Mission Matters: Adapting with Current Events

In this show, Chirag Sagar Presents Mission Matters: Adapting with Current Events

There are many events from bank failures, evolution of AI tech like Chat GPT4, political factors, and economic factors that are impacting all industries and companies. Learn what’s happening in the world and what your peers are doing to adapt to the times. 

Show Notes:

• Adapting to Current Events
• Adapting When Covid Hits
• AI is Taking Over
• AI Projects for Drug Interactions
• Misutilization of ChatGPT 
• Micro Loans in Africa

Mission Matters Authors Attended:

• Chirag Sagar
• Adam Torres
• Mher M. Vartanian
• Rodrigo Loureiro
• Jacque Lee
• Dave Reich
• Joe Glaser

Follow Adam on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/askadamtorres/ for up-to-date information on book releases and tour schedules.

Full Unedited Transcript

 Hey everyone. Welcome to another exciting week of our Mission Matters Twitter spaces. Once a week we put together a dialogue where we introduce a round table, coordinate and interview and introduce our mission Matters community and create dialogues like this.

So mission. For those of you tuning in or aren’t familiar with us, we are a multimedia platform focused on the needs of entrepreneurs, executives, experts. We amplify their stories, and the way that we go about doing this is through our media platform on the front end, but also behind the scenes. We are also a book publishing company.

We’re a podcast agency. A PR agency and a digital marketing agency. So we’re able to help people amplify their stories and help them accomplish their missions ultimately. And so with this, we have many of our podcasters are book publishing authors that are with us. Some of our PR clients as well.

And so what we’ll do is just go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves. Today’s topic for those of you tuning in, is adapting to current events. There’s a lot happen. Globally right now in terms of technology, economic factors across the board from banking failures from, you know, Silicon Valley Bank.

You know, one day they’re completely fine. Three days later they’re completely bankrupt, losing, you know, 200 billion or whatever it was under management, not to mention several other banks. There’s a lot of AI technologies like Chat g P three that just came out, you know, several months ago. They already have chat, G P T four, which is launched, and AI is.

You know, front and center when it comes to this whole tech revolution or revolution that we’re going through, there’s a lot of political factors, economic factors, and there’s so many industries and companies that are being impacted by this. And so we wanted to create a dialogue you know, bring in all these different industries of folks that, you know, come from a lot of these.

Different backgrounds and share their insights on what’s happening with them, what they’re noticing, what they’re seeing, and how they’re adapting to the times. So with that Adam, feel free to introduce the rest of our panelists and why don’t we get this underway. Awesome. And thank you Charag.

And so I’ll get it kicked off. So just bring everybody out. So mayor, if you wanna start maybe with an introduction on yourself and what you do. Yeah. I’m Mahara Vaan from Philadelphia. I’m, and I’m a commercial real estate broker and investor.

So, and, and I, you know, I just, I had the privilege of being on, in, in one of those, I think the next book that’s coming out from Mission Matters, and we just had our first podcast episode come out about three weeks ago. So it’s been, you know, it’s been cool going through all this. And you know, I’ve, I’ve listened to a few of the spaces, so these are cool, but, As far as what we’re here to talk about today, I mean, the commercial real estate side of the of the world has, I think, you know, it’s, it’s minute by minute for us.

You know, we’re, directly tied to treasuries and interest rates. And, you know, since, since the summer of 2022 when rates started picking up, I mean, it’s been difficult conversation after difficult conversation, we’ve probably. 30 deals since that. Then on a commercial level, average transaction size is about $5 million.

But, you know, while you’re under contract and, you know, these are 60 to 90 day Long periods to, to buy these commercial assets rates are rising two or maybe three times during that timeline. And every time rates rise to 50 basis points, people are losing about five to 8% of their asset value while on their contract.

So if you’re going under a contract that, let’s just say a million dollars, I mean every 50 basis points, you’re, you’re tearing the huff about. 70 to 75 to $125,000 worth of value in real time. And that’s just, you know, it’s, it’s no one’s, it’s something you can’t control. We all knew what was coming. And the, the so it’s kind of setting expectations with clients, setting expectations with buyers and sellers.

I mean, it’s, and you’re having very difficult conversations every step of the way. And, you know, we’re doing this 10, 15, 20 times a day. And, you know, it’s, it’s tolling, it’s tolling on everyone involved. But it’s, it’s all about keeping everything moving forward and, and trying to find ways around it.

And I think that’s the key here is how to be creative in, in these changing environments, you know? Awesome. and we’re gonna circle back to this mayor, and thank you for the intro. I’ll just make, I wanna go around the room first I’ll get, I’ll get everyone else in and then we’re, I got some questions on how you’re dealing with that.

let’s get Joe up next. Joe, if you wanna introduce yourself, please. Hey guys. I’m Joe Glazer. I was part of the very first. I don’t even remember what the topic was at this point. You’re old. Cool. Come on. That’s Marketing Maybe I really don’t remember, but I know I liked it and was very happy and proud to be a part of it.

My background has pretty much been in two different realms forever. I. I’ve been in construction and much before that I was in insurance World Health Insurance. Life insurance. Had a you know, insurance brokerage company for a while in Northern California. And then, A general construction company, which I continue to do along with other things that I’ve kind of got my hands in right now, some crypto stuff, and, you know, lost a lot of money in crypto since I’m just learning, learning my way around that.

So, you know, made money, lost money. But yeah, that’s that’s my background. Awesome. Thanks guys. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Joe. Rodrigo, you’re up next. Hey, everybody. I’m rod. I’ve been in the, in the tech technology industry for, for about three decades. I paid my dues in the, in the corporate world spending about three decades in the corporate world.

Working my way up to the sea level executives and leaving last year as the CIO of a large public company and decided last year to reinvent myself and really start in the, the startup world. And just dipping my toes into the, into the world of technology startups focused on cybersecurity and with the help of Adam and others here, you know, launching my podcast.

And I’m also trying at the same time do my technology and my business, but also my passion for cycling. I’ve also started a nonprofit around cycling and fitness for life. So have many different interests and really looking forward to, to this conversation today.

The topic is really a topic of a very high interest to me of adaptability because I think we have to reinvent ourselves every day, every, every year. We have to reinvent ourselves just to keep up. As I always say standing still is actually going backwards. Awesome. And thank you Rod.

I’m also interested to hear your, your vantage point of what’s going on in the world right now. So glad to see you made it and let’s get Dave involved over here. Dave, welcome. Welcome. Thank you. So first before anything else, Rodrigo, I wanna talk to you about the cycling stuff cause I’m a former semi-pro bike racer and I live on bicycles, so in fact, I just got off as w a little while ago.

But That aside. So Dave Ra, I’m based outta Boston. What I do every day is I’m a customer success manager for I B M in data and ai. So everything we’re talking about with AI and chat G P T and is it going to take over people’s jobs, displace people and, and things like that. You know, There’s a lot of perception about AI cuz people don’t quite understand it. And I, I get it a lot more from the geek perspective. I’ve been doing it for a really long time cuz I used to work on speech recognition and natural language understanding, let alone AI and predictive kind of things, using artificial intelligence and just to round things out.

I’m also on the side a professional. and I merge my business stuff with my, performance stuff. So I kind of look at a lot of things differently. So when we talk about the current events I’m looking at, you know, I’m looking at a lot of the things that I know and looking basically underneath the surface.

Okay. Because let’s face it, I’m a, I’m a computer scientist and a magician. I’m the world’s biggest. So, so I like, so I like looking at a lot of things you know, a little bit differently. So, you know, don’t panic but be informed. And that’s kind of, there you go. That’s awesome. Thank you. This is gonna be a good conversation and just for context, cause I know everybody on, this call, I possibly interviewed and we’ve worked with directly.

This is not a podcast interview, so I’m gonna ask some questions. I’m gonna throw some stuff out there. I’m gonna stir the pot, but this is very much. Interactive, everybody ask each other questions like pick each other’s brain. Like that’s what this is all about. This is a true round table. So the first part’s a little formal just to make sure we get everything, you know, everybody introduced.

But I’ll just kick it off with something that mayor said earlier, and I was. Thinking about this, and I was having the conversation about it, and maybe we’ll start on this end of it and then move wherever we wanna move in, in the conversation. But Mayor, I was thinking about it today, man, and actually last couple of days, I’m with the banks, what’s going on with them?

And I was talking to another a fellow person that was in, is in, he’s still currently in wealth management. I was like, man, Like, having those client conversations right now might must be so tricky, whether you’re in lending, whether you’re an advisor, whether you’re in like, like how are, how are you handling that?

, I’m just so interested to hear your vantage point. Cuz when I was in finance, I wasn’t going through quite the exact environment. , on our end, I mean, , we had our first experience with this when Covid first said, you know, ed, when the world shut down and transactions still had to get.

Mm-hmm. You know that that’s what a lot of, and you know, if you owned a multimillion dollar shopping center or office building and your tenants weren’t coming in, no. No one was paying. You know, everyone thought that’s when oh eight 2.0 was gonna happen. Mm-hmm. So we kinda, we, we got the first version of that.

Then for this time around when rates are rising, it’s like, just gotta be rational man. At, at the end of the day, this is a numbers game, right? It’s a simple math equation. like, you have to cover a certain, like debt to income ratio, and then if the rates are X and you’re selling you property, Z I mean, you know, you gotta move with it.

And you have to keep telling everyone it’s not gonna stop. The, the Fed’s very transparent on what they’re gonna do and just kind of getting that message across is, I mean, and having people make rational decisions, it’s not easy, especially when millions of dollars are on the line. You guys know, you know it from wealth inve wealth management.

Money’s like one of the first things people start getting, getting irrational about and just making sure everyone’s on. And having that, just that initial conversation and you, you, you, what I found to do. Sometimes you just gotta, he have ’em sleep on it, have them understand it, it, you know, it wasn’t a mystery of what was happening.

And especially when, you’re in this world, everyone knows the power of inflation and what it can do. A lot of the guys that we work with, you know, they, they’re the ones that talk about the seventies all the time. And you kind of have to Tail off to that a little bit and remind them how that went down and, you know, it’s not gonna be the same hopefully, but, you know, it’s just, it’s setting expectations and kind of putting into context is key here.

Anyone else? I mean, feel, free to chime. Yeah. Hey, mayor, what you, whatever. Mm-hmm. Mayor, this is Joe Glazer. I just looked at your profile and I, you know, realized your commercial real estate and I’m actually curious what you think the future of commercial real estate is gonna be. I think there’s hard, hard days ahead for that.

It, I mean, just after covid, especially if no one’s going, you know, there. There’s not gonna be a sixth Avenue anymore. Right? Where you have all kinds of office space and people going into work anymore. People are working from home more and more and you know, not going in and, I mean, what’s that doing to your industry?

we have this conversation all the time because it’s. It’s on everyone’s mind. Just to put it in context, in the next 12 $1 trillion worth of debt is gonna be coming due. And people who have been buying real estate over the last three years at floating rate debt or underwriting, you know, a five cap, six cap exit and you know, their entire business model was built off of jacking up multi-family rents every year by $200.

You know, unsustainable business. You know, they’re gonna, they’re gonna be in a lot of pain. I mean, it’s just, it is what it is. every building is a business and you have to operate it like a business. And everyone here has operated multiple businesses At one point.

We know what, you know, when you’re taking the lifeblood out of business with your main sales generator, what are that’s gonna. you can’t forecast crazy numbers and tell people to invest based off of that. And these, and I, I, I even sold some of those buildings, you know, I mean, I sold five cap apartment buildings where, you know, if they’re gonna replace a toilet for a tenant, they’re gonna have to come out of pocket for those.

it didn’t make sense, but I mean, that’s what was happening in to asset values. I mean, some people are gonna be in pain, but then there’s gonna be a lot of guys out there who didn’t over-leverage. And that’s the key. They’re gonna be able to just to get through this wave. Like they have the, the last, you know, 20, 30 years of, of, so more or less you seem pretty optimistic.

it’s just a normal cycle. I mean, everyone has, you know, before Covid it was the death of retail. No one was, you see this as normal. Okay, I see this. Yeah. I mean, wow. Office, I think suburban office is gonna come back strong. from what I’m seeing, it’s people, people like working in. Collectives, I mean, Again, entrepreneurs get this more right than anyone.

We like our staff to be together. Question with that because, you know, working for a large company but also I work with a lot of startups and what I’m finding is, you know, the company that I work for as well as a lot of them, cuz I’m in the Boston area, you know, we got Google around, we got Microsoft, we got Facebook, plus we have a lot of the biotechs that are well established as well as the startups and.

It seems like nobody, and when I say nobody, I’m overstating a little bit, but most people are not going back to the office and they’re not going back on any sort of regular cadence, maybe two or three days a week tops. And, and what I’m wondering is, I mean, look, I’ll give you a perfect example. Ibm, we had a large lab facility in Littleton, Massachusetts, and the lease was coming due and all this wonderful stuff.

And they said, you know what? We are going to redo a bunch of floors in a different office space and we essentially downsized, closed this big honking lab with our own cafeteria and things like that, and people are coming and going and it’s almost like a startup e co-working space. And I’m seeing a lot of that, you know, downsizing and I’m wondering what’s gonna happen to all of these c.

That are all over the place, that have bought large office space, built this stuff out, put technology infrastructure in, and you know, and their people are not using it, and they’re just painting the overhead on it. Yeah. That was gonna be my kind of follow up was, you know, all those physical areas.

What happens to them, you know, I said sixth Avenue, but you know, yeah. Boston, Silicon Valley, all, those areas that. Places where employees aren’t gonna be coming back. I mean, look, I don’t even mind. A lot of places just build apartments. I don’t mind driving in Boston anymore because the traffic isn’t there.

Exactly. Great. You see it in LA too? I don’t mind it. Yeah. In Philadelphia right now, I see two brand new construction office buildings, class A being built. One of them is from Chubb. They’re, they’re building a new headquarters right next to the Comcast tower. And then there’s another building right across the street that they just finished.

They’re gonna being able to occupy by the end of summer, early fall. And those are being built throughout Covid. And, you know, who’s lending on those deals is what you have to think about. And it, you know, it, it’s not like these banks are gonna do multimillion dollar, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of lending on a project that’s gonna fail.

I think, you know, on the IBM. Aren’t you guys seeing some disconnect with this work from home or hybrid model? Do you see inefficiencies? you know, I see, so let me, let me back up. A lot of it, I think has to do with culture. All right. Depending on the company. Okay. And again, I can only give you my first hand experience from ibm.

We’re, we’re all over the place. All of my colleagues. I mean, there’s no, there’s two other people in Boston and we’re, we’re all over the country and a bunch of people all over the world we’re used to zoom in WebEx and we kind of didn’t miss a beat when Covid happened and we couldn’t go to the office.

There’s a lot, but, but at the same time you know, and, you know, we talk about current event. When I first started, we had a few major labs. We had a lab in Boca Raton, Florida. We had a lab in North Carolina. We had our research facility in New York, and those were the main employment plan. But given where people wanted to live and the ability to work more remotely, that just became a little bit more normal in the culture.

And now with a lot more people saying, I don’t have to go to the office. You know, we’ve been working for years on how do you maintain that collaboration, that casual dialogue that you might see three people in, in the cafeteria and say, Hey, you know, I’m working on this. Any of you guys have seen this before.

And you know, I, I think a lot of it depends on the culture where some of it you have to come into the office and. All right. But a lot of it, I’m finding, you know, it’s not happening and especially in the tech industry where we have tons and tons of people and I’ve been wondering what’s gonna happen to all of this commercial space.

I mean, I drive around even the suburbs of Boston, I say lots of buildings for Oracle and s a p, an analog device. Yeah. , and the parking lots are empty even now. And that’s what I’m kind of wondering, wondering. Yeah, and you can’t convert it all to apartments, right? let me step in here a little bit cause I wanna, we normally keep these to an hour and I just wanna make sure that we hit some, hit a bunch of topics, but we might have to do a whole one on that topic because I wanna know it too.

This might be another panel. Mayor, we might wanna get a couple of your guys out here. We can, we can do a whole nother panel on this one, but cause this is interesting, so I’m. Switching the topic cuz it’s not interesting. But I do wanna make sure we get some other things involved. Cuz we don’t talk about chat G p T or if we don’t talk about ai, SAG is gonna kill me because he, you know, that’s what he wants to talk about.

So Thank you. So who wants to, who wants to just, I’m not even gonna ask the question. I just threw that out as a theme. Who wants to kick it off? When do the robots take over? Oh, there you go, Joe. Oh, don’t you know that they already took over? Hang on a second. I am a robot. Exactly. I knew Dave, I knew it.

you don’t know if any of us is really, is really on this side, or we just we just connected the Whisper API to the, to chat C P T and we’re just sitting and watching TV while we let our AI do the work for us. Yeah. You know? Exactly. I’m gonna tell you. So I’ve been working in.

For, oh my goodness, gotta be 25 years now. In, know, in speech recognition, doing dictation, natural language understanding into what we’re doing now. And know, really what it is, it’s a bunch of training data and it’s statistical models and it’s gluing data back together in different ways without people having to type it in.

you know, one of the things that people are scared of is, the biggest thing I’m not scared of is it’s not creative. If I ask it to, to write a piece of code that does something. It’s not writing the code. It’s some big honking data system somewhere that’s finding it a lot quicker based on the natural language understanding of what I asked it to do, the semantic interpretation of what I asked it to do, through statistical models.

through a statistical model. Right? Yeah. Not through. Yeah. Right. And it’s gluing it together in different models and some of the things, some of the things are being put together in ways that, we didn’t understand. And I’ll give you a real brief example. Okay. Cuz it’s a project I worked on a while back, so I was working on, on an AI project.

for drug interactions. So if a physician wants to prescribe a drug, but the patient already is taking something else, how do they know the drug is not gonna interact? And you know, there’s a lot of knowledge there and the doctors study tons, but what. Something like an AI system can do that a doctor can’t is it sees all of the ingredients, even the inactive ones.

Okay. And there might be some inactive ingredient in drug A that causes an upset stomach when you add some inactive ingredient in drug B. Okay. Or might cause an allergic reaction. And that’s something that an ai, a quote unquote AI system can dig into and find that information a lot quicker than, than a human being might be able to.

That’s wonderful stuff, but asking it to be creative and, and come up with new drugs to try and fix something that’s, that’s a long ways off, if ever. How far away are we from having some kind of. AI protocol, I guess that’s able to build itself, improve itself and, and kind of do what you’re saying where you can say, Hey, chat g P 20, create a, a drug that create an antibiotic, that there’s, you know, no resistance to.

How, far away are we from that? Well, when you think about something that learns from itself, right now, the best we’re doing is machine. Which is really tons of data is coming in and human beings need to bootstrap systems that classify the data and build ontologies around it, and it needs to go through huge amounts of of human directed, then supervised, then semi supervis.

Learning before we can even think about, you know, something that might be unsupervised learning. And and the unsupervised learning that’s where it gets a, a little bit dangerous. But right now we’re a, a huge ways off in my opinion chat. G p t, it’s a bright, shiny thing.

It’s cool, it’s neat. It’s basically a natural language Google search engine right now in my. So when people talk about like the singularity that’s just hype and trying to scare people to get attention, , we’re really not close to anything. Like you said, some unsupervised, I think realist realistically, I think we’re a long ways off.

I think at the, at the end of the day, and remember what I said, okay, I’m a magician and a technologist. I’m a skeptic. Me too. Yeah, me too. so, Adam, Mark your calendar. We are a decade away. Yeah. There you go. Oh. Yeah. Easy, easy. So, let’s book calendar to have a repeat of this conversation about a decade away, because I think In a decade’s time, we’ll be very close to that singularity that we are talking about because, you know, technology, computers processing power continues to evolve and increase at an exponential pace. Yes. And it’s, it’s, it’s very difficult for any of us to really comprehend what exponential, exponential growth really means.

I think we are very close to the point. You know, you talked about chat, G P T, let’s say chat g p t 10 or 12 or 15. You know, we’re really going to experience exponential growth when chat G p T seven is now actively building chat G P T eight, and that’s, that’s where the single will start, will start happening.

Is exactly that. You know, right now chats, every version of chat is still limited by, by the humans feeding it. But I, I think we’re very close, as I say, within, within five to 10 years of actually our AI’s model, building AI’s model. And then when we start that, it’s, it’s really and, and controllable.

And that’s where we will see the, the singular. What worries me? That’s the coolest thing I’ve heard all week. You know, when we have robots right, in an assembly line like we do now that, you know, build cars and that puts physical labor out of the, you know, out of the marketplace. What I’m worried about is when AI is able to take my job, you know, and take like middle management’s job, take jobs that require some kind of.

You know, some kind of like creative thinking, you know, or, you know, like a builder, right? You need to go through all these processes or someone selling real estate. You go through all these negotiations, these things that don’t follow a simple, you know, a, b, C model or, you know, screw a screw, a, screw.

You know, it’s something kind of creative. Thinking happening that, and like you’re saying, when chat G p T seven is building chat G P T eight, that’s when we’re really in trouble. Right? Because that’s when the market’s gonna, like right now again, you have the assembly line worker, he’s out of a job.

But guess what? New jobs are created. Yeah. Now people can code or whatever, but when it gets to the point to where, you know, jobs are getting demolished and no new ones are getting created, and we’re all. Wa slowly watching all the white collar and thinking jobs go away and get replaced by some, you know, algorithm.

So, so let me ask a question cuz you, Joe, you touched on something and I wanna, I wanna direct this right to mayor because it goes to, you know, we’re talking about real estate here, all right? And I’ve never done commercial real estate, but I’ve bought and sold my share of houses.

Okay. You know when people are looking, they’re looking at price per square foot and what the comps are, and they’re crunching numbers and things like that. But then when they start doing negotiation and they start you know, figuring out how much I really want to pay, you know, a lot of this is instinct and supposition.

Okay. That an AI engine, where is it going to start getting its instinctual, you know? I know what the numbers say, but I’m seeing this and I just get a good feeling about this, You know, I’m kind of wondering, you know, what your take on that. Totally. Yeah. So we actually, we actually speak about this in our circles, right?

Because real estate’s one of those industries where technology hasn’t disrupted our industry yet, right? It’s one of the, it’s a tried and true. Type of industry. It’s been around for thousands of years. People have always built stuff and lived in it and used structure and, you know, is AI gonna impact that in any way?

Like if anything, maybe lease drafting, right? But that’s more for attorneys. Right. And you know what? Attorney doesn’t use a template anyway and just fill in the blank. They all do it. That, that, that’s what Rocket Lawyer really is, right? That’s, that’s what that entire company’s based off of. I think.

real Estate will see blockchain integration before AI integration, I believe just because of title search, being able to link titles to certain people. I think that’s gonna be, we’re gonna see that much before. Much sooner than AI because, It’s gonna get to a point where, you know, AI might, might be able to pull comps, but there’s all programs out there that automatically generate comparables.

So because that’s a very easy data set, the pool and it’s, you know, it’s still, you still have to do it manually for certain things depending on, and because it’s a self-fulfilling process, right? The data pools is only as good as the data that people manually type. And input. So there, there’s always gonna be breaks in that system because of that.

But I think blockchain is gonna be what what real estate is gonna see in terms of the technology front, much for much sooner than ai. Well, yeah, I mean like, another good example is, again, I’m only dealing in, in residential, but if I look at. And Redfin and realtor.com and Trulia and whatever else there might be.

You know, what they’re doing is they’re, they’re coming up with their estimates. You know, it’s, it’s not really an AI estimate, they’re just, they’re just crunching numbers. And you know, a, a, again, a perfect example is I have a little place that’s on a lake. Okay. But that is certainly not taken into account, even though, you know, it’s in the record for my house because I know what my house can get on the market because I’ve had people come and make me unsolicited offers.

Okay? And that’s not being captured because the data is not captured properly in those tools. So just like you said, you know, it’s only as good as the data that goes in and that subjectivity. You know, AI is so far away from doing anything like that right now. Yeah. there’s so much involved in it, right?

And what is a proper negotiation gonna take? What if there’s a retrade for some specific reason? You know, what if HVAC system goes out, or, you know, a lease? A lease lapses. Or something. There’s so many different components to it, right? And it’s gonna be diff I mean, and that’s, you know, as entrepreneurs, right?

That like, these are the fears I have. Right? I can’t see that future and that worries me, right? Because I’m trying to figure out in my head, how can this happen? How can this disruption happen so I don’t get caught up in the, in the headwind. Because disruption, you know, people lose jobs to disruptions.

People in entire industries could change or go away. How am how are we how am I gonna you know, deflect that? And I can’t see that future. And maybe it’s because I don’t understand AI enough. Maybe I don’t understand the true capabilities of it. When Rodrigo said you know, seven’s gonna build eight, it kind of, that just blew my mind because that I’m, that’s at a point where I didn’t even fathom yet, and that’s probably when estates gonna get impacted by ai. So, so let me, let me just say something about that real quick. Cuz Rodrigo had a very good point, and I don’t know if it’s gonna be seven or GD seven G pt, it might be 70 and G p t 80. But, but but the, the other thing is, you know, going back to, I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie iRobot.

Okay. It was a Will Smith movie a while back, but essentially when the robots are building the robots and the robots are, are setting them up. There also need to be a whole set of governing laws in there that people have to put in place. So that things you know, even though the movie was a little crazy, You know, so that things are going to, you know, take a direction that we want.

Because, you know, another thing about AI is you can ask it a question and you’re gonna get some really freaky off the wall answer. Because something in the model somewhere went a little bit off course. It’s just like I worked on the IBM Jeopardy project years ago, and I mean, oh my God. we asked at a question about presidents and it came up with the answer of a penny.

Because somehow Lincoln wound up in there when we wound up chasing down the errors and the models. And the models are really what give AI its power, and that’s the most fragile thing that gets built and operated on right now. So, so yes, it’s definitely something that, making a lot of strides and it’s kind of you know, at an increasing pace, but it’s still got a long ways to go.

I think there’s has to be more formality and uniformity in every industry across the board for it to get to where it needs to be. And I think it’s gonna take other technology to get it there, like blockchain. Cause once things are on the blockchain, things get registered faster. And I think that’s the movement forward.

AI is where it is today because other technology has carried into this place. But I do think other. Like avenues have to progress for, to get to that next level. Sure. but again, I’m not in tech. Yeah. And, and, and those topics around the, you know, the on iRobot you know, those are the Asimov laws which is the first laws of robotics is, is do not harm and do not harm your creator.

And all of these laws and all of these steps are being taken care by all of the organization. Microsoft, you know, has definitely, you know, they launched a chat G P t that their bing version of, of chat, G p t and they had these problems where they created their AI was hallucinating.

So, this is a, a real problem, but I would also make everybody aware that this is really not a totally different problem than, for example, when the Google. Google and the web searches came along. So, you know, people are saying, oh, chatty pt, you can ask chatty PT how to build a bomb.

Well, people can already Google how to build a bomb. And there are safeguards that were built in search engines. The same way safeguards are being built into AI engines to prevent mis utilization of the technology. Now, is it perfect? Absolutely not. It’s built by humans. Therefore, by definition it is not perfect.

So there will be a lot of trial and errors. I’m pretty sure that there will be some very notable media. News about how chat PK was used for evil and some news where it was used for good. And this is probably always the same thing with all the technologies. You know, every time there is a new technology, we always have the same questions of can it, can this be used for evil?

Is this going to eliminate All the jobs and you know, we are going to adapt. Society will adapt and our civilization will adapt to artificial intelligence and it’ll become part of our society. And for example, you know, one very interesting job

is the prompt engineer. You know, if you Google now, and there are jobs for prompt engineer, which are people that are trained and know how to talk and how to make an AI work. So on that, on that aspect, I actually remain fairly bullish and confident that you know, we will adapt.

And the problem is where people refuse to adapt, where people refuse to learn new skills and refuse to, to be further educated. You know, the thing about, oh, my dad has a job doing the same thing for 50 years, that is gone. I mean, that is not the future anymore. You will have to reinvent yourself.

Every 20 years or every decade, you need to learn new skills. And I think AI is going to further accelerate that reality. exactly what you said, everything has been an evolution. It’s not gonna be, you know, we turn around and all of a sudden half the jobs are gone because of this.

It’s gonna be an evolution and I think it’s gonna be a a faster evolution than. than a lot of others. But I think it’s gonna be slower. And, you know, one of the things is something new like this comes out, it’s this big, bright, shiny thing, and everyone is trying to figure out how to, quite frankly, make money with it.

either by trying to become an expert before they, before it’s ready, or by making you scared of it. Okay. And, trying to advise you on it. You know, and, it’s kind of just like, don’t. Okay. it’s coming. It’s going to happen. And just, you know, learn, learn, and adapt.

Hey, Joe, I’m curious and my, if my memory’s off on this, then it could be, but I think you’re doing quite a bit of work internationally, maybe in Africa and other places like that. if my memory’s not off, if I’m not off, I’m curious. It doesn’t have to be chat g p t by the way, or anyth or ai, but just in general technology abroad and international.

Where are you seeing opportunity? You’re like, what excites. So yeah, I am doing a lot of stuff. Ah, good. I’m glad my memory wasn’t off. I didn’t wanna put you on the spot for a question that was irrelevant, so, all right. Same question. Go. Yeah. Well, I would say Africa, that that’s what I’m most excited about in particular.

And, and then a few places in Central and South America ua. El Salvador have some interesting technology opportunities. El Salvador in particular. For me it’s Africa and Kinda like what Mir was saying before, you know, like blockchain is gonna change a lot of stuff with real estate. Yeah, absolutely.

And Africa is the continent right now where blockchain is really getting adapted quickly. An interesting thing is happening there because they didn’t really industrialize in the same way we did. You know where they built a big power grid and physical infrastructure. They kind of skipped that and started building their infrastructure during the digital age within the last 15, 20 years.

Really? And so you have a population over there that. Really trusting of new technology and they’re adopting it very quickly. For instance, like one interesting statistic is this, more than half the people over there don’t have a regular bank account, but they use web three apps to do their banking and you know, stuff like Bitcoin and different Altcoin, stuff like that.

So for what I. With all this web three stuff you know, Africa is where I just see so much opportunity. So, to answer your question, yes, it’s really happening a lot over there and it’s happening everywhere to really you know, there’s not a country where it isn’t happening, but Africa’s just a place where I see an enormous amount of potential growth and room for upside.

Joe, I got, I have a question. Yeah. You know, without getting too quick, geeky what kind of things are they doing, you know, over, you know, in Africa or any of these other places with something like blockchain? I mean, obviously the banking banking’s an interesting one. Aside from banking, I’m just wondering cuz banking, we understand that one.

I’m just wondering where else they’re, you know, cuz we say blockchain is you know, blossoming and I’m trying to figure out what other places they are. Well, so what I mean by banking, I don’t mean it in the sense that we think of banking here. The, the banking they’re doing over there is, is all on the blockchain and it stuff like microfinance where you’ll have, like individual citizens.

That’ll invest, you know, two to 20 bucks into a family farm somewhere. Right? And you have these micro loans and community financing and it, it’s, so, amazing. It’s more than just building a banking infrastructure based on this electronic, immutable ledger. They’re actually building almost gonna say commerce on it.

it, it’s almost like building, you know, Adam Smith’s like, Best dream come true where you just have all these voluntary associations popping up between citizens from on these like really small levels. Like I said, I, I mean it’s, you’ll see investments from people that are like, I mean it $2, right? And you know, you’ll have someone who owns there’s one area where there’s just like enormous potential as agriculture.

So you don’t have the kind of farming over there like you have here where you have like all big corporate farms and then basically no more family farms. It’s actually the opposite. So you’ll have, you’ll have a small family farm where, you know it’s grandma, parents and kids that go out and you know, they’re raising potatoes and chickens or whatever.

And it’s, you know, they’re on a half an acre and, you know, they, they produce enough to go sell at their local market, but they need to buy a tractor. So they’ll go on one of these Web three, DAPs, they’ll put on what they need. Hey, we need a tractor and enough, you know, and 200 bucks for fuel for the next month, and then 50 people.

We’ll go on there and do a bunch of micro loans to finance it. Got it. And then those 50 people make their money back by them paying their loan back on that dap. And so you’re getting people who get returns as high as 50, 60% again, on micro loans. So you know they’re investing. 10 bucks and they make 15 bucks.

And I think that, you know, it, it’s, it’s amazing. I think, and I think that’s a perfect example of some of these current events. You know, giving birth to, to, I’ll call it industries that never existed before. So jobs are gonna change, you know, from Completely. Yeah. So a night. Thank you. I like that. Yeah.

Actually, Dave, I sent you a, I added you as a friend. Add me. I’d like to talk with you guys. Yeah, absolutely. Rodrigo Mer, all you guys. Hundred percent sounds good. Oh man. we normally keep these about an hour, give or take a min a couple minutes either way. So normally about this time we, because, and again, we.

Every week. So I’d love to have everyone back on, of course, as time allows for you guys, but me and sh will be here, that’s for sure. And you know, she’s on it, on sending the email invites. So I guess let’s, let’s go around. Any last words, any last comments, any last thoughts as we kinda wrap this up?

But I, I don’t wanna cut it short, but anything else on anybody’s mind? Yeah. Can I ask one broad based question? Absolutely. I’m probably the, I’m probably the youngest guy. So, you know, the, like the last big recession we had in like oh eight, I was still in high school. And you know, but that, like this is, we’re in a unique time where not only are we gonna be entering some sort of economic turbulence, the, you know, the breadth of it I think is e Everyone has their own opinion on it.

But we’re also entering that environment with a rise in just technology that was just unfathomable. Five years ago, right? Like AI in this regard is regard like what GB TP is wasn’t like five years ago was like sci-fi. Today it exists and with, you know, with all these new layoffs coming, especially in the tech inside of it the things that I are actually driving are the US based economy.

I mean, when, like, is there any other point in history where we can kind of point to, to kind of look for some sort of playbook for. Because you know, it is unique, I think. Well, I I’ll decide, you know, Buckle up. It’s gonna be a rough ride, but it’s also been a rough ride in, in 2008, when, when it crashed in the early 2000 when there was a tech boom 1987, the, you know, what was it, black Monday or, or, or what was it?

What was it called? You know the opec? The OPEC crisis in, in the sixties. You know, and of course the, the Great Depression. So, you know, these things are cyclical and, I would say that, you know, I’m jealous of, your youth. But on the other hand, you know, we’ve seen, we’ve seen this before. So that’s why I, stay very confident because it always seems very daunting and very difficult, and everything is being turned upside down when we are, when you are experiencing it.

But, you know, having those gray hairs on, on the top of your head, it, you kind of look at these situations and go like, Hmm, I’ve seen this before. And maybe the playbook is not exactly the same, but you’re kind of like we gotta buckle up. We gotta take the lessons from the past and, and have confidence that we will adopt the society.

Has always adopted. You know, when the first cars came along, obviously it was. very catastrophic. Because while no more horses, what will that do to the horse industry? You know? So these things happen are cyclical and I think our society will still go on and we will adapt in and, you know, in five years from now, we’ll be talking about something else because AI is part of our normal daily.

Couldn’t have said it better. Well, thank you guys, cuz I need to go Anyway, so thank you and I really appreciate everyone’s time and it’s a great talk. Thanks. You luck everyone. Great talk. Have a great evening everybody. Thanks everyone for tuning. Thanks everyone do these once a week. So appreciate all of you.

Hope you all have a great evening and we’ll be back Thursday. 4:00 PM PST again, so absolutely. Thanks you guys. Bye week. Take care. Have a good one. Bye.