Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: How to Have Power Over Your Money & Technologies That Will Reshape Us

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Starting point is 00:00:45 Saving money should be an absolute joy. You can spend the money that you save. Nobody tells you that you can't touch it. But you have to have money that you can access when things go wrong. And trust me, things will go wrong. Also, an effective way to get a burst of willpower to resist temptation. And will artificial intelligence and other technologies make your job and career obsolete? We need to be realistic. There are some people who will lose

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Starting point is 00:02:05 The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. We start today with something that's pretty interesting and could also easily win you a bar bet. And that is to bet somebody they can't photocopy a $20 bill. Because you can't. It is illegal to copy money and it is almost impossible.

Starting point is 00:02:36 If you try to copy a US dollar bill of any denomination on a modern photocopier or a scanner, it won't work. That's because in 1996, a series of five dots resembling the Uriyan constellation and then repeated over and over again was added to U.S. banknotes as well as to the paper money from several other countries. Software in modern photocopiers and scanners recognize that pattern of dots and will not copy the money. Even if you try to take a picture that you find online of a $20 bill or something and try to drag it into Photoshop, it won't open. So you can't make money by copying it, you have to earn it the old-fashioned way.

Starting point is 00:03:21 And that is something you should know. Would you say that you're completely happy with the way you handle your money? Are you saving enough? Are you investing wisely? Do you feel like you have enough money? I'll bet not. I think everybody wishes they had more money and wish they had more money saved and invested and wish they had less debt. And maybe, just maybe, had a better handle on the whole thing. Well, here to help is Susie Orman. Susie has been preaching financial responsibility for a long time. She's been on television. She's written several books.

Starting point is 00:04:01 She is really a personal finance guru. She also has a podcast called Women and Money. And she, as you are about to hear, she isn't wishy-washy about what you should do with your money and the reasons why. Hi, Susie. Welcome. Mike, Money Mike. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. So let's begin with this question. What is it that you think, from all the people you talk to, particularly people later in life as they look back on their financial life, what is the thing that older people regret that younger people may not even think about or contemplate that perhaps they should? Debt. Seriously, debt is the biggest thing that

Starting point is 00:04:47 people said, why did I buy that? Why did I have to buy cars? Why did I take out so much student loans? Why did I have to buy such a big house? Why did I have to refinance my house just so I could go on vacation? Debt is really the one thing that makes you feel like you are in financial jail. And a lot of debt, such as student loan debt, you cannot get rid of. So especially from younger people, like in their 20s, in their 30s, even in their 40s, they're always saying to me, Susie, why did I take out so much student loan debt? What should I do about it? I don't know what to do.

Starting point is 00:05:22 And really, debt is the biggest mistake that most people wish they had never taken on. But once you take it on, and a lot of young people take it on without a whole lot of thought, and short of bankruptcy, you've still got to deal with it. So how do you deal with it? If somebody listening has debt and says, okay, well, but I still got to pay it back. So this answer is going to be a little bit surprising to you. The first thing you have to do is you have to call every single person you know and tell them how much debt you have. And I'm serious about this because the biggest problem with debt is nobody knows you have it. So you have all the shame and you feel like you're the only one who's like this. And when you start calling your friends

Starting point is 00:06:11 and you go, I have $10,000 of debt. How much debt do you have? And they go 20,000. And then you talk to somebody else. You find out that everybody around you, number one has debt. So now you don't have to feel shamed about it because believe it or not, shame is one of the internal obstacles to wealth. Fear, shame, and anger because you got to deal with things. And normally when an emotion comes up, Mike, that's when you go out and you spend more than. So you spend more than when you feel less than. So now you have this debt. So here's what you're gonna do. You are going to total up all the debt that you have

Starting point is 00:06:52 and you're gonna arrange it from the highest interest rate to the lowest interest rate. You're gonna try to get your high interest rates lowered and you are going to add 20% to that figure. So if you find out that your minimum payments due on all your credit cards, for instance, happens to be $300, then add 20% to that or 60 bucks. plus the minimum payment due to your highest interest rate card. And next month, when the bills come in and they've now lowered your minimum payment due every month, you're going to stick with the minimum payment due that you were making the month that you did this.

Starting point is 00:07:37 You are not going to send in less. When the first card is all paid off, you're going to take that payment plus the 60 and add it to your second card. And you're just going to keep rolling it down till you are out of debt. Which sounds good, except then your car breaks down or your mom gets sick and you have to take time off work and go fly to see her. And life happens. And life happens, which is why besides getting out of debt, you need to have an emergency fund.

Starting point is 00:08:06 So I've always told everybody they need eight months emergency fund. And they say, well, Susie, I don't have eight months of an emergency fund. I don't have that kind of money. So some money is better than no money. And you really have to make it a priority. You have to get as much pleasure out of saving as you do spending. And time, the other regret that a lot of people have is that they didn't start early. They didn't understand that when you're 25 years of age and you start putting money into

Starting point is 00:08:40 a retirement account, it will grow far faster than when you are at 35 years of age and you start. So time is the most important ingredient in any financial freedom recipe. So there are people who work, they're 25, they're 35, and they've got to put something away for retirement. The best place would be a Roth IRA or a Roth 401k. And in case of an emergency or something, they can always take out their original contributions from a Roth IRA. But these are things they need to know, Mike. They need to know these things. And nobody wants to know any of these things. They just don't. That's the thing is that people hear this and go, yeah, maybe next year, maybe another time. But right now, you know, I'm young and I need to, you know, spread my wings and fly.

Starting point is 00:09:36 All right. So then let me just give you an example, those of you who want to fly. Let's just say you're 25 years of age and you put a hundred dollars a month away in a Roth IRA. And the reason I want you to put it in a Roth IRA is a Roth IRA is the best retirement account you will ever have bar none. Any money you put into a Roth IRA, you can take out without any penalties or taxes, regardless of how old you are or how long that money has been in there. So don't be afraid about putting money in because you can get it out if you need it. So let's just say you put $100 a month in from 25 all the way till 70, which is really the new retirement age today. So you did it for 45 years at $100 a month with just a 9% annual average rate of return, you would have about $700,000. But let's

Starting point is 00:10:35 say you go, oh, Susie, I'm 25. What difference does $100 a month make? $100 a month is $1,200 a year. 10 years is only $12,000. What difference can it make? I'll start at 35. If you start at 35, you would have only about $300,000 at the age of 70. So those 10 years cost you $400,000 and that's at000 a month. Think if it was at $500,000 a month, which is what you can put into a Roth. You said something a moment ago about you need to enjoy saving money as much as you enjoy spending it. Well, I'd love to know how to do that because most people don't see it that way. It's like, you know, you need to enjoy your root canal as much as you enjoy your vacation. And I don't see it.

Starting point is 00:11:31 Well, the reason you don't see it is that who in their right mind would compare saving money, saving money that would mean in case your car breaks down, in case something happens, an emergency, that you actually have that money there to pay for it and you don't have to put it on your credit card. A root canal is absolutely painful. If saving money is painful, then really there's a psychological problem that we have here because saving money should be an absolute joy. You can spend the money that you save. Nobody tells you that you can't touch it. Nobody says you can't ever use it, but you have to have money that you can access when things go wrong. And trust me, things will go wrong. My favorite thing that I'm doing

Starting point is 00:12:27 right now in life is I am hosting the Women in Money podcast. And the emails that I get, and I read every single one of them, they always say to me, Susie, I need money. I just got divorced. I just got sick. I'm maxed out on my credit cards. I don't know what to do. Where do I go to get money? And when you're in that position, it's so sad because all of a sudden you're saying, mom, dad, can I have money? And mom and dad don't have any money.

Starting point is 00:13:06 So the key really is if you really hate saving money, you better ask yourself the question, why? Because, and this is a little deep, but not that deep, is that you and your money are one. If your money is a mess, it's because you're a mess. Because your money cannot do anything without you. You are the one who goes and you earn a paycheck. You decide if you save it, spend it, waste it. Money can't do anything without you. So if you decide to waste it all the time, what is it about who you are that doesn't want to value who you are. I remember talking to you several years ago and seeing you on television, talking about this idea of the amount of money people spend on coffee every morning. If you go to Starbucks every day and get a coffee, how much money you're spending and that if you save that money and made your coffee at home,

Starting point is 00:14:06 that could really help you become wealthy. And there was pushback. You got a lot of pushback on that because people said, well, look, I want to have coffee every morning. I want to go to Starbucks. I don't want to live a life of deprivation. I want to go to Starbucks. All right, then go to Starbucks, get a coffee every day for $3 a day, which is $100 a month.

Starting point is 00:14:29 Oh, do that every day for 40 years rather than having invested it. And that's $700,000 that you just peed down the drain. I'm not saying that you never do it, but every day, I was somewhere the other day and this person came in carrying one of those trays where you have seven cups of coffee on it. And they showed up and they bought Starbucks for every single person in their little cubicle that they worked in. And so they passed it out and they were so proud of it. And then I said to them, by any chance, do you have credit card debt? And they said, oh yeah. I said, well, you pay it off at the end of every month, right? And they go, oh no, we pay the minimum payment too. I go, how did you pay for those Starbucks? And they said,

Starting point is 00:15:21 oh, I put it on my credit card. And I said, and how much interest rate do you pay? And they said, oh, I put it on my credit card. And I said, and how much interest rate do you pay? And they said, oh, we're at 18% because I have a really bad FICO score. So they didn't pay $100. They didn't pay whatever it was, $21. If they're paying the minimum payment due, it's going to take them forever. That's like $75 or $100 by the time they paid it off. And it's the same thing with manicures and massages and all these things. If you have money and you don't have debt and you're fully funding your retirement account and you own a home and all these things are happening, do whatever you want.

Starting point is 00:16:00 But all right, once a month, once a week, you go get your Starbucks. But every day? Really? My guest is Susie Orman. She is the author of several books on personal finance, and she's hosted the podcast Women and Money. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl

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Starting point is 00:17:16 And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation.

Starting point is 00:17:45 And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back.

Starting point is 00:18:04 And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Susie, one of the questions I think people have now because cars have gotten so expensive is, you know, lease or buy because leasing on the surface looks like it's a lot cheaper than putting a down payment and making car payments to buy the car. And you're not a proponent of leasing. So explain why. So if you're somebody who buys a car and every three years you trade that car in no matter what for a brand new car, all right, you can lease.

Starting point is 00:18:54 But if you really want to get the most out of your money, you would buy a car. And if you didn't have money, you would buy a new car for you, but one that's used because the second you drive that car off the lot, if it's new, it depreciates 20%. Totally depreciates 20%. But anyway, if you buy a car, number one, you should never finance it for more than three years. If you can't afford the payments of a three-year financing deal, you're buying too expensive of a car. So after the car is paid off, if you keep it another seven years, now we're talking. Now you're making money. Otherwise, if you lease it every three years, you have to turn it back in.

Starting point is 00:19:46 Every three years, you're going to have a $200, $300, $400 a month payment. If you simply buy a car and in three years it's paid for and now you're saving that payment every single month for seven more years, that's money you can fund your retirement account with. That's why. Good answer. What, were the other ones not good? Oh, of course they did. Just joking. What else do people give you a hard time about or you notice that they are not really paying attention? Have we hit the big ones or what else are people missing?

Starting point is 00:20:32 People are also missing that they really don't have the paperwork in place today to protect their tomorrows. They never think they're going to get sick. They never think they're going to do anything wrong. So once you especially are out there and you have kids, do you know that minors cannot inherit money? So if you are, let's say, 35 years of age, you've just had your first kid, you're married, and now something happens and you have this little kid, what is this little kid going to do if something happens to you and your spouse? What's going to happen? The money will go into a blocked account and they won't be able to get it till they're 18 unless somebody petitions the court. So everybody also needs a will, a living revocable trust, an advanced directive, and a durable

Starting point is 00:21:19 power of attorney for health care. And I know those are all things that wants to make everybody like, what? I don't have any money, Susie. Why do I need that? I've been told only rich people have that. I'm sorry. The less money you have, the more you need those documents. And so it's just, it's sad that there is no financial education out there. Nobody is telling you the right things to do. Nobody is telling you the downside of a student loan that happens to be on an income-based repayment program. And maybe you owe $500 a month on a standard repayment method,

Starting point is 00:21:59 but because you don't make much money, you're only paying $50 a month. Nobody ever told you that the difference between those two, which is $450 a month, is added on to your loan plus interest. They don't tell you that a Roth IRA or a Roth 401k would be better than a traditional IRA or a traditional 401k. They don't tell you the things that you really, really need to know. Don't waste your money on whole life universal or variable life insurance. Only buy a term policy. Be careful of how you are investing your money. How to use a financial advisor. What should they charge you? All those

Starting point is 00:22:41 things. I could send you five emails that I got today from my Women in Money podcast about wrong financial advice that their financial advisors gave them that are costing them anywhere from $50,000 to $90,000 each in penalties. And it's really sad. It's sad. And you're so right about the educational know, the educational part of this. My son, who's 15, has said to me, I think it was a month or so ago, he said, you know what they don't teach us in school? Like, can you show me how do you pay a bill? He has no idea.

Starting point is 00:23:18 And he was interested in knowing. And I said, well, you know, it's pretty easy. But no one ever told him. And he's at that age where he kind of wants to know how money works. And what's very fascinating is I had a kid write into the podcast and said, Susie, I got a credit card when I went to college with an $800 credit limit on it. And I used the credit limit. And now they're mad at me because they want the money back.

Starting point is 00:23:47 The kid had no idea that a credit card had to be paid off every single month. But let me tell you something else, Mike, that I bet you don't know as well. Once your kid turns 18, do you know that you have no legal authority over him whatsoever? You don't have the legal authority to request what his grades are at the school. If he ends up in a hospital for whatever reason, you do not have the legal authority for you to make decisions with his health providers. Did you know that? That's why, you know, years ago, I decided to create products

Starting point is 00:24:27 truthfully, to make it easy for people to do all these things on their own. Because if you were to go to a lawyer truthfully, and get the will, the trust and everything, it's going to cost you at least $2,500. And who has $2,500 for that? So I created about 20 years ago, my own must have documents package, which sells for $69. And I'm not saying this just to sell this to all of your listeners or whatever. But it's something that if you went on, and it's $69, if you just went to suzyorman.com slash offer, you would find it there. What would happen at that point is you could download it, do all these documents, share your activation code that you get with all the members of your family or anybody you want for that matter. And you would have $2,500 worth of documents right on the spot. It is interesting how money really confounds people,

Starting point is 00:25:27 that they make such bad errors in judgment with money, and they are otherwise intelligent people. If you understood how money worked, and money is not that difficult. Listen, I was still a waitress at the age of 30. I had been making $400 a month for seven years. So for me to go from that to where I am today, don't tell me that nobody can, that you can't do this. I was dyslexic. I never got a grade above a C in college, if I can even remember that. But if I can do it, I didn't come from money,

Starting point is 00:26:05 my mother was a secretary, my dad was sick, he died at 70 years of age, he was always in the hospital. If I can really become who I've become and have the knowledge that I have about money, there's not one person listening to this today that has an excuse, not one. Well, as I said in the beginning, you're not especially wishy-washy about the advice you give and how you feel about money, and I appreciate you sharing it with us. Suzy Orman has been my guest. Suzy is the author of many, many books on the subject of personal finance, and she is host of the podcast Women and Money, which you can listen to. And her website is suzyorman.com, and there's a link to that in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Suzy.

Starting point is 00:26:57 All right, Mike. Thanks so much. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more.

Starting point is 00:27:26 A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast

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Starting point is 00:28:59 Steve Brown is a guy who looks into the future of technology, not with wild guesses of what's coming 50 years from now, but what's coming in the next 10 years or so, and how that technology will likely impact our lives and what it means for businesses and industry as well. He's author of a book called The Innovation Ultimatum, Six Strategic Technologies That Will Reshape Every Business in the 2020s. Hey, Steve. Thanks for having me, Mike. So let's dive right in here and talk about some of these technologies and why you think these are so important and why you think they're not that far off and what they're going to do.

Starting point is 00:29:42 Yeah, I mean, you probably can tell from the tone of my voice, I'm super optimistic about the future. We all get to watch Hollywood movies where Terminators stamp on human skulls and Neo runs through the Matrix and, you know, things generally are dystopian in science fiction movies. And I'm trying to be the antidote to that because technology is wonderful and it is going to help to solve a lot of problems for us. You know, there's a good chance that somebody listening to this podcast right now,

Starting point is 00:30:10 or their children, are going to have their lives saved by a drug that's developed in the future in partnership with an artificial intelligence. So let's start with artificial intelligence because I know you're a big proponent of it and you see it as doing many things in the future that, that are very cool. Is artificial intelligence something that's easy to define or is it more of a umbrella term that, that covers a lot of things? Well, yeah, it's a good, that's a very good question because it's sort of hard to define. Um, I mean, it's, it's our effort to create a machine that can do a task as well as a human can. And you do that in a way by, it doesn't really think, but artificial intelligence in a particular, this category of computing that's been called machine learning or deep learning, it solves problems in a completely different way to what I would call traditional computers, like your smartphone or your laptop.

Starting point is 00:31:08 So instead of running programs, AIs are trained by being given examples. And if they're given enough examples, they can figure out rules themselves. And so they learn from seeing examples. So if you show a particular type of AI enough pictures of puppies and enough pictures of cats, and they're labeled puppies and cats, it will figure out its own rules for how to determine what's in a picture. And it can, you show it a picture it's never seen before, and it will categorize it for you. So it's a different way of doing computing, and it enables us as humans to use it as a tool to solve problems that we don't really know how to solve.

Starting point is 00:31:49 And that's what makes it so powerful. You mentioned a few moments ago that you're very optimistic about the future, that technology will do wonders. And yet there's also a lot of fear from people that they'll be out of a job, that things won't work the way they've always meant or always known them to work. Things are going to be too complicated. So address that. Yeah, and that's very natural. And I speak all around the world and the audience reaction is always the same, which is, wow,

Starting point is 00:32:19 this is amazing stuff. And I'm slightly scared by it. And that's a natural human reaction. You know, change is different and difficult, especially something complicated like AI that we don't really understand. But, you know, as I've studied this in a lot of detail, we need to be realistic. There are some people who will lose their jobs because of automation. And we're going to need to work to use the same technology that displaces people from jobs

Starting point is 00:32:45 to help them retrain and get into new jobs. And those jobs will be hopefully better and more fun than the jobs that they left. But for most of us, these technologies are not going to, you know, automate us out of work. They're going to make our jobs more fun, more enjoyable. They're going to help us to be more productive, but more importantly, to be more creative and to augment our ability. So I talk in my recent book about the idea of automation and augmentation. So automation is where you use technology to automate someone's job and they have to go do something new. But for the majority of us, it's going to augment our abilities and help us be more creative. And. But for the majority of us, it's going to augment our abilities and help us be more creative.

Starting point is 00:33:26 And I think as a result of that, we're going to see people enjoying their work, finding it more meaningful, more rewarding, and they're going to enjoy going to work more every day. So can you offer some examples of how that might look? One of the categories of future work is augmented work, where we're using technology to guide us in new ways. So think about a construction worker. Today, they're still running off 2D printed blueprints, and yet they're building three-dimensional structures. So to be able to put on a pair of augmented reality

Starting point is 00:33:57 glasses, working on the job site, look up, and instead of having to try and visualize in their minds where the HVAC system, the electrical and mechanical systems are going to go, they'll actually see it overlaid on the structure as it's being built. And that'll make life easier for them and help them to do their jobs more efficiently. It's helping to visualize that. So that's one good example. So some other technology that you think is going to be really revolutionary like this? You know, artificial intelligence for clinicians, for doctors, to help them see in new ways. There is already an AI that can look at the back of your eye, at the retina, and with the same accuracy as a blood draw, it can predict your cardiovascular

Starting point is 00:34:45 health risks, so your risk of stroke or heart attack. There's another technology from a company called Beyond Verbal in Israel. And they're able to use artificial intelligence to hear what they call biomarkers, vocal biomarkers. So particular characteristics of your voice that are indicators of diseases. They can already hear sleep apnea, COPD, chronic heart failure, coronary artery disease in the sound of your voice, which is amazing, right? And they're working with the Mayo Clinic already and doing trials. They're optimistic. They'll be able to hear diabetes, hypertension, and even cancer in the sound of our voices and give us early alerts on that so we can get it treated early and hopefully get things fixed. Really? How can you hear cancer? That just seems so bizarre to me.

Starting point is 00:35:36 It does, doesn't it? And that's why I said earlier that AI can help us solve problems we don't really know how to solve ourselves. AI is good at finding patterns in data that humans can't see. In this case, it's particular patterns in the vocal cords and the way that our voices sound that betray disease states inside our bodies. And we're going to use AI as a lens through which we can see the world more fully. And we often think about AI powering machine vision so that robots and machines, self-driving cars, can see the world and navigate safely through it. But it's really going to help us as humans

Starting point is 00:36:13 to see the world more fully in all its beauty and glory. But is there real evidence that we're on our way to that? Or is that, well, if AI can do this, maybe it can hear cancer in your voice? Well, I mean, these trials are already going. And I'm, as a futurist, I'm fascinated to figure out what are the other things that AI will help us to see. There's an effort at MIT's Media Labs, Dr. Dina Katabi and her team there have developed, it's essentially a Wi-Fi hotspot, it's a fancy Wi-Fi hotspot on the wall. It just sends out radio frequency signals. But because they've attached that to an AI, the AI is able to interpret that,

Starting point is 00:36:50 and it is able to watch someone sleeping and determine what sleep state they're in. So, if you think about the sleep monitors people wear, a simple sensor on the wall will now be able to tell if you're in deep sleep, REM sleep, light sleep, awake. And that's important because your sleep is an indicator, again, of healthcare conditions. Then they're aiming this technology to assisted living facilities to keep an eye on patients there, keep an eye on people in case they fall over, it will detect that. But, you know, if people have disturbance in their REM sleep or they take repetitive patterns of motion walking around their rooms, that can be an indicator of early onset Alzheimer's. So there's all kinds of projects

Starting point is 00:37:30 that are already underway that indicates this has incredible potential and power to do really good things for humans. Wow, that's pretty amazing. What else? Give me another one. Well, I think the most exciting, let's get away from AI, the most exciting is all of these satellite constellations that are being put into space. We're going to see more satellites go into space in the 2020s than have gone into space in the entirety of human history. And these low Earth orbit satellites will whiz around the planet and they will form a mesh so that we can send a signal up from earth to a satellite it'll bounce through space to multiple satellites and then down to earth somewhere else that's going to bring connectivity to everywhere on earth and it's going to enable us to connect a hundred trillion sensors to the internet by the end of this decade and it's going

Starting point is 00:38:21 to give the digital world that we know has all this amazing capability, the ability to understand what's happening in our physical world, and act upon that and make the world more responsive automatically to human needs. So there's just all of this infrastructure being put in place, that's going to enable amazing innovators to use that to create incredible stuff for us. So give me if if you can, an example of how that would work and what it would do for something specific. So there are also satellites going up that have cameras on them that are connected to AI that are able to look for particular events. So for privacy reasons, you don't get to see the

Starting point is 00:39:00 camera feed, but they're able to look for certain events. So the AI is looking for things like lightning strikes. So if you can spot lightning strikes and fire starts early, then maybe you can dispatch an autonomous firefighting drone or swarm of drones to that spot, put that fire out before it even starts to spread, because it's once they spread that suddenly you get the kind of fires we've seen in Australia and in California last year. So by connecting all this stuff together and making an automated response, maybe we can help the human firefighters to be more successful and put less human life at risk. I think people have heard about artificial intelligence as it relates to healthcare. And you just brought up this thing that, you know, AI could potentially hear cancer in your voice, which is pretty awesome. But what about more everyday medical stuff and how this

Starting point is 00:40:00 kind of technology is going to improve what people sometimes find to be a very frustrating experience dealing with the world of medicine. If you think about when you go to a doctor's office, you know, you may be reporting something that you didn't feel well last week and the doctor's trying to understand, well, how did you feel? And you try and tell them a story about it. With wearables, we'll be able to record data about what's happening in our bodies and maybe even flip that around. So in the future,

Starting point is 00:40:31 it may be your doctor calls you and says, hey, you know, Mike, I'm monitoring something that's going on with you right now. You may not be aware of it even, but I'd like you to come in and just get checked out. So we can start being much more proactive in the way that we care for people. The other thing to think about is, you know, the poor, my wife works in medicine as well, and most clinicians, most physicians are spending almost half their time doing administrative work that has no benefit to the patient. And artificial intelligence will be able to record all of your medical information, present that to the doctor to help them to understand you more holistically as a person when you walk into that doctor's office so they're better prepared, and then take all the

Starting point is 00:41:15 notes that are needed, do all the coding for insurance purposes, and do all of that automatically so that the doctor can spend more quality human-to-human time with the patient. So those are the kind of things that are going to be coming in the next decade or so that I think will improve the way that we all interact with the healthcare system. What is it that's driving this? Is there some new technology that is underlying all this? You know, like, I don't know, that like the invention of the transistor changed everything. Is there something like that?

Starting point is 00:41:49 Or is this just little incremental improvements on existing technology that just keeps making things better and better? A great question, Mike. I'll answer that question by saying if you look back over the last 40 years, there were four, I would argue, big breakthrough technologies that changed the way we live our lives. The first one being the PC in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the emergence of the web and the internet. In 2007, Steve Jobs held that iPhone aloft and we first got our introduction into the mobile era. And at the same time, cloud computing technology emerged that

Starting point is 00:42:25 enabled innovators to innovate more quickly. So four technologies in 40 years, there are six new technologies that are all as big as those, I think, that are being deployed. And it just happens to be that in the 2020s, they're all coming to maturity in the same decade. That's artificial intelligence, autonomous machines, the Internet of Things and sensors, 5G and satellite networks, blockchain technology, and augmented reality. It's just happened to be that in this decade, they're all coming at the same time. So six blockbuster technologies all in the same decade, and they all multiply together. So it's not just they don't just work on their own.

Starting point is 00:43:06 They multiply together like the sensors I was telling you that are turbocharged by AI to enable innovators to do incredible things. So buckle up. It's going to be a really exciting decade to be alive. Of all these new technologies that are coming, and in some instances already here, what are these things that really excite you and keep you up at night? There's so many cool things. Let's pick one.

Starting point is 00:43:32 I mean, I think artificial intelligence is as powerful as any technology we have seen before. And your listeners should think about this as being on a par with electricity, right? Before electricity, we had to have ice blocks to keep our food cold. And, you know, the HVAC was a fan that you would wave made of paper. And, you know, we heated our homes with fire. It has changed the way we live our lives. And artificial intelligence is as profoundly important of a new technology that will change our lives in as profound a way as electricity changed the lives of our great, great grandparents. What of the concerns that people often say about AI that, you know, the machines will get smarter than us, they're going to take over, that this is scary business. I think that needs addressing. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, it's a common concern and a fair concern. But we need to remember that AI is a powerful technology,

Starting point is 00:44:33 no doubt. And a powerful technology can be used for great good or great evil. And we need to be careful about how we use it. You know, I am personally, I'm not worried that Skynet is going to be born and decide that as in all Hollywood movies, it seems humans are just getting in the way and need to be destroyed and kill and kill them all. I don't think that's the issue. Well, that's comforting to hear. Yeah, I know. You know, with AI, it is a powerful technology. I would encourage people to not be fearful of it. We should be cautious. We should ask tough questions. We should ask about, you know, where is it fair to use and where is it not? Do we want a robot to be looking after our elderly parents in the future? Do we want a robot to be looking after our children when we're out or not? We need to ask those types of tough questions. But we should always be mindful that AI is an incredible force for good. As I said, it will probably discover medicines that will save the lives

Starting point is 00:45:37 of multiple people listening to this right now. It will help us discover new materials that will perhaps help us fight climate change, new battery electrolytes, new superconductive materials that enable us to develop energy and distribute it in new ways. I mean, it is a very powerful potential technology for good. The biggest concern for me is not that AI is going to kill us and kill us all. It is that the speed of automation is going to displace people from work at a rate that we're not quite ready to cope with. So that's something that I, that's what keeps me awake at night on the dark side of things. And we'll be fine in the end. It's just in the short or medium term, this could be a very quick transition where certain jobs go away

Starting point is 00:46:31 and we need to retrain people quickly and get them back into new work. What, if anything, comes to mind when I ask you that people like you, futurists, and I know there are several of them who write and consult and look to the future. What have you missed? What have you, some technology that you never saw coming that changed the world or something that futurists were saying this is going to be the greatest thing and it turned out to be nothing?

Starting point is 00:47:00 Anything come to mind? As a futurist, I'm trained to ask fundamentally two questions. And I would encourage all of your listeners, I deputize you as futurists and ask these same two questions when you're thinking about the future you want to build for yourself, which is what is the future we want to build? And what is the future we want to avoid? Very often, we're too focused on the first question. And we don't spend enough time thinking about the latter question.

Starting point is 00:47:24 And the example I would give is social media. When social media first jumped onto the scene in the mid 2000s, you know, we had this great idea that it would be wonderful for staying in contact with old school chums, for seeing photographs of babies, of people who live a long way away when they're born. I mean, all of the great things that social media did and still does do for us in some degree, but we underestimated how people might misuse that for spreading disinformation, for bullying. So I think it comes down to the human factor. Technology is pretty benign. It's neither good nor bad. It's how we humans choose to use it that matters. And if there's anything that I think people like me, futurists, miss is we don't spend enough time thinking about the darker sides of things and thinking them through. technology will turn on us and kill us all, but the humans will misuse the technology and use it in ways that are not intended and to guard against those up front. Well, I appreciate the glimpse into the future. I think some of this stuff is so amazing that if what you say is true, that it's really not that far off that people will be able to

Starting point is 00:48:41 hear disease in your voice and things like that. I mean, it's something else. Steve Brown has been my guest. He is a futurist and author of the book, The Innovation Ultimatum, Six Strategic Technologies That Will Reshape Every Business in the 2020s. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Steve. Hey, I appreciate it. Nice talking to you, Mike. The next time you're tempted to eat junk food or smoke that cigarette you shouldn't smoke or buy that thing you really don't need, try clenching your fists. The Journal of Consumer Research did a study that found that tightening any muscle in your body strengthens willpower. Clenching your

Starting point is 00:49:26 fist or flexing your biceps, that can actually trigger your brain to take control of the situation. It also appears that willpower, no matter where it comes from, is like a muscle that can be taxed and worn out. So use it sparingly. And that is something you should know. This podcast continues to grow almost exclusively because of word of mouth, people like you telling your friends, and so tell another one. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller,

Starting point is 00:50:08 religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections

Starting point is 00:50:21 to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law,

Starting point is 00:50:37 her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator.

Starting point is 00:51:07 Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Redolph Buntwine, wherever podcasts are available.

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