So, we are living in what I call a post generational world.
When we wrote the book,
our objective was to understand Gen Z,
to understand the post-millennial generation those born after 1995.
What we quickly realized is that Gen Z is not about birthright,
Gen Z is about behavior.
And I will begin with the bold premise
that anyone in this room can be,
and most likely will be, Gen Z.
What I'd like to do in those few minutes is to give you a sense
as to the disruptors, the behaviors, that are changing in all of us,
that are causing uncertainty,
in some cases, fear, in other cases, opportunity.
but in every case, they are altering the perspective we have of the world,
and as John said, when we talk about West and East,
when we talk about cultural differences,
what we leave out of that conversation
is to me what's the most important thing
that these new behaviors, this new generation, is cross-cultural.
We can take pride and celebrate our heritage,
and yet, still behave and act as global citizens.
In so much of the behavior that I see is globalized behavior.
It's not just behavior any one part of the world.
We have to let go of that arrogance
and embrace the tolerance of true globalization.
And Gen Z is the first truly global generation.
Millennials were the beta test for globalization.
Gen Z understands what it means to be global.
So, what are those disruptors?
The catalysts in my mind, and we'll talk about each of these,
Hyper-connectivity beyond anything we could have imagined.
A demographic inversion that will change fundamentally
the very structure of society.
And this is immutable, it is happening, I'll show you,
in a time lapse from 1950 to 2100. How dramatic this exchange will be.
The rise of uncertainty, we see it in the US,
we see it in Brexit, we see it around the world.
Uncertainty is not going away.
We have to learn not to predict the future, but to survive it.
And there are ways we can do that.
The friction in every process, but the friction mostly in government.
As uncertainty increases and we have to react faster.
Governments are becoming more bloated, more complex.
That is an untenable situation.
Education. We will in the next 50 years
educate every human being that has the capacity to be educated.
What will that world look like?
How dramatic will that shift be for all of us?
And lastly, the tremendous edict.
The demand Gen Z has to be fully, utterly, naked, and transparent.
And this is something that we are not accustomed to as a society,
but we quickly are realizing that it is part of the landscape going forward.
So, hyper-connectivity. You've heard about the Internet of Things,
the Internet of Everything, we are all part of this Internet.
But what does that mean?
I'm a numbers person; I want to see the data.
When we did the book, we interviewed 600 separate individuals,
have 60,000 data points.
I wanted to look at one data point
that, to me more than anything else,
defines how quickly we are accelerating.
Stephen will talk more about this, because acceleration began in 1960
with the advent of computing.
So, back in 1960, we had mainframes, a few of them.
And then we went to departmental computers and then we went to laptops,
PCs, laptops, mobile devices, the cloud.
Here's what's amazing, and you don't hear this very often,
you don't hear this, so, please pay attention.
In every decade since 1960,
the number of user computing devices has increased by one order of magnitude.
It is almost like Moore's law,
it is an immutable. Every decade, one order of magnitude.
So, what you see here is a logarithmic scale,
it looks very flat, it looks very simple.
if we were to draw this in a linear scale,
this will go up through the clouds,
into the stratosphere.
Every decade, one order of magnitude. So, the math is simple, right?
So, if we do the math to 2100,
how many user computing devices will there be?
100 times as many user computing devices
as there are grains of sand on all the world's beaches.
Now, I'm being conservative; I'm not including the deserts, just the beaches.
Okay? How is that possible?
"It's absurd," you're saying, "that couldn't happen."
So, please, allow me to take you back to 1960.
If in 1960, I said to you,
today, we would have 10 billion user computing devices,
and of those 10 billion, 2 billion would be these,
7 billion would be cellphones at large,
what would you have thought of me in 1960?
You'd have thought: "Absurd. Can't be. It's impossible."
"Where would we find the resources? How would we use them?"
"What are the economics behind this?"
"How would we create the cooling systems to cool all of these computers?"
You'd be thinking in terms of the past not in terms of the present.
And, from where we stand today, it's so difficult to think
in terms of the future.
You will be digesting these computing devices.
You will be inhaling them. They will be in everything and everyone.
They will be pervasive.
What does that hyper-connected world look like?
And I'll share with you very quickly.
If you want to get a glimpse of it,
look to your children,
look to their behaviors.
My son Adam, he's 17 now. When he was 14,
he was incessant about video games.
He couldn't stop playing video games. He loved video games.
So, he would play 23 hours out of the day.
The other hour was spent on biological needs and necessities.
And I had it as a parent, I couldn't...
you know, it was frustrating for me to see this.
So, one day, Adam is in his room,
he's playing video games non-stop for 18 hours,
And I went into his room and I said: "Adam!"
"Please, it's beautiful, the sun is out."
"Go get some vitamin D, go outside, play with your friends."
He looked at me and said: "Dad," I love it when they say this.
"Dad, what did you do when you were my age, before computers?"
"How did you keep busy?"
I thought, "Really?"
I told him. I said: "I'd go out on my bike."
"I'd go out in the dead-end street, I'd play with my friends all day."
"Your grandmother would call me in at night for dinner."
"I didn't have a cell phone. She didn't know where I was."
"I was out on my own, enjoying nature."
He said: "Really?" He said: "A dead-end street, huh?"
He said: "Is that like a cul-de-sac, a dead-end street?"
I said: "Yes. It's sort of like a cul-de-sac. Exactly."
He said: "Well, you know what, dad?"
He pointed to his computer.
"This! This, dad, this is my cul-de-sac."
I thought "what do you say?"
What do you say to your son? What's your response as a parent to that?
My response, honestly, was:
"Get the hell outside and go enjoy some sunshine and some vitamin D."
"This is my cul-de-sac." That is where Adam socializes.
This is where his friends are.
His behavior is connected
not because he desires connectivity, we all do,
but because it is a necessary behavior
in order to be a part of the social structure that he inhabits.
My point to you is that Gen Z's behaviors
are a necessary part of the social structure that we will all inhabit.
We are all Gen Z, as I said.
Some of us won't go there willingly, some of us will fight it.
But to be a part of that society, a part of that economy, we have to.
So,
I talked about demographic inversion. This, to me, is the blockbuster.
This is what changes the world in ways that we can't even begin to predict.
Even more so than hyper-connectivity.
So, what I'm going to do is take the population pyramid.
This structure that is defined demographics for as long as we know.
And other than world wars and major famines and pandemics,
we always revert back, we regress to this pyramid.
Older people on top, younger people on the bottom.
Let me run a time lapse for you from 1950 to 2100
to show you how that pyramid is changing.
This is not just in the developed world.
This is not just the G7, it's not just the US, it's not just the UAE,
It is every part of the world.
The pyramid's going away. The base is growing,
but now, the middle is growing.
So, that educational group beyond the... below the first dotted line
to the working group between the two dotted lines
to the retirement group, which no longer exists as we know.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
From the pyramid, we go to a dome and finally, we go to a skyscraper.
By 2080, certainly, by 2100,
every five year age band
from 0 through 5 up to 60 through 65
will be separated by less than 1 to 2 percentage points.
What does this do to social welfare? What does it do to retirement?
What does it do to healthcare? What does it do to all the policy
that we are enabling through government? What does it do to sustainability?
These're the big questions.
And this is an immutable, like so much of what I'm talking about.
We're not going to change this.
This is the nature of moving from 7 billion to 10 billion people.
This is what the world will look like.
We will have 5, 6, 7 generations working together.
But at that point, the term "generation" is meaningless.
If we were going to work together, collaborate together,
it's not about the generation we were born in.
It is not a birthright.
We take pride in being a part of a generation.
But, like our eye color, we had nothing to do with it.
We were simply born at that point in time.
Take pride in your behavior, not in your generation.
Take pride in your ability to be a humanist,
not to be a Gen Z or a Gen X or a Boomer or a millennial.
And I talked about retirement, right?
Here's a fascinating little piece of data.
If we plot life expectancy, which continues to go up
and may very well accelerate,
we don't... as we approach the singularity,
who knows what that would look like?
But let's go with what we know today. It continues to incrementally increase,
so does work life expectancy. We are working longer.
And in 2100, something amazing happens when these two lines intersect,
when your life expectancy and your work-life expectancy intersect in 2100.
What does this chart illustrate?
That we will be working after we are dead.
As these two lines merge,
work-life and life expectancy become one and the same.
We don't want to disengage. We want to be intellectually, economically engaged
for as long as we can be.
Retirement goes away and part of the solution to the social welfare dilemma
of the population pyramid changing to the population skyscraper
is that we don't retire.
we continue... we build a new social structure, economic social structure,
but we also build a greater capacity to innovate
as the generations work side-by-side.
The diversity of generations turns into... not just the tolerance,
but the benefit, the opportunity of diversity,
that's happening on a global scale,
it'll happen on a generational scale as well.
Uncertainty is also increasing.
We know this, we experience this, we feel it in our bones.
As uncertainty increases, however, so does opportunity.
Opportunity increases with uncertainty.
It's just that window of opportunity, what you see on the scale,
the window of opportunity is smaller and smaller and smaller.
So, as uncertainty increases, opportunity increases,
but you have to act faster and faster.
But what's happening to government at the same time?
it's becoming more and more bloated,
more siloed, more procedural.
That is not a sustainable situation. It simply isn't.
And I have a potential solution.
We can talk more about this in the few minutes that I have.
But I can't get into too much detail about it.
But we have to move to a friction-less government
in the same way that our organizations are moving to friction-less.
So, when you think about Uber as an example.
Uber removed the friction from an industry
and built an entirely new industry as a result.
Can we not do the same to every industry?
Can we not uberize other industries?
Can we not uberize government?
And as you do that, what you find is that you move
from this very siloed
set of government policies and procedures and entities and agencies
and the anonymous citizen
to a behavioral model, where you understand the citizen
and you focus on outcomes, on experience.
And it is this focus on experience that, I think, is most missing.
Gen Z adores experience
For them, it's not about the technology.
The technology is just, you know, what they've grown up with.
They don't call it technology. For us, it's technology
because we didn't grow up with it. For Gen Z,
it's not technology, it is the way the world operates.
Have you ever seen a child, a 3-year old or a 2-year old, reading a magazine?
What do they do when they read the magazine? They touch it.
They want to swipe it, right? To them, a magazine is a defective iPad, right?
The world should respond to me. The world should be intelligent.
It's not technology, it simply is the fiber of the world.
As you move towards experience, you reduce friction.
When you look at the citizen as the user, you reduce friction
The government is not the entity,
it is ultimately the user, and Gen Z will not tolerate friction.
They will find their way around it.
They will hack the system until they eliminate the friction.
It's a fantastic way to think about how the world is going to change
because of those expectations.
And these expectations will increase
because the number of educated people will increase.
In the next 50 years, because of MOOCs; massive open online classrooms,
we will graduate more people than we have
in the entire history of civilization.
We will have, of the 10 billion people on the planet,
we will have 8 or 9 billion that are educated.
What will that world look like?
When we all have the transparent and the visibility to see
our potential and what we can be.
Today, every 2 billion people are actively involved
in the economy of world, the rest are not.
They're on the periphery at best.
What will that educated world look like?
And I'll tell you, it will be much more transparent.
We will demand transparency of our governments, of our society,
of our organizations, and of our selves.
And transparency means that it's a very different ethos
when it comes to protecting the rights of information.
Now, in some ways, we're seeing this, right?
Our president in the US incessantly tweets, love's Twitter, right?
You can say what you want about that but to some degree, that is an indicator
of how transparent we are becoming.
Direct communication without the intermediary,
that is what Gen Z demands.
They need it. They don't just want it, they absolutely need it.
And the reason they need it is because they need to collaborate.
My daughter Mia, she's 21 now. When she was 16, she had her first boyfriend.
Father's worst nightmare; the first boyfriend, right?
Wonderful young man, Ryan, wonderful young man.
Very respectful, very nice young man.
There was one problem with Ryan;
For the first year of their relationship, Ryan lived in our house.
He lived in Mia's room, at 16,
on Skype.
Anytime of day or night, I'd walk into Mia's room,
there will be Ryan on the laptop.
"Hi Ryan." "Hi Mr. K"
This went on for a year.
At one point, I said to Mia: "You know, at your age, I had a girlfriend."
Believe it or not.
But we would go for hours, sometimes days, without talking to each other.
And she said to me: "How could you do that?
How could you have a relationship with someone
and not talk to them on a daily basis?"
For Mia, collaboration is wired into the way she thinks about the world.
Gen Z demands transparency.
They demand that connectivity.
And I'll show you one Z who fascinated me; Easton Lachappelle.
Easton used to work with Legos when he was very young,
and he would build prosthetics.
And he moved on to building... with the Mindstorms, Lego Mindstorms,
these prosthetics and eventually, with 3D printers,
creating these prosthetics. And we talked to Easton for the book.
And we said: "This is fascinating but we have one question for you, Easton."
"You built a prosthetic that costs a few hundred dollars,"
"the same prosthetic coming from a laboratory might cost $80,000."
"And you've open-sourced everything you've done."
"Anyone can do it. Why would you do that? Why would you open-source it?""
And Easton said: "Boy, you Boomers!"
"Your math is always zero-sum."
"I can make it available to everyone and still make money."
"Why are the two mutually exclusive?"
"And, by the way, don't I have a responsibility"
"to make this code available to anyone in the world who needs it"
"because there are parts of the world, where not having an arm or a hand"
"is a death sentence?"
"Do I not have the responsibility to do that?"
We're an ethos, right? I'm a global citizen.
I have to do this. It is my responsibility to do it.
I want meaning out of my work and out of my life.
Imagine being able to say the same thing about government.
I want meaning from my government.
I want my government to do things that are meaningful,
that somehow add value to my life.
That is the ethos.
Highly collaborative, ignores intellectual property to a large degree,
much more so than we ever did.
And it's not just about technology, if you look at the last hundred years,
the Nobel Prize in the physical sciences
was awarded, almost exclusively, to individuals, not to teams.
Second half of the last hundred years, equally, to teams and to individuals.
Next 50 years, exclusively to teams. Why?
Not just because the problems are more complex,
but because this is the way we will work.
I know so much of what I'm saying sounds like heresy.
It sounds absurd. If I was in 1960,
talking about what today would look like, you would say the same thing.
What I want you to take away from this
is don't ever believe that everything that is is all that can be.
Don't ever believe that we've invented everything
that there's less in front of us than there's behind us,
because the reality's that there's always more in front of us.
Gen Z will create a world
that, in my mind, has much more opportunity,
is much more humanistic than anything we've seen up until now.
But sometimes, very smart people think very stupid things.
This quote,
supposedly it was Charles Duell,
commissioner of the US Patent and Trademark Office.
In 1899, he said: "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
How arrogant! We are arrogant.
We believe that the best is what's happened, not what's yet to come.
And I'll tell you, Gen Z is the best and it's yet to come,
and you are all part of it. Welcome to Gen Z. Thank you.