Today we’re going to talk about using technology for good in a new age of reason, driven by data, artificial intelligence, and people utilizing these tools for the right reasons.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Larry Weber, Founder & Chairman of Racepoint Global and author of the new book A New Age of Reason: Harnessing the Power of Tech for Good.
About Larry Weber
Larry is a globally-renowned expert on public relations and marketing services. As a founder of several successful integrated marketing agencies, he has cultivated over 40 years of experience. Recognized as a thought leader on the convergence of technology, the web, and communications, he has helped both international and emerging companies become powerhouse brands. Larry’s extensive experience in the tech field has allowed him to be at the forefront of technological innovation across several other industries. He founded Racepoint Global in 2003.
Resources
Learn more about Larry’s book: A New Age of Reason: Harnessing the Power of Tech for Good: https://www.racepointglobal.com/a-new-age-of-reason/
Racepoint Global website: https://www.racepointglobal.com
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom:
Today we’re going to talk about using technology for good in a new age of reason, driven by data, artificial intelligence, and people utilizing these tools for the right reasons. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Larry Weber, founder and chairman of RacePoint Global and author of the new book, A New Age of Reason, Harnessing the Power of Tech for Good. Larry, welcome to the show. Hey, it’s great to be here. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you and congrats on the new book. Why don’t we get started with you giving a little background on yourself and your inspiration for writing the latest book?
Larry Weber: Sure. Well, I’m mostly known in the PR world. I had originally started my own company, the Weber Group, which grew to be the largest tech PR firm in the world. It was acquired by Interpublic in New York. at which time I bought about 21 companies, which is today Weber Shandwick, which is, I think, the largest PR firm in the world. I’ve done a lot of things, but I’ve mostly been focused on watching technology evolve over 40, 45 years. And I’ve written seven books now. This is my seventh. The six before were mostly about marketing and marketing theory. and earn media, own media, paid media. But I thought I’d do something different this book because I was starting to notice that like the old Age of Reason, there was a lot of technology that had matured enough and was crossing to integrate into different vertical markets. that I think it offered a huge opportunity to start to address some of society’s and the world’s biggest problems in a more innovative, positive, optimistic, thoughtful way. So I got sort of inspired and like most of my books, I let it sort of cook in my head for a while. As I walked, I talked to people, colleagues, friends, clients, I reread Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and looked at my journals on some of the technologies I respected most over the last 40 some years, things like voice recognition, HTML, search, and many others. And I sat down and we researched and I wrote the book and I’m actually really pleased with it. I think it’s really good.
Greg Kihlstrom: So that’s great. That’s great. Well, yeah, we’re gonna touch on a few of the themes within the book. And, you know, first, as you just said, you know, you were seeing some parallels between current times and the original age of reason. Could you elaborate a little bit more on that? You know, what are the parallels that you’re seeing? And why do you think it’s helpful to think in these terms?
Larry Weber: Well, one thing that I was seeing was there’s a lot of doubt today about technology and its effectiveness and that are things like AI going to take people’s jobs? And, you know, there’s a lot of consternation there. Back in the original Age of Reason, there was a lot of, you know, religious fervor around not believing the scientists, not looking at what the facts were about changing things. They got together, the scientists, and came up with things like the vaccine and obviously Newton’s theory of gravity and many other things that sort of helped move society along on a fact basis and on an optimistic basis. So I looked around today and I saw, again, similar conditions only in a much modern world. And I thought, you know what, there needs to be more technology optimism. I’m not naive. I know there needs to be guardrails and some understanding of keeping technology under control. But I believe that if looked at optimistically and used properly, that technology can solve a lot of issues from climate, in health care, in agriculture, in education, and other places. So those were sort of the alignments. And I also saw, again, for the first time, technology becoming almost a horizontal discipline and less of a vertical orientation. you had technology and innovation, servicing, agriculture, healthcare, all the categories that I had just mentioned. So that created some excitement for me.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And to dive in a little more on the, the horizontal aspect too. And, and, you know, I agree on the optimism. I mean, I, I think there certainly are some things to keep an eye out for and that need to be people need to be looking at, but I think it is helpful to take an optimistic look as well. To look at this from a horizontal aspect, can you elaborate a little bit more on that? I mean, I think there’s a lot of power in that, and I think AI is, in particular, something that a lot of people are talking about, but they tend to talk about it in silos, right?
Larry Weber: Yeah, you’ll see in the book, I mean, my whole first chapter, which is sort of I think interesting people go, why did you start with John Deere and company? And the reason was they had bought an AI company, Blue River Technologies in Silicon Valley, well over five, six years ago. And they’re applying AI for a number of reasons to help farmers get better yields on their farms in a sustainable way. And examples would be, you know, picking out weeds, picking out disease and plants. and taking them out without hurting the soil or the healthy plants. There’s autonomous tractors and driving using the latest satellite technologies way before even Google or others came up with, you know, autonomous cars. a deer had come up with this. So figuring out a way to work, you know, with these technologies to create in a sustainable way, better outcomes for farmers that in hope that they could feed 2 billion more people by 2050 that we’re going to have. You know, another thing is another example would be a good friend, a physician, Catherine Moore, who started da Vinci systems. And this is using AI to help create robotic surgeries. And we have less and less surgeons in the world, especially in third world countries, and to be able to have an adjacency of good surgeons working from a computer base that’s flavored with AI and other technologies to get a result like taking out a gallbladder or fixing eyesight. Something like that is another healthcare example I have in the book. So those are two examples and there’s many more from taking plastic out of the ocean to using CRISPR and other open AI applications, quantum computing, how to take a whole physics look at computing versus just a mathematical look. and the opportunities that can come from that. So in the middle of the book, I dive deep into those technologies. So AI, from when it really started to appear in 1947, I believe, was Alan Turing’s first paper on it. all the way through to today, quantum, which goes back to the 60s, early 70s, which is the physics space, we look at CRISPR, we look at a lot of those technologies. So and then I get, you know, plain spoken about it, what are the kinds of things that problems can they solve? And what can they do? So yeah, yeah.
Greg Kihlstrom: Well, and so, you know, for those, for those, there’s a lot of leaders and aspiring leaders listening to the show out there. And, you know, in probably in some of the industries that you’ve mentioned, as well as many others, for those leaders and aspiring leaders out there, you know, how do they stay how do they balance, I guess, the optimism with the realism and adopt some of these, even if some of the examples that you’ve mentioned don’t apply directly to them, how do they take this and kind of think in this optimistic way?
Larry Weber: Well, two things to just make it simple. One is to there should be at the C-level chief innovation officer or chief technology application officer that is constantly looking for other technologies to partner with, to use, as well as what you build in-house, no matter the category you’re in. Every company is a technology company. So, you know, how they manage that and make sure that they’re looking at new developments. Also, what I learned in my career in the book is certain technologies evolve over a long period of time. Take voice recognition, for example, the Bakers founded that out of MIT well over 40 years ago. And some of its code is still in Siri and Alexa and, and other, you know, voice recognition as it gets refined and used in hundreds of applications. The other area corporations should look at, and young CEOs especially, is maybe having a chief ethics officer. Or how do you strive to be the moral corporation? Again, I don’t mean to sound Pollyanna here, but it’s how do you make sure you’re using technology properly and in the best interest of society? And what kind of guardrails do we need? And I talk about, like many have, that every time the government’s tried to sort of intercede and try to manage technology’s opportunities, they don’t seem to get very far. And that’s why I think corporations need to take that on themselves and build a trust between them and their employees, their customers. their markets, their peers, and set an ethics level and a moral level and a guardrail level that helps apply these technologies in the most thoughtful and safe and ethical way. So those are sort of two areas, but I do dive big into one of the chapters into how you can construct sort of the new C-level Uh, you know, when I started out in business, uh, Greg, it was just a CEO and a CFO, you know, and now it seems that every time there’s an issue in business, we slap a C on it, you know, from chief marketing to chief. operating to chief, you name it. But I think we’ve never quite gone and explored the more important things that are how do you build and protect the soul of a company to make sure it’s a good company, because I believe that’s part of a behavior that needs to be embraced.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And to, to dive a little bit into this, the ethics piece as well. So, you know, definitely agreed that government intervention, I mean, you know, there’s, there’s been some examples I think in the EU, like GDPR has been, has kind of charted a nice path and stuff, but, but many other examples where governments haven’t been as successful. And then we’ve got the platform companies that are, kind of self regulating and doing sometimes doing a good job, sometimes less than good. And then we’ve got the brands themselves. So in other words, you know, to oversimplify, there’s three players here. What do you see the role of the brand in all of you know, you kind of you kind of touched on this, but how much should brand rely on platforms and government, I guess?
Larry Weber: Well, I think brands have to realize that their brands are only as strong as their relationship and experience with their constituencies. How you make those stronger in every way, including the use of technology, and how you approach the use of technology, is important. Also to understand, like you mentioned the EU, they’ve at least gotten a little further respecting technology and they’re more interested in the monopolization of technology, it seems, than most others. But the government in the United States seems to be more like you know, the teacher that wanted to slap you with a ruler on your hands, you know, right. And, you know, that’s really incentive building, you know, right. So I think, you know, that branch and try to work with governments, you know, I also remember, when I was first starting out in my own business, and we worked for a lot of startups, you know, they would get funding from all the famous venture capitalists back then, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, Charles River, Mayfield, et cetera. But you know what? Always next to them was some division of the American government or the British government saying, yeah, we want to invest right alongside you in those platforms. I don’t see that as much anymore. So I think that’s where the distrust start to come in where there isn’t as much deep involvement in trying to create new innovations and use of technology. One important book was in the 1980 which was called Made in America by Michael Dertouzos and Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow, both from MIT, who basically said, don’t worry about Japan and Germany having a bit of a lead right now, because we understand software. We’ve invested in it. Governments have invested in it. Brands have invested in it. And America knows how to write software. And whether we like it or not, software is the thing that has changed everything. And so it’s important that brands try to build into their relationship with governments and peers and others, the idea that together we can create things that can be of societal use and help. Also, I think you can’t think in platforms anymore. I think, as I mentioned in the book, we’ve been through seven eras of computing. And the sixth era was the social media era. And that’s still viewed itself as platform creation. So here’s my platform, Facebook. You use it how you want to use it. Well, you can’t do that anymore. That’s like the NRA argument that We make guns, that doesn’t mean they’re bad, you know. But you’ve got to have some kind of ethical and moral fiber to look at how you’re going to use platforms because in this next year of computing that we’re in right now, it’s computing and humanity. And we are completely intertwined now. And there’s no way to separate computing and humanity anymore. So we’ve got to live with it, whether you’re a brand, government, individual, company, competitor. That’s my opinion.
Greg Kihlstrom: Along those lines, you talk about several aspects of society and culture in the book. One of those is climate change. And I know you briefly touched on this already, but I wanted to dive a little deeper in there. You know, there’s the famous Marc Andreessen quote, software is eating the world. That’s applied to business often, but, you know, is the solution to some of these things like climate change that’s driving, you know, wildfires, health issues, food insecurity, all of the above and many more. Is the solution technology? Is it part of the solution? Where does the role of technology play here versus other aspects?
Larry Weber: Good question. It’s also one of the ones that surprised me the most after finishing and researching the book. I thought I was going to find what I’m calling the Amazon of climate. where there was a company that was striving to be, you know, sort of the everything by using new technologies to solve climate issues, you know, from, you know, the heat warming of the planet to plastic in the ocean to you name it, rising sea levels. And what I found was there isn’t right now any company that’s trying to do that. There are Dozens among dozens of small startups that have interesting technologies to help you with carbon Reducing carbon and doing some other other things to help save the planet, but there isn’t that concerted sort of Big company dedication and I say in the book don’t be surprised in 10 years if a company like Microsoft becomes the largest environmental company in the world and The way they’re looking at carbon, the way they’re using their software, the way they’re using AI now, especially open AI, you know, that software becomes just sort of a generic offering that helps you manage businesses and tasks. and things like that, but where the real value is coming now is in putting that all together to solve a problem, you know, like a huge climate problem. So my guess is it’s not going to be climate.com that does everything. It’s probably going to be a Microsoft or, you know, maybe an Amazon, but this is more of a proactive approach. There also is a reactive approach you know, and I bring up Amazon to be a reactive. Think of the fires that are happening right now in the West again. You know, they have some of the best drone technology in the world. Why isn’t Amazon using or offering their drone armies to help get supplies into the areas that have the California fires or help with the extinguishing of the fires with their drone armies? You know, so the technology exists. Why aren’t we banding together to use it in that kind of way.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, is this, you know, is this a matter of at least for the time being incentive, right? I mean, you know, to rule the e-commerce world, there’s billions of dollars in it. I mean, you would think to put out wildfires, there’s billions of dollars worth of cost savings, but is it maybe just the fragmented nature of things, and that’s inevitably going to get less fragmented?
Larry Weber: Yeah, I’m hoping, and I’m also hoping that corporations start to understand that their brands are going to have to stand for something good. And that maybe it’s not about all the paid media budgets but maybe it’s about becoming a good corporation because then like I say in the book marketing sort of disappears because you’re reaching an audience right now a younger audience that is going hey I want to work and deal. and buy from good companies. So that’s becoming a huge marketing message and positioning. And if you want to retain and recruit the best people, which is going to get harder and harder, then it’s imperative that you be a moral corporation.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. One last topic I wanted to explore from the book, and I think you touched a little bit on this at the beginning, but you use the term adjacencies, and just wanted to maybe just first explain what you mean by this and give an example.
Larry Weber: Well, most of the, I’d say, more advanced users, especially of AI, and Quantum right now, kept using the word adjacency when I was interviewing them. And what they meant was this isn’t like magic. It isn’t you just buy the technology and it works. You have to have a person who is expert adjacent to that technology, making sure that there’s data integrity, you know, the old garbage in, garbage out, cliche, but to also make sure that it’s doing the right things in the right way. I go back to the example of da Vinci systems and surgery with robotics and AI, and there’s no way they would let the robot just be on its own. It had to have an adjacency with the surgeon who kept watching, checking, making sure that it got better because the best software learns from itself and rewrites its code on its own. So the adjacency helps through that management system to create even better offerings over time. So that’s what I mean. And by adjacency and you can pick any application of these technologies and you can’t again just leave it alone. That’s why this myth of it taking jobs away from people or things like that is sure. Maybe the mundane things like there’s already a long time been robots that vacuum your your apartment or or cut your lawn. So, sure, they’re going to do sort of manual things, but the more complex issues that are vexing society, you know, that’s going to need human intervention for a long time to make it the best it can be. That’s what I mean by adjacency. Got it.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And I think, you know, given the, you know, I know a lot of people are not able to, you know, they don’t have the luxury of dealing on a longer scale, but you know, it’s been, it’s been shown many time over time that technological advances end up creating more jobs and wealth and all those things then. you know, remove it and stuff like that. So, you know, we may lose a few jobs over the over the coming years. And certainly that will affect people. But but then they but then they change.
Larry Weber: Right. Right. Who knew that nuance would become, you know, a 500 million dollar company and get bought by Microsoft and represent leadership and voice recognition in a variety of categories? You know, right.
Greg Kihlstrom: Right. Yeah, definitely. And I think that speaks to the the optimism and the reason to to move forward with all this stuff. Well, Larry, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up here. Sure, Greg. As a fellow author, I always like to ask at least one question about the process of writing. And so, you know, this is not your first book, but in writing A New Age of Reason, what did you learn through the writing process and, you know, what might you do differently?
Larry Weber: One thing I learned was that what I’ve been doing to write books was good for me and everybody’s different, but I work from a deep, deep outline. So I don’t really write right away. I don’t, even though I like Jack Kerouac and the origins of sort of just, you know, stream of consciousness, freedom of consciousness writing. That’s not what I do to, come up with books like this, I keep looking at table of contents, changing it around, deeper outlines, and then doing the research and making sure that there’s a logical flow and a lot of storytelling. I’m telling more stories than I ever had in this book than I have in the other books. People get stories. They learn from stories easier and faster. So I guess that’s what I’ve learned a lot about. And then that research is really important. And and that factual and validated research and knowledge is really important to make sure that things are accurate and moving forward. That’s all.
