Even if we think of ourselves as forward-looking and proactive versus reactive, and you don't you might not know disruption is happening until it's actually happening to you far down the road what happened with kodak

kodak 2000 as the internet emerged was this one of the two best known brand names on planet earth uh the other being coca-cola there's nobody who didn't know kodak from their orange and yellow packaging they were a behemoth and people who are 50 and above today most of them have spent over fifty thousand dollars in their lifetime on photography cameras, all the film we bought before we went on a trip, processing things teenagers don't even recognize, buying photo albums, reprints for mom and dad.

So Kodak was a hugely successful company.

Incidentally, the chapter, you mentioned Xerox also, the chapter on Xerox and Kodak is called Why Rochester, New York Should Have Been the Capital of the Silicon Valley because Kodak and Eric Weiner, PhD.: : Xerox were from Rochester and both suffered the same fate, but Kodak one thing, a lot of people don't know Kodak invented digital photography back in the early 1970s, it was an extraordinary achievement.

And when they brought the first digital camera, crude and weighed about the size of a big toaster, when they brought it to the CEO, he was really impressed.

But his first question was, this is great, but where does the film go? And the minute he understood the answer, they sat on it for 30 years because it was not just a disruption of their business.

It was the elimination of their entire business model, selling chemicals, selling film, selling cameras.

I mean, there's not a person in the world who doesn't know what Netflix is, right? Are there companies that have made true mistakes by trying to be such early disruptors or trying to disrupt just for the sake of disrupting that they've failed?

Why?

Well, for 25 years, my business has been telling global CEOs what I think they need to know, how to prepare for disruption, change that comes from unexpected places that turn trillion-dollar companies upside down.

And what we find is very few of them are ready for it.

And even if you take Google, back in 1999, when Larry and Sergey created Google in the garage in Mountain View, they didn't create Search.

They just did it better than anybody else.

And when they created Google, there already had been AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo.

So they knew that what they did to those companies could be done to them.

You think in another 20 years it could potentially not be the heavyweight that it is.

Based on what you're saying in terms of the typical timeline that exists between these disruptive technologies or innovations, how much of that call it fear mongering, do you attribute to just the fact that because it happened so soon, those of us, like there's a lot of people on the planet who were alive to experience the disruption of the internet, and that typically, like that would typically be the only big disruption that they see in their lifetime if we're going off 150 year segments, whereas this one came right off the heels of it where people can remember you know poking fun at the internet and being like oh that's just a fad it's gonna go away and then they see how it disrupted and then they see this new technology and then they're going like oh well if it did that then this has to do way worse you know

And we tend to think, absolutely, they're integral.

But just an interest, a little story, if you don't mind.

So we started this internet project with the belief that the internet would change everything.

And so we started tracking it in all these countries and still do.

And to my friends, not always in a flattering way, I became known as Mr. Internet.

Once again, not always as a compliment.

talk to young people about thriving, not just surviving in a world that looks unfamiliar than the one that they were told was going to exist when they graduated?

Huge.

So there was just no way to know where it's coming from.

But that's still the first step.

is expect to be disrupted.

And then the biggest mistake, denial may be the biggest threat of disruption.

The biggest mistake people make is they refuse to accept that their weaknesses have been found, that they may have to change and adjust.

They may make less money tomorrow than they made yesterday.

What's a specific mistake that you made while you were scaling?

Why does that happen, and what are they consistently missing, these sophisticated and well-educated, talented executives?

It's not even successful companies.

It's especially successful companies.

Part of the reason disruption is so effective and catches people off guard is it comes when an industry frequently is at its most successful.

Best example of that is the music industry.

Business model of the music industry up until 2000 was nothing short of extortion.

Said, you want to buy two songs? Great.

From what you can see, how has the film and television industry historically responded compared with other industries as we are now facing more change and more disruption than ever before? How could they have handled it?

What can you tell us from your perspective and the context that you have of previous disruptions?

Well, first, writing a chapter in a book on AI is really a foolish idea because before you can save your writing to the hard drive, it's outdated.

Even writing in a magazine doesn't make sense.

So I tried to really look at what I think were the continuing aspects of AI.

And when Chad introduced the first popular version of AI just a little over three years ago, it already was clear that it was the most important disruption technologically since the printing press.

I now think it's becoming the most important technological disruption of all time.

And, you know, interestingly, I've been tracking the Internet for 25 years and the Internet started with all this hope and optimism, the hope that it would connect everybody.

Jeff, you say that sometimes people know that they're about to be disrupted and you use the banking industry as an example.

But we have not seen the volume of disruption that we have seen in the last twenty-five years in human history.

Not n- we've never seen it so pa- so spaced so closely together, and I would argue that the internet tra- has...

You know, I ar- I, I don't think there's a business or activity that has not been affected by the internet, and most are transformed.

Much of the disruption of COVID turned out to be temporary, although there were some permanent disruptions, the disappearance or the diminishing of cash in society, telemedicine.

Most of the disruptions went back, learning in schools, and AI has the potential to be the most disruptive technology of all time.

And, you know, if you think about it for a minute, you know, the internet started with all this hope and optimism, this excitement that it would connect everybody, which indeed it did, that anybody could be a journalist, which twenty-five years ago sounded like a good thing, and then we discovered the dark underside.

We discovered hate speech, bullying, misinformation.

Yeah.

engine.

And this is not overhyped.

We may be overhyping the negative effects.

of whether 24% of the people we talk to thinks it means the end of humankind, I think there's no evidence to support that yet.

But it is real, and it really will disrupt.

I'm interested in disruption.

I have a book with disruption in the title coming out later in the year.

And to fortify David's reaction on the company most in trouble, yes, Paramount Warner Brothers, whatever they're going to call themselves, because of debt, because of scale, and you know, not to revisit the enormous negative impact that this is going to have on the entertainment industry.