STEVE
I’m sure you saw some amazing stuff at ces.
MARLO
Yeah.
STEVE
We’re talking about that a little bit. But one of the things that you were also famous for, and I just mentioned it, NationalDayCalendar.com. Check it out. You were on CBS Sunday morning and that finally aired, I gotta cut ’em a little slack. You were bumped for the Pope and Barbara Walters. But you aired and a little bit of buzz is going on with the calendar now.
MARLO
Yeah, it’s been crazy since Sunday morning. I don’t want to say that we weren’t prepared, but I guess we weren’t prepared. I thought we’d see a little bump in traffic and, I get a couple media mentions or whatever, which is typical for the National Day Calendar.
STEVE
It’s been a nice platform and a little bit of national media attention and, holy crap.
MARLO
On a national level, telling the story of how we came to be and all of that, was really cool. And, I think, the cool thing around that story too is coming from a small town, in Mandan and Mandan was highlighted nicely in the piece. And I just think that there’s just something about that. I’ve always said that National Day Calendar is a grassroots thing. And I think, having CBS’s Sunday Morning come here and actually show that grassroots is Americana. I think just really, that National Day calendar and this whole movement of Celebrate Every Day comes to the heartland of America. And I don’t know, I just think that there’s something all about that, and I think that’s why. It’s just, I can’t even tell you the craziness that it – I can tell you some things, but the craziness that’s happened in the last 48 hours because of that piece, it’s just unbelievable.
I already have a little bit of a following in Switzerland. I have no idea how this happens. I feel I’m the Jerry Lewis of Switzerland because I walk in there and everybody’s, Hey Marlo’s here. Hey, will you interview me? And I – it’s the Tech Ranch. And they’re like, what? What is this? I only got a couple of interviews done on Saturday in there and I told them I’d be back tomorrow morning to finish up with everybody I walk in there of course, and they’re just like, “Hey, we see you this morning on the show.” And it just was a whole nother level of buzz around that. And I was walking down the street and people would come up to me cuz they watched it that morning and, so it was a little different.
STEVE
Yeah. I’m trying to figure out why Switzerland?
MARLO
I don’t know. I did some interviews with them last year and they got some play nationally.
STEVE
So I think that’s probably why. And then people from Switzerland will listen to the you and me, it’s not because you’re your own autonomous neutral country,
MARLO
Maybe, I don’t know.
STEVE
So the question I’ve got is, explain the booth part because a lot of people may not know. So you say you walked into the Swiss booth. What’s a Swiss booth entail? What’s that look like?
MARLO
So, they’re called pavilions actually. So the French have one. The Ukraine has one. No Russia this year, by the way that I’ve seen anyway. They have a lot of the countries,
STEVE
If it would’ve been there, you couldn’t have ’em next to each other.
MARLO
So yeah it was interesting to see Ukraine there, actually. Yeah, they had 11 booths in their pavilion. So they weren’t crazy well-represented but not bad. But sad. I interviewed a few of them. There’s one called E-Pharm. Great product by the way. They have a product that basically. you mount a sensor on your old tractor and then you put it like a tablet in your cab or next to the steering wheel, depending on how old your tractor is. And now you can drive straight lines down your field when you’re planting, or it’ll tell you to put a little more fertilizer here or a little less there. So it basically brings these old vehicles to the 21st century. So I’m interviewing this wonderful lady, and then she brings up the fact that they’re developing part of their platform is for mine removal.
STEVE
Yeah. That puts things in a little bit different perspective, doesn’t it?
MARLO
It’s a whole different perspective. And the emphasis of their company now is moving to this platform and they’re using all the money they’re making to offset the mining situation. Or, the fuels being mined in Ukraine. Because removing mines isn’t the easiest thing in the world I just was really taken aback
STEVE
Interesting dichotomy. Just unbelievable.
MARLO
So a lot of people, I explained to them what CES is, and you and I talked about this a little bit last week. There’s buyers and sellers or there’s the other side there were people are trying to find out what the next biggest project I can invest in.
STEVE
So it’s like a big shark tank.
MARLO
It is.
STEVE
So from a pavilion perspective, I’m guessing there’s multiple layers on the pavilions where you’ve got all the countries represented, but you’ve got also industries represented as well.
MARLO
Yeah, so they’ll segment it out. So you’ll have all the 3D printing stuff in one area. Wouldn’t really call it a pavilion. They just put these different things, because all the car automotive things are in one, one hall. All the televisions, all the screens are basically like in the main hall.
STEVE
So that’s another question – is how often are they asking your opinion? Because of course the Tech Ranch is the platform by which all this gets rolled out. How often are they asking your opinion? It’s “Hey, are we onto something right now?”
MARLO
The conversations afterwards are that way, during the interview not so much, but afterwards and then I get asked a lot to do, like on boxing and stuff, and I used to do a lot of that type of thing. I don’t anymore because of my dual role with National Day Calendar but I want to get back to that again. So I guess I really give advice to some of these things.
STEVE
So, back to CES.
MARLO
Yeah.
STEVE
So from a technology perspective what was CES this year as far as what your expectations were?
MARLO
I expected to see artificial intelligence at a level never seen before, and I was correct in that. It’s being incorporated in so many things. And for example have we talked about the refrigerator and cooking type of scenario?
STEVE
Yeah, we did a little bit last last week. That’s right.
MARLO
That’s what I thought.
STEVE
Got a chance to take a little at someday it could be one unit.
MARLO
Yeah, there was some prototypes of that. And the idea is that because of autonomous vehicles the thinking is that you don’t have to have as much food in your house. We’re off at that point now, you and I grew up in a generation, especially my wife, where you need to have four freezers and everything else cuz you need to store all this food if you come from rural country. That’s how it is, right?
STEVE
Yeah. I’ve got my wild game freezer. I’ve got my cow freezer,
MARLO
There’s enough food in our house to last a year if we needed to, I’m sure. But The idea here is that you have one unit that, that your refrigerator is going to basically talk to your favorite grocery store. The autonomous vehicle is gonna deliver your food in a timely manner. It’s gonna know that you’re leaving work and gonna be home at 5:45 or whatever. And that Autonom vehicle will show up at about the same time, and you can take your bag of groceries in stock, your refrigerator, and then it’ll start pulling things out of that refrigerator , to make things, there’ll be a robot involved in this as well. There’s actually robots that are being developed right now that will help you with cooking, doing your clothes, laundry, clean your house above and beyond.
STEVE
With AI and the robotics and stuff going, wait a minute, it’s not about the safety aspect, it’s about workforce and getting workers. Has there been a paradigm shift from a mindset
MARLO
It’s the quickest form to monetization. So if a company says, you know what, the United States has a workforce shortage right now of 18 million jobs or whatever it is. Right? So there’s the economies as well, right? So then your fast food hamburger can’t be 99 cents anymore. No. All of it has to go up. So in order for you, if price point is an important thing for your restaurant, for example, which I would imagine most are. They look for two things that has to happen. They either have to lay off staff because that’s the most expensive part of a restaurant is the actual staffing that goes on. Or you figure out other ways to make or serve, make food or serve your customers. And probably robotics will come into play more and more all the time.
You’re seeing kiosks and McDonald’s just pop up like crazy. I occasionally run into a McDonald’s. They seem to, they’re just more of them. And a lot of times when I’m in a smaller town, that’s the only fast food restaurant in town, so I’ll go in there, but even in a small town of three or 4,000 people, you’re met with four kiosks, and then they just have one person at the counter that would take the occasional order and or hand off the food instead of having four or five staff there. And I guarantee you, if you were to talk to the manager of that facility, they’re gonna state wages and they’re gonna state lack of workforce. Those are the two reasons why they put those kiosks in.
STEVE
What else is out there to from a daily life simplicity perspective? What are some of the things you saw at CES?
MARLO
There’s a lot of dedicated artificial intelligence. You can get into, if you’re an attorney or if you’re a bookkeeper, all of these things, there’s artificial intelligence being built to help you with those scenarios. For example, if you needed to do a search on a particular case as an attorney, in the past, before we had a lot of com, computer searches, you would probably go through a bunch of law books and site cases or whatever to make your point, right?
Then computers come along and you can do a search to do that, but you still have to compile this stuff. Now you can ask an AI that this is the case I’m working on. These are the parameters. This is what I’m looking for, to cite cases in the past to make my argument, and it will actually go and research that for you.
STEVE
AI, what do I need to win this? What information do I need to win this case? And what information do I need to present to a jury?
MARLO
Yes. Put all of that together for you so you can make your argument. Again, you could state that maybe you’re going to put a few people outta work here or whatever, but in, in an attorney’s situation if this costs me less money, they have to pay a little extra for the ai. That might, maybe the AI costs 10 grand a year or something like that. But it certainly will make their jobs more proficient, more efficient,
STEVE
you think about robotic surgeries and some of the things that surgeons can repair now with the use of robotics and now you get into the AI sphere of medicine. What did you see this year?
MARLO
So it started with this, I did an interview with a company that is using artificial intelligence to determine if your pet has issues, health issues. So what you do with this app is you take a photo of your pet every week, okay? And it will then monitor your pet along with all the other pets that are in this database. Okay. So then they take machine learning, artificial intelligence, and they look at all these others, they start accumulating data that are noticeable on these photos they’ll have a photo of your pet healthy, and then there’s a biomarker that happens, let’s say a year from now.
And that biomarker indicates some type of cancer. This is fascinating that they could, they’re taking all this data and they’re putting it together and with just the use of a photo, they’re able to determine or at least a high probability of your pet having cancer or whatever. So there are millions and millions of probably possible good businesses, good ideas, healthcare things, whatever else that’s sitting out there that somebody had a couple beers one night with a couple buddies, wrote it down on a bar napkin, but doesn’t have a million dollars, or can’t come up with a million dollars to do this. What happens if you can just pull up an app and type in the parameters and it punches out the app for you?
What’s possible with this, and this is the thing I think you have to think about, and this is why I don’t think that the job markets in any jeopardy at all, because the acceleration of ideas being brought to market is gonna just go through the roof in the next couple of years because of this stuff, and then all these other companies are gonna get born. A great example in my opinion is National Day Calendar. If we didn’t have the technology that’s that we have available right now, National Day Calendar could not afford to do what it does because we don’t bring in enough people. If it wasn’t for technology, we’d have to have 200 people working there, right?
But because of technology, we have our 20 people or so. Because that’s what our cash flow allows to have happen. Is the world better if we can create an app that can take photos of you every week over the course of your lifetime and then at some time it says, Hey, there’s something going on with you. You should go to the doctor now and check it out because there’s a possibility that something’s changed with you. And our doctors, for example, may not even be using a knife in the future, and microsurges are gonna become more and more commonplace because you’re just gonna put a laser or something inside of you.
STEVE
Yeah. I go fix somebody who is on the cellular level rather than, okay, we have to give you a heart transplant.
MARLO
So DNA and the ability to break into DNA even further, which is what’s going on right now because there’s subs of subs. I guess the information that’s in DNA is just extensive and they’re starting to get it at a level now because they have the computing power and artificial intelligence, again, that can dissect this stuff, right? That is key to artificial intelligence. And I’ve learned that over the last month and a half that I’ve been playing with chat GPT. It’s all about the ask. You can get pretty close sometimes, but you’ll realize after a while that. Sometimes it doesn’t give you quite the right answer because I didn’t ask it the proper question.
STEVE
So from an educational standpoint, there’s still the value in education because you have to have the ability to ask the correct question,
MARLO
If you’re writing a term payment paper on Benjamin Franklin, for example, and you ask it to write a term paper in Benjamin Franklin, back and it’ll review the things that you’ve written in the past, online or in a book or whatever and then it’ll punch out a story about that. Let’s say this app that I just was talking about detecting skin cancers or other cancers in human beings, it has to have that database to make that happen. It’s your photo. And a million other photos, that this is AI, the database is tracking and then it cumulatively creates these biomarkers that if you start to have one of these biomarkers it’ll learn, but it can’t learn from you alone.
It can learn a little bit from you, but you’d have to go in and let’s say you develop cancer sometime in the future, then you’d have to go in and tell the app that you had cancer. But it really doesn’t do you any good at that point. You, the app only learns when you have a bunch of people that have come in and said, all right, I developed cancer. There’s cloning that’snot cloning in the reality that you’re thinking but a virtual clone of yourself. Some of this stuff is possible. Maybe not hammer nail type of thing right now, but you could have your robot do that for you.
STEVE
Yeah. I hate dusting.
MARLO
Your robot will. My robot can do that. Yeah. And have dinner waiting for you when you get home at night and have all your clothes full folded and cleaned. Impressed and, yeah. All good stuff.
STEVE
See, I’m really good at loading the dishwasher and running the dishwasher and get yelled at for not unloading the dishwasher.
MARLO
Your robot will take care of that for you too.
STEVE
So in the last.20 seconds we’ve got here. If there was one thing that you saw that was earth shaking, what was the most fascinating thing that you walked in the door and went, oh my gosh.
MARLO
Psionic is the name of the company. It’s a robotic hand that was attached to a person’s arm, somebody who lost their arm and below the elbow, and he’s able to feel his daughter when they hold hands.
