The Year in Disruption: Hits, Misses and Maybes

UVA Darden.

The Disruption, a lively discussion between UVA Darden School of Business professors Yael Grushka Cocaine and Mike Lennox on cutting edge technologies and practices that are challenging the status quo.

Hey Mike, how are you?

Hi, how are you doing?

I'm good, uh, this time of year, uh, you know, as we start to think about the holidays that are upon us, um, it's always, you know, it begs to kind of come together and reflect, don't you think?

Yeah, it does, it does.

What, what's your favorite holiday tradition?

Uh, well, we have so much.

We are a mixed family in terms of backgrounds and traditions, and so we get the best of all worlds.

We celebrate Hanukkah with a big party.

We have Christmas.

We put out stuff for the rain.

You know, we have all of that.

So I'm curious because this has been a debate in our household, uh, you know, in terms of when we put up like Christmas decorations.

I'm a, I'm a traditionalist.

I'm a big like after Thanksgiving.

Like you have to get to, but apparently I'm wrong, uh, accordingly, according to my wife.

Early November November 1st.

Apparently November 1st, Christmas music decorations can go up.

How about you guys?

No, we're very late, so we put it to the last minute.

In fact, one of the fun things is to actually put up some of those decorations which were a little bit.

Um, I would say probably, uh, humble with because we don't have huge amounts, so, um, we typically go, it all goes up the night before, meaning the kids wake up to the light, so it's kind of a surprise, and but they anticipate the surprise, but it's a surprise.

How do you time like Hanukkah versus Christmas given that Hanukkah's moving on the calendar?

So some years they overlap, some years they don't.

Hanukkah has much less on the decorations front.

They typically for a party.

Do a big party and so we'll decorate for that, um, but then we have our little traditions around Christmas, especially if somehow every year it's a miracle that every one of us gets a Toblero for Christmas.

So you know, that's pretty cool.

That's pretty cool.

Well, obviously this is a time of year for reflection and looking, looking back on, I, I'm, I've got a question for you.

What technology that emerged this year.

Are you excited to maybe get as a gift?

Anything that you would like to get as a gift coming, you know, into the, the holiday season?

Wow, that's a great, great question.

Um, I've been a lot more in touch with my wearables this year.

Well, we haven't quite done an episode, although I think we should, um, I did take a move and buy myself a, a, a watch, but I think that there's more out there.

I'm also really kind of enjoying some of my exercising and enjoying a big runner.

I'm a big runner and I'm getting more into it, but also at this age, you know, weightlifting and all that fun stuff, and so I think that there's a lot there that I can invest in.

Gym and invest in some of the kind of tracking technology and so on so I'm excited about, about the, the innovation in that space.

I'm not sure like what's the latest, like, you know, uh, ski machine or what what what era or one of those things that be cool.

That would, that would be.

I've my gym at home is in a great state and I love going down to my gym and I really indulge in it.

So kind of sprucing that up a bit is really, um, what my, what my hope is for the, for the new year and for the holidays.

Cool, very cool.

What about you?

You know, they just came out with the Switch 2 this summer, but like I'm not really a gamer, but, but I'm like maybe I should get one, but I'm probably not, probably not.

Um, the humanoid robots that we've talked about in the past, you know, I don't think I need one, but like if you're, if you're gifting it to me, if you're looking for a gift for me, that would be pretty cool.

Maybe somebody to help out in the office or somebody who could help with uh I think about the office.

I'm seeing more at home, but.

Uh, yeah, yeah, I'm not sure, you know, we've talked about those before if we're still a humanoid robot to sit in your classes to take attendance, you know, maybe that sort of thing's grading, uh, you know, OK, OK, yeah, that's, that's good.

We can put some of that stuff off to the, uh, to the robot.

Exactly, exactly.

Well, I'm, I'm sure that you're just waiting for the day that you can buy your own autonomous vehicle, but that's, you know, I mean, look, they're largely autonomous as is.

I mean, we're pretty, we're getting pretty close on that one there, but, um, yeah, I actually, I enjoy.

Driving, so I don't know, you know, I love the tech, as you know, but I'm not sure, you know, I'm gonna rue the day when I don't get to actually drive the car anymore.

Well, I miss my old stick shift, so I'm, I'm also a sucker for like the, the old technology, but, um, I thought, you know, one fun stuff that we do, that we've been doing an episode that we've been doing every year is kind of reflecting on the year that we had, talking, revisiting some of those technologies and how maybe our opinion has even changed in the few months since we recorded.

And maybe we can kind of start to think with our listeners a little bit about what's coming and what might be interesting to talk about in 2026.

Yeah, awesome.

OK, so what have, what have we done this year?

Well, so we'll go back to, you know, humanoid robots again, and I think the one thing I would reflect on there is this still seems a long way off to me, and what's been fascinating is looking at things like Tesla's valuation.

If you look at their evaluator, it's hard to justify it without there being this, this massive boom in, uh, humanoid robot adoption.

Um, again, you know, I think we're still on that early part of the S curve here, so we'll see, but it seems like it's still a ways off to me.

My question about those.

The humanoid humanoid robots and where it's headed, how does that conversation intersect with anything related to energy?

Like, I hear a lot about the ener energy concern related to data centers and LLMs right when we talk, and we'll talk a little bit about our latest episode about LLMs.

So the energy concern is a, is a, is a big one.

But when we talk about these humanoid robots, if, if we are to start to see more use cases and more applications, is it also going to require us to rethink how we power them, you know, the battery situation a little bit like we did with cars?

I think it's an interesting question, but if you look at like the last 100 years, in many ways we've been electrifying human work for a while, like whether it's a washer, washing machine.

Right, or a dishwasher machine like this is replacing human labor.

Uh, the dryer machine instead of having to hang everything on a, you know, a clothesline, we still like to hang everything, yeah, we do.

We, we, we don't like what the dryer does to our clothes, but that's on the side.

I mean, then of course there's like, you know, Roomba and these already, you know, vacuums that we have.

So I think it would just be a continuation of taking human labor and replacing it with a You know, electricity generated, uh, or powered device, um, at the same time, you know, I'm not sure these are gonna be big, big energy consumers, so maybe on that front it's more of a linear continue con continued kind of linear increase versus maybe something like a data center which or data centers plural that kind of alludes to more of an exponential kind of growth in the needs.

That are that it puts on our energy.

Maybe, you know, even with data centers, not to get too optimistic here, you know, they're already starting to emphasize efficiency in a way that we might be able to generate the same amount of compute with far less electricity, and I don't think we're there yet.

I think there's a long learning curve still to move down, but it's obviously attracted a lot of attention now.

So, um, we'll see, we'll see if, if, if the, you know, the electrical needs for humanoid robots, uh, ends up.

Breaking the grid.

Fair enough.

Fair enough.

So at the time when we talked, when we recorded that episode, which was a while ago, um, after our conversation with Professor Frank Lee, we both concluded, I believe, that it's a good disruption.

Um, any change in your opinion about that?

Not at this point.

Again, I think this is one of those that I could have been tempted to say like this is, this is still pretty far on the future despite all the efforts that are going there.

I think we'll see a lot of niche, you know, specialty adoption.

Um, I, I, I feel pretty optimistic that, like, you know, we'll be able to keep this one under, under control.

Interesting.

Um, I'm kind of still, I think I'm still in a good, in a good space in terms of that, but, um, I might be on the fence with no disruption at all, to your point.

Maybe it just feels very natural to continue to replace human labor with, with, with these robots, and maybe this is just the next stage of it, and it doesn't feel.

As you know, huge of a step as disruptive because it's kind of gradual, but again, I might be mistaken.

Well, and again on this podcast we always like to remind people like the, the more technical way of thinking about disruption is about how it restructures markets and whether this will, you know, really fundamentally restructure markets or not.

I think is an open, open question.

OK, beautiful.

And so maybe I'll use that opportunity to segue into talking about.

Digital twinge, which was our next episode, and we hosted one of our own faculty here, Sam, uh, uh, Levy here.

Um, I think you said no disruption, and I, I embarrassingly, I think that you never called me out on the fact that I didn't actually what's your answer?

The, the, the, the public, our listening public has wanted to know for for months where does Yael stand on digital or on uh digital twins.

Well, um, I think I also.

Fall and no disruption, uh, in terms of disrupting markets, it's interesting because one, talk that I heard recently that kind of maybe calls that into question, we had a great talk here at Darden by Ken Ono from UVA who told us about all his amazing work with the UVA swim team and the Olympic swim team and those incredible swimmers who, uh, really crushed it, uh, in Paris in terms of the medals and.

Um, some of what they could do was using things like digital twins to kind of understand some of the dynamics of each individual swimmer and, and some of what they need.

So I've seen cases where it really changes or it causes a shift in how people think, maybe not to the point where it shifts markets, right?

Well, no, and I think that's the like we're not saying when we say no disruption that a technology isn't improving, right?

Like isn't making things better in some way or not.

It's just more of a question of whether it.

Reinforces kind of existing capabilities and existing market structures, or does it actually cause us to kind of rethink how those those markets are structured, which actually is a good segue to our next one which was quantum computing.

Well, yeah, and I think that these are related in some way, um, and let me tell you what I'm thinking because as you were saying that I was thinking about, uh, in the United States right now we're dealing with some of the shutdown and the implications for the air traffic control like.

Could digital twins maybe together with quantum, I don't know, or maybe separately, could they change, let's say the structure of that market, right?

How we think about air traffic controllers and their role and the different players there maybe there's, are you gonna eliminate the air traffic controllers we're gonna go with all AI to control.

I don't know.

I've always thought about that and as a possibility and maybe digital twin allows you to kind of create scenarios that otherwise you don't wanna it's, it is interesting to think about.

About like, um, you know, plane travel already is fairly autonomous, the actual flying of the airplane.

So maybe the air traffic control could be more autonomous.

Fascinating.

I, let's put it on the list for next year, air traffic controllers, as everyone's waiting to go fly for Thanksgiving and the holidays.

Exactly, exactly.

I mean, I, I love, uh, uh, I love revisiting that.

Did, did, did you know that my, uh, PhD thesis was, uh, work that I did with Eurocontrol, which is the organization that is basically in charge.

Of the air traffic control in all of Europe.

Oh my goodness, so you're like a, you're a global expert.

I don't know about that, but I have, I've had some exposure for sure.

Um, OK, so quantum, quantum computing, we had my, uh, uh, my friend, uh, Yav come in and tell us, uh, incredible, um, kind of provide an incredible vision here in terms of quantum and where it's headed and all of the investment, uh, in that space.

Um, uh, where do you come down on it?

We came down, I came down as good, uh, with, with some caveats, um, and.

You know, my worry here is, is, and on the more disruption side is, is this gonna lead to like extreme market consolidation?

Will there be a handful of companies who have the wherewithal to build these massive quantum computers and then begin to dominate huge sections of the economy?

And we've talked about this even more broadly with AI that this.

Could be, uh, could be a result.

So I would say good for now.

Some, some worries about what, you know, concentration of market power.

Well, maybe let me push a little bit just because we have the time not to talk about it among the two of us, but like if, if listeners want to understand a little bit more, like in a way what you just described is a market structure change, right, which is your definition of like a disruption.

Why is that necessarily bad in your mind?

Like, why is that concentration necessarily a bad disruption, uh, in, in the way that you're describing it?

Well, it's interesting, and many of the digital technologies we talk about, this is a common worry and maybe feature of these markets, you know, we talk about network externalities, winner take all markets, that you get this consolidation.

I, I think the worry actually bleeds over not only to like the market side and consumer surplus, whether you can extract it when you have these massive.

Uh, entities, but also in the political sphere, right, like in a, in a world where, you know, data is, is gold and, um, these companies might end up consolidating and using and then processing massive amounts of data about you and I and everyone in society like it, it starts to worry about some of these kind of toiltering, you know, worries that we've had in sci-fi and the and the like there.

So the more technology can be distributed, I think.

I would argue kind of generally better for society.

Interesting, which may might feel to me like a good transition into the small nuclear because that was one of the ideas around the small nuclear that it can provide for some kind of distributed approach.

Is that fair?

I think it is fair though it is interesting that as we had the discussion and learned more about it.

Um, it's not that small, distributed, right, right, so, you know, I, you know, I guess the, the image of like having a little, you know, box on your desk that's a nuclear generator, like that's not what we're talking about, at least not right now, um, so I, I think, you know, you came down on, on no disruption.

I still said good, um, but I think we maybe were in agreement that doesn't necessarily feel like this is, uh, Uh, a radical change from the past here.

OK, fair enough, and we had, uh, um, our alum here, uh, uh, Steven Leff come in and join us, uh, to talk about that.

It was fascinating, and I see the topic of small nuclear kind of show its head often.

Um, I think folks are still pretty intrigued, and it doesn't feel like it's hit the popular press as much, and maybe I'm wrong.

Well, I think because it's not kind of market ready yet.

Like we're seeing some pilot projects, especially with the race to build out AI, um, but we're still a ways away, I think, from it being, you know, just commercially viable, building at scale.

Um, we might get there, but, um, we're still in the pilot phase with this.

Um, from your conversations and you're tapped into a lot of what Happens around here in Virginia.

Um, there's a lot of data centers, uh, in Virginia.

Um, our dean Scott Beardsley likes to talk about Virginia as the most, the highest number of data centers in the world potentially, uh, in terms of, uh, uh, um, uh, locations per square foot or however you wanna calculate it, um.

Is the small nuclear conversation related at all or on top of my, you know, policymakers here in Virginia or not really?

No, absolutely.

I mean, I think it's, um, again with this mad dash to build compute and the energy and electricity needed to power it.

Lots of discussions about these alternatives and so, um, in some ways it's having its moment right now, um, even in the months since we had the conversation, um, but again I just wanna caution like we're in that again earlier phase of the S curve here where the market viability piece still needs to be proven out.

Yeah, what is that that part of, uh, the curve, the hype curve there, the, the peak of disillusionment right before the trough of, uh, of, uh, uh, awakening, yes, um.

OK, so we, after nuclear small nuclear, we did talk about GLP ones.

OK, that was a great topic.

We got a lot of people interested to, to think more about this as a disruption.

Um, have you thought about it since we recorded with Doctor?

Well, look, I, I was looking over our year and I Realize as always, I'm like the optimist and I either am good and on a couple of occasions no, but I didn't actually say bad for anything this year, which I'm kind of embarrassed I'm kind of embarrassed by that.

But at the same time, you know, I went into this one, probably my predisposition was bad disruption, um, and so I think what I learned from our conversations with Doctor Chalborough was that You know, the, the, the, the side effects that I worried about seemed to be maybe not, at least at this point, like not as bad as I had worried about, which makes it hard to argue, you know, this is a, um, unequivocally bad disruption, um, and so I still have my worries.

I have my worries about abuse of it, what it means in terms of, um, You know, the conditions under which people use it, but there are enough people with serious ailments where this is, and sometimes, you know, a lifesaver.

Um, it, it, it seems, I, I will stick by my good disruption on this one.

Well, I think it's interesting because a lot of these technologies, and this goes back to the point that you were making around, uh, um, even quantum computing and like what, what do we do with this power?

What do we do with these capabilities?

What do we do with these disruptions.

These technologies, um, so there's a few things with the GLP ones both in terms of who's prescribing them and who's consuming them and how do we put in place mechanisms to make sure that it's more for the good and as for the bad, um, and there's also a really strong social component and we see we've seen it since that episode has aired, um, around that time I think the whole sequence of, um, ads came out with Serena Williams and her involvement and I think that there was a big debate around.

Uh, that her role in promoting, uh, promoting the, the use of it, and I can see that that's, that's on people's minds.

They, they're flipping between good and bad.

They can't quite decide if this is a disruption that is being used in the right way that it's intended or not, um, understanding the, the positives and what it can provide for individuals who need it, um, but I definitely I.

Definitely fall in that this seems to be a disruption in that technical way we were talking about it.

This is having impacts on a whole variety of industries, including the the health and fitness and wellness industry, um, clearly on various aspects of the healthcare industry and and drug discovery industry, um, uh, even things like I've imagined like beauty and cosmetics, like, you know.

This, this seems to be having an interesting impact across a wide variety of sectors, and there are companies in adjacent areas that are having to kind of respond to it, right?

So, right, interesting.

And of course it's also like we said before, disruptions quickly become political, right?

The price being debated, and this is stuff that, you know, uh, the government is involved in.

So, so it's, it's really fascinating to watch.

Um, drones, we moved to drones.

This is when we disagreed, which is always good.

It's always healthy when we disagree.

Oh yeah, you like it.

I do.

I do find more polarizing.

So you were bad, and again, yet again, I was good.

Um, have you rethought your, uh, bad disruption?

Oh, if anything, I'm even more convinced about that.

Yeah, I, uh, not only did I make the mistake of watching the movie The Gorge, but, um, but I just think I'm really fearful of what, um.

On the, on the war warfare, um, aspect, and, and I just don't see as many positive use cases and, but, and yet I, I think it is transformative.

Like I think it's a huge disruption.

I think it can completely change markets and industry when it comes to that, um, and I'm fearful about the implications, yeah, and I think maybe we're, we're probably more aligned than, than I, you know, originally was suggesting there because I do think from the commercial side.

I can see it as a good disruption.

It's hard to see like some serious negative, really negative on the agriculture side, right, right, or even like, you know, drone delivery and things.

These are adding to the portfolio, could disrupt the markets in kind of interesting ways because of the ease of that last mile delivery, which is a big issue in the retail sector and the like.

Uh, but I, I can't deny that on the military side and the use of these in warfare, it's scary.

It's scary and it is fundamentally transforming the way we do that, and I think Um, yeah, that could have some real negative repercussions, and I think it's already happening, right?

Like I, I know that it's already happening, yeah, yeah, no, I hear you, but it was great to have that conversation, and I think it's a, it's an important technology and disruption that folks need to make, make themselves aware of and think about like many of these things, the business models and the kind of ethical leadership component of this is vital, um, and, and I think that that's fascinating, especially for us at Darden because we care about those questions.

I mean, a lot of people do, but.

Uh, we definitely spent some time thinking about it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, last one, how was that live session for you?

Yeah, this was just like last month, so this is fun.

It was a lot of fun, and I, you know, we should do more live sessions, uh, and have, have our students and others in the room with us as we, as we record.

What did you find that was different when you did it live?

I mean, you were there physically in a room filled with people.

Uh, you could see their reaction to the conversation.

I was unfortunately over Zoom, but I enjoyed kind of talking to Ronnie.

Yeah, well, I think the, the obvious is great questions, right?

Like we try, but like.

Having crowdsourcing, you know, questions, uh, for our guest experts is, is really useful.

So, um, I think that's a great, a great addition.

We, we, we can figure out a way to do this more live more often and get, you know, real-time feedback from our, from our, uh, audience.

Well, I know that we've had the secret, you know, hope of maybe making it to South by Southwest or to Vegas or to some of those kind of, uh, cutting edge to conferences where we can, uh, go and experience some of the technology firsthand.

Maybe we should do that.

We should do that.

We should do that.

Uh, we both decided good on LLMs.

Um, again, it was only a few weeks ago, but you're, you're sticking to your guns on that one, sure, yeah, I mean, I think folks are asking good questions when they're concerned with generative AI in general, um, but I think it's these types of questions that make it exciting and the solutions will emerge, and I have faith that mostly we will find acceptable solutions for all of this.

I just think the opportunities are huge, yeah, and I think, you know, in terms of the disruption piece.

You know, a couple of observations, you know, one, we, when I think about like disruption again, it's these kind of competitive life cycles.

There is this thing called the hype cycle, uh, and they, it is real and it overlaps the competitive life cycle.

Um, I do think we're high on the hype cycle.

Um, I think we're coming close to probably the shakeout phase of the competitive life cycle.

Um, as I always say, that is to be expected.

This does not say the technology is, you know, not impactful and will not continue to be impactful.

Um, but there, there will be an alignment between expectations and performance, and then you'll kind of hit that plateau where it's starting to perform as we expect it to.

Yeah, exactly.

I do have a little bit of a worry about, um, the investment bubble.

I think we are seeing in AI, um, and especially the build out of the physical infrastructure we see.

Um, my guess is in the long run it's gonna be great because we're gonna have all this cheap compute available, but in the short run.

You know, there's a lot of dollars going to this that it is hard to see how you can make it up on, you know, queries that people are doing on chat GPT or the like, uh, so how that will shake out remains to be seen, um, and hopefully we won't get like a 2008 type of episode, uh, in terms of the economy here, although I can see, I mean, I was, I think you and I, uh, both had experience, and I, you know, I was out in San Francisco like 2000, 2001, 2002, like.

Uh, are we headed in that direction?

Quite honestly, probably like there's gonna be again some adjustment also in terms of the investments and the evaluations, um, because they, we haven't quite figured out those business models, but, um, yeah, and I think, I think you know, the, the, you know, we should talk about like financial disruption, right, like in 2001 with the dot com.

In some ways it was muted in terms of its overall impact on the economy because a lot of it was just inflated stock prices, right?

And that hurts for those who took those stock positions, but it doesn't necessarily affect the underlying economy. 2008 was a little bit different because of the impact on the credit markets and financial markets and the correlation that existed there in all of theirs, right, right.

And so I think.

You know, the upside would be a 2001, uh, disruption in the marketplace, optimistic, right, like there's overvalued stocks that their prices come back down, uh, 2008, you know, financial crisis, that would be the, the bigger risk there, um, but again, long term, this seems to be a major disruption affecting a wide number of sectors in the technical way we talk about it.

And you know, we're the optimists, so we're we're we're we're on the good side that ultimately this will be good, uh, for society.

I, I wanna do one more.

I wanna go back to one that we did in our very first season, uh, and it's kind of now been my annual thing to bring this one back up.

Uh, so crypto, crypto, um, I very, I very famously am in a bad disruption or no disruption camp on this.

Uh, I have.

A lot of concerns and questions about why this is a thing and why people are pouring their money into it.

Well, this is what I was gonna say.

So in the last year, uh, 27% raise in Bitcoin, now at 103,000.

So, as I always tell my students, never invest based on my advice.

That's why I'm a college professor.

Uh, crypto keeps or these Bitcoin keeps going up.

We have not seen a collapse and, uh, Uh, I'm still sticking to my guns.

I'm still sticking to my guns that I'm a little surprised and confused by the, you know, continued excitement about crypto, uh, that we, that we see.

Interesting.

What will have to happen for you to say, oh, maybe I was wrong, would, would be the question.

How many?

Well, my one, I will say my one caveat has always been that, um, if we think of one of these, probably Bitcoin.

As a a substitute for something like gold, just something that's a store of value.

I can get my hands around that a little bit more.

Um, as a, as a mode of transacting, no, we're not seeing that.

Having hundreds if not thousands of these cryptocurrencies out there makes no sense to me.

And then you get like the, you know, the, the derivative stuff we're seeing that like, It it's just gambling.

It's just, and it's gambling on no fundamentals.

At least if you gamble on sports, there's like a winner and loser, and you know, this is just gambling that other people will think.

You know, having this, this stock, uh, this coin will be valuable at some point.

And I feel like maybe that's an episode that we can, uh, kind of come back to right now that we're thinking ahead.

Once the prices all crash, then I can, I can have my, uh, my, my big moment.

Fair enough.

Well, let's think about, um, where we're headed a little bit, and then in just, uh, the few minutes that we have left, like think about what are you excited for us to think of covering in 2026, so we don't have.

Necessarily cover all of these, but what ideas do you have that we should explore?

So I, as we know on this podcast, I'm very interested in clean tech and decarbonization and the like, and there's some really interesting innovations coming around, uh, batteries, and batteries broadly defined.

Uh, so one I want to talk about is a CO2 battery, which is a way of basically converting, uh, CO2 gas from liquid to gas, using it to turn a turbine, produce electricity.

Um, and the thinking is to use this for long term storage of, uh, electricity, so very different than like a lithium ion battery and would have very specific uses for like electric utilities, um, and, and that's just one of a handful of really innovative ways of rethinking like what do we need for storage and how do we go.

Storage, could that be storage for other sources like for instance, could it help with some of the storage of, let's say the solar that you know, no, well, that's the whole idea.

Like if you could use renewables and then store it to deal with the intermittency issue, that, that becomes important.

But you know, you have to realize like different use cases have different needs.

So an electric vehicle needs power when you hit that.

That gas pedal or the pedal, I guess it's not a gas pedal anymore, um, and, and that's a specific need to discharge the battery really quickly.

If you're, again, long term term storage here, you don't need to have it do that.

So you have other options available to you, and I think there's just a lot of innovation and exploration taking there.

Fascinating.

I would love, I can't wait to, I can't wait to learn more about that.

Um, oh, there's so many things, uh, on my mind, you know, I'm fresh off of a conference where, um, I saw the use of like VR, like virtual augmented reality, virtual reality, those headsets in instruction and in case method teaching, and so I'm super excited about talking about, and I don't know if this falls under the AI Gen AI LLMs like it's everything combined with those headsets and.

And some of the, the, the hardware as well, um, I think the use cases for education are so exciting, and, um, I think we should record, uh, record an episode on that.

We did online education a couple of years ago.

We did, but that was a totally, I mean, it was almost like a different world, yeah, yeah.

Well, and as we talked about, I think in that podcast, the idea that higher ed probably could use some disruption, uh, and there isn't that many really.

Radical different models out there, but now we're talking about personalized approach.

Think about the case method that we do.

Like now the students are interviewing the protagonists themselves.

Like there's so many exciting things that we can do there, um, so it's worthy of, of revisiting.

I would, I would love to talk about one that like as a kid, right, like was out there being teased to us, which is like personalized space travel.

Oh, there we go, right?

Like I mean we grew up.

Like Star Wars, like when am I going to be in my fighter jet, you know, scooting around the universe.

Um, obviously we're, we're not there yet, but a lot has happened, and, and especially the commercial piece, which I think is the most fascinating piece.

I mean, even going back to 2001 A Space Odyssey, like they were already portraying, um, commercial, you know, commercial space travel, so.

Um, it'll be an interesting one to talk about kind of like where are we today, how close are we to like it.

I don't know, maybe don't want it to be like our airlines, right?

Maybe better than the airlines.

Well, maybe we have to talk about that in the context of the airlines knowing what we know about that business model which is highly problematic, heavy investment intensive, and, and, and huge costs, and so it's very hard for airlines to, to survive the long term, um.

Uh, banking, we've talked, I mean, you just mentioned crypto, um, but there's a lot going on in the banking sector, uh, I believe the term is neobanking, um, so new players, new models that are kind of creating a new, almost like a, a facade for individuals to interact with the bank instead of the traditional banks as we know them.

So it might be interesting to think about that one too.

Yeah, one more for us, um, you know, we haven't talked about things like.

Starlinkk and other kind of low orbit satellites and um again from a disruption standpoint like will this change the way we are able to access the internet and access technology um we're still fairly based on, you know, terrestrial systems whether it's cable or cellular, um, could this, could this radically transform how we think about access to The internet, so there's not gonna be any more, uh, can you hear me now kind of situation?

That, that's the hope, but I don't know.

I mean, we haven't to talk.

We'll have to, we'll have to explore.

Well, there's one more that I wanted to bring up that maybe we can put on our radar, and I'll be curious.

And again, anybody listening, uh, to this, if we have any listeners, we would love for you to email us and send us your ideas, but our thousands of listeners, our thousands of listeners at this point, um, but you know we do.

I'd like to touch on health care.

We did the GLP ones this year, but it would be great if we could also spend some time thinking about all the, um, just the, the theme of aging.

Um, I don't, I've heard that anti-aging is not the right term and that we're not, we're not against aging aging happens to all of us.

Well, they're trying to stop aging well, right, so like just thinking about aging and, and what's happening in that space in terms of how we think about, um, growing older, how we think about our.

The longevity of our lives and and how that is really being disrupted in many different ways.

This is one that is very personal because we need to accelerate this because my, my great fear is we're gonna figure out how to end aging when I'm like 80 and I'm just gonna be stuck being an 80 year old for eternity.

You're like now is better than that.

I mean, it would have been better 20 years ago, honestly, but like every year it gets a little worse.

So think about your kids and your grandchildren unless we can do de-aging if we can. that would be, that would be a great, we should explore that, but there's plenty clearly ahead of us in 2026.

So, um, I'm really excited about this year ahead.

Yeah, no, and I guess, you know, uh, state the obvious, you know, disruption is all around us.

Um, it's scary, and I think we often talk about, you know, obviously what are some of the downsides, um, but we're optimists by nature and really trying to understand how these will play out, and I I do think it's a truism that when we look forward, we always have these fears or excitement that probably both are out of bounds and the reality tends to be somewhere in between, uh, with a lot of these technologies and often are ways that we didn't forecast, you know, if you go back in time, our inability to see like the microcomputer revolution that has transformed society over the last 50 years, uh.

Or or other forms of technology and health care and the like, um, it's just always fun.

Yeah, it's great and um the fact that so much of this is also, you know, it comes from literature and comes from folks uh writing novels that have imagined the future that we now, uh, you know, bring to reality is, is also, uh, serendipitous, but, um, Mike, I'm excited for us to embark on our, our next year looking forward to next year.

And uh, maybe new, um, sessions, live sessions, and, and new guest speakers, but, um, yeah, thank you, thank you as well.

Um, uh, do you want to thank our amazing, of course, I mean this is as always, we want to thank our producer Gary.

We want to thank our lead researcher extraordinaire Becky, uh, for all the work they do to make this podcast possible.

Amazing.

Thank you everybody and, uh, enjoy the holidays and happy New Year.

Happy New Year.

Good Disruption is a podcast from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

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