Episode 67: Trond Undheim on the Future of Technology and a Framework for Analyzing Forces of Disruption

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Hello, I'm Bob Gourley, the chief technology officer of OODA LLC and today on the Oodacast, Tron Unheim. Tron is a futurist, investor, consultant, executive, a speaker, an entrepreneur and a podcaster. He produces the widely impactful podcast Futurized and also the Augment 3D podcast. Trond is also a author and an author of a string of books, including one of my most recent favorites that we'll talk about now. Future Tech. So Trond, welcome to the oodacast.

Thanks a lot and you are way too generous. But that, I guess that's the role of a podcast host. So thank you.

No, really, I'm excited about this and I'd love to talk about your podcast. Would love to talk about the Future Tech book which was really just released. But before getting into that, I'd like to talk a little bit about your background. Can you summarize your career path for us?

Sure. My career path is easy. There is no path. I'm a jack of all trades that based on deep passions, opportunity, chance, and a mix of good and bad luck, I end up where I end up. The short story is I started out interested in kind of Lego and engineering and then for some reason I didn't really end up there. Early on I ended up more in like books and editing and stuff. And I thought I'm going to become an editor. But then really I became a social scientist and got a degree there. Except my PhD ended up being about technology and that locked me in forever. And you know, my entire career has been in technology firms for governments, advising on technology for the eu. And then I was picked up by Oracle and did a bunch of stuff on standardization. Although I guess I was also a little bit of a lobbyist, which one shouldn't really say, but that's probably the truth. And then I worked at MIT for seven years and did a lot of different things in the meantime and underway. I was always an entrepreneur, mostly unsuccessful, but sometimes successful. And then I guess right now I am an investor, which is perhaps a more comfortable thing. I love evaluating and assessing and connecting people. So at the end of the day I'm sort of a jack of all trade connector. I know a little bit about everything and yeah, I'm sticking to it.

Awesome. That's great. Another thing I wanted to ask you about at the beginning of your career, you get this PhD in your dissertation. I noticed I had a very interesting title this is 2002 and the title is what the Net Can't Do. That sounds very interesting, and I'm just wondering what that was about.

Yeah, the whole idea was back in the heyday in 1999, when I started writing this thing. The Internet was obviously very new and very hot, and people who are using it for work, or at least the people selling technologies for work, had this notion of the nomadic worker, which today is something we still talk about. But back in 99, there were very serious marketing campaigns where they were saying something we experienced only this year, much, much later, which is remote work. You can sit on an island and be connected to your workplace and all of that stuff. So I wrote about how impossible that vision was, which feels kind of ironic now that I realize we have come almost full circle. But I'll tell you what, if you want to stick to this argument, I'm sticking to my guns. Remote work has not changed over Covid. I think some of it will happen. But take it from me, who has a PhD in the topic, and I've been working remotely for the last 20 years in it is not for everyone. It is difficult, and it has consequences. My conclusion in the PhD is that if you're doing what I called presentation and convincing work, basically trying to convince people of important things, you are always going to be outgunned by people who are together with authoritative people on a daily basis and have the chance to insert all kinds of things, you know, through the coffee conversation or wherever it is, even in stealthy ways. So technology will always, I think, be inferior to that. And let's see if I stand corrected 20 years from now. But for now, I'm sticking to it.

Yeah, this is very interesting to me. And I just, I filtered that through my own kind of observations in my model of business. I work in the cybersecurity domain with a lot of technologists and strategists and cybersecurity people. And one of the ways we really get work done, we go to conferences. Not to attend the conference, but to host a social hour and get people together and share a beverage and talk and catch up. And so much gets done in that face to face world. And now coming out of COVID I can see it already. Some people are going to want to stay in their basement, but some of us will be meeting together face to face.

And those that meet. Yeah. And you know, Bob, what I figured out is, of course, you know, augmented reality at some point will become nearly indistinguishable to this. I'm not Saying it will not be. I'm just saying we have been for the last 20 years so far from this. And I think nothing was actually, for me more proof of that than the COVID situation, because I actually thought that we were much further. I was sort of like not happy. But I mean, I was accepting these video calls. I was accepting of, you know, all of this type of behavior that happens when you have to fit in these, you know, you know, FaceTime things online. But I realized over Covid that not only for us workers, but definitely for students. And, you know, my kids who had to really suffer through education that way the first few months before, before they figure it out. But certainly even now, as they have figured it out, the technologies just weren't ready. You know, this was not a finished technology. I think we're going to have an explosion. In fact, there's a massive investment right in. In augmented technologies right now. You know, they're of my podcast, but it's going to take a while because the killer applications, they just don't look anything like we think they look like. They're not a one video camera stream with ever better quality so you can see your pimples. There has to be something different, right?

So speaking of your podcast, I want to mention Again, there's two of them that I want to mention, one augment 3D and augment 3D. It aims to pull out these stories behind this new era of industrial operations. And I think that's critically important. And Futurized, which frankly is one of my personal favorites, goes deep into the trends that are moving us all forward into the future and the underlying forces of disruption in tech. I have a feeling that Futurized was part of the reason that you were able to produce your book so well, because you're always thinking about these topics. But I'll be linking to both of these podcasts in our show. Notes. One question on this subject of the augmented podcast, and is your feeling that more industry is moving away from China and into other parts of the world that have such a restrictive controlling government? I hear anecdotally that this is occurring. Is there a shift like that underway today?

I think when it comes to manufacturing, which I believe is the heart of the question here, right there is really no way around China currently. We can talk all day long about diversifying the supply chain, which is extremely important, and figuring out domestic value chains and stuff like that. But, you know, some of that, you know, is coming out in US Government policy right now. They have realized they have outsourced production to China. And it had, you know, guess what, it had some consequences. But the point is these are path dependencies that you cannot fix overnight if you want to try to fix them, they're enormously expensive and probably not even worth the security, you know, benefits of it. So. So that's like generally my point. But yes, you know, by and large, if you can, you will try to duplicate and avoid countries where the risk has just proven to be large, either for security or human rights reason, or just the sheer distance. But when it comes to microelectronics in Shenzhen, it's going to take a while until the rest of the world catches up with that formidable machinery for manufacturing advanced electronics. So, you know, good luck with that certainly on this side of the pond.

Great. Thanks for context now, about Futurized the podcast. One of the reasons I like that so much is you talk about a wide spectrum of issues related to technology, especially disruption in tech. That's also the topic of your book. So let me switch to that, if that's okay. Let me tell you what I liked about your book title is Future Tech. But you did not just say here's my view of the future of technology. If you did that, I would read it because I really believe and know you are an expert in this. But what you did was say, look, technological change is extremely complicated. You then looked at the history of this. You went way back into the history of change. You talked about this phenomena of overvaluing technology's role in change. You mentioned that there's a name for this technological determinism. Then you give us an approach for studying the impact of technology on the future. That's what I like about your book, because after reading this, I can apply that approach to multiple domains and form my own projection of what's in the future.

You are my best reader, Bob, because this is exactly why I wrote the book. This is, of course, the history of my career as well. I'm not there to kind of boast my own ideas. I will have opinions about everything if you do ask me, but that's not really the point. The point is I think we're going into an era where if everyone else doesn't have opinions, somebody is going to actually impose their future on you. So it is imperative for me that people start thinking in longer time cycles. And by people, I mean governments, I mean leaders in business, but I also mean young people, and I mean people in any step in the ladder, in the corporate ladder, because these things I think I have a chapter on polymaths and this used to be a term reserved for the uber brilliant people. I just don't think we have a choice anymore. We all have to be some version of a polymath. It's not enough to kind of be deep in a domain and sort of ignore the rest and just be good communicator. That whole thing was a nice PR ploy. But we're moving into a world that is so complicated. And my aim was just to simplify a little bit and set up some sort of guardrails and, and scaffolding so that anybody can start using those tools to their own benefit and actually achieve insights. Maybe not predict the future. I think none of us futurists try to predict the future anymore. We just present scenarios. It's much easier. They can't be falsified. But I'm glad you said that because it is exactly that. That's my goal for people to use it and to train people to think better about the future.

You know, a word you use early on in the book is framework. And for busy people, I think for all people, it just helps us understand the world better. If you have a framework that orients you to it and then specifically you discuss what you call a forces of industry disruption environment framework, or you simplify that to forces of disruption. I find frameworks are helpful, very helpful in any domain. And I think if we want to understand the future, it is just critically important that we have some sort of framework. I should ask you, what is this forces of disruption framework?

I'll explain it to you, Bob. But I want to say one thing, and this comes from my academic background. Any framework is also dangerous. The simpler it is, the easier it is that you become lazy. So what I don't want is for people to go in there and say now I have a framework, I don't have to think for myself. So secondly, when you apply applies very differently in different contexts. And I have picked a framework with these four forces plus this sort of environmental context around it. They are not enormously unique. They weren't actually picked so that they were unique. They exist out there in various forms. But the point is I have operationalized it so it can be used across a wide variety of contexts. The main point is this. Technology development is not so much about technology. It is really everything else around it. It is the needs in a society, the social forces. That's where it all starts. But then the business models around it can actually make or break a technology. We know this. Whether you're talking about some failed phones that never made it to the market. Or you're talking about any kind of technology that had a long adoption curve or even just disappeared after being launched with bravado and then policy really underestimated. People think maybe government is like, stodgy and old or should stay out of technology or business, but far from it. If you look at the history of innovation, we were talking about the Internet. And it's not just the Internet is pretty much any infrastructure technology. Every infrastructure technology you can think of has been financed by wealthy pockets, whether it's governments or princes and potentates, or it could be private sector big tech that are refinancing the next wave of development and then the context around it. So I call it the environmental context. But it's not just sort of the natural ecosystem which now suddenly has become popular to discuss for sort of everybody, which I'm glad to have happen, because I think we have a lot of time left to figure that out. But it's also our material physical world and how that impacts our thinking, how that impacts our decision making, and how it actually impacts what we can do, you know, in the future. So I have just put all of those things into these four plus one buckets. And I have ways that you can kind of think around it. But the most important thing, there's one thing to think about whenever you think I'm going to learn, you know, quantum computing. Don't go ahead and read quantum computing books. Read everything around it. Read about what governments think about it. Read about the startups that are coming in. You know, so take a very structured approach and read everything surrounding the technology. Because the technology is just a shell. It's everything around it that has formed and shaped it.

Fascinating. Yeah, I like this. I really do. And just one other quick personal story. I was asked about a year ago by a group at Amazon to come in and brief them Amazon Web Services to brief them on the future of technology. I thought, wait a second, these guys are creating the future. I'm just trying to be a fast follower of them. But I decided to brief them anyway because I thought I could do it in an entertaining way. I didn't have your framework yet. If I had your framework, I would have used it in that presentation. Instead, I focused on business models, which is a piece of your framework. But I thought through, okay, what will the future Amazon customers be demanding of them? And that will show them a piece of the future. Had I had your framework, I would have had a much more comprehensive brief. So I wanted to say that, well.

That'S far too kind. But I do think that it does help for anybody, and it's a great point. You know, even Amazon can't see everything. And in fact, it makes them all the more clever, right? It's, it's sort of this old adage that the, the smarter you are, the wiser you are, the. The more aware you are of how little you really know. But then, of course, they are themselves fast adopters of whatever insight they glean. So they hired the smartest guy around, they got you in, so now they're smarter.

You know, let me ask. So you apply the framework in the book to several key technology areas, and you selected these as being important, I think, because they interact with each other. And they are artificial intelligence, blockchain related technologies, robotics and automation, synthetic biology, and 3D printing. I think I should ask why did you select these?

You know, any choice like that is a little bit arbitrary. There are more. I mean, I had about 25 candidates to choose from, but I chose them because I think this decade is really what this book is about. I have other work that's about the next 50 years and quantum and other things would come into that. But this decade, it is what we do around algorithms and how we regulate them, how we deploy them in big data. It is how blockchain becomes conceptualized, whether it just remains a financial technology for innovators or it actually becomes the platform technology for society. It is robotics and the extent to which we can stem a kind of like an automation that doesn't take humans into account, but still achieve all the productivity and efficiency. And the fact that all of these things go together because there is no robotics without AI, that's a very dumb robot that doesn't use algorithms for its functioning Synthetic bio is interesting just because it is now, this year, actually becoming productized as a IT technology. You know, it's making leaps and bounds into a hybrid of data and organics. So, you know, we are moving into an age of bio factories where we can actually manufacture biology using engineering principles that has never, ever been impossible in the history of humankind. And what that will engender is enormous and it won't be resolved in this decade, but it starts now. And 3D printing, of course, is related to all these things because you can now start printing organic material, desktop, metal. This year, in fact, two weeks ago, came out with a printer that can print wood, recycled wood. So now you're getting to really near term, really transformational technologies that are actually all of them connected, somewhat misunderstood, and they have very Little to do with the underlying technologies. It's about how are we going to deploy them, how we're going to ensure that everybody gets the benefit of it. And, you know, what are the clever business models surrounding them? Because if not, they will just be these nice things to talk about in futuristic conferences.

Right. And the key point of your book is we can study these just to know what may be coming in the future. But more importantly, we study them so we can make decisions today on what we want to accelerate and what we want to regulate.

Yeah, that's the point. I mean, the future isn't something scary or it isn't something far off that you can kind of put off as, like, this is a nice to know for every year when we do our getaway, you know, up in the mountains and think about the future, the cycles are much faster. So the future actually, for a futurist these days is like the next three, four years. Even that is hard to kind of wrap your mind around. But if we don't start thinking that way, you know, you're going to end up in somebody else's future and nobody really should do that. You should end up in your. Or at least try to end up as close as possible to your future. Right.

For each of these domains, if you are, let's say, an enterprise technologist, you do need to make decisions today on what you want to accelerate into your enterprise and you want to make decisions about your own policies. And then as a society, we have to think through the policies. Piece of that too. An example I just read in the News Today, news coming out of a lab in Israel where mouse cells were grown into mouse embryos in an artificial uterus. And you can see video of these things. Their organs are functioning, they don't live past a few weeks because they can't really deliver oxygen well enough. But this is something where decisions have been made on the policy for things like that based on geography and what country you're in. That kind of research wouldn't be funded here in the us. Other countries it is being funded and it's accelerating. So it's a classic example of why we need to think through what we want to do and what we want to accelerate and what we don't want to accelerate.

Well, then to that point, I mean, a lot of my book is spent on the fact that governance isn't a government problem. You know what I'm saying? So the nation state was a nice principle that was invented 300 years ago or so, and it worked well for a while. Right. Arguably it had some disastrous consequences on people that, you know, didn't, you know, didn't end up on top of the priorities or who were caught, you know, in the middle as ethnic groups or whatever. But, you know, but leaving that aside, we are now dealing with on a daily basis, decisions that are global in their consequences. Yet where the regulatory frameworks are national and that makes zero sense, it's inefficient, it's actually going to slow down technology, thankfully. So it gives us more time. That's the only benefit of these inefficient nation state based systems. But the ideal system of course, is something of a multi, not just multilateral sort of treaty based, you know, let's collaborate as nations. There are many, many more stakeholders involved. And you know, de facto this is already happening. The Amazons and all, all the big tech companies, which now include all the big banks, pretty much any surviving Fortune 50 company is a tech company these days. So these are the top 50, top 100 companies. And they are already, of course trying to shape this kind of future. But they should in a much more natural way be integrated into the governance framework of our planet. And that's sort of partly why I wrote this book. Because this is not just a question for a government to figure out, or it's not just something where 50 industrialists or billionaires can sit there in some island congress and come up with principles. These are things we all need a debate. And you don't need an IQ140 to take part in that debate because they're human debates.

Right, Very good point. I have another question about each of these and maybe this is an idea for another chapter of this book. AI blockchain, robotics, synthetic bio, 3D printing. One thing they all have in common to me is there's all cybersecurity dimensions of each of these. AI, for example, it's been proven that it's deceivable and adversaries can attack it in multiple ways. They can attack an algorithm, they can attack training data, they can attack the data you put into it. And so AI and also they can manipulate the results in other ways and make it non explainable. So lots of security issues with AI. Blockchain is seen by many people as a positive thing when it comes to cybersecurity. It's a truly indelible ledger. But the adversaries have other ways of tricking and getting things that they shouldn't and committing fraud and deceiving people. So there's security issues there. Robotics. Nobody wants your robot to Be taken over by a malicious actor and do bad things. We've seen all those sci fi movies, Synthetic Bio. It's really important to protect a lot of that info, depending on what it is. For example, if I sequence my genome and that's compromised, well, I've just compromised the genetic material of every one of my descendants on out through infinity. So there's a lot of security issues there. And 3D printing, we could talk about the security issues there a lot. And we have and written about a lot of that. What if there's a design sent somewhere to make a replacement part for an airplane and an adversary manipulates it and they print the wrong design and there's a crash? Well, that's oversimplification. But security issues of each one of those. And that's why I think, gosh, maybe we should think through what's the future of cybersecurity and how does it relate to each of these. Do you have a thought on that?

I do actually. And you know, you're right, it's a future book. It's more than that. I mean it's one of the central questions of our day. My short answer to that question, and I'm not, you know, not perhaps not the best expert on this particular domain, but I would say the only answer to those questions is to distribute the responsibilities and create smaller segmented systems that ideally are actually less connected than the potential would be. So I do not think in this case for all of these systems that they all should be interconnected. We actually need to regulate and create regional hubs for many of these things, create smaller players, less dependencies, but an interoperable framework so that they all theoretically can reconnect when we need them to. But I just think that the single point of failure idea that we have had been operating, which even in security now has been challenged for a long time in other aspects of security. We need to make that count. For non digital technologies or these side spinoff technologies that are deploying it need to have the same principles because there's just too much risk. If everything is one system, whether it's a government or it's an Amazon or a Google that owns all of that data, we cannot take that risk anymore. That's my opinion.

Well, sounds good. Very prudent. Let me underscore something else that you've already mentioned a couple times. And that is the point of studying the future technology is so we can make better decisions today. And you say that technology is really in the hands of humans. And the way you write that near the end, you say there's no shortage of gloom and doom predictions about the future. Nor is there a shortage of optimistic accounts of economic progress based on technological innovation and market growth. As with many phenomena, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Never have hell and paradise been presented to us as two distinct choices. I do not mean that there is somebody offering up that choice in a conventional way, but rather suggesting that given where the world is going, it would be smart to stop and think about what direction we'd like the future to take. Well put.

Well, thank you. I would say the point here is technology is a sword that can be used for good or evil, and we just need to know which is happening. And in order to do that, you need to know what is happening, and you need to know the details of what's happening, and you need to figure out who's behind it, what are they thinking? And more importantly, any technology that was just developed is just a beginning. So there's a reason why these design thinkers start iterating technologies, testing them with real users. But the thing is, this testing typically is, you know, testing with a qualitative small sample. What we're dealing with here, the totality of technologies that I'm describing in this book. I mean, what would it require to test a system that starts to integrate these things? Now, we typically think of testing as like, oh, I have this little gadget. I'm going to test it with you, my friends, and a hundred people, and a thousand people. And then, you know, you do it on the web and you see, and then you have 10,000 responses. You think you have tested it. Well, we now know from vaccines that if you don't have the luxury of time, you're going to play that same game, and you're going to say, well, we're testing it on 10,000 people. We tested it on 5,000 kids. We're going to let it go. But these are risks that we're taking. And it just becomes compounded the more complex and the more connected each of these technologies are. We still have a lot of time. It is not like these five technologies, and perhaps a couple that I've forgotten or that will come on stage in the last, last part of the decade. But we do have to start asking the question, where do we want to go with this? And, you know, is everyone really happy with how this is evolving? I am not a pessimist. I think we can control these things to a certain degree or we can stop them. For example, there's much talk these days of oh, it's too late to regulate big tech, you know. You know, it's like so hard. They rule the world. I mean, that is a load of baloney. Right? You can just regulate that tomorrow if you wanted to. The point is no one has really got a clever idea about how to do it. So the best idea actually is to start on the algorithm side and just implement organizations that are similar to standardization bodies with very wide representation, and they should just regulate algorithms and it should start this year. Why is that not being done? Because not enough people understand that this is becoming a problem. They will understand a decade from now, by which time these algorithms have been running havoc for a decade.

Right.

That's too long.

Right, thanks. Well, I think your book goes a long way to helping us all think through scenarios of the future and what we want it to be so we can make decisions today on what to bring into our enterprises or bring into our home or have the government regulator work with in other ways. So, thanks.

Well, there's one thing I wanted to point out, which is government regulators need to be smart. This is very important. So upskilling our governments is maybe more important than upskilling any other function across the world. So that I would leave because, you know, you can talk all day long about how regulation is necessary, but if it's not smart regulation, it's actually counterproductive. And we all know that. So I want to leave with that, that I'm not going to end up as some sort of, you know, regulation is the answer. Smart regulation is the answer.

Right. And I guess the question is, how do we do that? You and I are both involved with the Atlantic Council, for example, which is a way of generating ideas and producing them and congealing them down to succinct reports that can be digested. I think that's one answer that we can help inform governments globally on the future technology. But how else do we do that?

Well, I think we are dealing. And this goes back to my augmented podcast, which really is about augmentation of the next billion human workers. Right. I think that over the next 10 years, we need to re educate a billion workers. That's what it would take to, to transform manufacturing into the potentials of these technologies we're speaking about here and some others. And in order to do that, we just need to reconfigure training. Training can't be going to a college. You can't go away from what you're doing. It has to be right then and there. It also can't just be Micro training, you know, like a tiny little thing that you learn 10 minutes with a little video. That's also not real training. It is somewhere in the middle. And we need to design systems for it. We need to have an enormous array of mentors. It needs to be scalable. There needs to be other types. You and I were talking before about productivity systems. Digital productivity systems should become commonplace. Every worker should have them. I mean, I work for a company, Tulip, that builds, you know, a frontline operation platform that is kind of available to sort of citizen developers around companies who are not necessarily IT trained. They could be, you know, working on the operations side. But the idea is that the technology needs to be simple. The way that any consumer technology these days is simple. You don't sit there and say I'm going to take a course to go on this website and order food, you know, for lunch. It's a website where you order food for lunch, you need a password and you need to put in your credit card and you order your food. Right. Every IT system needs to be like that. I have a vision that even these enormous E government scandalous systems that, you know, three quarter of them are over budget and fail and you pay enormous amount of money to systems integrators that eventually, you know, you're the fourth system is integrated on the project and you know, you scratch your head and you don't, you don't even understand the system. We need to again, modularize all of these things so that they can be understood by the everyday person wherever they are in an organization and not make them any more complicated than that. So the interface needs to be easier. And then you do need to invest time every day in learning.

Yeah, I agree.

All of us. Yep. Yeah.

Everything you say just, it resonates with me. I've seen example after example of situations where I mean like this, the topic of integrators and government spending money on them to create things they don't need is one that I deal with just about daily or you know, folks who have not kept up with what industry can give them right now. So they take their own money and have their own people try to code something. I see that every single day.

Yeah. And I'm not against integrators. So it is not like being angry at a specific group. It's just that we have created systems that create layers of complexity that of course you want to feed on. If there's a business opportunity to be an integrator, you know, by all means, go and be an integrator. I'm talking about as a systemic choice, it's a poor choice. If I was an integrator, I'd be very happy. So, you know, you got to see these things in context, right?

This is all great context. And I have another question for you, Tron. I wanted to ask a general one. What do you think the future really looks like? Can you give us your view of the future? A couple years out?

Yes, a couple of years out. Not much is going to happen, I hope. I think we will get in the Western world out of the coronavirus pandemic. I have some 70% faith in that. In the next three years. That would be a prediction. The rest of the world will take the rest of the decade to get out of it. Unfortunately, other than that, I think on the positive side, I do think that I'm very excited about some improvements that can and should be made in global healthcare, partly because of that epidemic. But I do think that consumer healthcare will. The price points and the technologies and the sensor networks and broadband and 5G and other things will enable large parts of the world to leapfrog some of the things that have plagued Western health systems. So I'm very excited about that sort of near term as an opportunity to at least even out a little bit the playing field. And even for you and I, seeing the doctor 10 minutes a year does not help me with my chronic sinus infection or any other issue that I might have. Chronic diseases which we all eventually acquire. You need a different type of monitoring approach. And technology is actually a very good solution for some of those things. So near term, those are the things I'm the most excited about. I am, of course, worried about the security side with you. I'm worried about the skills challenge. More long term, it is the technologies we've talked about today. And then if you go even further, that's the subject of my next book, 2050. I mean, 2050. By 2050, I think we have to really reconfigure this world. Otherwise I'm trying to make some analysis of how long we have left on this planet. And currently my prediction is we have about 500 years left. And I think by 2050, we will know whether that is stoppable or not. So, I mean, the stakes here are enormous. So now you see how you got me into predictions.

Right. So this is important for us to think through as a species, as humanity. What do we leave?

Yeah. I mean, would we want to exist or would we. Yeah. Do we want to be a multi generational, perennial sort of species? Or do we want to be an annual species?

I can't wait for this book. So you get me excited.

Well, that's good to hear, Rob. Thanks for your support, and it was a great pleasure to be on your show.

All right, well, thanks, Tron.

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