What’s in Store for Tech With Futurist Mark Esposito

Mark Esposito, welcome to Minds Worth Meeting. Happy 2025.

Happy 2025, Justin. Thank you for having me. And my first professional event for the year. So very happy that we kick off with our conversation.

Yeah, and I appreciate you taking the time to be here. Obviously, a lot happened in 2024. I'm sure a lot more is going to happen in 2025. So we're recording this for our listeners at the beginning of the year in January. So what are some of your takeaways technology-wise from last year? What really made an impression on you?

[Speaker:YURI] So, you know, I do work, as you know, within the AI field among other areas. And I knew AI was becoming the conversations that every single organization wanted to have, but I wasn't expecting this to become so widely distributed across the world. I thought at first it would happen in country like the US or in Europe, but I travel enough so that ranging from Brazil to Asia to North Africa, the conversation on, on AI was becoming almost like a common denominator. This was for me a surprise. This, this distribution, this permeability of the technology, at least at the conversation level, was not expected, to be honest.

It's interesting because we've heard so many experts say the same thing that You know, obviously this has been developing, at least pop culture-wise, ChatGPT, we've been hearing about it for about 2 years now, but 2024 really felt like a kind of inflection point where it went from a novelty to we really need this for our business processes. Are you seeing that same thing?

Absolutely. At least from a perspective of, I think, the awareness, this is where we are right now. This has become a conversation that has priority, no matter whether you are dealing with, you know, industrial companies that still have physical production, whether you're dealing with marketing agencies, whether you're doing a conversation with the education providers or healthcare. So I think the awareness is today much more evenly distributed than it was before. I still think there are gaps and we can of course go deeper into the conversation. So I think there's a difference between the perception that this is, something that everybody appreciates or at least talks about. And then the implementation of these technologies on the field, that's a different ballgame. And I think this is also what I have seen in 2024 is that the lip service was always there. But when you go and try to scrap a little bit the surface, you realize that some companies have understood it also at a deeper level of integration. Other companies haven't crossed the bridge yet.

Yeah, and I definitely do want to go deeper into that. I feel like there's a bit of an education gap in the sense that, you know, an executive's kid might say to him, hey, you have to do generative AI, you have to do ChatGPT. And, you know, they go to the board and say we have to do generative AI, but don't really know what that means. So like, what's the next step from knowing it's a thing to understanding how it's going to help your business?

I think if I could simplify my own understanding of what I have experienced with both governments and organizations, there's a cultural dimension that tends to be underplayed. In many organizations or governments, they think that it's the technology that becomes self-explanatory, but what they sometimes miss out is that there's an entirely cultural compound that needs to be built before this is going to be even a conversation. So So that cultural shift is quite important. The second step, which is where I think we are today in terms of where I find a recurrence of challenges, is turning that awareness into strategy or strategy formulation so that it's not necessarily just the idea of having AI for the sake of it. It really is embedded into the value chain of an organization. Or if you're looking at, you know, governments into how the public sector is working. Those two steps, the cultural mindset that is building this compound and the strategic formulation is really where I find the difference between organizations or entities who have understood it and those that still have to have a form of literacy towards that. So it's, you know, it's a journey in many ways. It's not downloadable. It's not something that you can easily replicate. You have to build the context for your organization to be able to use GenAI, but AI in general.

Right, right. And I feel like the on-ramp is longer than a lot of people think, that you don't just flip a switch and, hey, we have AI. Can you talk a little bit about that process of, you know, from awareness to actually getting an ROI on AI systems, AI tools?

Sure. So see, Justin, where I found that there is, uh, opportunities when suddenly a clear area of intervention or a pain point is identified. Maybe we have already started to have a first inkling of digital transformation and we have understood the difference between running organizations like we used to and running organizations through technology. I think this is where I found almost like a threshold. When that happens, then the quality of the questions that we're asking define whether we need AI or something else. There are circumstances where we don't need predictions or we don't need detection of patterns or we don't need delegation of tasks. We simply need to transform a process from obsolete to contemporary. And that, you know, a software would do it for you, right? I think there are circumstances where programmable chatbots would be good enough. Think about, for example, how customer care today on any of the numbers we dial, right, is largely integrating a number of functions within a menu that goes from 1 to 0, right, to 1 to 9, right? And so somehow there are boundaries that do not necessarily require AI tools per se. They are simply sound digital transformation. There are other questions that instead they are coming as AI native because they are taking into account the fact that this is a question that likely could use the delegation of agency to an algorithm. And those are the kind of questions that define organizations that are becoming AI-driven in comparison to those that haven't yet necessarily, like, transformed into that.

Right. So AI for the sake of AI is not the way to look at it.

Absolutely. See, there is a— I think it was a— this is trivial information, but I think no long ago there was a survey from one of the Big Four asking how many of those companies saying we do AI really do AI. And I think the number was close to about 50% say they do, but they don't. The rest, they do. So I think we still have to, to like go deeper into the verification of what defines an AI company, except that saying it, that you want to do AI doesn't necessarily make you do AI.

Right, right, right. I definitely want to go more into the agency part of it. I feel like the talk about agentic AI and AI agents now is where the talk of generative AI was not even last, maybe 2 years ago. And I feel like it's going faster. Can you tell us a little bit about if somebody like me didn't hear of agentic AI before this, Can you give us just a quick primer on what that is?

Sure. Look, it goes hand in hand with the transformation of the internet that happened almost like a trigger after COVID. So just, just to give a bit of context, the size of the internet, that's an infrastructure of exchange, is today bigger than before 2019. We estimate in majority of industrialized economies, the size to be about 30% larger. With more, more internet, we do have more decentralizations. So there is more peripheries that now have been impacted by the use of these technologies. And this is what the narrative around Web3 tends to go. The idea that the web went from centralized and a marketplace to decentralized. Agentic AI actually trails on the very same narrative that we have an expansion of the internet by decentralization, and we delegate some of the tasks to algorithms to take care of an entire process autonomously without any form of intervention from our side. So it sounds more, I think, to some degree, it sounds probably more mystique than what it is. It could be, for example, a payment that is automatically verified and sent over, right? It could be a verification that we're doing with a Face ID on our smartphones that suddenly unlocks, you know, points or privileges on a Fidelity card. So it could be any form of delegation of agency to the algorithm that doesn't require verification within the standard distribution. Of course, when you have anomalies, you tend to resort to human intervention. That's what they call human in the loop. But this expansion of the algorithm from a control environment where we used to basically say supervised, unsupervised, and then eventually try to get algorithm to do specific functions was always very centralized. GenAI was the very beginning of this foundation models. They have— they happen because we have millions of users on generative AI interfaces. And the GenAI is the implementation of the expansion of the size of the infrastructure into specific tasks. So this is why we are seeing it almost like following a path that started from GenAI in 2023, expanding into sort of like the use case, hundreds of million people using this, and now the implementation towards specific applications that is really where GenAI is gaining traction and momentum as well.

Yeah, and do you see that becoming widely adopted in 2025, or are we going to need, again, similar to GenAI, are we going to need a year to really understand it and then it starts getting implemented widely?

I think more and more. I think there, there, there are two possible interpretations of this. The first one is that if we're expanding the spectrum of use cases of GenAI, we're going to find more use cases also for agentic AI.

Sure.

One of the challenges that we have today, especially in small medium enterprises, is that the range of functions they use is very narrow. You could, you can count them on one hand, right? And this is very different for multinational companies because they are much more capitalized. And so they could explore more, they could pivot more, they could do more experimentations. So if we are able to expand the, the, the almost like the spectrum of reference for organization to use more function of AI, then one way to to do this at a relatively low cost is to tap on agentic AI. So I think agentic AI will happen as a consequence of having expanded the use cases. It won't happen just because people will find this cool. It's because it requires to be integrated inside of a specific choice that discretion to say, I want to do it, is important.

OK, so you can't just skip the steps before and say, We're doing agentic AI this year.

No, see, Justin, because of what I think we were saying before as well, there's a whole transformation of the workplace when you're doing agentic AI. The delegation of power to algorithm does not necessarily displace humans, but it does augment them. And the augmentation requires training. That training in a lot of circumstances, not where we want it to be yet. Two days ago, the World Economic Forum. So two days ago, we're talking early January 2024. The World Economic Forum has published the 2025 report on jobs. And one interesting story about the infographics they produce is that there's a significant number of people, roughly 40% of the workforce, that has not yet been trained to use technology adequately. And so you might find that there is the board intention to go in that direction, but you don't have the capability on the talent front to support the integration. And that sort of like integration of the labor force into the skills that are required to run, uh, GenTech AI is critical because one of the things that sometimes we do not consider, the more we're delegating tasks to technology like AI, the more we actually go and generate an exception for humans to basically interfere or intervene. So we don't displace humans, we have to reallocate them according to that, how we are reframing the task in the first place.

Interesting. And as we move ahead into the year and further into this kind of implementation, I know something you write a lot about is governance. Are we going too fast? Is the governance not catching up quickly enough?

Look, I don't think governments have been able to be fast enough. I think there's a, there's a subtle balance between the expediency of innovation where we have to innovate is the nature of advanced economies and the legitimacy that comes from governments regulating. I don't personally find that governments have been able to be on par with that. I find them to be a bit behind. Because they're behind, sometimes they overdo governance. It becomes quite prohibitive or very restrictive. What I fear is we might find few examples from small countries that have more sandbox mindset that they will be able to eventually do the right level of governance, meaning governance becomes agile. Entrepreneurial, experimental, right? And governments who don't understand this because it's not part of their DNA and they don't have necessarily the skills force necessary to understand how do I assess risk in that context, we might find governments to be out of sync with the pace of development. I think we were getting to some form of minimal threshold towards the end of 2024. But, you know, with the new administration coming in, We don't know what will happen. It's likely that President-elect Trump will probably change, if not undo, what the Biden administration has done in terms of AI regulations. You heard not long ago Meta changing some of their criteria. So we are up for a ride in the sense that we cannot expect that what we have done so far will follow a linear trajectory. It is very likely the governance will be bumpy because there will be so many different inputs and so many different outputs at the same time. I'm hoping that eventually on some foundations like privacy or, you know, so like the defense of vulnerable groups, we will achieve some form of consensus. But look, it's very difficult for us to say.

Are there some specific areas of the regulation, the governance— you just mentioned privacy— that should be prioritized that you have concerns about?

Look, I think what governance has done is to try to regulate the consumers. It doesn't necessarily regulate the developers.

Right, right.

And the argument goes always in the same way. How can we regulate a multi-jurisdiction function? A software doesn't necessarily have only one legal jurisdiction, right? It changes. You can see changes across the US state by state, but imagine you're going overseas, then suddenly that becomes a much bigger Pandora's box. So I think the complexity that are inherent to governance have been paralyzing the producers' side, but they have instead gone towards the consumers. I think any sort of governance that wants to be mature needs to have both governance of the, the producers and governance of the consumers and the supply chain or the supply chain in between. Not too different from how we govern tobacco companies, not too different from how we govern pharmaceutical companies, not too different from how we govern food companies. The difference, though, is that the pace of development of digital services is much faster than any of the traditional industries in which you could still track and trail some of the items. But how do you easily do that when data is by itself difficult to be captured, right? And classified or categorized.

[Speaker:MICHAEL KRIGSMAN] And it's so accessible too. I mean, what's interesting to me about this is the bar to entry is low in the sense that a bad actor can do this from their basement, from their couch. Pretty much. What concerns you about the possibility for bad actors and that bar being so low?

Okay, it goes back to the conversation, Justin, we're having about government and governance, right? Governments, so governments are too slow at the moment to really regulate properly. And I think it's an historical legacy that they couldn't operate faster than innovation players. Now, the same principle of how we want to govern AI, which is benevolent, needs to be applied to protecting ourselves against bad actors. And so you see this in the orbit of cybersecurity that today is a critical conversation. Today, we do know that bad actors, they interfere with elections. Bad actors, they change social media. Information so that we have group of people building opinions based on entirely deepfakes. We know bad actors are breaching data, stealing data, they're duplicating identity theft, you name it. The cybersecurity capacity that we need to counterattack this or counterbalance is the very same narrative about can we govern AI? And we can't yet. At the full spectrum of what we could, as we do not have yet the capabilities to build cybersecurity infrastructure that are going to be capable of withstanding any form of stressors. The priorities in the next few years will be that we're building capacity for that as well. It's—

it made an impression on me within the last 3 months, I got more notifications in the mail that somebody I do business with, whether it's healthcare, whether it's banking, had a data breach. You know, every now and again you get those messages saying, you know, you've been part of a data breach. But again, in the last 3 months, 6 months, I've got more of those than ever before.

That's right, Justin. And look, if you're looking at— I see this in the difference when I'm back in the US and when I'm, for example, in Europe. Europe has one shield of protection, what they call the GDPR. So you have a bit more of a cushion and you don't feel it that much. But the moment I go to the US where we don't necessarily have the same, so like our overarching structure of protection, I feel exactly what you say, right? That I am much more exposed and I am triangulating data every single day in so many different instances. My life is digitally mediated these days. So I find that whether we're gonna be able to, let's say, take GDPR and expand it, evolve it to what we need to do elsewhere, I think probably I think that's what we should be doing. I find that sometimes we feel that we are hurting businesses when we do that, but we don't, right? Boundaries are not necessarily bad for innovation. I think it's the opposite. They support innovation, but they create a perimeter that defines what is permissible versus what we don't want to have.

Sure. And there are the reputational blowbacks for that. As far as businesses that are victims of these cyberattacks, what can executives of those businesses do to kind of get ahead of that?

I think it really starts by prioritizing this not as an unintended problem that might happen, but making it proactively as a capacity building. Sure. The same way as if you're having a shift in demand because consumers want something else, you kind of don't think about it twice. You, you resort to basically resources that are going to build a specific capacity. We should take it as almost like intrinsic to the business proposition. Similar, look, back in the days, a bank would have a vault and the vault has a safe, right? And you have, you know, armed guards. The idea was you're building a bank, but you're equally building the security systems alongside. We should think about the same as we expanding into this digital infrastructure that is becoming much more cognitive because is populated by this, so like brain-like algorithms. We have to start understanding that risk is no longer the firewall. Risk is probably much more intrinsic in our own behavior. So how do we start preparing and hiring for that? I think it's really a shift in understanding this is not only an occasional opportunity for me to showcase capacity. It has to be infrastructural to start with.

So as a futurist, I'm tempted to go down the road of quantum and if that's going to completely shift the paradigm. But I also feel like we're not close to that yet, or are we?

So, Justin, great question. Look, we are closer than what I could have imagined if you were asking me this question one year ago.

Wow.

Okay. But we're not as close as for this to become a reality like we're talking today about GenAI. Right. I was in Brazil and actually there was an event Stern organized for me and I remember going to IBM in São Paulo and they are the first company that has very actively introduced a quantum feature for their clients. And it's amazing to see that you have already a technology companies that is doing advisory on quantum and this is no longer just like hypothetical. They are doing it. I think the perimeter of reference right now is very narrow and it will be on, on specific industries or applications. But we do understand, I think, that with the increasing demand for computation, shifting to a different kind of computation infrastructure is not just fancy, but is becoming almost like an inevitable upgrade of that. We might find it, for example, in the military, that this will likely will happen before military historically has been ahead of the curve because of the nature of the business, right? And if that happens, I mean, maybe it's already happening, we'll see this commercialized in the next few years. And one of the examples of this would be, it was unthinkable today to imagine that you could go to a private subscriber for satellite communication. Right. And today with this, what they call the LEO, right, the satellites around the first tier of the Earth, we have a significant wide coverage worldwide. It was an airline, I think it's Qatar Airways, that started to pilot Starlink on some of their flights and people were watching Netflix or doing phone calls. Right. So the same way as this was unthinkable even 5 years ago, The moment that quantum is becoming more visible, I think we're going to see that is a groundbreaking transformation. So unlikely we know exactly when it will happen. It would be— I think it would be too far-fetched for us to imagine that it will not happen.

Yeah. One of my favorite things to do, and, you know, I'm a— I'm an old-school nerd. I went to— I went to science camp when I was growing up, up in the Pocono Mountains, looking at the stars. Seeing those Starlink satellites, and there are apps that'll tell you when you can see them, and seeing those satellites going across the sky is just one of the most surreal experiences because it's such a cognitive dissonance that you don't expect to see something like that. And also when you think about the technological aspect of it, it's really a little mind-blowing.

Big time. Look, Justin, I grew up By thinking of space as an exploration, right? And the fact that you have astronauts. Today you have a generation of Gen Z and millennials who talk about space economy. And it's like you have to wrap your head at the idea of what is a space economy. And the fact that we can talk about the space economy. I saw this in Dubai no long ago, the government had a project to do exploration of Mars that was 100 years into the future. And you're thinking this is not coming from a science fiction, you know, to do so. This is a national government thinking about that. So clearly we are looking at expanding our sense of normal, of what is, you know, life on Earth, by expanding this to the, uh, the outer part of, uh, of the, the Earth, to, um, to the space. Um, and I look, the private organization that today are into space economy, they're a company that we all know about. And this, this shows you that this is not only just NASA or the former Soviets, right, or the Chinese now becoming a pretty flourishing business. And likely in our lifetime, we'll see more of that.

Yeah, I, I've said this before on the podcast. I think about— I have 9-year-old nieces, and I think about when they're my age, you know, the things that I couldn't imagine when I was 9 years old, like smartphones and streaming movies. I worked at a video store when I was— that was my first, like, big boy job was working at a video store. And so I wonder, you know, in 30 years, what they're going to think back on in that way. And can we predict something like that, or is it hard to because we can't necessarily imagine that kind of stuff?

You see, listen, I just do build on the same analogy. I remember walking to the Blockbuster store to actually rent, and I remember being late for the rentals back later on when I grew up. I find out that it was part of the business model that they were making a significant amount of money on the late rentals, right? And I remember that they came with the video game, the popcorn, and it was a journey, right? Going to Blockbuster. I think in the same way, I would have never imagined back in the days that, let's say, 30 years down the road, we would have thought about streaming completely different, music completely different. And there is— I have a friend who teaches, uh, uh, it's like innovation and entrepreneurship. He tells a story at the beginning of his classes to say In the 1980s, all the technology that we had on our smartphones today, they all existed, but their cumulative price would have been $32 million back in the days.

Wow.

It was unthinkable that we could have the same technology one day for $1,000. Right. So to answer your point, I don't think I can stretch myself to something that is outside of my own conditioning. Sure. But it's very likely that if within 40 years technology entered into a smartphone when the pace of development was not so fast. Today that we're dealing with an entirely different set of technologies, it's really unimaginable what likely the next 20 years could be like. And if we, you know, if we survive the next few years, it will be exciting to see this firsthand.

Yeah, I think about those teachers in high school who said, you know, you're not always going to have a calculator in your pocket. Look at us now. So I do want to get to in the next year. So if we're having this same conversation this time in 2026, what do you think we'll be looking back on as big steps that were taken this year?

I think we will see more examples of AI application that have now entered smaller medium enterprises. And today we still match greatly AI with the large companies. We're kind of missing the voice of the smaller player that now can innovate and become, you know, world-class players because they were able to integrate AI and build their productivity differently from before. So I'm looking forward to the story of the small guys who have really created a global impact because they really understood the idea that this technology largely, largely expands the opportunity that we have outside of the traditional size of the organization or country we operate. I would hope that we'll have more examples of companies that have been able to shape our landscape by doing that. I also think that there will be a wider range of people that will move into augmentation. See, one of the things that today we are sometimes talking about, it becomes almost like a trade-off. You go, for example, into conversation in the classroom, you say, as a company, you could decide to automate or to augment. But we see this sometimes as a, as a like a diametrically opposite. The answer would be probably those companies that have automated bioprinting. And I love to imagine that we'll be able to do that so that we are automating, but we're doing bioprinting tasks. That would be probably a meaningful reduction on stress and pressure that people have right now. It would be— you would be surprised by the number of times where I run a program mostly my executive program at Harvard, in which one of the questions during the coffee breaks is, will jobs disappear? And I think it would be great that we can put this behind and say the question is not about jobs disappearing, it's redesigning jobs accordingly. So that's, I think, what I would love for the next few months to happen.

Yeah, and I heard a great way to look at it, that AI is not going to take jobs, but it's going to change jobs. And that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing.

Look, you know, I remember, Justin, not long ago, we had this conversation about jobs gone and jobs created, and it was in favor of jobs gone, right? So, it was clearly a moment in which you could say the job will be gone because they were obsolete to start with. In the report from the World Economic Forum I mentioned before, for the first time, we see that we have replaced 92 million jobs but created 170. So finally, finally, we're understanding that technology is not an enemy or it's not designed to antagonize us. It is, I think, is an opportunity for us to move away from complacency and change the design of the job. I remember running a video in some of my classes not long ago. About the transformation that we're having with technology. And what really struck me back in the days was when David Yu said, if you're taking the jobs in the United States today, roughly 50% of those jobs existed 100 years ago. So it's not that technology by itself is doing us a disservice, it's that we had jobs that were designed when this technology was not even, you know, a possibility. And so it's natural to think about upgrading this job towards the technology components. I think we should not fall into the trap of, of a trade-off between technology and humans. The question should be, how do I now design a job where I am using technology to expand my voice and move my, my necessity from more of a physical repetitive task to more of a slightly different supervisory, contextual, or, or strategy-driven task.

Yeah, and I think it could be really intellectually stimulating that, I mean, in the last 2 years, I've been at Stern for 2 and a half years now, and I've learned so much from clients like you that it's just, it's interesting. And I feel like, you know, my life has been enriched by understanding these things, especially the technology and the futurism. And it's just, it's fascinating. And I think it's a great opportunity for us as humans to upgrade that intellectual understanding of our world. That sounds really pretentious, but you know what I'm getting at.

Look, I subscribe to that, Justin. I can tell you, I start feeling that if education back in the days was like a match to an employment into the future, we understand that cannot work anymore because we do have people with high degrees who don't have a job. I think when education becomes mostly knowledge, because we like it, then it becomes almost like our arsenal of opportunity for us to explore. But decoupling us from the employability of technical skills that came before with the silos, I think is a form of liberation, to be honest. Look, I came from economics. So in my first years, I was really siloed into economic thinking and I was thinking this is so far from the reality. And later on, I was lucky to have mentor who helped me expand. So I don't regret, but I will offer the future generation not essentially to be constrained to a silo and then realize that life is much more, I would say, distributed, right? Rather than concentrated.

Yeah, yeah. No, I love that outlook. Um, I appreciate your time. I want to, I want to start getting, uh, close to, uh, our wrap-up here. At the end, I like to touch on a lightning round. Okay, so these are questions I did not prep you on. I want your, your first reaction. And this first one's going to be kind of a gimme because we, we kind of touched on this a little bit. Uh, is there a technology we have now that wish you would have had as a kid?

I would have loved to have streaming because as I grew up in Canada, those walks to Blockbuster without a car were not fun.

Yeah. Um, it's funny, when I worked at the video store, uh, I left to go to college— this, I'm totally aging myself here— as they were changing, literally installing the shelves for DVDs. And I remember the manager being like, nobody's going to buy these. And, you know, I've now got from working at the store, I was one of those people who I spent my paycheck right back at the store. And so I've got boxes of VHS, you know, in my mother's basement that are useless. I don't even think collectors want VHS tapes.

No, that's not like, like, you know, they're not collectibles, right? Yeah.

Right, right. Okay. So I know you do a lot of traveling. Is there a food you miss most when you travel?

You know, I love Korean food for some reason. I got under my skin, uh, so anything that this, uh, bibimbap, something like kimchi stuff, I love it, right? I don't know why. I love the spice and the kick. Sometimes if I can fly Korean Air, I do, because I know that in their menu there is always a Korean dish.

Okay, uh, I, I'm a big fan of poutine, so I hope, uh, you know, I hope I can appeal to your Canadian a little bit. Okay, so if you could hang out with one musician or band for a day, living or dead, who would it be?

I have always liked, although it's cheesy, Bon Jovi, because I always was singing on a CD that I had in the car, Living on a Prayer and all of that. And I remember going to a concert and I always didn't want people to see me there, right? But I just like the guy, right? I think that would be my first choice. And, you know, I grew up in the '80s and '90s, so The Boss was for me a reference. If I could spend some time with The Boss, it would be great.

You're hitting all my New Jersey inklings, and I'm not kidding when I tell you I'm 5 miles away from the Jon Bon Jovi rest stop. That is 100% true. I'm not saying that to be funny. They named a rest stop on the Garden State Parkway after Jon Bon Jovi. It's got a guitar. As the logo. Yep.

Oh, the guy's an idol.

Yeah, Jersey proud. Uh, okay. So if our listeners want to learn more about you, more about your work, where can we find you online?

Uh, look, beside LinkedIn, um, there's a quite, uh, comprehensive profile of mine on, on the Stern website where I think they can see videos and, and readings. Uh, one of the, I think, best, uh, uh, redacted, uh, bio is on the website of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet Society at Harvard. Um, that where I think it reflects also some of my works in the governance, as you mentioned before. So obviously, these are areas, and I'm on X, and so it's, you know, it's X, it's like exp_mark, or, you know, look, it's LinkedIn as well. That's fine. These are some of the places where they can see the work I've done. But I have to say, the page you built together, Søren, probably is the most generous in terms of covering from the bio to the contribution to the videos, to the podcast. So So yeah, look, I love that you do this for people like me because you really help us capture the essence of the work we do better than if I have to use active memory for that, Justin.

Thank you. No, I appreciate that. And, you know, appealing to the host's ego is a great strategy. No, I really appreciate that. And people can go to our website, sternstrategy.com, and of course they can engage you for keynotes and longer-term advisory arrangements.

Absolutely. Look, I've been doing a lot of work already since I got on board with Stern across the world. So we— I'm going to be back now for another engagement in 10 days in Miami with Stern. And then there's been New Orleans, there's been Brazil, there are events in Dubai. So I love the fact that you are a global organization and You know, I was introduced for the first time to Stern when I was at Harvard Business School with Professor Michael Porter, who was working already with Stern. And that's the first time that I really heard about the company. So it became almost like a fulfilling dream for me to be able to be represented by your agency.

Oh, that's really cool. And I keep telling my boss that I think we should have marketing representatives go with our speakers when they go to these far-flung places, but it hasn't worked yet. I'm still stuck in New Jersey. I am going to pass that on.

It's a matter of time. It's a matter of time.

I like that. Mark Esposito, I really appreciate your time so much and your insight. You know, this is going to be so interesting again as we look back on this conversation at this time next year. And yeah, I appreciate that you've been so generous with your time.

Thanks for having me, Jesse. I really appreciate that I could be featured on this podcast. Till the next time then.