This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host Stina Heikkilä.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript which has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Hello, everyone. Super excited today, I’m here with my usual co-host, Stina Heikkila.

Stina Heikkila:
Hello, everybody.

Simone Cicero:
And we have a very special guest, Jeremiah Owyang.

Jeremiah Owyang:
Hi, Simone. Hi Stina.

Simone Cicero:
Hello, man, that’s great to have you. We were really looking forward to have this conversation with you. Today I’m also recording from outside. Apologies to our listeners if they will hear some strange noise in the background for today, and maybe some pigeons in the background. Let’s have fun and explore your insights about basically what is coming up. I think you’re really doing an incredible job with Kaleido Insights with the research firm that you’ve co-founded if I’m not wrong. Right?

Jeremiah Owyang:
Yes, that’s correct.

Simone Cicero:
You guys are researching across many aspects, let’s say of consumer behaviour, and also engaging with how companies responds to these changes. I particularly appreciated your work with regards to exploring the impacts of the Covid outbreak, because today we can talk about anything without considering what’s up recently with this pandemic. So, my question for you as a start, let’s say, for this conversation, is to really look into what you guys are perceiving in terms of structural changes in consumer behaviours, and how these can impact essentially the shape of the businesses to come. Also, I think a nuance that I would like to explore, which is…For sure Covid has been accelerating some changes, but to some extent, and to what extent in your point point of view, these changes were structural changes that are just accelerated by the Covid but much more long term and much more solid changes that we can expect in the future.

Jeremiah Owyang:
I think that’s a wonderful question. And hello, everybody from Silicon Valley. I am so pleased to be here and connected with you all. Any issue that we see today from Covid-19 is just amplifying the challenges that were already there. But let’s take a look at Maslow’s pyramid. Many people were focused on the upper echelons many were not. But essentially when Covid-19 struck, nearly everybody was slammed down to the bottom two layers, physiological needs and safety and security. We were struggling to get food and find medicine and locked into our homes and our income might have stopped and so we all went down to the bottom of the pyramid. Many individuals have climbed out of those bottom rungs and life is returning towards a common normal that they remember from the past, but the world has changed. So, even with the health issues that have arose, certainly this is a new novel virus, but those that were already afflicted with health challenges, they might have been overweight, or they might have been elderly or they just didn’t have health care, or they might have been impoverished. Those were existing conditions that were just amplified. I love your question, and I’m thinking that this is just creating multiplications on what was already a challenge.

Simone Cicero:
I would say, in this case, should we look into the Covid outbreak as, I don’t want to say as an opportunity, but as an opportunity for our firms to really basically take the choices and in terms of both the business model innovation, organisational forms and governance forms to take the chance of the Covid. To say, we really need to change for real. The question is, how would this change unfold from your point of view in terms of both business model, organisational model, constituents, governance models?

Jeremiah Owyang:
All of the aspects of society are certainly going to be changing. So, we are looking at the space from…we can think about it in five particular areas of society that are being impacted from the digital trust is an area that we look at. Now we see that there is information out there or the tech companies are taking information from us and we’re relying on them and so our governments. The next one, obviously, is what we call health and wellness, and that’s an area that has come to the forefront of all of this. Just for some background, my focus here especially being in Silicon Valley is on technology. So this is my lens to the world, but not limited to. The third one is what we call ambient computing, and this is how, for example, 5G and IoT around us, the world is becoming more intelligent and we will see self cleaning rooms, cars, buses, planes. The fourth one is sustainability around, obviously, we need to fix this planet, and you and I have worked on many projects together — Stina as well — with events and beyond. Then lastly is how do we do the future of work?

To answer your specific question, Simone, I do think many things will change a lot, but it’s going to be in between from where we are and where we’re going. We call this hybrid. For example, many people are now working from home, even if they had a corporate job, but some of them yes, some of them will never return to the office and have a physical desk five days a week. But in most cases, it will probably be a hybrid, a mixture of going to the office maybe one to three days a week, but working at home three, two or one days a week. So we’re going to see that mixture. I don’t think everything is going to stay just at home. We are anxious to get out and connect to other people out in the in the world. So we’ll see something in between, from where we were in the beginning of the year and where we are now in the summer.

Simone Cicero:
It’s a provocative question probably. So, there is a good friend of mine that wrote a blog post before the pandemics, as soon as the pandemic started. And we started to be put into lockdown and so on. He wrote his essay and said, “You know, we’re going to end up emerging from this pandemic, a little bit like.. — in Italy there is this tradition of doing sausages with meat — like artisanal sausages”. When you do these sausages let’s say, normally you’ll put these sausages into plastic basically. You plastify them to conserve, to keep them good for a long time. He made this parallel and said, “You know, we’re going to end up after the pandemic, a little like the sausages. We’re going to be plastified, we’re going to be sanified.” The question is, do you see that we are emerging of these as a just as sanified consumers? Or there’s something deeper?

Jeremiah Owyang:
Yes. I agree that’s going to be the case. We’re going to be so focused on keeping things clean. We’re going to be physically distance. We will use technology to make sure that we’re not connecting. For example, this is going to be a challenge. How do we greet each other? In some cultures you do double kisses, I think where Stina is living right now, cheek cheek. She’s in Paris. And Italy, it’s also a warm embrace. Americans shake hands if not hug. That in itself is going to be a rewrite of our culture on how do we greet. It might be a wave or a verbal or maybe a bow that we would use from Asian cultures. All of that is going to be changing. This also has significant impacts to how we travel, an area that you and I have looked at a lot in the past. This is for example, some of the ride sharing companies in Silicon Valley have now turned off the ride “pool”, and now it’s just single rider. Some of the drivers put plastic up around them when they’re actually driving in the car. Those pictures are emerging and people laugh at them, but they’re trying to keep themselves safe as well as the passenger safe because it is an high area of traffic in those cars. There’s also new technologies that are using UV light to actually sterilise train cars, subways and buses. We are expecting that planes will have partitions between the seats and middle seats are already gone. So, the cost of your flight might actually increase as we start to travel more. We might see special sprays emerged in around those seats and UV lights in all of those places of transportation. Here in the United States, movie theatres are now opening again, and they are socially distancing seats and of course they need to be sanitised. Even the structure of even the seats we might move away from fabric to just hard plastic seats. The world is going become more sanitised, less comfortable as we start to go about the world in this particular way, and that will affect for many, many years.

Simone Cicero:
Mm-hmm. I was doing a reflection on exactly this and also so what the option that presents to ourselves is to say, to just continue as if nothing gets past and just trying to sanify whatever we do. So actually plastify ourselves. In the other end, if I look into your area of research, for example, there is this research on the area of research on wellness, health and social work. Basically we have been reflecting a lot on the impacts of the pandemic on for example, if you focus on the worker, the fact that you are pushed to work from home, it’s to some extent, it impacts the organisational shapes. Impacts the way that work is managed. So you end up in having these located teams, small teams, re-embed in their communities. There is a lot of talking about working remotely, a lot of people leaving cities in the US now looking for more remote positions. So, just an initial propagation on what kind of epistemic changes, what kind of priority change is this going to enforce on the consumer. To some extent may this be in your opinion, dramatic, I mean a dramatic change in terms of what companies are supposed to produce, maybe moving away from this idea of the experience age into something that we could call the age of health, the age of wellness. Because especially we are interested in this why? Because health care, it’s as Daniel Wahl and other guests in our podcast said, it’s a property of nested systems. If you really start to think about our healthy you are, you need to start thinking about how connected you are to your context, in your systems, to your communities, to your landscape. So the question will be, do you do you think this extraction of changes are really changing radically what gets produced? What is the output of the enterprise?

Jeremiah Owyang:
I love your systems thinking approach, and I was also hearing your other guests on the podcast and how you think about those things and the connected systems. That is also how we think about the world as well. That is a fantastic question. So, let’s just dive into the first part around health and well being. We are a product of our environment, as well as the biological gifts in which we were presented. Each of us are individual in both of those scenarios. We can already see how certain individuals have genetic build up and this can help them, some of them might have immunity to the virus and some others do not. Then also depending on where you live and the healthcare coverage that you have impacts that. So let’s just go to the American example, since I am an American. Some communities do not have much healthcare coverage, and they have been suffering, specifically the black community. They have had more a higher mortality rate when it came to Covid-19 versus those that did not. So, that is showing the systematic breakdown from an early age, even some other cities were polluted. This is where they didn’t have the right health care coverage or is difficult to transport themselves to health care or this wasn’t coverage insurance for healthcare. This has a lifelong effect across their whole community, which is wrong, and we must change that and fix that absolutely. So, this is an example of the environment around us and how we’re using these things. This is also what we call the digital divide. Those that have access to digital tools are more connected and they can keep better track of their well-being and wellness. They might be able to order food or to participate in online fitness, or do meditation apps. We’re seeing that there’s this real divide, all of that has been a real change within the societal landscape to see these things.
Our focus has been around technology, and health and wellness. In particular, we’ve seen a number of the Silicon Valley firms and beyond launch digital contact tracing apps. To your point, this is spanning both your individual person as well as your community. And for those that are not familiar with digital contact tracing apps, you can download it in your particular region, and there’s different ones for different countries. If somebody near you is also using that app, and one of you gets sick, you can indicate that on the app and it will anonymously in theory, tell that information to the other person so they should go get tested. It’s a form of what we call hand intelligence or crowd intelligence to see those that are sick. Unfortunately, there’s low trust and adoption of these apps for numerous reasons. But the sad thing is we need 40 to 70% of the general population to use them for them to be effective of this hand intelligence. To bring it back to you, yes, the individual, the way we behave, and the the neighbourhood, and the state, and the region, and the country, the societal aspect, those rings of systems, all flow out and they all are interconnected.

Simone Cicero:
Stina, I know that you have a question to add on this, right?

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, it was very interesting to listen and I keep wondering about the opportunities that technology brings and also, I mean, that infamous quote of with great- No, sorry, I lost track of the quote — but with great power comes great responsibility.

Jeremiah Owyang:
Responsibility, yes, great one.

Stina Heikkila:
So I was thinking, what is needed to taking the good sides of technology and to help us in this aftermath of the Covid? I’m thinking about something along the lines of: how do you bring about a race to the top in developing new solutions instead of getting power in the wrong hands or creating solutions that doesn’t really help society as a whole in this context?

Jeremiah Owyang:
Thank you. That’s a great question and that is the first thing that we look at called Digital trust. There’s kind of awakening happening in Silicon Valley. These tech companies are trying to decipher what is their role in society? Are they enablers of people to make transactions amongst themselves? For example, we saw this right? Both of us with Airbnb and Uber, and they were trying to be hands off and say, we’re not arbitrators of good and bad. You are doing the transactions, we’re just a platform. We heard the same language out of Google, Facebook, and others. But now I think there is a shift. In some cases, it’s because the government pressure has scrutinize their behavior and wants to regulate them so they have no choice. Certainly, even the European Union has put pressure on the tech companies to be more thoughtful and moral. However, I do think there is a change now where the tech companies are recognising their role when it comes to ethics. Yesterday, I spoke to an executive at Cisco, and they have been talking about inclusion, which means to include everybody in the world, not just a certain type of person. That means not just workers, but also the technology can be useful for all those of all those, of all colours, creed’s, genders to be involved.
There is this moral reckoning amongst tech industry. We even saw last week that three big tech companies, Amazon, I think it’s Google and- I can’t remember the other, said that they will no longer sell facial recognition software to police departments because it could be used to incorrectly identify or to put pressure on people that might be protesting, which is not democratic. Also, some of the technology is not working well with people with darker colour skin. So you might incorrectly identify somebody as a culprit, when they actually may not have committed a crime at all, and that would just perpetuate the societal problems. Then even yesterday, and thank you Stina for bringing this up, there was a question around all of this ethics, and Facebook deleted ads from the Trump administration that had imagery related to the Nazis. They’re now taking a moral stand on the types of content that are allowed to be on the platform they now recognise that they have a role to play when it comes to what is good and bad. Now, here’s the downside. Do we and should we trust these tech companies to be the arbiters of our ethics and morality? Where does the line start and stop? It’s a very slippery slope, because they were not geared up to be the ethical judges in our society, and the way they decide is a limited view. So, this is a real challenge for all of us because we’ll all be impacted.

Simone Cicero:
I think, at the end of the day, you are hinting into what is starting to be a clear topic when we talk about technology and Society. The year actually started with the presentation that went pretty viral from Ben Evans at the World Economic Forum, talking about the role of regulation indeed, and also the fact that especially as Internet becomes mature, it’s permeating every aspect of our life. We need to regulate that. We need to as a society, we need to take care of how technology plays out its role in society, in our lives. The other thing that we need to acknowledge is that also, the world is fragmenting now into the US internet and the European internet, and the Chinese internet. Also, this time, it’s even no more just about the internet. Everything is fragmenting in pieces, in smaller pieces. The US and China are really doing trade wars and so that’s more or less what we are living. I think also if I look at today topics of research of your firm, this is also very interesting to look into because if you look into digital trust and biometrics, you’re basically talking about how the government controls society. The government’s regulates organisations and to some extent controls society. So what some people could call “Cosmo techno-politics”. That’s more or less the topic. Then if you look into the renewable part and the energy and the sustainability part, you’re essentially talking about infrastructure. It’s still a government job, so still government work. Finally, if you should look into awareness and future of work, that can be seen, I think, from both perspectives and also from the perspective of existing organisations and how they embrace a different future of work and a different idea of health in society, or it can also be seen from the perspective of how do we imagine a different idea of work and a different idea of the organisation, that may be leveraging some technology and leverage is on the all these things that we have learned to use. But to build the company different, radically different business models, for example, a much more low cost. There is a lot of talking about hardening our supply chains, hardening our food chains.

To some extent, the reflection that I want to offer to you, if you move from the experience economy, to the health economy, probably there is some efficiency that needs to be left on the table. We need to probably deliberately build a more, you said moral ethic, but I would say also more secure, redundant, society and redundant types of businesses. So, the question will be, how do you see the patterns that we have been chronicling about platforms, marketplaces, and experiences whatever, moving into this new landscape, this new perspective? How are we going to use them to build a new different economy and a different story to some extent?

Jeremiah Owyang:
Yes. So I do work with companies that have global supply chains, and a handful of them have tried to have multiple manufacturing lines, not just be reliant on China, after what happened. So they learned a valuable lesson. But the overarching, movement has been pretty slow. In most cases, we’re still dependent upon the global supply chain. For example, we were doing research on the impacts of sustainability and Covid-19, and there’s been…Actually I’d love to ask you, can you guess what percentage of carbon emissions globally has been reduced during the quarantine? What percentage?

Simone Cicero:
Well, I’m a particular informant on that because I’m a bit obsessed. So, if I do recall very well it should be something like 17% for the first weeks.

Jeremiah Owyang:
That’s exactly right.

Simone Cicero:
Now we have that on 5%.

Jeremiah Owyang:
That is exactly right. In northern Italy, we saw the satellite images of that reduce carbon emissions. What I pull from other people who are less informed than you, they guess 50 to 70%. Nope, it’s just we have…yes, we’ve made improvements, but the energy creation and the global supply chain and the shipping has not stopped. Only human transport has stopped, which is roughly around the 20%. So we are still relying upon a global supply chain. Every time we order products from e-commerce sites, those products are being assembled, likely overseas and shipped over and assembled somewhere else and put on big ships or aeroplanes. We haven’t really made that change. So I think that’s a real struggle. Even in the US, I have not heard or read about big pushes towards local provisions and provisioning of your supply chain. Still even here, there’s regions that produce food so they still have to ship it to other regions that don’t produce food and areas that produce things made out of metal, which are not done in California. So we have to get that from the north. I unfortunately don’t see the localization of supply chain happening except for specific farm to table business models.

Simone Cicero:
You know, these prompts are reflection which is…I think, I often quoted Wendell Berry in this conversation, if you’re familiar with his work. But essentially one of the key points of this vision that Berry that was a farmer is a farmer actually, he is 90 at the moment, and a poet, not just that. But essentially one of the key points of his story is that the big problem that we have is that we live in a society that is very much specialised, and very much focuses on the role of offering us the role of consumers. So, the question is, unless you don’t radically embrace this idea perspective, that you need to become a producer of value, and you need to take care of some essential processes in how do you manage your life. It can be food or energy, these kind of essentials. It’s very hard to imagine that society can really shift if we don’t embrace these different perspective.

Another interesting project that we have been interviewing for the research is called Participatory City. It’s a project from the UK and it’s one of the…It has been basically creating an initiative in two boroughs of London, one of the two most disadvantaged ones, and essentially building this network of citizens around shared infrastructures, where they can really get back to the essentials and produce clothing or cutlery like…not cutlery… but basically plates and that kind of stuff. Food and that kind of endeavours and the founders call it an “economy of essentials”. So, the question for you will be, do you think this kind of transition is possible and to what extent, to what roles can an organisation maybe by creating different organisational structures and different business models generated these transition towards an economy that is more about producing, and more about the essentials?

Jeremiah Owyang:
I think it’s possible, but will need support from all levels. From the person living in the home to the local neighbourhood, to the city itself, the leaders of the city as well as the businesses. They would all have to agree and participate in doing that. I see that behaviour in some cities, for example, Detroit, which is a city that has had some plight, and they try to encourage people to purchase things from Detroit, and try to be proud of the things that are done locally. There are a number of companies that have emerged that have produced products and people know them as made in Detroit. And there’s a lot of pride in that. I’ve seen that. One thing that has happened during the quarantine is that many people have started gardens, and they are producing their own food. During World War Two, that was called Victory Gardens where people in the United States would produce 40 to 60% of the actual produce for the table from their own gardens. We are seeing people taking up gardening at a rapid pace here and around the world including I am doing the same. Growing squash and lettuce and my goal is to make all of my own salads in my backyard and we got pretty close, we are still pretty close to doing that. So, that is one example of just easing the supply chain and thinking about all the carbon benefits by me not going to the store and then going backwards that led us brought from the farm on the supply chain. There’s lots of benefits by just doing that for the environments as well.
But there is a challenge here. Outside of the food supply chain, many of the advanced products that we need now electronics are things made out of metal or plastic. Those are still going to require a global supply chain. I just don’t see that changing. Certainly things like textiles and woodworking and artists and goods can be done at a local level. But there’s going to be a mixture of global and local supply chains.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, that is for sure. I’m not naive to the extent to think that we can have localised, considering electronics. But maybe that’s exactly the point. The point is, what are the second or the effects of having to transition towards more locally based economies? In terms of also what do we expect? I don’t think that this transition can really happen. You know, that’s the problem with systems thinking. When everything needs to change at the same time, it’s really hard to think about stuff happening. Again, I think a good reflections that I bring up is, without the second order effects of these transitions and exchanges of priority, for example, in the choices you take as a worker. So as a worker, you may take a job that is different just because you want to move to the countryside and maybe start a homestead. So that’s the kind of second order effects that we may be seeing in the coming years. Stina, do you have the faster question on that?

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah. I’m curious to know what you think about whether this is like an information problem, because I agree that probably all levels would need to collaborate in order to somehow nudge consumers. That’s what we’re talking about. Like to be more aware in their consumption habits and so on. We’ve been talking with a lot of different people, but I recalled now our conversation with Michel Bauwens, and he was talking about this Reporting 3.0, and he said “governments cannot see flows”, they just see more static accounting systems. I think this is related, maybe it’s not only governments, but I’m wondering if consumers would be able to see the full impact of their choices. Do you think that it would change behaviours towards consuming more locally? Or how do you see that?

Jeremiah Owyang:
That’s a good question. I think it depends on the cohort of individuals, some groups are very sustainable minded and that will be a primary decision point. But in the research that we have looked at it specifically in the sharing economy, we were asking people why would they want to use Uber, Lyft, Bla Bla Car, Airbnb and other shared services over and over. Other studies that I didn’t even do all the findings were always around, first is convenience, the second is price. I think that is still going to be a primary driver. The third, by the way, was often connecting to others, and fourth was sustainability. That was a study done five years ago. It might have changed. I’ll bet you it has changed now, where people are more sustainably minded, especially the younger generations who are going to have to live with this planet. We have seen products with carbon scores or fair trade goods. Those are things that have existed in the past. But in some cases though, especially during a recession, people are price sensitive. So that’s going to be the primary factor. Is it cheap? There’s their value there. So they may not care as much about the sustainable impacts because they’re in crisis mode. Just trying to make sure they can keep their families safe and feed them. I think it depends also then there is the point of when, when are people more sustainably minded during your crises?

Even the topic of sustainability has waned significantly, as we’ve spoken more about health and safety, which has become the more important topic and even in the last weeks around racial justice that has started to even take over the topic, specifically in the United States over the health and wellness as people even hit the streets and globally, certainly even in Paris, even putting their lives at risk for the transmission of the virus. It was more important to protest. They have made that very clear in their behaviour set and of course, I participated in socially distance protest myself. I think all of these factors have numerous factors on who is it and what is the situation in this scenario. We are approaching in the United States, the hurricane season, it’s starting to happen now, and here in California we’re going to be approaching the fire season and we’ve had severe smoke in all regions. That will trigger and then of course, we’ll have blizzards in the winter, and that will be a harsh reminder to everybody, as the weather becomes very angry, that we need to stay committed towards sustainability goals.

Simone Cicero:
I cannot think about more things that this position is leaping out of control, not because you, first of all I think you gave a pretty clear explanation of the double bind, that we are all rapidly into now. This idea that, for example, when you are in crisis mode, you’re going to be looking into short term solutions, and while maybe a crisis is more than a being there for long term, the need for long term solutions. So that’s the one point but if I think about what’s happening with Covid then you mentioned the fire season. It was incredible for me last year here to look at Silicon Valley, California, the heart of the techno optimistic and Promethean culture that we seem to have embraced globally, and see that during the fire seasons, some parts of California were without power for weeks because-

Jeremiah Owyang:
Yeah. We went out in the whole region and it was quite humbling.

Simone Cicero:
The question is, do you see, you know, you had a such a deep concern of the scene, the trends, the people, the perceptions, your work on for example on mindfulness and wellness. Do you think that Silicon Valley is really going through some kind of perception crisis, some kinds of epistemic essential crises and maybe a structural change that these bring to one of the engines of the development of the world?

Jeremiah Owyang:
Yes, absolutely. Silicon Valley is just going through adolescence. We are not a mature adult. We have not realised our responsibility. Literally our body is changing, we’re developing into an adult, we’re realising that our behaviours impact other people. That’s one of the things that teens go through, because they’ve been dependent upon somebody else to make decisions for them in the past as a child, and then they realise they transition that their behaviours and they’re also responsible for themselves. Am I talking about a human in adolescence or Silicon Valley? It’s both. You can see that that’s the direct lineage. We don’t really know who we are and who we want to be. We say things like, we want to make the world a better place. Such a cliche, but in reality in many cases, that’s true, but we can find just as many negative examples where that has not been the case. Even causing people incredible suffering around the globe. So, this is a real challenge which we are going through this crisis of the identity and ethics. In fact, many of the executive teams are building digital ethics into the discussions. They’re hiring chief diversity officers for inclusion. They’re also encouraging that the programmers and product managers, for example, Microsoft, they have a number of playing cards with different faces on them or different colours. For example, it might be a 13 year old girl who is black and so how are you building software that meets her need.

Secondly, many of the different tech companies have set up lobbyists groups in Washington, DC to make sure they’re connected to government change both to influence them, but to also sense and understand about the changes that are coming from Washington DC. So, we need to think more broadly about the impacts of society and that is the wake-up call that is happening now. Very astute observation Simone.

Simone Cicero:
Well, I also see this large disconnect in the US society, between some pioneering voices, for example, now is the moment of climate tech funds, everybody’s opening a fund for climate work. This connects between this kind of leadership coming from the tech industry, in Silicon Valley, the tech browser like somebody called them, and the US government. Simply it seems like the US are not really coherent as a society in this moment. So, what are the things that excite you about what is happening? What is coming up from the US society at the moment in terms of deep changes in behaviour, deep changes in the relationship between society and technology and politics and governments? What are the things you are excited about?

Jeremiah Owyang:
Yes, we are now becoming becoming socially awake. We are now actively discussing in equity and equality at the very foundational levels and at the history of the country. Even this week when we’re recording this podcast, we are discussing an historic date when the slaves were freed through the Emancipation Proclamation on today. This is something that wasn’t recognised and certainly wasn’t even considered as a potential informal holiday. Many organisations are allowing their employees to take the day off and think and reflect about equality amongst society. So that is new. That is a new topic. In addition, we’re analysing our culture and our behaviour around freedom versus safety for the masses and the United States is ripped asunder. There’s a complete bifurcation on those values. The country is built on capitalism and individual freedom. But at the same time, we are a federalist nation that is loosely connected. And so there’s extreme tension between those two value sets and cultures, and they’re even geographically dispersed as well. So the society is discussing that and the discussions and the arguments and the agreements that happen out of those discussions are the first step that is required for systematic change. For the system’s thinking that you have aptly talked about. My French friends tell me and reminded me that severe changes and informal or formal revolutions where the society is rebooted or restarted, the term I like to use as reformatted are required for us to have these discussions in order for us to change society in the way that is least damaging to us. I’m excited that we’re all talking about the real challenges in society. Many of these topics, specifically even around racism or the digital divide we’re not talked about some day. It was taboo to talk about them, you wouldn’t want to talk about them in polite company or certainly at the workplace. But now, all of that has been ripped open and a lot of that is because of Covid. People feel like they’ve gone through crisis so they’re willing to talk about it now. In summary, we are openly talking, protesting, debating, yelling about the real issues that we have in society and that is not something that was done across the whole country. And now it is.

Simone Cicero:
Sounds like a really pivotal moment in the study of the US, and the study of the world. I would say at some point. Stina, do you have any additional reflection to share with this?

Stina Heikkila:
Well, I wanted to ride on the wave of positive sentiment and to ponder on this idea of, I know you’ve been researching the future work and I think it’s quite likely that a lot of jobs might become automated and that might have happened anyways, but it might be accelerated in the current situation. I’m just curious to hear about you know, when machines to some extent take over certain tasks and humans get more time and maybe less work in the labour sense. What would be their role in stewarding society forward? What is needed by companies and by other institutions to provide like some spaces for humans to still have a role to play in progress? If we want to use that word.

Jeremiah Owyang:
Thank you. That’s a fantastic question. We need to discuss the types of automation. Let’s just break it into two camps that we’ve looked at. One is the physical world being automated, so that could be driving or people that are checking out your groceries at the store, or those could be people working on the manufacturing line actually creating products. The second group would be knowledge workers, also called white collar workers or office workers that are working with information and data. The first camp, we’re not seeing much growth there, the physical world is not being automated as fast. In fact, I’ve been on a number of calls with engineers and production leaders at warehouses, and they are not doing much automation. The reason they haven’t really done that is because the companies have pulled back their budgets, especially because we’re in a recession. And automating supply chains is very expensive.
Secondly, the self-driving car companies, they require other cars to be on the road so they can capture accurate data, and that has stopped. They have been slowing down and many of them have had layoffs at these self driving car companies so they have not rapidly moved forward. But the checkout lanes, that is still being moved quickly because that is tied to health and wellness. So contactless checkout and payment systems could reduce the amount of time of cashiers and reduce the amount of cashiers. But that doesn’t make sense to have robots for example, in restaurants. It doesn’t make sense. For example, Boston robotics just announced their robot dog spot is now available to be purchased. But it’s $75,000. That doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re perhaps in the mining industry. So that’s the first camp. I don’t think we’re going to see as much automation there in the short term period. However, in the second camp, where there’s knowledge workers, we’re seeing faster automation. That’s because it’s cheaper to install cloud software to your systems and use chat bots and machine learning, because that is rapidly being offered by the cloud based companies like Salesforce, Google, Microsoft and Automation anywhere and beyond. In many cases, they’re turning that on because companies weren’t ready for the onslaught of phone calls. So they need to turn on chat bots as quickly as possible to be managed during this crisis. We are certainly seeing an increase of automation for the white collar workers.
Now to specifically answer your question, there is an opportunity for humans to focus on the things that matter the most, which is to focus on creativity, thinking at systems level, like Simone naturally does, and you too Stina. And to focus on the human interactions and the relationships. For example, we could have more people as salespeople or waiters and waitresses, or to be in the HR department to talk and listen, carefully to other people or just spend time with customers to build that real relationship. Things we want to actually be more human about. What the repetitive tasks in the workplace, those will likely become automated in the mid term, certainly, and in the long term. I hope that answers how I am seeing it and when I talk to the technology leaders in the space what they’re trying to do.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, thank you.

Simone Cicero:
This also brought me to some more reflections that maybe as we entered the last part of the conversation, I think is worth trying to do with you. It sounds like also the impacts of automation that you just described to some extent, they picked at this moment of transition between what our friend Lisa Gansky defined once in the Podcast as a transition between the “no more” and the “not yet”, which has been very clear for us to frame where we are at the moment. When I think about the not yet — and the not yet it’s a word where we, as you said that a few times, we rely more on social relationships — we build the more caring systems, more local maybe, much more thoughtful and to some extent, ethical. It sounds like a place where maybe in Europe more than the US we could think about today the government to also play a fundamental role. In the US in general, the role of government is limited, tends to be limited, especially federal government, which normally invest mainly in defence and things like that.

The question is, I see this as I’ve also heard this being described by some voices in the internet as an entrepreneurial opportunity, and also this, the fact that we got to deconstruct the different society and different production systems. It represent no doubt and entrepreneurial opportunity. And the question for you will be, do you see this, for example, let’s talk about community agriculture or community energy or services, care services like education now. What we are seeing with companies such as Wonderschool, these are the entrepreneurial opportunities that presents to ourselves? What is the role that two things are going to play within this entrepreneurial opportunity: first of all existing incumbent brands, how they are going to look at this opportunity in terms of how they restructure the governance structures and the processes to fit with that? And secondly, how constructs that me and you we have been talking about a lot such as platforms and network effects: How are these marketplaces, these kind of things going to help us to address and make the best of this new society that looks like this new markets, these new firms that we need to build to really take all these entrepreneur opportunity to make the “not yet” more real?

Jeremiah Owyang:
Thank you. So you’re asking about the entrepreneurial opportunities with companies and startups, is it?

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, I mean, not just a company. I guess that this entrepreneurial opportunity will be also open to new constituents, such as communities, local communities, for example. For example, I’ve been trying to organise my community around permaculture project or around an energy project. So this is an opportunity also for entrepreneurs that may be less into the startup thinking, but more into community owned or platform coops or something like that. But the question is: still we have the technology, we have the patents, we have the knowledge to leverage network effects, the leverage on platforms, so how do these new citizens are going to use this knowledge to take all these new opportunities?

Jeremiah Owyang:
I hear that many people are now communicating with their neighbours when they didn’t do so in the past. This is because we’re all home-bound and people are checking on each other in the communicating through social technologies. That is certainly happening throughout the United States and beyond. And that is the first step in that relationship for people to connect to each other. We’ve seen a number of startups and services emerge, where you encourage people to check up on the elderly, to enable just the health care because we’re worried about the primary health care teams not able to handle the Covid infections. So when it goes over the quote curve. So we saw many startups emerge that enabled that. Secondly, we have spoken with a number of startups that are enabling the crowd to help self-service each other when it came to mental health. One is called Wisdo based out of Israel, and you can become a volunteer and help people who are struggling with their mental health and they may not have access to professional therapists and psychologists, but now you can have a friend anonymously that you could build a long term relationship and you end up being friends for life.
Those that were having the mental issues, they in turn become those that help others as they continue to grow and graduate. That’s an example of both local and global community effects that can be used. Now when it comes to specific neighbourhood resiliency, such as micro grids, or coops, those I don’t hear of that happening as quickly. It’s in many cases, people don’t want to be physically around each other right now. It has created some challenges for that to actually happen. But that does Neal Gorenflo — our mutual friend — there is community gardens where he lives, and people are exchanging food amongst each other as they all grow. My friend, Amanda Weber, in Washington, DC, their church has a community garden where people are coming together and learning skills, even though they’re socially distance, and they share in the bounty in the harvest. That was specifically in response of Covid-19. So that’s an opportunity to happen. But when it comes to the many ideas that we had when we were so focused on the sharing economy, such as shared cars and neighbourhood, we haven’t seen an increase in that recently, or shared tools or shared vacuum cleaners or other utilities. I haven’t seen those models emerge yet.

Simone Cicero:
Do you see that some champions that may emerge to really, like leaders that can maybe build high growth or in general, high impact startups or something like that to really demonstrate that this new space can be taken with a different approach than the usual venture backed approach that brought us the technology, the latest revolutions?

Jeremiah Owyang:
Unfortunately, where I live, and my network tends to have many venture backed people and so that is very common. But I would say the one thing that is common is there are a larger set of investors. In fact, the amount of angels and syndicates that emerge in many ways is like crowdfunding, where it is coming from high net worth individuals, but they’re not the institutional VC firms. Crowdfunding, that has waned in a bit, is not as common and you don’t see startups pronouncing and talking about how much they’ve raised on Kickstarter and Indiegogo that that has passed. Yes, it does happen, but it’s not generally what you hear about. But we do hear many startups are using friends and family money and seed funds and angel investments and syndicates in order to get funded, which is a form of crowdfunding. But those are investors, of course crowdfunding is a form of investment. But the bigger thing, Simone, is that the cost of getting a startup off the ground is continuing to decrease. You just need mostly time and talent and right timing to get cloud-based software. Cloud services is in many cases free. For example, I know the folks at Amazon cloud services, and they offer credits to startups to get going for free, and this is a way to kick-start that environment. Of course, they want to get them on their platform and not defect to Microsoft or to Google Cloud. So that’s why they are offering these things to startups. Never before has it been cheaper to start a tech startup because you can do this. And since people are at home, you don’t need to rely on even co-working or office space, it’s just assumed that you use these free services to get your company off the ground. It costs a few thousand dollars to get going. So I think that is the other economic impact here as well.

Simone Cicero:
This sounds like something that Marx predicted and for sure that’s going to probably impact a lot of the type of businesses that that will be prototyped and created, maybe allowing for also different way to think through good old network effects and scaling across like, many systems thinkers always preached about, and also not really this idea of scaling, concentrating, everything was scaling horizontally, across different local systems where you can just play not just the role of consumer, but also maybe the role of investor, maybe the role of producer, contributor or manager, and so on. Maybe this is the kind of startup economy that we are supposed to see in the coming months?

Jeremiah Owyang:
And since there is 15 to 20% unemployed. In many cases, now is the time to birth a new company. In fact, the biggest companies that have emerged in the tech space came from a recession. Airbnb, the classic example. They couldn’t afford hotels, so they made their own living room available as a form of hotel, a bed and breakfast. So now is the time we will see the next big tech winner.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, if I judge on the sides of the crisis, maybe the leaps we’re going to see in terms of the next technology models may be broader than those that Airbnb and Uber brought about in 2007, or 2006 and 2008. So, one closing question, Jeremiah. I’m really curious to ask you one thing, I see that you are shedding so much enthusiastic comments about Clubhouse and my question would be — in the last few weeks — my question will be: do you see a new emerging way of relating to voice thanks to this new wave of voice based social applications?

Jeremiah Owyang:
Of course, and here we are doing it right now on your amazing and wonderful podcast. So there’s three mediums to think about. There is text base, there’s audio based and there’s video based. And there’s two other factors. There’s real time or asynchronous. Then there’s another factor which is publishing versus interactive. So those are the three different areas. In fact, I should put together a little graphic on that, and I will. Right now many people have fatigue from zoom and there’s been multiple studies that showed you use more brainpower trying to squint and look at somebody as their cameras shaking as they type and you’re straining to hear when their signal goes out or it goes into robotic mode, or your mic is not set up and the screen is small and you’re staring at the same fixed position. It is tiring.
Secondly text, text doesn’t give you the emotion that you need to make this happen. So the in between medium specifically when people want to connect to each other, yet they want to move around the house or they want to go on a walk, or they want to do other things and multitask is voice. Voice gives that emotion. Now tools like clubhouse, our real time voice rooms and there’s multiple rooms like a conference, like Ouishare conference or like a TED conference. You can go into different rooms and hear speakers or you can create your room and you can jump into hallway discussions and learn different things. This is kind of this new applications. You also know discord which gamers use this is the same technology set, or from the 1990s phone lines called party lines where you dial into that. This is the same thing that’s happening now.
That is a hot trend that we’re seeing voice-based collaboration, especially when teams are remote. It’s light enough but not as heavy as video and you don’t have to be pretending like you’re paying attention during the video, you can be doing other things. You’re more efficient, and there’s less social pressure. I definitely see this as a a new way for this to happen and I got to predict in just a few quarters. You this podcast, you might have another version where it’s interactive, where people are dialling in and talking to you live with your guests even though you will be running the stage Simone and Stina. But there will be another aspect of this that will happen. I do think that is the next frontier in terms of communications.

Simone Cicero:
I love it, I really think that these podcasting, audio revolution that you are hinting about, it may really create a new space for having these important conversations that we’re having. So I’m really enthusiastic about that again, as well. I really echo your enthusiasm for this. So, Jeremiah, one last word, something that you want to add, and I would also ask you to tell our listeners where they should catch up with your latest work?

Jeremiah Owyang:
Sure. My Twitter account is @jowyang, my first initial and last name and then I point to all the different things that I have in publishing on multiple websites and other social accounts.

Simone Cicero:
Well, that was a great conversation. I think we’re going to keep talking about this in the coming months. As our podcast, we continue, and we’re going to integrate your insights in the research. So, really it was great to really look into what’s coming up.

Jeremiah Owyang:
Very deep questions. Thank you both. I do have to run. I have another call to prepare for.

Stina Heikkila:
Thank you. Thank you very much.

Simone Cicero:
I see! Thanks very much for your time. Amazing to talk to you and to our listeners: catch up soon!