CW 725 - Professor Mark Skilton - Our Amazing Digital Future, Real Estate & Technology, Warwick Business School, Building the Digital Enterprise

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Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to the Creating Wealth Show. This is your host, Jason hartman. Episode number 725. 725. Thank you so much for joining me today, as I am. I'm worn out. We had two weekend events back to back. I've never done that before that I, at least not that I can remember. Of course we had the Venture alliance weekend in Seattle last weekend and then just finished up the real estate technology software and buying event in Phoenix. And thank you for all of you who came to both of those great events. I just thoroughly enjoyed both of them. I tell you just one observation about doing things like this and probably many of you listeners do events or you know, maybe speaking engagements or hosting events of any kind. It is a amazing how much, I mean, I don't know, I'm just kind of amazed by this really how much energy it takes to host an event. And what I mean by that is that, and I guess here's the surprise is that it's not really physically demanding in a way. It's not like going to the gym and working out. It's not like running a marathon or for me running a 5k which would be a big deal because, you know, I don't really run too much. I believe there's a good reason that we have automobiles so we can go 26 miles. You know, I use cars for that type of stuff.

But.

Okay, enough of my silliness.

But yeah, just kind of the idea of sort of being on all the time for so many hours is surprisingly demanding. But instead of saying, and I remember Dennis Whateley teaching me this many, many years ago. He was one of my mentors at age 17 and he's on episode number 150. Dennis, wait.

He.

Jim Rohn, Earl Nightingale, and Zig Ziglar, of course. Gosh, I'm forgetting Zig Ziglar, one of the most important ones, the four mentors that I had at age 17, I was so fortunate to discover them. But Dennis Whateley talks about our language and how we need to manage our language and how our language affects our attitude. And of course, Tony Robbins talks a lot about this, too, and he was one of my later mentors. But Dennis Waitley says, instead of saying you're worn out, or instead of saying you're tired, or instead of saying you're exhausted, say this.

I'm ready to relax after an active day. Isn't that good, though? You know, that really changes the whole tone of things. It changes the whole tone. And how would that apply to us as real estate investors? Well, what if we have some difficulty, come up, some challenge, some bump in the road with one of our properties? Say we get an email that says, I, oh, my gosh, you know, we've got to replace or repair an air conditioning unit, and that's going to cost $1,500. Well, you know, we can decide we're upset about it. We can decide that income property investing doesn't work. We can decide that even though tens of millions of people have been enriched by income property, the most historically proven asset class in the world, we can just make the decision in our own mind that it doesn't work for us, that, you know, this little bump in the road is going to dera our big plans to acquire dozens and dozens or maybe even hundreds of properties. It's funny how we are as humans, we've got to constantly examine our own psychology and manage our own psychology. And one of the ways we manage our psychology is through our language. There's a great concept in the world of attitude and motivation and positive thinking, if you will, and that is that. The most important conversations we will ever have are the conversations we have with ourselves. That is the most important conversation. It's not that conversation with your loved one. It's not that conversation with your significant other, your spouse, your children, or anybody else. The most important conversation you and I will ever have is the conversation we have with ourselves. So be careful what we say. We got to be careful what we say to ourselves, right? And we gotta manage and talk kindly to ourselves, right? But also at the same time of being kind to ourselves, we also need to be rigorous with ourselves, and we need to be disciplined and self disciplined with ourselves. So all of these things are a Good balance. And lest I get off on a big tangent here, as I tend to do, I will save that for another episode. But today our guest will be talking to us, not specifically about real estate per se, but a little bit as we talk about how technology impacts real estate, but our digital future and how technology is going to impact us all in so many incredible ways. As I always say, it's an amazing time to be alive. It's an amazing time to be alive. Thank you again to all of you that came out last weekend to Phoenix and made such a phenomenal event. It was really wonderful seeing all of you. Congratulations to all of you who purchased properties. I know many of you did. I don't really have a final count on that yet, but I know there are probably a couple dozen of you who purchased or at least a couple, not maybe a couple dozen parties, but a couple dozen properties that were purchased at the event. So congratulations to all of you who are taking steps to increase the size of your portfolios. Great job on that and just thank you all for attending the event. I really appreciate it. And by the way, I forgot to ask in our busyness at the event that you turn in your evaluations, your speaker evaluations, so if, if you have those with you still, I know many of you do. We did get some of them back. Please email them over to me or to your investment counselor so we can get that feedback and always, always improve our future events. We would really appreciate that and we love your feedback. So without further ado, let's get to our guests. But do make sure you go check out jasonhartman.com check out the latest properties and all of the good stuff on our website and make sure you're subscribing to the show so you don't miss any episod episodes. Let's get to our guest and talk about our amazing digital future and think of all the ways it impacts us as real estate investors and all the great opportunities it creates. You know, one more comment on that. We did a panel, Oliver and Fernando and I yesterday at the event and we talked about self management and also management of our property managers. Kind of compared and contrasted some of the differences. We talked about unbundled property management service and we talked about a la carte property management services and what was amazing to me is the number of resources that were shared just off the cuff with our audience. So many great websites and tools and digital services and sharing economy type services that we can use to be much better real estate investors. So it is an amazing Time to be alive. And our guest will talk about that. So without further ado, here he is.

Yeah. It's my pleasure to welcome Mark Skilton to the show. He is a Professor of Practice of Information Systems and Management at Warwick Business School. He's author of Building the Digital Enterprise, A Guide to Constructing Monetization Models Using Digital Technologies. And we're going to dive into some of the issues surrounding the sharing economy, the self driving car, what that means for our future, for the economy and so forth.

Mark, welcome.

How are you?

I'm fine, thank you, Jason, for having me. So glad to be here.

Good to have you on. Yep. And give us a sense of geography. Where are you located?

Well, I guess if you got a pin on a map, it's right in the middle of the uk. So smack in the middle of near Birmingham in the uk.

Fantastic. Well, you've written a lot and talked a lot in various interviews about Uber and Lyft. And of course the self driving car is going to have a giant impact on real estate and on everything else in life. Mobility, you know, it's just truly an amazing time to be alive. Parents may not have to cart their kids around so much anymore and the elderly will have access to transportation as they've never had it before in history. So a lot of, a lot of amazing changes. Give us your take on some of them and just start wherever you want.

Well, wow. I agree totally with what you're saying. We're in an inflection point of view how digital technologies, which it could be about the cloud computing or as you say, the connected car, where you've got smart devices like a control system in a car or in the home or in banking that we're seeing and many other sectors now starting to become more integrated with the Internet. And what's happening really is you're starting to see a shift between driven by probably two areas, automation in a broad sense. So like the connected car being able to self drive, still not quite there yet, but we're starting to see pilots now happening in America as well as the Nordic countries and I think over in Asia as well. Now it's happening a lot faster than a lot of experts are expecting in which automation can do things that humans can do, which hitherto we thought, well, you know, these are things that are way too complex for machines to understand, you know, the direction of traffic and complex scenarios like that. So we're starting to see really what I call embedded intelligence into everyday objects like cars. I set the home. So we look at, say Entertainment center, which is almost like the control system to the house, if you will. Still not there, but we can just see tantalizingly at the edge. Now we're starting to see technologies. I mean, I have a friend in LA who, you know, he gets his remote control. He's got a remote control for everything, right? You can control his fire, his heating, his lighting and everything. And what we're starting to see is sensors, as we call sensorization, in the places that we live, where we travel, where we work. And this sensorization is giving feedback into the way we do things, improving hopefully our lives, but also potentially replacing the other key thing is productivity, competitiveness, replacing human jobs potentially, or changing this. You say real estate, the value of the way assets and buildings and services can be built in the new 21st century economy. So it's really understanding what is happening. And you mentioned Uber and Life and Lyft and how that is starting to play out as a kind of microcosm of the bigger picture where we can have on demand through a mobile device, which I always like. A quote from Hilton Hotels, the head of marketing there a year ago, as part of my book, she said, the remote control to the world is your mobile device. Which I thought was a great quote if you think about it, because you can basically order a pizza, pay for your movie, you can basically surf the Internet. I think some survey said that maybe what, two, three hours a day we spend on average on a mobile cell phone. I guess you and I may be even longer than that.

I can go on and on. So I think the realities are automation, the realities are changing the way productivity, both in the small you and I working, or our companies or the society, and really the way governments need to address this because it's starting to change the whole dynamic of marketplaces, of course. So it's a completely top to bottom, left to right, wherever you are, even in the developing countries as well as the developed world, is starting to see this pervasive digitization effect, starting to sort of diffuse either radically or through mobile cell devices or whatever, starting to become part of it.

I sometimes think about the amazingness of the IoT, the Internet of things, and how we are really, really, truly in this amazing environment where things are being monitored and controlled from our mobile devices. The one that might amaze me most, although I'm not sure it has the biggest impact on the world, but it's sort of really, truly amazing, is my toothbrush. My toothbrush, which is connected with an app on my iPhone. I can monitor my brushing Habits. It is truly amazing. Much less change the lighting and the temperature in the house and the alarm system and the cameras and so on and so forth. Truly amazing in so many ways. But I don't think any of us can even grasp how far this goes and how quickly it happens. Just the, the inflection point, the tipping point in the digital economy is truly mind boggling. But Mark, I've wrestled with this next idea and I'd love for you to just take a stab at it as an interesting thought experiment. We talk a lot about the economy on the show. We talk a lot about real estate markets. And of course for real estate investors, it's rather important that their tenants have jobs and earn money. And with automation and robotics, there is a hu fear that there will be massive unemployment in the very near future. But if we look at the past and we look at all the technologies that have been introduced, they've only created more jobs ultimately and created more prosperity. And added to this endless, endless insatiable number of human wants and needs. We may think that all of the Uber and Lyft drivers will be replaced by self driving cars. Sure, that will happen. We all know it's coming and it's coming quicker than most people think. But those people, they can't become robotics engineers, right? Not, not many of them at least. But there are so many other wants and desires that maybe those people can fulfill that robots and automations can't. I don't know, it's. It's a very big question mark in my mind. What are your thoughts?

Yes, I'm going to illustrate it with an example of an airport. I did a digital study there. But before I go into that example, I think is a good way of explaining with the real estate aspect to that. I think the fundamental thing is really the use. You know, you said economists are saying that. Well, every technology revolution, you know, the industrial revolution and now the information economy, every new technology changes, has destroyed the old way of doing things, but created new ways of doing new jobs. I think the $64,000 question this time around is, I think is the net difference going to continue to increase with automation, with robotics or with artificial intelligence helping us do our jobs quicker or better. If they are also replacing the need for blue collar or white collar workers, as they say, the question is this time round is actually a net loss in the total available jobs to the human workforce. That's the critical question. I think a lot of the economists and other government society look at you just look at, say just quickly in terms of the study of taxation, how governments collect tax from people who are working. Obviously if you're working, you can pay tax, but if you're not working, you're not paying tax. So the question around that is how will automation change the tax profile, that is the income that the governments can generate. That's one big issue. But I think just to get back to the question around, how is it going to change? I think if you look, go back to my airport example, at the airport, you've got lots of different people walking through, passengers going through the airport. They just want to get on the plane, right? You've also got, you know, duty free or services along the way, restaurants, bars, shopping services. And then if you're depending on type of traveler, frequent traveler, or somebody who may just be coming along to see mom and pop for the weekend or whatever, they all have different needs. And then of course, you then have the airline handlers, the third party people who may or may not be working for the airline that you're going to be boarding, etc. What's happening is in digitizing that space, the value is changing. In other words, you've got to think about how can I keep the attention of the traveler coming through my place? And this is an analogy I'm giving you for what is in real estate now in the digital world. And what's the two points I want to focus on is what's happening in the airport design is they're starting to realize that we need to, to augment reality, right? So we can see the smart adverts are saying, well, do you want to buy some stuff while you're waiting or can we help you with your services if you want to do something while you've got an hour to kill or whatever. The question around airport design now, customer experience and services is thinking about how can I use digitization to augment the space to become bigger than the physical space it is. So there's a physical space and then the virtual space, right? So I'm talking not just virtual reality, which is another issue, but it's more around thinking about the physical and the virtual spaces that we are in now. You can be in a connected car. I mean, we were, you know, we were just joking earlier about, you know, we're going to be using, you know, Uber or Lyft or whatever. But what are we going to do in that car? If you got an hour or two hours in the car, we want to work, right? We might want to watch some movie or entertainment or we might want to have A meeting, you can still work and you can get that productivity buzz. You know, you can get the 10, 20% uplift in adding more value in the moment that you're working or living or playing in that space. That's the key difference that we have to think about in digitization. So for sure, you know, that might change the way the role of the people working at the airport. And I'll just give you another example where I checked in and I had to get a hire car from, I can't remember which, which company it was is in San Francisco airport or wherever it was last. And I didn't have to use the human.

Attendant. I said, well would you like to use this TV screen which you can dial into our headquarters and use an electronic screen and just do it over the air. The physicality doesn't matter anymore. That's the critical thing. Quickly on the second point.

Well, one of the things you didn't mention though, but it really kind of goes without saying, but I want to make sure we say it is that now with all of this virtual space available and with this extra time available, productivity is going to skyrocket. I mean look at what Google did with like, you know, the metric that many companies look at is you know, revenue per employee. And 10 years ago that just soared with some of these tech companies. And Google was of course the lead of that. You know, you used to to get productivity per employee of X and now it's five, ten times that number. It's mind boggling the amount of scale. But what were you going to say about that?

No, I totally agree and I think it was really the point is not only productivity but it's about micro location. Right. So we can do. The value of the advertising space is not just a physical advertising space, it's the virtual space as well that you can't see. You can know what a landlord's got to do. What are the airport going back to my analogy, what is the value of the moment that you're passing through? How can we get the, what we call attention of the eyeballs to be looking and paying attention? The attention economy. And this is the complete reinvention of marketing. You know, this is what's quite exciting and then the sense that airports and other places are starting to realize that we need to engage in both physical and virtual ways. You look at the ibeacon technology, the way they're trying to get that kind of integrated experience with customers and this is all about real estate of course, is how can they create better value for Advertisers for engaging people, for sort of making those spaces either physical or virtually more valuable. But the second quickie point on that and back to your Google productivity thing is then using machine algorithms either to replace human activity or to use back to virtual reality or augmented reality, which is starting to break. I would say that you look at Amazon, Echo Alexa, you look at the Google home thing, that's starting to happen now. Got pretty good speech recognition going on there now that's starting to break. 2017 I think will be the year it really takes off. What's happening there is this artificial intelligence, if you will, is starting to augment the space. Not only the intelligence of the space, but actually you can, can do more than you could physically do as a human in that space. You'd make recommendations to you. It can make much more customized advice and guidance and services and we haven't really seen that yet. And this is really what is the opportunity to look at it positively. There may be a downside, privacy opting in. Do we want to be interrupted while we're trying to do things or how are we going to make choices between different aadd.

And don't forget ADD as a downside.

We're too much demanding our attention. Okay, so where does this go? I mean when I mentioned that issue of robotics and automation, do we just as a society become so much more prosperous? Do we have productivity skyrockets, more leisure time is available for entertainment, like you mentioned watching a movie in the self driving car, et cetera. Do things just get better? Or do we have half the population unemployed in civil unrest? I don't know if the future is dystopian or incredible. It's kind of hard to tell.

Well, it depends. I mean I'm a kind of a half full guy so I kind of try to look at things in a kind of what can we do? Because I believe that there is a nature that we do want to survive, not try to kill ourselves. But if you look at the current pushback in the States and also in, in Europe as well, around globalization, where the shift of jobs between markets between different countries is starting to raise questions and people are starting to bite back on that, the popularist movements and that's a political issue. Popular issue. But if you think, well if that's fairly a reaction against changes in automation or sourcing and where jobs are going to be going, I think if you look at automation, the next wave if you will, where robotics could start to significantly replace self driving cars, I mean I think it was a number in the UK that, you know, there's the current fleet truck driving market. I think it employs about 2, 200, 300,000 people. Now what are they going to do? If you can do automated driving of lorries in America, the number must be.

Driving just transportation alone. Just transportation alone is one of the largest industries on the planet. And you better translate for our audience. What is a lorry?

Yeah, sorry, that's the same thing. You know what I mean? But that's the narrative that we've got to be focused on in terms of understanding. Back to your question around. So, you know, there has been this talk of, in economics and government circles around should there be a minimum, minimum wage? And I think there have been some pilots again in the Scandinavian countries. I think even in Switzerland we're looking at giving people a minimum wage of 20, $30,000, $50,000 or whatever. Because the narrative is there isn't going to be that kind of economic job for everybody or there may be some uberization part time sharing of jobs. You know, I think this is going to be a significant issue about what are we going to do with people, what are we going to do with time? You know, I just look at my own children and they're looking for jobs and they're looking around locally or globally or moving around. You know, how are we going to invent the work that we need to keep people engaged. And I think this is going to be one of the side issues that will become quite a significant political issue in the probably the not too distant future.

Yeah, I do too. The interesting thing is that we've always done it in the past. There really has only been fairly short lag times historically in people retooling and, and going to work in different fields. You look at the IT revolution and at first we thought, well, the computers on everybody's desk are just going to kill jobs and what are all the secretaries going to do? But there have been whole new industries created. Obviously the question is the technology seems so advanced now that I just wonder how many people with jobs that will be replaced can adapt to that or do they just do an entirely new thing? I don't know. I don't know the answer. I just know the question.

Well, I think you look on the news and you see large retail companies like Walmart and others downsizing their headquarters or looking to invest in Jet.com to try and compete against Amazon. And then this morning I was listening to the radio about the oil and gas industry. The oil industry still continuing to invest in, in oil exploration. And they were talking about renewable energy as a different kind of market and why they invested in that. I think the reality is that what's coming over the horizon, the digital horizon, if you will, is the need to rethink about what is. Back to my question about the airport. What is the value proposition you're going to offer in the digital economy? What is your role with your people or with your automation? It's the redesign of the customer experience. In the case of the oil industry or with large retail. The issue there is about, well, what are the businesses, are they going to go forward? They're going to have to find new markets like renewable energy in the energy sector, like an online kind of retail experience that can compete against Amazon being the leading in this area. I think, as I say, it's a reimagination of what does a business model look like, understanding the role of technology of the future in that place. But it's fundamentally changing the way you and I consume services. I mean the fact we're doing this webcast right now is a totally different thing that what, 15, 20 years ago would have been unheard of. It's understanding where this new market is going and being able to invest in that. And I hope, and I'm a positive kind of person, is that we need to be generating roles and skills and jobs that hopefully will bring people along that way and provide a prosperity for everyone. 1 But no, the maths, if you look at it, you know, if you look, go into a business model in a banking situation or in insurance or in retail or other sectors, you just do the numbers on it. Then do you need that headcount? Do you need all those people doing the old physical world? The answer is probably no. But there's a drop in the number of humans that you need. Then there's obviously more automation and services and more skills to maintain that kind of high end digital technology. Well, why can't you use that as a new outsourcing service? Probably you can see what I mean. It's still trying to figure out what that is and I think it's a challenge of our times and I think that's one of the challenges that going forward is understanding that new model for customers and companies.

Well, it is certainly an amazing time to be alive. No question mark. Give out your website and tell people where they can find out more about you and your books.

Yeah, sure. Thank you very much. Well, my personal website is markskilton or one word.commarkskilton.com or you can go to Warwick Business School and Google me there. I'm one of the professors of practice there and my latest book is Building the Digital Enterprise from powergrave Macmillan.

And Mark, just before you go, we touched on it, but we maybe didn't really touch on it. Just, just what is the thinking over there and with whoever you talk to about the self driving car and its effect on real estate. I've been predicting the rise of suburbia, a resurgence of interest in the suburbs because the last 20 years or so there's been a resurgence in interest in the city and we've seen these urban cores, a lot of nice redevelopment there. I don't think it's been maybe as good as people have expected because it's awfully hard to push the crime and the homeless out. But those problems exist. But certainly, you know, walkability and we've seen more communities like that, more mixed use development, at least in the states. Europe has always had that. The States have been known for suburbs for decades now. But I'm kind of thinking the suburbs are coming back.

If the commute becomes less meaningful than ever before in history, as I think geography is less meaningful than it's ever been in history. That bodes well for the suburbs, I think. I don't know. What do you think? Am I right or wrong?

You're probably ahead of your time in terms of about five to ten years. I think the two points quickly I would make is infrastructure. I mean I'm doing some work around 5G, right. And I think one of the caveats, look at Google rolling out fiber networks and the challenges of doing that in the city space. I think it's in the sense your vision is totally correct, that there will be a re. Re urbanization, an expanding landscape if you will, of other places to work. But that needs to be predicated, does it not, by fast broadband infrastructure. And I think what I'm seeing in Europe and the UK and the work I'm doing is a lot of the focus back on the city, the smart city. And trying to get the infrastructure right is really one of the critical necessary steps to enable all this. Because sure, you could work in a nice place in the countryside, but you've got to have high broadband speeds. You then got to then have the other infrastructure around you to be able to create the sort of same work environment wherever you are. And I think the other quickie point is around economists, they talk about agglomeration, which is a fancy name for clustering if you will, of a. I was up in Liverpool, a city that I guess your People in America would have heard of, obviously with the Beatles and whatever, and, and Liverpool development is kind of looking at well, how can we create a sustainable job market in that city? And this is the mindset that we're starting to sort of see challenged by digitization, through globalization, through regional interregional competition using digital superhighways. And so in the old world we would be talking about clustering, creating a sustainable job market so you and I could move around in a, in the physical space and see a career progression. I don't have to move to Scotland or to Europe to get my next career move. It's all local, you know what I mean? I think what's interesting about digitization, you're right, it will create the opportunity to work, telework or work remotely. But then the interesting question is how will it preserve the clustering of the jobs where all the skills are. You look at Silicon Valley or Silicon Fenwood, Cambridge, of course, and then other places you have that clustering model of physical and the operations, right?

No question, people definitely cluster. But I don't know if I made myself really clear enough. What I was saying is not people would work remotely. I mean, I remember way back in the, I think it was the mid-90s when John Nesbitt, who was the futurist who wrote megatrends and megatrends 2000 and so forth, I'm sure you're familiar with his books. He talked about how he moved to Telluride, Colorado because it was this beautiful area. He didn't need to work in a big city, whereas he would have had to before. And his big innovation he was talking about was, get this, wait for it, Federal Express, FedEx. It wasn't the Internet. And what I was saying is that people will still cluster and maybe work in cities to some extent. We already know they're telecommuting now, so that trend is already a foregone conclusion. And certainly faster bandwidth will.

Help make that even more so. But what I'm talking about is people can still physically work and cluster, but they can live further away, right, with the self driving car if they can just get in their car and like being on a train, right? You know, have breakfast, take a nap, do yoga, work on the, their laptop, whatever it is for that hour commute or even two hour commute that is sort of not really even a commute anymore. Right.

I know I was visioning that there could be in the future these cars where you could just board this car and you could stay on it for a couple of Days like a moving hotel. I'm just being slightly sci fi now. Elon Musk has got his batteries gigafactory working. You can just slot in the batteries while you're driving. I'm just being slightly silly, but the idea here is probably not.

That was, that was a Tesla innovation a long time ago. They never went with that, the changeable battery.

But yeah, it's cool, go ahead. But I know, yeah, I agree with you that I think there is a reimagination of the spaces. As I was saying about the airports or the cities or the, the wider places that we need, we do not need to physically be together to be able to do, to do stuff in the, in the new economy. And I think it's how information management will be, you know, be able to give you all of the knowledge and experience at the place. Either use FedEx or you got drones, of course, which the FDA and others sort of the FFA try to establish that as a kind of potential way of. I think the narrative is very much around how to enable this new world. Because at the end of the day, the way I often teach it in my lectures is you've got 24 hours in the day, you've got 365 days on average. You may spend 10 to 20% of your time online. Let's say you've got to sleep for eight hours or less, depending on your job. And you've got other things, other chores. On average you've got about a 40 to, let's call it 60% white space of data and experience during that 24 hours that you're not connected, you're not doing stuff that could be augmented by digitization. One side might say, well, that might be a good thing. I don't want to get over digitized, you know what I mean? But there's this kind of, this opportunity space, if you will, that when you're traveling, which could be say two or three hours a day, if you've got a long commute, if you do the numbers each week, it adds up to about maybe you spend half a day a week traveling, right? That's an opportunity space for productivity improvements, real estate. Again, if you're looking at ways in which you can use assets, physical assets, and you have this sort of, this very popularization now of crowd innovation centers and you can set those up anywhere. Now innovation doesn't have to be in a place. It could be done as a collective collaboration with hackathons and stuff like that. Digitization allows us to reimagine how we can use tools and techniques that in the old world would have just been impossible. Now we can do stuff because you've got fast connection speeds when they work. We've got big data now becoming a tool. We've got algorithms and artificial intelligence, robotics, all these things on the edge. 3D printing, additive manufacturing. Starting to change. Where we might be thinking about those in the near future. I think the narrative is really understanding how does my experience, my customers, my products and services change in this world. And you know, as I tried to illustrate with the airport analogy again is it's a very different kind of story. It's all about the attention and about the value that you can create. It's a co creation, digital intermingling, digital preservation. The life cycle of a customer experience is not just at the airport. It's of course starting with the dream or I want to go on a vacation. It can start many months before you even arrive at the airport and then after you've left. So the life cycle is extending with the opportunity to not just connect at the dots in the moment of the transport, but actually before. How do you connect and how do you offer services before to get people to use things, you know. So it's a complete reimagination of the customer journey, life cycle, which is a whole nother story.

It really is. It really is. And we have only seen the tip of it. Whatever we think we're going to see nowadays, I think the future will just amaze us in the next five to 10 years. So Mark, thank you so much for joining us today. Appreciate it.

Thank you very much, Jason. I've enjoyed it. Thank you.

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