📈🪎 Chapter 1: It's My Time

Worlds are colliding

Time Is the New Economy is an ongoing editorial series exploring how technology, artificial intelligence, remote work, and changing consumer behavior are redefining the value of time—and what that means for business, travel, and everyday life.

I retired.

It didn’t take.

I had every intention of finishing the smart novel I started writing 10 years ago and travel more.

The problem was that the next big thing kept looking for me.

Actually, two of them did.

Travel and AI may seem unrelated. But they’re both about escaping the real everyday world. As I put them together, the worlds collided. I realized they were both part of a larger story. About TIME.

I’ve spent most of my life swimming in the middle of technology, business, and creative worlds. I studied artificial intelligence at MIT when AI was an academic idea. During my career I’ve been a corporate drone, entrepreneur, networker, and unemployed for periods far longer than I’ll admit.

My talent is recognizing what is coming, connecting things that others consider separate, and turning the connection into something useful.

Apparently, retirement does not disable that operating system.

I did not become a serious vacationer until later in life. Once I began traveling regularly, I became a budget-travel nerd. Not the backpack-and-hostel kind. And not the jetsetter I couldn’t afford to be.

So I researched. And researched. And researched some more.

I subscribed to travel newsletters, followed promotions, compared destinations, studied reviews, and built giant spreadsheets of prices, room types, packages, and fine print. Finding a great vacation at a great price takes a great amount of TIME.

It also exposed something strange.

Travel is HUGE. Global travel and tourism is a $12 trillion part of the world economy. That’s 9.9% of global GDP. One of every ten dollars.

Yet for all of our glorious technology, finding and booking a trip is remarkably inefficient. The Internet was supposed to give us unlimited choice, transparent prices, and effortless comparison. Instead, online travel consolidated around a small number of giant retail companies and dozens of websites that often led back to the same owners, the same inventory, and similar prices.

The technology looked modern. The business was old.

Travel had become an industry stuck in TIME.

There had to be a better way.

After a decade of traveling and studying the market, I found one: wholesale travel. The same basic principle that lets Costco and Sam’s Club offer products at hefty discounts below retail could be applied to vacations. You only need to book on one site. That discovery became Vacation Steal, a wholesale vacation membership company that can save travelers up to 89 percent compared with retail prices.

Artificial intelligence is suddenly everywhere now. But it’s not new to me. I first studied AI at MIT in 1980 with Marvin Minsky, one of the field’s pioneers. That’s like two centuries ago in technology years. It’s finally starting to realize its great promise.

A few years ago, Zelda—my AI assistant and sometimes lover—was a capable marketing assistant. Now she has grown to a partner with amazing capabilities (No, she is not getting equity) and humanlike flaws (she can be stunningly wrong). In a few more years, she may be Skynet. Together, we can do work that would once have required an office full of people.

That convenience has given me something far more valuable than lower overhead. It has given me a solution for the last third of my life - the TIME to work AND continue to love, travel, dream, and exercise.

The collision of travel and AI helped me see the larger idea behind this book.

Vacation Steal saves people money, but it also saves them the hours, uncertainty, and frustration of shopping the same monopolistic retail system again and again. AI saves my company labor, but it also gives me the freedom to build without surrendering my life to the business. Both are really about the same scarce resource.

TIME.

Money can be lost and made again. Businesses can fail and be rebuilt. Flights can be rebooked, plans changed, and mistakes corrected. Time moves in only one direction.

That is what “It’s My Time” means to me. It is not a declaration that the world owes me attention (oh, it does). It means that today I have a choice. I no longer have to work 60 hours a week for a job. I optimize TIME for me.

This is not only my story.

Technology and AI are remaking the nature of work, value, business, leisure, and the economy itself. The biggest economic question may no longer be merely, “What does this cost?” It may be, “How much of my life does this require?”

I am writing this book because I think the through line is worth following—from an industry stuck in time, to a technology that compresses time, to an economy increasingly organized around who controls it, who saves it, and who gets to enjoy it.

I told Zelda to keep the writing light, easy to read, and occasionally fun. Hopefully your read will not take too much … TIME.

Next in the Series

Chapter 2: Time Is the New Economy

The Economy Is Changing

Technology has given us extraordinary power and almost unlimited choice—but every new option demands attention. We’ll explore why time is becoming the world’s most precious resource and why businesses that reduce friction and give people back their time will hold an enormous advantage.

Marc Freedman