 So here's the most important curve of the day, the exponential curve. And I think you've heard about this a hundred times, right? Moore's Law, Malkov's Law and so on. But basically what is happening, Moore's Law says technology is doubling in power roughly every 18, 24 months and that is kind of true for chips. But if you're in the tech business, you know that this is really no longer possible because we've reached the nanometer. It's not entirely possible to go beyond the nanometer unless you get into 3D computing, which is happening now. But the bottom line is this, when I got started on the internet doing tech stuff and doing all these new things, it was the beginning of the curve. And that was basically 0.01 to double is 0.02 is nothing. It is still nothing. So when you do this early there, you don't really see very much. But all of a sudden here we're at the takeoff point, we're here, right? We're at 4. That's the takeoff point of the curve. That's when it gets serious. So now if you imagine that 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, you go 30 steps, you're at a billion. 30 steps, a billion. So just think about this for a second and roughly seven or eight years will be 40 times as far as today. Digital money, digital healthcare, the end of oil, desalination as cheap as getting water from regular sources. We're going to go to a bunch of things that are absolutely mind boggling. The kids of my kids will never know how to drive a car. They won't know CDs. They will never know how the music came to be a record. All of these things will be completely different. And that's what we have to understand. So if today you're here and you're saying, oh, we have time to figure out, you're deeply mistaken because by the time you're on this part of the curve, you are either toast or you're doing well. And this is what's going to happen to banking, insurances, healthcare. You have the duration of the takeoff point. Basically when you're at 4, you have a duration of 3, 4, 5 years until you get to the very serious where it goes vertical. When it goes vertical, you're gone if you're not there. But this is very important to think in a linear thinking will be detrimental. And here's our challenge for humans. We are not exponential. And we cannot be exponential. There's no such thing. Humans need to sleep. We're inefficient. We lose things. We forget stuff. We lie. We make mistakes. We kill people. We do the wrong thing. There's no way we can be exponential. And we shouldn't try. For example, multitasking. Are you familiar with that? It doesn't work. If you're 15-year-old, you can multitask in the video game and do your homework. I don't know what that does for your brain, but humans in general can't. So it's very important to remember that we can never copy that curve as humans, but we must understand how technology does it. We must imagine what it does. There's two different things. Being exponential, thinking exponential. The old story, the most traditional exponential story I'll tell briefly because it's a good illustration, is when the chess game was invented. One of the chess masters traveled around in China and he met one of the emperors in the local area and he introduced the chess game. He played chess with the emperor and the emperor loved the game so much that he said, you have to stay here and we have to keep playing chess. And then I give you a present every time you win. And then the chess master said, I just want you to put one rice corn on the field and then double the rice corn every time I win. And the emperor said, well, that can't be very much. It's just a bunch of, it's not very much. Of course, the chess master was very good and he won every single time. And by the time he got to the middle of the chess board he would have gotten all the rice in China from the emperor. By the time he got to the end of the chess board there would have been a layer of 10 meters around the globe of rice because that's how exponential works. So you can see here, 128 gets to be billions, billions, trillions very quickly. And of course the wise man was killed because he was insubordinate to the emperor and it couldn't be paid so he had to be killed. But that is how the exponential works. So the thing that's happening here is that we're seeing a whole new relationship of man and machine. When you use your mobile devices, this is our machine brain, that's our second brain. We keep our information here, we keep our data there, we keep our dating there, we keep our banking there. And now we have machines that we're talking to. I don't know how you're talking to your machines but this is already happening widely now. Apple Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google Home. 35% of American kids are already using the voice interface only. So you don't type anything and just say, hey, what can I do tonight? And imagine this, for example, what happens in the banking business today called RoboAdvisors. You get a piece of software and you say, you know I have 10,000 euros, I need to invest and I want to get at least 3% or something and then the machine goes out and gets it for you in real time. Using a voice interface. Robots. Robots will become as normal as WhatsApp. I mean the robots are already cleaning the airports at night. That used to be people. Very soon the robots will drive the local buses, you know, going from the hotel to the airport. Robots will fly airplanes, you know, the freight planes mostly. Not the passenger planes. Not yet. Dubai is launching the first taxi that flies itself. I mean I would never try that but, you know, they're launching this, I don't know, they have to do something as I was saying earlier so maybe it's no longer the oil, it's the flying taxis. So here's the fact that we'll make you think about this a little bit more. Right now computers are still pretty stupid even though we could say they're much smarter than before but as I was saying earlier, our brain can do 40 quadrillion calculations per second. There's five computers around the world that can do the same. That cost roughly about $800 million. As big as this room. Biggest one is in China, of course. But roughly in seven years, eight years, the first computer will have the capacity of the human brain. I don't mean our capacity as a human, that's completely different. But just calculating, you know, 300 billion neurons firing in trillions of combinations, that's a lot of stuff. Computers can't do that today. But in a few years they can. And at that point, they're going to be able to do jobs that are very, very complicated. Like insurance brokering. If you're an insurance company, actuaries, called actuaries. Computers. Lawyers. That's already happening. You know, there's already software that does basically, you feed all the information into the system. The system checks 100 million data sources and it says you're going to lose this case. You know, recommend. It decides for you. There's already a software in America that decides who goes out on probation. So if you're in jail and you want to get out, you have to go to a judge to say that you won't do it again. People do that now. That's software doing that now. And the software has twice the success rate than the judge. I mean, this is a scary, I'm not sure that's the right thing to do. And in 2050, one computer will have the capacity of all human brains. We're talking about 10 billion brains, roughly. And there isn't much we can do about that part. That is just progress and we are creating it. So the future is not about brain capacity. It's as simple as that. The future is not about how smart you're going to be and how much you know, how much you've studied. You're going to have to do that anyway. But the future is about being exponentially human. Doing things that machines can't do. We'll talk more about that later when we talk about the examples. So there's a theme that I took from Hemingway, one of his novels. Well, he talks about how things are changing. And basically technology is teaching us one thing that's very important. It's called gradually than suddenly. Which means that for a long time we don't see anything happening. And then boom, it's there. Like, for example, a paperless office. Didn't, you know, 20 years of discussion, nothing really happened. But we kind of have the paperless office now. Kind of. In some places. But it's definitely kind of tangible now with a mobile device. The car industry is the best example. You know, we've tried for 70 years to build a car with electric engines. And that drove like three kilometers. But now all of a sudden Tesla came along and they published all of their patents. And what do you know? All of a sudden gradually than suddenly having electric cars and car sharing is the number one business for the car industry in the future. Banking. Farmer business. I mean, the artificially intelligent enable bank. An intelligent bank. You know, that is possible, right? This bank is using a software engine. This one is called Amelia. To do the customer service and to figure out customer mode and to create portfolios. Right now that's probably not working for really intricate stuff. But you can see where this is going. Imagine if you're seeing an exponential scale here. So maybe seven years will be a thousand times as far. Right now it's probably not very good. Just like Google Translate wasn't very good. But today if you're looking to translate while you're traveling you can use many apps that work perfectly. I use one called Say Hi and you can speak in real time. I was in Japan a couple of months ago. I spoke with a sushi chef. I spoke in German and he spoke in Japanese back to be through the mobile. Works perfectly. And then if you're in the farmer business we have talked about this for a long time. You know, beyond the pill. Roughly taking pills right now is a 7.4 trillion dollar business. It's quite a bit of money. In the future what happens if we don't have to take pills anymore? We use technology to regulate the problem. Diabetes is a great example. If you suffer from diabetes it's very hard to cure diabetes. But you can use technology to deal with diabetes. For example, if you have a measuring device like a lens that measures your blood sugar you can reduce 95% of emergency situations. Roughly 700 billion euros a year. And do you need more insulin there or more medication? Probably less because you can change your eating habits. So what if technology can solve all this? Then you go into really a future without that. You're going to go to a future where machines can actually understand this. Well understand not in our sense but understand in a computer sense. Here's Gary Kasparov. Who lost against IBM computer in chess. This is obviously a long time ago but chess is a mathematical game. So not much you can do about that with computers. But he said after the game, and he's been going on to explain this, many people think that if something worked yesterday and it's still working today it will keep working tomorrow. And that's just really wrong. That is if you're extremely lucky. So in most cases it's wrong. When I started my own company, the Futures Agency, our primary job was to identify trends and forecasts and developments. Today all you have to do is you speak to Siri and you say what's the future of Greece and it will tell you. I mean literally there's going to be the first event at TED, you know the TED conferences, there's going to be the first event at TED where they have computers speaking as speakers. That's not much better than or worse than many other speakers I suppose. But still that used to be my job. So what's my job in the future? Well it's not to speak about the obvious. So same thing happened here. So in the car industry you can say well what worked yesterday is to sell cars by the unit. And the future is mobility. To sell a car, to rent a car. This is Kasparov breaking down after he lost the game because he never thought that a computer could beat him. You know the other day three weeks ago something more interesting happened even with computers is that the world champions in poker lost against the computer. You know poker is not a mathematical game. It's just a lying game, right? It's cheating. It's perception. It's theatrics. I don't play much poker but it's definitely not an intellectual game in the sense of a goal or chess. How can a computer play a game that is about cheating? So that's where we go into the future. We can safely say the future is no longer just an extension of the present. In your case that's a benefit. Let's not assume that the problems that we're having today will be our future in much the same way because the context has changed. This is key when you work for companies. Transformation is not innovation. Innovation is what you do every single day. But transformation is about becoming somebody else. Again we go back to the music business. When I worked in the music business we were selling music. I was a musician. We were selling records. Today if you're in the music business you don't sell music. Music is free. YouTube. Spotify. You used to pay 20 euros or so for a CD. Now you pay what? Was it 8 euros or 10 euros for Spotify? Spotify has 21 million songs. What kind of equation is that per song as nothing is free? Now the music business has to transform. That is happening with whether you're a lawyer or government or energy or mining or shipping for example. Why do we need people to ship stuff if we can print it in 3D? On a 3D printer? We've always talked about that but it has never happened because it wasn't ready. Now the first trials are happening next year to where some of the big consumer goods companies will print ice cream on the beach on demand. For a machine. On demand. Now there's the first printing machines for bread and pizza and very soon we're going to print airplane engines and parts. Do we need shipping companies then? We need them for other things. Maybe to ship the printer. I don't know. That's a little bit of impact on Greece. Anyway, I'll give you some examples. Science fiction is becoming science fact. If you work for a company that has been in business for a long time you say we heard about all that stuff already 10 years ago and it never happened. But the fact that it didn't happen doesn't mean it won't happen. He was just lucky. Banks for example, our great example, was right behind regulation, behind consumer habits and nobody else came close. But now it's like all these things are breaking down in 50 different places. Science fiction becoming science fact. Robotics. Robots that can walk. This is the company that used to be owned by Google. They got rid of it because they're too scary. So that was an interesting step and this is the Dubai flying taxi. You can see that all on YouTube. Of course, in Dubai everybody looks rich and everybody looks really excited about technology. But I would advise against trying this one but allegedly that's going to happen. Here is a Swiss company called Enviso. They do a face recognition technology for banks. So when you're sitting down to apply for a loan the bank scans your face to see what you're really feeling. With your permission. And people do that. Because there's only 62 facial muscles. It's like a lie detector. It's impossible to hide your emotion. Think about that when you're putting a photo on Facebook. Facebook is using this very technology in the background. So emotional testing through photos, very advanced. So things like that are happening all over the place. Here is a UPS van that does the same thing as Mercedes. They're flying off with drones. And here is the new delivery guy. And now I just saw yesterday there's a company that makes luggage for the airport that walks next to you. So maybe in the future it will just walk without you. You don't have to go anymore. And here's of course a personal digital assistant. Now there's over 200 of these. And this is what this company says about this box. It says it's not a robot. It's a friend. Talking about the perversion of friendship. Not just Facebook now. And here is of course the most obvious ones. What's happening in the car business. We can have cars. We will have cars that can do this. It's a long time before you can do this in the German freeway. But you know most cities, most 92% of driving is done in cities. And in cities you drive 20 or 30 kilometers. It will be some while before we do that in Athens because of the traffic. But Beijing, Las Vegas, Singapore, that's going to be the new normal. You're going to have to get a permit to drive yourself. Enjoy the driving while you can. So in fact, we're kind of going to become like God in a way. I'm not religious but we have super power now. Technology is giving us super power. And this is very bad for jobs. Telecom companies are looking at this every single day saying why do we have 10,000 network engineers? What exactly are they doing? Are they geniuses? Some of them probably are. But in general, they're doing pretty much routine work of checking and figuring out and at this moment software can't quite do that and the robots are just stupid. But in 70 years, 70, 80% of those guys will be replaced by. So that creates all different scenarios and then we have to talk about the job situation later. But a friend of mine, Peter Diamandis, when he talks about exponential, he actually wrote a book on this as well called Exponential Organization with my friend Yuri van Geest. He said the moment the day before something is a big idea, it is considered utterly ridiculous. And this is what happened with the self-driving car. Now we can imagine cities without parking lots. Imagine that. When we have electric cars and we're sharing and we have a subscription, you buy a subscription like Spotify for the car. You don't need to park. Cars are always moving. Imagine if we could unlock the parking in Athens. I looked it up the other day. Imagine how much percent of the real estate in Athens is parking. Take a wild guess. Twenty-two percent. Parking and traffic. I mean imagine what kind of parks we could build there or senior homes or I don't know, demonstration locations. So we could pick up, you know, this is... I mean imagine this, right? This kind of future. I mean we can cut emission and pollution by 50, 60, 70 percent and create lots of new jobs also. It's also side effects. So this is basically an e-commerce, you know, we already have things like this. You may have seen this already. I want a flat white and a banana bread warmed. Short. Double upside down Machiato, half decaf with room and a splash of cream in a grande cup. That's pretty cool, huh? I mean this is obviously very easy with Starbucks if you have voice recognition. You know with voice recognition, we're very close. We're about... There's another 0.2 percent missing to perfection, which is the important 0.2 percent. So to be able to talk a computer to a computer and the computer will understand you in 30 languages, that's maybe a year or 18 months away. And then you can speak a combination of Greek and English and we'll still understand it. So you can speak to a real estate agent on the internet and you can speak like you speak to a friend and the computer will understand what you're saying and furthermore the computer can speak back in the voice of your wife. Right? If you wanted to. Yeah. Let's say your girlfriend or whatever. Or the president for that matter. So another thing that we have to imagine, this is another really important factor for Greece in general and for Europe also, longevity. I mean our lifespan increases one third of a year if a year already. The kids of my kids will live to be 100 to 120 if they don't have accidents or if Donald Trump remains in office. But longevity is dramatically increasing. And imagine what happens when you live to be 100. I mean you're going to go in retirement at 60 and how we're going to deal with that. So that's going to be a good and a bad thing. Everybody wants to live to be 100. I mean most people do of course. It would be nice. So that's a huge impact. So I wrapped up the first part of this and we'll do a mentee shortly. Technology is now the driving force of society. It's no longer oil, gas, nuclear, military, banks. It's technology. And the most powerful companies in the world. Here's the Chinese supercomputer that has the computing capacity of a human brain. One of the first machines. But of course you know the human brain takes less than one third of a watt to compute. This machine takes the, what does it say, 20 megawatts of electricity. So it's quite different. You can't really adhere to the human brain yet. But this is what's happening in terms of power. This is very important for Greece. This is your number one opportunity. Forget about the banks. Forget about the money guys. Forget about the oil guys. They're basically husbands. The banks will remain when they adapt but the oil guys are in deep trouble. Every single oil company around the world has presented already what's called the transition plan. Shell and ExxonMobil have said they're going to transition to renewable energy and diversify away from oil. I mean I have no idea why Trump is building this pipeline and nobody's going to need his gas. I mean it's the most useless undertaking you can imagine but that's just one of many. But what's happening here is the most powerful company. The companies with the most money, the most power, the most reach are technology, data, platform, information companies and the next 20 are Chinese. And that's the future. So the future is actually, this is a very good thing for Greece because there's two things that will matter most. One is connecting people and dealing with data and the other one is disconnecting people. Humanity, tourism, locations, nature. You already have that so that's pretty well covered. But that is kind of a learning from this and you can see that the companies who are doing this like Baidu and Tencent, they're playing on a tilted playing field. I'll give you some examples here. The examples basically show the biggest media company in the world, Facebook, does not produce any media. The biggest hotel company, Airbnb, does not own any hotels. The biggest retailer, Alibaba, does not have any houses. They're tilting the playing field. And this is a very important thing. For example, in healthcare one more time, if you see what's happening here, it's that basically going beyond the pill, you have this whole different business model. Two-patient data, big data analytics, mobile health, digital workflow thing, demand drivers and discovery of things. I mean, you have a whole new ecosystem starting. I mean, just like Facebook stole the media business. I mean, Facebook and Google make 90% of digital advertising money in the world. If you're a newspaper, you know what that means. This is bad news. Or radio or television company. They basically own it. You can learn from that. If you're in the healthcare business, if you don't watch out, some healthcare company from Guangzhou or from Palo Alto will own 90% of the diabetes treatment in the future. Same story. So this is the opportunity, exponential connectivity, data, intelligence. We'll start down here. Connectivity. Everything connected. The Internet of Things. I live in Switzerland, so I use the connected cow. In fact, now the cows are connected in Switzerland. I saw the other day, in real time when I was hiking, I saw the first setup in a farm where the cows can milk themselves. Pretty cool. It costs about 150,000 euros, and the cow wears this army and they just walk into the barn and then the sensor says it's cow number, so and so. And then the cow can come any time of the day to milk themselves with a fully automated machine. And those cows give 25% more milk. Just as an example, you know how connected cows are really important. So data is the new oil. This is the new oil business. You want to be in the oil business? It's too late to be in the oil business. You can be in the data business. You can be in the technology business. The conversions of man and machine and ultimately that sort of thing, this is where we're going. So first part of the day, this is the summary of that thinking. We need to not think about 10% better, but about 10 times as good. That's what we need to think about. When you have a company that deals with healthcare or banking or insurance or airlines, 10x thinking. So the other day I had a session with one of my airline clients. And I said, you know, the airline business is a good business. They can rip off customers and make more money all the time. Like, see United. So maybe it's not a good business, but they make lots of money, but it is growing 5%, 6%, 10% per year. But for how long? What is the future of the airline business? Not to fly. So I told the airline we should invest in virtual flying. That's 10x thinking. I go to the airport, I buy a hologram, a projection ticket to Singapore to go to a meeting. Because you may have seen holograms, you know how they can project bodies into spaces. CNN is using that already. So rather than bringing people for an interview, they project them onto the stage. Cost a million dollars in the setup. Now if I was in the airline, I would approach 10x thinking. I would say, let me get in the business of virtual transportation. That is definitely going to happen. I mean, rather than going to Singapore for a meeting for two days and come home exhausted, I can go off to the meeting, be in Singapore with my colleagues, like 90% real and be home for dinner. And pay 100 euros. Just as an example. So the way this is heading, this is the question you have to ask, right? The question you have to ask, what if? You know what I hear mostly when I talk to companies about how they can transform? The response is not what if, it's yes but. You don't want to do that. You know when you work with startups, it never comes up. You know what they say, it's awesome. What should we do first? This is why imagination is so important. What if this happened? What if it was possible? What an exponential thinking. So as you know, of course technology is transforming every single sector of our society. And I was in the music business, that was first and then of course e-commerce and books and now the car companies are on top of that wave. I mean imagine how painful that's going to be for a company like BMW. You buy a nice car for 100,000 euros and you enjoy the car, but it's held three years later, it's 50,000 euros. That's a huge margin. The future is going to be, I pay, say, 1,000 euros a month in a big city and I have a subscription to everything that BMW makes and public transportation and flying taxes and holograms. It's going to be a little bit harder to make money with that. So that's what's going to happen. If you're still on the beach, monetary, government, banking, healthcare, insurance, energy, education, this wave is coming very quickly. So we can learn from developments that happen in media and telecom, for example, if you're in this business. I mean clearly the banking industry, for example, is the next music business. We have to take a look at this and figure out how can we avoid this displacement, which I'll show you in a second what happened there. But we can observe what's happening and learn, go from there. So very important to think first part, the future really is a mindset, not a timeframe. If you have a future mindset, you will not become indispensable. If you have a future mindset, you can help your company invent itself. It's really amazing to see that most of the Fortune 500 companies in the last 100 years, in the beginning they lasted to live 70 years or something. You know what the average duration is today? Of the Fortune 500 company? 14 and a half years. Until they reinvent themselves. And revenues are now constantly changing. So to have a future mindset is really important to think about that. So let me bring it up to that point that's really important here. And then I think it's time for a brain break. Assumptions. This is an African saying, I think, from South Africa, from the Zulu tribe, that have said basically when you assume things, it aren't so. Assumptions are the termites of relationships. So this has happened when you've married a long time, for example. But this is the kind of thing that happens. You're assuming things just because it has always been like this, or you never had to talk about it, or it just became that way or so. But the reality is actually completely different. It's just that you're assuming all of these things and then you have 50 assumptions and nothing works anymore. And this is what we do in business because when we are successful, we're assuming that the same model will be fine. I'll just make some minor adjustments. I made money like this five years ago, so I'll do it again. But the fact is actually it's not that way, right? We need to have an assumption with the question of our assumptions whether that's going to be the case in the future. And that also refers to Greece and the problems of Greece. Just because it has been that way doesn't mean it has to be that way in the future. Here's the greatest assumptions of all times. Again, the music business is my favorite example here. When I was in the music business in the mid-90s, the record industry worldwide was $50 billion. It was huge. And then a colleague a friend of mine, Sean Fanning, invented Napster. It was around here. You see what happened? It went into what's called the valley of death. You're very familiar with the valley of death. This is the worst place you can be at the end of the climb. And you know what the record companies assumed? They said, well, our assumption is that if people can get free music and they don't pay, then our business is over. Seems to make sense, right? But the reality is they couldn't prevent it. And people wanted to get music in a different way. So they went to court and they sued 258,000 people around the world for copyright infringement. In the process of their 10-year denial, right? You see what happened to their revenue streams. They have a 74% decline. Because music is now no longer a product. It's a service. So you see what happening here after the valley of death, which is roughly about last year or so. Now you're seeing this red column which is streaming, you know, on demand music. And they finally allowed people to use their music. Because copyright, right? And Spotify and the likes of Spotify have to pay $1 billion to get a license from Universal Music in advance. Right? We're talking about a tough deal, right? So that's why it took so long. That's why I stopped working in the music business. Because, you know, at the end of this, it kind of looked like it was just going to go away. But here's the lesson. You see this red line emerging here? Music business. And so I would say be more optimistic. Roughly in 10 years we'll be bigger than it got started. We're bigger than 50 billion. Because we're going to have 10 billion connected people. Everybody loves music. They will not pay 10 euros a month in India. They will not pay 10 euros a month in Greece. But, you know, let's imagine this. There are 10 billion people. Let's say 5 billion people connected using music. They paid 1 euro a month. That's 60 billion. Do the math. So, but here's the lesson. Nobody in 10 years will know who Sony Music is, or Bertelsman, or Warner Music. Because they are no longer the ones that are controlling this. It's the platforms that control this.