my name is Joel and in this episode of unplugged I will be talking to Peter Hinssen a remarkable man he started out as an engineer became a serial entrepreneur and is now one of the most sought-after port leaders on radical innovation digitalization and leadership it has keynotes all over the world and lectures at business schools such as London Business School and MIT I met Peter earlier this year in San Francisco today we are going unplugged at one of my favorite hangouts in Amsterdam and discuss topics like his personal motives

the impact of artificial intelligence in the future of humanity I think they were pretty rich history and you look at what you’ve what you’ve done in your life so when you look back on your life and you would divide it and chapter headings can be 2 or a chapter headings what would be the early chapter headings what would be the middle chapters and what would the current chapters be well I think the early chapter is nerved I mean I was a really nerdy kid i-i-i-i didn’t have a lot of friends I spend most of my time with a computer

locked in my room and I had the I had the big advantage that I was one of the first kids who really started to program on computers at an early age so by the time I was 18 I was I was writing computer code to supplement you know what I got from my parents is pocket money but in those days I was the kid with the Ataris and the Commodore 64’s and the early Apple Macintosh is learning how to write code in in Pascal or C so that that’s nerd I think I didn’t had a chapter which was really entrepreneurial and and even as a kid I

dreamt of building a company I mean I didn’t want to become a footballer or I didn’t want to become a policeman or a fireman I I wanted to be a software guy and build a company what was that why was it I think because I was exposed to Apple early on and I love this story of how two guys in a garage built a company that built really cool products and I was inspired by you know gates basically starting a company when he was only 18 19 years old and I think those stories really stuck to me and I really wanted to do something like

that and I had the dumb luck that when I graduated the world wide web exploded and I I finished my studies in 1993 and in 1994 I saw my first web browser and in 1995 I started my first company just when most people were starting to understand what the internet really was and then second chapter was startups I did the first startup that we grew to about 200 people in four years time we built software and we sold it to Alcatel that I did a second startup which did streaming video and we sold that to

belga calm the kpn of the Netherlands of Belgium and then the third one was a company called Porter’s that we was a cloud provider software as a service and we put it on the stock exchange we IPO did in 2006 and we ran it as a public company and I loved that but when we sold that company in 2010 to our Canadian competitor on the Nasdaq that’s a period of 20 years and then I had a really big confrontation with my family because they said you had three startups we have two kids and you spend more time

on the three startups and on the two kids and and it’s true if you’re a startup entrepreneur there’s even when you’re home you’re not at home and then I had a candid conversation with the family and and they said why don’t you do something else and and that’s what I did I mean I switch gears and and I don’t regret it but it was really difficult because I think doing a start-up is like there isn’t a day that doesn’t go by when I think when I wake up I think you know I think it’s like a heroin junkie even if you’re clean for

20 years you wake up and think damn I’d like a shot right now and I think it’s the same as startups so how do you look back on that decision decision to quit with startups because it seems like it wasn’t yours well I think in hindsight it was the right choice because if I wouldn’t I wouldn’t have a family anymore so but it was hard because it’s extremely addictive and if you do one you want to do another and if you do another you want to do one more and I think it’s something where now if I look back it was probably the best

decision I’ve ever made because my quality of life is improved I spend a lot of time on the road I travel constantly but if I’m home I’m home and this is something that I really noticed and this is what my family tells me as well is that if I’m home I’m there because if you’re a startup entrepreneur you’re constantly still engaged with your business because your customer or your market or your developer or your investor there’s constantly something and now if I’m home I’m home so in that sense it was a

really good decision so what was the chapter after it started I think it’s it’s more of a it’s probably reflection I mean I have a chance now to not be in the action but to have a bigger perspective and to be able to reflect on the things that I see to have some sort of an a bird’s eye view I mean if you’re a startup you focus on one thing and now I have the chance to see many different technologies in many different markets and see how it’s gonna play out in in many different companies and that’s been

immensely rich because I can be in a you know a cookie company on Monday and I can be in a bank on Tuesday and I can be an immediate company on Wednesday and and they all talk about how they’re thinking about radical change and and I feel very privileged now these days to be able to see all that I mean in that sense I’m an observer said it was the final chapter so far so far yeah I don’t think it’s the definitive chapter you know but being able to to reflect and being able to synthesize and and have a perspective and and maybe a

little bit of a long-term vision of where things are going I find really rewarding and part of it is yeah I also joined the London Business School a couple of years ago and I’ve been teaching there for six seven years and then last year I joined MIT in Boston MIT Sloan so the Business School to do very similar things and and it’s it’s it’s wonderful I mean at MIT you’re really close to the technology but in the business school it’s about what does it mean for the world what does it mean for companies but it’s me for society or

for governments and and that’s really rewarding to be able to do that because what do you hope to bring to the world in a sense I I think one of the strange things that I see is that we’re living through change that is tremendous and I’m a collector of old I tea to give you an idea and I have a collection probably one of the biggest collections of old Apple computers in Europe and if I exhibit that and I show it to people I have people say oh my god I worked on that or oh I I wrote my thesis on this

and then I asked him what did you do with it they said oh we threw it away and it’s fascinating to see how if you look at the the phones we had in our lives that we threw away the computers that we use today it’s it’s almost unimaginable in this constant change that we’re discarding a big piece of history and in that sense I begin to feel sometimes like a historian of change I mean I I’m almost like a collector of of radical change and and in that sense yeah maybe I I begin to feel like somebody who is privileged

enough to see and then if you can boil that down and write that up into a book or put that into a lecture or it’s almost like time capsules time capsules of an era of fundamental change your most recent book is called the day after tomorrow what are you trying to achieve with the book well I meet a lot of companies that are trying to reinvent themselves I mean and the irony is that when I would do a lecture say ten years ago and I talk about changes that was gonna happen and it would be a hundred people

in the room there would be I think five people who would be uneasy and uncomfortable and there would be 95 people who would go home and say nice story but you know and now we see that technology is accelerating the pace of change it’s change in society in so many ways many people have children that are the consumers of tomorrow and they realize they don’t watch TV they don’t watch the ads if you want to reach them what are we gonna do they have young people joining their company that is a fundamental different paradigm than the

employees that are 30 40 or 50 years old business models are changing overnight and now if I do a lecture and there’s a hundred people there’s ninety five people who go home thinking oh what are we gonna do and there’s maybe five people said but not for me and that is an interesting thing and what I’m really trying to find out is how can companies deal with that and it’s it’s an era where you don’t have time anymore to wait until the final Harvard Business Review article is written you say all we’ll just do that

we’re fine no you’ve got to do it and you’ve got to learn an experiment and I think what I wanted to do with the book is figure out one to raise awareness that this day after tomorrow is it’s coming and it’s accelerating and we have to take it seriously but to to give examples of companies that I think are doing it in a really cool way or that are trying it and not wait until it’s fully proven but at least give some of the ingredients and the recipes of this is what you could do to actually be more

fluid and more agile and figure out a way to be on top of that day after tomorrow and that’s just really cool to see so in the long term do you believe there is a future for larger corporate companies why is not every company becoming a one-man company we had a lot of freelancers you talk about in your book well in that sense I’m I haven’t given up on large companies I do think there is a big wake up call in the sense that in the 20th century being big was good because you had scale and power and

muscle and Finance now it’s actually a burden because in these times that are changing so fast you have to be fluid and fast and rapid and adaptive and being agile becomes the number-one priority if you can’t change fast enough your debt and that’s why big corporations have a disadvantage but I haven’t given up on the idea that they could do that what I see is there are very simple there are a lot of excuses why it can happen and I see a lot of big corporates there although it’s impossible here no no it’s we have too

much governance systems and the structures we have and we have committees for this and but they’re making up excuses I believe there is absolutely no reason why a large corporation couldn’t do that and at the same time leverage the power I mean one of the really almost absurd things that you see is I do a lot of work with startups and I love startups but you’re small and the most horrible thing about a start-up is you’re always starting from scratch if you have to convince your first customer to buy in and you

haven’t sold anything yet that’s like an insurmountable you know Hill to get over you’re always struggling in a startup and every startup that I know wants to be big and every big corporation wants to be small again so I think there is this very strange thing that large corporations if they would be able to be more fluid and then use their strength power scale market customer-based and money I think they could do amazing and look at finance for example banks the last couple of years have gotten a

little worried about FinTech and all these FinTech startups you know what I don’t think that is their biggest threat I think if one of the big banks figures out a way to turn their power base into a more agile power base that Bank is going to blow away all the other banks so I don’t think they should be afraid of the little you know startup ends that are pecking away but I think if you can figure out what to do then you can become an absolute category king in almost every market how do you look at

the future of humanity because we have today after tomorrow and we have today after today after tomorrow I think we are in the huge technological acceleration right now yeah so in 10 20 years from now what’s going to happen and the scientific field is kind of divided about what artificial intelligence is going to do for us yes optimists and pessimists how do you look at that I am essentially an optimist but the older I get the more pessimistic my view is not that when when I was writing the book I had the

chance to meet a couple of crazy people and one of them was Nick Bostrom and he runs the future of humanity Institute in Oxford this is a philosopher by training but he is a team of mathematicians I think he has like 10 or 15 mathematicians and they’ve been calculating this the strategies for Humanity so this is a guy who is looking like 50 to 100 years out and looking at artificial intelligence and machine learning and robots and automation and what are the chances that we as humans will survive and after he did ten years

of research with you know all these mathematicians and and his conclusion in life is there is no chance that we as humans will survive and I think this is a pretty sobering thoughts I’ve been heavily influenced in in the past couple of years by Kevin Kelly he is the founder of Wired magazine and when I was when I was young I wrote a couple of articles for Wired magazine and he was my editor of chief editor he’s the founder of wired and and I got to meet him a couple of times and and in my opinion he’s one of the the chief

thinkers on this subject and he wrote a brilliant book called what technology wants and his vision is that we humans seem to have this naive belief that we invented technology and we’re now thinking how could technology kill us but he said technology isn’t something that we invented technology is a vector and when you see the evolution of life we humans are like a very small fragment that is taking technology to the next level and he said we should be grateful that we are at this moment the most

intelligent species who has been given the chance to take technology to the next level so instead of fearing the fact that we’re going to become obsolete we should be thankful that we’ve had this position in the course of history now that’s maybe extreme what I do think is we need to have a really societal debate about this when when Obama in I think the last two weeks of his administration he gave an interview in Wired magazine with the chief of MIT Media Lab and he talked openly about AI and ml and jobs displacement universal

basic income an American president talking about universal basic income is like communist heresy just a couple of years ago and he basically said we need to have a societal debate because if you look at the manufacturing jobs in the US it’s less than 10% Trump was elected on the fact that these 10% people thought robots was going to destroy their jobs but there’s 70 percent of the US population which works in services many of them in information services in banks or insurance companies and the impact there is going to be even

higher and basically Obama in a brilliant interview said we’re all we need to have a debate about this and what I find cowardly about Obama is that he was present for eight years he’s a real nerd he literally loves that stuff for eight years he knew what was happening and he didn’t talk about it and in the last two weeks he said well good luck and I think this is something that we have to do more intensely I think we need to to have that debate and I think we need to think about this because the implications on how we live

our lives on many aspects that we now take for granted I think we completely have to rethink in your book you present a model which is this is about today tomorrow the day after tomorrow and the shade of yesterday maybe you can elaborate a bit on that and I’m curious how do you use a model in your own life well I mean the model really started in a very simple reflection on in a world that’s changing faster we always look at tomorrow with the things that we know today and we try to extrapolate and I I

came up with this maybe naive idea that if you look at today tomorrow day after tomorrow today is the 112 emails we get on Monday morning we didn’t know we had to worry about the Friday night before tomorrow budgets I a lot of companies go through budget exercises but they look at next year’s budget basically as an extrapolation of today’s budget and then you have this day after tomorrow new ideas new concepts new business models new technologies and that’s where the real long-term value lives and I see

many companies spending too much time on today a lot on tomorrow almost nothing on the day after tomorrow and my naive idea was what if you would look at that day after tomorrow and calculate back you would probably come up with a different tomorrow added to that that you spend way too much time figuring out the of yesterday which is dragging you down the model is so stupid that it sticks in people’s minds and and sometimes I have a fear that if I die the only thing I will be remembered is oh it’s the guy

from the of yesterday honestly it’s what everybody who comes to a lecture they remember the of yesterday and maybe if it triggers people to think a little bit differently fine I mean if it gets people to think a little bit more about the day after tomorrow fine when you ask a question what it means for me I could give you a really cute answer if you’d ask my family they would probably burst out a little laughter because they think I’m the most conservative guy that has ever lived I could eat the same meal

every single day because I just like to eat these things my wife is the one who is always trying new things my kids think I’m you know the guy who is incredibly backward I’ll tell you a story my 17 year old daughter had to do us some presentation at school where she had to say what does she want to become when she grows up and she was struggling with this and she she’s quite assertive and we were having breakfast and she said you know what I’m gonna say I want to be just like my dad and at that

moment you think oh wow she said if I see that you go around the world talking about the day after tomorrow and talking about new technologies and how little you know it must be the easiest job in the world that puts things in perspective so yeah I think maybe it’s difficult to put that in perspective in terms of an individual the only thing I would say is I’m insanely curious about that day after tomorrow and I’d probably find looking at tomorrow just too boring I just wish it was the day after

tomorrow every single day so I think that curiosity is probably what I try to maintain even if I get older so on a deeper level do you want it to be today after tomorrow or can you are you able to be present as well because it’s always today yeah that’s true and and I think the only concern I have is that many of the things that I start to explore or write about or talk about is stuff that I’d really like to see and and I think that’s the only regret I have of I mean I’m 48 so there are a couple of technologies that I’m really

excited about but that I know it’s gonna be a close call for me to see and I’m not talking about AI we’re gonna see that or settle driving cars we’re gonna see that but the possibility to really fundamentally change who we are as human beings the possibility to not just read our DNA but code our DNA and rewrite our DNA the possibility to to build humans that have capabilities or intelligence or you know things we could have only read about in science fiction are gonna become reality and that’s probably at

the threshold that I won’t be able to see anymore so that’s maybe the only regret I have in that respect so why does it excite you so much to really realize the potential of human beings when it comes to technology because I really believe that in that Kevin Kelly philosophy we are taking it to the next level and I think I’d rather be the person who gets excited about the new then worries about maintaining the old I don’t think you know when we had the Homo sapiens and Neanderthals people said ah it’s really sad that we’re not

gonna have those Neanderthals anymore no you wanted to go ahead and I think this is something we’re fundamentally people who really want to understand how to do things differently better in a completely new way are the ones that I feel naturally attracted to that’s why I spend so much time with the startups because those are the ones who don’t know what they’re doing and they want to do things differently and I think this is if you see Elon Musk landing a rocket on a barge in the middle of the sea where

thousands of NASA scientists for tens of years said it’s impossible it can never be done I get excited about those possibilities so it’s all about becoming that’s what kelly writes about it right exactly it’s about becoming and I think you know there’s a whole debate now about what it means for example in the world of artificial intelligence right and and Kevin Kelly I think is right in the sense he says we’re always positioning like okay we went from monkeys to humans and then we’re gonna have you know

cyborgs taking over no no this is gonna be a wealth of possibilities and and he compares we’re always look at that from going you know up and up and up but he said if you look at the evolution of life any positions as a sphere where we started out when we we got the first cells to work together and then it grew but you’ve got fungi and you’ve got ostriches and you got hippos and and a squirrel is as evolved as we humans but in different ways and he tells the story which I really like it says if you take

a squirrel a squirrel can remember where he put 3,000 nuts five years ago to the exact location and we humans think why would you want to know where 3,000 nuts are all over the place but for a squirrel that’s really important and I think this is what we’re gonna have we’re gonna have intelligence evolving in all sorts of directions and I think what is really crucial is that point where we have to say is it just going to make things more efficient or is it going to have the capability to really reinvent new things and that’s going to

be I think a really pivotal moment in our human history we say oK we’ve arrived at the end of the year at the end of your life on your deathbed when will you be looking back in a happy kind of way whatever what is what have you done for the world I think there would have to be an enormous amount of misery in the next couple of years to not reflect the thing I had a pretty good life I mean I I think if you’re part of an evolution you should be privileged if you were in in in 1825 in Britain and you witnessed the Industrial

Revolution I think you have lived incredibly full lives you’ve seen change that was going to reshape the globe if you were in in France in 1789 and you saw the French Revolution and and how we live our lives being impacted by that I think you’ve lived an amazing life if you were in Egypt when they built the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal and you were an engineer I think you could only say I have led incredible life because I have seen changes that have impacted the world we are all privileged at this

moment to live in a time where we are the most privileged observers of one of the most fundamental changes in history and I think we can only be glad for that I at the end of my life if I spend more time with the one percent who wants to believe then with the 99 percent whiners and people who think it’s never gonna happen I I’d be a happy man if I could spend most of my life with the 1% [Music] Thanks yeah pretty good snow [Music]