'm publicly talking about robotics and AI, you know, at the time, no one even in the valleys even focused on this kind of stuff. So I'm seen as a complete lunatic in the community. My partner's things I've lost my mind because I panic about AI and like, what are we going to do when AI is all over the place? We need to make sure everyone's included. And they just think I've literally think I've snapped. And, and so, so I go to our lawyers one day thinking, you know, I'm going into to like sign for another.
  
  property because it was like almost every day we were buying new properties. And I go to sit in my seat and the lawyer comes in and goes, you're in my seat. And I was like, well, where do I sit? He goes, over there. And so these lawyers and my partners were all lined up and proceeded to tell me all of the things I was not doing according to the operating agreement. Now taking into account when we started, it was only three of us. At that point, there was like 100 employees. So none of us were doing the things that were our responsibility in the operating agreement. But I learned a valuable lesson to update and stay on top of paperwork and stuff.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (03:51.612)
  If they want to find something, they find something.
  
  John (03:53.918)
  Right, right. So, so I ended up being going from being worth millions to nothing, like in a matter of five minutes, you know, and again, our community is a German Dutch honor culture. And so the way you respond to things, you will be judged. And because I'd helped raise a lot of money, and I had relationships with the investors, I would be seen as fighting them, not the company. And so, so I made the decision that, okay, I'm, you know, I'm not
  
  Sebastian Schieke (04:18.218)
  Yeah.
  
  John (04:23.594)
  I'm not going to fight this. I wanted some kind of buyout and I was like, I'll figure it out later. But right now, you know, I can't be worried about that. Now the next day, literally the day after this happened, I was supposed to speak at something called the Pennsylvania Economic Development Association, spring legislative conference. So it's put on by our governor here in Pennsylvania. It's in Harrisburg. People from all across the United States come do it. It's all about economic development. And I had been asked to talk because we were the youngest at the time in the country.
  
  building the way that we were building, like the millennials building for millennials. Typically it was big development companies doing this, not people like us. And so I was supposed to get up and talk about economic development and how we help launch all these businesses. And the night before, I was like, I'm not doing that. I'm not talking about those guys. And so I drank a bottle of whiskey and rewrote a completely different keynote, all about robots and AI. I'd never done like keynotes before. And it's like I pitched and I was in a band, so, you know, lead singer.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (05:19.751)
  Uh, uh...
  
  John (05:20.918)
  But I'd never like, I didn't know what a keynote was even. And I'm like, I'm like, but I was just so angry. I'm like, I'm not talking about them. Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (05:28.085)
  Yeah, but this is this is fuel sometimes, you know, I mean, for some people anger is fuel and then it really
  
  John (05:34.066)
  Right, right. The one thing I have learned though, so especially as I've gotten older, so anger, like that sometimes will drive you. The key is don't let it feed you. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, you know, because then it turns into vengeance or revenge. And, you know, that's like one of those things where it's I think Gandhi said it where it's like, you know, drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Like it's just, you know, you know, I've seen how it eats away at people. And I was like, yeah, I never want to be like that.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (05:45.448)
  Mm. Overtake you, exactly.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (05:58.999)
  Hmm. Ha ha ha.
  
  John (06:04.29)
  And so I'm about to get on stage and I hand them the jump drive and they're like, don't talk about robots. I was like, I'm talking about robots. So you better put that in. So they end up putting it in. So I get up again, this was an economic development. Like nobody, you know, nine years ago, nobody was talking about this stuff. I was, you know, I was supposed to be talking about like, you know, the coffee shops we opened and the artist incubator. And so, uh, so I get up and I'm just like, start talking about robots and AI, showing people what's happening, where it's going.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (06:11.865)
  Ha ha ha!
  
  Sebastian Schieke (06:19.713)
  Yeah, no, no.
  
  John (06:32.85)
  I tied it to a plan that came out of our town in World War II. Needless to say, nobody was prepared, but everyone was terrified. Like you could see people shaking. The person that introduced me got up and was like, well, that was terrifying. You could hear a pin drop. People were hyperventilating.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (06:47.37)
  Ha ha
  
  What?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (06:53.549)
  watch the new Terminator movie.
  
  John (06:55.838)
  Right, right, right. And so everybody's freaking out, except for one lady, her name is Maureen Sharkey. She came up, she goes, she goes, man, I've never heard about any of the stuff that you're talking about. Would you come to my town and tell that story? And I'm like, sure, you know, I'm unemployed at the time, I think I had like, maybe $50 in my bank account. I was like, you know, I didn't know what I was gonna do. Like, this was the first time I'd ever had money. And then, you know, had it all taken away. And she said, well, we'll pay you. And I was like, you'll pay me. And she goes,
  
  Sebastian Schieke (07:07.169)
  Oh.
  
  John (07:24.362)
  Yeah, it's $2,000 enough. And I was like, to talk for 20 minutes? I was like, you're gonna pay me $2,000 to get up and talk about robots? And she goes, yeah. And I was like, deal. So I find myself in like, you know, I think it was like maybe Peoria, Illinois or somewhere, like, you know, this little town and I give the same presentation, terrify everybody there. It's like an old holiday inn or something like that. And everyone there is terrified, except for one person comes up and goes, I've never heard about any of the stuff that you're talking about.
  
  I, you know, I run the economic development group two counties over, will you come talk to us? I was like, Sure, 3000. Like I just because I didn't know. I just added another thousand. And they're like, deal. Go ahead.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (08:01.253)
  Exactly.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (08:04.797)
  But you know what? You know what? What is really staggering to me is not the fact that you talk about robots in the eye, but it's just nine years ago. I mean, what is nine years? It's nothing. Nothing, yeah, nothing. And the amount of development we went through in the last nine years, and now by the week, we have more stuff coming. I mean, this is the amazing, amazing part.
  
  John (08:17.042)
  Nothing. Blink of an eye. Yup.
  
  John (08:30.23)
  Oh yeah, but everybody still doesn't know about it. You know, there's still like a, it's interesting. There was something I read recently that something like now, I think it's like 85% of people know what artificial intelligence is. Like now it's like a thing, but something like 5% of them have used it. And so, you know, go ahead.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (08:34.488)
  Uh.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (08:49.709)
  You know, just an example, a client of mine, he's the director for a bank and a big international bank. And I was talking to him, I was talking about AI and chat GBT, I said, yeah, I wanna learn about chat GBT. Can you create a workshop for me? I said, yeah, sure. So I sent him an offer and he forwarded this offer to his procurement department for a chat GBT crash course, you know, just half a day. Procurement department came back, said,
  
  ChetGBT is not in the catalog of training, which is authorized for you. So this will be rejected. And this is 2024, you know.
  
  John (09:25.439)
  Oh my gosh.
  
  John (09:29.758)
  It's unbelievable. Yeah. So this has been, I've seen this pattern, like not to derail, but you know, it's, I've seen this pattern of us making things that should be the focus, like hobbies, like we did it with computer programming, right? When we needed computer programmers, they were after school clubs. By the time now all the kids are learning the code, code is writing itself. You know, by the time it becomes a core, it's not necessary. Same thing with robotics. Like I was pushing to get robotics in regular schools.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (09:35.171)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (09:42.325)
  Yeah. Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (09:52.13)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (09:56.999)
  Mm.
  
  John (09:59.134)
  And robotics were like first robotics, like an after-school club. And now all of a sudden robotics is like a big core, but now you're seeing things like figure, like humanoid robots and like robots that are figuring things out themselves and like doing things in simulations. And it's like, well, great, now you're gonna teach everyone about robots while the robots can do whatever they want. And like that pattern is exactly what you just said. Yep. Yep, yep. And so, yeah, so nine years ago, so-
  
  Sebastian Schieke (10:18.341)
  It's repeating. Yeah, repeating itself all the time. It's crazy.
  
  John (10:27.19)
  Think about it now. You're going through that in 2024. Imagine what it was like for me, like nine years ago, when there was no understanding of any of this. Like I said, people in the Valley weren't even paying attention to this. So basically, I ended up getting a buyout. I can't get too deep into it. It's fine. It wasn't great. But part of my deal was I couldn't do anything in York for two years. At least anything in the same space. I couldn't tap into my old investors.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (10:32.421)
  Thanks for watching!
  
  Sebastian Schieke (10:36.764)
  Uh
  
  John (10:53.762)
  So essentially for two years, I would just stumble into speaking engagement after speaking engagement. I didn't know it was a real job. I was so used to getting paid nothing and touring with my band and then having to share that nothing five ways that getting paid a couple thousand dollars to talk was unbelievable for me. But the real benefit was for two years, it gave me the ability to crisscross the United States to all these little towns.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (11:13.901)
  Deal. Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (11:21.093)
  Mm.
  
  John (11:22.654)
  And I learned how to talk to small town mayors, county commissioners. I started to understand how local government work, what, you know, what the pain points of manufacturers get to know more manufacturing families. So it gave me like, um, kind of a, a crash course in not just the technology, but how to communicate it to non-technical people, because people weren't trying to do that at the time, you know, like, you know, they were saying things like, Oh, well nobody was talking about AI and robotics and what it was going to do. They were like focused on, okay, well you need to create a Facebook page.
  
  You know, like things like when they talked about tech for business, that's what they meant. So, right, exactly. Social media, you know, you name it. Now, now one of the neat things was, and I said before, like, you know, the person asking to come and I was like, yeah, 3000. Like, I just kept doing that before. And then all of a sudden I was getting paid, you know, 10,000 every time I spoke. And then, you know, then the events were getting bigger and larger and, you know, just more gravitas.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (11:53.881)
  Hmm. Yeah, you could in a website.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (12:14.341)
  Hmm.
  
  John (12:16.974)
  until I finally find myself as the main keynote at I think it was like a 10,000 person event in Seattle. And I was the only person without an agent. Everybody else was represented by Gotham Artists, which is my agent now. And so Alec ended up like delaying his flight so he could watch me because he was like, how the heck did this guy with no agent, I don't know who he is, he gets the main slot. Like the guy before me was the guy that led the team that.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (12:38.329)
  Duh duh.
  
  John (12:41.29)
  put the Mars Rover on Mars. And it was like me. It's like, you know, nobody from York, Pennsylvania talking about AI and robots. And so I ended up working with Gotham artists. And then all of a sudden, my fee went up 15,000 to 20,000, 25,000. And then I found myself getting I was actually a keynote for President Obama a couple times. And then I did something similar for President Trump, actually taught Vice President Pence to program my robots. I became known as like the technical futures to rural communities.
  
  So like, you know, third tier cities and small communities out in the Midwest, I was the guy if you wanted to understand how AI and robotics was going to impact your community, I kind of fell into this niche. It was great. And the other cool thing about it is I was actually able to seed fund my robotics company. So through my speaking engagements, that's what I used to seed fund my company. Two years go by, I land my first million dollar contract, my non-compete is up, and then I go back to my old investors and in an afternoon raise about four and a half million.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (13:10.135)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (13:21.829)
  Amazing, yeah.
  
  John (13:40.618)
  So then we scale very, very fast. I start to hire engineers from all over the world. I was actually very committed to the educational piece. I was convinced that we were gonna need less PhDs because again, computer programs were gonna write themselves, computer vision was getting better. While we're racing to catch up, we're not gonna need any of that stuff. Here we are with ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies able to do this stuff. But on the flip side of it is,
  
  Sebastian Schieke (13:55.865)
  So.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (14:03.769)
  Ha ha.
  
  John (14:08.778)
  I knew that robots wouldn't go viral. The demand is going to explode, but it's going to be about how fast can you build, install, and maintain, right? Which are the non-sexy parts of tech. So I was like, okay, well, that's the fundamental pieces, the building blocks. So I tried to convince our local college to do it, and they thought I was nuts. And so out of pure frustration, I actually founded, I'm wearing a t-shirt right now, the Fortress Academy.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (14:15.781)
  It's... yeah. There's a limitation.
  
  John (14:34.678)
  So we're a licensed higher education institution, all focused on accelerated education around AI and robotics combined with traditional manufacturing skills like welding and electrical, with the goal of creating the first generation of robot mechanics. So blue collar jobs in robotics. That was kind of my thing. I also wanted to do something very large in town and because of my real estate background, I actually ended up taking control of the center of our city. So we were gonna build an innovation district where humans and robots would work side by side. It would be the first place like this.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (14:46.529)
  Wow, yeah.
  
  John (15:02.242)
  was focused very heavy on our manufacturing capabilities. In the meantime, I helped raise, I partnered with the YMCA downtown. We raised a little over a million dollars to turn an old bank building into the school. You know, I ended up getting some more money from the state. I ended up also getting $6 million from Governor Wolf, our governor at the time, to start building. Was working with a very large defense company that wanted to take like 200,000 square feet of the Innovation District. It was like literally everything that I'd been working on was all coming together. It was astonishing.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (15:15.813)
  Hmm.
  
  John (15:30.73)
  And, you know, people now were starting to like, we believed in you the whole time. It was that same thing I experienced before. And then as soon as all this stuff was happening and coming to a head pandemic hits, like literally, like we open the doors for the building, we get the funding. You know, we're going to break ground. And now the company doesn't need space anymore because everybody's working remote. And, you know, I had to focus on like at that point, Pennsylvania, our governor locked everything down.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (15:43.877)
  All right. Boom.
  
  John (15:59.51)
  Like, you know, and for us, the way our business works is, you know, we get paid in tranches and big chunks of it happen at install. And, you know, we were just sitting on all of these cells and robots we'd built and that couldn't get installed. I didn't know what I was gonna do. The other thing is our town, while being a tiny town, I swear to God, everybody thinks they're in Game of Thrones. Like if you've ever seen the show Game of Thrones, it's literally like these people, like we gotta take this down. And I'm just like, what is happening? We don't have dragons.
  
  Like, why is everybody acting like this? So it was like a full-time job trying to stop people from screwing all my stuff up. But when I had to focus on my company, they systematically destroyed everything else. The building, I think, is still empty now. I mean, it's just, you know, the Northwest Triangle, ended up, my project ended up falling through. Someone else stepped in, still empty. You know, it's, and so I went through like a major depression. You know, my engineers started leaving, like they didn't want to be in York anymore.
  
  And so, you know, I was really bummed out. Like, I was like, man, what am I going to do? Like, it literally looks like it was all happening. Like it was like, I swing for the fence, swing for the fence. And it was like, I hit it. And when that happened, you know, and I'm not the only one that went through, you know, depression and the pandemic, obviously, right? Especially with business people, you know, like, there were people that, you know, built multi-generational businesses that just disappeared. And so, you know, it was just a painful time, I guess, for all of us in the business world.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (17:26.871)
  I also lost the business due to the pandemic. So, I mean, I can completely...
  
  John (17:29.618)
  Really, what happened? I don't wanna deviate too much, but I'm curious, like what happened for you during that time?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (17:34.221)
  I was, but basically we've been in a very big project for a client and due to the pandemic, this project was sort of postponed and postponed and then canceled in the end. And then I had all these people not having anything to do. And as far as we basically, yeah, I'm basically retired from this business at this point. Happens.
  
  John (17:56.062)
  Yeah, that's, it's tough. It's, you know, it's rough. Like, yeah, like you said, I saw, you know, all my projects disappear and fall apart. It's, you know, it's traumatic. So, you know, I'm, in all honesty, you know, I'm naturally a very optimistic person and I like to get people excited. And, you know, that's a strength of mine. But when I was going through that at the time, it was like.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (18:16.514)
  Yeah.
  
  Mmm.
  
  John (18:20.05)
  it was dragging myself out of bed. And you could see like, my teams weren't as excited anymore. You know, and I, it was very difficult for me to get excited. And so I don't blame them. You know, a lot of them now work at Tesla and SpaceX and other places like that. You know, I had a very young, aggressive team which I made mistakes with because robotics is a mix of advanced technologies and old manufacturing skills. It, and...
  
  with computer programming, it's a little different, right? Like you want to get young people with computer programming, but if you do some spaghetti code, you can fix that later. You can't do that when you put a hole in the wrong place or you measure something wrong. And so, a big chunk of that, those millions I raised, I lost because I had no idea. I was trying to apply all this stuff from the tech startup into this weird blend of a world. There's just not a lot of robot companies. Even now, there's not a lot of robotics companies.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (18:48.995)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (19:07.428)
  Hmm.
  
  John (19:14.966)
  So what ends up happening is, you know, I'm down to just a couple engineers now, you know, from like 50, there's just a couple people left and I'm really bummed out, not really knowing what I'm going to do. And a friend of mine was in Mexico City and he ended up getting some money from something called the Nier Foundation. They were a blockchain protocol and he wanted to set up an extended reality lab and they needed a robotics expert. And I hadn't traveled, you know, the travel ban had just been lifted. And so I was like, all right, well, yeah, I'll come down. You know, I've never been to Mexico City. It seems like a pretty cool place. So I go down and I'm helping him kind of set up this lab.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (19:42.585)
  Hmm.
  
  John (19:44.778)
  And at night I'm bored. So I'm on the dating app Bumble. Like I'm just, you know, I'm on Bumble swiping right. And I match with this beautiful Argentinian girl. She's an NFT artist. I mean, she's super talented, amazing. We're still friends. And I was like, man, you're incredible. I was like, I've never met an Argentinian before. I was like, are all Argentinians like you? She goes, yes, we are the best. Which apparently is like a thing that Argentinians do believe. And so I go, really?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (20:06.914)
  Hahaha.
  
  John (20:12.878)
  So it got me thinking, like, you know, I came back to York and, you know, I obviously only had a couple of engineers left. And young engineers, again, had burned me. Like, they just made mistakes. It's very difficult to find experienced engineers in the robotics world. It's just very, very hard. And so I go, all right, I'm going to put one of my most difficult jobs that my teams here struggled with. I'm going to see if I can hire some Argentinians and see how they do. So I put my most difficult job, I think it was like on Upwork or something. The first guy that applies solves the problem. In like an afternoon, I was like, get out of here.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (20:39.717)
  Hmm.
  
  John (20:42.698)
  So I put another difficult job, zero interest in Argentina. The next guy hops on, solve the problem. And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. And so it turns out, Argentinians are very, very smart. Yeah, and especially in engineering. They had the world's second largest economy, second largest railroad, second largest dam, and then Peron came in. But overall, I mean, just very, very creative. And so I'm like, all right, well, I'm gonna hire some Argentinians.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (20:52.973)
  Amazing people. Yeah.
  
  John (21:10.602)
  I got to figure out how to do this, right? Because again, we're a very physical world, so I started embracing 3D scanning. We bought a HoloLens, so we started using augmented reality headsets, so the engineers there could see what my engineers here were doing and drawing over it. Again, I was seeing where all this tech was going, so I was like, all right, I got to figure out how to use all this stuff. So I'm bringing it together. I ended up going down to Argentina, as soon as I hired that first guy, I was like, all right, I need to gain their trust.
  
  And so I went down, we hiked up in the mountains, spent time with their families. And so now I have a team down in Argentina that works seamlessly with my team here. Again, by embracing all of those technologies. So all of this is starting to work very fast. And while the things in New York were falling apart, those seeds I planted during those two years when I was in that non-compete, just traveling around, people were calling me because they were seeing the things that had happened before. So all of a sudden I was getting asked
  
  Sebastian Schieke (21:43.141)
  Mm-mm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (21:59.961)
  Paid off, yes.
  
  John (22:05.27)
  to go back to all these communities again. So then I started to see like the demand for robotics beginning to explode everywhere. And I was like, okay, well, I'm not gonna be able to do this like on my own. Like before it was gonna be kind of York and we were gonna be York centric, but now the demand is exploding. So I started to think, okay, well, how do I duplicate myself so that I can expand at a very rapid rate? I've been experimenting with generative AI very early on. And then I started to see like, you know, when GPT-3 came out, I was like, it's here. Like all of these like tools and these things that.
  
  You know, these exponential curves were all crossing each other. You know, like they're all starting to. And the interesting thing is I was seeing them cross each other and then begin to carry each other. You know, like.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (22:35.717)
  Mm-hmm. Yeah.
  
  and
  
  Sebastian Schieke (22:43.753)
  Exactly, they support each other and create more as a result. This is the amazing part.
  
  John (22:50.198)
  Right, right. And so that drastically shifted even my mindset. So we've been training our own agents and I'm hoping to work with you on some of this stuff too because I think this would be a lot of fun is I'm starting to train on how to be an AI to be a project manager and an AI to like do all of our ordering. And the interesting thing is what I've been doing is I've been giving our agents not just telling them to speak in Spanish, I've been feeding it like Argentinian Spanish because Argentinian Spanish is different.
  
  than like, you know, generic Spanish. So it's been great because now I can bring on non-English speaking engineers and they interact with the AI. And so it's like all of these things are just starting to come together and that demand, yeah, the demand for robotics is going to explode. And we can get into like some of the reasons for that. I actually think the pandemic is one of the things that is going to accelerate robotic adoption, especially in the US because Americans attitudes towards work have changed drastically.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (23:20.085)
  Yeah. And.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (23:32.749)
  That's amazing.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (23:44.357)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (23:49.529)
  Oh, everywhere, everywhere. I mean, I just said, I listened to podcasts this morning as I talked about, yeah, chancet, you know, very young people and I mean, for some of them, work is not the most important factor anymore. Like for us, you know, 40 hours a week, oh no, this is too much, you know, this is unhealthy. And I mean, with all the economy going down, you know, people are not interested in work. I mean, we need something like robotics to...
  
  John (23:49.759)
  Like, right, right. And go ahead.
  
  John (24:06.476)
  Right.
  
  John (24:10.627)
  Right? Right.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (24:19.033)
  get the work done. I mean, yeah.
  
  John (24:20.622)
  We're gonna have to. And so the interesting thing is, and this is what I try and stress to people, is that, because I love people. Like in general, I just, you know, it comes, I guess, from my family's missionary background. Like I can't turn that off. Like, you know, I started my robotics company to help people because in the robotics world, it's about how many people can you get rid of. And I'm thinking, how do I do this responsibly? Like responsible disruption. How do I learn the lessons from the last industrial revolutions and not just plow through and make all those same mistakes?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (24:33.506)
  Yeah.
  
  John (24:50.486)
  which is, you know, I wrote a children's book and we can get into that a little bit later. But so I was focused very heavily on creating a robotics company that puts people at its core. And so that's really been my big focus. And I try and communicate to people that while, you know, they're like, I want flexibility, I want more money, I want this, this. And I'm like, you want more, you wanna output less at the same time that technology is like robotics and AI.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (25:01.593)
  Hmm.
  
  John (25:17.854)
  are getting better in capabilities and dropping drastically in price. I was like, is nobody connecting the dots that you're accelerating robotic adoption? You're not making yourself more valuable. And so we're about to hit this crash. Now that's why it's changed my thinking on instead of focusing just on York, how do I do what I want to accomplish everywhere? How do I figure out how to duplicate myself and do other stuff? AI is the only way to really do it.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (25:27.853)
  Yeah.
  
  John (25:45.11)
  I've abstracted a lot of the difficult things, like the things that I lost a lot of money on, I'm kind of taking out of it and keeping it a separate entity where the AI lives, the other engineers, the designs, all of these kinds of processes. We're focused very heavily on how do we build cells in a way that I can have people that I train in a very short period of time, service, install, and maintain, right? Like, so it's just drastically changed my business. Our profit margins are way higher than industry standards.
  
  which is giving me the ability to drop price and undercut. And as we begin to embrace AI, things like the Apple Vision Pro, things that before we were just experimenting with, now are becoming seamless, right? And so kind of like we were talking about earlier, it's like there's this curve happening and for the longest time, I was dragging the train and now I'm like surfing on top of the train on a tsunami. It's not even a surfboard. It's like enough power to carry the whole train that I was dragging before.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (26:38.521)
  We, exactly, yeah. We talked about exponential growth for years, you know? And honestly, I never felt this exponential growth. It never appeared to me that this is exponential, yeah? But now we are on this tipping point where boom, every week, every, almost every day something else is happening. And this is real, the exponential acceleration.
  
  John (26:59.97)
  Yeah, it's just, you know, it's technologies feeding into other technologies and, you know, like, you know, and whenever somebody goes, yeah, but I'm just like, you don't, you don't understand what the thing you're looking at means. You know, they're like, yeah, but what about battery technology? I was like, but now we're using AI to discover new batteries. Yeah, I mean, there's just, it's like breakthrough. It's like breakthrough leads to other breakthrough leads to other breakthrough. And I don't know that people understand that we're at
  
  Sebastian Schieke (27:04.152)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (27:15.27)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (27:24.417)
  Yes.
  
  John (27:28.586)
  It's accelerating returns, right? Like it's a thing that accelerates this thing that now accelerates other things. And so it's a precarious time, right? Because the decisions I think we make in the next five years are gonna echo for the next thousand. I mean, they might be like, you know, my fear before was like, you know, we have haves and have nots. We might actually have haves and have nevers. Like that's a real possibility that chasm will be so large, so fast that there will be no catching up.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (27:29.025)
  No. Yeah, yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (27:43.725)
  Yes.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (27:55.585)
  Yes, yeah, yeah. How.
  
  John (27:58.058)
  And you know, that's just, I think about in the US and in Europe, you know, developing nations, like that's, you know, drastically different.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (28:06.393)
  Just last week, Devon was released. This AI which is used to create code, I mean, completely out of talk, scrapping the internet, looking up for API documentation, putting us into a code. I mean, how, I really ask myself, how do we, how will we create money in the future, value in the future, you know? How do we create our living? Everything is done by robots and AI. That's the crazy thing. And at the same page, sorry, in the same way.
  
  John (28:28.619)
  Yeah.
  
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (28:35.373)
  We have lots of strike at the moment in Germany. The U-Bahn, the S-Bahn not going because people want more money, want less work. As you said, it's just accelerating that robots will drive the trains in the future. So.
  
  John (28:41.655)
  Right.
  
  John (28:48.714)
  Yeah, yeah, and lay the tracks and like, you name it. Well, and so it's interesting you say that because I have an interesting story and this is a true thing that happened. So one of my early engineers, Abhishek, somehow, I wasn't there at the time, somehow he got left at a job site overnight. Like he just didn't say anything. Ended up sleeping in their break room. So he was rudely awakened by some furious factory worker.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (29:09.218)
  Ha ha.
  
  John (29:17.302)
  big guy just standing over him screaming at him. Abhishek wakes up and he's like, what's happening? And the guy's like, did you do this? He's like pointing at the robot. And Abhishek goes, yeah, I put the robot in. And the guy's just fuming. And he goes, he goes, how would you feel if a robot took your job? And Abhishek foolishly goes, oh, that'd be great. I would just stay home and play video games all day. So this makes this dude furious. So this guy's freaking out.
  
  So they called me because I've got to come in. I've learned a lot on how to do this responsibly and right by making a lot of mistakes. And so I ended up going out to the factory and I'm like, you know, I calmed the guy down and I go, I go, listen, I was like, if you won the lottery tomorrow, like what do you love to do? What are some of your hobbies? And the guy was like, well, I like to fish. And I was like, well, let me ask you a question. Because you know, we were getting into this deep discussion on like, he was angry about the robot, but you know, obviously it was a bunch of other things that he'd been internalizing
  
  And the robot was just like, you know, there was, it was like a wall. Like you couldn't see past what it represented or what it meant. You only saw the negatives. And I go, um, I go, well, what if instead of, I was like, how many days you work here? He goes, he goes, I work here five days. Sometimes I pick up an extra day and I go, well, what if I paid you the same, but you only had to work here two days a week and you worked with the robots, you produce just as much, and then for another day or two of the week, I paid you to fish.
  
  And he was like, you'd pay me to fish. And I was like, yeah, but there's one caveat. There's a lot of kids in my city that don't have a dad. I want you to mentor them. I'll pay you, but I want you to teach them how to fish, teach them life lessons, spend time with them. And I was like, would you do that? And he goes, well, yeah, I would do that. I was like, is that a life that you would want? You feel like you make a difference. You're making the same money, if not more, and you have a chance to do your job and then actually have it in. And he was like, yeah, I would love that. And I was like,
  
  Sebastian Schieke (31:06.901)
  Exactly.
  
  John (31:10.246)
  that's what that robot can represent. I was like, it can free us up to be more human. Now, I'm not a universal basic income kind of a guy. Now, what I am is I do believe, we spend a lot of time and I go through this debate with folks. They're like, we need to tax the rich. And I'm like, that is a losing battle. They will always find a way to do the loopholes. There's a reason they're billionaires. But what you're doing is looking in the wrong place.
  
  Well, we don't need to tax the rich more. We need to make it so that if you don't make a lot of money, your quality of life is higher. Like if you only make, you know, we're not gonna be able to redistribute all the money, but if you can say, all right, you make $20,000 a year, but you live like you make 100,000, that's what robots could do. Like we could actually, you know, we're already in an age of abundance. Robots could just bring it in. So again, I don't wanna just give people money, but I do think we should eradicate homelessness.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (32:03.182)
  Yeah.
  
  John (32:07.51)
  We should use AI and robotics. Everybody has health insurance. We should make sure that everybody has food. Those basic needs are met, right? Right, but then you still have a purpose. There's other things that you have to do and things like that. And if you wanna grow businesses, you wanna have more money or go on vacations or whatever, then you work and you do that. But I think making sure that we eradicate some of those basic needs, we should do that. But I do think people need a purpose. So if we're gonna say robots and AI can do all of this stuff that we used to value.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (32:08.037)
  Oh yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (32:15.609)
  Basic needs, yes.
  
  John (32:36.554)
  and we say we value things like charity work, but we expect people to do it for free. I think what we do is we use the robots, we work hand in humans and robots working hand in hand. We create this age of abundance. We keep, you know, keep the economy going, tax the robots, whatever you want to do. It doesn't matter to me. You know, we can figure out creative ways to do this and then pay people to be good citizens. In one generation, could we solve all these problems? And I'm like, yeah, we, you know, we keep jobs going. It's just now we have more jobs. We're paying people to be good people now, right?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (32:56.29)
  Exactly.
  
  John (33:06.518)
  Like, so now their motivations are aligned with that. The robots allow them to have more impact. I mean, I don't know if you've ever worked in a factory, but I always go in and work the line because I like to learn like the nuances. And, right, right. And I'll go and work it for a day. And I'm like, this is the worst day of my life. Like, I can't, you know, putting these things in a box and twisting a thing. And I was like,
  
  Sebastian Schieke (33:19.958)
  I did all kinds of jobs as a student, you know, I mean, night shift, everything.
  
  John (33:34.002)
  Who would want to do this? Your brain atrophies. Humans shouldn't be doing that. People tell me all the time, well, robots are going to take people's jobs. I was like, people have been doing robots' jobs. The human capacity is amazing. But if you're not flexing, it's often guys like you and me, or I'm in academic circles, and they talk about things like, well, humans have always adapted, and humans have always done this, and can a robot—
  
  Sebastian Schieke (33:39.704)
  No.
  
  Yep, exactly.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (33:52.676)
  Hmm.
  
  John (34:00.934)
  I always look back at that, do you remember the movie I Robot with Will Smith? And you know, where he's interrogating the robot and he's like, can a robot create a symphony? Can a robot paint a painting? All things that robots can do now, like we can get into that later. But the thing that I love is the robot looks back at him and goes, well, can you? And the reality is Will Smith couldn't. So
  
  Sebastian Schieke (34:04.481)
  Yes.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (34:21.678)
  Hahaha!
  
  John (34:23.998)
  So it's very easy and now we can get into some of the things that we actually have to do to make sure that everybody like, you know, I'm glad we're getting kind of going into this like the kinds of things we should be doing discussion. Because when people say things like, well, can a robot do this and AI can't do this humans are, you know, are great at this and AI is never gonna do this. I was like, what you mean is 0.00001% of humans can do that. Because you are using the exceptions as the rule.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (34:47.884)
  Exactly.
  
  John (34:51.414)
  Like I'm not worried about, it's one of the reasons why I didn't focus on creating more startups in York. Like I very quickly was like, yeah, I don't need a bunch of like coders in a cool building. What I'm worried about is all of the people that have no idea this stuff is happening. Do you know what I mean? Like I don't want to create more startups. I want to figure out like, how do I make sure that everyone who's non-technical gets brought along with this, you know? Entrepreneurs will be fine. Like they'll figure it out. They've always been fine, right? I'm not worried about them.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (35:14.872)
  Exactly.
  
  John (35:21.214)
  I'm worried about the people that are working in the factories or aren't sitting down and having discussions like this. They have no idea that this is even happening. That was my motivation. Everything that I've done in my life around robotics and around AI has always had this helping people at its core. Candidly between you and I, I'm not doing this because I'm a martyr and I don't believe I'm a missionary of some kind of robotics. Not that level.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (35:30.126)
  No, no.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (35:49.721)
  I mean, you're an entrepreneur. I mean...
  
  John (35:51.55)
  Right, right. And so I actually do believe though, that when the time comes and demand for robots explodes, it's already coming, but soon it will be everywhere, that having started the company, like that puts people first in the robotics space, will end up being very valuable later on. Like I have a track record of caring, being involved in communities, helping people. I think if you hit a point where you've got to use robots, you're going to want to work with the company that's community focused.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (36:20.033)
  Exactly.
  
  John (36:20.042)
  And so, you know, that's always been kind of my mantra is like, I could make more money in the short term, but in the long term, the value is going to far outpace the money that I could have made before, because I'm people centric with robotics. Does that make sense?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (36:34.345)
  Totally. I mean, we cannot stop robotics rising and taking over jobs and activities. But what we can do is actually what you said, you know, we can create a way that it's human-centric and that we support people along the way. That's an amazing vision.
  
  John (36:53.098)
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a really exciting time to be alive. So, you know, through a lot of this, and again, because I've been able to like, you know, abstract myself more from like a community focus, which, you know, sometimes is a little sad. I was very involved. But the reality is it was, a lot of it was exhausting. It was very, very exhausting. And the truth is now there's so many opportunities and things moving so quickly that it's like, you know, it was good that I cut my teeth on this and I learned a lot and I figured things out.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (36:58.786)
  Mm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (37:13.73)
  Yeah.
  
  John (37:21.89)
  But the opportunity now is so large, it's not just about one place anymore. Like, you know, it can be anywhere. And so feeding into that, so obviously I've got my engineers in Argentina, we have York Exponential, which is our robotics company. We started doing what are called collaborative robots. So those are human-sized robots are smaller, designed to work next to people, not replace them. Now we do anything from collaborative robots to big industrial systems that are as big as a house. So, you know, anything from like hundreds of thousand dollar projects to multi-million.
  
  So that's what York Exponential does. And obviously I have my Argentinian company, and I have the company here, and they're working seamlessly. But I wanted to make sure that, again, I reached everybody and that everyone was a part of it. So I'm also a published author, so I just brought out my first children's book called Tim the Robot Wizard, and I can talk about that in a little bit. But the other thing, well, actually, I'll talk about it right now. So I don't know if you can see it. So this is, I'll make sure that you get a copy of it. So if any of your listeners, Tim the Robot Wizard, yeah, it's really neat.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (38:16.261)
  save the robot reset
  
  John (38:19.03)
  So it's a cool story. So I don't know if you're familiar with, do you know who Goodwill is? I'm not sure if you all have, so Goodwill's are like, they're kind of like thrift stores here in the United States, but they're nonprofits. And their main mission is to help people. And so one of the CEOs, he was the Kansas and Missouri CEO, it was called Mokan Goodwill. He was doing his master's thesis on the future of work and he had a panic attack.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (38:26.479)
  No.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (38:30.338)
  Mm-hmm.
  
  John (38:45.494)
  because he realized everyone they were training for jobs, they were training the working poor. They were basically training people to get replaced by robots. Because he'd never thought about this stuff and he was seeing it. So he had basically a panic attack and he was having a little bit of a meltdown and he ended up having tacos with a mutual friend. So I'd never met him before, but my friend Johnny in Kansas City and Ed was just lamenting the fact that all these people were gonna be out of work and AI and robots were gonna take over and he didn't know what to do. And he goes, you need to talk to my friend John.
  
  because John has a big passion around this. He started a school and I think you guys would get along really well. So he ended up bringing me out. We ended up doing an AI project with them. So it was the first AI. It was really interesting. So we developed an AI that could detect defects, composition, pricing of like one-off donated clothing because they had a lot of one-off clothing. It was very subjective and so we had an AI that could do this. But it was the first AI that while we built it, we didn't train it. We taught people that were goodwill participants to...
  
  Sebastian Schieke (39:42.042)
  Hmm.
  
  John (39:43.874)
  to train it. So we had people like, you know, single moms, people with disabilities, like it was the first neural net trained by not only non-technical, but people with, like I said, disabilities and barriers to entry. So we were really proud of it. It was like, I mean, it was a really interesting system. It worked, but it opened the door to do a lot of other things in Kansas with Goodwill. You know, our missions aligned very much. Like, they wanted to make sure that everybody was included. You know, for me in the United States, there's a Goodwill, I think, within 15 minutes of 85% of all Americans.
  
  So it was a great channel. I could reach lots and lots of people. So part of this was they wanted to raise some money for something called the Artemis Initiative. So they ended up starting another school and it was all skill sets in the fourth industrial revolution. I ended up coming out, we ended up raising a little over a million dollars to do this and part of my job was I testified in the Missouri House and Senate, same thing in Kansas. And then also I had to give like a bunch of, you know, presentations in a row to stakeholders and government officials and stuff like that. And at one of these events,
  
  I was about to get on stage and one of our program participants came and sat next to me. His name is Tim Starr and Tim has Down syndrome. And we taught him how to program the robots and like he was teaching other people how to program robots and do like annotating for the, for the, you know, all the data. And he goes, are you nervous? And I go, no, I think I'm okay. I do this quite a bit. He goes, well, you shouldn't be nervous. I believe in you. And he goes, if anyone gives you any crap, you send them to me. I was like, all right. So, you know, he gave me a fist bump and went back to his seat.
  
  So I get up and I get my presentation and it goes well. After the presentation, me and Ed are talking to these elected officials and foundations and people trying to get money from them. But nobody's watching us anymore. Everybody's looking at Tim. Tim had figured out how to get one of our little robots to follow him with like hand gestures and sign language. And he's getting this robot, it's weaving in and out of the crowd. Everybody's watching him going like this and stopping it and moving it around.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (41:21.718)
  Hmm.
  
  John (41:34.346)
  And then he just stops and he throws his hands in the air and he goes, I am Tim the robot wizard. I was like, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen. So that's what the book's about. The book is actually about, so that's, that's actually me. So in the book I'm Johnny robotics. So essentially I, you know, I meet Tim in Kansas city. He becomes my apprentice. I take him all over the world and then into, into space to meet all these different robots that are doing things to help people. But the whole crux of the book is responsible disruption.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (41:44.176)
  Ugh.
  
  John (42:01.686)
  like that we need to be making sure that everyone's included in it. But one of the things that I love the most, which is kind of the thing I'll talk about next is, um, so I was one of the very early testers of mid journey. So I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with mid journey. I mean, you know, it's really cool. I mean, the technology itself was neat, but when I first started using it, it was in that nightmare phase. Do you remember when it was like just everything that it created was this horrifying monster, like a disaster. And so, you know,
  
  Sebastian Schieke (42:23.693)
  What's this?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (42:28.218)
  Oh yeah, I remember.
  
  John (42:29.502)
  Right, and so in my mind, I wanted the book to be made with AI. Like, nobody was using it back then. And like I said, everybody was naysaying, going, oh, it's terrible with hands and it can't do anything. And so for like, you know, three or four weeks, it was creating pretty terrifying stuff. I actually kept a lot of it because they're cool art pieces. But then after about three weeks, you know, I was training it at night, it started to create really cool images. Like, all this really unique stuff that I never would have thought of, even as a, you know, I was a professional photographer. So it's not like this is a new world to me.
  
  But it was doing things like, one of my favorites is, here, I'll show you. So if you can see it, it's essentially, I was trying to get it to create, and this is when Ed called Tim's family to ask him to participate, it was supposed to be a man and a woman answering a telephone in their living room with a painting of Kansas City on the wall. But what it did was, if you see it, the border of the page is the frame. It put them in a painting of Kansas City. So it's, you know, it's did these weird, cool things.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (43:25.462)
  Ah, amazing.
  
  John (43:28.994)
  that I never would have expected. You know, here's like, you know, here's when I meet Tim and there's, you know, robots flying everywhere. And like, so this was really cool because I was like a man floating above an arena. And what it did is, so it put me floating and then it did a hologram of my head. And I was like, I didn't, you know, it was, it was cause it didn't quite understand what I was asking, but it was just doing this really cool stuff. All of a sudden, you know, two weeks later, I wake up and I try and get it to do it. So mid-journey opened the beta to the public. It looked like a person did it. I couldn't get it to do this anymore.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (43:30.794)
  Uh, uh.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (43:43.545)
  Ha ha!
  
  John (43:59.178)
  And so it's like, the book is this frozen moment. Like I call it early AI. Like it's a very distinct art style that doesn't exist anymore. It's like this frozen moment in history. So, you know, that's what the book's about. Like it's, you know, that's the whole concept is like, as a social piece, it actually has some kind of relevancy to like when the AI needed us holding its hand. Do you know what I mean?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (43:59.301)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (44:08.217)
  Yeah, uh... I am!
  
  Sebastian Schieke (44:20.345)
  Hmm. Yeah. Watch a couple of TED talks, you know, which are a year or one and a half years old. Yeah. I mean, they talk about breakthroughs, which are now standard. Yeah. And
  
  John (44:36.279)
  Right? Right. Yep. So the book is cool though, but it's also, like I said, it's a way for parents and kids to not just both learn about robotics and AI, but that concept of responsible disruption is all through the book.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (44:45.39)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (44:48.69)
  I love this phrase. I love this phrase, responsible instruction.
  
  John (44:52.458)
  Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, it's been a thing I've been talking about, like, like I said, I saw in all the little towns, you know, the thesis I had about the first Industrial Revolution, the second, the third becoming caretaker versus risk taker. During those two years when I traveled the United States, it was almost like every town was exactly the same. It had the same people, the same families. It was like this blueprint. And you could see that is exactly what happened. Right. And so I look at this and I'm like, all right, we need to embrace the technology, but we need to do it responsibly.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (44:55.449)
  Yeah.
  
  Mm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (45:15.907)
  Yeah.
  
  John (45:22.218)
  I don't want to be like a Google or a Facebook that uses everybody's data, does all this stuff and then at the end spends all the money on PR and marketing to make it sound like they didn't know they were doing these things. So I wanted to always put it at the forefront. Now to piggyback on that, we actually did a lot of cool stuff with Tim. I alluded to the HoloLens earlier. We did some tests where like...
  
  Tim would wear the HoloLens at work. He'd come in, it would look like Iron Man, like his day would pop up. Like, I mean, we were doing all kinds of cool stuff, haptic feedback vest. You know, it was all this stuff that was like bleeding edge is now very quickly becoming, you know, gonna be a mainstay. Now, one of the things that makes me the most excited about this is all of the people, like, so Tim works for a restaurant called Anton's. Everyone there loves him. He's always on time. He's a hard worker. He just needs a little help. And this technology, like we're starting to train in AI,
  
  to be an assistant for people with disabilities, because there's gonna be things that the robots can't do. And honestly, a lot of Americans don't wanna do this other stuff. If we can use technologies like the Apple Vision Pro and AI to kind of be an assistant for folks like Tim, all of a sudden, Tim becomes critical to our infrastructure and it drastically changes people's opinion of his value. And that's the kind of stuff we should be using AI for and robotics for.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (46:25.855)
  Exactly.
  
  John (46:38.782)
  is empowering people, not immediately thinking about what is it going to take away, we need to be thinking about what is it going to add? Like how do we augment you? Yep.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (46:45.233)
  Yeah, it's leverage. Yeah, yeah, it's leveraging capabilities of people. It's increasing effectiveness and efficiency. And we can do so much more by using these tools and using large language models. And well, if our employers realize that chat GB is actually something valuable to learn, put this into the training budget, please.
  
  John (46:52.876)
  Yep.
  
  John (47:04.906)
  Right.
  
  John (47:09.81)
  Yeah. Well, so the funny thing is, and we should talk a little more on this because, um, because I have a licensed college, I can actually run things through my school that qualify for state funding. And like, it actually does qualify because it's a licensed college. So we should talk a little bit, a little bit about that. It's one of the reasons I kept the license. Like while the robot mechanics are a piece of it, it essentially was supposed to be an on-ramp for everybody. Like that was the goal is skills, like the kinds of stuff we're talking about. So, so
  
  Sebastian Schieke (47:29.349)
  Hmm.
  
  John (47:40.194)
  So the book kind of is that I also have a nonprofit called the Fortress Initiative that is all focused on making sure people don't get left behind in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But whenever something weird happens, I get asked to go on the radio or TV and the last one was ChatGBT when it came out, you know, everybody was freaking out. So I ended up going on NPR, which is our national public radio here, and it was so well received like my interview that PBS gave me my own TV show. So public broadcasting here.
  
  It's all gonna be a show, it's eight episodes, it's all on generative AI and artificial intelligence and how it's gonna impact everything from not just the economy but to education, to religion, like I'm interviewing priests, like what does it mean if AI can create longevity and then cure death? Like, you know, I mean, there's all of these things where it's not like, it's not you can just say, well, I'm not techy. Like the AI and robots, it's gonna be everywhere and deep in everything, and it's gonna make us rethink
  
  Sebastian Schieke (48:19.173)
  Mm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (48:29.656)
  No.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (48:34.501)
  Mm.
  
  John (48:36.902)
  what it means to be a human. That's what the show is. I'm excited because it's a cool format. I do a longer form podcast, but what we do is I'll talk to someone for an hour or a couple hours and then we'll pull snippets from the podcast and those become the prompts for what we're going to create. The whole show is going to be generative AI created. We're really leaning into it. We're embracing it. We're going to deep fake it into every other language so the rest of the world learns all at the same time.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (48:38.83)
  Yes.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (48:52.261)
  Mm-hmm.
  
  John (49:06.498)
  But the reality is it's going to very much like the book, right, has a distinct look. I love the fact that the tools we're using are going to look quirky, right? They're going to have this weird uncanny. Again, that's a frozen moment. Right. And so that's what makes me really excited about kind of like this transition. Like everything I'm trying to do, I'm trying to keep that responsible disruption and a thing that's like weaving a narrative with visuals.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (49:11.201)
  Yeah, and it's a.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (49:17.093)
  That's a snapshot again, you know, it's a piece of history. Yeah.
  
  John (49:34.934)
  with all of these things together so that people can understand because they can see it. Exposure is critical. We saw what happened when only a small part of a society could computer program. Everybody went to Silicon Valley, all the money went there, but this tech is going to be everywhere.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (49:54.985)
  It's democratized tech, basically. It's available for everyone. It's available for free. I mean, everyone can log into chat GPT and use it, create it. It's available. That's the power.
  
  John (49:57.119)
  Right.
  
  John (50:05.01)
  Yeah. Yeah, it's an amazing time. I actually so one of the things before the before I did that particular interview, I ended up doing a it was an emergency board meeting for a college. And because all the students were cheating with chat GBT, and like, you know, higher ed is having this existential crisis right now, which they should be right. And so they brought me in to basically, you know, explain to them what was happening, where this was going, get my thoughts and feedback.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (50:22.146)
  Ha ha ha.
  
  John (50:33.398)
  So I ended up giving this presentation to these 20 plus board members. And one of the administrators who was there said, well, I think what we're gonna do is we're gonna force, that we're gonna ban the use of chat GPT and we're gonna force all of the students to not use the AI and we want them to still learn this way and we need to separate it. And I was like, as an employer, right, I was like, as an employer, I can promise you, if you do that, I will never hire one graduate from your college.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (50:53.573)
  It's the wrong decision.
  
  John (51:01.23)
  Because I don't actually care how good they are without the AI. Like, I don't care at all how good they are without the AI. You know what I mean? It's the difference if someone is great at woodworking, right? But I'm hiring them to build houses. Like, I don't care how good you are, like whittling and all of these little things. I need to build lots of houses very quickly. So I think what's going to happen is, and this will be the weird thing, right? Because we had the discussion where
  
  Sebastian Schieke (51:12.593)
  Exactly.
  
  John (51:30.358)
  you know, that the company is like, oh, chat GPT isn't an approved, which is bananas to me, right? But what's going to happen is you're going to get people using it. And this is happening right now. Like they interviewed all the C suites and like all the C suites are like, AI is going to be a big deal. We need to lean into it. We need to start using it. None of them had though, like a plan on how to implement it. But something like, I don't know, 65% of the employees were already using it. They just weren't telling leadership, right?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (51:57.809)
  Using it, exactly. It's called shadow IT. Everyone has their own logins. And then they're uploading data to the public chat GPT. Exactly.
  
  John (52:01.769)
  Right? Right.
  
  John (52:07.05)
  Yep, without knowing what they're, yep. But the interesting thing is, when the leadership finally does catch on, right? And the boards catch on that you can use this, right now people think, oh, well, this is great because I'm doing like a full week's worth of work in a day. And it's like, as soon as the companies figure this out, we are about to enter the age of hyper productivity. Like now my expectations will be that instead of, right, yeah, in one week you do four weeks worth of work. And that's coming.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (52:31.521)
  phobics.
  
  John (52:36.414)
  Like that time is coming very, very soon, which is why it's so critical that everybody starts to at least mess around with these tools, right? Like learn what, yeah. Because the expectation, like I said, I don't care how good you are without the AI. I don't care at all. All I care about is you and the AI together. What can you produce? Right. And so it's an exciting time to be alive, but it's, um, we need to be very intentional.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (52:37.285)
  Uh.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (52:43.389)
  Yes, yes, we have to educate.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (52:56.493)
  What are the results? Yeah.
  
  John (53:04.214)
  You know how before tech was developed, and there were all these ripple effects that we didn't take into account, like with social media and disinformation. It's like we messed up those things. What's about to happen is gonna make that stuff pale in comparison. And so when I say the next five years will impact the next, I mean, the next five years might impact the rest of humanity. Because if you look at it speeding up now, one year,
  
  Sebastian Schieke (53:07.364)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (53:21.813)
  Yes, to what's happening now.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (53:29.867)
  No.
  
  John (53:33.99)
  is worth 20 years of innovation. Do you know what I mean? Like it used to take all this time to get things done and now it's shortening and shortening and shortening. I mean, I can't imagine in five years, it's gonna be like the speed of thought. You know, like things are gonna happen and morph so quickly. Now that gets into a couple other discussions because people often say, well, human beings have always adapted. And it's like, yeah, but even so, I was in the Marines and I was trained to be in combat.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (53:36.483)
  Yes.
  
  John (54:01.402)
  And we had great training, you know, the Marines, you know, in the US were considered like, you know, the best of the best, you know, first in to fight. But even we can't be in war indefinitely. Do you know what I mean? Where it's just, you never get a break. And the tech is moving so quickly that it's not about can human beings adapt. It's can we adapt fast enough? Because the speed at which it's going to happen. So that leads into the questions of like, okay, well, then are we going to have a chip in our brain?
  
  are some people going to have a chip in our brain and other people go, I'm not going to. And that's where that, you know, that chasm of right. And these are things, you know, it's funny because, you know, you and I kind of live in this, right. So we're riffing and just talking. And some of the stuff we're talking about, and I used to give that status in my presentations a lot is, you know, people at the end would go to me, they go, man, that was, that was riveting. You know, it was entertaining. People in general like to be scared.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (54:35.604)
  This gap is widening exactly.
  
  John (54:59.086)
  It's like a roller coaster kind of a thing. And I'm a pretty good public speaker. And so I'm able to tell this story, but they would inevitably come up at the end. Doesn't happen as much now. They would go, man, John, can tell you're really passionate about robotics and AI. You really care about this stuff, but I'm gonna be honest with you. You're talking about robots and AI and all this stuff, and we're dealing with this stuff right now. Like you're too far in the future. We've got these problems we need to fix. And right, and I would tell them, and I...
  
  Sebastian Schieke (55:22.977)
  Sci-fi. Yeah.
  
  John (55:26.254)
  I did my presentation specifically for this reason. I was like, 99% of what I just showed you is not the future, it is the past. Like, and it terrifies me that decision makers can look me in the eye, I can show them things that have already happened, and they're like, it's not going to happen for a long time. I'm like, but it already did happen. Like I'm showing you that it's, this is the past, this isn't the future. Now that, you know, the stuff that you and I are talking about even on this.
  
  People are thinking it's science fiction. It's like, no, this stuff is happening right now. Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (55:55.861)
  No, it's not. It's reality. It's there. It's just not common knowledge yet. And it's not that widespread, but it's happening. It's all there. This is why we need to educate. We need to continue and share this. Go on conversation like that and tell the world what's happening out there.
  
  John (56:03.327)
  Yeah.
  
  Yeah. Well, now... Yep.
  
  John (56:19.798)
  Yeah, well, and that's, you know, so for the TV show, that's one of the exciting things is, to produce what we would, what we're going to produce, would have cost a lot more money, like millions of dollars a couple years ago. It's gonna be a fraction of that. The technology to actually deep fake it into other languages is here for the first time, right? So the upside of this is, the technology is gonna be everywhere very quickly, but we have the technology now to make sure everyone is exposed very quickly.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (56:32.481)
  Yeah. No.
  
  John (56:47.978)
  Like that's the, you know, the upside is like, we, if we do this right, and we harness the technology, it's, we can't afford to do what we did before, like with the internet and like nobody knew what was going to happen. And you know, social media creates depression cycles and suicide, you know, like all of these things that happened, right? We have that from recent history, so we can learn those lessons and apply them very, very quickly. Like I said, responsible disruption, making sure we're doing it. But the cool thing is, the tech that's coming out, it's going to be everywhere.
  
  can help us make sure everyone's included. And that was never possible before. You had to be a Google that raised billions of dollars. You had to be like these big monsters, right? You and I are doing this now, right? Like, you know, I think Sam Altman was saying that, you know, we're gonna be at the first like, you know, is it like one or three person unicorn? You know, like, yeah. Yeah, and that's possible. Like, you know, we're hitting this point now where like things that were, that you needed tons and tons of money.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (57:34.003)
  One billion dollar company with one employee. Yeah.
  
  John (57:44.106)
  And that's like the cool thing about it, right? Is the democratization of it. The bad part is, like I said, the lack of exposure to what this, not what the technology is, because you don't need to be a technologist anymore. Like you don't have to go to school for this stuff. Like you don't have to have a four-year degree. So that's the exciting thing. The bad side of it is, people still in their minds are like, well, I'm not a techie. So that doesn't concern me, right? And it's like, it's like you don't, right.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (57:47.929)
  Yes.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (58:10.513)
  Exactly. I will never understand this. They have all these limiting beliefs about AI and the usage.
  
  John (58:15.018)
  Right. I can tell I can promise you and I went through this and you may have gone through this as well. I was trying to work with a software development shop and I was interviewing them for like a side project that I had going on. And I'm telling them what we want to accomplish and they're like coming back with these quotes for like fifty thousand dollars. I was like in like timelines of six months. I'm like what are you talking about? I was like I think why you know they're like well this is our process and now we're hitting a point that it's almost more detrimental.
  
  for you to be a technologist, right? Like it's limiting your beliefs.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (58:48.138)
  Yeah, you have this mindset, how you did this in the past, all the development cycles, and now boom, you can get it in an afternoon, yeah. Yeah.
  
  John (58:52.841)
  Right.
  
  John (58:57.598)
  right and you should right hyper productivity you know I was telling them and there'd be things they're like well we need to do this we need to build this and I was like yeah don't just wait a month and it'll be here and they're like you know they were telling me like I'm crazy and then it's like okay and then the you know custom GPT has come out and I'm like seeing like it's not hard like I'm very good at like seeing the curves right like it's been a strength of mine I saw it with the photography business I saw it with the new people coming in you know like I'm very good at leveraging it and seeing it.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (59:16.377)
  Yeah, yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (59:23.885)
  Mmm.
  
  John (59:27.546)
  I can see now about five years in the future, I think. I can see how things are connecting this, but we're going to hit a point very soon where I'm not going to be able to tell you what's going to happen next week, let alone in 10 years. And so that pace of rapid change is coming very quickly. And like I said, being a technologist now, it is almost a hurdle that you have to get over. And that's the exciting part.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (59:27.65)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (59:34.552)
  Mm-hmm.
  
  John (59:55.338)
  Now, the scary part is we have idolized entrepreneurs and technologists in our communities at such a high level, right? That it makes people that aren't in that bucket feel like they can't participate in that world. And that's the exciting thing about right now is you're getting people with domain expertise or community knowledge that can then start leveraging these tools that you used to have to be a Google. And the cool thing is that
  
  Sebastian Schieke (59:55.801)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:00:08.995)
  Hmm.
  
  John (01:00:24.498)
  they're going to be doing things that like a team of the best software engineers in the world would never even think of because they're so far removed from that. You know, that was the downside of Silicon Valley. Like, there were a lot of times I did think about moving there, you know, being a being seen as a lunatic consistently is incredibly lonely. You know, it's like, it's demoralizing, like, you've got to keep yourself excited. You know, you're seeing like you have 10 heads when you know, like, like what you what you went through.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:00:47.618)
  Yeah.
  
  John (01:00:53.29)
  with the company that's like, Oh, well, GPT, you know, chat GPT is not an approved whatever. And it's like, you're like, are you crazy? And it's like that feeling like that was my feeling every day that I'm a lunatic, I'm a lunatic, I'm a lunatic. And, you know, now I'm hitting this point where it's like, no, I've been validated. Everybody else now is crazy. Like, it's like, how can you just see it and ignore it? And that's where I think like, these conversations need to happen. Yes, and everywhere.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:01:02.709)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:01:20.567)
  Morphed him. Yeah.
  
  John (01:01:22.942)
  Like, it's, this is the first time that you know, now I get my mom sending me articles and stuff, which cracks me up because my mom's like, did you know this is gonna happen? I was like, yeah, you've seen my present time. I was like, now my mom's teaching me about like what Elon Musk said. And I'm, but, you know, but this is weird because now this is this multi generational discussion and we've never had this fertile ground to do this. Right. And I think the window is small though.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:01:34.181)
  Hahaha!
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:01:49.224)
  before. Yeah. Because as you rightly said, it was only for the big boys in Silicon Valley with lots of money, with lots of education. They knew how this all fit together.
  
  John (01:02:09.397)
  Yeah, yeah,
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:02:10.341)
  for a lot of people, yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:02:22.501)
  Hmm.
  
  John (01:02:30.186)
  I mean, I don't know, maybe it's an issue of like, all the folks like us need to get together and figure out like, hey, how do we leverage everything to reach everybody because this is so important? And maybe that, go ahead.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:02:38.665)
  Yeah. I love your, sorry to interrupt you. I love your concept of the TV show, which is translated into multi languages. Really get leverage and educate the world. Yeah.
  
  John (01:02:48.801)
  Yeah.
  
  John (01:02:53.194)
  Yeah, no, it's amazing. Like, again, this wasn't it's it. I remember because when I first when they asked to meet with me, I pitched the TV show to their executives. And they're like, I mean, they were literally like, well, no, you're not gonna be able to do this. And you're not gonna be able to do that. I was like, Yeah, but by the time we shoot, we will, like I had to keep telling them that we can't like and so at the beginning, it's funny, they just kept dragging their feet and dragging their feet. And I just kept sending them article after article after they're like,
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:03:02.917)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:03:11.193)
  Just wait a month and it will be there. Ha ha ha.
  
  John (01:03:20.99)
  Oh my God, it's happening. You know, and so even now, like we'll do a shoot, they'll use the technology and it's like, they're amazed. And it's like, you know, it's like, I'm talking to my mom. Now they're like, did you see this? And I was like, yeah, I sent you that article. So it's cool, right? Though it's cool to see people getting excited. I think the interesting thing is gonna be, is gonna be when all of the tech, it converges in a way that it becomes so obvious.
  
  And we're starting to see that now, you know?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:03:52.633)
  Yeah, and then it's really leveraged by companies. At the moment, I feel that everyone is sort of playing around. Everyone is trying to understand what's happening and developing solutions. But there will be a point when they really see, OK, now we can use it. And boom, then it will have the massive impact on society.
  
  John (01:04:15.583)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:04:15.797)
  And there, this is, I see the tipping. I mean, some countries will be slow. I mean, for example, Europe or Germany, they are very slow in adopting new things. And as I said, I mean, CHED GPT is not in the education list. But I see other countries like US really moving fast, moving wise ahead. And there's this chasm also between the countries widening. And we have a global economy. And...
  
  John (01:04:41.686)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:04:44.769)
  Dare I see the challenges.
  
  John (01:04:46.582)
  Yeah, yeah, one of the interesting things, so, you know, I spent a little bit of time in China and I was always like, honestly, I'm very, the way they were developing AI, you know, and to do some of the things that they were doing with it, I was like, oh, man, that's, you know, that is, that is an opposite philosophy of how we should be developing AI. And, you know, and but the US was like, you know, falling behind for a long time. Like, you know, China was actually starting to, you know, have more patents, like they were they were going from the imitation copying.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:05:10.713)
  Hmm.
  
  John (01:05:15.17)
  to actually innovating. There was stuff I saw over there and I was like, you gotta be kidding me. It was actually really mind blowing. And I was getting nervous for a while until ChatGPT, like OpenAI, released it. One of the interesting things about generative AI is it hallucinates, it says crazy things sometimes, but the reason it's accelerating so fast is all of these users are teaching it. Now in China though, they cracked down immediately because they needed to control all of, they didn't want an AI
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:05:26.044)
  Mm-hmm. Yeah.
  
  John (01:05:44.77)
  bad-mouthing the Chinese government, right? Like they didn't want it saying things that they didn't want. And so they locked it down. So now they're trying to be this proponent of like, going, no, we need to slow down development or whatever, because the way we're doing it in the West, it's like the opposite, because it's almost like, you know, folks like you and I are using it and we don't know what we're doing, but we're just figuring it out as we go. And so what if it says some crazy stuff or doesn't quite work right? What does it matter? But that's very different philosophy than they have. So that...
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:05:48.581)
  Mmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:06:10.901)
  Yeah. Oh, interesting.
  
  John (01:06:14.334)
  You know, so this, this may actually be a point where like, okay, if we do this right, like I said, it's going to be painful in the short term and you can see it, you know, the AIs aren't as reliable. Like it's still astounding and that it's getting better and better. And as long as we don't lock it down or overregulate it, I think we'll have that chance to have AI developed for the purposes of good. Now, a lot of the use of the AI like in China is used for like spying infrastructure and like.
  
  you know, like social scoring and all that kind of stuff. And it's like, you know, that kind of stuff terrifies me because I don't think people understand like, you know, I've gone through this debate with people before. So because I was in the Marines, I actually, you know, I have assault weapons and there's things that I have in there. I have them for very specific reasons. Like, but when I hear people say things like in the US, they're like, you know, the government's not taking my guns. And it's like, you know, I need a gun. So in case the, you know, we need to rise up against the government. I was like, I was in the Marines. I was like,
  
  You're I don't care what you've got in your house. You are not stopping the Marines like you're not stopping the government. None of this stuff, right. But but we're hitting this point where it's like, like the way we're developing these two technologies, like they really are at polar opposites. And so like I said, in the in the short term, as long as we don't overregulate it, right, like we don't, because that's the downside is because the AI is learning and there's but
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:07:12.25)
  Ha ha!
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:07:17.63)
  Ha!
  
  John (01:07:37.43)
  But again, there needs to be an understanding of what it can do right now, what it will be able to do very soon. And that's why it's like, you can't have the attitude of wait and see, right? Because it's learning right now. So if we want the AI to act a certain way, we need our society to interact with it and start teaching it, not just dudes like you and me and business people, right? Because then it's all going to be geared to how much money can you make, which inevitably will lead to how many people can you get rid of.
  
  the world is starting to teach this, it will reflect our values. And we should start doing that right now. And that's if anything, that's one of the reasons we should be interacting with it. Like I was actually on the one of the guys I interviewed yesterday is from CMU. And I asked him the question because he was saying, you know, they're a part of a couple projects with Pinnacle Health, which is a healthcare system here. I think UPMC it might be. And they've now got like the doctors interacting with different agents.
  
  Like one is a doctor AI, the other is a nurse AI. And the question that I asked him was, because he's like, we're training it on medical journals and all this, and I was like, well, are you giving it personalities? And he goes, well, what do you mean? I was like, well, I don't wanna go and interact with an AI doctor. And I go, okay, doctor, so give me the news. And it's like, you'll be dead in a week. You know what I mean? I want it to have like a bedside disposition, right? And he had never thought like it's as important, the data is as important as the personality.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:09:00.785)
  Exactly. As personality and human behavior and human way of communicating.
  
  John (01:09:05.922)
  Right. And we need to be more intentional about that. Not like, you know, when people are like, well, we don't want AIs doing this, we don't want AIs doing that. I was like, yes, if I'm going to have to work with an AI, or I'm going to have to interact with it in some environment, I want it to have an understanding. Well, it's not thinking. The persona and how it interacts with me is just as important. But right now it is just like business folks and techie people.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:09:09.773)
  Hmm, yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:09:33.035)
  Yeah, I read that Amazon is, I think it was Amazon, using AI to monitor the efficiency of their delivery people. And then if this not meets the KPIs, AI is sending out termination emails, you know?
  
  John (01:09:47.463)
  And is that the world we want to live in? That was my big thing with the innovation district, the big project I was working on with humans and robots side by side. I wanted to have kids walking to school and having a little delivery robot going past them. I wanted them to see it because the more they're exposed to it in real life, the more they become accustomed to it. So exposure is like half the battle.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:09:49.422)
  Not really, no.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:10:04.261)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:10:13.667)
  Yeah.
  
  John (01:10:15.178)
  The second is they'll be able to say things like, yeah, I don't think it should do that. I think it should do this. So then, you know, then policies start to change. Now, the other reason that we're pushing the TV show and here in the US, one of the reasons we pick this time is obviously we're about to enter an election cycle. So there's going to be lots of misinformation. But the one thing that I've realized, especially in American politics, is politicians will never vote for anything unless they think it will pertain to them getting reelected.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:10:42.777)
  helped them. Yeah, exactly.
  
  John (01:10:44.75)
  Right? So, so if the public is not, not demanding intelligent policies, not understanding how the technology works, our politicians will not make the right decisions. Right? And so we're entering this cycle where I actually do think, again, these next four to five years are going to determine like a very long, right? And so if we're sleeping on it, or we overregulate it, because again, this is like, you know, like you've got countries
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:11:05.497)
  Super critical.
  
  John (01:11:13.598)
  like Russia and China that understand how important AI is and robotics. They get this, right? Right. This is what I was alluding to before where I was talking about having a gun but not being able to stop the military. It's like, I don't care what you tell me now, if you're going to compete with the AI and the robots, you're going to lose because they're only getting better, cheaper, and faster.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:11:19.536)
  Hmm. They use it a lot. Ha ha ha.
  
  John (01:11:42.814)
  are you getting better, cheaper and faster? The answer is no, we are not, right? So this fighting of it and over-regulating is only gonna hurt us. But I do think as a society, like as, I mean, honestly, as a species, we should be making sure that this intelligence is being developed correctly in a way that is gonna benefit everyone. I think we're gonna be in a weird transitional time that we will make decisions that...
  
  we will go, all right, we're gonna have to revisit this, these like five year strategic plans out the window. We're gonna have to revisit every couple of weeks. And, right, exactly. And so, but we're not, I don't know, we're just as a society and as a species, we're not conditioned to do that. And there needs to be this like.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:12:17.713)
  Oh my god, yes. Wait a month and it will be there. Ha ha ha.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:12:31.341)
  No, we are not exponential thinkers. We are linear thinkers.
  
  John (01:12:37.327)
  Right. But we can learn exponential thinking. That's actually one of the things people bring me in. It's why now I'm getting calls. So you'll find this interesting because it's like another hack. I would find myself, because I was early on one of the only people really talking about this, especially in like middle America and these small towns, I would come out, I would freak people out. They would go, man, this is blowing my mind. And then life would take over and they, they never would hear about AI again and robotics and it would drift. And so what I started to do was like, okay.
  
  I need to train their browsers. So my email list, like every time I would send an email, it would have a link in there that I knew would start to train their algorithm to start showing them the things that I wanted them to see, which is why now, you know, things are popping up because I had them train their algorithm years and years and years ago. And I realized that that's what I needed to start doing. And so like all of that stuff is intertwining now, but that window is going to be gone very, very soon. Like it just, it's hard to explain.
  
  to people the speed for that reason, the exponential thinking, right? Like now people are connecting all these dots and they're like, oh, this actually means this. But that kind of stuff should be the things that we're teaching in schools, right? Like we should be focusing very heavy on like how do we break kids out of linear thinking and bring them into an exponential world? Because then we could be a whole generation of superheroes.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:13:59.873)
  We will be a whole generation of superheroes. I think we should stop by now. Because I think this is an amazing finish.
  
  John (01:14:06.011)
  No, that's good.
  
  Yeah, I mean, I see it like, you know, it's interesting because you see like, you know, when I was growing up, you know, the Harry Potter and Twilight, you know, the very similar narratives. But now it's like, man, the Marvel Universe just keeps going. And in an age where attention spans are so short, I ask the question, why are we all looking for heroes? Like what is it that we're gearing up for? Because this technology is going to give us, it's going to be like magic, like superpowers. Right.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:14:10.974)
  I love this.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:14:18.742)
  Uh
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:14:35.803)
  It's super power. Yes. Super.
  
  John (01:14:37.558)
  And so with great power comes great responsibility. So that's my hope is that we are the first generation of superheroes.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:14:44.217)
  Yeah. Hey, John. I think we could, we should do another episode next week because we could continue talking for hours. It's been amazing. Yeah, it is. It is. And I thank you so much for sharing all these insights. And I guess people have to, should listen to this twice or three times to get all the, the knuckets out of this. We definitely, yeah.
  
  John (01:14:52.478)
  Yeah, no, it's an amazing time to be alive.
  
  John (01:15:05.379)
  Yeah. Well, if people are, I was gonna say if people are interested, and I'll send you the links for this, the Tim the Robot Wizard, it's available on, oh great, yeah. So it's available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, a couple different, or you can get it right from timt If anybody wants to learn any more about the robotics company, go to yorkexponential.com.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:15:14.741)
  Yes, I will get a copy. I will get a copy, definitely.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:15:21.404)
  Uh.
  
  John (01:15:30.214)
  And if you're interested in watching one of my keynotes or longer ones, I have them posted on embracing disruption.com. If people are interested in watching one of the longer keynotes, actually on that site, it's cool. I have one of my keynotes that I gave to adults, but I have one of the first keynotes I ever gave to high school students, like post pandemic, and it rocked their world. Like because the timeline that I showed was right when they were getting out of college and they were all freaking out like because now they're realizing like, you know,
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:15:55.565)
  Yeah.
  
  John (01:15:58.966)
  They thought they were all tech savvy and new technology and they're like, Oh no, like existential crisis all around.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:16:01.265)
  Yeah, yeah, no, they're not.
  
  Awesome. We will put everything in the show notes so that people don't miss this.
  
  John (01:16:10.654)
  Awesome. Now I was excited. This was a lot of fun, Sebastian. I'm hoping that one, we'll do more podcasts together, but hopefully we'll work on some business stuff and do some cool things together.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:16:21.177)
  Definitely. Thank you so much, man.
  
  John (01:16:23.994)
  Awesome, appreciate it