If you could choose three other industries to work in, what would they be and why?

I think the most exciting area to be involved in right now is emerging technologies, which encompass many industries. Of course, it takes a lot of time and research before one can be sure a new venture will be fruitful, and most importantly, interesting. Even if it’s not successful, at least you’ll have learned something from a field you like. 

Regarding the industries I’m involved in right now, I really knew very little about each of them before I got started. My strength really lies in being able to draw on my generalist background and apply principles from other industries, as well as solutions I’ve implemented in the past. When you get brought up and trained within a specific industry, it’s very difficult to look at a problem differently than you have done for the past ten or twenty years. 

If I had to choose three other businesses to get involved in, I might be tempted to look at sports. I love football and I’m a die-hard Pittsburgh Steelers fan, so it might have been interesting to explore that avenue. Fields such as injury prevention or player performance are heavily based on statistical analysis, which is what I trained in. They involve developing models to assess and predict player performance, injury risk and potential improvements. They say don’t mix business and pleasure, but I imagine it’s a pretty exciting area to work in.

Another area I might look into one day is artificial intelligence. One of my all-time favorite books is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. He talks about statistics, my background, and says that 90% of everything we do is really “thinking fast”. The human mind is essentially doing constant correlation analysis, i.e. statistics; if I do X, Y will happen. These kinds of revelations have had a big impact on artificial intelligence, which quite frankly is going to have a huge impact on the evolution of our society. 

Many jobs you might think are highly professional really just involve thinking fast. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said that we won’t have soldiers, sailors or pilots within five to ten years. Some new fifth-generation aircraft are manned, and some are flown using AI, which can do a better job than pilots for example when they need to withstand high levels of G-force. To put it simply, many of the fundamental jobs we have today are bound to change, and being involved in that transformation would be an incredibly stimulating experience.

Finally, there are a lot of very interesting innovations happening in the food industry. It’s no secret that the population is growing day by day—we’re almost at eight billion—and our capacity to supply everyone with enough good quality food is going to get very complicated. There are some fantastic developments from laboratories in California who are investigating cultured meat, as well as more efficient and sustainable ways to grow crops and vegetables that require less water and less space. Whether you’re for or against the idea of lab-grown meat, I think it’s an area we really need to think seriously about with regard to the survival of future generations.