RISING ICON #82: Will Preble
photo credit: https://www.instagram.com/_asapabby/
What name do you prefer to be called?
Will
What are your pronouns?
He and him
Where did you grow up?
Roseville, Minnesota.
What city are you currently based in?
Currently based in Scottsdale, Arizona.
How do you typically introduce yourself to new people?
Typically, I introduce myself as an emerging tech entrepreneur.
What’s one thing you wish more people knew about you?
I wish I could share the visions that I have in my head with people without using words. It's hard sometimes to communicate the things that I'm holding in consciousness, and I feel at times limited in what I can actually share. So I guess the answer would be I wish there was an easier way for people to see what's in my head before they become real.
Who do you help?
I help brands and leaders who want to use AI & Emerging Tech to realize the potential of their vision
What are you building now?
I'm building Ascendance. We are a growth & innovation studio that helps brands and leaders unlock their potential through AI and emerging tech.
What were you building ten years ago today?
Ten years ago today I would have been 18, I was not exactly building anything at the time. I guess I was building an awareness and understanding of the world through trial and error, through a little bit of suffering, certainly some mistakes. But I did not have a vision for myself at the time. My mind was still trapped in the paradigm that was set before me by my peers, teachers, parents, etc., which was the 40-years-retire-and-die path. It never really excited me. I was not living up to my potential. So at the time, I was not building anything, but I guess I was developing some of the foundations for who I would become.
What do you predict of yourself 10 years from now?
I predict that 10 years from now my brand and voice will play a large, global role in shaping how we think about emerging tech & innovation. I’ll be working with some of the most innovative people in the world, some of the most innovative minds, investors, creatives, leveraging business and technology to plant seeds in the world that create possibilities for more abundant futures.
What’s a fact or statistic you wish everyone knew about your industry?
II think the singularity prediction is probably relevant here. Ray Kurzweil originally predicted the singularity to be, I believe, 2043. For context, the singularity is the point in time when machine intelligence surpasses all of human intelligence combined. So that's pretty relevant in the sense that, one, we're very close to that (and Kurzweil has been extremely accurate in his predictions) and two, we're actually having a lot of smart people come out and say that that prediction might actually be too far off, it might happen sooner.
Why do you believe the work you do matters?
I think the work I do matters because we need people in emerging technology who are looking at the world from a divergent, holistic, and heart centered perspective. I think far too often those who are leading in emerging tech are very trapped within a cycle of scarcity or short-term incentives that limit their vision and limit the possibilities for the things that they're able to bring into the world. Since technology is a reflection of the humans who create it, we cannot engineer our problems away intellectually without acknowledging once again that the spirit must come first. Nothing changes if we don’t change, and it is nearly impossible to change if the soil we walk on requires a gallon of glyphosate laden roundup for us to take root. We are not separate from our physical, social, economic, or spiritual environment. Therefore, we need spaces where new technologies, new business models, new seeds of what is possible can be conceived and planted in the conditions for growth. Not to tear down what currently exists, but to build things that can work with it strategically and help it evolve.That is what I'm attempting to do in some form.
Who is your mentor and what is the best advice they’ve given you?
I have many mentors. A few I know personally and many are digital mentors. For example, Tony Robbins and Tim Ferriss, I've never met in my life. I've only known them through audio and through text, but they've been highly influential to me, especially in my early journey. I do have a mentor I know personally named Jason. And one of the biggest things that he told me was right when I was coming out of college. I was meeting him for the first time through another entrepreneurial connection. This is back when I was about to take a corporate job. I told him about how I was planning to pay down my student debt. He looked at me and said, “Why would you ever pay off that debt? That's the cheapest money you're ever going to get” I looked at him a little bit dumbfounded, and he said, “You need to switch your mentality from a cashflow mentality to a balance sheet mentality.” I could go down a rabbit hole on all of the implications of that, but that shift as someone who was moving towards starting ventures of my own was extremely important to the mentality that I needed to actually build and create things in the world versus just working to support myself.
What piece of content about you or your company are you most proud of?
I'm publishing an article that should be up on Substack and LinkedIn by the time this is out that is pretty relevant to my current mentality around artificial intelligence. It's about the fact that automation in and of itself is not innovation, and it kind of talks about how most of the conversation around AI in the business world is really only focused on 5 to 10 percent of what's possible, and it's really only focused on taking existing things and automating them. This is a good thing to do, don't get me wrong, but if we look back at the internet, all of the companies that really changed the way we experienced the world in the internet era created things that could not have possibly existed before the internet technology. So we need to start shifting our thinking in AI to these same lines. What is now possible that was not possible before AI, as well as the convergence of other emerging technologies like blockchain?
What publication do you hope to appear in next?
I don't know that there are many big traditional publications that I hold in quite high esteem anymore. It's hard to find ones that seem to be open and truthful. I imagine this will change once Laurel is up among the names of top publications like Forbes in the future. Right now, I'd probably see myself more so on a podcast of some sort. Joe Rogan would obviously be the dream, as he is the biggest one out there and still serves as an open slate for surfacing new ideas into culture. However, I think a smaller podcast, like Aubrey Marcus's podcast, which touches a lot of areas surrounding human potential, would be one that I'd definitely see myself being on at some point in the not too distant future.
Who would you love to be interviewed by?
I would love to be interviewed by Aubrey Marcus. I realize I answered this in the previous question. There's others. I think I could come up with a list of names, but people in the podcasting space that are kind of outside the traditional mainstream media. Although, I will say they're essentially mainstream now to the extent that to people like me, entrepreneurs, creatives, divergent thinkers, these are the mainstream sources that we frequent. Networks of Podcasts, X, Substack, & Youtube accounts are the new CNN, Forbes, Time, etc.
If you had to give a TED Talk tomorrow, what would the title be?
It would be called, “Don’t Grow, Ascend: How redefining business growth will drastically change the trajectory of our future.”
What award would mean the most to win?
I can't really think of an award that would make sense to me. I'm sure there are some that would be cool, but I guess the biggest reward for me would be to get to the end of this life and know I totally iced the game. In the scriptures this is marked by the words “Well done, good and faithful servant.” That would be pretty epic
What makes zero sense to you?
It makes zero sense to me that we as humans create things and then subjugate ourselves to our own creations. For example, money and legal entities. It’s not that we shouldn’t use these amazing psycho-social technologies to organize ourselves, our work, and our resources (which is why they were created in the first place). It makes zero sense that we orient our lives towards (which is the definition of making them our God). We may not consciously believe this, but if you look at our actions, it is often so. I think that it is our fragmentation which makes this possible. We separate our minds from our bodies, our spirit from our intellect. We separate red from blue, ourselves from our neighbor, humans from our environment. This fragmentation allows us to forget who we really our, which is why we can be deceived into serving our own creation.
What’s a word in your industry you hope gets re-evaluated?
I'd like to see the word growth get re-evaluated, and that's part of the creative inspiration behind the brand of Ascendance. The idea of Ascendance is that we have to redefine growth in the AI era, specifically speaking to business growth, but it applies practically to every part of our world as well. So it applies at the individual level, the political level, etc. With growth, we have to realize that growth needs a direction. Growth without purpose or direction, growth that is just uncontrolled and just keeps growing and growing and growing… In the body we call that cancer, but in business, we call that quarterly earnings reports. As we're creating these incredibly powerful technologies, we're also literally trying to colonize every aspect of reality. From the human body to the psyche, to Mars, to the quantum realm, all of these different places we attempt to create “growth” in. We have to realize that more growth and more “colonization of reality,” so to speak, is not necessarily the right thing to orient ourselves towards. Growth isn't bad, and financial abundance is a great thing if it serves you (and not the other way around). The problem is disordered and misaligned incentives, combined with lack of vision. Growth needs to be aligned towards an upward looking vision (I will leave the conversation for where these visions come from for another day). Nature knows how to grow harmoniously not eat itself, not destroy itself. We need to rethink what growth means, especially in business and technology, and we need to reorient ourselves towards a vision of the future that is closer to the highest thing that we can think of. You look at many of the companies that used to be the most innovative organizations in the world, they are all over the place when it comes to growth. There is no alignment, no vision, and thus our future stagnates. It's very obvious that they don't have a vision that they're orienting towards that really speaks to the heart, that really inspires them. I don’t see this as an inherently bad thing either. I hope to work with more of these companies in the future, to help them Ascend, or reorient their growth.
What game are you changing?
The game of tech entrepreneurship, not in the sense that I want to break down or change anything that's come before me. I'm grateful for the shoulders of those that I stand on, the strategies and technologies that I have access to, etc. But I want to show my peers and the leaders coming after me that there are new ways to play this game.
What’s the next thing you’re a part of that you want to invite more people to participate in?
Ascendance is the thing that I’d invite people to participate in. Formally, if you want to be a client, partner, or investor in one of our projects, but also informally as we build a network of leaders that resonate with this vision of aligned emerging technologies and the idea of orienting towards the highest potential.
Where can we follow you online?
https://www.instagram.com/kingwillxm/
What’s one thing that makes every leader better?
Faith. If you do not live by faith, you cannot partake in the grace of faith. A life without grace is
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We’re grateful to each Rising ICON for their transformative work. Thank you, Will, for sharing your story!
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“...we need people in emerging technology who are looking at the world from a divergent, holistic, and heart centered perspective.””
Notice: It’s important for our readers to understand the origin of the interview content. The featured ICON contributed responses that were not edited from the original submission. All claims are made solely by the contributor and do not reflect the views of LAUREL or its partners. Thank you for supporting innovation leaders. We’re convinced, the future is bold.
