And welcome to Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker, where I show the broadcasts every Thursday from 2 to 2.30 in the downtown studios of Think Tech Hawaii and Pioneer Plaza. We focus on successful stories of individuals and companies in Hawaii who have overcome the challenges and made it work for them here in Hawaii. We keep making these top one, top two, top three rankings for the worst state to do business. And there's some truth to that. The costs out here are very high, but there are companies and individuals that have made it work and they've done very well. So this show highlights those success stories. We also have individuals who help small businesses in Hawaii, define as 500 employees or less, to be successful with rules, regulations, taxes. And one of those people we've got today, Gene Ward, a lot of people know who Gene Ward is. He's a member of the House of Representatives here for Hawaii. Been in Hawaii for many, many years and has had a very successful career. Gene, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Rich. I like the backdrop, but we'll really down tell him, although I thought we were going to be in Waikiki Beach, but I guess it's good. It's raining in Waikiki, so... Okay. Well, you've been on the show before. Thank you for coming back again. We were talking a little bit before the show that you've got a very successful career. You've got a lot of accomplishments in your history. And a lot of people know who you are. They know what you do presently, but they don't always know or appreciate everything that you've done in your career. Can you kind of just talk to us a little bit about... I say, who I am and what am I doing here? Yes. Give us some history. Who are you, Gene? Probably the biggest defining moment in my life was when I went to Hilo as a Peace Corps trainee. I was a Peace Corps volunteer for two years in Borneo and came back to the University of Hawaii to major in Asian studies and everything thereafter. Even though I had met my wife who was Malaysian, everything became Asian-oriented. And that was in Hilo? No, I met her at the East West Center. If you've got time, I've got two hours of soliloquy about this, but it essentially became an Asian orientation. My undergraduate is in Asian studies and my wife is from Malaysia, my daughter is from China. I speak Malay, Indonesian, a bit of Chinese. Vietnamese. And I was a Vietnamese translator in Vietnam. I guess in related more to your show is that I was the small business administration advocate of the year a couple of decades ago. In fact, it was a national advocate, not an advocate, advocate for the year for Hawaii. And then I went to Washington and I was the advocate for the country because George Conahaley and I, some people will remember Dr. George Conahaley. We founded the Hawaii Entrepreneurship Training and Development Institute and trained 3,000 people throughout the world. We had 10 different countries. Started here with Hawaiians, did Kamehameha schools, went to Guam to do Chamorro training, to New Zealand to do Maoris, and then Africa and Mainland. And you even had a mokana, didn't you? Wasn't there a mokana that was used? We, in fact, were still putting the website together to keep it alive even though because I've been in politics, I haven't been doing the consulting as much as I should. But with the text, how to start a business, how to run a business, how to write a business plan, how to borrow money, how to work with a CPA like yourself.  My wife and I did 15 years at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel selling clothing. And I was her marketing guy, paid the bills and washed the windows and wiped the typical entrepreneurial activities. You've got to be able to be the bottle washer to everything. But to me, the salvation of our economy is small business. I guess I come out of that Asian orientation and then out of the small business orientation as kind of in a nutshell. Right, and one of the themes that we encourage here is to understand how important the small business community is to our local economy. I think it's 97% of the businesses in Hawaii are defined as small business. Using the SBA 500 and below, but if you use, I think the Chamber of Commerce sometimes says 20 employees and below, there's probably 75%. It's still a large part of the economy. Yeah, but we are just really a lot of small businesses. You remember in the old days, there used to be the Big Five, Alexander Baldwin and all the other guys. They're no longer the guys that we can count. There's no Big Five, except the Big Five Republicans and the Legislative. There's only five of them. I know you don't want to get to that yet, but I call us the Big Five. All right, well, very good. And you all seem to sit together, too, so. On the telephone booth. Now, I was just going to say, it's a nightmare thought, but if using the 20 and 75%, if they ever got sick, it would have devastating results in the economy. I mean, think about it, 75% of all the business in Hawaii all of a sudden goes away. You know, that's a scary thought, and it's very important that we help that small business thrive and be healthy and help them to survive. Most definitely. Even though there's a considerable resiliency in the small business community, they generally are looked upon not with the economic engine that they are. The 70% of all new jobs come out of the small business community. They have a difficulty getting capital, the regulation. And quite frankly, in the legislature, we give, like lip service to farmers, we give lip service to small business. We haven't really been pro-small business. I think rank number five of the bottom five in the nation as a, quote, business-friendly environment in the state of Hawaii. We have the most entrepreneurial, ethnic groups in the world right here, right within the vicinity of where we're doing this show. But yet we kind of, we don't promote it, we're sort of underachieving, if you will, our entrepreneurial potential. Hawaii's got the best brand name that exists in the world. And we should be taking more advantage of that. And we haven't. Yeah. It's too bad. Well, and we can talk a little bit about some of the things that we can do that tends to embarrass us a little bit. We had a chance to touch on that. But before we get too far, you've also done some pretty interesting international positions within the government. I mean, you were involved in some countries that were interesting. My overseas experience began in the Peace Corps in Borneo, where the orangutans are and all of the other good things. But then when I was a young man, I would look at the globe and I'd say, how could there be so many countries? I've got to go there to prove that they're there. So I've been in 63 countries and I'm still willing and wanting to go to more. My wife and I joined the UN in the 80s, went to Malawi, and did small business development there. Recently after, as you know, as most other people know, I ran against then Congressman Abercrombie in 1998, lost, but went off to Washington and worked at USAID under President Bush as an appointee. But then one of my colleagues at USAID said, hey, Peace Corps is looking for country directors. I said, well, I was at the bottom of the group. What's it like to be a country? So I applied and I became the country director in a place where most people don't even know or heard of, East Timor. So I was there just about 10 years ago as the country director. Had 46 great volunteers, people who loved America and they wanted to give back. That's kind of a tradition that I think we're losing a bit in the last few years. I'm out of the old John Kendi. Don't ask what the country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. It's not corny, it's real because right now the mindset on the street is, hey, what have you got government for me? What can I get out of you? Exactly. That spirit is fit. They've got their hands out. The entitlement and other things. I know that maybe at some point we can talk about those issues, but, anyways, overseas is a big issue. East Timor, yes. Interesting environment that triggered your departure. Interesting environment, the poorest country in Southeast Asia, 400 years of colonial Portugal suppression and 25 years of military operations by the Indonesians. But in terms of what was going to happen and how the, let's say, and I would even apply this to Hawaii, you can unite a country, you can unite the islands, but if you don't unite the people, you haven't got a country yet. What was going on in East Timor is that the military was jockeying with the power structure within it with sometimes factions and some ethnic and some other regional stuff. So there was an insurrection. So the ambassador said, okay, all unessential American personnel leave. I thought our volunteers were essential, but they said, no, where are you going to go? It will come back. But Reg, after they evacuated us, it took 10 years to get Peace Corps back into a place which needed it so, so, so, so badly. As I said, the poorest country, but maternal, maternal death when the East Timorese would give birth was the highest in the world in terms of death rate. Well, we're going to have to take a short break here in a minute. And we're going to come back and talk about some of these other issues. But the reason why I wanted to just touch on that is that there's some similarities, I think, to what you went through and what I went through, the Dorn Evacuation of the Saigon, which was fragmented and we pulled out in 75. And it was a very terrifying and very sad experience, almost embarrassing. Could I interview you about that? Yeah, we'll do that sometime. All right, but this is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're here today with Gene Ward talking a little bit about his background in history, which is very colorful and interesting. And we're going to talk a little bit more about the upcoming special session and some other things that Gene's going to be working on for the rest of the year. We'll be right back after one minute. Aloha and Richard Concepcion, the host of Hispanic Hawaii. You can watch my show every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. We will bring you entertainment, educational, and also we'll tell you what is happening right here within our community. Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Tim Apocha, host for Moving Hawaii Forward, a show dedicated to transportation issues and traffic. We identify those areas where we do have problems in the state, but also the show is dedicated to trying to find solutions, not just detail our problems. So join me every other Tuesday on Moving Hawaii Forward. I'm Tim Apocha. Thank you. The Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. This week we're talking with Gene Ward, who shared some very interesting details of his background and experience, always impressive to hear that. We're going to talk a little bit about the special session that's coming up and some other issues that we're going to be addressing here in the next year or so. Gene, I know we're switching gears a little bit here, but I guess we've got a special session coming up here pretty soon. Is it special? I'd say we're going to go back in the session. Whether it's special, it depends on where you are on the rail. And I'm not sure that I would call it special, but it's an extraordinary addition to what we've done, 16 years. As a layman, every session is special. Yeah, hold on to your wallet. So we've got to, I guess that's the single purpose of the session. It's going to be coming up as- If I understand these, there will not be any overrides of any of the vetoes that the governor has put forth. There will be no new legislation, only whether, and this is where the tug of war is, is it going to be an extension of the general excise tax? Or will it be an increase in the excise tax? Or will it be a combination of the TAT and the general excise? Because I doubt it's going to be a full on TAT, the travel, sorry, the transient accommodation, or the hotel room tax. So you think the property tax issue is off the table? To me, that would be an anathema. If we went into session and the result was that the property taxes went up for the people of Oahu, they should throw all of us out. The only thing we've got going tax wise in Hawaii are property taxes. I don't call it a sacred cow, but it's one thing that, my God, give people a break. We in the legislature have not cut the cost of living for decades. In fact, if anybody's cut the cost of living, it's when they brought in Costco, they brought in Walmart, they brought in Tarje, like my father would like to say. That's how we've cut down the cost of living. Otherwise, the people of Hawaii are hurting and to raise their property taxes, the landlords. And you know what the median household income, the household cost or the median value of a house now is $775,000. That's huge. It's huge. And I've heard that in the next five years or so it could go up over a million. That's what is projected by some of the economists. So those at the lower rung are going to be hit by a general excise tax because it's very regressive. The poor pay more to put it in very simple terms. And that's what makes that solution somewhat unfair. But also, you could build a similar case for TAT because then all of a sudden, unless you restrict it to just the Wabu, the neighbor islands, if they have to pay TAT, then that's- It would be a sucking sound for the whole of tourism. But the attractive part of that is that the tourists are going to pay. But then the tension is the goose that lays the golden egg is the visitor industry. And if we keep pushing the envelope to where we're going to be at the price of New York and all those people who come our family, they're not business travelers like they get in New York. We're going to push ourselves out of the business. And it's very competitive. And it's getting more competitive. There's a lot of markets out there that are seeing this golden egg, and would like to have a piece of it. And so they're getting pretty aggressive. So you have to be careful. My sense is, and I'm not going to be voting in any of the TAT or the general excise tax increase, is where- And you know Hong Kong by your own experience. Japan and Hong Kong gets the private sector to divvy up because they get development rights. You want to build a shopping center. You want to build underground areas for retail. You got it. You want to build a hotel. You want to build workforce housing. We have not got any private money into this at all. And I'm very saddened by that. We have not leveraged what we could leverage in that 20-mile stretch of the quote, transit-oriented development corridor. Do you see any possibility for a private public venture? I've talked to Mr. Bothy about this. He said, well, we are going to get some of the stations. Maybe the stations will have some vending or some part of it. I would hope there would be some creative entrepreneurial using again small business as we have showing up. And like the rent that the small businesses pay at the airport, basically fund the airport. It's almost self-funding by the amount of percentages that the vendors are getting. So we could be creative. We could be more entrepreneurial. But the way it is now, and Reg, we haven't even talked about the operational cost, the electricity, and all of the things that are probably going to run $200, $300 million a year.  Exactly. It's in perpetuity. So we have a real difficulty. I think there should be a discussion that Clipslater and Ben Caetano and Randy Roth and Sam Sloan will put forth. Run those buses back and forth. You could do it rapidly, more cheaply, get them off at the station just like it is with the automated rail cars. There's a number of options, but we got locked in early and we got ourself committed to where if you're swimming across the river and you're halfway there, if you go all the way or you come back, you've got the same amount of energy. And right now, well, you can't tear it down. Well, we can use a different technology to use it, because steel and steel is 100 years old. Well, it was old when we initially selected it. And if there was ever oppressions about the vote that was very close, if people knew, nobody believes later when you say, oh, it's going to cost three or four times the amount. Nobody believed that. If there was a vote now, it would surely go down. And I'm sure they're going to avoid any vote, like the plague, to do that. So anyways, that's quote the special session. It's basically something where there's going to be an understanding of this is a state project or is it a county project? Is it the Syrian county? Well, I know that the finance committee and Mayor Caldwell have been at loggerheads about the veracity, the truthness, and how if we're going to pay for something, give us a price tag, not a moving target of how much it's going to cost or how we're going to do it. It's probably one of the, and you're the expert business consultant, probably one of the worst kind of business plans that people make up like the back of an envelope in a bar. Well, it's got no credibility. So far from what I've been watching, they have not been accurate in any one of their projections yet. So they're 100% inaccurate. That's the way I've been reading it. So where's the credibility? Who are you going to believe and how are you going to believe? Because when you, you know, if they went to the bank to do this, the bank would, OK, when you know what you're going to do, come back and see me. When you know how much it's going to cost, give me your cash flow statement. Give me all these operational costs. They can't do it. It's loosey-goosey, and somehow government allows that to happen. And I'm hoping there will be whether it's going to be some skin in the game, some monitoring, and some accountability. Otherwise, as I said earlier, we're just taking the poor of Hawaii and making them poor.  They said there's a need for it. That would have cleared their name, and that would have made them a bit more credible. Why would you not want an audit? Why do you plead the Fifth Amendment when you know you're feeling guilty? The audit, unless it was going to be so costly, they couldn't afford it, which was not the case, they should have had it in order to clear their name. I'm confident Mr. Murthy is, if anybody is going to turn this thing around in an open and frank way, he can do it. As long as he's allowed to. And not balling to the political pressure of other forces in the world. Well, good luck to him, and good luck to us as a state that we can figure out a solution to this. The rule of thumb is unless you've got 3 million people in the vicinity or the corridor to do a real, you have not even reached square one to say, yes, we're going to do a master answer. Well, and that's why this is going to be a drain on the economy for a very long time. There's only one good thing that's there, and it's the gem of we have an identity crisis as to who we are and how we're going to develop. Sometimes we think we're Los Angeles, we're just going to sprawl all over, which we do look at what's going on in Ho'opili. Or sometimes we think we're Hong Kong, we're just going to go up. We kind of go between back and forth. The one good thing about the rail is there's got to be one way to develop to the second city, and that's going to be along the quarter. If we did that well or had plans, right now, Reggie, there's not even the infrastructure to put in some of the things I said if they had the rights to build a hotel. There's not the infrastructure to do it. Well, and that's where the costs just keep multiplying. Well, we forgot about this thing. Exactly. Then it's where, again, if you don't do it, you wasted the money that you've already put in. It's going to be an interesting 10 or 20 years to see how this all plays out. We meet the end of August till the 1st of September, so you'll be following this blow by blow. Well, hold on to our wallets. Yes, that's the... You know, we've got about three or four minutes left, and I just wanted to touch a little bit about another hat that you wear as the... I'll never wear a hat, according to my wife. But yes, she reminds me I should always wear a hat, but I don't. Well, yeah, at least you still have a hat here. My son. But what I'm getting at is your role with the Republican Party at a national level.  National committee man. Actually, it's not an appointee. It's an elected position. I ran for the position in May of 2016, and it's one of three positions that each state has, national committee man, national committee woman, and the state party chair. Throw in the American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and the territories, and you've got, I think, 169 people who basically won the Republican Party. And I find it's really invigorating to go to the RNC meetings and see so many red states. It's kind of like a vicarious, like, wow. The values and the attitudes that we have in Hawaii, we know there's a minority of us here. The values and attitudes of us here is what's in effect the governing model there. So we should take heart. Even though we're temporarily a blue state, the values and attitudes of America are being run out of the mainland. So I'm very, very encouraged by that. And you just had a conference call or a meeting? Right, I was at a conference call last week. One of the guest attendees in the conference call was Karen Handel. If people remember Georgia, six of the six congressional district of Georgia, broke all time records. It's almost embarrassing as a political person to say that that race cost $60 million. Six zero? Six zero, no, 50 had been reported, but she said on the phone call that there are new expenses coming in and it looks like it's gonna go up to $60 million. And that was quote the test case as to whether Trump could be pushed over or the ushering in of a new era, anti-Trump was gonna happen. So everybody in their uncle threw money into that, particularly the Democrats. I think huge amounts of money, more so than the Republican. But Karen Handel was a former Secretary of State, a God-fearing woman, conservative, and it was just a great encouragement to hear from her vis-a-vis what was going on in the White House. And they talked about it. And Cuba and others. Pardon me for asking, but was this a U.S. House or a U.S. Senate seat? U.S. House seat. A House seat. Yeah, Georgia's seat. $60 million, no. New Georgia's old seat. You know, I ran for Congress once. To get into the congressional race, you gotta have at least a million or a million, have a Congress spell on a million and a half, I spent $500,000. So for openers, you gotta have at least a million. To win, the average is $1.55 million, I think, in all the states. So when you jack it up to $60 million, you're pouring everything, including the kitchen sink into that. That is not good for money and politics. It's huge. It is. Too much. It is, and it makes it to the point where normal people who would like to run for office don't even want to try. It's like, it's out of the league, out of the fashion. A race in Hawaii is 35 to probably $50,000 a year. So it's doable in the sense you can raise that amount of money in a few years. But we have always had these public funding bills come forward, but we can't afford it. We have not been able to do that. And I don't think taxpayers want to fund political elections otherwise. Very interesting, but also a little sad, too, to hear that it's gotten to that point. But it's a good indication of things to come. I guess it was a bill where there in a sense that she won the position. There's other states that are gonna be in a similar type of election cycle that's gonna be coming up, I think, next year. And so there could be more opportunity for more GOP representation in the House. The GOP has got to deliver. It has the White House, it has a majority in the state houses. It's got the Congress, the Senate. We have to deliver. And I think the people are ready for that change. But as Churchill said, democracy is a messy thing, but it's the best thing we got going. It's like a sausage factory. Messy, but it tastes good when it gets done. Democracy is self-correcting, so all the stuff that's going on about the Trump and all the other things, it'll settle down. America's going through a lot of these trials. You know as a Vietnam veteran, when we came home, when you came home, if it wasn't spit, it was a vitriol about who you were as a man who serves your country. So we'll get through this, but it's a little bit... I just hope we can keep it civil. We need to bring some civil discourse. Speaker Sen and I just wrote a piece for civil beat on the need for civility in politics, either in Hawaii or in the Middle East. Perfect timing for that. I wish we had time to go into that, but we've run out of time today. We'll leave it on. We just got started. We could spend another half hour on this. But we'll have you come back and we'll talk some more. This is Reg Baker, business in Hawaii. We broadcast live every Thursday from 2 to 2.30. And we highlight individuals and businesses that have made an impact on the business community here in Hawaii. Until next week, aloha, we'll see you soon.


Welcome to The Get, the podcast for Enterprise Leaders, delivering timely insights for today's global economy and tomorrow's competitive advantage. I'm your host, Chris Kane, President of the Center for Global Enterprise. And today we sit down with two global technology leaders to discuss generative AI, artificial intelligence, and its impact on business and society. Tom Friedman, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist of the New York Times and author of Widely Regarded Technology Related Books, and Sam Palmasano, Chairman of the Center for Global Enterprise and former Chairman, President and CEO of IBM. Tom and Sam welcome, and thanks for being with us today to discuss what will change in a world where generative AI technology such as chat GBT becomes widely accessible and used by individuals and business. Tom, you recently wrote a very compelling column, our new Promintheum moment, arguing that humanity is on the verge of a new technological revolution powered by generative AI tools like chat GBT. You state that it will fundamentally change the way we live and work. There's been a lot of buzz about the impacts, both positive and negative, that this new era of innovation will pose. Economic disruptions, job displacement, ethical dilemmas are some of the negatives mentioned. But addressing some of the world's most pressing problems from climate change to healthcare to inequality are some of the positives mentioned. The excitement in expanding use of chat GBT has ignited a race among AI labs to develop and deploy even more powerful tools. As this is happening, many stakeholders such as government regulators, business leaders are now scrambling to understand the impact their app emergence of new AI tools will have on consumers, businesses, society and global economies. Regulators are considering new rules and guidelines for AI, while even some leaders in the tech community are calling for a time out to better understand their amplifications of generative AI. In this podcast, we will explore the implications of these new AI tools and the challenges and opportunities they present for business and others in society. Sam, given your deep experience with technology, perhaps we can begin with you, which is what is AI for our audience? How long has it been around? And why is so much attention now being given to generative AI? Chris, that's an excellent question and thank you for having me today. If you don't mind, I'll take you back more than a half a century. I know I'm old and I'll admit that, but let's go back in time and Tom will recall some of this as well. Fundamentally, it all started with people and technologists doing research, tried to simulate the human brain. And that went on its course for several years. However, it led to the thing called the cold winter of AI, which everything was set on pause at that point in time because it was extremely difficult to simulate the functioning of the brain, especially given the computing capacity at that point in time. I mean, if you think about it, you need acres of technology to simulate, which is in a shoebox called the human brain from a cognitive perspective. So that led to what I'll call massive data and statistical lookup, which we know AI today, artificial intelligence. It's really artificial or augmented intelligence, if you like. Having said that, a lot had to happen within the technology infrastructure to make this what it is today. You needed massive scaling and lower computing costs beyond what you knew with supercomputers, now it's large cloud infrastructures. You needed the internet. The internet was important because it drove large data sets and lots of different information, not just ones and zeros in table format and those sorts of things that were traditional in classical computing science at that point in time. And so all those things had to come together and you had to get the algorithms or the software tools to do the statistical analysis. Now, what's changed now, it's led to this thing, generative AI or truly large language models. So therefore, what you're talking about now is almost like human interaction in a way, if you could think about it that way. It was an analogy and it's not a great analogy. It's the browser to the internet is what this is now doing for AI. It makes it available to everyone now. You don't have to be a data scientist to take advantage of these technologies. That's why it's so transformative. Thank you. Tom, in your column you wrote, and I'm quoting here, this is a Promethean moment we've entered. One of those moments in history when certain new tools, ways of thinking or energy sources are introduced that are such a departure and advance on what existed before, you can't just change one thing. You have to change everything, end quote. Clearly you see the possibilities good and bad of this technology's use. What makes you so convinced that the technology can change everything? That's a big order, everything. And then Sam, are you as convinced as Tom? But Tom, please go ahead. Well, you know, I define a Promethean moment as a moment where you get the introduction of a new technology or way of thinking that does require you to change everything, how you govern, how you learn, how you teach, how you do commerce, how you fight wars, how you manufacture, and even how you commit crimes. And we know what these Promethean moments in history are, they're the printing press, scientific revolution, the agriculture revolution, the industrial revolution, and this moment. And I call this moment, this Promethean moment the age of acceleration, amplification, and democratization. Never have more people had access to more tools that amplified their physical or brain power at a steadily accelerating rate and were being democratized at the same time to more and more people. So let's start at a far edge of the spectrum. You now an illiterate Indian farmer with a smartphone. Will now be able to ask a generative AI app, anything from soil fertilizer needs to water, and get an answer, and this word is the interface is so important, as Sam can tell you, get an answer in his own Indian language. And it may not be Indian, it could be one of 22 Indian languages, and I guarantee you two years from now it'll be in one of 122 Indian languages. He'll be able to get that answer any way he wants it, or text by voice. And again, if he's illiterate, that would be very important. And that answer, once this gets going, will be the best answer that is possible. So for the first time, everyone everywhere will have access to the best of everything. And that is a Promethean moment. And that will change everything. Powerful, Tom, you wrote a book a couple of years ago called The World is Flat. What it listening to you, it sounds to me like you're saying life is flat, given the power of the generative AI capabilities that you just described, it's been individualized to come to the personal level. Well, the theme of The World is Flat was that the new, new thing, you used to have to be a country to act globally. Then you could be a company to act globally. Now you could act globally as an individual. And now you build that globally as an individual with access to the very best and any range of subjects. Yeah, it's quite exciting. Sam, thoughts? Oh, I agree with Tom. And the vision he paints is actually the most positive view of the outcome, and I think Tom would agree with that. And there's a lot of innovation along the way to get to where Tom is talking about this. And what do I mean by that? There are a lot of capabilities, just like the internet in its early stages that had to be built up to what it is today. I mean, it was basically you're passing scientific documents between research organizations, and then all the technologies came along. I won't bore you with the path of 30 years or so, but fundamentally all that came along. It's a similar thing here. The only difference is this one's moving out heck of a lot faster. I mean, a heck of a lot faster than the early days of the internet. Okay, I'd like to turn now to the focus on business and the implications for business. And you both have spent years assessing technology impacts on business and society. If generative AI tools have such a pervasive impact across industries and society, what's your advice to CEOs and government leaders about where to start for them to determine its relevance for good outcomes and risks for bad outcomes? Tom, why don't we start with you? The best place to start, Chris, is to start. And what I mean is whatever business you're in, whether you're selling hamburgers and french fries or software and hardware, the only way to learn about this is to dive in. That's what I'm trying to do. Dive in, play with it, and see where it takes you. There's no other way to learn. And one of the features of generative AI is that the engineering is the head of the science. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. James Vanneke from Google made this point to me. It's a bad thing because we don't know how these systems do what they do entirely. He gives the example of they cannot give, barred Google's generative AI system scraps of Bengali. And it can start writing poetry in Bengali. They actually don't quite know how it does that. So the engineering of it is actually head of the scientific understanding of it. Now, the upside of that is these things may be capable of doing so many more things positively than we fully understand. They equally may be, and certainly are capable of doing so many more bad things than we understand. So that's the moment we're at. And the only way we're gonna find out is to dive in.  Sam, thoughts on where CEO should start? I completely agree with Tom and I'd add one more thing to that point. Firstly, it's gonna become ubiquitous. So you have to assume it's gonna become ubiquitous. So Tom's right, you need to start learning now. Now, I'll answer from a CEO perspective versus a government official, since I've never been a government official, I have been a CEO. You need to establish a management system within your company on usage principles. Cause everybody's gonna use this. Remember, it's gonna become ubiquitous. Everyone will use it. So you need a structure and principles of usage guidelines. No different than chatbots and those things that are now on the internet. Everybody established usage guidelines for their enterprises. And then you have to let the people play with it as Tom's saying, cause they have to learn. And there's one other thing I would add to it. You have to establish a culture of trust. Back to Tom's points, it could be good or could be bad. And the engineering's ahead of the science, I totally agree with that.  So therefore you have to build a culture within the organization that's principle-based that long-term builds trust as you use these technologies. So in a new space like this, building trust can be a difficult task cause people don't know what to hold you accountable for. And it seems to me that enterprises and government agencies will have to proclaim what their value system is relative to this new environment because otherwise I don't know how to hold them accountable. In other words, I don't know how trustworthy they are. Do you see that as a necessary first step? Tom and Sam about having organizations that are beginning using these powerful tools talk about how they're using them for why they're using them and what they will not use them for? Well, you know, this is a classic example of another point that I've been making for several years now, which is that you cannot govern the world we're in now from the left to the right. You have to govern it from the center out. And what that means is that you need actually complex adaptive coalitions to manage any number of challenges. And AI is one of them. So if we want to govern AI properly, what do you need? You need engineers. You need technologists. You also need moral philosophers. You need government regulators. So this is not like in the old way, I government regulate your business innovate. There was a binary system. This has to be much more like nature, like an ecosystem approach where you get all the stakeholders together, not just the stakeholders, people who can understand the stakes and define them and bring them under one tent in order to write the regulation. Because we have to be very careful. We don't want to over-regulate it and basically retard its potential, but you don't want to under-regulate it either. Now, one of the problems with generative AI, one of the challenges is that regulating it will not be one size fits all. Because if you're competing with China, you don't want to regulate it at all. If you're worried about aberrant outcomes, you want to regulate it a lot. If you're worried about ISIS getting it, you need arms control. So it's got a lot of different variations and that's why regulation has to be a merchant, can't be from the top down, and it can't be one size fits all. So you've jumped ahead, it's a perfect... My next question was going to be to you about your call for complex adaptive coalitions and you've already gone there and that's great. And I want to... You both will remember back in the late 90s when internet regulation was a topic among policy makers both in the US government and around the world. And the governments from around the world did exactly what you were just saying, Tom, which was to have a regulatory approach that gave space and time for the internet and its application and value to develop. From a policy standpoint, it was called forbearance. Governments were going to forbear command and control regulation to see what was going to happen. And it started to talk... Governments started to talk about behavior, right? Here are the behaviors that our society considers to be appropriate. But that was a very different time. We seem to be more cohesive and more together as a society and you talk about needing to come organically from the center and go up and go out. Today though, is that really possible? We're living in a world where we have so much separation and division in society. Can this approach to generative AI or generative AI in and of itself bring us together or just separate us further? And if there are historical examples, either one of you have that can point to the fact that the power of a tool like generative AI can bring us together, I think that would be really powerful to discuss and important to discuss because there seems to be such a lack of trust in society today. And yet if what is needed here to be the critical success factor is a foundation of trust, can we get there from here? Sam, why don't we start with you? Yeah, Chris, I think there are excellent analogies to what you've said. You need to let learning occur, right? If you don't let learning occur, you're not gonna get the benefits associated with the technology.  People weren't quite sure and it started with putting up your information about your company, your products or your government websites and those sorts of things. No idea would be transformational as far as inclusive society where there's sharing of ideas where you could grow globally. I mean, Tom's example of a farmer in India, all those things came about because the world was connected. So one could argue that there's benefits to that and yes, standards did emerge over time and that was the role of the regulator, quite honestly, to establish some of those standards. I'll just say we've learned a lot about how to create these standards. There are organizations and they're nonprofit organizations, NGOs around the world that know how to do these things and it'd be great if you could convene those to Tom's point because it's multidisciplinary and bring those together. I'll give you an example of an institution that's trying to do this. I'm on the advisory board called the Human Center Institute for Artificial Intelligence at Stanford and it's multidisciplinary and it's people of all kinds of backgrounds both the philosophy department, the law department, obviously computer science and business, et cetera, et cetera. They're trying to convene and bring this together but that's just one example and that's not enough quite honestly to have this occur. I think to rely strictly on governments today to bring the world together, given the nature of the governments and how they are, that's gonna be very, very difficult to do but perhaps this kind of nonprofit, intellectually honest entities and they exist all over the world, coming together might address the points that Tom's making. The Tom is spot on, I completely agree and if not, there could be, I think that the negatives could outweigh the positives. I never would have said that back to the internet days but I really worry a lot that given the nature of some of our leaders today, at least in the public sector, the negatives could outweigh the positives. Tom, thoughts? I've been working on a book and I have a chapter on this question of regulation because what happens basically when technology goes so deep, you notice we added the adjective deep to everything. There's no global lexicographer that ordered that. We just did it intuitively because we sense that, oh, that's not a fake, that's a deep fake, Chris. Yeah, that's not just medicine, that's deep medicine. It's just research, that's deep research. Everything had to go deep because we sense technology was going so deep that we really didn't even know what it was. So that old relationship which Sam alluded to, I government regulate you business innovate, really breaks down when it gets that deep. I have this leaked email from these Boeing engineers and one of them's talking about his basic as FAA regulator and these are in the New York Times, a person leaked to me, there was a Times reporter there and the guy says basically my regulator is so clueless about what I do. Watching him watching me is like watching dogs watching television. Oh, that's a lot of where sort of regulation is today. Watching government regulators today, watch chat GPT is like watching dogs watching television and the speed and depth of it is just way, way too far. And so the old top down command and control system just not gonna work. And the speed that this is coming at because these are really powerful tools. This is not the internet, this is not just about reaching somebody. You can start wars with this, you can rob banks with this in a way we've never seen before.  And you can only hope that the system responds that way. Maybe we can talk a little bit about hype. Every new exciting technology has a hype cycle affiliated with it it seems.  That connotes that there's a specialized impact that something has but everyday impact and I agree with you where the world starts to change, right? Where people change their behavior, their interests, their investments, their time because they see a benefit for doing so. But these new technologies have a hype cycle and that everyday impact takes a while to stick. Examples, right? The personal computer, the internet, smartphones, social media, FinTech, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are just a few, right? Of the technologies that broke onto the scene and there was a tremendous hype cycle affiliated with them. From a practical value, pervasiveness perspective, where do you think we are in the generative AI hype cycle? I think it's underhyped. I was going to say, Chris, if you look at traditional adoption cycles to the points that you've made, this thing is like definitely faster than the adoption cycle. It's up to millions and maybe billions of users already that are just sort of talking about it within a year. Large language models quite honestly have been in research for maybe a decade or so. I mean, I've been invested in companies for seven or eight years now that have been working on large language models. But the fact that it's coalesced around this chat GBT that was now actually a open source piece of technology that people could have access to, the adoption, it's well ahead of anything that's ever happened historically back to Tom's point. So therefore it's the hype, but it's also the adoption. Now, what's happened historically, and will happen here, because there's a ton of innovation going on and there's a ton of investors flowing to this space, there are gaps in the technology. As we know, you don't know the source of the answer as Tom alluded to, so therefore you don't know the accuracy of the answer. There really isn't a fact checker per se as we would hope to have as far as the accuracy of this answer because the text is so persuasive that therefore you conclude it must be right. It's almost human-like, but it could be completely wrong. And I think some of the inventors of this are free to, like Sam's admitted, this is completely wrong at times and we need to be able to deal with those sorts of things. So my point is those gaps will be filled, but I think they're going to be addressed and filled much quicker than they ever have in the past. So those questions about data accuracy, quality, profit and sandwich you've just addressed, right?  At some point in time, there's going to be reflection or scrutiny about that result was either, to Tom's point earlier, a deep fake intentionally or it was just wrong. And then it seems to me that those moments have a capacity to constrain adoption. Tom, you talked about how democratized this capability is, is the reason you think it's underhyped is because it's in the hands of everybody and therefore its adoption is not gated by certain stakeholders where traditionally in economics and society, there were certain institutions that allowed certain things to come to market. And until they allowed it to be widely distributed, the adoption was constrained. Or in my off point, the distribution and impact aspect. Nothing you're right. I mean, it's been distributed so fast and therefore people are going to find its benefits and its problems much faster. So I think it will improve much faster. But, you know, my wife found the museum in Washington DC called Planet Word. We had a board meeting a couple of weeks ago, Craig Mundy from Microsoft did a briefing for us on chat GPT. He asked it to do a 400 word summary of Planet Word. It did it perfect. Then he asked it to do a 200 word. It did it perfectly. Then he asked to do it in Mandarin. It did it perfectly. Then in Arabic, then in Spanish, then in Shakespearean verse and then in Abyssinian verse. This is the Model T version did that. Yeah, right. And you're telling me this is hyped? Okay. This was the Model T. I shudder to think what the Ford Mustang version is gonna be like. You know, look in our lifetime, personal computer, internet, AI.  This is one of those moments. You are here to Promethean moment when Gutenberg invented the printing press. Some priest turned to some monk and said, now that is really cool. I don't have to write this Bible out long-hand anymore. I can't actually stamp it out. You know, I mean, like we're here at that moment. Only that moment took about 200 years to spread scale and ultimately give us the reformation and the renaissance. This, I mean, hold on to your hats. This is coming so fast. And we have a Congress. Then knuckleheads up there can't balance a checkbook. And the idea that they are going to be able to regulate this alone is ludicrous. We have a lot coming down the pike right now. Yeah. And that monk said, we can sell more copies of the Bible too. Yeah. And they did. And a lot of them, you know, got into, because then people realized they could publish something other than a Bible. Yeah. And they had enough money to build a huge cathedrals. Right. So there's a lot of economic gain by the monks. Well, maybe we'll come back to the history of organized religions on another episode. All right. Well, look, thank you very much. This has been a great discussion. You know, you really feel like you're at the beginning of something transformative, Tom. Your column was great, very compelling. I recommend everybody who's listening today to read it as well as to think about the implications to your daily life and whatever business and vocation you're in about how this will change, what you have to do and what you can do. Before we close our episodes here on the get, we always like to take a minute and ask our guests whether there is one, in one word or one phrase, is there one emerging issue that you see on the horizon that business leaders need to put on their radar? And we call it our emerging critical issues moment. And so, Tom, let me go to you first. I know this has been a pretty provocative conversation, but something either embedded in this or beyond generated AI that you think business leaders have to put on their radar, what would it be?  And if you aren't diving into it right now, you're too late. Okay, Sam? I would add to what Tom's saying, one word, Chris, trust, this is beyond ESG. Everybody wants to talk about ESG. This is well beyond ESG. If you're running any kind of enterprise that touches society anywhere in the world, you have to be trusted. Therefore, you need a value system and principles. So if you don't have one, get it created. You don't wanna be Disney in Florida. You can't go back and say, well, I used to believe this, now I believe this because of chat GBT or generative AI. So I think it's fundamental, it's simple, it's one word. Start the day every day saying, is my organization and am I trusted? Great, okay, thank you both very much. We'll come back to these on a later show. I'm sure that we will organize an episode around the concepts of trust and how trust is operationalized in today's very connected and distributed world. So thanks, Tom and Sam, for your time and your insights today. You've been listening to The Get sponsored by the Center for Global Enterprise, celebrating 10 years of convening global enterprise leaders around the most important business transformation issues.


You're watching News Made Easy, I'm Nandio Chakravarty. Today I'm going to ask a very strange question and that is who were the farm laws meant for? Was it meant for the farmer or was it meant for the business person? You know these farm laws that were bulldozed through parliament by PM Modi and the BJP and they have now been cancelled. They're going to be repealed in the winter session. My answer is that these farm laws were actually not meant for the farmer. They were meant for big business. They were meant for big business and you'll ask me why. The reason for that is that in the past few years India has been facing a major demand problem. And because of that, 4 out of 10 machines in India's factories have been sitting idle. Capacity utilization is very low and when you have so many machines that are sitting idle why would you invest more? Why would you want to produce more, build more capacities when you can't even sell what you already produced? What you can already produce? So India Inc has been facing what one would call a problem of investment. They have nowhere to invest. What are the options open to them? The option number one is of course to look at the export market and we know that's not easy because China is sitting there, a huge giant which has developed these export markets for many, many years and then there are these low value, no margin goods which have been produced by the Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam where India Inc is not actually very interested because the margins are pretty low there. The volumes have to be very high. It's not a space to be in, all right. And the second option that India Inc has is to look for a sector where there is still domestic demand that they can sell goods to Indian consumers, right. And what better I think and that there be if you can combine the two what if you can both get domestic demand and also get an export market where can that be and that is agriculture, right. Because agriculture till now big business has been kind of barred from entering it for about 73 years, right. It's only now that they were allowed to enter that space and what the farm laws did for big business which have now been cancelled and will be repealed, right. They would have allowed big business companies to produce crops not for the domestic market but for exports, things that foreigners would want to buy. And you know they don't have to care about food security of India, they care only about profit. And the second thing that they would have wanted to do is that the 5-7% of relatively affluent people in India they wanted to control the agricultural market and distribution and retail for them. These are the two great opportunities that agriculture provides for big business, alright. And what are the Modi government's calculations? The Modi government's calculations were that if these farm bills are pushed through poor farmers, right. Poor farmers will support these farm bills. Why? Because the assumption was that you know poor farmers generally they don't get minimum support price. About 5-10% of farmers actually end up getting minimum support price. And therefore they would have actually had no problem if this market had been opened up and big business allowed to enter. It would have not really made a difference to them. There was another assumption that poor farmers will want to oppose rich farmers and oppose the traders, the grain traders, the Arathiyas. They would want to get rid of them because they are oppressors, exploiters in the countryside. Well, but these ended up being Modi government's miscalculation and why am I saying that? Because poor farmers do not get MSP but the government's own assessment data of agricultural production tells us that a large number of poor farmers do know about MSP, about minimum support price. And they also understand that wherever MSP is given, farmers are richer, right. We know that in Punjab, procurement is higher than what the Punjab farmer actually produces. Why? Because farmers from western UP and other states end up going to Punjab and selling their produce at MSP because it's not available. They can't sell it at MSP in their own states, right. And another thing that they realize is that when one looks at the crops which are sold at minimum support price, those crops actually have a more or less stable pricing. So you can, a farmer can kind of, even if they're not being able to sell it to a government procurement agency, they can expect a stable price for those products which is paddy or rice and wheat. Other products where there is no minimum support price, the prices fluctuate all the time. They could be very high and they could be so low that the farmer has to completely dump their crop. So even poor farmers, they want MSP. And that is why we saw how poor and rich farmers across India, especially in Punjab and Haryana, but actually all across India, united to oppose these pro-cooperate farm laws and demand MSP, which they're continuing to demand. And then the elections were coming up. So the feedback system must have told the BJP that there is resentment, not just in the small number of rich farmers and agricultural grain traders, but also amongst the middle and poor farmers. And that is why one could assume and report commentators are saying that PM Modi has withdrawn these farm laws right before two crucial elections with the Pradesh and Punjab. So that is one of the key reasons why the farm laws got defeated because the poor farmers did not think that the farming laws are good for them. And the poor farmers also realized that they are going to lose out in the long run. That's the show today. Keep watching NewsClick. Do subscribe to us, like this video and also share it as much as you can.


Hello, everybody in our product school audience and welcome to the show. My name is Chantel De Prey. I am a product marketing manager here at product school and I am super excited to have with us this evening Michael Mace, the VP of Market Strategy at User Testing. Michael, how are you? I'm just fine. Thanks. Nice to be here. Nice to have you. We're super excited. We've got some awesome questions in our agenda today and we're looking forward to getting to know you. I want to hand the mic right over to you right from the top and let you introduce yourself to all of our folks who are tuning in online. Sure. So, hi everybody. I do market strategy user testing, which means that I'm looking at the outside environment, the customers and competitors and industry analysts and trying to figure out what's going on and what we need to do about it. That's not my background though. I started off in life as a software developer, not a good one, not a very successful one, but I was a Mac developer way back when, so I'm kind of dating myself. Out of that, I got hired by Apple and I spent 10 years at Apple working within the product management organization. I worked on product planning. I also was running for a long time the overall market intelligence function. So all of the competitive analysis, customer research, all that sort of stuff. And one of the things that drew me to user testing was the stuff that I saw at Apple and other places I worked at where the ability of the research functions, the customer understanding functions, to keep up with the needs of the product functions, the product managers was really lacking. There were so many times when the product people had to operate on very fragmentary information or on no information at all and just make guesses. And the amount of business risk that that created, and I always felt like we could do something better in terms of letting people make more fact-based decisions and less guest-based decisions. And I think we're at the point now where we can do that. And that's one of the things that really excites me and it's one of the frontiers of product management that I'm most excited about today. Amazing. What an introduction. That is so cool. Apple back in the day, again, not trying to help you with dating yourself. Apple back in the day must have been so cool just in that energy space. It was. It was weird at the same time. So it was working with really bright people, tons of energy. And I really, a lot of the cultural practices and business practices that I've learned have been super valuable. At the same time, the company had way more money than it knew how to spend at the time. There were all sorts of bad habits. Like I thought it was normal for the company to send you to the most expensive hotels around the world when you were on a business trip. What a come down that was to work at a normal company and see what it's like. So I kind of missed some of those things. But in terms of engaging with customers and the excitement around it, that was super, super fun. And it's always something that I've looked to try to recreate elsewhere. Let's get that sort of passion going. I know we have an agenda, Michael, but I actually just have another question. Because now you're working on software products. You're testing as a software product. So what was that like transitioning from Apple, which is, I mean, fundamentally a hardware product over the software. Oh, great question. And actually, I'm going to even take your question a little bit further. So it wasn't just hardware versus software. It was B2C versus B2B, because user testing is a B2B company. Yes. So I had to make that transition. And the other thing that's spooky is Apple's not actually a hardware company. This is something people don't understand. But this is true of Apple and Tesla and some other places like that. Apple is a systems company. The thing that makes them special is they don't just do hardware. They do hardware and software together and coordinate those things together really nicely to do a solution. Super hard to do. Very few other companies really understand how to do it. And that's kind of their superpower, is how they combine all that stuff together. So the transition from system company that plans in 18 to 24 month increments and that's consumer facing to software company that plans in like three day increments and is B2B furthermore. Yeah, it was totally different, different language, different sets of business practices, different assumptions. And even today I still run into weird stuff where like the way a B2B company talks about itself is a different voice on the marketing side. A consumer company wants to be as plain and as straightforward as it can be because you're trying to relate to consumers. A B2B company actually needs to speak in a voice that's a little bit erudite and sophisticated because they're investing their corporate portfolio. And so you need to be able to use lots of words like architecture and stuff like that, whereas that would turn off a consumer. So it's a whole different set of habits that you have to learn. It's really, really weird. Crazy. But I am assuming that you're managing well since you're in the VP position. They haven't fired me yet, yeah. Fantastic. I'm betting that they're not planning on it anytime soon. Hopefully not. Let's jump into these questions we have prepared, Michael. So what are the biggest challenges facing the product managers you work with at user testing and how are these product managers dealing with those challenges? Yep, you know, it varies depending on the specific situations of the company, obviously, in the way it's organized and stuff like that. And I'd say one big distinction is between legacy companies and brand new companies. Brand new companies, they're generally operating under a whole bunch of new assumptions about how you organize things and business practices, the role of product management, what you expect a product manager to do. So we talked to some companies that are way advanced on product management and they're working on issues like, well, do we need to have separate business product managers versus technical product managers? Is it possible for one human being to do both of those roles? If not, how do we divide between them and how do we do this stuff? And there's all sorts of super advanced conversations we have with those guys. Then we talk with a bunch of people in legacy companies who are still trying to establish the role of product management, you know, and like, no, I am not a program manager. My role is not to take orders from you on what the features should be. My role is to figure out customer needs. Let's work out the fundamentals of why that's necessary and how does that play with Agile, you know, and you say you're doing Agile, but you're not really doing Agile and can we talk about what you really need to do? And very often those product managers, they are the change agents within the company trying to explain back, you know, these business practices because they need the company to behave differently for them to be successful. And so there's really this bifurcation of the ones who are in the new style companies who are running way ahead and the others who are trying to drive a transformation. And how do I champion that transformation? When I'm a lot of times I'm telling my boss they need to do something that they don't know how to do. And I know that's the sort of topics you guys hit on a lot. So we're seeing that all the time because we've got a product that fits into the workflow for the product managers. It's one of the assets for them. But in order to really be able to take advantage of us, it depends on how the overall decision making is working within the company. So sorry, that's a big convoluted answer to your question. But basically it's what we're seeing with is two different sets of problems based on whether it's a legacy company or a new company. That's amazing. I want to jump up to one of the questions I've prepared, Michael, because I think that spins nicely into legacy companies. You know, what advice would you give to those legacy companies who might be setting up product teams for the very first time? Yeah, so it's a couple of things. It's number one, they need to recognize that this is not a function that you can just paste onto your existing structure. And it's not, by the way, an existing group that you can just repurpose. You know, and I've heard, like I've had these people who are like director or VP level product management people saying, oh yeah, when they brought in the institution and the product management a year ago. And what they did was they took all of the project managers and they renamed them product managers.  You know, and it's you have to empower them to drive thinking within the company. You therefore have to be willing to respond to what they're working on. And you need to hold them responsible for the right set of things, you know, the outcome metrics and stuff like that, as opposed to holding them responsible for how much do they follow orders, or just make them schedule keepers, you know, which is a way of just turning a product manager into a program manager, which really isn't fair to them. And so it's understanding how you need to change your overall organization to take advantage of this institution of product management. Because it's really a change of the entire company. It's not just a change of that particular role. Does that make sense? Totally, totally, totally. We're seeing that on our side, you know, we talk a lot about product-led growth. And a lot of the companies that we're partnering with are speaking about product-led growth. And when we talk about it, like looking at it, I don't know, from 2014, 2016 era, those were tactics. And now when we talk about product-led growth, that's a total company mindset and it informs how you're gonna build your sales teams, how you're gonna build your marketing teams, crossing collaboration is stronger than ever. So, yeah, totally.  Oh, okay, so this is something, product. To me, the key word in there is led, like leadership, which implies followership and cooperation and a lot of other cultural things around it. And people tend to neglect the led part. They tend to just focus on the product part, the what as opposed to the how. Yeah, completely, which is, I'm sure something that, a trap that we all fall into, despite our best intentions. Amazing. Michael, do you have any special advice for product managers who are trying to establish their roles at legacy companies where PM is a relatively new title? Yeah, yep. So I talked with a lot of people about that. And in addition to what we just talked about, about making clear, here's what the role is, here's how we're all gonna work together. And that's hard, because that's managing up in a lot of cases, but you gotta, if you're gonna accept the job, it's kind of like right from the start, you need to make clear how it's gonna operate.  You can't just give more orders, you have to persuade. I think there's a lot of marshaling evidence that can be very, very helpful for you. And so I'm gonna be a little biased on this because I'm working at a company that does some of this. So my examples are gonna tend to come from stuff that I see, but based on what I've seen, to give you an example, you'll get people who use our product, user testing to get feedback from customers and understand what they're saying. And then, okay, great, I can make a better informed decision in real time so I can get the feedback super fast. That's great, thank you very much. And then they say, okay, I'm gonna make better informed decisions. They often neglect taking the stuff that they've gathered and sharing it with others in order to persuade them on why they should follow.  Because here's what'll happen to a product manager. You're working away on something and the senior VP comes in and says, well, you know, I had this brainstorm yesterday when I was taking a shower and it's that we should do this and it's an entirely different thing. And you think to yourself, I can't tell them what a bad idea that is because they'll fire me, they're a senior VP. How do I get them off of this without me having to make it a me versus them type of thing?  Put, you know, run that VP's idea past people. Within 24 hours, you can have those videos, clip them into some nice little clips of people throwing up on this stuff. And then you send it to the senior VP and you say, hey, I loved your idea. I thought it was so great, but you know, we tried it out on customers. I'm so sorry. Look at how they reacted. And then you're not rejecting that VP. The customers are. And it's an entirely different conversation. And, you know, that one's a more extreme example. It's not like you're in conflict with VP's every day, but how often are you trying to align teams? How often do you get engineers who are questioning your authority and your judgment and saying, well, I want to do it this way or they're arguing with each other over the color of a button. And the clips of customers talking about things are an asset to persuade people as to why you're doing the right thing. And so many times I'll see people who take the learnings out of this stuff, but don't share the evidence. And so use the evidence as an asset to drive people's decision making and alignment with what you need them to do. And that can be super helpful. And that doesn't just apply to our stuff. Same thing for the numbers and everything else. Share the work and it'll actually be far more persuasive to people and it'll help you get your stuff done with less conflict. Amazing. I would add to that. Again, coming from my own bias and I often do these on these fireside chats, you know, put in a subtle plug for product marketers out there who I think are the best friends of product managers out there. And often us product marketers, we say, oh, you know, we're gonna own the voice of the customer. And I think that when you're talking about finding that evidence to back up decisions, either a go decision or a no-go decision, product marketers can be some of your best allies in that for sure. Well, and to build on that, how often do you see product managers who think, oh, I should bring in the product marketer at the end? You know, oh, great, we're almost done. Time to plan the launch. Let's bring in the product marketer. If you bring them in earlier, they can be an ally in getting you the support that you need. Furthermore, they can talk your project up in the marketing team and get some budget lined up ahead of time. So it's all about networking to your allies early, getting them all aligned, sharing the stuff back and forth with them, which, hey, maybe you can get them to run some of the user tests for you so you don't have to do as much work.  You know, all this stuff comes together really nicely. I'm gonna take a question kind of out of left field just based on what we're saying there. You know, we're talking about product marketers, product managers, program managers, all these different titles are in your experience, and especially your days working in the product sphere. Are you seeing more and more different product-linked roles and titles emerging? So like, growth product manager, data product manager, things like this. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, we are seeing a subdivision of the role names within product management. And again, that's in those newer companies that have been started from scratch. Basically, companies that grew up with the idea of Agile that were formed in the world of Agile, and so they're used to all the business processes that go along with that, including product management. And so we actually survey companies, we do a yearly survey of companies asking a bunch of issues. And one of the things we ask is, do you have unified product management roles or do you have separate different sorts of product management roles with different titles? About half the companies responding say they have now different product management roles. Now, that samples a little biased toward tech companies because they're heavy in our customer base. But nevertheless, a lot of companies are doing these different PM roles. And then the specific titles vary a lot. So it'll be business versus technical product management. Another one we hear a lot is inbound versus outbound product management. That's another one. Growth product management, I haven't heard as much, but I kind of understand the spirit of what that's talking about. It's kind of like, oh, okay, that's growing out of growth hacking. I kind of get that, that sort of stuff. So it's becoming more and more diverse. The other thing is the actual name product manager is sometimes used at some places and sometimes not used at other places. So for instance, at Apple, we actually, I don't know if they still do this, but when I was there, we called it product marketing, but product marketing was actually the role of the product manager. And so if you don't think that's confusing, it was really, really weird. But that was just Apple's legacy and how it had grown up and it kind of evolved this role and then repurposed it into these other things. So we'll see those cases as well where there's a completely different job title, but it means this other thing. I do a lot of translation in my job. That's amazing. I mean, the good news there is for anybody who's looking to get into product management, it seems like there's gonna be kind of a flavor for everybody, eventually. Yeah. Yep, I think very much. And really the more importance that the product manager takes on, the more difficult it is to have a single person doing all those different things. Inevitably, you'll see people who will either get, they'll either get sucked into the day-to-day interacting with the team, being the product owner, that piece of it, which can just completely consume your life and needs to. But on the other hand, then there's no time for doing the longer term like customer problem discovery, right? We're supposed to be doing discovery continuously. Well, if you're spending every day in one-on-ones with the engineering team, you don't have time to go out and do that discovery stuff. And there are superstars who can do both, but when you're dealing with regular human beings, it's sometimes much better to let them, let them specialize a little bit, but then you have to figure out the interface between them. And I'm sure that's the sort of stuff you guys worked through. Okay, now you got these two roles. How do they trade off between each other? How do you avoid warfare between them and all that sort of stuff? And yep, yeah. And startups too, like what we're seeing is some of our clients are coming to us who might be on the startup or scale up. Size range of things are going, okay, I know I need to hire a product team, but I've heard about like this specialized product manager versus a general product manager, who's gonna give me the best ROI, right? Who do I hire? Again, going back to setting up product teams for the first time or establishing product as a function, that's a tricky choice to make. And it's definitely becoming more convoluted. Oh yeah, and we see in a lot of small companies there are people switching back and forth between hats. Today they're in this role, tomorrow they're in this other role. Yep. Yeah, which is great. I mean, as long as the place isn't on fire. Oh yeah, it makes it fun. And hey, if you sign up for a startup, it's because you wanna do that sort of thing.  Absolutely, absolutely. So going back to these individual product managers, what do you see the most successful product managers doing? I think it's, they're recognizing that their role is more about leadership than controlling, if that makes any sense. You know, product managers tend to be detail-oriented people because they wanna get all the details, right? And the devil's in the detail and that's really, really important. But there comes a time when you just can't, you can't control all the details. And so what you need to be doing is making sure that everybody's aligned such that 80% of the time they're gonna be doing the right things. And the ones that I've seen who are most effective, they're wonderful multitaskers. They can switch between lots of different contexts, just like that. But they also understand that ultimately, their job is to facilitate others doing their jobs right as opposed to telling them what to do and giving them the context that's needed in order to keep them focused and coach them toward what needs to happen. And man, my favorite product managers that I've dealt with are almost like team coaches where they've gotten this tight group of people together and they're focused on, okay guys, let's all stay together on this. Let's remember what the North Star is about what we're trying to pursue. And they do that so effectively that people are 80% aligned all the time and then they don't have to do as much problem solving of individual issues because people are naturally tending to align. The most effective PMs are like that where they're owning the intellectual direction and the thinking about it as much as trying to make the actual individual decisions. That's easy to say, but it's super hard to do. No, for sure. And in that, I mean, I don't know what your experience is with this, but I always find that I'm able to think more strategically and get my head out of the weeds after a vacation. Yeah, yep. And that's tough, right? Because the job is so demanding. Who has time to take a freaking vacation? And yet you have to find ways to keep yourself fresh. That's a great career management one for PMs, I think. How do you hit that balance of keeping yourself fresh and still being in a job that is totally all consuming? Yep, yep. I think, you know, as we see recessions potentially on the horizon and the question that's turned over, I said the R word, but as we see interesting economic events, macroeconomic events on the horizon, a question that lots of companies are asking is, you know, how do I retain my people? And I think setting up organizations so that if somebody is out for a day, nothing burns, nothing catches on fire, is the best like way to start retaining people because then people know that if they have to take time off, they feel assured, right? That, okay, the whole thing isn't gonna collapse because I need to take two days off. Yep, yep. The ability to get stuff done and the ability to have some sort of, at least a slight amount of balance in your life, those two things count, for getting really good employees, those things actually count more than an incremental certain amount of money. A lot of money will overcome the bad stuff, but you know, if it's a choice between two jobs that are relatively close and even if one pays a little bit lower, if somebody's well-empowered and if they have a good life balance, a lot of the best employees want, they understand that they want to get that. And that can be a great way in these sorts of situations to retain the right sorts of people. Totally. So at user testing, can you tell me a little bit about your team functions in that are they in the office, are they hybrid teams, are they fully remote teams?  And so as it happened, especially in our engineering team, we'd been getting people like around the world, we had people in Scotland, in San Francisco, in Atlanta. And so when the pandemic hit, we already were used to using Zoom a lot. And so it kind of for us, we were very, very lucky. It was a relatively natural transition. So we're now spread out all over the place. I mean, we've got offices in San Francisco, we've got stuff in Europe, we've got stuff on the East coast of the US. We're not that big a company, we're about 900, but we have more, many more people outside of our home office location than we do in the home office location. And a lot of people are just scattered around. I'm in San Jose, which is for people who don't know, it's an hour south of San Francisco, if there's no traffic and it's two hours or more, if there is traffic, I haven't been up to our office in San Francisco in the last six weeks. You know, I'm just doing it this way. And that is normal for our company. We don't even notice sometimes. And it creates the usual challenges you'd expect. Like we got a bunch of employees who've never seen any other user testing employee in person. And it's weird and it's hard to build team and it's hard to coordinate things. But the flexibility to work from home at least part-time is what most people want now. If you're in a company that, I have a really strong opinion about this because we've been doing a lot of research on it. If you are in a company that believes that it's gonna be able to get everybody to come back to the office full-time and it's not one where they have to be like a hospital. Yes, everybody has to be working in the hospital full-time. But if you're in a company where it's possible to work from home and you're really thinking that you're gonna force everybody into the office every single day, you're going to cut your available employee base by about two thirds. That's what's gonna happen. Yeah, because most people, if given the choice between two jobs, one of them will let them work from home part-time and the other has them in the office full-time. They will definitely choose the one that gives them the flexibility to be at home part-time. Because they, it's getting rid of the freaking commute.  Even if it's not as long a commute as mine, you're saving an hour a day. How valuable is an hour of your time that you're not sitting in a freaking car listening to sports talk radio or whatever the equivalent is? I mean, maybe use that time better. Maybe you're listening to podcasts or something like that. But still, it's just a better way to work when you can be flexible about the location. Absolutely. Well, my God, I was homeschooled actually, K to 12 as a kid. So I also feel like I was uniquely prepared for the pandemic and for remote work. And I can tell you that I am a super efficient person when I'm working from home and got my dog and my team beside me. So yeah, we love it over here probably. We absolutely love remote work. You know, if you're not, if you don't trust your employees when they're not, because a lot of times it's trust, like managers feel like to be a good manager, I have to have the employees in the office. So one thing you can do is force them to all be in the office because you don't trust them or here's the thought, hire people who are trustworthy, you know, where you can trust them to work from home part-time. And there are a lot of people out there because they will make like, I have to be responsible because I'm getting a special privilege to work from home. Hire those people and then everybody's happy. And it's also easier to manage them. So I'm with you. I'm really passionate about this. Yeah, me too. And you know what? Maybe we'll come back, we'll meet in a year or so and maybe things will be different, but I have a feeling this is a bandwagon that's here to stay. I think it's a permanent change. Yeah, really is. Awesome. We are at time. So I wanna thank you so much, Michael for joining us here live today. My pleasure, this is super fun. Glad to do it any time. Wonderful, we will definitely take you up on that. And to everybody who is tuning in live online, thanks so much for joining us. And we look back to hearing you and seeing you and looking at your chat comments in our next fireside chat. Thanks so much everyone. Thanks Michael.