Episode 129 | A conversation with a Futurist: Beyond Covid-19 | Craig Rispin, The Future Trends Group

When emerging innovations and the future of property meet.
If there is new and emerging technology or innovation coming into the global scene Craig Rispin already knows about it. In today's episode we chat with Craig, author, speaker and advisor. Craig and our hosts discuss how the innovations of today and the societal impact of Covid-19 will alter how we purchase and build property in the future; will the work from home movement take over, 3D printed houses to create affordable housing and technology affecting change in all businesses. 

Here’s what we covered:

• How Covid-19 brought an age of innovation.

• How do these new innovations impact the property market

• What will 5G towers do to property prices?

• How will printing property in the future impact the construction industry?

• Will the work from home movement take over?

• How will commercial property be impacted by the work from home movement?

• Will companies evaluate the cost of living to determine work from home salaries?

• How has online shopping shaped since Covid-19?

This weeks Dumbo:

• What happens when you buy property to the GFC in America

RELEVANT EPISODES:
Episode 118 | Pete Wargent
Episode 123 | Martin North
Episode 128 | Mike Mortlock

GUEST LINKS:
Future trends group

HOST LINKS:
Looking for a Sydney Buyers Agent? www.gooddeeds.com.au
Work with Veronica: info@gooddeeds.com.au

Looking for a Mortgage Broker? www.wealthful.com.au
Work with Chris: hello@wealthful.com.au

Buy the book - AUCTION READY How to buy property at auction even though you’re scared s#!tless:
www.getauctionready.com.au
Use the coupon ELEPHANT for your 30% listener discount.

Send in your questions to: questions@theelephantintheroom.com.au

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: 
Please note that this has been transcribed by half-human-half-robot, so brace yourself for typos and the odd bit of weirdness…

This episode was recorded on 2 June, 2020.

Veronica Morgan: You're listening to the elephant in the room, property podcast, where the big things that never get talked about, actually get talked about I'm Veronica Morgan, real estate agent buyers, agent cohost of Foxtel's location, location, location, Australia, and author of a new book called auction. Ready? How to buy property at auction, even though you're scared shitless.

Chris Bates: And I'm Chris bytes, mortgage broker, and together, we're going to uncover, who's really making the decisions when you buy property.

Veronica Morgan: Don't forget that you can access the transcript for this episode on the website, as well as download our free, full, or forecast or report, which experts can you trust to get it right? The elephant in the room.com.edu,

Chris Bates: Please stick around for this week's elephant rider bootcamp, and we have a cracking Dumbo the week coming up

Chris Bates: Before we get started. Everything we talk about on this podcast is generally nature and should never be considered to be personal financial advice. If you're looking to get advice, please seek the help of a licensed financial advisor or buyer's agent. They will tailor and document their advice to your personal circumstances. Now let's get cracking today.

Veronica Morgan: We're looking to the future. We're going to explore the possibilities of change that a global pandemic can create was our pre COVID life. Really, as good as we thought it was. Do we really want this to end so we can get back to normal? Or do we want our new normal? Are we taking stock? Are we reas sessing our values and changing our priorities? But before we look ahead to how our lives might be different in the wake of lockdown, perhaps we need to look backwards to see whether there were already rumblings of new ways of being, and bringing it back to the point of this podcast. How will new ways of being impact on where we live, who we live with and what we live in in this episode, we pick the brains of business futurist and innovation expert Craig Rispin Craig's expertise is in emerging business people and technology trends. And we're very excited to be able to get a glimpse into the world as he is seeing it. Welcome, Craig, thanks for coming along.

Craig Rispin: Oh, I'm so excited. I just want to help and be a message of hope. There is hope the future is going to be better.

Veronica Morgan: Fantastic.

Chris Bates: It's funny you say that Cray because you've kind of taken the words out of my mouth for the first question. Is that crisises a crises are a time when innovation kind of, you know, thrives. And are you saying that innovation coming out of covert already?

Craig Rispin: Yes. Yes. Incredible innovations and some big companies really helping. And we'll talk about that as well. And the past, yes, there were warnings. And I can tell you about that if you want as well.

Veronica Morgan: Well, let's start with that then.

Craig Rispin: Okay. So I've got a fellow futurist friend. You may know of him. His name is Nissim Talab. He wrote the famous book, the black Swan and the black Swan was written in 2006, published in early 2007. And it predicted the GFC and predicted the pandemic that we're in right now. And someone you probably know very well by the name of bill Gates, read it, recommended it on his reading list, became an advocate for preparing, gave this big speech in 2015 about, we need to be preparing still people didn't listen and look at where we are now. I think they're going to be listening more carefully in the future. What do you think

Veronica Morgan: He is? Well, two strikes. They got two, two, right? That sounds that's a pretty good strike rate.

Craig Rispin: Yeah. Yeah. And when I read that book, the black Swan, I'm like, Hmm. Yeah. Maybe I need to get all my shares out of the market. And I did like a lady. Yeah. I dodged that, but I'll tell you about my Dumbo later.

Veronica Morgan: And so what else what's next?

Craig Rispin: Well, good things happening. So, because we are changing the environment and we're changing the business economy and we're changing the technology. And so what's happening in the future. Well, right now, before we were all concentrating on the pandemic, we were already in the midst of shifting into a brand new economy, the fourth industrial revolution that I'm sure your listeners. Oh yeah, I know about that. Do they know that it's the intersection of the digital, the biological and the physical worlds, like real estate? Do they follow that very much? And when I go out and talk to various industry groups and I speak in about 50 different industries, they're like, Oh yeah, we've heard of that. I go, well, but do you know about this? And they say, well, what do you mean? And I say, well, what about the intersection of technology and biology for data storage?

Craig Rispin: And they say, what do you mean the intersection of biology and technology? I said, well, look at your little fingernail, just look at your little fingernail that row, the rabbit, the average size of your little fingernail we could using technology and genetics. We've already designed. I mean, we meaning scientists around the world have designed a storage medium. That's about the size of your little fingernail that can store get this 1 billion terabyte drives in that surface area. So you think, yeah, that's a lot of storage and guess who's invested in this company, every big company you can imagine fall GAM. So that's Facebook, that's Apple, that's Google, that's Amazon, that's Microsoft and Alibaba. I guess I have to put another eight on the end. I'm all invested in this because they've got these huge data storage, commercial real estate buildings, right. There are data storage buildings.

Craig Rispin: Yeah. Well, imagine replacing a bunch of, with tiny little areas, you know, that you've got, you can stick them in the basement and still have massive storage. And so yes, all these companies already invested in it. And the first thing that they're doing, I'm not making this up. They're taking all the movies from Hollywood because they want a storm for a thousand years. Again, storm and DNA. It's DNA storage. It's just mind blowing. When I show people that they're like, that's already happening. That's a thing. And I said, yes, yes, yes. Go look up twist. Bio-Sciences whose twist I go. It's the company that fog gams invested in, and yet there are listed organization. And if you invested in them, you would have been doing pretty well. Cause I know I've got shares in them. So full disclosure, they're an amazing company.

Chris Bates: Are they related to the kind of internet of things? You know, I guess lots of different devices connected all over the world, everything from your ties to T a car, et cetera, or is this more around sort of kind of humans being able to almost be computers sort of thing? Well, listen, IOT is one of the drivers of the fourth industrial revolution as well. If you listen to McKinsey at all, McKinsey says that IOT is going to be about, Oh, by 20, 20, sorry, 2030. They say not 20, 25, 2030. They say it's going to be six point $2 trillion worth of value. And I hate the name, the internet of things. I love what GE calls it. And it has a better name, the internet of everything, the internet of everything, because everything's going to be connected to the internet. And I think there's a much better name, but that's a subgroup. That's why we're moving to five G by the way, they should be closely related because five G was made specifically to support IOT, not just so you can download the entire seasons of the crown very quickly on your phone.

Craig Rispin: No, no, no, no, no. It's not for that. It's to support one single tower, five G tower can store a can connect and transfer the data up to a 1 million devices, 1 million devices for a single tower that gives you an idea of these towers of crashing in price. And if you think that there's COVID has slowed down the investment, it hasn't because it only takes two network engineers now and they can do social distancing. So they're still going out. And to give me an idea by 2030, according to the world, economic forum, not just me, but the world economic forum and the peak industry group, which is called the G S M a, they, they think that about 12 trillion, that's $12 trillion worth of value. And how is this related to property? Well, there's one listed organization. So they're called American tower and American tower invest in commercial real estate where these towers are and they say, we've got this tower. You can rent it and put your, put your antennas on it if you want. And they're doing incredibly well. They're doing yeah. Their tickers at AMT AMT. They're doing pretty well right now. Yeah, because yeah, it's not stopping. It's not stopping.

Veronica Morgan: It's a pretty cheap type of property to own though. A tower. Like, I mean, you look at the Eiffel tower in Paris, for instance, you know, you could just make it out of some metal. You don't have to feed it out. You just got to make it tall. Right? So all that commercial space that is previously needed or currently needed all those ocean, those big cargo ships had flooding around the sea, apparently, you know, storing information. So you're saying basically that that type of real estate is going to not be needed.

Craig Rispin: No it's going to be needed. It's going to be needed. But w the, the, the good news is for five G is that you're going to need many more towers, even though we're going to need lacks, because we can, we're going to need many more towers because they're shorter range. So we're going to have them inside shopping malls. If we ever have shopping malls in the future, that's a big question. We're going to have them inside stadiums when people go back to stadiums and that sort of thing. So don't worry about it. There's going to be a big market for it. How big $12 trillion, not according to me, but to a lot of other experts. So it's a, that's just a, but there's about 35 different drivers. And we've just mentioned a few of the fourth industrial revolution in the physical world. I advise the building research associations around the world. So I work with the Australian and New Zealand cause I'm based in in Sydney, Australia. And I work with the, these research organizations looking at what the future buildings are. And I can tell you the future buildings, you've seen these three D printers that print a building in a day, right? Hmm. Yeah.

Chris Bates: Machines that bicycle light breaks. And you know, I say that guys, that brick lie, you know, and machines just kind of can do it, can wait 24, seven, doesn't ask for kind of holidays, et cetera. Right. So but then,

Craig Rispin: Yeah, but even more important is the Chinese get a builder who put together this system who first printed 10 sheds in a weekend. And then he printed a one story building. And the following year he printed a three story Villa and a five story apartment building. Each floor just takes a day. And then the three D printer hoist itself up to the next floor and then prints the next floor and the hoist itself up to the next floor. And everybody was looking at that and they're like, okay, what's the material that you use and the material get this. He goes to all the building sites around China and goes, give me your building scrap, give me your trash. That goes into landfill. So it's 90% trash that would go into landfill and only 10% cement. So wouldn't you like it if you were building and 90% of your materials were the stuff that can go into landfill,

Chris Bates: It's crazy, isn't it? So you got like a it's happening a lot faster. And then it's obviously potentially even a lot cheaper because of time, but also the materials that they use. So they strong know what the problem is.

Craig Rispin: Sorry. Yes. And all those. Yeah. So all the people, this is the big problem. All the people that were in the room that when I was presenting this research, which is not my research, by the way, it's written, you know, meta studies and research that I've done with academics and so on and, and collected by AI by way, by the way. But anyway, what's the big problem they're looking at me. And I can see there, that's looking like a deer in the headlights. They're like, Holy cow, this is just going to come eat our lunch. We're not going to be able to be builders in the future. And so they just want to hold back the future. They don't want to have a bar of it and they go, but risk, you don't understand. I go, I think I do. No, you don't understand. I said, I think I do because I have family in the business and what are you worried about?

Craig Rispin: And they go, well, you know, we get to charge clients a lot of money because it takes a long time and it's complicated. And if it doesn't take a long time and it's not complicated, how can we charge them a lot more money? And I said, Hey, you know, there are businesses. Imagine a business comes to you in the future. There's sort of like the Uber of the building industry. And they say, we can print your house in a day, just choose a design here on our iPad. And we'll just hit the button and you'll have it tomorrow. Would you pay a premium for that? Of course you would. Of course you would. Of course you would, but who's going to do it first.

Chris Bates: Well, it's interesting. It makes a lot of sense to do things like modular homes and build them offsite, et cetera, but trying to create, you know, mover industry up to the current times when they've been building it a certain way for a long, long time, it's very difficult for people to kind of change their Fossette for set a perspective, I guess isn't it.

Craig Rispin: Yes. And their guilt they're going to have to, because I can go to these leaders and say to them, Hey, just think about the last 30 years. Think about the last 30 years, the incredible changes that we've seen in our lives. And since most of these leaders are 50 plus year olds, and I'm one of those as well. They were a member 30 years ago and they were a member and then they look back and they go, Holy cow, where we've come from. Right. And they're like, Oh, the incredible changes that we've seen. I go, we'll take that and make it at least a hundred times faster and bigger for the fourth industrial revolution. They go, that's not possible. And I go, Oh, well, look at this chart and look at this chart, look at this chart. And the one chart that I show them is a Moore's law Moore's laws, this exponential curve that we've been on, that's been driving.

Craig Rispin: Yeah. Okay. Well, if you put that on logarithmic chart, you can say that a computer that costs $10 million in 2001, it was just $10,000. So from 10 million to $10,000 to 20 in that same timeframe, what costs $10 million in gene sequencing? Like the storage that we were talking about, where you can use genetics to do the data storage, that's crashed from $10 million down to 10 cents. And that's, what's driving. It's the, when you, when you intersect, you crashed together, it's the fusion of technology and the biological and the physical world. So it's not just three D printers. There's new materials like bricks made out of fungus. My selling them is a new material. So that's in the physical world. Yeah. Yeah. My selling them is a fungus. It's, you know, the roots of basically a mushroom and it's fire retired tardus but here's the cool thing. You can just build a frame and you can grow your house. So you just come back. There's your house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's very safe, flame retardant, flexible earthquake proof as well. And afterwards you can just melt it down. Basically you can spray it with some other materials. So it, you know, it just goes away into the environment is biological.

Veronica Morgan: It's sort of fascinating what he's fascinating. Of course it's fascinating. But here we are, we've got governments that struggle with change. You know, many of these are going to try and get voted in. But, but out there you've actually got entrepreneurs and inventors and, and some serious money going into this sort of technology and exploration. How is it? You know, my mind's boggled really is in terms of how it's, how it's developed, sustained financed. It all seems to happen irrespective of what the political landscape is doing. And it's quite fascinating, even from that perspective that this is like a whole world order that's happening regardless of what's happening on the surface.

Craig Rispin: Yes. And in fact, I work with many entrepreneurs who for years were thinking about what do we need from the government? And then they figured out it didn't matter which government was in. They weren't doing anything for them. So they've decided, you know, let's just ignore them and move ahead. And yeah, I worked with one group that baby basically a secret group in Adelaide, a secret, you know, star chamber of business owners who basically said the government in Adelaide is useless. So let's ignore them and let's move ahead. And they made a huge difference to the business community, to the retail area, to the festivals, a business, by the way, to sport and to real estate in spite of the government, I'd have to say, so they just basically didn't engage with them. And guess what happened? Things happened, obviously.

Chris Bates: Changed you know force companies to innovate in terms of changing the way that they do, you know, their work policies around. You have to come to the office nine to five, or you have to work from home, et cetera. You've obviously looked at remote work and working from home. Um, how much do you think that kind of Corona has brought that forward and, you know, will this change be permanent or do you see us all kind of going back to the office nine to five,

Craig Rispin: We are never going back. We are never going back. We have a new normal, and we see it every day, every single day. I see another announcement cause I have an alert on companies announcing in their earning reports that are publicly listed remote work and the word permanent. So remote, remote work and permanent, you get those words together. The, a number of announcements just in this earnings season that we're having right now is earning seasons. All these publicly-listed companies announcing what they're doing, the occurrence of the words, remote work. So just in the last quarter, the number of publicly listed companies saying that the three words remote work and permanent 1,185 times, that's 1,185 different publicly listed companies. Who've mentioned that. And so are we going back?

Craig Rispin: No, but are we, will we ever go back to the office? Yes. So the most likely scenario that I'm discussing with my colleagues, 20,000 futurists in the world, future society. So we're discussing, what's the most likely scenario for the future. And we say it's three places. So you've got the office that you go to because you have to, because there's a meeting, but how many days a week do you go to that? Debatable depends on what industry you're in, what your job is, what maybe even what division you're in. And the second place is your remote office, your home office, right? And the third place is a third place. So it's like a way work or shared office space. Yes. Are the most likely scenarios in the future. You'll have these three places that you'll be going to, so that's really going to impact the commercial property world and how much, well, the latest statistics are about 30%, about 30% of office space won't be needed going forward.

Craig Rispin: And if you just look at publicly listed companies, it's hard to say for private Lily listed because you know, they're not reporting these things, but publicly listed companies. And just look what happened with the Facebook. Facebook will send everybody home and they're like, Holy cow, people are more productive. Well, not everyone, but most people where they're like, Holy cow, we're more productive. We were, we were really against this remote work thing. And then we figured out, Hey, people are more productive. Wow, surprise, surprise. And then they, what do they do? They call their property developer. And they, Hey, you know, the multibillion dollar headquarters we're building, just come back the floor space 29%. Please go. How about that for foresight? For my community. They said about 30% Facebook confirmed it. You know, it's Twitter, it's square. It's the one company after another just announcing, Hey, you know, this remote work thing, we think it's pretty good. And we're going to be doing it permanently from now on. So

Chris Bates: Work in terms of you know, there's work from home. Like I work from home three days a week. I go to the city two days a week, let's say, yeah, you're already there through remote work. I think is I live anywhere in the world and I don't go to the office at all. Or we need a, you know, a futurist in the, in the business. And the best features in the world is actually in San Francisco. So we'll hire them so you can hire globally. And you can live globally and work for a company anywhere in the world. Do you think that still some far still farfetched?

Craig Rispin: No, no, no, no, no, no. So there's a whole community that the like myself for the last 20 years, and there's a huge community of remote workers like myself, I run a remote company, so I can mostly work anywhere in the world or hop on a plane to fly somewhere, to deliver a presentation or do strategic planning for a weekend with a company and yeah. Yeah, yeah. And listen, listen, these companies are multibillion dollar companies that you know about, and I've been doing a whole bunch of presentations to companies that what are these companies that are remote only know that you don't know that you have been forced into being remote. And they know a lot of things that normal companies don't know. And you picked up on one of them that you can recruit from anywhere. That is a huge difference. That means you've got this global talent pool, not just can I get somebody in San Francisco and it's hard to get developers in San Francisco for instance, but it's easier in a, you know, in Israel let's say right now, well, what's the downside. It's a property issue. It's a property issue. Well, property is part of it,

Veronica Morgan: Human connection and belonging, and establishing in networks and understanding. I mean, I've got a friend of mine who is, he was actually started quite a senior senior role with a big company in Australia in the middle of COVID locked down. And, you know, so she's a general manager has got quite a lot of staff and, and the onboarding process for someone at that level has been really quite challenging and difficult because there's absolutely been no face to face contact other than via zoom. So that, I mean that it sort of has to coexist. Doesn't it? I mean, I think pure remote working sort of, it flies in the face of the fact we do need to connect and network and different personality types also require different types of interaction. Right?

Craig Rispin: Well, you would think that if you've never worked for a remote only company, have you worked for a remote only company?

Veronica Morgan: No, of course I haven't. But if there's a downside because of that,

Craig Rispin: Well, I have to tell you some of these remote companies that I work with who are too, by the way, multibillion dollar organizations. So it must work. Or if it didn't work, they wouldn't be multibillion dollar organizations. They have incredible culture. In fact, their culture, I would say is better than a lot of, you know, what I say, you know, legacy companies, because they're definitely, they're showing us the future and there are some guides out there. And I just want to point the listeners to some great guides because these companies that are remote only, they've been sharing all of their learnings. This is what we learned over the last 20 years.

Craig Rispin: Like here's how you create a great culture and I'll give you just one example. How, how remote only companies, not only do they use different technology, but they use it differently. So they were all using zoom before we were using zoom. I have to tell you, I started using it back in 2011 because I saw my remote only companies using it, but they were using it in a different way. So, you know, in zoom, you can have this gallery view where you see a lot of people, like, you know, Brady bunch style where you got everybody on screen. And so I went to visit this HR person that was booking me for this event. And, and she had this screen up and I said, Oh, are we meeting with all these people? She said, no, that's our hallway. I said, what if they go, Oh, this is what we do. We just leave zoom running all day long, zoom running all day long,

Chris Bates: Basic companies doing it. I think it's amazing. And I agree with what you're saying is that, you know, a lot of these tech companies that have a kind of open source let's share best practice sort of philosophy.

Craig Rispin: Yeah. Yeah. And I point you to these companies who share this and they go, this is, this is the technology that we use, and this is how we use it differently from you. And so there's one company that is a valued at more than a billion dollars, a little company called Zapier Zapier makes connections between web services. Yeah. And they've got a remote working guy. That's 178 pages. And I know you don't have to read the whole thing, but every chapter is useful. And say, for instance, you don't know how to recruit, recruit remote workers because there's a different way to recruit remote workers than it is through a job board where it says, okay, what city do you, are you living in?

Craig Rispin: You know, obviously the rate, the job boards don't really handle that very well. And so there are remote only recruiting websites that you go to you recruit. So that gives, gives you a feeling, but there's so many guides out there. And, and there's one particular a resource I want to give all of your listeners right now in this time of crisis. Cause yes, I sound optimistic because I can see what's happening. And also the intersection of technology and, and biology and the physical going to solve this Corona crisis faster than ever before. I'm good. I can tell you, I can see what's happening now with, we just need more and more clinical trials and human trials. And there are more trials and human trials coming for this than ever before in human history. And it's all because we've got this technology. So back when AIDS hit, it took us two years, two years to isolate what it was.

Craig Rispin: We didn't even know what it was. It took us three years to find a treatment fi just any kind of treatment. It wasn't even a cure. And do you know, we just cared the second person on earth. It looks like just finally. Now that was the 1980s. Right? Incredible. That it took that long. But now what happened? Well, even in spite of China saying, no, this isn't what you think it is. It's not something new. It's not a novel Corona virus. In spite of that in five days, we isolated in three days, it was up an Amazon web services and 350 organizations that were looking for treatments, all downloaded it within three days and started on solutions. This is incredible time that, yes, it's the worst time in human history. And we're more prepared for dealing with it than ever before. We should have been better prepared, but we're more prepared to fix it than ever before.

Craig Rispin: And this is the great news and this means that things are gonna change. And I just want to give you a future scenario of what's going to happen in the future. So if we need, let's say on average 30% commercial real estate, well, what does that mean? If you're remote only, I mean, you can work from anywhere. So where are you going to live? And you know, Facebook has already discussed this. They said, okay, everyone, you can work from home for the next 12 months. At the end of 12 months, we're going to reevaluate where you're living. And if you're in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the cost of living is 35% less. We're going to adjust how much we pay you because obviously you have to get paid more to live in San Francisco. I don't know if you've seen San Francisco rates, but they're insane. Yeah. They're, they're kind of like Sydney and Melbourne, but anyway, yes. Insanely expensive. And so yeah, look at that. And that's what companies do. They opposite. They optimize for costs. And so if they're, if your employees can cost you less and that's one of the other benefits is you can pay people less because their living costs are less.

Veronica Morgan: Yeah. But you see where that's going, don't you? I mean, obviously that then changes the, the rate of pay from what the output is or what that person is doing or what the value of the individual is, is to, you know, a rate that's indexed by where they live. And then obviously the inf the big organizations are going to start looking for, for starter live in cheap areas.

Craig Rispin: Yeah. And that's a good thing. And I have to tell you, this is a good, this is a message of hope. It's not a problem because I've been an executive. I gave it up 20 years ago, but I wasn't exact global executive. And we had this indexing for our packages. As you move from place to place, they say, you're in London, London. So there's this consulting firm called Hewitt and Mercer. And there's another, and there's several. And all they do is negotiate a executive packages. What does that mean? That if you move to an area that costs more, you get paid more. It only makes sense because your costs are bore. And so there are firms, and this is the good news. It used to be just for senior executives, VPs and above, right? And now every employee is going to get that opportunity to get paid more because your living expenses are more San Francisco and get paid less because you want to be in Tulsa.

Chris Bates: And I guess what comes down to whether you've got an abundance or a scarcity mindset. So, you know, I guess one side of the coin, you could look at this and say, wow, if, if I'm not good at my job, I live in an expensive country. I'm expensive to companies and I'm not doing a great job. Well, I need to be fearful that people living all over the world and cheaper countries that can do a better job than me because in remote world, you know, they're more likely to get hired because they're cheaper and better. And so the job market is potentially going to be destabilized longterm by people who aren't great or aren't working on themselves and educating. And then you've got technology, replacing jobs as well. I mean, you know, there've been lots of reports that saying, you know, 40, 50% of jobs are going to be gone due to technology in the next, you know, 10, 20 years. Let's say, Craig, you know, people worry about technology taking their jobs. What's your thoughts on that? Okay.

Veronica Morgan: Before we do that, can we just go back for a sec? Because where I was going with those questions was that one of the reasons that say Sydney, inner Sydney and in Melbourne are really strong stable areas with it, with, with, in, within which to invest. And also in terms of leaving the property is more expensive than the rest of the country is because it attracts, you know, the, the, there the knowledge center right there attracts that sort of, that highly skilled out. Right. So what I'm seeing from what you're saying is that this could, could have a fun, or could lead to a fundamental shift in the, in the structure around how location and property prices are linked. That's what I'm looking at.

Craig Rispin: Yes, definitely. It's already starting to happen. We were going to see a shift because of the pandemic, but will it come back? We're not quite certain. And I can tell you a big difference because I have an inside source. My sister works for a little company called office, works in Australia. And and I'll tell you how their business has shifted. They've had some boom days, boom day, right? And why, but their business model is completely changed. It used to be, I'm a big company. I've got a thousand employees send us a thousand, stand up desks, dual screen monitors, et cetera, et cetera, and send it to these five locations. Now, what they're saying is I've got 3000 workers send the new Mac book and the new iPad and the new phone and the standup desk and the dual screen to 3000 people's homes all over the country.

Craig Rispin: And what I, what I think is that this is great news for country areas, because I think that areas that are outside the city, which are a bit of a longer commute, let's say will and gong for Sydney or up to new castle or wherever it might be, or you're in San Francisco. And you're on the other side of the Bay. And you're like, Oh, I hate commuting. And every day, well, you don't right. You commute in one day or two days. And the rest of the days you stay somewhere else, that's a bit of a longer commute, but you're not doing it every day. So it's not grinding you. And so you're like, okay, well then I can live in, fill in the blank because I only have to commute in once a week or once every two weeks or whatever. So I think this is great news for a region regional areas, just like we've seen this boom in regional tourism just recently after, you know, so we've got some freedom and everybody's like, I'm going to go spend some money in the regions. I'm not going to get on a plane. I think that people are going to go, Hey, you know what? I don't have to go in the office anymore. How about we live here?

Chris Bates: I think that's, yeah, very true. And I think especially if it's still commutable, you know, one, two days a week, I think what she, you start going, you know, three, four or five hours away and you start to get away from being commutable, I guess, it's you need the employees to really advance to that remote working paradigm. And I guess it's, how long do employers really get to that? We don't really care where you work, where you live in Australia. You don't even need to ever come to the office. I just don't know whether this will get us there in this sort of transition. Or do you think that's wrong?

Craig Rispin: Listen, we're already there. The is a great futurist who has had this great phrase, William Gibson, we're a science fiction writer, extraordinary and coined the term the, the cyberspace around that. Where are we gonna be going with virtual reality in the future? And what did he say? He said that the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And I have to tell you these remote only companies over there are multibillion dollar companies. I've just, there's another one, you know, at Lassie and they're doing the same thing. They make tools. Multibillion-Dollar listed company, one of our success stories in Australia. And what do they do? They make tools for remote companies. That's and how bout Slack Slack went from being valued at $0 million to $1 billion in 15 months, it was the fastest growing enterprise software in the history of the world, faster than the Microsoft office, faster than Salesforce. And it's why Microsoft had to respond with where their, where their tools, because Slack changing everyone, every single remote company, I know runs their entire communications channels in Slack. They hate outlook with a passion

Chris Bates: And to say obviously if you have to drive to the city it's a bit of a pain. You have battle the traffic it's unproductive time, but do you say the future of autonomous cars, you know, closer than people think because it's kind of going off the front pages. Now, it was all about the rights a couple of years ago. And you know, we're going to be all in driverless cars by 2030, et cetera. But how soon do you think to we actually are not driving anymore?

Craig Rispin: Well, I've been in self driving cars, driving around Las Vegas just last year. And I mean, there was, they were taxis and there were no drivers and yes, they were on a particular circuit. They weren't going all around Las Vegas, but I have to tell you, it's like getting a microwave. Remember the first time you had a microwave, you're like, Oh, I've got this microwave. I'm never going back. And when you get into a driverless taxi and you, and what they do is they install these screens. And so you can see what the, what the taxi can see, and it can see all around itself three 60 and you're like, Oh, it's actually driving better than I would drive it. Like, and so it's already here. It's just not evenly distributed, but I think we're going to see self flying taxis before we see self driving cars.

Craig Rispin: And the reason for that is, well, I think it's going to be easier because we have three D space. Why is everybody on two D roads when we're living in 3d buildings? That's what Elon Musk says. That's crazy. I'm going to go under the ground, but I think we're going to go through the air and this is already happening in New Zealand. So, and so Larry Page, the cofounder of Google funded, Sebastian Thrun, Sebastian is the guy who created the Google self driving car. And now he's creating Larry Page, self flying vertical takeoff and landing plane. It's a plane with all these little propellors on the wings, and it takes off vertically flies to where you need to go land safely. And then it flies off and take somebody else. And they're going to be they've got a license they're going to be doing they're doing test flights. Now they're gonna be flying live customers this year in 2020 in New Zealand, it's called like Uber air, but not Uber. Uber has got a multibillion dollar business around this. There it's called Uber elevate. And they're working with companies like bell used to be bell helicopter, and they showed off their, their system lasts two years ago. So this is all happening. This is, this is inevitable, inevitable that this is going to happen. What do you think about the re

Chris Bates: Online shopping has kind of been a bit, you know, we've, we've kind of maybe you know, dabbled with, you know, buying things on Amazon and things like that, but we haven't, you know, until covert really shifted buying everything like groceries and everything,

Craig Rispin: Example, it just accelerated the future, you know, total of online shopping before the COVID crisis was only on average, globally, about 12% of all retail sales. Yeah. And now we think it's about 35% of all retail sales. And why isn't it a hundred percent? Because there are some things that you just can't get online shopping, but but it's accelerated, it jumped just in the last quarter from 12% to about 35% globally. And it's just accelerating. And I think that many people here in Australia still go and get their groceries, but in California where my family is, they don't get groceries. They don't get, just get delivered to their door. They never go, they never go to the grocery store anymore. They just don't.

Chris Bates: And you actually think we'll do zoom sort of video recordings, or do you think we will kind of innovate and go further in that maybe it's virtual reality meetings and things like that. Do you know? Cause I think a lot of, one of the negatives that people get very tired on zoom all day.

Craig Rispin: Yeah. It's screening fatigue. Yes. And so this is what I think, and I've already seen this. So another example of the future, not being evenly distributed in Singapore, when families have major events like major birthdays or anniversaries, and they've got relatives all around the world, they do a really interesting thing. They push the dinner table up against the wall, put a projector on the dinner table and project onto the wall, the other half of the dinner table in China or laser or whatever right now, imagine that there are these projectors and you can buy them now. And they're short throw projectors. So you just put it up against the wall and it projects this huge 150 inch image. And because it is reflective, it's, you know, it's signed onto the wall rather than into your eye that a screen does, which has direct light into your eye.

Craig Rispin: It's less fatiguing. And I think what you're going to see is that people are going to take a room in their house, their bedroom. They're going to have a one of these video walls and that's going to be all their coworkers. When you walk in, it's going to be a full length camera when you can sit down at your desk and turn around and they're going to be your workers. And I think, I think that's what we're going to see. You know, we've seen it. I know you've seen this in science fiction where these video walls, but I don't think they're going to be led. I think they're going to be these projectors because they're crashing and price. You can get one of these short throw projectors. Now for under $1,500, they'll be under a thousand dollars next year. There'll be under $500 after that. And people are going to go, Hey, you know, that projector that's much easier on my eyes. I think I'll just project my entire laptop screen my zoom conference on that wall. I just, yeah,

Veronica Morgan: Dang a lot more power. And obviously the internet are we, you know, in terms of an infrastructure point of view, are we ready for this?

Craig Rispin: No, the infrastructure isn't, but don't worry about that because the infrastructure is irrelevant. So we have not invested in the power distribution that we need. And you probably realize this because we're getting power outages in cities, all around the globe and the future. I know, cause I work with energy companies and those energy companies who have figured out that their business models actually take their customers off the grid off the grid. So I work with a power company horizon power out in Western Australia. And they've actually accelerated this. There are, you know, a semi-government organization, partially governmental run, you know, a commission and their charter is to help everyone in the regional areas, not the major cities in Western Australia. And so they've got these runs where they have to run this power cable, you know, 58 kilometers out to one of their customers.

Craig Rispin: And they're like, you know, it costs us $8 million every five years just to service that. How about if we take you off the grid, we give you solar panel panels. We give you a battery backup and a Jesus diesel generator, just in case those batteries go down and guess what? They've never run the diesel generator. So they've just, and this is a major company. This is a major power company that they've just taken off the grid entirely. And they've done this 45 times. Last time I checked in with them 45 times they've taken their customers off the grid. So I think what we're going to see the biggest their future. I did some scenario planning with them. They believed is what we call community grid. So in your local neighborhood, every, maybe only every, every other house is good for solar, but you sell the extra solar that you've got to your neighbor next door neighbor.

Craig Rispin: You basically connect up on the grid. And if we had every other house in Australia that had solar panels and we had batteries in our garage and we had electric cars on our driveway to give you an idea, the projection from BHP who says, we've got to get out of coal, but we'll stay in nickel and copper because those are needed for batteries. And so we're getting out of coal entirely because electric cars have grown faster than we ever predicted. So we're getting out of coal. Why? Because we seen that there's no future in it because we're not going to have any more coal of power plants because we're going to have community grids. And what was the projection? This was last year in their corporate earnings that by 2029, 2030, that the payback your return on investment, that if you put solar panels on your roof, you put a battery in your garage and put an electric car in your driveway, the return on investment 11 months, 11 months.

Veronica Morgan: And it takes big business to come up with this stuff rather than our governments. Isn't that interesting?

Craig Rispin: Well, you know, then they're fighting against it. They're trying to hold back the future. Aren't they don't. They want to get voted in, in North Queensland and places where there's heavy reliance on coal.

Craig Rispin: Yeah. Here's the good news in Australia. Our power has gone down to below zero. Why has our power costs gone below zero? It's because the amount of solar that we have in this country is staggering and it's the, and it's going to be true for America soon. It's gonna be true for Germany soon. And this is inevitable, but why are our power bills more expensive than ever? And I have to tell you it's because the energy companies have figured out, we've got to charge our customers as much as possible, but soon they're going to figure out they don't need us.

Chris Bates: It's funny. I did that. I did it quite on my house with some solar just last week, actually. And because of the government rebates and you know, there's lots of the cost of solar, then, you know, there's different qualities of panels and different countries and et cetera, but, you know, for a reasonably decent one, it was only gonna cost about $4,000. And that would basically save me three grand a year and you know, electricity. So, you know, it's like after a couple of years, you kind of already breaking even, I think that's obviously come down a lot over the years.

Craig Rispin: Well, how would you like a free electric car? I mean, when they say return on investment, that means that you have completely paid off the panels, the battery and the car. And how do you do that by connecting to your neighbors? I've got a lot of trees next to them and say, Hey, I'll just, I'll become my own power company.

Chris Bates: Tesla was talking about something like that, right? You, you kind of, you lease it back to the, to become a taxi grid. Yes.

Craig Rispin: It's a vehicle to grid solution, vehicle to grid solution.

Veronica Morgan: So these are all really big, exciting things to be discussing and understanding that they, as you say, they're already happening, what are sort of on a, on a sort of a any more on an individual level, are they changing values and priorities that are helping feed into this, but also that have been brought to the fore through this lockdown period and Corona borrows.

Craig Rispin: Yes. So I've been talking about this for 20 years. Have you, have you felt this, that there's sort of a shift in the way that people are valuing the role of work in their lives?

Veronica Morgan: Not just that, but they, you know, connections and the families and the space in which they, and you know, what they spend their money on. There's a whole, there's a, there's a shift on many levels, but yes, definitely

Craig Rispin: Total stiffed, a big shift. Yes. It's really difficult for me and my family, for instance, to buy my adult children gifts. I can't buy them things anymore. They're like, damn, we don't need things. We don't have things. I don't want things. Right. We want to create memories. Don't buy me things. And I'm like, wow, your values are completely different for me. I was a child in the 1980s, you know, greed is good. And we had a lot of things I have to say, and I don't have a lot of things to show for that. Those things that we bought and their values have completely changed. They're there. And it's a good thing. It is a good thing because we needed to change our values. We really did. We did, we didn't need to live in this consumer, a world that was driven by stuff and people are figuring that out.

Craig Rispin: But you know, I want to go back to the question that you asked, because everybody asks me about this. I go, Hey, you know, all this AI stuff for us, but it's going to replace me. I go, no, it's not going to replace you. It's going to replace jobs. And what kind of jobs are you going to replace? The ones that you want to get out of? So what, and so this is what I say to everyone. It's a message of hope. And it's true. The only reason that I get the kind of clients that I get is because I'm Craig, Rispin powered by AI. I'm a futurist plus AI. I have an AI tool called Athena, and I can ask it what's the future of fish market. So I can work with the Sydney fish markets or the Sydney cricket grounds or Sydney airport.

Craig Rispin: What's the future airports. And it's that AI tool that makes me as super human futurist. And so jobs are not going to go away. They're not going to be replaced by AI. Those jobs are going to be replaced by jobs plus AI. So I'll give you one example. These remote companies have figured out that they can do all their sales calls on zoom. They can build a billion dollar company, a billion dollar company just by making zoom phone calls. How do you do that? Well, what they do is they plug in a little thing called chorus.ai. It records your zoom calls and gives you instant AI coaching afterwards. Hey, wristband, you stumbled a little bit with that answer that you gave. Here's, here's Sally. She did it much better in her close rates, a little bit better than yours. Would you like to see that completely changes your sales culture?

Craig Rispin: So think about your job right now, any job and say, if I added AI, could I become a super heroine superhero? Could I have, you know, Jarvis in my head and make it, you know, like Ironman hat and make myself, you know, that much smarter. And I have to tell you, a lot of people have already figured this out. I'm not the only one. There are doctors plus AI. There are lawyers plus AI, there are accountants plus AI. There are journalists plus AI. There are investors plus AI. There are investors online doing really well with AI. And so I have to say, this is my message of hope for the future. There are incredible opportunities and right now is a crisis. And it's the best time to reinvent yourself, reinvent your business, reinvent your industry, reinvent your country.

Chris Bates: That's really I guess the, the, the worry is that, you know, you leave it too late. And I think that's where, you know, your, your kind of call to action is, you know, so you're so important because, you know, if you kind of wait for five or 10 years time and go, actually, wow. You know, there's no pay rises and I've just been made redundant. I need to re skill, you know, you've kind of, you know, let the years go by. And I think that's, you've kind of always be thinking about what tends to going to change and probably going to evolve, I guess. Yeah. Every week we hear incredible stories of the dumb things. Property buyers do dumb things that end up costing a whole lot of money and there a whole lot of stress mistakes that can be avoided please. Great. Can you give us an example of a property Dumbo? We can all learn what not to do from these stories.

Craig Rispin: Yes, I do. So I read the black Swan and I read about how the equitization of mortgages. I guess we called it at the time was going to lead to this incredible crisis that it wasn't inevitable. It was like a train rolling into a wall. It was going to happen. And I thought to myself, I got to get out of all of my shares, but I didn't think I got to get out of property. And so, yes, I closed on a property two weeks before Lehman brothers collapsed in California and it took what, 11 years to come back. Oh boy.

Veronica Morgan: Ouch. And so do you still own that property?

Craig Rispin: No. It's long gone and I'm never doing that again. I have to tell you,

Veronica Morgan: And when did you get out of it? After 11 years? Over the years,

Craig Rispin: 11 years, I wasn't going to sell it at a loss, so I just hung onto it and rented it. And when it came back, I finally got rid of it.

Veronica Morgan: Right. It's interesting. There's lots of version and a think about it.

Craig Rispin: I was in the same situation of everybody else, you know, buying a property that was one point $3 million. And all of a sudden, two weeks later, your property was worth point 3 million. Like it wiped a million off,

Chris Bates: Pretty good decision to hold her then. Cause it's, then now gone up four times, let's say over that 10 years. So it must've been a, a reasonably good asset cause it's at least it's come back a lot of properties, you know, in those situations haven't come back. So in terms of just future things that no one's really about Craig's I think that's always interesting, you know, a lot of people can get snippets of what's the different areas and their information, but you know, what are some of the things that you think when you always talk to people, they just don't know that this is coming and Oh, it blows their mind.

Craig Rispin: Yeah. I'll tell you what they don't know. They don't know that we're already in the midst of it and that you could invest in publicly listed organizations that are multibillion dollar organizations that are part of this inevitable multi-trillion dollar shift to the future. Right. They're just not doing it. And so when I say to them, Hey, I'm just going to check. I just have to make sure that I've got the right number. I'm just looking at my portfolio, which is my fourth industrial revolution portfolio. And this morning it's Oh, it's down a little bit because our currency went down. So I'm at 119 point 83% hundred 19.8, three per annum for a little investment that I made in 2013 of just under $30,000. This morning is $309,000. And this portfolio is just these companies that most people, when I say, Hey, have you heard this little company called American tower? They go who's that? Or twist bio-sciences, which is up 124% or next DC and Ozzy success story with, with data centers or a little, a little company called Shopify. And they're like, Oh, Whoa, talk about e-commerce and moving to e-commerce my shop five investment up 597%.

Veronica Morgan: So you're privy to, to pick the winners. There must be a lot of other people in the race that don't actually end up winning.

Craig Rispin: No,

Veronica Morgan: I mean, there must be a lot of people in this race, or are you saying there's only a very finite amount of sort of future thinking or, or innovative enough organizations that are actually at this cutting edge?

Craig Rispin: Well, I have to tell you when I launched a new business just two weeks before the, the shutdown called explore future wealth to educate people in this area specifically. And I thought to myself, you know what, I'm going to have big competitors, these big, you know, the companies like, well, Macquarie bank and others, I must have experts in there that know what I know. So I went to some of the biggest investment managers, people that manage huge pro property portfolios and equities portfolios. And I said to them, Hey, have a look at this portfolio. Has anybody talked to you about this? And the one person said to us, my business partner, Peter Leggett and myself, he said, I have to tell you guys, nobody is really talking to us about this. And nobody's shown us this. And I would know, because I handle some of the biggest investments in Australia and I get pitched on everything.

Craig Rispin: Absolutely no one's talking to us about this plea. And these results are staggering because our advisors are saying, let's be really risky and get you a 12% return. You're saying 112%, this, this, this can't be possible. And so we share our research with them. They, they do their due diligence. They look at it and they go, Holy crap. Why hasn't anybody told us this? And I can't believe that nobody's done it. And so, you know what people say to us, they come to us and they say, why are you telling people this, keep it secret, set up a fondant to become a millionaire. And we're like, but that's not our purpose. This is a purpose led organization where we want people to make massive profits, take care of their family and then do good works in the world. This is a purpose led organization. Yes. We could go and take those profits, but that's not our purpose. And they just don't get it. And I get these calls all the time. What are you guys doing? Don't tell anyone like, Holy cow, you just, you don't understand. You just don't get it.

Chris Bates: That's very enlightening. I think it's a definitely something that's come to mind for me looking at the property side more and more as the, the work from home sort of shift the remote working. You know, there's always been companies like freelancer and Upwork for the last few years where, you know, people would outsource a little bit of their business, but I think this is just going to dramatically bring that forward. And you know, if you've got a property, you've got to really kind of understand how would, if this shift does happen on mass, how would your property perform? Is it still as desirable? You know, can they build more of them in the areas you're thinking about investing? So it's just something that people need to really kind of start to understand more and more, because it will start to impact property values. I believe

Craig Rispin: It's already starting to happen. It's just, most people can't, they don't connect the dots. I mean, just ask yourself if this happens, what does that mean? And then what does that mean? Second, second layer, you know analysis. This is something that we do as futurists. What does that mean? What does that mean? And that's when you really understand something and we can see it right now. If you say, if everybody's working from home, what does that mean? It means that some of them are going to continue working from home. And what does that mean?

Veronica Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. That's been fantastic. I've been wanting to get a futurist on. So, and certainly the COVID opportunity is we might decide to call it gives the, it gives us truly

Veronica Morgan: The opportunity to discuss these things and consider how, you know, how our world is going to be shaped and how it is already being shaped. So thank you very much for your time and for your insights.

Craig Rispin: You're very welcome. And anytime, how about you bring me back in six months time of we see where we were and where we've come to.

Chris Bates: Dramatically further based on exponential growth. Thank you, Craig. You're very welcome.

Chris Bates: We want to make you a better elephant rider and this week's elephant rider training keys.

Veronica Morgan: Well, let's just pick up on Craig's Dumbo actually, because he was saying that he bought a property in California two weeks before the GFC hit. Now that's a pretty woeful time to buy property in America, as we all knew that everything fell off a cliff. So, you know, we talk about it. We've spoken about it on the podcast about the disposition effect and loss aversion to the behavioral biases that lead us to hold onto property or anything. It could be any investment that is not performing because we wait until it actually performs or it delivers a prophet. Shall we say before we sell it? And he said that I wasn't going to sell it at a loss. Now he obviously in the light of the fact that he's lost would have been too great, I guess, to sell it. He might've been forced to hold onto it.

Veronica Morgan: There's a lot of people in mining towns are, you know, their debt that they owed. The bank is so much more than the is actually worth that they can't actually afford to get out of it. And, and we talked about I think it was a mortgage prison. I think the debt prison that Martin North talks about. And that's, that's a good example of that. So I guess wanted to talk about the difference between when you might have to keep an asset that you've mistakenly board versus where you should actually cut your losses and get out and sell that asset because in reality, you're missing out on opportunity. And if you think about in, in Craig's case, and of course we don't know the numbers around his borrowing and et cetera, et cetera. But if you think about what property in Australia did over that same period of time, versus what it did in America, he's just regained his losses versus, you know, pulling money out of that and, and investing in, in Australia as one example, it's not necessarily that I'm saying that he should have done that, but I'm just wanting to talk about the fact that sometimes you can get trapped in a property.

Veronica Morgan: And that's why we have to be very, very careful before we buy property, because we recognize the risks associated with it. And other times we were in it with we're holding a low performing asset or a poor performing asset, or even a losing asset and holding it the longer we hold it, our situation gets worse because we could cut our losses, get out of that and actually reinvest somewhere. That's going to grow and be a hell of a lot better off them by waiting until it finally gives us back what we paid for it in the first place.