Futurist(Mom)

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Hi everyone, this is Nancy Ano, exponential strategist, curious world student I guess, and mother of three who, uh, is really thrilled to be bringing the Futurist Mom podcast to you.

It's designed to really weave this perspective on how we look.

Farther out, right?

And we look at how things are shifting and changing with how it is that we are approaching our jobs as parents and caregivers right now.

Hopefully with greater confidence in making decisions today that impact tomorrow and a perfect person within to have that conversation is my really good friend.

Deborah Perry p uh, Silicon Valley based entrepreneur, innovation expert and bestselling author who has spent years helping organizations adapt to disruption and exponential change.

She's written many books about them specifically, uh, for starting with Silicon Valley and unlocking the secrets of Silicon Valley.

Been thinking a lot about how do you motivate and incentivize people.

She wrote a book called The People Equation and Unlocking Innovation, and our most recent book takes a.

Bigger lookout and thinks about what happens with the world of work.

The book is entitled, employment is Dead, and has been featured in outlets from the Wall Street Journal to the Harvard Business Review, but beyond just the professional lens.

Deborah's also the mother of three children, two young adult twins in their twenties, and her daughter who's heading into college and higher education.

And so a lot of these things, as we imagine again, is your.

Preaching about how things are shifting and changing, and it's impacting then the decisions and the ways that you support your children as they're navigating their way through.

So as we talk about the future of work isn't about or about the job.

That those structures around work are shifting and changing, even if it doesn't appear so in real time.

Right.

The tug of work currently exists between what we can imagine it looking like and right now the, the sort of pullback to an older way of doing it.

So it may not seem as though we're in a moment of tremendous change when we think about how the technologies like ai.

Like decentralized technologies of blockchain and, uh, robotics and how all of these are going to impact both the way we work and how we work and where we work.

And if we'll work in traditional jobs or whether or not work will take a different, um, shape or allow us to have more freedoms to build the lives that we want, dere will enhance.

Help us answer the question of what kind of world we want to live in and how we want to spend our time.

It is so fun again that I have a friend who is such an accomplished person because I was thinking about it this weekend as I was preparing for this podcast or thinking about this.

You know, you and I have had so many real time conversations, but I hadn't really dug into the whole history of your work as I get to listen to your podcast and dive more deeply into your book.

And,

So now I feel like I get to have a, you know, an even more robust conversation with you around it.

But I think that as we jump into.

This conversation and kind of where your head is.

I love the fact that you framed the world very similar to I two, that we have this incredible moment, right, this incredible moment of change.

And you ask two questions as we prepare for that moment, which is what kind of world do we wanna live in, and what kind and how do we want to spend our time?

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Yes, absolutely.

You know, I from a very early age have been fascinated by time.

So I would be sitting in my Washington DC office on Capitol Hill, and if I finished my job at two, why did I have to sit there till six?

Because you had to put in that FaceTime in Washington DC and if you did an all-nighter, it was like a badge of honor.

And I just never understood the concept of FaceTime when you could be doing so many other beneficial things towards your life.

You could go for a run.

I wasn't married then, didn't have children, but you could spend better family time together.

You could avoid the traffic.

So time is something so interesting in that we're so caught up in.

What it is to, you know, how it equates to productivity when really we should be thinking about productivity and outcome.

And I do think we're at this very profound moment where, you know, we can really rewrite the rules we can completely capitalize off of ai,
have enormous, you know, savings of time, and figure out how to develop the other side of our brain and start dancing and laughing again.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Well, I said I think that let's start back with your, you know, the highlights of a career.

So you grew up in Miami, but then you went to combination of New York and dc.

Spent 18 years on the East Coast and really high pressure, high visibility professions and government and media.

And you know, there is a way in which that world worked and I

grew.

I went to New York and where I started in advertising, it's creative industry is different than I think that what you were doing.

But I still think, you know, it was pretty intense work culture.

I do think that as I wonder as women, if we question that clock more than as men, because I think that there's just a different way in which we look at all the different components of our lives.

We don't compartmentalize as much.

Right?

We try and blend all those things together.

So maybe that was part of it.

'cause I had the same kinds of questions that you had back then.

And then you moved to Silicon Valley.

You've written books about how Silicon Valley works and the mindset of Silicon Valley, but that contrast between the two is really an eye-opening thing for you.

You wanna fill us

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Oh, without a doubt.

You know, I really thought 18 years in Washington DC I'd worked on Capitol Hill, then I. Was appointed to the White House, and then I completely fell into media as a commentator, and I really believe that everybody works in these hierarchies.

And you know, there were like two sandboxes, particularly in the political environment.

You're a Republican, a Democrat, you're for the bill, you're against the bill.

And so there wasn't really middle ground back then, although I was always an iconoclast, no doubt.

But I really believed after 18 years, it wasn't until I came to Silicon Valley.

And I realized that in all my years in DC I learned how to do two things really well.

I learned how to put fear in people because if you put fear in people, you galvanize 'em to contribute to your political campaign, you galvanize 'em to, you know, increase viewership at CNN, where I was a commentator for over 10 years.

And that was how a lot of that business got done.

And then the second thing I became very good at is dividing people.

Into an us versus them, because that's what you're indoctrinated into.

And I really believe everybody works like this.

So it wasn't until we moved to Silicon Valley in 2006 for full disclosure for my husband's job that I realized there were multiple sandboxes.

And multiple ways of getting things done.

But at its core was this very question, how can I help you?

And that's exactly what happened to me.

I was in line at a Starbucks in our local community in Los Altos.

A woman recognized that I was new to town.

We started talking and then she said to me, how can I help you?

Three weeks later, because of that meeting, I was sitting down at Kleiner Perkins, one of the premier venture capital funds, and ended up raising $5 million, not just from that investor, for my very first company.

And then that company sold 18 months later and I was like.

What is it with this culture that makes it so fundamentally unique, almost an anomaly?

And so I really wanted to study the DNA of Silicon Valley.

It had been written about more in a quantifiable.

Standpoint and maybe comparisons with Boston and Route 1 28 or you know, in Raleigh Durham, that area.

But no one had really kind of covered the culture of Silicon Valley and it is the innovation capital of the world due to the culture that, you know, sustains with its unspoken rules.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Well, and I thought that, again, it's a combination, interestingly.

'cause I mean, Silicon Valley, you know, at this point in 2025.

Has conjures up a bunch of different kinds of feelings and things.

Right.

So this is early days

Silicon Valley.

I think that it'd be interesting to see how you feel about some of the things that we questioned about it now.

But I think at the time, the way that you described both the impact that Stanford University had and the founding of Stanford and the real ethos that was built into that was to be collaborative, that was to be cross-functional.

It was to be tech and science forward, which was, you know.

Really a challenge to a lot of the universities at time.

It was founded in the la the late 18 hundreds, right.

And brought that kind of thinking to California as part of the gold rush and part of the boom and all the businesses that were happening there that were challenging a lot of the thinking on the East Coast.

So I thought that was a fascinating part of it.

And the geography itself, right?

That there's this like narrow mountainous area that puts things in the string of.

Towns that go between here and there.

I never really understood the

full valley part of it.

And that it is a flat, not a big hierarchical, it's not built in big, huge high rises.

It's built in, you know, second and third story

buildings.

And so, all of that becomes this confluence that makes people want to work more with each other.

I had the same feeling when I moved to Austin, actually when I moved from LA where everybody was like.

Don't steal my agent and don't steal my idea, and don't steal my whatever to now being in Austin, which was very entrepreneurial and very and very governmental actually,
interestingly, and people wanted to meet with you and wanted to work with you and wanted to collaborate with you and wanted to help you bring your idea forward,

right?

The question was, what do you do and how can I help?

So, I think those cultures make a really big difference in how people think.

But I think there was also, like you talk about the workflow since this was.

More of a conversation around the future of work, right?

There was a way in which they worked that was different.

So partly it was more collaborative, but also was more fluid, right?

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Yeah, without a doubt.

And look, I still feel exactly the same way about Silicon Valley as I did back then.

If I look at, you know, look, you and I travel a lot, we see the world.

It is, I'm not gonna say very easy to get things done, but it is the most seamless that I've seen.

And I think in part, there's not.

Two sandboxes.

It's, there's multiple sandboxes, so if you don't fit into one, you can just kind of jump into the other overall.

But yeah, it's, it is this mindset where it's not about chasing the dollars.

That's not why you're here.

A lot of people are here because they've known what they've wanted to do since they were.

Two years old or they were just born that way.

Right.

So it is this commitment to wanna make the world better.

And I found for the people who feel like they can come from other spheres of influence, and I'm gonna go to Silicon Valley 'cause I'm gonna make a tremendous amount of money.

The industry and the community really, the ecosystem kind of pushes those people out.

And so yeah, I mean you look, there's countless examples of people who are al already multimillionaires or billionaires who continue to wanna contribute to the world in meaningful ways.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Yes.

We'll talk a little more about that.

'cause I think there is this there, there's a success culture that's pretty intense there.

But let's back up and say also, interestingly, juxtaposed against that is an acceptance of trying and

failing or experimenting and learning, or however you wanna describe it, right?

There's a lot more, tolerance, if not encouragement, to go out and try something new.

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Yeah, and I think you hit the nail on the head.

I remember seeing Google for the first time.

I mean, this is back in 2006, and I thought, how crazy.

Why do they only have these, you know, I was so used to tall buildings, particularly from New York and.

Washington DC and you do have two and three story buildings here because if people do fail, they just like jump from the second or third story, they sprain their ankle and Monday morning they, you know, they realize they can restart again.

And so it's not about, we say it's the great experiment rather than the failure.

And you do, it's amazing to me how many great experience experiments I've had.

Now play relevance, whether it was that immediate learning over time or the market just wasn't ready for what it is I was trying to go to market with.

And so I always told people it's not, there's no failed experiences because there's so much learning and there's so many great stories where enormous innovations have come out of things that didn't initially work.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: And with that comes the ability to pivot.

So, you know, if you look at it from the corporate lens, and we'll talk about it in the family lens in a moment, but if you look at it
from the corporate lens, there are so many companies that started in one direction and then realize that's not really where the market was.

And then they pivoted to another direction, or they took this idea, it didn't work, but then they took the kernel of it and built something else, right?

So there was this lot of shifting, moving, reinventing this idea that again, it didn't have to start like and go.

Fully against just one vision.

Which I think is a really key part of when we start to look at the future and we think about what is available to our children, that we don't get so baked into that there's only

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Yeah, for sure.

For sure.

Yeah.

And even within companies, I mean the original iPod, which was a third of Apple's revenue for quite some.

Time that Steve Jobs did not initially support, but it looked like the beginnings of the iPhone, you know, just the basics of it.

So, you know, we get incredibly scrappy and I think by being scrappy, you know, when it comes to creativity, it allows you to try a lot of different things.

In fact, some of the best advice I ever got from any successful entrepreneur out here came from a woman.

And she said to me.

Get it to the market as fast as possible, because particularly as women, we like to, you know, it's almost analysis by paralysis or paralysis by analysis.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: I

wanna make it perfect.

Yeah.

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: really throw it out there as quick as possible.

'cause the market's gonna tell you what to do.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Okay, so then you translate that into then what is it like to raise kids?

Because we also know that, you know, there's lots and lots of stories about what it's like to be in a Palo Alto High School and the intense pressure that parents have on their children to want to be very successful as they grow up.

And you know, there's whether.

There's a whole documentary, right?

Race to

Nowhere that has been written and about these kinds of, and it's not, you know, only in Silicon Valley, but I think a lot of that was kind of, modeled from there, right?

Every AP course, every extracurricular that you could possibly do, every whatever.

Somebody actually even told my son, my oldest son, when he was in high school and thinking about going to college, like how you go to prepare and they're like, write a book and.

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Yeah.

Right.

Or build out a company by the time you're 15 or Yes.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Right.

But even then, like a company I can almost understand in a book, I'm like, are you fucking kidding me?

Sorry.

Language.

But the point was that there was like all this pressure to not just be one version.

Like you couldn't just be a nerd or an athlete or a creative or a philanthropist or, you know, whatever the idea was that you had to be all of these things so that you'd be able to get into Stanford, right?

Or be able to get into whatever the the schools are that parents wanted their kids to be a part of.

So how do you balance this?

Mindset in Silicon Valley of experimenting and pivoting and collaboration and all these things with this really intense how I raise my

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: You know the, it's such a critical question, right?

To today's landscape.

And let me just admit, I was that parent, but not from Silicon Valley, more East coast, you know, like my mom's entire side of the family.

Went to Harvard, so there was so much pressure to perform.

Although my mother never put that kind of pressure on me, but I have a feeling it's because she had moved to Florida and if we'd still been in New York, maybe that pressure would've been there.

So, you know, in some respects I saw it even more so in Washington DC and New York and in those environments.

And that was when.

Those degrees mattered.

I know for me, there's certain things that I did not get in Washington DC because I didn't have the right educational pedigree.

And I, my very first kind of interview process when I moved to Silicon Valley in 2006 I was told by Google after seven.

Interviews that my education was not on their list, and I went to Florida State undergrad for two years, then spent the third year in London and then put myself through Georgetown.

I went to Florida State.

It's a great school, but we couldn't afford for me to go to any of the schools that I had gotten into in the Northeast.

I ended up paying for my own undergrad and graduate school, and so, you know that.

Has really resonated it.

It didn't stop me from achieving what I wanted to achieve, but to me, placing value in judgment just on where someone got into school or not, was absurd.

Particularly for that position that I was interviewing at Google, they could have very much benefited, you know, my background because it was in the government relations space.

So, you know, I was that parent.

We put our kids through very rigorous private schools.

80% of the private school they were in was of Asian descent, so there was just enormous pressure to perform, you know, and some of my kids' friends were fearful to come home with a b plus.

And so I just had to take a hard look at some point.

I started to transform and go, wait a minute, these guys gotta be kids.

'cause it wasn't just academic pressure, Nancy.

There's a lot of athletic pressure.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: That's what I'm saying.

Athletic pressure,

creative pressure, Phil, philanthropic or

altruistic

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: yeah, absolutely.

You know, we have a lot of former Olympic athletes here.

You know, it's a great place to train and they have kids.

So I've seen remarkable things on the tennis court of the fathers and mothers who put pressure on their kids as well.

So, you know, at some point just, it was like an, I don't know if you wanna call it an aha moment or what it is, but it was just like, happiness.

What does that mean?

What does that mean for me, for my children, for our family at large?

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: So to catch everybody up, you've

got three children, you've got twin boys, and you've got a daughter, and your boys are 21 now, 20.

Oh, 20.

Okay.

So, college age, although they may took different paths around what they wanted to go do, and then your daughter is just in the process of applying those schools and thinking about what she wants to go to next year, where she wants to be.

Right.

So you're in that interesting crossroads where everyone's made these interesting and fascinating decisions inside The Crucible.

That is you know, again, a very successful.

Area of town and a very expensive part of the world to live in, by the way.

Right.

We know that Silicon Valley requires that you have a certain lifestyle or certain income to be able to have a really, you know, I think a great lifestyle.

So I think the interesting thing is you start to switch.

Then that light came on and said it about happiness.

I think I did the same thing, like there was, you know, I'm definitely was the AP mom.

I wanted my kids to have really, to achieve.

Well, and we moved to Austin so they could be part of a really great school district just outside of Austin that was much more competitive and they got experience with all these kinds of things.

And then like you say, I think there was a moment where you woke up and thought, am I pushing them too hard?

And for what?

And I think you had a really interesting point just now when you said, when that education really mattered, because the question is what

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Yeah, absolutely.

And I think, I wanna say, you know, certainly by having three kids going through COVID at a private school where they were, it was like they were in person March, 2020, and then the next week they weren't.

And the exact same amount of schooling.

Still happen at home, at online.

So I think it was, you know, even more dangerous in a lot of respects to have kids sitting in the room for eight hours of lessons every day and then have to do their homework and projects after that.

But I remember distinctively one day, my son Drake was on a very competitive.

Tennis path about to play at a national level and he was sitting in the backseat 'cause he wasn't old enough to be in the front seat.

And I just heard, you know, continuously on the way to a tournament that he was going to.

And I turned to my husband after and I said, this kid is feeling too much pressure.

My husband's response at the time was, kids don't feel pressure and this kid.

Did feel pressure.

Maybe other kids wouldn't feel the intensity, but this kid did.

On top of that, Nancy, as you know, he was working as an actor, so he had athletic pressure, he had Hollywood pressure, and he had athletic pressure where coaches were telling my husband, this kid has an opportunity.

He's got what it takes to go pro.

And it's not just about the talent.

There's a lot of other things that come with it.

And.

We actually got called in by their school at one point.

He was in fifth grade and they said, something's gotta give, something's gotta give.

'cause he had a meltdown during one of his math tests.

And so, you know, it wasn't at that moment that we made dramatic changes.

We always checked in and asked him, do you wanna still play tennis?

Do you still wanna do acting?

But I think for him, he was always trying to appease us and so he was my kid that I focused on the most.

The other one, his twin brother Dominic.

He is that kid who was born a certain way, and he did.

We knew who he was going to be from a very young age.

And that is who he has turned out to be.

And I studied these great innovators.

They're incredibly challenging kids to, to raise.

He beats to his own drum.

He tells us where, when, how, and why.

And I.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Already started two companies, right?

He's 20 years old And he is already started two.

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: because the first company is now sold, the second company is doing incredibly well.

I mean, he just, he knows what he's doing and he figures these things out.

But he works 24 7 literally.

And so, you know, it, that type of child, I'm not sure you can parent, you can, you know, do the best you can, but at some point they just know themselves so well.

They're so authentic that, you know, it's, you can tell 'em it's your way or the highway and they'll take the highway, you know, so.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Well see now you have, because you have two, two boys, so one that did go to school, go to college, and now is gonna be leaving earlier before he finishes his degree so he can focus on the work that he's already been doing.

And then the other son decided not to go to college at all, although he had amazing opportunities.

In an east coast school and with a military academy.

And instead he is now

in Hollywood full-time pursuing his acting career.

And he has started

during COVID, right?

They gave

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Yeah.

But let me just say, he was planning on taking a gap year and as you know, his best friend was supposed to be on that gap year with him.

So he Drake had traveled down to South America in Antarctica.

And just had this overwhelming feeling that his best friend was not doing okay.

So he decided to come back before he was planning on leaving for Africa.

'cause he had a commitment on volunteering there.

He came home, I always get a little emotional.

February 12th they made plans to get together that weekend.

And you know, a couple days later Marco was found.

Dead in his dorm room in Berkeley.

So that really changed the trajectory for Drake.

He was very much planning on going to college and you know, and unfortunately the mother died six months later, so it was just.

Just a really traumatic year with no guidebook on how to handle grief or direct him.

So he did a lot of things in a very short period of time, including going on Mr.

Beast, you know, competitive show.

And then he realized that he needed to, figure out the best approach to face the facts that this person will no longer be in, in his life.

So he went back to the Amazon and just really sat with it for a while.

And it was at that point he decided, you know, it was not gonna be the way he's gonna learn.

And he was going to go to LA and live life for himself and for Marco, and do the thing that made him happy, which was acting.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: And how did you feel as you were watching him go?

Not obviously the grief process was really hard and you guys were still all navigating that as a family.

You're close to Marco's family.

There's a lot to process in that and I think many people on this podcast can probably relate to somebody that they know in their lives that has been going, gone through something either close to this or as dramatic and as tragic as this.

So I have a lot of empathy and heart.

For for Marco's family and for all of you all, as you guys were navigating this, but as you're watching then Drake turn down some
of these big, historically relevant opportunities and instead deciding that he wanted to bet on himself and really go through this.

In

Were you all

fully on board?

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: My husband at the time, not at the end of the day, it's about being happy.

And of course my head is five to 10 years out.

I think universities are going to have enormous challenges with relevance.

and I look at most of these degrees and think, you know, AI is gonna take those over.

I didn't care.

I just wanted my child happy.

But what's interesting is the RIF that it puts not only within your own marriage, but your extended family.

So even my mother, you know, gave me a lot of, you know, crap for not pushing Drake towards.

At the Naval Academy or Harvard or I just wanted him happy.

That was it.

That's all I cared about.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Which I think, again, this is why I think being a futurist and a mom simultaneously is such an

extraordinary thing, right?

You did live five to 10 years out.

It was easier to make some of those decisions.

I had some of those moments, not quite as dramatic but with my children where I was like, why am I pushing so hard when I think that at the end of the day, this doesn't really matter?

Or there's another way of looking at this because we can see around the corner.

So let's transition now to the most recent book you've written, which is called Employment is Dead, which is a very provocative title.

Doesn't mean work is dead.

It means employment as we both see it and know it is dead.

You know, I've had lots and lots of conversations around this.

So how do you launch into this conversation with someone who doesn't have any real sense?

Like do we start with how the technological landscape is changing everything and opening up completely new opportunities?

You know, for people who haven't spent a lot of time, you and I throw out AI very.

Comfortably and very casually.

It's a much a part of how we think.

But I think there are a lot of people who are still trying to wrap their arms around it.

A lot of families that I have met that are thinking they still, they're proud that their children aren't using AI 'cause they

don't want their children to cheat.

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: I'll start by saying we've never seen a transformation that is now we're just at the baby step, the very bottom.

Yeah, we've never been challenged where

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: very early days.

Yep.

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: can go away.

You know, as you know, I think even much further out, robots, robotics and human noise are progressing far faster than we anticipated.

I get the question a lot, you know, what does it mean?

Employment instead?

It's just the structure of work that we've been in over the last 150 years is gonna go away and it should.

You know, we've been stuck with Taylorism where you know, people are just cogs on the wheel, and it was all about mental management.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Can you back up for a second and really describe Taylorism?

Because I was listening to one of your other podcasts and you brought that up and I had never really thought of it that way, and I went and I was Googling Taylorism last night.

But can you give

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Yep.

Absolutely.

Who was an engineer?

It really was the kind of the nexus for the assembly align to evolve and it, the thinking was.

That, you know, people are just cogs on a wheel.

They don't have emotions, they don't have feelings, they just have a function and it layered in middle management, right?

I mean, we were making this transformation from.

Farming into the industrial age the assembly line plus, but we never really got past the part of control, you know, controlling individuals.

Putting fear in people.

You know, fear is just a horrible thing when there's not psychological safety.

You know, what people can and can achieve for the organization and for themselves overall.

And no one really has the right to determine.

You know, to be able to reach our full authentic capacity.

So Taylorism was the style of management that we sort of got stuck in and didn't even know how to get past.

And it dates back to 1918.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: All about efficiency, right?

Efficiency and productivity.

And so now we're in this world where we're really, you know, focused on innovation and creativity and collaboration and all these things that
we know that we need, and hopefully, you know, integrity and ethics as we build a future that is gonna have such a huge impact on all of us.

And so bringing, I, I talk a lot about this unite.

This is where our work so unites, right?

If you bring an industrial era way of thinking into this exponential future, it creates tremendous pain, but also I think tremendous danger.

It's just an awful way of looking at things, and we're seeing that right now in this whole tug of war around what current work should look like.

Nevermind the future of work, right?

Again, there's another headline in the Wall Street Journal this morning about the fact that

all the bosses who are, you know, demanding return to work and all the employees are going I don't think so.

So even that, the control that people

thought they had over their workforce is,

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: it's just, first of all, COVID proved that we didn't need to be in the office, but you look at like, nobody should have traffic.

I just was in a few different cities this past week.

You know, all of them are experiencing traffic.

We can be so much smarter.

Right.

Overall we don't all need to be in the office at the same time.

We don't need to be commuting at the same time.

All of this is so easily solvable.

So you go to a place like London, right?

You can't drive more than 30 kilometers, I think within Central London.

And there's a real push to get everybody to take.

Public transportation overall, it's very easy just to put these rules in place and, you know, really figure out.

And I get, there's a lot of economics, right?

If there's a lot of small businesses built around commercial space, you know, you don't want all those small businesses to go away and you wanna support them as best you can, but come on.

You know, we're really good at you know, screwing things up and screwing up the planet and the process due to the way that we've continued to do things the last 150 years.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Yeah, because we're really wed to those structures and to those practices in that way of approaching things.

So now we're in this world, right, where technology's gonna come and blow everything up.

In the beginning of your book, you've got a really great glossary that takes people through this.

You know, collection this whole basket full of things.

It's not just ai, right?

It's this understanding of decentralized systems.

It's thinking about blockchain, it's thinking about robotics.

To your point, there's a, I mean, we've got smart contracts.

There's a whole bunch of things that are changing.

The way that we coordinate action together and to create value together is the way that I describe what that looks like, right?

Which then

opens up a completely different way in which we

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: And you know, really this is about I mean, I'm trying to kill.

Management.

'cause I think management gets in the way of innovation and really can thwart how people feel about themselves and not be able to give their best work.

I mean, psychological safety.

I wrote a book on risk taking and you know, that component of just feeling safe to take chances if it's not there, if it's absent you know, companies will continue to have.

Innovations come out of r and d, but really at this point, every person in every corner of the company should be able to bring forth new ideas in a safe and trusted environment.

So, you know, as you know, I, my really how I spent my career over the last.

Since 2013 is just looking at innovation process and how do you provide that psychological safety and that process so that people can, you know, explore
what's on their minds because that's really where these incremental to the big moonshot innovations have an opportunity to surface and really bring value.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: that's where the humanistic side and the, you know, corporate success side really blend.

I mean, those two things, they're not like either or.

They're a hundred percent.

I would say the same thing about sustainability and corporate success, right?

Those two things need to be woven more closely together.

So let's define work, because I think that, you know, to your point in other conversations that you and I have had, my work becomes this like very heavy word and I redefined it, You define it more broadly.

So

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: In a phase right now.

We're just in this fusion between work and life, you know, work o Obviously you need to have sustainability to be able to support yourself, support your.

Your families, but this is where I think our passion really comes into play.

We are going to need an entirely new economic model, and you and I have lots of conversations around this.

So people lose their jobs right now.

Right.

And the government, certainly everything Elon Musk was doing really lended itself for other organizations quite large.

To not only say we're gonna look at our existing workforce and figure out where we can make cuts, where AI can kind of come in, but at the same time.

You know, big firms like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey have said 60% of our white collar entry level jobs are now have gone away because that can be replaced by ai.

So the question is, how do we sustain ourselves right when this changing landscape.

To better answer your question is really we're going from this employment model to this hyper gig work where you can be an AI engineer and a plumber and bake cookies and drive for Uber and have this portfolio career.

Kind of core, what you've been trained into and bring in a lot of passions along the way.

But things are going to shift dramatically and we do need government support to figure out, you know, even from my political background, you know, we are gonna need some sort of basic income.

And so we've gotta figure out what that.

Going to look like and how that's gonna be paid for.

And I do think what President Trump is doing with the terrorists is interesting with regards how it can maybe not fully eliminate taxes, but
reduce them and really start to explore how we are going to move forward in this transformation that is gonna happen whether we like it or not.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Yeah, I think tariffs

and tax is a whole nother conversation.

It'd be really interesting to go and to dive into that one.

So I will put that one aside for the moment and the few moments that we have left.

Yeah, because I think there's a lot of really interesting things.

'cause even when we talk about wanting to bring manufacturing back to the us, the reality is most of that manufacturer will be automated.

It'll be done in dark factories, it'll be done with robots.

And you know, it's not gonna necessarily go create a whole bunch of new jobs for people.

I think it brings IP back to the us, which I think is really important, right?

Our intellectual property and an understanding of how things are manufactured.

But I don't know that it's necessarily gonna create all these jobs.

And so I think it goes back to what you're saying around how would we create some sort of economic support.

So I think to back up for a second, right?

Work is not just about having employment because somebody pays you to go do something, right?

Work is, energy that's expressed to be able to go create value in some way that's important to you.

Sometimes it gets paid.

Sometimes you do it just because you wanna go create something, right?

I created a whole bunch of TEDx events and did that

without getting paid, but I got a bunch of different kind of cultural currency and social currency for having done that.

You know, taking care of our parents, taking care of our family, taking care of the planet, taking care of our community.

That's all kinds of work.

Inventing and doing new things and tinkering in our garage is work that's valuable.

So I do think that there will never, ever be a shortage of things that need to go get done on the planet.

The question is, do we need to go have what?

There was a whole essay that a friend of mine wrote this past week.

Tim Labret in the House of Beautiful Business around, you know, the need for bullshit jobs taking David Grabbers.

Com phrasing of what a bullshit job is, which is an empty job, but just gives you a sense of someplace to go and something to go do and you get paid something to go do it.

Right.

Do we need that in order to feel fulfilled in the world that we're heading into?

And I would say no.

I think that there's a zillion ways in which we can feel as that we will be purposeful as we move ahead.

The question is how do we balance, to your point, the economic side of this in some way that doesn't burn you out with a portfolio career?

Right.

It enriches you.

I think you use the, you have three Ps and I'll add a fourth one.

Right?

You talk about passion, play and profit, and I'll add purpose in there, right?

There's something that's driving you intentionally to wanna go do that.

So there's a way in which we can think

about how work would look different.

I think that as you have been taking this book out now, you wrote this book almost a year ago or eight months ago.

Yeah.

So in the conversations that you've had with people since, what is these, the greatest fear around what it is that you're proposing

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Oh, I don't know.

I don't know if there's any relief

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: Or the greatest relief

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: there's a lot of fear of the unknown, right?

And I think a lot of questions I get are, you know, why isn't this being adopted faster?

And I think the fear is if you adopt it faster, you position yourself to be unemployed out of a job.

And so, you know.

I think at this stage there, there's so many interesting possibilities to think about.

I mean, I like to think about, you know, do we really even need to travel beyond a 15 mile or 10 mile radius within our own homes?

You know, can we, our kids go to neighborhood schools, can we be able to.

Work you know, locally and then be able to be better community members.

Well, we have community farming.

Are we gonna grow our own food?

We need soil replenishment for sure, but there's lots of possibility right now, and I think that's where, you know, it's super fun for
you and I to think about and go out there with all of our speaking engagements and thought leadership and be able to talk about this.

But the reality is for individuals, Nancy.

People have to really start to develop their other side of the brain too.

You know, we've been wanting and complaining that we want this European lifestyle for so long, or we work less.

We enjoy more.

We now are going to have the opportunity to do that.

The question is.

Do we all know how to enjoy more and, you know, do we know how to connect with our families or our communities?

You know, you've taken a walk down my neighborhood and, you know, it's as friendly as Silicon Valley is, you know, you get these pockets of people that just work work and just, we've just gotta take a breath a bit more.

Allow the folks who are.

Leading in ai, let them go work 24 7.

Figure this all out with us involved along the way in the ethics and and, you know, challenging, just making sure that AI is happening in a way that's safe and trusted as well.

But, you know, we really owe it to ourselves to live life more and not just to exist.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: 100%.

And I think some of the pushback that we have around shortening the work week, like I'm a big proponent of having a shorter work week for this while we still have traditional employment, right?

That it should be set to a different kind of clock, no longer than industrial clock.

And the pushback has been, well, you know, the Europe is not as productive.

They've got this shorter work week, or they've got, you know, more.

Time off and summer.

But look, they're not as productive as we are.

They're not ahead in the AI race the way we are.

They're not, you know, as hungry as we are.

So it's really interesting to see the conversations around business leadership and big, huge consultancies that I've been talking to that
have had that, that have literally given me the excuse or the reasoning why we aren't moving into more humane work modes and approaches.

Because it somehow goes back to the taylorism.

You know, piece, and I think this race right now, to get to artificial general intelligence and to have it be in a privately held model
in the sense that one company owns it as opposed to a country like Switzerland and feels as though, then somehow they're gonna win.

So I think that we are in this moment where so much is breaking apart, and yet we're still bringing a lot of old structures and patterning to it.

That's our work becomes really important and that's why these conversations become really important.

So I have to let you go in a few minutes.

So just as we're signing off as a, you know, global futurist, as a person who's studied a lot, who's really observant about how systems work and where
things are going, and as a mom of three amazing children, what would your advice be or your guidance be to parents who are very afraid of all this change

and don't

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: a breath.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: How best to support their kids

in a world in which employment may be dead?

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Recognize, depending on how many children you have, they're all individuals.

There's no one size fits approach.

There are certainly reasons for kids to go to college other than the academic piece.

You have to do what's best for each child.

But I would definitely weigh in, you know, whether it's a $15,000.

A piece of education of higher ed or $90,000 a year you know, what is the value and the ultimate benefit.

Of having your child in a particular place, everybody's different.

I did what was best for my boys and my daughter will absolutely go to a four year university, hopefully play soccer as well.

Do the things she loves and give her a chance to have that level of independence.

So really just.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: But if she has fired her job at this point, Deborah, having followed and been so, she has been so seminal to this work in which the time that you
wrote the book and delivered the book and have been talking about this book, I'm so curious what Dane's view is on the future of work and the kind of job that she would wanna have.

And I know that you have so little time to answer that question, but,

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: She's a

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: into a young woman's view of the world,

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: to do no matter what, and I think the benefit of being in a university, setting away from her family, having this.

Social experiences will be so, so rewarding for her.

And so, no, she has, she does one ear out the other, you know?

Yeah.

I don't even try.

She's so independent.

Yes.

Yes.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: It's so funny, right?

This is so,

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Not at all.

Yeah.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: so.

Even if you are a future mom, it doesn't mean your kids ever listen to you when you talk about the future.

Debra, thank you so, so much for spending time with us today and introducing the world more or this world to your work.

Right?

It's interesting, again, after I give a

keynote talk, and I'm sure the same way with you, people always come up and talk to me, but often come and talk to me the role of parent.

So we can be talking to the professionals anywhere in the world and government leaders, but at the end of the day, the thing that they most worry about are their children.

And the thing that they're most hopefully guiding as

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Absolutely.

Such a pleasure to be with you, my friend.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: a little bit more of that together for them as they hopefully take a deep

deborah-perry-piscion_1_09-22-2025_080949: Thank you.

You too.

nancy-giordano-_1_09-22-2025_080949: and more and more to come.

So, keep rocking.

Thanks.