by G. Sax, Head of Communications, RESO
We caught up with Derek Taylor, Vice President of Consulting at T3 Sixty, to talk through the art of teaching vs. doing, a near-future society with AI humming at its core and vintage Japanese guitars. Enjoy!
Q1: It is evident by your work that you are an impassioned real estate technologist and a tech solution creator, not a talker. How do you leverage that desire to tinker with tech in a hands-on way with the more cerebral art of consulting and teaching others to fend for themselves?
Derek: I think the sad secret is that I have to tinker in order to keep myself sane, so I will continue to do that, even if it takes me down bizarre roads like the trend to make AI “talking baby podcasts.” I made one of Stefan Swanepoel, the Founder and Executive Chairman of T3 Sixty.
RESO: We need to see that!
Derek: I’m actually working on a big AI empowerment project that has been well-received internally at T3 Sixty. Most of what I’m doing is technical. I do some strategy as well, but it’s still pretty technical.
We try to be multifaceted in our approach to whatever the client needs, and we make a point to assign multiple consultants. My roots are in brokerage, so I tend to help that sector to build tech stacks that agents will receive well and use.
Developers can sometimes have a reputation of building a nail and hoping that someone wants to hit it with a hammer. You have this division in real estate where technologists want to build something that they feel the industry will use, and the industry is trying to find that thing that moves the needle.
I’ve spent my time in those trenches, and I don’t want to see others waste their time on that sort of thing. There is a happier middle ground where the developer does the research and finds what will actually move the needle. That is where I can help to avoid wasted time and costly mistakes.
Q2: You are an early adopter of AI and a fan of implementing it in your work, yet you are quick to enjoy a friendly conversation and to be social in general. Should the ultimate goal of AI be to let the robots do all the dirty work and repetitive tasks while humans enjoy leisure activities? Is such a dream possible, or will we as a society dig even deeper into productivity? What is the threshold for “enough,” or does such a thing even exist?
Derek: That’s an existential question if ever I heard one! What’s interesting is that I’m actually writing a book around that thought. We’ve done all this work as humans to build our knowledge base and push this forward through generations to the point that we’re overwhelmed with knowledge and data.
I know what AI can handle today and what it will be able to handle in the near future, so I believe that the best use of AI for us is to use all this knowledge and data to allow us to be the social creatures that we are, so we can talk to each other in a civilized manner.
That’s something that’s broken in our society. It’s not polite to talk about religion and politics in mixed company. We’ve lost track of why it should be the opposite – why we should discuss and learn from our differences rather than fight over them. When AI can gather, digest and save information for us, it will theoretically allow us to become the species that we are genetically, which is a social creature.
Q3: You collect vintage Japanese guitars. What makes them special to you? In the world of guitar collecting, which is a fairly common activity if I’m to believe podcast backgrounds, this seems to be a niche within a niche.
Derek: Number one, I’m cheap. But I also like high-quality things. Call it champagne tastes on a beer budget.
Japanese guitars are just less expensive than $75,000 for an original 1954 Fender Telecaster. Yet they can be rare, extremely well made and hard to find. And they create what is perceived by many as a better sound.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fender and Gibson started to produce things that were suffering in quality, while Japan was already producing reproductions that were every bit as good as earlier models. They’re hard to find in good condition but are really top-notch, underrated instruments. So they’ve become collector items.
When Fender and Gibson started to flood the market with instruments that were of lower quality and produced on an assembly line, Japanese craftsmen latched on to the trend and began producing better replicas than the originals. There were many different brands – like Ibanez, Greco, Burny and Tokai – and they were shipped everywhere.
Two specific factories produced the bulk of these quality replicas. In the early 1980s, Fender realized that they had lost all of their domestic, talented craftsmen and decided to use one of these factories to save their brand. They instantly started releasing an exceptional product.
Actually, most of these guitars were made for export. And, of course, these first-rate knock-offs caused some lawsuits. Gibson won a lawsuit against Ibanez, forcing them to change their guitar shape and headstock symbols, but that didn’t change the quality.
I’m starting to sound like my grandfather when I say that I don’t think we make things as well as we used to. But there are three things we do better today: beer, craft guitars and AI.
Three Questions is a lighthearted interview series that features real estate industry professionals, their businesses and how they interact with real estate standards.
