Transcript: Blockchain - Smart Cities Are Changing Policy

I really still wanted to be part of the process because how do you learn how to improve the process unless you're doing it? That's the problem with a lot of technology companies today where they've never swung a hammer in their life and they're saying, hey, use this thing because we say it's good. Yet people then have to change their processes in order to learn how to use a tool. What a stupid way of using technology. So business is driving innovation.

The innovation is going to have winners and losers. People are not going to like a lot of things I said on this podcast. But you know what? I don't care. This is what's happening.

This is a report. And what's cool about it is that there's a lot of people that can make a pivot and start to embrace what's happening around them. And what's cool about it is once you make that pivot, there are no rules. The things that we thought were always going to be there forever are being totally disrupted. We are the last major industry in the world to be disrupted.

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, episode number 44. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it. This podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. I want to announce that today is an exciting day.

And if you don't know why already, I'll tell you in just a moment. First, I just want to let you know about my talk last week with Barbara Botelone. Barbara and I discussed how the Sustainable Performance Institute, where Barbara is founder and CEO, works with companies to prepare an organizational strategy and do the right things culturally that support a sustainably focused organization. Check it out if you missed it at Constructor.com slash EP 43. Now for the announcement.

Today is the first day of a five-part series where I interview guests about the use of blockchain in construction. Some of our exciting guests include consultants, lawyers, designers, researchers of blockchain, and the architectural engineering in construction space. If you don't know about blockchain yet, don't worry. I will explain and provide resources for you to learn more about it. The main thing you should know is that blockchain is changing governments, healthcare, energy, and the financial industry in ways we could never have imagined it before.

Large technology companies like IBM, Intel, Microsoft, had developed blockchain platforms initiatives, and this year alone, over $4.5 billion have been invested in the private sector worldwide for blockchain development. That being said, my guest today, Paul DeHorty, president and CEO of the Digit Group, a leading smart cities design and solutions company, actively applies the use of blockchain in his projects and provides consultancy on how to apply it in smart cities. In preparation for this interview, I found that he's been known to say blockchain is as valuable as the brick and mortar itself.

This is just one of the technologies he's recommending and his recipe for creation of smart cities. Paul DeHorty is a registered architect, software entrepreneur, and developer. You'll see that Paul is very passionate about the AEC industry and such an expressive person. So if you have small children nearby and you just want to note that there are a couple of expletives, even so, you should know that Paul is a prominent and highly rated speaker because he sees the opportunities to improve and disrupt this industry. We discussed blockchain at a high level, but the main focus is about how smart cities and the use of Paul's guiding principles for innovation, high performance, and urban environments address some of the major considerations for the future.

Let's get into the interview. Hello Paul, welcome to the Constructor Podcast. We're happy to have you on the show today. Thank you, Brittany. It's a great opportunity to express what's going on, what we see from our viewpoint out on the global scale and then how that affects every person that will be listening to us on the podcast so that they can start thinking differently even tomorrow morning.

You are the CEO of The Digit Group, otherwise known as TDG, and you have involvement with Built Worlds, AEC Hackathon, and the small meeting enterprise that is associated with the White House and a plethora of other organizations. So could you tell us who and what your purpose to affect in this world and how it fits into what you're doing at TDG? Thank you for the opportunity to, I guess, just express maybe one small firm's guide through the past 25 years and how things have changed. And I think that a lot of that has to do with the beginnings part of what became TDG, which was a consultancy back to the AEC world.

We had some very good luck right in the beginning because we had a very strong background as a design, build, and operate type of organization, mostly design-build, where we were contractors before we became licensed architects and there were three partners in it. I was one of them. I broke away from that particular partnership after putting up a ton of work in and around the Long Island, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut region. And what I found was that because of the pragmatism of trying to get to all of our job sites because of the traffic, the things like Lotus Notes, if I could put it onto a computer, I could communicate with my project leads out on the job site, which cut down a ton of stress and a ton of money.

I went through school in New York City doing work study at New York Tech with IBM. So I took an IBM internship for a semester and then I would go back to school for a semester and I did that for a number of years. But what that taught me was that I was, you know, like where a lot of interns in architectural school would be doing, you know, like they get involved with an architectural firm and the intern would be able to do like bathroom details because you've got to start somewhere like kitchen cabinets, something like that.

Well, I was doing trade show booths for IBM, learning all of the technology that had to be showcased through their business development group. So I had to learn technology from the ground up in order to design the booths. And it was a really interesting time because at that time IBM was it. Microsoft didn't even exist back then. And then suddenly this brand new company called Microsoft came around.

I had to interface with these guys like Bill Gates and others to learn about their software in order to integrate it into the IBM booths. So I was meeting these folks that I had no clue who they were because I was an architect. Yet all of a sudden they became big deals. And I'm like, hey, I know that guy. It was a really interesting time.

So everything that I've learned about design has technology integrated into it the same way that you would never think of building a building without doors and windows. I've always looked at built environment where how do you build a built environment without integrating technology? So that led to a number of different opportunities to consult where I was friends with a guy named Mark Andreessen, who I was introduced to through IBM that had this really cool technology called Mosaic, which was the world's first graphic web browser. It eventually became Netscape.

Because of the introduction from IBM, I was able to not use things like Lotus Notes to connect my people. I was using the web. This was 1993 into 1994. This was way early. This caught the attention of a number of different people, including publishers like R.S.

Means, the construction cost estimation data people that publish books. I got introduced to the CEO of R.S. Means and he said, well, what you're doing is really forward thinking. This is really cool. I said, well, yeah, I'm talking with other publishers.

I'm a little frustrated because I want this book to be on the Internet to showcase how to use it. In other words, like just don't publish a book. I wanted to have a companion website. He said, I'll do that. And that started everything that now is culminating here in 2017.

Because of that, as a young designer, I was able to get out there and now no longer be seen just as an architect, but as a person that's using the Internet as a design tool for architects, engineers, contractors, subcontractors, building product manufacturers. And that was the way that all of this built up because we started to take a look at technology differently. So because we were very high profile then, we got on the speaking circuit and whatnot, I got introduced to a number of different organizations that were just starting up, including one that had this really cool idea about taking CAD and making it parametric designed in 3D.

So they call it parametric CAD. It was a bunch of startups out of Boston called Charles River Software. And I was brought in with the business development team to get this particular technology in and implemented as a tool with all the big design firms because I already had those relationships with those folks because of the Internet book called Cyber Places. Right? Well, what happened was Charles River Software was renamed Revit.

And I was responsible for bringing in about $800,000 worth of revenue when Autodesk bought us for $133 million. And that was the start of BIM. So having our hands in that, I'm going, hey, this is really cool. You know, not only can we make a lot of money, but we're making a difference. So at the same time, we were working with a gentleman named Carl Bass, who at the time was the chief technology officer of Autodesk.

And he took a sabbatical along with a number of different people. We created Buzzsaw. Buzzsaw then got purchased by Autodesk for $21 million. So I'm going, well, I think I know what my business is. Except that that wasn't long lasting because really, I really still wanted to be part of the process because how do you learn how to improve the process unless you're doing it?

That's the problem with a lot of technology companies today, where they've never swung a hammer in their life. They're saying, hey, use this thing because we say it's good. Yet people then have to change their processes in order to learn how to use a tool. What a stupid way of using technology. So what happened then was I took a look at facility management because I thought, you know, the end game is going to be the owner about what they're receiving, not just the deliverable of the building itself, but also the technology that's associated with it.

A lot of people think that once you do an as built, either in 2D things like AutoCAD or Revit or Bentley products or, you know, ArcaBus, you know, anything like that, they think they're done when they're not. The problem with taking a photograph, almost like the same way that you do like a balance sheet with your finances is it only tells the story at that moment in time, which means what happens when you do a renovation to a hospital and people are looking for that VAV box up in the plenum and they can't find it because the as built drawings say it's exactly there, now they have to go searching, which costs time and money and effort and all that stuff, which is why the data behind the AEC industry is flawed from day one.

So we took a stab at taking a look at the financial aspects of this to start to control the data with a company that we created out of Las Vegas called Trirega. That got purchased by IBM. Now all of a sudden I got three big wins and things are looking really good and I get introduced to this world of 3D modeling entire districts and then cities. And I said, well, that could be the next big thing. So you know, about 12 years ago, we put a lot of money into developing the software that was developed.

Our chief software architect was a gentleman named Remy Arnaud. He is the architect behind Google Earth and created an AEC version of a better version of Google Earth that was based upon gaming technology. We were way too early. We crashed and burned. We lost a lot of money and I learned more about losing than those other big three wins between Revit, Buzzsaw and Trirega.

So you know, looking at my wounds, I went back in and said, you know what? I've been developing these tools along with others for a number of years. I really think we're trying to do the right thing, you know, between publishing books and everything else, showing horses how to drink the water, but they're not drinking. The thing with Revit is Revit was never designed to be a design tool, ever. It was not meant for that.

But because of the marketing behind Autodesk, they had to go in that direction. No fault by Autodesk. They played to their strengths. The problem is they're selling a bill of goods to people that really don't know how to use the damn tool even to this day. When you look at a Revit expert, they really are experts.

They're awesome at what they do, but there's a very, very few amount of them. It's never really taken off, even the way that CAD did with AutoCAD. So we had to rethink everything about how does the process of when we say building information and modeling is meant for architects and engineers to start things off. We're supposed to share that model. Yet 99, I'm going to be very, very transparent in this, 99% of those models never get reused by the subcontractors of the GCs.

They build their own models. We're supposed to be building off a common model, but the GCs and the people that know how to swing hammers and put plenums into place and sheetrock and all this other stuff, the people that know how to build buildings don't trust that the architect knows the means and methods, nor should they. Architects and engineers are not supposed to know about means and methods. Yet if you're going to use BIM properly, you have to have the means and methods in place because you're virtually designing and construction that facility and that asset.

That's why we have BIMWASH everywhere. And that's the dirty little tool, sorry, or the dirty little point in the process that no one is saying the EBR has no close. BIM as it is now is broken and will never, ever be used properly if we continue along with this continuum. So no matter how much education you do, no matter how good you think your BIM is, you still suck because it's not meant for that. And it's not your fault.

It's not your fault. You know, it's like understanding that, you know, that that screw works really well to put it in with a screwdriver. But you know what? I can put a screw into the wall with a hammer. Is it the most efficient way of using it?

No, but I could still do it. That's the state of BIM with architects and engineers. They're putting screws into the wall with a fucking hammer. Now we got a problem, right? Then everyone's going, oh, you know, this thing, that thing, we're going to have like, you know, let's really focus in on what the real value is, which is let's use Navisworks for collision detection.

Are you freaking kidding me? Any good team out on a job site knows collision detection. They don't need a freaking piece of software to do it. And everyone's hanging their hat on it. I'm going, this is like the inmates running the asylum.

This is not good. So we took a strong look at this with, of course, no hard opinions, as you can tell, and said, you know what? We are now no longer going to be part of this world that says we're going to build tools for others because everyone else is sucking at using it. Even BuzzFeed, even Tri-Rega. Because the tools are more advanced than a couple of different things that happen.

Number one, the contractual obligations that have to change, which are now fundamentally being coerced by the insurance companies that if you don't do this and you don't do this, we're not going to cover you. Well, that bodes well for innovation, right? Because you put handcuffs on people. And then the roles and responsibilities of people that the technology is asking you to take risks and do things that are beyond what you're normally contractually obligated to do and what your skill set is. And we're wondering why people are looking at the technology saying, well, what's wrong with it?

No, our process is wrong. So eight years ago, I pulled the plug and said we're no longer going to be developing software for others. We're going to do it for ourselves. And what we're going to do is start to do real estate development ourselves. And how we're going to do it is through high performance urban environments.

At that time, because of my past experience with IBM, I still knew a lot of really good people there. They had just started a program about trying to bundle together their solutions called Smarter Planet, Smarter Cities, Smarter Buildings. And each one of those thirds, the buildings, the cities, and the planet, were built around things like Watson and other things that are just like normal nomenclature for large scale implementation in governments and enterprises, stuff like that. Now, we don't have a lot of those types of companies inside the AC industry.

We have a lot of mom and pop organizations that could never even afford to say the word IBM, let alone buy the software solutions. So we were kind of left in the dust as an industry worldwide. What I really liked was this idea of a roll up of this idea of called Smart Cities. That was a great branding exercise, but holy cow, when I started to see how the different organizations within a municipality work so independently, where there's no sharing of data, sharing of information, because they're focused in what they have to do in order to make a city function, that's when I saw the opportunity.

And what we did was we started to take a look at both existing cities and new cities, what's called Greenfield. And what we did was that we decided that we wanted to create a piece of software that I could start to manage the immense amount of data that's out there that already exists. And this had to be a non-software centric approach. It had to be a data centric approach. And that's really hard for people in the AC industry to get their heads around because we've been so focused in and our behaviors are all around buying that piece of software that's the solution.

Those days died about five years ago. In the advent of when the iPhone and the Android phone started to take off and there was these things called Google Play and the App Store. Suddenly you did not need to have these big honking applications to get things done. You could download on your phone customized for you the apps that made sense for your lifestyle. Now, fast forward that now to today, where we're starting to see a major shift, especially with groups like Microsoft and Apple and then in our industry with Autodesk, where they're starting to take up an approach where you no longer have to buy, like in the case of Microsoft, the big box of Microsoft Office.

You don't need to do that. You can now go up online and do the Microsoft 360 and choose the things that you need without having to buy the whole honking thing. We're starting to see that now with Autodesk, specifically with Inventor, which has always been the redheaded stepchild to SolidWorks, their main competitor. And what they decided to do was no longer compete, but blow it up so that you can't buy Inventor anymore. But if you go up to the cloud, Inventor functionality is now focused in on third party apps that make it specific for you so that if you're an optical engineer, you don't have to buy all the third party add-ons to add onto the software of Inventor.

When you go up to the Fusion 360 site and you start to pick and choose like a Chinese menu, what makes this particular system work for you in the way that you worked as an optical engineer or a structural engineer or a renewable engineer, whatever you want. It's that mass customization element of the cloud, which is what's going to win. So in other words, you're not downloading all this amazing technology that, like let's say AutoCAD or Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word has over 38,000 commands. I use like five.

Spell check because I suck because I'm an architect and I don't have a spell. Save as because I'm lazy. Print thesaurus if I want to sound smart. I mean, very, very specific things. I don't do all that crap that they give you.

Same thing now with all the other applications inside the AC industry. They keep on throwing more and more stuff out there thinking you're going to use it. Yet I just want to be pragmatic. I just want to get my work done. So we took that approach and said, all right, when it comes to cities, we have to start with the building and then the neighboring buildings and then that street and then that block, then that district and then that city.

And when you start to roll things up, we could not rely on the software. It had to be about the data expanding that drives things that can be reports like 3D versions of that. So what we did was we created a tool called Orbi that allows us to take a vast amount of information and allow the geometry in a geospatial environment like a globe. It's very similar to Bing or Google Earth, but it's our own globe that then drives where the geometry should be. So part of the data would be at this particular latitude and longitude, the left corner part of this building starts there.

Now build me the rest of what that looks like, at least as a shell, just to start so I can start an analysis and start to now think about what is a city and what has transformed our thinking is that now that we can simulate a lot of this in a geospatially perfect world, we're creating relationships behind what is digitally trusted and authenticated that, yes, that particular part of the building is exactly where it is on the planet Earth, but in a digital format. Now I can have trust between buildings or between other types of assets that I can say with absolute certainty that particular brick is at that positive z angle at that latitude and longitude and I trust it.

I can now blockchain that with any other trusted information in that geospatial environment. What does that do for you? Well, in the case of how we design smart cities as a master planner, as well as a real estate developer, TDG, we actually are at risk for our developments. In other words, we bring money to the table and we sit on the side with the owners, which are mostly government agencies. Now that means that we're not for fee, which also means that we get to specify things that actually get implemented because we're the one purchasing it.

This is a big, big difference from the majority of the AC industry, which is for fee, quite frankly, right, or per contract per project. Now the big problem with the AC industry is that we have a lack of R&D and innovation being implemented into these projects because who wants to take that risk? Which means that the R&D level of the AC industry is one step below the phishing industry in the United States. The phishing industry, you're freaking kidding me, right? We're the second largest, well, depending on who you ask, we're either the second or third largest industry in the United States, you know, one behind the government and some people argue behind prostitution, which could be interchangeable with the AC industry, but that's another story.

So, you know, we have this entire world that's saying, what the hell is wrong with you guys? You know, you're one of the largest industries, but you don't have either the time, the risk profile or the profit margins to do R&D. So where are the innovations going to come from? So why would innovators want to enter our industry when, you know, you have a huge, you know, hill to climb and you hope that as an inventor, you're timing the market properly? What we're doing is turning it on its head and saying, you know what, we're sick and tired of selling stuff to you guys.

We're going to do it and show you. And oh, by the way, because we're talking about multi-billion dollar projects, entire central business districts of five square kilometers to start that has a ticket item for each project of starting out at $20 billion. That's our world. What happens when we introduce a technology? It gets implemented.

So we're market creators. And that's what the invention and the innovation groups of the United States love about what we're doing. Who else loves that? The United States government. They see that when we go into China, when we go into India, when we go into Vietnam, when we go into Australia and UAE and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where we have active projects right now, we're implementing and specifying and holding the spec and purchasing American goods and services.

This now starts lowering the trade imbalance. So all of a sudden we're into policy and smart cities are no longer this cute phrase that Cisco is using to try and sell you more routers. This has a direct effect on the built environment. So let's get back to this whole thing of BIM and how the data can be used to help design. 120 years ago, there was a brand new innovation called an elevator that fundamentally changed the shape of cities.

One of the innovations that we're betting heavily on is autonomous vehicles. All of our cities do not allow vehicular traffic or humans to drive anything in our cities, in the Greenfield ones. And the reason for that is because they wouldn't know how to drive in it. Because if I can set up in a blockchain all the different trusted information in a virtual environment, I no longer need roads or curbs or sidewalks. The actual vehicles themselves don't need turn lanes because they can pivot at 90 degrees in turn.

They can move out, back and forth and slide in and out. So these are very, very different types of vehicles that move within the built environment, which means that the built environment is going to no longer need to have grids because you won't have to know where you're going because the vehicle will know where you're going. Now all of a sudden, start thinking about a high performance environment that has the need for being able to condense a lot of people into an urban environment. But that doesn't mean that you have to build a bunch of skyscrapers to make it look like the set of Blade Runner.

I'm sick and tired of Hollywood and TV and all these groups showing this diopic world of what the future is supposed to be that looks like Batman or Star Wars or something. There's a better way of looking at this thing that the density of being able to condense then not have to rely on things like a grid. Now start to think about what this looks like. Does it look more like a campus, like a park, like a golf course? Where do you position your building?

Because now you can have buildings that are positioned properly for renewable energy usage and that type of thing without the constraints of having to sit on a plot that the municipality says that you have to build your building. Now all of a sudden, wow, things start to change. More importantly, because you've now set up the blockchain, you've set up digitally the canyons that these autonomous vehicles can thrive in. And now all of a sudden you have that cyber-physical relationship that is the fourth age of the Industrial Revolution.

And that's what we're selling as TDG. Before we get any further, I wanted to make sure to give you guys a really great description of what blockchain is. I'm confident that this be really helpful for you. Blockchain is a centralized database that stores a registry of assets and transactions across a peer-to-peer network. It is the exchange of value in order to increase transparency and lower uncertainty about one another in a transaction.

Blockchain is a record of transactions, a transparent and tamper-proof digital ledger that allows users to share information quickly, freely, and without fear that it can be altered without users detecting it. Essentially, it's a public registry or ledger of who owns what and then who transacts what. The most commonly used cryptocurrency is Bitcoin and it's underpinned by a blockchain network that focuses on the support of payments. So whereas Bitcoin is all about payment technology, there is another blockchain network called the Ethereum network. It has some other real-world applications and that is the one I'm particularly interested in.

Ethereum allows you to have a smart contract. It is a contract that self-executes where it handles the enforcement, the management, performance, and payment. It is a computer protocol intended to facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. It is decentralized code that can move money after a condition is fulfilled. So hopefully that's really helpful to you guys.

We're going to get back into the interview. What an incredible intro to innovation through all the experiences that you've had and then ultimately determined that you have to be the developer and show pretty much the world that this is the way you have to implement innovation into a smart city. This is the best case study that you could ever show and I think that's incredible. Well, thanks, Brittany, but I'll tell you what, it also takes an incredible team. One thing that you will see about who we are is that we have a very good mix of people just getting introduced in the industry and I really, really stress that a lot.

There's a lot of media bashing about millennials, snowflakes, all this other crap. What I'm finding is that the openness of mind before they get involved with the past ways of working, which is very inefficient, and then more or less leapfrogging that entire unlearning exercise because you haven't learned the bad things, is now providing a very, very fertile environment for people that were laughed at because they were like experts in Minecraft. You know what? Those people in Minecraft got it right. They're doing some incredible work.

Then when you start to take into account that this is not just a US made up media thing or a business development term called smart cities, but it's an actual need on a policy level through some of the most powerful countries on earth where they're going, you got to get this right because it means our survival. Here's a case in point. We've been involved with the White House because of our, first of all, our technology that through friends of friends, we got introduced during the Obama administration into the Office of Science and Technology at the White House, and they freaked out.

They said, not only is this useful, but because we can filter a lot of different pieces of data when you have quote unquote big data out there and we can use an iPhone because of the opened standards that we use in the back end like WebGL and other type of technical devices that we're able to show people that they can go out into the field instead of being stuck inside of like a command center or situation room, that type of thing, and use their iPhone and actually get information to make a more informed decision.

That freaked out everyone. The second thing was we're using all American innovations, and the really funky thing is we're creating American jobs. All that stuff is great, but we're not really focused in on the American market. A lot of that has to do with the fact that there's some pragmatic things here where getting innovations involved, we're in a very litigious society. When I read about people spilling tea on themselves because they went through the drive through at Starbucks and they sue Starbucks for $500 million and they get $20 million out of it, I'm going there's something wrong.

You know what? We're our own worst enemies. We have this technology. We have this great intellect. We're the gold standard in the world with everything the US does.

If it's made in the USA, and I've lived in Shanghai for five years, I've lived in Delhi for three years, I've lived in New Zealand for almost two years, I've lived in Australia, still to this day, being an expat most of my life, the United States is still yards ahead of anyone else, but we don't do it for ourselves. It's almost like the Cobbler's son. We have holes in our shoes, but we're making beautiful shoes for the rest of the world. It's kind of funky. At the same time, getting involved with the White House was a really, really important step because we then got introduced to the Department of Commerce, Department of State, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy.

And in the Obama administration, we were introduced and then made friends with those secretaries and then the staff. And that was huge because it got us involved with things like trade missions. Now, the reason why I'm mentioning that is because unless you have top-down support with foreign countries, knowing that the United States government has your back as a small, medium enterprise, we learned a lot because all of a sudden, check out what happens in China. So I'm living in Shanghai. I know Secretary Prickster.

We make some phone calls with their team. They have this trade mission coming over. We get part of it. And it's funny because being a small, medium enterprise, we're sitting at the table with like Alcoa, GE, Microsoft, all these big guys and little old us, except that we had the shiny keys. And all the people love the stuff we were doing because it's so sexy to see your entire city on an iPhone and it works.

And you're moving around, you're clicking on your house, you're seeing how much energy you use today. I mean, just wild stuff. Like just blew away people. And that actually caught the attention of central government in Beijing. So we've been working with President Xi and Premier Li now for a period of about four and a half years, working with their different government agencies, including what's called the NDRC, which is their main group that goes out to do rehabilitation of existing infrastructure in new cities and whatnot.

State Grid is another partner of ours that works with the largest power company in the world. So when you're involved with energy, when you're involved with waste and water and healthcare and education, all the stuff that make up urban environments, that was a good first step. But what we learned through policy and then through the demographics of reports like that came up from McKinsey and Company that said over 300 million people today, you know, August, sorry, September 14th, 2017, over 300 million people are migrating from the Western provinces where that are primarily agricultural based to the cities of the East Coast, where there's jobs in urban environments because they can't find work anymore because the Chinese have mechanized their food supply chain so well that they don't need as many farmers.

So you can imagine almost the entire population of the United States is literally walking, driving cars on planes and trains moving into already overpopulated cities looking for work. I lived in Shanghai and right now there's this thing called the Haku and the Haku is how you understand that if you're born in that city, you get all the services of like healthcare schools, that type of thing for that city because you're born there. So like an internal passport domestically, right? And right now they can guesstimate that there's about 21 million Shanghai people.

We know for a fact it's double that because they can't account for the people that are from other areas of China, the expats, all that other stuff. So you're talking upwards of 40 to 50 million people and it is atrocious to try and get anywhere. It's almost a dysfunctional city, yet it's one of the world's cities seen as one of the leaders in the world. They're estimating that 140 million people in the next two years will now inhabit Shanghai looking for work. Now if you can see how that can cause society problems and just disruption and all that stuff, the number one thing that you have to understand about the Chinese government is that they're number one priorities to remain in power.

When you have social instability, that threatens that. This becomes a high priority with the Chinese government. Now you start backing that into smart cities and you start to think, aha, so now all of a sudden you have ways of creating new jobs. You start the flow of people heading to those bigger cities because it's a nice environment. And my job in China is to make Chinese people fall in love with a piece of dirt.

And when you get your head around that, that's a big freaking deal because you have to have people that say, I've never been to this place before. I know Shanghai, but I don't know this thing. It looks nice, but what do I do tomorrow morning? Do I get a job? Where do I go to the bathroom?

Where do I find food? My kid's sick. Is there a clinic? Are they going to be educated? All these things go into this idea of smart cities.

Now they didn't teach me this shit in architectural school, I'll tell you that much. What's really turned into a really interesting way of navigating the gray waters of all this stuff is actually now working with both the United States government and the Chinese government in a common goal. And we're not talking about, oh, you know, it creates more jobs here and blah, blah, blah. That's not the important thing. It's about solve the solution because what the world does not want is an unstable China.

So that's how moving from business into almost policy and diplomacy has almost been a seamless way of working. In mid-November, we've been invited to join President Trump on his trade mission trip to China, along with all the big boys, you know, all the Microsofts and the GMs and the Boeings and all that stuff. And we'll be representing small business America along with all this great stuff. Two weeks ago in our Guangzhou office, I was there to greet the new ambassador to China, who's the former governor of Iowa, whose name Terry Branstad.

He came to visit and he was only in office like two weeks as the ambassador to China because he's now heard from the Chinese government, you know, because of course he asked, who are you working with? I mean, it's the first thing you do when you find out, you know, well, you know, what's the landscape? And our company kept on coming up and no one knows about us and I like that. I, you know, I purposely don't get involved with the high-end media, you know, the Bloomberg's and the groups like that.

Now, we have talked with CNBC. They've done some great reporting on our smart cities work in Saudi Arabia. It raised the high profile level a little bit, but, you know, growing up in New York City in an Italian neighborhood, I learned one crazy thing and it was actually validated both in the Godfather movies and the Sopranos, which is you never want to be the face of something that's disruptive. You want to sit in the background and let other people get whacked. So we kind of want to take a back seat because here's our role.

Not only do we bring money to the table, we actually get operational. We take fees out of that. That's how we keep the lights on. We perform what's called Executive Program Management Office or an EPMO. There's lots of PMOs out there, but this is like the executive PMO because we're sitting on the owner's side of the table.

Functionally we create a central BIM office that creates this continuum of information from the consultants, the architects and engineers that then we put into a gaming environment that then can be passed off through freeware like Kolata into tools that subcontractors and contractors use. We then pull that back into the central BIM office for facility management operations, which is usually done in augmented and virtual reality. And then we use it for financials and whatever, you know, as we move forward. But we are the central bank for information.

That has been very successful, not only in China, like I just discussed, but also with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with their Vision 2030 program, which is to transform the entire country off of petroleum into something else. We just completed two weeks ago our first big deliverable, which was to create the entire capital of Riyadh in 3D with active data so that they could start to make informed decisions based upon benchmarks of the quality of life, which is probably the biggest thing that you want to measure in a smart city.

Are people happy? Because for intents and purposes, the only two countries in the world that were somewhat successful because of the limitations of technology, meaning an automobile, was both Australia and the United States with pop-up cities. The pop-up cities started, of course, with the first innovation, which was the locomotive and the transcontinental railroad, which then created these cities along that route as stations. And then subsequently, there were other lines besides the Union Pacific and Lotnot that then started to really fill out the West. Then we became a continental United States, not just the East Coast up to the Mississippi River.

But when we started to really start to expand things out, that we took these trading posts like Albuquerque and Phoenix and other places, well, they literally became pop-up cities, right? Because we had other modes of transportation. Airplanes came involved and the interstate happened in the 50s. Now all of a sudden, the United States started to mature. Same thing happened in Australia, except that it happened that it hooked around the coast, but the same concept.

But because they were pop-up cities that were fundamentally developed around old types of transportation, both locomotive and motorized vehicles, the fossil fuels, we can't do that in places like Saudi that need to fill out their peninsula because of growth, because of trying to improve their quality of life for their people. So we're starting to see that smart cities now are being looked upon not just as real estate developments, but as overall policy shifters, specifically in places like China that can help the flow of these 300 million migrants into quality of life environments that will hopefully stop the stem of this major shift of society.

We're also doing this in Saudi based upon the Vision 2030 program. And of course, other people are looking at this and they're saying, oh my God, this is a way that we should have been thinking about laying out our cities years ago. So how do we fix our existing cities? So it's a fascinating time, Brittany. It's one of these, you know, it's a lot of work that has already been done, but the market conditions are forcing everything to come together.

And the way that we look at this is that the analogy is that we're chefs in the kitchen and that not one city, even within the same country, is ever going to be like another. That we have to think about ingredients that we call innovation. And the different ingredients that you put together create a recipe. And the more recipes you have, you can create a cuisine. And as long as you start to think through that, through innovation, creating recipes for that, you know, almost like a mass customization thing, I think we're starting to see the maturity of the AEC industry no longer thinking of the individual building as the ultimate output, but how that building becomes part of an organism called the urban fabric of a high performance city.

I want to talk a little bit about how municipalities and government view some of the maybe more basic things. And I'm kind of circling us back to even how the US might look at it, because like you said, we're not utilizing the good stuff that we know, right? My curiosity is about life safety and security and the better user experience that I've heard you talk about. And then you talked about the different ingredients of innovations. I want to dig into a couple of those as well.

Sure. So, I mean, you hit right in the head. We have a three legged stool that we go into as a framework that then develops what innovations we should be investigating, what's mature enough. How do you build in obsolescence to these innovations? And it all revolves around the three primary elements of safety, security, and a better quality of life or a better user experience, right?

Which really is not that different from how you develop software, right? First of all, you want to have security involved and you want to put safety factors in there. You want to click something and it goes out to 40 million people. And of course, how do you better have a user experience? And what's been interesting about this exercise, about trying to do that, is our ability then to bring in pragmatic things.

We are fond of working in the US and the UK and other places that have more mature urban environments that they want one piece of it to be seen as it really needs improvement, right? Like in some cities, it may be resiliency, right? Take a look at Houston, take a look at Tampa and Miami over the past three weeks. Holy cow. Look at New York City, right?

During Hurricane Sandy. And then what about all the earthquakes, you know, down in southern Mexico and this thing and that thing. There are many innate and natural occurrences that will always threaten humans when they're in a dense environment because there's more worry about the loss of life, right? Because you've centralized it now, which is the big thing about, you know, do we want to urbanize? Well, it's not do we.

All the indicators, everything is pointed to that by the year 2050, 92% of the world's population will be in some sort of urban environment. So from the existing environments, from a pragmatic aspect, where should you focus? You know, if you're New Orleans, the first thing you focus in on is ensuring that the Army Corps of Engineers is making sure that the bathtub that you live in that is four meters below any sort of, you know, top of a lake or, you know, the Gulf of Mexico is airtight.

That's number one. I have such great friends in India and they're the most warm-hearted people on earth. They have the greatest food, right? But their entire environment is for shit. Are you kidding me?

You know, I mean, you know, having lived there, it's funny and please anyone from India, don't take offense, but as an expat and being very frustrated with not having running water or running electricity for hours and days on end, how about this? How about even drinkable water ever in the capital of your country, Delhi? There's something fundamentally wrong, right? Forget about smart cities. Let's get back to what, like you said, let's get to pragmatism to go.

If you figure that out, then we can talk about roadways and then maybe you can think about smart cities, guys. But you know, having an autonomous vehicle is not going to help four million people that don't have running water in that district in Delhi. India stands for I'll never do it again. And that's not right. It should be, I want to be there.

But holy shit. Let's get together first when you're talking about energy, waste, education, public safety and security, sustainability, not just of, you know, I have a whole other rant about lead and green building crap and all that stuff. Sustainable also means sustainable economically. It's not about green. Green when I was going to school is called good design.

How come we're patting ourselves on the back because we're doing good design and call it green is stupid? You know, I mean, that I mean, come on, of course we're supposed to do sustainable stuff. It's like going to H&R Block and patting someone on the back because they use a calculator to do your taxes. It's like, would you stop? We're supposed to be doing this stuff, right?

So when it comes down to the practice and here's a couple of scenarios. What we like to do is build out storylines that it's not about one technology that's going to be the magic bullet that solves all the problems. It's about how do you create the building blocks within a budget, within a market need, and then the sustainable quality over time? How long are these things going to work together so that it creates a safer or secure environment that creates a better quality of life? Okay, here's one in the energy sector.

You know, I'm not convinced about renewables, not because I don't believe in them. Of course I do. Implemented a shitload of them. But at the end of the day, when I spend $100 today on a solar energy installation, I'm getting $23 worth of value because the efficiency factor is only 23%. Plus those solar panels look so nice up on top of a roof.

You freaking kidding me? It's like the lunatics run the asylum. It was an immature technology that got productized too quick before the research and development was finished. We still use solar. We're going to continue going forward.

But when you have things that look like an engineer designed it, no one's going to like it. Sorry engineers, but you're not the best designers in the world. That's where the architects come in. Everyone has a role. a look at even the incentives to put solar panels up on your roof, the efficiency factors on that, mathematically it doesn't work.

That's why the Obama administration got absolutely toasted by investing in a solar company during his first term, if you remember that, and went out of business. Now it's not his fault. It's not the company's fault. It's that the technology still needs time to cure. It's still immature.

So what are the energies we have? And I love those, you know, D 75 foot propellers up in the air. I mean, they're so good looking up on top of the mountain that I used to love where the sun went down. Now I got this propeller thing going that sometimes turns and other times it doesn't, right? And then the cost of it.

Are you freaking kidding me? And then let's go to hydro and start talking at three or $400 million to start with hydro. And you're starting to think, well, you know, what's renewable energy stuff? So we were introduced to a bunch of researchers in the kinetic energy labs at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. They run a group called the Georgia Tech Research Institute, led up with a specific group that's focused in on what's called piezoelectric.

Now the energy in kinetic is in two forms. One is compression and compression in Latin is piezo. And then there's tree bow, which is Latin for friction. So you have friction and compression and that makes up what's called kinetic energy. The best example for friction would be those buoys that are out in the ocean to catch the ocean wave energy, right?

And that's been around a while and there's been a lot of research in it. But the problem is how do you get the fricking energy from the buoys to onshore? It's that last mile problem. It costs a lot of money to do it. And then by the time you do it, it's not worth the cost of actually put the system in place.

With piezo, what we're finding is that through the use of material sciences and the research and development done in that world, different materials as a substrate underneath a flooring finish or underneath a road or sidewalk finish or playground finish can have an extreme effect on the molecules that are excited by a compression event, be it walking, running, jumping up and down, riding a bicycle, a skateboard or trucks or cars driving on top of it. So we have different types of materials that we put underneath asphalt, concrete and rubber for outdoor use and wood flooring, ceramic tile and carpet for indoor use.

And we're generating enough energy to start the promotional process of proof of concepts. And then when you extrapolate what that energy can do with enough of a budget and of course then the productization to keep the costs down, we're talking kilowatt plants based upon like let's say in Atlanta, the ring road, the interstate that surrounds it. If we just took one lane in each direction and we put in the piezo product that we've developed in Atlanta at Georgia Tech, we're talking about a 60 megawatt power plant for one lane each way.

Now with the advent of what was introduced yesterday at the Apple conference where the iPhones and the iPads now have wireless charging capabilities, imagine that now for cars, you never have to stop. There's no need for charging stations. Sorry, Elon Musk, someone just moved your cheese. So now we're into a different world that says, whoa, I mean, anything that moves now can create energy. So at Atlanta Hartsfield Airport, we implemented a piezoelectric selfie station at the TSA lines, which if you know Atlanta, there's a lot of people that stand online and they were able to jump up and down again, behavior change, exposure to a different type of energy.

And as they jumped up and down, we had LED lights that went up to say, keep going, keep going, keep going. Boom. Okay, good. You've created enough energy to have that particular camera kiosk take a picture of you and you could post it up to your Instagram or Facebook. We had 500,000 people do that in one week between Christmas and New Year's in Atlanta this past holiday season.

So this stuff is real. Where we're going with this, of course, is we petitioned the NFL for next season in the Atlanta Falcons, new spanking, new Mercedes-Benz arena, that we would implement the piezo on the playing field of the NFL football team so that as the teams played, they would have enough energy to keep the lights on. So that's a really, really cool technology that's never been exploited and it's been in front of our face forever. Because if you remember over the past 10, 15 years, any kid under the age of five, if you saw the bottom of their sneakers, every time they jumped up and down it, lit up, it's the same type of technology.

So now all of a sudden, things get very interesting as we mature this technology to say, this now has the same cost at this immature level of the maturity of installation of solar per kilowatt hour. What we're going for is over the next three years with the budgets that we put in place at Georgia Tech and then, of course, the manufacturing processes that we have under negotiation right now that we feel within 36 months, the price of piezoelectric installed would be the same price as coal.

So now all of a sudden, it becomes a reality. Now what it does really well is that it just doesn't create the electricity and the power and the energy that we harvest. We're able to use technologies like halo from Qualcomm that is the wireless energy way to dynamically charge things. And that's really, really cool. But what it does that is phenomenal is that every time, wherever the energy is created, the data is reported back to a backend system to say, at this point on the planet Earth, this amount of pressure was put onto the piezo product and it was held for 2.4 seconds.

Now that by itself, just the data harvesting that we're creating doesn't sound that interesting to begin with unless you start talking about for retail, like Target, Walmart, places like that, that get paid a tremendous amount of money for end cap highlighting and showcasing of the new shampoo for Procter & Gamble or Johnson & Johnson or Kellogg's. Now think about the product placement in every one of the Target stores, 2,842 stores in the United States, that we can then tell Procter & Gamble that during their period of three weeks of being the end cap on every store, that in the past 15 minutes in this store in let's say, you know, downtown Washington, D.C., had 32 people pass by, five of them stood for a period of 8.4 seconds.

Now all of a sudden, things get very interesting in the world of retail. That's just one product, that's one innovation. Tie that together with autonomous vehicles where they never have to stop. Now you have no need for parking lots, which account for 32% of every city on the average in the world. What do you do with that extra space?

There's no need for stop signs, no need for traffic lights. There's no need for even wide roads or roads themselves as I mentioned before, that are fundamentally always continually moving, sort of like the analogy of blood through veins and that every body is a little different. And that's what we're looking at now as part of an ecosystem. In addition to that, because of the amount of energy that you're creating through these autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles, they're not going to use all the energy that they create.

So the idea is then, well, that should be actually used to light up these spaces that used to be called roads and sidewalks that these autonomous vehicles drive on. And the number one choice of course would be LED. But what the cool thing about LED is LED with its light spectrum as it flickers, can carry internet protocol. So there's a company out of Sunnyvale, California called Sensity that sits in between the light bulb and the street light housing that creates a 10G Wi-Fi network for free just by having the lights on.

So now think about that entire storyline. You have piezoelectric as the energy source. There's enough energy to allow all autonomous vehicles to drive on the internet of roadways that allow them the extra energy to light up things for safety and security issues that provides free 10G Wi-Fi throughout your city. That's what we call a recipe. It sounds tasty is all I can say.

Oh man. What I can say is that I'm dancing over here because of all the opportunity that we have just based upon what you've illustrated for us through talking about the innovations. I know you mentioned the internet of buildings. I wanted to get your perspective on that. And I know you mentioned the use of blockchain too.

Can we seal the deal and understand that really quick? Sure. I can give you two quick examples. One is something that's implemented right now in Canary Wharf in London, which is the banking headquarters of the European Union. Well, at least until Brexit happens.

And so if you can imagine, you have HSBC, you have Barclays, you have all these big banks and whatnot around there. And it is right on the Thames River. There's a company called Future Decisions out of Cambridge. These were professors and students that created a startup that I really liked. And what they did was they said, all these buildings, because they're kind of new, have building automation systems and building management systems already in place that do things like controls like Johnson Controls and whatnot that create, let's say a very simple thing, like the mean temperature for each floor.

The biggest complaint in the world for every office building that any facility manager gets by far is it's too hot or it's too cold. The reason why is because when you load balance your entire building with air conditioning units, packaging units like let's say on top of a roof or whatnot, and then you have the controls put into place, which could be from the same company or not. Johnson Controls can talk with Carrier and all sorts of things because it's interchangeable. Your building management and building automation systems are based upon averages, meaning that the mean average of like, let's say we want it always at 68 degrees Fahrenheit on this floor.

Well, that's predicated on the belief that there's always going to be 50 people on that floor and that it load balances to say that once it goes below that particular temperature, the heat turns on, and once it goes above, the cooling turns on, but it's still based on averages. So if you can imagine a 50-story tower like one Canada Square in London, there's different needs on every floor. And even within the floor, it's usually partitioned off depending on the amount of tenants that you have. But again, the entire building is not designed for the individual, it's designed for the holistic whole.

So what Future Decisions says is, OK, we're going to put sensors into every floor that will account for the number of people on every floor so that if one floor has some sort of corporate offsite and there's only like a skeleton crew of three people there, they will never be cold because it's already made the adjustments that it doesn't need to blow that much cold based on the 50-person average. Now all of a sudden things get interesting because now you're not using as much electricity and power to actually make sure that that is at that level.

Because electricity is sold from the grid off to these private companies like one Canada Square, that particular building, they usually have an overabundance if they're not using enough electricity. Now because it's a portfolio called Cary Wharf, imagine if one building talks to another building and says, you know what, I have a lot of people that are having a conference here and I need more energy than what's been allotted to me. You have extra, let's make a deal. And because they trust each other because it's part of the same portfolio through blockchain, they can transact energy.

Now all of a sudden you're load balancing between your assets. The way that we've been working it with Cary Wharf is that there's a series of 12 different buildings that constantly load shedding each other and checking and balancing, say I need more electricity this 15 minute block. I need less electricity. I have something to sell during this block. What they do is they pull that together and once an hour, if there's excess energy during peak times, they sell that electricity back to the power company.

They're going to make a profit of over one million British pounds this calendar year. That's smart cities. Real dollars being used in very unique ways that use things like sensors. People call it the internet of things. I call it all bullshit.

This is called about building, this is making money. This is the new building industry. If you are focused in on thinking that you're building the building, yet you are the digital creators or managers, you will go the way of the Amish. Now there's a place in the world for the Amish too, but there's going to be other folks that actually think differently and going to make a hell of a lot more money than thinking about just throwing up a building, getting a fee for it, or as a designer thinking that I do my design documents, I get my CDs and I'm done.

Scknack design, whatever. Those days are over. The constraints of the AIA documents are antiquated and they should be actually shelved. The way the AGC is thinking about this is old. The engineers contracts are like from 1952.

Are you freaking kidding me? Let's start thinking digitally. There's a lot of money to be made on the people that create the information. The fact that they're not able to hold onto that as stewards of that information is a shame because there's going to be a lot of people that suck up all of that information, make a shitload of money. And a case in point can be pointed back to when the AIA documents, the contract documents, took out site supervision as a need because of the risk factors associated with architects that really didn't know what was going on on the job site.

And the insurance company said, well, we're no longer covering you. So the AIA documents had a change that did not do away with the need of the owner to have an owner's representative look over people's shoulders. That's why the world of construction management came around. It didn't exist before then. The same thing now is going to happen.

We're seeing the evolution and the emergence of a construction information manager. Those businesses are going to be the ones that control the projects because it used to be the people that control the schedule and the budget control the project. No more. The budgets and the schedules are being driven by data. The people that control the data are going to control the project.

So tell me, what do you recommend for people to really get it in their heads that there's something happening and they need to get on board? I don't think it actually comes down to a, you know, tomorrow morning, some group from you know, Siberia is going to take over your project and it's because you didn't see it or didn't listen to this podcast. What is going to happen is more of a subtle shift that in certain cases will happen so quick in certain markets that people are going to say, what the hell just happened?

And that will come from the outside world catching up and seeing where our weak spots are that we have too many professions that we consider legitimate that are making money off the inefficiencies of our business that we legitimize. And that's where it's really going to happen. And that's when people are going to wake up and in certain cases, it will be too late. And I don't mean to be an A-sayer that way. What we are seeing though is organizations like Google, like Facebook, and others that have untold cash but have real legitimate needs get involved with the construction industry because they say we suck at it.

Look at flux.io out of the Google labs, right? Look at what Google is doing because of the lack of affordable housing in Silicon Valley that they're doing prefabricated housing for their own people just to keep the talent there. Same thing with Facebook. They actually partnered up with a prefabricated housing group to make that happen. The industrialization of the AEC industry is upon us, not because there's some guy on a podcast saying it.

It's not because there's this group of evil people that are plotting against taking your job away. But you've got to understand that we have been doing things so inefficiently and making money off of it that it's just good enough that it makes it cool that we can just go home and drink a beer and wake up the next morning and know that the project's still there. When we start to take a look at things like prefab, and I'm not talking about trailer park stuff and buildings that look like cubes and elongated rectangles, those days are gone.

When you have the power of BIM being able to be put into a CNC machine that can route out and cut out all the panelization necessary for a 2,500 square foot building in under seven minutes with zero defects, a 10-year guarantee, and clipped together within one week for people to move into, the housing industry, as we know it, died. We are working with an organization in Shanghai that's doing this right now, 2,500 square foot homes. They're gorgeous. No one is alike because the machines can adapt to what the information that's being put into it is output.

And actually, we use SOLIDWORKS for it, by the way. What that does is that it creates the industrialization that we are fundamentally not getting around the critical path of the schedule. We're blowing it up. We have no need for subcontractors. I showed this to the leadership of a very large equipment and tool manufacturer here in the US.

You can probably guess who they are. And it was with their leaderships, with the CEO. And he got so unnerved that he sent a guy out to our factory in Shanghai. And he reported back and said, this is for real. There's not one tool that's used in our manufacturing process.

We have 4,000 units being built that will be completed and manufactured, fabricated, and installed by the end of December in Queensland, Australia. We have another 1 million units over the next two years to build out for Saudi Arabia. There's not one tool being used. There's not one subcontractor being used. And again, how do you get zero defects, a 10-year warranty at a $250,000 per unit affordable housing unit?

So business is driving innovation. The innovation is going to have winners and losers. People are not going to like a lot of things they said on this podcast. But you know what? I don't care.

This is what's happening. This is a report. And what's cool about it is that there's a lot of people that can make a pivot and start to embrace what's happening around them. And what's cool about it is once you make that pivot, there are no rules. The things that we thought were always going to be there forever are being totally disrupted.

We are the last major industry in the world to be disrupted. Banking went through it with the ATMs. You know, finance, all this stuff has gone through it, including the automotive industry. So we're the last ones to be hit. And it used to be that we had the protection of general contractors.

What happens when you don't need a general contractor anymore? You know, I'm sure the AGC would love to hear that, but that's the truth. And now, is that going to be the case for every building all around the world in our lifetime? No. There are fundamental shifts worldwide that start to take into account the industrialization of the AC industry.

So pay attention to that, as you know, my fellow colleagues inside of this beautiful industry we have. But also take a hard look in the mirror and start to say, you know, what business are we? You know, what are our values? What are the things that are affecting our values? What happens when a Google and Microsoft start to enter our industry?

Are they the enemy or do we embrace it? So yeah, fascinating times, Brittany. I don't think that there's any one silver bullet thing that I can say like, definitely do this and you'll be fine. No, I don't think anyone's fine, including ourselves. This is a brave new world.

And the ones that are going to do it are the pioneers. And hopefully, you know, you're not the pioneer with the arrow on your back. Great advice. I think the idea of learning as much as you can about the technologies and shifting even your skill set learning as much as you can, I think training and development quite honestly is probably going to be that sweet spot of innovation that's taking place. If someone slots themselves right in there, I think that might be really a great viable place to be.

What do you recommend that the listener do right now? I mean, we have lots of owners and general contractors and architects, but the design background, I guess, what is your recommendation for them to research or of course, TDG will be listed in the show notes. Is there any particular resource that you'd provide? And that's really interesting because what happens when you look internally is that you're going to self prophesize what the future should be, right? Because that's what you learn and what you know.

I would highly recommend that organizations start taking a look at other industries because they went through some of these processes because this is really about a process behavior change rather than a silver bullet technology coming out of a field saying, you know, you must use this. You know, like BIM was supposed to replace CAD. No, it was never built for that. It was meant to be built for an entire new professional that didn't exist at the time that we're just starting to see the beginnings of this new professional called a virtual design and construction professional, VDC.

So one of the things that I thought was very clever that I've seen with certain design firms is that they would take a certain studio on a certain project that they felt like, okay, you know, we have some seasoned veterans, there's a project captain there that I feel comfortable with, yada, yada, yada. And what they would do is that they would ghost or shadow the existing processes with a team that were doing things with different processes. And they did not disrupt the flow because, you know, you're still getting paid by, you know, an owner for a contract, yada, yada, yada.

But what they would do is start to show by shadowing that group where the efficiency would be for that firm, right? Because everyone's going to be different. You know, every company is going to be different. And that way you're reducing the risk of saying, okay, I got to jump in and change my business, which is that sort of like a reactive way of doing things rather than saying, how do we start to nurture a culture of continuous innovation and continuous change without it being so disruptive that we could fail with one or two projects that could literally put us out of business, right?

So by doing that shadowing exercise, I always thought that it was really clever. The other one that I saw also was with an organization in Seattle, an architectural firm that actually brought in other types of design processes. So for their sports studio, they brought in people from industrial design. Now architectural design, you really don't show a lot to the client because you want it to be almost perfect every time, right? Where with industrial designers, people that do like product design, they're constantly doing, let's create a prototype, throw it out, iteration, iteration, iteration, and they're really quick at it.

And what was interesting about them introducing that to the existing antiquated process was that they found a good healthy medium between that firm's culture and the exposure to a different industry's process. And they adapted and learned so much so that the entire firm went that direction, right? So I think that there are both two things I would recommend for any organization inside of our industry, which is that you can talk about change. You can go to AIA and CSI and EIEIO chapters and listen and hear about this thing and that thing.

At the end of the day, it comes down to taking a mirror up to yourself and understand what type of firm are we. Are you a high-end firm that only does high-end type of work? Well, guess what? You're going to need technologies and processes that are high-end to meet those criteria. But if you think you're high-end, yet you're doing storage warehouses off the interstate, you do not need to have the top-end technology to get those things done.

Nothing wrong with the business. It's actually a very solid business. But you're not doing high-end design. Understand who you are. And that's a really, really difficult thing for a lot of businesses in our industry to do is to own up to who are we?

Who are we really? And a great way of doing that is from your marketing. But marketing is going to drive those business decisions based upon your business plan. Hopefully you have a business plan. Most don't.

But based upon at least the direction that the leadership wants to go, and you've got to be really smart about how to match the technology to the processes that you're going to require. So let's talk about market perception. How do you market yourself? What are the technologies that will help enhance those processes that can be automated? What we also find is that people think that they can automate everything.

No, they can't. I mean, there's still certain things. People laugh at me, but I do my to-do list on a piece of paper. Of course I take a picture of it and stick it on my iPhone, but it's kind of best-ackwards. But there's certain things that I feel comfortable with.

But to say that there's going to be policy and we're going to do this Monday morning, we're going to transform our business. I've been involved with a number of these things. And now working with large-scale governments, it all comes down to bite-sized ways of showing progress to move forward because we're a very, very large industry and you don't want to out-innovate yourself that all of a sudden in your market, you are so far ahead of anyone that no one has use for you. You don't look valuable.

So it's going to be a real balancing act. It is probably the hardest thing to do in any business is being involved with the ASEA industry as it's changing tires at 100 miles an hour. Yeah. Well, on racetracks, they learn how to do it. If even it's stopping really quick and they've innovated that process, right?

And I think there's something to be said about disrupting yourself throughout the process, maybe taking a portion of your organization, like you mentioned the architecture form and testing a different model than you've used prior just to see maybe what are the innovations that are actually improving XYZ steps and see how implementing those things into different areas of the business might actually improve. So I really liked that response. So with that, Paul, this was amazing. Thank you for sharing. I really, really appreciate it.

The last thing I want to ask you is how can someone get in contact with you and learn more about what the TDG is doing? Sure. Just go up to thedigitgroupinc.com. Just hit info. We always respond and that's the easiest way of doing it.

But I just also want to say that, Brittany, this is a labor of love. It shows that there are people that really do care about the industry and podcasts like this are part of the ecosystem that will drive the change. And I just wish you much success as you keep on moving forward with this. Anything we can do to help just further this cause, just let me know. Oh, wonderful.

Thank you so much for that. I appreciate it. And I think the listeners appreciate that as well. All right. With that, thanks so much.

And it was a pleasure. Same here. Take care. Look, Paul has some ideas that will just blow your mind. So check him out on Twitter and on LinkedIn for sure.

One thing I realized is sometimes the future is now. So if you enjoyed yourself, let me know on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn. Or you can just email me at Brittany at constructor.com. I want to know how this podcast is helping you and this series as well. Again, my email is b-r-i-t-t-a-n-i-e at construct double r dot com.

A reminder for this week, the constructor podcast is going to the LCI Congress in Anaheim, California during the week of October 16th, 2017. If you're going, feel free to let me know. I'm happy to meet anyone there and just connect with my wonderful lean practitioners. So yeah, I'm looking forward to that and I'll be posting while I'm there. So that should be awesome.

Next, I want to just mention that we will continue our series about blockchain and construction next week. Our guest is Dave Hughes, a construction professional who is interested in unlocking the productivity issues in the industry and sees blockchain as a major piece of the puzzle in doing that. Listen out for our talk next week and the next episode of blockchain and construction series. Don't forget to subscribe at constructor dot com to get emailed updates from me. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at iTunes and Stitcher.

I am also making my podcast available on other networks like Google Play and SoundCloud in the near future. So look forward to that. I'll keep you guys updated. Also please leave a review to show your support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.