Benjamin Zweig talks with Jason Barnard about decoding the future of work.
Benjamin Zweig, an economist and the CEO of Revelio Labs, talks with Jason Barnard about the future of work, particularly in light of AI and remote work trends. Benjamin highlights how remote work has proven beneficial for business growth, employee satisfaction, and global hiring opportunities.
Jason Barnard and Benjamin Zweig discuss remote work's impact on productivity and organizational dynamics. They talk about the challenges of managing remote teams versus in-office teams and the evolving role of AI in job execution and coordination.
The conversation offers valuable insights for entrepreneurs navigating the future of work in an increasingly remote and AI-driven world.
#FutureOfWork #RemoteWork #WorkforceIntelligence #AIandEmployment
What you’ll learn from Benjamin Zweig
00:00 Benjamin Zweig and Jason Barnard
01:10 What Did Jason Barnard Emphasize on Benjamin Zweig’s Brand SERP?
01:37 How Did Jason Barnard Find Benjamin Zweig’s Knowledge Panel Even When Google Doesn’t Show it?
01:53 What is a Knowledge Panel According to Jason Barnard?
02:17 Why Doesn’t Benjamin Zweig’s Knowledge Panel Appear When Someone Searches His Name on Google?
04:13 Why Have COVID and AI Made the Future of Work Less Predictable?
04:28 Where Did Predictions About the Future of Work Typically Focus in the Past?
04:46 What Agency Makes Predictions About Job Growth by Occupation?
04:54 Why Are Predictions Made by the Bureau of Labor Statistics About Job Growth Often Inaccurate?
06:26 Why Didn’t Experts Predict the Shift to Remote Work Caused by COVID?
06:36 What Made COVID the First Major Labor Market Shock?
07:09 Why Has Remote Work Had a Good Impact on the Growth of Companies?
07:26 What Impact Has Remote Work Had on the Growth of Companies?
07:58 What Are the Two Main Reasons Remote Work Can Be Productive for Companies?
08:45 Why Do Some Bosses Believe Employees Should Return to the Office?
10:09 Why Do Some Managers Use the Return-To-Office Mandate as a Workforce Reduction Technique?
10:32 Why is Managing Employees Becoming More Difficult Over Time?
11:15 What Are the Tasks Involved in Managing Knowledge Work?
11:35 Why Has Managing Knowledge Work Become More Challenging?
11:54 What Are AI and Most Technologies Particularly Good At?
12:08 What Does a Job Involve Besides Performing Tasks?
12:35 Why is the Coordination Part of Jobs Expanding as Task Execution Shrinks?
12:54 Why Do We Still Need Human Organizers While AI is Handling Task Execution?
15:50 What Can Companies Do to Improve Workforce Engagement and Coordination in a Remote Work Environment?
16:11 What Makes External Data Easier to Analyze Compared to Internal Data?
17:15 How Can Messaging Data Help Organize Jobs?
19:37 What is the Foundation of Good Organizational Work?
20:14 Why Might It Be Challenging to Rely on ChatGPT for Orchestrating and Organizing a Company?
This episode was recorded live on video April 15th 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qqUsyq606w
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/latest/Benjamin Zweig
Transcript from Benjamin Zweig with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Decoding the Future of Work
[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands at test of time and becomes our legacy?
[00:00:26] Narrator: A legacy we're proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody, and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. And today I'm here with a quick hello and we're good to go. Welcome to the show Ben Zweig.
[00:00:42] Benjamin Zweig: Thank you. It was quite an intro.
[00:00:46] Jason Barnard: I love singing. It's one of my favorite things. I'm an entrepreneur who's a singer and you are an entrepreneur who's an economist.
[00:00:53] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah, the close cousins.
[00:00:56] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Wonderful. Delightful. So welcome. We're gonna be talking about decoding the future of work. I mean, I think my first question is gonna be, what is the future of work? Now that we have AI, we had covid, we have remote working. It's gonna be a really, really interesting topic. But before that, we're gonna look at your Brand SERP. That's what we always do. And you share your name with this guy, a very famous drummer who's got a huge Knowledge Panel with his photo in there, results about him. And when you share your name with somebody famous, getting the results to represent you is almost impossible.
[00:01:29] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah.
[00:01:29] Jason Barnard: So here, you have an impossible task to dominate the drummer.
[00:01:34] Benjamin Zweig: Wow. I, I did not know that.
[00:01:36] Jason Barnard: Oh, right. Okay.
[00:01:37] Benjamin Zweig: Of luck.
[00:01:37] Jason Barnard: But look at this. When you work a Kalicube like I do, and you created a super machine, 3 billion data points, I can find your Knowledge Panel even if Google doesn't show it.
[00:01:49] Jason Barnard: And here it is.
[00:01:51] Benjamin Zweig: Okay.
[00:01:52] Jason Barnard: So you actually have a Knowledge Panel. A Knowledge Panel is Google's understanding of the facts about you. It's a summary about you that it shows its users, so they don't need to visit multiple sites to find all the information. So the description, and in our drummer's case, the description from photos, different channels, in his age, for example, it would have potentially his partner. In your case businesses, you found it. For him, it would be groups he plays in. So it's the factual summary of the person that Google thinks you're looking for, which is why yours doesn't pop. It doesn't appear because Google thinks it's more probable a persons searching for the famous drummer.
[00:02:30] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah. That that, that's a good life ambition to be the most famous Ben Zweig. So you know, Ben Zweig the drummer, I'm coming for you.
[00:02:37] Jason Barnard: Yeah. How many Ben Zweigs are in the world?
[00:02:40] Benjamin Zweig: You know, I, I, I know one other personally.
[00:02:45] Jason Barnard: You have a club.
[00:02:46] Benjamin Zweig: You know. What?
[00:02:48] Jason Barnard: You have a club.
[00:02:49] Benjamin Zweig: Yeah, yeah, I guess so. So, I mean, I, I, I actually had never met him, but he was, my wife was friends with him when they were little.
[00:03:00] Jason Barnard: Oh really?
[00:03:01] Benjamin Zweig: And, and they, and she thought, oh wow, that's so funny. Like, I, you know, was kindergarten friends with the kid named Ben Zweig. So I don't like I'd seen him around. But other than that, I, I think, I think I'd googled that there's like a photographer named as I, I don't know. So maybe, my guess is how many in the world, I would say not more than like six to eight.
[00:03:22] Jason Barnard: Right. Okay. so your competition is all, is very low. The ambiguity is a huge problem with this guy here behind us. Scott Duffy. He shares his name to 10,000 other people.
[00:03:31] Benjamin Zweig: Right.
[00:03:32] Jason Barnard: And dominating like this was a huge challenge for us, but we managed to do it. I'm sharing my name with about 3,000 people.
[00:03:38] Benjamin Zweig: Oh wow. That's pretty high.
[00:03:40] Jason Barnard: But if you search my name, Jason Barnard, I dominate. You wouldn't imagine the other ones exist.
[00:03:44] Benjamin Zweig: Nice.
[00:03:44] Jason Barnard: I'd feel sorry for them because I worked so hard on it and I'm sorry. All the Jason Barnards out there. There's a podcast in the UK. I'm very sorry. Anyway, onto the topic which is the future of work.
[00:03:57] Jason Barnard: The future of work from my perspective, has been in the past, pretty predictable. But Covid and AI have just thrown the whole thing out the window. Is that fair?
[00:04:10] Benjamin Zweig: What a good question. So has it been predictable in the past? I think I would say, I think I would, I would say no. I mean, there are, there are some cases where, I mean, yeah, I guess, let me, let me back up and, and think, you know, what are we really predicting when we're predicting the future of work?
[00:04:32] Benjamin Zweig: Very often in the past, it seemed like what we were predicting would be employment. Just employment by occupation, by industry, by by sector. And there there's a long history of us kind of getting it wrong. So, you know, the simplest, the simplest case is that you know, the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes predictions on the growth rates by occupation, and that's you know, as close to meaningless as possible. The, the correlation between the actual employment metrics is like zero. So, you know, and, and that's on like a three to five year timeline. So in the kind of medium term employment predictions are very poor. Then there are some kind of high profile predictions. Like, you know, when the ATM came out, everyone predicted that would be the end of bank tellers and the employment of bank tellers actually increased.
[00:05:23] Benjamin Zweig: There, there's this very famous paper written in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, which, which tried to predict the very long term. So he was trying to predict what would happen by 2030, so in a hundred years from when he wrote in 1930. And basically that, you know, he wrote that, you know, we're gonna see economic growth 2% a year, which we've actually exceeded.
